Plantagenet Penguinista

$ ls -l get* -rwxrw-r-- 1 $USER users 11617792 Oct 31 12:28 access- $CUSTOMER -HOWTO.doc -rwxrw-r-- 1 $USER users 241002 Oct 31 12:28 access- $CUSTOMER -HOWTO.odt -rw-r--r-- 1 $USER users 196751 Oct 31 13:13 access- $CUSTOMER -HOWTO.zip -rw-r--r-- 1 $USER users 83624 Oct 31 13:12 access- $CUSTOMER -HOWTO.7z Same document in each file. DOC is MS-Word format, ODT is OpenDocument Text, ZIP is, well, a Zip archive and 7Z is a 7-Zip archive (both of the .doc)

ABC fm hosted a free concert by this 14-member WAAPA percussion ensemble at Government House this afternoon , so we trotted along for a listen (11 people in our group, 5 of them adults). It was excellent, highly recommended. The first piece, here is the shell that was never ours but remembers , [yes, the capitalisation is correct] was a little spooky but every piece was interesting throughout. Pia will be pleased to note that the most impressive players overall (IMESHO) were the second and third shortest girls, and the single most impressive performer was also femme (she played a fast-paced Brasilian composition on a Glockenspeil(?) with five (5) sticks at once, including special effects produced by whacking the ends of the bars with the “neck” of some of the sticks). The array of instruments they featured was pretty awe-inspiring, from drums the size of a matchbox up to massive kettle-drums that sounded like thunder, via tubular bells, tiny chimes made out of “pian...

Cycling back home from work (well, from Whitfords station — I cheated on the way back due to time constraints, but I did cycle all the way to town in the morning) in the early afternoon on Friday, I decided to take a short-cut past some historic ruins and the relocated Wanneroo Primary School [PDF, ≅3MB, photos on p35] which you can see in the southeast quadrant of this satellite image of Perry’s Paddock . I would normally do my run up the cycleway to the west of the lake (which you can see wiggling NW/SE in the southwest quadrant of the image if you squint), cross Ocean Reef Road, then cut across the lake on the north side of the bitumen, picking up the cycleway again for the last few km home. As I approached the little bridge across the vestigial channel between lakes, I was surprised to see a bloke with a lawn mower — the ordinary little garden-variety kind — trundling noisily across the vast reaches of the paddock. If you find the large roughly-right t...

Today, I moved gear around in the office, including my Billion 711CE ADSL modem, because I have a back-pain type headache which is exacerbated by staring at screens too much (what you see here is quota for about an hour) and my chiro isn’t available until late today. When I plugged the Billion back in, she’s a no go. Some experimentation with tcpdump on startup reveals that instead of its normal (and default, for the model) address of 192.168.1.254, it has assumed 10.0.0.2 and begun ARP scanning from 10.0.0.2 on up. Eh? Attempting to log in via the web interface reveals that it responds to neither the password I’d set, nor the factory default. So... out with the paperclip. One reset later, and hurrah for Firefox remembering the web pages with all of the settings on, now all I have to do is laboriously plug about twenty “virtual server” (port forwarding) settings in. But... wha...? Has anyone seen this kind of bizarrity from one of these before?

Building on a one-line LXer comment from “ salparadise ”, “ number6x ” came up with this little gem: Attention all investors! Microsoft admits it can no longer compete on technical merits. Microsoft has admitted that it is incapable of implementing the open document standards freely published by the OASIS group. These standards have been implemented by other software companies like Sun, and even by unpaid volunteer amateurs in the free software community. Microsoft claims that adoption of Open Document standards that are published and free for all software companies to implement could lock it out of important business opportunities. This would be like an accounting firm claiming that requiring them to be able to add columns of numbers together could jeopardize future business prospects. This admission of inability to implement simple technical standards comes on the heels of several years of disastrous stumbles by the once great software giant. Microsoft was nev...

I’m sure all-y’all Linux heads out there in reader-land have read an oh-my-goodness-this-is-hard story about someone’s struggle to get accelerated OpenGL working with this or that video card. Well, here’s the other side of the coin. Last night I had to do a fair bit of sitting in an office, waiting for things to happen, and I had to do it in front of an MS-Windows 2000 machine. So naturally I began improving it. After a little of the usual cleaning up, my attention turned to the video, which was set to run at 85Hz on an LCD screen. D’oh? I wound it back down to 60Hz, which looked fine, no extra flicker ’n’ all, then installed the Really Slick Screen Savers from a copy of TheOpenCD . They didn’t so much run as limp. So I tried some other 3D stuff. The short story is that despite (eventually) having the latest drivers installed, and everything switched on, and everything saying that OpenGL was in Hog Heaven, it was not. No amount of tweak...

