Tophography

Here at UTOSC (the Utah Open Source Conference), I’ve found some very reliable evidence for which editor is better. After examining the sticker table, I found that the Vim stickers completely disappeared, while there are still a large number of Emacs stickers. I’m sure you all agree that this can finally end the debate.

I’ve always heard that the hot springs around Utah Valley are frequented by naked hippies. Fortunately, this is wasn’t the case last night. I do have a soft spot in my heart especially set apart for hippies, but only for those hippies who are properly dressed. Preferably in some stylish tie-dye apparel.

But getting on to the point. We had a fun little jaunt down to Spanish Fork on Friday night. There was a bit of concern, initially, about whether or not the mountain was on fire, but I suppose that we lucked out. We also benefited from the experience of Ms. Vernon, who had previously been to the hot springs before. It’s always nice to be looking for something with somebody who has a good idea of how to find it. This contrasts somewhat with the time I went to search for Nutty Putty caves, and drove around for a couple of hours looking for it, before we finally gave up and went home.

The hike in was easy, though it did take us around an hour. I’m sure that those in a hurry could easily do it in half the time. We only saw two or three other groups at the hot springs when we got there. We had passed a few groups on the trail that were heading out. The first spot we looked at was actually a bit too hot for our liking, so we went downstream a bit, and found a nice little pool that was goldilocks-ion perfection. We discovered a rather slimy moss on some of the rocks under the water that we affectionately named, “Dragon Snot.” The discovery of which, being the highlight of the trip (for me, anyway).

For those interested in the springs, here’s a link to a google map that I think shows the correct trail. Just watch out for those hippies. I’ve heard too many rumors to completely disregard.

My friend Victoria went to a 3-year-old’s birthday party over the weekend, and had decided that lucky birthday-girl needed a Hello Kitty cake in order to properly celebrate. I didn’t think it was going to be a big deal, but I didn’t think it was going to be that fun either. She left Friday night, so we started working on it around 1:00p on Friday. Earlier that week, I had baked a cake in a cookie-sheet to see how it would come out. Some of you may be thinking, “Duh. What did you think it was going to do?” But I had never seen it done, or heard of it being done before. It came out looking fine, even though I forgot the oil, so I decided that cookie-sheet cakes would work.

Anyway, I’ll hopefully put up some sort of tutorial on how it all played out, and some suggestions I have for an even smoother operation, but for now, I’ll just present you with the finished product. By the way, it turned out to be a whole lotta fun, even though it took about 6 hours.

I arrived at the theater without having eaten anything since my breakfast in Mona, which I suppose could account for part of my disappointment in the show. BYU’s music department has a number of excellent vocal performers, which shows in the quality of the cast’s singing. Unfortunately, this production was filled with great vocalists with little talent for acting, a poor director, a poor choreographer, a poor lighting-designer, and a poor sound-engineer. I wish that the theater department would be more involved with the Spring Operas. Somehow, they did a good job with Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado, but this production had serious problems.

The ensemble sounded marvelous for an ensemble. Unfortunately, I’m usually only aware of the quality of the singing when it is especially good or especially bad. My mind is usually tuned more to acting. Most of the female characters had a look of maniacal glee while they were on stage, and half of the men appeared to be concentrating on blocking and lyrics, seemingly having forgotten that they had characters to portray.

When the two leads, Marco and Giuseppe, first appeared, I was pleased. Marco had performed very well as Frederic in “Pirates of Penzance”, and did another outstanding job in this production.  As he was singing “Take a pair of sparkling eyes”, I remembered why I loved the theatre, and was moved to applaud as loud as I could.  At first, I thought that Giuseppe was appropriately comical, and exuded a good amount of energy. Unfortunately, he continued to overdo it, and became rather annoying as the show continued. I think I could have enjoyed it if the director had reigned him in a little, and helped him find that happy place between “past the footlights” and “over the top”.

The Duke and Duchess performed well, in spite of bad direction. The daughter and Luiz the drummer were even better. Luiz did a wonderful job of finding the right level of comedy for his character, and kept it consistent. Something I don’t think I would have noticed had I not been forced to compare him to his cast mates.

