Terminally Incoherent

Over the past 2 weeks I watched all Lost episodes from season 1 and 2. Can’t wait till the show starts again next week. Wohoo!

To kill time I’m now catching up on all the wild theories regarding the numbers and assorted stuff. Here is some interesting stuff:

Mapquest places you in the middle of Pacific Ocean when you use them as coordinates. Google maps actually shows a real island close to the location of these coordinates.

Someone use the nifty web application to plot the shortest path between Sydney and LA. This would likely be the path taken by most flights between the two cities with some slight variations. Our point, seems to lie just a little bit off that course…

You may want to check out the Shaw-Basho Polynomial thing. One would think that a named polynomial would turn up in Google at least once. But this one only appears in LOST related articles. Obvious fake, but very creative one.

Then there is that stupid Lost Experience immersive reality games. There are tons of clues and snippets of information that are churned out by the game producers, and analyzed to death by players. I’m not sure how much of this is actual LOST canon.

Someone put together all the video snippets released in the game so far and posted them on Youtube. If you are to lazy to click on the link, watch it below:

So the numbers are supposedly factors in the Valenzetti Equation which predicts the time till the collapse human civilization or something like that. The goal of Dharma institute is to change one of these factors by modifying the environment, human behavior and etc..

Interesting stuff, but unless this info trickles into the show somehow then it is just useless peripheral fan service. If they do include this footage in the show, then it would be an awesome treat for the guys who spent countless hours cracking the Lost Experience clues…

Someone at Lostpedia managed to transcribe the Blast Door Map from Swan. Very awesome work:

click to enlarge

What is in the Flame hatch? Is the crossed out hatch the fake door that Sayid found in the fake other’s village? There are two other un-named hatches with dashed outlines on there that are left to be discovered.

Note the reference to a zoological facility - this may help to explain the polar bears on the island. Also there is a manufacturing facility note on the map. Hmm…

Penny Arcade totally stole this joke from that Futurama episode, but it is still funny:

comic © penny arcade; click to enlarge

Here is a question to ponder: why do mermaids have boobs?

My dad’s car had the scary Service Engine Soon light flicking on and off at random for the last 3 years. Every once in a while, it would just switch on and stay lit for few days. Then it would go off, and stay off for months on end. He saw several mechanics about this in the past, and most of them said the same thing.

The problem was either a faulty Oxygen sensor going haywire, or there was something wrong with the way onboard computer handled the signal from the said sensor. In either case, it was nothing serious. It was only one out of n similar sensors that was fucking up and if something was really wrong with the oxygen levels they all would be going crazy. There were essentially two options:

a. go to the dealer, spend mucho dineros to do a thorough diagnostic and replace some of the onboard electronics, or

b. just ignore the damn thing, keep on driving, and do periodic checks to make sure nothing else goes wrong.

Of course my dad picked the second option, and chose not to worry to much about it. Then, few days ago, when he realized that he needed to do the state inspection and the stupid light just happened to be on for the last week.

He decided to visit our local mechanic, The Turkish Guy (from now on I will refer to him as TTG). TTG is a very nice guy actually, but I can never remember his name. My whole family goes to him, and we never really refer to him as anything else but TTG. I bet to him we are The Polish People or something like that so it all works out.

I tagged along because my dad’s English is about as good as my Japanese (all I know is Konichiwa) so someone had to do the translating. TTG futzed around with the electronics for a bit, and managed to shut the light off using some 1337 car-hacking skillz. He recommended to wait 48 hours before doing the inspection so that the onboard memory is overwritten with fresh data, and the O₂ Sensor Failure message disappears.

Naturally, 15 minutes after we pulled out of his garage the damn thing flicked on again. Somehow I knew that something like that would happen. Stupid asshole dashboard light! Sigh…

So we sat there staring at it for a while, and in the end decided to just risk it. There were only 2 days left on the old inspection sticker and it just had to be done. If the car would fail, then at least it would give us an incentive to haul it to the dealer and get that annoying bug fixed once and for all.

I ended up tagging along for the inspection trip too. I had to drag myself out of the bed early so that we can hit Rahway before work. I was pretty much napping in the car on the way there, and I only woke up when we pulled into the inspection lane and the guy told us to get out and wait on the sideline while the run the tests.

As I was climbing out of the vehicle, I glanced at the dashboard and I saw the light was off. The car passed with flying colors, and they haven’t even noticed that there was some shit going on with the sensors. WTF?

This was either blind luck, or that car is just seriously fucking with me.

Here is how you set up Mutt without a working sendmail or exim installation. Most linux boxes I work with already have some kind of mail transfer agent installed by default, so I never really had to do this. My cygwin install on the other hand only had a bare bones, minimalistic ssmtp application that forwards emails to an SMTP server. This is in fact perfect for my needs. Here is how you set it up.

