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Brief Updates
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Migraine situation continues. GRRRR!!!
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Due to the migraine situation, I was not feeling well enough to make garlic bread. Does something count as a disability if it prevents you from making garlic bread? Is making garlic bread a major life activity?
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Staying up another hour or so instead of going to sleep now because I need to move my car. It’s parked in a space that becomes illegal at 7am tomorrow morning, but I can’t move it yet because the spot where I’m going to keep it overnight is not available right now.
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A very large fraction of my time is being taken up dealing with hiring tasks.
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RAT MAIL WORKED!!!!
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This Week in Hacking
Had a migraine most of today. Gonna go to sleep soon. But first some updates on the status of children and hacking.
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Several days ago (or maybe a week or more ago) a student made several sock-puppet accounts and accused several other students of “hacking” a game on our site. This user presented no tangible evidence and merely asserted that these alleged hackers were doing much better than could realistically be expected at this game.
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Not related to the game: A totally different student made a screencast of a fake “hacking” of his friend’s account. The “code” for the hacking was roughly as realistic as something that you would see in a low budget media production (which is to say, it was syntax-colored text on a black background but meaningless to anyone who knew anything about code). The output of the hack showed publicly available (or guessable) information, and had convenient censor-bars over the information that the “hacker” couldn’t possibly know. The friend freaked out and reported the fake-hacker.
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Back to the game! Today a student posted on a public part of our site fairly specific information on how to elevate a normal user account to admin-level privileges in the game. The game has been taken offline.
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Standing Around Not Trespassing
Sorry for a lack of posts lately. I’ve been doing a lot of knitting and a lot of standing around in parking lots and on bridges trying to look like I’m not trespassing so that I could take pictures of the Lufthansa plane.
I was going to write something about data structures in R, but I still have a lot more thinking and reading to do before I can say something that is both useful and not too long about that. Main idea: Everything in R seems to tacitly assume that everything you want to think about is rectangular in some sense. Which is great when you are working with spreadsheets. But not so great in other settings. More about this later.
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Winter Storm
So many people are having their plans ruined by winter storms today.
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The Lufthansa plane is on its way to San Diego, and it might be raining when it lands. I don’t have the right type of gear to take outdoor photographs in the rain.
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Today is the AIME II, the second-chance for students to take the American Invitational Mathematics Exam if they were unable to take the AIME on March 6 (which is “most of them” because the organization running the contest was not able to get the qualifying scores to the schools on time). A lot of schools are going to be closed today. The committee is going to allow those students to take the exam tomorrow, raising some of questions about exam security and academic integrity.
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Not related to this winter storm: my neighbor reports that the new roof that we got last year might not be living up to expectations. I am hoping that the problem comes down to isolated problems with flashing and not some sort of general roof integrity issue.
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The Facebook Scandal
I’m having a hard time figuring out why everyone is so worked up about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica these days.
My understanding of Facebook is that when I am logged in as me, I can see assorted things that my friends posted and can jump to conclusions about my friends based what they have posted and liked on the site. When an app is logged in as me, it can do the same thing but much more quickly and efficiently. Scraping the web for information is not new and surprising. Heck, if the information on a page is highly structured (particularly if it is XML), even I can write the code to do it. Whenever I’ve connected an app to Facebook, it has given me a long list of things that it might do on my behalf, and “creep on your friends” does not seem to be out of the ordinary.
Or is Facebook just jealous because Cambridge Analytica seems to be so much better than they are at making sense of the data and targeting their ads? I get a heck of a lot of Facebook ads for children’s clothing consignment and pre-schools, despite the fact that Gwen and Sophie are both cats (not human children). Today I got an ad for a prescription medication to help people stop smoking (I do not smoke).
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Rat Mail? More Like Rat FAIL.
Do you remember how excited I was the other day that I had strung together a collection of scripts that were going to send me email every Monday morning telling me about the account registrations from sketchy domains (note to self: register for an API key so that the sketchy-domain checking* can be more robust than just a heuristic based on a regular expression) and new accounts that logged in from both the homes and the schools of well-known troublemakers?
Well,
launchdlet me down. Or maybe I let myself down.Yesterday morning when I arrived at work, there was a half-composed email message open in Mail.app. Something had gone terribly wrong.
The R script never ran. The file still contained the placeholder text. This is weird because in my testing, when I told
launchdto run the R script at a specific time in the not-too-distant future, it did. But when I told it to run it at a specific time on Monday morning, it didn’t.Likewise, the AppleScript failed, too. Again, it worked in testing. But it did not succeed in populating the header fields of the email.
I had told the power management settings on my computer to wake it up in time for everything to run. Are computers groggy when they first wake up?
And, adding insult to injury, I had another headache yesterday afternoon, so I wasn’t able to focus enough to improve and debug my script. Instead I spent most of the day dealing with the email that arrived over the weekend, the homework bug reports, various other reports that came in, and an assortment of hiring tasks (WE ARE HIRING). Today is my real chance to get things done because a significant part of tomorrow will be spent interviewing (PLEASE ASK YOUR FRIENDS TO APPLY), and Thursday I am taking half of the day off to watch THE LUFTHANSA PLANE COME DIRECT FROM FRANKFURT (please don’t rain).
*My learning how to query FlightXML via GET requests with an API key will pay off! There is a service that tells you which domains are sketchy, and you just send a GET request with the domain as the value of the variables and your API key in the header, and it will return JSON!
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The Women's Pages
Oath is a subsidiary of Verizon that is in charge of its AOL and Yahoo! products.
One of the members of Oath’s Board of Advisors is running a coding camp for girls.
The New York Times did an article about this camp for yesterday’s paper.
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