Info
2008-05-30 face crime
This article about face crime was on slashdot and I must say, this gets me a little worried. I don't have the best face around and to think that my expressions could be monitored leads to all sorts of disgusting possibilities for advertising companies. What if the face was monitored as you walked through a shopping centre, your expressions could be carefully monitored to tailor advertisements to your specific profile - and it doesn't take long to identify you for good with recognition software.
What about other possibilities of identifying things that you should not be happy about, perhaps this could venture into the thought crime that George Orwell predicted in his best selling book 1984, which predicted a situation where the government could arrest citizens before a crime was committed based on their intention to commit the crime. This is quite a far fetched and extruded idea from face crime, but it does have lots of morbid possibilities - many of which would deter me from going to places where this is deployed merely because I would not like any sort of commercial profiling. It doesn't take much after using a credit card at a shop for the cameras at that business to keep an identifier on your spending habits and your expressions.
On another note, I'm redoing the geo DNS project from the start again! Not because there's anything wrong with what I've done, but merely because I think that it can be done better too.
It's funny how a single plan to get something done in one or two days can take a month.
On yet another note, it was possible to keep my speed below 70 on the way home tonight but at points I decided it was just more fun to put the foot down and cruise.
2008-05-28 returning
The return from work today took much less time than normal because the road was very clear and allowed me to keep my pedal down to touch 100 - but this sort of journey is a bad habbit for me and perhaps one which I should try to stop. There might be some point to this if there was an important reason to return which there just isn't today.
Very soon I shall be doing voulenteer work for the couchsurfing project. This is a great project idea which is non-profit and joins people from all sorts of cultures who would otherwise never meet.
2008-05-25 eyes forward
Met some new friends last night at a club and had a great time. It's really confusing for me at the moment and don't know what direction my future could be going in. My friend Oly has a birthday in two weeks and is planning a special Jägerbomb event. This will be awesome and I cannot wait for the event to take place.
Next week should be a good time in Reading town, just out for getting drunk and should help this bank holiday week along. Aside from this the beta work on my geographical dns patch is comming along nicely.
It's time for me to move away from Thatcham and head towards Smoke, possibly Twyford or Maidenhead. The only reason for this move is to cut my commute costs, if I stay in Thatcham then I'll never change my ways, which cost me dearly.
All that matters now is keeping my head above the water level with mortgage payments - which I really hope that I can afford otherwise I'll be sitting on the curb with the word 'failure' on my head. If I rent then I'll never see the money again.
2008-05-22 that feeling
Heading back from Maidenhead this night with my foot down doing 100 with some tunes from the radio playing cat and mouse with another car. Really nice. At 20:30 there's not much else on the roads so it's a stress free drive. In the distance I saw a lot of break lights and wondered what the problem was. As I got closer I could see a large car with yellow and red diagonal stripes - it was a highway maintenance vehicle but it's presences was enough to make a lot of people slow down.
2008-05-21 dns improvements
Recently I've been thinking about providing geographical DNS for free. If I'm currently providing your DNS then soon it will be possible to define country code specific responses. At the moment there is only one class of DNS result, once modifications are complete (probably next week sometime if the weekend is busy or maybe after) then you will be able to provide results based on the country code or generic.
2008-05-17 nokia? more like sloppier
The replacement nokia phone from o2 seems to be exhibiting the same problems as the original handset which I sent to them previously. The problem appears to be a report of "Error in data connection". I have to wonder if this is a common error that other people might be experiencing with nokia 6500 phones. For me it is quite a shame as this phone is otherwise a brilliant and welcomed addition to my pocket.
2008-05-13 night with a new layout
The keyboard arrived first class as promised by the seller, which has pleased me - but there are some obvious problems
- home keys
these are still f/k but in different locations - backspace
rocks only on the left hand side - key pressure
the build quality is such that each key requires a lot more work to operate than a board like the logitech ultra tech-x
I still think that the effort to learn this will pay in the long run as the keyboard is very much here to stay for a very long time. This will be only a short post tonight due to more time needed with the typing tutor.
Some applications that bind control keys are not mapped to their dvorak equivalents. This can be very annoying!
2008-05-11 how to fail at business and succeed
Throughout my days of being drunk I have been surprised with some bar service in the Newbury area.
One normally expects to be served at a bar for rudimentary items such as beer or soft drink. It is the bread and butter of the pub trade. It's quite unusual to be told that thee are no beer glasses. This happened maybe six months ago at Chicago night club. It was quite surprising to be told that there were no glasses my chin almost hit the floor. How can someone run a bar without glasses - isn't that what bars are in business for, to serve customers with beer in drinking vessels?
