the daily dub

Only funny if you’ve ever studied calculus. Hilarious if you have though.

“An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one orders a …” – hot soup? anyone?.

To me, this says it all:

Prop. 8 Votes by Education Level

Education is the path to fairness for all?

What makes it even more painful, is that this legislation flies directly in the face of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Where is the pursuit of Happiness now?

Let me put it thusly:

If these churchs believe so strongly believe that gay marriage is wrong, then they should simply not perform gay marriages in their churchs.  Don’t go telling everyone else in the state that they have to believe the same way.  In fact, it could be construed that this is unconstitutional.

The First Amendment of the constitution states this:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibing the free exercise thereof;…

Now, what if my religion happens to support gay marriage.  This law is now a law that prohibits the free exercise of my religion.

Recently, some kid hacked Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! email. He explained how he did it in detail on the 4chan forum.

Turns out, he made a huge mistake of only bouncing through one proxy server. Oops!

When he realized that, he chose to do what, at first glance, sounds like a stupid idea: post the password and the story to the forum. Upon further consideration, what he did might have increased his chances of evading discovery better than just walking away:

By posting the password and login information to a widely travelled public forum, he effectively decreased the signal to noise ratio by two orders of magnitude (at least). With 1000 IP addresses to comb through, instead of just 1, your chances of escape are infinitely better.

Finding the person behind the first IP would constitute circumstantial evidence at best, and not conclusive that he was the one responsible. He could just as easily have been one of the 1000s of people on the forum who logged in out of curiosity (still probably illegal, but I’d imagine it’d be a) way harder to bag them all, and b) much less of a sentence than the original break-in and leak).

However, there’s still the major gaffe that he posted under an account on a forum. An anonymous craigslist ad posted from a public library in a neighboring town, all while bouncing that through a couple of proxies would have been a much better idea.

The only way security researchers “tentatively identified” him was by his forum post.

EDIT: Ctunnel is apparently cooperating with the FBI, and the hacker’s screenshots with the Ctunnel URL in it may be his undoing. Three proxies would have been better. And do it from a library, you fool.

It’s amazing how often I’ve been hearing the term “bricked” used these days by people with little or no hardware/firmware engineering experience.  People in the media are claiming that iPhones are being bricked by not activating; if they can’t use it to make phone calls or check email, it’s now bricked.  If it doesn’t come usable out of the box, it’s bricked. Some people claim any device that has become or is otherwise useless is “bricked.”

By that definition, those programmable remotes all ship bricked – they don’t perform any useful function until you program them for your TV. Clearly, however, they are not bricked.  They still work, all you have to do is program them.  

Similarly, by this definition, any device that requires battery power, but has no batteries is bricked.  But those devices aren’t bricked – add batteries again, and you’re back in business.

Bricked is a special term, not to be used lightly, or without understanding its meaning.

A little education goes a long way.

Definition: Bricked – Adjective.  Bricked means the device will no longer power on, due to some irreparably misconfigured hardware or firmware or a fried (e.g., permanently destroyed) internal component. Bricked is only slightly different than destroyed (e.g., physically smashed with a sledge hammer), in that is is theoretically possible to ressurect the device, but you god damned better have a JTAG device or soldering iron or other hardware debugging device to load new firmware/components back on it (and even then, it’s really only a 50/50 chance you’ll ever see it boot up again).  

Usage: “I’m sorry, Bob, the firmware flash for your embedded device failed halfway through, and now it wont even boot up.  The damn things bricked, and without a JTAG board to restore the bits, it’ll never function again.”

Basically, if you’ve never had an electrical engineering class, or developed embedded firmware, you probably shouldn’t be using the word “bricked” in casual conversation.

If your iPhone doesn’t let you use it without activating, that is not bricked.   

That’s locked.

That’s you (or AT&T) being an idiot.

Unless you’re flashing firmware on a device, and it never boots up again, don’t say your device is bricked.

Right around now is when things start to get hectic. Who am I kidding, they’re always hectic, but right now even more so.

I’ve got WWDC coming up, a show to rehearse for, plus my normal day job.

As you can imagine, things can get a little draining.

Here’s a little recipe to battle the stress and the fatigue:

• Workout Daily

Admittedly, I can’t keep up with this one. It’s hard to hit the gym every day. Lately, though, I’m making an effort to get up at 6:30 and be at the gym by 7am. Then, it takes me about 8 minutes to run a mile, which I follow with some Yoga Ball exercises. This gets my energy flowing, and works my core muscles – basically helps wake me up and keep me toned.

• Coffee

A no brainer. Actually, Coffee has been shown to have detrimental effects in large doses. It will temporarily increase your blood pressure (in turn elevating your perceives stress, and making you a bit more touchy), but it still helps get you going. Caffeine is a proven performance enhancer – it helps concentration (unless you over do it), and stamina.

• Gingko

And now for some herbals.. Gingko relaxes your blood vessels, which offsets the BP raise from coffee. Studies have shown [citation needed, i know] that Gingko can relax tough blood vessels as a result of years of drinking or smoking. I take it every day, and it not only helps wake me up, but also helps keep my blood pressure in check. Also, people think it’s good for your memory, but I don’t remember where I heard that…

• Ginseng

Ginseng is believed to normalize body functions – for example, it raises BP in people where their BP is too low, and lowers it in people where their BP is too high. I found some really cool shots of ginseng at Whole Foods that I’ve stocked up on.

• Laughing

No shit. Laughing is really good for you, and if you can find something to laugh about, you’re obviously not that stressed.

Keep up the good fight. Cheers!