tag:www.blubb.org,2012:mephisto/ Mephisto Drax 2010-03-23T01:23:24Z Bjoern Rennhak tag:www.blubb.org,2010-03-23:1420 2010-03-23T01:23:00Z 2010-03-23T01:23:24Z <br /> <br /> <br /> We cook them, we fry them, we grind them, we do all kind of processing and enjoy a good bean product. Today I'm taking a closer look at these <b>miracle beans</b> and their uses, it's quite incredible what you can make of it. Word wide nearly 250 Billion kg a year. That's about 35 kg for every human on earth. <b>The bean is high in cholesterol free protein, rich in fiber, low in fat, complex carbohydrates and full of vitamins and minerals and other good things your body needs.</b><br /> <br /> There are many different Beans or Leguminos as they are called, for instance:<br /><br /> <ul> <li>Soybean</li> <li>Drybean</li> <li>Azuki (Wagashi, Anko, Ice cream)</li> <li>Baby Lima</li> <li>Black</li> <li>Blackeye</li> <li>Cranberry</li> <li>Dark Red Kidney</li> <li>Garbanzo</li> <li>Great Northern</li> <li>Large Lima</li> <li>Light Red Kidney</li> <li>Pink</li> <li>Pinto</li> <li>Navy</li> <li>Small Red</li> <li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chickpea">Chickpeas</a></li> <li>More <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bean#Types">here</a></li> </ul> <br /> <h3>Uses</h3> There are so <b>many uses</b>, it is difficult to really capture all their uses, but some are: <br /> <ul> <li>Foods</li> <ul> <li>Tofu</li> <li>Vegetarian Hamburger, Chicken or other meat products based on tofu</li> <li>Vegetarian Milk based on Soymilk</li> <li>Soysauce</li> <li>Soypuddings</li> <li>Instant coffee</li> <li>Hummus (chickpea)</li> </ul> <li>Eatable Oils</li> <ul> <li>Salad dressings and fine oils</li> <li>Margarine (Hydroginated soybean oil and Soybean salad oil)</li> </ul> <li>Used in:</li> <ul> <li>Cookies</li> <li>Coffee creamers</li> </ul> <li>Plastics</li> <ul> <li>Car doors and other plastic parts e.g. for cars</li> </ul> <li>Even more uses:</li> <ul> <li>Insulation</li> <li>Foams</li> <li>Lubricans</li> <li>Creyons</li> <li>Biofuel</li> </ul> </ul> 80% of all consumed oils in the U.S. are soy based. <br /> <h3>Workflow of Soybean Oil Processing</h3> <br /> <ul> <li>Filtering out large particles (field materials)</li> <li>Heating up to 76-80 Degrees Celsius</li> <li>Separating outer covering from the inner of bean</li> <li>Extracted hulls (outer shells) go into animal feeding</li> <li>Flaking mills flatten the flakes into large surface pieces (40% protein, 20% oil)</li> <li>Multiple <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexane">Hexane (C6H14)</a> baths are used to extract the oil components to chemically extract the oil</li> <li>Hexane-oil compound is heated to evaporate hexane away from the oil</li> <li>The rest of the soy flakes are grind up into "soy bean meal" again used for animal feeding (approx. 80%)</li> </ul> <br /> Other by-products which are extracted are <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lecitin">Lecitin (bydegumming) </a>. Lecithin is widely used for applications in human food (fully digestable, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emulsion">emulsifiers</a>, candy bars, etc.), animal feed, pharmaceutical (cosmetics), paint, and other industrial applications. Yet another extract which has great value and use. <br /> De-fatted Soy flower another product can be found virtually everywhere acts as a natural preservative and protein source. E.g. in bread, pancake mixes, pasta, doughnuts, pet food and many other foods. Particularly to replace meat this soy flower is processed into textured soy protein. This is the basis for all vegan products you can find. <br /> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington_Carver">George Washington Carver</a> pioneered alot of the soy bean uses in the chemical industry beside the peanut research he conducted. <br /> <h3>Soymilk Processing Workflow</h3> <br /> <ul> <li>Mix and grind wholesoy beans with hot water and stirr into a consistent slurr. This is called Soybase.</li> <li>Filter out the fiber (ocara) from the slurr by a centrifuge.</li> <li>Use high temperature steam to kill all unwanted bacterias and to ensure shelf-life</li> <li>Flash-cool the hot slurr to get rid of unwanted bean flavors</li> <li>After this processing the soybase is used together with other ingredients to give it taste and look of cow milk</li> <li>The soymilk is then pasteurised.</li> <li>Furthermore other flavors are added, e.g. chocolate, cocos, etc. to give it a different taste</li> <li>Hydrogen peroxide and ultraviolet light is used for packaging sterilisation. Afterwards 285 Degrees Celsius of heat is used to evaporate the hydrogen peroxide. This packaging method can ensure shelf-life of up to 100 days.</li> </ul> <br /> <h3>Benefits</h3> <br /> Soybeans can lower the risk of:<br /> <br /> <ul> <li>heat disease</li> <li>certain cancers</li> <li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osteoporosis">osteoporosis</a></li> </ul> but don't eat too much of it, because there are also certain dangers.