Patch your systems: Blaster is loose

If you run Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows Server 2003, and you haven’t gone to Windows Update in the last few weeks, you may be vulnerable to a new worm that started spreading yesterday, W32.Blaster.Worm. This nasty little worm is spreading on machines that didn’t apply the MS03-026 patch, then replicating itself and apparently mounting an attack against WindowsUpdate.com. This post on Slashdot suggests that one sign of infection is that your machine will start showing a 60 second shutdown timer, and the comments provide some really good tips about dealing with the worm, including a way to abort the shutdown (by typing shutdown /a at a command prompt) so you can apply the patch that works on some systems (though maybe not on Windows 2000). There’s also a worm removal tool on Symantec’s advisory page, if you suspect you’re already infected (though I would suggest downloading the patch first).

Tip: If you haven’t already patched your system and you can’t get to Windows Update to apply the patch, you may want to try going to the security advisory on TechNet, which points directly to the patch download location for your OS.

On a personal note, I wonder if this has something to do with the dog-slow performance I was having at home (Comcast DSL) yesterday and this morning.

My tomato plants: “We’re bigger than the Beatles”

slowly ripening tomato

I spent part of yesterday afternoon finally staking some of our indeterminate tomato plants. —Yes, I know. When the seed salesman informed us of the difference between “determinant” plants, which grow straight up, and “indeterminate,” which just kind of sprawl everywhere, I thought she was having a joke on us. As it turns out, the joke was on me. Some of the plants have been growing over the sides of our garden boxes, and all the way down the eight inches or so to the ground, where they’ve started producing. So staking them was a little tricky, especially since the longest stakes I had were about eight inches long and I needed something about three times that.

Unfortunately, the tomatoes on the plants are still wee little things. And if yesterday’s weather (cold and rainy for the first part of the day, after two evening rains during the previous week) was any indication, the growing season isn’t going to last forever. So it’s a race between the tomatoes and the weather.

Don’t know how much blogging there will be this week. Work is crazy busy, and I’m flying on Friday back east to a family reunion. But I’ll try to squeeze in a few moments along the way.

Now that’s what I call a user interface

I’ve been playing with Clutter, and I think I finally found a way to replicate my physical desk on my virtual one (warning: linked image is quite large):

my god! it's full of album covers!

I know everyone else in the world has already seen this, but if you haven’t: the concept is simple, and cool. Clutter listens in the background while iTunes plays, and downloads the album art for the currently playing song automatically. If you want to keep the album out for reference, just drag it to the desktop…then you can double click it later to play the songs from that album. The end effect is something like Tyler’s CD collection in college.

A few questions about a 12 inch doll

Regarding this little toy, just a few questions:

  1. Was the White House consulted when this toy was being designed?
  2. Or did the White House call BBI with the idea?
  3. Either way, is taxpayer money paying someone in the White House to work on the production details for this doll?
  4. Does the White House get a cut of the $39.99 per doll? Does George?
  5. Does the doll come with a Greg Jenkins doll to make sure it’s only photographed in strong, manly poses?
  6. Does the doll make your car move ten times slower than normal to facilitate said photo ops?
  7. Does the doll go missing from your child’s collection for up to a year at a time?
  8. Will there be a Singin’ John Ashcroft doll? How about a Poindexter? A Rumsfeld?

Thanks to Esta, among others, for the link.

New high water mark @ Weblogs.com

There was a new high water mark at Weblogs.com on Wednesday: 4112 weblogs. My data record of the Weblogs.com high water marks has been updated to reflect the new mark.

This was good timing, coming as it did during the Great Weblogs.com Data Pull. Now I’ll be able to look at traffic trends before and after a high water mark, and see if there is any relationship between high water mark days and mean traffic levels on Weblogs.com.

Happy birthday, Mom

Today is my mother’s birthday! I owe this woman a big debt of thanks, not only for my existence, but for my love of reading, cooking, and (in large part) music, as well as my sense that the world ought to be better than it is.

I can’t hug her in person today, but I’ll get to do that next weekend when I fly to the family reunion. In the meantime, happy birthday, Mom, and many happy returns.

Fetching blog updates from Weblogs.com using Applescript

As I mentioned earlier this week, I’m running an AppleScript once an hour to download data from Weblogs.com. For anyone who may be interested in seeing how it’s done, the code is below and is easily adaptable to other scripting languages, including DOS Batch (I know, I’ve done it). This is first pass code, not optimized, warts and all. Enjoy.

copy getWeblogsChanges() to {success, theFile}
if not success then
	display dialog "Could not get the changes file from Weblogs.com."	
return

end if
processWeblogsChanges(theFile)
on getWeblogsChanges()
	set changesSource to "http://www.weblogs.com/changes.xml"
	set theDate to current date
		set theYear to year of theDate as string
	set theMonth to month of theDate as string
	set theDay to day of theDate as string
	set theTime to time of theDate as string
		-- need to prompt for the user's directory instead
	set theFileName to "~/" & theYear & theMonth & theDay & theTime & "_changes.xml"
		set theShellCommand to "curl " & changesSource & " > " & theFileName
		--need error handling
	do shell script theShellCommand
	return {true, theFileName}
end getWeblogsChanges
on processWeblogsChanges(theFile)
	set theShellCommand to "gzip -c " & theFile & " >>changesxml.gz"
	do shell script theShellCommand
end processWeblogsChanges

