Adobe Opens SWF Format

Published on May 1, 2008 in artsyfartsy and gnu|linux. 0 Comments

Adobe, owners of the FLV and SWF formats after their purchase of the original developer Macromedia, have decided to open the formats as part of the Open Screen Project. While this is already fantastic news for the free software movement in general, I am hopeful that this may open the door for a native Linux SWF development environment. The ability to design flash in Linux, possibly integrated with other open-source dynamic presentation frameworks like xinf and haXe would be a huge win for the user community. Just one more reason not to run Windows.

And Happy Birthday Chloey. <3

K2, CSS, and Google Syntax Highlighter

Published on April 22, 2008 in codito and self-referential. 0 Comments

I recently switched my WordPress theme to RC3 of K2, Son of Kubrick. I’ve been really impressed with its simplicity and flexibility; two -itys that don’t usually play nicely. One of the best features is the alternate stylesheet loader. K2 allows a secondary stylesheet to be included after style.css so users are free to override the default styles without touching the core CSS.

Aside from decreasing the font size slightly and switching some ems to pxs, I haven’t fooled with much. Someone out there may find this useful however. Here is a quick and dirty hack that will take out the excess margin weight that Google Syntax Highlighter gains when displayed on the standard K2.

/** make google highlighter look pretty with k2 css */
div.dp-highlighter > div, div.bar > div.tools {
	margin: 0px;
}

div.dp-highlighter {
	margin-top: 13px;
}

Lessons Learned

Published on April 19, 2008 in self-referential. 0 Comments

Yesterday’s happyhour became last night’s evening of drinking and debauchery. However, I did manage to come away from it with a few new things to add to my information bank and a 4GB memory card full of happy, drunken memories. Gallery2, get ready.

My Shure SE420 headphones still play perfectly after being accidentally submerged, while playing, in a pint glass full of beer for about 30 seconds. I was quite happy upon discovering this and used them to great satisfaction on the metro back to my apartment. Besides smelling like beer and providing me with aural bliss, they also prevent me from hearing just about anything else going on around me. As a result, I had a nice drunken nap on the train from Metro Center to Vienna at 2:30am and had to take a cab from the Vienna station back to my apartment near Ballston.

Music Quiz Results

Published on April 18, 2008 in musicality and self-referential. 0 Comments

Your final score was 101/180.

Birthday Party DJ (73-108 points)
You are a rabid consumer of music. You get a rush every time you hear something new but remain faithful to those artists you love. Your music collection represents who you are and what you care about and your home may even bear the tell-tale signs of your affections – posters, old band t-shirts and the odd music biography. But you aren’t a completist [sic], you know what you like and make sure you have it. Simple as that. To expand your repertoire, perhaps there are some genres that you’d benefit from giving a little more attention to – perhaps now is the time to hear something new or get hold of that missing album from your collection.

Take the quiz yourself.

Back from South America

Published on April 17, 2008 in self-referential. 0 Comments

And what a blast it was. I’m working on getting pictures up in Gallery2. Will update.

Visualizing Malware(z)

Published on March 12, 2008 in alt.nerdy and artsyfartsy. 0 Comments

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.

Malwarez

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.

Cygwin vs. andLinux

Published on March 5, 2008 in alt.nerdy and gnu|linux. 0 Comments

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.

Bob Forgot the Password Again?!

Published on February 23, 2008 in (in)security and omgwtfbbq. 0 Comments

This baffles me. Twenty-five years after Wargames and people still think it’s a good idea to write down system passwords near or on the physical machine. I don’t care how often Bob forgets the password. Don’t write it on the keyboard.

bb&b_pw



Recovering Disk Encryption Keys in Cold RAM

Published on February 22, 2008 in (in)security. 0 Comments

Who knew RAM fades to stripes?

Absolutely amazing bit of security research. Basically, disk encryption keys for various products are stored in RAM, obviously. What isn’t so obvious, and even I would have found this suspect, is that if the target computer is shutdown and re-booted quickly, the key will still be in RAM and can be dumped for later use.

I don’t see any simple way around this attack. Even if computer manufacturers decided to make the BIOS clear the RAM on boot, you’d still have a vulnerability. The attacker could remove the DRAMs from the machine, spray them with freon to slow the data fade and put them into another machine running a custom BIOS.

Very neat attack.

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.