Dave Currie's Weblog

Life update

I've just realized that I haven't updated the blog in a month! Bad form, that.

As you may have noticed, I don't really like just throwing up a few links and calling that a post, I prefer exposing some original thought and ideas. Unfortunately life has been rather lacking in the interest department, at least in what concerns this blog. Work has been ok but monotonous, cocktail-wise the winter takes away the joy of sipping concoctions on the balcony and my recent experiments have been into the classic cocktails, about which much has already been written. Finally, I have one book waiting to be read (Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver), but I'm saving it up for the winter holidays, so all I've been reading is newspapers and magazines.

In short, I've been intellectually bored. However, times are a-changing! I've been working on a site update for the main noaxs.net pages using all the latest techniques (CSS and stuff, not a <table> in site). My wife has also given me a digital camera (Sony DSC-P8) (w00t), so I'm going to take some serious time to update and expand the ferret galleries. If you don't know why I need time for this, you've obviously never tried to get a ferret to sit still for a photo :).

Finally, I have embarked on another blog, this time a thematic thing so updates are more frequent. But I'm keeping it anonymous, for no real reason. :) Hints: It's in spanish and has nothing to do with anything geeky.

So that's it really. I'll write up some of the geeky stuff soon, I promise.

April 4th, 1984

Yes, I've finally started to read George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and I have to say I'm enjoying it a lot. It's been a while since I've read a book where I felt that I had to read, understand and think about every single sentence. I suppose this defines the difference between books and literature. :) I also feel my conscience easing up on me a little, because this is a book I should have read a long time ago.

I haven't updated my reading sidebar in quite a while. This is mostly laziness, but perhaps also due to the books I've been reading. They're good books, but there's really not much to say about them.

I finished Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and I enjoyed it a lot. Much of Bladerunner makes much more sense after having read it. I then got through Martian Time-Slip, also by Philip K. Dick, Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett and Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. I also read a book on dog psychology (!) and I'm starting a book about Bull Terriers, since we're thinking of getting one at some stage to complement our ferrets.

Next on the list is Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, which I'm also looking forward to. But it's thickness made me tackle 1984 first, since it looks a little more inviting...

The sidebar is thus updated, and if somebody out there comes out with an interesting album I'll even update the music part too!

Google pitfalls

It's strange, but I've come across two rather fundamental (yet unrelated) problems with Google searches in the last half an hour.

First problem. if you use Linux or some other Open Source projects, you've probably had problems at something you want to do but isn't well explained in the documentation. So you go and look up the problem on Google, and get 350,000 results. Of these, most of the pages are from back in 2000 when everyone was coming across the issue and generating a lot of traffic on forums and mailing lists talking about how to fix the problem, what has to be implemented to get it to work, etc. This traffic is all very relevant to your search terms, but not very useful if all you want to know is how to do whatever it is. Usually, buried in the 32nd page of results is a page from a couple of months ago that answers your question in a concise way but, because of the way it is written, is not high up in the ranking.

This, in my eyes, is a major problem. Google doesn't seem to give much importance to how new a page is, and therefore the usefulness of the results is skewed in some cases. Ironically, the problem is worse when searching in Google Groups, but since it allows sorting of results by date, it can be overcome much more easily by just displaying the results in reverse chronological order.

Second problem. This isn't really a problem for me, but I was thinking about it as problem number one happened, and when I tried it my suspicions were confirmed.

Imagine yourself as a complete newbie. You've been told that the Internet is good for many things, and that everything you need can be found by searching Google. So far, so good, and many of us might actually give that kind of advice. Now, you've heard that the Internet can be used for sending email, so you search Google for "how to send email", or maybe just "sending email".

If you've clicked on the links above, you will have seen that there is absolutely nothing in that result list that might help you on your quest. To find some helpful results you'd need to search for something like "free email services" or "how to get an email account", search terms that betray decent knowledge about the subject area in the first place.

I think it's obvious from these examples that in order to find anything on Google, you need to have a fairly clear idea of what you're looking for, which defeats the point when you're looking something up because you have no idea what it's about. While not a bug per se, I think this is an unfortunate side-effect of the searching methods used.

These two issues can be serious hurdles standing in between you and the data you need. Basically, in order to narrow your search, you need to know more about what you're searching for. And you can't find out more until you've found what you're looking for. It's a vicious circle.

