January 2012
3 posts
Sync Multiple Google Calendars on WP7
Google sync on Windows Phone 7.5 works great, with one notable exception: your shared calendars aren’t automatically recognized.
Fortunately this problem is solvable on Google’s end, as detailed in this post. Basically, you tell Google to sync specific shared calendars with your WP7 device, and you’ll be all set. Worked for me.
Best Slashdot comment of 2012, so far...
Re:Part of a money conflict within the King family (Score:5, Insightful)
by Solandri (704621) writes on Tue 17 Jan 11:26PM ( #38730852)
The bitter family feud that has divided the children of Martin Luther King Jr. isn’t much different than other fights between brothers and sisters — except that this one has spilled into the courts and publicly tarnished the legacy ...
How to fix copyright in the digital age
The President recently asked us to come up with a better system for enforcing copyright online.
Here’s my proposal:
Exempt linking to, copying, and redistributing digital information, while leaving all other copyright protections in place.
This radical but progressive move acknowledges the fact that digital copying and redistribution is fundamental to the way networked computers operate....
November 2011
1 post
The Windows error haiku
A file that big? It might be very useful! But now it is gone.
In 1998, Salon Magazine ran a challenge to readers to convert Window’s style error messages into haiku. The above, by David J. Liszewski, is a favorite. But the winner in my opinion, was this gem by Nick Sweeney:
wind catches lily scatt’ring petals to the wind: segmentation fault
October 2011
1 post
Data Migration Pattern
Facebook-er Kent Beck’s Software Design Glossary includes an entry on Succession, “the art of taking a single conceptual change, breaking it into safe steps, and then finding an order for those steps that optimizes safety, feedback, and efficiency.”
As an example, he gives us (for free!) this pattern for migrating from one datastore to another:
Convert data fetching and...
September 2011
2 posts
Sync mSecure using Dropbox
The authors of the (otherwise excellent) mSecure password database for iOS and OS X do not let you chose where to save the password database. This makes it difficult to use Dropbox or a USB key to share the same database between, say, a home and a work computer.
Yes, you can manually sync via and iPhone or via the new “Dropbox sync” feature in v3.0. But manual syncing falls down the...
July 2011
2 posts
Java 1.5 in OS X Lion
Update: Ben Morin has improved on the Snow Leopard method to get Java 1.5 working on OS X Lion. Great news!
Why would anyone want to go through all that just to get Java 1.5? There are plenty of applications out there (my beloved Zend Studio 5.5 is one of them) that are stuck at 1.5 because vendors have either disappeared or have moved on in incompatible directions.
One of these days I’m...
Difference between i5 and i7 processors in Macbook...
According to this page, the major difference between the Mobile Core i5 and i7 processors shipping in the latest generation of Macbook Air is that the i7 line has hyperthreading enabled, which doubles the apparent number of cores.
Since OS X Lion is an aggressively multithreaded and multiprocess OS, that will probably make a big difference. Benchmarks anyone?
June 2011
2 posts
IEEE Series on the Social Web
IEEE Spectrum just published a special report on “The Social Web”, which does a great job of summing up where we are and what the landscape looks like.
Some of it is the same old (and tired) Google vs Facebook PR schmaltz, but they are the major players circa 2011, at least in population and business valuation.
The pieces I was really drawn toward are the ones that survey the state...
You call it a Cloud, but it looks like a Silo
I predict that Apple’s iCloud will have the same problems inherent to every other mass “cloud” effort to date: no awareness of family.
If you share a computer or device with others, you know what I’m talking about. It’s not just my photos, music, and books. It’s OUR photos, music, and books. And yet, they are always tied to just one user account in these...
May 2011
4 posts
Why hasn't Amazon ditched their Comodo...
On April 14, 2011, OS X and iOS were updated to blacklist a group of certificates that were infamously cloned by attackers using a compromised Comodo affiliate Registration Authority.
This isn’t the first time Comodo has been compromised.
So why does Amazon still use Comodo? Parts of their ordering pipeline are broken (no images) due to the now untrusted certificate shown above.
1 tag
When Inline Attachments Get Scary
I just got an interesting 419 letter purporting to be from the Lagos office of the FBI. Unlike most such, it came as a PDF (screenshot above).
It’s obviously not credible on several levels, but what gave me pause was this: Apple mail automatically rendered the attached PDF.
We have been hearing about PDF attacks for years, where a maliciously crafted PDF can lead to arbitrary code...
