Staying curious, one idea at a time.
Zombies are impossible to avoid in this day and age, even (maybe especially) online. Anyone who maintains a publicly accessible server and pays even passing attention to their security logs can attest to the repeated brute force login attempts for everything from SSH to WordPress admin panels. Having a strong SSH password, disabling root logins, [ ]
My school webmail uses Outlook Web Access (OWA) by default to access Microsoft Exchange 2010. Although this is clearly suboptimal, I do find myself using OWA occasionally when I'm not in my office and need to quickly send an email (I don't particularly like drafting emails on my phone). Unfortunately, I would randomly get the [ ]
Most modern Listserv software are pretty good about making unsubscriptions relatively painless. For most reputable mailing lists, gone are the days when unsubscribing meant having to email sometimes inattentive administrators and asking to be taken off. Unfortunately, while the automated mailing list managers usually operate without a hitch, when errors do occur, it can sometimes [ ]
I originally wrote this op-ed this summer for A Global Village, a student run journal on international affairs at Imperial College aimed at a non-specialist audience. The full issue can be found here. Obviously, the article is now a bit dated, and some figures are missing from this version (see original nicely formatted PDF). Although [ ]
I originally wrote this op-ed last winter for A Global Village, a student run journal on international affairs at Imperial College aimed at a non-specialist audience. The full issue can be found here. Obviously, the article is now a bit dated, and some figures are missing from this version (see original nicely formatted PDF). Ranging [ ]
I run nearly everything from the terminal, including my mail client (mutt), music player (cmus), custom simulation software (Python/Matlab/C), and some hacked together daemon-like mail and server scripts my browser (Firefox) is the only always-on GUI application. Thus, GNU screen is an essential tool in my workflow, since it allows for easy multiplexing and detaching of [ ]
Human minds are great for many things, but picking random numbers is not one of them1. At one point, these sorts of cognitive biases were used to support arguments for determinism, to the point where some experimental psychologists even undertook to train subjects to produce statistically random-looking output2. Determinism is beyond the scope of this [ ]
Update 2012-12-09: Facebook changed their URI mangling code, so this probably won't work as written anymore. However, a similar scheme should still work if you take the time to read the FB source code to figure out how to remove the new mangling code. (I no longer actively use FB, so I haven't updated the [ ]