Kalimat al-Mutafalsif

Ok, the title lies. but I’m cleaning up my desktop, and came across a screenshot from a few days ago. It is a CAPTCHA that I, for the life of me, could only make sense of as: Six E Pi Pi. So, in this case it worked, right? The human figured out what the letters should be, except as clearly as those are Pi’s, Pi is not a letter on my keyboard. I figured I should get a screenshot to show where CAPTCHAs are going:

Sadly, CAPTCHAs are a technology we need to combat spam, which accounts for at least 80% of email today, not to mention message boards, instant messages, or text-messages. However, we’re merely engaged in a technology arms race with spammers, this is *not* a technology that is winning any fights, we just try to stay one step ahead. This is increasingly hard with CAPTCHA entry being a job in countries with lower incomes, spammers cheating by offering porn in return for solving a CAPTCHA, and (in a case that doesn’t just apply humans) CAPTCHA breaking drives AI research. Basically, no ‘new’ CAPTCHA technology is going to keep spammers out for long. A bleak future indeed. On the other hand, we already have 80%, how much worse can it get? I think the real answer lies in spam filters, although for the most part those are also in a mere arms race, but at least then you can control your own computer, not just leave the image out there for another human to crack.

Its been a few months since I announced I was going to try to write a PHP based Mafia game and in that time I’ve learned a decent amount.

First off, if you want a project done, you can’t be getting distracted. Since I’ve started Thieves Tavern I’ve also fallen in love with motorcycles and started gun smithing. Both of those have stolen major programming time away from this project. Its only through the weather being downright cold lately, and parts for the gun being on back order that I’ve had the time to get gung ho on this project again.

Secondly, when dealing with databases, its really easy to tailor the database so that the game works. In fact, that’s the whole point of editing the database: To test this bit, or that bit… but not the overall product. Earlier this week I’d reached a point where I thought I could push my code live, and invite some friends to beta test it. I figured, at the time that clearing out my database would make stuff work better, get rid of all the random edge cases I’d built up along the way. Well, after clearing out the database, nothing worked. I couldn’t start games, I couldn’t chat, nada. This is when I learned that it doesn’t get easier after removing test data, only harder. It took another two days of testing, clearing, testing some more, as well as cleaning up my code, before I got it back to the ‘working’ beta state. Thankfully, now I know its working as intended (minus the obvious beta bugs, of course).

So now its off to beta test Thieves Tavern. I’m kind of excited to be playing this, I had loads of fun while playing myself in local tests, and I can imagine it being even better taking out friends online. If you’d like to help test, get ahold of me (in real life, I’ll ask for signups for a public beta later on) and I’ll send you an invite.

(And in the 10 minutes it took to write this I already have a laundry list of fixes/stuff I just plumb forgot)

I nabbed a plugin to fix my borked LJ Crossposting script… mine was not behaving nicely. So this is mainly a test to see if/how it works.
Test.
Test 2…
Big Test
Now we’re testing an edit, and adding in a link to the plugin’s home.

Tragically, there was another school shooting at the beginning of this week. This one was in Finland, and their second in 12 months which left 10 dead, 11 including the shooter. We can expect the cry for more gun control, both domestically, and in Finland, so I pulled out a post I’ve been saving due to not having time to finish it.

As I mentioned before, I’m putting together an AR-15, and my next few posts will be the story of how its been put together. I’m also using this project to test out Picasa, so I’ll use that to post my images (just as soon as it finishes scanning a few of my automated rip folders, such as icanhascheezburger, forgot I had all them!)

Before I begin, I’d like to link to a schematic which can be found here. This way when I mention random parts you can find them and play along!

Its been a long time since I’ve written anything, I’ve kept busy at work and at play. On the work side I’m going to look into what it will take for me to actually run Three Planets as a real company, mainly for tax purposes and my own sanity. On the play side, there’s been a LOT more developments.

I just picked up a motorcycle about two months back since one thing I love to do while stuck on some code is drive. Naturally I figured that riding would be an even better escape. It turns out it is, but I’m concentrating too much on the riding to be able to head-code. The upside is, this is probably the most fun activity I’ve ever found. So, meet Kari:

I realized on Sunday that I’ve put 1000 miles on her in the month and the week since I got my license, not too shabby considering I probably spent on the low side of $100 of gas for that entire time! Since she’s an older bike, I’m doing as much of the maintenance as I can, so that I’ll only need a mechanic for major operations. More on that later.

