Thoughts between the Earth, Sky and Beyond.

a couple of blocks.

Quite a lot of time I have set my Skype in SkypeMe! mode, for those of you unfamiliar with Skype it is a way of making yourself available to anyone else that also use skype. Being in SkypeMe! mode is good way of making new friends at random, but it also have darker side in the shape of the occasional oddball it attracts. Like a user calling himself nakkeddriver that messaged me a while ago, after a quick look at his profile where he described his hobby of masturbarting in public places and engaging in casual sex with truckdrivers I quickly decided that he was not the type of person I'd like to have a conversation with. Well, actually his username alone was enough for me to reach that decision. Apart from the oddballs, you will also receive the occasional message with a link to some dodgy site, or even a 419 letter, all the fun I could have had with that one had I not instinctively blocked the sender right away.

The latest fraudster to contact me was yount

She initiated her contact by requesting me to add her as contact with an amatuerish promotional text offering cheap electronics with a link to http://www.eoyunt.com/index.asp. Now, this slightly differed from the normal scammer approach of just sending you a URL as a normal message. Which made me realize that I could have a bit of fun while reading my news online, so I started a conversation with yount. Our conversation went as follows, my comments to our conversation is in dark blue.

[18:42:05] Robin Eriksson says: I'm not in a habit of sharing my details with people that are not corteous enough to at least say hi
Just like I would not give my phonenumber to a stranger coming out of the blue saying "Gimme your phonenumber.
[18:42:50] yount says: Are you very busy?
[18:42:58] Robin Eriksson says: not really
I'm just reading the news and plan to have a bit of fun taking the piss out of you at the same time.
[18:43:50] yount says: You be the wrong electronics product interested in?
Of course I'm interested in the wrong electronics, only insane people are interested in the right ones
[18:45:11] Robin Eriksson says: The only electronics products I'm interested in are computer stuff and for those I get a very good discount through my company
[18:45:58] yount says: That is very good
[18:46:13] Robin Eriksson says: yup
[18:46:15] yount says: I is the company that you recommend us
[18:46:19] yount says: www.eoyunt.com
[18:46:59] yount says: If you joined it, you will have good price to purchase what you want
Did I not just say that I get very good discounts thru my company? Duh!
(In the hope of finding some ammo for later use I use the fraud check in Opera to see if the site has been listed as fraudulent, but It's not listed as fraudulent nor verified by a third party as trusted)
[18:50:42] Robin Eriksson says: Possible, then again it has not been verified as secure/trusted by any trusted third party such as TrustWatch or Phishtank or a known certificate publisher.
[18:50:51] Robin Eriksson says: so....
[18:52:32] yount says: Not understand
Whyyyyy did I see that one coming?
[18:53:20] Robin Eriksson says: I am saying that there is no way for me to verify whether it is a honest business or a scam.
[18:53:30] Robin Eriksson says: nothing personal
Hey! she is very pretty
[18:54:50] yount says: We are a regular companies, please trust to purchase
Sure, just like I would trust a complete stranger to watch my wallet while I go to work.
[18:55:35] Robin Eriksson says: not from a site that isn't secure
[18:59:08] yount says: We are a regular companies, many people all purchase the product of our company, and you have to believe us
Sure, just as I would trust that stranger person to meet me with my wallet outside work when I finish.
[19:02:47] Robin Eriksson says: Not without at the very least having seen a copy of your company registration and had it verified by the local authorities in Haidan
[19:03:30] Robin Eriksson says: unless you ship on POD terms of course
POD=Payment On Delivery which is a term is commonly used in the freight industry. POD basically means that if the delivered goods isn't what it is supposed to be you don't pay for it.
[19:04:29] yount says: Our affirmation wants to deliver the goods to you of nation
Go ahead,just don't expect to deliver any to me. By the way, who is your affirmation?
[19:07:27] Robin Eriksson says: Sure and google delivers quite interesting search results http://blogs.ebay.com/duosimcard/entry/www-Online-ElecShop-com-China-Scam-Company/_W0QQidZ178488018
[19:09:21] yount says:
what?
[19:09:44] Robin Eriksson says: your company is featured on that link
[19:11:14] yount says:what?
[19:11:43] Robin Eriksson says: did you click the link I gave you?
She's now silent for a long time, so I figure it's time to change the direction of the conversation a bit.
[19:17:36] Robin Eriksson says: heh! your picture reminds me a bit of my ex-wife
She really does.
[19:19:55] yount says: Do you have to purchase our products
No I don't have to, nor will I since I'm not a sucker.
[19:21:52] Robin Eriksson says: I'll consider it, but first you have to send me a larger picture fo yourself, I just want to make sure you're not my ex-wife.
Nothing bad intended about my ex-wife, though we are not on the best of terms I would trust here with money, really.
[19:23:27] yount says: ca ni ma de kao
[19:23:32] yount says: gun a
I have no idea what she said there, although it do resemble a cantonse insult suggesting you to perform sexual acts with your mother. It sure is close enough to be the Mandarin version of it. Whatever the case, at this point yount decided to go offline.

Thank you yount for making my day. I still would like that picture though, so don't be surprised if you find a request for it in your hotmail inbox eoyunt211@hotmail.com and quite possibly spam originating from bots having picked up your email address that I so sloppily posted in plain text here. Sorry about that.

