Death Messages: Will+

I hope you're not in too bad of a mood already, because this post is less than cheerful.

I've been thinking recently about what would happen to the knowledge I have accrued if I were to die an untimely death. There are a thousand things - from interesting facts/skills to sentimental feelings - I want to say to a whole bunch of different people, but I don't have the time to tell while I live.

My solution is a collection of audio recordings (or video or text) tagged for dissemination to various people and locations if I die unexpectedly. Groups of people can be nested, getting narrower and narrower. For example, I might record a message for broadcast to everybody who might be at all interested, a message for people that knew me, a message for people at my school, &c. If later in my life (after the initial recording set) I discover new information that deserves a mention, I would record an addendum for the appropriate message, stating the date on which it was added.

If I choose to actually set this up (which is kind of unlikely), I'll probably have some sort of deadman's switch that sends instructions to my immediate family on how to disseminate the recordings and contact information on people who have special messages tagged for them. That instruction document would, of course, also contain the members of each special group and extra steps required to release the appropriate recordings in certain places (like online communities).

This is probably an actually good way to send "last wishes" as well.

Snowflakes

I was standing outside tonight and, instead of going where I needed to go, looking into the wind seeing snowflakes fall down. It was a windy night, so the flakes (which were considerably larger than average) were going down at a considerably horizontal angle. All I could think about was the intricacy of each of the snowflakes and how much I'd like to capture one and see if they really are six-way symmetrical.

I don't know if it's true that all snowflakes are unique. I would think that, since so many have fallen and they're so small, there would have to be duplicates. Since there obviously aren't giant inch-wide snowflakes crashing down on us, it's likely that there is indeed a finite snowflake space. Perhaps they could be used as a true random number generator? It would be pretty easy to create a hash function for the flakes.

To be honest, I'm not really sure why I wrote this. Things like snowflakes make me ever more amazed at the complexity and beauty of the universe.

"What is SQL Injection?" for the Average User

Computing is central to the Information Age and therefore is it critical for each user to at least have a basic understanding of it. With almost all of the commonly used sites moved up to "Web 2.0", accounts, credentials, and personal data are important.

The first step to online account security is choosing a good password. However, before storing anything important online, you should consider that there are other potential security holes - those which do not require a password at all. The most prominent of these is "SQL injection", which I will attempt to explain to an average computer user now.

SQL stands for Standard Query Language or something like that, but that's not really important now. What is important is that there are computers that store a whole lot of data and use SQL to access (e.g. on log-in) and modify it (e.g. on account creation). SQL is based on text-based code which is sent to the data server to request information (e.g. to find the user whose name was typed on the log-in form).

Since it's based entirely on text, it's vulnerable to hackers who know SQL and type fragments of its code into log-in forms, causing their code to be executed by the SQL server. If the web page does not "clean up" the input - removing characters that would cause SQL to do bad things - then anybody can make the server do anything.

Frequently, it's possible to type in SQL code that will cause the server to think that the hacker entered the correct password for any account. (This usually results in the hacker being logged in as the first user in the database.) More terrifyingly, it's possible to enter code that will result in the server destroying all its stored data. Once that's done - just once, by anyone - everybody's account info is either stolen or destroyed.

What can you do to avoid SQL injections? Ask the website's creator. Search the Internet for information pertaining to the vulnerability of that particular server. Finally, be aware that the Internet is an amazingly volatile and dangerous place for data.

The New Year, 2014

Obligatory new year post engage!

Well, it's 2014. You could say a lot has changed for me since last year: I'm 15 (can get a student driver's permit), just finished my first semester of high school (hopefully did well on those finals), and will continue taking college classes in the spring.

However, things are going to be pretty much the same. I will again be busy with school, just slightly more difficult school. I will again be mildly overloaded by college classes, just different classes. Such is the passage of time: gradual and only made staccato when humans impose special spans upon it. Admittedly, starting driving lessons is a pretty big change.

I don't really have any new-year resolutions; I'm too busy with everything to try to maintain anything drastic. It probably would be good for me to go outside more often, which is manageable. To start that, I pulled out some sleds and went sliding down various hills today.

Holding said sled

Snow in the beard