Update 13: Media Phun, Teaching, Ofoto, Sexiest Geek, CCC, Misc
February 20, 2000
Reply-To: david@weekly.org
From: update@david.weekly.org
Subject: Media Phun, Teaching, Ofoto, Sexiest Geek, CCC, Misc
To: update@david.weekly.org
f e b r u a r y 2 0 / 0 0
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< david.weekly.org > Update #13
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Wow, so much has been going on that it's going to be hard to
hard to put it all into one email, so I put up some articles
on the site with some of the things that have been going on
here, and here I'll relate the others.
First off, the site has gotten some fair bit more popular due
to my Napster exploits. For those of you who didn't follow it,
I analysed the napster protocol by peeking at packets that it
was sending to the network from my computer and then deduced
their meaning to write a rough description of the Napster
protocol. As it turns out, Dr. Scholl from the OpenNap project
(to make an OpenSource Napster server) had done a far more
comprehensive writeup on the protocol, but I only found this
out after I told people about my protocol. Oddly enough, a
fair number of people picked up on the story (see my "links"
section if you're curious - http://weekly.org/links.php3 --
the number of links from overseas surprised me!), and I
was amused by the resulting "15 minutes of fame."
The protocol: http://david.weekly.org/code/napster.php3
The next week I got an email from a student whose University
had blocked access to Napster, so just for fun I posted
instructions on how to circumvent a Napster blockade. That
got a little bit of press, too. Well, no matter, I have
other things to be working on now. (Like an encrypted
version of ICQ in Java for my cryptography class! See
http://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/cs255/project1.pdf )
The docs: http://david.weekly.org/code/napster-proxy.php3
---< TEACHING >
Well, it looks like this quarter is all about teaching!
I'm still working on writing my book, filling in the odd
hours with editing and additions and whatnot, and now I'm
helping teach two courses. I'm a section leader for the
Intro. to Computer Science curriculum at Stanford; it's
been a real learning experience introducing people to
computer programming and help them learn good style. I'm
also teaching a course of my own on Saturdays to high
school students called "1-2-3 Startup!" that reviews the
details of what goes into a startup: financing, real
estate, the mechanics of the Internet, what goes into a
good or bad idea, how to find a good idea and what to
do with it, IPOs, etc. Last week, we had my friend Gene
Hoffman, President & CEO of eMusic come talk with them;
we have some other speakers set up for coming weeks,
too. It's amazing to see how bright these kids are!
Gene was blown away, as am I every Saturday. They asked
him what his ticker symbol was and the next week
confided to me that they had bought EMUS. Gene wasn't
just speaking to high school students; he had been
speaking to shareholders! The mind boggles...
---< OFOTO >
Well, I gave my girlfriend a digital camera for Christmas,
and we've really enjoyed just having it around to snap
shots of this or that. I'm planning on taking some of my
favorite pictures and putting them up on my website. Two
are already there in thumbnail, mid, and humongous sizes.
http://david.weekly.org/pix/
Wanting to print some of these out, I checked out a bunch
of online printing services and was most impressed with
oFoto (www.ofoto.com) - they give the first 100 prints for
free, 1st shipment is free and after than shipping is
$1.50 for any size order and photo prices range from 50
cents for a 4" x 6" to $3.00 for a 8" x 10" -- I have an
8x10 of "HELLO" on my wall next to my bed. Very cool!
---< SEXIEST GEEK >
Wow. I don't know what to say. I quote the following:
"Congratulations! Out of 16,709 entrants to the "Sexiest
Geek Alive Contest," you have been selected to be one of
the Top 500 Sexiest Geeks. We had a difficult time choosing
among the 8,742 men and 7,967 women who filled out our
questionnaire."
Heh...it must have been the Playboy article:
http://www.playboy.com/oncampus/feature/mp3/weekly1.html
--< CCC >
Much to my delight, I've pretty much figured out what I
want to do for the next year of my life. Manual labor.
Why? Well, I pretty much poured out my feelings about
the issue on the news section of my website and I'd
rather not just retype the whole thing:
http://david.weekly.org/news/00feb20.php3
Incidentally, "CCC" stands for the California Conservation
Corps, which is kind of like Americorps (in turn, kind of
like the Peace Corps!)
---< MISCELLANEOUS >
Well, I got really upset at my Compaq computer for not
turning on and wrote a bit of a rant:
http://david.weekly.org/writings/compaq.php3
I also explained why my server has been down:
http://david.weekly.org/writings/server.php3
I added a copyright explanation to my page:
http://david.weekly.org/copyright.php3
(I also did a few HTML updates to clean things up)
Finally, I did a quick writeup on the effectiveness
of Mirc and why Net file sharing will never die:
http://david.weekly.org/writings/mirc.php3
---< FUNNY >
I ran across this on the 'Net, and I thought you all
might enjoy "Delta marketing in Ebonics" (foul language)
http://www.techradioshow.com/Files/delta.mp3
---< END >
Well, that's all for now! As you may have surmised by
now, I don't send these out very often, but I hope that
you do enjoy these updates!
Yours,
David E. Weekly
PS: There are currently 484 subscribers to this list!