Jefferson Davis replies to Joseph Johnston

history / /

From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (126):

[Jefferson] Davis read [the letter from Joseph E. Johnston] with a wrath that quickly rose to match the sender’s. … In composing his reply, however, Davis employed not a foil but a cutlass. Rejecting the nimble parry and riposte of thetoirc and logic, at both of which he was a master, he delivered instead one quick slash of scorn:

Sir: I have just received and read your letter of the 12th instant. Its language is, as you say, unusual; its arguments and statements utterly one sided, and its insinuations as unfounded as they are unbecoming.

I am, &c.

Jeff’n Davis.“

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Word of the day: cunctative

commonplace book, history, word of the day / /

Cunctative: Cunc’ta*tive, a. Slow; tardy; dilatory; causing delay.
Cunctator: Cunc*ta’tor, n. [L., lit., a delayer; — applied as a surname to Q. Fabius Maximus.] One who delays or lingers.

From Wikipedia’s “Fabius Maximus“:

Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus (c. 275 BC-203 BC), called Cunctator (the Delayer), was a Roman politician and soldier, born in Rome around 275 BC and died in Rome in 203 BC. He was consul five times (233 BC, 228 BC, 215 BC, 214 BC and 208 BC) and was twice dictator, 221?–219 BC, and 217 BC. His nickname Cunctator (akin to the English noun cunctation) means “delayer” in Latin, and refers to his tactics in deploying the troops during the Second Punic War. His cognomen Verrucosus means warty, a reference to the wart above his upper lip. …

Fabius was well aware of the military superiority of the Carthaginians, and when Hannibal invaded Italy he refused to meet him in a pitched battle. Instead he kept his troops close to Hannibal, hoping to exhaust him in a long war of attrition. Fabius was able to harass the Carthaginian foraging parties, limiting Hannibal’s ability to wreak destruction while conserving his own military force.

The Romans were unimpressed with this defensive strategy and at first gave Fabius his nickname as an insult. The strategy was in part ruined because of a lack of unity in the command of the Roman army: Fabius’ magister equitum, Minucius, was a political enemy of Fabius. … Minucius had been named a co-commander of the Roman forces by Fabius’ detractors in the Senate. Minucius openly claimed that Fabius was cowardly because he failed to confront the Carthaginian forces. Near the present-day town of Larino in the Molise (then called Larinum), Hannibal had taken up position in a town called Gerione. In the valley between Larino and Gerione, Minucius decided to make a broad frontal attack on Hannibal’s troops. Several thousand men were involved on either side. It appeared that the Roman troops were winning but Hannibal had set a trap. Soon the Roman troops were being slaughtered. Fabius, despite Minucius’ earlier arrogance, rushed to his co-commander’s assistance and Hannibal’s forces immediately retreated. After the battle there was some feeling that there would be conflict between Minucius and Fabius. However, the younger soldier marched his men to Fabius’ encampment and he is reported to have said, “My father gave me life. Today you saved my life. You are my second father. I recognize your superior abilities as a commander.”

At the end of Fabius’ dictatorship, the command was given back to the consuls Gnaeus Servilius Geminus and Marcus Atilius Regulus. In the following year, the new consuls Paullus and Varro were defeated at the battle of Cannae, and the wisdom of Fabius’ tactic was understood. Thus Cunctator became an honorific title. This tactic was followed for the rest of the war, as long as Hannibal remained in Italy.

… Later, he became a legendary figure and the model of a tough, courageous Roman. According to Ennius, unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem – “one man, by delaying, restored the state to us.” While Hannibal is mentioned in the company of history’s greatest generals, military professionals have bestowed Fabius’ name on an entire strategic doctrine known as “Fabian strategy.”

