SPAM Me! Well actually, spam this guy:

Can I have some SPAM, please...?
We are currently testing a piece of software and need a fair amount of SPAM. Really. I mean it.

I you want to help, please send all your SPAM to .

If you can, please copy this request on your blog. Thank you.

(via Tech Observer)

RFID Sushi I'm busy catching up with all the blogs I've neglected reading over the week.

I came across a post about calculating your tab the RFID way. It turns out that the sushi / sashimi plates have the RFID tag attached so that the staff can just scan the stack of plates to tally up the total.

I think this is pretty cool. However, I think it would work better if the RFID tag was actually in the sushi itself. That way you just scan the person's stomach as they're leaving the store. This way you can prevent some dirty gaijin sitting next to you from slipping in plates into your stack.

Come to think of it, it's quite amazing that Japan has been able to live without this technology for so long. How did they ever do business back in the good, old bubble days?

Free Culture Lawrence Lessig's new book, Free Culture, is now available on the web under a Creative Commons license no less. You better get your copy while the downloads are still hot.

Scrumptious wallpaper Semafore Calendars gives you one amazing background every month. It's time to drop a couple of these into Gush.

(via HotLinks)

What's a pederast Walter? Ohio motorists convicted of DUI's are now being issued 'scarlet letter' license plates, so that other drivers can identify them on the road. This is a great idea, punishment based on humility is much more fitting than jail time in many instances. Reminds me of when the Jesus had to go door to door, telling his neighborhood he was a pedofile, in the Big Lebowski. If you don't understand the title of this post, go see that movie right now! (via boing boing)

Panorama Stitching Acts of Volition doesn't just have a cool radio broadcast, they have some wonderful panoramic shots as well, and a link to the software they used, Panorama Factory. I decided to give it a try instead of trying to stitch some shots we took earlier myself. And here is the result: The software is amazing! I just had to specify which images to stitch, my camera type, and some correction settings, and 10 seconds later, a seamless panorama. The results would have been better if I wasn't so haphazard when taking the individual shots, but still quite impressive and well worth the $60.

Update: This should give you a better idea of how well this software works. The samples below are my attempt at a stitch of 2entwine headquarters in Photoshop vs Panorama Factory.

Bad Signs We were looking for a good photo of the Capital Building and the near by area, and this was the best we could do. Right by RISD. Wes had a neck cramp and could only take pictures looking straight up. Right next to the center of Brown University we found some very New England like buildings. What are the odds of that happening? Rusty brown color was everywhere we looked today. So were the Fallout Shelters in downtown Providence.

Saturday morning music The WinAMP playlist is usually restricted to Hard Rock or Punk music, but this morning I had a chance to listen to Acts of Volition Radio. The newly released Session Eight is exactly what I needed to get me through the boring compiling of Subversion and all of its dependencies this morning. Session Eight features a musician by the name of Gene Eugene. It's worth a listen. I'm glad someone is out there putting decent broadcasts together.

My knees I found the Knee Defender website via HotLinks. If it works as advertised, then that's exactly what I need. This is indispensable for the 13 hour flights to Tokyo. I love the Oliver Wendell Holmes quote:

The right to recline my seats ends where the other man's knee begins.

Amen to that.

Providence in March Continued. More snow here in Providence. Thankfully, I didn't have to shovel this time around. This poor plant has taken a big beating this winter. I'm sure I can safely speak for the plant by saying that we want no more snow!

Where would you rather be? Tokyo or Providence? While I'm hunting for nice photos in Providence and New York, Andy seems unable to miss wherever he goes. Andy's ducks at the Korakuen Garden look a lot happier than my ducks in NYC. Go figure.

Speak to the Blog Mark Cuban's blog, Blog Maverick, is only a couple of days old, but already very entertaining. I think the man has way too much money (I'm envious), but too his credit he is pushing around the media so you've got to like him.

By the way Mark, if you're reading this, how about one of those nice digital movie theaters here in Providence, RI?

Ten most overpaid jobs in the U.S. I guess this is old news, but maybe you're someone lucky enough to be on this list of most overpaid jobs in the States.. Interestingly, software basement dweller isn't one of them.

Providence in March

Long Shadows Some bleak, wintry NY pictures taken late February. A little California sunshine finds its way into the last picture.

Thesaurus! So that's what you call it. Typgraphica points to a pretty cool desktop/online Visual Thesaurus (Launch online version). We really could have used this a couple of months back when we came up with names for our product.

Flash games Damn JWZ for pointing to this wonderfully time consuming and frustrating game called Bubbles. Damn my fingers for being too darn slow to get even a respectable score in this typing game. These games are just another way that Flash taunts us on a daily basis.

(via HotLinks)

Color Blindness Victor Ng, a Python blogger, is apparently very color blind. To be honest, I never knew. His website supposedly had some really nice bright white and purple colors, but I never noticed it.

Am I color blind as well? Not exactly. Thankfully, my RSS reader allows me to control the format and style of all the content that comes in. It makes me completely immune to whatever strange layout or color scheme some blogger found interesting that week. However, unlike Scoble, I do appreciate nicely designed websites.