First you tell mutt where is your MTA - add this line to your .muttrc:

set sendmail="/usr/sbin/ssmtp"

You may need to configure your ssmtp to send out the emails properly. Here is what you should have in /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf:

root=username@youremail.com
mailhub=smtp.yourisp.com
rewriteDomain=youremail.com
hostname=youremail.com
FromLineOverride=YES

Note that mailhub is the address of the SMTP server provided by your ISP. For example, in my case I would use smtp.comcast.net as mailhub, but and terminally-incoherent.com everywhere else.

SSMTP has an annoying tendency to rewrite the From line as it sends out emails. In my case it ended up being my_local_username@mydomain.com instead of myemail@mydomain.com.

To prevent this put this line into your /etc/ssmtp/revaliasses:

local_username:myemail@mydomain.com:smtp.myisp.com

This should do it. Enjoy!

Check out the sidebar! It’s a live webcam link! You can now see me pick my nose, and bite my fingernails in real time. Wohoo!

I’m not streaming or anything - just uploading an image every few minutes. Naturally, since I’m not here most of the day the cam will likely be off during work hours. You may catch fresh pictures in the evenings. Enjoy!

Btw, if you are interested, I’m using Dorgem to capture the images.

Lately it has been difficult for me to work on my school related projects at home, because of constant interruptions and distractions. I also can’t really do much research related stuff when I’m at work, because they usually make me do other things when I’m there (crazy, I know). So I come here to school and shut myself in my little office to get some quiet time just for my research…

And all I can think about are all the cute girls walking all around the campus. All I have to do is to get out in front of the building, and I’m surrounded with hawtness. Seriously, they are all over the place this semester. I’m going to miss this once I graduate. But right now, it’s really not helping me to concentrate on reading all these cryptic research papers. Sigh…

I just hit up bloglines to take a break and clear up my head, and I get another batch of distractions - things like Assassin’s Creed gameplay video. I think the best way to describe this game is Hitman meets Price of Persia meets Oblivion. Or something among these lines. It looks totally awesome, and distracting as hell!

Sigh…. And now back to Nonnegative Matrix Factorization papers…

I find that most GUI based clients tend to have issues with IMAP. Even the usually lightning fast kmail tends to have sluggish response times when dealing with remote mail folders. Same goes for Thunderbird and host of other mail clients that I tried. On the other hand Mutt performs awesome, and gives me exactly what I want: a lean IMAP client for a low traffic account.

How do you set up Mutt to work with imap? It is actually amazingly simple. You just need to add two lines to your .muttrc:

set folder="imaps://username@example.com"
set spoolfile="imaps://username@example.com/INBOX"

If you don’t feel like typing in your password every time you can also put it there:

set imap_pass="mypassword"

Also, my favorite line which disables that annoying Mutt prompt that asks if you want to move the read mail messages:

set mbox="!"

Maybe this will help someone who is looking for a good IMAP client. Mutt is really awesome in that area. Fast simple, and small. There even exists a working port for windows, but you are probably better off using the cygwin based version instead.

I’m so tempted to reply to one of those and make fun of them! But I’m kinda scared that if I do Mr. Ecko is going to show up at my house and kick my ass.

From:LadyRita Mosley.
4 Old Church Street,
Chelsea, SW3,
England.

Here writes Lady Rita Mosley, suffering from cancerous ailment. I am married to Sir David Mosley an Englishman who is dead. My husband was into private practice all his life before his death. Our life together as man and wife lasted for three decades without child. My husband died after a protracted illness. My husband and I made a vow to uplift the down-trodden and the less-privileged individuals as he had passion for persons who can not help themselves due to physical disability or financial predicament.

I can adduce this to the fact that he needed a Child from this relationship, which never came.

I didn’t even know that adduce was a word. Apparently it means to provide evidence for [source]. I’m totally gonna use it from now on. In fact, I’m going to use it in a sentence right now:

Dear Sir and/or Madam, can you please adduce that you are a rich english lady and not some dude from Nigeria?

How do you provide evidence that he needed a child anyway? I kinda needed to pee like an hour ago, but I don’t think I could adduce for that.

And , if you don’t mind me asking, why the hell do you spell child with capital C? Are you just capitalizing Random words in your Letter for fun, or is it some clever new technique to bypass spam filters?

When my late husband was alive he deposited the sum of Twenty Million Pounds (20,000,000.00 Million Great Britain Pounds Sterling)which were derived from his vast estates and investment in capital market with his bank here in UK. Presently, this money is still with the Bank. Recently, my Doctor told me that I have limited days to live due to the cancerous problems I am suffering from.

