The Lair

Actually, no. It isn’t. But if it were, I’d totally want to be Bogart - and that’s not just because the cool surname either.

Is it wrong that I still snigger when I say “cowboy analogy”? Ok, it probably is but I blame psy. And since you’re asking - yes, the phrase “cowboy analogy” does occur frequently in my IM conversations. So what?

I watched White Men Can’t Jump on TV this weekend. Made notable (among many other things) by the fact that Woody has lots of of hair in that movie. One of the recurring themes in this ancient (but I suppose classic in its genre) movie is the idea that “A black man would rather miss than look bad”. Funny, I subscribe to that view myself. No, not about the black man but about looking good, even when you lose. Losing is ok, sometimes - so long as you don’t get kicked to the kerb and stomped upon.

As proof, I cite my continuing fandom for Arsenal football club (they look pretty passing the ball around, but can they win games? Umm. NO), the French rugby union team (when they’re good, they’re a really really great running team. Crazy, but pretty to watch) and most recently - the Sri Lankan cricket team.

Yeah, the 4 wickets in 4 balls business. Pretty? Sure. We didn’t get whipped like dogs, although we probably deserved it. On another day, I’d be well content with that.

Today? We still lost. Boo! Hiss!!

So the airbase took a hit or three. I’m not really up for analysis and what does this all mean and random handwringing. Or maybe I am. At any rate, from a fairly self centered point of view - this is going to suck for international travellers.

See, the airport was hit in 2001. That spooked lots of international airlines, just like Cathay Pacific this time around. They pulled out of Colombo. I’m sure there was some wheeling and dealing involved but they eventually started flying in again. In some cases, it took an year or more before the airline consented to operate the route. But there was a twist in the tale. Airlines used aircraft that were probably older than I am. Tattered and sometimes faded seatcovers, no personal video, seats with dimensions where stretching out is a luxury for even a runt like myself. And where the whiff of kerosene and avgas sometimes seeped into the cabin. In short, not the most pleasant flying experience.

And that’s probably going to start all over again. Gah.

And since I’m all about the airline tidbits today - I doubt that this airplane will be visiting the sunny isle any time soon. A double bed and champers? I’d totally fly that. Oh, I mean I’d sleep on the bed, of course. The best thing to do on long airline journeys. Watch movies that I couldn’t be bothered visiting the cinema or renting/buying the DVD for, play some inflight tetris (yes, I still do) and sleep. I’ll even forego the movies and tetris for a comfortable nap or three on a flight anywhere.

Completely unrelated sporting note: they recruited a manager with a crappy record at Middlesborough to coach the English football team. Now, sacking him for poor results will cost the FA £2.5 million. Failing to qualify for the Euro2008 tournament (don’t give me that jazz about having it all to do, we’ve only just started blah blah blah) will cost the FA one hundred meeellllioon pounds. I cleverly deduce that the FA stands to lose £102.5 million quid in a hurry if they don’t do something soon.

In more sport speculation, I wonder how many arms were twisted to clear the Pakistani squad in the Woolmer case. An extremely defensive trio of Pakistanis were interviewed on Newsnight last night too. Ok, so the guy interviewing them was an idiot (leading questions were his speciality) but nobody came out of that room smelling of roses.

So I wrote about some of the online games that I play when I’m bored. Yesterday, I discovered Desktop TD. Oh my. I’ve become so obsessed with tower defense maps that I’ve even downloaded the original War3 bonus maps to play them.

And in something completely different, I swear if I see that line about “Sinking one billion hopes” one more time - I’m going to … I don’t know what I’d do, actually but it wouldn’t be pleasant. I’m more interested in the Agatha Christie-like potential of the Woolmer murder saga. Had a brief disagreement about the more appropriate AC hero/heroine summoned to investigate… I go for Hercule Poirot, Rustifer wanted Miss Marple. Don’t forget that Poirot would probably be ignorant of cricket and that has comedic potential.

“Cricket?! What eees that game?”. Also, where the heck is Horatio Caine when the Jamaicans need him, huh?

Last weekend, the local supermarket was having an offer on pâté and it was being offered at a cheap cheap price. Well, cheaper than I expected, at any rate. Unsurprisingly, I made a grab for it. The ethics of eating a food product made from forcefed geese never really crossed my mind… I wanted to try it again and it was cheap enough to throw away if I really hated the stuff.

