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2007 a Year of Weather Records in U.S.
Look for more crazy weather in 2008.
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Been almost a month since my last post, so it's probably time for another update...
Life is generally good, although I have a cold now, which is kind of annoying. On the other hand, it was nice enough to wait until vacations started before striking, so I can't really complain. Probably one of the most convenient times to have a cold, actually, since I'm mostly just sitting around at home anyway.
[ 1 comment here ] A few days ago I saw this post on Slashdot. Curious, I took a look at the puzzle and ended up spending most of the night working on it with various random people on the net. It was pretty fun. One of the clues hidden in the puzzle fairly early was a reference to a google group (this one), so people who were working on the puzzle used it to communicate and collaborate (which was the point of the whole exercise).
I went to bed at around 3am after being unable to figure out the final clue; by the time I woke up somebody had figured it out and solved the challenge. Turns out it was put together by N-BRAIN, a software development company, to promote their new collaborative development environment coming out in January. The software itself doesn't sound overly promising (to me at least) but still, the challenge was pretty fun.
One of the guys who participated blogged about it (here and a more detailed analysis here if you're interested). For me, it was just a lot of fun because it combined: (a) solving puzzles, (b) hacking up one-off scripts and programs on the fly to solve a particular sub-piece of the puzzle, or to try and analyze data, and (c) the thrill of trying to be the first to figure out the solution. With that kind of cocktail, how you can you go wrong?
[ Add comment here ] In more recent news, I've been wanted to eventually move away from GMail. It's pretty hard to do just because GMail is so damn nice to use, but I think in the long run it's probably for the best. Anyway, now that GMail supports IMAP in addition to their broken POP3, downloading the contents of your GMail account is a lot easier. I wrote a quick PHP script (since my local PHP install includes the IMAP module) to download all my email and save it locally.
It actually downloaded my chat logs too, which was nice, but the format of the chat logs is really weird. It seems that chats are broken up into fairly small chunks and stored as separate messages, potentially with a different encoding. That's not too hard to piece back together, but what's really annoying is that the chat data is in HTML and the lines are reverse-ordered in the message, (most recent at the top of the message). That's just plain weird. If that's actually how the data is stored in GMail internally, then the GMail backend must be doing a lot of work to piece the chat back together when you view in the GMail interface. And if that's NOT how it's stored internally, then the IMAP engine must be doing a lot of work to generate that. Makes no sense either way.
Anyway, I had about ~19800 messages to download (including received mail, sent mail, and chat logs) weighing in at about 740 MB. The GMail interface reports that I'm using "685 MB (11%) of [my] 6029 MB." I wonder if the mismatch is due to not counting email headers or something. If so, there might be a way there to trick GMail and store a lot more data than it lets you :) On the other hand, the discrepancy might just be due to attachments being base64-encoded or something. Meh.
More interesting was that on two of the 19826 messages, GMail's IMAP server seemed to choke and return 0 bytes. Not only that, but all messages after that were 0 bytes too (I had to skip past them in order to get the rest). It seemed like the worker processing my requests died on those messages. I was able to fetch the headers for the messages and figure out which message it was, and then opened them up in GMail's web interface. Both of them had attachments that seem to be giving their virus scanner difficulty (the message displayed above the attachments was "Oops... the virus scanner has a problem right now. Download at your own risk, or try again later.") I'm assuming their buggy virus scanner was scanning all the emails before the IMAP server was allowed to push it out to me, and when the virus scanner died on the attachment, that killed the IMAP process too. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to figure out a way to get the original email data for those two messages yet (the "Show original" function doesn't work for those messages either).
[ 3 comments here ] Anyway, that concludes this edition of bits n' bytes.
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An article at Ars about the proposed new .lat TLD. My first reaction was that it was pretty ridiculous. My second reaction was that it's no more ridiculous than having TLDs by country.
Political boundaries are really just as arbitrary as anything else, so I guess slicing up the Internet by other criteria makes just as much sense. I am kind of curious about who's going to be in charge of administering the new TLDs. Countries usually have a single obvious administrative body (the government), which isn't the case for things like ethnic communities. Arbitrarily appointing some individual or group to administer the domain is probably going to anger other individuals or groups within the community.
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I was reading Dan Bernstein's paper on security in qmail (via Bruce Schneier's blog), and his comments on single-source transformations (section 5.2) got me thinking. What he describes is a way (in *NIX) to isolate a program in a sandbox so that it can't do anything other than what it's supposed to. That means that the rest of the system is protected from any bugs in the program.
I was thinking about this, and it occurred to me that all OSs should do this by default. Programs shouldn't be able to open arbitrary files on the disk; there's no real reason to allow it. Programs usually only need to be able to access three kinds of files: (1) input files that are being processed by the program, (2) output files that the result is written to, and (3) settings/configuration files that the program has.
The third category is easiest to deal with: the OS should provide an API to load and store configuration data. Most OSs do this in some way, but usually through files. Instead, the OS should just provide get/set methods for a binary blob (or perhaps key-value pairs) to store per-program configuration data. It would be opaque to the OS, and therefore the OS would not be vulnerable to bad configuration data.
