As a computer consultant, I get to see all kinds of computer problems.  And since I've been in the industry for 27 years (Since 1977), I've pretty well seen them all.  Or so I thought.

True story:  I've actually seen a computer with two floppy disks jammed into the drive to the point that the drive had to be replaced.  Apparently when the computer said "Put in Disk 2" it should of been more specific.  (True story.)

I've seen a lot of times that the client would explain everything they are doing and you would walk them through this thing and that thing only to give up and go on-site.  When you get there you find out that they didn't actually have the printer cable hooked up, but they swore up and down they did cause they had it plugged into the wall.

Many times you'll find a computer with PEBKAC or ID:10-T errors.  Sometimes you'll find a customer that you just want to... ok, well.  You get the idea.

But in all of my years, I've never seen THIS.

A woman went out to a local computer store to buy a computer that her family wanted her to get so she can e-mail them. The sales person told her that they would deliver the computer, set it up and give her some pointers on using it.  If she had any problems later all she had to do was call their "Technical Support" they would talk her through it over the phone or come back to her house to find the problem. The sales person asked her if she wanted to purchase 2 years in-house warranty, the woman said yes.

A few months went by, she was getting good sending and receiving mail and checking the other web sites with only one call to tech support until one day -- She called tech support.

SUPPORT: Hello, technical support how can I help you

LADY: Last night my computer started making a lot of hissing noise at me so I shut it down. This morning when I turned it on the computer started hissing and cracking, then started smoking and a bad smell, then nothing.

SUPPORT: I will have a technician come over first thing this morning, just leave the computer just like it is so they can find the problem and fix it or change it out with another computer. Give me your address; phone number and the technician will be there just as soon as they can.

When the technician got there, the lady showed the technician where the computer was, said what happen to it, this is what the technician found wrong.

   

Now don't go getting upset or scared or go running around yelling "The sky is falling!  The sky is falling!"  The sky isn't falling.  It's mearly taken some major damage and the engineers are saying that it needs to be replaced before it does fall.

SHA-1 computer hash code has been broken by a team in China.  A "hash" code takes a file, and encodes the document into a string of characters.  If you think about when you were a kid, if you take a message and cut out every other character, then that would be a hash of the original message.  When you read the message and compare the hash to it, if any of the characters are different, then you know you are not reading the original message.

SHA-1 is often used to encode passwords and secure communications. But don't worry, no one is going to be breaking into your grocery list or your dirty pictures anytime soon.

<<CAUTION:  Superscripts Ahead>>

I never would of thought it.  As much as I think Spam is the bane of all existance and that the people that send spam are little better, I found a small, significant, albeit miniscule to the global bane (did I use that word already?), bright point of spam.  [Was that the sound of my grammar teacher fainting?]

Spam will often employ random words or phrases in the message to try to confuse a type of spam filter called a Bayes Filter.  What this filter does is look at the words in spam (viagra) and then look at the spam score.  If the word viagra is often used in spam and not so much in your non-spam, called "ham," then the Bayes will apply a higher score based on the presence of that word.  So doctors and pharmacists might actually have viagra in their Bayes as being a neutral or positive word, but most people it would be a sign of spam.

Unless you are a writer and your emails often sound like passages from Mark Twain, or you are someone that often speaks in random $10 words in random order, then the technique really doesn't work to poison the Bayes filter.

While I was clicking the delete button, I noticed a word.  "fotogalary"  Hmmm.  No clue.  As Dictionary.com was loading I was pretty sure I figured it out after looking at it for a bit.  Fotogalary -- No definitions found.  I'm thinking "Photo Gallery" but what language?  Sounds German?

Head to Google.  Type it in.  No problem.

fo-to-gal-a-ry:  n. "Photo Gallery" in Dutch.

I learned something new from Spam.  Shudder.