Tonight I suddenly had the urge to re-discover a cover off a New Scientist from a while back. I have no idea why – but it was good to find the website, and Chris Dorley-Brown’s morphs were still on the web.
In essence 1) take photos of lots of people of all ages 2) morph the photographs of people of the same gender in ever widening age ranges. Finally, morph the lot.
| Is this the face of mean female? |
 |
The full image tree is here.
So tonight [yesterday?] I won both ‘rounds’ of Poker in the PokerProject league – hosted by The Fiery Angel in Cheltenham.
I’ve won a round before – twice I think – but never won both rounds before – and it feels rather good [esp. as I was way down on chips going into the final with Steve (the only name I know him by)]
I paced myself – and it paid off. I don’t think I’m a good poker player, but I do think I have a certain intrinsic way of weighing the probability of a given hand – and, when that says ‘fold’ of not always going with it!
Steve should have won the second round tonight [we came first and second in the first hand – me first!], and he had such a huge chip advantage over me during most of the second round too. However, as he himself told me over a fag, he plays – or is prone to be – conservative … read: “I think this hand could win, so I’ll play it”.
Ok, and that’s all well and good when there are more than two people playing – but when one is ‘heads up’, well, it’s a weakness. Don’t get me wrong – I never thought I’d win the second round at all – and, I actually, truly wanted Steve to win – but I wasn’t going to just ‘roll over’ – although I did offer him a ‘let’s go all-in blind’ at one point … something I think he should have gone for.
So many of the poker players want to win – whereas I want to A) enjoy myself, and B) as long as ‘A’ happens or no, I don’t give a flying fuck about whether or not I win – I honestly don’t. So anyway. Steve was pleased with coming 2nd/2nd, and of course, I was happy coming 1st/1st – now I’ve done that – where does one go? I think it’s ‘bluffs-ville for me!’ from now on … or playing for real money [which I’d be carp at!] As good as a fish in other words!
Ξ October 9th, 2007 | → 2 Comments | ∇ Rant |
My ex-wife plays too much World or Warcraft.
Whereas once she would have called anyone 'sad' for doing this, she has now become sad herself. Where once she would have 'turned in' around 9.30 and probably inhaled a whole book before turning off her light, she now games until around 1.00 am.
Still, playing with real people in a game like WoW is preferable to playing 'the machine' in games like The Sims IMHO. I once knew someone who'd be quite happy to sit in their dressing-gown all weekend and play this. Get a real life, nurture something real I say. My son too spends far too long IMHO on his XBox, PS/2 or other PC installed games.
Computer games really piss me off – I mean I just don't get the attraction. Ok, it's highly subjective – and it doesn't exactly hurt anyone does it [my own patience aside]? Although the BBC has this today!
Maybe I'm just a Grumpy Old Man now, but surely real life is preferable: go for a walk, read a book, watch a film even!
Truly, I find it terribly depressing, and 'sad'.
Brian Clegg's recent post on Book Covers reminded me of what I consider to be the worst book cover in my collection:
What do you think? It's a book on Windows Programming, yet features a guy who looks bored [and wearing a suit!] and looking out a window. Then there's the old PC in the foreground – running some DOS application!
If people were put off by the cover, it's a shame really – this book has one of the very best descriptions of Windows' Mapping Modes I've ever seen – the best in fact.
I replied, "Um, yes I do, but I don't have that one!"
What they'd handed me was a
1st edition and first printing – from 1979, and they were going to donate this to one of our libraries at Oxford.
Well, what could I do – I offered to swap my Penguin Books paperback edition from 1980 – to which they agreed.
And now I'm a very happy man. Not only because I love this book and now love owning a 1st edition, but because, upon browsing through it once again, I re-discovered a few of the joys nestled in its pages, for example, the chapter on Propositional Calculus. I now intend to re-read the whole thing once again.
Today, things just haven't gone right – much.
I still have a cold – and its got heavier – and drove me to have to go back to bed this pm. "I'll nap for a few mins", which turned into about four hours. So, that's a chunk of the day missed. I was also due to go to a wine tasting this evening – but having the snots make that socially unacceptable.
