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Category: Uncategorized

Radio Tivo

Published February 27, 2004

Radio: Community Projects at Moertel Consulting: My new Radio VCR. That is so cool.

Interesting tidbits:

He records using Speex, the open-source speech-recording codec, in real-time. I wonder how well it'd work with a more music-oriented codec, like Ogg Vorbis. Bit-rate used is 16Kbps, which seems to be pretty reasonable according to the Speex folks.

The resulting output is 10 MB per hour. That works out as 1.4 years of radio time on one $95.00 hard disk, which strikes me as pretty excellent buffering room ;)

Next step: Retroactive Radio Recording.

However, I'm thinking a really nifty application of this would be a single drop-in Knoppix CD-ROM for radio stations to stream their output without paying up the big bucks to You Know Who and Those Other Guys.

Silly: The Moaning Goat Meter, by xiph.org -- a load meter written in a proper programming language, and with an inexplicably spinning fish that stares at you.

READY…

Published February 26, 2004

Jeff Minter reminisces: 

  * COMMODORE BASIC *

  7167 BYTES FREE

  READY...

7k free. Hard to imagine these days; even my watch has more than that.

‘Goblin-fancier’?

Published February 25, 2004

Insults: Tom takes issue with my assumption that 'anyone not living in a hole would know that SpamAssassin includes a probabilistic classifier'. Hmm. OK, I should have made it clear I meant anyone following anti-spam filter development. Henceforth I'll over-qualify every statement on this weblog accordingly.

But at least I know that badgers are CLEARLY down, since they do live in a hole. DO YOUR RESEARCH, FARRELL.

Thermal Depolymerization

Published February 25, 2004

Green: There's been a bit of chat on the intarweb recently about a new high-tech fuel source that avoids the fossil-fuel trap, namely thermal depolymerization. Here's a couple of links that are relevant:

Sounds possibly useful although: (a) is there enough biomass produced to produce fuel in useful quantities, and (b) I bet it stinks downwind of that. ;)

Craigslist genius

Published February 24, 2004

Funny: Craigslist: wanted: web designer (why this phrase may get your ass beat)
. 'sneakily trying to advertise for a web designer to make you a porn site is weak. just say in your ad that you want to show naked pictures of women fucking dogs so i can decide, before i apply, if i want to see that sort of thing, and not AFTER you've sent me a mentally and emotionally scarring photo of a maybe-blonde (it was hard to tell, at that angle) and a great dane, and THEN ask me if i am comfortable with that kind of content.' (via swhackit!)

Slashdot Anti-FUSSP Form, and DSPAM’s FAQ

Published February 24, 2004

Spam: Slashdot: This will fail because... Tick the boxes to produce
a generic slashdot comment on a new anti-spam proposal. Very funny.

So, regarding the Noise Reduction probabilistic-classification tokenizer tweak posted on Slashdot yesterday -- it does look interesting; basically, it operates by monitoring the 'noisiness' of the token stream, and if the current probabilities for the tokens from the stream differs from what's defined as acceptable for too long, it 'dubs' them out. In other words, it ignores those tokens until another sequence of 'useful' tokens is encountered. Plus I'm totally down with the Janine ref ;)

However, it's disappointing to come across this in the DSPAM FAQ list:
Why Should I use DSPAM Instead of SpamAssassin? -- a lovely selection of anti-perl and anti-SpamAssassin FUD, generally overlooking SpamAssassin's training components ('leaves the end-user with no means of recourse or satisfaction when they receive a spam'), and in general taking a combative tone. Is that really necessary?

BTW, in case you've been living in a hole for the last year -- SpamAssassin does include a probabilistic classifier, in the form of the BAYES rules. It's easy to train, uses good tokenizing and combining algorithms to get high accuracy (although doesn't yet do multi-word windowing until we've determined that that works acceptably for the db size increase), and, importantly, has been measured on corpora that are not my own mail.

A story: way back when, in June 2001, the SpamAssassin README boasted of it's 99.94% accuracy rate. This was true -- it was measured on my mail feed over the course of a couple of months. However, once measured on someone else's mail, that dropped pretty quickly. Measuring a spam filter on the developer's mail feed, (where presence of HTML is a killer spam-sign!), is a sure-fire way to get (a) great but (b) non-portable accuracy figures.

sleep(1) in Berkeley DB?

Published February 23, 2004

Code: Berkeley DB, the de-facto std for open-source high-performance database files on UNIX, is displaying some odd behaviour -- it appears to be sleeping for 1 second inside the database library code, under load, for some versions of libdb. If you're curious, there's More info here.

‘Social networks’ spam filtering technique

Published February 19, 2004

Spam: /.: New Method of Spam Filtering: 'A simple and easily implemented scheme for combating e-mail spam has been devised by two researchers in the United States. P. Oscar Boykin and Vwani Roychowdhury of the University of California, Los Angeles use their method to exploit the structure of social networks to quickly determine whether a given message comes from a friend or a spammer. The method works for only about half of all e-mails received - but in all of those cases, it sorts the mail into the right category.'

Abstract here. It appears it classifies 53% of the emails and leaves the other 47% as undiagnosed.

The problem with this scheme is that it relies on the data in the To, From, and CC fields being accurate. Currently, there's no means to stop spammers faking those addresses.

A trivial way to get around this filter, similarly to the other filters that trust the From address, is for a spammer to send a message using your address in both the From and To fields. Most people would include themselves in their web of trust, hence the spam would get through.

A more resilient method uses IP addresses from the Received headers in conjunction with the From address. Once you do this, you can no longer use To and CC data -- and the scheme becomes pretty much similar to SpamAssassin's auto-whitelist.

Life Hacks

Published February 18, 2004

Work: Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks, Danny O'Brien's ETech talk.

Amazingly, despite not being an alpha geek ;), I already use all these things:

  • a todo.txt file (anything else is inconvenient).
  • everything incoming comes through email, including RSS (thanks to rss2email). Again, anything else is inconvenient; I couldn't be bothered with another desktop app.
  • I hack scripts for every repetitive task I run into
  • I sync instead of backup; everything has a CVS repository running on a remote server, even my home dir
  • I have a nasty tendency to web-scrape data

These tips definitely are good advice. Although I have a feeling the result is optimised to a weblogging UNIX geek who spends hours hacking perl/python scripts. ;)

I'm looking forward to LifeHacks.com when it does eventually go live... should be interesting.

BitTorrent

Published February 12, 2004

Net: Great NYTimes article interviewing Bram Cohen about BitTorrent (u: sitescooper p: sitescooper). Good to see that it landed him a job with Valve, but let's hope that's not the last piece of free software from Bram...

One of the best things about the article, BTW, is that it does take notice that BT isn't a tool for piracy. Refreshing, given how these things are often covered.

Future Firefox Features

Published February 11, 2004

Web: More on the Firefox crappy-movie-now-web-browser thing, from Chris Blizzard:

  • A mind-controlled UI: but it only works if you think in russian!
  • Flashback mode: whenever you hear a helicopter overhead the browser will
    • redirect all page loads to web.archive.org, circa 5 years ago.
      • Stealth mode: using specially malformed headers, Firefox will load your web pages and web servers will be unable to log your vists.
      • Mach 6 Technology: advanced compression algorithms will make the web faster than it's ever been before!
      • Arctic compliant: you can land firefox on an ice floe in the middle of the north atlantic. Not sure why you would need this, but hey, we had some extra bandwith.