• There is already an ISO standard named ODF (Open Document Format): a dual standard adds cost to industry, government and citizens.

• The OOXML specification is protected by multiple patents, where as the patent holder Microsoft corporation does not guarantee not to sue or confer any other rights for competitors. The basic implementation of such standard by the competition can face patent infringement cases around the world. This means a real threat for competitive applications even before the development begins.

• The idea of one standard should be clear, easy to implement by any party, with smallest specification possible, it should grant privileges for using such standard in any application, provide for compatibility or better said, interoperability between different applications using the same standard, free of patent infringement. The OOXML specification is 6,000 pages, which makes it a real hard to implement for the competition. An OOXML vendor does not guarantee anything to its competition and can sue or threaten them with patents. The OOXML encapsulates other binary data, not clear what they are, which the compatibility and interoperability features between different competitors cloaks in shadow, as a result of which the competitors will be unable to provide for a 100% compatibility with the binary data.

• The OOXML contains binary data for their "backwards compatibility" of their previous office standards, "backwards compatibility" with older Microsoft office documents; however, they do not publish the specification for other parties, which makes them Microsoft the only entity that can fully implement such specification with "backward compatibility".

• From the beginning, office suite applications by Microsoft were benefiting from their proprietary standards, where other parties were unable to implement such standard and make their products compatible. Microsoft decided to ignore the existing open standards, and as we have seen in the past, they are trying to bring upon a new “open” proprietary standard that can be fully integrated only by Microsoft itself. There have been Open Standards for document exchange out there for a longer time, Microsoft had pledged only one step for its implementation, but in the end it turns out to be a third party plug-in which was made by another developer (Sun Microsystems).

• To date, the standard has not been implemented by its vendor or the competition. It is clear that the Microsoft product will switch to their “open” standard in a certain time; does this mean competition in the field of standards?

• No standard can be backwards compatible; this is an application feature, which can support different versions of one standard.

• The OOXML is dependant on the Windows technology platform. Its specification is written to be fully implementable only on the Windows platform, which means other existing platforms cannot implement or use the standard and the customers will be literally stuck on the Windows technology from the first day they start to use OOXML in their Office.
• Specification of OOXML is clearly not implementable in its full version for the competitors.

Above list of arguments against OOXML courtesy of <No>OOXML.

Other problems with OOXML include:

• OOXML does not include support the use of Chinese characters within a Web address.

• Considerations for users in Israel and many Muslim countries were excluded in the specification of OOXML.
  
  For any locale, the function 'Networkdays()' will always return Saturday and Sunday as the weekend (fine for USA).
  
  However, this is wrong for Iraq, Algeria, Sudan,Bahrain, Qatar, Bangladesh, Israel, Jordan, Libya, Pakistan, Syria and the United Arab Emirates.
  ODF the existing standard handles this correctly.

• Only dates after the nonexistent Gregorian date 1900-02-29 can be used, and it ignores the ISO 8601 standard for the representation of time and date

• Non-standard language codes and color names.

• Errors in the spreadsheet formula specifications confirmed by Microsoft. I find it very disturbing that despite known errors Microsoft still push for OOXML to become standard. I find it even more worrying that in the 6000 page document that defines OOXML it is likely to exist more errors. And sufficient time to thuroughly review the documentation isn't given prior to February 25 to 29, 2008, national boards will meet in Geneva to discuss and vote finally on OOXML.

Sources: Wikpedia and Microsoft OOXML / ECMA376 Get The Facts (PDF)

Tonight was my first time in my new hometown, the for me still unknown Antwerpen.
Curious on my new town and the people in it I ventured out in search of interesting people and places. I could not have a had better night out in this to me unknown territory. Entering a cafe lured by music that leaked out onto the street like a flowing river of captive rythm, lead me to learning to know new friends, Vanessa and René, the two musicians that so entrapped me with songs** like Obatala no quiere guerra.mp3




Thanks guys

Vanessa, I wish you the best of luck on the path of music you have entered. René, what can I say, thanks for excellent music, a great night out and your friendship. I look forward to be seeing (and hearing )you guys when you come back next year and wish you a safe journey back home to Brazil.

If you that read this like the song I posted** here, you can discover more of René Ferrer's music on Cambuca Music



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ThePast, over and out.

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**Yes, I have the artists permission to use his music on my blog.

Today I have had the questionable pleasure of listening to music in the park, on the street, in the bus and just a short while ago from below my window.
It seem that there are no urban places free of the plague of Ipods, Zunes, cell phones or other devices with crappy small speakers utterly incapable of producing even the slightest hint of a proper base sound; resulting in an audio experience just slightly less poor than that leaking from a pair of headphones. Why anyone would like to listen to their favorite tunes on one of these are beyond my understanding. Yet one can not be in a public space for very long before some jackass or another comes along with his/her Ipod, Nokia or whatever and with it the power to pollute your life with poorly reproduced music. Don’t get me wrong here, I love music and my taste covers a wide spectrum of it, it’s poorly reproduced music forced upon me that I can not stand. If you necessarily are going to force others to listen to your mp3’s at the very least make sure that it sounds somewhat decent. Better still; let us all enjoy our parks and other public places without it, or you might just find that soon someone with a bit of force introduces you to a very novel place for storing your music player.