Happy Buy Nothing Day

No new hits in two days! Curses!

Today I set up a prototype system for Cynical Studios Comments Forum. Based on my yet-to-win-an-award Mormegil code, it uses PHP and MySQL to control a comments board much in the manner of this one. Their site gets over 300 hits a day though, so this will be a good test of how well my code stands up under high traffic. They are still looking for an old PC to host the database, donations accepted.

Anyway, it’s good to be able to use my skills and code I’ve already developed. Nice to see how easy it is to twiddle a few bits and apply the exact same code to a different site. It’s not seamless yet; I’d like to have the settings be read by a file and split off different dynamic functions into different pages etc., but it’s looking pretty good. Maybe that could be a project for Christmas break.

In closing, stupid people make me angry.

My life as a Unix Shell session

Yikes.

[phil@life ~/fiancee]$ confusedemotions > /dev/null
[phil@life ~/fiancee]$ echo $WTF
bash: environment variable not found
[phil@life ~/fiancee]$ man women
no manual entry for women
[phil@life ~/fiancee]$ apropos something sensible
kmahjongg (1) - The classic mahjongg game for KDE project
[phil@life ~/fiancee]$ /usr/local/bin/kmahjongg

    
[...]

    
me wonders what that was all about.

Dangers of a closed mind

I was reading a bit about the DMCA, and I got quite worried. Basically DMCA is a law that exists to make it a crime to crack copy-protection schemes. Sounds pretty good on the surface, right?

There are a few obvious problems with this, such as the fact that it prevents many fair-use applications that used to be legal. The most famous is the Adobe e-book example. A tool was created to extract the text from the e-book files that used a laughably simple 2000-year-old cipher. This tool was helpful so that (for example) blind people could use the e-book through speech synthesis, or the text could be used for academic criticism. When the man who created the tool came to the US, he was arrested by the FBI and incarcerated for years.

So now you can be arrested for attempting to break codes. Well, that’s good, now our codes won’t be broken, right? That naive thinking was proved ineffectual as far back as World War II. The Nazis believed in security by obscurity. According to them, the Engima code was so tough to crack that nobody could ever do it. So they relied on that one cipher in the hopes that its inner workings would remain secret. Once the math behind it was cracked, their entire intelligence was laid open to their enemies eyes.

Any cryptologist worth anything can tell you that security by obscurity is a pipe dream. If your security relies on the secrecy of the method, then once the method becomes known, you won’t have any more secrets.

So what’s the DMCA say about security? It says that it will stay safe as long as nobody tries to crack it. The other obvious ridiculousness about it is that the DMCA can only apply within the US. Therefore we are going to be relying upon copy-protection that is completely untested. When it gets released into a free market outside the US where DMCA rules don’t apply, the code will crack faster than a Windows NT password hash.

That’s not really all that frightening, as the only people who will suffer from its effects are those stupid enough to believe copy-protection works anyway. The ingenuity of crackers has always trumped that of copy-protection engineers, and there’s no reason to think that will change.

The implications of it are worse though. Apparently the US lawmakers think that a closed market of ideas is a valid way to keep things secret. If the government decides the open exchange of ideas is not the best way to develop, it’s inevitable that the US will fall behind in the progress of technology.

This is admittedly another idea I’ve reaped from Neal Stephenson. In his book Cryptonomicon, he makes a very convincing argument that the deciding factor in determining who has the technological edge is which side allows for the free exchange of ideas. The Nazis fell behind because they didn’t allow people to challenge the dominant ideas. This was detrimental because it disallowed the sort of paradigm shift that is necessary for technological advancement. The Allies encouraged the sharing of ideas that lead to advancements like Bletchley Park and the Manhattan Project.

Basically the scary thing is that I can see that the DMCA reflects the mindset idea that lost Nazi Germany the war. And that sucks.

Homesick

I was looking for recepies online, and I found this site called SGezine. All kinds of cool Singapore stuff. I like the photo essay on Little India in the gallery especially. Take a look.

Thought of the day

So, how about this…. Under the NT Windows Kernel, the uptime was stored in a 32-bit number. That means that until a couple years ago, no Mircosoft computer was capable of dealing with being turned on for more than 50 days at once. A little prophetic, if you ask me. In the unlikely event that a Windows computer was left on for 50 days, the time would simply roll over back to zero.

Microsoft even admitted themselves in the documentation that instability would be experienced if you did so, and they recommended you turn off your computer regularly. The funny thing is, this applied even to the servers. Lol.

New setup

This is all terribly exciting for me, exactly me, and no one else, but I’ve got up a better setup for my blog that makes use of all my mad webmaster database skillz. I’m the only person a feat of this magnitude would impress, which is slightly disenheartening.

Laugh now, but when I’m writing super-cool sites for a living, we’ll just have to see who’s lauging then…. won’t we….

