binfalse

The last two weeks I took a time out. The first week I visited my sister living on Usedom, Rumpel came with me.

Those of you who are following me on Twitter may have noticed the one or other story, it was one of the best trips I made! Very funny and of course much too short ;)

We cycled a lot of km’s, climbed on trees, swum in the Baltic Sea, took sunbathes on the beach, went to Poland and so on. Detailed reports would blow up the framework of this website, but I’ll provide some pictures at Picasa, here is also a YouTube video from Poland.

And I’ve prepared a funny animated gif of an interesting evening ;)

So, if you ever have the chance to go to Usedom: Do it!!

Usedom - Aug 2010

The yellow bar on the top of the administration panel was very annoying, so I just decided to update the Software.

Nothing special happened, please tell me if anything seems to be wrong!

Btw. I installed another plugin that tweets news from this blog. Let’s see if it works.

Just read the so called Algorithmencatalog (maybe Algorithms Catalog in English!?), published by our German Bundesnetzagentur. They seem to know exact expiration dates for hash functions ;)

In this PDF file I found the following table (see original screen-shot):

So I hope there is anybody out there that has started to crack SHA-1 to get finished this year :P

(maybe it’s the recounter’s turn!?^^)

Yesterday, while waiting in a traffic jam, I implemented a small game. I read about this game in a book and to not get too annoyed about the waiting time I opened the lid of my laptop and wrote this game. This morning I completed it with some usual stuff to increase the usability..

It’s written in C++ and you can play against the CPU. There is a strategy that makes you win in almost every case! This game is a classic in game theory, but if I provide you with it’s original name it’ll too easy for you to solve the problem with help from Wikipedia or something like that. So just try it on you own ;)

The aim of the game is to clear all the stacks that are filled with o ‘s. The stacks may look like this:

stack   size
0:      ooooo (5)
1:      oooooo (6)
2:      ooooooo (7)
3:      ooooooo (7)
4:      oooo (4)
5:      oooooooo (8)
6:      oooooo (6)

Now it is your turn to choose one of these stacks and remove some or all o’s of it. Notice that you have to remove at least one of them and you can only remove o’s from one single stack! After your turn, the artificial intelligence will do the same. Afterwards it’s again your turn, until all stacks are cleared. Winner is the one who cleared the last stack, so try to get the last o ;) Here is the download.

You can choose the number of stacks and the maximum number of o’s a stack can carry:

USAGE:
        -n      number of stacks [2..30]
        -m      maximal stack size [5..50]

If anybody knows the strategy, feel free to tell me!

Actually I revived my Creative Zen and had some trouble with that crazy media stuff..

Ok, every body who knows me knows that I hate that media fuss, to many functions that nobody needs, and to many failures on important stuff. How to mount an MTP-fs I explained in a previous posting, here it is in a nutshell:

# install needed packages (had trouble with mtpfs v0.9, be sure you install < = v0.8)
$ sudo aptitude install mtpfs mtp-tools
# try to find the device
$ mtp-detect
libmtp version: 1.0.3

Listing raw device(s)
Device 0 (VID=041e and PID=4157) is a Creative ZEN.
   Found 1 device(s):
   Creative: ZEN (041e:4157) @ bus 1, dev 11
[...]
# mount the fs
$ mtpfs /mnt/mtp-dev
# after doing crazy work, umounting:
$ fusermount -u /mnt/mtp-dev

With mtpfs version 0.9 and libmtp8 from sid I just experienced segfaults reported by dmesg, but the versions from squeeze just work fine. Of course it is interesting that I’m not able to overwrite existing files:

itsme@MiniMe /mnt % cp /tmp/chicago.mp3 zen/Music
cp: cannot create regular file `zen/Music/chicago.mp3': Function not implemented

Curious, but the workaround should be clear ;)

Last but not least I can show you how to play a YouTube video on this device. The easiest way is to install the Firefox extension downloadhelper, so you can download the song as a .flv file. The usual player don’t know what to do with .flv , and of course mine doesn’t, so convert it with mencoder. Here is an example:

# just grab the audio
$ mencoder Sport-ist-ihr-Hobby.flv -of rawaudio -oac mp3lame -ovc copy -o Sport-ist-ihr-Hobby.mp3
# keep the video and create an avi
$ mencoder Sport-ist-ihr-Hobby.flv -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc -o Sport-ist-ihr-Hobby.avi

The audio file doesn’t have meta data yet, so my Zen can’t find a name for it (don’t know why they didn’t implement a fallback to name it by it’s filename). To edit the meta tags you can use common tools like amarok or XMMS, I used easytag.

So you see, with a little work everything will be fine!