Black Coffee (Deprecated)

You read it here in March... Winamp 3 sucks; Now Nullsoft Agrees

So back in March, I complained about how badly Winamp3 was working on my new monster PC.

I eventually solved the problem by 'degrading' back to the old, familiar Winamp2 + Shiva skin. No problems forever after.

Well, apparently Nullsoft (creators of Winamp) solved their problems with Winamp 3, too. They're 'degrading' back to the old, familiar Winamp2!.

Making dramatic 180s in project plans like that sets off all my Bayesian soon-to-die-company filters. Sell Nullsoft, buy Spam!

ps. shout-outs to RogerW for pointing out this little bit of vindication.

First Installment of My Photographic Self-Denunciation: Bad Framing

On my last two big photo excursions I managed to poison two potentially very nice, striking photos by doing a lousy job framing the shot.

In this case, I love the nun's stern, windblown pose, the deeply saturated bus, and the pleasing bokeh of the background market.

What ruins this photo irrevocably is that I chopped her at the ankles. No matter how open-mindedly you look at it, your eye is always drawn to the tiny bit of ankle left visible which screams out, "He chopped the nun's feet!"

It's irredeemable -- the more you crop it, the weirder it looks.

Similarly with this photograph of a car plowing itself sideways through a turn. Again, a very pleasing picture when seen through squinted eyes -- sharp, saturated, with a simple and compelling action.

But what happened to the car's left wheel? There is dirt absolutely boiling off the right wheel, the driver and navigator look like they're going somewhere in a hurry, and the flow of the scene strongly hints your eye to the car's left wheel. But when you discover the wheel missing, the flow of the whole picture is shattered.

This picture is also unrepairable. The visual flow is so woven into the fabric of this photo that there is no other way to dice it into a complete, compelling photo.

Why!?

I wish I could say how these accidents happen.

I can't blame it on the viewfinder of my camera. I shot the nun photo with an EOS-3. Its viewfinder shows less than the lens, not more. So if anything, I was cropping to an even narrower version of the nun picture than what you see. The car photo, taken with my EOS-1v has a 100% viewfinder, so I should have noticed the clumsy framing when I shot.

Flattering myself, I can say that perhaps the subjects of the photos were so attention-commanding that it prevented me from noticing the periphery (ankles and tires). But I think this is a lazy, self-satisfying answer.

Most of the time I'm shooting in a hurry. Haste never helps fine details. I must make add a quick "scan main subject for any non-intentional clipping" to my pre-fire shooting checklist.

So Funny I Can't Bear to Steal it

404 Not Found

Wow! It's All Coming Together

I've had a lot of frustrating starts and stops with my Finke Race photos -- problematic scans, problematic printers, problematic web displays.

On 31die's wise counsel, I went for quicker&smaller&rougher on pictures I scanned for the web. I chose to spend my energies working on high quality prints instead.

It was a great payoff -- the prints' color, sharpness, exposure are coming out extremely well. Much better than any of 72dpi webpage scans.

I've been printing A3 (297mm x 420mm) photos this evening and the resolution is beautiful. It makes me curious how much more I could blow these out -- they are looking great. At these A3 dimensions my images are 365 pixels per inch. My understanding is that as long as they're bigger than 240 pixels per inch, I'm in very good shape.

Learned a few more lessons about the Epson 2100 and Photoshop 7.

1) I think it is always good counsel to clean the ink cartridge before you do a round of printing. Yes, theoretically it wastes ink, but I only print perhaps a few times per month. Invariably the nozzles plug. I end up wasting the ink anyway, as my first photo turns out a banded, wretched mess.

2) I was fucking up Image Resizing for printing. I was leaving 'Resample Image' on -- this was producing lots of bogus resolution. As well, I was leaving the 'Maximize Image' selection on. Epson explicitly warns that this can lead to ugly banding and other crap effects.

So now that I am comfortable with my print output, I can start looking more artistically and editorially at some of my photos and make some nice displays.

Wheeeee

Why Am I Getting All This Spam?

