Divine Lunacy

The best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley… So they do. I had plans for a wonderful rant—a true rant. Unfortunately, I was under the influence of thirty-two ounces of coffee at the time… When the caffeine wore off, so did all my creativity. Now, I am left with hollow outlines of what was once a promising rant. oddly enough, I think I am succeeding in ranting about forgeting what I am supposed to be ranting about…

If I can’t rant, I’ll summarize; If I can’t summarize… I suck. I was given many presents today… Mr. Horne gave me some books, and a list of more to buy, then McNutty gave me a book.. and… gasp..no… work… he chuckled about it too… He walked in, ruined my summer.. and walked out laughing. FOOL! The chemistry work shouldn’t be so bad, but I’ve yet to recieve my english work for next year… Anyway… The hard cover versions of the books I’m supposed to buy are about $80 each.. not bad. I could get a paperback, or soft copy of one of them for around $30, but is that what I really want?

Class day was today. It sucked, but it does provide me with ample oportunity to bitch at Trogisch. That bitch. I’m not sure if it was his decision, but class day was moved back until 1300… Now, Trogie, since when has class day taken fewer than fifty-two minutes? It hasn’t, you moron? So why did you try to make it?… CAUSE YOU’RE AN IDIOT. Previously, class day has always been in the moring. You know… MAKING IT EARIER… MIGHT help with the sweating my bawls off factor. soo… did anyone see the old guy with the little kid? ( Austin? ).. Just thought I’d make it known… That’s my uncle, Mr. Polachek’s partner in crime, for over 40? years…hehe

I had an idea today. Read carefully, this doesn’t happen often… ::giggle:: Damn, I’m badass. In short, I plan to make a wordpress plugin to post my wordpress posts to an Lj… What fun!!! Well, the programming part anyway. Live journal is beginning to piss me off. ( time for a hey you guys type of thing.. ) HEY YOU GUYS!!!… Blogger is MUCH better and it is made by Google ( definitely a + [one googol] ). Short of paying, live journal provides no means of template customization. Note: I refer not to changing colors and petty things of that sort; I refer to actually editing the [X]HTML of one’s template. I also find the Blogger interface muchos sexier. ( ooo.. look at me. I hablo spanish… )

i 4m 74king 7h3 7ruck ( either that or the car… ) 70 5ch001 70m0rr0w. :)… and the next day.. and the next day.. and the next day.. and the next day…. see a pattern here? I thought so. I’ve already taken my physics exam ( which I got a B+ on after the 15 point scale… ), so I am freeeee after my history exam tomorrow!!! Yay!.. Tim and I are going to Bert’s for breakfast… Josh is stowing himself away in the trunk/bed.

Its no secret that I hate telephones and completely and utterly detest cellphones. On the bus today, Lea asked me why I hate phones. I didn’t really have a good answer, but I’ve had plenty of time to think since then… Here are some reasons/excuses:

1. If you call me on the phone while I’m home… If I’m home, I’m on the internet. Instant message me, shithead!!! Don’t make me get up and walk 15 feet to the nearest phone.
2. If I’m not home… You’ll ask me to call you back? What’s with that? If you really want to talk to me, you’ll call me back… Then we’re back to number 1…
3. I am on the internet. You know my email address. Don’t lie to me… You do. If you are reading this then you have ways to obtain my email address. ( you could try a whois on divinelunacy.com, or you might read my LiveJournal user info ) Get to it…
4. I don’t talk when I’m not on the phone; what makes you think I’ll talk when I am on the phone?
5. I don’t want to talk to you. I’d rather talk to a telemarketer. I have no problem telling them to f*** off.
6. Cellphones… Ah yes. What good are they going to do me? I don’t want to talk to you anyway, and a cellphone is just another good way for you to reach me.
7. What’s that you say? You’re dead? Nothing is too sensitive to tell me via email… If you don’t like that, get your ass over here!
8. I don’t need a cellphone incase I get lost… I’m an Eagle Scout… I don’t get lost. ( accidentally, that is. )
9. If my car breaks down… oh well.. sucks to be me. I’ll just sit there like an idiot then cry about it for days to come…
10. If I’m attacked by wolves… or other animals: I’m an Eagle Scout… I’ll stab them and burn their eyes out then eat them…
11. If I’m drowning… I don’t think I’d swim with a cellphone. I’m an Eagle Scout, I dont’ drown.
12. Brother Soccer six… My brother doesn’t play soccer… Ghee!
13. I have more sophisticated ways to set off bombs… Cellphones are so old school!

I should be at the Math League party right now. This sucks. I have no transportation. ( now is where the ranting starts… ) I would drive there but, I can’t find my driving directions, my sister has My dad’s car, my mom has my mom’s car, I’m not ‘certified’ to drive the truck ( manual transmission ) and my Dad is too sick to drive me. I bet the party sucks without me there… ( can’t type that with a straight face… ) In my time of great depression, I think I might make a list of links in the navbar and maybe start work on a Coke theme

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/…

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.

