2011 Jul 9, 1:49Glasses that whisper in your ear the mood of the person with whom you're speaking and a jerk-o-meter you wear around your neck that tells you when you're being a jerk. Social devices.socialsciencetoolaugmented-reality
2011 Jul 6, 7:28"Over this past Fourth Of July weekend, we neglected to note that it was the 15th anniversary of Roland Emmerich’s 1996 blockbuster Independence Day. New York comedian Sean Kleier remembered, and
decided to make his own tribute, going to various locations around New York City—Times Square, the Brooklyn Bridge, the subway, and inside a Victoria’s Secret—reciting Bill Pullman’s rousing speech
before the movie's final battle sequence, megaphone and all." humorvideobill-pullmanindependence-daynew-york
2011 Jul 1, 10:12" Historically, protocol designers and implementers distinguished
between "standard" and "non-standard" parameters by prefixing the
latter with the string "X-". On balance, this "X-" convention has
more costs than benefits, although it can be appropriate in certain
circumstances."prefixtechnicalstandradrfcuriurlx-
2011 Jul 1, 10:09"I periodically get email from folks who, having read "Accelerando", assume I am some kind of fire-breathing extropian zealot who believes in the imminence of the singularity, the uploading of the
libertarians, and the rapture of the nerds. I find this mildly distressing, and so I think it's time to set the record straight and say what I really think. Short version: Santa Claus doesn't exist."scifisingularitycharles-strossfuturefiction
2011 Jun 30, 1:23"Join Whoopi Goldberg (Guinan) as she hosts The Captain's Summit. Whoopi sits down with Trek stars William Shatner (Kirk), Leonard Nimoy (Spock), Patrick Stewart (Picard) and Jonathan Frakes (Riker)
and gets personal with them. From fan-etiquette to comparing series, this is a must see for all Trek fans."
2011 Jun 20, 11:25A cautionary tale in chart form: lesson is make sure you can always upgrade your hashing algorithm or don't have security dependencies on hashing algorithms.referencehashencryptionsecuritytabletechnicalhumor
As it turns out the WPAD Server Fiddler Extension I made a while back actually has a non-malicious purpose. Apparently its useful for debugging HTTP on the WP7
phone (or so I'm told). Anyway I took some requests and I've fixed a few minor bugs (start button not updating correctly), changed the dialog to be a Fiddler tab so you can use it non-modally, and
the WPAD server is now always off when Fiddler starts.
2011 May 30, 3:13"We covered the Newstweek, a wall-wart sized box that injects fake news stories over public WiFi connections last February, but now there’s a great walk through and it seems our doubts about this
project were disproved."securityjournalismwifihacktechnical
I wanted to ensure that my switch statement in my implementation of IInternetSecurityManager::ProcessURLAction had a case for every possible documented URLACTION. I wrote the following short
command line sequence to see the list of all URLACTIONs in the SDK header file not found in my source file:
grep URLACTION urlmon.idl | sed 's/.*\(URLACTION[a-zA-Z0-9_]*\).*/\1/g;' | sort | uniq > allURLACTIONs.txt grep URLACTION MySecurityManager.cpp | sed 's/.*\(URLACTION[a-zA-Z0-9_]*\).*/\1/g;' | sort | uniq > myURLACTIONs.txt comm -23 allURLACTIONs.txt myURLACTIONs.txt
In
the PowerShell version I can skip the temporary files which is nice. 'diff' is mapped to 'compare-object' which seems similar to comm but with no parameters to filter out the different streams
(although this could be done more verbosely with the ?{ } filter syntax). In PowerShell uniq functionality is built into sort. The builtin -cmatch operator (c is for case sensitive) to do regexp is
nice plus the side effect of generating the $matches variable with the regexp results.
2011 May 26, 1:28This was on my todo list. I'll scratch it off knowing far more funded folks are doing this: "A startup called BlueStacks has developed an Android runtime environment for the Windows operating system.
