March 2006 Archives

The Luther burger is something I had seen referred to a few times but I never pursued the definition with any vigour. To discover after the fact that it's the genuine article makes my heart hurt. Scary, scary Homer Simpson like incidents involving six pounds of rich, creamery butter.

gedit has this nice feature where it asks you what character set encoding a document is in if it can't decide this for itself. I'm not familiar with the mechanism that is being used for this, but it probably has something to do with ninja badgers, character counting and a telepathic link to the borg collective. The problem is that if it has to give up on guessing what the file is, there's no way to force the file to be opened as any file type at all. I encountered this when trying to access some old data that had trailing NULL characters at the end of the file. The problem is that there's no 'mangle it to this file type and show it to me' option.

Disable the Composite extension in /etc/X11/xorg.conf
For me, this solved the problem.

Brian has this habit of sending out emails with a bunch of attached pictures/embedded power point presentation/something using up lots of bandwidth.
Finally an email that only weighs in at 5k (damned html email). It contains a link to pictures. Now if only he would not have his website in a notes database. It just makes me cringe when I see it. It's so... wrong. There's no other word for it.

There's a little message in the middle of Adam Curry's Daily Source Code, from a man in Greece about dynamically adding ID3 tags to the file just prior to downloading. I just remembered that Version 2 id3 tags are put at the beginning of the file. All you need to know is how long the tag is, add it to the content-length for the download and the feed the tag out before the file. Adam's idea of the golden ticket is doable without too much processor overhead.
Theoretically, you can embed ID tags into mp3 files once they are out of frame. The property of the tag is that it appears as junk for non-supporting applications. Embedding audio bumpers at the start and finish is trivial (you may need to eat a v1.1 tag at the end of the file).
Other trivial pieces of information I discovered today - WiFi is a pun-term of HiFi, and doesn't stand for Wireless Fidelity, it was simply the name that the ad execs came up with when asked (as 802.11 doesn't have a ring to it). [via The old new thing]

You Are Teal Green

You are a one of a kind, original person. There's no one even close to being like you. Expressive and creative, you have a knack for making the impossible possible. While you are a bit offbeat, you don't scare people away with your quirks. Your warm personality nicely counteracts and strange habits you may have.

The Robservatory (good pun there by the creator), has a wonderful listing of the 24 rules of the '24' universe. Pretty much all true.
It really is annoying, they keep hitting the same problems again and again and again. You would think they could get to the solution without having to suffer through so many problems. Case in point, season 2, I think, and the Israeli agent gets dragged out of the SUV and beaten to death by the racist hicks just to add another two hours to the storyline (minimum). In a movie there wouldn't be a twist like that because it kills the bloody story, and drags things out so much that you just want to shout at the TV to speed things up.
Of course I was watching the show on DVD, so it made all the delays more painful. I presume if it was on TV that the delays would not have felt so bad. I gave up after season 2, I just don't have patience for a directed yet unfocused show.
Hang on a minute, my favourite shows over the last while have all be japanese anime, which has the distinction of regular bouts of aimlessness. The advantage is that they're only 22 odd minutes each which makes them a lot easier to digest.
Anyone else got a tune-in?
AIR, which really touched me. Kanon is another show that got me.

I went to the cinema last night with the full intention of seeing V for Vendetta. It's not the same as the graphic novel, but I think that it hit the spot in terms of what's happening in the world today. I enjoyed it and would recommend it for other folks. A bit schmaltzy at the end, and missing the point that 'plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose'. Go, see, enjoy a bald Natalie Portman.
IMDB link.

It's unofficially doable; a few folks won the $14,000 odd prize for it. Practically nothing on the machine works, though. I am reminded of the situation of Solaris on X86 - noone wants it because the hardware support is so poor. The reason for the poor hardware support is that there isn't anywhere the number of driver developers as there would be for such beasts as Linux or Windows.
640x480 (or 800x600 I think) VGA graphics drive, no wifi, no networking, no bluetooth. Pretty much useless from the usable laptop front. I'd take Linux on it before Windows if that's the case. Of course theres a fully functional unix machine under the hood for Mac OS X, and while someone will probably want to shoot me for it, the fact that it's proprietary isn't too much of a big loss.
I was talking to my mate Mark on St. Paddys day about Hyper Threading processors, and he was mentioning that they're not the best at high-performance computation (without extensive and expensive hints in the code). I agreed, mentioning that the latest generation of multi-core processors offer roughly equivalent cost and scale almost multi-processorly. I then went on to explain that the multi-threaded processors are better for I/O workloads, you shove a lot of the scheduling cost back into the silicon where it belongs, rather than having the OS deal with it in software.
For a big server, performing lots of I/O, a multi-core and multi-threaded processor would be the best of both worlds, and based on the direction that Sun is taking with the Niagra system, one can see that this can be taken to a scary extreme - consider 8 core with 8 threads per core all on the one processor module. The power-savings alone would be enough to warrant buying these machines.
Im still waiting for quotes on a few more laptops. I can wait, I just don't know for how much longer. Meanwhile I'll probably buy a phone. Nokia 6230i looks like a cheap and easy option - buyable from €260.19. Or maybe an annoying smartphone like the iMate PDA 2K (it's the original of the O2 XDA IIs).

