Alumni giving and why it's not perfect

from Linda Goldstein to annualgiving@iit.edu date Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 1:43 PM subject Re: IIT Students Need Your Year-End Support! mailed-by gmail.com Images from this sender are always displayed. Don't display from now on.

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Jason Smith,

Have you considered trying to institute a program where alumni can give to specific students/labs in a manner similar to DonorsChoose or Kiva? Because frankly after seeing the failures of the Financial Aid office during my time as a student, I doubt that donating my money to IIT's alumni fund is a good use of it.

Linda Goldstein

- Hide quoted text -

On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 7:31 AM, Jason Smith, IIT Advancement <jsmith31@iit.edu> wrote:

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"Knowing that alumni donate each year motivates me to do my best in class and gives me the drive to succeed." -Julia Zuag, Second-Year Chemistry Major Dear Linda, I am writing to urge you to make a year-end donation in support of IIT students. Your tax-deductible gift to the IIT Alumni Scholarship Fund will have a direct and immediate impact on IIT students in the upcoming spring semester. Your donation makes possible the resources that our hard-working students depend upon to achieve their educational goals. Fully 97% of IIT undergraduates rely on some type of financial aid. Click here to support the next generation of IIT innovators and leaders. Alternately, your gift to your college's general fund will also make a difference for today's students. From graduate fellowships and research stipends, to faculty support or lab and classroom improvements-your donation will be directed where needed most to support IIT graduate and undergraduate students in this challenging year. Best wishes in 2011 , Jason E. Smith Director of Annual Giving The IIT Alumni Association invites you to connect:

Forward email This email was sent to wordymusic@gmail.com by jsmith31@iit.edu. Instant removal with SafeUnsubscribe™ | Privacy Policy. Email Marketing by IIT - Office of Institutional Advancement | 10 W. 35th St. | Suite 1700 | Chicago | IL | 60616

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And the response I got:

Hi Linda,

Thanks for the feedback.

Although Financial Aid dishes out the money, the scholarship money is actually assigned to undergraduate students based on a matching system managed by our office, Institutional Advancement, in conjunction with the Admissions office. The IIT Alumni Scholarship Fund can be assigned to any undergraduates earning financial aid that have not been covered by more specific, or restricted, scholarships. Because of this, it is a very important fund for the university.

We try to keep things simple and focused on the web site for now in terms of limiting options. However, you can use the online giving form to designate your gift elsewhere if you don’t like the options provided. Simply leave the designation blank and enter an alternate choice in the Comments field.

If you would like to make a gift today and have it be more specifically restricted, you could designate it to the Department of Humanities Annual Fund (basically a where-needed-most fund restricted to that Dept), or to the Humanities Scholarship Fund (which our office would match with an undergraduate Humanities student). There are also some lab funds I might be able to direct you to, if you have something specific in mind.

Federal privacy laws would prohibit us from showing individual students, but your comment on Kiva and DonorsChoose is food for thought on a possible direction for our web presence.

Finally, in the recent, and ongoing, effort to improve university services for students called Students Speak, the financial aid office was targeted as one of the offices most in need of improvement. Here is there page detailing their efforts in response to the survey results - http://www.iit.edu/financial_aid/resources/student_speak.shtml

Thanks again,

Jason

jsmith31@iit.edu

312-567-7112

RFID Mythbusters

Mythbusters can't do an RFID show because the credit card company lawyers won't let them. (Not new news, but new to me.)

http://www.engadget.com/2008/09/02/mythbusters-rfid-hacking-episode-canned-by-credit-card-company-l/

I knew a kid freshman year who had an RFID reader/writer/spoofer setup that worked... he was a raging paranoid and never had a facebook account, but man he was good. He quit school about a year in to go work for some company I'd never heard of at the time... and at the time I didn't really keep up with the technical world...

I think that PumpingStation1 has an RDIF reader/writer/spoofer setup... I kinda want to play with it. what kind of software goes with that? It's soooo bitlevel, though... -sigh- I'm not really about the bit-level... but understanding it would be emotionally rewarding. Bah.

ThinkGeek & UPS

So, when you ship your ThinkGeek order to the wrong address, talk to them via live chat. Then call UPS at 1-800-PICK-UPS (742-5877). Then talk to ThinkGeek again if UPS gives you guff. "Josh H" ftw.

Why the IIT bookstore should sell Ubuntu CDs

Here's a place to buy them https://shipit.ubuntu.com/

• They're cheap for the campus bookstore to buy (like $0.05 each if you buy in bulk), and their maximum-profit (i.e. number sold * price is the maximum possible) sale price is like $3 (my guess) so that's a nice markup profit
• Many IIT students use Ubuntu therefore there is a possible market (personal experience speaking, here)
• Downloading the .iso and making your own boot disc takes like two hours and is boring
• IIT students might buy them, use them, and gain actual skills (important, no?)
• It looks good when the parents tour
• Expand into different versions of Linux, like BSD, OpenSuse, RedHat, etc for optimum possible value to IIT students
• Would make IIT-ACM's job easier (local supply and proof of demand- also increases demand via exposure, i.e. if they're $3 and ACM gives them away for $0, students gain value from ACM)

There are probably other reasons. And some of my reasons might be crap. But I do think that it would be a good idea.

3D printer: V for Vendetta mask

The spirit of V for Vendetta demands that a file which allows a Guy Fawkes mask to be printed on a 3D printer to be created. I will try to attain the skills needed to accomplish this, but I won't be sore if someone beats me to it.

EDIT: Someone beat me to it. Neat! http://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/guy-fawkes-mask-3d-max/437441

In a continuation of the previous... I would really really like to be able to play with a 3D printer. The Chicago hackerspace PumpingStationOne has a Thing-O-Matic and I can use it if i pay materials (much cheaper than buying one myself, no?) so all I have to do is 1. learn how to make stuff that will print and 2. Get up there, print stuff, watch it fail, edit my files, repeat...

