Jumbled thoughts from a jumbled mind

we've relocated

2005-06-23T16:39:00.000+01:00

And it's been a been a blast so far. Not enough time to do all the tweaks I wanted, but things are working out fairly well.

why am I doing this ?

2005-04-29T14:20:00.000+01:00

It seems odd, really ... I haven't done a full year of blogging as me and I'm already contemplating a change. The thing is, blogging under my real first name was an experiment and I think I've gathered sufficient data points to draw the conclusions I needed. Ok, let me try sounding less grandiose and less in control now.

I like the anonymity of the internet. For whatever reason, for whatever weirdo may be out there, using a pseudonym means that you have a fallback. It's one of the reasons I oppose biometric authentication. If some cracker figures out how to fake your retina scan or thumb print, how would you change those things ? In the same way, if some nutjob takes a dislike to you, personally .. or just decides to make a nuisance of him/her self, using your real name in a blog means you don't have a way out. You are, literally, at the mercy of a person who knows how to use Google. Of course, it can be argued that if some information about you is in Google, your chances at privacy are pretty much screwed anyway. But even responding to a nutjob puts one at a distinct disadvantage. It depends on how much value is placed on information that is considered personal. I, for one, like to operate on a need to know basis. As in, if someone don't need to know something about me, why bother handing it out on a platter ?

I started doing this under my real name (of sorts) because I usually jump headfirst into stuff that I am uncomfortable doing ... sort of like facing my fears, if you like ... and I was very uncomfortable with putting my real name out there. The few times I was forced to use my name on the odd mailing list are now archived for posterity. And I dislike that. I don't need the publicity.

It doesn't help that in the small goldfish bowl that is Colombo, it's highly likely that you know someone who knows a blogger. Other Sri Lankan bloggers are nice, certainly, but why make yourself easy to find in real life if you don't want it so? I certainly don't need my name out there as a "blogger". Or a liberal. Or as a nerd. Or a geek. Or whatever tag someone chooses to attach to me. The amount of abuse inherent in the discovery of personal information by strangers or foul mouthed fuckwits is not funny. The recent influx of a few unsavoury characters made blogging under my real name a less attractive option, but the problems existed before the rotten apples infiltrated the barrel. So, it's time to branch out.

Essentially, what this means that there will be infrequent (possibly no) updates at this site from now on... I may be back for the odd post or two, but I'm moving on, at least for the forseeable future. I've always wanted to tinker and experiment with blogging software on a real live website. More importantly, I've spent so much of my professional life building software and the random hacked together website or two for clients that I think it would be fun to do my own. Blogger is a great service, but I like experimenting with things too much to accept the restrictions of a managed blogging site for long. I think there is already a lot of useful technical writing on the web. Of course, that didn't stop me from adding to it. Some people even found my odd experiments useful. That's what I want to make available elsewhere in the vain hope that other people find it useful.

I've met some very interesting people since I started blogging here. And actually met them in real life too. But as always, expecting everyone on das intarweb to be nice is naive. That's uptopian. It's not going to happen. The inflow of people with political agendas or religious motivations ... well, that's not for me. I don't blog as a grand socio-political experiment. I don't blog to preach my message to the masses. I certainly don't blog to further my career. In fact, if I did, then I think the contents of this very blog would probably disqualify me from a number of jobs *grin*. But escaping those with an agenda is difficult nowadays. Made more complicated by the fact that most people here know me by this identity and no other.

If you already know me in real life, I suppose you can ask me where I've moved on to, if you're interested. If you don't know me IRL and if you're mildly curious drop me a mail. I'm harmless. Or so people tell me, anyway. The URL may change, but the things I blog about won't...

the gap

2005-04-22T17:16:00.000+01:00

Went all the way to the Gap of Rohan only to find there is no Gap in Rohan. Not even a Banana Republic. False advertising!
The very secret diary of Arwen Undomiel

It's a bit of a sobering transition to go from mocking the old farts to being one of them. I don't have a problem with growing old (can you even call a not quite 30 year old old ?). "Hey, I'm young. What do I know ?" is one of the excuses that no longer seems to fly with anyone. What brought the onset of years home (not for the first time) was the quick scan through an entry which appeared in my RSS reader*. Someone bitching about O/Ls. Dear god.

I can remember the bare details, but that's it. Through the fuzzy, romanticized and selective memories of the past, I just remember knowing exactly which subjects I'd screw up... and which I wouldn't. Which ones I'd need to cram for like a mofo and which ones I'd just give up and not even bother. I remember the desperation and thinking "why the fsck do I need to study this shit ? I don't believe it and I don't need it and sure as hell I'm not going to use any of this horse poo ever again". Yes, I was much given to pointless railing at things I couldn't change. That much, at least, still remains. And in the end, what did it matter ? In the grand scheme of things, not very much at all. Not the pointless railing and certainly not the exam or it's results. But those things are only learnt with the benefit of hindsight.

Oh and I fully look forward to constant use of phrases like kids these days, I tell you and oh, you young whippersnapper, in my day we would ... and the evergreen what the bleep do you mean it costs THAT much ? Man, are prices rising or what ?.

Crap, I sound like my long dead grandparents now. That can't be a good thing. And this sounds like one of those closing monologues from Desperate Housewives. Crap.
---
* Quick plug: if you're on any sort of Loonix or Unixish OS and you're running KDE, you owe yourself a look at Akregator, a very very nice RSS reader. They really did hit the usability sweet spot for me. And the integration with Konqueror is a dream. Exactly what all the Windows based RSS readers offer with IE, except that in this case, you're pretty sure you won't get 0wnz0red by clicking on a stray link. Oooh, and tabs. And you can click on any tab and "detach" it into a new browser instance. Shiny.

enron

2005-04-21T14:33:00.000+01:00

Recently, I got to know something. Something so big, so earthshaking in it's potential consequences that it rivals the scandal at the company in the title of this post. Well, at least for those concerned. Something so huge for the circle of people involved that it literally means ... not life or death, nothing quite so extreme ... but perhaps emotional well being for the immediate future. Overstating much ? Maybe. There isn't any money involved, no laws were broken and nobody gets hurt. physically. Not a big deal ? Wrong.

The problem is this. I can't tell them. It's privileged information. There have been countless movie scenarios, hordes of book plots that revolved around the sanctity of a priest's confessional or lawyer-client privilege. Like ... insider trading, if you want to call it that. My restriction is none of those, but it is still a question of ethics. Perhaps the worst kind of barrier there is... And my choices at this point are all somewhere between the northerly devil and the southerly deep blue sea.

Do I tell the person in question that I know ? Do I tell all the people who might be affected what I know ? or more realistically, just the individuals whom I know personally ? Or do I pretend I never heard what I did and let fate toss the dice for those people however it may ?

There is a trite turn of phrase for one option; "for the greater good", but that's a whistleblower's choice. Transparency only seems like the most attractive option if it doesn't act like cling film wrapped over spoilt food.
Ob note: Ask me why that metaphor was uppermost in my mind. Or maybe you can guess already. Goddamn coleslaw and silly expiry dates.

Anyway, why do I always seem to blog about these moral dilemmas ? Is it just that I am the only one to encounter them and consider them blogworthy material (for whatever thoughts that definition may conjour up)... or is it just that I make a Mount Kilimanjaro out of a termite mound ?

killer quote

2005-04-20T12:01:00.000+01:00

Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity.
--Friedrich Nietzsche

I'll freely admit that there are those (yes, I'm referring to myself, I think) who strive for clarity but the twisted workings of their minds seem to make the words come out all garbled. Or maybe it's their complete lack of lucid thoughts to begin. There I go again. What I'm trying to say is that it's all too easy for me to unintentionally be about as clear as a puddle of mud stirred with a stick. Profundity is very much a hit or miss affair.

And with that quote, which I had not seen before, Neitzsche just boosted himself to equal footing with Voltaire. Because we all know that a witty saying proves nothing.

And in other news, the biggest darn icefloat on the planet crashed into a stationary object. Picture here. No casualties were reported; and the driver of B15A got off without losing any points off his license. The makers of Smirnoff Ice were unavailable for comment. Even the BBC reported on this story here and used the word "tongue" in a most disturbing fashion. Some protestors also used this event to bemoan the lack of justice and the leniency of driving laws in their region. The care police are investigating.

map me

2005-04-19T13:35:00.000+01:00

Google Maps for the UK. They don't have Ireland done yet, it seems... but yay. At the risk of sounding like a gushing fanboy, man... that is soooo cool. Directions, animated scrolling. *exclaims*. Mapquest and Multimap looks terrible in comparison.

update: Google Local is also available for the UK now. curry joints in my locality. Woo. Don't worry Yell, we still lub ya.

update 2: They got satellite views up too. Wowsers. It isn't exactly the cool aerial views offered by Multimap, but woot. Hmm. and on closer examination, it doesn't mean much. No real detailed sat views of the UK yet. Do they even exist, I wonder. Maybe looking at the Ordnance Survey might help.

Alexandria .. or something close

2005-04-19T10:06:00.000+01:00

The library of Alexandria was one of the largest on Earth at one time. These days, it's possible for a slim 2.5 inch hard drive to hold enough information to rival the great library. This is the final step in my attempt at getting a publicly available encyclopedia in a form that is relatively easy to access from my own computer. Parts one and two set up the environment previously.

One very important initial step requires changing a MySQL database parameter. Find the database configuration file (named my.cnf, usually), open it in a text editor and find the line which sets the max_allowed_packet_size for [mysqld]. This must be changed from the default 1M (1 megabyte maximum) to a higher value. I chose 10M. Perhaps a slightly lower value is possible, but why take chances, huh ? If this step is forgotten, the import will fail somewhere around the 600,000 row mark; ie: with only 33.3% of the job done. I discovered this, obviously, by having the job fail on me the first time. By the way, a configuration change of this nature requires that the MySQL server be restarted.

Wait for the download of the cur table dump to complete. A 806 megabyte compressed SQL file should be somewhere on your hard disk. Next step, get that SQL fed into your MySQL database. This is the point where a bit of command line MySQL knowledge comes in handy. The problem with a file this large is that most GUI (or web) tools will simply choke, curl up and die at the sheer size. It's possible (theoretically) to get this done via GUI by splitting the file into managable chunks or something similar, but err.. why bother ?

First, get a Win32 port of gzip. Ungzip the compressed file. Find the MySQL command line client and use that for the import of the SQL. The MySQL command line client is called (perhaps obviously) mysql. My interaction with the command line is shown below. Run the following command:
mysql -u wikip_user -p < 20050406_cur_table.sql

For bonus points, there is also a way with some command line trickery and pipes to manage the entire ungzip/import steps in one line. It's even possible on Windows although a bit dodgy if you're doing it on a Windows cmd prompt. Of course, you could still use the GUI tools for everything. Just that they'd be much much slower.

Enter the password for the wikip_user when prompted and that's it. The hard disk will start churning and anything from 20 minutes to an hour (depending on the speed of your hard disk and a few other factors) later, the Wikipedia data will be in your database. Celebrate ? Nope. Not just yet. See, the Wikipedia schema cur table does not have a prefix. So, looking at your database, you'll see a mw_cur table and a cur table. Simply type in the following commands at the mysql prompt after logging in as user wikip_user:
drop table mw_cur;
alter table rename cur to mw_cur;

The first drops the existing (installed by default) mw_cur table from your database. The second command renames the cur table (with all the freshly imported wikipedia data) to mw_cur.

Now, open a browser, point to http://127.0.0.1/Wikipedia and see if you're greeted by the Wikipedia start page. If all has gone well, you should indeed see what looks like a Wikipedia start page. Notice that the page does not look identical to the main Wikipedia page. Be a bit disappointed. This is because the Wikipedia dump does not include ANY images. Some might argue that this is part (or most) of the fun of a Wikipedia article. Unfortunately, various copyright laws prevent their bundling with the standard database dump. Some of the images in use can be found in the Commons project. Of course, some images are only linked via the fair use doctrine which is only applicable to the US. Your mileage may vary. Later, I'll describe how I got some of the images included in my local Wikipedia copy, but for now, just click on your very own Wikipedia random page (http://127.0.0.1/wikipedia/Special:Randompage), follow links and enjoy. By the way, it's possible to change how your MediaWiki (and therefore, your Wikipedia page) looks by changing the skin from the not so nice default to something a bit cleaner. I recommend the cologneblue skin myself.

And that's all folks. With this, you'll never need to have another dull moment. You can become the trivia master, amaze your friends and stun your enemies with your encyclopedic grasp of proboscis monkey digestive habits and other pieces of information that may ... in time .. earn you fame and fortune in Jeopardy. Or not.

shovelling data like a mole on steroids

2005-04-18T13:31:00.000+01:00

We're on part 2 of our great Wikipedia experiment. Part one is here.

My motivation was simple. I wanted a reasonably current snapshot of the Wikipedia data. Idle clicking around or the odd focused search could then happen from my own machine; not subject to the vagaries of network conditions or the health of the Wikipedia data center. I am probably a compulsive hoarder, but there are limits to the whole pack rat mentality, therefore, I followed some basic guidelines when downloading the databases.

Only current snapshots. No revision history, no metadata. This is a work in progress, so I was prepared to live with the odd dead link as well. Furthermore I only downloaded the English version of Wikipedia which has the most number of entries, but perhaps more pertinently, because it is the only language out of that lot that I can actually understand enough to read encyclopedia articles.

The database dumps of the Wikimedia foundation are done (roughly) once a month. The most recent which I used happened on the 6th of April. The dump files sans much explanation can be found here. Note that other projects by the Wikimedia foundation can also be found here; I also have local copies of wikiquote and wiktionary running on my machine. A simple mediawiki cloning technique (discussed a bit later) made this a snap. In fact, I actually had a trial run by importing the much smaller wikiquote database.

But first, find the download section for Wikipedia; as of writing, it's 4th from top. The subsection that we need is en.wikipedia or english wikipedia. All the other 2 and 3 letter acronyms represent different localized language versions. There are several hyperlinks; one for cur (http://download.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/20050406_cur_table.sql.gz, I'm not making that link clickable) which is what we need. Start downloading, get on with your life. This is, at the current dump, 806mb of compressed text, which decompresses to 2.3 GB of SQL. It might take a while to download. In the meantime, we'll set up our local copy of MediaWiki.

