Chris' journal has moved to InsaneJournal

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:56:51 GMT

Four days ago, I moved to InsaneJournal. To clarify that a bit: I'll continue to read my friends page here and comment on entries, but I don't plan to post to this journal in future. Some possible options for reading my journal are:

Read it on LiveJournal: just add chris_boyle (same as shortcipher_ij) and my entries will appear on your friends page almost exactly as before. Public posts only, but that's nearly everything.
Read it on InsaneJournal: add shortcipher. You can do this either by using OpenID (enter yourusername.livejournal.com) or by creating an InsaneJournal account.
Read in an RSS reader: use this feed (again, public posts only).

If you haven't done one of these (looking at the new readership vs. the old, that's most of you), I'd appreciate it if you'd tell me why:

View Poll: Migration post-mortem

LieJournal: [sic] and tired of all of this

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 09:47:04 GMT

I'm moving to InsaneJournal. Add me as shortcipher there, or shortcipher_ij here (public posts only and there are some old entries atm, sorry). Geekier post about migration coming soon.

To the management and owners of LiveJournal, ← (can anyone suggest the best place to send this?)

Summary: paid user leaving LiveJournal because of issues of culture and communication

This used to be a nice place. The social contract was a shining example of how to write such things. The title and nature of that document have changed a bit since then, as have your priorities. I realise that LiveJournal is a business and that it must make money to survive. I don't take issue with any particular change you've made, such as ads; InsaneJournal, the site I'm moving to, has those as well.

My big problem with this place is that it's evident, despite all your assurances to the contrary, that LJ now puts making money before the interests of its users. One need only examine the fanfic suspension incident to see that. Your handling of the recent decision to axe Basic accounts only shows me that lessons have not been learned.

The decision itself: well, fine, I can see why you might need to do that, though brad makes a good case against it and, frankly, you should have listened to him a bit more, on this and many other issues (it's a shame you were the best of a bad bunch in this regard). I can also understand not telling people in advance (a last-minute rush for Basic accounts would have somewhat defeated the point), but, in the end, you didn't really tell people at all.

I'm sorry, but we streamlined and simplified things so that now it’s faster and easier than ever to create a LiveJournal account. doesn't really cover it; that's a euphemism at best. Your subsequent message, admitting it was a business decision, is laughable in places, like so many of your apologies: working out how to strike just the right tone when communicating with such a diverse and complex collection of communities, indeed. Announcing the big change you had made and the reasons, rather than trying to bury it among less important news, would have been a good start, as I'm sure some of you knew. Did you think people simply wouldn't notice?

There are many cliché ways to say this: the place has become too commercial, you're too big to care about the little people anymore, you've sold out, etc. Unfortunately, they all seem to be true. Perhaps one day they will be true of InsaneJournal too, but I'd rather risk having to move again than give any acceptance to what LiveJournal has become. I've had an account here since 2004-05-17 (by word-of-mouth recommendation; I wonder how many of those you get these days?) and a paid account since 2005-05-09. I shall not be renewing it.

No love,

~~shortcipher~~

Last one out, lock the door.

Housewarming

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 13:13:57 GMT

By unanimous tickyboxes, the housewarming will be on Saturday 19th and Sunday 20th April. Contact me (or Susan) if you don't know where Normality is. Turn up for as much or as little of the weekend as you like. Some crashspace (floor / fairly comfy sofas) should be available.

Housewarming

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 11:01:32 GMT

We've been at Normality for just over six months now and we still haven't had a housewarming. Admittedly, the house is warm anyway (at least when the boiler hasn't gone out), but we feel this is somehow missing the point, namely, an excellent excuse for a party, ideally lasting all weekend, of the open-house variety. Without further ado, a poll:

View Poll: Housewarming dates

Edit: Please comment if you know of any big events that will clash.