Lovely Filelight

Published February 9, 2004

Linux: Doing my backups -- it's a good feeling to know your data will (probably) be safe if your computer suddenly carks it.

This time around, I have way too much data to actually back up the lot -- so I'm being selective. Filelight is very helpful here; I can see exactly where my disk space is going, spot tmp files that I should have cleared up long ago, and so on.

One thing is clear -- I have too many MP3s. How am I supposed to listen to all of those?

Firebird now Firefox

Published February 9, 2004

Web: Donncha notes that Mozilla Firebird has been renamed 'Firefox'. Retro cruddy 80's Cold War movie reference? check!

I like it. In fact, I'm looking forward to Linux kernel 2.6.2 'Red Dawn'.

BTW, my current favourite Firebird^H^H^H^Hfox extension: Session Saver. Load and save the current list of open tabs, and have them automatically saved when you quit the browser. Given that I often have a few tabs on stuff I'm researching, leaving them until I'm a bit less busy (which can take days!), this fits perfectly with my modus operandi.

Funny: This is GREAT!

And if that's too much product placement for you, there's Students for an Orwellian Society: 'Because 2004 is 20 years too late.'

How To Increase Voter Turnout With New Technology – The Right Way

Published February 7, 2004

eVoting: One of the desired features for new voting mechanisms is that they will increase voter 'turnout', encouraging people to vote who are too busy (or too unmotivated) to visit a polling station.

This has been used to suggest internet voting (see the fiasco that was the now-scrapped SERVE project) and voting-by-phone. Both offer a scary number of vote-fixing opportunities and possible failure modes, and are fundamentally a bad idea.

However, it turns out there is a great system to implement absentee voting securely, reliably, conveniently (for the voter) and even cheaply! A comment on Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram newsletter (scroll down to comment number 3) details this.

I've copied the entire mail here, since it's hard to link to in the other location, and is well worth a page to itself:

From: Fred Heutte

Thanks for your cogent thoughts on ballot security. I almost completely agree and was one of the first signers of David Dill's petition. I am also involved professionally in voter data -- from the campaign side, with voter files, not directly with voting equipment -- but we're close enough to the vote counting process to see how it actually works.

I would only disagree slightly in one area. Absentee voting is quite secure when looking at the overall approach and assessing the risks in every part of the process. As long as reasonable precautions like signature checking are done, it would be difficult and expensive to change the results of mail voting significantly.

For example, in Oregon, ballots are returned in an inside security envelope which is sealed by the voter. The outside envelope has a signature area on the back side. This is compared to the voter's signature on file at the elections office. The larger counties actually do a digitized comparison, and back that up with a manual comparison with a stratified random sample (to validate machine results on an ongoing basis), as well as a final determination for any questionable matches.

Certainly it is possible to forge a signature. However, this authentication process would greatly raise the cost of forged mail ballots, absent consent of the voter. In turn, interference or coercion with absentee voting would require much higher travel costs (at least) than doing so at a polling place, for a given change in the outcome.

It is true that precincts have poll watchers, and absentee voters do not. But consider this. Ballot boxes, which are often delivered by temporary poll workers from the precinct to the elections office, are occasionally stolen, but mail ballots are handled within a vast stream of other mail by employees with paychecks and pensions at stake. The relatively low level of mail fraud inside the postal system is a testament to its relative security, and the points where ballots are aggregated for delivery to the elections office are usually on public property and can also be watched by outside observers if need be.

Oregon has had some elections with 100% 'vote by mail' since 1996, and all elections since 1999. So far, no verifiable evidence of voter fraud has emerged, despite many checks and some predictions by those with a political axe to grind that we would be engulfed in a wave of election fixing.

The reality is that Oregon's system, which is based on some common-sense security principles, has proven to be robust. The one lingering problem has been the need of some counties to make their voters use punch cards at home because of their antiquated vote counting equipment. But while this is a vote integrity issue -- since state statistics show a much higher undervote and spoiled ballot total for punch cards as compared to mark-sense ballots -- it is not a security issue per se. And with Help America Vote Act (HAVA) funding to convert to more modern vote counting systems, the Oregon chad remains in only one county and will go extinct after 2004.

The mark-sense ('fill in the ovals') ballots we have work well, and have low rates of over-votes and under-votes, despite the lack of automated machine checking that is possible in well-designed precinct voting systems. This suggests that reasonable visual design and human-friendly paper and pencil/pen home voting is a very reliable and secure system. When aided by automated counting equipment, we even have the additional benefit of very fast initial counts.

The increase in voter participation in Oregon since the advent of vote-by-mail -- 10 to 30 percentage points above national averages, depending on the kind of election -- leads to the only other issue, which is slow machine counts on election night after the polls close due to the surge of late ballots received at drop-off locations around the state. Oregon in fact isn't really 'vote by mail,' it's vote-at-home, with a paper ballot that can be mailed or left at any official drop-off point in the state, including county election offices, many schools and libraries, malls, town squares, etc.

The great advantage of the Oregon system is that it relies on the principle that if you appeal to the best instincts of the citizen, the overwhelming majority will 'do our part' to ensure the integrity of the democratic voting process, whether it is full consideration of the candidates and issues before voting, watching to make sure all ballots are securely transferred and counted, or favoring those laws and policies that insure that everyone eligible can vote, that their votes are counted, and that the candidates and measures with the most votes win.

The system is also cheaper than running traditional precinct elections. What's not to like?

It's so simple, and so sensible. Next time someone suggests 'i-voting' or 'm-voting' or whatever, you know what to point to...

Firebird Extension Idea

Published February 7, 2004

Web: I watched a hilarious Rob Corddry segment from The Daily Show last night, repeated from earlier in the week. Having not seen The Daily Show in a while, since dropping everything but basic cable, I went looking through The Daily Show video archives to see if I could find a few more good ones -- with no luck.

Every link on the Video page links to something like this:

javascript:openMediaPop('/multimedia/tds/cord/cord_8065.html','','SRM','high');

Which opens a popup with this page. Now, the interesting thing is that I do have Real Player installed -- but for some reason, Firebird hasn't figured this out. If I could just get through the twisty-turny maze of Javascript 'detection' code, I could get the URL for the .ram file directly from the server and play it.

So this is where my idea for a new extension comes in. It should do this:

  • intercept Javascript calls to navigator.userAgent, navigator.plugins et al, and allow the user to select what plugins to report;
  • add a context (right-click) menu item to list the URIs used in data attributes of object tags, and allow those to be cut and pasted -- or launched in any helper apps registered for that filename extension. Alternatively, it could just replace the object with a link to open that file in the helper app.

The first allows the user to choose what plugins to report are installed, and navigate their way past broken 'detection' scripts like Comedy Central's and The BBC Radio Player's.

