Crazy Or Genius?: Category School

Discover The Unexpected

Sean — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 14:35:44 +0200

A while ago, I was contacted to participate in a new advertising campaign for Dal. They were apparently looking for ‘cool students doing cool things’ and one of my professors apparently recommended me from among students in our faculty. Go figure. At the time, I thought to myself ‘Sure, why not?’. I thought that it would be something like a little blurb and a photo in some advertising pamphlet, maybe even my picture on a fridge magnet that I could send home.

Instead…...... I ended up Discovering the Unexpected.

I have to admit that the photo shoot and the video was fun, even if the entire thing went farther than initially expected. Talking to some of the other students involved with this, they all had the original ‘I thought it was just going to be a picture and some text’ expectations that I had, and are all a little overwhelmed by what it became in the end. Especially since the other day we found out that some of this stuff might be in movie theatres this summer…........

My first thought was ‘Dear God, I have to move out of this province now’.

TurnItIn.com - Beating The System Part 4: Denying Our Corporate Overlords

Sean — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 12:14:00 +0100

As many of you might know, a while back Mike Smit started taking a hard look at TurnItIn.com a while back. For those of you who follow his site, he has more recently begun an information campaign, pointing out failings, problems, and concerns with the service. Even outside of his site, the issue has been getting a lot of attention, including being covered in the current issue of the Dalhousie Gazette.

One of the things Mike is doing is investigating how effective it is, and how difficult it is to trick the system. Currently has mentioned three ways to beat the system. One involves his own program that manipulates the document to make it pass. The second involves using MS Word’s built in hidden text feature. The third to date is using MS Words built in macro functionality. “How can we trick the system with free tool that are readily available?” However, not everyone can write software, or own MS Word. I began thinking to myself ‘how can I trick the system with free tools that are readily available?’. First step: take a look at OpenOffice. Can the same hidden text trick work? A quick test shows…......... no. Hidden text is a field attribute in OO, and a character attribute in MS Word. The two are not compatible. Macros? Keeping the macro as is and saving as a MS Word file doesn’t work. This is largely due to MS Word using their own scripting language or VB for their macros, while OO has their own scripting language, as well as using javascript and a few other options. Either way, the macro option is out, especially since TurnItIn.com doesn’t accept OO documents, making an effort to create a similar macro for OO pointless (at this time).

But wait…... what formats DOES TurnItIn.com accept? A quick check (verified by Mike a second later) gives me the following list: MS Word, WordPerfect, PostScript, PDF, HTML, RTF, and plain text. Plain text is out for obvious reasons, MS Word is being hammered by Mike’s own tests….... wait…... HTML? Instantly a few ideas come to mind. Idea the first: What happens if I replace all the spaces in a document with a & nbsp;? Thankfully TurnItIn.com DOES convert these to spaces. I would have laughed my ass off if they hadn’t.

Idea 2) What about inline style tags using spans? For example, this document. Note that this is what the professor would see. Now view the page source. You should see a number of lines like this:

<span style="position:absolute;left:-10000px">fgahlhgk</span> “What is sad is the fact that we are not even trying hard yet.”

This basically takes these characters and shifts them WAY to the left out of site of people like your prof.

Result? 0% plagiarized according to TurnItIn.com. Total time required to figure this out? < 5 minutes. Tools required? Your favorite plaintext editor. So not only can cheap windows users use this technique, but now Linux users can too!!!

What is sad is the fact that we are not even trying hard yet.

Degree Requirements

Sean — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 15:48:00 +0100

At the start of this term, I thought I had one more degree requirement: one second year or higher course that was from Mathematics, Science, Engineering, Management or Commerce. ‘Crap’ said I, ‘I most likely won’t be able to complete that until next fall’.

Today, however, I checked over what I needed to graduate and all I will need after this term is any one course. ANY ONE COURSE. I forgot that I signed up for a 3rd year commerce (Entrepreneurship) course at the last minute this term. Which means I can basically take anything this summer if I wanted to.

Funnily enough, this discovery comes just after having a talk with Dr. Scrimger regarding the directed studies course. Sure, at the time I didn’t think I would be able to take this course. However, it is my opinion that simple course work doesn’t really cut it for preparing students for their post university experience. Sure there is Co-op, but that is more ‘ok I need a job, any job, and maybe I will like it or not’ where Directed Studies is supposed to be more of ‘Yeah, this stuff really excites me, I want to try it’. Sure, there is Honours as well, but Honours has additional requirements.

Additionally, it is my understanding that there are Faculty members that have work that needs to be done, but that isn’t really of graduate thesis calibre, or is really some small project that is tangential to things being worked on, but needs to be done at some point to support other work, or just stuff that needs to be done to create a proper infrastructure for further work to be done on. Wouldn’t it be great to match interested undergrads with interesting things that actually need to be done?

