Beware of Ghost Ships Carrying Cannibal Rats

This is not a story you expect to read every day:

A ghost ship carrying nothing but disease-ridden rats could be about to make land on Britain’s shore, experts have warned.

The Lyubov Orlova cruise liner has been drifting across the north Atlantic for the better part of a year, and salvage hunters say there is a strong chance it is heading this way.

Built in Yugoslavia in 1976, the unlucky vessel was abandoned in a Canadian harbour after its owners were embroiled in a debt scandal and failed to pay the crew.

The authorities in Newfoundland tried to sell the hull for scrap – valued at £600,000 – to the Dominican Republic, but cut their losses when it came loose in a storm on the way.

Sending the ship off into international waters, Transport Canada said it was satisfied the Lyubov Orlova “no longer poses a threat to the safety of [Canadian] offshore oil installations, their personnel or the marine environment”.

I’m mostly posting this because of the sheer weirdness of the story and the creep factor. It is also kind of fun to think of scenarios involving ghost ships filled with cannibal rats beaching itself on an inhabited island. I wonder if rats that turn to cannibalism continue the practice after they’ve found an alternate food source. If so they could be an effective method of reducing rat populations in human settlements.

The Raid: Redemption

I’m usually a little slow when it comes to watching movies. This is mostly due to the fact that I don’t pay much attention to what movies are coming out so I only hear about them after they’ve been released for quite a while. Fortunately my group of friends give me recommendations so I usually end up seeing the cool movies, eventually.

I’m a big fan of martial arts movies. So when one of my friends recommended The Raid: Redemption as a good entry in this genre I decided to look into it. Holy shit, it was good.

Effectively Indonesia schooled every other nation in the art of making modern martial arts movies. The fight choreography was top notch. Rama, the protagonist, didn’t succumb to relying on the same set of moves for every fight, which helped make each fight feel fresh. Too often modern martial arts movies get stale as the later fights are merely replays of earlier fights with new opponents. The Raid also manages to have just enough story to make you care about the characters but not so much that it gets in the way of the balls to the walls action.

All in all I highly recommend this film if you’re a fan of martial arts or action movies.

WristCoin Update

Although life has done its best to prevent me from working on WristCoin I’m finally getting close to a version 1.0 release. It is now at a point where I feel comfortable posting some screenshots of the application and giving a brief explanation of what it does.

When you open WristCoin on your Pebble you will be greeted with this screen:

wrist-coin-main-menu

This screen lists the three exchanges that WristCoin currently works with (Bitstamp, Mt. Gox, and BTC-e), fetches price information from each of the exchanges, and displays the price of the last Bitcoin sale on each exchange. I’m thinking about changing it to display the 24-hour average instead but I haven’t settled on that yet.

If you highlight and click an exchange you will be greeted with additional pricing information:

wrist-coin-extended-information

This screen shows various pricing information for a selected exchange as well as the volume of Bitcoin that has been trade on that exchange in the last 24 hours. Clicking the back button on the Pebble will return you to the main menu.

At this point the only thing I really have left to do is write better error handling code. I’ve created an icon for the app but I’m not entirely happy with it. Needless to say I’m no artist. But things are progressing smoothly and I must say that I’m very impressed with the latest beta of the Pebble iOS application.

Glorious Super Mario World Hack

I’m a huge fan of hacking, which should be made obvious by my yearly pilgrimages to Defcon. Although I’ve seen many hacks that have impressed me few have impressed me as thoroughly as this one:

It’s at 1:39 in the video where things really start going pear-shaped, as the fabric of the game’s reality comes apart at the seams for a few seconds before inexplicably transitioning to Mario-themed versions of Pong and Snake. Understanding what’s going on here requires some deep knowledge of the Super NES’ internal sprite and memory management, which is explained in detail here and here.

Suffice it to say that the first minute-and-a-half or so of this TAS is merely an effort to spawn a specific set of sprites into the game’s Object Attribute Memory (OAM) buffer in a specific order. The TAS runner then uses a stun glitch to spawn an unused sprite into the game, which in turn causes the system to treat the sprites in that OAM buffer as raw executable code. In this case, that code has been arranged to jump to the memory location for controller data, in essence letting the user insert whatever executable program he or she wants into memory by converting the binary data for precisely ordered button presses into assembly code (interestingly, this data is entered more quickly by simulating the inputs of eight controllers plugged in through simulated multitaps on each controller port).

