Thoughts

I read about a tool called NMAP, and it made me think of a blog post topic. NMAP is a lot of things. For starters, it’s a bad acronym ( I say “enmap” ). It’s also a program that you run on your computer. It’s a tool, and it’s one of many tools that can run on a computer in parallel together.

Like most programs out there, it has a narrow purpose. Its purpose is to explore and probe the connections and possible weaknesses of your computer’s network. It’s actually a useful hacking tool, because it allows one to determine how they might be able to break into and screw up a remote server across the internet. It lets a hacker see all the details about the internet communication protocols people have in place. These are the protocols that control how the computers talk to and cooperate with one another across a web of wires and spectrums. NMAP exposes the exchanges of little bits of information over time that are usually hidden away from us, so as not to distract us. NMAP makes them all obvious. Making them obvious makes their vulnerabilities obvious as well. Hence, NMAP = hacker’s tool.

I recently read an article on NMAP that discussed how it’s a must to master if you wish to hold ground in the realm of ethical hacking ~ which is a big and competitive emerging field in Computer Science, with particular application to government jobs. Did anyone hear about the People’s Liberation Army’s attempts to break into US and Russian government computers just a few months ago? Or weeks ago? Or days ago? Long story short, they could have been stopped by ethical hackers

So what irked me about this article was that it was essentially saying, “Want to be an ethical hacker? Well, the way to do it is, master the use of this program tool! A tool that a few other software developers wrote! You don’t have to know all the internal details of what the program does, all you need to know are the commands that you can give it, and results that these commands will spit back at you. Then you can string together these results to figure out how to exploit someone, or expose exploitations that others can take advantage of. Now viola! You can call yourself an ethical hacker.”

I don’t like this message at all, and not only because it involves exploiting people. I’ve seen tons of people follow this “use the tools” mentality. More and more, I find the characteristic of “tool-mastery” being purported as the key to becoming an expert in “whatever-the-next-best-thing-is” field. The truth is that this line of thinking works, and it will get you both jobs and respect if you become a master of tools for your domain. But I find a big flaw with it: Ready-made tools are good, and their use is a necessary abstraction to get work done, but every tool will always have in it a collection of functionality that you, whoever you are, doing whatever you do, will find useless. For example, take Microsoft Windows. How many of you use little ’shortcut’ icons just to the right of the ‘Start’ button? Or in Microsoft Excel, do you use the built in “Functions?”

NMAP is great, but it has at least three features that you, being an ethical hacker / real hacker / script kiddy / confused person who decided to download it after reading this blog, will never understand or will never need to use.

Today’s software tools invariably present you with things you don’t need. This is because ‘you,’ collectively, are a group of people with widely varying needs. Tool makers can’t create a tool just for you, because they’d be ignoring millions of other ‘you’s’ out there that might be interested in slightly similar, but different, functionality. You are a tough crowd to please! The uniqueness of individuals yields individual necessities.

So the typical tool user will often need to waste time sorting through the list of necessary features needed, then skillfully circumvent the useless features in order to get work done.

I think this is a waste. It’s a sharp corner that many perceive as necessary, but I tell you, it can be cut! At the very least, it can be rounded so as to not be so sharp … and I’m not talking about having a “hide menu” option, like in Word (pre-ribbons).

I’ve been looking into the source code for several software tools for some time now. This gives me a glimpse into their lower-level components. Most of the time, software tools are assembled from well-structured building blocks that other software engineers have designed with significant effort. These blocks make the tools tick. They are the legos that make up the lego castle. (You remember legos right? I hope so. If not, you’ve been deprived! ).

What I find amazing about this perspective, and the beauty of open source software, is that I’m given the ability to snap off these legos, take the blocks I find most useful, and combine them into my own unique program that does exactly what I’m looking for. My programs can contain only the things I find useful, so I have the opportunity to streamline my workflow as much as I need to feel I’ve expressed myself to the best of my ability. I think it’s unfortunate that others aren’t given this level of creative control and utility in their work. But things are by no means paradise for me, because rearranging these blocks isn’t as easy as I’ve implied. And some blocks ( from proprietary tools like Word, Excel, Dreamweaver, Internet Explorer, Premiere, etc) I unfortunately can’t break.

