A few weeks ago, TSN’s Pierre LeBrun reported that the Tampa Bay Lightning is looking for a defenceman (preferably a right shot) in a theoretical Jonathan Drouin trade.

Since then, we have heard buzz about a number of potential Drouin deals, perhaps the most prominent concerning Tampa Bay’s targeting of Cody Ceci and/or Thomas Chabot from the Ottawa Senators.

In essentially every potential trade scenario, the proposed deal has Tampa Bay acquiring some type of defender in exchange for their former third-overall pick. To me, that’s just as interesting as the reality that a player with such great potential is on the trade block, his future with the Lightning organization as dead as a doornail.

Tampa Bay is in a tough spot here. Trading a blue-chip prospect at such a young point in his career presents the danger of a pennies-on-the-dollar kind of return. It’s an even bigger risk since the Lightning is an organization that should realistically be competing for a Stanley Cup right now. Only Washington has emerged as a serious threat in the Eastern Conference, so that window is wide open.

The way they are so actively targeting defenders in potential trades indicates that the front office has identified the team’s biggest operational need – a defenceman to play behind their vaunted top pairing of Victor Hedman and Anton Stralman.

It’s an interesting development, and one that seems to be data-driven. You can apportion at least some of Tampa Bay’s relatively slow start to the season to their second and third pairings not performing up to par. What’s more troublesome – at least if you are general manager Steve Yzerman or head coach Jon Cooper – is that the bottom four’s bad performance has been somewhat pervasive, regardless of who is on the ice with them.

Where Hedman and Stralman elevate the performance of Tampa Bay’s impressive forward group, the rest of the blueline seems to artificially suppress performance. Playing with the second and/or third pairing often means spending more time in the defensive zone, and, consequently, fewer chances to have an impact in the offensive zone.

It doesn’t matter if the first line or the fourth line is out with Tampa Bay’s top pairing — they’re going to spend a significant portion of shifts in the offensive zone. This pairing has become something of an analytics darling, so there’s no need to re-hash what’s already been said time and time again. Simply put: they have an incredible impact on their team’s play regardless of whom else in on the ice with them. That’s indicative of very real, very measurable talent.

On the other hand, Tampa Bay defenders three through six have really struggled from a possession standpoint. It’s amazing to me that none of these defenders can do little more than break-even (at best) when playing with a generational talent like Steven Stamkos, or the vaunted Triplets Line that has chewed up competition since being assembled a couple of seasons ago.

I do wonder if Tampa Bay thinks this is a two-pronged issue – the first being that talent on the second and third pairings hasn’t played up to expectations, the second being that ‘handedness’ is contributing to some of the defence’s struggles.

Three of the four regulars (four of five if you count Nikita Nesterov) are left-handed shots, meaning at least one pairing is lefty with lefty. That means the other pairing features the lone right-handed shot in Andrej Sustr, a player who hasn’t developed as quickly as Tampa Bay anticipated. Acquiring a talented right-shot defender would hypothetically solve both of these issues.

It’s a theory, but one worth considering in light of the trade buzz.

The Takeaway

If Tampa Bay was just a team looking to inch into the playoff race and hope for a May miracle, we likely wouldn’t be so concerned with how their blueline depth has performed. But Yzerman and company have pegged this team as a Stanley Cup hopeful. Knowing that the future of Stamkos is up in the air, I’d hazard to guess that the pressure is on to win now. To that end, it’s also understandable why the front office wants a defensive upgrade. After Hedman and Stralman, they just haven’t been good enough.


Health Minister Leo Varadkar has admitted that parents of babies who died at the Midlands hospital in Portlaoise had been lied to over the circumstances of their children's deaths.

Speaking on RTÉ's This Week programme, the minister said he found it "extremely worrying" and "appalling" that parents who lost children at the hospital "were not dealt with honestly".

This included some cases where parents were told that their child's death was the only one of its kind.

He said it was important to create an environment where hospital clinicians at all levels were honest about mistakes made, but that there had been a culture of defensiveness within the health service.

The minister also said that the HSE continued to dispute some of the findings of a damning investigation carried out by HIQA, the health standards watchdog.

However, he said both the HSE and his department had accepted all of HIQA's recommendations.

Among these, he said that he hoped to see the proposed Patient Advocacy Service in place sooner than the May 2016 target.

He also wanted to see the planned national maternity strategy published by the end of this year.

Minister Varadkar also said he expected that terms of reference would be drawn up either this week or the week after for an external review into how certain red flags at Portlaoise hospital did not pass up through HSE management.

He said he expected a final report in a number of months.


How can you keep an eye on that slow SQL query? Is it taking up too much time nowadays? How about that call to the 3rd party API? Is it actually slow during the weekends? Being able to answer such questions quickly, to track these numbers in real-time, is a bit like driving at night with headlights on!

Imagine adding a new feature that you’ve tested well enough, but want to roll it out slowly in production, while keeping an eye on the time taken for a few crucial operations. Having a system where it is easy to add in these few metrics quickly, have it graphed and alerted on in real-time, provides the scaffolding for smooth, solid ops. And less weekend on-call duties.

So how do you get yourself such a system? Read on!

Measuring

This is the easiest part. Measuring the time taken to execute a piece of code typically goes like:

func ( foo * Bar ) Parse () error { t := time . Now () // ... do stuff ... elapsed := time . Since ( t ) // report elapsed } // or, a little more cleanly, like this: func ( foo * Bar ) Parse () error { t := time . Now () defer func () { elapsed := time . Since ( t ) // report elapsed }() // ... do stuff ... }

If you want to count the number of times an event occurred, you’d use something like this:

var parseFailures uint64 func ( foo * Bar ) Compile () error { if err := foo . Parse (); err != nil { // count the number of times this happens atomic . AddUint64 ( & parseFailures , 1 ) // ... } // ... }

There are better ways to count and to report that count, though. Read on.

Reporting Metrics (push) vs. Collecting Metrics (pull)

How do you get the measurements out of your app and into something which can graph them? There are two approaches:

Push : After gathering the measurement, your app reports, or “pushes” the measurements into a low-latency service, and continues with it’s work.

: After gathering the measurement, your app reports, or “pushes” the measurements into a low-latency service, and continues with it’s work. Pull: Your app exposes these metrics in a standard format at a predefined endpoint. A collection service “pulls” these metrics.

There are enough examples of these in the wild. The proc filesystem mounted at /proc and an SNMP agent that can be queried are examples of the pull model. Google Analytics is an example of the push model.

So which one should you pick for your app? There’s no correct answer. In both cases, apart from your app, you need a service that can accept metrics or pull metrics. You should choose an approach that suits your app, scale and team.

The expvar package

Within Google, the pull approach is used, which perhaps explains why the expvar package exists in the Go standard library.

This library provides a way to expose your app metrics so that a service can collect them. Rewriting the above using the expvar package makes it look like this:

import "expvar" var elapsed = expvar . NewFloat ( "parseTotalTime" ) // nanoseconds func ( foo * Bar ) Parse () error { t := time . Now () defer func () { elapsed . Add ( time . Since ( t )) }() // ... do stuff ... } var parseFailures = expvar . NewInt ( "parseFailures" ) func ( foo * Bar ) Compile () error { if err := foo . Parse (); err != nil { // count the number of times this happens parseFailures . Add ( 1 ) // ... } // ... }

Importing the package sets up an HTTP handler for the default HTTP server to handle the URL path /debug/vars , and serves up your metrics as a JSON object. You’ll need to start the default HTTP server explicitly.

Although it is convenient that this package exists in the standard library, there is not much of an (open source) ecosystem around it. Neither are there schema or conventions around the JSON format that is exposed.

If the pull approach suits you best, you might also want to take a look at Prometheus.

StatsD and Graphite

For the push model though, StatsD and Graphite are the de facto standards. There are client libraries for many languages that let you push metrics into StatsD and graphite.

You can send your measurements as plain metrics into a graphite server. A single report is simply a name, a timestamp and a value.

StatsD was designed to sit between your app and graphite, and do some aggregation of the metrics before passing it on to graphite. What’s that, you ask? Basically, StatsD hangs on to the metrics you send it, and at periodic intervals (called the “flush interval”, typically 1 minute), calculates additional information and then pushes it into graphite. Here are some things that it can calculate:

Each time an event happens, you can send a “+1” to StatsD. It can count them, and report totalled counts.

Each time you send a timing measurement, StatsD remembers it. At flush time, it computes percentiles, min, max and more for each timing measurement metric and forwards it to graphite.

You can track a varying quantity (like system temperature or fan speed) as a gauge. The last value at flush time gets reported.

See this page for all the cool stuff that StatsD can compute.

Sending Data to StatsD

The StatsD on-wire text protocol is so simple it hardly needs any vendored library. Essentially, you can send text strings in this format to an UDP port. Here’s the complete source of a fully functional StatsD client:

package util import ( "fmt" "io" "net" "time" ) var queue = make ( chan string , 100 ) func init () { go statsdSender () } func StatCount ( metric string , value int ) { queue <- fmt . Sprintf ( "%s:%d|c" , metric , value ) } func StatTime ( metric string , took time . Duration ) { queue <- fmt . Sprintf ( "%s:%d|ms" , metric , took / 1e6 ) } func StatGauge ( metric string , value int ) { queue <- fmt . Sprintf ( "%s:%d|g" , metric , value ) } func statsdSender () { for s := range queue { if conn , err := net . Dial ( "udp" , "127.0.0.1:8125" ); err == nil { io . WriteString ( conn , s ) conn . Close () } } }

As you can see, the code is quite simple. The metrics are pushed into a channel to allow the caller to continue ASAP. The statsdSender then writes each measurement into a StatsD-compatible agent on localhost.

