ohryan.ca

A Web Developer in Winnipeg

  • The Love of God…won’t get me to fall for your scam

    in

    I received this confusing email the other day. I’m pretty sure this was in response to a question I posted to an advertiser on a kijiji.ca property rental listing.

    I think this email represents a change in the way Nigerian 419 victims are being lured in. A few interesting things are happening in this email:
    1) The premise of the scam is not mentioned in the email at all. Are scammers counting on their charisma to win over feeble minds? Seems like a long shot…
    2) The scammer essentially admits he’s from Nigeria. He mentions “west africa” and the +234 country code is Nigeria.
    3) The email contains very specific and accurate local information. “355 MAGNUS AVE” is a valid residential address located in “Winnipeg (North West)Manitoba”. Also $690 for rent in that area of town is pretty close to the mark, albeit somewhat suspiciously low when you consider that it includes an “electric cooker.”

    Granted all of this information could be gathered/verified via google. I think this idicates that these scammers are putting a lot more effort into finding victims, which hopefully means they’re having a harder time ripping people off.

    Here’s the email:

    from    the love of god <[email protected]>
    to    [email protected],
    date    Sun, Mar 16, 2008 at 12:58 PM
    subject    house for rent

    Greetings in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,

    I am new to this internet stuff and probably I am newer to renting out  houses.My name is Rev Michael Savage, I am the owner of the house you responded to the advert I placed online I lived in the house with my Wife Katherine and my daughter Lisa before I was transfered to California to head the Halfane Mission house branch,hence the reason I placed the advert .

    The house is complete with hydro washer,internal heater and electric cooker and all other ammenities to make life comfortable the rent goes for $690 and it is available for immediate occupancy.

    The house holds lots of memeories for us and we would like someone that would take good care of it and keep it neat and clean at all times.I started building an indoor fountain for the living room last month if you are someworth of a handy person it would give me great joy if you could complete it.I am presently in West africa Lecturing in a six week theology seminar on the divinity and godliness of Lucifer an intresting topic by the way i would love to share it with you if you might be intrested.

    You can call me on +2348029684719 if there are any details you would like to clarify.The house is located on 355 MAGNUS AVE Winnipeg (North West)Manitoba you can go and view it and get back to me if you find the place suitable so i can forward you an application form.

    God Bless you,

    Rev Michael Savage

  • Using A Colour Is Not A Trademark Issue

    in

    via Veronica Belmont

  • Linux: Finding Newer Files [OR How To Create A Patch File]

    in

    The linux `find` command is very powerful, it has tonnes of switches and options that I’m not terribly familiar with. Even though I’ve been a LAMP developer for over 5 years, I don’t work on the command-line too often. Yesterday I ran into a problem that I had never tried to resolve before. I was working on a large project on a development server and I had some updates I wanted to push to the production server, but I had lost track of which files I had updated. I dug through the find manual for a few minutes and discovered the `-newer` flag, from man “File was modified more recently than file.” With this flag you can generate a list of files that are newer than a given file. If I set file to a file I knew had been updated before my last set of changes, I could pull a list of patch files.

    find /path/to/project/ -newer /path/to/project/last-archive.tgz

    After some more digging and trial and error I found the proper syntax for rolling up all these files into a nice little patch archive:

    tar -czvf patch-20070321.tar `find /path/to/project/ -newer /path/to/project/last-archive.tgz -print`