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Plenty of money for Dublin’s bikes

Published February 16, 2009

So it seems that JC Decaux have been complaining about the costs of running the Velib scheme in Paris:

Since the scheme's launch, nearly all the original bicycles have been replaced at a cost of 400 euros each.

Of course, this won't be a problem in Dublin. Going by Newstalk's estimates of how much the advertising space provided to JC Decaux for free, in exchange for the (as yet nonexistent) 450 bikes would have cost, each bike comes at a public cost of 111,000 Euros. That should cover a lot of "velib extreme".

(OK, that may be overestimating it. The Irish Times puts a more sober figure of EUR 1m per year; that works out as EUR 2,000 per bike per year. Still should cover a few broken bikes.)

A quick reminder:

ParisDublin
20,000 bikes450 promised
~1,600 billboards~120 installed
~12.5 bikes per billboard~3.8 bikes per billboard
10km range (from 15e to 19e arondissement)4km range (from the Mater Hospital to the Grand Canal)

And, of course, there's no sign of the bikes here yet... assuming they ever arrive. Heck of a job, Dublin City Council.

BTW, here's the rate card for advertising on the "Metropole" ad platforms, if you're curious, via the charmingly-titled Go Ask Me Bollix.

Links for 2009-02-13

Published February 13, 2009

Fixing the Gmail Tasks window bug

Published February 13, 2009

Hey Gmail users! If you're using Tasks, there's a slightly annoying bug in Gmail right now -- you may see the "Use this link to open Tasks" tip window appear every time you access the inbox page.

Several other people have reported it, and apparently the Google guys are 'working to resolve it' at the moment. In the meantime, though, here's a way to work around the issue without losing Tasks (you will, unfortunately, lose the offline-gmail functionality, though). Simply disable Offline Gmail (Settings -> Offline -> "Disable Offline Gmail for this computer"), and the bug no longer manifests itself.

You can allow Gmail to keep the stored mail on your computer if you like, which will be handy for when the bug is fixed and Offline can be re-enabled -- hopefully sooner rather than later.

Continuous deployment

Published February 12, 2009

This is awesome, if a little insane. Continuous Deployment at IMVU: Doing the impossible fifty times a day:

Continuous Deployment means running all your tests, all the time. That means tests must be reliable. We’ve made a science out of debugging and fixing intermittently failing tests. When I say reliable, I don’t mean “they can fail once in a thousand test runs.” I mean “they must not fail more often than once in a million test runs.” We have around 15k test cases, and they’re run around 70 times a day. That’s a million test cases a day. Even with a literally one in a million chance of an intermittent failure per test case we would still expect to see an intermittent test failure every day. It may be hard to imagine writing rock solid one-in-a-million-or-better tests that drive Internet Explorer to click ajax frontend buttons executing backend apache, php, memcache, mysql, java and solr. I am writing this blog post to tell you that not only is it possible, it’s just one part of my day job.

OK, so far, so sensible. But this is where it gets really hairy:

Back to the deploy process, nine minutes have elapsed and a commit has been greenlit for the website. The programmer runs the imvu_push script. The code is rsync’d out to the hundreds of machines in our cluster. Load average, cpu usage, php errors and dies and more are sampled by the push script, as a basis line. A symlink is switched on a small subset of the machines throwing the code live to its first few customers. A minute later the push script again samples data across the cluster and if there has been a statistically significant regression then the revision is automatically rolled back. If not, then it gets pushed to 100% of the cluster and monitored in the same way for another five minutes. The code is now live and fully pushed. This whole process is simple enough that it’s implemented by a handfull of shell scripts.

Mental. So what we've got here is:

  • phased rollout: automated gradual publishing of a new version to small subsets of the grid.

  • stats-driven: rollout/rollback is controlled by statistical analysis of error rates, again on an automated basis.

Worth noting some stuff from the comments. MySQL schema changes break this system:

Schema changes are done out of band. Just deploying them can be a huge pain. Doing an expensive alter on the master requires one-by-one applying it to our dozen read slaves (pulling them in and out of production traffic as you go), then applying it to the master’s standby and failing over. It’s a two day affair, not something you roll back from lightly. In the end we have relatively standard practices for schemas (a pseudo DBA who reviews all schema changes extensively) and sometimes that’s a bottleneck to agility. If I started this process today, I’d probably invest some time in testing the limits of distributed key value stores which in theory don’t have any expensive manual processes.

They use an interesting two-phased approach to publishing of the deploy file tree:

We have a fixed queue of 5 copies of the website on each frontend. We rsync with the “next” one and then when every frontend is rsync’d we go back through them all and flip a symlink over.

