Someone called this "The goth-ninja look, re-invented". Pretty accurate, pretty cool, and I want one.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Layer 8 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, searchLayer 8 is humorous Internet jargon used to refer to a nonexistent "user" or "political" layer on top of the OSI model of computer networking.[1][2]
The OSI model is a 7-layer abstract model that describes an architecture of data communications for networked computers. The layers build upon each other, allowing for abstraction of specific functions in each one. The top (7th) layer is the Application Layer describing methods and protocols of software applications. It is then held that the user is the 8th layer.
Since the OSI layer numbers are commonly used to discuss networking topics, a troubleshooter may describe an issue caused by a user to be a layer 8 issue, similar to the PEBKAC acronym and the ID-Ten-T Error.[3]
Political economic theory[4] holds that the 8th layer is important to understanding the OSI Model. Political policies such as network neutrality, spectrum management, and digital inclusion all shape the technologies comprising layers 1-7 of the OSI Model.
An 8th layer is sometimes said to be implemented in industrial networks usually containing device profiles or communication interface (e.g., ALI in Profibus)[verification needed].
In addition, sometimes Layer 8 is referred to as the finance layer.
Contents
[hide][Layer 9" is jokingly considered to be the religious layer of the OSI model or an action ordered by someone's manager, known to be wrong.
[edit] Similar pseudo-layers in the TCP/IP model
In the TCP/IP model, a 4-layer networking model, the 5th layer is analogously sometimes described as the political layer (and the 6th as the religious layer). This appears in RFC 2321[5], which is a humorous April Fools' Day RFC published in 1998.
[edit] Other uses
- A large Cisco Partner in the UK is named Layer 8 Networks.
- Linux Gazette carries a regular column called Layer 8 Linux Security [6].
[edit] References
- ^ Gregg, Michael (2007-05-01), "OSI: Securing the Stack, Layer 8 -- Social engineering and security policy", TechTarget, http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid7_gci1253302,00.html .
- ^ NCSU Layer 8 Initiative
- ^ News article on the "eighth layer"
- ^ Mosco, Vincent (1996), The Political Economy of Communication: Rethinking and Renewal, SAGE Publications, Inc, ISBN 0803985606.
- ^ IETF, RFC 2321, 1998-04-01
- ^ Layer 8 Linux Security
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layer_8"
via en.wikipedia.org
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Fuck Yeah, Tattoos!
Still trying to decide on a tattoo to get... This is a cool source of random ideas.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
F A B R I C A : Exquisite Clock
Clock built using real life objects, very interesting the way people interpret things.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Tropes - Television Tropes & Idioms
alt title(s): General TropesTropes are storytelling devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations.
via tvtropes.org
45 Beautiful Dual-Screen Wallpapers
via sixrevisions.com
If you're like me, and use multiple monitors then here are some nice dual screen desktops, I recommend using UltraMon for displaying a different desktop on each monitor, among other useful things.
Anthropomorphization
Anthropomorphization
Semantically, one rich source of jargon constructions is the hackish tendency to anthropomorphize hardware and software. English purists and academic computer scientists frequently look down on others for anthropomorphizing hardware and software, considering this sort of behavior to be characteristic of naive misunderstanding. But most hackers anthropomorphize freely, frequently describing program behavior in terms of wants and desires.
Thus it is common to hear hardware or software talked about as though it has homunculi talking to each other inside it, with intentions and desires. Thus, one hears “The protocol handler got confused”, or that programs “are trying” to do things, or one may say of a routine that “its goal in life is to X”. Or: “You can't run those two cards on the same bus; they fight over interrupt 9.”
One even hears explanations like “... and its poor little brain couldn't understand X, and it died.” Sometimes modelling things this way actually seems to make them easier to understand, perhaps because it's instinctively natural to think of anything with a really complex behavioral repertoire as ‘like a person’ rather than ‘like a thing’.
