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Long day at work, I just got done with dinner 
. And I have early meetings tomorrow. Oh well. At least I got to watch last night's episode of Prison Break. And I have Vanished still recorded.
Nice warm weather all day, just rainy. Says 68 outside right now. I guess I'll be going to bed shortly.
Ever heard of THP? It's a highly specialized engineering acronym that stands for Tomlinson-Harashima Precoding. It's terms like this that show online resources are not yet there when it comes to categorizing and organizing all human knowledge. In fact, they have a long way to go.
This term would be familiar to any advanced electrical engineering student today, yet neither Britannica, nor Wikipedia or Encarta offer a trace of it. A Google search for "THP" reveals plenty of results none of which are relevant. You would have to scroll several pages and really know what you are looking for to get anywhere. A search for "Tomlinson Harashima" reveals the first relevant hits, most of them either from course outlines or from papers published by schools such as Georgia Tech or UCLA.
Tomlinson in the US and Harashima in Japan independently introduced Tomlinson precoding as a technique for intersymbol interference mitigation. The structure that they presented is referred to as the Tomlinson-Harashima Precoder (THP). This technology is used in most of today's modems and DSL routers, etc. for dynamic signal equalization.
See a GA Tech reference in their Advanced Digital Communications course. I covered this in school myself, I think under the Communication Theory courses.
This afternoon I spent a couple hours dissecting a war bot. I would say it was not very polished, but it was interesting nevertheless. It disguised itself as a standard service using the name svchost.exe. In reality it was a custom version of mirc running as a bot, with tons of scripts and the ability to update itself. All it wanted to do is download music from the IRC rooms.
It started itself by placing a basic entry in the registry:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows]
"run"="c:\\windows\\system32\\include\\svchost.exe"
Then it would run a series of .reg files placing various other entries into the registry that hijacked the web browser and popped tons of windows. That was only a distraction so you would not notice it had launched mirc with a transparent icon.
Anyway, it was OK. You could do so much more harm by beeing more stealthy.
I noticed the TW HD cable box has an inconsistency in its GUI. It's a subtle one. If you hit the button to review and list recently recorded shows, it blocks out the background, takes over the screen, and creates a PIP window on the top right corner with the current live programming. It's a 4:3 graphical interface, the 16:9 sides are blocked by gray bands even if you were watching 16:9 programming. That's all fine. However, if you are viewing a recorded show, bring up the list of other recorded shows, then delete the very show you are viewing, the box automatically switches the PIP and the background to the curreny live programming. Fine as well. But, if the channel you happen to be reverted to is 16:9, the sides of the interface will show the programming through the interface instead of being 2 gray bars, thus being inconsistent.
I can see how this happened. They probably only tested it with 4:3 stuff, and never detected it. Doesn't create any problem or cause any issues at all to the end user.
Nice day at home, it will make for a shorter week. Woke up late, just watching more tennis and doing some reading. Verizon's DSL had problems most of the day today, so I was unwired. Funny how when you call they always "are already aware of the problem in your area." Almost as if they had it programmed to spit back whatever your area code is, and say they are aware , wouldn't surprise me. Anyway, in this case it did seem to be a generic problem, maybe the bad weather of these past few days.
Was very awake last evening, so I went out for a bit. Central and East Village, mainly. Nevada Smiths, Continental, Cooper 35, etc. Very packed everywhere, I guess everybody was taking advantage of the long weekend. Got home reasonably early.
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