But Firefox, as you might have heard, is an open-source internet browser. If it’s open-source, that means it lets me break its blocks! And since a majority of my work can be done within the context of a browser, I have all the legos I need now. The bottleneck I’m left with is this: The tools available to help me get a glimpse at the blocks of large bodies of software, today, are extremely lacking. Back to the lego analogy, imagine trying to built something with them while wearing full-arm casts, only able to wiggle your finger tips. That situation isn’t too far off from a programmer’s reality. Programmers mostly work in a plethora of glorified text editors that all do the same but slightly different things. They work. But they can be so much better.

I hope the open-source trend continues in software development into the future, and I am dedicating myself to improving the tools we use to perceive large code collections, so that when a nice open tool like Firefox comes onto the scene, people will very easily be able to come to terms with the blocks that make up the castle, and break them in a snap.

It’s all about the analogies

If you made it this far … thoughts, comments? I’m wondering if I have any readers =)

Ok so… I’m lying in the grass on a lawn at Stony Brook University, relaxing, taking the sun, and typing …

Honestly! I’m surrounded by grass (and a few bees, unfortunately) with laptop in chest, sun in closed eyes, typing my thoughts into the laptop as I relax and take rays. It’s times like this that I’m grateful I learned to type with my eyes closed =)

I know it sounds out-there, but honestly, this is fantastic. Everyone out there, especially bloggers, try this! I’m telling you.

So, what am I doing besides schlepping around in grassy meadows with my laptop? I’m actually trying to get a tan. I convinced myself that I need one after my talk of the good qualities of sunlight in my last post.

Though I got to thinking about it, and I can’t ignore that there are bad qualities of sunlight as well. Most obvious, skin cancer and 3^rd degree burns are a risk of prolonged exposure to the sun’s rays. I need to figure out how much sunlight it takes to get a healthy dose of vitamin D and brownish complexion, without the whole irreversible-skin-damage thing. I guess it’s a function of exposure time, skin cell regeneration rate, and skin cell degradation rate in the presence of sunlight. Which I guess also makes it a function of latitude and time of day … ozone layer thickness … solar storm activity … so this is getting complicated. Ah well …

Something physics-related popped into my head today. Did you ever wonder how those sun rays are propagated from the sun to the earth?  My understanding from undergrad physics is that photons basically shoot off the surface of the sun and connect with the earth at some point. My question is, how do they know what path to take? The idea is that they propagate radially outward from the surface of the sun, and the sun is a a sort of sphere-like ball of mostly-hydrogen (as far as we know), but is there something written in stone that says photons absolutely must propagate radially outward perpendicular to the surface of their energetic emitter in a vacuum? This makes me wonder about the sun.

Actually, the reason i’m even thinking about it is because I read some interesting findings about the sun’s plasma today. This is the hot gas that floats around and ejects off the sun’s surface. Scientists recently observed, by tracking the velocity of plasma discharging from the surface, that a wave-pattern is clearly present in the velocity of the plasma discharge. That means that plasma is streaming off the sun in alternating periods of fast-slow, fast-slow, over and over again, ad infinitum. From the footage I watched, the plasma seems to have variable velocity across different patches of the surface, but the period of each wave (the time it takes cycle from one particular velocity back to that same velocity again) seems to be fixed across the entire surface. Considering the size of the sun, this is a huge feat of synchronization.

This interesting find gives some insight into what’s going on under the frothy heat layers over there. My guess is that the sun must have some sort of rippling energetic mass near its middle that is making some waves.

