Pornostar

While it's possible for me to write several posts with that delicious title, I'm giving it to this one (so far my titles are unique, I think).
I was listening to c.o.p project - pornostar and I decided I wanted the lyrics, for a quote or two, so I went to google.
Lyrics are normally a breeze to find, and they are generally correct. This time only the former was true. Google gives me about 3200 hits, but it's apparently been the parade of retards on the lyrics scene, or it's just been automatically transcribed by some bad voice recognition software.
After about 5 hits, it's painfully apparent that all the lyrics sites on the internet just blatantly copy each other, because the errors are exactly the same ones, and there are errors aplenty.
I know that lyrics don't always follow the grammatical norms, but this is ridiculus.
Listening to the lyrics it is painfully clear that the voice coming out of my speakers is not saying the same things that this epileptic monkey has scribbed on the webpage (nothing against epileptics, they fight a tough fight, but this looks like transcription in mid-seizure).
Whomever it was who said that an infinite amount of monkeys on typewriters would produce the complete works of Shakespere was only partially right. What they seem to have produces is the content on the internet.

Van Eck Phreaking

Van Eck phreaking (or TEMPEST technologies, denepding on where you read it first) is about reading information from electro-magnetic radiation. What it will allow someone to do, for example, is read your monitor from a distance, based solely on the electro-magnetic radiation that comes off of it.
I first read about van Eck phreaking in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. It is used a couple of times, and I was instantly intrigued. Since then it's made it around the net a couple of times, and today I picked it up again from a post on hacksine. They even had a link to the paper by Wim van Eck from 1985 (in astonishing quality, compared to most old papers that I come across).
I was even more excited when I found a little blurb about the author, and it turns out that he's an alumn from my university, Twente University. Sadly the discovery seems to have come some years later when he was working at some other company, but still.

Crunch time

As you may have suspected from my lack of updates, it's been crunchtime these last couple of weeks.
Not only have I released version 1.0 of cuftpd, but I have also, today, written what could very well be my last exam ever. I don't have that "it's all completed"-feeling quite yet, as I won't have the results for another couple of weeks, so there is still a lot of anticipation, but atleast I know that it is out of my hands now.
It didn't feel like a 10 (nothing ever does), but it didn't feel like a fail either.
Currently, all I want is a passing grade. I'm happy if I get more, of course, but I really don't want to have to redo the exam.
Luckily I only had one exam this period. It would have been hell if I had had more.

On a completely unrelated note, I saw a gameplay video of Mythos yesterday (when I should have been studying). Being as big a fan of diablo as I am, I believe that I will play Mythos until my eyes bleed when it comes out. I signed up for the beta, just in case.

The Spice Must Flow

The price of crude oil recently reached $100 per barrel.
The oil that powers society today is much like the spice in the Dune universe.
In the Dune universe, the spice not only extends life, but allows for instantaneous space travel.
Much like the spice allows for unlimited travel, oil powers the entire transportation machinery of our planet.

Interesting things happens when spice production is halted. Read the book or watch the movie and you will see.
I wonder what will happen when oil production stops. Not because someone chose to stop pumping oil, but rather because there was no oil to pump.

The spice must flow.

For now. In the near future, however, we need to wean ourselves off our dependency.
If we don't do it now, while there is still time, the withdrawal will be much more severe.