So I've decided to do a much-needed revamp of the Far North Racing websites. It looks like my second tour of Afghanistan may be iffy and I may need to get a job. Given that my website work is kinda my portfolio/resume, it's high time I stripped out the 1998-era table-based layout for some proper CSS.
Anyway, feedback encouraged. Lemme know what you think.
DG
I need a place to have a full on rant about this. My Slashdot Journal is as good as any.
Is it so much to ask, that in 2009, the video game industry as a whole would have figured some way around the problem of home routers and getting devices behind them to communicate with devices behind other home routers. Yes, I know, it's not a trivial issue. WAN/LAN IPs, DNS, End to end connectivity, Ports, TCP, UDP, protocols and connections, planes trains and automobiles. Yes, it's not an easy thing to accomplish.
But you've had ten fucking years!!! Or as near as makes no difference.
How many times have I had to reset, reconfigure and reinstall routers? How many times have I had to click through those infuriating HTML configuration pages, one form at a time, in an effort to add, port by port, protocol by protocol, game by game, each and every little irritating requirement just to get the fucking game I bought to play online like Mechwarrior 2 did flawlessly back in 1997!?!?!?!?
I've cracked. I admit it. The final straw was this latest gem from Team Fortress 2, a game I don't even play(I basically manage the router for 5 people). I had to set up port forwarding and QoS (Whatever the fuck that is) just to let the gods damned game to play properly.
61 ports. Sixty One ports. And that's just for the forwarding, never mind the QoS malarky. Yeah, Fuck you too Valve. And want to know the best part? It's a server based game!! Why in fuck's name do I need to do any of this?! Oh give me lag any day of the week.
But to be fair, it's not just Value. Far, far from it. It's not even PC developers, each mandating their own custom crafted set of ports and protocols to enable online play behind a router. No, consoles too have gotten in on the game. Take these gems required for the Playstation Network.
TCP port 80. Otherwise known as the HTTP port. Great. And what's this? TCP 443. You mean the HTTPS port. Great choice guys. Yeah, thanks for that. I'll forward those right away.
Come on Microsoft. You've been computing specialists for over 30 years. What's needed to run Xbox live behind a router?
Great classy. I lover that overlap with PSN on the Port 80 thing. Can't have them hogging HTTP entirely, especially since you control the DNS ports now. Awesome. Complete clusterfuck. Why doesn't one of you mandate port 22 altogether, so my entire network will be totally inaccessible from outside for anyone not using a game's console.
Oh well, I guess at least with consoles you only have to forward one set of ports for all games right... right?
In order to play GTA IV via the PS3 network you will need to open the following ports on your router:
- UDP ports: 6672, 28900
- TCP ports: 8000-8001, 27900, 28900
AAAAGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!! LEAVE ME ALONE!!!! I'm not a network administrator! I don't have any certs from Cisco!! No! I can't use IPTABLES!! How would I get Linux onto the router in the first place?! What do you want?! Blood?!?! I just want to play games!!!
And don't talk to me about UPnP! Just don't. As far as I can tell, the Useless, Painful 'n Pointless protocol's only meaningful function is to establish connections between devices which confirm UPnP is available, but then don't work anyway. I've never once managed to get a single game to work using it. It has never worked and it will never work. Most companies don't even mention it. They skip straight to port forwarding, gleefully rolling off their own in house list of obnoxious ports.
You know what this is like? It's like every video game publisher and company is trying to stake it's claim to ranges of ports and protocols. By insisting on their own original, capricious and dogmatic set of connection requirements, it's as though Sony, Microsoft, EA, Valve and all the rest are trying to enforce by fiat what would normally require an RFC to be made official. Namely, the assignment of a port. Companies are literally carving out their own space on what is supposed to be a no ownership zone. And trust those armchair experts at Wikipedia, to stick these turf claims in a Registered Ports List. "Oh but, the unregisted ones are in blue OMF". FUCK YOU! There are only 65000 ports, which is too few to risk being lost to this bullshit.
