Darius Bacon's Journal
 
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Darius Bacon's LiveJournal:

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    Monday, January 31st, 2005
    2:04 pm
    Sunday, January 30th, 2005
    3:41 am
    random()
    Out walking today, a bike brushed by on the sidewalk, its rider giving me an odd look and asking some question I missed. I shrugged apologetically, though I hadn't thought I'd been blocking the way, and thought no more of it.

    Later at the library, leafing through The Joy of Music in the stacks, I was accosted by someone wanting to know if I'd accepted Jesus as my savior. It turned out this was the same guy as on the bike, and that I bore a powerful resemblance to Jesus -- not the first time I've been told so, but certainly the oddest. If we hadn't been at the library I'd have liked to preach on computational eschatology just to see what would happen. He went back for some pamphlets that I had to turn down.

    When my hair was shorter nobody ever said I looked like Iain Banks, hmph.

    Unrelatedly, I visited a big dotcom this week and they had everyone working in a giant open-plan office without even cubicles. How can anyone code in a place like that? Don't they need to concentrate? Maybe I'm more distractable than most? (For me even a blinking cursor is like a little man jumping up and down yelling "Look! Look!") Anyway they're hiring Erlang hackers -- if anyone's interested I can hook you up.

    Since I asked for a rant from [info]lunza it's my memetic duty to offer rants now on subjects of your choice. Expect a lecture or an essay or something instead, though, even if rants have higher fitness.
    Sunday, January 9th, 2005
    2:28 am
    an unusual use for literature
    For years I've been threatening to build a user-programmable website someday, vaguely like a wiki but for code instead of text. I came up with a piece of the design tonight that I'm afraid might annoy lovers of literature. It takes some explaining: say this website were named foo.org. People come in and make new pages on it; the site assigns each page an ID, random enough to be unguessable, like https://foo.org/1e6cc1499953b4052d75. (There can be meaningful names, too, but they're less fundamental. Random unguessability is part of how we prevent abuses -- for example, the LJ hack I posted about depends on attackers knowing the URL that updates your journal.)

    So we've got something like a phone number, https://foo.org/1e6cc1499953b4052d75. foo.org is a memorable enough area code, but 1e6cc1499953b4052d75... uh. Most of the time you don't care, because you just bookmark the page, or follow a link to it someone sent you, etc. Still, IDs that humans can handle would be nice to have. One choice I looked at: use dictionary words instead of numbers. We get IDs like

    https://foo.org/toxon-basal-Pinal-upheld-corp-a
    https://foo.org/screw-herdic-ridgil-Oglala-erose-a
    https://foo.org/josser-kazoo-cause-cense-burl
    https://foo.org/weal-androl-culgee-Inga-rehang-a
    https://foo.org/surtax-flot-pussy-epural-lampas-aa

    and what does that remind you of? That's right! Spam.

    Trying again with a different word supply:

    https://foo.org/awful-heave-host-loyal-slayer-heroes-decked
    https://foo.org/deed-body-keels-fold-tests-giver-after
    https://foo.org/both-speed-nay-blow-awful-hoard-brands
    https://foo.org/dared-tore-spy-twain-spied-hale-of
    https://foo.org/robed-weave-thy-third-surest-expect-sentry

    Now this manages to not look like spam, I think, but I wonder: if you saw much more like this, could you ever read Beowulf without remembering that damned foo.org website? Because that was my source. I can even imagine this tainting Tolkien.

    ( more techie notes )
    Friday, December 31st, 2004
    4:16 pm
    Friday pieblogging with Neal Stephenson
    This page from The System of the World almost made me wonder if the same author writes Fafblog. I can't see him doing that, but it's not like he's incapable of the same level of lunacy:
    "...and so we have made an arrangement with Mr. Party--but not disbursed any money to him, of course--nor do we expect to, until the end of this month," Daniel said. He'd given Isaac an account of the Clubb's late doings, mercilessly abbreviated because of the aroma of the mutton pies, which were waiting on a platter in his lap. The platter was a twenty-pound slab of silver done up in full Barock style and engraved with miles of tangled script: a paean to the sexual powers of Newton's niece. Here she was referred to as Aphrodite, a code that Isaac was not likely to penetrate.

    In an apt demonstration of the principle of Relativity, as propounded by Galileo, the bawdy platter, and the steaming morsels thereon, remained in the same position vis-a-vis Daniel, and hence were, in principle, just as edible, as if he had been seated before, and the pies had been resting upon, a table that was stationary with respect to the fixed stars. This was true despite the fact that the carriage containing Daniel, Isaac Newton, and the pies was banging around London. Daniel guessed that they were swinging round the northern limb of St. Paul's Churchyard, but he had no real way of telling: he had closed the window-shutters, for the reason that their journey to Bedlam would take them directly across the maw of Grub Street, and he did not want to read about today's adventure in all tomorrow's papers.

