Maszman Speaks!

We’ve missed much of the weather that’s been plagu­ing the North­east, but not com­pletely. It’s pretty, but a pain to shovel.

How we mea­sure the snow at our house:

Look­ing out our front door after shoveling:

Some­one wishes it wasn’t Win­ter anymore:

Bear with me on this one. Most web­sites (like this one) these days rely on a data­base to hold infor­ma­tion and gen­er­ate the pages you see in your browser on the fly when you request them. All of the pop­u­lar data­bases in use accept com­mands in a com­puter lan­guage called SQL. A post­ing like the one you are read­ing is basi­cally a line or two of SQL that reads the words out of a data­base and con­verts them into HTML for your browser to dis­play. When some­one uses a SQL injec­tion to attack a site they basi­cally add SQL state­ments to URLs or fill them into form fields. If the site doesn’t check URLs for cor­rect for­mat or doesn’t closely eval­u­ate what peo­ple type into text boxes that SQL code can be sent directly to the data­base. The code could then write infor­ma­tion to the data­base or read infor­ma­tion out of it, infor­ma­tion you don’t want any­one to know about like credit card num­bers. Recently Rafal Los, an HP secu­rity spe­cial­ist, was test­ing a site for vul­ner­a­bil­ity to SQL injec­tions and in the process dis­cov­ered the site had already been suc­cess­fully attacked. The site was send­ing a Tro­jan to every vis­i­tor, totally with­out the knowl­edge of the owners.

Why Pro­vid­ing Value in Your Job is Impor­tant | WorkAwe­some.

I’ve never liked the cof­fee at work and they don’t allow things like cof­fee mak­ers any­where other than des­ig­nated areas. I’ve been drink­ing mostly instant for a while now and hat­ing it. Last week I remem­bered an online dis­cus­sion of some­thing called the Aero­press, made by Aer­o­bie (yes, the folks that make the fly­ing disks). Here’s what it looks like:

It’s basi­cally a tube with a fil­ter at one end and a plunger. You fill the tube with ground cof­fee and hot water then use the plunger and air to force the water through the fil­ter into your cup. Since it essen­tially makes espresso, you need to dilute the result­ing cof­fee with hot water if you want reg­u­lar cof­fee. The result is excep­tion­ally good cof­fee, bet­ter than you’re likely to make your­self with­out spend­ing a lot more money. It’s also easy to clean since you can pop the used grounds right into the trash. I haven’t had it long enough yet to know the real eco­nom­ics but it should be more than price-competitive with most work cafeterias.

I got mine at Ama​zon​.com but lots of other places sell them too.

It looks like even the Chi­nese aren’t keen on giant gas-guzzlers either as the sale of Hum­mer col­lapses. I guess peo­ple who wish to give the mid­dle fin­ger to the envi­ron­ment will have to shop elsewhere.

Android Cen­tral has a post on a pro­to­type cam­era app called Rec­og­nizr that uses facial-recognition to link you to your subject’s social net­works. Take a pic­ture of a ran­dom stranger and if they’re in the data­base you get all of the info on them the net can offer. Creepy.