DVR saw my complaint about spam and remark that USENET was toxic to email addresses. He sent me an interesting url on obfuscating email addresses. More interesting, however, was a follow-on link to some research on how email harvesting systems work.

Contrary to my idea, it seems an email posted on a webpage produces a lot more spam than email posted on USENET. It also indicated that obfuscating email addresses was very effective way to avoid being harvested.

I would have thought the harvesting software was smarter than it apparently behaves. I'm also suprised no one has got there hands on some of the harvesting robots.

Trying Out SpamBayes

Word to the wise... never post an email id that you value on the web or usenet. I think the usenet is especially toxic. My black-coffee2002@karavshin.org account receives a spam per hour on average. It's driving me nuts.

For a long time I ignored it.

Then I turned on server-side SpamAssasin. But it doesn't identify many spams, and furthermore, there was no filtering of it. So it just plops into my inbox anyway.

Six months ago I read a really fascinating article on using Bayesian statistical methods to filter spam.

Apparently a lot of other people did, too, and in short order tons of systems were written to implement this kind of system.

I run Outlook2002 on Windows XP. Many of the interesting prototype projects were written on unix-based platforms. I'm not dumping Outlook for a command-line based mail tool. [I would like to find a better replacement for Outlook] So all these were basically useless.

Then one day 31die pointed out: SpamBayes: Bayesian anti-spam classifier written in Python. The exciting thing is that it's designed to work inside Outlook!

On my first attempt, I didn't see the windows binaries. So I ended up installing Python so that I could make it myself. The fun of that wore off quickly, and it languished on my pc for several weeks. Just this afternoon I decided to see if I could find a binary for this program, and skip all the compilation and makefiles and rubbish.

Sure enough, I did.

Although warned that the codebase was somewhat out-of-date, I installed it anyway.

Installation took almost no time. The directions were very clear. And after fifteen minutes of tweaking, re-testing, and categorizing, SpamBayes has a set of rules that, at least, spotted the first message I received this hour.

One interesting thing you can do is pick an arbitary message and ask it "why are you giving it this Spam Score?" Then it gives you a list of all the tokens it found in that message and the probability of the message being spam if that token was found.

Curiously, a lot of signifcant tokens are found in the mail header itself, not the body that you read. For example: 'noheader:return-path' scores a .9907.

For the time being, I am keeping my 'Corpus of Spam.' This allows me to re-run the rule base easily. This will be helpful if I change systems, upgrade, etc.

Now I am sitting here like a little kid waiting for a spam to arrive so that I can see how it's dealt with.

In the meantime I've been scanning over old messages examining the tokens' significance.

One amusing thing, for example, is the 'fucking' token -- it only scores a 0.03 spam weight. Meaning... it's found much more often in my legitimate emails than spam! Howver words like, "this", "lot", and "more" are some of the highest-scoring spam identifier words. Strange. But that's the beauty of Bayesian Spam Filtering -- it identifies real patterns that you'd never recognize or even understand.

I did notice that Outlook acted a bit weird after I installed SpamBayes. A restart cleared that up. (Namely the auto-fill feature was displaying strange text). Outlook seems to start a lot more slowly, too.

Dipshit Crew

Don't fuck with Jerry's Site

For the last couple years I've been keeping up with Jerry Capeci's Gangland News, a gossip, news, and society column written about New York's organized crime world. It's an odd weekly diversion.

Today I wanted to make fun of some New York colleagues. To that end, I hopped onto the site to find some FBI surveillance photos taken of Mafiosi outside the Bergin Hunt & Fish club.

I was having trouble finding it, so I had the idea to find the site's images/ directory. I could browse that more quickly.

Where is their images/ directory? I don't know. So I tried to 'View Source' on the column. But instead of the source, up popped:

<-- Browser Detective - Protected Source Code --> <-- Your IP Address Is Being Logged! -->

hahahahaha how tedious.

(1) It wasn't really clear to me what they're protecting.
(2) I doubted they were doing a very good job of protecting it anyway.

My guess was that they had some javascript code that some restricts 'View Source.' I've seen other javascript pages also make View Source act queer.

