I spent some free time over the last few days putting together a parody comment thread for the news/link aggregator Hacker News (HN). (This parody isn't officially affiliated with Hacker News whatsoever.) As with any community, HN has its quirks and predictable comments. It has an interesting mix of young entrepreneurs, highly skilled senior engineers, web developers, managers, etc, which can make for an interesting mix of discussion.

For fun, I wrote a mock comment thread for a hypothetical link to a tech guru blog post. The parody comments attempt to humorously encapsulate the quirks that stand out to me when I read such a comment thread. Such quirks include things like differences in attention to detail, which posts garner the most replies, knowledge grand-standing, which comments end up at the bottom, and popular off-topic tangents. Some of it isn't unique to HN, but it was fun to include anyway.

Ignoring the rule of not explaining your jokes, here is some of the effort I put into the parody. (Don't read this before you read the actual page.)

• Some of the comments are meant to be taken verbatim, others are just meta-commentary on their content. The two styles are interspersed without any markings to distinguish them. I was afraid that giving the two types different formatting would detract from the formatting parody so hopefully it will be obvious which way they should be taken.
• All the URLs are mini-jokes. (The "reply" URLs are meta-jokes about potential replies that didn't work as well as actual comments, usually because they're the type of thought or comment that we I consider briefly before moving on. The links to HN resources are commentary about those resources.)
• The timing of the posts isn't arbitrary, and some of the positions of comments with their time ordering are mini-jokes too.
• Some of the usernames are commentary on the type of person who I think of when reading such a comment, some of them are just gibberish, and some are just juxtaposition jokes.
• All of the numbers in the page source are mini-jokes themselves.
• I kept the downvote arrows for those who crave, but have not earned, the ability to downvote comments. (Voting does nothing, obviously.)
• I used the actual HN page markup, although I now hate myself for doing so.

I hope I covered my bases for parody work. I tweaked the main logo and site title, none of the page's resources are being pulled from the original website, and there's a big "parody" banner at the top.

It's worth noting this is not the first Hacker News parody: HN front page parody.

It was fun to make, and I hope HN readers enjoy it. Here's my account on HN and the parody's submission to HN.

[Edit, 1.5 hours later]: The response on HN was fantastic - thanks guys! The comment thread is at least as funny as the parody itself, one should definitely read it after reading the parody.

I don't think that most people would consider lying in a dark, soundproof box for over an hour to be relaxing. But, I'm not most people.

I recently tried an isolation chamber, aka "float" tank, for the first time. A float tank allows the participant to come as close as possible to not experiencing any of their physical senses for a prolonged period of time (hence another name, "sensory deprivation chamber"). The the tank allows virtually no light or sound and has a shallow pool of highly dense salt water that keeps a human body afloat, permitting you to float while touching, seeing, or hearing anything. The goal is that, once inside for a while, you feel like you are disconnected from your senses while you float in nothing.

People have various motivations for using float tanks. Using them for just 40 minutes can alleviate stress, allow the body to heal injuries more efficiently, allow muscles to relax, and provide a other skin and edge case medical benefits. Some people, like me, just find the idea relaxing. Most people I talk to don't think they would enjoy the experience (and they're probably right), but I'm a very introverted person and I spend much more time inside my head than out of it. When I'm thinking I find external stimuli to be distracting, too much of it can be annoying or even tiring. I enjoy having quiet time with very little stimulation, and a float tank is the quietest session you can have. When I found commercial sensory deprivation chambers being marketed as flotation tanks I was instantly intrigued and bid my time until I had the chance to try one.

My Experience

I went to a local salon and spa, which offered a couple of float tanks among its services. Float tanks aren't too easy to find, but after some searching around it seems that most metropolises have at least one place that offers them. The float tank itself was essentially a large, covered bathtub in a small, dark room just a couple feet wider and longer than the tank itself. The procedure was to shower, enter the tank, close the hatch behind yourself, and an attendant would knock on the room's door once the time was up (taking further measures to wake you if necessary). I opted not not use background music (recommended) and to float in the nude (to avoid feeling any clothing, also recommended).

Closing the hatch behind me for the first time felt odd. I can't say I've ever stepped into a small box with no practically no light or sound. There was a sudden rush as I could almost feel the light and sound leaving my brain and I was suddenly very aware of how much of both I had been processing just before closing the hatch. The tank was virtually sound proof; I couldn't hear anything; no hallway chatter, no honking cars, no footsteps, nothing.

The Physical Aspect

The water was just one foot deep, but the extreme salt density made that plenty to keep me afloat. I extended my arms and legs to touch the sides of the tank and center myself, then pulled my limbs slowly off the side to let myself sit motionless in the middle. This was tricker than it may sound, since the slightest bit of momentum can cause drift and eventually touching the sides. I had to try a couple times to succeed.

At that point I experienced a very unique feeling. I saw nothing, heard nothing, and felt almost nothing. The water was body temperature and whenever I was motionless for an extended period of time the water feeling would subside to being minimally noticeable. But any movement or conscious thought about it would allow me to feel it. The feeling wasn't distracting by any means, but it was still a sensory connection to outside world.

One of the keys to floating is to relax as much as possible, both mentally and physically. Relaxing physically was actually a bit trickier than I had expected. I tend to be somewhat highly strung internally and I often tense muscles without realizing it. (I believe most people do this to some extent or another.) It took longer and more focus than I expected to relax all my muscles. After about 5 minutes I realized that I still had some of my facial muscles on the left side of my mouth tensed slightly, a little later I realized my right quadriceps were a little tensed, yet later I realized I had re-tensed my face, etc.

After about 20 to 30 minutes of being completely motionless it felt like my muscles were almost dead. While I knew I could move any muscle I wanted to, it felt like it would require tremendous effort to do so. At one point I twitched my foot, just for fun. It felt like there was a 10 pound force working against my foot as I twitched it. I think it may have produced some muscular benefits, since I felt several brief localized muscle spasms that were possibly tight muscles relaxing.

The sensation of lying in the tank was nothing like lying in bed. For one thing, my posture, suspended in the water on my back, let my head sit farther back than it would if I were lying on a normal hard surface. Initially it was a bizarre feeling, since it felt like my head was sitting too far back and of my control, but I got used to it. The rest of my body was held in a perfectly comfortable floating equilibrium. You can still feel a bed, the sheets feel soft, the mattress offers firm, albeit ignorable, resistance. The float tank offered no sensation or feeling. It wasn't snuggly, warm, or just kind of quiet. It felt like as close to nothing as possible. (Interestingly, tests have shown that replacing dense water with a bed does not provide the same benefits.)

The Mental Aspect

Once I was centered and relaxed I was very comfortable and felt completely alone with my thoughts. I let my mind wander for some of the time, and I let myself focus my thinking for other times. Aside from my own heartbeat, it kind of felt like time stopped.

