Politics

Politically the last few years have been really hard for me, 2014 , 2015 , and 2016 saw votes go completely against my expectations. This week was also surprise. It is easy to think I hold fringe views, that I am all alone surrounded by fascists, but the numbers show that only about have the electorate disagree in each of these cases.

The problem in almost all of these votes is not the right, but the inability of the left to draw people out. The fascists have it easy, they can hold a deplorable ideal, get rid of the immigrants and their supporters can galvanise around the idea. The left only seems to offer the status quo.

There are two courses of action at a time like this.

Get some supplies and a gun, go up a hill and disconnect from the world. (I can reccomend some hills)
Get involved and try to advance the causes you really care about.

Today, I really just want to climb a hill and start living in a cave. But that is the easy way out, instead I am going to start helping make the world a better place.

Reading: Abaddon's Gate, Reamde

Stupid

Couldn't say it better if I tried. @warrenellis @DarickR pic.twitter.com/yswrRp9u4p
— Mireille Abrihet (@MireilleAbrihet) November 9, 2016

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

Pirate Searching For Images On 500px

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.

Collecting my own stock images

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

CC0 Images With Unsplash

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