De Wildt and Shakama photos

Sunday, March 6, 2005

Since it was the De Wildt-Shingwedzi ranch that I was staying at, I think it would be suitable to first mention the cheetahs. They're the only approved breeding center in the world for cheetahs, and the only one to successfully retrain and release them into the wild. Believe it or not, they eat Eukunuba food (and the occasional donkey).

The left two photos are a group of young males having their lunch — in the left photo, that's a very rare king cheetah on the far left. The middle photo is cheetahs following us as we drove off, and the right photo, well, that's pre-lunch cranky cheetahs. Below are a couple photos of the “front yard”, “back yard”, and “driveway” of the lodge we stayed at. As a point of trivia, the cost of staying there was a fraction of the cost of the average hotel in Toronto. Barring the flight costs, this is a cheap vacation.

In the right hand photo, taken on the drive up to our lodge, you can see one of the many free-roaming residents. Below we almost ran into a few friends of theirs coming back late at night (a few minutes earlier we'd come upon a very, very fat rhino and her baby, but I wasn't fast enough with my camera after a few Windhoek Lagers).

Below are a few more residents of De Wildt. On the left is (I think) a caracal, then a heard of impala, and, if you've got sharp eyes, a couple of crocodiles (if you don't have sharp eyes, don't go swimming or you risk being eaten), a big ant hill, and a large bird of some sort… Sorry my nomenclature skills aren't more elite. The birds are funny — they rest on the road, and when you drive up to them they won't move until you basically bump them with your car, and then they just hop forward forty feet… It can take a kilometer before they've given you right-of-way.

There was also a pack of African wild dogs, which I take it are sort of the African equivalent to coyotes (they're not like domesticated dogs at all). They have a really bizarre yippy bird-like bark, and are vicious hunters, enjoying the kill — they swarm their prey, slowly taking bites off it, but letting it live… When it eventually dies of shock, they pounce on it and reduce it to skeleton in minutes.

After that story, how about something more pleasant? Here's a picture of a tortoise.

On the right is the sunset at Shakama Game Lodge where we had dinner a couple times (highly recommended). You can't see them in this photo, but as we were having sundowners, we watched kudu drinking at the water hole (which you can just barely see), and giraffes grazing nearby.

Other than that, there's a group of girls sitting across from me in the lobby here where I'm online. They asked what I do, so I told them I make porn (which I guess is true, yeah, I'm a pornographer, and I love it)… I'm pretty sure they liked that answer a lot.

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Out from the bushvelt…

Sunday, March 6, 2005

Sorry I've not been able to post the last little while. Until earlier today we were staying about an hour from Pretoria, down a long dirt road deep into the bushvelt, on a cheetah reserve. Right now I'm at a crazy over-the-top South African resort (imagine a cross between Las Vegas, Disneyland, and an African Safari), The Palace of the Lost City, trying to get my mail downloaded. It “out-Vegases Vegas” and it predates modern Las Vegas as far as I know.

Anyway, before the two and a half hour drive here, in the last couple days we've come across about thirty cheetah as well as desert lynx and other wild cats, wildebeests, warthogs, insane wild dogs, kudu, impala, caracal, rhinoceros, springbok, crocodiles, tortoises, zebra, tons of different kinds of birds, lots of little lizards, and more. It's amazing how much wildlife is here (but also how much of it is endangered) — and quite something to suddenly come across it on a dark road at night! Pictures soon…

It's really nice being able to see so many stars as well… I'm old enough that I remember stars from my childhood — I don't just mean the occasional glimpse of Venus and the bigger constellations, but millions of stars visible to the naked eye, and the bright and well-defined band of the Milky Way. These days in North America (and even in much of Mexico), they've slowly been going out as we pollute with both layers of smog and incessant artificial light. There are some faiths that believe that the Gods will snuff out the stars as the apocalypse unfolds… Perhaps we've beaten them to it?

I'll write more and post more pictures when I can get to a stable connection… and update BME — I have stuff ready to post, and will do everything I can to at least get BME/extreme and BME/HARD updated shortly. I've had a generous offer of a 512kbps ADSL connection in Johannesburg that I may take up if I can't post from this hotel — they've got wireless on trial and it's going surprisingly quickly!

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On the beach in Durban

Thursday, March 3, 2005

I had a great day here in Durban, South Africa. After finishing up the morning's work we took a stroll down to the beach to enjoy the Indian Ocean. The left photo gives you an idea of what the walk looked like (scenic waterfront region). The waterfront is very pretty with a long golden sand beach, multiple piers for both relaxing and fishing, and lots of people swimming and surfing in spite of the signs warning not to. The right two photos below are from one of the piers.

