numbersix

i want one

PuTTY - super fine terminal emulator for windoze. far better than any of the commercial ones i've used, even does ssh. one executable, no convoluted top heavy feature set, just the basics.

rediscovered one of the best computer games ever written, dark star. it has all the playability and simplicity lacking in so much of what is available these days. also figured out that the high score table contains lyrics from a supertramp song.

rediscovered one of the best computer games ever written, dark star. it has all the playability and simplicity lacking in so much of what is available these days. also figured out that the high score table contains lyrics from a supertramp song.

nice winner to Satire Web's annual SPAM poetry contest

Windows started life as QDOS, Quick and Dirty Operating System. now it isn't even quick.

rediscovered doom II . still as good as i always was :) looking forward to some deathmatching, oh yes.

ok, so for whatever reason (firewall) you can telnet to a unix box but not ftp. however you need some files from it. they are reasonably large, and contain binary information. how do you get them?

client $ script
client $ telnet (host)
..login..
host $ uuencode (filename) (filename)
host $ CTRL-D
client $ CTRL-D

you should now have the result of the session in a file (probably called typescript). all you need to do is strip the ^Ms out of it, and uudecode it. hey presto. neat :)

interesting spam fighting article - http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html. I wonder if I could do this in Perl?

when will the female fashion world wake up to the wonders of pockets in trousers?

to re-read rc.conf after making changes, from console:

# shutdown now
(Note: without -r or -h)
# return
# exit

from here

those damn modem commands you can never remember - http://www.modems.com/glossary/extend2b.html

at last someone has come up with a name for that state of decay that your OS slips into the older and more used it gets : cruft. windows machines seem to suffer more than others.

Perl's mkdir function is a bit odd if you expect the mask parameter to apply permissions directly. this is a good explanation of it, and make sure you do NOT put quotes around the mask, otherwise it behaves even more weirdly.

just read a very interesting article in the Guardian on the rise of the mobile phone.

solaris - how to allow users to chgrp (and presumably chown) files to other users -

in /etc/system :
set rstchown = 0

changed my FreeBSD email client to Sylpheed from Mozilla's built in client. Although I like Mozilla's, there are a number of things that still irk me, the main one being that it is part of Mozilla when Mozilla should be a browser and nothing else. First impressions are good, it has the (now standard) Outlook layout, seems to do IMAP reasonably well against the company's expunge server, though I've yet to figure out how to fill my address book with minimum hassle. I'm hoping it does somthing similar to Mozilla by catching all the email addresses that go past, which I always thought such a great feature. Once I'm happy with Sylpheed I will have a go at Phoenix as a lighter replacement for Mozilla. Already converted to Chimera on the iBook which is much faster and lighter.

so how about some logic in the web browser to spot URLs that haven't been made into links, and do so. for instance this : http://www.numbersix.net would be changed into this : http://www.numbersix.net. i see this so often, either people not bothering in their HTML, or text that has been taken from some other format and not fully marked up. i think i'll suggest it to the Chimera developers.

i think my desk has reached critical mass. i now have 6 pcs either on or under it. well, three pcs (two BSD one windoze), one ultra 5, one (non-working) ipc, and an apple laptop. add to that a two large monitors, a palm pilot, a mobile phone, an ipod, a minidisc player. i fear one more piece of electronic equipment and things could be pushed too far. remember tetsuo? more plants, i think that's the answer. a balance.

'Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.' - Benjamin Franklin

very interesting article over at OReilly on Swarm Intelligence.

this song (mp3) has the worst lyrics i have ever heard.

Thanks to Obsolyte.com I now have a working Sun IPC running the Sparc incarnation of NetBSD. What I'm going to do with it now is anyone's guess, but that's so not the point.