All in all, this is very intriguing stuff, and way ahead of most sites. Cool!

(thanks to Chris for the link)

Links for 2009-02-11

Published February 11, 2009

Config management as cookery

Published February 11, 2009

interesting to see Chef, a configuration management framework using cooking as a metaphor.

Back in the early '90s in Iona, I wrote a user/group synchronization tool called "greenpages" which used a cooking metaphor; "spice" (data) was added to "raw" (template) files to produce "cooked" output. Great minds, eh!

Links for 2009-02-09

Published February 9, 2009

IR book recommendation

Published February 9, 2009

Thanks to Pierce for pointing me at this review of an interesting-sounding book called Introduction to Information Retrieval. The book sounds quite useful, but I wanted to pick out a particularly noteworthy quote, on compression:

One benefit of compression is immediately clear. We need less disk space.

There are two more subtle benefits of compression. The first is increased use of caching ... With compression, we can fit a lot more information into main memory. [For example,] instead of having to expend a disk seek when processing a query ... we instead access its postings list in memory and decompress it ... Increased speed owing to caching -- rather than decreased space requirements -- is often the prime motivator for compression.

The second more subtle advantage of compression is faster transfer data from disk to memory ... We can reduce input/output (IO) time by loading a much smaller compressed posting list, even when you add on the cost of decompression. So, in most cases, the retrieval system runs faster on compressed postings lists than on uncompressed postings lists.

This is something I've been thinking about recently -- we're getting to the stage where CPU speed has so far outstripped disk I/O speed and network bandwidth, that pervasive compression may be worthwhile. It's simply worth keeping data compressed for longer, since CPU is cheap. There's certainly little point in not compressing data travelling over the internet, anyway.

On other topics, it looks equally insightful; the quoted paragraphs on Naive Bayes and feature selection algorithms are both things I learned myself, "in the field", so to speak, working on classifiers -- I really should have read this book years ago I think ;)

The entire book is online here, in PDF and HTML. One to read in that copious free time...

Good reasons to host inelastically on EC2

Published February 9, 2009

Recently, there's been a bit of discussion online about whether or not it makes sense for companies to host server infrastructure at Amazon EC2, or on traditional colo infrastructure. Generally, these discussions have focussed on one main selling point of EC2: its elasticity, the ability to horizontally scale the number of server instances at a moment's notice.

If you're in a position to gain from elasticity, that's great. But it is still worth noting that even if you aren't in that position, there's another good reason to host at an EC2-like cloud; if you want to deploy another copy of the app, either from a different version-control branch (dev vs staging vs production deployments), or to run separate apps with customizations for different customers. These aren't scaling an existing app up, they're creating new copies of the app, and EC2 works nicely to do this.

If you can deploy a set of servers with one click from a source code branch, this is entirely viable and quite useful.

Another reason: EC2-to-S3 traffic is extremely fast and cheap compared to external-to-S3. So if you're hosting your data on S3, EC2 is a great way to crunch on it efficiently. Update: Walter observed this too on the backend for his Twitter Mosaic service.

Ice Cycling

Published February 6, 2009

I seem to have invented a new extreme sport on the way into work: Ice Cycling. The roads were like an ice-skating rink. Scary stuff :(

Here's some advice for anyone in the same boat:

  • use a high gear: avoid using low gear if possible, even when starting off. Low revs mean you're more likely to get traction.

  • try to avoid turns: keep the bike as upright as possible.

  • try to avoid braking: braking is very likely to start a skid in icy conditions.

  • use busy roads: where the ice has been melted by car traffic. In icy conditions, you should ride where the cars have been, since they'll have melted the ice.

  • ride away from the gutters: they're more likely to be iced over than the centre of a lane. Again, ride where the cars have been.

  • avoid road markings: it seems these were much icier than the other parts of the road; possibly because their high albedo meant the ice on them hadn't been melted by the sun yet. So look out for that.

Here's a good thread on cyclechat.co.uk, and don't miss icebike.org: 'Whether commuting to work, or just out for a romp in the woods, you arrive feeling very alive, refreshed, and surrounded with the aura of a cycling god. You will be looked upon with the smile of respect by friends and co-workers. - - - Or was that the sneer of derision...no matter, ICEBIKING is a blast!' o-kay.

