663 is an overwhelmingly larger number than 13, and the optimist in me (yes, I have my weak moments) would like to think "Good! Looks like some of the pollies have grown a spine - at least temporarily. They might even be worth their feed".
Then the realist in me sees that the 663 piggies might be all equal, but the 13 pigs could very well be More Equal: Our Helpful Friends in the Content Cartel will certainly do their best to make sure of that. Bastards.
Why?
(more...)
And 2 + 2 = 5, FSVO 5.
Therefore Tor appeals to me, a lot: no logs. decent crypto. grass-roots. hard to subvert completely. Good.
So in an attack of unwarranted altruism I'm doing my tiny bit to improve this bloody place. (mind you, with limited bandwidth and not as an exit router just yet, cause I want to monitor that experiment a bit longer before I extend the service)
However, György Palfi is Not Dead - and I heartily endorse his film Hukkle to anybody who likes subtle films. It's really, really nice. His second film, Taxidermia, is pretty cool as well but quite a bit further into the odd realms of the universe.
Due to an incredibly gross and dirty bit of rule all properly dated mails get an extra 3.6 added to their score. *kablam*!
Botch/Fix: edit /usr/share/spamassassin/72_active.cf,
and change the regexp for FH_DATE_PAST_20XX to something that doesn't fire
in the near future (like 20[2-9][0-9]). Don't forget
to sa-compile if you use compiled spamassassin rules.
Some other pics taken last Friday and Sunday:
I named them the Howler Monkey family: Mr. Monkey loses it, big time, every single bloody weekend without fail and shouts and screams at his family. It's always something simple that drives him into a door-slamming screaming rage, like the kids not filling the dish washer or leaving some of their toys on the lawn or the like.
Mr. Monkey is a great specimen. In his rage he completely loses command of all human language: his vocabulary gets reduced to precisely four items: "fuck", "shit", "mate" and a fourth word which rotates depending on what enraged him this time (toys, dishwasher, money, whatever). (You might say he's a prime Australian specimen; he never loses his focus on mateship.)
How he manages to make do with just those four during his five to ten minutes of outrage is beyond me, but he does. True to his name he's loud enough for everybody around to participate passively. Oh joy!
Mrs. Monkey isn't much better - but more petite, hence less volume.
And the little Monkeys (three of them) - well, let's say they follow their parental guidance well. The Big Monkey (fem about 11) is loud, brash and talks back to her parents - it's no surprise that she seems to be the trigger of these parental shitstorms quite often.
The Middle Monkey (fem about 5) is an absolutely horrible brat. A prickly, take-no-prisoners egotist, throws a screaming tantrum whenever the universe doesn't rotate around her (=very often).
The Little Monkey (male under 2) isn't totally spoilt - yet. But he is catching up, learning that throwing tantrums and screaming at the top of one's voice is an accepted means of social exchange (and I don't blame him; in that family it'd take a retarded saint to stay quiet).
It's said that parents get exactly the children they deserve, and the Howler Monkeys seem to reinforce that. (Which is quite unfortunate for these kids, as they can't pick their parents.)
De Brülloffn san ja so a nettes Ehepaar!
Nobody knows why, how and for whom it works, but for me it does.
Still thin (of course) but instead of hard-to-see fine hair there's more and properly sized stuff. Not bad, says my vanity.
But (just like in Asterix) there are downsides: never before have I had to shave my earlobes regularly, shaving just below/outside of the eyes is now an annoying necessity as well, and I really didn't need any hair on my back above the shoulder blades.
Of course begga^Wbaldies can't be choosers!
The comments on that post are also quite fun to read (ranging from 'politically correct', dimbulb outrage to realistic cynicism).
The interesting thing about the story: There never was any evidence of anything nasty beyond them having written down fantasies; there were no threats, nothing.
Orwell called that "thoughtcrime", and so would I. Yet another reason why I'm not about to visit the UK anytime soon.
"Lepa sela, lepo gore" feels like the Serbian version of Catch-22. Very nasty, humorous, unflinchingly direct and I liked it a lot (as far as one can 'like' war-themed films that weren't shot through a pink matte filter and with the regisseur on tranquilizers). It's been criticized as being overly pro-Serbian, but I think that as far as its story goes it shows all the combatants simply similarly mad (and what multi-ethnicity civil war isn't mad...).
Another film from that unhappy corner of the world just outside of home is "Grbavica" which I think is at least as good - but lots darker. It covers life in post-war Sarajevo. No gore - nevertheless not an easy film to watch but really, really worth it.
Less strong (and more mainstream), but still quite good was "Savior". The storyline is a bit odd, starts slightly superhero-esque but that doesn't last too long and fortunately the american financiers didn't insist on some kind of cotton candy happy end - which would have ruined the film.
Then of course there's "No Man's Land", which feels like Catch-22 played out in three rooms: a trench, a bunker and the outside. More nasty humour, not as bleak as the previous films. Personally I found it more long-winded than the previous but still very good. (But the Dutch movie about them sitting on their hands during one of the major massacres was better.)
"Welcome to Sarajevo" is great, but I think it could have been darker and then would have been even better. I don't think it showed the horrors of the siege clearly enough, or maybe not well enough for me: I prefer a film that's hard to watch but powerful over an "easy listening" happy film. For example, in my book "Lilya 4-ever" wins over "Come and See", which in turn wins over "Saints and Soldiers".
Finally, the recent film with the most impact for me was "Vengo". A very lean, clean, beautiful film about Andalusia. The story is very Spanish, a deadly feud among families and their men, and it's beautifully filmed. But the music is what makes it extra-special (it won a Cesar) and includes beauties like a mix of sufi and flamenco (complete with some whirling dervish dances). Of course everything ends pretty tragic, but that's certainly part of the magic. Very much recommended, if you are (like me) allergic to hollywood garbage.
ebay without JS works fine as i need none of the "advanced features" (read: time-wasting blinking gadgetry that make thing less usable).
"works", that is, with one major exception: sorting search results. Selecting sort criteria now officially requires that you allow all of ebay to run JS (and advanced search doesn't expose most of the more useful sort criteria, like "price + postage"). obviously i can't have that!
oddly enough it's "JS to the rescue!" (ebay javascript = evil bloat, greasemonkey javascript = pocket tool bliss)
my greasemonkey script here restores non-js search criteria: find the unrelated search option and popup trigger elements in the page and add the search option links as normal list back to the trigger. then make it look good: the final extra gimmick uses the fact that gecko-based browsers honor the CSS class ":hover" for anything, not just anchors, so my script then makes sure the sort option list only shows up when you hover over the current sort criterion.
share and enjoy!
*ahem*
and now for something...completely...different.
(ahoy, captain bligh! more moronic politics, *pleeeeease*!)
Austria, on the other hand, always manages to find new excuses for not even prosecuting the lying bastards.
So which place is more sophisticated, cultured, decent?
From:
header set to <randomglibberish>@snafu.priv.at has the "nice"
side-effect of directing all the bouncy crap my way.
So I've got the choice between convenient and wrong, or inconvenient and right (according to my personal universe of values).
Simply caving in and being suitably cowed to let Them do whatever They want would, of course, make my daughter and hence me happier - but only for about 2 seconds:
I am neither a criminal nor a shipping container!
and I refuse to be treated and tracked that way. Nobody and nothing has the right to do that to me, neither my 'own' country nor anybody else.
I cannot accept this kind of demands, and so I don't visit the US or the UK anymore (apart from lots of other Garden Spots I never wanted to see anyway).
So, will I personally make a difference? *bwuahaha* Not bloody likely.
Does that deter me? No.
Does my insigificance suggest conformance as an acceptable solution?
Hell no!
Am I a fool? Likely, but no bunch of governmental thugs
deserves my blind obedience and I'm very much in agreement
with H.D. Thoreau in this matter.
But of course trying to be steadfast and true to my personal values feels to Conny not much different from me not wanting her or finding her unimportant. Neither of which is the case.
But what is more important, my universe of values or her happiness? Damned if I do, damned if I don't.
I choose my values. Sorry, Conny: you can be happy without me visiting you in your place, but I can't be content with serving as a silent, conformist gear wheel.
So far we've managed to soften the sting of this conviction of mine by my sponsoring her to visit me instead. So far this has worked out ok. But will she ever understand me making my stand in this?
Nevertheless I see less and less travel ahead of me, and/or extensive sanding paper sessions when I have to renew my current passport.
Governments and human nature suck. If only humanity was evolved enough for anarchy to work...
Combined with my "love" for cleaning this is not a happy exercise.
Still and all it was to be done, and so I spent this arvo first prepping and then grouting all the bathroom walls. No photos right now, because during the work I was way too busy for snapping pix, and afterwards I had the joy of cleaning up the mess, and now I'm too tired.
Anyway, this here progress update is dedicated to my lovely daughter, to
alleviate her worries :-)
(more...)
Well, there is progress in my bath, not stellar but not to be sneezed
at either.
(more...)
after one primary mistake on my side (not realizing that the qantas freight office is n/a on a saturday, when conny left a month ago) i was in need of getting her second suitcase to vienna, somehow.
qantas would have wanted $1300 for sending it with her as excess baggage (that's for 18kg...as her ticket cost $1500 i conclude that the humans themselves are treated as worthless encumbrances while their baggage is worth gold...to qantas). pack and send quoted a ridiculous $550, and qantas themselves would have charged $350 airport-airport (as the unaccompanied baggage discount is only available when you submit your unaccompanied stuff before you leave yourself) - and you'd have to pick the stuff up at the vienna airport, home of truly obnoxious customs bureaucrats.
worldsnails looked fine, at $305 or so for airport to door and so i booked the suitcase with them, hoping for speedy delivery for my good money.
that was on the 19.1. as an aside, they shafted me nicely with insurance fees (their online calc doesn't reflect what they really charge and the fine print was suitably badly worded to trick me out of a nice extra $150...my own mistake).
on the 21.1. i learned they had lost the paperwork, so i resubmitted that. on the 22.1. i finally got the rotten bill.
and then...nothing, for a very long time.
on the 9.2. the first signs of life reappeared, as in "the suitcase is somewhere around amsterdam". after the customary wrangling with the fucking austrian customs the suitcase was finally delivered on the 13.2.2009.
19.1. to 13.2. - even carrier pigeons would have been faster! not even australia post needs four weeks for airmail from oz to at.
And for the more visually oriented, I definitely recommend the "Night Watch" and "Day Watch" movies - but enjoy them in the original Russian with subs, the American/"International" cuts of both films are crap.
Even more interesting: I found the movies no letdown when compared to the books.
As you can see QLD is a good place for carnivores and a bad place for
cheesivores (or at least not for people on a reasonable budget).
Fortunately I like meat, and so does Conny - if it comes in the right form.
This is about one such form: dried meat goodness.
(more...)
More on this quite interesting issue at groklaw.
Being the Dismantler and Recycler Of Crap that I am, I have a few dead hard disks sitting around. Dead hard disk = two large and strong magnets, iff you manage to get them off their backing without breaking the brittle material. Sometimes I do manage, sometimes I don't.
So here's my ghetto mount: a fat magnet in heatshrink tubing, embedded in the back of a slab of coreflute which is stickytaped to the car dash. The Treo-side consists of a bit of thin sheet metal (was once part of a floppy drive housing) taped to the back of the treo with super-thin packing tape.
Simple, neat and zero-cost. I like that.
Actually, she does, and not surprisingly, I did. She wanted a skull and crossbones design and who am I to object to that Sound Sensible Choice :-)
Leider ham die Österreicher aber genügend wählende Deppen daß die nächsten braunen Arschlöcher ganz bestimmt bald wieder an der Macht/in der Regierung landen. *seufz*
For some unfathomable reason I found this gem in the pikiwedia entry on ducks highly hilarious.
A classic example of this problem....
"AGB International...has recalled 13 brands of garlic bread after learning that the bread turns blue when heated."
