Suddenly, I don't feel so culinarily adventurous.

(For non-Australians, SBS is our "ethnic broadcaster", which means it shows equal amounts of soccer, and european soft-porn art-house movies. This led someone I went to university with to dub the network "Soccer Before Sex")

I was developing a website for work during the week (just an internal project-tracking one), and I thought I'd share this nifty CSS trick I came up with that insets a header into the border of a box without screwing around with tables. Requires a CSS2-capable browser.

(Any typographical errors mine, footnotes/references elided)

When American Vice-Presidend Dick Cheney said that the 'war on terrorism' could last for fifty years or more, his words evoked George Orwell's great prophetic work, Nineteen Eighty-Four. We are to live with the threat and illusion of endless war, it seems, in order to justify increased social control and state repression, while great power pursues its goal of global supremacy. Washington is transformed into 'chief city of Airstrip One' and every problem is blamed on the 'enemy', the evil Goldstein, as Orwell called him. He could be Osama bin Laden, or his successors, the 'axis of evil'.

Read the rest of this entry…

I got knocked out in the second round of the pool competition, to someone I really should have beaten. I'm not particularly impressed.

Ever Onward, from the 1940 IBM Songbook

Ever Onward! Ever Onward!
That's the sprit that has brought us fame.
We're big but bigger we will be,
We can't fail for all can see, that to serve humanity
Has been our aim.
Our products now are known in every zone.
Our reputation sparkles like a gem.
We've fought our way thru
And new fields we're sure to conquer, too
For the Ever Onward IBM!

I've come to the conclusion that what needs to happen for the last Star Wars movie is that George Lucas goes back to being producer, Joss Whedon writes the script, and David Fincher directs.

Big Brother is proudly brought to you by the Genital Herpes Facts Pack.

You have two giraffes. The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.

Mmmmmmmmmmm. Bacon and eggs. And mushrooms. Lots of mushrooms.

My CD-player is dead. Not Happy, Jan.

The Register reports that there are more problems with biometrics than just fake gelatin fingerprints. German magazine c't has tested consumer face-recognition, fingerprint-reading and iris-scanning devices, concluding that most of them can be fooled pretty easily.

While at work, I use Windows 2000. This it not by any choice of mine, it's based entirely on a choice made by IBM several years ago to never finish fully functional Linux version of their Java IDE, VisualAge for Java. (The replacement for VAJ, Websphere Studio Application Developer, is available for Linux. We still have a lot of projects tied up in VAJ, but once we stop working on them, it's bye-bye Windows.)

Today, I got around to doing what all computer users, regardless of OS, must do. I had to install the latest set of patches. When I got to WindowsUpdate, I discovered that there were three "critical updates" that I had to download, or be faced with ruin and damnation. The problem was, you couldn't install all three. You had to download one, install it, reboot, download the next, install it, reboot, download the third, install it, and reboot.

I remember when I first installed Win2k and was amazed how few times I had to reboot to set the machine up. What happened to those good old days?

Even if I were to accept that I had to reboot, I still take offence at this disgusting waste of my valuable time. One of the whole points of computers was supposed to be the automation of repetitive tasks. There is absolutely no technical reason why I should not be able to download all the updates I want, and then hit a button to tell Windows to just keep rebooting itself until they're all installed.

No technical reason, but a significant practical one - Microsoft just don't give a shit that my time, and my employer's time, has to be used up playing nurse-maid to their incompetent update system.

Oh, and while writing this, I discover that I have to reinstall the first update I downloaded. It reappeared in the list of critical updates, presumably because it was trashed by one of the other patches. The software should have known this was going to happen, and told me to install them in the other order.

The computer should be serving me. Not vice versa.

While at work, I use Windows 2000. This it not by any choice of mine, it's based entirely on a choice made by IBM several years ago to never finish fully functional Linux version of their Java IDE, VisualAge for Java. (The replacement for VAJ, Websphere Studio Application Developer, is available for Linux. We still have a lot of projects tied up in VAJ, but once we stop working on them, it's bye-bye Windows.)

Today, I got around to doing what all computer users, regardless of OS, must do. I had to install the latest set of patches. When I got to WindowsUpdate, I discovered that there were three "critical updates" that I had to download, or be faced with ruin and damnation. The problem was, you couldn't install all three. You had to download one, install it, reboot, download the next, install it, reboot, download the third, install it, and reboot.

I remember when I first installed Win2k and was amazed how few times I had to reboot to set the machine up. What happened to those good old days?

