All posts by eddy

Wall-based laptops

Technology

Here’s a useful link from a friend (thanks, Kevin!)

http://www.grynx.com/index.php/projects/laptop-on-the-wall-walltop/

A nice look at the steps needed to convert that old laptop into a neat wall-mounted photo/art display.

Cracking WEP in 10 minutes

Networking

Tdoday’s edition of Jon’s Radio pointed me towards an entertaining screencast which shows just how easy it is to attack a wireless network protected using WEP.

The screencast is at

http://whoppix.hackingdefined.com/Whoppix-wepcrack.html

and it’s well worth a look (no audio required). WEP may be better than no security at all, but only if no one can be bothered to take the trouble to defeat it.

Move over Google Maps, World Wind is here…

Technology

I was away last weekend at the annual ICPUG Charmouth meet, and saw a very cool demo of Nasa’a World Wind mapping tool.

It’s hard to do it justice in a description, but essentially it provides a 3D interface to a world database of satellite maps, such that you can wander around the globe with your mouse, zooming in to any area to a resolution of around ~30m (and down to ~1m in some parts of the US). Generally, US detail is much better than in the rest of the world, since there are more detailed maps available for free – in Europe and elsewhere, similar maps are quite expensive.

You need a decent PC (1.5 GHz+), graphics card, and hard disk (5-10 GB for the cached data, 1 GB minimum), along with a fast Internet connection, but it’s well worth it – if you haven’t seen World Wind already, give it a try.

Name that tune!

Networking

For a while, I’ve thought that someone should set up an Internet site to let you find the name of a piece of music you’ve heard. Apparently I just wasn’t looking hard enough – today, I stumbled across Musipedia.org, a kind of Wikipedia for music.

My plan was that the site would allow you to enter the tune on some sort of virtual keyboard, ignoring tempo and paying attention only to the relative up and down frequency differences. It turns out that Denys Parsons proposed a similar but more robust system for encoding tunes in his 1975 book, The Directory of Tunes and Musical Themes. This is now known as the Parsons Code.

Using it is pretty straightforward – just type an asterisk for the first note, then for each following note, type U if it goes up, D for Down, or R if it repeats the previous note. With three possibilities for each letter, a short sequence of just 20 notes can record more tha three billion distinct tunes. It is also not affected by errors in pitch or timing.

Once you have the Parsons Code for your tune (or at least a brief snippet), you just need a big database to search against – which is where Musipedia comes in. They only have about 30,000 tunes so far, but over time I expect this to grow. Certainly, it had no problems identifying Rossini’s William Tell Overture and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi – Oh, mio babbino caro.