Johnath’s Book Guide 2007

BooksAlthough I can enter droughts that last for months at a time, I am, in general, a reader. At the end of 2006 I checked my PalmPilot’s list of books read in 2006 and it turned out there were 25. This is not a particularly impressive number, but it is clearly fodder for a blog post of some kind. I thought about writing a separate post for each, basically a book review a week or so — I could stretch the content until June that way.

Problem is, I don’t really care about stretching content, and that sounds like a lot of work. Besides, I suspect that some of those reviews would be pretty thin since the books either left no mark, or left a mark which has faded over the intervening months. So instead I’ve done the potentially more useful thing and just compiled them into a coarsely ranked list, because what would the internet be without lists?

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Tales of Comeuppance

Crying BabyOne of my cognitive science profs used to have a bit of a soft spot for evolutionary psychology and it is from him that I developed my love of “cheater detection.” If you’re an evolutionary psychologist, see, a lot of the righteous indignation you see from your fellow simians out there in the world is traceable quite directly to a part of our psyche which is tweaked powerfully by the feeling that someone is cheating – acquiring benefit without paying expected costs. It really gets us riled up, on a very primitive level.

It makes sense, of course. Cheaters in a social species will act in ways (eating other people’s food, making sweet sweet love to other people’s lady friends, etc) that allow them to acquire huge positional benefits within the group unless there are powerful repercussions like ostracism or worse.

So lo and behold, here we are with all this evolution behind us and wouldn’t you know it, our brains are wired such that someone jumping the queue at Walmart or trying to pass a traffic jam on the shoulder is taking their life in their hands. It is rarely the case that I am pro-homicide but in the case of those inveterate jack-offs that pull into the lane which they know is ending right up ahead, and which will only gain them 3 car lengths, but will slow everyone down when they force themselves back in, I am more than a little inclined to make case-by-case exceptions.

Thus, as a public service, in this time of charity and co-opted pagan solstice rituals, I have put together a list of three of my favourite recent stories of cheater-busting. These stories are cheater-detection catharsis. You can go ahead and pump your fist at the end and say “Yes!” under your breath. I won’t tell.

1. What’s Noka Worth? Noka Chocolate is a hyper-elite brand of chocolate which gets packaged into gift baskets at the Emmys and so forth. Rarest of the rare cacao, hyper pure, no additives, blah blah blah. I will not be the one to impeach a company that focuses on quality for being elitist – quality is a legitimate thing after which to strive, and a legitimate thing for which to charge a premium. But at $2000/lb, you should be able to demonstrate some actual value add.

2. The Tale of Lyger, Jericho, and Republican Congressional Aide Todd Shriber. Todd decided to hire a “hacker” to change his GPA at Texas Christian University. Too bad he ended up emailing a couple of the guys running attrition.org which, like most sites which chronicle network security news, are used to being solicited by idiots, and tend to have some fun along the way. After you read the blog post, you can read the actual emails here (or, since attrition is under almost constant attack by one party or another, the cached version).

3. Reverse 419 Artwork Scam. Okay, I confess this isn’t as recent as the other two, but I have a lot of love for 419eater.com. These guys respond to the 419 scam emails from Nigeria and elsewhere and, by acting as interested parties, get the scammers to perform in various silly ways. Usually it’s restricted to requests for religious conversion or even getting the scammer to send some money themselves but this is my absolute favourite. I won’t spoil it or anything, but if you only read one, read this one.

Car Quips

Car QuipI have always wanted an LCD Panel for my rear window in the car. It always seemed like it would be exceedingly handy to have the ability to fire off one of several pre-canned messages or, if I had a passenger, have some kind of keyboard where they could provide context-appropriate messaging for the cars around me. “Your turn signal is on.” “Your high beams are blinding me.” “That is a very big SUV, clearly you suck.” And so forth.

LCDs are still a good idea, but one can accomplish the same goals in a cheaper, lower maintenance, and much more analog way. What I have made instead is a coil-bound flip book with 14 standard messages I might find myself needing, plus three laminated blank pages at the end on which I can add messages with dry-erase markers. The whole thing is designed to fit in my glove compartment, and has forward and mirror-image versions of each message on facing pages so that cars in front of you can read it through their rear view mirror. Obviously the messages have to be kept short to maximize font size, but other than that, the sky’s the limit. In the hopes that someone other than I can see the value in such a book, I present:

Building your own Car Quips booklet
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Green Threads

Yesterday I got a package from Dr. Dobb’s Journal with three copies of the January edition, confirming that not only was my latest article in print, but it was a front page feature, huzzah! The article itself can be found online here. My sister-in-law Barb said that it sounded “Drier than toast” so don’t say I didn’t warn you, but I do manage to mention my wife and marijuana grow ops in the first sentence, so really, you knew it had to go downhill from there.

The rest of this post will be dedicated to reprinting an email exchange I just had with a DDJ reader in the States, in anticipation of the fact that he might not be the only person to ask his particular question. Future respondents can thus be directed here, saving the tubes literal hojillions of electrons. [Editor’s note: Firefox 2’s sexy new spellcheck doesn’t like the word hojillions and recommends, instead, “gazillions.” I love you Firefox. Pat, pat.]