Their recommendations are pretty sane, though. ;)

Links for 2009-02-05

Published February 5, 2009

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Published February 3, 2009

Links for 2009-01-30

Published January 30, 2009

UK’s proposed anti-filesharing quango

Published January 30, 2009

Wow. The IFPI's strategy of "divide and conquer" by taking individual ISPs to court to force them to institute a 3 strikes policy, as successfully deployed against Eircom this week, is possibly marginally better than this insane obsolete-business-model handout proposed by the UK government in their Digital Britain report:

Lord Carter of Barnes, the Communications Minister, will propose the creation of a quango, paid for by a charge that could amount to £20 a year per broadband connection.

The agency would act as a broker between music and film companies and internet service providers (ISPs). It would provide data about serial copyright-breakers to music and film companies if they obtained a court order. It would be paid for by a levy on ISPs, who inevitably would pass the cost on to consumers.

Jeremy Hunt, the Shadow Culture Secretary, said: “A new quango and additional taxes seem a bizarre way to stimulate investment in the digital economy. We have a communications regulator; why, when times are tough, should business have to fund another one?”

Well said. An incredibly bad idea.

By the way, I've noticed some misconceptions about the Eircom settlement. Telcos selling Eircom bitstream DSL (ie. the 2MB or 3MB DSL packages) are immune right now.

They are, however, next on the music industry's hit-list, reportedly...

Links for 2009-01-29

Published January 29, 2009

Eircom forced to implement “3 strikes and you’re out” for filesharers

Published January 29, 2009

Eircom has been forced to implement "3 strikes and you're out", according to Adrian Weckler:

If the music labels come to it with IP addresses that they have identified as illegal file-sharers, Eircom will, in its own words:

"1) inform its broadband subscribers that the subscribers IP address has been detected infringing copyright and

"2) warn the subscriber that unless the infringement ceases the subscriber will be disconnected and

"3) in default of compliance by the subscriber with the warning it will disconnect the subscriber."

My thoughts -- it's technically better than installing Audible Magic appliances to filter all outbound and inbound traffic, at least.

However, there's no indication of the degree to which Eircom will verify the "proof" provided by the music labels, or that there's any penalty for the labels when they accuse your laser printer of filesharing. I foresee a lot of false positives.

Update: LINX reports that the investigative company used will be Dtecnet, a 'company that identifies copyright infringers by participating in P2P file-sharing networks'. TorrentFreak says:

DtecNet [...] stems from the anti-piracy lobby group Antipiratgruppen, which represents the music and movie industry in Denmark. There are more direct ties to the music industry though. Kristian Lakkegaard, one of DtecNet’s employees, used to work for the RIAA’s global partner, IFPI. [...]

Just like most (if not all) anti-piracy outfits, they simply work from a list of titles their client wishes to protect and then hunts through known file-sharing networks to find them, in order to track the IP addresses of alleged infringers.

Their software appears as a normal client in, for example, BitTorrent swarms, while collecting IP addresses, file names and the unique hash values associated with the files. All this information is filtered in order to present the allegations to the appropriate ISP, in order that they can send off a letter admonishing their own customer, in line with their commitments under the MoU.

[...] it will be a big surprise if [Dtecnet's evidence is] of a greater ‘quality’ than the data provided by MediaSentry.

More coverage of the issues raised by the RIAA's international lobbying for the 3-strikes penalty:

Links for 2009-01-28

Published January 28, 2009

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Published January 23, 2009

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Published January 21, 2009

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Published January 20, 2009

Switched to Magnet

Published January 20, 2009

I've switched my home broadband from Eircom's 3Mbps all-in-one package to Magnet's 10Mbps LLU package. It's about a tenner a month cheaper, and significantly faster of course.

The modem arrived last Friday, about 2 weeks after ordering; that night, when I went to check my mail, I noticed that the DSL had gone down, and indeed so had the phone. I was dreading a weekend without the interwebs, it being 9pm on Friday night -- but lo, when I plugged in the Magnet router, it all came up perfectly first time!

Great instructions too. Extremely readable and quite comprehensible for a reasonably non-techie person, I'd reckon. So far, they've provided great service, too.

I'm not actually getting the full 10Mbps, unfortunately; it's RADSL, and I'm only getting 5Mbps when I test it. Just as well I didn't pay the extra tenner to get their 24Mbps package. Still, that's a hell of a lot faster than the sub-1Mbps speeds I've been getting from Eircom.

It's hard to notice an effective difference when browsing though, as that kind of traffic is dominated by latency effects rather than throughput.

I haven't even tried their "PCTV" digital TV system; it seems a bit pointless really, I have a networked PVR already, and anyway I doubt they support Linux.