I have a set of hand written pages of the next 20-30 features to implement/changes to make to pocketcity in order to make it 1. better and 2. more easy to port. One of the things I'm planning on doing is moving the water pipes underground. This will change things quite a bit.
I'm considering getting a new laptop (again) and I've reached the point where the hardware that's available is reaching what I want. It needs dual-core processor; I'm not getting another uni-processor machine again. Acer have dual core centrino models, with a decent graphics card. The only problems are the DVD drive and the video card. It's a DVD-RAM drive. It won't region free! it's the same problem as the Ferraris. I don't want to re-code all the non region-2 discs I have. That would be a pain in the ass. The video card isn't supported in Linux either, which is another annoyance. I hope that ATI release a driver for the X1000 family soon.
Alternatives are Alienware and their Aurora m7700, which has an athlon processor. Has a more supported graphics card, but it's about twice as expensive as the Acer. Then there's the Widow PC laptop. Still the price tag problem.
Until I get a new laptop, I'll have to be happy with the one I have. It's an early generation centrino, so I've only got a/b wireless, and an integrated GPU. It works well for what I'm doing (programming, watching movies, occasional game).
Shame that Dell haven't caught up on dual core for the gaming laptop.

I was driving this evening from Cork back to Kerry, so I was unwilling to participate in the drinking of many, many pints. While heading for the car at about 10.30 in the evening I noticed a few very unsteady people, but it didn't remind me of the worst excesses of previous years. It was bitterly cold, which probably kept people indoors and out of trouble. Pubs haven't let out yet, so the storm is probably on the way.

Let's make this one easy for the protocol writers. Front load the important information in the packet. That way we can more easily detect it and send it on to the correct handler. Stop putting the decision making information in the middle of the packet. We don't have infinite processor time on these handlers.
This complaint was brought to you by people who care how network bandwidth is being consumed.

There i am reading rec.humor.funny and I encounter a ROT13 joke. I can't find the ROT13 button/choice in the menu structure of Thunderbird. Has this arcane skill been lost to us? <sarcasm>I must compose a letter of complaint to the Times. I think they should know about such an egregious omission</sarcasm>.

I didn't know about the electronic disruptor until the last level. I'll have to replay it now that I know about it, to see how much of a difference it makes.

Finished Splinter Cell. Way too much fun to be legal. I decided to return to F.E.A.R. and the 1.03 update. I reinstalled the game, applied the correct patch, and still could not run the game. It took about an hour to find my solution to the problem. From the VU Games Community Forums we have, down at the bottom a link to securom that contains a replacement binary for F.E.A.R. so it now works correctly again. For those of you who care, this is just to get the game to work, you still need to be legal.

And all I can think is... damn, I want to see Battle Royale again.
If I was listening to music at this time, I would be listening to Stinkarelli; I watch too much TV

I download the european version of the patch. Bleugh, another 200MB download. I apply the patch and now the game no longer works as it claims the game DVD is incorrect. Piece of s**t. There's no way to unpatch the program so I uninstall it to reinstall it. I forgot to have the game manual handy. Hunt the install key.
Could it be that having Splinter Cell and F.E.A.R. installed on the computer at the same time could be causing problems? Or was it an incorrect patch, as it worked before I applied the patch.
Annoying, I'll just have to stick to playing Splinter Cell until I'm finished it.

I bought FEAR last week. It informed me that there was an update to the game to bring it up to snuff. Took about 25 minutes to download it and started to install. It then displays the following:

This Update is only compatible with the English (United States) version of F.E.A.R. Please use the correct Update for the installed version of the game.

This was the auto-update tool that came with the application. What a waste of my bandwidth!
Aaaaaaargh!

