notsunil.com

What do they say?

That’s the comeback the corn industry has to the bad reputation High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) has (You know what they say). It’s always really bugged me the way the commercial makes the detractor some uneducated person and then the smart person sets him straight.

How about this Princeton study then?

When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they’re becoming obese — every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don’t see this; they don’t all gain extra weight.

I myself am proof of this. I wasn’t an overweight kid in India, but when I came to America I drank a lot of soda as a kid. It was like water to me and as a result, I started becoming overweight over the years. I wasn’t eating all that terribly and no more than friends of mine, but I was gaining weight easily. About 7-8 months ago, I completely cut out soda and also kept an eye out for anything else that had HFCS in it. Well… there are A LOT of things that have HFCS in them. I read labels and if I saw HFCS listed as an ingredient, I moved on.

Today, I’m roughly 20 lbs lighter without really exercising at all. Granted I also changed other aspects of my diet, but cutting out HFCS made a big difference. I don’t miss soda at all. The last time I tried it, it just tasted overly sweet. That’s another thing; our sense of taste has been dulled over the years to require more and more sweetener (salt too!). Having cut overly sweet drinks, I can now taste more subtleties in foods.

I’ve slowly seen HFCS removed from products over the years, but until we get rid of corn subsidies, we’re not going to see a complete overturn of the food industry. We’ve got health on the mind this week and this one change would change the health of so many people for the better.

Begun, the phone war, has.

Steve Jobs has been fairly vocal lately about what he thinks of Google. He’s been quoted as saying that Google’s “Don’t be evil” company policy is BS and that Google is out to destroy the iPhone. Now I can’t confirm or deny that Google is evil, but I can say one thing about Google wanting to destroy the iPhone… Duh? Google is a competitor and up until a few days ago, a fairly civil one. I don’t think that it was coincidence that Google announced multi-touch for their apps on Android (only the Nexus One for now) the day that Jobs called their policy BS. Of course Jobs’ remark was made after Google CEO Eric Schmidt made this comment about the iPad “You might want to tell me the difference between a large phone and a tablet.” So the once partners (Eric Schmidt used to be on Apple’s board) and then friendly rivals are now just plain rivals.

This can only be good for consumers. Google has got a fire lit under them now and will be cranking out the Android updates as fast as they can. Meanwhile maybe Apple will find the magic that is supposed to be in the iPad. Of course they can’t just forget about the iPhone. And on that front they have introduced even more rules into the app store. Developers can now, no longer make reference to Android (like if their app won the Android Developer Challenge) in their app descriptions or apps themselves. They have digitally thrown down the gauntlet.

I’m also interested to see what Microsoft comes up with in their mobile devision. They knocked it out of the the park with the Zune HD so a phone based on that would be pretty incredible. Microsoft became complacent and content with their place in the mobile world until Apple came and unleashed the iPhone. Apple is in danger of doing just what Microsoft did; that is, stagnate and assume that you will always be the leader.

It’s going to be an interesting year and I personally can’t wait for the upcoming throw-down of innovation and technology.

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I actually wrote this about a week ago and now saw this infographic that sums it up pretty well.

If hypocrisy was distilled into a person…

… that person would be Sarah Palin.

She keeps doing the same thing over and over and they keep buying it. She’s not even subtle in her manipulation and she’s succeeding. I feel like I could very easily put folksy words along with hyperbole, fake outrage, and “easy fixes” to make a speech that would have the RNC following me to the ends of the earth… Hmmm… That’s not a bad idea. Let me start my speech.

“Hopey changey, Alaska, maverick, socialism, drill baby drill, war, lower taxes that will magically make our deficit disappear, fear, propaganda…”

Is it working? Are they behind me? You’re right; It’s not worth it.

Colbert says it best, as Colbert always does.

The Colbert Report

If I’ve learned one thing from Sarah Palin… it’s that Sarah Palin is always right and never does anything wrong of her own free will. People are just “out to get her” because she’s such a “radical thinker.” She’s a radical something, but I’m not sure “thinker” is the right word. Also, I’ve been using the word “satire” incorrectly this whole time! Who knew? Sarah Palin, that’s who.

Possible?

Maybe I will start posting regularly again. It could happen.

iReasons

If you have to think of a reason for it… you don’t need it. This is basically my feeling towards the… I’m just gonna call it the iTab. I’ve seen sites posting reasons why the iTab is actually really amazing and groundbreaking, but if you have to tell me why I need to have it and what I would use it for; then I just plain don’t need it.

The argument I’ve heard is that the iTab is the device that is in between a smart phone and a netbook. Alright… so what’s going to be in between the smart phone and the iTab? What do you mean we don’t need anything between those two devices? I didn’t think we needed something between a smartphone and a netbook either. Now if the iTab was actually revolutionary software-wise, then things would be different.

Want to see a revolutionary idea for a tablet from another company? An idea that actually looks amazing and useful; and not just a smart phone with a larger screen slapped on.

This little leaked video from Microsoft for the Courier is what I can get behind. I personally still wouldn’t have a use for it, but at the very least I could see productive people using it to make their job or life easier and more organized. The iTab is almost literally an iPhone with a larger screen. And like I said before… I don’t care how good an an screen keyboard is; it will never feel as good as something physical.