Debian Harmony

So I was eating my fried rice the today…. I put the hot sauce on it, and I thought, ‘you know what; I recognize that shape’.

—>


Click for a 1024×786 version.
Perfect for desktop backgrounds.
Debian rocks so much it’s not even funny.

Share the love

I thought I’d share the PHP code that runs my
web site as a service to the web community. It’s nice to be able to
give a little back. It’s pretty well-documented and hopefully not
confusing. It includes the code for comments submission through a
mySQL database. You have my permission to use and modify it.

Apology

I’ve got a lot going through my mind right now. I know anything I say is going to quite bungle things. So perhaps the best way to clear my mind right now is a defence of my governance and policies. There has been some unrest expressed recently over my announcement and declaration of meritocracy. I think this merits an explanation as there is really something behind this.

As would be evident from any perusal of this site, it has a decidedly technical bent to it. This is a guiding decision of mine that stems mostly from the stated purpose of the site: to allow me to gain a better understanding of web development and enhance my skill at administrating it. Consequentially, many of the posts on the blog section would be incomprehensible to Joe Sixpack. The Slashdot links, the FSF/OSS-centric comments, and the embarassingly geeky pages of Bahamut Lagoon all serve to reinforce this key fact.

Coming from this perspective, it seems sensible that the site would favour the technologically competent and the hackers (not crackers!) that visit it. Just as people will pay more attention to you in a gathering of surfers if you are a skilled surfer yourself, a bit of hackish tendencies in a person should give them greater influence on a tech site. Having said that, an explanation of the voting on this site.

Here at the Beach of One Thousand Shrunken Heads, voting is based upon a complex system of HTML forms and CGI scripts. In order to ensure that any idiot could not unduly skew the outcomes of certain polls, checking is done to make sure that each vote comes from a unique IP address. While each computer is connected to the network, it is given a unique address with which to identify it. This makes it possible to ensure my policy of one vote per IP address.

There are some interesting side-effects to this. For instance, if someone has used your computer to vote already, you cannot vote. Thus the system punishes you if you are not on top of things and caught up. On the other hand, it also has the side-effect of rewarding ingenuity and effort; see below. Thus the title of meritocracy and favouring the technically inclined.

There are actually four ways to influence the vote. First and most obvious is the so-called “legitimate” method; that is, vote from your own computer. Everyone gets one vote based upon the very fact that they own or have access to a computer. Secondly, the newly-christened “Dustin” method which takes very little thought to come up with, but a good deal of effort to enact. It involves visiting several different computers with unique IP addresses (often in a computer lad), and registering a vote from each of these. While this is terribly inefficient, it does a great deal to increase your influence.

I’ve recently been reminded of the joy of discovery. Hacking is much more fun if you can figure it out on your own…. So I’ll leave the other 2 methods secret. Each of them takes a good deal of skill to discover, and a little bit more skill to implement, but that’s the fun of it. Like I said…. Meritocracy. If you don’t care, you’ll get one vote. If that doesn’t sound fun to you, then stop complaining about your small voice. If you are clever, you may be able to figure it out. (Oh, so tempting, isn’t it?)

With that out of the way, my rule with an iron fist of benevolence goes on. I’m open to new ideas that aren’t stupid. Projects for the future include:
-Database-stored comments

-An option to use preformatted text in comments as opposed to HTML
-A recepies section where I store all my greatest culinary hits!
-More user interaction with the site.

Announcement

Announcement:
The Beach of One Thousand Shrunken Heads is a meritocracy.
That is all.

A Fable with no Moral

I went and sold my soul, so I could pay the rent,

I waited by the mail, but the check was never sent.
So I called the devil up, but I just got his machine.
I left an angry message, said I gotta have the green.

I didn’t give up then, but I made another plan.
If Satan didn’t want my soul, I’d sell it to the man.
I tried to find his number, but it wasn’t in the book.
I’d get the money anyhow, no matter what it took.
No matter what it took…

A paragon of virtue,
At least I’m not a thief.
It’s so easily justified,
But always leads to grief.

So I got myself some cardboard, and I made myself a sign,
To sell my soul below the market rate was my design.
I went down to the street, and I tried to make the deal.
A land rover drove right by with Satan at the wheel.

He saw what I was doing and said, “That’s not yours to sell.
You’ll get your check tomorrow, and I’ll see you down in Hell.
So you’d better spend it well.


-by Quasi from Field Studies

The sky above the port was the color of television

I was an assassin for Halloween.

What ever happened to VRML? I want to learn it. That would be cool.

A thousand thousand slimy things

This site is now on http://216.239.57.104/search?q=cache:7-qzgKRPKpEJ:www-students.biola.edu/rozinant/index.php+%22beach+of+one+thousand%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8”>Google. What fun! My worth as a webmaster has grown significantly!