Reddit, Repercussions and Relatives

An interview with New York Times Best-selling author David Thorne, of www.27bslash6.com
By Alex H

Waiting for David Thorne to show up for an interview, at a seedy bar in downtown Toronto, the thought that he might not show up, as some form of prank, crossed my mind. Or worse, he might. Glancing at my wrist and wondering if I still had to time to leave before he arrived, I heard a deep Australian accent state "Sorry I'm late, a dingo stole my baby." I first wrote to Thorne over a year ago when I ordered his first book, The Internet is a Playground, and, along with around a hundred others, didn't receive my copy. After an exasperating delay due to delivery issues with Thornes's publisher, and a well documented run-in with one of Thorne's now ex-employees, my copy finally arrived four months later. Admittedly, it was worth the wait. Learning that Thorne was visiting Toronto this week for a snowboarding trip, I emailed him asking if he would be up for an interview for www.avbrand.com over a few drinks. He replied "Sounds good. As long as you are paying for them."

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Over on one of my sites, www.uer.ca, I have a chatroom for members to use. Although the site is dedicated to Urban Exploration, the chatroom often features a variety of topics and usually contains anywhere from 4 to 20 people at any time of day.

Around the holiday season, to make the chatroom more interesting, I switch on a bot that I wrote called the "Santa Bot". It's an automated chat bot that interacts with the participants in the room, and appears to them just like any other user. He responds to direct questions, and also responds to select statements. He also speaks at other times.

I'm not much for AI (Artificial Intelligence) -- I've never had much interest trying to write something that pretends to be a person. Most chatbots out there are extremely complex, and they work by trying to figure out what you mean when you talk to them. Saying "How are you" usually results in a response like "I am fine", since the bot has either been programmed to understand that question or has learned the appropriate response.

Writing that kind of algorithm seemed much too complex for me -- I just wanted a simple bot that I could use to entertain the chat users. So, over the last few years, the Santa Bot has evolved into its current incarnation, which results in wonderful interactions such as this one:

[23:15:04] <Aleksandar> santa, you dont know what fus do rah is?
[23:15:07] <Santa> its better you dont know what that is

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I recently ordered a laptop sleeve along with a new laptop from Lenovo. For some reason they came in separate shipments.

The laptop sleve came in a HUGE box, much bigger than even the box the laptop came in, even though it would have easily fit inside a bubble mailer, along with enough construction paper to supply a Jack Astor's for a week.

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Not very exciting, I know, and a few weeks old, but I wanted to share the photos. I built a nice picnic table from scratch for the park where I go each morning with my dog.

It's basically a piece of private land that's not really used for anything, so a bunch of us meet there and let our dogs run around. To keep people from stealing my table, I chained it to a tree.

Since the table wouldn't fit in my car, I transported it as raw wood and assembled it there. I cut, sanded, and sealed each piece in my garage first.


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Took Taiga out for a nice hike on top of some huge rocks in Port Carling, Muskoka, this past weekend. The orange collar and chunky black thing is his new GPS tracking collar, which is awesome.





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UPDATE: I've added another 8 bulbs and updated this article.

So it's that time of year where by 6:30pm, the sun has set and it's dark out. To make matters worse, next week, the clocks will fall back an hour, meaning the sun will set an hour earlier each day. So by 5pm, it will be pretty dark outside.

To try to make my place feel less depressing and to give myself lots of nice light, I build this "artificial sun" rig yesterday:

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People keep bugging me for the code to the PopCARD server software, so here it is.

http://www.avbrand...ard/codeserver.asp

Enjoy!


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Here's a quick video I made of the bathroom reno:


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I don't use facebook -- I've yet to find a hole in my life that it can fill. But sometimes you need a facebook account to see something, so I registered a fake account just so that I'd have a way of seeing them. Naturally, it didn't take long before facebook started spamming the address.

Today's is a really bad one, showing really deceptive tactics:

The email says that I have received notifications, and shows 1 message waiting.



However, when I click the message link, I instead get taken to the "Find your Friends" page...


There is no message. They just wanted me to "Find my Friends". This is really deceitful of them.


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It's pretty much done now. A few tiny finishing touches left, but here it is!

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The reno continued this past weekend and this week, with a lot of smaller details being finished.

If you missed part one, read it here:
http://www.avbrand...oom_Reno_part_one/


1. The toilet had to come out again, so now you can use the commode while watching TV.

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I recently spent some time upgrading PopCARD!

Check out the full project page update here:
http://www.avbrand...ts/popcard/#update
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This isn't really something I'd ordinarily post here, but several friends have asked for a status update on the bathroom reno, so here are some photos.

