My last wk93 story, the time we discovered school faculty was spying on students and we uncovered student's deepest secrets.

I call it, kiddiegate.

So if you've read my past rants you've noticed I did some pretty childish and reckless stuff with my highschool's systems when I was younger, but nothing compares to this thing.

After resetting the sysadmin account pwd on some machines it occurred to me I could write a keylogger to capture teachers Moodle accounts and so on, I decided to try it out on a regular lab computer first.

Imagine my surprise when I found a hidden keylogger already installed! I couldn't believe it but then I thought, what if other PC's have it? So I recruited my mates and teached them the process to check if a PC had been infected...ALL PCs were, over 30 computers we checked had been logging for over 3 months! That damn sysadmin! >:[

We were shocked and angry, but then I thought "hey. . . My work has been done for me, better take advantage"

So we did, we extracted each log and then removed it from the PCs along with the keyloggers. There were hundreds of records and then one day we started snooping into the fb accounts of some students (we shouldn't have) we uncovered so many nasty, shocking secrets...

One of the school's lady's man had a drunk one nighter with one of our gay friends, the most secluded and shy guy was sexting like crazy with 15 chicks at the same time, things like that...we promised to never say a word and deleted the logs.

After that we didn't do much and continued highschool as every teenage minor should, getting drunk and avoiding responsibilities, though we could never see many of our classmates the same way. The sysadmin was fired shortly after I graduated, no reason was stablished.

I want to clear out we were minors and laws in my country weren't clearly stablished at the time plus no harm was ever done. I don't condone hacking or any kind of illegal activity, just thought I'd share.

My first unintentional "hack" was in middle school, I had been programming for a couple years already and I was really bored.

My school had blocked facebook, twitter and so on because most students are lazy and think everything revolves around their "descrete" cleavage picture's likes. Any way, I thought most would be naive and desperate enough to fall into a "Facebook unblocked" app at the desktop, the program was fairly simple just a mimicking FB page done on C# ASP that saved user and passwords in an encrypted file.

I distributed it in around 5 computers and by the end of the month I had over 60 accounts, and what did I do? I used it to post a gay relationship between two of my friends on fb (one had a gf), it was dumb but boy did I laughed, after that I erased everything as it didn't seem so important.

My God is map development insane. I had no idea.

For starters did you know there are a hundred different satellite map providers?

Just kidding, it's more than that.

Second there appears to be tens of thousands of people whos *entire* job is either analyzing map data, or making maps.
Hell this must be some people's whole *existence*. I am humbled.

I just got done grabbing basic land cover data for a neoscav style game spanning the u.s., when I came across the MRLC land cover data set.

One file was 17GB in size.

Worked out to 1px = 30 meters in their data set. I just need it at a one mile resolution, so I need it in 54px chunks, which I'll have to average, or find medians on, or do some sort of reduction.

Ecoregions.appspot.com actually has a pretty good data set but that's still manual. I ran it through gale and theres actually imperceptible thin line borders that share a separate *shade* of their region colors with the region itself, so I ran it through a mosaic effect, to remove the vast bulk of extraneous border colors, but I'll still have to hand remove the oceans if I go with image sources.

It's not that I havent done things involved like that before, naturally I'm insane. It's just involved.

The reason for editing out the oceans is because the oceans contain a metric boatload of shades of blue.
If I'm converting pixels to tiles, I have to break it down to one color per tile.
With the oceans, the boundary between the ocean and shore (not to mention depth information on the continental shelf) ends up sharing colors when I do a palette reduction, so that's a no-go. Of course I could build the palette bu hand, from sampling the map, and then just measure the distance of each sampled rgb color to that of every color in the palette, to see what color it primarily belongs to, but as it stands ecoregions coloring of the regions has some of them *really close* in rgb value as it is.

Now what I also could do is write a script to parse the shape files, construct polygons in sdl or love2d, and save it to a surface with simplified colors, and output that to bmp.

It's perfectly doable, but technically I'm on savings and supposed to be calling companies right now to see if I can get hired instead of being a bum :P