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Too much tail to that kite

history, politics / /

From Addison Hart’s “General Fremont Has Chicken Guts!: Why John Charles Fremont Got Kicked Out Of Missouri“:

… [John Charles] Fremont did little else in his first few months in command in Missouri … He did, however, manage to get some criticisms over his choices for staff positions. Unlike many generals, Fremont wanted to be allowed to pick and choose each member of his staff and his bodyguard, and he did in fact do so. One priority, it seems, was that a candidate had to have a funny name, or at least a European one. In fact, the majority of Fremont’s staff members seem to have been Europeans, primarily Germans and Hungarians. A large amount of them seem to have been extra-legally commissioned and most had no idea of how the war in the West was to be fought. Those who knew military tactics advocated using the outdated tactics of Napoleon and Frederick the Great, as well as the Baron Jomini and that lot. A lot of them were as inefficient as possible, some were even minor nobility, and many were corrupt, mixed in with anti-Lincoln groups, Know-Nothings, and the like. …

The fact that the list of the staff members (about three hundred men in his personal bodyguard alone and a good thirty members, all over five foot eleven inches in height, made up his staff) is practically endless also bothered some individuals, especially when scrolling down the list one reads many times over French or Italian names, or running over several individuals with the surnames of ‘Kalmanuezze’ or ‘Zagonyi’. A lot of these fellows spoke English very badly at best, which only deepened the stupidity of the situation. When Fremont’s opponent in the field (not that Fremont ever bothered to fight him), General Albert Sidney Johnston, [Confederate States of America], was shown a copy of the staff list at his headquarters in Nashville, he simply commented with one of his deep chuckles “There’s too much tail to that kite!” Even the locals could feel their stomachs turn when they saw Fremont’s bodyguards and staff officers walking the streets, many wreaking of perfume, and wearing ridiculous (overly grandiose) uniforms with plumes and braids. Such men were the reason that the locals gave the men of Fremont’s staff (and the General himself) the somewhat embarrassing title ‘Chicken Guts’.

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Lincoln’s 1st political speech

history, politics / /

From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (23):

[Lincoln’s] first speech was made at a country auction. Twenty-three years old, he stood on a box, wearing a frayed straw hat, a calico shirt, and pantaloons held up by a single-strap suspender. As he was about to speak, a fight broke out in the crowd. Lincoln stepped down, broke up the fight, then stepped back onto the box.

“Gentlemen and fellow citizens,” he said, “I presume you all know who I am: I am humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by many friends to become a candidate for the legislature. My policies are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance. I am in favor of a national bank. I am in favor of the internal-improvements system and a high protective tariff. These are my sentiments and political principles. If elected I shall be thankful; and if not, it will be all the same.”

Election day he ran eighth in a field of thirteen …

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Cameraphones are different cameras & different phones

commonplace book, social software, tech in changing society, technology / /

From David Pescovitz’s “The Big Picture“:

Mobile researcher John Poisson, CEO of the Fours Initiative, focuses on how cameraphones could revolutionize photography and communication — if people would only start using them more.

As the leader of Sony Corporation’s mobile media research and design groups in Tokyo, John Poisson spent two years focused on how people use cameraphones, and why they don’t use them more often.

TheFeature: What have you learned over the course of your research?

Poisson: People think of the cameraphone as a more convenient tool for digital photography, an extension of the digital camera. That’s missing the mark. The mobile phone is a communications device. The minute you attach a camera to that, and give people the ability to share the content that they’re creating in real time, the dynamic changes significantly.

TheFeature: Aren’t providers already developing applications to take advantage of that shift?

Poisson: Well, we have things like the ability to moblog, to publish pictures to a blog, which is not necessarily the most relevant model to consumers. Those tools are developed by people who understand blogging and apply it in their daily lives. But it ignores the trend that we and Mimi Ito and others are seeing as part of the evolution of photography. If you look at the way people have (historically) used cameras, it started off with portraiture and photographs of record — formalized photographs with a capital “P.” Then as the technology evolved, we had this notion of something called a snapshot, which is much more informal. People could take a higher number of pictures with not so much concern over composition. It was more about capturing an experience than photographing something. The limit of that path was the Polaroid. It was about taking the picture and sharing it instantly. What we have today is the ability to create today is a kind of distributed digital manifestation of that process.

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30 seconds to impress

commonplace book, science, social software / /

From The Scotsman‘s “Men, you have 30 seconds to impress women“:

HALF of all women make their minds up within 30 seconds of meeting a man about whether he is potential boyfriend material, according to a study on speed-dating.

