Bonnie noticed this when we were watching Dr Horrible’s Sing Along Blog last night. Here’s a picture of Neil Patrick Harris as Dr Horrible.
And this is a photo from my 2007 Halloween cosume.
These are a creap pair of welding goggles that Bonnie found on eBay and I modified for my cyberpunk costume. I painted mine differently than they did and I added to optics from a very old digital camera. I also added the LEDs which blinked. Still if you look closely they are very similar.
Today I learned the magic formula that makes any valid credit card number evenly divisible by 10. There are plenty of other sources of this information on the web, but many are confusing or potentially wrong. This, among other things, is used to validate numbers before sending them off to be processed.
I have verified this works with visa, mastercard, amex and it should work with discover and jcp too.
I did some searching for a fake credit card numbers that validate which probably put on some goverment watch lists somewhere. Via a blog post by the Rimm-Kaufman Group I found this Amex number which should demonstrate this method.
371449635398431
Step 1. Reverse the number
3 7 1 4 4 9 6 3 5 3 9 8 4 3 1 becomes
1 3 4 8 9 3 5 3 6 9 4 4 1 7 3
Step 2. Double every second number
1 3 4 8 9 3 5 3 6 9 4 4 1 7 3 becomes
1 6 4 16 9 6 5 6 6 18 4 8 1 14 3
Step 3. Any 2 digit sums from step 2 have their component number added together. In other words 14 is 1 + 4 = 5
1 6 4 16 9 6 5 6 6 18 4 8 1 14 3 becomes
1 6 4 7 9 6 5 6 6 9 4 8 1 5 3
Step 4. Add all the numbers together
1 6 4 7 9 6 5 6 6 9 4 8 1 5 3 becomes
1+6+4+7+9+6+5+6+6+9+4+8+1+5+3 which is
80
Step 5. Is the sum evenly divisible by 10? If so then you can be 1 step closer to sure that the credit card number is valid. There are also other things you have to check that are card provider specific. For example, all visa number start with 4 and are either 13 or 16 digits long.
As a mentioned in my previous post I spent a little time last night installing PCLINUXOS on my laptop. Other than my machine at work most of my computer time is spent on this laptop and dealing with Ubuntu Hardy Heron was starting to take its toll on me.
I installed the MiniMe version of the distro, the Live CD of which weighs in at just over 200MB. It’s meant to be just enough to get get everything up and running so you can then, through ATP or Synaptic, install just the software you want. This was one of the major appeals of this Distro to me. The reason I gave up on Window, while I doubt I’ll ever run OSX, and why I’m moving away from Ubuntu is that I don’t so much extra crap built into the OS from the start. I want my operating system to operate my system, I’ll take care of the rest.
The first thing I noticed what that PCLINUXOS was able to start using the broadcom wifi in my laptop right out out of the gate. I opened up the network configuration tool and it asked me if I wanted to use the windows driver for via ndiswrapper for the card since there is no linux driver. I said yes and was done. In Ubuntu I had to use the wired ethernet to search Ubuntu’s forums for the right driver to use and instructions on how to set up ndiswapper.
PSLINUXOS time: 30 seconds
Ubuntu time: 45 minutes
My graphics card installed and worked correctly right from the get go. In Ubuntu I had to install the driver from Intel which was a hassle. Though the hassle was more Intel’s fault that Ubuntu’s.
PSLINUXOS time: 0
Ubuntu time: 20 minutes
Either MiniMe doesn’t come with klaptop or the install didn’t figure out that I was running a laptop because the utility wasn’t installed. But since I already had a working eithernet connection all I needed to do was install the utility via Synaptic and I was able to get all my power managment working just fine. I had to tweek the sleep settings a bit to get the machine to return from being suspended properly, but I’ve had to do this with every linux distro I’ve installed on it.
