Froosh. Stuff.

Like the rest of the world, I was shocked by the bombings in London. I felt this a lot more personally this time as it’s the first time I have had friends or family in close proximity to the attacks.

My brother and his wife are now living in the central London area, but thanks to Google Mail I was able to re-assure my parents (and myself) that they were OK.

I’ve been listening to a variety of ‘casts, many of which have excellent commentary on the bombings and implications for the world at large. I’m not going to discuss them. The one that seemed really hit me with completely appropriate timing was in IT Conversations/Tech Nation: Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with William Vollmann, philosopher and author of no less than seven works, all on the subject of violence.

10:50-11:19
“Violence is justified and good when it limits or prevents greater violence. Violence is justifiable I think when it is proportionate and discriminatory. … You are choosing to direct your violence toward people who are causing the violent problem as opposed to non-combatants.”

11:39-11:45
“Violence which is simply random or passionate can’t be justified …”

I could probably go ahead and quote the rest of the interview as well – it’s just so relevant to the world today. First chance I get, I will be reading William’s book (probably the abridged to start with ).

Tie this up with the London Mayor’s reaction to the bombings: “This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful. It was not aimed at Presidents or Prime Ministers. It was aimed at ordinary, working-class Londoners, black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindu and Jew, young and old. It was an indiscriminate attempt to slaughter, irrespective of any considerations for age, for class, for religion, or whatever.”

One of my favourite authors, Sherri Tepper, uses as a device in one of her books (The Fresco) a ban against using terms like “claimed responsibily for”. Instead, the perpetrators should be forced to use truthful statements: “was responsible for the cowardly acts”, etc

We can only hope.

There are so many points of view both for and against open source software, and I’m definitely in the ‘for’ camp. I could spout all the usual party lines regarding the ability to check code for security flaws, free speech vs. free beer, etc, but why do I like open source software? (Incidentally, I haven’t noticed hackers and analysts having much trouble scrutinising closed source code for security flaws. e.g. Windows )

I love the fact that I can solve my own problems, and then submit the fixes back to the developers … and actually have them pay attention! And I don’t mean this in just a theoretical sense; this is something I actually do.

In my professional career as an “I.T. Systems Engineer” I have to diagnose faults with an amazing variety of big budget, closed source software. Once I have determined the solution (and occaisionally actually created patches or other code fixes), I find that the vendor has absolutely no interest in actually fixing the product and completely ignores any suggestions or solutions. (The conspiracy theorist in me says it’s because they make so much more money out of their premium support services)

No so with the open source projects I have participated in. For starters, it’s so much easier to diagnose issues when you can see the actual code, tinker with its innards, re-compile, etc. Once you have a solution, it’s normally a very simple task to submit changes, patches, documentation, and fault reproduction procedures back to the developers. Who more often than not are completely under-paid – if they are paid at all! The best bit comes next … the developers take your patches, integrate them into the product …and … say “Thank you”

This is sooo different from my daily professional grind. It’s so fulfilling I have to gush The best response I get from a vendor in my professional life is to be ignored. The worst was when I actually got accused of revealing trade secrets … serves me right for trying to do good

I’m probably spoilt a little by working with the WordPress folks: they are really on the ball, and patches are often vetted, approved and applied within minutes! Unfortunately the only changeset that I have attibution on is one for a typo..

Hmm this post is a little dis-jointed, mostly due to it being written in several quick sessions over the last few days.

I’ve been re-discovering the joys and delights of Lego for a while now, thanks (mostly) to my son and his natural inclination towards creative and imaginitive play.

I don’t think people really give Lego enough credit for stimulating and encouraging children. Sure, everyone recognises the link with engineering but often don’t consider the versatility and potential of the humble brick.

Solo play includes the obvious tower/bridge/fortress options to build the tallest/longest/stongest construction and learning the associated science and engineering concepts, but why stop there? I think Lego could be used in just about any area of childhood (and adult) development.

