Archive for September, 2006

Distractions

Thursday, September 28th, 2006

Lately it has been difficult for me to work on my school related projects at home, because of constant interruptions and distractions. I also can’t really do much research related stuff when I’m at work, because they usually make me do other things when I’m there (crazy, I know). So I come here to school and shut myself in my little office to get some quiet time just for my research…

And all I can think about are all the cute girls walking all around the campus. All I have to do is to get out in front of the building, and I’m surrounded with hawtness. Seriously, they are all over the place this semester. I’m going to miss this once I graduate. But right now, it’s really not helping me to concentrate on reading all these cryptic research papers. Sigh…

I just hit up bloglines to take a break and clear up my head, and I get another batch of distractions - things like Assassin’s Creed gameplay video. I think the best way to describe this game is Hitman meets Price of Persia meets Oblivion. Or something among these lines. It looks totally awesome, and distracting as hell!

Sigh…. And now back to Nonnegative Matrix Factorization papers…

Using IMAP with Mutt

Wednesday, September 27th, 2006

I find that most GUI based clients tend to have issues with IMAP. Even the usually lightning fast kmail tends to have sluggish response times when dealing with remote mail folders. Same goes for Thunderbird and host of other mail clients that I tried. On the other hand Mutt performs awesome, and gives me exactly what I want: a lean IMAP client for a low traffic account.

How do you set up Mutt to work with imap? It is actually amazingly simple. You just need to add two lines to your .muttrc:

set folder="imaps://username@example.com"
set spoolfile="imaps://username@example.com/INBOX"

If you don’t feel like typing in your password every time you can also put it there:

set imap_pass="mypassword"

Also, my favorite line which disables that annoying Mutt prompt that asks if you want to move the read mail messages:

set mbox="!"

Maybe this will help someone who is looking for a good IMAP client. Mutt is really awesome in that area. Fast simple, and small. There even exists a working port for windows, but you are probably better off using the cygwin based version instead.

More 419 Letters

Wednesday, September 27th, 2006

I’m so tempted to reply to one of those and make fun of them! But I’m kinda scared that if I do Mr. Ecko is going to show up at my house and kick my ass. mrgreen

From:LadyRita Mosley.
4 Old Church Street,
Chelsea, SW3,
England.

Here writes Lady Rita Mosley, suffering from cancerous ailment. I am married to Sir David Mosley an Englishman who is dead. My husband was into private practice all his life before his death. Our life together as man and wife lasted for three decades without child. My husband died after a protracted illness. My husband and I made a vow to uplift the down-trodden and the less-privileged individuals as he had passion for persons who can not help themselves due to physical disability or financial predicament.

I can adduce this to the fact that he needed a Child from this relationship, which never came.

I didn’t even know that adduce was a word. Apparently it means to provide evidence for [source]. I’m totally gonna use it from now on. In fact, I’m going to use it in a sentence right now:

Dear Sir and/or Madam, can you please adduce that you are a rich english lady and not some dude from Nigeria?

How do you provide evidence that he needed a child anyway? I kinda needed to pee like an hour ago, but I don’t think I could adduce for that.

And , if you don’t mind me asking, why the hell do you spell child with capital C? Are you just capitalizing Random words in your Letter for fun, or is it some clever new technique to bypass spam filters?

When my late husband was alive he deposited the sum of Twenty Million Pounds (20,000,000.00 Million Great Britain Pounds Sterling)which were derived from his vast estates and investment in capital market with his bank here in UK. Presently, this money is still with the Bank. Recently, my Doctor told me that I have limited days to live due to the cancerous problems I am suffering from.

Though what bothers me most is the stroke that I have in addition to the cancer. With this hard reality that has befallen my family, and me I have decided to donate this fund to you and want you to use this gift which comes from my husbands effort to fund the upkeep of widows, widowers, orphans, destitute, the down-trodden, physically challenged children, barren-women and persons who prove to be genuinely handicapped financially.

So you have a stroke? Are you having it right now? Is it like a continuous, never ending stroke or something? Man, that must suck considering you also have cancerous problems.

I took this decision because I do not have any child that will inherit this money and my husband relatives are bourgeois and very wealthy persons and I do not want my husband hard earned money to be misused or invested into ill perceived ventures. I do not want this money to be misused hence the reason for taking this bold decision. I am not afraid of death hence I know where I am going. I do not need any telephone communication in this regard due to my deteriorating health and because of the presence of my husband relatives around me. I do not want them to know about this development.

