bid - Dave's Blog

Internet Explorer 8 Released

2009 Mar 20, 6:18

IE8, the software I've been working on for some time now, has finally been released at MIX09.

• Download IE8.
• Dean's MIX09 Keynote releasing IE8 is viewable here.
• Louis pointed me to this humorous IE8 advertising that doesn't make me cringe. On the contrary it has Ask a Ninja, Janeane Garofalo, and several comedians I recall collectively from either 'I Love the [decade]' or 'Best Week Ever'.
• It seems like only a year ago that IE8 Beta was released.
• IE Blog: IE8 Released.

As I mentioned previously, I worked on accelerators (previously named Activities) in IE8. Looking at the kinds of things I blog about on the IE Blog, you might also correctly guess that I work on the networking stack. Ask me about what else I worked on during IE8 development. The past few months were very busy for me and I'm happy this is finally out.technical internet explorer ie8

Second Life Translator

2007 Jul 4, 10:58Hackdiary
I really enjoy reading Matt Biddulph's blog hackdiary. An entry some time ago talked about his Second Life flickr screen which is a screen in Second Life that displays images from flickr.com based on viewers suggested tags. I'm a novice to the Second Life scripting API and so it was from this blog post I became aware of the llHTTPRequest. This is like the XMLHttpRequest for Second Life code in that it lets you make HTTP requests. I decided that I too could do something cool with this.

Translator
I decided to make a translator object that a Second Life user would wear that would translate anything said near them. The details aren't too surprising: The translator object keeps an owner modifiable list of translation instructions each consisting of who to listen to, the language they speak, who to tell the translation to, and into what language to translate. When the translator hears someone, it runs through its list of translation instructions and when it finds a match for the speaker uses the llHTTPRequest to send off what was said to Google translate. When the result comes back the translator simply says the response.

Issues
Unfortunately, the llHTTPRequest limits the response size to 2K and no translation site I can find has the translated text in the first 2K. There's a flag HTTP_BODY_MAXLENGTH provided but it defaults to 2K and you can't change its value. So I decided to setup a PHP script on my site to act as a translating proxy and parse the translated text out of the HTML response from Google translate. Through experimentation I found that their site can take parameters text and langpair queries in the query like so: http://translate.google.com/translate_t?text=car%20moi%20m%C3%AAme%20j%27en%20rit&langpair=fr|en. On the topic of non US-ASCII characters (which is important for a translator) I found that llHTTPRequest encodes non US-ASCII characters as percent-encoded UTF-8 when constructing the request URI. However, when Google translate takes parameters off the URI it only seems to interpret it as percent-encoded UTF-8 when the user-agent is IE's. So after changing my PHP script to use IE7's user-agent non US-ASCII character input worked.

In Use
Actually using it in practice is rather difficult. Between typos, slang, abbreviations, and the current state of the free online translators its very difficult to carry on a conversation. Additionally, I don't really like talking to random people on Second Life anyway. So... not too useful.personal translate second-life technical translator sl code google php llhttprequest

Phishing

2004 Aug 19, 2:52I received an email from verification@citibank.com the other day with the subject "Fraud Check Verification". Or at least that's what someone at the jumphk2.net domain would have me believe. The whole official looking email was very convincing at first glance. There's the Citibank logo image up in the left corner, the reassuring TrustE image in the opposite corner, and just the right amount of legal-ese on the bottom. The text requested me to follow a link in the email to update and verify my information. At closer examination however it becomes apparent that this is a scam. Little things start to catch your eye. The TrustE image is hosted on ebay and the Citibank logo is hosted at 65.108.92.50. Both images one might expect to be hosted on Citibank's site. The link in the email looks like its taking you to https://www.citibank.com/saw-cgi/citibankISAPI.dll?PlaceCCInfo but in fact its taking you to a page hosted at 65.108.92.50 again. The following sentence appears in the email:

If your account information is not updated within 48 hours then your ability to sell or bid on Citibank will become restricted.

Oh shit! My bid on Citibank might not go through! Seriously, they might have gone to a little more effort than just copying and pasting a scam letter meant for EBay. And the number one fact revealing the email for what it is -- I don't have a Citibank account. I had received an email exactly like this several months ago and just deleted it, but for some reason, perhaps I was in a foul mood, I decided to do something this time around. I emailed abuse at my domain, the ISP controlling their IP address, and Citibank. My domain told me there was nothing they could do. Citibank has yet to respond. As for their ISP, the following day I received an email from Leon at Alabanza's Abuse department informing me:

This account has been locked down and is now on schedule for deletion. If we can further assist you please let us know.

Fuck yeah! This was a lot better than anything I had expected. I anticipated no response from any of the letters I sent. The page is gone now. Leon rocks!