In that spirit, http://blog.makerbot.com/2010/12/17/design-and-print-a-cookie-cutter-in-minutes/

MTurk

https://www.mturk.com

Man, there is so much data experimentation that could be done with this thing.

Ruby 1.8 multithreading: fail

Ruby 1.8 "multithreading" is not real multithreading. It ends up that the entire VM blocks on any I/O. Well, hell.

Discovered (and probably soon solved) by rancorbeast.

Other guy's ideas: http://timetobleed.com/fixing-threads-in-ruby-18-a-2-10x-performance-boost/
(Just fixes the performance issue, not the fact that they don't provide useful concurrency.)

IRC yay

http://webchat.freenode.net/

Oh, irc. Thank you for solving my technical difficulties.

ALso: dammit cr48 stop crashing.

Virtual Machine

Dammit, I forgot my 10.04 cd. Guess I'll have to finish this later.

Using VirtualBox to put a 10.04 in my W7 because right now Firefox in Windows is what is needed to make my stuffs work.

Anonymous image hosting

http://bayimg.com is unquestionably the best.

Things I use bayimg for:

• posting to reddit (I don't want reddit-sposure on my Picasa account... that might mean comments, which then I would have to look at, and waste time. bayimg is faster than disabling comments... and besides, I like it when my college friends comment on things.)
• ...that's about it so far.

Brainsplosion

Posts that I have not/will not post:

• My running bug list for Cr-48
• My running bug list for the online class I'm taking
• Mplayer chrome ubuntu and how I'm banging my head on it
• Why fonts annoy me

Charlie Miller (big name)

I was reading for TWU (again more always) and ran into the name "Charlie Miller" which was discussed as if of course the reader would know who it was, so I looked him up. I can't believe I didn't know who this guy was.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/questions-for-pwn2own-hacker-charlie-miller/2941

http://www.dailytech.com/Charlie+Miller+to+Unveil+20+Zeroday+OS+X+Exploits+at+CanSecWest/article17934.htm

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/pwn2own-2009-safarimacbook-falls-in-seconds/2917

http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/charlie-miller-mac-os-x-pwn2own-and-writing-exploits-031810

I find it interesting that he can hold the whole thing in his head at once.

Plumbing break

Took a minute off from reading up for TWU to take apart my bathroom sink popper-up drain stopper thing, clean the yuck out of it, and put it back. Now my roommate is trying to figure out where her receipt for her brand-new $16 drain snake went so she can return it.

I would have taken pics, but it was fast and gross and I didn't think of it until I'd put it back together. The guide here was useful because I didn't know a damn thing before I started.

http://www.ehow.com/how_4910160_remove-bathroom-sink-stopper-cleaning.html

Next project: facebook plugin for picasa for ubuntu

The Facebook plugin for Picasa in Ubuntu is not satisfactory to me. Someday I'll take some time to poke around in it and try to improve it. Or write my own.

Although right now I'm buried in TWU reading.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1093761

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=2483740875&topic=3457

Chromium OS (I has it)

I attended a session at Google Chicago about HTML5 and especially the new Chromium OS.

Slides presented are here: http://slides.html5rocks.com/#landing-slide

The sell of the presentation was twofold- one, HTML5 has built-in everything previously accomplished with tiresome individual repetition... and two, that he did the whole thing on an onstage- just-unboxed Chromium netbook.

Then, midway through the presentation, the presenter (whose identity I don't actually know yet!) announced that everyone in the room would be getting a new Chromium netbook. I may have said "What??" somewhat loudly.

And indeed, after the presentation everyone stood in line and signed a terms of agreement (in a google form), we were each handed a beautiful box. In fact, I'm typing on it now.

Dozens of people are probably doing in-depth analyses of their new hardware just this moment, and I don't need to join their ranks. It's hardware version Cr-48, has 2MB of RAM, and you get to the terminal with ctrl-alt-T (and exit with "exit" ...there's ssh! But no man pages, or really anything. No built-in dev tools. But the browser has a nice pseudo-firebug debugging extension, which you summon using ctrl-shift-J.

To get and change the keyboard mapping, use ctrl-alt-/

ctrl-n is a new window.

forward delete is alt-backspace

to switch windows, alt-tab

In chromium, to see tak manager go to shift-esc

got to about:flags to see some awesome experiments.

I'm now inspired to:

Write in HTML5 because it is beautiful and useful

play excessively with my new netbook

Buy a goddamn cover for the netbook because every laptop needs a protective case

So far my annoyances with the netbook include:

No end or home keys, or anything that maps to them

No forward-delete key

You can't really develop code on it. Ruby, Python, or anything else... i.e. no native support for it. Need that!

Too much awesomeness to handle! :)

Edit: The speaker was Ian Fette, as in https://code.google.com/u/ian@chromium.org/updates

Books (novels)

Books I've read recently:

Miles Errant by Lois McMaster Bujold
It was very good. I went through it in two evenings and poof it was awesome. Charismatic underdog takes on governments and corporations in a war-scifi world and wins.

The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary by Eric S. Raymond
He makes sense of hacker culture. Which I thought was impossible. Win.

The Caryatids by Bruce Sterling
Crazy crazy cyberpunk post-apocalyptic scifi.

Euler (more, again)

Today I solved Euler 25 and 48. Neither were particularly hard although I did have an integer offset fail incident for each of them.

25. http://pastie.org/1366169 problem here: http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=problems&id=25

28. http://pastie.org/1366176 problem here: http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=problems&id=48

I'm going in order of difficulty, not number order. Which is why my numbers are out of order.

Euler is a good way to distract myself from stuff sometimes.