Even if I were to accept that I had to reboot, I still take offence at this disgusting waste of my valuable time. One of the whole points of computers was supposed to be the automation of repetitive tasks. There is absolutely no technical reason why I should not be able to download all the updates I want, and then hit a button to tell Windows to just keep rebooting itself until they're all installed.

No technical reason, but a significant practical one - Microsoft just don't give a shit that my time, and my employer's time, has to be used up playing nurse-maid to their incompetent update system.

Oh, and while writing this, I discover that I have to reinstall the first update I downloaded. It reappeared in the list of critical updates, presumably because it was trashed by one of the other patches. The software should have known this was going to happen, and told me to install them in the other order.

The computer should be serving me. Not vice versa.

The top 10 Things We Want To Hear Samuel L. Jackson say in the Star Wars Prequel: 'What' ain't no planet I've ever heard of! Do they speak Bocce on 'What'?

Top 15 new Star Wars euphemisms for masturbation: Lightsaber practice with Captain Solo

Jamie Zawinsky does fridge-magnet poetry. ...since a day without dada is like fish ventricle capacitor

Slashdot talks about the RealNames "Blame Microsoft" game, making the long post I was going to write on the subject completely redundant.

A company whose business plan solely consists of maintaining a single contract is doomed. A company whose business plan consists of maintaining a contract with Microsoft, notorious for only ever looking out for number one, is doubly doomed. That RealNames got investors at all is another example of the dot-bomb lunacy writ large.

Today's "yeah, right" quote comes from page 4 of Programming Web Services with SOAP by Snell, Tidwell and Kulchenko (O'Reilly)

Every business issue will have a software-based solution

Yeah sure, whatever.

Google Sets look rather interesting. Go to the sets page, and type in "Dave dee" and "dozy" into the first two boxes. Click the "small set" button, and the set is filled out to include "Dave Dee", "Dozy", "Beaky", "Mick" and "Titch" (who are an obscure 60's band)

Type in "Kennedy", "Lincoln" and "Reagan", and get a list of 13 other presidents' names. I tried putting in random terms, but it seems that "fish", "Elvis" and the "Magna Carta" don't have quite enough in common to form a set.

At this particular moment I have no idea what use this technology will be put to, but it's still a really good example of the cool things that you can do when you've got such a gigantic store of data, and a lot of smart people looking for new things to do with it.

Google Sets look rather interesting. Go to the sets page, and type in "Dave dee" and "dozy" into the first two boxes. Click the "small set" button, and the set is filled out to include "Dave Dee", "Dozy", "Beaky", "Mick" and "Titch" (who are an obscure 60's band)

Type in "Kennedy", "Lincoln" and "Reagan", and get a list of 13 other presidents' names. I tried putting in random terms, but it seems that "fish", "Elvis" and the "Magna Carta" don't have quite enough in common to form a set.

At this particular moment I have no idea what use this technology will be put to, but it's still a really good example of the cool things that you can do when you've got such a gigantic store of data, and a lot of smart people looking for new things to do with it.

Read the rest of this entry…

Triumph for Lucas as new Star Wars film hailed as "not shit"

...

Peter Walker of the Evening Standard has been even more effusive. "Lucas has really come up trumps with this passable, mildly diverting movie", he wrote. "It's not appalling, and that's good news for Star Wars fans everywhere".

Song to the Siren (Tim Buckley, I think)

On the floating, shipless oceans
I did all my best to smile
til your singing eyes and fingers
drew me loving into your eyes.
And you sang "Sail to me, sail to me;
Let me enfold you."
Here I am, here I am waiting to hold you.
Did I dream you dreamed about me?
Were you here when I was full sail?
Now my foolish boat is leaning, broken lovelorn on your rocks.
For you sang, "Touch me not, touch me not, come back tomorrow."
Oh my heart, oh my heart shies from the sorrow.
I'm as puzzled as a newborn child.
I'm as riddled as the tide.
Should I stand amid the breakers?
Or shall I lie with death my bride?
Hear me sing: "Swim to me, swim to me, let me enfold you."
"Here I am. Here I am, waiting to hold you."

From Bruce Schneier's Crypto-gram

Matsumoto uses gelatin, the stuff that Gummi Bears are made out of. First he takes a live finger and makes a plastic mold. (He uses a free-molding plastic used to make plastic molds, and is sold at hobby shops.) Then he pours liquid gelatin into the mold and lets it harden. (The gelatin comes in solid sheets, and is used to make jellied meats, soups, and candies, and is sold in grocery stores.) This gelatin fake finger fools fingerprint detectors about 80% of the time.

