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A story of two dreamers

A young man began having a dream on a dark, cold winter night. In it, he met a girl with no name, who brought him along on a wonderful adventure through places unexplored and paths uncharted within the dream realm.

He did not know her name, but in a way only possible within the world of slumber, their characters and personalities could be vocalized in a way that could not be done in the waking world.

He fell in love with her, and her with him. She was always there when he slept, and he was always there when she slept. Somehow, he knew that she was real.

One lonely night, the young man couldn't sleep. Yearning for his love of dreamland, he reached harder than he had ever done before to try to find her name, but instead found a strange melody in his mind. 

He slept a dreamless sleep, peacefully.

He awoke from his sleep, sorrowful.

It was at that moment of awakening that he understood that the strange, quirky tune, with a inconsistent yet haunting rhythm, was a shallow echo of the dream-name that encompassed her whole being. The song needed his words to make it complete. 

take my hand

hold me tight

sit with me in the moonlight

dream with me of what could be

adventure, treasure, mystery 

and then one day

all will change

I'll meet you again

and you'll know me from your dreaming-time

and I'll know you from mine

on that day

it shall be clear

our unsolved mystery 

my dream come true is to know your name

and for you to know of mine

—

The young woman sat up with a start, her eyes wide open.

"What?" she breathed.

The words echoed through her mind, over and over, never fading. It felt like a poem, and the meter felt strange to her. The voice was unmistakably his. The words sounded like song, but were missing something more. 

Taking out a pencil, she marked down a few chords on a slip of paper, singing the words to herself as her heart fluttered every time a verse crossed her lips.

Setup: Debugging Mackerel with Fiddler

Hello!

Today I'd like to introduce what I've used to understand how Mackerel communications work with the Mackerel API. It's actually really simple, thanks to the flexibility of mackerel-agent's configuration.

First, I set up Fiddler Web Debugger, a very useful (and free!) tool that I have used for many projects in the past. It serves as a proxy server that you can manipulate and debug traffic with.

Inside your mackerel-agent.conf (I've put mine at the top), put this:

http_proxy = "http://proxy.example.com:8080"
apibase = "http://api.mackerelio.com"

We are removing SSL to get it to proxy properly without doing strange things with installing a self-signed SSL on the system, and then re-adding it with Fiddler.

To do this, let's add the following AutoResponder rule in Fiddler:

Match: regex:^(ix)http://api.mackerelio.com/(.*)$

Respond with: https://api.mackerelio.com/$1

You can also import this rule by saving the following content into a Fiddler AutoResponder Export file (.farx) and importing it from the AutoResponder menu:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<AutoResponder LastSave="2018-09-07T11:30:18.2557112-04:00" FiddlerVersion="5.0.20181.14850">
  <State Enabled="true" Fallthrough="true" UseLatency="false">
    <ResponseRule Match="regex:^(?ix)http://api.mackerelio.com/(.*)$" Action="https://api.mackerelio.com/$1" Enabled="true" />
  </State>
</AutoResponder>

Restart mackerel-agent and it will take effect immediately.

Congratulations! Now you can watch mackerel-agent as it talks to the server. You can also (if desired) modify the messages going to Mackerel for testing purposes.

To disable this, simply comment out (prefix with #) or remove the lines in mackerel-agent.conf, and restart mackerel-agent.

I would not recommend sending your Mackerel data (which includes your API key) unencrypted over the Internet, so please do this within your internal infrastructure (private network) only.

Earthquake in Japan, as seen in the USA

Here is some information about the recent earthquake in Japan.

Before I start, please observe the follow for the sake of your neighbors:

I pray that you all stay safe. Prepare food and water, but do not forget to be kind to each other. There is no room for impatience. Be helpful to one another and share as you are able. Be selfless towards others. Thank you for showing love to your neighbors.

Please observe this first graph.

This graph shows a lot of 5-6 second period waves, some from storms in the Atlantic ocean, and possibly from the typhoon.

Time domain: top line.

Frequency domain: bottom trace.
The light blue is the primary energy component of the noise, centered at about 0.2 Hz (5 seconds)

For this graph:
- the vertical trace is in red
- North/south trace is in green.
- East/west trace is in blue

地震波 - Wikipedia || Seismic wave - Wikipedia

Order of waves:
- P wave comes first, on the vertical channel (red)
- S wave comes second, on north and vertical channels (red and green)
- Core phase (bounced off the Earth's core, which has dampened it a bit) - both horizontal channels, low frequency

Japan is ~90 arc degrees out from where my location. Seismic waves go deep into the Earth's mantle before coming up and being detected by our seismic equipment.