Half-Life withdrawal symptoms

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 17:23:29 GMT

In my typical fashion of being late to the party for this sort of thing, I first encountered Half-Life in about 2001/2002, by finding the Half-Life: Platinum Pack (or something very similar; it came with the t-shirt in this userpic) in a game shop bargain bin. This looks worth a try, I thought. Impressed would be one word for my reaction on playing it. Addicted would be another; after finishing everything in the box I was somewhat left hanging. More recently, I've had much the same experience with The Orange Box: having grudgingly ignored Half-Life 2 when it came out (for want of sufficiently powerful hardware) and subsequently mostly ignored Windows games more generally by eschewing a native Windows install when building apollo (my current machine), I didn't notice when Wine became able to run Source/Steam. Hearing people raving ecstatically about Portal and the rest of the orange bargain, I discovered that by then it was able and gleefully set out to acquire a copy. (Another pleasant surprise was that just entering the CD key for my previous purchase into Steam gave me the Steam equivalents plus Blue Shift and Day of Defeat, saving me trying to get the original CD to play nicely with Wine.)

So here I am again, having charged headlong through HL2 and the rest of its runty children so far and, effectively, run smack into an Under Construction sign. Half-Life 2, Episode 3, ~~Millwall 1~~ isn't expected to be released for some time. Woe. However, help is at hand: my aforementioned lateness means there's been time for a good few third-party mods to appear as well. HL1 mods abound; I can particularly recommend Poke646 and its sequel, Vendetta (amusingly, the protagonist of these has, modulo spelling, the same name as my employer's former CTO). I can also recommend Someplace Else, but, most of all, its HL2 sequel, MINERVA: Metastasis. Just… wow. The author, being a one-man band, seemingly hasn't the time/resources to put in voice acting or friendly NPCs like Alyx, but the level design is every bit as good as Valve's (better, in places) and if they haven't offered him a job yet, they're missing out.

Another current source of HL-related fun for me is level editing. As of my last (fairly recent) check, I can't get recent versions of Valve Hammer Editor to run in Wine (Hammer draws its views of the map using strange DirectX hackery that shows up in Wine as a mostly-black window). Happily, there is QuArK, which, as well as being more Wine-friendly, has some improvements over Hammer (e.g. negative polys, duplicators (think staircases), other pseudo-preprocessor-macros, groups). Unfortunately it lacks model/lighting previews, but it's under active development. What am I doing with all this? Well, as an initial learning project, Normality (home) and the surrounding area. I tried this using Hammer (which may still have been called WorldCraft) some years ago with my parents' house, but ran out of patience and, in places, hit limits of the HL1 engine (e.g. number of switchable lights). Unfortunately I don't have the file to compare progress, but with the better editor and more powerful game engine / machine, it's much more fun this time around. As a template for the surrounding area, I've placed the whole thing on some Google Maps aerial photos. For that reason and others, I don't intend to release this map, but it'll be an entertaining way to try out what-ifs of furniture/redecoration/extension. HL2 players out there, who among you hasn't ever wanted to rearrange your house with a Gravity Gun, or race the HL2 vehicles on the nearby roads? :-)

Bwahahahaha

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 12:43:53 GMT

UserFriendly.org is very much +1 Insightful this morning. I already wanted to post about media distribution, so here goes:

Why do people blindly believe the unsubstantiated claims that ~~piracy~~ copyright infringement is solely responsible for the decline in music/film sales? Especially the claim that it costs them millions, and similar waffle, repeated as a mantra by an industry with its head in the sand? One cannot simply take an estimate of illegal downloads, multiply it by the price or profit on a CD, wring ones hands in despair and claim to be losing a lot of money on the basis that clearly all those people would have bought CDs. They've been doing just that for years, though. Journalists and, worse, some powerful politicians seem to believe them.

They don't even have the excuse that they're doing it for the benefit of the artists:

The RIAA is asking the Copyright Royalty Board to lower songwriter royalties on song file downloads, from the present rate of 9 cents per song — about 13% of the wholesale price — down to 8% of wholesale. Meanwhile, the big digital music companies, such as Apple, want the royalty rate lowered even more, to something like 4% of wholesale. So any representations by any of these companies that they are concerned for the 'creators' of the music must henceforth be taken with a boxcar-load of salt. (via)

Oh, woe is me, won't somebody please think of the starving record executives. Going back to UF: they are obsolete. Artists can sell and advertise to the world without their assistance now; some have been brave enough to do so. This gives them more income and a lower selling price: everybody wins. I think, economically, there is no reason for these organisations to exist anymore; I just wish people (especially artists) would notice this a bit faster, so we can get rid of them before they do any more damage.

