Cubic

I've recently been exploring the world of FreedomPop on behalf of a friend who is going through a really rough patch in his life. FreedomPop sells WiFi hotspot devices that supposedly get 500MB of data per month for free. The only thing to pay for is the device itself, which will set someone back about $50. It sounds awesome, but that's really all it is. The old adage, "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is" definitely applies here. This plan is marketed as 500MB of data per month for free "forever" (the 'forever' is implied). Even 3 years of use (i.e. until the lithium ion battery wears out) would be enough to help my friend out in a significant way. I was willing to play guinea pig for this interesting service because I also have some potential use for it. So, I went and bought the device, which set me back a little over $50 (after tax). Then I waited. And waited. And waited. And waited some more. And pretty much forgot ab...

I run Windows 7 Ultimate, full Aero effects, and Firefox. The most recent update of Firefox to version 29.0 resulted in yet another redesign of the tabs. This redesign is very unfortunate because it makes the text completely unreadable. I have some very choice words for the Firefox developers about their general competence, but that's not what this post is about. This post is for the average user that this garbage release was foisted upon. I've been running the fix for about a week now and, while not perfect, it is much better than not being able to read the text on my tabs at all. Go here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/white-to-gray-gradient/ Click "Add to Firefox". Done. That's the best theme I could find that balances readability, usability, and some semblance of elegance.

My current office chair I use at home that I bought a decade ago for about $100 (it was on sale) is starting to fall apart. One would hope that innovation over a decade would result in improvements. First off, the office chair you sit in probably looks like this: If you are lucky to work for a really nice employer, you might get one of these: Oooh...armrests! You know what the ironic thing is? Neither of those chairs were designed to be sat in, yet they cost just as much as (if not more than) a decent chair. Those chairs exist due to some insane thought process that managers and executives get nicer chairs to sit in as a person moves up the corporate ladder. I'm sorry, but that's just cruel. If you are going to sit in a chair for 6-12 hours a day, then it had better be comfortable to sit in regardless of who you are. Sitting in the wrong chair for hours on end can and will result in regular headaches and/or migraines (I'm speaking from personal experience ...

A few topics came up on my radar recently that questioned whether or not AdBlock Plus is a security risk because several websites are now asking users to disable it for their website and claimed AdBlock Plus is a security risk. That got me thinking about why I really run both AdBlock Plus and Ghostery. I trust both plugins because they do their job VERY well, are generally trusted products by millions of people, and, most importantly, are open source software. However, the reason I run these tools is not the usual "ads are annoying" or "privacy is important" reasons that I see bandied about. I run them because NOT running these tools introduce security vulnerabilities and serious performance degradation into the web browser stack and those using ad servers do not follow the law. Here are a few reasons as to why you should be running *at least* AdBlock Plus: Ad server operators are notorious for running any ad, including ads that deploy malware. It is not ...

Update May 30, 2017: As per OSI, this license has some insurmountable issues. I have retracted the proposal for OSI inclusion as a result. If you used this particular license in any work, I highly recommend moving to a pure MIT license as soon as possible for software and CC0 for other works. Other than government entities in some countries, it would seem to be impossible to avoid copyright and place any given work into the public domain while offering sufficient protection of the original author from spurious lawsuits. I view this as a serious failing of copyright law and thus the real source of the problem is copyright law(s) not allowing for simple public domain dedications by members of the public. There are valid scenarios where public domain dedications are legitimately necessary for the furtherance of the common good. Therefore, only if the law changes would a simple public domain dedication option become possible. Even Creative Commons Zero (CC0), with its best attempt ...

Googlebot watches Gmail. I recently bought a new domain name and kept an active search window open for very specific keywords to make sure it didn't go live until I was ready for it to. The people who received the link to the domain are trustworthy to not blab about it (e.g. tweet, post, etc) until I'm ready. That said, two days ago I sent a link to precisely one person with a Gmail account. This morning, Google search results returned positive for search discovery. Googlebot is definitively watching Gmail for references to new domains and the number of references passed around within Gmail might actually affect PageRank. This shouldn't really surprise anyone, but it should be something to be aware of if you want to keep a product launch a secret. In my case, it doesn't really matter.

