"We used their surface and projected the truth onto it."

He didn't actually say that but the sentiment is there. They also got his age wrong. A few years prior they wrote an article about the high school he went to. The reporter talks about him a bit but only has once quote.

"So, is there a proposal, or did you just want to open the discussion?"

And again a number of years prior (this is like 10 years ago now) we have a quote from an article about the boy scouts in Park Slope.

"Not really"

I'm fairly certian he's mentioned in one more artcle about a town meeting her went to that was on domestic violence in specific communitites, but I'm sure I'll be corrected soon enough. The quotes don't do him justice, but the articles might, they're not bad reads. I'm proud of him. Not for being in the newspaper but for doing things that he believes in. It's just cool that they're newspaper worthy.

–Francis

PS (I got more updates in the works but I've been a bit sick.)

Me and Miracle Berry Tablets

Miracle fruit or berries makes sour things taste sweet. An effect that apparently is quite amazing.

From the supplier's website.
The active ingredient in the Miracle Berry Fruit, known as Miraclulin coats the tongue and blocks out the taste bud receptors which are responsible for sour, bitter and acidic flavours. The outcome is that all foods which taste sour, bitter or acidic miraculously come to taste sweet.

Once I was told you could solve the problem with transporting "Miracle" berries by freeze drying them (they spoil quickly) and that you could buy said berries online for $20 dollars, I immediately bought them.

It comes with 10 pills each formerly being 3 berries. Think geek says you should cut them in half for twenty servings. The official supplier claims that even fresh berries start loosing their effects due to age and that problem doesn't exist after it's been freeze dried.

I'm going to have to try it to find out =)

–Francis

If only I had the cash to burn…

This would have been the best website ever. But some squatter will pick it up no doubt.

And I'm even invited to a dinner tomorrow night, chemists make wonderful chefs.

–Francis

PS Oh and you better belive I've got a backlog of stuff to share.

I had my headphones on, so I just looked at him.

He took the card and flipped it over, read the front for a while. (You know, the side with a big picture and the phrase "Did you know you can refuse a subway search?") and then flipped it over and took some time reading the back. The seat next to him was empty so I sat down, took off an ear of my headphones and said he could keep it.

The people in front of us kept looking at me, and then up at the other post card I had put near the ceiling. I'm glad I put it back side facing out so they could read what it's about. I don't think many people bother to turn them over and I don't think people need a pretty picture to get the point. I mean the back has a lot more to it and is probably more interesting during the boring commute to work. They guy finished up and put the card back up where I was trying to stick it. Nodded at me and then just stared forward like everyone else. I put my head phones back on sat back and enjoyed the ride.

A few stops later someone new was in front of me and grabbed the card from behind me. He picked it up and spent a few minutes reading over the back. The people who had seen me put it up started looking at me again, I just smiled and sat back. The guy flipped it over a few times and then he pocketed it! I couldn't help but grin a little. I'm not so sure about the first guy, but this second one obviously was learning something. He seemed genuinely interested which makes me wonderfully happy. =)

Despite my personal thoughts on Security Theater (that's actually a good link) this card is kept generally neutral and doesn't question if the subway searches keep us safer or not. (They don't!) They do explore why you don't have to be searched and take the position that giving up your rights needlessly is a bad idea. I'll have other cards that talk about why bad security is worse then none at all. Which is an idea I've gotten a lot of resistance to. I'd rather know something is unsafe then to think something is safe and be wrong.

In the meantime there are at least two people in the subway today that know they have Fourth Amendment Rights and know how to safely execute their rights when asked to give them up with out probably cause.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

It was made for a Gizmondo competition by "Noriko" — Composed with sounds of a failing Hitachi hard-disk. I lost his link, but you can probably google for it. It's really quite beautiful and peaceful. Though once I was diagnosing a laptop and this song came on and freaked me out. You never want want to hear these sounds coming from your computer.

Oh and if you ever do hear these sounds coming from your computer, turn it off (pull the plug) and call me. ;-)

–Francis

Longest I've gotten on this laptop so far I think.

