This has sorta turned out to be a mashup of NSID. But because I started mid-November, it’s

No Shaving In the Last Half of November and First Half of December. wxyz for the more obtuse title name.

I wasn’t sure when I started. At the very latest, it was November 14th. So yesterday marked the 31st day, and today is the day I can shave it off :) Happy New Years!
It wasn’t easy, and I hate the end result. But I enjoy the not shaving for 31 days part.

I’m covering up my beard here. I wouldn’t look too bad with some facial hair :

A comparison :

UPDATE : I originally wrote this mid-December, but kept it in draft until the beginning of January so not to spoil the other participants and for them to get all jealous. Thanks to one of my bank statements, I figured out I most likely started on the 19th, not the 14th. So I shaved 5 days too early. fail

There was a bunch of GPG tinkering trying to get GPG to generate a ssh-compatible (ie. one you get from id_rsa.pub) key using my private key. While it turned into a epic fail costing me a good chunk of the day. I dived a bit into the security stuff that everyone hates.

While going about my day, I wondering if self-signed certs can be used in a way that wouldn’t get you ostracized from a security conscious community. Johnathon has warned the blogosphere at large why self-signed certs are bad and why Firefox makes you jump through hoops to allow a self-signed cert to get through. But I thought of a good use case for why you may want to use it :

1. Self-signed certs provide little value for your users (fe. blog comments are public anyways)
2. You may not have the means (eg. credit card, unique ip if your with Dreamhost) to buy one
3. You only really need them for some basic stuff that users shouldn’t interact with at all. Like logging in to wordpress.

In which case, you can generate a self-signed cert and configure a web server to serve you it on some uncommon port such as port 43034. The benefit is that its transparent to users. It will not interfere with their browsing. And you get the benefit of encryption and authorization, and knowing for certain that the certificate is yours (you have access to the certificate’s fingerprints).

I tried this on Dreamhost and I failed. Or, rather, Apache doesn’t you set up a <VirtualHost> in a .htaccess file. Dreamhost didn’t have anything in their web panel that would fix this. You can enable SSL for a site, but they force you into port 443 and don’t let you have both HTTP and HTTPS.

Another excellent educational learning opportunity ruined by over-zealous security zealots.

This post is a mashup of a few things I have been tinkering with over the last week that I think is fun to share. So if it seems I have been unfocused or whatever, this is pretty much why.

The first project I started doing for fun was working on canvas. This was different then some canvas stuff I have done in the past, The interesting people at nihilogic did a sepia filter using canvas. I wondered if it was possible to do filter so you can see an image with a red-green colour blindness. After some substandard research, I finally managed to do it. Though the quality is poor because it tends to be inaccurate. YMMV.

I wondered if you can do something like this for an entire webpage. So I moved the Javascript to an extension so I can use canvas’ drawWindow() method and take a picture of the entire website. Though I noticed that doing this on large image was computationally expensive and locking up the UI for an unreasonable amount of time.

I then tried to move all the calculations out of the main thread into a DOM worker thread. It was an interesting experience. I noticed though that while the main thread (and therefore, the UI) did not lock up, it was still sluggish and impractical to use. So I decided not to develop the extension further.

You can see the full demo here.

I then thought about what this would look like on other browsers. I didn’t expect anything requiring DOM worker threads to work on Safari/Opera. And sure enough, it didn’t. But I found out that DOM worker threads was based off of Google gears! So I looked into that and made a separate webpage that uses gears. Unfortunately, I found out that my efforts were largely wasted, as it only increased support to Firefox 2 and Mac Safari (Gears isn’t compatible with Windows Safari or Opera, and IE doesn’t have canvas support).

Either way, I made the Gears version available here.

Going away from canvas, I spent most of another day working on Google Maps API. The problem I was trying to solve was to see if I can highlight a 1 square kilometre radius from a pinpoint. This was difficult, as points on a map had a latitude, longitude co-ordinate, and I had to blindly figure out how much to reposition for a half-kilometre. Finding the distance between two points was also helpful, but hard getting a good formula for.