So when I came home, I opened a bash shell and ran 'wget http://ganglandnews.com'.

When I opened the output I had to laugh, because all I saw was the now-familiar:

<-- Browser Detective - Protected Source Code -->
<-- Your IP Address Is Being Logged! -->

Ok... So now my guess was that in addition to the javascript blocking, the server was smart enough to parse the user-agent string in the URL request. Things like 'wget' it simply refuses to serve.

So then I said, "wget -U="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705)" http://ganglandnews.com" Now it has to assume I'm using the same browser that it merrily served the file to just moments before.

Of course it fell for the 'trick.'

So when I opened up the output in a resized emacs window, I had to laugh at myself. It appears I gave them way too much credit.

Yes, my little user-agent bluff worked, but it was wholly unnecessary. This stupid 'Browser Detective' doesn't do shit. They just put that dire warning at the top of the html file, followed by fifty carriage-returns. My emacs buffer had been fairly small, so I never noticed that the rest of the html came after a bunch of linefeeds. When I went back and tried 'View Source' again, I realized I'd made the same mistake there, too. I just scrolled down a bit, and there it was.

So asinine. It was such a weak, pointless effort that I wondered who was even behind this 'program.' This led me to the hilarious discussion board where people list about nineteen different ways to defeat this pathetic software. (It also has some primitive javascript code to disable the right-mouse click -- to stop you frome saving the images, for example)

I looked further and found other discussions that discuss similarly weak security attempts.

All in all a laugh.

The only other time I've run into this nonsense is about two years ago, when (I am not making this up) I was looking for some pictures of Macho Man Wayne Newton. I found a fan site that was just as bad as you'd imagine a Wayne Newton fan site would be. The only thing was, they had some javascript code that was blocking me from saving the pictures. I was too busy to go back and do the exercise of defeating it, but I guess it probably would have taken five or fifteen minutes too. Must. Safeguard. Precious. Photos.

Spam that almost passed the Turing Test

Ever since I put my email address online I've been suffering escalating loads of spam. (Don't ever place online an address you value, especially on USENET). So one of my daily tasks is deleting loads of rubbish. One email smelled like spam, 'Proposal for Karavshin', but I checked just to be sure. The message went something like this:

Hi,

It was a pleasure visiting your website Black Coffee. The article posted on
March 25, 2003 "Disheartening News From California" is really sad.
The link "Works of Edward Gorey" is very interesting. The background makes a
good contrast with the site design. I am sure the site will attract lots of
traffic and hence I would like to extend an offer to you.

I work in the marketing department of ADDR.com ( ADDR.com is a
professional web hosting and web design provider currently servicing
over 60,000 customers) and if you would be interested in trying our
services, I can offer you a full year of hosting for your site
(http://karavshin.org) completely free of charge.

Should you decide to cancel at any time, you will of course not be
charged anything. In fact, we will get in touch before the completion
of the trial period to find out how you liked our services and if you
would like to continue with our ADDR.com.

To sign up, simply go to our website () and go
through the standard ordering form. There is no need to provide a
credit card number, simply select “pay by check” option for now and
mention “1 year free from Richard Williams” in the “How did you hear
about us” field. Also, It would be great if you could send me a quick
email to let me know that you signed-up so that I can ensure you get the
1 year free from our end. Moreover your files and domain name will be
transferred absolutely free of cost.

Please feel free to email me if you have any questions. Also, if you
are interested, I could offer you a great rate for a professional
redesign of your web site.


Thanks!

Best Regards,
Richard Williams
richardw@addr.com
www.addr.com

I read it and thought, "this isn't legit, but it sure sounds close." This robot must look for blogs, maybe even specifically MoveableType blogs?, and find articles and links for which it spots hot words that it can form a message response to. "Disheartening => sad" "Weird => interesting" etc. Ha pretty clever.

It's clear a human didn't really generate this -- the "Disheartening News From California" was me complaining about hippies living in my house and hanging peace signs from the window. Appalling but not tragic.

