Ramble On

In a conversation with a colleague today - who was wondering about the source for a question we had about web application security - I remarked to him that unless it was a banking site, or an e-commerce site (if even then) - anyone that uses the word security was most certainly an IT person.
IT [...]

A few weeks ago - I wrote a bitching diatribe about how hard Sun makes it to get Java.
They could learn a thing or two from VMWare.
Dear VMWare,
Your patch situation is still a pain in the ass - but thanks for making it easy to download your software.
Thanks, Jay

I admit it, I’m a geek. I’m completely at home with obscure and inconsistent command line switches to applications coming from dozens of different sources. I use software written by geeks for geeks. I write software for geeks and complain about users that don’t get it. I worship [...]

And no, I don’t mean The Onion - which would have been far more entertaining.
Through Joi Ito’s blog I have recently become aware of the phrase “Yak Shaving.” Joi wrote about it in 2005, here’s WikiPedia’s take - and here’s an etymology from Alexandra Samuel.
When I first read Joi’s blog. [...]

So… maybe you are coding up your totally way rad awesome application in Rails - and you are thinking to yourself.
“Self, I really would like to set my own created_at and updated_at timestamps. Look - there’s even a way to do that in the Rails documentation”

class Feed < ActiveRecord::Base
[...]

so I went into snarky overdrive with my vendor dependencies post. it wasn’t quite as funny as last year when I went off on the people that can’t unsubscribe from lists either. Nor was it as funny as some other commentary on Rails I’ve snarkily made
I really do love the err.the.blog guys - [...]

So you want to upload KML files to your MediaWiki install? Simple as putting ‘kml’ in your allowed file extensions right?
Wrong.
Through the almighty power of a string match that’s not actually a regular expression, but instead a strpos match in the SpecialUpload:detectScript function (yes, that’s right, a strpos match, not a stripos match - [...]