Mon Jul 26 13:34:05 PDT 2004

• Lots of Python magic
• Holographic fractals

Sat Jul 24 13:42:57 PDT 2004

It seems that Subways are breeding like Starbucks these days. And I kind of understand why, they are certainly a step up (quality wise) from McDonalds and those of that ilk. But, in the UK, I avoid them because buying anything is too stressful.

Subway take the idea of choice very seriously - you can choose your bread, your type of cheese, your toppings, almost anything. But cost pressure means that they are usually staffed by foreign workers; and foreign workers are great, esp female ones. But they often don't have the soundest grasp of English.

A Subway visit usually consists of a whole barrage of questions in semi-English with a queue of people behind you. Since I have no idea what they're saying I usually resort to answering "Please", "No thanks", "Not today thanks", ... randomly. And often they don't understand my reply so I end up getting something that I didn't ask for and didn't know what it was in the first place. It's astounding that, with all this confusion, I don't end up with a 9 foot sub packed full of strawberry jam, condensed milk and ready salted crisps.

But I've now discovered the driving force behind Subway - Californian workers. It's almost sickening how pleasant Californian shop assistants are. Buying a carton of milk involves, at least, "Hi! How are you? What a great day! Let me ring those up for you. So that's three bucks ... that's great. There you go, there's you milk. Have a wonderful weekend! No really, have a really great weekend - hope to see you again. Bye now!".

I fear that if I ever find a shop assistant in this place who tells me to fuck off I'll end up dancing in the street with glee.

But it seems that working at Subway is boring enough to take some of the edge of whatever drugs the people round here are on - but leave someone who can speak English. And since I now know what the hell I'm asking for I actually get a decent meal.

Which is good, because all the shops round here seem to sell by the metric tonne. Thank god Google feeds me the rest of the time.

Sun Jul 18 11:10:28 PDT 2004

Ohh, PyBloom made the del.icio.us popular list. Ahh, the feeling of little fame .

• Expect a copyright extension attempt soon
• Old news, but in case anyone missed it - new Hitchhikers radio series.

Sat Jul 10 14:37:37 PDT 2004

In reply to The Register: Archive.org suffers Fahrenheit 911 memory loss:

> But just hours after putting up the movie, Archive.org pulled it down

Although Moore is the creator of the film, that doesn't mean that he holds the
copyright. The copyright law is very broken. Archive.org knows this and is
doing it's best to fix it[1]. However, organisations are still bound by the
rule of law

[1] http://www.archive.org/about/dmca.php

> "Then, it called Archive.org to remove any trace of the interview at all".

Given that there's a six month delay till content hits the Wayback Machine, I
very much doubt that.

> "and how a "library" can obey this request defies comprehension"

Welcome, once again, to the law. I'm sorry that archive.org doesn't do the
Right Thing - irrespective of the law. We would all like several aspects of the
law to be changed, but the way to do that is quite well known. Small
organisations which break the law don't change it - they cease to exist.

You know, if you want to host all the copyrighted content in the US, for free
and take on the RIAA + MPAA etc. Go ahead and fund it. I'm guessing that you're
not willing to take that personal risk. You'll just keep attacking others for
not doing it for you.

Archive.org isn't perfect - it's struggling to archive all the content that it
legally can without the funds or the lawers to do so. But it's trying.

Next time it's a slow news day - take a walk.

AGL

There doesn't (for some strange reason) seem to be any good Python source for Bloom filters. There's a Sourceforge project, but that uses mpz for hashing, which is deprecated. So I've written PyBloom which impliments counting and standard bloom filters.

Wed Jul 7 10:05:25 PDT 2004

Well, the kernel patch I need to impliment capability systems has been written by Andrea Arcangeli.

Sat Jul 3 23:50:09 PDT 2004

Stackless twisted Python proof-of-concept code that I wrote today.

Fri Jul 2 19:28:26 PDT 2004

MD5 cracking in seconds

The toilets at Google have no less than 22 buttons (yep, I did count them). As wiping ones own butt is oviously far too great a burden these days these toilets have a little `wand' that can come out and spray water up your arse (or at the front for the girls ... or the boys I suppose) - that's 5 buttons.

The seat and spray water are also heated (4 buttons) and the wand can be moved back and forth (2 more). It can self-clean (many buttons) and do stuff on a timer. It even has a button to flush!

Frankly - I can't write about most of the stuff that goes on here so that's why I'm talking about the toilets. But I'm doing great

Sat Jun 26 03:18:23 BST 2004

Well - in flight entertainment keeps getting better every time I fly. Today I had full video on demand with a good selection of films and that makes the flight so much nicer. Now, you may be one of those people who can sleep on planes - but I'm not. I need something .. anything .. do to and Virgin Atlantic now has my custom until I hear that someone else does it better.

Unfortunately, the good flight was balanced by a god-awful customs lines. It wasn't that they gave me a hard time (I did have to give two fingerprints thou) but it was training day. And thus everything went very slowly. Very, very slowly.

Tue Jun 22 18:42:46 BST 2004

For anyone who has ever wondered what the picture and quote at the top of the front page was all about, then see today's featured article on Wikipedia.

Tue Jun 22 16:00:04 BST 2004

Yay! Unsecured wireless access point at home! Unfortunately, I have to balence my laptop on a box, on the window ledge for it to work. But it's a good 60KB/s link.

