Bandmoreagain

PayPal idiocy

2011-02-22T11:17:00.003Z

This is unbelievably stupid of Paypal. I just got this email from them:


vinyl tap records would like you to use PayPal - the safer, easier way to pay and get paid online.
To send vinyl tap records your payment and see the details of this invoice, copy and paste this link into your web browser:

https://www.paypal.com/uk/cmd=_prq&id=...

So much for "never click a URL in email". Even worse, if you log in separately, the request is not visible anywhere. Morons.

NatWest phishing service

2011-02-18T02:36:00.002Z

I got some NatWest phishing spam the other day and was amused to notice this:


<title>NatWest - Security Information</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://www.natwest.com/microsites/global/phishing_demo/includes/css/generic.css" media="all" />
...
<a href="http://www.natwest.com/"><img src="http://www.natwest.com/microsites/global/phishing_demo/images/h_logo.gif" alt="NatWest - Load home page" /></a>

Enterprising of them to actually uses NatWest's explanation of phishing to ... phish.

Name and shame time

2011-02-03T13:02:00.002Z

To quote 123-reg customer support:

> When will you be supporting AAAA records?

There are no current plans to implement this but notifications will be sent out if this takes place.

Avoid vps247 hosting

2011-01-05T23:39:00.005Z

Late last year, I was forced to find a new host for movementarian.org, as my previous hosting provider (Blue Room Hosting, who were really great) were shutting down. I went with VPS247, as they were local to Manchester and seemed reasonable.

Unfortunately my experience has been terrible. They've failed to keep the machines on the net, regularly causing ssh sessions to die. The dmesg is full of warnings about the block drivers failing to write for more than two minutes: evidently the SAN setup they have is totally unreliable.

My VM went down for a significant amount of time and support were very slow to respond. During the total outage, there were no status updates, and no response on the support tickets or the forums. The penultimate straw was when my filesystem was massively corrupted. Even though my VM is hardly critical, I can't be doing with unreliability like this, especially when they're not reachable when problems occur.

My final straw, though, was when I discovered they'd deleted all the negative comments from the Client Comments section of their forum. That's really, really, not on.

I'm now with linode and happy (so far).

pbranch curiosities

2010-09-02T01:13:00.003+01:00

I've started using pbranch extension for hg more seriously. It works nicely but is a little rough around the edges, in particular:

No hg qpop/push equivalent: I really miss this. I find myself constantly doing hg pgraph to figure out where I am and then typing the patch above or below.
No way to shelve a patch: With MQ, I can easily guard a patch to temporarily remove it from the queue. There doesn't seem to be a simple way to do that with pbranch.
Editing patch messages.: You use peditmessage, but because this modifies the repository, you then have to always hg pmerge -all. This pops to the top and causes a bunch of extra changesets, and it gets annoying quickly. And frustratingly, these patch messages do *not* appear in the repo history. So your code reviews of the main repo are just showered in useless merge messages, instead of the actual commit message you care about.
No pfinish: I don't know why, but there's no way to automatically commit a patch as a single changeset on the root default tip, then close the patch branch.
Inserting and deleting patches is horrible: Yuck - I really hope this gets easier soon.
Showing the current patch history: A little tip not mentioned on the pbranch site: the way to show the changelog history of the current patch is to do hg log -b patchname.

Re-enable Ctrl-Alt-Backspace in Xorg

2010-09-02T01:05:00.001+01:00

Create the following as /etc/hal/fdi/policy/30user/10-x11-zap.fdi:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
<device>

<match key="info.capabilities" contains="input.keys">
<merge key="input.x11_options.XkbOptions" type="string">terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp</merge>
</match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>

and then restart hald and Xorg.

Disabling that goddamn GTK bell

2010-09-02T01:03:00.001+01:00


echo 'gtk-error-bell = 0' >>$HOME/.gtkrc-2.0

Changing liferea keyboard shortcuts

2010-01-31T17:26:00.003Z

Liferea has no keyboard shortcut editor itself, but "Toggle unread status" demands the wrist-breaking chord action of Control-U. It expects you to be able to edit the shortcuts via the editable menu feature of GTK+.

Unfortunately that's disabled on all modern GNOME installs, and there's no UI for re-enabling it. As usual, gconf-editor to the rescue. The key you need to change is /desktop/gnome/interface/can_change_accels. After re-starting Liferea, you can then edit via hovering over the menu item and pressing the combination. Of course, this in itself is buggy: if it clashes with a menu accelerator (as 'r' is), it will perform that action instead.

It's simpler to directly edit the accels file in your Liferea dot dir.

Epson all-in-ones: avoid like the plague

2010-01-26T23:36:00.002Z

Browsing the net, you might get the impression that Epson Stylus All-in-ones are well supported under Linux. Unfortunately this is not the case. The pipslite driver you have to install is extremely flaky, and Fedora SELinux doesn't work properly with it. There's no "draft" mode for some bizarre reason; printing is extremely slow and often randomly cancels half-printed jobs due to USB resets

The scanner doesn't work at all with the iscan software, despite claims to the contrary.

Setting up JACK on Fedora 12

2010-01-26T17:28:00.003Z

Audacity is somewhat of a broken joke these days, so I needed to use Ardour to record. And that meant setting up JACK. Since JACK insists on exclusivity, I also needed to route pulseaudio through JACK so I could use other apps at the same time. Unfortunately, this is a bit of a pig to figure out. I hacked it as follows:

First edit /etc/pulse/default.pa, you need to add two lines:


load-module module-jack-sink
load-module module-jack-source

In theory now, a restart of pulseaudio should start using JACK for recording and playback, if jackd is running. However, it tends not to work very well: you might find PA hanging and you have to kill -9 it.

