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Thu, 29 Dec 2005
[09:06] Human Area Networks
I didn't see the HAN mentioned in the CCNA study guide anywhere but they appear to be a burgeoning technology, well according to the folks over at RedTacton anyway.
According to them - they being the NTT - they've created a device that utilises the weak electric field that is generated by all living humans to faciliatate data transfer. The website alleges "duplex communication over the human body at a maximum speed of 10 Mbps" (about 1.25 Megabytes per second), they mention "duplex" as opposed to full duplex but this figure is reduced to half-duplex in the FAQ. The bulk of the pertinent information can be found on the:
- info page,
- Technology Note page
- and in the FAQ
The obvious comms comparison here is to Bluetooth, but the current maximum data transfer rate of 2.1Mbps for Bluetooth EDR is well below the alleged 10Mbps (or even 5Mbps depending on which bit of the website is telling the truth about the full data transfer rate) of RedTacton, although the transmission distance (10 centimeters or less) is considerably lower. I guess it is also analogous to RFID in some ways.
A couple of things I'm wondering about this:
- Is the electric field generated by a person capable of being used as a unique identifier? That would make for some interesting "embedded" authentication devices.
- Can these things be human powered or are they going to require batteries? The FAQ says the transceiver requires "several hundred milli-watts". We aren't there yet but people are working on human powered batteries.
category: /tech | permalink | Comments suspended due to spamwhores
Wed, 28 Dec 2005
[10:24] Get Some Culture Up Ya - or Kynan and Shona Go To The Ballet
This is a little bit old news but I'm whittling down my pile of "Thangs to be blogged" and this one has been sitting here for a couple of weeks now.
We went to the ballet because Shona won subsidised seats to the Royal Opera House - they cost us £10 each but if we'd been actually paying they'd have cost about £80!!! (Sorry I felt the multiple punctuation marks really were appropriate - that's about $A200)
The seats were actually pretty good, if you go to the ROH Seating Plan site you can see just how good they were (and I presume still are). The seats we occupied were "Orchestra Stalls", seats 18 and 19 - you can click on seat 21 and see our view of the stage - I think having this functionality is GREAT idea!
Anyways, we saw two ballets, in three parts - The Lesson and La Sylphide.
The first 30 minutes was devoted to The Lesson, a "modern" ballet. The Lesson was actually adapted for ballet in 1963 by Flemming Flindt from a play written by a bloke named Eugene Ionesco in 1951. I liked it the most of the evenings entertainment. In a nutshell, the story is about a teacher who becomes extremely disturbed by their pupils inability to understand what they are being taught, with some unfortunate consequences for the student. the actual play seems to fall into the Absurdist category, one with which I'm not familiar but I'll be doing a bit of reading around the subject as it looks quite interesting.
The Lesson was followed by a 30 minute break, the first half of "La Sylphide", another 30 minute break and the grand finale of "La Sylphide". La Sylphide was more of your traditional ballet and involved a damnsite more prancing. It was written way back in 1832 in France and is set in Scotland. The story is that some Scottish guy (James if you must know) is getting married and, the night before his marriage he spies a forest nymph and, completely besotted, screws up the big day by sodding off into the forest chasing the nymph. Blergh.
As I am an uncultured buffoon I was not particularly enamoured of the ballet. Although I can certainly appreciate the athletiscism involved in the activity, the substance does not particularly appeal. Although I went in with an open mind, I came out with the opinion that ballet dancers (is there a plural/group noun for them? Balletisists seems a trifle clumsy.) are for the most part egotistical prats. Watching ballet was like watching a cross between slowed down mime and synchronised swimming, but without the thrill that the performers could drown at any second (despite my fervent wish that they would, somehow). I was also deprived of the opportunity to watch the orchestra as they were hidden in a pit!
The bright side of the evening came when, after interval two, the curtains open the evil witch, Madge, cooking up a storm in a "steaming" cauldron. It seems the providers of said "steam" were a little to enthusiastic in their provision and when the scene change came from Madges cave to the forest, the entire stage was slicked with some kind of oily residue. This made it completely impossible to dance upon! The curtains dropped dramatically after one of the nymphs/sylphs nearly broke her ankle and someone frantically cleansed the stage somehow. Fifteen minutes later the curtain arose and the forest magically re-appeared.....I waited, secretly hoping for disaster. The last half of the show was immensley more enjoyable because whatever they'd used to clean the stage had REALLY cleaned it. Every step was accompanied with a tiny tearing sound, as if the entire stage had been covered with upside-down masking tape.
The straw that broke the camels back came when the person who dies (finally) finished cavorting around the stage and dropped dead. Down came the curtain, up came the curtain for crew bowing/curtseying and general audience appreciation. Now, I've been to the theatre before, I've been to a lot of live gigs, I'm familiar with the whole concept of showing ones appreciation by clapping. I've expressed my dislike of the whole "encore" trend that seems to be de rigueur these days; At least if a band makes you clap and carry on for five or ten minutes they come back and play you another song or two. These ballet prats sort of pulled an "encore" but instead of actually DOING anything they just stood there lapping up the adulation.
First we clapped for the whole cast, then each section (leading couple, principals, sylphs and Scotts) and the curtain came down. I was reasonably happy at this stage. Then, someone pulled up the corner of the curtain and the leading man pranced back out and we all clapped for him for a little while, he shoots back in and the leading lady came out and we repeated the whole clappy thing. She ducks back in and they spring back out together for a bit more clappy-clappy before the principal cast memberst came out for their shot and then everyone gets some flowers. They all disappeared again and then the whole sodding bunch of them pour out at which point certain crazed individuals in the crowd, unable to curb their enthusiasm, start up with the standing ovation. I was no longer clapping at this stage but muttering imprecations under my breath. The travesty continued although when the conductor came out next I clapped for him. He was yanked off stage so the leading couple could score another hit before the curtain finally closed for good.
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Tue, 27 Dec 2005
[10:04] Modblog Transplant
OK, I finally moved all of the ModBlog articles over here. If anyone were to care, they could look here: blog.kynan.org/modblog. The code I used to turn the output from ModBlog into something that can be read by blosxom is a dodgy Korn shell script. I should have done it with something else but shell scripting, despite being ugly, is just too easy. I suspect this could have been done in a much nicer fashion using perl but what the hey - it worked.
#!/usr/bin/ksh
INFILE="kynan_modblog.txt"
cat $INFILE | while read -r aline
do
DATE=`echo $aline|cut -c1-4`
if [ "$DATE" == "Date" ];then
DATE=`echo $aline | awk '{print $2}'`
TIME=`echo $aline | awk '{print $4}'|sed 's/
//'`
AMPM=`echo $TIME | tr -d '[0-9:]'`
if [ $AMPM == "PM" ];then
HOUR=`echo $TIME | cut -f1 -d:`
HOUR=$(($HOUR + 12))
if [ $HOUR -eq 24 ];then
HOUR=00
fi
else
HOUR=`echo $TIME | cut -f1 -d:`
if [ ${#HOUR} -eq 1 ];then
HOUR=0$HOUR
fi
fi
TIME=$HOUR`echo $TIME|cut -f2 -d:|tr -d '[A-Z]'`
YEAR=`echo $DATE | cut -d/ -f3`
MONTH=`echo $DATE | cut -d/ -f1`
DAY=`echo $DATE | cut -d/ -f2`
if [ ${#MONTH} -eq 1 ];then
MONTH=0$MONTH
fi
if [ ${#DAY} -eq 1 ];then
DAY=0$DAY
fi
OUTFILE=$YEAR$MONTH$DAY-$TIME
fi
if [ "----------
" == "$aline" ];then
mv $$ ./done/${OUTFILE}.txt
echo touch -t $MONTH$DAY$TIME ./done/${OUTFILE}.txt
else
echo -E "$aline" >> $$
fi
done
category: /tech | permalink | Comments suspended due to spamwhores
[02:58] White Christmas...check!
It was a mite nippy when I stepped out to go to work this morning and by the time I hit London Bridge it was snowing, albeit in a somewhat off-handed and desultory manner. I called Shona when I got to work and she had apparently been trying to call me. IT all sort off packed up by 0930 but then, about 30 minutes later it put on a show of force and really dumped. I don't know what it's like at the moment as my office has no windows but Firefox (well ForecastFox actually) tells me that it is now up to 0 degrees from -2 and it's also "Partly Sunny" as opposed to "Snowing" so I guess the shows over. Now I just have a slushy ride home to look forward to!
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Sun, 25 Dec 2005
[16:58] What I Did On My Christmas Holiday
Well it's been an interesting weekend. We went over to Decathlon on Saturday and bought Shona a bike. She got exactly the same cheapo bike as me but she splashed out and bought a gel seat cover for an extra six pounds. We then rode around the corner to do the shopping at a Christmas-ravaged Tescos and had lunch at an interesting fast food franchise called spudulike. We then did the 4 mile (about 6.5k) ride home for Shonas first "big ride"! She had a very sore ass by the time we got home.
I then spent the rest of the day reading Michael Crichtons State Of Fear. I finished it on Sunday morning and it was a pretty good read. I've not got a lot to say about it at the moment because I've got a lot of digesting and background reading to do. I'm somewhat surprised that that there wasn't a bit more of a controversy surrounding it - maybe there was when it was released, I don't keep up with the mainstream media much. If you like Crichtons books (hell, who doesn't) then I'd advise checking this one out. The only odd bit was the somewhat Flemming/Bond death-trap scene, apart from that it was up to the normal standards and the subject matter is certainly something I'm going to look into - more on that if it all turns out to be true!
Finally, Christmas. We rode over to Sam 'n Simmos place for lunch. There was some contention as to how to get there and, after 10 minutes, we checked map and compass and then rode in the right direction for another 10 :) There was a little bit of struggling to et the bikes into the lift but it all worked out in the end.
