I am fed up with people doing stupid things when checking email addresses on web forms. Apparently other people are too...
The main thing that really gets on my tits is this...
+ is an allowed character in an email address, for example:
bob@example.com (is an email address)
bob+randomthing@example.com (is the same email address with a +randomthing tag which helps people filter their mail appropriately, and saves people creating different email aliases for things.)
Far too many web forms do utterly stupid "sanity" checks on the email addresses entered, and are just wrong.
Stop it you fucking morons, read the RFC. It is the RFC that tells us what makes an email address acceptable or not, not whatever magical idea just popped in to your head. They're called standards for a reason.
Showing posts with label Interweb. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Interweb. Show all posts
Friday, January 29, 2010
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
It's a loose lose situation
I keep on reading crap on the internet (I should probably stop there) where people have used loose instead of lose, and there / their / they're, and others too. Oh, what else is there?
"Its loose loose really."
"there not just police its the army? look at there hats MP? its a question"
Just fucking stop it! That and learn how to use an apostrophe.
Gaaaaaah!
The English language is being threatened by fucktards and lazy bastards who cannot be bothered to apply primary school level English usage.
And don't get me started on TXTSPK.
"Its loose loose really."
"there not just police its the army? look at there hats MP? its a question"
Just fucking stop it! That and learn how to use an apostrophe.
Gaaaaaah!
The English language is being threatened by fucktards and lazy bastards who cannot be bothered to apply primary school level English usage.
And don't get me started on TXTSPK.
Tuesday, December 02, 2008
E-mail abominations!
So, I have been getting a lot of email recently.
More and more email (real email - ham, not spam) is coming through in HTML format - HyperText Markup Language - the format of web pages... The clue is in the http:// - That's HyperText Transfer Protocol.
Email is sent using SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). The clue is in the name! Nowhere in there does it mention HyperText.
Keep your filthy HTML to your web pages.
There's more to the internet than just the www!
Being a purist (luddite) I use a plain text email client called pine. It's great... I can log in to my email server from a far away place using ssh (secure shell) and get my email quickly even over a low bandwidth or high latency connection. it's not pretty, but it works.
STOP PRESS!
I was thinking about the subject of this post since I was engaging in a Flame War on a mailing list... And then... I receive an email invite to a wine tasting... A subject line and a 6.8MB JPEG attachment! WTF? How completely useless is that? And 6.8MB? What were they thinking - even in these modern times an email with no body text and a 6.8MB attachment?
(Deleted).
More and more email (real email - ham, not spam) is coming through in HTML format - HyperText Markup Language - the format of web pages... The clue is in the http:// - That's HyperText Transfer Protocol.
Email is sent using SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). The clue is in the name! Nowhere in there does it mention HyperText.
Keep your filthy HTML to your web pages.
There's more to the internet than just the www!
Being a purist (luddite) I use a plain text email client called pine. It's great... I can log in to my email server from a far away place using ssh (secure shell) and get my email quickly even over a low bandwidth or high latency connection. it's not pretty, but it works.
STOP PRESS!
I was thinking about the subject of this post since I was engaging in a Flame War on a mailing list... And then... I receive an email invite to a wine tasting... A subject line and a 6.8MB JPEG attachment! WTF? How completely useless is that? And 6.8MB? What were they thinking - even in these modern times an email with no body text and a 6.8MB attachment?
(Deleted).
Thursday, August 14, 2008
With every surgical strike...
... there is collateral damage.
So, I was out for a few small beers with Duncan and some other blogger types as arranged by Jeff. It was a pretty good evening, meeting folk, and chatting about stuff.
So anyway, we're chatting away. Someone was saying something interesting, and some jakey bastard flyering person wandered over. They tried to break into the conversation, and failed several times. The chap speaking was talking sense, and we other bloggers were all interested to hear the full story...
Eventually, the guy managed to find a pause long enough to break in to our drinking and chatting, to pimp some crap fringe show or other. I suggested we would be drinking, and chatting, and not interested.
He persisted.
I insisted.
He left the flyer on the table.
I told him to take it with him and fuck off.
He fucked off. But left the flyer.
I screwed up the flyer and threw it at him, and hit him...
... and it ricocheted off him and hit a lady at another table who was enjoying a drink, and otherwise minding her own business.
Of course, I apologised to the lady, and said in my defence that I had hit the flyering bastard with it first. She and her friends resumed their drinks.
Ah well. You win some and you lose some.
So, I was out for a few small beers with Duncan and some other blogger types as arranged by Jeff. It was a pretty good evening, meeting folk, and chatting about stuff.
So anyway, we're chatting away. Someone was saying something interesting, and some jakey bastard flyering person wandered over. They tried to break into the conversation, and failed several times. The chap speaking was talking sense, and we other bloggers were all interested to hear the full story...
