Technical

With apologies to Terry Prachett, I feel like I being dragged (dragging myself?) into the Century of the Fruitbat. As I mentioned a long time ago, I don’t care for Facebook. I prefer my blog. That said, many of my friends and most of my family use Facebook. So I’m going to start a bit of an experiment. I’ve downloaded and installed the Wordbook plugin for my blog software (wordpress). Starting with this post, in theory anything that’s published on the blog gets cross-posted to fb. ...

I’m not a big baseball fan. For that matter, there are few ball sports that interest me. But, this is important. If you recall, a few years ago (2004), there was a big furor over steroids in baseball. The government searched BALCO and found evidence of rampant steroid use by baseball players. Now I hadn’t been paying attention to this, but there has been an ongoing legal dispute over that search and how it was conducted. ...

In computer security, one of the most difficult and annoying problems is the distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). The idea behind a DDoS attack is straight forward: the attacker tries to prevent legitimate use of the service by using a large number of other computers. Usually these other computers have been compromised (hacked) and are following the commands of the attacker. Such computers are usually called “zombies.” There are a number of ways to conduct a DDoS attack, but they are typically variations on the following theme. The attacker instructs the zombies to request access to the service. But the zombies have no intention of actually using the service, instead, they often forge network traffic so that it’s impossible to tell who is making the request. Because the zombies don’t want to use the service, they can make thousands of requests without slowing down. The poor computer hosting the service then sees tens of thousands of requests for access, tries to fulfill the requests and eventually becomes overloaded and dies. The zombies win. ...

I was using my personal laptop at a meeting yesterday and grabbed about a gig of files from someone’s usb key. While I was taking minutes, I noticed a lovely new icon that popped up… your hard disk drive is failing. Eeek! Not cool. So, last night I got home and started backing up my files. A few of the new files and a couple unimportant old files didn’t transfer properly. Fine, I could live without them. ...

… and he and Tim Berners-Lee want you to stop breaking the Internet. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve had several occasions to be invited into someone’s walled garden on the internet. You know the places. Lovely little sites that are entirely self-contained and which you can’t access unless you are a member? In the old days, Compuserve and AOL were the big walled gardens. These days, it’s Facebook and Linked-In. ...

This is neat. Typealyzer claims to examine a blog (or presumably any webpage) in order to identify the Myers-Briggs type of the author. It correctly identifies me as an INTP, but doesn’t seem to get etselec.

Some recent (somewhat) technical notes: A while back, I swapped the dead harddrive from my ipod with a compact flash card. Unfortunately, at the time, the biggest (affordable) compact flash was 16 GB, so I lost about half the capacity from my ipod. Not a huge problem, but it became more of one as I added more music. Yesterday, a shiny new 32 GB compact flash arrived and now I’m back to the nominal amount of space on my ipod, except that it’s all solid state and cool. From the technical standpoint, this was something of a PITA, since I didn’t have a windows or mac machine around to reinstall the firmware. My ultimate solution: 1) back up /dev/sdb (boot record and partition table) and /dev/sdb1 (firmware) from the ipod using dd; 2) put the CF in my laptop and format it (a camera would work just as well), this just normalizes the card; 3) put the CF in the ipod (or in the laptop); 4) write the patition table using dd; 5) edit the partition table using fdisk, set the size of sdb2 to be 32 rather than 16 GB; 6) write out the firmware to sdb1; 7) format sdb2 using mkfs.vfat. Voila - a 32 GB ipod CF If you haven’t seen it already, check out projecteuler.net. They’ve got a bunch of mathematically oriented programming problems online of varying difficulty. Good solutions should all run in 1 minute or less and generally take 100 lines of code or so. It’s a good way to get familiar with a new programming language and to exercise your brain. So far, I’ve done the first 70 or so problems - they don’t take too long, maybe a half hour each on average. Finally, I got the clutch in my car replaced yesterday. The mechanic said that it was in pretty bad shape and that the (plastic?) bearing the clutch uses had worn completely away. This probably explains why I’ve had no acceleration for the past year (or more?). I had forgotten what it was like to drive a decent car :-)

A few years ago, K was taking some GIS (geographic information systems) classes. That was a lot of fun for me since GIS is something I’ve poked at on and off for quite some time. Back when I was first playing with GIS, GRASS was probably the best (and may still be) open-source GIS system out there, but it wasn’t too user friendly. So it was a lot of fun playing with ESRI’s ArcGIS. ...

A while back, Luis Villa asked about a script to add creative commons licensing information to an image. I just wrapped up a first cut at a GreaseMonkey script to do exactly that. Hopefully someone will find it useful.

I’ve had the Sony Reader now for about a week. In that time, I’ve taken it on a plane trip, read three full books, multiple days worth of the NY Times and I’m in the middle of two books right now. Observations so far: The electronic paper is very readable. On my plane trip, I must have read for several hours straight with no more eye strain than if I had been reading a paper book. The legibility is good regardless of font size. You might still want to increase the font size if your eyes are tired, but otherwise, there is no need. The menus and button layouts are pretty reasonable. You can page forward or back. There’s a up-down-left-right cursor that is used to move around on a page. Using the number buttons on the right, you can jump to an arbitrary page in the book. These buttons double as a quick jump to a menu item on the Reader’s standard menus. One gripe, you can only move to different links using up/down on the cursor, left/right don’t do anything. At GB, paideka mentioned that it would be interesting to see what Apple did with the layout and look and feel of a reader. Agreed Battery life appears to be as advertised: 7,500 page turns per charge. Keep in mind that a page on the reader contains only about half the content of a standard paper back (depending on page layout and font size). Still, around 3,500 pages of paper back text is still pretty good. Updating the screen is slow. It takes about .5 – .75 seconds to update the screen. A few ramifications: 1) this is almost un-noticeable while reading text; and 2) using the cursor keys is painful, you deal with the update time for each cursor pressed – where ever possible I use the numeric shortcuts. A third ramification of the slow update time is that the Reader, and almost certainly any other reader using this generation of e-paper, is unusable as a reference book. When I use a reference book, I flip around quite a bit. Forward to the index, back to the text, forward many pages to the next topic, etc. I suppose if the reference book had a really good index, it might be better, but for the most part, this is still not a good tool for referencing which is a real shame. The bookmarking system is good. Each book keeps your place in the book. The top level of the reader keeps up with the last book you’ve read and your place in that book. You can set any number of bookmarks in each book and then access the bookmarks on a global or a per book basis. It would be nice if the reader also kept a list of most recently read, rather than just the single most recently read book; but that’s a small issue. Typically, I’ll just set a bookmark when I pause in reading, then delete it when I pick the book back up. PDF conversion still leaves something to be desired. I’ve looked into this a bit. The converter I’m using converts PDF -> HTML -> LRF. The PDF -> HTML conversion uses pdftohtml (surprised?) which is good in some ways, but still leaves off certain things (like images!), at least as used by the reader’s converter. Part of this is due to conceptual differences between PDF and HTML. HTML marks up text, flagging paragraphs, noting images, etc. Ideally, all of this is passed to the browser which handles the layout. PDF will have none of that. PDF consists of a set of primitives that indicate what text (in which font and size) should go in which location on the page. There is no markup of paragraphs, instead, each line of text is described individually. There is no easy way to reconstruct paragraphs from a PDF file (as a research note, I wonder if you could use a partially observable markov decision process?). That said, minus the missing images, the LRF result is definitely readable. So overall, I’m pretty happy with the reader. The biggest issue is the refresh time on the electronic paper and I hope that will improve over the next couple of years. ...