And now for the biggest disappointment of the evening, the Grand Inquisitor, Don Alhambra. His character is meant to be authoritative, but instead, he bumbled about the stage, stuttering his words in a voice that made him sound as though he had recently come down with a bad cold. I believe this was an attempt to make himself sound snobbish. I cringed ever time he appeared on stage. The director should have quashed this character from day one, and helped the poor player find some other way of portraying the part. In spite of his dismal failure in acting the part, he sang it very well. Unfortunately, one of his songs (“There lived a king, as I’ve been told”) was cut from the performance.

Once again, as happens to me quite a bit in Utah, I found myself sitting down while the rest of the audience rose for a standing ovation.  Hasn’t anybody seen The Incredibles?  Don’t they understand that if everybody is super, then nobody is?  Or to take a line from the show that we all had just watched, “When every one is somebody, then no one’s anybody!”  A standing ovation used to mean something.  Now I sit through them almost every time I attend the theater.  At times, I have been moved to stand during a curtain call, or to briefly stand to appreciate a particular actor, but I hold those moments for occasions when I am truly impressed.  To paraphrase President Kimball, “What do [standing ovations] mean when given out like pretzels and robbed of [value]?

Despite these issues and other technical shortcomings, I am still happy that I was able to attend the show. BYU has some wonderful talent in the area of vocal performance.  I only wish that they would have presented the material in a simple concert setting, and saved me the pain of sitting through the full theatrical performance.

Saturday was unusually busy for me. Technically, I guess it began with a few last games of mafia, around the campfire, then going to sleep under the beautiful stars (a new moon). I’m afraid that I am simply no longer able to have a good night’s sleep while camping. I finally got up around 7:00 with a sore back. Luckily, there was plenty of food to cheer me up.

A group of about 12 of us chose to go camping in Mona because of a certain rope swing that we had heard about. The rumors turned out to be true (Google Map). Other than the rope swing and the pleasant pond, one of the niceties of the campsite was that there was no fee.

After breakfast and another few hours at the rope swing, we packed up and went back to Provo. My friends thought I was a bit ridiculous for hopping into Carriage Cove’s boiling-hot hot-tub in the middle of the day, but I thought it might do some good to my back. The rest of the afternoon was filled with a little shopping and studying Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Gondoliers” in preparation for the evening performance that I planned to attend. Part of my shopping trip included buying a copy of The Format’s CD, “Dog Problems”. I’ve had it on my Shuffle for a while, and it’s definitely good stuff. I also bought some nice bratwurst for the PLUG’s Annual Summer BBQ.

During the two hours prior to the BBQ, I listened to the entire soundtack of “The Gondoliers”, and followed along in a copy of the libretto. I’ve found that I enjoy theatre much more when I’m familiar with the show, especially when it comes to witty writing like that of Gilbert.

The BBQ started at 6:00, and the show started at 7:30, so I figured that I should show up for the first hour, so that I’d be able to enjoy my bratwurst with a few others that didn’t mind being unfashionably early. Unfortunately, despite the advertisement of a 5:30 call for those setting-up, the guy with charcoal didn’t show up until a little after 7:30. He evidently was involved with some sort of medical situation, but he apparently didn’t make any arrangements for anybody to take over his duties. There was another person that happened to have a bag of charcoal, but it still wasn’t ready for cooking when I had to leave at 7:00. Quite the let-down.

I suppose that I should give my operetta critique its own posting…

Books, books, and more books. My excuse for never having a clean bedroom is that I just have too much stuff, and not enough places to hide it all. The chief ingredient to my permanent mess is a horde of books. When I was switching apartments, I was given an extra bookcase by one of my former roommates, which almost gave me enough room store all my books, with the paperbacks stored two-deep on two shelves. Unfortunately, the bookcase itself was a piece of junk, and is now even more so.

Now I guess I’ll have to find a new bookcase for my ridiculous collection. I say ridiculous because I don’t really have a good reason to keep most of my books around. I almost never read a book twice, and I don’t plan on ever reading some of my books. I don’t know anybody else that collects old UNIX manuals. The only reason that I actually buy books is so that I can get somebody else to read them too. I also like the fact that I don’t have to worry about returning books to anybody.

Anyway, now I have to clean up the mess, and find some corner to temporarily store my library. If you’re ever looking for a good book to read, stop on by, and I’ll give you something. If you don’t live nearby, email me for recommendations. I’m full of strong opinions.

