Gotta love the Olympics. Not only is it costing many times more than was originally budgetted, not only are the organisers quite open about taking bribes, not only are they going to screw up public transport with their Zil lanes, and they're happy to close down small businesses and put loads of poor people out of work. They do, of course, bleat about how building the stadiums for their pointless events employs so many people, but it only employs them temporarily, whereas many of the businesses they closed down were well-established and could have been expected to provide employment for the long term.
But now we find out - and are shocked, of course, because we could never have predicted this - that landlords are evicting tenants from housing near games venues so that they can rent them out to rich visitors. The only thing that's surprising about this is that some landlords are doing it illegally at short notice, and that the press have only just noticed. I knew that it would start happening in about January, as tenants would need two or three months notice to quit and then landlords would need some time to spruce up the properties before the scum they'll be renting them to arrive.
Of course, after the Olympics have been and gone, rents will go back down, but not to current levels. Having had their refurbs paid for by Olympic vermin, landlords will be able to set their prices higher than they are now.
Github makes accepting patches from other people and applying them soooooo easy!
Instead of having to extract the patch from an email onto my workstation and manually apply it, applying this contribution was a simple matter of clicking on one button.
Thanks Mark - and thanks Github as well!
And I was also amused to see that the new release of Net::Random was exactly five years after the previous one. This adds support for fetching your randomness over SSL.
Posted at 22:56
by David Cantrell keywords: geeky | hacking | perl
I've used a website called WorkBidder as a convenient way to find tradesmen to do tedious little jobs for me. It was a useful service. But I won't be using them again, because they've started sending spam. And not just the usual crap, this spam seems to be carefully crafted to tell me that they do not have the best interests of customers* at heart.
It reads:
Are you looking to take on more work? If so, WorkBidder has teamed up with ServiceMagic, UK's leading provider of work leads, to offer you a one-off special deal:
blah blah blah
We limit your competition to no more then 4 contractors
Never mind that they seem to have confused me, a lazy bastard, with their tradesmen, but that last sentence is the killer. Limiting competition - that is, setting up a cartel - is done for one reason only: to raise prices. Therefore I will not use them again, and I urge you not to either.
* yes, I know, I'm not their customer, the tradesmen who pay them a commission are their customers. I don't care.
My main journal has been mostly filling up with book reviews, which tends to hide all the other content, so I have decided to split things up a bit.
All my reviews and cooking posts will now appear in separate dedicated journals, and will shortly disappear from the default view of my main journal. However, they will still be available at the old URLs if you link to any particular post or keyword, including if you link to keyword-specific RSS feeds.
The new journals do, of course, have their own RSSfeeds.
So we've known for for years that the Olympics would end up costing nearly four times the original budget, being £9.3 billion instead of the £2.4 billion we were originally told. Naturally, those extra seven billion will be taken from the pockets of tax-payers. Now the National Audit Office says that even that much higher figure might not be enough.
And now, for no apparent reason, the budget for the opening and closing ceremony has just been doubled. How it managed to cost £40 million in the first place is beyond me - all that's needed is:
a brief welcoming speech;
for the participants to take the "Olympic Oath" which they will then blatantly ignore;
a brief closing speech
and what on earth they'll find to spend £81 million on I have no idea.
I recently bought a Kindle e-book reader (I'll post a full review later after I've had another week or so of using it) and first impressions are pretty good. Not great, but pretty good.
There was, however, one big problem. It couldn't connect to my wireless network, whose base-station is a Mac Mini running OS X. I talked to a nice lady in Amazon's customer support department, but after getting me to send my Kindle's logs, and having Amazon's engineers look at them, the best she could say was "your router isn't configured properly".
I'm afraid it is configured properly, and everything else - my phone, my iPad, my Linux laptop, my Mac laptop - can talk to it just fine. The only thing that can't is my Kindle.
This is because of a bug in the Kindle's DHCP client. In DHCPDISCOVER messages, the 'secs' field is meant to be set to the number of seconds since the DHCP process started. Many DHCP servers, including (in my case) Apple servers are configured by default to ignore such messages if 'secs' is set to zero, as this indicates a client that isn't fully running yet so any reply may not be noticed. A compliant client will retry if it gets no response, and after a few seconds of retrying 'secs' will be above whatever the server's threshold is, and everything will work. It seems that the Kindle always puts a 0 in that field, in violation of the standard.
