Admin: If you have anything hosted on dogma.slashnull.org,
our old shared server, get in touch with the boxhosting list, Vin,
or even myself ASAP. It’s going to be gone in 2 weeks…
Month: January 2004
Travel: Maciej writes up a few reasons why he likes Poland. Aside from the hilarious description of day-to-day formality in speech, there’s this snippet:
In all of Eastern Europe, it’s traditional for passengers on an airplane to applaud when it lands. The cynic in me is tempted to call this a legacy of the Tupolev days, when a safe landing was truly a special occasion, but I prefer to think of it as an acknowledgement that flying ten kilometers above the Earth at near-sonic speeds is something to appreciate. For unknown reasons this custom irritates the stuffing out of certain of my American friends, who will be glad to know it is slowly dying out, reserved now only for more spectacular landings in heavy rain or turbulence.
This is something that’s traditional amongst the older Irish travellers, too (I’ve noticed it on charter flights to holiday destinations). The youngsters don’t do it, of course, unless the plane has just stopped safely after skidding sickeningly sideways across the tarmac.
I’ve always wondered if it was an Irish thing, but now I see it’s not; and given the two nations involved, and the distance between them, I suspect it’s something that people always used to do, and they’re just not doing anymore in the places where air travel is commonplace.
Shame, I’m sure the staff would love the appreciation ;)
Iraq: Iraqi who gave MI6 45-minute claim says it was a ‘crock of shit’. Gotta love that no-holds-barred style…
Spam: Ever seen this in referrer logs, and wondered if the International Atomic Energy Agency really had linked to your site? Sourcefrog has.
Of course, it isn’t them. In reality, it’s a spambot called Atomic Harvester 2000. This is how spammers get ‘targeted lists of email addresses’; they throw a couple of search terms into this, it hits Google, and scrapes all email addresses from the pages found. More info:
Law: Darius Whelan at UCC writes, ‘my colleague Louise Crowley and I are involved in drafting an Irish version of the Creative Commons licence‘.
If you’re interested in helping ‘port’ the Creative Commons licence to Irish law, it’s well worth a gander.
Admin: Well, it worked — twice ;)
Admin: taint.org has moved to a new server. Let’s see if it works!
Music: … from CDWow selling us cheap CDs. Paddy forwards on the news — ‘CDWow.ie will now charge EUR 3 on every CD sold from their Irish site. And they wonder why people download music illegally…’
It seems that IRMA and the BPI both joined forces in this case against CDWow, hence this decision affects Ireland, too. The record industry are very happy — ‘it is not the consumer that will suffer, just CD Wow’s profit margins.’ Not entirely clear how the consumer doesn’t suffer due to a 3 Euro surcharge, but I’m sure they have it all worked out.
Globalisation where it suits the producers, rather than the consumers, is the name of the game here.
More at The Register.
(Thanks, Paddy!)
Culture: Five killed in separate road crashes. Donncha notes ‘There were 2 terrible road accidents this morning. One of them was just outside Cahir, in Co. Tipperary. I drove past there dozens of times in the past and I was shocked to hear the news.’
It’s interesting to note this cultural difference. In Ireland, a road crash with multiple fatalities is national news, on the 6 o’clock news; in California, as far as I can see, it’s pretty much an everyday fact of life — unless there was a juicy ‘road rage’ story attached, it won’t get reported.
Are there more deaths in the US than Ireland? It seems not. The US department, NHTSA, notes that California had 3,956 fatalities in 2001, which works out at 11.47 per 100K population. The Irish dept, NRA (heh — that’s National Road Authority) notes a 2001 rate of 10.7 per 100K population. (However, Ireland’s rate has dropped since then, due to an increased emphasis on road safety; the 2003 rate is reported to be the lowest since the 1960’s. Not sure what it is now, though.)
So, interestingly, the death rate is comparable — so where’s the difference? I reckon it must be simply a PR issue; Ireland’s road safety authorities have made it a PR priority, so that public awareness of road safety is heightened. As a result, road crashes are headline news.
Funny: The IKEA Walkthrough: ‘IKEA is a fully immersive, 3D environmental adventure that allows you to role-play the character of someone who gives a shit about home furnishings. In traversing IKEA, you will experience a meticulously detailed alternate reality filled with garish colors, clear-lacquered birch veneer, and a host of NON-PLAYER CHARACTERS (NPCs) with the glazed looks of the recently anesthetized. … with practice (and this IKEA Walkthrough!) you will soon be able to muster the sense of numb resignation necessary for victory.’ (defectiveyeti)
Bizarre: OK, OK, Google, I’m planning to! Geesh, all I wanted was a search engine, not health advice. They’re not even my ads!
