Ron’s Blog

If you switch your monitor off when you leave the office, and you then try and remote in from home – will you see a blank screen?

Get to work, minding my own business – then, at 10am, the local transformer box blows (AGAIN). I was working on a critical update to one of my apps at the time that just HAD to go live today. So, no problem I thought, I’ll just take my work computer and go home to finish it. I get home, and found that for some reason, my stuff wasn’t synching between my computer and the dev work server as it should have been – all my stuff was on the dev work server.

I then phone my network admin, and hear that he and the support people are the only ones left at the office – everyone else had buggered off (bearing in mind that we had scheduled load shedding at 2pm, and this looked like it would take a while to fix). He says no problem, come and get the dev work server (with EVERYONE’s dev work on it, mind you), and take it home with you. I’m like “are you SURE????”, and he’s like “no problem”. So, I drive the 3km back to the office, pick up the server, get the admin password for it, and off I go home again, connect both PCs up to my network, and transfer my stuff to my work computer.

It doesn’t take me long to finish the code changes that I had been planning, but now I have a new problem – my code needs to go onto our daemons server at our server farm at IS in Umhlanga – and I can’t go through the office network, because the UPS died five minutes after I left the second time. Once more, I phone my network admin. He tells me that there’s a back way in, and tells me all the details. I upload my code to the server, and test it – it worked first time, thankfully. 

As I finish testing, one of the support people phone me to tell me that the power is back on. So, both computers get loaded back into the car, and back to work I go to put them back. We plug the dev work server and my work computer back in, and I quickly send off a few mails that needed to be sent, as our 2pm scheduled load shedding is about to happen. Sure enough, it happens. At this stage, I decide “bugger it”, and head off to the Pavillion to get some lunch and kill some time.

After Steers, I pop into Look and Listen and pick up two trance CDs (the same one I got for Palu but this time for myself, and another one). I browse around the various shops in the Pav, looking for something to keep me interested. Eventually, I look at the time. 4:15pm. I have to be at Kingsmead at 4:30pm as I’m doing the scoring for Cricinfo for the Pro20 final. So, off I head, only to be caught in the mother of all traffic jams at Warwick Junction. I eventually work my way through, and get into the Kingsmead scorebox at 4:50pm. Fortunately, my rather late arrival wasn’t a problem, as everyone else got caught in the same traffic jam.

So, I sit though 40 overs of a really good cricket match, which the Dolphins lost narrowly, get invited to drinks in the President’s Suite afterwards (nothing alcoholic for me – still had to drive home), and head off at 10:00pm thinking “what else could possibly happen today?”. As it turns out, there was an accident on Spaghetti Junction that had happened moments before I got there, and as it was pitch black I only saw it at the last minute (and, Murphy’s Law, it’s in MY lane). I don’t know how I managed to avoid running into the crashed cars and keep control.

So here I am, at 11:10pm, finally chilling out at home. Won’t be online for much longer, as I’ve got an early morning tomorrow…

A programmer started to cuss
Because getting to sleep was a fuss
As he lay there in bed
Looping ’round in his head
was: while(!asleep()) sheep++;

Every now and then, I give Supreme Commander a go. This is typically what happens:

1. Make sure Andrew is on your team.
2. Let Andrew do the actual hard work of hunting down the opposition. After all, he’s way better than you.
3. While the above happens, act all emo and stay in your little corner… while building nukes.
4. Wait for Andrew to do a bombing run and disable the anti-nuke defences.
5. Initiate a nuclear winter across the map.
6. …
7. PROFIT!

Hey, it works when Andrew and I are playing against the AI…

(Yes, yes, I know… I’m going to have to think up a better strategy when I play human opposition. I’m working on that.)

OK, so we know that the time of the dinosaurs must have been a pretty rough time to live. To say nothing of the carnivorous dinosaurs themselves, you had to deal with plenty of air and sea predators as well. As Gollum would say, “nassssty place, precioussss”.

Well, it seems like even the frogs were nasty buggers back then as well:

It was the biggest, baddest, meanest froggy ever to have hopped on Earth.

Scientists on Monday announced the discovery in north-western Madagascar of a bulky amphibian dubbed the “devil frog” that lived 65 million to 70 million years ago and was so nasty it may have eaten newborn dinosaurs.

This brute was larger than any frog living today and may be the biggest frog ever to have existed, according to paleontologist David Krause of Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York, one of the scientists who found the remains.

Rest of article

Well, although that frog is no longer around (thankfully), one now begins to understand why some African cultures have an irrational fear of frogs…

Andrew has sent me an article detailing how popular anti-virus software deals with threats not present in standard AV signatures:

 The winner of this antivirus sweepstakes was a product called Avira, which managed to detect and defeat 71 percent of the unknown malware. Right behind it was the equally-obscure NOD32, which swept away 68 percent of the threats. The more well-known commercial products fared more poorly. Norton Antivirus and McAfee tied at a mere 24 percent, while Microsoft’s OneCare did even worse by only identifying 18 percent of the new threats. Resting at the bottom of the barrel were Kaspersky and eScan at nine percent, and AVG, which detected only eight percent of malicious software in addition to producing many false positives.

