Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Have you had any bizarre IM messages from a person with “coho” in his screen name?

I was moving some Visual Studio projects around when an odd AIM window popped up.  It was from someone named “limbercoho” and the message was “Hail, Fellow”.  I usually close unsolicited AIM messages without even looking at them.  There are other ways to get in tougc with me, I view anything unsolicited from AIM or MSN with more than a little suspicion.

At that momemt, my PC was busy moving files around, so I had a some spare bandwidth and decided to see what was going on.  I responded back with “Hail” and it got a little wierd:

limbercoho: Hail, fellow!
me: Hail
limbercoho: hail?
me: Yes?
limbercoho: hell yes?

It didn’t take long to realize that something was just not right.  Going on the assumption that limberoho was some sort of whack job, I decided to do a Google check on that name.  The second hit was on Nixie Pixel’s blog, List of AIM Fish Bots – Salmon, Coho, and Trout.  There is an organization called “Project Upstream” that created the robotic fishbots.

The fishbot takes two random IM users and sends a greeting to each one and then connects each user to each other user.  They don’t see the other person’s screen name, they see a fishbot generated name like LimberCoho or BakedCoho.  Basically a random word plus “coho”.  Previous incarnations used “Salmon” and “Trout”.

Once I figured out what was going on, I IM’d the link from Nixie’s blog.  Understandably, he responded back with “I’m not going to click that link”.  That made sense, I wouldn’t have clicked a link that a stranger had send me.  So I explained what was going on and he asked how to block it.  That would be the annoying part, you can’t block randomly generated names.  There is an opt-out mechanism, but you wouldn’t know about it unless you knew what was going on.  The Project Upstream site does not mention, but someone claiming to be part of Project Upstream posted the instructions The Missing Hat’s LiveJournal site:

Opt-out support introduced
Greetings, hat missers. We are Project Upstream.

We have chosen to provide you with a new ability. You may now send a message such as "$optout" to any of our robotic fish. This will permanently prevent all Project Upstream communications from reaching your account.

Some additional information can be found on the Wikipedia entry for TheGreatHatsby.  That seems easy, but unless you know how to look for that sort of thing, you’ll never figure it out on your own.  It’s an interesting idea, connecting two complete strangers using social networks.  The flaw is that most people are not going to know anything about Project Upstream and and they are going to think that other person is up to no good.  There should be some information about the project in that opening message.  You could make a new friend, but it’s more likely to freak the other person out.

I chatted with the other person for a few minutes and we exchanged Twitter accounts.  It turns out that we really have nothing in common and we doubt that we will keep in touch.  It’s an interesting experiment and I think I’ll stay in it for a while.

The other thing to remember is that you are not directly connected to the other person.  Your message goes to the fishbot and the fishbot relays that message to the other user.  The same would be true for other user.  That’s great because if you don’t want to have an IM conversation with the other person, that person has no way of making contact with you again. 

That does raise an interesting privacy concern in that the fishbot is monitoring both sides of the conversation.  It needs to do that to relay the conversation and to be able to handle the “$optout” request.  But, what are they doing with that information?  The web site for Project Upstream only tells you how to opt in, there is nothing about privacy issues or how to opt out.  Just remember the security issues if you decide to play with a robotic fish.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

On this episode of “Jon and Kate and an American Chopper”…

On this episode of “Jon and Kate and an American Chopper”, Kate and Paul Sr have it out over how dirty the OCC office appears to be.  Jon struggles to find his place at OCC.  Paulie nearly loses his mind when he takes the girls shopping for new shows.  Mikey and Aaden continue to work on their concept bike.

Paul Sr organizes a dodge ball match between the OCC camera crew and the Gosselin camera crew.  Hilarity ensues when Kate shows off her new tattoo and Jon tells her “That’s not the Korean word for love", but it’s kind of similar.”

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Resetting the mouse cursor

Some app on my XP development PC left the mouse cursor stuck in the “move” state.  The mouse was behaving correctly, but it was stuck in move image, the one with the four direction arrows.  Normally, the mouse cursor is application specific.  One the apps is coloring outside the lines and the cursor image was stuck for all of the running applications.  I’m using a beta version of a Twitter client app, it’s the obvious suspect, but I still need to prove that.

I couldn’t figure out which app was doing this and I was in the middle of editing some code and I didn’t want to break my concentration by restarting everything.  So I decided to address the symptom and not the problem.  The question is how to do you reset the mouse cursor?

First, I tried the simple solution and just removed the mouse.  It’s plugged into a USB port on my monitor so I just turned off the monitor and turned it back on.  After coming back on, the mouse still had the wrong cursor.  What I did next was to bring up the Mouse applet in the control panel.  I selected the “Pointers” tab and it was obvious that something was a little off.  On this tab, you can select the theme to associate with the nouse cursors and the preview display shows the “move” cursor image for each possible mouse cursor image. 

I selected another theme and then went back to the current theme.  Now the preview showed the correct images.  I clicked the “Apply” button and the mouse was back to normal.  There’s probably a command line for doing this, but I’m not going to spend the cycles looking for it unless this happens again.

Sorry it didn’t work out

My work email inbox had a lot of spam this morning.  The messages were very similar in content with subtle variations in the sender and subject fields.  Nothing unusual there.  The odds are that someone got hit with a virus and my email address was in their address book.  That’s the tax we pay for free transmission of email.  Okay people, move along, there’s nothing to see here.

As collateral damage, I also received an automated error message from someone else’s email server.  That person got spammed from the first guy’s virus and the spam email used my email address as the sender.  Once again, typical tactics.  I usually delete these messages without even looking at them, but the error message caught me eye.  The message contained the following text:

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at something.something.something.net.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

<somebody@alaska.net>:
qmail-spawn unable to open message. (#4.3.0) I'm not going to try again; this message has been in the queue too long.

--- Below this line is a copy of the message.

Return-Path: <theguywithavirus@yahoo.co.uk>

The email addresses were changed to protect the innocent.  I found that text to be greatly amusing.  I’m working on a some error handling code for one our products and I am going to find a way to work in the text “This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.”.  It’s a subtle bit of humor and for the use case that I working on, entirely appropriate.