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THE FIFTY-NINE-STORY CRISIS, The New Yorker, 5/29/95, pp 45-53

2011 Jun 5, 4:56"What's an engineer's worst nightmare? To realize that the supports he designed for a skyscraper like Citicorp Center are flawed---and hurricane season is approaching."PermalinkCommentsarticle history design business engineering

Hidden device distorts news on wireless networks, brews beer, is time machine - Hack a Day

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."PermalinkCommentssecurity journalism wifi hack technical

Command line for finding missing URLACTIONs

2011 May 28, 11:00

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
I'm not a sed expert so I had to read the sed documentation, and I heard about comm from Kris Kowal's blog which happilly was in the Win32 GNU tools pack I already run.

But in my effort to learn and use PowerShell I found the following similar command line:

diff 
(more urlmon.idl | %{ if ($_ -cmatch "URLACTION[a-zA-Z0-9_]*") { $matches[0] } } | sort -uniq)
(more MySecurityManager.cpp | %{ if ($_ -cmatch "URLACTION[a-zA-Z0-9_]*") { $matches[0] } } | sort -uniq)
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.
PermalinkCommentspowershell tool cli technical command line

clip.exe - Useful tool I didn't know shipped with Windows

2011 May 26, 11:00

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:

$input | tee -var teeclipout | clip;
$teeclipout;
PermalinkCommentspowershell clip tool clipboard cli technical windows tee

_opt Mnemonic

2011 May 24, 11:00

​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.






SAL foo == nullptr allowed at function start? *foo == nullptr allowed at function end?
__deref_out void **foo No No
__deref_opt_out void **foo Yes No
__deref_out_opt void **foo No Yes
__deref_opt_out_opt void **foo Yes Yes
.
PermalinkCommentssal technical programming

[whatwg] CORS requests for image and video elements

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">."PermalinkCommentscors crossdomain web browser webbrowser html technical

PowerShell Script Batch File Wrapper

2011 May 22, 7:20

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

%systemroot%\system32\windowspowershell\v1.0\powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Command . %~dpn0.ps1 %*;(pwd).Path 1> %temp%\%~n0.tmp 2> nul
set /p newdir=
PermalinkCommentspowershell technical programming batch file console

Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy Remake - AGS Games Database

2011 May 14, 3:31Fan remake of the Infocom HHGTTG text adventure as an adventure game.PermalinkCommentshhgttg game videogames adventure-game

Seth Meyers & Barack Obama at White House Correspondents’ Dinner

2011 May 1, 7:51"The hilarious speeches by Seth Meyers and Barack Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Seth and Obama really let Trump have it in their speechs. Trump’s reaction in the audience is priceless."PermalinkCommentshumor politics barack-obama seth-meyers video white-house-correspondents-dinner

HTTP framework for time-based access to resource states -- Memento

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."PermalinkCommentstechnical rfc reference http header time memento archive

Nighty Night | Amanda Palmer

2011 Apr 27, 4:10PermalinkCommentsmusic download amanda-palmer ben-folds neil-gaiman damian-kulash ok-go mp3

draft-abarth-url-01 - Parsing URLs for Fun and Profit

2011 Apr 27, 3:12Prescriptive spec on URI parsing. "This document contains a precise specification of how browsers process URLs. The behavior specified in this document might or might not match any particular browser, but browsers might be well-served by adopting the behavior defined herein."PermalinkCommentstechnical rfc reference uri

Why We Need An Open Wireless Movement | Electronic Frontier Foundation

2011 Apr 27, 2:23"The gradual disappearance of open wireless networks is a tragedy of the commons, with a confusing twist of privacy and security debate. This essay explains why the progressive locking of wireless networks is harmful — for convenience, for privacy and for efficient use of the electromagnetic spectrum."PermalinkCommentslaw eff wireless internet technical privacy security

Lessig: Copyright isn't just hurting creativity: it's killing science (video) | Motherboard

2011 Apr 27, 2:22"Larry Lessig gave a new talk at CERN last week about copyright and how it has affected open access to academic or scientific information"

The Architecture of Access to Scientific Knowledge from lessig on Vimeo.

PermalinkCommentscopyright science lawrence-lessig video talk

Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies

2011 Apr 27, 2:21Competing price setting algorithms create a very high priced book. "But Peter Lawrence can now comfortably boast that one of the biggest and most respected companies on Earth valued his great book at $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping)."PermalinkCommentshumor internet blog science book commerce ad

President Barack Obama stands by a cut-out picture of First Lady

2011 Apr 18, 4:28"President Barack Obama stands by a cut-out picture of First Lady Michelle Obama during a visit to Miami Central High School in Miami, Fla., March 4, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)"
PermalinkCommentshumor photo obama

SRU: Search/Retrieval via URL -- SRU, CQL and ZeeRex (Standards, Library of Congress)

2011 Apr 18, 4:27"SRU is a standard XML-focused search protocol for Internet search queries, utilizing CQL (Contextual Query Language), a standard syntax for representing queries."PermalinkCommentsstandards search library metadata xml uri technical library-of-congress

Welcome to HTML11 Labs

2011 Apr 11, 3:56PermalinkCommentshtml humor future html11 technical standard

Patterns for using the InitOnce functions - The Old New Thing - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

2011 Apr 8, 2:32"Since writing lock-free code is issuch a headache-inducer,you're probably best off making some other people suffer the headachesfor you. And those other people are the kernel folks, who have developedquite a few lock-free building blocks so you don't have to. For example, there's a collection of functions for manipulatinginterlocked lists.But today we're going to look at theone-time initialization functions."PermalinkCommentstechnical windows programming raymond-chen lock thread-safety

Internet probe can track you down to within 690 metres - tech - 05 April 2011 - New Scientist

2011 Apr 8, 2:07"On average their method gets to within 690 metres of the target and can be as close as 100 metres – good enough to identify the target computer's location to within a few streets.", "When a landmark machine and the target computer have shared a router, the researchers can compare how long a packet takes to reach each machine from the router; converted into an estimate of distance, this time difference narrows the search down further."PermalinkCommentstechnical internet privacy geo geolocation security
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