Flaw found in Google's new desktop search

December 20, 2004

News comes today of a security problem with Google Desktop. The somewhat funny part for me is I asked a somewhat prominent blogger about this when it first came out.In spite of the years of blather by this person about open community, sharing experiences, etc. they basically said it was so simple that I was stupid to suggest such a thing. Part of the lesson here is to be very wary of people who repeatedly ask for help and when that help is offered can't be bothered to even reply with an acknowledgment of the offer (also something that has happened several times with this blogger).

The little details

December 19, 2004

With the help of a great article at MacDevCenter I got my source control moved to Subversion this weekend. Having gotten it all working I was really bummed when I got home and it didn't work. A few painful hours later I remembered that you must also remember to open up the port on the firewall when you're running a webserver on a non-standard port. Duh!

Google Print

December 11, 2004

The Google Print beta product looks really cool. It will be interesting to see how it progresses. How will this mesh with the Take Control books that TidBits is publishing? Seems like a great match. Take the books which sold for not a lot and allow them to be served up with paid ads in Google.

Apple's changed start page

December 9, 2004

There were hints it was coming, but Apple has gone and done it. Yes the new and improved Apple start page has been released. This is the default page for Safari. The thing is the old Apple Stat Page was great. There was enough news from the Netscape sites to keep it worth looking at. And there was good Apple content. Now the page is merely Apple marketing. I'd guess the number of people looking at it will go down. Apple's been running a script in between it's default address (http://livepage.apple.com/) for the last few weeks. I'm not privy to what goes on inside Apple but I'm sure somebody is convinced a lot more people will look at it. Unfortunately it doesn't have enough real content to keep my interest. The comments posted over at Mac World echo my thoughts that mindshare is going to go away with this change.

Who are the good domain name Registrars out there?

December 8, 2004

A question for everyone, who are the good domain name registrars out there? Don't email me an answer because I won't get it. You see eNameCo.com has managed to bungle completely a change of name servers. Several of my key domains now respond to whois by saying there are no name servers for the domains. Here's the timeline, on Monday I tried to use the web interface and change the names. It said there was an error and it couldn't complete. Tuesday I noticed some odd bounces to email saying my domain had to exist to send email. Later Tuesday I started looking at whois and sure enough it says NO NAMESERVERS LISTED.

So I call the bozos, once they decide to get in the office this morning. They say "it's right in our database it just isn't showing up on Internic." News flash - I don't give a damn if it shows up in eNameCo's database. What I care about is does it show up in the Internic response to whois queries.

So the long and short is I'll be looking for a new registrar. I almost moved them today but given the lack of email and the probable confusion a transfer will add on top of their screw up, I'll have to wait. But when I do transfer who should I transfer to?

Meaning of hack

December 5, 2004

Hadley Stern has a note on the many meanings of hack. I've always liked the juxtaposition of the meanings of a clever workaround or bit of code and somebody who is terrible at things.

Computing