Cox Crow

For some time now the New York State Department of Transportation has been studying what to do with a section of Route 22 between I-684 and Doansburg Road. Their inclination was to widen the road, add left-turn lanes, etc., which doesn’t sit too well with the community activists. And wouldn’t solve the problem.

I posted my solution to the problem on the Brewster10509 list, just to get some people thinking: change the intersections. It sparked a bit of conversation — and appears to have stimulated the creation of a Brewster blog. I suggested using traffic circles, but apparently there’s a difference between circles, circuses, rotaries and roundabouts.

Roundabouts appear to be under serious consideration by several States’ departments of transportation, which I think is a good thing.

It appears to me that while County or State or Federal jurisdiction over the highways helps pay for them, and gives a semblance of regional concern, the people most affected may not have the responsibility that they should. Or, is it simply that State and Federal funds come with strings attached?

When I use my down-level version of Safari, Google says, Your browser is not officially supported by Google Maps. In order to improve the user experience here, like they do elsewhere, I would greatly appreciate it if they would link my search to alternatives at Expedia, MapQuest, Yahoo!, and other purveyors of fine goods.

Just watched the Democratic Convention on The West Wing, and it was much more exciting than the real-life snoozefest in 2004.

Disney’s World.

At a site where I use Blogger, someone commented. Looks like there’s a problem with either Blogger or the template I’m using: so he commented at 6:31 PM. BFD. What date?

Can you imagine the trouble that could be caused if letter like symbols were allowed in domain names?

In the paper he links from there, letter-like symbols, I learned that there are glyphs for “telephone sign” and “facsimile sign.” That is, ℡ and ℻.

Being obtuse, and English-speaking, this begs the question, “Why?”

I’d say some glib and meaningful here, but what I really want to make are observations about a company. Maybe I should get an opinion on this that isn’t clouded by The Shadow.

Hey, these kittens are crazy critters.

I just noticed that Google now displays satellite images in the map results. This is the really neat, and paranoia-inducing, upshot of their earlier purchase of Keyhole.

The difference between this, and, for example, Terraserver, is that it is just so easy.

FAQ: Will I be able to see my house? Yes.

Firefox fails to check the prefetched cache before requesting the next page when the in-memory cache-size is allocated.

To repeat, set browser.cache.memory.capacity to a known value, then wait until the memory reported as being used by Firefox is greater than said known value. Then, clear the disk cache. Then, request the test case and observe the headers in transit.

They’ll look like this.

We’re taking down the ProdigyBiz environment today, and have off-loaded the web work to another host. However, instead of just taking the hosts off-line, we have tried to provide a somewhat more palatable experience for unwary visitors.

For those of you interested in the details of the implementation, keep reading. And if you were a ProdigyBiz customer, you may want to check your e-mail address of record.

Continue reading →

May Terri Schiavo rest in peace.

While much of what I have heard regarding Mrs. Schiavo focused on whether she should die, I find it troubling that a less ethically difficult, but still critical, question has been glossed over. Since I am not certain of the specifics of the instant case, I shall pose this hypothetically.

Marriage, in the civil sense, is a contract between parties. Church marriages take on greater significance, and vary among faiths, and may be recognized by the State, but the union is essentially a contract, with rights and privileges defined not only by written agreement but by tradition and law.

Suppose one party to the contract is rendered either incompetent or incommunicado. Can that party remain fully bound to the contract, when he can no longer consent to substantive changes to it? When, and under what circumstances, can the contract become null and void?

So far the only link pre-fetching I’ve observed from Google has been of www.stanford.edu. This is terribly funny, actually, since the pre-fetching of this page doesn’t speed things up. Here’s why:

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2005 17:28:48 GMT
Server: Apache
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

Stanford does not provide enough information with the prefetched response for Mozilla to use the cached version, or for Mozilla to ask for Stanford to return the page only if it has been modified. What we should see are some more headers, specifically Last-Modified: and/or Etag:, so that we can make a request to which the server can respond HTTP/1.x 304 Not Modified.

So, even though Mozilla has prefetched the page into local cache, it still makes an HTTP GET for http://www.stanford.edu/, to which Stanford, smart people that they are, respond “OK.”

Now, here’s the really funny part: pre-fetching is broken in Firefox’s default configuration anyway.

MovableType, and TypePad, also enable pre-fetching, by the use of a link rel="next" element. Since typepad.com does not always emit Last-Modified: and Etag: headers, look at my test case here. What we should see is that the next page is pre-fetched, with an HTTP/1.x 200 OK response. Then an actual click should make the same request, but including If-Modified-Since: and If-None-Match: headers, with a HTTP/1.x 304 Not Modified response.

Instead we see Damn. My test case works. I swear it wasn’t working before. Anyway, it doesn’t work with MovableType.

Paul Hoffman announced the release of Bruce Schneier’s and his Internet Draft on Attacks on Cryptographic Hashes in Internet Protocols. It’s readable, and covers the issues in their typically not-paranoid fashion — unlike some other articles I’ve read (but will not bother to find again).

While it is certainly possible, and at a first glance even probable, that the broken security property will not affect the overall security of many specific Internet protocols, the conservative security approach is to change hash algorithms. The Internet protocol community needs to migrate in an orderly manner away from SHA-1 and MD5 — especially MD5 — and toward more secure hash algorithms.

This document summarizes what is currently known about hash algorithms and the Internet protocols that use them. It also gives advice on how to avoid the currently known problems with MD5 and SHA-1, and what to consider if future predicted attacks become real.

Being the slow, not-so-trendy sort, it took me a while to pay attention to Yahoo! 360°. Or rather, it took Jeremy’s post offering invitations, which suddenly sprouted more than 200 comments.

There are lots of observant people out there, so I doubt my comments, or the mails I threw out, or my internal journal post in February, or my small aside here in June, had anything at all to do with Yahoo! noticing that they already have data on some social networks.

Now they’re mining it, to provide something that you may find useful.

Good dog.

Lake Placid’s Ubu Ale is a mild-manner red ale, suitable for drinking early in the evening, or on a warm spring day.

John Massengale has his students focusing on the really important projects.

🙂

For Kim Regan of Southeast, it’s about having to pile her three daughters into the car to go anyplace, such as the movies, shopping or the library.

So begins Michael Risinit’s article on the Riverkeeper’s report on sprawl, on the front page of today’s Journal News. And, frankly, that’s about the size of it.

Our request for a variance was not contested, and was granted by unanimous vote.

Receiving the variance is thrilling; we can move on to the next stages of the project. If you were watching SusCom channel 8, you could see the backs of our heads.

Amazon now shows what similiar items customers ultimately bought after viewing a particular item. So you can see, for example, that 50% of the customers who looked at the Grundig Mini 100 PE Portable AM/FM/Shortwave Radio with Headphones bought it, whereas only 3% bought the Oregon Scientific WR196T All Hazard Radio with AM/FM Radio & S.A.M.E Technology. Maybe they don’t know what S.A.M.E. is — I didn’t — or maybe they just saw something similiar for $40 less.