One thing that's wierd; when my wife attempts to view video on news.bbc.co.uk on her Mac running Firefox, it stalls with the spinny "loading video" image, and the status line claims that it's downloading from "ad.doubleclick.net". This worked fine (of course) on Eircom. If I switch to my user account and use Firefox there, it works fine, too -- possible difference being that I'm using AdBlock Plus and she's not. Something to do with the number of simultaneous TCP connections to multiple hosts, maybe? Very odd anyway. It'd be nice to get some time to sit down with tcpdump and figure this one out... any suggestions?

Links for 2009-01-19

Published January 19, 2009

Links for 2009-01-15

Published January 15, 2009

Google.ie HTTPS fail

Published January 15, 2009

Check out what happens when you visit https://www.google.ie/ :

Clicking through Firefox's ridiculous hoops gets me these dialogs:

Good work, Google and Firefox respectively!

Links for 2009-01-14

Published January 14, 2009

Links for 2009-01-13

Published January 13, 2009

Hack: reassassinate

Published January 13, 2009

A coworker today, returning from a couple of weeks holiday, bemoaned the quantities of spam he had to wade through. I mentioned a hack I often used in this situation, which was to discard the spam and download the 2 weeks of supposed-nonspam as a huge mbox, and rescan it all with spamassassin -- since the intervening 2 weeks gave us plenty of time for the URLs to be blacklisted by URIBLs and IPs to be listed by DNSBLs, this generally results in better spamfilter accuracy, at least in terms of reducing false negatives (the "missed spam"). In other words, it gets rid of most of the remaining spam nicely.

Chatting about this, it occurred to us that it'd be easy enough to generalize this hack into something more widely useful by hooking up the Mail::IMAPClient CPAN module with Mail::SpamAssassin, and in fact, it'd be pretty likely that someone else would already have done so.

Sure enough, a search threw up this node on perlmonks.org, containing a script which did pretty much all that. Here's a minor freshening: download

reassassinate - run SpamAssassin on an IMAP mailbox, then reupload

Usage: ./reassassinate --user jmason --host mail.example.com --inbox INBOX --junkfolder INBOX.crap

Runs SpamAssassin over all mail messages in an IMAP mailbox, skipping ones it's processed before. It then reuploads the rewritten messages to two locations depending on whether they are spam or not; nonspam messages are simply re-saved to the original mailbox, spam messages are sent to the mailbox specified in "--junkfolder".

This is especially handy if some time passed since the mails were originally delivered, allowing more of the message contents of spam mails to be blacklisted by third-party DNSBLs and URIBLs in the meantime.

Prerequisites:

  • Mail::IMAPClient
  • Mail::SpamAssassin

Links for 2009-01-09

Published January 9, 2009

Links for 2009-01-08

Published January 8, 2009

  • Map/Reduce and Queues for MySQL using Gearman : A talk by Eric Day and Brian Aker at the upcoming MySQL Conference in April: '[Gearman] development is now active again with an optimized rewrite in C, along with features such as persistent message queues, queue replication, improved statistics, and advanced job monitoring. For MySQL, there is also a new user defined function to run Gearman jobs, as well as the possibility to write your own aggregate UDFs using Gearman. This gives you the ability to run functions in separate processes, separate servers, and in other languages. The Gearman framework gives you a robust interface to also run these functions reliably in the “cloud”. This session will introduce these concepts and give examples of sample applications.' Persistent queues (at last)? Gearman integration directly in the DB? excellent!
    (tags: gearman queueing mysql databases brian-aker mapreduce sql conferences talks papers)

Links for 2009-01-07

Published January 7, 2009

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Published January 6, 2009

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Published January 2, 2009

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Published January 2, 2009

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Published December 28, 2008

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Published December 22, 2008

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Published December 21, 2008

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Published December 19, 2008

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Published December 18, 2008

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Published December 17, 2008

If only this were true

Published December 17, 2008
Some people, when facing a problem, think "I'll use regular expressions." Now they have HORDES OF CUTE PEOPLE WANTING TO SLEEP WITH THEM

-- Yoz, on twitter

Listening to music over wifi?

Published December 16, 2008

Hey lazyweb! Long time, no write.

I'm wondering what setup people use to deal with the following situation. Upstairs, I have an Ubuntu 8.04 server with 71GB of MP3s. Downstairs, I have a stereo system. In between the two is a wireless network. How can I listen to the music downstairs, without simply copying the lot (or subsets thereof) onto a local disk on some appliance down there?