My 3Com 1100 switch is refusing to 'play ball' – but, what with my cold I'm not so inclined to investigate the why in detail today. I also think my ISP was playing silly buggers as I was tweaking it – which didn't help the head scratching. Still the Silenx fan I installed in it works a treat … so much so that I thought at first that it was duff – yes, it's that quiet that I had to see it spinning to know it was working!
I missed my son a lot. Sometimes I think school is cruel – not from his point of view [on one of his non-moaning mornings] – but from mine. As I work more or less totally from home these days, it seems that when I've returned from walking him in, that *my* life is cruelly affected. It's funny how just hearing your child patter around the place can light up your heart. He used to be Home Educated, and while that largely failed on a number of fronts for us, I do sometimes wish it were still the case – although I'd have only sneezed all over him lately and made him ill I suppose!
Just heard from a ex-Oxford friend and office mate of mine who's in Princeton: a lady who it was impossible not to soak up a smile from in any given day one was fortunate enough to be in her presence – even if it were but 'fleeting'. Jana, I miss you – come back! OR – at least get on Facebook!
Brian Clegg pisses me off 
I just read some of his stuff: his review of a novel, and then his blog. I hate [too strong] people who can write — I mean my 'reviews' are usually one liners, or even one word-ers ["crap", "Get it and read it", ...]. Yes, I'm sure I could do better, but I'd never be able to do 'a Clegg'. Brian doesn't really piss me off of course – I'm just jealous!
One good thing from today – I now know what Spirax Sarco 'do'. I've seen this company's buildings for about 20 years, and walk by their head office when I'm walking Daniel to school – but, until today – although I've often asked myself – I've not known what they actually produce. Many years ago someone told me it was zippers, and maybe that's why it's always slipped my mind to 'go see' myself. Anyway, today I finally remembered: it's stuff to do with boilers and steam heating. Must say that I preferred thinking it was zips.
P.S. In the bit about Brian there are two hyper-links. Do they appear the same to you – colour etc? One of them is yellow/orange for me, whilst the other is a light blue. I wish I could figure out the difference my style-sheet makes of these. I would investigate but well, you know – atchoo!
An interesting post on \. [Slashdot] took me to the Google Watchdog website – the article there starts like this:
It appears that a spammer has found out how to infiltrate the Google index without being caught. Here’s what is happening in a nutshell:
- Some searches (very specific phrases, and I won’t list any of them right now – Google knows which they are) return results with a large number of .cn (Chinese) sites
- The .cn sites are often scraped content from legitimate U.S. websites
- The legitimate sites are being ranked below the scammed .cn sites for these competitive keywords
- When a user clicks on one of the .cn sites returned in the result set, the user is redirected to an entirely different page which attempts to install one or more pieces of malware on the user’s computer. If the user is not protected, they become infected – I don’t know the specifics of the infection as I AM well protected
- The .cn sites don’t appear to be hosted ANYWHERE. They are simply redirected domain names. How they got ranked in Google in such a short period of time for fairly competitive keywords is a mystery. Google’s index even shows legitimate content for the .cn sites
- It appears that the faked sites are redirecting the Googlebot to a location where content can be indexed, while at the same time recognizing normal users and redirecting them to a site that includes the malware mentioned earlier. This is an obvious violation of Google’s guidelines, but the spammers have found ways to circumvent the rule and hide it from the Googlebot
The bit I find amusing is that last bit “spammers have found ways to circumvent the rule and hide it from the Googlebot”
To rediect any crawler is relatively simple [at the moment]. For example, I can see that my home page was last crawled by Yahoo and Google on Sunday:
- Sun, 30 Sep 2007 17:49:31 -0500 — lj511588 crawl yahoo net IP Address is: 74.6.25.38
- Sun, 30 Sep 2007 18:13:59 -0500 — crawl-66-249-65-170 googlebot com IP Address is: 66.249.65.170
I didn’t get that stuff out of my Webalizer logs btw, I did it myself, i.e., I have an index.php page as my default page, and alternative index pages, e.g., index.html and index.htm both redirecting to index.php. That php page gathers the stuff above [and more] about my visitors, and then itself redirects them to home.htm.
