Tue, 17 Jun 2008
(Alternative title: I aten’t dead)
My name’s Anthony and, like a lot of other people, I suffer from depression. It’s not something I like to talk about – my normal philosophy is just to filter out that part of my life and just talk and think about the interesting and fun parts of life. The downside is that when it gets particularly bad, everything gets filtered out and I more or less just vanish.
Fri, 21 Dec 2007
The latest warning from Dresden Codak’s Aaron Diaz:
Do we really want to live in a society populated by geriatric 27-year-olds? In living so long and spending so much time `thinking’ do we not also run the risk of becoming a cold, passionless race incapable of experiencing our two emotions (fear and not fear)?
Also interesting, is a talk by Vernor Vinge from back in February to the Long Now institute titled “What if the Singularity Does Not Happen?”, to which slides are available along with an audio recording.
Fri, 05 Jan 2007
Suppposedly, card number five in the Tarot is the Hierophant, described as “someone who interprets secret knowledge” and representing concepts such as “conformity” and “group identification”.
Not that any of that is related to this “five things you don’t know about me” meme, for which I’ve apparently been tagged by both Pia and Tony. And since I wouldn’t want to be accused of being either cool or vanity lacking here’s some from me.
I used to be a regular bit-part actor in school plays and musicals; I was in the school choir for four years in high school too. I tried getting back into it once during uni, but didn’t really have the time or interest, so I’m just left with going to the occassional show and watching these days. Of course, when they’re as spectacular as Woman in White that’s not much of a problem…
For quite a while, my favourite food was lamb’s brains, crumbed and fried with a white sauce. I’m quite fond of offal, also known as “variety meats” apparently, in general really – I’m not really persuaded by the “it’s morally wrong to eat animals” thing, but I figure if you’re going to anyway, it makes sense to not be wasteful about it. Kidneys are pretty awesome too; though liver seems to get boring before you’ve finished eating it. I’ve never tried haggis; but I suspect that’ll change before the next DebConf is over…
Prior to getting an 486sx33 that eventually ran Linux, I used to be an Amiga geek. As an Aussie Amigoid, that meant reading the Australian Commodore and Amiga Review (edited by Andy Farrell), and eventually when I became really elite, subscribing to Megadisc, a monthly magazine on floppy disk, which included useful programs, reviews, letters, and all sorts of interesting things. My first published C progream was included on one of the issues – it was a teensy little app for people with hard disks that would see if you had a Megadisc in the drive, then open up a dialog box so you could choose a directory to copy the disk too, and not have to worry about seek times and such. Unfortunately I was new enough at the whole “C” thing that I wasn’t sure how to make a new directory myself, and decided to just expect the user to use the “New Dir” button in the standard Amiga dialog box for that. Which would have been fine if I hadn’t also gone to the trouble of helpfully emptying the selected directory so the user wouldn’t end up with two Megadiscs in the same place. Put the two together, and evidently you end up with Megadisc’s editor, Tim Strachan, calling you at 9am the morning after publication and telling you how someone had tried it out and it had started deleting all the files on the hard drive. Ooops. With the Amiga dying out and the rise of the internet, it looks like Tim’s now more into alternative health products than computers.
On the Friday before flying down to Canberra to be Rusty’s wingman for a meeting with the Attorney-General’s department I had my first motorbike accident – not making a turn on a wet road at night just near home, hitting the asphalt and the gutter. I came out of it with some torn jeans and a grazed knee, a banged hand that needed icing, a nice bruise on my side, and a bike that ended up taking aaaages to get fixed and ridable again. Happily it’s gotten another couple of thousand k’s on the odometer since then.
In the couple of days before I head to Sydney for the 2007 edition of the fantabulous linux.conf.au I’ll be moving from my unit in Toowong to a house in Highgate Hill. Clinton and I will be sharing the upstairs, while the downstairs will be turned into a granny-flat for my parents for when they decide to stay in the city. The theory is it’ll be an investment over the longer term, with the idea being to try building some townhouses in the rather large backyard and sub-dividing. Should be fun!
