Viruses on Navy computers, i.e. I'm paying to get spammed

It looks like the Navy needs to update their virus software as they have a machine trying to send me spam:

Feb 20 21:37:39 linux sendmail[6685]: NOQUEUE: connect from
pacfc.fleet.navy.mil [205.56.145.37]
Feb 20 21:37:48 linux sendmail[6685]: k1L5bda1006685: ruleset=check_rcpt,
arg1=, relay=pacfc.fleet.navy.mil [205.56.145.37],
reject=550 5.7.1 ... Relaying denied

Can I send the Navy a bill for having to deal with their virus infected computer? I'm glad my tax dollars are hard at work sending me spam.

Nice work, RapidWeaver

Over the past 24 hours, I've been bombarded by bounced email that appears to have originated from my server. Turns out, there is a security flaw in the php script that RapidWeaver uses for its contact page so people have been exploiting it to send spam. Reading the message boards for the software shows that the authors knew about this about 1.5 weeks ago. It would have been nice for them to inform their users to turn this feature off until they can patch it. Even after they patch it, I'll find another way to handle the contact page so I don't have to deal with this again.

Fun with Pointers (not the dogs)

One of the aspects of programming that took me a long time to understand was (memory) pointers. I grew up with BASIC, learned Pascal and C where I always used fixed length structures or types and never cared about memory allocation as it was way too confusing to me. In college, I majored in engineering and only took 1 computer science class, so most of my programming knowledge is self-taught, on the job training. It wasn't until a few years out of college that how pointers worked really clicked. These days, with high level frameworks and languages such as Objective-C and Cocoa, I don't use pointers all that often (I still have to deal with allocation and de-allocation of memory), but when I need to use them, they're a piece of cake to use. I find that I only use them when shipping data across a wire, i.e. to/from a handheld device. Knowing how to use pointers, walk pointers, etc. makes complicated code very easy. I think that understanding how pointers work is essential to being able to write applications that aren't self-contained, i.e. only run on a desktop machine. I wish I had learned about them earlier as I'm sure it would have made my life easier.

Samsung A900 Update - Almost golden!

Samsung/Sprint released an update to the A900 phone today or yesterday (version ZB12) which directly addressed the "phantom ringing" issue that I, as well as others, reported. This is excellent as I can now use a Bluetooth headset with the phone. However, my Parrot EasyDrive carkit doesn't work with it, yet. I'm not sure if this is a Parrot problem or a Samsung problem, but I suspect Samsung as I can use the carkit with a GSM phone I have on my desk.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Samsung/Sprint will iron out this remaining issue in the near future. It's disappointing to see the fixes take so long and not to have them in there before the phone was released, but I'm glad they're finally getting addressed.