Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup
I should be - preparing a couple of rather important talks, perfecting a general purpose parser which is displaying some silly bugs which I can’t seem to track down, getting started on some serious writing up, doing hush hush planning work for a new venture I joined a week or so ago.
Well, so I have been working on those things too - but I’ve also been spending a bit too much time writing things which don’t really have a lot to do with increasing productivity.
A guy on a mailing list I’m subscribed to sent us all the results of his IQ test via email recently. The email also invited (no, urged) all of us to test our own IQ online. Regardless of the dubious merits of an IQ test that is conducted online; it appears that this application had also managed to surreptitiously email an advertisement of itself to all the contacts in his address book.
Perhaps signing up for an IQ test at a site which does something so sleazy was the first test.
Of course, the rather confused account had it that the address book was actually in Gmail. Now, Outlook having its address book raped and pillaged by the passing massmailer Viking worm is passé. Everyone knows about it, no one raises an eyebrow. But Gmail? A web based email service had its address book plundered? That just doesn’t sound right.
Oh, wait. It gets better. Dazed and confused, the same person goes onto tell us (the mailing list) that he may have actually used his credit card to pay for this test. Or for something else, maybe. The account gets a little bit hazy at this point. Apparently, alcohol was also featured heavily in this tale of confusion and intelligence testing. Everyone reading this can raise eyebrows in shock and go “Well, I never!” about now.
I’ve heard of using firewater to stoke up courage before a big battle; but never before as Gatorade for an IQ test. Also, plastic mixed with alcohol is a surefire way to declare bankruptcy. I actually know of a guy who used to leave his plastic at home when he went out drinking. Well, he worked for a credit card company, so he probably knew how much the interest rates hurt.
Of course, this is all in keeping with the grand tradition of getting a client liquored up before relieving him of cash. Everyone, from confidence tricksters to sharp businessmen, knows of that trick. The excellent trick here is that the client paid for the booze. Wooo. So, maybe the makers of the IQ test site were smart after all.
Also on the subject of unwanted purchases, did you know that distraction buys rack up £46m annually for retailers? Distraction buys are items bought to mask embarrassing purchases, such as condoms and treatments for piles, in the same shopping basket. Can we have a price check on CONDOMS PLEASE? AISLE 5? CONDOMS? YEAH, THE SCENTED VARIETY. THANK YOU. Apparently, pretending that it’s for a wedding getaway vehicle decoration is lame now. Who knew?
Update: and seen on IM, a few minutes later…
chickenbutt: scented condoms? what scents do they have dude?
drac: the vending machine downstairs had quite a few
drac: apple, peach, banana
drac: mwahahaha… a banana scented condom
chickenbutt: apple sounds nice
chickenbutt: dont you dare
chickenbutt: i’ll throw you out if you bring a banana scented one
chickenbutt: apple sounds nice though 
chickenbutt: muahahaha
drac: *shock and horror*
drac: now isn’t that just peachy
chickenbutt: you and peach do NOT mix:p
drac: I’m so going to blog this
It’s been a hectic week in more ways than one. This is inspite of the fact that I’ve been spending more time on an outside project and goofing off than I have on the work I need to get done by the end of the month. The work I need to finish is all planned and ready to be started on this week though. More on the outside project later; I think some of you may know the name already and at least it’s getting some use, so it’s not a complete dud. Still haven’t decided exactly what I want to do with it or where it needs to end up, though.
Since I actually have the time to entertain myself; the mini-flutter of the week has been (according to some, anyway) the rise of the dissing blog. Yeah, so it’s petty, juvenile, perhaps even malicious to create a blog specifically to point out a few nasty home truths and in some cases, exaggerations and malicious overstatements. Was it humour? No, I think it stepped outside the boundary of being funny. Was it someone who wanted to get a rise from folks? Absolutely. Did it succeed? Yes, I sort of think it did. An interesting facet for me is the notion (expounded elsewhere), that being anonymous automatically confers minimal merit on the statements in the blog. Did the Emperor really know the kid who shouted out that he was naked? I doubt it. Was the kid’s observation less valid because he was unknown to the Emperor? I think not. Pertinently, how much should the Emperor care that he might be naked?
