悪の巷に豪邸

Ongoing google issues.

2007-08-26T10:25:34Z

I never managed to figure it out, except that something was going crazy during the ipmasq being performed by the wireless access point. To get around it, I eventually tunnelled around it with ssh, as described here. The link he gives for the tinyproxy script isn't very good, go back to the original mailing list message for it.

Zeitgeist

2007-07-29T14:48:08Z

Well, I picked up Zeitgeist in Hokkaido. The Japan bonus track is "Death from Above" ( B-Side from "Tarantula" ).

If you enjoyed the Judas Priest / Sabbath influenced tSP heavy rock catalogue, you may well enjoy this album. There is not much left of the dream-pop of Siamese Dream, etc, and likewise the sense of grandeur that accompanied albums like Melloncollie is also gone ( although perhaps this aspect will improve with relistening ).

Part of the vocal melody on "Neverlost" is very similar to "Bloodflowers" ( Bloodflowers, The Cure, 2000 ). ( tC: "Between you and me,...", tSP: "You make what you want of me..." )

I liked it, but it hasn't grabbed me by the throat as other offerings have ( even the single Zwan album ). I will give it some more listens and some more thinking.

curious_jp @ 2007-07-20T13:27:00

2007-07-20T04:31:15Z

"I am staggered that some American newspapers have decided to publish purported spoilers in the form of reviews in complete disregard of the wishes of literally millions of readers, particularly children, who wanted to reach Harry's final destination by themselves, in their own time."

-- J.K. Rowling

"What do you get with freedom? Excesses? Exploitation? Of course. And what does one say to that? A small price to pay. If you dont like it, dont listen to it, dont read it, dont watch it."

-- Attributed to Hugh Hefner

Almost as ridiculous as the ridiculous Harry Potter Grief Counselling announcement.

The Golden Bough

2007-07-20T01:41:58Z

While outdated now, this was still a groundbreaking work of cultural ethnography for it's time. I own a very old hardback copy of it - it has Sir Frazer's obituary clipped from the Times of London sandwiched in it's backplate.

Good news! You don't have to pay a pile of money for it because it's all up on Wikisource!

The End

2007-07-19T23:35:14Z

Well, it's my last day at work today. I have no internet at home, so this will probably be the last post I make for a while, at least this month. So, that said,

Space Ghost: Let's go back inside where the gas is.

See you all again, in Australia, where the Gas is. Probably back on curious_au.

Cards.

2007-07-16T23:07:59Z

I played in a seven way ¥2000 hold-em limit / no-limit tournament on Sunday night. It was frustrating.

I won't go into a play by play, but three of the players were fratt-y types that spent their rounds stacking beercans, telling lewd jokes and sending their girlfriends off to the bathroom to take photographs of herself with their cellphone cameras. Two of the other players were drunk as the lord and completely unpredictable. Drunks deal slowly and with poor card control.

Play commenced at 7:30pm. I took the scalp of the third place player at around midnight. The remaining heads-up game went to 50/100 no-limit and ground on for a full hour more of very conservative play before I offered a compromise of splitting the pot between us and just ending the game, which I am very greatful my opponent accepted. My share ended up being ¥6000... while this is my first tournament "victory" and I'm happy about that, the profit / hour ratio was pretty bad for such a frustrating game. ;-)

pulltheplug

2007-07-13T06:10:59Z

I have just started playing the first wargame on pulltheplug, Vortex, and I'm going to whinge. The problem description for level 0 is:

Your goal is to connect to port 5842 on vortex.labs.pulltheplug.org and read in 4 unsigned integers. Add these integers together and send back the results to get a username and password for level 1. Note that vortex is on an x86 machine (meaning, a little endian architecture).

Obviously if they used network byte ordering, we wouldn't have to worry about it being x86. :colbert:

shared_region_map_file_np and You

2007-07-11T23:58:53Z

So, Phrack 64 was generally a disappointment - it's been poorly edited, a lot of the content is nonsense about Astral Traveling and how you can smash the state, man! revolutttionnn! on Youtube. However, there was a great article in there by Neil Archibald on XNU/OSX vulnerabilities ( file 0x0b ). Very interesting!

