The Musings of Chris Samuel

Can we have a new pope please ? This one is broken..

Wow, this is really impressive. After reading this LWN article about Hv3, a Tk/Tcl based web browser I decided to give it a go and it’s just great. Lightweight and blindingly fast!

Now this is a browser that’s still in alpha, so expect odd behaviour and bugs, but it’s still remarkably useable. The biggest issue I’ve had with it in a few minutes of playing has been that it doesn’t support HTTP authentication but that just stops me testing it on a couple of sites at work.

Well done folks, keep up the good work!

Oh joy, the BBC is reporting…

Users of the world’s most common web browser have been advised to switch to a rival until a serious security flaw has been fixed.

It’s yet another security hole in Internet Exploder, this time a heap overflow that works against IE 7 as well as IE 6 and the betas of IE8.

It’s being actively exploited too (again from the Beeb):

As many as 10,000 websites have been compromised since last week to take advantage of the security flow (sic), said antivirus software maker Trend Micro.

I’m pretty sure the writer meant flaw, not flow..

Please use Firefox instead!

This is pretty neat, Breathing Earth is a flash based simulation of the real time statistics of births, deaths and CO2 emissions across the planet. You can mouse over countries to see how many people have died and been born whilst you’ve been watching, how much CO2 has been emitted and the rates.

It also has the per-capita emission numbers which are quite illuminating (especially if you listen to all this noise about getting India and China on board). So, for example, here are a few examples of the annual per capita CO2 emissions (in tonnes) of some countries:

USA : 19.66
Australia : 18.17
Japan : 10.1
UK : 9.23
France : 6.72
China : 3.7
India : 1.17

“We have ’survival’ emissions, you have lifestyle emissions.” – Shyam Saran, India’s envoy to the UN climate conference in Poznan, Poland

So the Labor Party has decided to set a measly 5% reduction in emissions by 2020. How pathetic. They say that they will consider going to 15% if everyone else cuts their emissions but given that we are one of the worst emitters per head of population that’s just not good enough.

What with this on top of their crazy Great Firewall of Australia internet censorship scheme I don’t think I’ll be able to vote for these people at the next election (and no, I’m not going to vote for the even worse opposition coalition).

Bah humbug..

After some discussion on the OpenMoko community list a couple of the OpenMoko folks created an official OpenMoko CafePress shop. They’ve got some fun stuff including a t-shirt and mouse mat that have the OpenMoko schematics on them as well as a CAD design shirt.

Here’s some good news, our good friend Anne McDonald has won the Personal Achievement Award in the 2008 Australian National Disability Awards! She was at the awards ceremony at the Federal Parliament in Canberra on the International Day of People with Disability to hear who’d won. The press release says:

Anne was born with cerebral palsy and at age of three was admitted to the St Nicholas Hospital state institution, unable to walk, talk or feed herself. Eventually Anne learnt to communicate by pointing to letters on an alphabet board and at 18 years old went to court to win her freedom from St Nicholas. She has since written a bestselling book, graduated from university with a Humanities degree and dedicated her life to advocating for the rights of people who can not talk.

But they don’t mention bungee jumping, Mona Lisa or a wicked sense of humour.. Well done Anne!

I’ve been playing with my new work laptop, a Dell E4200 (which I chose as I wanted something light) and thought I’d run Bonnie++ on my XFS /home partition on the SSD (a “SAMSUNG SSD Thin uSATA 128GB M” according to dmesg) to see how it compares to spinning disk. Here’s the results with Ubuntu Intrepid (8.10):

Version 1.03c       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
sys26            2G           68551  27 38896  23           90404  30  1356   6
                    ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
                    -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                 16   556   8 +++++ +++   679   7   605   8 +++++ +++   442   5
sys26,2G,,,68551,27,38896,23,,,90404,30,1355.6,6,16,556,8,+++++,+++,679,7,605,8,+++++,+++,442,5

real    3m56.775s
user    0m0.580s
sys     0m36.930s

So comparing with some old results on my home desktop system seems to show that the block I/O numbers are better, but the file manipulation stuff is much worse! Once I can get btrfs on here I’ll have to try again.

Putting this up on behalf of Peter Harms at La Trobe Uni, in case there are people on PLOA who might be interested. The text is all his I’ve just done the markup.

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For those who feel strongly about the brain dead government plan to break Australian Internet access through censorship and security theatre rather than following existing effective law enforcement methods GetUp is running a campaign against the proposed mandatory filtering of Internet access.