The ticket sales for
Congress
this year have been a ultra fast, it is has
been entertaining to watch friends fight against server crashes and load while
trying to get tickets. This year I was lucky enough to avoid that ordeal, but
it has made me think about writing bots to buy tickets. I think I would be
trying to do so if I was going through the public sale.
I have previously watched a
defcon talk
about buying cars using a set of
bots, I do wonder if there is a set of literature on doing this and dealing
with mitigations.
There is also
this talk
, it might be good.
Reading:
Abaddon's Gate, Reamde
Ormiret
from the
hacker space
created a
tool
to encourage him to
head out and take more photos. His random theme generator is built up from some
photo theme lists.
I have been wanting
to have a picture on every blog
post, for that to be feasible I have to take many more photos.
The theme tool is an awesome idea, I thought it would be more powerful if there
were exemplar images alongside the theme. There are quite a few sites that have
attracted a large number of photographers and make an excellent place to search
for images matching a theme.
I looked at both flickr and 500px, but neither of these sites have an API that
allows unauthenticated access. I really don't want to create account on these
sites just for a throwaway image search. I did spend some time looking at their
APIs but neither looked like much fun.
500px has a public search page that doesn't require auth, by using Firefox to
grab the request headers it was easy in an hour or so to put together a command
line search tool.
#/usr/bin/env python
import sys
import urllib2
import pprint
from StringIO import StringIO
import gzip
import json
################################################################################
# _ _ _ _ #
# _ _ ___ _ __| |__ _ __ ___ | |_| |_ (_)___ #
# | '_/ -_) '_ \ / _` / _/ -_) | _| ' \| (_-< #
# |_| \___| .__/_\__,_\__\___| \__|_||_|_/__/ #
# |_| #
################################################################################
header = """
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; FreeBSD amd64; rv:49.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/49.0
Accept: application/json, text/javascript, */*; q=0.01
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br
X-CSRF-Token: J2iawi/G7GJ3cqXgKVhYVlIQjNMWCXCdSPNscW/lyZb0xk1+Y3HWlPgCW6/kYQWY6tkfSWF2IWDtx8H8Q8A4Eg==
Referer: https://500px.com/search?type=photos&utm_campaign=google_search_box&q=blue
Origin: https://500px.com
Cookie: _hpx1=BAh7CkkiD3Nlc3Npb25faWQGOgZFVEkiJTcwNWJhODM3OGE0ODIwZGRjMWMzNzBmZGY5NGU1ZTczBjsAVEkiCWhvc3QGOwBGIg41MDBweC5jb21JIhhzdXBlcl9zZWNyZXRfcGl4M2xzBjsARkZJIhBfY3NyZl90b2tlbgY7AEZJIjEwNjdYdkV5M092YVBjUDVQelRsZHpyakprNXAzZjFIOXBUU3RqU3dsOFlRPQY7AEZJIhFwcmV2aW91c191cmwGOwBGSSI%2BL3NlYXJjaD90eXBlPXBob3RvcyZ1dG1fY2FtcGFpZ249Z29vZ2xlX3NlYXJjaF9ib3gmcT1ibHVlBjsAVA%3D%3D--2a92d13e5bc840dd0de0d3d469d0cc3019e12fb3; optimizelyEndUserId=oeu1478624905590r0.6262684177302974; optimizelySegments=%7B%22569090246%22%3A%22false%22%2C%22569491641%22%3A%22campaign%22%2C%22575800731%22%3A%22ff%22%2C%22589900200%22%3A%22true%22%7D; optimizelyBuckets=%7B%227781310076%22%3A%227773970029%22%7D; _ga=GA1.2.166996737.1478624906; _gat=1; _gat_unifiedTracker=1; amplitude_id500px.com=eyJkZXZpY2VJZCI6IjJkYjljZTg3LTk5ZjktNDg4Yy1hNTFlLWNhN2M5ZGU3MGUwZFIiLCJ1c2VySWQiOm51bGwsIm9wdE91dCI6ZmFsc2UsInNlc3Npb25JZCI6MTQ3ODYyNDkzMTM1NSwibGFzdEV2ZW50VGltZSI6MTQ3ODYyNDkzMTM1NSwiZXZlbnRJZCI6MCwiaWRlbnRpZnlJZCI6MCwic2VxdWVuY2VOdW1iZXIiOjB9; optimizelyPendingLogEvents=%5B%22n%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252F500px.com%252Fsearch%253Ftype%253Dphotos%2526utm_campaign%253Dgoogle_search_box%2526q%253Dblue%26u%3Doeu1478624905590r0.6262684177302974%26wxhr%3Dtrue%26time%3D1478624986.482%26f%3D7763794202%2C7254840151%2C7769081978%2C7513516222%2C7781310076%26g%3D582890389%22%5D
Connection: keep-alive
Cache-Control: max-age=0
"""
################################################################################
host = "api.500px.com"
path = "/v1/photos/search?type=photos&term={}&image_size%5B%5D=1&image_size%5B%5D=2&image_size%5B%5D=32&image_size%5B%5D=31&image_size%5B%5D=33&image_size%5B%5D=34&image_size%5B%5D=35&image_size%5B%5D=36&image_size%5B%5D=2048&image_size%5B%5D=4&image_size%5B%5D=14&include_states=true&formats=jpeg%2Clytro&include_tags=true&exclude_nude=true&page=1&rpp=50"
themes_url="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ormiret/photo-themes/master/themes.txt"
def search500px(searchstring):
query = urllib2.quote(searchstring)
url = "https://" + host + path.format(query)
opener = urllib2.build_opener()
for line in header.split("\n"):
if not line:
continue
s = line.split(":")
opener.addheaders.append((s[0], s[1].strip()))
response = opener.open(url)