For me the best part was on local privilege escalation using shared_region_map_file_np, which allows you to map data from a file to a region of memory for all processes, including suid. There has been a lot of ballyhoo about the stack becoming NX in 10.4, which destroyed a lot of traditional buffer overflow attacks where you'd load shellcode into a buffer and then overwrite eip to jump back into it, and while there have been other approaches to evading this, I have never seen it done as clearly and simply as here - simply using the syscall to place the shellcode at some distant address without it's NX bit set.

Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?

2007-07-11T02:46:02Z

Apple, I don't understand the function prolog as documented in the IA32 Calling Conventions ABI Reference Document.

Pushes the value of the stack frame pointer (EBP) onto the stack.
Sets the stack frame pointer to the value of the stack pointer (ESP).
Pushes the values of the registers that must be preserved (EDI, ESI, and EBX) onto the stack.
Allocates space in the stack frame for local storage.

However, an example prolog for a function with 12 bytes of locals looks like this:

pushl   %ebp
movl    %esp, %ebp
subl    $24, %esp

As you can see, none of the so-called non-volatile registers were pushed, nor were they pushed by the call statement that led to this function as far as I can tell - they're certainly not where the ABI implies they should be. Despite this, a great deal more stack ( an additional twelve bytes ) was reserved than is necessary. I guess space was reserved for pushes of edi, esi and ebx, but as these registers weren't used by the function, they never got pushed, despite compiling without optimisations. Weird.

Mount Fuji

2007-07-10T02:26:08Z

I climbed it yesterday with Cassie. It was probably the hardest thing I have ever done.

The climb was fraught with problems. We started the ascent at around eight. After the third scrambling section of the trail, about station seven / midnight, I started to experience problems with altitude sickness, and despite using an oxygen bottle, couldn't get my head clear enough to competently climb. Even though we'd miss the sunrise on the summit, I had to sleep. We crashed in one of the huts. Cassie woke me at 4:30 so we could watch the sunrise together from the doorway, and then I went back to bed for another three hours of sleep.

After that, I felt much better, and we continued our climb. The low oxygen and hot sun made the climb very difficult for me, and although it was physically quite strenuous, the biggest problem was probably me stressing about falling off the mountain - the surface is very loose and crumbly in a few places. As a result of the air, I spent a lot of time leaning on my kongo-zue walking stick and panting like a dog. We were passed by many old grandmas as well as a patrol of soldiers that appeared to be hiking in full uniform with heavy packs.

Unfortunately, as I had expected to be climbing at night and then down in the very early morning, and am kind of stupid, I took few precautions against the heat besides some sunblock, and I got very, very sunburnt indeed. The summit was very beautiful, and Cassie took some photos that I will share later. We made our descent ( part of the descent trail is still closed - this was the first weekend of season ), and this would have been very easy except that I had my boots laced improperly or something and my toes were striking the front of my hikers on every step. They rapidly bruised into agony and as I look at them now, they're still blue/black and quite swollen. Cassie also hurt her knee.

Unfortunately, we weren't able to directly catch a bus back to Shinjuku. For some reason the last one leaves at 4pm, while they arrive much later, and after much transport wrangling, and with the pain starting to set in, I decided to take a day off work today. We arrived back at Cassie's house at around 11:30pm. What a day.

All this said however, I am very glad I did it, and it was an amazing sight and an amazing achievement. Photos soon!

edit: Note - available oxygen at the summit is 64% what you can get at sea level, but with acclimatisation, blood oxygen levels will not drop as dramatically.

Phrack News

2007-07-06T06:08:27Z

Some time on, my little article continues to bring me joy - someone saw fit to translate it into French. Incidently, Phrack is back, and I didn't even notice! I'm obviously losing my 3dg3.

first impression: New editors are not the sharpest knives in the drawer. This august journal of the security scene now includes a great article on astral projection, as well as editors calling themselves the "<THE CIRCLE OF LOST HACKERS>" (sic) and complaining in every second paragraph about how the underground is dead ( including addressing the audience as "Dead Underground" )

Finally!

2007-07-03T15:03:11Z

I finally finished my SVG repainting of the Mary, Star of the Sea cover. Here!

