Or is it just that Usenet is dying anyway and that there is more revenue in spamming myspace wankers? Dunno, but the less idiots on Usenet, the better for the rest of us.
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.
If you've got a good answer to that, let me know.
Mine currently is a little bit weird, being: "life? not very much. less likelihood of major injuries: quite a bit"
click here for the rest of the story...
Just found this guy via Boingboing: This one I like a lot. He also has a nastier side. Enjoy.
Greg Egan's SF scenarios are about as complex and mind-boggling as anything Stephen Hawking would come up with. His stuff earns the Capital S in SF.
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...
Some British researchers have found out how to defeat (some of) the Chinese Internet-censoring infrastructure: The keyword blocking system doesn't block packets. Instead it sends RST packets. Which you needn't heed. Nice.
"Think of it as the Harry Potter approach to the Great Firewall - just shut your eyes and walk onto Platform 9 3/4."
I'm no fan of EczemaScript but the recent Westpac/Virgin mess convinced me that scripting in the browser is not necessarily bad - as long as I control what runs where and when (hence I use NoScript and deny all scripts everywhere except where I know the code).
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.
Sometimes I need time off the computer stuff and deal with tangibles.
Playing around with house-related things serves very well here, and most of
the time iff I get started on a project, it ends up between fine
and perfect.
click here for the rest of the story...
Japanese crows fight dirty: in Tokyo they're taking down (pole-strung) fiber cables because the stuff apparently makes good nesting material. Result: loads of people without Internet access.
I rebuilt my backup-and-music box recently, because the case was ugly and because I needed to fit another disk for online backup.
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).
The front with the lcd got a painted fascia (balsa) and the IR sensor was mounted internally this time.
After a shitload of further surgery on the cases and innards I ended up with this pleasant look.
But you can't see the rear in that photo which is good. None of my small ATX power supplies would fit without totally rebuilding the thing (not-so-perfect an idea as I'd basically have to strip all insulation off, then resolder half the high and low voltage connections and cram all the resulting mess into the franken-case), so I started looking at DC-DC PSUs. Like this one. Which I did eventually buy, thinking "the 90W/145W peak PSU I have used so far, so this 200W thing should do nicely". Cost me about us$100 (with a 9A AC-DC external brick and shipping).
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
It does get a bit cold at nights now (+5°C last few days on the coast, with frost inlands) but the days are still nice at up to 22°C and, predominantly, sunny. That's the kind of winter I like nowadays.
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.
I've also got two short movie clips (taken with the digital camera, so they suck) of Rob at Killarney two weeks ago and one of Phil launching at Beechmont today.
Propaganda idiots at work: Dear Captain Copyright, it is with great pleasure that I hereby violate your absolutely moronic IP disclaimer, which shows that you have no clue whatsoever about technology or anything else for that matter.
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".
As of 28.5., I'm the 3547th most paranoid geek on the planet.
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
This weekend was one of those DNF ones, with loads of annoyance thrown in.
click here for the rest of the story...
This fellow seems to have been pretty close to Taking Drastic Measures.
The disadventure hits it spot on. sigh
From worth1000.com comes this contest entry titled "an early art project by young MC Escher".
You want plussed addresses, as in 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!
I've been planning to buy a small dishwasher for my kitchen for some time.
Here in Australia most washing mashines
come with hot and cold connections to use the
main house heater which is more efficient than lots of small
heaters everywhere. Makes sense.
click here for the rest of the story...
...you see an ad on your Coke bottle that says "5 HUGE GIGS"
and you think nah, 5 gigs is nothing special today
but I remember when it was not just huge but UNIMAGINABLE
only
to blink and realize that they were talking about music...
Last Sunday (12.3. - the 19th still counts as this Sunday) I was
pretty lucky and very close to ending up in the hospital or worse.
The dangerous phases of any flying are the beginning and the end, because
if there's trouble you've got little to no time to deal with it. Botched launches
and landings are what kills you, with the likelihood
of terminal problems flying high a lot lower (e.g. thunderstorms,
freezing, oxygen-deprivation).
click here for the rest of the story...
The iptables recent match module is pretty cool; things like keeping the sodding ssh brute force guessers at bay are trivial: accept only X new connections to the ssh port within a minute, if not coming from a trusted known network. Two iptables-lines.
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:
click here for the rest of the story...
These guys have no clue, and
I hope Phil Zimmermann is not involved anymore.
click here for the rest of the story...
Somehow the current copyright wars remind me quite a bit of the European dark middle ages, where the Roman-Catholic inquisition tried to weed out the "heretics" - many of which had only tried to keep the church out of secular politics:
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.
The Australian Copyright Agency (an extortionist gang with official backing who fleeces schools for "photocopying fees") now claims to own the web. All of the web. And they want some MONEY!
Eh? Now what copyright do they have to my ramblings, for example?
Link to the story
The expletive (in Austrian German) applies to the Linksys people,
who managed to castrate the WAP11 access point in its version 2.8 but good:
click here for the rest of the story...
Some time ago I mentioned a big mess
in debian's sudo regarding the environment cleanup.
The mess is even worse: run 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.
Goddam, it feels like the Endless September all over again: hordes of clueless, reckless, dumb twits invade a world. Again, the fools themselves are not the guiltiest party but rather the provider of the sucky service (who didn't bash them with the netiquette first) should rot in hell.
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;
$seen{$1}||=1 && print qq|<a href="$1">|.++$i.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.)
click here for the rest of the story...
There are people who just don't deserve to be alive. Responding to spammers is stupid, but dragging thousands of other recipients into it makes it a capital offense. A recent email to the debian-security list supports my assertion:
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)
Fat and skin: $0.5/kg (let's make some soap, shall we?)
Eyes: $10/pair (please gouge them out with a clean teaspoon only and pack
them in dry ice straight away before couriering them over.)"
This is from the Houston police chief, who wants surveillance cameras in apartment blocks and private homes:
"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.
