Technical

Let me get a prediction in here before the data come out tonight or tomorrow. “Cyber Monday will be a disappointment to retailers. They will do more electronic business than they did last year, but not significantly more than they did last Friday or next Monday. Any uptick is going to be small and due to people paying extra attention to online sales. “Cyber Monday (sorry, I can’t help but put it in quotes) is yet another marketing ploy. The theory is that when people go back to the office, they’ll use the high-speed connection to shop online. The problem is that the majority of people who shop online already have a high-speed connection at home. Add to that the companies that are cracking down on online shopping (and game playing and general web surfing) from the office and I’m guessing that it’ll be a non-event.

It’s taken me a bit to write about Admiral Poindexter’s visit and the small group talk we had with him. Let me start by reminding folks that here’s a guy who was convicted of lying to congress. The conviction was later overturned on a technicality. He’s also very politically savvy. I once asked my father if he would ever pursue becoming a general in the army. He told me that he was hoping to make full colonel (he later retired as a lt. colonel), but that becoming a general required a literal act of congress and that you needed to become a politician. I would assume the same thing is the case with an admiral and doubly so in the case of Poindexter who managed to become the highest ranking geek in government. All of which is to say take my impressions with a grain of salt. ...

bah – the past few nights, my website/blog keeps getting screwed up because all of the disk space on the drive is consumed. the first night, i freed up some space, but didn’t pay attention to how much was free. it happened last night and again i freed up space, noting that i had about 700 MB free. Tonight, it happened again and I finally tracked down what happened. I do an rsync backup to an external drive every day. A couple of days ago, I rebooted the machine and the external drive didn’t mount back up. So I wound up doing a backup of my home directory and root partition to the root partition. Of course the partition filled up. Oh well, problem solved now. I just need to be more careful in the future

Well, it seems that we finally know what happened with the North Korean nuclear test that fizzled. They apparently mistranslated the Arabic documents the U.S. posted online. Okay, so neither of those is really very funny. On the one hand, the U.S. posted a whole host of Arabic documents from Iraq that had never been examined before in the vague hope that someone would be able to find evidence that Iraq had a WMD program before we invaded. This was idiotic. It’s equivalent to my posting an entire database of personal information in the hopes that someone online could determine if there were social security numbers in it. ...

I recently had a small argument with a vendor selling biometric fingerprint scanners tied to your credit card number. He said that they were the greatest and most secure thing ever; I said that there weren’t any standards and that the security of the devices was questionable. I wish I had seen this earlier.

No, not that – Programming. I need to do some statistical work to test a theory. The best approach in order to compare my results is to do the work in R. But it looks like I’ll need to extend a package. I download the package from CRAN (the Comprehensive R Archive Network), unpack it and start trying to figure out how it all works. Unfortunately, it is written in Fortran, C and R. Untangling it will take forever. ...

IT security (and for that matter, other security concerns too) are often seen as conflicting with usability. There is something to that. If you take any given technology and turn up the level of security it provides, you will almost always decrease the usability of the system. Consider passwords. If people are allowed to choose their own passwords, they will typically choose something very usable for them. They’ll pick their dog’s name, their wife’s name, their userid, etc. These passwords don’t provide much security. To compensate, we often turn up the security knob and require “stronger passwords, e.g., minimum of six characters with no dictionary words and multiple “character classes. ...

One of the disadvantages of having so many email accounts is the number of spam you get. Recently, I’ve been noticing an increase in stock spam making it through my spam filters. I’ve been wondering how effective the spam is and whether or not one could make money shorting these stocks. Apparently, I’m not the only one. The local paper carried a NYT article titled “ Many people fall for stock spam. In the article, the author describes the work of Frieder and Zittrain. Frieder and Zittrain found that pink sheet stocks that were heavily touted in spam were significantly more likely to be traded than non-touted stocks. Purchasing these stocks would lead a 5.25% loss within two days. For the most heavily touted stocks, the average loss was almost 8% in two days. ...

Back when I was a grad student and just about to finish up, the school of engineering turned a class of 60 freshman over to me to teach intro to numerical methods for engineers. I tried to liven things up by emailing the occassional engineering funny to my students who even reciprocated. The following is a brief excerpt from an engineer identification test that was sent to me by a student. ...

I spent a lot of time last week looking at an application in order to assess its security. The thing that was troubling me was that this is a web application and the primary form for data entry was defined like: form name=foo method=post action= This means that the nothing happens when you hit submit on the form – at least not in the html world. So, I took a closer look and found that each of the buttons (submit and clear) actually had a field “onclick=’doSomething();’ attribute. ...