even more windows are flying by...

By Matthias Dittgen 14 Feb 2001

So if you have been a beta tester for MacOS, would you do beta testing for M$ windows xp? Probably I am late, but I just recognized that there is another windows version to come…
“built on the enhanced Windows 2000 engine”….I guess they have a lot to enhance :) and why don’t they enhance the former versions right? Windows98 becomes pretty usuable with the time, not that stable of course….so they only should make it more stable.
But I don’t really want to heat an operating systems discussion here! I just wanted to add that it was not possible to register for the preview programm with ie5.5….I had to use mozilla, that’s cruel!

china pictures

By anders pearson 11 Feb 2001

you’ve probably noticed that i’ve been rather delinquent about posting sketches lately. it’s not that i haven’t been drawing (so far i’ve gone to all my classes this semester so i’ve had plenty of doodle-time). i just haven’t scanned any in.

instead, i’ve been staying an hour or two late at work whenever i have time and scanning in photos from my trips to china. i decided that with my luck, i’d probably lose the physical copies eventually so i figured that i ought to get them all scanned in so i can keep digital copies backed up on a couple different machines and make sure i never lose them. with that in mind i had my parents send me my albums and i’ve been slowly scanning them all.

i’ve got basically three sections:

1999 trip

pictures from tucker and i’s trip in may of 1999. i’ve still got another 20 or so pictures to scan in from this one, but it’s mostly there.

1997 trip (group pictures)

these are sort of the “best of” pictures that were traded around amongst the people on my 1997 fall semester in Nanjing after the trip. all taken by various people. this set is all scanned in.

1997 (my pictures)

my own photos from the 1997 trip. i’m scanning them all in (even the boring, bad ones); got about 180 to scan in all. only a few of them in so far.

true enlightenment

By jp 11 Feb 2001

“It’s a myth that bats do not have eyes. Bats do have eyes. It’s just that they don’t use them for navigational purposes. Instead, they send and receive high frequency waves to detect obstacles and to guide them along.

That’s why I like to shoot them.”

I have no idea where this came from. but I wanted to share.

information overload

By anders pearson 10 Feb 2001

my XML/RSS newsfeeds are running again. updated every hour on the hour.

really online

By Matthias Dittgen 10 Feb 2001

I am really happy! :-) My parents got now a DSL line with a flatrate combined, which makes it possible to be online without thinking of money…. Lucky me!!! Now I can enjoy the internet at home! At university, of course, it was possible to me before, but I don’t like those computer pools where people look over your shoulders…
Now I’ll get into things like ICQ (perhaps) and can download sources for my linux whenever I need, no longer running around with those ZIPdisks to catch things I wrote on a list.
But, poor me, napster doesn’t work, don’t know why…
So a question to our community here: Is the internet important to you? Why? Why not? What do you like, dislike? Can you imagine to live without the internet?
Curious to read your answers!!!!

drugs for bugs

By anders pearson 10 Feb 2001

Lani once again comes through with an excellent site on pesticides. it’s worth a visit if only for the graphic at the top of the spaced out insects (pun intended).

REVIEW: Visor Platinum

By anders pearson 09 Feb 2001

i got my Visor Platinum this last monday and have been playing with it continuously ever since.

i’ve never owned a PDA before (unless you count the little electronic addressbook that i won on trivia night a couple years back. i don’t) so i really don’t have much experience to compare it to. i should also mention that i am, by nature, a very unorganized person (i nearly failed out of my junior high math class not because i found the material hard (quite the opposite) but because i kept forgetting to turn in my homework (i did it; it just never occurred to me to actually hand it in so it could be graded)), so it’s probably about time i got one of these things to try to straighten my act out.

first off, it really is nice looking. the visors in general aren’t quite as aesthetically designed as the palm V’s but that metallic finish actually works for it. physically, it’s very well engineered; all the details are taken care of. the plastic cover snaps on over the back when it’s not guarding the screen, the buttons have depressions so you can hit them easily with the stylus, the tip of the stylus screws off to reveal a little pin that will let you hit the reset switch, and the other end of the stylus screws off to reveal a micro screwdriver just in case you feel like taking the damn thing apart while you’re at it. overall it feels solid; the weight is just enough that it’s comfortable without really being particularly heavy.the leatherette case it comes with is basically useless though; it’s difficult to slide the visor out of it with one hand and it doesn’t have any sort of belt clip or other mechanism to attach it to anything. all it seems to do is keep the plastic shell from getting scratched (like i really care). so i’ll probably buy a decent holder for it soon.

