Simon Says : Latest posts

Since all the iptables documentation out there is super complicated, here's something really simple.

To see all of the ports that are open, run:

       sudo iptables --list
      

To add a new rule (to open a new port, e.g. 8080):

       sudo iptables -A tcp_in -p tcp -d my.hostname.com --destination-port 8080 -j allowed
      

That's assuming you have a chain called "tcp_in" of course...

And to delete a rule, run iptables --list, count the number of the rule (the index #) and then:

       sudo iptables -D tcp_in [index]
      

Simple enough....

So you want to use SVN? Fine, it's easy to move a project from one to the other.

Get cvs2svn

Go to a checked out copy of your cvs project and run cvs admin -kb filename on any binary files.

Commit to CVS.

Assuming that you've got a simple CVS project with no branches that you want to keep, do this:

% ./cvs2svn-1.5.1/cvs2svn --trunk-only -s project-name /path/to/cvs_repository/project-name
% mv project-name /path/to/svn_repository/
      

Tinselman is the very amusing blog of the co-creator of Myst, Robyn Miller. It's a bit iffy on a daily basis ... and very eclectic. A bit like this blog, but better.

He's got this ongoing thread about the Republic of Tinselman, which appears to be something dating back to some attempt to create a fake republic on Wikipedia, or something, but whatever. It's just stuff.

He also seems to be a big fan of Walt Disney. To be particular, Walt Disney, and Disneyland. Not necessarily the Disney company or the movies per se. In fact, thinking about it, or maybe I read this somewhere. Anyway, that he wanted Myst to be a bit like Disneyland, which I think it is.

It's worth noting that Robyn Miller is the one who did the music for Myst and Riven, and he left after Riven. It's a bit obvious looking at any of the sequels after that the original spirit isn't there. With his brother Rand, he also did pre-Myst stuff like Cosmic Osmo, which was pretty cool and all done in the absolutely brilliant and amazing but now-forgotten HyperCard. In fact, did you know that the original Myst for Mac was written and deployed in Hypercard? Amazing but true.

Actually, that reminds me of a story, which is that back when Myst was first released I was working at this rather unusual place called the Southam InfoLab. Anyway, I was mainly a HyperCard hacker and pretty damned good at it if I may say so. And I managed to hack into Myst and actually look at the source code running it. HyperCard is an interpreted language, the language is called HyperTalk, and there was no compiler for it. So, they implemented this fiendishly complex system for preventing you from breaking into debug mode and viewing the code, but I managed to hack it. I don't remember doing much with it though, because the source code for Myst was way over my head at the time.

Anyway. Robyn is clearly a very interesting and unusual person. I think it would be very interesting to meet him and peer into his brain some day. Once you get past the "oh my god he's the guy who made Myst" thing then his blog seems to be quite interesting.

My name is Lieutenant Frank Drebin, Police Squad, a division of the Police Department. I just got a call from headquarters. Someone killed off a cop series in the prime of its life, and they couldn't find the body. Fortunately some new evidence turned up, and it looked like we might have found the body and it's killer.

And so begins this week's episode of A Bit of Torrent, a weekly (almost) feature of Simon Says where we highlight the absolute latest in downloadable content. This week in the crosshairs: Police Squad!

If you've ever seen Leslie Nielsen or any of the Naked Gun movies, you know what to look for. You know what I mean. Exactly. It's basically six mini-Naked Gun movies in a row.

Download Police Squad (complete) on The Pirate Bay .

Sadly, the show was cancelled before its time. Cigarette? Yes. I know.

When I first saw this, I thought, hey cool! Then I took a screenshot and when it came through in the screenshot, that was even cooler. It's not often you get something like this. Memory corruption, maybe, not terminal, and not detected by the graphics software. My laptop gets hot sometimes, maybe the memory got corrupted that way? It happened on wake from sleep. Anyway, voila.

It sort of went away when it redrew areas of the screen but not completely, so I restarted.

I just added two new features. First, now you can finally page through the posts 15 at a time (or whatever # it's set to show on the front page), using the "Previous Page" and "Next Page" links at the bottom. Second, you can save a specific post to Digg or delicious by just clicking on the appropriate little icon in the meta-data at the top of the post. As if anyone would want to do that. I don't, but I saw it on a bunch of other blogs so I thought I'd do it to.

I guess in theory you could use digg to discuss the post, if everyone used digg.