Come on! Finally you've got at least some fun bread in this dreary place (dreary where Real Bread is concerned) and you do what, recall it?!? Spoilsports.
oh how i despise and hate these bastards! couldn't somebody pretty please invent a good tailored plague that kills off politicians and all the other power-lovers?
Together with the fact that the cheap bastards sell the rail-equipped cars without crossbars by default, you get aftermarket hell: subtly different gear to be sold for every model year.
I resent that. A lot. And I'm certainly not willing to pay $270+ for a set of factory crossbars (or similar money for a non-sooby rack).
So looking for secondhand gear for your soobyroo is more annoying then necessary as you'll have to match the model year - or buy bars that are longer and cut the alloy part down a bit. For those who might consider this and want to know what you'd get with MY99-03 Outback/Liberty crossbars, here's the info: The front bar is longer, the alloy profile is 75.5cm long. The plastic/resin endpieces (screwed in) add up to a distance outside rail-outside rail of 90cm (inside-inside 84.5cm). The rear bar is 1.5cm shorter.
We now conclude this publice service information announcement.
this is the proof, watch: http://someshitesite/video1.exewould you visit that site? Yes? Really? Now that is what I'd call a self-fulfilling prophecy: you must be a total moron indeed to trust a spamster feeding you an executable. A slightly circular proof, but still QED; no pity from me and you deserve all the mess you'll get into.
The annoying bit is that there are sufficiently many morons out there to make this kind of crap work for the spamsters...
The human gene pool really needs a lot more chlorine.
So I made a new grip: reused some wood reclaimed from a door frame, shaped it with my router, glued-and-screwed the grip halves on, sanded and lacquered the thing multiple times.
This pending ruling is welcome news, because (as I mentioned a few weeks ago) the extra mandatory fees make ebay vastly more unattractive to sell one-offs like I do occasionally. (What also sucks is ebay's sugary political correctness bullshit but that's a separate story.)
In the meantime I've gotten me an account at Oztion, the biggest(?) local alternative. As they only charge fees on successful sale (so far) and offer auto-relisting that's a vastly nicer environment for people like me who sell only odds and ends occasionally.
Ingredients:
Getting the ESC to stop beeping and start working was almost as horrible as having to learn vi without a clue and a manual (ie. it beeps a lot but doesn't work, no matter what you do). Extremely frustrating. The thing being a very no-name non-brand, I even cut off the heatshrink to have a peek at the circuit board looking for manufacturer clues, but to no avail. Eventually and only because of a few really odd, happy circumstances I finally found out that it's one of these and got a working manual. Wohee, this actually works! I glued on an old heatsink block to the ESC's metal back plate and then closed it up again with transparent heatshrink tube. Looks neater than the original.
Most folks at my palace de ork are...odd, to put it nicely: today I strolled over to the "Dispose Me!" desk in the hallway which is often stacked with orphaned books (today: loads of Flash, Dreamweaver and other less interesting stuff) and there I picked up this Absolute Gem: the 1977 hardcover edition of Donald Alcock's Illustrating Basic. (I very much recommend checking out the PDF excerpt. 134 pages of hand-lettered and -drawn illustrated goodness.)
Picture this: the person who dumped it, has had it since 1978 and nevertheless decided to toss out this classic.
These are people who'd throw out a full Knuth to make space for "Vista for Dummies"!
On similar occasions in the past I did inherit/adopt/reverently provide a new home to: Tanenbaum's Structured Computer Organization, Sterling+Shapiro's The Art of Prolog, one of the compiler bibles, The TCL/TK book and sundry Lesser Goodies. But enough of that; their (unfelt?) pain, my gain.
One of the cool things about the Basic book is that it's well written, and actually had enough appeal for Conny to spontaneously start learning how to program today. She did her first few experimental programs (with bwbasic and emacs on my/her Debian laptop) just this evening and so far is pretty much thrilled by what one can do. Pretty cool, and I hope she gets something of lasting value out of it.
Go Conny! :-)
"Imagine a neurobiology-obsessed version of Greg Egan writing a first contact with aliens story from the point of view of a zombie posthuman crewman aboard a starship captained by a vampire, with not dying as the boobie prize."I'd change that to read "...version of Greg Egan, but with McNihil's B&W mods, writing...", otherwise I fully concur.
It's a bit like Linda Nagata's excellent "Vast", but loads darker and with an Egan-like hard science disposition.
I'm also inclined to say nice things about Watts' Rifters books, which I just started - but likely more interesting to you out there is this factoid: Watts has published all his books under a Creative Commies licence online on his website (and in various convenient formats). Kudos to him, and I'll certainly consider buying his books when I see them in dead tree format.
This email gem arrived a few minutes ago:
The SMG Workshop agreed that academic staff should wear their scholarly gowns for key events, such as the Faculty Award Night and graduation ceremonies, as from the second semester of 2008. ...Somebody sufficiently annoyed by this fool idea replied (to all, in all caps which I fixed as being bad for your eyes):The reasoning behind this proposal supports the view it will help provide students with an overall sense of academic custom and professional admiration.
Thank you for your anticipated cooperation in this matter.
we already wear gowns to graduation. wearing gowns anywhere else, such as awards night, would only provide students with an overall sense of hilarity at our expense. no one will attend awards nights if this unutterably silly requirement is in effect. why is there such a persistent drive to return to the middle ages, when we are supposed to be the university of the 21st century?Time to get the popcorn out, sit back, relax, and watch the upcoming exchange of heavy ordnance. "Fire for effect, over!">thank you for your anticipated cooperation in this matter.
i'm afraid your anticipation of our cooperation is mistaken.
How exactly one manages to fall into an elevator shaft despite knowing the thing is being repaired, is a tad beyond me.
Now that Conny has a shiny digital camera of her own (and a bit of associated trigger-happiness) she also needs something to organize her pics with. And while my photomanager is fine for me Old Fart, it's a little bit gnarly. So I looked at more user-friendly (but not idiot-friendly) solutions. And voila, the first apt-cache hit was already what I had been looking for.
Martin Herrmann has written "martin's picture viewer" aka mapivi, which is more than just a viewer (a feature which is fairly irrelevant to me). It's written in Perl plus Tk (important to me), it's a photo manager (ditto) and it keeps pretty much all info where relevant: in the photo files themselves. The last is most important IMHO, because it frees me from sundry databases, proprietary overview formats and the like. mapivi uses EXIF and IPTC metadata to record pretty much anything you can think of in extra segments of your jpegs (and other image formats that allow such metadata storage).
The thing is a bit rough in places but works very well for a 0.x release, and the combo of Perl and Tk is really fun to work with.
I've immediately gone full steam ahead and coded the two plugins I need to emulate the few features my photomanager had over mapivi (complete with balloon popup help texts for Conny); also submitted one patch to the upstream author.
Gone is my photomanager, and
welcome mapivi. Not Invented Here indeed :-)
Anyway, I thought why not try and see whether ads might work for paying towards the server cost. Hence, Enter Adsense, which claims to provide contextual ads.
...
...
...
A week later they hadn't managed to serve me one single ad (always only offering the community service ads - or none).
So, Exit Adsense: you suck.
I halve a spelling chequerReminds me a bit of what openoffice's spall choker did to one of conny's homework texts recently...
It came with my pea sea
It plane lee marques four my revue
Miss steaks aye ken knot sea
...
In the news today: Australian Senator arrives at Parliament dressed as a beer bottle. My first thought: "When in Rome^WACT..."
ABC has the story complete with pics.
I wore my Tux shirt today (which has a penguin and the slogan "Linux - for IQs higher than 95" embroidered) and she said something like 'hmm, I guess I've got an IQ higher than 95 then!'; her new EEE pc thingie which comes with Linux was quite nice and so on.
The solution: teach her something! So we repurposed an old broken desk lamp carcass, I taught her how to solder, programmed a 12f629 PIC and we combined the above with sufficiently many white LEDs and some recycled laptop Li-Ion cells into an auto-off bed light: Press the button when off, and you get 18 min of light. Press the button when the light is on, and the light goes off. Simple, neat, efficient. As a bonus the lamp body is black, Just Like It Should Be.
The circuit is trivially simple, the diagram follows and the PIC code (also boringly simple) is here (plus the auxiliary delay library).
Great care should be taken to avoid shorting or annoying the three 2000+mAh cells in any way - unless you like to play with fire extinguishers.
In Obelix' Worten: ils sont fous, ces americains. Completement fous!
(As always I also hand out the involved source code, which might come handy
if you want to build something similar.)
(more...)
A federal judge in Vermont has ruled that prosecutors can't force a criminal defendant accused of having illegal images on his hard drive to divulge his PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) passphrase. U.S. Magistrate Judge Jerome Niedermeier ruled that a man charged with transporting child pornography on his laptop across the Canadian border has a Fifth Amendment right not to turn over the passphrase to prosecutors. The Fifth Amendment protects the right to avoid self-incrimination.
(see pg. 5 of this flyer for an idea of how that looks).
Driving up to Ikea and rob's place yesterday, I went past the driver training centre at Mt. Cotton, which sports such a huge billboard ad.
It also has a neighbour/vis-a-vis, which is announced on the road signs around the place in the same size as the training centre: the neighbour is a crematorium. Driver training turn left, Crematorium turn right. Easy, but don't you forget it!
I wonder which institution was there first, and who decided to show that particular ad facing the road and the crematorium.
Apropos billboards and coppers:
So you need some booster circuit. Clive has a nice set of instructions for making what he calls a "Joule Thief", a simple inverter with three parts only: a centre-tapped inductor, a resistor and a transistor (He also has articles on other Must-Have Cool Things, like how to make a USB-powered turd).
For the ham-fisted among us, these guys show how to build the same setup with larger-sized parts.
I had a few minutes of nothing better to do this arvo, and built three variants with a fat 10mm white led: one hand-wound largish coil (2cm dia), one salvaged coil of similar size, and one smaller hand-wound one (0.9cm dia) with which the circuit wouldn't light up continuously.
For the adventurous, Dick Cappel has another set of really nice pages on similar projects, like the Rusty Nail LED inverter.
And of course, here's the ObXKCD:
Now I've got such a tinkertoy again, a big rc car. But this
time it's far from toy-grade, and I'm already in the process of modifying
it. This is so much fun! *giggle*
(more...)
In other club-related news, they've decided to ban RC planes at Beechmont, for "safety reasons". Damn but this sucks!
There's no chance in hell that I will be visiting these parts of the world anytime soon.
plus Stanley-Robinson's Antarctica; which is (science)fiction but nevertheless very nice.
:-)
Aldi/Hofer has a new vacuum on sale for $39. What do you do?
(more...)
for those who have no idea what i'm happy about: the fellow in question is the most obnoxious litigating landshark in germany. he's been flailing around his cease and desist letters and lawsuits for pretty much anything and then some, usually remotely related to IT matters.
now he's ripped off the taz, a newspaper, and got 6 months without probation. yes!
but best was this quote of the judge: "Die Allgemeinheit muss vor Ihnen geschützt werden."
What's even better is that the Underdogs have the game downloadable in its full glory (abandonware; released in 2000).
Especially the dumb ones: have a look at this innocent, boring, unoffending page (as it has been for the last four years). Then imagine some legal muppets and their threat letters and then look at the same page as of now.
Need I say anything more?
How Sweet and Just and all that! I feel a lot better now that poor Haneef has his future fucked up for nothing and no good reason. He'll certainly bear no grudge whatsoever against this completely fucked up joke of a legal system and the society behind assholes like Howard & co. Surely not.
This is so sickeningly stupid. I hope our descendants finally wise up and have all politicans be the first against the wall when the revolution comes. Because they are most certainly mindless jerks, and with crime now being transitive, the polly bastards' close associations with the real criminals should be treated at least as harshly as the luckless doctor with the dud relatives.
