Porn Clerk Stories
I recently ran across something on reddit called the True Porn Clerk Stories. It is the self-told tale of a burgoning actress who is desperate enough for work to take up a job at a videostore. It is an Old Relic of the internet - I had stumbled across it many years ago but never had a chance to finish it, and lost the link. I was very happy to find it again, and I recommend it to any of my readers.
The writer has great style, and as I’m sure you would expect, a pretty open mind on pornography. It’s a good read.
Also for anyone who likes geeky things and politics, reddit is like a bidirectional digg with nested comments. As for the stories and the community, I for one thing they’re far better than digg and slashdot, but everyone has their own preferences. You’d do well to check it out as well.
What I ended up doing this summer
I was a little bit embarassed to admit this, so I didn’t post earlier: I didn’t end up getting a job with Shotgun. For reasons not under my control, they were unable to hire me this summer. I’m still on good terms, and hopefully someday I’ll get a chance to work with them again; but not this summer.
Now that I’ve found some other work, I’m more comfortable with posting about it. I applied to and was accepted for a research position at UOIT, under the supervision of Dr. Heydari. I’ll be working with Dr. Heydari to model and simulate WAN networks, and more specifically the way that they fail. The concept will be that I will be simulating link and node failures, and watching what the network does in response. At first I will be using standard IP link failure handling, which is basically the stuff we learned in CCNA; routing protocols notice the change, and figure out the new best path, and then eventually converge. This takes between seconds and minutes. The goal is to make a huge improvement on this time within autonomous networks, possibly via a protocol called MPLS.
I’ll be working in an industry-standard network modeller and simulator known as OPNET. Part of my duties as a research student will be to study the capabilities of OPNET and find a way to fulfil the goals of the project. My first goals are to determine how to make a node or link disconnect, and furthermore, see if it is possible to disable all of the links within a certain radius of a coordinate (which will simulate severe a local outage, such as a natural disaster). The second goal that I have in the short term is to work on automation. I need to be able to get OPNET to load a topology, break the network in some way, log what happens, and dump that into a file for later review - all done thousands of times, in slightly different ways.
After that, I’m not sure. There’s a possibility might have to write some OPNET code (which is really just C with an OPNET library), in order to help with the modelling of MPLS and the improvement of speed of convergence. I’ll post more when I know.
OpenID strikes again
Ugh, so it turns out my old provider for openid, gpgpid has gone unavailable. That sort of screws me over. Or it would, if I actually used openid for anything with a point to it. I don’t know if it’ll be back, but it gpgid pretty much failed as a provider anyway. I haven’t done a significant security audit on it but I think it may have been vulnerable to man in the middle attacks after all, since it would authenticate you for an entire browser session. Also, it didn’t support any extensions.
Either way, I’ve decided that I’ll implement my own pgp-authenticated openid system on l3ib.org. One or more of the other lazy l3ib bastards might be helping me with it, who knows. It will hopefully fail less and be more friendly than gpgpid, and if it mysteriously dies I’ll at least be able to figure out why. I hope.
There are official libraries for openid, for php, python, and ruby. The ruby library requires rails, which is total overkill for this project. Php just plain fails. So, I guess I’m going with __lolpython(self).
The next chapter
I’m finally done exams.
So what am I doing for the summer? Starting on May 1st, I’m starting employment with Shotgun Software. Their website is not very informative, but it does explain why it is lacking in information, in a way. Without revealing too much, they basically have this gigantic ruby on rails webapp which is intended to be a private site for a company to run on their intranet or out on the internet with no public access. It is targeted at 3d animation studios to help them manage the massive amounts of assets and other massive amounts of “stuff” that needs to be managed for a high production-quality 3d animation. Everything is very relational; the ruby on rails code (at least when I was working on it) had tons of polymorphic model objects and HasAndBelongsToMany relations. It got confusing.
I worked with them two summers ago as a ruby on rails developer, which was a very rewarding job. I’ve kept in touch with them, and I’ll be working again. But, this time I will not be a developer.
This summer, I’ll be working under Chris Opena who is shotgun’s official Security/IT guy. This is a bonus for me since my specialty is in security. I haven’t got many details about what I’ll be doing as soon as I start, but Chris has alluded to things: He’d like to assign me a security related task, and an infrastructure related task. I look forward to both. Perhaps I’ll go into it when I find out.