My brain felt so unencumbered while thinking. It was like a CPU able to run a dedicated process without interruption from I/O and other processes seeking time-share. When they were focused, my thoughts were in one of those extremely laser-like grooves that come along only occasionally. I had compiled a general list of things to think about in the tank before hand, and without going into specifics they covered various ideas from my programming projects to philosophical quandaries. I was able to analyze and organize things very quickly, and had extra time to pursue other ideas that came up I felt no time pressure while thinking, I moved from step to step as I felt comfortable doing so.

My biggest motivations for using the float tank was relaxation along with my thoughts. I was not disappointed.

Other Things

Unfortunately, I did make a mistake. At some point early on I instinctively touched my face with my hand, probably to scratch an itch. At about the 15 minute mark I opened my eyes, just to see how much light there was in the tank now that my eyes were adjusted (answer: almost none, I could barely make out the walls 2 to 3 feet away). That allowed some very salty water to run into my eyes. I was doomed because I couldn't get it out of my eyes with my salt-water covered body. I tried ignoring it, but after my eyes burned for 20 seconds I gave in. I exited the tank, wiped my face off with a towel, got some water from the shower and cleaned my face and thoroughly flushed my eyes, and got back in. The problem took only a minute to fix, but it was still a disruption.

I ended up floating for a total of 1 hour 45 minutes. That's a long time to be without any physical stimulation, but I really enjoyed it. I came out of it very relaxed and feeling pretty good. I didn't even fall asleep once, although I had kind of expected to. I would do it again.

Advice to Potential Floaters

Based on my experience, here is what I would offer to anyone planning to try float session.

• Spend a minute in the beginning getting yourself positioned. - You don't want to touch any of the sides of the float tank. Unfortunately, any bit of momentum causes you to drift, and if you start drifting you likely will probably bump into a side. Any time I made any noticeable movement I extended my arms and legs to the side until they touched the sides, used them to center myself, then slowly withdrew them.
• Avoid getting salt water in your eyes. - This may seem extremely obvious, but it's worth emphasizing. Don't even get salt water on your face, and avoid opening your eyes regardless.
• Spend some time focusing on relaxing your muscles. - I think that focusing on your body too much would defeat part of the purpose of floating, but it's worth spending some time up front intentionally relaxing all your muscles. It may not be as easy as lying down and telling yourself to relax. I'd recommend spending 5 or so minutes just focusing on relaxing every muscle from your face to your toes. It's very easy to tense them unintentionally.

How do you know if you would enjoy floating? It's probably impossible to know short of actually doing it, but here's a pseudo-test to screen out some who definitely would not like it: Take a pair of the best earmuffs or headphones you can find, put them on, and lie on a bed in a dark room without a pillow for five minutes. If you feel like ending before the time is up, you would probably not enjoy it. If you find it relaxing, floating may be enjoyable for you. (I enjoy doing that sort of thing, that's why I was fairly certain I would enjoy a float tank.)

I finished all of the practice exercises on Khan Academy. I have to say, it was fun.

(My profile.)

I'm not exactly not their target audience, though. I received a B.S. in pure math about 3 years ago, so my math background is far beyond the current content offering of Khan Academy (which is basically U.S. high school AP).

I was motivated to try the exercises for a couple reasons. First, I hadn't really checked out Khan Academy before, despite the fact that it had generated a lot of interest on the Internet over the last couple years, I saw it referenced a lot as a math review resource, and I heard undergraduate engineering students swear by it. Second, I'm a big fan of doing consistent mental exercises. I definitely exercise my brain during the work/reading/fun cycle, but I like having some sort of consistent activity to warm up my brain. I usually prefer puzzles that require focus but don't stretch your brain. I hadn't had a set of such exercises in a while and I thought that basic math review would work well for that purpose.

I did all the exercises and watched a small handful of videos. My comments are only about the exercises, not the videos.

Doing the Exercises

I worked through the exercises by following their exercise dependency tree. It's an inter-connecting tree of all the exercises and how they relate to each other. The top/root of the tree starts with an exercise on basic one-digit addition, branches out through the rest of arithmetic, continues into geometry, algebra, etc, and then eventually collapses down to Differential Calculus. There are 37 groups, each with between about 3 and 20 individual exercises. From the zoomed out perspective you can see how all of the high-level groups relate to each other and if you zoom in you can see how the exercises within each group inter-relate, with a few of the edge exercises connecting to exercises from nearby groups.

I followed the tree very methodically from the top down, working left-to-right when a tie-breaker was needed. Exercises are presented in sets of 8 questions and you earn "proficiency" at an exercise by demonstrating sufficient skill at the exercise. You can choose to do problems just from one specific exercise or a mix-up of questions from all the exercises in the group. I chose to do just one exercise set at a time because I enjoy getting into a focused "zone" while solving problems and I was largely doing this as a brain warm-up. I'm not sure it was best, though, if I continue doing exercises I will probably use group questions.

I worked through the exercises at varying rates. In the beginning I would usually do exercises for a couple 10 minute sessions over the day, one in the morning and another one at lunch or during the mid-afternoon. After a couple weeks I enjoyed the process more, especially as I moved past the elementary exercises and into the more fun ones like probability and systems of linear equations. I had never used a math question-answer format like this before, being able to get a stream questions in an easy-to-answer format was downright fun. I found myself putting more free time into the exercises. After all, who doesn't love to do some math problems here and there? (It was a rhetorical question. The majority of you can put your hands down now.)

As expected, the exercises weren't challenging. As a math major, I was not only well-trained in mathematical thinking but I also used the principles of geometry and algebra constantly, so there was nothing there I was not familiar with. However, a handful of exercises used tricks (like converting repeating decimals into fractions) or identities (like trig identities) that didn't come to mind and prompted me to use the "I'd like a hint" button to see a solution strategy.

To make the exercises more engaging I restricted myself to not using scratch-work or a calculator whenever it was possible. This made some of the exercises more difficult and lead to various mistakes in some of exercises requiring multiple steps. It was a good challenge, though, and some of the exercises forced me to keep more objects in working memory than was comfortable. I actually had a few exercises where I constantly made mistakes due to bad mental work, typos, or hasty shortcuts (such not bothering to check whether 221/299 can be reduced by a factor of 13).

While I worked from start to finish fairly linearly, I didn't race through the material. I backed up and re-did exercises that I found particularly fun and re-did some exercises using slightly different methods. (Although I'd estimate only 1/5 of my total points came from re-doing exercises, I think they are worth fewer points once you are proficient at them.) I finished all 380 exercises in about 2 months of consistent work. Khan Academy is constantly adding content, so I plan to do future exercises they add.

The Educational Experience

Although I couldn't see the exercises from the point of view of a student with little mastery of the content, I had some thoughts on their educational value.

I think that the biggest benefit of the Khan Academy exercises is that they can supply an unlimited number of practice problems and provide immediate feedback and explanations. This is something that's hard to do in a non-computer setting. A teacher can only spend time on so many examples during class and homework doesn't give a student immediate feedback. The strength of automation is that examples are infinite and feedback is instant and I think they leveraged both of those aspects well.

