Blog Archive: June 2014
Coming to SLC and PDX
I'm heading to Salt Lake City this week for Westercon, followed by an appearance at the SLC Library on Monday. Next week, I'll be in PDX for three library gigs: Beaverton, Tigard, and Hillsboro. See you there!
World Cup 2014 We Know Four
Four of the sixteen are in, four more out. Lots of drama even if some of the football was a little stinky. Brazil and Colombia So the hosts got (just barely) past Chile. At this point, Ill honestly be surprised if they get past Colombia, and if they do, theyll be crushed by whichever of France or Germany emerges from that side of the bracket. Neymar and Oscar? They arent, and the defense is frankly porous. I suppose the results qualitatively fair in that neither team really dominated the other, but I felt awfully bad for Chile. And the shootout itself was sort of lacklustre, what with shots wide of the goal and straight at the keeper.
Android and USB
Discussion on IRC about keyboards for Android devices today. Jashank Jeremy opined that Bluetooth keyboards were no good. I've already been there, done that, and came to the conclusion that there wasn't much point attaching a keyboard to an Android. But Jashank had a different problem: the key spacing is too small, at least on the keyboards he tried. But a couple of weeks ago, for a completely different reason, I blew $1 on a normal USB to micro USB adapter, which allows me to connect normal USB devices to the tablet. Would it work with a keyboard? Most people thought not.
DisplayPort vs HDMI on OS X
Recently I wrote about plugging a Samsung U28D590D 4K display into my late-model 15" MacBook Pro. Decent performance, easy setup. It was reporting 30fps, which is OK for programming, but Sheldon McGee a.k.a. @tooshel said that Id get 60fps via DisplayPort, and pointed me at video evidence. So I tried, and heres the data. This is OS X 10.9.3 on a MacBookPro11,3 i.e. late-2013 15" model. There are three possible configurations: Standalone laptop, Laptop/outboard via HDMI, Laptop/outboard via DisplayPort. For the latter to work, I had to buy a DP-to-mini-DP adapter; the Mac then reported the display as running at 60 Hz.
World Cup Tools
Ive managed to take advantage of my between-gigs status to watch just over half of the World Cup matches. To satisfy my curiosity, I regularly needed answers to two questions: What are the group standings? and Whats on today? Youd think that FIFA.com would be the place to find them, but youd be wrong. To figure out whats on, Im using this web calendar from Britains Sky Sports, which plonks the matches, timezone-corrected, right into the Google calendar I look at 20 times a day. Pleasingly, its auto-updating the playoff fixtures as the group standings settle down. To understand the group statuses, I do a Google Search for world cup standings ; this puts the Group A status at the top of the results window and gives you a one-click link to see all eight groups.
2014 World Cup Round of 16
Nobody would say the tournament format is perfect but, based on the first-round play, its hard to find teams that should have been in but are out, or vice versa. When the biggest injustice is Greece instead of Côte dIvoire, thats not terrible. The exits of Spain, Italy, England, and Portugal are surprises, but Id say the bigger story in 2014 is the ascendency of Latin-American football. Brazil-Chile The hosts are heavily favored, but Brazil just hasnt, to my eye, really showed the brilliance Ive seen from certain other teams. Their goal differential (+5) is tied for fourth (Netherlands & Colombia at +7, France +6, Germany +5).
Java Security Hole
Good solid cryptography is an essential foundation for sound business usage of the Internet, and essential to provide a sane privacy level. But the tools for Java programmers are in horrible shape. OpenPGP The crypto landscape is wide and disorderly, but in the area I most care about, private messaging, OpenPGP is central. RFC 4880 gives pretty crisp and clean coverage of how it works. So what we need are nice clean OpenPGP tools for Java-heads. OpenPGP describes public/private key formats and what signed/encrypted messages look like. So there are four or less inputs to any PGP process: The key, the plaintext (to be encrypted and/or signed), the encrypted text (to be decrypted), and the signature (to be checked).
digitalmailbox revisited
Further discussion of Austraila Post's MyPost on IRC today. It seems that this isn't Australia Post's first attempt at something like this: they already have https://paypaperbills.postbillpay.com.au/, which seems to do exactly the same thing. And Jürgen Lock came up with Qualsys SSL labs, which gave results for digitalmailbox.com.au that were less than stellar: A-. Still, that's better than postbillpay.com.au and anz.com.au, both of which get a B, So maybe they do offer bank-level security . By comparison, FreeBSD.org, google.com and ozlabs.org all get A. There's still a long way to go before you can trust any online financial institution, it seems. ACM only downloads articles once.
