New posts and my feelings of purileness

I feel that the new posts, since my absence have at best been juvenile. I apologise for the poor content. I planned to have a big to do when the blog turned two, however that didn't happen, mostly because of a turn in my health and stress at my job/life as well as other obligations. I apologise for this. I will at some point in the future have a HUGE DEAL, to make up for it. However, as I am still in poor health, and my work and finances demand my attention elsewhere I will try to appease with what I can. Expect new content on http:\\fuckinfiction.wereboobs.com soon. And expect better posts on here.

One of the reasons for the ubuntu posts is because I was a hardcore fedora fan, however after using there test repositories and 13 alpha, I had so many crashes and data loss....I finally went to the darkside...yes, oh yes, I tried arch. I know it's all the rage. And all the cool kids are using it. But my problem with arch was many. So I went with Ubuntu, please forgive me.


Also, here's me straight razoring my head.....yes, I am an idiot.








Thanks,

Dusty C.

Ubuntu / Gnome change your wallpaper every 10 seconds

Ok so assuming you have a folder named Wallpaper in your home directory which contains numbered .jpg's(in my case 385) you can use this to change your wallpaper every 10 seconds. You can adjust how often it changes by changing the sleep number on the 5th line of the script and you can adjust the number of wallpapers you have on the sixth line of the script by changing the number 385. I originally had made this as a cron job rather than a constantly running perl job which I run in screen (screen perl wallpaper.pl...then ctrl + a + d). However I was having some trouble getting it to work with cron, and the outside sources I used to help figure this out where at a loss so here it is.

#/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
while(1){
 sleep(10);
 my $numberW = int(rand(385));
 print $numberW;
 my $wallpaper = "gconftool-2 -t string -s /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename /home/lane/Wallpaper/".$numberW.".jpg";
 system($wallpaper);
}

Now you may wonder how you get neatly numbered wallpapers. Well I wrote a script for that as well and it works as long as none of the wallpapers are already named as numbers already. Remember to change the @files dir to the directory where the pictures already exist non-numbered, and to put the $newfile directory where you want the new files to go. It is not advisable that these be the same place.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;
my @files;
my $it = "207";
print $it;
@files = ;
my $counts;
my $newfile;
my $file_number = "0";

while(1){
  foreach (@files) {
    my $file_regex = qr!(\d+\.jpg)!s;
    if ($file_regex =~ @files) {
      $counts = $counts + 1;
      print $counts;
      if ($counts == scalar @files) {
        print "fuck you";
        }
        if ( $counts == scalar @files ) {
          exit();
          }
    }
    my $loopy = "1";
      while($loopy){
        my $file_regex = qr!(\d+\.jpg)!s;
     if ($file_regex !~ @files) {
       $newfile = '/Users/lane/Downloads/tat/ta2/'.$it.".jpg";
      rename($files[$file_number], $newfile );
      ++$it;
      ++$file_number;
      if( ! -e $newfile){
          $loopy = "0";
          exit();
        }
      
      }
    }
}

New Posts, The nexus one, and hyperlocal.

I haven't posted in a little bit so I posted twice today for you guys, below is a little robot I coded while at the coffee shop. But I also wanted to talk about google's neww phone the nexus one. This is the one google is really throwing there weight behind. They had a press conference and since then this thing is on almost everybody's adsense, including this blog and my employers. I read somewhere that they were having a little copyright trouble with the name as the Phillip K. Dick estate was a little mad about the Bladerunner refrence. There's only one reason I don't like the nexus and that's because it doesn't have a keyboard. If I was a patient person I myself might have gotten The Droid over The Moment, however I'm not patient and though there are things that irritate me about my phone, I still love it.
I think google maps has really changed the way I live. If I need something in particular I always hit google maps first to make sure that the place I am going is the closest. I really use it a lot now that I have moved to West Nashville, and am not as familiar with the area as I would like to be. As someone who works in the "hyper local" space, I appreciate this apps and the one's like it. I also like foursquare,sort of a venue tagging phone app for hipsters or something, and will probably be making use of that shortly.(I hope I can become mayor of cafe coco). The blog is almost 2 years old, last year I had a huge announcemnt....I have one of those coming but don't know if I will make the deadline of doing it exactly on the year mark. But let's check the two years of analytics we have so far:



The picture is only impressive if you click on it.


