To switch between dialog options in OS X from the keyboard, use the TAB key. ::
Archives for 2011
New PC Setup Steps
There are a few things that are near as matters necessary when getting setting up a new computer. This is the PC version of this article: Linux Tools: install tools so that you can do things like ls and grep without going insane SysInternals Tools: have these available wherever you are in the command line Update your Path:…
New Mac Setup Steps
There are a few things that are near as matters necessary when getting setting up a new computer. This is the Mac version of this article: Install customized shell files Homebrew: get all your opensource packages via the command line RVM: keep your Ruby enviornment up to date and pivot between versions Little Snitch: see where your traffic…
Hitchens vs. Strunk and White
I am quite curious how top tier writers square the circle of Strunk and White’s demand for being concise and avoiding long, complex sentences, and Hitchens’ ability and inclination to do so beautifully. An example from a Hitchens essay: I have heard arguments about whether it was Milton Friedman or Gore Vidal who first came up with this…
An HTML 5 Christmas
It’s Christmas day and I just happened upon a post by the Google Webmaster team talking about removing the HTML, HEAD, and BODY tags from their code, as they are evidently no longer necessary. I started looking at their code (particularly for their 404 pages), and it was very interesting. It’s a few minutes later now and most…
A Collection (of Collections) of Obama’s Accomplishments
This next year is going to yield many debates on what our current President has or has not accomplished in his first term. Here’s a collection (of lists) of what he has accomplished. http://obamaachievements.org/listA seriously comprehensive list of accomplishments, by category. PolitiFact Promises Kept ListingA phenomenally unbiased list of promises and statements made by Obama, with analysis of…
Who Makes the Best Web Security Testers?
There’s been some debate in my circles recently on the topic of what type of person and background makes the best web security tester. The issue is that web testing involves and requires a number of skills. It includes performing a staggering number of monotonous actions according to a methodology, as well as being able to use deduction…
Plane Crashes and Child Molestation
In one of Malcolm Gladwell’s books he talked about how respect for authority has caused a massive number of plane crashes over time. Basically, the relationship between a senior and junior pilot was so severe in many countries that the co-pilot (junior) knew that his effective boss could bury him in an instant, and so he walked extremely…
Why Christopher Hitchens Inspires Me
News of Christopher Hitchens’ death was crushing to me last night. I can think of no other author that is so inspiring to me. Here are a few simple reasons why: Reading, or listening to, his prose makes me a better writer. His skill with language was simply magical. I can listen to him speak for hours upon…
Disambiguation of the ‘Women in Technology Problem
As with most Internet debates, the heat to light ratio in the ‘Women in Technology’ discussion is rather poor. The problem is that we never actually get to have a single, complete discussion without it turning into a related one. Here are a few of the points that people seamlessly pivot between during this discussion, followed by my…
Observations of Japan
I had the opportunity to go to Tokyo, Japan for a week this month for work and while there I kept a running list of observations. I was able to commute to work on the subway, which I found quite fun. First, my observations: the Japanese are extremely orderly; everything is very neat and clean Japanese men are…
Three Proxy Options Every Security Pro Should Consider Using
Working in the information security field it’s frequently handy to be able to browse the web in different configurations. Sometimes you want to be able to see and interact with our traffic we speak with a server, sometimes you want to hide where we’re coming from on the other end, and other times we need to bypass a…
A Potential Issue With Immersive Fantasy Games
I’ve been a role-player since junior high school, and I have been a reader of non-fiction long before that. I have a group of friends from junior high that still game (role-playing), and I noticed over the last couple of years that there was something very negative about it for me. I haven’t been able to capture it…
Stereotypes as a Wisdom Metric
I had a thought this week regarding metrics for gauging overall life wisdom. If you had only one question to ask, what would you ask in order to estimate the overall wisdom of a person? Here’s a possible candidate: What do you think about stereotypes? Are they true, false, or somewhere between? I see clear maturity levels in…
The Worst Way to Waste Time
There are many things to regret as one nears death, but I understand people tend to regret most the things they didn’t do rather than those they did. You may be thinking now of activities, such as jumping out of an airplane, applying to become an astronaut, or moving to Europe to be with an early lover. But…
Mechanical Turk vs. CAPTCHA: An InfoSec Lesson
I’ve always hated the “THING is dead. Long live the THING” cliché, but I’m going to use it here for CAPTCHA. CAPTCHA raises the cost of attacking something, which improves its security. It’s that simple. The question is simply how much you raised the cost vs. the dedication and resources of the attacker. For a random, uninteresting blog,…
Handling Redirects with Varnish and Nginx
[ NOTE: I am now using Nginx for everything, i.e. not using Varnish anymore, and getting the same or better results. ] I run Varnish here on the site, with Nginx as the backend. I’ve written before about my overall setup, and how to improve site performance, so I won’t go into it here. Here I want to…
The Other Half of Online Education
