Ali's Tumblr

2012-02-17

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Today’s sysadmin todo list:
0. Get corporate membership with EFF.
1. Identify all applications with user-generated content.
2. Move all associated domains to a non-US based registrar.
3. Migrate DNS, web serving and other critical services to non-US based servers.
4. Migrate yourself to a non-US controlled country.
I’m sorry for US sites and users. Your government is hell-bent on turning the internet into a read-only device like TV, easily regulated and controlled. The population will be required to sit quietly and keep their eyes glued on the screen so they don’t miss the ads, with any infringers deemed terrorists and pedophiles and thus deserving of summary punishment by DHS squads.
Hopefully the internet will route around the damaged segment, and the rest of us can continue to enjoy the amazing interactivity it has brought our society.

—

foxylad on hacker news

Today’s sysadmin todo list:0. Get corporate membership with EFF.1. Identify all … | Hacker News

(via fred-wilson)

(via rafer)

Source: news.ycombinator.com

2012-02-16

Misconceptions About iOS Multitasking

There is one iOS “tip” that I keep hearing and it is wrong. Worse, I keep hearing it from supposedly authoritative sources. I have even heard it from the lips of Apple “Geniuses” in stores.

All those apps in the multitasking bar on your iOS device are currently active and slowing it down, filling the device’s memory or using up your battery. To maximise performance and battery life, you should kill them all manually.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. There are caveats to this but anyone dispensing the advice above is clearly uninformed enough that they will certainly not be aware of these subtleties.

You’d already know this stuff if you’ve developed for iOS, but even then it’s worth a look.

2012-02-14

endofunctor:

random fact:

at the start of 21, the movie about the MIT blackjack team (which replaced most of the asian students with white people), someone says something about having a 4.0 at MIT

which uses a 5-point GPA scale

Going to rewatch this Friday.

(via hackedy)

Source: endofunctor

2012-02-13

I open-sourced a game and it was awesome

Not trying to be a jerk, but you break a lot of Ruby language conventions. I would add improving that to the top of your list.

The first response to my Reddit thread about my CYOA engine. This was probably the best response I could have hoped for.

I’ve been pushed to open-source my code many, many times. Usually I don’t listen — mostly because I like keeping certain projects closed-source, or because a lot of the code I write is either an assignment or a script to automate some process I don’t want to do manually. After hearing Erik Michaels-Ober’s talk on open source at Boston.io, which was another call-to-action for young developers to get into the open-source scene, I decided that instead of putting up something new I’d publicize a side project of mine.

I had this dinky Choose-Your-Own-Adventure (CYOA) game I made. The content was taken from a book I found while playing Skyrim, and the program itself was basically a DFA. To be honest, I wasn’t proud of it because it was a really trivial program (definitely not as cool as ClownFactory), but it was fun to make so I put it on Github.

A month later I made the Reddit thread. My single-serving CYOA game is now a game engine (dubbed “kolb engine”, or just “kolb”). The git repo now has 6 watchers, and someone had submitted a big change to my code shortly after I made that thread. It’s also on RubyGems and has 26 downloads at the time of posting. Anyone can use the silly ruby program I created on a whim and make their own CYOA game.

6 watchers, 1 fork, 1 pull request, 26 downloads. Okay, I guess those numbers are kind of weak. So why am I so pleased?

Because: I got a free code review, and I made something that was interesting enough that it was worth looking at. I learned about Ruby project structure, put a gem up on RubyGems.org, and made something that’s not only for me.

The main takeaway is that open source is cool. I’m planning on continuing to push updates to Kolb and even contribute to other gems now that I know my way around gem projects.

2012-02-09

Source: Flickr / marcoccia

2012-02-06

yeeyuh

(via kirsthestars)

Source: brohirrim

2012-02-03

I’ve recently come across a site that doesn’t sanitize their input. I have two options:

Email the administrative contact for the domain name
Drop their tables (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

I’m going to go with option 1 because I’m not a complete jerk. I do hope the user accessing the database with this input has read-only permissions, though. I can’t be the only one to have discovered the exploit.

SQL injection is actually a really interesting exploit because it’s such an easy trap to fall into. I might set up an intentionally vulnerable PHP website just so I can mess around with what’s possible given the different types of permissions you can give the server-side MySQL user. Fortunately, when I was learning PHP and MySQL in middle school from Spoono.com, I was taught that this exploit exists and how to sanitize your input. I really wish I did have a cool “oh I was stupid and my tables got dropped and now I learned my lesson” store, but I don’t.

Source: xkcd.com

2012-02-01

rafer:

parislemon:

Put this way, it sounds so simple. And actually, it should be this simple.

Unfortunately, this discounts the fact that Hollywood is run by people with their heads up their asses. Like this guy. It’s a fucked up nightmare of politics and greed. It’s amazing that anything good comes out of the system at all — it’s a testament to the true creative talent behind the films themselves.

You can bet that Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and all the rest have tried to talk Hollywood into the system above. They’ve probably been doing it for a decade, if not longer. Instead, we get bullshit like UltraViolet — a giant middle finger to consumers.

Rafer sez:
Going to be reblogging you twice this morning (Wed SG time).

What people in NorCal rarely appreciate is that the politics and greed are secondary at best. At an individual level, you’ve got a bunch of VPs and SVPs making a lot of cash every year, who have no noticeable equity in the businesses they run. They are mainly trying to keep the money flowing until they can retire and make it the next person’s problem. The mantra is ‘just three more years….’

No guys jeeze that means they have to be innovative and adapt. Can’t they just cling to failing business model and yell at people for being unethical?

Source: robsheridan

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boxhopkins asked: I'm a cs major at UNF. This past year has been my first programming in any capacity. I was always interested in learning but I was hesitant about self learning. Now that I'm in in the program, I have found that I LOVE it.. At least for now lol. Currently I'm taking cs ii, which is learning object oriented programming with java. Sorry for the long intro, but my question is this: Realizing that learning the basics is crucial first, what can I do to produce something useful beyond the classroom?

That’s awesome! Welcome to computer science, we have a lot of fun here.

To answer your question, it all comes down to “see a need, fill a need”.

Actively find things in you do that could be automated. CLI tools are my personal favorite for this kind of things, because I get to focus on problem solving instead of designing GUIs. I wrote a lot of Java CLIs back in high school, each of which were probably used less than three times. Making them was mostly a personal dare.

Since you know Java, making something for Android devices shouldn’t be too much of a stretch for you. My iOS app, ChordPad, came about because my sister didn’t like dealing with printouts of chord charts, so I made the charts into an app.

I wish I could tell you “go and make a program that does this”, but that’s something you have to figure out for yourself. The thing is, a lot of the stuff you make won’t be useful to anyone else. BUT, it’s good practice for when you actually make something that ends up being really useful, and it’s great exercise for your brain.