today, i was a hero

February 06, 2002, 05:54 pm

Ugh. Jeez. Today is insanity. The sky is falling at work. Our main server is fucked beyond belief and shit is breaking left and right... clients calling pissing themselves... Ugh. I hate days like today, when I come in to work and everyone is stressed and freaked and upset.

Bleagh.



Today at school, I was walking to the computer lab and I noticed a group of maybe ten or twelve students waiting for their teacher to open the door to their classroom. So I went to this lab door, enterred my access code, walked through the lab to the classroom door, and appeared -- magically! -- to hold the door open for those waiting kids!

It was like, by the grace of my hand (or my door access code), I kept these poor, little kids from waiting in the hall. I felt like a hero or something.

Then I went to commercial law.



UPDATE! And now I am a hero again.

My boss was on the phone with one of our clients, whose site was under attack today from lame people trying leech all their data. And this has happened to them before. So he was telling them that it's possible that we could programmatically prevent this kind of thing from occurring, but that he didn't know how.

And, very calmly and quietly, I said to Kurt:

Well, why don't we just check the HTTP_REFERER [sic] environment variable on the page that shows the result set. If it isn't the clients' domain, we know it's someone being "naughty".

And his eyes widened. And his jaw dropped. And you could see the gears a-turnin' in his head.

And then he spoke to the client, suggesting how we implement my clever/brilliant idea.

Wow.

And then, talking to him later, I said:

You know, if I were working for some scumbags that were leeching valuable data from other people's websites, I wouldn't be so blatant and obvious to just try and suck all the data down at once so that you mildly DenialofService attack them. You draw too much attention to yourself!

(dramatic pause)

It's less that I'm offended that someone is trying to steal their data, and more that they went about it so... thoughtlessly.
Ha. Oh, my moments of technocratic elitism.