–Francis

Ask her about your dreams. =)

–Francis

Social Graphs

Last night over dinner I was given an idea about graphing social graphs. I'm not sharing that with you here yet.
Wait, what?
Thanks to all the new interest in Social Networks, i.e. Facebook, MySpace (which is evil and must be destroyed), LinkedIn and even flickr there's been some interesting developments.

All those sites in one way or another are considered Social Networks they provide a way to link people to other people either by friendship, admiration (of their photography for example), business relationships or any other idea they deem relevant. These connections are called your "Social Graph". And while ever site differs on what exactly links two people they all deal with managing and using your graph for both your benefit and theirs.

People are starting to take this idea a little further by displaying their social graphs on their own blogs (akin to blogrolls or just linking to friend's websites) by using microformats (a way to put info on a website so it is both human and machine readable) such as XFN (The Xhtml Friends Network) which can be considered an improvement because it puts them in direct control over their graph, they can take it down, delete it, share as little or as much as they want and use that information anywhere they want. They can also share things about trust, which can go a long way but is a topic for another discussion. A problem is that most social networking websites do not allow you to take your graph and leave them. If you quit you usually don't get to take any of your data with you. And they don't usually delete everything either.

Facebook decided to take your data, the social graph, and allow you to share it with made for facebook applications. They do a reasonable job at protecting your privacy while still allowing apps full access to who your friends are, where your photos are, what groups are you in, and more. Most things are shared not by name but by an id number, and while anyone who runs an app can still keep a copy of every one of your photos on fb if they wanted to I have to tell you your personal photos aren't that interesting while the applications can be interesting even though most are not.

Google being the benevolent overlords that they are created something called Open Social. Which is a set of API's that allow websites to talk to each other. Facebook release their api's so people could make applications for facebook, open social isn't for google, it's for everyone to use. So I could make an application and have it work on many different social websites. Google's real plans are a lot more complicated, they're doing something their excellent RSS reader which allows you to share RSS feed items with the click of a mouse. A few of my close friends are using this and it's cool. They're leveraging the google reader to be the core of google's own social networking platform whatever it may be. (Though, I'd argue, that Gmail, Gtalk, and google reader are already a fine social networking platform. Buddy lists and address books are not so different from "social graphs") The more people who use open social the more access they'll have to information.

I've shared a lot so far and you're probably not still with me. Let me share two more links.
The coining of the term social graphs which is the post that caused most of what I've talked about to happen, and a nice easy to follow write up about Social Graph's Concepts and Issues by ReadWriteWeb.

So what's the point of me sharing all this? Besides this being an interesting new direction technology is leading us to, it's allowing me to play with Graph Theories and I like learning new stuff and making cool things with it.

More later!

–Francis

Also now you can boot your entire PC from truecrpyt! This is the first free implementation of this that I know of for windows. (I'm probably wrong.) But from what I'm reading it's really really easy to do. That is probably a first. But without waiting for your entire drive to encrypt, you can basically set it up, reboot, and it will start to encrypt everything as you continue to use your computer normally. You can even reboot (or crash!) before it finishes and it will pick up where it left off. I wonder how much this would slow your system down, and how much of a pain it would be to fix hard drive problems. I imagine it would mess with volume managers, backup software (like mozy or trueimage) and in the end whoever has to fix it (me). It's still cool, and worth playing with if you have a spare system laying around. I wouldn't tempt bootcamp with it, but I encourage anyone with vmware or parallels to goto town.

http://www.truecrypt.org/

Home encryption getting easier to do right every day! I just home it works ;-)

In fact let me help you out. I have an edited podcast of Cory Doctorow's reading and a Gutenberg PDF of the book. Both perfectly legal as Bruce not only let his book be distributed for free electronically (since 1992!) he also gave Cory permission to read it as long as he distributed his reading for free. See where I'm going with this? Cory publishes all his work under The Creative Commons License which says as long s I mention it's his work then I can share it as much as I like.

