If anyone reading this plays WoW, make sure you log on today. There is a 4th anniversary pet in your mail...

Also be careful, it is account-bound unique, you can only learn it on one character.

EDIT: evidently the article I read was wrong, it's not limited to one character.

Let the Right One In is really good, if you can find it showing (very limited release). Worth checking to see if it's playing anywhere close.

I was making an online reservation at a hotel today and came across this interesting tidbit on the (major chain) hotel's reservation page:

"Due to system limitations please do not use the following characters: &, %, < and >."

Good lord. Why didn't they just say:

"Our developers didn't bother to do proper input validation and translation of special characters into and out of HTML entities. Since we didn't do this, our site is probably vulnerable to SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks as well."

Most people, if they think about it at all, will assume the site is safe because it has a Verisign certificate and shows up with the lock icon in their browser. But all that means is you know what site you are at, and that your data is fairly secure against real-time snooping. If the site itself is badly coded, it means nothing.

Makes me feel real comfortable putting my credit card information in (I almost quit and called them instead).

Yesterday I visited the site of another huge traditional retailer that I never use. I wanted to make a one-time gift purchase, and never intend to shop there on a regular basis. The site made me put in my credit card information (fine) but also made me create an account, and gave me no opt out to not store my credit card on their back end. When I tried to remove it after I made my purchase, I got a 100% repro javascript error.

Come on, people. This is 2008. Security is not a "would be nice" add-on feature. We need companies to be criminally liable if they don't bother to implement well-known security practices and consumers suffer for their negligence.

Realms can be full??!!

I bought a copy of World of Warcraft today (actually, troublebox bought a copy too.)

I am downloading a huge patch right now, which is only going at about 128k/s; I have a sneaking suspicion my ISP is rate limiting me, which is annoying since I have business class service. In any case, after having successfully avoided MMO's for years, I will be playing one tomorrow.

OMG there's a cat behind me whatdoIdo?????

showsWatched["Heroes"] = NULL;  // Plot no longer makes any sense whatever

This is what downtown Issaquah looks like during the annual Salmon Days festival. Mmmmmm festival junk food.

Yesterday, I heard a McDonald's ad where a woman was overjoyed that she no longer had to pursue intellectual pursuits in order to order espresso, since McDonald's has it now. "Come back to the least common denominator," the ad seemed to say, "it's more comfortable here."

Today I saw in the news that Beverly Hills Chihuahua won the weekend and, in fact, pulled in $29M.

I weep for America.

../configure --host ppc64-apple-darwin9 --disable-dependency-tracking CFLAGS="-arch i386 -arch ppc64"

I wish Autotools understood OS X fat binaries natively...

Tags: geek