Posted by: nuxusr | March 27, 2008

Internet Saftey

A new wiki has been created to educate people about Internet safety. In a time where everyone has starting saying the “web is broken” when it comes to security, this couldn’t be more important. I have contributed some of my time into adding information to this wiki and hope that others will do so as well. This wiki could help prevent identity theft, getting tricked by XSS, and many other areas of security on the world wide web.

See the site here: http://wiki.internetsafetypodcast.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

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Posted by: nuxusr | March 20, 2008

UPS - Who would have guessed?

I’m currently reading The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman. This work gives wonderful insight about twenty-first century and its progression towards “Globalization 4.0.” Chapter two, which outlines “The Ten Forces That Flattened the World,” opened my eyes as to see how events in the 21st century aligned into place and are the reason we are here today.

While many of the events such as the growth (and reasons behind the growth) of outsourcing and outshoring weren’t completely new to me, the whole idea behind insourcing was new to me. If you were to asked me how Toshiba is able to fix products and have them returned within three business days, I would have guessed an extremely large repair team. I never imagined that UPS actually does the repairing themselves! UPS is also the HP printer repair man that comes to your door in Europe and Latin America; UPS dispatches and schedules the trucks of Papa Johns; UPS packages, picks, and inspects your shoes ordered from Nike.com; and UPS helps Ford dealerships control their inventories.

In fact, according to the book, many companies never actually see their product in the complete sales process anymore — which shows how entangled all these companies have become in insourcing. After reading this chapter I agree with Friedman in that insourcing is allowing smaller companies to appear big — all inventory, phone calls, and support taken care of by UPS– and bigger companies to appear small — they can fulfill orders similar to a small local company.

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Posted by: nuxusr | March 13, 2008

The digital flood

A recent CNN article shows that technology “experts” can’t keep up with the rate of change in technology happening today. A year ago, IDC predicted the amount of digital growth for 2007 — predictions that ended up being more than 10% short. As of Dec. 31, 2007, there was approximately 281 billion gigabytes of captured data in the world. I believe this growth in digital data will make for an interesting future. New websites, such as Twitter launched in 2006, can have millions of users and yet still be lost in the flood. 87% of the students polled in one of my computer science classes hadn’t heard of Twitter — all of which probably spend more than 4 hours a day on-line.

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Posted by: nuxusr | March 11, 2008

Women in Computer Science

The majority of the computer science classes I have taken at BYU had only males in them. The few computer science classes I have taken with females have shown that they are equivalent to the top/brightest males in the classroom. The females I have known have been hard working, extremely bright (brighter than I am, I must say), and just as capable as the males in every other area.

In degrees that overlap quite a bit with computer science, this scarcity of women is not nearly as prevalent. In mathematics for instance, nearly 50% of graduates these days are women. Reading a few known papers on the topic shows this scarcity of women in computer science is not only common, but is a problem throughout the United States. It is in the best interest of the United States to be continually advancing in the sciences — requiring a large amount of both men and women in all of the sciences.

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Posted by: nuxusr | February 26, 2008

Security over the web

Markus Hess was a German who successfully hacked into multiple (10+) government databases, selling the gathered information to the KGB. A book written by Clifford Stoll, The Cuckoo’s Egg, reveals how Stoll traced the hacker and watched his every move. After studying the information, I was surprised to find that the hacker was able to do all he did by exploiting very basic holes in the system. Most systems are are shipped with security mechanisms that need to tightened before official use. Take the very popular MySQL database for example. An initial installation leaves the root password open for anyone to change. After an initial installation of MySQL, the person in charge of the system must set a root password in order to secure the database. Hess recognized that many systems, including “highly secure” army databases, were leaving holes such as this MySQL example open (I use MySQL only as an example. MySQL was not in existance during Hess’s attempts).

While this was fifteen years ago, today the same problems persist. After installing Logwatch onto a server I oversee, I was surprised to find that there were over 500 break-in attempts daily– all from different places around the United States. Most of the attempts where shooting for basic security holes that might have been left open.

I feel the problem of these programs which require tight security is that they are too easy to install and setup. On popular Linux distributions the process is automated and completed by running apt, yum, or yast. The installation process should be made more difficult — requiring the person in charge of the installation to lock-up these features before they will even work.

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Posted by: nuxusr | January 29, 2008

Cursive Writing is for the Birds

With all our recent advances in technology, writing remains one of the most crucial skills to have. Emails, instant messages, sms texting, blogging, my space portfolios, resumes, all require writing. What is decreasing is the need to have handwriting skills. Handwritten letters are being replaced by emails, class note taking is being replaced by word processors on a laptop, and even grocery lists are going digital. So it bothered me when I recently discovered that the nearby middle-schools teach cursive writing, however do not offer courses in typing. It’s frustrating that our kids are learning soon-to-be-obsolete skills. Let’s let go of cursive writing (don’t worry, signatures — the only form of cursive writing I do — can still be accomplished with a few scribbles) and focus on typing, how to write proper emails, and the other writing “ways” of tomorrow.

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Posted by: nuxusr | January 24, 2008

Died in a Knitting Accident

Three weeks ago, if someone typed the phrase “died in a knitting accident” –quotes included– in Google, the search produced approximately seven results. Today, as of 8:09 p.m., typing the same search phrase into Google yields approximately 10,200 results! In fact, the phrase saw an 800% increase in less than 24 hours.

It is incredible how fast information in this age spreads. This exponential growth in popularity of the above search query started with a web comic on xkcd.com. Within hours the internet showed us just how fast news can spread in our “global village.”

Just over ten years ago, one of my favorite comedians, Chris Farley, passed away. Gaining information about his death required waiting for updates on the nightly news, or reading the next day’s paper. In contrast, yesterday afternoon I heard that another great actor, Heath Ledger, had passed away. Within an a hour or so, I read all the details on his death on the internet. In fact, the wikipedia page on Heath had been updated before I had even heard the news on fox.

See this article for more information on “died in a blogging accident.”

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Posted by: nuxusr | January 14, 2008

print “Hello world!”;

me.png Welcome to my weblog.This is my first post, so I will give a little information about myself. I am a computer science student at BYU working towards my bachelors degree; I have two semesters left. Outside of computers, I enjoy mountain biking, snowboarding, jet-skis (stand ups), and motorcycles.

I have been married two years to my wonderful wife Megan. We have no kids (but we do have two parakeets).

Currently my favorite programming languages are python, perl, and c++. I enjoy learning new programming languages and getting lost in new projects. I have done projects in java, c#, c, c++, scheme, php, ruby, and a few others.

I use and enjoy multiple operating systems (Linux, Microsoft’s Vista, and Apple’s Leopard); however, my daily preference is a Linux distribution known as Sidux (a close second, which I would recommend to anyone wanting to try something new, is Ubuntu).

Dallin

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