Some brilliant internet person has discovered that if you take the Garfield out of Garfield comics, they get a whole lot more entertaining (in a bizarre sort of way). [ link ]

AC tried to convince me that when the rugrat arrives, we’re going to split everything 50-50. Everything. Luckily I found this educational website full of important parenting tips, which totally gets me off the hook. [ link ]

So, I know I haven’t been so awesome on the prompt EuroTrip updates. My bad. But I have to interrupt your irregularly scheduled program for the following public service announcement. Dumpling House Restaurant, of 328 Spadina Ave, in Toronto, is now closed. Closed because sometime today, it failed a City of Toronto Public Health Inspection. It failed this inspection miserably - so badly that a Health Hazard Order was involved, and the proprieter was issued a summons. It failed, in short, because of rats:

But wait. It gets worse. You see, today I dined at this fine establishment. Today. Today I had lunch at Dumpling House. The same day that it failed a City of Toronto Public Heath Inspection. The same day that a Health Hazard Order and court summons was issued. The same day that rats were witnessed, scurrying about with their little rat feet over top of the table where delicious dumplings are formed. Delicious rat-contaminated dumplings.

I finished lunch at 1:30pm. The first comment on this blog post that broke the rat story was posted at 4:06 pm. So the shutdown was maybe at 3pm? A scant hour-and-a-half delay, and I might have witnessed the shutdown in action. I might have been sitting there, dumpling in hand*, when a crack team of Public Health Inspection officers came sliding down by rope from the Official Public Health Rapid Response Team helicopter, crashing through the window, while megaphones blared “put down the chopsticks and step away from the pan-fried lamb” **.

Or, perhaps, I simply would have arrived after the shutdown, and missed out on the rat-contaminated dumplings entirely. Of course, then this post would not have been written. And, I would be feeling distinctly less queasy about the whole thing. It’s always a trade-off, I guess.

News travels fast - even the National Post is blogging about the Dumpling House rats. The proprieter of Dumpling House is quoted, stating that it is not Dumpling House in particular that has a rat problem, but the City of Toronto as a whole. Well, clearly, yes, there are many rats in downtown Toronto. But the rats inside the window, contaminating the dumpling preparation area? Definitely a Dumpling House problem.

The worst part is, now the lab has to find a new dumpling place…

* In fact, I do not eat dumplings with my hands. But “dumpling pinched precariously between two chopsticks” wasn’t really working, sentence-wise…

** This is how I imagine a Public Health shutdown happens. The more likely “man-with-clipboard” scenario hardly does the situation justice, in my mind.

Comedy Gold.

Today I have various bits of edutainment for you. But first, Happy Birthday to my wee sister, who turned 21 today. Actually, yesterday. Well, technically, 2 days ago, depending on your timezone. Regardless - Happy Birthday, Sis’.

Ok, on to the entertainment. Well, it’s not really that entertaining, actually. But it is educational. Apparently the corporate behemoth that is Dove (you know, the soap people) have reformed their fetishizing-waiflike-bulemia-victim ways, and are now using “real girls” in their advertising. Or, at least, they’re willing to show you what the real girl looked like, before the makeup team and photoshop artists got at her:

I wasn’t particularly surprised by the make-up part, but the Photoshopping blew me away, and I’m a frickin’ professional computer graphics nerd. I’m well aware of the crazy photoshopping that goes on these days, like this Faith Hill “re-imagining”. But this video is insane. Did you see what they did to her NECK?!? Who has a neck like that?!? And then they give her bugged-out alien space-eyes!?! Freakish. It’s basically a caricature. I wonder why we don’t notice this kind of thing…

Ok, now on to the lowbrow humour. Below is the subject line of an e-mail that was forwarded to most of the departments at a certain university-which-will-not-be-named (senders have been hidden to protect the guilty):

AC pointed out that the slip may have been Freudian in nature, which hadn’t even occurred to me.

(Yes, I am making jokes at the expense of a dead man (well, tangentially, at least). Hear that scraping? It’s the bottom of the barrel…)

Finally, for your nerding pleasure, don’t you just hate it when you don’t have a fixed memory address containing jmp esp to point your buffer overflow attack at? I know I used to. But not anymore, because some ingenious hacker-type has come up with a solution - Temporal Return Addresses.

If you don’t know how a buffer overflow attack works, here’s the Coles notes - say you have some program with a function foo() that has a local array char bar[100]. Because the programmer is an idiot, the function contains a call like “strcpy(bar, line_from_a_file)”. So you create a file with a line that contains more than 100 characters, causing strcpy to write past the end of the array, overwriting the return address on the stack that foo() will jump back to when it is finished. Normally this causes the program to crash, because the return address was replaced with random garbage. But if you’re clever, you can craft a string that replaces the original return address with a new one - say somewhere else in memory that contains the assembly code to delete the hard drive, or give you administrator access. Voila, you’re a hacker.