Have a Happy Twenty-Ten, and if you have any suggestions for the blog feel free to comment.

BeerBot Prime Here to save the day. Or maybe get you a free beer and a date.

I made this robot, at and for coffe shops or other public places with wifi. You can take him there and whenever anyone tweets his name, it will read the message from your laptops speakers...yes yes I know, ignore the man behind the curtains. This will only work on mac os x right now, as it uses the say command. If there is an equivelent on linux you can just plug the command name in $say near the bottom. If you have windows you can execute a little vbscript here that will do the same thing. So what I do is tweet things like "I want a coffee" for places like the coffeshop down the road and for places like cafe coco I crank it up with, "Will you buy me a beer". As always make sure any modules you don't have are install via cpan or activestate's ppm utility if you have trouble with cpan.


i.e. A tweet like this:
@beerbotprime Buy me a beer

will make beerbotprime say buy me a beer, no matter what account it is tweeted from
he also moves his hand

use Sys::Hostname;
use strict;
use warnings;
use LEGO::NXT;
use LEGO::NXT::Constants qw(:DEFAULT);
use LEGO::NXT::MacBlueComm;
use Net::Twitter;
use Date::Format;
my $dev = new LEGO::NXT::MacBlueComm('/dev/tty.NXT-DevB');
my $bt = new LEGO::NXT( $dev );
my $speed = 100;
my $tachoticks = 360;
my $tailFtac = 100;
my $tailBtac = 100;
my $tailSpeed = 100;
my $tailBSpeed = 100;
my $backSpeed = 100;
my @names = ('New Tweet');
my $bob = "test";
my $tail = "tail";
my $retract = "retract";
my $say;

my $tweet = Net::Twitter->new( username=>'beerbotprime', password=>'insertyourpassword' );
print "logged in? \n";
my $last_id = undef;
my $switch = 0;

while(1){
 my @tt = ();

 if($last_id){
  @tt = $tweet->friends_timeline({count => 5, since_id => $last_id });
 }else{
  @tt = $tweet->friends_timeline({count => 5 });
 }

 foreach my $t (@{$tt[0]}){
  my $target = $t->{text};
  
  if($target =~ m/beerbotprime/i){
    $say = `say $'`;
    $bt->set_output_state( $NXT_NORET, $NXT_MOTOR_A, $speed, $NXT_MOTOR_ON|$NXT_REGULATED, $NXT_REGULATION_MODE_MOTOR_SPEED, 0, $NXT_MOTOR_RUN_STATE_RUNNING, $tachoticks );
    $bt->keep_alive($NXT_NORET);

   printf("%s: %s\n", $t->{user}{screen_name}, $t->{text});
   print "sleep 4\n";

   sleep(4);
  }

  $switch = 0;
  print "sleep 4\n";
  sleep(4);
 }
}
exit;

A note to perl enthusiasts trying to get Lego::NXT installed on their machines

If you keep getting cpan errors trying to install Net::Bluetooth or LEGO::NXT...

You need to first install Device::SerialPort first.

Save you many headaches.

QC, Questionable Content Meetup in Nashville last night

That's Questionable Content for the uninitiated.

This is me and Jeph. This meet up was neat and really approachable. I think anyone who asked, would have gotten a drawing. I didn't want a drawing I just wanted my friends and I to get pictures.

Here, are some of the people that showed up:



Some were more enthused than others to have their picture taken.