Matsumoto uses gelatin, the stuff that Gummi Bears are made out of. First he takes a live finger and makes a plastic mold. (He uses a free-molding plastic used to make plastic molds, and is sold at hobby shops.) Then he pours liquid gelatin into the mold and lets it harden. (The gelatin comes in solid sheets, and is used to make jellied meats, soups, and candies, and is sold in grocery stores.) This gelatin fake finger fools fingerprint detectors about 80% of the time.

The king of the "make an impression while remaining comfortable" movement, however, was the Wearing of the Black. Having been exposed to beatnik imagery and The Lost Boys, we were under the impression that no matter how much of a social maladroit one was, no matter how much one resembled Barbapapa in shape and texture, wearing all-black made one inexpressibly cool. And, as an added bonus, unlike most other forms of looking cool, wearing all black required no effort or iron. Plus, it was easier than picking an actual outfit, because you didn't have to match hues, and the color helped disguise gravy stains. And, near as I can tell, it's since been growing in popularity among the techno-savvy and socially-clueless.

The problem is that when the stigmatized do something, that thing becomes stigmatized. It's the same thing that happened to the word "special." You can't just assign something cool to someone uncool and expect it to remain cool. When I see someone walking down the street wearing all black, even in Berkeley where all-black is considered picnic wear, I don't think "Poet with a tortured soul." I think "Doesn't like picking out shirts, doesn't like doing laundry, probably has a favorite Linux distribution." Two of which apply to me, you guess which ones.

I resemble that remark.

The Emoticon Version of King Lear (abridged)

:-)

.-|

-(

I'm offline right now, this post is mostly a reminder to myself to post the same point to the discussion group when I get home.

Ah, vanity...

Mike Cannon-Brookes

It may be just my newbie-ness - but does Radio sometimes duplicate news (or bring back deleted news) in the Aggregator?

It's a side-effect of the way RSS works.

Most likely, you're seeing the result of someone editing an old entry. If someone modifies a weblog post, the aggregator will show it to you again, as there's no way of it knowing that you've read something similar before and deleted it.

This can get particularly annoying with Doc Searls, who doesn't divide his daily weblog into different entries, he just edits a single entry in place. Every time he updates, you get Yet Another Copy of his really long post in your aggregator, and you have to try to work out what changed.

On the other hand, it's quite possible that now and then Radio might forget you've already seen something, and show it to you again. In this case, I'll give it the benefit of the doubt. :)

Trying to reproduce a Radio News Aggregator. bug. Please move on.

Here is some example HTML, as if I were giving a tutorial: For example, if I were to type <b>this is in bold text</b>, it would appear in the browser as this is in bold text.

Now look at the paragraph above in the aggregator.

(Oh, if you're keeping track, this isn't a new bug at all. Mark Pilgrim found it back in March. I just assumed it'd have been fixed by now.)

Banner Ads We'd Like to See. I like the Oracle and Andersen/Accenture ones. Warning, requires geekiness.

perfect little dream the kind that hurts the most
forgot how it feels well almost
no one to blame always the same
open my eyes wake up in flames
it took you to make me realize
it took you to make me realize
it took you to make me realize?
it took you to make me see the light
smashed up my sanity
smashed up my integrity
smashed up what i believed in
smashed up what's left of me
smashed up my everything
smashed up all that was true
gonna smash myself to pieces
i don't know what else to do
covered in hope and vaseline
still cannot fix this broken machine
watching the hole it used to be mine
just watching it burn in my steady systematic decline
of the trust i will betray
give it to me i throw it away
after everything i've done i hate myself for what i've become
i tried
i gave up
throw it away

(Trent Reznor)

Stand back, I need to vent.

xmlStorageSystem is Bad and Wrong. Or at least, Radio's implementation of it is. I'm not talking any high-falutin' grandioseness like REST vs XML-RPC, or even the fact that the whole "updating files on a webserver via HTTP" thing is done quite a lot better by WebDAV. I'm just looking at the specification itself (and trying to implement the bloody thing) and getting more and more annoyed.

