A group of pedestrian hackers called Cross Anytime announced their discovery of several back doors or "cheats" using crosswalk buttons at many intersections. The 3658-item list has been released on their website http://www.crosswalkbuttonhacks.com/.
While some of the codes have been obtained through intelligence gathering and analysis of illegally obtained push-button systems, most were uncovered through the brute-force approach. "It's wasn't as easy as it sounds," Walker said. "Contrary to what the kiddies may think, going crazy with clicks doesn't help much. You need to understand the inner workings of the systems - not to mention differences in the push-intervals. For instance, the McKenzie mkI model is based on dual 1.2 second cycles (meaning that long clicks and pauses last 1.2 seconds) while the mkII model uses a 1.5 second cycle (pauses are 1.5 seconds long). And the models look almost identical to the casual pedestrian!"
The most popular hack, which works on most models, is the "Instant Walk." Three short clicks, followed by two long, one short, two long, and three short; turn any crosswalk signal from "don't walk" to "walk" with a matching change in the traffic signals.
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Crosswalk Button Hacks: Cross Anytime!
Have you ever watched someone manically push the crosswalk buttons? Did you think they were fools? I did. But, as it turns out. . . they were on the right path!
It's Times Like This I Want To Revoke The First Amendment
* click image to enlarge *
Listening on the radio to the BTK strangler testify, in sociopathic, unemotional detail about each of his ten murders, or "projects," as he calls them. . .that's when you start to wonder about our right to hear this. Get this guy out of the papers and into the hoosegow!
While we're on the first amendment (sort of), would we have been permitted to see Janet Jackson's nipple if Justin Timberlake had, say, cut it off instead of flashed it?
---o0o---
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
The Posies Release New CD!
The Posies
[from: billboard.com] Seattle-based power pop veterans The Posies will break a seven-year new album drought [jack note: in the meantime, they have released a two live disks, a box set, solo albums, an E.P., and another mini-E.P.] with "Every Kind of Light," due Tuesday (June 28) via Rykodisc. The 12-track record would appear to have been a long time in the making. But according to co-frontman Jon Auer, its actual recording was a lightning-quick process capping a half-decade of the band's adventures in limbo."We'd actually officially broken up after 'Success' in 1998 and called it a day," Auer tells Billboard.com. "We actually decided it was over before making that record. Then we toured it and said good night." Read the rest here.
---o0o---
Update On The Former Presidents Club: POTUS Bush & Clinton Hang Out In Kennebunkport
POTUS Pals - click to enlarge
The friendship between President Clinton and President Bush (the elder) continues. Early on, it felt like a marriage of convenience, but it really appears the two Presidents have come to genuinely like each other. The club just isn't that big anymore--President Ford is now in his nineties, and for all the great things President Carter has done, he probably is not anyone's first pick to bring to a party... /jack
AP - Tue Jun 28,10:55 AM ET
Former presidents Bill Clinton, left, and George H.W. Bush smile for wellwishers before starting a round of golf at the Cape Arundel Golf Club in Kennebunkport, Maine, Tuesday, June 28, 2005. Clinton was in the state Monday autographing his book, 'My Life' . Clinton was invited to Kennebunkport by his former political rival. The two got to know each other and became friends while touring countries affected by the tsunami. (AP Photo/Pat Wellenbach)
Eat Your Own Dogfood
Actor Lorne Greene used to flack the dogfood Alpo on TV, saying "it's so good I feed it to my own dogs." It gained currency during the dot-com craze, and the phrase is still used most commonly in technology companies. I believe it is one of the central tenets of quality assurance (as opposed to QA's subdiscipline, testing).
"Eating your own dog food" means that you use the software you create, or play the games you make. In other businesses, you might actually eat the food you serve, watch the TV shows you make, or use the product you manufacture. This can be taken to extremes, of course, as in the Not Invented Here syndrome, where you not only eat your own dogfood, but you also won't touch anyone else's [1].
Ben Hamper, writing about life as a shoprat at General Motors in his book Rivethead, tells how anyone foolish enough to drive a foreign car into the employee parking lot would find their car keyed, tagged with spray paint, mirrors ripped off, and possibly rammed by a one-ton pickup. That is an extreme punishment for not eating your own dogfood.
