iphone and flash




“Flash is not yet good enough for the iPhone,”






To park or not to park

What would you say if not owning a garage your auto seller would supply by default a Mord truck by your house for you to park your new car into and told you this is your only alternative besides buying a garage from them?

Well such a situation is functional concerning Internet domains and this is what happens when you buy a domain and do not have a dns/hosting server.

But what if you are mislead into not taking your car from the truck in the morning , instead letting the truck drive you and your car to work?

This is a new situation where your active Internet domain is still parked on the same server and the traffic is transparently redirected to your server.

Well concerning cars and garages you would probably laugh at such a aberrations and no car maker would even hope such an plan to work just so they can proudly flaunt how many people drive Mord trucks but for Internet domains it works and i will go on detailing how GoDaddy does it.

You see in the last months there was a big racket over how a couple of million sites suddenly switched to windows servers.

Turns out that GoDaddy has moved all of it’s parked sites from linux servers to windows ones.

Well it’s their right to get greedy and host your parked site on whatever system pays off best for them, it legal too and somewhere along the registration you agreed to it.

But when you activate your domain and start using it and they still leave it parked just forwarding your traffic not only is it misleading for you and poisonous for webserver surveys but also damaging to the quality of the service and causing you problems like it did to the person that pointed this out to me.

I am talking about the owner of galacticchaos.net who was asking for alternatives to godaddys’s forced “truck” or expensive “garage” because they intentionally failed to inform him of any.

He , the owner of the domain and the content that should be on it has the ip and the content is served by a Apache webserver.

However galacticchaos.net points to the ip and the content is served by a IIS webserver.

In effect the content of the owner appearing to be hosted from a 2million+ domains** IIS*** webserver, in effect Go Daddy having mislead customers into having their active domains parked and putting up with inferior quality of service and other negative implications.

*whois.sc reports as the ip of the server for galacticchaos.net and PARK5.SECURESERVER.NET**** as the hostname of the dns server for galacticchaos.net

**domaintools.com reports over 2 million domains being hosted on

***netcraft.com reports IIS as the webserver on

****SECURESERVER.NET and it’s subdomains are known to have shady implications likehttp://aplawrence.com/Security/fake_blacklists.html

On MS VC++ 2005 reinventing the wheel

It comes as no surprise too , microsoft’s paradigm for adding new features is reinventing the wheel , and they overengineer it just to the point where it is inevitable to break , and impossible to determine why it did so.

Without further adieu let me present MicroSoft Visual C++ 2005 and it’s brand new ‘wheel’ , i mean deployment model , dll’s now have to come with manifests and policies , and rely on the Side-by-Side service and this is is just a rough sketch , you can seehttp://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms235342.aspx for in depth details , there is a method to this madness you know , as always.

To put it bluntly however what you have are :
2 files in %windir%WinSxSManifests , a .cat file (security catalog , for the policy) and a .manifest file (xml file for describing the libraries)
then you have a directory in %windir%WinSxS where you need to put your actual libraries (directory name and filenames being a mix of the name , version , hash , and architecture so you wind up with something like x86_Microsoft.VC80.CRT_1fc8b3b9a1e18e3b_8.0.50608.0_x-ww_6262d37f
, nice )

Ok , so now to the explanation , all that is microsoft striving to accomplish with all this is so we can have different version of the same library for our programs that were built with and require a specific version of it , when all you had to do to achieve this since windows 3.1 till 2000 was drop the library in the same location with the program , as a windows program will always try to load a library from its parent folder first , then start looking in every path for it , so you had different versions of the same library , each with the program that required that version.

There can be much more to be said but i rest my case for now , what are the platforms that are ‘vulnerable’ , i mean capable of this new deployment model you might ask , why it’s NT 5.2 and it’s older brother NT 5.1 (vulgarly known as Windows 2003 and XP respectively)

On high-tech thrillers and story telling

I have finished going trough my third Dan Brown novel , i was curious about these “high-tech thrillers” he is supposed to write , and what can i say , they are not plain , prety documented and mostly entertaining , but i am not sure Dan Brown is a writer , or at best that he has any grip with technology.

There is something about the story telling of Umberto Eco , Jules Verne , Stephen King etc. that leaves no room for doubt in the reader that they are good writers , they do not only have good ideas and vast research , but they also know how to tell a story , and i am not sure Dan Brown knows that.