Having a cellphone has been intersting in various ways.  One of the things that I find entertaining is getting phone calls for a wrong number.  I guess I like it because it usually means I get to practice speaking Spanish (I have an 831 area code, look up the demographics for Salinas).  Even if I just say “Creo que tienes el numero equivocado,” and they hang up, I still get a kick out of it.  I think I’ve gotten about 5 or 6 mistaken callers, and all but one was speaking Spanish when I said, “Hello.”

I’ve also gotten a few calls from some company in Florida.  The first two times, I just told them that they had the wrong number, and just hung up.  This time, the lady on the other line apparently wanted to talk to me even though I couldn’t understand her well.  She asked if I could understand her if she spoke slower.  I thought, why not practice my spanish a little today?  So, she asked what my name was, and I told her, “Topher.”  She needed me to spell that one out for her.  Then she asked about my age, height, weight, whether I worked indoors or outdoors, and about my general state of health.  It eventually got to the point where I was asked if I was interested in sexually appealling pheremones, muscle enhancing supplements, or vitamins to help my poor, over-worked brain.  It was then when I said that I wasn’t interested in anything like that, and that all my health problems could be solved with more sleep, more food, and more exercise.  I thanked her for helping me to practice my Spanish, and said goodbye.

Okay, just one more post before I go to bed. Last Saturday I presented some non-research at my college’s annual research conference. I spoke about a project that I’ve been working on in the Internet Security Research Lab at Brigham Young University. (Am I just link-happy or what?) My work started with the idea that web login forms (like the one on BYU’s homepage) that are sent over an insecure connection can be altered using a man-in-the-middle attack, and instruct a browser to send a username and password directly to the attacker. I used ARP-spoofing to gain control over another machine’s network traffice, then I used a program that I wrote to watch for the user to request a certain web page, sent them back an altered form, and then waited for the user to send back their username and password.

It was a really fun project to work on. Hooray for C! I still have one question though. Why do machines process ARP replies that that didn’t request? It doesn’t seem like it would be difficult to keep track of requests, and only process matching replies. Anyway, I’m still looking into that, so hopefully I’ll find the answer and make another post. But I forgot what this post was supposed to be about. My PowerPoint slides and the accompanying script that is almost accurate as to what I said in my talk, and when I clicked the remote for the slide to change. My talk was also judged. My judge remarked that black on blue does not good contrast make (yes, I agree), but on a positive note, he was impressed with the manner in which I presented while the photographer was running around me snapping pictures.

Alright. I’m going to bed now.

I happened to be browsing through the ivtv driver source last night, trying to find out how closed captioning gets recorded. Anyway, I came across an operator that I had never seen before. The ellipses! It was something like this:

    switch (val)
    {
        case 0 ... 10 :
            printf("Between 0 and 10.n");
            break;
        case 11 ... 50 :
            printf("Somewhere from 11 to 50.n");
            break;
        case 51 ... 99999 :
            printf("Really big.n");
            break;
    }

Isn’t that just crazy? Apparently, it’s an extension that gcc supports. I found a nice Red Hat manual that has some great stuff on gcc. I never would have found it without the assistance of Lord Byron. I had to ask the PLUG mailing list about it because I couldn’t find anything about it with Google, because I was searching for “C ellipses operator.” Lord Byron told me that it was known as a “case range.” It’s amazing what using correct search terms can do for you.

Anyway, I recall reading somewhere that you should never blog while drunk. This isn’t a problem for me since I don’t drink, but I’ve been told that lack of sleep can have a similar effects on a person, so I’m going to put my laptop down and go to sleep now.

[Disclaimer] This post took me about 2 weeks to write. I started it two weeks ago, then realized that my version of WordPress was _horrible_ at formatting code. It was ignoring my <pre> tags! I decided to upgrade WordPress before I drove myself insane trying to fight against WordPress, but then I got distracted, and never got around to doing the upgrade until now.

I gave my first (and probably last) presentation to the BYU Unix Users Group tonight. I’m finally getting over whatever has made me sick (flu or something), so I was almost completely lucid. I started talking about hash functions, symmetric key encryption, and public-key encryption. I then talked about how those ideas are used in encrypted email, and certifcates. I then gave a very lame explanation of SSL/TLS. After that, we discussed some different attacks, and common security mistakes that people make. Overall, I think it was a good hour-long presentation.

Here’s the slides:
PDF Slides