Sergio, Sergio Knight

In case anyone was curious what I did with my iPhone application, I did end up releasing it for jailbroken phones. It's called ContactXfer and is available through Cydia. It's beta for sure, though I haven't received any complaints.

Looks like it's even getting a tiny bit of attention, which is fun. The code is pretty crappy, but I've got tarballs up if you want to take a look. You can marvel at the insane steps I had to go through to contend with the removal of ABPerson serialization from the AddressBook framework (it's in the regular osx version, but not the iphoneos version). I guess they didn't want people serializing address book entries or something.

My coding curiosity got the better of me, and I made a little iPhone app. ( But there's a problem... (read on if you want to listen to me whining about Apple...) )

It's odd how you forget things that you like.

I just watched a movie which I've seen many times — Rope (1948) — which I own precisely because I think it is so good (hint: I've had this userpic for a very long time). In fact, I had completely forgotten just how good this film is (Thanks to unseleigh for suggesting I watch it tonight). For those who don't know, it's a Hitchcock film made from an English play (based on a true American event) about two young men who commit a murder just for the thrill.

This may be Jimmy Stewart's best role, from the completely stationary shot of his reactions while arguments are happening off screen to his ever so slightly shaking hands. The performance really is astounding.

The play is written for a single set, and this is how Hitchcock shot it — one cut per reel, 3 rooms in toto. The constraint enables excellent compositional complexity that might otherwise seem out of place.

It may be because I'm on my third Celebration Ale (thanks Dave!), but I do feel compelled to tell everyone who hasn't seen this film to go watch it this very instant.

I just found a bug in find(1).

For the very few of you who may appreciate this, here is a very nice example of
( memory corruption causing problems in distant places )

I actually love excuses to go digging through assembly, and this was definitely one. It's such a simple bug, but finding it from where it shows up is non-trivial indeed.

Being all over whois (that's my ancient nic handle from back when you updated your domain by uploading text files1), I get a lot of unwanted email. My mail server typically rejects between 200 and 400 messages per day (bursts into the thousands), just for coming from an IP address it can't find a name for.

Even with that, I probably have another 200 messages per day which I consider spam. I used to use an RBL, but I started getting too many false positives (one is pretty close to too many).

So for a long time I just relied on client-based filtering.

On a seemingly unrelated note, I have never run mail server anti-virus software since no one on my network is likely to get infected.

Until I realized that I am an idiot, and most of the spam now is some sort of virus2.

So, turns out running ClamAV on my mail server cuts out another 150 or so messages, leaving me (or Thunderbird) with only 50 to deal with.

I highly recommend the product to anyone looking for something similar.

On a more depressing note, I now reject about 90% of the mail reaching my network. I miss when it was still the simple mail transfer protocol :).


1 I don't know how they figured out I lived in CT, they must update their database from other registrars.
2 Phishing emails and stock scams are now considered viri and have anti-virus signatures.

I'm posting this right now during a power outage. On the bright side, it seems I have all of the right things hooked up to the UPS.

By the way, does anyone know Category Theory? Specifically things you can do with F-Algebras?

A ship can float on water, but it can sink in it too.

This is a small road along a "back way" to campus:

(more)

I don't know about you, but I think if it's going to snow, then it might as well be pretty too :) (as opposed to the storm last week that left everything an icy mess).

In other news, I'll take some time to complain yet again about programming languages that index their arrays starting with 1. Sure, 0-based arrays seem kind of odd when you first see them1, but they make things so much easier!

So I was reading this SANS Diary Entry which talks about Social Security Number - IP Address equivalence, and I got curious.

I won't do something silly like post my SSN here, but here's the whois registrant that it belongs to, which I thought was kind of funny (in exactly which way I'm not sure yet).

OrgName:    Halliburton Company
OrgID:      HALLIB-1
Address:    10200 Bellaire Blvd
City:       Houston
StateProv:  TX
PostalCode: 77072-5299
Country:    US

Every once in a while living in the middle of nowhere turns out to be good.

"You need 30,000 mile service on your car with 2 hours notice? No problem!"

In every other place that I've lived that would have been a "Hahahaha!"

If anyone knows anyone who:

1. Knows linux
2. Knows java and c++
3. Knows SQL
4. Preferably knows AWK and misc shell scripting
5. Wants to work for a financial modeling company in Bethesda

... let me know. The hours are long and work never ceases, but pay raises are steady.

Would anyone be interested in playing with a wiki?

I need to get cracking on some of the interesting ideas I've had as of late. They include an ephemeral file system, statistical thermodynamic game theory, and a p2p protocol for mail delivery. Probably they are all bullshit, but I won't know until I put some effort in.

In other news, I've really come to like awk quite a bit.

Happy Ian Curtis day.

A man arrived where I had also arrived moments earlier. His words were, "What, are you following me?" He obviously knows about following people.

It's been 7 weeks since I last posted something; quite some time. If only I had news more exciting than my <$700 1U RM server which I will be turning into a firewall called ice.atistar.net.

For now, a nap and back to work.

. . . .

Heh, microsoft has said that the source code leak is real. Too bad I've lost touch with any means of easily getting it. Not that I have the space to store it or anything.

This is something that I've been waiting for: MADDA. I imagine that we will see some odd moves on the part of major labels as these things continue to happen.

Hmmm.

Bubba Ho-Tep is coming.

I don't know exactly what it is about me or the world that causes me to gravitate towards being awake late at night (not to say that I am unique in that respect). It is, however, the case.

Is it society's schedule that we are repelled from, as a like magnetic pole? If one, magical day the work day started at 2pm, would we be leaving our respective diners through the quiet, empty streets in the wee hours of mid-day?