Why should you eat your own dogfood? You actually get to know the product you are making. By knowing it, you may get some ideas about how to increase its goodness. In the case of games and software, problems, bugs and deficencies become apparent often only after extended use by a variety of people. Eating your own dogfood shows you believe in your own product. If you work at a brewery, a game company, or bakery, it probably works pretty well for you, if you manufacture cod liver oil, syrup of ipecac, chastity belts, or experimental aircraft. . .not so much.
[1] "Not Invented Here," describes a company that will use nothing developed by "outsiders." In many cases companies don't know a solution already exists. But even more often, the organization believes they can produce a superior product. Apple Computer, from System 1 through OS9 did not include many U.I. innovations (from, say, Windows) because they were not accounted for in Apple's human interface guidelines (a great document, by the way).
Apple rejected any change they did not invent...which, of course, ignores the fact that Apple cribbed most of this stuff from innovations at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in the first place. In the open source world, at any time, there are several groups working on different projects that all do the same thing.
Large corporations like Microsoft reject all use of open source software...because they feel the source sharing requirements are too onerous. Therefore they must come up with all these tools in house, no matter how much it costs and no matter how poorly the tool emulates what is already available for free.
---o0o---
"Eating your own dog food" means that you use the software you create, or play the games you make. In other businesses, you might actually eat the food you serve, watch the TV shows you make, or use the product you manufacture. This can be taken to extremes, of course, as in the Not Invented Here syndrome, where you not only eat your own dogfood, but you also won't touch anyone else's [1].
Ben Hamper, writing about life as a shoprat at General Motors in his book Rivethead, tells how anyone foolish enough to drive a foreign car into the employee parking lot would find their car keyed, tagged with spray paint, mirrors ripped off, and possibly rammed by a one-ton pickup. That is an extreme punishment for not eating your own dogfood.
Why should you eat your own dogfood? You actually get to know the product you are making. By knowing it, you may get some ideas about how to increase its goodness. In the case of games and software, problems, bugs and deficencies become apparent often only after extended use by a variety of people. Eating your own dogfood shows you believe in your own product. If you work at a brewery, a game company, or bakery, it probably works pretty well for you, if you manufacture cod liver oil, syrup of ipecac, chastity belts, or experimental aircraft. . .not so much.
[1] "Not Invented Here," describes a company that will use nothing developed by "outsiders." In many cases companies don't know a solution already exists. But even more often, the organization believes they can produce a superior product. Apple Computer, from System 1 through OS9 did not include many U.I. innovations (from, say, Windows) because they were not accounted for in Apple's human interface guidelines (a great document, by the way).
Apple rejected any change they did not invent...which, of course, ignores the fact that Apple cribbed most of this stuff from innovations at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in the first place. In the open source world, at any time, there are several groups working on different projects that all do the same thing.
Large corporations like Microsoft reject all use of open source software...because they feel the source sharing requirements are too onerous. Therefore they must come up with all these tools in house, no matter how much it costs and no matter how poorly the tool emulates what is already available for free.
---o0o---
Monday, June 27, 2005
A Poem by James Wright: Lying In A Hammock At William Duffy's Farm In Pine Island, Minnesota
One of my favorite poems by James Wright, a powerhouse mid 20th century American Poet.
Lying In A Hammock At William Duffy's Farm In Pine Island, Minnesota
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.
- James Wright
---o0o---
Lying In A Hammock At William Duffy's Farm In Pine Island, Minnesota
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.
- James Wright
---o0o---
My Worst Jobs No. 5 - Design Insanity - Hype, Shuck, and Jive In The Dot-Com Years
Design Intelligence was formed in the middle of the dot-com boom. D.I. was something of an anomaly in that dot-com bubble. . .software was blase. Everyone was doing a dot.com, and if you weren't, well, you and your company were schlubs. Even the most gossamer and flimsy crackpot schemes were nailing down fat first and second rounds of serious capitalization. Some of the kookiest web sites were even going public (like the sock monkey site and a web site that sold dog food). People were streaming into Seattle faster than in the Yukon gold rush of '97.
Design Intelligence was a well-funded startup poised to create a Pagemaker-slayer. It would be the first commercial software with a web-based browser interface. Design Intelligence
had serious artistic underpinnings; they liked to think of D.I. as a heroic foray by artists into real software. A lot of time and money was spent nailing down patent rights to the underlying technology. A lot of time and $$$ was spent on green crystals [1] and the U.I. while the guts of the project languished. Between securing patents, trademarks, and copyrights, and mounting a glitzy and facile marketing campaign, people sort of forgot about the software we were supposed to create.