March 2011
6 posts
Run Linux command as a different user
It’s easy to forget how powerful the unix su command is. You can have it launch a different shell than the one specified in /etc/passwd, and tell it to run a particular command.
This comes in especially handy when adding startup tasks in /etc/rc.local, when you want to launch a server or some other process as an unprivileged user:
su -s /bin/sh - edarwin -c...
In the future we shall all be assimilated.
How do you transfer a domain registered through...
Short answer: you have to write to the email address that Google gives you under Advanced DNS Settings, and request the auth-info code for the domain.
Long answer: How to Transfer a Domain Name Registered With Google to a GoDaddy Account
Dr Josef Oehmen explains Fukushima Accident
I am writing this text (Mar 12) to give you some peace of mind regarding some of the troubles in Japan, that is the safety of Japan’s nuclear reactors. Up front, the situation is serious, but under control. And this text is long! But you will know more about nuclear power plants after reading it than all journalists on this planet put together.
Use Decomb instead of Deinterlace in Handbrake
I use Handbrake to extract video from DVDs all the time, as part of my job. And being old-school, I like to use the deinterlace filter to remove the field lines from the video so that it doesn’t look like it was shot in the 1980s.
But it turns out that it’s better to use the decomb filter instead, because it is smarter and less invasive. This page on the Handbrake wiki explains it...
Don't confuse Java and JavaScript
JavaScript is a completely different thing from Java. JavaScript is a scripting language that is contained within a web page. These scripts don’t have any access to system resources like hard drives or cameras.
Java is a virtual machine for running programs either inside or outside of the browser that may have direct access to system resources.
The similar names stem from a truly...
February 2011
2 posts
Avoiding stopwords in random strings
If you use base 28 for URL shortening or for encoding randomly generated strings you can avoid many of the worst English-language swear words. Base 28 has no S, T, or U. Think about it.
(Originally tweeted.)
Why anime fans pirate shows
Ars Technica’s quickie on Why anime fans pirate the shows they love made me want to comment:
The reason why fans shun “official” anime is obvious: it’s the difference between American Saturday morning cartoons and anime.
Western media companies think that anime and cartoons are the same thing, with the same target audience. So when they sub (or more often dub, ugh) the...
December 2010
7 posts
On Net Neutrality
I think the FCC’s plan is potentially a win, if it actually does what they say it will. Phone and cable companies won’t be able to muck with the bits, and wireless providers will be able to prioritize service when necessary.
Think of it this way: if you can’t watch video in real time on AT&T, then switch providers to a carrier with a more video-friendly network. Or use...
Ctrl-Shift-Eject →
A Possible Future for ChromeOS in the Cloud
The recent Wikileaks fiasco (among other developments) has me thinking about political control of the internet. How do you route around national firewalls and knee-jerk corruption of the DNS? Or institutional firewalls? Or even just untrusted networks, like the compromised wi-fi at the local coffee shop?
One obvious solution is to use a VPN with an endpoint in a country which not only loves...
Internet Security is an Oxymoron
What have we been reminded of in the past three weeks?
Governments are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to lie and spy on friends and enemies alike. The diplomatic cable releases from Wikileaks are the tip of the iceberg, in that they are not the biggest secrets, just the low-level ones available to millions of rank-and-file government employees.
The CEO uses the same password for...
NYC Ballot Recount Finds 195,000 Votes (17%!)...
Once the polls close, each of the digital scanners used at the city’s polling sites spews out a supermarketlike receipt. Election workers cut the paper strips and sort them by election district, since a polling place may serve more than one district. They then use a calculator to tally the results for each candidate, and the count is transcribed by hand onto “return of canvass” forms. They...
November 2010
2 posts
How to build a BOM in PHP
Byte order marks are the secret bane of many a PHP coder, and usually you want to remove them from documents that you are about to process.
But if you are sending UTF-8 CSV data to Excel, then you need to add one, otherwise your unicode is gonna be gibberish.
// send BOM echo pack( 'C3', 0xef, 0xbb, 0xbf ); // then immediately send output print $csv;
Note that this doesn’t work with Excel...
GMail in Safari, no cursor in replies
Man this one is annoying: after you upgrade Flash on OS X, the cursor disappears from your GMail replies.
The fix is here, which is that you should go to Settings, scroll down to Attachments, and select “Basic attachment features”.
Why in the name of HTML5 does Google still use Flash for file uploads? Grrrr.
October 2010
1 post
Icons disappear from Dock (OS X 10.6)
Every now and then an application’s icon will randomly disappear from the Macintosh Dock. The application is still on the Dock, you can click on it like normal, but its icon is blank. What to do?