<br /> <br /> <h3>Dangers</h3> <br /> Problems occur like with all things, if you eat too much of it. It can include irregularities in men and women because of Isoflavones. Some research indicates that <b>Isoflavones</b>, a Estrogen like substance found in plants causes problems. This can reduce the natuarally produced estrogen in the human body. <br /> <ul> <li><a href="http://www.isoflavones.info/estrogen.php">Menstrual irregularities</a></li> <li>Lower sperm count</li> </ul> <h3>Todo</h3> <ul> <li>Chickpeas</li> <li>Hummus</li> <li>Industry production methods</li> <li>Computer Vision in bean selection</li> <li>Least known beans</li> <li>Bean republic <a href="http://www.republicofbeans.com">BR</a></li> <li>Wagashi, Anko, Azuki Beans (Japanese pastries), Koshi and Tsubushi An</li> <li>Botamotschi "Inside out"</li> <li>Motchi Ice cream</li> <li>Religious aspects in cultures (e.g. japan)</li> <li>Gas preventer, Bino - Aspergillous niger, enzymatic action</li> <li>Flatulence tales (Pythagoras, Roman emperor claudius & constantin, Benjamin Franklin)</li> </ul> <br /> <h3>Interesting Video about Beans</h3> <h3>References:</h3> <ul> <li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bean#Types">Wikipedia entry about beans</a></li> <li><a href="http://www.megavideo.com/?v=OT1E3DA8">History channel on beans</a></li> <li><a href="http://www.zensoy.com/">Zen Soy, U.S.</a></li> <li><a href="http://www.bgfoods.com/bm/bm_index.asp">B&M Beans, U.S.</a> </ul> Bjoern Rennhak tag:www.blubb.org,2009-11-08:1360 2009-11-08T01:55:00Z 2010-03-08T01:55:30Z I had a interesting request recently. Is development for the iPhone/iPod touch a good idea? Is it worth it? <br /><br /> Well, as usual if your idea is not that great, then probably not. On the other hand if you put some effort in it and you realize something interesting, then probably yes! If you see games being developed (or better ported) <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4a6-cUOPoLY">like this</a> then you will realize that this thing is far from just a telephone. <b>Its a fully fledged hand-held gaming device!</b> Interesting enough, how did Sega manage to release their game so fast? Whats going on? What do I need?<br /><br /> <h3>iPhone Business in general</h3> Like all embedded devices the half-life time of an software application in the iPhone world is rather low. Studies so far have found that people tend to use free software (no costs) roughly once or twice and then loose interest.<br /><br /> Of course such a generalization is not without exceptions. You can exclude this behavior for everyday utilities (e.g. twitter, mail) and especially games. The Apple iPhone application store is growing rapidly an so are the users. The Sales in this field are sometimes very impressive <a href="http://www.edibleapple.com/ifart-developer-makes-40000-in-2-days/">if you have a "good" idea.</a> (Sales currently roughly ~3000USD/day, app cost 1 unit == 0.99USD) <h3>iPhone Business in Japan</h3> Let me briefly digress for our domestic market in japan. Sales in the past have for the iPhone ranged from roughly 300,000 units per year. This is a lower estimation and will now sharply change as <a href="http://mb.softbank.jp/mb/iphone/everybody/">Softbank gives away the devices for free.</a> <br /><br /> In the rest of the world the device has a "viral" effect meaning that sales are going very, very, good. As a direct result so are also the sales for top ranked applications in the "app store". <br /><br /> There was a recently a interesting article about "<a href="http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/02/28/japanese_hate_for_iphone_all_a_big_mistake.html">japanese hating the iphone</a>" which turned out to be wrong. <a href="http://blog.nobi.cc/2009/02/my-view-of-how-iphone-is-doing-in-japan-by-nobi-nobuyuki-hayashi.html">Ref. here</a> (In this referece there are also sales numbers.) <br /><br /> <h3>Application Sales</h3> Here is an <a href="http://ajnaware.wordpress.com/2008/12/21/how-to-estimate-app-sales/ ">interesting article</a> how to estimate sales from iTunes ranking. Unfortunately apps can't be too expensive, <a href="http://www.losingfight.com/blog/2008/11/15/how-to-price-your-iphone-app-out-of-existence/">See this.</a> <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/id/174266">How much monkey can you idealy make?