Reading Microsoft Word documents
Mark Richardson sent me a Microsoft Word document yesterday. How do I look at that? That's what a Microsoft box is for, right, and now I have one. Tried to open it, and discovered: Windows can't open this file . Why not? Sure, I don't have Word , but even Apple's base utilities can approximate to reading it. OK, off to search the web, which came up with FreeFileViewer. Installing that involved running the gauntlet of a whole lot of spamware: I got by without installing any, but I still had a registry checker that told me I had over 200 registry errors: ...
Constructs
Photographic subjects can be sorted into any number of mental baskets. Mine are, more or less: People, Nature, and Human Constructs. The objects in the first two baskets are curved, mostly; but those Constructs are mostly about line segments, the angles they meet at, and the surfaces between them. Here are three examples. Two are Vancouver, one Keats Island. Okay, some Nature snuck into a couple.
ART and Dalvik
The Android avalanche today at IO included an announcement that Android L will use a new default runtime called ART. This is really a pretty big deal, that is if youre an application-runtime geek. Since Androids launch in 2008, the app runtime has been Dalvik, which is a story that never got the attention it deserved. Its a novel register-based VM, not like Javas at all, but whose bytecodes could be generated from Javas with reasonable efficiency. A fully garbage-collected and (starting in 2011 or so) JITted VM, pretty power-efficient, and pretty fast. But never quite as power-efficient or fast as iOS apps, compiled from ObjC to ARM-native code; perhaps no classic VM ever could be.
Damn you, LinkedIn
I swear I clicked "cancel" but obviously I have instructed LinkedIn to tell the world I wanted to connect with them them. Every mailing list I'm on seems to have received an invitation. I have a feeling I'm going to get a lot of angry email today. So, if you received an invitation, please ignore it.
Australia Post goes electronic
Interesting paper mail from Australia Post today: they're going electronic. Instructions on how to set up an electronic mailbox, with the comforting URL http://www.digitalmailbox.com.au/, showing instantly that it's related to Australia Post. As an aside, why are people creating such long domain names lately? Not only do most people not type well, but the toys they use to access the web make it even more difficult. Still, it was worth trying. Setup was easy modulo the stupid password rules. It seems that A2z is an acceptable password, but Don't break in isn't. And the confirmation email I got was typical of modern systems: Content analysis details: (4.0 points, 3.0 required) pts rule name description ---- ---------------------- -------------------------------------------------- 1.0 HTML_FONT_FACE_BAD BODY: HTML font face is not a word 3.0 MIME_HTML_ONLY ...
2014 World Cup The Horror
I refer to the events of today, June 24th. The Beautiful Game , they say; only sometimes not. Italy 0 Uruguay 1 Yeah, Italy deserved to lose. But yeah, Suarez bit that guy. Id have been cheering for Colombia next round, whoever won. Heres the thing: Italy hasnt quite got over 2006, when they won the World Cup with their ironclad defense anchored by the incomparable Cannavaro, who Im convinced single-handedly beat Germany and went through the tournament without a red or yellow card. This years team was not quite as good, a whole lot nastier, and that defensive-lockdown mode was truly ugly.
Read the (very) rough draft of our new book!