The tree of interconnected math concepts was well done. I wish I knew of a similar detailed tree for higher math topics. A very select few of the tree relationships did seem backwards, where I had a hard time believing that the a latter exercise offered any challenge a former exercise didn't. (I now wish I had saved examples, but I didn't.)

The exercises did a good job of focusing on one thing at a time. When learning any new skill it usually helps to isolate it in a familiar environment and focus on the unfamiliar part, so by focusing only on one idea per exercise these exercises would likely be a very helpful learning aid for someone who is trying to improve a specific weak point in their math skills. Combined with the tree as a whole, it would probably be easy to backtrack from an exercise full of confusing ideas to the lowest point of weakness and then work on refining the relevant skills from the bottom up. I can see a coach being able to do this easily for a student, or a motivated student doing it them self.

The system uses some clever math and machine learning to estimate when students are have achieved proficiency in an exercise (but all the student sees is a progress bar). Not knowing this when I began, it was still immediately clear that solving the first several problems in a set quickly and accurately earned proficiency but a couple of mistakes required numerous correct problems to earn proficiency. The system was well-tailored and let an initial burst of obvious competence pass quickly, while not passing mostly-right-but-still-struggling performance.

The "I'd like a hint" button was not the learning resource I hoped it would be. It offered step-by-step solutions (allowing the user to reveal one step of the solution at a time) but the steps were very formulaic without much explanation. For example, a typical step would read like "next we take the X and blah it with the Y", but with no mention of why this was necessary or possible. The exercises definitely were not teaching resources by themselves. Each problem did have a link to the associated teaching video, though, so they weren't designed to stand-alone.

Here are some of exercises that I thought were particularly interesting:

• The group of triangle proofs. This set allows for a unique chance to walk through geometry proofs step by step. The way they set it up, each step was verified as you input it, so it was pretty much impossible to get it wrong. The geometry diagrams would light up the relevant portions each time you input a new step or hovered over an old step, so I think it would give nice feedback for students who have a harder time "seeing" the geometrical aspects of what they're doing.
• The exercise on derivative intuition. A simple introductory concept that was well-illustrated. I'd recommend all beginning calculus students do this exercise. There were a couple other exercises oriented at building "intuition" for a topic. I really liked this, since I'm in favor of teaching intuitive concepts. (These should be replaced by rigor later on, of course, but many students, such as myself, benefit from these sorts of "gimme a clue or view as to what's happening here" explanations.)
• The group of logical reasoning. A quick review of the basic steps of logic and the relevant syntax. This is typically covered in the first few weeks of a first-year introduction to math college course for math or computer science students. I'd recommend everyone in such a class go through the exercises to help cement those ideas.

Unfortunately, some of the exercises lacked diversity in the problem sets. As examples, when reducing fractions there were never common factors larger than 13 (possibly to keep it mentally doable, though), polynomials often seemed to be picked out of only a few sets of styles, and there were a limited number of triangle ratios used. Some of the problem sets were constrained by the intent of the problem, such as trying to pick a problem that resulted in clean answers, and those constraints left only a handful of possible starting values. Those were understandable, but some of them didn't have any such constraints. With problems that didn't vary much, a student could unconsciously get into a rote system of "take the number there, blah it against that number, blah the result and write it down". The entire point of Khan Academy is self-study so I'm not suggesting it needs to take anti-cheating measures, but there were some problems sets that seemed unnecessarily bland considering the pool of potential problems. With some of those exercises I would actually consistently get the exact same question twice within a span of eight questions.

There weren't many exercises on the deeper/more challenging topics. The practice exercises don't cover as much depth as the video lessons do and I would like to see more of the topics fleshed out. For example, there are very few Linear Algebra exercises yet many Linear Algebra videos. Calculus is limited to Differential Calculus only. Even in Algebra they covered a lot of specific skills, but left out some worthwhile ones. They're consistently adding new exercises, though, (they've added 13 exercises in the past three months alone) so hopefully these areas will be expended in the future.

Miscellaneous Observations

On grading:

• You can achieve proficiency at any point during the exercise set, not just the end. You can keep an eye on the green star in the left-hand bar to see when you get it. Once achieved it can't be lost, although it can be recommended for review.
• I could almost always pass a problem set in four questions if I answered them correctly and within their "fast" time slot.
• The most efficient strategy that I found for passing a problem set was to get the first five questions right with three of them done at "fast" speed. Focusing on speed for all four would encourage hasty mistakes. Better to let the easy ones be fast and give them all good attention.
• Once a mistake was made, it would take at least 6, usually more, correct answers to pass the set. Wrong answers were weighted much more negatively than slow answers.
• A mistake seems to set your progress bar for the exercise down to at most half-filled.

On answers:

• Their scratch pad interface is a nice idea, but it's impractical to draw/write things with the mouse if you need to be fast. I just used a pen and sticky notes when I wanted scratch paper.
• Allowable answer formats varied somewhat inconsistently. Fractions almost always had to be in reduced form, but not always, rounding varied from 0 to two decimal places, and these were across exercises that had nothing to do with reducing fractions or rounding decimals. It was worth checking their little "acceptable format" indicator to see what types of input was allowed.
• The answer parsing was reasonably flexible. For example, when entering multiples of pi you could write "5pi" or "5 pi". It was flexible enough to not be annoying.

Final Thoughts

The Khan Academy exercises are a good source of practice material. They are not, however, a learning resource and do not replace real homework assignments and feedback by teachers. But I think they're solid supplementary material. I also think they would help someone who was once comfortable with material and wants to re-learn it.

I think Khan Academy did a good job making the exercise format pain-free and enjoyable.

Mikuru Asahina, from the anime The Melencholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, is pretty close to the definition of "moe" and very popular among anime figure collectors. Atelier-Sai has a nice Mikuru figure, available in three colors. It's very nice, like most Atelier figures, from the sculpting to the paint work. But it has one major problem: It does not balance on the stand. If you read user reviews, the figure's inability to balance on the stand is a widely encountered fatal flaw.

It's no wonder why the figure doesn't balance. It connects to the stand at one point, the trailing foot, and from the face-on view the entire 8 inch figure is forward (toward the viewer) and left of this anchor point. The figure's center of gravity is nowhere near the anchor to the stand and the anchor connection is not very tight, so the foot pulls loose and the figure falls easily. The foot seems to do a half decent job of preventing the figure from falling left (from the face-on view), but it offers very little support against falling face-forward. My figure will fit firmly into place initially, but the weight of the figure causes the foot to start sliding out of place within 5 minutes and it will fall forward within an hour. Unfortunately, there is just no way for me to set it up solely on its base. Here are some photos of my figure about 10 minutes after being set up:

Making an Extra Support

I knew about the stability problem before getting the figure, but I was fairly sure I could add some support to fix the issue. I really liked the figure and never enjoy storing figures in boxes.

