If I were an STD, I would be…
Year: 2004
Ferreting Out Piracy
CNet News has a story
on the BSA‘s attempts to educate children
that copyright evasion and piracy is wrong, with the help of their new cartoon mascot – a ferret (shown).
And yes, I’ve used the picture of their new mascot without their permission. <wink>
Is a ferret really the best mascot they could think of…?
Thrashing
Thrashing is a computer science term referring to an undesirable occurrence in multiprocessing systems.
When a processor is given multiple jobs to do, it services them a little each in a round-robin fashion (assuming that no priority system is in effect), until each is done. This is, of course, actually significantly less efficient than doing each job one at a time, but doing a little of each job, a little at a time is more productive when dealing with humans, who like – for example – their web page to download at the same time as they write a Word document.
Unfortunately, optimizations to this system can cause it to go wrong. By giving the processor more and more jobs to do, it eventually passes a critical point at which it is spending more time performing administrative tasks and managing it’s ’round robin’ scheme than it is actually performing the tasks you want it to. You’ve probably seen a system doing this. The solution, of course, is to either stop giving the system jobs to do until it can finish some of those it already has, or, better still, to kill some of the running processes to enable the processor to catch up on it’s workload. The solution is not to click irritably on the buttons, or repeatedly demand more and more of the processor.
Today, I feel like a thrashed processor.
How To Keep Up With The Latest Happings On Scatmania (or What Are All Those Pretty Buttons?)
If you’re looking for a way to keep up-do-date with the latest Scatmania happenings, it’s now really really easy. I’ve enhanced my weblog with a heap of useful syndication tools that make keeping track of my latest activities a doddle, even for those of you who are unenlightened and can still be caught using an awful choice of web browser.
You may have noticed that at the bottom of the Scatmania menu there’s a series of button. Most of these buttons (the top five) relate to subscribing to Scatmania, like this:
| RSS |
RSS is a popular format for syndicating news and views on the internet,
supported by most weblog communities and applications, as well as by many news sites. To view RSS content, you will need an
RSS Aggregator such as Pluck (a plug-in for Internet Explorer), RSSOwl (for most operating systems) or the attractive NewsMac
for MacOS. The Opera web browser now supports RSS feeds, too, and it looks likely that other browsers will soon follow suit.
RSS is a great way to keep up with your friends weblogs and your favourite news sites. |
| Atom | ATOM, like RSS, is a simple way to keep up-to-date with your favourite sites. Just download an ATOM-enabled newsreader (some, like BottomFeeder, can read RSS feeds as well) and point it at the sites you want to watch. Scatmania publishes an ATOM feed of the latest blog entries. |
| ESF | ESF is a small, fast, and simple new way to publish content like weblogs. There aren’t really any programs for reading it right now. Why not consider writing one (see how simple the data format is). |
| CDF | CDF, developed my Microsoft as part of Internet Explorer 4, was supposed to be the future of the way we used the web and subscribed to the services of web sites… but it never took off. However, Internet Explorer to this day provides the means to subscribe to ‘active channels’, and for Internet Explorer users, this may be the easiest way to keep up with Scatmanian events. Just click the button in Internet Explorer and Scatmania will be added to your Favourites list as a submenu, automatically adding new items (and removing old ones) as new entries are added to the blog. Thanks to Aquarionics for suggesting this reincarnation of Internet Explorer ‘active channels’. |
So, now you’ve got no excuse for not being up-to-date with my blog… or anybody elses!
The other buttons are mostly just me showing off because I can write standards-compliant code – click on them and see for yourself.
1984 Revisited: What If Apple Took The ‘Microsoft Route’
Daring Fireball has an article about “Apple vs. Microsoft” with a difference. Contrary to many, he argues that if Apple had taken the ‘Microsoft route’ in 1984, with their hardware and software (significantly superior to IBM-PC platforms running Microsoft software), by licensing the platform, they wouldn’t necessarily be the market leader today. It’s a well-written and compelling article, and if you’ve any interest in OS politics or parallel universes, it’s worth a look.
SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Competing Directly Against Microsoft May Be Hazardous to Your Company
Weather Situation Unclear For Weekend’s Parachuting
As you may know, I’ll be doing a crash course in parachuting – hopefully climaxing in a solo freefall – next weekend, to celebrate my (finally) getting a degree, courtesy of my dad. The weather reports don’t look too favourable, though – potentially stormy at the end of this week. Hmmph. We’ll see. It’ll take more than a little lightning to stop me from throwing myself out of an aeroplane.
In other news, Claire‘s been using the student loan repayment calculator on The Guardian’s Education site, looking at different career paths and calculating how long it would take her to repay her student loans (at £18,000 + inflation only, it would take her about 40 years). She clicked on “Web Site Designer”, just out of curiosity, and the resulting page caused her browser to crash. Somehow, this is very funny.
Windows Security
Just recieved the following error message from Windows, while trying to connect to a shared directory elsewhere on the network… have never seen one like it before, so I thought I’d share it with you:
Oh, so now I’m a hacker? Thanks, Windows.
Dan Breaks The Internet… Again
Whoops. You’d have thought I’d have learnt my lesson when I fucked around with BIND last year, and ‘broke’ a small portion of the internet, but no. I managed to ‘break the internet’ again while playing with the Domain Name System settings on big. That’s why Scatmania was inaccessible for the last day or so (to most people).