Safari Books now has the (very) rough draft of The Practice of Cloud System Administration online and available to anyone with an account. This book is all new material. How rough is rough? Well, the diagrams are the hand-drawn sketches that will eventually be turned into nicely drawn diagrams. The copyediting hasn't been done yet. There's probably a few other things missing. If you don't have a Safari Books Online account you'll be able to look at the Table of Contents and other materials. With an account, you'll be able to read the entire thing. http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9780133478549 The final release date will be mid-September.
DxO PRIME: Worth the trouble?
DxO Optics Pro is one of the slowest programs I've ever used. Even on a relatively fast machine it takes about a minute of CPU time per image. But clearly that's not slow enough: the latest version includes a noise reduction algorithm that slows it down to about 15 minutes of CPU time on my machine. Is it worth it? I've been taking photos of the dogs with the camera sensitivity set to 33° ISO (1600 linear), and there's some noise to be seen. Today I tried the effect of PRIME. It's hard to see: It's not until you magnify the detail images to their original 600×450 crop and run ...
CL XXIX: Biryani
What happened was, my family signed me up for an Indian-cooking class. On Thursday Nasreen taught us Chicken Biryani and so I thought I might try to enrich early-2014 Cottage Life with it. Biryani, well, its complicated. This versions payload featured chicken, peas, yogurt, potatoes, onions, and loads of spices (there are variations including excellent veggie choices). Then build up layers of rice, payload, caramelized onions, sliced peppers, and pour some magic over them. Nasreens recipe described it as a lively, multitasking dish and yeah, its not the kind of thing youre going to whip up on impulse at short notice.
More Old Glass, with Eagle
Well, it had to be tried: Can you strap an antique 400mm F5.6 Tokina telephoto on a state-of-the-art modern mirrorless, as in the Fujifilm X-T1? Why, yes! Yes, you can. And an eagle might drop by. The family cried The eagles down at the dock! Miraculously, after I ran in, got out the camera, got out the lens, put the adapter on the lens, and put the combo on the camera, he still was. Hes scruffy and wet because he wants dinner, which involves splashing into the briny Pacific. Hes standing on an old wooden arch thingie on our dock, which I guess is a nice vantage point: We saw him take a couple of tries, coming up empty.
Podcast: How Amazon is holding Hachette hostage
Here's a reading (MP3) of my latest Guardian column, How Amazon is holding Hachette hostage, which examines how Hachette's insistence on DRM for their ebooks has taken away all their negotiating leverage with Amazon, resulting in Amazon pulling Hachette's books from its catalog in the course of a dispute over discounting: Under US law (the … [Read more]
My talk at the Edinburgh Publishing Conference
Here's my talk at last week's Edinburgh Publishing Conference, called "Information Doesn't Want to Be Free."
More TV reception problems
Somehow my fix to the MythTV configuration didn't do the job. I'm still getting really bad reception on tuner 2. About the only thing I have eliminated is the cabling: tuner 2 is the first tuner in the daisy chain, and it's the one with the problems. It looks like I'll have to try to recover the old tuner database and see if there's something obvious about the differences. That's not the only problem. Recently just about every new programme has simply not been recorded. Looking in the log file, I find things like: 014-06-20 16:04:25.698 DB Error (change_program): Query was: UPDATE program SET starttime = '2014-06-21T22:32:44', endtime = '2014-06-21T23:28:51' WHERE chanid = 2002 AND starttime = '2014-06-21T22:32:34' Driver error was [2/1062]: QMYSQL3: Unable to execute query Database error was: Duplicate entry '2002-2014-06-21 22:32:44-0' ...
Java Pain
In 2014, its not OK if its hard for a developer to run a simple program from the command line. I wrote some code to connect Keybase and OpenKeychain, and plan to write more. Since its in an Android app the code was in Java and it occurred to me that since (so they say) other people use Java too, those people might be able to use it, so Im working on that. But it shouldnt be so hard. I had the Java code already working and in production, so I copied it out of OpenKeychain and made a new project and wanted a smoke test which I thought I ought to be able to run from the command line.