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Hacking the Cisco 79xx Series

Cisco 7960GThe phones where I work are fun. When we moved to the new digs back in 2001 (September 11th, actually) we were probably some of the first kids on the block to have a whole building running on Cisco 7960s – VoIP phones. Most of the time these look like normal phones, but the plug at the back is an RJ-45, not an RJ-11 which means there’s all kinds of fun available for people who like to play.

First of all, if you have one of these phones, make sure these problems have been fixed. I put that notice out in conjunction with Cisco back in 2002 and any reasonable admin should have pushed out the necessary firmware updates. But hey, if your phone system still allows one person to shut down arbitrary phones or potentially the entire phone system – neat.

After that notice went out I stopped playing with the phones quite as actively, but there are several other cell-phone-like things you can do if you’re lucky enough to have one of these on your desk.

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Spiritus Frumenti

eBay and I have a relationship that is more flirtation than passion. Of course I know how sexy it can be. Of course I want to get to know it better. But eBay is an expensive mistress, so my feedback is a withered little 5, because I rarely actually buy the things there that I covet.

I am, however, so thoroughly chuffed with a recent purchase there that I must share. Thanks to the kind auspices of ginger.1 I am the proud owner of this:

Prescription (small)

It’s a prescription from December of 1924. A very special prescription, printed on a very special prescription pad issued by the U.S. Treasury department. It’s a prescription for Spiritus Frumenti, filled in Providence, RI. This is exciting for me, because 1924 is right in the middle of prohibition and Spiritus Frumenti, as the Latin geeks have no doubt already ascertained, is whiskey.

I have always loved old paper, but I am particularly fond of old paper which reflects old ways of thinking, and reminds me that people have always been crazy. This one is particularly great because it also reminds me that people have always been wily about wrangling their way around government prohibitions of things that are fun. And as you all know, I’m a real fan of people.

Moving in progress?

So I have am migrating this blog to dreamhost, a really quite impressive web hosting outfit. The blog has, more than once in the past, generated enough traffic to destroy our personal internet access, so it seemed to make sense to offload it. The move went extremely smoothly though – worryingly so. This post is basically just here to confirm in my mind that everything is operational. Please drop me a comment if you spot this post so that I am reassured that people are finding it in its new home.

If it really was that easy, dreamhost wins even more points and I shall be filled with an emotion not entirely unlike glee. I invite you to join in.

The Aeroplan Game: An ethnography

AeroplanSteph’s sister Jody says my posts are boring. I choose to interpret this to mean that my posts are fascinating, but on topics which do not readily proclaim their relevance to her life. In any event, today’s will be no exception, because I’m going to be talking about frequent flyer miles; but also about voyeurism, so there’s some excitement for you.

Aeroplan, and programs like it, are a real challenge for geeks. On the one hand, as a demographic with higher-than-average concern for issues of digital surveillance and privacy, loyalty programs like Aeroplan which allow a company to profile your purchases and predict which brand of condom you will enjoy are viewed as being somewhat intrusive. On the other hand, Aeroplan miles bear a disturbing resemblance to points, and games with points, where intelligence can be applied to earn more points, well brother, that might well be called our oeuvre.
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Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge

A Google search reveals that this book isn’t nearly as well known as I would have thought (only 16,000 hits), and Amy hadn’t heard of it either so it must needs be posted here. Don’t ever say that my cognitive science degree never brought you any joy.

So I guess it was in one of my philosophy classes – ontology maybe, or philosophy of mind – that I first heard about it, but in a 4 year cog sci degree you can’t avoid hearing about this book half a dozen times. It comes up virtually any time you get into a conversation about classifications, taxonomies or crazy people.

The book, Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, is an extremely old Chinese encyclopedia, or so the legend goes, and was translated by a guy named Franz Kuhn (no, not the Structure of Scientific Revolutions guy, that’s Thomas). It might have been lost to antiquarian irrelevancy if it were not for one crucial section which set out the categories of animals in the world. Keep in mind, this is centuries if not millennia before the whole Linnean classification was developed (Kingdom Phylum Class Order Family Genus Species – my mnemonic was Kings Play Chess On Fine Green Sod – what was yours?) and yet it is absolutely enrapturing. How, you ask, does an animal classification system rise to the level of rapture? The 13 categories it outlined are as follows:

(a) those that belong to the Emperor,
(b) embalmed ones,
(c) those that are trained,
(d) suckling pigs,
(e) mermaids,
(f) fabulous ones,
(g) stray dogs,
(h) those that are included in this classification,
(i) those that tremble as if they were mad,
(j) innumerable ones,
(k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush,
(l) others,
(m) those that have just broken a flower vase,
(n) those that resemble flies from a distance.

Tell me that isn’t beautiful. I absolutely adore that list, and revisit it because its crazy randomness breaks you out of any structure you might be building up around yourself. And yet, it isn’t random, quite. There’s an almost deliberate lack of overlap, a perverse balance.

Or maybe not – in any event I had always loved the list and had to share for those who might not yet have encountered it.

PS – It goes without saying, of course, that lo these thousands of years later, with the advent of the internet, Web 2.0, folksonomies, and tagging, that we have come full circle and can now have a cat which is classified, at once, as fabulous, embalmed, and drawnWithVeryFineCamelHairBrush.