LastGraph / why I listen to so much gothy bleep

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 15:52:37 GMT

For those who use last.fm, a random cool thing: LastGraph. Give it your last.fm username and a date range, and you'll get a "wave graph" showing which artists you've listened to in that time and how much, in PDF and SVG. Here's my graph (PDF), starting in January last year, just before I started listening to streams from last.fm. It's a much better view of things than the charts available on my last.fm profile: you can see how I've listened to numerous artists, some of which I've liked and kept listening to, and how my tastes have changed over the past year.

Currently my listening habits seem to be approximately centred on the tuneful end of what's played at The Calling. A good example is Mind.In.A.Box, whose album, Crossroads, I've recently bought (I've never heard that particular group played at The Calling; if any of the DJs are reading this, could we change that?) That's because these days I mostly listen at work and I find that style about right as a background for that. At a concert or when sitting around not doing anything important, I love listening to the Wise Guys, who are engaging, funny and often moving too. When I'm coding, I really don't want that; I just want something tuneful, not too distracting, active/bouncy (so as not to send me to sleep) without being cheesy. It's the last of those that's largely the explanation for the tendency towards darker, gothy stuff; I think very few more mainstream bands get that right. My favourite example of one that does is The Feeling, despite the quote on that page: Don't fear the cheese, embrace it. Contrast that light-heartedness with groups who try to write terribly serious stuff and fail (except perhaps from the point of view of the average teenager, hence their success).

What about you lot? Those who write code (or do vaguely similar work) in particular, what do you listen to?

Ruddigore singthrough, 8pm tonight, Mong Hall, Sidney Sussex

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 14:24:30 GMT

I might or might not be able to make it myself, but I thoroughly recommend it. To be notified of future Gilbert & Sullivan events, join the soc-gands mailing list.

Writer's Block: Tools of My Trade

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 13:06:18 GMT

What work tools could you not live without?

View 85 Answers

A full answer would probably too long to fit into this ~~margin~~ journal, but for anyone who's curious, here are a few of the interesting ones:

Firebug. It's an amazingly useful tool for web development of any kind. You can press "Inspect", click on part of the page, and see it in the document source (and vice versa by hovering parts of source); you can see which bits of CSS actually apply to that element; you can temporarily edit CSS on the fly for an instant "what if?"; you can see how long individual objects take to load. If you're using JavaScript, it'll give you a good debugger and an easy way to browse the DOM. It's all nicely integrated, too. You can put an expression in the console that evaluates to a page element, and then do things to that element as if it was in the source view, or jump to it in the source view.
Wireshark. No surprises there, it's "the world's foremost network protocol analyser". Seeing what's really happening on the wire is often of vital importance to my work. Actually, it's also a wonderful way to learn how network protocols work, if you're a learn-by-doing sort of person: unlike in many other areas of computing, you can easily see the layers of abstraction, how they fit together and most of the meaning of most of the data.
Last but not least, the humble grep. It's definitely worth knowing how to use regular expressions, not just for advanced script-writing and such, but just for day-to-day operations. Being able to do more complex searches than just "contains these words/phrases" is, like carrying a multi-tool, something that rapidly makes life easier: something you subsequently "can't live without", in the sense intended by the question.

View Poll: Writer's Block

rocketjon's party, tomorrow (Saturday) 8pm, here

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 22:05:37 GMT

Party! Come one come all, to Normality (near the Carlton). For those who like to dress up, there is a theme of esoteric superheroes.

Call me on 07786 888749 (or contact me some other way) if you don't know where Normality is.

A naive question about lorries

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:50:49 GMT

Prompted by my driving to Coventry and back today (I haven't done that for a while). I've never quite understood this one; someone explain it to me please? (gerald_duck, I'm looking mainly at you here.)

