Work Slides

Later this week i'm presenting to my co-workers on benchmarking storage. As some of you may find them interesting, here is a pdf of the slides. The presentation assumes a rudimentary understanding of storage concepts and is only a 30 minute overview.

Copenhagen

Based on usage figures from the World's entry in the CIA World Factbook, some random calculation on the efficiency of solar panels and their cost, and some other figures on the conversion of oil and natural gas to electricity, i am looking to raise $201 trillion in order to solve our Climate Change (with the snow outside, that's a much better phrase than "Global Warming") problem - $200 trillion for the solar panels and $1 trillion towards utterly conquering Western Sahara, which will then be completely covered in the requisite panels.

Yes, that's right, today we can assure all our energy needs are met by renewable (for the next 5 billion years, give or take) solar energy by covering 262000 square kilometers with solar panels. Conveniently, Western Sahara is 266000 square km, is rather sunny, and doesn't have much of a government, so we can invade, set up a stable government and some solar panels, and save the world.

Still not sure how to distribute that power around the world, but after dropping $200 trillion on panels, i expect the vendor to solve that one for free. Then there's that incovenient conversion of existing petrol and oil devices to run on electricity, but i can't solve everything tonight - watch for a future post.

Data

I enjoy using and perusing the CIA World Factbook on a regular basis; its intelligence has come in handy over the past few years. One feature i've always wanted is to graph any of the Factbook's data in any manner. Unfortunately, for comparative purposes, the Factbook only contains a limited number of lists and no easy way to access all of its data in a programmatic fashion. I've wanted to cross-compare different stats as well as generate and compare derived stats. Towards this goal, i've created a proof of concept graphing engine for the Factbook.


Internet users as a percent of population



HIV/AIDS - adult prevalence rate

These two examples of the graphs generated show the kind of comparisons that can be made. I wrote a couple scripts to download and parse the Factbook country pages, then insert the data into some MySQL tables. Then there's one more script that gets the data and generates google chart urls and displays those images and the data.



So far i've found the resulting data visualization fun and interesting. I'm also hoping that data mining the information will be equally fun and interesting.

Hello

Today Rex introduced me to the Google Chart API. I said "Hi" and an hour later had this. It's a little buggy, not necessarily 100% accurate and only projects to 2009.

Two steps back

Not quite CNN, but i am quoted in the Voice, WCC's student newspaper. The article outlines why i didn't sleep much over Labor Day Weekend, a nice way to start off the new semester.

Unfortunately the web version of the article doesn't have the photos that are in the paper version, so here are some poor photographic copies of the paper articles:





Let's keep these copies close to the realm of fair use; here's a critique of the originals.

The first photograph is taken with a wide angle lens, creating the rounded effect with my face and making my fingers look smaller. Note i recognized that i would look like some funhouse mirror effect, hence my uncharacteristic smile. I might suspect that the photographer was trying to caricaturize my hispanic features, but the wide angle was the easiest way for him to get the shot - there isn't much space in front of that rack. The composition is pretty good - on the one hand, my hand draws eyes away from the photograph, but my eyes are more focused and closer to the viewer, bringing the viewer's eyes back to the photograph. Finally, my arm is a good frame for the lower portion of the photo.

The second action shot is an attempt to make the job seem more active than it is (99% of my work is typing and watching text scroll by, not as exciting to shoot). The photographer tries to convey the sleep-deprived nature of the emergency work by shooting at an angle; i try to reinforce this by copying the newspaper slightly bent, curving the bottom portion of the original. Compositionally, the keyboards almost succeed at framing the photograph, but unfortunately it doesn't quite work - instead they appear to be trying to cop a feel.

Both photographs show a young photographer applying basic techniques to create decent enough shots. If he continues to approach his photography with thought and mindfully evaluates his work for simple mistakes, he will eventually make a good photographer.

Edit: one photo has been added to the online story. Additionally, a different photo was added to a separate story about the incident.

