Category Archives: Writing

Writing

Using Internet Explorer ? Switch Browser Now!

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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!

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How Depressing

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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..

Go Anne!

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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! 🙂

Cartoon of Anne McDonald as Mona Lisa from her website.

Book Meme

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Seeing as everyone else on PLOA is doing it.. 🙂

Instructions:

  • Grab the nearest book.
  • Open it to page 56.
  • Find the fifth sentence.
  • Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
  • Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

So here’s mine:

This was spotted quickly, and a patch was shipped, but almost a hundred U.S. government systems in Germany were using unlicensed copies of the software and didn’t get the patch, with the result that hackers were able to get in and steal information, which they are rumoured to have sold to the KGB.

That’s from “Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems” (second edition) by Ross Anderson. I’m on page 76 of 891..

It’s the only book I have with me here for SC08 in Austin, Texas, so you can’t say I rigged it! 🙂

Patent Trolls Attack OpenMoko Project

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It appears that the patent trolls Sisvel are attacking the OpenMoko project, and as part of their strategy the project has chosen to pull all of their downloads whilst they remove any support for MP2 and MP3 files.

The short story is that we are in a protracted battle with some patent trolls. Google for Sisvel. In order to get ourselves in a stronger position, we want to make sure no copies/instances/whatever of patent-infested technologies like MP2 and MP3 exist on our servers. Our phones never shipped with end-user MP3 playback features, but we want to use this opportunity to make sure it’s not even in some remote place somewhere.

As Sisvel aren’t the only ones to sue over MPEG related patents (( note that Microsoft won on appeal very recently, reversing the decision )) it really does bring the message home that MPEG is not a safe technology for audio files and that things like Ogg-Vorbis and FLAC are far better (and safer!) choices in the long run.

Dulce et Decorum

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Today is the 90th anniversary of the end of the First World War, a horrific slaughter of youth from across the world in the name of politics, alliances and patriotism.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
– Wilfred Owens writing from the front.

Lest we forget..

First Flight on an Airbus A380!

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Well I’m now in Los Angeles on my way to SC’08 in Austin, Texas and I’ve got a few minutes to blog about flying here on Qantas’s only A380 before crashing out (if you’ll excuse the pun).

First of all, boy is an A380 big! I’d seen a couple briefly at Singapore but always from a distance. This time seeing one close up at the gate at Tullamarine, next to a 747, really brought it down how big it is. As we were waiting to board a 737 trundled down the taxiway behind it looking for all the world like a toy. Photos will have to wait as I’ve forgotten my USB cable, d’oh!

OK – first for the good points:

  • Quiet – much quieter than a 747 or similar in the cabin!
  • Power sockets – standard Aussie ones, hidden down below the center armrest of the seat in front.
    Self service “bar” at the back of the plane with soft drinks, plenty of apples, snacks.
  • Wide-screen safety video. 🙂 What I mean is that even in economy you’ve got a widescreen aspect ratio LCD which looks very nice. It also works all the time, you don’t need to wait for the staff to turn on the entertainment system. This leads nicely on to..
  • Skycam! There’s a camera mounted at the top of the tail which provides streaming video that you can see from your LCD screen (in the “Information” menu section). It also shows how big the A380 is when you notice that it’s about level with the roof of the terminal buildings at Tullamarine! It’s impressive to watch during taxi, takeoff and landing and you even can get good views of sunset and sunrise when you cross the terminator going from Australia to the US. Very boring at night, no stars visible, just the flash of the navigation lights..
  • Seats in economy seem well built and nicely designed, and the screen is great.

Now the not so good bits:

  • Economy class seats don’t seem any larger than other planes (not that surprising I guess).
  • The network point in the seat doesn’t work – I could get a 100Mb/s link negotiated but nothing responded to DHCP and there were no packets at all visible. 🙁
  • Donna and I were seated on opposite sides of the isle in row 68, the staff reckoned that might be because that’s usually the back row in a 747 and they’re sets of two and we’d have been together in that configuration. On an A380 it’s 3-4-3 all the way back.
  • Donna’s seatbelt didn’t work. She noticed just before takeoff that it wasn’t keeping its tension and would just slack off if you pulled gently. Fortunately the middle seat in the row of 3 I was in was free.
  • Before Donna moved the sound stopped working on her entertainment system. So it did for a couple of other people and one person behind me had theirs lock up. Mine seemed to restart itself once when I was selecting a menu but otherwise worked OK. So obviously some teething issues around that.
  • When the cabin lights are right down for sleeping on a long haul flight you can no longer tell whether a toilet is occupied or not because the indicators aren’t lit! People resort to trying the handles all the time which is disconcerting if you’re in one..

So all in all an interesting experience, and if it wasn’t for the fact that I had terrible restless legs at one point I’d have slept a lot more than I did!

Qantas are apparently going to be taking delivery of a second A380 quite soon and are aiming for about 20 of them in the fleet all up.

Technology predictions

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I’ll add three to the ones that Stewart just posted:

  • Two years: The distinction between laptops, netbooks and mobile phones will get even more blurred with consumers demanding mobiles with more power and lighter and lighter laptops/netbooks;
  • Two years: Tivolised/Androidised Linux mobiles will grow, but there will be a few more open Linux phones around (mainly due to the convergence of mobiles, laptops and netbooks);
  • Five years: Peak oil will start to affect pricing of consumer electronics directly through raw materials.