Sam is back home in Australia at the moment so 'twas us, Jason (Simonsen), Giorg, Simmo and Jess. We played XBox and chatted, ate Iceland Turkey-inna-box with roasted veggies (thanks Giorg) and watched Granny which I would heartily advise you not to. We then watched the death of the Dr Who franchise on the BBC (seriously, what the hell were they thinking when they wrote that trash). Basically, a good time was had by all (although as everyone but us was a smoker we came out smelling hella stinky). We rode home around 2330 and, after meeting a few odd people, made it home - huzzah!
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Fri, 23 Dec 2005
[10:03] Damn you Borders!!!
I was SO close to making it through the "festive" season without encountering a single christmas carol when *BAM* I was mercilessley subjected to a barrage of "Jingle Bells" whilst on hold on the telephone.
Since I'm on the subject, according to multiple sources on the internet ('cause you know I'm just going to link to Wikipedia - I do look in other places but who's to say that THEY are definitive?) "Jingle Bells" is not actually a Christmas Song. 'twas written by one James Pierpont back in 1857 to be sung for the American Thanksgiving celebration (I'm not in the mood to go into it now, but it's interesting reading if you try to find out the origins of Thanskgiving, by the by).
Back to "Jingle Bells", and I must admit that I now find the song a smidge less offensive knowing that the original was written about attracting the eye of a comley lass with your souped-up sleigh and racing fast horses with an eye to making a killing betting high stakes, but there's still not a great deal of love in my heart for the poxy Commericalistmas version that we hear so often.
There's more info over yonder, including the missing lyrics, at (brace yourself, here it comes) Wikipedia.
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Tue, 20 Dec 2005
[10:42] and now I'm a drug addict...
Well, that's what I think anyway. I normally drink about two or three litres of water a day. This has the obvious consequence that I go to the toilet a fair few times a day. There is an automatic "Air Purification System" in there and, over the last couple of weeks I've noticed that my "relief breaks" seem to coincide perfectly with the automatic *pssshht* of the little machine on the wall. Two options spring to mind:
- My body has come to crave either the propellant or (god forbid) the "fragrance" and is driving my body to the only source it knows of
- I smell SO bad that the automagic machine can tell when I'm in the room and is trying to freshen me
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Mon, 19 Dec 2005
[10:59] A New Phone - The Moral Dilemma
I've been eyeing off new phones because the dinky little Samsung I'm borrowing at the moment is REALLY annoying. I hate clamshell phones and this one is so old that the battery will only hold charge for 20 hours, once it gets low it starts complaining, LOUDLY, even in "silent" mode. While I'm at it (a small tangent I promise) WHAT THE HELL IS UP WITH VIBRATE OR RING. WHY CAN'T IT DO BOTH??? It's not just me either, as this Google search shows.
Hence, I was looking at the new Sony Ericsson W800i. I really liked my old T610 and the form-factor is very similar. There are a few other reasons I was eyeballing the W800i:
- I'd like a little "happy snap" camera and the W800i has a 2 Megapixel camera built in. The demos I've seen on the web show that it takes some really stunning photos considering the package it's in (ie a phone not a camera).
- The "Walkman" feature. This phone can take a SD Memory card, up to 1Gb I believe, and acts as an MP3 player.
- It's a USB Key! No proprietry software is required either, you plug in to a USB port and voila, you can drag and drop or mount just like a normal USB device (and it's USB2).
- Oh yeah, it also functions as a telecommunications device
- The FFWD time is quite slow, there doesn't seem to be a progressive speed up so if you've got an hour long MP3 and you want to start at the 30 minute mark then scolling through it can be quite tedious.
- The chassis has a few buttons that operate seperately to the keyboard. These include the camera button, a rocker that controls volume and track forwards/backwards and a play/pause button. I had two problems with these. The first is that you can't lock these keys at all. Even when the phone keypad is locked these keys remain active. I can see a point to that but it means that these keys are always going to be liable to accidental pressings. The second problem comes from the rocker button. If you tap it quickly then it turns the volume up/down. If you hold the button down for a second it skips to the next/previous track. The distinction between "tap" and "hold" seems to be very close and I can see that becoming quite frustrating.
The phone can play any MP3 at the moment, but not any other format (Ogg or WMA for instance). I wonder how long before it will only play music encapsulated in some kind of Sony DRM? Would they do that and risk alienating the market? I don't see why not, most will be unaware of the issues and alternatives and those who are aware may be to complacent to care.
In the end I decided I wouldn't purchase one, because Sony is evil.
OK, so that's a little melodramatic but sadly I consider it to be true. I have a substantial CD collection back home and it includes more than a few Sony (or Sony affiliate) produced CDs in it. I pretty much stopped buying CDs from them and indeed most other big labels a few years ago. The lack of good music initially precluded any purchases and the initial stumbling, bludgeoning attempts at DRM decided me. I've been trying to support unsigned bands (a task made a lot easier in Australia by the unflagging support of new music by Triple J) and buying music directly from the band themselves since then. The internet is only just starting to become a valid method of promoting your band (why it's taken so long I don't know) and as the podcasting phenomenon moves into the mainstream more and more great bands are utilising the internet via podcasts and websites to not only promote but actually sell their product.
The revenue framework of the music industry as it exists today has been crumbling for some time and as this trend of self-promotion and self-supply by the musicians continues, it will continue to degenerate; but they won't go down without an almighty stinking fight and I wouldn't be surprised if, on the way out, they manage to pull some kind of "if we can't have it, you can't either" stunt.
I don't believe that the way Sony and Co are approaching the whole DRM issue is right. Supporting them, either by buying CD's (DRMd or otherwise) or by buying hardware produced by/for the Sony conglomerate is rather hypocritical. This is unfortunate because I really like buying good new music and I really like the SonyEricsson phones (Nokia blows goats).
The DRM battle has been a long time coming. The concept is already well entrenched within major corporations; companies like Microsoft and Sony and PC hardware manufacturers like Intel and AMD (see the Trusted Computing FAQ for some interesting reading), the craziness surrounding the next generation of DVD - would you like your content to belong to Sony, Apple, Dell, HP, Hitachi, Panasonic, Philips and TDK (in the Blu-Ray corner) or Microsoft, Intel, Toshiba, Warner Brothers and NEC (in the HD-DVD corner)? A lot of money has been spent on making sure the public has no problems with DRM, mostly using old Microsoft FUD techniques. Now is the time for those on the other side to use the Sony mess to bring the alternatives to the public eye. The DRM battle started along time ago but now we're all on the front lines!
I don't have a solution to the DRM "problem". Am I honest enough to purchase the music I like and download? I like to think so. Obviously there are things like iTunes from Apple, the VirginDigital service, heck - even Woolworths and Tescos have jumped on the music download bandwagon! The problem is, it's all DRM encumbered (I can't vouch for Tescos or Woolworhts there actually, I'll verify that) and if I want to drop a track onto my generic MP3 player, forks to me! As far as I can see, the only way forward is:
- Support the artists who are actively avoiding DRM.
- Educate others who are unsigned
- Lobby those who are signed up to unsign themselves
- Stop paying for DRM!!! This means not giving money to the companies actively working on this stuff. Don't buy it and LET THEM KNOW YOU DIDN'T AND WHY. I decided not to but a phone and I dropped Sony a line on their feedback page explaining why. I also discussed all of this with a friend and he decided to forgo the Sony MP3 player he was going to buy and went with an alternative. Every little bit counts.
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Mon, 12 Dec 2005
[10:34] UK Oil Fire
As most of you are probably aware an oil storage terminal in Hertfordshire exploded on Sunday. Although it's a long way away from me it seems that London will be caked in non-toxic smoke sometime this evening. I'll try to stay low while I ride home tonight but I suspect it will have to fight pretty hard to make itself noticed above the normal particulate content of London "air".
Some interesting figures from the paper this afternoon:
"[The fire department] will attempt to create a "foam blanket" to put out the huge inferno using 250,000 litres of foam mixed with 25,000 litres of water per minute.The emphasis is mine. I don't know about you but that sounds like a LOT of watery foam to me. I checked it out and your average Olympic-standard swimming pool is 50 metres by 25 metres by 1.5 meters. Using the magic of mathematics I know that this equates to 1,875 cubic metres of water. I believe that 1 cubic metre is equal to 1,000 litres so an Olympic-standard pool contains 1,875,000 litres of water. So, somehow the fire brigade is going to pump out about 15% of a pool a MINUTE (that's a whole pool in about 7 minutes) to extinguish the eight burning tanks remaining (they've put out twelve of the twenty already).
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Fri, 09 Dec 2005
[09:01] Sony...you've done it again
Dragged your name through the mud that is...
You'd have thought they'd have learned after the whole XCP debacle, but apparently not! They've attempted to clean up an earlier copy protection program (Suncomm Media Max) and repeated their earlier blunderings with the "cleanup" of the XCP. Check it out here on Arstechnica or the excellent FreedomToTinker article or here on CIO Central, for a humourous high level view with an interesting point about the new PS3 copy protection.
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Wed, 07 Dec 2005
[01:24] The Fall and Fall of Journalistic Standards
There are a lot of people who detest blogs and curse them as the scourge of modern journalism. I don't intend to cover that argument right now. As a completely unbiased bystander I would just like to casually point in the direction of the "professional journalists" over at news.com.au. After the storms that caused significant damage back in my home town of Canberra last weekend, this is, or was at the time, the front page story on the aforementioned site. I present for your reading enjoyment: Storms leave three dead from the Daily Telegraph.
Please note, I don't intend to make light of the fact that people died during these storms. If I knew the people involved and they cared who I was then I would pass on my condolences to the families of the six three people who were killed.
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Tue, 06 Dec 2005
[09:23] Kynan v. English Furniture...FIGHT!
Well, it was a forgone conclusion but - for the doubters - I won.