Linux: If you use Fedora Core 1, here’s a yum stanza to download and install Subversion.
Add these lines to /etc/yum.conf:
[subversion] name=Subversion at Summersoft baseurl=http://summersoft.fay.ar.us/pub/subversion/bin/subversion-latest/fedora
Run:
yum install subversion
That’s it! svn will now be kept updated using yum.
Software: Nelson Minar: Primitive Debugging. Nelson quotes Kernighan, ‘The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements’, and assents from a viewpoint a quarter of a century later. Strange but true; I find this also. Why is that?
IMO, it’s all usability problems.
- debuggers are labour-intensive. To print or explore a complex data
- structure requires lots of typing, or liberal cut and paste from a side window with your debugger commands ready to go. DDD does a very good job of helping with this, since it’s built around a data display model.
It’s easy to make a mistake that requires a full restart. If you’re single-stepping through some code, hit a loop, and want to skip several steps, you might select ‘continue until loop exit’ — then find that you’ve gone too far. What can you do? Restart from scratch.
There is a fix for this — backstepping. However, so far it seems to be only available in research models; I don’t know of any deployed debuggers that support this.
Even given a good debugger, I find myself throwing in a printf() every
time. By now, my brain’s hard-wired to debug using printf.
(More correctly, my own equivalent, a ‘JMDB’ statement. This is a little bit of usability sugar; I’ve defined that in my editor as a language-dependent macro to output a ‘JMD’ string — so I can find it easily in code and output — and the file and line numbers, along with whatever data I want to log.)
It’s too late to save me ;)
Ireland: So, Sarah Carey got called up to testify at the Moriarty Tribunal, since she was involved with ESAT. In the process she notes that she ‘was slightly freaked out when the Chairman, in the process of reprimanding me for leaking information, made reference to my media activities AND my website! So are they reading my blog?’
Sounds like it…
She definitely deserves bonus points for the tagline.
Spam: Andrew ‘tridge’ Tridgell’s junkcode directory really does contain some useful snippets, like he said. Here’s spamsum, a checksum algorithm for hashing spam text:
The core of the spamsum algorithm is a rolling hash similar to the rolling hash used in ‘rsync’. The rolling hash is used to produce a series of ‘reset points’ in the plaintext that depend only on the immediate context (with a default context width of seven characters) and not on the earlier or later parts of the plaintext. A stronger hash based on the FNV algorithm is then used to produce hash values of the areas between two reset points. The resulting signature comes from the concatenation of a single character from the FNV hash per reset point.
Very very nice!
Funny: The latest ‘personality test’ page, via forteana — what surreal invention are you? Justin is ‘a hi-fi that looks bigger than it really is!’, and taint.org is ‘a housebrick that keeps your teeth clean and never needs repairing’.
Also — even better — Giant Battle Monsters. Apparently ‘taint.org is a Collosal Man-Eating Plant that breathes Fire, is Susceptible to Electrical Damage and Extremely Hydrophobic, was brought back from a Distant Volcanic Island, has a mean Left Hook, and eats Metal.’
Web: Google Labs has a nifty toy called Google Sets; name a few items, and it’ll tell you what other items have been seen in conjunction with it.
Of course, the only use I know for it is this search for Blonde and Brunette, which says more about the modern web than we really need to know.
Open Source: Edd Dumbill on the Planets. It seems the latest thing for open source development communities is to syndicate their weblogs together on one site, viz. PlanetGnome, Planet Debian, Monologue, and PlanetApache.
Interesting results — I quite like it. It’s very Advogato Recent Log-ish!
Politics: G2: Tales of Tel Aviv.
Tomer, aged 33, a promoter in the music business who personifies Israel’s lost generation, the soldiers of the two intifadas: ‘There’s no prize any more for being a good soldier or a good citizen, we all have a mental scratch – for some of us it’s a scar, for others it’s a Grand Canyon. The saddest thing for me is seeing people in their mid-20s with such an empty look in their eyes. All the symptoms are of people losing hope, of seeing no solution.
At the moment I’m trying to promote the Geneva accords as much as possible. We’ve all made so many mistakes in this region, what else have we got to lose? But mainly, I’m just sad.’
