Archive for the 'www & thecloud' Category

Initialism Infix Injection

Published on July 28, 2008 in languages and www & thecloud. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

All frequent internet conversationalists should be familiar with the concept of initialism, whereby “If I recall correctly,” is shorted to “IIRC,” and pronounced I-I-R-C. The most commonly used initialisms occasionally make the shift to acronyms to be pronounced phonetically, which then gives rise to amusing phonetic perversions; i.e. “Rolling on the floor laughing my ass off!” becomes ROFLMAO which is imported to spoken English, and eventually back into text, as “waffle-mayo.” As a result of this phonetic borrowing I, and perhaps others as well, now sound the ‘word’ out in my head.

Chloey used an interesting, and in my experience unique, initialism construction in gTalk the other day.

… because im(elitist)o that’s the only way to use said adjective.

Now, I’m curious how natural that construction was for readers. IMHO is an often used and widely accepted initialism that has now become part of the standard Internet abbreviation lexicon and has never made the jump to an acronym. Therefore, I still process IMHO as ‘I-M-H-O,’ which might have made it more natural for me parse the unknown syntax. I didn’t chunk the whole word-phrase. ROF(laughing)MAO doesn’t quite seem as natural.

Of course then this could be just pure happenstance. I wonder if this injection is more common than I know or if this is just a one-time thing that won’t catch on. I like it.

The <Image> is Out There

Published on July 4, 2008 in www & thecloud. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

People pour more multimedia into the cloud every day. But if you want anyone to find it and make use of it, it needs metadata. Tags, folders, classifications, descriptions, and titles. In a word, words. Search engines algorithms are classically s(text)→text. Several image search offerings perform very well at s(text)→images, but they rely on the words around the pictures.

TinEye is different. It hosts a true s(image)→images algorithm for web image search; to my knowledge it’s the first of its kind (publicly available). Right now, the engine itself is more useful for those searching for copyright violations. TinEye searches for pictures that look more or less exactly like the input so searching with a picture from a personal album will most likely produce nothing. But that won’t be true forever.

It won’t be long before the search space becomes s(image)→text. Want to know what kind of architecture some pillars exemplify? Or who painted that picture hanging on the wall? Take a picture of a church in Chile, a tomb in Argentina, or some random structure on a wharf, upload it with your phone and wham: instant tour-guide.

The information is in the cloud; we just need to get smarter about locating it.

Jews <3 IE 6

Published on May 28, 2008 in www & thecloud. 0 Comments Tags: .

The Torah doesn’t include that most crucial of tomes, the Book of Moz.

Moz 13:37
And He spoke unto the netizens, “He that browseth the Net without the Fox of Flame shall suffer unending frustration. Blessed be the keepers of the Gecko trunk!” And lo we there did view source and beheld the true meaning of the Mark of the Beast Web!

South Park Studios declares that only Jewish people use Internet Explorer 6

Leave it to those crafty and chaotic creators of TV’s best animated crapfest (or maybe the wizards behind their new site) to be brutally honest about which browser they would have us use.

Everyone’s Head in the Cloud

Published on February 18, 2008 in musicality and www & thecloud. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

The inspiration of this article was the discovery of a music aggregator called Songza. It has found every song I’ve thrown at it so far. I’m not sure how much it will actually come in handy as most of the time I already have a copy of the song I want to listen to locally, but it made me start thinking about how long that will actually be true. If I had an Internet enabled iPod with access to Songza’s search capabilities, would I really bother with a music “collection?”

Currently, almost all data is available online. Very few pieces of data that aren’t deemed sensitive are unavailable. The aggregation of the information cloud is rendering private, local collections obsolete.

Before the turn of the millennium, a charming or hilarious internet movie was a precious find. Fledgling websites with even moderate traffic didn’t have the resources to allow hosting a 25MB movie and streaming was still in its infancy. I owned a stack of Iomega Zip-disks to save all the movies, mods, and wads I might want to share with friends later. The acquisition was time consuming (oh Infoseek…) and relied partially on happenstance. But one could find something that nobody else had seen and the thrill of sharing it was undeniably gratifying.

Now, flash video encoding can enable streaming video of decent quality to all but the slowest of Internet visitors. Everyone can find anything and by the time you’ve seen it on Digg, StumbleUpon, or (gulp) Facebook , it’s already yesterday’s news. This is perhaps beside the point, however I still mourn the lost experience of those wonderful blue disks, much the way some may pine for the lost days of frequent trips to a library.