Original article

I’m SO glad I use NOD32 then.

The article is from last year though, and is consequently on the outdated side. If you hear of a more recent study, please put the link in the comments…

Very broken. Very, very broken.

I wrote in an earlier blog post just over a year ago warning people not to use it – looking back on that post today, it seems like my reasoning at the time was justified, by this Slashdot article if nothing else.

If you’re using IE7, read that article, and the comments that go with it. If you’re still convinced that IE7 is the future of web browsing after all of that, please forward me your address so that I can come to your house, install Firefox or Opera for you, and show you how web browsing SHOULD be.

I’m probably going to get a lot of flak from the non-Christians, and maybe even the non-Catholics who read my blog. But what the heck.

Ettienne, in his latest entry, believes that Christmas is a total waste of time. He states the following:

Many people don’t know this… but Christmas was originally a PAGAN festival. That’s right. When Christmas was first created, it was a festival in which public nudity and being drunk, gambling, etc etc etc was what was done. December 25th was a day on which many different gods were worshiped, gods like Elah-Gabal, a Syrian sun god, and Thor, the God of Thunder.

Christmas was never celebrated by Christians, ever, until eventually, in the year 379, the Catholics decided “Hey, how about we chuck Jesus’ birthday in with all these other pagan gods?!”.

There’s a reason why the early Church decided to have Christmas on December 25th, which I found after doing some research. No, it’s not the reason that Ett thinks, although it’s also not the actual birth date of Jesus (I doubt that there are birth records that far back, even within the Roman empire). This article explains the choice of date:

In 350, Pope Julius I declared that Christ’s birth would be celebrated on December 25. There is little doubt that he was trying to make it as painless as possible for pagan Romans (who remained a majority at that time) to convert to Christianity. The new religion went down a bit easier, knowing that their feasts would not be taken away from them.

If that was indeed the intent, no doubt it has been a great success, as Christianity is now the dominant religion in the world today. The article that I linked to earlier mentions that some pagan traditions still continue today; this should in no way detract from the religious aspect of Christmas.

The article doesn’t mention of the giving of gifts to each other, but I remember reading somewhere ages ago that this was done to remind us of the gift of Jesus. Unfortunately, commercialisation has taken this way too far now. I’m not going to go into too much detail on this; I’m sure we all know it. After all, we all see it at this time of year. If you’re really interested, this Wikipedia article details how the religious aspects of Christmas are slowly being degraded by secular, commercial aspects. Maybe we’re just coming full circle from 350 A.D. – regardless, if you’re a Christian, it makes for some pretty depressing reading.

But it’s definitely not the fault of us Catholics. To be quite honest with my loyal blog readers, I’m getting rather sick and tired of my faith being constantly attacked, even by fellow Christians. Mass media isn’t helping either – just look at movies like “The Da Vinci Code”, and more recently “The Golden Compass”, both of which attack the Catholic Church. (Admittedly, they toned it down in the latter movie from the book from which it was adapted, but it doesn’t make it any less worrying.) In particular, I’m really concerned about other Christian groups attacking us. One person that I know ended up at a charismatic church for a while, and I was told that said church (or, at least one of it’s members) was distributing material attacking the Catholic Church. This is just plain not acceptable. We’re all Christians. We all worship the same God. We should be united – not divided.

But enough of that litte rant, and back to Christmas. Don’t ignore it. But if you’re Christian, then put the emphasis into the religious aspect of the whole occasion. As some local churches are saying, “Put ‘Christ’ back into ‘Christmas’”. It’s something that my family does extremely well, and if you’re Christian and reading this, try doing the same. You’ll get so much out of this “pagan festival” this way.

 EDIT: Seems like my shamless copying and pasting from other sources created a Javascript error on this page. Hopefully it’s fixed now.

Firstly, thanks to Anakha56 of PCF for bringing this to my attention. He posted links to these two articles, on how one service provider in the States is interfering with P2P traffic.

For those of you too lazy to click the links, here’s some excerpts:

Comcast has been “caught” blocking BitTorrent traffic in some areas, according to tests performed by the Associated Press. The news organization claims to have confirmed that Comcast is blocking—or at least seriously slowing down—BitTorrent transfers, regardless of whether the content is legal or not. If true, Comcast’s actions have serious implications for sharing information online, and by proxy, Net Neutrality.

In two out of its three tests, the downloads were blocked altogether, while in the remaining test, the download started after a 10-minute delay.

