Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made a controversial trip to the United States to speak at the United Nations General Assembly. Time was short as many news correspondence sought interviews. Ahmadinejad has been known to speak often to foreign audiences, through the use of a translator, with his straightforward and sometimes compelling yet often humorous rhetoric including his famous, “There are no homosexuals in Iran” quote.
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I was at a friend’s apartment the other night and on the TV set was CNN’s Headline news. The story for twenty solid minutes: Casey Anthony. A woman who allegedly killed her 3-year-old daughter. There was not one mention of Lehman Brothers collapse, or the Merrill Lynch buyout. For twenty solid minutes, all that was seen was people commenting on Casey Anthony, protesters standing outside her home and Nancy Grace yelling annoying to the audience.
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There has been a lot of main stream coverage of the Democratic and Republican conversion. Kucinich’s “Wake Up American” speech and Palin denying accepting funds for “The Bridge to Nowhere” seem to take the top of the newsreel, with asides to the hurricane season upon us. However the real story of the protesters has been all but non-existent in the main stream media. At both the DNC and RNC, major protests have taken, and are currently taking place.
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I’ve released an alpha version of Bmcb or Breaking the Multi-Colored Box, a framework intended to generate known CAPTCHA challenges and then test various techniques to break them. Although it’s fully functional and has a decent amount of preliminary documentation, it’s far from being really useful. The built in analysis and filtering techniques can only solve the most trivial cases efficiently.
However, the framework is well structured and sound. I’m hoping I can develop interested from other open source developers who have skills in fields I lack in such as image recognition, analysis and AI. It will be the first project I’ve had where I’m actively seeking developers from the community. Anyone interested in a challenge?
If I can generate a decent amount of interest, I’ll move it over to a full project hosting repository such as SourceForge or Google Code.
In 2001, a trial began for the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa. Prosecutors wanted to try Osama bin Laden along with the four men they had in custody, but in order to do so, they needed to prove he was the head of a criminal organization and charge him under racketeering laws (similar to the head of a mafia). To this end they enlisted the help of Jamal al-Fadl who build a foundation story that bin Laden was a criminal mastermind behind the organization Al-Qaeda. In reality, Bin Laden had a very small group. Some militants came to him for funding, however they were mostly independent and set their own objectives. Propaganda videos bin Laden produced were filmed with hired soldiers who were told to bring their own uniforms and weapons.
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I originally intended this site to have many well though-out articles that would help bring things into perspective for its readers. Spam problems, server issues and a lack of time caused this site to be offline for the better part of a year. However a recent e-mail entitled “Agree or Delete,” made me realize just how important imperative it is for individuals to stand up for what is relevant. The focus of the site has changed into more a of a blog format, with the hopes of inspiring others that with the mass communication offered to us, we as individuals can make a massive impact on our world. The following is my open response to “Agree or Delete” …
On Friday I received a call from a friend informing me of an event that seemed to have escaped the main stream news under seemingly more pressing stories about John Edward’s affair and the Olympic games. Major fighting has broken out between Russia and Georgia. The main stream media caught up by the end of the weekend. Wes Burney, a History Graduate who has been following the story for some time, gives us a play-by-play via his twitter feed
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I created a new script, oggfolder2mp3, to recursively convert ogg files into mp3s while maintaining file meta-data (i.e. copying vorbis comments to MP3 ID3 tags).
My mom sent me this simple problem.Combine four fours arithmetically (i.e. 4 / 4 – 4 * 4) so the result is 20. The following solution is written in C++ and uses brute force to find all possible solutions:
/*
* combo.cxx - Four Fours Combination Problem Solver
* (using brute force)
*
* Solves the simple problem: How do you combine four fours
* using standard arithmetic operations to equal 20.
*
* This program solves this puzzle using brute force and
* shows the answer ignoring order of operations.
*
*
* Sumit Khanna / /tech/
* free to modify and redistribute
*/
#include <iostream>
using std::cout;
using std::endl;
int doOp(char op, int a,int b) {
if(op == '+') {
return a + b;
}
else if(op == '-') {
return a - b;
}
else if(op == '*') {
return a * b;
}
else if(op == '/') {
return a / b;
}
else {
cout << "Error. Invalid Operation " << op << endl;
exit(2);
return 0;
}
}
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
char *ops = new char[4];
ops[0] = '+';
ops[1] = '-';
ops[2] = '*';
ops[3] = '/';
for(int i=0; i<4; i++) {
for(int j=0; j<4; j++) {
for(int k=0; k<4; k++) {
int r = doOp(ops[i],4,4);
r = doOp(ops[j],r,4);
r = doOp(ops[k],r,4);
if(r == 20) {
cout << " 4 " << ops[i] << " 4 " << ops[j] << " 4 " << ops[k] << " 4 = 20 " << endl;
}
}
}
}
cout << "Note: Solutions ignores order of operations" << endl << endl;
delete[] ops;
exit(0);
}
I’ve added a new Scripts section to the website. It contains several shell scripts I’ve written over the years for automating basic tasks on my Linux machines including Gentoo Package Updating, lnSponge which keeps track of new files in a given directory tree, and an Email Script which will e-mail the standard output of an application. Expect more scripts to be posted in the near future.
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