We’re all well aware of the growing list of high-quality universities offering free online classes. It’s remarkable by any measure. But we also know the counter-argument: you don’t receive near the benefit from free online education that you get from attending university because much of the benefit comes from being forced to go to class, to take exams,…
Recording and Replaying Experiences
One of the things I worry about most is not being able to recall the great experiences that have happened to me over time. It’s not about forgetting that I went to the beach in Israel that one time, or any other highlight event. Those types of events should be captured as well, of course, but I am…
A Civilization Manifesto
This will be rough. I’ve always been attracted to the idea of identifying unifying characteristics of desired society, and defining those ideals as sacred to the group that embraces them. The Constitution does this, of course, but it deals with principals where I aim to talk about behaviors. I come to this from decades of observing dissimilar people…
Visualizing Interesting Log Events Using Splunk’s Google Maps Application
I never stop being fascinated by the fact that web admins have boxes online that anyone in the world can reach out and touch. Visualizing this activity is enthralling to me, as visualization often highlights answers to existing questions while exposing new ones. Geolocated firewall drops within the last 4 hours [ Fullsize image. ] Splunk excels at…
10 Ways to Test Your Website Performance
So you’ve replaced Apache with Nginx, or put Varnish out in front of your main webserver. Or maybe you just spent time converting all your main site images to CSS Data URLs. Either way, you’re now ready to taste the fruits of your work via speed tests. Here are some of the best resources for doing that. Google…
How I See Class
I recently read perhaps the best book ever written on the American class system, and it set me to thinking quite a bit about the subject. First, I put this together as a capture location for what I learned. Then I began to process it. The concepts listed there are appealing to me for a very basic reason:…
Time Spent Not Reading Books is Time Wasted
I’m starting to think that most of the time I’m not reading books I’m not spending my time optimally. Naturally, this doesn’t include time spent with friends and such, but rather time that I’m supposedly “gaining information” by other means. So, reading news, feeds, and pretty much anything else I can find on the Internet is all decent,…
Linkclump for Web Testing
Anyone who does web security testing knows that the browser is the most important tool in the arsenal. Scanners are nice and can help save time, but no technology is the equal of manually making requests to a page while passing through a good proxy. Linkclump is a Chrome extension (you are using Chrome, right?) for selecting multiple…
October 2011 Mobile Stats
iOS accounted for approximately 66% of all mobile visits to my site in October. Android had about 30%, and the other four precent were those wishing they were the first two. I can’t wait to see how this plays out over the next 24 months. ::
Human Accomplishment: Engines vs. Fuels
I think a lot about why some people are highly productive and successful while others produce nothing in their lifetimes. Some get Ph.Ds and spend their time writing books, giving talks, and working on their next big idea. Others punch a clock somewhere, refuse to eat right or exercise, and consume hollow media until they die. The difference…
Job Creation Idea: Six-hour Shift Maximums
Here’s an idea for job creation: institute six-hour shift maximums for low to mid-tier work. Here are the advantages: You give more time for each worker with his/her family You have already captured the maximum daily productivity from that person anyway This will require that you hire more people You pay more in benefits and payroll, obviously, but…
My Comment on the NYT Free Will Article
There was a recent article on the New York Times regarding free will. I posted it here earlier and I just finished posting a comment in the thread. It follows below: — The author succeeds in bringing life back to the debate, but he doesn’t make any new progress. The issue, as a few commenters have touched on,…
Do a Google Search for ‘ip’ and Get Your IP Address
Millions of us know the trick of getting our public IP address. Most go to ipchicken or the site aptly called “whatismyip”. Well, Google just made all that unnecessary. You can now just search for ‘ip’ (yes, two letters) and it’ll return your public IP at the top of the page. Note that if you’re using Chrome that…
A Response to Dinis Cruz’ Comments on Invisible Security
Dinis Cruz did a presentation at OWASP recently on why security should be invisible to developers. His basic idea is that security is for security people and building things is for people who build things. He says that security people should stop rubbing developers’ noses in their problems and make security transparent so developers don’t need to think…
Disciplined Parents Tend Not to Have Kids With ADD
Caution, anecdotes ahead. I was reading some symptoms of ADD today and was stunned by the fact that they all were the exact symptoms of not having enough discipline in a household. doesn’t pay attention doesn’t follow-through doesn’t listen unfocused unorganized Try this: imagine a family that you know where the parents are pretty strict. Not like beatings…
Mount an ISO From the Command Line in OS X
Dead simple: hdiutil mount yourfile.iso
I’ll Not Hear Another Word About Apple Restricting Freedom
From Stallman to Raymond, the favorite counter-tone in recent days has been that jobs was a great marketer and a shrewd businessman, but that he was ultimately a force for evil due to his restriction of freedom of computing. This argument is not even wrong: it’s outright silly. Consider why it is that BMW is not criticized in…
The Individual Problem
I believe that humans transferring their minds to digital form is inevitable. In fact, I think it’s precisely the way in which we as a species will achieve immortality. That’s interesting, of course, but what may be more intriguing is the problem that will come from it. The issue is that once we are digital it will be…
Do Children Make Parents More Conservative?