But the main reason I am blogging this is because, one person, home grown in the big TN, was ,pre than hospitable. She made sure I got my picture taken with Jeph, and really left me walking away with a great view topatoco, her name was Christy or Kristy, or some other spelling, I didn't get the spelling, I apologize. Regardless she help make the evening memorable for my friends and myself:




***She's the cute one in the back***

More pictures at my flickr
My flickr

Microsoft VS Apple, Google grows

In 1975 Microsoft began selling BASIC interpreters, what we might consider a computer language today. Back then OS's weren't really a part of the computing scene, you wrote your own programs or copied them from a book. But that's not really what I want to talk about, there are thousands of texts on this subject. Microsoft started empire building from then on, trying to dominate the market in all ways. One major move they made was to corner IBM to distribute their OS.They put their Internet browser that was not standards compliant on there OS, not just to obliterate the Netscape browser, but to obliterate the server market that Netscape was a part of. By having a browser that was incompatible with there server, they were taking the bread and butter of Netscape. This is key part of what happened, this is when Microsoft truly started empire-building. A sort of allegory, in which Microsoft began building castles. Companies like Apple tried to compete, but they were competing on the same terms, and in the early days they thought that simply having a better product would win the war. However this didn't work. Apple and Microsoft were the equivalents of warring nations, and though Apple (debatably) provided better products, it was simply out gunned. Even after Steve Jobs came back in coup like glory, they were still fighting the same war. They did take a step forward in making a remarkable phone, with a good profit markup. Even though Microsoft had a mobile platform, it wasn't that good, and it certainly wasn't a complete solution.
Despite this Apple and Microsoft are still fighting the same war. Apple has taken to use some guerrilla tactics, which while that has helped it hasn't really brought them to equal market share.

Enter Google. "Don't be evil"
Google does not sell computers, or phones, or languages. Googles sells ads. It leases various platforms such as AndroidOS for phones, eventually ChromeOS for netbooks(and maybe more). Google offers applications....for free. Most of the code for these products are freely available. The quality of it's mail app, is in my opinion comparable to Outlook, and while I wouldn't say the other google doc apps are perfect, or are as feature rich as Microsoft's apps, I would say that they are a replacement, I wouldn't scoff at, and what's more, they are free. So I wanted to leave with one metaphor, if Apple and Microsoft are nation building empires, filled with castles and war machines, this is not what google is. Google is a form of ivy. And while ivy in general will not do any damage to a well mortared wall, it will however tear down, walls with imperfections, walls of castles that have been fighting each other for years.

I HAZ A NEW PAGE!!1! wereboobs.com

I decided to make a new page for all of my on going projects. It probably looks awful in your browser and resolution....but being that very few people are going to actually look at it, I'm not fixing it. However, it has links to some programming stuff and some other projects I am working on, that I haven't mentioned on the blog, so feel free to check it out....

wereboobs.com

This guy is a fucking joke

The worst part of this, is this guy was on Modern Marvels. What the fuck?

I guess I can't watch Modern Marvels anymore. le sigh.

The Samsung Moment An android phone

Engadget kind of slammed this phone, but I bought it anyways. They said:

On that level, we applaud Sprint for staying on the ball and recognizing that the keyboardless Hero wasn't enough to satisfy every last subscriber who'd like to get in on Android. Thing is, the Moment still feels like a first-generation device -- and for a platform that launched commercially a solid year ago, that's not really acceptable.

Engadget Review

I haven't really owned a smartphone since my sidekick 2(if you even consider that a smart phone), so maybe I'm not the guy to make judgement. But I love this phone. The pictures it takes are acceptable quality:



***To see full size photo click, then on the flickr page click all sizes, then click original***

The videos it takes are the same:


And the fact that I can listen to last.fm from and to work makes me happy. The only thing I think that feels first generation about this device, is that it's a little thick. But with an 800Mhz processor which is one of the faster chips in the android phone, and a full qwerty keyboard, the thickness doesn't bother me. I used an iPod touch as my PDA before I got my Moment, however the moment has completely replaced this device. The only real criticism I have of this device is that it came with android 1.5, rather than 1.6 or 2.0....What up with that? But really that hasn't affected my experience, all the apps I wanted are there...with the exception of a kindle app, which I REALLY enjoyed on my ipod touch. But there are no kindle apps on any android. But I have heard that they are making a kindle app for the mac...one day in the far future. So I guess I'll wait for that.

Having an imaginary relationship with a flickr person. (Stalking ?)

