Bad code! No biscuit!

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Codepoet, while discussing ways to quickly edit and preview HTML and CSS code, pointed out a program called HyperEdit, which contains a “live preview” pane to show the rendered code as you type it out. It sounded interesting, so I went to check it out…and cringed.

One of the first things on the page is this screenshot:

HyperEdit screenshot

First — the <center> tag, which is deprecated in current HTML.

Next — the <font> tag — also deprecated.

Next — the use of <i>Fast.</i> rather than the more semantically correct <em>Fast.</em>.

Last — the two closing tags that are both missing their final > character.

Sorry, guys, but if I’m seeing four cringeworthy examples of bad HTML code within the first couple seconds of visiting your page, you could have a program that makes BBEdit look like Microsoft FrontPage and I wouldn’t be able to take it seriously.

But maybe that’s just me.

iTunes: “Tourniquet (Prosthetic Dance)” by Marilyn Manson from the album Remix and Repent (1997, 4:10).

Good point

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I’d rather be shot than vote for Bush at gunpoint. After all, I can recover from a gunshot wound in, say, a couple months. Voting for Bush, well, that takes four years.

— Phil, via IM tonight

Mac OS X vulnerability

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News broke across the ‘net over the past day or so that there is a verifiable, serious security threat under Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) involving Safari (or any other web browser) and the Help viewer application.

What’s going on is that Mac OS X maps different “helper applications” to handle different protocols as you surf around the internet. A ‘net address that begins with http:// is handled by Safari (or your default web browser), an address that begins with ftp:// is handled by the Finder’s built-in FTP, and so on.

By default, the help:// protocol is handed off to Apple’s Help application, which (no big surprise here) is a viewer for documentation for OS X applications. Some documentation is stored locally on your hard drive, but Apple wanted to make it easy for updates to the documentation to be added, so Help also has the ability to fetch documents over the ‘net — essentially, it’s a stripped-down web browser. And that’s where the vulnerability kicks in.

While Safari has built-in controls to prevent malicious attacks, the Help viewer does not. It is able to run scripts that are fed to it, and can do so with the full user permissions of whichever user is logged in to the machine at the moment.

In this rather disturbing example of the exploit, the web page makes a help:// call, which launches the Help application. Help is then directed to an Applescript which is fed the terminal command ‘du‘ (disk usage, I believe), which presents a scrolling list of all the files on your hard drive inside a terminal window. Now, this is just an example, so it’s harmless — but if the Applescript or the terminal command had been more malicious in nature, some serious damage could have been done.

Luckily, the fix for this is quite simple:

  1. In Safari, go to Safari > Preferences…. In the “General” settings pane, uncheck “Open ‘safe’ files after downloading.”
  2. Download and install the ~~More Internet Preference Pane~~ [RCDefaultApp preference pane]{.underline}.
  3. Open your System Preferences (Apple Menu > System Preferences…) and go to the ~~More Internet~~ RCDefaultApp{.underline} preference pane (it should be at the very bottom of the System Preferences window).
  4. Scroll down the protocol list and click on the ‘help’ protocol, then ~~change that to an application other than Safari or Help — many people are recommending changing it to the Chess game application, as it’s harmless and will provide a distinct visual clue that something has happened~~ [set it to ‘\<disabled>’. Do the same for the ‘disk’ and ‘disks’ protcols]{.underline}.
  5. There is no step 5. You’re done!

(via lots and lots of people)

Update: John Gruber recommends another application for the same approach, as MoreInternet doesn’t show the disk:// and disks:// protocols that can also be used for this attack.

iTunes: “Coda” by Webley, Jason from the album Only Just Beginning (2004, 10:10).

Battling the blahs

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There’s a certain odd irony in that spring, when the days are getting longer, temperatures are getting warmer, and the world is getting greener also tends to be something of a difficult time for me–something of an inverse take on Seasonal Affective Disorder, I suppose.

This spring, it seems to be hitting me especially hard. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been battling a bout of depression, with all the usual symptoms. General listlessness, apathy, lack of motivation, etc., etc., yadda yadda, and so on. Not to the point of becoming self-destructive or suicidal by any means–in all seriousness, I honestly can’t envision getting that depressed–but definitely fairly far removed from my usual fairly chipper self.

The causes (or, at least, some of them) are easy enough to pinpoint, especially as I’ve gone through this for the past few years: the combination of my birthday and my anniversary of escaping Alaska and moving down to Seattle fall just about a month and a half apart (May 3rd and June 16th, respectively), and each trigger the yearly “and just what have I done with myself?” question (I had the same thing going on before I left Alaska too, only with the single trigger event of my birthday). This year, it seems to be harder than usual to come up with a satisfactory answer to that question.

(Warning: long, rambling, self-indulgent, and quite possibly slightly whiny babbling follows. You’ve been warned….)

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Moving towards reinstating the draft

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It may not be much longer before the draft is back in action — inactive Army reservists are getting notified that they’re next on deck to be called back to service.

A friend of mine who is currently an inactive Army reservist forwarded me some memos he received regarding future mobilizations — memos that indicate that we are not far from some kind of conscription in the next few years. According to my friend, recruiters are telling inactive reservists that they’re going to be called up one way or another eventually, so they might as well sign up now and get into non-Iraq-deploying units while they still can. There’s also a “warning order” — i.e., a heads-up — from the Army’s personnel command that talks about the involuntary transfer of inactive reservists to the active reserves, and thus into units that are on deck for the next few Iraq rotations.

(via Atrios)

iTunes: “I Must Increase My Bust (The Lords Like ’em Large)” by Lords of Acid from the album I Must Increase My Bust (1992, 6:46).

