Muscat's OxBlog

EVE Online: Protests continue over microtransaction row

2011-06-26T16:39:00.000+01:00

JITA - There are unprecedented scenes in one of the busiest game areas of EVE Online today, as player protests against game owners CCP continue into a third day.

Players form a ring around the Jita Memorial

Players are angry with CCP following the most recent game expansion, dubbed "Incarna". One of the additions to the game was the "Noble Exchange", where real-life money can be exchanged (via a convoluted route of in-game items and currencies) for in-game items. Most notable amongst these is a monocle, offering no in-game benefit and costing the equivalent of a very real US $80.

But what concerns players most of all is the prospect that items that actually affect gameplay - such as ships, skills and standings with the in-game NPC factions - might be offered for sale. A CCP internal newsletter to that effect was leaked, and later confirmed to be genuine, further adding ammunition to the protester's weapons (not literally, though maybe in a later version of the Noble Exchange).

For some reason, CCP thought that this developer blog would help matters. Entirely predictably, it didn't, and angry threads on the EVE forums have nearly reached one million views and over 10,000 comments. CCP's internal attitude was revealed by another leak to EVE News 24, an internal E-mail from CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson seeming to revel in the anger sown amongst the playerbase.

The view from the hangar of the Jita IV - Moon 4 - Caldari Navy Assembly Plant station, the busiest trading hub in the game

The largest, most visible sign of the unhappiness of a large number of players has been an in-game attack on a monument in the busiest system, Jita. The monument itself bears the inscription "A memorial to the winner of the Ruevo Aram Riddle Competition, Hienky and Shin Ra of Burn Eden". The statue (which is invulnerable in the game) stands as a reminder of times when CCP were actively engaged in promoting the community of EVE Online, making the current protests all the more striking.

Hundreds of players, as well as abandoned ships, protest in Jita

How this will play out in coming days remains to be seen. Nay-sayers will undoubtedly say nay, while some think the protesters should just leave and let them play the game in peace. Are there any precedents from other MMOs of in-game protests on this scale? The ironic thing is that it's exactly this sort of community spirit that reminds me just why I enjoyed playing EVE for so long anyway.

EVE Markets for 2011

2011-01-09T16:53:00.000Z

This blog has quite a broad range of topics, including religion, technology, and internet spaceships. Today's post falls into the latter category; so if you have no interest in EVE Online you're excused!

EVE Markets has been online since May 2008, keeping track of price trends in the virtual market of EVE Online - a market complex enough that the game's developers, CCP, have a full-time economist performing analysis and producing quarterly reports with plenty of charts to keep traders informed. It was those charts that gave me the inspiration to start EVE Markets - what if we didn't have to wait for CCP EyjoG (the in-game name of Dr. Eyjólfur Guðmundsson) to release the economic newsletter, but could have up-to-the-minute data displayed in real time, with customisable indices and lists?

So was EVE Markets born, and when I review the figures I'm always shocked at how popular the site is with users. At last count, the site has nearly 3,800 registered users; and over the course of the year the number of daily visitors has doubled, to about 400 a day. Unsurprisingly, the items most viewed are Tritanium and the 30-day PLEX; the most-viewed market group is the fullerenes.

For a site that I work on in my spare time and that started as a hobby, and which (thanks to NearlyFreeSpeech who host it) costs pennies to run, I don't think that's bad at all. During 2010, it even spawned a sister site, EVE Monitor, which tracks various public EVE APIs - sovereignty and outposts, for example - and as well as letting you view the history of a system, region or alliance, also tweets changes via @EVEMonitor. Prime focus of development remains the EVE Markets site though - in fact, some of the technology developed for Monitor is due to be ported back to EVE Markets in the coming year.

In 2010 most of the changes to EVE Markets were behind the scenes. Finally, there is database support for multiple data sources, though it's not currently live; and the underlying refactoring meant that the oldest areas of the codebase received some love and attention. The introduction into the game of Planetary RSI - sorry, Planetary Interaction - led to the addition of PI industry information alongside manufacturing and reprocessing data. The API was expanded to include a JSON-format option. And, of course, with each new expansion there were random breaking changes to the CCP data dump needing to be taken into account!

What lies ahead for EVE Markets in 2011, then?

Multiple data sources
It's been a long time coming! Sadly this will not include EVE Metrics data, since that site was closed last week. However, I'm keeping an eye on both Jitonomic and Eve-MarketData (though the former seems to be struggling at the moment). A side effect of multi-source support is that it will also be possible to track regional or even system prices - for example, comparing Jita local prices to global ones.

API improvements
It's been bugging me for a while that the API is pretty limited in what you can get from it. I'm hoping to stick to the principle that any of the data you see on the site will also be available over the API. I'd also like to be able to collect figures on API usage, since I don't have any idea how many people this affects!

UI improvements
Someone rightly pointed out that it's a pain to add a load of individual items to a list. It could be a lot easier to choose which of your lists are displayed on your summary screen, as well. These things, and other UI improvements, are on the cards for this year.

Oh - and just like so many other third-party developers, I don't actually play EVE all that much any more ;-)

Review: Advent Vega Android tablet, part two

2010-12-22T22:19:00.000Z

So, "tomorrow" kind of disappeared into a fit of preparation for carol services... but here is part two of my review of the Advent Vega (part one here).

At the end of Part One, I said that installing a custom ROM (such as the one from MoDaCo that I used) was the only sensible approach to the Vega. Without the standard wave of Google functionality the Vega is essentially crippled. With Market, Gmail, and the other Mountain View offerings in place, the Vega suddenly becomes a very powerful tablet indeed.

Having Market access naturally explodes the functionality of the Vega. Of the apps I've tried so far, nearly all have had no problems working on the 10.1" screen, though one or two insisted on rendering on a phone-sized portion of the screen, making them awkward to use. The rest seemed to make good use of the extra real estate, with the games Angry Birds and Air Control being great at that size; and the onscreen keyboard is big enough for me to type at a reasonable fraction of my usual speed, albeit with slightly lower accuracy without the tactile click of physical keys.

On the subject of keyboards - there's no need to stick with the Android default. I tried a couple of options, including Smart Keyboard and SwiftKey trials, before finally opting to pay a couple of quid for the full version of the latter. I still wouldn't choose to write an essay on it if I had a laptop with me, but for reasonably quick text entry it works well.

At least, it works well when the thing isn't plugged in. When it's charging, something seems to happen to the touchscreen; it seems to register phantom touches, and it can make typing impossible (when eevverrrry kkkeyy gggeettss mmuulltttipplee prreesseeesss). I've only noticed this when the tablet is plugged in, though (and mine isn't the only one to behave like this).

That leads me nicely on to talking about the Vega's battery life. I've not got any firm figures, just anecdotes from using it for a couple of weeks, and I can say that the battery will easily last an entire day of use - I think my colleagues and I managed to get it down from 100% at 9am to about 25% by the time I tore myself away from it to sleep that evening. Recharging to full normally takes a couple of hours, though make sure you have something small and opaque to place over the charging light if you charge it overnight as I do, or the purple blinking will drive you mad.

There are a couple of other limitations the Vega has over, say, the Samsung Galaxy Tab (on paper; not having the latter I can't really perform a true comparison. Donations welcome...!). There's no 3G, so if you're not in a wifi hotspot there's no data for you. There's no vibration (ahem) so Android's haptic feedback settings are redundant - though I don't like it much on my phone anyway. And there are no hardware "Home" or "Menu" buttons - though the latter is simulated with a long press on the physical Back button, and all three have buttons on the Vega's always-present notification bar, which mercifully has been made smaller in the MoDaCo ROM (if you pay for access to the custom "ROM Kitchen" - well worth it IMO).

Further - though it has a full size USB-A socket, which might imply that you could connect USB drives and such, the device is configured as a USB guest and not a host so you can't. Someone on the Internet has found a Korean rebadged version of the same hardware with USB host support, so it's only a matter of time before this feature arrives in a custom ROM for the Vega. This also means you can't yet get clever and plug in a 3G dongle for a data connection; and you'll have varying degrees of luck if you try configuring your phone as a wireless access point, since many phones can only manage ad-hoc and not infrastructure modes, and Android so far refuses to connect to the former.

There's been a lot of discussion about the display. People have complained about limited viewing angles, especially in portrait. Personally, while you can't by any means still read the screen through a 180-degree arc, the viewing angle simply hasn't been a problem or even that noticeable in normal use. The only time it's been an issue has been when it's sat on the desk in front of me - it needs to be propped up a little to make it readable - but my desk is cluttered enough that a jury-rig solution has always been to hand!

Use Cases

The question lots of people pose about tablets - be they the Cupertino fondleslab or any of the other variants around - is what are they actually for? So here are some situations where I either have found a place for the Vega or can see it would be useful, if those situations existed in my life...

Checking details on (eg) Bugzilla during our morning stand-up meeting at work
~~Checking details on (eg) Facebook during our morning stand-up meeting at work~~
On the bus/train as an RSS feed reader (with offline sync with apps like NewsRob)
"Hey, Mum, read this news article, you'll find it interesting" before passing her the device
As an e-book reader; the screen's no e-ink but it's more than adequate. (I also have the YouVersion bible application installed, though I haven't tested this in anger yet.)
Using VNC to interact with another computer - this is how I controlled the lighting for the church carol services last week. I could equally have controlled the sound desk
Sitting on the sofa watching telly with housemates, while flicking through Facebook or Twitter or chatting to someone over messenger

I'm sure I could think of more - I haven't even covered the possibilities for media (iPlayer works great), which a lot of people would see as a major role - and, certainly, there's overlap there with what netbooks, notebooks, desktops and phones could achieve. But I'm convinced that there's a definite gap in the market for this form of device - and if you can have it for half the price of the Apple offering, and without the draconian limits that Steve Jobs puts on his device, then why not?

To sum up: the Vega isn't the perfect tablet, but for the price I'm very happy indeed with the purchase. As Android gets developed more for the larger form factor, and as the online community continues to play around unlocking more of the device's functionality, then it can only become even better.

Review: Advent Vega Android tablet, part one

2010-12-09T00:11:00.000Z

So, I finally got my Advent Vega yesterday morning as I arrived at work. As there's such a buzz of interest around this budget Android tablet, I figured I'd contribute my thoughts to the blogosphere and add to the discussion!

First, some backstory.

The Saga of Getting One

Stock's been arriving in dribs and drabs for the couple of weeks since the Vega first went on sale at an insanely reasonable £249. When they first launched via the Dixons, Currys and PC World websites, the initial batch sold out in less than an hour; and subsequent batches have been even quicker (I think twelve minutes was a duration bandied around on Twitter at one point). I was lucky enough to get my order in quickly enough for the second batch, and a couple of days later it duly arrived.

Sadly, while the rather reflective screen was a very good mirror, that was about the only functionality I could eke out of the 10.1", 750g tablet. Repeated attempts to reflash the thing all ended in failure; after all the hype the Vega was DOA and I returned it to the PC World a short walk from my office that evening, where Mandie was very helpful in arranging a refund.

Back to the waiting game... and I managed to order again the next Saturday. Or, so I thought.

Apparently the DSG stock system couldn't quite cope with the sheer volume of people all trying to buy the Vega at once, and it sold about 100 more than they actually had in stock. After a few days of limbo, I got an E-mail telling me to call the customer service line otherwise my order would be cancelled. Not wanting to join the hordes of F5-induced RSI sufferers for a third time, I asked the lady I spoke to (who, again, was very helpful) if I could have my order put in a queue for the next batch, and she happily obliged. (I'd been reading on the MoDaCo forums about others in the same situation.)

All good, or so I thought... the next batch of stock came and went, and nothing was mentioned of my order. A further E-mail to DSG gave the impression that somebody had been promising so-called "forward orders" even though it was against company policy, and now management had been left with the task of fulfilling their promises. The gentleman who phoned me back was the third of three very helpful employees I'd spoken to at this stage, and he promised that the scheduling team were working out how to match up orders and Vegas as they became available.

And so eventually, one was placed in the (not-quite-so) capable hands of DHL who, after accidentally ripping the box open and repackaging it with lots of tape, managed to deliver a fully-working Vega to my office on Tuesday morning. And the fun began!

Initial Impressions

It was shiny - literally; the screen was very reflective, and is a magnet for fingerprints. They didn't seem too noticeable when the Vega was switched on and in use, even under office lights, but switch the screen off and just try and resist the urge to clean it!

Boot time was a little tardy by most standards, but for a device pretty much designed to be always left in standby I can forgive that. The initial app selection was pretty dire, and a last-minute change by Advent meant there was no central package manager (oh, OK, "app store" in your Cupertino-speak or "Marketplace" as Google would have it). Out of the box, the Vega is basically a touch-screen web browser - yes, it is possible to hunt down the Android .apk application packages manually and install them, but it's far easier to take the brilliant efforts of Paul at MoDaCo and get the full set of Google apps - Market included - with a custom ROM image.

For part two of this review (which I plan on writing tomorrow, it's late!) I'll talk about how amazing the Vega is with that custom image, and how you should really buy one if you're looking for a tablet but can't stomach the cost of an iPad. Just so there are no surprises. :-)

"Is bad sound a sin?"

2010-06-29T23:48:00.004+01:00

That's the question that Gary Zandstra recently posted on his blog at Church Production Magazine. It's taken me a while to get the chance to write this up but the question reminded me of a conversation I'd had a few weeks previously.

Some friends and I - some techie, some not - were having a picnic after an open-air church event a few weeks ago. I was commenting to one of the other techies that the sound mix hadn't been particularly good, and he agreed. Someone else chipped in that, from where they had been stood, all they could hear was electric guitar.

Then one of my non-techie friends said something that the three of us immediately and strongly disagreed with:

"It doesn't matter if it didn't sound good, as long as people were worshipping!"

Having had plenty of time to mull this one over, I still stand by my initial reaction. But, at the same time (and I'm not just saying this so she doesn't feel like I'm picking on her!) I think she was completely right too...

The passage that came to mind when she said it was Malachi 1. There, through the prophet Malachi, God tells of his anger at the substandard offerings presented to him by the Israelites:

"When you bring blind animals for sacrifice, is that not wrong? When you sacrifice crippled or diseased animals, is that not wrong? Try offering them to your governor! Would he be pleased with you? Would he accept you?" says the LORD Almighty. "Now implore God to be gracious to us. With such offerings from your hands, will he accept you? Oh, that one of you would shut the temple doors, so that you would not light useless fires on my altar! I am not pleased with you," says the LORD Almighty, "and I will accept no offering from your hands. (Malachi 1 v8-10)

The days of animal sacrifices are over, but that doesn't render this passage irrelevant. The point remains that God deserves the best we can offer. Christians are called to be living sacrifices (see Romans 12:1) - our very lives become our offering to God, and by Christ we can be made "holy and pleasing to God". The Christian aim of living a blameless life is not (rather, should not be) to achieve salvation - though so often it's seen that way. (How many times has someone tried to summarise all religions as "try hard to be good and hope that $deity thinks you're good enough to get to heaven"?) Rather, having been given salvation through no act of our own, as thanks to God we are called to live to honour Him.

That was a little digression; I'm supposed to be talking about AV, right? But here's the thing: if our worship is technically poor, if it's produced with an attitude of "It'll do", if the mix is being drowned out by one instrument or whatever it is - then how does it form service that is "holy and pleasing to God"?

I want to make another short digression at this point and tell the story of a friend of mine from my first church. He first started getting involved in sound production in church as the person responsible for recording services to audio cassette (remember those?). And he was very happy in that role. Over the years, though, more and more sound equipment appeared at the back of church; and recording the services became just a minor part of the tasks that were required on a Sunday. My friend and I had a conversation a few weeks before I left the church to come to university. He told me how he'd not expected the demands to pile up as they had, and that he was thinking of stopping because he didn't have the technical skill that was now required.

I don't think I'm being mean to say that my friend wasn't able to mix sound very well. In light of the above, then, does that mean his efforts behind the sound desk were "useless fires"? Far from it! Because what ultimately matters is the attitude that we come with; to continue to be willing to serve for so long when you feel unhappy, almost overwhelmed, in the role - that's sacrificial worship!

Back to the picnic, then, and the original statement: does it matter, if people are still worshipping?

I know very little about sheep. If you placed a specimen in front of me, I'd likely have great difficulty in telling if it was a prized lamb in perfect condition or if it had some form of sheep-disease that reduced its value. If the specimen, say, had only one leg and hadn't moved after several hours of intense observation, I might suspect it of not being entirely healthy. But to a shepherd, or to a vet, those subtle symptoms of sheep-disease would be glaringly obvious. I figure, the same is true of sound mixing: the three techies in the group had no hesitation in calling out the symptoms that were obvious to us, but the others had counted the legs, checked for movement, and seen nothing wrong.

But should it matter, when we're not the ones behind the sound desk? On the one hand, the only way any of us improve at anything is from receiving feedback from others (I try and always tell the sound guy at church when it sounds beautiful); on the other, who am I to judge if the "mite" of an offering from my brother or sister is the change they found down the back of the sofa or their entire savings for this month? And why should I interfere with someone else's offering?

Tough call. This blog has comments open; what do you think?

Setting Up Sound for Worship

2010-06-15T13:55:00.011+01:00

A friend of mine who's worship minister at a church in London asked me to write down a few notes on how we set up and sound check for services at St Aldates. I figured other people might be interested in it, so I asked if she'd mind me turning my reply into a blog post; here it is!

Before Sunday

The monthly rota will have been E-mailed out with details of who's playing in the band for that service, so the sound guy knows what to expect.

The worship leader might send their proposed set list out in advance, too. Visuals guys love it when you do that :-)

Service -2 hours

Arrival and setup

In an ideal world, a small army of gnomes would ensure that all the required equipment is in place, working and connected before the band arrive. However, since gnomes have very fussy employment requirements, it falls to the lone sound guy to...

...put out required number of microphones - vocal or instrument mics
...put out required number of DI boxes
...make sure everything is plugged in to the right place and there are enough jack-to-jack leads for everyone
...put out required number of foldback monitors
...make sure everyone who needs it has power sockets available

The drum kit (in its own little cave of soundproofing) is left out and miked up permanently, because it takes ages to assemble and plug in all the mics. We're fortunate at St Aldates to have a permanent AV installation, but other churches may have to also lay out multicores, connect up amps and speakers, and so on.

As I say, ideally all this setup would be done before the band arrive, but realistically the band do help out too!

Service -1.5 hours

Pray

This is the point at which the sound and visuals engineers (the visuals person has turned up by now, right? That's for another post...) leave the sound desk and head down to the band to pray together. This is important! It also helps in getting rid of any partisanship between band and AV team; both need to be working together for the glory of God in the service.

Sound check

The sound engineer runs this part of the process. The aim is to check that everything is working, plugged in correctly, and is giving enough signal to the sound desk. It's useful if the sound engineer has a microphone at the sound desk to talk to the band via their monitors, if the sound desk is a distance away from the stage.

In turn, the sound engineer asks each of the musicians to play their instrument and/or sing into the microphone. (It's nice if you note down their names from the rota, so you can address them directly!) On the desk, the standard procedure is

Unmute the channel
Move fader to around -10 / -5dB
Adjust the gain until the sound that you're hearing is at a decent level

Some sound engineers rely exclusively on the LED meters on their sound desk at this point. They're a useful guide but ears work best! Obviously, if something is peaking at the desk then you need to turn the gain down, regardless of what your ears say. You might need to ask the musicians to adjust the volume or EQ on their instruments in order to get a decent amount of signal. You might also need to encourage them to "give it some welly" - for vocalists this can be difficult early on as their voices won't have warmed up. If the lead worshipper is a guitarist, then get them to play and sing at once - since that's more natural for them.

The sound engineer might also apply some basic EQ at this point. I tend to not do much EQing at this stage, instead waiting until the practice (see below).

If the keys player is going to be using piano sounds and pad sounds, ask them to play both (not at once). Some fancy keyboards apparently let you split these over two channels to solve the issue - pads and pianos sound very different, and the sound engineer needs to make sure that both give a suitable level without peaking. Likewise, if the electric guitar player has a fancy set of effects pedals, try a few.

Once the engineer says s/he is happy with one instrument, they will ask the musician to stop playing/singing, and move on to the next. It's important at this stage that the rest of the band don't try and play over each other. (It's also very difficult to sound check when there are people having loud conversations in the room. O hai, Late Service setup!)