</a> Super Monkey ball is priced at 9.99USD because Sega has a lot of assets to support this low price vs. dev costs. <h3>iPhone Application Development in General</h3> Bascially the iPhone is a COCOA based handheld device running XNU (also called, MacOS, stipped version). Building an application which is based on using the iPhone provided API is fairly easy and fast. The API itself provides nearly no capsulation of the OpenGL ES interface (stripped down version of OpenGL for Embedded Devices) which means that you can work with it directly to build an application (XCode). <br /><br /> If you write everything from scratch and use no tools like game engines, it will initially take some time to abstract the OpenGL ES interface to your requirements. One full-time developer maybe around 2-3 weeks. Parallel to this the developers can work out UI flow, Gameplay, Program structure (e.g. UML, State diagrams etc. for core concepts). After that you can <b>start</b> with your product desgin implementation. The time here again, depends on the complexity. Monkey Ball was ported not re-implemented which saved a lot of time. <h3>Game Engines</h3> The problem with a complex game is that you need many components like a Physics engine and a 3D Game engine in general, scripting support and so on. <br /><br /> You could rely on tools helping you for this process, e.g. <br /><br /> <ul> <li><a href="http://unity3d.com/unity/features/iphone-publishing.html"> Unity3D</a> (Mono, JavaScript, C# -(compiled to)-> Native ARM code, XCode)</li> <li>Here is for instance a <a href="http://www.kevindoolan.net/blog/post/2009/01/24/iPhone-3D-Engine-Development.aspx">nice writeup</a> on one guy developing a 3D engine for the iPhone</li> <li><a href="http://www.inivis.com">AC3D Engine</a> + <a href="http://memention.com/ac3dreader/">AC3D Lib</a> for the iPhone</li> </ul> <h3>Case Study, Monkey Ball</h3> Sega of course has all this already, in the case of Super Monkey ball they just needed to port their code to the iPhone system. (This is the reason initial development was so fast). <br /><br /> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Monkey_Ball">Monkey Ball from Sega</a> exists already since quite some time. <br /><br /> I think their game engine is C or C++ based and easily convertable to other platforms as they tend to support C. So if you want to write everything from scratch, it will take more time. <br /> <h3>OpenSource Example</h3> A sample application using OpenGL ES (OpenSource) and the iPhone API, <a href="http://www.sunsetlakesoftware.com/sites/default/files/Molecules-12312008.tar.bz2">Molecule</a> <b>(please note that even though the name of the file is .tar.bz2 the file is actually an tar.gz)</b> <a href="http://www.sunsetlakesoftware.com/2008/10/02/molecules-source-code-now-available">A description is for instance here.</a>. <h3>People</h3> I think the most important aspect of the iPhone/iPodTouch are the usage of the accelerometers. <a href="http://gizmodo.com/5040631/3d-app-converts-iphone-into-window-to-alternative-world">See this for instance.</a>. <br /><br /> Finding iPhone developers (programmers) currently is difficult I think, they are still rather rare. The core competencies here are,..<br /><br /> Programmer:<br /><br /> <ul> <li>Objective C, or C/C++</li> <li>OpenGL (preferably, OpenGL ES)</li> <li>XCode, InterfaceBuilder experience</li> <li>iPhone SDK</li> <li>Cocoa Programming</li> <li>Mac Development experience (or GNU/Linux)</li> <li>For proof of concept development, Ruby or Python knowledge.</li> <li>Design Patterns, MVC</li> <li>3D or Game Development experience preferrable</li> </ul> Artists<br /><br /> <ul> <li>Texture creation for Sprites and 3D Objects</li> <li>3DSMax, Maya or Blender experience</li> </ul> Useful/Mandatory Tools<br /><br /> <ul><li>Building 3D Models with e.g. 3DSMax (Commercial) or Blender (OpenSource) or Maya</li> <li>A 3D Game engine, or we need to write it from scratch</li> <li>Loading Maya models http://bill.dudney.net/roller/objc/entry/wave_front_obj_textures_working</li> </ul> Hardware<br /><br /> <ul><li>An iPhone or iPod Touch (different Hardware, iPod is scaled down, internet through wlan)</li> <li>Either a Mac (e.g. Mac Mini) or we use VMWare ( I have a running Mac VM on my system. This eliminates the requirement of a Mac)</li> </ul> Licences<br /><br /> <ul><li>A iPhone developer licence to publish our product ( http://weblog.infoworld.com/enterprisemac/archives/2008/03/new_iphone_ente.html )</li></ul> Supplemental<br /><br /> <ul><li>A Website for the product and support (meaning, somebody has to answer emails)</li></ul> <h3>Rough Estimation</h3> Sega's team used to port a simple working example from their Monkey Ball product to the iPhone 2 Weeks. They had a working engine, professional developers and artists. So what do you probably need for the average 3D game on the iPhone? <br /><br /> <ul> <li>1-2 Engineers Full Time</li> <li>1 Artist (2D/3D, Textures)</li> <li>Licenses maybe around 250USD</li> <li>Game Engine License 1500USD</li> <li>Mac Mini + iPhone or VMWare + MacOS</li> <li>XCode Dev. tools</li> </ul> <br /><br /> To give a good estimation, it must be pretty clear how complicated the application will be. Then maybe you could make a valid assumption of how many (mythical) man-months you would need. <br /><br /> <b>What do you think? Where am I wrong? What did I forget?</b> Bjoern Rennhak tag:www.blubb.org,2009-10-08:1354 2009-10-08T01:55:00Z 2010-03-08T01:57:12Z Today at work I had a interesting request. Make a screenshot of a Flash application and send this the customer by mail every 5 minutes or so. First I though that it would be best to utilize some <a href="http://www.flash-db.com/Tutorials/snapshot/snapshot.php?page=1">Actionscript with PHP/GD</a>. This was ok but the other guys seemed to prefer some other hack. So I came up with using something like <a>Browsershots</a>, or some <a href="http://mattaustin.me.uk/">CutyCapt/IECapt, Python, Django combination</a>. This seemed too complicated though.