Sun Dec 14 16:36:04 GMT 2003

My life:

• Last night: Setup for Streetcar. Goto Union Staff party. Start striking Streetcar. Take the money down to DPFS and get locked out of the rest of the strike. Goto Cav's with Ash and Harriet. Go back to Beit to pack away their Xmas party.
• Today: Sleep and work on all the coursework due in this week
• Monday: Normal day at Uni. Talk to Malcomb about Summer Ball venues. Work all evening to get coursework finished.
• Tuesday: Normal day at uni. Setup mics for Council. Dramsoc bar night. Have to decided which parts of the all nighter I can manage.
• Wednesday: 9am - LotR. 2pm - setup for Rock night at the Union; goes on until late then we strike it.
• Thursday: Normal day at Uni. Rig and point parcan's on the roof in the evening.
• Friday: 7am - goto Stage with Gary to pickup lights. Rig, run and strike the Xmas Carnival. Probably a 24 hour shift.

Sat Dec 13 13:03:47 GMT 2003

Fleep

Sun Dec 7 12:25:42 GMT 2003

So, Bush wants to go to the moon again. At least, he wants to announce it during his last year to try and boost his popularity before the election. He's already screwed the economy by borrowing huge amounts to fund tax cuts and a couple of semi-major wars. This is what happens when you put a monkey in charge.

When dear old dad proposed the same thing, Congress estimated that it would cost $400 billion. I think we can safely say that it would actually cost a fair bit more than that. And for what? The first lunar missions were basically a world-wide moonie at the USSR. Certainly, it did wonders for technology, but given the price, I would certainly hope so.

But what's the point this time? There's no USSR and we've done it all before. Go do something useful like asteroid mining instead.

Thu Dec 4 11:55:31 GMT 2003

Panic, everyone upgrade rsync to 2.5.7

Wed Dec 3 22:55:10 GMT 2003

The number of recent attacks against infrastructure is getting worrying. Within the past few weeks we have had an attack on the kernel sources, on the Debian core servers and, today, on a Gentoo rsync rotation server and Savannah.

Savannah and Debian breaks look identical. The CVS attack, we don't know about and I'm thinking that the Gentoo break was unrelated because they didn't go after the obvious spoils. I'm still very interrested to know what the "remote exploit" was.

It's still greatly worrying that someone determined and smart is going after important boxes like these. And I do mean smart - watching the BK changesets for a fix and then making a binary from the do_brk overflow isn't script kiddie stuff.

Fri Nov 28 18:19:44 GMT 2003

Random thoughts of the day...

Register a domain name and point it somewhere silly like 1.1.1.1. Make a tarball of your most important files and encrypt it. Then, once a day, email it to a user at that domainname. If you have a disk failure just wait a couple of days and all your files get bounced back to you

Most people would agree that torturing a conscious being is bad. Most of them would say that it's criminal and that you should be locked up for it. But what's is a conscious being? At least, if it's biological and can pass the Turing Test, is that good enough?

So now imagine how your best friend doing a Turing Test. By definition your mental representation of them passes the Turing Test because if you would expect different answers then you just aren't thinking hard enough. So your mental representation is conscious.

So now imagine torturing them. Should you be thrown in jail?

Tue Nov 25 20:40:29 GMT 2003

The Guardian Online has been my favourite online paper for a long time. I find that it, balanced against Samizdata is best.

But now, the Guardian is beta-testing a new service. It has both the Guardian and its sister paper, the Observer, and you can select any page from any section of the print editions and get a thumbnail view. Clicking on a story brings up the text of that story. Clicking a picture (even an advert) brings up that advert and you can get PDFs of any page. And you can go back in time to see old editions.

This is such a gob-smackingly cool service I might even start paying for it when it leaves beta phase.

Sun Nov 23 18:50:55 GMT 2003

... I'm not totally sure that the term "cluster-fuck" was in common usage in England in 1685. (Quicksilver, page 702).

(Actually, it's a really good book. That's the first complaint I've had)

Sun Nov 23 13:43:52 GMT 2003

... if you email me to say that your mail is down you really should include a phone number or some such. Some non-email way of contacting you at least!

I'm afriad that mail.imperialviolet.org doesn't point at anything any more. It's not a hard bounce, so mail won't fail because of it, but the server doesn't exist anymore. If you need a backup-MX I can set it up on my current mail server (a.mx.freenetproject.org).

Sun Nov 23 12:55:51 GMT 2003

Well, it's really peeing it down with rain and has been all weekend. It's quite nice to look out on the rain when you're inside, but its enough to make me not want to bother going to the supermarket so I'll probably be eating weird combinations of whatever I can find over the next week.

Things that I need to do:

Get the new Union webserver racked up. And when I racked up, I mean in the very loosest sense as this is a desktop mini-tower that will be sitting on a rack plate.

I then need to try and convert the users. No amount of warning is going to work for most of them and I fully expect to be snowed under with dozens of "But why shouldn't I use the account of someone who left years ago, like I always have?", "Why can't I upload gigs of warez and use the server as a distro for all my friends?" and "Your computer has broken because this has stopped working and I'm perfect and cannot possibly be doing anything wrong".