This is the time I normally remember to do an initial check of foldback levels. If you're lucky, then you'll be inheriting the desk in a sane state and only a few tweaks might be needed. If you're unlucky, then a completely different set of instruments were used last time and you need to do it all from scratch! It's really down to the preference of the musicians as to what they have in their foldback. In general:

Worship leader: their guitar/keyboard, their vocal should be loudest. Maybe some kick/snare drum. Maybe a little backing vocals.
Drummer: maybe their drums (we use in-ear monitors so that's not as daft as it sounds!). Lead instrument and vocal. Bass.
Backing vocalists: Backing vocals loudest, leader vocals softer. Maybe some lead instrument. Maybe some kick/snare.
Keys: The keyboard. In my experience, keys players find it universally impossible to hear themselves in foldback even when turned up so loud you don't need front-of-house. (Any suggestions, anyone?) Lead vocal and instrument. Electric guitar if there is one.
Electric guitar: if they don't have their own amp they'll need to be in their foldback. Lead instrument and vocal. Bass, keys.
Bass: if they don't have their own amp they'll need to be in their foldback. Lead instrument and vocal. Eguitar. Maybe kick/snare drum.

Those are really rough starting points, but we'll tweak them later. You also probably don't have that many channels of foldback - we certainly don't! - so there's some compromise needed based on who is sharing a monitor with whom.

Once all musicians have sound-checked, all the appropriate channels on the desk should be on and at about -5dB. In general things will be too loud right now - which is good. If you push levels in the service higher than they were in the sound check, then you risk feedback. The mix will also probably sound a bit naff because everything's at the same level.

At this point I like to make the handover very clear: the sound check is done, the band are free to get on with their rehearsal, so I say something like "OK, Rich, all yours" (where Rich is the worship leader). The whole sound check should take about 10-15 minutes at most.

Service -1.25 hours

Rehearsal

After the handover, the worship leader decides how things happen. It's usually useful for the band to play through one song, after which a flurry of foldback requests will be shouted at the sound engineer all at once. :-)

I use the rest of this time to work on EQ and on the front-of-house mix. My general approach with EQ is "fiddle until it sounds good" mixed with "less is more". One piece of wisdom that was passed on to me (via Dave, via Nolan) is that a fairly tight cut at 250Hz helps make vocals a bit clearer, so I normally apply that early on. I've yet to work out how to EQ the Nord to make it sound as good as our previous Triton (though I suspect all the keys players in church will want to make me suffer for that comment).

Occasionally, a member of church leadership will wander in during the sound check or rehearsal and make comments about the noise. It might be worth either the sound engineer or worship leader having a chat to them about this if it becomes a problem; particularly the point I make above about feedback. At Aldates, leadership will sometimes ask for front-of-house to be turned off once the engineer has a reasonable front-of-house mix, and although this changes how the band hear themselves and means I get less tweaking time before the service starts, I normally comply. And I always try to remind myself that I need humility in those situations where it's so easy to become annoyed at leadership!

Service -0.25 hours

Final setup

Once the band finish their rehearsal there's typically about 15 minutes before the start of the service. We normally put a worship CD on at a moderate level at this point, and I always see it as the last chance for a "bio-break" (trip to the bathroom!) before the service starts. Once done there, it's time to check battery levels in the handheld radio mics and put them at the front of church (making sure they're switched on!); prep one or more lavalier (clip-on/tie) mics depending on the speaker's preference; double check those battery levels; and pray over all the little technical details that will inevitably need to be sorted during the service.

Service +0 hours

End of the service

Have a CD cued and ready to play as the band finish. Make sure the song is appropriate to whatever's going on at the end of the service up front - if there's some intense prayer ministry happening and the band just finished on a quiet note then a loud guitar intro might not be the right thing to play!

Service +0.25 hours

Set-down

This is the part that people tend to forget! It entirely depends on what other services or activities are going on in church that day - for example, if there's another service starting soon with a similar band you won't want to put cables away only to get them out again.

If there are no more services or events that day, then the goal is to leave the stage and sound desk in the state you'd have preferred them to be in when you arrived. To me, this means a relatively blank stage (though I might leave foldback monitors set up): microphones and DI boxes put away; mic and music stands folded and put to one side; cables coiled, tied and hung up on the appropriate peg. We have an M7CL, so unless I've done something outlandish like softpatching I'll generally just leave the sound desk in whatever state it is at the end of the service.

So... that was a new experience...

2010-05-20T00:18:00.004+01:00

Tonight I led worship at the Oxford Prayer Room. It was my first time leading worship in public (eg with people I don't know in the room). Inspired by another Oxford-based blogger, I'm going to analyse the evening here, warts and all... I probably shouldn't analyse tonight publicly, or with the probably self-critical method I'm going to employ. I almost certainly shouldn't be writing this blog post at half past midnight [Edit: It's now 1.15am...] when I need to be in work early tomorrow. I'm going to ignore both of those suspicions for now. It would make for a boring post if I didn't.

First let me say OW OW OW OW OW OW. It currently hurts using my left fingers to type, and I hope that my left arm won't be too stiff in the morning. I've never played guitar for such an extended period of time before - after about 40 minutes cramp set in and I had to let Claire take over at that point until I could grip the guitar neck again.

I'd asked Claire to help me lead, mostly because I am very aware of the limits of my musicianship and she clearly has an anointing that I simply don't have. I don't say that in a self-deprecating way; but I know that my skills don't primarily lie in playing music or singing (of which, more later). I've never played music with someone else before (well, not anything like this and certainly not for years) and I think that showed. I know the Aldates bands do spend the time practicing with one another, helping them to gel musically. Claire and I hadn't even practiced together before tonight, and things were made more difficult about ten minutes in, when we suffered a Technical Problem.

If you have ever shared a sound desk with me, you'll know that I don't do technical problems. If I have to leap into the power room mid-service and repatch half the system to work around a problem, I will; if I had to kneel on the floor holding a loose cable in place while operating the visuals computer keyboard with my face and the DVD player with my left foot, I would. Probably. It comes with the territory of being an A/V engineer and programmer. But in this new arena, I simply didn't have the tools and skills to deal with the fact that, ten minutes in to what turned out to be a 90-odd minute session, my guitar strap broke.

"That's hardly the end of the world," you've probably just thought to yourself, and you're right. A quick requisition of a chair to sit on and I could carry on just fine; except it made things just that little bit more difficult. Trying to look around at Claire to signal a chorus or a repeat was awkward; she wouldn't have seen the usual leg signals even if I'd had the spare mental capacity to remember to give them. And as for trying to work out what chords she was playing during the times when she improvised was (especially for a non-keys player) impossible. Mostly, Claire was able to follow what I did just fine, but then she has the advantage of knowing both instruments well!

The high probability that anything I played to Claire's lead would be in the wrong key, then, meant I mostly didn't play while she was leading. But what I did try to do is improvise with my voice, rather than the guitar. Now, I don't have a spectacular voice. My parents always tried to discourage me from singing - though in their defence, this was through those teenage years when male voices become difficult tools to wield! Still, it really touched me when, a few weeks ago at church, someone standing next to me told me that I had a wonderful voice and it was so nice to worship next to me. Without that, I probably wouldn't have volunteered to lead tonight, although I'm still not sure I understand all the reasons why I did!

I was quite pleased with how well my voice managed on some of the songs, but - and I think this is a confidence thing - I'm well aware that for probably 40% of the time, I was horribly out of key. Again with the lack of tools thing - how do I fix that mid-song? I noticed a tendency that I had of trying to sing songs an octave lower than I'd practiced, for fear of not hitting the right notes; all that resulted was that I hit the same wrong notes, just an octave lower. When I managed an octave jump for the third verse of David Crowder's "Alleluia, Sing" I was actually really surprised with how my voice sounded - to me, at least, much better than the lower first two verses.

I also liked being able to use the prayer room in worship. There's a wall in the room on which people have written the names of people they know and prayers that they would come to know Jesus. As part of the worship I read out each of the names that were up there, asking God to break in to their lives. I don't know any of them (save one), but God does. I hope that that prayer can be used in some way.

Much like this post, the session went on a little longer than I'd expected. I'd only really prepared enough for the 40 minutes my wrist lasted before cramp set in, but Claire and I were there for another 45 minutes on top of that. (While my memory for song lyrics is necessarily quite extensive, the same is not true of their chords!) I am truly grateful that Claire was there. She certainly helped me to enter into God's presence this evening - and after all, that's what worship is about. Not that we can make our own ways into the presence of God, but that Jesus has made it possible at all, and somehow we can commune with God as we sing and pray. It becomes not about the singing, the praying, the words, the chords, the visuals or the sound mix; it becomes about Jesus, and Jesus alone.

So Jesus, take those songs and prayers; you deserve so much more than the little I was able to give, but every beautiful chord and every bum note are yours.

Oxford bans Spotify?

2010-01-18T17:30:00.003Z

So the Cherwell reports, and IT website The Register has picked up, on a story the latter headlines simply "Oxford bans Spotify"... which isn't necessarily the most accurate title for a story released today.

Reading between the lines (banks?) of the Cherwell, it seems that OUCS have placed a block on the music-sharing application, which was already banned under Oxford University network rules.

The reason is simple: OUCS houses a connection to JANET, which happens to be one of the faster Internet backbones of the country. Peer-to-peer applications are designed to use the bandwidth of their peers to spread the load away from the single server of the standard client/server model.... and that means that P2P software tends to saturate JANET as much as it can.

That's a bad thing. So it's sensible to prevent its use.

So, Oxford have not recently banned Spotify; rather, they've imposed technical restrictions preventing its use, to replace the logical ones that apparently people weren't following. It was banned all along, people! As was the original BBC iPlayer Downloader and Channel 4's equivalent, until they moved away from the peer-to-peer model. And in fact Skype was included in that list for a while, before a special relaxation was granted with certain configuration options.

But I guess they had to save a story for Fifth Week...

Reykjavik Blog, Day Three

2009-10-02T20:23:00.004+01:00

Hmm, lots happened today.

Headlines (for EVE players): Dominion will be released on 1st December, with Walking in Stations sometime after that. I posted a video of the teaser shown here to the EVE Markets site, forgetting that I pay for bandwidth :-S See http://fanfest.mmmetrics.co.uk/ for a decent summary of all the chatter. Oh, and someone who wasn't me mentioned EVE Markets in a dev round-table!

Headlines (for non-EVE players reading this because you know me): More internet spaceships stuff. Surviving mostly on chocolate covered raisins and orange juice, though I managed to sell a couple of beer tokens for 1000ISK so might be able to afford nutrition today! It's been cold and wet, or at least it was this morning when I last saw the outside world...

Reykjavik Blog, Day Two

2009-10-01T20:52:00.002+01:00

FanFest proper opened today.

I'm sat on the floor next to just about the only plug socket I could find in the FanFest venue - and yes, that is the Jita 4-4 undock point you can see through the 'window' - because there's free wifi here.

Didn't manage to get a slot in the frigate free-for-all tournament, but went to round-tables on the EVE server architecture and web development team. There is only one database server for the whole game... (Actually, there are two - one is a hot-standby machine - but the 30sec of unavailability that a switch takes is enough to kill the cluster anyway).

An (ahem) interesting presentation from those idiots at Goonswarm concluded events today as part of an alliance leaders' panel. EVE really is a cold, dark, harsh universe, and that's reflected in some of the playerbase...

I met CCP Applebabe today too! Finally shook hands with DV of EVE University. And, I was in the same room as StevieSG. Wow, I'm mixing it up with the stars here at "Jita 4-4"! Now, I should head off and find some food - it's only 8PM but it feels like it's been a long day. If only there were an easy way of getting or making a cup of tea here...

Tomorrow's expected highlights: talks on COSMOS (nicknamed 'Spacebook' by pilots), the API, the in-game browser and the economy; a preview of the next expansion, Dominion, and throughout the day the main PvP tournament. It's an even longer day tomorrow!

Reykjavik Blog, Day One

2009-09-30T22:24:00.004+01:00

Left my flat at 7.30 this morning, got to Gloucester Green and on the Airline coach at 8. Checked in at Heathrow by 10.30am - I was amused by the EVE banter going on in the queue. The poor an behind me lost his Absolution the previous evening. (But it's not all bad; his son salvaged the wreck in his Paladin.)

The flight itself was about three hours, end to end - I got a window seat above the wing so got a few nice pictures, as well as some video footage that's just begging to be used at the next Late Service I run visuals at... Very smooth flight, and any form of transport where the tea is complementary is a winner to me.

Got to the hotel at about 5.00, and I went for a wander around the city while I had the chance... Managed to get thoroughly lost, and did actually end up going in circles for a while before I worked out I'd been right the first first time... It's not warm here, but above freezing, so I'm fairly comfortable with the temperature walking around.

Grabbed some food from the Subway across the road. This hotel's a little stingy - there's not even a "welcome to the hotel" pack, let alone a kettle or even any toiletries - and the WiFi is costly, so I've had to make the choice to leave the "leet haxor" skills in the toolkit and will use the FanFest area's free WiFi tomorrow!

Tomorrow's expected highlights: Free-for-all PvP tournament, plus some round-table discussions on the EVE server cluster and web development. More photos, thoughts and news from Iceland as it happens (and as I find free WiFi hotspots and the time to type!)

So, here's one for you...

2009-07-12T01:17:00.003+01:00

It's time for me to upgrade my mobile phone contract. Three give a "14 day peace of mind guarantee", so if you're not happy with your new phone you can send it back within two weeks.

But wait: there's more...

"In order to be eligible to return your mobile under the 14 -Day Money Back Guarantee you must not have used your handset to make or receive calls or texts, take photos, or download content."

So, I'm supposed to make up my mind based on... the colour?

Peace of mind? I'm tempted to give them a piece of mine...

I just don't understand how they broke it so badly...

2009-05-12T22:59:00.002+01:00

"I know what the security settings for this wireless network are. But, they don't quite match what they were last time. Rather than use the proper settings, or let you change them, I'm just going to POINT BLANK REFUSE to try and connect."

And, actually, "channel" does not equal "security settings".

This stuff made it past QA?

It may be a game of internet spaceships...

2009-04-27T01:10:00.004+01:00

...but I'm still not going to turn against someone who has a great deal of my respect (even if I have more scepticism about others). The ships may be pretend but the players are real, and that's enough for me.

Indeed, internet spaceships does turn out to be serious business.

Spoilt

2009-03-30T13:33:00.002+01:00

Yesterday I had to install drivers for my printer on a housemate's laptop. It took about an hour to find, download and install them (and even then somehow we managed to get an installer in Dutch and muddle through).

It made me realise just how spoilt Linux users are that things Just Work...

Big news from EVE

2009-02-05T12:01:00.002Z

In the early hours of this morning, news came from New Eden: the largest alliance in the game, the Band of Brothers (BoB), has disbanded.

Details are still mostly unconfirmed - but talk is that a director of BoB's executive corp turned rogue, and booted all of BoB's member corporations from the alliance (thus disbanding BoB).

Goonswarm thugs are said to be pleased with this outcome.

Discussion thread (well, one of many) on EVE-O forums: http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=990387

This is possibly the biggest event to ever happen in EVE. With BoB out of the way (finally!) the resulting free-for-all to claim their former space will prove crucial in deciding the future shape of 0.0 politics and warfare.

Journalism 101: How not to review software

2009-01-23T22:24:00.003Z

I was unfortunate enough to come across this "review" of KDE 4.2 (release candidate) today. Written by "Jacob W. B. ", it is perhaps the worst attempt at journalism I have seen in quite some time, and I'd like to explain why I think so.

First, a disclaimer: I like KDE. I prefer it to Gnome. I'm using KDE 4 quite happily at home and soon at work too. Even so, I feel entirely justified in the remarks I'm about to make.

Let's leave aside the deficient grammar, punctuation and coherence of the article and start examining the content:

we think that lately the KDE team version by version have been taking large steps in the wrong direction. They have been doing a good job at making a Desktop Environment that feels almost invisible, but the general design of the Environment itself seems a little too much like a Vista (i.e. Widgets) and Mac (i.e. the theme) clone and this isn't what GNU/Linux was originally designed to be, a clone.

Version by version? "Lately", there has only been one new major version of KDE: that is the KDE 4.x series. Its predecessor KDE 3.5 has been around years. The minor releases after KDE 4.0 - surprisingly, 4.1 and 4.2 (due soon) - haven't exactly been "large steps" but continuing on the path started by 4.0.

The first sentence, then, can be summarised as: the author doesn't like KDE4 and that is the approach they will be taking for the rest of the review. The second sentence seems to contradict itself: either the KDE team have been doing a good job with KDE4's design, or they haven't. And, incidentally, I'd say the theme was more Vista-ish; the "widgets" idea has been on Mac for years, and was adopted by Vista. What's novel in KDE4 is that a widget can live on the desktop or on the panel or both - it's a new take on an existing paradigm.

As for "what GNU/Linux was designed to be" - providing a choice, and providing an open-source alternative to proprietary software - I see no features of KDE that prevent this from being the case. Just because something's been used in proprietary software, does not make it a bad idea, and does not mean it should be avoided if it's a good idea.

Personally, I wasn't sold on the whole KDE4 theme until I used it. My first impressions were "it looks too much like Vista, and what's the point of the Plasmoids (widgets)?" Since the 4.0 launch, there are plenty more themes available, as well as some genuinely useful Plasmoids - from the usuals like the Wastebin and Pager applets to RSS feeds and the Folder View applet, of which I use three.

Back to the review, which continues:

"The second problem we have with KDE is the fact that they are somewhat breaking away from the easy usability and user friendly design of the GNU operating system...for example KDE 4.2 would not run on a computer with an 800MHz processor, less than 64MB of video, and 128MB of memory, where GNOME easily would."

I'm sorry - since when did "user friendly design" equal "low system requirements"? I think perhaps the author is conflating two quite different issues. If you're trying to run KDE4 on a machine with those specs then you're doing it wrong. Might I suggest that, say, Xfce would run much more smoothly on that hardware - because it's supposed to? If my Eee PC can (just about) run KDE4 then I see no reason why the system requirements should be a cause for concern.

Now we get to the real killer - the reviewer doesn't like the letter K. Indeed, the letter K is evil and therefore KDE must be bad! I mean, at least he doesn't drag in a mention of the Ku Klux Klan at this point, right?

Ah, crap, he did.

The "K Desktop Environment" when native programs starting with the letter 'K', are listed read "KKK" KKKKK ... they sometimes even designed artwork for the system that makes it look intentional to say "KKK", as seen in the image below. And we know that's not the case. It just seems as if they take pride in the letter 'K'... Though GNOME does the same thing i.e. "GGG", but this way is better because anything to avoid the "Ku Klux Klan" name similarity and reference.

Aside from being written in something barely approximating English, that such a substantial section of a software review would be taken up with such drivel is quite astonishing. Not only that, but it's accompanied with an image labelled "KKK KDE artwork - KDE 4.2" that's actually taken from an earlier version of KDE. The image is irrelevant - the prose even more so!

Now somewhat incredulous, I continued reading.

"And the KDE Desktop Environment has always made programs look more integrated with the Desktop Environment than as separate programs, and this kind of behavior is more confusing and takes away more from the usability than it adds. Additionally, the KDE team have designed their own replacements for programs, so that they integrate better, nice, but when there is something already out there, it would probably be better-- particularly for compatibility reasons --to use it instead, and just modify, add and remove features."

I'm sorry, but I honestly can't decide what point the author is trying to make here. A consistent "look & feel" is supposed to be confusing?Maybe he just doesn't want to use programs so obviously endorsed by radical pro-white groups? Come to think of it, don't Gnome applications aim for a consistent look across them all - shared icon sets and so on? I'd be surprised if they didn't.

As for "their own replacements for programs" - if you don't like a particular program, don't use it. That's the choice that Linux gives you. I'd always found the Kubuntu default package manager, Adept, more intuitive to use than Ubuntu's, Synaptic - mostly because of it's quick-search bar. In Ubuntu 8.10, the version of Adept that shipped is, honestly, pretty dire. So I switched to Synaptic (the Gnome default, remember), which now has a quick-search feature. So what? If you don't like a program don't use it, use something else. The author is clearly used to his Gnome applications and wouldn't want to switch. The "compatibility reasons" mentioned seem to only exist in the author's own opinion - fine, but not in a review of this sort.

"But over all, it's not our favorite Desktop Environment, mainly because we believe more strongly in the philosophy of the GNU project, and the stability."

"But"? Wow, didn't see that one coming. That's a huge shock. Now let's translate the reasoning: "We don't like things that use Qt, because at one point in the past it wasn't released under an open-source license and that makes it inferior." As for stability - remember, he's reviewing a Release Candidate, not a final release - it might have been nice to back up the suggestion of KDE instability with, you know, some evidence? Even something anecdotal would have been nice.

Then, halfway down the page, we find this.