All the furniture in this country is made of MDF and, despite what its manufacturers and the media have to say about it, I'm not convinced that it's such a grand old thing to be constructing load bearing furniture out of.
During my brief stay over here I've so far managed to put my foot through a friends bed, broken the middle of an Argos hutch, snapped the leg off a desk and broken the head-end legs off my bed. To add to the list, this weekend I broke the foot-end legs off the bed as well!
Luckily I still had enough spare parts from the last repair to be able to put it back together (in a slightly more sturdy configuration I might add) and, after borrowing a drill from the next door neighbour and a saw from a friend, we got it back together within the same afternoon as it was broken.
That's all very well but I would expect furniture like a bed to be able to withstand any random amount of load from an averagely proportioned person; whether they choose to step daintily into bed or leap with gusto from the bathroom should not be a factor in deciding if the legs will part company with the body. Maybe they don't use thick enough boards? The board the legs were attached to, the one that gave way, was approximately 1.7cm thick. Or perhaps making furniture out of cardboard just isn't a good idea! On top of all its structural issues it seems that unprotected (painted/laquered/whatever) MDF releases formaldehyde gas from the urea formaldehyde used to hold the wood particles together!
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Thu, 01 Dec 2005
[13:44] Faithless at Brixton
We went to see Faithless at the Brixton Academy last night and ther're three things I'd like to talk about:
- Ear Plugs
- Brixton Academy
- Faithless
Ear Plugs
I've been toting ear plugs to gigs for some time now and I always have a stash of Laser Lites in my bag. This time I thought I might be supplying a few people other than myself so I went out to grab some extras and I thought I'd lash out and test drive a few different sorts. I went to Boots (a UK chemist chain) and I picked up a packet of Muffles Wax Earplugs and a packet of Foam Earplugs. These both unequivocally sucked. The wax ones are just plain weird, they're little blocks of wax wrapped in some kind of magical sticky-togethery wax so they don't just crumble into your ear canal. Unfortunately I just couldn't get the thing to sit in my ear no matter how much I tried to "make a cone shape by rolling it between my fingers". All I ended up with was a slightly rounded crayon that basically coated my ear in wax. Won't be trying those again.
I took the Foam ones to the show and plugged 'em in when the support act started their horrendous caterwauling (Note: Crazy Penis ain't no good live - they might not be that great recorded either but I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt). The "Boots Foam Earplugs" are about 1cm x 2cm and are capped at each end by some kind of smooth plastic - kind of like the outside of your traditional squishy ear plug. The sides however are just bubbly foam with heaps of tiny little holes which look like filth traps to me - odd for a supposedly re-usable device. They squished up and went in OK (except for my wax-slicked ear where it had a bit of trouble gripping) but about half way through the support act my ears were pretty uncomfortable. The edges of the smooth endcap sections were starting to cut into my ears! They did an alright job of blocking the really ear-thumping sounds whilst allowing normal conversation but they were damn painful. I swapped back the the ever-faithful Lasers for the main performance. So far they're the best, even if it does look like you've rhubarb and custard rammed in your ears.
I hope that proves useful to someone. I may one day decide to get a set of proper musicians earplugs but, considering that you can buy a box of 200 Lasers for 30 quid and I don't really mind the sound quality I get, I might not. Either way, it's definitely good to be able to leave a concert and NOT have to yell at everyone over the godawful ringing in your ears. Concerts WILL destroy your hearig folks.
Next up is the Brixton Academy
I raved about this place when I went to see NIN and I'm going to do it again. I think this may be my favourite venue ever! Let me list its virtues:
- The floor slopes gradually down from the back to the front so you can nearly always see the stage.
- When I tried to buy some water (you can't bring stuff in from outside - remember to smuggle in bottle tops, they won't let you keep them if you buy a bottle inside), the gentleman behind the bar pointed out that although I COULD purchase a bottle for £1.95, he could just provide me with a pint glass full of tapwater, with ice no less!
- There are barriers strategically placed throughout the standing area. This helps to reduce gravitational blackhole that is the normal crushing moshpit. We also found that there is the added bonus of drunk people not understanding that these things are about 1-2 meters long and electing to try to climb under/through them rather than taking a step or so to the left or right :)
- Somehow, bless their little cotton socks, they manage to get a breeze running across the stage! I have no idea where it comes from but it is truly magical when you're soaked in sweat and inhaling steam.
Finally, Faithless.
I've been following Faithless since I was in Uni - about 10 years now - and I've managed to see them play live four or five times now. I'm happy to report that they remain consistently fantastic! They opened with Insomnia and I noticed that Maxi was sounding distinctly crook (I suspect a cold or flu or something). His voice "warmed up" or the Strepsils kicked in or something and he managed to get back to his normal form fairly quickly. He's certainly a charismatic, energetic bloke.
The set was good with a sample of music from every album I think - all the anthems were in there, Long Way Home, God Is A DG, Insomnia, We Come One - and a few of my favourites like Don't Leave and Bring My Family Back as well. All in all, a great concert.
It's always good to see Faithless because Maxi likes to make everyone feel good about themselves. He also likes everyone to be friends with everybody else - he's the kinda guy who could incite marches on the government and stuff, were he so inclined. He's not as preachy as some other bands I've seen - I suppose he gets to preach via the lyrics more directly than if he actually sang them so there aren't any "between the songs" monologoues.
I can't say I disagree with anything he's got to say about gangs, war and the general lnastiness or the world and, like I said, for a couple of hours he makes you feel like you could actually make a difference. The euphoria usually lasts until the next day when you have to go back to work....
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Tue, 29 Nov 2005
[15:30] Windows Tip o' The Day
At work today I accidentally pressed Windows Key+B. The Start Bar popped up, as it is wont to do when the Winkey is pressed, but I noticed that one of the system tray icons was highlighted. Further investigation shows that Windows Key+B will actually make the system tray active! You can move the highlight from icon to icon with the arrow keys and hitting enter will kick off the default action for that icon. I don't know if this is Windows XP only - it hasn't worked on the one Windows 2000 machine I've tested it on - but I'm excited anyway; I love not having to use the mouse for stuff!
As ususal, Wikipedia was there first with a somewhat indefinite article on the Windows key. Maybe I'll update that a little once I've done a bit more research.
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Mon, 28 Nov 2005
[05:41] The New Rammstein Album Is Out
Rammstein have released their latest album, Rosenrot. I'm a little bit late with the "news" as it was released just over a month ago but Hurrah anyway!
I've only listened to it once so far (goddamnit I left it at home today too) and that listen made me think Wagnerian opera! It is still a very Rammsteinian (if that's a word) album, the first track, Benzin, is all about setting things on fire :)
If you'd like more info Herzeleid, the biggest fansite out there, has LOTS of information for you.
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Tue, 22 Nov 2005
[10:06] *Pop* What was th...*pop*...at
That was BOTH of my tires being puntured on the way to work this morning.
I'm feeling crappy at the moment as I'm recovering from a cold (caused by my house auditioning for a role as an aquarium - more on that tomorrow) and didn't want to sit outside in the cold fog sodding about with tubes and looking for punctures. With this in mind I called the local bike shop and asked 'em how much to fix it for me. I was advised not to bother and do it myself or purchase a new bike, the prices would be approximately the same :)
I've managed to rack up three punctures now in the space of two weeks. The first was very exciting - I had a slow leak which meant I had to pump up the tire every time I rode home at night until I managed to purchase a puncture repair kit.
Amusingly, after I repaired the puncture I managed to rip the valve off the tire whilst pumping it back up so I had to go and obtain a new tube the next morning.
Lessons learned? Always carry a pump and puncture repair kit and pump s.l.o.w.l.y!
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Fri, 18 Nov 2005
[07:19] Good Luck Andrew!
Andrew has skipped the country - or is that Andrew has skipped the country? Either way, welcome to the expat club! A much more controlled departure than mine and for a lot more exciting reasons - all the best!
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Mon, 14 Nov 2005
[09:25] Firefox 1.5 and Online Banking
One of my banks is preventing the 1.5 version of firefox that I'm using from hitting the online banking site. Being the progressive bank they are (their debit cards have PINs now!!!) they used to let firefox 1.0 in. I'm assuming they haven't blocked 1.5 because of any specific security issues as they've listed none on their "Why you can't log on" page. I figure they just haven't updated their list of allowed User Agent strings. With this in mind I have loaded the User Agent Switcher Extension and added my own custom User Agent string to pretend I'm the old version I was running. The specific string looks like this:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915 Firefox/1.0.7
Now I can get in again :)There's a handy list of example UserAgent strings on the Wikipedia entry for them if you want to find some useful examples for spoofing the browser and there is an insanely complete list here.
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Sun, 13 Nov 2005
[09:15] Weekend Technical Frickery
I added the pollxn "Discussion Engine" blosxom plugin to the site this weekend to see if I can have some commenting without getting spammed to, well, wherever it is that you get sent to by comment spam. Based on teh assumption that the spambots search for links marked as "comment" I've called it something else.
I've also edited blogTools so that it's working again after my abortive attempts two weeks ago to add some JavaScript sanity checking stuff and (once again) locked myself out for a while. I now have new blog posting and editing functionality but not WITH categorisation. Still on the ToDo list (in priority order) are:
category sensitive posting/editing- keep original post time on updates
File Uploading (ie images/supporting data)- Rewrite (again) to modularise code
- Hide/UnHide functionality - this sort of works but not with categories
- TrackBacks
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Thu, 10 Nov 2005
[14:53] The Sony DRM Debacle and why I like Sysinternals
This post is partly in relation to the current Sony DRM debacle but before you all groan and change channels I must absolve myself of the crime of "posting old news". As I've whined previously I just don't have time to keep up with the real world right now. Even my lunch hour is spent reading the manuals for the software we are inflictinginstalling at work (because no-one else seems to have).