So Saxite is the new name for my siteware project. For those of you not paying attention, it's all written in XSLT and XML and it runs on AxKit.

I decided to make an icon so I came up with this icon, below.

Like it? I was inspired by a recent issue of Computer Arts Projects (one of the fantastic UK graphic design magazines that my local Indigo store carries) that was all about fonts, to do some of my own font work. So, I had a visual idea of what I wanted the logo to look like, with the X as a white space in the middle, and then I looked for a font on my system that was very blocky and thick and wound up with Arial Black. "ITE" on Arial Black are very generic, but I really didn't think that the S worked at all for me, and the A didn't fit, and the X I didn't like either (not wide enough).

So I started with the A. I actually did the A from scratch, not even bother to look at the Arial A. It's more like half of an A anyway. Next I got the X in the shape I wanted, and filled in the negative space on the right side with the I. Getting the hole in the A to look right was tricky, right now it's actually a white copy of the shape of the A!

Oh yeah, and check out the arrow in the A too :-) (it's pointing right). And check out the angle bracket on the right side of the X :-)

I spent by far the most time on the "S". I didn't like the original Arial S and wanted to replace it the most since it's by far the most identifiable letter of the ones I used. Also it didn't look blocky and aggressive enough in my opinion. There was quite a bit of variation in the width of stroke which I didn't like, so I drew my own "S" over top of it with a more even stroke (drawn with beziers). I also didn't like the flat ends so I switched over to ends on 45-degree angles. Getting it to balance was interesting ... the bottom end of the S actually extends out beyond the curve above it, while the top end is shorter than the curve below it. Weird.

I actually tried out another one which was even more streamlined, with the top and bottom strokes ending totally horizontally (like in the Star Wars logo) but that looked too, I don't know, sci-fi?

Finally I added the hole to the right of the X, before the I. And then I redrew the rest of the letters by hand so that they would all flow together. Now there's no Arial Black left at all.

Oh yeah, and post-processing in Photoshop to give it that 3d look.

Although I love graphic design, I've never been able to get the hang of colour. I usually work in black and white. My colour palettes usually suck. The colours on this site are nice but that's a very lengthy evolution and they could still be better.

Now if I ever need a colour palette I'll just go to this flickr set by lunaryuna called quest for colour . It's bloody brilliant.

Here's a random sample, just reload to see another 4, or click through for higher-rez versions...

This week on "a bit of torrent" ...

Aren't british comedies brilliant? Bittorrent — isn't that brilliant? I mean, downloading TV over the internet — what will they think of next? It's fantastic. The Fast Show, isn't it great? It's a bunch of sketches but before they wear out, they start the next one. And all the sketches are brilliant. Well, not all of them, the one with the thief wasn't so good, but then they get him off the set and on to the next one. Brilliant!

Meanwhile.... nothing will ever touch the true genius of "A bit of Fry and Laurie" — seriously, don't even go there — but The Fast Show gets pretty close at times. It's called the fast show because (a revolution in comedy at the time) the sketches are short and sweet. No lengthy build-ups here. Good ones come back in the next episodes, and they have a series of really hilarious steadies like the "brilliant" guy, who thinks everything is great, even the Nazis; Ted and Ralph, who aren't really funny, and a soccer newscaster who always goes off on a tangent about "boys in the park, jumpers for goalposts, eh?"

Most of the best characters are played by Paul Whitehouse so it's weird that I've never heard of him before. He's a bit of a chameleon. He appears in two of the attached pictures but every time, it's a different voice, a completely different look, different body language. He hasn't been in a lot of movies but even so I'd not be sure that I'd spot him.

Anyway, definitely a top pick. Here are some links. There are 3 seasons. There's also some specials out there somewhere.

TorrentSpy:

• The.Fast.Show.-.Season.1.torrent
• The.Fast.Show.-.Season.2.torrent
• The.Fast.Show.-.Season.3.torrent

UPDATE: ... but don't bother with season three. It's a dog.

I just spent a whole bunch of time sorting my tags. Because I have the best tag browser ever and so I'm having some fun going through and tagging my content and making my tags better now. For example, I had no rhyme or reason for uppercase, some were mixed-case, some were uppercase, some were lowercase. I decided to make them all lowercase.

So, a bunch of tags were renamed which will break links but too bad, backwards-compatibility is for losers. Also, I don't think people have really linked to my tags yet. But they will....

