I love the fact that the Secretary of the New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties is named Stephen Blanks.

It just goes to show that Max Headroom really was a documentary showing the world twenty minutes into the fu-fu-future.

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July 04, 2008 05:12 PM

A few weeks ago I got an email from the Malt Shovel Brewery about a beer and food tasting at their brew pub on King Street Wharf. Best thing, of course, was the price: free. I signed myself and Holly up immediately.

The evening started off with a Golden Ale, always a lovely drop, and a bit of a talk from Chuck Hahn. Golden was paired with some pretty good jumbo deep-fried prawns. A good combo, the fruity hops going well with the seafood. Next up was Amber Ale paired with lamb cutlets. I'm not so sure about this combo really being a match, but I like both amber ale and lamb.

The next combo was a revelation. I think the James Squire porter is one of the best beers made in Australia. It's pretty much flawless, getting the critical balance between sweet and sour just right for the porter style. The combination was a cheesecake. I'm not normally that keen on cheesecakes, but a bite followed by a slurp of porter was an amazing taste sensation. The sourness of the porter cuts through the (normally cloying) richness of the cheesecake. A brilliant combination, which I'll be serving at my next dinner party I think.

Finally came the latest seasonal brew, a Pepperberry Winter Ale. Bush foods are something brewers in Australia are trying to incorporate, with varying degrees of success. The Barons Lemon Myrtle Witbier is vile, tasting more like Toilet Duck or Strongbow Lemon than a wheat beer.

The pepperberry is more succesful, keeping the exotic seasoning as a subtle texture to the flavour instead of overpowering the beer. It's a fairly standard winter ale, dark, fairly sweet, heavy (5.2% I think) and the pepperberry gives a warm spiciness to it. The aroma is something slightly aniseed, with a similar slight flavour running through the taste. It's got a very long, lingering flavour that changes as you savour it. Well worth checking out, but it's a limited seasonal brew so get in quick.

I asked one of the brewers when they'd be making another wheat beer. Previously they've done what they called a Colonial Wheat Beer, which wasn't as tasty as I'd hoped but pretty good. I'm more into the spiced wheat beers, Hoegaarden being the most well-known of the variety. The only Australian brewer getting it right is the Snowy Mountains Brewery's Charlottes Hefeweizen. Malt Shovel's Summer brew is apparently going to be a lager, like Australia needs more of those, but hopefully they'll have another crack at wheat.

The beer event was actually pretty quick, moving through the beer and food at a rapid pace. Holly and I decided to wander into town and find some dinner, and we've been looking for a change to try the Korean Fried Chicken I saw reviewed recently.

Sadly Dashi Korean seems to have closed. We wandered all the way up and down the short laneway without finding it, though there's a not-yet-opened restaurant with workers in it, and I suspect that might be where Dashi was.

We ended up wandering around the corner onto Liverpool Street where we'd seen KoreanFC advertised to check it out. The place is a real rabbit warren, the downstairs area packed with (mostly) Koreans, so we were shown upstairs to a kind of covered-in verandah. The decor is, well, dodgy. I suspect the council would not approve.

Anyway we ordered some of the sauced fried chicken, hoping it would be as good as the stuff we've had in London. Unfortunately not in this case.

The batter was overly thick, the chicken a bit dried out and the sauce was synthetic-tasting, without the chunky bits of onion and capsicum. Altogether not very nice, and quite disappointing. Korean food always comes with little side dishes of pickles and the like, and these ones were pretty ordinary too. A simply vinegared radish was somewhat refreshing after the greasy food, but the kimchi was very ordinary and the cold clear noodles bland.

We'll just have to keep looking for the perfect KoreanFC here in Sydney!

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July 04, 2008 02:09 PM

My mate Don sent a letter to the King Pig and the Special Minister for World (Catholic) Youth Day in NSW in regards to his freedom to annoy Catholics.

Dear Minister

It was my intention to be involved in a peaceful demonstration over the Pope's supposed World Youth Day on July I am concerned by reports in the media, primarily the Sydney Morning Herald, that I will be breaking the law and risk jail or a fine.

Could you please clarify that I will not be breaking the law if I:

• assemble at Taylor Square, Darlinghurst at 12pm 19 July with other like minded citizens.
• wear a T-shift of the English folk/rock band Chumbawumba. The T-shirt is plain black and says in grey writing "Chumbawumba" on the back "Atheist" on the front.
• I will be carrying a cardboard placard A2 size. One side will say "Miranda Devine Sux" and the other side will say "World Peas" with a picture of some small green vegetables.
• Offer condoms to passed by, in a respectful, polite and peaceful manner.
• Possibly sing or chant harmless songs - such as one of my old rugby favourites "Has anybody seen JC" lyrics at http://www.guysrugby.com/songs.asp

Thank you kindly

Don McCallum

Stanmore

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July 03, 2008 10:10 AM

Wow, I can't believe there's still web agencies who do everything in Flash. This technique is so effective, the above is what Google can see of their site. That's right, the title.

Supposedly Adobe is working with the search engines to index the internals of Flash crap. I can see this ending in tears. They're either going to expose internals that were never intended to be visible (like the kind of people who do Flash know anything about security) or the designer will have to explicitely list keywords, which will end up being as useful as meta keywords.

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July 03, 2008 09:59 AM

The Guardian has a great piece about direct action group Plane Stupid, who are all about preventing the expansion of the aviation industry in the face of climate change. It presents a passionate and well-reasoned insight into why direct action is important, and how electoral politics can't solve the world's problems.

