A few reasons to avoid socializing at work

... or why you should avoid messing with your co-workers and stick to your old school friends. While some people prefer to go all way liberal and social, chit chat loving hipsters et al, some find out that work is really meant to be for work and skip the social crap.

Here we go with a few reasons for avoiding (in general) socializing at work:

1. Your coworkers are far more likely to develop envy and other vicious feelings towards your persona.
2. Your coworkers are there for the paycheck, probably as much as you are, if not more.
1. They will most likely do whatever comes around for getting a better one.
2. That means selling your ass out. Really.
3. It's human nature when it comes to money to fuck up things. Especially confidence.
1. Everyone has a price.
2. Sadly, the world is full of cheap people.
4. They will usually engage in so-called 'social chat':

• Buddy X: Hey dude, I'm just back from the gym!
• Buddy Y: Yo, I bench press 140 pounds, lol!

Let's go on the analysis of the conversation above:

1. Buddy X is ingenuous e¡to enough to talk about gym. You know, it's about 2% of the world population that truly care about their fitness and shape. People out there think bioimpedance machines tell the truth (you seriously think you have 12% bodyfat if you can't even see the joint point between your chest and abs!?).
2. Buddy Y knows what anyone who was watched a cheap sitcom knows: there's a thing called bench press. Pushing it further, you get him to know about the Guido work out! (Evil grin).
3. Buddy X afterwards thinks Buddy Y is a moron. If you weight 200 pounds and you think lifting 140 is quite an accomplishment, you seriously need therapy. Now, if you weight 140 and lift 200, it's not yet an accomplishment but you are more likely to achieve one. Hah.
4. Buddy Y claims he goes to the gym 'on regular basis'. Buddy X suddenly has to live together with Buddy Y and finds out that Mr. 200 pounds is a bedroom worm. Wake yourself up, soldier! Hah.
   

Let's continue with more reasons and suggestions...

1. Never cook at work. Especially in IT jobs, that's like a serious curse on your persona. You are supposed to grow the mandatory belly. That gives you a coolness factor of seventy-five chin-up coupons. Or fast food discounts, whatever comes first.
2. Your co-workers will hate you if you are able to fit more than just work in your life.
1. Example 1: Look at Buddy X, he's leaving at 4pm! - a 9pm-regular whispers...
3. Your co-workers might be a bunch of liberal asses like most commie imitators around the globe. This is fairly usual at Europe nowadays. Now, they wear Levis too.

The solution is simple: quit and kick their butts afterwards. For real and great justice. Army way.

Darth Vader: today we dine with Jesus!

"Your lack of Vodka supplies is disturbing."

Browser fun everyday

The people from the Metasploit project came up with a certainly nice idea: a blog-style publication for releasing web browser bugs and security flaws on a daily basis for one month. A rush of issues have been published, affecting a wide range of browsers, from Microsoft Internet Explorer to Safari. Just for the shake of mayhem and destruction, some issues will get published over here as well, discovered using either their tools (DOM-Hanoi, etc) or the under-going project for developing an easy to use QA and vulnerability assessment framework, QANUM (first show-case is out...).Today's one is a simple and not-really-useful NULL pointer dereference in the Macromedia Flash ActiveX component function LoadMovie():

a = new ActiveXObject('ShockwaveFlash.ShockwaveFlash');

try { a.LoadMovie(-1, "bogus.swf") } catch(e) { }

The bug is triggered by passing a non-zero value to the first parameter (which represents the layer for the loaded movie). Nothing really interesting, right? It seems already fixed in Flash 9 (finally after remaining in 8 for quite a bit of time), and it seems there was previous knowledge of the bug, two years ago. Nice timing.

Game bugs?: Jedi Academy, gravity out

Playing multi-player online games is fun. No one else doubts that, well, no average human at least. But some people, as it happens mostly everywhere, also have fun making the experience of others the worst possible. From so-called "spawn killers" (yes, those who don't let you play even a second, throwing thermal detonators right next to you when you get "spawned" in the area) to spammers (those who should keep out of playing for a while, as announcing their new kill record gets boring for most of us) and the more-than-hated h4x0rs. Those are the real problem. Either an unfair administrator or a player with some skills and knowledge, can take advantage of specific problems inside the game engine to do all shorts of tricks.

Today's episode is about a little trick that will make most Jedi Academy players out there smile the first time they see it in action. Beware of bugs, gravity doesn't seem to affect them.

Short explanation: gravity value is used to calculate the height you can gain when jumping, the velocity needed to get back to the ground, etc. The problem is that, if gravity value changes when a player is jumping or "flying", the new constants are applied immediately. The result in this case, is first putting the player characters at the highest height and then literally crunching them into the ground.