Sport:
Observer: Football, blood and war: an insane article about the
crossover between Serbian nationalist paramilitaries and football
hooliganism:
The crowd watched as a group of Serbian paramilitaries (the self-styled ‘Tigers’), dressed in full uniform, took up positions in the north stand. There were about 20 of them and, one by one, they held aloft road signs: ’20 miles to Vukovar’; ’10 miles to Vukovar’; ‘Welcome to Vukovar’. More road signs were brandished, each one bearing the name of a Croatian town that had fallen to the Serbian army. From high up in the stand, Arkan, the notorious commander-in-chief of the Tigers and director of the Red Star supporters’ association, emerged to receive the delighted applause of supporters who were no longer fractious but united in hatred of a common enemy – the Croats.
Mind you, that was 1992. Still, very scary. (Via the ie-rant mailing list)
Spam: The new hash-busting, Bayes-avoiding, spam evasion trick: inserting random dictionary words into the middle of another word. Like so:
Subject: SPAM(30.8) Be your own bovertigoss…
and
Subject: SPAM(29.6) Earn huge monteleostey quickly from home…
I’m not sure exactly why increasing monteleosity (something to do with the intensity of light emitted on a mountain, I think), and becoming a bovertigoss (a kind of antipodean rodent) would help me, though. It certainly isn’t helping the spammers — both messages were autolearned as spam on arrival.
Tech: Great. More on the ‘prevention of banknote scanning’ thread; Ed Felten notes that the European Central Bank is
considering recommending legislation to the EU to require inclusion of currency recognition into digital imaging products. Predictably, the ECB’s proposal is wildly overbroad, applying to ‘any equipment, software, or other product’ that is ‘capable of capturing images or transferring images into, or out of, computer systems, or of manipulating or producing digital images for the purposes of counterfeiting’. As usual, the ‘capable of’ construction captures just about every general purpose communication technology in existence — the Internet, for example, is clearly ‘capable of … transferring images into, or out of, computer systems’.
Let’s hope that proposal gets shot down in the way it deserves.
Security: Chennai businessman ‘transformed’ into Al-Qaeda suspect (The Hindu):
‘It would seem the U.S. anti-terrorism set-up,’ one expert told , ‘is not very culturally attuned. After all, no one would set off a major terror alert just because a passenger called Mr. Jones or Mr. Smith figured on a passenger manifest.’
(via IP.)
Spam: OK, I just noticed that I have a few hits for the SpamAssassin rule HTTP_ENTITIES_HOST in my corpus. This searches for obfuscated hostnames in the URL links in mail messages, and is generally a very reliable sign of spam — because who would want to hide a hostname apart from spammers?
Well, Buy4Now.IE, for one, it seems. WTF? I have a mail here that uses this markup:
<a href="''http://www.buy4now.ie/fbd''>Totally and utterly nuts. If they really wanted a way to tickle malware detectors, mail filters, and anti-spam measures, they could hardly pick a better one. I have no idea why they did this.
grr....
Tech: PDF file: how do photocopiers decide not to photocopy modern banknotes? ‘a geometric pattern … of five 1 mm large circles’. Fascinating stuff from Markus Kuhn, as usual! (via HackThePlanet)
Games: Anti-Monopoly: ‘A professor and a freelance writer are determined to set history straight on the origin and theft of a favorite American pastime’.
Details how Monopoly(R) is very similar — and allegedly based on — The Landlord’s Game, a socialist educational game from 1904, which was introduced as follows: ‘the object of this game is not only to afford amusement to players, but to illustrate to them how, under the present or prevailing system to land tenure, the landlord has an advantage over other enterprisers, and also how the single tax would discourage speculation’.
Apparently, once Monopoly(R) was set to succeed, this original was bought out and buried for $500. Here’s some more links that seem to back that up…
MonopolyCollector.com says ‘the Landlord’s Game was very similar to Monopoly(R), with the purchase of properties, utilities, a public park square, and a ‘Go to jail’ square. Many feel Darrow just added items to this game and improved some features.’
This article and its second part provide lots more detail.
Here’s a description of ‘The Landlord’s Game’, and another.
Spam: So, next Friday I’ll be in Cambridge, MA for the Spam Conference 2004, a one-day extravaganza of probabilistic classifiers, spam-bashing, and hopefully, some socializing too.
Anyone else planning to attend? If so, see you there!
Funny: The staff of O2 Retail, Kennedy Road, Navan have set them up the foneblog, it appears, and are messing about… Why not give ’em a call? Looks like their number is +353 46 21803!
On the subject — Dervala on texting. I couldn’t get over the text frenzy that took place over New Year’s — I’d forgotten all about it in the few months I’d been away.
Funny: Getting Even With Nicorettes (NYTimes): a very funny article about giving up smoking by taking up a full-time nicotine gum habit.