This tutorial/manual will go over the very basics of stalking someone on flickr. It's simple, and you can't get herpes from flickr. I have lots of reasons for doing what I do, but I figured it's more interesting, how I do what I do. There is only one strict rule to this "game", DO NOT MAKE CONTACT - YOU ARE DOING SOMETHING MOST PEOPLE CONSIDER CREEPY AND UNNACCEPTABLE. No matter how endearing you believe you are, you aren't. You're just a creep. It's best to be a happy alone creep. Or a broken depressed alone creep....without a restraining order.

Look through flickr for a subject, you might want to start on the Most Recent Photo page. It's best to choose someone with at least 1000 photos. Don't watch the videos at first, I'll talk about videos in closing. Look through every photo, and extract information. Sometimes it will be blatant, like a skyline you recognize revealing the place they are at. Sometimes things will be subtle, always look for writing in the background. Any sort of information that might reveal more about there personality, habits, hobbies, medications, and work(More about medications below). Pay attention to things like, what tv shows and books are in the background, or what programs are running on there computer, and if you get a picture of the dock or the task bar, study it for things you can figure out about them, like creative programs, like photoshop or Reason. Often times you will get pictures of food, a good indication of diet, let's you know if there vegan or on a macrobiotic diet or whatever. Are they messy, are they neat? Keep notes in a notepad/TextEdit.app/gedit file, if you have a bad memory.


Adding them as a contact on flickr, or favoriting a photo, is probably okay, just for your convience of finding their page...however, favoriting 500 of their photos is not ok. Dead give away you're a weirdo. You don't want to be on the radar, no matter how much you think you do.

If you divine there real name from the photos, or account info, use pipl.com to do a search this will reveal all there other online accounts. If you don't have there name use there flickr screen name to search on other social networks. Last.fm is my favorite because I can compare musical tastes. Some social networks, like facebook, etc are to revealing about the person to have an idealic imaginary relationship with them, so stay away from these.

The best place to look up what medications is always google, just don't go to the pharmaceutical companie's website about the drug, that's never interesting, you want a wikipedia site or medical site. By the way, if you just get a shot of the pill imprint code, the best place to look that up on is rxlist.com. Of course the best way to glean information from medications is just being familiar with drugs in general, and if you're reading this you probably have a pharmocopia your self, so that shouldn't be an issue.

If you see that they have a boyfriend, or girlfriend, just innundate that person with horrible qualities, and pay particular attention to shots, were they are together but unhappy.

FAQ:

Ok this guide was awesome...so awesome in fact now I'm madly passionately in love with this person, what the fuck did you do to me? FIX IT!

Ok so this is what the videos are for, video's are the fastest thing to help you find faults in someone. Like a horrible southern drawl you didn't expect. Go through the pictures one more time and look for things that just annoy the piss out of you. Like something they wrote that was incredibly unclever, or conji tattoos. Or look at that endearing picture of her crying, and think "That's just a crazy crying bitch, would hate to deal with her shit all the time". It helps

Is this healthy?
Probably not, no.

Are there advanced techniques not included in this manual/tutorial?
Yes, but it's probably unethical to post them on the intarwebs.

Why the focus on Medications?
Usually people who have thousands of pictures of themselves publically available online, have a screw loose. I mean look at me for fuck's sake.

Any practical applications for this "game" ?
I guess if one were so inclined, by building scenarios in your head, like seeing your subject at a fair and then implanting yourself at the fair and thinking about the fun you would have would be it's own reward. Ok not really, but something it would help with, is if you had to lie on the spot about a whole day or thing that happened. With the memory of pictures you can add a level of detail and complexity to your lies that make them very believable.

Why would I do that?
You're reading a post on a hacker culture blog, about having a fake relationship with someone who has a flickr account....I'm pretty sure fucked up shit happens to you a lot, and some of that probably involves lieing.

Why do you do this?
I have problems...lots and lots of problems, and it's pretty much a good thing I never meet these people.

You're a fucking psychopath.
That's not a question.

I see what you did there.....with my childhood

woot PhreakNIC, see you guys around 4:00

http://www.phreaknic.info/pn13/ woot Hometown Hacker con

Script for finding servers of a particular kind. IIS Apache or Otherwise.