Doug pinged me out of the blue yesterday. Who’s Doug, you might wonder… Well, this is the person who coined the nick that I use on IRC (well, in certain channels, at least) and he was my co-worker and friend for almost an year of hectic startup madness. Because of management insanity (and layoffs that resembled Stalin’s purges of the Red Army in their ruthlessness) we ended up doing the work of about 10 people. That’s a lot of servers to configure and keep running, network cables to lay down and sundry stuff to sort out. Actually, I never laid down an inch of network cabling, the hardware side of things was strictly the Dougster’s domain. My area was making sure the servers stayed up… well, one of the areas, anyway. That was why I used to dread the nightly sweepers and subnet scanners (and most of all, the random DDOS) who’d cause servers to flood and slow down during that era, but that’s probably a story best left untold. We actually spent a lot of time hanging out in freezing cold server rooms and chatting via IM - and I got to know the guy about as well as anyone could.
Shortly after I came back home, emotionally drained and hating the thought of doing any more programming (yes, really) - I heard that Doug had turned down a raise and gone back home to NJ. He was unhappy about leaving the west coast; but he said it was the right time. I don’t doubt that. The place joined the swirling toilet bowl of over-extended and out-of-business startups 6 months later. Last I heard from him, he was setting up his own consulting company and he was excited about that… He was slightly shell shocked from the gigantic clusterfuck that was our meeting ground, exactly the same as I was - and any escape, even back to the dreary urban sprawl of ghetto Joisey, seemed good to him at the time.
That was then.
And someone will scrawl “drac waz hea-yah” in the background.
Anyway, a moderately eventful weekend with a couple of random visits to pubs and the discovery that sweet cider at the Masons now costs a whopping £2.60 per pint. Ok, so £2.60 a pint isn’t big news darn souf, but us poor northeners are accustomed to cheaper booze, ye know?
In other news, I’m slowing down the pace of development on my counter assimilation toy - not through lack of interest, but rather through lack of time. It is, however, reasonably feature complete for the sorts of things I want it to do. Against all rational impulses, I even added tagging - although I’d probably prefer watchlists to tags (from the technorati approach). More interestingly, I think I’m finally getting the hang of cross browser JavaScript, and it isn’t half bad. Lots of the little idioms that I’m accustomed to transferred smoothly across the great Microsoft/Opera/Mozilla chasm and the stuff which didn’t work was relatively easy to work around. Incidentally, Opera 9 implements the -opacity CSS property for images. Woo.
It seems hardly credible to a person venturing towards the city - but there is only one pub in a 3 mile radius which serves something other than the ghastly Strongbow cider. So, I venture towards The Vic in search of Scrumpy Jack and discover that the Vic kitchens are closed. It’s 1325 on a Friday afternoon. On St. Patrick’s Day. And the kitchens are closed? Fer cryin’ out loud! Two quick pints later, I was out and about heading towards the Snack shack for some quick (and probably unhealthy) fodder. Vic, you’ve just made absolutely sure that I never step inside your premises for serious drinking. No good food in a pub = no point paying a return visit.
In other news, I’ve been making promises for so long that it’s about time I showed something for it… ladies and gents, the counter assimilation has begun.
Web 2.0 or Star Wars ? I scored a reasonable 36. On one hand, I am ashamed at having been proven to conform to a stereotype of Star wars nerds, yadda yadda whatever.
On the other hand, I think … I only scored 36 out of 43. That’s like … 80%? Man, am I a loser or what? I need to re-read the series.
But at least they got one part of the quiz assessment wrong. My parents don’t have a basement in their house, thus I never lived in it and hell, I haven’t lived in my parents house for a few years now. So there. Nyah nyah.
