Posted in anecdotes, gaming, introspection, left-brain, right-brain, society/culture/news at 11:45 am by Josh Peters
Rethinking Schools Online has a great piece about social justice, modeled via a Lego® brick economy. It’s a great read that really led me to think about how children develop their thinking. In times like this I’m happy I’m not a parent yet, but in any community sense similar mental mores are passed along and subconsciously created, modified and replaced constantly.
One of my “passions” would be playing board games. I especially enjoy games with a deeper level of economy and politics. I’m fascinated by what comes out of playing a game with friends: feelings of frustration at not getting your way, the joy of winning, the experience of helping someone else, etc. I think games really teach us a lot about ourselves, if we’re willing to pay attention.
Through my experience I’ve learned about my beliefs by playing games (both board games and physical competition). I used to put a lot of stock about myself as a person in how well I played games. That’s changed a bit, and I’m happy to say that I am in a position to teach some of the vague lessons I’ve learned to others in the same context. Gaming to me is an enjoyable time of self-discovery through an abstraction.
Of course, it’s not always this way, sometimes I just like playing Carcassonne.
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Posted in funny, society/culture/news at 10:35 pm by Josh Peters
A PETA activist is changing her name. I hope this gal knows what she’s doing. When she’s in her 60s and still known as FishingHurts will she still be happy about this decision?
And as for the “.com” part, ever hear of “dotcom”? Pronounced the same way, and I’m certain she’s doing this for the airtime on cable news anyway. Talking heads would have to promote the site then…
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Posted in best-practices, customer-relations, technology at 6:51 pm by Josh Peters
Friday I received notice via the mail that my cable company (Insight) had sold its cable modem assets to Comcast Cable.
A chill ran down my spine.
Insight had provided pretty good ‘net access for me these past years. They’ve been really easy to work with from a customer-relations standpoint. They’ve even been good at upgrading their system. At last check, I was getting a speedy (for America) 7-8 Mbps connection down and a 1-2 Mbps connection up.
Enter Comcast.
The very day I got the notice my connection began plodding along. Doing some snooping, I discovered a whopping 40% of my packets have been dropped.
I went from somewhere in the high 90s to the low 60s.
How can you run a business in this manner?
To make matters worse, the connection speed dropped dramatically as well. According to an impartial network diagnostic server (the same server I’ve used to generate the numbers above) I’m now getting a paltry (on average) 800 Kbps up and down. That is truly a huge quality of service drop.
Since I wasn’t a shareholder of Insight I cannot help but question the value of this switch. Thanks to the crappy service of Comcast, I not only hold Comcast in disregard, but Insight Cable as well.
How does consolidating internet access providers in this manner and setting up a cartel of providers help consumers? How is this at all good for capitalism?
Sadly I find no recourse but to approach the (hopefully) lesser or two evils and switch to Verizon’s DSL offering. Sadly there are only two choices if I want any wired connection beyond dial up.
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Posted in apple/mac/ipod at 4:26 pm by Josh Peters
See here.
Guess I need to start whitening the teeth, buying sneakers, and convert my station wagon into a hybrid.
In case it helps, I’m also a markup snob and a beer snob.
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Posted in http, web, work at 4:20 pm by Josh Peters
I’ve mentioned URL Rewriting twice before (here and here if you’re curious).
URL Rewriting is a great technology that makes Cool URIs much easier to obtain and manage. Essentially you run a filter on your web server that listens to everything and can interpret various expressions as different requests. That sounds pretty vague and complicated so here’s an example: RewriteRule /favicon.ico /images/favicon.ico [RP]. In this example, an incoming request for /favicon.ico will be redirected to /images/facicon.ico. This lets you keep a tidier filesystem without breaking links for people.
URL Rewriting does a lot more than mere redirects though. You can redesign paths to contain variables in them RewriteRule /images/(\w|\d+)/blank.png /spambot/identify.php?id=$1 is a way to uniquely identify someone with an alphanumeric id via a HTML image link. Like I said earlier, the example above can allow someone to be identified in an image linked in the body of an email.
Today I realized that I can use URL Rewriting to save me a lot of trouble switching between development and production environments.
In this case, we can match a condition of the request and see what server is referring the URL to my server. In other words, a link from http://josh-peters.name/ can be handled differently than a link from http://blog.josh-peters.name/ even though they both link to the same address (in this case, say http://example.org/foo).
The benefit is huge! I can push out the same markup to a development server as I do a production server and then simply redirect the development resources as needed. Currently I’m involved in a project where someone else is serving the pages and I provide the styling rules and scripting. I’ve setup the rewrite rules such that when someone comes from http://dev.example.com/ they are treated differently than from http://www.example.com/. No forking of the markup is needed, which translates into one less problem area for rolling out changes 
I love it when a plan comes together!
