Primate Brow Flash

I’ve been doing some reading on security tools and found some omissions on Wikipedia! Of course, I rolled up my sleeves and pitched in. I’m fascinated by blind SQL injection, so I added a bit about it to Wikipedia’s SQL Injection page and edited a few others. I noticed that Absinthe (software) and NetCut have no entries at all! It is great to write a sentence or two and be notified when someone else fixes your stuff. It is like being in a class with 1 student, 19 grad student supervisors and 23 professors (and no diploma).

You can see everything I ever did to Wikipedia.

On our trip to Texas and before, I was chewing a lot of sugarless gum to entertain myself and try to manage my need to always be chewing on something. On our trip, I became very irregular. I have heard from an informed source that the sorbitol in sugar-free gum causes intestinal discomfort, but I didn’t think I was susceptible. Then, as I started to unwrap another stick of the stuff while I looked around for a plastic bag to put my pants in, it hit me: I had been chewing ever greater amounts of this stuff and it might be worth it to cut it out. When I quit, my problems went away.

Sorbitol is a sugar-alcohol that breaks down slowly and causes an “osmotic purge” because it isn’t absorbed well in the intestines. I can tell just by the sound of “osmotic purge” that yes, that is what was happening.

Well, we could have died for the chance, but we got to be on KARE 11 for about 5 seconds during a piece about how bad the roads were.
We stopped at Cabela’s in Owatonna where they had closed the road going southbound on I35 and there was a news crew.

Click here for video documentation of us risking our lives. After an intro, there is a brief pause in the video and then the segment with us begins.

The drive back from Texas was pretty smooth until we hit blizzard conditions in northern Iowa. The wind was insane. The car heater had a hard time keeping up because cold air was being forced through the door handles and door frames. Visibility was reasonable until we hit spots without windbreaks. Then it was terrifying.

Near the cities, for added excitement, the cruise control got frozen out of its mind and took over the entire car. This meant that even if we leaned on the brakes, the car thought it should be going 65 miles per hour and revved the engine higher. That made stopping in front of our house kind of dicey. Kate accomplished that maneuver by throwing it into park and killing the whining, bucking engine in a cloud of smoke. We plan on using that car again only when we are in a BIG HURRY.

This weekend was more like this:

via J-walk blog

The ride in this morning was pretty cold. I have inadequate gloves and I had the kind of cold fingers that don’t start hurting until they start to warm up. Those big, expensive 3-fingered lobster gloves are not going to be happening this season, I’m afraid. Black ice under an inch of powdery snow made it fun and justified my studded tires. I was carrying my laptop on my back along with a change of clothes and some lunch, so the hill up Ridgeway had me huffing and puffing. I had to pull my balaclava away from my face so I could get enough air. It certainly pays off now as it makes winter enjoyable, but I’m also expecting it to all pay off when I can ride a geared bike with tiny tires again.

In the “You Suck at Photoshop” series, a person in a lot of emotional pain teaches us useful skills. They are a scream.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

I’ve always found screencasts to be a good way to learn. It is like looking over an expert’s shoulder as they work and talk out loud about what they are doing. This guy is forging new educational ground with his R-rated approach.

I’m taking a bike overhaul class with Matt this month. I’m learning a hell of a lot.

The bike I rode all last winter is a disaster. I took the chain off and it bends in exactly two places. Most links are frozen. I can use it to scratch my back. I stripped the threads of one crank arm trying to take it off. I ended up using a hacksaw to get it off. When the first day of class came around, the hacksaw was deep in the crank arm and I wasn’t about to walk into class the first day with a hacksaw embedded in my bike. So, I brought my other bike, which is a Trek 420 with some broken spokes, an expired dérailleur and a headset with noticeable brinnelling. Last night we learned wheel truing and, as an extra bonus for me, spoke replacement. Before that, we learned to repack hubs. I have taken apart several hubs and never have been able to get them back together perfectly. In this class I learned a trick, backing the cone up into the locknut and thereby tightening it.

I did get the crankarm off the other bike and took apart the bottom bracket to find some severely damaged ball bearings and clods of dirty grease.

I also did the hub on the other bike. The cones were spectacularly pitted. The bike shop had no replacements, so I’ll keep looking.

All of this drives home the importance of maintenance, especially in winter.

One of the best features of the bike class is going out for beers with Matt afterwards. Blackwater Oatmeal Stout and seasoned fries.

My freshman year of high school, I eagerly signed up for a class called “Small Engine Repair” and looked forward to it for weeks before the term started.

At the start of the second class, while waiting for the teacher to arrive, Mike McClatchy pulled out his lighter and started to light a box of butcher paper. I sat in my seat hoping he’d actually do it. When the teacher walked in the room, he was greeted with flames reaching towards the ceiling and eight kids averting their eyes and whistling. He put it out and left. He was a community member who had agreed to come in and share his knowledge with the kids. We never saw him again.

The Assistant Principal interviewed every one of us. I tried to live by the code and say that I hadn’t seen anything.
Him: “So, you were in the room with eight others and didn’t notice someone lighting fires?”
Me: “That’s right.”
“McGuire”, he said, “We know you didn’t light the fire. That’s not your STYLE. So, I’m going to name a name and if that is the name of the fire bug, you are going to nod.”
The code of Omertà said nothing about nodding, so I nodded when he said the name.

