Category: Uncategorized

hooray, those Next/Prev links are now implemented. I knew sitemap support in WebMake would come in handy, eventually. If you’re using Mozilla, switch on that View -> Show -> Site Navigation Bar and hyperventilate with excitement.

Some day I should start adding titles to all these blog items… some day when I have a lot of time on my hands, that is.

some changes around these parts, in case you haven’t noticed. Firstly, I’ve caved, and adopted the de-facto std of having a sidebar. Everyone’s doing it, and I just want to fit in.

Secondly, there’s now an RSS feed, at the request of Bernie at topgold. All you folks with yer fancy news aggregators and what-not can now add taint.org/rss10.xml to the blogrolling list.

Thirdly, I’ve deprecated my old home page content, replacing it with this blog. After all, an infrequently-updated website is a useless website, and this is my most frequently-updated site these days.

I’ve been ogg-encoding my CD collection. Soundtrack for today:

• Future Sound of London, Dead Cities

• Philip Glass, Koyaanisqatsi

(Update, Feb 2007: This PSA may be relevant to this story, possibly.)

it seems a herbal remedy which “mystified and delighted doctors when it cured prostate cancer”, in fact contained hefty quantities of synthetic drugs (link):

We do have to admit that these are not natural substances … and that at least some, if not all, of the biological activity has to be attributed to these synthetic compounds.

Ireland: EircomTribunal.com, which highlights very effectively, and quite humourously, the current situation with the internet fiasco in Ireland. This is sure to be sued into oblivion very shortly ;)

Via forteana: Quorn, the yummy meat-substitute, has been having a hard time of it recently. First, there’s a court case going on in the US at the moment, where some people are suing the company claiming that Quorn makes them puke — now the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority is requiring that they get rid of claims of its “mushroom” origins, and note more clearly that it’s a mycoprotein.

But hey, anyone who thinks eating “real” meat bought in a an average supermarket is a good idea, can stick with that, as the hormones turn them into hirsute, uddered bovines. I’m happy with my mostly-veggie diet.

Gordon Rutter, fungus expert at forteana, notes in passing:

A few years ago there was a court case about mushroom soup – the majority are actually made with boletes rather than what people would think of as mushrooms. The reason is that mushrooms don’t preserve very well whereas boletes do and people did not want lumpy bits of black putrescence floating in their soup.

He also notes that the Quorn fungus is a tiny bit more closely related to the fungus that causes athlete’s foot, than it is to a mushroom. urgh. Now I feel sick.

man, this is so cool. “A self-organising electronic circuit has stunned engineers by turning itself into a radio receiver. This … followed an experiment to see if an automated design process … could be used to breed an oscillator. …. When they looked more closely they found that, despite producing an oscillating signal, the circuit itself was not actually an oscillator. Instead, it was behaving more like a radio receiver, picking up a signal from a nearby computer and delivering it as an output.” New Scientist, via BoingBoing.

excellent, Mozilla 1.1 supports site navigation via LINK tags; check the menu under View -> Show/Hide -> Site Navigation Bar. About time too! (he said ungratefully.) Now to figure out some time in the nearish future to fix this blog to use the goddamn things. (via Danny)

so, everyone knows that Nigerian Scam, “help us embezzle lots of developing-world money that got lost somehow during some coup”, that kind of thing. Well, Theo Van Dinter forwards a new take on it:

I am an Uruk of Mordor, charged with the discovery of a number of valuable treasures within Moria. It has come to my notice that the mithril hoard previously owned by Ori of the land of Moria has been found by one of our cave-trolls. Under our laws, the hoard will be shared between our lord Sauron and the local Balrog, but so far neither knows the extent of the treasure.

latest bizarre Japanese sex fetish: “There weren’t any particular standards regarding who was hired. I suppose the only requirement was an ability to stand erect after being kicked in the balls”. (via forteana, of course) (Link)

I must get around to changing the text at the top of the front page; nowadays, half of this blog is stuff I want me to read — a kind of public “must read when I get a chance” list.

Here’s one for “must try when I get a chance”: The hackerslab.org Free Hacking Zone. It’s a simulated-hacking game, with increasing levels of difficulty, simulating a system you have to crack at each level. Sounds like fun…

(again — well, not really) Looks like the South Pole will have fiber a hell of a lot sooner than I will.

