compile the prime, do the time

The illegal prime posting on reddit was guaranteed to capture my attention - it combines elements of both intellectual property and mathematics.

As a mind game, this one looks fun. Since it is illegal in the US of A to possess code that defeats encryption schemes that protect digital media (a la the lovely DMCA) some hackers tried thinking of some interesting loopholes. The one they have come up with takes advantage of the behaviour of at least one version of gzip - to ignore bytes after the end of a null terminated compressed file. They generated two large prime numbers that represents the DeCSS algorithm that can unlock the encryption used to protect DVD media. Unzip one number and voila! - you get DeCSS C code. Unzip another and you get directly executable code.

Now, surely knowledge of a prime number is not considered a crime? Certainly intellectual property law sees numbers (and mathematics in general) as "elements of nature", beyond copyright or patent protection, and belonging to everyone. So far, it doesn't look like this has been tested in court. Best guess is that possession of the number would not be considered illegal, but some interpretations (like the DeCSS source code) would be.

I wonder if anyone has patented this idea yet [evil grin]...

Illegal Prime [Wikipedia]

gmail switcharoo redux

Here is an update on my last post with a few notes regarding the switch:

1. If you want to become a Gmail Masta, my young padawan, then you must become one with tools like Gmail Macros. Check out this article at Lifehacker to learn how to label and archive emails with mere keystrokes!
2. Once you decide to take the plunge and start working with all personal email in Gmail, you'll want access to your archived mail as well as new messages. Happily, a lot of clever people wanted exactly the same thing, and created a solution that everyone can use. Mark Lyon's Gmail Loader will intelligently import your old email into Gmail, taking care to preserve the "From:" field and submitting email in a way that allows Gmail to group it into its funky conversations goodness. Available as a Windows program and Python scripts.
3. The first time you want to send a message to someone, you'll want your address book of contacts from your last email client. Check out this Gmail article to learn how to import contacts into Gmail.

I sucked in several hundred archived emails into Gmail and I've been using Gmail Macro keyboard shortcuts to label and archive 'em like mad. I'm still amazed just how right Google got this email interface.

the gmail switcharoo

I've enjoyed using Gmail from the first day I started, but tonight I hit a turning point: I've decided to switch to Gmail for all of my personal email.

Up to this point I've lead a dual-email-system life: Thunderbird and fetchmail on my home server for Shaw email, and Gmail for a newsletters, Google Alerts, etc. News from family, kids soccer and hockey email, etc. would hit my Shaw account, and stuff like the Gentoo Weekly News would hit my Gmail account.

No longer. I've increasingly found working in Gmail to be a breeze (especially with tools like the Gmail Macros greasmonkey script for Firefox) and working with email in Thunderbird to be a pain. Don't get me wrong - Thunderbird is a great client. There are two things, though, that it can't help me with:

1. Threaded conversations: related emails are shown in a timeline in Thunderbird in default. Using the topic view would only group them; nothing beats the integrated roll-up conversation view in Gmail.
2. Labels for email management: the family Shaw email account contains email for Kim and I (and once in a while, the kids). Guess who usually wades through it all? Since I don't want to file a message into a folder that Kim or the kids should read, I end up leaving it in the inbox. There are hundreds there right now, just waiting (in vain). The Gmail Macros let me label and archive messages with just a few keystrokes.

So how will I shift messages from the family Shaw account to my Gmail account? Easy - just flip on auto-forward for all messages. The "send from" feature in Gmail is also smart enough to send replys to messages using the "From:" address they were addressed to, so this switch will be invisible to folks sending email to our Shaw account.

One last note: although I expect it unlikely that Google will disappear anytime soon, there is always a chance that my archived email might be lost. I've configured fetchmail on my server to continue downloading email from Shaw on a daily basis as a backup. That way, if for some reason my archived email evaporates at Google, I'll still have a copy (although not as kewl an interface to it).

dark measure of technology

Whilst flipping through Compusmart, London Drugs and Future Shop flyers this weekend, I was struck by just how commoditized some technology has become. Linksys 802.11b/g routers, for example, can be had for $60 CAD (after rebate) brand-spankin' new - or search eBay and get 'em for even less. The same technology from a company like Cisco, 10 years ago, would have cost thousands of dollars. And 25 or so years ago, during the height of the Cold War, well... having the same technology in your hands might have put you on a CIA or KGB hit list.

