Who knows about a good, reliable web-based RSS/Atom feed aggregator (other than Bloglines)? It has to be web-based (i.e. not an application that runs on my computer, not a browser plug-in), so that I have access to my feeds wherever I happen to be. If you have recommendations, please let me know. Thanks!

Well, it seems you shouldn’t be visiting the American Spectator website, readers:

It seems the American Spectator site has been infected with malware.

I have done some exercises and read parts of Yet Another Haskell Tutorial, among a few others. At this point, I have only recently learned a new distinction between ‘classes’ (like ‘interfaces’ in Java) and ‘types’ (more or less like ‘classes’ in other languages), and am barely qualified to comment on the matter, but that never stopped me before. Haskell is interesting in that, without monads, no program written in Haskell would ever ‘run’. Pure Haskell, like a system of equations, cannot ‘run’. It simply is. That sounds like ‘crystallogy weenie and pipe-stress freak’ substance until you consider that functional programming languages such as Haskell are inherently thread-safe and allow foolproof test units. Overall, it seems to be a very rich, powerful and concise language. The well-known quicksort implementation is a good example:

quicksort :: Ord a => [a] -> [a]
quicksort  []           =  []
quicksort (x:xs)        =  quicksort [y | y <- xs, y<x]
                        ++ [x]
                        ++ quicksort [y | y <- xs, y>=x]

Five lines, including (an automatically deducible) declaration. It could probably fit into three. Haskell pwns n00bs.

I remember that object-oriented programming used to be considered an academic toy, used only by ivory-tower chair-polishers who drink liberal tea and eat quiche. Since then, OO has not only come into mainstream acceptance, it has also become a meaningless buzzword fit for the meager intellects of PHBs. I wonder whether Haskell and other FP systems will meet the same fate one day. In any case, I will remain faithful to Haskell, so no one can claim that I jumped on the bandwagon and avoid the turgidity usually associated with bandwagons (e.g., XML).

Well, second post in and I’m quite ready for Hank Dagny to step in and decry the liberal decadence of ‘lazy evaluation’.

A security exploit took place several days ago, in which the 2.1.1 download package was tampered with…

They modified two files in WP to include code that would allow for remote PHP execution.

This is the kind of thing you pray never happens, but it did and now we’re dealing with it as best we can. Although not all downloads of 2.1.1 were affected, we’re declaring the entire version dangerous and have released a new version 2.1.2 that includes minor updates and entirely verified files. We are also taking lots of measures to ensure something like this can’t happen again, not the least of which is minutely external verification of the download package so we’ll know immediately if something goes wrong for any reason.

Take heed.

“This is just a bunch of freaks out there that don’t have anything better to do,” he said. “When I came in to work Monday morning, I had about 500 e-mails, plus anonymous phone calls from all the geeks out there. [CentOS is] a free operating system that this guy gives away, which tells you how much time he’s got on his hands.”

He also thinks it was a good idea to repeatedly threaten to call the FBI; he thinks it got him the result he wanted (which, remember, was to have some innocent stranger do his job for him):

Taylor said that he also did not regret threatening Hughes with FBI action, since he believes that was what prompted Hughes to start treating him seriously.

“After that, he called me Mr. Taylor,” he said, “and he got me the information I needed.”

What a tool.

These two quotes, in combination, will haunt the poor fellow for the rest of his life:

One: Get this web site off my home page!!!!! It is blocking access to my website!!!!~!

Two: I am computer literate! I have 22 years in computer systems engineering and operation.

It seems the poor fellow discovered that, when someone tried to access the city’s website from any of the computer terminals in City Hall, they got a default test page instead of the website they expected to see. Rather than assuming something had gone awry with the website and/or the server it runs on, he took this to mean that the City Hall computers had been hacked and infected with some evil hacker software called “CentOS” (a Linux distribution), some software that was “blocking access to [his] website.” Rather than get in touch with the city’s web hosting provider, he freaked out, blew several gaskets, and then, wisps of smoke drifting out of his ears, sat down and wrote a series of nasty, accusatory emails to the CentOS development team, demanding to know why they had hacked his systems. Hilarity ensued. Internet comedy gold, readers. That poor city manager is now the laughingstock of every systems/network/software geek on the World Wide Web.

(As it turned out, of course, the server running the city’s website had crashed, the operating system (CentOS, of course) had been reinstalled, and the web pages hadn’t been restored yet; that’s why the default test page was showing up. A couple of phone calls could have cleared up the matter in a few minutes, and the poor city manager could have saved himself a lot of embarrassment.)

The man’s confusion and disquiet was understandable, but his tone of panicky, breathless truculence, with threats of FBI prosecution and accusations of “hacking” flying fast and furious, his adamant refusal to listen to reason, his predilection for multiple exclamation points, and (best of all) his arrogant, imperious invocation of his background in “computer systems engineering,” all really make it hard to feel too sorry for the guy. Sure, he was just trying to do his job as City Manager, and he didn’t understand why the city’s website suddenly seemed to be “blocked,” but when he played that “systems engineering” card, while simultaneously demonstrating he didn’t even know what an operating system is, he really crossed the line into assclownery.

I’ll go ahead and admit it, readers: this idea excites me. From a business standpoint, I have no idea if this idea makes sense or not. Who cares? From a technical standpoint, I think this would be the coolest fucking thing since sliced bread. A 64-bit operating system that combined the best features of HP-UX and Solaris would kick so much ass, it wouldn’t even be funny.

(via OSNews)

(via Slashdot)