Category: Geek stuff

If it involves physics, math, computer science, electronics or has general geek cachet, this is the place for it.

Backing up GMail

A recent Slashdot post raised a good question: Google Has All My Data – How Do I Back It Up?

I am a pretty determined Google user myself. While I have abandoned Blogger for WordPress and never much liked Picasa, I do have a pretty packed Google Account: Alerts, Analytics, Book Search, Calendar, Custom Search, Docs, GMail, Groups, iGoogle, Talk, Web History, and Webmaster Tools are all used to differing degrees. The bolded items, I would definitely mourn if lost.

Backing up most data fed to Google is probably best done by retaining the copy you had before you uploaded one to their system. That works well enough in the case of photos and MS Office documents. It doesn’t work with emails, however. This is annoying, because they are probably the most important and irreplaceable thing most people have entrusted to Google.

Thankfully, backing up your GMail is a relatively simple process. Start on a computer that (a) you already have a regime for backing up itself and which (b) has adequate hard drive space to store all your Google Mail. Then, follow these steps:

  1. Log into GMail
  2. Click ‘Settings’
  3. Click ‘Forwarding and POP/IMAP’
  4. Click the button beside ‘Enable POP for all mail’
  5. Configure a mail application like Outlook or Thunderbird to access the POP version of your GMail account.
  6. Watch all your messages move from Google’s ‘cloud’ to your hard drive

My GMail archive is an extremely valuable collection of data, greatly improved by the ability to search through it with ease. That functionality doesn’t carry over to the backup, but I do feel more at ease knowing that in the event of one of their data centres burning down (with no working backup tapes to recover from), I won’t have lost the messages forever.

Virophage discovery

A while ago, I mentioned a virus that infects a fungus and in turn allows a grass to live in hot soils. Recently, scientists discovered a 21-gene virus that infects larger viruses. The virus, called ‘Sputnik,’ infects a larger virus which in turn infects amoebas.

It just goes to show how complex the lives of microscopic organisms are. It also adds additional fuel to the debate about whether viruses themselves are actually alive, or whether they can only be considered alive after they have been incorporated into the nucleus of a host cell.

Nanomaterial safety

When it comes to geological periods of time, our intuitions about how things work cannot be trusted. This is a reflection of the parochial character of many of the heuristic shortcuts in our minds. The same thing applies to the behaviour of objects at a minute scale. For instance, sufficiently tiny machinery is hampered enormously more by friction and surface tension than a larger equivalent would be. Because they have more surface area relative to their volume, they also tend to be much more reactive.

Indeed, asymmetries of behaviour at different scale raise serious concerns about the safety of newly developed nanotechnologies. Just as our brains are calibrated to deal with the kind of experiences that have been normal to human lives for thousands of years, our regulatory procedures are calibrated to respond to known risks like toxicity or corrosiveness.

There have certainly been serious problems that arose from regulation lagging innovation in the past. Think of ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons, or mesotheliomas caused by chrysotile asbestos. Balancing safety concerns with the desire not to stifle innovation is extremely challenging, especially when the entities with the most sophistication in relation to a new technology are its commercial backers.

In some cases, nanomaterials have almost completely escaped regulation because it has been assumed they behave like their non-nanoscale equivalents. That said, nanoscale titanium dioxide is not the same as a macroscopic bar of the stuff. The same is true for carbon nanotubes, silver nanoparticles, and so forth. Indeed, if the substances were equivalent, there would be no promise in nanotechnology itself. Especially when it comes to the exposure of nanoparticles to human beings (though food, cosmetics, etc), it makes sense for the nano-versions to be regulated as new substances, with the onus on the manufacturers to demonstrate safety.

The Pilot G2 lineup

Lovers of the Pilot G2 series of pens, take note: the so-called G2 ‘Pro’ version of the writing implement is only very marginally superior to the disposable model. Both are made of similar plastic, and the clicking system for retraction actually feels a bit cheaper on the $5 ‘Pro’ pen than on the $1 disposable pen. Since the ordinary version takes refills just as well as the more expensive one, there is no real reason to make the switch. In fact, the cheaper pen actually comes apart more elegantly to be resupplied with ink.

