Miscellaneous Musings

After finding a Python interpreter embedded into a vendor tool (which shows they have some taste), I got to wonder just how pervasive Python is getting, and how oddly like Klingon it can be: You look at the fluent script, attain a glimmer of understanding, yet are unable to put together the simplest phrase without making a mess of it.

I loathe Python's indenting and lack of delimiters (it makes it impossible to use a consistent style of vim folding across all my source files, for one). Now that D has re-surfaced (after a long trek in limbo), maybe curly braces will go back in fashion.

mproxy Rendezvous Forwarder

I've just published a brute-force (but effective) Rendezvous proxy over at the CVS repository, written by one of my colleagues. It's simple, ingenious and most likely useful in a lot more ways than we can envision at this point. It is also unsupported, so you're on your own.

The Non-Flaw in TCP

So someone finally figured out that you can reset TCP connections (or, most critically, BGP ones) by spoofing IP addresses and sending RST packets.

Big deal. The only clever bit (guessing the right window number) was trivial on Windows systems a few years back (Windows for Workgroups' first TCP/IP stack, for one, was notoriously flaky in that regard, since it pretty much hung up on any half-baked RST packet).

And, in case you don't know it, real ISPs already do anti-spoofing.

AT&T Wireless loses 367.000, Sprint adds 400.000, Cingular 554.000. Being a mobile carrier in the US is tough these days...

Not happy with ripping off Windows, Linspire (née Lindows) is now ripping off Apple's iTunes and iPhoto with a couple of hacked-together mock-ups called Lsongs and Lphoto:

This is precisely the sort of thing John Gruber is likely to pick up on as a follow-up to the Usability Wars - Open Source developers tend to blindly copy the surface of popular applications without understanding the mechanics (or even using the original).

Allow me to suggest a title for Gruber's next rant: Rip Off, Spray On, Be Sued.