What makes this hack so impressive is that it didn’t rely on any emulator glitches. Instead the hack was performed on an actual Super Nintendo using only a standard controller as an input device:

Last week’s Awesome Games Done Quick “total control” demo is also notable for being run on actual, bare-bones SNES hardware rather than on an emulator (as is standard with most TAS videos). The robotic player at the event was powered by a Raspberry Pi hooked up to a special adapter (mounted amusingly to an NES R.O.B. controller) that let the computer send its preprogrammed controller inputs into the controller ports at superhuman, frame-level speed. Thus, the demonstration proved that this exploit was present in the actual system and cartridge released by Nintendo and not some sort of artifact of faulty emulation. That isn’t a foregone conclusion, either, as syncing up the vagaries of split-second timing and memory management between real and emulated hardware are not trivial (this is yet another area where the idea of perfect emulation accuracy might come in handy).

I can only tip my hat in awe at the sheer quality of this hack. Here is a video of the hack:

I’ve Got Nothing

I spend most of last night working on the finishing touches to WristCoin and planning a new project. So I don’t have anything else for you today. But I will say that the Pebble wristwatch is an interesting piece of hardware to program for. There are certainly some limitations, which cannot be avoided when you consider its diminutive size and several day battery life, but overall the API is pretty well thought out and complete (which is worth noting because the SDK is still in beta).

The Spirit of Metal in Nature

Mother nature again proves that it was metal before the gods of metal bestowed the heavenly music upon us:

This assassin bug sticks the corpses of it’s devoured prey (ants!) onto it’s back for camouflage and to hide it’s scent from other ants. On top of being an obvious “meat shield”, this also allows the assassin bug to infiltrate ant colonies while posing as one of their own.

And this is what the thing looks like walking around with the corpses of its enemies stuck to it:

metal-bug

Obviously this thing belongs on the cover of a death metal album. In fact this song came to mind as I was reading about nature’s little genocide machine:

Welcome to 2014

If you’re in the Central Time Zone then it is now officially 2014 (at least according to the atomic clock this server synchronizes to). 2013 was an interesting year to say the least and 2014 looks like it will keep that trend going.

I will be taking the day off of blogging as I do most holidays. There’s much to do outside of the blogging world and there is a distinct possibility I will be nursing a hangover. After all, studies now indicates that people who don’t drink tend to die young.

Enough with the Political Grandstanding

I haven’t spent much time writing about the shooting in Colorado because, frankly, there isn’t much to say. The event is still too recent for any solid facts to be available. But there is something I do feel the need to bring up. Whenever a heinous act like a school shooting or a bombing occurs there seems to be a need for people to hit the Internet and write about the perpetrator’s political viewpoints as a criticism against everybody who shares them.

When a perpetrator holds “conservative” (quotes necessary because the term has been bastardized beyond recognition) beliefs the “liberals” (quotes used for the same reason) run to their keyboards and post about it. They treat it as an “Ah ha!” moment, a correlation that proves that “conservatives” are violent psychopaths. After the shooting in Colorado I saw many “conservatives” posting this story:

In one Facebook post, Pierson attacks the philosophies of economist Adam Smith, who through his invisible-hand theory pushed the notion that the free market was self-regulating. In another post, he describes himself as “Keynesian.”

“I was wondering to all the neoclassicals and neoliberals, why isn’t the market correcting itself?” he wrote. “If the invisible hand is so strong, shouldn’t it be able to overpower regulations?”

Pierson also appears to mock Republicans on another Facebook post, writing “you republicans are so cute” and posting an image that reads: “The Republican Party: Health Care: Let ’em Die, Climate Change: Let ’em Die, Gun Violence: Let ’em Die, Women’s Rights: Let ’em Die, More War: Let ’em Die. Is this really the side you want to be on?”

Apparently the Colorado shooter held “liberal” beliefs and that is proof that “liberals” are violent psychopaths.

Here’s the thing, nut jobs exist in all political philosophies. Just because a perpetrator of a heinous act held “conservative”, “liberal”, libertarian, communist, or anarchist beliefs doesn’t prove anything about anybody else who holds similar beliefs. Bringing up a perpetrator’s political beliefs as a serious criticism against everybody else who holds similar beliefs is fucking retarded.

With that said, this is aimed at the people who bring up a perpetrator’s political beliefs as a serious criticism. If you’re doing it for LULZ you get a pass.

Nothing to See Here

Once again I spent my night working on WristCoin. It turns out that doing asynchronous lookups of Bitcoin prices and sending them to the Pebble as they come in is a recipe for bad times. The Pebble can only handle a single incoming message, which it must process before it will accept another incoming message. There is no way that I’ve found to check from the phone side whether or not the Pebble is ready to accept another message so I had to switch over to synchronous lookups, which is not ideal in my book (I like firing and forgetting as opposed to waiting around for each price to arrive before looking up the next price). Considering how resource constrained the Pebble is I do understand this design decision but it’s a pain in my ass.