Passwords

I have a separate password for

1. sites that don't have my credit information and which I use rarely.
2. sites that don't have my credit information but which I use often
3. sites that do have my credit information but which I use rarely
4. sites that do have my credit information and which I use often
5. facebook
6. twitter
7. google
8. laptop partition 1
9. laptop partition 2

Really not that hard. I change # 4-7 every semester, and sometimes more often than that, depending...

Some sites want a password with one lowercase, one uppercase, one number... etc. Sometimes I wonder if they check that with regex and whether I could escape the regex and borkenize their somethings. ...A quick bit of research shows that Delicious is immune to my clumsy regexes. Curses, foiled.

Funny fact: Delicious insists on more password security than my bank does.

Cthulhu snowflake

Okay, so the whole Star Wars snowflake thing made me jealous, so I stole some of my roommate's scrap printing paper and tried to make some. It was fun but not all that successful, so then I made a Cthulhu one which I like much better. (Why are there no patterns for this on the internet? It makes me sad. Also, celtic knotwork paper snowflakes.)

Pics of all attempts here. http://picasaweb.google.com/wordymusic/Blogflakes?authkey=Gv1sRgCLSB1KXcvMP6SQ# Cthulhu below.

Note: I need to try to make one of these. http://twitpic.com/3guwfq

CS books I haven't finished yet

I keep skipping from book to book and finishing none of them. But the one on top is almost done.

Pics of my hardware projects

In differing stages of completion and success. Full album here, highlights below.http://picasaweb.google.com/wordymusic/Hardware?authkey=Gv1sRgCNGjpZ7r7behZQ#

I nuked my GRUB again

I was in the middle of updates, but then had to pass through a security setup with a "power off everything..." rule in a hurry, so I ended up pulling my battery and having all kinds of strange crap on startup. Eh, at least I know what I'm doing this time.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2

/boot/grub/menu.lst

Backed up the auto-generated grub to menu-old.lst (oops, guess I rewrote the backup from last time)

Current grub is here:

default 0

timeout 60

title Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS, kernel 2.6.32-26-generic-pae (64-bit)

uuid 97da0f78-1a67-4dfa-9239-70cf44363b26

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-26-generic-pae root=UUID=97da0f78-1a67-4dfa-9239-70cf44363b26 ro quiet

initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-26-generic-pae

title Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS, kernel 2.6.32-26-generic-pae (64-bit recovery mode)

uuid 97da0f78-1a67-4dfa-9239-70cf44363b26

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-26-generic-pae root=UUID=97da0f78-1a67-4dfa-9239-70cf44363b26 ro single

initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-26-generic-pae

title Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS, kernel 2.6.32-24-generic (32-bit)

uuid 97da0f78-1a67-4dfa-9239-70cf44363b26

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-25-generic root=UUID=97da0f78-1a67-4dfa-9239-70cf44363b26 ro

initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-25-generic

title Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS, kernel 2.6.32-24-generic (32-bit recovery mode)

uuid 97da0f78-1a67-4dfa-9239-70cf44363b26

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-24-generic root=UUID=97da0f78-1a67-4dfa-9239-70cf44363b26 ro single

initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-24-generic

title Windows 7

root (hd0,0)

savedefault

makeactive

chainloader +1

Infographics

I like infographics a lot. Someday my walls may be covered in them. I've been reading a bit about how various people make them. ...In short it comes down to getting and learning to use Illustrator, which is expensive and has a long learning curve for true expertise.

There are some really good freeware pseudo-Illustrator ports, and there's no time to start learning like the present... and it'll keep my mind off of my exciting governmental office treasure hunt tomorrow.

fizzbuzz

This post informs me that "Yikes! Moment FizzBuzz is apparently an easy way of weeding out 99.5% of those who apply for programming jobs. Source: Coding Horror"

I think I've heard of fizzbuzz before but I don't remember ever implementing it. I decided to see how fast I could do it. It took me about two minutes to write. I didn't use TDD, although I know that I should get in the habit of doing that... http://pastie.org/1351255

Oh, and here's the updated version, made after reading this. http://pastie.org/1351272

Comcast DNS fail

So... according to Twitter and news.google, Comcast is down in IL, IN, MN, MI. Which is a lot of areas to be down in. DNS issue. Fix it by following instructions here. https://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/using.html#setup

I would be unsurprised if someone hacked Comcast in return for the Netflix thing. It's not like Comcast is universally loved. I'm watching how this plays out with some interest. Mostly by keeping an eye on http://twitter.com/#!/comcastcares

If it was an accident, how did this accident come about?

Passport

I learned on Friday evening that

1. I had to send in my visa application by Tuesday
2. My passport was missing

Now it's Sunday, and the plan is thus:

• Parents send me my old passport, to arrive no later than Tues morning (as ID to get replacement for lost passport)
• On Monday, I get passport photos taken (two sets) and print & fill out visa forms and passport forms
• Tuesday early afternoon, receive old passport at post office, go to appointment downtown to get new passport
• Tuesday afternoon, mail visa application

Tuesday evening, drink with friends.

I feel a little bad for Lily (The TW visa person); there are some politely calmly panicked emails in her inbox, and one voicemail that all basically say "oh god oh god something went wrong and I don't know what to do. Help!" But now I think stuff is pretty well handled, barring (more) unforeseen fail. I hope she gets back to me on Monday, though. I'd really like some reassurance and guidance to double-check that what I'm doing is the correct thing to do.

Where did my passport go? I don't know. I wish I did. If I could find it, I could save a couple hundred bucks on Tuesday. But I'll have to settle for just not losing my new one. I'm going to keep it in the drawer of papers where it should have been this time, but wasn't.

Navigating the passport appointment phone system:

to book appointment
18774872778
1
2
1
1
4
1

...then pick appointment time. then take deep calming breath and go on with life.

