| LieJournal: [sic] and tired of all of this |
[Mar. 15th, 2008|09:46 am] |
I'm moving to InsaneJournal. Add me as ![[info]](http://chris.boyle.name/images/userinfo.gif) shortcipher there, or ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif) 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 ( An open letter )
Last one out, lock the door. |
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| Bwahahahaha |
[Feb. 12th, 2008|12:43 pm] |
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. |
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| A naive question about lorries |
[Jan. 24th, 2008|12:54 am] |
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? (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) 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? |
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| Snippets |
[Jan. 3rd, 2008|12:58 pm] |
- 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).
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| Shaving (a rant) |
[Dec. 20th, 2007|11:18 pm] |
Dear Lazyweb,
I wish my facial hair would go away. Recommend/disrecommend an electric shaver for me? ( Here beginneth the rant ) |
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| We have Normality |
[Aug. 20th, 2007|01:35 pm] |
I hate wasps. There was a nest (possibly under construction) in the wall near an air vent in the bedroom; wasps were going in and out of the outside surface of it fairly constantly. I was stung thrice; the first sting was on my left wrist and woke me up at 6am on Saturday. I had nothing in the house and had to drive to Tesco to get something to treat it (which obviously took a while), so my hand has since blown up like a balloon. It's now very slowly deflating, but I'm still having to type this one-handed. In related news, I can recommend Cambridge Environmental Services for all your wasp-poisoning needs; they were effective, prompt and professional. :-)
Also, we lack many things at Normality, including internet access. We're considering Sky broadband (ADSL available to Sky TV customers for £5 - 10 /month), since we might want Sky anyway, but I hear scary things about 100:1 contention ratios and incompetence. Is there anyone reading who has used them and can (dis)recommend them? Also Virgin broadband (cable, formerly NTL), same question, especially anyone with recent experience of them. I always used to hear very variable reports of NTL and its outage frequency, but outages, when they happened, seemed fairly universally to last days rather than hours, which, if it's still true, is probably a deal-breaker for me. This would therefore mean ADSL, since I don't know anyone else doing cable in Cambridge (please correct me if I'm wrong). The question then would be whether to get it from Sky or not: obviously the price is attractive, but I'm worried that you get what you pay for.
Edit: thanks for all the information; we're going with Sky broadband (just as soon as our phone line has been activated for long enough to be ADSL-capable, grrr) |
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| My .name is my own |
[Jun. 25th, 2007|01:15 am] |
( Changing cmb.is-a-geek.org to chris.boyle.name soon; mammoth braindump about why; poll for the terminally interested )
Final Thoughts Ultimately, I'd like to see the end of spam in my lifetime (wouldn't we all?). I think it can be done. I think our two best hopes are systems like SPF that, somehow or other, restore correctness and therefore reputation to Sender addresses (note that reputation need not imply everyone knowing who you are, only that you are the same person who sent many previous legitimate emails) and systems like HashCash, which add a computational burden per recipient address. Nobody wants to pay money for email, but paying in CPU time might just work. The only losers there are people who want to email large sets of users outside their own mail servers, and they can be whitelisted. Then all we have to do is finally get serious about cleaning up the botnet problem, which we want to do anyway, and spamming will become a lot more difficult. |
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| The search for a decent PDA |
[Apr. 14th, 2007|02:45 pm] |
( wherein shortcipher compares every PDA/phone he's owned from 1998 to 2007, and explains imminent purchase of a Treo 680 )
In conclusion: Dear Lazyweb,
Given that I refuse to buy a Windows Mobile device, I think the two main contenders are Palm and Nokia, and am fairly sure that the Treo 680 is the best of those two manufacturers. Does anyone want to vehemently disagree / disrecommend on the basis of experience of a similar device?Do you know of any others that are useful? I know very little about BlackBerries, I don't suppose they're any good?- Have any of you already written anything non-trivial for the Palm? If so:
- How would you rate its developer-friendliness?
- Do you have any relevant guides / HOWTOs / websites you could recommend? I have no problems building a Hello World app and running it on a device; what I'm after is something that walks through a semi-useful application, explaining how best to do things like UI, storage and, ideally, Bluetooth/networking.
Do you know anywhere where a Treo 680 could be had more safely/cheaply/promptly than eBay?
Thanks.
Edit: I now have a Treo. :-) |
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| PSA, name-and-shame: IT Week / VNU gave an email address to spammers |
[Feb. 24th, 2007|12:05 am] |
Once upon a time (2002?), my father passed on an unwanted IT Week subscription to me, which I occasionally read. Some time afterwards, I signed up for my own online subscription, as it was free, only to discover that it was supplied in a Windows-only format, a fault they eventually fixed, though only with a Flash viewer. This subscription was supplied by email, to an address I gave only to IT Week. On 2007-01-03, I received a renewal reminder for this subscription. On 2007-01-08, I received the first piece of spam for that address (there may have been previous spam that didn't make it through dspam). More spam arrived on 2007-{01-{09, 09, 12}}, 02-{01, 05, 06, 23}}. Eight messages in total isn't a lot, but it is a direct violation of VNU's privacy policy, which states that they should only have passed on any contact information to any other organisation if I opted in (I did no such thing). Hence this post, my unsubscription from IT Week and my imminent routing of the email address in question to dspam's spam-training input (this sort of situation is precisely why I give out distinct addresses in this way). Ho hum. |
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| The cost of moving |
[Oct. 5th, 2006|12:38 pm] |
Transporting all my stuff: 4 trips in a Corsa (one evening).
Flat-pack desk with filing drawer: £49.99.
PCI 802.11g card which I was silly enough not to buy and retrieve the driver for while I still had networking elsewhere: £19.99.