Get the RS232 protocol to the crossovers working. The docs say that they can be daisy chained, but as far as I know they only have a single connector. I'm not sure of the electrical problems if I split the cable. And I've got to reverse engineer the undocumented bits of the protocol.

Sat Nov 22 00:02:59 GMT 2003

"Wave of human spam" - phrase of the week from this fantastic text. I mean, one of them seriously has a sign saying "The Illuminati must be destroyed".

Fri Nov 21 00:33:02 GMT 2003

What a difference an editor makes eh? All that not wanting to upset people and so forth . Well, here's the original...

(note, I'm not pro-Bush. I'm just very anti most anti-Bush protesters. My enemy's enemy is not my friend.

Wed Nov 12 15:10:44 GMT 2003

Remebered to renew domain name with 3 hours to go.

Hell, at least it's better than Microsoft with hotmail.co.uk

Tue Nov 11 19:15:38 GMT 2003

This new MP isn't very good at replying to letters. The last one at least wrote something back.

(prompted, of course, by today's ID card announcement)

I meant to post this a while ago. It's an extract of an email I sent. Firstly you'll need a little background: someone setup a website for registering `crushes' (I guess it goes around like those quiz things) and then opened up the database for a while before having a pang of consience and closing it again. First I hear was spikeylady complaining:

but am most unimpressed that I can't now find out if anyone had a crush on me

Actually, that's a really interesting game problem. You want to know about all incoming arcs (people who have a crush on you) but are unwilling to disclose any outgoing arcs (people who have a crush on you). Except I guess that you are willing to disclose if you are sure the other party has a crush on you.

I didn't see the "crush thing", but I'm guess you could register your crushes on other people and it would tell you about any two node cycles (e.g. if they also fancied you). Of course, you could just falsely register everyone and find out exactly who has a crush on you. You've not given any information away because you picked the trivial subset. Of course, anyone else can do that so your number of false positives goes up as more people choose this strategy. So pretty soon any kind of service is like that is going to be useless.

(esp if they start publishing the results)

Which reminds me of one of the answers to the two-party signature problem (you have a contract that two people need to sign. Neither will sign first so they take turns saying "With 1% probability I agree to this", "With 2%" ... and so on).

Assume a fully connected, directed graph of all the people in the set of interest. Each person assigns a probability is crush to each outgoing node and at each time slice that is the probability that you'll `ping' the other node.

Pings will be pretty random and you might see a higher than average number of pings from a given node. It could be random, but it could be that they have assigned a higher probability to you. If you crush on them, you can assign a higher probability and see if they respond. That way, pairs of crushers will rise out of the mess and noone has to disclose a non-reciprocated crush.

A little like flirting, but could be made so that noone else sees any of the interactions by blinding the pings.

Wed Nov 5 19:14:23 GMT 2003

Well, it seems to be Matrix-bashing day to day. Well, I was watching it at 2pm GMT today and I really enjoyed it. It's certainly not the best film this year (Sprited Away) and the story is a pile of crap, but it's damm fun.

If I had been writing the script, it could have been better of course. (Ah, I wonder how many people are saying that). But the Battle of Zion is worth the ticket price alone.

Sat Nov 1 16:20:21 GMT 2003

Since I don't do it nearly enough these days (being a poor, destitute student and all) I walked into a large bookshop today with a few notes in my back pocket and came out with a nice lot of dead tree, including:

• Quicksilver
• Information, Hans Christian von Baeyer (no link)
• Permutation City
• Master and Margarita

Reviews as I finish them. (Could be a while).

Wed Oct 29 12:38:05 GMT 2003

Bastards!. Don't they know how much effort by .. unknown persons .. goes into doing something like that? Or so I've heard, of course.

Sun Oct 26 23:23:15 GMT 2003

So what, exactly, has the Whitehouse got against people archiving their pages about Iraq?

Quoting from http://whitehouse.gov/robots.txt:

Disallow:       /vicepresident/vpphotoessay/cheneyalumnifield/iraq
Disallow:       /vicepresident/vpphotoessay/cheneyalumnifield/text
Disallow:       /vicepresident/vpphotoessay/iraq
Disallow:       /vicepresident/vpphotoessay/part1/iraq
Disallow:       /vicepresident/vpphotoessay/part1/text
Disallow:       /vicepresident/vpphotoessay/part2/iraq
Disallow:       /vicepresident/vpphotoessay/part2/text

It goes on for a long time like that.

Sun Oct 26 20:40:15 GMT 2003

Just written some notes on the DoC webserver setup. Just so that people can see what goes into a complex Apache setup. And this isn't even factoring in all the research groups and Tomcat servers.

Sat Oct 25 03:36:24 BST 2003

Look at that timestamp. Damm timezone differences for the Google Codejam.

Don't quite think I've made it to the top 250. Read that last sentence in a slightly sarcastic tone. I just hope that I'm not last.

It seems that not only cannot I not type very well at this time in the morning, I can't read either.