Why I support Wikileaks

Well, let's start with why I shouldn't support Wikileaks.

• Some bad shit has come out of Wikileaks. Diplomacy will be more difficult for a while. Diplomacy is the thing that stands between us and war. I like diplomacy and hope that it thrives in all its finicky confusing glory.
  http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-cohn/79483/wikileaks-round-iii-will-it-matter-much
  http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2010/08/a_bad_name.html
• Encouraging people to break national security is not good for national security, and national security exists for a reason. (Sometimes a misguidedly-applied reason, but in truth there are many things that are a good idea to keep secret, like troop movements.)
• Releasing this specific bit of info could be bad bad bad (although shouldn't these sites be protected?) http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-wikileaks-reveals-global.html

Why I support Wikileaks:

• Because I've read an enormous number of scifi books, and that number included 1984 and brave New World and everything that Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross has ever written, and when the government starts suppressing more information, it is soon a very very bad time.*
  
• When Amazon and Paypal stopped serving Wikileaks, it was because they were afraid of political pressure, and not because of a violation of their company's Terms of Service. The ToS violation was the excuse. The fear of the government was the cause.
• (The following is in the words of Z and rancor, but I agree) "They're doing the right thing, because in a democratic society, transparency is a good above all others." "You can't vote for things properly if you don't know what people are actually doing." "Without information, there is no accountability."
• The infographics are awesome
  http://www.fastcodesign.com/1662770/infographics-of-the-day-whats-in-those-leaked-diplomatic-cables
  http://www.fastcodesign.com/1661985/infographic-of-the-day-a-guide-to-the-wikileaks-war-memos
  http://infosthetics.com/archives/2010/11/wikileaks_us_embassy_cables_the_visualizations.html
  
• The bodies of the cables have not been published to the public (which makes me sad, but which might be a good idea... I can't know that because I don't know what's in them!) The full text is only available to a few large news agencies, who aren't releasing it.
  But you can download the cable metadata here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/nov/29/wikileaks-cables-data

So there you have it. Not very complete, not very elegant, not very informed... but these are the baseline reasons behind my current opinions.

List of Wikileaks mirror sites (it is long and I am pleased) http://www.twitlonger.com/show/79s9r1

Have I donated money to WIkileaks? I believe so. I hope I did. I remember donating to Wikipedia, but that's and entirely different organization. Am I likely to donate to Wikileaks? Yes, when they have a Paypal-substitute up again. Why? Because I they need it, and because I think they'd do good things with it. Why not until there's a faux-Paypal working? Because I'm lazy. Such is humanity. I'm not a very good revolutionary... which is probably a good thing.

*I very much want to read a scifi book which has a plot like so: government starts supressing and regulating the free flow of information. Through intelligent political maneuvering by hackers, the government is quickly and without fuss returned to its place.

Clear wifi

If you are connected to a Clear wifi hotspot (in my case, one that I own) then go to its IP, which is 192.168.1.1

At this point you can log in as admin / admin (unless someone's changed the defaults)

Or you can go to 192.168.1.1/super and log in as super / super and change the admin password from there. There's no GUI way to change the super password, but if you go into the .htapassword file, you can change it there I believe.

I'm still experimenting... while keeping in mind that there's no "reset" button on this thing and if I screw up then I will have no internet until I go somewhere else...

This idea came from an article about how to hack the Clear iSpot, which only works for apple devices and which is rather cheap per month. Therefore, if it can be hacked to work for non-mac devices... one would get a good return. Since it's all Clear hardware... it seems that it's the same. Sigh.

I'm perfectly content with my current Clear services and I don't intend to hack anything... but I'm concerned that someone could potentially log into my Clear device and change my admin password (which is no longer the default password, of course...)

So, what are the security defects here?

• The informed populace can log into my wifi hotspot and change my admin password
• There's no way (yet) for me to stop them
• Presumably, the "informed populace" can also go in and screw with my security settings, therefore opening a way for them to gather my data, including credit card information if and when I send that over the network.

Why are these security defects not that bad?

• The "informed populace" is so far very small. The wifi hotspot is also small. It's unlikely that anyone within range of it will be able to figure out how to use it... or hack those using it.
• this is probably Clear's way of resetting *lusers' admin passwords when they forget them, which is a necessary task
• With some work, I can probably change the password on the super account.

* luser is a contraction of loser and user and means an uninformed user.

Euler 13

Today I learned about Ruby inject, otherwise known as a left fold. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fold_(higher-order_function)

nums.inject &:'+'

&: takes the ... and calls to proc which is a callable object. with the provided arguments... the result is that you can take a method name on one of the array objects (like +) and ...do it.

1.send '+', 2

Assuming that you've assigned nums[] to hold the data you're dealing with, then puts nums.inject(0) {|a, b| a + b} will get you the answer 9and then you just take the first ten digits)

A much less elegant way to do this is

sum = 0

for i in 0..nums.size-1

sum = sum + nums[i]

end

puts sum

Once you understand what the notation does, it's an elegant way of doing it. But the uneducated will be extremely confused. There is all sorts of evil to it.

Impostor syndrome:

The recurring feeling that you don't know what the hell you're doing, regardless of whether or not anyone else knows what they're doing. Brought on in this case by reading blogs written by people while they were attending TWU.

Right now, my flatmate is watching... some show... about cops, I think? In her room. So that's cool, although I can hear it pretty well.

Passport: I lost mine. I spent most of today and yesterday looking for it and trying to figure out where it could have gone. if it were in my apartment, I would have found it. But I'm reasonably sure that it hasn't left my apartment since September. We haven't been burgled or anything, so... where could it have gone? I have no idea.