The point here is that local cache is obsolete but for speed concerns. The data is accessible, eventually, everywhere, by everyone.

  • YouTube has copies of any public (& maybe private) domain video clip of even passing interest.
  • Songza aggregates the aural libraries of multiple sources to allow on-demand streaming of just about any song to which anyone would care to listen.
  • Flickr may not allow one to find an exact image, but it will return 300 that are pretty close.
  • And if you’ve forgotten what kind of media it is, Google‘s vast resources can crawl its index of the indexes faster than I can find a bookmark in my Bookmarks menu.

So how much longer will the “take your music with you” be enough? How long until “take all the music with you” is the tagline of the newest iAll audio player? Really the only limiting factor is Internet speed, availability, and player interface. Those won’t take long.

Oh, and speaking of yesterday’s news above, I turned 24.

There Ain’t No Strings on Me

Published on January 31, 2008 in gnu|linux and www & thecloud. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

I just bought a Dell 355 Bluetooth chip for my D420 since I make the rookie mistake of not ordering it installed originally.

About four hours later, I’ve successfully connected my Ubuntu 7.10 machine to the interwebs via GPRS/EDGE on my Sony Ericsson W810i issued to me by US AT&T. But, I bought the phone back when they were Cingular, so my settings remain from the good ol’ orange days.

First things first : $ sudo aptitude install bluez-utils blues-pin ppp

There are lots of instructions available to pair your phone with the PC. Make sure to put the phone in discoverable mode, then try to discover it and connect:

$ hcitool scan
Scanning ...
        00:11:22:33:44:55       icarus (W810i)
$ sudo hidd --connect 00:11:22:33:44:55

Now that we’ve got the initial pairing done, we’re going to write some connection settings.

We need to find the dial-out device channel. 

$ sdptool browse 00:11:22:33:44:55 | grep "Dial-up" -A10
Service Name: Dial-up Networking
Service RecHandle: 0x10002
Service Class ID List:
  "Dialup Networking" (0x1103)
  "Generic Networking" (0x1201)
Protocol Descriptor List:
  "L2CAP" (0x0100)
  "RFCOMM" (0x0003)
    Channel: 2
Profile Descriptor List:
  "Dialup Networking" (0x1103)

Now, we set this number in the bluetooth radio-frequency config.

$ cat /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf
# bluetooth config for phone
rfcomm0 {
    bind yes;
    # Bluetooth address of the device
    device 00:11:22:33:44:55;
    # RFCOMM channel for the dialup connection
        channel 2;
    # Description of the connection
    comment "w810i -- icarus";
}

In order to make this change “stick,” reinit the rfcomm0 connection.

$ sudo rfcomm release 0; sudo rfcomm bind 0;

Also, lets go ahead and configure the PIN settings for bluetooth:

$ cat /etc/bluetooth/pin
1234

$ cat /etc/bluetooth/pin_helper
#!/bin/sh
echo "PIN:"`cat /etc/bluetooth/pin`

Now that we have the configuration for the connection set, we configure the p-p-p-peer at /etc/ppp/peers/<nameofpeer>. This defines a ppp (modem) connection via rfcomm0. I called my peer gprs. You can name it whatever you want. You will use this filename as the alias for the call command we’ll issue at the end. 

$ cat /etc/ppp/peers/gprs
/dev/rfcomm0
115200        # speed
defaultroute  # use the cellular network for the default route
usepeerdns    # use the DNS servers from the remote network
nodetach      # keep pppd in the foreground
crtscts       # hardware flow control
lock          # lock the serial port
noauth        # don't expect the modem to authenticate itself
local         # don't use Carrier Detect or Data Terminal Ready
debug         # show debugging information in plog
noccp         # compression
noipdefault
asyncmap 0xa0000 #make server happy
0.0.0.0:0.0.0.0  #default nopid

user "WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM"  #Cingular Orange
remotename cingular
ipparam cingular

# Use the next two lines if you receive the dreaded messages:
#
#    No response to n echo-requests
#    Serial link appears to be disconnected.
#    Connection terminated.
#
lcp-echo-failure 10000
lcp-echo-interval 1000

connect '/usr/sbin/chat -s -v -f /etc/chatscripts/gprs'
#no disconnect script necessary

Additionally, the CHAP authentication scheme that Cingular wants with the username is configured in /etc/ppp/chap-secrets.