if response.info().get('Content-Encoding') == 'gzip':
buf = StringIO(response.read())
f = gzip.GzipFile(fileobj=buf)
data = f.read()
data = json.loads(data)
photos = data["photos"]
print("{} photos in response".format(len(photos)))
images = []
for photo in photos:
image = photo["image_url"][-1]
page_url = "https://500px.com/" + photo["url"]
datafile.write("<img src=\"{} \" href=\"{}\"></img>"
.format(image, page_url))
images.append({"image":image, "page_url":page_url})
return images
if __name__ == "__main__":
searchstring = "night time rail"
if len(sys.argv) > 1:
print(sys.argv)
searchstring = " ".join(sys.argv[1:])
print("Searching for: {}".format(searchstring))
filename = "{}.html".format(urllib2.quote(searchstring))
datafile = open(filename, "w")
datafile.write("""
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<h1>
{}
</h1>
""".format(searchstring))
images = search500px(searchstring)
for image in images:
datafile.write("<img src=\"{} \" href=\"{}\"></img>"
.format(image["image"], image["page_url"]))
datafile.write("""
</body>
</html>""")
print("writing out file: {}".format(filename))
datafile.close()
This scrip paired with the request headers exported from firefox allows you to
search for a string on 500px and generates a page with the first set of
results. Of course I had to pull out the search and send Ormiret a pull request
to add this functionality to his theme generator.
Yesterday
I came across the awesome CC0 license stock image site
unsplash
, both today and yesterday I have used other peoples images from
that site. The images aren't of anything I have been writing about, but images
make blog posts looks a ton better.
I think I am going to continue to try and have an image on every blog post, even
if it is just to give them some colour. There really is nothing stopping me
from using my own pictures of awesome places.
This awesome picture of the
Skogarfoss Waterfall
(which I got from
unsplash) is really strange to me. I was in Iceland in August and I visited
that exact waterfall and while I have used someone else's stock photo there is
nothing stopping me from using my own picture of the exact same feature.
I will attack my photo collection in the next few days and try to built up a
bank of images to use. I think I want to have images sorted so I can match them
against the tags on blog posts. My approach to tagging is very haphazard, I
will probably make groups like:
-
electronics
-
coffee
-
radios and antennas
-
landscapes(rural)
-
landscapes(urban)
-
graffiti
-
tool kits, workbenchs, desks
I am going to have to start taking more photos.
Reading:
Abaddon's Gate, Reamde
This has been a hard morning, the weather is extra foul and heading into a real
winter, and I sense a cold coming on. On HN today there is the curated CC0
image site
unsplash
, I have co-opted a giant night sky image from there for
today's post.
I have been thinking for a while that every post really should have an image,
ideally I would take a load of great photos and add a sort of relevant one to
each post as I go. In lieu of that happening I might integrate something like
unsplash and one of their great collections.
https://unsplash.it/200/300/?random
They do have a service which provides random images with a url,
others
have
used it to make 404 pages more interesting.
Reading:
Abaddon's Gate, Reamde
The
HN thread
about
nyancat on the new MacBook TouchBar
is
overwhelmingly negative, that's normal for HN, but the response I have seen to
it other places has been just as bad.
The changes to the keyboard, awkwardness of touch screens and position of the
board are common points of compliant. I think Keyboards have too many keys, I
type on a
planck
which only has 40 keys. I love this keyboard. I think if
you look at a layout map of the planck you will realise that you can get used
to very strange layouts.
An awesome, long screen like that is a great addition the standard laptop
layout. Having a way to access context while not obstructing the main display
is awesome. The hardware as implemented by Apple is a problem, if it
really is
running WatchOS
then no other OS will ever work with it, that doesn't stop
over manufacturers doing it with a sensible hardware link.
I love the idea of having a secondary display built into my laptop. Look at the
awesomeness @jcs managed with the RGB bar on the chromebook pixel, that bar is
only RGB, a full colour display could do so much more.
Screens on keyboards aren't new, there have been
gaming keyboards
with
screens for a long time. Apple might be the first to try this on a laptop, but
will probably be the first to succeed with this idea. I suspect Apple will have
the first implementation that sees real adoption in the secondary screen
peripheral space.
It
is
Sunday, so that
makes
seven
days
of
writing
.
Reading:
Abaddon's' Gate, Reamde