So anyway, I only stumbled upon the whole Sony DRM thing on Monday (the 7th, a full week late) whilst on a completely different mission:
I had to verify that a lot of machines were up to the task of running the software we are installing - things like CPU being beefy enough, enough RAM and free disk, certain versions of Windows/IE etc. I knew that the psinfo utility from Sysinternals could give me that information but due to the volume of machines I needed the output in tabular format rather than human readable format. No probs I thought, the -c option will dump the output in CSV format. Hurrah! Then I found that the Kernel Version and possibly the Processor Type fields might have a comma in them. Obviously this might wreak havoc with a comma seperated file. I noticed that the -t option allowed you to specify your own delimiter. I wanted tabs and I tried all sorts of ways to get the -t option to accept a tab character but it refused. I dealt with it by getting upset because I couldn't use the delimiter I wanted. In the end I e-mailed the author, one Mark Russinovich, a quick note saying that there was an error in the documentation on the webpage, that the downloadable version didn't seem to match the documentation version and I slipped in a request "Can I please have an update to psinfo.exe to allow TABs to be passed to -t", hoping that my other information, like a sacrifice to the gods, would provide me with some kind of credit/karma. Imagine my surprise when he e-mailed me back today:
Thanks for the correction.with a swanky new version of psinfo attached to the email! VERY big thank-yous to Mark for making my life just that little bit easier :)
I've attached an update that supports a tab delimiter. The current posted version is 1.71, this version is 1.72.
-Mark
Not only do Sysinternals provide an awesome trove of information and a set of FREE (even for commercial use) utilities - they update on demand within 48 hours!!! The help for psinfo now specifies the tab delimiter: -t The default delimiter for the -c option is a comma, but can be overriden with the specified character. Use "\t" to specify tab.
And where does Sony come into this? Well, in case you've been living under the same rock that I have, the latest move in the Music Industry vs The Consuming Public from Sony is a VERY excitingly interesting piece of DRM work that is effectively a Windows rootkit. Mark picked this up first in his blog on the 31st.
If you haven't already, I highly recommend you go and check it out. He provides a very thorough analysis of the software in question and all but provides a step-by-step tutorial on discovery and disassembly of said software. Since its publication, the article has gone on to raise merry hell for Sony - there are articles and podcasts everywhere and, to my knowledge, at least two class action lawsuits have been launched. There have even been rumblings reported from Microsoft regarding the way in which Sony are abusing their OS.
I don't think there's going to be any kind of "Battle of the Titans" action here; I do suspect that Sony might be adopting Microsofts DRM solution real soon though...
UPDATE: Seems someone has written a Trojan that uses the Sony DRM software to hide itself.
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Sun, 06 Nov 2005
[16:19] Halo Audio Outtakes
My sister sent me one of the audio outakes from the Aussie marine in Halo (the XBox game), whose name I've just learned was Private Chips Dubbo! It's a Steve Irwin, Crocodile Hunter rip-off and I found it most amusing. There are more at the Bungie Audio Outakes page if you're interested. On the subject of audio outakes from games, a few years ago now my friend Donovan "Blogs suck like nothing else has sucked before" Ryan also pointed me at the outakes from the Duke Nukem 3D Outtakes. I just listened to them all again and they're still funny - possibly because I remember them from the game but if you played Duke then you might want to go check them out.
UPDATE:Oh my god, I can't stop, I started this post nearly an hour ago. I got hooked on reminiscing and started to track down the swear track from the 1999 hit "Kingpin: Life Of Crime". Not only did I find what I was looking for, I found that Kingpin is alive and well today and is still being actively played on the net! I also found the Kingpin vs Half-Life WAV that someone put together - hehe.
OK, I hear Big Ben tolling midnight - bedtime methinks!
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[07:55] Guy Fawkes Night
Last night was Guy Fawkes night and was the cue for everyone in London who hadn't been letting fireworks off every night for the last month to do so. We went out to my original London base (my friend Sams' house in Stockwell) for dinner and watching of fireworks from the comfort of the sofa. The apartment is on the 7th floor so we had a pretty good view of pretty much 180 degrees of the south-west of London from the lounge room and about 45 degrees of the north east from the kitchen. It was all very pretty, when an entire city the size of London decides to start letting of fireworks simultaneously for four or five hours you're in for a fairly spectacular show. The other advantage of watching from an apartment is that you are at eye level for the ones being set off at the bottom of the building. I was watching from the kitchen when one shot up and exploded right in front of me - I was pretty excited as I've never had the opportunity to examine an exploding firework at such close range before (the magic of double-glazing).
As a side note, I find it more than a little amusing that in this current climate of fear and "Terror Alerts" that the entire country is celebrating an event that, were it to occur today, would be decried as a most heinous terrorist attack!
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Fri, 04 Nov 2005
[11:23] If god were a condiment....
I'm "Home Alone" this evening - at least for now - and having to prepare my own dinner. Since I really couldn't be assed to do much I have created a very quick and very special recipe that all you bachelor boys can write down and use. It is based upon leftovers which are MAGICALLY transformed merly by adding the liquidy love that is WASABI.
Ingredients
-----------
1 x Carrot
1 x Sausage (cooked/cold)
1/4 Onion (cooked/cold)
Wasabi - The God Of Condiments
Recipe
------
- Take the carrot and cut it into .5mm (18fl oz if you don't do metric) discs. If you couldn't be bothered cutting discs just bite the appropriate sized chunks off - that's what I did.
- Take the sausage and slice (or bite) it into thicker discs - about 1.3cm (approx .00483 acres)
- Smear some Wasabi (NB: God, objectified) on the carrot and then arrange some cold, slimy onion on top of it.
- Smear some Wasabi (aka The Gooey Green Goodliness of the Gods) on the bottom of the sausage disc (it is left as an exercise for the reader to decide which side is the bottom - there IS a wrong answer).
- Sandwich the onion 'twixt carrot and sausage.
- Eat the delectable delight and bask in the glory that is the Breadless Carroty, Ongniony, Sausagey Wasabi Sandwich. YUM!
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Sun, 30 Oct 2005
[23:59] If all goes well....
You'll actually be able to read this! This post comes to you via what I like to call blogTools, hopefully all this typing won't go to waste.
OK, I cheated and tested it just then. The good news is that it worked! The bad news is that the post belongs to the user running the http daemon, I'm going to have to have a look at that. In the end it only took another 30 minutes to get it all working. Hoorah for python.
In other news, or olds as the case may be, here's a picture of me descending the building on Friday:
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Thu, 29 Sep 2005
[15:57] the calendar plugin
I got the calendar plugin working once I got access to the error logs! It seems that it likes to create a file called $plugin_state_dir/.calendar.cache and as I (an ordinary user) own that directory, the web services (running as the ordinary web services user) can't write to the directory. So, if you're gettint a 500 Internal Server Error just by having the calendar plugin in the $plugin_dir, that's why!
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[15:28] File formats and so called "standards"
Last week I kicked back into "Job Huntin Mode" so I've been sprinkling resumes around like confetti. For various reasons my distributable resume is in PDF format.
By way of response I've had several requests for my resume to be re-sent in "standard Word Format". There are a myriad of reasons why I'd prefer not to do that and the majority of them are covered in a very nice rant/article entilted MS Word is {Not} a document exchange format.
Basically I have two options:
- Stand up for my ethics and not transform my OpenOffice.org work of art into a nasty Word document. This saves me from having to rejig the formatting because I know it doesn't quite translate and then having to keep multiple copies in sync.
- Spinelessly bow to public pressure and Save As .doc
My suspicions are that these so called "databases" are nothing more than macros that merrily trip through Word documents filling in arrays with keywords as they go. This leads me to the thought that if I HAVE to play the game, maybe I can be a little sneaky about it. If it's all as stupid as I think it is (and various articles I've browsed this evening lead me to the conclusion that it is) then a few headers/footers full of white on white 2 point text along the lines of:
CCNA CCIE MCP MCSA A+ LCP RHCE CCSE CCEA Network+ Security+ CUE CISA CCP CLP MCSE CNE ...Should get me to the shortlist for pretty much EVERY job! I haven't decided what I'm going to do yet.
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[03:00] I've turned the lights out...
...but I'll leave a candle on the windowsill.
I didn't feel like sleeping last night so I stayed up and got the new blog off the ground. It's butt-ugly at the moment (lets face it, so is this one) but functional (enough) so all new posts will be over there from now on. I've downloaded an XML feed of everything from this blog and it will magically reappear as soon as I write a script to blosxomify it.
Pertinent details: The new blog is back at the old address: blog.kynan.org, assuming I manage to avoid bollocksing it up somehow - I'm still covered in tomato from my last little adventure (although Andrew assures me it was all self-inflicted pain and, on further investigation, I think he's right).
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the Modblog team for providing me with a more than adequate service considering I paid £0 for it (that's approximately $A14.27). I'm leaving because I prefer the level of control one has hosting ones-self and the little quirks associated with being hosted here (the odd RSS feed, the dissapearing 's, the intermittent blackouts) can be more than a little annoying at times :)
I AM going to miss the ability to post via the web but I've started working on a python based cgi system for adding/modifying blog posts via HTTP - if it works I'll post it somewhere. I'm sure someones done this already but it wasn't the top hit when I very briefly looked last night so I've started and damned if I'm stopping now!
...and like that he was gone....
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[02:00] I've turned the lights out...
Date: 9/29/05 at 10:00AM
...but I'll leave a candle on the windowsill.
I didn't feel like sleeping last night so I stayed up and got the new blog off the ground. It's butt-ugly at the moment (lets face it, so is this one) but functional (enough) so all new posts will be over there from now on. I've downloaded an XML feed of everything from this blog and it will magically reappear as soon as I write a script to blosxomify it.
Pertinent details: The new blog is back at the old address: blog.kynan.org, assuming I manage to avoid bollocksing it up somehow - I'm still covered in tomato from my last little adventure (although Andrew assures me it was all self-inflicted pain and, on further investigation, I think he's right).