$ sudo cat /etc/ppp/chap-secrets
# Secrets for authentication using CHAP
# client        server  secret                  IP addresses
"WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM" * "cingular1"

When we use the dialer to make the above link to the phone’s modem via bluetooth, the modem has to know what conversation (chat) to have with the server. (Note the file location on the second-to-last line above.) 

$ cat /etc/chatscripts/gprs
#
TIMEOUT 10
ABORT   'BUSY'
ABORT   'NO ANSWER'
ABORT   'ERROR'
SAY     'Starting GPRS connect script\n'

# Get the modem's attention and reset it.
SAY	'ATTN Modem\n'
""      ATZ

# MAGIC Sony Ericsson Init Codes
#SAY	'Sending SONY Codes\n'
OK 	'ATV1E1S0=0&D2&C1'
OK 	'AT+CMEE=1'

# Cingular Orange (if you signed up before the merger)
OK      AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","wap.cingular"

#SAY     'Dialing...\n'
OK      ATD*99#
CONNECT ""

Now, we have all the pieces in place to attempt to call. Fire it up. Remember to call the filename you used in /etc/ppp/peers/ if you changed it.

$ pppd call gprs

Now you should see lots of pretty text flying by and your phone should light up saying that it’s connected. If not, I’m sorry and your settings are either slightly different than mine or there’s some mundane detail that you need to complete in order to make your dialer behave like mine.

If your connection stays open without any errors, before you can use the connection with Firefox, you may need to add a default route. Use netstat to figure out what connection you currently have, and then use route to add that connection to the default route configuration.

$ netstat -nr
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags   MSS Window  irtt Iface
10.10.1.0       0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0   U         0 0          0 ppp0
$ sudo route add default ppp0

Bueno.

justsayhi Quizzes

Published on January 25, 2008 in rand() and www & thecloud. 0 Comments Tags: .

There are some useless quizzes out there to kill time.

  • You could take on 20 five year old kids in a fight.
  • You are 71% Geek!
  • You Have a 36% Chance of Survival in a Zombie Apocalypse.
  • Approximately 141,703 people died worldwide on February xx, 19xx.
  • Congratulations, your dead body is worth $3590!
  • Congratulations! Your body is 47% effective as a human shield.
  • Number of colors I can name in 5 minutes : 34
  • There is a 57% chance your brain matter contains grade-A synesthesia!

Is it bad when I saw thought “The Geek Quiz : Ever lose your car keys and wish life had ctrl+f?” I thought, no I lose my keys and wish life had ‘/’…

War! Hua! What is it Good Fo’?

Published on January 24, 2008 in (in)security, omgwtfbbq, rand() and www & thecloud. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Hackers exist. They even do some pretty nefarious (or idiotic) things. Most of it we don’t hear about because if bigwigs knew how insecure most systems really are, they’d lose it. If Wachovia or Bank of America’s website was consistently down, would you leave them for another bank? Maybe. Since servers have finite bandwidth, there’s a vulnerability waiting to be exploited.

A few days after the now infamous Tom Cruise video was released and subsequently recalled, a group of people called Anonymous (some subset of whom are (cr|h)ackers) openly declared war on The Church of Scientology. When I saw their video, I laughed a little and thought of Angelina Jolie in that see-through top in Hackers. I miss those good ol’ days,” when worms were in 3D…

Anyway, today it happened. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks were apparently successful in bringing down many of the Scientology websites targeted. For up-to-the-minute Scientology faceplants, fans of the movement have created a nifty status page.

What’s interesting about this attack is that it’s public, it’s not for money, and it’s not against a business, insofar as the Church of Scientology cannot be called a business. It’s against a group of individuals who share a common faith in alien souls inhabiting human bodies. Sure that belief may be weird and you have to pay money to advance and learn its tenets, but seriously, what happened to the Hacker Manifesto? “We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias…” — The Mentor, 1986. Anonymous is attempting to digitally purge the Internet of a belief system they find objectionable. Why not Nazis? Why not Elvis impersonators? Why not hackers? The whole idea of the Internet is that it’s free and for everyone.

Anonymous are censors. Amusing, intelligent censors with whom in many respects I whole-heartedly agree. But censorship is a bad thing.

Google’s Unwitting Adwords

Published on January 23, 2008 in alt.nerdy and www & thecloud. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

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.