How, on $DEITY's green earth, have we ended up in the situation where all HGVs appear to be limited to very slightly different speeds around 60mph and it is legal (AFAIK) for them to attempt to overtake each other on two-lane roads such as the A14, painfully slowly, over the course of about a mile, jamming up dozens of following vehicles? The total time lost to occupants of following vehicles due to this phenomenon seems large. More importantly, so does the increase in accident risks, considering typical impatiently short following distances.

Have there ever been any attempts to get a law passed banning overtaking with a speed difference of less than ~4mph (at least, when there are only two lanes)? If so, what was the outcome?

Come to my talk (in Coventry), and the pub afterwards!

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 21:58:02 GMT

How we built the world's fastest web server (and what we did next)
Zeus Technology is a Cambridge-based software company, working mainly in application traffic management. This technical talk from two members of the development team will cover some of the design and implementation challenges encountered during the company's history.

3:30pm tomorrow, S0.11, Social Studies, University of Warwick campus, CV4 7AL. Moving on to The Graduate in the union afterwards.

(poster)

Of journals, other sites for them, feeds, OpenID, lions, tigers, bugs etc.

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 15:20:49 GMT

Since Lupie unfortunately had to move her journal again and I keep seeing people asking how to keep track of such journals on other sites from LiveJournal, or at least all in one place, I thought I'd write up an explanation here so I don't keep saying the same things in comments.

The short answer is: the only way to put these other journals on your LJ friends page is an LJ syndication. An LJ user with a paid account must create the syndication and then any user can friend it. I just created lupie_ij, which, like lupielupe before it for GreatestJournal, will get the public entries only. (Edit: Unfortunately IJ's feeds cut off after the first few words, so you still have to click through to IJ.)

A geekier, non-web-based alternative is to use an RSS reader, the easiest one being Firefox's Live Bookmarks feature: go to Lupie's journal (or any other, on any LJ-ish site), click the orange and white icon in the right-hand side of the address bar, choose Live Bookmarks. It'll ask you where to put a bookmark; this will be a button you can click to bring up a list of Lupie's recent entries. You can put it in your "Bookmarks Toolbar Folder" for easy access. Whether this includes locked entries depends on whether you're logged into IJ (or whichever other LJ-ish site is generating the feed) when Firefox updates it (you can right-click it and choose Reload if needed). Ticking "Remember me" when you log into the site makes this fairly painless.

Some of the LJ clones, including IJ, support OpenID. This means you can, for example, log into IJ with your LJ account (Edit: to do this, click "OpenID User" on the bar at the top of IJ, and enter yourlivejournalusername.livejournal.com in the box), so you don't have to create an IJ account, a GJ account, a DJ account, etc. Unfortunately OpenID is just a login system; it doesn't make it any easier for LJ or any other website to get a logged-in feed (with locked entries) in a machine-readable form such as RSS, which is what's required to mix them in with your friends page.

InsaneJournal, like other sites based on LiveJournal, can include locked entries in feeds, but only if it knows who you are (Live Bookmarks works if your browser is logged in to IJ). When LJ retrieves a feed (for a "syndication"), LJ itself is not logged into IJ as you (in fact it retrieves it on behalf of all LJ users at the same time, so it can't be logged in as any one user).

Another thing you can do is retrieve a logged-in feed without doing a web-based login: if you add "?auth=digest" to the end of an LJ-ish feed address, as in this example, the site will ask you for HTTP Digest authentication. In Firefox, this means you get a dialog box asking for an IJ username and password, which isn't very useful, but if you put such an address into an RSS reader, some readers will cope with giving you a similar dialog box, where they obviously wouldn't know to present the normal IJ login page.

And Finally, what I use myself: I use a web-based RSS reader: Google Reader. Unfortunately it doesn't support authenticated feeds (e.g. the auth=digest trick) directly. I have a workaround in the pipeline, more on that will follow on my journal Real Soon Now™.