First, run an administration tool for MySQL (MySQLCC or any thing else that is handy) and CREATE a fresh database. I called mine Wikipedia, but really, the choice of name is yours. For an illusion of better security, a separate database user who can only access this database is also recommended. I called mine the fairly obvious wikip_user. You will need this information before starting the install of the wiki. Testing that this user can actually login and access the intended database is always useful if something goes wrong. It usually will. A guy named Murphy said that

Download the distribution of Mediawiki (download link here but do read the documentation). Decompress the contents (making sure you preserve subdirectories) into a directory named Wikipedia into your webroot. By default, apache calls this webroot directory htdocs. Point your browser at this URL (ie: http://127.0.0.1/Wikipedia) and the installation process should begin. It's nice and easy; with informative error messages and so on. One detail that I would recommend is using a prefix for the media wiki tables. The default mw_ works well as any other. This serves to distinguish the media wiki tables from any others that may be in the same database. It also has another use (explained later) for all those intrepid souls attempting a Wikipedia clone. At the end of this installation, you should have a nice local install of MediaWiki chugging away on your own machine. If all you need is a wiki, stop here. Your job is done.

Some technical notes: the mediawiki install really is simple. All the installer does is create and populate a file named LocalSettings.php (which it instructs you move to the main directory when installation is complete). LocalSettings.php contains the full path to your mediawiki install, the web path and database details as variables. So, if you want another wiki, you don't need to go through the whole installation procedure again, simply copy the entire Wikipedia directory over and make the appropriate changes to LocalSettings.php. That's it. Begin, the cloning of wikis can.

Part 2 is done. We now have
a shiny php enabled webserver and mysql database.
our own copy of media wiki running off our local webserver.
a download-in-progress of the english wikipedia cur table dump.

Onto the hairy part. Importing the wikipedia data. That's part 3.

a wiki, kwikly

2005-04-17T15:54:00.000+01:00

No, not KwikiKwiki or even the better understood twiki. What I'm going to describe is a download, install, configure, tweak session that actually ended up with something useful. A wiki, right quickly. And not just any wiki, but the mighty Wikipedia. This is probably going to be broken up into several parts because I tend to natter excessively. I'll try not to get distracted meanwhile.

Why am I doing this ?
I don't really understand the point of a wiki. Ironic that I linked to perhaps the best known wiki of them all for a definition, isn't it ? But I love the idea of a collaborative encyclopedia that anyone can edit. I haven't reached that point in my life where I have sufficient disposable income to shell out ... a few thousand of $currency_unit to grab all the volumes of Britannica. I do, on the other hand, have access to a reasonably fast internet connection. So, Wikipedia became the poor mans Britannica for me. Then it became a bit more. Because Wikipedia is a lot more current that the fuddy duddy print versions. Tsunami on the 26th of December ? Well, the wiki entry was one of the better ways to stay informed. flashmob ? metrosexual ? Those additions to the lexicon were defined and explained by Wikipedia long before the more conventionally distributed encyclopedias got their act together.

The problem is, I'm not always near an internet connection of any description. And even more distressingly, sometimes the Wikipedia servers can be a touch slow. The latter may get fixed at some point, but the former isn't really going to change anytime soon, so I need my Wikipedia fix while I'm offline. I have the hard disk space, I thirst for knowledge. And hey, I'm just curious at the amount of effort necessary to get it running and I like wasting bandwidth. Any (or all) of those reasons apply. And having a massive test corpus of reasonably sensible English sentences is a bit of a side benefit in my line of work.

The engine which powers the mighty information dispensing Wikipedia juggernaut is named MediaWiki. Free (licensed under the GPL) and relatively simple for the amount of heavy lifting that it does. The first step (all you need for a shiny wiki of your very own) is to install the MediaWiki engine. Onwards.

What you need:
Apache. 1.3.x is ok. 2.0.x is better.
PHP. 4.3.x is good. 5.0.x is ok, though perhaps not as well supported yet. I've configured machines with either version and minimal (like: almost no) tweaking was required.
MySQL. 4.1.x is probably a better idea than the beta 5.x at the moment.

Of course, you could just be lazy and check out any one of the following all-in-one installers:
EasyPHP
WAMP server
XAMPP

I've run WAMP and XAMPP at one point or the other. Most people seem to prefer WAMP, but figure out what works for you. Of course, you could download and configure each piece of software individually, I prefer this route myself... I loved the slightly more customizable installers like ApacheToolbox, but sadly, that project seems to have died.

By the way. running a webserver on a machine without firewall protection is quite possibly a bad idea, so some security precautions are recommended. Like, don't allow the webserver to listen to any address except your own local machine (127.0.0.1/localhost), for starters. This only applies if your machine will be connected to the internet, obviously :)

Additionally, if you want your own personal Wikipedia clone, you will need:
At least 3GB of hard disk space. If you don't have that much to play with, then the full Wikipedia is not for you.
The bandwidth and/or the patience to download at least 1GB of data. I lack patience, but I have access to a fast connection. Whatever works for you.
It might also help to have a relatively powerful machine at your disposal. Plenty of RAM (512mb is enough to run the Wikipedia on a local workstation AND get a reasonable amount of work done at the same time) and a fast hard disk are useful, although not strictly necessary. The beefier the instruments, the less patience you need.

Whee. Click on the installer, run it and generally get the PHP in your Apache talking to the MySQL. I'm not going to cover the mechanics of this step in any great detail because so many others have. Do what the url says.

At the end of this first step, you will have:
a webserver (probably Apache) running on your machine, with support for executing serverside php scripts
A mysql database on your machine

It would save a lot of grief in the next step if there is some familiarization with mysql tools. Most of the click-n-run installers come with a nifty web based admin tool for mysql databases named phpmyadmin. This is good for basic stuff, but at least one of the following steps will need a command line based tool.

Now, onto the next step; downloading the database dumps for Wikipedia... That's part 2.

the hottest TV chicks

2005-04-15T19:27:00.000+01:00

From a conversation with Gromo... In no particular order of preference, the top 10 (or however many I can manage) hot TV chicks. Just to play with the heads of anyone who might be looking for these very names. Reverse chronological order, sorta ...

Eva Longoria - Desperate Housewives
Poppy Montgomery - Without a trace
Jessica Alba - Dark Angel
Gillian Anderson - X-Files
Katie Holmes - Dawson's Creek
Tiffani-Amber Thiessen - Beverly Hills 90210 (a)
Jennie Garth - Beverly Hills 90210

Honourable mentions

Elizabeth Harnois - Point Pleasant
Sarah Michelle Gellar - Buffy
One of the Charmed people... Alyssa Milano ? Dunno. One of those. *waves hand around vaguely*

And there I have it... I think. A few more (Terri Hatcher ?) were pretty much on the fence, so they didn't make the cut, so to speak. And some people (Monica Belucci, for instance) haven't made a significant appearance on TV. I believe the point of this exercise was to prove that I obviously thought more than that were definitely cute, but recalling them isn't easy*. Amen to that. Any more ? I'll probably agonize over this for the next few days.

update a: One of many updates to follow, possibly. the Regster reminds me of Ms Thiessen. I went ahead and put Jennie Garth in that list too. Always thought she was the hawtness. Hmm, The Gilmore Girls duo get no more than a honourable mention, I think.
---
* I dont know why the conversation wandered into this tangent. Ask Gromo.

too good to pass up

2005-04-13T10:11:00.000+01:00

Anyone can now write enough papers to reach that elusive annual target. All you need is Scigen. Get your papers written for you. In LaTex, with graphs and properly cited references. I think my laughter at the generated content is drawing too much attention, so I should stop now.

In case my supervisor is reading this: I'm not going to use this for the papers. I swear. Really. Hand on heart.

sqlite3 ships without readline support

2005-04-12T18:42:00.000+01:00

Which may or may not make sense, but I was somewhat annoyed to discover that the more recent SQLite shells ship without readline support. The standard binary build excluded readline support because some Linux distributions (namely Suse) do not include readline support (checkin here). What does this mean ? (someone else started the rant before I did).

Well, for one, you can't type in a SQL statement, curse to yourself because you missed out on a key piece of the syntax, hit the up arrow key, edit your previous command and fire it away. Instead, an up arrow key produces some sad ASCII. So, onto the source, Luke.

Download the source. Spend 1030 minutes futzing around with the configure options. Build a shared library version in a few minutes, but (obviously) this is a bit slower and for something as small as SQLite, I really prefer the static build route. Hmm, so how do I go about making a static build ? Get really really irritated because there isn't a lot of documentation on the build options and their interactions (and also because I seem to be wearing my dunce hat today).

./configure --disable-shared
(I'm lying. What I really typed in was ./configure --enable-static --enable-releasemode --disable-shared. Told you I was feeling stoopid today. You really don't need all that. I'm not even sure if it makes sense to mix all those)
make

Hold breath. Wait till the shell compiles and produces an executable. Run said executable. It works. Readline support enabled. Perform small wardance of victory. Replace my current, crippled SQLite shell with the much friendlier readline enabled version. Continue work.

There. That wasn't so hard, was it ? If you build SQLite locally and your system has readline support, the shell will automagically build with readline support too. But, making a static build, ie: the same precompiled binary available here instead of a shared executable requires a bit more work. A quick Google didn't reveal anyone else who had written about this particular problem (and it's solution) so I'm blogging it.

this is not a ...

2005-04-11T20:07:00.000+01:00

post to congratulate myself on how cool I am to be running Firefox. Really. It's not. Firefox isn't perfect. In fact, read through the forums and the bug database and you'll find quite a few unresolved problems swept under the carpet (or marked as WONTFIX), desperate cries to let people know more about the development process and in general, all the stock experiences of a widely used, hugely popular piece of software. You can't please everyone. In fact, sometimes, you can't please anyone. And this is not for want of trying. And if I am to let a bit of narkiness creep in, it's not always like the Mofo tries pleasing anyone, anyway.

But just once in a while, you use something else (no, I'm not referring to the whipping boy of the savvy browsing public, but yet anther browser. Yes, amazing, isn't it ?. There are browsers besides the big three) and you begin to understand the extent to which your browsing expectations, even your browsing patterns, have changed. Just about to shut down and go home for the day, I realized my ajax library of choice was out of date. Fired up the nearest browser available (Konqui) and typed in the url. Dropped one crucial letter in the URL and ended up in a parked domain. Oh, well. *sigh*. No biggie. Leave the site to Google the correct address. See an assload of flickering, a sure fire that some ugly Javascript events are being fired in the background. Lo and behold, popups.

I can't remember when I last got a popup that I didn't explicitly request. Not in ... I dunno ... six months ? Maybe longer. Closing the windows was trivial compared to the feeling that yes, even other browsers are vulnerable. I don't get to see the fruits of idiot web designers who like to throw popups or popunders, I don't see the creativity of people who try to hijack the status bar for their own special message... I dont see lots of things that various hosts want me to see. And I haven't been missing out. Not one bit.

Sometimes, it takes an occasional typo to realize how things have changed. 4 popups from a page as late as 2001 would have been trivial. Not even worth blogging about. In fact, a day of browsing that produced a mere 4 popups would have been a good day. Or a day with only about 2 minutes worth of internet browsing. Not anymore. And the problem is, not just with popups but with anything, once you've tasted freedom, you simply cannot countenance going back.

big yellow taxi

2005-04-09T15:14:00.000+01:00

One of my landlord's frequent events on a Saturday afternoon is to head down to the Viceroy for a meal and a piss up with his buddies. This means I am the beneficiary of a lift down to the university on Saturday afternoons and consequently, I've gotten to know the taxi drivers who visit. All of them are well known to my landlord, which indicates a long standing habit of Saturday afternoon taxi rides. And here's the odd thing. Odd enough to blog about. All, yes all of the 5 blokes whom I've talked to thus far have either had or are still in the middle of a career in IT.

The guy I chatted to today was new. Well, first time I've met him anyway. In his taxi, he had a P800 mounted to the dashboard, a Garmin GPS system which he said he bought for his personal use and ... a flash memory based MP3 player. Along the journey, he discussed the relative merits of ZoneAlarm firewalls with my landlord, knew about port scanners and as I found out a bit later, works as a systems administrator for a local company. Ok, so ferrying people to and from pissups is a profitable sideline for a sysadmin. Noted. I learn something new every day.

Another chap worked for 19 years (he said) in the city council and before that, for an unspecified number of years in industry. Much older than today's bloke, he called IT a "young man's job. too many systems, too much new hardware and software packages to maintain". In fact, every one of the taxi drivers I've talked to so far has a similar story. Those two stories are merely the edge cases. What is it with IT folk and driving taxis ? Is this a blip in statistics ? A rich clump of moonlighting taxi drivers in the vegetative masses of eye tee drones ?

Maybe taxi driving is a profitable sideline. Or just maybe ... the evil outsourcing trends are forcing people to abandon their ergonomic keyboards and wrist brace supported mice for steering wheels and CB radios. Well, if that sort of career change is on the cards for the majority of IT peeps, I fricking well want a three wheeler with a huge ass subwoofer. Face it, the average three wheeler chap has a lot less regulation to contend with. Beats driving a boring taxi any day.

bookish

2005-04-08T18:46:00.000+01:00

BoingBoing reports that a 46 volume compendium of Robert Heinlein novels will be published by Meisha Merlin Publishing. Although I pretty much agree with Cory's view that RAH's later books are rather bad, he left out Starship Troopers, Puppet Masters, Farnham's Freehold and hmmm.. lessee, probably Friday from the list of great Heinlein reads. Come to think of it, the man (Heinlein, not Cory Doctorow) has churned out a huge number of classics, introduced a new word to geekish slang and influenced a new breed of people who mixed political thought with their fictional writing. Not that the last is necessarily a good thing, but anyway, Heinlein is quite worthy of a compendium collection.

As with my present struggles with a complete, inorder reread of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, my read through all of the Heinleins' ever written died of a genre overdose. There is only so much of a single author that can be read over a smallish period of time(like 2-3 months). Like wine, you need to sip rather than gulp down as many books as you can find as fast as you can. I tend to forget this at times; and poison myself against finishing all of a large series or an author. Hmph, well. Maybe the new republished editions will give me some incentive to finish off the Heinlein works. This one for example, is highly regarded and on my list of read-when-free. I do admit that I made the mistake of mixing Robert Heinlein's awesome older books with the more recent, much worse offerings. Since the newer ones bored me almost to tears, I pretty much lost interest midway through the reading.

Returned my borrowed copy of Conquering the command line a few days back. I originally read the book to kickstart my planned move from bash to the far more powerful zsh. Unfortunately, this was not to be, and I ended up using the book as a handy reference to various tips and tricks within bash. Nice. I learnt lots. But I'll probably need to read it again when I get around to moving to the z shell, though.

And I'm thoroughly enjoying reading Maskerade, part of the discworld series. It adds to the hilarity if you know and like the inspiration to the story.

file managers

2005-04-07T16:51:00.000+01:00

One of the so called must-have applications for me, on any desktop machine, is a file manager. The problem with Linux having a much better terminal (or command line based) environment is that file managers haven't quite assumed the polish of their Windows counterparts. For years, I've been using this on Windows and before that, I used the venerable Norton Commander. So much so that I got the complaint that "whenever anyone sees your terminal from afar, it's coloured blue", a reference to the trademark blue/cyan background of the original Norton Commander.