I learned a lot about Inkscape and SVG while I was doing it. I have a lot of niggles with this program, but overall it is very good. I also learned a lot about the MSoTS logo that I will no doubt never forget ( including sneakies like lines changing thickness when they go behind clouds! )

While it's not a perfect copy, I think it's quite close. The challenge now will be to find a way to stencil it!

A special presentation.

2007-07-03T10:50:25Z

Again, I am away from my office this week, so here is a translation by me of the children's fairy-tale, "Urashima Tarou".

うみの　ちかくの　むらに　うらしまたろうという　わかものが　すんでいました。
Once upon a time, in a little village by the sea, there lived a little boy named Taro Urashima.

あるひ　こどもたちが　かめを　いじめていました。
One day, he came across some children teasing a sea turtle.

「こらこら　かめを　いじめてはいけないよ。」うらしまたろうは　かめを　たすけてやりました。
"Hey. HEY! Stop that!" Taro went and helped it.

しばらくして　うらしまたろうが　つりを　していると　なみの　あいだから　かめが　かおを　だしました。
A little while later, Taro was out fishing. A turtle's face popped out of of the water!

「わたしは　あなたに　たすけられた　かめです。　おれいに　りゅうぐうじょうに　ごあんあいします。」
"I'm the turtle you rescued! To thank you, let me escort you to meet the princess-beneath-the-waves."*

かめは　うらしまたろうを　せなかに　のせて　うみの　そこに　もぐっていきました。
The turtle placed Taro upon it's back and dove down to the bottom of the ocean.

「さあ　つきました。」
"Ahh, we've arrived."

かめに　つれられて　おじろに　はいっていくと　うつくしい　おひめさまが　でてきました。
The turtle led Taro into the seafloor palace, where he met with a beautiful princess.

「よくぞ　かめを　たすけてくださいました。　おれいに　おもてなしを　させてください。」
"We're so happy you helped out our turtle here, please allow us to repay your kindness with our hospitality."

めずらしい　りょうりに　さかなたちの　おどり。
There were all kinds of rare foods, and the schools of fish put on a dance.

それは　それは　たのしい　まいにちでした。

In this way, they spent the time pleasantly.

「そろそろ　いえに　かえります。」うらしまたろうが　おひめさまに　いいました。
Taro told the princess, "I really must be getting home..."

「では　おみやげを　もってかえってください。　でも　いえに　かえるまで　あけてはいけませにょ。」
"Well, please take this present with you. But be sure not to open it before you get home!"

うらしまたろうは　たまてばこを　もらいました。
And with that, she gave Taro a large chest of treasures.**

うらしまたろうは　はまに　かえりましたが　むらの　ようすが　ぜんぜん　ちがいます。
Taro returned to the seashore, but everything about the village was different!

むらの　ひとたちも　しらない　ひとばかり。
All the familiar people were gone as well, replaced by strangers!***

うらしまたろうが　りゅうぐうじょうに　いるあいだに　りくでは　なんじゅうねんも　たっていたのです。
In the time Taro had been with the princess-beneath-the-waves, tens of years had passed back on the shore.

こまった　うらしまたろうは　おもわず　たまてばこっを　あけてしまいました。
Worried and confused, Taro accidently, and regrettably, opened the treasure chest he had received

すると　なかから　しろい　けむりが　もくもくもく。
- clouds of white smoke came billowing out!

うらしまたろうは　おじいさんに　なってしまいました。
When the smoke had cleared, Taro Urashima had been sadly turned into an old man. :(

* Cultural note: Rendered here from the literal "Girl who dwells in the house of the Dragon King", this is a reference to Ryūgū-jō, c.f. the palaces of the Chinese 龍王, Lóng Wáng.
** This word, Tamatebako, appears in Japanese only in this story or by idiomatic allusion to this story. It is written with three kanji, Round / Pearl, Hand, Box.
*** "Well, I wandered again to my home in the mountain, Where in youth's early dawn I was happy and free, I looked for my friends but I never could find them - Ev'rybody I met was a rank stranger to me." - Bob Dylan, Rank Strangers to Me, from "Down in the Groove".

