The what-the-hell-is-this-omg-this-is-cool-should-play-with list

Python

Mingle

Heroku

MongoDB

https://www.linqpad.net/

..the entire internet?

prank@WSU Nov 5 awesome

"So far I've received emails from 3 news reporters, 1 job offer at Google, one from someone in Lighty, one from an angry "IT" guy, and hundreds from fans. All in all a good day. Now just to hope my real goal, students making this university a better place, will be achieved."

http://www.facebook.com/pages/WSU-1812/166561193368233?v=wall

http://twitter.com/search?q=%23wsu1812

https://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/hacker-makes-the-fifth-of-november-one-to-remember/28076?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

I admire this guy because

1. Awesome technical skills (IT actually had to pull the hardware to shut this thing off before his auto-off)
2. Whitehat (he included an auto-off at 5:01 pm and an uninstall script, with instructions on his website)
3. V for Vendetta is awesome (yes, I celebrate Guy Fawkes day by watching it)
4. He knows how to cover his tracks (hasn't been identified yet)
5. Google offered him a job without knowing his identity
6. He wants to improve his campus (yeah, I was in student government when I was in college... can you tell?)

I mean... isn't that enough? Dude.

BSOD

Check out the data from the BSOD I just had. I don't know what it means (or even whether the data here is meaningful) but I'm going to put some effort towards finding out, because this isn't the first time that this has happened (the last time it happened, I was using Vista and I ended up installing W7) and I don't enjoy BSOD at all.

Problem signature:

Problem Event Name: BlueScreen

OS Version: 6.1.7600.2.0.0.256.48

Locale ID: 1033

Additional information about the problem:

BCCode: f4

BCP1: 0000000000000003

BCP2: FFFFFA8009D81890

BCP3: FFFFFA8009D81B70

BCP4: FFFFF80002D885D0

OS Version: 6_1_7600

Service Pack: 0_0

Product: 256_1

Files that help describe the problem:

C:\Windows\Minidump\110810-53087-01.dmp

C:\Users\geeklinda\AppData\Local\Temp\WER-104302-0.sysdata.xml

Read our privacy statement online:

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=104288&clcid=0x0409

If the online privacy statement is not available, please read our privacy statement offline:

C:\Windows\system32\en-US\erofflps.txt

(some) Stuff I've thought about today:

Electronic voting https://www.eff.org/issues/e-voting

Your ballot is encoded to your public key (all citizens have a public/private key pair?) and your private key is your newSSN, which is long enough that it actually provides secure encryption (unlike current 9-digit SSNs (perhaps your SSN is a hash for some longer number?))

And how cool it is that U of M ppl broke the released version so quickly and thouroughly, and how I wish I had been able to see that first hand.

NASA

- Discovery http://discovery.nasa.gov/

- Robonaut https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/464887main_Robonaut2FactSheet.pd&pli=1

- Waldos (explained 'em to a friend) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_manipulator

- fancy new chips -> the singularity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_A2

This guy's blog and so many amazing articles on it.

http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2004/07/10/what_to_do_when_youre_screwed.html

http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2005/11/21/saying_no.html

http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2007/11/11/the_nerd_handbook.html

http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2003/07/10/nadd.html

How cool http://news.ycombinator.com/news is and the fact that I only two days ago went through a huge list of reddit channels, customized my front page, and now surf it about as often as I check boingboing (and the fact that Google Reader is NOT an acceptable solution for my blog-surfing needs... and that I'll probably end up doing a large-scale data-gather on all options, then suffering with something mediocre until I suck it up and write my own)

My favorite reddits at the moment:

http://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/

http://www.reddit.com/r/space/

http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/ I have a special love for this one, actually

http://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/

http://www.reddit.com/r/coding/

This excellent new(ish) gourmet organic resturaunt near where I live and how much I want to go there for dinner, since they've started serving dinner and cocktails.

http://www.nanaorganic.com/live/

http://www.yelp.com/biz/nana-chicago

http://code.mixpanel.com/amazon-vs-rackspace/ I.e. what sysadmins want from a cloud server, why they want it, how well different providers provide it, and what providers will do in the future- and the "style" of the providers.

