| Saturday, December 18, 2004 |  |
| Google Suggest Dissected |
| Chris Justus diggested the very cool Google Suggest. The code is absolutely brilliant and uses a bunch of tricks that few people knew about. I didn't even realize there were functions that could pick up live XML data without reloading the page. As he says, that's going to raise the bar for what we expect from webpages. I just have to figure that out and do some cool things with it. Apparently most of the major browsers support the necessary functionality. Which means one can do web apps that work much more like "real" apps, in terms of being responsive and picking up data from a database without having to reload the whole thing. It is still a mystery how google's servers can respond so damned fast, though. [ Programming | 2004-12-18 16:24 | 2 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| World's Smallest P2P Application |
| To demonstrate how simply it could be done, Ed Felten wrote a tiny peer-to-peer file-sharing program. Fifteen lines of Python:
# tinyp2p.py 1.0 (documentation at freedom-to-tinker.com/tinyp2p.html) import sys, os, SimpleXMLRPCServer, xmlrpclib, re, hmac # (C) 2004, E.W. Felten ar,pw,res = (sys.argv,lambda u:hmac.new(sys.argv[1],u).hexdigest(),re.search) pxy,xs = (xmlrpclib.ServerProxy,SimpleXMLRPCServer.SimpleXMLRPCServer) def ls(p=""):return filter(lambda n:(p=="")or res(p,n),os.listdir(os.getcwd())) if ar[2]!="client": # license: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0 myU,prs,srv = ("http://"+ar[3]+":"+ar[4], ar[5:],lambda x:x.serve_forever()) def pr(x=[]): return ([(y in prs) or prs.append(y) for y in x] or 1) and prs def c(n): return ((lambda f: (f.read(), f.close()))(file(n)))[0] f=lambda p,n,a:(p==pw(myU))and(((n==0)and pr(a))or((n==1)and [ls(a)])or c(a)) def aug(u): return ((u==myU) and pr()) or pr(pxy(u).f(pw(u),0,pr([myU]))) pr() and [aug(s) for s in aug(pr()[0])] (lambda sv:sv.register_function(f,"f") or srv(sv))(xs((ar[3],int(ar[4])))) for url in pxy(ar[3]).f(pw(ar[3]),0,[]): for fn in filter(lambda n:not n in ls(), (pxy(url).f(pw(url),1,ar[4]))[0]): (lambda fi:fi.write(pxy(url).f(pw(url),2,fn)) or fi.close())(file(fn,"wc")) And it can both be a client and a server. Of course this isn't going to run any network with 100s of thousands of users. But it shows how impossible it is for the enemies of file sharing to stop it. [ Programming | 2004-12-18 16:48 | 1 comment | PermaLink ] More > |
| Neurocam |
 A posting on Metafilter about a mysterious, eh, project, called Neurocam.:A billboard appears near a Melbourne freeway entrance inviting people to "Get out of their mind". "Those who follow the instructions on the neurocam website are assigned missions, with the threat of grave consequences should these tasks not be carried out. Individuals prove their mettle by completing progressively more complex, riskier assignments - possibly of questionable legality." Reading the second blog there... hm, very interesting. Kind of like The Game. I'd be very tempted to join if I were in Melbourne. Mindlessly delivering packages, without knowing whether they contain drugs or explosives. But it is fun to be a secret agent. I bet it is a psychological experiment. It will show how thrilled we are to do stuff we don't really know the consequences of, if we're just played the right way. [ Culture | 2004-12-18 17:48 | 10 comments | PermaLink ] More > |