I also (very, very recently) decided to get into Gun smithing. To that end, I’m going to be making an AR-15 over the next month(s), and keeping track of my progress here.

So, what do the two new activities have in common? Both of them stem at least partially from an interest to be reliant upon only myself for work. This comes from the programming I do, where I have chided others for not thinking outside of the box, and really doing anything they want with the code. It finally dawned on me that that goes in all walks of life, and you can even approach it in the same way.

Lets take the Gun smithing, for example. I’m approaching this from a design perspective first. I laid out what I want to use the gun for, then set my constraints (money), and planned out the parts. This is exactly the same method I take for programming: First I’ll plan out how I want it to look/act, figure out what corners I have to cut to keep it within my memory/CPU/bandwidth bounds, then start with the functions.

In this case I decided I want something for (eventually) match target shooting, for medium ranges (100-600 yards). My constraints were that I wanted to build it all myself, short of fabricating the parts, and that i didn’t want to spend more than $700 on the total cost. So far I’ve decided on the following:

• DPMS Lower Receiver, stripped (already purchased)
• DPMS Lower Receiver parts (already purchased)
• Advanced Technology 6-position collapsible stock
• Ergonomic pistol grip
• 20″ chrome lined barrel (not sure of manufacturer yet)
• Flat top upper receiver with rails
• Generic bolt/bolt carrier, stripped

It should be a really fun project, I look forward to learning a new machine and how it all works. This will also mean that from now on my firearms will be like my computers, completely unique, and I’ll have an intimate working knowledge of each and every part.

So why now? Why am I trying to learn all this new stuff once I get out of college, and not while I was in it? The answer here stems from some conversations I’ve had about why I enjoy firearms, and thoughts I’ve had after them. The short answer is: “I’d rather learn how to shoot now, when I don’t need to, than later when I need to, but don’t know how.” I don’t think carrying rifles in public is necessary, though I am a vocal defender of the 2nd amendment, however I do think it is very short-sighted to assume you’ll never need to use a firearm, and therefor write them off. Didn’t you learn how to change a tire, even though you may never need to, perform CPR in gym class, or how to balance an equation in science (or for the scientist, write in plain English, or not blow up the world)? Sure, all of those will be needed a whole lot more than shooting, but other than CPR shooting might be the most important to know if any of those situations came up.

Now, I considered myself set once I learned safety, and how to aim properly. But lately I’ve been thinking that its really short-sighted of me to assume the rifle will work perfectly all the time. More importantly, I don’t know when its not working at 100%, because I don’t understand it all. Just like the sorority girls whose computers I’d clean up at the end of the school year, I might not realize all the junk that is building up inside my gun. So, I’ve decided that I need to know at least basic gun smithing, just in case. Knowing this will keep me, and those around me when I shoot, a whole lot safer in the long run, plus save me money!

The motorcycle is the same story. I have no idea what’s going on, and if you read up on an inline-4 engine, there’s really no excuse for that. So again, I’m teaching myself basic mechanics in order to keep my machines running as smoothly and safely as possible.

And if you think about it, these skills of checking the usual fail points, oiling the squeaky parts, and throwing your own custom parts in, are the same across many fields, not just mechanics, gun smithing, and programming. So get out there, and get yourself head first into a new field today!

For about two weeks now I’ve been working on a PHP version of the game Mafia. If you don’t know it, mayhaps you know the name Werewolf, or Assassin (not Assassin’s Creed, like I had some people guess…. there’s no way I could port that to PHP). If you’re still in the dark, check the [...]

A bunch of us were chatting yesterday about ICANN’s new TLD policy, wherein companies can buy custom TLDs for tons of money, such as .google or .microsoft. Peter Harkins, over at push.cx, maintains that this means ‘WWW’ will never die. The thinking is that now we’ll need a way to indicate the start of a [...]

On the 15th of May, Symmetry Breaking put out this call for help. It seems that the PR department of Fermilab received a (handwritten) letter in code. A high resolution version can be found here. Since its been a few days, and mainly since Slashdot picked up on the story, there’s been some breakthroughs. Of note is ‘Geoff’’s work found here (only linking to the most recent post). I heard about this earlier today, and found it rather interesting, both the code, and the assumptions people were making. I’m keeping my measly ideas regarding the actual code to myself for now, as most have been enumerated elsewhere, but I’d love to examine these assumptions.

(And for the record, I’m not assuming ‘male’, I’m using ‘he’ since its quicker to type than ’she’, or ‘he/she’).