    Isaac, though better equipped than Daniel or any other man alive to understand Relativity, shewed no interest in his pie--as if being in a state of movement with respect to the planet Earth rendered it somehow Not a Pie. But as far as Daniel was concerned, a pie in a moving frame of reference was no less a pie than one that was sitting still: position and velocity, to him, might be perfectly interesting physical properties, but they had no bearing, no relationship to those properties that were essential to pie-ness. All that mattered to Daniel were relationships between his, Daniel's, physical state and that of the pie. If Daniel and Pie were close together both in position and velocity, then pie-eating became a practical, and tempting, possibility. If Pie were far asunder from Daniel or moving at a large relative velocity--e.g., being hurled at his face--then its pie-ness was somehow impaired, at least from the Daniel frame of reference. For the time being, however, these were purely Scholastic hypotheticals. Pie was on his lap and very much a pie, no matter what Isaac might think of it.

    Mr. Cat had lent them silver table-settings, and Daniel, as he spoke, had tucked a napkin into his shirt-collar--a flag of surrender, and an unconditional capitulation to the attractions of Pie. Rather than laying down arms, he now picked them up--knife and fork.

    Happy new year!
    Tuesday, November 2nd, 2004
    12:32 pm
    Peter Norvig on Hiring a President. Norvig is Google's Director of Search Quality, and incidentally someone involved a couple times in deciding whether to hire me.
    In my professional career I've participated in about 1000 hiring decisions--some hires, more no-hires. But not once in those 1000 decisions did we ask the candidates to create 30-second ads attacking their rivals, nor did we ask them to sit down and debate each other. Instead we evaluated their skills for the job at hand, looked at their record of accomplishment at similar jobs, and got expert reports from people they have worked with first-hand, or from leading experts in their fields. I wish our country would take that approach in choosing a president to "hire" -- if it did, I think the results would go something like this ...
    Monday, October 18th, 2004
    8:55 pm
    this is to declare
    that I am a member of the [info]reality__based community. (Ron Suskind's article explains why.)
    Tuesday, September 7th, 2004
    2:24 am
    There's this sweepstakes/pyramid scheme to get Americans to register to vote:
    http://db3531.VOTEorNOT.org

    $100,000 to the random winner, provided they can prove they were registered for the upcoming election, and another $100k to their referrer.
    Wednesday, July 28th, 2004
    2:54 pm
    [info]badmagic writes (via [info]thette):

    "Your user icons, where did you get them? I realize a lot are simply photos, but where/when were they taken, and why did you choose that picture, that pose?"
    ( Read more... )
    Monday, July 26th, 2004
    12:20 am
    juggernaut watch
    Kerry now leads Bush on the betting markets: the IEM has given the edge to Kerry since July 20, while on tradesports Bush just dropped below 1:1 odds within the last day or two. While looking this up I came across some freepers blaming it all on market manipulation by the eeevil George Soros.

    Creepy-crawly post of the day (via [info]rimrunner). Reminds me of a fine book I read last month, For Love of Insects, whose author reminisced about poisonous bugs with fondness and respect and gorgeous photos.
    Tuesday, July 6th, 2004
    6:40 pm
    My stalker a billion miles away, how that must frustrate him.

    darius's LJ stalker is cassini_saturn!
    cassini_saturn is stalking you because they think you are rich and they want your blingbling. They are also in jail for murder!


    LiveJournal Username:


    LJ Stalker Finder
    From Go-Quiz.com

    Congrats to [info]cassini_saturn on his safe arrival and amazing pictures.
    Friday, July 2nd, 2004
    12:14 am
    the hemstitch notebooks
    John M. Ford is too damn brilliant.
    The furry one came into the cantina. He did not walk as a coyote should, he flowed like brown fuzzy water along the floor to the bar and held up a finger, and though he did not speak the owner poured him a drink and he drank it. It poured over his teeth and around his tongue and down his gullet and past his duodenum and into his flat coyote belly, and then he filled out and stood up straight like a man coyote does, and his eyes had the light of those who have had the very big rock fall on them, or been blown up by the Acme dynamite, or have fallen off the high cliff and hit the telegraph wires and bounced up again. When a man coyote knows these things they do not go away from him. The coyote walked out of the cantina straight with the tire marks down his back like sergeant's stripes.

    from Heat of Fusion and other stories, which also has the 110 stories I linked to before.
    Wednesday, June 16th, 2004
    8:25 pm
    freebies
    I've been picking mini-peaches from the tree in my parents' backyard, in Pasadena, and there are way too many. (Tomorrow I think I'll take out a ladder and go after the higher branches.) Anyone nearby want some?

    Also on offer: one Gmail invite.
    Saturday, June 12th, 2004
    5:02 pm
    There's been some confusion about the "very interesting" LJ hack, from both directions -- no, it doesn't harvest your password; but also no, this type of attack is not harmless, and you can't stop it just by disabling Javascript.