Now there's an idea for a darker kind of technology index: the likelihood that intelligence agencies 20-something years ago would have killed you for it. Measures such as processor clock speed, Mbps, etc, all have far less emotional impact. Imagine having your current home or work computer with you in Grade 9; you would have been the ultimate uber-geek, with enough computing power to render the most complex photo-realistic scenes! And enough computing power to crack the most current encryption used by both sides at the time.

Oops.

a button not pressed

Wow - the hairs on the back of my neck stood up when I read this article. In short: on September 26, 1983, the world avoided nuclear devastation because one Soviet officer kept a level head.

When I was younger I used to believe that technology should increasingly replace emotional and irrational human beings in decision chains, especially those as critical as the decision to launch nuclear weapons. Now that I have a much better understanding of how technology comes to be, I believe the exact opposite. The only thing that saved us on September 26, 1983 was the judgement of one human being - an automated system would probably have launched the missiles.

Russian Colonel Who Averted Nuclear War Receives World Citizen Award - NEWS - MOSNEWS.COM

where no man has gone before

The New Horizons probe lifted off safely today and is speeding towards Pluto - though it won't get there until 2015. Still, this spacecraft is the fastest one yet - it will pass the Moon later today, the orbit of Mars in about 3 months, and reach Jupiter (for a gravity-assisted boost) in February 2007. The spacecraft will eventually reach a speed of 36,000 miles per hour.

It was fun watching the launch live via an Internet video feed from NASA - kinda reminded me of the model rockets I built and launched as a kid. Only the Atlas V launch vehicle is much bigger...

your wish at our command

Most of us simply fret about laws like the Patriot Act and how it seems governments like to treat 1984 as a self-improvement guidebook instead of a dystopian nightmare. In his latest posting, Tom Owad takes it one step further and scares the bejeezus out of me.

Put simply, Mr. Owad combines an old computer, several basic scripts and Amazon wish lists to build his own list of potential "subversives". After reverse-engineering the URL structure for these wish lists, he chooses a common first name, sucks in all wish lists for people with this name, and scans the lists for his selection of "subversive" texts. You know, books like Brave New World and (naturally) Orwell's 1984. And he does this using resources freely available to him, in about 30 hours total.

As always, here are some of my favourite excerpts from this posting:

Next comes the fun part – what books are most dangerous? So many to choose from. Here's a sample of the list I made. Feel free to make up your own list if you decide to try some data mining. Send it to the FBI. I'm sure they'll appreciate your help in fighting terrorism.

One curiousity revealed by this project is that there are quite a few people who show up for multiple books. Reading On Liberty and Build Your Own Laser, Phaser, Ion Ray Gun and Other Working Space Age Projects? We really should have a special list for you.

Thanks to Google Maps (and many similar services) a street address is all we need to get a satellite image of a person's home. Tempted as I was to provide satellite images of the homes of the search subjects, it just seemed a bit extreme even for this article. Instead, I opted only to pinpoint the centers of the towns in which they live. So at least you'll know that there's somebody in your community reading Critical Thinking or some other dangerous text.

I recently started to track articles I'm reading by posting them to my del.icio.us account and assigning the reading tag to them. I'm not the only del.icio.us reader to do so; a quick scan of del.icio.us/tag/reading shows many other del.icio.us users do so as well. I wonder how long it would take to scan all bookmarks marked reading for subversive texts?

web comments extention for firefox

I've seen various attempts at this in the past, but the new Blogger Web Comments extension for Firefox might finally pull it off. Several past web services have given users the ability to add comments to web pages that can be viewed by all other users of the service, but these "metacomments" were stored at the service provider's site. I think these early experiments failed 'cause no one service ever became big enough to dominate the space.

This new extension, however, approaches this problem by searching the data space where many folks are already commenting on web pages: their blogs. The search capabilities of Google are leveraged to pull all blog entries for the page you are currently viewing in Firefox. I've tried it out with several web sites already and found several interesting postings already.

