suggest - Dave's Blog

Search
My timeline on Mastodon

Tweet from David_Risney

2015 Sep 25, 12:21
Additional article info suggest the VW emissions cheating is likely intentional and not a bug http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-25/volkswagen-said-to-manage-faked-test-results-from-german-offices …
PermalinkComments

The Interview ending interpretation

2014 Dec 25, 2:29

As the title suggests, spoilers for The Interview follow.

Towards the end of the movie, after Dave Skylark is shot, he miraculously has a bullet proof vest, blows up Kim Jong-un, finds a random tunnel and is picked up by Seal Team Six. These are the same details of the unbelievable scenario that Dave Skylark describes to Agent Lacey at the beginning of the movie.

This isn't a coincidence. Everything after Dave is shot is his fantasizing about how things should have gone as he dies in the interview chair. Unsurprisingly his fantasy closely matches his original ridiculous thoughts about how he would assassinate and escape.

This is similar to movies like Brazil in which the later fourth of the movie is the main character’s romantic fantasy as he is tortured and killed in real life. Or Total Recall where the end of the movie matches the description of the memories that the main character will have implanted at the beginning.

Its safe to assume that after Dave is killed, Aaron and Sook are captured and also killed.

PermalinkCommentsthe-interview

Netflix responds to Verizon’s cease & desist letter....

2014 Jun 10, 2:54


Netflix responds to Verizon’s cease & desist letter. Somehow I doubt that Verizon will bite on your offer to work together to increase network transparency Netflix. Nice suggestion though.

PermalinkCommentstechnical net-neutrality Verizon Netflix net

JS NICE: Statistical renaming, Type inference and Deobfuscation

2014 Jun 3, 9:36

JS NICE | Software Reliability Lab in ETH

JS NICE has indexed over 10,000 JavaScript projects from GitHub and then probabilistically infers newly suggested names and types for all of the local variables and function parameters of new JS.

PermalinkCommentstechnical javascript js coding

Internet Archive lets you play one of the earliest computer...

2014 Apr 28, 9:39


Internet Archive lets you play one of the earliest computer games Space War! emulated in JavaScript in the browser.

This entry covers the historical context of Space War!, and instructions for working with our in-browser emulator. The system doesn’t require installed plugins (although a more powerful machine and recent browser version is suggested).

The JSMESS emulator (a conversion of the larger MESS project) also contains a real-time portrayal of the lights and switches of a Digital PDP-1, as well as links to documentation and manuals for this $800,000 (2014 dollars) minicomputer.

PermalinkCommentscomputer-game game video-game history internet-archive

Welcome to TypeScript

2012 Oct 1, 6:41

TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that adds interfaces, and type safety and compiles to JavaScript. In VS this means you get much better auto completion suggestions.  Watch the Channel9 video.

PermalinkCommentstechnical javascript typescript Microsoft programming programming-language

Why 'Nigerian Scammers' Say They're From Nigeria (microsoft.com)

2012 Jun 20, 5:05

Far-fetched tales ofWest African riches strike most as comical. Our analysis suggests that is an advantage to the attacker, not a disadvantage. Since his attack has a low density of victims the Nigerian scammer has an over-riding need to reduce false positives. By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favor.

PermalinkCommentshumor security scam

Elements of Modern C++ Style (herbsutter.com)

2011 Nov 15, 11:59

Summary of some of the new C++ features with comments and suggested usage.  Not sure I agree with the take on auto.

‘“C++11 feels like a new language.” – Bjarne Stroustrup’

PermalinkCommentstechnical c++ programming

A Taxonomy on Private Use Fields in Protocols

2011 May 22, 10:36Notes and suggestions for private use fields in protocols and formats.PermalinkCommentsietf rfc protocol technical private-use

Bruce Lawson’s personal site  : In praise of Internet Explorer 6

2010 Dec 7, 2:24"...suggested that I document this fact before history records that we all hated it from the second it was released: we didn’t hate it at all. We loved it."PermalinkCommentscss history ie6 ie web browser technical

A Practical Attack to De-Anonymize Social Network Users

2010 Mar 8, 1:50Paper suggests history stealing to find what popular social networking site groups a visitor to your web site belongs to and stats on how easy it is to then uniquely identify the visitor on the popular social networking site.PermalinkCommentssecurity privacy social social-network paper research web browser css technical system:filetype:pdf system:media:document

i am extremely terrified of canadian people :: What do you suggest?