1. Here's how the bathroom looked before. Ugh.

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Haven't posted here in a while so I thought I'd post a cute photo of Taiga:



He's waiting for the ball throwing machine to throw the ball... it's so cute
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Today, AvBrand.com is the Engineering Site of the Day on www.eeweb.com !





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Photo credit Hello Foto
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Last month we met two malamutes while out on a walk -- here's a photo of them with Taiga. Yay malamutes!




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I haven't posted a photo of Taiga in a while. Today, Annie and I took a nice hike at Rattlesnake point. Here is Taiga amidst the trilliums.




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I recently purchased the book Zer0 Day by Mark Russinovich. You probably don't know Mark, but that's mainly because he's not an author. Well, actually, he is an author. But his usual domain is authoring software, not books.

You see, Mark is the man who created many of the best Windows debugging and tracing utilities, such as Process Explorer, Process Monitor, and countless others. He published these as freeware under the name 'Sysinternals'. Microsoft loved them so much that they bought him out; he now works for Microsoft directly.

I've been reading Mark's blog for several years. The posts are infrequent but always interesting. He recently posted that he had written an actual novel! A thriller about cyberterrorism, etc. I downloaded the sample onto my Kindle and found it interesting enough to buy. (I was initially angered over the $2 price increase for Canadian buyers even though the US dollar is worth less than the Canadian dollar right now).

Reading through the book was slow. If I get my hands on a good thriller, I sometimes stay up hours past my bedtime because I just can't put it down. Unfortunately, this was not the case with Mark's book. I feel it took a long time to get going, featuring pages of scenes with nothing but dull background information and huge sections devoted to character analysis. Mark's characters also spend an awful lot of time in front of computers, and the jargon is heavy. Even I as a computer programmer felt a bit overwhelmed at times.

At a few points as I forced myself through the book, I was ready to throw the Kindle across the room and stab Mark in the chest. Specifically, any time any character had an online conversation, via IM, Email, or other, they spoke in bizarre short form that doesn't resemble any kind of common or well-known internet shorthand I've ever seen before. All characters did this, regardless of age, ethnicity, language, or technical prowess.

Here's a sample of a dialog occurring between characters "Daryl" and "Jeff", named "D007" and "JA33" respectively.

He opened ICQ, saw Daryl was online, and typed: JA33: Is thr any pln t leak t media? There was a short pause. D007: Hello t u 2. I hdnt gvn it any thot. Wht do u thnk? JA33: We arent mkng nuff headwa. I cnt see any hrm. Wht do u thnk? D007: Less I go off reservtn it wn’t b my cll. Th secrity vndrs knw abt it alrdy. At sum point I’d think 1 f thm wud issue prss rls. JA33: I ws jst thnkng we cld gt mre rsorcs t bear if th pblc ws invlvd, + it wld pt heat on t vndrs. r thy coprtng yt? D007: Its stll prtty lw n t totem ple so fr. I kp tryng. Rtkts mean mny vrss arnt detectd. JA33: Any nw dvlpmnts I shld knw abt? D007: More BIOS wipes, prmrly Dell and HP. Thy trnd th mchns to anchr wghts. JA33: How about chat rms? D007: Sphreak name sumtim bt no help. I dnt hv nuf staff t d t as mch as Id lke. JA33: Hv u pstd ny mssgs t sphreak? D007: We tlkd bot tht n dcdd gainst t. t wld alrt hm. He’d chng hs pttrn. No one knws mch abut t gy. We fond sm psts fr spreak frm otsde. JA33: Wh? D007: Smn usng t nme dragon lady. Mean nythng t u? JA33: Dragon Lady? Someone Chinese? could b lmst anbdy bt ths isnt cmmn knwldg yt. th IT mngr at t frm is prt Chinese bt sh ddnt sy nythng t m abot pstng. Wht do u thnk? D007: Id sy sphreak hs bn tippd off alrdy. If sh hsnt tld u anythng it cus sh ddnt lrn anytng. Jeff made a mental note to talk to Sue about it in the morning. D007: NYC tomrro. Will call to meet w u if ok. JA33: Snds good. Anytng els? D007: I think wer scrwd.

I bet you couldn't even read past the 3rd line without feeling really irritated. Both of these characters are adult professionals (one is a government agent) who really should express themselves more clearly.

About 80% of the way through the book, the action finally started to pick up, with the appearance of an assassin. From there pretty much right through to the end, with a few brief stops along the way, it was full steam ahead right to the climax. I stayed up until half past two this morning finishing the book. I just wish the whole book had been like the last fifth.

For the first novel from a programmer-turned-author, I think Mark has made a good start. But there's a lot of room for improvement. If a second edition is published, the "leet speek" should be completely removed.


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