Now, an argument against all this is that the professors are volunteering their own time to supervise a student. However, they also have final say on if a student is able to perform directed studies or not. So, making more individuals aware of directed studies (and honours technically) might cost them a little more in meetings up front, but the pay off is that their is a greater possibility of attracting motivated students who have interesting ideas that in turn, might interest the professor and there is also the chance of finding people that are willing to do things that are actually needed.

So, we’ll see how things go in both regards. Can I set something up, so Professors have a larger pool of candidates for doing interesting things? Can I come up with something interesting enough that I can enroll in directed studies in the near future? I am certainly interested in finding out.

Because Screwing Up Only One Server At A Time Is Child's Play........

Sean — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 00:51:00 +0100

So the Dal-ACM hosted another Installfest on Saturday. Rather than be a simple spectator of cool stuff and mooching off the nice spread of snacks, I decided to be an actual PARTICIPANT this time.

So, the Dal-ACM has this ‘development server’ (of the desktop machine variety) called mblast. In times past (2 Installfests ago) Gentoo was installed on it for some reason. Every time this was upgraded, something broke. More importantly, since almost everyone could sudo su - for root, packages were installed and upgraded with impunity, resulting in things breaking often. Funnily enough, the DSU opt-out site was run from this machine, and someone actually upgraded it while the opt-out period was running.

So, flash forward back to the present. Since the Dal-ACM aquired slammer, more people have shifted their user accounts to that machine, leaving mblast somewhat underused with the exception of some of my own work. I figured, since with the exception of a few Ruby On Rails Cookbook tutorial instances, I was the only person using the machine, I could wipe it and play with a few things I have been thinking about for a while (and yes, I asked to make sure there was nothing critical and performed a backup anyway).

So, what did I end up doing? I decided to try my hand at virtualization. Set up Debian Stable as a host machine, installed Xen, set up a host server from disk, and started that up…....... two machines running on one machine’s hardware. It was pretty sweet to get running. Of course, it wasn’t as easy as reading those lines. I somehow screwed up a minimal Debian install, had problems with mblast’s hardware, some misinterpretation of the hardware, and oh yeah, the pain in the ass of backing up everyone’s data before wiping that sucker the first time.

In the end it was done, it was cool, and as soon as I figure out how to install other operating systems besides Debian (since I used debootstrap for that) and to have the virtual hosts actually accessible to the internet, I will be able to set up any operating system (well, linux or bsd really, unsure about Solaris) for people, and then they can screw it up to their heart’s content without affecting someone else’s work (assuming that work is on a different virtual server). Yeah, learning all that is what reading week will be partially for.

The other cool thing at Installfest was Roomba hacking. Several people in the CSB, including my friend Oliver, bought a Roomba (a programmable robot vacuum cleaner) a wireless router, and other items. Their goal is to power the router from the Roomba, install linux (WRT Firmware) on the routers, and then be able to control the Roombas remotely via wireless. Add in some USB ports on the router and you can do a lot of things with that.

At the installfest, most of the time was spent deconstructing the Roombas without breaking them. Towards the end, they actually experimented with powering the router from the Roomba. One problem: the router partly starts up and then…. dies. The Roomba is currently blamed, the theory being that, while the specs say 2 amps of current can be drawn from the Roomba, there is probably some regulator somewhere that doesn’t allow more than a percentage of that out of the power interface they are using. A set back to be sure, and I am looking forward to seeing how they solve it, and having those Roombas running around the CS building.

Accomplished

Sean — Fri, 12 Aug 2005 17:36:00 +0200

Picking up my mail today, there happened to be a big paper tube accompanying the regular catalogs/bills/junk. Even more curious, it was addressed to me. Odd…... I wasn’t expecting anything.

Inside was a letter from the Dean of the Faculty of Computer Science, as well as a sheet of paper that had the words Sean Smith and Citizenship Award in big, fancy lettering.

While I can’t say this comes as a COMPLETE surprise, the timing was somewhat unexpected. I knew Mike had written up a nomination form (and Mike, reading this letter, you obviously put in a lot), and that Jon and Mark had signed it, but the e-mail that requests nominations each term also states that “Students who are nominated for an award will be contacted by the Scholarship Committee so they can provide a résumé, transcript and any other information which they think the Committee should consider in its decision.” Now, I haven’t heard anything about it since I was told by my nominators that I had been nominated, and in fact, have been asked by some of them if I have heard anything, cause they hadn’t when the summer term nominations request went out.

In the end, I am honored to have been considered, and selected for this award. I would like to thank all of those who helped make this possible, including my nominators, and all of those who actually came out to the events I arranged.