How to make Chloroform

http://www.sci-spot.com/Chemistry/chloroform.htm

So you just need bleach, acetone, and lots of ice.

Washington Post Confirms Felt Was 'Deep Throat'

The Washington Post today confirmed that W. Mark Felt, a former number-two official at the FBI, was "Deep Throat," the secretive source who provided information that helped unravel the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s and contributed to the resignation of president Richard M. Nixon.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/31/AR2005053100655.html


Well there goes one mystery.

How to make your own flame thrower.

I wouldn't advise this to anyone, but if you don't mind getting burned, then go right ahead.

http://mirror.linnwood.org/flamethrower/

How to make your video with a light saber.

Ok, so my co-worker wanted to figure out how to make videos with a light saber in it. This should make it easy for him, these software allows for the light saber, sounds, and more.

http://lsmaker.uw.hu/page.php?main=main.html

Google Gulp, emmm that sure hits the spot.

http://www.google.com/googlegulp/

How to make a RJ45 cable tester

http://www.southwest.com.au/~jfuller/rj45/rj45.htm

">"New Cornell Institute Will Apply Artificial Intelligence to Decision Making and Data Searches"

Cornell News (05/18/05); Steele, Bill

Cornell University's new Intelligent Information Systems Institute shows how far the university has come in its involvement in artificial intelligence, which was nonexistent on the campus not too long ago. The institute is the result of a $5 million, five-year grant from the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research. In addition to conducting research into helping computers handle enormous amounts of data and problems that involve numerous choices, the researchers will focus on game theory, information retrieval, and automatic verification of software and hardware. Visiting scientists will be heavily involved at the institute with Cornell computer scientists and other faculty in operations research, applied economics, mathematics, and engineering. The facility has a dedicated computer cluster comprised of a cluster of 12 Intel processors operating in parallel that can be accessed from the computer terminals. The institute is about collaboration between scientists, says director Carla Gomes, associate professor of computing and information science and applied economics and management.

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/May05/IISIlaunch.ws.html

Make mario building

http://www.yikes.com/~pengo/8bit/



kinda cool, but using approx. 3800 postit notes and 1.5 hour of my time is a waste.

Google: Personalize Page

http://www.google.com/ig
You can view your email, quote of the day, word of the day, a few news sites, etc...

Check it out, especially if you have a google email. (If you need a google email account, reply to me giving me your email address and I'll send you a invite. )

Daily Show clips:

http://www.onlisareinsradar.com/archives/daily_show_comedy_clips/index.php

The recent one about new's anchors reading blogs is really funny.

Updated website material:

Comdey:

Added a Southpark tribute towards Monty Python mpeg.
http://www.cs.sunyit.edu/~andrusw/pic/comedy/
smf/SouthparkVSMontyPython.mpeg

Games:

Got rid of the castle game and replaced it with a similar game called invaison.
http://www.cs.sunyit.edu/~andrusw/games/invasion3.swf

Also added a chess game:
http://www.cs.sunyit.edu/~andrusw/games/chess.swf

Leo Leoporte and the other old Screen Savers crew

http://thisweekintech.com/node/3313

Hack: Make your own laser snooper

http://www.ews.uiuc.edu/~nshin/PROJECTS/LASERSNOOPER/

Online Karaoke

http://www.theonlinekaraokemachine.i12.com/index.htm

My favorite:
Pink Floyd - Another Brick in the Wall

Hey, Ithaca, New York in the news, for making cloning robots.

Self-cloning robots are a chip off the old block

The first scalable robot to have built an exact copy of itself could herald a fundamental rethink of how robots may be used to explore other planets. Hod Lipson and colleagues at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, built their self-replicating device using small mechanical building blocks that can swivel, and also attach themselves to one another using electromagnets.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18624997.100

Personal Update

Car:
My car overheated on Monday. I called the warranty people to take a look at it, thinking since it says it covers overheating. They don't bother to pick up the car like they were suppose to on Wednesday. Thursday comes and they call me at work that they were going to pick the SUV up, this is around 10am. I call them at 3pm. The conversation goes something like:

me: "I'm calling to check up on my SUV"
guy on the phone: "What SUV?"
me: "My SUV that got picked up for repair"
guy on the phone (1 minute later): "Oh, that just came in"

I'm thinking WTF!?!?!?! what took so long from 10am to 3pm for it just to arrive. Giving the benefit of the doubt: 2 hours down + 1 hour of hooking it up + 2 hours of driving up. This takes in the account if it was the slowest traffic day in California history. This place is only 30 minutes one way on a good day.
So now I have to wait another day for them to review the car. They then call me on Friday that it was the thermostat, which I figured, but its not covered by the warranty. But on the warranty it states that if its an internal engine problem than they will pay for it. He then tells me that I will have to pay for the towing also. So it wasn't until Monday that I could pick it up from the place, since they are only open 8am - 5pm Monday through Friday. This is when I work, when the hell do I have time to go down there. ARGHHHHHH.


