Experimenting Life

Today was a really bad day for me. Why? Because for the first time in my life, I was attacked by an email bomb. Whats more frustrating is that the bomber is none other than one of the famous “music-oriented social network” named 8tracks.com.

Yes, that’s correct. I was email bombed byone of the “50 Best Websites” listed by Time magazine in 2011.

Why was I bombed?

I don’t know! Seriously, I have no idea why was I bombed. The email which was send repeatedly (email bomb) is as follows:

To: my email ID

Subject: 8tracks - One of your tracks is missing

Hi, Ashutosh,

Unfortunately, the track Wonderwall by Oasis has been removed from SoundCloud. To add a different song to Wonderwall, click here. If you’ve got any questions, write us anytime at support@8tracks.com.

Thanks, 8tracks

This are some screenshots:

I did created a playlist contain some of the remixes of the song Wonderwall. And unfortunately, one of the track was removed from SoundCloud. And I was fortunate enough that 8tracks reminded with an email notification at around 12 o’clock in the afternoon.

But I didn’t know I would be email bombed, literally. At first I saw around 113 emails sent to me at the same time. Then again they were sent with the same email content and the emails just kept bombing my Yahoo mailbox. At around 8 o’clock in the evening I had around 5300 emails and yes, all had the same message.

This was really annoying and frustrating too! I contacted 8tracks for support via email but no answer. I also tried contacting via twitter at around 7:30pm but I never heard anything from them.

@8tracks You just spammed my emails with more than 2500 emails saying “One of your tracks is missing” in about 2-3 hours!! Why??

— Ashutosh Dave (@ashutoshdave)

May 22, 2013

I tried to unsubscribe from their email notifications but still the emails kept pouring in. I checked my mail at 10pm and found that I was still having 2893 new emails bombed by 8tracks. That total to around 8200 emails!! It will take forever to delete on a slow internet connection and that too when I am using Yahoo Mail where one can only select and delete around 200 emails at a time! This is really the most frustrating experience I am having online!!

Finally, I just took down my playlist and made it private. And I did got some relief as the email bomb was finally defused!

P.S. - I will never ever use 8tracks again! And I really hope no one gets email bombed again!!

UPDATE:I just got an apology email from 8tracks sending their sincere apology for spamming my inbox! They also added at the end  that “deleting the messages won’t take too much time from your day.” Wow!! That’s really great of them for spamming my inbox and then sending an apology!! They are really great people!! Seriously!! :(

Yesterday, I watched a video called “The Art of Glitch” on PBS Off Book, a web series from PBS that explores cutting edge art, internet culture, and the people that create it. The video was about how glitches have evolved into an art.

What is a Glitch?

According to Wikipedia,a Glitch is a short-lived fault in a system. It is often used to describe a transient fault that corrects itself, and is therefore difficult to troubleshoot. It is also called data-bending.

My first encounter with Glitch

My first encounter with Glitch was at a very early age while playing video games. At that time, the video games used to have what we called game cartridges. Whenever the cartridge was not inserted properly, there would be random colorful lines on the display(T.V). I didn’t know at that time that it was called a glitch. Also, no one would have never imagined that glitch would evolve as an art. This is what is know as video game glitch. This glitches were due to some technical fault.

Glitches also occurred on television when the broadcast signal is corrupted due to reasons like damaged cables or weather. These kind of glitch are technical faults. But now a days, many artists and programmers, have embraced these crisis moments and discovered beauty in the glitch. By hacking familiar systems, they intentionally cause glitches, and manipulate them to create art.

Below is the video from Off Book about the Art of Glitches:

After watching the video, I decided to created a glitch out of a JPG image. Making glitches out of a JPG is easy. But before starting, make sure you have created several copies of your image file cause glitching an image will permanently damage them. Also, never ever glitch your original images! 

First step is to open the JPG file in the hex-editor of your choice. I used the freeware hex editor XVI32 (for windows only). Your screen should look like this:

Now, its time to bash some random text into the hex codes (on the left hand side) or into the right hand side that has some garbage looking text. Now just save the file (Ctrl + S) and open the image file. The result will be the glitched image. It might not look practically beautiful, but that’s the way to created glitch images.

Below are some of the glitched I created using the above method:

Glitch 1:

Glich 2:

Glitch 3:

Glitch 4:

Note: You may find it difficult to upload glitch images on sites like tumblr, flickr etc. I too had difficulty uploading glitch on tumblr. But as you can see, I have uploaded glitch images. So the trick is to open the JPG image in any photo editing software like Photoshop, Paint.NET or even MS paint, and resave image as JPG. That’s it! Your glitch file is ready for upload.

idoe

A couple of days ago I came across reading list of Om Malik. This is how I came to know about the book Mastermind by Maria Konnikova.

Read More

I installed GNU Emacs(24.2) for windows yesterday for SML. GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing. For more info: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/

Its easy to install, looks outdated but still great at various things that I ought to find out in couple of days.

I am listing some Emacs tutorials that I found useful:

• Xah Emacs Tutorials - http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs.html
• Emacs Beginner’s HOWTO - http://jeremy.zawodny.com/emacs/emacs.html

Currently I am using it for SML. But will surely share my experiments and experiences with Emacs.