The key to fixing the stability is that the figure's left leg is nearly parallel to ground and passes pretty close to the figure's center of gravity, making it an great place to wedge an additional support. Placing a pole carefully underneath the left leg can alleviate both the figure's forward and left tilt. I went to a craft store and got

• a 1/8" thick wood dowel
• a 3/16" thick foam sheet
• black matte acrylic paint

and made a make-shift stand to support the left leg for less than $5. Making the support pole was simple, I:

1. cut a 3 1/2" section of the dowel
2. glued a small 1/4" foam square to both ends of the pole
3. painted the dowel and the sides of the foam
4. placed the support pole under the left leg, about 1/2" from the tip of the left knee angled toward the figure slightly

The result wasn't too bad for someone whose entire "crafty" experience to date had consisted of, well, this. Here's the final result.

Details and Comments

The height of the support pole was very critical and it took me a couple attempts to get it right. Too short and it allowed the figure to lean forward, but too tall and it pushed the figure backwards. Letting it lean a little bit wasn't a bad thing, I just didn't want the pole to be able to slip after a long period of time. I chose the thickest foam I found at the store because that allowed for the height to adjust somewhat dynamically to the weight the figure placed on it, alleviating the need to cut the pole exactly correctly. One helpful thing about the leg is that it isn't perfectly parallel to the ground, it's height varies by about 1/8" from knee to ankle, so you can push a support underneath starting from the knee and slide it until it hits a good firm point. The foam and leg angle both alleviate some of the need to cut the pole to the right height.

That said, I did find that the pole needed to be placed precisely. I found that about 1/2" from the tip of the left knee slightly angled toward the figure provided the best support against the front and the side. It took some trial and error to get a combination of the right pole length and the right brace point on the leg that was thoroughly satisfying, although it was easy to find one that did most of the job.

I used foam on both ends of the pole to avoid scratching the figure or the stand and to provide stability at the base. The deeper foam allowed the figure's leg to form an indentation that helped hold it in place. When cut to the right height (with some tension on the pole by the figure), the pole stood somewhat firmly in place. I can pick the figure up and move it gently with dislodging the support pole. The foam didn't keep paint on well, so starting with black foam was a good idea.

I actually bought three different dowel sizes and made various samples to see which size I liked better. The stoutest one, 1/4" thick, definitely felt the sturdiest and seemed the easiest to position such that it held the figure still. But it looked too distracting and out of place, probably because it was about as thick as her legs. And in retrospect, I should have sanded the dowel before painting it for a smoother look up close.

Also, I made multiple supports. I may lose or break one some day and I probably don't want to repeat the process. There were plenty of left over materials for it, since one pole and one foam sheet could make almost a dozen.

Conclusion

This figure may not have a chance at supporting itself, but you don't have to let it sit in a box. Spend $5 and prop it up. It may not look perfect, but it looks better than it would in a box.

Mikuru a la Atelier-Sai is standing stably. Where is your god now?

Oh, yeah, on the same shelf.

I read an interesting essay about the "New Math" effort from several decades ago: Changing School Mathematics by Robert Davis (about 12 pages long). The essay gave an overview of New Math but focused on the Madison Project, a specific effort at implementing New Math, and how it sought to change the way students learned math from the old style of following formulas to a new style of emphasizing conceptual understanding. The essay covered some interesting techniques of teaching and how students responded, and I some of the thoughts from the essay really resonated with me.

The project was set up to address some shortcomings in the popular math teaching of the time and the difficulties that math education faced. One of the biggest problems in teaching mathematics, particularly at the primary education levels, is that it is difficult to convey good understanding of mathematics, and it is also difficult to learn if the student has gotten a good understanding or if they are simply memorizing and repeating steps. Much of the usefulness of math stems from understanding what is happening and why it is happening, and a student who doesn't understand that is missing out on the majority of what learning math has to offer. So there has been a lot of debate and experimentation about the "right" way to teach math and what styles are or are not effective.

I liked a lot of what the author had to say about teaching math, and I think a lot of it applies to learning and teaching in general. A lot of it resonated with my inner mathematician (I'm a math major) and reminded me of ways that I like to learn and ways that I think are effective in tutoring other people in math. (Teaching math is a subject I'm very interested in right now, as I think about starting to teach my children math in the next few years.)

Here are some interesting quotes from the article, although I recommend reading the whole thing. I think that a lot of it applies to most learning topics in most learning scenarios, not just math in a class room. (All emphasis in quotes is preserved.)

No child can be expected to "discover" historical accidents or what is in the teacher's mind. Only after a task is clearly understood can the creativity and inventiveness of children take over the agenda. The correct understanding of the [Madison] project's approach might better have been stated as, "If, at this moment in the lesson, what is needed is an intellectual breakthrough of some sort, please wait and let a student take the first step." If you wait, someone will.

- pg. 637

I like this point because I'm very convinced that we both understand and remember things better when we make the connections ourselves. It's certainly possible to feed people answers prematurely, either for the sake of keeping up a pace or because we're too excited ourselves and we want to share our knowledge, and in doing so we hinder the listener's ability to play with key pieces of the puzzle themselves. Providing an answer too soon can deny the listener a "light bulb" moment, which is key for understanding ideas.

When I'm explaining an idea to somebody, perhaps one that itself involves several different ideas, there will inevitably be a time where a few ideas come together and the listener doesn't instantly make sense of everything. (This arises frequently, almost whenever a relatively deep conversation has gone on for 10 or so minutes.) They're not dumb, just taking a moment to sift through things. When I feel like this has happened, I usually like to just go quiet for a moment and let the other person think. Even if they ask a question, I may just ignore it for a little bit (politely, of course, perhaps with a little "hm..." and a pregnant pause). The idea will make more sense to them and be more useful if they put it together in their own head, and I'm usually certain that nothing I can say will substitute for their own effort.

Besides demonstrating the assimilation paradigm, the preceding example shows another way in which the project provided help to students: the use of clear, unambiguous language and notations. We had been aware that David Page was using small raised symbols for positive and negative, as in ⁺2 or ^-3, and carefully using the words positive and negative when that was the idea (as opposed to plus and minus in the situation where those meanings were intended and nonraised symbols were used). We had not chosen to follow his example in this usage until some seventh graders, asked to invent a sensible way to add, subtract, and multiply signed numbers, responded that

(+2) x (-3)

should be equal to 3. How come? "Because two times three is six, and then you have to subtract three." We converted immediately to Page's notation, and this difficulty disappeared.

Probably, if we were telling the students what to do, alternative interpretations such as the one above might not arise --or, at least, might not see the light of day and might not come to be noticed. But if the children themselves are building up the mathematics, if they are inventing ways to proceed, then exactly how they are thinking about the ideas becomes directly relevant. In traditional "teaching by telling," the question of which notation is used may be seen as unimportant.

- pg. 640

When a teacher is emphasizing a conceptual understanding of math, clear notation is necessary. This example looks like a very interesting case where seemingly simple notation obscured the math problem. The student tried to derive a mathematical meaning from the notation, but the notation was imperfect. It was a simple example, and the author points out that this is easily solved by just telling the student what to do (they will eventually memorize the rules through repeated practice), but it illustrates how notation can be an artificially imposed difficulty.