On Tuesday (the earliest appointment available) I have to go downtown and get a new one (in person, for a painful amount of cash). Then I can send my Indian Visa application, which will be lovely. In fact, there is a faint chance that I can even make the hoped-for deadline that Lily from TW sent me, or at least not miss it by more than a day. Sigh. I'm very upset with myself for misplacing my passport. I don't know how I did it; it was in a safe logical place... and now it's not there. I obviously moved it while cleaning, or used it for some purpose which doesn't come immediately to memory.

I was going to go to RHoK today but instead spent the day looking for my passport (and being somewhat ill from the typhoid vaccine). It snowed somewhat excessively earlier. Biking in snow is difficult; it would help if I had larger tires...

I wish I had gone to RHoK. But at the same time, I know that opportunities for communal freeware opensource coding are not all that difficult to find. And I can always just scout github and request a fork of something. The human interaction is valuable, but it can be worked without.

Right now I'm trying to make a coherent summary of what I think would be good to learn while at TWU. Messy version is at http://notepad.cc/share/SQnRYrimN5 for now.

Oh hey. I should have used http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Sed.html#uh-0 sed to deal with euler 13.

Southwest database fail

Linda: So it turns out that the reason that I've been locked out of my account is that when I booked your ticket their database subbed your birthday for mine, therefore no validation with my birthday would work. Database flaw, they have one. Also, it seems likely that all of my password reset emails are in your spambox somewhere.
(1:29:32 PM) ce: oh, that's ugly :(
(1:29:54 PM) ce: at least it's fixed now?
(1:30:59 PM) Linda: No, it's not. The database also subbed in middle name and gender and I can't fix them from this end for some reason. Unless I get this fixed, there's no way I can get through security again if booking travel through my SW account.
(1:31:03 PM) Linda: Sigh.
(1:31:27 PM) ce: that's fucking terrible.

When I booked a trip for him using my account (and the rewards and vouchers in my account) the database must have inserted his information instead of mine in the fields of: middle name, birthday, gender, and email address. And there's no way to fix it from the consumer side of the webpage.

However, the good news is that, thanks to someone on the help line, I have a password to my account now. The bad news is that I can't book travel yet, unless I want travel booked for a male with my first and last names, but Lance's middle name. ...useless, no? So, back to the phone help line.

Edit: Called customer service 214-932-0333. After some initial confusion on the part of the agent, and then a request that I fax her my drivers license (my reply: "I don't have a fax machine... can I email you a picture?"), she simply changed my data to correct data which I supplied verbally. A quick refresh of my account page shows that she changed my middle name and my gender, and although for some reason my account won't show me what she changed my birthday to, I have no reason to doubt that she did that accurately too.

So, where are the security flaws here?

• Initial database flaw- replacing good information with bad. How far does this extend?
• In password reset attempts, sometimes two attempts with the same data had different results, i.e. either "bad data, please retry" or "email sent, please click link"
• Lack of ability to change your own birthday/gender on the website might be an attempt at security? Or just a bug. Inability to see my own birthday in my account info is definitely a bug, because if I can't see it, it might be wrong and I would have no way of knowing.
• Ability for customer service rep to change account info without evidence other than my voice (and confirmation data that I provided, such as address, name, birthday... all things that someone could find out about me).

By the way... the way to add a Southwest LUV voucher to your account is here: https://www.southwest.com/flight/travel-funds-results.html (for the next time that I forget and get frustrated)

quantum crypto

Quantum crypto is what I claim to be interested in. It would help if I took some time and poked around in advanced math. I made it through Calculus 4 (didn't know that existed, did you? Me either) but I stopped there for reasons of practicality- i.e. gotta get the degree, get out, and pay pack the loans.

I don't love math enough to chase it in my free time, but at the same time I like it enough that I choose it over other occupations when it's one of a set of options... and frankly once you get past algebra, math and numbers are differentiated by many factors.

I guess I'll go donate to the EFF and go back to writing Ruby of slowly increasing quality.

Cyberpunk tropes

I was looking for cyberpunk ebooks and began thinking about common themes in cyberpunk literature.

http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/

AI evolves out of the internet

nanobots

India / Japan / China (is this just a western thing?)

neotribalism / geotribalism

copyright leads to war

lone hacker

against The Man

nearfuture (at least the beginning of the series)

space (in-system, not FTL)

urban

one-world syndrome / globalization

convergence

tech singularity

social breakdown as tech evolves faster than response

megacorporations

human vs. economy

lack of idealists / idealists die

hacker as protagonist

human mind incomplete without data access

Router, it is now set up

My mother is a sysadmin of a Beowulf cluster with something like five thousand nodes goddammit, why do I get to set up the household router?

Not like it's hard. But seriously.

WRT54G Linksys

Just gotta remember that the setup form is at http://192.168.1.1/ and it's intuitive from there.

However, getting my dad's slow XP home laptop to connect to the damn network was a problem. For some unknown fucking reason, the "Network Connections" dialogue (and all related dialogues that I could find) would only accept a WEP key, not the network password... which my personal laptop accepted just fine. I am obviously missing something important here. Anyway, everyone's all connected to the internet and stuff, so I'm going to go work on my own stuff now.

nothing is installing properly

I will deal with this in just a minute.

Processing triggers for initramfs-tools ...
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-25-generic-pae
Bus error
Bus error
rm: cannot remove `/tmp/mkinitramfs_2xhLIe/lib/modules/2.6.32-25-generic-pae/modules.*map': No such file or directory
Segmentation fault
update-initramfs: failed for /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-25-generic-pae
dpkg: error processing initramfs-tools (--configure):
subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Processing triggers for libc-bin ...
ldconfig deferred processing now taking place
Errors were encountered while processing:
initramfs-tools
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Edit: It turns out that I'd tried to switch from kernel 2.6.32-24-generic to 2.6.32-26-generic-pae but didn't do it completely. Fixing that (yay aptitude!) fixed the problem. Also, remember to update GRUB.