Why are file managers so useful ? Well, the OFM page has the lowdown, but basically, for the person who takes some time to get used to the interface, it offers massive productivity gains in the mundane move, copy, preview, rename file tasks. Yes, even over terminals, an area where Unix power users/sysadmins are generally said to be the most productive. A single shortcut key, GUI based file selection instead of wildcards and complex manipulations of directory trees are some places where a file manager shines. The best (in fact, the most useful) OFMs are ones which are dual paned, they allow browsing two directories at the same time. Total Commander, which I use all the time in Windows, is of this category, as is the Norton Commander lookalike FAR.

On Linux ? Not much joy. Considering that I spend most of my time in a editor/IDE, browser, file manager and IM client (in that order) in Windows, it seemed rather awkward to live without a dual paned file manager when I moved to Linux. Unix machines already have a variety of file managers, from Rox-Filer to Konq to XFFM4. (No, I detest Nautilus). Unfortunately, dual paned file managers are (or so I thought) in short supply. I had to live with the imperfections of Midnight Commander, which only runs in the shell, and doesn't have a nice shiny GUI to play with.

Enter the contenders. I'd heard good things about Gnome Commander, but Ubuntu repositories didn't seem to have a working version, so I scratched it. My criteria for inclusion were dual panes, Gtk or Qt based, reasonably customizable and not entirely hideous looking. My next stop was gentoo (not to be confused with Gentoo Linux). Unfortunately, as the screenshot indicates, it isn't exactly going to win any eye candy awards. Nice, fast and functional, but falls down a bit in the looks department. That's probably the story of my life too; so not wanting to be reminded, I moved hastily onto the next contender.

From the absolutely fantastic KDE application suite, we have Krusader. Dual panes = check. Looks good = check. Customizable = hmm, so so. I confess Total Commander may have spoilt me a bit. Their latest stable (1.51) continually segfaulted when I tried to customize the starting directories (err.. ouch) but everything else seemed to work ok. Oh, except that it didn't remember my viewing preferences and gave me all the toolbars and widgets back when I restarted. Oh, well. But it does the job of file management reasonably well, so Krusader is a keeper. But, a drawback. I don't use KDE as my primary desktop. I personally dislike it's widgetyness, even with the most eyecandy like of themes. And I dislike the fact that I'll never see ports of these apps in Windows. Ok, so the last won't be true when Trolltech releases Qt 4 for Windows as GPL, but that's a while away.

So, onto the next contender, TuxCommander. Gtk2 based, good. Customizable = yes, it actually does allow good customizations. The plugin system isn't working that well, and it is less developed than Krusader (like, TuxCmd doesn't even HAVE options to disable toolbars and the like). So, we have two winners. Krusader is probably the file manager that is most usable at this stage, but TuxCmd isn't bad enough to toss into the bitbucket either.

use it or lose it

2005-04-06T17:30:00.000+01:00

Slashdot is abuzz with the news that Bitkeeper is moving away from offering a free license. This impacts development of the Linux kernel, which completed a controversial move to Bitkeeper 5-6 years ago. Now, if I understand the licensing correctly (and I've had a long argument with several people about it), BitKeeper specifically forbids use of the free tool if you've ever contributed code to a competitor. This includes Subversion, CVS, Arcs ... and so on. Why they pulled the free license was because a contractor with Linus Torvald's employer was reverse engineering BitKeeper. on an unrelated project.

Hmph. I don't develop the kernel. I've only seen any of the source a handful of times. Their development practices mean nothing to me. If the Linux kernel was developed by a bunch of monkeys using no version control; by merely banging away on a set of keyboards, I'd be none the wiser. Well, I'd notice if the fricking thing didn't build. I'd bitch if it breaks something. I'd probably notice if my beloved Loonix machines didn't boot because of a screwy kernel. But other than that, I don't care. So I'm not going to comment. But as in an election, the absence of comment can also say something. I learnt something from this episode. If you really value your data (in this case, the Linux source), there is little difference between a possibly poorly maintained OSS application (with no vendor and no support) and free use of a commercial application (whose license for use may be revoked at any time). Having said that, I'm still using the freebie version of Perforce. It's nice. I'd prefer Subversion, all the cool kids use Subversion (1.1.4, with bugfixes, was released today). But installing TortoiseSVN on a Windows machine I don't admin is impossible. So I am playing a bit of do what I say, not what I do.

In other news, people keep insisting biometric security is good, right ? Try convincing K Kumaran of that. He'd probably err.. give you the finger.

reflections

2005-04-05T09:18:00.000+01:00

Inspired by this post.

10 years ago
I was cramming for subjects that I disliked, for an exam I didn't want. I was living with my parents and I honestly had no idea what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. My entire life stretched out before me and I knew sweet fsck all about what I wanted from it.

5 years ago
I had gotten back from a stint outside SL and I was living with my parents again. Exams round the corner but the difference was that I liked the stuff I was doing now. No cramming necessary. Sometime inbetween 1995 and 1996, I had discovered something that I liked doing and paid the bills. Living on my own didn't produce the cliched reactions that I thought it would. I didn't appreciate my family more. Instead, I found I had a taste for doing my own thing and not being part of a crowd. Oddly, I grew up again. A few years ago, a wedding made me comfortable with my much older siblings and cousins. Now, I was not only comfortable, but an equal.

Started working for real later that year. It took ages to absorb that "yes, I am making that much money".

3 years ago
I had just returned from a harrowing experience outside SL. For the first time in 7 years, I was doubting if I wanted to do this shit for the rest of my life. I disliked work, I wanted to just mooch about at home. I was also officially a fatass for the first time in my life; no one believed it was ever possible, but there it was... Volunteered reluctantly for ~~one~~two jobs and also moved work places. Later in the year, set a personal record for number of consecutive hours awake. Not sure how much work got done towards the tail end of the marathon, but remember inhaling multiple esspressos and falling asleep in the elevator.

2 years ago
Drop a steady income and a decent place of work to cast myself out into the blue yonder again. Not that it wasn't necessary, but I had wondered if growing "older" would have meant an end to such life changing decisions. Apparently not. For the first time, I'd be living on my own outside SL and not doing a real job. Scary.

1 year ago
Wonder how the hell I'd ever get to grips with the mounds of books and papers that are required reading for research. Wonder if I'd ever finish. Oh, and figure out that the UK is no different really from any other place I've been to. Have recurring flashbacks from childhood holidays to rolling grassland and tilled fields.

Last week
Swot and type furiously and juggle a few clashing deadlines. Reach another personal milestone; handle things without crashing and burning even when down with the flu. Other than the fever, optimism abounds.

Today
Realize that I've (just barely) spent more time outside SL on my own than in it living with my parents over the last decade or so. And I'm still not finished here. Haven't got a clue about what happens after 2006, or indeed, after this semester. Ah, glorious uncertainty.

Tomorrow
Realize that if I sit on my ass writing blog posts instead of papers, I'm likely to hang around here for a lot longer than 2006...

anonymity is optional

2005-04-03T19:02:00.000+01:00

Wonder why Blogger didn't publish this the first time around? Anyway, I also like this one and this one.

bozo

2005-04-02T15:32:00.000+01:00

Free time, some boredom, trolling. The climbdown of a deadline adrenaline high and the detox of stress from the body. The usual. I should really find some productive thing to do next and get around to doing it. It's the starting that's the hard part for the moment (insert a cliche about a journey of a thousand miles blah di blah di blah here).

I've committed a mortal sin. Ok, not a mortal sin, but an utter waste of time. I've been arguing on das intarweb again. A very non PC reason for why this is a bad idea can be found here (don't click that if you get easily offended. I warn you).

And, not for the first time, it occured to me. I've gotten back into the habit of setting the bozo bit on people. Arrogant ? Probably. But it does tend to increase the signal to noise ratio in an argument if you can ignore the name callers, the flingers of verbal poo and the just plain silly. That's another reason why I dislike the movement from good old Usenet to these new fangled forums and blogs. Any newsreader worth it's salt has a wonderful device called a kill file. Think someone is an idiot ? plonk him. Problem solved.

Incidentally, C2 (from the article linked above) claims to be the oldest wiki. It has some informative articles, lots of familiar names contribute and even has a very informative section on rolling yer own. I've been reading it on and off for a few years for the pithy quotes and insight. With the recent interest in wikis in certain quarters, it might just be of interest to others.

who ?

2005-04-01T17:57:00.000+01:00

I watched the first episode of the latest Doctor Who last weekend. From the ITN screenings in the 80s, I recall a white haired chap with a green telephone booth. Was I oblivious to television ? I think I was. Subsequent revisionist reading brought me up to speed, but I wonder if everyone raving about this in Slashdot belongs to an older generation. I certainly can't remember much beyond the basic plot... What compelled me to watch this first episode was curiosity. The same reason I watched the Charlie's Angels movies. And how well those turned out, huh ?

Been peering at messaging systems recently for some work I've been doing. I've been pointed towards Styx, a very cool looking filesystem abstraction layer. Still need to look at it, of course. Till then, I'm using JMS. Oddly enough, J2EE and it's related bits and pieces are beginning to grow on me a bit. Some of it (I concede this very reluctantly) are beginning to make sense.

And finally, I've been spending a bit of time adding to the Eggcorns database. Interesting, if you're into wordplay and the like ...

sick. deathly sick.

2005-03-31T18:03:00.000+01:00

Have report to finish. Spent most of yesterday in a delirious haze. Feeling thoroughly sorry for myself. Must finish. report. Must. crawl. out of bed. Had to do a presentation today at The King's Manor anyway.

Must crawl into a nice warm hole and die. I feel (to quote one of my Ma's favourite idioms) like death warmed up. And served with a nice garnish of headaches and chills.

Chundering like a mofo every 20 minutes (or feeling like it) ain't helping either.
Oh, is that steak and mushroom pie ? blech
Goddamn flu.

if programmers were like seismologists ...

2005-03-29T18:32:00.000+01:00

Scientists predicted more earthquakes in Sumatra.

But no one knew when they'd occur. Or indeed, if more will occur after last night. Or why this one didn't cause a tsunami. Yes, there are theories, but no hard evidence. Was this one too deep under the seabed to jolt the water ? Did it occur in an area of greater depth and did the water absorb the energy ? Was it a different type of quake altogether ? A so called subduction quake as opposed to the upthrust type that happened on the 26th of December ? Ask a seismologist that (and several TV channels did) and you'd get the verbal equivalent of a shrug of the shoulders. And a weaselly "we need more data to confirm our theory" accompanying a shifty eyed expression.

Compare this with the lot of the mythical programmer.
So, underpaid hireling, when's this project gonna be done ? Two weeks ? What ? You want more ? Ok, make it three. What ? What's that you say ? You don't even know all the requirements yet ? Oh, all right then. A month. How's that ? You can do all this in a month right? You have lots of fancy degrees in ~~Seismology, Geology and Oceanography~~Computer Science... you should be able to figure it out.

Fire the lot of them, I say*

On a slightly more serious note, does anyone know where I can find reasonably hires maps of the Sumatran region (ie: ones that cover the Indian Ocean) ? They'd need to be public domain/free for non commercial use and drawn/reproduced to some sort of consistent scale. If you know of where I may find some, please leave a comment, thanks. IM or email would work too.

---
*If you didn't detect sarcasm and/or humour in the above, at least a little bit, then please take several doses of teh funnay and report in for laughter therapy. Your sense of humour will thank you.

Soo-NAH-mee ?

2005-03-28T20:18:00.000+01:00

The gods were listening. I swore privately to myself that I wouldn't blog again till the dreaded piece of creative writing was over and done with. Written,
polished, bound and handed in. It would take, I promised myself, an earthshattering event to get me to blog before the 1st of April. Well, screw this for a lark.

8.2 earthquake off Sibolga, Indonesia

Is it possible to sound any more self obsessed than that ? Probably not. So to all those in the danger areas, stay safe, head for the fricking hills, don't stop to admire the nice waves or break out the bloody surfboards. Once is enough for anyone's lifetime, I think.

First it was the day after Christmas, now the day after Easter. Day of a full moon poya, two days after a full moon. Someone up there doesn't seem to like us much, huh ?

meandering

2005-03-24T19:54:00.000Z

I am 5482 miles from home, give or take a few, since that database doesn't contain an entry for York. And the closest match is Leeds, which is about 25 miles from here.

And Salem is upto his "see if you can break someone's neck" tricks again. Named after the bewitched feline, this cat is built like a huge, black furred tank. He likes perching on laptop keyboards (the idiot), getting locked in rooms and then meowing plainitively till someone lets him out (the fiend, he times it till everyone goes to sleep before he meows) and tripping yours truly down the stairs. Doubtless, he's in cahoots with injurylawyers4u or something. Why can't he be like the other two and stay the heck out of the way ? At least he's lucky I like cats. My ex-flatmate didn't.

And finally, I installed KUbuntu for a laugh. Nice, shiny KDE 3.4 goodness with Ubuntu under the hood. A bit rough around the edges, but the applications that depend on KDE are so fricking fantastic that they're worth a blog entry on their own... later. After I submit the multiple reports and do the multiple presentations that are due next week.

personal responsibility goes bye-bye

2005-03-22T00:23:00.000Z

It all started because a press conference with this guy depicted him puffing on a cigarette while speaking. I didn't see the press conference in question, but I heard the outrage quite clearly, even through the somewhat muted medium of Yahoo Messenger. A case of product placement, alleges my friend. And since he's the activist type with a social conscience, he and a few of his colleagues are planning to kick up a fuss about it. Which left me in the familiar (but not easy) position of playing devil's advocate.

Freedom of choice vs A blanket ban on indirect advertising... in all it's shapes and forms. Can any legislation even begin to cover the myriad ways in which a product may be placed on a TV screen ? Should any legislator (let alone a Sri Lankan legislator) even bother ? Whatever happened to change the bloody channel or turn the dang TV off if you happened to be watching a SRK press conference (you poor bored soul, you). Is there a correlation between some random celebrity's behaviour and your own ? Something along the lines of if he jumps off a cliff ....

Do video games cause violence ? Do some genres of music predispose fans towards psychotic rampage? Should they be banned too ? Will someone please think of the children ?

Allowing all viewers to make an informed decision instead of resorting to censorship and bans only happens in utopia. At least, that's what a few (perhaps many) seem to think. A kneejerk ban or protest may not save any of the 10 odd million who are slated to die this year of smoking related diseases. But down the line ... maybe. And that's enough for some. From my point of view, if you have a swimming pool in your backyard, teaching your kid to swim is always safer (although perhaps a lot more effort) than fencing the pool off.

