The Musings of Chris Samuel

If you were fretting about the Ubuntu mirrors being so slow, remember that the installer defaults to using HTTP, rather than FTP.

• Download speed of KDE4.0.4 in hardy-backports from http://au.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ - 20KB/s.
• Download speed of KDE4.0.4 in hardy-backports from ftp://au.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ - 150KB/s
• Happiness at remembering old, forgotten protocols - priceless

Warning: download speeds can go down as well as up..

By Bruce Schneier:

You know you’ve got a problem when you can’t tell a hostile attack by another nation from bored kids with an axe to grind.

Also, on a crypto related humour note - The Traveling Cryptographer’s Problem, via Bart.

The OED has a spelling FAQ, so if you’re ever at a loss at whether it’s email, e-mail, Email or E-mail, then worry no more, the OED website says:

We recommend email, as this is now by far the most common form. If in doubt with other words, hyphenate - this is the most comprehensible form of such words.

That same section also has a page on how “ye” came about, and why it doesn’t mean “the”:

The use of ye for the, like the use of f for s, results from a misreading of old letter-forms, in this case the letter ‘thorn’ (for the sound ‘th’), which in its plain version looks like a p with the stem extended above the loop. ‘Thorn’ originated as a runic letter, and is still used in writing the Icelandic language.

Apparently it was mainly used to refer to more than one person as the subject of a sentence.

This is wonderful, look what the power behind the Microsoft sign is..

Via Groklaw’s newspicks..

As part of Adobe’s OpenScreen project to get Flash onto more devices they have just openly published the Flash 9 specification, with what appear to be no restrictions on their part (that I can see). The OpenScreen site seems to confirm it, listing their moves as:

• Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
• Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
• Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
• Removing licensing fees – making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

This is great news, suddenly Flash becomes an open standard and the projects to create open source viewers for it suddenly should have a lot of the information that they need. It doesn’t remove all the issues though, some of the codecs that can be employed are patented and can themselves attract licensing fees, but it does appear that they are not required (unlike OOXML, which requires MP3 for audio content for example). It also means that people wanting to implement open tools to create Flash content, or export to Flash, will have their job made a lot easier too.

Hats off to Adobe - better late than never!

Update: This also includes the FLV/F4V specification too!

Found via the ever excellent LWN..

Jon Oxer has a great blog on dealing with email, based on the idea of Inbox Zero from Merlin Mann.

He also links to a video recorded at a great talk Merlin did for Google, it’s an hour long but worth listening too - plus you’ll get an insight into working on the inside of Google from the questions at the end - it’s heartening to hear them complain about the same problems that affect us mere mortals.

CSIRO has developed a biodegradable plastic that’s made from wheat starch. They say:

The wheat starch plastic has similar properties to conventional plastic, but it will break down in the compost heap in 40 to 50 days.

They also claim that it won’t contaminate the food it holds, but I wonder if it is suitable for coeliacs given that wheat starch is known to contain residual gluten ?

(Hat tip to Jeremy for that).

At the ripe old age of 86 Humph has left the building..

The master of trumpets, wit and innuendo will no longer be hosting I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, leaving us ISIHAC addicts to ponder what will happen next ?

Perhaps the BBC will finally get around to publishing that final compendium of Mornington Crescent rules, which might finally bring together the warring standards bodies of the game in a mark of respect to its most notable (and knowledgeable) referee¹.

Humph could be surreal, rude, funny and incisive all in the same sentence. His wit, humour and timing was second to none and he will be very much missed.

Here’s to you Humph, don’t get caught in the Dollis Hill Loop..

1. it is, of course, sheer irony that the Wikipedia page for Mornington Crescent has part of its entry labelled as requiring citation; don’t these people listen to the wireless ? [back]

From Techdirt:

Playsforsure was so bad that Microsoft didn’t even use it for its own Zune digital media device. Along with that, Microsoft shut down its failed online music store, and now for the kicker, it’s telling anyone who was suckered into buying that DRM’d content that it’s about to nuke the DRM approval servers that let you transfer the music to new machines. That means you need to authorize any songs you have on whatever machine you want — and that’s the only place they’ll be able to reside forever. And, of course, any upgrade to your operating system (say from XP to Vista) and you lose access to your music as well.

So now you find out that with DRM you don’t really own the music you bought, it can get taken away from you very easily, but you won’t get your money back I bet!

So, I thought, I’ll test out the latest shinyness in btrfs on my old test box (an Olivetti Netstrada 7000) with 5 SCSI drives. But first, I’ll quickly upgrade to the latest development release of Ubuntu, Hardy Heron, to get the latest goodness of compilers, etc.

Except now my box won’t boot..

initrd extends beyond end of memory (0x0ffef173 > x01000000)

It looks like the kernel is getting the memory size wrong, but sadly even forcing it with the boot option mem=256M doesn’t do anything to fix it. Fortunately the kernel that comes with Gutsy still works on it..

Logged as bug #219868, but no response yet.

Update: This appears to be a bug from the mainline kernel, I’ve reproduced it with 2.6.25 and am in contact with the i386 boot code maintainer about it.