1 cup 2% milk

1 cup Dannon Fit & Light vanilla yogurt

1 scoop Syntha-6 protein powder (banana is great)

Mix.

This yields 450 calories with a whopping 39g of protein, 48g of carb (but only 30g of that simple sugars), 11g of fat, and 5g of fiber.

You could live off 3 or 4 of these a day. (and I have)

What’s wrong with Yahoo Mail?

A lot of web addresses start with http://–that’s a signal that the “scheme” used to deliver the page to your browser is something called HTTP, which is a technical specification that turns out is a really good way to move around web pages. As the page flows to the browser, it’s susceptible to eavesdropping, particularly over a wi-fi connection, and much more so in public, including the usual hotspots like coffee shops, but also workplaces and many home environments. It’s the virtual equivalent of a postcard. When you’re reading the news or checking traffic, it’s not a big deal if someone can sneak a glance at your page.

Some addresses start with https://–notice the extra ‘s’ which stands for “secure”. This means two things 1) that the web page being sent over is encrypted, and thus unavailable to eavesdroppers, and 2) that the people running the site had to obtain a certificate, which is a form of proof of their identity as an organization (that they’re not, say, Ukrainian phishers). Many years ago, serving pages over https was considered quite expensive in that servers needed much beefier processors to run all that encryption. Today, while it still requires extra computation, it’s not as big of a deal. Most off-the-shelf servers have plenty of extra power. To be fair, for a truly ginormous application with millions of users like Yahoo Mail, it is not a trivial thing to roll out. But it’s critically important.

First, to dispel a point of confusion, these days nearly every site, including Yahoo Mail, uses https for the login screen. This is the most critical time when encryption is needed, because otherwise you’d be sending your password on a postcard for anyone with even modest technical skills to peek at. So that’s good, but it’s no longer enough. Because sites are written so that you don’t have to reenter your password on every single new page, they use a tiny bit of information called a “cookie” in your browser to stay logged in. Cookies themselves are neither good nor bad, but if an eavesdropper gets a hold of one, they can control most of your account–everything that doesn’t require re-entering a password. In Yahoo Mail this includes reading any of your messages, sending mail on your behalf, or even deleting messages. Are you comfortable allowing strangers to do this?

As I mentioned earlier, new, more powerful tools have been out for months that automate the process of taking over accounts this way. Zero technical prowess is needed, only the ability to install a browser plug-in. If there are any web companies dealing in personal information for which this wasn’t a all-hands-on-deck security wake-up, they are grossly negligent. Indeed, other sites like Gmail work with https all-the-time. But still, in 2011, Yahoo Mail doesn’t. I have a soft spot for Yahoo as a former employer, and I want to keep liking them. Too bad they make it so difficult.

The deeper issue at stake is that if this serious of an issue goes unfixed for months, how many lesser issues lurk in the site and have been around for months or years? The issue is trust, my friend, and Yahoo just overdrew their account. I’m leaving.

FAQ

Q: So what do you want Yahoo to do about this?  A: Well, they should fix their site for their millions of remaining users.

Q: What if they fix it tomorrow? Will you delete this message?  A: No. Since I no longer trust the site, I am leaving, even though it takes time to notify all the people who still send me mail, and no matter what other developments unfold in the meantime. This page will explain my actions.

Q: Do you really want everyone else to leave Yahoo Mail?  A: No, only those who care about their privacy.

Q: What’s your new email address?  A: I have a couple, but <my first name> @ <this domain> is a good general-purpose one.

I will continue to update this page as more information becomes available. -m

But with browser forms, input and output are tightly intermingled. The View takes care of input and output. Something else has primary responsibility for mediating the data flow to and from the model–and that something has been called a Presenter. This yields the MVP pattern.

The terminology gets confusing quickly, but roughly

XForms Instance == MVP Model

XForms Model == MVP Presenter

XForms User Interface == MVP View

It’s not wrong to associate XForms with MVC–the term has become so blurry that it’s easy to lump variants like MVP into the same bucket. But to the extent that it makes sense to talk about more specific patterns, maybe we should be calling the XForms design pattern MVP instead of MVC. Comments? Criticism? Fire away below. -m

Changing to a new hard drive is the digital equivalent of moving. Disruptive to your routine, and you’re living out of boxes for months afterward. Not much fun, but also an opportunity to reorganize a few things, to start fresh. -m

So back into the carboy it goes, with a fresh dose of fining agents. What’s a few more months at this point? -m

As a refresher, here’s some things that Google and other search engines can handle. The square brackets represent the search box into which the queries are typed, not part of the queries themselves.

[term]

[term -butnotthis]

[term1 OR term2]

["phrase term"]

[tem1 OR term2 -"but not this" site:dubinko.info filetype:html]

So what kind of semantic queries would be usefully expressed in a similar way, avoiding SPARQL and the like? For example, maybe [by:"Micah Dubinko"] could map to a document containing a triple like <this document> <dc:author> “Micah Dubinko”. What other kinds of graph queries are interesting, common, and simple to express like this? Comments welcome.

-m

Try this one on for size: Just What I Needed by The Cars:

Just What I Needed (swing version) by davermont

But this really caught my eye, from Nalco, the manufacturer of the oil dispersant Corexit 9500 which is being used both in unprecedented quantities and depths in the Gulf. Here’s how they cleverly describe the ingredients of their product, an ingredient list they protect as a trade-secret:

1. One ingredient is used as a wetting agent in dry gelatin, beverage mixtures, and fruit juice drinks.
2. A second ingredient is used in a brand-name dry skin cream and also in a body shampoo.
3. A third ingredient is found in a popular brand of baby bath liquid.
4. A fourth ingredient is found extensively in cosmetics and is also used as a surface-active agent and emulsifier for agents used in food contact.
5. A fifth ingredient is used by a major supplier of brand name household cleaning products for “soap scum” removal.
6. A sixth ingredient is used in hand creams and lotions, odorless paints and stain blockers.

That is one impressive bit of verbal agility, my complements to their staff writer(s). It would be a fun exercise some day to see what kinds of toxic sludge could be described in similar terms. But let’s see if we can figure out the exact ingredient list: here’s the MSDS for the substance. According to it Propylene Glycol is clearly one of the ingredients, as are “Distillates, petroleum, hydrotreated light” and “Organic sulfonic acid salt”. “Wetting agent” and “surface-acting” are both code words for a surfactant. A little knowledge of chemistry along with household product label reading might go a long way… Got insight? Add a comment here to describe what you find.

-m

6/10 Update: Nalco released the full ingredient list and cheat sheet:

The * footnote indicates, essentially, “contains propylene glycol”.

The ** footnote indicates that this chemical is found only in Corexit 9527, not the one most commonly used in the Deepwater Horizon cleanup.

“Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature…”

Hmm, Mr. Ebert doesn’t seem to be up on the concept of hypertext, which has manifold connections with cinema. See for instance the scholarly paper Cinematic Paradigms for Hypertext. In fact, making a hypertext or branching narrative requires even greater amounts of authorial skill.

But I’m still curious, what is the Rick Wakeman clause? From where did that term originate? -m