The util.Stat* functions are meant to be used from application code, like so:

func ( foo * Bar ) Parse () error { t := time . Now () defer func () { util . StatTime ( "parse.timetaken" , time . Since ( t )) }() // ... do stuff ... } func ( foo * Bar ) Compile () error { if err := foo . Parse (); err != nil { util . StatCount ( "parse.failures" , 1 ) // ... } // ... }

If you anticipate that too many metrics might get pushed into the channel, have a look at the client-side sampling rate feature of the StatsD protocol.

StatsD and the OpsDash Smart Agent

In the code above, the metrics are pushed into a StatsD running on localhost.

For OpsDash, we actually use nearly the same code above in production, and we don’t have a StatsD on each node! The OpsDash Smart Agent includes built-in StatsD and graphite daemons. Naturally, we use OpsDash itself to monitor the SaaS version of OpsDash!

Here’s a snippet of the agent configuration file /etc/opsdash/agent.cfg :

statsd { # You can enable the statsd interface by setting this to 1. enabled = 1 # For timing metrics, percentiles are computed as per this list. Values # must be comma-separated integers in ascending order. Default value is # "90,95,99". #percentiles = "90,95,99" # When enabled, OpsDash will listen on *:8125/tcp and *:8125/udp for # statsd connections. Uncomment to change the IP or port it listens on. #bind.udp = "0.0.0.0:8125" #bind.tcp = "0.0.0.0:8125" }

The OpsDash Smart Agent runs on each node and accepts the StatsD metrics from the application code. It then forwards it to the OpsDash SaaS server, where it can be graphed and alerted upon. Here’s how the above metrics will look on an OpsDash custom dashboard:

Further Reading


Analysis For IBM, storage value is moving to software, with object storage and flash growing while legacy disk and tape products see revenue falls.

In Big Blue’s fourth 2016 quarter overall revenues dropped nine per cent but storage hardware revenues fared worse, dropping 11.1 per cent, with no end in sight.

This continues a trend seen for the past four years. The only bright spots seem to be flash arrays (FlashSystem) and server-based storage but we don’t know how bright. IBM’s financial reporting singles out storage hardware but not flash hardware within it.

IBM doesn’t report server-based storage separately nor identify storage software revenues as a single reporting category; all of which hampers our ability to know what’s going on.

We can see what’s been happening with the storage hardware category generally and it ain’t pretty. Here's four charts showing what’s what.

Chart number one is a look at IBM’s quarterly revenues from 2010 to the end of 2015, with storage hardware revenues separately tracked.

Click chart for larger view

Chart two is a look at storage hardware revenues on their own to make things clearer.

A trendline has been added to show the downward trend

Our third chart summarises this in an annual view.

Four straight years of decline

Chart four abstracts out each quarter and shows its value year by year.

We see a consistent decline in storage revenues here.

The message here is that IBM storage hardware revenues have seen four straight years of decline and there is no end in sight. IBM management does not identify storage hardware as an area needing attention, despite annual revenues having dropped 35 per cent over four years, from $3.7bn in 2011 to $2.4bn in 2015.

Martin Schroeter, IBM’s CFO, said in prepared remarks: “A couple of years ago we laid out our strategic imperatives around big data and analytics, around cloud, and around mobile and security.” In 2015’s final quarter “Our strategic imperatives continued strong performance, up 26 per cent for the year. This now represents 35 per cent of IBM’s revenue.”

Within that: “With 57 per cent revenue growth over the last year, cloud is now a $10 billion business for us. This made us the largest cloud provider in 2015.”

Cloud is the big thing, in Schroeter's view. “To address opportunities we see in this space, in 2015 we made seven cloud acquisitions including Cleversafe for object storage, Gravitant for cloud brokerage services, and Clearleap for cloud video services. We also invested nearly a billion dollars in capital expanding our global cloud data centre footprint to 46.”

It’s not that hardware, per se, is bad, though. In Schroeter's words: “Our Systems Hardware revenue was up, driven by z Systems and Power. … This was the fourth consecutive quarter of growth in both z Systems and Power. … about half of our systems segment revenue in 2015 was to address analytics workloads, or hybrid and private clouds. … Even though the Unix market is declining, by delivering innovation and repositioning the platform, our Power systems have grown four quarters in a row.“

But that apparent determination to grow the non-x86 server business was not paralleled in the storage hardware business; “The growth in our servers was mitigated by a seven per cent [constant currency] decline in storage hardware, which continues to be impacted by weakness in traditional disk and tape.”

Analysis

IBM could exit the commodity x86 server hardware business and focus on its proprietary z Systems and Power Servers. No such exit strategy appears possible in general disk and tape storage, where commoditisation of disk is affecting IBM.

“Value in the storage market continues to shift to software and offering requirements that are driving demand for flash and object-based storage,” said Schroeter. “We are well-positioned in these new areas, with growth in flash, and our recent acquisition of Cleversafe.”

This implies that IBM is not at all well-positioned in the general SAN and filer hardware area, and products here have been left on their own. We can infer that development budgets for these product areas will not be growing.

Will IBM be looking to build hyper-converged infrastructure appliances (HCIA) using its Power servers as a base? We think not, as commodity x86 server-based HCIAs could undercut them on price.

Our thinking is that IBM could be doing well in server-based storage, but may be thinking that capacity-focussed SAN and filer storage is heading towards a commoditised on-premises game, which it doesn’t want anything to do with, or to public cloud provision where its storage software, like Cleversafe, has a role.

Therefore, IBM’s storage hardware business could dip to a $2bn annual revenue run rate by the end of 2016 and fall below $2bn in 2017.

In the fourth 2015 quarter, storage hardware accounted for 32 per cent of IBM’s hardware business. We expect that to fall below 30 per cent this year, and head towards a 25 per cent contribution.

This is, it seems to us, a managed decline, with IBM wanting a smaller, but presumably more profitable, storage hardware business to eventually emerge. ®


Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE’s presidential campaign raised $11.3 million online over the last three days, the campaign announced Tuesday.

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The “record-breaking” figure is the most Clinton has raised over a 72-hour period since she became the nominee at the Democratic National Convention in July, according to the campaign. The sum only includes online fundraising.

The surge in contributions came after FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to Congress on Friday informing them that his agency discovered the existence of emails that appear to be “pertinent” to its investigation into the private email server Clinton used while secretary of State.

It was later revealed that the emails were found on a computer belonging to former Rep. (D-N.Y.) Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin who is under investigation for allegedly exchanging sexually explicit messages with a minor.

Comey’s letter was widely criticized by Democrats for being vague, and Clinton's surrogates have assailed Comey for not being more forthcoming.

Republican nominee Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE has seized on the FBI's move as he seeks to make up ground in the polls ahead of Election Day.


As jihadists expel Christians from Mosul, the international community responds.

There is a mass exodus of Christians from the Iraqi city of Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq. The Muslim fanatics who have taken over the city, calling themselves the Islamic State, issued an ultimatum to the city’s Christians earlier this month, saying that if they did not leave by Saturday, July 19, they “must convert to Islam, pay a fine, or face ‘death by the sword.’” As of Tuesday, most of the city’s estimated 3,000 Christians had fled.

Further, the Islamic State, formerly known as ISIS, had marked homes and businesses owned by Christians with a red, painted ن (pronounced “noon”), the 14th letter of the Arabic alphabet and the equivalent to the Roman letter N. The ن stands for Nasara or Nazarenes, a pejorative Arabic word for Christians.

The ن is now being shared on social media as a symbol of solidarity with the Iraqi Christians forced to flee their homes. The Catholic blog Rorate Caeli has wrote, the Islamists “mean it as a mark of shame, we must then wear it as a mark of hope. . . . You may kill our brethren and expel them but we Christians will never go away.”

The hashtag #WeAreN is also trending, along with pictures of people of all religions drawing the ن in red ink on their bodies.

When asked why he changed his profile picture to the ن, political consultant Ryan Girdusky said, “I changed it because of the lack of response by our media and our president . . . We feel like the Christian community is being persecuted at the same time the Palestinians are being given constant attention. There is a Christian genocide and no one is paying attention.”

The mass exodus has incited international criticism, even from Muslim scholars. Al Jazeera quoted Iyad Ameen Madani, the secretary general of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) as saying, “This forced displacement is a crime that cannot be tolerated.” Yesterday, the United Nations’ secretary general, Ban Ki Moon, said that the treatment of Iraqi Christians “may constitute a crime against humanity.” He also “condemned” ISIS’s actions “in the strongest terms.”

Mosul has played a role in Christian history since the first and second centuries, when the Assyrians in the city converted to Christianity. It is the home to many churches, as well as mosques and synagogues. Al Jazeera described, via an Assyrian Christian who chose to stay behind, how a statue of the Virgin Mary outside of one of Mosul’s churches was destroyed and replaced with a black flag. This Christian is one of the last left in Mosul, as most others have fled, many leaving with only the clothes on their backs.

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— Christine Sisto is an editorial associate at National Review Online.


