This guy drove a delivery truck for 28 years, so the sun hit him only on one side. Which side do you think it is? New England Journal of Medicine via Kottke.org.
New BART seats
Those of you who have been on the BART know just how incredibly nasty the fabric on those seats can be, accumulating filth and disease for many years now.
Someone had the brilliant idea to finally replace that fabric with vinyl, which should be millions of times easier to clean and absorb millions of times less human fluids. Thank you.
Online security 2
I wrote about password reuse a while ago and I promised to follow up – I just didn’t promise to follow up quickly.
Today, LinkedIn suffered a massive security breach, and 6.5 million passwords were stolen. I went and I changed my password for a new one and I am done. You should do the same, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you are done.
If you re-use your password, then you are in trouble. You may be really good about not writing down your password and not telling it to anyone… but the breach can happen on the other side. It’s trivial for a hacker to write code to try out every username/password combination on many popular websites (Google, banks, Facebook, etc). Out of 6.5 million passwords, I’m willing to bet they would have lots of success. You should really, really use different passwords for each different account you have.
Impossible to manage? No. Just use a password manager. I use 1Password on the Mac, iPhone, iPad. It stores all the passwords locally and securely encrypted. The browser plug-in for the desktop is really good, and the app for the iPad and iPhone is ok. It all synchronizes seamlessly. It’s an expensive solution, but having your bank account drained or your identity stolen will be way more expensive. There are other similar products but I haven’t tried them.
Will this make you completely secure? Well, no…
…you are never 100% safe. But you can always do better.
And last, and admission: While I knew I was vulnerable because I was reusing just 2-3 passwords on all my online accounts, what prompted me to get serious is when I saw one of my passwords on this list. Shameful.
Engineer jokes
Apologies in advance…
There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don’t.
Ad in the personals:
Me: Wirey, sensitive
You: A little resistive
We’ll make a great thermocouple!Just joined a rock band called 1023MB…we haven’t done a gig yet!
Why did the programmer get stuck in the shower?
Lather, rinse, repeat.Q: What do you get when you cross a mountain climber with a mosquito?
A: Nothing. You can’t cross a scalar with a vector.Q: Why do programmers get Christmas and Halloween mixed up?
A: Because DEC 25 == OCT 31I would tell you a joke about UDP but you might not get it…
Two antennas met on a roof, fell in love and got married. The ceremony wasn’t much, but the reception was excellent.
Two atoms walk into a bar. One says, “Dang! I just lost an electron!” The other atom says, “Are you sure?” The first one says, “I’m positive.”
A tachyon gets kicked out of a bar. The bartender says “we don’t serve your type!”. A tachyon walks into a bar.
So, a neutron walks into a bar. “I’d like a beer” he says. The bartender promptly serves up a beer. “How much will that be?” asks the neutron. “For you?” replies the bartender, “no charge.”
Did you hear about the man who cooled himself to absolute zero? Don’t worry, he’s 0K.
An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one tells the bartender he wants a beer. The second one says he wants half a beer. The third one says he wants a fourth of a beer. The bartender puts two beers on the bar and says “You guys need to learn your limits.”
Schrödinger’s cat walks into a bar. And doesn’t.
A photon walks into two bars…
How do you tell the difference between an extrovert programmer and an introvert programmer?
The extrovert programmer looks at your shoes when talking to you.Q: How many programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: None, that’s a hardware problem
RIP: Eduard Khil
Eduard Anatolyevich Khil (Эдуард Анатольевич Хиль; 4 September 1934 – 4 June 2012)
May your sweet voice stay stuck in our heads forever.
Photo of the day #39: The Spear
This portrait of South African president Jacob Zuma by Brett Murray has triggered a scandal and even marches. It’s based on this portrait of Lenin but it also shows his penis. I think it’s cool and if anyone ever decides to paint me in this style with my package exposed, I’m all for it. Especially if they make my package that big.
More info on CNN, where – heaven forbid they show an abstract three color painting of a dick and offend a puritan reader – the painting is censored.
The eternal number
In 2001 I moved to Austin and got a land line number with AT&T. This is the number I give out for everything that’s not personal: banks, credit cards, etc.
Keeping this number has been hard. I had to transfer from AT&T to Vonage. This was great: cheap long distance, voice mail to email, and the ability to bring it with me to California. But Vonage charges me per month and frankly I wasn’t getting much use out of it anyway. But I want to keep the number!
So I started another odyssey: porting my number to Google Voice.
This wasn’t trivial: Google will port numbers from some cell phone companies, but not from Vonage. So I had to go through an AT&T pre-paid cell phone. $15 for the SIM + $20 for the Google Voice port. And I get to get rid of this:
I’m happy to announce that the process is now complete and was successful! The only drawback: spam calls about the elections are now getting redirected to my cell phone. Time to deal with that.
The next iPhone’s screen size
There are lost of rumors about the next iPhone primarily centered around the screen. The leading rumor says that the screen will:
- Keep the same resolution (pixels per square inch) as the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S.
- Keep the same width: 640 pixels
- Increase the height: from 960 pixels to 1136 pixels
I think it’s plausible. Some ramifications of this rumor are:
- A new 16:9 screen ratio, like an HD TV, which is good for watching movies but could make some apps to feel awkward while in landscape mode.
- A lot of iPhone apps are already “elastic” when it comes to screen height. You can test this today by making a VoIP call and switching to another app. The menu bar doubles in size. Some apps will adjust just fine to that.
- But many other apps will need developer work in order to look good on the new screen.
- By making the screen longer but not wider, Apple could possibly keep the same phone size. In a world where Android phones are becoming ridiculously big, this would be a welcome example of Think Different. See artist rendition above.
- Because of the way LCD screens are manufactured, it makes sense to keep the same resolution as today’s phone and just cut the panels to a different size. Changing the resolution which would require a new production line which can be complicated and expensive.
One thing that most people don’t understand, however, is that making such a phone is not just as simple as slapping the parts together. Rather, it’s a balancing act. Increasing the screen size – all other things equal – implies higher power requirements thus shorter battery time. Apple will also want a faster processor, a thinner form factor, LTE, etc. Can it be done? Maybe – there are other variables: new thinner and lower power screen technology; more advanced chip manufacturing processes; a smaller Dock connector could all help.
We’ll see soon enough.
Today’s quote: Mark Zuckerberg
From an SMS conversation shortly after launching thefacebook.com:
There are now over 900 million “dumb fucks” signed up to Facebook and submitting all sorts of personal information. I’m one of them.
Source: Business Insider
End of the world?
I am stuck in standby hell (an airline term in which you are stuck in airports) in Orange. County. I am watching the Great Final and Rayados is losing by one goal. This is impossible, right? Vucetich cannot lose a Final! Is it the end of the world? Were the Mayans right? No, that can’t be.
And then I look outside and a dragon is devouring the sun! It is the end of the world! What’s happening?!
