Larry Hosken: New

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even St Louis

2012-05-16T02:36:43

You must enjoy this St Louis travelog, aka how I traveled to DASH4. And it's also my report on DASH4 itself. Remember when I micro-blogged about tornado warning sirens? I wasn't kidding.

Books Report: Paranoia T1 Stay Alert; S1 Reality Optional; Y1 Traitor Hangout

2012-05-12T01:44:58

These are novels based in the world of the Paranoia paper role-playing game. I used to play this paper RGP called Paranoia. It was pretty fun. Most RPGs put emphasis on surviving: making smart tactical decisions to overcome enemies in simulated combat. But Paranoia was all about bleak humor; the characters in the game didn't survive. Everybody died. The world was a sort of Logans-Run world run by an insane Computer who was obsessed with Commies. If you've heard some of your older nerd friends mutter about "Trust the Computer. The Computer is your Friend," now you know where that came from. Though I don't play RPGs anymore, I still remember the world of Paranoia with fondness, so I was happy to find out about these books. Bonus: they're cheap on the Kindle. You might like them even if you never heard of Paranoia, but I dunno. The world of Paranoia has a lot of backstory; the books start you out in the middle of things. Mmmaybe you can figure it out from scratch if you don't already have the background? I dunno. I had the background, so I just had fun.

Potential Puzzle Hunters are everywhere, even St Louis

2012-05-05T17:22:45

While I was in St Louis to volunteer for DASH, I did some shoe-leather investigation in search of potential puzzlehunters. I had a lot of fun helping at DASH... but we only had two teams this year. Those folks had only found out about DASH because I happened to know Prof Bryan Clair, who passed along word to some SLU faculty and students. Us organizers had tried some other publicity things, but they hadn't borne fruit.

So I tried wandering around a couple of other St Louis school campuses in search of recreational math clubs and such. This isn't necessarily a smart way to go about finding potential puzzlehunters, but it's what I thought of.

MU-StL has a Math/CS department with some kind of Math Club. In my wanderings, I didn't see much sign of it or find someone to talk to. If I found the departmental office (which, depending on what sign you read is in room 303 or 311), then there was a lady in it who was on the phone the whole time I was wandering the halls. One room in their area had a sign out front labeled 'Math Club / "ACM"' Why was ACM in quotes? I don't know. So if I wanted to track down a math club in MU-StL, I'd start by calling up the math department on the phone. I dunno how useful it'd be, but it's at least as useful as wandering around lost on campus.

Wandering around lost the fifth floor of WUStL's Lapota hall (an engineering building) was more promising. I saw signs for events organized by ACM. And a big ACM banner hangs over a lounge area; so the ACM seems capable of organizing gatherings and such. Looking up the WUStL branch of the ACM on the internets, we can see they are sufficiently puzzle-y to have their own puzzle trail, in which I failed to solve so much as the first puzzle but let's not hold that against them. (Am I supposed to recognize an ASCII cow saying "phizzbuzz" from somewhere? I've heard of fizzbuzz. I know about a dogcow that says "moof". But that's as close as I get.)

I found the WUStL math department office and asked the nice student behind the desk if there was a local organization who was into "recreational math, puzzles, that sort of thing." He said that sounded like the Math Club, who was faculty-sponsored (or something) by this guy, Professor Chi.

After I told Prof. Clair of my investigations, he pointed out, "You could have just asked me; we St Louis math people talk to each other about stuff from time to time." So of course, that would be an important question for anyone you do manage to get interested: who else should I tell?

2012-04-29T02:21:29

Thunder, lightning, tornado warning sirens, golf-ball-sized hail, rain... most adventurous DASH ever!

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhen in San Mateo

2012-04-21T18:02:08

Because the dream of the 80s is also alive at Paine Memorial High School, here's a write-up of the Doctor When Game, a pretty amazing weekend-long puzzle-hunt time-travel-story game a bunch of folks played in a few weeks back.

2012-04-22T03:24:29

Just read @jfagone's @wired article about The World Henchmen Organization Game. (It's available on Kindle as part of the magazine.) Fun stuff!

Book Report: Falling to Earth

2012-04-19T02:46:21

It's Al Worden's autobiography. Al Worden grew up a farmboy, but became an Apollo astronaut. He didn't walk on the moon. He was a pilot, excited about piloting spaceships. He was pretty excited to pilot the module that orbited the moon for a few days instead of landing. He was around as fickle America started to lose interest in the moon. And he agreed to carry some envelopes into space for some philatelists who planned to sell them, and thus got fired from the Apollo program and hauled in to testify before congress about astronaut ethics. He went on to become an engineer, designing equipment for airplanes; and he ran for congress. As you might guess from all this, he had an interesting life and his autobiography makes good reading. Have you heard folks talk about how their attitude towards the world changed when they saw the "big blue marble" photo? Here you can read the recollection of someone who saw that live before the photo came along—and how it helped him understand our place.

Book Report: Semper

2012-04-16T14:51:55

Peter Dudley wrote a book! (You might remember Peter Dudley if you worked at Geoworks back in the day.) It turned out pretty darned well. It's young adult fiction, but there's nothing wrong with reading the occasional bit of young adult fiction, right? It's set in a post-apocalyptic future, but you might recognize story-pieces from more epic times. There's royal politics, romance, mysterious folk who live under a mound, and the joys of healthy outdoor living. It's all woven together well into an adventure story with some interesting characters. Good stuff.

Book Report: Digital Forensics with Open Source Tools

2012-04-15T21:11:57

It's a book about how to look over a hard drive and find out "what happened here?" This is a useful skill for computer security—you might want to figure out how a virus or hacker took over a machine just based on the changes they left behind to files. This might occasionally be useful to a computer repair person; maybe a hard drive got a little messed up such that it lost the "directory" information saying that the file Great_American_Novel.txt is in sector 1234... but you know that file contains the text "best of times". It seems like you ought to be able to recover the file if you have that information, and maybe you can.

This book talks about the process by which you do these things. It's a pretty interesting problem. How many files are on a typical hard drive nowadays? A lot. How do you sift through all of those to find those that help you figure out how someone or something misused a computer? You don't just turn on the affected computer and start clicking around looking for stuff, not any more than you would run through a crime scene knocking things over for a quick once-over. Instead you copy the disk image onto some other machine. There are tools to reconstruct files, whether that means regular files, files "forgotten" by corrupted directories, files marked-for-deletion but with their bits still there, file fragments partially written-over but with some old bits left behind in the cracks at the ends of the sectors... There are tools to reconstruct timelines: this file was accessed at this time, that file was created at that time.

I'm neither a security person nor a repair person, but I still got something out of this book. It doesn't just talk about reconstructing files. It also talks about the common things computers record about what we do even when we're not obviously working with a file. When you browse the internet, your browser is helpfully caching copies of those visited pages on your hard drive. If you're someone like me who hasn't got around to using webmail, then whenever your machine tries to send/get email to/from the greater internet, it probably logs something about how that went. And so on and so forth. If you mess something up and want to know Hey, is there some "historical log" I can look at to figure out what I messed up? the answer might be Yes.

Book Report: In a Sunburned Country

2012-04-14T01:13:20

Bill Bryson travels to Australia and writes about the place. He's pretty funny, and Australia gives him a lot to be funny about. This is partly because Bryson is given to self-deprecation and Australia is sufficiently awesome to give self-deprecating funny folks plenty of material. Or at least it seems that way in the book; I dunno, I've never been. Bryson doesn't just write about the interesting parts; he also writes enough about the boring parts to scare future travelers away. E.g., I now know that I don't need to visit Canberra.