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Tweet from Ken Jennings

2016 Oct 7, 2:48
I get it, guys. I mean, how could you possibly have guessed that Donald Trump was terrible to women? http://www.sltrib.com/news/4444721-155/after-video-huntsman-says-it-is 
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Tweet from Magic Realism Bot

2016 Aug 31, 10:06
A grandfather steals small talk and hides it inside a diamond beehive.
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Tweet from Anil Before Zod

2016 Aug 18, 5:42
More than 2000 kids' lives were ruined by the "kids for cash" bribery scandal, including some suicides; the CEO who did it is already free.
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Tweet from David Risney

2016 Aug 18, 5:40
Mother Jones on ending private prisons and their previous piece inside private prisons: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/department-justice-plans-end-private-prison  https://twitter.com/AlexCKaufman/status/766300516007682048 
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WinRT Toast from PowerShell

2016 Jun 15, 3:54

I've made a PowerShell script to show system toast notifications with WinRT and PowerShell. Along the way I learned several interesting things.

First off calling WinRT from PowerShell involves a strange syntax. If you want to use a class you write [-Class-,-Namespace-,ContentType=WindowsRuntime] first to tell PowerShell about the type. For example here I create a ToastNotification object:

[void][Windows.UI.Notifications.ToastNotification,Windows.UI.Notifications,ContentType=WindowsRuntime];
$toast = New-Object Windows.UI.Notifications.ToastNotification -ArgumentList $xml;
And here I call the static method CreateToastNotifier on the ToastNotificationManager class:
[void][Windows.UI.Notifications.ToastNotificationManager,Windows.UI.Notifications,ContentType=WindowsRuntime];
$notifier = [Windows.UI.Notifications.ToastNotificationManager]::CreateToastNotifier($AppUserModelId);
With this I can call WinRT methods and this is enough to show a toast but to handle the click requires a little more work.

To handle the user clicking on the toast I need to listen to the Activated event on the Toast object. However Register-ObjectEvent doesn't handle WinRT events. To work around this I created a .NET event wrapper class to turn the WinRT event into a .NET event that Register-ObjectEvent can handle. This is based on Keith Hill's blog post on calling WinRT async methods in PowerShell. With the event wrapper class I can run the following to subscribe to the event:

function WrapToastEvent {
param($target, $eventName);

Add-Type -Path (Join-Path $myPath "PoshWinRT.dll")
$wrapper = new-object "PoshWinRT.EventWrapper[Windows.UI.Notifications.ToastNotification,System.Object]";
$wrapper.Register($target, $eventName);
}

[void](Register-ObjectEvent -InputObject (WrapToastEvent $toast "Activated") -EventName FireEvent -Action {
...
});

To handle the Activated event I want to put focus back on the PowerShell window that created the toast. To do this I need to call the Win32 function SetForegroundWindow. Doing so from PowerShell is surprisingly easy. First you must tell PowerShell about the function:

Add-Type @"
using System;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
public class PInvoke {
[DllImport("user32.dll")] [return: MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.Bool)]
public static extern bool SetForegroundWindow(IntPtr hwnd);
}
"@
Then to call:
[PInvoke]::SetForegroundWindow((Get-Process -id $myWindowPid).MainWindowHandle);

But figuring out the HWND to give to SetForegroundWindow isn't totally straight forward. Get-Process exposes a MainWindowHandle property but if you start a cmd.exe prompt and then run PowerShell inside of that, the PowerShell process has 0 for its MainWindowHandle property. We must follow up process parents until we find one with a MainWindowHandle:

$myWindowPid = $pid;
while ($myWindowPid -gt 0 -and (Get-Process -id $myWindowPid).MainWindowHandle -eq 0) {
$myWindowPid = (gwmi Win32_Process -filter "processid = $($myWindowPid)" | select ParentProcessId).ParentProcessId;
}
PermalinkComments.net c# powershell toast winrt

Tweet from billy eichner

2016 Jun 7, 12:34
I'm ok with a female President AS LONG as she doesn't start busting ghosts.
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Tweet from David Risney

2016 Apr 28, 4:14
Coincidentally YouTuber on hacking dispute res by incl IP from diff large companies in same video http://kotaku.com/game-critic-uses-brilliant-workaround-for-youtubes-copy-1773452452 
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Tweet from Lux Alptraum

2016 Apr 26, 4:07
I *totally* consider my IUD a cyborg implant. http://fusion.net/story/294770/women-body-hackers/ 
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Tweet from David Risney

2016 Apr 20, 6:35
Hadn't considered https://twitter.com/berendjanwever/status/722882656996691968 
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Retweet of xeni

2016 Feb 25, 10:15
Yep. #nightlyshow pic.twitter.com/EUX3uVTBPH
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Tweet from David_Risney

2016 Feb 20, 1:40
Preview of Obama's post presidency standup tour @CSPANVL http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4558279/obama-ribs-republicans-candidates …
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Retweet of xeni

2016 Feb 20, 1:22
If the #BernieSanders campaign lacked punk street cred before, they got it now. Them's some optics indeed. pic.twitter.com/g1sv86YAvH
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Tweet from David_Risney

2016 Feb 16, 2:06
OK Go's beef with YouTube led to latest video release on Facebook: http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/why-ok-go-went-facebook-only-debut-its-buzzy-zero-gravity-music-video-169599 …
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Tweet from David_Risney

2016 Feb 10, 9:56
OK Go is in vomit comet for new video: http://boingboing.net/2016/02/11/ok-gos-new-video-was-shot-in.html …. Looks amazing but I'm constantly worried plane is about to pull up.
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Retweet of mayabielinski

2016 Feb 9, 9:20
Gender bias on GitHub: women's contributions accepted more often than men's - except when gender is identifiable. https://peerj.com/preprints/1733/ 
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Retweet of SaraGamerKitty

2016 Feb 8, 5:09
The reason Spider-Man was not in Civil War teaser. pic.twitter.com/vcqCviurYj
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Let's Encrypt NearlyFreeSpeech.net Setup

2016 Feb 4, 2:48

2016-Nov-5: Updated post on using Let's Encrypt with NearlyFreeSpeech.net

I use NearlyFreeSpeech.net for my webhosting for my personal website and I've just finished setting up TLS via Let's Encrypt. The process was slightly more complicated than what you'd like from Let's Encrypt. So for those interested in doing the same on NearlyFreeSpeech.net, I've taken the following notes.

