The worst positions to play (this should not come as a shock): Linebacker, Cornerback, Wide Receiver, Safety, and Running Back

The best positions (partially due to there being only a few per team): Long-Snapper, Kicker, Punter, Center, and Quarterback

Though, it seems quarterbacks have sustained a fair amount of different injuries per player this season.  After all, we had our fair share of quarterback injuries.
​
Let's dig down and take a look at some 49er statistics.  These are figures based on the cumulative number of injuries from week 1 to week 14 and are not player specific, meaning that the numbers presented are Week-Injuries not number of unique injuries.  For example, say one player was out for two weeks with a hand injury.  This would be counted as two hand week-injuries.

​And a quick overview of all teams:

The numbers above show the total injuries per team, and are color coded based on the relative number of injuries per week.
​
In other news, much like Joe Flacco, my friend Daniel is currently going through recovery for his torn ACL.  He has weekly updates about the processes and he's also a skilled videographer.  Check out this snippet from his channel below!

​The Creative Cloud has always been teetering on the edge of “I like this” and “I don’t like this.”  Well Adobe, you’re teetering in the wrong direction.  Once again, I’m late to the game – so I’m probably not one to talk, but getting rid of aspx support for Dreamweaver just wasted 30 minutes of my day, after watching a few tutorials about adding SQL database connections through Dreamweaver.  Harrumph.  Now the search begins for a better solution…

​R – You didn’t change a thing.  But you probably should.  Why is working with strings so counter intuitive in R?  Take the simple example of having two strings: “disorganized” and “program”.  Let’s say I want to put the two together to make the single word “disorganizedprogram”.  This is usually referred to as concatenation, joining, merging, and adding strings.   None of these commands exists.  In my mind, the logical approach is to take:

'disorganized' + 'program'

​But no.  Definitely not.  Instead, R uses the command “paste” to join strings together.  Trust me, there are some really great aspects of R, but this seems ridiculous.  Oh, and you need options.  The R syntax to make this solution would be:

paste('disorganized', 'program', sep='') 

​Looking back, I’ll probably wonder why this even bothered me in the first place, but I believe it’s important to keep things simple, so they’re easily passed on to others.  The paste legacy should go away.

​You removed Visual Basic from AppleScripts, Apple... a while ago (again, I said I’m usually behind on these topics), but you removed it nonetheless.  Why can’t you get along with Microsoft?  If not for the sake of excel automation.

Now all do Visual Basic commands are dead.  Luckily, macros may still be run from AppleScript, but that means that the macros have to already exist.

tell application "Microsoft Excel"        activate        run VB macro "MyMacro"end tell

​I don’t own a Mac, but I’ve resorted to borrowing others people's computers in order to solve what should be minuscule problems.  Then again, these were also problems back in 2012, so I guess my next tiffs update should be about the cancellation of Desperate Housewives, CSI: Miami, and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition!

​And you know, it wasn’t just 49ers fans that were extremely vocal about the mistake that would be starting Blaine Gabbert; his former team’s fans also chimed in:

​Rumors stated that Vernon Davis openly called out Kaepernick after a heated exchange in the locker room.  Well, Vernon Davis now plays for the Broncos.  Although this 49ers team is almost unrecognizable compared to last year, the impossible (at least according to redditors) happen…

​Well, they did.  And it did happen.  “Lol”.  While I can’t say if the 49er’s winning streak is sustainable – especially since we’re playing the Seahawks tomorrow – the amount of wrong predictions was pretty incredible, given that there was very little data that would tell us exactly what would happen if the 49ers changed quarterbacks mid-season.  The pessimists almost won... almost. With that, there was one user with some sort of delusional hope that I hope turns out to be extremely prophetic.

Recently, I was sent a phishing email at work.  This one was not from a malicious hacker, though.  It was sent internally to teach employees the scary dangers of opening “untrustworthy” emails.  Oh the humanity!  However, this email didn’t really have to do with phishing – it just contained a link to a supposed tracking number of a package that I didn’t order.

If you didn’t know, phishing is the act of trying to “fish” for information from people by posing as credible sources.  Most of us know how to avoid Nigerian Princes and Russian Brides, but there are legitimate scams out there.  The important thing to keep in mind is to always check your URLs for misspelled/questionable links and to never give out any personal information.  Back to the story, this is where things get interesting.
​
It seems that the company that sent me this email also sent emails to my coworkers as well (this makes sense, and isn’t too weird).  Yet by sending out multiple emails, we could see that the email’s URLs have a distinct pattern:

With the irony surmounting, let’s just say that it’s fairly easy to deduce that the query takes base 16 values: 0-9 or a-f.  This means that there are 16 possible combinations per spot, leading to 16^6 possible choices or 16,777,216 possible values.  While this sounds like a lot of combinations for most people, it’s a fairly easy number for computers to crack.  Even worse, these query variations don’t only lead to internal personalized webpages, but they also lead to external companies!
​
From the banking industry, to the entertainment industry, to consultants, we’re able to see which companies are using this service – and by extension, how many emails are being sent to each company.  For a security company, this doesn’t seem like a very secure practice.  Especially because it can be easily remedied.  For example, changing to an 8 character code leads to approximately 4 billion additional combinations.  A 16 character code (abcd12345678efef for example) allows for 18,446,744,073,709,552,000 combinations!  Clearly, it doesn’t take that much additional effort to generate a random number that’s hidden within a larger code, thus protecting customer privacy.  Though it should go without saying, do your part when protecting the identity of your customers, don’t group them all together in tiny clusters.