Mindful Musings

I put up some Christmas Lights and I wanted to put up a couple of pictures for my parents to see. So here they are. I love the color blue! My rant for tonight is the poor quality of notes found on the internet (and for that matter, everywhere!) I have been trying to find documentation and proof of implementation of 3d Texture mapping and automatic co-ordinate generation for OpenGL for about all day now. All I have come upon are people copying each others’ work, thus resulting in a mesh of unethical, incompetent dundarheads trying to look all cool! Every professor, in every college offering an advanced course in openGL (that I have come across over the internet. I AM wrong, I hope) talks about the same darn examples, copies the same darn pictures (for their slides) and code and publishes it as their own work (they DID put in comments after all!) This is fricking ridiculuous! I am going to be really pissed if this project is incomplete and Dr Heuring will get a logn writeup on how I could not find any relevant information to help me out. He will also get proof that I looked extremely hard. So how was your day?

Want to know what a good education from a simple local college can lead you to? Ever hear of Jeremy Zawodny? He was born in Toledo, went to BGSU and graduated with a degree in computer science. He worked through various jobs and is now a part of Yahoo’s platform engineering group working as a MySql architect. He is responsible for planning and deployment of Mysql throughout the Yahoo enterprise . I found out about him through his recent article “Pagerank is Dead” He has also been the executive editor of Linux Magazine and is very very well respected in the computing community with many laurels to his name. He is truly the “technologist” that Toledo is looking to attract. I hope I grow up to be like him!

I have spent most of this week (amidst mouthfuls of turkey and other goodies) trying to understand our second last OpenGL project. We are supposed to render a VW bug (co-ordinates were provided to us) and a bunny, put them on a randomly generated landscape, add a few other GLUT objects and then texture them all using the different modulation equations that OpenGL has built in. I had thought that the landscape (with fractal subdivision method) would be the hardest part of the project. Boy was I wrong! This is probably the hardest project in this class so far. There is a myriad of documentation out there which talks about these things, but none are very specific (including OpenGL’s own website) and I am swimming. I am hoping to get the VW and the bunny drawn tonight and then worry about textures again tomorrow. I can just fudge it, but that goes against my grain and I would just be copping out of hard work (and my grade would reduce).
In other news, I did NOT go shopping with Jennifer this week. There was nothing I needed. Jennifer did end up spending a little bit, but she might be taking some of it back when she is done trying things on. I have been meaning to write another skin for this site but the work load has been too much. After school ends on the 15th of December, I might actually participate in the CSS contest that WordPress is having. It will be good practice and I will be able to make my site look interesting to me again. I have had someone offer me an LJ code and I might start a sister blog over at LJ with every post being mapped there as well. I can do that now with shameless plug my new blogPost 1.0
Did you know that it costs over $150 to list your software over at Downloads.com? Thats a ripoff! They are making loads of money through their advertising and they still demand money from software developers. Well, maybe if I were to make some money from my software, I would be ok with spending some on advertising it, otherwise it is a bum deal for me.
If you know of anyone that is looking for a Windows application to post to multiple blogs at the same time or would like a very lightweight application for yourself (it works well for single blogs as well), head over to Weblog Tools Collection and give it a go.
Have to go get some food…I am starved!:lol:

I need to find a chart of weblog growth…

I was just over at Technorati and noticed the “weblogs watched” count went over 400,000 today (it’s at exactly 400,091 right now). It was only March 5 when the 100,000 mark was passed. At this rate, there will be more than 6 million blogs by the end of the year. [VentureBlog]

...expect a hockey stick when AOL Journals rolls out.

(Syndic8)
...excerpt from: http://www.ventureblog.com/articles/indiv/2003/000131.html

Kittens!

The weather is darn blah! I have not interest in doing any work. I need to get somewhat done with my graphics project over the next couple of days and then look at my thesis a little more closely. I also have an architecture project coming up, but I should have the rest of the school year (which is just a few weeks!) to work on that! blah!

I tagged along with Jennifer last year while she went shopping in the wee hours of the morning. It was a very strange experience. The lines stretched further than the eyes could see and yet people came coming. I remember the lines leading into Best Buy stretching till the end of the block and the employees passing out hot chocolate for the people outside. I do have to agree that I would not have been able to purchase my laptop at that price that I did, had I not stood out there in the cold.
For all the people reading this post from this side of the world, HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

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The TCM product line are cable modems distributed by Thomson.

