Divine Lunacy

You are currently using 986 MB (44%) of your 2248 MB.
The space in gmail seems to be going up as quickly as I can use it up. Very depressing, this is. I finally hit 1000 gmails ( I’m slow… ). I think I’ll have to subscribe to more mailing lists in order to fill my box. ( or at least 1024 MB of it… ) I just can’t seem to get past 44%… pathetic, I know… Feel free to send me mp3’s and high resolution picutres.

The powers at be have granted Mr. Horne permission to give me an independant study. ( Yiippeee ). With my input, Mr. Horne will make up a semi-flexible-ish curriculum. I’m suppose to make a list of things I would like to know. I know there are a lot of things I would like to know, but I don’t know some of them and thus can’t know that I’d like to know them. ( hehe ). As for the other things, my mind doesn’t serve me well… I need a bullwhip. Have you ever just had the urge to use a bullwhip? ( for the sound. ). A whip would definitely come in handy when bossing little people around.

I recieved a 90 on my latest physics test. Good things, this does for my grade. If I actually did work consistantly, I might have all A’s… I guess I’m just too inconsistent to be consistent.

I really need to get working on that spellcheck plugin. My spelling is atrocious… ( yet I can spell atrocious… )

I figure I’ll do one of those posts—yeah, one of them. You know, one of those ones like “I mowed the lawn on saturday then went to the beach and got some sun.”… Nothing is definitely something to blog about. I may not have much something, but believe me, I am full of nothings to write about. If only one could do well in english just writing nothing. Very good at writing nothing, I am. Take this for instance. I read the logs; I know there are a bunch of you idiots out there reading this ( including me ), but what do you expect to get from it? If you’re in the business of stalking, you won’t get anything. It’s not like I’m going to mention that I urinated at 0844 this morning or anything… One of my biggest problems is my memory. Don’t get me wrong, I have a very good memory, but why waste it memorizing everything I did on may 23^rd? If I sit here and think, I won’t get any further and I’ll probably get a headache. What’s the point? What’s the point of this paragraph? There isn’t one. You could have used all the time you spent reading this paragraph sleeping.

While we’re on the subject of monday… A good day it was. The schedule seemed to go exactly as it does every other monday. It’s kind of funny how that works, isn’t it? I don’t recall much of anything happening on tuesday either… Lets skip ahead to thursday, shall we?

Thurday was great for a bad reason… I almost feel bad for the underclassmen. They are having all these pooey graduation requirements added and what do they get for it? Class cuts!!! They’ve yet to drop the whole technology department, but I assure you, they are on their way. Another one of my classes was cut last week! AP-Stats won’t be running now. Meanwhile, there is some fat ass turkey walking around in my backyard. wow, I am easily distracted. Perhaps it is the latino pop music? la vida que viene y yo me voy..aaahh. Anyway, the class being cut is one thing, but trying to find one to replace it is another thing. There is nothing else for me to take as far a math goes. Biotech Runs the wrong period. AP-Bio is the same period as AP-Chem… I’d rather not take fashion design… As for web, I think I have that down. ( and I’ve heard not so good things about the class… ) “Take band!”, says my mom with a hint of enthusiasm. Band? I detest band. I haven’t even THOUGHT about taking band since I was shafted by the evil Mrs. Kyte. ( her very presence was enough to kill anyone. ) I can’t say I like the idea of having a craaazy, harvard graduate, coffee theiving, hat yoinking, scatter-brained midget for a band teacher either. ( Not that I have anything against her. My coffee smuggling antics are far superior to her evil gaze. ) Off topic again, I am. This seems to be a good example of a rant. I have no idea where this is going. I initially learned about the cancellation of stats on tuesday, from the all-knowing Mr. Horne who said “Believe me, I can find something” when I mentioned that there aren’t any classes to take. If there is one thing I will never forget from White Stag ( leadership training ), it is “use your resources”. Mr. Horne turned out to be quite a useful resource—he is going to try to hook me up with an independant study for next year.