For this script you need to have nmap installed. In the example script I made I am search for IIS servers but you can use it to search for any kind, just search for them in the format that nmap saves them as. So apache servers would change the variable to this:
my $webserver_type = qr!(Apache)!;

So this script saves all open servers to one file, all servers of a particular type to another file, and it saves all results to a file. You can cahnge where those files are by editing these variables:
my $hunt = "/root/serverhunt";
my $found = "/root/found";
my $open_file = "/root/open";

**Oh and it just appends to the file, so you can run it and it will never overwrite your progress, just add to it.**


This does scans randomly in increments of 100, you can change how many times you want it to loop by changing this variable:
my $howmanyloops = "1";
So if you wanted to do it twice you would put:
my $howmanyloops = "2";

Ok so before you get going with this you probably need to be aware of the legality of port scanning. Port scanning may attract unwanted attention. Talk to a lawyer before port scanning. I'm not liable for you using this script. Etc Etc....

use strict;
use warnings;

my $webserver_type = qr!(IIS)!;
my $open = qr!(open)!;
my $howmanyloops = "1";

my $hunt = "/root/serverhunt";
my $found = "/root/found";
my $open_file = "/root/open";

my $nmap_scan;
my @hunt_file;
my $line;
my $iter = 0;

while($iter < $howmanyloops){
 $nmap_scan = `nmap -sV -iR 100 -P0 -p 80 -oG $hunt`;
 open HUNT, $hunt;
 @hunt_file = ;
 close(HUNT);
 open FOUND, ">>", $found;
 open OPENFILE, ">>", $open_file;
 foreach(@hunt_file){
  $line = $_;
  if($line =~ $webserver_type){
   print FOUND $line; 
  }
  if($line =~ $open){
   print OPENFILE $line; 
  }
 }
 ++$iter;
}
close(FOUND);

Installing SuperCollider3 on Fedora 11

So I went to install supercollider on Fedora and I was using the standard instructions:
http://swiki.hfbk-hamburg.de:8888/MusicTechnology/479

But I had some extra problems and solutions I would like to share:
Most of the dependencies I already had installed:
See Here

So basically install all the dependencies from the normal instruction sheet tells you to with yum, plus to be on the same side do them all again with -devel tagged on the end.

I compiled fftw from scratch because when I did a search for it in yum it wasn't there(I had searched for fftw3f), and so I was looking for the solution to get it to show up in scons,(when you ran scons it said Checking for fftw3f... no ) and someone on OpenSuse said compiling with the --enable-float option helped them(./configure --enable-float). This didn't help me in Fedora, however I did another search and realized that it WAS in yum, so I installed it and the devel package:
yum -y install fftw
yum -y install fftw-devel

After you build with scons you can launch, supercollider with this:
/usr/local/bin/sclang

However I wanted to add the SwingOSC to mine, so I downloaded that tar:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/swingosc/
After you download that, in terminal navigate to the dir and run
sh install_linux_system.sh /usr/local
(The /usr/local is because of the way supercollider was installed)

Create a file called .sclang.sc in your user folder with these options:

GUI.swing;
SwingOSC.java = "/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.6.0-openjdk-1.6.0.0/jre/bin/java";
SwingOSC.program = ("/usr/bin/SwingOSC.jar").standardizePath;
SwingOSC.default.boot;

So that file would be, /home/user/.sclang.sc or /root/.sclang.sc, and these paths are Fedora specefic.

Installing all the shit you need on fedora core

So I just built a new fedora box...woot. But the problem is I set it all up by hand which is stupid. So I wrote a script in bash for everything I did, so next time I don't have to. First I did it with bash and then I did it with perl. Make sure, your root if you choose to run these scripts, they should be easy to edit to install what you want, becuase there pretty simple, in the perl one you just need to replace the stuff in @yum_installs. Also run yum update, before you run.(The bash one includes two tar balls, not in the perl one)


RUN AS ROOT
RUN YUM UPDATE FIRST


Bash:

#!/bin/bash
#run as root
#prep
cd /root
mkdir /root/tar
#Necessities for existence/development
yum -y install xchat
yum -y install screen
yum -y install cpan
yum -y install wget
yum -y install PCRE
yum -y install cmake
yum -y install gtk+
yum -y install pygame
yum -y install python-devel
yum -y install cmake
yum -y install cmake-devel
yum -y install liblo
yum -y install liblo-devel
yum -y install gcc-c++-devel
yum -y install cmake-gui
#robotics
yum -y install nxt_python
yum -y install pybluez
#Audio programs setup
yum -y install libsndfile
yum -y install libsndfile-devel
yum -y install qjackctl
yum -y install zynaddsubfx
yum -y install vkeybd
yum -y install qtjack-devel
yum -y install csound
yum -y install csound-devel
yum -y install portmidi
yum -y install rosegarden4
yum -y install jamin
yum -y install jack-audio-connection-kit-devel
yum -y install ctapi-cyberjack-devel
yum -y install zynjacku
yum -y install ardour
#installs of utilities through tar balls
#Yes, you can get nmap through yum, however Fyodor reccommends a source install
#and to be honest, it isn't that hard
cd /root/tar
wget http://nmap.org/dist/nmap-5.00.tar.bz2
tar -xvf nmap-5.00.tar.bz2 
cd /root/tar/nmap-5.00
./configure
make
make install
cd /root/tar
wget http://download.gna.org/algoscore/AlgoScore-081112.tar.bz2
tar -xvf AlgoScore-081112.tar.bz2
cd /root/tar/AlgoScore
./make_build

Perl version:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $yum;

my @yum_installs = qw(
 xchat screen cpan
 wget pcre-devel cmake
 gtk+ pygame python-devel
 cmake cmake-devel liblo
 liblo-devel gcc-c++-devel cmake-gui
 libsndfile libsndfile-devel qjackctl
 zynaddsubfx vkeybd qtjack-devel
 csound csound-devel portmidi
 rosegarden4 jamin jack-audio-connection-kit-devel
 ctapi-cyberjack-devel zynjacku ardour
 nxt_python pybluez
);

&array_cracker();

sub array_cracker(){
 foreach(@yum_installs){
   print $_;
   $yum = `yum -y install $_`;
   print $yum;
  }
}

Had to Change ABSPATH after moving my wordpress blog fuckinfiction

I choose to move my wordpress blog, fuckinfiction from, wereboobs.com/fuckinfiction to fuckinfiction.wereboobs.com. Now I choose to do this to try to clean up server a little bit, and that required a directory move as well, however after the move I couldn't get to the admin interface because the ABSPATH or Absolute Path, within the database was still pointing to the old directory. To fix it this required two database changes. The recommendation that I read said to go in with phpMyAdmin, and to make the changes, I however had no interest in installing that on my server, so I could have done it by hand, However, I'm typically prone to error when doing that kind of stuff. So I did it with and app called Sequel Pro, which was really spiffy. It created the SSH port forwarding so I didn't have to.

Ok so if you need to do this, you should navigate to your wordpress database
Navigate to wp_options
change siteurl (row 1)
and home (row 39)
to your fqdn
for me that is http://fuckinfiction.wereboobs.com

Some Bad photography of mine, and my nxt stuff

I took a couple shots of my NXT face I made. Video with functionality soon.

Blog News

The blog has been on a bit of a slow streak, But I should have some more over the robot stuff soon and I am reading some interesting security books right now as well, so some of that may leech there way here as well. There is a local( Nashville ) hacker con ( PhreakNIC ) at the end of October I will most likely go to, however, Electric Six is playing the 31st, and there is no way I am missing that. You should check and see if you have local hacker cons, if you're not in the Nashville area, there are probably more than you think. Check out the new update on wereboobs fuckin fiction ( http://wereboobs.com/fuckinfiction ), that would be my fiction blog for those of you uninitiated.
In other news:

Interesting Reboot Remix videos:
http://cyjon.net/videos.php

Hipster Please! has a very interesting review of Schaffer the Dark Lord's new album.

Singularity Summit: a brief review

Singularity Summit: a brief review

This is a review by the guy that does Dresden Codak, of the Singularity Summit. This review is exactly what I wanted to know about the summit. I suggest you read it if you have any interest in the Singularity, or Artificial Intelligence.