I think that good notation should distinguish between what something is and what actions are happening. There is probably a more formal way of expressing that thought, but that's my basic idea. In the example above, the student confused what quantity existed (negative 3) for what action needed to be done (subtracting 3). Obviously, the two ideas are closely related, but technically the notation (aka, "-3") was ambiguous by itself, the intent had to be inferred from the context, and the interpretation mattered. (This last point is important because, particularly in higher math, ambiguous notation may be permitted when various interpretations/definitions are equivalent, so the reader is free to choose the interpretation they like best.) Such seemingly simple things can, at a minimum, create confusion, and once the student is confused their progress will be slowed down. I don't really see a need for such ambiguous notation, and in an ideal system we wouldn't have it. Since notation is mostly established by popular tradition, it's no surprise that odd quirks like this exist.

The essay closed with:

By imagining that mathematics means knowing when to invert and multiply, we have come to trivialize mathematics, knowledge itself, and even the nature of human thought. Anyone who listens carefully to what children really think about the world will know otherwise.

-pg 645

Another re-iteratation of the thesis: Students, even young ones, can understand ideas and find motivations for those ideas on their own given sufficient guidance. Rote memorization of using tools doesn't teach the same skills.

Math can be a difficult subject to teach. One reason it's hard is because a good understanding of it is generally a very "internal" feeling. Mere words don't really convey what a person understands about math, much like words fail when trying to describe a piece of music. Differences of viewpoints, preferred approaches, and mental strengths between teachers and students can raise barriers when trying to take knowledge from the teacher's head and get it into the student's head. But it's not an impossible task, and there are definitely some techniques have tend to produce better success rates than others. Good teaching will allow the student to build math understanding in their own head, instead of cramming a pre-defined structure in there. The Madison project tried to accomplish this, and it seems like they had a lot of good ideas that students of any generation would benefit from.

While device images can be helpful to keep, they can be a pain to store. They must literally contain every byte of the original device, making them about as big as the original image. However, saving unused disk space is pointless. By zeroing out unused filesystem space and then using fast compression on the resulting image, the compressed will be about the same size as the used data on the filesystem. If a significant portion of the filesystem is unused, this can save a lot of space in final image.

Making a device image is not difficult. Unix-based systems have long had the "dd" utility. For Windows, Vista introduced a built-in utility for creating image backups. There are also many third-party software applications like Partition Magic provide this sort of functionality.

The biggest disadvantage of a raw device image is that space unused by the filesystem is still saved. If a 20 GB file system only has 4 GB of data on it, all 20 GB will still be saved in the image. If there are many images that need to be stored (such as images from multiple devices, or images from multiple points in time from the same device) this isn't very space efficient. Users with space concerns often compress the images, but the unused space often contains normal data since it is likely that it was used at least once in the past as files were created, deleted, and moved. So, unfortunately, the unused portion of the filesystem usually compresses only a little better than the used portion. Since the contents of the unused portion of the filesystem are often arbitrary, it is undesirable to have such high overhead for storing then.

(Note that filesystem based images do not have this problem. But these are more complicated and do not work on full disks, which is necessary to preserve the MBR, partition boundaries, etc.)

However, if the unused space of the file system is filled with zeros before compression then the image containing the filesystem is compressed the unused space will be trivially compressed to almost nothing. Compressing 4 GB of data is practically the same as compressing 4 GB of data and 16 GB of zeros.

Implementation

Zeroing out unused filesystem space is simple. First mount the file system to be imaged, then create a temporary file on the file system and fill this file with zeros until either a) the file system runs out of space, or b) the file system's maximum file size limit is reached. In the case of the latter, continue creating and filling temporary files until the file system is full. Delete all the temporary files once you are finished. At this point practically all unused space has been allocated for one of the zero-filled files that was created, and thus has had physical zeros written to it.

On a Unix/Linux system, the dd utility makes this easy. The following command:

reads from virtual device /dev/zero which supplies and unlimited quantity of zeros and writes the zeros to an output file, automatically terminating when the file can not grow anymore. The argument bs=16M is included to speed up the operation, since by default dd will read and write in chunks of 512 bytes and the constant switching between read and write operations in very inefficient and can make the process take tens of times longer.

I've written a quick platform independent C++ program that will create files full of zeros until the files are as large as they can grow and no more files can be created. While "dd" is certainly more convenient, this should work on Windows systems and on filesystems that don't support sufficiently large files. Execute this program with one argument pointing to a path on the partition you want to zero-ize, no argument will default to the current working path.

Obviously, it may not be a good idea to perform this zero-ization operation on a filesystem that is in active use. After the filesystem is filled, but before the temporary file(s) are deleted, there will be almost no room to write data to disk. While this will be a very small window of time, any applications (including the operating system) that need to write to disk will possibly be denied the ability to do so and since it is rare for applications to be denied write access to open file handles, their behavior may be unpredictable. In the majority of my own personal tests I have not encountered a problem, but a couple times the system froze or slowed down noticeably until I deleted the temporary files. Just be careful, filling a live filesystem to the brim is not standard good practice.

An astute reader may note two technical issues with this method of filling the filesystem with zeroed files:

1. Filling a file with zeros does not guarantee that all unused space will be used as partially-used sectors will not have the unused portion zeroed out. But these sectors will represent a negligible percentage of the total disk. They typically occur as the last sector of a file that isn't an integral multiple of the sector size. A typical Windows 7 install will probably have less than 500,000 files, and 500,000 sectors means about 125 MB of space on average.
2. Writing to and then deleting a file does not guarantee the file to be written to disk due to both the OS/filesystem and disk-level caches. Cached data that never gets written to disk will be abandoned when the file is deleted, and the space on disk it was supposed to zero will be left untouched. But only a small portion of the data to be written will be cache-able by the OS and the disk. Home disks rarely have larger than 32 MB caches, and the OS/filesystem will likely cache at most a gigabyte or so. This has the potential to be non-negligible size, but even an aggressive cache would have a small total impact. Since so much is being written to disk, the caches will overflow quickly and be forced to write most of it to disk.

A fast compression scheme is probably better than a good compression scheme, unless time is not important. It's likely that the majority of used space will be binary data (executables, already-compressed media formats, etc) and will yield very low compression no matter how hard you try. Any simple compression method, like GZIP, will be able to make efficient use of the sections of 0s and not waste too much time compressing the rest of the image.

Concluding Notes

The difference in compressed image between the original device contents and the zero-ized device contents will depend on the filesystem(s) involved, how full they are, how much data has been added and deleted, how long it's been since the last time the device(s) were wiped, and similar factors. However, since this is a fairly easy procedure, it wouldn't hurt to try this if saving device image backup space is helpful. In my personal experience, I've seen the size of the compressed image as much as halved. On a device where not much data is copied, this may only need to be applied once or twice in the lifetime of the device to keep the majority of the unused space zeroed.

Somewhat obviously, this technique should not be used on a device that requires forensic analysis, as sectors unclaimed by the filesystem may still have contents that need to be examined.