The women were on average far quicker at making a decision than the men during some 500 speed dates at an event organised as part of Edinburgh Science Festival.

The scientists behind the research said this showed just how important chat-up lines were in dating. They found that those who were “highly skilled in seduction” used chat-up lines that encouraged their dates to talk about themselves in “an unusual, quirky way”.

The top-rated male’s best line was “If you were on Stars In Their Eyes, who would you be?”, while the top-rated female asked bizarrely: “What’s your favourite pizza topping?”

Failed Casanovas were those who offered up hackneyed comments like “Do you come here often?”, or clumsy attempts to impress, such as “I have a PhD in computing”.

About a third of the speed dates were actually over within the first 30 seconds, but there was a marked difference between the sexes with 45 per cent of women coming to a decision within 30 seconds, compared with only 22 per cent of men.

… Conversation topics were also assessed. Only 9 per cent of pairs who talked about films agreed to meet again, compared with 18 per cent who spoke about the subject found to be the most suitable for dating: travel.

It is thought women’s taste for musicals clashed with the male liking for action films, while talking about “great holidays and dream destinations” made people feel good and appear more attractive to each other.

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Russian anti-tank dogs

commonplace book, history, security / /

From Damn Interesting’s “Let Slip the Dogs of War“:

Nary does a modern movie depict the way the Romans used mastiffs with razored collars in battle, nor the fully armored Death Hounds … that the medieval knights would loose on a field to snap at the legs of opponents and dispatch the wounded that littered the ground. In fact, dogs have fought alongside their masters through most of history. At the eve of World War II, the Soviets had a fully operational four-legged fighter division, and a dog with a bomb is a potent foe.

The Soviets were unable to address the looming tank problem with any new technologies right away, thus they were forced to contemplate tackling the issue with the means at hand. Landmines were a viable option, but because one couldn’t count on the Nazis seeking out the mines, they had to figure a way to make the mines seek the tanks.

The answer laid in the dog division. The trainers would starve the dogs, then train them to find food under a tank. The dogs quickly learned that being released from their pens meant to run out to where the training tank was parked and find some vittles. Once trained, the dogs would be fitted with a bomb attached to the back, and loosed into a field of oncoming German Panzers. When the dog climbed underneath the tank – where there was no armor – the bomb would detonate and gut the enemy vehicle.

Realization of that plan was a little less successful. The dogs had been trained to look under a Soviet tank for food, and would sometimes be loosed into a battle just to turn around and find a friendly tank to climb under. Sometimes the dogs would spook at the rumble of a running diesel engine and run away from the battle. Sometimes the dogs just decided they didn’t want to go.

Despite the problems, the Anti-tank dogs were successful at disabling a reported 300 Nazi tanks. It was enough of a problem to the Nazi advance that the Germans were compelled to attempt measures at stopping them. The top mounted machine gun proved ineffective due to the relatively small size of the attackers, the fact that there were low to the ground and hard to spot, and that dogs just don’t want to die when they think they’re close to food. … Eventually the Germans began using flame-throwers on the tanks to ward the dogs away, and they were much more successful at dissuading the attacks – but some dogs would stop for neither fear of the fire nor actually being burned.

However, in 1942 one use of the Anti-tank dogs went seriously awry when a large contingent of anti-tank dogs ran amok, thus endangered everyone in the battle and forced the retreat of the entire Soviet division. Soon afterward the Anti-tank dogs were pulled from service.

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Dead for 3 years

commonplace book, true stories / /

From The Telegraph‘s “Skeleton woman’ dead in front of TV for years“:

A woman’s skeleton was discovered in her flat three years after she is believed to have died, it emerged today.

Joyce Vincent was surrounded by Christmas presents and the television and heating in her bedsit were still on.

The 40-year-old’s body was so decomposed that the only way to identify her was to compare dental records with a holiday photograph.

Police believe she probably died of natural causes in early 2003, and was only found in January this year when housing association officials broke into the bedsit in Wood Green, North East London.

They were hoping to recover the thousands of pounds of rent arrears that had piled up since her death.

