Bitcoin wallet password recovery
A few weeks back I was in Ottawa and I bought some bitcoins from this bitcoin ATM:
I made a basic newbie mistake and took the one piece of paper with the wallet password on it to Ottawa with me.
I since put it somewhere safe. Very safe. So very safe that even I have no idea where I put it.
This reminds me of my mum. She was an expert at finding good hiding places about the house. Very good hiding places. So good, she would forget where things were. My sister and I got quite used to getting late Christmas presents, maybe as late as Easter when mum would happen across one of her stashes.
Basically, it was like geo-caching, but low tech and way better hiding places.
So, after wasting way too much time trying to find the thing I came across walletrecoveryservices.com
I sent off an email with brief details of the problem and some good clues as to the password. I got a response in two minutes.
Now just hoping my password is as insecure as I think it is.
Art Builds on Art
A couple of days back I got the bridge drawings from Leona.
A friend, Damon, was over at our house that evening. Leona had visited us and he had met her then, so I wanted to show him the drawings.
Of course, I had to explain what they were about. I told him the tale of the engineer and the bridge, I talked about crazy software teams and why they arise and about open source and how that works.
We were using an old laptop, running Ubuntu. He asked if we could write something like photoshop on this thing. I said, we could, but someone has beaten us to it, I told him about the GIMP.
So we fired up the GIMP and I opened Leona’s drawing in it.
Now a little digression on the GIMP is in order. I have used the GIMP many times, not frequently, but the GIMP must have been around 17 years or more. I can’t remember a time with Linux, but without the GIMP.
But, I have never been able to do anything with it without considerable cursing. At 25c a curse I could have bought photoshop many times. Instead, I muddled by with the GIMP until whoever had asked me to do some magic with it lost interest.
So while I was desperately trying to remember how this thing works, I told Damon about the GIMP Tool Kit, or GTK.
I explained how when the guys started to write it the first thing they decided to build was a GUI Toolkit, but they called it the GIMP Tool Kit.
This eventually became to be known as GTK and was used in a plethora of projects, usually beginning with ‘g’. But that is a whole other story.
So, by now Damon had taken over the computer and was exploring the GIMP. We needed food, so I started getting that ready. Ten minutes later I glanced at the screen.
Damon had done more in ten minutes with the GIMP than I had in 17 years.
So we stopped to eat and talk. He says, “so that thing is free?”. I explain, yes its been around for years, but its not just free, they give you the whole manual and everything you need to build it. So if we need to change it, if something doesn’t seem to work, we can try and fix it.
So he asks again, “so that thing is free?”. And he tells me how he has used photoshop a lot over the years and never knew there was a free option. He confessed, that the software he used, or rather the activation key, might not have come from the usual source. He felt bad about that, and mad that he’d never heard of the GIMP.
I was just relieved. Before he tried it I was expecting frustration with the tool, that it didn’t work as he would expect, that things were not quite right. It is why I made a pathetic attempt to show him what it could do before I let him near it. I’d always heard the GIMP is ok, but you really need photoshop.
So here was Damon, editing a photo Leona had given us, that was inspired by a story on stilldrinking.org
And now all of this has lead to more stories here.
This is what happens when ideas are shared.
A tale of two bridges
I was looking forward to opening the email and seeing the drawings.
They were line drawings, comic style. Here is the first drawing:
You can see Dave’s sweater slowly unravelling and being used to hold the whole shakey structure together.
The deck of the bridge represents the software platform, or rather, platforms, as each section of the bridge seems to have a different design.
The monitor is displaying an error message, which bleeds into the ravine (the ANY key is a tongue-in-cheek reference, which is placed high in the sky so as to be an unattainable solution);
The city represents frustrated, dismayed and angry users, on the edge of the ravine, all they want is a simple bridge to lead them across.
Why software invariably ends up looking like this bridge
Building great software is hard. Ironically, building mediocre software is probably harder. As with the bridge builders things are often made difficult for the engineers. They have many arbitary and unhelpful constraints from their own management, most of whom have forgotten why these rules were introduced in the first place and none of whom have ever used the tools that the engineers are using.
They are invariably dealing with many different systems, built with different technologies. Often these are proprietary systems which come without the actual source code. So, if a system does not quite work as it is supposed to they just have to work around it.
If they are lucky the system comes with support and there is someone at the end of a phone line who has never actually written any code, but who has a script to follow. And if you stick with them for the next 2.5 hours might get you to the point where they say, “Well we haven’t seen that error before”.
They file a bug and for the next two releases you eagerly install the new version only to find your bug hasn’t been fixed.
