Desultory Thoughts

Last weekend a friend of mine and I went wardriving [wikipedia.org], although we didn’t actually access the open networks we found and we won’t be publishing our findings as others who do this do. The reason we did it is so that we could test out the cool GPS Visualizer [gpsvisualizer.com] website that allows you to upload a text file with GPS coordinates and convert it to a KML file that can be opened in Google Earth [earth.google.com].

We hooked up a GPS to a laptop and used NetStumbler [stumbler.net] to collect the data. The final result was a file that when opened in Google Earth gave us a detailed visual map of all the networks that we detected in our neighborhood. We could see which ones were protected and which were unprotected. Just as a point of interest, we discovered 64 access points on our short drive and 31 of them were open, meaning they had no apparent security in place. It’s possible that some were securing their network by only allowing specific MAC addresses access to their network, but I doubt that’s the case for too many.

As a side note, Google Earth made a brief appearance on Fox’s “24” [fox.com/24] TV series tonight.

You might be surprised to know what kind of information people know about your computer when you visit their website. I have several different stat programs that record information about the visitors who come to my website, as most people do. If you’re curious to find out what people can find out about your computer just by visiting a website, check out this interesting site called Project IP [projectip.com].

The most revealing thing (especially if you’re using Internet Explorer) is at the very bottom of the page on Project IP. It’s the last item you copied onto your clipboard and the script that was used to find this information out is turned on in IE by default. I was surprised to find this out and I immediatley set this option to prompt me if I ever run into it again. I don’t keep track of what was last copied into my clipboard, but I know that it’s nobodys business.

The instructions to disable or prompt for permission to run the script is outlined on Project IP as follows:

Only works in Internet Explorer on the Windows platform. It reportedly works with varied success when IE is running in an emulator such as VMWare on another OS. If you have to use Windows, at least dump IE and use Firefox.

Rouge Evil websites can use this to steal potentially sensitive data from your Windows clipboard. I have done this in Javascript within the browser and the contents of your clipboard is not sent to this server. If someone wanted to snoop they would do what I have done, except the text area where it’s displayed would be invisible (using CSS) and they would use an XMLHttpRequest object to send it back to the webserver.

Fix: Go to Tools > Internet Options > Security > Select a security zone > Custom Level > Scripting > Allow paste operations via script and set it to Disabled or Prompt.

Today our entire LAN team went out to lunch and we talked a little bit about some differences in programming between two departments in our building; namely District Computer Services and Agency Computer Services. Agency Computer Services employees are currently programming in PowerBuilder (Sybase) and District Computer Services are writing in Visual Basic. We discussed how there is a possibility that Agency Computer Services may decide to conform with a building standard. Standardizing would be beneficial, the question is, what should be the standard?

Side-by-side comparison between PowerBuilder and Visual Basic [woodger.ca] are actually not as different as I would have thought. The major differences seem to be the learning curve (PowerBuilder has a higher learning curve), “openness” and diversity (PowerBuilder remains “open” so that it can be implemented on a much wider range of platforms) and cost.

I don’t really care what they choose, although it is more likely that they’ll choose Visual Basic based on its popularity and short learning curve. The programmers in Agency Computer Services could pick up VB easily enough.

Interestingly enough, there was a Slashdot article today along the lines of our lunch conversation entitled “Is Visual Basic a Good Beginner’s Language?” [slashdot.org]. I don’t have any experience in Visual Basic, but based on many of the comments made on Slashdot, I would tend to agree that it may not be the best beginner’s language, but not for the reasons you might think.

My experience is based entirely what I learned in college, so I am definitely not the expert. However, I started out with a C++ class (without concentrating on OO to start with) and then an advanced C++ class that taught us all about the Object Oriented nature of the language.

The entire time I wished that I knew what the computer was doing with the programs I was writing. I was very happy when I finally had my assembly language class, although admittedly, it didn’t make me a better programmer; it just shed some light on the process.

When I took my COBOL class, it was a completely different experience. COBOL was pretty straight forward compared to C++, but very verbose! It was very format specific and the only good thing about it was that it was extremely easy to tell what the program was doing.

Finally, I used Java in my graphics class which was pretty satisfying for me. Despite having to get past the fact that I had never formally learned Java, I really enjoyed writing programs whose output was so much more then just lines of text; they were moving, interactive, and clickable.

I like the idea of knowing how to program. If I ever did it as a job, I would need some major refresher courses, but I think I could pick it up again easily enough. One of the arguments made at lunch today was that many of the programmers want to use C# or .NET primarily because by learning those languages they would be more marketable if they ever decided to leave. I tend to agree, I would rather learn something that is more widely used and that teaches you more. Visual Basic from what I’ve read, really doesn’t make you a better programmer. From Wikipedia:

Many critics of Visual Basic explain that the simple nature of Visual Basic is harmful in the long run. Many people have learned VB on their own without learning good programming practices. Even when VB is learned in a formal classroom, the student may not be introduced to many fundamental programming techniques and constructs, since much of the functionality is contained within the individual components and not visible to the programmer. Since it is possible to learn how to use VB without learning standard programming practices, this often leads to unintelligible code and workarounds.

Of course, everybody has their comfort zones and background, so you tend to like what you’re comfortable with. Since I’m no longer comfortable with anything, it really wouldn’t matter to me, but I would prefer to learn something that will help me in more areas than just my current job. Seeing as how I work on the network side of things, it really doesn’t make a difference what I think. I don’t have to deal with programming at all in my current job, but I’m still quite interested in programming. I think if I ever find the time, I’ll learn the latest web development craze of the last year, Ruby on Rails [rubyonrails.org].

A very funny article [slashdot.org] (non-intentional) was posted by CmdrTaco on Slashdot today. CmdrTaco is an editor and, according to the article, the owner of Slashdot. Slashdot.org, for the uninformed is “News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.” It has turned into a place for geeks to “discuss” articles that are submitted by the readers of Slashdot. It’s a community blog!The funny part about this post entitled “On the Subject of Slashdot Article Formatting” is that he addressed spelling and grammar and noted that they weren’t very important or that they were “secondary” issues. He proved it by misspelling several words including ‘to’ when he meant ‘too’. He even sited that as a direct example as one of the mistakes he doesn’t care about when he said, “Of course some users like to email me to tell me how much Slashdot sucks, how fat and lazy I am, and how the most terrible thing in the history of Slashdot is the fact that the 4th story down contains the word ‘to’ when it ought to contain the word ‘too’. That missing ‘o’ is the greatest travesty on-line today! It’s hard to take that seriously.” However, the Slashdot community disagrees, for the most part.

I’m using this article as an example of how important spelling and grammar are to the reader. When you misspell words, especially obvious ones like ‘to’ when you really mean ‘too’ and ‘there’ instead of ‘their’, it tells the reader that “you’re not as smart as you think I am”.

I hope that all the computer kids out there recognize that “See you later” is not really spelled “CUL8ER” and I wonder how much more of a problem this will be in the future, especially when the “editors” of a major blog don’t really care either. I know I’ll be certain that my children learn these essential basics.