maebmij’s blog

Cadets participating in ‘cyberwar’ games against the NSA (is that Wireshark up on the screen?)

(New York Times article)

Does your mobile browser have difficulty reading the ‘title’ attribute on xkcd strips? Is this a problem for you? Does your mobile device have command-line access to a unix-like system? If so, you may find the following title-extracting script useful. Call without arguments for the latest strip, or supply the strip number as an argument:

#!/bin/bash

if [ $1 ]; then
    URLPATH=$1/
fi

curl -s http://www.xkcd.com/$URLPATH |grep "img.*title" \
|sed 's/.* title="\([^"]*\).*/\1/'

You know what this blog needs? More miscellaneous pictures that I find on the internet:

Oh, and profanity.

These guys are one of those punk bands that never die, but just keep on being awesome while growing increasingly wrinkly.
The video is arguably not-safe-for-work.

Die Ärzte – Manchmal haben Frauen…

The current anonymous-vs-scientology stuff has been reminding me of an idea from Ghost in the Shell: A “stand alone complex” which can result in people spontaneously engaging in copycat-like behaviour, but without an original. The director said he was trying “to underscore the dilemmas and concerns that people would face if they relied too heavily on the new communications infrastructure”. In the story, the complex manifests in many people claiming to be a famous hacker known as the “laughing man”, who hides his identity using a digital mask which looks like this:

Meanwhile, in reality, lots of people called “anonymous” have been protesting Scientology, wearing masks:

I’m not the first to notice a similarity, of course:

On a side note, if you like the idea of the laughing man, you may like this website, which automatically applies laughing man masks to detected faces in images:

…you know me so well:

You can read the whole thing here.

Eco-friendly electromagnetic superbikes, miniskirts, and hi-gloss white boots:

(TreeHugger article, manufacturer’s website)

Fake Steve Jobs on Google’s mobile phone platform thing:

“Also, whenever you see companies start talking about being “open,” it means they’re getting their ass kicked. You think Google will be forming an OpenSearch alliance any time soon, to help also-rans in search get a share of the spoils? Me neither.”

Ouch.

I imagine the marketing-psychology stuff runs pretty deep here: I present for comparison a current Dell advertisement for their video chat system, and two Apple promotional screenshots of their video chat sytem:

Dell

Apple

And, to add some politics into the mix, I’ll just note that (allegedly) Michael Dell’s political donations are 89.4% Republican, while Steve Jobs’s are 99.6% Democratic.

It’s all iPhones at work at the moment. I got to play with one for a few minutes, so I finally got to try out my Fortune iPhone-web-interface, mentioned previously:

Something interesting that I hadn’t been able to visualise before was “viewport” scaling: The browser de-couples the physical screen resolution from the page’s virtual resolution. When you visit a web page, the browser simulates a relatively large window, and then scales the resulting page down so it fits on the screen, but is very small. If you’ve already designed with a small screen in mind, you end up with a lot of wasted space unless you tell the browser (via a meta tag) that you’d like it to pretend a smaller window size (resulting in less scaling). See Apple’s iPhone-Safari dev notes for a proper explanation.

Here’s Fortune with a specified virtual window width of 600 pixels:

And here’s what it looks like without a specified viewport width:

Incidentally, the viewport width seems to stay constant when the orientation changes: If you rotate to landscape, the page image zooms in somewhat so that it can still fill the screen without becoming any wider in terms of the virtual browser window (i.e. the viewport width is preserved).

Poster on George Street during APEC week:

Selected details:

[Title from Agrippa (a Book of the Dead), by William Gibson.]

I’ve noticed that recent iPod posters bear a resemblance to a certain memorable movie:

Exhibit A:

iPod posters, Maccentric Chatswood, 2007

Exhibit B:

Imagery from Battle Royale, 2000 (left-hand image as featured on Airside’s Battle Royale t-shirts)

Some pictures and news stories I collected in 2003/4:

Brain in virtual reality; body soaking in nutrient-filled vat

(2004-02-24): “Dr Hoffman believes pain contains a significant psychological element which is why distracting thoughts by virtual reality lends itself so well to pain control.
‘Pain requires conscious attention. Humans have a limited amount of this and it’s hard to do two things at once,’ he said.”

link, more detail

Korean students learning important skills

(2004-05-11): I love this pic, but unfortunately I’ve lost the source for it. I saved it as “Seoul student training 040511″, but I must leave any further interpretation to your imaginations…

Iraqi soldiers capture US military drone

(2003-03-25): “Iraqi television broadcast these pictures of a coalition drone aircraft shot down and then paraded through the streets of Basra.”

link

I heard this song on FBI Radio a year or so ago. It’s the inspiration/basis for the Black Eyed Peas’ Don’t Phunk with my Heart – and it turns out it has an awesome, Orientalism-confounding, James-Bond-esque video/dance-routine as well:

Aye Naujawan Hai Sab Kuchch Yahan

It’s from Apradh, an Indian movie from 1972.