At first glance, to anyone who understands how these programs actually work, this seems like an absurdity. As hackers are among the people who know best how these phenomena work, it seems odd that they would use language that seems to ascribe consciousness to them. The mind-set behind this tendency thus demands examination.
The key to understanding this kind of usage is that it isn't done in a naive way; hackers don't personalize their stuff in the sense of feeling empathy with it, nor do they mystically believe that the things they work on every day are ‘alive’. To the contrary: hackers who anthropomorphize are expressing not a vitalistic view of program behavior but a mechanistic view of human behavior.
Almost all hackers subscribe to the mechanistic, materialistic ontology of science (this is in practice true even of most of the minority with contrary religious theories). In this view, people are biological machines — consciousness is an interesting and valuable epiphenomenon, but mind is implemented in machinery which is not fundamentally different in information-processing capacity from computers.
Hackers tend to take this a step further and argue that the difference between a substrate of CHON atoms and water and a substrate of silicon and metal is a relatively unimportant one; what matters, what makes a thing ‘alive’, is information and richness of pattern. This is animism from the flip side; it implies that humans and computers and dolphins and rocks are all machines exhibiting a continuum of modes of ‘consciousness’ according to their information-processing capacity.
Because hackers accept that a human machine can have intentions, it is therefore easy for them to ascribe consciousness and intention to other complex patterned systems such as computers. If consciousness is mechanical, it is neither more or less absurd to say that “The program wants to go into an infinite loop” than it is to say that “I want to go eat some chocolate” — and even defensible to say that “The stone, once dropped, wants to move towards the center of the earth”.
This viewpoint has respectable company in academic philosophy. Daniel Dennett organizes explanations of behavior using three stances: the “physical stance” (thing-to-be-explained as a physical object), the “design stance” (thing-to-be-explained as an artifact), and the “intentional stance” (thing-to-be-explained as an agent with desires and intentions). Which stances are appropriate is a matter not of abstract truth but of utility. Hackers typically view simple programs from the design stance, but more complex ones are often modelled using the intentional stance.
It has also been argued that the anthropomorphization of software and hardware reflects a blurring of the boundary between the programmer and his artifacts — the human qualities belong to the programmer and the code merely expresses these qualities as his/her proxy. On this view, a hacker saying a piece of code ‘got confused’ is really saying that he (or she) was confused about exactly what he wanted the computer to do, the code naturally incorporated this confusion, and the code expressed the programmer's confusion when executed by crashing or otherwise misbehaving.
Note that by displacing from “I got confused” to “It got confused”, the programmer is not avoiding responsibility, but rather getting some analytical distance in order to be able to consider the bug dispassionately.
It has also been suggested that anthropomorphizing complex systems is actually an expression of humility, a way of acknowleging that simple rules we do understand (or that we invented) can lead to emergent behavioral complexities that we don't completely understand.
All three explanations accurately model hacker psychology, and should be considered complementary rather than competing.
via catb.org
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Charles Bukowski, How To Be A Great Writer
Charles Bukowski, How To Be A Great Writer
you’ve got to fuck a great many women
beautiful women
and write a few decent love poems.
and don’t worry about age
and/or freshly-arrived talents.just drink more beer
more and more beerand attend the racetrack at least once a
week
and win
if possiblelearning to win is hard -
any slob can be a good loser.and don’t forget your Brahms
and your Bach and your
beer.don’t overexercise.
sleep until moon.
avoid paying credit cards
or paying for anything on
time.remember that there isn’t a piece of ass
in this world over $50
(in 1977).and if you have the ability to love
love yourself first
but always be aware of the possibility of
total defeat
whether the reason for that defeat
seems right or wrong -an early taste of death is not necessarily
a bad thing.stay out of churches and bars and museums,
and like the spider be
patient -
time is everybody’s cross,
plus
exile
defeat
treacheryall that dross.
stay with the beer.
beer is continuous blood.
a continuous lover.
