Kooker in School

When Quick Look was first introduced as a Leopard feature, I was pretty impressed, I’ll admit. But the feature needed a little help. When I selected a folder, and hit the space bar, I got the same info I could see via Get Info (Cmd-I). Same goes for source code files, and zip archives.

I have good news, my friends. Three wonderful (free!) Quick Look plugins later, this feature becomes indispensable. Download, install, and get hooked on hitting your space bar again.

BetterZip Quick Look Generator – Don’t get confused: the “buy” links are for the full-featured BetterZip app. The QL plugin is free.

BetterZip Quick Look Example

Folder – Don’t worry when half the page is in Japanese. You’re at the right place.

Folder Quick Look Example

QLColorCode - This one saves me hours of opening and closing. A must-have for any software developer. A should-have for everybody else.

QLColorCode Example

I keep my Quick Look plugins in ~/Library/QuickLook, in case I find any weird bugs with them. Enjoy!

I’ve posted the written progress report for my CSE 237D project, along with the slides from today’s oral presentation. It’s all available in the usual place!

Here are a few things we learned about today in class.

Physically unclonable function

• We use unpredictable properties of chip fabrication to enhance security. Now that’s how we turn lemons into lemonade.

BCH Code

• A form of error correcting code (ECC) that helps with thermal/voltage errors in the PUF’s above.

execl command

• Covered with reference to buffer overflows. Don’t use execl to run some command from memory, just after doing a strcopy around that area. (Probably better to use strncopy.)

We also talked about trusted signals on the digital logic level. For example:

So, if our trusted input A is 0, then we can trust the output (it’ll always be 0). If A is 1, then we can’t trust our output.

Today we covered Embedded Systems Security, and this was one of Prof. Kastner’s slides:

xkcd – A Webcomic – Alice and Bob.

xkcd + wikipedia = an education in itself.