So which makes more sense ? I'm not sure.

edible things

2005-03-20T15:56:00.000Z

Bleargh. Busy and probably going to be blogging infrequently till the end of the month. Just a smattering of food related news: like, bananas are good for you... even if it sometimes resembles broiled yeti penis, a delicacy of Tibet, I'm sure.

And has anyone contemplated the oddness of having to boil yams thoroughly because they're poisonous when raw ? It's one of the things that some people do automatically, but to the outsider, it seems just as exotic as eating fugu. Tried explaining the reason behind boiling yams to an uncomprehending Greek and Englishman... But why would you even want to eat that ?.

And kimchi may help with birdflu. I'm not sure about this, but I could joke about the cure being as bad as the disease. But oddly enough, I like kimchi ... or maybe it's only because I've only eaten a slightly less pungent preparation of it.

food and drink

2005-03-16T20:31:00.000Z

First, they modifed food and no one spoke up, then they enhanced food and we didn't complain. Now, they're colouring beer green for St. Patrick's day. The final straw, ladies and gents. If I wanted green coloured liquid to drink, I'd liquidize grass or something.

On Pulp Fiction, I'm still Butch. I took the test a while back and retook it today.

Bah. Still drawing diagrams and spinning 100 word summaries into 2000 word descriptions. I hate writing.

life imitates bash

2005-03-15T16:32:00.000Z

Or a BBC article that I can't seem to find the URL for... I have more machines than I really know how to deal with. I got a machine as a demo machine sometime in September last year. Since there are already 3 machines clustered around my feet (say hello to EMR) and a distinct scarcity of network ports, the machine was packed off to some place and I logged in remotely. Did the demo, forgot about the machine, went off to a conference (and visited SL).

Today, I get an email:
Our records indicate that you are the designated owner of PCXXX and we would like to update the Linux installation on this machine. When can someone visit to perform the update ?.
Crawl underneath my desk and realize that, nope, this PC ain't under my desk. Where is it ? Fire up a shell connection and it connects just fine. But where the hell is the machine ?
16:20:46 up 164 days, 1:11, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00.
No one has rebooted the machine in around 6 months. Probably since the day it was set up. Ack!. Admit shamefacedly to myself...
Err. I think I've lost the machine. I don't know where it is... but I can still login ? So at least no one has nicked it or anything.

15 minutes later, they find it nestling under a vacant desk. On a lower floor. Dammit. Which is marginally better than the bash quote.
<erno> hm. I've lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to ping, it works completely, I just can't figure out where in my apartment it is.

Which brings me to something even more bizarre. At some point between a sand strewn Mid East airport and SL, I had my cellphone nicked last year. Never got around to replacing it and never bothered cancelling the SIM either. Now, some people I know still haven't registered the fact that lost phone = no point calling that mobile number. And insist on calling me. And still say ...
Hey, I called you yesterday and I got the answering machine. Left a message but you never replied. Err. I'm sure the petty thief who swiped the phone will take them up on the invite to visit the pub.

more firefox goodness

2005-03-14T14:29:00.000Z

An introduction to custom builds, fans who've compiled Firefox from scratch.

I've tried compiling myself and believe me, it takes some doing to decipher the maze that Mozilla devs call a source tree. Why is it worth running these ? Well, each build is optimized for a specific processor and allegedly runs faster (I've heard figures of 20% tossed around. Took so many pinches of salt with that number that I got elevated blood pressure). The main reason this isn't done officially (obviously) is that it makes life more complicated for the end user (there are 4 binaries to choose from, depending on the type of processor you have on your computer).

Of course, these are not official (Mozilla Foundation sanctioned) builds, so don't run this unless you know what you're doing. At the very least, it would be trivial for someone to add a few lines to the code, compile a nice custom build and then have the custom Firefox doing all sorts of nasty things like phoning your browsing habits to a central server, logging your online banking/web mail user name and password combos, signing away your first born child and so on. It might even (oh the horror) steal your Blogger username/password. Some evil cracker type might start blogging as you *gasp*. They might even get more visitors to the blog than you currently manage and become famous!!11oneoneeleven. Yes, things could get pretty bad.

Still interested ? I haven't scared you off yet ? Moox builds and Stipe builds. (A whole forum section devoted to them and others can be found here). What's the difference ? Well, anecdotal evidence says that the Stipe builds are a bit faster, but Moox has been doing this for a few versions now. If that means anything. I'm running both, in a fit of boredom and Stipe seems faster, but not by a whole lot. I'm writing this entry from a Moox M3 build Firefox. I'm still not trusting it to do everything, but hey, I will probably keep an optimized build around.

And a fairly complete document on Firefox/Mozilla about:config entries.

mostly fictional

2005-03-14T11:02:00.000Z

Been busy with odd things like deadlines. Among other things, I've also been spinning a few lines of code into a marketing extravaganza document (some people call this a progress report, but I'm not so sure)

Watched part 1 of Supervolcano last night. It's not a disaster flick yet, but has all the signs of turning into one (Part two is screening tonight). The 3D animation system (codenamed Virgil) was rather nifty looking and a great gimmick for showing the volcanic eruption scenarios. And rather cool, they actually showed the equivalent of a coredump when the doomsday scenario was simulated *grin*. The recycled volcano erupting footage got a bit old after the first few times though. Arma virumque cano

Spent a minute thinking about how cool the BBC is... I've been watching the (slightly slow paced) work on Dirac with a lot of interest and they screen fantastic documentaries. Don't trust them for politics, either UK or elsewhere... but you can't fault the quality of their programming. And most of the stuff is downloadable as well.

Been indulging in some fiction recently.. Read Black Wind which is really a Jerry Springeresque comedy rather than a thriller as it's billed. The main character for the Dirk Pitt series by Clive Cussler is, surprisingly enough, named Dirk Pitt. A swashbuckling outdoorsy James Bond actalike. When the series started, Dirk Pitt was said to be in his 40s. Rather than take the Simpsons route and keep the characters at the same age forever, this most recent installment introduces the son of Dirk Pitt. Also named Dirk Pitt. With an identical appearance, the same job as his father (who is now a faraway figure). Can things get any cornier ? Yes, it seemed they could. The young Dirk Pitt has a fraternal twin sister, apparently. And in a miracle of cloning technology, the young Dirk Pitt talks and acts exactly like his father. Tom Clancy tried this angle in Teeth of the Tiger. Were the critics impressed ? I think not.

Also started on Chainfire, book 9 (!) of the Sword of Truth series. Same-ol same ol. It seems that I seem to read more books out of a need for closure than real entertainment value these days. Dammit.

boredom

2005-03-09T18:29:00.000Z

I'm spending more time idling around than doing actual work... at least during day time. Which is never a good thing. So I read and bookmarked how to win any argument on the internet. Because I find boredom is easiest relieved by trolling someone. And arguing heatedly without any intention of actually accomplishing anything... beyond expending bandwidth. And no link about arguments would be complete without a (repeated) link to the classic...flame warriors.

There is a story (also recounted in The Pragmatic Programmer) which goes like this ..

"But they say that if you take a frog and drop it into boiling water, it will jump straight back out again. However, if you place the frog in a pan of cold water, then gradually heat it, the frog won't notice the slow increase in temperature and will stay put until cooked."

It's not true. Many frogs the world over croaked at the news.

And if you're feeling upto it, TweakGuide. Their Firefox tweaks are pretty basic, but WinXP tweaks are a nice and basic (if lengthy) introduction. Saves having to buy a book on it, I guess.

patent pending

2005-03-08T13:24:00.000Z

And I thought I had made a recipe breakthrough. Only to find that it already exists. Dang it.

The above was vaguely influenced by Gumz's visit to the hairdresser.Blogging about hair trims and recipes. Oh my.

2 months after the tsunami, the first lawsuit. Aimed at discovery rather than compensation, or so they claim. Because lawyers are quite interested in knowledge for the sake of it (I know, unfair stereotype). Especially the kind of lawyers in the US of A.

say it ain't so

2005-03-08T02:37:00.000Z

The Office > Fawlty Towers.

I mean... come on. Ricky Gervais is better than John Cleese ? Are you serious ? I also found a vote for the best sitcom, which has a slightly different result.

word

2005-03-07T17:39:00.000Z

I've had some reason to munge around with the mainstays of Office computing, Powerpoint and Excel recently, so I decided to test the work out on the open source competitors, OpenOffice and Gnumeric. My experiences follow, more than anything to have a point of comparison for when Open Office 2.0 is released.

The Good: The interface is uncannily similar. Other than the theme that I was using on XFCE, I couldn't notice many differences between the OpenOffice applications and MS Office on WinXP. This is useful for prospective migrating users (such as myself). Either the open source developers did this to ease the learning curve, or there is only one true way to lay out the plethora of options and icons that represent the functionality of the software.

The import functionality, particularly on OpenOffice, simply rocks. I made a presentation, complete with text appearances, textbox dissolving and a few of the standard features of PPT XP. Simply opened it in Impress and ran it. It does almost everything right. OOo Impress just fell over on some of the moving text effects (fly in a block of text in from some portion of the screen) and it also didn't handle effects on implicitly grouped objects. It preferred instead to apply the effects to just one object on import. Explicitly grouping several objects together in PPT XP and apply an effect and Impress handles that all right. But essentially, Impress 1.1.x functions better than PPT 2000.

Gnumeric was another feature complete Excel replacement. I just do babysteps Excel for number crunching. For what I needed it to do, basic number totups and charting, Gnumeric was a viable replacement. A few of the cooler "select and apply one action to ALL selected cells" style shortcuts of Excel XP weren't available, but still ... babysteps Excel works.

Both OOo and Gnumeric support a near seamless export to PDF, something that Office doesn't support out of the box. They also natively save to a compressed XML format, which (if you care about such things) should make your documents/presentations (theoretically) capable of being diff-ed and version controlled.

The Bad: OOo Writer isn't quite as neat as I thought it would be. Although the features and functionality are superficially similar, it does have enough subtle placement differences that irritated me. Two page view was missing, which I sometimes use for the big picture view of a document... and it somehow appeared a bit less polished than the other products. This might well be because I've used Word for a lot longer than I have Powerpoint or Excel and consequently appear to use more of the features. Even style support was a bit flaky, but I don't think this is a big deal, because only Office 2003 got styles done right.

OOo in particular does hog a bit of memory. I am sure that this is all relative and certainly, the other things that run on a standard Linux desktop have more bloat, but still ...

The Nitpicks: Well, there are quite a few niggles. I'd have loved Impress to have exported a complete animation enabled PDF of the presentation. It didn't, can't argue with that, but still .. it would have been cool. No more futzing around with Prosper/Slide and LaTex to get an animation enabled PDF. The biggest nitpick is one of market forces. MS Office has been in the game for ... what ? a decade and they have a huge array of features. For the most part, other office suites are still playing catchup and that is for an ever moving set of goalposts. This, unfortunately, leaves little time to innovate and thus far, I haven't seen anything in OOo that seriously convinces me to use it for any reason other than cost or platform choice. Ok, maybe the XML based file format is a nifty thing to have ... but .. but ... in the grand scheme of things, how many people care what the file format is ? They've lived with binary-only .docs and .ppts and .xls for long enough.

Away from the wordy review, it seems that Asians are a sleep deprived bunch. With 40% sleeping well past midnight (true dat. I'm a poster child for the late bed time campaign) and a surprisingly large number waking up early. In Indonesia, 91% (!) wake up at around 7 a,m. Yes, fellow late risers, such an hour exists. I've heard people speak of it (including that idiot who mumbled something about early to bed and early to rise blah blah blah). Ok. So am I half Asian ? Because darn straight the only 7 o'clock I experience is in the evening and I'd prefer to keep it that way, thanks.

And maybe this ungodly early rising business is related to the quality of the beer ? According to the beer review, no Indonesian beer rates above barely drinkable. Somewhat gratifyingly, Lion Stout gets a fairly high mark, but in an absolute travesty, the blechworthy Indian Kingfisher brand scores higher than Lion Lager. So, onto my SWAG,
The time the inhabitants of a country awaken is determined by the quality of the beer they produce.
Sounds reasonable ? It does to me.

slightly cynical

2005-03-06T19:26:00.000Z

Everyone writes about it, everyone recycles the same jokes... but then, if it didn't ring true at times, people wouldn't find it funny, right ? Do clients treat software grunts like this ?. Umm. Yes. Some of the time, anyway.

And more cynicism, you can sell pretty much anything and call it therapeutic. Desperate Housewives. In Japan. And we're not talking about a cliffhanger murder mystery, but real desperation. This quote comes near the end of the article:
the women are given a book containing photos and the personal details of Kim’s volunteers, whom he claims are not gigolos and he emphasised that he earns nothing from anything that happens beyond his clinic’s walls.

And finally, in a game that is tailor made to enhance driving skills, I present Carmageddon in Flash (note: that URL is unlikely to be safe for work).

watch that finger

2005-03-04T19:05:00.000Z

No, not this one, but the interesting research that has emerged about what a difference in length between the index and ring fingers can say about a human male. The BBC reports.

A male is more aggressive when the index finger is shorter compared to the ring finger. Perhaps it's typical enthusiastic overstatment on the part of the researching academic, but there is an aura of definitive "get with the program, why dontcha" in this quote...
"For example, if you had a group of runners and they were about to start a race I could predict reasonably well who was going to win based on their finger length ... ".

This prediction, interestingly enough, doesn't apply to females. Yet more things to blame on the nuts and bolts.

A researcher has come up with a brilliant idea to uniquely fingerprint any machine based on the clock skew. Despite some rumblings about the size of the test set (only done on a lab of 60 odd machines), it seems like a brilliant technique. This comment refutes up my intuitive "this can't work in the real world" suspicion with facts and figures. But how about the crypto textbook Birthday paradox ? The chances of a repeating skew pattern has to be mapped into a space of 240,000 elements. I'd suspect that isn't large enough to apply to any machine on the internet...

AI in games

2005-03-03T22:29:00.000Z

Sat in on this extremely interesting talk today by Alex Whittaker.. a more detailed version of this one. Alex works for Eidos, which is a largish game company and publisher (Tomb Raider, Commandos, Deus X, Thief among many others). The first thing, I was under the impression that all the big guns used simple rule based systems for their bots. Not so, according to Alex. He spent a thoroughly enjoyable hour describing first how rulesets don't scale for larger, more complex problems ... and then walking us through his solution... The fun part here was that each time he described an extension to the basic idea (Augmented Transition Networks, first widely used in NLP), he'd bring up a game where this particular extension was first deployed. Lots of interesting snippets about Republic, for instance. The neat thing was that he described a complete development environment, based around the ATN, which included an interactive debugger for game designers, check points and save positions... reused, extended and refined over a score of titles.

