sstream of consciousness - Fun

Photos on Zooomr and Flickr, LiveJournal

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 10:24:40 -0600

I put some of my photos to two photo hosting sites: Zooomr and Flickr. Zooomr is nice but until recently its main advantage was geotagging, but the other day Flickr announced geotagging capability too and full-blown Yahoo maps beat API-exposed Google Maps hands down. So I will probably settle on Flickr.

If you know Russian language you may also read my blog on LiveJournal.

I am a nerd God (and atheist too)

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 12:59:25 -0700

Digital Fortress is crap

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 19:52:25 -0700

I've just finished yet another portion of "mental floss" (I borrowed this term from Brad, thank you). Dan Brown's "Digital Fortress". Oh, is that floss too thick.

I read "Da Vinci Code" and "Angels and Daemons" before and had that feeling that Dan just pours a mishmash of cr.. er.. creative streams onto reader's brain, hoping that s/he will not go down deep into details. As I am not that into art and history I just relaxed and took these bocces as they are. Visible antimatter sure did not look right but hell with it, I am not big afficionado of physics either.

But "Digital Fortress" is a totally different story. IANAPC (I am not a professional cryptographer), but I sure know enough so that my head cracked after reading this endless feed of these crooked lies. There was so much crap, I could not even keep the list in my head. Heres what I remember.

There is no Bergofsky principle. It just cannot be. If key length is greater than message length this encryption is unbreakable. By definition.

64-bit cipher takes around 10 minutes. And million bit cipher takes 3 hours. What???! If we take former statement as true, it will take around 3 hours to crack 68-bit cipher and breaking 128-bit cipher will exceed universe lifetime by several orders of magnitude.

How in the world passive analyzed encrypted text could turn into a worm, or a virus? Theoretically that is possible, but that would mean NSA programmers were really really really talented and succeeded in killing themselves from water pistol, so to say.

Even if we leave crypto, I do not get how a person with an IQ 170 see that NDAKOTA is an anagram of TANKADO. I saw that immediately and read couple of pages several time trying to understand how I managed to miss the fragment where that fact strikes two brilliant cryptoanalitics. If found that fragment closer to the end of the book. Feh, even amateurs would do better.

When I saw the phrase about "difference between elements" I immediately thought about subtraction of chemical elements in periodic table. Brightest NSA minds then spend precious minutes comparing tons of characteristics of nuclear bombs. Whom do I send a resume?

American government spends gazillions of dollars on NSA, yet lets its communications to flow through conventional Internet.

A smartest NSA employee that cracked NSA backdoor in the past does not lock his computer!! It's even less likely than orthodontist not brushing his teeth.

I could go on and on with this list but I am already too bored now.

Well, at least SKIPJACK story is close to reality.

This is sooo funny. Oh wait...

Mon, 21 Nov 2005 21:27:11 -0700

Looking at wordpress.com I found a blog named "Go Flock Yourself". In incredibly funny (yet offensive) manner these guys bash Web 2.0 hype.

While they push things a little bit to extreme, their rants make a lot of sense. Web 2.0 is an overhyped and a vague term. Joel Spolsky also nails it down.

All those services like Flickr, del.icio.us, etc which are posterchildren of "Web 2.0" are really nothing more than evolution of rather old ideas. There was no quantum leap from "Web 1.0" to shiny new "Web 2.0". Anyone stating that either lived last ten years in a cave, or deliberately supports the hype.

It's not like I am trying to stand on ideas from Book of Ecclesiastes, but behind every great "breakthrough" there are years (sometimes hundreds or thousands of years) of immense work. Here are few examples: before Tim Bernes-Lee came up with the idea of Web, there was a Project Xanadu. Microsoft did not invent Graphical User Interface, nor did Apple. Instead, over the years, these corporations (and many others) perfected research work of Xerox PARC center, which in turn was based on works by Doug Engelbart. Many physicists go as fa as suggesting that Einstein was not actually the inventor of relativity theories, but successfully re-branded less known theories of Poincare, Lorentz, and Minkowski.

So you see, "Web 2.0" folks, the idea of a mash-up is ages old.

Having said that, I must say that Internet experience is getting better over the years. Just don't hype these improvements as "groundbreaking" and enjoy the ride.

Merry geeky Christmas!!

Sat, 29 Oct 2005 08:38:52 -0600

Merry geeky X-mas!!

Why today?

There is a geeky joke. It's so old it's not even funny. Just in case someone managed to miss it:

Oct 29 = Dec 25

If you fail to understand the meaning of this joke, start with an easier one:

There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't.

iyhy.com bookmarklet

Mon, 03 Oct 2005 11:47:18 -0600

There is a wonderful web service iyhy.com. From the site:

[iyhy.com] is an absolutely free web application that strips all the crap from a web page and gives you the good stuff when you're on the go -- the content.