It will be interesting to see how customized and clever spam can get. I am awfully tired of "Nasty three-hole lesbians filling there[sp] holes" messages -- especially when they never show up.

Others' Finke Websites

In addition to some nice photos of the 2003 Finke Race, Steve Clark caught a great bike crash on video. It occurred roughly 20km along the track.

Dangerously close to disaster

This montage (click it for a bigger image) was hair-raising for both the riders and the photographer.

Picture this. It's 730am on Prologue Day at the Finke. The temperature, which the MC keeps gloating about, is hovering a few degrees above 0C. I'm holding an expensive metal tube full of glass with bare hands and feeling the pain of it.

I'm dutifully taking shots in the morning's warm, low-angle sun. The race is starting out with the bizarre 'Outfits' class -- dirtbikes with sidecars. The sidecar drivers are not passive riders. They're hanging their ass out all over the bike to help it corner faster.

As the third crew to pass around the turn I'm watching comes roaring by, something catches! I think the driver caught the heavy dirt shoulder of the turn. In a flash I'm watching the bike roll over and the riders tumble through the air!

It was sort of like being in a car wreck myself. Everything was momentarily slow-motion. I remember realizing, "yeah, I'm aimed right on this wreck with a gigantic lens, and a monster camera with a power boost-drive." Then I remember considering for another agonizing moment, "is it rude to be photographing these guys flying through the air?". And then finally deciding, "Hell no! They'll enjoy the photographs better than anyone." and then snapping away.

I felt like an absolute hero for about five minutes. The guys (#1025 Steve Harvey and Mark Green from Taperoo) had righted their bike, restarted it, and finished the prologue. I'm grinning ear-to-ear for having caught this on film.

Then I re-inspect my film settings and realize, "holy fucking shit. holy fucking shit.
I suck.
I hate myself.
I suck.
I hate myself.
I suck.
I hate myself.
I suck.
I hate myself.
I really hate myself.

My clumsy, numb fingers had accidentally whacked the exposure setting down more than one stop. The photos were junk!

I cannot convey how disgusted with myself I was. I even digressed to hoping another outfit wiped out at the exact same spot for me to capture. This time I promised myself to have the exposure dialed in right, and hold down the shutter trigger as if it were a Vulcan chain gun.

Alas, and of course, it didn't happen. I consoled myself that maybe I could use Photoshop to torture a decent picture out of the data. And in fact, the rough draft you see above is reasonably salvaged. I probably can do a better job with more effort, but it's good enough for now.

At any rate, it was a good lesson for me, and I assiduously checked the exposure wheel from then on. As well, I tried to track the vehicles with my lens whether I was shooting or not. There's never enough time to catch a crash in midair otherwise.

A Diet of Dust

Three hundred cars and bikes blasting through the desert generates an insane amount of dust. Nearly more than you can fathom. Choosing spots along the track from which to photograph had to take three things into consideration:

Safety
I saw scores of instances where cars were flying wide outside of turns, way inside of turns, and just off the course randomly. I gave myself a rule that I'd always keep an eye on the car, whether I was shooting it there or not. I had no interest in being run-down, even if I would get to watch the rest of the race from a helicopter.

Sun
The warm Outback sun was great, especially in the morning and late afternoon, so I was always aiming for to be between it and the driverss.

Dust
The dust clouds drift away like giant dirt zeppelins as the cars pass. As much as possible you try to find a location where the prevailing winds pushes the dirt cloud away from you, rather than over and through you. It seemed almost futile at times trying to keep my lens dust-free. I was constantly squirting it with a blower-bulb.

Vigorously Attacked the Jumps

Damien Brunello, from Mt. Isa, caught my attention 200m before this jump. I heard him coming, and watched as he never relented from the throttle as he took each of the jumps in series. No suprise that Damien came in 13th in his class.

Aristihtis Polychronopoulos Lands Firm

Bike 596, a Honda CRF 450, lays in another landing after a series of short jumps along the prologue circuit. Polychronopoulos finished 15th in his class of 36 finishers, and fifty entrants.