Knowing that would've made cs450 a lot more pleasant. Damn.

what's in the IIT crypto class?

"RSA, DSA, ElGamal, encryption and signature of each. Lots of Modular Arithmetic. Concept work with a number of different other forms of encryption and most recently we've gone over RFID security. A good half the class has been concept work, learning how it's supposed to work."

Hmn. Interesting.

I wish wish WISH that I had 1. known that that class was offered 2. been interested in it while in school 3. TAKEN IT
I'm kicking myself right now. I know that I can learn it all independently with some effort, but structured learning is so useful! And I missed it! Grrr.

TW bug

if you go to http://blogs.thoughtworks.com/ then you see a list of blog posts. If you go to https://blogs.thoughtworks.com/ then you see a submission page for code tests.

This is awkward for me, because my Chrome tries to force https on everything (because I told it to). In order to see the "real" version of this page (or any link to this page) I have to either disable my add-on or open it in Firefox.

Random note: My tag for my TW-related thoughts is ThoughtWorks but my tag for my upcoming experience at ThoughtWorks University will be TWU. There will probably not be double-tagging on the TWU posts.

non-forbidden knowledge

So now I know how to recommend someone, or refer them, or whatever, to TW. Cool. useful knowledge.

Things I have heard of today for the first time:

The company factset (financial stuff)

nlp research at bing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming

I wrote down a short summary of my hiring process at TW which I don't think will give anyone any clues on how to game the system, but which helps me keep straight in my head what happened. Here it is. (One line per item)

1. Contact w recruiter (for me, at IIT career fair and then again at GHC10)
2. Email test on ethos/writing skills
3. Email code test
4. In-office Wonderlic test, TW proprietary logic test
5. In-office pair programming w/ 2 TWers on prev code test, interview w/ HR re: travel fitness and decisionmaking skills in client situations, interview w/ head of Chicago office
6. Get a phone call. Get a packet of papers to sign. Sign papers, mail them back.
7. In-office Agile workshop (for me it was after signing, but for many others it was before)

non-techie babble

Things I am trying to do right now

1. Research vegan and sugarfree recipes for family thanksgiving dinner so I can practice making them today/tomorrow
2. Set up afternoon coffee hangout today (with crappy cell reception in the canyon)
3. Get an appointment for getting travel shots for India set up (gotta find some relevant numbers on id cards)
4. Set a finalized schema for the code test that's being written
5. Get tix to take me and the parents to HP7 :)

Update:

1. List that my mom may or may not think much of http://notepad.cc/share/iZi2FdAiji
2. Done
3. Done
4. Getting there
5. Postpone

Might get Grandma an iPad for her birthday. Need to figure out 1. what apps and 2. How to help her get used to them

App ideas...

reading stuff

playing games

Sigh.

Airport thoughts

I'm sitting in an airport (again, still always) and am researching two things:

1. Drinking water test kits
   Conclusion: If you want to test more than one thing, it gets damn expensive. There must be a better way. It may be time to buy some agar and petri dishes, because it really is just that simple.
2. Arduino projects for non-newbs
   Conclusion: there are a lot of newbs. Also, I need to figure out what I actually want to do with this thing. Ideas: door-opener sensor. Robot (of course) that moves around in my apartment and puts my roommate's pets back where they belong. Alternately, squirts them with water. ...that might be a little complicated for a first project.

Not having much luck yet with either, but it's early times yet.

Soon I'll work on the code test that I'm writing in C#, which I don't know.

Midway airport (MDW, Chicago) Southwest terminal has no pornoscanners and no patdowns. They also didn't see fit to ask me about the two large containers of JB-weld in my carryon.

ThoughtWorks Home Office Day

ThoughtWorks Home Office Day apparently hasn't happened in a while... like, a year or so (although Chi-Fridays happen every month?) Anyway, one of them happened today. I met Ronnigan, who's also a new hire starting in January. I introduced us as Newb One and Newb Two. I met a ridiculous number of people whose names I don't really remember, including the head of TW in the Americas, to whom I said "well, shit." I think that falls under the category of putting my foot in my mouth rather than speaking truth to power. He didn't seem to take it badly.

Joanne explained that TW has a very "flat" structure... which basically means that 1. I will someday get to meet Martin Fowler !!!!!!!! 2. It's normal to mingle socially at company events with people who are serious firepower.

I went to a session on Mingle, which is software that TW made to manage Agile projects with. It looks like it'll actually be useful. I like large parts of the UI. However, I am severely disappointed by how slowly that chart rendered. Seriously, it took over two minutes. Nothing should take over two minutes. Especially something that you need to do all the time...

I went to a session on noSQL, which as cool... mostly review for me, but shiny. MongoDB is a big thing at TW, it seems.

Went to a session on "the cloud" which was interesting. Lots of stuff about how it can apply to current and future TW projects, and things to watch out for... i.e. reserved vs. non-reserved instances.

I wonder what my life would be like if CleverSafe (a cloud services company) had hired me. I hope they fix the problems that the one marketing guy left behind. I still wonder how their algorithms work, dammit. (InStep Software called me to schedule an interview a couple days ago but I told them that I was currently employed. I am charmed that they called, though.)

I went to the lightning talks. I liked the one that was basically a State of the Union talk on what's up with Oracle and Java. It's all a little complicated... There was also a talk from the women's shelter people that the in-office hackathon was benefiting. And one from Julie and her Grace Hopper peeps, so that was cool.

There was a large session which focused on the three columns... breaking up into groups, etc. Post-its are awesome is the lesson here...

I went to the birds of a feather meetup and sat in the dev circle... it was pretty awesome. When Ron said "Flash" he got a kinda incredulous/eew reaction. When I said "crypto" I just got a hell of a lot of perfectly straight faces...