I hope this clarifies things a bit. :-)

State of the railways

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 14:19:11 GMT

An amusing rant from The Times: So: this is where we are, right now, with our railways. Incompetent and greedy train operators, a ticketing policy that only a man called Barry properly understands, an infrastructure that is starved of investment and crumbling to bits, …

Snippets

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 13:12:35 GMT

Snow! I predict that by the time I want to get home tonight, there'll be a crash somewhere and the A14 will come to a complete stop, followed as usual by all of Cambridge.
Stomach bugs! I predict that some kind soul will give me (or worse, Susan) this gift that keeps on giving at some point.
On a more positive note, for anyone else who's been looking for the blunt instrument required to persuade all ALSA applications to use, say, card 1, which in my case, at work, is my USB headphones (Last.fm is particularly problematic and baulked at the few .asoundrc tricks I tried), a fairly easy way is to set the environment variable ALSA_CARD to 1 (e.g. by putting ALSA_CARD=1 in /etc/environment).

New Year's Eve?

Sun, 30 Dec 2007 15:10:33 GMT

Susan and I are wondering what to do. Where's everyone going? (comments screened)

Shaving (a rant)

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 23:16:55 GMT

Dear Lazyweb,

I wish my facial hair would go away. Recommend/disrecommend an electric shaver for me? I've never had much success with wet/manual shaving without cutting myself, by which I mean I think the number of times I've achieved a good, blood-free result can be counted on one hand. I realise this may be down to matters of technique, but I have a fundamental problem with the method itself: it's always going to require some degree of due care and attention to avoid injury; this does not sit well with my usual weary state first thing in the morning or last thing at night. As long as my face is going to keep doing what it's doing, my ideal device, in rough order of priority, is one I can operate perfectly safely (including considerations such as ingrowing hairs, something I've been warned foil shavers can cause; is there any truth to this?) and effectively, with zero effort/time, self-cleaning; replacement parts should be cheap and needed approximately never. My current device, a Remington R330, falls woefully short of this. The blades now need replacing, but even when new, its effectiveness has never been exactly stellar. It's never rendered my face as smooth as I'd like, no matter how many times I go over it. I'm happy to buy one of the nearly-200-quid ones if someone'll tell me it'll work that much better and have sensibly-priced replacement blades which will still be available in N years' time.

Mindless link propagation

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 09:48:43 GMT

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to require all organisations notify customers immediately of any personal data security breaches. Seriously, please consider signing this; organisations across the public and private sectors clearly lack sufficient motivation in this area at the moment and, if the history of similar legislation in the US is any guide, the desire to save face might make some of them pull their proverbial fingers out.
57 pages of nightmare-inducing doom: a presentation on the malware industry (spam/phishing/etc). Industry is exactly the right word. Unfortunately so much of it is based in countries whose governments don't care that there's not a lot that can be done about it at the moment.
And Finally, Zero Punctuation: hilarious (though potty-mouthed) stick-figure game reviews. :-)

Google Reader notifier

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 22:52:40 GMT

The bad news is I have a mysterious ear-blocking toothachey lurgy. The good news is I finally got around to hacking together a Google Reader notifier in 66 lines of Python to sit in my GNOME system tray and light up when I have new items. At the moment, that's all it does and configuration is a matter of editing the script. Improvements (browser launching, config UI, Free images) to follow in my copious free time. It does at least mean I don't now have to keep Firefox open to keep an eye on Reader (my previous monitor for it was a Firefox extension). :-) If you use GNOME, please do take a look, poke holes, send patches (I should be so lucky) etc.

# A terrible disclosure has just been made

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 11:16:25 GMT

I've been turned down for Pirates of Penzance at the Arts Theatre next term. Can anyone recommend any other interesting singing opportunities for a tenor after Christmas? They needn't actually be on stage, but bonus points if they're G&S or similar, because otherwise, given that three weeks at Minack would be rather too many days of holiday, my next G&S show will be this time next year. :-(

Strange blank screen bugs, or, I want my /dev/tty1 back!

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 15:19:20 GMT

Dear Lazyweb (or at least the geekier portions thereof),

My Ubuntu desktop at home has a strange problem (or rather, two possibly related problems) for which I'm hoping someone on this flist can give me a clue.

The first problem is that once Xorg/X11 has been started, the text Virtual Terminals (e.g. tty1, Ctrl-Alt-F1) become unusable. I can switch to them, but my monitor then goes to standby (I remember some occasions when the monitor complained of an unsupported mode in this situation; that might happen if I turn the monitor off and on again). Switching back to Xorg works correctly; everything's fine from boot time until the first run of Xorg; stopping all Xorgs/gdm doesn't fix it.