A problem has been identified in Thomson Cable Modems when handling long requests on the HTTP port. Becaus…
...excerpt from: http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/9091

Found a couple more bugs which have been removed or gotten around, comments control should be working for MT as well. It was not MT, but my own code BooBoo!
As if you didnt know already, I am talking about postBlog.

I figure now that I have written my own application, I should use it myself. This is a post from blogPost and I guess i ran into some
error trapping problems which I did not foresee. It should be fixed for now (if there is a problem with the config)

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I have most of the work done for blogPost Beta 1.0. Here is a small list of features and bugs.

#Features include (for now), posting to multiple blogs, comment and ping control, category control,—more—and—excerpt—modification ability.

#Bugs: There are quite a few for now. I have not been able to test this on too many blog applications
I know that the comments do not get blocked on MT, their documentation sucks
If someone could get me an LJ code, I could test it on there
Any others, let me know.

Here is the download link to blogPost 1.0 Beta. Have fun!

Greg finally relented and now he has a blog! I am working on Ed and Jon. But in the meantime, look up GregsPr0nMunkees.com when you have the chance. We could get a closer look at Greg as we know him through his blog. However, despite all of the hoopla, remember and respect the disclaimer that goes with every blog and about every blog owner. Enjoy!:oops::roll::lol:

I am really surprised to NOT see this bit of news all over the blogworld! Dell has decided to stop outsourcing their techsupport from Bangalore, India. Instead they will be handled by tech support personnel from call centers in Texas, Idaho and Tennessee. This is bittersweet news for me, partly due to the possibility of reduced social stress in the tech community in America and partly due to the loss of revenue for India. I guess this could mean a change in the prevailing atmosphere for technologists in this country and somewhat reduce the threat of job loss to foriegn companies. But this could also mean that companies are simply going to outsource other peices of the pie, being more elusive and secretive about their decisions. The financial benefits of this trade pattern is quite obvious. In this dog-kill-dog market, are companies that are extremely strapped for cash, really going to give up on saving large sums of money if they can (mostly) get away with it? If you read the article above with squinted eyes, you will notice that Dell is NOT REALLY making much of a change. They are simply restructuring their support methods. They are not going to scale back their operations in India. Dell home customers will still have to deal with tech support from India. As a matter of sad fact, Ronald Kronk, the Presbyterian minister from Rochester, Pa, whose name gets mentioned as someone who was dissatisfied with Dell’s poor customer service, is probably going to have to deal with the same people over again. Dell, in my opinion, is simply playing the game.

I have gotten quite a few comments and emails recently about the University of Toledo stopping the admissions of International Students into our graduate programs. This is quite untrue. There are major budget cuts in the EECS department and the Univeristy in particular, and International Students are (domestic students get the preference, as it should be) the last to be asessed for financial aid and/or teaching/research assistantships. This basically means that there is no money to be offered to graduate international students here. If you are willing to pay for your edcuation, (and have the credentials) you are welcome to apply and will get admitted.
I also receive a multitude of emails and comments with various questions about admissions to UT. I do not answer them individually because of the sheer number or requests, so please dont take any of this personally.

This was a very nice weekend. I got to do what I really wanted to do. I coded.
I am almost done with blogPost. This application (written at my own behest, to learn) is a client application to post to blogs. Some of the final features will include:

Ability to post to multiple blogs with the same item
blogPostComment, ping and post status controls (which are lacking in w.bloggar)
Ability to code RPC calls into the application (with associated help files) for new blogging applications and APIs not implemented
Pure XMLRPC implementation, so simple code, existing methodology
Open Source, ThankYouWare

Features NOT part of the agenda include:

Fancy interface with lots of XP like icons which are never used by the average blogger
Ability to edit or modify previous posts
Category name retrieval from blog(might be included in forthcoming editions, just not this one)
Multi-threading (this example will NOT be thread safe)

I have gotten the XMLRPC++ modded enough to work with my application and I am presently working on the MFC code to make the GUI and the pretty front end stuff. I am also starting work on storing profiles and automatically setting up users for various blogs. The first alpha will not have many of the features. I am still too busy with other crap from school. and I will be looking for beta testers by the end of this month. If anyone is interested, leave me a comment or send me an email and I will hook you up. Greg Door (a kind soul, a true friend I must say) is going to work through this with me (as per our last conversation) and with our collective minds, we should wrap this up by the end of this year. Once the application is where we want it to be, it WILL become shareware with some features lacking in the free version. We will have to decide on that. So beta testers with the final beta have free software.
In other news, I have gotten some feelers from the New Jersey based company that had been after me to go there and be an intern. I ended up telling them that it was full time emplyment or bust! This coming week should be a lot of fun. School is off after this Tuesday and Thanksgiving deals are always exciting. I cant wait to see what Best Buy has in store for this Thanksgiving. I had the opportunity of buying an $1100 laptop for $500 last year. I would like to get a wide screen TV if I could find a good deal for it (under $700). Keeping my fingers crossed!