It was only on reaching home that I realized my mistake - it wasn’t pure gooseliver but mixed with (the heresy!) pork. That explained the low low price. *sigh*. It still tasted mighty fine though.

And another theme, comfort food. Same supermarket stocked smoked bockwurst. Now if only they had used bockwurst in this recipe… That would have been heartstoppingly fantastic.

And in a final foodie theme, spaghetti bolognaise is the favourite British home cooked dish. OMGWTF?! Why? And there are only four dishes made by the average Brit? Why not just eat pot noodles and forget about the rest then…

Somewhere around this time last year, I was posed with a problem. A bit of (personal) history here - I was doing some crucial (to my thesis, anyway) research and I was busy running experiments and writing papers and the like. By this time last year, I had finished those experiments, my results were decent and I had decided to myself that a break was required. So I was looking around for something to do.

When looking around for something to keep idle hands occupied, I usually tend to scratch my itches - so to speak. I write things that I need. Sometimes this includes writing plugins to spam fighting software, sometimes it involves various other things. But this time, I got this idea about doing an aggregator right. So, it was around this time last year that I decided to build Achcharu. Yeah, Ach is a one year old.

Yeah, so there’s ancient history here, here and here. I really didn’t write much about Ach back in the day but I’ve begun to realize the value of documenting some of my plans and assumptions because … as usually happens … I tend to forget them fairly fast. I blame my advancing years.

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The odds on a subcontinental team winning the Cricket World Cup got a bit shorter, didn’t they? Oh my. I wish I cared more, honestly I do but there were other, more compelling sporting activities happening yesterday.

Ireland were pipped by France to the six nations title. To be honest, I thought the ref for the France/Scotland game (south african?) was pretty fricking awful. He farcically sinbinned the wrong Scottish player for a late tackle and the way he posed the question about the final injury time try made it very difficult for the TV ref to overturn it. Also, the guy scoring the injury time try for France was named Elvis. Remember the name, people. Elvis. Then again, the Irish also had a few forward passes in their tries against the Italians, so it’s all fair. Maybe. Ireland then made up for the lack of St. Patrick’s sporting cheer by mugging Pakistan in cricket. I’m sure the majority in the green isle won’t give a damn about the cricket but meh. Small consolation.

Everytime I write off the French rugby union team, they either sink further into the cesspool of imbecilic play or they turn shit around and kick the stuffing out of their opponents. I’m going to give up trying to predict what they’ll do next. Just like Arsenal in the Premier League, truth be told.

A heretic mails to inform me that his pick for the Cricket WC semifinalists are SL, WI, Aus and SA. He forgot NZ, the follower of the false prophet. He also forgot Bangladesh and Ireland.

Easter is almost upon us. Ok, so I’m not really religious so it doesn’t matter - but there is a certain savour to having the pesky undergrads away from the department for a few weeks. No doubt they’re saying the same thing about their long suffering demonstrators.

Someone (on IRC yesterday?) remarked that Easter is actually a fairly strange holiday. I don’t mean in a religious sense since I have absolutely no context to decide strange and non-strange but more an observation about some of the rituals and symbology of the season. There are eggs usually of the chocolate persuasion. There are also rabbits. Or hares. Or bunnies. Fertility symbols apparently. Which then begs the question why people don’t throw eggs more often. Forget the rice throwing rituals at weddings, just break out a dozen eggs and let fly.

Speaking of throwing eggs, apparently Brits throw away a third of their food. But all of these are apertifs before the main course…

I Used To Believe is like Grouphug or postsecret yet not quite as disturbing just yet. Or maybe it is …

I always thought that the easter bunny had special chocolate flavoured poo, and thats how he made the easter eggs.

(source)

and you ate the eggs, kid?

Why do some things seem so incongruous and strange on second thought? Or even the first glance.

There is at least one person I know who apparently does not like mayo on their pineapple. By the way, that phrase is responsible for helpless laughter and much innuendo in certain IM circles. To the food related version of that observation, I’d say: “you follower of a false eating standard, the mayo is irrelevant. It’s the pineapple that counts“. Still, someone finds that combination strange. I find it perfectly normal myself.

There is a whole website devoted to keeping people updated about your exact whereabouts. Twitter. You can even microblog on it or just answer the question… It’s all good. There are more startups devoted to online calendars and organizing parts and portions of my life than I have fingers on both hands. I also have a PDA, a choice of organizational software and I suppose even my cheapass hand-me-down phone can double up as a personal organizer of sorts if I wanted. But … I don’t use any of them. More useless accounts?