I wrote my three congressmen today to voice my opposition to a well-known pair of bills that are under consideration by the United States House of Representatives and Senate (respectively), namely SOPA and PIPA. These bills were drafted with strong support from the multimedia industry and they bring a very heavy hand into the legal realm of copyright enforcement and are very unpopular with Internet-based companies and most Internet users in general. As I write this, many websites are in the middle of a day-long self-imposed blackout in protest.

I strongly oppose these bills. I do sympathize with the fact that multimedia companies have legal and moral rights to exercise over their content and that these rights are violated by mass-piracy, but these bills take far too drastic action to protect said rights. I won't re-iterate all the reasons why these bills are bad, even in spite of recent tamer modifications.

So I wrote my three congressmen today to voice my opposition. I'd like to share the letter publicly, as a wider proclamation of my position on this issue and hopefully as an aid for anyone writing their congressmen on a political issue. It's not a master-piece, but I thought it might be helpful. I'll explain some of the reasoning and structure below. Here it is:

To the Honorable [insert congressman's full name],

I would like to add my voice of support to the millions of people who oppose [SOPA/PIPA].

I am sympathetic to the motivation of the bill. I understand that multimedia companies have proper motivation to protect their intellectual property. I support their moral and legal rights to own their content.

However, I do not believe that their efforts to protect their property should be at the expense of humanity's convenience and technological development. We the people do not exist to listen to music, we listen to music while we live our lives. Similarly, technology does not exist to play music, it exists to enable us to do what we want, some of which is to listen to music. Legislation like [SOPA/PIPA] takes a multimedia-centered viewpoint of the universe, assuming that we should hinder productivity and change the dynamics of an entire industry just to protect the convenience of one sector of that industry.

The multimedia industry has a history of resisting technological development due to their reluctance to change business models. They tried to legally combat cassette tapes, video tapes, and CDs under the pretense of fighting piracy that would hurt them. Yet those very mediums enabled them to distribute their content in better, more widely-reaching ways than before. They resist change, yet change and progress is what technology, and humanity itself, is about. Every sector of an industry faces critical changes over time, and while it can be difficult for them to adjust they should not seek legal aid pass their difficulties onto us, the common citizen. This is a capitalist society, the multimedia sector needs to adjust, not be pampered.

My request, congressman, is that your position be to protect the progress of the general public. I support the multimedia sector's desire to protect its content - once again, I sympathize with their motivation - but not at the expense of all our development. Their history and the current [SOPA/PIPA] legislation show that they are not seeking to provide us with multimedia enjoyment while we live our lives, they prefer to limit our lives to fit their existing business models.

Thank you for your time. For what it's worth, I voted for you. To protect me.

--Brad Conte

Some thoughts on this letter, in no particular order:

• I used SOPA or PIPA where appropriate for the recipient. One bill is in one house, the other bill in the other house. Writing a blanket statement like "SOPA and PIPA", or worse yet just the popular one "SOPA", sounds more like a form letter. Who wants to get a letter that mentioning a bill that they can't even vote on?
• I wanted to paint a big picture perspective. 1) I gave a very quick history of similar actions in the industry and their outcomes. 2) I noted that the multimedia industry is just a sub-sector of the larger industry that this bill effects. 3) I remembered international concerns; the U.S. is the country most impacted immediately, but this likely has implications for the whole world, hence I slipped in the word "humanity" a couple times. The goal wasn't to be dramatic, but to always remind them of how wide-reaching the implication would be. The overall point was that this was far too invasive an action to protect one specific sector.
• As a general rule for opinions and debates, you should always separate general intent from specific implementation and you should separate analysis of the consequences from debate over what the consequences are. If you want to get your point across to someone, decide which perspective you're arguing and make it clear, too many conversations are completely wasted due to a missing of the minds on those simple topics and jumping confusingly between perspectives. In my letter, I opposed this implementation of copyright and laid out the consequences for what happened. If the congressmen doesn't agree that the assessments that I asserted, that's the subject for a separate, much longer e-mail. I would suggest that it's best to go for lots of detail or very little, because few things are as weak as an argument that uses just a few details strewn about.
• It's easy to read - about 370 words and about 2/3 of a printed page, so easily readable in a few minutes. There are 5 paragraphs (the closing line isn't really a paragraph), but only 3 have the bulk of the content; it looks very digestible at a quick glance. That's all you need to give a summary of a position. This makes it easily skim-able: a) while each paragraph is unique, you could omit any one and get the majority of the argument, b) you could read the first sentence of each paragraph and still get the message (that's actually a good rule in general), and c) you could read the first and last paragraphs and understand it. Given the popularity of this topic, it's likely that if the congressman is reading my letter, it is just one of hundreds on the same topic.
• I emphasized what impact my position would have on the opponents (the multimedia industry). Actually, I somewhat trivialized their position as simply being for "convenience". It isn't a matter of preserving the multimedia companies, it's simply about them finding and adjusting to a new business model, just like they've done several times in the past. It's important to know what's at stake in a situation like this, and I wanted to contrast humanity's technological stifling against their convenient business model. (In retrospect, trivializing it as "convenience" was a pretty strong statement to make without supporting evidence, maybe it should've been a little tamer.)
• Similar to the above, the secondary focus of the letter was on priorities. "We the people" are not befitted in general by this bill. I said and implied that a couple of times.
• The tone is unemotional, yet a little grave. It's a serious subject but it won't kill my grandmother, so there's no need to sound like it would.
• The closing line ("...I voted for you. To protect me.") might come off a bit snarky, but it conveys a valid point. Congressmen are put in place by "the people" and those people are who will lose (and lose very badly) should the legislation pass. Obviously there are times where a congressmen needs to put aside the individual or short-term benefits of each person for the big picture, but I wanted to remind them that my hope is that their voice will do its best to echo ours. If I would be strongly opposed to the bill, that should count for something. I didn't make any threats (ie, "I won't vote for you if you don't oppose this"), I just reminded them of established fact. And, for what it's worth, I did actually vote for the congressmen I wrote to. (I shouldn't have to point that out, but it's an easy statement to lie about and I've seen it done elsewhere.)

Hopefully the letters will do some good. (Update: For what it's worth, I only received back form replies from a couple of the congressmen.)

Redirecting input and output of an executable is a standard and trivial practice in Linux operations. When launching a process, the user can trivially redirect the output of the process away from stdout via the > operator and can redirect input away from stdin using the < operator.

But that only works if stdin or stdout are switching before the process is launched. What if we have a pre-existing process that we would like to change a file handles for, but we would like to avoid restarting the process? For example, say you have a cron script execute sudo my_command from an environment where you can't provide input (perhaps you meant to use gksudo instead). You might be able to kill the sudo process, but perhaps when sudo exits the script will proceed with undesirable results. You could kill the script too, but assume that you very badly don't want to abort the script in a semi-completed state. (Obviously a well-written script shouldn't have this sort of behavior, but the assumption is that we are in an unusual situation.) The ideal solution would be to redirect input into the hanging sudo process allowing it to succeed and your script to continue.

