Dan Q

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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…

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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.

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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…

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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.

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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…

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The Jews Are Back In Town (Spread The Word Around)

A large number of orthodox jews have descended upon Aberystwyth as part of an annual tradition going back for as long as anyone seems able to remember. They charter a train and rent out PJM, the student village. It’s an interesting spectacle. I recall that about this time two years ago I had a fire on the beach. The people I’d been there with had gone home, and I stayed to tend the embers. Eventually, I fell asleep, curled up beside the fire, and when I woke up (at around 3am) I found myself surrounded by orthodox jews (of all ages), standing, staring out to sea. As you can imagine, I assumed I must be dreaming, but it gradually became apparent that no, this was actually happening, and the beach really was filled with jews. Trippy.

On other jewish related news, are any of you familiar with Dor Yeshorim, a schecme to reduce the frequency of close-society-breeding related genetic disorders in jews of Eastern European origin? I guess not, but anyway – SmartData is writing the software that tracks the genetic samples submitted by Dor Yeshorim service users, which is keeping folks like Alex and I immensely busy with lots of early mornings and late nights.

In other news; he saw beans, lots of beans, lots of beans, lots of beans; he saw beans, lots of beans, lots of beans, lots of beans.

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An Idea – How To Get Treeware Junk Mail Banned

Here’s a thought: a way to try to get unsolicited (treeware) junk mail banned –

Every time you receive a bit of junk mail, just go and put it back in the post box: it’s almost all franked mail, and so the post office will re-sort it and deliver it back to you. Put a tally on the reverse side, and add one to it each time you forward it to yourself. If enough people did it, I wonder how many recursions you’d need to put through the post office before the postal workers union petitioned the government to disallow the sending of unsolicited treeware junk mail.

Not sure if it’d work, but I think I’ll do it anyway, just out of curiosity about how high a tally I can get before the post office start refusing to re-deliver them. Heh.

Got my Dad’s web site done. Just waiting for the domain name registration to go through so I can deploy it.

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Making Progress

Claire’s at work this Saturday morning, so I’m taking advantage of the oppertunity to finish the web site I’m developing for my dad – almost got a deployable version ready, which is nice, because I could do with getting his feedback on it and (assuming all’s well with design and whatnot) deploying it “live” on Monday morning. Which is all good, because I need the money!

The folks who now own the cafe below us – our new landlords – have made great strides in getting it ready for use. It’s now got tables, and chairs, and a chiller unit, and some stock, and a coffee maker, and all kinds of stuff. It’s been entirely repainted and refloored and redecorated. It’s pretty much ‘there’. They’ve even put up the new sign. The new sign advertises the cafe’s web site, mgees.com. I’ve taken a look… and… it would appear that they tried to make a web page in Microsoft Word (bad start), then ran the source code through a copy of Dadadodo to ensure that it was completely mangled, before they uploaded it. Jeez. Still, they’ve asked me to quote them for a new one, so once I’m done with this site for my dad I’ll see what I can do for them.

Speaking of Dadadodo, Claire‘s been playing with it recently. You should see what happens when you put the book of Genesis through it… oh; we laughed.

Back to the code…

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A Win For A Sensible Web Browser

I’m making progress with the people I work with. I’ve now got six of the eight folks in our office using Opera (they were formerly using Microsoft Internet Explorer, and some of them have tried Mozilla Firefox. Perhaps my recent spate of ‘blog posts criticising Microsoft’s browser – combined with the various hacks I’ve been showing them that I can use to exploit an IE terminal – has had some part in this.

Just Phil and Sarah left who still use IE as their primary browser. Think I’ll install Firefox on the sly and see how long it takes them to notice.

Win. R.

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