StrongFarce

An outlet for the observations, anecdotes, and other bits of randomness from a computer programmer, musician, science enthusiast, and humanist.

[strongfarce]

Zeratul attempts a gank on Abathur

[strongfarce]

Path: Perfect Response?

Over on Daring Fireball, John Gruber linked to the Path blog post regarding sending all the address book contacts to the Path servers for helping people link each other. He said it's the perfect response.

It's not.

Path does not need to have the email addresses to link contacts together. Path can do it without ever knowing the actual email addresses. In fact, Path shouldn't have the actual email addresses because it's pointless for them to have them. It is data they should never be using.

The goal of a solution would be to give Path no email addresses, but give them a way to know that if two people have each other in their address book based on email address. This is easier done than said.

On the iOS clients, instead of sending plain-text email addresses, the client would perform a cryptographically secure hash on a sanitized version of the email address (ie, lowercase, normalized unicode, etc). Secure hashes are great because it's practically impossible to get the original value from the hash. Because two devices using the same hashing algorithm will produce the same results, the server can now receive just computed hashes and compare the hashes instead of the email addresses to find the matches.

With this simple change, Path wouldn't be in possession of personal contact details, but would still be able to suggest friends. This would serve users interests best while still providing Path the necessary information for their product to function.

[strongfarce]

Nine years ago today the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated upon reentry into Earth's atmosphere. Mission STS-107 was the 113th shuttle launch and was delayed over two years from its original launch date of January 11, 2001. This loss resulted in the suspension of the shuttle program until President Bush announced the [Vision for Space Exploration](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_for_Space_Exploration) less than a year later.

[weareallstarstuff]

[strongfarce]

weareallstarstuff:

North American Nebula

[designersof]

Check Me Out - http://joshhardman.tumblr.com

[designersof]

a Lil’ Treble Clefs by Jazzies and Lilies Designs

Colored Toned Copper Wire Wrapped Rings in Navy, Green, Purple, Black

http://aliljazz.tumblr.com

Check out my shop at http://www.jazziesandlilies.etsy.com

[timemarauder]

[strongfarce]

invaderxan:

The Carina Nebula in false colour…

[strongfarce]

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race”

Calvin Coolidge

[strongfarce]

That's not what today's work has turned up, though - but it's probably the next best thing. What this group was looking for were hypothetical organisms that have learned to use arsenic instead of phosphorus. There are environments that are much richer in arsenic (and its corresponding arsenate salts) than they are in phosphorus. And arsenic is right under phosphorus in the periodic table, and forms similar sorts of compounds (albeit with rather different behavior), so. . .maybe it could substitute? Well, they didn't find any native arsenic-users - but they did force some into existence. They took a strain of bacteria from such an environment (Mono Lake sediments) and starved it of phosphate while providing it plenty of arsenate. The colonies that grew under these conditions were picked out and grown under even higher arsenate concentrations, and the process was continued stage after stage.

This is a great writeup that explains the ins and outs of the NASA announcement this week.

[strongfarce]

Censoring the DNS of Wikileaks because they were attacked is just punishing the victim. We know better than to punish a woman was raped because she wore a provocative dress.

If we were to translate the actions of EveryDNS into other situations, we would force women who have been raped while wearing provocative clothing to don a hijab. We would evict a tenant after someone broke in their apartment because their computer was visible through the window.

Instead of going after Wikileaks under false pretenses, EveryDNS should have said that they wanted to drop DNS because they didn't like Wikileaks. That's really what they're doing.

Anyone who is using EveryDNS to host their DNS should actively consider other alternatives, because EveryDNS's actions show that it is not a company that supports freedom of speech.

[strongfarce]

Awesome recreation of Road Runner vs. Wiley Coyote with real people.

[tumblrphotography]

[fuckyeahtheuniverse]

[fuckyeahnebulas]

Orion Nebula

[strongfarce]

Just because of this, I'm thinking of buying Super Meat Boy even though it's not on Steam Sale anymore.

[strongfarce]

"Lost" Craig Ferguson Doctor Who intro

[byyyyyyyyyyyyyyyye]

[strongfarce]

theragetasticvoyage:

The total number of stars in the Universe “is likely three times bigger than realized.” Yale University astronomer Pieter van Dokkum says there are “possibly trillions of Earths orbiting these stars,” dramatically increasing the possibility of finding alien civilizations. read more here

[rentzsch]

Base32-CS has 54 symbols (22 new lowercased alphabetic symbols in addition to Base32’s original 32 upper-case alphanumeric symbols).

[strongfarce]

I would think that would be Base52 ;) I've always enjoyed cramming bits in smaller places, and I kind of wish CouchDB would have thought about this for its UUIDs. Makes me think of tacking on a short-id using Base64 or Base64url onto saved documents.