Recreational Waste

This weekend i bought myself some time by giving away the best book i'd begun reading in months - i'm quite certain he will get more out of the book than i would have as i barely know my nouns from pronouns, let alone transitives from intransitives.

Not wanting to study statistics, i spent Saturday revisiting an old concept - a class project from 1997, a program that parsed WCC's web-format class schedule (1997 auto-generated html, shudder), prompted a user for the desired classes, and finally figured what sections of those classes fit together time-wise. It took 3 of us 6 weeks to finish this final project and during that time i was continually up from about 10pm to 4am writing C++, much to the chagrin (i'd like to think amazement) of my girlfriend. This time it took me a day to implement most of it in perl.

So what do i have to show for 11 years? New and improved (and faster) ways to waste time.

Shame

I used to write VRML, one character at a time, but that was many years ago. Now, it seems state of the art for 3d product display has turned to pre-rendering 100's of images and displaying them via flash. Unfortunately, not all webapps act kindly when simultaneously serving 100's of small images.

I wish i could render our scenes in VRML - i really do - especially considering the lack of complexity of the scenes in question. But i'm also willing to attempt the "new style", and towards that end i've created this moveable view of a recognizer (only tested in Firefox 2/Mac and IE7/win). It's a Proof-of-Concept consisting of 3 files: the html, the css, the image. Here's a scaled-down view of the entire image i'm using:


That image is composed of 612 rendered views of a povray file that i made a couple years back, in anticipation of a compsec shirt i never printed. The PoC concept is rather simple - reposition the one large image based on what button the user clicks. With a little bit of work, it can translate to clicking and dragging the image, working better around the poles, and maintaining consistent speed.

I'd like to deliver my PoC in Flash, as that's what the original target was set for, but i'm not really sure how to begin creating a flash file - that magick is beyond my current capabilities. For now, i'm happliy disgraced by my PoC. Oh, whatever happened to the wonderful world that VRML promised?

Yes, i wear Matterhorns

The knock is quiet at first, but quickly grows louder, more urgent. An old friend is at the door, and wishes to come in.



At first she doesn't look so familiar - new haircut, new outfit, new pose - but after a couple blinks, i remember who she is. Let's sit down, reacquaint ourselves, catch up, where've you been? I missed you! Slowly, we'll regain depth into each other.

----

The math was a bit tricky at first, a lot of second guessing myself, but eventually i knew i was on the right path once i had distracted myself enough to programatically draw the above image (yes, the dissolve is deliberate). Perhaps if i had had the discipline to make it through college, then the math would have flown naturally from my fingers, and calculating the x's and y's would have been as easy as drooling. Instead, it took me a day.

But slowly, tenuously, carefully, i've started my way back to thinking in 3d. Eventually i hope to have lifted myself from a blank mind back to a well-rounded consciousness.

Yearly

Was considering wearing a smile all day today, but thought that costume might be a bit too weird for most of my coworkers, not to mention it would likely really, really scare me as well. And also, given other events, a smile didn't seem all that appropriate.

Goodbye.

Where do the children play?

Monday, 4am. 6 more hours of work and i've done my 40 hours for the week. But as before, i'll put in at least 40 more over the next 5 days. What is this? I can do 70 hours of work in 3 days, but ask me to read a textbook chapter for a class and i'll have it done in a month, maybe.

When we were much younger, my brother and i used to play a game with small soldiers and a marble. Each set up a series of soldiers, then rolled the marble to knock down the other's army; killing was so easy. Why can't i remember any other games we played together?

I've been thinking through my vacation plans for next month. The problems i had in June keep coming back: i'll lose so much money, going on vacation, is it worth it? Time enough to relax in the grave, to paraphrase the Great One.

But for now it's put-up-or-shut-up time: 4:30am, and still that one script to write. You know the one: once written, it'll either cost them a few million bucks, or go unnoticed by all but 2 or 3 people. Irregardless, it needs to be written, and instead i'm busy blogging.


In final, completely unrelated news, i've nominated a friend for sysadmin of the year in what is sure to be their most rambling, incoherent entry.

