[@904]
The Bourne Supremacy

I just love it when a sequel holds up to the original, and this one was even better.

ICMP I'm looking for a way to execute ICMP requests (ping, echo, etc.) as a non-privileged user under Linux Red Hat. I wrote some JNI code to perform my requests. The native library is loaded within a process (web server), which of course is, not running as root. Anybody know of a way to do this? Maybe using some kind of ICMP daemon or proxy? Please let me know.

[@843]

[@731]
Base64

How many implementations of Base64 encoding does Java need?

Sun has a few:

• java.util.prefs.Base64 (non-public)
• javax.mail.internet.MimeUtility
• sun.misc.BASE64Encoder (unofficial)

There are also:

• Open Source Implementations
• Public Domain
• Common

The big boys, such as IBM and BEA, have all taken a stab at it.

I even have my own.

I know we Java coders love to re-implement the same thing over and over and over and over… But someone should put a stop to this insanity.

[@061]
Humour

A man appears before a judge one day, asking for a divorce. The judge quietly reviews some papers and then says, “Please tell me why you are seeking a divorce.” “Because," the man says, “I live in a two-story house.” The Judge replies, “What kind of a reason is that? What is the big deal about a two-story house?” The man answers, “Well Judge, one story is ‘I have a headache’ and the other story is ‘It's that time of the month.’”

I, Robot

We went to see I, Robot last weekend, we both really liked it. 

As a teenager I spent a lot of time buried in sci-fi books; devouring 2 or 3 per day, especially during the summer. Asimov never really did it for me. I actually find him quite boring as a writer.

The movie didn't even come close to following the book, which was just fine by me.

[@913]

[@184]

[@701]
Spam Challenge Cédric is testing a simple challenge/response anti-spam method. Great! A simple system like that is definitely needed. The problem with Cédric's approach (and other challenge/response systems) is that they still leave a few problems unsolved. Requiring people to respond to the challenge is fine if they are the ones emailing you. There should be no challenge if someone is responding to an email you sent them. This is not an easy problem to fix because everything happens on the email client side.

[@911]
Steve is telling me that ASK addresses this issue by embedding a key in all outgoing messages. Although it did not work for me. Apparently Steve's key is his signature, which Thunderbird automatically removed when replying.

As Cédric mentioned, a whitelist is required to ensure that certain addresses or domains are never filtered. Spammer have gotten a lot smarter in the last few months. The sender's email address is often a valid address from the same domain as the recipient. How do you fight this? I get a lot of spam pretending to be from my wife @ thauvin.net, and I'm not about to bounce all mail coming from her. Company mail is even worse.