On the face of it, the software was exciting because it used "design intelligence" to create good looking print and web pages. The user did not have to be a designer. We did all the thinking for you and then formatted your input into a gorgeous document! It looked like a license to print money. I wanted on the gravy train.
Working there combined a bunch of things I liked: art and photos, typography, book and document making, publishing, story-telling, internet linkage, and software. In the end, the designers and powers that be decided we couldn't do all the thinking for you, and rather than doing the designing for you, we reverted to the old dreaded mode of garbage in, garbage out. . .e.g., if you didn't know what you were doing, your output might look terrible. This is exactly what happed like SALSA!, it was impossible to protect the end user from themselves (without spending a lot more money), although the marketing blather never told you that. Because you could not protect end users from themselves, it became a power users tool and anyone less than a power user would just have to pound sand. Alas, the power users who could create gems with iPublish wouldn't use it; it didn't have the power user features they needed because it was designed to be used the average Joe.
The enterprise was shrouded in a mantle of secrecy. There were paper shredders all over the place. I remember specifically being urged not to discuss anything with my family.
My nominal boss was reluctant to hire me (wisely as it turned out for him). But I wanted in and I called them, and emailed them and "pinged" them daily. They finally relented. I took a huge pay cut, and jumped from being a senior manager at a public company to an individual contributor role in a startup. I was stuck in a dark room with two other bizarre testers and one normal one (Mark Ferkingstad).
It wasn't long before I realized it was all a cheap facade. Once you stepped behind the painted stage flats, they were inventing it as they stumbled ahead. The people who weren't just blowhards were locked into seriously delusional thinking.
They built the company using every bad consultant, corporate leech, huckster and flim-flam man you'd ever met. They talked about who knew whom, regaling each other with past war stories and blew smoke up each others asses until they all believed they were about to change the world. It was an exercise in mass delusion . . . guys pulling down six figures dropped by a couple days a week to pontificate about typography, or about their multi-tiered marketing scheme. vPeople smelled money and everyone was searching for their piece of the pie. The rest of us hoped to get through it, and maybe even cash in some of our modest stock options, if we ever did succeed in pulling it off (which was still up in the air). It was not easy to drink the Kool-aid tm.
Everyone was half as smart as they thought they were, and in particular, me. I had walked away from another project with many of the same delusions and organizational insanities. I couldn't see the handwriting on the wall; I didn't want to see it. So I hopped on board.
As is often the case in a startup with grand plans, there was not nearly enough money to accomplish what we set out to do. So they decided to put out something that would pretty much work, and really make it good in version 2 (Software Startup Delusion No. 5). Version 1 either so damages your reputation so badly that you can't possibly recover, or it it stiffs and you are left with no money.
I bailed right after they released Version 1. DI offered more stock, money, and a promotion two bumps up the ladder. It was like being handed the helm of The Titantic an hour after they hit the iceberg. It was everything I wanted, a year too late and with no possibility of changing anything. I headed for greener pastures.
[1] OXYDOL: Detergent w/ green crystals. One of our marketing people at SALSA often told the story of Oxydol...a detergent that sold poorly until they added those famous green crystals. The green crystals had nothing to do with laundering clothing...they were nothing but some harmless material colored bright green. We had to be ever alert for our own green crystals. I never actually heard the marketing guys ask for or think about features in i-Publish. They just wanted to identify the presence of green crystals and then flog them in the marketing materials.
---o0o---
Design Intelligence was a well-funded startup poised to create a Pagemaker-slayer. It would be the first commercial software with a web-based browser interface. Design Intelligence
had serious artistic underpinnings; they liked to think of D.I. as a heroic foray by artists into real software. A lot of time and money was spent nailing down patent rights to the underlying technology. A lot of time and $$$ was spent on green crystals [1] and the U.I. while the guts of the project languished. Between securing patents, trademarks, and copyrights, and mounting a glitzy and facile marketing campaign, people sort of forgot about the software we were supposed to create.