Scientific Method

Taking these science classes, both books open with a bit on the scientific method. Being a complete moron, i'd never heard of this "Method" previously and decided to attempt to apply it. Sitting at a bar (and not even drinking), i came up with a theory: i communicate using fewer words than others. A bit later i get some work via IM and see potential for a hypotheses: my IM logs will show i've written less words to others than others have written to me. That's easy enough to research, i've just over 1.5 year's worth of IM logs to parse. A few lines of perl later and here is my word count, their word count, and the former divided by the latter:

           Me    Them  Diff
           44      37  1.19
           53     181  0.30
           53     289  0.18
           94     146  0.64
          200     453  0.44
          231     401  0.58
          279     238  1.17
          323     146  2.21
          339     428  0.79
          347     392  0.89
          398     374  1.06
          399     855  0.47
          511     627  0.81
          682     773  0.88
         1251    1137  1.10
         1341    1021  1.31
         1375    1831  0.75
         1469    2596  0.57
         2519    3084  0.82
         2849    3565  0.80
         3221    2194  1.47
         3947    3707  1.06
         4908    8957  0.55
         5323    7113  0.75
         6071    3920  1.55
         6128    4624  1.33
         8124    8035  1.01
        11096   17018  0.65
        34601   53853  0.64
        64800   84477  0.77
Total: 162976  212472  0.77

Out of 30 people, 11 use fewer words than me and 19 use more words. Overall (and rounded a little), i'll use 4 words for every 5 someone else does.

Next i should look through my collected e-mail from the past few years and see if the trend continues through that medium, but instead i'm going to be distracted by my IM logs for a few more days, and past that i've still some visuals to work on.

You can safely ignore this post.

This will interest very few of my readers, make sense to even less, and be worth reading to maybe .35 of you (if you happen to find this post fully worth reading, there's a good chance i only think of you as a tenth (or less) of a person). I suggest you wait for the next post.

I have a tendency to keep my IM client logged in 24/7/365 independant of whether i'm near a computer. Currently i only run my IM client on one machine (my work machine) and remote display it onto my home machine when i'm not at work. I also log everything and have scripts that assist me in viewing the most recent messages (necessary if i kill the client to remote display it - sure i could run it in vnc but don't feel like it). Sometimes i get messages i'd prefer to read before i get back to a computer, so yesterday evening i started on a script that prints the last X minutes worth of messages. Here's the script:

#!/bin/sh
#
#prints out last few minutes worth of logged gaim messages.
# Usage: $0 [minutes]     defaults to 15 minutes.

diff=$1
if [ X"$diff" = X ]; then
        diff=15
fi

#convert time into something manageable
h=`date +'%H'`
m=`date +'%M'`
time=`expr $h \* 60 + $m - $diff`
mtime=`expr $h \* 60 + $m + $diff \* 2`

#took me only 2 hours to forget why i am using this tmpfile, it looks wrong
tmpfile=`mktemp /tmp/XXXXXX`
echo 0 > $tmpfile

#find all files that have been modified in the requested time interval
find $HOME/.gaim/logs -mmin -$diff -a \! -path '*.system*' | while read file; do
        found=0

        #run through all the lines in that file, looking for the first
        #timestamp within the range we want
        while read line; do
                if [ $found = 0 -a `echo $line | grep '^('|wc -l` = 1 ]; then
                        ch=`echo $line | sed -e 's/:.*//' -e 's/^(//' -e 's/[^0-9]//g'`
                        cm=`echo $line | sed -e 's/:..).*//' -e 's/^(..://' -e 's/[^0-9]//g'`
                        ctime=`expr $ch \* 60 + $cm`
                        if [ $ctime -ge $time -a $ctime -le $mtime ]; then
                                echo
                                echo $file | awk -F/ '{ print $8" on "$6":"}'
                                echo $line
                                found=1
                                echo 1 > $tmpfile
                        fi
                elif [ $found = 1 ]; then
                        echo $line
                fi
        done < $file
done

retval=`cat $tmpfile`
rm $tmpfile
exit $retval

With that utility, i only need to answer the following questions:
1) am i running gaim at work?
2) is one of gaim's parents sshd (and thus it's being remote displayed - would be easier to check if i installed ptree, or if this were Solaris (pargs and the other p* utils are great!))?
3) is my screensaver running at work?
4) is my screensaver running at home?
5) is my monitor at home on?

