webstersprodigy.net

Statistics can be weird. Just when you’ve done the game show paradox, and the birthday paradox, there’s this. I think people in general need to realize that we as humans are just not that good at intuitively knowing probability.
From John Rice’s Statistics Textbook:
A black urn contains 5 red and 6 green balls, and a white [...]

From the system man page, it explicitely says:
Do not use system() from a program with set-user-ID or set-group-ID privileges, because strange values for some environment variables might be used to subvert system integrity.
Since system is basically a fork and wait, it’s pretty easy to use execv instead. Here is a snippet from the goog_pam module [...]

“There are only n minus two choices remaining.”
I hear people walking in late, like I usually would be, but in this situation it’s actually impossible since the schedule revolves around me.
I kinda live in a computer world lately. Where like, most social interaction I get is over irc and sometimes facebook, but god not twitter, [...]

In summary (from http://slashdot.org/~arizwebfoot):
Crooked, obscene, irrational, ineffective assistance of counsel, insane, tom foolery, crooked, baseless, should have used NYCL, undeserved, excessive, way excessive, legally raped, crooked, sanctions, more sanctions, terroristic actions, bungled, inept, crooked, bad dog bad, sit in the corner, stupid, payback, legal hos, dumb award, timeout, crooked, who ya gonna call, something is [...]

This is an experiment in playing a homeless family in The Sims 3. I created two Sims, moved them in to a place made to look like an abandoned park, removed all of their remaining money, and then attempted to help them survive without taking any job promotions or easy cash routes. It’s based on [...]

Boinc is a project I just discovered, but find it very cool. I have used projects like the protein folding and seti@home in the past, which use your spare cpu cycles for something useful. Boinc allows you to manage many projects like that in one place. It seems like an awesome way to help scientists discover look at some really cool problems. http://boinc.berkeley.edu/

Pros: Fits my girthy frame, has wolves on it, attracts women Cons: Only 3 wolves (could probably use a few more on the ‘guns’), cannot see wolves when sitting with arms crossed, wolves would have been better if they glowed in the dark.

Making the not possible, possible

In CS 504:Real Time Operating Systems, the class built a functional Real Time Operating system based on the UIK API. In my implementation, I heavily relied on the source code of FreeRTOS. The process focused primarily on demonstrating the atmel processor, multitasking, and and basic interprocess communication, which are fundamental parts of an RTOS. In this project, the same problems are achieved with a very different architecture. Namely, all the first programming projects – generating a sound wave, counting LEDs, timing how long buttons were pressed, and handling hardware events – were programmed similarly and multi-tasked on the propeller chip. This project included interfacing with the ntsc and peripheral drivers, writing a sound driver, learning spin and propeller assembly, and comprehending the propeller architecture.

I am doing some research that involves a *lot* of google searches. Because this research involves a significant number of directed queries, it seems logical to hide this information as much as practical. If there is a web host who notices sequential names in a Google referer URL repeatedly, this might raise suspicion or alter behavior which could skew results. Similarly, it is desirable to hide IP information from both the web host (for similar reasons) and possibly even search engines.

A musical “note” is a waveform that has a certain fundamental frequency. A perfect sine wave consists only of the fundamental frequency, and sounds very “pure” or mellow, like a flute. For this project, you are to use interrupts to generate the notes of a musical scale, while at the same time using another interrupt to update a count. We will generate square waves by toggling a bit within a port on and off. Specifically, your program should play the notes from middle C to the next higher C, each of approximately one second in duration. These notes should be playing at the same time that an 8-bit binary count is being displayed in the LED’s, updating at approximately 1/4 second.

This Scotland dude is just amazing.

Cool band, cool song:

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/04/boston-college-prompt-commands-are-suspicious
On Friday, EFF and the law firm of Fish and Richardson filed an emergency motion to quash [pdf] and for the return of seized property on behalf of a Boston College computer science student whose computers, cell phone, and other property were seized as part of an investigation into who sent an e-mail to a [...]

http://www.socuteurl.com/
This is just so cute. The ugliness of http://webstersprodigy.net/2009/04/08/avr-interrupts/ can become http://www.socuteurl.com/sqooshywishy

This is an oldie but goodie. I’ve seen format string bugs in the past, and have even exploited a few using the “magic formula”. Today, I thought it would be a good time to actually sit down and figure out how they work. The below link is an excellent resource to anyone learning about these: http://www.cgsecurity.org/Articles/SecProg/Art4/

The purpose of this assignment is to give you experience with the AVR’s timers and the use of interrupts. You are to repeat assignment #1, this time performing the timing using an interrupt-driven timer. You are to write an interrupt service routine (ISR) for one of the hardware timers on the AVR. Each time the timer interrupts, you should update a counter variable. Then, when determining the amount of time that the switch is held down, use the counter value. Then, use the counter again to determine how long to turn on the LED. As before, in addition to writing the code, determine the size of the code in your program, including main and the ISR.

I really enjoy this song. Despite all the slash fans out there, I think Scott Weiland made this band. This video is also pretty badass – you can’t go wrong with a good ol’ western gun fight.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwJhQnt34m0

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