I’ve ranted so extensively that I’ve forgotten about what I am supposed to rant about… Alas, the sun hath come and warmed my soul. The sun brings warm feelings to my heart, even when it means mowing the lawn. I’ve decided that I am some kind of demented beach bum thing. It seems all I have done for many summers involves water and submersion therein. I suppose true beach bums don’t sail and kayak, but that is what makes me demented. I quite enjoy being demented… I’m fat… I need food. I think I’ll proofread this later. Hmm.. proofreading might ruin the weird scatterdness… Maybe I’ll even rant some more later. I have a report to write, and if I spare 5 minutes, I can complete the rest of the requirements for a gold palm. Yay me. I’m a super-scout/ubergeek/weirdo/etc/…

We had our first philmont shake down this weekend—It sucked… I mean… Talk about detail. We’re all at least 3^rd year scouts… Personally, I’m on my eighth year and working towards a gold palm. Needless to say, I didn’t need to be trained in the art of using a backpacking stove. I’ve been using stoves for years, I think I can handle it, but nevertheless, I had to demonstrate my stove pumping abilities. As if anyone can’t do that… Furthermore, I’ve learned that one must position the pot EXACTLY in the center of the stove. Don’t worry if you find this two hard—your spotters which must be positioned ninety degrees apart will help you line everything up. Don’t forget to light the match BEFORE turning the gas on. ( I never do that!! ). I would be remiss if I didn’t remind you to keep your head down and away when lighting the stove… Come on!!! I’ll risk blowing my head off with a backpacking stove if I do so choose. After the oohh so exiting stove demo, we were forced into a group stretching session… Before you leave after a break, always remember to say: “Is anyone NOT ready?”…

The rest of that campout was pretty good… Aside from the fact that Mr. B comandeered the campout. He apparently has the right to “steal” any campout he wishes. Against the better wishes of the PLC and everyone that matters he stomped on our biking plans and made us backpack! I brought my bike anyway though… Did some pretty sweet stoppies…

SAT scores came out today. I did pretty well although I am quite depressed with my math score; The questions are easy, I know I can do better than I did. It is just a matter of paying attention to detail. ( The score report will be out in two days… I can’t wait to laugh at all of my stupid mistakes. ). Anyway… I got: 590 CR, 600 W, 670 M, for a combined score of 1860. I’ll be retesting again in the September. I WILL do better. ( I feel like some kind of craaazy perfectionist )

Note: Title has no relation to topics of post…

I found this so amazing I just had to post about it… I was talking to Tyler on aim last night. ( like before star wars was out in the U.S. ). He just happend to metion that the movie had leaked already and that it was available on torrents… I dunno.. I just found it pretty amazing that it leaked that quickly…

Umm… I just went to see starwars ( this is several hours after the last paragraph ) with Joe :). It was fucking awesome. I have actually dreaded it for weeks. I had watched the trailers. I knew that mace windu was going to die… I feared seeing him die, but now that it is all over it’s not that bad. I also feared seeing Anikan take the path to the dark site, but that isn’t so bad either. It is done such that you end up hating Anikan at the end anway…

The evil concessions ended up sucking me in. I hadn’t planned on getting the large soda, but who could resist the $.1 plastic Star Wars cup? Certainly not I!… I now owe joe $4.27ish.

I think I’m too traumatized to blog any further… And so ends the series…

I finally finished that PHP tutorial I was working on for Ryan. It came out to only 17.5 pages, which means I left out an incredible about of information. ( I could easily add 5 more pages just elaborating on everything in it now… ) Perhaps I’ll continue adding to it just for the hell of it.

I actually felt like posting two hours ago… Just my luck… The MySQL server was down and now I don’t feel like posting and I dont’ even remember half of what I had planned on posting about.

One of those stupid viruses has been going around AIM lately. A message reading “This was cool, check it out.” is sent to everyone on an infected person’s buddy list. “This” is a link to an executable. People seem to be smart enough to click on it and run the executable… It really annoys me… I have recieved several of them in the last few days and I click everytime, just to spite them. I’m neither running AIM nor winndows—Can’t hurt me.