First, there seems to be a basic assumption of sanity for the writer. I think this is the worst assumption made so far, and the most likely to bite us in the butt. While there’s a chance someone was simply sending a letter to Fermi to see what they thought, pranking their co-workers, or whatever the reason, I think its at least just as likely that this is a crackpot guy who saw that Fermi has a .gov address and decided to send in something relating to their abduction, a secret formula, or world peace.

Three bits of evidence for this. The first (that hurts my thought of mental illness) is that the address it was shipped to is not given on the main website’s contact page. This seems to imply sanity and foreknowledge, or at least some stalking, to come up with a different address. If we use Archive.org, you can see that while the address was different a year ago, it was a formatting, not substantive change. In fact, the address the letter was sent to is given on the website in quite a few places, so it is conceivable still that the author came across it coming to their site from a link, and not the main page looking for the address.

The second bit of evidence is the symbols that are used. As some have pointed out, this looks a lot like a Rosetta Stone for another message. While some of the symbols look clearly human (Upper case Phi, no doubt about it), others simply can’t be found in our alphabets, yet look close to what some hypothesize should be a galactic, math based language. Where am I going with this? Perhaps (and please take this with a grain of salt, I don’t personally believe in it) someone who believes in abductions found this message, understood it, and is trying to teach the language to only those humans who are worthy of learning it. Hence my thought of ‘crackpot’. Sure, it may come out in the next 24 hours that these symbols match up to something else, and the guy is sane. Just remember, if it does come out to be a conspiracy, you heard it here first.

Finally, Fermi sat on the letter for a year before dusting it off and passing it off to the public. I can think of three reasons for this. The first is they honestly didn’t have the people to bother. That could be, but judging by the reaction of the Slashdot community and other scientists I know, them putting this up in a break room, or an internal email, would garner a lot of attention during down time. The second thought is that they just didn’t care. This would lend credence to my mental illness thought, they wrote it off immediately upon receiving it, rather than even attempt to decode it. Or, perhaps they’ve been working on it for a year, and got no where. I’m sure they would have the top and bottom solved, but maybe the middle bit has eluded them as well, which again would lend credence to it not having any real meaning at all.

Second, a lot of people seemed confused on the time frame. Fermi started they received this over a year ago, but some were reading into stories of interstellar communication that they assumed were related. We can’t assume anything about the time frame other than any information made available after March 5th, 2007 is *not* involved in this message. In fact, due to the elaborateness of this message, I’d guess at least a week before that, as well. So anything after the end of February 2007 cannot play a role in this message. Of course, if research was going on before then, and only released afterwards the author may still have obtained a copy, or even worked on the project, and could have that information.

Third, there’s the assumption that the middle portion (the symbols/’hex’ characters) is a straight key, meaning one character corresponds to its hex character. I think that’s wrong. A simple frequency chart shows the following:

As you can see, the frequency still fits into our base 3 assumption. I think that’s very important, as the author uses base three (we assume, and can come up with English-correct translations for) in the top and bottom portions. So, rather than say that the sideways triangle equals ‘F’, we should say that it equals 3.

Now, translating the message into the frequencies, then decoding as we did for the top and bottom portions yields something cute (assuming that 222 is a space, not 000). We get:

111_1_111 111_1_111 111_11_111 11_111_11
111_1_1 11_11_11 111_1_11 11_111_111

OR

D D G G
E _ F S

There was speculation initially that the ‘Basse’ ‘misspelling’ in the message meant the middle bit should be a song. Well using this translation we have a song! It can be read left to right (half note D, half note G, quarter note E, quarter note rest, F sharp), or top down (quarter note D, quarter note E, quarter note D, quarter note rest, quarter note G quarter note F, G sharp). Of course, in many circles (especially Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Independence Day) music and lights are thought to be ‘universal’ languages to chat up aliens with. Hmm. Not saying that’s the answer, but playing it is kind of catchy.

Going along with this assumption was the thought that 1 and A (and also ’s’) needed to be assigned values. I’d argue that they are assigned values as seen above. They’re included in the chart 0 times, so they’re all worth 0. And if you’re as good with off by one errors as I am, that will get your hopes up for the ‘initials’ between the ‘key’ and the bottom.

Well, those are my thoughts on the assumptions that are being made so far. Hope it helps someone out there!

A few weeks back I acquired a PS3 (another post on that is in the works), and nabbed Assassin’s Creed as my Single Player game for a while. From the previews I was expecting a game with decent open-ended game play, decent graphics, and some good fighting. Boy were my expectations blown out of the water…