AP believes that the reason for the block and delay was due to reset packets being sent back from what claimed to be other torrent users—including the AP’s second computer. “However, the traffic analyzer software running on each computer showed that neither computer actually sent the packets,” wrote the AP, indicating that the packets were sent by a mysterious middle party. Further, the AP says that when it performed traffic analysis on another computer torrenting files over Time Warner Cable, over half of the reset packets came from the addresses of Comcast subscribers. This is curious, since Comcast’s 12.4 million subscribers only make up about 20 percent of US broadband subscribers.

Comcast’s actions also have implications for net neutrality. But that’s no secret, as Comcast has been among the plethora of ISPs that regularly oppose net neutrality legislation. The ISPs like to argue that, by allowing all Internet traffic to pass through the pipes equally, they could lose money because of overall network slowdowns. But customers pay for broadband service for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is so that they can get full, high-speed access to the content of their choice.”Initial investigations suggest that Comcast is interfering with some subset of protocols, rather than interfering equally with TCP/IP traffic generally,” the EFF’s study says. “We have seen definite interference by injection of RST packets into certain classes of BitTorrent and Gnutella TCP sessions.”

“Initial investigations suggest that Comcast is interfering with some subset of protocols, rather than interfering equally with TCP/IP traffic generally,” the EFF’s study says. “We have seen definite interference by injection of RST packets into certain classes of BitTorrent and Gnutella TCP sessions.”

Comcast has been extremely secretive about the scope and extent of its traffic management activity. The company provided instructions to its employees specifying how they should respond to consumer questions about P2P interference. Employees were informed that discussing the specifics of Comcast’s P2P blocking with anyone outside of the company would lead to termination.

You get the idea.

Now, what I’m interested in is whether Telkom does the same thing. Here’s the tool with which to find out, and here’s the guide on how to go about using said tool. I’ll run some tests over the weekend, but they probably won’t turn up much as I have an unshaped SAIX line. Then again, if unshaped SAIX is being affected as well, can I ask for my money back?

I finally made a decision that I really should have made a few months ago – the decision to leave the FRAG LAN core admin team. Due to the fact that most of my free time and financial resources these days is going towards my part-time studies, I felt that I could no longer contribute to the team, and the others on the team felt the same way. I believe that my decision to step down was the best thing for both myself and for the event itself.

Initially, I was going to leave completely; however, I’ve been asked to continue looking after the website – I suppose that the only real reason for this is that I’m the only one on the team who knows Joomla and phpBB 3 inside out. I’ve agreed to this, but I won’t be doing this indefinitely. Ideally, I’d like to train someone up on the FRAG website, and eventually be in the position to say “it’s yours now; do with it as you please”. I’m teaching one of the team members how Joomla works, and another how phpBB 3 works – neither of them are particularly challenging if you’re willing to learn.

I’m currently negotiating with the remaining core team as to them buying out the assets that I contributed towards the event (a server and some networking stuff). I have been given the opportunity to buy back into the event when I want to; however, I doubt that I’ll take this up. Firstly, I probably won’t be in a position to do this for at least another year, maybe more. Secondly, by the time I’m in a position to do so, I probably would have decided to move on. Thirdly (and this is totally personal), I may not even be gaming for much longer, given my growing discontent with Windows and the fact that the latest editions of Ubuntu are looking very, very tempting…

In a way, I’m sorry I had to stop this, particularly as I was one of the people who got the event rolling in the first place. At least I’ll now be able to concentrate on the things that need concentrating on.

I’ll be having a holiday with my family down in Cape Town in January – leaving Durban on the 5th, and getting back on the 23rd. Little sister is off to start her second year at UCT Medical School, so we thought that we’d have a nice long family holiday down there.

This is something that I’m really looking forward to, given my love of the place. I was there for a holiday in 1994, then spent a year there while at UCT myself in 2003. I’ll probably end up moving there one day, although that day is still years off. Firstly, I need enough work experience for a senior developer position, secondly I need to complete my part-time studies (around June next year if all goes well), thirdly I need a car and fourthly I need cash in the back – and I’m currently lacking in all four departments, although they will all come with time. (Then of course, there’s the worrying consideration of Jacob Zuma becoming South Africa’s next president that may throw a spanner in the works of my future plans – but let’s not go there.)

Anyway, I’m planning on what to do with myself while I’m down there for all of two weeks (plus two days getting there and two days getting back – we have a habit of making the road trips part of the holiday, which I consider to be a Good and Fun Thing). I’m trying to organise a movie evening at Cavendish with part of the PCF crew – Jeff (silv3rback on PCF) is helping out here. Then, just before we leave, I celebrate my 23rd birthday on January 21st, and I’m told by my sister that if you go to the Table Mountain cableway on your birthday and bring proof of your date of birth, you get a free trip, so that’s that sorted out as well. Other than that, I don’t have much planned. Yet. I obviously would like to meet up with as much people that I know down there as possible – old UCT mates, old school friends that are down there now, and former Durbanites that have taken the trek down there (jerith, that means you). If you’re interested in any reunions or meetups, you know where to get hold of me – comments, forums, e-mail, IRC, GTalk, MSN, Facebook, yadda yadda.