Examples For Using io.Pipe in Go

Much has been written and said about the work of art that are the io.Reader and io.Writer interfaces. Simple, yet powerful - just as Go itself.

In this post I want to showcase another part of the Go standard library that I find to be both simple and powerful - io.Pipe.

pr , pw := io . Pipe ( )

According to the docs, io.Pipe creates a synchronous in-memory pipe, which can be used to connect code expecting io.Reader with code expecting io.Writer .

Upon invocation, io.Pipe() returns a PipeReader and a PipeWriter . They are connected (hence the pipe), so that everything written to the PipeWriter can be read from the PipeReader .

The following three examples show use-cases of io.Pipe , its versatility and the way of thinking and composing I/O it enables us to do.

Let’s get started!

Example 1: JSON to HTTP Request

This is the go-to example one usually sees when it comes to io.Pipe . We encode some data as JSON and want to send it to a web endpoint via http.Post . Unfortunately (or rather fortunately), the JSON encoder takes an io.Writer and the http request methods expect an io.Reader as input, so we can’t just plug them together.

Of course we could always create intermediate []byte representations, but that is neither memory efficient nor particularly elegant. This is where io.Pipe comes in:

pr , pw := io . Pipe ( ) go func ( ) { // close the writer, so the reader knows there's no more data defer pw . Close ( ) // write json data to the PipeReader through the PipeWriter if err := json . NewEncoder ( pw ) . Encode ( & PayLoad { Content : "Hello Pipe!" } ) ; err != nil { log . Fatal ( err ) } } ( ) // JSON from the PipeWriter lands in the PipeReader // ...and we send it off... if _ , err := http . Post ( "http://example.com" , "application/json" , pr ) ; err != nil { log . Fatal ( err ) }

First, we encode some struct PayLoad to JSON and write the data to the PipeWriter created by invoking io.Pipe . Afterwards, we create a http POST request, which gets its data from the PipeReader . That PipeReader gets filled with the data written to the PipeWriter .

Important to note here is that we have to encode asynchronously to prevent a deadlock, because we would write without a reader if we didn’t.

This practical example showcases the versatility of io.Pipe very well. It really incentivizes gophers to build components using io.Reader and io.Writer , without having to worry about them being used together.

Example 2: Split up Data with TeeReader

I found another very cool way of using io.Pipe together with TeeReader (read: T-Reader) in @rodaine’s great blog post about asynchronously splitting an io.Reader .

In Solution #4, he describes the use-case of using a video-file and simultaneously transcode it to another format and uploading that, while also uploading the original file. All with minimal overhead and completely in parallel.

Based on this solution, I tried to capture the gist of it with the following example:

pr , pw := io . Pipe ( ) // we need to wait for everything to be done wg := sync . WaitGroup { } wg . Add ( 2 ) // we get some file as input f , err := os . Open ( "./fruit.txt" ) if err != nil { log . Fatal ( err ) } // TeeReader gets the data from the file and also writes it to the PipeWriter tr := io . TeeReader ( f , pw ) go func ( ) { defer wg . Done ( ) defer pw . Close ( ) // get data from the TeeReader, which feeds the PipeReader through the PipeWriter _ , err := http . Post ( "https://example.com" , "text/html" , tr ) if err != nil { log . Fatal ( err ) } } ( ) go func ( ) { defer wg . Done ( ) // read from the PipeReader to stdout if _ , err := io . Copy ( os . Stdout , pr ) ; err != nil { log . Fatal ( err ) } } ( ) wg . Wait ( )

My example is of course simplified in that it doesn’t use channels for propagating errors and results, but the underlying concept is quite similar - we have some kind of input io.Reader , a file in this case and create a TeeReader , which returns a Reader that writes to the Writer you provide it everything it reads from the Reader you provide it.

Now we start two goroutines, one which just prints the data to stdout and another one which sends it to an HTTP endpoint. The TeeReader uses the io.Pipe to split up the given input. When the TeeReader is consumed, those same bytes are also received by the PipeReader .

Pretty cool, ha?

Example 3: Piping the output of Shell commands

I stumbled over this gist recently, which combines io.Pipe with os.Exec in a nice way. Basically, it does what most task runners in CI services like Jenkins or Travis CI do, which is execute some shell command and show its output on some website.

I tried to encapsulate the general pattern behind it in this short snippet here:

pr , pw := io . Pipe ( ) defer pw . Close ( ) // tell the command to write to our pipe cmd := exec . Command ( "cat" , "fruit.txt" ) cmd . Stdout = pw go func ( ) { defer pr . Close ( ) // copy the data written to the PipeReader via the cmd to stdout if _ , err := io . Copy ( os . Stdout , pr ) ; err != nil { log . Fatal ( err ) } } ( ) // run the command, which writes all output to the PipeWriter // which then ends up in the PipeReader if err := cmd . Run ( ) ; err != nil { log . Fatal ( err ) }

First, we define our command - in this case, we just cat a file called fruit.txt , which will just spit out the contents of the file on stdout . Then, and this is important, we set the command’s stdout to our PipeWriter .

So we redirect the output of the Command to our pipe, which, as before, will make it possible to read it through our PipeReader at another point. In this rather contrived case, that point is just a goroutine where we dump the results of cat to stdout (which it would have done anyways), but I think it’s easy to imagine doing something nifty here like exporting the results of the command somewhere or flushing it to a webpage as seen in this gist, where we’d need an io.Writer as input.

Conclusion

I hope these examples helped to convince you of the many opportunities opened by using io.Pipe together with nice abstractions which expect either io.Reader or io.Writer . Not only does io.Pipe enable seamless composition of components based on best practices, it’s also quite flexible with the use of TeeReader , which points the vast possibilities of using io.Pipe in custom-made I/O handling pipelines in both a readable and scalable way.

Of course this post only scratched the surface on this topic, as it didn’t handle the inherent gotchas with this approach nor error handling, but I plan to remedy this by a post or two on these and some more advanced topics in the future.

Have fun pipin’! :)

Resources


For years, the works of Russia’s towering men of letters—Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Goncharov, Turgenev—lay beyond the reach of English-speaking readers. That is, until a pale, sickly, unassuming British mother decided to translate them.

To the extent that 19th century Russian fiction deals with universal themes of human existence — nature, religion, love, death, and, of course, war and peace — these beloved tomes can feel timeless to readers. But the fact is, the English-speaking reading public didn’t get their hands on them until some years after their publication, when Constance Garnett picked up a dictionary and set out to bring the Russian masters to life in her native tongue.

The Brighton-born Garnett (née Black) was a coroner’s daughter, and worked as a governess before becoming a librarian in London’s East End. Her sister Clementina, a writer and labor organizer, introduced Constance to Edward Garnett, the man who would become her husband in 1889. Edward was a publisher’s reader, and was from an aristocratic literary family. His father was the Keeper of Printed Materials at the British Museum.

There weren’t many Russian speakers in turn-of-the-century Britain, but because of growing political unrest in the major cities of the Russian Empire, there were increasing numbers of exiled Russian revolutionaries. And the suggestion that Garnett translate Russian literature came from one of them — despite the fact she spoke no Russian. Constance may have had something of a crush on Feliks Volkhovsky, a bearded bad boy who had escaped imprisonment in Siberia and settled in London. So when he broached the idea, she was amenable.

Volkhovsky was part of a community of political thinkers and writers, and an editor at the Free Russian Press, an emigré journal and publishing house started by Alexander Herzen, the “father of Russian socialism.” Edward Garnett regularly invited members of the Free Russian Press scene to spend weekends at his home. On one weekend visit, Volkhovsky, according to Constance, “suggested my learning Russian and gave me a grammar and a dictionary.”

Leo Tolstoy relaxing at Yasnaya Polyana in 1908. (Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky/Library of Congress)

Once laid up with pregnancy complications, Garnett undertook the mammoth task of learning the notoriously complex Slavic language. One of her first translations was “The Kingdom of God is Within You,” a religious and philosophical tract by Leo Tolstoy. She went on to translate over 70 volumes of Russian literature, including almost everything Tolstoy ever wrote, Chekhov, all of Dostoevsky, and her favorite, Turgenev, among others. In 1894, Garnett took a three-month trip to Russia, and even visited Tolstoy at his estate, Yasnaya Polyana.

Clara Bell, a British linguist, had published a translation of War and Peace in 1886, but hers was a copy of copy, translated from a French translation, not the original Russian, and it wasn’t well received. The first ever English translation of Anna Karenina was done by an American, Nathan Haskell Dole, the same year. But because of the readability of Garnett’s versions, and her close ties to the publishing industry, her editions were printed cheaply and sold more widely than any that had come before. The Russian classics began to find their way into English homes and classrooms. A 1905 article in the Saturday Review, a British literary magazine, began, “Twenty years ago Tolstoy was hardly known outside Russia […] Who has not heard of Tolstoy now?”

Garnett maintained, in the words of New Yorker editor David Remnick, “an ascetic lifelong routine of housekeeping, child-rearing, and translating.” She worked ceaselessly. D.H. Lawrence, who was a friend of Garnett’s, recalls seeing her sitting in her garden “turning out reams of her marvelous translations from the Russian. She would finish a page, and throw it off on a pile on the floor without looking up, and start a new page. That pile would be this high — really, almost up to her knees, and all magical.” In 1921, writer Katherine Mansfield sent a letter to Garnett: “As I laid down my copy of War & Peace tonight I felt I could no longer refrain from thanking you for the whole other world that you have revealed to us through these marvelous translations from the Russian,” she wrote. Of Garnett’s body of work, she said, “The books have changed our lives, no less.”

