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Technology’s Infestation of my Life

Examples of how technology has permeated every single bit of my life.

eBooks in School

I went into the Campus Bookstore to buy some 0.5mm pencil graphite and ended up chatting with Ann Fraley, Barnes & Nobles VP Stores for Territory 4 for the better part of 15 minutes (Full Disclosure: the CSM Campus Bookstore is operated by B&N).
I asked Ed Showers, who runs the bookstore, about eBooks (I use eBook to mean any book that is available electronically). Ed directed me to Ms. Fraley, who was standing next to him. Here’s the low down:

  • Pearson Education (parent company of Prentice Hall, “the world’s largest publisher of academic and reference textbooks”) is pretty much the only publisher who produce eBooks.
  • McGraw also produces some eBooks, but to a much lesser extent.
  • In order to get access to eBooks, the course instructor must explicitly allow the bookstore to sell them
  • Most eBooks are only accessible through the web.
  • Some eBooks allow printing, but only a set percentage of the total pages (e.g. 30% of the book)

I’m now going to email all my profs for next semester and have them allow access to the eBooks.

[tags]colorado school of mines, college, tablet, barnes and noble, electronic book, ebook, McGraw, Pearson, Ann Fraley, Ed Showers, for Robert Scoble, for Gary Anderson[/tags]

Full/Partial Feed Debate

Robert Scoble is having a discussion on full versus partial feeds (see his links here, here, and here).

I agree with Scoble and I don’t subscribe to feeds that only have partial text. And there were some really good feeds that I had to delete. But my time is valuable and I only have a limited amount of time between classes to glance at my feed reader (I use JetBrains Omea Reader 2.0, which is free and the best one I’ve found of yet). If I have to spend time reading a small primer and then clicking on a link and waiting for that load (with all it’s wonderful graphics), then I’m not a happy camper.

I would assume the whole point of partial feeds is to draw the user to the site, a marketing gimmick of sorts. With me and countless others, it’s having the opposite effect and driving viewers away. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, not Rich Site Summary (at least in my book).

Some of my friends have blogs that only provide partial feeds and I tell them that I won’t subscribe unless they use a blog service that allows full feeds. I even offer to help them move over to a new blog service (like WordPress.com).

[tags]Robert Scoble, RSS, feed, full versus partial, WordPress.com, Omea Reader[/tags]

Riya Alpha Testing

Just got an email Tara over at Riya and I’m in the Alpha. If you’ve never heard of Riya, it’s a photo sharing site, or search engine as they put it. However it does more than just share your photos, it automatically tags them using facial recognition technology. So, still in alpha, but definitely looks cool. Riya also means business. They recommend, at minimum, to upload 1000 photos! That’s just under a 1/4 of all the photos I currently have uploaded onto Flickr!

Yikes.

So my plan is to test it with a bunch of my Flickr Photos. My eventual goal is to help Mom and Dad to scan all of our physical photos and put them through Riya. It will be interesting to see how Riya handles the same person over a period of years and decades. Stay tuned for more Riya!

[tags]Riya, Flickr, facial recognition, alpha[/tags]

Facebook Security Issue

I really don’t know how much of an issue this is, but I was able to gain access to Quinn McGinnis’s Facebook account and change his stuff around (sorry Quinn).

Here’s how I did it:

  1. Download and install Ethereal, Firefox, and Add ‘n Edit Cookies FF extension.
  2. Capture packets using Ethereal
  3. Analyze packets for Facebook traffic, any traffic that is sent to Facebook is fine.
  4. You’re looking for the cookies set by Facebook that are transfered back to Facebook for verification.
  5. Using Firefox and AnEC, input the values for the following cookies: c_code, check_val, and c_user
  6. Navigate to http://facebook.com, you should automatically be logged in.

Some notes:
I did this while both Quinn and my were on a Linksys wireless router, which means that both our public facing IP address were the same. I would suspect (and hope) that Facebook ties your current session to your IP. The c_code value is 32 digits long, I would guess that it’s probably a MD5 hash, but it could also be crc32. Both are easily (and natively) implemented in PHP, which Facebook uses.

I was thinking about how this could be solved, but I couldn’t think of anything, other than just using a pure SSL session. But that wouldn’t make much sense. I’ll also be submitting this information to Facebook on Monday.

[tags]the facebook, facebook, hack, php, md5, crc32, linksys, quinn mcginnis, ethereal, firefox, add ‘n edit cookies, packet capture[/tags]

ViewPad 1000

On my way through security, I saw a guy (I’ll call him Ben) who had a ViewSonic ViewPad 1000. I almost took a picture of it, but decided against it because TSA doesn’t like people taking pictures on their turf.

I asked Ben about it. The conversation went something like this:

Andrew, “Is that a Tablet PC?”

Ben, “Yea, it is.”

Andrew, “That’s cool. What kind is it?”

Ben, “It’s a ViewPad.”

Andrew, “Do you like it?”

Ben, “Yea!”

Andrew, “How old is it?”

Ben, “It’s a little old. 900MHz, 30GB Hard Drive, 512 Ram, WiFi. But it’s solid.”

Andrew, “That’s cool.”

Ben, “ViewSonic is actually refurbishing them now, too.”

Andrew, “Really?”

Ben, “Yup.”

Andrew, “Yea, I have an M200, Toshiba M200.”

Ben, “Cool.”

Andrew, “Yup. Well, thanks!”

In case anybody cares, Ben was having his bag wiped down for a mass spectrometer test (because everyone knows what that is;-)).

[tags]toshiba m200, viewsonic viewpad 1000, tablet pc, tsa[/tags]

Server Compromised

Stephanie Savage, the VP of The CSM Broadcasting Club, sent me an email last night telling me the server was down. Ryan Goodwin went over to the office to check it out. Nothing doing.

I just got an email from AC&N (Academic Computing and Networking) saying that our server had been “compromised.” I had Goodwin take preventive measures (i.e. turn the server off). He’s going to format it and setup Linux on it.

Seeing as he’s the Linux guru, I’m letting him go for it.

Print Screen

If you press the Print Screen button (labeled as PrtSc on my Toshiba M200), you will capture the entire screen. I’ve known about this for years.

But what if you just want to capture a single window? Just make sure the window you want to capture is the active window (i.e. it’s the foremost window) and press Alt+ PrintScreen.

That’s awesome!

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