Scatmania

Hmm… as part of my ongoing work with Abnib v3.0, I’ve noticed a couple of interesting little quirks in the way that LiveJournal handles security for “friends only” and “private” posts. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve found a way to - for any given user - produce a list of the times, dates, and URLs of all posts made by anybody - even ones to which I don’t have access. Not terribly disturbing news, as I still can’t get access to the content of the posts or even the comments to them, but it’s an “opening” - a “way in” - which could potentially lead to a full-blown exploit.

For example, I can tell you that there is a post on Andy’s blog that I’m not allowed to read, that he wrote on the 17th of Januaryat about quarter past four in the afternoon (I hope you don’t mind me using you as my “guinea pig”, Andy - you’re the first person I came to who had a “recent” private post).

The numbers near the end of LiveJournal post URLs are supposed to be semi-random to prevent people from just “guessing” their way to posts, but it turns out this isn’t necessary. I’ve e-mailed LiveJournal to try to explain their flaw to them, but as I can’t be arsed to debug it myself (hey: not my weblog at risk, here), I don’t know yet how much of a priority they’ll make it.

Ho hum.

Edit: Further investigations have revealed that I can easily get the title (but not the content or the comments) of any LiveJournal post, including protected ones. For obvious reasons, I’ve now stopped using my friends’ weblogs as testbeds, and I’ve set up a couple of “play” accounts to try things out with. I wonder if I can get the content of posts? That’d be an interesting challenge.

Well, I’ve completed the first release of Abnib v3.0. It’s not quite as full-featured as I’d have liked, yet, but a lot of the new “core” functionality is there. I hope you’ll all agree that it’s been worth the wait. And, if you’re reading this on Abnib… Hello there!

So: what’s new -

“Friends-Only” Support For LiveJournal Users
Just add ‘abnib’ to your friends list and abnib-readers will be notified when you make “friends only” posts, so they don’t have to check more pages than they need to. Abnib won’t show your “friends only” text - it’ll just tell people that you’ve made a “friends only” post, and invite them to click the link to go to it. If you’re particularly paranoid, you can even set up a custom group that doesn’t include abnib, so you can make private posts that abnib readers don’t get told about.

I’d appreciate it if a few of you would try out this feature, so that we can be sure that it works.

Integrated Member Descriptions
Click on somebody’s name in the upper-right, and you can read a short description of them. I’ve filled a few in to start us off. You can opt to only view posts by a certain person, and, soon, you’ll be able to cloak posts by certain people (if you always find their ‘blogs boring, for example). If you want to edit your description, you can! If you do this, abnib will ask you to prove that you are who you claim to be by posting a certain unusual series of words in your weblog within the next few days. Please give this a go!

Gallery, RockMonkey, and Troma Night Integration
Abnib talks to Abnib Gallery, the RockMonkey Wiki, and the Troma Night web site in order to bring you the latest news and pictures. These features - particularly the Gallery and RockMonkey ones - are yet to be enhanced even further, so watch this space. The Gallery “Random Picture” feature refreshes itself every 30 seconds, so even during the most boring blog rant, there’s always something to occupy your interest.

New Look-And-Feel
It’s got wavy corners and transparent bits and everything. Looks great in FireFox and Opera, tolerable in Internet Explorer 6 (good in Internet Explorer 7)…

Read More…
If you’re really “out of the loop” and need to catch up, just scroll to the bottom of Abnib and you can easily view “older” posts at the click of a link. The page doesn’t even need to refresh!

Flushed with success at my wine-making efforts (which have ranged from “barely drinkable” to “good”) over the last few months, I thought I’d turn my hand to fermenting some different kinds of fruits in my spare time. The first of these that I decided to try is mangoes. So, a few mangoes from the greengrocer on Chalybeate Street and a few litres of additional mango juice from Morrisons later, I was ready to start. I kicked it off yesterday with a hunk of mango pulp, juice, sugar, and - of course - brewers’ yeast. This drink, I have decided, will be called “mangohol”. And if it turns out to be undrinkable, I’ll try my hand at distilling, too, and try to make a spirit out of it. =o)

This morning, I was quite surprised to find that the proto-beverage had escaped from the captivity of it’s bottle, forcing mango pulp up through the airlock and out onto the table by the sheer force of it’s expanding gases. It turns out that mangoes actually have quite a high sugar content, and the yeast in the bottle is having a bit of a party. I looked at my chopping board (which has pictures of various fruits and vegetables and suggestions on how to prepare and serve them). For mangoes, it reads: “Mango [sic] have a juicy, pale, orange flesh, which is full of flavour. Sliced lengthways and served in a fruit salad, pureed for ice creams and mousses, used in chutneys, veg curries, tarts, and pies.” Does it say anywhere, “Warning: may ferment explosively, spewing mango pulp accross your surfaces?” Does it buggery.

So violent was the push of the excited funghi, they even managed to compress whole chunks of mango through the airlock, where they became lodged. I’ve no idea how - if it’s at all possible - I will get them out, but I’ll be using one of the larger-style airlocks for the rest of the brewing process.

Of course, it doesn’t take a physicist - even one who’s not been caught in the explosion of an immersion heater (whoever that might have been) - to tell you that the expansion of gasses in an enclosed space is a bad thing. In fact, what biologists might call an “uncontrolled yeast reaction in a sealed container” has another, more brutal, name amongst chemists and physicists. The name they use for it is “bomb.”