And also, I’m pretty sure I could discern between an British and Nigerian accent. Not even mentioning the fact that you are a dude, not a lady. So yes, we definitely don’t need telephone communication in this regard.

As soon as I receive your reply I shall give you the contact of the bank in UK. I will also issue you a Letter of Authority that will empower you as the original beneficiary of this fund. My happiness is that I lived a life worthy of emulation. Please assure me that you will act just as I have stated herein. Hope to hear from you soon.

Anyone who actually believes that some English widow with a perpetual cancerous stroke is just going to give them 20 mill totally deserves what is coming to them.

Update 01/28/2007 02:38:52 AM

Here are some useful links for those of you who found this through a google search and want to learn more about the 410 scams:

  1. Wiki Article on 419 scams - everything you need to know and more
  2. 419 Coalition - has some tips on what to do if you get scammed. This includes some contact links of where you can file complaints and etc…
  3. Ebola Monkey Man - a site that records the correspondence with these people and tries to fool them into doing silly stuff (like sending in pictures holding embarrassing or silly sings)
  4. 419 Eater - another website that specializes in making the scammers do stupid stuff

Are You Clueless?

Tuesday, September 26th, 2006

Take this 10 question quiz to see if you are a clueless luser, or a hard-core hacker. Please note that this post is filed under humor which suggests that it should not be taken completely seriously.

  1. What is the best browser?

    a. What is a browser? (-10)
    b. Interner Explorer (-5)
    c. Mozilla, Firefox, Opera and etc.. (+0)
    d. Lynx, Links (+5)
    e. Browsers are for pussies - I use wget and more (+10)

  2. What is the best email client?

    a. What do you mean when you say “client”? (-10)
    b. Outlook/Outlook Express (-5)
    c. Thunderbird, Eudora, Pegasus Mail, Evolution and etc.. (+0)
    d. Mutt, Pine (+5)
    e. Who needs clients, I just telnet to port 110 (+10)

  3. What is the best OS?

    a. What’s an OS? (-10)
    b. Windows FTW! (-5)
    c. OSX (+0)
    d. Linux, BSD (+5)
    e. Amiga OS (+10)

  4. What is the best text editor?

    a. Word (-10)
    b. Notepad (-5)
    c. EditPlus, TextPad, Notepad2 and etc.. (+0)
    d. Emacs, Vim, vi (+5)
    e. Ed (+10)

  5. What is the best desktop environment?

    a. What is who? (-10)
    b. The one that comes with Vista (-5)
    c. KDE, Gnome, etc.. (+0)
    d. WindowMaker, IceWM, etc.. (+5)
    e. I don’t even have X server installed (+10)

  6. What’s the programming language you excel at?

    a. I can do links in HTML.. (-10)
    b. Visual Basic (-5)
    c. Java, C++, etc.. (+0)
    d. Lisp, Prolog, etc.. (+5)
    e. I only code in assembly (+10)

  7. Your favorite base?

    a. Ace Of Base (-10)
    b. Google Base (-5)
    c. Base 10 naturally (+0)
    d. Base 16 or base 2 (+5)
    e. All your base are belong to us (+10)

  8. Your favorite shell?

    a. You mean like sea shells? (-10)
    b. cmd.exe (-5)
    c. bash (+0)
    d. csh (+5)
    e. scsh (+10)

  9. You write your essays in:

    a. You dictate them to your secretary (-10)
    b. Word (-5)
    c. Open Office (+0)
    d. Emacs/Vi and compile using Latex (+5)
    e. Emacs/Vi in postscript format (+10)

  10. What is your education level:

    a. MBA (-10)
    b. High School Diploma (-5)
    c. College Degree (+0)
    d. Masters Degree (excluding MBA) (+5)
    e. PHD

Add up all your points, to get your final score. Compare it to the results listed after the jump.

(more…)

Gmail Down?

Tuesday, September 26th, 2006

Is it just me or is anyone else having issues logging into Gmail? It was driving me nuts in the morning because I thought my Gmail Manager plugin was broken. But it turns out that gmail server is simply slower than slow. It’s very odd because the rest of Google is working just fine.

Gcal and writely are lightning fast, but Gmail page just keeps on loading forever. Very odd. It’s almost as if it was DDOS’ed or something. But I always figured that to DDOS a server belonging to the almighty Google you would have to have a botnet of the size of a small nation and plenty of luck.

Anyone has a clue what is going on?

Update Tue Sep 26 16:19:31 EDT 2006

It came back to life! I just noticed that my Gmail extension in Firefox turned from red exclamation mark to a blue envelope with a big 20 on it (crap, I have 20 unread messages).