The last wave is the one that you all felt. It's the Rayleigh wave, which stays in the Earth's crust, and is the one that causes the landslides, building collapses, and other bad things to happen.

I would like to thank my dad for providing me access to the data from his seismometers, and for explaining some of this to me, especially details about the core phase and other details about the event.

コンテナ化

"Containerization"

CQ, 私はKD8OUYです

"CQ、私はKD8OUYです。ミシガンアメリカ出身です。日本語が話せません、英語がはなせます。おはようございます!"

I'm hoping to meet some amateur radio operators in Japan. My Japanese isn't very good though (yet!)

The screenshot is of a program called EchoLink, which lets amateur radio operators talk to people far away by proxying their transmissions over the internet before they are retransmitted by radios far away!

motemen puzzle

I became curious about id:motemen's profile image today. Is it a puzzle?

What if we interpret each color as an HTML color code?

#BCCFDE #FCFFF5 #15357C #9AA6B8
#754826 #FEDBCE #F6BFAE #D32925
#9AA2B8 #FDBCB0 #FDAA9A #DB6055
#A4AAAE #30363C #481E11 #4F5054

aburk@aburk:~/Research/motemen-puzzle$ file motemen.png 
motemen.png: PNG image data, 400 x 400, 8-bit/color RGBA, non-interlaced
aburk@aburk:~/Research/motemen-puzzle$ cat color_codes.txt 
#BCCFDE #FCFFF5 #15357C #9AA6B8
#754826 #FEDBCE #F6BFAE #D32925
#9AA2B8 #FDBCB0 #FDAA9A #DB6055
#A4AAAE #30363C #481E11 #4F5054

But which order is it in?

Left to right, then top to bottom

aburk@aburk:~/Research/motemen-puzzle$ cat color_codes.txt | tr -d "#" |tr -d " "|tr -d "\n"|xxd -r -p|xxd
00000000: bccf defc fff5 1535 7c9a a6b8 7548 26fe  .......5|...uH&.
00000010: dbce f6bf aed3 2925 9aa2 b8fd bcb0 fdaa  ......)%........
00000020: 9adb 6055 a4aa ae30 363c 481e 114f 5054  ..`U...06<H..OPT

That doesn't resemble anything particularly useful.

Top to bottom, then left to right

aburk@aburk:~/Research/motemen-puzzle$ for position in $(for word in $(seq 1 4); do echo $word; done); do awk -v position="$position" '{print $position}' color_codes.txt ; done|tr -d '#'|tr -d '\n'
BCCFDE7548269AA2B8A4AAAEFCFFF5FEDBCEFDBCB030363C15357CF6BFAEFDAA9A481E119AA6B8D32925DB60554F5054

Hm..

aburk@aburk:~/Research/motemen-puzzle$ for position in $(for word in $(seq 1 4); do echo $word; done); do awk -v position="$position" '{print $position}' color_codes.txt ; done|tr -d '#'|tr -d '\n'|xxd -r -p|xxd
00000000: bccf de75 4826 9aa2 b8a4 aaae fcff f5fe  ...uH&..........
00000010: dbce fdbc b030 363c 1535 7cf6 bfae fdaa  .....06<.5|.....
00000020: 9a48 1e11 9aa6 b8d3 2925 db60 554f 5054  .H......)%.`UOPT

Clearly I will get the same 3-byte words here, no matter which way I read it. We have 48 bytes from the color codes - this is not a power of 2. Could it be a hash?

I looked up the hash functions that would produce a 48-byte hash.

The only hash function that I can find that produces a 48-byte hash is SHA-384.

Let's write a quick script we can use to test it out:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
# Sudofox - motemen puzzle tester

if (!@ARGV) {
    print "Usage: ./generate.pl <48 bytes of hex>\n";
    exit();
}
my $hex        = $ARGV[0];
my @colorCodes    = unpack("(A6)*", $hex);

print <<'HTML';
<style>
.motemen-cell { width: 50px; height: 50px; word-break:break-all; text-transform: uppercase; font-size:21px; text-align: center; font-family:monospace; line-height:initial;}
.motemen-holder { display: flex; flex-wrap:wrap; width: 200px;}
</style>

<div class="motemen-holder">
HTML
foreach my $color(@colorCodes) {
    print '<div class="motemen-cell" style="background-color: #' .$color. ';">'.$color.'</div>';
}
print "</div>\n";

First, the original image:

How about "motemen"?

printf motemen|sha384sum|awk '{print $1}'|xargs ./generate.pl

a2acaa

da0a3a

20c41e

b28a08

9c510b

59280d

d2b967

5e9454

dda0bf

4fc087

29cb61

960a7a

cec04c

637bde

f1b95f

a8e7e5

I tried the following:

• Hatena
• hatena
• Hironao OTSUBO
• (motemen's publicly-listed email address)
• Hiragana: ひろなおオツボ

However, none of these produced a matching image.