It just goes to show that Google is not the ultimate knowledge searching tool. And while this is unfortunate for you and me because sometimes we might not be able to find the data we need, it means that there is still room for improvement and maybe (gasp!) competition.

And given Google's recent spate of bad press, this may well be a Good Thing(tm).

For the discerning pre-teen girl

Have you heard about BarbieOS?

This year, Mattel is upping the ante by making the B-Book into a full-fledged desktop replacement targeted specifically at toddler through preteen girls who are currently Windows users but may be seeking alternatives, possibly due to increasing licensing fees or out of a desire to break free of vendor lock-i

Brilliant stuff.

Uni-what??

Joel Spolsky talks about Unicode and Character Sets. Essential reading for non-experts such as myself.

Actually I think the problem that programmers have with character sets are that 1. they use tools that don't understand them and therefore never learn about them (Joel mentions PHP), and 2. tools that do understand character sets but that don't make charset-related issues obvious. An example of this is Apache's Xerces. Anyone who has ever spent serious time researching a weird XML parse error only to find out that the XML document they were using had the wrong charset in the header knows what I mean.

Anyway, read the article, it's worth it.

Manipulation

I try not to talk about politics because this is not that kind of blog, but sometimes it's just too much. You may have heard about the Spanish diplomat murdered in Iraq recently.

It's a serious story, but I get annoyed at the way different media portray it. Today in the TV news and newspapers, TVE (Televisión Española, Spanish National Television) called the guy an attaché to the spanish embassy. TeleCinco (independent spanish TV) referred to him as a military something-or-other, and El Pais, a major newspaper, called him a spy.

I won't get into my own opinion, but the language used by each medium makes their bias quite clear. I found the government-backed TVE message to be the most disturbing, which maybe makes my bias quite clear. Either way, it annoys me.

Like Rage Against the Machine says, There's nothing proper 'bout your propaganda...

The Crypto Software Wars

I received a GPG-signed piece of email yesterday. This is no big deal, except that I didn't have anything set up on my machine to cope with it, so I took it as the opportunity to set up some crypto software on my machine.

I do this every so often, you see. I move to a new desktop machine, reinstall or upgrade the operating system and suddenly I have a blank page to configure the desktop experience. Over the years, I've become used to setting up the basics automatically - development tools, browser/email/messengers/etc, office apps and other necessities, but there are always things to do which aren't automatic because they are not used as often, and crypto software is one of those things.

So every year or so I get to investigate anew, see all the available software and decide on what to install and how to make it work. As usual, every time I set these things up it's in a different environment - now I'm using Linux (RedHat 9, to be precise), and I recently switched to Mozilla Thunderbird for mail.

Thankfully, even Linux projects are quite professional these days, so installation was painless, everything from RPMs or, for Firebird, from .xpis. This is what I installed:

• GnuPG - (gnupg-1.2.1-4.rpm comes with RedHat 9)
• GnuPG Made Easy - from FreshRPMS
• KGPG - KDE GPG software that sits in your system tray and gives you a nifty GUI for most of your needs.
• Enigmail and Enigmime for Linux

Installing in that order should work fine. Run kgpg from the command line to create or import your keypairs, and you're done. Much simpler than when I first started experimenting with PGP back in '96 or so, back when using crypto software was more like a war (hence the title of this post).

This was all done from my work machine, so when I get home I'll replicate the process and then post my new collection of keys to gather dust for another year or so. :)

Dear Sir...

Google Fraud

Russ has posted an entry about Google AdSense, possible fraud and abusive terms&conditions. It's good reading, and since I can't add anything to it I'm going to go off on a tangent from there.

The idea that caught my eye is in the update to the article - the fraud-monitoring software. I'm thinking about how can traffic that isn't fake can seem like bad traffic to a monitoring algorithm?

My first thought is inspired by one of my minor annoyances in recent times - HTTP proxies.

It is conceivable that a certain number of people behind a proxy find an advertisement on a site interesting and click on it, all in a short length of time. If the algorithm isn't proxy-savvy (i.e. knows how to interpret X-Forwarded-For headers) or the proxy isn't compliant (not all of them are), then the monitoring software could be fooled by honest traffic.

This is not a far-fetched idea, most big ISPs use proxies, which they automatically configure from their install CDs. And some, in particular Telefonica here in Spain, give you no choice by installing a transparent proxy, which is the root of all evil. :) If the AdSense monitoring software is not proxy aware, then it would throw out sites like ADSLNet or BandaAncha because anyone in Spain using ADSL will appear to come from the proxy IP (currently 80.58.4.42, if you really want to know), even if the clicks were from many different people.