2014 World Cup Days 8 and 9
Well, weve seen all the teams now, so Im going to back off and only write about the games that matter, where by matter I mean I watched and didnt bore me . So, is this the year of Latin America or what? Colombia 2 Côte d'Ivoire 1 It was fair, the Colombians are the real deal and the Ivoiriens just werent there yet, even though Gervinhos goal was maybe the best solo-effort score in the tournament so far. There are now like 5 Latin-American teams that you have to think are a threat to any team on any day. Among other things, in two games Colombia has a total of one goal against.
How Hachette made the rope that Amazon is hanging it with
In my latest Guardian column, "How Amazon is holding Hachette hostage," I discuss the petard that the French publishing giant Hachette is being hoisted upon by Amazon. Hachette insisted that Amazon sell its books with "Digital Rights Management" that only Amazon is allowed to remove, and now Hachette can't afford to pull its books from … [Read more]
NYC: Day-long Awesome Postmortems workshop!
Yulia Sheynkman and Dave Zwieback are repeating their "Awesome Postmortems" workshop on July 10. https://ti.to/mindweather/awesome-postmortems It's a great way to get the team--and not just ops--offsite to experience a healthier way of dealing and learning from failure. If you are in the NYC-area, this is a great opportunity to learn how to make postmortems an integrated part of how to improve reliability and prevent future outages. When we wrote our "how to do postmortems" section of the upcoming The Practice of Cloud System Administration, we asked Dave for advice because we respect his expertise. Now you can get a full day of training directly from Yulia and Dave!
2014 World Cup Day 7
Today marked the tournaments first exits, notably including the champs. Things are starting to take shape. Australia 2 Netherlands 3 Good on the Aussies for making a game of it! I was working with the match on an outboard computer screen, initially not giving it much attention, but saw both Robbens one-man run and Cahills one-foot one-timer. Good football! When the Australians got ahead of the Dutch, it reminded me of what they used to say back in the Joe Montana days: If youre up on the 49ers by a touchdown, its tied; if youre up by a field goal, youre behind. And so it was.
USB catastrophe
I know that FreeBSD release 9 has issues with USB, particularlyfor some reasonon eureka, my main machine. So when I connect cameras or backup disks to it, I first switch to /dev/ttyv0 to avoid this strange X bug that causes the mouse to hang. But today that didn't work. The display hung, and I couldn't get any response even after disconnecting and reconnecting keyboard, mouse and other things. I had to reboot. How I hate rebooting! My troubles weren't over, though. I had no networking! After some cursing and investigation, discovered that natd wasn't working: although it was configured, I had put in my own firewall rules, and natd only gets started if I use the standard firewall configuration.
2014 World Cup Day 6
Now weve seen all the teams. Also, it was goalkeepers day! Belgium 2 Algeria 1 Well, except for this first match. I confess to drifting away from it about halftime. The Algerians were ineffectual (even on that penalty, it was far from clear that Feghouli was going to score), the Belgians were boring, and the keepers were surplus to requirements. I eventually started watching again and was paying attention for Mertens go-ahead goal, the result of a thunderous high-velocity attacking run. So why didnt they do any of that stuff during the first 80 minutes? Often football strategies escape me. Whats a little saddening here is that Group H is really soft, so either of these yawners could end up being mincemeat for a good team in the round of 16.
My Tedxoxbridge talk: How to break the Internet
I gave a talk last month in Cambridge at the Tedxoxbridge event called How to break the Internet, about how urgent it is that the Internet is fundamentally broken, and why we should be hopeful that we can fix it.
2014 World Cup Day 5
Ouf, those Portuguese. Germany 4 Portugal 0 Readers who followed my commentary on the last two World Cups know that I have an attitude problem about Portugal, because whenever I watch them it seems like theres a whole lot of hacking and diving. Theres a word for that: Cheating. And hey, the New Yorker found someone with the numbers: Portugal tied for the cheating lead in 2010 (with Chile and Italy); Ronaldo was third overall among individuals. Which is to say, this result was OK by me. Both the initial penalty shot and the red card were fair calls. I stopped watching around halftime because really, who needed it.
