A movie production company added me as a contact through Flickr last night. I looked through the pictures on their account, and noticed the labels were quite odd. The shots were awkwardly titled using the name of their latest motion picture. Say the movie is called “Gronky”, and its big star is “Intellectually Bankrupt”. A photo’s title would read, “Intellectually Bankrupt signing an autograph - GRONKY”. It took me about two minutes before I realized that this was sophisticated spam. I subsequently sent an email to Flickr’s abuse address regarding the offender.

I respect the brilliance of this subversive advertising as it probably wasn’t just a random spamming. The marketers may have targeted their message because my profile lists me as a fan of one of the stars of their movie. I can’t believe that Flickr would sell profile data in bulk to guerilla marketers, however, the scenario is plausible. Either way, the movie production house is now a dirty spammer who must be destroyed at all costs.

The magnanimous Eric Holbrook unwaveringly opined that it is possible to generate the prime numbers using g++ error messages.

template <int i> struct D { D(void*); operator int(); };

template <int p, int i> struct is_prime {
 enum { prim = (p==2) || (p%i) && is_prime<(i>2?p:0), i-1> :: prim };
};

template <int i> struct Prime_print {
 Prime_print<i-1> a;
 enum { prim = is_prime<i, i-1>::prim };
 void f() { D<i> d = prim ? 1 : 0; a.f();}
};

template<> struct is_prime<0,0> { enum {prim=1}; };
template<> struct is_prime<0,1> { enum {prim=1}; };

template<> struct Prime_print<1> {
 enum {prim=0};
 void f() { D<1> d = prim ? 1 : 0; };
};

#ifndef LAST
#define LAST 18
#endif

main() {
 Prime_print<LAST> a;
 a.f();
}

Save this off as dedekind.C and then abuse gcc with the nefarious recipe.

% g++ -DLAST=30 dedekind.C 2>&1 | grep "error:  "
error:   initializing argument 1 of `D<i>::D(void*) [with int i = 29]‘
error:   initializing argument 1 of `D<i>::D(void*) [with int i = 23]‘
error:   initializing argument 1 of `D<i>::D(void*) [with int i = 19]‘
error:   initializing argument 1 of `D<i>::D(void*) [with int i = 17]‘
error:   initializing argument 1 of `D<i>::D(void*) [with int i = 13]‘
error:   initializing argument 1 of `D<i>::D(void*) [with int i = 11]‘
error:   initializing argument 1 of `D<i>::D(void*) [with int i = 7]‘
error:   initializing argument 1 of `D<i>::D(void*) [with int i = 5]‘
error:   initializing argument 1 of `D<i>::D(void*) [with int i = 3]‘
error:   initializing argument 1 of `D<i>::D(void*) [with int i = 2]‘

Bumper has proved this inadvertent programming paradigm to be Turing-complete. As a result, I’m diligently coding a new interpreted web frame work called “Gronky!”. The output is generated exclusively with gcc error messages which are then consumed by Zeus just as a munted man consumes libations. Expect a feature-complete alpha upon the return of Hale-Bopp.

I Googled around for this at one point, however, all I could find were ill-fated attempts by a couple of tortured souls on ruby-talk. Google offers POP3S access to Gmail, but, unfortunately, Ruby’s Net::POP3S module is still under development. POP3S is the much reviled and revered Post Office Protocol tunneled over a thick blanket of SSL obfuscation. Fortunately, the good Stunnel folks have anticipated this kind of thing and they’re giving out some code that can encode and decode SSL to a standard socket.

This was done on OS X, but Stunnel seems to work on most platforms. However, I wasn’t finding it in ports or fink. So, I had to roll my own stunnel binary.

wget http://www.stunnel.org/download/stunnel/src/stunnel-3.22.tar.gz
tar zxf stunnel-3.22.tar.gz
cd stunnel-3.22
./configure
make
sudo make install

Whew. So, after you’ve installed stunnel, you need to invoke it to redirect a local port to Google’s secure POP3 port located at pop.gmail.com on port 995. You can redirect any local port to Google’s pop server. I chose to use port 42 because that’s as good as anything else. Here’s my stunnel invocation.

sudo /usr/local/sbin/stunnel -c -d 42 -r pop.gmail.com:995

So, now you can use Ruby’s Net::POP3 to access your gmail from port 42 on your local machine. Stunnel will handle the details of SSL.

require ‘net/pop’

pop = Net::POP3.new(’localhost’, 42)
pop.start(’mrbeastly’, ’sUp3Rs3kRiT!’)
  if pop.mails.empty?
    puts ‘No mail.’
  else
    i = 0
    pop.each_mail do |m|
    exit if i > 20
    puts m.pop
    i=i+1
  end
end

Running this code will display the first 20 emails in Gmail to your terminal. This is really a stopgap solution until the fabled POP3S patch gets accepted into Ruby’s Net library. This is rumored to be soon. So, I’ll keep my hopes up.

Jim once believed that the following Ruby code constitutes an example of reflection.

def create(klass, value)
    klass.new(value)
end

g = create(Greeting, "Hello")
g.show

Neither introspection nor metaprogramming occur in this code. This is not reflection. However, Jim argues that since getConstructor exists in Sun’s Java reflect class and because the Ruby code accomplishes the same task as his Java example that this is reflection. This logic is tenuous. However, I can defeat it because his Java code does not exemplify reflection.

public static Object create(Class c, String value)
  throws Exception
{
  Constructor ctor = c.getConstructor(
    new Class[] { String.class } );
  return ctor.newInstance(
    new Object[] { "Hello" } );
}

public static void main (String args[])
  throws Exception
{
  Greeting g =
    (Greeting) create(Greeting.class, "Hello");
  g.show();
}

Using Java’s reflect class does not preclude that reflection has occured. If these examples are reflection, I could argue that the following C code is an example of reflection.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

void* create(void* klass, char* value);

void* create(void* klass, char* value) {
  size_t value_length = strlen(value);
  klass = malloc(value_length+1);
  strncpy(klass,value, value_length);
  return klass;
}

int main() {
  char* Greeting;
  Greeting = create(Greeting, "Hello");
  printf("%s", Greeting);
  free(Greeting);
  return 0;
}

Oh dear. Why did I switch to Ruby anyway if I can reflect in C?

“You’re maleficent!”
“Mellifluous?”
“No, MALEFICENT!”
“Magnificent?”
“MA-LIF-EH-CENT!”
“Mellophone?”
“Why do I even talk to you?”

m = "mr_beastly_"
(1..50).collect { |darkie_the_fridge|
  thefun = m + darkie_the_fridge.to_s + "!"
  eval %{
    def #{thefun}(cinnamocha)
      puts cinnamocha * #{darkie_the_fridge}
    end
  }
}
mr_beastly_5! 'boogiebot '

The result of this is boogiebot boogiebot boogiebot boogiebot boogiebot.