<br /><br /> So I finally settled with using <a href="http://www.vncrobot.com">VNC Robot</a>. This thing is actually really funny, its like (shudder) Windows Scripting Host in VNC. <b>Perfect!</b>.<br /><br />Originally I also looked into Ruby/Mechanize and other alike but with Flash thats a problem these days...<br /><br /> Here is a sample script I created and other <a href="http://www.vncrobot.com/docs/examples/index.html">nifty examples can be found here.</a> <br /><br /> <pre> # Open Firefox from start menu Mouse move to=x:145,y:755 wait=1000 Mouse click count=1 # Go to location bar Mouse move to=x:262,y:65 wait=1000 Mouse click count=1 # Go to webpage # Press Ctrl+l wait=1000 Press Backspace count=20 Type "http://10.0.0.9" wait=1000 Press Enter wait=6000 # Go to login form Press Tab wait=1000 Type "usernamewashere" wait=1000 Press Tab wait=1000 Type "passwordwashere" wait=1000 # Skip over the "Do you want to remember password question" Press Enter wait=1000 Press Enter wait=1000 Wait 10000 # Take a screenshot and send it to John Screenshot /tmp/stock.jpg Sendmail subject="XYZ Application stock on {_DATE}" from="root@yourmachine" to="foobar@blahblubb.org" server="localhost" attach="/tmp/stock.jpg" # Close the browser so that we can rerun the script safely Press Alt+F4 wait=500 Press Alt+F4 wait=500 </pre> The result looks like this (scaled down).<br /><br /> Bjoern Rennhak tag:www.blubb.org,2009-06-17:1417 2009-06-17T06:37:00Z 2009-06-17T06:43:53Z Ever copied your Git development tree to a VFAT Filesystem media? Well, if you did then you probably encountered this later:<br /><br /> <b>fatal: Not a git repository</b><br /><br /> The fix is pretty simple. Git depends on the uppercase file naming of the .git/HEAD file. So if you find it to be lower case then:<br /><br /> <b>mv .git/head .git/HEAD</b> <br /><br /> Dear Git-developers,<br /><br /> why is such an insanity necessary? Bjoern Rennhak tag:www.blubb.org,2009-04-27:1416 2009-04-27T10:11:00Z 2009-04-27T10:12:44Z I happened to run into Alceste Scalas in the Erlang IRC channel and I asked him about his EEP7 implementation and R13 compatibility. Seems that it will be soon also running on R13 ! <br /><br /> <pre> 02:54 &lt; _br_> alceste: nice, good to catch you in the irc. Hey did you happen to get your ffi things running on R13 or R12 ? 02:55 &lt; _br_> alceste: sorry to bother you with this :\ 03:10 &lt; alceste> _br_: not yet, but some guy on the erlang-questions mailing list was able to port the patches and (apparently) make them work 03:10 &lt; alceste> _br_: i'm going to verify it and release updated patches ASAP 03:17 &lt; _br_> alceste: Thank you ! Thats really great :) </pre> <br /><br /> <a href="http://www.erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2009-April/043055.html">Erlang-Questions Mailing list reg. EEP7 on R13A</a>. Bjoern Rennhak tag:www.blubb.org,2009-04-26:1415 2009-04-26T15:08:00Z 2009-04-26T16:15:55Z This weekend something interesting happend to me. I was sitting in McDonalds (I know its unhealty) and eating a Hamburger. The thing costs only 100 yen and for that price its a really cheap and quick supper. It was already quite late so I just wanted quickly to eat something. Well I was sitting there and eating while a elder japanese woman was staring at me. She was maybe 70 or so. So, well she stared at me and I got annoyed for a moment and looked back, smiling. She smiled back and left me alone (looked some other way). I didn't think much of it and continued eating my food. I didn't have anything to drink but I thought, hey, just buy yourself later in the late-night supermarket something.<br /> <br /> She got up and went to the counter to buy something leaving her things unattended at the seat. I found that not so good but hey, it's japan and here its a bit safer than in other places around the world. Well, she came back and put a coffee cup with extra milk and sugar in-front of me and said I should drink something.<br /><br /> As you can imagine I was totally baffled and kindly refused. I tried talking to her and seemed she just found it too terrible just eating something and the coffee was so cheap too (120 yen) so no problem. I thanked her and tried to talk to her until her husband came who was totally confused why she was talking to not only a stranger but a foreigner here in japan. Very amusing.<br /><br /> This was the first time a <b>random stranger</b> was kind to me here. I'll not forget that.<br /><br />Anyway I just wanted to share this interesting, friendly and memorable coincidence with you.<br /><br />Have a good start into the week! Bjoern Rennhak tag:www.blubb.org,2009-02-24:1366 2009-02-24T23:21:00Z 2009-02-24T23:22:13Z Do you often need to help friends or family with their Windows system? Something broken on their system and <b>talking</b> them through is just totally impossible? Well probably you like this then. Let them install VNC, e.g. <a href="http://realvnc.com/" title="_blank">RealVNC</a>. There is a free edition, so make sure they don't install something else.