Frederick's Timelog - News, technology, life, and more.

Rick Perry’s university transcript

August 30, 2011 by Frederick | Comments Off

Rick Perry’s worst marks

Trigonometry (D), organic chemistry I (D), organic chemistry II (F!), organic chem lab (D), Shakespeare (D), economics (D), Keats (D), “writing for professional men” (D)…

How did he ever get a Bachelor’s degree in animal science?

Drawing connections

It’s no surprise Governor Perry denies evolution (“a theory that’s out there”) and global warming (“a contrived phony mess”). The lack of training in economics might also explain his ridiculous stance towards the role of an independent Federal Reserve and its chairman.

Given his educational record, one might speculate that his lacklustre efforts in university translate to his cost-cutting approaches to public/higher education in the state of Texas. 61.3% of high school students graduate? That’s terrible! One shudders to think of what might occur if he were president.

Organic chem must have been a requirement for his program of study. One wonders why he didn’t switch to a program a little more appropriate for his aptitudes.

Dawkins’s rebuttal

Elegantly and poignantly written:

There is nothing unusual about Governor Rick Perry. Uneducated fools can be found in every country and every period of history, and they are not unknown in high office. (Richard Dawkins, emphasis mine)

Dawkins is the author of several titles, such as The Greatest Show on Earth and The Selfish Gene. Part of his rebuttal to Perry’s mis-characterization of evolution as “just a theory” is an observation that is unfortunately true: while the United States is home to millions of intelligent beings, some of whom are undoubtedly the geniuses of today, some voters inexplicably seem to prefer unqualified, anti-intelligent candidates!

New York Times editorial

Krugman of the New York Times points out in “Republicans Against Science” that “the G.O.P. [...] is becoming the ‘anti-science party.’” I highly recommend reading this article, if only for the brilliant realization at the end: (recall that The Wall Street Journal is a conservative media outlet operated by Murdoch’s News Corp, which is also responsible for Fox News)

Lately, for example, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has gone beyond its long-term preference for the economic ideas of “charlatans and cranks” — as one of former President George W. Bush’s chief economic advisers famously put it — to a general denigration of hard thinking about matters economic. Pay no attention to “fancy theories” that conflict with “common sense,” the Journal tells us. Because why should anyone imagine that you need more than gut feelings to analyze things like financial crises and recessions?
Now, we don’t know who will win next year’s presidential election. But the odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect. (emphasis mine)

Along Yonge Street

August 11, 2011 by Frederick | 4 Comments

For various reasons, I walked down Yonge Street today from Finch Avenue right down to Lake Ontario.

Accounting for stops and detours, and the little walk I took at the lake shore, Google Maps estimates a 17.4 kilometre trip, or 3 hours and 32 minutes of walking time if I had walked continuously.

Timeline

According to the audio clips I recorded in Evernote, text messages and instant messaging chats…

10:00 exactly — Arrived at Finch Avenue & Yonge Street
10:14 — spent almost exactly 15 minutes at Staples, bought a pack of pens
10:37 — bought a 1.5 L bottle of water from Shoppers Drug Mart
10:40 — reached government office and got out at 10:45
10:58 — took a detour around the Yonge/401 intersection because that’s how the sidewalk works on the East side of Yonge Street
The next half hour-ish — walked through sparsely populated area with huge houses, hills upon hills, and large open green spaces/parks
11:38 or so — arrived at Starbucks in an affluent uptown area and ordered a light ice green tea lemonade; by the way, the wifi signal is really weak at this place

Light ice green tea lemonade from a certain Starbucks

Amount of ice left after drinking a light ice green tea lemonade

Amount of ice left over -- not bad!

11:57 — observed person walking by with a Harvard T-shirt
12:21 — reached Elginton Avenue & Yonge Street and at last observed lots and lots of people
12:27 — light drizzle; first hints of impending rain
12:50 — reached St. Clair Avenue & Yonge Street; things are looking okay for a short moment
12:55 — suddenly heavy rain begins; ran a distance holding umbrella before pausing under a bridge
13:00 — reached another Starbucks; ordered a sweetened iced coffee with soy milk that came in this cup:

Is that blood?

13:25 — okay, enough rest (although still hungry!); the rain stopped a while ago, so I returned to walking down Yonge Street
13:35 — reached Bloor Street & Yonge Street; this is such a vibrant part of the city
13:44 — reached Wellesley Street & Yonge Street
13:50 — passed College Park and got to the construction site at Gerrard Street & Yonge Street; the crowd is getting bigger
13:56 — beginning of a one-hour–long visit to the World’s Biggest Bookstore and a nifty little place called BMV Books right next to it

Greenpeace supporters riding a huge tandem bicycle

A not unordinary sight on a Toronto street

A whole row of APA Publication Manuals!

