September 2003 Archives

I started going to Google News at the end of September last year and it became the homepage on my browser shortly thereafter. I find it *so* handy.

I just read an interesting interview with Krishna Bharat on his reasons for creating such a handy beast in the first place.

After Sept. 11, when all the newspapers were recording who, what, when, where -- there was a big question of why. Why did this happen? What's going to happen in the future? A lot of people were spending a lot of time looking for news, and I was one of them. All the servers were slow and it took a long time to find the content. Fundamentally, I wanted to build a tool that would automate this: Here's a new development, let's find all the articles that talk about this development.

Google News Creator Watches Portal Quiet Critics With 'Best News' Webby

In case you've been living under a rock, there's a good article on Slate that describes the Valerie Plame "affair" in a nutshell. The author of the article, Jack Shafer, makes a very good point that it's not just White House officials who have to shoulder some of the blame.

Novak's White House sources aren't the only potentially prosecutable leakers. The identity of an undercover operative such as Plame would not automatically be something in circulation at the White House. Somebody at the CIA would have had to tell the White House that Plame was Wilson's wife and that she was undercover. Any aggressive Justice dragnet is as likely to collect CIA employees as it is White House officials.

Will the leak of a CIA agent's name be the next big political scandal?

Some of these are really quite clever. The 'Rotating Snakes' one is *extremely* clever in fact.

Link via dws.

So it's official, Adam Sandler has actually made a movie that I like - Anger Management. I don't think I'd ever watch it again but at least I said "hmm, that wasn't bad" when the movie ended which is a big improvement over his other crapola.

Didn't watch any other new movies. Instead we watched some of our favourites that we hadn't seen in a while:

• Unbreakable
• The Bourne Identity
• Stir Of Echoes
• Good Will Hunting
• Raiders Of The Lost Ark

Why oh why aren't the Indiana Jones movies out on DVD? Come to think of it, why aren't *any* of the early George Lucas movies out on DVD? What exactly is he waiting for?

Via Dave it looks like the BBC are bringing back Dr Who. I used to love watching Doctor Who back in the day.

I'm pretty sure most Doctor Who geeks will name Tom Baker as their favourite Doctor. Not me, I was too young to really remember any episodes with Tom Baker. To be honest, I liked Peter Davison the best. I think he was the best Doctor of 'my era' (the Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy years). I can remember taping 'The Five Doctors' (the Doctor Who 20th anniversary episode) and watching it over and over again.

Oh yes, good memories :-)

Wine absolutely rocks. I installed it a couple of weeks ago but forgot about it.

Today I was sent an 'important' MS Word email attachment. To be honest this was the first Word doc that I'd received since installing Linux on my laptop and I really didn't want to reboot into winders so I thought I'd give OpenOffice a try.

Didn't work. In fact, every attempt resulted in a core dump. Bugger. Then I remembered Wine. I wasn't sure if Wine supported Office 2000 but I thought I'd give it a go. Worked first bloody time! I'm now running Office 2000 on Linux. How cool is that?

I did run into one problem. Word refused to save documents. Not to worry, a quick scan of the comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine newsgroup revealed that I needed to add a couple of lines to my ~/.wine/config file:

[AppDefaults\\winword.exe\\DllOverrides]
"ole32" = "native"
"oleaut32" = "native"
"comctl32" = "native"

Now works like a charm! I can't say enough good things about Wine, quite simply it rocks :-)

Seems that Universal might not be lowering the price of CDs afterall.

The world's largest music company, Universal Music Group, is reconsidering its plan to include a lower sticker price of $12.98 on its CDs. Retailers have complained that the proposed sticker price would cut sharply into profits.

Universal Music Rethinks CD Sticker Price

Last night there was a story on our local news about some kids who were shot in some gang related fight on a basketball court. They were interviewing some of the kids who witnessed the whole thing and one of the girls said something to the affect of "yeah we heard gunfire so we just dropped to the ground like we were taught". What do you mean like we were taught? I'm not sure what I find more disturbing - the fact that there were kids shot or the fact that it obviously happens with such regularity that kids are now taught what to do in that situation.

Do they learn this at school?

<Jimmy> So what class do you have next?
<Scott> Oh just gang shootout survival.