The first and second categories (input and output files) should be provided to the program only after permission is given from the user. In the vast majority of cases, the "Open File..." and "Save File..." dialogs could be used to implicitly obtain permission. The OS would be responsible for opening the file input/output streams and handing them to the program; the program wouldn't be able to arbitrarily open an input/output stream to a file.
There are some programs for which the above is not enough; mostly programs that do batch processing of stuff for which it would be tedious to manually approve every input/output file. In these cases, there could be some way for the user to batch-approve access to files (i.e. "VLC" can read all files matching "My Pirated Content/*.divx").
With current systems, one of the fundamental underlying principles is that a program run by user X should be allowed to do anything that user X can do, unless stated otherwise. I see no reason why this principle should be upheld. Programs having a lower privilege level than the user, such as described above, would probably go a long way towards preventing accidental and malicious data corruption.
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Stuff (seriously, it's an article about stuff).
Moving every four months was a great way to get rid of stuff just because moving all that stuff around was so hard and annoying. Now that I'm in a semi-permanent location though, I'm worried that I'll start accumulating too much stuff. I think it's already begun. Maybe I should force myself to throw out something for every new thing I acquire. Presumably this will force my set of stuff to, on average, improve.
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Following up from the previous post, I've added MicroID support the comments on this site. If you are logged in to this site and post a comment, the comment will be tagged with a MicroID generated from your OpenID identity URL and the site identifier ("https://staktrace.com"). You can see the MicroID if you view the source of the page with your comment on it. You should see something like the below as the table tag for the table that encloses your comment.
<table class="_commentBox
microid-http+http:sha1:95016c1927c0521385cb4e73db5f59ec0f80cf2a">
Obviously, your question now is, what can I do with this? Well, most of you will probably not do anything. But if eventually you decide to use something like ClaimID, which allows you to claim ownership of stuff you write/post/create and aggregate them in one central place, it should come in handy. ClaimID doesn't seem to yet support verifying content tagged with microids other than the one they generate, but I'll start pestering them :)
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So I was a little bored this morning and decided to do a vanity search to see what the web thinks of me. Since I have a rather "unique" name, it wasn't until the 3rd page until I hit the first false positive. That is, the first 27 hits on Google did actually refer to me. The 28th was some random PDF, then there were a bunch more valid results, and the next false positive was at #45. After that it was hit-and-miss.
A surprising number of the hits were just old newsgroup postings that I made that seem to have replicated across the web. And my old ticalc programs resurfaced as they always do. There was also a large set of pages relating in some way to the ACM finals that I was at last year.
There were three hits that were new and/or interesting. One was my site entry at OpenIDDirectory.com. Apparently they just crawl the web looking for sites that support OpenID and add them to their database with a short description. You can then "take ownership" of your site entry by embedding a MicroID on your site to prove ownership. MicroIDs seem kinda cool, so it's something I'll keep an eye on and see how it evolves.
The second was that apparently two people have added my site to their del.icio.us bookmarks. I think I know who one of them is, but have never (to my knowledge) met the other person, who was the one to originally add the link. It's always nice to know random people do stumble across my site. (Hey, it's called a vanity search for a reason).
The third link was a recently made post on the IBM DeveloperWorks forums. Apparently somebody was trying to figure out how to use jar2jxe (which I helped work on at IBM) and ran across my site. I found it amusing that the poster said "... he might reply, or better yet, post here". I was tempted to post something but I figured the guy had already found what he was looking for since the thread is already a month old. Also, if I posted something and it got indexed by Google and turned up the next time I did a vanity search, that would just be weird.
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So with the 700 MHz wireless spectrum auction coming up, Google has a chance to really shake up the wireless industry and essentially hijack the US communications network. See Cringely's latest column for a blow-by-blow of how they would do it. I'm convinced that they can do it (i.e. it is technically feasible to do it), but the question is: will they? Does it make sense from a business standpoint? Or will they suddenly remember their mission statement and decide to do it even if it's a financial drain? What do you think?
(My vote is: yes, they'll do it, just because they can.)
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So the other day I got a HDMI cable through the Apple Store and since it was made by XtremeMac, I decided to go check out their website. I managed to stumble across a typo on this page, and seeing as there was a handy "Comments" link at the bottom of the page (which most sites don't seem to have these days), I decided to let them know. I sent them an email about it, and the next day I get back a reply with a 10% discount code. (And more importantly, they fixed the typo). Sweet!
I haven't yet gotten the chance to use the cable, so I can't comment on actual quality, but they sure know how to satisfy their customers :)
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Important life lesson*: if you get a carton of "Lots of pulp" Tropicana orange juice and put it in the fridge, the pulp tends to sink to the bottom. However, if you don't refrigerate it (or, say, your fridge doesn't actually get cold), the pulp tends to float to the top.
*Not really an important life lesson.
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