Thankfully I noticed the problem before the pressure became sufficient to detonate my (glass!) demijohn, and I had the sense to remove the cork and airlock from the neck of the bottle. No prizes for guessing what happened: suddenly, I found my face, my hands, my body, the room - pretty much everything, actually - showered with partially-fermented mango juice and pulp. It’s not nice stuff to be shot in the eye with. That said, it smells fantastic.

The majority of the drink remained in the bottle, and it’ll be continuing to ferment for a couple of weeks, yet (although I’ll be keeping a closer eye on it’s airlock). I’d never had guessed mangoes were so sugary, but this is really volatile stuff: having already diffused it the first time around I took a short video clip of it bubbling out (observe in the video how it “spurts out” if I hold my hand over the top of the bottle for a few seconds, and how much of the bottle is “froth” generated by the yeast):

• Watch the video (718Kb, Flash format - requires Flash v8).
• Download the video (1796Kb, WMV format).

Now our few “odd weeks” are done, Geek Night is returning to Friday nights. See you tonight from 7pm for board games!

If you don’t know why I’m writing this here, then that’s probably for the best: Eat my ticklish surfboard. There. I said it.

Remember a few years back an unlikely couple got together? Well, an even stranger pairing just occured down here in Aberystwyth. I ought not to say who it is, but the bottom line of this LiveJournal post will say it all for those who can read it.

In other news, the Nintendo GameCube that Claire bought for me us with the money her dad sent me for my birthday arrived today… I want to go home and play!!!

I had a particularly strange dream last night. I’ll relate:

[some bits at an airport that I don't remember]. Claire and I boarded an aeroplane. It was somewhat unusual as a ‘plane in that it seemed to be carrying cars, a bit like short-run passenger ferries or the channel tunnel. In addition, each car’s “space” had tall hospital-like curtains that could be pulled around it in a square to isolate it from those around it, providing some kind of privacy.

After having looked around the rest of the ‘plane, I returned to Claire’s car and looked out of the window, and saw that this lead on to what initially looked like more storage for cars (like the segment we were in), but later appeared to be hung under the wing (yes, out in the open). No cars on it, though. Thinking this was strange, I tried to open the window. It turned out we’d already taken off, and the air pressure difference, coupled with several hundred mph speeds, pulled Claire and I from the aircraft and started us plummeting.

A few moments of lucidity (which isn’t at all uncommon in my dreams) later I was able to deploy a parachute, as was Claire, and we sailed through the clouds and circled while we attempted to work out where we were. As it turns out, we were over the edges of Antarctica, and with some effort, we were able to maneuver our ‘chutes such that we landed (roughly, in high winds) on the shores, rather than in the water!

For some reason this dream had been influenced more by Disney than by actual geography or biology, because Antarctica was populated not only by several varieties of penguin, but also by polar bears. Some of these polar bears were able to talk… through the medium of visible “subtitles” and sign language… and one of them was kind enough to tell us about a research station nearby that he was “able to get in to”, and we were relieved that we would not have to freeze to death. At the research station, the friendly polar bear demonstrated how to climb up to a window, and helped me to do so too. I prized open the window and climbed inside while a huge crowd of the animals (mostly penguins) stood and watched.

As I was doing this and Claire was beginning to climb up, too, three humans with guns appeared on the horizon and began shooting at us. Claire hid among the penguins and I took refuge in the research station, but it turned out that the shooters had keys and they came in and found me, and, soon after, found Claire. They originally planned to kill and eat us, but I persuaded them not to by offering them my services as a landmine disposal expert (landmines, it seems, are a significant problem in the Antarctica). I’d lied - I wasn’t by any stretch an “expert”, but this didn’t seem to be such a problem as, while I was scavenging the supplies at the station for tools to use in finding and disarming landmines, my alarm clock went off and I woke up.

Just thought I’d share it with you all on account of it being so weird. Right: now I need to step out of the office to deliver Claire’s cashcard to her, which seems to have been left in my wallet, and then I can get on with some work!

Yay. Woo. I’m 25. Etc. Quarter of a century old. [Insert meaningful speech here.] Ahem. Thanks to all of you who came to Troma Night yesterday and saw my birthday arrive; and in particular to those of you who brought me alcohol. Bonus.

As I seem to have been given at least two (three if you count expansion packs) board games for my birthday, and it is Geek Night (Aberystwyth’s favourite alternative board games night), tonight’s Geek Night will be extended such that it will start not at 7pm as usual but at 5pm. This’ll give us a chance to play not only the usual favourites, but also some of the new stuff - Gloom, the designer card game with funky semitransparent cards, in which the aim is to make your family as unhappy as possible and then die, while trying to cheer up the other families and give them happy lives - a great oppertunity for nanofiction; Il Principe, a renaissance Italy strategy and resource management game (why do the Germans make all the best board games, by the way?), and the 5-6 player expansion for Seafarers of Catan, which finally completes the main published tree of my collection of the Settlers of Catan games. Oh, and we’ve also got a copy I’ve assembled of my interpretation of the Programmer’s Nightmare card game, which Claire and I playtested yesterday and it seems to work… although anybody without a grounding in Assembly language might find it somewhat confusing.

So, hope to see you all at 5. Or at 7. Or whenever.

In the news: Inside Move: ‘Futurama’ may get new lease on life. That’d be fabulous.