Questions I have asked Japanese people:
Would Tarou have been better off just leaving the turtle to be harmed by the boys?
Did Tarou do anything wrong? If so, was his punishment justifiable?
What is the moral of this story?
No satisfactory answers yet!

edit: I have become informed that the boys name would actually have been Urashimatarou, and that tarou was a suffix for boys names in that period, in the way that "ko" is a feminine suffix for names now. I'm not going to change it, as Taro[u] is a common boys first name now.

Vector graphics and stencilling.

2007-06-29T04:18:53Z

I'm working on a new stencil at the moment ( * ), and I'm in the process of vectorising the image.

While autotracing has come a long way, I think the process of cleaning up a trace really has a lot to do with sculpture - take a large block of stone ( nodes ) and then chip away anything that doesn't look like the subject.

curious_jp @ 2007-06-29T08:35:00

2007-06-28T23:52:50Z

退職の日、飯おごったくらいで泣くなよ。
俺、親孝行してないなって反省したぞ。
　ー　福岡信之(男性·29歳)

On the day you retired,
"Don't cry just because I took you to dinner,
It occurred to me I've never done anything to repay you."
- Nobuyuki Fukuoka (M.29)

New kanji / new words:
退職　　ー　たいしょく　　ー　retirement
飯　　　ー　めし　　　　　ー　a meal
奢る　　ー　おごる　　　　ー　to treat someone, to be extravagant
親孝行　ー　おやこうこう　ー　filial piety
反省　　ー　はんせい　　　ー　reflection, introspection, reconsideration, contemplation

curious_jp @ 2007-06-28T10:40:00

2007-06-28T01:44:44Z

お父さん　気づいてますか？
私と　お父さん、２人の写真が
まだ１枚もないことを。
　ー　廣部恵子(女性·20歳)

Father,
Have you ever noticed?
There is still not a single photograph of the two of us together.
- Keiko Hirobe (F.20)

"Exodus" Skatalites/Gugug for Melodica

2007-06-24T14:39:36Z

Gugug has a great cover of the Skatalite's cover of "Exodus" up on Youtube, I liked it so much I transcribed it. Tabnabber system, number indicates octave, capitals are sharps. It sounds pretty close to me.

Exodus:

a3-d4 a4-g4 d4-f4-g4-e4-c4-d4
a4-c5 b4-c5-d5-b4-g4-a4

a4-a4-c5-e5 d5-a4-a4 c5-d5-c5-a4-d5-e5-a4-a4

g4-a4-A4-c5-a4
f4-g4-a4-f4-f4-e4

a4-d4 a4-g4
e4-f4-g4-e4-c4-d4

b4-c5 b4-c5-d5-b4-g4-a4

a4-a4-c5-e5 d5-a4-a4 c5-d5-c5-a4-d5-e5-a4-a4
g4-a4-A4-c5-a4
f4-g4-a4-f4-f4-d4

d4-c4-d4-c4-a3
c4-d4-c4-a3-c4-d4-f4-g4 f4-e4-
d4-c4-d4-c4-a3
c4-d4-c4-a3-c4-d4-f4-a4 g4-e4-
d4-c4-d4-c4-a3
a3a3-b3b3-c4c4-C4C4-d4

a4-g4
e4-f4-g4-e4-c4-d4

a4-c5 b4-c5-d5-b4-g4-a4
a4-a4-c5-e5 d5-a4-a4 c5-d5-c5-a4-d5-e5-a4-a4

g4-a4-A4-c5-a4
f4-g4-a4-f4-f4-d4
g4-a4-A4-c5-a4
f4-g4-a4-f4-f4-d4

curious_jp @ 2007-06-22T20:26:00

2007-06-22T11:41:35Z

｢人間はな。。。」親父の説教は凄かった。
昨日、息子に「人間はな。。。」と始めたら
あくびしていた。
　ー　小山年男(男性·66歳)

"Ah, the human race..."
A father's most dignified sermon.
Yesterday, I launched into it with my son,
"Ah, the human race..."
Who yawned.
- Toshio Koyama (M.66)

New kanji / new words:
親父　ー　おやじ　　　ー　boss, old man, father
説教　ー　せっきょう　ー　a sermon, to preach, to propound

田んぼが、黄色にみのったよ。
いねかりつかれるのに、
なぜ、うれしい顔してるの。
　ー　中島浩貴(男性·7歳)

The rice fields are yellow with fruit,
Although you get tired from the reaping, you wear a smile.
Why?
- Hirotaka Nakajima (M.7)

New kanji / new words:
いねかり　ー　いねかり　ー　rice reaping

亀レスが、すみません。

Unnovations catalogue makes leap into real life.