This is probably obvious, but it seems to me that waves are a part of everything, and it should be acknowledged. They say that solar bursts cause ripples across the surface of the sun, like ripples on water, and that the sun rings like a bell in the process. These are surface waves. Now they are also saying that the sun has these core-to-surface velocity waves perpendicular to the surface that manifest in the solar wind. It’s obvious that waves have a fundamental coolness. Is it a coincidence that in math, one can use ‘wavelets’ to approximate any function, with any amount of variables? That means that the sum of waves can be used to represent anything you see in 2D (paper), 3D ( the world ), 4D (3d plus time), and anything in higher dimensions. The universe works in waves it seems. I find that interesting…

One last sun factoid: they say that the emitting plasma waves might give insight into why it is that the outer atmosphere of the sun, called its corona, is hotter than the sun itself. This fact is something that has perplexed scientists ever since it was discovered. Think about it. If you scaled the sun’s situation down to, say, toaster-oven size, this would be like saying that the space just in front of a toaster oven gets one-thousand times hotter than that inside the oven. If you were to throw some toast in there and crank the ‘toast’ knob up, reaching for it upon hearing the chime would cause you severe bodily harm! And you wouldn’t even be able to reach the toast!

Maybe this velocity-wave business has something to do with that. If the speed of the escaping plasma is constantly changing speed as it escapes the sun, I can see it causing a build-up of energy around the atmosphere as all that mass bursts out of the surface. The fluctuating fast-and-slow motion of the escaping plasma is probably creating a situation such that no inertia in the surrounding space can stabilize over time. Incoming plasma will always clash with the existing atmospheric plasma in a maximum of friction, and therefore, heat. Maybe it’s hotter around the sun than in it because there’s more friction out there.

So sun is great. And I don’t mean the guys that made Java! Though they aren’t so bad I guess.

That’s all I have for now. Adios!

-CJ

Hey folks! This is my first official non-introductory post. This summer has been interesting, so I’ll fill you in as I go on what I’ve been up to, what I’ve researched, what I want to research, and what I’m generally up to.

Summer Days

When I started this blog in May, I had just finished a semester of near-full time Master’s classes, and I figured I’d have the summer off. I was set on developing a nice web presence. Who doesn’t have a really nice web presence these days? I’d read up on some some new technologies (AJAX via GWT, Cuda) and topics (GPGPU, Computational Geometry Algorithms), and wanted to continue my work on touch-screen devices and related software. (For those unfamiliar with touch-screens, get ready. In my opinion, multi-touch screens will be the next major step toward the future of computer-human interaction). I considered having a social life, but that didn’t work out last summer, so I figured I’d try something different this time …

The summer was looking great … I had my own schedule, my own plans, and a solid wi-fi connection from my back yard. I could tan and be productive at the same time! How great is that?

Coders, Sun Is Not The Enemy!

I think the stereotype that coders must fear and hide from the sun is terrible! I don’t know who started it, but the fact is that we need the sun! I read some details recently discussing how its rays trigger a reaction in skin cells, triggering release  of Vitamin D into our bloodstream. Vitamin D is hard to come by in natural food. Milk has ;some, salmon a little more, but your best bet is to take 15 minutes of sunlight each day to get above the recommended amount. A few minutes of daily natural illumination gives us all we need to keep us going ~ improving bones, complexion, hair, and health. More important to note, studies show that a lack of vitamin D has a strong correlation with cancer in adults, and sufficient daily doses of it result in 30%-50% reductions in cancer risk. See? I’m no chemist or statistician, but from the looks of things, a little sun can’t hurt, and a lack of sun probably does! So, if any coders out there are reading this, shaking your heads, thinking “too bright, not gonna go near it. Hurts my delicate coder eyes,” I’m telling you, reconsider! Or at least start eating lots of salmon… It’s for our own good. Exploit your local wi-fi. Become a Sun Coder =)

My outside coding experiments were relaxing and productive times, and I definitely recommend the work style to anyone with a laptop, a mild amount of freedom, and a glare-resistant screen.

