On the beginning of july a new exploitable bug has been found on one of the microsoft websites. And in fact there are no news in this sense :)

The exploit allows bad guys to get access into hotmail accounts. It is not the first of this kind and not the first on hotmail. If i remember well something similar has been found on one of the satellite websites of msn.com, it should be ilovemessenger.com or similar. The concept is the same, once you get to hotmail websites and you type username and password you get authenticated, same if you logged in on your msn messenger. From that moment and if the session is not closed a cookie is set up to allow the server to recognize you. This cookie is not dependent on the ip address of the user. It means that the simple fact to have the cookie allows you to check your emails. But since it is not ip dependent then the same cookie on another machine (after going through some make-up) allows that machine to get the rights of reading the same emails. There is a way to get this cookie.

Probably someone notices that i avoided to mention tools and many details. I dont want to show the method in details, simply because you can find it on many internet specialized sites. Just my 2 cents.

To know that some hundred milions emails are under risk is always a nice source of interesting thoughts.

Is Computer science & IT a science with too many parameters to continue to be considered an exact science? or is it just a consequence of the increase amount of dynamic content in the websites?

There should be lot of confusion in Microsoft offices, well... it's a big company, lot of people going back and forth...confusion can happen, i hope :)

I began to play chess more or less costantly at the university to fill those boring hours among one lesson and the other. I had also the chance, i can remember clearly, to meet with a former chess player of the italian national team. Or maybe he just aimed at it or got very close to it. He could move the pieces on the board mentioning at the same time the exact coordinate (d4, cf7 etc...) on a board where those numbers and letters were not written, and explaining the several configuations that a match could have, actually i should say all the configurations. He was a punk. And he was a master.

Later when i had less time for boring hours and more time spent on internet, as many chess players i began to look for an online game, chess game obviously. It was october 2001 when i found scacchisti.it.

The link is here: Scacchisti.it

It was written in asp, it had a chat and the list of connected players, no ads, no popups and the owner and developer, Sgrulka, was used to play on it as well. lol. He also asked some of us if we could help him in porting the asp to a java applet version. A thing that he did. The asp made the whole chat flickering on any new sentence going to be displayed. Sometime you got mate but the site didnt do anything, small loveable bug :) Then the java version, solid, capable of many hundreds connection at the same time, even thinking of the possible routing problems and thus allowing the user to select a connection port. too good.

Today Sgrulka can exhibit a nice prize that he got from the italian chess federation to have created the first national chess online website. That website gives still the same positive and true feelings, no ads, only actual passionate people, who like chess, who like to play against a human player.

And the whole idea based on a non-business website, i will avoid to argue about business and passions and how that site could have died if taking another way and i will save sgrulka also from my wishes to continue in this way, wishes that he absolutely does not need. But i would have loved such an argument... :) It is still so dramatically far from any business that the site seems to create the atmosphere that i could find in that university classroom, on that board placed on the teacher's desk, in one of those boring hours among one lesson and the other.

The druid in the picture today finally reached lvl 35 in the World of Warcraft. Usually the skills can be added to the charachter at every even number, so 35 apparently does not mean anything, except maybe for the acessible new mana regeneration drink. It was hard to continue with the sweet nectar. But something important is related to lvl 35 if your profession is alchemist, maybe also if you are something else but i dont know since i have only been an alchemist.

At lvl 35 i can pass to artisan alchemist, after 10 lvls waiting, since lvl 25, i was looking at the number 35 as the number of the maturity. Lol it is unbelievable what i can do now, and no, i dont accept the argument that druids are over powered. That's bullshit. For sure it is a good solo player, and choosing an euro server from over seas it is useful, but you have to know how to play, m8 :)

Wow! :)

Some days ago Blizzard gave the announcement, better... THE announcement for the new patch of World of Warcraft.

Next patch will contain World pvp and Cross-Realm battleground.

World pvp will be based on world-sized maps with as objectives startegic positions as usual and resources as well. Cross realm pvp is more, more than what we could expect. Someone wrongly called it realm vs realm battleground, even dreaming that horde and alliance factions of each realm could get in an ally together to fight another realm, it's not that, the separation among horde and alliance is still well estabilished and cannot be different (since if i spoke elfic... i doubt an orc could understand me) but now it is enlarged to outside a single realm, with tens (yes, exactly tens) of server which can join the same battleground. Considering that i am in a relatively new server and we are 15k... lol.

In effect the game which otherwise is perfect and i would say a masterpiece, was lacking some action on that side. it already merged perfectly lvling and storyboard as nobody did before, in fact we can say it is the first game where you have not to spend all the time grinding only or questing only (such a mistake in d&d...), now with the patch 1.12 it is even among the best pvp based online games.