What is it with people wanting to get into the gaming industry ? Are things like the EA scandal not enough to dissuade them ? Apparently not. Game programming is more popular than ever, and even OReilly has gotten in on the act. Unfortunately, truly adaptive AI in the Skynet sense of the word, seems to be a long way off. Like much of the AI field in general, a series of shortcuts (Eliza ?) perform close enough to the ideal to satisfy most needs.

the extreme height of irony

2005-03-02T19:37:00.000Z

Yes, folks, gather round, this is the Mt. Everest of ironies, right here.

Yahoo turns 10 years old.
Offers free ice cream to America.

I read the title, go "Those Americans get all the great deals, dammit".
Visit the birthday page, find a tiny UK flag.

[19:33] thimal: omg omg omg
[19:33] thimal: they offer it in the UK
[19:33] thimal: hold it
[19:33] sage: omg omg omg!
*sage cries
[19:33] sage: this blows

Realize that it is now -5C outside.
[19:33] thimal: screw this for a lark, it's bloody -5C outside
[19:34] thimal: WTF do I need ice cream for ?
[19:34] sage: MAN
[19:34] sage: that doesn't matter!!!
[19:34] sage: get it anyways!!!!
[19:34] sage: and take a pic of it and send to me!!

Drool over Baskin Robbin's flavours.

Get the coupon. Realize that the nearest Baskin Robbins is 4 miles away. It's now 1945. What do you think I did ?
Update [19:50]: As sage notes, I should inform everyone that the offer is only valid for the 2nd of March. ie: today. Dang it.
Update [19:53]:
[19:52] sage: my sis is using my yahoo login to get free ice cream :(
[19:52] sage: my life sucks.

super cow

2005-03-02T17:47:00.000Z

Miracle pills available. They're made from the panchagavya (hazarding a rough guess at translation, the five facets of a cow), namely butter, milk, curd, urine and dung. The all time classic "product with a potential marketing problem" in that list is cow dung toothpaste. Aah, the thoughts of spreading the processed excreta of your friendly neighbourhood bovine on your teeth and gums. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "I think you've got something trapped between your teeth". And some innocents are still grossed out by the thought of elephant dung paper.

Speaking of elephants, it seems that quite a few of the NFL are overweight. You just couldn't tell, with all the padding on their uniforms.

And in an article that I seriously question, it seems that most people use formal language on IM. Yeah, rite. LOL. WTFBBQ?! OMG u dun no wht u talkin abt.... ! I think I'll stop now.

clumsy

2005-03-01T15:56:00.000Z

As far as confessionals go, it's not up there with "Mamma, just killed a man", but nevertheless... I don't know how to tie a tie. *hangs head in shame*. Much to the horror of my dad, who spent at least the last decade trying to teach me; to no avail. Maybe what I need is an infusion of geekiness. How to Tie a Tie perhaps?. And hopefully, not tangle my own fingers in the process. Or emerge from the ordeal with the equivalent of a hangman's noose.

And it appears that all the cloak and dagger stories about spies were true. Or at least, the Soviet spy manual covered the high life, with lots of swank hotel recommendations and the like. That actually got me looking around for the group mentioned, the Rote Kapelle. And the most likely author of the manual, Leopold Trepper.

I've stumbled on Blogsome, a newish service which offers, among other things, a free Wordpress user account. I'm interested. And contemplating folding up tents here. Not that Blogger is bad, it's not. Just that a Wordpress install offers some interesting possibilities. Without the hassle of having to host and manage the darn thing yourself.

smile for the camera

2005-02-28T17:25:00.000Z

Take the test. See if you can spot the fake smiles. It requires Flash, by the way.

In other news, carry a female for 80m, win her weight in beer. The original story read wife but then confused the issue by saying "competition is open to anyone and entrants do not have to be married to participate". How many competitors will dare show up with a lightweight female and have a sticker on their shirt saying "My real wife is much heavier" ? I'm guessing ... not many.

And finally, an odd look at gaming college entrance tests.

tainted fodder

2005-02-27T13:14:00.000Z

Our lives are not in the lap of the gods, but in the lap of our cooks. Or increasingly, in the hands of the food producers and processing companies.

As The Independent puts it, another week, another food scare. This time, it's an orangey-red food colourant named Sudan 1, which appears to have carcinogenic effects on lab animals. Although it's quite difficult to locate truly hot sauces in the UK, chillie powder tainted with Sudan-1 seems to have made its way to a surprisingly high number of products. Of course, the company responsible will escape sanctions. No one will ever know if the company wittingly hoarded tainted chillie powder for 3 years before passing it out onto the food chain. Or if there will be any steps to prevent a repeat. Food scares aren't anything new in these parts, of course...The last major British food scare was BSE. And people still haven't figured out a solution, because this latest Sudan 1 discovery was made in Italy. Sheesh. Amateurs. Haven't they heard of adding ground up bricks to chillie for that authentic fiery orange colour ? Unscrupulous vendors in SL have been doing that for years.

And onto other news, if you haven't heard this yet, Firefox has a new update out. It fixes several security flaws and also has a bandaid for Unicode addressbar spoofing. I didn't use the installer, but downloaded the zip archive instead. You *must* delete all the contents of the Firefox directory before unzipping the update, though. There have been a few bugreports by people who forgot to do this. 1.0.1 seems to be a bit faster than 1.0, but YMMV. All the extensions still work fine.

the dragons win

2005-02-26T20:26:00.000Z

Or ... the red dragons ate the blue cockerels up. It was a very close match, perhaps a lot closer than the score suggests. And Les Bleus nearly pulled it off. The irony is that in the past two weekends, France played stodgy, ugly rugby and won. This weekend, they played their best in a long while, and they lost. I'm referring to the 6 Nations competition, by the way.

But in something completely unrelated, Wikipedia edified me on the fine distinction between male and female Gryphons. Not that one is likely to run into either gender of that animal, but you know... trivia. And that also led to the origins of a hippogriff. Man. Wikipedia. Is there anything it can't tell you ?

And in more mundane (sort of) news, it seems that Hollywood has queer plans for the Basic Instinct sequel.

ambling

2005-02-25T20:35:00.000Z

I'm doing a lot of bits and pieces work, mostly tidying up and the blog seems to reflect this. Random, uncoordinated snippets without coherence... Er. Wait. That's the norm around here. Never mind.. anyway, moving right along ... Neal Stephenson had a much quoted work, In the beginning, there was the command line. Now, it's been annotated with more recent developments and made available here.

And in the spirit of other lists that deal with cliches in movies, The Evil Overlord list. Filled with good advice for when my name turns up on the World Domination sweepstakes. Of course, since evil overlords get lots of advice (just like everyone telling millionaires what to do with their money, I suppose), there are two addendums, cellblock A and cellblock B.

And finally, if you thought the Inca ritual of sacrificing the losing team in sports was macabre, then you might not want to play tennis at the Burj Al Arab in Dubai. Become a bit too enthusiastic about playing back a lob and you'd fall a mere 321m. A rematch is unlikely. In gamerspeak (which I pretend to understand) gg no re thx.

whiteout!

2005-02-23T16:13:00.000Z

Lotsa snow in Scotland. And York is doing it's best to keep up too. At times like this, I make sure that the three Hs' are close at hand. (Home, Hot cocoa and a Heater). Hence the sparse number of updates.

Because I see people doing the whole winter sports thang, it's time to link to Something Awful. I've noticed that in this day and age, people seem to be fond of building snowpeople rather than snowmen. Well, it's either that, or a place selling ChestExpander2005™ for snowmen is doing brisk business.

Random snippet: How Paris got hacked. (No, not the city, but a certain female. And NO, not really her, just her Sidekick II, you pervs)

polar bear

2005-02-21T15:01:00.000Z

Well, how does one react when the first snows of the winter visit you in ... the tail end of February ? With disgust, obviously. York is usually quite cold, but it rarely snows (once every decade or so, there is a multi foot snow event and then everyone panics). Well, this morning, I woke up with this poetic winter wonderland scene. The problem: I needed to trudge several miles in this sludgy, muddy, gooey crap that passes for snow. Not fun.

According to Wilbur Smith folklore, the Bushmen of the Kalahari measure wealth by the amount of fat stored in their buttocks. Well, since I am (by most accounts) a pauper in Kalahari terms, it's fair to say that I really wanted to avoid a two point rump first landing on the icy pavement. So, I had to resort to a ginger, shuffle-trudge instead of the customary brisk pace. Consoled myself with lunch at The Rose and Crown. Which informed me that Australia is a trifling 16776km away, but managed to serve some quite interesting tasting ale.

And in something completely different, since I enabled vi mode on bash, the vim tips have been quite useful.

nothing

2005-02-19T20:26:00.000Z

February 19th and 20th: nothing. Just a few random snippets: I've finally discovered that associating a shape or colour to a sound (and related switching of senses) has a name, it's called Synaesthesia. A very interesting experiment is also found here.

And in another one of life's great mysteries, The Ketchup Conundrum. And more symptoms of a patent system gone mad.

And since I've been idly exploring some CMS recently, Wikalong caught my eye. A wiki interface that appears as a Firefox sidebar.

odds and ends

2005-02-18T19:41:00.000Z

Tshirts for the discerning geek. I stumbled on the site through this link, which for some reason, is rather popular in the Perl community.

Stayed up latish last night, purely for entertainment purposes, and watched Tai-pan. Been a big fan of everything James Clavell wrote, after all, I learnt my first Cantonese swear words from the books. But there was little deviation from the book. Ordinarily, the purist in me would have been happy with this, but because of how the story ends (in Tai Pan, at least), the last sequences lost their impact somewhat. Also started reading this last night. All this after a few hours getting my second lesson in Magic.

The Enterprise reference reminded me of this, a mocking look at cargo cult scifi special effects.

chipper

2005-02-17T11:44:00.000Z

The world record for largest bag of chips fried is a disappointing 368 kilos. A new record breaking attempt will fry nearly triple that amount, for National Chip Week. In other news, there is an event named the National Chip Week.

I watched the UK edition of The Apprentice last night. Umm. Hadn't seen it before, and I was wondering about the hype. It seemed pretty ordinary reality TV stuff. Maybe the US version has more marketing clout or something, but it didn't seem like a big deal. Two teams, divided by gender. Buy and sell flowers on the high street. That's it. Ogling Eva Longoria was more fun than watching this...

And the birth pangs of the double helix, on a A4 sheet.

things environmental

2005-02-16T14:02:00.000Z

A brief scare a bit earlier about the US possibly launching missiles against an Iranian nuclear facility. False alarm though. (MSNBC link). In some ways it would have been history repeating itself. Of course, it could also have been any number of (less disturbing) possibilities, like some trigger happy chap firing a bigass gun in the desert, or the Iranians taking potshots at the US recon drones ... or just giant firecrackers. But US launches missile attack! is a good headline to stir up the masses. I'll refrain from making bad Taco Bell and flatulence related jokes at this point.

And in slightly more mundane news, Kyoto started today. Without the support of the largest CO₂ emitter, you'd have to question if it's worth much, but at any rate... it's a first step. I've been hearing arguments for and against all of last week and my position has wavered slightly. I'm no longer convinced Kyoto is enough (for the last few years, I thought it was). Is Kyoto akin to the budget deficit agreements of the single currency EU ? A limp mockery that no one can or even seems bothered enforcing ?

But speaking from a purely "every man for himself and to hell with the lot of you" approach, anything that ups the temperature of the bloody British Isles by a few degrees can't be a bad thing. At least from where I'm standing (-4C and a few degrees windchill added last night).

And in other news that may cause a stir in the immediate environment, a scientist has invented the condom equivalent of Dolby NR. Here's hoping that a bright spark doesn't err.. cause a sizzle. People who need more cowbell should also refrain from using this err.. device. Now, about the songs themselves.. the mind boggles...Let's get it on? Work it? Err.. maybe not this.

genuflect before me

2005-02-15T13:19:00.000Z

To be fair, I only got anything close to that score because I used to be a huge Chemistry geek at some point a decade or so ago. And that's the only part of my misspent A/L years that I even care to remember without shuddering.

Other things to remember, do not move over a site onto a flashy new layout and then decide to turn up late the next morning. Your inbox will be overflowing with comments and bug reports. And will people *please please* consign monstrosities such as this and this to the rubbish heap ? Save the retro for a 70s disco night, for heaven's sake.

And my kingdom for an ethically challenged bike repair man! I want one bit of the bike fixed, not all of it. And yes, I know it's dangerous to leave the other bits unfixed, but I can handle that. I don't see the point in paying 200% of the sale value of a bike to get lots of non essential things (like rear brakes. Pfft. Who needs two sets of brakes ? Wimps) sorted out. Just fix my goddamn gear mech. Not that it's going to happen, but if I can't rail against the injustices of the planet on the blog ...

conspicuous consumption

2005-02-14T14:35:00.001Z

Everyone has a different definition of soul food. Does the hamdog fit ? It might. A deep fried beef patty, covered with chili, cheese and onions, on a hoagie bun. And a few sundries on the side. And a fried egg on top. And since digital photography trumps a 45 minute lecture any time, a dissected hamdog. Damn. That looks like a cardiologists' meal ticket, right there. It goes without saying, it also looks delicious.

There is no fun in eating lots of grease without a suitable relish. How about ketchup ? As the article notes, it wasn't always made with tomatoes. Other ingredients (at some point), included lobster, oyster and anchovy. Now a Turkish company has made a culinary breakthrough. The Swedish market got it's first taste of penis ketchup. Unfortunately, the launch was a cock up, because the recipients didn't know about the secret ingredient. In invaluable market research for the source company, it was later ascertained that penis ketchup is not so good on bread rolls. And in a startling turn of events, the Swedish company responsible for distribution is called Axfood. Soylent Red anyone ? The dicks (err.. I meant, the police) are investigating. Makers of this delicacy are unavailable for comment.

In other things that are bloated, Acrobat Reader 7 is probably one of the (many) hamdogs of the computing world. Fortunately, there is also Acrobat Reader Speedup which removes the extra plugins that slow down the reader. Or, you could just poke around the install directory for a directory named "plug_ins" and remove most of files within. I just have Checkers.api, Escript.api, ImageViewer.api, reflow.api, Search5.api, Search.api and weblink.api left (and a few directories). The result: near instantaneous loadup. Of course, people who use AcroForms and the like might need a few more plugins loaded at startup.

random things

2005-02-13T13:23:00.000Z

I needed to get to a net connection and Google to find out that shell scripts can, in fact, generate random numbers. I tried the standard random char generators, but it seemed too kludgy for what is, on the face of it, a fairly simple task. Turns out, there is a $RANDOM available in bash. But anyway, now that's sorted out, I can get a random bash.org quote without having to be online. The depths that I sink to keep myself amused. *sigh*

In other news, Intel's wireless drivers have an opensource alternative. Link here. I'm trying them out, in the vain hope that my Linux wireless problems will get sorted out. On a somewhat related note, The Linux bootup process, as seen on Slashdot.

