Category: Uncategorized

CNN: “A plaque intended to honor black actor James Earl Jones at a Florida celebration of the life of Martin Luther King, instead paid tribute to James Earl Ray, the man who killed the black civil rights leader, officials said Wednesday. … the erroneous plaque read: ” Thank you James Earl Ray for keeping the dream alive”.” Whoops. Not everyone can make that bad a mistake.

Well, I’ve just added archives to the blog — about time too. Hopefully this will help keep http://taint.org/ fresh and sweet-smelling.

Students describe John Walker as bumbling zealot:

John Walker bumbled his way through his first trip to the Middle East, unwittingly insulting other Muslims and repeatedly getting into trouble with authorities, say those who encountered the Marin teen-ager in Yemen. …

Josh Mortensen, another student, said from Cairo that Walker asked peers to call him Suleiman, affected a “bogus” Arabic accent and wore traditional Muslim garb unlike that of most Yemenis. Other foreign students at the school mockingly nicknamed him “Yusuf Islam,” the name pop singer Cat Stevens took when he became a Muslim and rejected his music career. …

Islamic experts said that in his naivete, Walker, a baptized Roman Catholic who converted to Islam at 16, fell into a trap so common that Mohammed himself predicted it.

“A person who might have been living a typical happy-go-lucky life and then he really gets very much attracted to the teaching of Islam and its ideal, but then he wants to change overnight – that’s what the prophet actually was teaching against,” said Jamal Badawi of the Islamic Information Foundation in Halifax, Nova Scotia. “He said, ‘Go gently.”‘

“A wayward weighing machine that told a woman she was a fat pig and told a man than he was a fat * * * * has been removed from a Melbourne shopping centre.” Hmm, hidden keyboard eh?

Inevitable: Harry PotHead.

Joel @ rathergood.com’s made a Flash video for Destiny’s Child which is worth a look — you might need knowledge of UKian TV for this one — http://www.rathergood.com/alf/ . (fwded by Stewart Smith from forteana)

Japanese youth getting rowdy at their ‘coming of age’ ceremonies.

Lovely user support, a la Smoothwall. One of the /. comments notes:

I have visited irc.smoothwall.org only once. I do feel, however, that my experience there alone was almost enough to discourage my use of the product. I joined the #smoothwall channel in hopes that I might find answers from knowledgable users or developers that I had been unable to find in any of the available documentation (all of which I read in its entirety).

Upon joining the channel, I was bombarded with the omnipresent topic, “Welcome to #smoothwall :: Please do not expect free support if you haven’t donated. http://redirect.smoothwall.org/donate ”

Ignoring the blatantly anti-open-source sentiment, I proceeded to ask about features and functionality that I feel are paramount to implementation of a device designed to secure my entire network. Before anyone so much as regarded my first question, I was bombarded with “Have you paid yet?” A simple ‘not yet’ got me my first response: “Can’t you read the f**king topc?!”

Of course, I wasn’t looking for support — simply answers to questions about the products capabilities. Off to a great start.

Quite a few of the other comments say pretty much the same thing. IPCop is a fork of the code. Use that instead, I reckon.

I used to think that geocaching sounded a bit silly — but after visiting Glenrowan’s astonishingly cruddy animatronic-fest that is Ned Kelly’s Last Stand, this looks like it would have been a bit of fun by comparison.

The wineries had to suffice instead. Mmmm, booze. And — very surprisingly for a country town — Benalla’s art gallery was really excellent.

BTW, this bloggage is quite funny about the whole “Ned Kelly Country” thing. Just be thankful he didn’t pay the 15 bucks to see Ned Kelly’s Last Stand; it’s the most overpriced, so-bad-it’s-not-even-funny-anymore tourist trap I’ve ever seen. I have a feeling cgregory would just have chucked a heart attack, there and then.

Mr Bowron said the hotel was negligent in ‘Allowing or permitting the use of pork chops as footwear in circumstances that the defendant knew or should have known that such use would have produced a hidden trap and did so produce such hidden trap’.

Wow! Lossy zip compression reduces all files down to 10% or even 0% of their original size! The FAQ:

It utilizes a two-pass bit-sieve to first remove all unimportant data from the data set. Lzip implements this quiet effectively by eliminating all of the 0’s. It then sorts the remaining bits into increasing order, and begins searching for patterns. The number of passes in this search is set to (10-N) in lzip, where N is the numeric command-line argument we’ve been telling you about.

For every pattern of length (10/N) found in the data set, the algorithm makes a mark in its hash table. By keeping the hash table small, we can reduce memory overhead. Lzip uses a two-entry hash table. Then data in this table is then plotted in three dimensions, and a discrete cosine transform transforms it into frequency and amplitude data. This data is filtered for sounds that are beyond the range of the human ear, and the result is transformed back (via an indiscrete cosine) into the hash table, in random order.

