Unfortunately, they aren’t broadcasting the TKD matches on the TV here in the states, so we have to resort to the interwebs for the fix. The fun started yesterday in Beijing with the women’s 49 kg and men’s 58 kg preliminary. You can catch up on all the action over at NBCOlympics.com.
Digging through my server this evening I came across an old redesign of the site. I think I called it orange or something.
“The world will look up and shout ’save us’…and I’ll whisper ‘no’.”
And this time it’s not the webpage! July 2nd I moved out of my folk’s home and into an appartment all my own! Unfortunatly, I don’t have pictures as I’ve lost my camera, which did have pictures on it. *Sigh* I think I left it somewhere in Iowa.
Last Friday Willmar got a surprise, a tornado. In my twenty years of living here, I’ve never known one to hit so close.
It was pretty insane. I was sitting in my living room at the time kind of mad that the sirens weren’t stopping despite the clear skies. Fortunately a friend who was coming over for a visit decided to call me to tell me why he was late saying, “Hey Josh, I’m not coming over right now…there’s a tornado right over your house.”
Fun times.
http://www.severestudios.com/Willmar-Minnesota-Tornado-Video
A quick search around Google reveals that there are many an application that will remove the protection from Word documents. However I question the trustworthiness of these programs, what if they install key loggers, or trojans, or some other nefarious code? So I did some research and scripting to make my own document cracker, and it was incredibly simple.
It’s a Powershell script, but I’m sure you smart people out there can make a neato interface for it with your Vb Script or C#, or even port it! You can get the source here.
Scrawlr is tool that HP recently release for doing some simple testing of web sites for SQL injection points. One of the limitations on this free tool was that it could only do 1500 pages on your site. But apparently they’ve been distributing debug builds (which have a 2.1 billion page limit) this entire time!
Original posting: Whoops!: Or we are paid to be researchers not QA professionals
So, it was a super fast weekend. Friday after work I went to Get Smart, which was a pretty funny movie, especially if you’ve watched the 1960’s television show. Afterwards I drove down to New Prague to see some friends and hangout for a couple days. After the bonfire on Saturday evening I drove back and rolled into Willmar at about 3:30 am!! After a nice night’s sleep I went to the baptism on Eagle Lake. When that was over, I came back home and slept for a while before being awoken by David. Not one minute later Mark calls me and invited me over for some Paintball.
What a weekend!
Hey, I’m actually writing on a programming related concept!!
Pretty much anyone who runs a public blog/site (like Mark Langenfeld, Nick Davis, MySpace, Dream.in.Code, etc.) knows that spam can be a problem. Fortunately, there are ways to combat it. With Wordpress, there is Akismet which I’ve found very helpful in keeping my blog clean. My blog isn’t very big and doesn’t get many hits a month, so I can send off comments to a third party for review. But for larger sites with thousands of hits, the programmer in my wonders what could be done to minimize traffic, decrease waiting time all the while better filtering spam. Enter my idea which basically scrambles the form up for the client so that the various fields, options and values aren’t easily parsed by bots.
When a client requests a page, the server assigns the client a session ID, generates a mapping of form fields to random names, and stores the relation of random form field names to that session. Then sends the page with the randomized form fields to the client. The client now fills out the form and sends it back. Since humans can much more easily parse abstract structures (and they don’t know/care about the underlying code), the data should be consistent whereas a bot should only be able to guess (poorly) or fill out the same thing for each field. After that, validating each field then using a battery of tests of what it should contain would be fairly easy and should give a much better idea on what is legit and what is spam.
This is not without problems though. For one, the session might expire and so the server couldn’t remap the randomized form fields to their respective real names and thus the user couldn’t finish the process. For another, bots could eventually be made smarter and could better figure out a well known interface. For instance, the order in which the form fields occur, their relative position in relation to other document elements, and the things needed so that humans can understand it.
This being a rather new idea of mine, I’m still trying to figure out other strengths, weaknesses, and ways to address the issues. That and I don’t know if anyone has tried this before. I think that this could be a neat and effective way of filtering down spam if implimented well.
Woo! I passed my Blue Belt test last night!
I have to say that this test was the first that I actually felt prepared for and felt I could do at. Previous tests I was really nervous about remembering things and getting them right. Granted I was still nervous, but I noticed I shook less.
Even so, for the next test, I’m really going to have to hammer down on a few things, 1) knowing my oral test material better, 2) counting while reciting (I had to list a specific number of details about the American Flag), and 3) remembering what I was told to recite when they aren’t well related topics (i.e. 3 details about the flag and then what the number 12 is in Korean).
Next up is the purple belt! Which should be pretty interesting as we’re going to be having to throw some neat looking kicking combinations!