Computer

A few days ago I was not-really-jumped by some people handing out random flyers in the city centre. Nothing unusual there.

Except they were from No2ID ! Who I'm already down with, but I suspect at least one of them I should know or at least have recognised.

The long-predicted big day is upon us with massive updates to Adobe's Flash player and ColdFusion application server, along with the release of version 2 of (now free) Flex and the recomended 'Cairngorm' framework.

Been waiting for this a long time, so I may be a bit excited for a while :-)

Updated the Flash player OK in a WINE Firefox, but a freshly recompiled flex app now has lots of nasty bevel borders on it.

Oh, this is great -  because of not-really-understanding-what-they-were-doing, Microsoft didn't know until very recently that by wiring one pin to the earth in their XBox console, you could make the very first instruction the CPU runs not come from super-secure-ROM but from you-can-put-anything-you-like-in-it Flash.
Which renders all their bonkers security useless.
And they can't change it because it's hard coded into the very fabric of the CPU because of stupid-legacy-reason.
And you can write to the Flash by putting a specially mangled saved game on a USB stick and loading it.

Giggles.

And who found all this out ? The Linux people - they are far, far, too knowledgeable.

Well that's it then.

The spammers have started running the people who try and keep the 'net safe out of town :-(
Guess our server will have to just bin 300-odd emails/day rather than reporting them.  

 So, we report all our spam, and therefore opt-outs and law-enforcement heads-ups via BlueFrog.

Only now a spammer is so worried he knocked them, 9000 other web sites, and in the wee hours us off the internet.
But the BlueFrog community won't give up, in fact we'll hopefully get the spammer thrown in jail.

New work is great - down the pub for lunch two days last week, and a total lack of stress.

Getting to the point of doing real work now, using Flex in anger for the first time. And it is very funky.
Not worth god-knows how many thousands, but apparently Flex 2 will be free (to compile) and the beta does full-blow CFC remoting for added 'wow'.

Finally saw a moving tram today too :-)

It appears we haven't been getting any inbound email since Friday (when I upgraded our Sendmail config file to stop the mail server moaning it [and aliases] were out of date).

This is now fixed. There is no need to resend emails, they should be retried automatically unless you actually got an email back from somewhere saying the mail server gave up trying.

Gah, sorry !

Like the man said "The issue's not whether you're paranoid ... I mean look at this shit, the issue is whether you're paranoid enough".