Vincent Gable’s Blog

July 30, 2008

Hell Hath No Fury…

Filed under: Research,Security | , , , ,
― Vincent Gable on July 30, 2008

The New York Times ran an article on research into the economics of vengeance. It’s fairly interesting, but to quote the article, “Most of (the) findings confirm what researchers in different disciplines have already found”.

The meat:

people who have been victims of the same kind of crime … tend to be more vengeful, but not if they have been victims of a different crime…

Vengeful feelings are stronger in countries with low levels of income and education, a weak rule of law and those who recently experienced a war or are ethnically or linguistically fragmented.

…most surprising was that women turned out to be more vengeful than men. If a woman had been a victim of (a crime), she was 10 percent more likely to (seek a stricter punishment); for men the figure was 5 percent.

July 28, 2008

Burger King Sucks

Filed under: Announcement | , , , ,
― Vincent Gable on July 28, 2008

My last year in college, there were five fast-food restaurants within walking distance of my apartment. Now I won’t say I’m a connoisseur of the stuff, but I’ve had my share of drive-through-dinners (especially when coupons are involved). And I must say Burger King really stood out with their poor quality food. Unfortunately, they are now the only drive-through restaurant within a mile of my current apartment.

Now, I agree that the Whopper is a pretty good burger — better then anything from McDonalds (but a little less tasty then a Sourdough Jack). And the Cheesy Tots do have their moments. And I have to give props to my local BK for carrying Dr. Pepper, unlike every Taco Bell I’ve been to in the Midwest. And I really liked the creepy/hilarious “The Burger King” commercials. (And don’t forget the Video Game.)

But outside of hamburgers… Burger King is just bad. Almost all of their “chicken” products are mechanically separated meat. Their Original Chicken Sandwich is made of MSM, and has noticeably worse taste and nutritional value then the equivalent offering from Wendy’s, made of whole chicken. Burger King is the only restaurant who’s coupons I’ve thrown away.

Then there’s the health of it all, where Burger King gets low marks: “Fried foods from Burger King are alarmingly high in trans fat, according to The Center for Science in the Public Interest. A regular-size order of Chicken Tenders with a large order of French fries has 8 grams of trans — more than someone should consume in four days.“.

July 26, 2008

Floppy Disk Drives Getting Smaller

Filed under: Uncategorized | , ,
― Vincent Gable on July 26, 2008



To complete this picture you need a USB thumb-drive on the far right.

July 25, 2008

Trained Open Source Security

Filed under: Design,Programming,Quotes,Security | ,
― Vincent Gable on July 25, 2008

So it’s a matter of training. And that’s pretty much true of Open Source security models. Think of Open Source software. Having a bunch of random people look at the code to tell you if it’s secure won’t work. If you have well-trained people who look at the code, that will work! Open Source just means you can see it, it doesn’t guarantee that the right people will see it.

—Bruce Schneier

The interview is much broader, and worth reading.

July 23, 2008

Wow, Macs Really Are Easier

Filed under: Accessibility,Design,MacOSX,Usability | ,
― Vincent Gable on July 23, 2008

Atul Varma learns to love his Mac

…In a nutshell, though, I had always assumed that Macs were only marginally easier to use than PCs. I guess I’ve found over the past two months that in some ways, this holds true—the Mac is essentially an incredibly sexy-looking PC, with the same annoyances and a few polishes that make it a bit more humane to use. In other ways, however, the difference is truly like night and day.

This is a story about such a situation.

… I had to go through 8 wizards in all, so that’s a grand total of twenty-four clicks required to unplug my keyboard and mouse from one side of my computer and plug them into the other side. I’m not actually installing brand-new hardware here.

The first time I had to plug this keyboard and mouse into my Mac, I was floored. In the best-case scenario, I expected it to think for a second or two and then give me a reasonably unintrusive message informing me that I could use my USB mouse and keyboard. That would have been pretty humane.

But it did one better.