Latest example: I talked to rob earlier this evening (about 3.5hrs ago), and he
asked me how hard it would be to make a Hardcore Gym Timer,
so that he can keep his "8 second blast/12 second slow" training
regime precisely.
(more...)
Somebody sold off his stuff by the kilo, after retiring from an electronics repair career. All bandoleered, also mostly labelled and well mixed: a few strips of transistors and filters/ceramic resonators, resistors, a pile of chokes/inductors, some tantalums, a pile of ceramic caps, a big pile of film caps and a bloody huge pile of electrolytics. I said well mixed: all common values well represented. Ah yes, and more fuse holders than I'll ever need.
4.7kg of gear, for a whopping total of AU$80. I'm pretty pleased. But the sorting is a pain.
Photos by Alan Stankevitz, whose webshite sucks (flash-infested eye cancer) but whose photos rock!
(via the OZ report)
Well, no more. swish-e seems to be better behaved, and actually works! *duh*
These guys have cooked up a tiny perl CGI frontend (which I've reworked and cut down a lot further), and the search functionality on this site works again.
I've also fixed a long-standing annoyance of blosxom: plugins can't
cleanly set the title of a page from the story title, because the header
plugins run first and the story plugins have no official access to the
output. The fix is Really Dirty, in the best tradition of blosxom which
is Abysmally Dirty Code: a plugin with a sub last {...}
that massages $blosxom::output. If it finds exactly one story in there,
then it changes the <title> to that story's title. Hideous but
it works, and the search interface can display story titles instead of
just the boring story links.
If you want to play with the Abominable Code for this stuff, let me know.
(I've said nice things about ipt_recent before here and here, both with example applications.)
I've just added these extra rules to the firewall setting on my mail servers:
# smtp access is controlled by previous behaviour: spam me and you lose. iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 25 -j smtplimited # smtp: if mimedefang has flagged you as bad, you lose for 12h iptables -A smtplimited -m recent --name SMTP --hitcount 1 \ --seconds $((12*3600)) --rcheck -j TARPIT # clean up the old entries to unclog ipt_recent iptables -A smtplimited -m recent --name SMTP --remove # and let people through if they've been good in the past iptables -A smtplimited -j ACCEPTMy mimedefang filter has been instructed to (do the perl equivalent of)
echo "+$ASSHOLE_IP" > /proc/net/ipt_recent/SMTP
whenever it detects an asshole that tries to:
The net effect is that when you do something nasty to me (email-wise), all your subsequent connections to my mail servers are tarpitted for the next 12 hours. Works great, easy to tweak if you want to be more lenient (just up the hitcount and adjust the following --revove rule) and reduces the time my systems have to waste on repeating the checks for surefire rejections on the smtp-envelope level. (I usually get about 5000-10000 rejections per server per day.)
09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0 (with a heartfelt "Leckt's mi am Arsch!" to the RIAA/MPAA/AACS goons)
Netzpolitik.org has some nice alternative renderings, and of course it makes a weird color bar, too.
Now everybody sane knows that even keeping track of such reasons is futile as they pile up faster than you can read up on them, but these two were mad enough to deserve the mention: Satan, Satan and Thought Crime at Last.
And of course there's the title of his mad angry tome: The Pain -- When Will It End?
The Archive and the Enemies section are especially recommended.
Und die BAWAG kriecht fleissig im vorauseilenden Gehorsam. Was sie ja leider legalerweise dürfen; Kundschaft ablehnen ist nicht verboten. Hoffentlich ist aber die Erklärung warum diese Kundschaft abgelehnt wird, illegal: in Ö gibts sowas wie ein Diskriminierungsverbot in der Verfassung. Freilich, es ist eher unwahrscheinlich daß es das Papier wert wäre...
Current project: making a very obnoxious and loud doorbell with a PIC. I came up with the necessary microsecond-precision delay routines and the remaining frequency generation stuff, and a bit of perl took care of eating a MIDI file and barfing out suitable frequency and duration information in PIC assembler.
The last insanely horrible tune I've been trialling: "Innsbruck, ich muß dich lassen". Sounds perfectly ghastly when a cheap piezo is squarewave-squealing its guts out. I'm also thinking about using "Tirol isch lei oans" just to remind me why I'm here and not there.
Here's a pic of the latest test setup: I'm currently learning how to use an inductor to boost voltages (and how a common collector amplifier works). Messy but fun.
Some of the assertions seem...unfitting, though: for me, moving the mouse to the bottom is the most annoying move, not the least: the mouse has to travel beneath my palm and wrist (I tend to control the mouse with my fingertips and a bend of my wrist and rarely ever lift my elbow off the desk.) Moving to the top I just extend my fingers, so that's faster.
But then I'm weird: I have the mouse on either side, with some bias to the left -- but I'm somewhere between righthanded and ambidextrous otherwise, I switch between two different keyboard layouts every day (german at home, english at work) and so on.
Well, now they can insist as much as they want because I wield the Greasy Monkey wrench...and I win! This greasemonkey script neuters the plugin-insisting code and also converts the EMBEDded (*spit!*) PDF into a normal plain link. Works for Citibank AU, maybe other incarnations. (BTW, userscripts.org sucks, I lost my password and can't reset it, thus this script will not end up there anytime soon.)
But the Swallow is DC only, 11-15V, good for taking with you in the car, bad for at home. I hate wallwarts. So I need: DC, preferrably 12V at 3-5A. But I have: loads of lousy underpowered wallwarts (bad) and loads of old garbage (good). Because the old garbage contains the innards of a few Sun SCSI enclosures, some of which came with brilliant fanless Sony-made switching PSUs. APS-28: old, silent, solid, juicy and saucy :-)
Time for the tinker: it simply took a few galvanised nails, some foam and a bit of soldering to convert the Molex outlets to posts for crocodile clamps. (There is extra insulation behind the foam, but the sparkies wouldn't be too happy with the design. Screw 'em!)
The fat plug also works with the cordless drill, now and only after I gutted the drill charger stand: first I connected the Swallow to that, but the stand actually contains a few resistors for trickle charging. The Swallow blasted a few Amps at about 19V across that, the resistor got a tiny little bit hot, the stand plastic started growing surrealistic in shape and I quickly stopped things before the Magic Smoke got out. Now: gutless stand, brains in the charger. Me happy.
Another recent successful tinkerproject was modding Guntis' radio: he wanted a remote PTT switch to connect to his small speaker-mike sitting on his shoulder, just like the setup I've used for the last two years. (My new in-helmet setup was tested on Sunday and works superbly.) So I hunted up parts, traced the wiring in his speakermike and Simply Dit It. First I rewired the speakermike to activate on the PTT switch, and then I built a new remote PTT switch from scratch.
Here's the switch I made for him: 100% recycled components! :-)
And the next projects are already on the horizon: exploring the wonderful world of PIC microcontrollers. These things are cool! (I recently spent about $250 on a better multimeter and a bunch of chips, and may soon spend another up-to-$800 on an oscilloscope. Learning electronics is fun, but getting a reasonable set of tools is not -- for a money-concious person like me.) Here's my first pic circuit: it toggles the led state on every switch activation, debounced in software. Looks like nothing, better stuff to follow soon because I've got shitloads of wacky ideas that I want to implement...
Wolf Haas: empfehlenswert.
(more...)
VeriSign ConfigChk ActiveX Control Buffer Overflow Vulnerability iDefense Security Advisory 02.22.07 http://labs.idefense.com/intelligence/vulnerabilities/ Feb 22, 2007 I. BACKGROUND The ConfigChk ActiveX Control is part of VeriSign Inc.'s MPKI, Secure Messaging for Microsoft Exchange and Go Secure! products. It looks for the Microsoft Enhanced Cryptographic Provider in order to support 1024-bit cryptography. II. DESCRIPTION Remote exploitation of a buffer overflow vulnerability in VeriSign Inc.'s ConfigChk ActiveX Control could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code within the security context of the victim. The ActiveX control in question, identified by CLSID 08F04139-8DFC-11D2-80E9-006008B066EE, is marked as being safe for scripting. The vulnerability specifically exists when processing lengthy parameters passed to the VerCompare() method. If either of the two parameters passed to this method are longer than 28 bytes, stack memory corruption will occur. This amounts to a trivially exploitable stack-based buffer overflow.Original advisory here
So what does one do when it's unflyable? Well, from next week onwards I will have a radio-controlled glider -- again, almost 20 years after the first one. No more unflyable days!
But what I did yesterday amongst other things, was to fix up my radio
setup -- nicely, I think.
(more...)
Yesterday I acquired a PIC+eeprom programmer kit (serial) for a number of upcoming projects, and decided that I *must* start building it... that was at about 2300.
After the late session yesterday, I had the solder station still set up, the work table was still a mess and I decided to Get More Magic Stuff done.
I have one of these Gadmei Tuner boxes. Why? because I prefer to watch DVDs via the VGA out of my player, which works better (read: at all) if you have a monitor rather than a TV. Thus the need for something that eats HF deviltry and spits out VGA. Hence the Gadmei box. Which is great: it works, was cheap at <60$ and the picture quality is better than my old TV could wring from my very bad roof antenna. The 15" monitor was a castoff from Richard and the combination produces solid 1280x1024x60Hz TV.
But the Gadmei looks crap, has a plastic case (with only a minimum amount of internal shielding for the HF parts), and it drives me mad with its maniacally blinking red LED...in standby! (Must be the advertising industry subtly pushing you to watch more crap TV) When on, the LED is stable on. It also uses a wall wart, 5V 1A (although the thin wires provided would start glowing if it really drew that much current...) and I dislike wall warts, especially the ones (like this one) which come with the wrong prongs and need a converter stack.
However, Dr. Hackall has no fear! (and a soldering station, and a recently installed RCD for the whole house...) So I created the KingstonTV: an old gutted Kingston 10Mbit ethernet hub (ex-EUnet mid-90s vintage) which sports a solid steel case and is oversize for the Gadmei box. This required open-heart surgery, as the Gadmei has IR sensors (and *spit* LED) in front and connectors in the back, but the Kingston is almost twice as deep. Looking at the power problem, I decided to gut the smallest 5V/1A+ wallwart that I had lying around, which fortunately is just low enough to fit into the Kingston...if one leaves off this wussy 'isolation' stuff.
(haha, only kidding! three solid layers of plastic. I know my RCD works but I prefer not being woken by the fire alarm.)
So the IR sensor needed to be desoldered (I thought that I had fried it, so hard was it to get the desolder braid to work) and put on an extended cable bit. The juice plug in the back was removed, too, and direct wiring (higher-diameter stuff that should survive 5V/1A) was put in.
The kingston case acquired a number of new holes for standoffs to mount the Gadmei Guts, minus the builtin speaker (audio is connected to the Yamaha below anyway) and without access to the command buttons on the box (but that's what remote controls are for).
Friends of mine recently asked my whether there's any changes now, and if I'll use the Dr. title anywhere; both of which I answered in the negative: why should anything change? Has anything, honestly, changed? I'm no more (in)competent at what I'm doing, I certainly am no better person because of having outstubborned the Processes and Procedures, and I'm not overly proud of the achievement (instead I'm relieved and moderately happy that this exercise is over). My friends told me that I should be proud :-)
For the second time in the last 5 years I've been given the Teaching Excellence award of our faculty. Doesn't have any special effects; while the last time it was a framed cert, recently they've changed to handing out "sculptures" -- or "headstones" as one of my colleagues put it.
Kudos to him (whose Old Man's War is certainly on my to-read list), and to all the people who put in their two or three extra points. A "Cathartic" exercise, as one of them said. Indeed.
And gratitude + all good karma to my parents, who worked hard so that my two sisters and I never experienced more than a select few of the hardships on that list.
But one remembers, just like lots of the "having {been|grown up} poor" contributors to John's post have remembered.
Hamming-coding for phone numbers NOW!