get a large typewriter
and as the footsteps go up and down
outside your windowhit that thing
hit it hardmake it a heavyweight fight
make it the bull when he first charges in
and remember the old dogs
who fought so well:
Hemingway, Celine, Dostoevsky, Hamsun.If you think they didn’t go crazy
in tiny rooms
just like you’re doing nowwithout women
without food
without hopethen you’re not ready.
drink more beer.
there’s time.
and if there’s not
that’s all right
too.93 notes Date: 11.15.09 Time: 20:56 PM
Stendhal Syndrome
a psychosomatic illness that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to art, usually when the art is particularly beautiful or a large amount of art is in a single place. The term can also be used to describe a similar reaction to a surfeit of choice in other circumstances, e.g. when confronted with immense beauty in the natural world.
My mathematical prowess brings all the girls to the yard.
Ask her to think of any number. Then have her double it, add 12, divide by 2, and subtract the original number. Before she’s done, tell her the answer: 6. It will always be 6.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
RatioMaster
RatioMaster
RatioMaster 1.8.9 was released on August 22th, 2009.
* Intro *
RatioMaster is an application designed for spoofing uploads on BitTorrent trackers. It connects to a tracker and behaves like a normal BitTorrent client, but without actually uploading to / downloading from other peers in the swarm. It reports to the tracker that it's uploading (or downloading or both, it's your choice) at a certain rate, thus making it useful for artificially increasing your ratio on certain sites that track a user's overall ratio (total uploaded/total downloaded).
RatioMaster has hardcoded emulations for the most commonly used BitTorrent clients, but it is also able to parse external files for emulation settings, thus making it easily extensible for your favorite client and easy to update when new versions of said clients are released. The client files (extension ".client") are actually renamed XML files and the syntax should be pretty straight-forward. The emulation layer includes support for parameter order in GETs, reproduction of HTTP headers, generation of application-specific peer_ids and keys and more. RatioMaster can also parse the tracker reannounce time from the tracker's HTTP response, and combined with the fact that you can specify down and up rates makes it pretty hard to detect by any anti-cheat scripts, if not downright impossible. Other features, like a TCP listener (so as to appear connectable on the tracker's peerlist) and a leecher counter (so as to stop any uploads when a torrent has 0 leechers) also contribute to RatioMaster's spoofing abilities.
Memory Reader
Starting from version 1.6 RatioMaster have integrated Memory Reader tool that useful when you want to read exact Peer ID, Key, Port and Number of peers announce parameters from your regular torrent client (like uTorrent,Azureus,Bitcomet or others). Look for the 'Memory Reader' button in Advanced Tab.Command Line support
Starting from version 1.7 RatioMaster supports command line options.This feature is useful if you want to run several torrents from batch file or shortcuts with predefined setting:
Possible keys :
/minimize - RM will start minimized/start - RM will load latest torrent (or the one provided in command line) and automatically start it/downloadRate, /uploadRate - RM will set download and upload speed/percent - RM will set finished percent (0% = start leeching, 100% = seeding)/hide - RM will start in hidden mode, minimized and no tray icon .Use at your own risk, as far as i know the only way to stop it, is to kill process in Task Manager.
Examples (torrentpath.torrent is a full path to the torrent file) :
ratiomaster.exe torrentpath.torrent- will load the torrent
ratiomaster.exe torrentpath.torrent /start- will load the torrent from torrentpath and run it with default options
ratiomaster.exe torrentpath.torrent /start /uploadRate:250 /downloadRate:200 /percent:100- will load the torrent and start it with 250 upload,200 download,and finished 100%
ratiomaster.exe /uploadRate:250- will set provided value,all others will be default from settings
ratiomaster.exe /minimize /start- will start ratiomaster in minimized mode with last loaded torrent.
Saving individual torrent settings
Starting from version 1.7 RatioMaster saves individual settings for each torrent and uses those settings next time that you are loading same torrent. Setting files are stored in '/Torrents Config' subfolder of the ratiomaster.exe folder.
