Yahoo! News – Code Name: Geekfun

I was looking at a new search engine called snap.com and I couldn’t think of anything to search on, so I entered “geekfun” for my search term.

Suddenly I was getting all these pages that referenced the term “Code name: Geekfun.” Most of them weren’t available, or if they were, I couldn’t find any mention of “geekfun.”

I finally found a google cache of yahoo page of an syndicated LA times story on the codenames given to various tech products.

Kinda dull, if you ask me. I was hoping to uncover some vast conspiracy involving the international pickled herring cartel, the LA rotary club and the guy who sold me my last pair of shoes.

iPodder, the cross-platform Podcast receiver.
This is cool, it might even be very cool.

The cool part is that it’s a tool to help you automatically load audio from MP3 blogs onto your iPod.

The very cool part will come when I find stuff I want to listen to.

Then I’ll become frustrated that Apple’s audio book bookmarking features don’t seem to work with anything but AAC files with an .m4b file extension.

Or maybe I won’t, because maybe Apple will have realized that someone is giving them something good and support their independent developers.

This morning I had a great conversation with Robert Scoble. I’ve not really followed his blog, but I know he reads widely and is widely read, so I decided to check it out once I got back to my desk.

I found this post which could almost be cut and pasted out of the last few minutes of our conversation. From the timestamp, it looks like he posted it almost as I was heading out the door.

It’s my sad duty to announce that Marshall Poison, my collaborator, is dead.

We had a falling out over a woman and a jar of pickled vegetables (or something) and in the ensuing scuffle, I must have hit him pretty damn hard, because when the dust cleared, my hair was a mess, and old Marshall had gone to meet his maker.

In the aftermath, I wasn’t sure what to do with this weblog. As you can see, Marshall has been the driving force since its inception. I may have provided the technical know-how, weighed in on subject matter and editorial tone, but Marshall did all the day to day work and I wasn’t sure Geekfun could continue without his contribution.

It took some hard thinking, but I realized that Marshall’s passing presented me with a new opportunity, and so, I decided to abuse my position as Marshall’s literary executor and appropriate everything he has written as a foundation for my own turn at writing this blog. I may not do better than he has, but I’m sure you can all agree, it would be hard to do worse.

Rest in Peace, Marshall Poison.

via Salon.com

The windows operating system from Windows 95 through Windows XP contains a critical flaw in the code responsibile for viewing JPEG images (the most prevelant image format on the web). Malicious parties can create JPEG files that execute arbitrary code embedded in the image file. As a result, it is possbile to become infected with viruses simply by viewing a web page or opening an e-mail with an attached image — practices formerly regarded as safe.

So far, the actual threat from this vulnerability is small, but the potential threat is huge, and so it is important for people to patch their systems.

Microsoft has started to address this problem through the automatic update process, but so far, their approach is totally half assed. Automatic update will only patch the vulnerability in the operating system and internet explorer. It will also install a scanning utility which will help you identify other software containing the flaw, but only if that software was produced by Microsoft, and even then, you must take additional meausres to actually patch the Microsoft software.

The problem is that there is a lot of non-microsoft software out there which might also contain the vulnerability. Fortunately, a 3rd party has created GDI Scan which will help identify other software containing the flaw.

This article explains how to use the utility to find problems, and the steps you can take to fix them.