https://blogs.williamhuang.org/post/ Recent content in Posts on Perception Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us William Huang © 2012 - 2018 Fri, 26 Feb 2016 02:48:02 +0000 https://blogs.williamhuang.org/post/2016-02-25-security-broken-with-a-quest-for-convenience/ Fri, 26 Feb 2016 02:48:02 +0000 https://blogs.williamhuang.org/post/2016-02-25-security-broken-with-a-quest-for-convenience/ I feel compelled to write about something I just found out yesterday. It was about a service that CloudFlare proudly touted as an innovation on web security technology — Keyless SSL. It allows CloudFlare, as a CDN provider, to “securely” serve content for the origin, with the origin’s own TLS certificate, but without requiring the origin to give up its private key. At first I was pleasantly surprised. If something can really be done it will with no doubt boost the security and even redefine how CDNs work today. https://blogs.williamhuang.org/post/2015-06-05-it-all-started-with-humblebragging/ Fri, 05 Jun 2015 22:23:06 +0000 https://blogs.williamhuang.org/post/2015-06-05-it-all-started-with-humblebragging/ I used to be an avid user of social media, and I truly believed that social media brought people together. When I was first introduced to social media back in high school, it was a pleasant surprise to find most of my childhood friends there, and it was really great to feel connected again (though most of us only lived several blocks apart). Back then social media was still a relatively informative place, since everybody was a student of some sort and had almost nothing to worry about except for the homework and exams (so these were also what we posted all the time…). https://blogs.williamhuang.org/post/2015-05-08-the-fake-football-crisis/ Fri, 08 May 2015 21:02:35 +0000 https://blogs.williamhuang.org/post/2015-05-08-the-fake-football-crisis/ I never liked opinion sections on any media. I like facts, not speculations, or so-called analyses which in my opinion are just speculations from “experts” (I come from a culture where publicly speaking experts have no credibility whatsoever so I might be a little biased on the latter one). My critical feelings against media exacerbates as Tom Brady and his deflated footballs keep making national headlines, eclipsing real issues like the earthquake in Nepal or Ted Cruz’s outrageous comments on climate change. https://blogs.williamhuang.org/post/2015-02-23-when-standard-fails-us/ Mon, 23 Feb 2015 23:06:37 +0000 https://blogs.williamhuang.org/post/2015-02-23-when-standard-fails-us/ I guess I have finally lost my patience with C semantics. Although the C programming language is kind of infamous for its lack of memory safety and disastrous type system, I still believed that the programming language still represented intuition well, and given that an appropriate amount of attention is paid, all mistakes can be avoided. Well, turns out it is not the case when it comes to undefined behaviors. https://blogs.williamhuang.org/post/2014-11-05-favorite-quotes-from-the-part-time-parliament/ Thu, 06 Nov 2014 03:12:42 +0000 https://blogs.williamhuang.org/post/2014-11-05-favorite-quotes-from-the-part-time-parliament/ The Greek island of Paxos has way too many mysteries, for both archaeologists and computer scientists. When I was first reading Dr. Leslie Lamport’s The Part-time Parliament, which was an epic introduction of a novel consensus protocol designed for distributed systems, I genuinely wondered who that group of archaeologists were and how Dr. Lamport managed to discover such perfect analogies between an ancient democracy and distributed computer systems. To be honest I almost planned my visit to the archaeology department myself. https://blogs.williamhuang.org/post/2014-05-15-what-is-the-difference/ Thu, 15 May 2014 10:11:01 +0000 https://blogs.williamhuang.org/post/2014-05-15-what-is-the-difference/ I was confronted an ethical dilemma the other day. Although it is just a hypothetical one with the form of a series of academic discussions, I consider it to be serious enough to put up an article documenting it, and expressing some of my thoughts. The question at the center of the concerns is very simple: we, who identify ourselves as engineers, are we really making the difference we think we make? https://blogs.williamhuang.org/post/2014-04-02-how-i-met-your-mother-a-finale-and-a-fresh-start/ Wed, 02 Apr 2014 21:01:21 +0000 https://blogs.williamhuang.org/post/2014-04-02-how-i-met-your-mother-a-finale-and-a-fresh-start/ !!Spoilers alert!! !!Spoilers alert!! !!Spoilers alert!! If you haven’t