But there’s one problem. You need to know the new return address, which is highly program-specific. The problem is that the addresses of memory buffers can change for all sorts of reasons, including people wising up and making them random, breaking this attack. Good, right? But those hackers are crafty. They’ve figured out that, really, you just need a fixed memory address that is constantly being incremented - like, say, a timer. Then you just wait until the bit pattern of the timer is the same as the assembly instruction you want to execute, then you (very quickly) point your return address there, and you’re golden.

Let me repeat that, for the kids in the back. The timer is an integer which is constantly incrementing. At certain times, the bit pattern of this integer is the same as the bit pattern of an instruction the attacker wants to execute. The buffer overflow attack can be executed at that exact moment - the attacker just has to be willing to wait.

But you’re safe, you say, because your source code is closed and nobody knows the addresses of your timer variables. Wrong again, because the crafty hackers have written a program which scans your program over time and automatically identifies addresses in memory that are constantly incrementing. Plus, on Windows it turns out that all processes have at least one timer that Windows makes for them. Wild.

If you’ve read this far but aren’t a programmer and don’t really understand, just trust me, this is a work of staggering fucking brilliance. And we totally lucked out, because most timers on computers count the date from 1970, and it turns out that for most of 2003, these timers contained a highly desirable bit pattern really, really often. Combined with all the worms that were running amok back then, and, well, it could have been messy.

(That’s the end of the science lesson - you may return to your facebook now…)

For my first 8 months in Toronto, I lived with some friends in the upper two floors of a house in “Little Portugal” (near Dufferin station). It was a great place, we didn’t have access to the yard, but we did have an awesome balcony with a nice view. We also had another squirrel invader. At the back of the house, there was an un-insulated “cold-room” on the second floor. Outside, there was a hole in the side of the house, in which this particular squirrel decided to nest. At first, we just heard the scratching (which drove the cat nuts). Then, one day, the squirrel started to come through:

At first it didn’t seem so bad. We figured it would hear us (and smell the cat), realize it was coming through the ceiling into scary human-land, and stop digging. At least, that was the story I told my roommate, because she was slightly paranoid about waking up one morning and finding a rabid squirrel loose in the house. (I have to admit, I did start locking my bedroom door closed - just in case…). But this squirrel wasn’t going to be deterred by a vicious, hungry cat, and things quickly escalated:

At first, the landlord figured a few strips of packing tape would do the trick. I tried to point out that this was an inferior approach, and duct tape would be far more effective. But in the end, no tape-based solution was going to keep that squirrel out. We were forced to abandon the cold-room and retreat back to the kitchen, barricading the door at all times (except when we had to get stuff out of the refrigerator). Although guilt was felt (by some), we requested an exterminator. The landlord was a bit squeamish about that, though, so instead she just had the hole patched over. The squirrel lost it’s nest and probably froze to death. And the cycle of life continues…

Toronto has lots of weird public service advertisements, like this one I saw on a full-size billboard in the subway (below-left). Maybe it’s only been since the SARS thing, but there seems to be a general paranoia about GERMS. Every bathroom at the university has signs explaining secret hand-washing techniques that will prevent you from leaving behind any GERMS. Secret techniques like “wiping down everything you might have touched with a huge wad of paper towel”. (I guess when it comes to GERMS vs Environment, GERMS win). I would not be surprised to learn that there is a number you can call if you accidentally contaminate something with your GERMS, to have a biohazard clean-up team dispatched immediately. Although, I guess Alberta does have the rat patrol. I wonder what weird neuroses other provinces have.

Also, fighting meats:

Finally, just in case you are ever having some trouble classifying different types of wood, the IKEA in Etobicoke has your back:

So, about 6 months ago I moved unknownroad.com to a new webhost, site5, because they had an awesome deal where I got 5 full sites (not just domain pointers) for $200 for 2 years. Which works out to about $5 a month, which I can cover with a bit of advertising. w00t. Anyway, one other bonus is that site5 has waaaaay better web statistics tracking. Which is awesome for me, because I’m a huge dork. Seriously, though, because I actually get a decent amount of traffic, it’s interesting to see the breakdown of some of the statistics (Well, “interesting” if you’re also a huge dork. If you’re a normal person, please be aware that you are now descending into hard-core nerdery. If that’s not your bag, lucky you. Just skip to the funny/horrific picture at the end of the post)

First, the OS wars. Linux on the desktop, eh? I’ll believe it when I see it. Even though 90% of my traffic is programmers looking for gdb tutorials (yes, gdb - as in, the linux debugger), most of them are using windows boxes. Ha! Also, AmigaOS and IRIX make strong showings, given that nobody has sold an Amiga or IRIX box for many, many years. Guess some people just can’t let go…

Next, the browser wars. I think Firefox has about 10% of the general “browser market”. Clearly, programmers are bigger fans. But I kind of thought Opera was more popular….