Homeland shortlisted for the Sunburst Award
I'm honoured and delighted to learn that my novel Homeland has been shortlisted for Canada's Sunburst Award, a juried prize for excellence in speculative fiction. I've won the Sunburst twice before, and this is one of my proudest accomplishments; I'm indebted to the jury for their kindness this year. The other nominees are a very … [Read more]
Podcast: News from the future for Wired UK
Here's a reading (MP3) of a short story I wrote for the July, 2014 issue of Wired UK in the form of a news dispatch from the year 2024 -- specifically, a parliamentary sketch from a raucous Prime Minister's Question Time where a desperate issue of computer security rears its head: Quick: what do all … [Read more]
Interviewing Leila Johnstone about Hack Circus
My latest Guardian column is an interview with Leila Johnston about her Hack Circus project, which includes a conference, a podcast and a print magazine, all with a nearly indefinable ethic of independence and art for its own sake. The opposite of useful is not always useless, as such. The opposite of reportage is not … [Read more]
Coming to Salt Lake City and Portland, OR
I'm about to hit the road again, starting in Salt Lake City, where I'll be a Guest of Honor at Westercon (Jul 3-6), and will follow it up with an appearance at the SLC library (Jul 7); then I'm doing a three-day library tour around PDX, with stops in Beaverton (Jul 8), Tigard (Jul 9) … [Read more]
2014 World Cup Day 4
It time for tactlessness: Some of these teams shouldnt be here. Switzerland 2 Ecuador 1 Didnt catch it. One of these guys might even make it out of group phase; then theyll get mangled instantly and unemorably. So, why are they here? Im not sure what the right number of teams for the World Cup tournament is, but the quality of some of these matches is evidence that 32 is too high. France 3 Honduras 0 I watched some but then wandered off. Neither side was putting a world-class show, which is what the World Cup is supposed to be about.
New mouse
While in town yesterday, I picked up a new 6 button wireless mouse from OfficeWorks. It represents a new low in documentation: And that's really everything. The fun started when the receiver wasn't detected when I plugged it in to the keyboard hub. Only when I put it in a port on the motherboard did I get: Jun 14 08:28:18 eureka kernel: ugen1.9: <MOSART Semi.> at usbus1 Jun 14 08:28:18 eureka kernel: ukbd2: <MOSART Semi.
2014 World Cup Day 3
Nobody could possibly watch all the games, even people between jobs like me. This was pointed out by my 8-year-old who wanted the TV, so I told her the story of how she was born the day before the 2006 World Cup started, which is why I ended up watching lots of it even though it was coming in from Europe at weird times: Paternity leave plus a newborns sleep/wake schedule. But she persisted in her (losing) argument for a switchover to Bugs Bunny. Colombia 3 Greece 0 Really, the least engaging game of the tournament so far. Colombia had some flashes of speed and precision, but from Greece more or less nothing; you cant attack at a walking pace.
2014 World Cup Day 2
Give the Brazilians credit, the playing surfaces held up remarkably under the heavy rain. So did the quality of play, mostly. Mexico 1 Cameroon 0 I tend to know and like Mexico because theyre often the big dog in the pool Canada plays in; and Ive thought that one of these years they should be able to win it all. On the other hand Im an unabashed fan of joyous run-and-gun African soccer. Anyhow, Mexico may do well this year, but today wasnt evidence; Cameroon was entirely lacking in cohesion and discipline. The execrable-again refereeing robbed Dos Santos of two pretty good chances; 3-0 would have been a fairer reflection of the result.
bash alias of the day: reader
I have some PDFs that have to be reviewed in Adobe Reader, because they include "comments" that OS X "Preview" can't display and edit. This alias has saved me hours of frustration: alias reader='open -a /Applications/Adobe\ Reader.app' Now I can simply type "reader" instead of, say, "cat", and view the PDF: reader Limoncelli_Ch13_jh.pdf For those of you that are unfamiliar with Adobe Acrobat Reader, it is Adobe's product for distributing security holes to nearly every computer system in the world. It is available for nearly every platform, which makes it a very convenient way to assure that security problems can be distributed quickly and globally.
