Brandt's Tumblr

"Microsoft is investigating new, public reports of a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 6 and..."

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:16:29 -0500

“

Microsoft is investigating new, public reports of a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7. Our investigation has shown that the latest version of the browser, Internet Explorer 8, is not affected. […]

At this time, we are aware of targeted attacks attempting to use this vulnerability.

”

- (emphasis added) Microsoft Security Advisory (981374): Vulnerability in Internet Explorer Could Allow Remote Code Execution. Bravo to all those IT departments keeping their employees on IE6/7. Bravo.

Intel's Core I7-980X Six-Core Benchmarked

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:01:00 -0500

Intel's Core I7-980X Six-Core Benchmarked:

Wait, how am I just now learning about Intel’s “Turbo Boost”? Since the MacBook Pro refresh will almost certainly include a processor with Turbo Boost (and be capable of using it), it’ll be my first computer with “Turbo” since the ’80s. Speaking of the ’80s, I may need to re-watch some Knight Rider, so that when I get my Turbo computer I’ll be ready to compute like the Hoff (see the video, cf turbo button).

Putting aside the kidding and corny name, Intel’s Turbo Boost is pretty slick.

"The fundamental problem with the quality of American medicine is that we’ve failed to view delivery..."

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:00:37 -0500

“The fundamental problem with the quality of American medicine is that we’ve failed to view delivery of health care as a science. The tasks of medical science fall into three buckets. One is understanding disease biology. One is finding effective therapies. And one is insuring those therapies are delivered effectively. That third bucket has been almost totally ignored by research funders, government, and academia. It’s viewed as the art of medicine. That’s a mistake, a huge mistake.”

- Annals of Medicine: The Checklist : The New Yorker. Excellent article. (But you’re gonna need Readability to get through it all.)

"In order to prevent an overloading of a single availability zone when everybody tries to run their..."

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:24:00 -0500

“In order to prevent an overloading of a single availability zone when everybody tries to run their instances in us-east-1a, Amazon has added a layer of indirection so that each account’s availability zones can map to different physical data center equivalents.”

- Matching EC2 Availability Zones Across AWS Accounts. Wow, I had no idea. And here I’ve been avoiding us-east-1a for just that reason!

Trailer for Logorama, the 2010 Oscar winner for best animated...

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:34:27 -0500

Trailer for Logorama, the 2010 Oscar winner for best animated short film. Buy the full movie on iTunes.

Diatoms, Butterfly Scales, and Spicules (via SEEDMAGAZINE.COM §...

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:03:00 -0500

Diatoms, Butterfly Scales, and Spicules (via SEEDMAGAZINE.COM § The Pre-Electric Slide)

Really, Amazon? It’s hard to actually use your cloud...

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:37:00 -0500

Really, Amazon? It’s hard to actually use your cloud computing capacity if I can only upload my code at 1.77KB/s. It’d be faster for me to use dial-up! Any chance you could attach a modem to my server for me?

"If you’ve got a model where revenue is tied only to web page views, switching to full-content RSS..."

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:26:00 -0500

“

If you’ve got a model where revenue is tied only to web page views, switching to full-content RSS feeds will hurt, at least in the short term. The problem, I say, isn’t with full-content RSS feeds, but rather with a business model that hinges solely on web page views. The precious commodity that we, as publishers, have to offer advertisers is the attention of our readers. Web page views are a terribly inaccurate, if not outright misleading, metric for attention. Subscribers to a full-content RSS feed are among the readers paying the most attention, but generate among the least web page views.

A reader asking for a full-content RSS feed is a reader who wants to pay more attention to what you publish. There have to be ways to thrive financially from that.

”

- Daring Fireball: Attention Is the Real Resource. This reminds me of someone I used to work with, who (despite my being overworked) didn’t want me to become more productive because we billed by the hour, so a boost to my productivity would hurt the company’s revenue. It saddens me when people shy away from opportunity just because it doesn’t fit their existing model. I’m always happy to find well-reasoned pieces like this to refer them to.

avalanche (murmurhash). Wow, that’s a striking difference...