And of course, this causes other problems for me. I don't know how other people in Spain keep track of how many individual users use their site, but I can't do it since I use shared hosting and can't change the Apache config to log real IPs instead of proxy IPs. I get lots of hits in my logs from the proxy, but I am also behind that proxy and I use my domain for quite a few other things, so most of those hits are probably mine. :) Anyway, if you're in Spain and using ADSL, leave me a comment so I know you're there!

Google News en Español!

It was about time! Google now has a Spanish localized version of it's Google News service. This is good stuff since I like to keep abreast of the news but don't really have the patience to read the propaganda masquerading as newspapers you buy here.

Actually, I speak like it's a Spain thing when it isn't. All newspapers have biases, most of them are political or religious, and you have to take everything they say with a grain of salt. Same thing for TV news. The great thing about Google News is that since it aggregates news from many different sources, you can be reasonably sure that you're getting a bias-free picture of the world, in that all the biases eventually cancel each other out. That's my theory anyway.

So it looks like I'll be getting my local news from Google now instead of, well, ignoring the news because I can't stand reading any single newspaper or watching any single TV channel. I've been getting most of my international news from Google News UK, since it's the closest I have to local and even though I don't often click through to the UK stories, I'm impressed that I have a much better picture of what's going on there than I've ever had since I moved away. I suppose it's just a great idea. Can you tell I love Google? ;)

Hurricane Isabel

The news tonight showed images of hurricane Isabel beating the east coast of the US. While I hope that the damage is minimal and that nobody gets hurt, I have one question on my mind, a question that occurs to me every time I see images of hurricanes (or earthquakes) in the states:

Have americans not heard of bricks? Why do they build their houses out of plywood? Every time that something like this happens we are treated to footage of houses having their walls blown away, whole blocks lying in heaps of wood and plastic... Why don't they use durable materials to build their homes? This isn't Bangladesh, after all.

Still, I have no experience in the matter, so I can't give an informed opinion. I just think that if we had that kind of weather here in Europe, we could handle it by just bringing in anything that could fly away and covering the windows with something hurricane-proof. Minimal destruction, except maybe for tiled roofs (not a big issue in Madrid) ;).

It just seems odd...

What do you mean?

Check out WordPirates, a site dedicated to listing words and terms that people are tired of hearing out-of-context or just with a completely different meaning. I think I'll be contributing a couple of words in the next few days... All I need to do is choose them, because if I start listing everything that bothers me, I'll be there all day. :)

(From Dan Gillmor's eJournal)

Ranting & Raving

I've just signed up to be informed when Sun's Project Rave is released. From what I've read, it's either "programming for retards" or else Sun is lying. :)

But seriously, I hope it's not like Visual Basic. The existence of VB is solely responsible for the huge amount of people who think they are computing professionals because they know how to put together simple apps, and nothing more.

Maybe I'm overreacting, but there are an awful lot of people like that in Spain. At least I keep on running into them. The other day at work, we were asked to install a webapp on a server we manage. The first thing that looked off was that the package was in a .jar, not a .war. Upon inspection of this .jar, we find a collection of classes - and nothing more. No WEB-INF, no web.xml, nothing. Thinking that this must be an oversight, we got in touch with the "coder" and asked for the web.xml file. No problem. Five minutes later we're staring at the following file:

<web-app>
</web-app>

Seriously. And the guy swore that it was correct. So the next few hours were spent reading the code and working out what servlet declarations had to be done (incidentally, the servlet-mappings were all the same as the class names).

Here is what I think happened: The guy started out writing VB programs, and thought he was good. Sometime during 1998-2000 he got a job in the computing industry, taking advantage of the dot-com boom. So that's how he got his job. Now one day he was asked to do something in Java. So he gets JBuilder (or something) and starts reading one of these cheap-ass (and crap) spanish computer books printed by these gentlemen. Armed with not nearly enough knowledge about computers in general and his chosen subject in particular, he starts doing stuff in JBuilder. He uses wizards, he copies public-domain code from the net, and in a couple of weeks has come up with a web application that seems to work. Great, except he doesn't know it's a web application, he doesn't know how it works internally, he doesn't know what an application server is, he doesn't know about .wars, etc, etc. And this is where we get a bunch of talented and qualified people wasting time arguing with this guy about his web.xml and then reverse-engineering his code to make it work. Thankfully we were charging by the hour for this.