2010 Mar 4, 1:15The 'What do you suggest' site lets you explore Google suggestions word by word in a lovely tree view. For instance, apparently folks are terrified of Canadians...PermalinkCommentshumor google suggest visualization canada

Researchers identify command servers behind Google attack

2010 Jan 14, 2:54Wow: "If the report's findings are correct, it suggests that the government of China has been engaged for months in a massive campaign of industrial espionage against US companies."PermalinkCommentsinternet google china security politics privacy

How Robber Barons hijacked the "Victorian Internet"

2009 Dec 2, 3:00"These are tough questions, but the horrific problems of the "Victorian Internet" suggest that government overreach isn't the only thing to fear. In 1876, laissez-faire "freedom for all" meant (in practice) the freedom for Henry Nash Smith to read your telegrams if he didn't like who you supported for President. It meant freedom for Associated Press to block criticism of Western Union, and even to put potential critics and competitors out of business. And it meant freedom for a scoundrel to hijack the system at his leisure."PermalinkCommentsnet-neutrality internet government politics communication telegraph technical

Making browsers faster: Resource Packages · Alexander Limi

2009 Nov 17, 6:52"What if there was a backwards compatible way to transfer all of the resources that are used on every single page in your site — CSS, JS, images, anything else — in a single HTTP request at the start of the first visit to the page? This is what Resource Package support in browsers will let you do." Another resource packaging implementation but this suggests they'll actually implement this in FireFox. One issue with all of these is you can't use the resources from the package in any context that didn't ask to use the package for fear of security issues which means you can't stick the packaged resources in your HTTP cache. The package itself could go in the cache which would mean multiple packages per page or all your page's resources in one package. Of course the same security issues are a concern for all of the packaging proposals if a site has any way to inject into the source the request for the package. It'd be a similar vector to the UTF7 XSS issues but much worse attack.PermalinkCommentssecurity web browser http zip firefox resource technical via:kris.kowal

Extreme JavaScript Performance

2009 Nov 12, 3:35Presentation comparing the performance of different JavaScript operations on different web browsers. Suggestions cover full range of good to know to common sense to ugly ugly ugly.PermalinkCommentsvia:thefangmonster performance javascript browser web technical tips presentation

Question Suggestions - small voyages into the collective psyche of humans who ask google questions

2009 Jul 29, 4:40Lists of Google's search suggestions for the starts of various phrases. Sometimes humorous.
PermalinkCommentshumor google search search-suggestions web psychology

Common Sense Journalism: Local news value = 0? Not exactly, but ...

2009 Jul 28, 5:07Suggests that local news must provide the raw facts and only in particular cases do a 'story' on top of that -- not everything needs to be a story.PermalinkCommentsnews via:sambrook journalism

Flickr Visual Search in IE8

2009 Apr 10, 9:48

A while ago I promised to say how an xsltproc Meddler script would be useful and the general answer is its useful for hooking up a client application that wants data from the web in a particular XML format and the data is available on the web but in another XML format. The specific case for this post is a Flickr Search service that includes IE8 Visual Search Suggestions. IE8 wants the Visual Search Suggestions XML format and Flickr gives out search data in their Flickr web API XML format.

So I wrote an XSLT to convert from Flickr Search XML to Visual Suggestions XML and used my xsltproc Meddler script to actually apply this xslt.

After getting this all working I've placed the result in two places: (1) I've updated the xsltproc Meddler script to include this XSLT and an XML file to install it as a search provider - although you'll need to edit the XML to include your own Flickr API key. (2) I've created a service for this so you can just install the Flickr search provider if you're interested in having the functionality and don't care about the implementation. Additionally, to the search provider I've added accelerator preview support to show the Flickr slideshow which I think looks snazzy.

Doing a quick search for this it looks like there's at least one other such implementation, but mine has the distinction of being done through XSLT which I provide, updated XML namespaces to work with the released version of IE8, and I made it so you know its good.

PermalinkCommentsmeddler xml ie8 xslt flickr technical boring search suggestions

Thoughts on registerProtocolHandler in HTML 5

2009 Apr 7, 9:02

I'm a big fan of the concept of registerProtocolHandler in HTML 5 and in FireFox 3, but not quite the implementation. From a high level, it allows web apps to register themselves as handlers of an URL scheme so for (the canonical) example, GMail can register for the mailto URL scheme. I like the concept:

However, the way its currently spec'ed out I don't like the following: PermalinkCommentsurl template registerprotocolhandler firefox technical url scheme protocol boring html5 uri urn
Older Entries Creative Commons License Some rights reserved.