The second then allows the user to get hold of the URL for future use, or pop it up in an external viewer.

David Hasselhoff’s role in ending the Cold War

Published February 6, 2004

Funny: The Beeb reports that 'Baywatch star David Hasselhoff is griping that his role in reuniting East and West Germany has been overlooked.'

Speaking to Germany's TV Spielfilm magazine, the 51-year-old carped about how his pivotal role in harmonising relations between the two sides of the divide had been overlooked.

'I find it a bit sad that there is no photo of me hanging on the walls in the Berlin Museum at Checkpoint Charlie,' he told the magazine.

Hating ABIs

Published February 5, 2004

Software: OK, one of my current UNIX pet peeves, perfectly illustrated by the new RPMs for KDE 3.2. 

  : jm 1015...; sudo rpm -Uvh *.rpm 
  Password:
  error: Failed dependencies:
      libiw.so.26 is needed by kdenetwork-3.2.0-0.1

I don't have a wireless card in this machine.

WHY does kdenetwork, a network configuration applet, link with a shared library component of the wireless-tools package? Why is this not simply a shell script, or even an optional binary command? Have the UNIX desktop environments forgotten all about the UNIX way in their rush to implement 'components'? To quote Doug McIlroy :

This is the Unix philosophy. Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

(my emphasis added.)

Hint: if you don't intend to call some third-party code over and over
again several times a second -- in other words, so that performance is essential -- you do not need to link against it as a shared library. Calling it as a command, with fork and exec, will work just fine and avoids this kind of 'DLL hell'.

A related issue is how this emphasis on binary or component ABIs impacts scriptability and plugins. Ever since Netscape came up with their plugins, we've had this new model that third-party application extensibility meant linking shared libraries into the app (with ABI issues), or calling out to components over distributed-object transports like CORBA or MCOP (with API issues), instead of the traditional 'helper app' model.

As a result, generally, when I install a new version of Mozilla, I have to try and remember what plugins I had in the last one, track them down, download the latest version to work around ABI changes, and hope they work in this version of the browser.

Inevitably, they don't -- I haven't found a working Java plugin in over a year. On the other hand, I can always click on a .ram link to listen to a RealAudio stream, because it doesn't really matter if the browser and realplayer were built with different compilers in the 'helper app' case.

In addition, and paradoxically, scriptability is becoming less of an option in the modern UNIX GUI apps. Let's say I want to be able to do the kind of thing Windows has had for years with it's 'Send To' menu; put a simple shell script into an 'actions' directory, and it'll appear in the right-click context menu, so that I can right-click on a file and select 'Run frobnicator' to frobnicate it. (Similar is possible from MS Internet Explorer.)

Is it possible in Firebird? Not a hope. But you can write an extension -- 100KB of undocumented Javascript. Great.

In fairness, the file managers have the right idea -- GNOME's Nautilus does support this nicely, and so does Konqueror. But there's an ongoing tendency to adopt the ABI dynamic-linking model, or the distributed-object model, in places where it's just not necessary, and a simple UNIX pipe or command API -- the 'helper app' model -- would work beautifully.

hmm. </rant> ;)

More interesting bits on ‘rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy’

Published February 4, 2004

Spam: Gary Schrock on the SpamAssassin-talk notes:

... that study that's being talked about in an email doesn't exist. There's something in the Trends in Cognitive Science journal about it, that discusses why that email is actually as readable as it is. I'd try to pass on the knowledge, but while I may work in a lab that does psycholinguistics, that doesn't mean I understand it enough to pass it on. But the short story is there's no such research at Cambridge.

(The irony here is that this was being talked about in the lab where I work earlier today, and when I mentioned this email someone in the lab was able to hand me to article from Trends. Unfortunately the journal is only available online with subscription.)

No Longer Possible To Spoil Votes In Ireland?

Published February 4, 2004

eVoting: 'Spoiling your vote', e.g. writing in 'none of the above' on a ballot paper, is a legally-permitted response to a ballot in Ireland and many other countries. Secrecy in how you vote is constitutionally required.

Aengus Lawlor on the ICTE list points out that it appears the new e-voting system in Ireland will no longer permit spoiling to take place in secrecy.

Indeed, in the 7 constituencies where e-voting machines were trialed in the 2002 Nice Referendum, no spoiled votes were cast. Compare:

  • Carlow-Kilkenny: turnout 47,192, Spoiled Votes 244 (that's 0.51%)
  • Cork North-West: 29,056, 144 (0.49%)
  • Dublin Central: 28,880, 115 (0.39%)
  • Dublin North-Central: 36,532, 93 (0.25%)

with the e-voting constituencies:

  • Dublin South: 51,229, 0
  • Dublin South-West: 31,336, 0
  • Dublin West: 25,659, 0
  • Dun Laoghaire: 50,070, 0

A pretty notable anomaly there, ignoring the wishes of 0.5% of the electorate.

On a separate issue -- let's hope the Powervote systems aren't as bad as the Diebold ones. Here's the RABA Technologies' assessment of Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting System security (PDF, 167KB), noting locks picked in 10 seconds, default passwords used to re-encode a voter card as a supervisor card, etc etc.

BUA Training — clueless interview

Published February 2, 2004

Media: ever wondered why SCO is being targetted by the MyDoom virus?

Wonder no more. Apparently, according to William Campbell of BUA Training in this hilariously off-the-wall interview with RTE's Morning Ireland radio show, it's because of the Browser Wars and 'Open System Software'. He goes on to explain:

'if you go to a website, such as openoffice.org, you can download a free copy of what is the competitor for Microsoft Office, an equivalent of Microsoft Word, and equivalent of Microsoft Excel, which probably most of you have on their computers.' 'These competitors, they don't really exists as companies, although there are some companies such as Open Office.org and eh, Star Office and lynux, but em, Microsoft has put all the commercial competition out of business, or they bought them up or whatever.'

Complete transcript here.

Sounds like Morning Ireland needs some new 'computer experts' ;)

Public Service Announcement

Published January 31, 2004

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...

Applauding the Landing

Published January 31, 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 ;)

Blogsplosion!

Published January 30, 2004

Social: It's a blogsplosion! (neologism, Creative Commons license, cheers.)

First off, we have Old Rottenhat, a fantastic group-weblog featuring several old mates of mine, musing on music (Eoghan), psychogeography (Delaney), quitting work (Dr.), and random comments (Krossie). It's great reading.

Next, Tom has finally set us up the blog in the form of Linux and Goblins, 'your home for neither of the above', with some trademark Tom-style moaning, half-baked ideas, and pestering of some politician git called Phillip Boucher-Hayes.

Both are now firmly ensconced in the sidebar, and on my daily list... an RSS feed for Old Rottenhat can be found here, and I'll be making one for Tom too when I get the chance.

Referrers from IAEA.org

Published January 27, 2004

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:

Server Moved

Published January 26, 2004

Admin: taint.org has moved to a new server. Let's see if it works!

New Server

Published January 26, 2004

Admin: So, taint.org has moved to a new server. With any luck, this message should show up there and get blogged...

US/Ireland Cultural Differences

Published January 26, 2004

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.