To work around it on your Mac, do the following, in this order. I assume Mac OS X 10.6, it may be a bit different in others:
open System Preferences
open "Sharing"
turn off "Internet Sharing"
open Terminal.app
type "sudo defaults write /etc/bootpd reply_threshold_seconds -int 0"
if that asks for your password, enter it
turn "Internet Sharing" back on
sorted
I have emailed the nice lady at Amazon and told her that I have a solution, and that Amazon can have the solution in exchange for a 20 quid gift voucher. Seems only fair, given that people have been complaining on Kindle-ish forums about not being able to use Apple base stations ever since the Kindle was launched. I'm really surprised that Amazon haven't figured it out.
Three and a bit years ago I wrote about how the Olympics security had increased in cost five-fold. I'm sure none of you are surprised that that was just the beginning. Since then it's gone up again. In fact the cost of "securing" the venues, training facilities, and the "Olympic village" has increased fifteen times. Naturally, this cost is going to be borne by the government and not by the liars who put together the original bid, all of whom are going to come out of the Olympics with several years of nice big salaries while the tax-payers foot the bill.
Other big sporting events, such as the Rugby World Cup, are privately funded, with the organising body both taking any profits but also bearing responsibility for any losses. In fact, it's because the 2011 world cup is expected to make a loss that the 2015 tournament will be in England, where it is expected to make a whacking great profit.
Why is the Olympic Games treated differently? Why does it automatically get subsidised by tax-payers?
For several years I've kept all my perl source code under version control. This is good. However, I was keeping all my distributions - all 40-odd of them - in a single repository. This is bad. It means that anyone who wants to check out the code has to check out 40 distributions, some of them very big, that they're not interested in as well as the one they are interested in.
So I've split the repository up into lots of seperate ones, and I've uplaoded them to Github instead of keeping them on my own machine. Normally I'm dead set against uploading my data to Teh Clowd, because you lose control over it and it's hard to make backups. Git and Github are an exception to this. My own checkouts - on my laptop and elsewhere - are complete copies of the entire repository, so if Github were to go out of business overnight, I'd not lose a damned thing, I'd just need to find somewhere else to act as the public front-end for my repositories. And it's all stuff that I want to be public anyway, so I really don't care if they lose a copy!
Splitting a git repository while still keeping all the history is a bit tricky, but the lovely Paul Johnson gave me a recipe, which I reproduce here with a few minor changes. Assuming that your monolithic repository contains a bunch of directories, each of which is to become a seperate repository ...
mkdir split-repo cd split-repo for i in \`cd ../monolithic-repo;ls\`; do git clone --no-hardlinks ADDRESS_OF_REPOSITORY $i cd $i git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter $i HEAD -- --all rm -r .git/refs/original git reflog expire --expire=now --all git gc --aggressive git prune git remote rm origin git remote add origin git@github.com:YOUR_USERNAME/$i.git git push origin master cd - done
This leaves the original repository unchanged, so if anything goes wrong you need not worry. I did get some warnings and errors from 'git gc' and 'git prune' about it being out of memory when trying to compress files, but that's because my repository has some very bigfiles. These errors were in fact harmless and just meant that the new copies of the repositories on my laptop were wasting lots of disk space. Once I'd uploaded them to github, deleted the local copy, and then re-downloaded from github, that was fixed.
I did, very briefly, consider a completely different rating system for my reviews, instead of just awarding 0 to 5 shiny gold stars.
I considered rating books out of ten on several axes - for example, entertainment, literary merit, imagination, consistency. I would then combine them by treating those scores as the co-ordinates of a point in an N-dimensional space, the overall rating being the distance of that point from the origin, or equivalently, they are components of a velocity vector in an N-dimensional space. Let me give a couple of examples:
The Quantum Thief might score 8/10 for entertainment, 10/10 for literary merit, 9/10 for imagination, and 10/10 for consistency. The score, then, is sqrt(82+102+92+102) = 18.6. A perfect score on those axes would be sqrt(4*102) = 20. So to normalise to a score out of ten we divide by 2, giving 9.3/10. I actually gave it 5/5.
A Mighty Fortress, on the other hand, might get 5/10 for entertainment, 2/10 for literary merit, 2/10 for imagination, and 8/10 for consistency, for a score of 9.8, which normalises to 4.9/10. I actually gave it 2/5.
There are at least three obvious reasons why I didn't go with this.
Maximum marks on one axis gets you half way to perfection with four axes, even closer with fewer. I don't want to give undue weight to good marks in any one axis. We could perhaps solve this by making it harder to attain maximum velocity in any direction the closer you get to the maximum. The physicists in the audience may now run away screaming;
different type of book require different axes. eg fiction vs textbook vs biography;
it over-complicates things, and is just a poor attempt to hide how subjective reviews are. Note that in the numbers above, I fudged the individual axis scores for both books so they'd mostly agree with the scores I actually gave :-)
Posted at 0:55
by David Cantrell keywords: geeky | maths | meta