Currently, I'm using a VNC client on a Nokia 770 to control a JuK window on the server. This works great, believe it or not! KDE 3 can be coaxed into providing a fantastic UI for a small touchscreen. This then uses Pulseaudio to transmit the sound output using the ESD protocol over TCP to the ESD server on the N770, and the N770 plays back the sound.

Until a few months ago, this worked great. However, something (either hardware changes, network topology changes, or an upgrade to Ubuntu 8.04 on the server) has resulted in effective bitrates between the server and the N770 dropping frequently -- hence the audio drops out or changes pitch, rendering it unlistenable :(

I've tried using UPNP servers (specifically mediatomb, ushare, and Twonkymedia), with the built-in Media Streamer app on the N770. All fail. MP3s cut off near the end, M3U playlists aren't supported, and sometimes Media Streamer just locks up. In addition it's pretty messy trying to get the UPNP servers to notice changes to the MP3 collection.

I've also tried using Squeezecenter (nee Slimserver), but the MP3 stream playback support on the N770 is pretty atrocious; there are audible decoding artifacts.

So -- anyone got a suggestion? Even something involving iTunes might be helpful -- as long as it can at least preserve the Linux server. I'm unlikely to host the full MP3 collection on anything else...

Links for 2008-12-11

Published December 11, 2008

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Published December 10, 2008

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Published December 9, 2008

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Published December 8, 2008

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Published December 7, 2008

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Published December 3, 2008

Links for 2008-11-26

Published November 26, 2008

Recession Hits The Digital Depot

Published November 26, 2008

The Digital Depot is 'an innovative, state-of-the-art building specifically designed to meet the needs of fast growing digital media companies [...] developed as a joint initiative of Enterprise Ireland, Dublin City Council and The Digital Hub Development Agency.' Generally, it's a pretty nice place to work, and a great resource for startups and small tech companies.

However, recently, it looks like they've been embarking on some innovative, state-of-the-art cost-cutting exercises.

There's a little canteen area, for companies to make tea and coffee, wash up their mugs, etc. Check out this snapshot from the canteen this morning, courtesy of JK's phone cam:

Notice anything odd about that bottle of washing-up liquid?

Yum yum! Nothing nicer than washing your mug with a dash of toilet cleaner.

Links for 2008-11-21

Published November 21, 2008

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Published November 20, 2008

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Published November 19, 2008

Dumb eco-questions you were afraid to ask

Published November 19, 2008

New Scientist have a great article up this week entitled 'Dumb eco-questions you were afraid to ask', including:

Q: Does switching from bus to bike really have any effect? After all, cycling isn't completely carbon neutral because I've got to eat to fuel my legs.

A: You are much better off cycling. A 12-kilometre round commute on a bus or subway train is reckoned to generate 164 kilograms of carbon per commuter per year. Somebody cycling that distance would burn about 50,000 calories a year - roughly the amount of energy in 22 kilograms of brown bread. A kilo of brown bread has a carbon footprint of about 1.1 kilograms, so switching from public transport to a bike saves about 140 kilograms of carbon emissions per year -- although this only really works if enough people cycle to allow public transport providers to reduce the number of buses and trains they run.

Also included: 'How clean does the pizza box/can/bottle have to be for it to be recyclable?'; 'Are laminated juice cartons recyclable?'; 'What's worse, the CO2 put out by a gas-fuelled car or the environmental effects of hybrid-car batteries?'; 'Can I put window envelopes in the paper recycling?' and many more. Check it out...

Links for 2008-11-18

Published November 18, 2008

Links for 2008-11-17

Published November 17, 2008

VisitWicklow.ie: Spammers

Published November 17, 2008

I think I just got my first spam from a government body! Specifically, VisitWicklow.ie spam from Wicklow County Tourism. It says:

Wicklow County Tourism is launching its sparkling 2008 Christmas campaign this month, with an extensive festive section on our website www.visitwicklow.ie/xmas . Here you will find all the information you need about what is happening in the Garden County this season including Christmas parties, seasonal events, carol singing, festive markets, Santa visits, great accommodation packages etc.

It was sent to a spamtrap address, scraped from an old mail archive. This address is a dedicated spamtrap; I've never used it for non-spam-trapping purposes, nor has it ever opted-in to receive mail. So there was no question that I granted permission to anyone to mail it.

The address delivers mail to my personal account -- that's what I do with my spamtraps, until their volumes get too high. So it still qualifies as a "personal email address". Here's the full spam with all headers intact.