IBEC’s Telecommunications User Group has again criticised the current broadband situation in this country:

“IStream (Eircom’s digital subscriber line service) does not provide an affordable broadband solution for business or households.” … “A basic monthly DSL price of EUR 30 to 40 is needed to stimulate adequate demand, while iStream costs the user a connection fee of EUR 199.65 and a monthly fee of EUR 107.69.”

In terms of cost, (they) referred to a benchmarking study carried out by Forfas in March, which found that Ireland is ranked as the most expensive country in the (small to medium-size business) category.

It’s good to see some backup for what is, broadly, IrelandOffline‘s positions, from other organisations. Let’s hope these datapoints will eventually trickle into the consciousness of Irish small businesses and the media; it’s truly shocking how little coverage this absurd state of affairs gets.

After 5 years of DSL trialling, cronyism, monopoly, and waffle from government, we’re still almost exactly where we started. This I already knew. What I’d never noticed before is that nobody in this country seems to care, or is bothered to understand the issues. Even Australia would be giving front-page coverage to this crap, yet over here you’re lucky to see any coverage at all in the news media.

It’s very tempting just to leave Ireland — again! — and go somewhere where these things have been sorted out already, and stay there, at least until Ireland cops on. As you can probably guess, it’s a pet peeve at the moment. ;)

Comics (or is it Games?): I can commiserate — the Mutant Slug Genghis Khan boss is a bugger. Wigu, via Memepool.

The Scotsman, with some hilarious reports of squaddie culture shock:

“British marines returning from an operation deep in the Afghan mountains spoke last night of an alarming new threat – being propositioned by swarms of gay local farmers. … “We were pretty shocked … we discovered from the Afghan soldiers we had with us that a lot of men in this country have the same philosophy as ancient Greeks: ‘a woman for babies, a man for pleasure’.”

… the locals began pestering Afghan troops attached to the marines with ever more outrageous compensation demands – topping off at a demand from one village elder for $500 (£300) for damage to a tree by the downdraft from helicopters. … “I managed to barter him down to two marine pens, a pencil and a rubber,” Major Joyce said. “He went away quite happy .”

given that IBM was granted more software patents than any other U.S. company in 2001, this screenshot is quite appropriate, really. “e-business is the game, play to win”, indeed…

a conservative MP in Oz is to spend a day as a “slave”, working for the madam of Langtree’s brothel in the mining town of Kalgoorlie. (via forteana)

more than 70,000 Aussies declared themselves as Jedi Knights when asked to define their religion in last year’s census, reports the Guardian (via forteana).

just got back from a brief weekend visit to LinuxBierWanderung in Doolin, Co. Clare. much chat and Guinness was enjoyed aplenty. Didn’t get to meet a few of the people I hoped would be turning up, and didn’t get to sample the official LBW brews (they hadn’t arrived yet), but it was still good clean Linuxy fun — and hopefully Liam will remember to bring me back some of the aforementioned LBWbooze ;).

Due to some Eircom crapness, the ISDN line for the LBW’s internet link was non-functional (hence my lack of email, if you’ve been expecting one from me). But with the help of the IrishWAN boys, the LBW hall was linked to an ISDN connection 2 wireless hops, over a hill, and a mile or two, away — with some cool side-effects. A very nice hack.

I’m dog tired at this stage though, after a 7-hour journey back to Dublin. must sleep soon.

In other news, SpamAssassin was on TechTV. twice. cool.

Ask‘s blog is an interesting read, must remember to bookmark it someday… ;)

Film: Cam points out that Apple are hosting the trailer for Godfrey Reggio’s new chapter in the Koyaanisqatsi trilogy, Naqoyqatsi. I’m hurtin’ to view this, but it looks like I’ll have to wait; as usual for apple.com, it’s Windows- and Mac-only Quicktime, and the only machine I have with decent bandwidth is a Linux-only work machine. The torture!

The Guardian: “Some Italians, it seems, are getting hot under the napkin about the standard of Italian food served in restaurants outside their country. Giovanni Alemanno, the agriculture minister, is chief among them. This week he announced a plan to introduce a policy of quality control on Italian food served abroad, lamenting the effect that the ubiquitous Italian restaurant is having on the reputation of his country’s food. Hundreds of Italian restaurants are created around the world every day, he said, but in most cases the only thing Italian about them is the name or a tricolour flag on display outside. ” (more…)

British Telecom lose their “we invented hyperlinks, honest” case against Prodigy. Good to see some sanity in the courts.