Thankfully, we can perform redirection on existing processes by explicitly manipulating the existing file descriptors. The method for doing so is fairly straight forward:

1. Determine which file descriptor you need to change.
2. Attach to the target process via gdb.
3. Create a file (to redirect output) or named pipe (to redirect input).
4. Use gdb to point the desired file descriptor to the file or pipe.
5. If applicable, send the necessary content through the pipe.

In terminal A, find the PID of the process, call it TARGET_PID. First, list the target's existing file descriptors:

When we are done we will double check this list to ensure we made the changes we wanted to.

Now you need to determine which file descriptor (hereon "FD") you want to change. Remember, we can only manipulate existing FDs, not add new ones. (For those who don't know: FD 0 is stdin (standard input), FD 1 is stdout (standard output), FD 2 is stderr (standard error output). These are the the base FDs that every process will have, your target process may or may not have more.) Examples:

• To change the input for a typical terminal program you likely need to to change stdin.
• To change output file X to a different file Y, you need to find which FD on the list is linked to X.
• For sudo, to change the input that accepts the user password you actually need to change FD 4, which should point to /dev/tty or something similar.

We'll call the the FD number that you want to change TARGET_FD.

For using a named pipe: First create the pipe using

We'll call this path TARGET_FILE. Then provide input to the pipe, or else gdb will not be able to open it in a later step. Provide the content by, for example, echo MyContent > TARGET_FILE from a separate terminal or as a backgrounded process. MyContent should be the content you want to send the process.

For using a normal file: Create an output file called TARGET_FILE.

Attach gdb to the process:

Within gdb, close the file descriptor using the close() system call:

The right-hand side of the output is the return value of the call we just executed. A value of 0 means that all went well.

Now create an FD using the open() system call. This must be done after "close()", because file descriptors are issued sequentially from the lowest unused non-negative integer and we are making use of the fact that once we delete TARGET_FD it is now the lowest unused file descriptor, so the next one created will use the same number.

If the right-hand side number is equal to TARGET_FD, that means we just successfully created an FD and it got the same FD that we just closed, which is perfect. Remember, if you are using a named pipe, this step may (will?) hang if there is no output going into the named pipe.

Now quit gdb:

At this point, you should be done. If you are redirecting output, the redirection should be under way. If you are redirecting input, the first input should be consumed from the pipe and you can continue to provide input as necessary by sending it into the pipe; when you are done simply delete the pipe using rm.

We can verify hat we were successful by checking the target process's FDs. Run ls -l /proc/TARGET_PID/fd/ again and compare the output against the output from the first time. If all went well then TARGET_FD should be changed to point at TARGET_FILE.

[Update: Jan. 24, 2010] The DNS leaking problem described in this article applied to FoxyProxy v2.14. On Jan. 12, FoxyProxy v2.17 fixed the problem.

FoxyProxy is a popular Firefox extension that enables users to, setup, easily manage, and quickly switch between multiple proxy configurations. One of the most common uses of a proxy server is for security/privacy. By establishing an encrypted connection (usually via SSH) with a proxy server on a trusted network, you can have your web traffic go through an encrypted "pipe" to that server and have that server send and receive web requests on your behalf, relaying data to and from you only through that pipe. By doing this you eliminate the risk that someone on your current network could see your HTTP traffic. Maybe you don't trust other clients on the network, maybe you don't trust the gateway, it doesn't matter -- your HTTP(S) traffic is encrypted and shielded from prying eyes. (Readers unfamiliar with the concept of using HTTP proxies through SSH tunnels are encouraged to research the matter, there are many well-written tutorials available.)

There are many other popular uses of proxy servers, but the application of encrypted web traffic is of concern in this case for the following reason: A key problem that arises when using web proxy servers is the issue of handling DNS requests. DNS does not go through the HTTP protocol, so even if HTTP is being forwarded to a proxy the DNS requests may not be. If DNS requests are sent out over the network like normal then eavesdroppers can still read them. So although the actual traffic may be encrypted, the DNS queries behave normally and may cause the same problems that using an encrypted tunnel was designed to avoid in the first place. A situation in which HTTP traffic is encrypted but DNS is not is referred to as "DNS leaking". When using a proxy for the benefit of security or privacy, DNS leaking may be just as bad as non-encrypted traffic.

Solving the DNS leaking problem is simple. One type of proxy, SOCKS5, can forward DNS requests as well as HTTP(S) data. A user simply needs to tell their browser to use the SOCKS5 proxy for both HTTP(S) and DNS and then both will be routed through the encrypted stream, allowing the user to surf the web with greatly strengthened security and privacy.

However, Firefox users who use FoxyProxy at the moment will encounter a problem when using DNS forwarding to a SOCKS5 proxy. When using FoxyProxy, DNS leaking occurs even when it is configured not to, which has made many users very upset. Initially many people thought the problem was with Firefox 3.5, but others confirmed it was only present with FoxyProxy installed. Unfortunately, however, not everyone is convinced that this is FoxyProxy-related behavior and I have not found anyone who has presented a solution yet. I plan to do both.

This is the basic setup for my tests:

• I set up an SSH server.
• I established an SSH connection and used the built-in SOCKS5 functionality of the SSH server daemon:$ ssh username@myserver -D localhost:8080(For the non-SSH inclined: This command forwarded all traffic my client sends to itself on port 8080 through the SSH connection to the SSH server, which then acts as a SOCKS5 proxy and sends the data on to the destination.)
• I used Wireshark to monitor all packets, specifically DNS requests, sent or received my network's interface. Note that DNS requests tunneled over the SSH connection to the SOCKS5 proxy are not visible to the packet sniffer.
• I monitored my Firefox configuration in about:config. (All network proxy-related settings are under the filter network.proxy.)
• I used Firefox v3.5.5 and FoxyProxy v2.14.

Using this I was able to monitor all DNS requests while I experimented with Firefox and FoxyProxy using a SOCKS5 proxy. I did a base test with no proxy configuration, a test using Firefox's included proxy management, and a test using Foxyproxy for proxy management.

Using no proxy

Starting with a default configuration (SSH SOCKS connection established but no proxy settings configured to use it) I visited several websites such as google.com, yahoo.com, and schneier.com. This was the simple base test.

I checked showmyip.com to get my IP address.

The relevant about:config settings:

Via Wireshark I watched as the websites generated normal DNS requests over the standard network.

Using Firefox to configure proxy settings

I restarted Firefox to avoid any cached DNS entries. Then, without FoxyProxy installed, I setup my SOCKS5 proxy. (Note that FoxyProxy replaces the standard Firefox proxy editor, so it is impossible to not use FoxyProxy when it is installed.)

Under Firefox's Preferences/Tools (depending on your operating system) I went to the "Advanced" tab, "Network" sub-tab, and opened "Settings". I chose "Manual proxy configuration" and entered "localhost" for the SOCKS Host and "8080" for the port.

