Australian Tour
Posted by Ray @ 11:48 pmI’m flying off to Canberra to meet a few friends… then I’m going to Melbourne to meet more friends… and then, luck willing, I’m going to Sydney to meet even more friends. During this time I’m not sure how reliable my internet connectivity will be. The comic’s still alive and kicking, it’s just kind of difficult for me & Zeng to communicate effectively when we’re in different countries.
(The pace of our e-mail communiques reminds me of the day when we were all on state-of-the-art 9600 baud modems and using Usenet. My, how times have changed…)
Then again, there could be an open WiFi network, which my Mac would just happen to automatically pick up, and by fortuitous coincidence I might see a “New Mail” notifier–my sleek, sexy iBook’s way of telling her master that she’s plugged in and turned on…
Ahem.
In any case, I’ll be back in Brisbane in early December, in time to wrap-up real-life stuff (like finding a place to live next semester) and such.
See you soon!
Yiddish Curses
Posted by Ray @ 7:49 amA delightful, colourful list of curses in Yiddish. Instead of shouting crude profanities to your enemies, tell ‘em “You should be a lamp, to hang by day, burn by night and be snuffed out in the morning.”
A few of my favourites:
God should bestow him with everything his heart desires, but he should be a quadriplegic and not be able to use his tongue.
He should have a large store, and whatever people ask for he shouldn’t have, and what he does have shouldn’t be requested.
God should bless him with three people: one should grab him, the second should stab him and the third should hide him.
(via Metafilter).
The Story of Coloured Bubbles
Posted by Ray @ 11:07 amUpdate
Boingboing posted links to the official website, where there are pictures of this marvellous creation. I love ‘em already. They’re really pretty, in an almost unreal way.
Be sure to check out the video too. These are magic. This guy’s gonna make millions.
Popular Science has an interestingly whimsical story on the man who invented coloured bubbles. The goal was to find a bubble that would be coloured while it floated in the air, but disappear completely once they burst. It’s not as easy as you’d think - it took 11 years and $500, 000 before success came.
The fun update to a traditional toy - dubbed the Zubble - may hit the market in time for the Christmas season. They sound very pretty. Might buy a few of them myself just to play with bubbles again.
Excerpt:
The first five minutes of the party were stunning. Mothers gasped, and a few were even moved to tears, at the initial sight of the strangely vivid orbs almost glowing in the sunlight. Kids shrieked and chased after them. It was the moment Kehoe had pictured all those years—not big checks or fame, just seeing this project reach its end in a single joyous afternoon.
And then the bubbles broke—on the kids, on the parents, on cars, on Haddleton’s prized German shepherds. It looked like there had been a paint fight. Kehoe had told the parents that the color would wash out, but it didn’t matter. Not when their children were covered head to toe in blue and pink splotches, when the color was getting into their shoes and hair and soaking into the concrete. In the faces of the horrified mothers, Kehoe immediately grasped the lesson. “You can’t go to market with something that leaves that much color, even if it is washable,” he says. “It freaks people out.”
Arrested Development Cancelled
Posted by Ray @ 9:18 pmCiting “low viewership”, Fox is pulling Arrested Development from television. No surprises there - Fox has a long history of cancelling awesome shows (like Firefly, Futurama and Family Guy).
What’s happening? Do people hate smart shows? Do people hate funny shows? Does Fox hate shows that begin with the letter “F”?
We may never know the answer. In the meantime, let us mourn the passing of another well-written, witty and intelligent comedy.
In other news, I’ve updated the site’s permalink structure. If you’ve bookmarked specific posts, you’re going to get an unpleasant 404 error message. I apologize for that. I promise there’s a reason behind the internal re-structuring.
Surf’s up
Posted by Ray @ 11:12 am
Peek-a-boo, said the sun
For our post-exam de-stress, we went to Coolangatta/Tweed and hit the waves. The sun didn’t look like it was going to co-operate for a while, but in the end it relented and showed us a good time.
Surprisingly, surfing is not what you’d expect it to be. Far from the exciting, fast-paced sport it looks like on television, surfing is instead strangely meditative. Floating on the water, looking out towards the clean, open sea, patiently waiting for that perfect wave… it’s the most relaxing thing imaginable.
Then in a split second you take a chance, and you turn around and paddle furiously as the swell behind you advances, becomes a surge, then a plunge, and your surfboard catches the wave and accelerates swiftly forward. You plant your feet on the board, and away you go.
For a brief instant there is nothing in the universe but you, the surfboard, and the wave.
