Mon, 21 Jul 2008

Calorie Calorie

Last night I flew from New York's JFK airport to Portland's PDX. While at JFK, I was hungry. I was enticed by the delicious-looking fries in the display sample from "Cheeburger Cheeburger [sic]."

When I went up to order, I found the fries alone seemed to have over 1700 calories. Since when do fast food joints tell me how many calories are in the food right next to the price? I ordered my cheeseburger but could not in good conscience buy a side of fries that had nearly three times as many calories as the "entree" itself.

This morning I ran into a news article explaining that this is because of a new health inspector rule requiring calorie counts "displayed on [chain restaurant] menus in the same font and format as the name or price of food items." The article reports, "New Yorkers appeared unfazed by the rule."

It continues to quote a casually pro-corporation anti-informing-consumers analyst named John Owens, "I'd be shocked if consumers weren't already aware that when they're eating in a fast-food restaurant." I knew it wasn't "healthy" to eat burgers and fries from fast food chains, but I'm still a little shocked that the fries alone have more than 1700 calories.

Maybe we could have this sort of signage everywhere, even in cities that aren't New York.

[/note/eat] permanent link

Wed, 16 Jul 2008

IP over Avian Carrier: Security implications

BBC News has a story on Brazil's pigeon drug mules.

Quoth Bruce Schneier:

I think this is the first security vulnerability found in RFC 1149: "Standard for the transmission of IP datagrams on avian carriers." Deep packet inspection seems to be the only way to prevent this attack, although adequate fencing will prevent the protocol from running in the first place.

[/note/sysop] permanent link

Tue, 15 Jul 2008

Seattle to Portland on a Unicycle

I decided that I didn’t want to disappoint me, Helen, or God, so to Winlock we went.

Via Eric, who attempted this for the first time this year. Congratulations!

It concludes:

A unicyclist with two beautiful and talented daughters as a unicycle honor guard drove the crowd completely wild, and I felt like I was the king of the world as I rode triumphantly, giving high fives to my subjects.

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Fri, 20 Jun 2008

+5 fooled Slashdot

Mod parent down. This is absolute rubbish, how did it get to +5 informative? I assume it's there as a joke so it should only be +5 funny, or possibly now, +5 fooled Slashdot.

[/scribble] permanent link

Mon, 16 Jun 2008

The S-video jack

for video

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Fri, 06 Jun 2008

Build failure

A package I am working on fails to build. Mako helps me understand why:

<mako> problem seems to be liboobs
<paulproteus> I'm afraid you're trolling me.
<mako> i wish i was

[/note/software] permanent link

Sat, 31 May 2008

Venkatesh clarifies

Mar 07 18:49:41 <venkatesh> often, your flames lack flame

I guess that's a good quality to have....

[/note/communication] permanent link

Mon, 26 May 2008

IPv6

Kartik pointed me to this post about "The Future without IPv6". IPv6 is the future addressing scheme that the Internet will hopefully be transitioning to in the next decade or so; IPv4 is the current setup. The reason we need a new addressing scheme is simple - we've run out of addresses. The dream of the Internet was "end to end connectivity," but you can't do that if you don't have enough addresses to give everyone on the network an address.

You've seen this every time you open up a laptop and it gets an IP address from a "wireless router" - the IP address created for you by that router actually can't be reached from the broader Internet. Network Address Translation (NAT) is a trick the router plays where it changes the headers on your messages destined for the Internet so everyone else on the network thinks the box sent the message. But this means if you want to do something not allowed by that box in the middle, or allowed but misunderstood, it is in an incontrovertible position to screw that up.

The article writes:

Ubiquitous multilevel NAT means the Internet becomes a system for making TCP connections.

Using the Internet only for TCP connections to me spells the end of decades of Internet innovations like Voice over IP that rely on the flexibility of the Internet. And the fact that these connections must always go to the few servers able to have their own dedicated IP addresses creates a separate class of connection in the Internet world: "consumer" vs. "distributor". That class distinction is what IP was designed to erase.

I don't agree with the author that we will never move to IPv6, but I also know we won't do it fast enough to satisfy me. Luckily, thanks to the "end to end" nature of the Internet, especially IPv6, I can do my own migration now and give my computers both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. I'll be here in the future, waiting for the rest of you guys.

P.S. I'm already "multiplexing multiple transports over a single TCP connection" with my always-on SSH tunnel. I am aware of the drawbacks he lists.

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