Don't Back Down

While I have a heck of a time remembering that it is "Motorsport" park (as opposed to "Motorsports" park), on Saturday night we went to visit the place. Before I continue, recognize that this is a big deal, as we aren't really racing fans. It just so happened that they had a special night where residents of Mecklenburg County could get in for free with ID. Luckily we had ID, so we went.

Concord Motorsport Park is a whole lot smaller than a lot that other track that is nearby, and it shows in their production values - it's not fancy, by any means. But it is fun. A smallish section of grandstand is reserved for families (no drinking), another section for, well, I guess it's also for families - but drinking is allowed. And of course there are the requisite open spaces where people can park their campers and whatnot.

Read "Concord Motorsport Park" »

Brian Livingston published an article last week that talks about picking the best online RSS reader. I can't believe it, because his first place reader is My Yahoo!, which he nearly dismisses with a wave of his hand by starting off "If you absolutely have to have to have stock quotes and local weather...". That's a back-handed compliment if I've ever heard it.

As a follow-up, he recommends that if you want to be able to "scale up" from a single user to a multinational enterprise, you should pick Newsgator. Huh? While I don't dispute it - and think that Newsgator might be fine - what happened here?

Earlier in the article, Brian goes into detail on the number of services offered by Bloglines, saying in a headline that they "Zoom Ahead". Apparently this is just for us geeks, and others should stick with Newsgator. Let's just go with that for a minute.

This article talks about using browser-based readers. Yet the only point that he really makes against Bloglines is that it doesn't support automated podcast downloads - a feature truly only available through Newsgator. Oh, and their client-side subsidiary, FeedDemon. Now Nick's a nice guy, and I really don't have anything against Newsgator.

But no matter how nice he is - how can his client-side solution give the win to a browser-based service? That just makes no sense. To delve further, Bloglines offers what Livingston calls a "universal inbox". I'm not sure I'd go that far, but I use the email functions of Bloglines regularly. Bloglines offers unlimited free searches. Newsgator gives you three for free. I don't have anything against services that require you to pay for them, but come on - you're writing an article to the public, and you enocourage a browser-based product that is better because of a client-side piece, doesn't offer as many features as other services for free, and can't even keep up in terms of market share?

I like Brian's columns, but this one is off. Way off.

Update: Nothing against Pluck, who seems to have a decent product coming along. But the column didn't mention them, so they weren't really relevant to this rant. Sorry guys.

It seems that Iraq may have spent as much as $300 million for faulty military gear - outdated, and perhaps even faulty! While I'm all for independence and everything - you just have to wonder. With all the deaths, all the problems, they can still waste (or possibly steal) $300 million. That's a lot of cabbage.

While we're speaking of freebies for download, don't forget about Plan 9 from Outer Space, now apparently in the public domain, and available for download from the Internet Archive.

Allegedly, the most excellent Greasemonkey extension is insecure, allowing folks to read files from your local hard drive. I tried Mark's leakage demo, only to find, well, nothing. I didn't get diddly. This may mean that it only works with particular versions (I'm using 0.3.3), it may mean that the code is no longer "active", so that it doesn't work, or it might mean that in some cases it's not actually a problem. I don't know the answer - but you should be aware, nonetheless.

After thinking about this momentarily, I came to the realization of why it wasn't happening for me. I have only two scripts installed at this point - Gmap Extras and UPS Track. Both of these scripts are set to work for only particular sites. Because of this, when I try Mark's page, Greasemonkey doesn't run - it doesn't think it needs to, since that's not one of the sites listed in the configuration. Adding it, or worse, adding "*", allows it to work just fine.

While I can't say that this makes Greasemonkey secure, it does make me feel a bit better. Of course, the sites that are listed may not be malicious now, they could become so with the current owners, or they could be taken over by someone who is. Still, it makes me feel a bit better that I'm open only to two sites - not to every site on the planet. And some of the more useful scripts, I'm sure, are open to every site you visit. It would appear that those are indeed dangerous.

Finally, it may be that I am vulnerable and it is simply that this site doesn't exploit that sort of vulerability. So if you're concerned about such vulnerabilities, you may indeed want to make the monkey frown, or perhaps banish him altogether. But it would appear that being completely vulnerable to every site in the world could be a bit of an exaggeration.