Workout:
Because of the Car (See Above), I've been too stressed out to workout. Last time I checked, I am weighing about 275lbs, which is about 25-55lbs lost. I definitely have more muscle around my arms, legs, chest, and back. My gut is looser and smaller when I lay down. The bad news is that it is still huge and slacking more with the separations of muscle and fat.

Work:
Lot of work, working on Florida, and Georgia Underwriting forms. My programming experience helps me make work go faster, since I can either write a program to make life easier and faster, or use the current environment with tweaks that others don't know of. I basically doubled by productivity. This of course has the effect of making me bored at work. Sometimes, I get work done so quickly, I just sit around waiting for something else to come around. It is getting really bad, sometimes I sit around looking for work half the day. Now this might sound like I have it good, but the day goes by so slow when not working on something.

Bills:
This is where my stress is. I just paid my 1999 NY state tax today, it is about time. :)
Anyway, I should be getting School bills sometime soon, and I have to pay off my car as another bill. I still have to pay off all my credit card, even though its not huge, just $1500.

Wants:
I still need to get a computer(s) and a T.V., but every time I get some money -- I end up paying for a car repair. I wish I could just take a train or 1 bus to work if it was only possible. :(

Hacking Coke machines got you bored, now try pepsi machines.

http://www.i-hacked.com/content/view/159/48/



So basically, its still the 1,3,2,4 combination, but now horizontal instead of vertical. Brilliant!!

World's Funniest Joke:

"Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed.

"The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps: ‘My friend is dead! What can I do?’ The operator says: ‘Calm down, I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.’

"There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says: ‘OK, now what?’"

http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=70&id=1096842002

A good intro to password hacking...

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/security/library/s-crack/password_cracking.html



Now just add this tool with Knoppix and you can probably get into any computer you want, but I wouldn't know anything about that. :)

This article shows how the Turing Test is quite there yet.

"Is It Human or Computer? Defending E-Commerce With Captchas"
IT Professional (04/05) Vol. 17, No. 2, P. 43; Pope, Clark; Kaur, Khushpreet

Captchas, which are puzzles or problems that humans can easily decipher but that computers cannot, are becoming a key defense for e-commerce systems against spammers and bots. Captcha stands for Completely Automatic Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart, and is modeled after the famous Turing test for distinguishing between men and machines, although the Captcha test is multisensory while the classical Turing test is conversation-based. The most generic type of Captcha consists of an image of seemingly random numbers and letters that are distorted to thwart optical character recognition. Ideally, the Captcha is resistant to brute-force attacks; compatible with completely automated processes for generating and evaluating tests; comprised of public code, data, and algorithms; and reliant on a totally random system of generation founded on the selection of files from an archive of numerous images, names, and other data. Captchas are used by many free email service providers to prevent the creation of accounts by automated scripts sent by spammers, and as a replacement for user accounts and passwords for pseudopublic files. Captchas can also make it difficult for Web spiders to index sites for search engines. Captchas come in several varieties, among them: Gimpy, a puzzle in which words are taken out of a dictionary and displayed in a corrupted image; Pix, which requires users to associate images of mundane objects with a single category or phrase; Baffle Text, which employs small, pseudorandom, pronounceable words; and Sound Captchas, where a random sequence drawn from recordings of simple words or numbers is combined and corrupted by noise and distortion, and must be correctly identified by users. Problems associated with Captchas include inaccessibility for disabled and visually impaired users, major hardware and software requirements, and only fairly difficult workarounds.

http://www.computer.org/itpro/promo1.pdf

This concept was actually discussed in my cryptography class. The concept of preventing brute force attacks like DOS-attacks on a website can be prevented for some time; however, these concepts can be broken if the patterns are learned. That is why it was suggested that changing the look, feel, and color and other traits are important.