Now I've got another set of suckers to deal with, Citibank AU. Their setup is less gnarly but still annoying. This time, I produced a fix myself: Citibank-Demouse is a Greasemonkey script that simply clears the hooks that invoke the virtual keyboard; and hey presto! keyboard-entry of your password works again.
On this happy note of unmitigated antisocial ranting we conclude this Christmas bulletin.
strip xkcd
name xkcd
homepage http://xkcd.com
type search
searchpattern <img\s+src="(http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/[^"]+.png)"
matchpart 1
provides latest
end
Two weeks ago I rebuilt the chgc website from scratch, with nice new images, no more tables, standards compliant HTML and CSS and so on. I also got rid of \rho's HTML++ thingie and replaced the automation guts with Mason (but still statically rendering everything).
Comparing this with the current setup I'm pleased with the results.
"After months of aggressive campaigning and with nearly 99 percent of ballots counted, politicians were the big winners in Tuesday's midterm election, ..."
$ perl -e '$a=3; $b=++$a + $a++; print "$b\n";' 9 $ perl -e '$a=3; $b=++$a + ++$a; print "$b\n";' 10 $ perl -e '$a=3; $b=$a-- + $a++; print "$b\n";' 5 $ perl -e '$a=3; $b=--$a + ++$a; print "$b\n";' 6My Bizarrotron just broke its indicator needle. Fascinating!
The Friday before the comp I got sick, something flu-ish with fever and general crookedness. Saturday, Sunday and partially Monday the others flew and I sweated feverish and slept. Tuesday and Wednesday I was on the hill but didn't like the conditions much, thus didn't fly. Thursday I did fly, but only a sleddie; it was a bit rough out there and I didn't fight much against being dumped in the bombout. Friday and Saturday I didn't even drive up to Canungra, because I didn't want to fly anymore: no motivation, only general depression. Didn't go to the presentation dinner either, as I had no wish to see any of the (mostly happy) 69 other pilots at all.
Taken altogether, this sucks plenty. I have no idea how I'll get back into the saddle.
In other not-yet-news, I ordered the steerable reserve from Switzerland two weeks ago; eagerly awaiting the delivery...
And Hooray! Dejagargoyle's archive finally shows email addresses again (with a bit of confuse-the-bot stuff, but that doesn't hurt). I was pretty annoyed when they started address munging, but whoever's in charge of dejagargoyle seemes to have been subjected to a properly sized cluebat.
I just finished "Distress": quite nice, relatively accessible. "Diaspora" was an extremely weird tale, as was "Quarantine". So far, my personal favourite among his books is "Permutation City". You can tell that he's a programmer, but he must be smoking Good Stuff at times...
"Think of it as the Harry Potter approach to the Great Firewall - just shut your eyes and walk onto Platform 9 3/4."
Yesterday I mucked around with making the local TV guide website bearable - all I really want to see is the innermost table of actual information, minus all the square acres of blinking advertisements and similar drivel.
Upgraded to Firefox 1.5 (actually painless, very different from past experiences), installed the newest (0.6.4) Greasemonkey, found a script that claimed to fix that mess but which was too ugly by far, rewrote it to suit my prefs, done.
I learned a lot about Javascript and DOM (and also where Greasemonkey sucks) than I ever wanted to, but that's fine.
Today I thought about tackling the Virgin problem, but found out that Joel Hockey has already written a nifty simple small script that gives you text-based password entry back (without removing the silly buttons, should you be stupid enough to want them). Thanks, Joel!
But it didn't work. My stubbornness has few limits (and the weather was not flyable today), so I learned still more about JS and GM and the DOM, especially about the recent paranoia that badly affect the new Greasemonkey and wrecks most of the nice things about DOM and JS (if there were any in the first place).
In the end I fixed Joel's script (and sent it back upstream) and am now quite pleased with my army of greased monkeys.
Next step, maybe: adding a squad of platypuses.
I had a Sun 811 case lying around, and another similar to a 411. Neither would take the Epia motherboard, PSU, dvd burner, two 3.5" disks and a 20x4 lcd, but together they can throw off the yoke of conformist PCism! *ahem*
So I cut out the plastic top of the 811 and riveted the 411 onto it, which gives me space for the drives. A face for the open rear end of the 411 was cut from the cannibalized pieces of my Sony stereo junk and hot-glued in. The frame for the HDs is an old cut-up drive bay, and the support for the burner is a piece of sheet metal that I riveted in (hot-glue isn't strong enough and I didn't want to use expoxy for no reason at all).
Little did I know, and for that matter, too little effort did I spend on research. Plug it in, fire up, works - somewhat: now I get loads of noise on the audio out connection. Not just mains hum but all kinds of activity-dependent crap as well. This is when I started doing the research I should have done before. It turns out that loads of people hate the PW-200-M for being a crap piece of equipment. First, it's nowhere near 200W, and some other speciality PSU manufacturers have accused the makers of shoddy lying advertising. The 5V rail sagged under the load of my two disks down to less than 3V at times. The 12V line is not regulated, so iff you're not using a regulated brick you'll fry your gear (especially the carputer people hate it for that). The smoothing caps are not exactly large at 390-1000uF. (But the form factor rocks, which is why I bought it...)
Tried pretty much everything non-destructive, like powering only the board from the PW-200-M, trying different 12V supplies to verify the noise is coming from the PW-200-M etc...but no joy. It may be useful for really low-power scenarios where one doesn't care so much about power quality (i.e. non-audio application), but for me it's junk...Bugger.
Back to square one: normal PSUs don't fit. Most high-quality DC-DC PSUs like the Opus gear won't fit or require 19V like the DC2DC converters.... So for the time being, I plopped my normal small ATX PSU like an outboard motor behind the box...with some shielding and extra grounding it doesn't affect radio reception too much. *sigh*
Some flying pics; last weekend we were rushing from site to site and mostly parawaiting as in the first pic. This weekend wasn't lots better but a bit: Saturday was blown out, Sunday was very south but still good enough for Beechmont. I got an hour of airtime and took some pics of Marty and Phil.
In short: you are total wankers. Now, please stop linking to yourself and do vanish in a puff of logic as your own site is very much "damaging or cause(ing) harm to the reputation of, Access Copyright".
One of the fringe benefits of the recent trip to Austria was that Werner Koch gave a keynote speech at the conference I was attending to, we had a chat and exchanged signatures (surprise, surprise; opportunities like that...). That has catapulted my paranoia ranking up a fair bit (from about 23500th place).
The newest analyses: by Henk Penning or Jason Harris
No comprendo? It's all about a type of modern voodoo, oddly-clothed weirdos sitting
around in pubs mumbling numeric incantations to each other and the result of this worship of
mathematical concepts. In short, not something normal people get excited about... but we're
not normal and proud of it! *grin*
yourbox+anything@yourdomain,
reach you so that you can presort the junk?
Easy - if you have a Real Mail System. Like sendmail, postfix, exim, qmail or anything else that has come into contact with reality and the relevant rfcs. At worst it's one config entry for the server, at best it works out of the box.
If however you're stuck with MS Excrement Sewer, then you're either totally fucked (older versions) or you need this gem of hideously horrible bloated vbscript "event sink" thingie that sort-of-retrofits the capability. Because the Redmondian Loonieware Doesn't Do Wildcards or anything else that's even remotely useful.
I hate the corporate idiots who made the decision to dump our fully functional email system here @ work to bring in the MS dreck. I HATE YOU!
nah, 5 gigs is nothing special today but I remember when it was not just huge but UNIMAGINABLEonly to *blink* and realize that they were talking about *music*...
Unfortunately, the module isn't overly stable internally and there's
some rollover bugs like this one.
I'd still give it some extra coolness points for allowing me to
implement Port Knocking without any userland tools in 5 minutes:
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They said then that the church is supposed to be poor and should not have a say in earthly matters. We say now that the Content Cartel is rich enough and shouldn't have any more control over how we use data and that information wants to be free.
They were burned at the stake by the greedy church functionaries who wanted to control everything and make money. We're prosecuted by the Content Cartel's henchmen who want to control all the data in the world and make money.
They were not successful initially, but today the RC church is no longer of importance as far as secular matters are concerned (unless you're foolish enough to live in fundamentalist places like the USA). ... We have encryption. And deniability. And steganography. And Guerilla tactics. And networks. And a thick skin. We'll win.
A couple of recent voices:
A BBC producer on the fact that file
sharing is not theft.
The MPAA can't convince anybody to let
themselves be violated
by their A(ss)hole proposals.
Here on Oz, not just the usual
voices
of Reason v1.0 but also government-backed committees say that
copyright
control powers should be scaled back extensively.
Eh? Now what copyright do they have to my ramblings, for example?
Link to the story
sudo env and you'll either get
a single PATH that is SECURE_PATH (and thus not yours) or you'll get two bad PATHes for the price of one! Hurry! This offer ends soon! *ahem*
Guess what is implied by the env_reset/env_keep fix for losing all your other variables... The problem affects all the 1.6.8's, that means sarge/security's p7-1.3 is as borked as sid's p12. p7-1.2 didn't force you to use env_reset so you didn't feel the problem as badly.
I'm a perfectionist. Not only do I now know exactly what is broken, I also have a fix. It requires recompiling sudo.
I'm a "mischievous webmaster"! (Thomas Scott says so, so
it must be true.) As a matter of fact, I'm a non-compromising utter bastard. Therefore I do my best
to make the experience of looking at (a number of) myspace user pages a...memorable one.
(naturally I don't discriminate against normal people: having no referrer header is fine by me. Copying
images onto your own machine and serving it from there is fine by me as it's unavoidable.)
A short reminder from your friendly webmaster: DO NOT HOTLINK TO ANY OF MY IMAGES, OR ELSE. The "else" part can be seen at these places, brought to you by the magic of
perl -ne 's/&/&/g; m!"(http://[^.]+\.myspace.com/[^\"]*)"! || next;
{$1}||=1 && print qq|<a href="$1">|.++.qq|</a>\n|;' </var/log/apache/access.log
(Note that not all links work as I'm too lazy to strip the ephemeral gunk from the urls.)
Subject: Re: Sell Your Organs Online! From: "kwd" <kwdowse@mts.net> Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2006 17:57:20 -0700 (Fri 10:57 EST) To: <jkeon@rcn.com> Cc: <debian-security@lists.debian.org> so what's this all about? get back to me with a list of what's worth what."Brain: $0.1 (as yours is too small)
"I know a lot of people are concerned about Big Brother, but my response to that is, if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?"Hellooooo? Any brains left? Apparently not.
Link to an article (in German) about this
Much cursing later it turns out that only this makes sudo tick again:
Defaults env_reset, env_keep="XAUTHORITY DISPLAY"
or, more to my liking in the case of unrestricted sudo, env_keep=*
An example of why I'm pessimistic: on one hand, voting machines in Wisconsin will now have to be open-source by law, but on the other hand merely annoying somebody online without disclosing your full identity can land you for two years in prison in Bush's kingdom. Sweet. It's good I'm not living there as I'm vocal about them all being fuckwits. That of course includes Mr. Howard and his cronies.
This world is such an obscenely fucked up place it hurts to even start thinking about it...
Mr. Feingold seems to have an unexpected amount of real spine for a politician, and his statement reads very nicely:
"Trust of government cannot be demanded, or asserted, or assumed, it must be earned," the senator said. "And this government has not earned our trust. It has fought reasonable safeguards for constitutional freedoms every step of the way. It has resisted congressional oversight and often misled the public about its use of the Patriot Act. And now the Attorney General is arguing that the conference report is adequate 'protection for civil liberties for all Americans.' It isn't."Somewhere I've heard the quip that these are signs of "sanity breaking out" - if only that was true!
You may find it TMI that bloody Google spits out tubgirls galore without even disabling the evil "SafeSearch" crap.
...10 minutes later...
Done. Enjoy! <sfx: evil laugh>
Now she has even put an email address on her website, so the Big Hammer treatment must have helped a bit. 10 brownie points for me! (I really do enjoy being evil, sometimes.)