Help Gayathri, a student at FIU, where my friend Vinay Puri Studies. She was hit by a speeding car, and the insurance cap of $250,000 has been exceeded. Her parents, like those of most Graduate Students cannot come to the…
...excerpt from: http://www.carthik.net/archives/000350.html

Thank you carthik for pointing this out. I feel very strongly for international students here in the US (because I am one) and I pray for her and her family!

Test description from metaBlog API

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Incorporating mouse gestures for Internet Explorer using Javascript (on your personal blog/homepage) I dont know how useful this is, but it sure is a cool way of doing this. Many browsers (including myIE and Opera) already implement this.
Here is another one of those “Test your….” kind of links. This one is from MSN and measures your Digital IQ. For the record, mine was a 195.

Vivendi has announced that it’s flushing all the music it hosts at MP3.com down the toilet:

...they’re not selling the archive, containing more than a million songs by 250,000 artists. As of December 3rd, they’re destroying it.

Link

(Thanks, Proclus!)
...excerpt from: http://boingboing.net/2003_11_01_archive.html#106949791004407591

I have a couple of vested interests in erdicating SPAM from my blog and from the rest of the Blogosphere. There are some interesting discussions (and disagreements) brewing in the various listservs and dev-blogs that I regularly visit or subscribe to. I cannot stress the importance of letting the programmer/owner of the blog choose the method that is right for them. There are hundreds, if not thousands of possible alternative ways in which to identify SPAM, some more potent than others. However, the problem is two fold. For one, it is very difficult to judge which method incurs the best results because of the difference in opinions. The second problem is that each of these methods take careful planning and a lot of code to implement which forces developers to choose a few from among the many. For a single developer to write an ‘effective’ SPAM filtering application takes very little discourse because he/she simply chooses what they think is best for their situation. However when we put a bunch of heads together (albeit, with the vision of coming up with a stronger, better and more versatile solution), we get bogged down in ideologies. I have recently suggested that the best solution, in my opinion, is to circumvent solving our differences and to build a common comment identification framework. Once we have a set of qualifiers (which we can easily extract from the given framework) any developer could poll the system to pass their comments through and do whatever they wanted to with the output identifiers. Effectively, the person who believes that links to sites which contain the word viagra more than once is SPAM, could very easily incorporate their own methodology in their site. The next programmer could think that image verification is a good method to check for SPAM. Well, if he/she implemented the framework, they could incorporate image analysis into their comments and check the origins of the comments using the framework. I have recently read some comments which seem to say that comment eradication will never become as automated as the process of placing comments. I whole-heartedly disagree. There will always be common, easily identifiable goals for a spammer. SPAM is meant to promote or sell something (in some way). In order to sell or promote, they have to have something they sell, be visible somewhere (a webpage, a name which is recognized, something that is not hidden or extremely modified, the normal public cant read encoded HTML Urls) If that is the case, with enough effort, a spammer will always be recognized. The question is how much effort is too much effort?
Here are some of the places where the discussion rages on…
WordPress Forums
Mark Pilgrim’s Website
Sam Ruby
Dougal Gunters
Blam! (SourceForge)
Jay Allen

This has been an exceptionally unacceptable week. It started off with very very long nights on Saturday and Sunday in trying to finish the physh OpenGL project. I had a tad easier time on Monday with nothing being due, but Tuesday took a turn for the worse with some homework issues in a class of mine and test scores from the same class. To add to the debacle, Putnam is having their insides probed by the F…something or the other and they are losing big bucks. I have some money in one of Putnam’s mutual funds and it really irks me to have to take a monetary hit because some idiot financial manager had the nerve to perform illicit trades with his access rights! I am going to have to pull the money out (even though my instincts tell me to stay put) because of the financial advice I have been receiving. I will talk to my dad about moving the money before I jump to any conclusions. I am tired, achy, bitchy and Jennifer is worse for wear with her extreme work and study load. Not too happy of times. The silver lining is this coming weekend and the few days off for Thanksgiving (which I will spend eating turkey, cooking and working on my XML-RPC blog posting application)
A moment of silence for the many people who have been hurt or killed or whose lives have been shattered by another bomb attack in Turkey. May God be with them!
Promote Peace, it makes people Happy.