So have it it. I made a torrent, you can download it right here.
DOWNLOAD TORRENT OF THE HACKER CRACKDOWN

What's a torrent? Well I can't blame you it's sorta new, and not everyone knows what it is yet. Go download uTorrent or azureus and read up on how torrents work. Both utorrent and azureus have documentation on how to use them but you basically take my small file and use it to get the set of files for the Hacker Crackdown. It's a large mp3 and a pdf. I'd give you the files right here but they're big and I have to pay for my server's bandwidth! In fact I have a large enough audience that if I offered both files up for download and paid for all the bandwidth that you would all use I'd be in the poor house pretty quick.

So as long as people will "seed" the torrent (as I do at home, but as of this writing so do 15 other people so I don't even have to anymore.) then anyone can download the files free of charge. And it frees me of charges too, because you're getting the file mostly from each other instead of me.

I'm glad technology like this exists.

July 31, 2007: 60-Second Science
Caffeine, Exercise May Protect Skin From Sun
Studies with mice found that moderate amounts of caffeine and exercise lowered the skin cancer risk from UV light exposure. Karen Hopkin reports.

Listen here, it will only take a minute.

They said the mice they observed had about two cups a day and mice that received more coffee actually fared worse then the mice who had no coffee at all. Something about the caffeine coupled with the exercise kills off damaged cells, which if they didn't die could grow cancerous.

R. Stevens of the illustrious Diesel Sweeties (now in papers!) pointed out Matt Madden and his Exercises in Style where he took one simple real world situation and presented it a about 10 different ways. And if I read this right he has a book coming out with a lot more. It's really neat. I like the concept.

I've got most of my comics in RSS feeds these days so I don't need a list of links to click anymore. Seriously Google Reader is amazing. (Click here for a feed of most of the comics I read daily — note that link is not how I read them daily, I use google reader, that's just a prettied up rss feed..)

–Francis

1) Pick a day (and forget to tell people right away)
2) Find a venue (my house, your house, whatever)
3) Add people
4) Add music
5) Add beer
6) (optional) Add hard liquor

And no matter what, as long as there are people + beer + music people seem to have a good time. Honestly I never though Id ever throw parties, but it's worked out quite nicely a whole bunch of times. I think it started with just a few friends, and slowly expanded to have like 10, 15, 20 people at at time. Which is just right for my tastes. People I love having fun, that's the idea.

For the record, the two photographers (minus a few camera phone pics by other people) were Mike and Jenny.

So for my birthday, I decided I wanted throwies. I got the idea from The Graffiti Research Lab, they developed them and gave them out to large groups of people encouraging them to "alter their surroundings". One of their biggest targets was "The Alamo" or "The Cube" that's in the village over on Astor Place. (I'm borring from wiki for the details, but I remember picking throwies off the cube after the event. Oh and I have to mention the unrelated Rubix Cube prank.)

So instead of buying beer in large quantities, I bought throwie parts. And with the help of the very simple instructions from instructables I decided on what parts to buy and after they arrived I stole a few rolls of packing tape from work, got a few box cutters (from my surplus order a few weeks ago) and I was all set. That's literally all the preparation I did for my birthday.

So once people started showing up (a few I had to convince to leave a showing of "the life of Brian" at another party, I promised they could finish the movie at my house but once they saw the lights everybody forgot about it.) I sat them down at a table in the living room and showed them how to make a few throwies. Nobody .. well almost nobody knew that was coming, but as it turns out, arts and crafts (like this anyway) are a lot of fun, and people are easily bribed with pizza.

Come back later for part 2.

–Francis

The event of an evening! PETRA LIVES!

My raid, my backup server, it's now named (hold on.. I got to log into it, setting up drivers and whatnot..) Petra!

