Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?

Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and methamphetamine addiction in a quiet American suburb.

HAHA. This is awesome!

garfield minus garfield

If you haven't heard about the Optimus Maximus keyboard yet, you are missing out. Looking at screen shots of it over at Engadget I couldn't help but notice this picture:

Unless my eyes deceive me, thats a picture of the Russian lesbians from the band Tatu.

Why they are mapped to a keyboard key is an interesting question. But that's not half as interesting as what happens if you push that button.

Late at night several times a week, Terrill powers up the 4-foot-tall, 300 pound device and reaches for a remote control packed with two joysticks and various knobs and switches. Standing on a nearby corner, he maneuvers the machine down the block, often to a daycare center where it accosts what Terrill says are drug dealers, vagrants and others who shouldn't be there.

He flashes the robot's spotlight and grabs a walkie-talkie, which he uses to boom his disembodied voice over the robot's sound system.

"I tell them they are trespassing, it's private property, and they have to leave," he said. "They throw bottles and cans at it. That's when I shoot the water cannon. They just scatter like roaches."

OMG, I can't believe he actually built it, and I can't believe it actually works.

You now have something more to look forward to at O'Terrill's besides the fish and chips!

Who needs security when you have a robot? | ajc.com

Ed Felton quoting Ross Anderson... ... oh god yes. [lights a cigarette] ...

Very few security papers are so so satisfying in that special special place...

Unless of course you added a Schneier/Alice/Bob three-way...

Felton + Anderson = Crazy Delicious

"There is a non-zero chance that the DOJ would fuck with you."

Old timers here will know about the concept of bruteforcing DNS using the clues available..

i.e. zone transfers disabled, but u see that the NS and MX servers are called gandalf.company.com and elrond.company.com. Effectively trying frodo.company.com is going to make good sense..

To this end BidiBlah will do this automagically for u and tries to eek out info.. (a little while back i saw fierce-scanner pop up in a similar vein!)

Young Mr Wilkinson ran up against a company last night with disabled transfers, but the 2 DNS servers showed up as:

* asimov.company.com
* heinlein.company.com

A quick trip to wikipedia shows that both are american sci-fi authors.

Very cool! A DNS Bruter using Wikipedia/Google to attempt to find relationships between subdomains. Bruting is fairly straight forward, and the trick has always been what values you should try. I faced this challenge about a month ago when I wrote a DNS bruter. Over the last 3 years or so I've made something of a hobby of collecting massive sets of URLs. At last count I had just under 90 million. I mined these and created a list of the 1000 most common subdomains.

Not as sexy as Bidiblah, but effective.

Subdomain bruting and you!

Jason Scott on the opinionated hordes.

I had forgotten, I guess, how easy it is for people to take a few quick glances at some data and shove their two-line thesis out the door. Or to then proceed to make even more conclusions based on this thesis. And then, how easily it is for this quarter-baked half-thesis to become an addendum to the original data, as if, you know, they deserved it.

I like nothing more than to browse people who have no idea who or what the hell I am, what I've done, what I'm doing, or any other data points, and then just make all these great conclusions about me. It's refreshing. They're neither friend nor foe. They're just observers, as so much of this medium turns us into

And of course, the original Penny Arcade Internet Fuckwad strip.

Internet Fuckwad Redux

DrawingSpace.prototype.drawLine = function(x0,y0,x1,y1) {

    var steep = Math.abs(y1 - y0) > Math.abs(x1 - x0);
    var tmp = 0;
 
    if(steep) {
        //swap(x0, y0)
        tmp = y0;
        y0 = x0;
        x0 = tmp;
        //swap(x1, y1)
        tmp = y1;
        y1 = x1;
        x1 = tmp;
    }
    if(x0 > x1) {
        //swap(x0, x1)
        tmp = x1;
        x1 = x0;
        x0 = tmp;
        //swap(y0, y1)
        tmp = y0;
        y0 = y1;
        y1 = tmp;    
    }
    
    var deltax = x1 - x0;
    var deltay = Math.abs(y1 - y0)
    var error = -(deltax + 1) / 2
    var ystep;
    
    var y = y0;
    if(y0 < y1) {
        ystep = 1;
    } else {
        ystep = -1;
    }
    
    for(var x = x0; x <=x1; x++) {
        if(steep) {
            this.buffer.setXY(y,x);
        } else {
            this.buffer.setXY(x,y);
        }
        error += deltay;
        if(error >=0) {
            y += ystep;
            error -=deltax;
        }
    }

}

Now why would you ever need an integer optimized line drawing algorithm in JavaScript? :-)

Bresenham's line algorithm

Today I used the phrase "John Terrill Approved" to win an argument. Yes, it was excellent.

Events can be set to trap when the image has finished loading and what the size of the image is. This creates a side channel for JavaScript to communicate with certain 3rd party hosts using the dimensions of the image. In practice, XBM images tend to work best because you can specify arbitrary lengths and widths up to a 15bit integer without actually needing an image of that size.

I knew I had talked about this publicly before! This was from Jan of 2007.

Good to know I'm not going crazy :-)

More image side channels