something from the archives. Daev Walsh forwards an article from The Irish Digest about “Billy in the Bowl“. This story is also immortalised in an old Dublin song, which in turn was mentioned in a Pogues track. Billy was a legless beggar in the alleys of Stoneybatter and Grangegorman (where I now live) during the 18th century, who discovered a new, but not entirely legal, way to make money.

the Gamasutra post-mortem of The Italian Job (account required, sorry). “you’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!”

notes from a suicide manual: the Japanese kamikaze pilot’s manual, now published in English for the first time. Extracts at the Guardian, but here’s some to go on with:

Taking off: Breathe deeply three times. Say in your mind: Yah (field), Kyu (ball), Joh (all right) as you breathe deeply. Proceed straight ahead on the airstrip. Otherwise you may damage the landing gears. ….

At the very moment of impact: do your best. Every deity and the spirits of your dead comrades are watching you intently. Just before the collision it is essential that you do not shut your eyes for a moment so as not to miss the target. Many have crashed into the targets with wide-open eyes. They will tell you what fun they had.

just spotted this on Karlin Lillington‘s weblog.

I sent (a mail) to whatever email contact was listed on the party website, noting in the subject heading that the message was an urgent press query. I asked them to give me a synopsis of their party stance on technology issues, which would be featured in a spread in the Irish Times, and gave them about 10 days to respond.

The Progressive Democrats, supposedly the pro-business party and the party from which the very publicly pro-technology-industry deputy prime minister (or Tanaiste) comes, never responded. At all. Neither did Sinn Fein, which had been making a minor campaign issue out of the state of Ireland’s internet infrastructure. Of those who did reply, the major party in government, Fianna Fail, only just sneaked in under the deadline (because I suspect no one had read the email earlier). Labour got the award for responding first (the next day); with Fine Gael also on top of things, and the Greens a bit slower but in time for the deadline as well.

Somehow this does not surprise me at all; Irish politicians are all too willing to pay lip service to tech issues, but do absolutely nothing concrete, or useful, about them. The fact that true broadband for the home user has only been made available by one ISP, since about a year ago, and even then costs over 89 euros per month, bears this out only too graphically.

I’ve read this before, but it’s worth pointing to: Jon Udell on SSL Proxying.

the browser's secure traffic flows to Proxomitron. It decrypts that
traffic, so you can see it in the log window, and then re-encrypts it to
the destination server. Coming back the other way, it decrypts the
server's responses, so you can see them in the log window, then
re-encrypts them to complete the secure loop back to the browser.  It's
really quite amazing, and amazingly useful. Automation tasks that used to
look like more trouble than they were worth -- for example, driving a
HotMail or E*Trade account from a script -- suddenly look easy.

Aaron sez:

It’s 1:30AM. Hours ago, my server seemed to stop working. I could ping it, but I couldn’t do anything else. We drove over to see what was up. … I’ll just say that everything broke. Repeatedly. … I think I have a small idea what it’s like to be Evan now. This is not what I want to be when I grow up.

Never mind that — I think you now have an idea what it’s like to be an on-call sysadmin ;)

I’ve been talking about these a lot on the SpamAssassin-talk list and other places, so forgive me for not blogging much about it.

• Paul Graham talks about his naive Bayesian spam filter. We already use a very basic form of this kind of matching in SpamAssassin, in the SPAM_PHRASES matches; but it’s not proper Bayesian filtering. However, it looks like Matt is taking the bull by the horns and making it Work Right once 2.40 is released (any day now). (BTW it’s worth noting that Bayesian filtering doesn’t always seem to get the success rate that Paul talks about; we think this is down to what kind of mail you get.)

• While we’re doing that, we’ll have to make sure we don’t hit this MS patent. grr.

• Habeas Sender-Warranted E-mail has launched. It’s a very nice solution, allowing non-spam senders of all kinds to “sign” their mails with a “mark” indicating that it’s non-spam — and filters, like SpamAssassin, can then use that mark as a good compensation signal (SpamAssassin now has the HABEAS_SWE test in CVS).

  The mark in question is a copyright- and trademark-protected haiku. Virtually every internet-connected country in the world honours copyrighted poetry with a high degree of legal protection, so unauthorised reproduction will be a big no-no, and result in a heavy battering in the courts.

  As a result, they’re going to have to have some serious lawyers on their side. But it looks like they do. And to really press the advantage, they’ve teamed up with Dun and Bradstreet — who can seriously impact a scumbag’s ability to do business in the western world, never mind just Florida, if it comes to that.