As an extra bonus, if you use Blogger, the little comment viewer box includes a link to let you add comments directly to your own blog! I used it to create this entry...

Read more at www.google.com/tools/fi...

what am i bid?

Since the beginning of time, the Deep Cove School PAC has hosted a Christmas Fair to raise funds, and this year my dear wife volunteered to manage the Silent Auction event at the fair. Which meant, of course, that I "volunteered" as well.

Like any to-the-core card-carrying geek, I immediately focused on how to apply information technology to what is normally a low-tech affair. The requirements were deceptively simple: track between 200 to 300 items, label 'em for display at the auction, and record the winning bidders for each item. This seemed ridiculously easy: set up a spreadsheet to track the items and winning bidders, and use the mail merge function of a word processor to create labels for everything. Sweet!

So as my dear wife brought in donations, I dutifully cataloged them in the spreadsheet. This was both more time-consuming and mind-numbing than I had anticipated; I have a new respect for folks that can handle hours of data entry without going mad. Even so, any time I cursed a cramped neck or aching fingers, I consoled myself with the knowledge that this effort up front would ultimately pay off. And indeed, as I generated ID labels for items and address labels for thank-you letters, the superior fire-power of IT technology over parchment-and-quill was apparent. Marvelous!

After weeks of cataloging items (and giving up more and more space in our home), it was time for the main event: the night of the Christmas Fair. As bidders filed into the room to view items, my wife and I reviewed the bid resolution strategy we had discussed several nights before. When bidding on the items closed at 7:30pm, volunteers would gather the bids (in a paper bag) for each item, find the highest bid and record it on poster paper at the front of the room. I would crank out the list of all items and paste the printout on the poster paper so that the volunteers only need record the bidder name and amount on the paper. I would also record the winning bid in my spreadsheet, so that when the room was reopened for the waiting hordes, I could quickly tell each one all of the items they had won (if any) and pass the total to the cashier beside me. Excellent!

As the evening wore on and hundreds of bidders pawed everything in sight, I began to have doubts. I was still cataloging 20 or so items that had come in at the last moment, and my wife casually informed me that we would have 30 minutes to resolve all winning bids before the hordes would stampede back into the room. Let's see, assuming the volunteers kept feeding me with data at a constant pace, 300 items in 30 minutes yields 10 items a minute, or a sustained rate of one item every 6 seconds. Eeek!

In her infinite wisdom, my dear wife drafted a large contingent of volunteers to resolve winning bids. Moving at a frantic pace, they somehow managed to find the winning bid for each item and record it on the poster paper within half an hour. Even as this effort started, it became painfully obvious that I'd have no hope of recording all the winners in the spreadsheet before the doors were opened again. I resigned myself to capturing this information at the end of the evening - the bidders would have to scan the poster paper to see if they'd won anything. Disappointment!

When the bolts were thrown back on the doors, the bidders pouring in all had the same goal: find out if they had won anything, pay for it, and get out as quickly as possible. There is no delicate way to put this: all hell broke loose. Some bidders rushed to check favourite items they had bid on, and others crowded around the poster paper, trying to find their names. Volunteers were barraged by questions from bidders, and my dear wife and I looked at each other with the same unspoken question: what do we do now? Chaos!

And yet, somehow, against all reason, the chaos assembled itself into order. Volunteers noticed that bidders were cruising the tables looking for their items, so they simply organized the paper bags (with the winning bid taped on the outside) next to the right items. One volunteer took command of the cash box, and bidders who had retrieved their items (with the paper bag as proof that they had won the item) formed a line and payed for their stuff. We matched nearly 200 items with the winning bidders in about an hour. Redemption!

All in all, a wonderfully humbling experience. At the end of the evening, we needed to note all remaining auction items and contact the winning bidders to arrange for pickup. Those of us volunteers still remaining quickly agreed on how to best accomplish this: we walked around to each item and wrote down bidder contact information using parchment and quill. Lesson noted.

the palm in my hand

Doug seems to face never-ending torment with his PDA, and he asked (challenged?) me to list what I use mine for. I briefly considered creating the list on the Palm itself, but a whack to the head quickly brought me back to reality (and was likely less masochistic than actually creating the list using Graffiti 2). Anyhoo, here are some of the things I do with my Palm:

1. Reading articles and papers. I started with iSilo several years ago, but have been an avid fan of Plucker ever since trying it about two years ago. I use the Sunrise offline sync tool and Firefox extension to quickly grab content for Plucker to display.
2. Read MS Office and PDF docs offline. As I've mentioned in a past posting, Documents to Go has excellent support for native MS Office files, and the latest version adds support for native PDF files as well.
   