Take each pattern in the original data set, XOR it with the log of it’s entry in the new hash table, then shuffle each byte two positions to the left and you’re done!

And you can see, there is some very advanced thinking going on here. It is no wonder this algorithm took so long to develop!

Very impressive! ;) (fwded by Joe on the ILUG list)

Some really useful tips for business travellers in Ireland. These are pure horseshit, by the way:

• Pointing is accomplished by using the head or chin, rather than the fingers. (jm: if you’re an actor in The Quiet Man, that is)

• The peace sign or “V” made by extending the index and middle finger with the palm facing out, is an obscene gesture in Ireland and should be avoided.

• If you are referred to as “plain,” there is no need to take offense; this is actually an affectionate term, meaning that you are “one of” the Irish. (jm: never heard of anything even vaguely similar to this)

And these were probably true about 30 years ago:

• Welcome Topics of Conversation: drink; the economy, especially positive aspects; the weather – be aware that rain is viewed positively here (jm: since when?!)

• You will find that potatoes are a very important part of meals in Ireland. Fish is also popular.

• Serving bread with meals is not part of Irish culture. You may see an object on the dining table resembling a bread and butter dish, but this is actually a receptacle for placing discarded, boiled potato skins. (jm: no comment needed here I think)

<bigwig> is a really interesting new design for web services. A month or 2 ago, I was thinking about web app languages, like perl/CGI, PHP, servlets, HTML::Mason, etc., and I realised that the big problem was the requirement imposed by the web environment itself; most “interesting” operations often have a UI that needs to take place over several pages, and each page has to

• unmarshal the user’s CGI params, decode them, check them for insecurity, validity etc.;

• open the database;

• perform actions;

• fill out the HTML template (I’m assuming nobody’s insane enough to still use embedded HTML-in-code!);

• insert “next step” form data in that template;

• send that back to the user;

• save a little state to the database;

• then exit, and forget all in-memory state.

When compared to most interactive programs now, it’s clear that this is a totally different, and much more laborious, way to write code. The nearest thing in trad apps is the “callback” way to deal with non-blocking I/O, ie. what we used before we could (a) use threads (b) use processes or (c) wrap it up in a more friendly library to do that. It just screams complexity.

<bigwig> fixes that:

Rather than producing a single HTML page and then terminating as CGI scripts or Servlets, each session thread may involve multiple client interactions while maintaining data that is local to that thread.

They call it The Session-Centered Approach.

It gets better. They also include built-in support for input validation, HTML output validation, compilation and compile-time code checking, and it’s GPLed free software. This is really good stuff. Next time I have to write a web app, I’ll be using this.

Found via sweetcode.

Dandy highwayman causes trouble in a pub in that London. Stand and deliver!

I can sympathise with Leonard; I just had a wisdom tooth extracted on Saturday and (argh) have had to give up cigarettes for a few days to avoid the dreaded “Dry Socket” (sadly, this is nothing like a “dry pair“). Dammit, I want a cigarette! Must… resist…

Still, the no cigs and raw-hole-where-a-tooth-was bit is the worst part. The extraction was quite painless.

I considered taking a pic of the offending tooth (complete with plentiful decay and 3, count ’em, 3 roots), but then decided that would completely gross out the fledgling taint.org readership.

BTW I do not know why quite a few of the web pages dealing with dry sockets refer to them as “exquisitely painful”. Maybe The Little Shop of Horrors was right about dentists.

Boo. Jon Johansen — the Norwegian teenager who broke the DVD CSS copy protection scheme — has been indicted by the Norwegian “white collar crime unit”. He could get “six months in jail if Johansen gained illegitimate access to data”, and “up to two years in prison for having caused damage by gaining such access or for having done so with a financial motivation.” Found via rc3.org.

NSync dropped from new Star Wars movie: Joey Fatone rang a Florida radio station to say the scene has been scrapped … “because people made a big deal about it. We’re not going to be in it and I’m not going to comment on it any more.”

The movie’s going to suck regardless ;)

Great article at Salon.com about changing prorities for academia; money-making over public benefit.

In the 1980s, computer scientists at Berkeley … created an improved version of the Unix operating system, complete with a networking protocol called the TCP/IP stack. … In 1992, Berkeley released its version of Unix and TCP/IP to the public as open-source code, and the combination quickly became the backbone of a network so vast that people started to call it, simply, “the Internet.”

Many would regard giving the Internet to the world as a benevolent act fitting for one of the world’s great public universities. But Bill Hoskins, who is currently in charge of protecting the intellectual property produced at U.C. Berkeley, thinks it must have been a mistake. “Whoever released the code for the Internet probably didn’t understand what they were doing,” he says.