The Mac didn’t tell me anything, because my mouse and keyboard just worked the moment I plugged them in. When you plug in a power cable or a pair of headphones into a computer, you don’t get some kind of confirmation message from your operating system, because it’s obviously supposed to just work—why should plugging in a USB keyboard and mouse be any different?

… I have to admit that when it all adds up, I find my Mac to be significantly easier to use than my PC.

July 19, 2008

Cabinets

Filed under: Uncategorized | ,
― Vincent Gable on July 19, 2008

I don’t close cabinets after I open them. Every cabinet in my kitchen is open.

This is an inverse of a few other people’s quirks.

You have to re-open any cabinet you close to use it again. Leaving them open is faster, and it lets you more quickly scan their contents. If you are ashamed of what’s in your cabinets…. fix that problem, don’t cover it up with a cabinet door!

There is only one exception to this rule. My bathroom cabinet gets closed, but only so I can use the mirror on it.

Now this all makes good sense. But, I can’t help but wonder if I do this because it’s the right answer … or for some other reason, and the rest is just rationalization.

July 17, 2008

Null-Terminated Argument Lists

Filed under: Bug Bite,C++,Cocoa,Design,Objective-C,Programming,Usability | , , , , ,
― Vincent Gable on July 17, 2008

I was using +[NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:] to make a new dictionary, but one of the objects in the dictionary was the result of a call to a method that was returning nil, so the dictionary was incomplete.

This got me thinking about NULL/nil terminated argument lists. I don’t think they are a great idea (the compiler should be able to handle the list-termination for you!), but I think they are an especially bad idea in Objective-C.

The problem that it’s very common to have a nil object in Objective-C, relative to, say C++. Many Cocoa methods return nil on error. Since doing stuff with nil (generally) won’t cause an exception, these nils stick around much longer then in other languages. As you can see, nil is a pretty poor choice of a sentinel value.

It’s the 21st century! The compiler could tell an Obj-C method using a variable-argument-list how many arguments are in the list. This is trivial when all arguments are of type id. Since Obj-C methods use a radically different syntax from C functions, it shouldn’t effect existing C-code. Unfortunately, I don’t see this being added, because Objective-C is already so mature.

In the meantime. Be a little more suspicious of any objective-C methods taking a NULL-terminated list. I wish I had a perfect solution to avoid them, but I don’t! Sometimes they are the best way to do something. If you have a great work-around for constructing, say an NSDictionary with a variable number of key/values please let me know!

July 16, 2008

Determinism and Bending the Rules

Filed under: Quotes,Research | ,
― Vincent Gable on July 16, 2008

There is a very clever little experiment that you would be amused by, run by my colleague Jonathan Schooler. He has a bunch of students read a paragraph or two from the Francis Crick book, Astonishing Hypothesis, which is very deterministic in tone and intent. And then he has another group of students reading an inspirational book about how we make our own decisions and determine our own path. He then lets each group play a videogame in which you’re free to cheat. So guess who cheats? The people who have just read that it’s all determined cheat their pants off.

—Tom Wolfe and Michael Gazzaniga discuss neuroscience, psychology, status, and free will over at Seed Magazine.

(Via Big Contrarian.)

July 15, 2008

Using a File Erasure Tool Considered Suspicious

Filed under: Quotes,Security,Tips | , ,
― Vincent Gable on July 15, 2008

I have often recommended that people use file erasure tools regularly, especially when crossing international borders with their computers. Now we have one more reason to use them regularly: plausible deniability if you’re accused of erasing data to keep it from the police.

— Bruce Schneier

Finder -> Secure Empty Trash

July 14, 2008

Crash Reporter Prefs

Filed under: MacOSX,Reverse Engineering,Tips |
― Vincent Gable on July 14, 2008

/Developer/Applications/Utilities/CrashReporterPrefs.app can make crash reports much more useful. It will show crash-reports for background processes, and stack-trace in the notification dialog.

Crash report-files are stored in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/

Unfortunately, crash reports are not sent back to third-party developers, even when you send them to Apple.

EDITED TO ADD: This still works in Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5.6)

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