The Boston Diaries

Saturday, May 12, 2012

Borg collective refugees? Oh, that's right, Borg collective refugees

From

Tom Morris <XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX>

To

sean@conman.org

Subject

Borg collective refugees?

Date

Sat, 12 May 2012 14:23:22 -0400

I got a great laugh out of this. Thank you for being so awesome.

—Tom Morris, chairman of the Miami Hamfest / Tropical Hamboree

I'm looking at this email, wondering what is this person talking about? Is this some type of spam? That's the entire email. But no, it turns out that Tom Morris is the Chairman of the Miami Hamfest and he was commenting on a comment I made eleven years ago (and it's been seven years since I last attended the Miami Hamfest).

But next year's show looks to be interesting, what with part of the emphasis on “alternative energy” and my interest in fringe science (I find it facinating, not necessarily because I believe in it but because I find it highly amusing). I'll have to check it out next year.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

A million dollars! And all he draws are stick figures!

After years and years of giving his work away for free, Rich Burlew just raked in more than a million.

Via Hacker News, The Crowd-Funding Phenomenon Continues – Comic Raises $1.2M on Kickstarter (+Q&A with Creator Rich Burlew)! | Singularity Hub

Wow. Rich Burlew just raised over a million dollars from his fans. For drawing a comic based on stick figures.

Granted, it took him nine years to to get the fan base for this, but still, that's quite a payout. And the best bit is that he did it on his own terms without reliquishing his intellectual property (link via my very first post).

Monday, March 12, 2012

And I bet Han still shoots first!

His idea was to edit the Star Wars prequels into one movie, as they would provide him a lot of footage to work with. He used footage from all three prequels, a couple cuts from the original trilogy, some music from The Clone Wars television series, and even a dialogue bit from Anthony Daniels’ (C-3PO) audio book recordings. He even created a new opening text crawl to set up his version of the story.

The result is an 85-minute movie titled Star Wars: Episode III.5: The Editor Strikes Back. It should be noted that the Star Wars prequel trilogy is almost 7 hours in total length, and the shortest film (Episode 1) is more than 51 minutes longer than Grace’s fan cut. What this means is a lot of footage ended up on the editing room floor, and a lot of creative choices were made in the editing process. And the result? Topher Grace’s Star Wars film is probably the best possible edit of the Star Wars prequels given the footage released and available.

Via Jason Kottke, Topher Grace Edited The ‘Star Wars’ Prequels Into One 85-Minute Movie and We Saw It | /Film

Personally, I would love to see this version. Heck, I'd like to see any of the subsequent re-edits from anybody other than George “Despoiler of Childhood Memories” Lucas.

Heck, even the “It's not Star Wars as you know it” comic Darth & Droids (the conceit: it's a role playing game) delivers a much better and more coherent storyline than what George “I should have stuck to editing” Lucas ever came up with.

What? Me, bitter?

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Hey, as long as you paid taxes on the income, I don't see the IRS having any issues with this …

Okay, let me see if I have the pitch right—hypothetically speaking, let's say I have made, through many illegal means, a metric buttload of money and I want to have it laundered. I don't want to mess with the banking systems as they seem to be under high scrutiny these days (besides, everybody knows they're criminals anyway).

So, I grab a few hundred pages from Wikipedia, bundle them into a “book” which I “publish and sell” via Amazon. This costs me nearly nothing. Then I “buy” as many copies of this “book”, getting nearly 45% of the money as the “author.” Amazon won't complain, as they're getting a nice chunk of change. Heck, I could even get a higher percentage of the money if the “book” is bought through an affiliate program I set up (this might push my percentage over 50%).

And who's to say this isn't going on right now?

And you know, money laudering might explain some of these Etsy sites (link via Regretsy).

Thursday, February 16, 2012

“You don't really own your data, as much as we let you use it”

I made a comment recommending against using “the cloud” to store your data on GoogleFacePlusBook and someone took offense to that remark. I know, I know, but in my defense, we were both in the wrong, and in the end I hope we all learned something. I learned that “buying a book” is more “licensing to read” than actual ownership (even the dead tree type, and this from a lawyer I called (and if I knew his website, I would link to it here)) and the other person learned that yes, Virginia, you can successfully sue Amazon for having eaten your homework.

I still stand on my original remark, not to use “the cloud” to store your data. To present your data (like pictures, idiotic blog posts, what have you) to the public, sure, use “the cloud.” To store your data (or even a backup of your data)? Not on your life.

I do have my reasons and they range from the reasonable (it's not reliable, as even Google has bad hair days), the debatable (you have no control over your data as in the aforementioned Amazon eating your homework, sites going down with little to no notification) to the downright “wearing a tin hat in a shack in the woods” (actual remark by the other person, and here we go into government snooping through your data in “the cloud”—and if you think you are not a “person of interest” I'm sure Ted Kennedy never thought he would be on the “No Fly List”—ponder that for a while).