El Ten Eleven
So, I don’t listen to only metal. A few weeks ago, I was told to check out the work of El Ten Eleven. I’m not entirely sure how to describe what genre of music they are. Wikipedia calls them post-rock, whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. Genres of art are the most frustrating topics ever, since the only way you can know what anyone is talking about is if you already knew what they were talking about in the first place. They have a light, instrumental only, sort-of-rock sound. It is impossible to describe, which is why I urge you to just listen for yourself; which brings me to my next topic.
At the bottom of El Ten Eleven’s merch page, they have their newest album Every Direction is North on sale, online, for $10 via paypal, available in both mp3 and FLAC. As anyone who has seen my music collection can tell you, I have an irrational affinity for music available in FLAC format.
As a quick overview for anyone who doesn’t know, mp3 (and many other formats, known as lossy compression formats) achieves significant compression by discarding some of the data that is not considered to be critical. You’ll most often see lossy formats in use with audio and video. FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. To quickly sum up, it is a free-to-use (no patents or royalties, and the format is openly documented) audio codec, and it does not throw away any of the original data - so it retains all of the sound data as the original, and as such will sound identical to the original. The downside: it is only about half the size as an uncompressed file. An album in mp3 is maybe 80 megabytes - in FLAC, it is 400. Many people will say that the human ear is not sensitive enough to tell the difference between a high-bitrate mp3 (more of the original data is kept with a higher-bitrate), and a pristine track. They’re right - I can’t tell the difference. However, I did say that all of this is irrational. Storage is cheap.
Anyway, back on topic; I was overjoyed that they provided the album in FLAC, since it was of a higher quality than the album I had already pirated. So, I forked over the $10 and downloaded their stuff. At this time, I was surprised by how low-tech the security was on their online store. After paying them at paypal, they simply gave me a link back to another part of their site where I could download their music. Go ahead, see for yourself. As a computer security enthusiast, I’m amused by how easily a non-paying person can get the material that is supposed to be reserved for paying customers. On the other hand, I can’t help but wonder if the apathy is on purpose. El Ten Eleven does not lose anything if I publish that link. In fact, if it wasn’t for piracy in the first place, they never would have recieved that $10 from me, since I never would have heard of them. So much in the way that I tried out their music, I suggest you do the same. Download their album, and if you like it enough to support an independent artist selling their music online, pay the $10 for the album.
This situation draws a little bit of insight on the copyright battle that’s going on between the recording industry and the supposed ‘pirates’. If it wasn’t for piracy, and a security hole, none of you ever would have even heard of El Ten Eleven, and neither would I. That’s at least $10 that El Ten Eleven wouldn’t have right now if it wasn’t for piracy. How many more people will buy their album now that I’ve told you about it? If one person does, then it is worth it. And if nobody does - El Ten Eleven neither gains nor loses anything. How is that not a good deal for the artists?
Getting the RSS icon to show up in Firefox’s address bar
I don’t use firefox, so I never really paid attention to that RSS hint that it gives you, but one of my readers mentioned that it would be way easier to find the feed for my site if I provided the right hints for firefox to pick up the feed. For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, see this screenshot. Google didn’t really provide much information, but I did manage to find some help from sponge and floffle on IRC.
You can use some code like this:
This is described in more detail by w3c’s link tag hints.
Also, IE7 is capable of picking up this hint, although it handles it slightly differently; it has a RSS icon in the toolbar instead of the address bar (which I suppose makes more sense to me), which can be seen in this screenshot. See a screenshot here. Epiphany handles it differently again, displaying the feed icon in the status bar, along with the padlock which indicates whether encryption is on. This makes the most sense to me, but I suppose I’m biased. Finally, here’s a screenshot of Epiphany’s handling of the RSS hint, this time provided by me.
Finally I’d like to thank Sang from nerdvana for their article “What is RSS?”, which is where I got the screenshots of IE7 and Firefox.
Mindless - Magic: The Gathering (of dorks)
Yesterday, my periodic addiction to Magic: The Gathering was renewed again by my roommate. It is a really awesome game, and anyone who passes up playing because of the dorky stigma is just missing out.