Eventually, the guy managed to find a pause long enough to break in to our drinking and chatting, to pimp some crap fringe show or other. I suggested we would be drinking, and chatting, and not interested.
He persisted.
I insisted.
He left the flyer on the table.
I told him to take it with him and fuck off.
He fucked off. But left the flyer.
I screwed up the flyer and threw it at him, and hit him...
... and it ricocheted off him and hit a lady at another table who was enjoying a drink, and otherwise minding her own business.
Of course, I apologised to the lady, and said in my defence that I had hit the flyering bastard with it first. She and her friends resumed their drinks.
Ah well. You win some and you lose some.
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Monkeys on mailing lists
I am on several mailing lists. One in particular, sunmanagers, is for people who work with Sun hardware and software. People who are on these lists are systems administrators, IT managers and so on...
The IT world is fairly small - I know this from working in Edinburgh, and when I worked in the USofA it was just as small a world over there too.
You would think then, that people would exercise common courtesy when posting to a list that contains people who you might be asking for a job in the future? Apparently not. People regularly ignore the FAQ, jump in with a question which has been asked and answered countless times (RED State Exception) or do not extend the courtesy of not bombarding the entire list with "I am out of the office" messages. I don't care that you're in the south of France banging your secretary. Really.
Another thing is people asking questions that Google will tell you the answer to, or things that if you just tried the command, or the man (that's the manual) page would tell you what you needed to know.
Here are a few examples I have saved for a rainy day...
Please go and fuck yourself. Would you like me to do your homework for you too? How about telling me (roughly) what vintage of hardware you have, at least, before asking us to re-write various online resources regarding Fibre Channel storage...
Errr, maybe psrinfo would work. I don't know, I just typed the fucking command, and, like, there it was. (And yes, for utilisation, you'd want something like top, or prstat).
Another personal favourite of mine - every email from the list comes from mailman, which has mailing list info IN THE EMAIL which tells you how to unsubscribe. How fucking stupid do you have to be? (Freecycle is bad for this too, but it's populated by techno-weenies, not people who are supposedly paid to be technologically literate, and run systems costing tens to hundreds of thousands!)
How about... uhhhh, man tar? Here's an excerpt from the man page:
And the classic:
Nope, your dumb questions should stay there for all to see... There are several archives of the mailing list, so your stupidity will haunt you for a long time.
Bill tells me this is a fairly frequent occurrence too - with not just individuals, but companies and government departments requesting dumb questions being taken off the list archives - do these people not know how the internet works?
That all said, I am still subscribed to the list, and it is still a fantastic resource for people in my line of work. I've had a few fairly obscure questions answered on there, and apparently have helped some other poor sysadmins too. As much as I may have ranted a bit, sunmanagers actually has one of the best signal to noise ratios of any list I have ever seen! My thanks go to John DiMarco and Bill Bradford for running it.
The IT world is fairly small - I know this from working in Edinburgh, and when I worked in the USofA it was just as small a world over there too.
You would think then, that people would exercise common courtesy when posting to a list that contains people who you might be asking for a job in the future? Apparently not. People regularly ignore the FAQ, jump in with a question which has been asked and answered countless times (RED State Exception) or do not extend the courtesy of not bombarding the entire list with "I am out of the office" messages. I don't care that you're in the south of France banging your secretary. Really.
Another thing is people asking questions that Google will tell you the answer to, or things that if you just tried the command, or the man (that's the manual) page would tell you what you needed to know.
Here are a few examples I have saved for a rainy day...
Subject: FC help
Dear managers,
Please put down some resources which can be used/referred for FC storage administration/Troubleshooting on Solaris.
TIA
Please go and fuck yourself. Would you like me to do your homework for you too? How about telling me (roughly) what vintage of hardware you have, at least, before asking us to re-write various online resources regarding Fibre Channel storage...
Subject: Linux has psrinfo command- Any equivalent for Solaris.
1. Folks, Linux has psrinfo command- any equivalent for Solaris.
I am trying to know the # of CPUs, and their utilization at any given point in time.
Errr, maybe psrinfo would work. I don't know, I just typed the fucking command, and, like, there it was. (And yes, for utilisation, you'd want something like top, or prstat).
Subject: please remove me from this list. Thanks!
unsubscribe
Another personal favourite of mine - every email from the list comes from mailman, which has mailing list info IN THE EMAIL which tells you how to unsubscribe. How fucking stupid do you have to be? (Freecycle is bad for this too, but it's populated by techno-weenies, not people who are supposedly paid to be technologically literate, and run systems costing tens to hundreds of thousands!)
Subject: Questions
Question 1: I backup several files using tar. How can I restore an specific file from that tar backup?