"Here is our review of the new KDE 4.2 release candidate..."

So what have I just wasted my life reading? I thought you'd already started that. Or maybe, in your opinion, it's a good plan to prepend any review with a rant on just how much you're going to hate the thing you're about to review.

OK, then. So, what's the headline story you can bring me from KDE4?

"First, now when you start any file operation, the progress will be displayed in a notification "bubble" that appears above the panel. "

Well, that isn't exactly how I would open my review of KDE 4.2. Not exactly going for the "Ooh, that's quite nice" here, are we?

The next few paragraphs read like someone who's read the KDE press release once or twice, detailing a couple of the things that were looked at between 4.1 and 4.2. Then, another inexplicable comment, when talking about the Folder View plasmoid:

"Users who prefer the conventional desktop icon paradigm can get equivalent functionality in KDE 4.2 by setting the Desktop Activity Type to "Folder View" ... But this doesn't seem to reduce processor or memory usage."

Should it? I see no reason to expect that switching between the two would have much effect on performance at all. To add that throwaway comment at the end just seems like a poorly-veiled attempt to suggest that KDE4 is a resource hog. I would like to know why the author doesn't just come out and say it, rather than drop unsubtle hints like this. If the reviewer isn't being honest about the reviewee, what's the review worth?

"Lastly" - as if an exhaustive list had been given! - "Lastly, the 24 hour clock is still a big problem, there isn't an easy way to set it to 12 hour mode, if at all."
System Settings -> Regional & Language -> Time & Dates. If you were that stuck, Jacob, you could have used Google.

And that's the end of the review. I came away still not quite believing the drivel of the first half of the article, and wondering if the author had actually spent more than five minutes in KDE to write it or not. Sadly, I have no evidence to suggest anything but "not".

Well done for making it to the end of this post - I realise it's a little longer than most of my posts are. I was disappointed that the original article was the second hit on Google for "fedora 10 kde 4.2" - I can only hope that people read a few other reviews before deciding if they want to give KDE a try or not.

Speaking of which - I did promise a KDE review here at some point. I think I've just found my excuse to write one.

Oh, really?

2009-01-16T15:10:00.002Z

Maybe you thought I was just being anti-Microsoft when I suggested that running Windows on warships was a bad plan, back in December?

Really. I wasn't.

Let's kill this myth: 64 > 32 after all

2009-01-06T14:03:00.002Z

So why would you choose to install a 32-but Linux instead of a 64-bit Linux?

Flash player won't work
sudo aptitude install flashplugin-nonfree : It Just Works.

Java won't work
Yes, it will. I have Eclipse running quite happily (though am yet to run the Power MTR QA benchmark we set ourselves at work!)
Oh, maybe you meant the plugin? Well, if the GNU Java plugin didn't already float (double?) your 64-bit boat, then Sun have now released one too.

Wine doesn't work in 64-bit
I play the Windows binary version of EVE with premium (DX9) graphics content at entirely decent framerates. Again I say: It Just Works.

I like paying for RAM that my operating system can't see
Uh...

But there are loads of posts on the Interwebs about people not finding drivers for 64-bit...
...Windows. For Linux, if it's in the kernel tree, it's there (especially with the unification of the 32- and 64-bit architectures).

Coming soon: KDE 4.1, and why people are wrong about it.

Thanks to the unique way the BBC is funded...

2008-12-24T10:26:00.003Z

... their lead Technology story today is that "people in remote locations, across the world, can use technology to get their Christmas messages back home to Britain."

Oh, really?

We're doomed

2008-12-18T13:32:00.003Z

After its success on the USS Yorktown, the Royal Navy have decided to run their nuclear submarine fleet on Windows.

The Register summarises:

But we just might, if things go wrong, be looking at ... British sailors of the future staring helplessly at what would shortly be literally a blue screen of death, as the shipkillers bored in without response.

Why...

2008-12-16T11:44:00.001Z

...do people still use such a crappy browser?

On leading and serving

2008-12-10T01:27:00.001Z

Things aren't perfect.

OK - hopefully that wasn't news to you. The question I pose to you is: when things aren't perfect, something goes wrong, or something is not done that needed to be - how do you react? I've seen about three different approaches recently, and I think it's a matter worthy of comment.

Take this scenario: at work (I work at a software firm) someone makes a commit that sets the build on fire[1]. Thanks to the wonders of version-control and continuous integration software, you can see exactly what set of changes was made, and who made them, to break the build.
At this point you have three options: you can leave it, and hope that someone else picks it up - or maybe somebody else is assigned to that area of the code, so they'll pick it up instead. (Fair enough, particularly at work.) Or, you could run an svn blame and find out who 'owns' the line responsible, then shout across the office, "${name}, you set the tree on fire!"

Maybe, and this is your third option, you could find out how the build is broken, fix it, then commit that fix (and receive the adulation of DeciBot[2] when it announces "All watched trees are now green").

Put like that, I guess it's reasonably apparent which is the best of the three options to take. But so often - and now I'm not just talking about work - people pick the wrong one!

I was reading Joel Spolsky's blog the other day; the entry entitled "My Style of Servant Leadership". In it, Spolsky tells a story from his time in the Israeli army:

Anyway, on my first day of work for the sergeant major, I didn't know what to expect. I was sure it was going to be horrible, a suspicion that seemed to be confirmed when he took me to the officers' bathroom and told me I would be responsible for keeping it clean. And then he said something I didn't anticipate.

"Here's how you clean a toilet," he said.

And he got down on his knees in front of the porcelain bowl -- in his pressed-starched-spotless dress uniform -- and scrubbed it with his bare hands until it shined.

To a 19-year-old assigned to clean toilets, which is almost by definition the worst possible job in the world, the sight of this high-ranking, 38-year-old, manicured, pampered disciplinary officer cleaning a toilet was a shock. And it completely reset my attitude. If he can clean a toilet, I can clean a toilet, I thought. There's nothing wrong with cleaning toilets. My loyalty and inspiration from that moment on were unflagging. Now that's leadership.

Those that know your Bible will already be thinking of Jesus' words to his disciples, after an argument breaks out over which of them is the greatest. Get this:

"If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all." (taken from Mark 9: 35, NIV)

Those words from Jesus - the very instrument of creation, the incarnate God of the universe, who washed his disciples' feet.

You can try the ostrich approach - that is, bury your head in the sand until it (hopefully) passes. You can take the "assertive" approach, and bang some heads together until (hopefully) everyone sees things from your point of view (or at least are speaking to each other again). Or, you could step out, and do something to serve them. There's truth in the cliche that actions can speak louder than words; how different things would be if, instead of shouting matches with harsh words thrown in both directions, we all opted for serving matches, both sides wanting to do things for purely the other's benefit?

That's both simplistic and idealistic; in truth, even in the best case it's rarely two-way, at least not straight away. But, leaders, persevere - not just because it's effective (it actually works!), but because it's the right thing to do, out of love for those you are serving. And it's not an easy road - because to serve others is to necessarily sacrifice some of your own ambitions and plans. Then maybe, just maybe, for the briefest fraction of time, you'll get a glimpse of better things to come. And when you get that glimpse, don't stop there - keep hold of it, keep "cleaning toilets", and perhaps you'll get there in the end.

Perhaps, God willing, we will.

[1] Note to non-software engineers: this essentially means 'someone breaks the program you're all working on'
[2] A friend of your friend, the DecisionSoft Continuous Integration watching IRC bot

US Elections: BBC News live feed

2008-11-04T14:49:00.004Z

The BBC have their own Twitter-like feed of US election titbits. But I didn't want it in a browser... so I wrote myself a little Bash script to do the job for me. Run that through (say) watch:

watch -n 30 elections.sh

and Obama's your Presiden... I mean, Bob's your uncle.

I've a small window pinned to my screen with that in. Hooray for distractions from work!

EDIT: 11.55pm - At some point they changed their format slightly and it confused my regexp. Updated version for download now, same location.

On F1 2008, James Allen and the end of an era

2008-11-03T02:31:00.005Z

(I can't sleep... so time for a brain dump!)

A few hours ago, some British bloke called Hamilton - heard of him?(!) - became the youngest ever Formula One world champion. He did it by about 5.4 seconds. In the very last corner of the very last race of only his second season in Formula One.

It's certainly the most exciting climax to a season in recent years, and certainly the most open championship in a long while. And yet it was so close to being remembered for all the wrong reasons... when even F1 greats like Niki Lauda call foul of the stewards, there's clearly something amiss.

At the very least the stewards have been horribly inconsistent (for example, awarding Massa a fine but no race penalty for unsafe release from his pit box... then a few weeks later for the same offence - when it wouldn't affect his race outcome - correctly awarding a penalty). At worst they've been outright opposed to anyone not in a red car - like Bourdais' penalty in Japan for, evidently, being driven into by Massa. And, of course, Lewis's penalty at Spa for, um, overtaking Raikkonen. Who then promptly drove into a wall. Wonder why there's not as much overtaking in F1 as people would like?

The officials in F1 seem to have a history of blatant bias in their decisionmaking. This year, it was all against Hamilton; but, not so long ago, it was all against Schumacher. Remember those days? The bias is always there; but, like the bias of a car's brakes, it does get adjusted back and forth from time to time.

Yesterday was the end of an era in Formula One in more than one way. It was David Coulthard's final race, having announced his retirement a few weeks ago. In keeping with the rest of his season, he got himself involved in a crash almost straight away, ending his race. (There must surely have been some races this season where DC wasn't involved in at least one incident... but I can't recall any of them right now...) It's not been a great final season for a man who, at his best, surely deserved more than the 13 victories by his name.

Thankfully, Brazil 2008 also sees the end of the grooved tyres introduced back in 1998. They were designed to reduce the car's grip and thus its speed, in the hope of both increasing the safety of the sport and (by limiting the speed difference across the field) give more overtaking. The actual result was pushing more of the car's grip to depend on aerodynamic downforce, triggering an increasingly complex array of appendages to spew from the wings and sidepods of just about all the field. This created such a "dirty air" effect behind the cars, that (you guessed it) overtaking became a whole lot harder - as you lose so much downforce travelling close behind the car in front.

As part of a plethora of changes for 2009, slick tyres are being reintroduced, together with restrictions on the rear wings designed to reduce the dirty air effect. Other changes include a "kinetic energy recovery system" (KERS) - which converts kinetic energy to an electrical store when braking, and can release that energy for a short horsepower boost when required. Alternatively, it can cause fires and electricute your mechanics. We'll have to see on that one...

There's talk of the FIA imposing a standard engine package for F1 cars, to reduce costs. F1 has always been, and should always be, the pinnacle of motorsport in both skill and technical prowess. It'd be a real shame to turn F1 into a more-hyped version of some of the lower formulae that use a same-engine (or even same-chassis) setup.

The 1997 season was the first time I watched a Grand Prix. I must have started watching halfway through the season, but my earliest F1 memory is Schumacher vs Villeneuve in Jerez, the title decider... that race said just about all you needed to know about Schumacher, and I loved it.

1997 was also the first season shown on ITV; 2008 is the last. Next year the sport moves to the BBC, along with commentator Martin Brundle. (I hope they don't keep interrupting it Grandstand-style for live "action" reports from Miscellaneous Golf Tournament. Though I'm told Grandstand is now, much like sport on the BBC in general, deprecated.)

Brundle's commentary counterpart, James Allen, has come in for a lot of stick from a vocal bunch of people. He took over the lead commentator job from the legendary Murray Walker at his retirement; to Allen's credit, he knew he couldn't fill those shoes and he didn't try. Instead he made his commentary his own; Yes, he could be repetitive on occasion - and, no, he could never be the next Murray Walker (could anyone?) - but Martin and James did a damn fine job, thank you. Please try and place the criticism where it's really due... after all this time, I still have yet to identify a single useful contribution from Mark "I Like Ferrari" Blundell. At least Tony Jardine sounded intelligent!

So we enter the long, cold and dark winter of the Formula One night, not quite sure what the 2009 season will look like. We have a new world champion, a new set of rules, yet more new circuits (that never approach the atmosphere of a Monza, Spa or Hockenheim), a new TV crew...

29 March 2009, Albert Park, Melbourne... bring it on.

Oxford At Night

2008-10-08T23:59:00.001+01:00

Oxford awakes from its summer slumber
Youthful blood courses again through ancient streets
Yet still the city is steeped in darkness
With empty hearts following empty desires,
Lustfully pursuing the self-gratifying thrill driven away by the morning.
The blood of ten thousand pumps through cobbled veins,
Each one searching, and each one choosing not to see
Yet still, amongst them the dreaming spires point up out of the black
To the light that they once knew, and loved
And yet this light will reach down through the darkness
So this city will shine brightly again

I won't do it...

2008-09-16T00:27:00.005+01:00

When you send me an E-mail with an attachment you want me to look at, why do you want me to pay circa £300 for the privilege? If your software is defective and can't save in free, open file formats that everyone can read, replace it. It won't cost you anything. It will save my time - that you've already asked me to spend doing a favour for you - because I won't have to spend twenty minutes looking for websites that can have a stab at converting it for me. Useful as they are, I have no clue if the end result I look at has any resemblance to the way it looked from within your proprietary prison.

Yes, I'm talking to you.

Much to update... but for now just a code snippet...

2008-08-31T22:03:00.005+01:00

A lot's happened since my last post - but for now I'd just like to share this line of JavaScript I came across a moment ago. It even comes with a helpful comment!

// Please, don't change below this line

// ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

var menus=[],TMg,TM09=['click','mouseout','mouseover','mousedown','hide'];function TM0A(TM0B){for(var i in menus){if(TM0B&&menus[i].TM0C&&!menus[i].TMc)menus[i].TM0C.TM0D.menus[i].TM0E();menus[i].TM0E();menus[i].TM0F=true}this.TM0G=true}function TM0H(TM0I){var TM0J;if(this.width!=(TM0J=this.TM0K(window))){this.width=TM0J;TM0B=TM0I=true}if(this.height!=(TM0J=this.TM0L(window))){this.height=TM0J;TM0B=TM0I=true}if(this.TM0M!=(TM0J=this.TM0N(window))){this.TM0M=TM0J;TM0I=true}if(this.TM0O!=(TM0J=this.TM0P(window))){this.TM0O=TM0J;TM0I=true}if(TM0I){this.TM0G=false;this.TM0E(TM0B)}}function 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TM1Y=this.TMs.TMT[0].TM1V,TM1Z=this.TMs.TMT[0].TM1W;if(this.TMs.TMT[0].TMu){if(this.TMs.TMh.bw!=null)TM1Y=this.TMs.TMh.bw;if(this.TMh.sh!=null)TM1Z=this.TMh.sh}else{if(this.TMs.TMh.bh!=null)TM1Z=this.TMs.TMh.bh;if(this.TMh.sw!=null)TM1Y=this.TMh.sw}this.TMs.TMY[TM1L]=this.TM0c(TM1Y,TM1Z);this.TMt=this.TMq.length-3;if(this.TMt>0&&this.TMq[3]){this.TMT=[];this.TM1a=TMM;this.TM06=TM1b;if(TM1E&&!document.layers){this.TM06();this.TM1c=this.TMR==0&&this.TMP.TM0r}}}function TM0i(TM1d){return TM1d}function TM1b(){this.TMY=[];for(var i=0;i<this.TMt;i++)if(this.TMq[3+i])new TM0s(this.TM1K+'_'+i,this,this.TMP,i);else this.TMt--;this.TM1a();for(i in this.TMT)this.TMT[i].TM0t()}function TM1O(){top.status=this.TMh.sb}function TM1P(TM0k){var TM1e=null,TM1f=this.TMP.TM0R[this.TMR];if(TM1f)TM1e=TM1f[TM0k];return(TM1e==null?this.TMs.TMV(TM0k):TM1e)}function TM1Q(TM1g,TM1h){var TM1i=this.TMV('css'),TM1j=TM1i[TM1g];if(typeof(TM1j)=='string')return TM1j;for(var TM1k=TM1h;TM1k>=0;TM1k--)if(TM1j[TM1k])return TM1j[TM1k]}function TM0h(TMC,value){if(this.TMt>0){if(TMg.TM0n){TMg.TMB(TMg.TM0o,{'x':0,'y':0});TMg.TM0l=TMg.TM4(TMg.TM0o,0,0);TMg.TM0n=0}var TM1l=this.TMT[0],TM1m=TMg.TM4(this.elements[0],(this.TMh.bl?this.TMh.bl:TM1l.TM1S)-TMg.TM0l.x,(this.TMh.bt?this.TMh.bt:TM1l.TM1R)-TMg.TM0l.y,this.TM1c);if(TM1l.TM1U)TM1m.x-=TMg.TMD(this.TMf);if(TM1l.TM1T)TM1m.y-=TMg.TMD(this.TMf,1);if(TM1l.TM1X&&!this.TMP.TM0C){var wise=TM1l.TM1X,TM1n=TMg.TMD(this.TMf,0),TM1o=TMg.TMD(this.TMf,1),TM1p=TMg.TM0K(window),TM1q=TMg.TM0L(window),TM1r=TMg.TM0N(window),TM1s=TMg.TM0P(window);if(TM1m.x+TM1n>TM1p+TM1r)TM1m.x=(wise==1?TM1p+TM1r:TM1m.x)-TM1n;if(TM1m.y+TM1o>TM1q+TM1s)TM1m.y=(wise==1?TM1q+TM1s:TM1m.y)-TM1o;if(TM1m.x<TM1r)TM1m.x=TM1r;if(TM1m.y<TM1s)TM1m.y=TM1s}TMg.TMB(this.TMf,TM1m);if(this.TMn)TMg.TMB(this.TMn,TM1m);if(TM1E&&!document.layers)for(var TM10=0;TM10<this.TMt;TM10++)this.TMT[TM10].TM07()}}var TM1t=navigator.appVersion.split('MSIE '),TM1E=window.opera||TM1t.length<2||parseFloat(TM1t[1])<5||(navigator.appVersion.indexOf('Mac')>-1&&navigator.appVersion.indexOf('MSIE')>-1)||navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Konqueror')>-1;document.write('<scr','ipt language="JavaScript" src="',TMenu_path_to_files,'menu.',(document.layers?'lay':TM1E?'opr':'dom'),'.js"></scr','ipt>');

In order to preserve the layout of this page, I've added line breaks; that was, literally, a single line of code. A single, 9,911-character, line of code.

And that just about sums up the state of the codebase for this particular website...

Goodbye, Stargazer

2008-08-16T23:45:00.003+01:00

"General Stargazer" is a man I knew through Eve. The character name might be made up, but the illness very sadly is real

The HMS Horizon was taken out for her final flight today to meet up with the HMS Burning Sun in honour of the loss of General Stargazer, a long standing member of Eve University for the past 4 years. It is with great sadness to report that the General has been inflicted with an illness that has been reported as life threatening, and although a cure is possible, the chances for survival are low. This very untimely and unfortunate loss coincides with a number of other high profile losses within the corporation and has deeply affected all of those involved.

The Generals benevolence and kindness is known throughout the University. In one last act of tearful kindness has seen the donation of a number of Carriers to it's cause; to give selflessly without expectation or compensation. General Stargazer embodies both the spirit and inspiration for which the University was founded and still thrives on to this very day. It is men like these who's personal struggle for their own life do not even take them away from their own dedication to serving others. It is men like this who make us strong, proud and free to survive in the harsh realities of New Eden. Men like this are rare, often true and seldom glorified in their humbleness. It is men like these who we all look up to with pride and honour. It is men like these, who all other men wish to become. It is men like these who brings great sadness and tears for their loss.

It is with these values and many more, that his brother, Super General, saw out the final flight of General Stargazer with Eve University. With an escort fleet comprised of current and ex-E-UNI members, the group travelled to Maila in The Forge, where the General Stargazer swapped to the HMS Burning Sun.

The fleet then witnessed the final jump activation of the dreadnaught, as it left for destinations unknown, beyond the edge of charted space.

