Found this hilarious picture on the blog of an aussie geek.

With the upcoming kitchen replacement I've had to re-evaluate a lot of todos and got a bit of a push to shorten that list.
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Received this email a few days ago:
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This counterscript (german only) is a pretty fun step-by-step guide for annoying telemarketers.

...is what I've had this weekend.
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Today I left work early and headed up to the hills, in hope of getting some flying. The weather was beautiful, but nil clouds.
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That's my current flying tally after 2.5 years.
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I like my house. It's old (for Gold Coast bungalow standards, at 17 years), but in fair shape and close enough to work for me to walk there in just 11 minutes door-to-office. With the car the trip takes about 9 minutes because of the huge detour involved, so walking is really a good option.

These are pics of the view from just outside my garage to the west, and the workplace from the park outside the complex (I had a panorama of that view, too, but chucked it as being too lousy. Will do again.)

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!

The third wasn't anywhere near a truss, and hung from a big hook which I couldn't use for the new ones anyway.

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. :-)

The next projects: replacing the kitchen, new antenna on the roof, a whirlybird roof ventilator, and neatify some cabling. Ah yes, and finally get a safety switch installed (which unfortunately means I'll have to replace the switchbox as the dumbasses installed a tiny one with not a single slot left...grrr.)

Item 1:

"Diebold Global Election Management System (GEMS) Backdoor Account Allows Authenticated Users to Modify Votes 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."

Cool 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!
Link to the Diebold story at BlackBoxVoting, Link to Lessig's blog

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.
...
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."

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.
Link to the reuters article

(but likely just this time only.) The french consumer protection agency DGCCRF has sued EMI France and the music shop Fnac because their music CDs weren't CDs anymore (because of anti-copying measures that break the Red Book standard).

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.

Cryptome is great; unvarnished, nasty, uncompromising. I love it. They've got an RSS feed, too.

"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. 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."

Great job!
Link to that story

As lots of others have noted already, EFF has won the Grokster case in the Court of Appeals.

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.

A family of collisions in MD5 has been found, and the "vultures are circling" (as Ed Felten put it) quite low above SHA-1. Bugger. Ah well, evolution at work I guess.
Link to Ed Felten's article

The US of A is really a lousy place to be. This is a quote from the Civil Rights Act (ha!) of 1964 which spells out how discrimination is bad:

"DISCRIMINATION BECAUSE OF RACE, COLOR, RELIGION, SEX, OR NATIONAL ORIGIN SEC. 703. (a) It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer
...
(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."

So if you're a communist, you're unprotected rightless discriminable scum. Brilliant.

Greedy bastards at work, is all. How I hate all that crap.

"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."

Link to the long and disgusting story

I just discovered a very interesting paper by Eben Moglen (of EFF fame) about software, property and anarchism. Not exactly new (1999) but really nice. Let's hope he's right.

Link to the paper

The shrub:

"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).

...to be here in Australia, and watching interesting foreign movies in the original language. Yesterday SBS played Levottomat, a fun Finnish film - in Finnish, of course.

Tonight they'll run Taxi, in French of course. Oz is really a multi-cultural country, and I love it for that trait.

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As an excuse I claim that the difference is minuscule at check 0.03125mm... damn metal threaded screws just don't DWIM. It took me two extra trips to the hardware store to learn this crucial fact.
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...but our Prime garden gnome is happy
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Apparently there are some voices of sanity within the EU commission:

"...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...
Link to the article

A very interesting article (where's the "rant", though?) on how and why ebooks work pretty well for authors (and their publishers, even though only a few realise this so far).
Link to the article

...says a recent German court judgement, wherein the netfilter project was awarded EUR 100k because Sitecom was using iptables technology in commercial products without abiding by the gpl rules.
Link to the heise article

Well, film @ 11. An interesting paper, however, and from an interesting source, too.
Link to the paper
Link to a short excerpt

"Here's the scenario we must be all be prepared for: 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."

A disturbing view of the upcoming US election by Wayne Madsen. Do you doubt it? I wouldn't.
Link to the article at cryptome

150 to 6 with 10 abstentions is the tally of the UN world court vote regarding the Israeli barrier. And, of course, the Aussie politicians followed the US lead closely enough to taste yesterday's lunch.

"We believe that taking this matter of the security barrier to the International Court of Justice was the wrong decision," Mr Downer said. "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."

Argh, this world sucks so badly it's not funny. If those despair.com posters weren't so pricey...
Link to the Sydney Morning Herald article
Link to the Reuters article

On the bright side:

..[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.
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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.
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It is not claimed that [he] ... made any money from the alleged piracy.
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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.

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.

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

Some tales of current {soft,hard}ware woes.

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. The structure was commented by the original author with: /* Ugly, ugly fucker. */"

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.

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.