This is a Greasemonkey script I started writing a couple of weeks ago. I had a specific set of needs from a site I visit on occasion and it seemed like a Greasemonkey script would be the easiest way to accomplish what I needed. It also helped alleviate the boredom of some tedious quarterly report writing. Yeah, and some of the JavaScript used in the script will be reused for another (work) project.
All of these are poorly disguised justifications after the fact, but what does the script do? Well, when I do visit kottu.org, I do so for a specific reason - to be entertained by the aggregated blogs on show. I don’t need the Flickr streams; and I consider the blogroll and much of the sidebar redundant. In most cases, I also don’t need to read the short excerpt. Scan the headlines, in and out. But the existing layout didn’t let me do this easily.
I spent the morning upgrading to Dapper Drake, the next Ubuntu release. Incidentally, my laptop (for this is the machine which permanently dualboots Windows and Linux) started with Warty Warthog, then got a dist-upgrade to Hoary Hedgehog, then to Breezy Badger and now onto Dapper Drake. No reinstalls, just dist-upgrade each time and the major things just work (with a bit of tweaking). That’s pretty darn impressive, if you ask me.
So much for the good news. The bad news is that I spent the morning fighting Dapper Drake. At the moment, the scoreline is Dapper 1: Drac 0. There is nothing wrong with the default upgrade procedure, just a few minor conflicts with some bleeding edge packages that I had installed from other sources. The new Gnome looks very … orange and it seems that hibernation and other functions that one comes to expect from laptops actually work. Much to my shock and horror, it even seems like ACPI detects the battery charge level. Wooo. No luck yet with encrypted wLAN though. Fuggit.
The really bad news is that Dapper Drake packages a bleeding edge, SVN updated version of XFCE. My settings got hosed; my careful menu customizations were ignored and general chaos ensued. Even worse, the bleeding edge Dapper XFCE does not include all the goodies (where is lil star? why remove it? whyyyy?). Revert to the old XFCE ? Nuh huh. No can do. So, in a fit of juvenile pique, I threw the obligatory hissy fit (Oh noes. My desktop environment of choice doesn’t work!) and booted back into Windows.
My options at this point appear to be: compile the goodies from scratch off SVN source, beg/plead/threaten people till the Xubuntu crowd update xfce4-iconbox or switch to another DE/WM. I suppose its as good a time as any to try out the intriguing Ion or even the more conventional Fluxbox/Blackbox WMs but ummm… I just want to get some work done this week? I’m easily twice as productive with a familar (read: heavily customized) desktop environment than with a plain vanilla Gnome or KDE. Even worse, it seems like Dapper Drake could become Ubuntu 6.06 (instead of 6.04). The rationale for this possible delay is explained here. That means two more months before packages have to be frozen in place. *sigh*. It’s all a conspiracy to drive me back to XP, I tell you.
In other news, it appears that the student bars around campus are being threatened with closure. The response from the SU? Urge everyone to go to the bars last week (I was oblivious, as usual) and then, boycott the bars this week. Geddit? Barcott. I am Jack’s utter lack of concern about all of this though. Wake me up when the campus bars start offering edible food because till that point in time, there really isn’t much reason for a visit there.
Unless you’ve never visited the website proper and just read the RSS feed, you would have noticed some changes from yesterday night. I’m experimenting with a change in layout. I’m ambivalent about the change at the moment, so a reversion to the old setup is a distinct possibility.
There was a time when I’d actually find it hilarious to dissect a few random newstories or links every day and construct a post out of it. If getting a lot of traffic was more a concern, that’s probably the way to go. Commentary on topical events drives traffic, as lots of news aggregator sites will attest. It’s still funny to do this from time to time, but the focus of what I ramble on about now has subtly shifted (and become more boring, in a way).
But I still have interesting, weird and bizarre links to share, so I wanted a link manager to post these items into the blog anyway. Far less commentary, innuendo, punnery and sarcasm than before - but the links remained. They even have a separate RSS feed here. Except they were tucked away inside a small widget - in a page that was already filled with text. Not a great believer in gratuitous use of whitespace, am I?