Garnett’s output was extraordinary by any measure, but is particularly impressive considering that she had a child to mind and spent the majority of her life in very ill health. She was frail, beset by migraines, and suffered from sciatica. Most surprisingly, she had terrible vision, which was dramatically worsened by her vocation, and was nearly blind toward the end of her translating career. But she remained indefatigable, eventually hiring an assistant to read aloud from the original Russian as she scribbled a translated draft.

The work of the translator, when not overlooked entirely, is often subject to extreme scrutiny, and Garnett has certainly not been spared. She reportedly translated with such haste that she occasionally skipped words or phrases that were too difficult to translate well — a fact that has pained purists and native Russian speakers, who think Garnett robs the reader of the richness of the original Russian.

Most vociferous among her critics were Russian writers themselves, most notably Nabokov, whose lectures on literature are peppered with grumpy, anti-Garnett marginalia. He called her work “dry and flat, and always unbearably demure,” and her translation of Anna Karenina “a complete disaster.” Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky, another Russian writer in exile, lamented that “the reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren’t reading the prose of either one. They’re reading Constance Garnett.”


EDIT: Would be nice to see some of you post your finished models. or even release them to the scripts / addon section!

class CfgPatches

{

class clan_sign_tutorial

{

units[] = {""};

weapons[] = {};

requiredVersion = 0.1;

requiredAddons[] = {"CAData","CAMisc3"};

};

};

class CfgAddons

{

class clan_sign_tutorial

{

list[]=

{

"Clan_Sign",

};

};

};

class CfgVehicleClasses

{

class clan_sign_tutorial

{

// name in the editor

displayName="3D Model Tutorial";

};

};

class CfgVehicles

{

class Thing; // External class reference

class Clan_Sign: Thing

{

scope = 2;

model = "\tutorial\sing.p3d";

icon = "\Ca\misc\data\icons\i_danger_CA.paa";

displayName = "Clan Sign";

mapSize = 0.7;

accuracy = 0.2;

vehicleClass = "clan_sign_tutorial";

destrType = "DestructNo";

};

}; Click to expand...

Ok, everything in a video for this one.This will bring us to the point that we can have a working model in game. After this I will follow up with an rvmat that we can applyDownload link for the Blender conversion script:And a thanks of course to Alwarren who developed the script.Next tutorial will cover rvmatsHere is the complete config:


Welcome to

We are on kickstarter to raise awareness of our cause and our brand. We will use everything we raise on the business and on establishing our brand to make our vision a reality.

Clothing is a basic essential that so far our society has mainly used for style or the eyes of others. To tell others who we are or who we want to be. We wear our clothes all day and that message radiates outward the whole time. Until you look in a mirror.

Sending a Message Inside

We believe that clothing is the perfect medium and opportunity for sending a message inside to ourselves. We will keep fashion designs with plenty of style but simply add a reverse image of a message. A message that touches you in a meaningful way every time you look in the mirror or take a selfie. Whether that message is Positive Reinforcement, A Personal Reminder, Internal Fire, etc. Whatever the case may be, you decide what kind of message works best for the betterment of yourself.

Our main goal is to put a bigger importance on who we are on the inside as opposed to how we are perceived on the outside. We want to build this brand for children and teenagers because their minds are still developing. Especially when starting young, we can use clothing as another method of teaching good traits and qualities, even when we can't always be there. Our brand can also help young adults and above. To whom we serve positive reminders, or simple qualities that we may not always remember.


Drug charges against three men have been thrown out after a judge ruled that a Toronto police officer had been “deliberately misleading” in his testimony and notes in an attempt to “strengthen the case” against one of the accused. Const. Bradley Trenouth “falsely attributed” a large piece of crack to Toronto man Jason Jaggernauth, Judge Katherine Corrick wrote in her Aug. 8 decision, staying the charges against Jaggernauth.

In her decsion, a judge wrote that public confidence in the rule of law is threatened "when police officers present false evidence against accused persons.” ( Andrew Lahodynskyj / Toronto Star file photo )

Because of Trenouth’s actions, Corrick excluded evidence gathered by him and other officers from the trial of Jaggernauth’s co-accused, leading the judge to find them not guilty in the same decision. “The false attribution of evidence to an accused’s possession, and false testimony by a police officer constitute precisely the type of state misconduct that undermines the integrity of the judicial process,” Corrick wrote. Jaggernauth, Jordan Davis and Jimal Nembrand-Walker were charged with possession of cocaine for the purpose of trafficking and possession of the proceeds of crime in 2014, after police found them in a Scarborough apartment that contained multiple types of drugs and drug paraphernalia.

Article Continued Below

Police officers found several grams of crack on Davis and crack, powdered cocaine and other drugs in Nembrand-Walker’s pockets at the time of the arrest, Corrick wrote in her decision. Police did not find any drugs on Jaggernauth, Corrick said. Trenouth testified in a pretrial hearing that he saw a large piece of crack fall from Jaggernauth when officers got Jaggernauth to stand up from his chair — testimony that was backed up by the notes Trenouth said he took at the time of Jaggernauth’s arrest, according to the judge’s decision. But at the trial several months later, Trenouth told the court that he did not see the crack fall from Jaggernauth, Corrick wrote. Instead, Trenouth testified that he found the piece of crack on the floor near Jaggernauth and assumed it had fallen from him. Corrick noted other discrepancies between Trenouth’s pretrial and trial testimonies in her decision.

At the preliminary hearing, Trenouth said he picked the large ball of crack off the floor after forensic officers had taken photos of the scene. But the photos taken do not include images of that specific piece of crack, Corrick wrote. Trenouth told the court that might be because the piece of crack had been moved or stepped on before the photos were taken.

Article Continued Below

The large piece of crack was also missing from evidence photos taken by police about three hours later, in Trenouth’s presence, the judge said. Trenouth’s story changed at trial, where he said there were no photos of the piece of crack because he had already picked it up and put it in his pocket before the photos were taken, Corrick wrote. Corrick ruled on Aug. 8 that Trenouth did not find the crack near Jaggernauth, as the police officer had claimed. “I have concluded that Officer Trenouth was deliberately misleading when he prepared his notes and testified at the preliminary hearing, in an effort to strengthen the case,” Corrick wrote. It is unlikely that Trenouth, who has eight years of police experience, would pick up unwrapped drugs and put them in his pocket at a crime scene, Corrick said. And if Trenouth had merely been mistaken in his pretrial testimony, he should have informed the Crown before the case went to trial, the judge added. An investigation should be immediately opened into Trenouth’s conduct in the case, Jaggernauth’s lawyer Chris O’Connor said in an interview. “The bottom line is . . . an officer falsely attributed an exhibit to my client that never was on my client,” O’Connor said. Toronto police spokesperson Meaghan Gray said she “can’t say whether (Trenouth) will face any discipline.” All disciplinary matters are confidential until the officer in question has appeared before a police services tribunal, Gray added. “Generally speaking an investigation into allegations of an officer providing false evidence in court could lead to criminal charges (such as) perjury or (internal) discipline under the Police Services Act,” Gray said. Corrick was scathing in her decision about the effects of Trenouth’s false testimony. “It is difficult to imagine how public confidence can be maintained in the rule of law when police officers present false evidence against accused persons,” Corrick wrote. “Our justice system cannot function unless courts can rely on the willingness of witnesses to . . . tell the truth.”


If you think that a computer which is not connected to a network, doesn't have any USB sticks attached to it and doesn’t accept any kind of electronic connection requests are reasonably safe against hackers and from all the malware, then you are Wrong.

Inaudible Audio signals. Here we have something shocking update that Some German Scientists have developed a proof of concept Malware prototype, could allow a hacker to infect your computers and other digital devices just using

The ability to bridge an air gap could be a potent infection vector. Just imagine, a cyber attack using high-frequency sound waves to infect machines, where stolen data also can be transferred back to attacker without a network connection, Sounds very terrifying ?

Dragos Ruiu claimed malware dubbed badBIOS allowed infected machines to communicate using sound waves alone, means that the devices are physically disconnected from any networks, including the internet, people said he was crazy. When a few weeks ago, a security researcherclaimed malware dubbedallowed infected machines to communicate using sound waves alone, means that the devices are physically disconnected from any networks, including the internet, people said he was crazy.

But Now German Researchers have published a paper on how malware can be designed to cross the air gap by transmitting information through speakers and recording it via microphone.

Rather than relying on TCP-IP, they used a network stack originally developed for underwater communication and the signal was propagated through the use of a software-defined modem based on the GNU Radio project.

In a scenario based hacking, “The infected victim sends all recorded keystrokes to the covert acoustical mesh network. Infected drones forward the keystroke information inside the covert network till the attacker is reached, who is now able to read the current keyboard input of the infected victim from a distant place.” paper explained.

In another scenario, the researchers used sound waves to send keystroke information to a network-connected computer, which then sent the information to the attacker via email.

Dragos dedication about badBIOS research because this extraordinary concept was first introduced by him only. While the research doesn’t prove Dragos Ruiu’s badBIOS claims, but it does show that even if the system is disconnected from any network, could still be vulnerable to attackers. However, I would like to appreciatededication about badBIOS research because this extraordinary concept was first introduced by him only.

