December 2013 – Geek Practitioners Blog

Prime Twins

Jay December 31, 2013

This is fascinating. Which is funny, considering I got dragged kicking and screaming through the watered down calculus they offer people who aren’t math majors. Of course, that was partly a matter of it being mandated for my major, and partly my not seeing how it was necessary. On the other hand, in high school I almost got moved retroactively into the advanced math program because I was a geometry star in 10th grade. I tend to need to grok some of the principles before I can go on, and if I am disinterested, I won’t work at the nuts and bolts.

I recently taught my nine year old daughter what prime numbers are. She’s in third grade, being introduced to multiplication, except I introduced her to that long ago. She has become more interested in math at school, now that it’s gotten to that, except she’s already toying with division, and at home she and the younger two play with negative numbers and square roots.

What’s particularly interesting here, beside that I did not know there was a concept called twin primes, is that this touches on concepts in addition, that most basic of functions. I love that the solution is by a complete unknown, confusing the establishment by coming out of nowhere.

Uncategorized

This Is Comforting

Jay December 31, 2013

NSA has nearly complete backdoor access to Apple iPhone… somehow. I have never used one, but it make me even more inclined toward the alternatives.

Gadgets, Security

Then There’s This

Jay December 30, 2013

NSA spying goes so far as to intercept packages to plant backdoors or other monitoring methods. It’s not enough to be offline, or to be on darknet, or to be on an alternative to the Internet. All unconstitutional, depending on how judges rule, which for all we know could depend on what they have on the judges in question, shades of the speculation regarding the Roberrts contortions on ObamaCare. And that speculation preceded the NSA revelations, and even the IRS scandal. But I digress into the non-technical, non-geek realm, if not into one that should concern us all.

What gets me is trying to picture how they do the physical interception. You order from, say, Dell, who ships it, say, UPS, then somewhere in transit to you the package is intercepted? Whatever is going to done to it happens, then it is inserted back into transit? Without the shipper knowing? Hard to imagine.

Business, Computers, Gadgets, Security

Hacking MicroSD Cards

Jay December 30, 2013

More than you ever knew about MicroSD and other flash/storage cards, including the ease with which they can be compromised, and the shocking quality issues.

Gadgets, Security

Site Meter

Jay December 27, 2013

I have removed Site Meter upon learning that in some cases it feeds back a popup video from MySpace when your site loads.

Announcements

Nine Hardest Things…

Jay December 20, 2013

That programmers have to do. A decent listing. Most people have no idea. It’s especially bad when you can whip together a basic interface that demonstrates what an app can look like and, to some degree even if by faking it, what it can do, and people then take that as an indicator of how little time creating the full thing should take.

Business, Programming

It Looks The Part

Jay December 10, 2013

The first identified meteorite from Mercury has been identified. Mars meteorites are a dime a dozen by comparison.

Uncategorized

Dark Matter Detected?

Jay December 10, 2013

It appears dark matter may have been found. I suspect that once we fully enough understand and have access to dark matter and energy, it will be a massive breakthrough on par with, say, discovering and understanding electicity.

Uncategorized

Floppies

Jay December 8, 2013

I have hundreds of them, and was completely unaware in the mid-nineties that they were, if such was indeed true, already on their way out. I wasn’t seeing signs of that until at least 2000, but when it snowballed, it was over fast. But then, my first PC (as in IBM-compatible) had a 5 1/4″ floppy drive. Have a lot of those around still, too, if nothing like the several hundred – perhaps over a thousand – 3.5″ ones I accumulated. Some have nothing on them, but I bought them a hundred at a time at computer shows in the nineties when I found them at a good price.

All of this was brought to mind by this LudditeCare article, regarding not only the technical problems with ObamaCare, but the roots of the problem: The federal government being slow and creaky at adopting newer technology (NSA being an apparent exception). This is an old story. I’d thought there’d been improvement, but if so, perhaps it hasn’t been enough. Certainly development of the ACA site went more like a traditional technology purchase, rather than more nimbly. For an agency still to use floppies does not surprise me in the least. The biggest problems with them are increasing obsolescence of equipment that can read them, and their size limits. Text files, doc files, even more modest PDF files or graphics might still be viable on floppies in small numbers, but people have forgotten about being efficient with their electrons and magnetized bits.

Computers