This isn't enough of course, now when you log in again, gnome-session will try to start pulseaudio, but not jackd, so nothing works. It's far from the right way, but I edited /usr/bin/start-pulseaudio-x11 (which is started from a /etc/xdg/autostart/ script), as follows:


amixer -c 0 sset 'Input Source' 'Line'

nohup jackd -d alsa &

sleep 5

/usr/bin/pulseaudio --start "$@"

Note that I have to set the input source by hand: something in desktop start up used to do this for me, but now I'm going through JACK it has to be done by hand.

Liferea strict feed validation tip

2010-01-17T16:33:00.007Z

New versions of Liferea refuse to parse any feed that fails to validate, even for relatively "minor" problems (the libxml2 recovery facility is no longer used; besides, it abandons the rest of the feed when it hits such problems). I don't want to use Google Reader, since I don't like the interface.

Typically bad feeds have things like high-bit chars or bare ampersands. Thankfully, there's a "conversion filter" feature that you can use to work around the bad feeds. On the two bad feeds, I run this filter:


[moz@pent ~]$ cat bin/fix-ampersands 
#!/bin/bash

sed 's/\o226/&amp;/g' | sed 's/& /\&amp;/g' | sed 's/\o243/GBP/g'

2009-11-10T16:27:00.001Z

The main indicators of egotism as I intend it here are are loud self-display, insecurity, constant approval-seeking, overinflating one’s accomplishments, touchiness about slights, and territorial twitchiness about one’s expertise. My claim is that egotism is a disease of the incapable, and vanishes or nearly vanishes among the super-capable.

I’m the crippled kid who became a black-belt martial artist and teacher of martial artists. I’ve made the New York Times bestseller list as a writer. You can hardly use a browser, a cellphone, or a game console without relying on my code. I’ve been a session musician on two records. I’ve blown up the software industry once, reinvented the hacker culture twice, and am without doubt one of the dozen most famous geeks alive.

No prizes for guessing who this was.

A horrible little ElementTree gotcha

2009-10-20T16:42:00.003+01:00

What does this print:


from lxml import etree
doc = etree.fromstring('<a><b><c/></b></a>')
newdoc = etree.ElementTree(doc.find('b'))
print newdoc.xpath('/b/c')[0].xpath('/a')

The answer is: [<Element a at 817548c>]. The first point to note is that xpath() against an element is only relative to that element: any absolute XPaths enumerate from the top of the containing tree. The second point is that the shallow copying of etree means that _Element::xpath, unlike _ElementTree::xpath, evaluates absolute paths from the top of the original underlying tree! So even though there's no <a> in newdoc, an absolute XPath on a child element can still reach it.
Yuck.

YouTube annoyance

2009-10-19T17:29:00.001+01:00

How much time would it really take to order multi-part videos, so the suggestion at the end of the video is the next part? Please!

An annoying Python gotcha

2009-10-10T17:05:00.003+01:00

Imagine you have this in mod.py:


import foo

class bar(object):
   ...

   def __del__(self):
       foo.cleanup(self.myhandle)

Seems fine right? In fact, there's a nasty bug here. If I try to use this module in client.py like so:


import mod
mybar = bar()

Then you're likely to get an exception when the program exits. This is because Python, for some bizarre reason, Nones out the globals in mod.py when taking down the interpreter. The actual __del__ method can be called sometime after this, and it ends up trying None.cleanup(), with the resultant AttributeError. It seems extremely bizarre that it happens in this order, but it does (a real example).

Kernel solipsism

2009-06-04T13:11:00.003+01:00

Thomas Gleixner:

Exactly that's the point. Adding dom0 makes life easier for a group of users who decided to use Xen some time ago, but what Ingo wants is technical improvement of the kernel... The kernel policy always was and still is to accept only those features which have a technical benefit to the code base.

It boggles the mind that someone could get things so backwards. The kernel exists to provide services to the outside world, not the other way around. By all means criticise the details of the Xen dom0 code, but this argument makes zero sense. How precisely did x86_64 support provide a technical benefit to the code base?

BNP

2009-05-18T13:24:00.001+01:00

Charlie Brooker on the BNP party political broadcast:

Nick Griffin's first line is "Don't turn it off!", which in terms of opening gambits is about as enticing as hearing someone shout "Try not to be sick!" immediately prior to intercourse.

Outputting XML in standard Python

2009-03-26T02:43:00.004Z

Is it really this ugly? I expected something like this:


doc = xmldoc()
doc.start('foo', { 'id': 'blah' })
doc.start('sub')
doc.text('subtext')
doc.close('sub')
doc.close('foo')
print doc

and I thought I had it in SimpleXMLWriter. However, I have to jump hoops to get it to output to a string, and it doesn't have any pretty-print. I tried using ElementTree, but that also doesn't pretty print! libxml2 is horribly low-level. lxml seems to do pretty printing, but it's still just as ugly as the best option I've found so far, xml.dom.minidom:


from xml.dom.minidom import Document
foo = doc.createElement('foo')
foo.setAttribute('id', 'blah')
doc.appendChild(foo)
sub = doc.createElement('sub')
sub.appendChild(doc.createTextNode('subtext'))
foo.appendChild(sub)

Yuck! If I'm building up a document, I almost always want to append directly at the last point: why do I have to keep track of all these elements by hand? I presume I'm missing some small standard helper module, but #python didn't know about it. Anyone?

