Crikey, it's a bit chilly today! Anybody would think winter was approaching 
Happy invoicing!
- Citation Needed - "I’ve spent far more effort than is sensible this month crawling down a rabbit hole disguised, as they often are, as a straightforward question: why do programmers start counting at zero?" The answer is not the one you, or I, thought, as Mike Hoye reveals in this detailed examination of a small corner of programming history.
- The Lost Cow Tunnels of New York City - "Like every other major metropolis, New York City has tunnels for people, tunnels for cars, and lots of tunnels for trains. But it also has something rather more unique: tunnels for cows. Or does it? This is the story of New York’s lost, forgotten, or perhaps just mythical subterranean meat infrastructure." Bovine Underground!
- Confessions of an eBay opium addict - "Looking for drugs on the cheap, a writer found poppy pods available on the Web. He also found himself hooked." Peter Thompson describes his decline.
- Casting Call Woe - A resting actor posts examples of the kind of thing she receives seeking to tempt her to attend auditions: "Girls must be up for semi-nudity, kissing and getting covered in muck & goo"; "The previous lead actor has been hospitalised"; "Actors needed to fill a dole office. No pay."
- How a grad student trying to build the first botnet brought the Internet to its knees - Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the Morris Worm. HT to SimonMac for this, which seems to be the best of many retrospectives published over the weekend: "It took days of effort by hundreds of systems administrators to clean up the mess, and the Internet community spent weeks analyzing what had happened and how to make sure it didn't happen again... But the most significant effect of the worm was how it permanently changed the culture of the Internet." For the curious, the source code for the worm is, of course, online, along with the fix and other related documents, including (inevitably) a parody poem from rec.humor.funny, The Worm Before Christmas: CERIAS Information Security Archive: Index of /pub/doc/morris_worm/
- The Parking Team with a sense of humour - Marc O'Reagh got a couple of parking tickets: "I realised that I was technically in the wrong. I’d done what I thought was the right thing, but despite my best efforts I was still displaying the wrong permit for my car and address. It also took about 2 seconds of reasoning to work out that these people probably don’t get a lot of… positive messages from the public. I imagine that at least half the calls they take are complaints from mad, sweary idiots like me. They’re probably pretty good at ignoring them, and certainly it wasn’t going to help. Given that my objective was to get the two tickets (cost: £220) cancelled, I thought I’d try a different tack."
- I challenged hackers to investigate me and what they found out is chilling - Adam L. Penenberg invited white hat hackers to do a pen test on him: "I’m discussing the evils of plagiarism and falsifying sources with 11 graduate journalism students when, without warning, my computer freezes. I fruitlessly tap on the keyboard as my laptop takes on a life of its own and reboots. Seconds later the screen flashes a message. To receive the four-digit code I need to unlock it I’ll have to dial a number with a 312 area code. Then my iPhone, set on vibrate and sitting idly on the table, beeps madly." From the hackers' point of view: A reporter asked us to hack him, and here’s how we did it - "Not surprisingly, through social media and other channels, we found quite a bit – his address, pictures of his apartment, credit reports, names of family members, birth dates, emails, phone numbers, etc... Using all of the preliminary information we gathered, we developed a two-pronged approach that combined both wireless and malware/phishing attacks."
- Star Wars as an Icelandic Saga - This is the whole thing in English (A New Hope starts at Chapter 17) or you can go chapter-by-chapter in both Old Norse and English starting with I. Kapítuli: Frá Jóða jarli Gormóarsyni (Chapter 1: Concerning Jarl Jóði Gormóarsson); or if you want to print it out, there's a PDF of the whole thing with both languages side-by-side via Tattúínárdǿla saga – the Saga of the People of the Tattúín River Valley: "En því at Falfaðinn konungr vildi kúga alla þá, es stóðu í móti honum, lét hann gøra it stœrsta skip, es menn hǫfðu sét á sjóvum; helt þat skip svá mǫrgum mǫnnum ok vǭpnum, at þeir máttu ræna allt þat, es vas í einni stórri borg, ok vas því skipi nafn gefit, ok hét þat Dauðastjarna. [And because King Falfadinn wanted to intimidate all who stood against him, he ordered to be built the greatest ship which men had ever seen upon the seas, and that ship held such a store of men and weapons that they could pillage an entire large city. And a name was given to that ship, and it was called Daudastjarna (Death-Star).]"
- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot - "Here are the first nine pages of my comic-book adaptation of the poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot." Well, if you can do Star Wars in Old Norse, why not modernist poetry in a comic?
- Pointless Letters - The very
bestworst of the newspaper correspondence columns, such as this useful advice on the benefits of self-asphyxiation:
Happy invoicing!