watched the final episode, move your eyes away! Unless you don’t care about this series or haven’t been following it for a long time. When it freaked you out, they succeeded. Most people who watched the final episode of the 9-year-long series How I Met Your Mother on Monday found it hard to accept. More than a decade of time span was crammed into less than an hour (including those annoying commercial breaks), and most of us were not prepared at all for the final twist that literally “ruins” many’s ideals about the show. https://blogs.williamhuang.org/post/2014-01-14-the-wolf-of-wall-street-great-story-bitter-reality/ Tue, 14 Jan 2014 05:32:09 +0000 https://blogs.williamhuang.org/post/2014-01-14-the-wolf-of-wall-street-great-story-bitter-reality/ I saw the well received movie by the acclaimed director Martin Scorsese The Wolf of Wall Street yesterday, and I have to say the $7.50 student rate was truly a great bargain. The three-hour -long movie can be a little overwhelming, but from the laughters from the opening till the closing credits I can conclude that everybody enjoys it. It is definitely a great piece of entertainment (rated R, of course); it’s also a powerful piece of art, and perhaps most importantly, it’s one of the most thought-provoking storytellings that we don’t have the luck to encounter every year. https://blogs.williamhuang.org/post/2013-10-23-terminologies-good-or-evil/ Thu, 24 Oct 2013 03:29:47 +0000 https://blogs.williamhuang.org/post/2013-10-23-terminologies-good-or-evil/ Due to some reason, I read through an article written in 1990 by Dorothy Winsor, titled The Construction of Knowledge in Organizations, which presents a stunning new view towards some critical failure contributing to the Challenger’s accident in 1986. One of Winsor’s points in this article is that the decision-making body at the time was not necessarily aware of the situation, which is contrary to the most widely accepted public perception of the official investigation on this accident. https://blogs.williamhuang.org/post/2013-10-06-brute-forcing-for-a-reason/ Sun, 06 Oct 2013 06:09:14 +0000 https://blogs.williamhuang.org/post/2013-10-06-brute-forcing-for-a-reason/ Last week I was assigned the task to brute-force the MD5 hashing function in-order to demonstrate a SQL injection to the following PHP login handler: // escaping username inputs, should be safe in most cases $username = mysql_real_escape_string($_GET['username']); // hashing the password input $password = md5($_GET['password'], true); $query = "SELECT * FROM `users` WHERE username='$username'". " AND password='$password';"; // searching for records $result = mysql_query($query, $dbh); if(mysql_num_rows($result) > 0) { echo "login successful! https://blogs.williamhuang.org/post/2012-11-16-installing-a-newer-version-of-gcc-on-ubuntu-64-bit-operating-systems/ Sat, 17 Nov 2012 01:06:27 +0000 https://blogs.williamhuang.org/post/2012-11-16-installing-a-newer-version-of-gcc-on-ubuntu-64-bit-operating-systems/ Ubuntu released a newer version — version 12.10 after the LTS version of 12.04, which contains the latest version of GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) binaries. Nevertheless, I believe that a majority of people using Ubuntu are with 12.04 or even earlier versions, becasue the compatability problem is a huge headache for the Ubuntu platform sometimes. The latest release of GCC supports the powerful brandnew C++ 11 standard, making curiosity burn I believe for lots of folks. https://blogs.williamhuang.org/post/2012-10-29-enabling-stl-container-inspection-in-eclipse-ubuntu/ Tue, 30 Oct 2012 02:57:50 +0000 https://blogs.williamhuang.org/post/2012-10-29-enabling-stl-container-inspection-in-eclipse-ubuntu/ All information in this post was fetched from this link under the Eclipse Wiki. This site is not responsible for the content from external sites/repositories. Programming and debugging is part of life for EECS students here in Michigan, and possibly also applies to anywhere else. Millions of tools have been introduced to make programming easier, and IDEs are just among a portion of them. Visual Studio and XCode by Microsoft and Apple are the two most famous IDEs in the software industry, whereas Eclipse platform reins the open-source world alone. https://blogs.williamhuang.org/post/2012-10-05-hello-world/ Fri, 05 Oct 2012 18:13:18 +0000 https://blogs.williamhuang.org/post/2012-10-05-hello-world/ The first post on this blog is just to check if everything works… If you notice anything unusual, please feel free to contact me. Obviously you don’t have to do that 🙂