This is an example of having a heck of a lot of time. This guy designs a level for Super Mario World which requires absolutely 0 input by the user. Full of bouncing off power-ups, riding on animals, and using the physics engine gravity to propel Mario. When I saw this, I was absolutely floored by how much pain staking details went into this level design. It even has a boss battle at the end, again with 0 input by the user. Check it out:

more animals

A recent article came out here which was news of a lady who sold her house to raise £25,000 ($ 46,522 American dollars) to clone her deceased pit bull … “Booger.” Apparently distraught over his death, and being that he had saved her life fending off an attacking dog. She felt compelled to contact scientists in South Korea at RNL Bio.

RNL Bio is a research and cloning facility who’s verticle market is cloning animals. More specifically cloning dogs. Among the staff, Hwang Woo-suk, who had been originally ostricised for embezzelment and one of the leaders in animal cloning technology.

The process was aparently a success and they cloned 5 puppies from the remains of the departed “Booger” dog. This was all over the news and pictures of Bernann McKinney, the lady in this story, was plastered all over the airways. This is where it gets WEIRD, as if this wasn’t already the screen play for an already nuts story.

Reporters and others started noticing a remarkable similarity with Bernann McKinney and Joyce McKinney. Joyce McKinney was a former beauty queen and Mrs Wyoming (1972), gained infamy when she kidnapping a Morman Missionary, Kirk Anderson, in 1977.

Kirk and Joyce had a brief relationship which ended with Joyce having a miscarrage. Upon advise from religious leaders, Kirk decided to end the relationship and went into hiding in Ewell in Surrrey a district of UK.

Joyce tracked him down using private detectives and in 1977, she kidnapped him at the Ewell’s Church of the Latter Day Saints. She took him to a cottage in Okenhampton and chained him to bed. For days she tried to persuade him to marry her and allegedly “raped” him. She was obsessed with being married to him and carrying his children. After days of tourture, he promised to marry her upon which time he was released and escaped to the police.

Joyce was arrested days later and a circus trial ensued. Joyce then managed to skip bail and escaped to Canada then later was arrested in Atlanta, Georgia where she was posing as a nun. This was due to her posing topless in magazines; capitalizing on her recent notoriety for the kidnapping events. Again she skipped bail. She was caught again in 1984 where it was aparent she was going to try to kidnap Kirk again in Salt Lake City. Again, she skipped bail and court, but the charges were dropped.

The links between Joyce and Bernann McKinney, come, not only in the striking similarities of looks, but also because of an attack by a dog which Joyce was a victim of. She was attacked and received serious injuries and her dog, “Hamburger” fended off the attacker. Her injuries left her confined to a wheelchair and received other quite extensive injuries to her hands and arm.

Well so now recently, she is being sought on charges for convincing a minor to commit aggravated burglary in 2005. The funds of which were going to be used to fund a horse’s wooden leg! WTF

Just so you don’t think I am making this up, here are the articles and the links I got this from:

Dead dog’s owner creates FIVE cloned puppies of her beloved pet

A cloned dog, a Mormon in mink-lined handcuffs and a tantalising mystery

Dog cloner Joyce McKinney sought over burglary to fund horse’s wooden leg

I don’t think there is any question this is one crazy lady!

Google Notifier for Mac OS X is really handy. Having had it, I rarely miss emails to my Gmail account as it is really quick to see when a message comes in and if I need to address it immediately. However, this program connects to Gmail and authenticates over plain txt through HTTP. It also gets any emails messages over the same unencrypted method, whereby it pops up a nice growl notification of the email that was just delivered.

Horrified yet again at being let down by an application I love, I did some digging and found you can actually secure this. There is no option in the application … common devs WTF! However, you can edit the plist file manually and enable a variable to switch to HTTPS. Here is how you do it in Mac OS X:

• Double click “Macintosh HD” (or whatever your hard drive is called)
• Click your username under “Places” (we are navigating to your user’s home directory)
• Double click “Library” under your home directory
• Double click “Preferences”
• Find the file “com.google.GmailNotifier.plist” in this location and double click it, it should open in a program called “Property List Editor” which is a plist editor for this particular kind of file
• You will see a “Root” under the “Property List”, expand it (click the arrow next to Root) so you see all the “Child” variables to “Root”
• Highlight “Root” then click “New Child” then enter the name “SecureAlways” (without the double quotes)
• Make sure the “Class” section for “SecureAlways” says “String”, if not, use the pull down to change it as such
• Enter in for the value section of “SecureAlways” “1″ (without the double quotes)
• Quit and click “Save” when prompted
• If open, you will need to turn off, then turn back on the application

Now after having monitored my traffic, the entire application runs through HTTPS. I don’t understand you devs putting in these variables in, having the code to handle it, and then not having the option available in the application preferences! Common guys give us the warm fuzzy of knowing we are safe and secure!

This has probably been shown a ton through forums and news articles but I wanted to make sure to reemphasize the need for security with Gmail. Gmail is great, there is no doubt about it, and I love and use it every day. Though you need to be aware that, while logging into the interface at Gmail’s website initially starts with SSL and HTTPS authentication for the password, you are immediately dropped out to a plain text HTTP session during your time logged in.

After the initial login, secured, the system uses a session based tracking method for making sure you are … who you say you are. This is also so you don’t have to keep entering your password for every click in the interface. While on the surface it seems reasonable to only need security logging in since the password itself is secure. However, anyone sniffing your network traffic can grab the session based data in transit as it isn’t encrypted. It is then trivial for an attacker to use your session data and enter your account without authentication. From there, they can read your mail and wreck all kinds of havoc on your account.

This is why it is important to setup HTTPS when using Gmail. Once logged into Gmail:

• Go to Settings
• Next to “Browser connection”, click the radio button next to “Always use https”
• Click “Save Changes” below
• Log out then log back in

This will now make your entire session through secured HTTPS transmissions, from the password exchange to the session exchange.