* Contact *
Website: http://www.moofdev.net/
Forums: http://www.moofdev.net/forums/
Email: ratiomaster_06 AT yahoo DOT com or dev AT moofdev DOT net
* Requirements *
RatioMaster requires that you've got the .NET Framework version 2 installed. You can get it from Microsoft.
* How to use *
1. Get a .torrent file associated with the tracker you want to spoof.
2. Load or Drag/Drop that file into RatioMaster.
3. Change the settings in the Options group to your liking: upload speed, download speed (set to 0 to spoof upload only), finished (how much of the file do you want to appear that you have - set to 100% if you want to appear as a seeder)
4. Choose 'Client Simulation' in Advanced Tab to be the same type as your regular torrent client.
5. Optionally, look through the Advanced and Network tabs and see if you need anything changed there, like using a specific port or announcing through a proxy server. Most users won't need to change anything here.
6. Press the Start button and watch the bytes start rolling.
7. After a while, when you decide you've spoofed enough, press the Stop button to announce to the tracker that you're ending your session.
Guide to writing your own client files
* Things to remember *
First of all, don't use very high upload speeds. Some trackers check sessions for very big upload rates. Using a 6 MB/s upload rate when your IP belongs to an ISP who only has a 512 kbps plan is plain stupid. Check the moofdev forums on more info on maximum safe speeds reached by other users on different trackers.
Never spoof uploads on a tracker with few peers. If there are only 2 leechers and they're downloading at a maximum of 300 kB/s, and you're spoofing an upload of 2 MB/s, it will look suspicious.
Keep the software up-to-date. Sometimes bugs are found that may get you banned on sites. RatioMaster includes an automatic version checker and will notify you when a new version is released. Update!
If you're going to take part in discussions on the moofdev forums, or other forums that deal with this sort of software, don't use the same username you use on trackers. We've had instances of tracker admins visiting the forums to see whether any of our users were members on their trackers and... well, you can assume what happened next.
Read the forums. Sometimes users will report that a certain tracker simply cannot be fooled. It's better to stay informed than be banned on your favourite tracker.
Last, but not least, only spoof when you NEED to. By cheating on a torrent, you're disrupting the swarm and going against the spirit of p2p. Unless you really need to increase your ratio and there's no better way (short of paying money - pay2leech trackers are a lot worse than cheating peers), don't cheat.
* Copyrights and acknowledgements *
RatioMaster (the software) was written by RatioMaster_06 (the person), with contributions by JTS-UD (yes it's an acronym!). We'd like to also thank:
- 12345B for moderating our forums, finding important bugs in beta builds, fixing my syntax errors and typos and for being a nice guy :)
- our anonymous betatester, who intensively tested every beta, came up with ideas and also made some nice icons for us
- Azurine, Samson and Thunder for beta testing and bug reports
- All other people we forgot, who helped with their ideas
Copyright © 2005-2009 RatioMaster_06, moofdev.net. All rights reserved.
Previous page: Welcome
Next page: RatioMaster Downloads
via moofdev.net
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Japanese Nostalgic Car - 1976 Nissan Laurel 2000SGX
FFFFOUND! | 5578_c394.gif (GIF Image, 400x400 pixels)
via ffffound.com
How many of these do you wish you've said to someone? (Also feeling that you've missed saying them is acceptable). By my count all 16...
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Monday, October 5, 2009
25 Hilarious Defaced Bills
via holytaco.com
Wish New Zealand money wasn't plastic, so I could deface it equally awesome as this!
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
VC blog » Blog Archive » Information Visualization Manifesto
Information Visualization Manifesto
Posted: August 30th, 2009 | Author: Manuel Lima | Filed under: Uncategorized |–
“The purpose of visualization is insight, not pictures”
Ben Shneiderman (1999)
–Over the past few months I’ve been talking with many people passionate about Information Visualization who share a sense of saturation over a growing number of frivolous projects. The criticism is slightly different from person to person, but it usually goes along these lines: “It’s just visualization for the sake of visualization”, “It’s just eye-candy”, “They all look the same”.
When Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas wrote about Vernacular Visualization, in their excellent article on the July-August 2008 edition of interactions magazine, they observed how the last couple of years have witnessed the tipping point of a field that used to be locked away in its academic vault, far from the public eye. The recent outburst of interest for Information Visualization caused a huge number of people to join in, particularly from the design and art community, which in turn lead to many new projects and a sprout of fresh innovation. But with more agents in a system you also have a stronger propensity for things to go wrong.
I don’t tend to be harshly censorial of many of the projects that over-glorify aesthetics over functionality, because I believe they’re part of our continuous growth and maturity as a discipline. They also represent important steps in this long progression for discovery, where we are still trying to understand how we can find new things with the rising amounts of data at our disposal. However, I do feel it’s important to reemphasize the goals of Information Visualization, and at this stage make a clear departure from other parallel, yet distinct practices.
When talking to Stuart Eccles from Made by Many, after one of my lectures in August 2009, the idea of writing a manifesto came up and I quickly decided to write down a list of considerations or requirements, that rapidly took the shape of an Information Visualization Manifesto. Some will consider this insightful and try to follow these principles in their work. Others will still want to pursue their own flamboyant experiments and not abide to any of this. But in case the last option is chosen, the resulting outcome should start being categorized in a different way. And there are many designations that can easily encompass those projects, such as New Media Art, Computer Art, Algorithmic Art, or my favorite and recommended term: Information Art.
Even though a clear divide is necessary, it doesn’t mean that Information Visualization and Information Art cannot coexist. I would even argue they should, since they can learn a lot from each other and cross-pollinate ideas, methods and techniques. In most cases the same dataset can originate two parallel projects, respectively in Information Visualization and Information Art. However, it’s important to bear in mind that the context, audience and goals of each resulting project are intrinsically distinct.
In order for the aspirations of Information Visualization to prevail, here are my 10 directions for any project in this realm:
Form Follows Function
Form doesn’t follow data. Data is incongruent by nature. Form follows a purpose, and in the case of Information Visualization, Form follows Revelation. Take the simplest analogy of a wooden chair. Data represents all the different wooden components (seat, back, legs) that are then assembled according to an ultimate goal: to seat in the case of the chair, or to reveal and disclose in the case of Visualization. Form in both cases arises from the conjunction of the different building blocks, but it never conforms to them. It is only from the problem domain that we can ascertain if a layout may be better suited and easier to understand than others. Independently of the subject, the purpose should always be centered on explanation and unveiling, which in turn leads to discovery and insight.
Start with a Question
“He who is ashamed of asking is afraid of learning”, says a famous Danish proverb. A great quality to anyone doing work in the realm of Information Visualization is to be curious and inquisitive. Every project should start with a question. An inquiry that leads you to discover further insights on the system, and in the process answer questions that weren’t even there in the beginning. This investigation might arise from a personal quest or the specific needs of a client or audience, but you should always have a defined query to drive your work.
Interactivity is Key
As defined by Ben Shneiderman, Stuart K. Card and Jock D. Mackinlay, “Information Visualization is the use of computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of abstract data to amplify cognition”. This well-known statement highlights how interactivity is an integral part of the field’s DNA. Any Information Visualization project should not only facilitate understanding but also the analysis of the data, according to specific use cases and defined goals. By employing interactive techniques, users are able to properly investigate and reshape the layout in order to find appropriate answers to their questions. This capability becomes imperative as the degree of complexity of the portrayed system increases. Visualization should be recognized as a discovery tool.
