I was reading up this cool exploit (PDF) in flash found out by the great Mark Dowd. Seriously, it is crazy shit! The exploit. Then I read up the way Mark discovered and it is even crazier.

A choice quote :

Has Mark Dowd simply outclassed us? Should we pack it up and quit?

Yes. But don’t feel bad about that. You’re a human being, and he’s a remorseless killing machine. Big Blue crushed Kasparov, and now he’s not the prime minister of Russia! At a certain point, you have to concede the field, moving on to games where human beings still have the advantage. Computers haven’t solved Go, for instance. For us researchers, I suggest we take advantage of Mark Dowd’s robotic inability to love, and take up the arts, such as watercolors or interpretive dance.

No wonder it was also compared to the insane super mario brothers version , which purportedly “Japan refused to ship to the US markets because they thought the difficulty would upset and provoke us ” . See the video to know what they are talking about. (audio maybe NSFW).

Iang on complexity :

This is why space shuttles blow up. Why Titanics sink, dams collapse, power grids shut down, and stock exchanges melt down. It’s not because of a lack in the quality of the people or the software, it’s because of the complexity of the system. Fundamentally, if you got it right, someone will build a better system on yours that is 99% right, and reliant on yours 101%. And the next person will layer their opus magnum over that great work and get that 98% right… and so it goes on until the mother of all meltdowns occur.

Reminds me of Joel Spolsky’s Law of Leaky Abstractions

I am tired of the stupid messages people keep sending me incessantly :

Check out Jaxtr
Free SMS link
See me on Gazzaag
Check me out on BigAdda

Leave me alone , to my antisocial self.

Why doesn’t GMail have a new Web 2.0 spam filter in which I can set it to ignore all new stupid Web 2.0 startups? It should be pretty easy for Google to do.  (Unless it is my kind of social software ?)

Bill De Hora

What it gets wrong:

“If the specified method is not one of get, post, put, or delete then it is treated as get in the tables below.”

Fail, on two counts. What it gets wrong:”If the specified method is not one of get, post, put, or delete then it is treated as get in the tables below.”Fail, on two counts.

I think what the spec writers are saying is , if you don’t specify a method we will use GET as it is the only safe method. Anything else is risky! I don’t see anything wrong with that.

I was reading Hasaan Gomaa’s Designing Distributed and Real Time Systems with UML.

One thing that stuck me most in its dynamic modeling chapter was how he stressed again and again on setting up all the interaction points at first. Is this the difference from the cool people ? Remember what the grand old man says :

Engineer for Serendipity!

Designing a cool new application requires you to expose the maximum number of interaction points (which in turn would require a uniform interface). Any interaction point you can expose , expose! It is very conceited to assume that you can come up with all possible interaction points for your application. And if you really can, then you need to start designing bigger cooler applications .

From Wikipedia :

Web 2.0 is a trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to facilitate creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users

Collaboration! A Web 2.0 application needs to have much much more than just funky colors and rounded corners. It needs to support collaboration amongst users and the easiest way to do that is to support maximum interaction points, even if you can’t come up with a use case for it right now. Your users are smart , they will come up with something. You need to move away from your old CORBA lifestyle and think RESTfully.

Footnote : It is funny how using HTTP is , “moving away from the Old”. If HTTP is new .. what is old?

Steve Vinoski on the different RPC(-esque) systems :

The layers of complexity required to maintain the resulting leaky illusion of local/remote transparency are reminiscent of the convoluted equations that pre-copernican astronomers used to explain how the sun and other planets moved around the earth.

(from some recent IEEE Internet Computing Issue)

Roy Fielding: “All links are wishful thinking. Guessed links are just somewhat more wishful than others.”

From the latest release notes

The Linux version of TrueCrypt has been redesigned so that it will no longer be affected by changes to the Linux kernel (kernel upgrades/updates).

Oh thank you! Atlast!

This is just beautiful. Has to be seen to be believed. (firefox and safari only).

(from CSS-Tricks)

A friend introduced me to Graham’s number recently. It is the largest number every used, i.e the largest named number. I went to read it up at Wikipedia :

…too large to be written in scientific notation because even the digits in the exponent would exceed the number of atoms in the observable universe
….
Graham’s number is connected to the following problem in the branch of mathematics known as Ramsey theory:
….

Although the solution to this problem is not yet known, Graham’s number is the smallest known upper bound for it. This bound was found by Graham and B. L. Rothschild (see (GR), corollary 12). They also provided the lower bound 6, adding the qualifying understatement: “Clearly, there is some room for improvement here.”

Clearly!