fugue.net

fugue \ fyüg \ n. 1. a contrapuntal musical composition in which one or two melodic themes are repeated or imitated by the successively entering voices and developed in a continuous interweaving of the voice parts into a well-defined single structure. 2. something having a thematic structure that is suggestive of a musical fugue. 3. a pathological disturbance of consciousness during which the patient performs acts of which s/he appears to be conscious but of which on recovery s/he has no recollection.

New and Exciting

May 2004

Further ramblings, babbling, and questionable insights will now be posted at Fugue Blog.

April 2004

It's not very often that I come across a company or idea that I find truly despicable... and it's even less often that such a find will be so bad as to make me want to write about it in a public forum. VirtualMDA is one such company.

Here is an organization that is riding on the success of other legitimate distributed computing projects (SETI@Home, Distributed.Net, United Devices) to send spam. True, some of the existing distributed projects out there aren't particularly useful (searching for extra-terrestrial life, crypto), but there are an increasing number involved in truly useful projects like cancer research.

Using this technology to add to the ever increasing flood of spam would be bad enough. Sendmails Corp. (the company behind this vile project), however, is luring the uninitiated in with promises to pay you for your CPU time. So the folks who perhaps need some extra money, or just plain don't know any better are far more likely to participate.

It's a sad day for distributed computing.

January 2004

My latest article - RPKGADD: A Remote Package Management Tool for Solaris (tm) - was published by SysAdmin.

The article was also picked up by www.sunfreeware.com.

August 2003

Things That Have Happened Since I Moved to Toronto, Canada

A really long cold winter
SARS
West Nile Virus
More SARS (in case you missed it the first time!)
Mad Cow Disease
The Blackout of 2003

May 2003

Do "opt-out" Mailing Lists Really Work?

I recently had occasion to register on BEA's website. I had to download an evaluation version of Weblogic Application Server for a project. Anyway, as part of the registration, BEA, like most reputable companies, allows you to decline (opt-out of) future emails from them. Since I already get more than enough unwanted email, I politely declined.

It looked like this:

Pretty unambiguous, isn't it? A few days later, I got this email.

It starts:

In the past you have expressed interest in BEA Systems, Inc., and have since chosen not to receive electronic communications from BEA. We are contacting you this one time only to let you know that we have a new Electronic Subscription Center that will allow you to choose your email communication preferences.

Gosh, I thought I already chose my email communication preferences. I guess the folks in the BEA marketing department didn't get it the first time.

Hey BEA: "NO" MEANS "NO"!

How to Write Spam

I've been reading up on the kinds of people who make their living by sending spam. I stumbled across this article: The message! The Does and Don'ts (sic). Written in all seriousness, it tries to guide the novice spammer. The results are startlingly funny. My favorite excerpt:

Your job is to get them interested. One of the most effective e-mail fundraising campaign for a charity had a subject line that read "Show me the money!" That's pretty smart, isn't it? And certainly don't lie to your reader's. Don't say "Naked pictures of Britney Spears", if you are selling lawnmower parts.

I guess part of the message is to incorporate a healthy dose of grammatical and spelling errors as well!

Fugue Mail for Mac Users

Macintosh users of Internet Explorer have reported difficulty accessing web-based email on Fugue. Although IE on the Mac is very broken in this respect, the following workaround might help. I have created a DER format certificate of Fugue's ROOT CA Cert... it's available from the navigation menu on the left, or by clicking here. When you click on it, IE should prompt you to install it. If it works, drop me a line and let me know... I don't have an OS X box to test on.

This article contains more information as well.

April 2003

You guessed it.... it's hockey pool time again. The site is slowly taking shape. I'll be adding more features, bells, whistles, and other cool stuff as we go along. In the meantime, check it out here.

January 2003

After a six week hiatus, the fugue server has a new home in Toronto, Ontario. Those of you who make use of the webmail service on fugue will be pleased to learn that we have implemented SpamAssassin to combat the ever increasing volume of unsolicited commercial email. Please drop me a note if you see any false positives!

My article - Why Java Isn't Appropriate for Everything - was featured at UnixReview.Com.