Terminally Incoherent

First Good Grace Park Fansite

Well, it seems that Grace Park got herself a decent and up-to date website I was thinking that I will have to make one myself since no one was going to do it. But someone did took on the responsibility to scour the web searching for all things Grace. Anyways, check it out at http://www.graceparknews.com/.

Once you are at it, check out the video section. You are in for a treat - they actually have that scene from Romeo Must Die there That and an awesome promo clip from her Maxim shot.

Here is the RSS feed. Of course the maintainer forgot to add autodetection tag, so Firefox won’t pick it up automatically

Wow… I’m really surprised that Forbes published what can only be called the official guide to harassing innocent bloggers. I always thought that this type of stuff was done by unscrupulous, shady companies. I thought that forbes was a decent, legit magazine… I guess not.

Come on, what kind of business advice is this? If someone speaks bad about your product, you want to go humiliate him? You want to threaten his ISP with a lawsuit? You have your splog drones churn out inflammatory posts on him day and night? Holy friken shit! This is crazy! If I don’t like your crap, I will talk shit about it using any medium I want. If my ranting cuts into your bottom line, you should probably look into fixing whatever causes these complains. I don’t care how good your product is - if you are in the business of harassing bloggers, you will loose me as a customer.

If your competitor is using splogers to spread lies about you, the correct response is not to turn around and do the same. What the hell? Do you want a total friken spamwar to break out? How do you distinguish between a private blogger who simply was disappointed with your product/service and a private blogger who just happens to take money under the table from your competitor? Are you going to investigate every single blogger that mentions you? This is not a solution - this is asking for trouble!

Sigh… The numbers in that article look kinda like RIAA sales loss figures. Where did you get them? How were they collected? Sigh…

Why doesn’t Java have unsigned primitives? I can never wrap my head around this. How hard would it be to implement unsigned arithmetic? Every single other strongly typed language out there has them!

I love Java, but this always bothered me. Java does not exist in a vacuum. Sure, when you are working in pure java environment, with pure java standards, and data formats you are fine. But in the real word, sometimes data uses non-java friendly conventions. Especially in imaging. Most images use unsigned ints or bytes to store pixels. Sure, you can always use an int to store a byte but this is wasteful.

Furthermore, most of Java API’s work with signed data. If you are just crunching numbers, this is usually not a big problem - but if you try to do something more fancy you run into issues. For example - awt package has some nice image display capabilities. I do not feel like implementing a rendering algorithm for my data. I also do not want to use JAI, because it is not standard, not mature enough. I want to use the existing API - but I can’t really plug a wraparound primitive into it. While byte in an int works fine (if you tweak the color model to only use 8 low order bits) an unsigned int might be a problem. There are no API’s which work with long types, so int cannot be wrapped into a higher order primitive this way.

So, I might need to check for these things and normalize the data somehow. Now, the big question is - should a negative int be converted to the min or the max value? I guess it is relative…

Seriously though - is there a reason for leaving out unsigned primitives? Any reason at all? Or was this done on a whim?

I still like java, I’m just slightly irritated

It seems that Disney does not trust the movie reviewers. According to slashdot, they will now be sending all the pre-release reviewer DVD’s encrypted and watermarked, and only in a format playable in a Disney issued DVD player.

Apparently each of these DVD players requires on-the-phone registration, and special setup. Furthermore they are considered to be slow, unresponsive and do not have any advanced features users come to expect from a standard player. Hell, if I was a reviewer I would send this damn thing back and tell them to stuff it. Or I would write a jaded review explaining in detail how Dinsney anti-piracy measures ruined my viewing experience.

Besides, we all know DRM is a joke. It will continue to be a joke until you introduce TCPA and allow movie studios to play a big brother tracking how many times you play their movie, and who do you give it to. By my calculations we still have at least few years till the world is brainwashed enough to sell itself to Microsoft. And by that time we will probably have no more civil liberties left so it really won’t matter that much anymore.

All you need to do defeat these measures is to record the analog copy by tapping the wire between the DVD and TV and then run the output through some noise equalization algorithm. If you are extra paranoid, resample the movie at a lower framerate. You might loose quality, but any watermark that was there will probably be messed up throughly. These people do not realize that all of this could be done by a 14 year old kid. All they are doing here is wasting money. Sure, Joe Average Reviewer probably does not have enough know how to rip the crippled move - but I bet Junior from next door who has been cranking out 0-day releases since he was 10 (so for 2 years now) will have no problem with it.

Fortunately Sony and Universal have enough common sense not to waste money like this. Or do they? Here is what slashdot readers thing about this:

I hear that Sony and Universal are making the reviewers watch the movies from jail, and letting them out when the movie is officially released.

I would say this actually sounds very plausible.

Dr. Robila showed the class nmap recently, and asked us to do a port scan on some of the campus machines as part of our assignment. For me this was a good excuse to run an exhaustive port scan on the whole IP range. Now I have a complete list of hosts along with open ports, OS information and so on - in other words, bag of goodies

I figured that if Joe Yun barges into my office to dish out some vicious LART’ing I can always say “Robila made me do it”. Besides, I don’t think he could track me by IP - I bring my laptop and I get my IP from DHCP so I probably get a fresh one every time I power up my machine.

Apparently few other people had the same idea as me (either that or they were clueless). Anyways, the IT guys did go hunting and pulled few of the school machines from service. Apparently James was using the department machine to do his scans, because it was gone today. So they do notice these things It’s good to know.