How about... uhhhh, man tar? Here's an excerpt from the man page:
x Extract or restore. The named files are extracted
from the tarfile and written to the directory
specified in the tarfile, relative to the current
directory. Use the relative path names of files and
directories to be extracted.
And the classic:
I have posted some Sun questions since a couple of years in sun managers and I want to delete those messages , please can you point me to the right steps to do it ?
This is all the links that I have found on sunmaagers portal :
Nope, your dumb questions should stay there for all to see... There are several archives of the mailing list, so your stupidity will haunt you for a long time.
Bill tells me this is a fairly frequent occurrence too - with not just individuals, but companies and government departments requesting dumb questions being taken off the list archives - do these people not know how the internet works?
That all said, I am still subscribed to the list, and it is still a fantastic resource for people in my line of work. I've had a few fairly obscure questions answered on there, and apparently have helped some other poor sysadmins too. As much as I may have ranted a bit, sunmanagers actually has one of the best signal to noise ratios of any list I have ever seen! My thanks go to John DiMarco and Bill Bradford for running it.
Monday, June 02, 2008
Spam stupidity
So I got a bounced message today.
So, your spam software detected this message was spam, and that the Envelope From header was likely forged... And it STILL bounced to ME. What kind of utter fucktardedness is that?
Backscatter from forged email headers can be even more of a problem than the spam its self. It's ordinarily not in our interests to /dev/null mail from postmaster or mailer-daemon because they are used legitimately to alert users and admins to stuff not working!
People writing anti-spam software need to be smarter. A lot smarter, otherwise they are only making the problem worse.
And as for ppp83-237-226-3.pppoe.mtu-net.ru, you may go and fuck yourself. With a cactus. A big, spiky one.
X-SpamTest-Envelope-From: ANGRY.STEVE@his..other.domain.example.com
X-SpamTest-Group-ID: 00000004
X-SpamTest-Info: Profiles 2969 [June 02 2008]
X-SpamTest-Info: {Headers: Spam B3: spamware from}
X-SpamTest-Method: headers plus
X-SpamTest-Rate: 100
X-SpamTest-Status: SPAM
X-SpamTest-Status-Extended: spam
X-SpamTest-Version: SMTP-Filter Version 3.0.0 [0255], KAS30/Release
So, your spam software detected this message was spam, and that the Envelope From header was likely forged... And it STILL bounced to ME. What kind of utter fucktardedness is that?
Backscatter from forged email headers can be even more of a problem than the spam its self. It's ordinarily not in our interests to /dev/null mail from postmaster or mailer-daemon because they are used legitimately to alert users and admins to stuff not working!
People writing anti-spam software need to be smarter. A lot smarter, otherwise they are only making the problem worse.
And as for ppp83-237-226-3.pppoe.mtu-net.ru, you may go and fuck yourself. With a cactus. A big, spiky one.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Network Solutions are crooks
Network Solutions Inc. (NSI) are, amongst other things, a domain registry for this new fangled interweb. When you want to buy a domain name, you do a "whois" lookup to see if it's available, then you buy it if it's available and you really want it.
The trouble is, NSI are registering domains that are looked up using their whois server... So, if you check to see if a domain is available using their server, but want to register the domain with another company, you can't because NSI have helpfully registered the domain, forcing you to buy it from them... This is apparently known as "front-running".
The helpful people at slashdot have a number of potential solutions to this problem (other than not using NSI in the first place)
including looking up (and hence making NSI register) a bunch of random domain names using a perl script. An alternative is to do a whois on a number of interesting domain names which include registered trademarks as part of the name - and then hope that a Cease and Desist letter is sent to NSI for trademark infringements...
What's really quite funny is their excuse for this practice...
Of course, they are monetizing the domain, since during this period you can only buy the domain from NSI...
In effect they're saying: "We're front-running to protect you (our customers) from front-running"
The trouble is, NSI are registering domains that are looked up using their whois server... So, if you check to see if a domain is available using their server, but want to register the domain with another company, you can't because NSI have helpfully registered the domain, forcing you to buy it from them... This is apparently known as "front-running".
The helpful people at slashdot have a number of potential solutions to this problem (other than not using NSI in the first place)
including looking up (and hence making NSI register) a bunch of random domain names using a perl script. An alternative is to do a whois on a number of interesting domain names which include registered trademarks as part of the name - and then hope that a Cease and Desist letter is sent to NSI for trademark infringements...
What's really quite funny is their excuse for this practice...
"During this reservation period, the name is not active and we do not monetize the traffic on these domains."
Of course, they are monetizing the domain, since during this period you can only buy the domain from NSI...
In effect they're saying: "We're front-running to protect you (our customers) from front-running"
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