Tag: Geek Stuff

ClickToFlash Safari Plugin

Once in a while I like to post useful or interesting tools I find scattered throughout the Internet. Well I will openly admit I hate Adobe Flash. It’s a massive resource hog that generally does nothing useful but certainly gums up a web page. But every so often (YouTube) it’s useful.

On Firefox I deal with such things via NoScript. But most of the time I’m using Safari and I haven’t found a nice lightweight tool to accomplish the same thing. Happily I can say I found such a plugin called ClickToFlash. It’s simple, instead of Flash code loading on a webpage you get a little box that says “Flash” in it. If you want to play it you click on the box and the Flash loads. You can whitelist sites, like YouTube, so all the Flash content will load without you haven’t to do anything for that single site.

Anyways it’s useful, small, and single purpose which are the type of tools I like.

Google Chrome on the Mac

So I tried Google Chrome yet again on my Mac. For those of you not in the loop Chrome is still in development on Steve Job’s platform. Either way it was pretty nice, certainly faster than Safari and didn’t beach ball of death me for minutes at a time. The problem though? Well it has two helper processes that soak up 100% of this MacBook Pro’s processor. Honestly it was completely unnoticeable so the processes must be at a pretty low priority but once I was running on the battery and my little power indicator went from it’s usual 5.5 hours to 2.5 I figured something was up.

Yup it certainly isn’t ready for average users quite yet but is getting closer. Most of the features are there minus a few things like certificate management and plug-in support.

The Internet’s I.Q. Just Increased

Good news everybody Yahoo is finally doing something to help improve the Internet. News was brought to my attention that GeoCities is being shutdown. To this end Yahoo also release the most useful help file on their site.

I’m sure most of you know of GeoCities. Although there were sometimes little nuggets of great information somebody pounded together in 5 minutes you had to hope the site wasn’t over the 3kb (at least that’s what it seemed like) limit imposed by Yahoo. Likewise you had to hop there weren’t so many adds injected into the site by Yahoo that it would make your browser take a big dump (remember we didn’t always have those super fast JavaScript engines).

Well good riddance. I only wish I could do a Spartan kick in GeoCities’s chest to send them down an apparently never ending void.

This Would Have Been Nice Earlier

I’m a little paranoid about my data. I perform complete system backups to external hard drives on a regular basis but that doesn’t cover my apartment complex burning down. No for real data integrity you need a copy of your data offsite. To that extent I perform a nightly backup of my most important data to Amazon S3.

When accessing your Amazon S3 storage there are two keys you need. The first is the access key and the second is the secret key. Well a little over a month ago Amazon changed my access key meaning that if I lost my configuration file for my backup software I’d be boned as I could no longer generate or view the secret key for my previous access key.

This of course irritated me as I had to re-upload all my data using the new key to ensure long term survivability of my backup. Well Amazon just released a feature allow you to rotate access keys and most importantly view all your previous keys and their accompanying secret key. Yup that’s a great feature, sure would have loved to have that about a month ago.

Google Voice Rocks

OK I just received an invitation to Google Voice and set it up. I’ve only played with it for a few seconds but it’s fucking awesome. For those of you who haven’t heard of it Google Voice is a service (invitation only at the moment sadly) where you receive a phone number from Google (you can select the number you want from a desired area code). You then enter in your phone numbers. When somebody dials your Google Voice number their service attempts to contact you by ringing all of your phones sequentially.

But the coolest part so far is if you can’t be contacted the caller is prompted to leave a voice mail. Google Voice then transcribes the voice mail to text and does two things. First is sends you an e-mail containing the transcribed message and it sends you a text message with the first part of the transcribed message. This means you don’t have to listen to the voice mail and honestly the transcription service is pretty bloody good.

It also allows you to send free text messages to people. Granted that isn’t much of a win for me since I have unlimited text messages on my plan, but still cool none the less.

Google once again surprises me with their cool services that don’t end up costing no money. I guess they do get free advertising from me via this post in the process to boot but really I don’t reach enough people for them to care.

Quantum Computers Aren’t Magic Either

Let me it shown that “super intelligent” talk does occur on gun forums. And by “super intelligent” I mean buzz word laden talk about theoretical topics that really have no bearing on modern society yet. In the computer science world quantum computers are the big next thing buzz word. They are based on a technology few have any understanding of (quantum theory) and therefore are perfect devices to make insane claims. One of these insane claims is that quantum computers will instantly destroy all modern cryptography methods and instantly make the entire security structure of the universe collapse causing the world to end.

Case in point Secure Socket Layer (SSL) is a security scheme used by most finical institutes to prevent prying eyes from seeing what you’re doing while on your banks web site. More or less it just sends normal Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) data through an encrypted tunnel which should be impossible for an outside person to see. In actuality this isn’t the case and there are functional attacks against SSL but they involve vulnerabilities in the protocol itself not the encryption being used. The perviously mentioned end of the world claims would be direct attacks again the encryption itself.