You could not make it up. It seems Ballymena councillor Robin Stirling, has accused UTV (Ulster Television) of sending viewers subliminal messages promoting Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams. From IrishNews.com via forteana.

Here’s that VR tour of an abandoned US ICBM silo which J.G. Ballard mentioned. Don’t mind the authentic 1995 background GIFs, frames, and big navigation buttons; it’s an amazing site, full of great little observations like:

Note that all of the overhead lights in the facility are mounted on shock-resistant springs so that if the complex were bombed, the ground could shake without burning out the lightbulbs.

Kevin Kelm and his co-explorer certainly did their homework and explored the silo thoroughly, and the descriptions read like an adventure game. Very spooky!

Cory at BB does it again… I don’t know where he finds ’em, but the animated GIF cartoons on this page are really neat; hand-drawn, black-and-white manga featuring what appears to be Killer Chicken Man (or something. hmm… I could really do with some subtitles ;).

Caganers, Catalonian shitting figurines, are getting in trouble in a California museum.

Two Sides of the Sun, from the Guardian via forteana, “How the Sun (UK and Irish tabloid newspaper – jm) cast a two-faced shadow on the eurozone”:

• UK: Dawn of a New Error: The euro is born. And thank goodness Britain is not part of it. … Sun reporters in London were taken for a ride by the euro.

• Ireland: Dawn of a New Era: Ireland wakes up to a new era today as the euro is introduced. … in Ireland, the new currency was set to be a huge hit with the public.

good interview with J.G. Ballard:

… consider another of his favourites: “There’s this group that got into a disused American nuclear silo (site now gone, unfortunately – jm). It’s wonderful! You’re taken on a tour and you can choose alternatives. ‘Would you like to look at the missile control room?’, ‘Would you like to see the sleeping quarters?’. It’s straight out of the stuff that I was writing about all that time ago.

“Sites such as these feed the poetic and imaginative strains in all of us who have been numbed by all the Bruce Willis films,” he says. “I’m waiting for the first new religion on the internet. One that is unique to the Net and to the modern age. It’ll come.”

My ghod, the new iMac is the coolest piece of industrial design I’ve seen in a while. Story here (via Boing Boing).

What used to be known as Media Grok before The Industry Standard fell over is now being published again, as Media Unspun. It’ll be free from now until March, then it goes commercial. Here’s hoping it works out.

Drunk men have been lurching into the headquarters of Queensland’s Prostitution Licensing Authority and demanding prostitutes.

Again, from a nerdy POV. It’s fascinating to discover this old SGI memo on memory leaks and code bloat, mainly because the code sizes they talk about are miniscule, these days.

The window system (Xsgi + 4Dwm) is up from 3.2 MB to 3.6 MB, and the miscellaneous stuff has grown as well.

3.6 Mb for a GUI desktop? Not bad! ;)

Much of the problem seems to be due to DSOs (jm: dynamic shared objects, aka shared libraries/DLLs) that load whole libraries instead of individual routines. Many SGI applications link with 20 or so large DSOs, virtually guaranteeing enormous executables.

As far as I know, this is still the case on most popular OSes.

Interestingly, I used both IRIX 4.0.x and 5.2 — and I preferred 5.2. Could have been the hardware, though. But anyway — the bottom line is, things have only gotten bigger and bloatier since then.

On a more nerdy tip, Joel talks about those days when you just can’t get started, under the title “Fire and Motion”. Here’s a choice quote:

Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That’s probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features. Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don’t have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP.

…

The sales teams of the big companies understand cover fire. They go into their customers and say, OK, you don’t have to buy from us. Buy from the best vendor. But make sure that you get a product that supports (XML / SOAP / CDE / J2EE) because otherwise you’ll be Locked In The Trunk . Then when the little companies try to sell into that account, all they hear is obedient CTOs parrotting Do you have J2EE? And they have to waste all their time building in J2EE even if it doesn’t really make any sales, and gives them no opportunity to distinguish themselves. It’s a checkbox feature — you do it because you need the checkbox saying you have it, but nobody will use it or needs it. And it’s cover fire.

“Monster waves” — ocean waves of 100 feet and more in height, not caused by seismic activity — may be explained by a new theory from researchers at the Technical University in Berlin.

“Even in the tank the effect was awe-inspiring,” said Prof Clauss. “The exploding wave was so powerful that it broke through the ceiling of the building in which the tank is located,” he added.

Impressive — but I’m pretty sure there’s been eyewitness accounts of bigger waves than the ones mentioned (120 feet), as well. I wonder if the theory can account for those?