So now I'm sitting in the sunny Australian outdoors (because the office aircon is set up for superconducters and responsible for my recurring cold), with lapdog on the lap & trying to get urgent work done - and listening to Austrian late night / early morning radio. (The commercials suck. The weather over there is horrible. Politics and the general news suck in both places.)
But the content...my, these spammers apparently believe in Truth In Advertising more than normal marketing assholes! (how that works out when selling fake Rolexes I don't know, but extrapolating from election results I infer that there are gazillions of sufficiently stupid fools)
The spam goes on like this:
Get the Finest Rolex Watch Replica...in a combo with the "Yes, I'm that stupid!" T-shirt.
"We only sell premium watches. There's no battery in these replicas just like the real ones since they charge themselves as you move. The second hand moves JUST like the real ones, too. These original watches sell in stores for thousands of dollars. We sell them for much less."Amazing! A watch with a second hand that ACTUALLY MOVES!
"- Replicated to the Smallest DetailI love the part about the 98% and the Signature Green Sticker...suppose without that it wouldn't be a Genuine Fake Rolex Replica Premium Watch my nonexistent woman should drool over.
- 98% Perfectly Accurate Markings
- Signature Green Sticker w/ Serial Number on Watch Back
- Magnified Quickset Date
- Includes all Proper Markings"
I've been Having Fun with kernel 2.6.14 and my machines. Lots of Bloody Fun. It takes heaps longer to configure things. The documentation has not exactly gotten better. The (feature-)stability of the 2.6 series is a joke. Some things still don't work. Lots of new things have stopped working. WAAAAAAAH.
The lucky list: ide-cd and ide-scsi still conflict. The latter ist needed for reasonable cd burning. The module documentation blithely says "There is usually no reason to remove modules, but some buggy modules require it". Idiots. The xserver will make your box hiccup badly and fuck up playing of sound if you run it with the previously required niceness. Vmware modules don't build on 2.6 at all, but somebody has cooked up a (really ugly but working) patch. The devmapper maintainer is a clue-resistant idiot who repeatedly refused a one-liner fix for a problem that breaks the use of the disk group so I rolled my own packages. The maestro3 sound support has gotten worse, the chip gets confused every now and then now (and I'm not going with the ALSA suggestion: You can install that bloated crap when you pry the keyboard from my cold, dead fingers.) Loopback (ahem, devmapper) encryption is still not possible for non-root users. Wavemon does no longer work. The netfilter code is fucked up, IP_NF_NAT_LOCAL is gone since around 2.6.11 which means that natting local conns doesn't work anymore. My nice location-independent setup for the proxy (everything configured to use localhost:3128, then NAT that to the real proxy if needed) is now officially unsupported. Thank you, bastards!
And, of course, direct rendering for mach64-derivates is once again absolutely utterly fucked up (uncompilable, incompatible, non-working code). Might be a good thing that with trying to find out and fix all those niggling problems I've got no time to play any games anyway...
On the plus side, however, are things like the kernel key storage api: goodbye quintuple-agent, hello kernel! I'm currently experimenting with code to make that stuff easier to use; Debian packages to follow as soon as things stabilise...
The last few weeks were pretty wet and occasionally miserable. A week-and-a-bit ago we had some big storms and the gutter on the northern end of my house ripped loose. I heard a bang, thought some tree branch must have fallen onto my roof but it was the trough hanging down crookedly. Turns out the bastards building this house had only put in a single small pop-rivet per bracket. No surprise the thing came down eventually.
This weekend Rob and I and possible a few others wanted to drive out to Killarney, for a fly+work weekend. Guess it's not to be; the forecast for the area in question has this to say: "Saturday: A few showers or drizzle in the east overnight and morning. Isolated showers and thunderstorms developing throughout Saturday afternoon and evening. Light to moderate E to NE winds. Moderate to high fire danger. Outlook for Sunday ... Isolated showers and thunderstorms." Bugger. While, as most of the time, the farmers are grateful for every drop, my mood doesn't take gloomy non-flying weather too well.
I'm so waiting for a plague to take care of all the useless, overpriced, spook-prone stupid creatures (and maybe their rich bastard owners on the way as well). Pferde Fleischkäs! or foal goulash, mmmmm...
sextractor -- Source extractor for astronomical images.Thought so. The author is proudly getting his rocks off with those super asstronomical pictures.
And despite that, we keep flying. Even the ones in hospital come back more often than not.
If you look at this impassionately, you can only conclude that we're all suicidal idiots: we know it's dangerous, we see friends getting hurt and still we can't keep from doing it.
Why? I don't really know. I think it is a mixture of addiction and avoidance. The addiction pulls us back into the air, while avoiding to dwell on the dangers allows us to not freeze up shit-scared when flying (which is a good thing as freezing up will surely compound most minor incidents).
It must be a bit similar to how other people in dangerous occupations cope. I've read that fighter pilots among others have this ego thing down pat: while knowing a lot of dangerous stuff happens, one just doesn't believe that it'll be him having a problem. It feels similar with free flyers, motorbike riders etc.
What I found way more fun, was what the ABC news nicely headed "Watching paint dry": two guys from UQ in Brisbane devoted their entire life to an experiment as exciting as, *drum roll*, watching pitch drops drop. Which. doesn't. happen. very. often. The experiment started in 1927, and one of the fellows already died - of boredom, I assume. The IgNobel fellows thought this commitment worth the physics prize.
Link to the standard article
Much of it was not neatly tagged/named, but &rw mentioned musicbrainz, a project similar to freedb but extended to fingerprints for MP3 and similar.
The stuff is partialy lunixified; Debian packages do exist but the docs suck big-time and the interdependencies between libraries and software are as clear as raw sewage...
The tagger app is a/v as Windows dreck only at the moment, but there's a "simple tagger application" (and Perl and Python interfaces). Do not try the "simple tagger application" tp_tagger from libtunepimp-bin: it sucks oh-so-badly (where have these idiots learned programming and interface design?!).
The perl version tp_tagger.pl (only in the source package) sucks about as badly, but at least one can quickly rip out all the crap and make it work somewhat.
Rant done. The idea behind musicbrainz is very good and I'm sure the system will be used more and more once a reasonable tagger application and docs are available.
Ed Felten has an interesting (if you want to puke) piece on the unholy alliance at work: your Vista PC would be their PC. (Of course, if you're foolish enough to run their hole-riddled pieces of bloat you might very much deserve it.)
This recent Boingboing article outlines another goodie: your monitor will show fuzzy crap unless you pay the Hollywood Hoodlums.
Well, to that I say 'fuck them all!'. The MS Weenies and the Hollywood Hoodlums will certainly be the first against the wall when the revolution comes...
Some pearls to follow:
"The Australian International University website is produced by an organisation called Academic Jihad. Academic Jihad has sleeper cells spread throughout the Australian university system and is poised to unleash a merciless firestorm of pedagogy on unsuspecting students, both local and international."
"Here at the Australian International University we have rationalised the normal system of different university faculties into a single faculty. We realised that most of the other faculties were not generating sufficient income and were having a negative effect on the overall marketing plan of the university. As a result, the Australian International University only has one faculty - the Faculty of Business."
Cynical, me? No way!
Source: the ever-brilliant samizdata blog
It would be a good idea to sign the petition against said lousy plan.
(However, realising that this world is currently in a very Kafkaeske downward spiral, signing won't help; we need something more like a plague that kills 99% of all politicians to improve matters. Gene tech wizards, that would be a good project for you fellows!)
So let's share this gem of corporate hushing up.
Links to Cryptome's comments and mirror, Bruce Schneier's comments and the latest Boingboing article on the topic
Why am I pondering such silly questions? I'm just listening to Sarah Blasko's first CD, which contains a lot of cool stuff including a non-suicidal song of said weird name.
On Wednesday she's playing a gig in Coolangatta (which is nearby: 20-25 minutes per car). Hmm, maybe I can find the time.
"...strategy...". Translation: "We have no clue."
"...commitment..."means: "We've got a short memory and we lie whenever we open our mouthes and of course we've never said anything like that."
"...focus..."means: "We've got no plan, no clue, no skills BUT we've got a fumes-addled vision."
Do you really want to know more?
Evolve On!
"Wiens Erzbischof Christoph Schönborn setzte sich in der New York Times vom 7. Juli in einem Kommentar an die Spitze einer Bewegung, die die Evolutionstheorie nicht nur anzweifelt, sondern als unwissenschaftlich ablehnt."Link zum artikel im standard
On Friday, Ms Robertson sent a letter to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, near Los Angeles, asking directors to take fish off the cafeteria lunch menu, adding: "Serving fish at an aquarium is like serving poodle burgers at a dog show."Now what's wrong with that? I guess if poodles tasted any good...
I hope the members of this "Fish Empathy Project for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals" (Judean People's Front, anyone?) show their empathy with the fish by not breathing any more air. Soon, please.
Link to the news article
Now a private developer is using this decision to get a hotel built on one of the responsible judges' private land. How very sweet! I would so very much love to see that actually happening. (Yeah, as if there was any chance of the corrupt bastards bending over. But one can dream.)
If only I had the money for such practical jokes...*dream*
Subject: Re: a sad host From: Brian Kantor Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 05:28:34 +0000 (UTC) Newsgroups: alt.sysadmin.recovery Garrett Wollman ... wrote: >Yeah, it is kind of sad when machines have to be rebooted weekly. > 4:15PM up 409 days, 22:02, 1 user, load averages: 12.34, 9.87, 8.01 >-GAWollman Or yearly, even: >Last login: Wed Apr 20 15:56:09 2005 from karoshi.ucsd.edu >10:26PM up 1453 days, 18:20, 3 users, load averages: 0.35, 0.17, 0.15 >----------------------------------------------------------------------- >[brian] 1 :*hehe*
"The theme of your film should be about how intellectual property theft affects both individuals and society."
The entry form clearly shows its origins:
"...Should I be selected as a finalist in this competition, I confirm the following: 7. I will formally license on terms acceptable to Microsoft, all intellectual property rights in my film and agree to waive all moral rights in relation to my film if requested to do so..."Pot. Kettle. Black. Assholes.
Link to the boingboing article
*snort!* The quote is from a
newspaper article
on some fellows taking a bus for a joyride (after the driver had gone for a pee and forgot the keys
in the ignition).
Australians seem to like public transportation only if they can drive themselves, as evidenced by the final paragraph of said article:
"The trio resisted picking up passengers during their short trip, say police, unlike in Melbourne a month ago, when a 15-year-old boy was caught after picking up passengers in a tram he had taken."
Australia is a very confusing place, taking up a large amount of the
bottom half of the planet. It is recognisable from orbit because of many
unusual features, including what at first looks like an enormous bite
taken out of its southern edge; a wall of sheer cliffs which plunge deep
into the girting sea. Geologists assure us that this is simply an
accident of geomorphology and plate tectonics, but they still call it
the "Great Australian Bight" proving that not only are they covering up
a more frightening theory, but they can't spell either.
(more...)
Link to the Heise article (german, can't be bothered looking for an english source)
"It's made out of poo, but also it's so Aussie."say Joanna Gair of Creative Paper Tasmania who is the manufacturer of a paper made from roo dung. Which seems to be a solid seller despite looking like, well, shite. King Midas would be impressed.
A firefox searchplugin is available over there.
So thank you, Martin Schulze, for that post. You put the concerns of lots of us in words very nicely.
The Bureau of Meteorology, source of often misleading weather forecasts but otherwise providing a lot of very good services IMHO, now has a height relief for the live weather radar images. Very nice. This is the one for the immediate surrounds.
this is how it looks when az has a bad day and takes a big hammer to the mh-e defaults:
;; gehts scheissn mit die bunten smileys... (setq mh-graphical-smileys-flag nil)
Ivan, one of the club's more experienced pilots had a close call yesterday. He was flying his Boomerang as usual, just a bit away from Tamborine launch when everything went pear-shaped quickly and he had to throw his reserve parachute. Which did open, and did slow him down and kept him from going *splat*.
