dsandler.org/wp

Archive for May, 2006

Keyboards.

Wednesday, May 17th, 2006

I finally realized what the boxy, raised keys on the MacBook keyboard remind me of! Compare:

MacBook (White) Keyboard Apple //c Keyboard

Posted in Notebook | 2 Comments »

Recent hacks.

Wednesday, May 17th, 2006

Dear blog owners, I’ve got some new software you should try:

  1. Updated: The powerful TrackBack Validator plugin for WordPress has been revved to version 0.7. This plugin kills almost all existing TrackBack, dead. [I say "almost" because I (coincidentally) received word today of a spammer who sets up real blogs to try to spam people. I think of this as a victory for our plugin: It has forced spammers to, you know, behave like real bloggers. Who's to say a TrackBack from this guy is spam and not a legitimate link to your blog?]
  2. New: Illuminati is a new Internet measurement project from the CoralCDN (”Coral cache”) guys. They’re gathering much-needed statistics (like these awesome graphs) about the edges of the Internet (that’s you!), including NAT and proxy statistics, and they need help from website operators everywhere. Visit the site to learn how to contribute, or (if you’re a WordPress blogger) install my Illuminati plugin for WordPress.

Posted in Notebook | No Comments »

Computer Science Investigation?

Friday, May 12th, 2006

Emil Sit postulates about a TV drama about grad students. Here’s what would actually happen if you pitched an idea like that to a studio: they’d say, “It’s perfect! Except, maybe as a straight sitcom, instead of a drama. And instead of being about graduate scholarship, we’ll just make the whole grad school thing part of the quirky backdrop. Instead of going to lab or office hours, the characters would spend all their camera time in a coffeehouse or something, engaging in banal four-camera comedy.” [Ironically, this is one of my can't-miss shows right now, and it just about matches that show profile. I guess I'm a sucker for snappy comedy writing and good casting.]

Posted in Notebook | No Comments »

Google Calendar: Not for the colorblind

Wednesday, May 10th, 2006

Sigh.

I can’t easily tell apart the two color blocks under “Other Calendars”. On-screen, I typically have the most trouble with small dots or lines, but these are HUGE regions of color. [They seem to have picked two colors of identical luminosity in the region where my deuteranomalous red and green receptors are both triggered, no matter how much contextual stimulus (read: larger areas of color) I'm given.]

Posted in Notebook | 7 Comments »

Chinese LED Trac spam.

Wednesday, May 10th, 2006

There’s a Chinese spammer out there Googling for Trac projects he can submit junk bugs to. The bugs contain page after page of advertising text for a website selling commercial-grade LED displays. The following is from my access_log, showing that this guy manually searches around for Trac ticket submission forms, then fires away.

61.48.126.237 - - [10/May/2006:10:00:24 -0500] "GET /project/report/6 HTTP/1.1" 200 107783 "http://www.google.cn/search?q=NEW+TICKET+Trac&hl=zh-CN&lr=&newwindow=1&start=990&sa=N&filter=0" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"
…
61.48.126.237 - - [10/May/2006:10:00:44 -0500] "GET /project/newticket HTTP/1.1" 200 15998 "http://trac.feedtree.net/project/report/6" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"
…
61.48.126.237 - - [10/May/2006:10:04:12 -0500] "POST /project HTTP/1.1" 302 14 "http://trac.feedtree.net/project/newticket" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"

The spam text, which is entered in every possible field in the bug form, is Chinese (”LED显示屏”, and on and on); it translates to the usual list of key phrases: “color led display, double base color led display, outdoor led display, indoor led display, …” I’ve gotten 4 or 5 of these junk tickets now. Congratulations, 61.48.126.237, you’re the proud recipient of a new deny from rule!

Posted in Notebook | 1 Comment »

Workspace.

Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006

E talks about her work environment.

(If I were Dan, I’d take a photo of the space and post it on Flickr, complete with tags and call-outs and stuff. I’m not Dan.)

Well, I am. But I’m not at home, and don’t have a photo of the space, so the best I can do is a pencil doodle on a sticky-note:

Posted in Notebook | No Comments »

p2p in OS X?

Monday, May 1st, 2006

Mac OS Rumors: BitTorrent in 10.5.

Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” will include a system-level “BitTorrent” filesharing client that can be user-customized to ‘donate’ upstream Internet bandwidth for things like pushing Software Update packages to Leopard users, delivering iTunes Store content, and just about any purpose to which Apple puts its bandwidth.

A somewhat similar p2p-based banwidth-sharing option was brought up during the 10.4 Tiger development cycle and dismissed out-of-hand because there were no good incentives for users to enter the shadowy world of peer-to-peer networking just to save Apple a few dollars. Now a group of developers at Apple think they have solved the most fundamental issues and want to bring the rest of the company on board.

I really want to know if this is true, and if so, what technologies are involved. Actually BitTorrent, or some other p2p system (unstructured or structured)? NAT hole-punching (presumably the iChat AV guys have some experience with this very thorny problem)? Possible impact on overall system performance (and ISP traffic-shaping effects)? [Friends at Apple: I will keep your whispers in closest confidence.]

Posted in Notebook | No Comments »