General News

I hate Internet Explorer. The hate stems from all the issues I've ran into over the years with web sites and web development while accepted web standards having to be bastardized to support IE. You add in all the security holes in that software with Active-X and all the COM exposed facets of the program and you have a nightmare for potential hackers intruding on your computer.

Today's news in the BBC simply highlights another in a long line of failures on Microsoft's browser:

Users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer are being urged by experts to switch to a rival until a serious security flaw has been fixed. The flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer could allow criminals to take control of people's computers and steal their passwords, internet experts say.

So PLEASE change over to a standards compliant browser that can fix vulnerabilities much faster: Firefox, Opera, or Safari. (I'd advise against Google Chrome for now)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7784908.stm

Its hard not to be excited for the change in leadership that will occur as a result of the election next week. Whether you agree with Obama or McCain (or even Barr), don't forget to vote!

I've been in the US for a couple of weeks on some business travel. I was thumbing through the photos I stored on my local machine from our Korea visit (which we'll be posting stuff about in the near future) and came across this photo. It pretty much sums up why I miss them in one shot.

Kim and I are watching this presidential race with detatched morbid curiosity. This is the first presidential race we've witnessed from outside the fish tank of the horrible US news media. Being outside the country certainly provides a different perspective of the state of the country, our problems and potential solutions. The 24 hour news cycle on cable networks generate a ridiculous amount of inane comments and manufactured hype that ends up on YouTube or overtly partisan blogs like Huffington Post. It is no wonder that the majority of my generation and younger turn to the Daily Show and Colbert Report to help frame the really important stuff from all this noise.

Regarding the election, I personally think if McCain were to win this election that the remainder of the free world would help build the border fences the GOP is pushing so hard to finish. In their minds it would not to keep illegal aliens from getting in the US but to keep US citizens from getting out and infecting the world with their stupidity... and I'm a registered Republican.

I'm always amazed at business models can be created out of identified business needs. I guess the adage "when the demand curve of people with more money than time intersects with the supply curve of people that have more time than money, a business opportunity exists" is really true.

This specific entry is about CAPTCHAs. These tools are appended at the end of blog comments, bank account login forms, web board submission pages, etc. to ensure that the data being submitted is coming from a human and not a 'bot' programmed to spread SPAM around the interwebs. Many people have put tons of effort into cracking CAPTCHAs so the bots can continue to do their work but a new development in the SPAM arms race is developing: human CAPTCHA crackers.

Dancho Danchev, writing for ZDNet, reports on the emergence of CAPTCHA-breaking as an economic model in India. He reports that it's impossible to untangle the corporate web that's unfurled, given that large CAPTCHA-breaking companies often farm work out to multiple smaller businesses, but all available information suggests that CAPTCHA-cracking (referred to as "solving" in marketing parlance) is a booming sector of the Indian tech economy. Danchev reports that CAPTCHA-crackers can earn more per day than they can as legitimate data processing centers.

Seems like we're destined for more SPAM in the near future... Great just what I was looking forward to.

Here is the full URL of the story: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080901-captchas-flummox-bots-but-may-be-doomed-by-captcha-farmers.html

This is required viewing for everyone. In fact I suggest watching it at least 3 times to get the full effect. All I can say is someone has a lot of time on their hands.

Happy Dad's Day! We hope you enjoy your Sunday off, free from honey-do lists.

Happy Mother's day to all you moms out there, especially ours.

Today is Kim's second Mother's Day and we're celebrating by going to brunch at YC&AC and taking a leisurely approach to the remainder of the day.

I was poking around on Maki's photo blog (http://www.tantbury.com/blog) and she posted a link to a site (which you can visit HERE) where you can convert a photo into an Edo era style photograph. Think of it as a web based Photoshop plug-in. I picked a nice photo of Matsumoto castle from our recent visit to the Nagano area for a trial.

Here are the results:

The weather here is really starting to get nice. Plum and peach blossoms are in full bloom which means the cherry blossoms are soon to follow. Its time to start checking the Sakura prediction websites to determine when the peak will hit us here in Yokohama. I'm queuing up some stuff for this week as it seems based on our web stats that more people are making us a daily visit. We hope you'll leave us comments to let us know what you want to see or tell us how annoying we are. In either case, feedback is nice. So while I'm working on next week's material, here are some videos that I've uploaded for last week and didn't get posted. In the first video, Sakura is being her normal self: our little devil. She loves to get under our desks to tug on exposed wires because it is fun and of course mom and dad will pay me more attention. She also enjoys copying dad's hand gesture. Hopefully she learns what it means sooner rather than later... of course she will still disobey it. The second video is Sakura from two weekends ago. For some reason Sakura kept grabbing my foot and then running away. When I chased her with my foot she started laughing so hard. Luckily momma-san had the camera handy for one of the 'attacks of the killer foot'.

Our Little Devil from Yokogaijin on Vimeo.

Attack of the Killer Foot!! from Yokogaijin on Vimeo.

I'll be posting a video every other day this week. I'm getting some stuff queued up so there will be a steady stream of new content everyday this week. Sorry for the lack of updates but I have had zero free time to do anything and Kim has been working which means I need to help take care of Sakura leaving no time for fun with the blog.

This is one fine example of why Kim and I need to relocate from our current school district to a better one whenever it is that we move back.

It seems to me that there is enough space on the sign for the missing "UR" in this sentence. The real question is do you think they know it is missing?

Sorry for the absence. The holiday hangover is officially cured and I finally have some time to put up a post. My work has been extremely demanding since our return and of course Sakura-chan keeps both her mother and I running around with little spare time in the evenings.

I will be pulling pictures off the cameras so expect to see new postings of the fam over the next couple weeks.

Work has been a real bear for me lately. This is the 5th week of about 60+ hours (and due to the time difference with North America, late hours) on this project along with all the other stuff I'm responsible for. As Kim said, she and Sakura went back to the US for her Aunt's funeral. We will all miss her and hope that Kim's Uncle is coping well with the loss, we wish him the best.

Things are coming to a bit of a more normal pitch for me as the work week winds down for the weekend. I'll try to get another post up this evening with the crawling videos as promised (I actually tried a couple days ago but lost my SMB mount on the Linux box and thusly failed the operation).

Anyway, just to close this post, I saw this on the interwebs today and thought it might other peoples' days.

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FYI - It seems the 'how many 5 yr olds can you fight' system is now just forwarding to the online dating site of www.justsayhi.com. So don't bother clicking the link in the box.

I tell ya, it must be really difficult to live the life of a house cat. They seem to always be tired.

It has been a looong time since we've posted any pictures of the cats. Seeing how they've effectively been trumped by the arrival of our real kid, the other "kids" have had to suffer a significant drop in attention. They both are doing well and have adjusted to the new apartment layout. They tend to hang with us wherever we are in the apartment so they pretty much stay in the living room now that we've converted the office into Sakura's room.