After the first pier stroll we had a bizarre lunch with an Indian guy and his young South African wife who called us over, admiring our tattoos. He told us he was a “mystery guest” for Sun International, being sent around from hotel to hotel to check quality and service issues, but he was pretty drunk — and I was getting there myself — and we weren't entirely convinced he was telling the truth. It may have been some sort of scam that never panned out, either because we foiled it somehow or simply because he enjoyed our company, telling us prison stories about his various hand-poked tattoos and adventures (“I got this one after I laid a guy out in prison — I didn't kill him, I just gave him the beating of his life”)… among other tattoos he had a Hindu swastika and lettering on his had, a dot on his forehead, a sacred heart on his shoulder, and a dagger-cross on his forearm. The waiter as well showed us his full sleeve (flames and kanji, done by a friend) — apparently committing some service-industry faux pas, but I appreciated it.

There's a fine line between “hilarious” and “terrifying”, and I think most good encounters ride that line very closely, and this one most definitely did… but highly enjoyable. After lunch we walked further along the beach and ran into a Zulu vendor who didn't speak a lot of English but appeared happy to see tourists with stretched lobes… That said, he seemed a little beat down and broken by life, which was sad. So far the reactions about our tattoos and piercings especially have been fairly negative, so it was nice to meet a local who had stretched lobes himself.

We didn't actually go swimming (I don't think I even remembered to bring a bathing suit), but I did roll up my pants and wade… The water is wonderful, and was full of mostly locals and a few tourists taking advantage of the summer weather, tossing themselves with glee into the cresting waves. It's a little scary here, but other than the overwhelming feeling of everything being a little sketchy, I really like it here.

We're off to supper shortly, and then as I mentioned earlier, tomorrow it's off to Pretoria. You may not hear from me for a few days — we've been told that where we're headed next (the cheetah and wild dog reserve) is online, but I'm not entirely convinced.
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Now I'm definitely getting arrested…

Thursday, March 3, 2005

Steganography is the art of communicating in a way that hides the existence of that communication… that is, obfuscation (there's no encryption involved). Most commonly this involves things like hiding data in the least significant bit of an image file — it is said that terrorists have used this method to communicate using images in USENET newsgroups.

One of my interests as an artist is the work of Russian mathematician Andrey Andreyevich Markov, after whom Markov chains are named. In short Markov chains are sequences of events, followed by a statistical representation of potential future events. I thought it might be possible to use subtle variations and fluctuations in the statistical output of applications of such data in order to encode secret messages. For example, the string below, seeded with the Book of Genesis, encodes the simple phrase, “Hello, world!” followed by a carriage-return.


Jahzeel, and replenish the fowl of every living creature after their hand of Hagar the land by his father, and Accad, and Calah, And they brought forth his voice, and she conceived, that Pharaoh for my power I pray you, saying, Jacob: all these words? God saw Rachel envied him. And I offended their possession: he and thou shalt thou in the sight because I shall be gone. And they might not toward Israel's left communing with thy brethren, sons of the ark; And he could we may preserve seed of Pharaoh awoke. And Abram said to interpret it. And the nakedness of the earth. Make ready the word of the face to him a well; whose land ye shall tell me; that he saw that betwixt me swear, saying, He is Hiddekel: that I have made the tree, of Canaan.
= Hello, world!

Basically what it does is it splits the Markovian data into two sets rather than a single set, with one set representing a '0' bit and the second set representing a '1' bit. Encoding is fairly simple — here's the metacode (input is a seed word — the last word rendered — and a bit value):


find word
 if word has 0 markovian sets (ie. terminating word)
  select random start word
  add word to buffer
  seed array with new word and start over
 if word has 1 markovian set (ie. single possibility)
  add word to buffer
  seed array with new word and start over
 if word has 2 markovian sets (ie. normal data)
  for bit 0, select random word (statistically balanced)
   from first set, add to buffer, and exit
  for bit 1, select random word (statistically balanced)
   from second set, add to buffer, and exit

What's interesting if it's not obvious is that the output data will always be different — there are billions of different ways that the “Hello, world!” example could have encoded, each one just as valid — it's not the characters that are important, but the subtle variations their selections make in the statistical flow of the words. The decode process is of course the same in reverse. Again, here is the metacode (this time the input is two words; a potential Markov chain which may or may not contain data):


find word1
 if 0 or 1 markovian sets, return -1 (no meaningful data)
 if 2 markovian sets,
  return 0 if word2 is in set 1
  return 1 if word2 is in set 2