Oh, and more randomness.. The Lake Woebegone effect explained. And the bash.org quote to go with it.

gasp

2005-02-12T13:34:00.000Z

Scripting language support for Java ? Goddamn. It appears that the Java bigwigs are actually taking notice and doing something about standardization. Even better, Jython has external funding. And clearly defined timelines too, although how those will translate to actual deliveries is yet to be seen.

In other news, the best British song of the last 25 years was written and performed by Robbie Williams. Robbie who ? I don't get it.

complexity

2005-02-11T16:48:00.000Z

Imagine a card game where there are an ever growing number of cards, at last count, around 5000. People buy them, collect them, obssess over them, hoard them. End up with sometimes 20 to 30 thousand cards in their personal collection. Create decks of 60, go and meet other people and play. Sound bizarre ? That's Magic the Gathering. I went to a meetup last night and had a very interesting (although quite bewildering) time of it. Remembering cards is near impossible. There are also card colours, mana points, life points, abilities, stackable abilities, interacting abilities and a whole host of things which I couldn't even track. It looked like fun, but seemed to have a steepish learning curve. On the flip side, my hair length made me blend right in with those folks, so no one noticed I was a spectator.

In other news, addiction can be a hard hard thing to beat. The first step, they say, is admitting you have a problem. Does an alcoholic who resorts to getting an enema of sherry have a problem ? I'd think so. You can't really say I drank it for the taste after that, can you ? Well, a couple of weeks ago, a man died after being administered a sherry enema, allegedly by his wife. Umm. I'm not sure about the origin of the toast Bottoms up, but I'm fairly sure it doesn't cover this eventuality. Now it seems that there was more to enemas than just alcohol. Is this a good time to revive the Richard Gere story ?

And I will write a review of Ubuntu sometime soonish for anyone who's interested and finally put all the technobabbling on the blog to rest *grin*.

dumbing it down

2005-02-10T18:30:00.000Z

I've been hit by the oddest Byzantine bug. Ubuntu wireless support has died. I've no idea how or why, everyone is scratching their heads; but nothing seems to work. Not the fancy GUI, nor the tried and trusted command line tools. To even begin to fix this, I need to go out and wardrive to find an unprotected AP. Bleargh. It's all a conspiracy.

Yesterday was the beginning of the year of the Rooster. I'd like to say I spared some members of the Rooster tribe yesterday, but ... that would be a lie.

And to wrap up a throughly meh post, I bring news of Die Hard 4. At this rate, Bruce Willis can be mocked like Stallone for the Rocky series.

Mmmm... pancakes

2005-02-08T16:29:00.000Z

It's Pancake Day today, also known as Shrove Tuesday. So, time to go recipe hunting. I was promised a sample of maple syrupy pancakes this evening, so all is good. Making pancakes can be dangerous too.

In other news, one English supporter lost a bit more than pride when Wales beat them. Darwin thanks him for not tainting the gene pool. In a stunningly unobvious statement, police confirmed that the person had a history of mental problems. Well, from now on, he's also likely to have severe dating problems.

And dating problems is precisely what a shy 23 year old gorilla is experiencing. In an article chock full of quotable sound bites, various human handlers do a hatchet job on this much maligned primate's name, character and general masculinity.
He's a wimp
You can sort of tell he's inexperienced,
"He's too nice a guy ... It might be the problem with why he never bred."
He's accustomed to females not being interested
She's waiting for him to show his masculinity, and he didn't show it

And the ultimate insult (for a gorilla);
He's very interested in human males

oh the humanity

2005-02-07T19:28:00.000Z

Ubuntu works. Yay. Well, sorta. No battery support (for some weird reason, ACPI support is rather dodgy on Linux in general. Yes, I am aware of the irony of linking to Microsoft). Which basically means, in layman terms, that I have no way of figuring out when the battery on the laptop is going to die. And there are also rumours that cooling systems go strangely crazy when ACPI support is turned off. Oh, well. Gather ye rosebuds and all that jazz.

In a startling discovery, I realize that Ubuntu does not exactly mirror Debian's packages. They provide their own. So all the fancy Synaptic poking around has to be on customized Ubuntu repositories. Blah. In even worse news, the latest XFCE refuses to run on Ubuntu. Double Blah. Then I discovered Ubuntu Backports, which may help. Or maybe not. Anyway, Gnome isn't that bad.

If none of that made any sense at all, sorry *grin*.

now watch this drive

2005-02-07T09:14:00.000Z

The Iggles lost. It wasn't the blowout that some experts predicted, but they pretty much paid for letting the Pats run over their defence in the third quarter. So in the immortal words of gamers everywhere...

And in other news, are you in lurrve ? If so, get help.. professional help. It's a disease. Hahahahahaahahahahahahahahahaaha *gasp choke* *draws breath* Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah. Excuse me, the extreme lack of sleep from watching the Superbowl has made me prone to hysterical laughter.

ovals

2005-02-06T15:00:00.000Z

Superbowl tonight. And I'm laying in assorted munchies to watch the big game. Most people seem to think the Patriots are going to win it... but hey, that's why cheering for the underdog is more fun.

And speaking of underdogs, Wales beat England last night in yet another sport played with oval shaped balls *grin*. If the Superbowl is going to be as exciting as that game was, then it's going to be worth staying up till the early hours of Monday morning. Unfortunately, no breast baring stunts this year. Actually, if a 62 year old man rips his shirt off, that's just cringeworthy.

muscle memory

2005-02-05T15:01:00.000Z

The problem with switching from one of anything to something else is ... muscle memory. Take Java IDEs. Get used to a particular editor for shortcut keys ... and it's hell to shift. You perpetually press the wrong keys and do something else. It might be a bit before you even notice that the shortcut key didn't do what you expected; and then you remember .. oops. Wrong editor.

The same problem, of course, exists on a much larger scale with an operating system. When KDE remapped the Windows Key shortcuts to work on their desktop environment, there was a firestorm of protest. Why emulate the evil empire's products, asked detractors. Well, simple. If you don't remap the extra keys, those are just little pieces of plastic that will be mishit by people with fat fingers. And that might explain why I find Macs so hard to get used to as well. One mouse button might be fun... but when you automatically try to do a right click for a context menu and it doesn't work, your first thought isn't "Oh, this is a Mac", but more like "Why the heck is it so hard to have another fricking button in there". It applies equally well to applications. In the earlier days of Netscape (version 3.x and 4.x), I had switched to and fro from Internet Explorer and kept on getting tripped up by the shortcut to get to the address bar. Alt-L in Netscape (Location) and Alt-D in IE (Address). Who needs to remember all that ? Well. No one. Which might explain why Firefox maps the address bar to Alt-D as well. If you want people to switch, eliminate barriers.

it's distro time!

2005-02-05T13:35:00.000Z

I got loaned a new gadget for "academic purposes" last week and I've been busy trying to figure out the best Linux distribution for it. Linux on Laptops seems to be filled with tales of woe, details of kludges, things that don't work, half hearted power management support and a general hell on wheels approach.

Unfazed, I popped in the live CD of Ubuntu Linux ... boot screen, ok. After that, nothing. The live-CD fell flat on it's face trying to boot. Wow. Umm. Now what ? Dammit. I really wanted Ubuntu on the laptop. Do I pledge my pennies to the mighty conglomerate ? It looks like it. I still have a few more distro options up my sleeve, ranging from Suse to the somewhat sluggish Mandrake.. but, but, but ... dammit. I'm not done yet.

just a fizzle

2005-02-02T19:53:00.000Z

No, it wasn't a drill, the alarm went off at flipping 1915 in the evening and forced the occupants of Computer Science to huddle outside in the freezing cold. Thanks a bunch, faulty sensor. Can I sue someone for this ? My fingers froze.

As is pretty much par for the course, I chatted to more people during the fire drill/alarm than I do on any given day of the week... and everyone spent their time swapping anecdotes. According to folklore, the Fire Brigade will in fact charge the University a few hundred quid for their grand entrance on the scene, sirens wailing in the accepted fashion.

And yes, the fire alarms are telepathic. They figure out the coldest night in a while to toss people out of the heating. But the thing is, not everyone takes the fire alarms that seriously. One postdoc today was seen calmly heading out of his office a full 5 minutes after the alarms had started. We're all watching from outside the building as he calmly pulls on gloves, grabs all his bags and heads towards the lobby. Almost as he reaches the building entrance, he turns, dumps his bags on the chairs in the lobby and heads towards (presumably) the mens room. Wailing fire alarms can't thwart the call of nature, can it? And my own internal thought process as I headed down the stairs... should I have saved that file before I scurried out ? ... hmm. Nah. If the building burns, the server is going to be toast anyway

it's my new obsession

2005-02-02T13:26:00.000Z

As Aerosmith would say it, a new fuschia tinted craze is sweeping through a select part of the blogosphere. Overly sensitive eyes should stay away. This could hurt a little.

And how about a pink rhino ? It's Pink Marduk Week and I'm all kitted up for it. This completely uncustomary colour is all his fault.

Incidentally, this is also Carnival week in Brazil. Which wouldn't normally concern me, except that we have a huge contingent of Brazilian and Portuguese in the department this year and they're partying this week.

better than a kick to the head

2005-02-01T18:42:00.000Z

Dilbert is not entirely about fictitious characters. Of course, I knew that already, but just in case someone thinks their job sucks... well, read this. Person gets kicked in the head by a donkey. Is pressured into turning up at work and conducting a training course. Gets a "meets expectations" performance review. Now, I don't dispute that this is a rotten piece of luck. But I have to ask... I can't think of many people who would work for Sun Microsystems and also have to list down "getting kicked in the head by donkeys" as an occupational hazard.

This reminds me; my grandma had cows in her estates (about two decades ago). Each of us cousins had a cow of his/her own. Being the absolute youngest in the extended family, I got the cute calf. One of my sisters, I remember, got the mean one. ie: a bad tempered cow that (according to rumour conveniently spread by workers who wanted the noisy kids out of their hair) liked to chomp on stray human body parts. Now, even in the Sri Lanka of 20 years ago, going to school toting an injury and saying a cow bit me is likely to attract some attention. And not the good kind, either. So, how do you recover socially from saying a donkey kicked me in the head in the heart of San Jose, California ? What exactly do you need to do to a donkey to get it to kick you in the head ? Was it a special karateka donkey ? Did it do one of those famed WWE finishing moves ?

On the subject of kicks, one of my sister's friends was captured for posterity being kicked by a baby elephant in Pinnawela. Awesome. We were told (well after the fact) that she was probably between the babe and it's milk bottle. She was unhurt (being laughed at by complete strangers doesn't count) and we got lots of cheap amusement from it. And a priceless picture.

Oh, and things look sorta different around here. I know. I needed to practice CSS layout, so the blogger template was the obvious choice for hackery. As can be observed, I have very little idea about colours. It's almost all black, white or a shade thereof. And there is also enough CSS in this template to feed an elephant for an year. Anyway, if your browser of choice isn't one of this, this or this and the page looks funky, let me know. I think the part between the title and the first post is weirdly spaced on different browsers, but other than that, it should all be good.

armageddon is near

2005-01-31T17:59:00.000Z

After the widely reported head peddler on eBay, you knew that there'd be more people trying to hoist their body parts on the gravy train. It's happened. A female in Glasgow has offered her tits up for advertising. And the winner is the Golden Palace Casino, with a top bid of .. wait for it ... £422. A point which almost err.. jumps out at one's face is that the said cleavage is measured at an (off the scale) 42GG. Umm. I didn't know a GG existed, godammit. That's practically the size of a billboard hoarding. This, by the way, is the same Golden Palace Casino which bought out an unaccredited tsunami relief site and snapped up the grilled cheese sandwich which looked like a religious icon. Of course, tattoos are old hat to the publicity hungry casino... they tried and failed to get a place on the arm of another man. We've got tattooed tits now. What's next ? ink stains on your butt advertising toilet paper ? piercings to advertise painkillers ?

And in a slightly related note, an article on the spread of obesity ran in the New York Times. For dramatic effect, they photographed a few females on a beach in Brazil. And called them fat Brazilians. Umm. Guess what ? They weren't Brazilian after all. And one of those photographed "says she is outraged that she was depicted as a fat Brazilian. She calls the reporter Rohter and the photographer Maier cretins". No news yet on if she was more annoyed at the mistaken nationality (Czech) or the unfair depiction of a weight problem. She plans to sue. Of course.

clever

2005-01-30T16:57:00.000Z

A lot of people have been complaining about the quality of articles on Slashdot. See Anti-Slash for more details. Even with all that, I have to say that the current poll is a work of genius. Notes on the context, there are actually two polls in there instead of one. One poll on the Iraqi election and the other on Superbowl XXXIX to be held a week from now. One comment on the poll also noted that the eagle was the symbol of Saddam's Iraq. Or is it meant to be a symbol of the American troops ?

By the way, I'm rooting for the Eagles. But only because they've not won it before and I think McNabb happens to be better than Brady. Oh, and I always cheer for the team tagged as chokers. And ITV is going to carry the Superbowl live. W00t!

I think I'll stop with the hyperlinks now. *grin*
---
The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little pratice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog! - Calvin

surprise surprise

2005-01-29T17:15:00.000Z

If you link to copyrighted material, you may be fined. Well, if the material is MP3s, anyway... This is in Norway. Odd. Watch where you hyperlink.

And in what has to be a story without peer *cough*, a Slovak man apparently pissed his way out of an avalanche. Beer. It can save lives, you know. Of course, the survivor was later (unsurprisingly) quoted as saying "My kidneys and liver hurt..". At any rate, if this guy truly did manage to drink 60 bottles of beer and stay conscious, he probably deserves a prize ... and a lifetime visitor pass to the Oktoberfest. I'm sure he was relieved that it wasn't something less palatable.

And finally, it seems that vegetarians are relatively safer than others, when it comes to avoiding nasty brain diseases at least. BSE (Mad cow disease) has jumped species.

more leakage

2005-01-28T21:27:00.000Z

That's it. I've officially dumped Thunderbird, at least for the time being. Nice email client, but I keep getting annoyed at the horrendous memory leak(s) in the mail filtering code.. and let's face it, an email client shouldn't hit 50mb as a process size for any reason. If I wanted that, I'd use Emacs, dammit. I've gone back to the trusty Pegasus. Which seems to have flaky IMAP support, but at least you can leave the mail client running and do other stuff at the same time. Had to combat a brief temptation to be hardcore, before sanity prevailed.