Let’s see, I’ll tag: vocalist extraordinaire James, companionable carnivore Pat, sometime C hacker David, fellow motorcyclist Sez, and future housemate Clinton.
Thu, 22 Jun 2006
Today’s news: I’m now a scary biker type person, just like Martin, Michael, David, Bruce, and James along with once and future bikers like Sarah or Pia, but only dreaming of approaching the glory days of the munificent Greg. As of yesterday, my ride is a gorgeous blue 2005-model Honda VTR250, picked up from the dealer with a whole 1km already on the odometer (apparently they rode it to the service station to get some fuel).
Wed, 29 Mar 2006
Via tha ABC:
Queensland’s Police and Corrective Services Minister Judy Spence […] told Parliament […] “Palmer and Comrie got it right, the Department of Immigration is unwilling to review and reform itself and it isn’t helped by an incompetent and indolent minister who isn’t willing to push these reforms.”
So today’s award for the promotion of indolence as a term and a lifestyle is jointly awarded to Ms Spence and Ms Vanstone! Congratulations to both our winners!
Tue, 10 Jan 2006
Have you ever found yourself reading slashdot (what? you don’t read slashdot? well, play along) and coming across a banner ad (what? you block ads? well, play along) for the nth time and finally just, you know, snapping?
Sadly, today it happened to me. To the tune of a ditty by Salt n’ Pepa at that.
Let’s Talk About ‘Nix
(Yo, I don’t think they’re going to aggregate this on the planet;
And why not? Everybody hates ‘doze.
I mean everybody should be codin’ perl!
C’mon, how many guys you know codin’ perl?)
Wed, 25 May 2005
In summary, I liked the third Star Wars prequel.
Sure, I found myself laughing at the horribly stilted dialogue and plot throughout the movie, and I wasn’t particularly awed by the visuals or the CGI, and in the end, knowing how it ended by the virtue of having watched the original trilogy pretty much robbed the film of any of the drama, and the heroics of their heroism.
But it was still fun, and interesting. I think maybe the most interesting parts of ROTS were the scenes that Lucas didn’t actually film, and that only took place in my head (or that were in the script originally, and got dropped). Maybe that’s a clever way of doing a film anyway: leaving the good bits for the audience to imagine, just like they would if they were reading, rather than doing everything for them, and the experience being over as soon as you walk out of the cinema. It’s presumably a good way to encourage spin-offs and fanfiction anyway – yay franchising.
Wed, 11 May 2005
I had been going to include this in my travelblog, but then I forgot, and then I decided I could give it its own entry anyway. To set the scene, imagine trudging up a mountain, about a kilometre above sea-level, with another half-kilometre of vertical rise still to go before you’ve got any chance of civilisation. You’re exhausted, you’re thirsty, you’re hungry, you’re wishing for ice cream. The path at this point is steep enough they’ve not only carved steps into it, but they’ve had to make them barely wide enough to fit your feet.
On one step, you see this. Buried in the mud, overgrown, trampled on, alone, and lost to the world: a heart of stone.
And yet, craggy and marred, it endures, unbroken.
(Also at the very bottom of the photo you can see the tip of one my new boots! They’re awesome!)
Fri, 15 Apr 2005
Tue, 15 Feb 2005
Subject: Warning: inactivity detected
Really, I’m surprised I don’t see that more often.
Sun, 06 Feb 2005
David pointed out the absolutely sacralicious “Baby Got Book” that seems to be doing the rounds (and if it’s not, it should be!). Normally I wouldn’t relink to things even that awesome (in the same way I didn’t pass on the cartoon skeletons page Hanna of Debian linked to), however in light of Ricky’s spiel on blog attribution, I figured it was probably worth quoting this tidbit google found me:
Hey this is Dan Smith, the guy who wrote Baby Got Book. Thanks for the love in hear. Check out the link to my website if you had trouble seeing it. My CD is coming out in the spring.
www.whiteboyDJ.com/babygotbook
If you tell anyone about the video, hook a brotha up and send ‘em to my site…
So, consider yourselves hooked up, brothas (and sistahs!).