Who lives in a pineapple under the sea eh? I'll tell you who, Spongebob fucking Squarepants. I know this because that bloody car commercial is played every 5 minutes. Please, make it stop.

A few choice words by Phillip Greenspun soon got snapped up by slashdot and before you knew it, another moronic "my programming langauge is better than your programming language" debate had begun. I actually waded through a lot of the comments and found one that I myself have used at work:

Bad programmers write bad programs regardless of the language.

John Caudwell, CEO of High Street mobile retailer Phones 4U, announced Thursday that he'll ban all employees from using e-mail across the business.

"I saw that e-mail was insidiously invading Phones 4U, so I banned it immediately," Caudwell said in a statement. "Phones 4U staff have been told to get off the keyboards, get face-to-face or on to the phone to colleagues. The quality and efficiency of communication have been increased tremendously in one fell swoop; things are getting done; people aren't tied to their PCs," the CEO said.

U.K. phone retailer bans e-mail

I dunno, I can't imagine doing my job without email. When you have to communicate with people in different time zones especially those in other countries having email is extremely handy. When you need to give some info to a bunch of people (again in different timezones) sending email is certainly a lot easier than trying to get everyone on a conference call. Also there's the 'cover your own arse' factor with email because you now have it in writing. Yes I've been burned in the past by someone giving me the 'I didn't say that' response after talking with them on the phone. They don't have that luxury with email.

Here are my two blogging grumbles from today.

(1) Why can't I post a comment on livejournal blogs without creating an account that I'll never use? Eh? Eh?

(2) Why oh why do you not have full post RSS? Now I've got to actually *visit* your page to read the rest of your post. Oh the horror :-)

And er, that's about it. Yes I'm extremely tired. Long day at work followed by a long night of statistics homework. Ooo Kev, Friday night statistics - you're such a party animal. Well yeah but I promised my better half that I wouldn't spend the whole weekend doing the bloody stuff this week.

Time for a quick beer before going to bed methinks...

For the past week or so I've been listening to nothing else but Depeche Mode. Back in the day I was a huge DM fan. Had posters on my walls, was part of their fan club, bought all their albums on record, bought all their albums again on CD :-) The highlight was actually meeting Martin Gore, Alan Wilder, and Andy Fletcher at a Nitzer Ebb concert in London back in 1991 (ish). They were up at the bar but instead of going up to them and talking to them like human beings I went all fanboy and just asked for their autographs - not very proud of that :-)

Anyway after a week of listening to everything from 1981's Speak & Spell to 2001's Exciter I can honestly say that my top 3 fave songs are 'Everything Counts', 'Stripped', and 'Enjoy The Silence'. I seem to hit repeat on those songs the most often.

Fave album? Hmm, probably Black Celebration.

Looks like David Blaine's latest stunt isn't going down too well in Blighty. Oh if only I lived back in England I could have the pleasure of watching Blaine 24/7 on Sky.

LONDON (Reuters) - If there's no such thing as bad publicity, then magician David Blaine's stunt of starving himself in a clear plastic box in London has been a smashing success.

So far, Britons have taken great pleasure in tormenting Blaine. His cage has been whacked with golf balls fired from nearby Tower Bridge. Eggs were thrown, following by sausages and bacon. Women have shown him their breasts and men their bottoms.

The disdain shown toward Blaine has thrilled some high-brow British columnists, proud of their country's apparent insensitivity to U.S.-style razzmatazz.

"You've picked the wrong town to be hung in, Mr Blaine," a commentator in the Sunday Times wrote. "What is clear from the start is that Londoners are not taking Blaine quite as seriously as he takes himself. ... Really, it makes you proud to be British."

Blaine's Stunt Prompts Anti-U.S. Displays in Britain

Hmm, now this is interesting...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush distanced himself on Wednesday from comments by Vice President Dick Cheney that left the impression he saw a possible link between Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

"We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in Sept. 11," Bush told reporters as he met members of Congress on energy legislation.

Democrats have accused the administration of creating a "false impression" at the heart of a widespread U.S. public belief that Saddam had a personal role in the attacks.

A recent poll by the Washington Post said 69 percent of Americans believed there was a Saddam link to the Sept. 11 attacks although no evidence of such a link has surfaced.