Mmmmm….. Marmite. “It must be spread thinly. T-h-i-n-l-y…”

We now, thanks to various visitors from the other side of the world, have 4 large jars of the stuff. Looks like we’ll be lugging it around for a while. yum.

Ever wonder if computer industry analysts were, quite simply, for sale to the highest bidder? Wonder no more, courtesy of the latest MS leak via the Register:

1. The first wave will attack the perception that Linux is free. To that effect, we’ll have an independent analysis commissioned by DH Brown … The DH Brown report will be customer ready and will help your customer understand just how competitive Microsoft is in this arena.

2. The second wave will be a full blown cost analysis comparison case study between Linux and Windows in a variety of usage scenarios (web, file and print, etc.) done independently by the analysts for us. ETA for this tool is in May and it will be a great tool to help you sell the value of Windows solutions over Linux. …

(emphases on will added by jm.)

It’s alleged that 10 midwives at Wollongong Hospital’s maternity ward have been holding nitrous oxide and tamazepam parties at work. Those nurses have all the fun!

Incompetent websites, part 43985943. Waider @ ILUG notes:

It’s a moot point at this stage, but am I the only person (well, other than whoever fixed the problem) who noticed that the euro countdown on http://www.euro.ie/ was, until some time this morning, counting down to midnight Dec 30/31 as opposed to midnight Dec 31/Jan 1?

snicker!

Where does the smell of rain originate from?

If you’ve wondered why the ground, or the road smells a bit odd when it rains after a long dry spell, wonder no more… The smell is given off by Streptomyces bacteria, a genus belonging to the Actinomycetales order of Gram-positive eubacteria, also called actinomycetes.

The bacteria grow in damp, warm earth before fine weather dries out the soil, which then blows around as dust. During a dry spell, actinomycetes produce spores that are released on contact with moisture. Rain hitting the ground kicks up an aerosol of water and soil and you breathe in fine particles of soil containing the bacteria.

Cool! via yak.net.

Jeff Bone points out Lingua::Romana::Perligata, a Perl module … that makes it possible to write Perl programs in Latin. A plausible rationale for wanting to do such a thing is provided, along with a comprehensive overview of the syntax and semantics of Latinized Perl.

Sample:

Blade director Steven Norrington is planning to direct a movie of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Alan Moore’s fantastic comic. This should be bizarre — Victorian superheroes, in authentic period style, filmed by a hyper-Hollywood director (going by Blade at least).

I wonder if they’ll take out all the accurate 19th-century colonialist bigotry: “the inscrutable Chinee” etc.?

BTW — went to see Lord of the Rings last night, totally fantastic. The interpretation was spot on too, and some of the CGI effects (Saruman’s tower!) were just incredible! Well happy with that — best movie of the year by far. And the “over-celtic” criticism noted before just doesn’t stand up IMO.

Only fault I could have is the slightly sluggish first bit (but I suppose LoTR novices need a bit of explanation), and (as Lukage pointed out via private mail) the “breakdancing Gandalf” sequence. Well, also, the elves were a bit super-fey but I guess that’s unavoidable.

Buzkashi — “Goat-grabbing” — is back in Kabul.

Horses’ hooves thundered, the crowd roared with excitement – and the carcass of a headless goat hit the playing field with a sodden thump. In a spectacle not seen since pre-Taliban times, the ancient Afghan sport of buzkashi returned to Kabul on Friday.

I can wholly sympathise with Joe Barr’s experiences with MPlayer; I tried to set up a few good, recent video players on my Red Hat laptop a while back, and the DLL hell just wasn’t worth it.

The attitude is hilarious too:

Don’t get me wrong. There is documentation. It is scattered, and often incomplete, and carries the same attitude I had seen elsewhere, but it is there. An example of that attitude, taken verbatim from the FAQ:

Q: I compiled MPlayer with libdvdcss/libdivxdecore support, but when I try to start it, it says: error while loading shared libraries: lib*.so.0: cannot load shared object file: No such file or directory

I checked the file and it is there in /usr/local/lib.

A: What are you doing on Linux? Can’t you install a library? Why do we get these questions? It’s not MPlayer specific at all! Add /usr/local/lib to /etc/ld.so.conf and run ldconfig. Or install it to /usr/lib, because if you can’t solve the /usr/local problem, you are careless enough to do such things.

What the hell are BOFHs doing writing a video player? Go back to LARTing lusers, or something!

I finally got XINE set up, thanks to two lovely RPMs from Red Hat’s Rawhide bleeding-edge distro. (At least someone around here knows how to package software ;)

There’s a few other packages which (I’ve heard) boast scary maintainers. Very nice to look at, but ask a question and the maintainer’s likely to stab you. Can’t see the point of that, myself. Half of writing free software is the fact that the users will contact you at some point. Get used to it!