Teia

Here’s something to tickle your eyes.

Bread and water can so easily be toast and tea.

Recruiting

It’s a really, really good idea to include something ‘personal’ (more personal than a ‘personal message’) when you’re adding someone as a friend on Facebook or anywhere else – use a nickname, whatever – as long as it’s more informative than “Thought you might find this interesting..”

It works around the possibility of invite fraud, gives us incentive to think about it longer before we hit ignore/delete, and lets us know when you aren’t inviting because xx application forced you to. Sounds sane?

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Trident

Let’s have a brief and concise thought experiment today, since we’re entering into a week of bestowing ribbons and then farewells.

I’m sure everyone is familiar with the conflicts resent in stories involving false confessions – you should be able to identify some.

In a nutshell, you’re accused of something, you insist on your innocence, and of course the prosecutor(s) insist that you committed a certain heinous crime or another. You’re faced with two choices, like those pick-your-own-storyline books – sacrifice your integrity, pride, and perhaps face, make a false confession and be “spared”, or stick to your position and sweat (and bleed) it out.

Which way would you go, if the whole thing is condensed into less than a quarter of an hour? This question has been asked time after time, and the answer is inevitably “It depends.”

Think of what you’d do, just in case you fall into the tiger-hole as well. Me? I sold my soul.

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Communications

I just realised that ‘infocomm’ translates very neatly to ‘资讯’.

The new generation of fire escape route diagrams are appearing in the weirdest locations. At least this time they have (visible) magic pen/highlighter markings on them.

I’m getting a caught-in-the-headlights feeling recently about which way to click once I hit the bottom of a blog’s front page. Some point left, some point right, and then some don’t have arrows. How very interesting. Which way is ‘right’?

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Surveys

I’m trying out this dNeero ’social surveys’ thing, ping me for a invite for some fun. It hasn’t gone viral yet, probably because it’s new (?) and the interface is really, really wonky.

Disclosure: I might get paid if you click on these links.

Update: links fixed.

Reap

Firewire/i.Link is really useful for live capture of DV video and long data transfers. There’s this interesting new revision, IEEE 1394c-2007, that came out a couple of months back – it uses Cat 5(e) cabling with the same connectors, and looks like it can do both ethernet and firewire over that. You already can do IP over firewire. How long more until something comes out that takes advantage of it?

Textures

Having watched The Magic Flute in ‘HD’ and standard trailer format, there’s a huge difference in quality and detail. Of course, if you were at the actual performance, you would probably have seen something closer to the trailer quality..

After spending one entire day on Google Translate, it seems that people have reverse engineered the RC-S320 reader enough to make it spit out some data from your FeliCa-based card. Only reads without encryption is supported via libpasori or pasoriv (encrypted communication involves PKI), and you still need quite a few pieces of information (service/partition code, etc) to make it work. Most of the work that has been completed in Japan revolves around the Suica, PASMO, nanaco and Edy cards – just take a look at SaPoRi. They’ve managed to decipher station codes and balance info to get what you’d see on EZonline via that fudgy Java applet, into nice Mac and Windows apps. wiki.osdev.info has some reverse engineered protocol info. Some part of it is based on the standard JIS X6319-4, while the rest is Sony proprietary stuff.

There’s quite a bit of documentation between ntt docomo and sony japan on providing i-mode services that are somehow related to felica tech – all available on request but that’s all in Japanese. The official SDK from Sony is priced in the hundreds of thousands of yen, and not available to individuals.

Having confirmed that the date spit out by lpdump is in the correct year, a newly purchased adult ezlink card claims to be ‘manufactured’ in 2001, whereas student concession passes are towards the end of the year that it was issued. Perhaps this date is actually the date that the card was programmed by ezlink/transitlink.

Then, the other (good) thing is, with some magic in pasoriv the IDm can be retrieved. The bad news is, it doesn’t correspond with the output from lp[dump|test] at all. Still, as long as it’s unique, it’s a form of weak, quick authentication, sufficient for some purposes. Now, to find a way to mod an existing key-operated door lock into being electronically operated as well..

Tinkle

Today, I dreamt that my piano was so out of tune two keys sounded exactly alike.