"In a situation where you need massive, urgent systemic change, we don't really have the system to achieve it," says Thompson. "Electorally, everyone is fighting over the middle ground. So the mere fact that you're not a moderate means you can't be listened to. That means anybody who had the answer to climate change would automatically be excluded from the debate. This is why you can't just think, if I vote for the greenest party at the election, I'll have done what I needed to."

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July 01, 2008 08:41 AM

So I have this Seagate 7200.11 500GB sata drive that's sort of died on me. Smartctl says Failed and pretty much anything that touches the drive returns 'Media failure' messages from the kernel. Next step I guess is to RMA the thing back to Seagate. But there seems to be something really odd. I can get to the warranty checker, type in the serial number, product code and select where I live, and it confirms that the warranty is till Nov 2012. Awesome so far. But the 'create rma' button just leads to a page that says 'This service is unavailable'.

Quite odd that they would go through the effort of getting the whole warranty checker etc online and not have a way to file for rma online. But then I've never had to go back to seagate before, the last time I had an issue with a seagate drive, my vendor sorted it out. hummm

-- KB

June 30, 2008 02:48 PM

Perhaps I need to travel a little faster. Or more often. Or something.

The new Dopplr profiles are fun.

June 26, 2008 03:44 PM

DV has recently been looking at the issue of Java bindings for libvirt. A few months back a libvirt community member, Tóth István, contributed most of the code for Java bindings to libvirt. Daniel has now taken this codebase added a build system, and is hosting it in the libvirt CVS repository and done a formal release. This should be hitting Fedora 10 rawhide in the near future, meaning we now have bindings for C, Perl, Python, OCaml, Ruby and Java. Now who wants to do a PHP binding....that's the only other language commonly requested

June 26, 2008 11:17 AM

Australia is in the midst of deciding how its eventual carbon taxation and trading environment will work, and the conservatives have switched back to their default climate change denial position, as they had before they thought it might win them last year's election. These supposed fans of the free market are now calling for petrol to be excluded from any eventual carbon pricing mechanism.

Crikey has been banging on about the fact that excluding any sector of the economy from the carbon taxation means the cost of carbon for every other sector will be higher. Our government would do well to resist these regressive moves, and aim for a flat carbon price that is based solely around the carbon emitted. We are, after all, trying to get the economy to be less carbon-intensive, so any moved by any sector to reduce their carbon emissions should be encouraged, via a price signal.

Last week China removed some subsidies on processed oil products, which caused a sharp rise in prices. This change was partially caused by pressure from economists to remove the subsidies and instead focus the subsidy on those in most need of financial help. This is the same approach Australia should take.

So the eventual approach we need to take is to tax all carbon sources equally, and help households that meet the criteria of fuel poverty through direct, means-tested and targetted subsidy. Otherwise you'll end up continuing to subsidise road transport over other forms of transport, the rich will end up with cheaper fuel, the poor will still be struggling.

Obviously part of the package needs to be providing alternatives to single-occupant petrol-based transport throughout the economy.

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June 26, 2008 09:53 AM

This is way cool. Apparently it's over in Fowler Street. Steve pointed out that it's probably cheaper to buy a VCR than a mailbox.

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June 23, 2008 10:28 PM

Niall Kennedy has a really clever JavaScript hack to sniff a user's browser history. It's a pretty cool hack, but also a little scary since any web page you load can find out what pages you've been to.

It works like this: you have some links somewhere inside the DOM, and inspecting the CSS "visited" attribute, you can find out if the user's history contains the URL you're linking. Of course it doesn't actually have to be visible to the user.

His nice white-hat example presents only appropriate "add to your <social app>" links to readers. I can think of some less nice examples. You're selling stuff and want to know if the person is a customer of your competitor. Check to see if they've visited the logged-in area of the competitor's site, then present a specific comparison between your competitor and your own products. Or you could be very reactive to stuff being written about you in the press in the press, even though the person read the article a few days ago. Cool!

I'm looking at personalisation at the moment as a way to try and mediate around the inevitable conflict of home page real estate between divisions in the company. The more we can work out about people hitting our site, the more accurate we can be. This gives the evil genius in me some ideas! Mwahahahaha!!!

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June 23, 2008 06:45 PM

I was at Mashed 08 at Alexandra Palace yesterday. Unfortunately I didn't have time to go back today, but I've made some progress on my project from home.

It was a successful day all in all though. Here's what I did.

• Watched Jonathan Tweed talk about the BBC /programmes api. If I hadn't already had an idea of what I was going to do I would have been very tempted to play with this. A year ago, I was working for the BBC on one of the projects that underlies /programmes, so it's great to see it being given a public airing.
• Watched the Guardian's Damian Carrington talk about what the Guardian's enviroment web team are hoping to inspire people into doing. Well, to be honest, I sat in his talk whilst getting my wireless connection working. Sorry Damian.
  
• Met up with a fellow Perl hacker. Last year the venue was full of Perl hackers. Shame there were so few there this year. I suspect many of the cooler kids were at Interesting instead - note to organisers: having two events like this on the same day is all a bit silly.
• Had an interesting conversation with someone from the BBC who is working on the next version of the Radio iPlayer. It sounds as though following the release of this new version, my BBC streams page will be redundant. Alternatively, it might be easy to make it far more useful. And I'll be able to retire all the grungy old HTML scraping code.
• Had an interesting conversation with the O'Reilly UK people. Might be some announcements coming out of that in a couple of months. Oh, and I might have opened myself up to lots of hassle about writing another book.
• Watched Doctor Who on a huge screen. In the wrong aspect ratio. Honestly, you'd thing that if there was one organisation who understood aspect ratios then it would be the BBC.
  