But as things go, these times passed rapidly, akin to a tornado swooping in, lifting me, and dropping me into an office. I’ll talk more on that later. I did manage to do some interesting research and formulate a few opinions in the time before the tornado. So read on, and hear my talk of the strife of open & free website creation, the flaws of modern code-standards development, and long stretches of digressions…

Free and Open Personal Web Development

In my early May days, while catching some rays, I set out to make the ultimate of websites. I bought some web space from Bluehost.com, which has so far been a great company with decent deals on web hosting, traffic, and server-side configuration (whom you can thank for setting up this Wordpress blogging software for me). I decided to get a little vain and register the charlesrojo.com domain, and I gave my inner artist a go at creating a symmetrical and colorful design for my pages. “How hard can a little CSS be?” I figured…

CSS: Cascading Style Sheets ~ Cause for Severe Suffering

For those that don’t know, CSS is basically a list of properties in a text file that instruct a web browser on how to display the many squared boxes that make up a website. Easy enough. A CSS is a “sheet” (the second S) that gives “style” (the first S) to each webpage. They also “Cascade,” ergo, “C”. The cascading aspect of them isn’t too important, but SS is way too short of an acronym to suit computer scientists, and web developers especially (what with all their SOAP and JSON and AJAX and XSLT and XMLHTTPRequests and whatnot).

So CSS, they say, gives web pages their flair and flavor. They can turn a page from a mundane black-on-white bore into an exotic browsing experience. Because the web is so central to our digital society, you’d think it would be easy to create such a stylesheet…right? I mean, beautiful websites are all over the place. I, being a coder and having seen some insane C++ code before, assumed that making a nice website couldn’t be any worse than writing some C++ code……. could it? So I said to myself, “I could probably do it in a basic text editor!” Who needs a special Microsoft product? I’ll use Notepad!

I spoke too soon…

Standards: Paving the Way, or Paving Paradise?

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium, the standards body responsible for producing various web standards ~ and their terrible acronyms) is the group responsible for laying out the rules of CSS. After some pain, I realize now that mastering their rules is akin to attaining a zen-like harmony with nature. It requires months to years of practice, infinite patience, and a mastering of the digital space-time continuum.

Curse or Cure?

The core problem is that most of the browsers don’t properly implement the full set of standardized rules for CSS. For this reason, in my opinion, creating a website that fully exploits CSS is worse than C++ coding, and I’m not talking about basics here. I’m talking the sort of deep, tricky, worse-than-STL C++ that is massively parallel, exploits all the hidden features Stroustrup snuck in only for himself (like placement delete), and is so complicated that it makes you wish you’d become a pharmacist. I’ll go a step farther and say that it may even actually leave you silently weeping in bed at night, dwelling over your inequities as a human for failure to comprehend. Since I foolishly elected to hand-code my CSS in a basic text editor without any automated assistance, I found myself constantly flipping the CSS reference website (W3Schools) up and down, slowly working out a mildly decent CSS sheet, assuming things would be reasonably close to what I was aiming for in the end.

If only I knew then what I know now. I spent a good amount of time getting my page to look right. On one browser ~ Firefox. Then I took a glance at it using Internet Explorer and decided that I hate CSS. I only tested my webpage on Firefox and Internet Explorer, and each change I made to my CSS file had unexpected and different effects across the two browsers. I constantly fiddled with numbers until I managed to trick both browsers into doing something mildly similar to my original intention before the day was through (and it took all day). I then checked my results in a third browser, Opera, and silently wept.

My experiences were worse than C++ coding simply because the result of my work was literally unpredictable. With C++, when something doesn’t work, there is always a definitive reason. These reasons are usually somewhat obvious, and you  often find yourself saying “why didn’t I catch that?” With HTML and CSS, the coder is given the illusion that solidity and guarantees exists, only to smack face first into a mirror. “Sorry, this should be here, but it isn’t yet!” the browsers say. “We didn’t implement this part of the standard.” This is a problem. What good is a standard feature if it only exists in the standard?