Let’s all just agree this was a bad idea and forget about it. It can join Nintendo’s Virtual Boy, Microsoft’s WebTV, in the big technology wasteland in the sky.

iPad…

Here’s my problem with this…. everything.

It’s is essentially a large iPod Touch/iPhone; meaning it still doesn’t multi-task and it still doesn’t have flash. The phone in my pocket multi-tasks and will soon have flash. Who out there wants a larger version of their phone? My phone (Nexus One) is more capable than an iPhone, but even I don’t want a larger version of it. At that size I want a full blown OS to play with. And who like typing on a screen? Be honest. Steve Jobs thinks netbooks don’t have a place, but that the iPad does. I think Steve Jobs is counting on hype to carry a mediocre product and bad idea (He might be right, but I hope intelligence prevails.).

I’ll be honest; I was somewhat excited at the prospect of a large touch screen device that Apple thought of. I didn’t know what purpose it would have, but I figured maybe Apple would create a purpose for it. What we got instead was a lazy idea. It is the Zack Morris iPhone. Why not put a full blown OSX on there? That would be far more compelling and drool worthy.

For $500 I can get the best netbook out there or a pretty nice small and low power laptop. All of which can do a whole lot more than this iPad.

I also really don’t like saying iPad.

Yes, Colbert! Yes!

Also. In case you haven’t seen this. It’s the index that should have been in Palin’s book. http://www.slate.com/id/2235917/

“Is this email really from the IRS?”

I get questions like this from people at my work quite often and I figured I would address and educate people about it so that you don’t fall for it.

Here is what the email looks like

Taxpayer ID: your_name-00000660988660US

Tax Type: INCOME TAX

Issue: Unreported/Underreported Income (Fraud Application)

Please review your tax statement on Internal Revenue Service (IRS) website (click on the link below):

Internal Revenue Service

review tax statement for taxpayer id: your_name-00000660988660US

Now the first thing people probably do is get a bit scared and maybe even wonder if it’s legitimate. The first thing to do when you get emails like this is think. Is the IRS really going to email you about this? No, they are going to mail you a physical letter about it informing you that you’re probably going to get audited.

Now if that doesn’t wipe your fears we can get some solid proof right here. If you hover your mouse over that link you should see what it goes to in the bottom of your browser somewhere. I have of course removed the link and put in a phrase, but I just want people to know where to look first of all.

Next up is the anatomy of a URL. Up at the top you should be seeing http://blog.notsunil.com/. That is because I own notsunil.com and that is what matters here. Actually what really matters here is reading URLS right to left. However, all we need to focus on is inbetween “http://” and the first ‘/’ after that. To the left of that first ‘/’ after “http://” is “.com” and if I were a goverment orginization, then I would have a “.gov”. Now you think you know where I’m going with this, but just wait. So no one can control the .gov or .org or .com part of their domain. That part is controlled by ICANN. What we can do is create a string of letters and numbers that may or may not form a word or phrase and put it in front of a .com and so forth. I purchased “notsunil” in the “.com” space and I can do so for others such as .biz and .net. I can’t however buy a “.gov” as that is reserved for goverement sites. Other countries of course have their own domain level. Japan has “.jp” so a “.com” in Japan is actually “.co.jp”, the UK has “.co.uk” and so on.

So I can’t choose anything for what comes after notsunil and before that 3rd ‘/’, but I control the notsunil.com domain which means I can make and put anything I want in front of notsunil. Such as this site which is blog.notsunil.com and my old WordPress site at tech.notsunil.com (which was orginally intended for these types of articles). So knowing this I can create www.irs.gov.notsunil.com and… well okay I hope no one would be fooled by that. But here is what the scammers do. They buy a domain name that is a random string like eaedejssad.org.uk (this is almost exactly the domain used for the IRS scam I was asked about today. I just added 2 letters). Now from this we can tell that this domain is supposedly in the uk, but other than that it’s just random letters. How is this useful? Well how about www.irs.gov.eaedejssad.org.uk Now that just might be enough to fool people who don’t know how domain levels work. Everything before that random string, including the www was created by them.

Here’s another trick that the information bar at the bottom of your browser is useful for. Say I put up a link or email a link to someone. I can have it say http://www.google.com/ and that looks perfectly normal right? But hover over it and you can see that it is clearly not google.com. Sometimes it might look simmilar though. So maybe it would be gooogle.com and people would just glance over it. Now some blog services such as Tumblr, actually have measures in place to prevent someone from doing this little switcharoo. It will actually replace the url you have typed with the actual URL. As you can see, however, their measures are easily circumvented by anyone who knows even basic HTML. In fact the method I used would probably pass right by most filters designed to look for this kind of thing (those curious can view source and ctrl+f “lmgtfy” to see how I did it). And if I came up with it, you can be sure the scammers have too. The only sure way to know is to hover over the link and look down there to make sure it’s right.

Well I hope this has armed some of you with the knowledge to protect yourself. And when in doubt… http://lmgtfy.com/

Let’s bring it back

I know I’ve been M.I.A. for a while…. that’s the military term not the singer. Let’s try and make up for some of that today.

Start of with a nice dose of Jon Stewart. Here he is doing a great parody of Glenn Beck for over 8 minutes.