Why I haven't gotten around to ripping this DVD of Sweeney Todd to a local version which I can use even while I don't have this inconvenient disc in my laptop, asking what I want to do with it every time I return from hibernation and confusing my startup processes by being potentially but not actually bootable. (Answer: how do you do that on Ubuntu, anyway? It's not something I've ever needed to do before. Put a bootable .iso on something, yes; burn a local copy of media from something, no. I'll pick a pretty tool and use it soon, yes yes.)

http://goo.gl/ and how amazingly excellent it is and why have I not been using this and look at all of the cool things that it can do! Although I was failing a copy-paste from it when my computer took a BSOD moment just a few minutes ago, so that's not really the best way to start a relationship.

The fact that attempting to connect to picasaweb.google.com while using Chrome and KB SSL Enforcer makes Picasa wibble and then give me a "no ssh available" error, and whether this is repeatable, and whether I have the patience to test it right now.

Also, (what I was trying to elucidate when I ran into the previous point)

How much space I have on Picasa, and how I'm thrashing my upload and need faster internet.

Space I have in Picasa: 81 GB In use: 14 GB (17.29%)

All of that 14GB is pictures, poster drafts, screenshots... mostly pictures. From the last 4 years. Mostly tagged, although not well-tagged.

My current upload speed: ...not sure, but probably less than 3Mb. This is not a recipe for success.

My irrational fear that ThoughtWorks will for some reason decide that I'm not worth hiring after all and try to break my contract- which, considering that I'm an easygoing kid with no real clout in the world, they could probably do pretty easily. Like, I said, irrational. It would be incredibly bad business sense, for one thing. But still, I do sometimes worry- especially when I fail at something technical or when I start digging into whitehat exploits. Because, yanno, anything whitehat could be blackhat with a flip of an intention.

How cool the revamp of http://torrentfreak.com/limewire-resurrected-by-secret-dev-team-101108/ is and whether I should try to install it on my W7 just to see what it's like. I did use LimeWire when I was a freshman, and probably while I was a sophomore, but I've lost all of my music and I live basically off of Pandora with a small local stash of celtic rock for when I have no network connection. I don't have any motivation to improve my torrenting situation. -shrug- The vast majority of the music I listen to is impossible to torrent because there are no peers for it. Maybe I should start uploading it, but I'm too lazy to do illegal things without a strong idealogical motivation.

The above leads to: BearShare, the RIAA paid torrenting site. Wait wtf rly? Yes, rly. http://www.bearshare.com/ I guess if you don't care what you listen to, it's okay. There is some stuff on there which fits my picky sensibilities, but srsly... " over 15 million songs & videos" ...that's like bragging that your... er. The analogy I want to make here is forbidden by good taste. Anyway. Only the ignorant think that 15mil is a high number in this context.

Easy ways to kill Firesheep: http://blog.scaramanga.co.uk/2010/11/08/two-firesheep-denial-of-service-attacks/ http://www.scaramanga.co.uk/stuff/fireflood.c

Always always always choose the "Custom Install" option. You never know what strange toolbar crap will be in there.

My cussing habits and the fact that I should switch back to using something mild like "dammit" or "bloody hell" before I end up sitting next to people who think that saying "GEE-sus onna stick" is inappropriate when I'm caught up in my own thoughts and something startles me out of them.

On a related note, I want to explore this site in detail sometime. http://www.exploit-db.com/

Reverse image search

Reverse image search. There used to be a website which made it work. Like... four years ago. But there can't have been, because there isn't now. And unless someone is suppressing the technology very hard...

Anyway, here's a list of what I see offhand. None of them do what I want them to.

http://www.revimg.net/

https://www.tineye.com/

http://www.gazopa.com/

http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/#text

http://amazon.ece.utexas.edu/~qasim/cires.htm

Euler Project

I'm doing problems from the Euler Project just now. My code is hideously embarrassing, but it's all my own and I'm kinda proud that I can write the stuff at all, considering that less than a month ago I might've looked at the problems and despaired, or at least made headway much more slowly.

My profile: http://projecteuler.net/profile/geeklinda.png I wish it said which specific problems I've solved...

1. http://pastie.org/1273530 An alternate and very elegant solution from rancorbeast ((1..(1000 - 1)).reject { |i| i % 5 != 0 && i % 3 != 0 }).inject(0) {|a, b| a + b}
2. http://pastie.org/1273527
3. http://pastie.org/1273740
4. http://pastie.org/1285750
5. http://pastie.org/1290420 Code blatantly stolen from 17 Sep 2005 03:20 am post by Olath at http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=forum&id=5 (can't access if you haven't already solved the problem) ... yes there is a discrepancy here. :)
6. http://pastie.org/1285746
7. http://pastie.org/1293957 (stolen from forums after getting answer)
8. http://pastie.org/1285739
9. http://pastie.org/1293953 (All mine. I'm proud of it. It runs pretty quickly. finding an answer took me several tries for some reason.)
   rancorbeast beat me by miles with the oneliner below.
   (1..500).each {|i| (i..500).each {|j| if i + j + Math.sqrt(i ** 2 + j ** 2) == 1000; print i * j * Math.sqrt(i ** 2 + j ** 2); end } }
10. solved in python.