In particular I think Lego is invaluable in learning co-operative play (collaboration to us big kids). Certainly collaboration can be learned with other toys or even without any props (story telling springs to mind) – Lego just makes such a potent combination, enabling multiple learning streams at once. Construction, sharing of parts, consistency of design, inter-operability of created objects, relevance to themes or story-lines, and timeliness of completion are all necessary skills in a successful co-operative play session. And don’t limit your thinking here to purely mechanical aspects (does my person fit the scale of the cash register my neighbour built?), but asthetics as well (do our colour schemes work together? am I using too many soft shapes vs. my neighbour’s angular objects?).

Problem solving skills and lateral thinking are big by-products of extended Lego play – you never have exactly the right bricks you need to create a non-catalogue object. I often wish some of my work associates had spent more time learning the habits of lateral thinking and problem solving as a child, because they appear to be incapable of learning them as an adult.

Lego can also save you money! Why bother buying all the latest “fad” toys when all you need is some Lego and a creative mind to have any toy you want (erm, or your children want – I guess ). And your grown children can make a living from their Lego habit. It can even help us average joes too: interviewing methods incorporating Lego and all the collaborative features I’ve just mentioned are catching on, so your Lego skills may be the deciding point in your favour for your next job.

So, what prompted this explosion of Lego favour? As a sometime follower of the LEGOFan site, in excited by their new BrickJournal. The first issue is fabulous … and frustrating – I don’t want to wait for the next issue! I want it now, now, now, NOW!

(BrickJournal link via BoingBoing)

SecurityFocus has an interview with Marcus Ranum which details many reasons why network and computer security has not improved significantly in many years.

The most appropriate line for me is at the end: “Blame the IT managers who overrule their security practitioners’ advice and put their systems at risk in the interest of convenience.”

I’ve been tearing my hair out with frustration, and ranting (unfairly) at my neighbours and colleagues about this: Why should anyone need to be an administrator of a machine to run an application or game – especially the games?!

I recently spent some time rebuilding my neighbour’s PC and locking it down so that SpyWare, Tojans, Viruses, etc would virtually be a thing of the past for them … Until their 7 year old daughter wanted to play the latest Barbie game. A game that included the “Designed for Windows XP” logo on the box. Sure, it had to be installed as an administrator and I can accept that. But why on earth would you require the 7 y.o. to be an admin just to play a Barbie game???

A quick check with FileMon and RegMon (from SysInternals) showed that write access was required to the /Program Files/Mattel/blah/blah/blah directories. Since XP Home doesn’t allow GUI editing of ACLs unless you boot into safe mode, a quick refresher course in ‘cacls.exe’ was required – during which I stumbled across Microsoft’s updated XCacls.vbs which handles permissions inheritance correctly for the first time. After allowing “Users” modify access to the application folder, the game ran perfectly as a non-privileged user. Modify access to the executable directory is obviously less than perfect, but an acceptable compromise without re-writing the game to use a separate “Save” location.

Which brings me to my point – Windows 2000 has been out for 5 years; Windows XP for 4 years. Why is software still being written this way? It would be SO easy for them to place all the data that needs to be modified (save games, logins, profiles, etc) in a separate location and modify the security of that location during install (worst case scenario: run cacls.exe with the appropriate options).

To make matters worse, even Microsoft does this wrong …

And don’t you Mac OS nuts think you get to skite – Every Mac game we’ve bought for Sebastian has exactly the same problem! I was liking Mac OS so much until that. If I have to put up with crap coding, it might as well be on a platform I’m familiar with…

Thanks to Geek Rant for reminding me that I needed to vent about this.

What is the life progression of a blogger? I think it’s too soon to be really sure, but this is a very good starting point: Lifestyle of Bloggers

I can’t quite fit myself into the later steps, but 1 through 5 seem close enough to be true…

Now that I’ve had my first ‘retirement’, it must be time to ‘get serious’

Happy blogging people

(via PhotoMatt)

Ok, so probably not 100% co-incidence, but certainly more than I’d intended …

There have been a few occaisions where I have chosen not to blog because my primary motivation has been guilt, but mainly I’ve just been busy and feeling too weary to bother about blogging.

Quick update: Everyone is fine, healthy and happy.

Recent acheivements: Convincing Kim’s Grandmother (“Nanny”) to buy a Mac Mini for her foray into modern PC ownership. So, maybe it was motivated by me wanting quick access to one, but mainly so I wouldn’t have to support the usual “My PC has been attacked by viruses/trojans/etc” issues that I get from the rest of my “client base”.