June 23, 2008 08:12 AM

On Friday afternoon, Liam Colm Askins came into the world a bit early. The birth was straightforward and both mother and baby are doing well. Being a bit early, Liam will have to spend a few weeks in the hospital, but he's doing well and is otherwise fine. Congratulations Ben and Karen!

Update: I spelt it wrong. It's Liam Colm Askins.

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June 22, 2008 10:51 PM

Remember, top-posting because that’s where the cursor happened to be is like shitting in your pants because that’s where your arsehole happened to be.

June 22, 2008 08:48 AM

I've been toying with an amazing new web analytics tool called ClickTale. It tracks everything a user does as they interact with your site, so as well as the usual heat maps and the like, you can actually observe a user's mouse moving around, clicks, typing, the lot! Amazing, but somewhat scary. Certainly could give some insights into how your users interact with your site, particularly complex elements like forms.

Here's a video of me testing it out to demonstrate quite how detailed it is. Wow!

Or view it on YouTube.

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June 20, 2008 10:58 AM

GetUp are collecting money to run a very funny ad about the Fuelwatch junk politics going on. Well worth watching.

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June 20, 2008 10:11 AM

We found a very major issue with the last set of ISOS for 5.2 meaning I had to redo the distro isos today. We should start seeding the mirror network in the next 24 hrs time, so release should still be 23rd June, give or take a day or so.

UPDATE: 2008-June-23 : We found yet another issue with the x86_64 tree, so while some of the updates are now syncing out, please wait for the release announcement before pulling packages and the isos.

--
Karanbir Singh [ http://www.karan.org/ ]

June 19, 2008 11:19 PM

I went to Google Developer Day today and learnt a lot. There's some very clever people doing some very clever stuff.

The sessions I went to in the morning were iGoogle gadgets, which is some very interesting stuff. We're thinking about using some of this kind of stuff for usage indicators and the like. it's remarkably easy to knock up a cool little gadget. Next was the YouTube where I mostly read my emails, as I'm not that fussed.

OpenSocial is very interesting. The open approach definitely appeals -- I was using Friendster, Orkut and the like long before anyone discovered Facebook, and got pretty over the idea pretty quickly. I'm quite interested in the possibilities of some social networking apps, done right. Last.fm is brilliant, and gives me information about music I really care about. LinkedIn is very good for professional contacts, and does that one task well. So the open API really appeals so you could integrate all your social networking stuff. But from the sessions I went to, the OpenSocial stuff Google has is alpha quality at best right now. I'm sure it'll improve quite quickly though.

Mapplets was very interesting. It's much like the Maps API but designed to let the user put your data in as a layer amongst many, which has many possibilities. The presenter seemed very nervous talking in front of the crowd, but he actually did a really good job of explaining it, so hopefully he'll get over the nerves and become an excellent presenter.

One of the items in the morning keynote was GWT, which is a toolkit that allows developers to write Java code that compiles into optimized JavaScript. The integration he was demonstrating with Eclipse was amazing. Almost makes me want to learn the acronym-soup that is Java. But not quite enough.

It was a great day, with as you'd expect from Google excellent catering. Pretty amazing the stuff they turn on for developers, but then I guess they get the opportunity to poach the best and brightest. My only complaint would be the ditchwater coffee. It left a bad taste in my mouth all day! Ugh. It was like the worst business hotel or Amercian diner percolator shite. Maybe I'm just picky?

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June 18, 2008 10:00 PM

Just finished my talk at the Red Hat Summit on libvirt and virtualization tools. For those who are interested, the I've now posted the slides online.

June 18, 2008 09:25 PM

It's the BBC Mashed hack session this coming weekend, so I suppose lots of people are trying to think of a project to work on. I have an idea that involves UK political web sites.

I expect that most MPs have a web site. A far smaller number of them have a blog. Some of them use blog-like software to publish news and other similar web feeds. Part of what I want to do is to build a directory of those URLs. I can't see any way to do this other than trying to track down each of the 646 MPs on the web and poking around on their sites to find all of the interesting URLs. I'm hoping I can get some help with that.

But there are also sites about MPs that are run by other organisations. These ones are easier to track down. For example, They Work For You has a page for every MP. The page for my MP is

http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/martin_linton/battersea

So that looks easy enough. You just use the name of the MP and the name of the constituency. Public Whip has a similar mechanism. My MP's page on Public Whip is

http://www.publicwhip.org.uk/mp.php?mpn=Martin_Linton&mpc=Battersea

Then there are the news organisations. The BBC has a page about my MP. It's at

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/mpdb/html/35.stm

In this case there's a magic number (35) and in order to construct these URLs for other MPs, you'd need to map these numbers to MPs (or constituencies).

The Guardian has two pages. One for the MP and one for the constituency.

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/person/0,,-3146,00.html http://politics.guardian.co.uk/hoc/constituency/0,,-696,00.html

Again, each of those contain magic numbers that you'd need to get a complete list of. And I assume (or, at least, hope) that these pages will one day be given shiny new URLs like other parts of the Guardian site.

It's this second part of the problem that I want to concentrate on first. Building URLs to external sites pro grammatically. And this is where you, gentle reader, can help me. I have two questions that you might be able to answer.

