Digital Meanderings
Meanderings of a coder

Wow - I’m surprised I’ve never thought of this …

When Stan Bubrouski decided to sign up with vText from Verizon he wanted to be different, so registered with “null” as his username. Cool you say. But I bet most people reading my blog are thinking to themselves - “Uh Oh.”

Since most of my readers are programmers they instantly realize what could happen. User sends a text message but forgets to enter a “To:” address. When a “null” value is put into a String, it is outputted as the word “null.” Therefore, Verizon will send the message to, you guessed it: null@vtext.com. Poor Mr. Bubrouski.

Anyway, E-Week has all the details in an article titled Who’s Reading Your Cell’s Text Messages?.

Introducing the Rundfunker, another interesting project that I came across on Hack-A-Day.

… music box that is! Apparently Pandora has been around for quite awhile but I just heard about it now. This service rocks my friends!

Basically they have people sit down and listen to music and then ascribe attributes to each song: instruments, tone, etc. Then you login to their service, there is no “Sign Up” phase btw, and enter in a band that you really like. The service then takes the attributes of your favorite band and finds other bands with similar attributes. It seems incredibly simple! Anyway, if your interested in how there did check out their about page.

Whew! It’s a two post day. I haven’t had one of those for awhile. Now it’s time for a nap, I’m beat.

There’s a great article over on IT Toolbox. The article is called Technologist Manifesto…, or Things Everyone in IT Should Know.

Although I’ve only been professionally involved in IT for about two years the author hits pretty close to home. He points out things that I’ve caught myself doing and things that I’ve witnessed senior developers doing. It’s a great read. Check it out.