Scoble sets a new record

2009-03-22T22:55:00.001Z

I really hate the word “friend.” It has no meaning anymore. No one can define what a friend is. Believe me, I’ve asked dozens of people to define it for me. My wife is my most “true” friend, for instance but if you trust her with picking a great wine (she doesn’t drink much) or picking a great sushi restaurant (she hates the stuff) you’ll be very disappointed. You’d be better off asking @garyvee about the wine even though you’ve never met him and he probably wouldn’t be listed among your “true” friends.

- Scoble

Might I gently suggest friendship isn't about wine recommendations?

Sheesh

2009-03-16T20:31:00.004Z

Apparently applications should be prepared to lose 60 minutes of data to work around the file system now.

Of course the notion that application should have explicit load/save operations is a nonsense already. Now we should "fix" one of the few places that never had this (ever seen a browser where you have to save your bookmarks explicitly when you quit?) to expose this implementation detail in a data-losing way again.

Amazon

2009-03-16T01:25:00.003Z

It's a shame that it's basically impossible to compete with Amazon when it comes to online book selling, because their website is so horribly awful to use. Not fair.

It's not just atol(), Nicholas

2009-03-14T12:03:00.004Z

Nicholas Nethercote warns us against atol(). Sadly, he recommends using strtol() instead. This interface is almost as bad. If atol() is impossible to get right, strtol() has to be classified under the obvious use is wrong.

As a perfect example of how horrible strtol() is, let's look at his example code:


int i1 = strtol(s,        &endptr, 0);  if (*endptr != ',')  goto bad;
int i2 = strtol(endptr+1, &endptr, 0);  if (*endptr != ',')  goto bad;
int i3 = strtol(endptr+1, &endptr, 0);  if (*endptr != '\0') goto bad;
...
bad: /* error case */

Can you spot the bug? What about an input like ",2,3" ? Nicholas does mention that this code is broken for underflow or overflow (you must wrap every singe call like this: "errno = 0; strtol(...); if (errno...)") but either missed this or considered it irrelevant. It's just too hard to get right.

Just use the *scanf() family (yes, that's hard to use too). Be suspicious of any code using either strtol() or atol().

Comics I Don't Understand

2009-03-10T02:15:00.004Z

Comics I Don't Understand. One for Seinfeld fans. What I don't understand is how someone can have a Wordpress design that has no "Previous" button. Blech.

Heston Blumethal's Feasts

2009-03-09T22:47:00.003Z

I've just watched last week's episode of this series, Heston Blumenthal's Victorian Feast. The guy is the epitome of the mad scientist (his dessert was strawberry, elderflower and absinthe dildo jelly with earl grey ice cream).

I had one of his inventions a while back: strawberry, olive and leather vanilla sundae. It was pretty nice, though the rather more staid chocolate wine popsicle was much nicer.

You should watch Tuesday's...

Tomcat on Centos 5.2: just don't

2009-03-07T19:10:00.004Z

If you were thinking of trying to use CentOS 5.2's tomcat packages: don't. You just get a silent 400 Bad request error on the holding page for no reason. Download it from upstream, and use that directly. It's very poorly documented, sadly, so to get started:

Install the Sun JRE and set $JAVA_HOME appropriately - gcj is ... lacking
Grab the Tomcat 'core' tarball and unpack it in place
edit conf/tomcat-users.xml to add a user that has the 'manager' role
start Tomcat with ./bin/startup.sh
Go to http://yourhost:8080/ and log in to "status" with the manager user you added
This will list any of the apps you installed (by dumping their .war file in webapps/)

I also set up a virtual host with Apache (for OpenGrok) like this:

<VirtualHost *.80>
ServerName grok.example.org
ProxyPreserveHost On
ProxyPass / http://example.org:8080/
ProxyPassReverse / http://example.org:8080/
</VirtualHost>

Gas no gas abadie pizza please

2009-02-27T00:49:00.003Z

Well this makes no sense:

Me: "Hi, your letter said I needed to arrange a visit with you to check the gas safety of my flat."
Them: "That's right, what's your details?"
*gives them*
Me: "There's no gas supply in the building, but apparently you have to come see that in person yourselves."
Them: "Yes, that's true. .... OK, we'll send you a letter with the appointment details."
Me: "Uh, I can't just do any time, it needs to be arranged."
Them: "That's OK - if you can't make the appointment on the letter, then you can ring us up after you receive it and tell us."
Me: "..."

Holocaust deniers

2009-02-25T17:21:00.002Z

Somewhat unpleasantly, I'm a vague acquaintance of a couple of holocaust deniers (in the sense that I've been in the same place as them once or twice). Really weird people:

They always bring it up at parties. Seriously, what? If I were a terrorism expert, I'd tend to keep off the subject at parties, since people might see it as a little sensitive. Even if I was just a huge fan of He-Man or something I'd probably only mention it if we were talking about 1980s kids' TV. Why do they always start talking about it?
It's never a slight correction. It's always some ridiculous figure they claim, like "zero" or "thousands". Surely if the figures are really dubious, they're not going to be 6 million off? It's equivalent to claiming that nobody lives in Libya.
They appear to believe in either the most expertly executed hoax of all time, and their only apparent response to this is to moan about it to people they don't know. How does that make any sense?