    When you log into LJ by entering your id and password, it stores a cookie on your browser; later, when you post something, your browser sends the cookie back to identify you, so you don't have to type your password every time. Now suppose another website presents a form to you to fill out, and you click the submit button, but the form is written to submit its data to LiveJournal, instead of the other website. Then LiveJournal will look at the cookie, check that this submission is coming from you (or rather, from your browser), and happily do whatever the submission tells it to, assuming your full authority. This is what the "very interesting" attack does, only it uses Javascript to automatically submit the form, without any extra action from you. Turning off Javascript stops that from happening, but it does not protect you from filling out an innocent-looking form (say, one of those "Which 19th-century cat wrangler are you?" ones) that does something evil through hidden fields. This is not limited to posting fake entries -- as I understand the current situation, it could do anything to your account that you can do yourself.

    So how can you protect yourself? You can:

    1. Never log in, so there is no cookie to authorize anything funny. Enter your password every time you post.

    2. Check the HTML source of any form on any other site to be sure there's no hanky-panky. Perhaps some browsers have an option to never submit forms to sites other than their originators.

    3. Bug the LJ management to switch to a secure design, or at least a less insecure one such as checking the 'referer' field on posts. This is possible but would break compatibility with existing clients.

    None of those is very attractive (well, except #3, but it's not likely to happen until after worse attacks -- bradfitz already rejected even checking the referrer). But there we are.

    Update: I don't think the referrer check would even work, because you can include <form> elements in your posts. Also, maybe I was too pessimistic about the LJ staff deciding to fix this -- I haven't been following that thread.
    Tuesday, April 20th, 2004
    4:57 pm
    Erdös number for sale! I wish I had the time it would take to claim it. The odd-looking picture of a 5 isn't explained, but it looks like it came out of one of those experiments where they drive a crude model of morphogenesis with a genetic algorithm trying to reproduce a target shape (like I showed in this entry, only those shapes were just supposed to look neat, not like anything in particular).
    Monday, March 29th, 2004
    4:16 pm
    Spiral Zebras of Mars
    A new paper in Geology explains the spiraling miles-wide troughs around Mars's polar ice cap with a reaction-diffusion model of the same sort Turing invented to explain zebra stripes and leopard spots. Cool!

    Via complexity theorist Cosma Shalizi, who writes "Clearly, I need to go to Mars to further my research."
    Sunday, March 21st, 2004
    3:08 pm
    As Jim Henley puts it:
    Katherine of Obsidian Wings continues to give the Maher Arar story the sort of detailed coverage we normally reserve for important issues like Janet Jackson's nipple shield.
    (Arar is the Canadian citizen who was detained from a connecting flight through the U.S., held incommunicado, and deported to Syria and tortured.)
    Saturday, February 21st, 2004
    7:40 am
    You know that group taking San Francisco to court to stop them performing marriages, the Alliance Defense Fund? Obviously they're not sf readers, seeing as they probably don't want people to imagine them as jackbooted singing butterflies posting screeds ending with "Death to vermin." Not that they're making themselves look good anyway -- marriage is a human right.

    I've started on a more biological sort of pretty-pictures program that paints things with 'cells' that move and divide, and it's beginning to produce nice results:
    ( screenshot )

    Also I dusted off the older program and made some new pics to put up on deviantart.
    Saturday, January 3rd, 2004
    10:19 pm
    Go Spirit!


    I get all choked up thinking of those brave little landers going out into danger for us. That might not be a rare feeling -- at JPL the last time they had a Mars rover (Sojourner) there was a line blocks long to get a Hot Wheels toy model of it.
    Tuesday, September 16th, 2003
    5:30 am
    two new interviews
    Vernor Vinge interview at Strange Horizons. Hey, interviewers, I wish you'd leave off the Singularity for a change and try picking his brain about other stuff, like this talk he gave in 2001. The interview had some writing news, a couple of novels he's working on: one set in the near future, and then a sequel to "The Blabber". Yay!

    Calpundit interviews Paul Krugman. Krugman's views on U.S. politics are sounding a whole lot like Graydon Saunders', who well before the 2000 election was warning about the forces that have put us in this mess. I took Saunders only semi-seriously up until that election; now I just hope he's wrong about what measures are needed to fight back.
    Wednesday, August 20th, 2003
    8:58 pm
    My LiveJournal Sitcom
    Being Darius (PAX, 10:30): darius (Keri Russell) ruins pegkerr (Ben Vereen)'s favourite book while house-sitting. That weekend, meta (Anthony LaPaglia) gets in trouble with the law when pameladean (James Doohan) discusses notepads with an undercover cop. Soon afterwards, caplet (Julia Roberts) accidentally throws away bwooce (Mimi Rogers)'s hairbrush. Nearby, trustmetrics (Liam Neeson) overhears onasc (Carrie-Anne Moss) talking about Marxism. The week after, harveyrabbit (Julianna Margulies) paints meanies (Lily Tomlin)'s peach orange. Parental discretion advised.
    What's Your LiveJournal Sitcom? (by rfreebern)


    Sorry, Peg!
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