Though what bothers me most is the stroke that I have in addition to the cancer. With this hard reality that has befallen my family, and me I have decided to donate this fund to you and want you to use this gift which comes from my husbands effort to fund the upkeep of widows, widowers, orphans, destitute, the down-trodden, physically challenged children, barren-women and persons who prove to be genuinely handicapped financially.

So you have a stroke? Are you having it right now? Is it like a continuous, never ending stroke or something? Man, that must suck considering you also have cancerous problems.

I took this decision because I do not have any child that will inherit this money and my husband relatives are bourgeois and very wealthy persons and I do not want my husband hard earned money to be misused or invested into ill perceived ventures. I do not want this money to be misused hence the reason for taking this bold decision. I am not afraid of death hence I know where I am going. I do not need any telephone communication in this regard due to my deteriorating health and because of the presence of my husband relatives around me. I do not want them to know about this development.

And also, I’m pretty sure I could discern between an British and Nigerian accent. Not even mentioning the fact that you are a dude, not a lady. So yes, we definitely don’t need telephone communication in this regard.

As soon as I receive your reply I shall give you the contact of the bank in UK. I will also issue you a Letter of Authority that will empower you as the original beneficiary of this fund. My happiness is that I lived a life worthy of emulation. Please assure me that you will act just as I have stated herein. Hope to hear from you soon.

Anyone who actually believes that some English widow with a perpetual cancerous stroke is just going to give them 20 mill totally deserves what is coming to them.

Take this 10 question quiz to see if you are a clueless luser, or a hard-core hacker. Please note that this post is filed under humor which suggests that it should not be taken completely seriously.

1. What is the best browser?

   a. What is a browser? (-10)
   b. Interner Explorer (-5)
   c. Mozilla, Firefox, Opera and etc.. (+0)
   d. Lynx, Links (+5)
   e. Browsers are for pussies - I use wget and more (+10)

2. What is the best email client?

   a. What do you mean when you say “client”? (-10)
   b. Outlook/Outlook Express (-5)
   c. Thunderbird, Eudora, Pegasus Mail, Evolution and etc.. (+0)
   d. Mutt, Pine (+5)
   e. Who needs clients, I just telnet to port 110 (+10)

3. What is the best OS?

   a. What’s an OS? (-10)
   b. Windows FTW! (-5)
   c. OSX (+0)
   d. Linux, BSD (+5)
   e. Amiga OS (+10)

4. What is the best text editor?

   a. Word (-10)
   b. Notepad (-5)
   c. EditPlus, TextPad, Notepad2 and etc.. (+0)
   d. Emacs, Vim, vi (+5)
   e. Ed (+10)

5. What is the best desktop environment?

   a. What is who? (-10)
   b. The one that comes with Vista (-5)
   c. KDE, Gnome, etc.. (+0)
   d. WindowMaker, IceWM, etc.. (+5)
   e. I don’t even have X server installed (+10)

6. What’s the programming language you excel at?

   a. I can do links in HTML.. (-10)
   b. Visual Basic (-5)
   c. Java, C++, etc.. (+0)
   d. Lisp, Prolog, etc.. (+5)
   e. I only code in assembly (+10)

7. Your favorite base?

   a. Ace Of Base (-10)
   b. Google Base (-5)
   c. Base 10 naturally (+0)
   d. Base 16 or base 2 (+5)
   e. All your base are belong to us (+10)

8. Your favorite shell?

   a. You mean like sea shells? (-10)
   b. cmd.exe (-5)
   c. bash (+0)
   d. csh (+5)
   e. scsh (+10)

9. You write your essays in:

   a. You dictate them to your secretary (-10)
   b. Word (-5)
   c. Open Office (+0)
   d. Emacs/Vi and compile using Latex (+5)
   e. Emacs/Vi in postscript format (+10)

10. What is your education level:

    a. MBA (-10)
    b. High School Diploma (-5)
    c. College Degree (+0)
    d. Masters Degree (excluding MBA) (+5)
    e. PHD

Add up all your points, to get your final score. Compare it to the results listed after the jump.

(more…)

Is it just me or is anyone else having issues logging into Gmail? It was driving me nuts in the morning because I thought my Gmail Manager plugin was broken. But it turns out that gmail server is simply slower than slow. It’s very odd because the rest of Google is working just fine.

Gcal and writely are lightning fast, but Gmail page just keeps on loading forever. Very odd. It’s almost as if it was DDOS’ed or something. But I always figured that to DDOS a server belonging to the almighty Google you would have to have a botnet of the size of a small nation and plenty of luck.

Anyone has a clue what is going on?

Update Tue Sep 26 16:19:31 EDT 2006

It came back to life! I just noticed that my Gmail extension in Firefox turned from red exclamation mark to a blue envelope with a big 20 on it (crap, I have 20 unread messages).