Javascript off

2009-02-21T18:20:00.001Z

cdfrey: the fact that you've disabled JavaScript in your browser automatically qualifies you as irrelevant for anyone designing a modern user interface - sorry.

Dear Everyone

2009-02-21T00:14:00.001Z

If you have a blog, and you ask questions in blog entries, have some way to leave comments, won't you?

All TV should be like this

2009-02-19T00:05:00.001Z

Things I discovered yesterday

2009-02-18T18:43:00.002Z

Installing Firefox in an OpenVZ container can make you lose /dev/null
OpenSolaris sleep(1) needs the network to be up
People are injecting foreskins into their face
Dubai is really screwed

Audacity is frustrating

2009-02-18T02:01:00.002Z

You might think that recording and then splitting it into separate audio files based on silences
between each track would be easy to do - sadly not.

Aside from crashing a few times and failing to recover properly, I've been hit by these
enormous frustrations:

- despite claims to the contrary, even 1.3.7 does not correctly alter labels when you modify the
audio. That means there's no way to Truncate Silence without re-doing all your labels!
- you can't split into tracks (or, apparently, make selections) based on labels added by the silence finder, so you can't remove inter-track silences that way either
- the labels dialog has a fun bug where it removes all your labels that don't have names (as
none of them do by default). This gets frustrating fast.
- there's no way to start a recording on the current track - I have to have a new one, it seems. This was fine until I discovered that Mix and Render completely screwed up the merging of all the tracks.

Seriously, how do people actually use this thing?

openpty() and forkpty(): avoid

2009-02-13T01:56:00.007Z

After dealing with more code that gets it wrong I was reminded of the numerous reasons why openpty() is such a broken API. The prototype of this "convenience" function is this:


int openpty(int *amaster, int *aslave, char *name, struct termios *termp, struct winsize *winp);

Now, sin number one should be obvious: the interface isn't const-correct. You're passing in the winp values, but there's no indication of that. Worse, you're doing the same with termp. Why worse? Well, think about how you use this API. Typically, you want to create the master/slave pair of the pseudo-terminal, then change the terminal settings of the slave. (Let's leave the master out of this for now - but the settings are not always symmetrical.)

But where do we get the terminal settings from? We don't have an open slave to base them on yet! So you find code doing a cfmakeraw() on stack junk and passing that in, because the API almost insists you do the wrong thing.

Indeed, doing it right, namely with a tcgetattr()/cfmakeraw()/tcsetattr() stanza, you'd expect term to be an out parameter, that you could then use - precisely opposite to how it actually works, and what const correctness suggests to the user. You can see some other amusing examples of how people worked around the API though.

I'm sure you will have spotted by now that the name parameter is outgoing, but has no len. It's therefore impossible to use without the risk of buffer overflow.

This API is not going to score well on the Rusty scale. What's worst of all about openpty(), though, is that it's non-standard, so almost every piece of code out there keeps its own private copy of this broken, pointless interface. Yay!

Review board review

2009-02-11T05:09:00.004Z

I was bored so played around with Review Board a little more, including installing it myself.

Things seem to have got easier to install, at least to some degree. You can use easy_install, though at least
for CentOS 5.2, you'll need to install a newer version of setuptools first. It's also far from automated, missing
out basic dependencies like pysqlite2, patchutils, and even patch itself. Discovering these can be, and in my case was, rather tedious work.

After that it's pretty easy to install, for the sqlite version anyway. The documentation isn't exactly clear on
what permissions changes you need to make: you need to chown all of db/ to the apache user as well for anything to work. Expect to set up a virtual host for the installation, like I did above.

Don't forget to enable logging in the admin interface whilst you're messing around.

Sadly, the Mercurial support seems some way behind. For example, it doesn't pick up changeset comments.

The diff parser (how is this not in a library by now?) can't handle git diffs, and the failure mode is horrible (basically, silent failure, with no debugging messages). This is because hg git diffs don't contain the revisions being diffed, so Review Board can't pull the files from the repo. Undoubtedly a Mercurial misfeature, but it does make Review Board near useless for my purposes unfortunately.

It can handle ssh repositories (which is all opensolaris.org provides), but there's a horrible work around needed: you have to set up a correct known_hosts file in the apache user's home directory. Yuck.

As for the main interface, it's generally pretty slick. I can imagine it getting cumbersome quickly with large code reviews though. Compare and contrast Review Board's diff viewer with webrev. The latter to me at least, is much more scalable, even though the actual diff mechanism is less smart. In particular, I can review each file with webrev in a separate tab, whereas Review Board insists on one big (very big!) screen. I'd still give my right arm for a webrev-based Review Board :)

Another thing I'd like to see is more integration with the repository, so I can click on a file and it will take me off to the repo browser for looking through history.

My Real Dad

2009-02-06T18:01:00.002Z

My favourite Wondermark for a while.

Pride And Prejudice And Zombies

2009-01-31T18:04:00.003Z

I haven't read it, but I'm guessing this does exactly what it says on the tin.

XML-RPC

2009-01-31T17:39:00.002Z

I've only just read the XML-RPC spec. I knew it was simple, but I didn't know it was stupid. Seriously, no parameter names? Only 32-bit integers? And no "NULL"? WTF?

Harold Wobble Wedges

2009-01-28T19:16:00.000Z

Talk about unnecessary. JUST USE SOME NEWSPAPER. Sheesh.

ASA to rule on the existence of god

2009-01-09T16:28:00.001Z

I think atheists and believers alike should agree to abide by the Advertising Standard Agency's decision, when it comes - agreed?