Based on that information, i can determine whether or not i am actively using a computer that i am running gaim on, and hence whether or not to run the aforementioned script that prints the last few messages. If there are any messages i can then mail these to my phone (this step would be easier if OpenBSD's mail command supported the -e option like Solaris and FreeBSD). Luckily this second part fits nicely into a small cron entry:

*/15 * * * * t=`mktemp /tmp/c.XXXXXX`; if [ `pgrep -u $USER xlock | wc -l` -ge 1 -a \( X`echo $(ps -o ucomm= -p $(ps -o ppid= -p $(ps -o ppid= -p $(pgrep gaim))))|awk '{print $1}'` != "Xsshd" -o X$(ssh inti.blackant.net 'if [ `pgrep -U $USER xlock|wc -l` -ge 1 -o `DISPLAY=localhost:0 xset q | grep "Monitor is On"| wc -l` = 0 -o `pgrep -u $USER xlock | wc -l` -ge 1 ]; then echo yes; else echo no; fi' 2>&1 | tail -1) = Xyes \) ]; then $HOME/bin/lastgaim 15 > $t 2>&1 ; if [ `wc -l < $t` -ge 1 ]; then mail -s 'gaim check' $myaddress < $t; fi fi ; rm $t

This could all be more readable and efficient in perl, and even more efficient if it were done as a plugin to the IM client (the next step, though right after upgrading the client, instead of continually patching), but sometimes it's nice to excercise shell skills. I'm sure there's plenty up there that should be done better. I'm also aware there are a million caveats (plus a bug or three) to the above, such as i get the last 15 minutes of messages, even if the screensaver's only been on for 5. Until i get the plugin written (or find the one that has already been written), i can live with that.

Sunny Times

Spent the weekend making sun jars. I found the components for a total of just under $15, and they are quite addictive to make, so i made 7 of them and have 6 more in the works. And am broke.

The Past

And now for a step back in time.

Ssh

Got ssh to work on my phone. For those of you who aren't jumping with joy right now, this means i can pretty much do all of my work from my phone. Sure, it's a little on the slow side, but i'm used to working from places like the Gobi Desert, Chanchamayo, and Kisoro, so it's not that slow.

Took a bit to figure out, mostly because i didn't do my research properly. Instead i contacted T-Mobile tech support, and they graciously helped me through my problems and directed me to the faq and forum i should have noticed in the first place.

Africa Photos

For lunch i had one of my favourite pitas and rewrote my script to make the montages more circular. Here is a comparison of various stages:




This montage is made up of 1502 photographs which is all i took on my last vacation. The center is photos of mountain gorillas, the edges are mostly birds around lakes. Now you've seen what i saw in east Africa.

I haven't sorted them yet, will do that over the weekend and then begin editing some 1000 photos from my last 3 trips.

Peru Montage, Take II

Ok, figuring out a simplistic spiral wasn't that tough, fit well into lunchtime:


The pattern (and the problems with the algo) becomes more apparent the smaller you go:


The images also need to be sorted better - using the mean instead of average of the pixel values should help a lot. Next time. And the time after that, maybe recognize the pattern inside each image.

Photos from Peru

Remember Christmas? I started looking through my photos from my Winter vacation.



Sure, same boring montage of the selected images as i did with the Mongolia photos. If my brain were up to it i'd montage them in a spiral fashion after some other Peruvian relics; for now the simplistic algorithm rules the night.

Either i've misplaced my photos from back in Lima or i didn't take any, who knows. Again as with the Mongolia photos, i'll get around to editing them Later.