In the near furture: A rant on the downfall of society.

For the nearly 10 regular visitors each month: Updates will be more forth-coming…

… your blog owns you!

Discussions with various other bloggers has revealed a common theme – when we have not blogged for a while, we feel guilt, a pressure to blog – about anything at all if necessary. I’ve certainly done it before. We are letting our blogs own us, control us. It’s time to take back the blogs!

I find that many people seem to end up as “Blog Lemmings” (as opposed to Bog Lemmings [2] [3] [4]) – that is, they blog about the same topics, link to the same sources, and generally have the same paraphrased content that all the other lemmings do. (Yes, I’m also guilty of this. )

And like the mythological cliff-diving lemmings it’s blog-suicide for many, but a rare few may make it across the ocean and into new lands. I hope I may be one of the lucky few one day.

Ok, so maybe I’ve stretched this too far … at least I don’t feel guilty about not making a recent blog entry!

I’ve been vaguely following the Rance blog mythology for a short while, but for some reason I’ve become addicted. And I’ve previously been sceptical of friends, colleagues, and other bloggers for doing just the same … bloody hypocrital bastard!

http://captainhoof.tripod.com/blog/

http://www.calicocat.com/2004/06/rance-why-does-he-blog.html

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/rance/

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/rance_second_thoughts/

http://blubberybastard.tripod.com/blog/

http://gusopenshaw.mindsay.com/

I’m liking the Museum of Hoaxes theory about Keith Thomson after today’s Whale-Killing Journal entry … but then again, that’s probably the desired effect (The April 1st publishing date makes it rather suspect I think).

From Amazon.com

About the Author
Keith Thomson wrote and directed the short film, Cupidity, which won the Napor Award. He has since written feature films for Tri-Star, Paramount and Disney. This is his first novel. He lives in Palo Alto, California.

Update: For those interested in starting from the beginning: http://captainhoof.tripod.com/blog/index.blog?from=20031229

I’ve see far too many rewrites of Christmas carols/hymns/poems/stories/etc to find many of them even remotely entertaining. I think this is because they usually try to fit too many geek references into a barely humourous framework – and fail.

I did find William Gibson’s altered “The Night Before Christmas” tale entertaining: Cyber Claus

Extremely good value for the price: free!

If you’re looking for a late Christmas present, leave a comment with your e-mail address (It won’t be shown on the site) for a GMail Invite. I only have a few, so first come, first served.

Two quick items on the evening before Christmas – and they’re not even Christmas related!

# We were slightly disturbed to discover that Sebastian has been going “Magpie” and stuffing stuff under his bed to hide it from us. Items include hats, water bottles, DVDs, unwashed clothes, clean clothes, scrubbing brushes, and finally, a small section of rope.
# This is an inspiring story – what can two guys achieve by continuing to work on a programming project well after they have been fired. I’m not planning to get fired anytime soon, and yet their experience can probably be applied to most workplaces and paid employees.

Have a Merry Christmas if that’s your thing, or at least a government endorsed break from work!

I have decided to adopt the following Code of Ethics (taken from Desirable Roasted Coffee via Scoble):

To write, publish, and be read is a privilege and responsibility. Being mindful of that privilege and responsibility:

# I shall not barter my words or my silence.
# I shall write and advocate openly and honestly.
# I shall strive for accuracy, avoiding errors and correcting them immediately when discovered.
# I shall strive for balance; even in advocacy, I shall not distort or suppress obviously relevant facts to bolster my argument.
# I shall welcome and invite rebuttal, debate and discussion through comments, email, and trackbacks.
# I shall disclose my sources fully, through credits, links and trackbacks, unless the source, with good grounds, has requested anonymity; moreover, I shall trackback where relevant and possible.
# I shall respect copyright; my own words will be licensed with a Creative Commons license.
# I shall let the record stand; I shall not delete posts, or parts of them, unless not doing so would violate one of the foregoing principles, and shall give notice that I have done so. If I modify a post, it shall be by adding to it; and I shall mark these additions clearly.
# I shall reveal material conflicts-of-interest.
# I shall, as a citizen of Australia, remain mindful of my duty to truth, the citizens of the world, and the laws of Australia.