Religulous

2009-01-08T17:46:00.002Z

After sitting through Expelled, I felt the need to cleanse my intellectual palate. Thankfully I had Bill Maher's Religulous to watch. Coming across like a mongrel of Borat and An Inconvenient Truth, it's an alleged documentary, played for laughs. And chunks of it are indeed very, very funny - the Cannabis Ministry guy comes to mind.

Consisting mainly of Maher tracking down the more comedic elements of out-there religion, it's a wonder he
got most of these people to sign the release forms. I'm especially thinking of the senator who admitted he
was religious because he was stupid. Maher uses his incredulity at these people's beliefs for humour, and he
does it rather well. It's not the kind of film that's supposed to make a serious point, though of course it does.

Particular highlights for me were the Vatican priest who dismissed Hell as a "silly idea", and the Professor
Frink style inventions of The Institute for Science and Halacha, devoted to technology to work around the absurd orthodox Shabbat rules (cue the pneumatic wheelchair).

Recommended.

My Stuff Of The Year

2008-12-21T19:53:00.002Z

Yes, it's a pointless end of year list! In no particular order.
Much of this stuff is by no means new in 2008, but it's all new to me in 2008.

Sailor Jerry's

Old news to most by now but the popularity of combining this vanilla-flavoured rum with coke and ice has yet to wane.

FFV

Imported via a visit to Helsinki earlier in the year, Fisherman's Friend Vodka (both its name, and its recipe) took the world* by storm, and continues to delight.

Helsinki Travel Theodolites

Jim Beam's, Disaronno, Coke, Ice and a slice of lime.

David Thomas Broughton versus 7 Hertz

"Can't afford a pasty from Gregg's bakery". Still loving this album. His singing voice is an acquired taste, but I acquired it. I also admire anyone who doesn't let their equipment blowing up stop them putting the song onto the CD.

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds - Dig Lazarus Dig

Reminded me that I do actually really like Nick Cave.

Cut Copy - In Colours

Uncomplicated but enjoyable electro. A New Order I like.

Primal Scream - Swastika Eyes (live)

Entire audience hated it, but it was the only good bit in the whole gig. Still think they're crap.

Trentemoller @ The Big Chill

I knew he'd be astonishing, because all his productions, and all his remixes, are astonishing. He was.

Leonard Cohen @ The Big Chill

The world is thanking his bent accountant for this tour.

There Will Be Blood

It's not exactly a stretch for me to like a Paul Anderson film, but still...

Atonement

To my shame, I saw the film before the book, but I thought both were brilliant. Yes, even Keira Knightley.

No Country For Old Men

I was expecting to be bored crapless by this but was mesmerised instead.

The Shield Season 7

This final season knocked this back up to seriously rival The Wire for best thing ever. The entire season exulted in reminding you that Vic Mackey was a truly horrible person.

Sons Of Anarchy

A drama about gun-running Californian bikers sounds dumb, but this was brilliantly done. For some reason I kept being reminded of Cher though - that is never good.

Abode

Very, very, good restaurant 2 minutes from my flat == yay.

Try Thai

Very good value, with excellent battered scallops, in Chinatown (if you can call a single square a town (which you can't, Manchester - sorry)).

The Deaf Institute

Well done for opening, Trof 3!

Sam Smith's Organic Ale

I drank way too much of this.

Allgates Shining Light

And nowhere near enough of this.

BBC News

2008-11-05T18:45:00.002Z

They're using the phrase "a sense of" even more than they used to. They refer to "the sense of jubilation" in the Democrat camp, or "a sense of taking stock" amongst Republicans. Practically every other sentence uses this moronic phrase. There's a real sense of lazy journalism at the BBC.

On the "moronic phrase" note: "Yes We Can" is just about the stupidest campaign slogan ever.

Also, the election coverage on the BBC was surprisingly biased. Way too many left-leaning talking heads, very
little positive coverage of the McCain campaign. It wasn't Fox News, of course, but it was bad: I expected better from the BBC. It was almost worth it to see John Bolton nearly explode with anger though.

You did it...

2008-11-05T04:01:00.001Z

Dear America: well done.

Apostrophe Abuse Overload

2008-10-29T17:49:00.002Z

Argggh!

Christian Voice kooks on the atheist bus

2008-10-23T13:38:00.002+01:00

"People don't like being preached at."

!!!

"But in a twist which will have Christians in gales of laughter, the advertising campaign...is to be stuck on bendy-buses."

May I suggest first that said Christians perhaps need to get out more, and second that "gales of laughter" doesn't seem like a very Christian response?

"fellow humanists, not known for their generosity, wouldn't stump up the cash."

Aren't you guys looking a little silly now?

Press release.

More Broccoli News

2008-10-22T21:56:00.001+01:00

I'm not sure why this loathsome stuff is so much in the news these days.
You might not think it loathsome. Think again.

Programmatic VNC password setting

2008-10-22T14:50:00.004+01:00

I had this problem recently: I was generating automatic VNC passwords via /dev/urandom, and needed to obfuscate them. Stupidly, vncpasswd is only interactive, and I wasn't in any kind of mood for hacking up the sources. A co-worker kindly pointed me to the solution:

printf "%s\n%s\n" "$PASSWD" "$PASSWD" | vncpasswd /tmp/vncpasswd

In my head, the use of getpass() means this couldn't work, but it does. It doesn't appear to be on Google, so I thought I'd mention it. Of course, as all know, the obfuscation done by vncpasswd is entirely pointless, but Xvnc at least will only take such "encrypted" password files.

