Dec 2, 2013

Less is a PDF Parser?

1,157 comments in three short weeks. I’m deeply saddened by Google’s recaptcha. But, today starts the last week of UT! Also, it’s the first day of December/Advent stories. Now that it’s the last week of UT, I’m going to talk about using less as a PDF parser. Remember the UT Class picker? So the data that uses is from the registrar’s PDF download of the class schedules. ALL of the class schedules.

Nov 25, 2013

Firefly!

It’s free on Amazon Prime! I haven’t done anything productive this week. Beyond the usual. (because I just finished watching Firefly. All of it) (also because of personal reasons) Also, as of this moment I have 907 pending (i.e. unread spam) comments. I appreciate that Google’s getting their books read by robots/sweatshop workers, but this reCAPTCHA thing really isn’t helping me…

Nov 18, 2013

Homeworld

I would have done something productive, but I got a copy of Homeworld. The 3D real time strategy developed by Relic. Thankfully, it runs under wine. Here’s a few snapshots: Before you hate on the graphics, remember it’s from 1999. And it has a method of controlling ships in three dimensions, which makes up for all of it’s hardships. Most RTS games are limited to two dimensions, but this one is actually three…

Nov 12, 2013

Bats in Space!

Okay, so this week I’m really busy. Forgive me. The Russians launched a rocket for the first time since they tried in late June, which crashed and blew up. Awkard. Also, space bats. ![][2] That is a bat clinging to the fuel tank of STS-119 (the shuttle launch on March 15th, 2009) During the countdown NASA engineers thought that the bat would simply fly away, but it didn’t. As the shuttle launched it fell off and was presumably vaporized by the exhaust.

Nov 2, 2013

Predicting Keirsey

Seventy-eight pending comments?!? SEVENTY-EIGHT?!?!? Something has to be done. I don’t know what I’ll do, but whatever I do, it will be done. My current idea is something like the Google 2-factor authentication. In order to post a comment, you’ll have to enter the correct code generated from somewhere. Today I’m going to go a little bit in depth about my analysis of a recent CS assignment which had to do with Keirsey’s Personality test.

Oct 29, 2013

Pillow SSL Support! (Again)

Now I have legit SSL certificates. Check them out: https://pillow.rscheme.org/ Also look at the bottom of the page. I coded a little “Comodo Secure” seal that only shows up when my site is visited via HTTPS. Comodo is giving out free 90-day certificates. I recommend you get one - I’m liking mine so far. (UPDATE 2017: The Comodo link was broken, and now I get SSL from https://letsencrypt.org/) Okay, sorry for the incredibly short post today.

Oct 21, 2013

Number Psychology Results!

Okay, finally. I have the number psychology experiment results. All 13 of them. To recap: The experiment asked the user for a number at four stages. At each stage the user was asked for a number with certain parameters. You can still go do the experiment through the link above. Each user was “uniqued” using their IP address and their user agent string. I wrote a script to track each unique user through the four stages, and then ran that through graphviz:

Oct 14, 2013

Pillow SSL Support

Due to recent concerns over the security of the pillow.rscheme.org website, I added self-signed HTTPS support to the site. Note that self-signed is presumably more secure than major vendors, because major vendors are being sold out to the government. If you trust cnet, that is. But even if you don’t, there is good reason to trust self-signed certs more than commercial certs - Commercial certs are used by vastly more people, and so there is more data that can be used to solve the equation required to break SSL.

Oct 7, 2013

They Shutdown NASA?

What? Why? I like NASA! But there is little I can do about it except make humorous posters about it: Apparently it could delay a mission to Mars by a couple years, since the next Earth-to-Mars launch window is in about a month. The launch pad at Cape Canaveral has got to be deserted… On a related note, I’m working on re-projecting Star Trek to be playable in a corner. The plan is on Thursday I’m going to get a few friends together and we’re going to actually watch it in a corner.

Sep 23, 2013

Indonesian Adult Websites?

Alright, just a quick post today, as I’m running late because I spent Saturday doing homework and Sunday in San Antonio with my family. Next week I’ll make up for it with something cool. Hopefully. Regardless, as a few people know, I run an open web proxy. It’s pretty effective, and a lot of people use it, so I keep it maintained (UPDATE 2017: It’s not around anymore). But recently I noticed that a large (>80%) amount of visits are to assorted porn sites.