One might say that the storytelling suffers from the technical nature of these high-tech novels , well i will go on exposing serious flaws in that technical side too.

The amount of misinterpretation , distortion and exaggeration of the high-tech side of these books would without a doubt offend and scandalise any techie or geek that actually has a idea or two about high-tech things , but the problem is that i think it will be a bit disturbing to any cultivated person too , and most certainly will induce gross misconceptions about technical issues.

For example at some point a program written in a given programming language is runned , and while it is running a personage needs to recall some syntax of that programming language in order to give some runtime commands to the program in that language. Well anyone with the least idea about what a programming language is knows that one writes the code of the program in a given programming language , any input the program will get at runtime will be nothing more than strings precompiled into the program , it is unthinkable to think the strings inputed at runtime would be in the syntax of the language the program is written in , only shell scripting comes close to that , and that is only when in the shell , hence while running the shell , not another program.

Further down the book , it is told about a file entering a bruteforce decryption cpu grid , and propagating from there into a databank , the firewall of the grid being named as the only protection, implying that what goes in the grid has a direct and unrestricted link to the databank .
Well a databank and a cpu grid can not have a single entry point hence something passing the firewall of the grid infecting the databank , because some processors and some hard disks , serving entirely different purposes and users, would not be parts of the same system , instead two autonomous systems , and the communications between such systems is done trough a network , a network with multiple entry points and firewalls.
It is unthinkable that a general purpose databank and the cryptoanalysts code breaking grid would be two parts of the same system , a system that , for example if the cryptoanalysts would crash , would be unable to serve any of the databank users , and all this in the most critical and advanced informatics system in America.

Even nontechnical things that are almost common sense are grosly missplaced in some places , for example it is told about a access stairway to the internals of a mainframe hall , and it is told about a body that falls from it into such a internal part hence shorting it out , and even more further down the functionality is restored just by removing the body from it. Now , who in the world would think that the internals of a multimillion high-tech equipment would be left exposed under a access stairway from which anything from dirt to accessories (and humans) can fall ?

And the examples could go on and on , especially in the book Digital Fortress that i just finished reading , and from which the above examples are all extracted.

Is is just the fault of the lack of the understanding from the author’s side ?
Is it really not a big deal that people will take such ravings for a fact ?
Is it normal for a high-tech novel to be like this , and does this not affect its quality ?

European Union is being corrupted

A tyrannical ruler of the medieval lands here once said “If you do not want me , well i do want you” when he was opposed to becoming a king , and he had his ways to enforce his saying and overcome all his opposer’s.

Well for the sake of freedom of the european union and the freedom of software let us hope that the same thing does not happen with Mr. Bill Gates too.

Because that is exactly the case nowadays , but to fully understand the situation i have to make a quick recapitulation of the facts.

With a more liberal environment , and smaller control by corporate will Europe and the countries in the European Union have always been a safe heaven and the cradle of open source software movement initiated by it’s american fathers (Richard Stallman , Eric Raymond)

One of the key facts to protect such freedom was the lack of the american software patent laws within Europe , but now that is on the verge of collapse as corporate interests in the growing European software markets have determined companies like microsoft to do everything in their power and seize the new markets.

That is especially understandable when we look at recent global markets analysis that rate america a mature market in means of software , that means it’s rate of growth is small , the concurrence is acerb and the quality standards are high

On the other hand in europe , the young market has a towering growth rate , little to no concurrence , and a callow sense for quality with few exceptions mostly in mission critical and educational organizations.

However there is good news, the European Commission said Thursday that it was not satisfiedwith Microsoft’s proposed licensing program for dozens of communications protocols , and EUdecided to fine Microsoft for anti-trust violations , furthermore EU sleuths think Microsoft sabotaged Windows

The bad news is that EU Council has approved the Software patent directive while making amockery of European ideals and all this whilst acting in collusion with Microsoft, says high-profile MEP Dr. Maria Berger in a press release , she says that the Commission adopted the position of Microsoft founder Bill Gates on the subject “without further thought”. Gates had visited the Commission and the EP in February.

So please , go back home to USA , Mr. Gates , we do not need your abject meddlings nor your frail patents here in the EU.