Of course, I am highlighting all the accomplishments and not mentioning the frustrating obstacles. There were several lessons learn on the way. Including a lot about incompatibility and how much I still don’t know how to do the kind of algorithmic research that you sometimes need. I’m starting to wonder if the BSD course taught me more than just to be a code monkey with a business touch, and made me wonder whether the theoretical/mathematical part will ever stop me doing something because “I just won’t get it”. Though, at the same time, I wasn’t willing to put the time and effort of research into pet projects. So this will probably be a problem for almost everyone, and not just me (honestly, mapping out longitude and latitude to distance is not something you learn anywhere).

Someone on digg made a post to a collection of Calvin and Hobbes comics. Which was a bad idea, cause I spent at least two hours looking through it.

Toronto was transformed at night on Saturday October 5th for some art thing called nuit blanche. Basically, it’s an event open all night with gallery’s across the city open for the public. Tom, Lucy and I spent all Saturday night and Sunday morning making trips to these exhibits, and had breakfast at 6-7am with Mike.

I was also surprised by meeting Armen there, and his brothers. It makes sense now.

While loads of fun (I didn’t know what we were doing when we met up. And I didn’t know how much I would enjoy it when I found out. But it turned out to be a great way to spend a Saturday night), I didn’t get home until later in the morning, where I crashed in my bed and didn’t wake up until 16:00 today. I didn’t manage to get any pictures because I didn’t bring my camera, but I did get a video of blinkenlights on my cell. They took over City Hall, and it was an entertaining light show. They also had it rigged up to play pong and tetris, but it was not well executed.

One internet phenomena that seems to be popular at Mozilla (at least, for some people) is rediculously cute animals and broken english in both in spelling and grammar known as lolspeak. So much so that Paul O’Shannessy (zpao if the name doesn’t ring a bell) created the bookmarklet that takes flickr images and turns them into canvas drawing overlaying text to it (called LOLify). The bookmarklet was based off of flolcatr, which brings more lols (well, some of the time anyways. The true lols come of the pics of middle-aged women).

Using that as inspiration, I worked on turning into a Firefox extension. Particularly because I wanted more flexibility out of it. For example, right now the bookmarklet takes random stuff out of the flickr comment and puts them into the image. But I wanted to add in my own stuff to either the top, middle, or bottom of the image and be able to align it left, centre, or right.

After spending all night doing it (I was afraid I would lose interest or get lazy if it took more than one day to complete), I uploaded what I had to addons.mozilla.org. After a good nap, I went back and fixed some pretty ugly errors and uploaded a much better version. I ended up with the name of kyoote (cutie), because it’s one of the words used to describe a fennec. And fennecs are extremely unrepresented as cute animals, even though they are adorable. And from today forward, let friday also be known as fen[nec]day.

Original image taken from deadstardro

So sit back this fenday and enjoy a meowtini :)

Update: Clarification based on comment

If you use screen + irssi a lot, you’ll know that sickening feeling when “screen -r” gives you a message that there are no screens to be resume. This happens when the computer is rebooted, and you lose all your screens. To add salt to the wound, you probably had your channels in some very specific window. For example, #seneca could be windows 2 and #developers could be window 6. And you can’t quite remember what was between 2 and 6.

While I can’t solve the computer rebooting problem, I have figured out a way to make connecting back to all your channels painless.

The first thing you have to do is create a network. A network would then contain a list of channels. Here’s the syntax to create a network :
/network add -nick cesar -realname “Cesar Oliveira” -autosendcmd “/^msg nickserv identify password” mozilla
It’s pretty self-explanatory.
-autosendcmd sends a message to the server once you are connected. In my case, I identified myself to nickserv with my cryptographically strong password (The /^msg means I don’t want to see the input. That way it doesn’t open up a new query window in irssi).
The last parameter is just the name of the network, which doesn’t have to be the same name as the server your connecting to (eg. irc.mozilla.org).

Then you add channels:
/channel add -auto #seneca mozilla
/channel add -auto #firefox mozilla
…
/channel add -auto #kittens mozilla
mozilla should correspond to your network. #seneca will be window 2, #firefox will be window 3…

Finally, when you get disconnected, you can connect to the irc server :
/connect -ssl -network mozilla irc.mozilla.org

Enjoy!