Posts by Frumious Bandersnatch

Early entry for website of the year 2013.

Looks good to me, too. I like the "Lost Consonants" feel to the whole thing (judging it by the pic in the article, anyway). That's not a bad thing at all.

Re: re: go forth and multiply

Thats just a mis-interpretation through censorship. What God actually told Adam and Eve was to F*** Off.

I always thought "go forth and Multiply" was more like a vague and inscrutable (as is His wont) warning against Adders.

Moderately strong tea, milk in afterwards

Actually, it depends. I prefer loose leaf tea to tea bags (*), but I drink more bagged tea due to the convenience. Anyway, if you make a proper brew(**) you need to scald the pot, put in the leaves and then put in the boiling water. If you've faffed around for too long between starting and pouring in the water, boil it up again then put it in the pot. It needs to be boiling(**). Then put it on a hot stove for about 4-5 minutes. For this type of tea, you absolutely need to put the milk in the cups first, otherwise you scald the milk. You might not believe this, but do a blind taste test and I think you'll be able to tell the difference.

For bags, you also need boiling hot water to begin with (and you may also wish to scald the cup first so it stays hotter, but it's not necessary), but from that point on you just leave it to brew by itself for a couple of minutes. Personally, I give it a stir (usually by grabbing the back with my fingers and swirling it around, but you can be fancy and use a spoon) and remove the bag before adding the milk, but the other variations of this aren't wrong. The only thing I'd insist on is if you have to use a sweetener, then it has to be honey. Even then, sweetener is really only something you want after some kind of shock or a day's hard labour, in which case it's acceptable :)

* Barry's Tea is de rigeur; it's a blend, but mainly based on Assam (also called Breakfast Tea by many)

** Actually there are many "proper brews", but I'm talking about black (fermented) leaf tea here. That's not to say that things like green/gunpowder/matcha tea (which don't take kindly to boiling water at all), Oolong or even (horror of horrors) mugi cha (which actually isn't a "tea" at all) aren't all worthy beverages in their own right.

*** Incidentally, this is why it's hard to make a decent cup of black leaf tea at altitude since the boiling point is reduced. Green (unfermented) tea is much better there.

Re: Eye Spy with My Raspberry Pi

Re: Don't you know, the PI itself is the loss leader

Actually, according to a recent interview, Eben Upton said that everyone in the supply chain is making a profit. I assume that the distributors also take a small/tiny cut. Granted, like you said, they are using the Pi to entice you to buy items they're making more profit on, but technically it's not a loss leader if they don't make losses on the Pis.

Re: Agree

Playing with a web server on my home connection isn't the greatest idea in the world

Learn how to set up a Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) on your network. Simply put, you make a separate subnet for your web server and use IP filtering rules (at your router) to allow machines outside that subnet to access it, but block all outgoing traffic (apart from responding to already-established connections initiated from other hosts). It can be as simple as three iptables rules: one default rule drops all forwarded traffic, one allows NEW connections to be forwarded to the DMZ box and a third allows packets that are ESTABLISHED or RELATED to be forwarded from the DMZ box. In practice, you'll probably want to do something more complicated, like doing NAT masquerading and port-forwarding at the router (so that all your machines appear to be at the same IP address and so that traffic coming from the Internet on port 80 is forwarded to the DMZ machine, respectively) so I can't give you the exact iptables commands or other firewall rules here.

Likewise, if you need to allow the DMZ machine to access certain services inside your network (that you can't or don't want to store on the DMZ machine) then you need to add more rules to allow it to make those connections. You'll want to lock down that service so that the DMZ machine can only do the bare minimum with it that it needs to operate without leaving a big hole in your security. Or better yet, migrate a minimal version of the service to the DMZ box itself or another machine on the DMZ subnet. There's always a trade-off between security (risk of the machine getting hacked) and utility (eg, you'd really like to be able to access your IMAP server) with any machine connected to the net, but a DMZ is a nice way, up to a point, to get the best of both worlds.

So basically, look up setting a DMZ for your particular router and learn about how to set up firewall rules in general.

Other than that, your distro should have packaged the web server to be pretty secure already, such as running it as a user with restricted rights (nobody in Unix-based systems) and maybe it also gives you the option of running in a chroot jail too.

Re: All true

You'd be better off burning 3 billion pounds in a park and throwing a party where tickets are a tenner to watch 3 billion pounds to go up in smoke.

But where are you going to get 3 million KLFs?

Re: Here's a fun question for you

Golbach's Conjecture is only for even numbers.

Oops. I misread the OP, then. I guess that's what I get for reading these articles first thing after waking up...

So... first odd number that's not a semi-prime or a power of a prime? I think I may need some coffee ... and a calculator ...

Re: Your point?

Applytes are quite "special", though.

I used to have an Apple, but it fell in the shitter. I used to feel special. Nowadays I'm just another applostate with an Android phone ... and loving it!

Ditto. If only they could have fitted "squabbling" in there too (to go with squillionaire) it would have been perfect.

Re: Three Strikes?

