Hacks

Asterisk File Transfer Protocol

Cory Menscher writes: As part of the NYU ITP “5in5” event this week, I created the Asterisk File Transfer Protocol. Using the CSound audio programming language, I wrote a PHP script that converts a binary file into an audio WAV file based on the “Kansas City standard”, created in 1975, for transferring binary files via […]

Web application hotkeys with Javascript

It’s unfortunate, but there are only a few sites that have done a good job of enhancing the user experience with hotkey support. In searching for the easiest way to do this in my own applications, I stumbled across the Hotkeys plugin for jQuery. In typical jQuery form it lets you do something moderately complicated, […]

Cyber Security Awareness Week

Dan Guido from the Information Systems and Internet Security Lab at the Polytechnic Institute of NYU wrote in about the Institute’s 5th annual Cyber Security Awareness Week. If you’re in high-school or a college undergraduate program, this is a great opportunity to test your infosec skills against your peers, and hopefully earn a little prize […]

MySQL performance tuning

Jay Pipes, MySQL employee and co-author Pro MySQL, gave a great presentation to Google employees which covers a number of techniques for tuning performance on MySQL. His examples include debugging and analyzing problems as well as best practices for table and index design, query and join operations, and server variable adjustments. It’s a little over […]

Peggy LED lightboard

MAKE’s Collin Cunningham really impressed me with this short film “A Date With Peggy,” a story of an overworked hacker finding relaxation through his craft. After a frustrating day at the office, it feels good to go make something that simply works. (playing with a bunch of ultra-bright LEDs doesn’t hurt either) The Peggy kit […]