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Justin's Linklog Posts

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

Links for 2008-10-30

Published October 30, 2008

Links for 2008-10-29

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 320×240 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 <a href="http://taint.org/2008/09/23/154834a.html”>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.

Links for 2008-10-21

Published October 21, 2008

Links for 2008-10-17

Published October 17, 2008

Links for 2008-10-16

Published October 16, 2008

Closed phish data costing $326mm per year

Published October 16, 2008

Richard Clayton posted a very interesting article over at Light Blue Touchpaper; he notes:

Tyler Moore and I are presenting another one of our academic phishing papers today at the Anti-Phishing Working Group’s Third eCrime Researchers Summit here in Atlanta, Georgia. The paper “The consequence of non-cooperation in the fight against phishing” (pre-proceedings version here) goes some way to explaining anomalies we found in our previous analysis of phishing website lifetimes. The “take-down” companies reckon to get phishing websites removed within a few hours, whereas our measurements show that the average lifetimes are a few days.

When we examined our data […] we found that we were receiving “feeds” of phishing website URLs from several different sources — and the “take-down” companies that were passing the data to us were not passing the data to each other.

So it often occurs that take-down company A knows about a phishing website targeting a particular bank, but take-down company B is ignorant of its existence. If it is company B that has the contract for removing sites for that bank then, since they don’t know the website exists, they take no action and the site stays up.

Since we were receiving data feeds from both company A and company B, we knew the site existed and we measured its lifetime — which is much extended. In fact, it’s somewhat of a mystery why it is removed at all! Our best guess is that reports made directly to ISPs trigger removal.

They go on to estimate that ‘an extra $326 million per annum is currently being put at risk by the lack of data sharing.’

This is a classic example of how the proprietary mindset fails where it comes to dealing with abuse and criminal activity online. It would be obviously more useful for the public at large if the data were shared between organisations, and published publicly, but if you view your data feed as a key ingredient of your company’s proprietary "secret sauce" IP, you are not likely to publish and share it :(

The anti-phishing world appears to be full of this kind of stuff, disappointingly — probably because of the money-making opportunities available when providing services to big banks — but anti-spam isn’t free of it either.

Mark another one up for open source and open data…

(thanks to ryanr for the pic)

solid Python queueing?

Published October 15, 2008

OK, message queueing has become insufferably trendy. You don’t need to tell me, I’ve known it’s the bees knees for 4 years now ;)

The only problem is, there doesn’t seem to be a good queue broker written in Python. They’re in Java, Perl, more Perl, or Erlang, but a solid, reliable, persistent queueing backend in Python is nowhere to be found, as far as I can see. Work is a mainly-Python shop, and while we can deploy other languages to our production, staging and test grids easily enough, it’s a lot easier to do developer-desktop testing if we had an all-Python queue backend.

Am I missing one?

Links for 2008-10-14

Published October 14, 2008

Dublinr Exhibition

Published October 14, 2008

Dublin is a city that, photographically at least, can be reduced to a set of clichés, but a new exhibition offers a fresh, vibrant perspective of the Irish Capital. Dublinr is organised by a group of photographers that came together through the photo sharing website Flickr.

The exhibition opens at 6.00pm on Wednesday 5 November, runs until Sunday 9, from 11:00am – 6:30pm daily, and admission is free.

The Joinery Gallery | Arbour Hill | Stoneybatter | Dublin 7.

Some fantastic local photographers, including Andy Sheridan, whose work I’ve been following for a couple of months now; and a good location. D7 is full of good stuff nowadays — in fact, ever since I moved out ;)

IWA post-mortem

Published October 13, 2008

I didn’t win a Web Award — but then, given the competition from a couple of very professional news organisations, I really wasn’t expecting to ;) Silicon Republic won, and rightly so. Good on ’em.

I had a great night nonetheless, hanging out with Vishal, Walter (who won his category!), Conor O’Neill, Jason and a bunch of others.

Thanks to Moviestar.ie and BH Consulting for their sponsorship of a great event — marketing money well-spent, I suspect. Extra thanks to Moviestar for the freebie DVD player. And thanks of course to the mighty Mulley for organising the whole thing — at this stage he’s a finely-honed events machine!

Links for 2008-10-10

Published October 10, 2008

Links for 2008-10-09

Published October 9, 2008

Want to eat on RTE’s HEAT?