So that's why I think this NAT business hasn't been resolved. Moving the video game industry to a solid standard whereby games automatically established connections(and hang the technical difficulties), would mean that companies would have to give up their little slice of that very relatively small pie of 65000 port numbers. These are corporations we're talking about, and giving up something that big, that central to the functioning of the entire internet, even if it's just a squatters claim, is not a step any of them are willing to take.
So, in my opinion, we're going to be stuck with this NAT port forwarding bullshit for quite some time yet. I fully expect more and more games to lay claim to ever larger pastures of unsettled port space, and continue to do so until the whole spectrum is so fully overloaded that people's routers or patience simply snap under the strain. Mine certainly has.
Mercifully, my ISP seems to allow PPPoE over a router, which thankfully the PS3 and Xbox360 both support. True, it exposes them to the elements in a way having them behind a router would not, but I really don't care any more. NAT is the fucking devil, and I've had enough of having my crank yanked as a pawn in this port squatting farce, so it's a WAN IP for me.
At least until all the IPv4 address run out and I have to set up all this shit again of IPv6 addresses.
Rufly translated: "Amazon Kindle: Germany waits in vain". Seems Amazon could not agree with T-Mobile or Vodafone over the price wireless delivery in Germany and now there European launch has become all "wishful thinking".
Full Story (in German): http://www.onlinekosten.de/news/artikel/34953/0/Amazon-Kindle-Deutschland-wartet-vergeblich
I got a new box on Slashdot this afternoon, thanking me for my 'positive contributions' and letting me turn off advertising because of them. Wait, there's advertising on the Internet now? When did that start?
If you've known
Then there's the annoying inline popup (so it's not caught by popup blockers) that tells you that "Firehose is paused due to inactivity". Whatever that means, it doesn't seem nearly important enough to interrupt my reading.
Quite frankly, from a user interface design standpoint, the "new" slashdot sucks. Badly. Maybe I'll try disabling all javascript for slashdot.org and check if that improves the experience.
So, what is your position on property ownership?
1.) Personal Property
I think, you work for it, it's yours. I help defend what you worked for from those who would take it unfairly, you do the same for me.
2.) Real Property
Natural resources should not be owned. If you are working an area, I'll ask if I can help and what the terms are before I help myself. If you claim an area you aren't working, I won't respect that unless you and I have made a personal deal to that regard. If someone tries to drive you from their land, I'll try to help you stop them, if you are willing to do the same for me.
3.) Intellectual Property
I'll always say where I got my ideas from. I'd like it if I could get some recognition for my good ideas.
Cooperation versus competition?
I think cooperation is almost always in an individual's self interest. Competition, of the form where some people have to 'lose' in order for others to win, is usually not in an individual's self interest, if it can be avoided.
Taking care of others?
I think desperate, frightened, hurt, or angry humans are the most dangerous thing on the planet. Making sure no one feels that way unnecessarily is in everyone's best interest. I resent people getting a free ride on the work some of us try to do making sure people aren't a danger due to desperation.
The free market?
A really good idea, in theory. However, a hybrid system where competition is balanced with cooperation is better for everyone. The benefits of such cooperation should be limited to other cooperators, and not extended to the ruthless and selfish.
That's a start.
I just love trolling libertarians. They are so easy to work up into a frothing rage. Like flat-earthers and creationists, they have to shut off all logical parts of their minds in order to go on believing their patently untrue and counter-factual ideology. This makes them easy pickings for trolls. Now, unlike most trolls, I actually believe what I'm writing. But that's beside the point. The point is, watching stupid people get angry is fun.
From this comment by gringofrijolero, I got the idea to do a whole 'wiki-dickory-sock' song, I figure 8-10 verses would do. So, first verse, taking gringofrijolero's verse and making it more Wikipedia specific:
Wiki-Dickery-Sock
Rules lawyers ran out the clock
We all got bored
"Yeah, you're the lord."
Wiki-Dickery-Sock
Then the verse I came up with:
Wiki-Dickery-Sock
Deletionists erased 'River_Ock'
The river's not notable,
Its water's not potable,"
Wiki-Dickery-Sock
Now to expand on the examples I came up with in the thread:
Wiki-Dickery-Sock
The vandals defaced 'Iraq.'
