Notes and debris, part 5

I'm still cleaning out old files...

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The Web is massive but any part of it is fragile. Here is a note from 2005 listing notable dead links on my links page:

The Cat-Scan contest, Prozac Pez, Mr. T. vs. Hackers, cr0bar's Matrix parody, the Interface Hall of Shame, the "House is prepared for space invaders" page (a real Republican response to Clinton's quip that Congress wouldn't be bothering him about Whitewater if the Earth was attacked by space invaders; yes, with a screenshot of the game), Moshez's "hello world" programming joke that grew and grew until it became a portable library, a collection of Dorothy Parker quotes, the CRAP Media Analysis reports on the Bible (both of them), Tim's Chemistry Exam (with smartass answers like "God made it that way"), Villain Supply, Home Despot, the Adopt a Dragon Foundation, Ben Parker's Random Programming Languages List, the "95 Registry &etc." Windows registry hacking guide, a couple other Windows tips sites, the FreeBSD file-system browser, many of my Free Software Advocacy links (7 of 21 are gone now), Itchan's Computer Buying Tips, the DVD player compatibility list, the x2 document archive, Cisco's Spanning Tree guide (probably just moved, but I didn't look for it), ZyNOS router commands, Eugene Kashpureff's Network Information Center, How To Decode a Bar Code

I wonder how many more dead links are on it now.

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I emailed somebody at aavis.net and got back an automated reply that told me to click on a link so that the aavis system would accept the message. It sounded like something a spammer would send, but I checked my sent-mail file to discover that I actually had sent an email to somebody at aavis.net. The product behind this is Merak Mail.

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In 2007, the abuse account at my company started getting spam advertising illegal services at Russian hosting site domenforum.net, namez.ru and ruserver.net:

"Anti-abuse (bulletproof) domains registration and hosting for child-porn websites, terrorist websites, fraud, spam etc."

Given how flagrant the messages were, it is quite possible that this was a smear campaign by a competing black hat group with a botnet and a grudge. Given that the hosting sites are in Russia, it is also quite possible that the spams are honest.

We got similarly flagrant messages hawking services at domains blackhatcrew.ru, blackgare.com, antiblack.info, and dreamhoster.net.

The Russian spam was not all from Russia even if the people were. I recall finding evidence of the Domenforum people being in Prague at the time, or somewhere else in central-Eastern Europe, by tracking down their usernames to a public webforum. The Dreamhoster spam came with a Belarus telephone number.

The Domenforum guy now has a Twitter account and an ad-delivery business. One reason I think he was a target of the spam rather than the originator is that his real name and a username he uses everywhere were easy to find.

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In a history class, we had to do a report on the political influnence of an American Revolution politician's beliefs. I picked Aaron Burr because he is famous for shooting Alexander Hamilton and nothing else.

He also founded Tammany Hall, created the first modern corporation in that it was allowed to use its money for more than one specific purpose, he may have had a hand in the arrest of judge Jedediah Peck which raised public outrage against the Alien and Sedition Acts, and he was tried for treason after trying to make himself lord of the lands between the Appalachians and Spanish Mexico. And he shot Hamilton. He may not have had much of a belief system beyond self-interest, but he was certainly influential.

On that "may": Milton Lomask refers to, but does not name, two earlier biographers.

Side note: Wikipedia says the Aaron Burr "Got Milk?" commercial dates back to 1993. That makes me feel older than normal.

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If anyone remembers that text-based rpg-battle-style spaceship combat game "gcset" that was my first serious program, I had big plans for version 2. It would still have been a text-based rpg-style battle but ships could have had different types of armor, different types of weapons that would do different amounts of damage to the different types of armor, and components that would use an amount of volume, add an amount of mass which would reduce the ship's evasion, and require a number of crewmen to operate, which would require carrying crew quarters components and life support systems. Between the combination of trying to do too much and never properly writing out all of the things that I wanted to do (and having schoolwork to do), I never finished.

After learning XML, I tried to write it using XML to describe the objects in the game. Augh.

Then again, the definitions of ships and other objects are data, and being able to serialize most of the universe would make it easy to add new features to a running engine. I may have been on a right track, but plain C and XML might be the worst combination of tools to take in that direction.

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I have an .Xauthority file which lists a system that has not existed in ten years as the authority.

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