I was in the air at that time, too, didn't see the events prior to the reserve opening but kept Ivan in sight after Mark had gone on the radio letting people know of the trouble.
Luckily Ivan didn't hit any powerlines, the main road or any of the houses close by as he touched down, nor did he end up in the trees - which might have been better: he hit the ground hard enough to injure his ankles somewhat.
I didn't much feel like flying yesterday anyway, so I landed shortly after he had given us an "I'm okay" on the radio. Some others did continue onwards and had nice flights; I just launched for another short flight later in the arvo.
Hours tally: 82.6hrs.
- "Go to the supermarket and buy two home brew kits. ... Also buy at least a couple of bottles of Coopers Pale Ale, more if you like.
- Ignore the instructions.
- Cool and pour the Pale Ale, being careful to leave the yeast sediment behind. Drink the beer."
Adding "abuse" or "torture" as keywords brings forth more precise stuff at Yahoo, but zip improvement at Google.
No way Google
mislaid these images accidentally.
"The most comprehensive image search on the web" my ass...
Source: cursor
Fortunately private health insurance isn't very expensive (yet), especially for higher income earners: you have the choice of paying an extra levy for Medicare for no extra benefits or you can take out private hospital cover.
For me, the extra levy would be about $650 p.a., and full-blown private insurance (not just hospital but also extras like dental, optical etc.) costs me about $900 p.a. Given the $200 I get for contact lenses every year and factoring in just one or two other doctor visits a year, my decision for private insurance was obvious.
Still, even private insurance leaves you with a gap between the benefits and the actual cost: for hospital stuff there's a safety net capping, but not for extras. So the visit to the dentist this week left me $50 poorer, still a lot better than paying $210.
It wasn't too painful (despite me being scared of dentists and their surprises) and didn't uncover any unexpected problems. I'll have two teeth taken out in a month but both were known candidates for 15 and 7 years respectively, so no real worries.
Q: Why did the chicken cross the road? A: Fermat: It did not fit on the margin on this side.Link to the article (PDF) (via Monochrom)
Cynic that I am, I find this not baffling at all: Drowned corpses caused by mother nature look better on screen than showing the results of American hubris. Dead soldiers can be done away by statistics, dead civilians aren't counted so they don't count, and for the veneer of a conscience let's quietly publish some acknowledgement of having no clue.
And all the bonsai shrub had to say is:
Mr Howard said yesterday he would not apologise or offer compensation to Mr Habib, who has spent the last three years in Guantanamo Bay for suspected terrorism and will be released within two weeks. Nor had he questioned the right of the Americans to apprehend Mr Habib in the first place....
Asked whether it was appropriate for an Australian prime minister to allow an Australian to be locked up for three years in a foreign country without proper legal rights, Mr Howard said: "I think the process took too long and we have made that known in very plain terms to the United States."
(cartoon by Peter Nicholson)
Somehow looking at such artful stuff tempts me to forget the stupid splashback tiles in the kitchen and try this: finish filling in the cracks, repaint with heavy white latex paint or similar and then do some stencilled spraying. Maybe some Escher icons on a sin() wave....or something like this?
I'm not a major fan of scribbly graffiti and tags, but the stuff presented
there is mostly great art - and Banksy's rats are really cool.
More Banksy and non-banksy, both nasty and thus good:
A small excurse for the colonials: This is "Speck". "Speck" translates to "bacon". But the "bacon" you can buy in the supermarkets around here is not Speck - and vice versa. At most they share the species of deader. Speck is fine for consumption as it is (raw but cured and smoked). "Bacon" is good for ham & eggs - at best.
Rob also transported the good stuff in a bag befitting the Austrian/German delicacy. That piece was actually a good 3kg, and cost me $53. Not bad at all, considering that it's almost as good as the one my grandmother made herself.
Apropos the nice bag, Aldi/Hofer stores finally have made it to QLD. Yay! I just checked: the closest store is at the north end of the Gold Coast. That place is called Labrador. I'm on the mid-southern end of the GC: in Miami. Whoever came up with the suburb names here was a horrible punster.
Source: Bruce Scheier's blog
So the Sydney Morning Herald, one of the few almost readable newspapers, ran this article with recipes today.
The engineering winner, and IMHO highlight this year, is US patent 4,022,227: the comb-over baldy man hairstyle. greed and stupidity, a mind-boggling combination.
So, do I have to burn off my fingerprints now or can that wait a couple of months? Is the RF-safe wallet the next thing I'll have to buy? Or an RF-safe overall, to be worn like a decon suit over all your RFID-infested clothes? Is ThoughtCrime next on the WIPO agenda?
What a bloody lousy outlook.
As it turns out, I had to ring their support for some fine-print info; less than a minute of waiting, a reasonably competent fellow on the other end and now things just work.
Their service is pretty good; things like port blocking (mostly of MS-junk and backdoors) can be disabled via the customer care webform, their status email list allows to select plain text or HTML crud, etc.pp. Connectivity is also better than with the other provider, and I've got free PIPE access again (mainly important for mirrors and usenet).
My reverse dns request (via email, close to the end of normal business hours on a friday) got answered and fulfilled within 20 minutes.
And they even have a kickd, so I feel very much at home :-)
Now they called the PIPE peering "non-viable" and terminated the peering agreement completely. No, not make the traffic cost us customers, just cut the access. Time to go somewhere else, but they were billing you $143 for service cancellation if you're within your contract period.
But, lo and behold, the public bitching, complaining and pestering of the new owner fools has helped: the cancellation fee is waived.
So I've fired the churn/rapid transfer application to WestNet yesterday; these fellows have been around a while, seem to thrive, were the other alternative last year when I selected ISPs and will cost me a few bucks less a month for a bit more service.
"The danger I see here is that intrusive judicial oversight and second-guessing of presidential determinations in these critical areas can put at risk the very security of our nation in a time of war," Ashcroft said...Link to the boingboing article"Courts are not equipped to execute the law. They are not accountable to the people," Ashcroft said.
The int'l observers - when not barred from entering the polling stations - observed:
"The observers said they had less access to polls than in Kazakhstan, that the electronic voting had fewer fail-safes than in Venezuela, that the ballots were not so simple as in the Republic of Georgia and that no other country had such a complex national election system. "To be honest, monitoring elections in Serbia a few months ago was much simpler," said Konrad Olszewski..."Apropos electronic voting, Andrew Tanenbaum has this to say on his electoral vote predictor website:
"One thing that is very strange is how much the exit polls differed from the final results, especially in Ohio. Remember that Ohio uses Diebold voting machines in many areas. These machines have no paper trail. Early in the campaign, Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell, a GOP fundraiser, promised to deliver Ohio to Bush. He later regretted having said that."Terrific.
Very good but way too real for my mental comfort.
"Being a maintenance programmer is such a privileged joy and honor. I get to spend anywhere from eight to twelve, sometimes as many as sixteen straight hours a day locked in an eight by eight cube grinding my ass out writing code that you freaks don't appreciate."What a beautiful rant, make sure to read this while it's still there.
However, there were a few bad spots on this appl^Whouse. One is that it's real close to the wild hill and termites abound. There's some in the retaining/decorative walls around near the fence, and in the forest for sure. The building inspectors last year claimed some old damage evidence, too. So I had a chem barrier done when I moved in last year, but you never know.
The inspection later last year showed none, and on the 26.8. I had the pest guys in again, for an inspection and a general spray. They didn't find any crawlies, and the fellow crawling through the roof klonking on the trusses didn't turn up anything bad. Very reassuring, and they weren't expensive, either.
Another problem is the kitchen being ready for replacement. Well, that's being taken care of right now, with the bathroom scheduled for next year or so.
The last problem I found was a nastily sagging ceiling in the living room. I realised this when I painted the ceiling early last November. Being a Wellconditioned European, I was very much worried by this: when a ceiling is sagging in places where houses are built, not just nailed together, this is a doomsday sign.
I feared the roof trusses themselves having sagged and didn't even as much as look into the roof cavity so that I wouldn't be shocked by the potential badness there. (I'm a big pessimist and avoidance is one of my skills. I'm good at both, occasionally too good.)
In short I dreaded that the house I've enslaved myself for to the bank would fall apart before I'd finish paying it off (which, after doing some non-panicky simple calculations, would still leave me with a living place for not more money than renting would cost me), and I didn't want to uncover any nasty surprises (which I was awaiting anyway) - thus the avoidance of certain tasks. So much for history.
After the pesties were gone I was feeling up and ready to tackle a couple of the DIY tasks I've had on the todo list for a year. First item was to buy matching replacement ceiling fans and mounting them. One fan had a grumbling main bearing that heated up badly, and another was totally unmatched, with a horrible non-recessed controller unit on the wall - super-ugly.
The fans were cheap, $52 each for the ones with light and $42 or so for the lightless one.
Item two was to resow the lawn in the back, which had a couple of very dusty bare spots where the jungle had been cleared earlier. Now, after two weeks the grass is growing beautifully. Very nice, indeed.
But back to technology (Oz-style). A day after doing the backyard and buying the gear, the weekend was there and the wind was too strong for flying. So I decided to do the fans.
Two of them were easy to mount as the old mounts were conveniently located beneath trusses to screw the anchor to. The electrical stuff I had to redo completely, with new controller panels etc. Cheap bastards had only twirled the protective earth, put some solder on it and then wrapped it in isolating tape. Assholes!
So I finally relented and realised I had to get into the roof. As the pesties had been spraying just two days before there wouldn't be any (live) critters up there.
Donning my dirtiest clothes, I entered the manhole in anticipation of
the very worst.
...
But there wasn't anything to be afraid of.
The replacement of the fan was simple, just had to improvise an anchor
for it resting on the closest two trusses (easy-peasy).
And my worries about the ceiling also were unfounded. OZ construction is nail-only (as much as I could see anywhere so far). The ceiling plasterboard is simply nailed to the underside of the trusses. That's all that holds it up. Naturally, after 17 years, a fair number of those nails had loosened and the ceiling drooped where the biggest stretches are.
So I've got another item on the todo list: push the ceiling plasterboard up and screw it in place properly. I'll do that with the kitchen work as it'll be dirty.
While crawling through the roof I also decided that now would be a good
opportunity to move the speaker cables for the rear speakers in the living
room into the ceiling (instead of having them tacked underneath it).
For once, Oz construction actually has advantages beyond just being cheap:
take a screwdriver,
extend arm upward, poke a hole, and thread the cable. Finished.
:-)
"Diebold Global Election Management System (GEMS) Backdoor Account Allows Authenticated Users to Modify VotesCool debugging feature, but totally inappropriate in critical software like that. Anyway, Diebold is enjoying good business with various US states and that's all that matters...NOT!BlackBoxVoting.org reported a vulnerability in the Diebold GEMS central tabulator.
A local authenticated user can enter a two-digit code in a certain "hidden" location to cause a second set of votes to be created on the system. This second set of votes can be modified by the local user and then read by the voting system as legitimate votes, the report said."
Item 2:
"Microsoft Patents The Obvious (Again)Looks like Microsoft has yet again patented plainly obvious technologies that have existed for years and years. No, I'm not talking about their patent of the sudo command. This time Microsoft has been granted a patent for nothing less than using your keyboard to navigate a web page!"
Well, the Oz patent office actually gave some fellow a patent on
the wheel...quite recently.
Link to the full story
"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. envoy to Iraq wants to shift $3.3 billion set aside for Iraqi water, sewer, power and other reconstruction projects to improve security, boost oil output and create jobs, a U.S. official said on Monday.so the money earmarked for real rebuilding goes into war mongering. and oil, how can one forget the oil? and it's all for "security" *boom-tish*! and if you're not for all this bullshit, then you're a terrorist and unamerican and an "insurgent" how doublethinkingly convenient for the U.S. bastards.