I was looking at the results of the Oscars last night. Considering that I was unimpressed with most of the movies. My heart was warmed by Philip Seymour Hoffman winning the oscar for best actor, he was the best of the nominees in my humble opinion. The fact that Brokeback didn't win best movie is only testamount to the fact that cheats never win :)
honestly, the overall quality of movies this year was terrible! Make better movies on a lower budget and don't shove the horrible ones on us because you have the money to advertise them.
I never realized (until I saw it ono IMDB) that the full title of 'The Talented Mr. Ripley' was 'The Mysterious Yearning Secretive Sad Lonely Troubled Confused Loving Musical Gifted Intelligent Beautiful Tender Sensitive Haunted Passionate Talented Mr. Ripley'. What a sad title.
Besides, I got such slagging over the Marmalade pudding recipe.

Medium Pudding Mixture:

• 4oz. Margarine
• 4oz. Sugar
• 2 Tablesp. Water
• 6oz. self-raising flour
• 2 eggs
• 1/4 Teasp. salt
• Flavouring

Method:

cream fat and sugar, beat in the whisked eggs, stir in the flour and salt with added water, Steam or bake.

For Marmalade Pudding:

Add one large tablesp. of marmalade to the foundation mixture. Steam and serve with Marmalade sauce.

To Steam:

1. • use a steamer over a pan of boiling water.
   • Have a well fitting lid.
   • Keep water boiling and steaming all the time
2. • Place the pudding basin in a saucepan with boiling water.
   • Water should come half way up the sides of the basin
   • Keep the water boiling, and as it boils away, fill up with boiling water, but do not wet the top of the pudding
3. Steam in a pressure cooker, according to instructions.

Time for steaming is about 1.5 hours for a pudding made from 6-8oz. flour.

Turning out: A light pudding breaks easily, so loosen it gently from the sides of the basin with a flexible round-ended blade, which should be pressed against the side of the basin, not the pudding.
When loose, cover the basin with a hot dish and invert quickly.
A good pudding may be marred by careless serving and enhanced by dainty dishing.

To Bake:

Use a pie dish, cake tin, soufflé tin, fireproof dish, ring mould, small moulds or deep bun tins.

Grease well.

Line the base of any flat-bottomed tin so that pudding will turn out easily.
Bake in a moderate oven (350f or No. 4)
Small moulds may be baked at a slightly higher temperature than large ones.

Time required: 30-40 minutes for large and 15-20 for small moulds.

It started out quite simply. I was with a few friends in an internet café just shooting the breeze when I noticed this perceptual shiver run through all the people there. When I asked what was going on nobody was talking. Finaly I convinced one of my friends to tell me and he informed me that one of the folks from the data retention section of the Gardaí was here to install the recording software for the shop.
This was in foot of the new legislation that had been introduced for the storage of all internet communications for an arbitrary time. Every bit was being recorded just in case it needed to be checked at a later time for terrorist activities.
This nightmare took a strange turn when I examined the data gathering software. It was performing a simple data dump of everything that was passing through. Because of the vast quantity of data, nothing was being done to ensure that it could not be tampered with by anyone should they have access to the data. At a later point one of my friends found himself in court facing a criminal charge of conspiracy to commit murder based on the content of one of the logs that had been recorded.
It's scary, but it is possible for it to happen. The question beomes how do we ensure the integrity of the data that is in the recording? If you wanted to prevent accidental tampering with the data, then using some form of checksum on individual blocks of data would provide for that, however a malicious tamperer could simply alter the checksum for the given blocks to prevent their detection. Based on the quantity of information being gathered, you could chain the checksums. Initialize the first block to some random piece of information. checksum it. For the next checksum initialize it from the content of the previous checksum. The principle is used in various encryption systems (Cipher Block Chaining). If you wish to tamper with the data in-stream you need to alter the checksum from the point of alteration to the end of the recording.
As simulteneously you have a program continually writing new blocks of information to the storage device, you would need to either (a) insinuate a program that would alter the checksums as they are written to the device, or (b) interfere with the recording program to possess the new checksum just prior to the next write to the device, thereby having it perform the updating for you.
Both techniques are not impossible to perform, in fact the first is downright trivial. The only way of bypassing this sort of tampering is to ensure that the recording device is isolated in some way from the data that it is recording.
For this purpose, it would need to be a specially assembled recording device which possesses two fail-hot network interfaces as it's only method of communication to the outside world. A fail-hot network interface pair is one that when the power is removed simply keeps the network traffic passing through without interruption.
Secondly it would just record the data, it would have no interpretation capabilities. The reason for this is to remove any chance that it could be subverted through maliciously formed network packets.
The box should be tamper-evident. by having this facility, any efforts to extract the data through physical manipulation of the recording device would be easily noticed, thus rendering the data recorded inadmissable in a court. Tampering with the device would be a criminal offence.
The device would need to be regularly inspected, hot-swapping new devices for old ones so the data recording could carry on uninterrupted.