Sorry to reply to my own post, but it just occurred to me that they try for a charge of "contributory infringement" if they can prove that the user was uploading to a torrent swarm as well as downloading. In regularl language I suppose that means that the torrent user is helping other torrent users to copy something illicitly. Makes a lot more sense than the argument I've seen with some cases that each pirated copy is responsible for some crazy number of lost sales due to the uploading part. I could never get my head around how they could even claim that with a straight face. Mathematically, ff that were true, we'd have an infinite number of illicit copies for every one that was paid for.

I still don't get how two songs can generate three strikes, though.

Re: Probability

If you had 50 marbles, numbered 1 to 50, there would be a 10% chance of selecting a specific desired number with any 5 random selections from a set of 50. So 43% is only four times better than random guessing. Does the software know what the valid 50 numbers are, and pick the closest match? If so, the results are not impressive.

Whoa there... the number 50 is the size of their test sample, and nothing to do with the number of possible PINs, so your probability calculation is meaningless. In other words, their program is being asked to guess what the PIN is, and not "guess which one of these 50 known patterns/PINS" we've given you".

The way you should look at it is that each random PIN guess (having no accelerometer hints) would be right 1/10,000 of the time (ie, 0.0001). If they can guess the PIN 43% of the time with 5 guesses, then their success rate per guess is 0.43 / 5 or 0.086. So in fact their ability to guess a PIN is actually 0.086 / 0.0001 = 860 times better than chance, not four times better!

Re: The G Bomb!

To be fair, I tend to refer any large secretive insular company as a Zibatsu.....

Maybe you should switch to calling them "zaibatsu". Just a suggestion...

Re: But this future will never come

So I'm not so hopeful that it'll all fit in memory...

There's been a trend in research systems at least towards looking at using RAM to store index information while delegating actual data storage to (flash) disks. FAWN-DS (Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes Data Store), for example, reduces the amount of RAM used by each index entry to 6 bytes, while SILT (Small Index, Large Table) achieves even more compression of those index data (somewhere between 1.5--2.5 bytes per index entry, iirc). It also helps that these systems are designed from the ground up to work well with flash storage and avoid the write amplification problem (where a single write requires several physical writes due to the need to rewrite entire memory blocks when a single page changes). I'm not sure how many of these design features are implemented in today's commercial-grade systems (like hadoop's file system) but I'd wager that there are more similarities than differences.

If you add to this the fact that clustering your storage nodes is relatively easy using consistent hashing (or a DHT) to spread the storage across many nodes/controllers each with their own RAM and local storage, then I think that such a future is actually quite practical today. A lot more practical than you think.

Re: Analogy failure...

"You can tell everybody to get out of their trucks (TCP) and get on motorbikes (the new thing) congestion isn't as bad, no need for the traffic lights at every junction, and no expensive lanes being added."

Or you can have everyone get out of their car/truck/bike and move forward one vehicle. Hows about that? Guaranteed progress even in the face of deadlock....

Re: train them to target vermin?

re: Can we train them to get urban pigeons?

I think you might want hawks for that. Providing the cats don't kill them.

Re: @Frumious Bandersnatch

Thanks, Daniel B. It's nice to have that validated, even down to my guess that private and public keys don't store the same data . The downvotes I got are unimportant compared to that. Now if Lee Dowling had said that p and q were stored with the private key then I'd happily have conceded the point to him. Maybe he knew that and it's what he was trying to get at, but it's not what came across. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say we're all right. Except the downvoters. You still suck.

Re: Will

Will they now use some of their record profits to give the workers better conditions and rates of pay and stamp out child labour?

They're turning kids into slaves Just to make cheaper sneakers But what's the real cost? 'Cause the sneakers don't seem that much cheaper

Why are we still paying so much for sneakers ? When you got them made by little slaves kids What are your overheads?

(Think about it)

what did it calculate?

I have it on good authority that it came up with "BOOBIES"

those extra horizontal pixels rarely go to waste.

I like widescreen too, for the reasons already pointed out. I still find myself wishing for more vertical resolution too, though. Tabbed browsing in the webotron and gnome-terminal (and virtual desktops if you want to count that) already make great use out of screen real estate, but it would be nice to be able to see more lines of code in emacs or Eclipse or the like. Come to think of it, I guess there's always Ctl-x 3 in emacs if I want to look at a buffer in 2-up mode, providing I don't mind scrolling manually in each window. I must remember to try that next time.

Re: ECT

Except he left out the bits about going to the bottom of the sea for bunk-beds. And the hooker. Can't forget the hooker. Almost as vital as ECT.

Re: Should be doable

Just break the encrypted files down into small enough chunks and you'll find dupes

If it were that easy, you could just break it down into 1-bit chunks. But that obviously requires a bigger index than the original file collection. (Q.E.D. by Reductio ad Absurdum). Random data (such as the output of a good encryption algorithm) by definition are not compressible.

Re: wow!

Gah! Enough with the downvotes. I get it. I know, it's something I'll have to take up with my the- rapist.