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the Modblog team for providing me with a more than adequate service considering I paid £0 for it (that's approximately $A14.27). I'm leaving because I prefer the level of control one has hosting ones-self and the little quirks associated with being hosted here (the odd RSS feed, the disappearing 's, the intermittent blackouts) can be more than a little annoying at times :)
I AM going to miss the ability to post via the web but I've started working on a python based cgi system for adding/modifying blog posts via HTTP - if it works I'll post it somewhere. I'm sure someones done this already but it wasn't the top hit when I very briefly looked last night so I've started and damned if I'm stopping now!
...and like that he was gone....
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Wed, 28 Sep 2005
[16:16] I'm back
OK, I've had enough for tonight. I was going to make the calendar work and do all kinds of funkiness but...I wanna go to bed - for now I will settle with just getting the timezone plugin working. It's been a long and emotionally fraught day (someone I know has a bit of a needle phobia) and now that I've called all the rellies I'm spent. Tomorrow, CSS, calendars and, oh yeah, work :P
Coming soon:
- Rant about resumes and their format
- No, I think I busted your mail
- The magic of keyhole surgery and some 'citing photographs!!
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[15:47] Please do NOT adjust your set...I always look like this
That's right folks, I'm back on the air from home again, hoorah!
There's more to come but right now I'm just setting up Blosxom, it's already quite late and I've had a hard afternoon so if I don't get back to finishing this post tonight the news in brief:
- Shonas operation is pencilled in as provisionally succesful. She still has both legs and an exciting little jar of cartilage to put on the mantlepiece! She's in overnight for observation and should be home in time to cook me dinner tomorrow ;)
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Tue, 27 Sep 2005
[09:29] Imagine I'm in stocks and you have a rotten tomato
Date: 9/27/05 at 5:29PM
Well, I'm all moved over to Andrews place now ('cept for this blog). I moved the mail over on Sunday night and, due to my misreading of the virtual mail setup page, I toasted Andrews sendmail config for a few hours. I am still feeling extremely contrite about this and not just a little bit stupid. I promised Andrew a public flagellation so, here it is:
T'was Sunday night when I sat down to make my changes. I added my standard fully qualified e-mail address as the default address to deliver mail to (by my reading the field was for a catch-all account) and tried to send a test message. I got an error message and the error was pretty obvious (in hindsight) as to the cause of the problem:
SMTP protocol diagnostic: 554 5.0.0 rewrite: excessive recursion (max 50), ruleset canonify
I didn't think anything of it at the time, I just thunk "Oh, Andrews got a sendmail problem" and sent him a message saying so, for some reason the dots didn't connect between me making mail changes and sendmail barfing everywhere. It was late, I went to bed.
About two or three in the morning I woke up and a thought popped into my head - "I wonder if I caused that error by trying to deliver mail to myself back to myself", unfortunately I didn't get up and do anything about it (although I suspect that by then Andrew had fixed the "Operator Error" as he put it, back in his timezone). I got up in the morning and saw the explanation e-mail and felt like a particularly foolish, clueless dick (oops, there goes the PG rating).
So there you go, I'm a dunderhead and I'm really pissed that I didn't get up and go fix it when I realised what I'd done. Beating up on other peoples servers, even without malicious intent, is a Bad Thing.
I'm sorry Andrew, I've learned from my mistakes and will be moving to Tibet shortly to ponder my bunglings in a computerless cave with a gentleman by the name of Ransel Rinpoche who has promised, as an aid to contemplation, to flog me mercilessly for the next 50 years.
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Thu, 22 Sep 2005
[07:16] More Terminal Services Excitement
Date: 9/22/05 at 3:16PM
It seems that from Windows 2003 up there is support for the /console switch to mstsc.exe. This is cool because you don't have to worry about getting a third party tool like VNC or Dameware to see what the hell is going on on the desktop if you're doing remote installs and all goes quiet...
Syntax is easy:
mstsc /v:SERVERNAME /console
I would LOVE to know how they came to choose v as the server name parameter!
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Tue, 20 Sep 2005
[23:28] Opera Runs Free
Date: 9/21/05 at 7:28AM
Well, in a somewhat interesting move the Opera web browser has had all of the advertising and licensing fees removed! It is now another free browser. It seems they intend to make money through premium support, which to be honest doesn't look that premium - 24 hour guaranteed e-mail response in English only. I think that's a token offering, the forums will provide better response I think. I suspect the real money spinner is their continued licensing of their quite extensive mobile platform. I listened to a podcast interview recently with the head of Opera, Jon S. von Tetzchner, who explained the secret behind their quick response to new platforms was that their whole app was based on vanilla C++. There are no OS APIs used on any platform so porting is a relatively painless process.
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Sun, 18 Sep 2005
[02:12] It's Official - Touching Wood Does SOD ALL
Date: 9/18/05 at 10:12AM
I mentioned last week that my new bike was going great guns and that "Touch Wood" everything was going to be OK now. So on Wednesday I notice that something is wrong. It feels like I've buckled the wheel and that the wheel is rubbing on the frame but when I watch the wheel it ISN'T rubbing on the frame - I've had enough buckled wheels to know exactly what that feels like too. I finally located the problem on Saturday when I accompanied Shona and Sam on a walk home. I was trundling the bike along in front of me with the front wheel up in the air, giving me an new and exciting perspective on the undercarriage of my bike. I could see that the innermost gear wheel was what was rubbing on the frame! Basically the whole pedal assembly was trying to exit stage left and was dragging the cluster into the frame - given time it could have sawed its way out!
So there you have it folks, I've done it again. Somehow I managed to break the bottom bracket which is basically the bit that holds the pedal crankshafts in the frame and lets them spin so you can get that exciting pedalling action going. Once again, I've not been involved in any hardcore adventure mountain biking and I've not even had a prang. My spider-senses are tingling and they tell me.....cheap bikes are constructed from cheap parts! On the bright side, I rocked up at Decathlon bright and early and was second in line for repairs - they fixed me up with a new one (£45 parts and labour) for free in an hour and as an extra bonus I seem to have had a break and gear checkup too! I think I see why the workshop is ALWAYS packed when I go there - they must get hundreds of returns a week.
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Wed, 14 Sep 2005
[00:41] Dark In Here Isn't It
Date: 9/14/05 at 8:41AM
The advantages to working on a laptop is that when the power goes out - you don't lose your work! I think that it might be a pretty good idea to stick some kind of battery/capacitor arrangement into the power supply unit of all computers just to keep them running for 5 minutes when the power drops - a mini UPS I guess. I think most of the people around me would agree that this would be also be a good thing!
On a slightly more paranoid note, the cause of things like mass power outages (I know of three separate buildings that all blinked out for a minute there) are more than a little worrying these days....
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Tue, 13 Sep 2005
[07:37] The Move
Date: 9/13/05 at 3:37PM
First off, many thanks to everyone who offered to take over hosting for me - much appreciated! Next up, special thanks to Mr Pollock for providing the offer I have decided to run with! I've moved the static content over and the DNS changes were made today to point to my new digital home. The blog however will live here for a few more weeks while I re-learn blosxom. I don't anticipate that being particularly hard but I don't see any time being available in which to move the data from here and re-format it and make the blog look as astoundingly nice and professional as it does at the moment :)
On an entirely unrelated note, I think that this is probably one of the more interesting ways to start a book:
So that ignorant, thick-lipped, evil whorehopping editor phones me up and says, Does the word contract mean anything to you, Jerusalem?
I was having a mildly paranoid day, mostly due to the fact that the mad priest lady from over the river had taken to nailing weasels to my front door again.
Contract? You'll never get a city hitman up the mountain to me -- you bastards die if there's actual oxygen in the air.
I can in no way recommend this book, which is by the way, "Spider Jerusalem in Transmetropolitan: Back on the Street" by Warren Ellis as this is all I know of it - I saw that mentioned on another blog and thought it was cool - the style reminds me very much of the great and, sadly, late Hunter S. Thompson. I suspect the structure rather than the content is the only similarity but one never knows.
Over and out...*click*
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Mon, 12 Sep 2005
[08:02] My Bike, my NEW Bike
Date: 9/12/05 at 4:02PM
I'm sure everyone remembers how I got a bike a few weeks ago (you better - there's a test at the end). Well, the story developed but as work is going through one of those "Your life is mine, MINE, MIIIIIINE MUHAHAHAHAHAHA" phases at the moment I haven't had a chance to write about it. As I sit here at work at 1900 I find I now have some "spare" time, so here goes:
Well, in what ended up being a stunning surprise to absolutely no-one, I broke it (especially my father who, being used to such things, just laughed at me). I don't know what it is with me and, well everything pretty much! Generally things just fall apart in my hands. I refuse to believe that I am the only one to get one of those bikes and ride it so hard that it just disintegrated under the pressure. I'm not morbidly obese and I was being careful (I'm not even going to qualify that with a "for me" - I was actually riding normally). I've gone through a large number of bikes in my past so I know that I can be a little rough (I managed to actually detach the frame from the forks on one - it just snapped whilst I was riding home. Took me a while to work out what happened, I heard the SNAP but the brake and gear cables held the whole thing together so I couldn't actually see a problem - when I got on and pedalled the pedals were scraping on the ground but it wasn't until I got home that I worked out WHY, but I digress)...ummmm, yeah, so, on with the story:
I actually broke it the week I got it - I described the disintegration of the whole gear assembly but I was willing to live with that, when the rear wheel bearing started to give out (this is within four days of purchase folks) I decided I better take it back to the shop and let them do a post-mortem. I took it back on Saturday - exactly one week after it left the store on its maiden voyage. They were, non-plussed, shall we say. The blokes exact words were "You've had this how long?". He took it out the back and after about five minutes I sorta peeked around the corner - three people were standing around it all with their hands on their hips, heads a'shaking. He came back and told me that they could swap it for me or refund my money which I thought was pretty cool. I decided that I didn't want another piece of poop bike (anyone spot the cunning plan here?) and asked if I could perhaps upgrade to something not constructed entirely of tinfoil and my erstwhile assistant said "Yup" so I requested a parade of the next crappiest bikes. I got the option of a mountain bike or a commuter bike, both with front suspension, I'm not real keen on suspension but I had no choice so I test rode them both. I decided on the commuter because by god that was one DAMN comfy seat - the seat on the original bike and the one on the mountain bike were both ass-reamers, to put it bluntly. So, BEHOLD MY NEW BIKE:
This little beauty is a Decathlon Riverside 3, constructed especially for riding alongside rivers - luckily I have to go over the Thames every morning so it's OK.