I watched “The Passion of the Christ” this weekend. Sure, it gives a pretty accurate historical account, but as far as a movie goes, it is just a bunch of blood and gore. Yeah… what is with those freaky devil scenes? how about that one where he is just sitting on the cracked orangish floor screaming? Who had the idea to make King Herod such a fruit? That was kind of funny. Addmittedly, my sister and I were laughing histerically at that and the scene in which the children were yelling at judas. Where is all that excessive beatind documented? It seems as though Mel Gibson decided to greatly over dramify things. So, how about the shooting blood at the end of the movie? Test if he’s dead? Everyone knows that if you stab a dead person, the blood will just kind of “meander” out. Judging by the exaggarated gushing blood, Jesus must’ve been alive. Basically, its a really bad movie, and we all know how it turns out, but if you want a taste of what Jesus’ crucifiction may have been like, go ahead and watch the movie.

Its that time of the year again!!! Yes, Its Exam week! After thinking about it, all I really have to study for is English and History, so it should be a pretty relaxing week…

wooohoo! I finally added that next page button… It works and everything. Took me no more than 5 mintues to add and stylize.

I spent like 4 hours talking to some random 7^th grader yesterday. Hehe. I really freaked him out. I knew when his great-grandfather died and his name. I knew his uncle’s name and his former address. It was really intersting to see him react to that. I have no idea why I was even talking to him, and I am surpired that he never blocked me. If I were him, even I would have blocked me! Well, I blame him for how crappy my report came out! :-p I spent all my time talking to him, and I should have been drafting a literary masterpeice.

No TSA this week :(, at least not for us non engineering people. All the engineering students took a trip to the guy in mass to discuss the playground. This means the website will be delayed at least another week, but I had nothing to do with it this time!!

Tom, and Tim: Hey, I’ll get your damned CD’s eventually. You can’t be too demanding when you are dealing with such goods.

I took my planned walk to the little general today! I had originally planned to buy $20 worth of pixi sticks. Unfortunately, after grabbing all the pixi sticks on the shelf and checking out the total was only $8.56; Only 16 packages of pixi-sticks. Not to speak in the in the past future tense ( it only exists in my minnd ), but we gave jill the pixi sticks today. It was mildly interesting, but of course, the more fun part was snorting some from the package I kept for myself.

On sunday and monday, I watched Lord of the Rings, Fellowship of the ring. Two hours of the movie were shown each day. During most of the commercial breaks, I went to my computer and talked to people on aim. When I arrived at my computer, my idle time was always 12-13 minutes. The commercial breaks lasted 4 minutes. See what i am getting at? The commercial breaks were in a ratio of 1:3 with the movie. For a four hour movie, that is 1.3333… hours of commercial break!!! Oddly enough, that number is also where the infinite sum of (1/4)^x converges, which is basically the answer to the problem of the week this week. Think about all those commercial breaks… Had I stayed and watched all of them, that would have been 160 30-second commercial Breaks. That is a lot of commercial.

Math league was yesterday… TSA was yesterday… Both of them were at 1400. I had to blow off TSA this week to go be a math geek *gasp*. It was go0d though, they were some pretty good problems. Fun problems.

It has been, for some time now my suspiscion that Google plans world conquest. With each passing day, my proof becomes more sound. What do you think of when I say google? Most people probably just think of a search engine, a very good one. Just a white page with an image, some buttons and a text box. Oh, but google is oo so much more. Ever notice the links at the “bottom”? Try clicking the link labeled “About Google”…You will be surprised. Don’t get me wrong, if anyone is going to take over the world, I definitely opt for google. They do everything right, and take everything the extra mile, as is the Google Philosiphy.

There is this mystical Force at google that goes by the name of Google Labs. They pump out some pretty crazy stuff, and they do some pretty crazy stuff. Google labs is all about research and Development. Perhaps one of the more interesting items released By google labs is Google Compute, a Distrubited Computing system. In short, google compute allows google to take advantage of your computers idle time to

…worthwhile endeavors, including projects to improve Google and its services…

It is the Google and its services that freaks me out… :-p

Ok, so you want a job at google labs? Google Does alot of problem solving things to find potential Google Labs Employees. The most recent Wonderful peice of insanity is the GLAT (Google Labs Aptitude Test)

None of the problems are that difficult, and most are pretty fun (there are no problems with unix >:o [unless they speak of the women…])…some of them might even give you a laugh…I will post more on “solutions” later.

Around 1800 tonight, I was caught in what seems to have been a ddos (distributed Denial of Service). I suddenly found my internet connection lost, and promtly connected to my router. My outgoing seemed to be near dead, and everything incoming was on eiher port 445 or 3531. Port 445 is commonly used for samba, but many times, it is also used by worms that Exploit LSASS. I am running linux, so that is really no threat to me. All signs pointed to me being pinnged to death. My router could not handle all the information coming in, and hence was forced to deny the LAN its services. I have tracerouted some of the Ip addresses. Most of the ones on port 445 seem to be from verizon, and they are in a relitively tight Ip range. The attacks on port 3531 were more varied in ISP. The attack lasted for 15 minutes, until I was finally able to obtain a new ip address. I am now running ethereal incase another attack does happen, this way I will have more info.

I expect to have this template finished very soon. It is getting very tedious tweaking the finer points…I really hate that.