In other news, I opted for the Snake, mostly because... given a choice between two evils, I'd rather pick the one I haven't tried before. Unfortunately, the automatic tendency to type a semicolon at the end of each line is frustrating, but hey, I'm getting there... slowly.

And finally, The Isle of Man is about to have a sex change.. just for the weekend. And yes, it's a sellout, this is sponsored by Yorkie Bars. Incidentally, I've been told that the delicious cocoa-ish smell that wafts over campus most evenings is due to the chocolate factories which are quite close to York.

the more things change ...

2005-01-26T19:36:00.000Z

It's not enough for some to merely write and use Java, they need to extend it too, the heretics. Fortunately, I needed this myself, so a few days ago, I settled down to evaluate the alternatives. Languages for the VM detail some of the offshoots. My pick for an embedded interpreter is somewhere between a snake and a rhino. Another contender was PNuts, a name driving some to strange looks and choked laughter... for reasons best left undiscovered. At any rate, I need to decide (essentially) between using a scripting language with semicolons as terminators or without... a really difficult choice.

Some know of about:config, the minimalistic configuration interface for Firefox. But did you know of about:kitchensink ? (No, it doesn't exist. Be thankful). about:plugins and about:cache are useful information though.

And finally, a link to a neat site, CleanSoftware, which gives useful information on privacy risks, adware and other nasties found in a lot of Win32 software. I found a potential alternative to Acrobat Reader there.

a dread disease

2005-01-25T13:30:00.000Z

I am suffering from a severe case of TB². No, not this TB, but rather the phenomenon known as Too Busy To Blog. In the past few days, I've figured out the largest file Java can read (the hard way), figured out some of the intricacies of passing distributed messages ... and generally messed around with Real Work™.

And one of the byproducts of this frenetic burst of activity is a relatively new discovery ... debugging by voice *grin*. Since I'm doing linguistics work (sorta), it's sometimes easier/faster/nicer to have output read out rather than reading it off the screen. Since this toy I'm building requires voice support anyway, I'm actually saving myself work... or maybe I'm just doing it because it seems cool to have a robotic voice droning things at me all the time. Weirdly enough, this article describes part of what I'm doing. It's apparently quite the hot topic among research folk. Or so I'd imagine, at any rate.

inbuilt repellant

2005-01-20T18:18:00.000Z

Turns out that some humans attract mosquitos more than others. A new all-natural insect repellant is being developed as a result of the finding. The problem that I can theorize about is that less attractive doesn't mean being completely immune. When everyone starts wearing this fancy repellant, the mosquitos are just going to do the insect equivalent of holding their noses and digging in. Sort of like how people must eat durian.

And if anyone is in the least inclined to form a band, the Swarming Midget archive is where you should look around for a name. Or here. Because a band named "LadyMonkey" is a guaranteed huge hit, obviously.

And the sparseness of this entry can be explained by this comparison of Java XPath engines. I've been using the libraries for most of the day. Deep frozen turkeys probably move faster than a Java XPath library crunching a largish document *sigh*.

random quotes

2005-01-19T17:48:00.000Z

So I've been building a toy that tries to parse questions properly. I'm being paid for it, so I've been doing this less haphazardly than usual, with test data, unit tests and the whole nine yards. Test data in this case is a huge pile of randomly culled questions from various sources on the web. Since extracting questions is automatic, the parser sees some hilarious input. Like, for instance ...

How can my Dad be a lesy?
Where can I write to get tickets to the Late Show?
Why is there no Nobel in mathematics?
Who first seduc'd them to that fowl revolt?
What is it that has hitherto preserved Europe from this lot?
What Does a Nobel Prize for Radio Astronomy Have to Do with Your Telephone?
What if I shot your computer with my hertz (sp)?
What an awful place, why do we bother to go on?

You get the idea. Sort of like Markov Blogger, but worse.

And in slightly less confusing news, David Duchovny hasn't ruled out a sequel X-Files movie. He obviously comes from a long line of people who required specialist support to tell them that the horse they were beating was, in fact, deceased.

And in New Zealand, an artist went all woolly headed and used a picture of an ewe with horns in a postage stamp. And now New Zealanders with a fetish for anatomical details of sheep are bleating about it.

"The stamp is an absolute impossibility," she said, noting that the animal in question had a ram's horns - but lacked any trace of other vital telltale anatomy found on a male sheep.

Because ... because when I buy a postage stamp, I immediately check the sheep in the picture for telltale anatomy found on male sheep. I do. Ewww... (or did I mean, Ewe ?). However, the NZ Post is unlikely to horn in on the continued sales of the stamps.

are we there yet ?

2005-01-18T15:23:00.000Z

Coldish start to the day, snow on the ground and everything. I would normally be moaning about this state of affairs, but some people genuinely do have it worse. Incidentally, who comes up with these weird names for towns anyway ? Embarass, Minnesota ? But, back in the UK, is summer here yet ? No ? Still not here ? No ? Now ? Is it here now ? No ? Dammit. I'm just going to go back into my shell till the place warms up.

On a slightly more technical note, some educated guesswork about Google page ranking factors. A very interesting read. Unfortunately, it has been compiled by a community known as SEO (Search Engine Optimizers), some of whom are responsible for all the spammy hits on specific keyword searches. Still, if you do want a page to be prominent on Google, some of those are interesting dos and don'ts.

And Och Aye, I knew it. The Scots speak that way to confuse everyone. And they're proud of it.

changing appearances

2005-01-17T18:09:00.001Z

Discovered a freaky site devoted to odd coloured contact lens. Expensive, but then, some of the effects are truly ... mindboggling. Reminds me of someone who wore green coloured lens to university a few years back. Mind you, this was Sri Lanka, where almost everyone is born with black hair/black or brown eyes (never mind what happens to the hair colour afterwards). I think I quite like the Demon lens myself.

And in case any food and beverage snobs are hanging around, The Complete Sushi Eating Guide. With what to order, how to eat it and so on. Sri Lankans worried about what their seafood has been eating recently (so to speak) can give this one a miss.

And an interesting scripting problem. Not too difficult, but getting the quickest/tiniest solution proved to be challenging. I have a (vast) number of directories (with sub directories and so on) of arbitrary nesting depth. Each of these subdirectories contain many gzipped files. The challenge is to automatically recreate the directory structure and ungzip all the files, while maintaining their original names and locations in the directory tree. The locations need to be maintained because the filenames can repeat (across multiple directories). The BNC files are distributed in this way. A pain to browse through the directories without using the supplied tools. Automatically, because the corpus contains several thousand gzipped files.

And a final snippet, The Complete Simpsons Guide. Heh. List of chalkboard intros is hilarious, but sadly, not yet complete...

dot dot dot

2005-01-16T17:31:00.000Z

Heh. Revived an old meme. It's all to do with Morse Code and the cool utility that I found here to help learn it. The rationale behind why you'd want to learn it is intriguing, though.
Why would they want to learn to ride a unicycle, or build a wooden boat? Like the unicycle, Morse code is a challenge. We can't learn either intellectually, say, by reading a book. Instead we practice, over and over, getting a little better with each little success.

Now, if you thought SMS-speak was awful (and I do), then Q Code and Morse Code abbreviations are even worse. For example,
S2 DE S1 = OK TNX QSO DR YETI = BEST 73 ES HPE CUAGN = + S2 DE S1 K means
Okay, thanks dear Yeti for this conversation. Best of luck to you and hope to see you again.
*shudder*

And you may have heard of the infamous hand of god goal by Diego Maradona, but have you heard about the lucky pucker ? No ? It turns out that a player got hit on the mouth with the football and all too coincidentally, the ball happened to roll into goal. A kiss of death for the opposing team. None of the opposing team supporters gave him any lip after that. Next time around though, he might just want to think about using his head and stopping his dentist from making a fortune in tooth repair.

Yep. That's a lucky ... p(h)ucker all right.

excess

2005-01-15T19:40:00.000Z

I hang out with a couple of people (and know quite a few more) who think that they're body height/weight ratio challenged. It annoys the heck out of them that I seem to have the opposite problem, looking vaguely starved and emaciated and still eat like a compulsive eater making up for lost time. But even I wouldn't want to eat 11 pounds of food in 3 hours. That's 6 pounds worth of burgericus giganticus and 5 pounds of fixins. Has anyone noticed that skinny folk seem to eat more ? This record in gluttony meant that the winner got to eat 10% of her body weight in one sitting. And all she got (as the popular saying goes) was a lousy tshirt. Oh, and twenty five bucks.

And in a different sort of excess, Rwanda is faced with the inverse of a class action lawsuit. The judicial authorities have to figure out how to prosecute one million people. That's apparently 12% of the population.

And finally, on a lighter note, a three month long poll has yielded the list of all time favourite Scottish bands. The winners happen to be the only band I don't recognize in the top 10. Go figure. In other information, Wet Wet Wet are over rated at No. 4, Eurythmics probably got what they deserve at No. 38, Snow Patrol are probably ok at No. 14 if it weren't for the fact that Franz Ferdinand are one notch below them.

tom jones ?

2005-01-14T17:26:00.000Z

Newly released documents from the Pentagon indicated that the US military played around with the idea of developing a sex bomb. No, really. The planning genius responsible for that must have been a hippie, with the whole make love, not war theme. Do I hear Tom Jones ?

And it seems that the gmail bug has been fixed. And finally, the Fedora Core 4 schedule has been released.

who are you ?

2005-01-13T18:31:00.000Z

It was a classic story, told and retold over many millennia. Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love with girl. Girl marries boy. A baby is born. On Christmas day, no less. Then the whole tale takes a twist. Because in their infinite wisdom, the parents named this unfortunate child Yahoo. Not Yahoo!, but Lucian Yahoo. The parents are from Transylvania, if that's relevant. Now consider the possibilities. This innocent child was named thus because his parents met on Yahoo. This could be the start of a whole trend right here. Meet over MSN, call your kid Microsoft (and he'll probably find himself the target of Viagra spammers). Meet on Orkut, call your kid that and don't ever travel to Finland. Whatever happened to safe, traditional Transylvanian names like Dracula ? Or even Vlad ? Er.. wait. On second thoughts, maybe Yahoo isn't such a bad name after all. Think of his email address (on Yahoo, obviously). yahoo@yahoo.com ? Yes ? Free advertising.

And an interesting article on Starbucks and two phased commits.

And finally, in a list of repeat offenses that you'd rather not be caught for, bestiality would be somewhere near the top.

scattershot

2005-01-12T17:45:00.000Z

Waiting for my CD spindle to arrive, so I can back up the hard disk and experiment with another Linux distribution. I was thinking of a hardcore Gentoo installation (compile it all from scratch, -O3 gcc switches and the like), but all the cool kids seem to be moving to Ubuntu. Being the trend terrier that I am, I thought... hey, why not. Some screenshots can be found here, and there was also a controversy over the desktop wallpaper a while back, to whet my curiosity. A slightly toned down image can be found here.

In other news, cheaper iPods and mini Macs were announced recently, making those devices accessible (maybe) to even starving students. Of course, I've actually used Mac OSX for a few days and I was left curiously unmoved (and the lack of a right clickable mouse drove me to distraction), but hey, it might yet grow on me.

And finally, it's completely unconfirmed, I can't replicate it but someone is reporting that gmail is hackable. Not much can be done from the point of the users, but it's worth reminding never trust sensitive information to email. And that meshes in nicely with how to secure Thunderbird email with OpenPGP.

snippets

2005-01-11T22:32:00.000Z

Starbucks has decided launched something that they call Chantico or "drinkable dessert". It sounds like it is in the same category as drinkable chocolate sauce (with added sugar) or chocolate frosted sugar bombs. Well, I'd still drink it. Sending that link to people on a diet is optional, evil, and also liable to result in death threats at the very least.

And still with the food and beverage theme, a food and beverage snob is actually required to do more than turn their nose up at all the food on offer. Who'da thunk it ? And to top it all off, one of those snobbish beverages is supposedly having an image crisis too.

And a few earthquake links, the 9.0 quake decreased the length of the day (by a seemingly interminable 2.68 microseconds) and also rearranged the world map.

water, water everywhere

2005-01-10T16:40:00.000Z

New video shown this week on the impact of the tsunami, half an hour after the earthquake. (Alternative link with video is here) Yikes. It also seems that water levels in a geologically sensitive well rose significantly during the time of the earthquake. The oddity: the well is situated in Virginia, US, halfway across the planet. I was pointed to a possible explanation here. And finally, how do you wash a tsunami ?. Ask CNN.

In other news, I just noticed that Google has published a paper on their distributed filesystem, GFS. Some very interesting performance benchmarks at the end of the paper, particularly a breakdown of operations and master requests (which give an idea of how indices are used by the Google search engine).

the odds

2005-01-08T17:55:00.000Z

of dying, for a US resident. Tsunamis come in a very distant last, with odds of half a million to one. Make that all natural disasters and it jumps to 3000 to one. Well, one of my lecturers used to joke about trends and odds by pointing to the example of a Christmas turkey. Fed and pampered from birth... till the day before Christmas.

However, the Canadian arm of Toyota is taking no chances and announced that it would rename a popular model of sports car from "Tsunami" to the bland "Sports Package". Well, I can't say I disagree with that at all. But ...in a followup, id Software announced that it was renaming a recent hit game to the "Blood Gore and Rocket Launcher package". Err.. wait.

In other news that defies the odds, it seems that a record Irish bank robbery might actually be defeated. The Belfast bank has vowed to recall and reissue all banknotes to prevent the crooks from profiting from the crime. Umm. Well, at least the robbers won't run out of toilet paper in the short term then, huh ?

And finally, since I seem to be in a mood for gawking at train wrecks, I will link to grouphug.us. Don't go there without preparing to come away feeling profoundly depressed.

tshirt obsession

2005-01-07T14:11:00.000Z

I have this preference for tshirts with slogans on them. No, not advertising claptrap. Nor is it ones with a a trendy political message. Just weird tshirts. Most of it with slogans that appeal to my warped sense of humour, like this one or even a widely circulated flowchart tshirt. Or an old Intel logo ripoff. Now it turns out that there is an entire blog devoted to tshirts. Weird ones, cultish ones. Ones that you'd not be seen unconscious in. Ones that you'd err..recycle into underwear. And people wonder why I'm still a starving student ... *sigh*

And on a slightly different note, my favourite online publication, the Weekly World News reports that porn stars will be honoured with postage stamps. Gives a whole new meaning to the (hygenically questionable) practice of licking stamps.

And finally, 6 years after the fact, I have discovered XPath. I now want a refund on the time I spent writing lowlevel XML parsing logic. Oh well. Live and learn, eh ?