In memorial,

-- M. Dawn, EUNN

From Maila local chat:

[ 2008.08.16 19:57:19 ] EYEDOLL > o7 GS, you'll be missed..
[ 2008.08.16 19:57:22 ] Aurea SIbylla > YAAAARRRRRRR!!!!! o7
[ 2008.08.16 19:57:24 ] Muscaat > o7 General
[ 2008.08.16 19:57:27 ] Racki Dumatre > 07 GS
[ 2008.08.16 19:57:32 ] Karii Ildarian > o7 General
[ 2008.08.16 19:57:33 ] Vor Kosegan > o7 GS
[ 2008.08.16 19:57:36 ] Kaldor Mintat > o7 General
[ 2008.08.16 19:57:38 ] Theon Aidelius > o7 General Stargazer!
[ 2008.08.16 19:57:40 ] Eleasan > o7 GS
[ 2008.08.16 19:57:40 ] MGMT > 07
[ 2008.08.16 19:57:40 ] Kelduum Revaan > o7 General Stargazer, you will certainly be missed.
[ 2008.08.16 19:57:41 ] Korr'Tanas > o7 General Stargazer
[ 2008.08.16 19:57:41 ] Silvey Vorick > o7 General Stargazer
[ 2008.08.16 19:57:42 ] Xar Khan > 07 GS
[ 2008.08.16 19:57:44 ] Oli Geist > o7 General Stargazer. Fair winds and following seas.
[ 2008.08.16 19:57:50 ] Ceragor > o/ General! Really appreciated the time with you!
[ 2008.08.16 19:57:52 ] space gator > o7 GenStar, will never forget o7
[ 2008.08.16 19:58:01 ] Kawasemi > o7 General Stargazer
[ 2008.08.16 19:58:11 ] Freyr Bibhorr > O/ GS! good speed
[ 2008.08.16 19:58:18 ] Lorl Rofeller > o7 general
[ 2008.08.16 19:58:33 ] Icchan > /emote salutes > G'bye Gens
[ 2008.08.16 20:00:19 ] Kasandra Mae > o7 General
[ 2008.08.16 20:08:27 ] Karii Ildarian > o7 General Godspeed
[ 2008.08.16 20:08:56 ] Acacia Incana > Bless You GS <3
[ 2008.08.16 20:09:06 ] Dee Carson > o7 General!
[ 2008.08.16 20:09:10 ] Muscaat > Goodbye, General
[ 2008.08.16 20:09:16 ] Aurea SIbylla > o7 General!
[ 2008.08.16 20:09:37 ] Kaldor Mintat > 07
[ 2008.08.16 20:09:38 ] EYEDOLL > o7 GS
[ 2008.08.16 20:09:50 ] Kelduum Revaan > fly safe, General Stargazer.
[ 2008.08.16 20:10:57 ] Silentbrick > 07 General and Godspeed

From Eve University corp chat:

[ 2008.08.16 19:47:52 ] Ceragor > i wanna see a SALUTE for GS in chat!!!
[ 2008.08.16 19:48:04 ] Ceragor > SALUTE
[ 2008.08.16 19:48:04 ] Erhina Asseba > 07
[ 2008.08.16 19:48:04 ] Mackers UK > o7
[ 2008.08.16 19:48:07 ] Trell Bruntelan > o7
[ 2008.08.16 19:48:11 ] Karma > *salute* o7
[ 2008.08.16 19:48:15 ] T'Alana Ferri > o7
[ 2008.08.16 19:48:15 ] Shadow Prowler > o/
[ 2008.08.16 19:48:16 ] Ceragor > o7
[ 2008.08.16 19:48:16 ] Cambata > o7
[ 2008.08.16 19:48:17 ] Trachnar > o7
[ 2008.08.16 19:48:19 ] Talisma > o7
[ 2008.08.16 19:48:20 ] SZ Rota > o/
[ 2008.08.16 19:48:23 ] Ivaanette > o7
[ 2008.08.16 19:48:25 ] MGMT > o7
[ 2008.08.16 19:48:26 ] Yosihimoto > /emote salutes sadly 07
[ 2008.08.16 19:48:28 ] Zarici > 07
[ 2008.08.16 19:48:31 ] Aelia Aelita > o7
[ 2008.08.16 19:48:38 ] Vor Kosegan > o7
[ 2008.08.16 19:48:47 ] * Hiroyuki Fujita spins up the Rokh for a 8 railgun salute
[ 2008.08.16 19:48:50 ] Freastro Comfix > o7
[ 2008.08.16 19:48:53 ] Kasandra Mae > o7
[ 2008.08.16 19:49:17 ] Khalidos > o7
[ 2008.08.16 19:49:26 ] Trian Kalart > 07
[ 2008.08.16 19:50:26 ] Lecctin Gor > o7
[ 2008.08.16 19:50:36 ] Muscaat > o7
[ 2008.08.16 19:50:36 ] Oli Geist > o7
[ 2008.08.16 19:50:36 ] Lorl Rofeller > o7
[ 2008.08.16 19:50:39 ] Karii Ildarian > o7
[ 2008.08.16 19:50:39 ] Korr'Tanas > o7
[ 2008.08.16 19:50:41 ] Xar Khan > 07
[ 2008.08.16 19:50:41 ] Spellcheker > o7 GS
[ 2008.08.16 19:50:41 ] Eleasan > o7
[ 2008.08.16 19:50:42 ] Theon Aidelius > o7
[ 2008.08.16 19:50:45 ] Aurea SIbylla > o7
[ 2008.08.16 19:50:46 ] EYEDOLL > o7
[ 2008.08.16 19:50:48 ] Racki Dumatre > o7
[ 2008.08.16 19:50:49 ] Kasandra Mae > o7
[ 2008.08.16 19:51:01 ] Kelduum Revaan > o7 General Stargazer
[ 2008.08.16 19:51:18 ] Kaldor Mintat > o7 god speed
[ 2008.08.16 19:51:27 ] Freyr Bibhorr > O/ GS
[ 2008.08.16 19:51:39 ] Freyr Bibhorr > fly safe
[ 2008.08.16 19:51:39 ] space gator > o7 my friend - you were the first person to help me in UNI o7
[ 2008.08.16 19:51:53 ] SZ Rota > o/ o7
[ 2008.08.16 19:53:53 ] Silvey Vorick > o7 GS was always kind and was always willing to help you out. You will be missed
[ 2008.08.16 19:54:41 ] Holub > o7 General , first person to invite me to a fleet
[ 2008.08.16 19:54:53 ] Gavinvin1337 > 07
[ 2008.08.16 19:54:56 ] Ceragor > same for me :(
[ 2008.08.16 19:56:22 ] PewPew Stew > he was awesome, he talked to me for a couple hours one day just answering my questions

The fleet was some thirty strong. Eve might be an internet spaceships game, but the Eve Uni family is real.

Fly safe, General.

A new member of the family is en route...

2008-07-31T14:14:00.004+01:00

My new baby... Just ordered one, and it should be arriving tomorrow.

Suggestions for names (to fit in with my canonical naming scheme using names of Imperial Star Destroyers) welcome!

29th July: Virgin Media won't give us a phone line

2008-07-29T22:59:00.004+01:00

Well, many things have happened since the last post on this blog. I'm no longer an Oxford student, for one! In fact, I'm now living with three good friends a short walk from the centre of Oxford and from the software company I now work for. But all that can wait...

For pretty much the last five weeks, we've been trying to persuade Virgin Media to install our phone line as we asked them to. The story here is copied/pasted from our house wiki.

Installation

Originally scheduled for 22nd July, this was rescheduled and took place on Saturday 28th June. Two engineers came to install cable TV and internet access, but had not been briefed to install a phone line. I was assured they would check this for me (separate installation is not uncommon). They left with a big hole in the wall between my room and the living room (with co-ax through it).

Initial Contact

Sent via their web form 07/07/08 19:06:

Hi, I recently ordered your 3-for-£20 offer. Broadband and television
were installed without problems (though I was left with a sizeable hole
in the wall) but I haven't heard anything about when the phone line will be
installed. Please could you verify that things are correct at your end, and
confirm when the phone line will be installed?
Thanks in advance.

First Reply

Received 10/07/08 17:18

Our reference:
Account Number:

Hi James,

Thanks for your email to Virgin Media about your services.

I do apologise for the delay replying to your query and any
inconvenience this may have caused.

I do apologise but we have a record that everything was completed on
28th June. Can you please advise what part of the telephone was not
completed. Do you have telephone sockets in the house, is it the inside
or outside part of the install that wasn't completed?

I hope this helps, but if there's anything else we can help with, please
send us a letter, email or call our team free on 150 from your Virgin
Media phone. Or on 0845 454 1111* from any other phone. You can call us
Monday to Sunday from 8am to Midnight.

Kind regards,

Becky Devoy
The Customer Concern Team
Virgin Media

Second Contact

Thinking I'd then be corresponding with Ms Becky Devoy I addressed my reply to her...

Sent 10/07/08 18:48

Hi Becky,

The engineers that came round said that they had not been asked to
install a phone line, just internet and TV connection points. There is a
single co-ax cable running through the house branching to the modem and
to the set-top box for the TV, but nothing phone-related at all to my
knowledge. There are no sockets (of any kind, as it happens) but just
the single co-ax.

If you need any more information from this end to figure out what's
going on, do let me know!

Yours,

James

Second Response

...but I figured not for the IBM KANA system... Received 14/07/08:

Our reference:
Account no:

Hi James,

Thanks for your email to Virgin Media about Telephone line installation.

We can make the changes to your account or can provide any account
related information only when we receive the correct customer
verification password (CVP) from you. But don't worry -- to get things
moving as quickly as possible, just resubmit your enquiry by clicking on
the link below. Then simply enter your password again, send us your
question, and we'll get straight on the case:

[long URL snipped]

You can find your CVP on the Virgin Media welcome letter or on the
Digital Service Agreement (contract copy).

You can also call our 0800 183 1234*. We’re on hand from 8am to 8pm,
Monday to Friday, and from 9am to 6pm on Saturday, from 10am to 4pm on
Sundays.

If you've forgotten your password or cannot find your CVP on the above
mentioned documents, just send us a letter signed by you or call our
team free on 150 from any Virgin Phone. Or on 0845 454 1111* from any
other phone. You can call us Monday to Sunday from 8am to Midnight.
We'll ask a couple of quick security questions and reset your password
for you.

Kind regards,

Sonali Yadav
The Customer Care Team
Virgin Media

Incidentally, the link (as you'll note) points to a page that no longer exists, and none of the literature we have received even mentions the initials "CVP" much less gives one...

Calling Customer Services

26/07/08 17:20 - After being bounced from "customer care" to "faults" and back, Gary from India arranged for someone from the "tolls" department to call back within 48 hours... Call lasted 10 minutes on 0845 454 1111.

First Bill(!)

29/07/08 18:46 - Well, no phone call from Virgin but instead a bill for £41, including at least £11 (likely £22) for phone line rental that we are not receiving. (2 months at £20/month clearly = £41 in the Virgin Book of Maths.)

My next actions? I'm phoning my bank tomorrow to instruct them not to pay the bill, and as soon as I can (realistically Saturday) I'll be paying their new Cornmarket store a visit.

What about the services we have received so far? Well, the internet access has been decent enough (though the upstream bandwidth is pitiful). We haven't yet received a letter from them accusing us of being criminals, which is nice. The TV - well, it works. iPlayer on your actual TV is remarkably useful, even if the video is compressed to death (even more than the regular channels - admittedly I notice these things more than most, but next to the Freeview picture on the laptop courtesy of MythTV, the difference is striking). However, we're not prepared to pay £22 of line rental for a line that we don't have.

Watch this space...

7th Week: XP Service Pack 3 and IE7

2008-06-03T15:30:00.001+01:00

So, I finally got around to updating my seldom-used XP installation to Service Pack 3 (which took about twice as long as upgrading my laptop from Gutsy to Hardy). Microsoft are now pushing Internet Explorer 7 as a "high-priority update" for SP3, and it will install itself the next time you do an Automatic Update.

Here's the supplementary license blurb:

PLEASE NOTE: Microsoft Corporation (or based on where you live, one of its affiliates) licenses this supplement to you. You may use a copy of this supplement with each validly licensed copy of Microsoft Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 SP1 software (the "software"). You may not use the supplement if you do not have a license for the software. The license terms for the software apply to your use of this supplement. Microsoft provides support services for the supplement as described at www.support.microsoft.com/common/international.aspx.

Hmm, what's missing from that? Could it be, um, Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3? Are Microsoft pushing out an update that they themselves have disallowed? Or could it be that actually, nobody pays the least bit of attention to these EULA-like pieces of crap - not even the software companies themselves?

(This reminds me of when Apple released Safari for Windows before realising it was against license terms to install it on anything but an Apple...)

Oh yes, and exams are happening.

1st Week: Java VM for Palm

2008-04-21T12:12:00.001+01:00

A couple of months ago Palm stopped offering the IBM Java VM for Palm OS devices. Irritatingly, this happened the day before I had to hard-reset my device...

Anyway, cut a long story short: I see nothing forbidding me to do this, so you can get a reasonably recent version of the VM here.

9th Week: Audacity, ALSA and Ubuntu

2008-03-10T16:51:00.001Z

So, the Aldate's Student Weekend (powered by Linux) had one technical problem: Audacity refused to work on my laptop. Looks like the culprit is something to do with the version of portaudio that Audacity was compiled against; changing the settings to use Jack for audio IO has solved all our problems. If you're getting "Expression 'ValidateParameters( ... ) failed in 'src/hostapi/alsa/pa_linux_alsa.c', line: 1142" then, until someone gives a better answer, install Jack and use that to talk to ALSA.

6th Week: A stream of consciousness on hunger and chains

2008-02-20T22:25:00.002Z

What does it mean to be hungry for something?

OED: "Having or characterized by a strong desire or craving [for something]".
And craving, "Urgent desire; longing, yearning."

If, in a room full of hungry people, you announce a feast, the expected response is one of elation.

If you claim that you are hungry for something, yet let that very thing pass by with barely an acknowledgement - are you really hungry?

If not - why not?

"Through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death" Romans 8 v2

To borrow rather heavily from Mary Mary: the shackles have been taken off your feet. Why do you choose, rather than dancing, to continue shuffling in lines like prisoners?

5th Week: Learning a New Language

2008-02-11T01:22:00.000Z

"And afterward, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days." -- Joel 2:27-29, The Bible

I've been running visuals for the Late Service at St. Aldate's. In an "ordinary" service this would mean getting the words of songs on screen at the right time, and keeping the speaker on-camera - straightforward stuff and all things I've done so often, they've become reflex. (Watch me during a service I'm not on AV, if you don't believe that...) The Late Service has gone beyond that, using video backgrounds behind the song words to aid the worship.

"Uh-huh, what's so special about that?" you may (or may not) ask. There is the ever-present danger of doing it for the sake of doing it, for the technical challenge, or even to "liven up" the worship - to which you might well reply "So what?". Background visuals can be just a "nice touch" but I always strive for more than that; to become as much a part of the worship as each instrument in the band, as each heart of the congregation. What I do behind the sound desk is my worship to God, my offering laid out on the screens that everyone can see. (That, by the way, is why it upsets me when I have to put up things that I know are low-quality. I want to give God more than that.)

Tonight, as Owen was playing and singing "For greater things have yet to come, and greater things are still to be done in this city" I felt God say, "Look outside. Outside the doors." Outside? How could I do that? The collection of loops we have is limited and there wasn't what I wanted to show. I went for the only "outside shot" I had available to me: across the entrance foyer and out through the front doors. And someone promptly walked across the shot and out of the building.

It struck me (as I walked to hand in work to the comlab at 1.15am) that what I was doing was learning a new language. As with any language, when you start you have a limited vocabulary - and when you want to express a specific thing, you can be scrabbling for words, hoping vaguely to get your point across. Here, the language was pictures, the point was God's heart, and my attempts to communicate were in desperation the closest thing I could get to the picture in my head. But that's OK - any language takes time to learn. And I know the point was gotten across (thanks Emily).

I really want to develop this further - I want to take a camcorder out and just walk around Oxford for a day, for one. The more words you have in your vocab list, and the more you learn them, the more expressive you'll be in the language. And the more new words you add, the less likely you are to fall back to the very basics - "Bonjour, je m'appelle James, j'ai vingt ans, j'habite a Oxford..." has a certain equivalence with those time-lapse clouds. They have a place, but there's so much more to French (right, Jenny?)

Oh, go on then.

And as for my vocab list? It'd be really useful if the thumbnail menu we have actually linked in with VLC to select what video was playing. And seamless looping in VLC would be nice, too... The former, at least, I've already prototyped.

4th Week: Space is a harsh mistress

2008-02-09T13:36:00.000Z

It was only a machine.

No - it wasn't even that. It was a computer simulation of a machine. A machine, created by a machine. How perverse.

It was just a lump of Tritanium (which doesn't exist). It didn't even have a Tech-II tank.

But we went through some good times. It never let me down. Even that time when I left a mission in 20% structure, hull on fire - it kept going, it got out at the last minute, to fight another day. We've been halfway across the Eve cluster together. On war operations with Eve Uni. Even (on the test server, anyway) to 0.0 space.

Last night was just too much... Warp-scrambling frigates and jamming cruisers conspired to trap me in a mission I couldn't tank. Eventually it lagged out so much that one frame, I was just in structure; the next, I was in a pod staring at the remains of the Anakin's Fall.

50 million ISK later, its Tech-II-tanked replacement (which I named the Vader's Fist) is flying... but it's not the same. It just feels... different. Sure, it can take even more punishment. Technically it's handling is the same; same speed; same everything. And yet it's different, somehow.

2008.02.08 17:39:00
Victim: Muscaat
Alliance: Ivy League
Corp: Eve University
Destroyed: Drake
System: Poinen
Security: 0.6
Damage Taken: 70334

Involved parties:

Name: Juggernaut Torpedo / Guristas Pirates (laid the final blow)
Damage Done: 70334

Destroyed items:

Small EMP Smartbomb I
Scourge Heavy Missile, Qty: 1262 (Cargo)
Shield Recharger I
Warrior I (Drone Bay)
Heavy Missile Launcher I, Qty: 5
Type-D Power Core Modification: Shield Power Relay
Scourge Heavy Missile, Qty: 150
Hammerhead I, Qty: 2 (Drone Bay)
Local Power Plant Manager: Reaction Shield Power Relay I
Invulnerability Field I
Hellhound F.O.F. Heavy Missile I, Qty: 100 (Cargo)
R.S. Officer's Passcard (Cargo)
Advanced 'Limos' Heavy Missile Bay I
Exotic Dancers, Qty: 10 (Cargo)
Core Defence Field Purger I, Qty: 3

Dropped items:

Shield Recharger I, Qty: 2
Heavy Missile Launcher I
Havoc Heavy Missile, Qty: 388 (Cargo)
Large F-S9 Regolith Shield Induction, Qty: 2
Type-D Power Core Modification: Shield Power Relay
Scourge Heavy Missile, Qty: 24
Local Power Plant Manager: Reaction Shield Power Relay I
Kruul's DNA (Cargo)
Thunderbolt Heavy Missile, Qty: 962 (Cargo)

7th Week: Whoops...

2007-11-21T00:40:00.001Z

So, Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs have lost two discs containing records for every UK family claiming child benefit in the post. Sky News emphasises this point: "It means that the personal details of every family in the country with a child under 16 have gone missing."

And this is the Government that wants to create a central database containing personal and biometric data for every single person living in the UK.

The Government that claims such a central database will be "in the interest of national security".

Why were they even sending the records by post? Has nobody told them of "the Internet"?

So apparently the discs were "password-protected"... what on earth that means, nobody knows (certainly not the Government). Thank goodness the BBC know some computer 'experts': "Experts say such data should normally be sent in encrypted form." Oh really?

To close with an Internet nerd-ism: Epic fail.

7th Week: Why Is Firefox Blocked?

2007-11-19T17:44:00.001Z

There seems to be a bit of a hoo-hah going on with some websites blocking Firefox due to the AdBlock Plus plugin. For the uninitiated, this is a plugin that will automatically prevent adverts from loading and displaying on websites you visit. PC Plus last month ran an article with the headline "Firefox killing web". The rather militant Why Firefox Is Blocked even goes so far as to say that "blanket ad blocking in general is still theft".

Woah, woah, back up there...

Since when has it become a crime to not display part of a web page - a page that is freely given out by a web server? Indeed, some web browsers are incapable of displaying some parts of a web page - try your phone's browser, for example, or the text-based browser Links. Is it, therefore, a crime to use such browsers?

WFIB also makes the claim that "Ad Block Plus... also prevents site owners from blocking people using it". Come again? I think what they mean is "it is non-trivial to identify users with this plugin enabled". To suggest it actively prevents such detection is plain wrong. Mind you, such detection is not exactly very complicated which suggests to me that the (anonymous) authors of WFIB simply don't know what they're talking about.

This point of view is reinforced when they claim that "Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending". Inexplicable capitalisation aside, no source (or even any concrete figures) for these mysterious "demographics" is cited. I'll cite my own here, then: in the last month 44.88% of visitors to www.oiccu.org.uk used Firefox compared to 48.96% using Internet Explorer. I'm not a statistician, but 45% doesn't seem "somewhat small", and certainly not in the context of the market leader having a 49% share. (Usual disclaimers apply: not representative, only one site, but no, they weren't all me - Google Analytics ignores requests from my (static) IP address). As for online spending, I certainly don't trust entering my card details into IE any more. Perhaps these demographics came from the same place as the BBC got their figures for Linux users?

