Mokka mit Schlag

Last night I was at the Silver Swan for Extreme Tuesday NYC, when I noticed on the menu “Wild Canadian Muscovy Duck”. Methinks someone embellished the menu a little too much. Muscovy Duck is a South American species. While Muscovies are commonly raised on farms, and escaped birds do appear regularly at least as far north as New York, I very much doubt anyone in Canada is hunting them. If they are, they’re doing it in city parks. Either these birds weren’t wild, or they weren’t Muscovies.

P.S. I had the beef.

Don’t you just love students who send you their homework problems in the hopes that you’ll do it for them? Here’s the latest example I’ve gotten:

Often in reading an article, a book or a document one comes across a word whose meaning is not known to the reader. This problem can be overcome by providing an on-line dictionary so that a reader could look up the meaning of a word. In order to provide help with reading, you are asked to develop a Java Applet with the following GUI interface:

Labels Text Boxes
Word typed Text box A
Word meaning Text box B

Once a user types a word in text box A and presses return, the meaning of the word is displayed in text box B (provided that word exists in the dictionary), otherwise, the message “word not known” appears in Text Box B. Notice that both text boxes are preceded by a label. For the purpose of testing, it is expected that the developed Applet is able to cope with 100 or more English words

That’s actually not a bad problem: takes in applets, GUI widgets, event handlers, data structures, and possibly network communication (if the dictionary is stored remotely). However it’s not too complex to implement in a week. I’ll have to remember it for my own classes.

In the meantime, if any teacher recognizes this as their own assignment and wants to know where I got it, drop me a line. :-)

For my next book, I’m trying to develop a reasonably comprehensive list of technologies which are potentially vulnerable to injection attacks. SQL injection is the most common, but there are of course many others. So far here are the ones I’ve got. What else am I missing?

• SQL
• XPath
• XQuery
• XSLT
• JavaScript
• LDAP

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I’ve been so busy with writing lately that I haven’t had a lot of time to bird. However, yesterday I took a couple of hours for a spin around Prospect Park. I felt like I was playing hooky, and that I should really be writing instead. (I’ve got a looming deadline for March 15.) Nothing too surprising, 30 species total including my first King’s County Common Merganser for the year:
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I was debugging some problems quoting a piece of a Google Doc article when I noticed something funny in their HTML source, an apparent string bogon. For example:

<pre> List&lt;String&gt;<string> ls = ... ;<br/> Collections.sort(ls, new Comparator&lt;String&gt;() {<br/> public int compare(String s1, String s2) {<br/> return s1.length() - s2.length();<br/> }<br/> });<br/></string></pre>

In context, I think this is really a tag, not a badly escaped piece of the source document. A little googling didn’t find any information about it. I’m fairly sure this was never a real HTML tag or a browser extension, though I could have missed one somewhere. Can anyone shed some light on this?
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Croton Point Park, 2007-01-27