I keep forgetting how frustrating it can be. The Task: get two MS-Windows machines to talk to one another to verify that a piece of software doesn't break simply due to being run from a Samba share. Simple, no? The Result: finally, the first (XP) and fourth (XP) machines talk to one another. The Path There: Nothing can connect to the first’s share. The second (2000) machine won’t talk to or share with anybody. The third (XP) keeps prompting for a guest user password, and nothing will satisfy it. Yes, I have enabled the guest user. On each end and both ends, just in case. Yes, I have tried giving the guest accounts a password, and making real accounts that match. No, we’re not on a domain or AD setup... although the first (now working-ish) machine thought it was joined to (a nonexistent, never-existent) one when I first sat down to it. The Remaining Problem: the application still breaks just as badly XP-to-XP (which is exactly the situation the developer has set up...

One house about two blocks from here put a huge pile of stuff out, slightly larger than my car and including many bikes and a barbecue. Within 6 hours it was down to just the barbecue. Another house half a block away had a couch piled high with gear, including a small microwave. It took two days this time, but they’re down to just the microwave (but now without the glass plate), no couch and no other gear. It’s kind of like a huge flea-market but without the cash registers.

Oh, good. Something else to do with all of my spare time. It seems that a small UK company has decided that it doesn’t want to be crushed or bought out. I’m wondering if they will suddenly be made an offer that they can’t refuse, but meanwhile it’d be great if they do succeed in Open Sourcing Xara Xtreme. Either way, the cat is out of the bag (another favoured way of putting it is “The can is open, the worms are everywhere!”); they’ve even published a Torrent for it. Open Sourcing is a good, productive reaction to the threat of destruction. DeScribe launched one last version of their software for free before closing their doors forever , but it would have been even better if they’d also published the source. The GPL wasn’t a major force in those days. Xara aren’t shy about their big ideas: To create a new cross-platform industry standard To change the graphics landscape forever To create the best drawing / vector graphics s...

A local developer who prefers to remain nameless was pleasantly surprised to discover that PostgreSQL’s stored procedures support is if anything considerably better than MS-SQL-Server’s . He is now converting his MS-SQL-Servee-backed application full-tilt to PostgreSQL. He had a look at MySQL and was very impressed with a number of its features but regretfully concluded that it did not have the right stored-procedure features to support his application (which is basically written as a big flock of stored procedures which a very thin GUI application layer invokes when it needs to do real work). It’s not as exciting as an umpty-thousand-desktop mass migration, but it’s much more up close and personal for me, and having this one developer change will swing at least hundreds of users across to an Open Source system, and soon see MS-Windows depart one of “my” server rooms entirely.

A week or so ago, I prognosticated that some craters on Satturn's moons looked like they were from gentler impacts. Lo, for a Nature article promptly arrives saying the same thing, as does a Mars Global Surveyor shot of secondary craters in western Arabia Terra . The Nature authors (Edward Bierhaus, Clark Chapman and William Merline of Lockheed Martin ’s Space Exploration Systems [link features a cool GoogleMaps-like satellite imagery navigator] division and the Southwest Research Institute ) are not shy about the implications: We now return to questions of crater distributions in the Solar System in general, and the implications for impactor size distributions and age dating. Laboratory-scale experiments demonstrate that impacts into ice and rock targets yield ejecta fragments with steep SFDs [size–frequency distributions] , with ice-impacts generating ejecta more efficiently. [...] The Moon and Mars both possess a steep branch in their crater SFD at sizes below a few kilomet...

Spent a few precious minutes reading some of Terry Pratchett’s latest book, Thud! , which has a section smacking of the “ What have the Romans ever done for us? ” skit from Monty Python’s The Life of Brian : “War, Nobby. Huh! What is it good for? ” [Sergeant Fred Colon] said. “Dunno, Sarge. Freeing slaves, maybe?” “Absol— well, okay.” “Defending yourself against a totalitarian aggressor?” “All right, I’ll grant you that, but—” “Saving civilization from a horde of—” “It doesn’t do any good in the long run is what I’m saying, Nobby, if you’d listen for five seconds together,” said Fred Colon sharply. “Yeah, but in the long run, what does, Sarge?” Everything I’ve read so far is classic Pratchett. Just the right level of nonsense to peel a day’s screen-gazing away from one’s synapses.

I keep forgetting how bad it is. This is Andrew Pollock. No, this is not Andrew Pollock on drugs, this is him on MSIE. PNG is an open standard, and therefore inherently evil according to Microsoft’s internal and unofficial Q’ballah, so apparently the thing to do is not support it properly. No tabs. Searching requires laboriously visiting a search engine by hand, instead of thumping in text and letting the browser soft it out. Bookmarks are a menu item and a dialog box, not “I want this «click» URL in this «release» menu”. The autoscroll is clumsy and replaces the ever-so-handy middle-click paste-to-go-here facility, as well as the click-to-open-in-new-thingie facility. No dictionary. No HTML facilities. No adblocker. The popup blocker only blocks useful popups, like SourceForge downloads. (For Konqueror users) no fish:// or any other interesting protocols. The progress bar tells gross and offensive lies. For example, it shows progress in t...