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The great divider

commonplace book, religion / /

From Richard Dawkins’ “Time to Stand Up“:

It is time for people of intellect, as opposed to people of faith, to stand up and say “Enough!” Let our tribute to the dead be a new resolve: to respect people for what they individually think, rather than respect groups for what they were collectively brought up to believe. …

My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a “they” as opposed to a “we” can be identified at all. …

Parenthetically, religion is unusual among divisive labels in being spectacularly unnecessary. If religious beliefs had any evidence going for them, we might have to respect them in spite of their concomitant unpleasantness. But there is no such evidence. To label people as death-deserving enemies because of disagreements about real world politics is bad enough. To do the same for disagreements about a delusional world inhabited by archangels, demons and imaginary friends is ludicrously tragic.

… Is there no catastrophe terrible enough to shake the faith of people, on both sides, in God’s goodness and power? No glimmering realization that he might not be there at all: that we just might be on our own, needing to cope with the real world like grown-ups?

The great divider Read More »

Respecting religion

commonplace book, religion / /

From Douglas Adams’ “Is there an Artificial God?“:

Now, the invention of the scientific method and science is, I’m sure we’ll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and that it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked and if it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn’t withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn’t seem to work like that; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That’s an idea we’re so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it or not, that it’s kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is ‘Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? — because you’re not!’ If somebody votes for a party that you don’t agree with, you’re free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it, but on the other hand if somebody says ‘I mustn’t move a light switch on a Saturday’, you say, ‘Fine, I respect that’.

The odd thing is, even as I am saying that I am thinking ‘Is there an Orthodox Jew here who is going to be offended by the fact that I just said that?’ but I wouldn’t have thought ‘Maybe there’s somebody from the left wing or somebody from the right wing or somebody who subscribes to this view or the other in economics’ when I was making the other points. I just think ‘Fine, we have different opinions’. But, the moment I say something that has something to do with somebody’s (I’m going to stick my neck out here and say irrational) beliefs, then we all become terribly protective and terribly defensive and say ‘No, we don’t attack that; that’s an irrational belief but no, we respect it’.

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The sky-god as origin of evil

commonplace book, religion / /

From Gore Vidal, quoted in Richard Dawkins’ “Time to Stand Up“:

The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal — God is the Omnipotent Father — hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is not just in place for one tribe, but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good.

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Familiar strangers

commonplace book, science, social software / /

From danah boyd’s “G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide“:

In the early 1970s, Stanley Milgram was intrigued by what he called “familiar strangers” – people who recognized each other in public life but never interacted. Through experiments, he found that people are most likely to interact with people when removed from the situation in which they are familiarly strangers. In other words, two people who take the same bus every day for years may never interact, but if they were to run into each other in a different environment across town, they would say hello and talk about the bus. If they run into each other in a foreign country, they will immediately be close friends.

Familiar strangers Read More »

Culture, values, & designing technology systems

social software, tech in changing society, technology / /

From danah boyd’s “G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide“:

Culture is the set of values, norms and artifacts that influence people’s lives and worldview. Culture is embedded in material objects and in conceptual frameworks about how the world works. …

People are a part of multiple cultures – the most obvious of which are constructed by religion and nationality, but there are all sorts of cultures that form from identities and communities of practice. … Identification and participation in that culture means sharing a certain set of cultural values and ideas about how the world should work. …

Cultural norms evolve over time, influenced by people, their practices, and their environment. Culture is written into law and laws influence the evolution of culture. Cultures develop their own symbols as a way of conveying information. Often, these symbols make sense to those within a culture but are not parsable to those outside. Part of becoming indoctrinated into a culture is learning the symbols of that culture. …

… there are numerous cultural forces affecting your life at all times. How you see the world and how you design or build technology is greatly influenced by the various cultural concepts you hold onto. …

… algorithms are simply the computer manifestation of a coder’s cultural norms.

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The botnet hunters

security, writing ideas / /

From The Washington Post‘s “Bringing Botnets Out of the Shadows“:

Nicholas Albright’s first foray into some of the darkest alleys of the Internet came in November 2004, shortly after his father committed suicide. About a month following his father’s death, Albright discovered that online criminals had broken into his dad’s personal computer and programmed it to serve as part of a worldwide, distributed network for storing pirated software and movies. …

From that day forward, Albright poured all of his free time and pent-up anger over his father’s death into assembling “Shadowserver,” a group of individuals dedicated to battling large, remote-controlled herds of hacked personal PCs, also known as “botnets.” …

Each “bot” is a computer on which the controlling hacker has installed specialized software that allows him to commandeer many of its functions. Hackers use bots to further their online schemes or as collection points for users’ personal and financial information.