It appears the message originated at IP address 87.192.126.62:

inetnum:        87.192.126.32 - 87.192.126.63
netname:        IBIS-PA-NET
descr:          BreezeMax-KilpooleHill-Comm-E 3MB 24:1 (2)
country:        IE
admin-c:        IRA6-RIPE
tech-c:         IRA6-RIPE
status:         Assigned PA
remarks:        Please do NOT send abuse complaints to the contacts listed.
remarks:        Please check remarks on individual inetnum records for abuse contacts, or
remarks:        failing that email abuse reports to abuse@irishbroadband.ie.
mnt-by:         IBIS-MNT
source:         RIPE # Filtered

Kilpoole Hill appears to be south of Wicklow town, just the right spot for a wireless tower used for Irish Broadband access from The Murrough, Wicklow Town (mentioned as the address for Wicklow County Tourism in the mail).

Suggestions? Did anyone else get this? How do I report spam sent by the Wicklow County Tourism Board?

Update: they also hit the Irish Linux User's Group submission address. I wouldn't be surprised if they scraped the addresses of other ILUG subscribers, then...

Links for 2008-11-13

Published November 13, 2008

Déjà Joué

Published November 11, 2008

James Tauber just mentioned on Twitter:

“is it bad that I just saw a photo of Stockholm and immediately recognized a stretch of road from PGR2, rather than when I was actually there?”

This is something I've been thinking about recently. As game graphics improve, the realism levels become close enough to fool our brains into creating something like "real-world" memories for the worlds we're experiencing in gameplay.

For example, when I visited California for the first time, I was stunned by the feelings of familiarity I felt in response to stuff I'd experienced while playing the super-realistic Grand Theft Auto: Vice City; little things like the way traffic lights were mounted above the road, the design of the curbs, etc., the level of detail for which Rockstar received a "Designer of the Year" nomination -- because of this, the streetscape of a typical Californian street was instantly familiar to me.

The same thing happened this weekend, watching footage on TV of Arizona's Monument Valley. Naturally, I've driven a dirt bike around Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas' version of this. ;)

Update: another one is the Pripyat level of Call of Duty 4, which would be extremely familiar to anyone viewing these photos from a real-life visit.

I think this phenomenon needs its own name. "déjà vu" is similar, but different -- that phenomenon occurs when the memory feels erroneously that an experience has previously happened, whereas in this case, the experience has happened -- albeit virtually.

I've come up with a phrase to describe this: "déjà joué". (In French, that's "already played", analogous to the "already seen" of "déjà vu".)

What do you reckon? If you like it, feel free to use it ;)

Links for 2008-11-10

Published November 10, 2008

IBM’s ZTIC

Published November 6, 2008

IBM Zone Trusted Information Channel (ZTIC) -- 'a banking server's display on your keychain'.

IBM has introduced the Zone Trusted Information Channel (ZTIC), a hardware device that can counter [malware attacks on online banking] in an easy-to-use way. The ZTIC is a USB-attached device containing a display and minimal I/O capabilities that runs the full TLS/SSL protocol, thus entirely bypassing the PC's software for all security functionality.

The ZTIC achieves this by registering itself as a USB Mass Storage Device (thus requiring no driver installation) and starting a "pass-through" proxy configured to connect with pre-configured (banking) Websites. After starting the ZTIC proxy, the user opens a Web browser to establish a connection with the bank's Website via the ZTIC. From that moment on, all data transmitted between browser and server pass through the ZTIC; the SSL session is protected by keys maintained only on the ZTIC and, hence, is inaccessible to malware on the PC [...].

In addition, all critical transaction information, such as target account numbers, is automatically detected in the data stream between browser and ZTIC. This critical information is then displayed on the ZTIC for explicit user confirmation: Only after pressing the "OK" button does the TLS/SSL connection continue. If any malware on the PC has inserted incorrect transaction data into the browser, it can be easily detected by the user at this moment.

This seems like quite a nice implementation, I think.

However, key management will be problematic. Each server's public key will need to be stored on the ZTIC, and not be writable/modifiable by the possibly-infected PC, otherwise the "bad guys" could simply insert a cert for a malware proxy server on the PC and perform a man-in-the-middle attack on the TLS session. But for that to be viable, the SSL certs need to change very infrequently, or some new secure procedure to update the certs from a "safe" machine needs to be put in place. Tricky....

Links for 2008-11-04

Published November 4, 2008

Linux: It Just Works

Published November 3, 2008

Here's a nice little (totally subjective!) story for Linux users.

At home, I have a HP Laserjet 1018 printer; it's a dinky little USB laser. When I was setting up my Mac running OSX, I attempted to use it.