Audio from todays keynote on digital publishing
This morning, I gave the keynote speech the 2014 conference of The Literary Consultancy in London, about the future of publishing. They got the audio up with lightning speed (I'm in the auditorium, listening to the follow-on panel). MP3 Link
TV reception problems, next step
I've had TV reception problems for years, and I've been keeping notes in my diary. Why didn't I look there earlier? It seems that almost exactly three years ago I had the same problem: fine-tuning was disabled. And so it was again today. Set the flag; now to see if it helps. It wasn't helped by random variations in each direction. I seem to recall some issues with frequency, but so far I haven't been able to find them. ACM only downloads articles once.
2014 World Cup Day 1
There were no broadcast breakdowns or stadium collapses or other disasters (aside from the refereeing); congrats to the Brazilians for getting this thing launched smoothly (aside from the football). Up here in Canada, it seems all the games are on CBC, who have the usual competent laid-back Brit announcers. The guys who call the Whitecaps games on the Vancouver radio station are way more fun. Not sure what CBC will do when there are parallel matches. Brazil 3 Croatia 1 There were only two clean goals. I include Croatias first, called an own-goal, but that was a lethal cross from Olic; if Marcelo hadnt touched it there was another red-checked shirt right behind him facing an open goalmouth.
ZOMGTERRISTSGONNAKILLUSALL tee, now in tote form
My ZOMGTERRISTSGONNAKILLUSALLRUNHIDE TSA tee-shirt (of Poop Strong fame) is available in tote-bag form, a fact I had somehow missed!
Parting from my old computers
What do I do with all the old computers, books and listings in the shipping container? I haven't looked at them in years, and we don't want to take the container with us when we move. Chris Bahlo wants to buy it, and we should move it before the winter sets in and the ground gets too soft. So today Stewart and Craig came by and picked up many of the old computers, and also my old brewing fridges, to be scrapped: I couldn't bear to look.
More recording problems
I've been keeping an eye on my TV reception quality for nearly 3 years now, and I still don't understand why sometimes things are normal, and sometimes the image quality is completely unacceptable, to the point where no data at all are recorded. I've eliminated most things, including the tuners and cabling. But since my reconfiguration of the system over the weekend, things are different. Recordings on tuner 1 are consistently fine, and recordings on tuner 2 are consistently unusable. Why? I didn't do anything with the hardware. It looks as if it must be something to do with the configuration itself, which is certainly confused: it had lost the names of the tuners, for example.
Network Neutrality and the FCC Proposal to Abandon it
The internet and the availability of content broadly and uniformly to all users has driven the largest wave of innovation ever e experienced in our industry. Small startups offering a service of value have the same access to customers as the largest and best funded incumbents. All customers have access to the same array of content regardless of their interests or content preferences. Some customers have access to faster access than others but, whatever the access speed, all customers have access to it all content uniformly. Some countries have done an amazing job of getting high speed access to an very broad swath of the population.
Network Neutrality and the FCC Proposal to Abandon it
The internet and the availability of content broadly and uniformly to all users has driven the largest wave of innovation ever e experienced in our industry. Small startups offering a service of value have the same access to customers as the largest and best funded incumbents. All customers have access to the same array of...
Podcast: Cybersecurity begins with integrity, not surveillance
Here's a reading (MP3) of a recent Guardian column, 'Cybersecurity' begins with integrity, not surveillance, in which I suggest that the reason to oppose mass surveillance is independent of whether it "works" or not -- the reason to oppose mass surveillance is that mass surveillance is an inherently immoral act: The Washington Post journalist Barton … [Read more]
The weekly eBay pain
Last week I tried to sell my old camera on eBay Australia. The problems I ran into were clearly bugs. Somewhat to my surprise I got a well-thought out answer to my bug report a few days later, offering workarounds for the bugs. But I didn't want to list it on a Wednesday. I have a hypothesis that from the seller's perspective the best time for an auction to finish is on a Sunday afternoon, when lots of people can watch it run to completion. It also seems reasonable to have a 7 day auctionanything longer tends to get forgotten. So that meant putting it up on a Sunday afternoon.
MythTV: the agony
So what do I do with my MythTV problems? I have at least three alternatives: address the immediate problem by modifying or updating the grabber software, install the latest version of MythTV, or install something else altogether. Fixing the problem in the current release has two significant disadvantages: it's probably only a matter of time before a new shepherd update will break it againafter all, I had the same issue 18 months ago. And it also requires me to learn more PERL than I want. Installing a new version of MythTV makes more sense, but how much work will it be?
Trusting Browser Code
It would be useful if you could really trust code running in your browser. Its not obvious that this is possible; but its not obvious that it isnt, either. Google just announced End-to-End, OpenPGP code, destined for life as a Chrome extension that might add Strong Privacy to your Gmail life. Similarly, Keybase offers a slick in-the-browser encrypt/decrypt/sign experience. Both of these do encryption in JavaScript. If this can be made useful and safe, itll be amazingly useful in extending privacy to everyone. But maybe it cant. There are two classes of reasons people dont want to trust browser-based crypto: political problems and technical problems.
More MythTV pain
Spent some more time reluctantly looking at my MythTV problems today. Once again, I see the value of keeping a diary: I got an almost identical error message 18 months ago. And it looks as if once again a shepherd update broke things. Unfortunately, the solution isn't the same. I'm going to have to accept the fact that my MythTV installation, installed over 5 years ago, is too old. Can I bear reinstalling it? ACM only downloads articles once.
Failure after failure
Woken up at 0:57 by the UPSs beeping: another power failure. That's so common here that I don't do more than confirm the fact. But it wasn't the only failure. My nightly mythfilldatabase run failed. Why? This stuff is so opaque that I really don't know. Tried re-running shepherd, which seemed to have forgotten everything it ever knew, and at the end it could no longer communicate with mythtv: 2014-06-06 14:46:45.044 XMLTV config file is: /home/mythtv/.mythtv/.xmltv 2014-06-06 14:46:49.110 Error in 1:1: unexpected end of file Huh?
Little Brother challenged in Florida high school
For the first time, one of my books has been challenged. The students at Booker T Washington High in Pensacola, Florida were to be assigned Little Brother for their summer One School/One Book read. At the last instant -- and over the objections of the head of the English department and the chief librarian -- … [Read more]
More Funky-lens fun
I previously wrote about sticking a groovy 100mm F/2.8 tele/macro Pentax lens on my Fujifilm X-T1; here are a few leftover pictures with no unifying theme, but theyre pretty. There are fancier flowers than a daisy, but few more fetching; my Mom scandalized her early-Fifties wedding planners by insisting on carrying them as a bride. Ive commented on how great the X-T1s manual-focus aids are, even with the mismatched lens. Let me walk that back a bit, because Ive been having trouble with shots at any distance; perhaps the adapter getting in the way? But for anything nearby it gets up and sings, for example like this: Focus on the ferns, then on the ferns behind the ferns.
eBay workaround
It took a while, but finally I have an answer from eBay about my listing problems. In fact, the support person (later identified as Jehan) went to a lot of trouble and just about listed the item for me. The problem? Who knows? He suggested clearing all cookies, which might have made a difference, but a lot of those cookies are unrelated to eBay, and any script that is so confused by them is clearly badly written. I wonder if this has been reported to the software development people. I suspect not, since they didn't ask me for any more details.
Edward Snowden Wins EPIC "Champion of Freedom" Award
On Monday I had the honor of presenting Edward Snowden with a "Champion of Freedom" award at the EPIC dinner. Snowden couldn't be there in person -- his father and stepmother were there in his place -- but he recorded this message. Left to right: Mark Rotenberg, Jesselyn Radack (Snowden's attorney), Lonnie Snowden, and Bruce Schneier...
