taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Stuff: So C is a massive antiques nut, and got tickets for the Antiques Roadshow next month in LA. As a result, we’ve been shopping around for interesting stuff for her to bring along.

Here’s what I found at the antiques market last weekend:

Click on the pic to check out my multiplication skills!

Tags: click, month, multiplication, nut, result, roadshow, stuff, weekend

eVoting: Craig passes on this link: apparently thousands of Orange County voters were given the wrong ballots in last week’s election. The result is that in 21 precincts, there were more ballots cast than registered voters. It gets better — apparently the voting machine vendor has said it will be impossible to figure out how many ballots are invalid as a result. It’d be funny if it wasn’t such a big deal…

Tags: cast, deal, election, evoting, link, machine, result, vendor, voting, week

Amazing! Porton Down is the UK’s center for research into chemical and biological weapons, and has been since 1916. Not the nicest place you could think of — by a long shot.

Well, it turns out that the massive no-go buffer zone around Porton Down, existing for 87 years, has preserved ‘the largest remaining continuous tract of chalk downland in Britain’. ‘The farming revolution of the 20th century, the development, the tourism, have all passed it by.’ ‘The disrupters are the large-scale inputs of chemicals, the pesticides, herbicides and artificial fertilisers that are the essence of intensive farming. At Porton Down, these have never arrived.’

As a result, it’s now an amazing wildlife heritage site. Quite hard to get to see it — but good to know it’s there! Thanks to Bruce Sterling for forwarding this along the Viridian list.

Reminds me of something I heard about Chernobyl — since the area around it is heavily irradiated, and therefore a no-go area for humans, it’s become a de-facto wildlife refuge (even if half of the animal inhabitants are sterile as a result.)

Tags: area, center, chemical, farming, nicest, place, porton, research, result, wildlife

so Athlon XP CPUs run pretty hot at full speed all the time, and my PC makes lots of noise as a result. I have a temperature-sensitive CPU fan, so reducing the CPU temp will reduce noise, too.

A while back, I came across this doc, the Athlon Powersaving HOWTO, which contains a great tip — namely a way to put the processor in ‘STPGNT Mode’ (Stop Grant Mode), which disconnects it from the FSB and turns off parts of the CPU when not in use.

It works perfectly, in most respects, although the Ensoniq 5880 onboard sound chip goes crazy when it’s active, as it can’t deal with the changed timings from the CPU. But when I’m playing music, I can’t hear the fans anyway ;)

The details — to keep it brief, just take a look at the commands for my chipset as described here. I’m using ACPI in the kernel anyway, since I’m using software suspend-to-disk as well.

Tags: athlon, cpu, cpus, doc, fan, noise, result, speed, temp, time

Congrats to Craig and Erica! Sounds like there was quite a lot of work involved for Erica — ouch — but the end result looks very cute.

Good choice of name, too — my friends Tom and Colette will be tickled by this one, given that they’ve named their son ‘Evan’, and their daughter ‘Alice’ ;)

Tags: choice, congrats, daughter, end, lot, name, ouch, result, son, work

As I’ve said before, C-R is not an acceptable way, alone, to deal with spam. You’re just pushing the work away from yourself, and onto your legitimate correspondents — and you won’t make any friends as a result. Things get worse when anything more complex than simple person-to-person mail intrudes, like internet mailing lists. (And come on folks — that particular innovation is only 24 years old ;)

Case in point this week: Declan McCullagh gets bitten:

My reluctant conclusion is that C-R systems with flawed implementations have the potential to end legitimate mailing lists as we know them today.

and Dave Farber says:

If I start getting a flood of challenges from earthlink ipers that require my response I will most likely declare them SPAM and you will stop receiving IP mail.

John Levine’s follow-up is well worth a read, as he predicts massive (and trivial) whitelist exploitation by spammers to avoid C-R — and then we’ll be worse off than we were when we started.

Finally, there’s quite a funny quote in John’s mail:

A relatively easy to solve problem with challenge systems is that most of them are written by dimwits who don’t understand the way that e-mail really works. In 1983 the 4.3BSD Berkeley Unix ‘vacation’ program correctly dealt with mail from lists and other mechanical sources, yet 20 years later I still see out-of-office replies from Lotus Notes and MS Exchange to list mail every day. (Is there really nobody at IBM or Microsoft who used 4.3BSD or knows the rules of thumb to recognize non-personal but legit mail?)

I have often wondered that myself ;)

Tags: anything, bsd, innovation, internet, mail, mailing, result, spam, way, work

Due to a set of advocacy and plain show-off mails recently, regarding sub-pixel font rendering under Linux, my hand has been forced ;)

As a result, here’s a little HOWTO document I’ve written up for getting sub-pixel rendering working under Linux. Check it out if you’ve got a Linux laptop and want some sweet-looking fonts!

Tags: advocacy, document, font, hand, howto, laptop, linux, rendering, result, set

Just got ADSL installed — it’s sweet. Napster rides again! Well, to tell the truth — gnapster rides again, the proprietary stuff was never going to work for me on Linux anyway, and they’ve been thoroughly shafted by the RIAA now.

Anyway, as a result, I’ve been getting very heavily into the Congo Natty back catalogue. Junglist! ;)

Tags: adsl, catalogue, gnapster, junglist, linux, napster, result, riaa, stuff, truth