  However, there’s still money to worry about (as usual). It does cost a hell of a lot to pursue as many legal cases as they may have to. Let’s hope they can pull it off. Good luck folks!

• Finally, cool — I’ve made Aaron’s see-also bar!

A US ISP, Information Wave Technologies, has banned the RIAA from accessing its network due to their announced plans to crack internet-connected computers to “protect their assets” — ie. stop file-swapping. Go IWT! (via BB)

Leonard has released a nifty upgrade to Newsbruiser, his weblog software. It now has the feature that means a weblog stops being an overgrown .plan file, and becomes a proper Web Log — a calendar. Now I’m jealous.

Phew! the Budejovicky Budvar brewery has “escaped significant damage” and it’s delicious Budvar beer is back online.

Another one bites the dust. Looks like the “live monkey brains for dinner” story is a big fib.

Eddie Mair’s diary at the Guardian. Eddie Mair is the producer of the BBC Today radio programme.

A case in point (and I’m not making this up): 10 days ago, when another Israeli bus was blown up on a Sunday morning causing several deaths, we carried a report on Broadcasting House from our correpondent at the scene. The next day we got a very serious complaint insisting we had, on air, called the victims “bastards”. We scoured the tape of the show for the offending word. It wasn’t there. It turned out what the listener had heard was the reporter saying “…the victims’ bus had started…”

Aaron notes:

Tokelau, a small island in the Pacific is inhabited by less than 1500 people. They’ve always divided their share of fish among the people equally and so now that they’ve got their own top-level domain (.tk) they’re giving those away for free too.

Some quick grepping of /usr/share/dict/words reveals that the following are still available:

transatlan.tk (transatlantic), antibiot.tk (antibiotic), determinis.tk (ah, you get the idea…), climac.tk, empha.tk, orgias.tk, parasi.tk, pedan.tk, pragma.tk, psychosoma.tk, sclero.tk, seman.tk, skep.tk, unrealis.tk, vladivos.tk, woods.tk, slaps.tk, acroba.tk, athle.tk, aristocra.tk, apathe.tk, apocalyp.tk, antisemi.tk, axioma.tk, atavis.tk, atheis.tk, asympto.tk, behavioris.tk, Dadais.tk.

They’re purely URL forwarding, of course, but good fun… I’ve just taken antarc.tk ;)

a great interview with Bruce Schneier (via /.):

If the rise of the Internet has shown anything, it is that huge numbers of middle-class, middle-management types like to look at dirty pictures on computer screens. A good way to steal … secrets … would be to set up a pornographic Web site. The Web site would be free, but visitors would have to register to download the naughty bits. …

Many of his corporate porn surfers, Schneier predicted, would use for the dirty Web site the same password they used at work. Not only that, many users would surf to the porn site on the fast Internet connection at the office. …

“In six months you’d be able to break into Fortune 500 companies and government agencies all over the world,” Schneier said, chewing his nondescript meal. “It would work! It would work — that’s the awful thing.”

some very nerdy Lovecraft-meets-miffy humour: Tales of the Plush Cthulhu. “How odd it looks!” said Miss Kitty Fluffington. “Very non-Euclidian.” “Yes,” said Brown Snuggly Bear, “but thank goodness it isn’t squamous.” “Or gibbous,” said Mister Bright Eyes. “It seems to be covering something,” said Miss Kitty Fluffington. “Let’s see!”

anti-spam laws are not necessarily the answer: A Seattle man who has been actively pursuing spammers in King County District Court has been hit with a nearly $7,000 judgment to cover a spammer’s attorney fees:

According to Newman, who prepared the order, the chief basis of Kato’s decision was “personal jurisdiction.” In other words, the judge agreed with Newman’s position that his clients could not reasonably expect to be hauled into court in Washington state for “sending something blindly over the Internet,” Newman said.

The British Museum in London is to display the contents of the Secretum:

Some items even have names, such as St Cosmo’s “big toe”, which dates from 18th-century southern Italy, where it was said to be a popular sex toy. Unmarried maidens prayed on St Cosmo’s day: “Blessed St Cosmo, let it be like this.” (Link)

Monsanto up to some serious dirty tricks than normal: now they’re posing as third parties to silence critics through character assassination. (article by George Monbiot in The Guardian — forwarded to forteana by Rachel Carthy.)

Le “maxi-vague” de la Côte d’Azur – a mini-tidal wave, every day at 4pm. Sounds like great fun!