The Profit by Kehlog Albran - very funny take on The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran

Find out who built the device with that MAC address : www.coffer.com/mac_find

Will I have to go to war and if so will I have to kill? This and many other questions are answered for potential soldiers in the Army FAQ

re-discovered seti after the recent news about it. finally finding a use for the spare E250 and E450 we have here :)

The Guardian has an excellent article on Ricardo Semler, fascinating man with very interesting and refreshing ideas on how to run a business and particularly how to manage staff. Must read some of his writings.

"Technology [..] will continue speedily progressing but altering nothing essential."

A password will only become memorable the moment you need to change it.

there aren't enough lists on the internet. so in an effort to rectify this situation I have posted a list of London Underground Stations, correct as far as I know. expect more lists as and when...

So I get to thinking about bayesian filters which have recently been used to fight spam. The idea is that you build a corpus of 'bad' text (in this case spam) and a corpus of good text (in this case legitimate email), and compare every subsequent incoming email to each corpus. The one it matches the most determines whether the mail is spam or not. Apparently this works well. Each new email is added to the approrpiate corpus making the system stronger as time goes by.

So what about applying this system to web pages? Add two extra buttons to your browser interface, 'Good' and 'Bad'. At each web page you visit you click either the good button or the bad button depending on your experience there. The browser adds the page to either the good corpus or the bad corpus. Over time, the browser, by comparing the page to both sets of data, will begin to be able to tell you (reasonably accurately?) whether or not the new page you are looking at is of interest to you or not.

Extending the idea, your personal Bayesian enabled web spider could be trawling around the web finding pages it thinks (knows!) you will be interested in.

Stupid idea?

Clownfish is an amazing collection of underwater photography, including stuff like this and this.

Note to self, write a funny sketch based on a miss-typing of 'rabbits' as 'rabbis'. As in "The head of the company has ordered twelve rabbis for his son's 5th birthday party". Maybe too Woody Allen.

This nutter has taken his MS Flight Sim a little too far. 13 monitors. Surely it would have been easier to take flying lessons? ('spect to Nick for the link)

This nutter has taken his MS Flight Sim a little too far. 13 monitors. Surely it would have been easier to take flying lessons? ('spect to Nick for the link)

A rare event - I agree with something Microsoft is doing : Toward a Spam-Free Future. One line particularly stands out -

"Like almost everyone, I receive a lot of spam every day, much of it offering to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It's ridiculous."

The biggest understatement from the world's richest man?

Hektor seems to be a can of spray paint suspended from two motors, all attached to a PC. It draw pictures! Cool. The world needs more of this sort of thing. Reminds me a little of the Blinkenlights project. cheers to Ben for the link.

mod_log_spread is an Apache module for collecting logging from umpteen Apache servers centrally. I've been looking for something like this for a while.

Tanya Streeter has broken both the men and women's free diving world records. The Guardian has an article on the event. Well done Tanya!

How many times have you read the phrase "Small enough to fit into your pocket" when oogling some new fangled gadget? What they don't tell you is that this new one will have to be the size of a pin head if it has any chance of sharing that pocket space with all the other "small enough to fit into your pocket" gadgets you already have.

Only Windows (XP) would have a green reboot button. "Yes this is a good thing, do it often."

Recently discovered - JASS, Sun's own Solaris hardening scripts. They look pretty thorough, and fit nicely into the Jumpstart mechanism.

Heard a quote on the radio the other day about writing books that I think applies just as well to programming :

Original quote - "A book is never finished, just abandoned."

My version - "A piece of software is never finished, just abandoned."

Any programmer will tell you that it is very rare to leave a piece of code without wanting to go back and do a little or a lot more on it, just to finish it off properly.

"The Project for the New American Century is a non-profit educational organization dedicated to a few fundamental propositions: that American leadership is good both for America and for the world; that such leadership requires military strength, diplomatic energy and commitment to moral principle; and that too few political leaders today are making the case for global leadership."

And they wonder why they are so unpopular at the moment. A similarly named site has information on who is behind these bizarre, disturbing, messianic ramblings.