Euler 11..n will be in a new post.

Reddit:crypto makes my day

I finally discovered reddit:crypto (and also reddit:ruby) thanks to a guy I ran into at the RubyChicago event I blogged about a few days ago. Actually, he mentioned how much he liked reddit:python, and I went from there...

Anyway.

http://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/

http://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/

http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/

Extreme Programming Applied by Auer and Miller

I got this book in the mail today. I don't think that it's the one that TW will want me to buy and read, but this is a fucking excellent book and I'll read their favorite when they tell me what it is, because they haven't done that yet (it's not like it'll take me until January to read it, so that doesn't bother me.)

Extreme Programming Applied by Auer and Miller http://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Programming-Applied-Playing-Win/dp/0201616408

Frankly, I bought it because 1. Fowler linked to it and 2. It was $0.01 (+shipping) used.

It is- let me say this again- awesome. It has stories. Which is to say, short biographical case studies. I skimmed the table of contents and then started skipping around in the book. It is tasty. Writing style is important, dammit.

"Suppose the best programmer on your team gets run over by a truck." p.170

I mean, I totally always start with that assumption...

"If I could write code that you couldn't understand, then I was, by implication, smarter than you. You can imagine the stinky code that came out of this group!" p.213

Anyway, the book might not be as entertaining as I think it is right now, but meh. Will see.

Amp talk @ ThoughtWorks

These are straight notes taken during the presentation and posted during the clapping. They may be updated later to add explanation and details. Presentation: 6:30pm-7pm, + questions.

Talk is by Justin Love

AMP: Mercurial.

http://www.delicious.com/rauros/amp

His first version control was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_SourceSafe ...soon learned better. had to let Windows ppl in, so used Hg (git was no-windows in 2007)

Michael Edgar, Ari Brown. User seydar

Current version: Amp 0.5.3

Starting to implement git support. Which is hard. Started over and scrapped the old one. Learned a lot. This time: modular. Amp frontend. Git is written in C. Mercurial is written in Python. Monotone is in C==, SVN is in C?

There's not much from Ruby on here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_revision_control_software and part of the manifesto is to change that.

briefly mentioned

Ruby Sinatra http://www.sinatrarb.com/

Ruby merb http://merbivore.com/documentation.html

Amp will be somewhat like ActiveRecord? In that it translates...

Talking about the rebuilding of Rails 3 around modularization. Common api to things.

Showing off the ability to modify/rename commands. Also looking @ code.

This is using Trollop. What's Trollop? http://trollop.rubyforge.org/ "A commandline parser for Ruby that gets out of your way. "

Discuss billing command parsing... "estimate time spent" How many ppl here just understood those last few slides? (about implementing billing estimate using amp)?

in amp, a command will be defined as a class. Can use Ruby built-in modules to customize commands. (hwa?)

git output- not standardized. Many problems. Get around this by amp-grit instead of amp-git? http://grit.rubyforge.org/

I would like to see the version of the manifesto. Link?

There's a guy w a fancy camera taking pics. I want a camera like that. I wonder where the pics will be posted?

Questions:

Q svn will be supported?

yes. problem yet to be tackled. svn workflow is very different... haven't addressed problem yet.

Q what distinguishes amp? what makes you choose it over Hg? or a different system?

It's a general system. Well, it will be a general system. "Ignore the ppl who don't care right now."

"This is my RubyConf talk, I have to add 15min to it, so give me suggestions.

To present at one of these things, talk to chicagoruby.org via email.

Elephant and Castle now.

Google: security

http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2010/11/rewarding-web-application-security.html

In other words, Google will pay you (and make you famous and possibly hire you) to find their security bugs for them.

Rocking.

Sadly I don't know where I would start on a project like that. Maybe some googling will give me some ideas. (ahaha irony)

EDIT: after reading parts of the Hall of Fame for people who've won the money, I'm less convinced that I can make an immediate contribution, but more convinced that I want to.