Well like most over the top fear mongering done about poorly understood theoretical technology, the fear that quantum computers will make modern encryption scheme useless is far from factual. An article I found via Bruce Scheier’s blog does the math for us and shows that quantum computers aren’t anything to fear.

Quantum computers could in fact speed up the time it takes to decrypt modern encryption schemes but there are two major things to note. First of all quantum computers are in their pre-infancy, meaning they are still in the extremely experimental stages. The post I liked to in Scheier’s blog is about how they were able to finally factor the number 15 using a quantum computer. Note the number 15 was chosen because it is a special case and can be represented by a specific form (discussed in the Emergent Chaos article I linked to). Factoring the primes of any number is not currently feasible with quantum computers.

The second thing to note about quantum computers is that they will start out slow and have to build up speed so to speak. The first quantum computers will be extraordinary slow at performing the tasks given to them just like modern semi-conductor computers once were. They will have to be developed over time and make them faster and better suited to perform the tasks put before them.

Currently RSA keys of 4096-bits in length are the largest supported by most software programs. According to the linked Emergent Chaos article if everything advanced as quickly in the quantum computer field as it has in the semi-conductor field 4096-bit RSA keys wouldn’t be broken until 2053. Assuming quantum computers advanced much quick these keys would still be viable for 25 years.

Likewise with current computing technology 4096-bit RSA keys are calculated to be safe until 2060. That means if quantum computers advance as quickly as current computers they would be able to break 4096-bit RSA keys only 7 years ahead of modern computers. This demonstrated that getting our knickers all in a bunch over emerging technologies is once again premature at best. Computers are not magical machines capable of any feat put before them, they are machines based on the reality they have been built in meaning they can only do tasks in the realm of their capabilities. The sooner people realize this the better.

Wow Windows Vista Really Failed

I never liked Windows Vista but it just dawned on me how big of a failure it was. There is a story on Slashdot about how Microsoft wasn’t going to back port a patch made in Vista and Server 2003 to XP. My first reaction was to complain how they won’t support their operating system even though their new one isn’t out yet.

Yeah I totally forgot there was a version between Windows XP and Windows 7 called Windows Vista. Yup it was so bad I suppressed the memory of it’s existence.

Awesome Gmail Feature

Yeah I’m probably behind the times as I’m a pretty vanilla e-mail user but I just discovered an awesome feature in Google’s Gmail.

If you want to sign up for an account or any other thing that you don’t want to receive e-mail from simple enter your Gmail address with a plus sign and extra junk at the end of the name. For example if my e-mail address was fakeaddress@gmail.com I could sign up for a web site using fakeaddress+anygibberish@gmail.com and the confirmation e-mail from the site would reach my fakeaddress@gmail.com inbox.

You can than block all mail sent to fakeaddress+anygibberish@gmail.com so it all gets sent straight to the spam folder. Many Google thinks up some amazing features.

Wow Looks Like Somebody Used Rob Allen’s Guide Already

Funny and sad news. In the post directly below this one I posted a link to Rob Allen’s guide to firearm identification for the mass media. It stated everything except the AK-47 was an AK-47. Apparently somebody read it and took it to heart.

Somebody called 911 when they thought they saw somebody walking around with an AK-47. Five officers were let loose in the area to find the hypothetical offender of decency. Well they found nothing but were lead to believe storming the Bungie studio was going to find their weapon. Bugie, the creators of the Halo video game franchise, and police swarming their building. So what did they find?

A prop gun from the Halo video game series. Yes somebody spotted somebody from Bungie carrying a replica of the game’s sniper rifle and decided it was not only a real gun by an AK-47 to boot.

Movement to Get Britain to Apologize for Persecution of Turing

If you’re in the computer science circle you will know the name Alan Turing. Mr. Turing is considered by many to be the father of computer science. His claims to fame are laying the ground work for computing in general, helping defeat the Nazi enigma cipher scheme, and coming up with a scientific method to determine if machines can think (call the Turing test).

But he was gay and back in the era of World War II that wasn’t considered acceptable. After helping win World War II this is how he was treated:

In 1952 Turing was prosecuted under the gross indecency act after admitting to a sexual relationship with a man. Two years later he killed himself.

Of course when there is prosecution there is punishment:

Alan Turing was given experimental chemical castration as a “treatment” and his security privileges were removed, meaning he could not continue work for the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

Well there is now a movement to get the British government to apologize for their persecution. I don’t know if it will go through but I’d like to see those British royals have to apologize for treating a war hero this way.

And yes I call him a war hero even though he didn’t fight on the front lines. He was paramount in breaking the Nazi communication cipher scheme. Breaking this scheme ultimately helped us win the war since we were able to decipher and read their communications. An apology by the British government for persecuting somebody who helped saved their little island is the least they could bestow upon Mr. Turin.