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Happy Birthday, “Amazing Grace” Hopper

Amazing GraceWho is “Amazing Grace” Hopper, you ask? Only the coolest old broad in the history of computer science! She wrote the world’s first program compiler, pioneered “human readable” programming code, designed the first widely accepted programming language (COBOL), championed the concept of network computing (the internet’s grandpa), and coined the term “debugging” when she found a literal bug in her computer. Long story short, every computer programmer in the world (including me) owes their livelihood to Amazing Grace.

In addition to making my job possible, she served her country faithfully for decades! She volunteered for the U.S. Navy during WWII and kept at it until she was involuntarily forced to retire at the tender young age of 79.

I really do like this lady. Sadly, she died during my senior year in high school and I didn’t learn about her and her amazing life until after I had graduated college. What I would give for one of here “nanosecond” wires!

Rather than retell her whole story here, just go read her wiki page.

[Added bonus! Found this link on Twitter. Amazing Grace on the Letterman show.]

What’s the Password?! Seriously?!

It’s been years since I posted about secure passwords. If you’re a “new viewer,” please go read it! In fact, even if you’ve read it before, go read it again! YES! NOW!! (Don’t worry. I’ll wait.)

The one thing I would add to that article today is this:

7 – Make your passwords as long as allowed.

Password guessing tools are getting smarter and faster all the time. Too many websites don’t defend against “brute force” attacks (where a hacker can guess thousands of passwords a minute and only has to be right once).

Now, keep in mind, that first post was from 2010. One of the articles referenced was from 2008. The other one doesn’t even exist any more. So, surely by now, things have improved, right? People have finally learned how to secure their web identity, right?!

Well, as it turns out, no. Not at all.

Just this week, it came out that some two million passwords were recently stolen, including some from Facebook, Twitter, and Google (GMail and G+). So, change your passwords today! Seriously!! (I just did.)

What’s worse is what we learned from the stolen data. Passwords are just as stupid and weak now as they were five years ago! Of the two million passwords stolen, over 15,000 of them were “123456”… ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! The article goes on to compare password strength from the new data to password data from 2006 and it shows that passwords are getting worse, not better.

Back in 2006 the top ten most common passwords comprised only 0.9% of the total count. Today, in 2013, they add up to 2.4%.

I know this blog is usually funny and far from serious and that is my goal. But in all seriousness, please be smart about your passwords. The internet is a truly awesome tool. But if not used correctly, intelligently, and carefully, it can ruin your finances, your relationships, and, even your health and well-being.

[Wow. That got way to serious for a minute there.]

And remember to incorporate either “fart” or “poop” in your passwords at all times.

[There. That’s better.]

I’m Such A Geek

Tick, tock, tick, tock… 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, NOW!!

9:10 11/12/13

There! Congratulations! You have experienced the penultimate sequential date of this century!! Isn’t that exciting? No? Really? Just me, huh? Oh well. You should know how I feel about these things after so many similar posts.

05:06 07/08/09
12:34:56 7/8/9
09:09:09, 09/09/09
11:11:11 11/11/11

And I’m sure there are more, but I don’t have TIME to find them.

But just think! Next year, on 12/13/14 it will be the LAST ONE… unless I and this blog live to see 1/2/3, 2103 that is. Oh Lord, please don’t make me live that long!

And the first person who comments that I should have posted at 8:9:10 11/12/13… shut up. It’s already bothering me. But I was driving to work and I *NEVER* blog and drive!

On White Board Quips

It’s Monday. And there’s a new post on my blog. That can only mean one thing: Time for a new white board quip!

I hate being bi-polar. It’s awesome!

But where did this all start? Well, you could click “More” under the WBQotW in the side bar, scroll to the bottom of the page, and then click “Older Posts” about fifty times (yes, really) and read my explanation on WBQotW #1. (Or I could just give you the link.) But that doesn’t really tell the whole story.

Yes the actual WBQotW (in its weekly format) started in a lowly intern’s cubicle at Hewlett Packard in 1998. But the practice of writing off-beat, puzzling, and sometimes funny quotes on a white board actually took root a bit earlier.

In the spring of 1993 (Holy Alzheimer’s, Batman! That was exactly 20 years ago!), I was attending Amarillo College and shared several classes with my childhood friend, Galyn Black. We took Calculus II in a newer class room, the first I’d ever seen with a white board. (As opposed to a chalk board. Yes, I am a dinosaur. You children can find out about chalk boards on Wikipedia along side cassette tapes, Milli Vanilli, and other aspects of the late Cretaceous period.)

