Monthly Archives: September 2002

Hack of the Day — ASCII television

While killing an extra few minutes waiting for my wife to pick me up for the ballgame lastnight, I was surfing the web and found the webpage for ttyquake, a version of the original Quake ported to use the ASCII art library aalib.
Digging around, I found that someone had written aatv, a program to display live video on the Linux console. That seemed like a good hack, so I modified my FreeBSD webcam program to do the same. A cool and semi-useless hack that took only ten minutes.
On the right you can see a screen capture of my attempt to watch Sportcenter via xterm.
A dead easy hack.

Legal Liability for Software Defects

ZDNet UK is currently running a
story about the comments
made by Microsoft VP Steve Ballmer about Microsoft. This provoked the usual backlash of
anti-Microsoft sentiment on weblogs like
Slashdot
, but one interesting point was raised.

The ZDNet article says:

Asked by one lateral-thinking MVP whether Microsoft planned to offer applications software on Linux, Ballmer said no. “We do not anticipate offering software on Linux. Nobody pays for software on Linux.” Even StarOffice, sold by Sun, was originally a free product, he said. And IBM, arguably the No. 1 player in the Linux market, promotes Linux to big users, but does not actually sell Linux: “It’s weird! IBM says ‘Hey British Aerospace! Buy Linux…. From SuSE.”

The big issue there, he said, was a reluctance to accept legal liability for open-source software.

The reason that I find this interesting is of course that Microsoft doesn’t assume any legal liability for damages caused by the use of their software either. From the WinXP EULA:

13. EXCLUSION OF INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL
AND CERTAIN OTHER DAMAGES. TO THE
MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE
LAW, IN NO EVENT SHALL MICROSOFT OR ITS
SUPPLIERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL,
INCIDENTAL, PUNITIVE, INDIRECT, OR
CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES WHATSOEVER
(INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, DAMAGES
FOR LOSS OF PROFITS OR CONFIDENTIAL OR
OTHER INFORMATION, FOR BUSINESS
INTERRUPTION, FOR PERSONAL INJURY, FOR
LOSS OF PRIVACY, FOR FAILURE TO MEET
ANY DUTY INCLUDING OF GOOD FAITH OR OF
REASONABLE CARE, FOR NEGLIGENCE, AND
FOR ANY OTHER PECUNIARY OR OTHER LOSS
WHATSOEVER) ARISING OUT OF OR IN ANY
WAY RELATED TO THE USE OF OR INABILITY
TO USE THE PRODUCT, THE PROVISION OF
OR FAILURE TO PROVIDE SUPPORT OR OTHER
SERVICES, INFORMATON, SOFTWARE, AND
RELATED CONTENT THROUGH THE PRODUCT OR
OTHERWISE ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF THE
PRODUCT, OR OTHERWISE UNDER OR IN
CONNECTION WITH ANY PROVISION OF THIS
EULA, EVEN IN THE EVENT OF THE FAULT,
TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE), STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF CONTRACT OR BREACH
OF WARRANTY OF MICROSOFT OR ANY
SUPPLIER, AND EVEN IF MICROSOFT OR ANY
SUPPLIER HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE
POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

I wonder what legal liability Ballmer is actually talking about, since this basically says that if WinXP blows up and destroys your house, even if their programmers put code that they knew could result
in the loss of your house, that they are not liable for damages. It is true that Microsoft is at least
a sue-able entity, but good luck in actually succeeding.

Microsoft offers precisely the same legal liability as any Linux distribution: none.

Welcome Back!

A long lost booster section from Apollo 12 has apparently reentered Earth orbit, for the time being at least. NASA’s Near Earth Object Program has found that a mysterious object labelled J002E3 was likely recaptured into Earth orbit in April of this year, and originally left Earth orbit in March of 1971. Their conclusions:

The timing of the object’s escape is consistent with our theory that this object is the Apollo 12 S-IVB third stage, which was left in a distant Earth orbit after it was launched on November 14, 1969 and passed the Moon four days later. We theorize that the spent rocket orbited the Earth chaotically for 15 months before finding the exit pathway through the L1 portal. The excellent match between the intrinsic brightness of J002E3 and that expected for a rocket stage of the S-IVB’s size also supports this theory. The other four S-IVB stages still flying (those from Apollos 8 through 11) have been dismissed as suspects because they entered solar orbit much earlier than March 1971.

The ultimate fate of the object appears to be again to leave Earth orbit through a Lagrange point in June of 2003, perhaps to loop around the solar system for thirty more years before paying us a visit.
Cool.