Researchers POC Malware is able to transfer data at 20 bits per second only, which is very low, but that's still capable of transferring your password or credit card number to the hacker in a few seconds.

Some basic countermeasures one can adopt to protect against such malware are:

Switching off the audio input and output devices from the system.

Employ audio filtering that blocks high-frequency ranges.

Using an Audio Intrusion Detection Guard.

Lets see how Antivirus companies will handle such threats to protect home users.


While it is hard enough to describe something effectively in fiction1—how a thing smells, moves, looks—sometimes it is useful to further describe how exactly a thing seems or appears to be, above and beyond any discernible physical characteristics. The ineffable sense of how things are often makes up the best and most memorable aspect of a piece of writing, but it can be among the hardest things to get right. It is useful for writers to remember that often this aspect of seeming and appearing will be conveyed through metaphor; and often the seeming and appearing will touch in some way on the meaning of what is being observed—or will include a mention of a character’s feelings about, or engagement with, the thing observed.

Note that the description of the ineffable sense of a thing will almost always be preceded by a more basic, sometimes quite extended, physical description. The writer in this case takes on the role of Dr. Frankenstein. With Igor’s help, the writer assembles legs, arms, torso, neck, head, and brain. The writer arranges all this stuff on the table, sews it together. But it is still dead (if vivid) matter. Then the writer applies the electricity—describes the mysterious, often quasi-metaphorical sense of a thing—and the thing opens its eyes and comes to life.

For example, in Alice Munro’s 1979 story “The Beggar Maid”, we find Rose, a scholarship student, just entering college. She is compelled to attend a meeting with other scholarship students, and, arriving with an unprepossessing companion at the room where the meeting is held, Rose hesitates outside the door.

There was a little window in the door. They could look through at the other scholarship winners already assembled and waiting. It seemed to Rose that she saw four or five girls of the same stooped and matronly type as the girl who was beside her, and several bright-eyed, self-satisfied babyish-looking boys. It seemed to be the rule that girl scholarship winners looked about forty and boys about twelve. It was not possible, of course, that they all looked like this. It was not possible that in one glance through the windows of the door Rose could detect traces of eczema, stained underarms, dandruff, moldy deposits on the teeth and crusty flakes in the corners of the eyes. That was only what she thought. But there was a pall over them, she was not mistaken, there was a true terrible pall of eagerness and docility.

Notice how Rose’s observation of this long exact list of gross-out sufferings—”eczema, stained underarms, dandruff, moldy deposits on the teeth and crusty flakes in the corners of the eyes”—is implicitly disowned twice (we are told that this is only how “it seemed”) and very explicitly disowned three times: “It was not possible, of course….It was not possible….That was only what she thought.” (And notice further that Rose’s disowning of the list in no way erases the impression the list has made on us.)

But no, Munro is onto something with these disavowals—because it’s true, these physical complaints are not what Rose has seen, not exactly. What she has seen is something else, something further, an impression of something, that she cannot really point to. She has seen “a pall”—literally, “something that covers, shrouds, or overspreads, esp. with darkness or gloom.” But where is the pall? Where is it in the room? Is it hovering “over them”, up near the light fixtures?

We understand from Munro’s unusual insistence that we are not meant to take this as just a metaphor: “But there was a pall over them, she was not mistaken, there was a true terrible pall of eagerness and docility.” But what is this, really? What is being described here? Nothing less than the sense of how things are, a sudden, almost mystical understanding of the truth about these people. And with this description, zap, the world of the room takes on meaning, and life. The Frankenstein Effect, at its finest.

Munro is a past master at this (and a million other things). In her story “Dance of the Happy Shades” (1961), a group of mentally disabled children arrive at a much anticipated piano recital. The narrator senses something going on:

It is while I am at the piano, playing the minuet from Berenice, that the final arrival, unlooked-for by anybody but Miss Marsalles, takes place. It must seem at first that there has been some mistake. Out of the corner of my eye I see a whole procession of children, eight or ten in all, with a red-haired woman in something like a uniform, mounting the front step. They look like a group of children from a private school on an excursion of some kind (there is that drabness and sameness about their clothes) but their progress is too scrambling and disorderly for that. Or this is the impression I have; I cannot really look. Is it the wrong house, are they really on their way to the doctor for shots, or to Vacation Bible Classes? No, Miss Marsalles has got up with a happy whisper of apology; she has gone to meet them. Behind my back there is a sound of people squeezing together, of folding chairs being opened, there is an inappropriate, curiously unplaceable giggle. And above or behind all this cautious flurry of arrival there is a peculiarly concentrated silence. Something has happened, something unforeseen, perhaps something disastrous; you can feel such things behind your back.

You can’t, of course—not really—but then again, yes you can. The many tiny details have added up to something impalpable and profound, something that goes beyond description—something that has, almost literally, entered the air of the room.

Almost literally is the point here. On the verge of literalness.

Note that not every description calls for a metaphysical component. Usually this sort of technique is most useful when a character is observing a complicated scenario—an airport concourse, a crammed bookshelf, a busy restaurant—in which a number of objects or people are involved, and where it is useful to convey both a sense of particularity and an overall impression of things. But always when you see a writer deploying the terms

an air of

an atmosphere of

a sense of

an impression of

and other similar shortcuts, you ought to feel the hair rising on the back of your neck, because Dr. Frankenstein is warming up his generator. And things are about to get metaphysical.

The P:V Ratio

If a metaphysical understanding is to be in some fashion arrived at through the medium of the world, then we may note that different authors derive this metaphysical understanding differently. Some writers prefer to assemble more world on the table before applying the electricity that represents a greater understanding.

We may therefore find it suitable to change our underlying metaphor, leaving behind all these dripping body parts our assistant has so obligingly harvested, and propose instead a more congenial potatoes-to-vodka ratio, where some writers prefer to assemble more potatoes (or “world”) and others fewer, to arrive at a given amount of distilled spirit (or “understanding”).

In this new potatoes-to-vodka model, the potatoes, of course, are the physical matter of a story—shoes, ceilings, arguments, sentences, eyebrows, wind, cat hair, Coca-Cola, and jump ropes3, while vodka is the metaphysical understanding derived from these physical things. We may call this a writer’s p:v ratio, representing the efficiency with which a writer typically makes use of the world.

In the following selections, potatoes are set in bold and spirit, in italics.

Alice Munro will, as always, provide a useful—and in this case usefully typical—example. In “Hateship Friendship Courtship Loveship Marriage”, a middle-aged, unattractive woman shops for a fancy dress, thinking (at this point falsely) that she is going to be married in it. She enters the shop:

Along one wall was a rack of evening dresses, all fit for belles of the ball with their net and taffeta, their dreamy colors. And beyond them, in a glass case so no profane fingers could get at them, half a dozen wedding gowns, pure white froth or vanilla satin or ivory lace, embroidered in silver beads or seed pearls. Tiny bodies, scalloped necklines, lavish skirts. Even when she was younger she could never have contemplated such extravagance, not just in the matter of money but in expectations, in the preposterous hope of transformation, and bliss.

Here the metaphysical understanding has plainly been reached by means of the physical observation. The potatoes of the shop provide a sort of ballast to the abstracted thought, but also provide the means by which to arrive at it. A reasonable amount of world (the rack, the net and taffeta, et cetera) produces in a character a reasonable amount of mind-stuff.

Munro is unique in her ability but not in her technique; most writers’ habits in this regard at least superficially resemble Munro’s, deploying a moderate amount of stuff to arrive at a moderate amount of spirit. And perhaps it is this moderation that allows us to qualify a writer as “realistic”—most of us seem to experience the world at something like this measured pace, after all, as we move through our days both beset by sensory input and at the same time subject to the addled and improvisatory workings of our own brains.4 In a similar vein, John Updike observes before he transcends, in “The Afterlife”:

A broad-faced strawberry blonde, she had always worn sweaters and plaid pleated skirts and low-heeled shoes for her birding walks, and here this same outfitseemed a shade more chic and less aggressively “sensible” than it had at home. Her pleasant plain looks, rather lost in the old crowd of heavily groomed suburban wives, had bloomed in this climate; her manner, as she showed them the house and their room upstairs, seemed to Carter somehow blushing, bridal.5

If this balance between world and mind allows us to locate Munro and Updike in the solid realistic mainstream of contemporary fiction, what of some others? What happens if you prefer fewer potatoes? What if you prefer more? What if you’re not interested in describing spirit at all? Or what if you’re more interested in meaning than in matter, like some spats-wearing evangelist, waving your hands in the air in hopes of producing something from nothing? Clearly this requires an inadequate, seat-of-the-pants survey.

Tweaking the P:V Ratio

Some writers, of course, prefer to avoid the explicit statement of spirit entirely. Hemingway and his ilk have a very high ratio of potatoes-to-vodka, with Hemingway’s followers arranged around him in a haphazard spatter array. To take a familiar example, Raymond Carver’s “Why Don’t You Dance” lives almost entirely in the present, physical moment; a man, now without his wife (we gather she has left because of his drinking, among other reasons), puts his household belongings out in his yard and driveway, arranging them for sale just as they have been arranged in the house. A young couple comes along; the girl dances with the man, and is evidently affected by his plight. The story is told in simple, factual terms, with little or no reference to thoughts, feelings, or epiphanic realizations. The story’s final section, in its entirety, goes:

Weeks later, she said: “The guy was about middle-aged. All his things right there in his yard. No lie. We got real pissed and danced. In the driveway. Oh, my God. Don’t laugh. He played us these records. Look at this record-player. The old guy gave it to us. And all these crappy records. Will you look at this shit?” She kept talking. She told everyone. There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out. After a time, she quit trying.

