2010 Feb 17, 8:09
Sarah and I just got back home from a Eric and Jane's wedding / Sarah and Dave's vacation trip to the Bahamas (note the lack of activity for the past twelve days on my website). I've got plenty of
photos and things to post but for now I'll just relate this humorous anecdote during the rehearsal dinner. I had said something about photos to Jim, Eric's brother and he gave me a crazy look. "Oh,
I thought you meant like pho-tos" he said. It took me a moment to realize he misunderstood what I said as "faux toes". I laughed until I cried a little. Also works with digital faux toes.
faux toes personal bahamas 2010 Feb 2, 2:49A small number of select scans at higher resolution
flickr photo army-man scan humor 2010 Jan 22, 1:44"He seeded the customer's parking lot with USB flash drives, each of which had a Trojan horse installed on it. When the employees arrived for work in the morning, they were quite excited to find the
free gadgets laying around the parking lot. Employees eagerly collected the USB drives and plugged them into the first computers they came across: their own workstations."
via:ericlaw security usb windows social-engineering computer technical 2010 Jan 5, 7:42
I've made a WPAD server Fiddler extension and in a fit of creativity I've named it: WPAD Server Fiddler
Extension.
Of course you know about Fiddler, Eric's awesome HTTP debugger tool, the HTTP proxy that lets you inspect, visualize and modify the
HTTP traffic that flows through it. And on the subject you've probably definitely heard of WPAD, the Web Proxy Auto Discovery protocol
that allows web browsers like IE to use DHCP or DNS to automatically discover HTTP proxies on their network. While working on a particularly nasty WPAD bug towards the end of IE8 I really wished I
had a way to see the WPAD requests and responses and modify PAC responses in Fiddler. Well the wishes of me of the past are now fulfilled by present day me as this Fiddler extension will respond to
WPAD DHCP requests telling those clients (by default) that Fiddler is their proxy.
When I started working on this project I didn't really understand how DHCP worked especially with respect to WPAD. I won't bore you with my misconceptions: it works by having your one DHCP server
on your network respond to regular DHCP requests as well as WPAD DHCP requests. And Windows I've found runs a DHCP client service (you can start/stop it via Start|Run|'services.msc', scroll to DHCP
Client or via the command line with "net start/stop 'DHCP Client'") that caches DHCP server responses making it just slightly more difficult to test and debug my extension. If a Windows app uses
the DHCP client APIs to ask for the WPAD option, this service will send out a DHCP request and take the first DHCP server response it gets. That means that if you're on a network with a DHCP
server, my extension will be racing to respond to the client. If the DHCP server wins then the client ignores the WPAD response from my extension.
Various documents and tools I found useful while working on this:
proxy fiddler http technical debug wpad pac tool dhcp 2009 Dec 21, 3:40"“I uploaded (Panic Attack!) on a Thursday and on Monday my inbox was totally full of e-mails from Hollywood studios,” he told the BBC’s Latin American service BBC Mundo. “It was amazing, we were all
shocked.”" And I can see why -- its a good video.
video scifi robot youtube hollywood 2009 Dec 16, 2:47
I played paintball for the first time at Eric's bachelor party a couple
months ago. With the worst of my bruises fading I'm examining what I've learned:
- Wearing a big jacket was a good idea, but another layer for my legs would have been good too.
- In retrospect I'd rather have run out in the open and had the brief pain of getting shot than take my time crouching in wait and feeling sore in my legs for all the next day.
- If I don't want to be first against the wall when the revolution comes, I'm going to have to make friends with folks who can aim.
paintball lessons 2009 Dec 15, 2:01"Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror fame) was in for a horror when he realized that his server crashed and his data was gone and due to some reason, the backup mechanism was not working. ... So what should
Jeff do now? Since Coding horror is a high traffic blog, I think there is a way to get back at least some of the images." Reconstruct the HTML from Google's cache, change the HTTP server to tell the
client it has the correct cached image for all the images, add script to the HTML to grab the images and send them back. Awesome idea. Of course now I want to setup Fiddler to swap in random
images...
via:ericlaw jeff-atwood backup web http cache image javascript technical 2009 Dec 4, 10:24Flickr dev. blog on the accept-language HTTP header: "It’s true that the Accept-Language header has a troubled history. Because of this, many developers regard it the way medieval villagers might
have regarded a woman with a warty nose and a pet cat – it should be shunned, avoided and possibly burned at the stake." And this great anecdote: "In two and a half years of running as an
international site, we’ve only ever had one case where it didn’t work. Helio, a cellphone company, had a browser was custom-built for them in Korea, and had its “Accept-Language” header hard-coded to
always request Korean, something which led to much confusion for the Flickr users amongst their American customers."
flickr internationalization language accept-language http http-header development technical web 2009 Dec 4, 5:06"If you want to watch videos from the National Archives today, they try to talk you into buying a DVD from the official government partner, Amazon.Com...To demonstrate to the Congress that if we
liberated this wonderful content people would really care, I forked over $251 for 20 DVDs and posted them on-line."
video history politics government public-domain internet-archive 2009 Nov 25, 7:09Relative URI resolution differences in browsers vs programming language libraries.
via:ericlaw url uri rfc web browser programming dotnet java technical 2009 Oct 6, 2:40Changes in life expectancy in America - with graphs!
visualization statistics life-expectancy health america age 2009 Oct 5, 9:51"What if the logos we’re used to seeing in Helvetica were redone in Arial? Would you even notice if the next time you saw the American Airlines logo it was redone in Arial?" Quiz of 20 logos
presented in their original Helvetica along side Arial and you must determine which is which. I got them correct but only due to the Arial and Helvetica overlay poster from last week.
typography helvetica arial blog quiz logo font 2009 Aug 28, 9:12
sequelguy posted a photo:
Cookies and cupcakes mysteriously appeared in my office. (Actually not mysterious -- thanks Eric!)
birthday chair cookie cupcake 2009 Aug 4, 7:19"Witnesses said that Sgt. Crowley, failing to recognize Gates on their flight to Logan Airport, arrested the tenured professor in midair, once again at the baggage claim, and twice during their
shared cab ride back to Cambridge"
humor onion politics 2009 Aug 3, 11:06"But how efficient is the alphabet at encoding information on a page?"
via:ericlaw humor paper storage encoding 2009 Aug 3, 8:30"The American Time Use Survey asks thousands of American residents to recall every minute of a day." I enjoy the graph animation when switching between different groups.
via:swannman graph visualization information graphic nytimes infographics demographics statistics 2009 Jul 27, 5:27"Parallel and Distributed Computation:Numerical Methods", Bertsekas, Dimitri P.; Tsitsiklis, John N., 2003-11-21
programming mit pdf algorithm distributed parallel math todo technical
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