1. I'm sure I'm missing some external sites. To be honest, I haven't really looked very hard yet. I'd be surprised if some of the other national papers didn't have similar pages to the Guardian. Do you know of any other good sites that have pages dedicated to each individual MP or constituency?
2. Do any of you work for organisations that publish these pages? If so, is there any chance that you could sent me lists of the "magic numbers" that appear in your URLs? What I'd need is something like a CSV file (or whatever format is convenient for you) that maps your magic numbers to a recognisable name for an MP or a constituency. I can then map your data to my list of MPs. I know it's a bit cheeky, but it doesn't hurt to ask.

June 16, 2008 02:40 PM

Things are getting desperate in the hunt for Bin Laden, with Britain's Special Boat Service being called into the hunt in Northern Pakistan. Last time I looked, there wasn't a lot of water up on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border. Is this the equivalent of Switzerland having a navy?

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June 16, 2008 11:14 AM

We finally got our gas point installed last Thursday so we've now got our excellent gas heater. It's the Paloma PG-711FRN which is the one that scored best in the Choice comparison of unflued gas heaters. So far so good -- our house is toast warm.

To help keep the heat in, I've been weather stripping around the house. All the windows now have a weather strip to stop draughts. This afternoon I attached a strip to the front door. It flaps down when you close the door to block any draughts, and will also keep dust and crap out of our hallway.

Last weekend I built and planted out this raised garden bed. It's a bunch of railway sleepers with some very long bolts holding it together. Planted out are broad beans, kale, silverbeet, parsnips, chives, sprouting broccoli and four types of garlic. Yum!

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June 15, 2008 06:02 PM

A. Yes it does, perfectly and at the highest detail level.

June 13, 2008 04:27 PM

Helen Yee reviews Dashi Korean Cafe and Restaurant and its Korean Fried Chicken. Yummy! Definitely have to check this one out.

Our favourite Korean in London, Bi Won on Coptic Street just off New Oxford Street, had an amazing fried chicken dish. It was the same crispy-skin chicken deliciousness, but with a sticky, garlicky and very spicy sauce. If you're checking that restaurant out, look for "Korean Sauced Chicken" on the menu. The other dishes are also excellent, but this is the real highlight.

Who's up for some Korean then?

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June 13, 2008 03:08 PM

The other day I moaned about Firebug crashing my browser. Seems that the reason, though this is weird but probably due to boneheaded network configuration, is that the firebug domain servers are down. Fortunately, SMS had the source on his laptop and built up an xpi for me. Sweet!

In other news, I can overhear our departmental admin person berating someone in the IT department. I requested a work laptop with at least two gigs of RAM and a "large" hard drive, as I run lots of virtual machines for browser testing. I got a gig of RAM and a 12 gig hard drive. Do they even make 12 gig hard drives any more? Mobile phones come with more than that these days!

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June 13, 2008 10:36 AM

Well that about wraps it up for the Labour Party as far as I'm concerned. Less than three years after they doubled the the amount of time that a suspect could be held without charge, they have pushed through a bill which increases the time by another 50%. If the bill gets through the Lords, you'll be able to be held for 42 days. This is far longer than in any other western democracy.

Like pretty much everyone I know, I've been becoming more and more disgusted with the Labour government. But through it all I clung to the belief that they were the best alternative. And I (usually) still voted for them.

But that's all over now. A party that has so little regard for human rights is not one that I can possibly vote for. I left the party and sent back my membership card in protest over the Ken Livingstone/Frank Dobson fiasco in 2000. I'm beginning to wish that I hadn't as this is a far more important matter to protest over.

The problem is, of course, who do I vote for now? Only the Labour and Conservative parties have a chance of winning my constituency. I've always been physically repulsed by the idea of voting Tory. Is it time to try and overcome that revulsion. Or do I effectively waste my vote by voting Green or for one of the more extreme left wing parties. I suppose I have a year or two to decide.

But this is a sad day in British politics. The modernisation of the Labour Party has gone too far. It's time for "New Labour" to go. We want our party back.

Update: Blimey. A Tory politician with principles. Hats off to David Davies.

June 12, 2008 02:32 PM

June 12, 2008 10:12 AM

I've been a customer of St George Bank, and before that one of the previous incarnations, Advance Bank, for many many years. Since I was a teenager. They had one of the first online banking systems, and their service has always been pretty good -- pretty good by Australian bank standards, which is admittedly a pretty low standard.

It seems they're about to be gobbled up by Westpac, one of the behemoths of banking here with a well-deserved reputation for baroque systems and surly service. St George seem to be preparing for the merger by degrading their own service.

When we moved house last December, I changed the address online and, from what I could see, it was all there. We haven't been receiving our printed statements. Earlier this year I used their online contact form to ask about this, and received no response.

Now I need those statments to reconcile mortgage payments. Online records only go back 90 days. I phoned up to have the address updated properly and request the statements, and they want to charge me $4 for each statement going back to December! They offered to send me the last two for free, which isn't very useful given I can see that online. Given I pay $6/month for my account, which includes statements, and their system fault means I didn't receive them, it's pretty bloody rich!

I've lodged a formal complaint and will see where that goes -- though given the last time I tried to contact them through the same channel (I can't find a postal address for complaints!) I received no response, I'm not holding my breath. Their response to this will determine whether they keep my business. Though to be honest, if the merger with Westpac goes through I'll be looking for another bank anyway.

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June 11, 2008 12:17 PM

This is just bizarre. I've received a new laptop at work and so I'm installing all my stuff. Firebug and YSlow have become absolutely critical to my day-to-day work, so that was on the list of extensions I want. Even searching for "firebug" locks up Firefox. Going directly to the site locks up Firefox. WTF?

