I'm Selling My Comic Books

I've got something over 1,000 Marvel comics from the 1970's and 1980's,
and have decided to sell them.

[I'll be updating this page regularly with listing additions and sales.

Note also the RSS feed of my eBay listings!
]


You'll be able to see which ones I have for sale at eBay.

All covers and other images are at my Picasa page.


Marvel Two-In-One (1970s) 48 books from 3-69 (ends 5:40pm CDT, July 26, 2008)

Iron Fist #15 X-Men (1977) FN/VF (ends Jul-28-08 15:44:48 CDT)

Power Man and Iron Fist (1970s) 29 books from 20-124 (Jul-28-08 16:25:54 CDT)

Captain America (1970s) 68 books from 178-326 (ends Jul-30-08 17:02:31 CDT)

Cygwin: Unix filenames from Windows filenames

Here's a bash script that will help Cygwin reference Windows filenames. It could work under /bin/sh, but I wrote is as part of a bash .profile, so I've only tested it there.

#!/bin/bash
#
# sanify - turn a Windows path name into a Unix name
#  - turns drive letters into /cygdrive/drive,
#  - flips slashes, removes enclosing quotes,
#  - replaces unusual characters with '?'

function usage() { cat <<"EOF"
  Usage:    $1 'Windows filename'
  ... where 'Windows filename' only has to be in quotes if
  it has special characters, such as backslashes or spaces. 
  This is free.
EOF
} 

function sanify() {                       
    echo  ${@} | sed \
                -e 's,^[A-Za-z]:,/cygdrive/&,'\
                -e 's,:,,g' \
                -e 's,\\,/,g' \
                -e 's,^\",,g' \
                -e 's,\"$,,g' \
                -e 's,[^A-Za-z0-9_\.-],\?,g'        
}

if [ -t ] ; then
   [ -z "$@" ] && { usage "$0" }  
   sanify "${@}" else
   for name in `cat` ; do
        sanify "${name}"  
   done
fi  

A new security arms race

According the The Register (UK), Spammers have developed an "mailbot" that can break through Google's CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) system. That's Google's version of the thing that makes you read distorted characters to sign up for email and other online services, including some online banking services.

It won't be long before a robot will be able defeat any current Captcha system, so those with such systems deployed should make sure they A) are using multi-factor schemes for securely adding and identifying their users and B) have the latest versions of the Captcha program installed.

Since the robots are currently successful against Google only 20% of the time, there is still some time for software developers and users to stay ahead by improving Captcha and combining it with other techniques for telling humans from programs. For instance, several Captcha images could be displayed, and the user asked to identify which of them are alike, or which of them match a given pattern (also displayed via Captcha).