Mongolia, revisited

Finally sorted through the images i took during my summer vacation in 2006 and made a montage from the unedited images. Sometime Later i'll get around to editing them all as well. I think i'm missing some, but maybe my memory is sketchy.

What?

People ask me questions on random computer topics that have little to do with my work. Like Photoshop questions - i haven't used Photoshop regularly since version 4 was popular (that's circa 1998 for those of you without the time to look it up), but today was asked: why did command-1 make my colours go away? I barely even use a mac!

Doesn't help that it took under 10 minutes to answer that question, despite not having a version of Photoshop to work with. The answer was only a google (for 'photoshop keyboard shortcuts') and a couple clicks away.

Other times it's usually a "Best Practices" response that gets them the answer, something like "did you check logs?" A surprising number of people forget to actually read the error message they get.

No, i don't mind the questions, they just make me nervous, as if i'm supposed to know everything, and the pressure is always on to actually know everything. And the various times that i don't have an answer just plain suck; i know my bro would have come up with the proper search terms to answer that question.

Passed!

This maillist response made me happy. It's maybe 50% of the time that i know the answer to a question posed on that mailling list and %25 of the time that i respond to the poster, but that's the first time i was labelled as "best solution", and about something relatively esoteric at that!

Family Bonds

A few weeks ago i started using Instant Messaging in order to ease communication with some co-workers. I've since expanded to include some friends, and i have accounts via AIM, Google Talk, MSN, and Yahoo in order to accomodate everyone else's pre-existing company of choice. I had avoided IM for years due to its more synchronous, wide-scale nature, but figured a change was in order.

A few days ago a co-worker sends me this message: good morning :). No one at work talks to me about non-work related things, so i waited for this co-worker to send me the problem that needed solved. Three minutes later, Rex asks me if i'm logged in, because the other co-worker had messaged him that i hadn't responded. I told him i hadn't responded because i hadn't been asked anything, which Rex forwards on to the co-worker, and i get the following message from that co-worker: i hear i dont know frisco aim protocol... rex is fixing it for me :).

Language is a tricky subject for me and daily i feel uncomfortable with English, despite it's being my first language. Phrases like don't look a gift horse in the mouth are strange to me and make me pause to ponder their ramifications (the Trojan Horse was a gifted horse, had the Trojans looked in its mouth perhaps Troy would not have been lost, so is the phrase deceitful in nature?). I generally try to focus on a person's questions and actions, at least at work.

Ok, it's not really language, but the way a particular culture uses its language - i haven't been immersed in any culture long enough to fully learn its language nuances. While this has a (sometimes delightful, sometimes annoying) side-effect of giving me a distinct voice of my own, its main effect seems to be distancing me from the rest of society.

I realise this situation is made more unique by my own history, that my history is shared by only a few people, and as such i can depend on one and only one person to truly understand the ramifications of someone saying good morning :) to me, from what the hell do they want? to crap, i should respond, what is appropriate? and all the hrm, 3 o's in that one in between.
That one person is my brother.

work

Was told today that i either take 3.4 weeks vacation by the end of June or i lose it. June is a long way off; i'll wait 'til May to think about it again.

In other news, the best part of my job is the free pen i get every couple months. Today's is a laser pointer/flashlight/stylus pen - it makes everything worthwhile (where everything = .1%).

Planes, Computers

Hiked a little over 4km to see Poland's largest air museum, which is free on Monday. Unfortunately i got there very late due to a mishap with some bad Chinese/Vietnamese food, and only had 30 minutes to shoot as much as i could before closing time. There were a variety of Soviet and Polish aircraft, and even a couple US, UK and German planes (older, WWII era). I saw nothing that made it stand out other than the quantity - there was one large hangar full of planes and the outside field had a couple rows of old fighter planes. None of them looked to be in pristine condition, and i didn't see a fantastic find, like a downed F-117 or the Enola Gay, but perhaps i don't realise the rarity of what i was seeing. The only other people there was a school tour, looked to be 13 year olds.

