SOPA/PIPA (Protect IP)

I am your constituent and I never miss a vote.  I want to make clear, that there are already laws and international treaties in place to protect from online piracy.  If those are not working, using Chinese style censorship methods to block foreign sites makes me wonder what happened to freedom, and I will remember those in congress who agreed with a minority of struggling entertainment concerns that Chinese style internet totalitarianism is the best answer....

18 Jan 2012 · 1 min · Gary Allen Vollink

[Geek] The Ubiquitous Computer Mouse

Xerox Alto Mouse (1973) The computer mouse has been a basic part of computing for about 20 years now (25 if you were a Mac early-adopter, and even longer if you are a Xerox Alto power-user).  Up until recently, innovations with mouses have been about adding more buttons, and scroll wheels.  Now, with Smart-Phones becoming more and more popular, things like multi-touch and gestures are being added too....

17 Sep 2011 · 2 min · Gary Allen Vollink

[Geek] Attack Vectors and Twitter

I wrote a script some time ago, that basically parsed the auth logs on my web server looking for IP addresses that try, and fail, to log in, multiple times.  Over the years, I've continued to expand what it does, and what it could do. At first, it would note something, and send me an e-mail, and I'd get to it, and it would continue to e-mail me once every hour until I did....

17 Sep 2011 · 2 min · Gary Allen Vollink

About Times Square

I've been working at the office on Times Square (xSq) for a little less than 2 months now. Times Square is one of the street level places that is recognizable as obviously being in New York, and not some other city.  As such, people who come to visit New York, at least for the first few times, feel that they must visit this space. To someone who needs to go through Times Square multiple times per day, tourists are painful, literally....

28 Aug 2011 · 2 min · Gary Allen Vollink