The main purpose of that site is to prepare pages for viewing on mobile devices, such as smartphones.

I use this service in my scripts that fetch interesting Web pages to my Palm. But I also use it on my desktop too, so I can get rid of annoying images, ads, and crappy layout, and concentrated on pure text. Oh, make many pages more workspace friendly too.

I created IYHY this bookmarklet to access IYHY version of the page with one click. Just grab a link to your bookmark bar and use it when your page is loaded. Happy surfing!

-- AF

A post from w.bloggar. Update on online bookmarking services.

Fri, 12 Aug 2005 17:42:18 -0600

After almost a year of posting articles from Drupal web interface I decided to try a client-side program. This post is written using w.bloggar, I am also going to give a try to other tools like free Semagic (which also supposedly works with Atom as well) and Qumana, and may be even commercial like BlogJet and Ecto.

And of course I am going to share my comparison with blog readers as I did for online bookmarking services. Speaking of online bookmarking: there is a lot of new players entering the market, and old ones are constantly adding features. Just to name a few new web services of that kind:

If you are interested in the subject you may find rather informative TechCrunch profiles of some of these services. There's just too may of them and I am not going to compare them anymore, because Furl works just fine for me so far.

Oh, and I've just tried to use w.bloggar's spellchecking ability. It is funny that it complained about words "bloggar" and "blog".

About my blog's name

Tue, 26 Apr 2005 21:28:42 -0600

Most popular keyword leading to my website from search engines is "sstream".

Apparently, web surfers are not looking for my blog, they are looking for information about C++ string stream.

I named my blog "<sstream> of consciousness" to reflect two facts:

I am C++ programmer
Entries of that blog are rather spontaneous than structured, or regular

In C++, in order to use string streams, programmer writes:
#include <sstream>

HTML chose angle brackets as primary control symbols. That is why when I see that word "sstream" magically disappered in some web application, I know: there is a bug. So far, I found:
read more

Our confluence visit is published

Mon, 04 Apr 2005 20:30:58 -0600

If you have GPS device and have never visited Degree Confluence Project - you missed sooo much. To summarize: people visit confluences (which are intersections of integer-number latitudes and longitudes) and post narratives and photos of their endeavours.

Recently my friends and I made a first-time visit to confluence 49N 84W. Go on and read our narrative and take a look at photos. The whole trip was incredibly fun!

Google in a h4x0r sp34k

Thu, 31 Mar 2005 20:48:53 -0700

I found that link on Boingboing: www.600673.com is a Google in a hacker speak. Now that's totally phun ny and wicked. For those "in the tank": hacker speak is a form of english language transcription, used by hackers both for fun and for serious purposes (sort of one of "masonic" signs).

Here is a crash course in a h4x0r speak.
read more

Microsoft evangelist is a Mac owner

Sun, 27 Mar 2005 16:24:20 -0700

Scoble's boss, Lenn Pryor, Microsoft Employee, has a title "Director, Platform Evangelism". Funny though, he has a homepage at mac.com. That implies he is an owner of a Mac with OS X, I guess. Now that's interesting.

�? папа-то...

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 19:22:51 -0700

Ва�?ька (мо�? трехлетн�?�? дочь) �?егодн�? вечером возжелала, чтобы �? нашел ей некую вещь. У�?тавший и �? больной головой, �? проворчал:
- �?у вот, вме�?то того, чтобы пои�?кать �?ама, за�?тавл�?ешь �?тарого и больного папу.
- Ты не �?тарый! - возразила мне жена. Вр�?д ли �?то комплимент, ей про�?то не хотело�?ь, чтобы внимание дит�?ти переключило�?ь на нее.
- Папа - новый! по�?ле �?екундного размышлени�? резюмировало чадо.

Еще один ва�?ькин перл

Sun, 20 Feb 2005 11:44:43 -0700

Ва�?�? �?т�?нула у мамы печенье �? ку�?очками шоколада. Спро�?ив разрешение �?ъе�?ть его по�?тфактум. По�?ле того как пол-печень�? ребенок ум�?л, Ва�?�? поинтере�?овала�?ь,
- Мама, ты хочешь печенье?
- �? е�?ли �? �?кажу "да", ты мне его отдашь?
Ребенок помрачнел, но в�?е же задумчиво кивнул головой. Пауза, ребенок �?мотрит на печенье...
- Сейча�?, вот только шоколад �?ъем.