<br /><br /> After that the only thing they need to do is right click on that <b>VNC logo in the Statusbar</b> and select <b>Add remote client</b>. That option is really neat. It lets the user open a reverse connection to an given IP/Port combination, so all that trouble with their firewall or router doesn't matter anymore.<br /><br /> Of course to make things work you need to give them a valid URL or IP combination so that they can connect to. e.g. <b>mydomain.com:5500</b>. <br /><br /> I myself sit behind a NAT'd and routed connection which makes direct connections no good. So I often just SSH tunnel myself to a remote machine for this purpose. The magic to make this happen is that you open two consoles, one for your vnc and another one for your tunnel.<br /><br /> The commands you will need are <ul> <li>vncviewer -listen</li> <li>ssh -Nv -R 0.0.0.0:5500:localhost:5500 user@mydomain.com</li> </ul> The first command basically just opens a vncviewer application in listen mode for inbound connections. The second one is a simple reverse tunnel to the machine at user@mydomain.com where every connection to port 5500 is sent back to my machine. Of course this will only work if you are allowed to do that and if the firewall on mydomain.com is not configured to do something else with :5500 traffic.<br /><br /> Voila! Your user can connect to your connection allowing you to solve their problems more quickly, saving you alot of nerve.<br /><br /> If you are like me and you <b>still like to save more keystrokes</b>, maybe this screen config will come in handy.<br /><br /> <pre> % cat bin/screenvncsessionconfig screen -t "ssh" 1 ssh -Nv -R 0.0.0.0:5500:localhost:5500 user@mydomain.com screen -t "vncviewer" 2 vncviewer -listen </pre> <br /><br /> For your e.g. Zsh config use this:<br /><br /> <pre> % which remotevnc remotevnc: aliased to ssh-add; screen -S vnc -c /home/br/bin/screenvncsessionconfig </pre> <br /><br /> Good Luck ! Bjoern Rennhak tag:www.blubb.org,2009-02-17:1364 2009-02-17T16:09:00Z 2009-02-17T16:09:20Z I <a href="http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Digg-Joe-Stump">stumbled across this</a> <a href="http://qcon.infoq.com/">QCon</a> presentation of <a href="http://www.joestump.net/">Joe Stump</a> who is Lead Architect at Digg. He talks about their architecture and what they did to get the horizontal and vertical scaling done. If you have no idea about how to scale sites from thousands to ten thousand requests a <b>second</b>, never looked into Amazon or EBay scaling and you are not afraid of learning new stuff then this might be <b>very</b> interesting for you.<br /><br /> <ul> <li><a href="http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Digg-Joe-Stump">QCon Video and Slides</a></li> </ul> Further reading:<br /> <ul> <li><a href="http://www.danga.com/mogilefs/">MogileFS</a></li> <li><a href="http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/">Apache Lucene</a></li> <li><a href="http://www.danga.com/gearman/">Gearman</a></li> <li><a href="http://xmpp.org/">Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP)</a></li> <li><a href="http://memcachedb.org/">MemcacheDB</a></li> <li> Cap Theorem (Databases)</li> <ul> <li><a href="http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.20.1495">CAP Theorem Paper</a></li> <li><a href="http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~brewer/cs262b-2004/PODC-keynote.pdf">Eric Brewster Presentation</a></li> </ul> </ul> Further viewing:<br /> <ul> <li><a href="http://www.infoq.com/presentations/availability-consistency">Availability & Consistency by Dr. Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO)</a></li> </ul><br /> Anybody has some other good links? Bjoern Rennhak tag:www.blubb.org,2009-02-17:1363 2009-02-17T01:03:00Z 2009-02-17T01:04:16Z You read RSS Feeds right? Well, if you don't know what <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)" title="_blank">RSS</a> or ATOM Feeds are then maybe you should check out the Wikipedia pages first.<br /><br /> I don't know what kind of feedreaders you use, but I liked for some time <a href="http://liferea.sourceforge.net/">liferea</a>. That was rather a hate/love relationship because I was never really fond of the need of using my mouse to read something. This is were <a href="http://www.newsbeuter.org/">NewsBeuter</a> comes into play.<br /><br /> Its a feedreader which follows the Mutt-like philosophy and allows you to quickly skim through your feeds hitting only ``n'' on your keyboard everything on a curses based CLI. This thing is pretty feature complete (version 1.3+) and it is good enough for painless reading experience, heck you can even use tagging and advanced search functions.