If you have a MacBook with an infrared receiver, did you know your Mac could be open to other people controlling your computer? By default, Mac OS will recognize the signal of any Apple Remote. Although the effect is relatively harmless (they will probably be able to randomly play some tracks on iTunes), it can range from being annoying if you were studying in the library and your friend happened to prank you, to embarrassing if you happened to be doing a presentation. Most people do not need to allow any Apple Remote to control their computer. Why would you Continue Reading
Popes Saint John Paul II and Saint John XXIII
Yesterday, Popes John Paul II and John XXIII were declared saints in a canonization mass attended by over 800,000 people in St. Peter’s Square. For the rest of us who weren’t able to make it in person to Rome, the event was live-streamed and now available to watch on YouTube! Here in Vancouver, the archdiocese held a Mass to celebrate this event with about 10,000 attendees in Pacific Coliseum. What makes a saint? I couldn’t really find a better way to summarize it so here are some quotations from Mark Hart’s blog post on “What makes a saint”: …the Church doesn’t “make Continue Reading
Database query optimization is a useful skill
Recently I read an article titled “Quick tip: Improve developer habits by showing time cost of DB queries” by Dan Birken. He claims that one common reason why websites load slowly are because of unoptimized database queries: Websites can be slow for many reasons, but an overwhelmingly common one is time spent performing database queries. Now database queries are likely a very important part of rendering the webpage – the information to populate a page has to come from somewhere. But sometimes rendering a page is slowed down by either unnecessary queries or improperly optimized queries. I completely agree with his view. For most Continue Reading
Heartbleed
The Heartbleed vulnerability has been all over the news this past week. As usual, the media sometimes twists the facts, sometimes intentionally, other times inadvertently. For example, I’ve heard Heartbleed being called a virus, or being framed as something that was deliberately created to be malicious. Also, from reading people’s comments on the online news articles and blog posts, it seems that many people don’t really understand what Heartbleed is or does. From my point of view as a software developer, I would like to provide some information and resources that I believe are true and report the facts (but Continue Reading
The hello world hackathon project
This past week, the co-op students at A Thinking Ape participated in an internal hackathon where they had two days to develop something to show the rest of the company. Among the games and tools that resulted, one project stood out to me: a hello world app. Yes, a hello world app. (For those not in the software development field, “hello world” is usually the first output that developers code when trying out a new platform or language.) It had a white background, black text that said “Hello World,” and a green button that was labeled, “I am a button.” It Continue Reading