Firefox snippets

2005-01-06T18:24:00.000Z

Ever noticed that Firefox leaks memory like a sieve ? Leave the browser open for a few hours to a day or so and the process size balloons to mammoth proportions. It hasn't been fixed for a few versions now, and the only solution is to close and restart the browser every few hours. Although I can't note down a fix for the leaking memory, some suggest that decreasing the browser memory cache size might help. Well, I've tried it and it hasn't made much difference so far, but I have a few Firefox tweaks along those lines.

Open a new tab and type "about:config" into the address bar. That should bring up a (large) list of all the browser options. Filter the options for the following: browser.cache.memory.capacity (create it as a new integer key by right clicking if the key does not exist already) and set the value to 16000. Which apparently limits the amount of memory that Firefox uses as cache to 16 mb. Another tweak to make Firefox more responsive is to change the config.trim_on_minimize value from true to false. This prevents Firefox from swapping itself out of main memory when minimized (with the subsequent delay when the browser is maximized).

And a couple of fantastic speedup tips for Firefox, outlined here. The pertinent tip is replicated below.
Find network.http.pipelining and double click on it so it is true
Find network.http.pipelining.maxrequests double click on it and change it from 4 to 100

A few more to do with how the pages are rendered by Firefox are also described here. In particular the keys to do with content.notify.* give the illusion that the page loads faster, by forcing Gecko (the page rendering engine) to display part of the page while it's waiting for the rest to arrive.

If you're using a fastish link, that's going to make pages load dizzyingly fast. Works for me.

politics and vultures

2005-01-05T18:08:00.000Z

Well, I'm not big on the whole moral outrage business, but since there is a vocal group of people waving virtual "US Marines and Israelis not welcome in Sri Lanka" placards on the internet, I might as well say my piece.

Dear dimwits, please stop. It's not about the geopolitics.

There. I've said it. If I'm mistaken in my views, I apologize, but The Glasgow Daily Record reports on the story here. An earlier interview carried in the Jerusalem Post is here. If someone offers help, take it. If you spurn that help, at least have the intestinal fortitude to dismiss it for reasons less tenuous than "OMG, OMG teh Americans are gonna take us over!!!11one". Were I formulating foreign policy (thank heavens I am not), I'd really question the meaning of a diplomatic tie or political relationship where accepting aid is forbidden because your ally doesn't like the aid giver. Or is the SL government just bending to someone else's realpolitik agenda ?

Flame on.

here, fishy fishy

2005-01-04T17:46:00.000Z

Eating fish in Sri Lanka may be a health hazard. Or is it ? I'd definitely be squeamish at the prospect, except for one small detail. I don't eat fish anyway. Er. Wait. Fish includes cuttlefish and prawns, right ? Dang it. But at any rate, I found the article notable for the quoted comments of one chappie, supposedly the head of the Disaster Management Center.

"Naturally, the fish would have attacked some of the corpses ..But people shouldn't worry. It's like eating pork. Pigs eat all the rubbish. But we eat pork, don't we?"

In related news, The Dale Carnegie Foundation has offered this genius a book contract. The title ? "Bad examples are better than none at all: How to make people feel comfortable about the food chain".

In other news, Indian authorities (whom I shall collectively call Sherlock) deduced that tribesmen in the remote Andaman and Nicobar achipelago had indeed survived the earthquake and ensuing tsunami. How on earth did they know ? The tribemen had shot arrows at the relief flight, prompting this terse and utterly unobvious deduction.

"... the authorities say the attack is a sign that they have survived".
Well, at least they've ruled out arrow shooting palm trees.

And some aerial pictures courtesy BBC. More widely circulated pictures are here, courtesy DigitalGlobe.

its a joke ... laugh

2004-12-31T13:39:00.000Z

A man walks into a bar and annoys a guy who is already seated at the counter.
"Hey, dumbass. That's my hotdog you just spilled"
The first guy gives the annoyed patron the finger.
"Bite me, Wiener boy"
The annoyed patron does a Homer Simpson drool: "Mmmm. Fingers. " and snaps at it. That'll teach the first guy to keep his fingers to himself.

On a more serious note, here's hoping that 2005 brings comfort and succour to those in need and health and prosperity to all (at least in relative terms). To all the people on my IM contact list (and everyone else!) who've been spending their waking hours packing and heaving emergency supplies into vehicles and generally helping out with the relief effort, you guys rock and you're doing a great job... Wish I was around to help.

125,000+

2004-12-30T20:08:00.000Z

So says Reuters. And it's going to keep climbing. A couple more links that cover the catastrophe, video clips from contemporary insanity, and wave of destruction.org. Not that most people with a television need the reminder... And a newsticker like blog can be found here.

On the topic of natural disasters, almost mundanely, I noticed a volcano eruption in Kamchatka. Why ? Because the theory is that the last major tsunami to hit these parts probably occurred as a result of Krakatoa. And Slashdot carried a story yesterday about a potential megatsunami .

And finally, I feel almost guilty about pretending normalcy at the moment... but I can't resist mentioning chocolate beer.

counting the cost

2004-12-29T14:33:00.000Z

Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?...

I presume I'm not alone in trying to find answers where none exist... in the aftermath of the tsunami. Maybe I am. Whatever.

My parents come from the south of Sri Lanka. When I was younger, I used to spend my school holidays in Galle (free logins for the Washington Post article here). Visiting all the beaches in a 20-30 mile radius, cycling through the busy bus stand... and now I'm told that the water has scythed it's way through all of those, and left only piles of rubble. And more than 2000 dead.

The best beach that I've ever seen is not in the touristy Hikkaduwa, but in a deserted cove near Tangalle, and this is where a friend of my parents decided to build his retirement house. My dad still hasn't been able to get in touch and we now fear the worst.

Someone I know well had 22 members of her extended family washed away. Imagine. 22 members, in one fell swoop. Just like that.

And in another retreat to the technical, I have a few more earthquake links. Didn't notice this earlier, Wikipedia has a frequently updated entry on the quake here, the US GeoSurvey page is here and I got this very useful earthquake index page from a comment on Slashdot.
update: Got one more, the NOAA, which has a bit more about tsunami and the general terminology.

And my final thought, imagine the devastation if the tsunami had rolled over the west instead of the south and east coasts. The west coastline stretch probably has about half of the population of Sri Lanka. If not more.

...

2004-12-29T13:42:00.000Z

Tsunami news. I don't think any written words can ever adequately sum it up, so I won't even try. A few random related snippets follow, in a (probably futile) attempt to prevent myself from becoming all maudlin and depressed again about this...

US Geological Survey - Asia for some information about earthquakes in the region. I used to haunt the site when I was living in an earthquake prone area a few years back. Notification by email here. The Andaman and Nicobar islands are still experiencing aftershocks, upto 6.2 on the Richter scale. It's unconfirmed, but I remember reading that anything larger than 7.0 will generate a new tsunami. Slightly older report here, about the top earthquakes (excluding ones after 2002), useful in that it explains the Richter scale. Summary for the TV generation: 9.0 is a pretty big honking earthquake, but it's not the largest ever. That distinction goes to Chile in the 1960s, where a 9.5(!) was recorded). Wikipedia link on Richter scale. One note of academic curiosity, I wonder how the Mercalli scale measures these incidents.

Off that determinedly technical viewpoint, a list of charities collecting for Sri Lanka can be found here. Oxfam is probably the easiest if you're in the UK, and I know a person working for them in SL.

seeing double

2004-12-23T14:17:00.000Z

Decided to take a break yesterday from the humdrum existence of a graduate student. And stayed home and slept. For a solid 18 hours. Damn, that felt good. I don't know exactly when I accumulated this sleep debt (or indeed, if there was one), but oh, well. I hope the gods of sleep are appeased. They got a massive offering from this loyal subject yesterday. It helped that there has been stereotypical English weather over the past few days. Dark grey skies, an irritating drizzle that refuses to go away and a chilly wind that leaves exposed extremities numb. A gale force wind added itself to the mix as of yesterday so unfortunate cyclists such as myself are forced to pedal furiously to gain a few meters headway. Fun stuff, that.

I hooked up my second LCD into my main workstation today. First time I've done this in XP and it immediately felt right, unlike my experience with Win2000. The 2nd monitor typically extends the desktop by a large amount, so essentially, you can drag windows across your main monitor and onto the secondary. The problem is that my secondary LCD is slightly cheaper, so it can't support the higher resolution. WinXP allowed me to keep the same res setting for the primary, but switch down the secondary, something Win2000 didn't allow. It also allows a window to be maximised but only on one monitor, another useful touch. There are varying reports on productivity increases with dual monitor setups, for example one here. For me, it seems to be slightly better. I can write text on the report and immediately generate a preview that appears on the other monitor. Same with the bits and pieces of Java that I touched today. It's useful to have tests on one LCD while writing the actual code in the other, mostly because I seem to have a lower and lower attention span as time goes by. Another article on multi monitor productivity is here. Unfortunately, it's been sponsored by ATI, so I sense a small conflict of interest there. But all the same, it's worth mentioning the obvious. Doing the same task on both monitors is better, but trying to do a separate task on each... well, down that road lies madness.

its all weird

2004-12-21T15:44:00.000Z

Weird and unlikely stories of 2004. Some of them, I've mentioned already. In other news, it appears that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince will be released in July. Hmm. No real news on the spoilers yet, but I'll probably start reading the newsgroups again.

And on a more technical note, I noticed IBM's reflexive interface builder, a GUI builder which describes the layout and widgets using a XML document. It doesn't seem very good yet, but it's an interesting idea. Most of the other GUI builders seem to spend way too much time on generating mounds of Java code (JBuilder, I'm looking at you), or generate a dependency (IntelliJ's GUI builder requires a jar file to accompany your own GUI app). The question is, will parsing and loading a XML document allow all the interface tricks, and more importantly, will it slow down an already sluggish Swing interface ?

what you fear is an illusion

2004-12-20T17:22:00.000Z

or something like that. I go into the viva thinking that I'm going to be grilled like a christmas turkey (or that my beloved assessor would tell me to get stuffed)... and he turns around and does a football coach style motivational speech ("be focused, go out and build the best in the planet, be the best in the field", waves his hands around madly) and generally acts completely ... weird.

I'm spaced out. I really am. The man who chases down every single bug and nitpicks every single paragraph in a report (or so legend has it) let me escape in under forty five minutes. It can't be because I'm good (I'm being brutally honest), because hell, I can see holes the size of an average Abrams tank in my report. So WTF ?!

In other news, 50 things to eat before you die. I have apparently eaten an astonishing 41 of those. And I think the rest I pretty much don't want to eat anyway (Haggis ? yuck, Barramundi ?). And I intend having item no. 42 (Cornish Pastry) before the end of 2005. Hey, I'm in the same country, so surely ...

and in other news: it started snowing today. Just a small flurry or two that melted, but close enough. White Christmas, anyone ?

pirate releases

2004-12-19T19:49:00.000Z

Trillian 3 has been released. No more betas. So far, I'm just going ho-hum at the stuff that is new. It seems slick, certainly, but I don't use many of the features that the new version offers.

In other news, it seems that Suprnova and a few other sites have been shut down, or have voluntarily ceased operations (depending on who you ask). I'm not surprised at this, honestly. Suprnova was getting a lot of press attention, so much so that BBC news articles for piracy featured vidclips of people browsing the site. That sort of notoriety never pays when you allow swapping of copyrighted material. BT was never intended to be a serious P2P replacement for errant fileswappers, anyway. Download the tracker, and voila, you now know all the IPs of users, and some obliging sites even put up download/upload ratios. Aargh. Unfortunately, the tag of file sharing application isn't one easy to shake, even for BitTorrent, with perhaps more legitimate uses than most other P2P clients. I still download the odd Linux distro ISO via HTTP, because BT is banned where I work.

The really inspirational figure to emerge from the torrent phenomenon (for me, at least) is it's author, Bram Cohen. At least he profited from his creation, in that he was jobless and living on credit cards while writing BT, but soon after Valve Software hired him to work on Steam.

Viva coming up tomorrow. And I'm wasting time writing about BitTorrent and Bram Cohen. Aargh again.

flopping chickens and pudding

2004-12-18T17:20:00.000Z

More good reasons to eat more chikin, cows are becoming increasing annoyed with humans. You thought mad cows were bad, what do you reckon when a multiton beef machine charges at you ? Yikes.

In other news, also seen on Slashdot, it seems that the HP and Intel collaboration was a flop. One might even call it a gigaflop, considering they were building Itanium products. Geddit ? Gigaflop ? Oh, never mind.

And finally, in the long running series of stories on festive cheer, it appears that putting up puddings on ebay might be a bad move, career wise. Does this mean that people from Buckingham palace actually scour listings on eBay for items ? How does one even find out that a (single!) spare pudding has been offered up for sale.

Hoaxes and pranks

2004-12-17T16:06:00.000Z

It seems that the season of festive cheer and much merrymaking has infected many. One guy went on a two week drinking binge and ended up with what should have been a lethal dose of alcohol. Apparently, he'd been singing Rudolf the red nose reindeer when the cops picked him up. Hic. You know what they say about the gods looking after fools and drunks. This guy nicely fits the bill for both categories, I'd think.

And speaking of people who've been thrown into the tank, as it were, one newbie engineer found himself at the barrel end of an elaborate hoax. Unfortunately, his purchase from BAE err.. tanked, else he'd have no worries about fending off bad drivers on the motorways, ever. Of course, he'd have a hefty fuel bill for his daily commute too.

And on the subject of non quotations and jokes, please please tell me that this is a joke. It couldn't be serious. Could it ? Miaow in your replies via comments.

the proof of the pudding ...

2004-12-16T18:27:00.000Z

Two food related items, especially since I'm hungry right now... first up, it appears that heart attack burgers are making a comeback. Hell yes. Toss out the wimpy salads and bring back the steaks and the whole roasted chickens.

And then, to prove that there is really no place better than an Indian takeaway, it appears that a guy actually nipped out during a celebrity dinner to grab some naan and chicken curry. The story is also notable for some PR person making some scathing and rather err.. tasteless comments about the incident.

And finally, the marketing team at Gillette outdid themselves by calling their newest feminine offering Vibrance. Yes, it actually does err.. vibrate the skin on impact, supposedly for easier shaving. This is a clear cut case of a brand name actually describing a product. Right ?

penguins on a bicycle

2004-12-15T18:48:00.000Z

For those who haven't been following the travails of the urban biker, some helpful words of advice. I usually follow those rules too. Believe it or not.

In other news, it seems that penguins and ice don't always get along. In a related blurb, Linux users everywhere galvanized into action, organizing a pilchard drop.

And finally, in a move that will bring festive cheer and joy to the hearts of thousands, pole dancers parade on the shop windows of a lingerie store. Santa's little (or not so little, depending on what you're measuring) helpers; just for passersby.