Published October 9, 2008

Here’s an interesting offer — be a restaurant critic/reviewer for RTE’s cooking reality show, HEAT:

Ireland’s top amateur chefs battle it out in our kitchen, each preparing a three course meal to impress the hardest critics; the paying diners. Mentored by Kevin Thornton and Kevin Dundon, these amateurs have a chance to shock or shine. Who wins, who looses (jm: sic), its all down to you. Come eat in the Heat Restaurant and decide who is Ireland’s newest culinary talent.

The restaurant is located in Ely HQ, on Hanover Quay. All three course meals, inc teas and coffees are €30 pp. Drinks are separate.

To dine at Heat, please email diners /at/ loosehorse.ie or call 01 613 6052 with your contact details and your preferred evening. Heat is open for business on Sunday the 19th of October, Sunday the 26th of October, Sunday the 2nd of November, Sunday the 9th of November, and Sunday the 16th of November.

Please note: The evening is being recorded for RTE so if you want to keep a low profile, please consider. Vegetarians, strange allergies and odd requests may or may not be accommodated as Heat has a limited menu and may not always be able to accommodate specific food requirements.

Bon Appetit!

Links for 2008-10-08

Published October 8, 2008

Links for 2008-10-07

Published October 7, 2008

MPLC fail to shake down Irish playschools

Published October 7, 2008

Oh, the irony. According to The Sunday Times, a body called the Motion Picture Licensing Company sent letters to 2,500 Irish playschools (aka kindergartens), demanding payment for children watching DVDs on their premises — a fee of EUR 3, plus 17.5% VAT, per child per year:

Playschools have been given an unexpected lesson on copyright law after a company representing Hollywood studios demanded that each child pay a fee of €3 plus 17.5% VAT per year to watch DVDs in their playgroup.

The Motion Picture Licensing Company (MPLC), which collects royalties on behalf of companies such as Walt Disney, Universal and 20th Century Fox, wrote to 2,500 playschools last month warning that it is illegal to show copyrighted DVDs in public without the correct license.

The letter was sent with the approval of the Irish Preschool Play Association (IPPA), which represents the schools and their 50,000 children. The MPLC had wanted €10 plus VAT per year for each child, but the IPPA negotiated for the lower fee.

Unsurprisingly, playschool owners are freaking out:

“To be honest, when I got the letter with the IPPA newsletter I laughed and binned it,” said Paula Doran, manager of Kiddies Korner, a community playschool in Shankill, south Dublin. “If we brought in something like that the parents would have to pick up the costs. But I don’t like the way they went about it — once you signed up they’d automatically take money out of your account every year.”

“I don’t think too many judges would come down hard on a playschool over this,” she said. “We would rarely show DVDs anyway because it’s frowned upon — kids get enough TV at home. The odd time we would pretend to go to the cinema. We give the children tickets and they watch 20 minutes of Snow White, Fireman Sam or SpongeBob.”

Here’s the funny part — it appears the MPLC failed to take note of its own legal requirements, and is not legally licensed to issue shakedown demands for fees in Ireland:

The MPLC had failed to register with the Irish Patent Office as a copyright licensing body. Under the 2000 Copyright Act, royalty collectors such as the Irish Music Rights Organisation (IMRO) and Phonographic Performance Ireland (PPI) are required to register before they can collect fees. A spokesman for the Patent Office said that if an organisation collects money but hasn’t registered it may be fined or staff may be jailed if a complaint is made and it is found guilty.

Crazily, it sounds like the IPPA didn’t find this out from their own legal advisors:

Irene Gunning, IPPA’s chief executive, said she was disappointed with the MPLC. “We acted in good faith with this organisation and felt we were doing our members good by negotiating them down from €10 per child,” said Gunning. “I feel misled by them now. It is only through an alert mother that we became aware that they need to be registered.”

oh dear. Let’s hear it for alert mothers, I guess. Anyway, expect more similar shakedowns once the MPLC get their little licensing oopsie sorted out:

The MPLC only began operating in Ireland in recent months, after setting up in Britain in 2003. It is also targeting other sectors such as coach operators, which occasionally show movies in public.

More coverage at Techdirt, Ars Technica, and TorrentFreak.

(Image credit: smithco on Flickr. thanks!)

Links for 2008-10-06

Published October 6, 2008

Links for 2008-10-02

Published October 2, 2008

Links for 2008-10-01

Published October 1, 2008