Chris Barna's Weblog Politics, Culture, Occasional Musings on Life.

I’m here, at my brother’s school, sitting at a desk that has a piece of duct tape saying “Macs Only.” There are four people sitting here, the only Macintoshes in the room, 3 iBooks and a Titanium Powerbook. Also on the table are about 6 7 11 bottles of Bawls, a set of speakers that were blaring such tunes as the Soviet National Anthem, a 40GB iPod, like 4 pairs of headphones, including my Bose QuietComfort II’s, a couple external hard drives, and 4 power adapters. My brother is on the right of me, and his friends to the left and across from me. We played Starcraft earlier, I lost horribly, but that’s beside the point. Well, the “Macs Only” table has turned into a grey hat hacking table. So far, (the guy sitting across from me) has successfully brought down the network at least once and almost twice. There is also a guy who aided in it running Knoppix a few computers away. We are now trying to send a message to every windows computer on the network. It’s pretty good. I love mac users!!! We can see how the the rest of the night unfolds, but it seems pretty good. I have to leave in a bit because I’m leaving at 4:45 tomorrow morning but that’s okay. Update: I just learned that it could not have been possible that someone took down the network. It happened was definitely unorthodox, I’m not sure pinging a couple computers can take down an entire network, it was probably a mix of things. Also, I learned that the internet port they used was out, now how could he do that. Then, it turns out the school servers were DOSed over the weekend, causing a strange set of circumstances.

I have been learning Python for the last couple days, it’s a pretty weird language compared to the other scripting languages I know. I like it a lot, but I need a book on it. I want to learn Java next, everybody knows it, and they say it is the best language. Can anybody suggest a good source for either of these languages. It can’t be a book unless you want to lend it to me.

After I return from the east coast trip with school, I will have a few days to sleep and stuff, but then I’m going backpacking. I leave on Tuesday in spring break and return Friday (I think). The place we’re going is called Havasupai, it’s in the Grand Canyon, on an indian reservation. There are supposed to be great waterfalls and cool water (I hope we can swim). The drive over there is expected to be about 10 or 12 hours, but I think it will be well worth it.

While I was walking home (past Vons to be exact) I thought of an idea for a web project. Yesterday, I posted about the yellow topped pepsis finally arriving in San Diego. I was thinking about my odds for winning and then, it came to me, how about a site that tracks people’s bottles. Of course it will be skewed (maybe extremely skewed) but it’s worth a try. Since I am in school and very busy, I would have to make it almost manage itself, or get a couple moderators for when I’m away.

I could give it an XML-RPC interface so people don’t have to go to the website every time you buy a new bottle. RSS could give you a bunch of statistics from, the average price of a bottle to the last 10 registered bottles. There could be a couple dynamic images so people could put the statistics on there own sites.

What could I do to limit the cheating? People would definitely try to get away with lying and faking their bottles. I could require them to include the barcode, but that would make it less convenient so people would forget about it and post less. Of course they would be required to log in. Requiring a valid email (testing it) would stop it a little, for the spammers and bots it would make registration harder. Writing scripts/programs that posted for people without a web browser would encourage more posting. I could track how many bottles somebody has registered versus how long they have been active, then if somebody has an excessively high average, I could pop over an email asking what the deal is. This could even be automated, if the average is over, say 10 or 20, or there has been a great spike in bottle registration on an account, then the system could send them a message, if they don’t reply, suspend the account. What would happen to their “bottles” then?

<

p>This could have a lot more features too, there could be groups, and friends. You could have a “looked first” checkbox and see who is looking the most. Sounds like a great project, I’ll probably start it (if I haven’t decided it’s stupid) after spring break.