...
Among other things, Negroponte proposed spending about $1.8 billion now earmarked for water, sewage and electricity to expand the Iraqi police, border patrol and national guard and increase the number of border posts, he said."
The French legal system guarantees the right of private copies, and EMI and Fnac broke not just that but also mislead their customers about the (lack of) quality of their product.
If the government wins that suit, then EMI and Fnac would have to call back the CDs and pay E 187k. Nice.
"Ken Carpenter called at 1:10 PM to say that getting a court order would be complicated and time-wasting so why doesn't Cryptome be "patriotic" and remove the document in the interest of national security. He said NSA had vetted the document as being important to national security.Great job!Cryptome said it had published his request and he should take a look at it and a reader's response.
Mr. Carpenter logged onto this file, and said, oh no, you published my telephone number and quoted me.
We said that is what we do when a government official gets in touch."
Summary: if you make truly decentralized P2P software -- like Gnutella -- you can't be held liable for any copyright infringement that takes place on their networks. This is the "Betamax principle," from the famous Supreme Court case that established that Sony wasn't responsible for any infringement that its customers undertook with their VCRs.
The decision paper makes for very interesting reading, inclusive of the simplified history/overview of P2P systems.
"DISCRIMINATION BECAUSE OF RACE, COLOR, RELIGION, SEX, OR NATIONAL ORIGIN SEC. 703. (a) It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employerSo if you're a communist, you're unprotected rightless discriminable scum. Brilliant.
...
(f) As used in this title, the phrase "unlawful employment practice" shall not be deemed to include any action or measure taken by an employer, labor organization, joint labor-management committee, or employment agency with respect to an individual who is a member of the Communist Party of the United States or of any other organization required to register as a Communist-action or Communist-front organization by final order of the Subversive Activities Control Board pursuant to the Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950."
"Strict regulations published by Athens 2004 last week dictate that spectators may be refused admission to events if they are carrying food or drinks made by companies that did not see fit to sponsor the games."
"Staff will also be on the lookout for T-shirts, hats and bags displaying the unwelcome logos of non-sponsors. Stewards have been trained to detect people who may be wearing merchandise from the sponsors' rivals in the hope of catching the eyes of television audiences. Those arousing suspicion will be required to wear their T-shirts inside out."
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."Kerry:
"We will double our special forces to conduct terrorist operations!"I'd say they're both crooks.
Link to the press release (fourth paragraph from the bottom).
Tonight they'll run Taxi, in French of course. Oz is really a multi-cultural country, and I love it for that trait.
"...it seems that public opinion and political realities in the EU are such as not to support an extension in the term of protection. Some would even argue that the term should be reduced. At this stage, therefore, time does not appear to be ripe for a change, and developments in the market should be further monitored and studied."Very positive. If only working documents like these dictated the actions of the commission...
"IRC is a network full of chat rooms (or "channels") where a lot of scary internet people (or "perverts") hang out.And he took jenny18 there. jenny18 passed the sex Turing test with flying colors, but a lot of the dalnet denizens didn't pass anything...except pass for fools, that is.
...
so i replaced eliza's tiny, boring script with a massive dumb blonde script that has like 3,800 responses on all sorts of topics, but mostly sex. jenny18 is very horny and she loves talking to horny guys. and everyone knows the best place to talk to horny guys is on dalnet irc sex channels."
"this goes to show that lots of challenge in AI is in speaking naturally, and on the internet most people speak like idiots, so you can sort of cheat around a lot of things."Jake's article on speaking like an idiot is a lot of fun to read, too.
"Here's the scenario we must be all be prepared for:A disturbing view of the upcoming US election by Wayne Madsen. Do you doubt it? I wouldn't.If the pre-election internal tracking polls and public opinion polls show the Kerry-Edwards ticket leading in key battleground states, the Bush team will begin to implement their plan to announce an imminent terrorist alert for the West Coast for November 2 sometime during the mid afternoon Pacific Standard Time. At 2:00 PST, the polls in Kentucky and Indiana will be one hour from closing (5:00 PM EST - the polls close in Indiana and Kentucky at 6:00 PM EST). Exit polls in both states will be known to the Bush people by that time and if Kentucky (not likely Indiana) looks too close to call or leaning to Kerry-Edwards, the California plan will be implemented. A Bush problem in Kentucky at 6:00 PM EST would mean that problems could be expected in neighboring states and that plans to declare a state of emergency in California would begin in earnest at 3:00 PM PST."
"We believe that taking this matter of the security barrier to the International Court of Justice was the wrong decision," Mr Downer said.Argh, this world sucks so badly it's not funny. If those despair.com posters weren't so pricey..."Israel must find ways of defending itself against terrorists and it isn't reasonable to tell the Israelis that they can't erect a security barrier to protect the people of Israel from suicide-homicide bombers."
..[The Film Classification Review Board] decided last night to retain the [R18+] rating, rejecting appeals by the Australian Family Association and the South Australian Attorney-General, and merely toughened the consumer advice for the release. It now says Anatomy of Hell includes "actual sex, high-level sex scenes and high-level themes".Common sense apparently prevailed. A real surprise.
But, on the other hand there's this piece of news, too:
[he] is making Australian legal history as the first extradition case under copyright law.So let's get this straight: the US claims he's a copyright infringer who hasn't even made any money from the alleged activity; they get him arrested on foreign soil (bad enough already), try to get him extradited to the land of the shrub (really brilliant judgement), AND want him to pay them for having the privilege of being extradited and prosecuted? Bastards. Fascist stiffnecked loonies.
...
The US had appealed against a decision by magistrate Daniel Reiss to release [him] from jail in March, after he found there was no extraditable offence.
...
It is not claimed that [he] ... made any money from the alleged piracy.
...
While the US can now proceed on the extradition process, it was unsuccessful in its application that [he] pay its costs - estimated to be about $20,000.
Quid pro quo: I want to see the murkins hand over one of their grow-your-dick-fast spammers to a fundamentalist country!
Link
to the Censorship article
Link
to the Extradition article
iptables doesn't fully like sparc64: the limit module, very useful for limiting log entries in bursty situations, is fubar'd on 64bit archs:
..."the problem is that the limit match does an ugly hack: it stores a pointer in its struct matchinfo. That pointer is 64bits in the kernel, but userspace is 32bits, and thus the compilar only allocates 32bit for the pointer in the structure: boom.Thanks guys, very helpful. Grrrrrrr. Ok, for now my syslogd is set to not sync on the file where these logs go to, to keep the box from melting down because of any silly scanner out there but that's far from perfect.The structure was commented by the original author with: /* Ugly, ugly fucker. */"
Then my alcadreck dsl thingie is flaky as hell: it really doesn't like service disconnections, and occasionally doesn't get the always-on connection into always-on state...Time to get a BPAC-5100 and enjoy proper syslog, SNMP, real CLI etc.
And my Ultra1 is showing the onboard HME lockup behaviour: suddenly no more data coming in, but ifdown/ifup fixes the issue. (or is it the alcadreck? seeing collisions and carrier loss errors on a lightly loaded Xover cable doesn't really inspire confidence in the other comms partner even without knowing about the alcadreck...) Built the kernel with the one-liner patch, seems to be ok for now.
And df is fucked on sparc64:
$ df -k / Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/sda1 -1324350 1 0 6% / $ df -k // Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/sda1 1511856 80608 1354448 6% /So a trailing slash coaxes it into working. Fugly.
And mozilla-firebird with the tabextensions on crashes when trying to do talk to ANZ (who are evil bastards wielding their javascript bludgeon inexpertly, but who - thank eris! - haven't discovered java...yet).
To make debugging easier, at work the same mozilla-firebird with the same extensions, a 99.9%-same config works without a hitch. Oh the joy. Mozilla needs some code to selectively disable each and every javascript function (not just the few silly things like preventing scripts from hiding the toolbar)!
Sigh.
"Today, July 1st, the Dutch Parliament has decided to direct Minister Brinkhorst and Secretary of State van Gennip (Economic Affairs) to withdraw the Dutch vote in support of the Council of Ministers' text for the Directive on Software Patents. This is the first time in the history of the EU that such a course of action has been undertaken."Nice. The voices of reason seem to prevail in the Netherlands; not surprisingly this is also the one spot in Europe with realistic drug laws.
"...But the court found that because the e-mails were already in the random access memory, or RAM, of the defendant's computer system when he copied them, he did not intercept them while they were in transit over wires and therefore did not violate the Wiretap Act, even though he copied the messages before the intended recipients read them."Hey, great, so the DVD contents you fools want to keep me from copying is also fair game: it's in RAM while I play it, so it's mine now! Thanks for that ruling! *HHOS* Link to the wired story
"The truckers, who haul hazardous material across 48 states, explained how easy it is to spot "Islamics" on the road: just look for their turbans. Quite a few of them are truck drivers, says William Westfall of Van Buren, Ark. "I'll be honest. They know they're not welcome at truck stops. There's still a lot of animosity toward Islamics." Eddie Dean of Fort Smith, Ark., also has little doubt about his ability to identify Muslims: "You can tell where they're from. You can hear their accents. They're not real clean people."Now that's exactly the type of person I'd like to sniff around my affairs.That kind of prejudice is hard to undo, but it's a shame Beatty's slide show did not mention that in the U.S., it's almost always Sikhs who wear turbans, not Muslims."
Bringing up a new, far-reaching law proposal, having no hearings on it at all for just under 3 months, then getting it passed by senate without a single debate: what's that? democracy? I don't think so.
The target? anybody using P2P sharing systems, not just copyright violators. The name? the PIRATE act. The benficiaries: the Content Cartel.
(defun browse-url-mozilla-firebird (url arg)
(shell-command
(format "mozilla-firebird -remote 'openURL(%s, new-tab)'"
url)))
(setq browse-url-browser-function 'browse-url-mozilla-firebird)
(global-set-key [S-mouse-3] 'browse-url)
and wohee, no more cut-n-mispaste. All hail emacs.
Now where do I find something similar for trn (/me can't stand gnus)...
19. Juni 2004 13:24 Kreidefresser HelpDesk Der Prozess steht auf des Messers Schneide, Da frisst der gute Blepp gleich Kreide. War da was mit Copyright? Das war doch gar nicht bös gemeint! Die GPL ist null und nichtig? Na ja, so ist das nicht ganz richtig! Man hat SCO bestohlen? Da sprach man doch nur in Symbolen! Die freie Welt, sie wird verteidigt? Nein! McBride war nur beleidigt, Als IBM nicht wollte kaufen, Das war natürlich dumm gelaufen. Und jetzt will man sich besinnen, Um neue Kunden zu gewinnen, Doch denk ich, daraus wird nichts werden, Denn Darl sitzt auf den falschen Pferden! Schlussbemerkung: So soll es allen Geiern gehen, Die nach Belieben Recht verdrehen, Die auf fetten Ärschen hocken, Wissen eins nur: abzuzocken.Link zum heise newsticker
His simple quote is the basis of MS's lawsuit, and this stinks to high heaven.
Ah well, I don't buy MS products anyway, and publicity nosedives like that one
will make sure that less and less thinking people do.
Link to Lessig's discussion of the issue
Postulating the idea of Internet Time, we could look at a term for Internet-relevant patents of about 3 realtime-years.(argument translated and paraphrased by me.) This very idea can also be found here.3 years seem to be suitable: not exactly nothing and thus likely good enough to give the inventor time to exploit his leadership, but not enough to block a competitor forever.
Given such a proposal, you wouldn't have to argue that software is a different field of technology where patents do not make sense. The only line of argument to cover is that the rate of development for software and the like is so much faster that a patent term of 20 realtime-years corresponds to over 100 years in other areas.
A real-world analogy: should a car maker really need a license to build a diesel engine today?"