<br /><br /> <br />(Screencast of v0.2)<br /><br /> Debian GNU/Linux currently has the 1.3-1 binary into their package repo so there is no need to build that thing for yourself. (its easy though). Oh, did I forget you can pipe the feeds into your own scripts to change the content/markup to your own needs? Nice, no more website loading :)<br /><br /> Seriously, if you wanted to increase your productivity - <a href="http://www.newsbeuter.org">go check it out.</a> Bjoern Rennhak tag:www.blubb.org,2009-02-10:1359 2009-02-10T03:45:00Z 2009-02-10T03:46:54Z Recently I had a discussion with a good friend about RC4 and if it is still to be considered "secure" ?<br /><br /> If you search around you will find that the Algorithm is still used very widely but often only in combination with other techniques like <a>RC4-HMAC</a> (hello! Microsoft), RC4-MD5 etc. This document for instance from <a href="http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=2250">RSA Labs</a> for instance is posted in the ``History'' section of their Homepage. This has a good reason.<br /><br /> The OpenSSH guys already kicked this <a href="http://www.openssh.com/security.html">Cipher out during development of early versions</a> when they realized that SSH-1 used this Cipher wrong. This Cipher was also used in the e.g. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wired_Equivalent_Privacy">WEP</a> Protocol and <a href="http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/M.Handley/papers/fragmentation.pdf">was a disaster.</a> (read: <b>real-time decryption</b>)<br /><br /> <b>Now you will scream foul</b>, we already know all that. For that purpose we have RC4-Drop ! It avoids all those bad, weak, keys and works fine. Cryptographically secure.<br /><br /> Admitted, you create a more secure version of this flawed Algorithm. I mean if you take into account all recent papers on Cryptanalysis and monkey-patch your Algorithm to drop at least 3^H256 byte, figure out the weak keys from a generated subset (<a href="http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/hopwood/crypto/scan/cs.html">ref</a>, many more papers until 2008) and then also make sure that you don't transfer too much data with this key, then you are <i>probably</i> on the safe side.<br /><br /> Let me ask this curious question, why do you want to use this Cipher? You will probably tell me you need alot of speed in your application and you don't care that projects like <a href="http://www.ecrypt.eu.org/stream/">eStream</a> and alike have been created (anno 2004) to address these problems? See <a href="http://www.cryptico.com/Files/filer/rabbit_fse.pdf">Rabbit</a>. This thing is really neat! <br /> <br /> On the other hand if you really go with standard these days you will probably pick AES (128-bit) in Stream mode. I'm not a crypto expert so please be kind with your comments.<br /><br /> Other references:<br /> <ul> <li><a href="http://cage.ugent.be/~klein/RC4/RC4-en.ps">Paper on a good RC4 Attack</a> (".. It is still successful if the first 256 bytes of the RC4 pseudo random sequence are not observable.") </li> <li><a href="http://events.ccc.de/congress/2008/Fahrplan/events/2875.en.html">Interesting talk about Stream Ciphers during the 25C3</a></li> <li><a href="http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.10.2350">New Stream Cipher HC-256</a></li> <li><a href="http://www.cryptopp.com/benchmarks.html">CryptoBenchmark</a></li> <li><a href="http://www.vocalata.com/RC4.html">RC4 Description and brief analysis</a></li> </ul> Bjoern Rennhak tag:www.blubb.org,2009-02-10:1358 2009-02-10T02:51:00Z 2009-02-10T02:54:14Z Sorry for the weird behavior of my blog recently. I somehow managed (I'm still unsure about how) that the article dates reverted to February instead of its original January. Hey, is there a XSS again out there for Mephisto blogs? <i>Please let me know.</i> Bjoern Rennhak tag:www.blubb.org,2009-01-26:1355 2009-01-26T04:15:00Z 2009-02-10T02:51:27Z <b>No time to read this? In a nutshell:</b> <i>Social networking sites and new tech is good not bad. It disturbs us too much though, turn it off when you don't want to be distracted. It is ok to be not available all the time. Otherwise be prepared to effectively sacrifice your concentration. New tech might just be a new form of distraction which we need to selectively ignore when we need too.</i> <br /><br /><br /> Since forever people fight over the fact that new technology is changing our life style and us, <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1153583/Social-websites-harm-childrens-brains-Chilling-warning-parents-neuroscientist.html">meaning our brain</a>, in a negative way. These are interesting claims and have been already made in the past for printing press, radio, televison and so on. Now the newest voices argue that Social Networking sites like <a href="http://www.facebook.com">Facebook</a>, <a href="http://www.bebo.com/">Bebo</a>, <a href="http://www.twitter.com">Twitter</a> alike harm us and change our brains in a bad way. <br /> <br /> Main points against sites like that are that we,<br /> <ul> <li>Multitask too much, which harms concentration</li> <li>Spend less face time with our friends</li> <li>By lowering our concentration with Mobile