So I’ve moved the snippets links into the main body of posts. They still won’t appear in the main post feed, but the posting chronology is now synchronized with the main entries on the blog. That’s a fancy way of saying that snippets and blog entries are now intermingled and appear in chronological order. Still don’t like the spacing between entries and sundry aesthetic details, but there you go.
There is a name for a guy who, having had a vending machine cruelly eat up his hard earned pennies and not dispense goods yesterday, revisits the same vending machine today and buys something from it again.
Yes, I kicked the fricking vending machine yesterday when it swallowed up the cash and refused to dispense goodies. Yes, it just hurt my fricking toe, the chunky KitKat refused to drop. At least I got sympathy from a bunch of random undergrads clustered around the adjacent coffee machine.
Weak willed? Trusting? Positively bovine in lack of short term memory? All of these?
Idiocy, thy name is drac.
Because walking the extra 5 minutes to buy the same packet of crisps sans 20% vending machine markup would have been much more difficult.
On the other hand, these crisps are so deliciously addictive that I’m led to wonder if it’s being spiked with something. It tastes so chemically salty that it absolutely can’t be good for human consumption.
And yet I guzzle it as if chemical and salt laden crisps are going out of style.
We had a fire alarm yesterday. No, more accurately, we had fire alarms (note: plural). The usual setup around here is that there is an annual fire drill conducted around spring time. We had our fire drill for 2006 about two weeks ago. The first time the fire alarm went off yesterday, a lot of people could have been excused for thinking it was the weekly test of the alarm system - except it was the wrong day of the week.
Turns out that the MySQL access control weirdness I referenced earlier was due to a bug. Yes, a bug in the MySQL database engine. I’d glance despairingly heavenwards and ask “Why meeeeeee”, but my throat hurts too much to summon the pathos such an utterance would require. In other words, I should bitch about my bad luck, but I’m not going to…
To make matters even better (or worse, as the case is), this appears to be one of those elusive, hard-to-find and harder-to-fix synchronization bugs - not easily reproduced.
In other news, the AUT strike begins today. Colour me completely oblivious. I spared a brief pitying look at the academic staff who were parading outside the halls with placards - complete with freezing winds and the odd splatter of sleet to keep them company. If you’re looking for favourable omens about a strike, a day with weather like today should probably give you the hint that you’re better off staying at home in the warmth.
On a completely different tack, it seems that the new Web 2.0 startup phenomenon is focused mainly on news/blog search and aggregator sites. Places with a “social” (as in, please login and do the editorial scut work for me) twist, places which offer a “democratic” veneer of allowing individuals to pick their own items of interest. Interestingly, a recent study concluded that users only visit six sites on a regular basis. Actually, that’s not quite true - the exact quote is
The study found that half of internet-using Britons (51 per cent) visit just six or less sites on a regular basis
At least the plethora of new aggregator sites makes it easy to switch - but how long they’ll last is anyone’s guess. Actually, that’s a bit cynical - but I guess I’m entitled to chant “business model, business model, business model” whenever someone does a Ballmeresque screech of “Web 2.0, Web 2.0, Web 2.0″ in my ears. Might be worth adding a largish list of Web 2.0 services. I actually spent quite a lot of time at listible.com. Who doesn’t like lots of lists of stuff? Not me.
Wordpress 1.5.2 has a definite known vulnerability. Be prepared to upgrade soonish (like today) when an upgrade is available. Wordpress 2.0.1 might be vulnerable too. In fact, it probably is - and a fix is (I think) already available.
Are we worried? Not the slightest. In fact, I upgraded mostly to avoid the hassle of jumping from 1.5.2 to 2.0.x in a hurry when the (inevitable) security alert came out. Upgrading from one version of 2.0 to another is far more straightforward. (That’s a long and elaborate way of saying “told ya so”. But then, who’s keeping score?)
YouTube has the video for The Simpsons intro, as played by real life actors. Cute. But they got Marge’s hair wrong. And Homer isn’t balding. Bah. The obsessive compulsive in me demands attention to those details.