Finally, the search engines wars. Have been won. By Google. Thanks for coming out, Windows Live! MSN Live! Search Live!. But you lose.

I also discovered on my shapeshop3d.com logs that ShapeShop was downloaded over 4000 times this month. Last month? 300 times. So it was very exciting. Until I noticed that the average download size was 300 kb. ShapeShop 002 is about 5 megs. So, there were probably 300 actual downloads, and 4000 failed downloads (I just verified that this gives almost exactly the right average. Which only cements my “huge dork” assertion…). So, I have to wonder - who is this person that tried (and failed) to download ShapeShop 4000 times? Whoever it is - I like their persistence…

END NERDERY (for those skipping ahead)

Finally, something almost unbelievably fucked up. It used to be that only celebrities had their photos photochopped so that they looked thinner. But not anymore. Hewlett Packard has democratized vanity retouching, bringing it to the people. You too can now apply advanced “horizontal scaling” technology to “instantly appear more slender”. I am ashamed for the field of computer graphics…

According to my computer machine, there are over 3000 pictures in my My Pictures folder. And I’ve hardly shown you any of them. So, it’s your lucky day. Sort of. Today we explore Montreal.

If you ever move to Montreal, one of the things you will get used to is the bizarre, incomprehensible workings of the City Works department. There are projects all over downtown that the city seems to have just forgotten about. You never actually see anyone working at these sites. They’ve they just thrown down some boards and moved on to digging the next hole. One of the local newspapers even stealthily followed a City Works crew around for a day. The crew ran errands all morning and hit the strip joints in the afternoon. Oh, and they spent about an hour filling a pothole. This dedication to a job well-done explains why, when you look down most of the holes on St Laurent, you see something like this:

Yes, those are your phone, cable, and electricity lines, suspended from metal tubing with a random system of rope and tape. This is what holds Montreal together. It’s unclear if the city ever comes back to fill these holes, or if they just wait for Montrealers to fill them in with cigarette butts…

This is a tiny hamburger, from a tiny restaurant called Patati Patata. You might consider it a snack, but for fashionable Montrealers, it is dinner.

During the winter, we made the mistake of only closing the inner window in our bathroom. Humidity from the shower froze the window shut, and a huge ice block built up that lasted until spring. During this time, a squirrel built a winter nest in the gap between the inner and outer panes. Imagine waking up after a late night, groggily stumbling into the shower in the morning, turning on the water, and having your squirrel buddy freak out inside a window just inches from your head. Woke me up pretty quick, anyway…

Montreal has some really great billboard advertisements. Maybe it’s because the culture is a bit more liberal, and, well, cultural. Unfortunately I don’t have pictures of any of those, so here is one that makes me wince, and one that AC thought was hilarious. She even found a postcard-sized version of the….um….”finger” puppet, which can be cut out and worn. (Thankfully, the card is still intact)

Finally, an action shot of the ballsiest (and/or batshit-craziest) motorized wheelchair guy I have ever seen. You can’t tell from the picture, but this is essentially a highway, with traffic moving at about 80 km/hr. I was walking towards the underpass one day and I heard honking, honking like it was going out of style. And then I sew the man in the chair. His little orange flag, waving proudly. And Montreal drivers careening around him, honking and screaming like the maniacs that they are. The man in the chair was unfazed by the situation. Perhaps even unaware. All I could do was stop and watch the spectacle. Crazy wheelchair man, I salute you…

Check back soon for more blurry, over-exposed pictures, brought to you by Motorola…

One thing I have learned about Toronto in the last year is that, save for a few parks, the entire GTA (Greater Toronto Area) is basically paved over and piled high with concrete. Coming from out West, this is pretty depressing, and I wondered how native Torontonians could stand living for so long without, well, trees. Well, last week AC and I found out. We went cottaging.

“Going to the cottage” is a big deal in Ontario. Every Friday, there is a mass exodus from Toronto to Muskoka (Native American word for “Lake of Boat Garages”), where there are large quantities of trees and other biomass (read: bugs). It’s a short two-hour drive through a scenic countryside that could be anywhere in rural Canada - except for that giant Staples and the condo towers surrounding any pond developers can get away with calling “lakefront property”. At Lake Muskoka, Ontarions “get away from it all” in rustic comfort. By rustic, of course, I mean recently-built faux-log-cabins with dishwashers, central heating, multiple stories, and wireless internet. Nobody out there is roughing it. I was told that an Ontario cottage is no different from the “cabin” one finds in Alberta or BC, but in reality “cottage” is just a synonym for “second house”.