Anyway, I also added some new tags and went back and tagged a bunch more old posts too. Have a look at original/prediction (my "original work" making predictions about the future). Or how about computer/wi-fi (lots of developing world stuff in there...). Or how about just meta (navel gazing fun). Yum.

I came up with this image yesterday when I was thinking about Disney's role in the fantasyland movie that ABC just broadcast (Disney owns ABC and apparently backed the film).

To be honest, I just like the colours. I always thought this was a cool logo. But anyways, no more Mr. Nice Guy or whatever. I had a look at the font on their original logo and it looks to me like Rockwell Light so I had a go in PhotoShop and changed "Pictures" to "Politics". Now Disney can put this up on the front of all their political propaganda pieces.

It didn't make much of a splash when I posted it in my diary so I figured it wasn't that good, but I guess that there really isn't any proper correlation between Recommendations and actual merit on DKos -- at least in the "long tail" of non-superstar diarists. I think that has something to do with their horrible, horrible tagging browser.

Well now I've got an even better tag browser. In fact I think it's the coolest tag browser ever. It's better than the flickr tag browser and the technorati tag browser and amazingly, even then del.icio.us tag browser. And what is delicious for if not tag browsing. Well.

Anyway, I used a sort of crazy CSS-float-left thing to make the big and small boxes all go inline together. It would have made more sense to use inline-block but it's not supported in Mozilla yet (weird).

Also, you will note that this new browser really brings out the awesomeness of my two-level tagging scheme because now for the first time you can see how the levels work. And I'm discovering that maybe I have some duplication oops, and I'm also completely inconsistent in how I capitalize. Hmm. I might edit my tags (I suppose that's bad for google though, oh well).

Anyway, the big names in the filled-in boxes are the "categories" and the names in the small white boxes are the "tags"... some day I might allow to view just the tags but I'm not quite sure what that would mean.

Note to self: I should add some category browser on the left side there.

A bunch of links and things.

Ahree Lee created (or is creating?) an amazing short film. Starting in 2001 she started to take a picture of herself, every day, in the same pose. As of 2004, she created a short film called Me in which the images are flashed at you at the rate of about one week per second. If you want to download the film, you can use mplayer (like I did...) with something like this from your unix shell. (Note that the rtsp URL might change, you can get it from AtomFilms web page / View Source.) (Also note that I had to insert a backslash in front of the exclamation mark, probably inserted by atomfilms to foil script kiddies trying to use this method.) I think you could do some cool analysis of the images over time.

  mplayer -dumpfile out.rm -dumpstream 'rtsp://shockreal.edgestreams.net/real.atomshockwave-secure_\!/me_300.rm?auth=caEascHb6b7dRbpdudXcLbKdibBaHbDbbdP-be81D5-cOW-REAwJrGowGoHn3wlB&aifp=123&span=10800'
      

My cousin Suzanne Thoma finally has a website. She still sings but mostly she's now a freelance graphic designer. My opinion: website needs some work. I'm not sure that my parents would be able to navigate it.

How to create little bar charts inside the cells of an Excel spreadsheet looks useful and pretty easy to do. Generally speaking Excel's graphing sucks, and it looks like the Excel 12 graphs aren't going to get any better. Apple's iWord graphs are somewhat better but not perfect and some important graph types are missing.

Finally, let's hear it for art: The Grooming of the Woodside Man V1 by Simon Donikian and The Grooming of the Woodside Man V4 .

Enough for now...

I just can't get enough of these ravenblack.net quizzes! They're so awesome! The author is a genius!

Wait, the author is also really weird and has a RavenBlog!

While I'm here and screwing around, here's a Googlewhack: aquaplane wimax

Also, I'm redoing some fundamental bits of the XSLT that runs my site, so things might be a bit haywire for a few days.

I was just reading this article on The Vets for Freedom faux grassroots movement . If there's one think that I don't like, it's astroturfing. See why at wikipedia. Especially political astroturfing, the worst kind.

The web of connections in the article is pretty confusing so I came up with this information graphic to try to untangle it a bit.

I have large versions in Some links between Republicans and Swift Vets and Vets for Freedom (PDF) suitable for printing at any size, and also bitmaps in PNG, and JPEG.

Keep an eye on this page and / or the blog generally, as I may update the infographic if more information becomes available.

It's licensed under creative commons CC-BY-SA , so if you want the original file (in OmniGraffle ) let me know.

I cross-posted this on sbwoodside's diary on DailyKos . If you want to comment, you can do so there (or just email me).