The Blog of Lucien Stals

The Register . Don't know why it took me so long to mention it. I love it.

Online World of Warcaft servers are being swamped by a new kind of

online virus

(Link to Podcast)

It's been an education.

I have learnt a lot, but nowhere near enough, about the following:

• Lecturing / Public speaking Try listening to yourself talking for a couple of hours while editing. Then tell me how good you sound. (Is it time for a vocal coach?)
• Sound Editing Wow! That’s a seriously big topic area. Rather than learn too much about it, I think I just need to find somebody I can trust to do this for me
• Garageband. That’s one serious sound editing program. (Compared to what Ive used before I kept looking for the “fade in” button only to find you have do stuff like that by manipulating the volume curves yourself.
• RSS. How many different versions are there now? And Apple goes and adds it’s own proprietry tags just so they can shoehorn it into their idea of how it should work with sound files.
• Podcasting. It’s been fun, but I just can’t see what all the fuss is about. It’s just an mp3 file. It’s not even streamed or anything. The only real inovation (that I can see) is using RSS as a kind of discovery service (I do like RSS).
• PHP. I could have just hardcoded the RSS wrapper for the feed, but I want to try a few more of these podcast things before I decide if it’s worth the effort. So I coded up a proof-of-concept php script which will wrap everything up for me. All I have to do is upload the mp3 files. Well, that’s the idea anyway. I’ve still got a bit of work to do before it’s working the way I want. And I’d like to enable id3 support in PHP. That way I should be able to put all the meta data for the podcasts RSS feed right into the mp3 file itself. That way I don’t have to write anything else to the server.

So I'd be happy to get any feedback about the thing. (Link is at top and bottom of this entry). I tested it on my iBook and it seemed to load and play okay, but if anyone has trouble, please let me know. I'm happy to try and iron out any bugs.

I tried listening to some other podcasts today. Have to admit I haven't listened to any before that. I wanted to get an idea of the quality people were using. I found some academic podcasts and it sounds like they have their media people (students? staff?) working on it. Recording quality was much better than mine.

And they had jingles (I want a jingle too!)

I think I've got a long way to go

(Link to Podcast)

I was sitting in my office working on podcasting (yes Andrew, I haven't forgotten), and I was listening to music on iTunes when I noticed that there were two name listed under “Shared Music”. I recognised one of the names and clicked on it, and suddenly I was looking at a whole new play list. So I started listening.

Now this is the part where the Borderline Personality Disorder comes in.

“How cool is this!”, I thought.

“How dangerous is this!”, I thought.

I went for a walk to the next building, and as I suspected, there was this other person listening to music on their own iBook (two floors down, and about 20 meters away), with wifi turned on, broadcasting their play list.

So the bit that gets me is that just because we had both forgotten to turn wifi off, our iBooks had found each other and were letting us share mus!
ic. Yes it's cool, but I normally like to think I'm pretty mindful of security issues, and there's my laptop happily connecting to somebody else without even telling me about it. The other person certainly wasn't aware that I was listening to their music.

I have my firewall locked down so that nothing is running, yet here's iTunes happily negotiating play lists with another machine. Can you say “stranger danger”?

I can see where stuff like this is cool. The fact that it did work so well (there was no noticeable loss of sound quality, even with two iBooks forming an ad hock network with each other) is realy cool. But frightening at the same time.

Last weekend, while judging the ACM contest, I was talking about wireless security with one of the other judges from RMIT. In the end we agreed that it was pretty much just a matter of time before somebody unleashes a serious wifi worm. Bluetooth has already b!
een used to propagate a worm. Once the user base of wifi equipment rea
ches a certain point, say when you get many overlapping networks, it will be ripe for the picking.

Hey, isn't the new generation of gaming consoles going to be wifi? How many homes will have those things in them? And we trust Sony and Microsoft to ship rock solid equipment that can't be exploited, don't we?]]>

Took ages to download. It's a small file, but I suspect the server was rather busy

Since then? Very nice.

I just tried doing some work on Blackboard with it. It renders that pages nicer than Firefox does, but there is still so much stuff the Blackboard spits out which is IE specific. Like the editor for writing text. I think it's some kind of ActiveX control. It doesn't show up at all in Firefox, but at least then you get a standard text field. But with Opera, you get all the lovely editing buttons, but nowhere to write your text!?

I'm happy to blame Blackboard.

Thinking about History of Computing, a subject I would like to write.

It was suggested to me that an interesting chapter would be looking at the early development of the personal pc. I guess Apple would get a big mention in there.