Humble Ebook Bundle adds Lawful Interception audio, From Hell Companion, Too Cool To Be Forgotten
The latest Humble Ebook Bundle has added four new titles: Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's From Hell, the From Hell Companion (review), Too Cool to Be Forgotten (review); and my audiobook for Lawful Interception, the sequel to Little Brother and Homeland. They join a stellar lineup of other comics, novels and ebooks with work by … [Read more]
The Human Side of Heartbleed
The announcement on April 7 was alarming. A new Internet vulnerability called Heartbleed could allow hackers to steal your logins and passwords. It affected a piece of security software that is used on half a million websites worldwide. Fixing it would be hard: It would strain our security infrastructure and the patience of users everywhere. It was a software insecurity,...
Google SRE University on the east-coast!
Usenix FCW '14 is in Philly June 17-20 and one of the tutorials is the highly rated SRE University--Practical Large System Design. It is taught by actual Google SREs. It is worth going to this conference just to take this class. There are other sysadmin-related classes at FCW '14 this year including Hadoop Operations, Apache Cloudstack, Jenkins CI, and Hands-On Security for system administrators. Check out the full schedule.
Network outage: aftermath
Updated my Facebook post about Saturday's network outage. Yes, at least one person affected wasn't using Aussie Broadband, so it looks like an National Broadband Network issue. When I have time I'll chase that one down. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Online activations: failed
We've been waiting for the activation of a SIM card from ALDI mobile and two debit cards from ANZ bank. It's not clear than any of them have worked. The last thing I heard from ALDI mobile was: Transferring your number can take from 4 to 48 business hours to complete, and we appreciate your patience. Whilst you are waiting for your transfer to complete, you can track the progress of your order by logging in to your account using your account number (instead of your mobile number).
MacBook Pro + Samsung U28D590D
When I got 10.9.3, display on the ancient Dell 30" Id had plugged into various Macs went south; It would only do 1080x1920, which looked like a bad cartoon. So I ended up with a Sammy U28D590D which is advertised as UHD which I think is the official term for 4K. It works really well, albeit at 30Hz, but that doesnt seem to be a problem. Back story What happened was, I tweeted So, whats a good 4K outboard monitor to get for my MBP? Where by good I include cheap . and a couple people tweeted back about this Sammy, and local dealer NCIX had em in stock at a fair price, so I placed the order.
Podcast: How to Talk to Your Children About Mass Surveillance
Here's a reading (MP3) of a my latest Locus column, How to Talk to Your Children About Mass Surveillance, in which I describe the way that I've explained the Snowden affair to my six-year-old: So I explained to my daughter that there was a man who was a spy, who discovered that the spies he … [Read more]
Help me explain our new book
Would you help us figure out how to explain our new book? A 30-question survey... only takes a minute.
Chinese Hacking of the US
Chinese hacking of American computer networks is old news. For years we've known about their attacks against U.S. government and corporate targets. We've seen detailed reports of how they hacked The New York Times. Google has detected them going after Gmail accounts of dissidents. They've built sophisticated worldwide eavesdropping networks. These hacks target both military secrets and corporate intellectual property....
Selling cameras on eBay
It's time to get rid of my old Olympus E-30. eBay's the place to do that, of course, so collected my photos and set off to list it. Things have changed at eBay, not only the massive breach of security they had a few weeks back, and which they didn't report to their users until much laterI heard about it on the radio news. But they've also changed their listing policies since I last sold something, so it was a little slow. But that wasn't all. After filling out all the fields, I got a message: OK, what policy?
Network outage!
Since the advent of the National Broadband Network, our network troubles are overaren't they? Today I discovered that I had lost connection round 16:10. Called up Aussie Broadband support and went through the usual debugging steps. At least he didn't ask me to reboot my computer, but he did ask if I had a spare router lying around. I did, and it also got no connection. How do you debug this kind of problem? The NTD is pretty much a black box. We know that it's an Ethernet bridge, but how exactly does it work? What do these constantly flashing LEDs mean?