So, thanks to that and the (not as good as emerge, but still ok) apt-get my old laptop now has X 4.3.0 with subpixel rendering and Firefox 0.9.

Also, it seems that people don't like the Speex codec - I guess technical quality isn't everything so I'll upload the raw WAVs for the NotCon talk tonight. (Assuming someone doesn't turn this AP off).

Sat Jun 19 01:12:12 BST 2004

I have far too little time to do this properly, but I'm managed to do a little of the NotCon cutting. There were a lot of cool people there - some of them were even speaking, but Brewster Kahle's Talk blew me away. I really think that everyone should listen to this.

(Speex codec homepage← codex that I used)

Tue Jun 15 22:27:41 BST 2004

I'm tidying up, ready to move home. Just next to my desk I've a piece of paper upon which I scribble down words that I don't know and later I lookup the definitions. Since any scrap of paper will get lost in the move I've typed it up:

Mon Jun 14 22:37:40 BST 2004

Firstly, you can stop emailing me about gmail invites now. I've gone through six nine of them and I've run out. However, pretty much all of Dramsoc has an account now.

Gary is still copying the recording of NotCon onto a hard drive - so that's not done either.

I've just been busy with nothing in particular and nothing particularally interesting. I've just posted a Python module for finding the maximal flow in networks if anyone is interrested.

And would people please get "that", "which" and "who" the right way round? Correct examples:

• The cats that are blue have hair. (exclusive clauses use "that")
• The cats, which are blue, have hair. (non-exclusive clauses use "which". Note that the last sentence means "cats that are blue"→"have hair" but this one means cats→have hair & cats→are blue.)
• The people who are blue have hair. (Talking about people means you use "who")

That is all.

Tue Jun 8 08:54:44 BST 2004

Ok, so I should write more about NotCon and things ... but I'm not going to at the moment.

But I do have a gmail invite. Who wants it? (email me).

Thu Jun 3 14:15:55 BST 2004

Since the European elections are coming up on June 10^th I decided to ring round and ask some of the parties about their policy on software patents.

• Greens: Firmly against as a general policy (the person I spoke to didn't know any details). Sent me an email with these links. "the Green Party is against the idea of extending patents to software"
• Lib Dems: First person I rung had no idea what I was talking about. Gave me a foreign number with a very knowledgeable person on the end. Basically they want a clearer law (were unhappy that the current law was being too widely interpreted) and wish to `strike a balance'. Were clear that the US system was flawed and that the patent office was overworked. But still believed that small business needed to be able to hold patents on inventions (inc software).
• Conservatives: Bounced twice till someone could answer the question and even then they just read out a prepared statement. There was little point in questioning as the poor guy didn't have a clue what he was talking about. The statement basically said that they were unhappy with the current state of play because they wanted more patents, though they recognise the the US system is out of balance etc.

Tue Jun 1 09:37:57 BST 2004

If Bruce Sterling actually wrote the comment in this then he should be ashamed. Only when preaching to the most devout choir can only get away with such crap.

"Here's what we do know about NV45, it's currently running at a 450MHz core clock with 1.1GHz GDDR3 memory"

... graphics cards are now running faster than (one of) my CPUs.

Because it just raises my blood pressure too much.

I need a simple search bot that can pickout stories complaining of "bypassing" "revenue", like they have a right to a profit and shouldn't have to work for it, and replace it with <h1>MORONS</h1>

Mon May 31 20:02:22 BST 2004

Well, I said that I'd write to the returning officer about the stupid London Mayor elections, and here it is. Finial comments in before tomorrow morning please (because that's when I post it).

Fri May 28 23:10:25 BST 2004

Ok, so I've only just realised where the name Samizdata comes from. I feel silly.

I also intend to write to the returning officer for the London Mayor elections to ask where the hell their election system comes from:

If one candidate gets more than half of the first choice votes, he or she is the winner.

If no candidate gets most than half of the first choice votes, all candidates except the two with the most are ruled out of the counts. The ballot papers of those voters whose first choice vote was for an eliminated candidate are then examined. Any second choice notes from these ballot papers for the two remaining candidates are added to their scores. Whoever of the two remaining candidates then has the most first and second choice votes is the winner.

(typos are mine)

Does anyone know if this has a name? I'm pretty certain that is doesn't have many of the desirable properties of other systems.

Wed May 26 18:37:29 BST 2004

Capability Systems page got an FAQ added to the end of it to answer some of the questions that people have emailed me.

And never, ever deal with SET Lighting and Sound. (Yes, that's an attempt at a google bomb)

Mon May 24 15:34:45 BST 2004

400^th entry!

You have probably noticed that the Janie Box has been replaced with a link-roll powered by del.icio.us. It's only updated when I regenerate the site, which is a manual process and not on a cron job at the moment. But if you're bored the site is generally a good source of cool links.

Also, I've ticked off one of my todo items: writing the text on capability systems:

When you go to the liquor store, do you hand the cashier your wallet, and ask him to take out what it costs?

Nope? Then why can your mp3 player read ~/.gnupg/secring.gpg?.

We have ridiculous amounts of ambient authority floating around our programs. A capability system not only allows us to move towards a design conforming to the principal of least authority, but creates a cleaner design at the same time.

(Read the rest: Practical UNIX Capability Systems)