But I’ve never heard of any of these artists… Say hello to iRATE radio. The premise is simple: mp3’s collected from various free sites are collected and indexed on a common server. You, through your spiffy iRATE client, are fed mp3’s, which you then rate. Over time, your musical tastes are matched against others, and you are then fed mp3’s which you will like, ostensibly. [...via Bifurnicated Reinvents]
...excerpt from: http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/29704

Jay, Dougal, Mike and others interested in the future of SPAM,I am really not ignoring this list, I wanted to make sure that what I said was not just a retort, but a well formulated and thought out answer. Jay, I agree with you that the Spamosphere ( is that a word? ) is quickly changing and we need to be flexible and ready for that change. I also agree that someone posting on lots of blogs in order to get on the search engines, can be considered SPAM. However, I also agree with Dougal that what is SPAM for you, might not be SPAM for me. I believe that this is the reason that evil always has an upper hand. The protectors (if I may use the word very loosely) are too busy covering all the exits and discussing the possibilities of new exits cropping up, while the criminal finds one which is flimsily guarded. I believe that everyone on this project can be a very powerful influence in the general direction of the project, but the project should not be bogged down by the details of individual needs. That being said, I would like to propose the development of a framework which encompasses all SPAM. Something along the lines of a product like XML-RPC itself. The Blogger-API and the MT-API both use XML-RPC, but their methods are different and they perform quite differently, suited to the needs of their developers and the users who choose to use them. If we know EVERYTHING we can about a spammer and his/her spam, then different people can use their own techniques and ideologies to identify, eradicate and/or remove such intrusions. I cannot speak for others, but I am OK with my blog being commented on by a bunch of people saying essentially nothing (to get their site to become more popular) but I would rather not have comments from a Viagra salesperson. However, to implement my blog filter, I still dip into the same repository that everyone else is putting information into, I just parse it differently. That way, I am protecting the doors that are important to me and not getting limited by what a general software is capable of doing. I would join the group of people who implement my type of a filter on top of the BLAM! stack of software.
Does any of this make sense? We can spend months trying to iron out the details of an all-comprehensive spam eradicator because all of our opinions are so varied and yet we believe so strongly in our personal experiences. I would really like to see this work and see the “protectors” come out on top.
Peace.
Mark
Picture courtesy of: http://boingboing.net/2003_11_01_archive.html#106925227102708662

Got a dead, orphaned Apple G4 Cube lying around? According to the ancient traditions of the Mac-faithful, this is a signal that you are to get out your caulking gun and turn it into a fishtank.

Link

(via MacSlash)


...excerpt from: http://boingboing.net/2003_11_01_archive.html#106926280293791284

This is what I like to call the Monsoon season of Northwest Ohio. We have been having wet and sloppy rain in spurts and bursts throughout the last couple of weeks. It is dark and depressing outside, not too warm and not too cold and simply dank. (The best time to sit up in my den and code :mrgreen:) I know my parents are out vacationing this week and I hope they are having a great time! Jennifer and I have been hitting the books pretty hard and we are completely tired out. I did not get to bed till the wee hours of the morning for almost all of last week (and the weekend actually) and Jennifer is suffering this week. The end is in sight. This is the last semester of classes for Jennifer and I. She will have to finish her rotations next semester and I will have to finish my thesis and work on finding a job. I am going to start looking as early as December. With all of this animosity aimed at people from foreign nationalities, I wont be surprised if I am still unemployed come August next year.
As for the rest of the morning, I still have to work some more on a writeup for my preliminary thesis proposal for Dr Makki. I am also working on an XML-RPC interface for blogs from inside Windoze. I am writing an application which will let bloggers post to more than one blogging tool simultaneously. The reason mine is going to be different is two-fold. I am going to let a blog topic/item be posted to multiple blogs at the same time and I am going to allow new API definition through the application interface. Thus if I have not hardcoded an API into the application (have not pre-set the method to post to a blogging tool) , a relative novice could, with the help of the readme’s, write their own methods to post to their own blogs. I am thinking of calling it ‘blog.Post’ .

Remember these? Well, now they have these.

