While I haven’t finished converting my RBAC implementation for MySQL to conform to the SQL standard (I wish we had thought of this originally), there has been some interest so I placed my code online. You can find my RBAC in MySQL page here.
Category Archives: Computers
1337 H4×0ring
So apparently I must be 1337. How 1337, one may ask? Well, apparently, I’m capable of h4×0ring other’s blogs without even trying. I’m so good I’ve done this twice now. Only problem is, I won’t tell myself how I did it.
Earlier this morning, tired of being bombarded with Moderation Requests for comments that are all spam (I believe I have four valid comments on my blog, and one might even be me), I decided to do something about it. I figured a simple captcha, no matter how trivial, should be sufficient to filter at least some of the bots. Minimal effort on my part, and it will hopefully save me a lot of time pressing the “Filter as Spam” button.
When I logged in, however, I was greeted with two new incoming links. Since I’ve said very few profound things on here (few = zero?), I was immediately curious who was linking to me. The two links were:
http://www.ragamuffinsoul.com/?p=601 and http://blog.oraclebrains.com/.
I visited both sites, realized there was (and probably shouldn’t be) any links to me. A little source viewing and I realized why: they were hacked. I can’t really confirm anything at this point, but looking through their source, it appears hundred of links to my blog and another were injected. You can see for yourself in the images below.
Part of it makes me worried that perhaps I’m infected with some Javascript and am acting as a puppetnet master. If I am, it can only help my Google ranking.
Computer Science Makes [almost] Everything Possible!
Filed under Computers
Apparently, there was a poster contest for K-12 students in the area to create a poster with the theme “Computer Science Makes Everything Possible.” Cute theme for a Computer Science Department to come up with, assuming you didn’t talk to anyone in theory about undecidable problems, anyone in crypto about perfect secrecy, perfectly hiding / binding commitments, etc.
I really wanted to rant about computers not being able to make people artists, poets, playwrights, composers, musicians, or anything else Microsoft seems to suggest in their ads (and Apple in their bundled apps) before I realized this was K-12 only.
For those interested, here’s the Winning Poster.
My computer graphics background and high-school probably don’t make me the most impartial judge of digital artwork and the abilities of the common user to use these tools. By grade 10 I was playing with everything from Photoshop (several years experience by that point), Director (now dead), Illustrator and Freehand (also dead), to ElectricImage, SoftImage, and Alias|Wavefront PowerAnimator (now Maya).
I guess the real kicker is that if this piece was done traditionally (sans computer science) then I’m sure the student would have masked her images (cut them out) with a pair of simple (analog) scissors (without using a mouse), and then used some (chemically engineered) glue to paste (adhere) the image to the page.
Laptop Returns
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Filed under Apple
My laptop was returned to me before 9:00 AM on Friday, and everything seems to be in working order. Considering I drove it to Indy on Tuesday, that’s not too shabby.
Laptop Woes
So, after spending two months fighting a rather simple BIOS problem with Myth, it appears my laptop got jealous. For about a week or two it had been acting a little flaky. There were long pauses with no activity, being completely unresponsive with almost zero cpu, net, disk, and paging activity. It was as though there were some process running around grabbing locks, trying to deadlock as much of the system as possible. Oh, and the whole time, the hard drive gurgled.
Yup, gurgled. Think CD spinning up plus bubbly fountain. There was no disk activity, but it sure was being vocal. On Monday, I think it had enough. I hard rebooted the computer (since I couldn’t do anything else with it) and when the familiar gray-on-gray Apple logo appeared, it just sat there, gurgling at me. After a short period of time the Apple logo got tired of hanging around and turned to colored noise (think Photoshop filter). After failing to boot off of the hard drive, rescue CD, or even enter disk target mode (turns the entire computer into an external Firewire drive) I drove it down to Indy to see a Genius.
It looked like the hard drive was toast, there was nothing he could do there. So, after waiting about two hours (always see the online Apple Concierge *before* driving to the store) I handed them a laptop, and they handed me a piece of paper, with a promise of returning the laptop “within two weeks.” Seemed like a fair trade.
Luckily everything will be covered under AppleCare.
As an aside, I have to say the Indianapolis Genius Bar apparently didn’t get the facial hair notice. Every Apple Genius I have ever seen has had crazy, excentric beards, goatees, etc. Flames flickering up from their mouths, trying to catch their hair on fire, lightling bolts emenating from the ears, or water dripping from a polar ice cap. At Indianapolis, the best I saw was a five-oclock shadow.
Lame, Indy. Lame.