If you want a genuine step up, using the same ink cartridge system, hunt around for the metal bodied, $12 G2 Limited.

On a side note, it strikes me as odd that, while I have dramatically more expensive pens than the G2, I rarely feel comfortable carrying them around. As such, they languish in boxes in my apartment while everything from letters to to-do items on 3.5″ cards emerge from the tip of Pilot’s low-cost devices.

Texas Hold-Em Scrabble

Probably inspired by the recent and unfortunate demise of the ‘Scrabulous’ word game on Facebook, I came up with another variant version of the original board game, based on a fusion with a popular version of poker.

For the most part, it is the same as normal; rules on scoring of letters, how words can be placed, and so forth remain. The big difference is that there are three face-up tiles beside the board. People can use any combination of their seven tiles and the three tiles to make a word on the board. Once the three letters are down and everybody has seven of their own, a three minute timer is started. Whoever can come up with the highest scoring word then gets to place it on the board. Players can use pads of paper to write down possible words and their corresponding scores, if desired. The same person can theoretically go time after time, replacing their own letters and the three upward facing letters every time a word is placed.

Normally, each player subtracts the value of their remaining letters from their score, when the first player runs out of tiles and can draw no more from the bag. (Also, if a player manages to use all seven of their letters in their final turn, they get to add the value of everyone else’s tiles to their score.) A fairer system, for this variant, might be to require that a player use all remaining upright tiles, as well as their own, to earn the bonus from the remaining tiles of others.

[Update: 6 August 2008] Tonight, Gabe, Emily, and I played the first ever game of Scrabble Hold-Em. The experience made it clear that a few rules needed to be refined.

Here are some updates:

  1. There are two variants to the game. In one, the three upright letters in the ‘hold’ change every time a word is put down, getting randomly exchanged for others in the bag. In the other version, only letters used to form words are replaced from the bag. Players choose which version they want to play before the game begins.
  2. In the event that two people have words of equal value, the word with the highest value letter will win (like a high card in poker). If the highest letters are tied, the second highest are used, and so forth. If all letters are tied, a coin will be flipped.
  3. The game ends when one player clears their rack, regardless of whether face-up tiles remain in the ‘hold.’
  4. A one minute time limit makes for a very hectic sort of game.
  5. Because it is harder to make ten letter words than seven letter words, a ‘Bingo’ is worth 75 points. This is awarded to a player who uses all seven of their own tiles, as well as the three in the ‘hold.’

Overall, this game made me feel more as though this could be a good variant upon the original game. It would be excellent if other people could try it and leave comments here.

Passphrases should be universal

One of the most annoying things about maintaining good password procedures is the fact that various places have different requirements. Some sites I use require one capital letter and one special character (100%Beef!), whereas others forbid special characters but require numbers. Many places have minimum password lengths, while a few especially annoying ones have relatively short maximum password lengths. Relatively few permit you to use a passphrase.

The best option would be to permit an unlimited string, including whatever punctuation and special characters are desired. Using a string basically foils brute force attacks, as the result of the sheer number of combinations. A hardcore password like “Sz5XULBKwPtI” is probably no more secure (and certainly much less memorable) than a custom phrase like: “The thing I most enjoyed about Paris, France was having picnics in the evenings.” Even if you only permit letters and numbers, each additional character increases the maximum possible length of a brute force search by a factor of 36: 62 if the passphrase is case sensitive.

Attacks not based on brute force (such as those where keystrokes are logged or passwords are otherwise intercepted) can naturally be carried out regardless of the strength of the password itself. What a passphrase system would allow is a high degree of security along with lessened requirements for obscure memorization. All it would take is a few minor code changes here and there, after all.

Big Bang

In the past, I have praised Simon Singh for the clarity and quality of his explanations, when it comes to matters scientific and mathematical. That capacity is on display once more in Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe. The book provides a good introduction to the history of cosmology, from the ancient world to the recent past. The book covers the contributions of figures like Keppler, Copernicus, Galileo , Newton, and Einstein. It also provides good information and anecdotes on those who actually provided the data that validated the theories. The book provides a good basic description of relativity (both special and general), though those seeking a better understanding would be better served by the first half of Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe, which contains the best explanations of relativity and quantum mechanics I have encountered.