phones, twitter and alike we actively lower our IQ</li> </ul> You can find the <a href="http://www.badscience.net/2009/02/the-evidence-aric-sigman-ignored/">original blog post here</a> and the referring video :<br /><br /> <br />(The first 2:00 minutes give a good overview of the argument)<br /><br /> Interesting enough is that one of the main arguments is that technology is reducing our face time and making us socially impaired. Well, just coincidently I had an assignment recently where I was required to review a Paper from Gaspar and Glaeser from 1998 on <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4934">Information Technology and the future of cities</a>. This paper is a interesting but complex read where the authors build a mathematical model to support their theory that cities will shrink, but never diminish and human interaction increases in cities rather than to shrink. This is interesting because it is the same argument that Social networking sites decrease our interaction, where the opposite is true. <b>We are now only more selective of how to spend our face time and the overall quality of it has to be higher. Face time is now a much more valuable commodity which we choose more carefully to spend.</b> Our general interaction has according to statistics and studies increased in the recent years, <b>greatly.</b> (I can't emphasize that enough.) <br /><br /> Here are the original slides from my presentation:<br /><br /> <div><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/brennhak/information-technology-and-the-future-of-cities?type=presentation" title="Information Technology and the future of cities">Information Technology and the future of cities</a><div>View more <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/">presentations</a> from <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/brennhak">brennhak</a>. (tags: <a href="http://slideshare.net/tag/it">it</a> <a href="http://slideshare.net/tag/cities">cities</a>)</div></div> <br /> <ul> <li><a href="http://www.blubb.org/assets/2008/1/8/Gaspar_Glaeser_1993_-_The_Future_of_cities_-_Presentation.pdf">Presentation Slides (PDF Format)</a></li> <li><a href="http://www.blubb.org/assets/2008/1/8/Gaspar_Glaeser_1993_-_The_Future_of_cities_-_Mindmap.jpg">Presentation Mindmap (JPG Format)</a></li> </ul> <br /> Now we have this argument on the one hand side that technology is changing us in a bad way. On the other hand side it can also be very positive. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yk7nKjr9Keo">Take for instance this video</a>. I was surprised how true it actually is. (Seriously watch it, it's worth it.) We take tech for granted even though it improves our life and life-style so much. Now you will ask me what has this to do with each other? Well, what are the side effects ? <br /><br /> Just think about it. New technology at least recently (+15 years), puts more and more pressure on people to respond or be responsive in a very short time. Our mobile phones disturb us all the time, we need to respond very quickly on eMails (hours mostly, days, but if its half a week we already tend to dismiss it and its "too late".) and anyway everything is changing so fast. If you are into the IT Industry you know what I am talking about. For a strong counter argument, <a href="http://faziarizvi.blogspot.com/2009/02/myth-of-concentration-vs-digital.html">read for instance this.</a> <br /><br /> Even, I, found myself reading things like David Allen's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done">Getting Things Done</a> because I don't know how to manage everything I have in my schedule. So rather than to argue that Social Networking sites are bad and harmful. I would rather argue that we need to be aware of their influence on us. We need to selectively turn off certain things so that we can concentrate on what is important in the moment. If this means to be unavailable to mobile phone, twitter, irc and so on - it is good. <b>Humans might grow with the technology but for now, we must realize that we can only focus on one thing at a time if we want to do a good job. This means for every distraction we loose 15 minutes of our work time we need again to focus and concentrate. Also be careful with your assumptions, this probably depends and changes from group to group, work type and so on.</b><br /><br /> <h3>References</h3> <ul> <li><a href="http://www.badscience.net/2009/02/the-evidence-aric-sigman-ignored/">Bad Science - Facebook causes cancer</a></li> <li><a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1153583/Social-websites-harm-childrens-brains-Chilling-warning-parents-neuroscientist.html">Social Networking sites change our brains</a> </li> <li><a href="http://www.springerlink.com/content/t703451w2753u344/">Effects of the Office Environment on Health and Productivity 1: Auditory and Visual Distraction</a> (Simple tasks are ok, but complex maybe not?)