It will enable users to run Android applications alongside conventional Windows software on Microsoft's operating system." "One example would be a convertible netbook tablet that normally runs
Windows but switches to an Android interface for greater touch-friendliness when the screen is flipped.
Such a product would offer the full power and multitasking capabilities of Windows but also benefit from having access to Android's broad touch-enabled software ecosystem."windowsprogrammingandroidjavatechnical
When you run clip.exe, whatever comes into its standard input is put onto the clipboard. So when you need to move the result of something in your command window somewhere else you can pipe the
result into clip.exe. Then you won't have to worry about the irritating way cmd.exe does block copy/pasting and you avoid having to manually fixup line breaks in wrapped lines. For instance, you
can put the contents of a script into the clipboard with:
more cdo.cmd | clip
I've got a lot of stuff dumped in my bin folder that I sync across all my PCs so I didn't realize that clip.exe is a part of standard Windows installs.
Nice for avoiding the block copy in cmd.exe but I'd prefer to have the contents sort of tee'd into the clipboard and standard output. So TeeClip.ps1:
I always have trouble remembering where the opt goes in SAL in the __deref_out case. The mnemonic is pretty simple: the
_opt at the start of the SAL is for the pointer value at the start of the function. And the _opt at the end of the SAL is for the dereferenced pointer value at the end of the function.
2011 May 23, 4:26Applying CORS to the media elements: "I've added a content attribute to <img>, <video>, and <audio> that makes the image or media resource be fetched with CORS And have the origin
of the page if CORS succeeded. The attribute is "cross-origin" and it has two allowed values, "use-credentials" and "anonymous". The latter is the default, so you can just say <img cross-origin
src="data.png">."corscrossdomainwebbrowserwebbrowserhtmltechnical
I'm trying to learn and use PowerShell more, but plenty of other folks I know don't use PowerShell. To allow them to use my scripts I use the following cmd.exe batch file to make it easy to call
PowerShell scripts. To use, just name the batch file name the same as the corresponding PowerShell script filename and put it in the same directory.
@echo off if "%1"=="/?" goto help if "%1"=="/h" goto help if "%1"=="-?" goto help if "%1"=="-h" goto help
%systemroot%\system32\windowspowershell\v1.0\powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Command . %~dpn0.ps1 %* goto end
:help %systemroot%\system32\windowspowershell\v1.0\powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Command help %~dpn0.ps1 -full goto end
:end
Additionally for PowerShell scripts that modify the current working directory I use the following batch file:
@echo off if "%1"=="/?" goto help if "%1"=="/h" goto help if "%1"=="-?" goto help if "%1"=="-h" goto help
2011 May 10, 10:49Interesting standards disagreements showing up in specs: "Some implementers feel a same-origin restriction should be the default for all new resource types while others feel strongly that an opt-in
strategy usuable for all resource types would be a better mechanism and that the default should always be to allow cross-origin linking for consistency with existing resource types (e.g. script,
images). As such, this section should be considered at risk for removal if the consensus is to use an alternative mechanism."referencewebdevelopmentfontspecificationw3ccss3
2011 May 2, 7:33I recalled that the order of function/method parameter evaluation was not specified by C++ standard, but I didn't know the more general rule and the associated implications for the double check
locking construct. Interesting.technicalc++programming
2011 Apr 30, 4:33"The HTTP-based Memento framework bridges the present and past Web by interlinking current resources with resources that encapsulate their past. It facilitates obtaining representations of prior
states of a resource, available from archival resources in Web archives or version resources in content management systems, by leveraging the resource's URI and a preferred datetime. To this end, the
framework introduces datetime negotiation (a variation on content negotiation), and new Relation Types for the HTTP Link header aimed at interlinking resources with their archival/version resources.
It also introduces various discovery mechanisms that further support briding the present and past Web."technicalrfcreferencehttpheadertimemementoarchive
2011 Apr 29, 3:55This memo defines URI fragment identifiers for text/csv MIME entities. These fragment identifiers make it possible to refer to parts of a text/csv MIME entity, identified by cell, row, column, or
slice.csvuritechnicalmimereference