I had an interesting idea this weekend regarding the effect that having children has on one’s life views. I was talking to a friend of mine about what our plans were for ten and twenty years from now, and he basically said that he stays focused on being very conservative with his money because he plans on having…
Jobs and HP
When he was in eighth grade, Steve Jobs decided to build a frequency counter for a school project and needed parts. Someone suggested that he call Bill Hewlett. Finding a William Hewlett in the telephone book, the 12-year-old Jobs called and asked, “Is this the Bill Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard?” “Yes,” said Bill. Jobs made his request. Bill spent…
My Problem With the Libertarians
I have many friends who are libertarians, and when I spew here regarding politics I often hear from them in comments or via email, “I agree with you that the Republicans are crazy, but I’m a Libertarian…”, and so on. Let me explain why I’m not a libertarian–and I’ll start by mentioning that I used to be one.…
Me On My Green Machine
This is a happy boy.
The Rich and Selfish Have Enlisted the Poor to Fight For Them
It seems the poor and uniformed are partial to the rhetoric of the rich and selfish. This is a most unfortunate fact, as it means that the slaves are demanding the right to be beaten, and they have named the abolitionists as the enemy. As sad as this is, I can’t help but laugh at it. But my…
Android’s Biggest Hardware Problem is Deceptive
A lot has been said, here and elsewhere, regarding the relative weakness of Android hardware. It’s too varied, it’s clunky, poor battery life, etc. But the biggest problem with Android hardware is not any of the things above, and it’s not even with any particular attribute of hardware itself. The issue that’s hurting Android is that they’ve produced…
The Truths of America in 2011
There is shockingly little truth in any of the normal outlets in America. Universities, mainstream media, common conversation — they all focus on their own particular vector and spin on truth. And often they’re not even lying: they’re just biased and wrong. So let me give my version of biased and wrong — hopefully with less bias and…
Dawkins on Free Will and Moral Responsibility
From Edge.org: Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem…
Your Problem with Vim is That You Don’t Grok Vi
From StackOverflow: Your problem with Vim is that you don’t grok vi.You mention cutting with yy and complain that you almost never want to cut whole lines. In fact programmers, editing source code, very often want to work on whole lines, ranges of lines and blocks of code. However, yy is only one of many way to yank…
Reality is Organization
Our entire universe consists of matter and energy interacting with itself according to the laws of physics. That is reality. This is a world of subatomic particles smashing into each other trillions of times per second according to a list of rules. The result of some of these collisions is a particular type of organization. Examples include atoms,…
Know Your Binary and Hex
If you’re in a technical computer field you should know your binary and hex. Many don’t and they’re secretly ashamed. Others mostly know (or at least they used to) and they have to basically re-learn whenever they need to use it or explain it to others. Let’s fix this right now. The following system will apply to binary,…
The Ultimate Bash Prompt
I just installed Lion and decided to do a refresh on my Bash prompt. After an hour of research and tinkering this is what I ended up with. It not only displays user, host, and directory information in a nicely color-coded manner, but it also gives git information. Here’s the code at Pastie. And here’s what it looks…
Christopher Hitchens on Using Clichés
Christopher Hitchens is perhaps my favorite writer, and definitely my favorite speaker. I’m currently reading The Quotable Hitchens, by Windsor Man, and I found this fragment of genius yesterday: You must get control of your speech if you wish to write…It’s ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL AND INDISPENSABLE that you begin the work of forming correct sentences in your head. Try…
Things to Do Every Day
Exercise in the morning Eat a light breakfast Go about your day Take valuable inputs Produce output Spend some time doing something that limits your inputs, e.g. walking with no music/content, meditation, etc. This is a working list. I need to incorporate previous lists and any input from others. ::
A Theory For Why Blue Eyes Are Attractive
From psychologytoday.com: Turney then makes two simple observations. First, every human pupil is dark brown, regardless of the color of the iris, which encloses the pupil and determines the color of the eye. Second, blue is the lightest color of human iris. The consequence of these two observations is that the size of the pupil is easiest to…