By the third release you have found a cunning way to actually take advantage of the bug to do some neat stuff you couldn’t do if the code actually worked as intended. So you build a whole new analysis system around that bug, only to discover they fixed it in the fourth release.
Every member of the team is an expert on one system or another, one language or another. It has taken them years to get to this level of comfort with their tool of choice. They remember the pain of getting there, they fear the day they have to switch to something new, go through all that pain again. They strongly believe that the tools they use are the very best (after the pain they have gone through to master it all, they had better be).
So is there a way to build software teams that actually works?
It turns out, there is. People have been doing it for decades now. It is called open source. Although, I think I prefer open literature.
But first, the tale continues.
The residents of the city were angry, but things got worse when the company they had paid to build the bridge went bust. Something to do with a lawsuit due to one of their previous projects and some people that died using it.
Someone called Richard had a workshop in which he built tools. Many people in the city thought he was a little crazy. He had a huge beard and didn’t get out much. But he built great tools. He also wrote instruction manuals telling you how to build those tools.
He would gladly give you the tools he built, but insisted on giving you a copy of his instruction manual too. He was delighted if you used it to build more tools and was also happy if you sold them or gave them to others. But he insisted that you also give them a copy of the instruction manual.
He loved it when you found new ways to build tools and updated your copy of the instruction manual. But, he insisted that if you gave anyone one of the tools you had built that you give them the full instruction manual telling them how to build the tool. So they could build new tools, just like Richard let you do.
Well along came Linus. He used to build wooden components. He used Richard’s tools and like Richard, gave away his components, along with the instruction manuals he had used to make them.
Beowulf came along and used Linus’s manual to teach himself how to link together these wooden components and make some really beautiful structures.
Larry started building tools that helped you do wonderful things with string. Larry’s tools let you take strings and weave them into ropes and baskets, nets and a whole wonderous world of things.
But, strings are delicate things and after a while threads would start to come unravelled. People who built stuff with Larry’s string tools also passed on their instruction manuals, but these manuals were really hard to read. Even the person who wrote them would struggle to follow the manual a year or so after it was written.
By now there were little cottage industries everywhere, writing tools to work with string. Guido came along and read the instruction books for all these tools and used these books to help him build his own string building tool.
His manual was easy to read and when you used it to build new tools to do things with strings the manuals for those tools were really easy to follow. Guido also introduced a thing he called the GIL. Nobody really understood this thing, but Guido insisted it was really important and would help stop threads unravelling.
Well by now, many of the people of the city were working with all these tools and doing some wonderful things.
Managing all these instruction manuals was becoming a bit of a challenge. There were thousands of manuals and each manual came in lots of versions.
Libraries sprung up to hold the manuals. The libraries all had strange names like sccs, rcs, cvs and svn. The neat thing was the libraries came with instruction manuals that helped you use them.
Linus grew frustrated with these libraries, as did others and they came up with a new type of library that made it easy for anyone to take a copy of the whole library and create a new library.
Linus created a library called git. Others created bazaar and mercurial. Life was good.
But, few people could understand how git worked. Some read the manual Linus had written and managed to figure it all out. They made changes to the manual, made it easier to read and created new types of git library that mere mortals could also use. And they taught each other how to use the library.
Well by now the people of the city were hard at work on the bridge. And bit by bit, using all these tools, they transformed it into this beautiful, simple structure:
Jacob came along on his pony and rode across the bridge to the beautiful oasis on the other side.
A tale of bridges
A bit of open source magic happened today. Actually, it has been happening a while, the full story goes back decades. Or rather to the time when humans first started communicating with each other. But I digress (note to self, find a good way to link to post’s I haven’t written yet).
A few weeks ago I came across this blog posting Programming Sucks
The thesis of one section was that, All programming teams are constructed by and of crazy people:
Imagine joining an engineering team. You’re excited and full of ideas, probably just out of school and a world of clean, beautiful designs, awe-inspiring in their aesthetic unity of purpose, economy, and strength. You start by meeting Mary, project leader for a bridge in a major metropolitan area. Mary introduces you to Fred, after you get through the fifteen security checks installed by Dave because Dave had his sweater stolen off his desk once and Never Again. Fred only works with wood, so you ask why he’s involved because this bridge is supposed to allow rush-hour traffic full of cars full of mortal humans to cross a 200-foot drop over rapids. Don’t worry, says Mary, Fred’s going to handle the walkways. What walkways? Well Fred made a good case for walkways and they’re going to add to the bridge’s appeal. Of course, they’ll have to be built without railings, because there’s a strict no railings rule enforced by Phil, who’s not an engineer. Nobody’s sure what Phil does, but it’s definitely full of synergy and has to do with upper management, whom none of the engineers want to deal with so they just let Phil do what he wants. Sara, meanwhile, has found several hemorrhaging-edge paving techniques, and worked them all into the bridge design, so you’ll have to build around each one as the bridge progresses, since each one means different underlying support and safety concerns. Tom and Harry have been working together for years, but have an ongoing feud over whether to use metric or imperial measurements, and it’s become a case of “whoever got to that part of the design first.” This has been such a headache for the people actually screwing things together, they’ve given up and just forced, hammered, or welded their way through the day with whatever parts were handy. Also, the bridge was designed as a suspension bridge, but nobody actually knew how to build a suspension bridge, so they got halfway through it and then just added extra support columns to keep the thing standing, but they left the suspension cables because they’re still sort of holding up parts of the bridge. Nobody knows which parts, but everybody’s pretty sure they’re important parts. After the introductions are made, you are invited to come up with some new ideas, but you don’t have any because you’re a propulsion engineer and don’t know anything about bridges.
