February 6th, 2004:

My "blog this" folder is getting pretty full. So here’s a quick link roundup so I can clean it out.

Portknocking: a new "security method" that brings us all back to our tree-fort days. "The server … does not directly listen on port 22 … until it detects connection
attempts to closed ports 1026, 1027, 1029, 1034, 1026, 1044, and 1035, in that
sequence, within 5 seconds. [It] then listens on port 22 for a connection
within 10 seconds." [via SlashDot]

Pepsi/Apple Superbowl Ad Parody: "We’re not going to take it, any more!" [via BoingBoing]

Cartophilia: "Prince Edward Island: The Island That’s Also a Smile." [via BoingBoing]

Dell blogs Linux: A fortune 500 company is actually blogging? Very cool! It’s a pretty geeky read, but, still, very good to see it happening. And, of course, as far as commerical computer sales go, Dell is one of my favorite companies. Go Dell. [via BoingBoing]

Jon 2.0: 2.0, it’s the new Jr. [via NPR on KERA, I think]

Comments on comments to manuscript rejection letters: I really love that some editor actually responded with a spoof of a William Carlos Williams poem — "This is Just to Say" — which, by the way, is an amazing poem.

Super Mario Brothers Tabs: No, they aren’t tabs to the music of Super Mario Brothers, they are tabs on how to actually win the game from start to finish. Someone had a lot of time on thier hands. [via BoingBoing]

That’s enough for today.

Microsoft is currently running an Ad for Frontpage 2003 on OSDN. The Ad states "FrontPage 2003 now has built-in professional coding tools that help you produce clean code faster". However, on the very frame of the ad that that text is written, if you look closely, you’ll see a terrible HTML mistake (hint, line 28). Not that there’s anything wrong with making a silly mistak like this. It’s just very funny when it comes from Microsoft, about a product known to generate horrible code, while talking about cleaning up the very code it generates. [via Mezzoblue]

What really makes it bad is that, either Microsoft FrontPage 2003 has some serious font rendering issues, or this entire graphic was made in a graphics editor without taking a screenshot of the actual words written in a screen in FrontPage. Not that it’s not okay to recreate it manually in a graphics program but, they didn’t even get the text aligned properly. Look at how the "code" becomes more and more misaligned with the "line numbers" towards the bottom of the ad. It’s as though they didn’t even try to make it look good. "It’s for OSDN, so, why bother".