“I take my [handheld computer] everywhere so I can keep tabs on the botnets when I’m not at home,” Albright said …

On a Sunday afternoon in late February, Albright was lurking in an online channel that a bot herder uses to control a network of more than 1,400 hacked computers running Microsoft Windows software. The hacker controlling this botnet was seeding infected machines with “keyloggers,” …

Albright had already intercepted and dissected a copy of the computer worm that the attacker uses to seize control of computers — an operation that yielded the user name and password the hacker uses to run the control channel. By pretending to be just another freshly hacked bot reporting for duty, Albright passively monitors what the hackers are doing with their botnets and collects information that an Internet service provider would need to get the channel shut down.

Albright spied one infected PC reporting data about the online activities of its oblivious owner — from the detailed information flowing across the wire, it was clear that one of the infected computers belongs to a physician in Michigan.

“The botnet is running a keylogger, and I see patient data,” Albright said. …

“Anything you submit to law enforcement may help later if an investigation occurs,” he said. “Chances are, though, it will just be filed away in a database.”

Botnets are the workhorses of most online criminal enterprises today, allowing hackers to ply their trade anonymously — sending spam, sowing infected PCs with adware from companies that pay for each installation, or hosting fraudulent e-commerce and banking Web sites. …

… in the 13-month period ending in January, more than 13 million PCs around the world were infected with malicious code that turned them into bots.

… Shadowserver locates bot networks by deploying a series of “honeynets” — sensors that mimic computers with known security flaws — in an effort to lure attackers, allowing the group to capture samples of new bot programs. …

Shadowserver submits any new or undetected specimens to the major anti-virus companies. Andrews said he is constantly surprised by the sheer number of bot programs that do not get flagged as malicious by any of the programs. …

In Andrews’s experience, by far the most common reason criminals create botnets these days — other than perhaps to sell or rent them to other criminals — is to install online ad-serving software that earns the attacker a few pennies per install. …

Even after the Shadowserver crew has convinced an ISP to shut down a botmaster’s command-and-control channel, most of the bots will remain infected. Like lost sheep without a shepherd, the drones will continually try to reconnect to the hacker’s control server, unaware that it no longer exists. …

“Bot hunting can really take over your personal life, because to do this right you really have to stay on top of it — it can’t just be something you do on the weekends,” he said. “I guess it takes a special type of person to be able to sustain botnet hunting. … I don’t know anyone who pays people to do this kind of work.” …

Albright said that while federal law enforcement has recently made concerted efforts to reach out to groups like Shadowserver in hopes of building a more effective partnership, they don’t have the bodies, the technology, or the legal leeway to act directly on the information the groups provide. …

“Sadly, without more law enforcement support this will remain a chase-your-tail type game, because we won’t ever really shut these networks down until the bot master goes to jail, and his drones are cleaned.”

The botnet hunters Read More »

John the Ripper makes password cracking easy

security / /

From Federico Biancuzzi’s “John the Ripper 1.7, by Solar Designer“:

John the Ripper 1.7 also improves on the use of MMX on x86 and starts to use AltiVec on PowerPC processors when cracking DES-based hashes (that is, both Unix crypt(3) and Windows LM hashes). To my knowledge, John 1.7 (or rather, one of the development snapshots leading to this release) is the first program to cross the 1 million Unix crypts per second (c/s) boundary on a general-purpose CPU. Currently, John 1.7 achieves up to 1.6M c/s raw performance (that is, with no matching salts) on a PowerPC G5 at 2.7 GHz (or 1.1M c/s on a 1.8 GHz) and touches 1M c/s on the fastest AMD CPUs currently available. Intel P4s reach up to 800k c/s. (A non-public development version making use of SSE also reaches 1M c/s on an Intel P4 at 3.4 and 3.6 GHz. I intend to include that code into a post-1.7 version.)