Record business protects Irish and British consumers

Published January 26, 2004

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!)

Using Subversion With Fedora Core 1

Published January 26, 2004

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.

The IKEA Walkthrough

Published January 26, 2004

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)

Debugging Thoughts

Published January 26, 2004

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 ;)

Orkut Down for Tweakage

Published January 26, 2004

Social: orkut - under construction: ' Based on your suggestions, I'm taking orkut.com back to the lab for some fine-tuning and improvements. It will likely take a few days to finish them. None of your data will be lost and I should have some nice surprises for you when I bring it back online. I'll email you when it's ready and running again.'

Probably taken offline mainly to deal with this wee buglet ;)

Orkut.com is interesting on a few levels:

  • the Google link paid off massively. It has a lot more geek cred than it would have had otherwise (especially given the in-my-opinion fugly MSN-style design, and -- ugh -- .aspx URLs ;)

    As far as I can see, it's not really Google-affiliated; just written by a Googler in his spare time. The Google names I know don't seem to be in there, and no games of 'Six Degrees of Sergei Brin' are possible ;)

  • the invite-only startup gave it some good initial buzz.

But IMO it needs a few tweaks: the main one IMO is export. Friendster, Tribe.net et al all give the impression that they want to lock you in the trunk so they can 'monetize' your network, or something. If that's the way it'll work, great, it's a toy, and that's all they're getting from me.

These things are just toys until I can get my data back out again in a machine-readable format (FOAF, RDF, etc.) I want to augment it with other social data; like an anti-spam web of trust based on who I know, and being able to graphviz my social network, dammit! ;)

Brian McCallister has a few more useful comments.

Puzzles: a UK crypto guy says the Voynich manuscript is gibberish and reckons he's figured out how it was made. 'They have shown that its various word, which appear regularly throughout the script, could have been created using table and grille techniques. The different syllables that make up words are written in columns, and a grille - a piece of cardboard with three squares cut out in a diagonal pattern - is slid along the columns. The three syllables exposed form a word. The grille is pushed along to expose three new syllables, and a new word is exposed.'

Spam: NY Times on the Spam Conf 2004.

Moriarty Tribunal Reading Weblogs

Published January 21, 2004

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.

Tridge’s Spam Hashing System

Published January 21, 2004

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!

What Invention Are You?

Published January 21, 2004

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.'

Tales of Tel Aviv

Published January 20, 2004

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.'

Serbian Football Hooligans

Published January 20, 2004

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)

New Spammer Trifluidityck

Published January 14, 2004

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.

More Crazy Laws

Published January 14, 2004

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.

Annoying Non-spam Tricks, pt. XVIII

Published January 13, 2004

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&#46;buy4now&#46;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....

The EURion Constellation

Published January 12, 2004

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)

The True Story of Monopoly(R)?

Published January 12, 2004

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.

The Spam Conference 2004

Published January 10, 2004

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!

Back to work you slackers

Published January 9, 2004

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.

Some Good News, For Once

Published January 9, 2004

Food: So I'm reading Fast Food Nation, which looked well set to put me off burgers and beef products for life.

Then I get to the epilogue, and find a glowing write-up for In-N-Out Burger, our local chain; they provide healthcare for their workers, use quality-assured beef, and have received top marks in food quality and cleanliness for years! Hooray! And they even have a secret menu (although the 4x4 seems a bit Elvis, if you ask me).

Beef's back on the menu!

Society: The Age: They are afraid, very afraid: 'it would seem that terrorists have
succeeded in frightening a nation. They may be aided by several decades of over-reaction to the social malaise that is endemic to the poorer and disenfranchised parts of America. It seems that at least one generation has already grown up in the grip of largely irrational fears.'

Misc: some snippets:

Google-Flop: Self-Reinforcing Stupidity

Published January 9, 2004

Web: What's the link between Debian Linux and Dueling Banjos? Any ideas? No? Well, according to Debian Weekly News of September 16th, 2003, it's become what's called a Google-flop:

No Dueling Banjos from Debian. Some of the most bizarre mails on debian-devel over the years have been repeated requests by various people for the sheet music for dueling banjos. Several list subscribers have been eager to assist the posters in their search. Jim Penny called this the Dueling Banjo Effect and explained that this has become a self-perpetuating Google-flop. People use Google which points them to Debian to get this sheet music, and the act of asking reinforces Google's notion that Debian is a good place to get the music.

(thanks to Rick Moen for pointing this out on the ILUG list.)

Nicorette

Published January 8, 2004

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.'

MS and GPL software

Published January 8, 2004

GNU: Let's all be very nice and friendly for our latest convert to the GPL club, Microsoft. Hi, MS!

Degenatron!

Published January 7, 2004

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!

Subversion

Published January 5, 2004

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.

Middle Earth Trivia

Published January 5, 2004

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...

Irish Free Software Organisation goes live, and piracy notes

Published January 5, 2004

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.

Post-Xmas

Published January 3, 2004

Vacation: We're back. Well, technically, my body is back, but the silver thread is reeling in somewhere over Greenland. So I'm pre-classifying my mail and looking for urgent stuff with my eyes glazing over instead of doing anything more useful.

Scams: Interesting Wired News article: 'Cyber-blackmail artists are shaking down office workers, threatening to delete computer files or install pornographic images on their work PCs unless they pay a ransom'. 'The e-mail typically contains a demand that unless a small fee is paid ... they will attack the PC ... or download onto the machine images of child pornography.'

Of course, it's simply spammed out, and they phish in anyone who is dumb enough to take it seriously and reply. But it does raise an interesting point, which I read about last week in this interview with Pete Townshend:

'Perhaps Townshend (was) thinking of a case at Southwark Crown Court in 1998, in which the judge made it clear what constituted possession: that you were in possession of child pornography not just if you actively downloaded it, but if it appeared on your computer screen at all.'

So that sounds like, if child-porn images are found on a PC -- and it doesn't matter how they got there -- the PC's owner is liable. So theoretically this could be exploited to cause serious legal difficulties to a UK resident with a lack of computer literacy, or a bad email client that displays images in messages from unknown senders without user approval first. Another bad law.

Funny: Andy Kershaw in North Korea: songs about revolutionary cabbage-growing.

SpamAssassin wins twice in OSDir.com’s 2003 Editor’s Choice Awards in Open Source (fwd)

Published December 19, 2003

SpamAssassin: The 2003 OSDir.com Editor's Choice Awards in Open Source. Woo!

Editor's Choice for Best Application (Top 5 environments):

Email: SpamAssassin (Double Winner)

SpamAssassin keeps keeps me out of Anger Management classes. If you are not running SpamAssassin get thee to SpamAssassin.org. Now. If you need your friendly neighborhood system administrator to do it.. start sending flowers or Scotch today with a nice little note asking to get SpamAssassin going medieval on your mail server.

Miscellaneous Editor's Choice:

Can't Live Without: SpamAssassin

The fact that this doesn't have to be explained says it all.

Wright Brothers Hack at MIT

Published December 18, 2003

Funny: The latest MIT 'hack': a replica of the Wright brothers' biplane on top of the MIT Great Dome. Nice work!