Then the wave dies, or you fall off, or you swerve to avoid some guy further inland who you didn’t see in the excitement of catching a wave (damn you, guy! that was a good wave!)… and you clamber up on your board and do it all over again.
Most satisfying.
To add to the overall pleasantness, mid-way through the day a plane with a banner sign attached to it flew overhead.
Bad photo - the tail is on the left, banner is to the right
Can’t make out the words? Here’s a closeup.
Oh, and did I mention there were dolphins in the water? Though not personally witnessed by me, a friend had to hop onto his board because a bottlenose was swimming right at him.
Good times.
Update on Sony DRM/Rootkit Fiasco
Posted by Ray @ 9:45 pmUpdated 16/11/05
- Boing boing has a much more complete summary here.
- Wired has a revealing article up, detailing just how many PCs got infected with DRM (I’m liking that phrase). The short answer? A lot - and it includes US Military and Government computers. I smell a criminal suit! Link here.
There’s been lots of dung-flinging going on ever since Sony’s rootkit fiasco was uncovered by the good folk over at SystemInternals. Here it is, in no particular order:
1) The Italians get a nice tip of the hat for launching the first legal investigation at Sony. The investigation was requested of the Italian Government, by Italy’s equivalent of the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, the ALCEI-EFI.
Link: News here. Official Press Release here. (Page is in Italian. Need a translation? Use the babelfish).
2) In the meantime, Sony puts up a webpage where you can “remove” the rootkit. The removal kit requires you to jump through multiple hoops: enter e-mail, receive confirmation e-mail, click on a link in the confirmation e-mail, go to the page with the uninstaller, install an ActiveX control (thereby limiting access to Internet Explorer users only), uninstall DRM.
Too add insult to injury, the DRM isn’t actually uninstalled. No, it’s just had its “cloaking” capabilities removed.
Too add even more insult to injury, the patch de-cloaks the software in a manner that could crash your computer. The company who made the DRM, First 4 Internet, denies this. After Mark demonstrated it could happen.
As a final kick in the nutsack, the patch is “keyed” in to your computer. If you have multiple computers, you cannot move this patch from computer to computer to remove the DRM on the other computer. No, you have to jump through the hoops all over again on Sony’s website.
Link: Mark’s further investigation is here.
3) Cheaters use the cloaking DRM to bypass World of Warcraft’s anti-cheating measure. In other news, lawyers everywhere flock to Blizzard Studios and camp outside.
Link: News here.
4) The first virus to make use of the cloaking capabilities of the rootkit hits the ‘net. It took about 10 days from the revelation of the DRM, to the release of the virus.
Link: News here.
5) Mark does more digging, finds out that the DRM on your computer phones home to Sony with an ID of what CD is being listened to. Without your consent, of course. If that isn’t scary Big Brother behaviour, I don’t know what is.
Link: Mark’s investigation here.
On an ironic note, some random dude discovers that by affixing a “$sys$” to the beginning of your CD-ripping program, you can bypass Sony’s DRM and copy the CD.
So you’re using Sony’s DRM… to bypass Sony’s DRM. Hah!
6) The EFF posts a list of affected CDs. Some big names are in there, including Neil Diamond, Celine Dion, and Ricky Martin.
Alright, alright, I take Ricky Martin back…
Link: EFF’s affected CD list here. Slashdot reader’s journal’s more complete list, here.
7) And at last, the news everyone’s been waiting for. Californian lawyers have filed a class-action lawsuit against Sony. They seek an injunction preventing further sales of such CDs, and compensation to consumers affected by the CDs.
So c’mon folks, give us lawyers some lovin’. Preferably the hot kind.
Link: Californian lawyers sue, news here.
An Incongruous Pairing
Posted by Ray @ 10:33 pmConversation excerpt (the context: we’re comparing Law lecturers):
[M]: haha anyway my lecturer is so funny
[M]: he is trying to attain nirvana now
[M]: he converted to buddhism
[Ray]: …what?
[M]: in fact he’s a monk!
[Ray]: …teaching competition law.
[M]: he’s an ang moh (i.e. caucasian - ed) monk
[M]: he wears those red robes to class
[Ray]: a Monk.
[M]: yeah
[Ray]: teaching Competition law.
Picture, for a moment, the remarkable (ironic?) juxtaposition:
A Bald. Caucasian. Monk. Teaching Competition Law.
Withdrawal Symptoms
Posted by Ray @ 8:44 pmExams are just tomorrow, I have not much time, I have an extremely shaky grasp of Competition Law concepts… and yet, I cannot concentrate. Where ordinarily desperation lends men wings, this time it’s given me lead weights and sandbags.
