(This is a somewhat old story.) I left a comment on Bruce Schneier’s cryptogram blog on his article about how Microsoft Windows Update was found to be updating even in the event where the user had turned off automatic updates. The article is located here.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes reported the secret updates on ZDNet. Nate Clinton, PM for Windows Update, responds on his blog.

My comment on Bruce Schneier’s blog is below: (more…)

This is an applet I did in my junior year at UT for my software engineering course. It’s implemented as a Java applet, and looking back that was precisely the wrong technology to use. I plan on doing an updated, web-based Javascript version soon. In the meantime, here it is.

The virtual tour site is of the Umlauf Sculpture Garden in Austin, TX. We took several hundred photos of the garden (which came to about a gigabyte of images), but had to size them down for bandwidth considerations. The originals were lost in a disk crash.

Ideally, I’d like to recreate this software to be easy to use and allow people to visit other places in a more natural manner. I’m still working out the feature list and applications of this software.
DiscEx: Discover, Explore

Al’s Alerts, a web application (http://alsalerts.com).

Al’s Alerts is a service that will email you posts from Craig’s List whenever a post appears with the keywords you provide. This frees you from having to check Craig’s List every day if you are on the lookout for something specific. This is an improvement on Craig’s List’s subscriptions, which will simply send you every post in the category.

The site is operable, but I’d like to do a front-end rewrite using the Python web application framework Django. The back-end also needs to be rewritten to scale better. The user interface needs to be improved and streamlined, and I also need to include the additional cities that Craig’s List now serves.

This is currently a work in progress.