After I left the bookstore around 14:55, I stopped keeping track of where I was at given points in time. After eating lunch, I proceeded down Yonge Street, used my receipt from a previous Starbucks purchase to buy a light ice black tea lemonade for $2 + tax…

… and walked all the way to the lake, arriving at around 15:40.

Lake shore at Queen's Quay & Yonge Street

I walked around a little near the lakefront area before returning home. There’s a video on Google+ if you’re a friend.

Reflections

Taking this walk through Toronto allowed me to appreciate the city once more for its diversity, its liveliness and the rapidity with which things are changing. This is still a city I love and one to which I hope to return.

It was interesting to note the pockets of activity along Yonge Street: a busy block in North York from North York Centre to Sheppard; an uptown district north of Lawrence; a heavily business-oriented area around Eglinton; general shopping facilities between St. Clair & Bloor; an area of total randomness south of Bloor; huge crowds south of College; even denser population moving about the Eaton Centre; a banking/corporate region near King… Each region gradually faded into the next, with some exceptions. (It was uneventful in some of the areas—especially between the 401 and Lawrence; there aren’t a lot of buildings around in those parts.)

If you’re a Torontonian (or someone who lives North of Toronto) with a day to spare (preferably a weekday…), consider trying this walk. Make sure you bring sunglasses (I forgot them), an umbrella just in case (I had to use mine), sunscreen, water (I bought a bottle and a bunch of drinks) and probably some snacks (I brought along chips).

(By the way, this entire walk is a lot more fun when one has someone with whom to talk! So if I know you in real life, we can try doing another one of these this month!)

Toronto is a city worth exploring. This is just the beginning.

When Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud goes down — even just one region — it takes Reddit, Quora, Netflix, Foursquare, Instagram, and many other sites down. It’s like part of the Internet goes dark.

At least that part of the Internet doesn’t include Twitter.

via TechCrunch

Good Life, eh?

August 4, 2011 by Frederick | Comments Off

I was at a Passport Canada office today, waiting for essentially two hours for my two minutes of attention. (Seriously, it took that long to get from C360 to C364… and all I really did was fill out my address and sign a slip…)

Anyways. That’s not the point of this post.

When I used to work for my local municipality, one of the regulations was that the radio equipment could only be set on certain approved stations. This made sense, because hundreds of patrons (many of them families and young kids) certainly would have objected to hip hop music riddled with vulgar and offensive lyrics.

I thought Passport Canada, a federal government agency, would have similar rules. And I think they do follow them. It’s just that radios are sometimes lax with how family-friendly their songs are.

Good Life by OneRepublic is one of my favourite songs. Compared with some things I experimented with a few years ago, it’s actually not so far a departure from my old classical preferences. Except, of course, the part about the B.S. that don’t work now.

I enjoy this song. A lot. Really. And this is hardly profanity.

But does it really belong in a public waiting room where hundreds of English-speaking patrons come and go?

July 8, 2011
by Frederick
Comments Off

How I organize my books

I keep all of my books organized in Librarian Pro by Koingo Software. Admittedly, the Windows port is a sort-of-slow version of the Mac software, but it’s usable and rather pretty.

The Librarian Pro software I use to catalogue books

Along with this, I use a USB barcode scanner to import items by their EAN/UPC barcodes. Librarian Pro connects to Amazon’s APIs and loads book metadata based on that barcode.

The operative end of a laser barcode scanner

After importing a book, I make sure to tag it with a code of my own, specific to my collection. For that, I have these stickers:

Barcode stickers as book tags

And voila, an electronically-catalogued library of books awaits. It’s pretty easy to add location information to the metadata to help look for books, as well as generate HTML pages to show off or sell used books.

Mongolian orphan delivers heartfelt performance

May 30, 2011 by Frederick | 1 Comment

This is a clip from a China’s Got Talent, also known as “中国达人秀”. For those of you who don’t speak/read Chinese, that’s okay—I’ll summarize the boy’s backstory (and the song is in some Mongolian dialect anyways, so few in the audience actually know the lyrics).

Major take-aways (Mandarin speakers skip my notes):

This boy comes from the Mongolian plains.
The boy’s dream is, translated literally, to invent a (figurative?) ink of which drops can turn the ground into vast plains of greenery.
When asked what he’s singing, he responded that the title of the song is (and I paraphrase), Mother in My Dreams. (the song has a distinct ethnic feel)
“Then, where is your mom?”
“Mom is in heaven.” (audience gasps)
“And your dad?”
“Dad also died, in a car accident.” (more gasps)

In the middle of the performance, one of the people on stage reflects, “this song… we don’t need to know the words, because you should feel what he’s singing.”
He’s a little off-tune when asked to sing a cappella but soon finds his key. In an emotional moment, this is understandable.