Over the years, I've had a vested interest in Copyright, Trademark, and Patent Law. As a software developer, having that knowledge at your disposal can be an invaluable tool to avoiding legal issues. We are in the business of writing complex software products, any of which may infringe at any time. Before I begin though, I am not a lawyer and what follows, while good common sense, is not legal advice. If you need legal advice, find a good attorney. I recommend reading the actual laws surrounding Copyrights , Trademarks , and Patents by visiting the various official .gov websites for yourself, which link directly to and have copies of the relevant laws available. If you are a software developer in a country other than the United States, you should make yourself aware of your own country's intellectual property laws. I'm hoping that what I have to say here is just reiterating what you already know as a software developer. What follows is opinion mixed with generally ...

For the past month and a half, I've been delving deep into C++ land, wrestling with the intricacies and annoyances of writing cross-platform code. My biggest gripe with the major libraries out there is that they all have a 'string' class and then proceed to use their 'string' class everywhere, which basically means that if you want to use a specific library, you end up using all of it. I also wanted to push the performance envelope to the limit, which means putting storage on the stack instead of the heap. At any rate, check it out: Cross-platform C++ Snippet Library My favorite class is Sync::TLS, which implements a temporary memory allocator that outperforms system malloc()/free() by a factor of up to 19 times! When I saw the stats, my jaw hit the floor and I drooled a little. It was awesome. I was expecting for Sync::TLS to get crushed soundly. I'm also rather happy with the little UTF-8 library that's included. A minimalistic Unicode implem...

...WHY?! For Outlook 2007, Microsoft removed the embedded Internet Explorer engine for displaying HTML e-mail and dropped in some half-baked solution. From Word. Apparently, the same engineer (an idiot) who thought that margins and padding in 'div's were bad (because Outlook is now pretty much incapable of that) also decided that support for blinking text is good. The ancient, decrepit 'blink' tag isn't implemented, so how does one accomplish this atrocity? With 'text-decoration: blink'. That's right, the same engineers who could have spent their time figuring out how to space things out on a screen with margins and padding, instead wasted those precious moments writing CSS support for blinking text. Sigh. Okay, so HTML e-mail is bad to begin with, but good software developers don't implement stupid stuff until more important things are implemented. Please prioritize what is important. Got it? Cool.

The question constantly comes up. It is a sticking point and everyone has a different answer for new C and C++ developers. There was even a stop-motion animation created once upon a time to explain them ( Pointer Fun with Binky ). They are just one of the reasons that a lot of developers are cutting their teeth, so to speak, on other programming languages (but there are other reasons as well). C/C++ pointers. I've given a lot of thought over the years on the best method to explain C/C++ pointers in a way that can be more universally understood. Even if the programming language you are using doesn't have pointers, understanding pointers helps gain an understanding of how the underlying hardware operates behind the scenes to execute code. In other words, they are still relevant to you. A lot of what I'm going to say involves gross oversimplifications of several concepts, but the goal is to understand how pointers work as succinctly as possible. First, we need a gr...

I ran into this comment the other day on the Internets: If you think that driving a car with reversed turn signal and wiper levers is bad, try driving a fork lift which slams into reverse every time you hit what would normally be the left turn signal. That is not the scary part. I have known numerous forklift drivers that got so used to using the lever to switch from forward to reverse throughout the day, that at the end of their shift they would get in their stick shift car with it in first gear, start the car, turn on the left turn signal, look over their shoulder, release the clutch and drive into the car in front of them. Life Lesson: Never park directly in front of a fork lift driver. I'm sure there is a reason for the lever to be conveniently placed at that location, but, if the bigger picture is taken into account, this is a pretty good case of UI design that results in expensive damage to property. Car insurance providers should take a look at this scenario to see ...