Unfortunately, Firefox v3.5 does not support a GUI method of enabling DNS SOCKS5 proxying, so I had to manually go to about:config and enable it by setting network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to "true".

I checked showmyip.com to ensure that my IP address displayed as coming from the server and not my client. It did show as coming from the server, so Firefox was using the proxy.

The final about:config settings were:

I visited the same websites. Via Wireshark, I did not see any DNS requests sent over the standard network. Firefox channeled both the HTTP and DNS data through the SSH tunnel perfectly.

Using FoxyProxy to configure proxy settings

I reset all the about:config settings back to their defaults. Then I installed FoxyProxy Standard v2.14. I went to FoxyProxy's options and, under the "Proxies" tab, created a new proxy entry whch I named "SSH SOCKS5". I set it to connect to "localhost" on port 8080. As well, I check-marked the "SOCKS proxy?" box and selected "SOCKS v5". I went to the "Global Options" tab and checked the box "Use SOCKS proxy for DNS lookups". To let this take effect, I had to restart Firefox.

When Firefox had restarted, I went to the Tools > FoxyProxy menu and selected to "Use proxy SSH SOCKS5 for all URLS". I checked showmyip.com to ensure that my IP address displayed as coming from the server and not my client. It did show as coming from the server, so Firefox was using the proxy.

I checked about:config:

The configuration was the same as the default, so apparently FoxyProxy does not adjust about:config to do its work.

Watching the DNS requests via Wireshark, I watched as all the website visits generated DNS requests over the normal network. Complete and thorough DNS leaking. And I would like to emphasize that I had selected "Use SOCKS proxy for DNS lookups", which is FoxyProxy's option to address the DNS leaking issue.

Fixing DNS leaking

There was no question about it, FoxyProxy caused the DNS leaking in my test. I wanted to solve the problem so I fiddled with about:config.

In about:config I manually set network.proxy.type to 1. I verified my IP address was from the server via showmyip.com.

The new about:config:

I watched for DNS requests again via Wireshark. I saw none. It seemed that just manually setting network.proxy.type to 1 fixed the FoxyProxy DNS leaking problem.

I also tried other about:config settings, such as manually changing network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to "true", but that didn't work. The above was the only change in about:config that I found that fixed the problem.

Summary

I repeated the results above three times in different orders on different computers on both Linux and Windows to ensure I made no configuration mistakes and to verify that the behavior was consistent and cross-platform. All the tests yielded the same results. Here is the final summary:

• Firefox v3.5 does not suffer from DNS leaking by itself.
• DNS leaking occurs when FoxyProxy is managing the proxies.
• FoxyProxy does not suffer from DNS leaking when network.proxy.type is manually set to 1.

It is obvious that FoxyProxy does not adjust about:config in order to configure proxy settings, but I do not know why. Many Firefox extensions adjust about:config in order to accomplish their goals and I know of no reason they should not. It's possible that FoxyProxy has not had a need to do so before, but in light of this serious problem that may need to change. The quickest/simplest solution for FoxyProxy may to set network.proxy.type to 1 if the currently enabled proxy is SOCKS5 and if the global options for FoxyProxy (or the about:config for Firefox) are set to enable DNS forwarding.

However, although this seems to indicate that FoxyProxy has made a mistake, I don't know that FoxyProxy is the party at fault. Clearly FoxyProxy does not have to alter about:config in order to change the other proxy settings, so why must network.proxy.type be set in about:config in order for DNS forwarding to work? Note that network.proxy.type isn't related to DNS forwarding, it just specifies which type of proxy is enabled. For all I know someone implemented a hack in Firefox that checks about:config when it shouldn't. Of course, I don't know that and I don't know if this is expected behavior from Firefox or not. It could be that FoxyProxy isn't setting whatever hidden configuration for DNS forwarding that exists on the same plane as the other invisible proxy settings it uses. Or maybe FoxyProxy is relying on an unreliable hack in order to avoid changing about:config. I don't know about any of that. What I do know is that Firefox by itself does not have this DNS leaking problem, FoxyProxy does, and a simple solution exists.

Again, I am certainly not the first person to note this problem, but a) I have seen many people blame Firefox for this bug, and b) I have not yet seen anyone else mention the solution that I noted above.

I leave it to someone with more time and knowledge about these software projects to determine which project should have which bug report filed. This needs to be fixed permanently.

The power of Linux lies in the tools it uses, and the shell is an essential tool. If you spend a lot of time in a terminal, you likely value anything that makes the experience smoother. Here are a couple tips to help make the terminal experience as smooth as possible.

Interact with the X clipboard

Before I discovered xclip, one of the most annoying things about being in a terminal was my lack of access to the X clipboard. Some terminal/shell combinations work well with a standard desktop environment, but "highlight-and-middle-click" a) isn't always feasible, and b) doesn't always work. Thankfully, xclip makes it easier.

xclip can output from and write to the clipboard from the standard input. The "-i" and "-o" arguments tell xclip whether you are inputting or outputting clipboard contents, respectively.

Example:

You may now "Control-V" paste that path where ever you choose. Another example:

This will download the file from the URL that is in the clipboard. I have found that "pasting" the contents of xclip into the shell using backticks (aka, `) a very convenient work-flow. The result of `xclip -o` is basically having the code right were you would have pasted it in the shell.

You can use xclip to read from and write to the different X clipboards, which allows you to interact with the clipboards for pasting via middle-click or Control-V. The "middle-click" clipboard is selected with the arguments -selection primary and the "Control-V" clipboard is selected with the arguments -selection clipboard.

I might suggest aliasing "xclip" to xclip -clipboard X, where X is your preferred clipboard to operate on.

Use "head" and "tail" more powerfully

You probably know how to use "head" to extract the first N lines from a file and "tail" to extract the last N lines of a file. While this is useful, it's often just as useful to extract the complement of those selections, namely, everything except the first N lines or everything except the last N lines.

The head and tail utilities are powerful enough to accommodate those needs. head allows you to extract either a finite quantity of text from the top or everything but a finite quantity of text from the bottom, and tail allows you to extract a finite quantity of text from the bottom or everything but a finite quantity of text from the top.

• head -n N -- by default outputs the first N lines (equivalent to using +N). Using -N outputs all but the last N lines.
• tail -n N -- by default outputs the last N lines (equivalent to using -N). Using +N outputs lines starting on the Nth.

Example:

Note that tail's complement mode requires you to specify the first line number to include in the output, so if you want all but the top N lines actually specify the argument N+1.

Change directories with the directory stack

The Bash shell (as well as others, like Zsh) have a built-in "back" feature for navigating directories. The built-in pushd command will put your current working path at the top of a shell-maintained stack and allow you to change to another directory. To go back to the saved path you can use popd. This one is more commonly known than the first two, but worth including because it's so incredibly convenient.

Example:

Since "pushd" stores the directories in a stack, you can push multiple directories onto the stack and later pop them off in the reverse order you pushed them. It's basically the standard "cd" only with a "back" feature. Speaking of which, the command cd - will always take you back to the previous directory you were in.