And that is the danger of VB. It makes the novice think that what he sees in the IDE is all there is to his program, because in VB it *is* all. However when he has to use something a little more complex, he's not even lost because he's not aware that there is so much more to know. And he just goes merrily on his way, oblivious to all the problems his code may be causing, thinking that if it doesn't work it's someone else's fault for not knowing how to set it up. "They must be so dumb", he thinks. "It's so simple".

What does all this have to do with Project Rave, you ask? Well, imagine for a moment that it is "programming for retards", as I mentioned before. This would mean that suddenly a whole bunch of people who don't know Java would end up thinking that they do. A whole bunch of clueless managers would believe them.

Now, where is Java used that VB isn't? Think small unimportant places like financial institutions, insurance companies, etc. So the risk is that suddenly you're enabling this calibre of programmer to do some *real* damage instead of limiting it to some stupid little desktop apps.

Does nobody else find this scary?

Choosing the Right Tool

On Friday afternoon I was asked to whip up a way of calling a command on a unix box by just bringing up a URL in a browser (insecure, I know, but it's what the customer insisted they wanted. Whoever said the customer is always right obviously wasn't talking about IT consulting. :) ).

There were a couple of extra issues. Firstly, the command takes arguments that had to be passed through the URL. Secondly, the command had to be run as a specific user. The first requirement is not so complicated, all web languages provide easy access to URL variables. However the second requirement was a little more puzzling.

My initial approach was to think of the problem as a regular Unix problem. If you have to execute a command or a series of commands, you write a shell script. So I thought about writing a CGI shell script. This is my reasoning:

• Maintanability - for a short system script, it's important that it be maintainable by the System Administrator, not a developer on a team. Sysadmins use Shell scripts daily, where PHP (for example) will probably not be as familiar.
• Testing - A little mojo at the beginning of the script (switch between command-line and URL arguments) allows you to test from the command line. Very handy.
• Flexibility - Since shell scripts are designed to run external programs, they allow a lot of flexibility in how commands are called, which commands are called, etc.
• Elegance - A shell script will be much more easy to read than a PHP file full of system() calls, for example, and is more appropriate to the problem being solved.

With the platform decided, I started by looking at how to get URL arguments into the script. Since I was a little short on time, I didn't want to start looking up how CGI worked, which environment variables were set, etc. A quick Google search turned up bashlib, a great little project designed to make using Bash as a CGI scripting tool easier, specifically by handling things like URL variables. This made the first point given above trivial.

Now on to the second point, running the command as another user. Now I like to think I know a fair bit about Unix, but I'm mainly a developer and not a sysadmin, so although I had heard about Sudo I had never used it. It turned out to be exactly what I needed. At first I had tried just using su, but apart from being horribly insecure, I couldn't find a way of using it non-interactively. When that approach failed, I looked up sudo. All I needed was a single line in /etc/sudoers with the command, the calling user and the user the command should be called as. It's important to include the directive NOPASSWD so that the command can be run in a script without expecting a password.

And that was it, problem solved! That's how I ended my work week. I like doing something different now and again, since it's easy to get burned out working week in week out on the same thing, especially in the "client is being a pain" phase. And it's the kind of task that allows you to learn new things in small steps and relatively stress-free.

Why have I called this post "Choosing the Right Tool"? I am referring to writing a CGI in Bash. When you have a problem like the one I have described, where I could have done it in PHP, Perl, Python or whatever, you have to look at the most elegant solution and that which satisfies the most "unnamed criteria" - things that don't usually go into a project description but are a given, like efficiency or maintainability, mentioned above. In this context, I think I made the right choice.

Defective?

The Reg is carrying a story about a lady in France who took EMI to court over a copy-protected CD - and won!

According to the story, the judge ruled that the CD she purchased, which would not work in her car CD player, was defective. This means that EMI have to provide her with a new CD that does work in all CD players (i.e. is NOT defective), or else refund the money. It also means that EMI are formally forbidden from selling defective CDs.

Of course, a CD is only considered defective as long as it can't be played in some devices, so if someone comes up with a "better" mechanism that does work well, then copy protecting is not in itself verboten.