I think the disgust with which he said the word “style” reached me like nothing any adult male said to me throughout high school. Seeing myself though his eyes as affecting some kind of style made my self image crumble. If someone had peeked into my ear with an otoscope after that interview, they probably would have seen out my other ear. More than a year later, when I was sent to the office for trying to sneak into the library, he told me that I had matured a lot since he had last seen me.

• If you have an inappropriate comment to make and you squelch it, you shouldn’t say something like ” You’d be amazed at the restraint I’m showing right now ” because that asks them to imagine what idiotic thing you are thinking. It is like saying, “I’m just barely keeping a lid on my boorishness. Stick around to see if it pops off”.
• You need to make a decision about whether you can do voices. Either you can or you can’t. If you can’t, you should never try because you will always sound like that guy on waiting for Guffman. A good way to test is to make a recording of yourself trying to do someone else’s voice. That should prevent 90% of us from ever trying. Of course, doing a Johnny Cash voice is exempt from this rule.
• Never self-deprecate. You will wake up in the middle of the night thinking you gave away too much. If you really need to share your failings in the course of the conversation, do so with an illustrative story because at least you will make the other party laugh.
• by the same rule, ignore the self-deprecation of others. If someone says they have no sense of style, have crooked teeth, talk too much, or can’t do math, they are begging to interrupt the conversation so the two of you can sort out why on earth they think that when all observers will agree that the absolute opposite is true. Don’t let people pull this crap! Imagine your conversation as a large wheel trundling down a hill crashing through obstacles and getting to it’s ultimate destination: giving your ego a platform.
• Sometimes, at a social gathering, Plexiglas will envelope you and you will become unable to interact with other human beings. You speak and no one hears. You stand near other conversations and no openings present themselves. No one comes around to inquire about your opinions.
  Analysis of ways to break the Plexiglas:
  1. Announce your alienation. In 1992, I watched a woman climb up on the stage after a Democratic Caucus and use the sound system to announce how alone she felt and how it was somehow the fault of the Democratic party. I never did check in with her to see how that worked, but I believe it will be no less awkward when you do it. Unless you are a mime, don’t make reference to invisible walls that separate you from other people.
  2. get throughly lubricated on hard liquor. The drawback to this is the 3:00 am roll call that Sarge calls when he wakes up and realizes that you drugged him and went out on a bender without him. He has a recording of all the conversations you had in his absence and you will not rest again until the two of you go through every last word and underline the mistakes you made.
  3. Look around for someone else in a similar Plexiglas container and merge your private hells into a duplex hell. Of course, you will then be sealed inside an airtight container someone who sucks at conversation as much as you do. You can then wait while the oxygen slowly dwindles and you die.
  4. Become an anthropologist. Some people who are uncomfortable in social situations decide that the reason for their alienation is that they are so much smarter than everyone else and that the best course would be to perform a scientific study on the spot of the struggles of lesser creatures. So, to break out of the Plexiglas, just act like you are on a bird watching field trip and make comments such as, “oh…. the mating dance of the bourgeoisie is so fascinating”.
  5. Engage a “pal” to keep you company in social settings and allow you to riff off of them when you are uncomfortable. You walk around the scene together trying to embarrass one another and pretty soon become the life of the party. “Pals” are a powerful conversational tool and are one of the reasons people almost never attend gatherings alone.
• If someone concedes defeat in a debate, starts believing something they never believed before, or simply changes their minds about something, here is a great line to try: “Whoa! It’s The Quixotization of Sancho Panza”.

Clive Thompson writes about emotional responses to the coming global shitstorm

In interviews Albrecht conducted over the past few years, scores of Australians described their deep, wrenching sense of loss as they watch the landscape around them change. Familiar plants don’t grow any more. Gardens won’t take. Birds are gone. “They no longer feel like they know the place they’ve lived for decades,” he says.

Albrecht believes that this is a new type of sadness. People are feeling displaced. They’re suffering symptoms eerily similar to those of indigenous populations that are forcibly removed from their traditional homelands. But nobody is being relocated; they haven’t moved anywhere. It’s just that the familiar markers of their area, the physical and sensory signals that define home, are vanishing. Their environment is moving away from them, and they miss it terribly.

I’ve often wondered how a video game would incorporate time travel. This one isn’t exactly time travel but it is getting there.. Ghosts of your previous lives run through the same puzzle you are in, repeating the same actions they completed in their turns and you have to use them to help you solve the puzzle.
Cursor10 nekogames

via waxy.org

I got this idea from J. grossman. I extended it to list over 50 Firefox extensions. If a visitor has installed those extensions, this page can detect them.

You might be advertising the fact that you have installed hacking tools, that you have a facebook membership, that you surf using TOR to hide your identity, or even that you have installed an extension with security flaws. If you are using a public computer and wish to see which extensions are running behind the scenes, this is one way to do it.

The detection relies on javascript. There is a long discussion here on the Firefox bug list about whether to fix it. Apparently, they decided not to.

The script tries to load images associated with the extension from a chrome://… type resource. Most of the extensions I’ve tried are detectable. Some use no images at all and so this method won’t work.

There is a certain amount of path guessing involved, but most of them can be found at chrome://[extensionName]/skin/logo.png or chrome://[extensionName/skin/[extensionName].png

There are certain cases, like with greasemonkey on Mac, in which I can’t detect the extension. I suspect it is just me who can’t find it rather than any prevention in place. Also, different versions of the same extension keep their images in different places, so your version may not trigger a hit on my list.

Let me know if there are any false results.