I can give only a suggestion: replenish your mana, sharpen your blades, and get ready!

The moment in which Windows Vista will be released could be the same when Bill Gates leaves the leadership of Microsoft. Therefore together with the triumph of the release of the biggest software project in the human history.

I recently came a cross an article of a microsoft employee's blog. They had to meet the deadline of August 2006. They are not meeting it. The first analysis is on the number:
Vista is a project of 50 milions lines of code, and if you divide that among the 9000 technical employees in redmond it means they produced 1000 lines of code per year per each one. Lol.
An avarage programmer among the ones that i know, no statistics except my experience, can reach 10k without big problems.

First law of the microsoft-sized projects: the number of lines per year per programmer decreases proportionally with the increased weight of the management. A bad circle. It goes to zero with the increasing size of the project.

And Vista is surely a big project, challenging, in management language. Since for a manager is part of the professional knowledge to replace the word "impossible" with the word "challenging". Which keeps it still impossible but sounds better.

11 layers of employees, theory of comunication says that an information remains the same or looses part of itself while travelling between two points.

Second law of Microsoft sized projects: a comunication in redmond which goes through all the layers increases his quantity of information, by 11.

I guess many programmers when answering the boss about his schedule-needs told him/her "this schedule does not work", and all of them heard the famous sentence "figure out how to make it work". Showing lack of understanding for pretty technical issues, and pushing for nonsense-based answers. I will not comment this.

At the bottom line, is Vista really the biggest sw project? OS like BSD then? unix? are much older, capable, fully featured, more secured and widely used on an higher range of activities than any windows.

Third law of microsoft-sized projects: the size of a software project is proportional to the expencies for its marketing strategy.

I am sure that microsoft professionals are among the best ones, when taken one by one. It is the organization that is wrong then.

Have your own opinion:
Microsoft employee blog here.

Download the full video here

This is creativity.
I am speaking about the creation process, starting from feelings, intuitions, ideas and art skills.
I don't know who is the author and i would like to know him, just guessing that is someone who has passion for creativity. He/she put many things together and the result is amazing. Manga and rithm, perfectly blended. It is a story inside the story. Please look at the image in the movie which is related to the word "cry" in the song.

This video could be another step towards the implementation of a download section. If anyone has produced things like that, i would like to publish them, even finding a deal if necessary. For this one i couldnt wait, it is too nice.

This is just a brief intro of the full video that can be downloaded from the link above.

In my small experience in managing these few html pages i came across an annoying bug affecting IE.

When using italic font style to underline some paragraphs it happens that on Mozilla Firefox, and probably on all the browsers different from IE, you get your italic font without problems.

The same html tag makes troubles on IE, breaking the layout of the page. I made some research and i didnt find anything useful, but a funny conversation about including the style in the css, with related complains about misunderstanding the role of a css.

The problem is generated by a wrong calculation of the font size and probably by the fact that since i use Firefox i never downloaded any fix for IE. And i have no intention to do it! :)

The bug happens only on IE so assuming that there you cant render an italic style without messing the layout the only solution is to use italic on all the other browsers except IE.

It can be done with few lines of javascript.

This at the beginning of the italicized paragraph:

if (!window.external) document.write("<i>");

and this at the end:

if (!window.external) document.write("</i>");

You can see this sentence is in italic on Firefox and not on IE.

It is tricky i know, and the condition is the one used in the bookmarking script...but btw, dont forget the "<SCRIPT>" markers and it will work.

While wondering in Darnassus, the elf capital, i met a strange guy, speaking a lot, he stopped another player to ask him if he could see a red icon above his head.
There was no icon, and i asked him why should he have an icon.

He said he was trying a new addon.
I know there are quite a bunch of 3rd party softwares intended to help the player, customize some aspects of the games and so on.

But he said it is an addon for "doing his own quests".
Sure, which other quests should you do??
No, he meant he could create quests and let other players accept them. The addon name is MyQuests.

Honestly i didnt check this addon, i think twice before istalling the stuff like that.
I would have liked to take a look at the src but though there is a forum running discussions also about development i didnt find any available sources.

It is a whole new area to explore apparently, quest givers are stuctured accordingly to the storyboard of WoW, and to have such a feature could be ... i dont know, can make the game different from what it is now, myabe better, but would it be a step towards the estabilishment of a non-official server community?

The game is well managed, i can understand that, but for games that are not well handeld, like Ragnarok for example, whose GM and MGM are such a big amount of shit that you could feel the stink even only opening their website.

But WoW is great as is now.

Up to you, if you want ot check it, the link is here here