About a year ago, Microsoft released version 4.5 of the .Net Framework to the world. No one really cared much but every programmer out there should. Why? Lurking in the shadows of that release was THE solution to our multithreading woes. If you've ever done multithreaded programming, you know three things: 1) Multithreading is painful. 2) Multithreading is messy. 3) Multithreading is painful. Multithreading is even harder in a GUI environment because most GUI libraries will crash (and crash the whole application too) if a programmer tries to do operations on the UI from another thread. So, the programmer ends up having to write a ton of plumbing to get back onto the UI thread after completing a multithreaded operation to do UI stuff. In addition, multithreaded programming requires thinking outside of how programs and programmers are really wired to think: That is, we think sequentially. The solution that needs to be ported to every programming language we care abo...

After spending a LOT of time researching, waiting, more researching, and almost giving up on WiFi, I've finally figured out a secure enough WiFi setup that I think has a pretty good chance of standing up to scrutiny. It is called EAP-TLS and it is serious Kung Fu (aka REAL security). Unfortunately, to implement said Kung Fu, the protocol requires a RADIUS server. And, to get said RADIUS server at an affordable price, FreeRADIUS is needed and therefore Linux is necessary. And the easiest Linux to use is (usually) Ubuntu. But, after scouring the Internets, I've also determined that there are NO good tutorials on setting up a basic FreeRADIUS EAP-TLS system at home under Ubuntu 12.04.2 using the apt-get packages for FreeRADIUS. This, therefore, is the definitive guide mostly cobbled together from a number of different sources. I'm assuming a half-decent understanding of Linux command-line editing, a fresh installation of Ubuntu Server 12.04.2 LTS on a computer on the n...

Earlier today, I had a "free heart attack" when a new thread showed up on the PHP Internals list: [RFC] more secure unserialize() I love serialize()/unserialize() because it is nice and easy to use. Unfortunately, with ease-of-use comes greater responsibility. In this case, it is important that users can't submit their own serialized data structures to the server. When the server calls unserialize(), it expands out any data type, including objects. Upon destruction of an object, __destruct() is called by PHP automagically, which then executes whatever code is in there. The "free heart attack" I mentioned earlier came from the fact I send serialized data to the SSO client in the encrypted cookie. Fortunately, a look at the encrypted cookie code revealed I had been using json_encode() and json_decode(), which allowed me to breathe a sigh of relief. For now. This just goes to show that security is a moving target. Or, if you are a cow, it is a moooooo...

I've been looking for an alternate to find + grep under Linux so that I can do similar queries to 'findstr' under Windows such as: findstr /sic:"my_function" *.php Recursive search for PHP files containing the string "my_function". The typical response to "how to search for some type of file containing some text" under Linux is usually along the lines of: find "*.php" -exec grep -H "my_function" {} \; Not only is that cryptic and longer and more difficult to type, it fires off a new, separate process (grep) for every PHP file it finds. I've seen a zillion incarnations of the above. Every time I run that, I end up waiting ten times longer than I would have waited for 'findstr' for the same operation. find + grep performance is terrible. So I said to myself today, "Hmmm...maybe grep has the solution already?" Lo-and-behold, it does: grep -nir --include="*.php" "my_function...

If you are in the mood for a not-so-boring "technical novel" (there apparently is now such a thing), may I recommend reading this lovely 730 page book: Engineering Security by Peter "Long-Winded" Gutmann Reading it does require a level of technical expertise and understanding of how SSL/TLS, SSH, IPSec and a number of rather boring protocols work to truly appreciate what he has to say. For those who don't have the time to read 730 pages, I'm going to summarize: Security, or at least the average programmer's understanding of it, is...severely lacking. We've had two decades to figure out how to not screw up security and, yet, we still find new, extraordinarily stupid ways to do so. The real problems are a lack of accountability in software development and that anyone can own a computing device without any training whatsoever. The book then proceeds to attempt to describe fixes for the problems, but I'd wager that around page 50 or so, mo...