But are we worried? nope.
This may shock some of you, but it appears that Jessica Alba has a distinct problem with exposing boobies to an adoring public. Well, at least to those in the adoring public who run out and grab copies of Playboy off the newstands for £3.99 (yes, I was in a newsstand and conducted a bit of research into the exact store price of Playboy. The lengths to which I go to factcheck a story, I tell you).
The story in short - Playboy swipes a photo for the cover of the March issue. This is noticed by the high powered Alba legal team, who promptly issue a seven page cease and desist letter. The good name and reputation of their client was besmirched because there is [an expectation among the public that the female appearing on the cover will also appear naked or semi-naked]. Clearly, Jessica Alba has a problem with appearing semi nekkid in public. No, wait. she doesn’t. Able was I ere I saw … Alba’s boobies. Just not inside Playboy. On the topic of boobies, it appears that squeezing them is ok if you say you’re not interested in them in that way. I don’t plan on using that excuse anytime soon. Also, I clearly spend way too much time at thesuperficial.com.
Am I worried ? Errm. So long as they don’t compile a list of recently visited sites, nope.
Despite being the word of the year, Brokeback Mountain didn’t win many Oscars. Completely unconcerned am I. Old news, to boot. However, if I read one more blog post that says something like “omg it’s a movie about ghey cowboys..lolololololol”, I may go postal. Or get Captain Obvious to beat the author up, whichever is easier. It’s not exactly a Snape kills Dumbledore style plot twist, is it? Sheesh. (Aside: if someone hasn’t read the most recent Harry Potter yet, you heard it here first (not). Snape. Kills. Dumbledore. Cry more, pls.)
I have to see a man about some MySQL access control weirdness tomorrow and my throat hurts. A precursor of what I’ll need to do to get things fixed? I hope not. *grin*
Am I worried? Hell yes. I don’t want to be some random flu bug’s bitch for the next 3 days, kthx.
I’ve heard this observation before - it seems that the South Indian/Sri Lankan way of saying “yes” or “ok” or indicating an affirmative action is to shake our head from side to side. I’ve never noticed it myself, but considering that I don’t spend staring at myself in the mirror, I’m not surprised.
Shaking your head elsewhere on the planet implies “no”. So, imagine that you think that you’re agreeing with someone (and nodding) when it appears to them that you’re actually saying no. Weird, eh?
So, yesterday my assessor shows up and he tells me that Bulgaria is the only European country to exhibit the same behaviour. And he asks me to demonstrate this “shake head == yes” phenomenon. And that’s when I realized that it’s impossible to think about it and consciously make a gesture of that sort. Call it performance anxiety, call it self consciousness, whatever. Every response I gave under scrutiny was a shake of the head.
Needless to state, I spent most of yesterday getting a crick in my neck trying to simulate this head nodding-shaking phenomenon. I think I have it figured out. The head tilts in a circular motion on affirmation (which seems like a shake of the head to other Europeans) and there is a much more definite side to side shake of the head for a negative. Strangely enough, I can’t think of any situation where people would actually vigorously nod their head up and down for an affirmative.
In Italy, I remember a phrase and a gesture which seems remarkably similar to this circular head shaking business - but they use it to mean something like “I don’t know what the hell is going on”. And Italians punctuate it by waggling their hands at the same time. But the key question: how the heck did Bulgarians and South Indians/Sri Lankans happen to share the same mannerism without having any direct known links?
The Sea Harrier was retired yesterday (that’s a video link and might not work outside the UK).
There is a quote in that video segment by the captain of HMS Illustrious about a known gap in air defences; but they’re “confident that they won’t need the support of Sea Harriers for any coalition led carrier operation”. In other words, the RN will now rely on the Air Force and other members of the a potential coalition to provide air cover for their carriers. Gone are the days where the naval air arm was self sufficient. The most obvious counter to that argument is the Falklands war, I suppose.
The most likely replacement seems to be the JSF, but there is no official word on when they’ll be made available.