The essential bits of the code look like this:
// Who’s ‘calling’.
//
ip$ = ” IP Address is: ” . $_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"];
ht$ = @gethostbyaddr($HTTP_SERVER_VARS["REMOTE_ADDR"]);
…
// Redirect.
//
$host = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];
$uri = rtrim(dirname($_SERVER['PHP_SELF']), ‘/\\’);
$extra = ‘home.htm’;
header(“Location: http://$host$uri/$extra”);
So, one can see that identifying who’s visiting that one could redirect them wherever one wished to.
The crawlers themselves are obviously listed in the DNS [I use OpenDNS btw] – that’s how gethostbyaddr() works, i.e., if I ping these servers directly, I get this:
C:\>ping -a 74.6.25.38
Pinging lj511588.crawl.yahoo.net [74.6.25.38] with 32 bytes of data:
…
C:\>ping -a 66.249.65.170
Pinging crawl-66-249-65-170.googlebot.com [66.249.65.170] with 32 bytes of data:
…
So, how could this type of hijacking be prevented?
Well, it’s easy – the IP addresses [and reverse lookup of the same thing] used by the crawlers has to be randomized [or at least not identified in the DNS], and there are plenty of ways to do that – for example, check out Tor. Doing this kind of thing is Tor’s job in life. To support ‘cloaking’ might look a bit bad – as it’s generally discouraged: one is not meant to hide ones identity and at the same time not appear to be a bit dodgy!
I guess as well as being not politically correct, such a thing might cause other problems perhaps? E.g., if a googlebot came looking at your pages – yet didn’t look like a googlebot, would there be some legitimate reason to throw it off your website? I can’t think of any myself, other than one could track that a crawler was doing its job properly!
Been quite busy today – well, tonight mostly.
The first thing that’s ‘entertained’ is a 3Com 1100 switch. That’s a ‘proper’ switch – although slightly long in the tooth I’ll admit! Having one of these in the home presents many a happy hour [no wonder I don't meet girls!] of fun and frolics. However, before it goes live, it just has to have the fans changed!
This type of switch – super clever as it is – was designed to run in a rack – in some kind of machine room, where its fans could merrily sing along with all the others – and thus make not the slightest bit of difference to the overall cacophony! Home is a different beast all together then!
So, I’ve ‘Mr. Screwdriver’ on charge [the mountings of the old fans need drilling out], and tomorrow I begin the hunt [local at first] for some replacement – quite – units. If that fails, there are plenty on eBay. Just to be uber geeky, I must say that I like the sound of Silenx fans. There, that’s done.
Second stuff tonight – now the switch is in bits – was to design a better logo for our research-based Numeracy Intervention website. Actually ‘better’ doesn’t really do the job justice. The first logo was purely temporary, and now that we’re to go ‘live’ on 1st November, I thought I’d have a bash at something more creative. Please have a look – http://www.numeracyintervention.net.
Some brief comments about Sunday then …
Up very early to watch the Japanese Grand Prix – I’m a big ‘petrol head’ you see.
It looked as though the whole race was to be run behind the pace-car – as it was pissing down. No that’s not right – to borrow a Terry Pratchett phrase, “it was the kind of rain that is merely a upright sea with slots in it”.
However, things eventually got going at around lap 20[ish]. Thank God for that, as I was beginning to think that getting up at 3.30 am was turning out to be a rather bad idea!
Lots of spins, poor ol’ Alonso crashing out [ shame ], and Lewis Hamilton winning. “Thanks very much – that’s 10 points to me and none to you then Fernando” – chuckle.
I particularly liked the pit-to-car radio at the end,
“so, we’ll tick-off driving in the rain then shall we?”
That was Lewis’ engineer – he’d never driven an F1 car in the wet you see! Bloody hell – that boy can certainly drive!
Sunday evening’s entertainment was the Stephen Fry “50 Not Out”. Fantastic program – pity you missed it eh?