I think it's funny that on my first day in Krakow i walk 1.5 hours to an air museum before seeing the traditional castles or art museums in the area, but i have yet to make it to the Yankee Air Museum so close to where i live. I did check my email before venturing out.

A lot of the net cafes in Prague use linux. Even the free net access at the hotel i stayed at was run on a debian-based system (the others used fedora). A couple were using W98 and W2K, but i was told that linux is quit popular with the net cafes. It looked like most of them were set up to discard changes upon reboot, and they seemed to be running recent versions of software, implying either an auto-patch mechanism set up, or some a person-service that did this for the places. The only place i've been to in Krakow uses WinXP; i'll have to check out some other places tomorrow.

I wonder if someone sells a packaged linux that provides these services, or if there's a free distro out there that does all this already. Doesn't seem that it would be that difficult to set up an OpenBSD install cd to be a kiosk-type workstation, but perhaps browser plugin issues would prevent this from happening.

Languages

At the hospital today. To my right sat a woman reading a book in Hebrew - judging by the cover, it looked like a novel. To my left sat a younger woman practicing Arabic in a workbook. In the middle, i was reading a book on the internals of Solaris.

N.A.Q.

Q: What do the following have in common?

• Handy Smurf
  
• Pol Pot Pie
  
• DDS4
  

A: They are all characters in Urban Dead.

Urban Dead is the game i wanted to make many years ago, except i wanted to stage it in Ann Arbor and use photos of the area, sort of a Myst-approach. Back then (1994) i had no digital camera, scanning was a laborious process, and i had no time either, so made no headway into such a game, instead focusing on very simple javascript games and run-on sentences. Now Urban Dead is here and i love it to the point that i'll probably get banned for overuse. Go play, let me know who your characters are, maybe we'll run into each other on the streets of Malton.

Work.

I am supposed to be at work in 4.5 hours for some hardware repair on a major server. The rest of the day i get to interview people for a web programming position. Of the applicants we will be interviewing, 66% have at least one Masters degree; i am a collidge dropout.

Today at work i was talking with a coworker and an instructor when the instructor - in reference to the semester's beginning - asked us, "are you guys all fired up?" I responded, "FIRED?!?!?" as if i had only heard certain words. My coworker was kind enough to laugh and say to me, "you walk on water up there, you would be the last to get fired - the rest of us would be gone and you'd still be working there." I hope he knows how deep the "Thank you" i said was meant to be.

Still, a degree or three would be in order. Maybe i can lease one of my brother's.

Posting From Scripts

I recently got a new phone - one that takes video and photos and can e-mail these out. My goal was to post photos from my phone.

Short Version:

Initially, i wanted to write a script to do this, but couldn't get the interface to blogger working, so instead tried blogger's "go@blogger.com" solution. That didn't work either, i went back to working on a script, and finally got the script bit figured out. The two previous posts were done from my phone.

Longer Version:

I was hoping to be able to simply submit a post via e-mail. I have a wrapper script for an e-mail address on my server that parses messages from my phone, retrieves the photo and text, scales down the photo, and then e-mails blogger with an html img tag and the text. Blogger translated the tags into html entities, so i e-mailed them with a html encoding, and this mail was rejected.

Next i tried go@blogger.com, which is supposed to take picture mail from various providers, including mine, but kept getting Mail Delivery errors:
Command died with status 1: " /home/bloggermail/mail_2_blogger.par www-internal.blogger.com:80 2>>/home/bloggermail/m2b-output.log"

Then i tried using perl's XML::Atom (v 0.11) module to post, but the script would die reporting a 500 Server Error. I followed the actual tcp connection and saw that it was really getting a 401 error, and the following:
I'm sorry, we only support BASIC Authentication over SSL
Looking at the rest of the connection, i noticed that indeed the auth bit generated by XML::Atom was different than what blogger wanted, according to their sample page.

So i followed their sample page and tried to manually connect by 'telnet www.blogger.com 80' and typing in the correct data. Retrieving data worked (and i believe my auth string is correct since if i changed it i would get a "login failed" message), but posting data died with this Java error:
Exception caught but no reason given: java.io.EOFException
which led me to believe that something is wrong in their Atom implementation.

