Word of the day: "sarcinarious"

Firstly, a warning that that old rumour about MP3s containing virii might have some truth to it. Only in this case, it's not so much a virii, but a flaw in Win XP and WinAmp that allows malicious code to execute through a buffer overrun vulnerability. It's particularly odious in Win XP because the damn file doesn't even have to be run; only browsed in a folder or hovering one's mouse-pointer over the file. In Microsoft's own words:

"...For example, when the mouse pointer is held over an icon, summary information is displayed about that icon. In order to seamlessly display this information, the Windows Shell is invoked to read the file attributes and provide them automatically... The function that causes the Windows Shell to automatically extract custom attributes of certain audio files contains an unchecked buffer. If specific data was entered into an audio file, the buffer could be caused to overrun when the Windows Shell attempted to read the file. A buffer overrun can in general either cause the application to fail, or code to run on the machine..."

Ah, dark side geekery rears its ugly head. Nonetheless, all should swiftly download the patches available on Winamp and WinXP.

Just a vague query I'd like to throw out to all and sundry - today, in a charming email by one of my correspondents, I was excoriated as "the living incarnation of rapacity." Now, while this isn't a particularly flattering (and hence, true) epithet, I have a feeling the writer lifted it from some text. The question is, where?. The closest I could find was "gaping maw of need.", from a Jack Kerouac missive.

Gah. Another damned Monday. Is this all life has to offer? Endless, fatigue-ridden weeks of deskbound servitude? But one thanks God (or Deity) for the little blessings; such as being able to slack off on the Net. And Stilton cheese. And blue-laser keychains. (the latter being alittle present from a colleague's long leave trip)

It's time to immolate this year's archives again. I have an annual habit of burning the previous year's diary, after reading them cover to cover just before New Year's Eve, and saving a few choice entries. It's a pretentious adolescent holdover from when I read about the quaint Ecuadorian custom of celebrating the new year by burning in the streets effigies of famous and infamous people from the preivous year's events - the idea being purification of the past to prepare for the future.

Although this custom worked well when I actually kept physical notes and diaries, it provided an interesting dilemma when I first discovered WordStar (back in the days of yore when PCs didn't have hard drives - you had to stick in the MS-DOS diskette first). It seemed a tad too callous (read: lacked poseur ritualistic feel) to just delete the documents, and obviously I couldn't burn the whole PC, and 5 1/2" diskettes don't ignite very well. In the end, this dilemma was solved when family purchased a dot-matrix printer - and once again, the smell of burning paper was restored to my Christmas season.