Alas, I once again was distracted. Ihad several paragraphs in line for the remainder of this post but they all seem to have seeped out of my mind. If I’m not too lazy, I might just think about replacing this with more bloggish informaiton…. ( when I remember… )

Ooo. I just rememberd. The title has a funny way of telling me what the post is supposed to be about. ( amazing, eh? ). I finally got around to trying VNC in linux last week. I had previously only used it with windows. I don’t really have Xvnc working the way I want ( I am using x0vncserver ), but that shall come in good time. I have gotten far enough for peeps to come in me, etc. Josh was nice enough to google penis ( safe search was on, sucker! ) and log me off of my x session. ( too bad the vnc server depended on that session.. hehe ). Ryan came in me as well… ( all he did was close my browser :’( ). I spent some time in josh and I did something mean, something very mean. He doesn’t know about it yet, but I get the feeling he’ll read this before he does. OH well… I’ll blog about that on the morrow. ( or later ) right now, it is off to bed with me.

The school is pleased to inform me that I will be honored at the undergraduate award ceremony to be held on Monday, May 23, 2005 at 1830. In fact, they’re so pleased that they mailed a letter and handed me one in school. (what a waste). This ceremony has gained a certain amount of presteige over the last several years, and they reccommend that the students being honored dress accordingly. To my parents, that screams “Run out and buy a sport jacket!!! (etc)”. I believe Garfield had it right: Whoever invented those things should be thrown out in the middle of the road and shot! ( he was talking about a christmas tree. ). I love how my arm movement is restricted so I feel like a chipmunk and I’ve yet to master the fine art of getting it on.

They swayed me… I walked into the store and I said to my parents “Black, take it or leave it!”. My father replied by saying “I don’t think they make black sport jackets”, I said “They better…”. It wasn’t long at all before we were raped by the sales hombre. It never fails. Never go shopping with dad, he always says yes to them. The sales hombre hooked me up with some black, but it apparently didn’t fit as well as the fake black. As if settling for the fake black jacket wasn’t enough, I had to settle for a black hawian print shirt. They didn’t have any all black, short sleeve dress shirts.

I just can’t get over it… Why the hell would I want to wear an article of cloathing with shoulder pads?!? As if I’m not fat enough… I get to put that ten pound (italian) coat thingy on and feel fatter.

The 3^rd Annual PUD cookout was today! I can proudly say I have been to all three, but this time I actually did something… Overall, the presentaition went well… ( no thanks to me of course… thanks joe ). They dudes at the place seemed pretty happy with what they saw. (though they seem to be easily impressed… )

The before the presentation didn’t go so well… We had a little trouble getting the computer hooked up to the projector. ( harder than it looks… ) When we finally did get it hooked up, it seems linux didn’t like it. We ended up showing the site on my monitor, which worked out pretty well.

The hard part over, we sat down for lunch. I was stupid enough to think I could challenge dick to an eating contest; I had 1^sts 2^nds and 3^rds… Dick had three complete meals, each including dessert and soda. My second plate consisted of only one hamburger. IN all, I had 2 hamburgers, 2 hotdogs, 2 sets of desserts ( yeah, they come in sets ) and two sodas… In the end, Dick failed to finish his third plate, therefore making me the winner by default… ( actually, he PWNED me )

…

An interesting turn of events today… Sometime ago, I had an idea, an interesting idea. As many of us php developers know, PHP is a rich language that comes with many built in functions and options to gain functionality through third party libraries, etc. Two of the more used of these libraries are MySQL and libCURL. It is curl I plan to talk about today.

Not too long ago, the School district installed a filtering mechanism provided by 8e6 technologies, through rinet, as is my understanding. This filtering device is clearly not what it is made out to be. While a good filter might sniff both incoming and outgoing packets, this filter only checks outgoing requests against a human-maintained blacklist (and keyword filter). Understandably, there is a lot of overhead involved in good filtering, but for those who are truly concerned, .3 seconds shouldn’t make that much difference. Because the filter blocks mainly by domain and the ip addresses they resolve to, one merely needs to bounce the blocked content off of an unblocked server I.e: divinelunacy.com is not blocked (yet), therefore, a simple php script can be used to take the content from addictinggames.com, rewrite the urls contained therein ( to bounce them ) and send it back to the user. In essence, it takes three lines of php to bypass the filtering mechanisms on a per-file basis.