At this same time, Galyn and I had become fans of the original Ren & Stimpy show on Nickelodeon. If you’ve seen any of this relic of the early 90’s, you’ll know it’s little more than a 20 minute string of nonsensical quips strung together with improbable plots and offensive characters. So, of course, I loved it.

For some reason, Galyn and I were always the first two to arrive to the class room. My compulsion to spoil empty white spaces and my fascination with the dry erase miracle (both of which are still important parts of my personality) left me powerless. I HAD to write on the board. I think it was probably Galyn’s idea to use Ren & Stimpy quotes. We would pick the most odd-ball, confoundingly out-of-context quote we could think of from a recent show and leave it on the board. Then, when the rest of the class would arrive, we would swear it was already on the board when we walked in. We were never caught.

Glorious.

Scariest Thing You’ll See Today: Mind Controlled Robots… REALLY!

I’m really torn about whether or not I believe this… and whether or not I want to believe it.

Some college kids have figured out (it would seem) how to control a drone with your BRAIN!

Game over, man! Game over!

You Gain Wisdom, Child

If this is not on a t-shirt, someone needs to make it into a t-shirt RIGHT AWAY!

If this IS a t-shirt, someone needs to send me a link so I can buy it RIGHT AWAY!

Arcade Wisdom
I Could Quit Anytime… If I Wanted To…

I suppose me posting a link on my blog to an article about internet addiction is a bit like one drunk hobo passing a half empty bottle of hootch to another drunk hobo. But it is an interesting read.

So… ‘ere ya go, buddy. *hic* Drink up. (Clicky clicky.)

Unannoyifying FireFox 7

Don’t you love new software?! Don’t you love all the great new features?! Don’t you love when the developers come up with some change that no one really wanted or had any reason to care about until they changed it and made life all the more difficult for you?!?! Yaaaay!!

Ok, so if you’ve been on the interwebs for any amount of time, you’ve see that odd little thing in front of the web address: “http://” This is what we in the bidnis call the “protocol.” 99% of the time, you’ll either see http or https (which means it’s using a SSL secured connection).

Firefox 7, just for grins and giggles, hides the protocol in the address bar. So, you don’t see “https://mybank.com/login”. You just see “mybank.com/login”. Gah! er… I mean… Yaaaay!

But why, you might ask, do I care what protocol is being used?

Well, I would say in a patronizing tone, you might need to see for certain that your connection is secure (https) before you put your username and password into your bank’s website (else someone would be able to intercept your request and steal your login) or put your credit card number on a web form (or someone might steal your number), or maybe your employer blocks http://facebook.com, but you’ve discovered that they don’t block https://facebook.com. There are many reasons why you might want to see and change the protocol.

In my line of work (I’m a web developer), the protocol is very important. I need to be sure that certain pages of the site I maintain are secure and that others aren’t. (https is slower, so only use it if you need it!) So I really really need to be able to see the protocol.

Thankfully, Google had the answer for me. (Google knows everything.) There is a config setting in Firefox to stop it from trimming the URL. Thanks Google! And thank you, Firefox 7 developer who thought this would be a neat feature, for wasting an hour of my life.

Word Nerd

Welcome to the 21st century.

Google has now digitized and cataloged millions of books from as far back as the 16th century. Take that, and mix in some university researchers desperate for a thesis, and you get Google’s N-Gram tool.

Essentially, you can type in any series of words or phrases, separated by commas, and Google will graph the frequency with which those words appeared in literature over the ages.

For instance, I wondered about “sneaked” and “snuck.” Which is correct? When did the wrong one appear and how popular is it? Well, easy enough: Click to see the results! Turns out, “sneaked” is correct, but “snuck” has been gradually sneaking up on it since the 1920’s. As a side note, “sneaked” shows a huge spike during and after WWII. Seems we got all interested in sneaking during the war.

Here are some more search ideas:
Who is more popular? Frodo, or Harry Potter?
When did the desktop start to lose out to the laptop?
When did “crap” become more popular than “poop”? (Try adding that other 4-letter scatological, word for a real surprise.)

If you’re interested and have 15 minutes to burn, here’s the video of the researchers describing their project at TED. (Clicky clicky)

Today’s Groaner

One atom says to another atom, “Oh no! I just lost an electron!”

The other atoms says, “Are you sure?”

The first atom says, “Yes! I’m positive.”

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