{"id":551,"date":"2009-01-23T23:59:07","date_gmt":"2009-01-24T03:59:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=551"},"modified":"2009-01-23T23:59:07","modified_gmt":"2009-01-24T03:59:07","slug":"odd-lots-51","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=551","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul>\n<li>From the Words I Didn&#8217;t Know Until Yesterday Department: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.british-civil-wars.co.uk\/glossary\/ranters.htm\">The Ranters<\/a> were a wild-eyed seventeenth-century religious fringe group, who were perhaps most notable for incorporating nudity into their worship. (Whatever else they might have been, they sure weren&#8217;t Catholic.)<\/li>\n<li>From ditto: In modern urban slang, a &#8220;butterface&#8221; is a homely girl with a great body, as in, &#8220;Every part of her was perfect <em>but her face<\/em>.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>And elsewhere on the words front, even William Safire, from whom the scariest words recoil in terror, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2006\/03\/05\/magazine\/305wwln_safire.1.html?pagewanted=print\">was unable to determine the origin of that very up-to-date and with-it 90s expression, &#8220;it is what it is.&#8221;<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/It_is_what_it_is\">Wikipedia suggests that it was coined by John Locke<\/a>, circa 1680. So much for being up-to-date.<\/li>\n<li>From the Microprocessors I Never Heard of Until Yesterday Department: There was an <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Intel_80376\">80376<\/a>. It was an embedded variant of the 80386 that did not support real mode, but only protected mode, and was produced from 1989 until 1994.<\/li>\n<li>Much angst is flowing about the blogosphere concerning the Conficker worm, but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.windowssecrets.com\/2009\/01\/22\/02-Keep-the-latest-worm-infestation-off-your-PC\">this is the first page about it that I respect at all<\/a>. I&#8217;ve long since disabled Autorun, and in fact, &#8220;autorunning&#8221; things is one of the worst ideas in computing since DLLs. Make sure you&#8217;ve got <a href=\"http:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/technet\/security\/Bulletin\/MS08-067.mspx\">that November patch<\/a> they speak of<\/li>\n<li>And while we&#8217;re talking worms, here&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vnunet.com\/vnunet\/news\/2234909\/trojan-targets-mac-pirates\">some news on a piece of malware that comes in on pirated Mac software<\/a>, evidently with the intent of creating an all-Mac botnet. The dangerous thing here is that a lot of nontechnical people seem to believe that the Mac is immune to malware somehow. OS\/X is certainly tougher to infect than Windows, but it can be done, especially when people are <em>sure<\/em> that it can&#8217;t.<\/li>\n<li>Carol and I launch our Internet-facing apps under a clever mini-utility called <a href=\"http:\/\/news.cnet.com\/8301-13554_3-9756656-33.html\">DropMyRights<\/a>, which basically runs such apps with limited user account privileges instead of admin privileges, even if you&#8217;re running as admin. Doesn&#8217;t work on Win2K, so I have not used it myself until fairly recently, but I installed it on Carol&#8217;s XP box probably two years ago, and she has used it daily without any issues since then.<\/li>\n<li>I have tried and failed to make a Linux utility called <a href=\"http:\/\/sourceforge.net\/projects\/kgrubeditor\">KGrubeditor<\/a> work under my instance of Ubuntu Intrepid. When I attempt to launch it, an item appears in the taskbar for about fifteen seconds before vanishing, and nothing else happens. At least one another person I know has made it work correctly, but I just don&#8217;t see what I&#8217;m doing wrong. I installed it through Ubuntu&#8217;s apt-get shell and saw no errors during the process. If any of you are users and are aware of any trickiness in the utility, I&#8217;d love to hear more.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From the Words I Didn&#8217;t Know Until Yesterday Department: The Ranters were a wild-eyed seventeenth-century religious fringe group, who were perhaps most notable for incorporating nudity into their worship. (Whatever else they might have been, they sure weren&#8217;t Catholic.) From ditto: In modern urban slang, a &#8220;butterface&#8221; is a homely girl with a great body, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[15,73,36,14],"class_list":["post-551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-hardware","tag-language","tag-malware","tag-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}