The Old New Thing

August 2009 - Page 4 of 4 - The Old New Thing

Searching for Evil: Spot the scam

August 5, 2009 Aug 5, 2009 08/5/09
Raymond Chen
Security researcher Ross Anderson gives a talk on how a search engine can be used to shed light on the various evils that lurk on the Web. It starts off slow, but picks up when he gets to the "Can you spot the scam?" game that he plays with each Web site. (If you're in a hurry, skip ahead to a little past the 20 minute mark...

Programming means that sometimes you have to snap two blocks together

August 4, 2009 Aug 4, 2009 08/4/09
Raymond Chen
Part of the challenge of programming (and for some people, the reason why programming is fun in the first place) is looking at the building blocks provided to you and deciding how to assemble them to build something new. After all, if everything you wanted a program to do already existed ready-made, it wouldn't be called programming any more. ...

A burglar tells you the best place to hide your money

August 3, 2009 Aug 3, 2009 08/3/09
Raymond Chen
Jeffrey Strain chats with a former burglar and learns the best place to hide money. ("The bank," responds the former burglar. Oh, the best place to hide money in the house...) A month later, the follow-up article discussed the worst places to hide money (that sound like good ideas but aren't...

When giving a presentation with a diagram, pretend the diagram doesn't exist

August 3, 2009 Aug 3, 2009 08/3/09
Raymond Chen
::Wendy:: suggested enabling a means of displaying pictures on the blog without messing up the display of the whole post. Actually, I've simply given up on the pretty diagrams since everybody seems to hate them. You may have noticed that I've been using ASCII art instead. It's certainly easier for me to write, though it's also a bit uglier...