ryara

These are some interesting links I’ve picked up during the past months. Some of them are quite old, so don’t be surprised if you’ve already seen some of them.

Let’s begin with how robots could be looking at humans.

And then a pair of personality related articles: a few things you should know about introverts (that’s me). And also a comparison, if you will, of the Wide/Deep personality types.

I found 10 Attributes of Really Lazy People quite entertaining.

And some reasons as to why I will never get an facebook account. Another, less serious, but still valid view on the same topic.

If you feel like you have too much time on your hans you could always do what this guy did: write a ray-tracing renderer from scratch.

Here’s some interesting views on today’s CS education, though I’ve not personally seen all those changes where I’m studying. It also presents a few things that are important for CS students to learn (more specifically in the programming area).

And at last, a nice explanation as to why writing general applications isn’t always the right choice.

So, I’ve been challenged by Linnea with finding a clip from a movie whose name starts with the letter ‘H’, so here you go.

Now I challenge ozamosi, and YOU to find a clip from a movie that starts with the next letter in the alphabet, namely ‘I’. The ones you challenge will have to find clips from movies that start with the letter after that (’J'), and so on.

I’ve yet again remade my website (second time this year), and I think it looks better than the older two.
New for this version is a new PHP backend for the portfolio part, which I’m quite happy with. Eventually I’ll probably release the source for it, too.

I’d also like to thank Andreas Viklund for the template I used, and friends of mine for help with a few design decisions.

Well, sometimes at least. A couple of days ago when I was bored I entertained myself with “enhancing” a crossword from a newspaper, and here’s the result:

I think it looks quite interesting, but I think I’ll try to use a bigger crossword next time (if it comes).

Yep, I’ve decided to release the source of the game SvsG that I made together with a classmate quite a long time ago. It’s released under the MIT license, and you can find it here.

I haven’t cleaned up the directories, but it should still be usable (otherwise you could just import the important files into a new project).

It should also be noted that I consider most of the code not to be very well written. But it’s still usable.

Yes, it’s now time for the last clue, here and it is (the original unenciphered text). The text is from Wikipedia (Credit given where credit is due).

And so, as stated before, getting the cipher key should now be a question of brute force

Seeing that I’ve once again have access to the files related to the challenge, it’s time for the next part.
As promised before I’ve now released the source code of the cipher, and you may aquire it from my projects page.

It should now be at least a little bit easier to take on the challenge, but as said before: if no-one manages to beat it, I’ll post the unencrypted text in one week. And after that it should only be a matter of brute force to beat it .

Good luck!

As some of you already know, I’ll have to delay the challenge for some time. This is because my laptop’s AC adapter broke, and the only place I had everything related to the challenge was on the laptop.
So you’ll just have to wait a few weeks for the first clue (until I get a replacement for the adapter).

Bilddagboken.se is a swedish site where people can share/show their photos to others (translates to image diary). I’m not an active user, but as I tried I found out that it’s not possible to save an image from the site using right click -> save image - they’ve put a layer above the images filled with a transparent 1×1 pixel image.

At first I tried to bypass it using Opera’s content blocking feature, but though it did remove the filler image, the div containing was still in the way. Therefore I opted to use user javascript to remove it.

If you want to use it you:
1. Download it. (Right click -> Save target as)
2. Put it in it’s own folder.
3. Open Opera’s preferences dialog, and go to Advanced -> Content and click the Manage site preferences button. Then press the Add button in the new window.
4. Enter bilddagboken.se in the site text box, and then go to the Scripting tab. There press the Choose button on the lower left and browse to the folder where you saved the javascript file.
5. Press OK -> Close -> OK, and you’re done.

You should now be able to save images at bilddagboken.se by right clicking them.

The javascript is probably usable in Firefox as well using some addon, but I can’t say for sure as I don’t use it.

Update as of 2008-03-19: The recent redesign of their site makes this script deprecated, as they’ve removed the protection.

I’ve constructed a weak cipher and made a sample implementation of it, and now I have a challenge for you: Find the key with which this file has been enciphered. You can find the characters supported by the cipher in this file.

To help you out a bit you’ll also get the sample program which can encipher and decipher text using a specified key. Please note that it’s not intended to reverse engineer the program.

If no-one has reported progress (or success) after one week I’ll post the source code to the librarary, and if there’s still no progress after yet another week I’ll also post the non-enciphered version of the text. Then I’ll wait a month or so untill I post the answer.

I intend to release the library and sample application later, but for now you are not allowed to modify or redistribute them.

Good luck!