Mon, 13 Dec 2004
Evidently Energex noticed the twenty minute thunderstorm we had after lunch today, and decided to switch to their summer policy. Hence we’ve had two prolonged blackouts this evening, so far; the current one’s stopping me from watching both the Rebel Billionaire and the West Wing. Not impressed. And why they’re happening well after the storm, I’ve no idea. On the upside, at least my laptop has a working battery now…
I suppose hoping that heads will roll at the electricity utility would be in bad taste, considering the past year’s events…
Fri, 03 Dec 2004
F—, yeah!
Mon, 22 Nov 2004
Hiccups suck.
Fri, 19 Nov 2004
Wow, Google Scholar is awesome. ifupdown even rates a mention.
Sat, 13 Nov 2004
Unlike some I’m a bit ambivalent about movie reviews – I tend to have a pretty low bar for finding them entertaining (Starsky and Hutch? AvP? Independence Day? Hollywood Homicide? Sure! Liked ‘em all!), and a pretty high bar for finding them great. Which generally stops me from panning or lauding them, and if you’re not going to do one or the other (or both!) where’s the fun in doing a review?
Anyway, I’m not going to be as harsh as Kirk Honeycutt, but I can easily see where he’s coming from. The Final Cut ain’t no Eternal Sunshine, and it’s not even a Paycheck, but it’s not a bad way to kill an hour and a half.
Hrm. Spoilers below the fold.
Mon, 25 Oct 2004
Perhaps the most beautiful facet of capitalism is the way even its nominal opponents are forced into enhancing its effectiveness. Following in the footsteps of Mike Moore’s schlocumentary producing corporate empire, it’s my pleasure to introduce the first issue of Blender’s Consumer Reports: Centrecom sucks. (And don’t forget to read issue two, Centrecom sucks: I really mean it and watch out for the forthcoming followups, with the working titles: You know what sucks? Centrecom, and Nothing sucks like an Electrolux? What about Centrecom?)
Wed, 05 May 2004
John Ray, who writes Dissecting Leftism, an interesting blog decrying various inane comments from left-wing types, recently noted:
Statistical expert John Lott Jr. sets out why California’s virtual ban on electonic voting is just ignorant technophobia. Australia has paper voting only so I have no personal knowledge of alternatives but his claim that electronic voting is in fact more secure than paper voting seems reasonable to me. Voting security in Australia is a joke – leading to Al Capone’s famous saying “Vote early and vote often” being regarded as good election-day advice in some Australian Leftist circles. Rather like Pakistan.
Obviously, I’m going to bridle at being called a technophobe, as I’m not persuaded by the linked article that electronic voting is secure. The main problem with the article is it conflates two security issues. One is identification and ensuring that people only vote once. Australia doesn’t do a terribly good job of that – no ID is required, so you can just pick a name from the phonebook, walk up, claim you’re that person, and vote. They might find out later that “John Smith” voted twice, but that’s not going to help them catch you, so what do you care? Similar problems for people who die, but aren’t off the electoral role, or who are away, or whatever else. That’s an issue where electronic measures can help: taking digital photos of people who vote and associating that with the name they claim to vote under would give you a mechanism of better catching fraudsters, and requiring photo ID with a barcode that gets scanned and passed around the various polling places would be a pretty effective countermeasure too. But none of that is really about electronic voting – it all happens before you get into the booth.
The real problem for fraud in electronic voting is in incorrectly counting the results. It’s trivial to write a program that displays a vote for Bob on the screen or on a printer, and records a vote for Alice on a read-only CD ROM. It’s trivial to write a program that does this only one in a hundred times, or only after a thousand votes have been recorded. And it’s impossible to test for this situation. Worse: you don’t have to be acting deliberately to cause these sorts of problems; they can be caused by bugs, or out-of-spec usage. With paper it’s not an issue: you know exactly what you’ve written down, there’s no physical way for that to change between you’re writing it down and it being counted, and when it’s counted we have security measures in place to make sure it’s counted correctly.