Setting up the latter two with my PC: three four too many hours last night.
Finally being able to sit down at said PC and boot it: priceless somewhat scary, actually; my graphics card fan is dying. File under One Of Those Days. |
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| A one-handed post |
[Dec. 2nd, 2005|08:18 pm] |
On the way to uni this morning, just after turning from the A429 to the A45 (the junction where si1entdave's Volvo passed away, R.I.P.) my bike's back wheel slid out from under me, swiftly followed by the rest of it. I landed mostly on my left wrist, which has for the rest of the day been prodded, irradiated, prodded some more, and mummified. I have a flake fracture (apparently not in itself plaster-worthy) but also a possible scaphoid fracture, though it didn't show up on the X-ray. Oddly enough a few years ago I did that exact same damage to the other wrist by falling over a pavement one dark night in Winchester.
I am otherwise ok (bruising and grazes elsewhere have practically gone now); the bike seems fine too, though obviously I haven't ridden it since. I'm told I might be in plaster and sling for about 10 days, and I have an appointment at the fracture clinic tomorrow morning.
Now for the mini-rant: I believe that piece of pavement isn't technically a cycle path, unlike just before the junction. However, I do see other cyclists on it and it certainly shouldn't have had that much in the way of leaves and mud on it in any case. I'm not the sort to sue the council over this kind of thing, especially not when breaking rules myself, but it's still annoying. If cyclists are supposed to dismount and walk that stretch (maybe half a mile up to the crossing by the petrol station; I'm not quite suicidal enough to bike that busy a road), that adds a lot to the journey time. The other pavement is likely just as bad.
...as has been pointed out, I guess bikes do suffer from wrong-kind-of-leaves problems then. :-/ |
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| Long overdue update |
[Nov. 29th, 2005|11:12 am] |
| [ | Mood |
| |  aggravated | ] |
The fourth year project is a pain. ( Nokia/Symbian sucks, for those at whom I haven't already ranted about this ) Oh, and my project team should be here now and they're not.
More positively, Empirical Modelling (a slightly unusual research area that seems to be specific to Warwick) is much less of a pain. I just talked to the lecturers about my cursework idea, modelling the London Underground including the effects of various kinds of failures, and they seem to like it a lot. Even better, someone already did some good machine-readable data on tube station positions, interconnections, etc (CSV at the bottom of the page). Oh, and a presentation I have to give on Thursday about web metrics is starting to look manageable too. I wish I could say the same about the one I'm about to co-present for the project. |
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| Be paranoid, they're really out to get you |
[Jul. 14th, 2005|11:42 pm] |
| [ | Mood |
| |  cynical | ] |
...is what I spent maybe about an hour trying to tell the parents today. This in response to "oh... so I shouldn't immediately click Load Images on all emails? and I shouldn't click links in any emails I don't trust?". The problem, as I see it, is that a few years ago you only had to teach your parents how to use a computer. Much as I hate Windows, it didn't present *that* much of a problem. These days, I have to teach them at least some degree of paranoia as well, to guard against all the evil scumbags of the net who are quite happy to use the most underhand of tactics to essentially steal advertising eyeballs, cpu time, spam routing capability, etc etc from anyone who might for a second fall for one of their tricks. It saddens me that a typical machine is not safe without extra applications for anti-virus, anti-spam, anti-spyware and firewall. Whether you blame Microsoft for not including (good versions of) these in the OS is a separate discussion, but it saddens me the number of evil bastards out there. Not to brag, but using an entirely different, reasonably-well-configured OS, I see a lot less of this, and had forgotten just how bad it can get. My sympathies to those who have to deal with this on a daily basis. |
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| A Very Bad Day |
[Nov. 17th, 2004|03:26 am] |
| [ | Mood |
| | annoyed | ] |
zeus has been crashing far more than previously the past few days, by which I mean that firefox, xmms, gkrellm, and occasionally the entire X server have been falling over. Also, very occasionally, the entire machine hardlocks. About as often, I get display corruption (an xterm's cursor will repeat at some other point on the screen). Graphics card swap didn't help.
So I ran memtest86+. Seems one of my RAM sticks had 152 errors on it. I shall be RMAing that in any case. One swap later... and things still seem to fall over. I give up. Some time soon I shall stop trying funky nvidia driver options and get some sleep...
And all this while I need to be doing web development for various reasons, and project work, and... gah. Perhaps we'd all be better off with abaci.
And the good news? Well, there was PretzelMeet III, that was good. Things like that help keep me (in)sane (depends which is which under your preferred terminology). |
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| Well I can only assume this is hayfever... |
[Aug. 2nd, 2004|04:46 am] |
| [ | Mood |
| |  pissed off | ] |
FFS. At some stages of last week at work I was unable to code for more than a few minutes at a time between leaving the room for major sneezing fits, and now... I wake up at 4am. Too fscking hot. Open window... and shortly afterwards commence sneezing and general runny-nosed badness. Grrrrr. I appreciate that plants need to reproduce, but for Bob's sake, could they please leave my nose out of the process?!? Gah. Thank you. That is all. |
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| The Jargon File... |
[Jul. 31st, 2004|12:20 pm] |
| [ | Mood |
| |  silly | ] |
I thought I'd had my share of laughs from it, but no. While looking into JPilot stuff, I found someone had used, and linked, the phrase "copious free time". The resulting recursive exploration... used any copious free time I may have had. That site is dangerous. If you have no idea what I'm on about, you can find out, but don't say I didn't warn you. |
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| I dare not speak its name... |
[Jun. 16th, 2004|10:58 am] |
| [ | Mood |
| | silly | ] |
Oh dear. New game addiction syndrome. *checks who packaged it*... Bartosz Fenski, you bastard. |
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