Although my RSS reader can insulate me from strange, high contrasting colors, it can't shelter me from the occasional long, boring rant.

May it please the court... No, it may not! I have a bit of junk mail news of my own. I recently registered for BloggerCon and next thing you know, the Williams Law Firm takes it upon themselves to spam the registrant list with some crap about their weblog. I wonder what side of the spam debate these guys are on. Thankfully, thunderbird automatically filtered their junk. Don't ask why I was rummaging through my junk mail, weird I know.

VMWare The fine folks at VMware spammed me today with the news of their VMWare GSX Server 3 release. I'm too poor to afford this beast, but to others with deeper pocket books, GSX server has the following to offer:

• 3.6GB memory per VM to support larger server applications
• Teamed network adapter support, SCSI backup devices for enterprise-class hardware
• 10-20% improvement in disk and networking performance Seamless migration to datacenter-class virtualization
• Migrate virtual machines from GSX Server to datacenter-class VMware ESX Server Cross-platform server consolidation
• VMware GSX Server 3 supports the latest Windows, Linux, and NetWare OSes giving you the flexibility to choose your platform to match business needs
• Runs on a wider variety of Windows and Linux OSes than any server virtualization product on the market

It's hard these days to live without some sort of VMware installation for development and testing.

As Mendel Rosenblum likes to say, "consider yourself notified."

(via my junk folder)

It's not your CD Just say no to circumventing copy protection shows you how to avoid accidentally doing something to your CDs that could land you in trouble with the law.

By the way, I would fully support an amendment to either the DMCA or the Constitution that would make listening to Celine Dion's music illegal.

Flash7 meets Linux Mike Chambers just announced that beta testing for the Flash7 Player for linux is starting soon, with a public release not too far behind. First Macromedia announced plans to make the Flash IDE work comfortably with Wine, and now this, I must say, I'm quite pleased.

Worse is better There's an article by Joe Hildebrand, Jabber.com's chief architect, at NetworkWorldFusion about the nature of XMPP. The paragraph that really stood out for me was:

XMPP serves as a universal transport layer for XML structured data. It embeds presence and context sensitivity into that data, which lets the data be routed efficiently to the most appropriate resource.

This made me think again about XMPP competing with other XML messaging middleware. There are lots of big players out there with very featureful and robust products, and of course the current XMPP implementations aren't exactly tailored for same types of tasks. However, XMPP's XML DNA and its seamless distributed nature are too compelling, and will eventually tip the scales in XMPP's favor if they haven't already.

If you don't believe me, take a look at what Sam Ruby is trying to accomplish using XMPP for comment authentication. This is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of non-IM related functionality that XMPP can provide.

In this case, worse is way better.

(via Jabber.org)

Team 23 Well, I never saw this coming, but apparently the Michael Jordan brand now extends to Superbike racing. Michael Jordan is now sponsoring Montez Stewart in the AMA Superbike Championship. Perhaps now I can persaude myself to spend my last bit of saved cash on a bike with full Jordan-label leathers.

Bad track record Anyone who has been reading this blog (and we know you're few and far between), knows how random the category of posts can be. So since we've added Google ads to the top of Going Nowhere, it's been interesting to watch what gets selected. Initially it was just other Jabber and blogging related topics because were busy prattling about Gush and other Jabber stuff at the time. However, Wes' "What it really takes to give more than 100%" and my post about Rhode Island threw some kinks into Google's ad oracle. For a while there were ads about hotels in Rhode Island, and now we have this:

It's at this point in time that I would like to emphasize that the above ad most certainly does not reflect our opinions. To prove my point, I'm now going to watch TV.

We need more entropy, Scotty! There was one small problem with the JEP-25 code for producing key sequences: the mechanism for producing the seed is pathetically weak. The length for the sequence is typically 256 in other clients such as Exodus. So if all the sequences were only 256 in length, you would only have to enumerate 256 * 2 ^ 15 hash values to be able to crack the sequence if you're using random.randint(1,2**15) to generate the seed. A better solution would be to use this function for generating the seed.

    def generateCNONCE():
        """http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2831.html requires at least
           64bits of entropy for the cnonce."""

        # Each character [A-Za-z0-9] character has ~5.95 bits 
        # (log(2) 62) of entropy and so we need a string of at 
        # least 11 characters to have 64bits of entropy. We're 
        # using 128bits of entropy.

        cnonceLength = 22
        
        cnonceList = [None] * cnonceLength
        for i in xrange(cnonceLength):
            randValue = random.randint(0,61)
            if randValue < 26:
                cnonceList[i] = chr(ord('A') + randValue)
            elif randValue < 52:
                cnonceList[i] = chr(ord('a') + randValue - 26)
            else:
                cnonceList[i] = chr(ord('0') + randValue - 52)

        return "".join(cnonceList)

Night Scenes Andy Gray is up to his usual photo-magic with a new set of Tokyo night scenes.

JEP25 and Generators You've got to love Python generators. Generators can make even an amateur programmer like myself look like I know what I'm doing.