Now, as I write this it is a day over two weeks since I got the new bike and so far (touch wood, touch wood, touch wood) it has behaved perfectly. It is insanely more comfy than the old one, the bell actually works (the old one was constructed of tinfoil and just crumpled when you tonked it with the little hammer) and you can even change gears!!
In another two weeks it will have paid itself off and I will be in credit to the tune of £70, huzzah!
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Fri, 09 Sep 2005
[02:51] The Magic Of Being Called Kynan
Date: 9/9/05 at 10:51AM
I get this a LOT but recently a large number of people have had reason to e-mail me. An e-mail was sent listing me as the contact like this:
"Please contact kynan.dent@blahblahblah". I have so far received the following exciting permutations of my name:
- Kenan
- Keenan
- Kenean
- Kyan
- Kyiran (I think this is my favourite)
- Kynana
- Kyran
- Kent??!?
Normally I am very forgiving of people and their attempts to get my name right, I've been called Ceinwen, Cyan, Conan and someone once went so far as so say "look, Kynans' too hard to say, I'm going to call you Simon" and I let them get away with it - English phonetics are painfully incomprehensible to a lot of people; however, if you have to write/type the name as part of the e-mail address, or even if you just copied and pasted it, SURELY your eyes passed over the letters....how can they still sod it up so badly. These aren't even typos, r and n are nowhere near each other (unless these people are morbidly obese and require special dialing wands to type or something).
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Wed, 07 Sep 2005
[02:26] Windows Command Shell Shenanigans
Date: 9/7/05 at 10:26AM
I've been writing a lot of Windows Command Shell scripts recently (can't use WSH because it's not on all the boxes and NT 4 is lowest common denominator) and I ran into a bit of a gotcha with FOR loops. This may not be a gotcha if you are new to programming and actually read the documentation (although in MY defense this doesn't appear to be mentioned in the FOR /? help). So anyway, I expected a FOR loop to behave in a rational Unix shell style fashion. Let me illustrate the problem, here is a functional snippet of code:
1 @ECHO OFF
2 SET THING=w00t
3 FOR %%G in (a b c) DO (SET THING=%THING%,%%G)
4 ECHO %THING%
I'd expect the output to be this:
C:>test_for.cmd
woot,a,b,c
What you actually get is this:
C:>test_for.cmd
woot,c
This is because the command interpreter scans the whole FOR statement in before the iteration begins and resolves any variables that aren't updated by the FOR loop itself so what starts out as:
FOR %%G in (a b c) DO (SET THING=%THING%,%%G)
actually gets run as
FOR %%G in (a b c) DO (SET THING=w00t,%%G)
To get around this you have to use the Windows Command Shell version of procedures. The working version looks like this:
1 @ECHO OFF
2 SET THING=w00t
3 FOR %%G IN (a b c) DO (CALL :GUTS_OF_FOR %%G)
4 ECHO %THING%
5 GOTO EOF
6
7 :GUTS_OF_FOR
8 SET THING=%THING%,%1
9 GOTO :EOF
10
11 :EOF
The command GOTO :EOF DOESN'T actually do what you'd expect, ie GOTO :EOF, it signals to the interpreter that the procedure has completed and that the script should resume at the point where the procedure was called. No, really...
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Tue, 06 Sep 2005
[02:08] Lotus Notes Login Dialog
Date: 9/6/05 at 10:08AM
I don't know if anyone out there is (or has been) subjected to the interesting experience that is Lotus Notes. Currently I am being forced to use it, amongst a bevy of other Groupware solutions - why have one when you can have MANY!!! Anyway, below is the login dialog for Notes (6.5):
Normally is doesn't say CENSORED across the bottom but everything else you can see is "normal". That bloody keyring has been annoying me for a while. After you type in four characters every new character prompts the keychain to morph. Below are some examples:
I asked a Notesy friend of mine why this is and he gave me this answer:
I think it's supposed to throw off anyone watching you type in your password. That's what a guy told me when I was on a lotus course. dunno if it's true.
I found myself doubting the veracity of the aforementioned "guy on a lotus course" so I did a little digging...it appears that these images are displayed and changed by running the characters you've entered through an algorithm so that the sequence of pictures generated whilst you type your password is unique (in the same way that your password hash is 'unique'). This is meant to aid in the detection of a spoofed login dialog, allegedly. You're meant to take particular note of the keychain image that is present when you finish typing your password and if it changes from normal then panic or something. An unconfirmed report I found in Google Groups suggests that this was requested by the CIA and/or NSA whom are both allegedly Notes users (apparently Notes is preferred because there are less viruses targeting it).
I initially doubted that this works or provides any useful functionality because it is mostly post-departure barn door bolting. Why? No-one has mentioned this to me, the Notes user, nor to ANYONE in the room whom I've asked whom are all Notes users. What's more - the bloke I orignally asked has several Lotus certifications AND was on a Lotus course when he tried to find out about it. If no-one, including Lotus community developers, knows what the hell it is I doubt that it's really going to help much :)
Also, this is a keylogger they're trying to thwart, any semi-decent keylogger isn't waiting for you to hit enter or press OK before logging/sending the keys - they're logged as you type. All you're doing with this functionality is identifying that your system has been compromised - this isn't bad per se but it IS the last level of defense against external attackers. However, on further reflection this is a useful feature if you've got internal attackers (ie employees) as they don't need to circumvent firewalls and mail filters to get trojans onto the system - they can use USB/Floppy/Internal Mail.
Just in case you're interested, I tracked the authorative answer down at the IBM RedBooks repository. The document in question is the Lotus Security Handbook and the section I've reproduced below is "6.1.4 - Notes passwords" from page 220:
Anti-spoofing password dialog box
To defeat dictionary or brute force attacks on ID file passwords and to reduce the
risk of password capture, Notes employs an anti-spoofing password dialog box.
This was introduced in R4 and has been retained in version 6 of Notes.
If a user enters an incorrect password, Notes waits for several seconds before
allowing them to try again. This delay increases with each incorrect attempt to a
maximum of thirty seconds. The delay feature makes it difficult to try many
passwords in rapid succession in the hope of guessing the right combination.
The anti-spoofing aspect of the Notes password dialog box resides in the
changing pattern to the left of the password input text field.
In R4 and R5, this was a set of four Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols. In version 6,
these hieroglyphics have been replaced by a picture of a key ring, with the
attached objects (such as keys, flashlight, pocket knife, and so forth) changing
after the fifth character is typed in.
These dynamic symbols make it more difficult to substitute a false dialog box that
captures passwords in place of the Notes Password dialog box. Users should be
made aware of the particularities of this dialog box and of the fact that the
symbols change as they enter their passwords. If they notice that the symbols do
not change or are not present, they should stop entering their password and click
Cancel. As well, they should memorize the last image after they’ve typed their
password because the algorithm behind the symbols will always compute to the
same symbol in the end. (However, the algorithm is complicated enough that it is
not easy to sort out the password just by looking at the symbols and the way they
change).
So there you go! I don't know about the "click Cancel" advice - I'd be inclined to say leave it the hell alone and call IT Support pronto - Cancel could self destruct or something and like I said before, they keys are already logged (more than likely) anyway.
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Fri, 02 Sep 2005
[00:11] Duh!
Date: 9/2/05 at 8:11AM
So I'm on the phone to someone and they're asking for hostnames. I looked at the hostname required and automatically switched to the Phonetic Alphabet. Here's how the conversation went:
Me: Sierra Two Foxtrot
Them: Can you say that in English now
Me: !?
Me: Umm, ess two eff
Them: ess two ess
Me: Ahh, no, ess two EFF - Foxtrot
Them: Oh, I wondered where that Foxtrot came from
Me: *bangs head on monitor*
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Thu, 01 Sep 2005
[08:59] Why I LOVE My New House: Reason 723
Date: 9/1/05 at 4:59PM
There are several really good things about my current domicile. I would like to share with you some of the bad things though ('cause they're MUCH more fun). Here is a sign that recently appeared in the lift:
 | Now, there are several points to consider when looking at this sign. Let us examine what I consider the two main points:
|
Below is an example of the impact this has had on the local lift urinating society:
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Wed, 31 Aug 2005
[08:27] Domain Registration
Date: 8/31/05 at 4:27PM
I have to renew my domain quite shortly and I'm looking for alternative hosting arrangements - there's just no way I'm going to be able to host everything at home because
- I don't own a computer at the moment (and the one I've borrowed is certainly not capable of performing hosting duties anyway)
- I don't know how long I'm going to be in the appartment I'm currently residing in
- BT can't keep my line active for more than a week :)
So, if anyone's got any good suggestions could you please mail me or add a comment to this post?
Thanks folks!
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[06:14] Free Version of Opera 8.02
Date: 8/31/05 at 2:14PM
You can score a free registration code for Opera 8.02 from Opera TODAY ONLY (until midnight CET (GMT +1) on Wednesday 31st of August) by visiting here. Apparently they're celebrating their 10th year online birthday party by giving away free registration "Party favors"!