3. Offline calendar with alarms. The original "killer app" that got me interested in PDAs in the first place. A 15-minute alarm prompting me to get to a meeting I've forgotten about has saved me more times than I'd care to admit.
4. Offline Tasks with alarms. I use Outlook Tasks to track the stuff I have to get done, and alarm ticklers for these tasks sync'ed to my Palm mean I'm bugged at least three times more often than I otherwise would be. The jury is still out as to whether or not this is a good thing, and whether this has any impact on task completion rate [grin].
   
5. Offline contact list. Now what was that phone number again? With my Palm at hand, I can quickly look up phone numbers and email addresses when I'm away from my computer. Hey, Doug, it even synchronizes photos embedded in Outlook Contacts!
6. World clock with time zones and alarm clock. World Clock lets you set up a simultaneous display of the time in several locations around the world, and I've found the alarm clock more reliable than many of the clocks (and wake-up calls) I've come across in my travels.
7. Carry around pictures, audio and movies. My Palm TX does come with a reasonable amount of internal memory, but a 1GB SD card gives me the space needed to carry around some mp3 tunes, podcasts, a selection of photos, and even try out the odd video. The open source TCPMP player can handle nearly any audio/video encoding, and video support on the new iPod has done much to increase the availability of digital videos formatted for smaller screens.
8. Pass the time with games like Bejeweled 2 (which I'm finding to be a seriously addicting game).

On reflection, what I find most interesting is how I actually use my Palm vs how I thought I would before I got my first one. I anticipated using the Palm to manage appointments and tasks, with the potential to eventually replace pen and ink as my note taking tool of choice. Instead, I really treat my Palm as a portable viewer for documents, appointments, tasks and notes that I primarily create and manage on my computer.

[PS] If you use a blogging service or engine that is supported by Writely , consider trying it to create blog entries. I've posted my last few entries using Writely 'cause I like the WYSIWYG interface and whole-screen text area.

blogging hacks

In this posting Steve Rubel describes ten favourite blogging hacks, including one I used to create this post: the online document editor Writely. This editor supports a number of features I'm keen to test out for blogging, including spell check and image insertion.

still a palm fan

My first PDA was a classic PalmPilot I received for free because I saw it in a colleague's office collecting dust and simply asked to adopt it. Ever since then, I've always kept a Palm PDA within easy reach.

I've upgraded several times since that first PalmPilot (which I still have, but now the kids play with it). I moved to a Palm IIIx and used it for years before splurging for a Tungsten E2 earlier this year, which I enjoyed thoroughly until it was stolen (along with my work laptop) several weeks ago. I knew I wanted to replace my stolen Palm with a new PDA, but I first had to face a more philosophical question: Palm OS or PocketPC?

I spent several evenings googling reviews and blogs for insight, but several factors (including Doug's recent experience with a Dell Axim) helped convince me I'm really a Palm kinda guy at heart. And the latest Palm handheld definitely stole my heart: the Palm TX, with a 320x480 colour display and built-in 802.11b and Bluetooth wireless. Synchronization with Outlook calendar, contacts and tasks has always just worked, and the included Documents To Go software is widely recognized for its excellent support of native Microsoft Office files. And the combination of the open source Plucker reader and Sunrise synchronization software makes capturing web content for later reading effortless.

It didn't take me long to decide to go with the TX - I guess I'm still a hardcore Palm fan!

lest we forget

I recently found an essay I wrote for some English course years ago, in which I describe some of the stories my Opa told me about his experiences in the Netherlands during the Second World War. Looking back now, I can see that these stories gave me a more comprehensive and personal look at the everyday impact that war had on the families that lived through it. Here is what I wrote in the essay about one of those stories:

One story my Opa often told me about was how my Aunt Joanne was nearly killed by an errant bullet while the family was staying in a bomb shelter. One way the shelters of the time were designed to protect their occupants was by the use of 90-degree turns in the entrance way. The theory was that all shrapnel would be absorbed by one of the walls before entering the living quarters.

