October 27, 2008
The Great Firewall of Australia
I've put a new banner in the side bar of this site. It links to a site campaigning to have the Australian government's Internet censorship plans halted. The background and justification is all there on the site, so I'm not going to repeat it here, except to say that I'm seriously concerned this story has not yet hit mainstream Australian media. Remember the uproar and public shaming of China's efforts to censor the Internet media around the Olympics? Now similar plans are being made in the lucky country and Australia's apathetic public have barely been bothered.
Posted by LightYear at 11:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
October 26, 2008
The future, on a platter.
Way back in the dark ages of mid 2007, I wrote about what I saw as a looming period of technical enlightenment. This vision has not waned. The channels of information I have at my fingertips continue to provide me with extraordinary pieces of insight and development, time and again.
Radio has been around for some time, but only recent developments have enabled me to pick the shows that appeal to me, download them to my sunglasses, and lead a eye-wear fashion parade while I ride to work. While trend envy is an obvious side effect of my choice of lens-flipping glasses, it's also the only reason I get to listen to quality radio programs like All In The Mind on ABC Radio National and Dr Karl on Triple J.
One segment on Dr Karl the other day caught my attention. Renowned skeptic Michael Shermer was guest question answerer. One of the callers brought up the experiments conducted by Robert Jahn at the PEAR laboratory. The caller was adamant that Mr Jahn had conducted robust and objective experiments over many years that consistently showed a random signal emitted from a machine could be influenced by the thoughts of humans. While they had heard of the experiments, neither Dr Karl nor Mr Shermer were familiar enough with the work to offer much comment, beyond some general skepticism.
15 years ago that would have been that. I would have forgotten Jahn did any experiments or what their significance was. Not any more. Not only is Jahn's biography and laboratory details a web site away, more importantly the scientific papers the group produced are freely available for anyone to review. In particular, a thorough report, published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, documents the findings of an experiment to see if the thoughts of humans remote to a random number generator could influence that generator.
The real power here is that there is nothing stopping me, Joe Nobody, from repeating Jahn's experiments and publishing the results to the world (perhaps even submitting to a journal that wasn't set up to document paranormal events). How positively empowering it is to think that anyone with access to an Internet enabled computer has the potential to turn scientific endeavour on its head. A repeated experiment that corroborated findings showing correlation between human thought and machine output would be simply staggering.
Incidentally, I'm not going to follow up Jahn's work, but this snippet of the paper linked above might whet someone's appetite. The numbers are the output of a random number generator with mean 100, as a participant hundreds of miles away tried to influence it with their mind high and low.
Apart from Jahn's work, a couple of other snippets of information that have blown my mind recently:
1) Researches at the University of Washington planted electrodes on individual neurons in the motor cortex of monkey brains and connected them via a computer to muscles in the monkey's wrist. They then temporarily paralysed the normal signal path that controlled the monkey's wrist and found that within a couple of weeks the monkeys had learnt to deftly control their wrist with the artificial nerve path. The computer simply counted the frequency of pulses occurring in the monitored neurons and translated that to electrical signals to the muscles. The ramifications for enabling movement in paraplegics are striking. Link.
2) A team from the Security and Cryptography Laboratory in Switzerland successfully demonstrated a method of deciphering the faint electromagnetic radiation emitted from the cord that connects a regular keyboard to computer. From up to 20 metres away they could determine the keys pressed on the keyboard, which suggests there's some appreciation to be given to the seemingly benign amount of radiation our regular activities generate. Link.
3) A horse got its head stuck in a tree. NSFW. Link.
Posted by LightYear at 8:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
October 14, 2008
Swings and Roundabouts
No you're not imaging it - this is one of the longest periods I've gone without more than a few words posted to this here blog. More evidence that blog activity is inversely proportional to actual life activity. I didn't plan it, things have just been going well for me recently. My priorities have shifted and I'm enjoying finding a new equilibrium, shared with someone I care about.
But never fear! The geek within still burns strong. And the geek within has finally managed to take the gloves off, put some real money aside, and dive into the sharemarket. What an enormously energetic introduction to share trading! What follows is my impression of the events of the last few months, from the perspective of a first time trader.
Continue reading "Swings and Roundabouts"
Posted by LightYear at 3:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
September 28, 2008
Painting progress, again
Amazing how a lick of paint can change the mood of a place.
The front door:
Posted by LightYear at 5:35 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
August 24, 2008
Painting progress
I'm happy to report that the front of the house is done. The light at the end of the tunnel is well in sight now. The photos are a poor substitute to actually looking at it (particularly the after photo, which I'm struggling to find the right light for) but it's great to look back and see the difference.
Posted by LightYear at 7:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
August 12, 2008
NTLM Message Decoder
I've just finished hacking up a very small program I should have written years ago. It turns out the ability to reverse engineer an NTLM HTTP proxy authentication message is still useful, and thus, NTLMMessageDecoder is here.
All it does is automate the deconstruction of the three NTLM message types as described here and elsewhere. It takes the base64 encoded version of the NTLM message (as it appears in the HTTP header) on standard input and spits out the results on standard output.
The source code is included (under the Creative Commons license), as well as a pre-built version for Intel Macs. To build your own version, just run make. Note that big endian architectures will need to edit the ltohl and ltohs functions (in main.c) to swap the endianess. Since I also built this on my Powerbook, here's an example of functions that will do the job:
short ltohs(short in) { return ((in&0xFF) << 8) | ((in&0xFF00) >> 8); }
long ltohl(long in) { return ((in&0xFF) << 24) | ((in&0xFF00) << 8) |
((in&0xFF0000) >> 8) | ((in&0xFF000000) >> 24); }
I welcome modification submissions (detecting endianess, better formatting, NTLM improvements, etc.) and will publish your work, with attributions, under the same license if you like.
Posted by LightYear at 10:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
July 31, 2008
Pissed as a treeshrew
With all the hoopla surrounding standards for excessive alcohol consumption, perhaps we've neglected the hardest hit.
Spare a thought for the pentailed treeshrew, which spends two hours a night suckling on nature's beer source - flower buds of the Bertam Palm.
Researchers from Germany's Bayreuth University reckon these little rodent like creatures are hitting the buds hard - hard enough to get your average human drunk - but are stumped by the animal's ability to appear sober. Well be stumped no more. As a slightly above average alcohol consumer, I can assure you that a well trained body will sedate the effects of alcohol, making getting pissed just that bit harder.
Mark my words, it won't be long before we see pentailed treeshrews leaving the palm buds where they hang and turning to the guarana and bull urine of the alcopop tree. I can assure you that when this catastrophe nears, I'll be grabbing a case, jumping on a train and leaving to rock out with the raging rodents of the Malaysian rainforest.
Posted by LightYear at 8:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
July 28, 2008
Phone budgeting, geek style
The Apple iPhone 3G was released here a couple of weeks ago. I've held out a long time getting a modern phone and the iPhone ticks many of the boxes I've been waiting for. Though as I've waited this long, I'm happy to watch how the costs settle and pick the best option for me. The selected carriers have been slow to announce pricing, but now that it's out, I see that it really isn't all that attractive.
So in order to justify a new phone purchase, I decided to do a little research into my current mobile phone habits. Knowing how and when I use my current phone places me in a much more informed position when comparing the available options. Fortunately, Virgin Mobile provide a detailed call history to browse. Unfortunately however, with so much data easily available, I got a little carried away with the analysis.
What follows turns out to be a real-world tutorial on using Excel, Python and R to extract meaning from a table of data.
Continue reading "Phone budgeting, geek style"
Posted by LightYear at 11:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