Simple! If you'd like to play with it, you can use any seed data you'd like, although I've used the book of Genesis personally. This version is case sensitive, and requires some words in the set to have capital letters (since it considers them potential 'start words'). Only spaces and linebreaks are considered terminators between words. Here's the links to the software and the seed data I use:


genesis.txt (seed data, text of Genesis)
markenc.exe (Win32 command line executable)

Note that it's a rather incomplete piece of code (the last option below doesn't work, there's minimal error checking, and it's far from optimized) — just a proof of concept really… The usage is pretty simple;

Usage: markenc seedfile infile action outfile [options]
Actions:   e  encode   ...or...  d  decode
Options:   y  confirm all
           t  use timer as random seed
           w=word  force start word
           b  byte mode

The command I used to encode the above data was 'markenc genesis.txt hw.txt encode hw.enc t y' and to test the decode (successful), I used 'markenc genesis.txt hw.enc decode hw.dec t y'… hw.txt is the file containing the input text, genesis.txt is of course the data that's used to seed the Markov chains, and hw.enc and hw.dec are the encoded and subsequent decoded files.

Well, I thought it was amusing.

I'm thinking about using it to write a BRAINF*CK-style language using three bits to encode each command… I'm going to call the compiler “THE BIBLE CODE”. If that's got you laughing as hard as it got me laughing, well, first of all you're probably an autistic savant, and second of all, you can have a beer with me any time you want because I'd definitely enjoy your company.

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Arrived: Durban, South Africa

Wednesday, March 2, 2005

Another day, another another three airports… Took off at about one from Windhoek, Namibia (left photo), and then landed at Johannesburg, South Africa (right photo), and eventually made it to Durban on the west coast of South Africa, at the southern end of Zulu territory. Some people have told me I may meet others with stretched lobes here, but I'm not keeping my fingers too crossed on it.

Flying in South Africa so far has been some of the most turbulent flying I've ever been through — many of the landings have been at very high speed, coming in fast and hard to minimize the chances of stalling I imagine. It's probably a great place to become a confident pilot (or dead). On South African Airlines they use steel silverware when the serve the in-flight meals… Rachel looked at me, holding a metal knife in her hand, with sort of a “holy crap, what have they given us?” look on her face — I told her we'd now have to hijack the plane to prove that American-style “let's use dull plastic” security is a good precaution.

Durban is very pretty from above, incredibly lush and green, but very industrial as well with a lot of refineries and processing plants (immense sugar refineries and so on). I wasn't able to get a lot of pictures of it because it was dark by the time we left the airport, but here are two photos taken as we were coming in for landing, the first of the beach, and the second of one of the harbors.

From the airport Rachel called a couple hotels to see who could provide us with highspeed Internet service in the rooms — I've got mail piling up and need to download it, and don't really want to have to sit in a business center for eight hours… The Sun International hotels (like the Kalahari Sands where we stayed in Windhoek) were charging R1.20 per minute (about $12 US an hour) for access about twice as quick as dial-up, so I wasn't looking forward to the bill to grab my huge bucket of bits.

Anyway, via a truly maniacal cab driver who drove a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour and ran at least five red lights, we made it to the Holiday Inn right on the beach… unfortunately what they'd told us on the phone wasn't quite right and they only had a business center, and nothing in the rooms… So off to the very swank Durban Hilton, or, as I like to call it, the church (sorry, ///, in-joke) in “Bobby's Cab”, a little car with broken doors and a collapsed window.

The left photo is their SuSE/KDE system booting up — a massive thunderstorm had taken their power grid out. I had to stand in line for quite a while with some unsavory Geologistics economic-hitman mining executives (a bunch of already-way-too-rich white guys here to steal the local resources and screw over and drive into debt the native population in the process) because the check-in system was being run manually. Luckily, Internet use here is only R130 for 24 hours (a lot cheaper than anywhere else we've been — about $0.90 per hour).

That said, so far, at very much at first glance, Durban is my favorite of the cities we've been to here in Africa , and seems the most diverse, with a heavy South East Asian (Indian, or perhaps from Madagascar?) population… Well, I've got some work to do but assuming the connection stays solid you'll hear a better report on the city tomorrow, and if the speed tests look good I'll do an image update as well.

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