Day: December 24, 2009

Christmas Carols Deluxe! The Three Tenors sing “Sleigh Ride”

Anything the Three Tenors sing is rich and worth listening to, including the Christmas classic, Sleigh Ride.

BTW, Pavarotti muffs a line around the 36 second mark. He sings “Hoo Hoo” instead of “Yoo Hoo”. Carreras notices this: watch his expression!

YouTube – CARRERAS DOMINGO PAVAROTTI – Sleigh Ride

Bah Humbug! The infamous CHRISTMA exec worm

Back in the 1980s when I worked on VM as a system programmer, people used to send around VM executable code like the CHRISTMA exec that people would run. The execs (as we called them)  would show a text message like the one in this picture. Pretty harmless and nice.

However, the CHRISTMA EXEC was different. It was not harmless or nice. It was dangerous and sneaky. It would not only display a Christmas message, but, without you being aware of it, would read a file (the NETLOG file) that would find out email addresses of people who sent and received email from you and send itself to them as well. A worm, essentially. Since people were used to getting scripts as Christmas greetings, they ran it without looking at it (indeed, the comments even tell people: “browsing this file is no fun at all       just type CHRISTMAS from cms “…sneaky). The next thing we knew, this worm was showing up all over the place. A nice way to spend Christmas time, killing this worm.

So to the CHRISTMA EXEC I say, “Bah Humbug!”.

But to everyone else I say: Merry Christmas!