Is, perhaps, the annoying virus scanner that PCs here come with doing something weird? This happens whether I use the corporate proxy or bypass it.

Anyone else seen this behaviour?

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June 11, 2008 12:10 PM

We were at our usual weekly pub quiz last night. One of the questions was this:

Who is the current captain of the Starship Enterprise?

I have to confess being rather confused by this question. Given that Star Trek is set two hundred (or so - I'm not a big fan, I don't know the details) years in the future, how can the word "current" possibly have any meaning?

The answer that the questionmaster accepted as correct was Jean-Luc Picard. Is there any way that answer makes sense?

As I understand it, he was last seen as captain in Star Trek Nemesis in 2002. But Jonathan Archer was seen as captain (of a far earlier Enterprise) until 2005.

I hate it when quiz questions are illogical.

June 11, 2008 12:07 PM

This is easy right?  Can’t you just restart the memcached server? Well yes, but you may cause errors in applications that are already connected to it. You can follow your memcached restart with an application restart, eg for a Ruby on Rails app:

# /etc/init.d/memcached restart && mongrel_rails cluster::restart

Of course if you have more than one application server you have to restart your app on every single one. This would work on an engineyard slice assuming you have the eycap gem installed:

$ cap production memcached:restart
$ cap production mongrel:restart

Restarting your application is not ideal however, you will lose anything cached in memory, cause delays to users trying to access your site, that sort of thing.

So what can be done? The answer is really simple. Assuming a memcached running on the local machine on the default port:

$ echo ”flush_all” | nc localhost 11211

Easy!

June 10, 2008 05:14 PM

For probably the first time ever, I'm almost getting tempted by an Apple product.

I mean, it's still a lot of money to pay for a phone. And who would be happy with a music player that a) only has 16Gb of storage and b) won't play sensible formats.

But they do look nice.

June 10, 2008 09:56 AM

Time for our newly elected mayor to start earning his money. I may not agree with him on many things, but I love what he said about George W Bush.

The President is a cross-eyed warmonger, unelected inarticulate, who epitomises the arrogance of American foreign policy.

I wonder if Boris will be meeting Dubya on his forthcoming trip to London. Maybe Boris is a secret supporter of Operation Manticore.

Look, posters based on the this quotation!

Update: Ooh. New! Improved! Pictures

June 10, 2008 09:39 AM

/etc/ldap/slapd.conf: line 127: substr index of attribute "sambaSID" disallowed

June 10, 2008 08:13 AM

The trouble with the cheap, mega capacity memory cards you get these days is that I have less incentive to process them all. I've got a gig in my little pocket camera, and 2 gigs in the big one. This one is the pub quiz we sometimes do, and Simon Stewart dropped in.

Scott and Katie just visited for a quick weekend.

Todd and Pete just celebrated their five years together, so we had lunch at The Warren View with them and a few mates. Congratulations!

We went to the Surry Hills Festival a while back, then got sick of paying $6 for Tooheys New (ugh!) and retired to Mr Mary's in Redfern for a boozy afternoon.

I went to the Reunion Rave on Saturday night. It was fun catching up with all the old rave buddies, listening to old classics. Main observation of the evening: my hasn't everyone's skin improved?

Finally, Holly's been cooking up a storm!

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June 09, 2008 01:20 PM

I like a bit of controversy in my RSS feeds. I subscribe to feeds from the Daily Mail and the Sun - papers that are guaranteed to get my blood boiling. An occasional increase in blood pressure can be most invigorating.

But I've just removed an RSS feed from my list of subscriptions because there was a distinct danger that it was going to give me a heart attack. I've been reading Biased BBC for about a year (I'm pretty sure that it was Martin who first pointed it out to me).

The premise of the site is pretty uncontentious. They say that the BBC is staffed exclusively by left-leaning Londoners and that the opinions in its output don't reflect the views of the general population of the country. Having worked at the BBC a couple of times, I have to agree that there is a large number of people working there with left of centre political views. However, I've only ever worked in the IT group so I can't say whether the same applies to the editorial groups.

And whilst anyone can point to occasional lapses in editorial balance by any media outlet, accusations of an organised attempt to brainwash the country fall far wide of the mark. I pretty sure that most of the contributors to Biased BBC would continue accuse the BBC of bias unless it was broadcasting exactly their opinion all the time. They seem to be confusing "bias" with "failure to agree with me completely".

But anyway, I found it an interesting read. Occasionally they'd point out some real example of BBC bias. More often it was an amusing way to read about a completely different view of the world.

All that changed a few months ago when Biased BBC introduced a new contributor called David Vance. Vance doesn't see the BBC as a generally reasonable organisation which exhibits occasional lapses of judgement. He sees it as a tool of the devil and find examples of left wing (oh, and pro-islamic) bias in everything that the BBC broadcasts. He is posting several entries a day, each one a foaming-at-the-mouth rant about the BBC. It's boring and depressing.

So that's why I've decided to stop reading the site. It went beyond parody and just became a waste of time. The site takes comments, so I've been tempted to get involved in discussions there occasionally, but looking at the opinions held by most of the contributors there, it would be a waste of everyone's time. They aren't going to listen to reason. They are happy to sit there with the veins in their neck throbbing away bashing out conclusive proof that everyone in the BBC is a potential terrorist who wants to implement shariah law in the UK.

It used to be good fun, but now it's just dull.

Can someone please let me know when it goes back to how it used to be?