The model was dismantled Thursday by Barber and Cunha, the Institute's hack evaluation and removal team, who salvaged a completed FAA certificate of airworthiness form for the MIT Museum.

How Not To Use OOP

Published December 18, 2003

Code: OOP over the top: a hilarious dissection of some of the most monstrous 'how to rewrite OO-style' I have ever seen -- take a 15-line if/elseif/else clause and rewrite as a thoroughly over-engineered unmaintainable 7-class, 15-method disaster, using the Singleton and Factory patterns. The rewrite in the original article is intended seriously, as far as I can tell.

As the xmldatabases.org article says: 'this is really a general problem with OO development. Fancy object oriented architectures have become the goal and this article maybe makes that point more clearly then anything I could ever say. It's representative of the thinking from a few years ago (written in 2000), and shows us just how much damage we now have to undo. It basically says that the simple solution that just works is wrong and will be unmaintainable. Maybe that's true, maybe it's not, nowhere does the article consider the question of whether or not that code actually needs to be that generic. It simply says that the simple solution is bad and that the seven class monster they came up with is the right solution. Talk about doing a disservice to students trying to learn how to build solid computer systems.'

(Found via sourcefrog.net -- Martin Pool's weblog, great for Linux and code bits).

WebMake: linux.com: An introduction to building sites with WebMake. W00t! Let's hope nobody asks any questions while I'm away for xmas ;)

The Wright Brothers and Patenting

Published December 18, 2003

Innovation: Maciej posts a fantastic look back on the Wright Brothers from an interesting angle -- their patent-related antics.

The Wright brothers won every patent case they fought, and it did them absolutely no good. The prospect of a fortune wasn't what motivated them to build an airplane, but ironically enough they could have made a fortune had they just passed on the litigation. In 1905, the Wrights were five years ahead of any potential competitor, and posessed a priceless body of practical knowledge. Their trade secrets and accumulated experience alone would have made them the leaders in the field, especially if they had teamed up with Curtiss. Instead, they got to watch heavily government-subsidized programs in Europe take the technical lead in airplane design as American aviation stagnated.

Fantastic article. If you're curious about the history of patenting, and its many fundamental failures, I can't recommend it enough.

Weblogs: Guardian's 'best of British blogging': good set of winners this year.

Racism in New Zealand, Teapot, and Lena

Published December 17, 2003

Politics: Lest we get carried away with the beauty, grooviness and coolness-in-general of New Zealand -- where 1 in 160 of the population was involved in the making of the LoTR trilogy -- up pops this story. It seems racism and xenophobia is finally arriving on the shores of Aotearoa.

Under the headline 'Whose country is it anyway?' Peters's leaflet rails against Asian immigrants, falsely claiming that hundreds of thousands are coming to New Zealand and blaming them for, among other things, traffic problems in Auckland. These immigrants are, according to Peters, simultaneously poor enough to be leeches on the welfare system, and rich enough to drive up the cost of housing.

It would be easy to dismiss all this as a piece of desperate populism. But, unlike the Australian One Nation party, New Zealand First is not a collapsing political joke: it is the third-biggest party in Wellington's parliament, and until 1999 Mr Peters was the country's deputy prime minister. Barring an electoral miracle, the opposition National party will have to take them on as coalition partners if it is ever to win another election.

'Traffic problems in Auckland'? WTF? (found via Danny Yee)

Computing: Amazing. via GirlHacker, it turns out that a teapot has long been used as a demonstration of complex computer graphics techiques -- with it's curved surfaces, hidden surfaces and the like (don't ask me, I'm no graphics guru). If you were around for the early 3-D graphics days, you've almost definitely seen the teapot.

Well, it turns out there was a real teapot. Here's the history.

A related image is that of 'Lenna', a standard test image used when testing image compression schemes, which features a woman giving the viewer a rather saucy come-hither look. It turns out she was a Swedish model, who posed for Playboy in 1972, and that picture was scanned by an (unauthorized) researcher at USC. Piracy!

Playboy later threatened to prosecute over the unauthorized use, but by now has recognised the unique history this now has, and has relented. Cool.

Racism in New Zealand, Teapot, and Lena

Published December 17, 2003

Lest we get carried away with the beauty, grooviness and coolness-in-general of New Zealand -- where 1 in 160 of the population was involved in the making of the LoTR trilogy -- up pops this story. It seems racism and xenophobia is finally arriving on the shores of Aotearoa.

Under the headline 'Whose country is it anyway?' Peters's leaflet rails against Asian immigrants, falsely claiming that hundreds of thousands are coming to New Zealand and blaming them for, among other things, traffic problems in Auckland. These immigrants are, according to Peters, simultaneously poor enough to be leeches on the welfare system, and rich enough to drive up the cost of housing.

It would be easy to dismiss all this as a piece of desperate populism. But, unlike the Australian One Nation party, New Zealand First is not a collapsing political joke: it is the third-biggest party in Wellington's parliament, and until 1999 Mr Peters was the country's deputy prime minister. Barring an electoral miracle, the opposition National party will have to take them on as coalition partners if it is ever to win another election.

'Traffic problems in Auckland'? WTF? (found via Danny Yee)

Computing: Amazing. via GirlHacker, it turns out that a teapot has long been used as a demonstration of complex computer graphics techiques -- with it's curved surfaces, hidden surfaces and the like (don't ask me, I'm no graphics guru). If you were around for the early 3-D graphics days, you've almost definitely seen the teapot.

Well, it turns out there was a real teapot. Here's the history.

A related image is that of 'Lenna', a standard test image used when testing image compression schemes, which features a woman giving the viewer a rather saucy come-hither look. It turns out she was a Swedish model, who posed for Playboy in 1972, and that picture was scanned by an (unauthorized) researcher at USC. Piracy!

Playboy later threatened to prosecute over the unauthorized use, but by now has recognised the unique history this now has, and has relented. Cool.

Aug 14th 2003 Blackout and the Blaster worm

Published December 17, 2003

Security: Bruce Schneier points out some interesting angles on the official report into the US power blackout of Aug 14th:

Why the tortured prose? The writers take pains to assure us that the power generation and delivery systems were not affected by MSBlast. But what about the alarm systems? Clearly, they were all affected by something--and all at the same time.

To be honest, it sounds pretty damn close to me, as I've said before.

That Samuel L. Jackson quote again

Published December 16, 2003

Ireland: Looks like I was wrong about that Samuel L. Jackson quote -- it really did happen!

Tom did the heavy lifting, and asked the production company; here's the scoop:

Anyway in answer to your question, similar comments were indeed made on the TV Special 'SWAT - The Movie'. In the programme Colin is considered a very successful 'fish out of water' in LA and the line of questioning was exploring how the Americans view him. Kate was 'claiming' Colin as our own in an 'inclusive' way. It was meant as a mark of comradeship rather than thievery and being of liberal mind I can assure you Kate has no intention of staking any real claims! It went like this.

KATE THORNTON:
Now lets talk about Colin because in the UK he's become the man of the moment.

SAMUEL L.JACKSON:
Really? Only in the UK?