White House clearing national policy with apocalyptic fundamentalists

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This Village Voice article is enough to have me seeing red: Bush White House checked with rapture Christians before latest Israel move.

It was an e-mail we weren’t meant to see. Not for our eyes were the notes that showed White House staffers taking two-hour meetings with Christian fundamentalists, where they passed off bogus social science on gay marriage as if it were holy writ and issued fiery warnings that “the Presidents [sic] Administration and current Government is engaged in cultural, economical, and social struggle on every level”—this to a group whose representative in Israel believed herself to have been attacked by witchcraft unleashed by proximity to a volume of Harry Potter. Most of all, apparently, we’re not supposed to know the National Security Council’s top Middle East aide consults with apocalyptic Christians eager to ensure American policy on Israel conforms with their sectarian doomsday scenarios.

But now we know.

[…]

The Apostolic Congress dates its origins to 1981, when, according to its website, “Brother Stan Wachtstetter was able to open the door to Apostolic Christians into the White House.” Apostolics, a sect of Pentecostals, claim legitimacy as the heirs of the original church because they, as the 12 apostles supposedly did, baptize converts in the name of Jesus, not in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Ronald Reagan bore theological affinities with such Christians because of his belief that the world would end in a fiery Armageddon. Reagan himself referenced this belief explicitly a half-dozen times during his presidency.

While the language of apocalyptic Christianity is absent from George W. Bush’s speeches, he has proven eager to work with apocalyptics—a point of pride for Upton. “We’re in constant contact with the White House,” he boasts. “I’m briefed at least once a week via telephone briefings. . . . I was there about two weeks ago . . . At that time we met with the president.”

[…]

When Pastor Upton was asked to explain why the group’s website describes the Apostolic Congress as “the Christian Voice in the nation’s capital,” instead of simply a Christian voice in the nation’s capital, he responded, “There has been a real lack of leadership in having someone emerge as a Christian voice, someone who doesn’t speak for the right, someone who doesn’t speak for the left, but someone who speaks for the people, and someone who speaks from a theocratical perspective.”

When his words were repeated back to him to make sure he had said a “theocratical” perspective, not a “theological” perspective, he said, “Exactly. Exactly. We want to know what God would have us say or what God would have us do in every issue.”

(via Atrios)

Spitting Image returning?

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One of the best discoveries I made when visiting England during the mid-80’s (sometime around 1985 or ’86, I think) was Spitting Image, a BBC political satire show using latex puppet caricatures of political figures. Hilarious stuff, and something that never really caught on in the states — for most people in the US, their only exposure to the Spitting Image puppets was in the video for Genesis’ “Land of Confusion“.

The BBC Comedy Guide has a good summary of the show:

In Spitting Image, famous characters in British and international life were re-created in the form of latex puppets, which – in the manner of newspaper political cartoons – grossly exaggerated that person’s most obvious facial or personality characteristic. Given voices by top-line impressionists and vocal caricaturists, the puppets were manipulated by a team of skilled handlers to act out the quantity of wickedly witty sketches that comprised each edition of the show. Essentially, then, viewing Spitting Image was not only like watching your favourite or most despised public figures taking part in topical comedy skits but also seeing and hearing them in a dialogue free of the omnipresent facade of PR gloss and occasional deceit – revealing, perhaps, the true personality underneath, or at the very least, a wicked, exaggerated guess at same. In this fashion, many hundreds – perhaps even a thousand – of people in the news, or faces just plain familiar to TV viewers, spanning the years 1984-96, were lampooned by Spitting Image. (To have been a Spitting Image target was deemed an honour by many.)

Now it looks like Spitting Image may be coming back!

Spitting Image producer John Lloyd is in talks with ITV in a bid to bring the satirical series back to the channel.

Mr Lloyd was an original producer of the show, which lampooned politicians and celebrities using latex puppets.

ITV confirmed having “early stage talks” with Mr Lloyd over the show, which originally ran from 1984 to 1996.

The article doesn’t mention whether the original puppetmakers Fluck and Law will be overseeing the puppet construction process or not, though as many of the original puppets were auctioned off in 2000 when Roger Law moved to Australia, that may be doubtful.

Another interesting tidbit I learned while reading about this: one of the voice actors for Spitting Image was Chris Barrie, known primarily to me as Rimmer in Red Dwarf.

iTunes: “Maestro, The” by Beastie Boys, The from the album Check Your Head (1992, 2:52).

Surf like it’s 1994!

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This may be the last CSS-related post for a while — though I’m considering a writeup of how I implemented the stylesheet switcher into my TypePad setup, so there may be more yet to come. We’ll see. In the meantime…

I got an e-mail from a reader who still uses a 640×480 resolution monitor. Because the new designs use a fixed layout width rather than the fluid layout that my old single-column layout used, he was running into an issue with his browser where the webpage was cut off by about 40 pixels on the right and left hand sides, rendering the site somewhat unintelligible.

As that’s hardly the effect I was going for, I’ve added a fourth stylesheet to the switcher: Old School. Basically, this stylesheet is actually no stylesheet at all. Because this strips all presentational code from the site and leaves only the structural markup of the HTML code, it’s not very “pretty” by today’s standards, but is gauranteed to work in any browser on any platform — all the way back to NSCA Mosaic, should anyone still be using that!

I’ve also designated the “Old School” stylesheet as the “handheld” stylesheet for the site, so that handheld users should (if their handheld browser works correctly) get that unstyled version of the site rather than having to cope with a layout designed for a more standard viewing portal.

It’s all about the content, baby. :)

iTunes: “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana from the album Nevermind (1991, 5:01).