June 09, 2008 12:40 PM

apt-get install re2c libc6-dev gcc make

loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::Rule2XSBody

femme:/etc/logcheck# sa-compile
[18741] info: generic: base extraction starting. this can take a while...
[18741] info: generic: extracting from rules of type body_0
100% [===========================] 3293.83 rules/sec 00m00s DONE
100% [===========================] 650.12 bases/sec 00m01s DONE
[18741] info: body_0: 647 base strings extracted in 2 seconds
[snip compiler output]
make install
Files found in blib/arch: installing files in blib/lib into architecture dependent library tree
Installing /var/lib/spamassassin/compiled/3.002004/auto/Mail/SpamAssassin/CompiledRegexps/body_0/body_0.so
Installing /tmp/.spamassassin18741hDrlUQtmp/ignored/man/man3/Mail::SpamAssassin::CompiledRegexps::body_0.3pm
Writing /var/lib/spamassassin/compiled/3.002004/auto/Mail/SpamAssassin/CompiledRegexps/body_0/.packlist
Appending installation info to /var/lib/spamassassin/compiled/3.002004/perllocal.pod
cp /tmp/.spamassassin18741hDrlUQtmp/bases_body_0.pl /var/lib/spamassassin/compiled/3.002004/bases_body_0.pl
cd /
rm -rf /tmp/.spamassassin18741hDrlUQtmp

Can't locate Mail/SpamAssassin/CompiledRegexps/body_0.pm in @INC

June 09, 2008 09:39 AM

All these years I thought I could not stand Gin. Not so any more. It turns out it’s actually the Tonic water that so violently disagree with me. Gin, a twist of lime, and lemonade or coke is really quite enjoyable. Who would’ve thunk it?

June 08, 2008 05:35 PM

We've acquired a cat. My step-daughter has come back from university bringing a cat with with her. And we get to look after it while she goes off on a two-month world tour with her boyfriend. I have no objections to this at all. I like having a cat in the house. What has been particularly interesting is watching him trying to establish his place in the food chain. We have plenty of local wildlife.

On the first day that he started exploring beyond the back garden he met one of the local urban foxes. I'm not sure what the circumstances of the their meeting were. The first we knew of it, the cat was dashing into our garden with the fox in hot pursuit. The cat ran up a tree and the fox couldn't follow. I went out into the garden and the fox ran away. It took ten minutes to persuade the cat down out of the tree though.

A couple of hours later the cat managed to re-establish some kind of superiority. He brought in a mouse. Fortunately (for us, I mean, not the mouse) it was dead. I disposed of it.

So we've established that cats trump mice but foxes trump cats. This morning there was an altogether more interesting contest. I was still in bed when I heard the cat flap open. Shortly afterwards there was an unearthly screaming from the kitchen. I was dispatched to investigate.

There was a cat vs squirrel fight going on under the kitchen table. And it was really hard to see who was winning. The cat obviously had the weight advantage, but the squirrel had the speed and agility. And the aforementioned screaming which seemed to be putting the cat off a bit.

I closed the kitchen door and opened the back door to ensure that if the fight moved elsewhere, it would be in the right direction. But neither of them showed any inclination to go back into the garden. Until suddenly the squirrel decided to make a break for it through the (closed) window. He sat on the radiator beneath the window scratching frantically at the glass. The cat sat on the floor watching. I grabbed a tea towel, wrapped the squirrel in it and threw it out the back door, where it picked itself up and made a sharp exit up a tree.

I went back to survey the damage. I was dreading finding the floor covered in squirrel poo or something like that. But I was spared that. I did, however, have to wipe rather a lot of squirrel blood off of the radiator. It seems the cat did more damage that I had first assumed.

Squirrels are just rats with good PR. They deserve anything the cat can give them. I just wish he didn't bring the fights indoors.

June 06, 2008 09:40 AM

I've just been looking at Thunderbird 3.0Alpha and it cant sent email when smtp login is required and 'secure authentication' is selected... wtf!

Many people will jump and point out that smtp isnt meant to be a secure transport, however since pretty much everyone supports secure logins these days and smtp-over-tls or ssl, and many mta's using secure transport, it can be atleast semi secure. Specially within mail domains that one might be able to influence. So whats the deal with Tb3.0 ?

Agreed, its an Alpha release and they might get it resolved before release.....

- KB

June 05, 2008 10:53 AM

In my recent post about online advertising, I mentioned that I use Adblock Plus and Filterset.G. Ares writes in to say that Filterset.G is is deprecated and probably unmaintained, with the last update in March. Didn't know that!

Ares recommends EastList+EasyElement from this list, which I've switched to now. We'll see how it goes.

Contact me

June 05, 2008 10:29 AM

We were in York last weekend, so here are some quick reviews of some of the things we did. Only time to do half of them today. More tomorrow.

Galtres Lodge
The hotel we stayed in. It can't really be beaten for location. It's right in the centre of York less than five minutes walk from the Minster in one direction and the Shambles in the other. Location is about all it has going for it though. The room we had was very small and cramped. When we first arrived we thought it didn't have a toilet. Then we found it hidden in a cupboard. Had it cost us £50 or so a night we'd have been quite happy, but it was double that and not really worth it.

The Olde Starre Inn
Pretty much the first pub we came across and as it is the oldest pub in York we though we'd try it out. Not very impressed to be honest. It was a bit dingy and there was a strange smell. The selection of drinks was ok and the staff were friendly enough, but it didn't have much of an atmosphere. Of course that might be because we were there at about 5pm on a Thursday afternoon.