A common refrain from Mac users is that MacOS X just works -- attempt to get something working, and the Mac will do the right thing with little friction, compared to the Linux situation which will involve complex config file editing and what-not. If this experience is anything to go by, that's not entirely the case anymore. In fact, the exact opposite applied; when I plugged the printer into the Linux box and ran System -> Administration -> Printing -> New Printer, it "just worked" and I wound up with a working network printer within seconds. No such luck with OSX. Some googling revealed the problem:

In summary, the LJ1018 is just not supported on MacOS X. In order to get it working you need to install a third-party port of the Linux printing components foo2zjs, Foomatic, and Ghostscript, ported to MacOS X, and then get busy with the config file editing and undocumented tweaking and what-not. Ouch.

So there you go. Linux: it just works! ;)

(By the way, I was able to work around it by printing from the Mac to the Linux print server in Postscript; the CUPS print server will transcode PS to the native format.)

Links for 2008-10-31

Published October 31, 2008

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Published October 30, 2008

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Published October 29, 2008

The horror! the horror!

Published October 28, 2008

Dead Space came out last week, just in time for Hallowe'en. It's a survival-horror first-person shooter, set in space:

In the bold and often-bloody Dead Space, gamers step into a third-person sci-fi survival horror experience that delivers psychological thrills and gruesome action. Set in the cold blackness of deep space, the atmosphere is soaked with a feeling of tension, dread and sheer terror. In Dead Space, players step into the role of engineer Isaac Clarke – an ordinary man on a seemingly routine mission to fix the communications systems aboard a deep space mining ship. It is not long before Isaac awakes to a living nightmare when he learns that the ship's crew has been ravaged by a vicious alien infestation. He must fight through the dead silence and darkness of deep space to stay alive.

I absolutely love this genre. If you ask me, Resident Evil 4 is one of the best games ever written; perfectly paced, with some truly terrifying villains, plot twists and tension-laden surprises along the way. There's no experience in computer gaming quite so viscerally terrifying as the first time you hear Dr. Salvador's chainsaw revving up in the distance, while trapped in a farmhouse under siege from an army of blood-crazed cultists...

So I got Dead Space last Friday, and have been playing it over the weekend; it's good. Problem is, it's not as good as RE4, but then, when you're up against the best game ever, that's going to be hard to avoid. Actually, to be honest, the first couple of stages feel very reminiscent of RE4, tending towards derivative. Stage 3, however, comes into its own, with flavours of Aliens. Fingers crossed the upward trend continues...

Reading the comments on a Slashdot thread about the game, I came across this tip:

Call of Cthulhu (Score:5, Informative)

I'd say this is the last game that scared the shit out of me. The fact that you don't have any health bar, and that your vision, hearing, and even your heartbeat and breathing pace are affected by the situation can really frighten you. I don't think this game got enough credit. I still haven't finished the game yet.

Here's a nice 10 minute video that gives you the general feeling of the whole game. (minus the 320x240 resolution and lossy quality of course). If you get bored skip to the middle.

The video is pretty compelling, so I did some research. It seems the game is still playable on XBox360, albeit with some wonky sound samples during dialogue. Sounds ok to me. I went onto eBay, and was able to find a copy for 8 UK pounds. bargain!

When I twittered about this, I got these responses:

Me: "Call of Cthulhu" 2005 Xbox title, apparently one of the most terrifying games ever written: 8 UK quid on eBay. woot.

Myles at 2:00pm October 23: You won't be saying woot when your sanity dwindles and you gnaw off your own fingers in an attempt to protect yourself from the Great Old One. [a fair point]

Andrew at 6:56pm October 23: Have you ever played Eternal Darkness for the Gamecube? Really really creepy, and as close to Cthulhu as you can get without paying royalties.

Síofra at 9:06pm October 23: Eternal Darkness - feckin' brilliant. My first videogame addiction and I remember it fondly. The darkness comes....

So I looked up Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, too. check this review out:

Resident Evil, this game is most absolutely not. What it is, however, to dedicated players who fully explore its length and intricacies, is one of GameCube's absolute best games, and indeed one of the greatest titles we've ever played. [...]

There are insanity effects -- hallucinations that have a major role within the game. [...] if a character's sanity bar drops too low, strange things will begin to happen. Very strange things sometimes. These occurrences are sure to set the dark mood of the adventure and have an impact on the play experience. Going insane too much can create unwanted obstacles for players and in doing so may also endanger one's health and magick supplies. Some of the insanity effects we've encountered have proven very disturbing. Some even attempt to pick at the mind of the player outside of the game universe.

