This Poe Parody/Translation [Boing Boing] reminded me of my own take on the first three stanzas of The Raven written in the wee hours of the morning after staying up for two nights trying to finish an A.I. assignment. Procrastination is a cruel mistress. Three hours before class, my professor emailed us and said we had another four days to complete the assignment.
This was my response:
Once wandered one named Alan, who ponder’d how he’d get a gallon
Out of many a quaint and curious volumed water jugs,
While he nodded, nearly napping, suddenly he’d find a mapping,
He’d wake, fingers tapping, clapping for those caffeinated drugs.
“(defvar visitor…” he fluttered, and drank caffeinated drugs.
Common Lisp kept finding bugs.
Ah, how clearly he remembered, and would’ve done dismembered
Lines and lines of silly Java code for nothing more than sport
Woefully he mourned the morrow; he would enter, beg and borrow
For some chance to ease the sorrow, to which Sanjoy would retort
In infinite wisdom, “It’s not my fault Lisp is not your forte.
Sorry.” Tough luck kid, in short.
As the sad forced-typing pressure, of a student who’d feel fresher
If he’d planned ahead and, like some others, slept a good night’s sleep;
Slowed, there rang the email Ding. O’ what worse horror could it bring?
Is the daemon trying to sing? And Oh! How high his heart did climb!
What bliss is this? Class canceled? Salvation for his wretched crime!
This was it. He had more time.
Many attempts have been made to bring h4X0r culture to the mainstream. But code, though elegant, is difficult to discern at a glance and would be completely passed over by all levels of geek below some of the more accomplished demi-nerds. Consequently, Hollywood’s worms and virii are 3D animated structures that are much more likely to awe the average movie goer at the expense of the technically savvy.
Hackers portrays the worm used to steal millions of dollars from an oil company (launched internally I might add) as a beautiful flowing structure that resembles a flowing chain of sea urchins. As it turns out, whether they knew it or not, they were on to something.
Alex Dragulescu has produced amazing, intriguing 3D representations of malware and spam text. It’s like a fractal based instead on code iterations instead of complex equations. It’s mindbottling. From his own explanation:
For each piece of disassembled code, API calls, memory addresses and subroutines are tracked and analyzed. Their frequency, density and grouping are mapped to the inputs of an algorithm that grows a virtual 3D entity. Therefore the patterns and rhythms found in the data drive the configuration of the artificial organism.
I’ve been playing with andLinux; a full port of the Linux kernel to Win32. I’ve installed a few little fun apps like tuxeyes and they all seem to be working, albeit with the usual visual idiosyncrasies of running Xwin in Windows. And while cute and technically impressive (It’s a whole lot of fun having synaptic sitting next to Internet Explorer!), I’m a little confused as to where this little bastard belongs.
While running Windows programs on Linux is extremely valuable (Ubuntu + Photoshop FTW!), running graphical Linux programs on Windows is kinda dumb. I can’t think of a XWin program that I’m dying to have on WinXP that hasn’t be ported over to run on Windows anyway. I just want the precious command line.
Cygwin gives me the ability to interact with my Windows file system through a bash shell. While developing on Windows, I want to be able to run mvn, p4, svn, and jboss from a bash commandline instead of the crappy pos that Windows attempts to call a shell. Aside: Seriously, why isn’t it dynamically re-sizable? It’s also dumbed down enough that non-unixy people can get into the CLI without having to worry about mount points and user permissions. Since there’s a win32 port of rxvt, it satisfies all the requirements of a bash command shell.
andLinux will (theoretically) allow mounting of windows partitions via the virtual cofs files system, but I’ve be unsuccessful in my attempts. Samba is pretty much the only other option, but keeping Windows shares open all the time is less than desirable. Still, having the entire Ubuntu repository of free software available to me is pretty damn impressive.
I have two Apple stickers lying around my apartment. Yesterday, I said to myself, “Well, I can’t use these unless I have something Apple-y to put them on…”
So, my Dell d420 is successfully running Kalyway Mac OS 10.5.1 Leopard on an external Seagate HD. Hacked vanilla kernel, SSE3 and GUID. The “big” animations (exposé, widget layer) don’t really show up on my crappy Intel 950 and there’re some occasional cursor artifacts, but everything is pretty smooth. Not good enough to put the sticker on I suppose, but still; what blasphemy to run OSX on a Dell.
I think I’ll keep Ubuntu 7.10. If only Nautilus had that NeXT-inspired column view that Finder seems to have a monopoly on at present. And I need a sticker…
If you’re at all versed in Google’s advanced search keywords, searching for mp3 files (or really anything that has a title) in the indexes of unprotected www directories provides a wonderful way to get highspeed downloads over http. Now, those who would profit from my using of Filesharing Product XYZ have capitalized on this by creating advertising honeypots for would-be music thieves.
My search for "Familjen" intitle:index.of mp3 -html yeilded a few results. One towards the bottom of the list looked like a hit, containing my search in the summary: … 2006-09-26 – Familjen – Familjen EP (2006) …. Excellent! I clicked it and lo and behold what do I find but
I downloaded all these files from – redacted
No Downloads Here! Get them from: redacted
Hi, I’m afraid none of the files here can be downloaded, this is just a big list of the files on my hard drive right now. Don’t believe me? Well, my files are a little disorganised but here is the size of just one of my MP3 directories:
…
Now doesn’t that just take the biscuit? Thousands & thousands of symlinks with enticing titles all pointing to copies of this same message. Ingenius!
This particular stalker of savvy searcher’s referral-id is aff_marse_29_1_100 and he probably makes a fair amount of cash for every visitor he refers. Google isn’t collecting adword revenue off this guy, but he’s using their service in mostly the same way. He makes a profit off of percentage points. I bet his clickthrough ratio isn’t that great though; it’s tough to trick the techies twice.
I have to work behind an authenticated proxy, so using cvs, subversion, or gem from the Cygwin command line can be tricky. Some programs recognize the HTTP_PROXY, HTTP_PROXY_USER, HTTP_PROXY_PASS properties, so I wrote this little script to export the environment variables for me so I didn’t have to hardcode my password anywhere. Yes, it’s in an environment variable so it’s still very insecure, but it’s better than having it sitting in a file somewhere.
This was also a great chance to test out how the Google Code Prettify and Code Markup plugins work together. The formatting works just fine, but the colors are misbehaving.
#!/bin/sh
if [ ! -n "$1" ]; then
echo "Usage: proxy [on|off]";
exit 5;
fi
function proxyon {
if [ "x$HTTP_PROXY" != "x" ]; then
echo -e "Proxy already on!";
else
proxyserver=THIS.IS.MY.PROXY:8080
u=MY_USERNAME
echo -n 'Password: '
read -es p
export HTTP_PROXY="http://$proxyserver/"
export HTTP_PROXY_USER="$u"
export HTTP_PROXY_PASS="$p"
echo -e "\nProxy is now ON."
fi
}
function proxyoff {
export HTTP_PROXY=""
export HTTP_PROXY_USER=""
export HTTP_PROXY_PASS=""
echo -e "\nProxy is now OFF."
}
if [ "$1" == "on" ]; then
proxyon
else if [ "$1" == "off" ]; then
proxyoff
else
echo "Usage: proxy [on|off]";
exit 5;
fi;fi;