I have modified #10 from it’s original as it was not particularly relevent. I believe my variant to be in the same spirit however.
(Original text reads: 10. I shall, as a member of IABC, a trained reporter, a resident of the European Union, and a citizen of the United States of America, remain mindful of the IABC Code of Ethics, the Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists, and the laws of the European Union and the United States.)

If someone claiming to be a geek is completely unaware of one of the greatest Sci-Fi writers of his time, can he truly be a geek?

Robert Scoble calls himself a geek, but has just outed himself in the worst possible way: He did not know who Greg Bear is!

I’m still unsure how that influences my view of Robert – ultimately, probably not that much at all…

Hopefully he has heard of some of my other favourite greats, otherwise I might have to re-write this post (And my opinion):

* E. E. “Doc” Smith
* Isaac Asimov
* Larry Niven
* Robert A. Heinlein
* L. Ron Hubbard
* Poul Anderson
* Orson Scott Card
* Arthur C. Clarke

… to name a few.

And these guys don’t quite fit into the previous class, but they’re close!

* William Gibson
* Stephen Baxter

It’s probably nothing new to anyone interested in easily securing wireless networks, but I thought it was hilarious:

Timers on the power cords.

I have no idea if any other security measures in place, but surely turning the AP off on a schedule guarantees it cannot be abused!

Maintenance at daylight savings change-overs would probably be a pain though … one timer per AP, one AP per room, and over 100 rooms. Each timer had to be changed manually with little pegs in holes. Glad I’m not running that network…

I drafted this from a borrowed Pocket PC whilst sitting in front of Andrew Denton – one of my favourite Australian comedians/interviewers as he was interviewed by … Andrew Denton (via Jon Casimir). Jon is the producer of Andrew’s ABV TV series Enough Rope and editor of Andrew’s books “Enough Rope” and “Enough Rope 2” The books are essentially transcripts from the TV series, with further commentary/tidbits/etc.

Jon asked Andrew some of the same questions that Andrew has asked various interviewees during the series, making it essentially Andrew interviewing Andrew. Overall it was an entertaining event with several interesting insights into Andrew’s mind and purpose.

One (of the many) insights that surprised the crowd was Andrew’s revelation that he does not believe in God, any God, and is vehemently opposed to organised religion of any kind. He see’s it as preying on humanity’s fear of death and the desire for continuation. Far too many evil things have been done in the name of “religion” – and not just in the past; so may arms of fundamentalist religions are committing just as many atrocities today as they have in history.

Andrew instead chooses to believe that he is on the earth for one lifetime only, and after that … nothing. This then presents a moral problem: Why be a “good” human is the face of this disbelief? My interpretation of Andrew’s comments is this: To fight entropy. Entropy is inclination of all systems to degrade, decompose into disorder. If we as humans are not creating, changing, growing, fighting against that tendancy to disorder – why do we even bother to live? If we choose to live, we must choose to be a “good” human.

Another interesting viewpoint is Andrew’s apparent lack of concern at the state of world affairs at present. It’s not that he doesn’t care; rather it’s that there is nothing he can do about the effects it will have on him and his family. He will still do the best he can to be a good human and make an effort to persuade others to be/become good humans, but in the end there is no point worrying about it now. You can go about enjoying your life knowing that you are doing what you can to improve the situation. Essentially we return to one of my favourite “direction thoughts” – If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.

Final Note 1: Neither my main page or /~robin/ render very well on the Pocket PC – I may try and cook up a style-sheet for small-screen devices, although there is probably already one out there.

Final Note 2: Taking Kim (or myself for that matter) to a good book-store is a very dangerous exercise. We are more likely to impulse buy in a good book-store than in any other place. Last night for example: we spent over $200 on books without planning a single purchase. I can’t recall when we last impulse-spent that much (Even the Playstation purchases a while back were only $170-ish).

Final Note 3: Views expressed here are mine and not necessarily that of anyone else. If they happen to co-incide with the views of anyone else (living or dead), I am very happy for them. If you don’t like the views expressed here, you don’t have to read them ever again – you visited me, I’m not ramming them down anyone’s throat.