I decided to revive the name since the old Petra couldn't possibly still be around anymore. She was my first server! and she was stolen by Stuyvesant high school back in 2001. I could still access her up until 2003 when she was rooted and I moved all my crap off of it, came up with better passwords and quit being so naive about computer security. (I sucked and continue to suck at it… I hope my clients don't read my blog.)

The only reason why I suck (despite not keeping on top of everything) is that eventually, bugs will be found in anything and be used to execute code. And once you got your own code running the box is yours. So I've been keeping safe by not running any servers, nothing to attack.

I'm keeping this server off my network, and keeping my clients data (and mine) encrypted so even if the box does get rooted (and by all means it's possible) the worst that will happen is everyone needs to backup again. That being said, there's a lot to do to lock this thing down, that I wont go into here.

Wooo!!!

I've never had an array so big. *snif

I've got to reinstall, and I'm probably going to go with the 32 bit version of windows 2003 server. These screen shots are on a .. trial.. copy of Windows Server 2003 x64 (64 bit version) but since none of my software runs 64 bit.. there's no reason for it. And even if I could find a reason for it, I'm not convinced that all the drivers have 64 bit support. (I hate this motherboard vendor.) The unused 65.18 gig volume is for booting. When I get my copy of 2003 server, I'll slipstream the raid drivers and install directly to the raid), the 1331.79 gig volume is for the backing up.

Oh and the reason why I couldn't get it to work the first.. 5ish times was that the bios was out of date, some chipset wasn't getting called right and during windows install the system would lock up. I was convinced it was the raid (I've had bad luck with them in the past.) and it took until tonight to make the free time (seriously, all my neighborhood friends were busy, all of them) to pull the raid controler and determine that it still didn't work. The not working of this motherboard had me so enraged that I was ready to toss it and buy another one. But then I'd have to make sure it took the same cpu and ram and everything.

I ended up finding a bios update…

I recently got really good at putting bios updates in floppy images and then burning cds with floppy emulation boot loaders. Sounds complicated, but it's not (I just have a really stupid way of doing it, I wish I had a single program that could do it or something), most computers with floppy drives have broken floppy drives, and most older computers that need bios updates need to do it in dos, which means booting off a floppy. (Well most of the time.. these are computers, 10,000 ways to solve any problem.) Came in handy at work.

Yawn, I'm going to let the raids rebuild over night, and I've got to find some way to reset the raid controller's password (I set it one night while drinking, I was very happy I got the thing powered up) because I forgot it. But even if I don't finish this tomorrow (well.. I wont) I need to get my copy of windows and the backup software. I'm just happy this project is back to moving along.

=D

–Franics

1500 Gigabytes

=D

–Francis

PS. I know we haven't spoken in so long, and here I come just flaunting my new raid… I'll make it up to you baby, promise.

Just start clicking, you'll see, A lot of repeats the deeper you go, but there are some really good photos in there. I wonder if I could program this trick, use the photos from the gallery or something. (*Stores that idea for a different day*)

Anyway, Enjoy the link.

–Francis

(And with all the fans turned down, (Yea I got a fan controler too) a cool 40 degrees.)

–Francis

I heard rumors of a mac port but for now here's our 32 bit windows binary. =)

Oh yea, I went skiing too!

Here's why.

Roborooter's own FU image generator!

That link can have any filename and any message (even blank!) and it will return a random FU image! I'm going to work on a way to encode the messages into the url so people visiting the link don't know what they're in for. Anyway, I'm off!

–Francis

And Greg from Real Life Comics has made my day.

I still think it's about ten thousand miles from being useful, I mean someone got windows 3.1 to run on it, we could at least have audio or video chat with a USB (it's got that too) webcam. … ooo I'd kill for a touch screen on that baby, heck even just a stylus so they could keep that screen behind the protective plastic…

One day it will be useful, one day.

–Francis

Google has a nice glowing logo today with out any mention of Christmas or Hanukkah, but when I did google searches for Christmas and Hanukkah and found these little easter eggs. =)

Kwanzaa too.

They were all kids, what happened?

The thing reminds me of stomp, I've seen that play like 5 times.