Visiting Family up North, Part 3

My immediate family and I spent all of today driving back from the family reunion. After breakfast, we checked out of our room at the Park Street Inn, which was an excellent place to stay. (If you're looking for a place to stay in or around Nevis, I highly recommend it.) On the drive back, I got some more practice with the manual transmission; I managed not to stall the engine at all today.

The relatives sent me this picture of two cousins helping me try to water-ski:

Trying to get the skis aligned properly

Tomorrow, it's back to the online class work.

Visiting Family up North, Part 2

Today was the second and main day of my visit to Akeley, Minnesota for a retreat with the extended family. I started the day by going around the neighborhood to see the attractions, including the statue of Paul Bunyan:

The world's largest Tiger Muskie

An unfortunately-named funeral home

Shortly after arriving at the lakeshore, I made my first attempt at waterskiing. I was not at all successful even after several tries, but in my defense the lake was unusually wavy. Along with the large group of extended family members, I walked the trails by the cabin my grandfather owned.

After lunch, I played the card game Bang! with several cousins. I had played only once before, but I like the game very much and have previously tried to recreate it as a networked PC game. (I might restart that project sometime.) That was a good deal of fun. Wandering about and watching things happen around the lake occupied the remainder of the afternoon.

The day was wrapped up by attending a show at the Woodtick Theater. It was a lively collection of songs in an assortment of musical styles; I enjoyed it very much.

Tomorrow will consist entirely of the drive back down to western Illinois.

Visiting Family up North, Part 1

Today my immediate family and I made a nine-hour drive up north to visit some extended family in Minnesota. The drive itself was without notable incident, but when we arrived it was already fairly late.

I've only been up here two hours, but in that time I met some cousins, uncles, and aunts I more or less forgot that I had. I also went canoeing on a beautiful lake with my father.

On the agenda for tomorrow is, among other things, water skiing, which I have never done before.

Reporting Phishing/Spam from .edu Addresses

Today I received a standard phishing (credential theft attempt) e-mail, the kind I wrote about in Mark Junk/Phishing Mail as Spam. However, this message claimed to originate from a .edu e-mail address. So, I went to that university's web site and looked for a contact e-mail. I then sent a message of the following form to that address, CC'd to abuse@[domain].edu:

Hello, 

I received the below e-mail that claims to have been sent from a [institution] address. It is a standard phishing/scam attempt; I have no doubt that the linked page will attempt to either drop malware or present a fake login screen to steal credentials. 

If the e-mail was indeed sent from that account, its user has probably been infected and the account hijacked by an e-mail worm. If the message did not originate from your servers, you might want to look into SPF to ensure nobody can impersonate your users. 

Sincerely, 

[Name]

A few hours later, I received a thankful reply from the Enterprise Security person at that institution. The account had indeed been compromised; the situation has now been dealt with.

So, new task for good Internet citizens: notify educational institutions of spam from their domain. Feel free to copy and fill in the above note if you receive such messages.

Things to do this summer

Today was the last actual school day of the 2014-15 academic year for me (yay finals are done!) so now it's summer. This means I have a lot of time on my hands, and I hope to accomplish something more publicly visible than reading a bunch of interesting stuff on the Internet, as much as I like doing that. These are my ideas:

• Make Abiathar Online. This will require learning JavaScript, which is something I really should do. It would also be my first actual open-source project. (I'd accept pull requests and everything!)
• Improve Abiathar (the real, desktop one) in some way. It would be kind of neat to have an integrated graphics editor, but there's not a huge amount of demand for that. Reinventing Abiathar as a total modding solution (texts, sprite behaviors, etc.) would be really awesome and also a huge amount of work. Note that such a program was the original goal of FMod, which turned into FleexCore2, which powers Abiathar.
• Learn C++. This is another language serious developers should know, and I don't. I'm picking up a few concepts through my wanderings into P/Invoke, but I'm still up in managed .NET where memory allocations poof in and out of existence when you need it. The Windows API is another thing I should know my way around, even if only to understand what Raymond Chen is talking about.
• Make Ineffable Learning. I'm kind of afraid to start this because I've never had any serious success in web programming and I'm afraid I'll royally mess up the architecture right off the starting line. The point of Abiathar Online was to get experience in web development, but it occurs to me now that those are two different types of web programming (one client-side and the other mostly server-side). There are always volunteers though - this wasn't really meant to be an individual project.
• Learn mobile app development. Having a snazzy new Android smartphone seems like a great opportunity to start creating apps for phones. That's a huge market, and I'm missing out by not knowing anything about it.
• Practice chess. I still play chess, but not a whole lot; I'm not currently getting any better. There are books of openings I should study, and online games might be helpful as well.
• Not forget all the Chinese I learned. I'm not sure where to find good resources for learning the language that are Internetty and also free. The Chinese StackExchange might help. I could also try to narrate things in Chinese to myself.
• Do things with friends. Being an introvert means I can get along fine alone (look at all these other things I could be doing by myself!) but it'd be nice to chat with people? Maybe? I guess socialism socialization is a good thing.
• Create documentation. Abiathar's manual hasn't been updated in a long time; it's pretty out-of-date. I should hammer out the updates to that document and maybe rearrange or split up the "advanced use" section. Or, I could just create bite-sized demo/tutorial videos and add them to the new Abiathar video documentation playlist.
• Write more meaningful blog posts. I find that I'm pushing half-baked thoughts out onto the Internet in the name of consistent posting. Maybe I should try to get some really interesting, thought-provoking essays together in a less spontaneous writing style. (I do have a couple serious topics I want to cover thoroughly but haven't done the necessary research.)

Exams and Plain Text Degradation

Today I had the lovely semiannual experience of taking some final exams. On one of them, the teacher had to post some corrections to errata on the exam document: some numbers were messed up because the text editor the teacher used apparently doesn't do superscripts. (But it could do Rockwell font and BOLD ITALICIZE UNDERLINE ALLCAPS what is allegedly REALLY IMPORTANT.) So, numbers in scientific notation like 10⁶ appeared as something plain-texty like 106, which is very much a different number.

Over the course of this course (ha ha), I have several times had to guess whether a number just a shade over 100 was actually that number or a misformatting of 10 to the something. In science, exactness is a big deal, so lack of text layout capability is kind of a problem.

So, my advice to teachers and anybody dealing with text in which superscripts or other non-linear text layouts may appear:

• Use a real word processor, not just a rich text editor (WordPad). You'll have lots more features at your disposal, and your document will look a lot nicer.
• Do the essential formatting as you go. Don't write something like "9.9 * 104", promising yourself that you'll come back later and fix it. (You probably won't.) Instead, learn the features of your word processor thoroughly enough that you can do formatting immediately. "9.9 ∙ 10⁴" can't be that hard to type.
• Write like it matters. If you want your students to write academic-quality scientific papers, you should be a good example of that writing style all the time. You should proofread to make sure that there aren't any "102"s left over and while you're at it, prettify the IMPORTANCE EXPLOSION into something more professional.

Here's to all the students preparing for finals!

Mark Junk/Phishing Mail as Spam

We all get the Nigerian prince scams, the webmail upgrade phishing attempts, the Viagra commercials, and all that trash in our e-mail inboxes. I can't be the only one whose e-mail management usually consists of striking the Delete key five or six times on useless messages.

However, when you get a message that is really junk/spam/phishing (rather than just something uninteresting), you should be pressing the Spam button rather than Delete. Most e-mail providers use that feedback to power a Bayesian spam recognition algorithm, which will lower the chance of you and other people getting similar junk again. By flagging spam as such, you help yourself and others.

Now I wish mail clients had a standard shortcut to mark a message as spam and delete it. Maybe Shift+Delete?