Cite your Source
Information Visualization, as any other means of conveying information, has the power to lie, to omit, and to be deliberately biased. To avoid any misconception you should always cite your source. If your raw material is a public dataset, the results of a scientific study, or even your own personal data, you should always disclose where it came from, provide a link to it, and if possible, clarify what was used and how it was extracted. By doing so you allow people to review the original source and properly validate its authenticity. It will also bring credibility and integrity to your work. This principle has long been advocated by Edward Tufte and should be widely applied to any project that visually conveys external data.
The power of Narrative
Human beings love stories and storytelling is one of the most successful and powerful ways to learn, discover and disseminate information. Your project should be able to convey a message and easily encapsulate a compelling narrative.
Do not glorify Aesthetics
Aesthetics are an important quality to many Information Visualization projects and a critical enticement at first sight, but it should always be seen as a consequence and never its ultimate goal.
Look for Relevancy
Extracting relevancy in a set of data is one of the hardest pursuits for any machine. This is where natural human abilities such as pattern recognition and parallel processing come in hand. Relevancy is also highly dependent on the final user and the context of interaction. If the relevancy ratio is high it can increase the possibility of comprehension, assimilation and decision-making.
Embrace Time
Time is one of the hardest variables to map in any system. It’s also one of the richest. If we consider a social network, we can quickly realize that a snapshot in time would only tell us a bit of information about the community. On the other hand, if time had been properly measured and mapped, it would provide us with a much richer understanding of the changing dynamics of that social group. We should always consider time when our targeted system is affected by its progression.
Aspire for Knowledge
A core ability of Information Visualization is to translate information into knowledge. It’s also to facilitate understanding and aid cognition. Every project should aim at making the system more intelligible and transparent, or find an explicit new insight or pattern within it. It should always provide a polished gem of knowledge. As Jacques Bertin eloquently stated on his Sémiologie Graphique, first published in 1967, “it is the singular characteristic of a good graphic transcription that it alone permits us to evaluate fully the quality of the content of the information”.
Avoid gratuitous visualizations
“Information gently but relentlessly drizzles down on us in an invisible, impalpable electric rain”. This is how physicist Hans Christian von Baeyer starts his book Information: The New Language of Science. To the growing amounts of publicly available data, Information Visualization needs to respond as a cognitive filter, an empowered lens of insight, and should never add more noise to the flow. Don’t assume any visualization is a positive step forward. In the context of Information Visualization, simply conveying data in a visual form, without shedding light on the portrayed subject, or even worst, making it more complex, can only be considered a failure.
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Get Free Anonymous BitTorrent With ItsHidden | TorrentFreak
via torrentfreak.com
This looks interesting, a free VPN for hiding your torrenting needs, compared to the Pirate Bay's Beta which came out Tuesday, and costs $150 kroner for 3 months ($10 NZD a month). How effective either service remains to be seen, and the abuse use could be terrible since these services are becoming so main stream. Hopefully governments see things like this, and decide not to implement policies which see us using this tech to counter them.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Freebies | Ambrosia Software, Inc.
via ambrosiasw.com
Two things on this page I recommend on this page for OS X users, the Defcon screen saver (awesome for fans of Defcon like me), and escapepod for cancelling useless applications, like Chicken of the VNC, when you miss type an IP address, and it takes an age to timeout.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Thursday, August 6, 2009
LED Spray Paint Makes Gangs Cool Again - Led spray paint - Gizmodo
via gizmodo.com
Remember writing with a sparkler when you were a kid? So did this person, using a led and slow-shutter photography.
iPhone + Wiimote
This is what I sort of see the future being, except that you'd have VR goggles, and gloves using wii-mote technology instead of a stupid wii-mote.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Brennende Autos: eine Chronologie der Brandanschläge
If you look at all the points marked on the googlemap, every marked point is a luxury car that has been set of fire by left wing Germans. Awesome.
Ludwig - A short video mapping experimental movie. - Creative Agents
via vimeo.com
This is the tech we should be working on and hearing about, not limited touch screen.
Buyer's Guide (time-ordered) - Mac Guides
Check out this website I found at guides.macrumors.com
Handy for Mac nerds like me!
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