My next thought is "brute-force". We can pull a bunch of webpages related to motemen: github code, HTML, bios, et cetera, and then extract all words from it as tokens. We can then check if a substring of the SHA-384 hash contains one of the sections of 3-byte HTML color-codes.

Unfortunately, I had very little luck finding an effective way of extracting words from HTML documents as tokens. I tried HTML::Extract, HTML::Treebuilder, and HTML::TokeParser, but had very little success.

I had an idea, though! There's another source of keywords, right from Hatena!

Hatena Keyword Documentation

It comes in EUC-JP, but everyone uses UTF-8, come on..

First, there's some weird encoding things we need to fix up since it seems a bit broken.

aburk@aburk:~$ cat keywordlist_furigana.csv|tr '\t' '\n' > a.csv; iconv a.csv -f EUC-JP -t UTF-8//IGNORE|sort|uniq > b.csv
aburk@aburk:~$ wc -l b.csv
337408 b.csv

Now, let's try each against our two different ways of reading the colorcodes.

#!/bin/bash
# Motemen Puzzle Tester


function test_word () {
    COMBO1="bccfdefcfff515357c9aa6b8754826fedbcef6bfaed329259aa2b8fdbcb0fdaa9adb6055a4aaae30363c481e114f5054"
    COMBO2="bccfde7548269aa2b8a4aaaefcfff5fedbcefdbcb030363c15357cf6bfaefdaa9a481e119aa6b8d32925db60554f5054"
    INPUT=$1

    if [[ $COMBO1 == $(echo $INPUT|sha384sum|awk '{print $1}') || $COMBO2 == $(echo $INPUT|sha384sum|awk '{print $1}') ]]; then
        echo "MATCH: $INPUT";
    fi
}

while read line
do
    test_word "$line";
done

This turned out to be way too slow, so I converted the list of keywords into a list of hashes instead.

aburk@aburk:~/Research/motemen-puzzle$ grep bccfdefcfff515357c9aa6b8754826fedbcef6bfaed329259aa2b8fdbcb0fdaa9adb6055a4aaae30363c481e114f5054 ~/b_hashed.txt
aburk@aburk:~/Research/motemen-puzzle$ grep bccfde7548269aa2b8a4aaaefcfff5fedbcefdbcb030363c15357cf6bfaefdaa9a481e119aa6b8d32925db60554f5054 ~/b_hashed.txt
aburk@aburk:~/Research/motemen-puzzle$ grep bccfde ~/b_hashed.txt
5f5ec82739f9daba961803aab4d6f78382c0c5b4e519994e98bcd1c3589f31a95bccfde25fab41cffe92e730d080c743
9902899010abde2bcd5aea716c2ffa284639fbe22e3843f7a9f0d53bb1bbccfdeedf0b85c23685ba52f4debdce0f17b9
be1ebeb4a84d65f467e2e5545ab0991dfbccfdec7d5c80292210570a2f186cf1801c3cdb6a4478856011a162991e82fe
c637e83f6e129054270ce1ae97ab24a0260526a4fc57d60c87da7fb94bccfde319d07b4ac26aee1b2d68208b530497b0
aburk@aburk:~/Research/motemen-puzzle$ grep bccfde ~/b_hashed.txt --color
5f5ec82739f9daba961803aab4d6f78382c0c5b4e519994e98bcd1c3589f31a95bccfde25fab41cffe92e730d080c743
9902899010abde2bcd5aea716c2ffa284639fbe22e3843f7a9f0d53bb1bbccfdeedf0b85c23685ba52f4debdce0f17b9
be1ebeb4a84d65f467e2e5545ab0991dfbccfdec7d5c80292210570a2f186cf1801c3cdb6a4478856011a162991e82fe
c637e83f6e129054270ce1ae97ab24a0260526a4fc57d60c87da7fb94bccfde319d07b4ac26aee1b2d68208b530497b0
aburk@aburk:~/Research/motemen-puzzle$ grep bccfde ~/b_hashed.txt --color|grep fcfff5

Alas, I was once again unsuccessful. At this point, I'm going to guess that it's not a puzzle! But, I did give it my best shot, and learned some things along the way, so I can say that I'm satisfied :)