Finally i tried perl's Net::Blogger module, which implies that XML::Atom should be used instead (as do most blogger pages - the reason i didn't try Net::Blogger first). There is also a link from the Net::Blogger docs to the blogger API, and this API page states that it is no longer developed but still supported.

Sure enough, using Net::Blogger works to post messages to blogger. According to this page, blogger should accept html encoded pages, so perhaps i will again explore that later. For now, i'd like to get some speech-to-text cli software working so i can send a voice message to my e-mail that gets translated into the text of the post, instead of having to type in on my phone, and i need to come up with a way to add instructions on image editing to my text message, so the image can be cropped/lightened/etc.

Spent a lot of time working on a script so i could post from my phone. More on that later.

Oh, and this is the new generator at work.

Web Programming

You too can save big time Sprint. Or, if you're feeling more generous, you can save something else. I wonder if that little page could lead to xss or worse. Maybe they need to take some WCC compsec courses, or read my slides.

1997 VRML

Thoughts of MCMOGATK inspired me to finally put up the vrml scripts i wrote in 1997. For the most part they are unchanged, i only removed a few links that no longer exist and added correct paths. Some of the code is rather ugly and desperately needs cleaning, but i tested it out last night and the scripts do work, for the most part.

MCMOGATK

The calls to participate were like dreams, and in my sleep did i create my entries.
See if you can find them: 1996 1997

Did You-san (or is it Minowa-san?) know how exciting the possibility of participation was?

Years later, i am left wishing i had participated harder, as if that would have made a difference. I also wonder what this means: screen.

I had forgotten how much time i had put into that briefcase/city/torii. The billboards turn to face the viewer, the insides of the buildings have difference features, there's a car flying around (would have been more, and people too, but the moving buildings were already overworking my 1994-era computer), and it's a royal pain to try to navigate through. The influences are readily apparent - Blade Runner, Metropolis, etc.

And the meaning? If it ever existed, it's long since been lost in the mind of a young 21-year old.



p.s.: if you need a vrml viewer, Cortona seems to work ok in WinXP/IE.

Depressive solutions

Once every 3 or 4 hours i become frustrated with everything. Usually it's not so wretched that i become non-functional, but sometimes it is. Over the years i've learned various things i can do to overcome this depression, such as sleeping, starving and drinking. Sleep isn't always possible, starving takes too long for results, and drinking has some serious drawbacks. There are a few other activities that work predictably well, and some of them are non-hazardous to my health as well. One of these activities is taking apart computer hard drives.

Joe brought me an ancient 10mb disk drive today. It's one of the really, really old cases about the size of two cd drives. Three large, thick platters, brown instead of the shiny metallic in today's drives, circuitry that was designed to need patch cables and bent pins, and a head drive mechanism that i've never seen before. Was quite fun to take apart.

Another of those activities is finding ways to bypass security measures. We've recently installed keycard access on some of the doors. The inside, secure area has sensors which detect movement and unlock the door upon detection. Is it possible to set off the detector from the outside? This would open the door from the outside and security would see it as someone on the inside leaving. As i started to fool around with the door, a number of other people gathered around me, helping out, including my boss, the head of the IS dept. We weren't successful, but only spent an hour experimenting with the mechanism by throwing objects towards the sensor and slipping cardboard underneath the door, and didn't actually look up the specs on the device. Soon enough, though, i plan on proving that our security measures are detrimental.

Cameras

Spent part of today setting up an Axis Camera. These are pretty nice - we have one set up at work in the radio room and simple to set up. Lots of options, run linux on a cf card (don't remember the processor), along with ftp and web (via Boa). Solid state is nice. First photo taken with camera - the rest should eventually be located at http://www.wccnet.org/aboutwcc/webcamera/ and there is but one saved photo at http://www.wccnet.org/aboutwcc/webcamera/saved/wccplaza-20041130.jpg. I wonder how long it will be before one of the web folks removes that photo of Rex.