The standard Let's Encrypt client requires su/sudo access which is not available on NearlyFreeSpeech.net's servers. Additionally NFSN's webserver doesn't have any Let's Encrypt plugins installed. So I used the Let's Encrypt Without Sudo client. I followed the instructions listed on the tool's page with the addition of providing the "--file-based" parameter to sign_csr.py.

One thing the script doesn't produce is the chain file. But this topic "Let's Encrypt - Quick HOWTO for NSFN" covers how to obtain that:

curl -o domain.chn https://letsencrypt.org/certs/lets-encrypt-x1-cross-signed.pem

Now that you have all the required files, on your NFSN server make the directory /home/protected/ssl and copy your files into it. This is described in the NFSN topic provide certificates to NFSN. After copying the files and setting their permissions as described in the previous link you submit an assistance request. For me it was only 15 minutes later that everything was setup.

After enabling HTTPS I wanted to have all HTTP requests redirect to HTTPS. The normal Apache documentation on how to do this doesn't work on NFSN servers. Instead the NFSN FAQ describes it in "redirect http to https and HSTS". You use the X-Forwarded-Proto instead of the HTTPS variable because of how NFSN's virtual hosting is setup.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Forwarded-Proto} !https
RewriteRule ^.*$ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

Turning on HSTS is as simple as adding the HSTS HTTP header. However, the description in the above link didn't work because my site's NFSN realm isn't on the latest Apache yet. Instead I added the following to my .htaccess. After I'm comfortable with everything working well for a few days I'll start turning up the max-age to the recommended minimum value of 180 days.

Header set Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=3600;" 

Finally, to turn on CSP I started up Fiddler with my CSP Fiddler extension. It allows me to determine the most restrictive CSP rules I could apply and still have all resources on my page load. From there I found and removed inline script and some content loaded via http and otherwise continued tweaking my site and CSP rules.

After I was done I checked out my site on SSL Lab's SSL Test to see what I might have done wrong or needed improving. The first time I went through these steps I hadn't included the chain file which the SSL Test told me about. I was able to add that file to the same files I had already previously generated from the Let's Encrypt client and do another NFSN assistance request and 15 minutes later the SSL Test had upgraded me from 'B' to 'A'.

PermalinkCommentscertificate csp hsts https lets-encrypt nearlyfreespeech.net

Retweet of NiemanLab

2016 Feb 3, 4:30
Public radio staffers across the U.S. lay out new guidelines for the "Wild West” of podcast audience measurement http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/02/public-radio-staffers-across-the-u-s-lay-out-new-guidelines-for-podcast-audience-measurement/ …
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Tweet from David_Risney

2016 Feb 2, 11:11
Frinkiac search terms gives Simpsons screencaps. https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=go+school&e=S10E02&t=387970 …. Make it video and always listening and I'll wear it on my face.
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4 people are living in an isolated habitat for 30 days. Why? Science!

2016 Feb 1, 3:27

nasa:

This 30 day mission will help our researchers learn how isolation and close quarters affect individual and group behavior. This study at our Johnson Space Center prepares us for long duration space missions, like a trip to an asteroid or even to Mars.

image

The Human Research Exploration Analog (HERA) that the crew members will be living in is one compact, science-making house. But unlike in a normal house, these inhabitants won’t go outside for 30 days. Their communication with the rest of planet Earth will also be very limited, and they won’t have any access to internet. So no checking social media kids!

The only people they will talk with regularly are mission control and each other.

image

The crew member selection process is based on a number of criteria, including the same criteria for astronaut selection.

What will they be doing?

Because this mission simulates a 715-day journey to a Near-Earth asteroid, the four crew members will complete activities similar to what would happen during an outbound transit, on location at the asteroid, and the return transit phases of a mission (just in a bit of an accelerated timeframe). This simulation means that even when communicating with mission control, there will be a delay on all communications ranging from 1 to 10 minutes each way. The crew will also perform virtual spacewalk missions once they reach their destination, where they will inspect the asteroid and collect samples from it. 

A few other details:

  • The crew follows a timeline that is similar to one used for the ISS crew.
  • They work 16 hours a day, Monday through Friday. This includes time for daily planning, conferences, meals and exercises.  
  • They will be growing and taking care of plants and brine shrimp, which they will analyze and document.

But beware! While we do all we can to avoid crises during missions, crews need to be able to respond in the event of an emergency. The HERA crew will conduct a couple of emergency scenario simulations, including one that will require them to maneuver through a debris field during the Earth-bound phase of the mission. 

image

Throughout the mission, researchers will gather information about cohabitation, teamwork, team cohesion, mood, performance and overall well-being. The crew members will be tracked by numerous devices that each capture different types of data.

image

Past HERA crew members wore a sensor that recorded heart rate, distance, motion and sound intensity. When crew members were working together, the sensor would also record their proximity as well, helping investigators learn about team cohesion.

Researchers also learned about how crew members react to stress by recording and analyzing verbal interactions and by analyzing “markers” in blood and saliva samples.

image

In total, this mission will include 19 individual investigations across key human research elements. From psychological to physiological experiments, the crew members will help prepare us for future missions.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

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