</li> <li><a href="http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2009/02/the_myth_of_the_conc.html">Mindhacks: Myth of the concentration oasis</a></li> </ul> Bjoern Rennhak tag:www.blubb.org,2009-01-23:1350 2009-01-23T22:34:00Z 2009-02-10T02:51:12Z Have you ever heared of Tynt? Well, if you have no own homepage you can ignore this. Also if you have a homepage or a blog and you don't care what people do with your content you can also ignore this. Lastly, if you run advertisement on your page and you don't care about the money, you can also ignore this. Otherwise listen up.<br /><br /> Tynt is a service for people to add or overlay comments and annotate things on your www pages as <b>they</b> see it. Well sounds harmless right, but take this for example.<br /><br /> <br />Source: <a />Eric Lander's blog</a>.<br /><br /> You can add your Grafiti, yes you heared right to any page. They even explain it to you here in the <a href="http://kb.tynt.com/questions/3/What+is+Graffiti%3F">Tynt help</a> pages. Unfortunately you can't sign up for an account currently (beta) phase so I can't give you more details. In anyway if you are interested, try <a href="http://www.ericlander.com/324.html">Eric Lander's blog</a>, here for the <a href="http://blog.tynt.com/">Offical Tynt blog</a>. <br /><br /> In those ressources you can also find ip ranges you can block but this probably won't do as it could change quickly. One alternative could be to embedd a noindex tag into your pages, but thats a hack for another day. <br /> <br /> If you want to try it out for yourself just use this schema: <b>YOURURLHERE.tynted.net</b>.<br /><br /> What do you think? Bjoern Rennhak tag:www.blubb.org,2009-01-22:1349 2009-01-22T04:43:00Z 2009-02-10T02:51:04Z You are going to love this thing, believe me. You work on the CLI and jump always around from directory to directory? Well, you tried "Ctrl+r" I suppose. <b>Frankly, it sucks.</b> Sure you can cycle through the items but its just to stupid. We all want to save keystrokes so try this instead: <br /><br /> Sh/Bash Shell Users: <a href="http://github.com/rupa/j/tree/master">Autojump j.sh implementation</a>.<br /> Zsh Shell Users: <a href="http://github.com/burke/j/tree/master">Autojump j.sh zsh port</a>.<br /> <br /> Original idea came from here: <a href="http://wiki.github.com/joelthelion/autojump">AutoJump</a>. <br /><br />So how does it work? Well download the script according to your shell and source it. Meaning either put it directly into your .zshrc or .bashrc or source the file. Then just work normally for some time, <b>cd</b> around like you normally work. Now you can do a <b>j regex</b> instead of cycling through the history with ctrl+r. <b>The script will guess what you want ! Neat.</b>. <br /><br /> UPDATE: See the comments for a interesting suggestion from Martin, about WCD (http://www.xs4all.nl/~waterlan/). Bjoern Rennhak tag:www.blubb.org,2009-01-22:1348 2009-01-22T03:55:00Z 2009-02-10T02:50:55Z Since Q3 and Q4 of 2008 we have witnessed how the financial crisis progresses. It has since then turned from a so-called ``recession'' into a ``depression'' or <a href="http://online.barrons.com/article/SB123396545910358867.html">D-Process</a>. Ray Dalio coined this term because people tend to understand and interpret depression differently, for more info on that please see the D-Process link. The stock markets throughout the world have plummeted by more than 50% of their original value from 2006 to 2009. This is just the beginning, optimists see a recovery at the end of 2009, negative and realistic thinking though predicts a much longer downturn until 2010 and 2011.<br /><br /> The crisis is a global problem due to the importance of the US Economy on the World Markets. So far I had trouble understanding what really was the root of the problem and those Videos here make an excellent introduction to our current problem. <b>I highly recommend to watch them.</b> <br /><br /> Part 1: <br /> <br /><br /> Part 2: <br /> <br /><br /> The point and the problem of the current crisis is that the companies, banks, actually everybody has to restructure their entire company and modus operandi to cope with this situation. Many companies don't want to face this and instead fire people to adjust their monthly and yearly targets. This works until a certain point when that is not possible either.<br /><br />Another effect which we can see is that Banks are getting more and more under Goverment control. What they will do is probably enforce more rules, laws and so on. Past economists like <a href="http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1976/index.html">Milton Friedman</a> (Nobel Prize, 1976 in Economics) were fighting for the strict deregulation up to a total <b>free</b> market. This strategy seems wrong and recent economists tend to dismiss this now and focus on reverting this to a mixture of ``commu-capitalism'' and recommend now a shift from the external locus focus to a internal. This means that e.g. countries should focus on their domestic instead of their international markets. This was one reason why Malasia for instance survived the Bubble burst so well in Asia. <br /><br />I am looking forward to your thoughts on this.