May 8, 2011
by Frederick
2 Comments

Windows Live Hotmail is now authenticating DKIM

Hotmail inbox screenshot

I haven’t seen anything published about this yet, but I noticed today that Windows Live Hotmail seems to be authenticating incoming e-mail using DKIM in addition to Sender ID.

Background

In the past, Hotmail has verified the authenticity of incoming e-mail through Microsoft’s proprietary version of Sender Policy Framework called Sender ID. Both of these projects were designed to verify that the computer sending the message, as identified by the originating IP address, is authorized to send e-mail on behalf of the named sender.

A typical SPF policy, specified through a TXT record in DNS, might say

v=spf1 ip4:208.97.132.0/24 -all

This means that only IP addresses in the 208.97.132.1–208.97.132.254 range are allowed to send e-mail on behalf of this domain. (The Sender ID policy would look similar, but starting with spf2.0/pra.)

Hotmail’s policy has been to verify all incoming e-mail using the Sender ID framework. This theoretically reassures users that authenticated e-mail definitely comes from the named sender, reducing the likelihood of header forgery. If an e-mail does not pass Sender ID verification (softfail) and has other signs of being forged, it will likely be classified as junk.

A valid e-mail is marked with these headers:

X-SID-Result: Pass
X-AUTH-Result: PASS

If the organization’s policy uses the strictest policy (-all), and the message does not pass Sender ID validation, and the organization has submitted its Sender ID records to Microsoft, invalid e-mail sent to @live.ca and @live.com domains are rejected. As far as I am aware, this protection is not applied to @hotmail.com accounts.

From SPF to DKIM

The problem with SPF is that it doesn’t verify much. All it tells us is that an e-mail comes from the right computer—not that an intermediate server hasn’t tampered with it. In addition, SPF only really validates the From: or Sender: headers.

Besides, many large service providers cannot implement a strict SPF/Sender ID policy because users may be sending e-mail through other servers. (For example, I might use my ISP’s SMTP servers to send e-mail from my Windows Live Hotmail address; a strict SPF/Sender ID policy would mark those e-mails as junk.)

DKIM, however, encompasses the contents of the message body, in addition to the headers. It does not necessarily require the e-mail to come from a certain IP address. Using public key cryptography, it allows organizations to take responsibility for sent e-mails by verifying that the e-mail came from an authorized source, similar to the way secure servers connect over TLS/SSL.

Implementing DKIM means that all outgoing e-mails are signed using a private key; the signatures are then checked by compatible software against the public keys published in DNS. Each domain can have multiple DKIM keys, allowing multiple sending systems to sign outgoing e-mails independently.

A sample DKIM signature looks like this:

DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed;
        d=frederickding.com; s=google;
        h=domainkey-signature:mime-version:from:date:message-id:subject:to
         :content-type;
        bh=b3wR4p4G21l92tc0ahioopi7atMwDp2wkaQb/uOL65E=;
        b=YJ6nD3Nx5hgwRhYppb/n2g5lQxA5jzFvYEJ0dR4dtkRFv14GVJWStQXwwZryGuujC/
         v4ve5ZE3ZAEAtv5hCj99ZLAfR52rskpbitso+106M8uQvryLyuLSnX1mrk6JaDFLMr8V
         qHmCEZUF5+cnWEYSwlLo1T8hntgN28hj8OyJY=

DKIM actually requires a lot more work for organizations to implement, as it requires additional DNS lookups and (perhaps) expensive cryptographic calculations. A decade ago, it would have been unfeasible to implement this on an organization as large as Windows Live Hotmail.

Hotmail today

Today, the inexpensive cost of processing power makes it possible for Hotmail to validate DKIM. Yahoo! has been doing this since the beginning, as it was the source of this technology. Gmail, too, has been validating DKIM for some time. (Both Yahoo! and Gmail sign outgoing e-mail with DKIM signatures, and Google has made this possible through its Google Apps service for companies as well.)

While Windows Live Hotmail has always validated Sender ID, today I noticed the addition of a new e-mail header:

X-DKIM-Result: Pass

This is good news.

Conclusion

To summarize a post’s worth of babbling, this means that Windows Live Hotmail is taking additional steps to combat e-mail forgery, phishing and spam. A step forward for everybody.