Momentary lapse of reason

I was a bit panicked earlier tonight; I came home and the Power and PC Connection lights on the cable modem were blinking in sequence, then stopping, then restarting. Usually a sign that someone somewhere has screwed up my cable modem service. Tonight that would have been a very bad thing. No video chat with Lisa and her folks, potentially a full day of Weblogs.com data missed, no blogging tonight…

After a bit, I stopped hyperventilating, called Lisa the old fashioned way on the phone, watered the garden, ate dinner, and watched a bit of This Old House. When I picked up the computer later, everything was working again. Bliss!

Hanging out
In the street
The same old thing
We did last week
Not a thing to do
But blog and try to parse XML

…er, something like that.…

Different but equal

Here’s a feature that Office 2003 has (and maybe Office XP, too) that Office X for the Mac doesn’t. Somewhat to my chagrin. In Office 2003, you can import an arbitrary XML file, with or without a DTD, into a regular old Excel worksheet.

Why might you want to do such a thing? Think data acquisition and analysis on the cheap, without having to write an XML parser to understand the data. Say, for instance, you’re bringing in about 200K of XML data from Weblogs.com every hour for two weeks and you want to look at, munge, and export it quickly to a format that can be imported by a SQL database. Possible using Excel 2003. Not possible using Excel X for Mac.

Little known not-secret: Excel X for Mac is a completely separate code base from the Windows versions of Excel, produced by a different team in a different division. Good news: this means it acts more like a Mac product (remember Word 6?). Bad news: sometimes major features go missing.

BloggerCon, and you’re invited

Have I commented yet on the terrible irony that I left Boston and its environs just as Dave Winer, the Blogfather, was moving there? Yes? Ok, moving on to the main topic: BloggerCon, the first convention specifically for bloggers, is October 4 at Harvard Law. Registration online. The conference is invitation only, which may explain why I can’t find all the details on the main site, but here’s some goodies from the invitation:

4. Presenters include Glenn Reynolds, Joshua Marshall, Doc Searls, Scott Rosenberg, Adam Curry, Elizabeth Spiers, Jim Moore, Susan Mernit and more. Moderators: Lance Knobel, Ed Cone, Christopher Lydon and myself. And new discoveries, people we hadn’t heard about until we set out to find the most interesting and eclectic blogs and bloggers.

5. We’re going to talk about how weblogs are used in politics, business, journalism, the law, medicine, engineering and education. And it’s Harvard so you know it tastes good and is good for you too. ;->…8. Our local host committee of Boston-based bloggers includes Cluetrain author David Weinberger, InfoWorld’s Jon Udell, author Halley Suitt, MIT’s Andrew Grumet and Tracey Adams, Harvard librarian Jessica Baumgart and Larry Bouthillier from Harvard Business School.

Maybe I can talk Lisa into a trip back East for a four or five day weekend…

Grilling lamb, and singeing the blogger

Four months after Julie Powell finished her lamb feast, I’m trying my own. Here it’s just me eating, but it’s a whole butterflied leg of lamb, rubbed with fresh rosemary, parsley, basil, and oregano from my garden, and done on the grill for (so claims The Joy of Cooking twelve minutes on a side. So for twenty-four minutes of non-rainy Seattle suburban bliss, I’m blogging from the patio on the new PowerBook, mint julep by my side…

…Sorry, I’m back. The fat on the back of the lamb had dripped down into the grill, which is a bit scary already, and so the grill was doing a reasonable imitation of The Towering Inferno. It was time to flip the lamb anyway, which I managed with something close to aplomb and something like 60% of the hairs on my hand intact. Mind, this is after the handy little spray bottle put out most of the flames. Man, it’s tough out here tonight.

(Twelve minutes later) The smaller portion of the lamb finished cooking in the prescribed 12 minutes a side, but the major part of the leg was about 15 degrees too cool. Hope this finishes in time to catch Alton Brown.

(After) Not bad, but would have been better with garlic. Still, it gives me hope that, through the magic of butterflying, everything can be grilled! Next up: wildebeest!

Question for the next year

Paul Krugman in the New York Times: “how can Congress or the public make informed votes if both are fed distorted information?” He’s writing about the trend of government agencies under this administration, in this instance the Treasury Department, to release incomplete information in a way that suppresses information that could put the Administration’s tax policies in a bad light.

The original article, by Martin Sullivan in Tax Notes, sounds like it would be a good read, except of course Tax Notes is behind a pay-wall. Another analysis by Robert Greenstein at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is good reading.