Furthermore, if a web designer does not take reasonable steps to ensure his content is accessible to as many browser technologies as possible, then surely not displaying some of that content is a consequence of their actions, rather than a crime on behalf of the visitor? I would count "reasonable steps" to include making sure that your page is valid HTML; the very simple WFIB homepage fails validation on 15 counts. Perhaps that has something to do with it being knocked up in Microsoft FrontPage 4.0.

And I haven't heard anyone object to the small text adverts that Google adds to search results...

4th Week: Song projection...

2007-10-30T01:52:00.001Z

So, I'm going to try OpenSong and/or Lyricue at the OICCU central meeting on Wednesday. Neither of them, though, let me do as I would like to and run the lyrics with a transparent background over a video window.

Lyricue has an experimental transparent display... but to get it working I've had to hack in Perl a couple of times, and the flicker makes it simply unusable in a production setting. I also don't think Lyricue handles verse transition well at all (it's actually hideous unless I'm missing a trick); OpenSong at least lets you jump from verse to verse as you need to. With the keyboard.

It took me a little while to get Lyricue's Gnome2::Canvas display working... for some reason none of the deb packages I tried had the right Perl bindings as a dependency.

Writing my own song lyric projection software has been on my "to-do" list for a while now, but realistically it's not going to happen before Wednesday at 5pm! And there's only one central meeting after this at Wes Mem, we move back to St. Aldate's next term (thank goodness) where looped video backgrounds are fast becoming the norm. I wonder what OICCU will make of them...

3rd Week: I'm Not American...

2007-10-27T01:33:00.001+01:00

...which means Amazon don't want me to pay money to download MP3s. I don't run Windows or Mac, which means iTunes doesn't want my cash. I'm not going to "upgrade" from what Walmart thinks is Windows 98, so they won't accept any finances from me. Neither Virgin nor HMV have heard of Chris Tomlin, PuraShop doesn't do downloads, and I don't see the point in paying vast sums of money for things I won't use (eg a physical CD) and don't need (the packaging, shipping costs etc).

Does the music industry still wonder why people use torrents?

1st Week: SJC MCR Fire

2007-10-12T23:37:00.000+01:00

You heard it here first*, folks...

On Friday night an electrical fault with the dishwasher in the MCR kitchen caused a fire at St. John's College. Several fire appliances were in attendance and at one stage seven firefighters were reported to have entered the building in breathing apparatus. The fire had been put out by 11.30pm; MCR members are waiting to be allowed back in to the building to collect possessions, it is hoped within the hour.

*Or maybe second, depending on if you've heard it elsewhere first.

1st Week: From absurd to absurd-er

2007-10-12T11:26:00.001+01:00

The ITV-F1 website reports that an FIA scrutineer is to keep an eye on McLaren during the final Grand Prix of the season in Brazil next weekend, due to pressure from the Spanish motorsport federation.

WTF?? Alonso can't hack it that a rookie driver might beat him to the title, and has already thrown his toys out of the cockpit several times this season. And now the FIA are joining in?

The political fight, while usually adding extra tension to a season, this year has overshadowed the real fight on the track. The constructors' championship has been decided by an FIA hearing (which resulted in a completely unprecedented fine for McLaren). The reigning world champion has been acting like a seven-year-old brat being forced to share his toys, and nas asked his bigger friend in the year above to protect him from the "bullies" of his team. And the FIA have shown themselves to be at best incompetent, and at worst corrupt.

Which is a shame, because we've had some of the best races since I started watching Formula 1.

I really hope Hamilton can win at Interlagos. Not because he's British, not because he's been the best driver, and not because it would be the perfect end to the completely unprecedented run of success he's had - let's not forget, at the start of the season we were all amazed he had three consecutive podium finishes! I want Hamilton to win because it would be the perfect two-fingers-up to everyone who's smeared F1 with dirty politics this year, while he's just done his job: get in the car and drive damn fast.

1st Week: From Kubuntu To The World

2007-10-11T00:41:00.001+01:00

OK, so after my last post I was feeling a little fed up with the world according to Mark Shuttleworth and the rest of Ubuntu. I decided to take a peek at what else was out there...

I'd picked up a copy of Linux User & Developer magazine, with a cover CD of Sabayon Linux (based on Gentoo). I plugged the CD in and booted my (non-work-critical) laptop, and saw what I could see...

First off, it plays music while it boots. It's an interesting quirk, and not one that gets repeated with the installed version! Incidentally the DVD also came with live options for Tor web browsing plus a handful of games. The CD prompts you to set up Compiz Fusion graphics when X first loads - the first distro I have tried that has integrated such eye-candy from the off. The app package selection was good, and even for a live CD it was very responsive and fast.

Then I decided to see if there are packages to update.

Following instructions found somewhere on their site, I did the "do this after new install" thing... and waited.

And waited.

And then, after three hours of thinking, it came up with a non-error message, telling me to run a different command to find the real error message.

I ran this command. It told me that the package that it was trying to update didn't exist, apparently.

I like Sabayon. I like their attitude: forget finnicking about this license or that license, people want to be able to play MP3s, dammit! A whole lot better than Ubuntu's left-hand-vs-right-hand approach, not including proprietary drivers yet writing a whole lot of code to simplify installation of the same. But I really don't have the time to hunt through pages of documentation just to get at an error message! Not giving the user a useful error message at the off isn't just bad design - in this day and age, it's just rude.

So, Sabayon was out. A mate of mine raves over Fedora (no-longer-Core) 7, so I thought I'd give that a go. They have a KDE spin now. I like KDE, so I tried that.

For some obscure reason, it installed both KDE and Gnome despite me only selecting the former, and ensuring the latter was deselected. I'm fairly certain amaroK doesn't depend on Metacity, the GNOME window manager... The GUI package tool was more clunky than Adept or Synaptic, and the package selection more limited. Beryl was installed by default but not running by default. With it running, it had a tendency to forget to draw parts of the screen, a problem I had not experienced running it under Kubuntu Feisty or with Compiz under Sabayon.

Fedora is known as a good distro in terms of art, and indeed it looked gorgeous for the most part; though the login screen truncated the words "Username" and "Password", and try as I might I couldn't get the fonts to render just as I like them (it reminded me, in fact, of MS ClearType).

Niggles though they were, they were minor ones, and if I had to I could probably get on very well with Fedora. However, I simply just don't have the time to learn all those little differences between RPM and deb-based distros...

Tryint out Gutsy now, a week before launch. Let's see what happens. From Kubuntu, to the world, only to find out I'm back where I started...

1st Week: Gutless Gibbon beta...

2007-10-08T00:35:00.001+01:00

GutsyGibbon/Beta/Kubuntu - Ubuntu Wiki

"Kubuntu 7.10 now includes Dolphin as the default file manager.
Dolphin has not replaced Konqueror, but was chosen as the default file
manager to introduce new users to file management a bit easier than
what Konqueror could do. The main focus of Dolphin is usability with
the following features:

a navigation bar for URLs allowing quick navigation through your file system

split views

and more...

Dolphin, unlike Konqueror, does not provide browser support as well as some of the advanced KIO slaves and options that Konqueror provided, therefor easing the use of the application."

Typo aside - removing features != ease of use. I'm sorry, it just doesn't! Grammer desaster as this entry is, it otherwise seems rather flawed...

Hiding the file tree from new users simply means they do not know that their filesystem is a tree. The locations seem disparate and unconnected. (The exact opposite of Windows' infinite-loop thing, I guess.) Most users will (should) be familiar with hierarchical file trees anyway from Windows (though I admit I don't use it often enough to be able to say for sure).
Konqueror has split views. The Kubuntu devs disabled that feature by default. Go figure.
So being able to just drag files from a local directory to (say) an FTP server, an SFTP server, over infra-red or Samba is more difficult than navigating to your local directory (without seeing the tree), then thinking, "Ah, that *is* where that file is... now what app do I need to load to transfer it using method x?", loading the app, navigating AGAIN to the directory...

But it's OK, they haz sexy graf1x! (Yes, I'm falling out of love with this distro.)

A Thought From The Wilderness

2007-09-12T00:58:00.001+01:00

Enough already.

Nothing can dull the pain of those still grieving? Maybe not. They say time is a healer, and God certainly is.

Can anything justify what happened that day? Certainly not.

But is every single year, re-opening that old wound that has already marked and shaped the 21st century, going to help?

I'm not a believer in conspiracy theories - the idea that "9/11" was constructed by the Bush administration is patently absurd. But now it's all Bush can do to drag people's minds back to the day America was attacked, because nothing but the raw emotion of that awful day can shroud the disasters his policies are making in the Middle East. Only by ensuring the wounds are fresh, the pain is still strong, have his warmongering policies survived six years.

Now, should someone criticise US "foreign policy" (or rather, military operations), Bush just needs to pull out the "9/11" card and he's won the argument.

And what _really_ gets to me, is that the whole thing is framed as some sort of good vs. evil, Christian vs. evil-terrorist-guys battle. A year after the WTC attacks, Bush quotes from John 1: "This ideal of
America is the hope of all mankind. That hope drew millions to this
harbor. That hope still lights our way. And the light shines in the
darkness. And the darkness will not overcome it." But note something very significant yet missed by most of the media at the time : Bush has replaced Jesus (the 'light' John was referring to) with the American Dream, a fact that seems to have been overlooked by Bible Belt America. (Stephen Chapman commented on this in more depth, in November 2002.)

I submit to you: America's response to the attacks on September 11th 2001 is not just un-Christian, it is anti-Christian. Bush himself, Sept. 11 2001: "Today, our nation saw evil, the very worst of human nature. And we responded with the best of America."

There are many in America who are not Christian, both supporters and opponents of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I don't seek to preach to them; my plea comes from Scripture.

Paul writes in Romans: "Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse." (Rom 12:14 NIV). And from Jesus himself:

"You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that
you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on
the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the
unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." (Matthew 5: 43-47 NIV)

That is the true Christian response. Nobody said it was the easy response. The easy response was to fight back; if someone strikes you on the cheek, strike him back with your cruise missiles, right? That's human nature. Wait a sec... "Today, our nation saw evil, the very worst of
human nature."

We can't escape the fact that we are human, imperfect, even evil. But for the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, that is all we would ever be; but we as Christians are called to be perfect, as God is perfect - something only possible by God's grace. America chose to listen to America, and not God; and I believe that only God can clean up the mess that this first decade of the 21st century has left.

I hadn't planned to write such a long post tonight; this has been on my heart for a long time. What triggered it was a forum post by "Silentbrick" (a player of the MMO game Eve Online):

Never Forget

Never Forgive.

I'm not going to voice my opinion here. This isn't the place for it.
But the four words above are the ones that will always be tied to this
date for me.

There is still so much anger, hurt and grieving over that day, not just in America but around the world. But I believe there is also a loving, healing God who is waiting for His children to turn to Him for comfort, and through Him and Him alone finding the strength to not just forgive, but to bless those who have persecuted them.

7th Week: London 2012 Logo

2007-06-04T20:55:00.000+01:00

Here's a pleasant break from revision... One of these logos is the real London 2012 logo. It cost (apparently) £400,000 and was designed by Wolff Olins (WARNING: Flash-based site, and the little HTML they use is buggy too). The other two were cooked up in about 10 minutes by readers of the BBC News website. Can you tell the genuine one? You may be unpleasantly surprised.

6th Week: The St. Aldate's Leadership React to a Mug of Coffee

2007-05-31T01:26:00.001+01:00

Don't ask me how this started... See if you can guess who's who! Some are, ahem, easier than others. (And don't take it too seriously - it's a bit of fun! All who are mentioned below are great people. :-) )

Leadership Team and Staff of St. Aldate's: A Cup Of Coffee

I have three things to say about that coffee, but I might only have time for two of them.
I think it's a prophetic mug of coffee; I think we should drink deeply of it, I think it talks of our destiny as coffee-drinkers.
Is it Starbucks?
Could you do it more like, uh... stirry-stirry-stirry chinkchink? (Hint: Risky sound checks)
It's there! But we need to drink it! Download it into you and then something is activated inside of you - the caffeine gets activated - and you know that you know that you've just drunk some coffee! It happened to me! I think there are people here today who need that caffeine activated in their lives. If that's you just come forward...
I've called this talk "Return of the King-dom Coffee"...
Hi James? I was just wondering if you'd do visuals for the coffee this evening... you can? Great!
Coffee? Cooooool.
Hey, guess what's cool - Ubuntu Coffee. Based on Java. And I got it installed on my Mac!
So, there was this E-mail that was sent... I hate people who start with a joke that's got nothing to do with what they're talking about, but that's got absolutely nothing to do with this coffee. Why not buy someone a coffee later?
En France, nous rendons du café beaucoup plus agréable que vous. Mais nous vous aimons en tout cas!
NowI'vebeenaskedtotalkaboutthiscoffeeandI'llmanagetogetatleastfiveheavytheologicalpointsfullydiscussedbeforeitgoescold.

coffee

saturday 11am

church

be there :-)
That coffee is disgusting. I bring my own!

5th Week: Well-Packed Cargo Bay

2007-05-22T12:53:00.001+01:00

Now, I know I'm not the best at packing suitcases and things. But someone really must be, to minimise space wastage like this...

4th Week: Five wins Neighbours soap fight

2007-05-18T18:28:00.001+01:00

It is done, then... the BBC report that from spring next year Neighbours will be moving to five from BBC One.

Thanks to the wonders of timeshifting, the adverts won't really bother me. Were the BBC right to not pursue its most popular daytime TV show? IMHO yes - a ~300% price hike is nothing to take sitting down. five are willing to pay (and it has nothing to do with them being part of the same company as Fremantle Media, Neighbours' distributors, of course) and I'm glad, because I do like to watch the show. Both ways, we win.

4th Week: Note to Facebook...

2007-05-18T12:31:00.001+01:00

...contrary to popular belief, not everyone in the world is American.

A few days ago Facebook launched their new Marketplace, which as the name suggests is a place for buying and selling things. In dollars.

Yes, that's right. The only choice of currency is the dollar. It doesn't matter if you're British, European or Japanese, you can only put ads that have a $ next to the price.

I was about to say "and nobody bothers to convert from GB£ to US$ to put the price up" but then I realised, who's to say it's US$? Why can it not be Canadian dollars, or Australian? Pick your exchange rate, people! Then pay up but only the converted amount.

I put to Facebook that this might be considered false advertising on behalf of the sellers, if they demand in GB£ what is being advertised in $. Their response:

Hi James,

Thanks for your feedback concerning Marketplace. We are

working hard to make this product as useful as possible to all

users, and we welcome any suggestions. Let us know if you have

any further questions or concerns.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Ryann

Customer Support Representative

Looks like it's going to take a while...

3rd Week: Blair to stand down

2007-05-10T13:19:00.001+01:00

The shock news item of the day: BBC NEWS | Politics | Blair will stand down on 27 June

HOORAY!

3rd Week: Own Your Own Integer!

2007-05-08T13:09:00.001+01:00

Well, since AACS LA claim to own an integer and are threatening to sue people who use it, lots of people have decided to ensure the security of their own portion of the set of positive integers ℤ.

http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1155

Any attempt to publish or use the number

BA 84 46 1D 08 21 0D F4 9A 7C 2D BA CA 34 A1 68

within the United States (where the DCMA applies) will be met with... aw, heck, I can't be bothered to sue you. In fact, given that generally it doesn't matter where you are but they'll try and sue you under the DCMA anyway: I hereby license the reader to use, copy, redistribute or otherwise modify (including, but not limited to, the operations of "subtraction" and "multiplication") the above Number indefinitely and without limitation, as long as this notice accompanies it.

(If you're reading this and thinking "WTF? You can't copyright numbers!" then you're in good company. Try telling that to AACS LA.)

2nd Week: Update: Microsoft in "We Came Up With This Idea, Really, And Patented It" Shock

2007-05-04T16:35:00.001+01:00

On Wednesday I mentioned how Microsoft were trying to claim UAC was an amazing new idea that they had come up with, rather than it being a badly-copied sudo from the Unix world.

Now apparently, it transpires that Microsoft managed to patent UAC in 2000.Except, of course, they didn't patent "UAC", they patented:

a method comprising: executing an administrative
security process under the administrative privilege level; the
administrative security process accepting a request from a user process
executing under the non-administrative privilege level to initiate a
particular administrative method, the user
process calling the administrative security process with parameters
comprising (a) an identification of the particular administrative
method and (b) arguments to be provided to said particular
administrative method; and the administrative security
process calling the identified particular administrative method on
behalf of the user process and providing the arguments to said
identified particular administrative method.

Which, in all but giving it a name, is sudo. (Read the full text here.)

Surely you can't argue now that software patents are anything other than a bloody stupid idea. When there's blatant prior art (sudo was around since the 1980s, not the 70s as I previously stated) a patent should not be given. It's clear that either the people granting the patents are being paid by Microsoft to not investigate fully (unlikely, since almost certainly this has happened elsewhere) or simply are not qualified to make decisions on technology matters.

Worse still: the patent explicitly states that "the invention is not to be limited to such specific examples, and the
inventions
may be practiced in general purpose computers or computers with
operating systems other than Windows.RTM., such as Unix or Linux."

How the f*** did this get through? And why does the European Parliament repeatedly need convincing that software patents are a bad idea?

Sorry about the language. It's been a long week, I've had far too little sleep and I have 25 minutes to do 2 hours' work.

2nd Week: 09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0

2007-05-02T13:01:00.001+01:00

Just thought I'd share that with you... (If you haven't a clue what I'm on about, then read up at Slashdot.)

"Again, you've got to ask - what's the point of DRM? It doesn't matter that the average person won't have the ability to crack their HD-DVD software, or that the company will be able to revoke the code using its fancy-dan systems. All it takes is for a couple of pirates to get their hands on it, and all those Aarrh, Jim-Lad! movies are sitting pretty. The sheer number of people trying to crack any security system makes such protection a totally asynchronous battle - it only takes one lucky hacker."

(Richard Cobbett, PC Plus)

Let's be clear, this is no justification of illegal distribution of films. Rather, it is more evidence that DRM is defective by design, that it cannot fulfil its remit but rather imposes unnecessary limits on legitimate consumers.

The other point of interest to bring out of this story is the question of how much censorship is possible, and how much is acceptable, in this so-called "blogosphere".

Oh - and no prizes for guessing the representation, in hexadecimal, of x in the equation

2^6 * 5 * 19 * 12,043 * 216,493 * 836,256,503,069,278,983,442,067 = x. ;-)

2nd Week: Microsoft in "We Came Up With This Idea, Really" Shock

2007-05-02T12:38:00.001+01:00

Arstechnica published this post yesterday, quoting Microsoft chief security advisor Peter Watson talking about Vista's User Access Control. If you don't already know, UAC is, in Microsoft's own words:

"a new security component Windows Vista. UAC enables users to perform common tasks as non-administrators... and as administrators without having to switch users, log off, or use Run As. ... By separating user and administrator functions while enabling productivity, UAC is an important enhancement for Windows Vista."

It's similar to, but has some major differences to, the user/superuser model that's been used in Mac, Linux and other Unix-like systems since the 1970s.

Says Mr. Watson:

"If you look at it from an architectural direction, User Account Control
is a great idea and strategically a direction that all operating
systems and all technologies should be heading down."

Uh, hang on a minute... Just read the last two paragraphs again, will you... "should be heading down"? Is this another case of Microsoft taking an idea that others came up with ages ago, changing the name, and pretending it was theirs all along and how silly of others to not have thought of it?

From the blog article:

"This is a new revelation for the company, but let's not kid ourselves:
this general approach to process elevation is older than Windows
itself."

2nd Week: IBM vs. SCO

2007-04-30T21:02:00.001+01:00

So, shortly after revealing to us that they own the entire Internet and every device connected thereto, we find out that SCO also have the right to tell Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, that he can't talk about their righteous crusade against anyone who might be using this Interwebbynet for themselves...

"We are also concerned about the statements about SCO's litigation claims made by Linus Torvalds... Because of Mr. Torvalds' position in the technology world, his comments about SCO's evidence in this case are given particular weight in industry and popular press... It is unlikely that Judge Wells would allow ... Linus Torvalds... to publicly comment on SCO's litigation claims..."

Quite, quite extraordinary. Those guys just don't know how to quit... but oh noes! I have a friend whose father works at IBM! Don't tell Judge Wells I said that...