everyone i’ve talked to has told me, and now i finally have to agree: palmOS is really easy to use and very well designed from a UI perspective. they really put a lot of thought into how people would actually use a PDA and designed everything accordingly. i’m also pretty impressed with Graffiti. it only took a couple minutes to pick up enough that i could start using it and i’ve been getting steadily faster ever since (i suspect that the years i spent writing chinese probably helped me out a bit; by now i’m used to writing things with the order and direction of the stroke being important).

the thing that really surprised me though was how friggin cool the IR port is. i hadn’t even thought about it before i got it but, damn, it’s neat. i spent the first hour i had it gleefully beaming cards around the office. one of my coworkers made the mistake of beaming me a game called “dopewars” which will probably be my downfall (in the game you’re a drug dealer running around NYC buying and selling drugs trying to make enough of a profit fast enough that the loan sharks don’t come break your legs. it’s… um.. addictive).

i was also pretty happy that i got it to synch up with my linux box without any trouble at all (although so far, only with the serial cradle that i picked up for it). aside from periodically flaking out and crashing, kpilot has been pretty good to me. i have yet to try the gnome-pilot programs but i probably won’t bother since i figure that most of what i do aside from backups will be through conduits that i write myself (oh, i’ve got plans, i do).

the backlight does suck though. it’s got that weird inverted kind of backlight. i don’t like it much at all. but i guess it uses less power than a normal backlight so i’ll live with it.

so next i have to find a good wireless modem module for it and i’ll be in business.

anyone have any suggestions on good accessories that are worth getting (prasanth mentioned something about little stickers that you put on the screen to keep it from wearing out) and where to get them?

more wearables

By anders pearson 09 Feb 2001

yesterday, i met Greg Priest-Dorman at a demo/lecture he was giving on his work on wearable computers here at columbia.

really interesting guy. he apparently has a neurological order similar to severe dyslexia; he didn’t learn the alphabet until he was in his twenties. he first got into wearables because he wanted to be able to have his computer read to him (via the text-to-speech capabilities of emacspeak (which he currently runs the developer mailing list for)) while he went about his ordinary business. once he had this basically working, he realized that he needed simple controls for pausing and repeating sections etc. that necessitated some kind of input device that he could also wear. this evolved over the years into his own homemade chorded keyboard. his rig now also includes a display as well.

he is a big proponent of DIY wearables and spoke mostly about how to construct a rig using scavanged or off the shelf parts. he recommended using pc104 boards for the main system, powered by camcorder batteries, displayed through a Tekgear M1 head-mounted display and using a chorded keyboard built from a scavenged standard keyboard. he also ripped on the commercially available xybernaut wearables for being bulky, uncomfortable, expensive and not hackable and the twiddler chorded keyboard for being generally difficult to use.

he has also designed a wearable kit for charmed technologies that you can either download the specs for (for free) or purchase from them (for about $2000 with no peripherals). so for about as much as a decent laptop, you can get a relatively lo-tek but fairly hackable wearable rig. hmm….

barnication

By tuck 09 Feb 2001

is it possible to sit still enough (and long enough) to have barnicles attach themselves to your body?

i recently re-experienced how friggin’ hard and strong they are (my ass, primarily) and was struck with the idea of organic armor.

i pondered it before. but now i want to know why i haven’t tried to barnicate my knucklels, shins and elbows.

why?

why?

have you fucked with a monopoly today?

By anders pearson 08 Feb 2001

i have.

a while back, i mentioned that IE was broken with respect to displaying images that had html in their comment field. what i didn’t mention at the time was that it was somewhat worse than that. IE5 on the mac not only didn’t display the image, but it would actually render the html, complete with javascript. this becomes a bit of a problem when you run a site that allows people to upload images but puts a lot of effort into removing harmful javascript from untrusted html. no admin in their right mind would think to scan images for javascript. if you remember all the fuss from a few months ago about “Cross Site Scripting” vulnerabilities or have a good imagination, you’ll see that this is actually a relatively severe problem.

anyway, when my coworker and i discovered it back in august or so, we got distracted and never really went beyond the “hmmm… we should probably tell someone about this” stage.

then, the other day, someone on a webdesign mailing list was complaining about IE ignoring mimetypes and i replied with an “oh, just let me tell you about IE ignoring mimetypes…” rant in which i mentioned this vulnerability we’d discovered. Kee Hinckley took it upon himself to write a quick perl script using this vulnerability to exploit a hotmail account (they work pretty hard to remove javascript from email coming in but — surprise, surprise — they don’t check images).

so, with a proof-of-concept exploit for a large site (one of probably thousands that would be vulnerable in various ways), we decided that it should be written up and posted to bugtraq.

so, if you use IE5 on the mac, IE4 on windows, (maybe other browsers too, we haven’t done too much testing yet) or run a website that allows users to upload images, you should take the necessary precautions. see the bugtraq link above for details.