By the way, it turns out that the Borders that I pass on my way to TW has a bitching hacker section in their CS books. It's on the third floor... somehow, before tonight I was under the impression that there were only two floors. -shrug- Now I know. I intend to make some serious purchases someday soon... probably on Amazon, because those books are fucking expensive in-store.

As for further festivities at TW... there was beer pong, and a wine tasting... and excessive amounts of tasty beer, including Sierra and Blue Moon. So I can't fault their taste, although if there had been Guinness or cider I would've chosen that over anything.

After TW, I went to the IIT acappella concert. It was glorious. I think that it's the first time in perhaps several weeks that I've felt genuinely moved by something. They're having some trouble producing and delivering the CD that they took many pre-orders for, several months ago. I wish they would just distribute it on Bandcamp.

One of my friends bought a welding torch and he and some of the guys were practicing pulling good welding beads... on the kitchen floor... which is now scorched... sigh. Well, that can be covered up. I have to say, I'm excited to have access to a torch. (Yes, they also have a helmet facemask shield thing.) I plan to take pics of the welding in action.

VPN (status updates)

I know what a goddamn VPN is, I'm just having trouble getting from point a to point b goddammit.

--

Aha, VPN. You are mine now.

--

No wait, this isn't working.

--

to be continued...

Euler project 11..n

So, Euler problems 1-10 have increased my knowledge of ruby, python, and pain. It's been fun, and took longer than I wish it had. Obviously it's time to start on #11.

11. http://pastie.org/1306770 This could use some refactoring, but it works. It took me a bit to figure out, but I learned a lot, and didn't steal anyone's code. Although rancor did tell me that string.split existed.

16. http://pastie.org/1342335 This one was disturbingly easy and I don't know why. Maybe I'm getting better at Ruby. Or their ranking system is off. Something. Yes, I skipped 12-15 so I could do this one quickly and feel happy.

20. http://pastie.org/1342458 This one was very similar to 16. Doing one makes the other easy.

13. http://pastie.org/1348523 my brute-force solution.

14. http://pastie.org/1348526 my brute-force solution. http://pastebin.com/JVDVBL0b rancorbeast's elegantish solution.

The what-the-hell-is-this-omg-this-is-cool-should-play-with list

Python

Mingle

Heroku

MongoDB

https://www.linqpad.net/

..the entire internet?

prank@WSU Nov 5 awesome

"So far I've received emails from 3 news reporters, 1 job offer at Google, one from someone in Lighty, one from an angry "IT" guy, and hundreds from fans. All in all a good day. Now just to hope my real goal, students making this university a better place, will be achieved."

http://www.facebook.com/pages/WSU-1812/166561193368233?v=wall

http://twitter.com/search?q=%23wsu1812

https://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/hacker-makes-the-fifth-of-november-one-to-remember/28076?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

I admire this guy because

1. Awesome technical skills (IT actually had to pull the hardware to shut this thing off before his auto-off)
2. Whitehat (he included an auto-off at 5:01 pm and an uninstall script, with instructions on his website)
3. V for Vendetta is awesome (yes, I celebrate Guy Fawkes day by watching it)
4. He knows how to cover his tracks (hasn't been identified yet)
5. Google offered him a job without knowing his identity
6. He wants to improve his campus (yeah, I was in student government when I was in college... can you tell?)

I mean... isn't that enough? Dude.

BSOD

Check out the data from the BSOD I just had. I don't know what it means (or even whether the data here is meaningful) but I'm going to put some effort towards finding out, because this isn't the first time that this has happened (the last time it happened, I was using Vista and I ended up installing W7) and I don't enjoy BSOD at all.

Problem signature:

Problem Event Name: BlueScreen

OS Version: 6.1.7600.2.0.0.256.48

Locale ID: 1033

Additional information about the problem:

BCCode: f4

BCP1: 0000000000000003

BCP2: FFFFFA8009D81890

BCP3: FFFFFA8009D81B70

BCP4: FFFFF80002D885D0

OS Version: 6_1_7600

Service Pack: 0_0

Product: 256_1

Files that help describe the problem:

C:\Windows\Minidump\110810-53087-01.dmp

C:\Users\geeklinda\AppData\Local\Temp\WER-104302-0.sysdata.xml

Read our privacy statement online:

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=104288&clcid=0x0409

If the online privacy statement is not available, please read our privacy statement offline:

C:\Windows\system32\en-US\erofflps.txt

(some) Stuff I've thought about today:

Electronic voting https://www.eff.org/issues/e-voting

Your ballot is encoded to your public key (all citizens have a public/private key pair?) and your private key is your newSSN, which is long enough that it actually provides secure encryption (unlike current 9-digit SSNs (perhaps your SSN is a hash for some longer number?))

And how cool it is that U of M ppl broke the released version so quickly and thouroughly, and how I wish I had been able to see that first hand.

NASA

- Discovery http://discovery.nasa.gov/

- Robonaut https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/464887main_Robonaut2FactSheet.pd&pli=1

- Waldos (explained 'em to a friend) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_manipulator

- fancy new chips -> the singularity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_A2

This guy's blog and so many amazing articles on it.

http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2004/07/10/what_to_do_when_youre_screwed.html

http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2005/11/21/saying_no.html

http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2007/11/11/the_nerd_handbook.html

http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2003/07/10/nadd.html

How cool http://news.ycombinator.com/news is and the fact that I only two days ago went through a huge list of reddit channels, customized my front page, and now surf it about as often as I check boingboing (and the fact that Google Reader is NOT an acceptable solution for my blog-surfing needs... and that I'll probably end up doing a large-scale data-gather on all options, then suffering with something mediocre until I suck it up and write my own)

My favorite reddits at the moment:

http://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/

http://www.reddit.com/r/space/

http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/ I have a special love for this one, actually

http://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/

http://www.reddit.com/r/coding/

This excellent new(ish) gourmet organic resturaunt near where I live and how much I want to go there for dinner, since they've started serving dinner and cocktails.

http://www.nanaorganic.com/live/

http://www.yelp.com/biz/nana-chicago

http://code.mixpanel.com/amazon-vs-rackspace/ I.e. what sysadmins want from a cloud server, why they want it, how well different providers provide it, and what providers will do in the future- and the "style" of the providers.