One thing it should lay to rest is the false and pernicious belief that it was only the European crossing of the Atlantic that led to the general belief that the Earth is spherical. Not only did the ancient Greeks know this by 300 BCE, they knew the size of the planet, the size of the moon and the distance to it, and the size of the sun and distance to it. All this from trigonometry and logical reasoning, starting with Eratosthenes. It also does a good job of explaining the ways in which now discredited theories stood up to scientific scrutiny at the time. It was only with refinement that the heliocentric view of the solar system had more predictive power than Ptolemy’s geocentric model, for instance. Similarly, the debate between Big Bang and Steady State theorists could only be resolved through the improvement of both theoretical positions and empirical measurements. The book touches upon some of the key ideas of Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which could be an excellent thing to read as a more technical follow-up.

For me, this book lacked some of the excitement of The Code Book and Fermat’s Last Theorem, but I think this was almost entirely because I already knew most of what is in it: from Grecian planet measurement to the detection of cosmic microwave background radiation. For those less familiar with our evolving knowledge about the origin of our universe, this is an extremely clear and accessible introduction. To those unfamiliar with the origin of the stars, galaxies, and elements that make up our universe, this book is a great place to start.

Improvement to GMail security

Array of cheeses

Much to my delight, GMail has added an ‘Activity on this account’ feature. It is located down at the bottom of the inbox page, where it lists the time of last account activities. Clicking ‘Details’ leads to a pop-up showing the last five instances of account access, the form of access (browser, POP, IMAP, etc), and the IP address.

This is a big security advance. Previously, anyone who knew your GMail password could access your account at will, with no way for you to know. They could even be logged in at the same time as you, with no sign on your machine that this was happening. This is also addressed by the new feature, which includes an option to log out all other accounts.

GMail users should definitely take a peek at this information from time to time, especially if they are in the habit of using their account from shared or public computers. Given (a) how much information the accounts store and (b) how easily searchable they are, any attack that gains access to your GMail account could have serious consequences.

WiFi wars

The present situation in my flat is a classic failure of coordination. There are so many (encrypted) wireless networks operating that interference seems to have become a major issue. Internet access has become slow and unreliable. Of the eleven channels in the 802.11b/g standard, only three (1, 6, and 11) are fully non-overlapping. The individual wireless access points are all interfering with one another, as well as with everything else that operates in the same part of the radio spectrum: microwaves, 2.4 GHz cordless phones, security cameras, Bluetooth devices, baby monitors, wireless video game controllers, fluorescent lights, etc, etc. Indeed, a new phone somewhere in my vicinity may well have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, as far as the 2.401 MHz to 2.473 MHz range goes.

Everyone would have faster and more reliable internet access if we could shut down all but a couple of the access points. Unfortunately, there is no way to coordinate such an action. Furthermore, anyone who actually ran one of the reduced number of access points, if such an agreement could be reached, would be faced with the same kind of illicit usage that forced me to shut down my open network.

One option is to seek a technological fix, in the form of 802.11a or 802.11n equipment that is less likely to be interfered with by existing devices. Of course, given enough time, those devices are likely to face similar hurdles.

Re-encrypting WiFi

Unfortunately, I had to shut down my open wireless network experiment. That is because I found three people within the span of two days who were both (a) criminal and (b) very stupid.

One thing to remember: if you are going to use open wireless networks to download illegal things, make sure you aren’t sharing your entire hard drive in read/write mode. Not only will the person running the network get wise to you without even needing to sniff packets, they will be able to remotely eliminate your ill-gotten files before banning you from the network. If they were so inclined, they could do much worse things to you.

I suppose I could set up a captive portal system using something like ZoneCD – thus providing scope for well behaved neighbours and passers by to use the network. That would, however, require acquiring and setting up a computer between my DSL modem and WAP. Since the two are presently integrated, the expense and bother would be even greater.

As is so always the case, a few bad apples have made it necessary to discontinue a good thing.