Potatoes? Vodka? It is debatable. The girl is feeling something, of course, as the story suggests, but she can’t express it, possibly because she hasn’t got the equipment to do so. And because she can’t express it, we don’t get an explicit statement of it either. It’s possible to read the whole story as a pile of potatoes, with that last 26-word paragraph serving as the equivalent of the story’s spirit. The story’s last paragraph is in fact the mental result, finally, of a worldly encounter. At any rate, the ratio of potatoes to vodka here is very high, if indeed there is any vodka to divide by.

By contrast, a writer may be particularly interested in spirit—literally so in the case of, for example, James Baldwin, whose stories and novels tend to avoid physical description while dwelling more on abstract concerns. In his story “The Outing”, three boys are on the make in various ways during a church retreat. Then they enter the meeting room:

During his testimony Johnny and Roy and David had stood quietly beside the door, not daring to enter while he spoke. The moment he sat down they moved quickly, together, to the front of the high hall and knelt down beside their seats to pray. The aspect of each of them underwent always, in this company, a striking, even an exciting change; as though their youth, barely begun, were already put away; and the animal, so vividly restless and undiscovered, so tense with power, ready to spring had already stalked and trapped and offered, a perpetual blood-sacrifice, on the altar of the Lord.

We sense here that, as is often the case for Baldwin, conflict is played out in an almost literal sense on the field of the personality, where such matters as identity and the fate of one’s soul are best and most frankly considered. The rendering of the Baldwin’s physical world is often minimal, as though such surface concerns are too trivial to consider.6

With these opposing practices in mind, we must now consider a minor and possibly self-evident corollary aspect of this idea, that of scale.

Scale

The scale under consideration here is the differing P:V ratio we find in stories versus novels. We know that novels tend to be richer in their effects than stories; specifically, we find that novelists tend to describe much more matter than a story writer will, but will derive from this matter roughly the same amount of spirit (or sometimes slightly more).7 In other words, novelists pile up more potatoes as a matter of course, but don’t derive giant gushing fountains of vodka. Longer descriptions leading to bigger heaps of stuff, but not a concomitant increase in the amount of understanding derived. You can only understand so much at once, after all.

In Couples, John Updike describes Harold little-Smith’s house; Harold has just learned that his wife may be having an affair. This has the effect of rendering his house “more transparent”, and the description that follows is limpid to the extreme, if sometimes verging on the purple. The house is:

…a flat-roofed redwood modern oriented along a little sheltered ridge overlooking the marsh to the south. The foyer was floored in flagstones; on the right an open stairway went down to a basement level where the three children (Jonathan, Julia, Henrietta) slept and the laundry was done and the cars were parked. Above this, on the main level, were the kitchen, the dining room, the master bedroom, a polished hall where hung reproductions of etchings by Rembrandt, Durer, Piranesi, and Picasso. To the left of the foyer a dramatically long living room opened up, with a shaggy cerulean rug and two facing white sofas and symmetrical hi-fi speakers and a Baldwin grand and at the far end an elevated fireplace with a great copper hood. The house bespoke money in the service of taste. In the summer evenings he would drive back from the station through the livelong light hovering above the tawny marshes, flooded or dry according to the tides, and find his little wife, her black hair freshly combed and parted, waiting on the longer of the sofas, which was not precisely white but rather a rough Iranian wool bleached to the pallor of sand mixed with ash. A record, Glenn Gould or Dinu Lupatti playing Bach or Schumann, would be sending forth clear vines of sound from the invisible root within the hi-fi closet. A pitcher of martinis would have been mixed and held chilled within the refrigerator toward this precious moment of his daily homecoming….

The description in the original goes on at about this length again, and includes such additional stuff as a chewed sponge ball, Jonathan in bathing trunks, the liquid branches of the lawn sprinkler, and so on. The overwhelming feeling is of an assembling stillness and a slant-lit suburban glamour—a hushed, beautiful hesitation—until at last:

Marcia would pour two verdant martinis into glasses that would suddenly sweat…and his entire household, even the stray milk butterfly perched on the copper fireplace hood, felt about to spring into bliss, like a tightly wound music box.

Here possibly we may see that a writer’s natural habits align better with one form than with another; in his best work Updike the novelist seems to be much more confident that his gist will come across than does Updike the short-story writer. There is far less—relatively speaking—summarizing and explaining, as though Updike feels confident that surely, given all the matter he has presented to us, we will be able to see what he means.

Turn the ratio down somewhat to discover Ian McEwan at work in Atonement, gathering his many finely described potatoes in order to derive, on behalf of Briony, a rather considerable draft of spirit:

…in a prized varnished cabinet, a secret drawer was opened by pushing against the grain of a cleverly turned dovetail joint, and here she kept a diary locked by a clasp, and a notebook written in a code of her own invention. In a toy safe opened by six secret numbers she stored letters and postcards. An old tin petty cash box was hidden under a removable floorboard beneath her bed. In the box were treasures that dated back four years, to her ninth birthday when she began collecting: a mutant double acorn, fool’s gold, a rainmaking spell bought at a funfair, a squirrel’s skull as light as a leaf. But hidden drawers, lockable diaries and cryptographic systems could not conceal from Briony the simple truth: she had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious, organized world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing. Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her to be cruel. Her effective status as an only child, as well as the relative isolation of the Tallis house, kept her, at least during the long summer holidays, from girlish intrigues with friends. Nothing in her life was sufficiently interesting or shameful to merit hiding; no one knew about the squirrel’s skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know. None of this was particularly an affliction; or rather, it appeared so only in retrospect, once a solution had been found.

And observe Henry James, masterfully interweaving matter with spirit through the mind of the young and impressionable Isabel Archer, suggesting that to the greatest and most knowing practitioners, mind and matter are really inseparable aspects of a fundamental unity. Notice how difficult it sometimes is, in the following example, to decide which side of things a sentence or a phrase is addressing, and how, for James, matters of custom and perception can be seen to blend:

The foundation of her knowledge was really laid in the idleness of her grandmother’s house, where, as most of the other inmates were not reading people, she had uncontrolled use of a library full of books with frontispieces, which she used to climb upon a chair to take down. When she had found one to her taste—she was guided in the selection chiefly by the frontispiece—she carried it into a mysterious apartment which lay beyond the library and which was called, traditionally, no one knew why, the office. Whose office it had been and at what period it had flourished, she never learned; it was enough for her that it contained an echo and a pleasant musty smell and that it was a chamber of disgrace for old pieces of furniture whose infirmities were not always apparent (so that the disgrace seemed unmerited and rendered them victims of injustice) and with which, in the manner of children, she had established relations almost human, certainly dramatic. There was an old haircloth sofa in especial, to which she had confided a hundred childish sorrows. The place owed much of its mysterious melancholy to the fact that it was properly entered from the second door of the house, the door that had been condemned, and that it was secured by bolts which a particularly slender girl found it impossible to slide. She knew that this silent, motionless portal opened into the street; if the sidelights had not been filled with green paper she might have looked out upon the little brown stoop and the well-worn brick pavement. But she had no wish to look out, for this would have interfered with her theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side—a place which became to the child’s imagination, according to its different moods, a region of delight or terror.

As a further and final aside, and related to the example of James, it is worth noting that as the efficiency of narrative distillation increases, and as the ratio of world-to-mind approaches the perfect balance of 1:1, peculiar things can begin to happen. John Cheever’s novels and stories live fruitfully at this stylistic event-horizon, the authorial eye shuttling so swiftly between world and mind that the boundary between the two begins to fade away. In “The Ocean”, one of Cheever’s prototypically imperiled householders fears he is being poisoned by his wife:

I mixed a Martini and went into the living room. I was not in any danger from which I could not readily escape. I could go to the country club for supper. Why I hesitated to do this seems, in retrospect, to have been because of the blue walls of the room in which I stood. It was a handsome room, its long windows looking out onto a lawn, some trees, and the sky. The orderliness of the room seemed to impose some orderliness on my own conduct—as if by absenting myself from the table I would in some way offend the order of things. If I went to the club for supper I would be yielding to my suspicions and damaging my hopefulness, and I was determined to remain hopeful.

Cheever’s rough 1:1 p:v ratio seems to go some way toward producing his trademark sound—a sort of tremulous, searching flight, as a claustrophobic eye shuttles ceaselessly between world and mind in search of an elusive certainty. The feeling becomes one of weird immersion and a kind of synesthesia; the character experiences the world, has an immediate mental reaction, and is then at once experiencing the world again. Fitting perhaps that we find the fraught and frenzied Cheever here, seeing and feeling, seeing and feeling, helpless to prevent his marvelously fruitful mind from making something of everything.8

The Visual Aid

Finally, with all these dubious propositions behind us, we can suggest that every writer might be plotted on a p:v graph, giving rise to the highly dubious Figure 1:

Surely we have gone too far with this, and certainly it is entirely wrong to put novelists and short-story writers together, rather as though we have tried somehow to pen up tigers with barracuda, but it is interesting to note the opposing and intersecting groupings, one of which we may very generally see is composed of Worriers—writers less at home in the world, and who have taken the self, or some version of the self, as the subject—while the other is composed of Composed Describers, writers who have taken the world as their subject and, generally speaking, written about society. That this is a byproduct of the individual personalities in question seems plain. We should also note that the very greatest tend to find themselves at rather the far points on the graph, outliers here as elsewhere, and that certain stylistically versatile folks can be imagined to be plotted in more than one place (Welty’s various moods, Updike’s, Faulkner’s come to mind), rather as though they have both a city house and a country one.