"Der Wertsack ist ein Beutel, der auf Grund seiner besonderen Verwendung im Postbeförderungsdienst nicht Wertbeutel, sondern Wertsack genannt wird, weil sein Inhalt aus mehreren Wertbeuteln besteht, die in dem Wertsack nicht verbeutelt, sondern versackt werden."
"Five days after arguing that the Eolas browser plug-in patent should be invalidated as obvious, Microsoft pocketed a patent of its own for 'Computer programming language pronouns', which covers the use of ellipses, blanks, and ditto marks as substitutes for names in a computer programming language. Perhaps the USPTO was won over by the patent's eloquent conclusion: 'Eliminating names is a substantial benefit as programmers dislike creating names.'"
But I still like Perl most, compared to all the other scripting languages.
"Here's what I'm here to convince you of:
1. That DRM systems don't work
2. That DRM systems are bad for society
3. That DRM systems are bad for business
4. That DRM systems are bad for artists
5. That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT"
Tomorrow, Senator Orrin Hatch (R - UT) will introduce one of the most blatant attempts at copyright maximalization ever attempted - the INDUCE Act.Now this stinks so badly out of every possible orifice that I don't include anything more here. If you want something to puke, look at the discussion at Corante.
Case in favour: yesterday the TV news (SBS, my favourite TV broadcaster here) showed the latest, earthshattering, really important piece of Austrian news: that a boat in the Seegrotte had capsized and a couple of tourists had drowned.
The commentator had a slightly hard time pronouncing "Hinterbrühl", but apart from that this is nothing short of amazing (it also tells you something how much interesting Austrian news items there are).
reading stuff on the palm, with my trusty folding keyboard attached, all that on a comic book on my lap and me lounging in a comfy chair, and life's good - or fair at least.
"And now the weather: Gold Coast 23° with a low of 6°."Winter's here, indeed. And together with the Gold Coasters' preference for glorified shacks^W^Wbungalows the next some weeks are going to be chilly. I've pulled the space heater from the cupboard this evening.
The American Civil Liberties Union disclosed yesterday that it filed a lawsuit three weeks ago challenging the FBI's methods of obtaining many business records, but the group was barred from revealing even the existence of the case until now.Disgusting.The lawsuit was filed April 6 in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, but the case was kept under seal to avoid violating secrecy rules contained in the USA Patriot Act, the ACLU said. The group was allowed to release a redacted version of the lawsuit after weeks of negotiations with the government.
"It is remarkable that a gag provision in the Patriot Act kept the public in the dark about the mere fact that a constitutional challenge had been filed in court," Ann Beeson, the ACLU's associate legal director, said in a statement. "President Bush can talk about extending the life of the Patriot Act, but the ACLU is still gagged from discussing details of our challenge to it."
"The following merchandise found on your website constitutes a list of items that must be removed from your site, ads and keywords in order to continue advertising with Google AdWords:
Friday we wasted sitting on the wrong hill, hoping for the right kind of wind. Just another case of parawaiting, like in the pic below.
In rock climbing you spend most of your time in a very safe situation feeling shit-scared whilst in paragliding you spend most of your time in a very dangerous situation feeling quite safe.And that's so true. We're insane/addicted enough to take to the air in our oversized shopping bags with a couple of strings attached like this:
One of the hangies nicknamed "T-Bone" because of his initials has recently switched to paragliders - which immediately got him rechristened "TeaBag", as that's what the other hangies think of what he is flying now :-)
The weather on Monday wasn't too flash so I slept in, but the addiction got the better of me and I drove up the hill, and It was Good. Two nice arvo ridge soaring flights, both with good face landings at the end.
Other People had more interesting landings, as per the picture below: look for the glider in the middle of the road. Its pilot had misjudged his final, bounced off a car's hood (bumping it) and landed on the road. Another reason why only fools park in this particular spot.
Not all Aussies, though; at least one couple among my friends is split over uggs by gender: he wears them in public, she can't stand them.
Australians have a proper sense of humour and don't take themselves too seriously, so wearing uggs is understandable - they're warm, they do the job. But how the fashion fools would deal with the fact that "uggs" stands for "ugly boots", I wonder.
"Highways" on the other hand, consist of two lanes of bitumen. Often there's a middle line, but not necessarily - and there are some "highways" that have single lane areas as well.
(I love this place. Really. But I'll have to get me a 4WD soon.)
(The story made it on page 2 of Iceland's largest newspaper - but they mixed up their pictures of the minister...by chance?)
...Fourtou mit dem Vorstandsvorsitzenden von Vivendi-Universal verheiratet ist, einem der grössten Nutzniesser dieser Richtlinie. Hier wird ein grosses Demokratie-Defizit offensichtlich, das Assoziationen an einen Bananen-Staat weckt.", so Markus Beckedahl für das Netzwerk Neue Medien.Aber jetzt wander' ich aus! *manisches gelächter*
Now the federal supreme court overturned that decision. This epithet is in fact against human dignity and racist. So far, so good (FSVO good).
However that court ruling does not have any effect for the police bastard
in question. Brilliant. Austria shows the world again how banana republics
work.
Link to the newspaper article
Hold it. On reading a couple of sample pages I retract the last statement: nothing notable has changed in the last 30 years. Politicians are still all crooks. Bickering, idiocy and greed still rule.
Anyway, it was interesting to look
at my birthday's news.
Link to the archive
We are glad to announce that, effective today, every single work by Adorno and Benjamin that you claim as your "intellectual property" has become part of the very public domain that had granted you these copyrights in the first place. Of course they will not be available instantly, and of course we will not publish them ourselves - but you can take our word that they will be out, in countless locations and formats, and that not even a legion of lawyers will manage to get them back. Maybe it helps if you think of your "intellectual property" as a genie, and of your foundation as a bottling business.I like that. Time to fire up GNUnet.
Link to textz.com
And in the real world those bloody tools aren't even as cheap as Crazy Clark stuff, they require way too much effort.
So rant away like those at XMLsucks.org, go back to XML 2.0alpha? Maybe YAML is the answer to the questions XPath, XPointer, XSLT, XQuery, XUpdate and all the other lousy languages don't answer properly?
I liked his Letter to George W. Bush on the Eve of War.
Why this blog-like site, then? because I want to share things I develop/experience, and because I'm trying to keep my Austrian relatives and friends somewhat informed of my whereabouts - but not to the extent of "What did I eat yesterday"...
"The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself. By manually typing the URL in the address bar, you can verify the information that Internet Explorer uses to access the destination Web site. To do so, type the URL in the Address bar, and then press ENTER."No wonder their software behaves as if written by braindamaged lemurs on crack: it is.
If an idea cannot survive the Darwinian fight for existance, it should either feed its pursuer or become fertilizer for new growth.Ah, what an idyllic environment to long for...
And yet, in the corporate culture of impalas, we protect the herd.
Ignore the apostrophe thinko (in best Bob the Angry Flower tradition) and read this very interesting article on (the lack of) corporate culture today.
"Age is not a determining factor in detention. We detain enemy combatants who engaged in armed conflict against our forces or provided support to those fighting against us."Assholes.
"The reason [SCO supporters are] silent is because if they stick their head up, they tend to get shot by a bunch of Linux people."
They must have good drugs at SCO.
Link to SCO's newest FUD
Link to SCO quotes at WLTSIM
Link to the SCO mug
(a tip: forget common sense. The report? What report? Oh, that report. Well, that report is the work of defaitists, communists and open sourcers. We can't trust them, because of securrrity and terrror <badum-tish>)
Link to abusabletech
IKEA is a fully immersive, 3D environmental adventure that allows you to role-play the character of someone who gives a shit about home furnishings. In traversing IKEA, you will experience a meticulously detailed alternate reality filled with garish colors, clear-lacquered birch veneer, and a host of NON-PLAYER CHARACTERS (NPCs) with the glazed looks of the recently anesthetized.Truly Lovely.
Am Anfang war das UML-Diagramm wüst und leer. Da sprach der Consultant: "Es werde ein UseCase!" - und es ward ein UseCase und er sah das es gut war. Und er trennte die Akteure von den UseCases und es war das Anforderungsdiagramm. Dieses waren die ersten 2 Millionen Lewonzen. -- Boernout Schultz, 29.08.03paßt sehr gut zum Fachbegriffe der Informatik lexikon.
For further reading I recommend the BOFH stories and TCP Towers. Of course bofh.* and asr are important media, too.
One definitely should care for one's admin properly, or you'll discover the truth the hard way:
Meddle not in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle and quick to LART.Therefore: RTFM!
If you receive email from any of my addresses without signature you
should doubt its authenticity!
(more...)
So in Austria it's legal again to deny someone entry explicitely
because of his/her race. Great, I feel like I'm in the 1930s.
Newspaper Link (german)
All very useful if you're a compulsive bit-twiddler and control freak (like me).
Brian Raiter's site
Linuxassembly's guide
Commission Spokesman Jonathan Todd has admitted that Commissioner Frits Bolkestein has concealed important details on the draft agreement reached with the USA on the transfer of Passenger Name Record Data (PNR) to the U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection when reporting to two Committees of the European Parliament four weeks ago.
...
"It is now clear that the Commission has agreed to the abuse of EU citizen's personal data to test a surveillance system that in its very nature is against the principles of EU data protection legislation."
The federal government is planning to overhaul its employee drug testing program to include scrutiny of workers' hair, saliva and sweat, a shift that could spur more businesses to revise screening for millions of their own workers.
...
All federal workers are eligible to be tested.
After years and years of longing I've finally found the time to do a paragliding course in the beginning of 2002. It took me about four weeks (one full week and some weekends) to achieve the first licence for it. Since then I've spent most of the flyable weekends (which means almost all) on the hills around here, either flying, parawaiting or lugging the pack up the hills again.
Currently I'm also running the net presence of the local club, the Canungra Hang Gliding Club (which despite its name also caters to paraglider pilots).
So far I'm still alive and I'm really enjoying this challenging sport.
Without too much fuss I god rid of some of my stuff (motorbike, flat etc.)
and on August 10 2001 I reached downunder - for the first time: I hadn't
been to Australia before, so it was a bit like navigating uncharted waters.
(more...)
I won't talk about Dilbert and userfriendly, they are must-sees anyway..
This is a very good compilation of computer jokes. There's the list of toaster makers^W^Wcomputer companies and the famous methods of how to shoot yourself in the foot, but see also other Unix methods. Internet...On A Stick is cool! Attrition has a nice picture gallery.
The paper and presentation slides are avaliable here.
It was very well received, and I'll give some follow-up presentations at this year's Tasmanian Summer IT Conference as well as the SAGE-VIC IT Symposion
I'm supporting the project by packaging and maintaining various stuff, most notably kuvert my mail privacy tool.
This list shows the packages I'm currently maintaining and a bit of technical status for each of them.
The languages of my choice are
No real hacker should ever miss the Obfuscated C Contest nor its Perl Counterpart, these are truly awful. Wish I could write gems like those.
Participating or stealing^Wborrowing code from the entries is worth its time for sure, because you'd improve your job security vastly by emanating that weird code :-)
I'm firmly in favour of open source software, whatever exactly you may call it. The dark side would like to condition everybody with propaganda like this, but it is not going to work:
Tom Christiansen said:
Emacs is a nice operating system, but I prefer UNIX.Nevertheless emacs is not my login shell.
R$1<@$2>$3 $#error $@ USAGE $: "aaaaaaaaaaah"Well, I am. Yes, very familiar. And I still like sendmail. Enough said.
There's a faint possibility that you might want to see what anti-spam hacks I've added to version 8.8.8+. Yes, I know that this is almost paleolithic in comparision to today's versions. Still it was a nice setup then. The new stuff is good for all of us, but there goes my effort :-).
Recently I've played with milter, the sendmail on-the-fly filter system - and I still like the beast (must be congenital, then).
Check out userfriendly's daemon series: day one, day two, day three, day four, day five and (IMHO the best) day six.
