Archive for August, 2007

Blog TLC

August 31st, 2007

Since this blog has going for a whole four months already, it was time to give it a wee massage and face scrub.

Beauty care performed:

spam: Akismet was feeling a bit lonely and started to eat actual comments out of frustration. Somebaudy recommended Spam Karma a while ago.
comment rss, as suggested by Serge. If you don’t have an rss, you don’t exist.
Shareomatic: not that i expect people to tag my posts, but i really like their project, so i’m very willing to advertise.
A nice mp3 player plug-in to be really multimedia at last.
I removed my LibraryThing thing, although it was nice, since i’m not keeping my books up to date

And i did a backup of my DB, to keep four months worth of (hrrrrm) intellectual jewels.

And also another occasion to remember that CSS are a Royal, nay, Imperial PITA for someone who’s none too familiar with them.
Note to self: hire professional web designers for any professional web design work.

5 comments »

Posted in trivia

Links on this mild evening

August 27th, 2007

The New Yorker with an essay about spam. I thought the history of technology was boring until i started reading the editorials of David Alan Grier, who makes it all sound like an adventure – which it is, in a way.

I installed Google Desktop on my work computer today to compensate for the appallingly bad file search on Win XP. It has been indexing like mad all day, slowing my computer down, and was only at 36% when i left … so the verdict’s still out.

Wellington Grey got married: very moving

No comments »

Posted in Uncategorized

Bayes rules

August 26th, 2007

One thing i realized last year, when i did my masters of Artificial Intelligence, was that statistics are the absolute basis of any kind of number treatment, be it science or opinion polls.

The problem is that statistics are difficult. I had a course in a distant past, but i don’t remember much (mean, standard variance, Gauss). It was a lot to take in, in an already heavy bachelor curriculum.

Not only that – i’ve learned during the masters (cognitive science course) that our intuition is fundamentally flawed when it comes to some statistics. In some cases we can trust our judgment, but in some not at all.

So I think everyone should get basic stats at the end of high school. It’s an incredibly powerful tool, and is useful for all kind of things – from small shop logistics to assessing what newspapers tell you.

Especially that last fact is essential. We have a society where science is a kind of religion. If someone makes a statement and supports it with graphs and numbers, well then, it must be true.

Some articles state facts based on one test. In statistical terms, that means a significance of zero. Some others give you numbers, but with absolutely no way assess the quality of the research.

So i think that i’ll go and get me a book on modern statistics. It is fundamental for search technologies and machine learning techniques, and is also interesting just to distinguish truth from utter BS.

5 comments »

Posted in politics, random musings

I Suck

August 22nd, 2007

There’s a first for everything. A first for me this morning: hate comments. A person took offence of one of my posts:

you suck your just jelous

So i could leave the comments on my site: liberty of press, everyone’s entitled to their opinion, and so on.

On the other hand, do i really want to be called “you pease of shit” (obviously a gentleman of distinction and taste) on my own blog ?

What’s your opinion ?
Moderate the comment into oblivion, or just leave it there for all to enjoy ?

4 comments »

Posted in Bloggers, life

Spot a geek

August 22nd, 2007

Something weird happened to me the other day. I got a mail in my mailbox with a photo of me the day before (!) by geekspotter@gmail.com. I wasn’t aware i had been photographed.

I looked pretty pissed off on the photograph. It was at an Antwerp food event, and i’d was waiting for my ‘Effiloce de Cabio al Pesto’ for 10 minutes. The person who’d accepted my food tokens had disappeared out of sight, and no hope for the food showing up.

So anyway, I wanted to know what it was all about. He/she replied that they were starting a new gimmick: geek spotting. And that i was the first spottee. And a geek.

They wanted my opinion, and i was honest: to receive a mail first thing in the morning with a photograph of yourself, taken unawares … well it’s strange. My photo has yet to appear on the site … hope the first one to appear will look more cheerful

Has anyone heard of similar sites, or is this a new concept ?

2 comments »

Posted in geek, so sue me

Sleeping Objects

August 21st, 2007

Ruby on Rails is an attractive web development platform. However, the fact that it persists object with ActiveRecord, based on the active record architectural pattern (one row = one object) limits its flexibility.

So it’s good news that there are initiatives (activeHibernate) to implement Hibernate for Ruby objects. Hibernate is extremely flexible: you can create objects over several tables and do intelligent mappings, translating the object to DB pretty much any way you want.

Even better, they’re trying to avoid the annoyance of having to deal with yet another XML file. Pretty much every Java contraption has its share of xml config files, and Hibernate is no exception. This is boring as every XML file has its definition. And usually modifications are not taken into consideration dynamically, but require some rebooting.

So for activeHibernate. Good stuff, i’ll keep an eye on that. If you’re going to do OO do it right.