KT: Well everywhere but we kind of claim him as our own because he's from Ireland.

SLJ: You can't claim him because he's from Ireland.

KT: Well we do because it's close by. (laughter)

SLJ: Ok. That's the source of all the conflict over there. You people always claiming the Irish as yours. We got a little problem just like that here called slavery but that's ok we don't need to talk about that so lets go. (more laughter)

KT: Well Colin is a very well paid slave.

SLJ: Ok good.

KT: As are you.

SLJ: Yeah all right.

KT: What did you know about him before you came to work with him on this project?

SLJ: I knew he was a hot, young, Irish actor who was good looking and I talked to a couple of people about him. I talked to Bruce about him and I talked to some script supervisors that had worked with him on a couple of things and they all loved him.

KT: So you checked him out?

SLJ: Yeah

The programme was an irreverent promotional vehicle for SWAT and it's cast and I must say that Colin gave the most honest interview I've ever heard on a junket. Long may his attitude prevail. Does this answer your question and win you the bet?

Yours sincerely,

Rufus Roubicek
Executive Producer
matchboxtv.com

Overheard on the radio

Published December 16, 2003

Funny: overheard on the radio just now, from the DJ interrupted during a station ident: 'Your phone's ringing. What, you have a text message? Fancy!'

Just to remind me I'm in the US ;)

Mind you, the DJ seems a bit out of touch; he's clearly just discovered the Rock Gods that are The Darkness.

Overheard on the radio

Published December 16, 2003

overheard on the radio just now, from the DJ interrupted during a station ident: 'Your phone's ringing. What, you have a text message? Fancy!'

Just to remind me I'm in the US ;)

Mind you, the DJ seems a bit out of touch; he's clearly just discovered the Rock Gods that are The Darkness.

Pharma companies ‘hoodwinking’ medical journals

Published December 16, 2003

Health: Revealed: how drug firms 'hoodwink' medical journals (Observer) -- an
amazing attempt to mislead scientific progress for short-term commercial gain. (via forteana):

Hundreds of articles in medical journals claiming to be written by academics or doctors have been penned by ghostwriters in the pay of drug companies, an Observer inquiry reveals. The journals, bibles of the profession, have huge influence on which drugs doctors prescribe and the treatment hospitals provide. ...

Estimates suggest that almost half of all articles published in journals are by ghostwriters. While doctors who have put their names to the papers can be paid handsomely for 'lending' their reputations, the ghostwriters remain hidden. They, and the involvement of the pharmaceutical firms, are rarely revealed. ...

(One) email, seen by The Observer, said: 'In order to reduce your workload to a minimum, we have had our ghostwriter produce a first draft based on your published work. I attach it here.' The article was a 12-page review paper ready to be presented at an forthcoming conference. Healy's name appeared as the sole author, even though he had never seen a single word of it before. But he was unhappy with the glowing review of the drug in question, so he suggested some changes. The company replied, saying he had missed some 'commercially important' points. In the end, the ghostwritten paper appeared at the conference and in a psychiatric journal in its original form - under another doctor's name.

25,000 ton spam relay

Published December 16, 2003

Spam: This is funny -- via IP, ANNOUNCING: The amphibious transport dock and spam relay:

(USS San Antonio) supports the Marine Corps 'mobility triad,' the LCAC (Landing Craft Air Cushion vehicle), the 'Triple A-V' (AAAV - Advanced Amphibious Assault Vehicle) and the MV-22 (Osprey tiltrotor aircraft), and ... spammers in Guangdong, Red China.

Ah, the perils of COTS.

That Samuel L. Jackson quote again

Published December 16, 2003

Looks like I was wrong about that Samuel L. Jackson quote -- it really did happen!

Tom did the heavy lifting, and asked the production company; here's the scoop:

Anyway in answer to your question, similar comments were indeed made on the TV Special 'SWAT - The Movie'. In the programme Colin is considered a very successful 'fish out of water' in LA and the line of questioning was exploring how the Americans view him. Kate was 'claiming' Colin as our own in an 'inclusive' way. It was meant as a mark of comradeship rather than thievery and being of liberal mind I can assure you Kate has no intention of staking any real claims! It went like this.

KATE THORNTON: Now lets talk about Colin because in the UK he's become the man of the moment.

SAMUEL L.JACKSON: Really? Only in the UK?

KT: Well everywhere but we kind of claim him as our own because he's from Ireland.

SLJ: You can't claim him because he's from Ireland.

KT: Well we do because it's close by. (laughter)

SLJ: Ok. That's the source of all the conflict over there. You people always claiming the Irish as yours. We got a little problem just like that here called slavery but that's ok we don't need to talk about that so lets go. (more laughter)

KT: Well Colin is a very well paid slave.

SLJ: Ok good.

KT: As are you.

SLJ: Yeah all right.

KT: What did you know about him before you came to work with him on this project?

SLJ: I knew he was a hot, young, Irish actor who was good looking and I talked to a couple of people about him. I talked to Bruce about him and I talked to some script supervisors that had worked with him on a couple of things and they all loved him.

KT: So you checked him out?

SLJ: Yeah.

[....]

The programme was an irreverent promotional vehicle for SWAT and it's cast and I must say that Colin gave the most honest interview I've ever heard on a junket. Long may his attitude prevail. Does this answer your question and win you the bet?

Yours sincerely,

Rufus Roubicek
Executive Producer
matchboxtv.com

Windows/Linux Biculturalism

Published December 16, 2003

Software: Joel on Biculturalism: 'What are the cultural differences between Unix and Windows programmers? There are many details and subtleties, but for the most part it comes down to one thing: Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers.'

I'm not sure I agree; I've met lots of Windows programmers who take what Joel calls the 'UNIX' orientation, and even a few Unix people who are as user-oriented in their coding as what Joel calls the 'Windows' way.

But, talking of the Unix/Win divide -- it seems that Ward Cunningham, inventor of the Wiki, is joining MS, who have something called SharePoint Team Services, an editable-web group sharing system as part of Front Page.

If you ever wanted to see an illustration of a Windows-Unix divide in the web age, it sounds like this is it: Wiki has quick-and-dirty links in FuglyBouncingCaps, is text-heavy, has obscure text markup formats, has little in the way of roles, access control, or a workflow model, and has some odd magic pages that live in the same namespace as everything else despite being different.

SharePoint, by contrast, is integrated with everything in Office, is a great success where the MS Kool-Aid is viewed as tasty, uses role-based security and a workflow, and seems to be generally reviled elsewhere.

No better illustration. The only thing that could improve that would be if SharePoint has a talking paperclip I've missed.

A New Toy

Published December 15, 2003

Fun: C just got her xmas present; a digital camera, the Sony DSC P10 to be exact. Results to right ;)

Good: Sony's easy-to-use use of USB mass-storage and open formats (GIF, JPEG, and MPEG). pnmstitch.

Bad: having to upgrade my kernel to 2.4.23 to get the bloody thing mounted! (Of course, iPhoto recognised it right away.)