Actually, the place we stayed was built in the 50s, and lacked both central heating and bonus floors. We were there in the “off-season” (ie, during the week), so it was quiet and relaxing. Well, there was the frequent drone of passing boats, and cottage-construction next door, but otherwise, it was nature-sounds only. The cottage was on a small island, so we were cut off from escape, should our host turn out to be an axe-murderer. Luckily, she was cool.

The whole living-on-an-island thing, which I assumed would be awesome, does have some downsides. One being that you can’t just walk down to the 7-11, you have to boat down, which is way more work. Whoever invents the mobile 7-11 is going to make a fortune out at Muskoka. It also gets dark at night - I mean really dark, not Toronto dark, where you can make a sandwich at 3 AM without turning on any lights. While I’m a big fan of sleeping in actual darkness, it’s less awesome when you’re sitting on the porch and you can’t see the bugs that are eating your human flesh.

Speaking of boats, when you live on an island, a boat is your primary mode of transportation. On land, we park our cars in garages. So where do the islanders park their boats? That’s right - Boat Garages! There’s even double-garages, for two-boat families.

I couldn’t zoom in far enough to capture the multi-storied mansions - sorry, “cottages” - sitting just behind the trees. But they’re out there. The Muskoka Wikipedia page lists famous people, including Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, and Nancy Dolman, who have “retreats” on the lake. Although I imagine they don’t need boat garages, since they probably come and go at night in silent black helichopters…

All things considered, I had a pretty good time at the cottage. I lived on an island for two whole days (well, about 36 hours) without losing my shit, which I think will be good experience to put on my resume if I ever want to apply to be an astronaut or live in a biodome. I had some pretty good food, and slept like a baby. I do have a few strange-looking insect bites, but I’m sure they’ll fade with time - amputation is unlikely to be necessary. And, I saw hummingbirds! Overall, I give the Lake Muskoka Cottage Experience a B+. I’ll leave you with this shot summing up our trip - sandals, barbeque, and wireless router signal extender. Ahhhh, nature….

So, I was home alone last week, and when this happens I usually go into insane-coding-mode and live in front of the computer. But I have come to realize that I’m not capable of doing that anymore - I burn out and accomplish nothing for weeks afterwards. So, instead, I worked regular hours, and watched a lot of TV (way healthier, I’m sure). Specifically, I got hooked on a little show called Heroes. 23 episodes later, I was able to again function as a normal(ish) human being. That’s about 17 hours. In 4 days. I tried to stop, but each frickin episode ends with a wild cliffhanger. I guess that’s not such an issue when episodes only come out once a week, but when the next episode is right there, the choice between “Find out if Hiro dies” and “Consume sustenance necessary for life” is basically made for you. Maybe I’m just less desensitized because I hardly ever watch TV*, but I can’t imagine how people with cable get anything done….

I also rented David Lynch’s Mullholland Drive. I’ve seen it before - I think I watched it in high-school on a friend’s recommendation, although there is a good chance that recommendation was more about the lesbian scenes and less about the plot (classy, I know). I remember it being completely confusing, and I think I fell asleep. But they have a David Lynch section at Bay Street Video, and the sticky-note on the box said it was one of Lynch’s best, so I gave it anther try.

Well, I stayed awake this time. But it was still completely confusing. I spent an hour or two afterwards reading different explanations of the plot on the interweb. Reading between the lines, it seems like everyone agrees that David Lynch is completely screwing with us, but the agreement ends there. I had assumed that the girl was a meth addict (because of her teeth at the end), but maybe she just wasn’t brushing enough. Either way, I highly recommend it. After all, when was the last time you watched a movie where people felt it necessary to create websites explaining the plot? (Besides Star Wars and Harry Potter, you dorks). Just don’t watch it late at night. Or think too hard about it afterwards. And close your eyes when they look for the monster near the beginning (it is extremely creepy and had me all paranoid when I went to the bathroom…).

Apparently I also have become nocturnal. It’s 3am again. Argh.

* This is not entirely true. Last semester, about 100 hours of my life were wasted on the wacky mishaps of Lorelai and Rory. That’s right, I’ve seen all 7 seasons of the Gilmore Girls. I’ve also seen almost 3 full seasons of House. Really, I’m a closet TV junkie. But at least I only see the good stuff. Er, except for that Gilmore Girls thing….