The Bengal Brasserie
We quite fancied an Indian on our first night. The sign in the window said that this place had been listed as one of the thirty best curry houses in the UK. The award was in 2005. Things have obviously changed a bit. It wasn't the worst curry we'd ever had, but I'm sure there were far better places to go.

The Old White Swan
We thought we were going for a quite drink. Then we saw the band setting up in the corner. Turned out it was a jazz band. Not a bad jazz band all in all, but we left when they started getting their mates up out of the audience to sing. It felt a bit like we were intruding on a private party. The pub seemed nice though. And their sausage selection looked very impressive. We would have gone back to try some if we hadn't discovered the Guy Fawkes Inn.

National Railway Museum
Does exactly what it says on the can. Lots and lots of railway engines in a couple of huge rooms. And it's free to get in, so you can't say you don't get your money's worth. We spent an enjoyable hour or so there. They have a "Yorkshire Eye" there too. We didn't bother with that.

St William's Restaurant
We had a very nice lunch in the restaurant at St William's College, which is attached to York Minster. Had it been just a little warmer, we would have sat out in the courtyard, which looked like a really nice place to spend an hour or so.

Richard III Museum
This was one of the highlights of the weekend. The tiny museum is in one of the gatehouses in the city wall. It's a really strange museum, mainly because it doesn't have any exhibits. Mostly, it consists of a load of posters on the wall which explain why you shouldn't believe a word you read in Shakespeare's play. It's obviously a passion of the chap who set it up. On the day we went, he was manning the shop and was very pleased when my wife bought most of the stock to use as material in English lessons.

York Minster
Of course, no visit to York would be complete without a visit to the Minster. We bought the "see everything" ticket, which was cheaper than usual as the Treasury was closed for maintenance. Our ticket included a visit to the tower which involved climbing 275 steps up a really narrow spiral staircase. I'm glad I did it, but I won't bother again. By the time I got to the top I was too knackered to really appreciate the view.

Guy Fawkes Inn
I didn't know that Guy Fawkes was born in York. Apparently this is the house where he was born. It's right in front of the Minster and therefore only a few minutes walk from our hotel. Once we discovered this place we didn't visit any other pubs. It had a really nice atmosphere, very friendly and helpful staff, a decent selection of drinks and great food. I can't really think of any way it could have been improved. Oh, and it's a hotel too. So you can actually stay in the room where Guy Fawkes was born. Room 10, I'm told.

June 04, 2008 01:57 PM

Finishing the reviews of things we did in York last weekend.

The Biltmore
Had a bit of a lucky escape here, to be honest. We walked past one lunchtime and it looked nice so we went in and booked a table for that evening. It took them ages to find someone who knew how to take our booking and we were on the verge of walking out. When we got there in the evening, it was completely different. It was like the set of Footballers' Wives - full of really tacky and loud people desperately trying to impress each other. Not our kind of place at all. We changed our mind and walked out.

Four High Petergate
Having walked out of the Biltmore, we went here instead. And we were so glad that we did. This was exactly our kind of restaurant. Top quality modern British food served by knowledgeable and friendly staff. The place just exudes class from the second you walk in. It's apparently a hotel too. We'll definitely consider staying there the next time we're in York.

Jorvik
It's over thirty years since I was last in York. And Jorvik wasn't there then, so I really wanted to go to see it. It was ok. I suppose that when it first opened it was revolutionary. But I've been on so many "dark rides" that they stop being exciting. I thought it was quite expensive for what it was. It would have probably seemed better value for money if we had spent more time in the bits of the exhibition after the ride. But it was quite crowded so we wanted to get out pretty quickly.

York Castle Museum
This was a bit of a spur of the moment thing. We saw the signs as we came out of Jorvik so we decided to have a look. And I'm really glad that we did. We spent about half an hour in Jorvik and for a pound less we spent about two hours in the castle museum. I particularly enjoyed their Sixties exhibition.

Wilde's
Nice little wine bar that we went into for lunch. Particularly enjoyable plate of nachos.

El Piano
Very interesting restaurant that we popped into for a quick bite before going off to the concert on Saturday evening. Almost like a tapas approach - all the food turns up on small wooden boats - but completely vegetarian. Another place where we would have spent more time had we discovered it earlier.

The Black Dyke Band
This was completely unplanned, but on our first evening wandering round the city we saw a poster advertising the Black Dyke Band playing in the Minster on Saturday night. It's not really my kind of music but I thought that we couldn't turn down the opportunity to see one of the world's best brass bands in such a great venue. We managed to get restricted view tickets for a tenner each. The concert was largely enjoyable - although we both agreed that it could have been a piece or two shorter. I was surprised at how much of the material was classical pieces. I didn't realise there was such a bit crossover between brass bands and symphony orchestras.

York Art Gallery
It was raining heavily on Sunday morning, so to kill a couple of hours before our train left we decided to wander round the city art gallery. Unfortunately, it was the kind of art gallery that takes about half an hour to see. There was a big Stubbs exhibition on, which would have been great if you like Stubbs - which I don't. There was an interesting exhibition about political cartoons and some nice stuff about still lifes. But it didn't engage our attention for long enough so we ended up back in the Guy Fawkes Inn.

June 04, 2008 01:54 PM

I've just heard that my current contract won't be extended when it finishes at the end of this month.

So if you are looking (or know someone who is looking) for a half-decent Perl, Unix, database contractor then please let me know.