I’ve moved the blog over to ron2k.za.net now (its previous home was Blogger). WordPress conveniently allows one to import posts from Blogger, so everything that was on the old blog is now on this one.

All new blog posts will be posted here from now on, so I suggest updating your bookmarks/RSS feeds/whatever. The old blog will remain for a few months to give everyone a chance to update everything, however nothing new will be posted there.

My word, I’ve neglected this blog for a while…

Anyway. Ettienne, one of my friends, has started up his own website dedicated to computer modding. You can find it here. If you’re even remotely interested in modding, I STRONGLY suggest that you pay a visit. His own project logs alone are well worth it.

Right, I will now write “I will not neglect this blog” 100 times on the blackboard…

Our cellphone messaging app, Yakkin (that I blogged about around a month or so back) has just gone live.

If you’re at all interested, the website is here.

OK, granted, it was never good to begin with, but if Microsoft gets their way, it’s about to become a whole lot worse. A link to this article has just been sent to me, courtesy of my Friendly Network Admin – and I’m shamelessly copying and pasting the article content here.

It’s such a tremendously bad idea that it’s almost bound to succeed. Microsoft has filed another patent, this one for an “advertising framework” that uses “context data” from your hard drive to show you advertisements and “apportion and credit advertising revenue” to ad suppliers in real time. Yes, Redmond wants to own the patent on the mother of all adware.The application, filed in 2006, describes a multi-faceted, robust ad-delivering system that lives on a “user computer, whether it’s part of the OS, an application or integrated within applications.”“Applications, tools, or utilities may use an application program interface to report context data tags such as key words or other information that may be used to target advertisements,” says the filing. “The advertising framework may host several components for receiving and processing the context data, refining the data, requesting advertisements from an advertising supplier, for receiving and forwarding advertisements to a display client for presentation, and for providing data back to the advertising supplier.”

The adware framework would leave almost no data untouched in its quest to sell you stuff. It would inspect “user document files, user e-mail files, user music files, downloaded podcasts, computer settings, computer status messages (e.g., a low memory status or low printer ink),” and more. How could we have been so blind as to not see the marketing value in computer status messages?

The software would also free advertising from its traditional browser yoke. “A word processor may display a banner ad along the top of a window, similar to a toolbar, while a graphical ad may be displayed in a frame associated with the application. A digital editor for photos or movies may support video-based advertisements,” the patent application says.

The patent application, first unearthed by InformationWeek, gives the impression that your software would have more control over the advertising than you would. “An e-mail client may specify that ads from competitors must be excluded, that its own display client must be used… (that) no more than 4 ads per hour are allowed, and that only text or graphical… advertisements are supported.” The patent makes no mention of any method by which an actual user might exert control, nor does it mention very real privacy or security concerns.

That’s okay. It’s still a good thing. It says so right in the application: “The ability to derive and process context data from local sources rather than monitor interactions with a remote entity, such as a server, benefits both consumers and advertisers by delivering more tightly targeted advertisements. The benefit to the user is the perception that the ads are more relevant, and therefore, less of an interruption. The benefit to the advertiser is better focus and a higher chance of conversion to a sale.”

The patent is a fascinating exercise in advertising delivery systems. But surely that’s all it is—an exercise. No way anyone would ever actually make a thing like this. Right?

Right? Wrong! If anyone is going to make something like this, it will be Microsoft doing it. It surely wouldn’t be difficult to modify the search indexer in Vista to send information on the content on our files back to base camp, and I’m sure you’d see this creep in sooner or later, disguised as a “security update”.

There are some rather worrying questions that need to be addressed here. Firstly, how can being spammed with ads be seen as a good thing for the consumer? If anything, too much advertising tends to put me off the product rather than make me rush out to buy it. Secondly, will we be able to turn all of this advertising off, or will it be forced upon us? I can imagine companies wanting to turn this off, as being bombarded with ads (even if it is only 4 ads per hour) can only hurt productivity – which could cost Microsoft if people move over to Linux because of it. Thirdly, privacy and ethics come into the picture here. It is just downright unethical to spy on users and spam them with unwanted advertising. Unfortunately, it seems that in today’s capitalist world, profit is more important than ethics. Just look at Telkom, for example.

And here’s an interesting one. Will security software classify this as adware, and if so, will they try to disable it? We could have an interesting situation if a piece of security software classifies the operating system that it runs under as a virus.

The day that this comes to fruition is the day that I uninstall Windows and permanently move over to Linux (instead of me just having it on my dev box) – even if it means the end of gaming for me.