John the Ripper makes password cracking easy Read More »

Google on the Google File System (& Linux)

tech in changing society, technology / /

From Sanjay Ghemawat, Howard Gobioff, & Shun-Tak Leung’s “The Google File System“:

We have designed and implemented the Google File Sys- tem, a scalable distributed file system for large distributed data-intensive applications. It provides fault tolerance while running on inexpensive commodity hardware, and it delivers high aggregate performance to a large number of clients. …

The file system has successfully met our storage needs. It is widely deployed within Google as the storage platform for the generation and processing of data used by our ser- vice as well as research and development efforts that require large data sets. The largest cluster to date provides hun- dreds of terabytes of storage across thousands of disks on over a thousand machines, and it is concurrently accessed by hundreds of clients. …

We have seen problems caused by application bugs, operating system bugs, human errors, and the failures of disks, memory, connectors, networking, and power sup- plies. Therefore, constant monitoring, error detection, fault tolerance, and automatic recovery must be integral to the system.

Second, files are huge by traditional standards. Multi-GB files are common. Each file typically contains many applica- tion objects such as web documents. When we are regularly working with fast growing data sets of many TBs comprising billions of objects, it is unwieldy to manage billions of ap- proximately KB-sized files even when the file system could support it. As a result, design assumptions and parameters such as I/O operation and blocksizes have to be revisited.

Third, most files are mutated by appending new data rather than overwriting existing data. Random writes within a file are practically non-existent. Once written, the files are only read, and often only sequentially. …

Multiple GFS clusters are currently deployed for different purposes. The largest ones have over 1000 storage nodes, over 300 TB of diskstorage, and are heavily accessed by hundreds of clients on distinct machines on a continuous basis. …

Despite occasional problems, the availability of Linux code has helped us time and again to explore and understand system behavior. When appropriate, we improve the kernel and share the changes with the open source community.

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The original description of Ajax

history, technology / /

From Jesse James Garrett’s “Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications“:

Ajax isn’t a technology. It’s really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways. Ajax incorporates:

  • standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
  • dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
  • data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
  • asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
  • and JavaScript binding everything together.

The classic web application model works like this: Most user actions in the interface trigger an HTTP request back to a web server. The server does some processing — retrieving data, crunching numbers, talking to various legacy systems — and then returns an HTML page to the client. It’s a model adapted from the Web’s original use as a hypertext medium, but as fans of The Elements of User Experience know, what makes the Web good for hypertext doesn’t necessarily make it good for software applications. …

An Ajax application eliminates the start-stop-start-stop nature of interaction on the Web by introducing an intermediary — an Ajax engine — between the user and the server. It seems like adding a layer to the application would make it less responsive, but the opposite is true.

Instead of loading a webpage, at the start of the session, the browser loads an Ajax engine — written in JavaScript and usually tucked away in a hidden frame. This engine is responsible for both rendering the interface the user sees and communicating with the server on the user’s behalf. The Ajax engine allows the user’s interaction with the application to happen asynchronously — independent of communication with the server. So the user is never staring at a blank browser window and an hourglass icon, waiting around for the server to do something. …

Every user action that normally would generate an HTTP request takes the form of a JavaScript call to the Ajax engine instead. Any response to a user action that doesn’t require a trip back to the server — such as simple data validation, editing data in memory, and even some navigation — the engine handles on its own. If the engine needs something from the server in order to respond — if it’s submitting data for processing, loading additional interface code, or retrieving new data — the engine makes those requests asynchronously, usually using XML, without stalling a user’s interaction with the application.

The original description of Ajax Read More »

Embarassing email story #1056

business, security / /

From MedZilla’s “Emails ‘gone bad’“:

In another example of embarrassing and damaging emails sent during work is an investigation that uncovered 622 emails exchanged between Arapahoe County (Colo.) Clerk and Recorder Tracy K. Baker and his Assistant Chief Deputy Leesa Sale. Of those emails, 570 were sexually explicit. That’s not the only thing Baker’s lawyers are having to explain in court. Seems the emails also revealed Baker might have misused public funds, among other things.

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