The full letter, from a lawyer representing SCO to a lawyer at IBM, is at Groklaw with the full story here.

2nd Week: Feisty, Xinerama and Myth

2007-04-29T17:06:00.001+01:00

Found out what was stopping MythTV from loading under Fiesty: it doesn't like my dual-monitor setup. Trying one more thing, then going back to Edgy on Avenger if it doesn't work.

OTOH, Chimaera is happy as Larry, whoever Larry is.

1st Week: Adventures in ThinkPad Land

2007-04-27T18:30:00.001+01:00

I welcomed a new member of the family today: an IBM ThinkPad T41. Came with some second-rate OS installed, but I wiped that straight away. More details later but here's the short of it:

What Worked Out Of The Box

All of the base setup (once I'd rid myself of the Windoze restore hidden partition)
Wireless ethernet
Beryl (whizzy window effects). OK, so technically not "out of the box" because you have to install it, but that wasn't exactly hard.
Hibernate/resume
Power management inc. CPU frequency scaling
Mythfrontend (meaning that the problem on Avenger is localised, and I should look into it further)

What Didn't

Suspend/resume

Not bad at all, IMO. Bear in mind I've only had this for a couple of hours and currently the only way I can access the internet with it is to spoof Avenger's MAC address (don't tell Matt...) - hopefully I can find a wifi hotspot to properly test the wifi hardware. And eventually get a wireless router so I can share the connection with Avenger, and even stream TV to the laptop (whose name will be decided shortly by Heather).

More later!

-2nd Week: The Term In Review

2007-04-05T00:48:00.001+01:00

Hilary Term 2007: A summary of things, in no particular order or coherence.

I lost something, and gained so much more.

I learned some things - one or two of them about computer science.

Three months - a long time in politics and in Oxford. I've kept mostly quiet about the personal stuff on this blog, but those who know me well enough know what a rollercoaster it's been. But I've learnt that "immeasurably more than we could ask or imagine" is no understatement.

I found some new friends; I lost some old ones. I still run Linux. I gained some facial hair. I still accept no responsibility for any damage you cause to your computer by running dodgy operating systems, but against my better judgement, I'll probably help you sort out the mess you made. Especially if there's a cup of tea involved.

Some people... well, some people need to be taught slowly and painfully how to use computers properly. Others just seem to make life easy for you even when you have to explain things slowly and painfully. And some are even thinking of switching to Linux. Woot.

They ripped out the old college organ, and dumped it in a skip. Dave and I managed to rescue some bits of pipe. They're now standing next to Bob. (Don't ask.)

The bandwidth of pigeon-post is approximately comparable to that of a twisted-pair ethernet connection, if you ignore the effects of the Big Pigeon-Post Pigeon that Eats Pigeon-Post. And his bigger cousin, the Big Pigeon-Post Pigeon that Does Not Eat Pigeon-Post, is just scary.

I was acquainted with the Sock Man of Loughborough (and Andrea, I'm very disappointed you didn't introduce me when I visited you way back). That's a highlight, for sure.

Wow, it seems a long time ago that I was last in Portsmouth. And I'm back there in about 13 hours' time. I should get packing...

-2nd Week: Boris Johnson vs Portsmouth

2007-04-04T00:47:00.001+01:00

"Outspoken Conservative MP Boris Johnson has been criticised for labelling Portsmouth as a city full of drugs and obesity," report the BBC. Various figures from the city have demanded that Boris resign/be sacked/apologise/be tortured to death/purple monkey dishwasher.

Portsmouth North MP, Sarah "One Flyer Is An Election Campaign" McCarthy-Fry, seems to think she is both able to determine who is fit for being a front-bench MP (because, you know, she has so much experience of that herself) and that she knows exactly how to "encourage young people in Portsmouth to go on to higher education".

As a young(ish) person from Portsmouth who was fortunate enough to be able to go on to higher education at one of the best establishments in the world, and on behalf of all my like-aged, like-educated friends, I say to her: I laughed out loud when I read the article. Long live Boris Johnson! Ms. McCarthy-Fry, credit for replying to my letter of way back, but go do something useful like representing your constituents, or maybe talking to some real young people before you decide how they're reacting to Boris.

11th Week: My degree is over

2007-03-29T11:52:00.000+01:00

I made the mistake of downloading EVE Online on Tuesday. Why is this a mistake? Because it's a really rather good game...

You see, the danger of being in Oxford for so long and hence sitting on top of the rather fast JANET is the temptation to go online and do Stuff. In this instance, after several references in PC Plus (including a whole-page article on how good it is) I decided to see if they had a Linux client. My intentions here were, of course, purely academic.

As it happens, there is no Linux client (though there are whisperings) but there was some discussion about running the Windows one over Wine. Being a Computer Scientist, I could hardly resist the challenge... and as it happens, there was not much of it. Using Wine 0.9.33, it (mostly) Just Works. The sound is a little jittery (as with most DirectSound things under Wine) but the game is just as playable this way as through Windows. Plus, it means I don't affect my uptime by rebooting every time I want to play.

So, these last couple of days have been spent in and out of the Eve world, running a few missions, mining a few asteroids, and generally not doing anything relating to my degree... The possibly good news is that I have 12 days left of the free trial period, which perhaps not coincidentally also will mark the end of my stint in Oxford for the time being (I'm going home for a bit).

After that, who knows...

10th Week: Something for Nothing?

2007-03-24T02:16:00.001Z

Or at least, for US$3?

I came across a site - www.freepgs.com - that offers advert-free PHP/MySQL hosting for a one-off payment from $3. So, what did I do? I PayPal'd my $3, got signed up, and uploaded the latest SVN of my content-management system (the one that drives the OICCU website). A quick E-mail to them as some of their defaults are a bit too restrictive - by the end of the day they've sorted it and all is working smoothly. Too good to be true? Not so far - I'll keep you posted.

10th Week: In the news today...

2007-03-19T14:38:00.001Z

I'm ill, so to waste some time here's a few stories that caught my eye, and I'll try and put the world to rights.

Firstly, if anyone still thinks software patents are a good idea, then you will be pleased to know that the linked list has been patented by a Ming-Jen Wang. (For the non-CompSci reading this, know that the linked list is one of the most primitive data structures used in computer science and is used by just about everyone.) Surely it's only a matter of time before someone patents "Hello World"...

Keeping with the computing theme, if any of you still think that Windows Vista is a good idea, then you will be pleased to know that security company Kaspersky Labs have stated "There's a question mark if Vista security has improved, or has really dropped down." Brilliantly, in the same article a Microsoft spokeman is quoted as saying "...[Kaspersky] have one of the best insights into Microsoft security products".

My old Maths teacher once told me, "The best way to picture something in four dimensions? Don't!" Now mathematicians have detailed a 248-dimensional structure with... I don't know, presumably some purpose. The title of the lecture in which this is being presented? "The Character Table for E8, or How We Wrote Down a 453,060 x 453,060 Matrix and Found Happiness."

And finally, if there are any of you who still think DRM is a good idea, know that 75% of customer service problems at a major online music seller are caused by DRM. From the article:

According to Musicload, DRM "makes the use of music quite difficult and hinders the development of a mass-market for legal downloads." The lack of interoperability is unfair to customers and prevents true competition between music services, in other words.

The MS Approach to Security

2007-03-11T01:02:00.001Z

Don't Let OneCare Eat Your Email - AppScout

"Oh, look, that file might have a virus... AAAGGHH! PANIC! DELETE EVERYTHING THERE! WIPE IT ALL OUT! ... oops, there goes the user's entire E-mail account. Oh well, who cares? Not me. They're paying for me, you know."

7th Week: Belated geekiness

2007-02-25T17:30:00.000Z

A couple of weeks ago, Peter T and I took various tools to Martyn Layzell's Mac G3. The laptop was officially certified dead before Martyn could get anything from his hard drive, so it went to the resident St. Aldate's geeks to see what we could find.

When I got there (carrying essential caffeine supplies), the keyboard had already been taken out, and we started work on the outer bottom shell casing... Or, we tried to, but none of the allen keys in St. Aldate's were the right size. Peter had a flash of inspiration: maybe it was using American sizing? A dash to Robert Dyas, and the laying on of hands by our worship pastor (j/k), and a jolly good prising with a screwdriver and the casing came away at last.

This had taken so long that I had to leave for a class at this point (Programming Languages), but I left Peter and Martyn with my camera to photograph the end result...

A ridiculous number of fixings...

And lo, a MacBook with hard drive removed!

6th Week: Blair really knows what he's talking about!!!!!1111one

2007-02-20T21:08:00.001Z

The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Right Honourable Anthony Blair MP, has responded to an online petition to ban the use of digital restrictions management (DRM) for digital content (read it here).

In a complete and total misunderstanding of what DRM is, what it does, and why it is used, the response reads:

"...However, DRM does not only act as a policeman through technical protection measures, it also enables content companies to offer the consumer unprecedented choice in terms of how they consume content, and the corresponding price they wish to pay."

Um... no.

4th Week: StarWarsGame extends Game...

2007-02-08T16:21:00.000Z

This is actually genuinely part of my OOP practical. (Note: contains spoilers for the game!)

          / __   __| / _ \ |  _ \
    ______> \ | |   |  _  ||    /_____________________________
   / _______/ |_|   |_| |_||_|\______________________________ \
  / /                                                        \ \
 | |          Episode OOPII: A New GoldenGlobe Game           | |
  \ \____________________________    _   ___   ____   _______/ /
   \___________________________  |  | | / _ \ |  _ \ / _______/
                               | |/\| ||  _  ||    / > \
                                \_/\_/ |_| |_||_|\_\|__/

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...
You are on the bridge of the Imperator-II class Star Destroyer Chimaera. Through the transparisteel windows you see a vast starfield.
There is a turbolift at the rear of the bridge

What now? go turbolift
You are in the turbolift
The turbolift doors open out onto the bridge. TIE Fighters patrol outside
There is the turbolift controls here.

What now? use controls
The turbolift doors hiss shut, and a few moments later you feel a slight motion as the lift descends. The doors open when you reach your destination.
You are in the turbolift
The turbolift doors open out onto a corridor
There is the turbolift controls here.

What now? go corridor
You are in a harshly-lit corridor near the belly of the Star Destroyer
A blastdoor leads out into the main hangar
Close to you, a door leads to another room
At the end of the corridor is a turbolift

What now? go blastdoor
You are in the main hangar of the starship. Beyond the magcon field lies the coldness of space
The blastdoor leads back into the corridor
An Imperial Shuttle is landed in the hangar

What now? go shuttle
There's no way to lower the ramp without the keycard.

... and that's all you're getting! I should point out that I haven't just played the game for the practical - but actually written it. (My first ideas, to extend the template we were given to read in XML-described levels, was discarded as being too advanced for the course.) There's an unexpected plot twist (well, such that there is any plot) later on in the game - I'll probably make the Java bytecode available somewhere at some point (but obviously not the source code, since some of that isn't mine and I don't want people to copy it before it's marked!)

3rd Week: Beyond Vista (or, how to cream your customers for every cent they own)

2007-01-30T17:26:00.000Z

More than six months ago, I mentioned the possibility of Microsoft moving to a modular, and pay-per-module, basis for operating systems after Vista. The idea was met with a general feeling of doubt that such a thing would happen, from all on #CompSci (including my aforementioned technically-adept contemporary MSHV).

Now, a short time after withdrawing a patent application for an idea they copied from BlueJ, Microsoft have filed for a new software patent. What could the subject of this patent possibly be? Why, it's entitled "System and method for delivery of a modular operating system". From the abstract:

An operating system and method for use include a core function module, or basic kernel, providing fundamental operating system support and one or more add-on modules that allow customization of the operating system as desired. Add-on modules may provide support or extended capability to the computer including hardware, applications, peripherals, and support. ... By withholding certification, a service provider may manage illegal or undesired modifications to a provided computer. Digital rights management may be used to enforce terms of use of the add-on module in keeping with licensing arrangements.

I'm not an expert on patent law, and especially not US patent law. Lucky for me, someone at Groklaw is. Their analysis?

The patent relates to a method of delivery of an operating system where you start off with a very basic operating system, a kind of crippled starter edition, and then you pick and choose (and purchase) additional functionality, with DRM used to make sure you don't self-help. It's like modular copyleft, turning the advantages of GNU/Linux -- modularity there increases what you can do and what you can add and how well everything works -- and instead turns the concept on its head by using modularity plus DRM to restrict and contain and enforce.

The article is quite a lengthy exposition of the patent application, and I won't try and further summarise it here - go, read for yourself. Most interesting, though, is the fact that some of these "add-on modules" are there to provide functionality that you would expect - nay, should demand - from the most basic installation of the OS. Plugging in all your peripherals, for example. Or having a network connection at the speed your hardware allows. Or having as many different programs open as you want, and that your computer can cope with. All of these things are flagged in the application as things available in addition to the basic kernel (eg with the possibility you have to pay for them).

As for the DRM... I believe I have my views already well-recorded on that shocking scheme for consumer manipulation and exploitation.

It's worth pointing out, of course, that "Microsoft doesn't need a patent to use this business model, nor does a patent application prove it will use the model." But who can argue that they're not headed that way?

Technorati Tags: microsoft, vista, patent, drm

3rd Week: OK, brace yourselves...

2007-01-29T16:58:00.001Z

The BBC News website reports on the story that's going to be everywhere in the world tomorrow: Windoze Vista's launch. Luckily for my sanity, they've avoided (so far) the Redmond whitewash by inviting proponents of the other two members of the Big Three OSs to give their pitch alongside two pro-Microsoft folk.

We can all but discard the first pro-Windows comment, obviously from someone who's never seen anything but Windows first-hand and focuses almost entirely on eyecandy (nothing wrong with an OS having eyecandy - but when you're paying £170 minimum (or £80 for an upgrade), it can't be the only thing going for it).

The second pro-Windows comment is more substantial, so I'll grab a few quotes and deal with them in turn, occasionally sarcastically.

A huge amount of research has been put into this new version which is evident in everything from the user interface right through to the new security model.

This would be the 20+ people it took to design the shoddy "shut down" options menu? And the new security model based on the philosophy of "annoy the hell out of everyone so they turn it off" (as instantiated by my technically-adept contemporary MSHV). You can't really defend against users with the mindset of "click OK just to get rid of the damn things", mind (hence why not everyone is cut out to be a superuser - don't take the name of root in vain).

This latest update provides many new components but the one which will provide the greatest change for windows users is the Windows Presentation Foundation - a set of components which allow graphics designers to produce visually stunning user interfaces.

I have to say, I wasn't blown away when I first saw Aero (I know - "Linux fanboy!!!!111") but I can't deny that it looks... nice. It's certainly a big improvement over XP's default Fisher Price settings. And I suppose the big difference here between Windows (and Mac for that matter) and Linux systems is choice, or lack thereof. A Windows developer making a GUI application is almost certainly using Visual Studio, and (for Vista) will be using WPF to make their app look and feel like every other Windows app - like it's part of the system.

Linux is different. Not only are there two competing desktop environments in KDE and Gnome (yes, there are more than this, but these are the big two) but the way they draw elements like buttons, scrollbars etc is different from the ground up. KDE uses the Qt toolkit, while Gnome uses the GTK one. Somehow, I get the feeling whenever I use an app designed for GTK, that it's not quite looking how it should - and while integration with KDE themes is there, it's not watertight. It doesn't (usually) affect the functionality of the app, just the look and feel. Oh, dear, we're talking eyecandy again...

I also like the way that all my existing hardware just works (although I am aware many other people have had problems).

Well, at this point I could give the usual "if-more-people-used-Linux-more-hardware-people-would-release-drivers-for-it" spiel but I won't. Fact is, I think of the Big Three, Linux has the absolute widest hardware support of the lot. Vista only seems available on x86 and x86_64 processors... no SPARC, no PPC... Ever tried to find drivers for an old printer on XP? Chances are it'll be already waiting for you in Linux. Reading through the list of drivers in the Linux kernel sources is a mammoth task - but, of course, we can't compare it since OS X and Vista are closed-source. Apple OSs, it's worth pointing out, only ever come with Apple-built hardware and are only designed for Apple machines, so Apple loses the hardware compatibility race from the off.

So we get to the Linux-user's comments (interesting that the Beeb would put Linux above Apple in the article). And going through this closely... I can't really fault it. It makes all the right points (though it does only dedicate two lines to eyecandy... shock horror). It doesn't make a big song and dance about being completely free; it doesn't deny the weak points (as the other three comments do - any OS will have weak points!); and it does briefly discuss the fact that the whole ethos behind Linux as an open-source project is a different one to that behind Windows and OS X:

What really sets Linux apart is its social significance provided by the free software license. It encourages users to share the software they love with their friends, rather than making the act of sharing illegal and branding it piracy.

Also it encourages programmers to be better people, working in the open and allowing other programmers from across the world to help improve their software, rather than locking up their work with restrictive licences which prevent programmers from working together.

So to the Mac-user... and I have to admit, I have too little experience of Mac OS to be able to raise many comments. Most of the points he raises - security, maintenance, productivity and interoperability with Windows users - could equally be applied to Linux too.

I now feel like I am in charge of my computer rather than it being in charge of me.

And yet you can still only do things that Apple let you do, Mr. Tilney. You only own a license to the OS, not the software itself... and still, you're tied to the Apple hardware+software+soul combination.

My bottom line? I think it's been well-stated elsewhere that I'm a Linux user through choice, and see no reason to go back to Windows. Sure, I keep it around for the odd spot of gaming (or playing Lucy at MSN Games into the early hours) but would I ever use it as my primary OS again? Not through choice. And, let's not forget, that both Apple's OS and Vista are defective by design, and include software "features" to limit your freedoms with digital media. But when the Penguin sets you free, you will be truly free... ;-)

Technorati Tags: vista, windows, linux

1st Week: Hooray for Kingsway

2007-01-15T10:25:00.001Z

Kingsway are offering individual song downloads for 99p each - and, more importantly, the downloads are MP3s and without any Digital Restrictions Management. I've just bought a copy of Matt Redman's "Never Let Go" - we sang this at St. Aldate's last night and right now it's just so spot-on for describing my life.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I will fear no evil,

for you are with me;

your rod and your staff,

they comfort me.

(Psalm 23: 4)

1st Week: A Copied Quiz Thing - Soundtrack To My Life

2007-01-14T17:41:00.000Z

I never ever do these things, but I'm doing this one because a) I haven't posted on this blog for nearly two months, b) it's quite a good one as it gives you an insight into a person's music collection, c) I'm bored, and d) it's one more thing to distract myself from everything that's happened in said last two months, if only temporarily...

IF YOUR LIFE WAS A MOVIE, WHAT WOULD THE SOUNDTRACK BE?
So, here's how it works:
1. Open your library (iTunes, Winamp, Media Player, iPod, etc)
2. Put it on shuffle
3. Press play
4. For every question, type the song that's playing
5. When you go to a new question, press the next button
6. Don't lie and try to pretend you're cool..

Opening Credits:
Pink Floyd - Shine On You Crazy Diamond

Waking Up:
Mr. Mister - Welcome To The Real World

First Day At School:
Pink Floyd - Is There Anybody Out There?

Falling In Love:
Delirious? - Message Of The Cross

Breaking Up:
Star Wars VI soundtrack - Ew*k Celebration and Finale (now there's irony)

Prom:
A few bars of the BBC News theme... don't ask why

Life's Ok:
Delirious? - Solid Rock

Mental Breakdown:
Fight, Win, Prevail (from the soundtrack to Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn)

Driving:
Delirious? - Now Is The Time

Flashback:
Phatfish - There Is A Day

Getting Back Together:
(Мне все еще жаль, что это не может случиться, with apologies for the translation)
Matt Redman - King Of This Heart

Birth of Child:
Delirious? - I Was Blind

Wedding Scene:
The Itchy and Scratchy theme from The Simpsons (again, don't ask why)

Final Battle:
Tim Hughes - Jesus You Alone

Death Scene:
Sean Callery - LA At 9:00AM (from the 24 soundtrack)

Funeral Song:
Spring Harvest - How Great Is Our God (ironically enough, I hope this will genuinely be at my funeral...)

End Credits:
Pink Floyd - Comfortably Numb

So what have we learned? Well, that my collection contains a lot of weird clips of television themes; that Ew*ks and the Rebellion are ultimately responsible for the events of the last two months; that a recurring theme of my life has been, and will be, Jesus; and that right now, I may not be comfortable, but I've certainly been feeling numb.