June 04, 2008 01:08 PM

I got this message in my feed reader this morning. It seems the BBC have moved the RSS feed for the "Documentary Archive" podcasts. The lame thing is, with a single line in their web server config, they could make this move completely seamless. Worse yet, when you follow that link there's nothing on the page called "Documentary Archive". Duh!

Contact me

June 04, 2008 09:53 AM

June 03, 2008 02:41 PM

I haven't seen online ads since about 1995, when HotWired first pioneered annoying, animated banners that detracted from the content. Initially I was using hacks like hosts files and the like, then I started using Craig's Squid-based blocker until these days I use a combination of Adblock Plus, Filterset.G and some Greasemonkey scripts to block some of the more annoying inline ads. Any time an ad gets around these filters, I quickly squish it because I've got used to viewing content without distracting, annoying crap flashing near what I'm trying to read.

Now I'm on the other side of the fence, and we're advertising through some of these ad networks and I've had to test view some of it. First of all, I'm staggered at how intrusive they've become. On some sites like NineMSN, they overlay animations over the actual content! Unbelievable and I'm amazed anyone uses sites that do that kind of thing. Mainstream sites still even use pop-ups and pop-under crap?!?!? I can't believe audiences don't go out of their way to work out how to block all this.

It's quite remarkable how useless the ads are in delivering a valuable audience. I guess it's not particularly surprising. If you're reading about the cyclone relief effort in Burma, you're hardly going to click on an advert for, say, a car. It's a drive-by impression, with similar brand-building impact to a billboard or a display ad in a newspaper.

What's more, the publishers don't help themselves by even further devaluing their impressions. Fairfax sites reload every five minutes, so if someone walks away from their computer, it happily counts impressions with nobody home to see it. That makes me very suspicious of their impression counts. I can't believe the publishers could be so stupid. Google changed the nature of this business by delivering benefits for everyone: advertisers and advertisees, which is why they're make kongbucks. Seems the dead tree purveyors, and those apeing them, haven't worked that out.

So apart from a very cheap (and it would want to be, given the publishers' efforts to devalue the product) brand building exercise, I don't really see the point of display advertising on content sites. It's generally not that relevant, not particularly targetted, and doesn't deliver.

Search engine marketing, however, is gold. I don't filter out ads next to Google searches because they're often actually what I want! If you type in "Marrickville plumber", the ads actually show better results for local plumbers than the search engine results. Everyone wins! If someone clicks on your ad, they're actually very likely to be wanting what you're selling. But it seems the publishers don't understand that to be successful, they need to find a way to make their advertisers successful.

Finally, we're seeing some rather nasty behaviour. The ad network we're using is reporting about 30% more clickthroughs (as recorded by the publishers) than we're seeing actually arrive at the landing page. They claim this is a fairly normal rate. What's going on here? Click fraud?

Contact me

June 03, 2008 11:56 AM

I really think that the term "Systems Administration" needs to go away. Use Systems Integrator, Systems Engineer (or Systems Reliability Engineer if you're Google) or some other term that more accurately represents the role.

I know there has been a lot of discussion about DSL's and Polyglot Programming around (eg http://ola-bini.blogspot.com/2008/05/new-hope-polyglotism.html), but I know that good Systems Engineers regularly context switch between different DSLs (config file syntax, puppet) languages (shell, batch, sed, awk, perl, python, ruby, powershell).

From my own experience I might be debugging a core dumping application using gdb, then swapping puppet update something, followed by a dash of shell, a sprinkling of graphing in gnuplot (or gruff and ruby), then some Java. I don't think the word administration even comes close to explaining that.

I don't hear the term "Operator" in common usage for Systems Engineer, and I'd like to see Administrator go the same way. If you're recruiting for people think about the fact that words are powerful, think about the role and what it involves, then see if you feel that Administrator is the word you'd choose to fit that.

If you don't know what your friendly neighbourhood Systems Integrator does, ask her if she would mind you shadowing for a day, if you're developing you probably will learn a lot about how to write applications that are supportable just from understanding the pain points of debugging with just a log file!

June 01, 2008 02:46 PM

The Same origin policy ensures that your browser won't load files from sources other than the original source of the loading file. It's vital to help prevent cross-site scripting attacks, but a bit annoying when you're working to draft AJAX responses.

One way around this is to run a web server on your local machine. There's lots of circumstances where this isn't ideal though, such as on an underpowered Windows piece of crap like I use at work.

Fortunately, Firefox has an option that helps get around this. I didn't find it when searching for "Disable same origin policy", so hopefully this blog post will help future seekers.

The Firefox option security.fileuri.strict_origin_policy allows local files to bypass the same origin policy. Yay!

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May 30, 2008 09:40 AM

I've used eBay for a very long time. Since it was first launched in Australia, I think. They had got the balance between buyers and sellers right. Recent changes of policy have forced me to think about whether or not I'll use it in future. I've decided that I won't.

They now require that you offer Paypal as a payment option, and will soon make it the only payment option. Paypal is not a bank, so your money is not guaranteed against failure of the institution. Paypal's dispute resolution procedures are opaque and poorly-implemented. Getting Paypal to connect with your bank account is a tedious, multi-day process that often fails. I refuse to use Paypal.

The recent changes to the feedback system also, I believe, skew things in favour of sellers too far.

Online auctions are really useful ways to buy and sell stuff, and you can often pick up real bargains. Conversely, when selling some people will end up paying RRP or more for used goods, which makes it great if you're selling. Now to find an alternative venue.

Any suggestions? I've found OZtion a bit crap.

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May 27, 2008 09:50 AM