But what are we to do with this, then, as writers of prose? Probably we ought to note the relative scarcity of successful examples on the left side of the chart, whose few denizens have managed, like those extremophile bacteria who manage to flourish on ocean-bottom vents or in sulfuric acid pools in the depths of limestone caves, to survive in difficult environments, deriving great hogsheads of spirit from mere armfuls of potatoes. We ought to observe the cluster of sturdy realists trading remarks around the 10:2 mark, with the anomalous Coetzee somehow standing there too, all cool and gray and saying absolutely nothing whatsoever to anybody, and we may further admiringly note the high, plush posts of the great novelists, who manage to furnish their work with not only a great amplitude of matter but also of insight. We will leave it to the poets and especially to those lucky vessels who feel themselves recipients of divine inspiration to aspire to the ratio of 100:100, wherein the great unimaginable gigantitude of the world is, leaf-by-leaf, quantum-by-quantum, infused with the fullness of a supernaturally omnipresent understanding. We here are only prose writers, and we have deadlines to meet, so something like “just enough, not too much” will have to do. A little vodka is good for you, let us be satisfied to say, and too much ain’t.

Notes

1. Person, place, object, situation, idea—they’re all hard.

2. I see pall people.

3. Nouns are especially weighty. Descriptions are usually made of nouns and adjectives. But actions and lines of dialog must also be recognized as potato-esque in their effects, too, and a very good description will usually contain some element of action. Notice where your attention tends to catch and where it tends to slide in this description of Gabriel, from “The Dead”:

He was a stout tallish young man. The high colour of his cheeks pushed upwards even to his forehead where it scattered itself in a few formless patches of pale red; and on his hairless face there scintillated restlessly the polished lenses and the bright gilt rims of the glasses which screened his delicate and restless eyes. His glossy black hair was parted in the middle and brushed in a long curve behind his ears where it curled slightly beneath the groove left by his hat. When he had flicked lustre into his shoes he stood up and pulled his waistcoat down more tightly on his plump body. Then he took a coin rapidly from his pocket.

Observe Joyce’s well-intentioned attempts to ‘actionize’ the description: “pushed upwards,” “scattered itself,” “scintillated restlessly,” “screened.” But these are tricks, and not very successful. The mind’s eye is most engaged when Gabriel is actually doing something—”he pulled his waistcoat down more tightly on his plump body.” And it is least engaged where he is simply being something—”He was a stout tallish young man.” We see what is done more easily than we see what simply is. In this our eye is amphibian, registering change, becoming blind to stasis.

4. This is, it may be argued, the fundamental work of narrative art: the description of the metronomic interaction between the private mind and the constantly impinging world.

5. Updike’s reliance on seemed here and throughout his mighty oeuvre suggests his general preoccupation with the truth that lurks behind appearances, with making sure that everything be understood; and if it is this impulse that gives rise to his occasional overweening anxiety that we get the point of something, it strikes me as a fitting impulse. Very tall, he was terribly gawky as a child, with a gigantic nose, debilitating eczema, a comical stutter, and to top it all off a world-class mind. No one looking at him could have guessed what he really was. No wonder that the Rabbit books feature a man who, on the surface, is mostly unremarkable—a former high school basketball star, a printing press operator, a car salesman, a middling husband and father—and yet who has perhaps the most florid, nuanced internal life of any character ever composed. Related to this, surely, is Updike’s chronic affection for adverbs, those gravitational devices that control the flight of a verb even after it has been set loose. What other author would give us a character who “steered sullenly”? A life that is “majestically rooted”? Why else would he describe a hoard of treasure as “surreptitiously hidden”? Because of a mostly generous desire to make sure we get what he’s saying. That we get him, really, the kid with the big nose and the hideous skin, who also happens to be, as he might say, transcendently alight.

6. This is complicated by the fact that Baldwin’s characters also often struggle against their own bodies in various ways.

7. This is true even when the novelist and the short story writer are one and the same person; Doctorow the novelist has a much higher P:V ratio than Doctorow the short-story writer.

8. That Cheever was subject to the workings of his peculiar brain seems obvious; it has always struck me that the hysterical, sensory-enhanced well-being expressed in so much of Cheever’s work resembles the feeling that accompanies an epileptic’s ‘aura’, wherein the universe seems infused with mysterious meaning. Late in his life, with his brain ruined by booze, Cheever in fact had two epileptic seizures; it is my unsupportable crackpot belief that he had been experiencing mild seizures all his life, and that his habitual drinking may have been, in some small part, a means by which he attempted to reproduce the lovely feelings that unpredictably descended upon him, and which must have seemed, undiagnosed as they would have been, messages from a greater, senselessly benign power. Poor, mean, helpless, brilliant Cheever.


Charleston church shooting: the larger covert op

by Jon Rappoport

June 18, 2015

NoMoreFakeNews.com

“Long-term covert ops sometimes disguise themselves by claiming that the hidden cause of a problem is the cure. So it is with psychiatric drugs, like SSRI antidepressants, which push people into committing murder. In the aftermath of these killings, leaders call for expanded psychiatric screening—which will result in further prescription of those very same drugs.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

Police report the suspect in the Charleston church shooting, Dylann Roof, has been captured.

This is the latest in a string of crimes in which black-white conflict has been highlighted, pressed, argued, and used, for the purposes of: fanning flames of racial discord, exercising further gun control, and fatuously claiming that universal psychiatric screening and drugging is an answer.

In this brief article, I focus on black-white conflict.

In the 1960s, in America, the burgeoning drug culture and the Vietnam War became the occasion for protests and riots that shook the nation. In that case, the main target was the federal government.

Even though the “revolution” was pro-left, the 1968 Chicago riots were staged at the Democratic nominating convention. That gives you some idea of the degree of overall and virulent anti-government sentiment.

From the point of view of elite planners, the 1960s should not be repeated; at least not in the same way.

This time, the government should be seen as the hero, the rescuer, the mediator.

For that to happen, Americans would turn on and target each other.

There is no better way to accomplish that than to strike at the issue of race.

Emphasize it, push it, make it stand out, tie it into political correctness, create absurdist “dialogue” that could have no other outcome than outrage. The “discussion about race” has turned into transparent provocation.

Divide and conquer is as old as the hills. The conqueror is the ruler. And, of course, as he wins, he enacts more downward pressure on freedom, in multiple ways, while pretending to be the healer.

This is the op.

This is the simplicity of it.

You can throw other logs on the fire: agents provocateur in the media; the release of violent immigrant criminals from US prisons; the seeding of the population with massive amounts of psychiatric drugs (SSRI antidepressants) that scramble brains and push people over the edge into committing violent acts, including murder.

And oh yes, you can also include the intentional expansion of poverty (and attendant resentment) through the departure of millions of jobs overseas: aka Globalism. That is provocation of the highest order.

The objective is shifting the target from government to the people themselves, along the familiar lines of race.

And the payoff message will echo the sentiments of 1995, after the Oklahoma City Bombing: “Come home to the government, we will protect you. Only we can protect you.”

If you believed mainstream media, you would think the entire race issue in America consists of a three-way conversation between Al Sharpton, a KKK high priest, and some demented college student who insists that every word in the English language contains a hidden racial element.

Update: CBS News is reporting that Dylann Roof was arrested on February 28 in a mall, while he was asking a store clerk “out of the ordinary questions.” At that time, he was found in possession of a medicine called Suboxone.

It is an addicting drug used to treat opiate addiction. Some adverse effects: agitation, hostility, hallucinations, attempted suicide, depersonalization.

Rapid withdrawal from Suboxone can be more dangerous than taking it.

Getting the picture?

Of course, the distinct possibility that the drug pushed Dylann Roof over the edge into committing murder isn’t part of the “correct” narrative aimed at accelerating racial hatreds.

The truth? Irrelevant.

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com or OutsideTheRealityMachine.


The vast majority of foreigners charged with crimes meriting the death penalty are relatively impoverished menial labourers, predominantly from third world countries. Members of this group cannot afford the "diya" or blood money payments to a victim's relative that can win clemency from the Shariah system of Islamic justice.

Although foreigners make up just one quarter of the oil rich state's population, Amnesty reported they made up the majority of all those sent to death row. Its report revealed that at least 1,695 executions were carried out between 1985 and May 2008, with the number of non-nationals totalling 830, compared with 809 local citizens. It was impossible to ascertain the nationality of the remaining 56.

But it is in the number of reprieves that the greatest disparity lies. Amnesty claimed that a pardon is granted in one in every four capital cases involving a Saudi citizen but only one in 30 of each foreign case.

Saudi Arabia executed 78 people in the first eight months of this year, a figure in line with the 2007 total of 158.


