Joe's Random Ramblings

Some time ago, Comcast got sued by a spammer, because they were blocking his spam emails.
On April 10, a judge ruled in favor of Comcast. That's of course how it should be, but unfortunately, not all judges are sufficiently clued-in about things computer-related...
The best thing about the ruling are the first two sentences:

Plaintiff e360Insight, LLC is a marketer. It refers to itself as an Internet marketing company. Some, perhaps even a majority of people in this country, would call it a spammer.

Not surprisingly, the spammer didn't like being called a spammer, so they filed a motion to remove the second sentence. Of course, the motion was denied

Working with the Windows ShellExecute and ShellExecuteEx APIs and the CreateProcess API I have come across a major annoyance:
The directory and filename passed into these APIs can not be longer than MAX_PATH (i.e., 260) characters.
This is particularly idiotic given that Microsoft nowadays uses fairly long directory names, e.g., C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data.
Furthermore, the ShellExecute(Ex) documentation does not even state this limit.

Anyway, I did find a way around it:
Microsoft maintains both long and short names for files and directories, even on NTFS.
So, the long path C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data is equivalent to the short path C:\Docume~1\alluse~1\applic~1
This way, the path to the batch file I was trying to execute was cut down from 261 characters to 106 characters.

For a while now, I have received unsolicited bulk email, aka Spam, from an organization calling itself the "National Federation of the Blind."
Like all spammers, when I talked to somebody in their main office on the phone, they claimed that I subscribed to their list. Of course, that is absolutely not true. They bought my email address. With that, they have put themselves in the same league as the usual barrage of pill spammers and the like.
They use a company called Convio for their email campaigns. So, either the NFB or Convio or both bought my email address. Shame on them to devalue their organization by becoming spammers.

In their latest spam, they ask to donate part of the economic stimulus package to charity, in particular to them... I guess they need money to buy more email addresses...
Idiotic lying spammers!

Audioholics has a hilarious answer from Blue Jeans Cable, after Monster Cable (notorious for going after smaller companies) sent them a Cease-and-Desist letter:
http://www.audioholics.com/news/industry-news/blue-jeans-strikes-back
Monster apparently missed that the Blue Jeans boss is a former lawyer
Some nice quotes:

I do not compromise with bullies and I would rather spend fifty thousand dollars on defense than give you a dollar of unmerited settlement funds.
...
my observation has been that Monster Cable typically operates in a hit-and-run fashion. Your client threatens litigation, expecting the victim to panic and plead for mercy; and what follows is a quickie negotiation session that ends with payment and a licensing agreement.
...
Not only am I unintimidated by litigation; I sometimes rather miss it.

We need more people like Kurt Denke, the boss of Blue Jeans Cable.