Why do I find this interesting? Well, for one thing I live in Spain and I suspect that it would be possible to get a similar ruling here from the courts if it came to it. The government doesn't seem to be interested in helping the music industry, as can be appreciated by walking through anywhere in Madrid and watching all the illegal immigrants selling pirated CDs/DVDs/Video Games in front of the local police force.

The other reason I like this ruling is that at last someone seems to be talking sense. You see, I have a reasonable CD collection, nothing enormous, but well over 100. I think that that alone, and the fact that I keep on buying CDs even though I have a broadband connection at home and could easily never buy any music again, should be enough for the music industry to afford me some respect and not assume that I am a criminal.

Fortunately, I don't buy the kind of CDs that are usually copy protected, so it hasn't affected me much. But still, is a little respect too much to ask for? I think not. And if the situation gets really out of hand, I can always move to France... ;)

Simon Says...

Simon Song seems to have changed the address of his weblog a couple of months ago and I didn't realise until today. I find his opinions of US culture as an outsider quite interesting, and as someone who has never been to the US I think they may be more in line with my own opinions than the usual stuff you read about in (american) blogs... :)

Microsoft Legal problems

I read Cringely's column this week with quite a bit of interest. I don't know what Microsoft is up to, but they seem to be having a lot of legal problems recently, and not many of them are nearly as publicised as they should be.

Frankly, I thought they lost the Eolas suit on purpose, so as not to create a legal precedent that might endanger their position as the holders of many software patents, but now I'm not so sure. Could it be that Microsoft is actually having some trouble they don't quite know how to handle? I hope so, it's the kind of tribulation that forges character.. :)

Java RSS Utilities

It's been an unacceptably long time since I last wrote, but I have an excuse! Yes, I've been on holidays for the last week and a bit and just got back to work today.

Anyway, this is just a quick pointer to an article over at java.sun.com which describes the newly-released Java RSS Utilities. This is basically just a taglib that processes RSS feeds and allows you to format the output as you desire, but it also provides a small API (used by the taglib) to process RSS in code. It looks good, although I haven't had time to play with it yet. However, it seems like a good start for building a really quick-and-dirty aggregator. Maybe I'll invest a couple of hours and see what comes up.

I have got more stuff to talk about, I want to get a gallery up of some random photos on my cellphone from my week off and also polish off and release a small software project I invested a few hours in recently, but I'll do this when my employer isn't paying for my time, so tune in later!

Emasculated

On Wednesday I had to modify some C code at work, to customize a piece of open source software. I hadn't realized how much I had forgotten about C. I even had to look up some really basic stuff.

I used to think my C was quite good when I was at university, I even did some Linux Kernel hacking (on a small scale), so it just goes to show how much you can forget in a few short years. I'm going to have to take up a project in straight C, I've been wanting to do some GUI programming in Linux, so I might roll these things up into one project.

Also, and to rub salt in the wound, Kuro5hin is featuring an article titled Certainly Not Logic, which includes a lot of sample bad C code. I admit a couple of these threw me off, because I had forgotten quite a few language specifics. For example, sizeof means different things in C and PHP, and since I frequently code in PHP I had forgotten this. Sucks.

Google calculator

This is extremely cool. Dave Winer mentioned today that Google has a calculator, and indeed it does. And a pretty decent one as well. The provided documentation gives you a good starting point, but I recommend some exploration.

The coolest thing for me is that it does unit conversion. I played around with some things and noticed it recognizes full names (kilograms), abbreviations (kg) and informal shortenings (kilos). Things with various possible values (e.g. gallons) default to the US values, but putting "uk" in front of gallons gives you the result in "Imperial gallons". Smart.

It doesn't do spell checking, so "33 kils in pounds" will not work, but that's a minor inconvenience. Actually, the fact that it doesn't work should be enough of a hint to check your spelling.

And all this from my (Mozilla) Googlebar. What will make it perfect is when I can type in "299.95 usd in euros". Let's hope it comes soon...

Update: It doesn't seem to be translated yet. "20 kilometros en millas" doesn't work yet, but doubtless they'll have it soon.

Not Much Blogging

It's been quite a few days straight without writing anything. I've been very busy, but things seem to be getting quieter now, so I'm going to try and get up the stuff I've been thinking about the last few days.