There are ways to avoid this sort of problem – making the source code available for public inspection is one, and another is having controlled interfaces (eg, between making the vote (press a screen, get a certificate), recording it (put the certificate on a scanner) and counting it (remove the storage device from the recorder and put it in another machine) – but none of them are perfect, and none of them are really even that well understood. And that’s by experts – voting needs to be something that everyone can trust, not something that you need a PhD in computer science to be able to understand.
Based on the Australian experience – where we have fairly effective preferential voting, very simple procedures for voting (no butterfly ballots), and a whole bunch of folks who’re good at getting election results calculated very quickly – it seems to me that electronic voting is trying to solve the wrong problem (“We need computers in the voting booths! Because that’s cool!!!”), instead of the right ones (“We need some non-intrusive ways of stopping people from multi-voting”).
Mon, 03 May 2004
Since the Professor’s decided to skip his Friday afternoon catblogging, here’s some Monday evening dogblogging for you. From left to right, meet Chips (m, silky terrier), Cheeky (m, chihuahua), and Skye (f, Siberian husky). If you’re not an RSS weenie, you can probably see Skye over on the right too, giving a practical demonstration of this blog’s theme.
(Okay, I admit it, I’m cheating by posting old photos. So sue me.)
Clinton pointed out that "you can probably see Skye over on the right too" wasn't very clear -- obviously I meant my right, which is your left.
Err, wtf? Cheeky's a chihuahua not a dachshund. Well, at least I got the "I can't spell it" part of the breed right. Fixed.
Thu, 22 Apr 2004
Newsforge reports that Clay Claiborne is quiting as President of the Los Angeles Linux Users Group. Why? Because he’s unhappy about Iraq, of course:
Claiborne: I’m glad they’re starting a LUG in Baghdad and I’m glad Hussein is gone. I just don’t think it had to cost maybe 20K Iraqi lives and how many Americans’ so far.
Obligatory, isn’t it? Let’s contrast that with this report that says “The [Human Rights Centre in Kadhimiya] have found that if the invasion had not happened, Saddam would have killed 70,000 people in the past year. Not sanctions: Saddam’s tyranny alone.”. IraqBodyCount says there’s a maximum of a little under 11,000 civilians dead, and released a press release last week describing the past twelve months as “a year of slaughter”.
One of the Iraqi LUGgers, Hasanen Nawfal seems to be the author of QV, an image viewing program. The screenshot gallery includes a pretty picture of a barbie made out of an old computer case too.
Back to Clay.
I think the question of military use of Linux needs a vigorous debate in the Linux community. It is just now happening. I don’t think that Linux should be used for killing and I don’t really trust the Pentagon to abide by the GPL.
This debate’s already happened. It happened years ago; and the conclusion is at the core of the Debian Free Software Guidelines, and hence the Open Source Definition:
5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
The license must not discriminate against any person or group of
persons.
6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in
a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the
program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic
research.
See for example this post by Marcus Brinkmann from 1999:
On Mon, Aug 02, 1999 at 01:23:22AM -0400, Mike Goldman wrote: > To take a somewhat more concrete example: suppose I write a program which can be > used to design explosive devices. Such devices have many appropriate uses, in > mining, construction, and so forth. Perhaps it is unnecessary that I explicitly > restrict use by terrorists, since terrorism is illegal. (However, if I did so > anyhow, would that make my license DFSG-non-free?) Yes. > On the other hand, perhaps I > do not wish for my software to be used by certain governments for "military" > purposes - which are by definition "legal", yet just as clearly destructive. > Must an author permit such military use for a license to be DFSG-free? Yes.
But hey, we’ve got to find some way to kick Bush or Howard or whoever, don’t we? And as technologists, what better way than technology?
The question of politics and technology always comes up because that is where the rubber meets the road. Some people think technology is pure and not related to the end use, and those people will be our doom.
You know, having the power of life and death over folks like Clay could become addictive.