On the face of it, the software was exciting because it used "design intelligence" to create good looking print and web pages. The user did not have to be a designer. We did all the thinking for you and then formatted your input into a gorgeous document! It looked like a license to print money. I wanted on the gravy train.
Working there combined a bunch of things I liked: art and photos, typography, book and document making, publishing, story-telling, internet linkage, and software. In the end, the designers and powers that be decided we couldn't do all the thinking for you, and rather than doing the designing for you, we reverted to the old dreaded mode of garbage in, garbage out. . .e.g., if you didn't know what you were doing, your output might look terrible. This is exactly what happed like SALSA!, it was impossible to protect the end user from themselves (without spending a lot more money), although the marketing blather never told you that. Because you could not protect end users from themselves, it became a power users tool and anyone less than a power user would just have to pound sand. Alas, the power users who could create gems with iPublish wouldn't use it; it didn't have the power user features they needed because it was designed to be used the average Joe.
The enterprise was shrouded in a mantle of secrecy. There were paper shredders all over the place. I remember specifically being urged not to discuss anything with my family.
My nominal boss was reluctant to hire me (wisely as it turned out for him). But I wanted in and I called them, and emailed them and "pinged" them daily. They finally relented. I took a huge pay cut, and jumped from being a senior manager at a public company to an individual contributor role in a startup. I was stuck in a dark room with two other bizarre testers and one normal one (Mark Ferkingstad).
It wasn't long before I realized it was all a cheap facade. Once you stepped behind the painted stage flats, they were inventing it as they stumbled ahead. The people who weren't just blowhards were locked into seriously delusional thinking.
They built the company using every bad consultant, corporate leech, huckster and flim-flam man you'd ever met. They talked about who knew whom, regaling each other with past war stories and blew smoke up each others asses until they all believed they were about to change the world. It was an exercise in mass delusion . . . guys pulling down six figures dropped by a couple days a week to pontificate about typography, or about their multi-tiered marketing scheme. vPeople smelled money and everyone was searching for their piece of the pie. The rest of us hoped to get through it, and maybe even cash in some of our modest stock options, if we ever did succeed in pulling it off (which was still up in the air). It was not easy to drink the Kool-aid tm.
Everyone was half as smart as they thought they were, and in particular, me. I had walked away from another project with many of the same delusions and organizational insanities. I couldn't see the handwriting on the wall; I didn't want to see it. So I hopped on board.
As is often the case in a startup with grand plans, there was not nearly enough money to accomplish what we set out to do. So they decided to put out something that would pretty much work, and really make it good in version 2 (Software Startup Delusion No. 5). Version 1 either so damages your reputation so badly that you can't possibly recover, or it it stiffs and you are left with no money.
I bailed right after they released Version 1. DI offered more stock, money, and a promotion two bumps up the ladder. It was like being handed the helm of The Titantic an hour after they hit the iceberg. It was everything I wanted, a year too late and with no possibility of changing anything. I headed for greener pastures.
[1] OXYDOL: Detergent w/ green crystals. One of our marketing people at SALSA often told the story of Oxydol...a detergent that sold poorly until they added those famous green crystals. The green crystals had nothing to do with laundering clothing...they were nothing but some harmless material colored bright green. We had to be ever alert for our own green crystals. I never actually heard the marketing guys ask for or think about features in i-Publish. They just wanted to identify the presence of green crystals and then flog them in the marketing materials.
---o0o---
Sunday, June 26, 2005
Bomb Shelters, Inc.
click the card to enlarge
When I was growing up, people were building fallout shelters everywhere, although I never actually saw one. The poor folks in the valley just didn't build them. But, up on the hill, you heard about people actually building them in their houses. At the very least, a lot of them were, as my friend Kevin Curran once said "sandbagging the jam closet."
---o0o---
Saturday, June 25, 2005
Woohoo! Let Their Breasts Swing Free!
Workers at the Dept. of Justice have removed the blue drapes covering the "naughty parts" of the aluminum statues at the Department of Justice.
The Spirit of Justice, with her one--quite attractive--breast exposed, and the shirtless male Majesty of Law, are finally freed from Attorney General Asscraft's fig leaves.
The drapes were installed 3 1/2 years ago--at a cost of $8,000--because former Attorney General Aschcroft (a fundamentalist prig) lived in fear he might be photographed with a winsome breast peeking over his shoulder, as he indeed was in this early photograph.
---o0o---
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