| Thu, 19 Jan 2012
ServiceMagic: when spamming goes wrongI'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: 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. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Sun, 8 Jan 2012
New journalsMy 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. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Tue, 6 Dec 2011
Oh look, more Olympic financial incompetenceSo 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:
Thankyou very much Seb Coe you midget Tory CUNT | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Sun, 23 Oct 2011
Rugby World Cup roundup
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| Thu, 29 Sep 2011
Amazon Kindle wireless bug - and a bugfixI 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:
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. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Fri, 9 Sep 2011
Olympic security costs - againThree 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? Thankyou very much Seb Coe you midget Tory CUNT. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Sat, 23 Jul 2011
Splitting a git repositoryFor 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 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 big files. 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. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Wed, 6 Jul 2011
Star ratings re-revisitedI 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.
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| Wed, 22 Jun 2011
Olympic ticketing fiasco shows the Olympics aren't wantedThe lottery by which Olympic tickets were allocated is universally known to have been a poorly-organised disaster. In particular, you should consider that money to pay for tickets was taken from peoples' credit cards as early as the 10th of May but it's only today that LOCOG could tell people what tickets they'd actually got. That's a bit odd, cos I would have thought that they'd have known that, and therefore been in a position to tell people, back on the 10th of May. But there's something more interesting hidden in the numbers describing the ticketing fiasco. 700,000 applicants got tickets, and 1.2 million didn't. This means that less than 2 million people in the entire country wanted to go and see any of the events, and 58 million didn't. Just 1 in 30 people are interested. For those one in thirty, the government has bent over backwards, introducing oppressive laws restricting trade and free speech, fucking up public transport and, of course, pissing billions of pounds of Londoners' money up the wall. All of this, for something that just one in thirty people give a shit about. For god's sake, no-one tell the government how many people care about football! Thankyou very fucking much Seb Coe you midget Tory CUNT. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Mon, 20 Jun 2011
Star ratings revisitedJust over a year ago I started awarding books and things that I reviewed shiny gold stars. I also retrospectively scattered stars on some of my older reviews. I thought it would be a good idea to see how many of each I'm awarding, and so how well I'm sticking to my rating system. I'm expecting a normal distribution, with the mean somewhat above 3 stars to reflect the fact that I deliberately don't read shite, and that lots of what I read is because other people have raved about it. Well, the results are in ...
I think this is good. It's roughly what I'd expect given my reviewing criteria and the small number of options available. If I had a larger scale to work with - if, say, I was awarding marks out of 20 - I'd expect a smoother drop-off, and at both ends instead of just at the bottom end. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