Why I haven't gotten around to ripping this DVD of Sweeney Todd to a local version which I can use even while I don't have this inconvenient disc in my laptop, asking what I want to do with it every time I return from hibernation and confusing my startup processes by being potentially but not actually bootable. (Answer: how do you do that on Ubuntu, anyway? It's not something I've ever needed to do before. Put a bootable .iso on something, yes; burn a local copy of media from something, no. I'll pick a pretty tool and use it soon, yes yes.)

http://goo.gl/ and how amazingly excellent it is and why have I not been using this and look at all of the cool things that it can do! Although I was failing a copy-paste from it when my computer took a BSOD moment just a few minutes ago, so that's not really the best way to start a relationship.

The fact that attempting to connect to picasaweb.google.com while using Chrome and KB SSL Enforcer makes Picasa wibble and then give me a "no ssh available" error, and whether this is repeatable, and whether I have the patience to test it right now.

Also, (what I was trying to elucidate when I ran into the previous point)

How much space I have on Picasa, and how I'm thrashing my upload and need faster internet.

Space I have in Picasa: 81 GB In use: 14 GB (17.29%)

All of that 14GB is pictures, poster drafts, screenshots... mostly pictures. From the last 4 years. Mostly tagged, although not well-tagged.

My current upload speed: ...not sure, but probably less than 3Mb. This is not a recipe for success.

My irrational fear that ThoughtWorks will for some reason decide that I'm not worth hiring after all and try to break my contract- which, considering that I'm an easygoing kid with no real clout in the world, they could probably do pretty easily. Like, I said, irrational. It would be incredibly bad business sense, for one thing. But still, I do sometimes worry- especially when I fail at something technical or when I start digging into whitehat exploits. Because, yanno, anything whitehat could be blackhat with a flip of an intention.

How cool the revamp of http://torrentfreak.com/limewire-resurrected-by-secret-dev-team-101108/ is and whether I should try to install it on my W7 just to see what it's like. I did use LimeWire when I was a freshman, and probably while I was a sophomore, but I've lost all of my music and I live basically off of Pandora with a small local stash of celtic rock for when I have no network connection. I don't have any motivation to improve my torrenting situation. -shrug- The vast majority of the music I listen to is impossible to torrent because there are no peers for it. Maybe I should start uploading it, but I'm too lazy to do illegal things without a strong idealogical motivation.

The above leads to: BearShare, the RIAA paid torrenting site. Wait wtf rly? Yes, rly. http://www.bearshare.com/ I guess if you don't care what you listen to, it's okay. There is some stuff on there which fits my picky sensibilities, but srsly... " over 15 million songs & videos" ...that's like bragging that your... er. The analogy I want to make here is forbidden by good taste. Anyway. Only the ignorant think that 15mil is a high number in this context.

Easy ways to kill Firesheep: http://blog.scaramanga.co.uk/2010/11/08/two-firesheep-denial-of-service-attacks/ http://www.scaramanga.co.uk/stuff/fireflood.c

Always always always choose the "Custom Install" option. You never know what strange toolbar crap will be in there.

My cussing habits and the fact that I should switch back to using something mild like "dammit" or "bloody hell" before I end up sitting next to people who think that saying "GEE-sus onna stick" is inappropriate when I'm caught up in my own thoughts and something startles me out of them.

On a related note, I want to explore this site in detail sometime. http://www.exploit-db.com/

Reverse image search

Reverse image search. There used to be a website which made it work. Like... four years ago. But there can't have been, because there isn't now. And unless someone is suppressing the technology very hard...

Anyway, here's a list of what I see offhand. None of them do what I want them to.

http://www.revimg.net/

https://www.tineye.com/

http://www.gazopa.com/

http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/#text

http://amazon.ece.utexas.edu/~qasim/cires.htm

Euler Project

I'm doing problems from the Euler Project just now. My code is hideously embarrassing, but it's all my own and I'm kinda proud that I can write the stuff at all, considering that less than a month ago I might've looked at the problems and despaired, or at least made headway much more slowly.

My profile: http://projecteuler.net/profile/geeklinda.png I wish it said which specific problems I've solved...

1. http://pastie.org/1273530 An alternate and very elegant solution from rancorbeast ((1..(1000 - 1)).reject { |i| i % 5 != 0 && i % 3 != 0 }).inject(0) {|a, b| a + b}
2. http://pastie.org/1273527
3. http://pastie.org/1273740
4. http://pastie.org/1285750
5. http://pastie.org/1290420 Code blatantly stolen from 17 Sep 2005 03:20 am post by Olath at http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=forum&id=5 (can't access if you haven't already solved the problem) ... yes there is a discrepancy here. :)
6. http://pastie.org/1285746
7. http://pastie.org/1293957 (stolen from forums after getting answer)
8. http://pastie.org/1285739
9. http://pastie.org/1293953 (All mine. I'm proud of it. It runs pretty quickly. finding an answer took me several tries for some reason.)
   rancorbeast beat me by miles with the oneliner below.
   (1..500).each {|i| (i..500).each {|j| if i + j + Math.sqrt(i ** 2 + j ** 2) == 1000; print i * j * Math.sqrt(i ** 2 + j ** 2); end } }
10. solved in python.

Euler 11..n will be in a new post.