PCLINUXOS time: 2 minutes
Ubuntu time: 0
In the file /etc/acpi/events/sleep I changed:
action=/usr/sbin/pmsuspend memory
to
action=klaptop_acpi_helper --suspend
I then installed firefox3, thunderbird, openoffice, cd burning software, vlc, flash, and ksudoku. These packages represent about 99% of what I do on my laptop. Getting all the files downloaded and installed from Synaptic took about half an hour. I wouldn’t have to have installed these packages in Ubuntu, but I would have spent a lot of time uninstalling others.
PCLINUXOS time: 30 minutes
Ubuntu time: 1 hour
I lost all ability to connect to my Windows desktop via samba when I upgraded to Hardy Heron. From what I have gathered this is a problem with the Nautilus file manager. I tried changing the Thundar, but I never could get things working. Ubuntu would hang and hang while trying to connect then finally say it didn’t have an application to open a smb connection. In PCLINUXOS it connect right away. No hangs, no problems.
PCLINUXOS time: 0
Ubuntu time: weeks without success
I need to get Photoshop running, but I’m confident that the instructions I posted previously on the subject will work fine in PCLINUXOS. I also need to get the media buttons on the front of my laptop to work. I haven’t even attempted that yet so I’m not sure what it will take. It’s a minor thing, but they come in handy for changing volume.
So far I’m very happy with this Distro.
I think I’ve about had it with Ubuntu Hardy Heron. It’s a sad day when my windows box is more stable than my linux laptop. I also made the mistake of upgrading my work machine from Gutsy Gibbon to HH last week and I’ve been regretting it ever since. Three times today alone I had Nautilus crash on me without the ability to restart it. When I’d kill the existing Nautilus process a new one would start automatically and crash until I rebooted the box. Reboots like that are unacceptable to me on a linux machine.
I’ve been playing with Ubuntu since the Warty Warthog days and this is the first upgrade that has not been a significant improvement. That makes me want to not give up on Ubuntu completely and instead downgrade back to Gutsy until the issues get worked out. Then there’s the bandwagon part of me that wants to jump on the the PCLINUXOS bandwagon.
Tomorrow after work I’m going to install PCLINUXOS on my home laptop and if things go well I’ll consider putting it on my work machine too. PCLOS has it’s .roots in Mandrake… aka Redhat, but it’s a full fledge distro in its own right now and it uses APT. I can work with anything so long as I have APT.
A week ago tomorrow IDX decommissioned the last of its image servers. Over the last 2 and a half months I migrated a little over 20 million images, about 480 gigabytes, from our severs to Amazon’s S3 service. Most of that time was spend just occasionally checking in on the migration scripts that I had written or rewriting our image acquisition scripts to work with S3. We download images from about 190 sources every night as we gather MLS data on behalf of our clients.
The best part of the whole image migration and overhaul is that image acquisition is now tied into into our data balancer system. Each MLS in our system has a time stored in the database that is the earliest we can reliably download data from that source. Once we reach that time in the day the MLS goes through a series of steps triggered by a cronjob that runs once a minute. First the data is downloaded from what ever source makes it available. This can be ftp, http, soap, rets, or even direct sql connections. Next the data is parsed and made ready for insertion into our database. Once processing is done the data is geocoded so that we can easily map all the properties.
This was where the process stopped. When the app was first written image scripting was rushed as we were trying to meat our launch deadline. The image scripts were on different servers, so the data balancer couldn’t act on them directly. Instead each was launched as its own cronjob on one of the image servers. Every MLS is unique in the way we acquire images and is constantly changing, as such each must have its own acquisition script. Now each of those scripts is defined in our database.
Once per minute a script runs on our EC2 server that looks for image ready flags in our data balancing system. When it finds one it checks the database for the specific file that should be run to gather images. The script runs and then resets the image ready flag. As with data our image sources are varied. In some cases we generate URLs based on a know syntax, in some cases we’re given URLs by the MLS. In this cases we don’t need to store anything. Often we get images from some FTP source, via RETS, or in one case we download binary stored as BLOBs on a remote SQL server. Needless to say it’s complex to get all these images from 190 disparate sources, so anything we can do to automate things better is good.
My next project is building WSDL web services using NuSoap. This is uncharted territory for me, so I’m sure I’ll have more to say on this subject later.