Apparently the walls drip with blood when you start losing your mind. Awesome! IGN gave the game 9.6 out of 10, Metacritic gives it 9th position, 92/100, "universal acclaim", on the all-time high scores list for the Gamecube, and of course, it's playable on the Wii.

Rosco has already promised I can borrow his copy. Sign me up! Looks like I'll be scaring the crap out of myself for a while to come...

Links for 2008-10-27

Published October 27, 2008

Links for 2008-10-24

Published October 24, 2008

the on-demand Windows desktop

Published October 24, 2008

A few days ago, Amazon announced that they would be supporting Windows on EC2. IMO, you'd have to be mad to dream of running a server on that platform, so I was totally like "meh".

However, James Murty pointed out the perfect use case that I'd missed:

Although I much prefer “Unixy” platforms for my own development, I can imagine situations where it would be very handy to have a Windows machine easily available — such as for running those vital but irritating programs that are only made available for Windows. Australian Tax Office, I’m looking at you...

He's spot on! This is a great use case. If you need to do a little 'doze work, a quick recompile, or a connect to another stupid platform-limited service -- indeed, like the Irish tax office's Revenue Online Service, for that matter -- simply fire up a 'doze instance, do your hour's work, SDelete any private files, and shut it down again. All of that will cost 12.5 cents.

This will save me a lot of pain with VMWare, I suspect...

More techie details at RightScale; a trial run.

Switch, ep. 3: revert!

Published October 23, 2008

So, that OSX thing. I'm afraid I've given up on the switch; I'm back on Linux. :(

I got the keyboard mapping working, but Focus-Follows-Mouse and the couple of window-management hotkeys I rely on were impossible to work around.

Focus-Follows-Mouse is emulated by iTerm, but every time you switch to an X11 app or to Firefox, a click is required. This app-specific behaviour is jarring and inconsistent.

For some reason, the window-management hotkeys had a tendency to break, or to be disabled by other hotkeys or apps. I never figured out exactly why.

In addition, OSX has a built-in tendency to hibernate once the laptop's lid is closed. I wanted to disable this, for a number of reasons; most importantly, I tend to leave the laptop closed, leaning beside a chair in the TV room, while I'm at work, but there's frequently something I want to SSH in for. I tried Caffeine.app to avoid this, but it failed entirely on my hardware. InsomniaX generally works, but for some reason it tends to turn itself off occasionally for rather random reasons (such as switching to battery power, no matter how briefly, then back again). This was the final straw.

So just over a week ago, I installed Ubuntu on the MacBook Pro, following the documentation on the Ubuntu Wiki. Everything worked!

The Wiki's suggestions were a little hairy to configure -- but then, the OSX experience had been, if anything, less easy. Plus, I know my way around a Linux /etc.

On the Linux side, the Avant Window Navigator is truly excellent, and rivals the Dock nicely, and the Baghira kwin theme gives a pretty good OSX sheen to KDE 3. It's not quite as pretty as OSX, but I'm happy to lose some prettiness for better usability.

Regarding the interface -- the current version of the Linux Synaptics driver supports multi-touch (Apple's patents be damned, seemingly), and all the nice multi-touch tricks supported by most OSX apps work with it too. I'm still working out the optimum settings for this, but it's very configurable, and quite open.

It's fantastic ;) I feel like I'm home again. Sorry, Mac people.

(image: CC-licensed, thanks to Dr Craig)

Links for 2008-10-23

Published October 23, 2008

Bonuses for bankers: business as usual

Published October 23, 2008

Wall Street banks in $70bn staff payout:

Financial workers at Wall Street's top banks are to receive pay deals worth more than $70bn (£40bn) [equivalent to 10% of the US government bail-out package], a substantial proportion of which is expected to be paid in discretionary bonuses, for their work so far this year - despite plunging the global financial system into its worst crisis since the 1929 stock market crash, the Guardian has learned.

Lloyds chief tells staff: you'll still get bonuses:

The chief executive of Lloyds TSB, one of the banks participating in the [UK] £37bn bank bail-out, has promised staff they will receive bonuses this year despite Gordon Brown's promise of a crackdown on bankers' pay following the investment by taxpayers.

In a recorded message to employees, Daniels stressed that the bank faced "very, very few restrictions" in its behaviour despite the injection of up to £5.5bn of taxpayers' funds. "If you think about it, the first restriction was not to pay bonuses. Well Lloyds TSB is in fact going to pay bonuses. I think our staff have done a terrific job this year. There is no reason why we shouldn't."

Now that takes nerve.