A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness,
satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death. -- Paul Valery

(more...)

The notion of "TransAction Numbers" I like, carrying the paper slip I don't - because paper encrypts so very badly and I'm lugging my Palm with me all the time anyway.

gocr takes care of the OCR, and generally works fine but BSTS...if comparing two sheets of meaningless numbers wasn't so ridiculously, mind-numbingly, dull. Can't have that.

So I had to look for a cheap, quick and dirty solution for that not-quite-problem, and after ten minutes I had it: espeak.

It's a fairly simple speech synthesizer, which unfortunately insists on pronouncing numbers as numbers, not individual digits, but a trivial half-line of perl data massaging took care of that.

Sure, espeak sounds like a post-lobotomy HAL 9000 with a hangover, but hey, it makes sanity-checking of the OCR results a lot faster and easier.

(Enlightened) Laziness is a virtue :-)

...

And it's pretty empty in this here house, without her around.

Therefore Tor appeals to me, a lot: no logs. decent crypto. grass-roots. hard to subvert completely. Good.

So in an attack of unwarranted altruism I'm doing my tiny bit to improve this bloody place. (mind you, with limited bandwidth and not as an exit router just yet, cause I want to monitor that experiment a bit longer before I extend the service)

Since today, wol also serves as an exit relay for a small number of well-known services.

A $5 PIC can do the same things and exposes you properly to what you're doing - preferrably in assembler, not C. Sure, large projects are better coded in C - later on, after you've mastered the low level; until then there's nothing better than assembler for learning how a computer works.

• born 78145500 seconds after the epoch (which is 1972-06-23 MEST 13:05 for you ctime-deficient)
• Austrian by chance, now living in Australia by choice
• classic hacker in appearance and habit
• graduate of the Technical University of Vienna (with the degree of "Dipl.-Ing. Tech. Math." which is somewhere between a "masters" degree in computer science and/or mathematics and a full PhD) and recently of Bond Uni (with a PhD).
• now gainfully employed at a place rivalling the Australian International University.
• sysadmin, security consultant, developer etc.
  This is not my full resume; if you need one please ask.
• and lots of other things no one cares about to know...but if you do, have a look in the interests section.

She also missed my landing, but that wasn't a great loss: southerly winds means northerly approach over the power lines and my slightly rough fly-against-the-wall landing didn't really have to be recorded.

Now this couldn't happen to me: first this climate is too humid for meat staying fresh long (and my ceiling fans wouldn't suffice for making me into biltong), and furthermore my money would run out, my house would go back to the bank (but that's only for a few more years) and so the vultures would find me. Sky burial by bank clerk, anyone?

Sort-of bad: there aren't many other scenarios for me being discovered.

After ages with Voodoofone I've moved over to different gang named ThinkMobile (while keeping my number: porting works fine in this country). They resell both Tel$tra and Voodoofone, but with very decent customer support and both better features and price (for low-volume users like me) IMHO.

ThinkMobile is fishing for new customers and is happy to give both newbie and referrer $24 credit each. So, if you want to do me some good why not join up, quote MATES and my name and we both benefit a little?

The newest bit right now: somebody higher up in the food chain decreed that the whole level 5 (where the IT school offices are) must be renovated, presto. Not at the end of the semester, or during the slightly longer christmas break, no: now, three quarters into the semester. Duration: just until the beginning of next semester (but don't hold your breath, plans in this place never work out).

And we get no temporary offices at all.

We are allowed to do our research and lecture prep work from home.

And not all types of prep work are easily doable from home, plus the work firewall is setup fairly strictly and VPNs? Can't have that, would be too useful.

The lectures and labs are of course held in person, so we'll have the joy of wandering around campus between the scheduled sessions, just like hobos.

So over the last few weeks, with all the fun and excitement of packing up our office contents and preparing our workarounds for all the damn mess this thing causes us, some semi-subversive posters have popped up all over around our offices (wasn't me, honest).

And here they are, for your amusement.

"IRC is a network full of chat rooms (or "channels") where a lot of scary internet people (or "perverts") hang out.
...
so i replaced eliza's tiny, boring script with a massive dumb blonde script that has like 3,800 responses on all sorts of topics, but mostly sex. jenny18 is very horny and she loves talking to horny guys. and everyone knows the best place to talk to horny guys is on dalnet irc sex channels."

"this goes to show that lots of challenge in AI is in speaking naturally, and on the internet most people speak like idiots, so you can sort of cheat around a lot of things."

Never mind that the Oz powers are happily ass-licking war mongers like G.W. Shrub who supports killing anybody for any silly reason, but the musician, oh he must be Exceedingly Evil. (Right. I don't like his sugary music much either.)

So, how about all the people who have not stated that they don't support dousing stupid politicians in petrol and lighting them? And what about those who haven't said they don't support our new weevil overlords? And what about those who haven't said they don't support skippy's misdeeds? And what about those who'd *dream* of a plague that takes out every single politician attempting to represent more than 50 people? (FSVO 50)

...

...picture az wandering off to code a tiny bit of perl for listing the infinite number of things which one has to say one doesn't support before being let into Kavanagh's Kave...

Picture me wookiepedia-surfing: from Mythbusters to Dirty Jobs to Body Farms in about 20 minutes. The article on Body Farms links to a two-page excerpt from "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" by Mary Roach. A very interesting read indeed.

Parting gem, for the squeamish:

"If you lower your head to within a foot or two of an infested corpse (and this I truly don't recommend) you can hear them feeding. Arpad pinpoints the sound: 'Rice Krispies.'"

So, me being me, the first thing (literally) that I did was take it apart. Completely, down to removing the piston ring from the piston.

This has changed today: you can now configure it to listen for quick "flip-flops" of your mode switch for cyclic mode (before it only recognized high-to-low transitions). That way you can run something else on the same channel (with a splitter cable) as long as that something else doesn't have a big problem with such "short blips".

Source code and manual have been updated:

• the main source
• some small helper routines
• the manual

Enthusiastic tool application quickly demonstrated one big issue with any metal FPOS (remember, I said cheap): very rough edges. Slipping and sliding the back of your finger along such edges is highly counter-indicated.

But the icing on the cake came later: I did, of course, finish the disassembly after wrapping up my finger - only to find out that the whipper snipper engine is beyond salvation. Just about zero compression, most rubber/plastic parts rotten. A new one will likely cost less than the replacement parts, never mind the time and effort for a potential repair.

WAAAAAAH!

663 is an overwhelmingly larger number than 13, and the optimist in me (yes, I have my weak moments) would like to think "Good! Looks like some of the pollies have grown a spine - at least temporarily. They might even be worth their feed".

Then the realist in me sees that the 663 piggies might be all equal, but the 13 pigs could very well be More Equal: Our Helpful Friends in the Content Cartel will certainly do their best to make sure of that. Bastards.

So why not build a converter?
(more...)