Actually, it seems like everyone's posting a lot less, although I think people are either on holidays or just spending their free time away from their computers, which is probably a Good Thing. :)

Studio weblog

I've been reading the weblog of Dr. Frank, of The Mr. T Experience. Recently, MTX have started recording their new album and he's blogging it. Very good stuff, and perhaps the first time someone has done this. He says at one point that there are points where you go nuts and think that you should have gone to grad school instead and get a "real job", but reading this stuff makes me want to be in the music biz. :)

More SmartTag Madness

Just a couple of quick things.

First, I found out where I saw this mentioned a few days ago. It was hidden in the middle of a completely unrelated post by Dave Winer.

Second, Scoble says that this is not so! I don't know who to believe, but to me the story seems more right than wrong, based on empirical evidence.

Defeating Smart Tags

I've just woken up at 6am because I can't sleep from the heat, and in between getting a drink of water and setting up the fan I had an idea. Since this is the 21st century, instead of writing it down on a piece of paper and going back to sleep, I'm blogging it. :) If it seems a little oddly written it's because I'm still mostly asleep. I'll make corrections in the morning.

So on to my idea. I read somewhere that Microsoft will probably be re-introducing smart tags into Longhorn, and it ocurred to me that if you can't switch it off from your page, then the best way to combat them is to make them stand out. Now I don't know how the software will work with stylesheets, but when it does come out there will probably be some trick to make the smart-tagged links stand out from the links put on the page on purpose.

When this is done, all that needs to be done is to include, in a prominent place, a link that says something like "Why do some links look different?" that links to an explanation of smart tags, why they are bad and how to turn them off. I think if many people did this, it might make a difference.

Anyway, I'm going to try and sleep another hour before I get up. I'll probably edit this later on.

Update: Busy day, haven't been able to update before. I was going to modify the post to add more details and fix a couple of style problems, but I'll just leave it as is. It's not that bad.

Anyway, now that I've given it some more thought, I figure that smart tags will probably just use the default style specified for a link in the page's CSS. This would make my idea quite straightforward to implement by just specifying a huge font or wacky colours and then giving your links a specific class which is the style you really want. This has the disadvantage of filling up the code with junk, which is the kind of thing style sheets were invented to avoid, but it's the only way I see after thinking about it for a while.

In static HTML, anyway. We'll have to wait until the new browser comes out to see if there is anything that can be done from javascript, perhaps. Depending on where the program logic fits in the browser, using DHTML techniques for retrieving text in tables, etc. could be used to find rogue links.

Who knows, maybe it will be possible to disable them with a META tag. :) It doesn't matter much anyway, it's a fun mental exercise.

Social commentary

If you understand Portuguese, read this article on GilDot and then read this comment. Great piece of social commentary on portuguese mentality. How can you not like the place? :)

Old Science Fiction

I just finished reading Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury this afternoon. Not bad. It's strangely similar to many of the books I had to study at school, which went under the guise of literature.

What I was most intrigued by, though, was the "old-sf" vibe. You know, science fiction written in the 50s and 60s where you can imagine the characters looking like people out of an old commercial. Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Isaac Asimov, etc.

So while I was thinking about what makes old science fiction feel old, I realized - computers and computer networks. Ever since the late 70s and early 80s there has been hardly any (popular) science fiction that doesn't include a computer network of some sort. Everybody is interconnected, much like today. Before then, most of the books written feature some futuristic technology, but the idea of being connected is not there. It's a phenomenon that nobody had even thought of until it happened. And maybe that's what makes older science fiction slightly less enjoyable. You read it and think it's not realistic, it's not credible, because we can no longer imagine a world where this interconnection is not there.

Maybe that's why, to me, books written since Neuromancer seem so much more compelling.

Anyway, that's my random thought for today. If you follow my sidebar, you'll have noticed I haven't even let the corpse of 451 Fahrenheit cool before starting on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I've read the first chapter and I think I'm going to like it. The problem is that even though so far the mood isn't exactly like Blade Runner, I can only picture Deckard as looking like Harrison Ford. :) Hopefully that won't be a problem...

Personal Sysadmins

Russell's entry about personal sysadmins suddenly seems quite ironic when you look at Dan Gilmor's second comment in his weblog. Apparently he does have staff to look after his blog.

I had to install Movable Type by myself... :)

Banned from Slashdot...Again

It looks like someone in the area has been messing around with Slashdot again, and now when I try to access the site I get a nasty pink page telling me my IP address is banned.

