In my copious leisure time the other night, I churned out a web-based Tic-Tac-Toe game that goes on endlessly. Basically, you make a move, then someone else comes along and makes a move. No player can make a move twice in a row. The program keeps track of how many total wins for X's and O's, and the number of ties. All in all, it's pretty useless, but kind of fun if you're bored to death. Check it out by clicking on "tic-tac-toe" in the left menu.

When I got the Unix timestamp for the (approximate) post time for today's blog post, I realized that there's a little more than 1 week and a half (604,800 seconds in a week; 920,000 seconds before 1,200,000,000) before it rolls over 100,000,000 seconds... I wonder if anyone celebrates when the Unix timestamp rolls over on certain powers of 10.

It's been a good a half a year since I wrote anything here, so I figured that in an attempt to distract me from studying, I'll write something. I found out something really cool at work today, so I figure that I'll make a write-up about it and maybe a few people will (hopefully) find it useful.

I was working on a customer's laptop running Windows Vista, and the 30-day activation period had ended, presenting the user with the very user-friendly "this copy of Windows is not genuine" black background and a dialog window to either activate Windows online or go online to get a key. Anyhow, here at Pitt both the wired and wireless connections use 802.1x authentication, and there was no option to properly configure either the wired network card or wireless card to get on the network to activate it. I tried a few things to no avail. Then I remembered that you can view files on the local machine from a web browser and essentially "download" them. So, when the Firefox window appeared after clicking "Go online to resolve this problem," I typed "file:///c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe" in the address bar and "downloaded" cmd.exe, then clicked "Open" in Firefox's download manager window. Voila, I had a command prompt, from which I was able to configure the wireless 802.1x client and successfully activate Windows. I suppose doing everyday tasks by typing in the paths of all the programs you want to use on the command line is a hassle, but at least it's better than not having the option to launch programs at all.

If I had Vista installed on my desktop, I'd take a few screenshots of the process I described above, but my desktop has been Windows-free for about 3 weeks, so that would be hard to do. I suppose I could try to install Vista in VMWare, but my computer would probably start smoking and melt from the massive amount of virtualized bloat hogging all system resources.

And by the way, religious goat crisply dissected cute cat. And flamboyant wrestling game softly hates bustling goat.

If you're looking for a place where there's a large amount of useful information, go look somewhere else. You most likely won't find it here. What you'll find here is a collection of crappy PHP scripts that do useless things and probably don't even work right. Who knows, maybe you'll find this entertaining, but don't put money on it.

First off (before I start rambling about something of no importance), props to Kevin for getting this nice layout together. I consider all this CSS code some type of black art and would never be able to put a design to together at all. It would have been nice if I was given some sense of graphical ability when I was born, because it would have helped in kindergarten drawing class (I was "that kid" who the teacher thought was mentally handicapped because of the lackluster drawings I produced), and it would be helpful now when designing web sites.
If Shayne is reading this, then yes, I stole your heading code. Although I don't really consider it stealing, because I plan on returning it to him at the end of next week and then use this site's design.

Anyhow, on to today's boring and uninteresting and overall unimportant topic: spam. Over the last few days I've received quite a decent amount of spam in my work e-mail account's inbox. Despite the fact that the organization I work for has an anti-spam solution in space, the mail gets through POSTINI by appending large amounts of non-sensical text. For example:

The list is extraordinary and I must say I am impressed, but I am not in hurry to install gadgets before completely switching over. " Both laughs and they peel out again.
Six months ago, an Englishman driving a big Land Rover had appeared in Ortum . What are the lessons to be learned here? See the rss-dev posting for details. The delay didn't worry me, it was a luxury I could afford. The Windows Vista Sidebar is a new feature in Vista that, similar to our own Yahoo!
That's because sex is what women's magazines are selling - "buy this magazine so you can be as sexy as our cover model".
MAZEL TOV esti from israel!

Judging from the content of these filler texts, it is apparent that random samples of text are collected from various sources and then appended to the end of each e-mail. But I have another idea, mostly likely have already been implemented by an enterprising spammer: computer-generated random text. (Yes, I still use <b>, <u>, and similar tags, merely because I don't like to muck around with CSS.)

I think that a basic sentence syntax would be adequate in circumventing most Baynesian spam filters. Perhaps a basic Subject-verb-object format, maybe even with a few prepositions tacked on the end for variety.

To make it interesting, I have created an interface so readers of this "article" can input words, and then view random output generated with words that people have supplied. Maybe then, I'll have a feature so that people can log "good" or "funny" sentences, and they'll appear on a "best of" webpage.

Without further adieu, let me present: A spam filter circumventer that I can't really come up with a good name for

The sentence generated:

Want to contribute? Go ahead, add a few words to the database and help make the sentences more craz-- unique. Make sure each one is less than 25 characters and contains only alphanumeric characters.

Have fun refreshing this page 50 times to actually get a coherent sentence. Join me next time when I talk about Unix Beard.