$handle = curl_init();
curl_setopt( $handle, CURLOPT_URL, $this->url );
curl_exec($handle);

Of course, that isn’t very good… Regular expressions are easily used to rewrite all urls contained within a page (including stylesheet urls). All of that barely uses a measurable fraction of libCurl’s abilities. I also used the user option agent and set it to my user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050317 Firefox/1.0.2. And yeah, there was more beyond that. The actual bypassing mechanism and all of the mechanisms contained therein comes out to 229 lines of php with excessive commenting. I have written it from scratch about 3 times. It is now all object oriented PHP :). A similar, opensource program is available at ibypass.org, in case anyone wants to know… ( I’ll post mine to my digital portfolio as soon as I finish coding the wordpress plugin… )

Well, anyway, apparently the school doesn’t like being undermined like that. We had a nice long talk 5^th period today about lots of things.

There has been a lot going on with Tom/Corey lately ( we’re not even friends… ) and the fools ( “or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;” ) seem to think that I have something to do with it. I cannot enough emphasize the idiocy incurred by these assumptions. It seems these days that one cannot know even a simple server side scripting language without being a hacker. Now as if the hacker assumption isn’t enough, it is apparently odd that I am working alone. Yes, you heard that right. Apparently, if you know how to program, you must have lots of friends, you must be part of a group… Hey, I’m writing a php tutorial if anyone wants to be immediately blessed with infinite friends and prestige amongst hackers… Wait… I’m only a script kitty, how can that work? Ever feel like you were somehow caught in the middle of something big? Well, If I know anything, I’ll be sure to tell the police. Wait!!! Need I say it more blatantly? I am not a hacker. Oh wait, our illustrious net admin can’t tell the difference… Honestly, Rambacher , what were you thinking running a web server on windows? (feel free to provide an answer.) Are you aware of the numbers? Clearly you don’t realize that the line of best fit for the IIS market share from February 2002 to present has a negative slope… Now, just looking at the graphs, Apache seems to have the absolute value of that slope during the same time period. About 48.83% MORE servers run on Apache than on “Microsoft” (IIS). I won’t even get started on the steady decline in IE use compared to the Steady incline in Firefox. Just about any browser is better and more w3c compliant than IE, not to mention the security gains. I guess security and performance don’t matter these days. In case you are wondering, this wasn’t posted from school… ( obviously… )

So. For those of you whom I haven’t told, I am working on writing a digital portfolio plugin for wordrpess. Why? I don’t know why I am making it a wordpress plugin. ( the only reason I have been able to come up with is the backend… ) I am making it to house my the vast depths of /home/mario/, which contains many assorted things. Including a Fibonacci number generator written in C++ ( well, I did a php version too ). Who wouldn’t want to peruse that? ( Ok, I wouldn’t… )

Well, for those of you who read all the way down to here, I suppose I should tell the end of my interesting anecdote. I’ve lost my computer privledges. It is apparently worse to write the software than to use it. Afterall, they didn’t even ask me for names of those with access. ( and I actually didn’t use it… ). Were they to ask, I wouldn’t tell. They have the names they want, they have a martyr and as for the other names, they know I didn’t use SSL on the form. ( though urls were base64 encoded ). A post on the combinatorics POW tomorrow, methinks.