"Picture This--Automatic Image Categorization"

"Picture This--Automatic Image Categorization"
IST Results (05/02/05)

The IST-funded LAVA project has found a way to automatically categorize or classify visual images without the use of additional metadata by bringing together researchers in the fields of machine-learning and computer vision and cognitive science, according to LAVA participant Gabriela Csurka with Xerox Research Center Europe. "We began our approach by grouping together similar types of objects...and trying to find a way of categorizing those that were common to a group," she explains. "We applied machine-learning techniques to find the distinctions between images by focusing on sections of images that were similar--sections that were common to other images with the same content." Another challenge for the LAVA team was to find a way to accurately categorize image content in spite of views of objects taken from different distances or perspectives. The researchers have successfully devised a technique for capturing visual images and automatically identifying the proper category those images belong to, and they think this advance has dramatically augmented the ability to create reliable vision-based detectors for common events and objects. The LAVA technologies' potential applications include image browsing within documents, consumer photo archival and image management, Web-based image searches, human-computer interaction, video surveillance, robotics, and medical imaging. The LAVA team won 14 out of 18 detection, localization, and classification contests in the PASCAL network's Visual Object Classes Challenge to amass a standardized group of object recognition databases and supply a common set of tools for accessing and managing annotations in those databases.

http://istresults.cordis.lu/index.cfm/section/news/
tpl/article/BrowsingType/Features/ID/75489

"Whatever Happened to Machines That Think?"

"Whatever Happened to Machines That Think?"
New Scientist (04/23/05) Vol. 186, No. 2496, P. 32; Mullins, Justin

The excitement generated by the field of artificial intelligence, and the support it garnered, waned dramatically in the 1990s as AI projects that promised to deliver convincing computer conversationalists, autonomous servants, and even conscious machines failed to pan out because their core principle--that computers can be made intelligent by human standards of intelligence--was flawed. This has prompted a reevaluation of what constitutes intelligence in many circles, although the Turing test still remains a key benchmark for gauging machine intelligence. The AI field was split into those who believe systems can become intelligent through symbolic reasoning, and those who favor biologically inspired approaches such as artificial neural networks and genetic algorithms. Carnegie Mellon University researcher Tom Mitchell is working to bridge the gap between these two approaches in his analysis of how the human brain reacts to spoken nouns and later verbs and sentences via functional magnetic resonance imaging. He thinks such research could perhaps lead to a mind-reading computer program. Meanwhile, former Stanford University computer scientist and AI research veteran Doug Lenat has been developing Cyc, an AI system that can learn by tapping a vast database of common-sense assertions, for over two decades. Lenat believes that once Cyc becomes freely available over the Web, the input contributed by millions of users will give the system the accumulated knowledge to correctly answer most questions within three to five years. Cyc is rekindling interest for AI, as are efforts in Europe, Japan, and America to build systems that can address uncertainty through statistical reasoning.

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/info-tech/mg18624961.700

I thought this was kinda obvious, but not everyone is on board this obvious concept of using stohastic reasoning. To me this way, of using statistics, is the correct path toward mimicing human intellegence. It is not possible for humans to breadth search every possible answer, or make decision with a cut and dry answer of yes or no. One of the greatest thing about being human is the ability to err and learn from our mistakes. Having a AI program learn and improve upon itself is the way to go.

Voice XML and Speech Application Language Tags

"Speech Recognition Software Slowly Making Progress"
TechNewsWorld (04/27/05); Korzeniowski, Paul

The future of speech recognition is promising if not spectacular, as the technology is experiencing gradual but steady growth. "Because of the growing emphasis on customer service recently, many companies have become interested in speech recognition systems," says Datamonitor analyst Daniel Hong, who also says speech recognition product and service pricing experienced a 30% decline last year. This trend stems from the simplification of product development via vendor adoption of standards such as Voice XML (VXML) and Speech Application Language Tags (SALT). However, the existence of different standards complicates interoperability between different speech recognition systems. Many speech recognition adopters are companies seeking to streamline or automate customer service, thus saving money and sparing customer service representatives from repetitive chores. Gartner analyst Steve Cramoysan says speech recognition rates have substantially improved thanks to new algorithms and more powerful processors, but Yankee Group analyst Art Schoeller says speech recognition systems still lack the sophistication to sift through the diverse reasons customers call for help. Usage of these systems is mainly restricted to closed questions, which give users only a handful of possible answers; companies must therefore devote a considerable amount of time to the design of speech recognition applications, and so they charge buyers a lot for professional services teams that assist with the design and development of such applications. Another reason for speech recognition technology's slow progress is the hyping of easier-to-deploy Web-based customer service by vendors.

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/117002YI63W0.xhtml

I posted this, figuring that Venkatesh Tatineni might be interested in reading about it.

Hack: Lockpicking with a HD and Mouse

http://www.sorgonet.com/security/hdlockpicking/

Updated my webcam...

So I got the netcam back up and running:
http://www.cs.sunyit.edu/~andrusw/netcam.html