Ricky Chambers finishing up Day 1

Ricky Chambers (#969), from Alice Springs, crossing the wide, dry, and exceptionally sandy bed of the Finke River as he wraps up the first day's leg.

The Quad Racers (Class 9) seemed a determined crew, with only two of twenty-two entries failing to finish. Ricky finished 13th in his class, roughly an hour behind the fastest class 9, and two hours, forty minutes, behind the King of the Desert, Max Burrows and his monster vehicle.

It says volumes about determined drivers like these who suffer nearly twice as long as anyone else. And if that doesn't convince you of their good attitudes, I'll mention that Ricky was the only driver, of the hundreds I photographed, who actually waved as he went by.

Colin Johnson

Driver Colin Johnson and Co-pilot Leanne Walker slam their 3.5l Class 1 buggy around the Finke Prologue circuit. The Prologue race is a short (10-15km) circuit each driver faces the day before the race. Results from the prologue set the take-off order for the race itself. The farther back you start, the more choking dust you're forced to eat on the grueling 400km circuit. They ended up finishing as the 34th fastest car.

Back from the Finke!

I got back Wednesday. Everything went well and was fun. I am furiously scanning in all my photos (about 550) and will get them into some presentations asap. Lots to write about, too.

Borat

I find this so fucking funny: Borat Sayadiev, Kazakh TV, audio highlights.

There's more...

I'm now on full USENET scan-mode looking for some of these videos.

Roger W Has a Blog

Gusher Hero

ooops.... Forgot to 'publish' this. It's been in draft mode for two weeks. Sorry, Roger!

Eric Rudolph

There are a lot of choice quotes I'm seeing in the paper about this lunatic.

I found today's favorite in the NY Times:

Certainly, Mr. Rudolph was born to a family that could take loyalty to extremes; his brother Daniel sent the Federal Bureau of Investigation a videotape of himself cutting off his hand with a radial saw to protest the bureau's naming of Mr. Rudolph as a suspect.

Weather Guaranteed

Zero concerns about the weather during our trip to the Finke Desert Race... Every day perfectly clear, high 75F, low 48F. The only pity is that since it is winter, the day is short, so only 11.5 hours of visible light per day. These excellent conditions, plus a first-quarter moon, means that on this trip I will get to see the Southern Sky constellations. On my prior, month-long, trip to Australia (Sydney-Blue Mountains-Arapiles-Melbourne, June 1998) it was perpetually overcast and I saw nothing.

Map Prep

Spent a chunk of this afternoon packing up gear for the Finke trip on Wednesday. This evening I worked on the navigation.

Mapsource
I reluctantly re-installed Mapsource so that I could download Garmin's meagre basemap of Australia into my GPS. Six map quadrants covered an enormous swath of Australia--very nearly from Darwin on the north coast to the southern coast. I expect I could put the entire Australian map into my GPS if I wanted to.

I upgraded the Mapsource software from 3.20 to 4.something. The errata doesn't show any special new functionality just endless kludge-sounding fixes where in certain peculiar circumstances Mapsource does peculiar things. ("2. Fixed an issue where the Tide Prediction calendar control was not working correctly in some date ranges when Windows was set to a time zone that automatically adjusted for daylight savings time." and "5. Fixed an issue where MapSource would not correctly send the Dark Green track color to some units." )Big Suprise. I don't really know why these hacks merited a left-of-decimal-point increase.

At least now I have basic Australian navigation capability, so long as the Etrex Vista doesn't vomit on me during the trip.

OziExplorer and Epson 2100
I'm not bringing any laptop this trip, so I'll have to rely solely on GPS and paper maps. The amusing thing was to take some of my higher-fidelity maps of Australia, load them into OziExplorer, dump the map.BMPs to Photoshop, and convert that into a one-page map cropped and accented to my exact specifications.

The final result was compressing the better part of three large maps into an A3 format page (11.7"x16.5") printed with photo quality. Fortunately my printer has excellent resolution. The map detail is just large enough to be legible with an unaided eye. It's nice to have the complete course on one map.

This prototype should help me to figure out what makes a good custom map design for our August trip.