Along with playing MTG again comes playing around with mindless again. Mindless is a posix/GTK clone of apprentice. And by clone I mean it has a compatible protocol with apprentice, but has a significantly better interface. For those that don’t know, apprentice and mindless are deck prototyping tools. They allow players to simply provide desk lists to the program, and emulate playing a game with another player over the network. The program itself does not actually enforce any game rules - it simply provides a way for the two players to maintain the essentials for a game - a table, a life counter, a hand, deck, graveyard, etc. Whether or not these things are used within the game rules is up only to the two players. Basically it provides a virtual means for two people to play over a network, and without actually owning the cards. Mindless and apprentice essentially operate on the honour system - and also there’s no way to stop someone from building a deck out of rare cards that would costs hundeds of dollars - but it is still fun to play around with your decks on a casual basis.
On the downside, mindless doesn’t appear to be actively maintained anymore, and you can’t find an up-to-date card database for it - until now - read on. The only working link provided in the mindless FAQ is from 2005. I don’t know if apprentice ever used a plaintext card database, but it certainly doesn’t anymore, so that avenue is cut off. I wasn’t able to find a more recent database dump from WOTC.
Fortunately, not all hope is lost quite yet. With some brute force, it is possible to update the database from 2005 with the cards from the newer blocks. Gatherer refuses to output the entire card database (i.e. when you search with an empty string), but it will accept it when you do that for entire blocks. So, it was possible for me to take the dump from 2005 and copy-paste the extra blocks onto the end. It was somewhat tedious but thankfully only three blocks have been released since then, as far as I can tell. Apparently mindless doesn’t care about sorting, which is nice - no post-processing required on the card database file. So, as long as I hang onto this file, I can just update it with the new cards from each block when they’re released. I 7zipped this file and uploaded it for everyone to enjoy: Updated mindless card database.
So, if you ever played MTG before and are interested in giving it a try again (or have a newfound interest for it now), grab mindless or apprentice, and get my attention. I’m always looking for people to play casual games with.
OpenID
I just added OpenID support to the blog. This means that people with OpenIDs can reply to postings without registering, and will skip comment moderation (at least until the spammers catch on). It is also possible to associate OpenIDs with registered accounts on this site.
I got my own OpenID from a site called gpgid. When I want to authenticate, gpgid site provides a random string of text, which I then have to shove into gpg like this:xclip -o | gpg --clearsign
I then paste the signature back into gpgid’s website, and they check that against the pubic key that I provided when I signed up. It may not be the most elegant method in the world, but it works, and is quite secure. There’s apparently a smoother way to do it via a firefox extention, but I don’t use firefox. Maybe if I get bored enough I’ll write an extention for epiphany.
Finally, OpenID provides a method of allowing you to use any webspace under your control for your OpenID URL. I mapped gpgid’s page into a URL on my own domain: fitzsimmons.ca/openid. Go ahead and take a look at it now - it is just a very simple HTML page that tells the “relying party” where to look. I belive this is technically the old way of doing it, but it works.
New Fitzsimmons.ca blag up and running
2008/03/21 13:17: nightm4re> also get a blagAnd here we are. A few months ago, I asked sponge if he would be nice enough to hack me up a webdesign for fitzsimmons.ca, and surprisingly enough, he actually bothered to do it. So, finally with the right moviation from m4re’s comment, I set forth to finally turn fitzsimmons.ca from a random file dump into a “real website”. For those that care (0), the file dump is still available (albiet significantly cleaned up) at http://fitzsimmons.ca/stuff/. I spent about 30 minutes searching for blog software and quickly settled on wordpress, due to apathy. I expected that designing a theme for it would be sheer agony, but it only turned out to be fairly painful. Yay. Then again, I didn’t actually do any of the hard work. I just took sponge’s design, fucked with the colours, chopped it into pieces, and told wordpress where to shove the content. Of course, shoving content into things isn’t nearly as easy as it sounds when how to do that is compeltely undocumented. Either that or the documentation is impossible to find, which is effectively the same thing. So again I just learned by example - the two default themes provided with wordpress were simple enough for me to decipher that I could at least make mine work. What I’ve got now is mostly incomplete - as far as I know I have no support whatsoever for things like archiving or tags or categories. But, since I also don’t really care about any of those things (yet), I’ve decided to not expend any more effort with this webdesign business until I absolutely have to.