McCain understands small business growth - he was one

2008-10-22T03:05:00.002+01:00

Since I can't vote, I may as well trivialise the election by laughing at McCain say things like "Obama's supporters are saying some pretty nasty things about Western Pennsylvania lately. And you know, I couldn't agree with them more. I couldn't disagree with you. I couldn't agree with you more..."

Doddery old fool.

What took you so long?

2008-10-20T23:25:00.000+01:00

They've finally invented wireless power.

Democracy*

2008-10-19T17:05:00.000+01:00

Vote obstruction may yet decide the outcome of the US election. Scary.

Ha ha ha ... ha?

2008-10-17T15:53:00.001+01:00

Why aren't there any headache tablets in the jungle? Because of the continuing policy of price-fixing cartels within the pharmaceutical industry, making it nigh on impossible for decent standards of helathcare to operate in the developing world.

More.

Vinyl space again!

2008-10-15T16:02:00.005+01:00

After Habitat stupidly stopped selling the storage I was using for my records, I finally found
something suitable for the size of my flat:

These are i-cubes. Not the most beautiful storage in the world, but I have expansion room again!

Following the US elections from the UK

2008-10-15T00:24:00.002+01:00

I've never paid anything like this kind of attention to US politics before, and I'm most certainly not alone. Everyone here in the UK is talking about it. It's not just the hatred engendered across the world as a result of the Bush years that's causing this though. I think it's mostly a combination of the huge gulf between the presidential candidates this time around, plus the pantomime nature of the Palin-McCain campaign.

Last time the UK faced a choice as stark as the US faces, I was a toddler, and not quite precocious enough to have an opinion. I'm sure I don't need to mention that everyone in the UK are Obama supporters - we've decided already to vote for Obama come November, and technicalities be damned.

Watching the debates and news clips of the candidates has been completely unreal, from both sides. It's bizarre seeing Obama talking about "crushing" and "killing" terrorists as if it's perfectly normal liberal terminology. Over here that kind of language belongs to the far right. Compare it with Blair (who need I remind you is rather hawkish): "There is no meeting of minds, no point of understanding with such terror. Just a choice: Defeat it or be defeated by it. And defeat it we must."

It's also been entertaining watching Palin stumble along in her attempt to pretend she has any idea what's going on. "First Dude" is an amusing phrase, but it's still amazing she actually uses it herself. Her "expertise" on energy appears to amount to saying "drill baby drill" a lot. Somehow her ridiculous attempt to debate via the language of winking is considered a success. Whuh?

God knows the level of debate in UK politics is woeful, but you'd never get anything like this kind of pantomime. You'd never get ridiculous smears like the Ayers thing, Brown's wife's speech or not.

The UK did elect a London mayor entirely on the basis of his hair, though. Maybe that's the real problem with the US election at the moment: it really can't be decided easily on haircut.

For shame

2008-10-14T01:54:00.001+01:00

I finally conceded and set up mutt at work to be able to read HTML email. Perhaps it's time to move into management.

Turning off Offensive YouTube popups

2008-10-13T20:16:00.003+01:00

What the hell are they thinking? These awful popups have actually genuinely achieved
a new low: even pop-unders and nefarious crap like that have an obvious way to dismiss the advert.
Apparently it's also OK to just plaster them all over the content so you can't even see it.

You go to the arrow at the bottom right and click "Turn Off Annotations". These are Annotations
in the "Ministry Of Love" sense. Oh, you have to do that for every video by the way. Unlike the
volume control, which of course persists across all videos.

Obviously, YouTube want you to hate them.

Dear clever types

2008-09-19T00:32:00.002+01:00

Can you please hurry up and actually release a decent A4 e-book reader? You guys are so close... I will pay stupid money.

Greg Kroah and Canonical

2008-09-18T13:59:00.002+01:00

I can't quite get over how arrogant his talk was. If you're not sending in kernel patches, that means you're bad and all your developers should get jobs elsewhere, apparently. Things like HAL aren't "Linux plumbing", and if you contribute to that, or GNOME in general, tough luck, since other operating systems can use it. GCC, binutils, and X.org are OK though, because, well ... just because.

What new horror

2008-09-06T19:23:00.001+01:00

As I just noticed on the TV advert:

Universal Pictures will release a special sing-along edition of the hit movie musical Mamma Mia! in selected theaters nationwide

I've thought of a worse thing than this though: a "wit-a-long" version of Sex And The City.

Infoworld: SOFTWARE HAS BUGS!

2008-08-29T00:09:00.000+01:00

Oi noi!

Awful, awful music

2008-08-27T20:17:00.003+01:00

Dave Stewart's American Prayer makes we wish I was a Republican[1]. And I don't even live in the US.
Whittaker: stop it. George from Seinfeld: stop it. Stewart: I told you a long time ago.

This is almost as bad as Roger Taylor's Nazis (at the very least, read the lyrics, if you haven't - awesome).

[1] a little bit

At last some honesty

2008-08-23T13:04:00.002+01:00

Things I never expected to read in a prominent Intelligent Design blog:

Sorry if I’m offending anyone but these people disgust me. They’re all like “I believe in rational inquiry, science, and bearded thunderers who live in the sky and worry about my immortal soul”. Please. Choose one or the other but not both.

So there you have it. If you're a Christian you'd better not be an ID proponent, and vice versa. Or, of course,
ID has nothing to do with rational enquiry. I'm not sure they really realised they were saying that.

