August, 24, 2004 archives

there’s things to like about the motley fool, but i hate it when they publish dumb articles like this one that says you should never sell stocks short. the whole unlimited-risk angle of selling stocks short is completely oversold. you see, there’s this thing called a stop order….

rescued from an old disk: trained monkey, before october 1998 and trained monkey, circa november 1998. i just renamed some .php3 files to .php, and fixed up some paths so the right images would load and the links would go to the right places.

i think the original design actually holds up pretty well, although the content is sparse. the later design has the fun fake history of the company, but otherwise doesn’t work as well. but it was the beginning of the hanging-monkey logo, which i only recently abandoned.

what is with the recent uptick in failed ssh logins everywhere? a few weeks ago, i almost never got emails from the automatic log watchers about these, now i get at least one or two a day, all from different ip addresses. usually they’re attempted root logins, but sometimes they’re attempts to log in as other role accounts (like bin).

discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or nation.

somehow, xchange::pdf manages to create pdf files that mac os x’s preview application can not handle, but adobe acrobat reader can. since this is the tool that my internet service provider uses to produce the bills that i need to print out to include in expense reports, it means i need to fire up adobe acrobat reader to handle them instead of just being able to print them from my browser. (and this means i keep around a disk image of adobe acrobat reader, because i don’t want to actually install the thing….)