I haven't use Opera since Phoenix came out - around Opera version 4 from memory - so I can't really vouch for it anymore. I looked at version 7 a whiel ago but I didn't like what they'd done to the UI - it's all skinnable though so who knows? At the time I was using it it was the best browser around, I think it's been well and truly eclipsed by Firefox now...but I've collected my free serial anyway - you never know :)
UPDATE: If you miss out then I requested a registration as opera@mailinator.com - you can view the e-mail here until it gets deleted.
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Tue, 30 Aug 2005
[02:30] Ext2 Installable File System For Windows
Date: 8/30/05 at 10:30AM
I have been using Ext2fsd for grabbing stuff off my ext2 formatted portable HDD. I was just about to install it on another machine this weekend and thought I'd check for newer versions and I found this: Ext2 Installable File System For Windows. Basically it
"...provides Windows NT4.0/2000/XP with full access to Linux ext2 volumes..."
It's a little more GUI oriented than Ext2fsd, can utilise ext3 volumes and provides full read AND write support for both ext2 and 3. Downsides? Although the software is freeware it is NOT Open Source, good for giving to people who are going to have issues once you start saying "and type cmd...". Now, we wander back to Ext2fsd. It has recently jumped up to version 0.25 and it now ALSO supports full read/write access to ext2, ext3 is still read-only. This utility IS Open Source but I don't think that the authors first language is English so the available information and documentation is a bit difficult to navigate. Everything you're going to want to read is in the download rather than on the website (although there is some very interesting reading - if you're into file systems - linked from there).
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Sun, 28 Aug 2005
[06:02] Hoorah For Gorman!
Date: 8/28/05 at 2:02PM
That would be gorman the ModBlog admin, not the hapless Lt Gorman from Aliens (just in case anyone was confused). And why is Gorman making me so happy? He's fixed the RSS feed problem! I've checked on http://planet.andrew.net.au and everything looks hunkydory.
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[02:23] BT giveth and BT taketh away...
Date: 8/28/05 at 10:23AM
At some point between 0745 and 1200 on Friday 26 August (GMT) the BT line to my house ceased to function. I tried to ring home at 1200 and it just rung and rung. We quickly ascertained that the bastard was no longer working because a) no ringing in or out and b) NO BLOODY ADSL!!!!!
I raised a fault on the BT website and after 2 hours of what I assume was automated checking it came back with this:
The green highlight started out at 1 and stopped at 4. I'm pretty sure this is bad because that means it's going to be a wiring issue or something. I called them up and after playing with nigh on every single robot they've got I finally managed to get ascertain that BT was working on the fault and it would be fixed....by the sixteenth of September! Hahaha, ahh - and I used to think Telstra was bad. I tried to find a human I could talk to and eventually got one by pretending I didn't have a TouchTone phone. They explained to me that this is the maximum amount of time it will take to repair/rectify the fault and that I can live with it.
I kept an eye out for people who'd crashed into poles/exchanges on the way but there wasn't anything obvious. I checked all the wiring I could access when I got home. The phone's OK but I tried isolating it from the modem and all that crap. I unscrewed the wiring box outside my front door and it looked OK to my laymans eyes, I followed the wires to the goddawful mess at the end of my floor which I have no clue as to how to decipher - I'm going to stick a photo here to prove what a goddawful mess it really is. I finally wandered downstairs to the BT Junction Box/Room. It was unlocked so I figured "What the hey" and opened the door....THE DOOR TO HELL aiiiiieeeeee
Again, the photo is coming, but let me describe the scene for you. The room is a small utility room and contains the telephone and electricity junction boxes and fuses. Now, when I say junction box what I mean in THIS case is the massive birdsnext of wires stapled to the wall. I swear that my first thought when I walked in there was "OK, here's the problem, someone has attacked the junction box with an axe" - seriously. There is shattered plastic all over the floor and wires writhing in all directions, some cut some connected. I investigated a little more closely and decided that due to the fact that some of the wires were painted onto the wall and some were twisted to hold what remains of the junction box together that it had probably been this way for a while. I would dearly love to see Mr BT working on this - how the hell he's going to know which wires connect to my house is a complete mystery to me...
UPDATE: Behold, in all its glory:
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Thu, 25 Aug 2005
[07:06] Have you ever had a day
Date: 8/25/05 at 3:06PM
that made you feel like this. I have. I've had two in a row now.
On a brighter note, check out some of the other stuff on that site. A lot of it is completely incomprehensible but hey, who said comprehensible was good! There's a guest appearance from the Badger Badger Badger badgers in the LotR: Two Towers Toon - I just worked out that this is the original site that the badgers came from....think I'll go stick the fork back in my brain now....
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Tue, 23 Aug 2005
[22:39] Dalek shmalek
Date: 8/24/05 at 6:39AM
Shona is off to the doctors today for her specialist appointment so that they can (hopefully) fix up her knee. She has a suspected meniscal tear. Basically, this is the cartilage that acts as a shock absorbe for your knee and keeps the big ole leg bones (tell me if this is getting to technical) from crashing into each other.
"Ahh, hello - this is meant to be in the Tech category" you're all waving and pointing and carrying on...well excuse the personal interest. I was building up to this: she's having some issues walking at the moment so a friend sent us this link to a Stair Climbing Robot. I've stolen the picture from the site so you can see how cool it looks but I'm sure it's even cooler in real life - steam probably comes out of valves and I imagine it makes cool Robotech style noises whilst going up and down!
Hehe - I love the Grip Of Death that the chick on the robot has on those arms there, "Sure I trust the robot" she's saying "Sure...now get me the hell offa here"
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[13:21] Streetfighter II
Date: 8/23/05 at 9:21PM
Well, I rode to work today again and, once again, my bike tried to kill me. I'm beginning think it's possesed by A'Nub Kid Thee the evil bike god. Either that or paying £80 for a bike entails the purcahser to exactly what they paid for!
What happend I hear you gasp - well boys and girls, take a seat and I shall tell a tale. A tale so dark and haunting you may well NEVER RIDE AGAIN:
Cue maniacal laughter, segue to story...
wavy lines...wavy lines...
The chain decided to make the same break for freedom as yesterday. This time however it timed it's devious behaviour a little better - it waited until I was powering around a truck, I'm standing up on the pedals to get all my weight into going forward, I need more power damn it! Throwing caution to the wind I click through to third gear...I can still hear the engineers haunting words in my ears, "It cannae be done Captain, shes going tae bloow". I lunged into the next down-pedal paying no heed to these words of caution. "Hahaaaa" I cried, "to hell with your antiquated notions of self-preservation - glory goes only to the glorious" and then (oohh, exciting isn't it) *sproing* the chain discarded the everyday constraints of the chainwheel - it's escape plan was foiled by the pedal and the two entwined in a way that I suspect Mr Rubik would gladly have paid for. Anyway, with all the mechanical links suspending me on the pedals removed I plummeted groundwards; Luckily I managed to catch myself with my testicles on the crossbar or things could have gotten pretty nasty.
I still got to work a damn site faster than the Tube and I managed to get home in 12 minutes this afternoon after finally working out the reverse navigation to my house. Hoorah!
I shall be paying a visit to the Decathlon store shortly to get the broken off bits replaced and to get the gear-shifty thing (alrighty, derailer if you must) adjusted. I'm suspecting that shifting into third is what caused the whole dismemberment thing in the first place. In its eagerness to comply with engine room requests it flucks the chain a little too far, up to where the fourth gear cog wheel would be if I actually had one :)
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[00:48] lUser Manager
Date: 8/23/05 at 8:48AM
Is it just me or is this just a little bit funny:
/cygdrive/c/winnt/system32>ls l*msc
lusrmgr.msc
That would be the Local User Manager for Windows
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Mon, 22 Aug 2005
[01:20] Zooming 'round the streets of London
Date: 8/22/05 at 9:20AM
Well, I made it. London very nicely turned on the rain for my first ride in - a fact I didn't notice until AFTER I'd gotten dressed so I had to go and get changed into my boardies and a t-shirt and waterproof my bag. Luckily my bag always has it's little waterproof jacket inside it or it would probably be back at home (Australia) where my waterproof pants are.
I managed to get as far as the bottom of the lift before I nearly stacked :) Luckily I recovered and from then I kept a sharp eye out for the many little slippery pitfalls that pepper the roads of London:
- Steel Manhole Covers
- Rows of VERY well polished bricks randomly embedded across roads
- The stuff they use to write on the road with. Back home it's paint - over here it's a plasticy substance that is significantly raised from the surrounding road surface (a good 5-10mm) and is slick as hell
- Motorcycles - one of 'em nearly got me this morning
- My Bike! Yes, that's right. I broke the bastard on my first real ride in. Somehow the (plastic) chainguard managed to break off and, in a desperate bid for freedom, it attempted to leave the bicycle and take it's close friend the chain with it. This sucked for a number of reasons. Chief among them the fact that I was in the middle of an intersection with no method for providing forward propulsion and a large garbage truck bearing down upon me. I did the first thing that came to mind which was the "Secret Signal" I learned whilst watching Team America: World Police. Surprisingly this didn't work. I rapidly shifted to Plan B and shuffled the hell off the road. I shall be talking to my fine friends at Decathlon later today about that. I don't THINK it's actually a functional piece of the bike. I think it's just meant to keep trousers from being eaten by the chain but it was displaying a remarkable penchant for flinging the chain off whilst in 1st gear - I stuck to second for the rest of the ride in.
The other interesting thing was riding ON the three lane highway. Coming from cycle happy Canberra I'm used to having actual defined bike paths. Here in London bicycles are classed as vehicles and are expected to drive on the road with everything else. This is a little freaky at first but for the most part London drivers seem to be prepared to give way to bicycles where appropriate. It was fun zooming down the middle of the three lanes - past all the stationary traffic - this morning with all the other cyclists. I think I'm going to enjoy this.