Is it wrong that my favourite enhancement from the shiny new Microsoft Office 2007 install is a set of new bundled fonts? In particular, Consolas. A specialized editor that I use does not like proportional fonts and I hated the other options I had available.

And yes, the choice of font matters.

But the prime piece of weirdness stems from an observation yesterday. A Spanish goth. Now, this may require a bit of explanation - but the general idea with goths is that they steer clear of sunlight and are generally pasty faced. How exactly does one accomplish this when one hails from Spain? Or even the tropics? I think there needs to be some extra credit for trying to vampirically keep out the tanning effects of the sun when you’re from a sunny country.

Sometimes work can become tedious, monotonous and downright boring. Sometimes it can get even worse. The sure-fire remedy for work related boredom is to drop into a quick shoot-em-up game, mindlessly frag everyone and everything in sight and then come back to work - dripping virtual blood, gore and bits of exploded space craft. I even had understanding employers who allowed this during work hours. It was not uncommon for me to stop coding, zap a few zombies and then come back to work refreshed. I presume employers operated on the basis that it’s better to let a game-happy employee occasionally kill zombies rather than stare at a piece of code too long and become one.

For a while, I used to employ conventional shoot-em-up classics for this purpose - Quake, ROTT among others. Then, games become progressively more demanding in their hardware requirements and the effort involved in closing editor windows and stuff to play a game became … too tedious. So, lightweight alternatives were urgently required.

Actually, I had a manic Tetris stage during my undergrad project too. But that’s an abherration. It’s not a real shoot-em-up and it’s far too addictive.

For the past year and a half, I’ve been playing a cutesey little flash game called AlphaForce. It doesn’t have fancy graphics or chilling sound effects but you do get unlimited ammo and progressively harder opponents. There are even cutesy powerups that allow for a bit of strategy. When in a rebellious or just plain destructive mood, I just load up the game and blow shit up.

And then recently I discovered another - Hoverbot Arena. Slightly better graphics, better sound, slightly worse gameplay but still - very satisfying explosions.

And now you know where all that pent up aggression goes.

Never realized how popular the medium of ceefax (teletext?) was in the UK till I came here. It’s 33 years since the ceefax service launched and I use it for lots of things. In fact, I usually hit the ceefax page for most sports scores.

So about the Cricket World Cup.

The cricket ceefax pages have a number of entries on the world cup, including their seedings for the 16 teams participating and a set of pages which talk up a master blaster and bowling/all round ace for each team. The seedings first. Guess who’s top? Australia. Yeah. The allegedly very beatable team are still seeded Numero Uno and ceefax thinks they’ll get their third successive world cup victory this time around. In a move that dismays fans everywhere, the second seeded team is Sri Lanka. Yeah, there’s more but blah blah blah, whatever.

Two factors make me wonder if this is really justified. Then again, the ceefax pages haven’t been notorious for calling it correctly (unfair though, along with most of the planet - they didn’t call the England Ashes victory in 2005 nor the Aussie drubbing delivered in 2006). First, the SL team isn’t exactly a bunch of spring chickens and secondly, notorious slow starters or otherwise, they lost to NZ in the warm up match. SL’s Ceefax master blaster, Sanath J. was rested for the match and their spin ace Muralitharan got carted around the pitch for 60+ runs in his 10 overs. Hardly inspiring news for a team seeded to see Australia in the final, eh? Shades of ‘99, anybody? Just me then? All right.

Oh and the Six Nations stuff today is boring but tomorrow - England vs France. Woo. And Yaschvilli is probably playing.

Ever wondered how confusing names are? Take programmes on TV, for example. Yesterday, I was trying to explain to chickenbutt that I had an evening of glazing over in front of the idiot box ahead of me. With roasted, salted peanuts to munch on. Fine. Fair enough, I go through periods of TV hate where I don’t bother watching anything and I also go through periods of being glued in front of the TV. This is clearly one of the latter times.