Irish Anti-Spam Law, and Gaven Stubberfield Arrested

Published December 11, 2003

Spam: Let me take this moment to welcome our UK friends to the 'spam now illegal' club; unlike the US, the European and Australian anti-spam laws seem to be shaping up nicely, requiring opt-in before 'email marketing' can be sent.

This actually happened in Ireland a couple of weeks ago, but I think I forgot to mention it here, so here's the details:

Announcement, full text, full text as HTML. (It's section 13 you want to read. Note that OpenOffice seems to have miscounted the bullet points in the HTML version ;)

The good stuff:

  • it's opt-in, not opt-out like the cruddy CAN-SPAM act in the US. so that's a fundamentally anti-spam position. Thanks EU!
  • each spam counts as a separate offence = lots of damages, I'd guess.

  • forging/disguising of originating header info is prohibited.

The bad:

  • if you run a mailing list, and you're not sure that you got everyone's permission to receive your mails (and if not, why not?), you'd better do a reconfirmation run quick ;)
  • no private right of action; but that's pretty much std for Europe. we're reliant on the Regulator to take action against spammers.
  • spamming to mailing lists is not prohibited -- but then, I haven't seen that blocked by any other law.
  • it's unclear if spamming to role addresses (e.g. 'foo-admin', 'info@company', etc.) is prohibited. I would guess that if they wind up in the mailbox of a 'natural person' it would be. But this may have to be worked out in court.
  • talks about 'direct marketing'. Does this mean that faked-up 'newsletters' will be a loophole? Also, means that religious and political spam is permitted. But I haven't seen much of that in Ireland... yet...

  • won't be any good against US-based spammers. No surprise there. HOWEVER it may be useful against large multinational companies taking advantage of CAN-SPAM's relaxed regime to indulge in a little spamming, if they have an Irish office.

    And, of course, it'll mean that Ireland won't develop Florida's reputation any time soon, which is a good thing.

  • Will it be useful against spammers in other parts of the EU? That's another question. Anyone know? I know of a bunch in France I'd really like to deal with.

    Brian Nisbet reckons it may.

I was reminded by this letter from the Department of Communications received by UCC , which notes:

But the Minister has announced that he intends using Ireland's Presidency of the EU to initiate global partnership in clamping down on 'spam.'

Global? Just don't ask for any help from the Florida state government. ;)

Spam: Other (big) spam news: 'Gaven Stubberfield' arrested for 'falsifying his identity so that his e-mails could not be traced'. SBL say that Jeremy Jaynes, aka 'Gaven Stubberfield' is the eight-most prolific spammer in the world, and is 'notorious for 'horsey porn' spam'.

Irish: Irish WWW pioneer Peter Flynn now has a weblog, it seems. As far as I can tell, Peter was responsible for much of the good stuff at celt.ucc.ie, which reminds me to post this link to Pangur Bán I've been meaning to post.

Messe ocus Pangur Bán,
cechtar nathar fria saindan:
bíth a menmasam fri seilgg,
mu memna céin im saincheirdd.

In my case, it's mise agus Bubba Liath, otherwise pretty close despite the intervening 11 centuries...

Great WashPost article on patents

Published December 11, 2003

Patents: The Washington Post gets it. 'The country "needs to revamp not just the patent system, but the entire system of intellectual property law," said Andrew S. Grove, chairman of Intel Corp. "It needs to redefine it for an era that is the information age as compared to the industrial age."'

BTW, one thing people say is that software patents are fine, as long as the technique is novel and new. What that misses is that novel, new techniques quickly become commonplace and standard infrastructure; consider image/audio/video compression, general compression techniques, cryptography, and so on. Those were all high-tech, super-complex schemes 5 years ago. Nowadays, we have JPEG, gzip, openssl, ssh, and all these other standard tools that are just part and parcel of our basic infrastructure. In software, 'new and novel' becomes 'standard infrastructure' remarkably quickly, and that's what's driving software innovation.

Now THAT is cool

Published December 10, 2003

Software: There's a certain frisson to be had when you find out that your software is running somewhere really cool; I got this when I found out that PLP was being used in McMurdo Base, Antarctica and SpamAssassin as The Well's spam filtering system (SpamAssassin's now even more widely deployed, which is amazing -- but this was the first 'woo!' moment).

However, I think Justin Frankel of WinAmp has got me well beat -- the International Space Station. Bloody hell.

Aside: I wonder if they need a spam filter up there? ;)

Funny: We Love The SCO Information Minister. 'Their assertions are incorrect. The source code is absolutely owned by SCO.'

Spam: 2 South Florida men agree to post $1 million bonds before spamming in future after an FTC bust -- looks like a mortgage-scam spam team. Yay FTC!

The two portrayed themselves as mortgage lenders in unsolicited commercial e-mail, the FTC said, but their 30 Minute Mortgage operation was in fact not a lender and did not offer 30-year loans at 3.95 percent, as advertised.

Instead, the two were interested in getting potential customers to divulge their Social Security numbers, income and other sensitive financial data, which they then tried to sell to others, the FTC charged.

Samuel L. Jackson’s ‘Irish’ comment

Published December 10, 2003

Here's a hot UL that's floating around the irish web right now --

In a British program about Samuel L Jackson and Colin Farrell's lastest movie SWAT presented by British presenter, Kate Thornton, the following exchange occured:

Thornton: What was it like working with Colin (Farrell), cos he is just so hot in the U.K. right now?

Jackson: He's pretty hot in the U.S. too.

Thornton: Yeah, but he is one of our own.

Jackson: Isn't he from Ireland?

Thornton: Yeah, but we can claim him cos Ireland is beside us.

Jackson: You see that's your problem right there. You British keep claiming people that don't belong to you. We had that problem here in America too, it was called slavery.

... yeah, right. ;)

(Update: Actually, believe it or not, that's more or less how it really went. Here's the transcript.)

Some commentary at
TheReggaeBoyz.com (quote: 'I NEARLY DEAD TO RASS!!!!') and Kuro5hin.

It looks like the TV programme does exist; no scripts online, unfortunately, so we'll never figure out if this one really happened, I think.

IMO, it's made up for sure. That last line is just a little too harsh for a primetime schmooze-a-gram, at the very least. Plus, it's the kind of thing only an Irishman would give a shit about -- the perpetual adoption of Irish celebs and worthies by the UK media is a continual source of irritation for the Irish -- as Dervala puts it:

'No, Oscar Wilde was ours. You put him in jail, though. And Shaw was ours. And Yeats. And Johnny Rotten.'

Spam Surrealism

Published December 10, 2003

Spam: Yoz comments on the bizarre new names appearing in spam, linking to a 2lmc spool entry and this entry at rereviewed.com, featuring such beauties as:

  • Inflorescence B. Afghan
  • Petards Q. Blinkers
  • Foobar Economides
  • Hillock H. Fossilized
  • Hotel K. Primate
  • Networked T. Crowley
  • Jitterbug I. Catastrophes
  • Pragmatism O. Playhouses

Me, I'm looking forward to getting spam from Collately Sisters with the international finance arse and Peter O'Hanraha-hanrahan on new Euro-quota rates.