Final Final Note: The nights most quotable quote from Andrew: “I only ever toy with ideas, I never see them through to completion”

Ok, so I have inserted some @font-face elements into my CSS, and referenced the fonts for the header style.
The HTML Validator and CSS Validator return PASS results.
IE6sp1 on WinXP SP2 even appears to attempt a download of the font files.

But it doesn’t work…

Mozilla Firefox doesn’t show the fonts. IE doesn’t show the fonts. If I install the fonts locally, they display just fine.

Is there any CSS2 compliant browser out there that will actually download and use the fonts??

I resign myself to frustration.

Maybe this { style: phreak; } can help me…

The CSS Zen Garden is a fabulous collection of CSS style-sheets displaying a wide range of visually tasty designs.

It has actually discouraged me from attempting some CSS stylings of my own. Partly because I know nothing I do will come close (I’m a hard-core tech … “art” is in engineering excellence ). Mainly, I am disappointed in the methods used to achieve the tasty designs – nearly everything I’ve seen is an image pasted over or under the content of the page.

I’ll pick on one, chosen nearly at random as an example: #104 “Invitation“. I think the font used for the main headings (h3′s) is quite nice, so I go digging in the CSS to see what font was actually used. Bad luck, it’s not a font, it’s just an image hacked into position.

CSS supports font specification and font downloading, but I have not been able to make it work and I am yet to see an example of it in use. I had great hopes for the CSS Zen Garden and was disappointed…

[I now can't seem to find where in the W3C CSS spec where it describes font downloading - Perhaps I'm losing it. If it doesn't exist, that would explain why no one uses it! ]

[Update: Found it - it's in CSS2: @font-face { src: url(...);} I guess I can forgive the Garden contributors given the restriction to mainly CSS1 usage ]

I’ve been using Firefox for a while, and am finding things almost daily that I love about it. Todays major feature is cross-platform usability … Using Firefox on Linux is identical to the Windows version I use everyday. Keyboard shortcuts, extensions (Sage & Adblock mainly), tabbed browsing options, Live Bookmarks, preferences – everything works the same and is in the same place. This might sound silly to some, but after try to remotely provide assistance to staff attempting to use Internet Explorer on a Mac when only knowing what Internet Explorer on a Windows box – I couldn’t even guide them through basic operations, let alone working out where to set a proxy server.

Hopping in a taxi the other morning, I saw one of these – an LCD in the back of the front passenger headrest (American readers don’t be confused – we drive on the left side of the road remember ) providing ‘live’ advertising. I was too distracted by the surreal downpour occurring outside the cab to really play with it much, but it was interesting to see and probably provides ample excuse to not talk to the driver – or plenty to talk about if so inclined.

Much as I want to, I just don’t have the mental capacity to continue my rant about domestic water usage vs industrial/commercial/agricultural usage. Ok, well maybe just a little bit … Our latest water bill included a note to inform us of the change to a sliding scale for water usage charges – the more you use, the more it costs. The aim is to encourage us to use less water. It’s a little galling to receive so soon after reading the earlier article.

I’ve thought about Australia’s non-household water usage vaguely before, but didn’t bother researching it to find indicative numbers. A colleague pointed this article out to me – I was gob-smacked: Guardian Unlimited | World dispatch | Plunder down under.

For those who couldn’t be bothered to read it, roughly 33% of our nation’s supply of fresh water is used for just 3 crops: Rice, Sugar, and Cotton.

[more rant to be included later, re: ag water, industry water, GE crops,]

[sounds like a good line for a song ]

It’s nothing new, not for these ‘modern’ times, for the IT industry, for single income families, or for anyone really – but I’ve been working too hard & too long. Lack of sleep, disturbed sleep, short temper, impatience, etc.

My short-term memory is offline, and I appear to have significant corruption of my medium-term memory. Long term memory passes CRC checks; restore times are sluggish though. Processes regularly segfault and core dump, my kernel is leaking resources, and I’ve run out of metaphors.

I … have no idea what I was going to write.

Way past time for bed then. G’Night