The stupid counter has been ticking for weeks; Counting down the days to what would either be the end of my life or a new beginning—the SAT. The test came and went and I’m no more insane than I was previously, but I am frightened of the possibility of retaking it at some point. At any rate, I don’t know if I’ll go to cumberland if I do take the SAT again. They were just sooo organized. I got there at about 0745 and there were lines of people stretching out through the doors and into the rain. Yeah, thats right… I had to wait in the rain. There were many persons there, most of whom had no idea where they were going. It didn’t help that there was only one teacher directing the hundreds of students. The room assignments were posted on the doors… Would have been nice if they had actually bothered to put a large attention drawing sign on top of them. Even when someone did find out what room to go to, there were no signs of direction, just that one teacher directing hundreds of studends. It didn’t help that they only had one person admitting studens per room. It takes a while to admitt 43 students one by one… It must have been past 0830 by the time the hombre finally got around to opening the test book. We got out around 1300. I admitted one on the math section and consciously got one wrong however, the one I [know I] got wrong is a grid-in and thus will not lose me any points. As for the critical reading and writing… Eh… I dislike them… I’ll definiltely do better on writing than reading though.

Before anything worth happening happens, I feel it is my civil duty ( to the society of me ) to point out that the title is obnoxiously long.

Yes, you read it right. I have a coke dealer now. Last week, I had a little talk with Aaron. ( “your mom” knows who he is… ) Nearly everyday, Aaron brings in a two liter bottle of soda. I am now in on this deal. I get 2-liters of coke on both Tuesday and Thursday. let the world rejoice, for a have a coke dealer.

Would you believe I have a coke whore as well? A lot of good that did… At lunch Tammy tried to steal my coke, which was no surprise. She trys everyday on the bus… Yesterday was different. She went for my 2-liter and succeeded. I then called her a coke whore. Apparently, girls don’t like being called whores. ( who knew? ). She didn’t say anything about it immediately, but on the bus she wouldn’t talk to me. Then she tried beating me up with a notebook, which went well, overall. The only problem was the teacher stalking the bus… She stalked us all the way to the middle school. The she came on the bus and flipped out at Tammy. It was pretty funny.

Oops. I’m out of order. Miss Ryan would not approve. I have a hero now too… Up until today, my Aaron was my hero. ( can’t not love the coke dealer… ) (excuse the preceding double negative.) Today, I found a new hero, a true hero. Mr. Harrison. He came to me in a time of dire need and gave me batteries for my calculator. For this, I shall be eternally grateful. In fact, If I weren’t busy writing this crap, I’d be building an alter.

One last thing before the rules and regulations… I removed a 10lb barbell from my backpack and distributed the weight more efficiently… It worked a lot better…

When in the course of computing (or life in general), one becomes pwned, prompt and powerful retaliation is necessary. As my first act of retaliation, I choose to prepend the pwnage with the negation operator. This removes from me the oh so intense pressure and gives me time to think. As my second act, I choose not to act, but to leave the negation as is; A negated pwn surely cannot hurt me and negating the negated pwn would certainly cause a syntax error. It is now in this state, shielded by the power of the Almighty logical negation operator that I choose to formulate a written retaliation in order to deffer all recurrences. [of pwnage]:

Henceforth, random pwns are disallowed. All those wishing to pwn me must submit a typewritten challenge using proper grammar and spelling. The letter must be no less than 2 paragraphs in length. The first paragraph should describe the challenge in detail, while the second should provide me with no less than eleven and a half reasons to accept the challenge. If the challenger fails to figure out how to make half a reason, the challenge will not be reviewed. if ( all requirements are met ) { The challenge will be reviewed. A typewritten response will be produced in no more than twenty three and twenty-six seventy eights hours. } If the challenge is felt to have bias or be otherwise unfair, it will be destroyed by means of fire in no more than thirteen hours [after being reviewed]. All destroyed challenge letters will be engulfed in flames atop the sacred rock. (I’ve yet to find one of those.)

In the event that the challenger wins the challenge, the right to call me pwned is not immediately granted. Pwnage is more than winning. For me to be “pwned”, I must unanimously be deemed “Stopped dead in my tracks” by a panel of upperclassmen judges, (selected by me) which shall be composed of no fewer than two persons. If one has the audacity to make a challenge, he best win; to lose a challenge put forth by one’s self is pathetic, and will, under all circumstances grant me the right to claim I have pwned the challenger.

Furthermore, I reserve the right to do whatever the hell I want. Don’t like it? Tough…