Standards Boards: The Digital Molasses

One could argue that I should hate the browser implementers (Mozilla and Microsoft, to name a few), for their failure to interpret the CSS properly, but in truth, I hate the standards, for being so backwards and self-conflicting that no browser developers want to implement them. Which brings me to my “Standards” rant:

The methods, channels, and principles by which standards for various coding languages are introduced (be they C++, CSS, or what-have-you) need serious overhaul in my opinion. The standards bodies need to be able to leave behind bad decisions of the past, rapidly try out new ideas, and crop mercilessly until a reduced set of well-covering features are discovered. They should also release the source-code they use to prototype their ideas. If they do, then organizations like Mozilla and Microsoft won’t have to create implementations from scratch. They will also be seeded with a common code base. This might encourage them to walk reasonably close to one another on the implementation pathway. A personal wish of mine is that the the standards developers would also distribute free creation tools coupled with each released standard as well. People seeking free web development environments shouldn’t have to keep minimizing and maximizing between their text editor and the w3school website to figure out what keywords or units they need to put in their sheet to make things look right. It just isn’t right!

Coding Details

I really wasn’t using Notepad to make the CSS, I was using Notepad++, coding the HTML and the CSS pages by hand then testing them out by refreshing the browsers, but the process was too painful and wasn’t working out well at all. Too many typos and mismatched brackets, missing semi-colons, and other syntactical mayhem led me to start exploring some auto-creation tools out there. I was unemployed, so I didn’t want to shell out the cash for Dreamweaver (which most claim is the best tool for this sort of thing due to features like CSS and HTML auto-complete, support for the various HTML formats [HTML loose, HTML transitional, HTML strict, XHTML], and a real-time view of what your changes affect). I also didn’t want a Microsoft mirror of it (Frontpage or Expressions-Web), so I experimented with a few free open-source website editors. I was sad to see that most of them were really lacking, with the exception of KompOzer (http://www.kompozer.net/). This is an extension to an editor called Nvu, which is a standalone version of Composer, which was part of the Mozilla application suite based on XUL (confused yet?) and all that other Firefox-like goodness. The man that was making Nvu, Daniel Glazman, seems to have run off to create a bigger and better version of Composer from scratch, but unfortunately, he left the really promising Nvu in a half-complete state. Noting this, the KompOzer developers have picked up the torch and extend KompOzer until Daniel returns.

I used v .7.7 of KompOzer, which was amazing if not for the fact that it would crash every 20 minutes on my machine with a cryptic memory error (but those first 20 minutes were really good!). And even better, version .7.10 is fresh out of the box as of August 9th, 2007! Grab it from Sourceforge and give it a go. It’s a wonderful free alternative to Dreamweaver, assuming they’ve fixed the memory problems on Windows.

See, what makes Nvu and KompOzer beautiful, and levels above Composer and Notepad++, are the builtin CSS creation tools and realtime feedback about what your changes affect on the resulting webpage. These tools essentially TELL you what you can and can’t have in your CSS files, letting you structure them from the ground up. This means that they are at every step complete, and make the creation process far speedier than that of my original technique - going wild in a text editor, then, when finished, receiving an “It fails,” or “It works,” confirmation back from the browser. Many unfortunately endure this process.

And All The Rest

I have a tendency to speak at length about things, so it dawned on me that perhaps it would be better if I video blogged rather then typed. I bought Adobe Premiere with the intent of making some great, hilarious, and informative youtube videos, and I even hoarded a list of visualization and interface papers to research so I’d have some juicy cutting edge tech to talk about. I have some videos I’ve created, so expect them pretty soon, but things have been busy lately…

With a new job =) I’ve been working for a great company since the end of May. I’m very happy with it, especially since the work is close to my interests ~ visualization. It’s an outlet for me to explore and implement some cutting-edge things. I’ve decided that since I’m already 33% complete with my Master’s, I’ll finish the remaining credits as a part-timer (2 classes a semester should do it) and dedicate full-time hours to my new company, so expect infrequent but long-winded updates for this blog in the times ahead.

Thanks for reading! If you made it this far, you may as well leave a comment