Mostly grim stories of cyberpunk interest that I’ve collected, from the last year or so:

Cyborgs to do battle with police

“Technology such as cloned part-robot humans used by organised crime gangs pose the greatest future challenge to police, along with online scamming, Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Mick Keelty says.”

link

Police spy-drones to monitor urban areas

“The machines, which are flown by remote control or using pre-programmed GPS navigation systems, are silent and can be fitted with night-vision cameras.

The images they record are sent back to a police support vehicle or control room.”

link

Police to wear head-mounted surveillance cameras

“Police say the Cylon camera will be used mainly while officers patrol potential hotspots such as Union Street, Mutley and the city centre … The message to the public is to enjoy yourselves but don’t misbehave because you don’t know when you may be caught on camera.”

link

Powered exoskeletons for stroke victims

“The robotic suit, which slips over a person’s upper body and arms, weighs only 1.8 kilograms (four pounds).

It was developed jointly by Activelink Co. — a venture of Matsushita Electric Industrial which is best known for the Panasonic brand — and Kobe Gakuin University.”

link

Taser knife-missiles

“If the subject tries to grab or disconnect the XREP projectile, the reflex engagement electrodes complete a circuit allowing TASER NMI to discharge from the Nose Electrodes, through the subject’s body, out to the hand that grabbed the XREP. … To maximize incapacitation, the XREP engine incorporates a microprocessor controlled optimal electrode selection technology.”

link

This Guardian article talks about Oscar Pistorius, a Paralympic sprinter with speeds that would currently place him 8th-fastest among able-bodied sprinters in Britain. He runs with Össur custom sprint feet (pictured). He’s asking to be allowed to compete in the Olympics, and there’s some debate over whether the feet constitute an unfair advantage. But I think the more interesting question is: As prosthetic technology improves, will we start seeing the best times coming from the Paralympics instead of the Olympics? Is it not at least theoretically possible that we could design a better sprinting leg than the human leg?
The article immediately reminded me of a great makes-you-think hidden detail from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, a sci-fi story where many of the characters are cybernetically enhanced, having had various muscles and joints replaced with stronger artificial ones:

One of these characters mentions he’s a former boxing medallist; but if you look closely, you discover that his medal is a Paralympic one. It took me a few moments to work this out (”but he isn’t disabled!”): One possible future for the Paralympics is as the competition where humans with elective (and superior) prosthetics are allowed to compete; in such a scenario, they could become the most interesting competition, with the Olympics relegated to special-interest for the purists…

It makes me sad to think that there might be a computing device out there incapable of running fortune. Since the iPhone doesn’t run real (local) 3rd-party apps, Apple wants you to write “Web 2.0 applications” for it instead. After an evening’s work (largely on the logo you see to the left – I’m very proud of it), I give you Fortune, the web app – a wrapper for the fortune-mod package from Debian.

A few days ago, reader.mac.com turned up, and was theorised to be an iPhone-only feed reader web app. Now that the device has been released, you can check it out from other browsers:

• Install User-Agent Switcher (or change your user-agent string manually)
• Use the iPhone user-agent string: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3
• Visit http://reader.mac.com/mobile/v1/http:%2F%2Fmaebmij.org%2Fblog%2Ffeed, or your choice of feed URL

Apparently, Safari on the iPhone sends RSS feeds to this app instead of processing them locally.

1972 Wella Balsam ad, from A Word From Our Sponsor, about mainstream advertising’s co-option of the 60s/70s counterculture.

I spent today catching up on videos I’ve been meaning to watch:

Wired/New York Public Library debate: The Battle Over Books, from 2005

Larry Lessig and representatives from Google, a publisher’s association, and an authors’ guild all debate the legality and necessity of Google Book Search. It’s worthwhile, if only because both sides get their ideas across pretty well. Lessig is very convincing, as usual.

A Discussion with danah boyd, from 2006

Danah was in the news yesterday for her piece on social class divisions between MySpace and Facebook. This video covers some similar ground: It’s a rambling talk/discussion about how people interact socially online, focusing mostly on MySpace and Friendster. She’s a good speaker.

Richard Feynman: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, from 1981

Everything from discussing what’s wrong with the way maths is taught, to getting toungue-tied trying to explain hadrons and quarks off-the-cuff without using any big words. The most interesting part, to me, is his extremely frank discussion of how he felt about his part in developing the first nuclear weapons.