botWerks

i’m increasingly impressed with the impact of the seemingly small optimization of adding flashblock to my browser (chrome | firefox).  things are just snappier. life is just a little bit more efficient and my browser interaction experience, just that much better.  sometimes it really just is the little things.

i had a need to stretch and do something moderately nerdy and anti-social this weekend. i’ve been poking at foursquare over the last month or so and i  must say, it’s kind of cute. i don’t wander around the ‘hood as much as i’d  like to, but the app’s been a little more interesting to me than your average social media app.

i was a little curious as to what kind of checks were implemented with the API and how interaction with the API actually worked. it turns out that the API operation is dead easy. however, they don’t do some things like check the realistic time difference between checkins or the distance between venues for consecutive checkins.  as such there’s no notion of physicality associated with the application and the check-in process and the game.

of course this means that they’re dependent upon well behaved client behavior. to that end you only have to present the coordinates for the venue(s) you’re interested in, in order to obtain (or maintain) mayoral dominance.  you can use this to periodically check into a venue, even if you’re not physically there to pick up the GPS coordinate.  given that there are often perks associated with being a mayor of a particular venue, there might be some value in squatting on a particular location.

this begged a little experimentation. yielding foursquatter. a perl foursquare client script which can be trivially used to squat on a venue, or venues.

code and such is available on github.

it’s clear to me that my best efforts in educating the next generation of star wars fans under my tutelage have been for naught.  while discussing star wars episodes this afternoon, they were referred in terms of their corresponding lego kits.  i.e., the battle of hoth (which has a corresponding lego kit) was the reference as opposed to referring to the empire strikes back. i don’t know whether to chalk this up to a failing on my part or whether this is a function of the marketing muscle of lego.

on the main server create the directory and initialize a bare repo on the server.

% mkdir path_to_repo
% cd path_to_repo
% git --bare init

from the local machine with your content/code, add the remote origin and push your code to the repo.

% cd path_to_local_source
% git remote add origin ssh://hostname/path_to_repo
% git push origin master

share it or get it from another location …

% git clone ssh://hostname/path_to_repo

assumes that the person has an account on the host with the appropriate permissions to modify or read the repo contents.

pull changes from the server to pick up the latest …

% git pull origin master

nothing revelatory here, but some interesting background pointers.

i’ve been catching up on a massive reading backlog as of late. one of the topics egregiously in the backlog has been digesting the information associated with internationalized domain names (IDNs) and poking at some of the attendant follow-on considerations. given that there’s a huge hunk of the world that doesn’t use latin character sets, this is an increasingly interesting and relevant topic. particularly for network infrastructure dweebs.

for those looking for a good place to start on the topic of internationalization i highly recommend geoff huston’s writeup on the topic, Internationalizing the Internet. he provides a reasonable primer on interesting topics such as digraphs, glyphs, etc.

fortunately, localization of content presentation is an area which has received a considerable amount of attention within the computer industry. further, it benefits from the fact that there’s been a bit of give and take socially and from a development perspective to accommodate various localization requirements. e.g.: japanese writing and layout has undergone a bit of accommodation to “modern” publishing capabilities and computer interfaces.

internationalization of the Internet is another matter. of considerably greater difficulty is enabling the infrastructure to support the variety of localizations that are out there. the first among these is the DNS infrastructure. this leads you down a windy path of different encoding mechanisms and a whole host of additional security implications. of notea number of interesting variants on homograph
attacks.

looking at this from the perspective of network engineering, we’re really moving into a world where there will be new stresses and strains placed upon the DNS infrastructure.  what was previously a relatively low bandwidth infrastructure service will rapidly explode in terms of bandwidth utilization and processing requirements going forward.  considerable attention will need to be given to application design and verification mechanisms in the background to alert users to a host of new attacks.  it’s unclear what the implications will be on service / application developers over the near term given that most of the infrastructure elements associated with web services are ascii oriented.

misc. background reading:

• punycode – a means of encoding unicode into the ASCII character space.
• Phishing defense against IDN address spoofing attacks – abstract: Address spoofing is a common trick used in phishing scams to confuse unsuspecting users about a Web site’s real origin. With the introduction of Unicode characters into domain names, also known as Internationalized Domain Names (IDN), the risk has significantly increased even for the most cautious users. The author explores the various types of address spoofing attacks focusing on IDN, and presents a novel client-side Web browser plug-in Quero which implements several techniques—including highlighting—to protect the user against visually undistinguishable address manipulations.
• RFC 4690 – abstract: This note describes issues raised by the deployment and use of
  Internationalized Domain Names.  It describes problems both at the time of registration and for use of those names in the DNS.  It recommends that IETF should update the RFCs relating to IDNs and a framework to be followed in doing so, as well as summarizing and identifying some work that is required outside the IETF.

i’ve come to the conclusion that chromium for the mac is close enough to start poking at consistently.  now, i need to find a way to make this honor the default cocoa keybindings and support for ctrl-a/f/n/p + w would go a really long ways towards making me happy.

the speed is quite frankly mind-boggling.  javascript apps scream, rendering is honored appropriately, java support is dicey (keep safari handy) and the interface is really snappy.

this week gives me enough breathing room to poke at the latest firefox 3.6 build as well.  this is the default workhorse browser for 99%+ of what i do.  frankly, i don’t know what i’d do without the “it’s all text” add-on.  given the amount of wiki editing and integration with online systems that i have to handle on a daily basis.  if i could get this for chrome, i might be sorely tempted to jump ship.  firefox 3.6 carries with it the attendant hassle of a new release in terms of add-on support.  but fortunately i’ve been able to hack or cajole all the major ones for me into submission.  there’s some decided improvement in rendering speed.  but beyond that, it looks pretty much the same to me.  which is more than ok, it’s a solid performer in the workflow.