, HTTP Polling, allows people behind overly restrictive firewalls to connect to Jabber networks via HTTP. JEP-25 has a smarter, better looking cousin, , but the Jabber.org sages haven't finalized it yet.

Both JEP-25 and JEP-124 require a key generation algorithm to make it difficult for people to hijack a HTTP session.

The formulation for the key sequence algorithm is:

K(n, seed) = Base64Encode(SHA1(K(n - 1, seed))), for n > 0
K(0, seed) = seed, which is client-determined

Python generators makes producing the sequence a breeze:

def JEP25KeyGenerator(sequenceLength):

    kg = createSequenceGenerator(sequenceLength)

    def generatorWrap():
        return kg.next()

    return generatorWrap

def createSequenceGenerator(sequenceLength):

    sequence = generateSequence(sequenceLength)
    while True:
        key = sequence.pop()

        if not sequence:
            sequence = generateSequence(sequenceLength)
            newKey = sequence.pop()

            yield "%s;%s" % (key, newKey)
        else:
            yield key

def generateSequence(sequenceLength):

    seed = random.randint(1,2**15)

    sequence = []
    key = str(seed)

    for i in xrange(sequenceLength):
        key = sha.sha(key).digest().encode('base64').rstrip()
        sequence.append(key)

    return sequence

Instantiating the generator and executing a couple of interations yields:

>>> keyFactory = JEP25KeyGenerator(5)
>>> keyFactory()
'EpEvcNDBlsi7A1g7WN7IM7HGxOs='
>>> keyFactory()
'BMZLLvKUQhHbh81aA36zJEzxpFg='
>>> keyFactory()
'4ONYMRixMwN6NLcKgzCSCTRVcBg='
>>> keyFactory()
'slhQAtISUUXvebLYb5IAb884Q3g='
>>> keyFactory()
'2kuSN7rMzfGcB2DKt67EqDWQELA=;nEz+8Cwjf+7gcKIELGBQBoHb6wE='
>>> keyFactory()
'i12uDskbdkkut6JL5OW1fvcSv98='

On the 5th execution of KeyFactory(), the sequence is exhausted and a new key sequence is introduced. However, the change over to the new key generation is completely transparent to the generator client.

The strings produced be the key generator are suited for constructing the body of the HTTP request:

#sessionID;sequenceKey[; newSequenceKey],[body]
httpBody = sessionID + ";" + keyFactory() + "," + xmlStanza
response = urllib2.urlopen(proxyURL, httpBody)

Beautiful Flash Design The guys at ni9e.com have 6 wonderful typographic animations set to music. Check out the main site for their entire collection.

Thank you Microsoft? The bogus Eolas patent has successfully been nullified by the USPTO. This is probably the first time the trademark office has put any thought into a patent decision, but unfortunately it takes a good deal of time and money to get them to take a second look. Last year the "one man operation", Dr. Mike Doyle, was awarded a $521 million settlement for Microsoft's infringement. No patent is worth that, period. Barring a successful appeal, MS saves some dough, which really means we save, and they don't have to break the web like they wanted. So .. uh thanks Microsoft? No that just doesn't sound right. (via The Register)

Enemyster We're tossing around the ideas for entering into the social networking fray. Our wild idea for the moment is pretty much the opposite of Friendster, Orkut, or any other networks out there. Enemyster will basically be the collection of people who you consider your enemies. Apparently useless at first, but the basic idea resolves around the truism "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." Basically, it will allow you to find other people with the common goal of undermining shared enemies. I'm already foreseeing such great features such as enemy of the month for truly reviled individuals. Just throw in some bulletin boards, and everyone will be set for some lively discussions.

Macromedia Breeze Live Now Available It's limited to the first 500 users in the US who register for a free full month trial. Macromedia is not the first to offer these services, WebEx and recently Convoq have joined the fray, but MM stands to deliver a knock out product. A quick run down of features includes, AV and text chat, screen sharing, meeting scheduler, real-time polls, and white board collaboration. I'm on my way to try it out right now.

What it really takes to give more than 100%

From a strictly mathematical viewpoint it goes like this...

What Makes 100%? What does it mean to give MORE than 100%? Ever wonder about those people who say they are giving more than 100%? We have all been to those meetings where someone wants you to give over 100%. How about achieving 103%?

So what makes up 100% in life?

Here's a little mathematical formula that might help you answer these questions:

If:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z is represented as:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26
Then...

H-A-R-D-W-O-R-K
8+1+18+4+23+15+18+11 = 98%

and

K-N-O-W-L-E-D-G-E
11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5 = 96%

But...

A-T-T-I-T-U-D-E
1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5 = 100%

And..

B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T
2+21+12+12+19+8+9+20 = 103%

AND look how far ass kissing will take you...

A-S-S-K-I-S-S-I-N-G
1+19+19+11+9+19+19+9+14+7 = 127%

So, one can then conclude with mathematical certainty that while Hard Work and Knowledge will get you close, and Attitude will get you there, Bullshit and Ass Kissing will put you over the top.