Fwd: Bruce Schneier RSS is now following you on Twitter!

So I just put a twitter widget on my phone and I decided to start following some people on my long forgotten twitter account to make the widget useful, and then:

The world's foremost expert on security, Bruce Schneier, re-follows me. 

Totally cool! Except I don't really tweet.  And even if I did, I would have nothing of import for such a person to read.

Now I feel impotent and unimportant.  Seriously, the most I could offer this man is a waste of his time.  Surely he has better things to do than read any of the dick jokes that I might tweet.

Holy shit, there are only 700 other people in the world following him?  Why isn't the entirety of the TSA following Mr. Schneier?  Or the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, the Mossad, or every other law-enforcement/intelligence agency in the world?

What the fuck is wrong with everyone?  Do they get secret twitter feeds where they're not counted in the subscriber listings? 

I don't think I know anyone who doesn't know who Bruce Schneier is (or who doesn't own a copy of Applied Crytography, or who isn't subscribed to the Crypto-Gram), so where the hell are all his followers?

C'mon, even @oldwhitemansays has 42k followers.  

Now I really hate twitter.

-------- Original Message --------

Bruce Schneier RSS is now following you on Twitter!

Bruce Schneier RSS (@Bruce_Schneier) is now following your tweets (@impliedchaos) on Twitter.

Bruce Schneier RSS followed you using liberation_fr.

Bruce Schneier RSS @Bruce_Schneier

125	673	701
tweets	following	followers

You already follow Bruce Schneier RSS.

What's Next?

• • Find out more about Bruce Schneier RSS on @Bruce_Schneier's profile page.
• • Send Bruce Schneier RSS an @ reply.
• • Send Bruce Schneier RSS a direct message.
• On your mobile? Learn Twitter for Mobile.

--
Dave Maez
You got a Benz, I got a busket: Gimme a dollar!

70s AOR DJ waxes ecstatic, briefly

Totally analog, circa 1978.

8:45 into http://brad-morrison.com/KEXL-part-one.mp3, the studio version of Country Joe & the Fish's Feel Like I'm Fixing to Die Rag winds out its weird ending that couldn't decide between SFX with extra cheese and a classically classic rock ending. Then the late Allen Grimm lets go of the LP he's cued up, and track #4, side 2 perfectly syncs with the final chord of Country Joe's single, right at 9:00, and at 9:04 or so you can hear him vocalize his approval in stereo.

-- 

Come on mothers throughout the land / And pack your boys off to Vietnam / Come on fathers, don't hesitate / and send your DAUGHTERS off before it's too late / And be the first one on your block to have your KIDS come home in a box.

~self-revised lyrics to the Country Joe song

Shit Just Got Old School

Using HTML5 canvas tags as framebuffers with JavaScript.

I saw a post on Buzz with some dude playing around with HTML5's canvas tag.  And I noticed he was accessing the pixel data just like I used to do on my 80286's VGA card!  AWESOME!

So I quickly coded up some color bars for old times sake.



Neato. 

It's kinda lame that Javascript has no means of quickly duplicating arrays of objects, so the only way to handle virtual frames is to use extra canvas objects and push/pull the buffer data to/from them.

Then I went for some classic shade bobs.



Chrome's Javascript interpreter is lightning fast.  Unfortunately Firefox's is slower and has mixed behavior depending on versions.  For example, some versions of Firefox handle the pixel data as unsigned char's correctly, and incrementing a red value that's 255 will set it to zero.  Other versions handle pixel data as integers (even though the allowed range is only 0-255) and decrementing a pixel that is 0 will cause it to become -1.  Chrome handles the data as 0-255, but doesn't allow rotational incrementation without using a modulus on it so incrementing a value that's 255 simply stays at 255.

Finally I whipped up some multicolor plasma.




This effect was a lot easier than on MCGA mode 0x13, since we're not limited to 256 colors, but to a full 24 bit pallette (plus another 8bits of alpha channel data).  I don't have to combine sine tables in one pixel, just in different color channels.

The only reason I ever learned to program was to make my computer make pretty things.  I'm so happy!  And since I'm not on a 12.5mhz CPU anymore, I don't have to do things like inline assembler or pre-computed trig tables.  JOY!

I got my 286 back!  Now to ditch enough work to code up a Mandelbrot roto-zoom...

--
Dave Maez
Helping to code a better tomorrow.