Category Archives: Uncategorized
Beware of the Rombertik virus
A vicious, yet serendipitously topical computer virus is making the rounds, and it has an added capability that can cause you great difficulty and lost data.
Known as Rombertik, it does what most viruses do: Infects your machine, steals data, remains hidden, that sort of thing. Mundane, in the parlance of malware.
But it has an additional capability that makes it infinitely more insidious:
Let’s hear it for the Prime Minister of Singapore
Incredible, I’d be surprised if *any* of our leaders, anywhere in this country, would be able to do something like this. After mentioning that he had written a sudoku-solving program in C++ while addressing an IT conference, people asked to see it so the Prime Minister of Singapore decided to post it on Facebook and ask for feedback!
How far we’ve come
If you’re like me and have been around for a while, you may have some recollections of what the computing, or at least the personal computer experience, was like back in the early days (circa the late 80s onward) when PCs were becoming more pervasive in the consumer space.
It was really undiscovered country, the entire industry was still feeling itself out and trying to figure out where it needed and wanted to go. Standards were not prevalent, at least inasmuch as we see them today, and everyone was trying to put their own stamp on what was clearly going to be a major part of the future.
Yes, but so could you (and YouTube trolls me again).
As many of you already know, I considered going to grad school for biology, specifically to study insects. Well, not insects, but spiders, and as we all know spiders are not insects.
However, within that discipline you learn a lot about insects. Outside of that discipline you learn a little about insects, and one of the things you hear over and over again is how ants can carry 2,000 times – or more – their own body weight. Now, we have robots – called MicroTUGs – that can do that as well as described in this story over on the BBC (or BEEB, if you’re a Brit). The article even states that they were designed, in part, by borrowing from ants.
Steam drops paid mods plan
The headline says it all, however if you’re not familiar with Steam, I’ll give some background and explain just what that headline means.
Steam is a digital software distribution platform developed by Valve, itself a well-known and well-respected developer of computer games such as the legendary Half-Life, and founded by former Microsoft employee and now-billionaire Gabe Newell. Steam has become the standard for digital distribution of software, and although there are others such as Electronic Arts’ Origin service and Ubisoft’s UPlay, none have had the impact or influence of steam.
Another function of Steam is to allow mods, or additions to games that have been created by fans. They may be upgrades to graphics, new items, levels, characters, sounds, or numerous other tweaks. Steam allows for the easy, one-click install of these mods through what is known as the Steam Workshop, whereas installing them any other way would require manually manipulating the files.
I have no idea what Pinterest is
You may have noticed that there is a brand new Pinterest feed in the Sidebar of this very page (every page, really). To be honest, I’ve never had any idea what Pinterest is, what it is for, or why someone would use it. Recently, however, I was speaking to a friend of mine and we were discussing some of the current movies that address the actual concerns we are starting to have about such things as dependence on technology and artificial intelligence (for example, the currently-in-theaters Ex Machina, and 2013’s Her), and comparing them to classics such as 2001 and TRON, and I said it would be nice to have a place on the site that could serve as an index for that sort of thing, where students could get more information if they were so inclined, but wasn’t just some static page or list of links.
It was actually his wife’s suggestion via him, but they suggested I try cataloging them using Pinterest, a digital pinboard. I didn’t know there were *analog* pinboards! Anyway, they kind-of sort-of explained it to me, saying it would be perfect for what I had described, and that she used it to keep ideas for home-improvement projects or something like that, I don’t know, but they both said it was very useful.
YouTube turns 10 years old today
YouTube, founded by ex-PayPal employees, turns 10 years old today. In case you underestimate the importance of YouTube, it has created celebrities (For example, Justin Bieber was discovered in YouTube videos), empires out of teengaers, the President of the United States uses it, and according to YouTube’s own statistics page, 300 hours of video are uploaded every minute (think about that).
After being founded, it only took two years for Google to buy it out for almost $2 billion, and it is now the de facto video service on the web. It is one of the reasons we all discovered we had to get rid of Flash and adopt the HTML5 standard which is much more secure and doesn’t require third-party software to play videos in a browser. Remember the days of the QuickTime player, or – shudder – RealPlayer?
Anyway, if you’re interested, here is the very first video ever uploaded to YouTube, entitled “Me at the Zoo.” Don’t expect to be blown away, it’s more historical oddity than anything else, but a very important one nonetheless.
How does your website perform?
Building on our discussion of how important a functional web presence is, I present WebPageTest.org. You simply enter a URL, and the site returns a huge amount of performance metrics that lets you pinpoint any problems in the performance of your site.
For example, I ran a test against is301 (I’ll assume you know that’s the site you’re on). I first ran the test in FireFox with a bunch of tabs open, and it returned predictable results. I know it can take a while for the page to begin the load process, although I was surprised by the First Byte time, which indicates the delay between you as the user making the request for a web page and the browser receiving the first byte of that page. There are many things that can impact that result, from network conditions to the quality of the hosting provider. That’s illustrated by the two tests below, one from FireFox and one from Chrome, the reasons for the First Byte time are clearly contradictory, indicating the fickle nature of the test.
I’ll take two!
Wandering at Fry’s recently I saw they had this TV, and it’s pretty impressive: Of course it’s 4K and UHD (which we all know is not the same thing), 105 inches diagonal, 3D, smart capabilities, 21:9 viewing ratio (16:9 on the screen, which is a cinema ratio), it looks very impressive.
Oh, it also costs $100,000. You can all come over to watch it at my house. I’ll throw an extra one in the backyard for the overflow.
The Actual Price
Here’s what happened
Not too long ago I read about many WordPress (which is the authoring platform for this website) plugins being vulnerable to attacks that could inject malicious code or bring down a site. Nothing happened to this one, so I figured it was too small to be a target. However a Saturday update to the Jetpack plugin, which is used extensively on this site and adds significant functionality, borked the whole site and rendered it inaccessible with the following error:
Jetpack crash
As you can see, something is terribly wrong with Line 31.
