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Reading the utopi­anism of world​chang​ing​.com after watch­ing a TED talk from the founder of it, I tried cal­cu­lat­ing car­bon foot­print more accu­rately than I had pre­vi­ously. Catching up on missed blogs, I’ve got­ten myself going on dopplr a moment ago, fol­low­ing a Lessig commenter’s idea to use it to cal­cu­late car­bon for off­set dona­tions — which is a pretty cool, IMO.

I’ve been using Tasque for a cou­ple weeks now and it’s extremely use­ful for keep­ing myself orga­nized. The only down­side was the lack of instant-access to it unless I’m sit­ting in front of my lap­top. Trying to rem­edy that I signed up for RTM and got their MilkSync to work with my Crackberry, so the tasks I enter on my lap­top end up on my phone and visa-versa.

Sigh. Being impressed with sync is very ten years ago…

I was sort of on the fence about the count­ing calo­ries thing, at least until I saw the WeightBot screen­shots, which sold me on the idea: eat­ing healthy to look bet­ter and live longer? Meh. Eating healthy for the sake of a new toys? Win.

Unfortunately WeightBot is only for the iPhone, which I don’t (want to) own, so that rule that out. Instead I googled for online tools and came up with live​strong​.com, which has a “MyPlate” thing that keeps track of all this, along with “X food has N calo­ries” and such. It also has a Blackberry thing for enter­ing all that as well that’s on the “Blackberry App World”.

The upshot? App World is a gigan­tic ripoff of Apple’s App Store, and some­thing they should have had from the beginning.

Something to say…

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
184 svn
165 ls
101 cd
96 ldapsearch
95 ssh
62 vim
25 ping
24 grep
23 sudo
20 rm

So frig­gin’ sweet to finally get there.

Point
Counter-point

So Slipshod Slashdot has a story up on a Chinese cryp­tog­ra­pher who found a short­cut through the SHA-1 scheme two years ago. While I’m not a cryp­tog­ra­pher, it appears to be eas­ier to forge mes­sages or crack hashed pass­words which use the SHA-1 algo­rithm. Unfortunately, even read­ing the com­ments at +5 puts the num­ber of com­ments at 40, includ­ing the same dumb-assed argu­ments about gun control/gun rights that you sim­ply can­not avoid when you stick Libertarians and Liberals (sounds like an RPG to me) in the same room. Shorter: Bullshit about Censorship and Gun-control and Tha Gubment and The Constitution have invaded +5, and since the goal of the point-based mod­er­a­tion sys­tem is to save the time of peo­ple who don’t care to wade through the same “legal­ize it!” v. “crim­i­nal!” argu­ments on threads about hash­ing algo­rithm secu­rity, it should be evi­dent that it has has failed.

So, why not extend or remove the upper lim­its on the mod­er­a­tion points, and add an option to only show the top n com­ments and replies to them? That is, at least, more con­sis­tent with why I use mod­er­a­tion (to save time).