7th Week: on the Facebook Development Platform

2006-11-25T14:53:00.000Z

There seems to have been a lot of controversy of late surrounding the mysterious and seemingly-misunderstood Facebook Development Platform. Is this a secret plan to sell your personal data to the highest bidder? Is it some way for people to view and steal your profile information? (For those who don't know, Facebook is one of these social networking sites - you know, the "I've got 17 more friends than you" type places. It's a complete waste of time, but (or possibly therefore) is brilliant.)

Let's look at what the FDP actually is. Above all things, it is for developers - computer geeks like me who like to write programs, and would like to integrate them with Facebook.

Here's a note that I found someone had posted:

Hey Kids, So apparently Facebook has started SELLING user information (surprise, surprise!) to third parties. They call it the "Facebook Development Platform." To restrict use of your information, do the following...

The same note goes on to make up "quotes" from the Facebook Terms of Service and Privacy Policy (Really! Go and look yourself, if you've seen the original note!). Facebook's own FAQ deals with this issue directly:

Facebook respects your privacy. We don't distribute your user information to marketers or spammers. We also do not allow crawlers from search engines on our site.

In fact, far from selling information, the FDP is free to make use of - anyone on Facebook can sign up and make use of the API in their own applications. The important point to make about this is that, in order to use applications that use the Facebook API and access any information, the user needs to log in to Facebook. At no point do they gain access to information they couldn't have gathered from the Facebook site.

The issue was raised again about an hour ago, when a friend of mine invited me to join the group "People Radar is an abuse of information on Facebook". People Radar, recently renamed from FaceRadar (because Facebook apparently own the copyright to the word "face"), is one of the myriad applications that make use of the Development Platform and its API. The basic premise of the site is: you go through and rate members of your preferred sex on how "hot" they are. You can also check your own rating (for some reason, mine seems to be 1. Maybe an overflow error?).

While I in no way think that this is a particularly brilliant idea (far from it), I disagree with the group's statement that it is an "abuse of information". Facebook is a site designed for sharing information. Any information you put up, you expect to be shared - and FB duly gives you control over how this information is shared.

The group also suggests changing your privacy settings to prevent your data being used for the FDP. This, though, is rather like using a nuclear warhead to kill an ant (Note to any American President reading: this is a Bad Idea). PeopleRadar itself has an opt-out, and I would recommend that instead of the kill-all approach. If everyone took this route, then some genuinely interesting, some intriguing, and maybe even some genuinely useful ideas would be rendered useless. (An extensive list is available.)

As a developer, I say that would be a shame.

4th Week: The Legendary St. John's Fireworks

2006-11-01T22:36:00.000Z

...were slightly disappointing this year.

Maybe it was the hype I was desperately trying to inject into the evening; recounting countless tales of previous SJC fireworks displays, from when they set fire to one of the trees encircling the Great Lawn, to last year's near-horizontal firework launch towards the crowd. Perhaps it was the fact that (mostly to prevent a re-occurrence of the aforementioned) a professional was called in. I mean, who wears a helmet when putting on a fireworks display? Perhaps it was the final two fireworks: Wheeeeeeeeee.... put. put.

Or maybe it's the fact I got to bed at about 3.15am last night...

4th Week: About Time

2006-10-29T00:25:00.000+01:00

BBC News has early coverage of a report, due out later today, with the Institute of Public Policy Research's report into a review of copyright laws. Read it at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6095612.stm.

From the article:

Copyright laws are "out of date" and must be updated so MP3 player users can make copies of CDs without breaking the law, according to a think tank.

Yes! That's exactly right! And, my favourite quote of them all:

It is not the music industry's job to decide what rights consumers have. That is the job of government.

3rd Week: Good news from the world of broadcasting

2006-10-28T14:08:00.000+01:00

At long last, BBC Parliament will be available in full screen format on Freeview from November 13, reports Digital Spy. (See the official BBC press release here.)

Unlike satellite and cable TV, Freeview has only a limited bandwidth available; there's a limit to the number of channels that can be broadcast. Until now, BBC Parliament has been broadcast quarter-screen, in the same video stream as the two News Multiscreen video loops; on both, MHEG text screens cover the other side of the screen.

With Parliament now in full-screen, this either means the end of News Multiscreen on Freeview, or else enough room for a few more screens. Or perhaps they've managed to squeeze out an extra channel's bandwidth by reducing the quality of the others (BBC Four/CBeebies, 301/302) But which is it to be?

The discussion of this has spread to eight pages on the DS forums...

3rd Week: Happy Release Day

2006-10-26T23:55:00.000+01:00

You really have to wonder what was going through their minds, though...

http://blog.pcplus.co.uk/page/pcplus?entry=ms_to_firefox_team_congratulations

3rd Week: Food for thought for Linux geeks

2006-10-24T20:41:00.000+01:00

This was written in July, but I've only just found it. Written by A Y Siu (a name I recognise from the Kubuntu forums, as it happens), it debunks the myth of "the year of the Linux desktop", while simultaneously destroying the myth that "Linux is not ready for the desktop". An interesting read...

http://www.psychocats.net/essays/linuxdesktopmyth

Essential reading for anyone waiting for Linux to break through into the mainstream; and for anyone who's heard of Linux, has maybe been told that it's better than Windows (by some Linux geek like me).

2nd Week: Latest Pictures - Anti-Lab Protest

2006-10-21T16:03:00.000+01:00

These were the best shots I could get of the anti-lab brigade (it's no longer sufficient to call them "protesters" thanks to Pro-Test, which causes confusion) - I really didn't want to hang out of my (ground floor) window as the protesters marched past, waving a camera, in case one of the ALF decided to make good their arson threat. Anyway, here are the photos.

The banner reads "FREE SPEECH" and has a website address. I'm not going to link to it. :-P

There were quite a few of them - they took a full four minutes to pass by outside.

And finally they depart... many of them seem to be holding banners saying "REMEMBER GEORGE". Unfortunately, I don't, though apparently he's a miserable-looking chimp. (Because there are so many chimps being experimented on in the new lab.) Also, some people were carrying banners saying "SUPPORT SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH - STOP VIVISECTION" or something similar. These people are, presumably, either confused or misled. I'm a Computer Scientist. The argument that "computers can do simulations so we don't need real animals" doesn't wash with me.

2nd Week: OCaml

2006-10-20T17:39:00.000+01:00

How to make the ML programming language, for beginners.

Take all the worst parts of Haskell.
Make all those Haskell error messages even more obscure.
Add in the noisiness of Oberon.
Provide contradictory documentation.

I have no idea what I wrote but, after 90 minutes of fiddling around with punctuation marks, the practical works.

2nd Week: MythTV Database Issues

2006-10-20T11:16:00.000+01:00

OK, for the second time in my life I had to scour the internet for the solution to a problem with a new installation of MythTV (from CVS). I'm putting this here so I can find it again in future!

If you try and run mythfrontend or mythtv-setup and get errors such as the following:

QSqlDatabase: QMYSQL3 driver not loaded
QSqlDatabase: available drivers:
2006-10-20 11:14:52.435 New DB connection, total: 1
2006-10-20 11:14:52.436 Unable to connect to database!
2006-10-20 11:14:52.437 No error type from QSqlError? Strange...
QSqlQuery::exec: database not open
QSqlQuery::exec: database not open
2006-10-20 11:14:52.496 DB Error (KickDatabase):
Query was:
SELECT NULL;
No error type from QSqlError? Strange...
2006-10-20 11:14:52.572 Unable to connect to database!
2006-10-20 11:14:52.573 No error type from QSqlError? Strange...

... then the solution is twofold. Firstly make sure you have the Qt MySQL drivers installed (Ubuntu people: that's libqt3-mt-mysql). Secondly - and this is the bit that always takes ages to find... You need an /etc/ld/so.conf file that contains the path to the said driver. Ubuntu people: /usr/local/lib.

That's it. That's what takes hours to solve. Not any more.

1st Week: Help! Help! We're being repressed!

2006-10-13T09:56:00.000+01:00

TechWeb reports on the licenses for Microsoft Windows Vista, due out... well, some time. So just how much will you "own" of Vista, should you buy it?

Well, of course the answer to that is "none", and has been for some time thanks to the barely-legal End User License Agreement ("this software is licensed, not sold", among other things). As an end-user, though, Microsoft are trying very hard to control what do with their new baby.

Ever upgraded a computer, ditched the old one and installed Windows on the new one? You can now only do that once. Says the license:

The first user of the software may reassign the license to another device one time. If you reassign the license, that other device becomes the "licensed device".

Interestingly enough, this sort of limitation seems to be illegal, at least in America. In 2001, in a case between Adobe and SoftMan, the judge ruled that

...the terms of the Adobe EULA at issue prohibit licensees from transferring or assigning any individual Adobe product that was originally distributed as part of a Collection unless it is transferred with all the software in the original Collection. This license provision conflicts with the first sale doctrine in copyright law, which gives the owner of a particular copy of a copyrighted work the right to dispose of that copy without the permission of the copyright owner.

More coverage of that story was at Linux Weekly News and The Register.

It gets better, though it might take some explaining. Unless you're a techie yourself, then the following might go right over your head:

You may not use the software installed on the licensed device within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system.

"Virtual machines" or VMs are, as computers become more powerful, becoming more popular. Tools like VMware allow you to run an operating system within an operating system. You can boot into Windows, then boot up a Linux VM, and run both operating systems simultaneously. As well as being useful for developers, who need to test their products on a variety of different platforms, it has benefits for home users: Why worry about spyware and viruses when surfing the web, when you can load a VM with a browser, use that, and once you're done you can restore it to its initial state (including getting rid of stored personal data etc).

None of which violates the new EULA, as long as Vista is the "host" (that is, the real) operating system. Where this gets interesting is when you look to the developments that both Intel and AMD are making in the field of virtualisation. It's easiest to explain with reference to a diagram, so here's one from a presentation "Xen and the Art of Virtualisation":
What this shows is four different operating systems, running each as if they were the host OS, thanks to the Xen layer. Microsoft's EULA stamps all over this party (though it should be said, the same restrictions do not apply to the more expensive and undoubtedly more bloated versions of Vista, just Home Basic and Home Premium).

Oh - and if Vista decides to believe you've got a pirated copy of it, whether you have or not, it will severely limit your use of the OS and your computer. If you're one of the law-abiding people who buy Vista in the shops, you could find it not letting you use the internet, other than Internet Explorer for one hour at a time (gah, it's like my parents!).

Think you're safe with a genuine copy? Past experience tells us otherwise, as this article reports.

Scrolling through the posts on Microsoft's official WGA Validation Problems forum is like reading accident reports from a multiple-car pileup on Interstate 5. Many of the victims are completely innocent and have no idea what hit them, and cleaning up the mess can be a nightmare.

If you're a Windows user, and/or planning to upgrade to Vista if/when it is released, that should send a shiver down your spine. You have been warned...

1st Week: A Conversation with Mel

2006-10-12T13:41:00.000+01:00

This had me in fits of laughter for whole minutes at a time...

(13:11:31) Mel: dude
(13:11:44) Mel: were's te ceapest place I ca get a ew keyaord, do you tik?
...
(13:12:26) Mel: it's gettig aoyig ow
(13:12:31) Mel: it was oly oe letter yesterday
(13:12:42) Mel: ow it's 3
...
(13:15:40) Mel: aaaaa
(13:15:53) Mel: (tat was laugig witout cocosats)
... We then proceeded to almost order a keyboard from ebuyer, before realising that they would only ship to my billing address (Portsmouth) for my first order...
(13:39:02) Mel: or I could use my ousemate's!
(13:39:14) Mel: wy did't tat occur to me efore
...
(13:43:31) Mel: I've lost te questio mark as well ow
(13:43:50) Mel: sad

This, folks, is the sort of weird thing that happens in Oxford.

1st Week: Famous people! Questions! And a textbook

2006-10-10T23:18:00.000+01:00

Slashdot reports on Jarosław "sztywny" Rzeszótko's E-mail interview with some of the greats in the computing world, including Linux creator Linus Torvalds and C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup. It's a very good read; here are my personal highlights...

- What do you think is the most important skill every programmer should possess?
Linus Torvalds:

It’s a thing I call "taste".

I tend to judge the people I work with not by how proficient they are: some people can churn out a _lot_ of code, but more by how they react to other peoples code, and then obviously by what their own code _looks_ like, and what approaches they chose. That tells me whether they have "good taste" or not, and the thing is, a person without "good taste" often is not very good at judging other peoples code, but his own code often ends up not being wonderfully good.
- Do you think mathematics and/or physics are an important skill for a programmer? Why?
Tim Bray (co-author of XML and ATOM specs):
In my case, I’ve almost never used my university-level math to support my programming.

- What is your favourite book related to computer programming?

Linus Torvalds:
I have a soft spot for Andrew Tanenbaum’s "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation". (This is on my reading list for next term! Good to know it has pedigree...)

Go, read the rest for yourself - and tell me if it was worth me doing all that Maths last year...

0th Week: Customer Service

2006-10-07T22:42:00.000+01:00

How's this for customer service...
I buy a secondhand book online from abebooks.com its Java In A Nutshell Deluxe Edition which is supposed to come with a CD. It didn't, and the book's been out of print for quite a while now.

One short E-mail to O'Reilly (the publisher), and a few days later I have a brand-new CD on my desk. Two thumbs up, O'Reilly!

0th Week: Tired!

2006-10-07T12:04:00.000+01:00

Wow, I'm tired... I got to bed at 3am after the St. Aldate's half-night of prayer; Dave and I were both on the A/V team for much of the evening, though we were able to take it in shifts. It was a really encouraging evening, and one that made me really feel (almost) as at home here as at my home church. I even got to use my nice Risky semi-transparent stuff (I think it's fast becoming my signature piece, quite worryingly). It's little touches like that that make the difference.

So, got in about 2.40, and really fancied a cheese toastie. Bed about 3, but (surprisingly, as I was exhausted) found it really difficult to get to sleep. Woke up about 11, and I should probably get dressed somewhen soon...

My ridiculously busy Freshers' Week continues... it's the SJC Freshers' Fair, and OICCU Churches Fair, both this afternoon. I'm sure Freshers' Week wasn't this busy last year... I'd better get dressed somewhen soon. And do some laundry. And find some lunch. And so on.

Edit: This blog has been going for a year yesterday! Go me!

0th Week: Freshers' Fair

2006-10-05T17:26:00.000+01:00

I helped out with the CompSoc stall at the OUSU Freshers' Fair this afternoon. Gave out some free Ubuntu CDs, and had a long chat with some of the guys on the Toshiba stall about Linux.

I'm really, really tempted to buy a laptop...

0th Week: Consumer Warning

2006-10-03T09:25:00.000+01:00

Please read this consumer warning. This stuff really exists and you should know about it. Please also pass this onto anyone else who may not be aware of what DRM is.

Warning: DRM! Digital Restrictions Management

This holiday season when you bring home a new electronic device, will you be bringing an intruder into your home? Will you and your family members end up being monitored and reported on by the software installed on these devices?

DRM is used to restrict what you and your family can do with the electronic devices and media purchased. It is an attempt by technology and media companies to take away your rights. DRM Means: No fair use. No purchase and resell. No private copies. No sharing. No backup. No swapping. No mix tapes. No privacy. No commons. No control over our computers. No control over our electronic devices.

DRM software and hardware monitors and controls your family's behavior.

Did you know that iPod users are restricted from transferring their music to other non-Apple devices because the music downloaded from iTunes is encrypted - locked with DRM? Apple allows you to write an audio CD, but will leave you with very lousy sound quality if you ever want to take your music to a new portable device in a compressed format.

Did you know that Sony Music was caught secretly planting DRM “rootkits” on customers computers. All it required was for you to play the CD you had purchased from them...

DRM is more than a nuisance. The film and music industry are setting the agenda to increase their control. They have demanded that technology companies impose DRM to deliver for them what their political lobbying to change copyright law never has: they aim to turn every interaction with a published work into a transaction, abolishing fair use and the commons, and making copyright last forever. By accepting DRM users unwittingly surrender their rights and invite a deeper surveillance. This will put your family's viewing, listening, reading, browsing records on file with them.

What gives them that right?

Stay away from DRM-dependent products like Blu-ray and HD-DVD, iTunes, Windows Media Player, Zune, Amazon Unbox...

Stay away from retailers who insist on making DRM part of the package.

Stop financing the people who want to restrict you.

Find out more at www.DefectiveByDesign.org and find 10 easy ways you can help make others aware.

Thanks for reading.

0th Week: Every TINYINT Helps

2006-10-02T10:55:00.000+01:00

Tesco are to launch their own-branded software, reports the BBC.

This new range, to be launched later this month, includes office software, "security systems" (presumably antivirus and firewall), photo editing, and a CD/DVD burning suite. Now, this is an interesting move... From the report:

"When it comes to software there is little choice and prices are high. Our new range of software changes this, bringing choice and value to the market that has offered little of either for too long." -- Tesco buyer Daniel Cook

I have no doubt that these aren't the real motives for the venture - rather, increased profits and market share are, quite understandably. But it struck me just how close the stated reasons are to those of the free/OSS movement. Providing choice in a market that's offered little? As for value, you don't get much better than free (as in beer).

Of course, Tesco haven't hired a vast army of programmers for this; rather, they've signed an agreement with Formjet PLC, which gives a clue as to exactly what sort of products we'll be buying with our cornflakes. (Don't delve too deeply on their website, though, or you'll end up with lots of "Untitled Document"s.)

Could this be a big blow for OSS in the UK? With cheap software available from the UK's leading supermarket, will fewer people turn to free alternatives like OpenOffice? Or will it make people realise that not all software is made in Redmond, and start looking for alternatives?

Tesco's software range launches in late October in about 100 stores.

-1st Week: Only for America

2006-09-29T23:44:00.000+01:00

This could be quite interesting to watch: Facebook | Election Pulse (you might well have to have a Facebook account to see this). It's the runup to the USA's mid-term elections, and Facebook is keeping tabs on how many people are supporting each candidate. I wonder how accurate it'll be...

-1st Week: Back in Oxford!

2006-09-29T23:17:00.000+01:00

Wow, it feels like years since I've been here last... and I have a nice new room.

Brilliant start to the Oxonian year - a few hours after arriving (and downloading ~500MB of updated packages) I was starting to think about dinner; then I got an E-mail from Flo at St. Aldates, saying that there was pizza on offer! The Lord provides. ;-)

Remember that installation of XP I talked about... well, technically two weeks ago, but the post only went live today...? Only 59 security or critical updates for it. Downloading those now.

Plenty more to talk about... plenty to organise, and still plenty to unpack... but that can wait, as it's gone 1am. Hooray for Oxford! (Happy birthday Bruce!)

-3rd Week: Why EULAs are bad news

2006-09-29T01:03:00.000+01:00

This is a first for this blog: a post written at home - though only actually posted when I go back to Oxford in a few weeks. Here's the reason for this exclusive.

It cannot be denied that there are certain applications (OK, mostly games) that require Windows to run - they either don't yet run through Wine, or don't run sufficiently well. This is not a problem, since I have a licensed copy of Ecks Pee that came with the very computer I am currently using. With me so far?

I don't like rebooting my computer unnecessarily. (Don't install Windows then, the purists cry!) Hence, I have set my computer up so that I can either boot Windows normally; or, boot into Linux then boot the same Windows through VMWare.

The fact that it is the same Windows installation, and not a separate one, is important because of this clause in the EULA:

Installation and Use. Except as otherwise expressly provided in this EULA, you may install, use, access, display and run only one (1) copy of the SOFTWARE on the COMPUTER. The SOFTWARE may not be used by more than one (1) processor at any one time on the COMPUTER, unless a higher number is indicated on the Certificate of Authenticity.

Let's check this. Windows is only installed to /dev/hda6, with its boot files in /dev/hda1 because it can't handle not being first. There is only one (1) copy of the SOFTWARE on the COMPUTER, which is defined in this instance as being "the HARDWARE". That's key, since a virtual machine isn't hardware. Not that it's installed inside the VM anyway; it has direct access to the real, physical hard disk.

Right, so no problems so far... except of course Windows Product Activation. After activating Windows while booted as host, I rebooted into Linux and booted as guest. Windows thinks it's had a radical hardware change and gives me three days to reactivate. This I do (by phone). The question is - the next time I boot it normally, will I have to go through the same process again?

9th Week: An Offer

2006-06-22T13:07:00.000+01:00

Stolen from Claire's blog, in turn stolen from someone else's...