So what was I watching? Dragons Den - nothing to do with dragons or mythology of any sort. Where every single one of the five “investors” are a Simon Cowell with a nipple tweaked (ok, that wasn’t a pleasant mental image for some of us. I’m sorry). The series is beginning to get a bit predictable too. Never come in and expect to give away a 5% stake of your whizz bang company, they’re going to turn around and ask for 50%. Oh, the dragons might occasionally be “generous” (with the reggae sauce guy a few weeks ago) and make it 40% because he needs to make a living.

Then there was the entertaining Party Animals - which really isn’t about much partying in the conventional sense. If I am to go all SepiaMutiny about the casting for the series, I’d note that there is a female Asian character, played by Shelley Conn. Still, it’s entertaining stuff.

And finally, there is the not so desperate and definitely not housewifey Desperate Housewives. Yes, I watch it. To quote someone else, don’t judge me. I’d maintain I watch it for the luscious Eva Longoria and that’s mostly true but recent photographs are making me rethink my position. Somewhat meh but still worth an ogle or four.

And for something completely different, the new Ach theme is somewhat whimsically called Metal Mickey. Inspired by the Suede song that I happened to be listening to fairly frequently and ultimately by the quirky BBC comedy Metal Mickey. Is there a connection? Well, I think the greys, blues and blacks look vaguely like Metal Mickey’s colours.

Boogie, boogie, boogie! Yeah. or summat like that.

So there’s a famous AI researcher giving a talk today and I’m skiving off. Unshamedly? Yeah. When I was an undergrad, I used to skive off lectures too. Mostly because there was something more interesting (Quake or Starcraft) to do. Some others because I felt they were pointless. In this postgraduate world things are strangely different and somehow quite similar. My laziness and apathy to bestir myself, if anything, has multiplied over the years.

Now that I’ve typed in a few lines, I’ve somehow magically justified the skiving too. I know the line between arrogance and pragmatism can be a thin one; but if I know the talk is going to be uninteresting and I’m more likely to be clock watching than not, it just seems practical to not go. Is it polite though? Probably not. So my self interest in avoiding potential boredom is yet another example of a social trap.

I’m still not going to the talk.

Dev blog announcement. Essentially, someone got into the Wordpress install hosted on the servers and made some modifications to a couple of files. Malicious changes at that. The information in the blog post seems to indicate that feed.php and theme.php (both in wp-includes) were modified. Perhaps other files were as well. The changes seem to have been made fairly recently (3-4 days ago?) but best not to take any chances.

So umm. Please go download the latest release (2.1.2) if you are running 2.1.1 - don’t mess around waiting with this one, just go do it now. Upgrade, make sure all the files are overwritten by the latest release.

I also took the liberty of mailing a few people who are running potentially exploitable versions of Wordpress - drop me a reply if you need a hand upgrading or need a few custom access rules to prevent malicious access in the meantime.

And yeah, stuff like this can happen from time to time. It can happen to anyone and to any project. I’m not particularly happy with how long it took before the malicious mod was discovered but better late than never applies, I suppose. Oh and a few hours of combing through logs for a couple of blogs await - I need to see if some nasty cracker exploited the wide open installs on this domain before I had a chance to make the upgrade. Le sigh.

The York diocese has granted permission to exhume a Yorkshire aristocrat in the hope of finding clues about bird flu. This unfortunate diplomat died in the Spanish flu pandemic of 1919 and was buried in a lead lined coffin. The virus that killed him may have been preserved.

This or a scenario close to it has been the subject of only a few dozen blockbuster movies. The hapless researchers doing the digging up are among the first to die (unless they happen to be reasonably good looking females).

But back in the real world, this step does raise a few interesting questions - for example, if more people jump on the cryonics bandwagon - they could conceivably be thawed out in future to allow scientists to study viruses and other nasties that were frozen with them.

And interesting enough to not just be a snippet, 10 modern delusions. I would say Amen for 2, 8, 9 and 10 in particular but then I’d be contradicting delusion number 6 - Astrology and similar delusions are “harmless fun”. I also wish more people (especially those calling themselves economists online) understood delusion number 5 (Laissez-faire capitalism is the prerequisite for trade and prosperity) too. And also, I’m shocked, absolutely shocked that the Guardian saw fit to run a piece praising Thatcherite era policies.

And seen in an obscure IRC channel last night: various ogles and cringing over pictures, new names for glamour couples, yet more discoveries about Colombo (and miniscule degrees of separation with entirely the wrong sorts of people), lecherous thoughts over jailbait and other idle chatter.

(IRC chat excerpts ahoy)