Next week I will not be here due to the fact that I will be on the east coast. It’s a trip for school, all the 8th grade students with a 3.0 GPA and who are willing to pay from my school are going. I have to be at the airport by 4:45 in the morning. We’re going to Washington D.C., Philadelphia, and New York City. It’s cool because I get to miss a week of school and then spring break is the next week. Ex-Suits from the album Morning Is When Jenoah Wakes Up by Jenoah

They have finally arrived, yellow topped Pepsis!!! I noticed them in Vons earlier and decided to buy one with my mom’s money. I couldn’t stoop myself to the level of cheating (sorry Jon) and I didn’t end up winning. That’s okay, I wasn’t expecting to. I’ll have to drink Pepsi like every day for the next week, before I go on my trip. Then I’ll go and get some on the trip.

Check out this file… Get your own

As you may have read, in the previous entry I went camping in the desert. It was pretty fun except for the temperature. Maybe because I’m from San Diego, I’m spoiled (it was only like 80F). We went up to the “wind caves” and they reminded me of little community in Riven, it was hollowed out by wind. We were considering sleeping up at them but it was a 1 mile walk. We also saw a sidewinder, kinda scared us from sleeping up their in a cave. Paintballing was also fun, I didn’t go home after camping, but instead I went to a friend’s house. Their were 7 people total that went paintballing and none of us had ever been before. We rented, but we didn’t have enough markers and I kept running out. I only got “tagged” like twice and the rest I just ran out of markers. It was pretty hot out their and I came back, looked in the mirror, and I looked horrible.

I’m leaving for desert camping tomorrow morning. My dad is bringing a digital camera so I might post pictures later. It’s out at a primitive camp called Fish Creek. We may even sleep in some caves. Anyways, sounds like fun I’ll post about it on Sunday, after I get back from paintballing.

I decided to set up a LinkLog. I’ve been having trouble finding things on the web, that were interesting and kind of spontaneus, so I decided to start it. There are RSS & Atom feeds, I still have to tweak them a little, I’ll do it tomorrow, when I’m on my Mac.

I recently had much trouble getting the categories working in Movable Type to work so I’ve decided explain how I did it, for the good of the people.

1. Log into Movable Type and navigate to “Weblog Config” -> “Archiving”.
2. Make sure the “Category” box is checked and the “Category Archive” is selected under “Template”.
3. Add: ‘categories/<$MTCategoryLabel dirify=”1″ trim_to=”15″ $>’ to the text field on the right (under “Archive File Template”).

This is just how I made it on my blog, you may tweak it however you wish please read the documentation or else you will screw it up like I did.

Update: To add the category in with the date and stuff, add the following code right next to your timestamp: <MTEntryCategories>| <a href=”<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>”><$MTCategoryLabel$></a></MTEntryCategories>

Wow, an eventful day on #joiito. I’m glad I got back into IRC, it makes the world go round. I also got invited to Orkut, how could I miss a chance like that. I like it, it’s the first service of it’s kind that I’ve used and it’s great. The community-ish things are awesome, Perl and Emacs all the way.

Wow, I’m posting my first entry with ecto since the beta. I love it, it is such an improvement from Kung-Log, which I probably still have laying around. Still this is awesome. I’ll praise Adriaan for a long time. That’s about all I can say now.

Saw “Bowling for Columbine” last night and watched it again this afternoon, it’s a great movie. I find it a little strange that Michael Moore is a lifetime member of the NRA yet he’s doing all this pro gun control stuff. He does know a lot about the subject, I can give him that much. I especially liked the part where he made whats-his-name (drawing a blank), the president of the NRA feel so bad that he got up and left from the interview. The part about Canada really shocked me too, I can’t believe people don’t lock their doors. Oh, well. I’d suggest it to almost anybody, gives you a lot of historical facts and is very interesting.

Damn, I moved my RSS feeds and forgot to update the templates to reflect it. I realized this by looking at my logs. Since I have custom error pages, they have invisible trackers and there are a lot of hits on http://omikron.substandard.net/blog/index.rdf, oops. So if you have been looking for my feed then go to http://omikron.substandard.net/blog/feeds .