Raymond Chen: It's not Christmas

2008-08-22T02:26:00.001+01:00

In March of this year, a customer wrote, "I have attached a Word document that describes the problem." (Hey, here's an idea: Why not describe the problem in your email message?)
The Word document contained a screenshot.

The screenshot was of an email message.

The email message contained a screenshot.

Bonus remark from the customer liaison: "Once you open the document, you may need to zoom it further to read it."

Awesome.

PulseAudio and volume controls

2008-08-17T17:03:00.002+01:00

For those wondering how on earth to access an underlying real device when PulseAudio is enabled (yes, both alsamixer and pavucontrol only show one mixer control - brilliant!), you can do this:

alsamixer -c 0

Of course, this behaviour isn't documented anywhere. I don't know how people are supposed to discover this.

Unwrap Mosaics

2008-08-14T23:48:00.003+01:00

This work at Microsoft Research is super-cool. Watch the video at the bottom of the page.

Hitler liked some good music, you know?

2008-08-12T20:46:00.002+01:00

In case you needed another fatuous reason for supporting Obama, here it is: Obama's Top Ten tunes versus
McCain's. Apart from the U2 stumble, not bad at all, Barack, not bad.

Ticketline RSS feed

2008-08-08T00:57:00.001+01:00

Ticketline, my favourite less-evil-than-Ticketmaster online ticket agency, have finally got added some RSS
feeds. Though, they do seem rather flaky. In fact, the website is currently refusing to return any data at all
to me. Hmm.

Showers onboard Emirates' A380

2008-08-06T21:18:00.001+01:00

Almost makes flying civilised.

This will be dreadful

2008-08-06T21:05:00.002+01:00

In addition to Gerardis, who produced "I, Robot," Jeff Vintar, who penned the screenplay to that film, was attached to pen the "Foundation" screenplay.

I, Robot was at best an awful film. The Foundation film will most likely be worse.

Orson Scott Card is a dick

2008-07-30T20:17:00.001+01:00

The first and greatest threat from court decisions in California and Massachusetts, giving legal recognition to "gay marriage," is that it marks the end of democracy in America.

So says Orson Scott Card. Shame; I enjoyed the "Ender" books.

Another victory for superstition

2008-07-29T16:24:00.002+01:00

Sikh girl wins bangle law battle

I'm sure there's some legal argument that makes banning all
jewelry, religious or not, "discrimination", but I doubt it's a sensible one.
I wonder if they could add a watch face to it instead.

Hah

2008-07-29T15:44:00.000+01:00

This one for the doubters (you know who you are): Likelihood of me being MALE is 100%

Writing Python Properly

2008-07-12T14:33:00.002+01:00

What are people's approaches to writing Python correctly? The library documentation basically doesn't document the set of exceptions the routines can throw, which makes it very difficult to catch the right things, and do the right thing[1] (for example). What do people do to deal with this problem?

[1] on that note, if you're writing a command line tool in Python, please catch KeyboardInterrupt and exit quietly. Drives me crazy!

Bubble calendar

2008-07-10T15:54:00.003+01:00

These are cool:

Nice bookends

2008-07-08T23:02:00.003+01:00

Nice bookends:

Mercurial corruption (again)

2008-07-07T04:41:00.002+01:00

It's somewhat disappoint that Mercurial is still corrupting repositories when you interrupt MQ operations.

Relatively easily recoverable for me this time, thankfully. I'd still like to see hg backup from the OpenSolaris SCM project get merged upstream though :)

Pure Python Plugins

2008-07-02T03:17:00.002+01:00

After some searching and asking around I didn't find any good explanation of the simplest way to implement plugins in Python. So, for posterity's sake, here's my solution. I'm sure there's a better way: I'd love to hear your suggestions.

First, the requirements. The code cannot have knowledge of how the plugins are named (.so files, .py, package dirs, etc.). I don't want to hard-code the list of plugins, as this defeats its dynamic nature altogether. I have to be able to iterate across all plugins. Any user should be able to use the module without knowing that it's got plugins. Finally, it's got to be as simple as possible.

First up, we have whatever/__init__.py:


import pkgutil
import imp
import os

plugin_path = [os.path.join(__path__[0], "plugins/")]

for loader, name, ispkg in pkgutil.iter_modules(plugin_path):
    file, pathname, desc = imp.find_module(name, plugin_path)
    imp.load_module(name, file, pathname, desc)

This basically uses Python's module search to find all contents of the plugins sub-directory and load them. Now we have some more scaffolding in the same directory, as whatever/whatever.py:


plugins = []

class plugin(object):
   """Abstract plugin base class."""
   ...

def register_plugin(plugin)
    global plugins
    plugins += [ plugin ]

# utility functions to iterate across and use plugins...

Finally, each plugin looks something like this, in plugins/foo.py:


from whatever/whatever import *

class fooplugin(plugin):
    """Concrete class for foo plugin."""
    ...

register_plugin(fooplugin)

Simple enough, but it took a while to work it out. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem possible to merge whatever.py into __init__.py as we have a recursive import problem.

Cake of awesomeness

2008-06-19T18:41:00.001+01:00

Best cake ever.

Amusing prank

2008-06-16T22:58:00.000+01:00

An amusing prank. I love how they get back in, as if that'll somehow help.