As it turned out, one bullet somehow bounced its way through the labyrinth-like entrance to graze past my aunt, hit a fishbowl beside her, and finally lodged into a wall. One thing that strikes me as odd now as I remember this story is that my Opa told it in a humourous way, although I'm sure he didn't find the situation amusing at the time. I think my grandfather did this for the same reasons we all do when we re-tell a frightening experience: such stories show us how precious life really is, and how easily it can be destroyed, and humour helps us to face that fact.

Lest We Forget

serving google from victoria

I never would have thunk it, but this recent post in the official Google Blog is from a guy working for Google, from Victoria! I especially like the Timbits reference he was able to slide into the post. Hmmmm, Timbits...

a new FSM believer

I've been moved almost beyond words (you were hoping it was beyond, weren't ya?). After learning about the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster as an alternative theory of Intelligent Design, I've become a believer.

After all, it is hard to argue with a faith where it is considered disrespectful to teach the beliefs of the Flying Spaghetti Monster without wearing full pirate regalia. Especially when there is a graph showing the statistically significant inverse relationship between global warming and the shrinking number of pirates since the 1800s. I always thought there was some kind of link, but was worried that people would find my belief crazy...

on product feature priorities

I've enjoyed reading postings by Joel Spolsky in the past, but one of his recent articles had me laughing out loud. In Set Your Priorities, Joel talks about the challenge his product team faces in setting priorities for the next release of their flagship software product. He could have simply described the prioritization process they used and why he feels it was effective, but instead grabs and keeps your attention by first describing how not to prioritize. Here is one favourite snippet from his posting:

Custom development is that murky world where a customer tells you what to build, and you say, "are you sure?" and they say yes, and you make an absolutely beautiful spec, and say, "is this what you want?" and they say yes, and you make them sign the spec in indelible ink, nay, blood, and they do, and then you build that thing they signed off on, promptly, precisely and exactly, and they see it and they are horrified and shocked, and you spend the rest of the week reading up on whether your E&O insurance is going to cover the legal fees for the lawsuit you've gotten yourself into or merely the settlement cost. Or, if you're really lucky, the customer will smile wanly and put your code in a drawer and never use it again and never call you back.

I've had the opportunity to be involved in product development for a number of years now, and Joel's posting does a great job of highlighting why product development can be so gosh darned hard. I find his posting funny because it is all true. It's good to see that I'm not alone [grin].

Set Your Priorities [Joel on Software]

what would mom say?

I forget how I found this older article at The Onion, but it had me in giggles this evening. What would you do if your mom found your blog? I honestly can't say. Of course, since my mom is online, and since there is a chance that one of my siblings will refer her to my blog, I'm now in the same boat as "Kevin" in the Onion article.

Some favourite quotes from "Kevin" (edited to protect more sensitive readers):

"With the raw materials in my blog, she could actually construct an accurate picture of who I am. This is f***ing serious."

"Mom loves hearing every boring detail of her kids' lives," he said. "She'd want to know what I'm eating for dinner every night, if she could. This blog is like p*rn for her."

I set up my blog to be public, and this impacts the tone of my writing here. But now that my mom might find out about my blog? I may not have the courage to ever write another entry [grin]...

Mom Finds Out About Blog [The Onion]

google reader

Each time Google comes out with a new toy I find I'm adopting it in place of the software or approach I used before. Gmail displaced my Yahoo! Mail account and Google Talk convinced me to switch away from the Jabber IM system I had been playing with. And ever since I've been using Google Desktop for search and Sidebar interface I haven't looked back.

Now Google Reader is coaxing me to use it for news feeds instead of current new aggregator (the lovely Sage extension in Firefox). Ever since experiencing the AJAX-goodness of Gmail I've been curious to see how Google might apply that same approach in other applications. I've only been experimenting with Reader for a few days now, but so far I'm liking the UI approach taken. I do like the tag-based approach to organizing your feeds, but so far find the sort mechanism a bit clunky (just give me the most used tags along the top!). Still, it passed my critical test of correctly rendering my online comic feeds, so how can I complain?

