InAnEmergency's comments

InAnEmergency | 6 years ago | on: Reviving an HP 660LX in 2019

(Author here)

I did spend quite a bit of time on your site, linked sites, and webarchive. The files on your site did not work out of the box for me. I did eventually get a combination of kernel and configuration that kind of worked, but I think the CompactFlash card was too big. It stalled out on hard drive interrupts.

InAnEmergency | 7 years ago | on: What You Need to Know Before Considering a PhD

Five years is not that long for a PhD in the US.

I took eight years but I also got married, worked full time, and started a company before I finished. By the time I graduated, the CS department had started taking a much firmer stance on timelines, with a desire for most students to graduate within six years or sooner.

InAnEmergency | 8 years ago | on: Game of Life in Scratch

Not much to the article, so I guess the interesting part is the actual game: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/164407978/#fullscreen

> It’s a slightly unusual implementation in that the surface of the game is, in effect, spherical – i.e. the edges are effectively a feature of the projection of the surface but left joins to right, top to bottom and so on.

I believe that is a torus, and not at all an unusual implementation choice for the Game of Life.

InAnEmergency | 9 years ago | on: FasterPath: Faster Pathname Handling for Ruby Written in Rust

Ruby's `Pathname#absolute?` is doing a lot more work[1]. I don't know why, but it is.

If I change it to just check the first character for the file separator, as I understand FasterPath does, then of course it is faster:

    Warming up --------------------------------------
                original     4.109k i/100ms
                  faster   110.202k i/100ms
    Calculating -------------------------------------
                original     42.645k (± 3.7%) i/s -    213.668k in   5.017595s
                  faster      2.643M (± 4.4%) i/s -     13.224M in   5.013294s

    Comparison:
                  faster:  2643274.6 i/s
                original:    42644.5 i/s - 61.98x slower

My implementation:

    class Pathname
      def f_relative?
        @path[0] != File::SEPARATOR
      end
    end

[1] https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/68ebbbfebe5b666cf76ab41f1e...

InAnEmergency | 10 years ago | on: Why Homejoy Failed

I've noticed this even with Groupon. Walk into place with a Groupon, they offer you the same price but just bypass Groupon. They get a new customer in the door, the customer is fine with it because it's the same price, but the business makes more money because they don't have to pay Groupon their cut.

InAnEmergency | 10 years ago | on: DEFCON 23 Badge Challenge

This doesn't even mention there was an entire newspaper filled with misdirection (Themela, Enigma machines, Mad Hatter, They Live, chromosomes...) or the Shavian text on the badges (all quotes from Buckaroo Banzai I believe). 1o57 even wore a Buckaroo Banzai shirt...gah.

Edit: Also, "Howdaddyisdoing" is an anagram for "Why did I add goons" which seemed very suggestive.

InAnEmergency | 11 years ago | on: Dell XPS 13 Review

It's a bit of a pain with the T440s (have to pry apart all the plastic), but still better than paying what Lenovo wants.

InAnEmergency | 11 years ago | on: Twitter Digits

Have to amend my statement...if the attacker can intercept the SMS in real time, then it is an effective attack:

1. Attacker knows victim's phone number and attempts login

2. Attacker intercepts SMS as it is sent to victim

3. Attacker completes their login process with the SMS code

InAnEmergency | 11 years ago | on: Twitter Digits

You are assuming that the SMS is like a password and the phone number is like a user name, and that's all an attacker would need to log into the app. However, it doesn't have to be designed that way. There could be another value tying the phone number and SMS to the specific app login attempt, in which case intercepting just the SMS is not sufficient.
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