Archive for March, 2007
Ain’t it del.icio.us
Just happened to note that I am pushing 1000 entries on my del.icio.us account. Del.icio.us is one of the most valuable tools that I’ve found on the intarwebs in the last couple of years.
NOTE: future project: now that I have so many links in del.icio.us, I need to set up some sort of system that will select one at random every so often so that I can confirm it’s still useful and add to its tags. Maybe someone out there already has something like this?
Learn to read assembly code
Ben Fry of Processing fame took the code from classic Atari console cartridges and created several beautiful images showing code and bitmaps, with links drawn from the jump instructions. Here is a small section from Pac-Man:
Span exploit for spam
An interesting spam made it through my GMail filters today. Some if it’s code looks like this:
<div><font face\u003d\"Arial\" size\u003d\"3\">\n<div>Hello,</div>\n<p><strong>B<span style\u003d\"font-size:10px;float:right;color:#000000\"> pj </span>rand new 2007 re<span style\u003d\"font-size:10px;float:right;color:#000000\"> tj </span>plic<span style\u003d\"font-size:10px;float:right;color:#000000\">\n zi </span>a watch<span style\u003d\"font-size:10px;float:right;color:#000000\"> pn </span>es - </strong><br>Express wor<span style\u003d\"font-size:10px;float:right;color:#000000\"> pt </span>ldwide sh<span style\u003d\"font-size:10px;float:right;color:#000000\">\n rp </span>ippin<span style\u003d\"font-size:10px;float:right;color:#000000\"> cz </span>g available!</p>\n<p><strong>LIM<span style\u003d\"font-size:10px;float:right;color:#000000\"> zp </span>ITED TIME OF<span style\u003d\"font-size:10px;float:right;color:#000000\"> zb </span>FER:
…And so on. The message shows up something like this:
Hello,
B pj rand new 2007 re tj plic
zi a watch pn es -Express wor pt ldwide sh
rp ippin cz g available!LIM zp ITED TIME OF zb FER:
The spammer has used the spans to insert random, garbled text into his message to confuse the spam filters, which are looking for keywords. But at the same time, his message is very clearly human-readable. Try slowly highlighting the text above to see how the message jumps from left to right.
Fairly clever. Beat the Google filters, which are about the best I’ve seen. I’d like to congratulate the spammer for ingenuity before inviting him to die in a fire. Hopefully this kind of exploit will be accounted for soon.
Hell and Halos, a Random Walk
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to come up with simple cloud systems to use with Blender. This is the result of one test, in which I used the Python scripting interface to create a model using a random walk.
In a random walk you start at the origin and select a random direction to move one space. Repeat. After many thousands of repetitions I was left with a cloud of vertices. I applied a red halo material to the cloud model and rendered.
The very first render produced a very pleasant result. As a still image. Right away I tried to animate this scene, as a single frame renders very quickly. Unfortunately, since all the vertices are placed at regular intervals, once the image moves, artificial structure becomes very easy to see.
I may have to try this again with a random jump between steps in the random walk. Another challenge for making this a good cloud material is to figure out a way to animate the structure of the cloud itself.
How do you get your video seen the way you want it to be seen?
I was reading Mark Cuban’s post about how the Oscars should deal with YouTube and was inspired to jot down some of my own ideas about video hosting. Mark argues that the best way for content owners to deal with the video hosting sites on the internet is not to bust out the lawyers to remove your content, but to flood the sites with clips that look like your video, but are really just billboards pointing back to your site, where presumably you can collect advertising revenue.
OK, this is a pretty good idea. Most of these video hosting sites will allow you to post just about anything (besides porn and hate material). If you want you could post hours of video of paint drying. There are no restrictions on posting video for commercial purposes. Posting an ad on YouTube in order to draw viewers away from YouTube may seem a little skeezy, but from a business standpoint, it just seems to make perfect sense.
So what’s wrong with this?
Flooding YouTube with ads for your site creates a value differential. Now when someone goes to YouTube and searches for your show, most of the time they are likely to only find your ad for it, while they can be assured of finding what they want on your own site. You’ve decreased the value of YouTube to the point where your site is more attractive. But YouTube still has some aces up its sleeves.
There are social solutions to the problem of flooding a site. All YouTube needs is a method for rating contributors. Voting on submissions. Heck, YouTube users could create systems that blacklist members that have links that point back to the old school media companies that do this. This tactic for decreasing YouTube’s value could very quickly be overcome.
Back to value differentials. If you decide not to try to reduce your competitors’ value, you must raise your own. I think a good example of how to do this is how NBC has dealt with “Heroes”. I don’t watch traditional TV anymore. The old saying, “There’s never anything good on”. I’ll buy DVDs, and I watch live events like sports at a bar. But I caught an episode of this show at my brother’s house one day, and decided that I’d like to see more, and I was excited enough about it I didn’t want to wait for the DVD. There’s plenty of video hosting sites out there that have the episodes within a day or two of broadcast. The quality is good and there are no ads.
So why do I watch it on NBC.com? Because of my high moral values? Pfft! I ain’t that nice a guy. NBC inserts a short ad in several times during the play of an episode, and has a still ad continuously on the side. But the quality of the video is just as good as what I’ll find on a hosting site, and I know exactly where and when I’ll find a new episode. There’s a bunch of bonus features on the NBC site as well, like a comic, a wiki, interviews, etc. So add together the pluses, subtract the minuses of the ads, and overall NBC has provided more value to me than the hosting sites. They’ve won my eyeballs for this show, and maybe I’ll check out some of their others on the site.