This is the tip of the iceberg:

• ping and getServerCapabilities are always called together by the client. This is pointless redundancy. It would be better if ping returned information that is constantly updated, while getServerCapabilities sends information that either seldomly updates, or only needs to be re-checked in response to client events.
• Some methods try to do too much. The user info struct that Radio sends with every ping is an example. A user's name, email address or blog name change rarely, it'd be far better off to farm that function out to an updateUserinfo verb.
• Some methods return a great deal of irrelevant or redundant information. Pretty much every command tells you what the URL of your blog is, even though that's never going to change. The ping command returns the userinfo you sent in your request, and even tells you what your own client's user-agent is. getServerCapabilities tells you what the URL is for the XML-RPC interface of the server, even though you'd have to have already called that URL to access the method in the first place.
• The protocol is mis-named. The protocol has outgrown its function of being a way to maintain files on an HTTP server, it's the server-side implementation of Radio. This is made obvious by the amount of radio-specific information that the methods return. Perhaps the radioCommunityServer namespace should have all the Radio-specific stuff, which would simplify xmlStorageSystem no end.

I'm tempted to write a specification for a replacement, but the simple fact is that xmlStorageSystem is not really a specification, it's "Whatever Radio Does", and Userland are far too busy with other things to correct an old kludge, especially one that is probably intertwingled with a hell of a lot of code in Radio/RCS/Frontier by now.

There's no reason to treat software any differently from other products. Today Firestone can produce a tire with a single systemic flaw and they're liable, but Microsoft can produce an operating system with multiple systemic flaws discovered per week and not be liable. This makes no sense, and it's the primary reason security is so bad today.

o/~ It's OK to eat fish, 'cause they don't have any feelings o/~

Wow. It's not even released yet, and Wired has a pretty favourable review of Attack of the Clones. Perhaps they downloaded it off the net?

Wow. It's not even released yet, and Wired has a pretty bloody favourable review of Attack of the Clones.. Perhaps they downloaded it off the net?

I've had my month's holiday, and very nice it was too. I went to various bits of California (namely Santa Barbara and various environs of San Francisco), and then up to various bits of Nova Scotia and Ontario. A good time was had by all, mostly. And now it's time to get my head down and finish this damn Radio Community Server thing that's been hanging over my head.

Devilfish, a Java implementation of that subset (and superset) of xmlStorageSystem required to host a Radio weblog, now supports all of the API that Radio relies on. There's a lot of stuff that still needs doing, but I hope to have enough of the non-API stuff (comments, streamlined installation, etc) done by the end of the week that I'll be happy to release the source and put up an example server.

My goal is to get the server working well enough that I can start implementing one or two things the Userland RCS doesn't have. I've got a little list...

Every time you run changeCommunityServer, Radio calls the XML-RPC verb "radioCommunityServer.getInitialResources". One of the things it asks for is the URL of your repository of Radio themes. Of course, not everybody has a repository of Radio themes, so if your server leaves this blank, Radio will continue to poll radio.weblogs.com for themes.

Unfortunately, even if you haven't specified such a URL, Radio will still consider downloading these themes to be part of the community-server-changing process, and if the theme download fails, the entire switch will also fail. Which, once again, is bad news if you're at 30,000ft in a 747, or even if you're doing testing while connected to the net with a 56k modem since the themes take quite a while to arrive.

The fix, I found was to go into system.verbs.builtins.radio.cloud.getInitialResources, and comment out the code bundle that downloads the themes. Radio survives quite happily without it.

(Watch Me Being Boring in Real Time)

On the other hand, this was the shutdown sound.

Ouch.

Estimated total (monetary) cost of holiday: AU$6000. (US$3000)

Dirt in the Ground (Tom Waits)

What does it matter, a dream of love
Or a dream of lies
We're all gonna be in the same place
When we die
Your spirit don't leave knowing
Your face or your name
And the wind through your bones
Is all that remains
And we're all gonna be
We're all gonna be
Just dirt in the ground

The quill from a buzzard
The blood writes the word
I want to know am I the sky
Or a bird
'Cause hell is boiling over
And heaven is full
We're chained to the world
And we all gotta pull
And we're all gonna be
Just dirt in the ground

Now the killer was smiling
With nerves made of stone
He climbed the stairs
And the gallows groaned
And the people's hearts were pounding
They were throbbing, they were red
As he swung out ofver the crowd
I heard the hangman said
We're all gonna be
Just dirt in the ground

Now Cain slew Abel
He killed him with a stone
The sky cracked open
And the thunder groaned
Along a river of flesh
Can these dry bones live?
Ask a king or a beggar
And the answer they'll give
Is we're all gonna be
Yea yeah
We're all gonna be just
Dirt in the ground

I recently bought the NIN "And All That Could Have Been" DVD. If you're an incurable nerd like me, you can read how the whole thing was done with regular DV cameras and Macs.

Already, I miss rushing home to find her waiting.

Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you're no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow.