Bens Babblings

How to shop!

2010-12-01T13:58:00.002+11:00

Coming back to Australia after living in London for 7 years was an eye opener into tariffs and duties. Typically people tend to think of London as being very expensive, which it is, but what many people don’t realize is that Sydney is comparable, and for many things, even more expensive. The main reasons for the high cost of buying general retail goods in Australia are tariffs and duties, and it appears that people are generally ignorant about what they are and why they are in place, so I thought I'd write a quick post about it, not to explain all the economics behind it, but simply to point a few things out. This ignorance about tariffs was highlighted when I recently bought my Boxee box and read the outrage on their forums about the different costs of the unit all over the world. I’ll use the boxee box as an example for the confusion.

The boxee box was initially selling for $199 USD in the US, 199 pounds in the UK, and $300 AUD in Australia, to name just 3 of the discrepancies. The boxee forums were in an uproar, as very few people seemed to understand that you can’t just sell an item at the same price all over the world. I won’t go into the economics of it all, but basically every country has it’s own set of tariff’s, duties and taxes, for example the UK has VAT, Australia the GST, then you have the government trying to protect local industries in some cases incurring additional tariffs and the like to try and "level the playing field". Then you have shipping, which is relevant to a place like Australia and last but not least you have what the local market will bear, in the case of both the UK and Australia, they are both used to paying over the odds for the majority of “luxury” items bought, and thus distributors have learnt to take advantage of this and put an additional premium on top. This has reached a point where recently I was looking to buy some climbing gear from Wild Country. Wild Country is a welsh company, that manufactures locally. Amusingly the cost of their products at discounted stores in the UK, was still ~25% more expensive then going to online stores in the US. How’s that for duties and leveraging what the market will bear?

Ofcourse the solution to this is obvious to most people, buy it where it’s cheapest and then ship it to wherever you are! In most cases, for luxury goods, that means buy it in the US. Now interestingly, in Australia, unless something costs more then $1000AUD, you can bring it into the country without any additional taxes or duties, which in effect means that once you cross a threshold of cost where the savings from buying it in America plus the cost of shipping is less then buying it locally, you’re ahead. That mark is typically at around ~$130AUD, which ofcourse means that the majority of things that most people buy would be cheaper to buy from oversea’s. Now I’m hardly the first to note this, and thus enterprising individuals have started business models around this, for example check out www.myus.com, which gives members a US address (many US stores refuse to ship internationally, supposedly due to fraud issues, more commonly because they have agreements with their suppliers who want to ensure that their local distributors have the market cornered), will repackage all parcels, stripping unnecessary packaging, and then collate a number of parcels into one shipment all for express delivery leveraging their scale to get reduced rates from various couriers. All in all I’m absolutely astounded that more Australian’s don’t buy from oversea’s, I guess it’s just the relative lack of net savvy that pervades over here that is the cause, that and concerns around getting “support” for the product you buy in the event that there is a problem.

All of this has recently started to be brought to the attention of the public as local retailers are starting to complain about being unable to compete, and there is now a campaign underway to try and lower the threshold of where duties and tariffs are applied. My advice to anyone living outside of the US, buy what you're after sooner rather then later!

Is virus even the right term?

2010-10-11T13:58:00.001+11:00

I just (belatedly I know for the rest of the security industry, but I tend not to read things daily, but rather I batch my news so I get it a bit later then everyone else!) read about Stuxnet. The malware I mentioned a couple of months ago is the same thing, but now I have a name! This is some seriously impressive software. For those of you that don't know this has been linked to all kinds of conspiracy theories, from the US government writing it to sabotage Iranian nuclear power plants, right through to Israeli's attacking their neighbours. The best technical explanation I've found is over at Symantec or for an overview check out Schneier's blog. Whichever way you cut it, if you don't understand the technical breakdown, or simply can't be bothered reading it, trust me when I say it's a whole new level of malware. It's quite literally malware done right, and every single component of this thing has had a LOT of thought put into it.

Succinctly put!

2010-08-19T16:21:00.001+10:00

Just read a presentation that very succinctly put why I'm so pessimistic about security. Way too much press goes to the trivial, easy attacks with little to no sophistication. Ofcourse this by design as the professionals simply don't indulge in the type of behavior that makes script kiddies famous. About the only caveat I have to the presentation is that in most cases their success is predicated on one of two things, either having the talent in house to be able to break in, or access to specialized attack tool chains. It is possible, albeit not probable, that in some cases the in house talent might refuse (if they knew!) to break in on behalf of a nefarious entity. That's about the only hope you have against the real pro's.

Industrial Malware

2010-08-18T15:58:00.001+10:00

I just read an article over at cnet about malware that is targeted at major industrial infrastructure. In summary there are now virii / malware that is automating attacks against specific things like Oil drilling platforms and the like. I wonder if governments (and major companies) will get to the state that the benefits of having major infrastructure on the net are outweighed by the negatives.

Train Announcements

2010-08-12T12:07:00.001+10:00

Living in the UK for 8 years, specifically London, opened my eyes to train announcements. In fact Londoners take great pride in the nature of the quirky announcements that happen on the Underground ( Living in Ealing we had a particular announcer that loved the sound of his own voice and used to regularly entertain the entire station with his antics.) and there are many sites around that list some of the antics. For the sake of those with some interest here's a link that contain a few amusing ones.
Now I'm back in Australia and I'm wondering how Cityrail can have mismanaged the trains infrastructure such that it is impossible to even hear the announcements. I'm currently catching trains for ~2 hours a day and so each day I'm in a position to hear various announcements, some of them important (it seems fairly commonplace for trains in Sydney to have their destinations changed mid-route so that if you don't hear the announcement you can often be caught out!) and yet without fail, I've been unable to hear any announcements clearly. It seems that there are a few problems. Firstly the speaker volume on most of the trains is set so low that you'd need a bionic ear to hear a thing. Secondly, there aren't enough speakers around, and so unless you're near one of the few that is in working order, you're just SOL. Finally it would appear that Cityrail need to invest some money in public speaking classes for their train drivers as the majority of them seem to be intimidated by using the speaker and invariably mumble, rush and shorten what they are trying to say in an effort to have it done as quickly as possible. In 2010, surrounded by technology with technology playing an ever increasing role in our lives it's a little disconcerting to see that in some area's we still can't even get the ~60 year old technology implementation right.

New beginnings and old problems

2010-07-23T13:42:00.001+10:00

So it's been a while (again) since I wrote anything, and I felt that it was time that I had a look around at some of the other blogging software rather then continue to use the horrid wordpress that I had been running up till now. I've always been against using services on the net to host anything personal (i've always insisted on running my own email servers for example) but I've changed my mind when it comes to blogging. The main reason in this case is security, as trying to keep up with the slew of wordpress vulnerabilities was proving to be a full time job and one that I didn't have an interest in. On top of that, I'm a fan of googles work in a variety of area's and thought I'd give this a try, so here I am at my new blogging home on blogger.com. Hopefully the transition will be relatively transparent to most of you as I'll do a few technical things in the background.

I've been inspired to start writing again for a few reasons. Firstly I've just had about a year off from regular work and I'm feeling rested and fired up to get stuck into problems and generally start working again, which means that I start to think about more challenging things then "When will I get up?" and thus some of it might be of interest to a wider audience. The other reason is that a few friends are also starting to blog a bit and ask some questions that I have some interest in trying to answer, so the combination means I think I might, finally, start writing a bit more regularly again :)

Something I read recently amused me and served as a good example of what I've been warning my non technical friends about for years. I'm referring to the well publicized attack on twitter. This was something that passed my by until now because for starters I've been on sabbatical from all things security while I've been "off", and secondly because everytime I see the word "twitter" my mind tends to shut down and ignore everything it see's for the following 5 seconds. You could say I'm not really a big fan of the concept ;) Still I couldn't think of a better example as to why reusing the same passwords and security credentials across multiple sites is a bad idea then the linked article. If you want to avoid re-using credentials with your web related applications but don't trust your memory then consider the following steps.

Firstly go and get a decent password safe application. Once you've installed that, each time you are prompted for a password for an account somewhere, use the random generate password function and put that into the requested field. Now whenever you are prompted you can simply double click on the right entry in password save and it will then load the password into your copy and paste buffer for use.

Normally I wouldn't recommend the following, because it is a slight lessening of security, however, if you're using a lot of different accounts and you find it too onerous to use password safe to manage all of them, then try the following additional tip. Generally it's a bad idea to let your browser save passwords, however, if you have a mechanism of encrypting all of the passwords it saves, or it does it automatically for you like Firefox does, then configure a master password (using a random one from password safe) and let Firefox now save your password for each of the sites you go to. Now firefox will automatically fill in your username and password for any given site you go to, however, you will have some protection over the username and passwords being stored on your local computer (or where ever your firefox password repository resides).

Writing - the return!

2009-02-21T02:27:00.001+11:00

So another full year has passed and I note my previous decision to start to blog more frequently. Ofcourse equally obviously there hasn't been a post in that time frame, so much for good intentions.

This time around I'm not going to make any bold claims, but I'd like to get in the habit of writing an essay a month so I'll see if I can keep up with it. Perhaps sitting down and having to formulate an article or chain of thought will spur me on to write smaller snippets more suitable to a blog, we'll have to see.

art

2008-03-08T23:25:00.001+11:00

I stumbled across this article today. Definitely worth a read and it resonated very strongly with me. I can still remember arguing with my math teacher about the value of what we were being taught and how we were being taught. Actually I'd go so far as to say it sums up why I have a problem with our education system.

Upgrade path

2007-12-14T00:29:00.001+11:00

As most technologist will tell you, the first thing to do when you get a new gadget is to upgrade it to the latest software and bios version. So this was in my mind when I recently upgraded my phone to a new Nokia 6500 classic. I promptly downloaded the software to manage the phone and at the same time downloaded the software to update the phone itself. I started off by transferring the phone numbers on my old phone to it's sim card, then i put the old sim card into the new phone and moved the numbers from the sim to the new phone. Then I put the new sim in my new phone and moved the numbers from the phone to the sim card. My idea being that I prefer the numbers on the sim card rather then the phone in case something happens to it (reasoning that it is more likely the phone would get broken then the sim card inside of it, besides I'd be able to put the sim card in another phone and still have access to my numbers). So there I was with my new sim card in my new phone with all my numbers on it. At this point I decided to back up my phone using the supplied software from nokia. That done, I decided to try and finally fix all the spelling mistakes in my address book and update some numbers. I was a bit annoyed to discover that while the software on my computer was able to manage other aspects of my new phone just fine, when it came to getting the numbers out of it and allowing me to edit them on the software on my computer, it just wasn't working. There appeared to be some bug, so before I started to try and solve that I decided to upgrade to the latest version. Big mistake.
I downloaded the new software for the new phone and updated it. I once again tried to manage the names and numbers in the phone with the software on my computer only to find that the bug had persisted and in fact got worse. Now instead of seeing maybe 25% of the numbers that were in the phone, I could see 2. I decided to try and create a new number and push it to the phone to see if that would help. I promptly added a number and asked it to synchronize. Just as promptly the phone deleted ALL numbers on the phone and synchronized the new number. Annoyed but not panicked, I thought I'd simply restore from backup all of my numbers, because I realized at this point that by moving the numbers off my old sim to the new phone I had ofcourse deleted them from the old sim. The only copy of my numbers now resided in my back up of the phones configuration. Well I'm sure you can guess what happened then. I restored from backup but the bug seemed to have taken residence in no uncertain fashion and ate all of the numbers. When it was done restoring I had 2 numbers in the phone. Thanks Nokia, thanks very much.

If you're reading this please drop me a line with your contact details because chances are I don't have them any longer.

Spot the techie!

2007-11-29T02:35:00.001+11:00

Uncertain if the person in front of you is a techie masquerading as an investment banker or the real thing? Then I have the solution! Simply look at his cuffs. If he's got cuff links on, then he's not a techie but a real investment banker!

How do I know I hear you ask? Having just started at an investment bank and turned up fully suited for my first day, I was quite dismayed to find out how hard it is to type with cuff links on, they basically make it impossible to do any real computer work.

Economical media

2007-10-31T01:56:00.001+11:00

I recently decided to grow my movie collection buy purchasing all the old classic movies that I've wanted to watch on and off over the years but had never bought. I was spurred to do this because while looking around for a few things I'd noticed that the cost of dvds had fallen to ~5 pounds. So I dutifully hopped on my computer and went to play.com to start putting in a big order for all the classic movies. It was only because earlier in the day I'd inadvertently wandered through a HMV store and seen some sale dvds for 4.99 that I thought I'd quickly check their website as well. Much to my surprise, pretty much EVERY movie I checked was cheaper on HMV then play! Now let me put that in perspective for those readers that don't really know the two companies involved. Play was a company setup in Jersey because of it's tax breaks when selling to the UK mainland. As a result they were able to offer incredibly cheap prices on cds / dvds that I don't think it's too far to say, probably led the charge in lowering prices on the high street. HMV on the other hand is the polar opposite, it's the largest dvd / cd selling in the UK with stores on all the high streets and, till recently, high street prices. It gives you an idea of how far things have changed when a company like Play can't beat HMV on price.

Keeping things cold

2007-10-30T23:37:00.001+11:00

After almost 5 years living in England you'd think that I'd be used to all the little differences here from back in Australia, however, even after all this time there are some things that still have the ability to wind me up and cause me to shake my head. One I just ran into again was trying to buy a cold drink.

I accept that growing up in Australia my perspective is a bit borked, after all most Australians are taught at a young age that if you get something out of the fridge, you use it, then put it straight back as it's too hot to leave anything out for too long. That aside though europeans (it's not just the Brits that suffer from this) have real issues at the other extreme. For some reason, I'd guess it was initially to save on power or perhaps floor space, shopkeepers over here have traditionally decided to not buy refridgerators, but rather, to buy "cool shelves". This idea was questionable at it's inception but certainly after I'd guess 50 odd years of evolution has now reached a state of complete and utter uselessness. For those of you that don't know what a cooling shelf is, it is much like a fridge, but sawn in half and with the cooling element at the base rather then behind. The result is a completely open air contraption that tries to cool from the bottom. Now physics aside about hot air rising and all that, it's curious that the concept of keeping a static amount of air in place and cooling it to a set temperature seems to have escaped my european brethren, and not surprisingly the cooling shelves have a net effect of, IF you're lucky, lowering the temperature of items placed in them by about 1 degree. Unfortunately the state of most cooling shelves is fairly abysmal, most are broken and filthy, few actually work as they should at the best of times. What's the issue I hear many euro readers thinking, well the issue my friends is that it doesn't COOL the damn drinks!

The issue with temperature is not limited to drinks though. It was with initial surprise, followed by amusement and then outright incredulity that I met the assertion that Air Conditioning is bad and makes you sick. As every Australian knows, life without AC in Australia is unbearable, trying to work in stifling heat is just a nightmare, yes now and again if you're in the habit of walking in and out of AC'd buildings hundreds of times in a day, and you're run down, and you're stressed and the first 4 moons of gemini align, you might get sick from the temperature changes. Yes it's also possible that you can get outbreaks of legionaires disease and a few other air bourne nasties, but given that a large chunk of the worlds working population in the first world works in Air Conditioned buildings, it seems a little far fetched to think that they are a death trap, talk to the average european though and you'll get a completely different picture. Almost without exception every european I've met, when the subject of AC comes up, they cross themselves to ward off the devil and start swapping stories about how one of their friends got sick from it (almost how aussies swap stories about how close they've come to being attacked by a shark / croc). Try to point out that they might be exaggerating the risks or that AC is actually good, and you're immediately excommunicated from the conversation, but back to my drink.

Now again I can only assume that in the past europe was actually a REALLY cold place, so cold in fact that inside a store, on a cooling shelf without real refridgeration it was reasonable to expect things to be kept at 4 degrees. I'm dubious that this was ever the case but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt (I don't know too many shops that don't run a heater inside the store during Winter). That was the past, possibly, now though I can assure you that most of Europe and certainly not many parts of London actually even get that cold let alone consistently. Instead, like today, it was about 15 degree's and I was after a cold drink. I walk into the local store and low and behold all their drinks are actually HOTTER then room temperature as their cold shelves don't work and they've got a heater going in the store. It took me going to about 4 local shops before I found one that actually had a fridge and consequently was able to serve me a drink that was cold. Europeans are a worried lot, they are panicking about global warming more then most other groups of people, now I understand why, it's going to be damn hard to get a cold drink in this part of the world in the future.

Recruiters and the job hunt

2007-10-11T00:26:00.001+10:00

The last two weeks since I've come back from Italy have seen me spending the majority of my time looking for a new job. This in turn has meant that I've spent the majority of my time each day chatting to recruiters. It's funny what proximity will do for perspective, normally recruiters are reviled by most people and while I have my issues with them, which I'll deal with later, on the whole I mostly feel sympathy for them right now, let me explain.
Currently most of my effort is going towards getting into the financial sector, in particular investment banks. Now investment banks typically have a fairly hefty dose of self importance at the best of times, but when it comes to recruiters I get the impression that they basically think of them as being scum. It's an unfortunately reality that most people, at least in IT, think of recruiters as scum and when you combine IT, with investment bank attitude you end up with no respect for the recruiter. What I've discovered is that it directly effects me. An example of this is where I'll get contacted about a role. The recruiter will go through it with me, come to the conclusion that I'm perfect for the role and put me forward. At this point the recruiter tells me that they normally hear back within 2 days whether the company will want an interview. Two days go by and the recruiter contacts me, telling me that he's talked to the HR department of the company and they are busy, "you know still sub prime fallout", and that they'll review my CV in the next two days and get back to him. Two days go by and the recruiter contacts me and tells me that HR are still busy and .... you see the pattern. The problem is that the poor recruiter has to deal with me calling him up asking what the status is, has he really put my CV forward, why haven't we heard anything back, is it really HR and not someone technical reviewing my CV etc. At the same time the recruiter is strung along by the bank giving him false information which they, unbeknowingly, pass on to me causing me in turn to get frustrated. All in all it's hard not to have some sympathy for the recruiters, they cop it from both sides and generally don't get much respect. Of course there is the flip side as well.
I understand that recruiters are not technical people, and that HR at the company you're applying to is equally not technical, but you'd think if it was your job to assess people with a certain skillset that you might learn how to do it with some level of accuracy, after all it helps everyone involved. You can imagine my surprise then when time after time I have to sit there and explain that I do know how to install linux right after I've explained that I'm a linux developer. You can view my resume here and see if it comes across as someone who has little to no knowledge about unix or security. In the last 2 weeks I've had to create 5 versions of my CV to "emphasize" different aspects of CV so that it will get past the recruiter / HR filters before going to someone that will actually understand it. Emphasizing sounds reasonable enough, until you realize what this actually entails is not rewriting it with a particular focus, nothing so complex! No, emphasizing simply means replace all occurances of "implement" with "build" because the client wants to know that you can build a linux box. Another tip for recruiters or HR is to google your candidates. If you're going for a serious IT role, by serious I mean any role that involves you having years of experience or a senior level of understanding, then googling their name will turn up hits on them, from emails they've written to mailling lists through to articles that they've published on different topics. If there isn't any hits, then you should be concerned, of course on the flip side if there is then it's a good indication that they are the real deal and not making up their skillset. Finally something that I understand but that annoys me is the insistance of people asking "so what was your package in your last job?". Frankly what relevance does this have if the recruiter / HR department is doing their job properly? What they use it for is to get a base from which to judge what kind of salary they should offer you for the role you are going for. Funnily enough it was my understanding that HRs point in life was to assess peoples suitability for a role, on the assumption that they are suitable then they are worth what the budget for the role is worth.

Cats

2007-10-04T03:02:00.001+10:00

For a while now I've wanted a pet, but given the fact that I'm living on a visa in a "foreign" country, it never seemed to be a good time. Well I finally got sick of it never being a good time and decided to just deal with the issues as they arose and bought a cat. To be precise I bought an absolutely gorgeous Russian Blue female 14 weeks old kitten. Mysha (or Myshka still trying to decide), is absolutely amazing, in all my life I've never seen a cat like her. She is so affectionate it's crazy, doesn't bite or scratch, eats well, uses the litter tray, has no "accidents", doesn't keep me up too much and is all around just great. After chatting to a number of breeders I've decided that I will get another kitten as 2 cats are no harder to look after then just 1 and will keep each other company. For the second cat I've decided on an Egyptan Mau. Some good pictures of them can be found at this link. I've decided on a silver spotted male and have one lined up for the end of the month. I guess I won't be getting much sleep for a while!

In other news Kasia and I have decided to move in together and have just made an offer on a new place in Ealing. Hopefully we'll get that and move around the end of this month. Finally less noise and a nicer place!

Spam

2007-09-12T11:37:00.001+10:00

Lots of people I know get really worked up about spam. For a long time I have to admit that I didn't get much spam, which was a bit odd really, given that for a very long time various email addresses of mine have been all over the net, still I guess I used to be a lot more careful about joining lists or the like. Now for the last 5 years or so I've been getting a lot of spam, the funny thing is though that it doesn't really bother me. Like anyone I do resent the time lost having to scan my emails, check the senders address and the subject (that's about all it takes for me to classify something as spam, since most of the mails I get are either tagged by a list or by a sender known to me) and delete the spam, but I can't help but feel that is just the way things are and in a funny kind of way, as it should be. I think the heart of my view on spam is quite simple and I feel logical. The Internet is a PUBLIC network. Think about that for a moment, it means that anyone has the right to use it. If you run a service on a public network, that implies that the public are allowed to use that service. So when I put it in those terms to myself I see no problem with people sending me email, as after all it's a service running on a public network, if I didn't want random public people to try and use it then I shouldn't be running it should I? Interestingly this ties into another argument that I've had over the years with various government agency types about different computer crime laws that was best summarized by me stating that if the law required you to have prior consent to making any changes to a system, then email would break that law and the smiling government agency person saying "I know, thus I can pull you in any time I want Ben for breaking the law". I finally realized then WHY they left the wording like they had. Still this is just one half of my thoughts on spam, the other half is the side of me thats job it is to stop such things.
When you work in security as long as I have you come to realise that there are very few ways, if not none, to stop someone determined enough doing something in the virtual world. I always put myself in the shoes of the spammers and thought "how would I bypass any anti-spam mechanism?" and in almost every case I could think of a way past it. Thus this article resonated with me quite strongly and made me smile. I'd like to think that there is at least a part of me that doesn't like beating my head against a brick wall.

It's all about HOW you think!

2007-08-15T23:17:00.001+10:00

I remember when I first started to play chess seriously I spent many hours reading all kind of books on every aspect of the game. One of the things that struck me when I read it was a study about Grand Masters (people that have achieved a coveted title for their prowess in the professional chess world) and other players. The common thought before this study was that GM's somehow just "saw" a lot further then anyone else did in the same position. That is that there were able to evaluate say 50 positions in a second rather then 3 or 5 that a normal player could. What the study proved through a variety of methods was that in fact that is completely untrue, a GM can see or evaluate slightly more positions then a rank amateur per second, but an identical amount to that of any semi serious club chess player or above. So what was the difference? It turned out it was simply HOW they evaluated the positions. A GM will simply only consider lines (lines is a synonym for "possibilities" in chess lingo) that are strong, whereas a normal club player will often consider moves that are quite simply much weaker. In other words the GM is able to achieve more with an identical amount of processing power because of HOW they think. I never thought of this being relevant in IT until I read this comment.

Survival

2007-08-10T10:55:00.001+10:00

Today there was a lucky american tourist with a camera on safari, he managed to catch this amazing footage, showing survival at it's best. Check it out here.

Porn

2007-08-10T08:14:00.001+10:00

I read a very interesting blog recently about the observations of a female clerk in a video store that had a porn section. It was really quite an interesting read on a number of levels, firstly it was an insight into the female perspective of porn, something that I don't often get much of an insight into. The author has quite a humorous style which helps with such a topic, but also some very interesting insights into porn, it's role and it's downsides in society. Unfortunately I can link directly to the section in question, but if you click on this link and scroll to the entry labelled "Men and Women and Porn" you'll see what I consider to be one of the better explanations of porn and it's usage and the differences of perspective between sexes.

On an unrelated note but still in the realm of things you don't talk about in polite company here is a list of swear words as sorted by the British publics impression of how offensive they are and what's more they have the same swear words ranked over time! Check it out here.

a giant leap for mankind

2007-08-07T11:01:00.001+10:00

Well I just finished watching 2001: A space odyssey again and as usual it left me thinking. One part of my thought process I'll sit down to write soon, was about the paucity of decent movies coming from Hollywood (everywhere?) in recent times, but the other was about the future and our achievements.

When I look back at the last 100 years or so, I can almost mark every 15 years by something completely revolutionary coming along. Machine guns, Airplanes, Atomic bombs, space flight, television and so on it goes, and then I look at what my generation has contributed and I'm starting to run out of contributions. It seems that what my generation is particularly good at is refining everything else, we take something and we just refine it, so much so that in some fields you could even argue that it is refined so far past it's original inception as to almost be a massive jump, but still, it doesn't feel like it. Maybe it's just my ignorance on matters, but it really does seem that we, as a generation have stopped taking giant leaps, or even looking in many cases. Is it really the case that we have taken all the large steps that can be taken? Is there really no more massive leaps that can be found, are all the advances that are to be made in our society from here on in to be made incrementally? It's feasible I suppose, but it doesn't sound likely to me. So I wonder what am I missing, where have we been making the giant steps? Or have we, as I suspect, not been making any for some time? What causes such a gap in our technological (or otherwise) evolution? When we will once again be driven forwards in all the disciplines of our society by visionaries who look beyond our current limitations. People that aren't afraid to challenge Einstein's theories because they're Einsteins (ok yes it's not that simple, his theories stand because either they are correct, or we simply can't disprove the hypothesis, but I often feel people don't even TRY). I'm looking forward to our next giant leap for mankind.

Privacy and darknets

2007-08-01T11:03:00.001+10:00

Today I've spent most of the day researching darknets and the technologies that enable them. Long since gone is the environment in which the original napster was created and now, in these days where the RIAA and it's ilk are constantly suing people the geeks have been brought out in force to combat them. The plethora of available technologies is fairly intimidating, even for a geek like myself it took a number of hours to read up on all the different protocol specs and get to the hard facts about various implementations and the real pro's and con's of each. The question I imagine most of the non geeks ask, is why bother? Bruce Schneier wrote this essay which I think fairly well elucidates why privacy is important to me. I often find myself holding views that are fairly unconventional and in many situations that can actually be a serious hazard to my health, but most importantly it impacts HOW I think. If we are all concerned about how our own thoughts, words or expression could be misused or interpreted then the very fabric of freedom is torn asunder. So I'm going to build myself a darknet, if you're interested you can see my thoughts on what i've read here.

Do you want some more?

2007-07-31T07:53:00.001+10:00

A few weeks ago I read this interesting article. What I liked about it was not that it just summed up my feelings about giving aid to the third world, but that it was also from a native and it had a solid logic reasoning. How long do we (I'm using "we" in the first world sense) have to keep giving "aid" to the third world with no difference in the long term outcome before we start to question what we are doing? The charitable side of me would like to think that we keep giving aid in the same way because even though we realize that we are only helping some people directly and in the short term it's better then nothing, isn't it? My cynical side suggests that it's because it's easy to give money and wash our hands of the problem having assuaged our guilt. Of course why we feel guilty about it is a whole different debate ....

Back in the flow

2007-07-31T04:05:00.001+10:00

Well after spending the last few months sitting around gaming and watching various movies I'm now, finally, back in productive mode. So for those of you who are subscribed to my blog be prepared for a lot more posts!

While I'm on the subject a lot of people have expressed interest in what my plans are at this point. Basically I'm going to make a concerted effort (no, really!) to get a job this week. If I don't look like I'm getting somewhere by the end of the week I'm going to take some more time off and go to Germany for a language course, then come back and continue to look. It's a source of amusement for me that now when I've decided to go contracting some really tempting permanent roles have been shown to me, one of them that might involve moving to NY at some point. While I've said I'm going contracting, and I intend on doing so at this point, I won't disregard these interesting roles. I'll keep you all posted.

Resignation

2007-06-01T22:56:00.001+10:00

Well this is a much belated post that I told myself I'd write in the immediate days following my resignation from Betfair while I had nothing to do at work. As it turned out though I was flat chat in the following week and since then have been on "garden leave", that is paid to be at home and consequently not that interested in writing blog entries :)

Betfair was the longest I've ever been in a job and was certainly the job I've enjoyed the most in all my career. I think in retrospect that I was very fortunate to get the manager I did who understood precisely how to manage people like me and by and large just let me get on with things. Of course it was also important that some of the most interesting and talented people I've ever had the pleasure to work with were also at Betfair and it was probably that fact that kept me there so long. That said it is time for a change, Betfair has run out challenges for me and after talking about it for seven odd years I've finally decided to go contracting. Part of the delay on that front is that it was non trivial here in the UK to organize my visa such that I was able to contract, but now I have a HSMP visa which allows me to do that there was nothing stopping me. So after a month or so off, I'll be joining most of the ex pats here in London and joining the contract market.

Farewells always seem slightly odd to me, I've never really understood the need for them that well. I'll keep in touch with the people that I want to and for those that I don't want to well I don't really care what they think anyway so a farewell just seems redundant, if you'll pardon the pun :) When I expressed that opinion though to some of the guys at work I was told that the farewell leaving drinks is actually not for me but for others, apparently they still need an excuse to go out and have a few drinks, so not wanting to be a party pooper I'll organise something shortly and see how that ends up.

A new table!

2007-06-01T22:39:00.001+10:00

A few weeks back I got an excited phone call from my land lord (In fact I don't think I've ever had a phone call from him where he wasn't excited, I think it has something to do with being a hair dresser) saying that he had a new table and chairs for me and would I mind if he went into my flat to replace my old ones with the new set. Given that he has been reliable in the past and has done me a couple of favours over the years I said I had no problem with him going into my flat while I wasn't there. He thanked me and said I'd love the new table set and if I didn't he'd remove it and bring back the old set. Win win situation or so you'd think.

As I came home that night I looked into his hair dressing salon (it is underneath my apartment) and he saw me and waved frantically at me. I stopped and went in and proceded to get a garbled story about a mess, tables not fitting and him having to do some work to get the table into the flat, I followed him with a bemused expression as we climbed the stairs together. At the top of the stairs i started to get a picture of what had happened.

For anyone that has ever had to move house or apartment I'm sure you'll be familiar with the situation where you buy some piece of furniture, commonly a lounge, assemble it and then when you go to move out find that you can't fit it out of the room that you assembled it in. This was the reverse problem on a bigger scale. Clearly my land lord had gone out and bought, or more likely via some other means had come into possession of this new table and chair set, decided that he didn't want it and he'd fob it off on me, the problem though was that once he got it to the top of the stairs leading into my apartment he discovered that it didn't quite fit through. Now here is where I, in my naive state, would have thought that he'd have given up, called me to say he'd do it another day, or disassembled the table. Clearly hair dressers think differently to me. He proceded to remove the door and then the door frame leading in to my apartment. Unfortunately after all that effort he discovered he still had that problem at the top of the next set of stairs, so being undeterred he removed that door and frame as well, and finally lo and behold the door into the kitchen was also problematic, but by this stage he'd gotten door frame removal down to a fine art and in a jiffy he had that obstacle removed.

I now have a really nice new table and chairs, it only took a weekend or two to get my doors back.

Poetic Justice

2007-05-03T21:18:00.001+10:00

As i sat there last night with the remains of a "easy to open" packet in my hand I contemplated the following.

Wouldn't it be poetic justice if you were somehow able to get the people in charge of picking stock for the supermarkets to actually try and use the stock they themselves pick. The case in point was with ham. Now unlike the rest of the civilized world it is next to impossible to buy fresh meat from a butchers in London, instead you need to go to your local supermarket and buy packaged meat. Now I've noticed a trend with this packaging, it boldly proclaims that it is "easy to open" or "Resealable" and presumably that is a big selling or marketing point for said product. Of course as anyone will attest, trying to open said products is next to impossible, invariably ending in frustration, swearing and little bits of plastic sheets all over the kitchen. I mean seriously what moron uses glue with an adhesive strength stronger then that of the damn plastic sheet in the first place? So I for one would absolutely LOVE to get the stock choosers down on the floor, and see them trying to open their damn products.

Who runs the Internet?

2007-05-01T22:28:00.001+10:00

I'm just going through all my data at the moment and attempting to once and for all bring some order to the chaos. Amongst the chaos I found all my old bookmarks. Funny how the entire concept of bookmarks has just about vanished these days, the days of the google. Still I found one link which was useful and thought I'd throw it up here in case any of you readers were also curious about who and how the Internet actually runs. Who makes the decisions? This article should clear it up for you.

Education

2007-04-20T19:43:00.001+10:00

An ongoing topic of discussion for me, one which had particular relevance with my ex who was a teacher and whom I got into a lot of debates with on the subject. Having just read this article Lesson number six struck me, as it was a better phrased expression of my own belief. Having gone to a selective high school, I was always a bit biased, but it's still my firm belief that putting children in an environment that looks at talent in a positive manner, rather then trying to chop it down ("tall poppy syndrome") is more important then giving then a fully rounded societal upbringing. Of course there is nothing preventing the two, but it seems to be the case that it's normally one or the other, for example the majority of the schools that get the best academic results in Sydney are single sex schools.

Cleanliness is next to ... food?

2007-04-20T19:07:00.001+10:00

I was sitting on the tube yesterday vaguely looking at an issue of "The Metro" when I saw an article that got my interest. The headline was about some restaurant fined for sanitation violations, and I saw the word "Ealing Broadway". Upon closer inspection I read that a local restaurant, Chinese / Thai place, was being fined for a number of sanitation violations, apparently having a rat and pigeon infestation. I have eaten at the place a couple of times, but it wasn't a restaurant that I liked so I wasn't feeling too queazy still it occured to me that there was a bigger issue. How would I, as someone that eats out every meal, know if a restaurant I was eating at had a record of bad sanitation? The answer isn't readily apparent. On the one hand some restaurants I've been to have some kind of certificate up on the wall saying that they passed some audit, but most don't do that. On the other hand forcing a restaurant that had failed a sanitation check to put up a notice to that effect would probably hurt the business significantly (rightly so in my opinion) and wouldn't be enforced. I guess there must be some kind of government website around that allows you to look up information on restaurants, but it will make me think before I wander into the next restaurant, well for a second or two at any rate :)

back in the friedrichshain, you don't know how lucky you are babe..

2007-04-05T06:41:00.001+10:00

De ja vu, while not German is a fairly good summary of what is going through my head right now. Five years ago I left Australia and went to Berlin to work out what I was going to do with my life after sitting down on my birthday and thinking about what I was doing. I was unhappy with what I'd been doing there and wanted a change. First stop was Berlin and crashing at my friends Benjamin Waters. Fast forward 5 years and here I am, once again at a cross road sitting here in friedrichshain thinking about what I'm going to do with my life couting down the days till my birthday. I wonder what the day will bring this time around, something as radicial as packing up my life and moving to the other side of the world I doubt, but then again, you just never know :)

While Berlin has a lot of issues, it still stands head and shoulders above pretty much every other place I've been in terms of just relaxing and doing nothing in good surroundings. For me what it means is that I'm getting a chance to catch up on sleep and for a change I'm actually reading again. I just picked up Camus's "The Happy Death", which is really starting to freak me out as so far the first few chapters mirror part of the decisions I'm going through right now, work for money or use the money I have to do what I want. In fact the precience of Camus continues to haunt me, in more then just this latest book I feel as though Camus has some kind of insight into my mind, each time I pick up one of his books I learn something about myself, or at least, see that I'm not the only person that thinks like this.

I was going to head off into Poland for a couple of days but the lack of net access at Ben's house put a cramp on my ability to find out the information I needed to plan the trip at short notice. Equally to blame though was the simple fact that I just didn't feel like it and so I'm just using my time to relax and think as well as a touch of reminiscing by walking around the parts of Berlin that I used to live in last time I felt and thought in this way.

I started off the trip by seeing Mahler's 2nd symphony performed by the Berliner Staatsoper conducted by Boulez. Talk about amazing. That piece of music is the most important piece of music I've ever heard (for a variety of reasons that I won't go into here) and to have it performed by an orchestra of that calibre, in Berlin, with Boulez as the conducter and with front row seats was purely awe inspiring. I look forward to the other 3 concerts!

the best example of

2007-03-17T03:09:00.001+11:00

a case in point. I'd just referred to a line from the "Love song of J Alfred Prufrock" and when my manager looked blank I'd given him a small serve about being an educated brit .. his response was pure value.

Jonathan "When it comes to poetry, no, just no. I know it's a bit philistinic, philosthropic, philosomething".

I've never heard of a better case in point.

Expensive?

2007-03-07T21:37:00.001+11:00

I've started to read The Economist which I have to recommend as being one of the better bastions of journalism around (yes I know all you regular readers of it know that already, but many don't!). One thing that got my eye in the latest edition was this article. Basically it confirms what I've been saying for some time, that London is one of the most expensive places in the world, certainly more expensive then the places that typically thought to be more expensive (NY and Tokyo being the main culprits). Coming in 4th it was notable to me that 2 of the cities more expensive then London were Scandanavian (Oslo at one, and Copenhagen at 3rd).

Skiing

2007-03-07T21:30:00.001+11:00

Well I'm just back from the Winter park resort in Colarado where I was on my first skiing trip. Skiing (bizare spelling actually, I had to verify that "skiing" was actually the correct way to spell it as while I initially just spelt it like that when you look at the double 'i' in English it's fairly rare.) was a lot of fun. I was spoilt by all accounts as the weather was pretty much perfect for skiing, the first day was bright and sunny, with about 2 feet of snow the night before meaning that I could fall over over and not hurt myself as well as the fact that I had good snow to learn on rather then the infamous ice that the resorts (perisher and thredbo) in Australia are mostly associated. All in all I was relatively happy with my progress. By the end of the week I was able to hit a black run and not fall over, though admittedly I was more comfortable on the blue runs. I was very glad that I had decided to ski rather then snowboard as watching the poor unfortunates trying to learn to snowboard I saw them fall over every couple of minutes, and often hurt themselves. Skiing on the other hand was fairly forgiving, I'd guess I only fell over about 10 times during the entire week, and didn't even come close to hurting anything other then my pride on each occasion. Of course the weather didn't remain perfect, there were a few days where the temperature dropped to -30 centigrade, before wind chill, and where skiing was a little harsher, still as most people that read this blog will know I don't really feel the cold and as such my jacket and tshirt kept me perfectly warm, except my fingers which I've come to the conclusion that after all these years of typing suffer from low blood pressure and consequently get cold, so aside from my whinging about cold hands, i got to sit there and chuckle as Adam and John complained about being cold in general.

The Rockies are a beautiful place, to date they are the most impressive mountain range that I've seen, though to be fair I didn't see much of the alps when I went through them on the train. There was one point where the ski lift we were on in the middle of a blizzard, seemed to be just ascending to heaven as the incline was ~70 degrees and due to the snow you couldn't see very far at all but we were just going straight up it felt like. So while I won't be quitting my job to spend a season skiing in Whistler (/wave john!) I will definitely be organizing another skiing trip!

Legalities

2007-02-22T23:11:00.001+11:00

If laws are the fabric of our society then surely we have a responsibility for them to accurately reflect what is going on in that society? Clearly changing laws should not be something that happens without serious analysis and consideration of all the implications (or as far as such things can feasibly be taken), but it strikes me that we as a society are starting to fail in this task, as right now after looking at a few different areas it's clear to me that our laws are simply not reflecting what's happening in our society. Let me take a couple of examaples that seem pertinent.
Children. This seems to be one of the big issues right now that was highlighted to me in a recent case where some "child", 17 years old, murdered someone and because they are under the age of 18, that is to say legally not an adult and consequently not responsible for their own actions, they got an extremely mitigated sentence. Now in some cases I can see this as being a good thing, after all we'd like to think that when someone is very young they can reform their ways and be reintegrated back into society, however, my issues comes with a lack of consistency in thought. If the law in the UK says that someone is not an adult until they are 18, why then can they have consensual sex and children of their own while still being considered children, ie at 16? Now I'm not saying that the legal age of sex should be pushed up, actually if anything I'd suggest that people should be considered adults at the age of 16, but the point here is that there is no consistent thought to what the implications of one law to another mean. Of course all this is a little off track to keeping laws up to date with changing things in our society (well perhaps not completely, I'd suggest that the level of extreme crime at young ages is more of a modern thing then in the past, note i say extreme crime, not petty theft etc) so on with the things that seem more relevant to my opening statement.

Genetics. Genetics is one of those things that our legal codes need to start dealing with now. Already it's entirely possible for our society to do some fairly amazing things in regards to eugenics and no one wants to address the questions of what is and isn't legal and more importantly WHY things are and are not legal. Eugenics is already practised in many places around the world, China being the most obvious example of it being embraced by a society and enforced by laws. It will be very interesting to hear the arguments both for and against the coming of the genetic revolution, Gattica anyone?

Computers. The easiest example for me to pick on due to my job and own experience with the law. Computer crime is obviously something fairly new, after all in the scale of legal codes computers are very new. Really you can say that computer crime laws came into their own category around the late 90's in most countries, and while there have been some updates to most of the original codes they are still hopelessly out of date in a few different ways. One of the fundamental paradoxes of computer crime is that more and more frequently the laws reference access via the Internet. A typical example would be a law that states (and i'm paraphrasing the australian law here as I can't be bothered to look up the precise wording) "it is a crime to intentionally modify, delete or access data on a computer not maintained by you". Of course this means that anyone who sends an email to another person is in breach of said law. When I brought this up with the then Senate rep for this type of thing (can't remember the tittle, it was during one of the more tedious meetings I had with the federal government while doing security work in Canberra) he smiled and said "I know, of course it means we can bring you in on that charge whenever we want". Nice back door for abuse of citizens that you don't like there sir! Computer crime is even trickier though, because people seem to overlook a fundamental thing, that being the Internet is a PUBLIC network. Think about that for a moment, the Internet is a public resource, just like a street. You have every right to walk down the street outside your home, because it's a public resource, just like I have every right, if we were to extrapolate from that law, to walk along the street and look at the houses and see if any had their front door open. Now I wouldn't be allowed by law to enter the house, even if it had it's door open, that would be trepassing, but it would be inconceivable to tell someone that they couldn't look from the street at the door, or even knock on said door. In computer crime terms though many countries have now made it illegal to do a port scan, the virtual equivalent of knocking or looking at someones door. Saying the Internet is a public network has other implications, spam for example. Spam is of course unsolicited, but just like it's not illegal (actually it is in some places in the world, but generally not in most that I'm aware of) to deliver pamphlets to a house, it shouldn't be illegal to deliver emails, after all, if you're on a public network, running a service for the explicit purpose of receiving emails why shouldn't someone send an email to you? Don't get me wrong, I'm not supporting spam, merely pointing out that by our current set of laws it should be legal, again though in many places it's not.

I suspect that the glaring descripencies between many laws are what causes the average layman to believe the legal system is broken, or at the very least not doing it's job as well as we would like. I'm not even going to delve into the world of copyright and patents and where to draw a line on what should and shouldn't be patented / copyrighted and what it means if that can be broken in a trivial manner, in particular if it's demonstrably unenforceable.

fucking animal liberationists

2007-02-14T22:44:00.001+11:00

What is it with animal lib activists? I completely don't get the mindset of all these self styled animal champions. I just read this article, where once again animal right activists, fighting to stop unnecessary harm and injury to ANIMALS attack HUMANS in order to achieve their goals. What the fuck kind of logic process do these retards have? Not only are they attacking people, in this case a japanese whaling vessle, they attacked the very ship that just saved their asses from dying by rescuing them from running around Antartic waters in a dingy, bright idea guys!

Seriously though what is the rationale for all these terrorist attacks, because make no mistake that is precisely what they are as, with few exceptions, almost all of the attacks are against perfectly legal targets / operations. It would seem that some people have issues with humans killing animals or causing them pain. I just don't get it, pain and suffering happens in the wild every day, it's for survival, yes, but it still happens. You don't see them out there trying to lecture the average cat that it needs to kill mice quickly and cleanly, felines and mustelids are both animals that practise vivisection, but they arn't on the receiving end of our wonderful anti vivis. Nor do they seem to grasp that we have every right to kill and eat animals. That last line seems to really fire up animal libs as they all like to start bringing in Peter Singers various works, as the champion of animal libs he is the most often quoted, normally by those that lack the ability to understand him. In particular this excerpt is often quoted as the definitive reason why animals are our equal. Well I hate to point a few things out, but first and foremost as was most clearly stated by a friend of mine, Benjamin Waters, rights are a human concept and as such, can only be given by us, they are not innate. It is therefore in my mind not a given that animals have any rights at all, beyond which any we so chose to give them. That to one side, the entire basis for most of singers conclusions is a basis of equality, something you need to accept in order to reach his conclusions. On the outside it seems reasonable to accept equality as something that we want to aspire to, in fact it's phrased as such a way that you'd appear to be a insensate heathen not think that it was reasonable, after all who'd want to be labelled a speciest? Well as it turns out I'd guess I'd be the stereotypical one, in the words of Denis Leary "I represent angry, gun toting, meat eating motherfuckers, so pull this bus over to the side of the pretentious turnpike!".

jokes

2007-02-14T20:58:00.001+11:00

I often think that Isaac Asimov was on to something in one of his short stories (I forget which one right now) that proposed that jokes were an alien experiment to work out the personalities of Humans. I find it difficult to understand how it could be anything else by the amount of repetition in jokes. I just received yet ANOTHER joke that I originally got about 5 years ago but that once again seems to be making the rounds. Now that is not particularly unusual, which says something in of itself, but what is unusual is that half the recipients are the same people as well...

The babbling starts!

2007-02-14T20:45:00.001+11:00

For some time now I've found myself thinking about something and wanting to write a blog entry. Unfortunately each time I decide that I'll sit down and "write it up" in a sensible manner. Of course, while it's probable that doing this makes the thought a little clearer, it has the unfortunate side effect of meaning that I almost never blog 90% of the thoughts that I have because I never have the time to actually sit down and write it out correctly. In an attempt to see if I can get into the real spirit of "blogging" I've decided to start actually putting down on this blog any miscellaneous thoughts that I think are of interest, either to myself, or some of my readers (it continues to surprise me the amount of people that actually read these ramblings!).

To that end I've created a net category, babblings, which if the nature of my ill considered random dumpings upsets you then simply remove it from what you view. Otherwise I hope you enjoy my new attempt at blogging, and Doug, if you're reading this, I hope that your opinion of my blog doesn't fall too far, I'll try to keep the babblings vaguely interesting ;)

Sickness

2007-02-02T20:55:00.001+11:00

I've never understood the majority of peoples actions when they get sick. At work I see the following behaviour all the time. Someone comes in, and they are clearly coming down with a cold, headache, coughing, red eyes and generally not well. Funnily enough they rarely complain, except to reply that yes they're not feeling well, when directly questioned. They'll last that day, even coming in the next on many occasions, and then end up going home sick for a day. The day after they were at home they'll be back at work either still sick, or JUST starting to recover. Usually a day or two after that someone else in close proximity to them gets sick and the cycle repeats itself.

Now I'll freely admit my work ethic isn't as strong as some people's but I just don't undertsand the above scenario. I've been sick about 6 days in 15 years now, so I guess I'm a little biased but I suspect that my actions have a large part of why that number is so low. When I start to feel unwell, it's unusual, and guess what? At that point in time I call in sick, relax, have vitamins, eat well, sleep and generally look after myself. The next day I'm normally fine and I trundle into work. I'd guess that I feel unwell about 4 times a year, which starts to fit into normal metrics on average sickness levels. What I don't understand is why do people let themselves get so sick so as to have to take time off work, often for extended periods of time? Why, when they are sick do they try and "soldier on" ? I work in high powered positions and I've basically NEVER, in my entire career, seen anyone who a company couldn't do without for a couple of days. Why, when they are still sick, do they come in to work and infect other people? What is it about sickness that causes otherwise sensible people to forgo logic and just act like idiots?

Flash mp3 player .. and the winner is!

2007-01-26T04:33:00.001+11:00

I've recently started going back to the gym seriously again. It's been really enjoyable but I've found that unlike in the past where I would read a book, this time around the book I'm reading (dante's inferno), isn't really suitable to the gym at all. As a consequence I want to listen to music, but my archos isn't really suitable due to it's size and weight as well as being a HD based music player (in other words susceptible to bumps). So I inadvertantly found myself in the market for a flash player. Now my primarily concern with any music player is quality, especially as I have a good set of earphones. Aside from the quality it needs to be able to support as many codecs as possible and have features that are suitable to my purpose, ie be shock resistant (all flash players are), waterproof, and have possible extra features. After extensive research the winner is a Sony NW-S205FW.

The Sony NW-S205FW is treating me very well so far. It has all the features that I required, as well as having time, pedometer, calories calculator and a few other useful functions and comes standard with a nice arm strap. All in all I'd recommend it to anyone that needs something to listen to music at the gym

America in summary

2007-01-14T09:31:00.001+11:00

Well I've been back from my trip to NY for a week or two now but I thought I'd finally write up my last blog on the subject. The trip itself was really enjoyable, though in a different way to a lot of my other ones. This time around I spent most of the time just sleeping and relaxing, I really didn't have any great desire to be doing a lot of the touristy things (having gotten them out of the way in my previous two trips) and consequently spent most of my time worrying about what restaurant I'd go to next. A hard life. I was a little disappointed that I wasn't able to do some of the things I'd planned on doing, namely, Ice skating, helicopter ride and seeing the NY Knicks play, it was a case of the Australians thinking we didn't need to book and once again being drastically wrong, still those disappointments to one side I really had a good trip.

NYE was a low key affair, when people heard I was in NY for NYE they all seemed to assume that I'd be at time square. The reality of "doing" time square for NYE is you queue up starting at about 1900, there is no toilets and you're not allowed to drink and then at 0000 a crystal ball drops .... in light of my description I'm sure you got the impression it wasn't my definition of a great party. Instead John, his girlfriend Karen, his sister Anne and myself all headed out for a nice meal at an Italian restaurant in west village and then on to a pub. Later in the evening we met up with some more friends but the night was all but over by then and we all shortly after 0230 headed home. There was one amusing incident though. Just after we arrived at this new pub and met up with some of Johns friends we were all standing around talking when suddenly there was an overwhelming stench. Clearly someone had farted, but this fart was on an awesome scale. As soon as I started to smell this fart I started to back away from the person I was talking to and trying to move out of the sphere of influence. By the time I'd traveled over 2 meters I begun to appreciate the true horror of what was happening. It was then I cast around and saw one of those massive americans that looked like a crane had just got out of his house that he'd been shut in for a few years was walking past out group. At this point the rest of the group, scattered over about 5 meters, begun to retch and cry out in alarm. John, seeing me standing off to one side looking like I was recovering breath, ran over to me in an attempt to try and outpace the smell. To no avail. He ended up standing next to me, eyes watering and said "you've got to admire the power of that ben, that's seriously impressive". Understatement of the year already I suspect.

From a technology perspective there were a few things that struck me about New York. Now bearing in mind that america was largely the instigator of the current technology revolution in the form of the net, it still surprised me that skype out was free. For those of you who don't understand fully what that means, in simple terms it means that using a small program on your computer, you're able to call ANY number, mobile or landline, in America for free. The implications of this are quite huge when you think about it. A simple example of what this means is that there is a growing number of people who no longer actually have a landline, after all why would you bother when for most of us we only use the landline to dial out on, not receive calls. The other thing that was interesting about New York was that their quality of service from their ISPs was atrocious.

Most people use the net in such a way that they are actually quite unlikely to notice small interuptions, or outages in their access. For example, if you're browsing this website and stopped to read this blog entry, then chances are that you're not going to notice if your ISP has a blip for a few seconds and stops passing all traffic. Even applications that you think might notice it, say Instant Messaging clients, can tolerate very small outages, in the area of a few seconds. What this all means is that if you're an ISP you can afford to, in the sense of not upsetting many customers, have a number of small outages and this is precisely what happens in New York. In London things are very different, the ISPs here have to deal with, I can only assume, a lot more net savvy crowd of people, people I work with do not tolerate their ISPs to go down at ALL, because in many cases the way they are using the net is subtly different. For example playing an online game will give you huge visibility of any kind of network slowdown, let alone outage. So without giving more examples you can imagine my surprise when pretty much every ISP I was connected to, regardless of size or reputation, constantly had outages, in the vicinity quite often of one every 60-90 minutes.

After two trips to NY in two months I can say that I really do like that part of the world. The american culture is very different, John summed it up best I think when he said that "Americans are participators" and he was dead right, it pervades their society at every level, from the "buy in" you get with team building excercises at work which most Europeans / Australians would be to cynical to participate in, through to their desire to be in the spot light answering a football quiz at an ice hockey game, the effect is obvious, and while it's not something that I like, it does make for a very interesting spectacle. Aside from that though there is a lot to be said about a good standard of living, with an emphasis on service and doing it right and efficiently and making sure that everyone is happy. I strongly suspect that I'd probably struggle to work there, I'm just too lazy to get into this one week off a year (the average amoungst my profession working in NYC) but still, I'd like to go up to Boston and see if that is similar as I could easily see myself living and working there at some point in my life.

Sweet tastes

2006-12-28T13:40:00.001+11:00

Well I'm here in "the big apple" and once again enjoying my trip having arrived in time for a christmas lunch courtesy of my friend John Burridge. It's funny how similar and yet how different american society and culture is compared to Australia's. As an example just after the plane touched down at Newark, all the americans on board immediately burst out into rapturous applause. Aparently it's an american custom to applaud the captain of the plane upon a successful touchdown. Well as you can imagine there was a look of startled confusion on the face of almost every non american on board the plane. The second thing that struck me about america, and maybe this is just particular to the NY region I don't know, is how hopeless the cab drivers are at finding their way around. In this day and age I expect all cab drivers to have GPS satellites, but apparently that's a little too advanced for most, still though I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that a cab driver would know where he is going, or at the very least to have a map to refer to if they had absolutely no idea. Of course none of those things would be the case in NY. So far I've caught about 14 or so cabs including my last trip and this one, and not ONCE has the cab driver even had a vague idea where Brooklyn was, let alone the street name I give them. They think it's odd that I can't direct them!

Another thing that you notice is just how sweet everything is over here. I remember when I first visited, ironically enough, John in London (at the time I was living in Berlin) and what struck me was just how salty everything was in England. Truth be told I still notice it everytime I come back from a stay of a week or more anywhere else. In america it's not the salt that you notice but the sweetness. I ordered a coffee this morning and asked got asked if I'd like sugar in it, to which I replied affirmatively and was shortly thereafter given said coffee. The coffee was undrinkable, not because it was too hot, or burnt coffee, but because it felt like I was drinking some sugar with just enough hot water to melt it. All of that said though I really do like it here, everyone, for good or bad, is open and inquisitive and very likely to strike up a conversation with you even as a complete stranger. It'd be the perfect trip if only I could find a way to get the live cricket without having to hang out in an Aussie bar ;)

'twas the night before christmas ...

2006-12-25T09:38:00.001+11:00

and all through the net, not a thing stirred, not even a mouse.

Well i'm sitting here counting down the hours till I hop on a plane and head off to New York. The heavy fog that caused chaos at Heathrow had me worried for a while, but as it cleared up over 48 hours ago, I'm hoping that they have got through the backlog, or at least got things back on schedule for my flight out at 0900. So as I have packed my bags and done all the things that need to be done I thought I'd have a look around the net while I had some spare time and write up a blog.
It's rare that I get excited about something in GUI land (graphical user interfaces) and it's even rarer when i havn't heard of it before stumbling onto it, but that was the case with Beryl. I had read some vague articles a year or two back about "composite window managers" and thought to myself that it would be good to have something decent for linux, but had then consigned it to the back of my mind. Of course in recent times (though the hype seems to have died down a bit of late) Max OSX has made lots of headlines about nice, friendly usable unix AND, most importantly, it's gorgeous GUI. Us linux users on the other hand have been stumbling along with KDE and Gnome for years thinking that while it's not that pretty, it's very functional and stable (my desktop at work, arguably one of the most abused machines in the world, has been up and stable without crashes [well at least not self induced ones] for about 8 months). We'd long since given up on actually playing games, well all the sensible ones had, there are of course a bunch of die hard Linux users that like to spend five times longer trying to get the game to run under cedega then they do actually playing the game, but hey it takes all types right? Personally the ONLY reason I have a windows partition at all on my desktop machine at home is to play games on and that's been the way since I left my amiga's. So you can imagine my surprise when crawling around the gentoo wiki I stumbled upon some screen shots of what looked like a REALLY sexy GUI. Further investigation wasn't to let me down and I was shortly examining Beryl in some detail and then installing it on my new home desktop. I'll side track here and say that I recently decided that I needed a new desktop at home, primarily because I bought a new Dell 24inch widescreen monitor and it's native resolution required a newer graphics card then what my old machine had. That in turn meant that I needed a new motherboard ... one thing led to another and the next thing I know I've spent a small fortune on what is comparatively, the best machine I've ever bought. By comparatively I mean that, I normally buy the 3rd or 4th best of each component on the market, that way you seem to hit an optimal point of performance and cost. At this point in my life though, I'm not constrained by the cost anymore and so I decided on getting something a little better ;) Needless to say I now have a machine capable of running a small supercomputing lab and my spare room (or my computer room as my ex liked to call it), now has a strong resemblence to a wind tunnel.

So here I am with a brand new machine running linux at a pace that I didn't think was possible AND a new, incredibly sexy yet functional GUI. Santa seems to have visited me early this year.

Intuition and technology

2006-11-25T03:09:00.001+11:00

Most people would say it's a bit of a contradiction, I mean how can you "intuit" something that is purely logical, yet I'd argue that is precisely what I do with technology. On my recent trip to iceland some of my friends commented on the amount of gadgets that I have (in reference to my laptop and archos) and another then commented "I don't know how he has the time to learn how they all work". I replied that I didn't "learn" how they worked, I just "intuited" it. I got a snort of derisive laughter and a knowing "ahh bens exaggerating again" look. I was surprised by Craigs look of amusement though, because the look suggested that he didn't think it was possible. It was then I started to think.

It started to occur to me that perhaps Craigs look wasn't joking and that he was serious, maybe people really DO have to sit down and think about how some piece of technology works. You see for me it's often unconcious and even when it's not its about 15 seconds of playing around, understanding some concepts that differ from the norm and then once again there is no concious effort to drive / use any technology. The reason for that, in my opinion, is that technology interfaces are all fairly similar and in many cases derived from similar bases. Take for example command line interfaces. Command line interfaces are considered clunky and unfriendly in todays computer world, primarily because people don't like to type and because theres a minimum amount of commands that need to be learnt in order to actually USE the computer. That said if you're familiar with say a unix command line interface, using something like DOS is quite easy as many commands are similar (whether thats through a concious effort of copying what was there before to keep your userbase from having to learn new commands, or because that was what works best is open to debate) and the more technology you play with the easier it becomes, soon your realise that things like Cisco's IOS are all similar on the command line to unix (though frustratingly lobotomized). Moving on to GUIs you find that windows is similar to xwindows which is similar to OSX which is similar to Amiga and so on, in fact the similarities between different GUIs are more noticeable then that of their command line brothers due to the fact that once a working GUI was found, the basic concepts were so universal that to deviate from them significantly was to actually hinder use rather then help it. I began to wonder if in fact we weren't the victim of our own successes in terms of technology interfaces, perhaps we'd be better off going right back to square one and redesigning something from scratch without the preconceptions of other interfaces. Still the fact is that in terms of using computers once you have a reasonable amount of familiarity with one using the others is easy. I can vouch for that because as a hardcore unix user I have still been able to do every task that I want or that others have asked of me on the latest version of Windows Vista that I've barely even used for more then 3 minutes.
Getting away from operating systems and computers though, back to where Craigs incredulous look originated, is the land of gadgets. Gadgets are a lot more diverse then operating systems and consequently the nature of the interfaces to them are likewise a lot more varied, or so you'd think. While it's true that superficially there are far bigger differences between interfaces on gadgets once again there are so many overlapping principals that I find it hard to understand how you can't just "intuit" their use once you've played with a couple. The first and probably the interface that most people are familiar with is the "old" digital watch.

The digital watch probably set the standard for most people's first interaction with technology devices, and in many ways it hasn't changed. The concept is still the same for most gadgets of a similar limited nature (by limited I mean simply that there isn't much user interaction required, monitors, watches, televisions and the like), the concept is one button will switch "modes", another or possibly 2 will allow you to actually change values and the last will be for miscellaneous usage. Those four buttons define almost all interactions for simple gadgets and that really hasn't changed in over 30 years now.
Outside of gadgets and fully blown operating systems we have the area that today would be termed the "mobile" market, or as I know it, PDAs. Basically this encompasses anything that has pseudo OS capabilities, but is limited in it's scope, generally limited to specific applications that have one or two functions, calendars or task lists and the like. I'd suggest that operating any PDA / mobile based gadget is actually even easier then operating a normal gadget as it is deliberately made to be OS like, and consequently anyone who is familiar with basic desktop functionality will find themselves at home using mobile devices, with the only difference being that your actual interface, normally some stylus or thumb board, is much more clumsy.

So after thinking about it for some time, and knowing that the majority of people my age or younger have spent at least some time playing with either an OS (most people work with one now), a digital watch or a PDA, you're damn right I'm surprised when you can't pick up a technology gadget and just use it.

Iceland

2006-11-15T22:40:00.001+11:00

Well I just got back from Iceland for an EVE gaming conference and let me say that Iceland is one really cool (forgive the pun) place to go! For a long time I've always wanted to go to Iceland, the idea of lava and glaciers in the same place is just too weird to pass up, combine that with the northern lights and scandanavian women and you've got my interest perked ;) So when I heard of the gaming conference set there I immediately signed up and along with 5 other friends headed off to see the last of the scandanavian countries that I hadn't seen.
The first thing that we all noticed as we were approaching the island was that it's actually a lot larger then you think when you look at atlas's, in fact it's not much smaller then the UK and certainly a lot more interesting to view from the air. Much like most "cold" places I've been it isn't actually that cold, I think the coldest it got while we were there was about -8 or so and maybe a few extra degree's for wind chill factor, but generally it was around 0-5. Now before you all go screaming at me that I'm a freak and that -10 is cold, think about it from the perspective of Russia which has many cities that AVERAGE well below -20 the entire year round, the gulf stream saves the entire European continent from a lot more then most people realise and this extends to Iceland which of course, sits between the European and American continents.

The first day we headed off on what was to be the first and last of our tourist trips. We did a trip around the eastern part of the island which started to give us all an appreciation of just how spectacular the nature really is in Iceland. We went and saw the geysirs which every 7-12 mins would burst up ~20m into the air in an explosion of water, sulfur and pure force that was quite spectacular. Equally fascinating were just the hot pools that were so hot that they'd basically sterilized the water and had a clarity to them that was amazing allowing you to peer down into what seemed like the depths of the earth. From there we headed out to Gulfoss waterfall which was the site, 10000 years or so ago, of a glaciar melting in a day due to geothermal activity and the resulting watershed carved out the single most impressive waterfall i've ever seen. At this point though it was about 1600 and the sun set and the temperature started to fall to what seemed like the depths of the waterfall in fact. We immediately started jumping around to try and stay warm which in turn resulted in a mammoth snowball fight on a treacherous icy path located just above a 100 meter fall into the abyss. Fortunately no one fell off, but few dodged my snowballs (of course throwing them is for girls, point blank is more my style!).

The next few days were mostly spent around the gaming conference, which conveniently, was located in our hotel. As usual Iceland is the epitomy of all things scandanavian, great women, high standard of living and amazingly expensive. Even coming from London, my normal fallback for when people complain about cost, didn't save me from wincing on the odd occasion when you pay 5 pounds for a standard beer. There was the usual drunk stories (actually some of them were more then "usual" given that 2 of my friends were scousers) one of which I'll relate as I thought it was quite amusing. Ritchie decided on the first night in Iceland that he'd have a big night and proceeded to get very drunk. By very drunk I basically mean insensate. By the time the night was winding down Ritchie was basically unable to walk and unfortunately for him he was staying in a hotel just down the road. At this point we got a storm warning and high winds as Ritchie and the guy he was sharing with leave for their hotel. Ritchie managed to fall over 27 times onto bushes, cars and basically anything next to the road. Then about halfway back to the hotel he just did a runner. We got a frantic call from the other guy saying that he couldn't find Ritchie and was worried he would die of exposure. A few people got back out of bed at 0500 and start to search, but after 30 minutes we couldn't find him so we all head back to bed. At 0600 Ritchie turns up back at our hotel saying "i'm cold, i just woke up on a building site". Scousers, got to love them.

In summary Iceland was a lot of fun, though a little too disconnected for me. Even though it's a first world country and in Scandanavia, it still lacks a lot of basic things that most big city dwellers take for granted, so while it's a great place to visit (and I'll be back even if just to see the aurora borealis which our trip was cancelled due to poor visibility both nights :( ) it's off my list of countries where I'd like to live.

The american life!

2006-10-11T04:38:00.001+10:00

It seemed a suitable title given my previous blog so i'm runng with it :) I've just got back from New York and I'm happy to report that I've changed my opinion on that city! I headed over there to catch up with a friend, John Burridge, for his birthday. Perhaps a bit extravagant as I was only there for a weekend but, as a friend recently said "our parents might be the generation of jet travel, but we're the generation of cheap jet travel", never so true as now. My previous experience of NYC had been fairly bad, it was the last stop on my round the world trip 7 years ago and as such I was relatively depleted of tourist "energy", and spent most of my time shopping. Throw into the mix that I didn't know anyone there and that I had seen too many hollywood movies making me think that I'd get killed walking most places, it didn't exactly bowl me over with it's charms. This time though things were very different.

The first thing that I noticed this time around was just how friendly americans really are, they genuinely are interested in just interacting with random people that they meet. I think that London is probably the other extreme where pretty much everyone goes out of their way to avoid having to talk to a stranger. This leads on in part to service. One of my real rants about Europe is that no european that i've ever met in any situation seems to understand what the word actually means, I always get the impression that when you ask for something in most of the shops or restaurants that I frequent the staff think that they are doing you a favour by getting it for you. Americans on the other hand invented the definition of "service", everything is just so friendly and prompt. Sit down at a table in a restaurant and before you've even actually sat down someone is over with a glass of water, smilling, asking about your day and would you like a few minutes or do you know what you want to drink? It's just amazing how much of a difference that kind of service makes EVEN if it is fake, which I actually don't think it is a lot of the time.

Aside from service this time around I really saw a lot of different sides to NYC that I must admit made me think, again, what am I doing in London. It struck me on many occasions that the city seemed to be filled with people ... just like me. That is 30's, professional, travelled and a variety of interests. There weren't crazy crowds of children running around, or even worse, their teenage mothers. Of course NYC does have its downsides as well, most notably the fact that it looks like it's permanently stuck in the 1960's in that the amount of unadorned concrete is just phenomenal.While clean, the concrete all around just makes it feel dirty, which unfortunately does distract from its aethestic appeal. Still, there are amazing places like central park which not only huge, and unlike hyde park, INTERESTING it is also surrounded by some amazing architecture that you really can sit down and admire, while say, playing a game of chess ;)

NYC is cheap. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. New yorkers themselves sook about the cost of most things, most notably rent, but let me tell you coming from London, the place is seriously cheap. Most of the people I met complained about the rent at one point or the other and the most expensive place one of them was renting was less then HALF of what i pay in London. Food was a lot cheaper and almost all medium to high class luxury items were 20-40% cheaper then what you can get in London. Did I say that the food was good? Well it is, really good. Bearing in mind that I was spoiled growing up in Sydney, NYC has food that is approaching that standard, which is something that you almost dream about in England, and indeed most of Europe.

Of course the real downside of living and working in NYC is work itself. The americans have got to where they are today in terms of the worlds economy from working, a lot. In fact they work so much that I really don't understand how they can handle it as they only have 10 days, on average, holiday a year. John pointed out that the lack of holidays just puts more of an emphasis on the weekends, which I certainly noticed in my weekend there, but still, personally I need more time then that.

I wanted to write more but i'm a little pushed for time, I'm currently working out if I'm going to Prague next weekend, Ireland the following before I definitely head off to Iceland the weekend after that ;)

The european life

2006-08-31T01:22:00.001+10:00

Well it's been a while since I last blogged due partly to the fact that my server that hosts this site fell over but due mainly to the fact that both work and my social life have been very busy.

Two weekends ago I took some time off and headed off to the Basque Country with a colleague from work who comes from there, Zigor. It turns out actually that my colleague has an interesting past as his family, in particular his father was quite famous in Basque due to being the first military head of ETA so you could say that I got a first hand account of the regions politics. History aside the trip was great fun. Firstly getting to hang out with Zigor and chat about non work related things was a pleasant change and the country itself was just gorgeous. The Basque country sits on the border of southern France and nothern spain and I daresay has the best of both worlds, gorgeous beaches on both sides really and some mountains, in the form of the Pyrenees Mountains. In fact on our last day we climbed up the mountain that marks the start of the Pyrenees which gave me an absolutely beautiful view of most of the French seaside and Spanish mountains. Of course language was an issue, the French don't like to speak english even if they can and the spanish generally just can't and as many readers will know, Basque is famous in linguistic circles for being a unique language which is FIENDISHLY hard to understand at all. Consequently I was pretty reliant on Zigor as, naturally, he speaks every language in the region and a few others just to make us native english speakers feel like idiots, something that most euros seem to excel at in my experience. We ran around most of the Basque country by the end of my 4 days, including the capital of Bilbao, San sebastien for a festival and other random places that I can't remember or won't embarass myself by trying to spell. San sebastien was actually really really good. It turns out that in Summer all of the Basque cities have a festival that lasts a week, and being cunning, instead of having that festival on the same date, it is on a different week for each city, meaning that if you time it right there is a festival going on in ONE city at any point in Summer :) While I was there it was San Sebastiens, which is an absolutely gorgeous city down on the coast with one of those settings that you always assume is fabricated it looks so romantic / nice. Well we turned up, along with some of Zigors friends and family and ran into about a million people all out in the streets going off. Given that the city is normally home to about 200k people the influx of people meant that it was bedlam, though in Spanish style which means it was fun. What does take some getting used to though is the hours they keep, we had dinner early at about 2130 and when we left at 0545 that morning it felt like the party was really just starting to get into FULL swing. So my trip to Basque was great, though sleep was at a premium.

Once I got back I had my first prom, Mahlers 5th which was quite spectacular. It's a favourite symphony of mine and the orchestra played it very well. It was quite amusing for me though as the ticket I had bought was considered a fairly expensive one (I thought 22 pounds was quite reasonable for a ticket) and was in one of the exclusive boxes. Of course the exclusive box was filled with exclusive upper class brits who weren't overly thrilled having a thuggish looking aussie sitting in. The "conversations" between movements was hilarious to say the least.

Last weekend I was off again, this time to up to Manchester for a party and then on to Liverpool for the rest of the long weekend. The party absolute blast and I got to meet a lot of people that I game with, we spent most of the weekend arguing about facets of the game and just generally hanging out and having fun. Keeping up with the "northern monkeys" while drinking was a bit painful, but I think I did my heritage justice, though once again sleep was at a premium.

This weekend I have two more proms including some of the real highlights so I'll write again soon and let you all know how they were.

Vocab traps

2006-07-27T22:47:00.001+10:00

When I first got to college there was the usual mixture of people from all over Australia and different socio-economic backgrounds. Possibly due to these differences there was a noticeable effort from most people to blend in, which resulted, amoungst other things, in everyone picking up each others vocab. The most notable word that got both myself and a friend (Yes, Benjamin Waters was also bitten) was "dodgy". Dodgy is a great word, from where Benjamin and myself came from it was barely used and consequently had more of an impact when employed by us to make a point. It was also wonderfully ambiguous, I mean dodgy could imply that something was untrustworthy, or that you were skeptical of something, you could even manipulate it to indicate that something wasn't complete or it was just ill favoured. Whatever the reason I shortly found myself using dodgy in almost every sentence and equally alarming after a period of time it just started happening unconciously. I'd find myself having a perfectly interesting conversation but every single time there was a place that I could use "dodgy" I did, and those places were many. In a short space of time both Ben and myself found ourselves saying dodgy so much that it drove each of us mad and we broke each other of the habit shortly there after. Dodgy was a locallized college phenomenon, or so I thought.

Living in England there are a lot of idiosyncracies that I pick up as a foreigner that the Brits themselves don't even notice. Something that i at first put down to just an unusual expression was "To be honest with you...". It seems innocuous, used to possibly draw you into the trust of the person saying it, almost like you're being told something that others are not, but the implications are a little sinister. Obviously if the person is being honest with you when he / she says that it implies that they are NOT being honest with you the rest of the time. So initially it seemed a little odd to me but hey, it wasn't the only Brittish idiosyncracy that was strange. Recently though things have changed. More and more people from more and more different backgrounds (english speaking backgrounds) are starting to use the phrase. In fact it's gotten so bad that its at that endemic level that "dodgy" was for me at college. One of my work colleagues doesn't even notice when he says it anymore and when i started trying to break him of the habit by interupting with a "yeah, be honest with me" every time he said it, he initially freaked out at the frequency he used the phrase and now just subconciously filters out my response and keeps on using it. To be honest with you I expect that these kind of dodgy phrases are like fashion, they dodge in and out of popularity and in a few months time it will be something else, I'll let you know :)

I went to the farnborough airshow last weekend with Eachan. That was a very cool Sunday afternoon trip, though getting there, like travelling anywhere in England, was a serious pain despite the fact that Eachan only lived about 10km from it. It is easy to explain to someone how powerful a jet is in horsepower or some other means of measuring power, but that mental understanding / picture doesn't quite do it justice when it comes to the real thing. Imagine a tiny jet around 1km away on a runway with ~5k people on a field around me. Back another 1km or so is a carpark. Now the jet starts to taxi to the take off run way and the sound it emits is just incredible. People start to look at each other in alarm and begin to make motions about covering their ears. Now the jet finishes it taxi and starts to fire the engines up. Whereas before I was stunned by the sheer power and noise the jet was emitting now I'm just speechless as the seemingly impossibly large noise from before starts to climb up in truely mind numbing degrees. All the babies and children around me are now crying. The jet starts to move. Now all the adults are on their knees with hands clamped over their ears. The jet screams along the run way and takes off. Now every single car alarm in the carpark ~2km away from the jet simultaneously goes off. It's really hard to convey the kind of power that these jets have, your brain struggles to ascribe that much raw energy to the tiny little jet that is now kilometers up in the sky doing all kinds of acrobactic feats that seem to defy not only gravity but the nature of their own propulsion.

I'm not really into planes and the like but I really had an enjoyable day and it was very interesting to me to see that more and more these airshows are about UAVs. Looks like shortly wars will be faught by geeks like me controlling vehicles by computers rather then pilots actually in them. Working for the government would generally be a bad thing but with toys like that I must just be tempted one day :)

Law

2006-07-11T20:41:00.001+10:00

I've been concerned for sometime about the increasing amount of pressure and control that religion is having on the societies that I live in. This article serves as a nice cautionary tale of the problems that start once you let religion start to dictate laws. I suspect a lot of the problem that many people have is that MOST religious doctrines are not too unreasonable, they are morally sound (by this I mean simply that most people will generally agree with the basic tenets of most religions from a moral perspective ie take the ten commandments) and generally seem to be comprehensible. For most people that is enough for them to give approval to religious ideology even if they are not really religious themselves. Unfortunately religion is not only about generalities but also a lot of specifics, the devil is in the detail as the saying says.

Fuel

2006-07-04T23:50:00.001+10:00

I've had a few discussions recently about the viability of "alternative" power supplies. I know that a few years ago it simply wasn't viable and while the following article seems to indicate that it is still the case (actually I believe it was always going to be unless there was some fundamental technological breakthrough). That said it really doesn't cite many references so it's a little hard to get real data on the state of alternative power. Has anyone got any decent links / info?

Information Overload

2006-07-04T22:58:00.001+10:00

I live hooked into the net, where most information is available in just a few keystrokes. In fact beyond that, now a lot of that information is automatically propagated to me in the form of RSS feeds or emails. For some time I've been struggling with the sheer volume of things being sent my way. There is so much information that I could spend all of my time just reading and trying to keep up with it, certainly it's distracting me from actually DOING things. Initially my response was to try and just ignore it all and batch mode my information acquiring, that is just spend 2 hours in a certain block each day looking up things. Unfortunately that didn't really seem to work very well. Next I thought about some way of tailoring the information that I get, this led to me thinking about trying to work out precisely what information i do want and how I normally go about getting it. Actually over the course of thinking about it I came to some interesting ideas about writing a kind of AI that would pretend to be me and sit on my computer automatically searching the net and then when I sat down in a morning present me with a list of interesting articles and prioritise my email for me to look at. Unsurprisingly others have already thought of such things though at the time of writing this, and from my brief investigations, there was nothing that really struck me as being too good. Still if anyone reading this has a recommendation please leave a comment!

A possible side effect of this information overload is lack of critical thinking. Recently it's struck me how many people are giving considerable amount of credence to fairly spurious arguments, often from the left (not that I think the entire lefts doctrine is spurious, simply that it seems the left are coming up with some increasingly dubious claims). In discussions with friends I stated that I believe this is because that people are so overwhelmed with information that whereas as a child most people are taught to "Get the facts then draw your conclusion" now there are so many facts that people also want the conclusion presented to them.

I feel that I'm starting to win the war on the information now. I'm a lot more selective about what I regularly read and once again the concepts behind open source are leading the fight. Enter reddit and other sites like it. Basically these are sites which users submit links to articles and things of interest that are then rated by all the other users / readers of the site. The higher the rating the higher up the list the article goes so that what you end up with is a self regulated filter of all the interesting things that appear on the net in a given day and the most amazing part about it is that it works. I've had more interesting articles and links of note from reddit in the few weeks that i've been using it then all the other rss feeds I was subscribed to before.

Sports

2006-07-04T22:40:00.001+10:00

Working in a betting exchange means that I'm more exposed to sports then I have been in the past. Since giving up on my childhood dream of becoming a professional table tennis player I really havn't paid much attention to sports at all, though I will, given the opportunity, sit down and watch the best of any sport just to see what its like at the highest level.

Living in London, and I dare say anywhere in Europe right now, it's particularly hard not to notice the fact that the world cup is being played. The world cup involves, what most australians would call, soccer. Now I'm reliably told that the world cup is the single largest sporting event anywhere in the world and so you can imagine my surprise when after a bit of investigation I found some an amazing thing out, they don't use technology.

Imagine, in an age where IT is making inroads almost everywhere, in the largest sporting event in the world, there is nothing remotely technologically related. No 3rd umpire, no chips embedded into the balls, no video simulations, absolutely nothing. Now I'm sure the purists would say to me "that's the way it's meant to be Ben, real football", but it's these same purists that are screaming hatred and issuing death threats to the referees that make a bad call during the game causing their favourite team to be knocked out. Now given the seeming importance that soccer has you'd think that people would be using every possible thing that they could to ensure that the winner of the game was the team that played the best soccer rather then some random bad decision made by a single person (yeah and some touch line judges), but that seems to not be the case, in fact, it was suggested by Benjamin Waters that the reason that soccer is so popular is that there is a certain amount of "assyness" about it. I mean let's face it, any sport that decides the "champions" based off one game is more then a little suspect.

Actually where things get interesting is watching the way different sports approach this problem. Soccer, as mentioned, doesn't appear to be doing anything, and while I'm sure I'll get in trouble for saying it, soccer appears to be mostly a south american and european phenomenon, bear that in mind. Now compared to say soccer, we have cricket a typically colonial sport, originally introduced from England to all of its colonies and now generally one of the most popular sports in each of the colonies. Cricket has had a technological revolution in the last 15 years, led mainly out of Australia. New things brought into the game include the "third umpire", video recreations, microphones, additional cameras and sensors. All of these things have substantially, though admitedly not completely, reduced the likliehood of the outcome of a game depending on a decision of a fallible human. In fact Australia has led the way introducing technology to a number of sports, especially tennis. America as well has introduced a lot of technology into their sports, and it could be argued, have a more substantial reason to believe that the champions of their sport are in fact the best team due to often having a series of playoffs rather then it all being decided in one game. Now where this gets interesting is that in my experience if you look at the average level of seriousness in approach to sports Australia and America seem to be well beyond that of say south america and europe. By that I mean simply that the culture / society in Australia and America have less tolerance of losing anything and an expectation that they will win (rightly or wrongly). Thus it's my conclusion that it's likely to be true that most europeans don't want technology in their sports, not because it wouldn't be better but because it would take away a lot of the element of chance and consequently the best chance that most teams have of winning.

Memories

2006-06-27T19:58:00.001+10:00

I've always prided myself on my memory. For most of my life I've possessed a borderline photographic short term memory that has enabled me to shortcut my way past many things (school in particular), recently though I've noticed a problem, I seem to have lost it. I think it started when the 'net truly started to take off and increasing amounts of information were stored and readily accessible. I stopped thinking "I must remember that", and instead changed my thinking to "I don't need to fill my brain up with that, I can always look it up if I need to know about it" and slowly, over the last few years I've completely got out of the habit of committing things to memory. It was with some surprise and a considerable amount of concern that recently in some conversations with Benjamin Waters that I noticed my memory is shockingly poor. I'd gone from being able to replay 20 chess games in a row move for move, to some dimwitted drooling idiot that was barely able to remember the contents of the last few books I'd read, even though I had enjoyed them! All of a sudden I felt like I had lost everything that I had done in the past 5 years, that nothing committed to memory at all, I imagine that this is how someone with alzheimer's disease must feel. It wasn't pleasant. I started to reflect precisely what I was in the habit of memorising, and fortunately there was something that I could clearly remember and that was technology related information. I still had an encyclopaedic chunk of knowledge in my head about all things technical in the IT world, but seemingly little outside of it. As you can imagine this situation is not acceptable to me so I've decided to start actually USING my memory again for one thing that I've learnt about memory is that the more you use it the better it gets, for me conclusively proven when I was studying chess and capable of all kinds of fairly strong feats of memory.

On the subject of memory I thought I'd share with you all something that doesn't appear to be as well known as I thought, or rather is only now starting to come into the general publics eye, omega-3. Some time back I read an article saying that scientists had discovered that they had discovered a substance to stimulate new neural pathways, omega-3s. Interestingly enough, or at least to me, no one seemed particular excited about this, I saw almost no follow up articles or a general acceptance of this news. Every time I saw omega-3 concentrates for sale it was always emphasizing its well know benefits on joins and flexibility. Out of curiousity I chatted to one of the guys who I worked with at the time and had a lot of respect for his intellect, upon asking I found out that he has taken omega-3 supplements for most of his life and, curiously, so had his parents. This triggered a memory of my own and I called up my mother and asked her what her father had forced her to have once a week, it was cod liver oil, one of the highest sources of omega-3's known to man. Now very curious I proceded to chat to a number of people both at work and outside that I considered "smart" people, without about 2 exceptions in 14 people I asked, they all took omega-3 supplements. Now I'll freely admit its all anecdotal evidence and hardly scientific but it was more then enough to convince me to try them and so for the past 2 years now I've been taking omega-3 supplements with what I would consider noticeable effects. Despite my complaints above about having a poor memory, it's not entirely correct. My memory is definitely poor when it comes to things that I consider unimportant, but my key memory for things relating to subjects that I do consider important remains very sharp. What's more since taking the omega-3 supplements I almost immediately noticed a clarity to my thoughts that had been absent for some time. With this as a background you can understand my interest when I read this article. While the article has a decidedly (and unfortunately somewhat typical of the left these days) biased doom and gloom leftist bent, it is nonetheless a nice starting point for looking into omega-3 and its an interesting thought that a lot of our current ailments in our society are possibly due to something as simple as nutrition.

I'm off to start regularly playing chess again ;)

A course? Of course!

2006-05-12T22:19:00.001+10:00

Well I'm sitting here on a Sourcefire course and I have to say its been great. Not, unfortunately because of the course, which while adequate hasn't been enthralling due largely to the fact that I've spent a lot more time then the instructor using their product on their high end kit, but because its given me time to catch up on a lot of things. Before I wander off onto other subjects it's worth noting that I'm not exactly convinced that giving full Internet access on a training course is actually productive. It's definitely a good thing for me, in that I'm not really learning much and the 'net functions as a conduit for me to do other more productive things (including some work) but for a lot of other people in the room who don't know a thing about Sourcefire they are still sitting here browsing the net and ignoring the instructor. I guess if it wasn't the 'net they'd have found some other way to ignore him.

I've had an interesting couple of weeks. Something that I have discovered is a renewed interest in plays. I was never very interested in plays, I think because I had seen some fairly ordinary ones and as a result hadn't been impressed with the genre. When I first arrived in London I went and saw some plays with some friends, really enjoyed it and determined to do it regularly, that was until I saw another few bad plays and once again got over it. Now I'm back at square one having just seen Blackbird which was an absolutely staggering display of emotion on stage. In a nutshell it is about a paedophillic incident that happened 15 years ago and the confrontation between the two protagonists. What is interesting is that the play manages to take you through BOTH perspectives of the incident, that is not only the revulsion and disgust towards the paedophile, but also through seeing it from his eyes, of a true love and a natural thing. It's great to see such controversial material and it certainly illicited some discussion from the 3 of us that saw the play together.

After seeing Blackbird I was in the mood to see another play and when my mother came and stayed with me for the last few weeks it seemed like a perfect opportunity to do so. My mother picked Embers which was a really enjoyable play to watch, Jeremy Irons plays a very good role, though that is what you'd expect. As is usually the way though, the book is far better then the play, and it is without a doubt the script that makes the play so good. I read embers a few years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it, I think perhaps because it struck a number of notes with me, not the least of them being friendship. Friends are very important to me, and I have a reasonably complex set of thoughts and philosophies around them, embers explores friendship and its definition quite a bit, and in many cases a lot of the ideas express ring very true with me. I'd recommend that if you can go and see the play, but more importantly go read the book.

I'm slowly catching up on my personal emails, so those of you that have written to me recently, I havn't forgotten but I've been working through a backlog, I prefer to write meaningful (or at least semi meaningful) emails as replies then just glib responses so I can't really churn them out that fast, though I noticed I managed to average ~10 or so emails a day for the last week of a personal nature. Part of that frenzy of emailling was related to 9/11.

It came to my attention via Benjamin Waters that the left had a new show piece, Loose Change which is a movie that promotes various conspiracies about 9/11 (note that the movie is about an hour long so be prepared to watch it if you click on that link). Benjamin Waters also wrote some commentary on the movie in an email and sent it out to various friends, a slightly edited version can be found here. In summary there was quite an interesting little discussion about 9/11, politics and the left in general, especially interesting was that the people I referred to the film all found it quite believable and persuasive.

I have a few things more to write about, but as I'm looking to get out of this course early I'd better go and pay some attention :)

Mobility and media

2006-04-28T23:46:00.001+10:00

As a birthday present to my self I recently bought an Archos PMA400. I have to say that this device is very nice and while not my idea of the perfect mobile device, which in my opinion should basically have the full computing power of a server, wireless, digital telephony connections, and long battery life, its not far from it. Aside from being a standard PDA which runs Linux, it has a number of other features including being able to plug into a TV and record any channel and play it back either on the TV or its own screen. While that type of functionality is not unique, especially as the recent trend towards PVRs continues, what is unique is how user friendly and convenient Archos has made it. My pma comes with a cradle that you plug it in and then plug the cables (scart for the euros) into the relevant parts of the TV. Now when you plug it into the cradle it enables an infrared receiver on the cradle and the included full, normal remote control now controls your pma. Even better then that the PMA learns the signals that activate your TV / stereo etc and now you can control ALL the devices via the PMA which sits there and relays stuff back to the relevant device via IR. Battery life, while not as good as I would ideally want it, is enough to play music for 9 hours and videos for 4.5 hours. All in all its fairly amazing and because it runs linux I can support ANY codec I want, including DRM'd if I was so inclined (I'm not) through to the more windows centric and of course all the open source ones. If any of you reading this have any familiarity with OpenPMA then let me know because I think that is the firmware I will try running on it next. So I've got my media player now what?

For a long time I've been uncertain about what to do with the digitalization of media. As a technologist I think its great, I mean its so much easier to list, select and play digital songs / movies then having to swap physical media around. The problem I have is that I'm very particular about the quality of both movies and music as I have spent a small fortune on a good home cinema and I can hear the difference between a 128kb mp3 encoded song and a 192kb one. The obvious solution is to just store everything in a lossless format (that is in its pure unaltered form from the cd / dvd), however, the concern about that is the amount of space that would require. Here the nice thing is, that having procrastinated so long, the amount of storage required, while once infeasible, is now very very affordable. So I decided that I would store all my media in a lossless format and then transcode on the fly any time I wanted to put it onto a more mobile device, like my Archos PMA. I set out to do some research on codecs and media.

The first thing that I discovered was that WAV format, which I had mistakenly thought was a raw music format is actually in fact more of a general container and not specifically for music. As a result of this there are a lot of extra things in a .wav file then you would need for encoding pure music for example. Looking into it further I discovered that FLAC was generally regarded as the best lossless format, the reasons being that it compresses up to 2/3 more then original WAV format, it can be streamed, tagged is completely open source and widely supported for a lossless format. After my investigations I have decided that I will store all my music in FLAC and then transcode them into AAC format for listening on portable devices or where space is an issue, AAC having been chosen after I conducted a number of double blind listening tests to see what my ears prefer. Now it was on to movies.

Storing movies is a lot more problematic then storing music. For starters there is two aspects to any movie, the picture and the sound, and while playing back picture is relatively straightforward, playing back sound can be very complex. The main problem with the sound for my requirements is that often the mechanism that is playing the pictures wants to also process the sound, in my case a computer. The issue with that is that no computer, regardless of how good a sound card, can run my speakers at the necessary requirements as well as my amplifier. This was causing me a lot of problems initially until I realised that I could keep the sound and just allow the mechanism that is playing the pictures to "pass through" the sound to another external decoder, in my case my aplifier. The question then was what was a satisfactory quality?

The question of quality I decided was moot in the end because I will do a similar thing with my movies as I have done with my music, that is I will just keep the full dvd image and when I want to watch the movie on another device I will just transcode it to something else. Now the question is what is the best something else? After doing some research it seems that Divx5 is generally regarded as the best picture codec, however, xvid4 is not far behind. Xvid (divx backwards) is an opensource codec that started off a fair way behind the current codecs at the time but up until the recent release of divx5 was leading the way. Even now, while many think that divx5 is better then the current incarnation of xvid, there are some areas which it would appear to be better, and as a believer in open source I strongly suspect that xvid will shortly regain its crown as the leading codec. Because I support open source and xvid is very widely supported, I will encode all my movies to xvid for use on mobile devices.

So there you have it. My advice to people considering moving their collection of music and movies to pure digital formats is to go out and buy a cheapish SATA raid card and 4 x 300gig hd's. This means that you will about 1 TB of storage which will be more then enough for most peoples entire cd and dvd collection. Store the cd's in FLAC format and the dvd's in a raw image and transcode them into AAC or xvid if you need to play them on more mobile devices.

Playing catchup

2006-04-19T02:31:00.001+10:00

Well it's been a while since I last posted and like in other things I'm currently playing catchup with my blogs. First cab off the rank is philosophy.

I recently turned 30, which is an age that I never thought of myself as being. By that I mean that all my life I've never really planned or thought ahead at all, I'm just interested in the here and now. The biggest surprise of my life in that regard was finishing university. I had, like most of my peers, "mapped" my life from school to uni and then ... well in my case nothing, I had thought that I'd be an acedemic. Of course once I actually got to the end of my honours year I was thoroughly sick of what I had been studying and hacking for 16 hours a day instead. While it was obvious that IT was what I should be doing it was a big wake up call in the sense that for the first time I had to think about something after university, a first. Turning 30 was a similar experience. The age itself doesn't worry me, afterall I've been steadily working towards various things, using my time learning and exploring concepts and ideas and all in all I feel stronger, faster, smarter and more knowledgeable then when I was, say 21. That said 30 was simply an age that I had never thought of in connection with myself. So I decided to take stock of what I was doing with my life and where I wanted to go, so instead of my usual birthday, which for those of you that don't know me is spent wandering around old haunts reminiscing, I went to hampstead heath and thought about the future. For the record I can highly recommend going to Hampstead heath for a walk and a think, it has a great view (something that I think is important for thinking) and it is one of the few places that you can get a bit of space in London. In fact I liked it so much I'm now seriously thinking about moving there shortly.

I spent about 5 hours just walking around thinking, after a particularly good thought I'd sit down for half an hour and write it all down. I approached it from the perspective of what I liked about my life and what I didn't like and what steps I'd need to do to fix the things I didn't like. A lot of what I came up with is a little too personal to put down in a public blog like this but I promised various people I would write up some kind of synthesis so here are the relevant points:

In order to do accomplish anything then I must be passionate about it. I should focus on doing things that I enjoy while avoiding things that I hate, common sense but easy to get distracted from. The following serves as those lists, though not exhaustive:

ENJOY

- learning - mastering something - tinkering with computers
- rigorous examination
- perfecting something
- competition
- adventure
- neophilia
- space ( both personal and mental)
- concrete objectives
- nice objects

HATE

- slow thinkers
- repetition
- conformity
- bad physical shape
- lack of accomplishment
- time where nothing is learnt

Finding motivation will come not from just one thing that I enjoy, but should rather come from a combination of things that I enjoy. Long term motivation means more discipline then I am currently enforcing on myself, while doing something that you love is easy, you don't always love it and shying away from something the moment I come across a part of it that I don't love is very counter productive. I should structure my life so that I can achieve goals (see accomplishments). I should also regularly think about what I'm doing and where I'm going and spend time considering possibilities.
Some thoughts on what matches some of the above are things like learning to code well which matches many of the intellectual side of things and doing regular physical activities matches the others. This suggests that it would be very beneficial for me to learn to code and schedule some regular "adventure" type physical activities. Mountaineering, canyoning, skiing and walking all seem appropriate.

Accomplishments can sometimes be smaller things that require little amount of work or perhaps just a moment of inspiration, but more commonly they require serious amounts of work and dedication. I'm not very good at the later and so
I should get in the habit of formulating lists and actively ensure that I am working towards the goals on the list. As part of this there needs to be some form of measurement, a regular litmus test to ensure that I have forward progress, this also helps the feeling of underachievement that often comes after working on something for a long period of time but without finishing it,
even when in many cases you are making big progress (ie learning a language isa very good example of this). I need to accept myself as an accomplishment andnot require any external validation of that. I need to appreciate that without
motivation it is highly unlikely that I will have any accomplishments.

So there you have it, motivation and accomplishments were the key for that train of thought. What that all equates to a list of things that I've given myself to work on and regularly check that I'm actually achieving. Again the list is personal but includes things like ensuring that I'm actually going out and socialising as well as getting back in shape.

Actually I'll end it there and make new blog entries for the different topics ;)

Time and M$

2006-03-29T03:11:00.001+11:00

Not going to write much, but thought I'd share some interesting links with you all. First up is this blog entry, an interesting insight into some of the things going on over at Microsoft. I try to keep my eye on MS and it was with some interest a few months back that I read an article about big changes going on there, it looks like they are not working.

On a different note ben sent me an interesting link to help with time management. Reading it just read like common sense to me, that said its useful to have it crystalized somewhere so I thought I'd link it in case anyone else was interested in such things.

Sleepless sickness

2006-03-27T21:23:00.001+11:00

Well it's been a while since I blogged for which I largely blame the combination of an obsessive gaming period and illness. I have been sick probably only twice in the past 10 years and both of those were some time ago, so it was quite a shock to have spent most of last week in bed with some kind of "cold". I say cold because everyone seems to get very upset when I use the word "flu" as they seem to think it implies some near death experience, I'm not convinced as you can tell from my tone, but nonetheless I'll refer to it as a cold. What was really annoying though, was that it co-incided with a bout of insomnia. I sometimes find myself so fired up over something, normally when I'm learning something, that I can barely sleep. This is normally not a problem as it actually helps me learn, but in this case, coupled with the cold it just meant that I couldn't get any sleep to give myself a chance of getting over it so I was pretty unwell for a while. Thankfully though it seems to be over now and I'm back to work and productive things. One annoying thing though is that I seem to have really screwed up my neck over the last few months, I'm not sure what it is by massages and careful placement of my head while I sleep hasn't seemed to help. I guess I'm going to have to go to some specialist but for some reason I have an instinctive aversion to trusting Brittish medical facilities.

Come fly with me we'll fly, lets fly away

2006-02-24T18:54:00.001+11:00

Here I am blogging again while 11km up in the sky over the "java sea" (the irony isn't lost on me) doing just under mach 1. I have come to the realisation that the problem with long distance flying is not now lack of options, it's that you don't want to do anything. They still have the antiquated system in place where you need to turn up 3 hours before an international flight, which means that even if your flight was at a reasonable hour, you still had to get up at some horrible time because you had to get to the airport (invariably located a long way away from where you are staying) 3 hours before the flight started. This time round I actually timed how long it took me from when I turned up at the check in desk with no ticket to when I was waiting at the passenger lounge having gone through customs and 2 security checks, total time - 11 minutes. Then I just had to sit down and enjoy Sydneys International airport (Kingford Smith) hospitality, which unsurprising to those of you who use it regularly, sucks badly. To top it off my plane was about 1 hour late leaving Sydney, though I actually prefer that as now I have one hour less to spend in Singapore occupying myself waiting for the London leg of the flight.
Now I'm sitting on the plane wondering if my next flight will have wireless net coverage or if I should use up my remaining time on this one, I think I'll assume that it does and just use up MOST of my time :) I might even try a skype voip conversation shortly and see if the prohibitive rates they charge for making phone calls is a thing of the past once and for all or if the telephone companies are in cahoots with the isp. Fortunately my headphones are still taking me to a world of sonic bliss where I am able to ignore all the crap going on around me. On which note it has to be said travelling with Australians is a good thing, on the whole all Aussies are used to travelling LONG distances and consequently spending long durations travelling, the result is that they are actually a fairly pleasant bunch to travel with, far less annoying then other cultures / socities I often find myself in the company of while travelling.
So here I am, I can do anything on my laptop (well for another 10 hours or so), including things like programming or watching various shows I have downloaded, or I could watch some in flight on demand videos or I could read. In fact I want to do none of the above as I am too tired to really concentrate well and I'd rather just catch up on some sleep, which is also fairly problematic due to the fact that there is drone of jet engines in the background and more annoying, the habit of planes to randomly drop a few feet every 10 minutes or so which sets of your body's sense of equiblium which in turn startles you out of sleep with a vague sense of impending doom. Fun. Perhaps I'll go back to baiting the nearby baby with scary faces (enhanced by my recent shaved head I've found) and generally making myself popular with people who arn't as audibly protected as myself.

Australia

2006-02-17T11:32:00.001+11:00

Well I'm back in Australia. It hasn't even been a year since I was last here and I'm back again, the reason, Best man at my friend Adam Skovron's wedding. I have decided that I won't be coming back for a couple of years so I took off 3 weeks and have made a real trip of it this time, even to the extent of not spending a few days in Japan like I wanted to, so that I can catch up with everyone that I wanted to see (i'm not quite there yet, but I'm close!). I find it really interesting seeing Australia now, it doesn't feel like home, London doesn't either for that matter, and whatever ties I once had here are now only in the form of memories. There are some key differences that I've noticed this time around though.
The sun. You just can't explain it to someone who hasn't spent time in the Australian sun. People from other sunny parts of the world think they know, but they still don't, the sun in Australia is harsh, really harsh. Sydney still sits underneath the hole in the ozone and you can actually discern a clear difference standing out in it. Yesterday I decided to walk into the city over the harbour bridge. I looked out the window from my mothers apartment (in Milsons Point) and saw an overcast day and so left my sun glasses at home and didn't bother with sun screen. I left the apartment and start walking, I had just started to cross the harbour bridge when the sun said "theres ben! rare spot! kill him" and the clouds parted and the sun light washed over me. I guess that I was walking for about 13-18 minutes in the sun all up by the time I arrived at my destination. I was absolutely soaked with perspiration and, predictably, thoroughly sun burnt. For those of you that don't know I have recently decided to act on an age old promise to myself, where I always stated that when I got to the point with my hair that I had a bald patch on top and I personally thought it looked stupid I would just shave it all off, which is precisely what I did. Personally I don't think that it looks too bad, but what little protection I had gained before from my strategically placed hair has now vanished and as a consequence I currently look like a beetroot. I look around and see everyone, even the "geeks", are brown. You just can't help it over here, if you move around in the sun at all, then you will be brown. Interestingly though, it doesn't look healthy to me, it looks in fact, like they are being slowly spit roasted by the Australian sun. It's no wonder that Australia has the highest rate of skin cancer in the world.
Something else that I found interesting was the cost of things. You'd think that living in London that I could rightly expect that everything was cheaper, pretty much regardless of what it was, or at the very least food. Food is something that Australia unquestionably has it better then London. There is an abudance of top quality fresh produce that London can just never match and so even when the chef isn't that good, the fact that all the produce is so good makes up for it and you are still left with a decent meal, but if you can get a good chef, then its heaven. So you could say that food was something that I was really looking forward to, and it hasn't let me down, but what was interesting was checking out the prices. It's still accurate to say that the cheapest meals in Sydney are less then half the price of something comparable in London, that is that it is still possible to eat well for AUD $10. That is not really possible in London. It is also fair to say that if you want to go and drop 200 pounds per person on a meal that you actually can't spend that much (short of alcohol) in Australia, but what has changed is the middle of the road meal. In London I regularly dine out, so I can comfortably say that a nice meal will normally cost you around 10-18 pounds, depending on whether you are having entres or not. I can now say after eating out pretty much exclusively since I arrived at all kinds of places that the cost is very similar now in Sydney, and, in some cases its even more expensive. It really took me as a surprise, I don't object to paying a little more but it really shattered the image of Australia being cheap in my mind.
Body culture. It's the largest difference between the Australian population and that of any in Europe, especially England. When I walk around in England you notice that many people while not overweight, are definitely well padded. On the whole it means that the guys look fairly big and the women quite curvy (i'm not complaining mind you!). When you walk around Australia though, you notice that neither the guys nor the women have ANY excess body fat. The result is that the guys all look muscle bound, simply because you can actually see their muscles, which in most cases are actually quite small, but I was so used to not seeing any muscles (ie I can't think of one person at work who strikes me as being "muscley") so I had this feeling that I was walking around surrounded by people that live in the gym. The women are noticibly hotter on average then their european counterparts, but again you can almost see the obsession with their appearence and the effort it takes to keep themselves looking like they do. It's a testamount to the difference that weather plays in profile of an average citizen. The final thing of note is about perspective.
Most city people, regardless of which city it is in the world (at least in my experience) are happy to tell you about how different they are from their "country" brethren, normally heavilly laced with quips and derogatory observations about how the country folk are slow, dumb or even inbred. In many cases it is true, not that there is necessarily anything intrinsically wrong with country people, or living in the country for that matter, but simply that there is a measurable difference in the average opinion on many topics and a slightly slower pace of life. What I found interesting this time around is that I now see such a difference between people that I know that have lived in many large cities and those that havn't left, for example, Sydney. Living in London (but the concept is applicable to any other large city) is very different from living in Sydney. The easiest explanation is of course culture and population and that is very true, but there are also different psychologies at work and different approaches of the government and businesses as well. The result of all of this in my opinion is that if you live in a few different large cities you generate a kind of "meta-city" person, someone that has adapted to live in ANY city, which means a very open mind, that has been forced to see things from a number of perspectives. This time around i've noticed that a number of the people that I've chatted with seem to be really stuck in the "Sydney' frame of mind, where their only reference and the only meaningful perspective for them is that of a Sydneysider. While living in the country or just one city is not a bad thing, it does seem to mean that you have to work harder to not get stuck in a given frame of mind, especially where in a country like Australia, all the media is controlled by one or two people. It almost raises the question to what extent are we already generating populaces in the image that the governments want via popular media.

Technology penetration

2006-02-05T01:46:00.001+11:00

Well its finally happened, I'm writing this blog from 10km up in the sky currently over the Black Sea at little under mach 1, and as you can plainly tell, I'm on the net! I must admit I was pretty sceptical when, bleary eyed, waiting to get on the damn plane this morning I was greeted by two attactive lasses who tried to give me some cards, and were muttering what I took to be something for sale. My normal scepticism almost cost me the best freebie I've had in a while, one free hour of wireless net access on my flight. Of course, as a geek I normally find it hard to engage women and ask for favours, but with the right incentive I've found that its quite easy... needless to say I now have enough net access to make my flight bearable :) Its not blisteringly fast, but its actually far far better then I thought it would be, perhaps at about ISDN speed, maybe even slightly faster just with an unusually high latency of around 2 seconds or so, which I assume is the time taken for it to bounce of various satellites.
On a different note I recently bought a pair of new ear phones, or more accurately, in canal ear phones. The concept of the in ear phones is simple, put the sound as close as possible to the ear drum directly by making you insert the head phones into your canal, it sounds a little odd, but after a few attempts you get used to it (for those of you, who like my father, panic about the idea of putting anything into your ears and the consequences of loud bursts of noise from your audio source, you needn't be worried as it comes with a sound filter that will block out any loud spikes in the audio feed). The benefits of doing this are that you need less power to drive the speakers and the speakers can be smaller, there is much more clarity as there is no interference due to sound traveling through the air. What this also means is that you effectively make a seal by inserting the ear phones, which means, you guessed it a MASSIVE reduction in back ground noise. This is the key thing on a flight, I'm sitting here surrounded by people talking, babies screaming and some lovely big Royles Royce engines and I can only hear Beethovens 9th symphony. Bliss, no really, its fucking bliss I have my own private world of sound. There are other benefits as well, most ear "buds" are actually detrimental to your ears, primarily because they don't block out ambient background noise and result in the user turning up the volume to drown it out and thus causing long term hearing damage. Due to the fact that the speakers are so close to my ear drums and the seal I lose about ~30db of background noise, meaning that I have to turn down the ear phones in order for it to be comfortable, from my reading it would appear that the in canal ear phones are actually the best of ALL the different personal speakers you can get for your long term hearing.
So you'd think with my ear phones, and wireless net connection I'd be able to amuse myself, and you'd be right. What's even more amazing though is that I am still spoilt for choice, I have on demand movies, not the normal timered, 4 or 5 heavily edited movies, but a solid 150 all of which I can play when and how I want. I just watched the "Edukators" are really good german art film which I meant to catch when it was at the cinemas a few months back but that caught my eye when flicking through the on demand movies.
Now if the plane doesn't drop out of the sky I might JUST be able to have a pleasant flight :)

Accurate Cold

2006-01-26T22:47:00.001+11:00

It has recently got a little colder in Europe, which has resulted in the usual round of eveyone complaining about how cold it is and how out of character for this time of year etc etc. The fact that it is the middle of Winter and the coldest time of the year and only recently dropped below 3 degrees celcius seems to have escaped them, I mean if its not meant to be cold at this time of the year when is it? Of course the answer is, that most people NEVER want it to be cold, but I'm getting used to that idea now after being subjected to it for 29 years. What I find it really hard to get used to is that the various news agencies around the world are buying into the cold mania and losing all ability to give accurate reports. A good example is the recent Russian "cold snap".
It seems that around a week or so ago Russia, or more accurately, the Moscow region was subjected to unusually cold weather. The weather was so bad that many people died from freezing to death and all kinds of emergency measures were brought into place. I don't for a moment suggest that this was not the case, but what I found interesting was the disparity of reporting on the event. This disparity fell into two main categories. The first, was the difference in recorded temperature. A friend of mine said that he read in the German media that it reached -39 degrees celcius, a quick search on the net found this article which says -24 degrees, this article that says -31 and yet another article that doesn't give a precise temperature at all. I find it absolutely amazing that these articles, most from fairly reputable news sources can have such a discrepancy about the temperature of Moscow, the largest city in Russia, but it doesn't end there.
The second way in which things differ from article to article is of course the records. Society now seems fascinated with records. Every day we have to beat more and more records and something isn't viewed as news worthy unless it does so. I guess with that in mind it should come as no surprise that almost every article about the cold weather seems to feel a need to mention how it breaks some kind of record. What was amusing to me was that once again, despite a large chunk of evidence and recorded fact each report comes up with differing "coldest day in Moscow" and how, depending on the widely varying temperature that it was on those days, how it was broken or almost broken. How can it possibly be that there is such disagreement about an event that happened a few days ago, in a large city? I suspect the answer ties into the fact that almost all europeans seem to be fixated on the weather and the natural human tendancy to exaggerate.
While I'm on the subject of cold weather, perhaps a reader can explain to me why the following (admittedly a somewhat unsavoury topic but nonetheless curious) seems to never occur, visible farts. I've lived in some colder part of the world for a while now, certainly I've been in weather that was cold enough to freeze breath very often and yet i've noticed that you never, ever, see anyones farts. This was highlighted to me recently as I was standing at a bus stop with one other person in front of me with his back to me. I quite audibly heard the guy fart, but despite being a sub zero day, was unable to see a thing. The only explanation I was able to come up with is that breath was visible due to the moisture content and perhaps farts were invisible as they did not have enough moisture. I asked a few canadian friends of mine about the subject and (after the laughing stopped) they too were also unable to remember ever "seeing" a fart, despite the fact that where they grew up it was below freezing for vast amounts of the year. Please leave a comment if you think you know the answer to this conundrum :)

RSS feeds - engadget

2006-01-12T23:30:00.001+11:00

As many of you know, I'm a huge RSS fan. I think its the easiest way to stay abreast of information that I have seen. One feed that I am becoming more and more attached to is engadget. While I've been following engadget for some time now, recently I've found that it's just about superceding all my old technology related feeds like slashdot. So while I havn't given up on some of my other feeds just yet, I whole heartedly recommend engadget to anyone that is even vaguely interested in technology.

Nice resource - reviews

2006-01-09T03:37:00.001+11:00

Every now and again I stumble on some really nice resources while browsing the net. Today I found Consumer Research. This site has reviews of pretty much any topic that you could imagine, from geek stuff to non geek topics. What's great about it is that they all (at least the ones I checked / read were) up to date, being no older then 3 months, and had a thoughtful, non biased collections of facts and noted down general opinion. As an example I am looking to buy some new headphones and reading the review, had a list of the top scorers in each category from all the reputable reviewers (eg forbes, cnet, amazon, tomshardware, anandtech, audiophile sites), the prices for all of them, and it even contained observations on them from the comments by buyers from ebay and amazon! This site just made my bookmarks.

Lasers

2006-01-07T01:02:00.001+11:00

I just saw an article on engadget about a new laser. This one is seriously kewl though as it actually does what you'd expect from a laser, ie transmits heat! This means that you can use this laser for doing things like, bursting balloons, igniting flammable things and of course, burning people! Check out their selection at this website.

Achieving

2006-01-04T07:54:00.001+11:00

For most of my life I've felt like I am meant to achieve something. In all likliehood its the result of being an only child with a doting mother combined with excessive competitive drive, but whatever the reason I feel an urge to do something. Of course the tricky part is working out what that "something" actually is. I've had various ideas, some of which I'm actively working on, most of which have just gone by the way side for various reasons but I did find a very interesting article the other day which I think is a nice synthesis of my various problems and thoughts about the topic.

Christmas

2006-01-04T07:23:00.001+11:00

Well I must admit that I didn't get all that I wanted to done this Christmas, but nonetheless, I don't consider it a complete failure. It's becoming a bit of a tradition for me to spend Christmas by myself concentrating on learning something new. The reasoning for chosing christmas is that it is a time of year that has no meaning for me but that seems to occupy almost everyone else around me, meaning that I am left unbothered by interuptions and able to get on with things that take a lot of time and concentration, something that I don't normally (or at least recently) have much of an opportunity to do. This time I decided to teach myself how to code in Python, given that three years ago I spend my entire Christmas break learning how to code c (I wrote a proxy server, nothing exciting but it was a learning curve for me given that I couldn't code a thing before that.). Well I met with some success, I managed to read most of a python book and have a fairly good understanding of Pythons strengths and weaknesses and also a reasonable understanding of how to get things done. Of course the main point, that being actual coding seems to have escaped me, as instead I saw myself spending a lot of time just relaxing and watching a series of relatively bad movies. While that is a little annoying, in the overall scheme of things I think it might have been the right thing to do as it seems to have allowed me time to reflect on a few things and to really recharge. I'm looking forward to getting stuck into a few projects in the next year.

Change of location

2005-12-22T22:14:00.001+11:00

Just a quick note for those of you who are using RSS aggregation and will therefore see this even though this URL will no longer be working. My blog will move from this current address to this one. Please find all future updates at that url.

Listening

2005-11-16T22:13:00.001+11:00

I'm in a fairly bellicose mood this morning so I thought I get a few rants out. Let me give a snippet of a recent phone conversation:
Phone rings
I pick up the phone and say "Shamsuls phone, Ben speaking, How can I help you?"
voice "Is this Shamsul?"

This phonecall is completely typical when I answer the phone for someone else. Now I accept that perhaps I am not always the most clear speaking person, so after it happened a few times I made a concious effort to enunciate and yet still the problem persisted. Then I realised that either the person calling was either unable to think fast enough to deal with the fact that someone else was answering the phone rather then the person they intended on speaking with and they needed the gap in the conversation by getting me to repeat information that they already knew OR that they just didn't listen. Given that its really not THAT challenging to adapt to someone else answering the phone I assume its people not listening. This I must admit I found a little bizare, that was until I went into the local sandwich shop.
Sandwich person "Hi sir, what would you like?"
Ben "Could I have a ham, cheese, and tomato sandwitch please"
Sandwich person "Would you like white bread sir?"
Ben "Yes, thats fine"
Sandwich person "Would you like butter on that sir?"
Ben "Yes"
Sandwich person "What would you like on that sir?"
Ben "Ham, cheese and tomato please"
Sandwich person "Salt and pepper sir?"
Ben "no thanks"
Sandwich person "With crusts sir"
Ben " yes please"
Sandwich person "How would you like that cut sir?"

Now if you examine the above conversation you will notice that although they actually ASKED me at the start of the exchange what I wanted, they didn't actually listen to my reply and consequently I had to tell them again. I have noticed that it seems to be the norm in our society to ask questions but not listen to the answer. Why has this come about? Of course another amusing side note is that even when I go back into the same sandwitch shop and ask for "a ham, cheese and tomato sandwitch on white bread with butter and no salt and pepper" I not only get a strange look but I get asked the same questions anyway.

Magnetism

2005-11-03T00:58:00.001+11:00

One of my colleagues is a mad gadget freak. Eachan seems to spend an infinite amount of money on bizare and largely useless gadgets, but the other day an amazing thing happened, he found one that was genuinely kewl, magnets. Of course there is nothing new about magnets but in the hands of geeks much fun can be had. For starters we immediately tried to degauss various media and were successful with floppies. Later I was randomly poking a magnetised stick at a bunch of coins and noticed something strange, some of the coins were able to be picked up but others weren't. I started to collect some penny coins and soon found that any coins older then 1991 were not able to be picked up, shortly thereafter google came up with the explanation in the form of this page. I have of course added them to my wishlist.

Windows and temp files

2005-10-24T00:47:00.001+10:00

As anyone that knows me can appreciate I am not a fan of windows. For some time now there has been only ONE thing that windows can do that I can't really do properly in Linux and that is play games. In particular Linux is rarely capable of playing any of the MMORPGs that I like to play, so to that end on my desktop machine I keep a couple of partitions free and install windows on them. Generally I install windows on its own partition, one that I can just blow away and reinstall every few months when the seemingly inevitable corruption sets in, and another which just stores things like the games themselves. I recently had cause to burn a dvd from an image I had stored on another machine, but given I was playing a game at the time I thought I would simply copy it across to my storage partition and burn it. Unfortunately upon examination I discovered I only had 1.5 GB of space free on my storage partition and the dvd image was 4.5gb. I started to look at data I had stored on the partition under the hopes that I could find something to delete and thus make enough room to copy the image over. Now here I will digress a little and point out that I HATE how by default windows won't let you do anything irrevocable, by that I mean, in a default windows install its a 4 step operation to really delete a file. You start off saying, delete that, then it says are you sure, then it puts it in the trashbin and then you have to delete the trashbin, then there is the automatic system snapshots and other things that go on. The long and short of it is that windows very effectively protects from the normal user making a fuck up and thus from that perspective I guess its a good thing, the problem starts when the user isn't the normal user. In my case when I ask the OS to delete something I expect it to be delete, right then right there, I don't want to have to go through hoops to get it to do that. Why not have this inbuilt protection? We all make mistakes I hear some of you say, well thats true we do but this protection comes at a cost, space. You see by making sure that you arn't really deleting the files windows has to store copies of the things that you delete everywhere, in our typical example there is the copy of the file in the trashbin and in the system snapshot. Now while thats fine if you have a HEAP of space, in my case I actively USE the 1.5tb of space i have on my network and I am not keen on windows wasting a significant portion of the space I make available to it on protecting me from mistakes (in reality I can restore things that I accidently delete even with all these things turned off, its just a pain). Theres the background now to continue with my main story. Anyway there I was poring through the partition trying to find something to delete and I noticed an option in the properties section that starts a windows cleanup wizard and I thought "its been years since I tried a util like that maybe its actually decent by now", so I started it up. Immediately I was presented with some choices about what kind of files it should look for / delete and being very cautious I only ticked the option I thought to be the least important, the one called "temporary files". After marking it I clicked the wonderful "Next" button and the system started to whir. I waited for about 10 seconds and then I started to think it was a little odd, it shouldn't take that long to find and list the temporary files for me, I waited another 20 seconds and then it proudly finished. It was about then that i noticed the terrible truth, windows in all its wisdom had decided that a "temporary file" was rather then the generally accepted use of the term meaning "a file that is generated during the course of normal use by an application and deleted at the end of the applications running" was actually in fact "any file that wasn't registered as belonging to a program as registered by the master install application list. This meant that because the majority of information was things like backups of my cd collection, games that were installed before the latest reinstall of windows (which resides on another partition for this very reason) were considered "temporary" and the result? All of them were deleted. Thanks a fucking bunch windows.

Frustration

2005-10-17T23:36:00.001+10:00

A friend of mine recently had an experience with his bank. I find it interesting peoples responses to such incidents, personally I would have had the bank manager explaining to me why I can't access my own money and, if nothing further happened, I would have had the bank in court. Not that I would expect to actually achieve anything but because that kind of behaviour pisses me off SO much that I am happy to lose some time and money just to make a point.

Blogs and OSS

2005-10-17T23:27:00.001+10:00

I just read some interesting articles. The first one was a discussion about OSS and its model in terms of what business could learn from it. It was very derrogatory about current businesses and in particular. The second article, if you can call a small blog that, was a lot more condemning, in particular it attacked professionals. Here is where I have a problem. I fully agree with what I suspect was the sentiment behind the blog, that is that you lose a lot more then you gain with conservative, politically correct views and restrictions, but what I have a problem with is the use of the word "professional". I would be interested to hear from others, but to me professional does NOT have the connotations that the author of the blog and Paul Graham seem to have. To me a professional is someone that gets the job done, when and how he says. He is first and foremost a man of his word, he is reliable. That does not imply that he is conservative, stuffy or overly dignified, rather, that he is someone you can rely on to get something done in the manner which you would want it done yourself. Is that so different from what everyone else thinks of as professional?

Happy!

2005-10-07T23:34:00.001+10:00

Just read an interesting article over at timesonline. I found it interesting because it largely gels with things that I have discovered about my own psyche, ie that the drive to achieve is larger then the satisfaction of the achievement.

Playing catchup

2005-10-07T20:17:00.001+10:00

Well its been some time since I blogged, and playing catchup on that much missed information closely resembles other aspects of my life right now. Lets see where to begin.

I guess the main impact right now is work. Work has been going mental as we have auditors over from Canada on behalf of the Tasmanian government making sure that we are compliant with their regulations in order to issue Betfair with a gambling license down there. That means that my team is frantically running around trying to pre-empt any questions that might arise and ensure that all the projects we had planned on finishing in the next 6 months are actually done this week (while the auditors are here!). Combine that with Sham doing his CISSP prep, Adrian with a bunch of commitments limiting his time at work and my scheduled appearence at Linux World expo on the gentoo booth and you have 3 very busy people. On the plus side I have been getting on top of ESM, well as much as you can given their general lack of Unix experience, but more interestingly I have been spending a lot of time getting to play around with the various sourcefire kit that has arrived. Big toys for big boys :) Actually it was fairly amusing for a while as I have been doing a lot of Gentoo work on Snort which is what lies at the heart of the Sourcefire kit. That has in turn meant that I was spending a lot of time on IRC (not like I don't anyway) chatting to the devs of both snort and sguil (I might as well add a shameless plug for sguil here as I think it is probably THE best security tool I have played with for a long time. Imagine being able to see attacks as they come in, stop them, replay them, even pull exploit code out of the traffic stream on the fly!) and of course that meant chatting to a few Sourcefire employees. What they didn't realise was that I was also a serious customer of theirs so they got quite confused when I started asking questions on IRC about their high end kit and various problems I was having with it. In the end it worked out well, I managed to get their tech guys in the states hassle their reps in the UK and I think my level of service might even get a boost because of it, certainly my updates are coming quicker ;) In summary the incredible pace at work has been dominating my life for the last month or two.

What makes my lack of time even worse right now is all the interesting things happening outside of work. I mean 4 months ago I was starting to get bored, work was a bit trivial and there was not a lot of interesting things happening outside of work so I was spending my time gaming. Now I don't have enough hours in the day. One of the things that is taking up more and more time is my Gentoo work. I have just finished a whole bunch of ebuilds which will result in me adding sguil to the tree very shortly (read in the next day or two) as well as doing a lot of crypto based stuff that should see a lot more automation and ease of use for the full harddrive encryption stuff that I have been working on.

The Linux world expo wasn't really as good as I had hoped (I will be writing an entry on it over on my gentoo blog which can be found here). There was nothing really remarkable on display and while the show was free, to hear the talks cost something like 80 pounds which I thought wasn't worth it. I ended up spending most of my time at the Gentoo booth chatting to people about the pro's of Gentoo and hopefully getting quite a few people to at least try it out. I also enjoyed the chance to meet some of the other devs and talk tech, though that was a little limited as I managed to miss the after show drinks due to other commitments. Anyway more on the show on my other blog.

I bought the smee.id.au domain two years ago, and like clock work APNIC (the company responsible for registering domain names in Australia) is now informing me that I have to fork out more cash to keep it. The main reason that I bought the domain was as a christmas gift to my father / step mother / half sister, but I have failed in my mission to get them to use it. Its an interesting tale of it own actually, as my father uses MS windows ME and it seems that the version of outlook / outlook express that come with it can't properly talk IMAPS/POPS/ and as a result he has been unable to use his MUA of choice to see his smee.id.au mails. Of course I have a webmail interface setup and running, but while everyone I know seems happy to use gmx/yahoo and hotmail for some reason they don't like my webmail setup ( which is even more powerful and less complicated with no ads!). So I think I will let the domain expire on the 25th December and move this blog back under the disciplina.net domain and be done with it.

One final note, as a favour for a friend I have setup two sites, one relating to politics the other economics. If you ever had an interest in either of those subjects have a look and see if you are interested in contributing something to what he is trying to build.

Holidays and visitors

2005-09-06T02:43:00.001+10:00

Well I have been slacker then usual and havn't really updated my blog for sometime. The main problem has been that I have been incredibly busy with social commitments and had a string of visitors, that while great having them over, have been in my computer room and consequently its been hard to get much geek related work done. Actually let me rephrase that, its been impossible to get any geek related stuff done.

I went down to Devon and Cornwall last week with Astrid which was a great trip. The English weather continued to be "perfect" (I use the quotes as I think hot sunny weather is fucking atrocious but I recognise that I am in the minority) and we were able to do a lot of walking around the most rugged of the coastlines I have yet seen in England, which is not to say that its actually that bad but rather the rest of England doesn't strike me as being that rugged ;) It was a very pleasant trip with some amusing incidents like trying to eat out in Clovelly where we found out that we had to book as the restaurants only have food for the first 10 people through the door! Ah the country :) The highlight of the trip for me was Tintagel which is the remains of a (supposedly King Arthurs) medieval Castle perched on a tiny island jutting out into the sea linked by a narrow land bridge that the proverbial 6 old ladies with broomsticks could defend. The view, combined with the weather rolling in off the Atlantic made for a magical setting.

Generation gaps and blogging gaps

2005-08-08T23:31:00.001+10:00

Well I have been a bit slack and havn't made any posts for some time. I guess it is partially due to having had a string of social commitments. Firstly my girlfriend, Astrid, moved back in with me which has been great but meant less time for the computer. Since then we have had a string of visitors ranging from Astrids friends from Germany and my family, all have gone now, but I still have my half sister, Fiona, staying with me.

I have been hitting the gym fairly hard, changed from doing aerobics to weight training and now going to throw in some boxing (just for fitness not for actually practising the sport) and see how that goes. My weight hasn't really changed but I am putting on a lot of muscle, which I guess I can use to justify any weight gains if they do arise ;)

I have been out of geek mode for a while now, instead I have been playing a lot of DAOC instead which has been fun. On that note I read an interesting article today on gaming. Seems to suggest that my own thoughts, that gaming is no different from any other medium and is not intrinsically bad, are correct. Though as the article suggests more real research remains to be done.

I bought a new monitor (dell 2005FPW) which is a really nice 21 inch wide screen. It is actually smaller then I thought in terms of height (it is an identical height to the 17 inch lcd next to it) but the width is amazing, actually its quite offputting at first but soon it seems the natural width and the normal 4:3 aspect ratio monitors look somehow squashed. I also picked up a new mouse, and finally went with the option of a cordless one. I ended up choosing the logitech mx1000, a so called "laser" mouse. Whatever it is, I quite like it and have no problems with it, though its battery life is closer to 2 days rather then the stated "Weeks". Then again it could be because I use it for 36 hours in 2 days ;)

I should also mention that I passed my CISSP. It was quite amusing really as I did about 2 hours worth of study, left 2.5 hours into a 6 hour exam and was hung over :) Still I don't imagine that my mark was anything to write home about, that said I won't know because they don't actually give you the mark in case you can use that to work out what the right answers to the questions are and then onsell that information to someone making a Study guide to the CISSP, like there isn't already a trillion out there.

Safe and sound

2005-07-08T00:40:00.001+10:00

Just a quick blog to let you all know I am safe and sound. The phone networks are pretty jammed at the moment so getting in touch with me is hard unless you do it virtually. The bombs didn't get me, at least, not yet ;)

More on RSS

2005-06-21T21:12:00.001+10:00

Well I just finished reading a very interesting article over at particletree.com. Keeping abreast of the latest developments relating to RSS feeds and how they are being leveraged to track and supply information has been a weak point of mine but this article has once again got me looking at searching and information retrieval in a new light. I had already noticed the power of blogs and RSS though as I was recently playing around with some web stat generation tools and I ran the tools against a set of data that included all the logs for all of the sites that Disciplina Networks hosts for the last 9 months. What was really interesting to note was that initially the sites were basic static sites but that nonetheless contained some interesting material. Almost immediately google and the other robots came along and start indexing it but still the overall traffic and hits on the various sites remained quite low. A few months into the data set and I started putting up some blogs and immediately you could see the average amount of hits and overall profile of the sites started to change. Of course the coup de grace in this respect was the moment I had a link from my planet gentoo blog back to here with my average traffic now spiking about ten times higher then what it was before that point.
Despite all of this though I wonder to what extent technical people are driving RSS at this point. All of my friends that I would consider tech savvy are using RSS, to differing extents but still they are using it, but outside of that circle of people almost no one else I know is using it. This makes me wonder, are all technologies like this? Driven almost exclusively by a (comparatively) small crowd of technologically savvy people and only making it into mainstream after a certain event / level of popularity pushes it there? Or all of this really just helping those who spend their time on the web surfing in the first place? Will RSS really change how we use the net or will it just be another tool that helps a small amount of people regain some lost time?

Technologies - directions and failures

2005-06-13T08:51:00.001+10:00

Well caught up with Greg Ferro today and went for a walk around London while having a chat. It was very enjoyable actually and one of the topic of conversations was Wifi and its impact. Greg was of the opinion that it was completely overrated whereas I think that it could be the thing that really changes the face of technology so long as they get over a few current obstacles, like speed and standards. In particular I think that if you can access a network, of any description, it doesn't even have to be the Internet, from anywhere in the world that a LOT of things will change. In particular it seems to me that the abililty to search and lookup information on the move will radically change things like street directories and mapping services, but thats just the tip of the iceberg.
Imagine for a moment what things you would be able to do if you had no bandwidth limitations (or perhaps more accurately limitations that you weren't likely to run into in "normal" usage) and that you could access it anywhere. In my opinion some very fundamental things would change about our society. Increasingly it seems that more and more people rely on computers for their job, now obviously I am biased in this observation because it is all I do for a living, but I think its not unfair to say that as a generalisation the prevalence of computers is increasing. If you agree to that then in almost all cases the ability to do that from anywhere challenges our current conceptions of the "workplace" and what it means to be at work. Already I would argue that I can do my entire job remotely, gone are the days of not having full, secure remote access, not only to the computers themselves but to their powersupplies and every little function of their environment (air conditioning, lighting, electricity phases etc). Given that kind of access I could work from anywhere provided I had the ability to connect. Now my own belief as to why that is not already the case for many people, in particular for people in positions like me, is that the mindset of everyone involved is not ready for it. Think about it, not only is management still very wary of people "working from home" but even the people involved actually quite enjoy working with other people on the whole, we are after all social creatures. Still, at least personally, I find I am more productive at home in my own environment then I am at work and there would be direct benefits for any employer of me to allow me to work away from the office and I don't think I am alone in this matter. All of this is just one way in which I think real, effective ubiquitous communication would change our society. The changes go a lot deeper then just the technology. In that line of thinking I saw an interesting article that seems to suggest we are heading down that road already. Of course with our current technology I don't think it will change things that much, but give the technology an iteration or two and I think it will be a very different story. Poor telco's will have to rethink how they are doing business, already there are skype phones available, fairly soon phone numbers will be a thing of the past and instead everyone will be using IPs to address each other (of course these will be made presentable by some nice username interface).
Another thing that caught my attention recently was TOR. This is something that I think is incredibly interesting and from a security standpoint could seriously challenge the established paradigms. I pick this concept, maybe not this implementation, but the concept, to be the biggest thing in security for some time to come. Not only does it enable truely anonymous Internet usage but its secure! Finally to add insult to injury to various governement agencies around the world you can now anonymously host services. Of course the media will focus on the bad uses for such technology, and don't get me wrong as a powerful tool it can be used for both good and bad, still the obvious benefits of what it can do for everyone should ensure its survival.

On a different note I am getting really sick of so called professional, IT savvy companies fucking up basics. I have this week off work to study and sit the CISSP exam. You would think that a certification system that targets security professionals and is trying to establish a worldwide repurtation as leading the field would make sure that their web presence and its functionality is flawless. I just sat the "practise exam" (with no studying, was curious as to just how much study I had ahead of me) and it seemed to work ok, though it was a tad slow, but when I got to the end and went to submit my final answers it broke with some stupid IIS error and asp warning. The reason it would seem is that it didn't like firefox. How can you possibly take anyone seriously at this point in time who doesn't deal with Firefox sanely (I won't even start about them running an ASP site or using IIS as the webserver). I look forward to having the opportunity to tell one of their staff personally what I think of their site :)

humour and correctness

2005-06-10T08:38:00.001+10:00

I just spent some time cruising around ESRs site. I always find it interesting to read older hackers thoughts and opinions, they seem somewhat more clear then so many activists these days. One page that caught my eye in particular and completely cracked me up was this. Truely empassioned and, imo, absolutely hysterical.
On a different note I find it quite intimidating reading through sites like ESRs and Stallmans if for no other reason then the amount of things that they have done and continue to do. Their productivity seems so incredibly high that I really don't know where they get the time to do it all. Then I started thinking perhaps the reality is with a lot of these people is that they don't have jobs like I define them. For me my job, by that I mean the job I do to make money as opposed to anything else, takes up an unavoidable 10 hours a day (9 hour working day + travel time which if I was truthful would be closer to 1.75 hours). Then I have to eat on top of that and I end up with about ~5-8 hours to do things depending on how demanding I want to be of my body. Now I realise that the majority of people have similar time demands, but I think, and I could well be wrong, people like ESR and other people don't actually spend as much of their time working for cash as the rest of us. At least thats what I want to believe, otherwise wtf have I been doing with my time ? oh and don't say the obvious like wasting time reading weird geek sites ;)

Nice machines

2005-06-09T20:38:00.001+10:00

Well things have continued to be busy, but I stumbled on to some interesting things since I last blogged. The first thing that caught my eye was the Z machine. Not only does it look kewl but it might be the answer to our power problems!

I also stumbled across this article. Basically it describes what happens when you have a bunch of geeks taking over your local neighbourhood. Of course in their case it is a neighbourhood in the most technological place on the planet so it makes it particularly geeky. Don't know that I would like to live there, but I will definitely visit it next time I am in Japan.

On a personal note its looking like I am going to have a busy June, Astrid is moving back in with me for the school holidays and I have my Father and step mother coming to visit me as well. The scary part about that is that I need to find someway of making my spare bedroom aka the computer room, quiet enough for people to actually sleep in, right now it sounds like a jumbo jet idling for take off.

"discussions"

2005-06-04T02:14:00.001+10:00

I saw an interesting essay today that made me think about how I discuss things with people. I have always enjoyed discussing things. In fact, as many people know, I sometimes err on the side of over analysing, especially when something is a little complex, but, even so, I reject being labelled as "too serious" or the claim "you think too much". For me there is little other point to life then thinking..
It is this that makes it hard at times interacting with other people. Very often something someone says or does provokes me to consider something that I havn't thought about and consequently I become very interested in the topic at hand, equally unfortunately it seems is that the person that might have instigated this thought process is not really interested or ready to have a discussion at the level I wish to. Of course my habit of playing devils advocate to new ideas (I do this to challenge the person who brought the idea up so that I can better get an understanding of how it works / fully fleshed out it is) tends to set people in apposition to me fairly quickly, and unless they come from a kind of "free discussion" background, normally found at uni's or philosophical type arena's, then they get angry pretty quickly. Being a geek I always fail to fully heed the warning signs and often push people over the edge from having a discussion to something that becomes quickly heated and very emotional. I guess this is the key difference, for me almost no topic I ever "discuss" ever evokes emotions, and even if they do, then I make sure to quash them so as to be able to be objective about the subject being discussed. The result is that I am happy to talk about almost anything that comes to mind or seems vaguely relevant to the conversation which includes many taboo areas (a few discussions about abortion and handicapped people come to mind).
What is interesting in relation to the original essay I referred to is that I often have conversations with friends that the entire point of which is to out manouvre the other person with quick logical points, there is an implicit recognition and understanding of the other persons view (this only comes when you know someone well), but the point of the immediate conversation is the mental sparring. I enjoy this a lot, but again I have problems translating that back into normal discussions where people think you are not taking them seriously, or become threatened by the tone, which invariably, becomes brusque, logical and perhaps slightly arrogant. All that said, please feel free to discuss this with me :)

time time time see whats become of me..

2005-06-02T23:24:00.001+10:00

Well things have been very busy for me recently. I have been doing a fair amount of work for Gentoo, and you can see a blog of activities here. I ended up deciding to have a different blog for gentoo related things so that I didn't overlap interest realms and incurr the wrath of people short on time reading my various wandering thoughts. If you are interested in running linux on a laptop or some more sophisticated suspend2 options then you might want to check out the HOWTO's I have written that are up at Disciplina Networks. Feedback is welcome.
Geek stuff aside work has been periodically frantic and then relaxed, which works out alright as I am able to focus on some other things now and again, but also get some work accomplished during the periods of frenetic activity.

An article caught my attention late last night. The reason being that it echo's my thoughts / discussions I've been having for some time, namerly that in order for a really revolutionary new bit of technology to come along in the mobile market, more power is required.

Gentoo Developer

2005-05-20T09:16:00.001+10:00

Well part of the reason I have been so busy recently is that I have been working on becoming a Gentoo developer. It finally became official tonight and I have now joined the ranks of the dev crowd. Its going to be a big learning curve for me and I am eagerly awaiting what it will bring and hopefully contributing a lot back as well.

Aside from that I came across an interesting article the other day relating to a space weather warning. I had never heard of one before and was quite interested to read about the effects of what the highest level of a space storm can actually do. Ofcourse maybe it was just the pretty pictures that got my attention :)

INTP

2005-05-19T05:23:00.001+10:00

Just did a quick personality test over at similar minds. While I don't really put a lot of credit in such things it was something interesting to do while I was eating dinner. The result was not exactly surprising, and the favoured careers at this page definitely brought a smile to my face.

Work has been fairly busy and I am working hard on a lot of tech things right now so I will keep this entry short :)

Python

2005-05-16T10:22:00.001+10:00

Just read this article which enthused me to keep at Python. Well keep at it is something of a misnomer as I have barely (read spent 3 hours on it) looked at it due to severe time constraints. On a different note it looks like I am coming to an end to my mentoring period for Gentoo one way or another ....
While I was reading up on some of ESR's articles I stumbled upon this proposal. It strikes me as a good idea so I think I will link it off the sites that I maintain shortly.

Ultra portable!

2005-05-11T09:13:00.001+10:00

Well it is finally here! My new fujitsu has arrived and I am very happy with it to date. I am have been playing around with it and am looking at windows stuff for the first time in about 4 years which is not exactly a thrilling experience I have to say but still its interesting to see how things have changed since I last looked at windows. Ofcourse I have gentoo running on it now with no problems, though I havn't had the chance to set it up just as I would like to due to work being very busy and me resurrecting a few older boxen of mine.
Aside from playing with new toys (much fun) I have been getting on top of some interesting technologies at work. In particular I have been designing and testing our IDS implementation. I have also managed to start to find a little bit more time to do some gentoo work but really at this point in time I am still not getting enough done and am going to have to make a concerted effort to catch up to where I should be at this point in the mentoring process. Bad Ben.
My weight bet has hit a snag as well. I have been reliably going to the gym at least 4 times a week, but of all weird things to happen I somehow developed a life and have been averaging about 3 social commitments a week for the last few months which has made it harder then I thought to achieve serious levels of gym going. A further, and more immediate complication, is that my scales I recently discovered a completely unreliable. I discovered this by accident as when I was standing checking my weight I moved a little bit and watched the measured weight vary by 5kg and STAY that way. Further tests showed that basically all my previous results were probably invalid and its entirely possible that I have gained weight. That said I am fairly sure I have actually lost significant amount of weight (2-4 kg) as cloths are starting to fit a lot looser and going to the gym for an hour every other day for a month or two is having SOME effect :)

The dentists

2005-05-05T07:46:00.001+10:00

I have to say after todays experience I am rapidly shedding any lingering childhood fears of that most dreaded of institutions, the dentists chair. Today I went to get my "broken" tooth looked at and much to my (pleasant) surprise was told that a filling had merely fallen out and that for 35 pounds I could have it replaced. In under 10 minutes there I was being bustled out of the chair and back down to reception to pay! Needless to say both I and my bank manager are very happy about this :)
On a slightly different note I had an amusing experience in the reception as I tried to pay with my brand new credit card from First Direct. I was asked for my pin (in the UK they have a new tech called "chip and pin" which is meant to do away with signing for things) and the transaction was declined. That in itself was odd as I had only openned the PIN this morning and I was almost certain that I had it right (after all its my job to keep memorised a large amount of psuedo random numbers / words). I asked them, somewhat sheepishly (why is it I feel like a criminal when asking them to do this?) to put it through so that I could sign for it instead. The lady did that but it was declined again. Now this was surprising as I have used the card already with no problems, anyway I paid with another card and called First Direct on my walk home to find out what was going on, and to get rid of that nagging feeling that I was again about to be taken for a ride to the tune of 5k pounds like I was with my first bank account over here. After some conversations it turns out that first direct were having a problem with their "systems" and that all credit cards they had were being declined, the ETA on the fix was a "few hours sir". I hung up chuckling to myself. Can you imagine a bank anywhere else in the world where a system could fall over and NO credit card transaction were able to be processed for HOURS? Rule Brittania, Brittania rules .... something I am sure.

UWB

2005-05-05T07:38:00.001+10:00

I consider myself fairly uptodate with technology, given I am a geek after all. So its always surprising to find something that sneaks under my radar and that seems to be as important / big as UWB. I was alerted to it in the last few days via some of the more obscure RSS feeds that I read and tonight actually sat down to start reading some of the articles. This stuff could be amazing! If you don't know what I am talking about then go and have a look at this article and to get more background info check out this one.

Toothy views

2005-05-04T05:11:00.001+10:00

Well I had a nice long weekend with my girlfriend and some of her friends, we ended up driving down to eastbourne and then on to Beachy Head. I thoroughly recommend the spot if you crave decent views (something that I particularly miss about Sydney) as I have found it really hard to get the feeling that you are up at a decent height in England. I managed to yet again get sunburnt in mildly sunny weather, I figure that if you give me another 10 years here I will completely destroy any reputation Australians have as sun faring people!
On an unpleasant note I have somehow managed to lose 1/4 of a tooth. It seems that my neglect of not regularly going to the dentist has paid off in the negative sense and I have a strong suspicion that I will be paying out a lot for the pleasure of letting a Brittish dentist fix it. To tell the truth I am actually very nervous about seeing a Brittish dentist (or any practitioner of the medical arts) as all I have heard is horror story after horror story. Still, my manager has assured me that this one is quite good. I sincerly hope he is right.

Fancy a dip?

2005-04-27T07:58:00.001+10:00

It's probably my sense of humour, but I found the following story hillarious. Basically the CEO of opera said that he would swim from Norway to America if more then 1 million copies of the new version of Opera were downloaded within a certain timelimit. Ofcourse the smart techies at Opera immediately slashdotted the story and unsurprisingly the CEO was shortly getting ready for a swim. See this link for the story. Damn funny.

Wishlist

2005-04-27T06:59:00.001+10:00

Well for all those people that struggle to think of presents for me, I jumped on the growing bandwagon and made a wishlist! Its linked from the top of this page or alternatively you can click here.

Travelling along ...

2005-04-25T01:33:00.001+10:00

....to the sound of music. Not to the horrid movie of the same name but once again to classical music. As most of my friends know my music tastes tend to fall into one of two area's, new techno style trance or classical music. For a long time I got carried away with the beat and immediate satisfaction of working to something high powered, but the more I thought about it the more I realised what was happening was that I couldn't really work that effectively as I kept getting distracted by the music I was listening to. That lead me to the stage where I just didn't listen to music at all when I was trying to learn something and while I still believe that is the case for the most absorbing of tasks, I have found the joy of listening to classical music in the background while doing anything less then serious thinking. I find that with classical music it doesn't impose on what I am concentrating on, and keeps me in a pleasant focussed mood. On the note of focussed, there has been a few articles making the normal news rounds claiming that email is bad for your intelligence. Actually the study that they are basing this off doesn't claim that as far as I can tell, but rather it makes the interesting conclusion that they way some people deal with email and other communication channels is that they drop everything that they are currently doing and refocus on the new piece of communication. This in turns causes problems with long term ability to focus and severely impacts whatever it is you were doing before the new communice came along. I found the article interesting simply because at various times I have been guilty of this, though not to a serious level. It also rang a couple of bells as I have heard other people whom I respect, namely Umberto Eco and Donald Knuth who said something very similar (read it here). So given that I currently don't have the ability I had to focus, most notably back when I was studying chess, I am going to make a concious effort to NOT context switch and try to give something I start doing my attention for a reasonable period of time. I have been unconciously trying to do this for a while, but clearly stating will help me achieve this I believe.

On a different note my other tasks are coming along nicely. I have been put forward as a gentoo developer finally, as you can see from this link. It's about time really, I have been loitering around doing dev work and generally being interested and active for a while, but being loath to commit time to something I have always held off. Now, thanks to my two mentors things look good for me to get CVS access shortly and to become accepted as a full developer.

My business idea's are coming along nicely, and my bet with Aaron progresses nicely, since we started Aaron has put on 0.3 of a kg and I have lost 2.5kg. I am going to the gym a minimum of four times a week now and I hope to really start sloughing off some of this fat shortly. My fuji is almost here, and for those that regularly read this blog you might be interested to know that I eventually decided on another Aeron chair rather then the mirra. The mirra is a nice chair, but its definitely not in the same category as the aeron, which I firmly believe is the best computer chair on the market. Both should be arriving in the next couple of weeks, which I have to admit, has me a bit excited :)
Ofcourse as usual to see my latest geek style posts check out my blog on Disciplina Networks.

Motivated

2005-04-18T09:49:00.001+10:00

Well I am in fire up mode. Gone is the gaming hang over, the relaxing period and all my other usual procrastinations. I am really fired up and keen to get a lot of things done. The main list looks something like:
* Lose some weight
* Master Python
* Sort out tax / visa /certification
* sort out some business idea's I have
There are a heap of others but these are the main ones right now. Since I stopped training to be a professional table tennis player I basically gave up on my body and concentrated fully on my mind. I am now not happy about the state of my body and have decided to rectify this imbalance and start treating my body with some respect again. To that end I have a bet with a friend as to who can lose 10kg the fastest and keep it off for a period of time. It will be curious to see whose approach will work out best, he is trying all kind of weird diets, whereas I am just going for the burn more calories then I eat and restrict my overall calorie intake from what my current "usual" is at. The rest of the things on the list basically constitute my mental tasks that need to get accomplished.

On a different note I have ordered my new gadget, a fujitsu lifebook 7010D. I am really looking forward to getting this (its currently en route from the states) and playing around with it, hopefully it will solve my mobile data requirements and enable me to start reading ebooks on the train and the like. I highly encourage anyone earning pounds right now to at least consider buying their next item from the states, the exchange rate is SO good right now its hard to imagine that it will not be more worthwhile going via there. The other thing that I am about to buy is a new desk chair. I am currently deciding between the aeron and the mirra although I think I will go with the aeron.

Holidays

2005-04-14T02:26:00.001+10:00

Well I am back from my trip to Australia. I had a great time and was really able to just switch off and relax, which all things considered, is not a bad thing to do now and again. I was a little frustrated by not catching up with all of my friends, but taking my girlfriend with me left me with a lot less time then I had initially anticipated. Still I did get to catch up with most of my friends and just relax into the Sydney holiday lifestyle for a couple of weeks. One thing that is clearer now then ever before is how easy it is for the average person in Australia to have a really high standard of living.
On an odd note, since I have got back to the UK I can't help but notice how heavily salted everything is, I mean so heavily salted that I am almost unable to eat anything right now, be it food from a restaurant or from the canteen at work. Weird how I never noticed it before.

Holiday

2005-03-25T06:33:00.001+11:00

Well tomorrow I am off to Australia for a few weeks. Looking forward to the trip, but not looking forward to the horrid flight I have to get there, its worse then usual because I have a stop over for 12 hours in Bahrain! Oh well, that will teach me for saving money on the flight.
I have been fairly busy in general recently, getting a lot of things in order like finances, recurring bills, stocks, banks and I finally got my first UK credit card approved ( I am not even going to start on this one) ! All in all its been a fairly productive period, especially when I look at what I managed to get done on the geek side.
I will be checking my email while I am away but don't expect the normal reply speed as I won't be online that much, I am sure Astrid will kill me if I am.

Productivity

2005-03-16T10:43:00.001+11:00

Well I have just added a new category, Journal, with the vain hope that I might use this blog a little more if I feel I have a section I can just jot things down in so that people who are interested, can keep track of what I am up to.

Well I have just about made the decision to buy a fuji T70K and hopefully I can get it before I go to Australia which is happening in 10 days. Work is quite crazy right now, its the biggest event on the horse racing calendar which correlates to massive quantities of money and data flying around, most of which falls under my area of responsibility from a security perspective. Still I don't envisage a horrible week, just a busy one.

I have started going to the gym every day and am doing a variety of cardio type excercises in the hope of flattening out my stomach and gaining a bit of definition. We will see how that goes, though if nothing else I do notice it helps my overall concentration when I have done some physical excercise, both in the sense that I can concentrate more and that the loss of time that happened while I was working out acts as a form of encouragement to get me to work harder in order to catch up on my perceived lost productivity.

I am about to start making some commitments to my geekdom in the form of actually signing up for and becoming a Gentoo developer. That should happen over the next few months and it will co-incide with an new initiative of mine to learn / master python. Time will tell how that all goes.

It looks like I might have a friend of mine, Daniel Symmonds, a lawyer from the states, come and crash at my place until he gets setup here in London. It seems he can't stand america but he can't get a job in Japan either, so good ole blighty is the next best bet. Hotel Smee is open once again. At least this time around I have a spare room!

With three blogs in one night, I will call it here and hope that I havn't misused too many apostrophes (I await the inevitable email from waters with the corrections to my blogs :)

Cultures or Personalities?

2005-03-16T10:30:00.001+11:00

I love to classify and generalise about things, two traits that are not good to have at once. Still as my friends have noted over the years, I do both a lot and it has lead me today to think whether I can explain an incident, like the one I am about to describe, as an example of cultural differences, or simply a personality difference.

I am currently working with an interesting guy from Canada. I must say I havn't really gotten to know many Canadians before, (with the exception of some online friends) so I was a little surprised at just how like they are to americans in many ways, but yet their colonial origins also show very strongly. They sound like americans but they think like Brits! What was interesting was that he made a comment today that went along the lines of "I hope we don't have to take it in the ass and take one for the team by staying behind today, i have plans for dinner". It was quite amusing at the time as it was in referrence to today being the start of the busiest period at work in the year. I immediately decided to put it up on the quotes page. Later in the day in hushed tones we were told that one of our co-workers recently had his girlfriend up and walk out on him with NO notice. This woman had been going out with him for 5 years and they had plans to go on holidays etc, he said he was going out to the shop, did she want anything and then when he got back she had left and hopped on a plane to New Zealand! No warning nothing, a bizare story and not something I would personally be talking about openly near the person in question. At any rate the person in question came up to myself and two other people (one of whom was the Canadian, Elliott) who were talking about his situation and Elliott, just turned to him and said "we were just talking about your situation". The other person and myself were just flawed, it seemed ... so inappropriate, but Elliott didn't even bat an eyelid. What caused me no end of confusion was shortly after this it came out that I had quoted Elliott on his earlier comment, immediately he was very concerned as to who had seen the quote and would I please take it down immediately. His reasoning it seems was that it was highly inappropriate in the workplace to mention anything that could be construed in any way about being derrogatory to gays and that you couldn't possibly have something like that quoted.

So there it is, at first I thought it was his culture, ie the repressed conservative north American views on sexuality and expression (ie the quote) and the forthrightness and confrontationlism in the form of his interaction with the person who lost his partner. Then I thought maybe it was his personality. Who knows? One thing is for sure, the more I see of different things, the more I belive I CAN accurately classify them, but whether or not that is just my perception, or whether it is reality ... thats a different story :)

books

2005-03-16T10:18:00.001+11:00

I have been meaning to put this one up for some time but due to being a lazy sod I am only getting around to it almost 2 years later then I originally intended and only then because I am procrastinating from getting pubcookies working!

I have always had a lot of respect for Umberto Eco, I believe he is one of the more articulate and interesting of modern intellectuals (for those of you who don't know him, he basically invented the field of semiotics, as well as writing some classy books like Foucaults Pendulum, travels in hyperreality but is probably best known in this modern culture as the author of the name of the rose), so it was with some interest that I read an essay of his books at the openning of the new library of Alexandria. The essay can be found here and is an interesting read though at the time somethings he said didn't sit right with me. It was with no great surprise then when I received a rebuttal of eco's essay from a good friend of mine, Benjamin Waters. I intended on writing my own commentary on both of them at one point, but given my current rate of productivity that won't happen for 5 years or so.

the geek returns

2005-03-03T01:08:00.001+11:00

A few people have noted that my blogging has taken a decided down turn recently, due to my gamer side taking precedence. I have noted that when I start to game I pretty much stop everything else in my life and game, well I am happy to say that my gaming side has now been satiated and its back to feeding the geek :)

Well I just got back from fosdem which was good fun. It was my first event like that, even though I have been fairly active in the whole free software scene for some years. It was quite interesting, I got see some good presentations from various OSS luminaries including Martin Roesch from snort, Alan Cox of kernel fame (man if my saying of beard = experience was every true, AC is living proof of it!), and Alisdair kergon who wrote the device-mapper. Actually I had an interesting conversation with Alisdair about my pet project of building encryption end to end for a box, I have some more ideas that I will persue further on that front. I also had the chance to meet some people from Disciplina networks, namely Till and m0n, which was actually really enjoyable. As a result of meeting Till, I spent the majority of my time hanging out with the KDE crowd (in particular the german SAP linux lab crowd) which was an interesting insight into how a large project like that actually functions. I finally met some more people like myself who consider their "hobbies" to be the most important things in their lives, I don't know that I would consider ONE thing as important as some of the KDE crowd do, but definitely the concept of learning new things constantly is the most important thing to me. I had an interesting chat with Scott Wheeler, a KDE dev guy who is involved in a concept of desktop searching, which is more then just the typical index everything on the desktop and reference it. The concept he has fleshed out involves relationships about data and categorising them and storing the relationships and then performing a google like search based on that. Some kewl stuff.
One of the bigger dissappointments about FOSDEM was the gentoo stuff. I went there with high hopes about meeting people from the gentoo dev side as there was a LOT of gentoo activity going on. Unfortunately once I was there I realised for the first time why gentoo has such a bad reputation with the rest of the community. Gentoo seems to have attracted ALL the wannabee kiddies and has almost no really respectable people championing it, or at least in Europe. Now that is probably a little unfair, but the presentations that I went to were invariably given by 18-22 year olds, which is fine in itself, but these kids couldn't give decent speeches! One of the main portage devs' gave a speech to a room full of people, about 200, which was meant to go for an hour. It lasted 25 painful minutes, where you couldn't hear him clearly, he mumbled, constantly looked at the door (which naturally had people going in and out constantly, you got the impression he took it as a personal insult everytime someone walked in late) and pitched his whole presentation at the wrong level. It was so bad I came close to telling him to shut up and giving it myself. Still my belief in gentoo remains, but man do we need to do something about our reputation!
Went to another conference yesterday in downtown London for sourcefire which looks like an unreal product. Again it was Martin Roesch who gave most of the presentation, and I really like some of his ideas. Basically what is settin g sourcefire apart from a normal snort setup is that he combines the IDS with a passive device that just gathers information about the network ( and does it remarkably well), by correlating the data we can filter out typical snort alerts like an IIS exploit against an apache server. For the first time the IDS knows more about the network then the attacker AND its updated real time. Combine this with close tie ins to firewalls etc and you have a really amazing setup. I will be looking to persue this further at work.

Speed

2004-12-06T02:14:00.001+11:00

As a gamer and a computer orientated person, I find input and output issues to be interesting. One of the things that I find very interesting is input, by input I mean any way of putting data into a system. I just found a little game that measures your speed for mouse interactions. My best was 0.106 seconds. Have a go yourself and see how you go.