Cleaning out the In box

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Cleaning some short items from the In box…

  • Reader Roy Harvey was the first to let me know that it was Lilly Tomlin’s Ernestine character on Laugh-In who immortalized AT&T’s legendary customer service, not Carol Burnett.  I’ve corrected my March 14 entry.
  • I don’t know how concerned I should be about Page Hijack: The 302 Exploit, Redirects and Google, but it’s interesting reading.  I’m continually amazed at the different ways that malicious users or nefarious spammers can make things difficult.
  • I got an email the other day purporting to be from my credit card company.  It looks like an official communication, complete with the correct last four digits of my account number.  However, the links go to capitalone.bfi0.com rather than www.capitalone.com.  I tried the bfi0 address plain, without the identifying tag at the back of the URL, and got a blank page.  Sounds like a scam to me.  What bothers me is that, if this really is a scam, somebody was able to link my email address with my credit card account number.  At least the last four digits, that is.  I’ll be keeping a close eye on this account.
  • Building a 3-column layout using CSS rather than HTML tables is something of a challenge, depending on what exactly you’re trying to do.  I spent a lot of time on my 3-column template for WordPress.  The best CSS layout tutorial site I’ve seen is Perched Upon a Lily Pad, which shows a 3-column layout with an explanation, and the entire style sheet is available if you view the source.  Very nicely done.
  • Back in the DOS days I and everybody else used PKZip to compress files for transmission.  PKWARE is still around making compression tools, but they don’t appear to offer a free or shareware version anymore.  WinZip is pretty much the defacto standard for compression tools on Windows, although even it’s not really necessary since Windows XP includes zip compression built into Explorer.  But it doesn’t work from the command line.  There are command line tools available for WinZip, but you need the GUI version installed if you want to use them.  The best command line tools I’ve found are the Zip and UnZip utilities from Info-ZIP.