Except it's not my IP address. Y'see, my ISP has a Transparent Proxy (or "Interception Proxy", as they are now correctly known). What this means is that all HTTP requests on port 80 are not actually handled by direct connections to the target machine, even though to the browser it seems that way. So there is no way around it. It's supposed to cache frequently used pages to speed things up and save on bandwidth costs, which I suppose I can't really fault.

Actually my gripe today is with Slashdot. As I've mentioned, this has happened before. Last time I wrote an email to their network admin saying that this IP was banned and that it wasn't really my IP address, etc. I also mentioned, and this is the important bit, that the proxy supplies correct X-Forwarded-For http headers. These contain the correct IP for the machine requesting the data.

However, they refuse to see this and have blocked the IP completely. Again. I suppose I'll just cut&paste my previous email and fire it off. Maybe tomorrow we'll have some progress!

Update! I got a reply back from one of the Slashdot admins. Apparently the proxy generated over 300 404 errors in less than an hour. Ok. I'm still blocked though, so that piece of information, however interesting, is absolutely useless. Oh well, we'll see if there is some progress tomorrow...

Photo Competition

I came across 26 things a while back, before the targets were up, and I was waiting to see what they were going to be. Now they're up, so I'm going to try it out.

But with a twist. I'm no photographer, I don't have a good digital camera and I certainly don't have the patience to think about this for a long time. The site says:

"the aim of this photographic project is to make us open our eyes and get creative with the things and people around us, to see how we each interpret themes."

I'm going to adapt it and add another condition - Spontaneity. I'll be doing this with my Nokia 7650, to try and capture interesting situations on the spur of the moment.

I might fail horribly, of course. ;) I'll post up my results at the end of the month. Does anyone else want to try?

Urgh!

Now this is just gross...

Batida de Côco

Andy reccommended I try some Batida de Côco the other day. Nice. It definitely tastes more like natural coconut than something like Malibu, which, although I know it's not the same product, tastes rather artificial to me. I didn't even think I'd like it given that I'm not too big on coconut flavoured things anyway, but I am impressed.

Now off to look for some cocktail recipes for this that aren't too girly. ;) I'll keep you posted if I find anything new and exciting, although I reckon I'll probably just end up using batida instead of Malibu in the wife's Blue Hawaiians.

First Post!

It's finally ready! After what seems like a long time planning, downloading, configuring, designing and plain old procrastinating, I finally have my very own blog. I suppose I could have saved myself the design stage, for what it was worth. :)

In this article I'll write a little bit about my goals in starting up a blog, and about the subjects I plan to touch upon. My reasons are as follows, in no particular order:

1. Since I've been reading blogs, which hasn't been that long, I've found the concept quite interesting. More importantly, since I've been reading blogs I come across more and more things that make me think "hey, if I had a blog I could write about this!".
2. I want to improve my writing style. I used to enjoy writing about things, but I got out of the habit and recently I only write documentation. So I want to get some more practice writing. I also want to make it easier to get ideas out of my head and into writing quickly and readably. You have no idea how long this post is taking to write.
3. Self-discipline. Just to see if I can do it and keep it up.

As for the topics I might talk about, you're likely to find stuff on most of the things I enjoy. Except family and personal life. Things I enjoy are:

1. Computers - This will probably be the bulk of what I write about. Apart from being my job it is also my main hobby. Specifically, I work as a developer at a small consultancy that specializes in solutions built on Open-Source and Free software. This presents quite a few challenges, most of which are about constantly learning how to use new tools. I'll try to write about my successes, failures, frustrations and experiences in general. The topic is labelled Geek.
2. Music - I enjoy playing and listening to music. I might touch upon playing techniques, although I will most likely talk about likes and dislikes and I might even attempt a review or two(!).
3. Ferrets - I have a couple of ferrets. There's nothing unusual about having pets, but when they're so different to other more common household pets it becomes a topic in and of itself. And having them in a country like Spain is even more of a challenge because they are especially uncommon. I'll probably end up writing about new stuff I find out.
4. Sports - I'm not a sports buff by any means, but I enjoy watching more and more sports as I get older. Formula 1, Football (Spanish league and european, with the occasional nod to Portugal), MotoGP... I don't think I'll post long articles on this, just short comments. Also, I might end up writing in Spanish or Portuguese if the situation demands it. :)
5. Food and Drink - Well, mostly drink. :-p I've been getting into cocktails recently, so when I read something new or try something new, I might write about it.

And anything else that strikes me as funny/amusing/interesting, like any other weblog I suppose.