The second problem is that when changing Xorg's resolution using XRandR (either using the xrandr tool or when I launch full-screen games in Wine) the screen goes black (the monitor shows no error and doesn't go to standby but is entirely black), until I switch to another VT (be it one of my non-functional text VTs or another Xorg) and back, at which point the screen shows the correct content, in the correct (new) resolution. This happens both when switching to a smaller resolution such as 800x600 and when switching back to my preferred 1600x1200.

My Google-fu appears to be weak and I've really no idea where to start. It's an up-to-date Gutsy install, with nvidia-glx-new 100.14.19+2.6.22.4-14.10 (though this also happened on Debian unstable / the previous generation of nvidia drivers), the graphics card is a LeadTek WinFast A340 aka nVidia Corporation NV34 [GeForce FX 5200] (rev a1) (10de:0322) with 1 DVI and 1 VGA port, and it's connected by DVI to a Dell 2001FP. I have yet to try swapping monitors, but wanted to see if someone recognised the symptoms before I lug the heaviest CRT known to man up the (partly blocked) stairs.

Edit: solved. I bought a new graphics card (still AGP 8x nVidia, but more features and more memory) and the problems went away.

Ruddigore, Pirates, The Orange Box

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 13:06:05 GMT

Ruddigore, Wednesday to Saturday next week, 8pm at the Robinson College Auditorium, £7/£5. Also, if you play an instrument and are free on any of those nights, get in touch with Debbie Murray (email dfm30) as we'd like a slightly bigger orchestra. I'll be in the chorus as usual.

Also, next term's show is The Pirates of Penzance, which was my first encounter with G&S back at Warwick and is, I think, my favourite of those I've seen. This one will be at the Arts Theatre and will be a lot of work, but very much worth doing. :-) Auditions, if anyone else wants to take part, are 7:45-10 tonight at Catz Chapel, and tomorrow (7:45-10) and Friday (7:15-10) in the Lloyd Room at Christ's. Not sure when I'm going yet.

In other news, I can thoroughly recommend The Orange Box. I recently finished Portal, and loved every minute of it, especially the ending song, Still Alive. Even better, that and Half Life 2 (so presumably the other games too) work fine in Wine; I've been playing them on Ubuntu. :-)

More last-minute filmage

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 12:21:47 GMT

Ratatouille, 8pm tonight at the Grafton. I'll need to eat somewhere beforehand. Would anyone like to join me for one or both of these events?

Ruddigore; Pirates singthrough

Tue, 09 Oct 2007 16:31:31 GMT

The university term has started, which means I have some convenient, enjoyable singing opportunities again, with Cambridge G&S soc. This makes me happy. :-) I'll be in their chorus for Ruddigore, which will almost certainly be in the week beginning 19^th November in Robinson Brickhouse theatre. There's a Facebook group where updates should appear. Also, they have a singthrough of Pirates of Penzance tomorrow night which I thoroughly recommend; it's at 8pm in the Blythe Room at Clare Colony (south from Castle Hill).

Singthrough directions update: you need to use the Chesterton Lane entrance. From the crossroads, go past the church and the tall brick building on your left, and THEN turn left and left again to head towards the triangular building. There will be signs up & the doors will be open!

Wasp of Doom

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 20:59:51 GMT

I know there's at least one person on this list fond of bees. If there's anyone fond of wasps, they might want to let me know (since I'm about to rant about them a bit again and may do so again in future). This particular wasp hadn't done anything to me, but I have become somewhat prejudiced against them since losing the use of a hand for a week.

This one (about 2cm long) appeared in the living room this evening. It flew around slowly with its body curled (stinger pointing forward) and I ran away and hid behind numberland. She, my knight in shining armour, killed it and got rid of it. I don't know if it was a queen (raising the possibility of eventual construction of a nest nearby) or just very big, but it was scary. Wikipedia's article on the common wasp shows such a queen (neither of us felt like getting sufficiently close to look for spots to see if it was a German wasp, even once it was dead).