‘I’ll be at a party,’ he said, ‘and someone will say, `Oh, is that Nicorette?’ and I’ll say, `Yes, do you want some?’ They’ll say, `Oh, I don’t smoke,’ and I’ll say, `Try it anyway.’ There’s this excitement and curiosity, and then on about the fourth chew, this look comes over their face that says, `Oh God, why are you giving me lead?’
‘It’s like prank gum. It’s like going to kiss your grandmother and finding her tongue in your mouth.’
GNU: Let’s all be very nice and friendly for our latest convert to the GPL club, Microsoft. Hi, MS!
Games: The DEGENATRON Archive and Gaming Page — amazing. The Degenatron is the games console advertised, and occasionally featuring in radio phone-ins as to the violent behaviour of ‘kids these days’ and the like, on the in-game radio stations in GTA:VC. This faked ‘homage’ page is perfect; right down to the animated rainbow horizontal-rule divider.
Be sure to check out the playable emulators! Smash the green dots inside the mysterious red square!
Tech: ATAC: Abusable Technologies Awareness Center. Great panel weblog, with some of the big names in the research field, dealing with several security issues quite nicely.
Found from a link to Simon Byers’ 2003 roundup of information leakage, which notes an interesting case I hadn’t heard of — a TechTV presenter accidentally posting topless photos of herself, due to a bug in Photoshop!
(link via Liudvikas Bukys)
Code: Rod writes: ‘I have had a bunch of fun today, gleefully playing with a new source-control package. I truly lead a sad life.’
I’d guess that was our fault, moving SpamAssassin CVS to subversion at apache.org ;) Happy to oblige, Rod!
If I wasn’t so jet-lagged (still!), suffering from a cold, and busy with the day job, I’d be having that fun myself; SVN is very, very, very nice from what little I can tell so far. Only time will tell if it can beat the lovely Perforce, though, the virtues of which I have extolled on many occasions (earning myself a freebie T-shirt in the process, payola!).
But yeah, SVN looks really cool.
Tolkien: The Encyclopedia of Arda — great for settling those insanely geeky Lord of The Rings arguments, of which there have been loads recently. ;)
For example, yes, Gandalf does wear one of the elf-rings — and this is shown in the ‘sailing of the ring-bearers’ scene in the third movie. (The elf-rings are only intermittently visible in the movie — presumably because only other ring-bearers can see them, or something like that. Ben?)
I’m looking forward to the extended edition of Return of the King already…
Free Software: Ciaran O’Riordan has just announced the launch of IFSO, the Irish Free Software Organisation:
With Ireland holding the presidency of the EU for the next six months, political lobbying in Ireland will be of increased importance. The fate of the software patentability directive is still undecided, and we now also have the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive to deal with. In the coming months, members of IFSO also plan to work on spreading education and adoption of Free Software in Ireland. Once we have a proven track record, we hope to become an associate organisation of FSF Europe.
He also notes: ‘by no coincidence, today is also the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the GNU project.’
Go IFSO!
Funny: Lobster Barbie outfit turns out to be a lifesaver: ‘Practical jokers Jim Bright and Chris Costello never imagined that their idea of dressing a female lobster in a Barbie outfit – accessorized with pink high heels – would save her from the steam pot. But it did – at least 10 times.’
Software: some interesting bits on how piracy affects the small software developer from PeerFear (the developer of NewsMonster), Nick Bradbury (Feed Demon), and Ambrosia Software — all small-scale commercial software developers.
Nick notes that when he uploaded a fake ‘cracked’ version to a warez site, he found out that more people used the warez in a few weeks than had ever paid for it. Amazing.
For a while now, I’ve been keen on shareware. I’ve paid for the shareware software I use (like iSilo), purely because I like the shareware model — and the software, of course. ;)
I prefer free software, but I understand some people need to make money from what they’re writing directly in this way, and aren’t writing the software as a kind of hobby or with a ‘public good’ motivation (which is pretty much what drives me to write free software). I even experimented with publishing as shareware myself at one stage.
I found, however, that open source suits me better; I like the way it builds a community of trust around the code, seems to gain better mindshare, reduces the bottleneck on the software developer himself, and generally is more how I’d like to do it. Plus, nobody’s going to pirate code they download for free anyway so I never have to worry about adding DRM-like stuff and accidentally annoying legit users with painful registration codes and so on ;)
With any commercial software, commercial support is required; thoughts about how to pay for it is required; and the developer has to make a commitment to the users in many ways. It’s hard work, and a full-time job. For the software I write in my free time, I can’t provide this support, so free software is the appropriate way to release it.