Archive for October, 2009
Friday, October 30th, 2009
As I stood there at the cash register (a PC running POS software), I noticed an upturned napkin with some writing on it. I couldn’t believe that someone (probably the manager) had written down not only the username and password (clearly marked with labels USERNAME and PASSWORD) but also the site those credentials were used […]
Tags: hack, photography, security, stupid
Posted in Life in general | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
Every once in a while I have to do an unusual join in SQL and I can’t exactly remember what join type to use. I found this blog post and I think it perfectly visualizes the different types of joins, without a lot of text and fluff. Plus it references pirates and ninjas. What more […]
Tags: code, software, sql
Posted in Life in general | No Comments »
Monday, October 26th, 2009
Apparently, clean smells promote moral behavior. From ScienceDaily: People are unconsciously fairer and more generous when they are in clean-smelling environments, according to a soon-to-be published study led by a Brigham Young University professor. The research found a dramatic improvement in ethical behavior with just a few spritzes of citrus-scented Windex. Of course, I immediately […]
Tags: culture, psychology
Posted in Life in general | 1 Comment »
Monday, October 26th, 2009
From BoingBoing: Researchers have identified the pathway in the brain that causes cognitive impairment when we haven’t gotten enough sleep. In a new study, Penn State biologists and neuroscientists found that when mice were deprived of sleep, a particular enzyme built up in the brain’s hippocampus. The hippocampus is the region of the brain linked […]
Tags: culture, health, psychology
Posted in Life in general | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
I run several HP DL360 servers with iLO cards in them, and one day I tried to access one of those servers via the iLO card and couldn’t authenticate. I thought “Hmm, I must have set the password incorrectly”, then started to search the web for a solution. The accepted solution was to power down […]
Tags: security, software
Posted in Server Management | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
For all those classic read jersey moments in the original Star Trek series, someone has created a nice little jingle and clip montage. The music gets annoying after a while, but the video clips perfectly illustrate just how unlucky it was to cast as a “redshirt”.
Tags: culture
Posted in Life in general | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
“The FBI today is announcing a rapid DNA initiative,” said Louis Grever, executive assistant director of the FBI’s science and technology branch, during his keynote presentation at the Biometric Consortium Conference in Tampa. The FBI is expanding beyond its traditional fingerprint collection practices to develop a new biometrics system that will include DNA records, 3-D […]
Tags: biometrics, culture, privacy, security, software
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Monday, October 12th, 2009
These guys over at Berg London did a really smart thing. They used an ID-20 reader module to kick out a signal to an LED when a tag is read, then put that LED in the center of the tag being read. Then they used some standard photography tricks to capture and superimpose all the […]
Tags: photography, range, rfid
Posted in Adventures in RFID | 5 Comments »