So, all in all, I'm going to call that a success. It's HEAPS faster than the Tube and I enjoyed it a lot more. Assuming the ratio of "parts falling off bike:number of trips taken" doesn't keep rising on a 1:1 basis then I should be OK.
Challenge the second: Let's see if my bike and I can make it home in (mostly) one piece.
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Sun, 21 Aug 2005
[02:14] What, and it's going downess
Date: 8/21/05 at 10:14AM
OK, it's been one of those exciting weekends, and there's still more to come. But first, a rant:
In a display of personal munificence I bought some speaks last weekend. To be precise a Logitech X-230. This was cool because now we have sound coming out of our (borrowed) computer. Unfortunately, said computer is running Windows 2something and as I didn't build it it has the default sounds turned on (which I turn off in my winnt.sif and never have to worry about normally). So anyway, there I was this morning eating my breakfast and checking out what music I wanted to put on my MP3 player, I open up explorer and click on C: ... *click* ... OtherDirectory ... *click* .... *MP3* ... click, at which point I started screaming at it, then I turned the default (aka crap) sound scheme off. Now my question is - who is so stupid that they would click on a directory and, in the time it takes to render the contents, completely forget what they were doing and require an audible prompt???? Let me present the scenario:
Characters:
- elBoxen: A default install W2x machine
- The Androgynous One : A Human Bean
Scene: A computer on a desk (elBoxen). A person (The Androgynous One) sits in front of the computer, mouse in hand...
Act 1: It Begins
The Androgynous One: I think I'll see what is in the "My Documents" folder, first I shall click on the folder
*clicks on folder*
The Androgynous One: Now we wait
nanoseconds later
The Androgynous Ones Brain: Oh SHIT, what were we doing....are we skydiving?!? SHIT!
elBoxen:CLICK
The Androgynous Ones Brain: Oh YEAH - waiting for a folder to load...let's click on another one...
nanoseconds later
The Androgynous Ones Brain: Oh SHIT....
*fade out*
Not likely really is it? Now I know I'm being a little melodramatic here (yes, just a little thank you). I know that the stupid clicky sound is actually the "Complete Navigation" event firing off. I can see there is possibly some leeway here in that a webpage might take longer to load than your directory full of files but it still pisses me off!
Right, onto more exciting news. I bought a bicycle yesterday. It was THE cheapest one I could find in the city that was still a legal purchase. I didn't want to get something bright and shiny because bicycle theft in this city is abundant. I also bought the plethora of locking devices on requires to cycle in modern-day London. A D-lock for securing the bike to something, a cable lock for securing the wheels/seat to the D-lock, another D-Lock to secure the first D-lock to something else in case the first thing gets cut/bent/removed and a small trailer to carry it all in.
I bought the thing because my Oyster card runs out on Monday and I'm not particularly keen on shelling out another 80 quid for the questionable privilege of ramming myself into a stinking, sweaty, overpopulated tube for "high-speed" transportation to somewhere close to where I want to be! I cycled in this morning in 14 minutes and 09 seconds - the Tube journey from Waterloo to Bank takes that long alone (including walking time form my house to Waterloo), it's another 5-7 minute walk from Bank up to where I'm working so so far most of me is happy - my tender buttocks are not so happy but they'll toughen up :)
Tonight we're off to see She Talks In Maths, a show by a lass named Eliza Lumley. She's a broadway singer and the show is launching her new album (of the same name). The album is "a re-working of songs by Radiohead". It sounds interesting and that's all we know about it. I'll let y'all know if she's any good!
One last thing, for those of you on the edge of your seats wondering where I left Bodies (the book, not the objects) - I haven't yet. It was pissing down on Friday and yesterday wasn't much better - not good weather for abandoning books to their fate in (even if they do have rain jackets - water resistant is NOT waterproof). Maybe when we go out tonight....
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Sat, 20 Aug 2005
[06:10] bash.org
Date: 8/20/05 at 2:10PM
More than likely everyone knows about bash but I haven't looked at it for months. While waiting for some installs to finish at work today I dropped by to have a look - now everyone thinks I'm (more) mental 'cause I've been cackling at my monitor:
#5775 +(8910)- [X]
* ab is away - gone, if anyone talks in the next 25 minutes as me it's bm
being an asshole -
#368808 +(4766)- [X]
<@David> Yay I get laid today! Been a month.... needing it by now
<@Sony> ...........
<@Sony> TMI TMI TMI
<@David> Only a few hundred pounds but its better than nothing
<@David> eh?
<@David> damn i meant PAID
<@David> I get PAID today
<@David> dammit
#329292 +(4645)- [X]
* Batty bangs his head repeatedly against a wall
#240849 +(4539)- [X]
UPDATE: Sorry, I couldn't resist one more (I read the Top 200 last night as well :)
#168859 +(2896)- [X]
PS: Sorry about the tragic use of cite/pre - I've fixed that up now with <'s
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Fri, 19 Aug 2005
[06:13] The Cleverst Little Printer In The World
Date: 8/19/05 at 2:13PM
I've just moved offices (wheee) and I am now situated directly opposite the printer. The printer in question is a venerable HP Laserjet 5 (OK, I just checked and they were only manufactured in 2003). Anyway, The printer has a little problem, every now and then the little grippy wheels that help suck the printed paper out seem to lose their grip and the paper doesn't fully exit the machine. The next piece of paper to be printed then pushes it out.
Whoop-de-doo I hear you say, care factor nil. Haha - think again! There is a slight point of interest or element of cool, as I like to call it, here:
When the first piece of paper is pushed out by the second piece it tumbles off the printer and drops to it's doom....NOT! The printer has been carefully aligned (by the great printer gods I can only assume) so that as the paper falls and flips (due to the curvature imposed upon it on its trip around the drum) the top edge of the paper slips in between the bottom of the printer and the desk upon which it resides and hangs there, as does the next, and the next! It is SO cool!!!! I've been watching it for ages.
Possibly I need to get out more.
I'm going to hunt down a device capable of capturing video so that I can share the full excitement of the moment with you all. Stay tuned....
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Thu, 18 Aug 2005
[12:24] Bodies by Jed Mercurio - *** (3/5)
Date: 8/18/05 at 8:24PM
Bodies is a book with the medical profession at its core. It follows the life of a young and naive freshly graduated doctor, from his first experiences as a casualty doctor onwards. It's brutally open in its coverage of his everyday life (if you're one of the whining killjoys who pipes up "Howcome they never go to the toilet in the movies" then you'll enjoy this book). Every nuance of his life from pimple popping to murderous thoughts and actions are illustrated which makes the book startlingly candid and immersive. You live vicariously through the main character and it really is most difficult to put down - on the other hand I found the sordid and grimy details of his life oft bordering on revulsion. There are some things I just don't want to know. I'm a nice clean neat kinda guy and there's a reason I'm not a doctor.
One of the reasons I was interested in this book is that my sister recently became a paramedic (no way I could do that) and this alternate window into her world was interesting, but horribly worrying, to peer through.
You grow up as a child assuming the adults know what to do. As I get older and wiser (for want of a better word) I see that no-one really knows what to do. We're all just muddling through life doing the best we can - it's just a worrying when you think that the guy up to his elbow in your guts with a very sharp knife is just doing his best...
I'm going off on a tangent here so go read the book if you want.....it is a good book. It would have had another half a star if I had a half-asterisk key on my keyboard, instead I knocked a star off because it was too horribly real for me, bring back the rose-tinted glasses!
Incidentally, I discovered this book whilst on my way to work - it's a BookCrossing book and you can find it and follow its journeys here. I'm going to release it tomorrow with its new rain jacket to help keep it whole whilst travelling.
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Tue, 16 Aug 2005
[16:13] WoW Comedy
Date: 8/17/05 at 12:13PM
I'm sure this has been linked to hell and gone by now but I have to post it....WoW Forum pwnage
The posts in question are 3 and 5, I've excerpted them below but head over to the forums for the ribbing:
3. Re: Alterac Valley for Tuesday 08-16-05 | 8/16/2005 3:29:01 AM PDT
Quote this post Reply to this post
ok i have a proposition for the horde, let us kill Korrak while you sit and watch. and well let you get all the honor youll ever want=}. no? ok well it shall be a great battle then, hope to see everyone there!
4...
5. Re: Alterac Valley for Tuesday 08-16-05 | 8/16/2005 8:44:27 AM PDT
Quote this post Reply to this post
Q u o t e:
ok i have a proposition for the horde, let us kill Korrak while you sit and watch. and well let you get all the honor youll ever want=}. no? ok well it shall be a great battle then, hope to see everyone there!
((OOC))
Pardon me for hijacking the thread, here..
But, Brion - if you don't want your mother to know you were up and on the computer at 3:29 in the morning - DON'T post on a forum that she reads.
Busted.
Grounded.
Ahahahahahaha :D
I've been thinking about (and I've even semi-written) an essay/article (for want of a better word) on the interaction of technology, specifically virtual communities, and the real world - this just fits in perfectly! Anyways, you don't need to know that - go forth and do whatever it is that you do!
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Sun, 14 Aug 2005
[06:22] Data taste good, Windows EAT DATA
Date: 8/14/05 at 2:22PM
OK, so that's not strictly true - but I thought it sounded funny. Here's the lowdown.
Shona bought a BlueEye portable HDD enclosure before she left Oz so that she could easily transport all her Mail/Recipes/Patters/personal data/etc. She then stuck an 80Gb drive in it and - for maximum portability - formatted it with FAT32. Now, as everyone knows, Microsoft have been making it harder and harder to format things as FAT32 in recent years, especially things bigger than 32Gb. To be fair to Microsoft, they do it because it is insanely wasteful to try and use FAT32 on such a large partition but this is the beauty of choice. If I WANT to stick the loaded gun in my crotch and pull the trigger, I can! But I digress, where was I, blah blah BlueEye blah, ah yes.
So with the aid of Linux and the mkdosfs utility the disk was f