Would you drive across this bridge? No. If it somehow got built, everybody involved would be executed. Yet some version of this dynamic wrote every single program you have ever used, banking software, websites, and a ubiquitously used program that was supposed to protect information on the internet but didn’t.
Now, this sparked an idea in my mind and I had a friend, Leona, who likes to draw stuff. So I sent her the story about the bridge. As I wrote to Leona:
I am wanting to give a talk which will feature this bridge thing (read below) and was wondering if you would be able to draw that bridge for me?
Think Heath Robinson with maybe a touch of Salvador Dali.
At this point I am way beyond my artistic knowledge and out of my depth, but I keep going:
wooden sidewalks, no railings, suspension cables in weird places, crazy ceramic tiles everywhere (all different designs). Dave’s missing sweater holding up part of the bridge etc etc.
Not sure if this is the sort of thing you usually draw, but thought it might be something you could do.
I added:
Oh, and also if you want to read the whole bridge article it is here, on the aptly named stilldrinking.org
It explains why I am a little crazy (ok maybe only partly).
So we exchanged a few emails about the details of the picture, oh and I threw in wanting a picture of a perfect bridge as well, one you might actually want to walk across.
I said that I wanted to write a story here, on this blog, which is itself a bit of a work in progress, so I included a nerd aside for Leona:
(nerd aside: I need to do some nerd magic to turn that into a proper blog – I might even have that done later today – but remember this is software and it could end up like that bridge).
Well the blog still needs work, but at least it hasn’t got people depending on it to get them across a gorge.
Well today I got the pictures back from Leona. And that has led to a whole other part of the tale of bridges. Will try to write that soon.
Letter to Gazette
Dear Sir,
We were struck by your opinion piece on Saturday. This paragraph, near the start of the article, intrigued us:
The young people now coming of are the first in almost a century to
embark life in a Bermuda where their choices are narrowing, not
expanding.
We understand where this perception comes from, but feel that this does not have to be the case in Bermuda.
The world is changing rapidly, a key driving force of this change is the internet. This can be good for Bermuda.
The article went on to say:
Further education and the chance to broaden cultural horizons beyond
our shores is now a financial impossibility for far too many gifted
youngsters.
Young people today are faced with many opportunities to learn through the internet. There are amazing resources out there. People can find others that share their interests wherever they may live. There are others out there happy to be your mentors, to help you learn, to let you help them learn too.
The article makes some excellent observations about schools. There are some skilled and dedicated people in our schools, often working with poor resources. The world is changing faster than curriculae can hope to change. Schools and colleges cannot do it alone.
We see Bermudans helping each other and others daily. It is central to way many people live here.
Bermuda also has many very talented and dedicated people, more than you would expect of any town of its size. There are people with time and resources to help others, yet it is often those with least that help most.
Bermuda has a complicated history. None of us can change that. What we can do is work together to turn this into the best place in the world to live, for everyone that lives here.
On July 18th Nelson Mandela would have been been 96. He was heavily guided in his later life by a concept called “ubuntu”. It is a South African word that does not translate well into English. In Nelson Mandela’s words:
Ubuntu does not mean that people should not enrich themselves. The
question therefore is: Are you going to do so in order to enable the
community around you to be able to improve?
On July 18th, why not find someone who needs your help and offer it? Best of all, help someone learn, let someone teach you something.
Johnny and Mary
PS no need to wait until July 18th
PPS Johnny remembers the Firkin Wine bar at college being renamed the Mandela Bar. You have no idea the fuss that debate caused. It was 1981, or thereabouts.
It is now caled The Graduate. Times change.
PPPS
Ubuntu philosophy.