They said it was good
When Saddam got wood
Wiki-Dickery-Sock
Hmm, the original rhyme does end with the same nonsense line it begins with, but Andrew Dice Clay uses the last line for the punchline to good comedic effect, perhaps I should here.
Wiki-Dickery-Sock
The vandals defaced 'Iraq.'
They said it was good
When Saddam got wood
So we banned their whole IP block.
But then there is the difficulty in coming up with twice as many relevant and funny '-ock' rhymes. Cock and block only go so far.
Wiki-Dickery-Sock
Deletionists erased 'River_Ock'
The river's not notable,
Its water's not potable,
Put it on the chopping block!
Wiki-Dickery-Sock
Rules lawyers ran out the clock
We all got bored
"Yeah, you're the lord."
(of making us sleepy, you cock)
Thought for latter 'Trekkies aren't quite as logical as Spock.' Work it in somehow. 'Puppet masters brought out every sock' will make a good last line somewhere.
The venerable BBC is reporting that a survey of light emitted from white dwarfs showed that between 1% and 3% had material (such as silicon) falling into the star on a continuous basis, potential evidence of dead worlds and asteroids. On this basis, the authors of the study speculate that the same percentage of mainstream stars in the active part of their life will have rocky matter. This is not firm evidence of actual planetary formation, as asteroids would produce the same results, but it does give an upper bound and some idea of what a lower bound might be for planetary formation.
Aside from being a useful value for Drake's Equation, the rate of planetary formation would be valuable in understanding how solar systems develop and what sort of preconditions are required for an accretion disk of suitable material to form.
Because the test only looked for elements too heavy to have been formed in the star, we can rule out the observations being that of cometary debris.
Four fireballs, glowing blue and orange, were visible last night over the skies of the Carolinas on the southeast coast of the United States, followed by the sound of an explosion described as being like thunder. Reports of hearing the noise were coming in from as far afield as Connecticut. There is currently no word from NASA or the USAF as to what it could be, but it seems improbable that anything non-nuclear the military could put up could be heard over that kind of distance. It therefore seems likely to be a very big meteorite.
The next question would be what type of meteorite. This is not an idle question. The one slamming into the Sudan recently was (a) extremely big at an estimated 80 tonnes, and (b) from the extremely rare F-class of asteroid. If this new meteorite is also from an F-class asteroid, then it is likely associated with the one that hit Sudan. This is important as it means we might want to be looking very closely for other fragments yet to hit.
The colours are interesting and allow us to limit what the composition could have been and therefore where it came from. We can deduce this because anything slamming through the atmosphere is basically undergoing a giant version of your basic chemistry "flame test" for substance identification. We simply need to look up what metals produce blue, and in so doing we see that cadmium does produce a blue/violet colour, with copper producing more of a blue/green.
Other metals also produce a blue glow and tables of these colours abound, but some are more likely in meteoric material than others. Cadmium exists in meteorites. Well, all elements do, if you find enough meteorites. but it exists in sufficient quantity that it could produce this sort of effect. (As noted in the chemmaster link, low concentrations can't be detected by this method, however this is going to be vastly worsened by the fact that this isn't a bunsen burner being used and the distance over which you're observing is extreme.)
Ok, what else do we know? The fireballs were also orange. Urelites, such as the Sudan impact, contain a great deal of calcium, which burns brick-red, not orange. This suggests we can rule out the same source, which in turn means we probably don't have to worry about being strafed the way Jupiter was with the Shoemaker-Levy comet (21 impacts).
What can we say about it, though? Well, provided the surviving fragments didn't fall into the ocean, it means every meteorite hunter on the planet will be scouring newspaper stories that might indicate where impacts occurred. Meteoric material is valuable and anything on a scale big enough to be heard across the entire east coast of the US is going to be worth looking for. It had split into four in the upper atmosphere, so you're probably looking at a few thousand fragments reaching ground level that would exceed a year's average pay.
if you're a fan of the AMV Hell series, here's another reason for you to hate the RIAA:
They subpoenaed youtube to remove the audio from the AMV Hell 3 deleted scenes 2 clip. Currently we get a message:
NOTICE
This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by WMG. The audio has been disabled.