Cheney, interviewed on Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," left open the possibility of a Saddam link to the attacks.

Bush Distances from Cheney on Saddam-9/11 Link

Working from home today which rocketh hard. I've been coding away like a mad thing and just realized that I should probably go and have a shower or something - afterall it is 3:15pm. Ah yes, the wonders of stumbling out of bed and plonking yourself down in front of the ol' computer :-)

Jeremy made me chuckle today.

If you're looking for an IT job that won't likely be subject to cutbacks anytime soon, I have a suggestion. Go work at Microsoft. In the group that writes their security bulletins and advisories. That's gotta be a pretty secure job nowadays, huh?

IT Job Security

And so it begins. They said it wouldn't happen but...

A North Carolina county prosecutor charged a man accused of running a methamphetamine lab with breaking a new state law barring the manufacture of chemical weapons. If convicted, Martin Dwayne Miller could get 12 years to life in prison for a crime that usually brings about six months.

Prosecutor Jerry Wilson says he isn't abusing the law, which defines chemical weapons of mass destruction as "any substance that is designed or has the capability to cause death or serious injury" and contains toxic chemicals.

Civil liberties and legal defense groups are bothered by the string of cases, and say the government soon will be routinely using harsh anti-terrorism laws against run-of-the-mill lawbreakers.

"Within six months of passing the Patriot Act, the Justice Department was conducting seminars on how to stretch the new wiretapping provisions to extend them beyond terror cases," said Dan Dodson, a spokesman for the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys. "They say they want the Patriot Act to fight terrorism, then, within six months, they are teaching their people how to use it on ordinary citizens."

New Terror Laws Used Vs. Common Criminals

Link via jwz

I've just spent the past 3 hours trying to get some encryption routines working. We're taking on a new project at work and we're using some encryption that we don't usually support. None of the CPAN modules seem to work on these test files and it's all rather frustrating.

I'm sure it's something trivial that I'm missing but I'm far too tired to even think about it anymore tonight. I'm off to bed.

Yep evil I tell you. Ok, not *all* Diet Coke is evil, Diet Vanilla Coke for example is probably the best non-alcoholic drink on the planet but plain Diet Coke is without a doubt a total and utter bastard.

All it takes is about 2 or 3 swigs of plain Diet Coke to turn my stomach into the acid fire pits of hell. I kid you not. It happened to me on Friday but I didn't think much of it - just assumed it was something I ate. Happened yesterday and again today. I haven't eaten anything for 4 hours and have just finished my third gulp. Yep, lo and behold I've got a nuclear reaction happening in my stomach as I'm writing this.

So the blame has fallen squarely at the feet of this little Diet Coke can which incidently is going to be squashed to a pulp as soon as I've finished writing this - that'll teach it a lesson it won't soon forget :-)

No more Diet Coke for me. Now all I've got to do is convince the vending machine bloke to stock Diet Vanilla Coke instead.

HBO sucks. It does. It is truely arse - $154 of arse to be exact. I can't remember the last time there was anything good to watch. I'm thinking about ditching it when the ole Satellite bill is due in November. Here lies the dilemma. The Sopranos. Dammit, the bloody Sopranos. I know I'll want to watch the new season. Is it worth coughing up $154 for one hour's worth of entertainment per week? Hmmm...

I like a good conspiracy theory as much as the next bloke. Couple of good articles here that might make you go hmmm...

First up, The Guardian has a piece called This war on terrorism is bogus. Once you've digested that one, take a peek at the Philadelphia Daily News article called Why Don't We Have Answers To These 9/11 Questions?.

Sad to hear that Johnny Cash died today. Apart from his recent cover of NIN's Hurt, my favorite Cash song was 'Ring Of Fire'. Sally is a bit partial to 'A Boy Named Sue'.

The temp dropped down below 80° last night. We went outside to play with the dogs and it was really nice. Yep, it's approaching the time of year where I actually like living in Arizona :-)

Here's your chance to decide which President told the biggest whoppers.

Ronald Reagan?

"We did not--repeat, did not--trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we," Reagan proclaimed in November 1986. Four months later, on March 4, 1987, Reagan admitted in a televised national address, "A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not."

George Bush? No not that one, his dad...