But then I got to thinking about Captain Crunch and Phreaking. Apparently some early techies figured out that you could fool telephones into giving your free phone calls (Phreaking) by transmitting a note on a specific frequency. As it turned out, the breakfast cerial Caption Crunch came with a free whistle, and if you blew a particular note on this little plastic whistle, hey presto, free interantional phone calls.

This was back in the days of Ma Bell. So I got to reading about the downfall of Ma Bell and there's lots of stuff writen about how it was a privatley help company operating a “natural monopoly” on behalf of the !
government. This got me to thinking about how Telstra is a 51% Government owned business (untill they sell the rest) and how Sol and gang are all Americans working towards the full privatisation of our largest telco. what lessons could we learn from Ma Bell in the upcomming sale of Telstra?

BTW,

Does everyone know that there is a huge stack of books going free to a good home to anyone who wanders into the EW wing of the EN building on the third floor?

]]>

ACM web site for the South Pacific region. It lists our own team, Darth Vector, as equal 11th in this region. (Did I mention #1 in Melbourne?). Very nicely done.

And congratulations to CIA from University of Auckland for first place overall.

Nice to see a total of 3 Melbourne teams in the top 11.

Some thoughts, while they are still in my head, about training for next years comp.

Participants should not use OOP to solve the problems. It has to be remembered that OOP is only one way to solve problems, and is only really good at solving certain kinds of problems. Unfortunately, the ACM problems, being rather mathematical in nature, are not those kind of problems. So any future team should train only in C. Procedural code all the way. It pained me to see that our team was soooo clo!
se to being somewhere in the South Pacific top 3, if they had solved one more problem. They had a functional solution, but kept having out of memory errors simply because they had an OO solution. Too many objects chewing up the heap. A procedural approach would have seen them possibly first in Australia (not just first in Melbourne). Hindsight is such a lovely thing

IDE's are wonderful productivity tools. But when all you get to work with is a text based editor like vi, emacs or even pico, you need to know how to use those tools. Any future team must train with such a text based editor. Familiarity will gain them precious time. Our team was very close to completing another problem (enough to put them in the top 3?), but beaten by the clock. If wonder if more familiarity with vi could have been enough to get them over the line?

The kind of problems in the ACM comp doesn’t vary much from year to year. Being familiar with those kinds of prob!
lems would go a long way to success. Next years team must train with p
revious years problems. Many of them. Lots and lots. Again and again… you get the idea.

There is no substitute for practice.

So once again, huge congratulations!

I’d be interested to hear from our team with any feedback as to where you think you could have improved, or what you would do better next time.

]]>

#1 in Melbourne!

14th (or so, the results aren't official yet) in the South Pacific region.

It looks like a team from New Zealand won first place in the region.]]>

static page in this blog.

OMG, I just found the PHP iCalendar site. I am so going to have play with this ]]>

Andrews challenge and see if I could podcast a lecture. So I've bought myself a Griffin Technology iMic and lapel mic to record with, and found a great article on using GarageBand to record podcasts.

Tonight I'm going to do a trial run to see if I get the levels and stuff right. Tomorrow I give another AWT lecture and I'll try and record at least half of it. It runs for 2 hours, but I can't imagine anyone wanting to listen to me for that long).]]>

The first thing I wanted to do was slipstream Windows SP2 into my original installation disk. I'd done it with SP1 the last time I rebuilt my computer over 2 years ago. But for some strange reason, I just couldn't get the damn thing to make a bootable disk. The slipstream itself worked fine, merging all the updates into a single installer so I wouldn't have to manualy add all the patchs one by one. It should have been a beautiful thing. But after burning three beer coasters, I gave up.

Time to install from scratch, even if it did mean adding SP2 afterwards.

So I put the new drive in the box, cursing myself for not having bought a bigger case.

Of course a brand new drive doesn't have any system files on it, so while I could boot from the Windows disk, it couldn't find anything to install onto.

Plan B:

Where did I put that Windows 98 boot disk? Right. Boot from floppy; fdisk; set primary partition.

Boot from Windows XP CD again. That's better. But I still had to format the thing. The downside of huge disks is long format time. I managed to watch the last half of The 4400 in the time it took to format the disk. That of course meant that the actual Windows installer didn't get started till some time after midnight. But at least it was easy going from there.

Nearly 2am and I was finally ready to go to bed. The system was a bear bones XP installation with SP2 and all the latest security patches. Something I hadn't expected was the fact that the system managed to work out the DSL modem and get it's own internet connection working without any for of configuration being done. So what's with the bloody CD that Optus sent me? Does it actualy do anything apart from change the logo in corner of IE?

Now, two days later, I have finaly managed
to get all my files off the old drive and re-install most of my apps. I just reformatted the old drive so it's ready to serve as a swap disk and backup for the primary.

I just wonder what I'm going to do with all the free space now?