1) Quit the Application if it is running.
2) Right-click on the blank Dock icon and click Options > Show in Finder.
3) Right-click again and choose Options > Remove From Dock.
4) Relaunch...
September 2010
6 posts
There’s a great post at Tomorrow Museum declaring The End of Sexism. It’s a bit of a manifesto, actually, the point being that there are no excuses, other than outright stupidity, for sexist behavior.
I agree and disagree at the same time. Based on reactions to valid claims of sexism in technology (I’m looking at you, IT) and politics, I think that a disturbing number of people...
Beyond Fusion
If the the repulsive force of squabbling bureaucrats could be overcome using conference-room confinement, the resulting release of energy would power the world forever.
— Slashot post by sakdoctor
The Perfect Blogging, Tweeting, Broadcasting...
Ideally, you would have one site, that you own and control, and you would post everything to that site. Then you would make decisions about how to republish those posts (or protect them):
Short posts get re-posted to Twitter and/or Facebook
Photos get re-posted to Flickr
Videos get re-posted to YouTube
Copyrighted media gets protected with a password so you can share it with friends and family...
EC2 on EBS: Taming the Amazon
I upgraded my old Debian 4 AMI to Debian 5 yesterday, and switched it from S3 storage to the more permanent (and more easily clone-able!) EBS.
With EBS-backed instances, we can finally have a boot drive that doesn’t go away if the instance gets hosed! There is dancing in my street.
Create a bootable EBS AMI from a running instance is more pro, but Creating an Amazon EC2 EBS AMI from a...
Beware of the default Apache 2 config for PHP
Ilia Alshanetsky points out that AddHandler is the wrong directive to use for executable file types like PHP, because Apache could execute the file bad.php.jpeg (I haven’t tested this yet, but plan to).
The safer directive is apparently AddType:
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps
July 2010
2 posts
Firefox Audio Fail
You would think that if your browser doesn’t support playing audio/mp3 content using an html5 <audio> tag, it would do the right thing and fall back to the fallback markup under it.
Consider the following html5 markup:
<audio controller=”controller”> <source src=”sound.mp3” type=”audio/mp3”> <a...
10 things you may not know about using Amazon Web... →
Or maybe you know them, so this is 10 things to keep in mind…
June 2010
3 posts
List of blocked ports in Safari
One of my colleagues likes to use port 6667 for his development environment. As in, when he tests his code, he connects to a url like https://dev.example.org:6667/
He recently noticed that Safari and Google Chrome restrict access to that port. Apparently when you allow a browser to connect to arbitrary ports, an attacker can craft a form that will submit arbitrary data to any port. I mean, duh,...
May 2010
1 post
Desalinization Update
IEEE Spectrum explores Eight [Present and Future] Technologies for Drinkable Seawater. Portfolios like this are why I subscribe to Spectrum. Way to scratch that infrastructure nerd itch!
I especially like the idea of the microbial fuel cell, which takes advantage of excess electrons generated by contaminant-eating bacteria.
I mean, whoa. Contaminant-eating bacteria that generate electricity. I...
April 2010
4 posts
Multiple file upload, the HTML5 way
This is rocking my world:
<input type="file" name="upload[]" multiple="true">
It does exactly what you think it does, allowing a single file input to upload multiple files in one request, without js or flash.
Available today in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. Thank you!
Chrome isn't a secure browser yet
In Chrome Phishing, Robert Hanson blows the lid off the “Google knows what it’s doing so Chrome is secure” idea. He argues that Chrome has a long way to go before it’s a mature browser, free of easily-exploitable holes.
Remember the old username-looks-like-web-site-in-the-url trick? http://gmail.google.com@evil.net/ is an example.
Try it in Chrome. Now try it in Firefox....
iPad Filesharing (iWork export)
The iWork suite allows you to export your documents to something called “filesharing” but where do the files actually end up?
It took a while (for me) to figure it out, helped by http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4094:
When you sync up via iTunes, scroll to the bottom of the Apps tab to see the list of files in File Sharing, where you can save them off to other places.
February 2010
2 posts
Farmville on Web Scaling
This was a pretty good read, How FarmVille Scales to Harvest 75 Million Players a Month. The lessons learned are worth generalizing:
Interactive apps are write-heavy.
Design every component as a degradable service, and provide a mechanism to degrade services server-side during peak demand.
Cache incoming data - they cache everything coming in from Facebook
Usage spikes during new releases of...