Goofing around with pygame

I was trying to decide on the easiest way to make a graphical user interface for the Scarne’s Challenge puzzle game that I’ve been experimenting with. I stumbled upon pygame, a simple game programming library that uses Simple DirectMedia Layer library to provide a fairly attractive environment for making simple games in Python. In just an afternoon, I coded a simple mpeg player with custom controls, and am now working on a version of the classic Spacewar! game, which I anticipate should
take me another day or two. Fun stuff, screenshots to follow soon!

AES Broken?

I subscribe to Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram newsletter, because I have mostly passing interest in things having to do with cryptography. Today’s included a rather startling revelation:
AES may have been broken.
Bruce’s description of the work is intriguing, but it is far from clear whether this break is of more than strictly theoretical interest. Bruce says:

So, here’s the current scorecard. Courtois and Pieprzyk claim a 2^100-ish attack against AES. They claim a 2^200-ish attack against Serpent. This is an enormously big deal.

Assuming that it’s real.

No doubt more revelations to come in the future. I’m not throwing away my 3DES code just yet. :

Nice Biology Site

I read talk.origins quite a bit. It is mostly a grand waste of time, but I like to read about the topic of evolution and its anti-thesis, creationism. Every once in a while you find a discussion or link that is truly interesting. Today a nice link to www.actionbioscience.org was posted. It is a very nice website which includes links to many find introductory essays on a wide variety of topics including evolution. Enjoy!

Do something good!

NSC First Aid

Recently I experienced something new: the excitement of rushing my wife to the emergency room for stitches. She slipped while hiking and gashed her arm pretty good on some jagged concrete. Score: 10 stitches and one tetanus shot. Today she sent me a link to the
The National SafetyCouncil, who are offering an
online First Aid and CPR course for free from Sep. 11 to Sep. 17. While this will not give you certification, it might help you be better prepared for the eventual emergencies, so I urge you all to
give it a look.

Zounds! Sounds!

While browsing through sweetcode’s archives I found an interesting link to Andrew Plotkin’s program boodler. Boodler is a soundscape generation tool written in Python. Basically it allows you to generate sounds by taking sample sounds, modifying them and playing them using independently scheduled agents. It is a pretty nifty little gadget, and comes with examples which replicate some of those “ambience” CDs like thunderstorms, crickets and frogs.
Continue reading

Awari Solved

The University of Alberta has a very cool group that does research into gameplay. Recently they
solved Awari, a very old game that is still very common and popular in Africa and the West Indies. They did it by brutally enumerating all possible board positions via retrograde analyis on a cluster of 144 PCs in 51 hours. Not bad for a weekend’s worth of work.

Alphabet Soup

While surfing around on sweetcode today I found a link to a project called Alphabet Soup, a wacky project by Matt Chisolm that attempts to generate slightly perverse versions of regular characters using a context free grammar that describes possible characters. For instance, the following renditions of BRAINWAGON were made by his nifty script:










Pretty nifty, although I don’t think they will become my logo anytime real soon.

The Tower of Babel

I’ve been working a bit more on my weblog over the past few days, trying to clean up and remodularize the templates that I’ve been working on. As a result, I’ve got a stack of books on my desk regarding the various bits of web technology that I use. And it started me thinking. And as so often happens when I think, I feel the need to rant.

Why in the world do we have to know so much to make an attractive, interesting web page?

Continue reading

The Oakland Athletics

Damn. I love baseball. It didn’t use to be that way. I found baseball to be rather dry and slow paced and not very interesting. But about five years ago I started to go to games. And now I am hooked.

And the Oakland Athletics have alot to do with it. Athletic tickets are fairly cheap, the ballpark is pretty easy to get to and the Athletics kick major ass.
You’d think that after losing a former league MVP that their team would be on the way down. Yet tonight they set an alltime AL record by winning their 20th straight game. Sure, they blew an 11-0 lead by allowing the Royals to come all the way back to tie in the top of the 9th, but Scott Hatteburg came up big with the game winning walk off homerun. This caps off two dramatic 9th inning victories in the last two games, both won by hits from Miguel Tejada, the obvious candidate for league MVP (despite some shakey defensive play tonight).

Damn, I love baseball.

Bad Science

I originally created several topics for this website to classify various types of Science. These included Science, Mad Science and Bad Science. Today, while browsing I found that an excellent Bad Science webpage already existed. While I normally think of bad science as pseudo science, they prefer to actually clarify genuine mistakes that are propagated in science textbooks and lore. They include nice sections on Bad Astronomy, Bad Chemistry, and Bad Meteorology. Worth reading!

It includes the excellent quotation

Be very, very careful what you put into that head,
because you will never, ever get it out.

Thomas Cardinal Wolsey (1471-1530)