(Thanks to Jared McLain)

...excerpt from: http://davebarry.blogspot.com/2003_11_01_davebarry_archive.html#106918403230339845

I have finally had the opportunity to sit down and put my thoughts together while having an email conversation with Martin Remy of http://www.Waypath.com . Here is a collation of my thoughts. Please feel free to email me for clarifications or enhancements.

The problem with a central blacklist server has always been twofold. If the blacklist is accumulated and then downloaded to a person’s computer or server before execution, it leads to staleness and people always tend to forget to update or simply don’t have the time to do so. Secondly, if the blacklist server is remotely hosted and is live, it could possibly run into the DDOS problems that SpamHaus and many others have recently faced. The answer, in my opinion, is to have decentralized blacklist servers running XML-RPC, in sort of a p2p network for servers. These servers would exchange information between each others, remove stale entries through an NN algorithm and simply maintain a p2p XML-RPC network of blacklists. The information would be completely distributed, sort of like MP3s, only much smaller and much faster with fewer nodes and smaller data payloads. XML-RPC is really powerful here because of the smaller payloads, the relative ease of code generation and a large support network. This information could be used by both email programs as well as comment spam based programs. This is the first part of my idea.
The second part is to have a plug-in for blogs (or any other dynamic CMS systems). The only reason for a spammer to post spam in a blog HAS to be a link. For that matter, the only reason for ANY SPAM has to be a link. When a user posts a comment on a blog, the plug in parses the text and finds links ( we would have to figure out the different variations of a link which could be used ). It sends an RPC message with the links to the SPAM blacklist server of choice and gets a reply of a yes or no. If it is a spam link, simply discard the message and log it. ( I will describe server-side in a second) The other part of the plug-in would allow the user to go through their comments and categorize SPAM comments to be sent to blacklist server. The whole message is not sent, just the links.
The server receives a message saying that a particular link is SPAM. It sets the link aside for crawling. The crawl brings back the text of the website. We continue crawling until we get a pre-determined about of text. This text is then passed through a perceptron based feed forward back propagation neural network (I already have the code for that, wrote the paper etc) which determines the spamminess of the link and stores the link as SPAM or NOT SPAM. When the server gets a request to check a link, it simply compares the list with its own and sends back a yes or no.
The p2p network could be very simple. Each link could be treated as a separate entity with a unique identifying digest. The p2p server would exchange information about new links at pre-determined intervals to keep their information fresh and updated. You might ask who would run these servers. We could make the server an integral part of the program, so if someone wanted to implement a SPAM filter in their blog, they would HAVE to run the server part of the XML-RPC as well. The beauty of RPC is that no actual service would have to be run, a simple php file with an associated text file would take care of the problem and the distributed nature of the program would avoid bottlenecks and speed issues.

Thanks for reading this far,
Peace.

Here is an excerpt from a recent thread of conversation from the WP support forums that I like to help out at.

I have used the nickname LaughingLizard since my undergrad days. I did nothing special to think of the name, just sounded like I fit right into it. After graduation I wanted to register the name but found some restaurant owner (very lascivious business genre) had registered it already. The desire to name my blog after my nickname had to come to an end for the time being. As for the present name of my blog, I worked very little to acquire it. I love the word muse, worked it around a little, kept in mind that I wanted it to be something that is easily searchable and distinct as a word group, and there it was. As luck would have it, when I could finally afford to purchase the domain, I found that too was registered! Here is a link that you (and other name seekers) might be interested in and it might help you get some interesting ideas. It randomly generates blognames for you. Hours of fun!!
Chris Thompson’s Blog Name Generator

How did your blog name come about? If you dont blog, do you have a fun name in mind? Have any stories to share, any fun little kibbles ? This is your chance to register (just a small form) and write an entry!

I pity the foo The OpenGL Physh are done for the time being. By the time I had all of the needed functionality built into the program, it was 4:30 AM. I woke up again at 8:00 to go to school. This should be a fun day to hang out with me. I pity the foo that messes with me!
On another note, I wanted to tell my parents that I finally picked up one of those pasta pot deals that they have been bugging me about. They think it will make my life SOOO much easier! Meijer’s had it on sale for 5 bucks and I just couldnt pass it up!

A PLAN to teach virus writing at university has come under severe criticism at a conference of the Association of anti-Virus Asia Researchers.

“Stopping virus writers is…
...excerpt from: http://www.securityfocus.com/elsewhere