Really, what's the limit to the stupidity of these guys?
As previously posted I am doing my little bit to try and help rid the world of the scourge of MS by participating (again) in the MS Bike Tour.
In an attempt to raise funds, I posted a little entry to the Donation Page to the following websites:
The results within the first week are striking. Facebook and MyFamily - nil. Fight Club, 1 pers for $10. And Slashdot - 2 pers for an amazing $125.
Clearly - although the sample set is admittedly small - Slashdotters lead the way when it comes to supporting worthy causes.
I am now attempting to challenge the other members of Fight Club to donate more by appealing to their manhood (or lack thereof) by daring them to beat Slashdot's contributions.
You, gentle reader (previous donors excepted) can help make this more difficult by raising the bar by donating more money - and in the end, it is the MS society who wins.
Help me end MS!
DG
The MS Society of Canada has opened its fundraising website for MS Bike Tour 2009 and I've registered my team.
Help me end MS.
DG
But another question one must ask is why there are so many applicants for this, when NESSIE (the European version of this challenge) managed just one? Has the mathematics become suddenly easier? Was this challenge better-promoted? (In which case, why did Slashdot only mention it on the day it closed?) Were the Europeans' criteria that much tougher to meet? If so, why did NIST loosen the requirements so much that they were overwhelmed?
These questions, and others, look doomed to not be seriously answered. However, we can take a stab at the criteria and evaluation problem. A strong cryptographic hash must have certain mathematical properties. For example, the distance between any two distinct inputs must be unconnected to the distance between the corresponding outputs. Otherwise, knowing the output for a known input and the output for an unknown input will tell you something about the unknown input, which you don't want. If you have a large enough number of inputs and plot the distance of inputs in relation to the distance in outputs, you should get a completely random scatter-plot. Also, if you take a large enough number of inputs at fixed intervals, the distance between the corresponding outputs should be a uniform distribution. Since you can't reasonably test 2^512 inputs, you can only apply statistical tests on a reasonable subset and see if the probability that you have the expected patterns is within your desired limits. These two tests can be done automatically. Any hash that exhibits a skew that could expose information can then be rejected equally automatically.
This is a trivial example. There will be other tests that can also be applied automatically that can weed out the more obviously flawed hashing algorithms. But this raises an important question. If you can filter out the more problematic entries automatically, why does NIST have a problem with the number of entries per-se? They might legitimately have a problem with the number of GOOD entries, but even then all they need to do is have multiple levels of acceptance and an additional round or two. eg: At the end of human analysis round 2, NIST might qualify all hashes that are successful at that level as "sensitive-grade" with respect to FIPS compliance, so that people can actually start using them, then have a round 3 which produces a pool of 3-4 hashes that are "classified-grade" and a final round to produce the "definitive SHA-3". By adding more rounds, it takes longer, but by producing lower-grade certifications, the extra time needed to perform a thorough cryptanalysis isn't going to impede those who actually use such functions.
(Yes, it means vendors will need to support more functions. Cry me a river. At the current scale of ICs, you can put one hell of a lot of hash functions onto one chip, and have one hell of a lot of instances of each. Software implementations are just as flexible, with many libraries supporting a huge range. Yes, validating will be more expensive, but it won't take any longer if the implementations are orthogonal, as they won't interact. If you can prove that, then one function or a hundred will take about the same time to validate to accepted standards. If the implementations are correctly designed and documented, then proving the design against the theory and then the implementation against the design should be relatively cheap. It's crappy programming styles that make validation expensive, and if you make crappy programming too expensive for commercial vendors, I can't see there being any problems for anyone other than cheap-minded PHBs - and they deserve to have problems.)
"Ninety percent of baseball is half mental." -- Yogi Berra