In 1986, when asked whether he had participated in White House discussions about the Iran-Contra arms program as vice president, Bush claimed to have been "out of the loop." He specifically denied attending a January 1986 meeting at which Secretary of State George Schultz and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger opposed the arms-for-hostages deal. But White House logs, made public by independent counsel Kenneth Walsh in 1992, revealed that Bush had attended that meeting, and several others. In response, Bush claimed not to have heard Schultz's and Weinberger's objections, though Weinberger's journal entry for the meeting noted of the deal "VP favored."

Bill Clinton?

During a press conference on Jan. 26, 1998, Clinton declared, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." But Clinton had, indeed, received oral sex from Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern at the time.

Or perhaps Dubya?

In making the case for a U.S. invasion of Iraq, President Bush stated in early 2003, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Yet the CIA had itself previously warned top White House officials and British intelligence that the reports of an Iraqi attempt to buy uranium from African countries were almost certainly untrue, and no nuclear program nor weapons of mass destruction have yet been found in Iraq.

• RIAA sues 261 people for sharing MP3s, one of them is a 12 year old girl.
• Some company is closer to emerging from bankruptcy :-)
• Man decides to mail himself to Dallas.

Gather round for Uncle Kev is about to give you some advice. If you have a bottle of water on your desk, always always always make sure you screw the top back on. That way if you decide to knock the bottle over, water won't go everywhere.

And so endeth today's "I'm a clumsy wanker" tip of the day :-)

CNN's Wolf Blitzer does a surprisingly good job of grilling National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice in last night's Late Edition.

He could not get her to say whether Bush was going to tell the American public how much postwar Iraq would cost - no matter how many times he asked:

"BLITZER: Will he tell the American people how much he expects this to cost?

BLITZER: We have seen a lot of numbers floated in the press: $60 billion over the next year in Iraq, $90 billion over the next year. What is the approximate number?

BLITZER: He (Bush) will give us a specific number?

BLITZER: Somewhere between $60 billion and $90 billion?"

Finally she admitted that "I 'm not going to get into the numbers here".

Later in the interview Blitzer started mentioning postwar planning (or lack thereof). He mentioned the fact that the former Secretary of the Army, Thomas White, stated that "The size and scale and magnitude of the challenge of postwar Iraq was not something that we adequately planned for". This led to a followup question that almost made me choke on my lunch when I read her reply:

"BLITZER: But the bottom line is you have to admit that you could have done a better job planning for this current environment.

RICE: The planning went on. Obviously, there were things that were not foreseen. They have now -- are now being addressed.

But I would just remind people, when you're dealing with a society like Saddam Hussein's, you're not going to know very much about it."

What? What do you mean you're not going to know very much about it? You knew enough about it to warrant invading the bloody country in the first place didn't you?

Another week, another RSS aggregator :-) I've wanted a server side aggregator for a while now. It has been a pain in the arse having one aggregator at work and another one at home as my home aggregator doesn't know I've already read a majority of the feeds already.

Enter feedonfeeds. Simple PHP/MySQL app that I installed on my Linux box at work. Now I can use my browser to read feeds at work or home with one central repository. Nice. The UI isn't very good but it's all HTML so shouldn't be too hard to hack up something decent looking. All in all I like it a lot.

Harvard Professor Michael Watkins on what Bush must do to save his presidency.

"The time is fast approaching for President Bush to ritually sacrifice Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (and Wolfowitz and Feith while he's at) to save his presidency. Bush's foreign policy, which has been driven in an unprecedented way by the civilians at the Defense Department, is in tatters -- and not just in Iraq.

Rumsfeld's unscheduled visit to Iraq is a sure sign that he knows he is vulnerable. Asked about problems with Iraqi security during a stop for refueling on his way to the Middle East, Rumsfeld uttered what will probably become his epitaph.

"This is their country. They are going to have to provide security."

If that is not a statement of utter helplessness, I don't know what is. Never mind that it is our obligation under international law as occupying power to provide security."