Getting decent stack traces

2008-06-10T23:41:00.002+01:00

Reading through this bug is seriously depressing to read (until Michael Matz steps in).
It was always complete madness to strip symbols from shipping binaries; it was always
madness to disable the frame pointer too. (The debuginfo trick is an excellent solution
to the problems of source-level debugging, by the way, it's just taken way, way, too far).

This is why you have to install a 1Gb debuginfo RPM in order to run OProfile on the kernel. Crazy.

It's a good read if you like to see certain people behaving like asshats to their fellow community
members too.

I Am Neurotic

2008-06-09T16:36:00.001+01:00

My favourite quote from I Am Neurotic: "Everyday, at 7:47 am or pm, I always say Boeing, after the Airplane, and I don't know why. I've gotten into a lot of trouble, and I even say it in my sleep."

US TV

2008-06-06T16:51:00.000+01:00

It's already extremely difficult to watch US TV, with adverts every 7 minutes, and massive animated
station idents taking up half the screen, but this is particularly obnoxious:

It's as if they want you not to watch.

Africa is big

2008-06-04T02:01:00.002+01:00

Very big:

T-shirt indecision

2008-05-28T00:03:00.001+01:00

This T-shirt: yes, or no?

Weezer and YouTube

2008-05-27T14:37:00.001+01:00

I only got most of the videos in this music video:

but it's still good. The song's not up to much though.

The NEW Underground

2008-05-17T21:11:00.001+01:00

Is CHRISTIAN electronic music the new underground?

"It used to be that all of the good new music was in the rave scene and then would trickle out into the internet and store shelves. Now when I look for traditional electronic music anywhere, I find that the music seems generally boring or has too much of a political or sinful feel."

I hate that traditional electronic boring, political, or sinful music too.

Nintendo and undersupply

2008-05-15T19:22:00.002+01:00

I'm getting more than a little bit tired of Nintendo playing its bloody games. Yes,
we get it Nintendo, your stuff is popular. Now, please make enough copies of
Mario Kart and Wii Fit to sell them. It's not even Christmas.

Mario Kart isn't even in shop charts. I've been past several shops selling Wii
stuff recently (Game, supermarkets, etc.) and most of them don't even have any
*mention* of Mario Kart. This is insane.

Waaa.

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

2008-05-14T20:36:00.000+01:00

America, how could you?

Smirking cat murdered

2008-05-10T17:56:00.001+01:00

This is a weird story already, but that illustrative photo, and especially its caption, are just plain bizarre.

gnome-terminal titles

2008-05-09T01:58:00.002+01:00

This finally annoyed me enough to find a solution.

If I set a title on a gnome-terminal tab, then it gets forgotten next time I log in. Aside from the GNOME default to not save your session (whuh?), the problem is this: on Fedora, /etc/bashrc forces PROMPT_COMMAND to set the xterm title.

This wouldn't really be a problem, if I could disable setting of dynamic titles in gnome-terminal preferences. However, gnome-terminal thinks that a manually-set (Terminal->Set Title) title is somehow "dynamic", so if you do that, you can never set the title to anything else.

Seeing as I use the tab titles to work what machine I'm on, that's quite annoying.

The "solution" was to just edit /etc/bashrc so it doesn't force a PROMPT_COMMAND I don't want.

Dear Software Authors

2008-05-08T04:13:00.004+01:00

Another request for sanity please. If I'm running a Linux distribution less than 6 months old, it should be feasible to install your software without installing random -svn versions of your dependencies.

If it's not, I'm not going to bother trying out your software. That means I definitely won't be fixing any of your bugs, and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone. That means you lose out.

Yes, this means you, Review Board. Is it really so essential that you use a version of Django that isn't released anywhere?

AMD

2008-05-07T22:55:00.001+01:00

I really don't understand why, but AMD's current problems are upsetting me. It really does make me feel bad. I have no idea why I care.

Kraken Botnet Infiltration

2008-05-07T02:22:00.001+01:00

If you had the ability to cleanse 25,000 infected zombie home computers, would you?

Rietveld

2008-05-05T20:36:00.002+01:00

Google have released rietveld, inspired by their internal code-review tool. The video
about Mondrian made it look pretty (i.e. incredibly) useful for code review. The released
version already looks pretty nifty. webrev works great for my day job, but it would be
awfully nice to be able to store comments too. I'd love to see rietveld get adopted, though
there's some tweaks I'd like to see...

Tyler, rejecting Jesus means you'll go to hell!

2008-05-04T01:48:00.000+01:00

"That's stupid! He can't put me in hell, because I'm a god, just like Jesus!"

What do Java and Neil Young have in common?

2008-05-01T01:26:00.000+01:00

They're both at JavaOne. It makes me want to go.

Skynet is cute

2008-04-29T16:30:00.000+01:00

Awwww:

A tale of 3 consoles

2008-04-29T14:21:00.003+01:00

The big three consoles, scaled according to how much hardware oomph they pack:

And now in terms of 2007 sales:

Yays for Nintendo.

Brazen broccoli bandit

2008-04-28T15:22:00.001+01:00

This guy is an urban hero. If he's destroying it, that is. If he's just eating it, he's a bit weird.

"Our Ecosystem Rocks!"

2008-04-25T01:41:00.003+01:00

Awesomely bad from Microsoft:

If that's really supposed to be Bruce Springsteen ... well ... no.

It makes my overlord's song, "The Power Of Sun", seem really, really good.

Rumour has it

2008-04-24T15:58:00.000+01:00

That Haddaway is making a comeback. With a single. Featuring Dr. Alban.

That's right.