Oh look, I've found some war:

MORRIS: Back live now, progress on The Day Today smart bomb - Jonathan! Get rid of Hurd! Thanks!

(Hurd vanishes from a monitor, replaced by a bomb's eye view of the war zone.)

MAN WITH GLASSES: Well, Chris, as you can see there's the missile, cruising at around 2000 per second trying to locate the target the soldier it's aimed at - there's the soldier, it goes in through the mouth, down through the oesophagus, into the stomach and there's the explosion. (The camera enters the gob of a surprised trooper before the picture turns to static)

MORRIS: Absolutely bang! That's The Day Today bringing you another tear on the face of the world's mother! Alan! Sport!

She’s Back

Published December 10, 2003

Irish: Sarah Carey's back -- good to see it. Delivering a prime piece of moral outrage regarding malls (or 'shopping centres' as they're quaintly called on the eastern shores), and their intolerance of political speech.

Redistributing the Future

Published December 10, 2003

Politics: WorldChanging.org on open source: 'we pay a lot of attention to it here, so much so that several worldchangers have asked why. Outside of the realm of computing, they ask, what does collaborative software have to do with changing the world? With sustainability? With democracy? With justice?'

'... as William Gibson reminds us, the future is here, it's just not well-distributed yet. The answer to our problems is not to redistribute wealth, it's to redistribute the future. In very practical terms, that's what the open source (OS) movement is doing.'

Great article -- and great picture from the CSMonitor (copied above) to illustrate it!

Warren Ellis on pop

Published December 9, 2003

Music: Warren Ellis on pop:

The American music industry ... seems to have sunk into a bizarre obsession with paedophilia. Britney Spears has gone from schoolgirl gear to a deeply strange hentai look, little-girl head stuck above great shiny plastic boobs, singing in a Minnie Mouse voice. No wonder she was being stalked by a shifty-looking middle-aged Japanese bloke. He probably had a suitcase full of tentacles to use on her. Christina Aguilera gifts us with the vision of a twelve-year-old girl in leather chaps and a rubber bra.

He's right, you know... I blame porn-addled middle-aged music biz producers, myself. (Found via the null device.)

Warren Ellis on pop

Published December 9, 2003

Warren Ellis on pop:

The American music industry ... seems to have sunk into a bizarre obsession with paedophilia. Britney Spears has gone from schoolgirl gear to a deeply strange hentai look, little-girl head stuck above great shiny plastic boobs, singing in a Minnie Mouse voice. No wonder she was being stalked by a shifty-looking middle-aged Japanese bloke. He probably had a suitcase full of tentacles to use on her. Christina Aguilera gifts us with the vision of a twelve-year-old girl in leather chaps and a rubber bra.

He's right, you know... I blame porn-addled middle-aged music biz producers, myself. (Found via the null device.)

Kayaking the L.A. River

Published December 8, 2003

Environment: (the built one, that is): LA Observed links to a couple of stories about kayaking the grim concrete trench that is the Los Angeles River. Well worth a read, and don't miss the 1999 LA Weekly story, in which the journalist makes it to the sea before being picked up by police.

The LA river was once a real river, but due to its tendency to flash-flood, was turned into a trickle in a concrete trench back in the 1930s. Since then, it's starred in a wide variety of movies and TV; the ones I can remember from the top of my head are Terminator 2, Earthquake, and V (which hilariously stole the river scenes directly from Earthquake, the cheapskates).

BTW, one interesting factor of living in the LA area is that you realise just how much of the TV and film of your childhood is taken directly from these surroundings; last time I was at the local train station, I looked out over a patch of sun-baked scrub and a couple of warehouses, and could clearly see The Six-Million Dollar Man running across it in my mind's eye -- wakka-wakka-wakka.

All along, I'd assumed these great sets were chosen for a particular reason, not just because they were right around the corner from the studio ;)

Talking of my local train station, here's a good article about a very Irvine situation; it seems people keep a second, clunker car at the train station, due to the shortcomings of the Southern California public transit system.

MS and Marshall Phelps

Published December 8, 2003

Patents: Wonder why MS is just now starting to monetize^W'liberalise' its patent portfolio, starting with a VFAT royalty fee for digital cameras?

Here's a possible reason why -- they've hired Marshall Phelps, from IBM, the executive who began IBM's aggressive patent-based revenue program in 1985.

Microsoft has reached a point, (Eben Moglen) says, where the company can no longer enjoy the same annual revenue growth that it did in the 1990s. Like IBM in the eighties, it's now looking for 'creative' ways to keep the shareholders happy.

CDWow: Anti-IRMA, pro-CDWow leaflet to print out and post somewhere (link via Donncha).

Report on Belgium’s Magic 4096 Votes

Published December 5, 2003

E-Voting: Very interesting page reproducing a translation of part of an expert report detailing an incident that occurred during an 'electronic election' in Belgium on May 18th 2003.

The latest EDRI-gram notes:

The total number of preferential votes cast on a specific candidate was higher than the total number of votes for his list. A series of tests was conducted on the computer of the president of the voting committee, but the error could not be reproduced. The difference in votes was exactly 4096, leading the research-team to the conclusion that the error was probably due to a spontaneous inversion of a binary position in the read-write memory of the PC.

This serves as a pretty good pointer to how, even if the software is audited to death and pronounced reliable, the hardware can still trip you up. Computers are fundamentally unreliable.

The solution? Why, a Voter-Verifiable Audit Trail of course. ;)

cdwow.ie

Published December 4, 2003

Music: So the current news on the Irish web scene is the Irish Recorded Music Association, Ireland's very own mini-RIAA, attempting to sue cheap CD vendor CDWow.ie out of the Irish market.

CDWow sell CDs cheap, by shipping from Hong Kong. Yes, the price differential between Hong Kong and Europe is so big that even considering the shipping costs, it works out significantly cheaper for the consumer.

The IRMA page on the issue is hilarious, with vague threats of 'credit cards floating through cyberspace' (whatever that means), and comments like: 'Remember every CD Wow purchase is a nail in the coffin of an Irish job', because so much of the bland, multinational, big-music-industry output is produced in Ireland. Suuuure.

Read on at the Boards.IE discussion. 'Doctor J' on that forum notes:

I saw a Ween cd, manufactured in the USA, on sale in HMV for EUR44.99 last night.
  • CD Universe - EUR14.99
  • HMV.co.uk - UKP17.99
  • Tower.co.uk - UKP9.41
    • Are IRMA seriously suggesting it is in the interests of the Irish consumer

    to be ripped off by almost EUR30???

‘the exhilarating whoops and pant-hoots of a troop of Rhesus monkeys’

Published December 4, 2003

Humour: This year's bad sex prizewinners. I think Rod Liddle deserved it, myself, purely for his comment:

Columnist and former Today programme editor Rod Liddle was almost struck out on the grounds that his sex scenes were actually rather well done, but his novel Too Beautiful for You, ('after a modicum of congenial thrusting, she came with the exhilarating whoops and pant- hoots of a troop of Rhesus monkeys') was reinstated after he said the judges were unqualified, since nobody on the Literary Review had had sex since 1936, in Abyssinia.