030317-N-5319A-014

Central Command Area of Responsibility (Mar. 17, 2003) -- Spetz a Bottle Nose Dolphin belonging to Commander Task Unit (CTU-55.4.3) is beached up on a transfer mat before going out on a training mission from the well deck of the USS Gunston Hall (LSD 44) operating in the Arabian Gulf. CTU-55.4.3 is a multinational team consisting of Naval Special Clearance Team-One, Fleet Diving Unit Three from the United Kingdom, Clearance Dive Team from Australia, and Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Units Six and Eight (EODMU-6 and EODMU-8). These units are conducting deep/shallow water mine counter measure operations to clear shipping lanes for humanitarian relief. CTU-55.4.3 and USS Gunston Hall are currently forward deployed conducting missions in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the multinational coalition effort to liberate the Iraqi people, eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, and end the regime of Saddam Hussein. U.S. Navy photo by Photographers Mate 1st Class Brien Aho. (RELEASED)

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Now that we’re gardening in a frost-free area we have to get acquainted with a new bunch of sub tropical-ish weeds. This week, it’s been all about the Madeira Vine. In our new garden, the stuff is everywhere.

Look up Madeira vine and you will find gazillions of references to its invasive and terrible habits. But did you know that it’s edible?

Last weekend we got stuck into our new rental home’s garden. Well, a corner of it, anyway. Small steps, obtain a yield, and all that.

Prettymuch every surface in the corner we started in was choked in the bright green, fleshy leaves of Madeira vine, a garden escapee which hails from South America.

Madeira vine (Anredera cordifolia) is a hardy perennial which climbs up trees and then proceeds to produce long tails of flowers followed by clusters of airborne bubils, which fall off, and make more Madeira vines.

It’s considered a real problem all across subtropical Australia – choking the edge of rainforests and other native vegetation – like many resilient pioneer species, it’s an aggressive little bugger.

And our new garden was choked with the stuff.

With the enthusiasm that only establishing a new garden can bring, I took on the madeira vine with gusto.

The tuberous roots were everywhere, and it trailed up the fence and the lemon tree, as well as thickly across the ground. I ripped and I ripped and I ripped it out.

During a pause in my ripping frenzy, I had a thought. And so I panted to Nick: “hey could you look up Madeira Vine and check what it’s good for?”

It turns out that Madeira vine is highly edible. Medicinal, even.

Madeira vine leaves can be cooked like spinach and are highly nutritious

Madeira vine roots (rizomes) can be baked like potato

Madeira vine bubils (the aerial seed-ish things) are used extensively in Chinese medicine as an anti inflammatory, anti ulcer and liver protectant.

So here I am, ripping out a perfectly adapted, naturalised and nutritious food crop that can be used like spinach so that I can, er, plant some spinach.

Oh the irony.

Our personal compromise? To meet the Madeira vine half way. We removed it from our intensive planting bed, But we left it be under the lemon tree, where it seemed happiest.

Our future strategy? Management and reduction, via eating it.

So we won’t plant any more spinach. Until we run out of madeira vine, that is.

As I looked through the very many online articles and references to Madeira vine as a noxious pest, I was struck by the fact that only one article in twenty mentioned the vine’s eminent edibility.

Don’t you think that’s crazy?

I mean, don’t get me wrong. Native vegetation is essential to preserve, as are our remaining pockets of functional rainforest. And weed removal is a part of that.

But conversely, in an age of food scarcity, of ridiculously wasteful and polluting industrial agriculture being promoted as the only way to feed Australia (because we couldn’t possibly feed ourselves with localised small farm based food systems, apparently)…

In the middle of all this, we have yet another rampant food bearing plant that is everywhere, and which is being entirely ignored for the nutrient dense value to our communities that it represents.

In fact, we have a local food source dripping, literally, from the trees around us. And yet our only plan for it, no matter where it grows, is to eradicate it.

Does this mean we should let plants like Madeira vine strangle our local nature reserve? Hell no.

But this does mean that, yet again, we have an adapted, perennial, zero footprint and highly nutritious food plant right on our doorsteps, which we’re trying our best to wipe out.

Because it doesn’t fit our idea of food, our idea of nature.

But unlike many other edible weeds that are there for the foraging but which could be easily discounted from cultivation due to various factors, it’s interesting to note that Madeira Vine ticks many of the boxes desired for a food crop…

It grows without much assistance, is hardy and produces prolifically.

It requires minimal cultivation.

It dominates an area where it is planted (meaning far less weed control is needed)

It is spread only by humans and by water flows distributing the bubils – an easy factor to contain with good design

And if that’s not enough, Madeira vine is already successfully cultivated + eaten extensively in Japan, where it is called okawakame (land seaweed)

At any rate, I feel fortunate that we looked it up, and now know of another local food that can be used to nurture our family and friends.

Seeking sustenance by whatever means available, and necessary.

Madeira Vine resources

It’s a pickle, isn’t it – what do you make of this issue?

Actually, speaking of pickles, i rekon Madeira vine would make a good pickle or kraut addition…

**Update in response to the various folks who are determined to see the above post as a promotion of cultivating noxious weeds – people, read the post again. It’s not.

What I am saying is that using the resources around you (even as you attempt to eradicate them) is a good idea, and an ethical approach to energy + food consumption.

Whether it’s madeira vine, feral rabbits, whatever – eating it is an appropriate use of energy, and should be considered over the alternative of exclusively approaching the problem with glyphosate or pindone.

And if you really want to talk weeds and the destruction of the Australian landscape, let’s start with the big ones – rice, wheat, canola, sugarcane and so on… it’s a long list, if you look at it in terms of adverse and invasive impact on our ecosystems…


Selena Gomez says she wants more people to talk about therapy — and she’s leading the charge.

Gomez said in April’s Vogue magazine that DBT, or Dialectical Behavior Therapy, is helping her recover from anxiety and depression. “[It’s] completely changed my life,” she told the mag, adding that she now sees her therapist five times a week.

IS ONLINE THERAPY LEGIT?

DBT is a form of cognitive behavioral therapy developed in the late ’80s to treat borderline personality disorder. “Now, almost three decades later, it’s been … shown to be helpful for people with depression, anxiety, and people with mood swings,” clinical psychologist Amanda Spray, Ph.D., assistant director of the Steven A. Cohen military clinic at NYU Langone, tells The Post.

“There are four basic components,” Spray explains: Mindfulness, interpersonal effectiveness (learning how to have your needs met by others), emotion regulation (learning how to process and handle your emotions), and distress tolerance (taking a step back and not acting impulsively under distress). Spray says that many therapists have adapted DBT to fit their own practice, but traditional DBT entails weekly therapy appointments, weekly group meetings, and at-home exercises to help patients apply what they’ve learned.

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Following news last month that Anthony Bourdain’s planned international food market at Pier 57 had pushed its opening back by two years, an investigation by Eater NY is now questioning whether Bourdain Market will open at the pier at all. Eater found out that Bourdain and his partners haven’t actually signed up for a lease at the SuperPier, but have only obtained a letter of intent, which is not a legally binding contract.

Instead, Eater NY is investigating rumors that the Bourdain Market partners might actually be considering a back up option, which is signing on to 155,000 square feet of space at Gansevoort Market. The head of Bourdain Market, Stephen Werther confirmed to Eater that they hadn’t signed a lease at Pier 57, and that they had previously considered Gansevoort as a backup option. He denied rumors that those talks had restarted again however.

The developers of the Pier, Youngwoo & Associates and RXR Realty declined to comment on the matter, but a rep for Youngwoo said that the development firm had never confirmed Bourdain Market as a tenant, and that only Google had been confirmed so far as having signed a lease at the space.

Werther admitted to Eater that he expected the project to have moved forward sooner, but that signing the lease was "imminent," and that there were bound to be complications for a project of this scope.

Architecture that comes to life in Game of Thrones


Oracle suffered with serious vulnerability in the authentication protocol used by some Oracle databases. This Flaw enable a remote attacker to brute-force a token provided by the server prior to authentication and determine a user's password.

A researcher - Esteban Martinez Fayo, a researcher with AppSec tomorrow will demonstrate a proof-of-concept attack.

Martinez Fayo and his team first reported the bugs to Oracle in May 2010. Oracle fixed it in mid-2011 via the 11.2.0.3 patch set, issuing a new version of the protocol. "But they never fixed the current version, so the current 11.1 and 11.2 versions are still vulnerable," Martinez Fayo says, and Oracle has no plans to fix the flaws for version 11.1.

The first step in the authentication process when a client contacts the database server is for the server to send a session key back to the client, along with a salt. The vulnerability enables an attacker to link a specific session key with a specific password hash.

There are no overt signs when an outsider has targeted the weakness, and attackers aren't required to have "man-in-the-middle" control of a network to exploit it. "Once the attacker has a Session Key and a Salt (which is also sent by the server along with the session key), the attacker can perform a brute force attack on the session key by trying millions of passwords per second until the correct one is found. This is very similar to a SHA-1 password hash cracking. Rainbow tables can’ t be used because there is a Salt used for password hash generation, but advanced hardware can be used, like GPUs combined with advanced techniques like Dictionary hybrid attacks, which can make the cracking process much more efficient."

"I developed a proof-of-concept tool that shows that it is possible to crack an 8 characters long lower case alphabetic password in approximately 5 hours using standard CPUs."

Because the vulnerability is in a widely deployed product and is easy to exploit, Fayo said he considers it to be quite dangerous.