RFC3514 specifies that Firewalls, packet filters, intrusion detection systems, and the like often have difficulty distinguishing between packets that have malicious intent and those that are merely unusual. We define a security flag in the IPv4 header as a means of distinguishing the two cases. How is this achieved? To solve this problem, we define a security flag, known as the "evil" bit, in the IPv4 [ RFC791 ] header. Benign packets have this bit set to 0; those that are used for an attack will have the bit set to 1. But what happens if an evil application refuses to co-operate and leaves the evil bit reset on packets generated by it? RFC3514 has a submission date of 01 April 2003, but this does not: Microsoft Office 2003 introduced Information Rights Management (IRM) that provides a way to help restrict recipients from copying, printing, or forwarding e-mail messages. [...] Opening the message with other e-mail applications or even using different types of accounts might...

Cort Fritz, “Media Solutions Architect” (near the top of the heap for their media products) for Microsoft, says (emphasis mine): Microsoft could even shut itself down and take it's video codec ball home and stop everyone from playing. But Cory is hiding the fact [...] that in reality of variety of platforms that play WMV is h u uuuuge. and growing. We are a mandatory codec for all next-gen DVD players. Yes that includes Blu-ray. Why? Because we are great at what we do. Oh, and we provide DRM. Which artists, content owners and governments have a right to use. But not, I notice, end-users. How very Microsoft. (-: Microsoft are great at what they do, that is, marketing. WMV and WMA have spread widely not because of any inherent technical superiority (many other codecs hammer them flat for quality vs compression) but because the marketing department has hammered them into every crevice available. The key point is that, modulo screams from consumer protection officials...

Coles got back to me, thanks Sharon K. The justification of the day for preventing camera use in Coles is for the safety of staff and customers. I’ve asked some questions which will hopefully stir the people above Sharon in the corporate heirarchy into wondering whether presuming that a customer with a camera has fell intent is indeed a good idea. Eskild Hustvedt gives some insight into what “guilty until proven innocent” feels like ; I’m not interested in letting it happen by default here, even for trivial stuff like taking pictures.

This one says: You have 2 options here, Option 1 - You can put ANY text you want in here. Option 2 - We will fill it in with the text only portion of the     html message if you put the macro UNIVERSITY DIPLOMAS [contents of said macro appeared here in the spam]     in here. NOTE: Some email clients don't disply html data. In that case what you     put here will be seen by the recipient. If the email client does     display html data then this will NOT be seen by the recipient.     Based on this you may wish to put a text version of your add here;     however, you can also put some macros here to make the message     more random. [contents of the macro appeared here for the second time in the spam] So, it looks like spamming kits are available (metaspam?) for those too dumb to spam unaided. And that they have useability issues. Hmm. I wonder, has anyone done any passive OS fingerprinting on spam traffic to se...

Small Sir pointed at a steel rule serving as a number line yesterday and correctly guessed that there were 3.4kg of M&Ms in a glass jar, which he got to collect today. He did not go to sleep easily. It’s also a substantial investment in chocolate and sugar for someone. The retail price of his indulgence is AUD$46.

ABCfm got a bit esoteric while I was driving schoolkids around today, so I flipped the wahless across to 94.5. They played the Boomtown Rats’ I don’t like Mondays , which says ... The telex machine is kept so clean As it types to a waiting world ...and the epiphany struck: none of the kids I was driving would know what a Telex was. Nor, it turned out, did my sister-in-law Jane or our mutual friend Monica. Jane’s hubby Jamie knew, but only just. <geezer> I remember working at a West Perth consulting firm (long since defunct) when the boss sent a huge (seven foot (as in eighty-four linear inches of paper with printing on)?) Telex from Malaysia. It was full of meandering generalities, half-formed thoughts and such but very light on for actual information. At the end, it asked a whole pile of long and random questions, mostly unrelated to the preceding waffle. The two leading employees responded, one by replying “YES” and the other by replying “NO...

A chap called Peter Lieverdink has just posted this to the OSIA list, and I think it’s something worth your consideration as well: For a large part of your average working day, I hang out on the #ubuntu irc channel on freenode, supporting and/or abusing various Linux users. As of probably about a month ago, a lot of filipino users associated with small businesses (like internet cafes etc) joined the channel, asking for help. This was a bit odd, as their influx grew rather suddenly. This morning, one of them actually mentioned why this is. About a month ago, the Phillipines government, after signing a FTA with our favourite imperialists, announced that businesses would have 30 days before they (in association with the business software alliance) would start raiding, arresting and fining windows and other license violators. Australia recently signed a FTA with the same imperialists, so that leaves me to wonder when the razzias might start here. A kiwi mentioned something similar is...