In other news, spent Sunday in the office, working on getting the database for the project I’ve been working on live and online, with some success, despite the power company’s best attempts to stop me. Those in Aber will have experienced the power cuts of Friday and Sunday (half an hour in the second case), which crippled one of SmartData‘s computers with a power spike to it’s PSU – one I’ll be glad to be rid of, admittedly (yet another cheaply made piece of junk from Microland UK). But nevertheless, the power cut was of great inconvenience to those of us trying to work to a deadline, on a Sunday, and wanting to get home in time to go out and see I, Robot. I sat outside in the sun-come-drizzle and read a book that was one of my recommended course texts but that I never got around to reading while I was actully doing my degree, and listened to the ocassional screams of the UPS bricks to let me know that I still couldn’t actually get on with some work.
I, Robot was OK… kind-of a re-hashing of the concepts put forward in Blade Runner, Electric Dreams, The Matrix, A.I., and Bicentennial Man, with an excessive use of bullet-time and slow motion. Coherent, though… but you will come out of the cinema saying “See every other robot movie for examples of this theme.”
Right; off to work…
Bushism Of The Day
“They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people – and neither do we.”
Full story from BBC News.
Painful Work Patterns
This is actually getting quite painful. I’ve now been at work for 13 hours straight, and for a total of 40 hours so far this week. Still; next week should be marginally better.
The knackeredness I can deal with. What’s nasty is that I’m not seeing as much of Claire as I’d like.
I’m Surrounded By Idiots
Conversation with a co-worker, who shall remain nameless:
Her: Is anybody any good at Fireworks?
Me: Yeh; you just light the blue touchpaper and run. But seriously, you ought’a be using Corel Photo-Paint.
(I wander over to her desk, and see that she’s working with a bitmapped image of our logo – she’s trying to remove some of the text from it… using the text tool… the text is jaggedy and quite obviously bitmapped)
Her: Why can’t I select this text?
Me: Umm… because it’s not text; it’s an image. The same reason that if I scanned in some of my handwriting and gave you that as a file, you couldn’t select it.
Her: But it is text: look…
(at this point, I collapse into a blubbering heap on the floor… this person has several years of an internet computer science degree tucked under her belt, but can’t understand the difference between vector-based and bitmap graphics [pretty fundamental year one web design stuff])
Computer Hardware For Sale: Bargain Prices
Overclockers Australia is running an article, collecting together advertisements for computer hardware and software over the last quarter of a century. I’ve pulled out a few of my favourites:
- 1989 Tandy 500 MC Professional – only $8499; VGA graphics, 386/20MHz, 2MB RAM – this computer’s a real beast: and what a bargain!
- Late-80’s Portable Computer – just $2295; 8" (monochrome) screen, CP/M (w/ WORDSTAR, MAILMERGE, and SUPERCALC). Has 64K of RAM and not one but two floppy disk drives (double-density)!
- Looking to increase your hard storage space (this means you, Paul)? There’s a 10-MB Hard Disk (sold in 1981) for the sweet price of $3398! Yes, that’s 10 megabytes, not gigabytes. About the same size as a modern desktop computer CD-ROM drive, and with a slower seek time.
- TRS-80 Model 16 (wonderful piece of hardware) for just $8499: 128K of RAM, dual-processors (one MC68000, one Z-80), multi-processing, page-capable memory model, optional 8MB HDD, two serial and one parallel port, and an 80×24 character 30.5cm green screen. Add a second floppy drive for just $500 more!
Those offers sound fresh! I think I’ll see if I can get a trade in against Duality…
Doom 3 Screenshots
Mmm… There’s some Doom 3 screenshots online…
64-Bit Columbine
Toy… Phill from work has gotten himself a sweet new AMD64 processor; I went round to help him install it after he thought he’d broken it during assembly (turns out he’d missed a power lead and hadn’t fully locked the processor into it’s socket). Jeez; those 64-bit processors have a heap of pins (as one might expect). Runs pretty cool, though.
Claire, Paul, Bryn, and I watched Bowling For Columbine yesterday evening. Most of us’d seen it before, but it’s worth a second look. We came to the eventual conclusion that Michael Moore‘s films are all about the shock value, and that his books carry a far more meaningful (and less biased) examination of the topics… and that this choice was made because to get through to the “stereotypical American white male”, he feels that you need to shock them with a film. Would his books get to the people who he felt needed them without the films to ‘get the foot in the door’.
Gonna be a long week at work.
Reb’s Back
Looks like I am making a regular reader out of Reb, my ex-. She posted another comment today. This time I’d improved the trace algorithm already (mostly out of curiosity). She’s connecting from her Tiscali IP (80.40.255.212). There’s no (meaningful) firewall running on the connection, and ports 439 (DASP), 445 (Microsoft-DS) [that could be interesting], 1723 (PPTP), 2001 (DC), and 6001 (X11:1) are open for incoming traffic (although the first two are filtered). Interesting that there’s a PPTP and X11 server running at that IP… looks like it’s probably a business server. Might see if I can probe it a little further… that wide-open port 445 looks like an interesting entrance…