Null Disquisition

While I was taking out the trash today, I noticed something peculiar about an old computer monitor left out by my trash can. It had been smashed open and a component was taken out of it. The missing component was in fact the electron gun – perhaps the coolest part of a cathode ray tube (CRT).

An electron gun is essentially a mini particle accelerator used to speed up and focus electrons into a teeny tiny beam that hits phosphorous atoms on the back of the class of your favorite CRT and causes them to fluoresce (make color). In a physics lab back in undergrad, I was playing with a smaller version of one of these that was running at 600V (low amps). My lab partner zapped himself and was all shaky for the rest of the afternoon. I imagine the volts running through these commercial grade electron guns must be pretty serious. My best guess is that one of the bums in my area is aspiring to be an evil genius – constructing some sort of death ray I’m sure. My hunch was bolstered upon further investigation of a photo I took of the CRT. As you can see, it’s clearly missing the electron gun as a whole (notice the large hole in the tube). However, I also noticed that a piece of the gun remained – the electron source itself (to the right of the hole). So whoever Frankensteined my monitor was after the accelerator component of the electron gun – the magnet array. What sort of dastardly particles could he or she be planning to accelerate?!? Photons? Positrons?!

I’m going to install a Faraday cage around my bedroom – just to be safe.

-David

When you’re growing in a container that has plants of different growing rates, you’ll often find yourself in a situation where one plant out-competes the others for light. There are plenty of things you can do to remedy the situation, but I’m going to share my personal favorite.

Take the offending plant (in this case a Basil), and somewhere about halfway up the stem (or higher, not lower), give it a good pinch.

The pinch to the stem will cause the plant to redirect its resources to repairing the damaged tissue. Since plants are really well programmed for self-preservation (as well as self-repair), it will not grow any taller until the stem is hardened and healed. This prevents it from buckling over at the pinch from any additional weight at the top of the plant from further growth. Plants are neat!

A word of caution though – don’t pinch it too hard (you’ll break it), too often (you’ll kill it), or too low (again, you’ll break it). You don’t want to actually hurt the thing, just mangle it slightly.

-David

Busy times. Been busting ass to keep up with everything this semester – teaching assistantship, classes, thesis, not to mention my new(ish) job at Loud3r. Had a few interesting things happen latetly that I felt warranted an update. To enumerate: I hacked some kid’s Facebook account, wrote an HTML scraper to get the latest Naruto Shippüden episodes from Dattebayo, got my code working for my thesis, and did my final edits on my first real academic paper.

Facebook failure:

I was sitting in the class I TA for (along with my cohort Billzebub), I was sniffing the wifi traffic (like you do) and took a look at the pcap dump that was captured. Amongst the garbage was some request/response headers for Facebook. Being the curious little monkey I am, I fire up Firefox and copy/paste all the cookie information into my session (using Web Developer 2 extension). I head over to facebook.com and low and behold, I am Matt Whatshisname. Full access too, not just a temporary hiccup in the login system. After resisting messing with stuff and/or snooping, I clear my cookies and sit back in awe. Awe at how ridiculous it is that the Facebook login system is so exposed and broken.

I tried to replicate the cookie spoof for some pics for this post, but apperently one or more of the cookies are time-sensitive.

Edit: Hack successfully reproduced! Epic fail!!

http://skitch.com/mumrah/7gcg/his-name-is-robert-paulson

http://skitch.com/mumrah/7gcj/full-access

More Naruto Shenanigans:

No need to waste time about how I did it, here’s a link that pretty much explains it all. Naruto Shippüden XML feed.

Thesis:

After going back and forth with my professor for weeks not getting anywhere, I sit him down and start at the beginning and force him to work through all the details with me. 4 hours later we have some functioning code. Obligatory photos to follow. The above picture demonstrates the orthogonality and normalization of the eigenvectors (meaning we finally have the parition function correct as well as the normalization criterion). The following three pictures are just the first three eigenvectors.

Looking forward to the break.

-David

I consented to a verbal NDA at the game store, so I can’t give any details, but I got Spore a day early. Native OS X support… drool. Consequently, this will be the first time I’ll have used my dvd drive on my new laptop. Lulz.

I literally jumped in the air when they guy handed my the bag and prompted me to vacate the premesis. Screenshots after the break.

-Break-

-David

In a tragic episode of miscommunication and server migration, I have managed to loose my once beloved Wordpress Blog (http://enja.org/david). I did, however, by the magic of the Wayback Machine uncover an archive from 2007. All of the important posts are there (the AJAX articles) and the other diatribe remains as well.

http://web.archive.org/web/20070105031325rn_1/www.enja.org/david/

Mad props to Archive.org.

-David