Thanks to T for the link.

So I'm looking through the bumf that came with my D-Link ADSL router, and I find a little piece of paper stating that the device conforms to all the right radio standards blah blah. The statement is signed by the president of D-Link, a guy with the most fantastic name of - Mr Wonder Wang. Excellent :) He is mentioned here.

"Make toys at home with common household materials, often in only a few minutes, that demonstrate fascinating scientific principles." - this looks really good fun, for instance
Building a simple crystal radio from things commonly found around the house. I'm definately going to have a go at this. Link from Zen Internet's newsletter, my ADSL provider (of all places).

Two recent additions to my already crowded technical life - ADSL, and wireless. The combination transforms internet access at home. You don't even want to know where I'm typing this blog entry.... ;)

Has the iPod backlash started I wonder? An article in the Guardian takes a sceptical look at the device and the obsessiveness of some of its fans. I've been an Apple convert ever since I first heard about OS X, I'm typing this on my year old iBook and I'm convinced they've done a fantastic thing bringing UNIX to the desktop. I also buy and listen to a fair amount of music. So in theory I'd be the first person to get one. But try as I might, I just can't muster up the enthusiasm to shell out the reddies.

The closest I've gotten is borrowing one from a friend last year, and despite the battery not lasting more than a few hours it was ok, it did what it said on the box and the transfer rate from my iBook was astounding. But I gave it back fairly quickly, and didn't even think of buying one when some sod stole my mini-disk player.

I'm not even sure when I would listen to it. At work I have my iBook full of whatever tunes I need to get me through the day, at home I have my CD collection. In between I'm either reading (I cannot listen to music and read at the same time), or doing other things which I'm not sure would be enhanced by a sound track.

I think another problem would be one of finding the right tune for the mood or moment. I have a suspicion that with all that music available to me I'd spend most of the time hunting around the collection for the perfect track for that particular situation, or even worse, thinking of all the tracks I could be listening to that I haven't yet put on it.

And there is also the fact that I'd be following the trend. The iPod is (apparently) THE must have accessory of the moment. I've even caught myself noticing if people are wearing iPod earphones or something else. Do I really want to shell out 350 quid for something that I wouldn't really use just because everyone else is? Not this time.

But then Apple haven't yet released the iPod Jr.....

Update - 2006/11/11

I read this old entry again recently and decided to update it as I have since bought an iPod and quite frankly I can't do without it. Not having easy access to BBC radio any more their Podcasts are invaluable for the 30 minutes each way in the car every morning.

Just ordered a 200GB IDE drive for around 100 quid. Amazing, the first drive I ever bought was 100MB at over 200 quid. At various stages I've stopped to wonder what we need such large storage devices for, but the data always grows to fill it. Recently it's been mp3s and movies, when I bought my first drive it was collections of images and all the software you could get your hands on.

Wow, it's a French verb conjugator - http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/ARTFL/forms_unrest/inflect.query.html. But what I could really do with is a site that does your French homework...

The televison in my hotel room is a typical weird hotel tv, not quite the same as a normal one, strange front end menu system. When you turn it off using the big button on the front, a message is displayed on a little LED panel to say 'OFF'. This stays until you turn it on again. My definition of off obviously isn't the same as Philips'.

Makes me think of a lot of PCs these days, their power buttons don't actually turn the power off, but mearly suggest to the machine that a shutdown has been requested. It seems then to be up to the PC to actually turn off if it wants. Of course what usually happens is that you're pressing the button because the machine has gotten itself into a state and is either too busy to field power off suggestions, or not in the mood, so it doesn't even work.

We're loosing control of the machines we're building! Of course there's always the power cable....

Seen recently on the back of a toilet door :

"Please ensure that nothing other than paper is flushed down the toilet."

Um, yes.

