Fun
Mind Control, Big Cats, Feynman && kiosks…
Aka… A good weekend..
The weekend got off to a slow start, when Amazon claimed it would take a little longer than planned to ship us the “Web Application Hackers Handbook”. Fortunately it picked up after that..
The first ray of light was finding a new strange bug on a huge application that smells a lot like full remote code execution.. Then the office had a power-outage and i felt the rage building.. drove to the office to collect my stuff mumbling statements related to 3rd world and feeling sorry for myself, but.. i needed to complete a report and needed to be in JHB later that night, so decided to stop off in Sandton City where i could work for a bit (exclusive books: coffee + gprs + deels could enjoy herself too)
PauldotCom Interview, Part I
OK.. so part one of our pauldotcom interview has hit the interwebs.. it was fun and involved a power failure and a dog that chewed through charl’s microphone cable about 15 minutes before the interview started..
My thoughts on it were best expressed earlier on irc..
-snip-
12:04 <+MH> i sounded (cleverer/less annoying/less nasal) in my head..
12:04 <+MH> apparently hearing ur own voice through ur teeth explains (3).. (1) and (2) i suspect are just mild delusions..
22:30 to 23:30: the quiet hour
while waiting around for the PSW guys last night, it seemed like a good time to test our mettle on the foosball table. we’ve witnessed rapid development of general foos skills in the office since the introduction of the table a few weeks ago, and the improvement in shot speed has been noticeable. of course, questions always remain as to the difference between actual and perceived velocity of shots, and the only way to answer the questions is by a clean, scientific, test.
Piotr Bania Agrees.. Metal Gear Rocks.. (warning.. this post has 0 to do with infosec)
Way back in 2000 i bought my kid sister a Sony PlayStation.. I have never been a big gamer (not since arcade games when i was tiny) but a reliable source at work convinced me to play Metal Gear – Solid. The game was awesome and for the period i played it, it dominated my life.. im not a gamer so probably not qualified to use words like gameplay but found the game incredibly intuitive and seldom ever found it “gamey”.
I have always tried to keep this blog politics-free
but the last Scott Adams posting on the Iranian presidents US visit has to be the best piece i have read in a long long time..
Alas.. i could have made squillions (aka – Amazon MTURK)
In early 2002 i suggested that we could solve some computer problems and south africas street-kid problem by setting up a network of street=kids with basic education to handle tasks computers still struggled with. At the time we were concerned with low-false positive, agentless remote detection of defaced web-sites, but also ran into the idea when we first built e-or, our early web application scanner. I suspect i didnt broach the subject with enough sensitivity (and in retrospect suggesting that remote controls for automatic gates could be replaced by 2 low cost street-kids (one as a spare)) might not have helped my cause..
Heheh.. Elite! snakes on a #$#%@# plane!
Courtesy of afx:
Another attempt at you-tube science, aka how to save 36c when changing the batteries on your remote!
ok.. so a long time ago we tried the you-tube mentos stuff and happily wasted time (and coke) in the office parking lot.. (of course this was after half assed attempts to mimic the experiments imperfectly.. given the typical office makeup, this ensured that we tried it with various other softdrinks, various other sweets and at one point even tried microwaving the drink cause roelof thought “the cold was ruining it”.)
Medical Doctors.. bah! hambug..
I’ve ranted a few times about things i hate about the way we “do medicine”. (Doctors are not alone here.. i cant believe that in the age where we operate on the eye with lasers and see production ready nano-tech. we consider yanking teeth with a pair of pliers a reasonable option)
Recently i heard an interview with the head of MS Research where he spoke about some of the same things.. i.e. that 9/10 people are visiting the doctor for the same thing (that new strain of flu going around) and that we could help alot of things with a simple “if you have a fever, and a runny nose and red spots today, u have the latest X going around.. take 2 of X and get some rest”. This would handle the majority of the ppl walking in..
Thunks from hacking games
In Vegas I bought Herman “Exploiting Online Games” by Greg Hoglund and Gary McGraw. Being the saint that I am, I looked at the book thoroughly on the plane on the way home. Fortunately I was able to verify that most of the pages were there and intact and that were no blatant spelling or grammatical errors – it wouldn’t do to give Herman a broken book.
Whilst I was checking the Herman’s gift *anyway* I figured it wouldn’t hurt to also read and absorb some of the content – just to make sure I wasn’t giving him nonsense (with all due respect to Greg and Gary). In particular what interested me was whether their thinking on online games held any lessons for the work we more traditionally do on online financial and e-commerce systems. I thought the book was fascinating, particularly in this context. What follows is a mind dump of some of the thoughts I had as I was reading.