2 comments »

Posted in developer, RoR

Pukkelpop

August 18th, 2007

As festivals go, Pukkelpop is a perfect illustration of a type.

The smell. You forget about the smell. The meadow consists out of good Limburg soil compounded with many generations of cow dung.

So this, being trampled by thousands of festivalgoers, and watered with by the occasional drunk, does bring out a very particular aroma. Add greasy food and old beer in the mix, and you better breathe through your mouth.

The public: nice and well-behaved, actually. No hordes of stumbling drunks or terminal stoners like in Dour. Quite young, of course – i remember going to festivals made me feel old when i was 25, and it’s not getting any better.

We went for one day, and I enjoyed myself. I think i have acquired a healthier attitude: i used to run around from act to act, determined not to miss a single minute, and to be at the very front too, dammit. Ending up singed by the sun, with a solid cold, a hangover, and completely exhausted.

Now we took it easy – taking in the acts at a reasonable distance, we sat about, enjoying ourselves. The weather remained decent, so a quite comfortable afternoon and night, all in all.

My highlights:

Chris Cornell : great voice. And he did some old favourites of Sound Garden. “Fell on Black Days” … what more can i say.
The Besnard Lakes: my boyfriend had seen them before, and i recommend them: guitars and voices in harmonic, yet unconventional ensembles. Very nice
predictably, Smashing Pumpkins: soulless, if technically perfect performance. Not a fan of their new album, but they played a few old numbers a fast “Bullet with Butterfly wings” for instance
And a few others that made less of an impression, but were pretty interesting: The Noisettes, Patrick Wolf.

OK, now i’ll go back to being a geek

No comments »

Posted in Entertainment, music

Links on this cloudy evening

August 14th, 2007

In the same subject as yesterday: Diebold are not up to rebranding, but they do seem to work at keeping past rumours out of our memory by the simple process of editing Wikipedia.

An enlightening post around the issue of IIS catching up with Apache. Or how you can make stats mean absolutely anything you like.

For some reason we’ve stuck with ugly plastic cases for our computers for way too long. Some people, desperate for glamour, have modded their cases themselves (with more or less success), and last few years there’s aluminium as an alternative.

But check this out (and others). I love these combinations of craft + design + high tech .

2 comments »

Posted in trivia

Cash machine

August 13th, 2007

I noticed this evening when withdrawing cash that the cash machine was from Diebold, as in notoriously cracked voting machines Diebold.

If i was them i’d to through a rebranding exercise. “No such thing as bad publicity” depends of the degree of badness.

(and i won’t tell you which bank agency it was, that would be publicity too)

1 comment »

Posted in security

Google Cracks ?

August 13th, 2007

Stumbled upon Google Hacks yesterday. Some are fun, some are useful and some stray into script kiddie territory. Anyway, here’s a rundown.

Fun:
inurl “viewerframe?mode=refresh”: should allow you to check insecure networked webcams. Doesn’t seem to work anymore – probably Google caught on and somehow filters that search.

Interesting:
“intitle:index of” : searching web content for files you want to have, for instance “intitle:index of” killers mp3

Mh, err:
“robots.txt” “disallow:” filetype:txt : find a listing of the text files for which it was explicitely specified not to be listed by search engines. The example given is the white house.
intitle:index of ws_ftp ini : hm. Allows you to pick up some config files from ws_ftp, which seems to have some weaknesses.
intitle:”index of” passwd passwd.bak : the guy goes wrong there, because i haven’t seen a whole lot of plaintext passwords lying around – usually it’s the ‘x’ that goes for password is hashed in shadow file . Fortunately.
inurl:_vti_pvt “service.pwd” : hack sites made with Frontpage. Apparently the pass is encrypted with DES, not that safe.
“vnc desktop” inurl: : you probably get the picture. The password is apparently easy to crack, too.
intext:”UAA (MSB)” Lexmark -ext:pdf or inurl:”port_255″ -htm : web interface of some networked printers are freely available. Room for practical jokes or a little bit of spying.
intitle:”index of” cookies.txt : cookie files lying about. You still need to crack the hashes or to be into exploiting other people’s sessions. What you certainly can see is what people are into (XXX for instance).
intitle “usage statistics for” “generated by webalizer” : lets you see webalizer pages from slightly underprotected servers. Like traffic over time.
intitle:phpMyAdmin “Welcome to phpMyAdmin ***” “running on * as root@*” : yes, for some it actually works.

Well, there’s a dark side to every technology : a powerful search engine can pick holes in your security, especially if there isn’t any. You think you’re safe, protected by the sheer mass of information, but no longer.

Still, it’s interesting to know about commands like intitle, intext, inurl.

7 comments »

Posted in search engine, security

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