2007-06-20T11:59:33Z

Finally, I can combine useless function with crass, artless form!

"Functional ball point pens that also double as a pair of electronic drumsticks?"

They said it couldn't be done!

p.s. I apologise for the lack of the usual Letter From Dad today, but I'm on assignment to other schools for three days and the book is back in my desk at my regular. Two letters on Friday.

Struggling with Pickles

2007-06-19T08:19:21Z

One of the great hopes I had when working on the design of my game was that a lot of other grunty, gritty feature implementation would be taken care of for me by writing things in a high level language.

Particularly, I was looking forward to not implementing save and restore, and instead using the builtin serialisation engine. This has definitely not been all I was hoping.

The first problem was when I reintroduced shadows in a more limited capacity ( they are no longer an object level implementation, but are turned on or off by individual getter functions ). A lot of the shadows would be represented by anonymous functions, generated by the lambda keyword.

Unfortunately, it turns out pickle only performs shallow persistence of instance variables - when it hits the code object generated by lambda, it dies. I managed to solve this by instead storing the function definition as a string and then using exec to generate a code object on the fly, but the shallow only nature of pickle has some other, more annoying consequences.

One is that, as only instance data is persisted ( and not e.g. the class definition ), if someone installs a module, grabs an item out of it at some point, and then uninstalls it, it invalidates their save file. This is not what I had wanted.

I have a terrible feeling I'm going to have to end up implementing save and load after all. Combined with the difficulties I am having writing decent AI, I am definitely feeling the mid-project doldrums.

I Woke up in a Strange Place

2007-06-16T00:21:54Z

Well, this is a little late, but I wanted to wait until I could find a copy of this without any pop and click.

It was the tenth anniversary of Jeff Buckley's drowning last May 29th, and Triple J did a J File to commemorate the event. It features some interviews with Mary Guibert, fans, the band and Jeff Himself, as well as a lot of music, including what might be some live cuts that JJJ made during the Mystery White Boy tour. Runtime is about an hour, presenter is Richard Kingsmill, format is Microsoft ASF.

Rapidshare, 14.7mb.

curious_jp @ 2007-06-15T13:54:00

2007-06-15T05:10:05Z

ひまがあれば一日中しゃべっている父へ。
あなたには、体力の限界がないのですか？
　ー　鬼頭浩二(男性·16歳)

To my father
Who talks from morning till night :
Are there no limits to your endurance?
- Koji Kito (M.16)

New kanji / new words:
体力　ー　たいりょく　ー　physical strength
限界　ー　げんかい　　ー　limitations, bounds

Shake hands with Danger!

2007-06-13T10:11:33Z

Another of Staplerfahrer Klaus – Der erste Arbeitstag's influences discovered?

edit: I should note, as archive.org did, there is a pretty good Johnny Cash impersonator doing little bits here and there on the second film - dah-nah-nah-nah nah-nah nyeooowww.

edit2: This movie should have been titled "OH SHIT, SON!"

curious_jp @ 2007-06-13T14:24:00

2007-06-13T05:31:39Z

お父さん、コワイけど弱い人。
気がついちゃってごめんんさい。
　ー　山本明日香(女性·17歳)

Dad,
You act scary
But I know you're really weak.
Sorry I noticed.
- Asuka Yamamoto (F.17)

New kanji / new words:
弱い　　　ー　よわい　　ー　weak, delicate, unskilled, frail
気がつく　ー　きがつく　ー　to notice

Research Request

2007-06-12T14:01:05Z

Most of the engine is complete now, and I'm writing content for a while. Part of this involves writing up a lot of equipment to be bought and sold in the imaginatively named "Hub City".

One of the big problems facing me is that I don't know what a lot of these things would cost. How much do you pay for a Luger P08 in 1930? If I had my Call of Cthulhu rulebook in Japan, it would go some way towards getting some resolution on some of these mysteries ( at least for the 1920s ), but not all.

I am still worried about balancing this game correctly.