But it didn't occure to me that a company hosting “the cloud” could concievably mine your own data—I mean, it's there, right? And then I read this little gem of an article:

… Target has a baby-shower registry, and Pole started there, observing how shopping habits changed as a woman approached her due date, which women on the registry had willingly disclosed. He ran test after test, analyzing the data, and before long some useful patterns emerged. …

…

About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She's still in high school, and you're sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”

The manager didn't have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man's daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there's been some activities in my house I haven't been completely aware of. She's due in August. I owe you an apology.”

Via Hacker News, How Companies Learn Your Secrets

Okay, it's not about a company mining “the cloud,” but it does illustrate just how much data we willingly (or unknowingly) give out.

Update a few minutes later

Perhaps government overreach isn't quite as “tin hat crazy” as I thought …

Wednesday, February 08, 2012

99 ways to program a hex, Part 31, has been delayed indefinitely

Yesterday's version is the last version I'll be posting for now. When I was initially inspired, I ripped through a majority of what you've seen in just three days. It's not really surprising given that a majority of the “variations” differed by a line or two of code.

But I've run out. And now, having done 21 variations in C (one more than I originally planned), five in Lua (I could do one more in Lua—the actual original code I based the Lua versions off of, but oddly enough, it doesn't actually handle files), two in a dialect of BASIC I can't currently test and two I didn't expect in C♯ (both submitted by Jeff Cuscutis), I don't think I have it in me to do many more.

I've exhausted C. And I pretty much exhausted Lua, which are my two “go to” languages these days. I could probably push out a couple of Perl versions, and a PHP version (PHP does not have nearly the expressiveness of Lua or even Perl to bother with more than one version) but that's about the limit.

There are a few other languages I could do (Common Lisp, Scheme, SNOBOL (seriously!), Forth, Awk, Erlang, Python and Ruby) but those would require significant time hitting up documentation and what not because I don't know those langauges all that well (if at all).

So I'll probably continue this series, but it'll probably be a post or two every few months and not every XXXXXXX day as I have been doing.

Tuesday, February 07, 2012

99 ways to program a hex, Part 30: K&R, really obfuscated

And here we have a fully obfuscated version of our program—a nearly impenetrable wall of characters that nonetheless compiles and works.

/*************************************************************************
*
* Copyright 2012 by Sean Conner.  All Rights Reserved.
*
* This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
* modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
* as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
* of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
*
* This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
* but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
* MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
* GNU General Public License for more details.
*
* You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
* along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
* Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307, USA.
*
* Comments, questions and criticisms can be sent to: sean@conman.org
*
*************************************************************************/

/* Style: K&R, system calls, full buffering, obfuscated 2 */

#include <errno.h>
#include <fcntl.h>

main(a,b)char **b;{int i,f;if(a==1)fa(0,1);else{for(i=1;i<a;i++){f=open(b[i],
O_RDONLY);if(f==-1){fd(b[i]);continue;}ff(1,"-----",5);ff(1,b[i],strlen(b[i])
);ff(1,"-----\n",6);fa(f,1);if(close(f)<0)fd(b[i]);}}return 0;}char a[4096],b
[75*109];fa(c,d){int e,f,g,h;char*i,*p;memset(b,' ',sizeof(b));e=g=0;i=b;while
((f=fe(c,(char *)a,sizeof(a)))>0){p=a;for(p=a;f>0;){h=fb(&i,p,f,e);p+=h;f-=h;
e+=h;g++;if(g==109){ff(d,b,i-b);memset(b,' ',sizeof(b));g=0;i=b;}}}if (i-b>0)
ff(d,b,i-b);}fb(a,p,c,d)char**a,*p;{char*e,*f,*g;int h;e=*a;fc(e,d,8,':');if(
c>16){c=16;}p+=c;f=&e[10+c*3];g=&e[58+c];for(h=0;h<c;h++){p--;g--;f-=3;if((*p
>=' ')&&(*p<='~'))*g=*p;else*g = '.';fc(f,*p,2,' ');}e[58+h]='\n';*a=&e[59+h]
;return h;}fc(a,b,c,d)char*a;{a[c]=d;while(c--){a[c]=(b&0x0F)+'0';if(a[c]>'9'
)a[c]+=7;b>>=4;}}fd(a)char*a;{extern char**sys_errlist;extern int sys_nerr;int
b=errno;ff(2,a,strlen(a));ff(2,": ",2);if(b>sys_nerr){ff(2,"(unknown)",9);}
else{ff(2,sys_errlist[b],strlen(sys_errlist[b]));}ff(2,"\n",1);}fe(a,b,c)char
*b;{int d=0,e;while(c>0){e=read(a,b,c);if(e<0){fd("read()");exit(1);}if(e==0)
{break;}d+=e;c-=e;b+=e;}return d;}ff(a,b,c)char*b;{if(write(a,b,c)<c){if(a!=2
){fd("output");}exit(1);}}

And because it's so obfuscated, it's mercifully short as well.