I attribute this crushing apathy to: withdrawal symptoms.
You see, I’m a gaming addict, and my last fix was in June. I think.
I can’t remember the last game I played. Hell, I can’t even remember the kind of game it was, or if it was on my PlayStation 2 or my PC, or if it was even fun. It’s driving me to madness; a continuous itch in one of those nerve-sparse areas of your body where you can’t scratch the darn thing because for some reason you don’t have enough nerves to register the satisfaction of a scratch, but you do have enough nerves to register the existence of that $%&@ itch.
And there’s the rub: it’s not like I can even play any games. Because I’m using a cursed Macintosh, whose game library reads like last century’s fashion catalog (The Sims 2? Doom? Please!).
Worse, the impending holiday season is driving me into pavlovian madness. Witness the deluge of top-notch games (upcoming or otherwise) that I have yet to palate:
- Shadow of the Colossus
- God of War
- Splinter Cell 3: Chaos Theory
- Age of Empires III
- Serious Sam II
- Quake IV
- Black & White 2
- X3: Reunion
- Call of Duty 2
- Civilization IV
- F.E.A.R.
- Fable: The Lost Chapters
I mean, come on, look at that list. Civilization IV alone will destroy any hopes of a social life for at least a couple of weeks, while X3: Reunion will probably do irreparable damage to numerous already-strained friendships.
(Note that I do not include World of Warcraft above. That’s because WoW is an insidious evil disguised as a video game. The aforementioned games will lose me some friends, at most; WoW will have its way with me and then happily spew my lifeless husk out to provide sustenance to maggots.
Everyone knows feeding maggots is evil.)
Oh Apple, why have you forsaken me? In my hour of need, you hang me out to dry while you sit on the vast quantities of wealth sucked from iPod sales…
Why do you do this to me? You say your OS integrates with OpenGL at the lowest level, you say you have the most powerful development tools, you say you have the best, the coolest, the fastest, well then, where the $*%# are my videogames??!
Never in my life have I yearned more for the buggy, BSoD-ing, crash-prone, security-holed zombie-magnet piece of s%$t the world calls Windows.
…
Now look what you’ve made me do. Are you happy now?
On Serenity
Posted by Ray @ 12:01 pmI feel that enough time has passed that it is now safe for me to indulge in a spoiler-laden, one-line review of the movie Serenity, sequel to the ill-fated Firefly TV series. For maximum effect, I ask that readers repeat my one-line review with the same tone of voice Luke Skywalker employed when he discovered his father was Darth Vader.
Ready? Here it is, my one-line review of Serenity:
Oh my God, Kaylee lost weight!
I shall now go sit in the corner and silently sob over pre-emancipation era photos of Jewel Staite.
Jack Thompson Compares Sony to Pearl Harbor
Posted by Ray @ 9:09 pmToday is the day the GTA cop-killer trial, Strickland v. Sony, begins. John B. Thompson (a.k.a. Jack Thompson) is representing the plaintiffs, who seek to hold Sony & Take Two (amongst others) responsible for the murder of two police officers and a dispatcher.
In his latest public appearance, Jack Thompson angrily berated Sony for disallowing the sale of GTA in Japan, but allowing it in the United States. And then he follows it up with a humdinger of an accusation:
Oh, and certain regional governments in Japan have banned the sale of the Grand Theft Auto games to minors, but Japan’s Sony has no problem whatsoever dumping this garbage into American kids’ brains. Looks like Pearl Harbor 2 by Sony/Take-Two… [emphasis added]
Sony DRM installs rootkit on Computers
Posted by Ray @ 8:22 am(Updated, click more to read)
Over at slashdot, there’s an interesting post with a link to an article by Mark Russinovich. Apparently, a CD released by Sony installs a rootkit on your computer to enforce its DRM system.
Let’s count the ways this is bad:
1) A rootkit is basically a set of tools that allow a hacker (or, in this case, Sony’s DRM system) to maintain control over a computer, without the user knowing. A rootkit will attempt to hide itself from malware scanners by acting as if everything is normal. At best, it slows down your computer by eating CPU time; at worst, it provides a backdoor for hackers to enter your system and run other malware… without you knowing.
(more…)
A Specious Species, III
Posted by Ray @ 11:42 pm
Because nine times out of ten, “I wish girls would approach guys more…” is usually just someone saying “I wish the girl I see every morning on the SBS bus with the tight butt and the nice tits and the slim waist and the hot body would approach me…”
(The other one time out of ten, he really means it.)
Happy belated Halloween, everyone. Hope ya’ll had crazy sexy costume parties =).