I hope Google isn't secretly planning to become an evil empire anytime soon, 'cause I'm slowly getting hooked on nearly every application they offer...

flunking the turing test

After the dark and serious tone of my last post, I decided a quick dose of humour was warranted. Check out “How I Failed the Turing Test” for a look at one man’s frustration at proving he is human to other humans via instant messaging.

Favourite snippet:

What really killed me was that the more I tried proving my “actual” intelligence, the more my “artificial” intelligence would get called into question. Take this pivotal conversation:

jmstriegel: no, really. I’m quite human.
jmstriegel: test me if you want
shymuffin32: ok
shymuffin32: why do you like music?
jmstriegel: hmm. i’ve never really considered that.
jmstriegel: hell, i’m not going to be able to contrive a good answer for that one. ask me something else.
shymuffin32: jeesus, you’re worse than eliza

And there you have it. I’ve been intellectually humbled by a 1960s robotic psychologist.

How I Failed the Turing Test [Jason Striegel]

oil and the end of the modern world

I noticed this thought-provoking and entirely frightening paper several weeks ago, but just recently got around to reading it. In some ways I wish I hadn’t; ignorance is truly bliss.

This paper describes how everything we take for granted in our modern world is entirely dependent on oil, and then states that even slight shortfalls between supply and demand will wreak havoc on oil-dependent economies. Oil production/consumption follows something like a bell curve, and best estimates are that we’re gonna hit the peak within the next few years. It’s all downhill from there.

Some lovely snippets from this paper:

Because petrochemicals are key components to much more than just the gas in your car. As geologist Dale Allen Pfeiffer points out in his article entitled, “Eating Fossil Fuels”, approximately 10 calories of fossil fuels are required to produce every 1 calorie of food eaten in the US.

In addition to transportation, food, water, and modern medicine, mass quantities of oil are required for all plastics, all computers and all high-tech devices.

When considering the role of oil in the production of modern technology, remember that most alternative systems of energy — including solar panels/solar-nanotechnology, windmills, hydrogen fuel cells, biodiesel production facilities, nuclear power plants, etc. — rely on sophisticated technology.

In short, the so called “alternatives” to oil are actually “derivatives” of oil. Without an abundant and reliable supply of oil, we have no way of scaling these alternatives to the degree necessary to power the modern world.

All of this hit home while the family and I were visiting Barkerville (a historic mining town) during our vacation. Original buildings, daily events and lively actors are all combined to provide a reasonably accurate picture of what life looked like in the 1870s. We all had a great time exploring Barkerville, but I found my interest heightened after reading the peak oil paper. The working Cornish waterwheel display would delight any engineer-at-heart, but I found myself paying much closer attention to this power source that had nearly no dependence on oil whatsoever. How exactly did the flume deliver water to the wheel? What clutching mechanism was used to couple the waterwheel to the mine pump?

Like most teenage geeks, I read all the science fiction I could get my hands on. Writers like Asimov and Clarke described a future in which ever-advancing technology played a key role in our lives: just as often nearly wiping us out as well as granting us god-like capabilities, but always playing a key role. I’ve simply always assumed that we would eventually overcome our dependence on fossil fuels and come up with a better solution, but what if we don’t do so in time? What if we are currently living in the peak of human technological achievement, soon to descend into a Dark Ages like the world has not seen for more than a thousand years? Geez - just when I finally got my Linux server up and running the way I like it…

As a side note, I’ve been rediscovering the most excellent Connections television series again, in which writer James Burke shows the connections between different technology inflection points throughout history. The first half of the first episode, “The Trigger Effect”, is guaranteed to give you the heebee-jeebees as Mr. Burke imagines the impact that a collapse in modern energy systems would have. If someone is interested in watching this episode let me know and I can lend it to you.

So, now what? How would we cope without our oil fix? Perhaps by looking to those groups that still live like they were in the mid-nineteenth century - folks like the Amish. I’m thinking now is the time to invest in all books describing Amish tools, building and farming techniques - get ‘em from Amazon before the last spark of utility-generated electricity goes out.

Peak Oil: Life After the Oil Crash