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:13:06 -0500

avalanche (murmurhash). Wow, that’s a striking difference between FNV and modified FNV.

"Under the circumstances, you would never know that Americans living in the United States were in..."

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:15:00 -0500

“Under the circumstances, you would never know that Americans living in the United States were in vanishingly little danger from terrorism, but in significant danger driving to the mall; or that alcohol, tobacco, E. coli bacteria, fire, domestic abuse, murder, and the weather present the sort of potentially fatal problems that might be worth worrying about, or even changing your behavior over, or perhaps investing some money in. Terrorism, not so much.”

- (emphasis added) Fear Inc.. He goes on to a spot-on critique of Obama’s response to the underwear bomber.

Pedigree Dogs ad shot 1000 FPS using the Phantom camera

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 21:56:42 -0500

Pedigree Dogs ad shot 1000 FPS using the Phantom camera

(from the CLR errata). How quaint. In a way, I miss those days.

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:47:23 -0500

(from the CLR errata). How quaint. In a way, I miss those days.

Humble Pied.

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:30:00 -0500

Humble Pied.:

Nicely presented interviews (about design advice, but that’s not the point). They’re well put together visually (once you see it, it seems so obvious) and the format suits the content (short and to the point).

"HI. You’re using libxml2 version 2.6.16 which is over 4 years old and has plenty of bugs. We..."

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:38:00 -0500

“HI. You’re using libxml2 version 2.6.16 which is over 4 years old and has plenty of bugs. We suggest that for maximum HTML/XML parsing pleasure, you upgrade your version of libxml2 and re-install nokogiri. If you like using libxml2 version 2.6.16, but don’t like this warning, please define the constant I_KNOW_I_AM_USING_AN_OLD_AND_BUGGY_VERSION_OF_LIBXML2 before requring nokogiri.”

- Best error message I’ve seen in a while. Now if I could just convince my client’s hosting company to upgrade from Centos 4…

"When visiting encrypted pages, you have to allow Opera to get in the middle to decrypt and..."

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:29:31 -0500

“When visiting encrypted pages, you have to allow Opera to get in the middle to decrypt and re-encrypt (via Opera Software), breaking what’s meant to be an end-to-end security chain. You need to ask yourself if you need another potential opaque layer of insecurity between you and, say, your bank account?”

- The case against Opera Mini on the iPhone. As they say on 30Rock, that’s a deal breaker.

Mark Simonson Studio / Notebook: Beneath the Volley of the...

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:51:52 -0500

Mark Simonson Studio / Notebook: Beneath the Volley of the Fonts. Nice.

Snake Oil?. A summary of scientific evidence for popular health...

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 14:43:39 -0500

Snake Oil?. A summary of scientific evidence for popular health supplements.

"We live in a unique time in our society: Cameras are everywhere, but we can still see them. Ten..."

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 10:30:41 -0500

“

We live in a unique time in our society: Cameras are everywhere, but we can still see them. Ten years ago, cameras were much rarer than they are today. Ten years from now, they’ll be so small, you won’t even notice them.
[…]
If universal surveillance were the answer, lots of us would have moved to the former East Germany. If surveillance cameras were the answer, camera-happy London, with something like 500,000 of them at a cost of $700 million, would be the safest city on the planet.

We didn’t, and it isn’t, because surveillance and surveillance cameras don’t make us safer. The money spent on cameras in London, and in cities across America, could be much better spent on actual policing.

”

- Spy cameras won’t make us safer

A sample from “Emily Howell”, a computer program...

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 01:55:00 -0500

A sample from “Emily Howell”, a computer program written by David Cope to compose original music using rules extracted from extensive analysis of the works of classical composers.

Amazon Web Services Blog: Amazon SimpleDB Consistency Enhancements

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 11:25:44 -0500

Amazon Web Services Blog: Amazon SimpleDB Consistency Enhancements:

Contains a nice example of how this enables optimistic concurrency control. If you’re not clear on why you need to care about all this, follow the links in Choosing Consistency for background info, especially on the CAP theorem.