Memo to the President: Time for a Ritual Sacrifice of Rumsfeld

Sometimes I write some code that I think is rather handy and I like it. Take debugging for example. I like to set a debug flag that will tell my program whether or not to be rather verbose and write debug info to my debug log. Something like this generally appears at the beginning of every program I write:

my $DEBUG = $ENV{DEBUG} || $opt_d || 0;

This allows me (or users) to either have a DEBUG environment variable set or set the debug flag on the command line via -d. Lets me do this later on:

$log->debug($cobol->resultsAsString) if $DEBUG;

I find this awfully handy. One of my coworkers thought it was rather confusing yet couldn't (or wouldn't) explain why. So now I'm scratching my head wondering why they thought it was confusing. I'm about to give up and ask them what they would do instead. I suspect the confusion arose because they don't really understand Perl's OO syntax and *not* because they don't grasp the concept of wanting to set a debug flag. We'll see...

Maybe it's just me. I can't help but think that the Bush administration asking the UN for help now that Iraq is such a clusterfuck is taking the piss somewhat. After insulting their allies by calling them "irrelevant" and "part of old Europe" and taking the "screw you, we're invading Iraq anyway" attitude to new levels of absurditiy - they now want help.

You can't alienate the rest of the planet and then expect some help in return. Remember how everyone supported America after 9/11 and how much sympathy & goodwill there was? Don't see much of that goodwill & support now do you? It's called burning your bridges. The sheer arrogance of certain members of the Bush adminstration (I'm looking at YOU Rummy) prior to invading Iraq means that it's all rather embarrasing to have to grovel back to the UN.

At the end of the day the UN will probably be noble and help out. In reality what they should say is "you made your bed, now lie in it".

Better late than never that's what I always say. It's been out for more than 2 years so I thought it was high time to buy Black & White [0]. It was only $9 so I couldn't really turn it down.

Didn't initially work on WinXP of course. Silly me for thinking I could install it and get playing right away. After browsing the help forums it turns out that some tweakage and patch installation was the order of the day. Two downloads later I finally had it up and running.

I haven't really played it for very long but my initial impression is that it's stunning.

[0] I see from their site that B&W 2 is in the works. NICE :-)

Sally and I spent the better part of Sunday & Monday playing Gauntlet: Dark Legacy. Not a bad game at all. Would be a bit boring if you had to play it by yourself but having two people play at once hacking & slashing monsters is great fun and we totally lost track of time. We finally completed the game and I ended up a level 89 Master or something like that anyway.

Good video game, couple of beers, sunny outside, nice way to spend a Monday don't you think :-)

jwz wrote a little Perl program to parse a RSS feed. Buried in the code is a gem of a comment that made the coffee come down my nose.

use bytes; # Larry can take Unicode and shove it up his ass sideways.

Quick, someone call Bruce Willis, better get that drilling team ready.

"A potential asteroid impact on 21 March 2014 has been given a Torino hazard rating of 1, defined as ‘an event meriting careful monitoring’. The newly discovered 1.2 km wide asteroid, known to scientists as 2003 QQ47, has a mass of around 2 600 billion kg, and would deliver around 350 000 MT of energy in an impact with Earth. Currently, the overall probability of this asteroid impacting Earth is 1 in 909 000. However, the orbit calculations are based on just 51 observations during a 7-day period. Dr Alan Fitzsimmons of Queen’s University, Belfast, one of the expert team advising the UK NEO information Centre said “The NEO will be observable from Earth for the next 2 months, and astronomers will continue to track it over this period."

Potentially Hazardous Asteroid given Torino 1 rating

Personally I think Blair is going to have a hard time convincing the country to trust him. Shame more people here in the US aren't questioning Dubya and his lies over the threat Iraq posed.

"After the exit of his powerful ''Sultan of Spin,'' British Prime Minister Tony Blair prepared a shake-up in Downing Street on Monday aimed at winning back the trust of British voters -- and his own Labour Party.

Media adviser Alastair Campbell, who wielded so much influence he was dubbed the ''real deputy prime minister,'' said last week he was quitting after nine years at Blair's side.

His resignation came as Blair battles to justify his case for war with Iraq and his handling of a weapons expert who killed himself after being exposed as the source of a report saying the threat from Baghdad had been exaggerated.

A poll published on the day Campbell quit showed public trust in Blair plunging -- just 22 percent of those asked said they thought the government had been honest and trustworthy."

Blair's new spin doctor to have limited role