I've been having problems with Firefox and Thunderbird doing DNS lookups recently. The lookups were taking much longer than they should have been, around 5 seconds for each lookup. This becomes highly annoying very quickly. DNS resolution from the machine using nslookup or host seemed ok.

Tracked it down to the network.dns.disableIPv6 setting (firefox - about:config). This was set to False, thus an IPV6 lookup was attempted each time before an IPV4. Setting this to True fixed the problem for Firefox, and seems to have had the same effect on Thunderbird (didn't know they shared these settings?).

Excellent quote taken from Word magazine interview with Stephen Fry:

"It is a tragedy that something as powerful and wonderful as personal computing should be in the hands of a rapacious businessman like Bill Gates rather than a creative individual. Gates has sold the world the idea that he's a geek and he's not. I don't think he's written a line of creative code in his life. This is a man who, in the early '90s, said he saw no future in the Internet. Gates is an absolutely rapacious, brilliant businessman and like all of them since Rockerfeller he has anti-competitive instincts and fundamentally terrible taste. If you have a monopoly of personal computing, as he has, then it is unforgivable to design something so....bad. So badly designed, shoddy at every level, the icons and interface are achingly inadequate. It's without thought, without care, without love, without passion, without emotion, and that is unforgivable.

The genius of Jonathan Ive, who designed the iMac and iPod and all the other things people love so much, is that he understands there's nothing wrong with having an emotional view on these things you use every day. Beauty is not an added extra, it's fundamental. People thrive when surrounded by things that are well made, with life and vibrancy. Just imagine how we would leap forward in business if we allowed people who now work in grey places like you see on The Office to have working environments which - for no more money - were designed with love and care."

Much as I like my Razr, I keep inadvertantly knocking the outside buttons when I handle it, causing the ring style to change to something I didn't want. This can be most annoying. However, there is a fix - http://www.howardforums.com/showthread.php?t=747103&highlight=lock+applications opening up a whole menu system I didn't even know existed. Despite a number of negative reviews I'm liking this phone more and more. I just wish the interface was a little faster.

Make Firefox give you a page of HTML instead of that annoying dialog box when you type an invalid URL - in about:config, change this :

browser.xul.error_pages.enabled = true

Nice.

If you get the following while trying to run up2date:

RPM error.  The message was:
Could not determine what version of Red Hat Linux you are running.
If you get this error, try running 

                rpm --rebuilddb

You may want to check to see if the redhat-release RPM is installed. Installing this fixed the problem for me.

It seems that the recent update to OSX (10.4.7) broke Canon's Camera Window software. While there doesn't seem to be an official fix for this at the moment I've found a work around which is almost as good. Plug the CF card into a normal USB card reader, the Camera Window software seems to recognise it as if you had plugged in your camera. After all the camera is probably only acting as a USB storage device anyway.

Hopefully Canon will fix this soon, I don't think it's a problem with OSX as such.

Quite often I don't want deleted mail to go to my Trash bin first, especially if it is spam or if I'm having mailbox quota problems. Holding down SHIFT before pressing delete will bypass the trash folder and delete mail immediately.

Nice library of regular expressions : http://regexlib.com/.

iPod borked. Thought it was the hard disk as it kept stalling when I tried to sync my Podcasts. Looked at buying a new one but after just shelling out all that dosh for the new Macbook I am reluctant. And I don't need all the new features, colour screen, video etc. Looked at replacing the disk myself, I think I could have done it too, found some good guides. But the replacement disks are difficult to get hold of. Found a place in the UK that would have sold me one for 30 quid, plus 65 quid postage. F*ck that.

Then my colleague stumbled across a service called the Podspital, which happens to be 10 minutes walk from our flat. Nice little place, a couple of guys set up shop at the back of an independent record store. They diagnosed a bad battery and had the thing fixed in less than 24 hours, all for 70 francs (around 30 quid). Now that's what I call service! And they also fix Macs.

Amazing magnet shop - http://www.supermagnete.ch