If you comment on this post:

1. I’ll respond with something random about you
2. I’ll challenge you to try something
3. I’ll pick a color that I associate with you
4. I’ll tell you something I like about you
5. I’ll tell you my first/clearest memory of you
6. I’ll tell you what animal you remind me of
7. I’ll ask you something I’ve always wanted to ask you
8. If I do this for you, you must post this on yours

To which Claire's reply was:

1. You have a very mean friend
2. you should try gnome or fluxbox, none of this KDE nonsense
3. oo i have no idea, colour of icecream
4. you use ubuntu
5. you telling me that if i didn't use windows things wouldn't break, and me protesting that i dont
6. a giraffe - you don't really
7. how do the buttons on the sound desk actually work?

Any takers?

9th Week: Goodbye Greg (I)

2006-06-18T21:58:00.000+01:00

We're going to miss you...

www.myspace.com/gregorydownes

Maths exam tomorrow. Eep. Let me see... "Let T be a linear transformation from V to V, where V is a finite-dimensional vector space over the real numbers..." - and that's before you get to the question!

8th Week: The Longest Day

2006-06-16T23:49:00.000+01:00

No fewer than six exam-hours today. CS3 this morning went OK, though Logic and Proof was scarily nasty (most of us had planned to attack all three L&P questions, based on the collection we did eight weeks ago). Managed to answer two of the Models of Computation questions (I hope) quite well. Since you have to answer five out of nine questions, I managed to not have to answer any Discrete Maths questions at all. Which was nice.

CS2 this afternoon was a bit of a mixed bag, but generally good. Some easy PP questions (apparently the easiest was Q2, though I didn't go for it), and it's always theraputic to be able to just write down elegant solutions to problems. As for DH - some really really badly set questions. It wasn't the content or the theory that was the problem, it was a third of a page taken up by a table that was mostly irrelevant and actually complicated things a lot. It took me a good five minutes to work out that it was describing a pedestrian crossing! Add to that all the signal names were in CAPS which GAVE ME A HEADACHE and it wasn't the most elegant or subtle of questions I've seen. And my method of using JK flip-flops? Wire them up like D-types! So much easier. Thanks, Brian!

Today's Star Wars Exam Reference: X-Wings/ TIE Fighters - talking about type extension in Oberon.

It occurred to me today that I haven't yet mentioned the Galactic Empire (GE) on here. At the start of this month, I reached five years with the club; in that time, I've made my way up the ranks from Ensign to Commander, where I am today. It's a whole different batch of problems - not least Zeta Squadron, who resolutely refuse to hold down a squad leader. Applications are open...

8th Week: On Windows Vista (rescued from Google Cache)

2006-06-15T20:14:00.000+01:00

This is good stuff. The OP took it down after a few hours of it being online; I've retrieved it from Google Cache. The following words are not mine: they are the words of someone who was a Windows team manager for five years. Slashdot link to this article (which is no longer there). The server is also now "too busy" - but then, it is an IIS...

The World As Best As I Remember It - Broken Windows Theory

Vista. The term stirs the imagination to conceive of beautiful possibilities just around the corner. And “just around the corner” is what Windows Vista has been, and has remained, for the past two years. In this time, has suffered a series of high-profile delays, including most recently the announcement that it would be delayed until 2007. The largest software project in mankind’s history now threatens to also be the longest.
Admittedly, this essay would be easier written for Slashdot, where taut lines divide the world crisply into black and white. “ is a bloated piece of crap,” my furry little penguine would opine, “written by the bumbling serfs of an evil capitalistic megalomaniac.” But that’d be dead wrong. The truth is far more nuanced than that. Deeper than that. More subtle than that.
I managed developer teams in Windows for five years, and have only begun to reflect on the experience now that I have recently switched teams. Through a series of conversations with other leaders that have similarly left The Collective, several root causes have emerged as lasting characterizations of what’s really wrong in The Empire.

The Usual Suspects
Ask any developer in Windows why is plagued by delays, and they’ll say that the code is way too complicated, and that the pace of coding has been tremendously slowed down by overbearing process. These claims have already been covered in other popular literature. A quick recap for those of you just joining the broadcast:
Windows code is too complicated. It’s not the components themselves, it’s their interdependencies. An architectural diagram of Windows would suggest there are more than 50 dependency layers (never mind that there also exist circular dependencies). After working in Windows for five years, you understand only, say, two of them. Add to this the fact that building Windows on a dual-proc dev box takes nearly 24 hours, and you’ll be slow enough to drive Miss Daisy.
Windows process has gone thermonuclear. Imagine each little email you send asking someone else to fill out a spreadsheet, comment on a report, sign off on a decision – is a little neutron shooting about in space. Your innocent-seeming little neutron now causes your heretofore mostly-harmless neighbors to release neutrons of their own. Now imagine there are 9000 of you, all jammed into a tight little space called . It’s Windows Gone Thermonuclear, a phenomenon by which process engenders further process, eventually becoming a self-sustaining buzz of fervent destructive activity.
Let’s see if, quantitatively, there’s any truth to the perception that the code velocity (net lines shipped per developer-year) of Windows has slowed, or is slow relative to the industry. is said to have over 50 million lines of code, whereas XP was said to have around 40 million. There are about two thousand software developers in Windows today. Assuming there are 5 years between when XP shipped and when Vista ships, those quick on the draw with calculators will discover that, on average, the typical Windows developer has produced one thousand new lines of shipped code per year during . Only a thousand lines a year. (Yes, developers don’t just write new code, they also fix old code. Yes, some of those Windows developers were partly busy shipping 64-bit XP. Yes, many of them also worked on hotfixes. Work with me here.)
Lest those of you who wrote 5,000 lines of code last weekend pass a kidney stone at the thought of Windows developers writing only a thousand lines of code a year, realize that the average software developer in the US only produces around (brace yourself) 6200 lines a year. So Windows is in bad shape – but only by a constant, not by an order of magnitude. And if it makes you feel any better, realize that the average developer has fallen in KLOC productivity since 1999, when they produced about 9000 lines a year. So Windows isn’t alone in this.
The oft-cited, oft-watercooler-discussed dual phenomenon of Windows code complexity and Windows process burden seem to have dramatically affected its overall code velocity. But code can be simplified and re-architected (and is indeed being done so by a collection of veteran architects in Windows, none of whom, incidentally, look anything like Colonel Sanders). Process can be streamlined where inefficient, eliminated where unnecessary.
But that’s not where it ends. There are deeper causes of Windows’ propensity to slippage.
Cultured to Slip
Deep in the bowels of Windows, there remains the whiff of a bygone culture of belittlement and aggression. Windows can be a scary place to tell the truth.
When a vice president in Windows asks you whether your team will ship on time, they might well have asked you whether they look fat in their new Armani suit. The answer to the question is deeply meaningful to them. It’s certainly true in some sense that they genuinely want to know. But in a very important other sense, in a sense that you’ll come to regret night after night if you get it wrong, there’s really only one answer you can give.
After months of hearing of how a certain influential team in Windows was going to cause the Vista release to slip, I, full of abstract self-righteous misgivings as a stockholder, had at last the chance to speak with two of the team’s key managers, asking them how they could be so, please-excuse-the-term, I-don’t-mean-its-value-laden-connotation, ignorant as to proper estimation of software schedules. Turns out they’re actually great project managers. They knew months in advance that the schedule would never work. So they told their VP. And he, possibly influenced by one too many instances where engineering re-routes power to the warp core, thus completing the heretofore impossible six-hour task in a mere three, summarily sent the managers back to “figure out how to make it work.” The managers re-estimated, nipped and tucked, liposuctioned, did everything short of a lobotomy – and still did not have a schedule that fit. The VP was not pleased. “You’re smart people. Find a way!” This went back and forth for weeks, whereupon the intrepid managers finally understood how to get past the dilemma. They simply stopped telling the truth. “Sure, everything fits. We cut and cut, and here we are. by August or bust. You got it, boss.”
Every once in a while, Truth still pipes up in meetings. When this happens, more often than not, Truth is simply bent over an authoritative knee and soundly spanked into silence.
The Joy of Cooking
Bundled with a tendency towards truth-intolerance, Windows also sometimes struggles with poor organizational decision-making. Good news is that the senior leaders already know this and have been taking active steps to change the situation.
There are too many cooks in the kitchen. Too many vice presidents, in reporting structures too narrow. When I was in Windows, I reported to Alec, who reported to Peter, to Bill, Rick, Will, Jim, Steve, and Bill. Remember that there were two layers of people under me as well, making a total path depth of 11 people from Bill Gates down to any developer on my team.
This isn’t necessarily bad, except sometimes the cooks flash-mob one corner of the kitchen. I once sat in a schedule review meeting with at least six VPs and ten general managers. When that many people have a say, things get confusing. Not to mention, since so many bosses are in the room, there are often negotiations between project managers prior to such meetings to make sure that no one ends up looking bad. “Bob, I’m giving you a heads-up that I’m going to say that your team’s component, which we depend on, was late.” “That’s fine, , but please be clear that the unforeseen delays were caused by a third party, not my team.”
Micromanagement, though not pervasive, is nevertheless evident. Senior vice presidents sometimes review UI designs of individual features, a nod to Steve Jobs that would in better days have betokened a true honor but for its randomizing effects. Give me a cathedral, give me a bazaar – really, either would be great. Just not this middle world in which some decisions are made freely while others are made by edict, with no apparent logic separating each from the other but the seeming curiosity of someone in charge.
In general, Windows suffers from a proclivity for action control, not results control. Instead of clearly stating desired outcomes, there’s a penchant for telling people exactly what steps they must take. It’s creating a generation of McDevs, few of whom enjoy the monotony. (For more on action control vs. results control, read Kenneth Merchant’s seminal work on the subject – all $150 of it, apparently).
Uncontrolled? Or Uncontrollable?
We shouldn’t forget despite all this that Windows Vista remains the largest concerted software project in human history. The types of software management issues being dealt with by Windows leaders are hard problems, problems that no other company has solved successfully. The solutions to these challenges are certainly not trivial.
An interesting question, however, is whether or not Windows Vista ever had a chance to ship on time to begin with. Is merely uncontrolled? Or is it fundamentally uncontrollable? There is a critical difference.
It’s rumored that VPs in Windows were offered big bonuses contingent on shipping by the much-publicized August 2006 date. Chris Jones even declared in writing that he wouldn't take a bonus if slips past August. If this is true, if folks like Brian Valentine held division-wide meetings where August 2006 was declared as the drop-dead ship date, if general managers were consistently told of the fiscal importance of hitting August, if everyone down to individual developers was told to sign on the dotted line to commit to the date, and to speak up if they had any doubts of hitting it – mind you, every last one of those things happened – and yet, and yet, the August date was slipped, one has to wonder whether it was merely illusory, given the collective failure of such unified human will, that Vista was ever controllable in the first place.
Are Vista-scale software projects essentially uncontrollable by nature? Or has Microsoft been beset by one too many broken windows? Talk amongst yourselves.
Published Monday, June 05, 2006 8:00 AM by philipsu
Filed Under: Software

8th Week: Hayfever

2006-06-15T10:35:00.000+01:00

There's revision to be done (there's always revision to be done!) so I'll be brief - this morning I had a doctors' appointment at 19 Beaumont Street Surgery about my hayfever. The appointment was for 10 o'clock. At 9.58 I saw Dr. Schuman. At 10.03 I was walking to Cornmarket Street with my prescription. At 10.14 I had my prescription (thanks to Boots).

Whatever the media reports about the NHS, it's good to give time for stories like this. Be it thanks to or (rather I suspect) despite the Government, on the ground there is still an excellence that we should be pleased with.

Oh - and it was all free (I'm still 18). :-)

8th Week: You are being spied on

2006-06-12T12:18:00.000+01:00

If you are using Microsoft Windows XP and have gotten any of the online updates: you are being spied on. GROKLAW have an article that completely rips apart Microsoft's handling of some software known as "Windows Genuine Advantage". This supposed "priority update" connects to a Microsoft server as much as once a day and report back to Big Brother Bill:

The genuine validation process will collect information about your system to determine if your Microsoft software is genuine. This process does not collect or send any information that can be used to identify you or contact you. The only information collected in the validation process is:
Windows product key
PC manufacturer
Operating System version
PID/SID
BIOS information (make, version, date)
BIOS MD5 Checksum
User locale (language setting for displaying Windows)
System locale (language version of the operating system)
Office product key (if validating Office)
Hard drive serial number

Hard drive serial number? What in the blazes? Also, this list has been revealed to be incomplete: they also receive "IP address and date/timestamp data relating to systems' booting and continued operations". So they know where you are, if you've turned on your computer today, and if you've bought a new hard drive of late.

It gets better... Microsoft are also calling this software a beta - or, in their words, "This software is a pre-release version of the software intended to
update the technological measures in Windows XP which are designed to
prevent unlicensed use of Windows XP". It's not finished. They're using you to test their software for them, in many cases without asking your permission.

They go on (this is in the EULA) to say: "By using the software, you accept these terms. If you do not accept
them, do not use the software.
As described below, using some features also operates as your consent
to the transmission of certain standard computer information for
Internet-based services."

If you do not accept them, don't use the software. Fair enough. Sadly, though, there is a problem here... See, you only get to see this EULA after the validation software has been installed (it comes in two parts, and this EULA is shown when you install the "notifications" part). And, just to ice the cake, "You will not be able to uninstall the software but you can suppress the reminders through the software icon in the system tray."

To summarise: You have to install it (in fact, if you have Automatic Updates turned on, it's already installed). Once installed, you are then asked to agree to it telling Microsoft far more than is really necessary; if you don't agree, tough, because you can't remove it.

By Microsoft's own definition, spyware is "deceptive software
that is installed on a user’s computer without the user’s consent and has some
malicious purpose." I'm guessing that if you're reading this while running Windows (and please say you're using Firefox), you both have this software installed and were unaware of its presence and function. So we have deceptive. As for malicious: firstly we have no sure knowledge of what it does (which is dodgy enough for me). Second, it allows Microsoft to collect more data from you than they say it can (by their own admission). Third, it uses resources on your computer without your permission (someone posting in reply to the Groklaw article uses the analogy of someone taking your car for a joyride without you knowing). That, in my book, puts this "critical update" firmly in the category of spyware.

There are a whole load of other issues that contribute to this argument: the legality of any EULA, for example; what security holes are opened up by this beta-test software, based on Microsoft's track record? And just how many of our rights and how much of our privacy are we prepared to give up - are companies - are governments prepared to give up to Microsoft?

The inevitable conclusion to this article is: why put up with this? "If you wish to remove the Windows Genuine Advantage tools, and I
expect most of you do," it reads, "why not go the whole hog and remove the entire
software package, replace it with GNU/Linux, and find out what it feels
like to be treated with respect and to breathe free?"

I am a free man.

8th Week: Love Oxford

2006-06-11T17:55:00.000+01:00

It was a first for Oxford: Forty churches joining together on a gloriously sunny and hot Sunday morning to worship God and declare His name to the city. The stage could barely hold all the leaders of the churches; the crowd of worshippers stretched back almost to the Bodleian, and easily from Baliol and Trinity to the shops across the street. Just a few yards behind the stage, the cobbled cross where Bishop Latimer and others were martyred; today, Anglican, Catholic, Baptist and more joined together in one voice to celebrate God's love.

I managed to drink a litre of water in about an hour - that's a lot. Charlie invented a new theological term - "prophetic ambiguity" - while purples and reds are "the rainbow God wants to see" (in a rather funny introduction to the offering - though I was slightly worried it wasn't as tongue-in-cheek as we all took it to be!)...

Vaughan Roberts was completely on song as he preached the Gospel - "We preach Jesus crucified" - as was OCC's Steve Thomas - "You need more notes for a short sermon than for a long one" - and Martyn Layzell was as spot-on leading worship as ever (although, in a dramatic break from tradition, only one of the songs we sang was written by him!). He couldn't help but deviate from the service plan though (I always said they needed a screen... and me operating it... ;-) ) for the chorus of "How great is our God, sing with me..." - but, what better words to worship God to - He is great!

A slight rewrite of the words to Father of Creation allowed us to sing "Let your glory fall in this town, let it go forth from here to the nations..." as opposed to the usual "room". But we couldn't sing that outside anyway, could we? Standing on Broad Street, singing On Holy Ground's "Where saints have walked this road before / Carried their cross through heaven's door" took extra poignancy.

OICCU President Greg Tarr read from 1 Corinthians, and Martin Smith's call to "Open up the doors and let the music play / Let the streets resound with singing" (Did You Feel The Mountains Tremble) was just the right choice of song to close with. Well, almost close with, followed by a unique arrangement of Amazing Grace (because, you know, no Christian gathering is complete without it...)

Plenty more I could blog about, but it's tomorrow already and I have less than seven hours in which to sleep. Plus a tute arranged for tomorrow without me having done any work for it... and less than 37.5 hours until my first exam... eek...

7th Week: 666, 6.06 and 158...

2006-06-07T00:44:00.000+01:00

In the immortal words of Granny Weatherwax... I ATEN'T DEAD!

Don't worry, I haven't converted to numerology - but the three numbers in the title of this post all have a certain significance. Firstly, 666... If it were written in hex, then its value would be 1638. But, it seems, there's a lot more to it than that (so people think). From BBC News: BBC NEWS | Have Your Say: Superstitious date: 06/06/06 ...

Hmm... 666... the Number of the Beast... the anti-Christ child... the end of the world... and Vladimir Putin, apparently. Where does this come from, what does the Bible actually say, and what does it all mean? All worthy questions, IMO.

Firstly, 666. This occurs (in fact) four times in the Bible (NIV at least) - twice referring to the amount of gold King Solomon received in a year; 666 exiles from Adonikam in Ezra 2:13; and the famous "number of the beast" verse in Revelation. Let's build some context here. John is having a vision. He sees "a beast coming out of the earth. He had two horns like a lamb, but he spoke like a dragon... He also forced everyone... to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead...which is the name of the beast or the number of his name." (from Revelation 13 vv11-16) Then comes the famous bit, I'll quote it here in full: "This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the
number of the beast, for it is man's number. His number is 666."

And... that's it. (Well, obviously the book goes on for another few chapters yet, but that's as far as the whole beast thing goes.) If you haven't looked at this before, you might be slightly disappointed. Where's this little brattish kid that's supposed to be destroying the world? etc. But this is what's actually there in Revelation.

What of this 666? There are two main (sensible) theories about this. For more see the IVP New Testament commentary from BibleGateway.com, from which I will paraphrase briefly.

One theory runs: The number "666" (programmers will hate me for citing it like that!) is a numbers game in which each letter of the alphabet is assigned a numerical value. The number, then, is the sum of the values that make up a person's name. Trouble is, with a little bit of fudging the figures, it can work for quite a few names (including Adolf Hitler, whom I'm sure John didn't have in mind).

Another theory, and the one that I prefer: The number 7 is regarded in Revelation as the number of God, of perfection. Thus, 666 falls short of the magic seven three times over. The beast falls short of God's power, His majesty, His wisdom, His strength, everything - "Failure upon failure upon failure". At any rate, it's usually safe to consider that the minor details of apocalyptic writing can be secondary to the main themes that are portrayed. The main themes of Revelation? "God is powerful. Jesus Christ reigns forever. Those who suffer for Christ will ultimately share his victory." (from the Youth Bible)

And what of this "anti-Christ"? The media tends to jump on the bandwagon of showing the antichrist as a person, inevitably an American brat called Damien, and with "666" somehow adorning his body. This doesn't come from Revelation at all - in fact, it comes a couple of chapters before (not necessarily chronologically) in 1 and 2 John. Who is the antichrist? In John's words: "Many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the
flesh, have gone out into the world. Any such person is the deceiver
and the antichrist." (2 John 1 v7). Even if they're not called Damien.

That's 666 down. Now, 6.06.

Dapper Drake - Kubuntu 6.06! - was released on the 1st June. It is no coincidence that my last blog post was on the 31st May. Suffice to say, the upgrade wasn't as simple as all the instructions suggested. After three failed attempts to upgrade packages, I was left with an X that wouldn't load and a kernel that wouldn't boot. I managed to scrape back to a loosely-functioning GUI and regrouped to #CompSci (there's another story in there, but that's for another - distant - time. If you're reading this, Claire - I'm still sorry...) where we agreed the easiest course of action would be for me to back up as much as I could to Alex's computer, repartition and reinstall. And it was easy... until I realised a few crucial little things that I'd forgotten. Like a website I'd spent about 90 hours working on. And all my E-mail. Apart from that, things are now looking very rosy - and in the next few days I'm hoping to take delivery of a nice 12" TFT monitor I found on eBay. Just right for watching TV while I'm working on the other screen. I've always fancied a dual-monitor setup, ever since we got one at church.

The last of these mysterious numbers - 158. That's greater than the number of hours I have left to my first exam.

Eep.