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Posted in politics/government, privacy/secrecy/security at 3:12 pm by Josh Peters
President Bush really, really wants the House of Representatives to make his administration’s illegal dealings with telecommunication companies okay.
According to CNN, he’s even pulling a Cheney, bringing out the “they’re still out there” trump card.
Of course our country still has enemies out there. We’re no angels.
The issue isn’t about whether or not we have enemies who want to destroy our country, Sir. It’s about keeping a cornerstone of our country in place: checks and balances. If you wanna spy on Americans we’ll even let you, given a proper due process and checks on your power.
Any why shouldn’t a company that works with the NSA to undermine the privacy of Americans be worried about liability. They’re doing something wrong!
In my opinion the number one thing this administration will be remembered for in history is a eroding of accountability in government. Enron, Lewis Libby, etc. are all examples of an ever broken system of keeping tabs on rogue elements in government. The next president will have a huge obstacle in front of them (especially if they’re a Democrat): should I continue to use the powers that Bush won for me, knowing full well there will be a huge amount of criticism?
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Posted in apple/mac/ipod at 11:48 am by Josh Peters
John Gruber continues his thinking a bit on iPhone’s lack of Flash.
My opinion on the matter concerns games. I believe that Apple has sampled the mobile phone Kool-Aid® and wants to control the marketplace of iPhone games.
Putting Flash on iPhone potentially kills off the market for games sold through the iTunes Music Store. Flash-based games are all over the ‘net, and unless the iPhone SDK offers something really promising Flash games would be way more compelling.
My bet is that Flash will eventually make its way to iPhone, but not for at least a year after the SDK is out there. Putting the SDK out first gives developers “One True Way” for doing iPhone development; Flash would be too competitive and would flood the marketplace with applications in way Apple couldn’t control them.
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Posted in PSA, privacy/secrecy/security at 2:58 pm by Josh Peters
Okay, here’s some advice with a slightly technical explanation of why you should put it into practice.
Planet Websecurity is reporting on the real-world example of a Cross-Site Request Forgery. In case you don’t wanna read it: in a nutshell a specifically crafted hyperlink can make bad things happen.
The advice you absolutely should put into practice: disable images in your HTML-based email. This refers not to someone emailing me an image to look at, but rather an embedded link to an image (think e-cards). Many mail readers allow you to set turn this on and then turn it off as needed.
It’s really easy for inline images and HTML mail in general to be spam-rific, if not dangerous. For example, a spam message can put a unique identifier into its URL and then use URL rewriting to extract it. Since you looked at the email, the image download is a “ping” to the spam server that your email address is indeed good and should be targeted in the future.
But that’s the least-bad thing that can happen.
Since images linked in an HTML message are automatically downloaded (just like a web page) a properly crafted image can be treated as an always followed attacking link. In the case that Symantec mentions, an image attacks a common router used in Mexico and changes its DNS settings to make your home network susceptible to phishing attacks.
This is bad news. Fortunately it’s dead-simple to have a very good amount of protection against this sort of attack:
- Set a non-standard password on your router.
- Disable automatic image downloads in your email.
In the future, hopefully smart browsers will disable (or at least filter) IP-based links by default.
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Posted in apple/mac/ipod at 9:43 am by Josh Peters
This weekend I upgraded my MacBook’s copy of QuickTime to version 7.4.1. After rebooting, the Bluetooth icon in my menu bar was crossed out. Further inspection in the details found in “About This Mac” reveal a lack of information under Bluetooth, as though there isn’t a card installed anymore.
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Posted in God/spirituality, introspection at 4:56 pm by Josh Peters
Tomorrow I’m teaching the third in a series of courses on communication and thinking. In a nutshell, the following is taught:
- Given some stimulus, identify the following
- The stimulus action
- Your underlying beliefs
- Your emotional response to those beliefs
- The action that the stimulus triggered as a result of the beliefs and emotions
- Taking ownership for those beliefs
- Learning how to change them as needed.
It’s a wonderful course created by the great folks at Equipping Ministries International.
I’m looking forward to teaching this course (as it’s something I’ve yet to teach before) and having the course said and done with I fully believe in the material, but I’m currently feeling a bit on the selfish side and really just want to spend the weekend sleeping in and taking an extended date with my wife. She’ll attend the class though, so it’ll be great having her there. Her presence really helps me to stay calm and do well in a teaching capacity.
Now I just have to finish my “pre-flight” checklist.
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