It was equally shocking at Liquid night club in Newbury when I was told that they could not serve beer because the pumps were not working. Yet again, second week running, the pumps at the bar have failed. Surely they would want to stay in their current business plan and serve punters with beer?
What hurts the most is that both these establishments can remain in business quite easily because the sub standard service is not told to the punter until they have paid to enter the establishment and upon arrival at the beer taps find that the service is unavailable. This can be likened to getting in a taxi and paying the fair up front, to be driven anywhere except your desired destination.
It would be perfectly OK I think, if the punter did not have to pay to enter the bar, entrance should be free in cases where the service is unreliable or incomplete. Upon leaving the bar, the door fee should really be refundable. It's not good at all to charge the customer for something which they cannot receive.
2008-05-09 hatebook
The facebook script does what I'd intended now. Unsurprisingly though while it was running and doing the work I wanted (and just can't be arsed to use the awkward facebook interface), it occured to me to take a look on cpan and see if someone has already done something that provides an abstract interface. Yes you guessed correctly, all that hard work of mine is pretty much redundant since my task is not pioneering at all.
Anyway as usual, the code is available in the code directory named facebook. So if you think this can be of use to you also (and you don't like paginated interfaces) then by all means please download and do what you want with it.
Some people in my last job were surprised why I would not join to facebook in the early days. The reason for this (and why I call it hatebook) is simply because I don't like the idea of people having direct access to personal information. Some examples of this can include spoofing another person's identity (as I've seen some people doing in the past with the much older 'friends reunited' website) and simply building a catalog of personal data.
What is to stop someone impersonating another using something like facebook. It's not too hard to take advantage of this situation. We already know of cases like this where vulnerable teenagers are isolated through bullying online with public social networking sites. This is also sensationalised by the media to extents where a new phrase is coined and then the craze grows exponentially.
2008-05-08 cant get enough of that vi
Today I found that it's possible to set vi key bindings to bash. This is great news as it means you need only to remember the vi bindings (which is probably your favourite editor). Things like ^$ bw yp etc etc all work as one should expect. Simply just type
set -o vi
at your prompt or add to ~/.bashrc or ~/.profile to enable this.
2008-05-07 stacking up
Things just begin to stack up on me as I'm getting older and seriously I'm starting to think about making a pictorial stack of the things that I'm putting off from doing.
For example, I'm part way through reading several books; have several programming projects going on; have several file system projects; and above all I have to get my stuff in order.
As time goes on, new things force their way onto the stack and old things get pushed out the other side in a non-complete state. What would be better is if I could just hold up this picture for people and point at it asking where they would like their item to be inserted and what they'd like to have removed from the stack in order for this transaction to complete.
Seems like a really nice idea and I wonder how I could make this web 2.0 ish.
2008-05-06 hatebook
I've noticed the growing trend in people putting things onto facebook rather than using other better services like flickr, where photos are preserved much better.
Despite the horrid interface to facebook I've thought about putting my own set of library functions together so that I can browse my published photos without the horrid facebook interface.
As soon as this is sorted out I'll put it in the same location as the rest of my code, maybe it can turn into some use by someone else with better ideas.
2008-05-01 update on phones and stuff
Ok. I've put my SIM card in my old phone (Nokia 6100) so if you want to get hold of my just dial the normal number (who knows - I might answer). With regard to the old phone, o2 have helpfully given me a return address to send it. Unfortunately I cannot change the model during this exchange, which would have been more useful to me since I could then purchase something like a HSDPA phone which would give me much more efficient use of the internet. GPRS/EDGE gives me about 300kbit/sec, which is a shame given that HSDPA is much more capable. Anyway, before sending it back I'm taking a disk image and wiping the contents. Here's how:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/phone/file bs=64K rm /mnt/phone/file umount /mnt/phone dd if=/dev/sde of=./phone.img bs=64K mount /mnt/phone rm -rf /mnt/phone/images/* rm -rf /mnt/phone/video/* dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/phone/file bs=64K rm /mnt/phone/file
Firstly we fill the disk with a large file that is full of zeros, this is to clear the empty space of the disk and make the raw image compress much more efficiently. We then remove the file as we don't need it in the image.
Next we unmount and create a disk image using dd and store that to the current working directory. Then remount the phone and remove the various data we don't want to send to the manufacturer, then fill the disk space with zeros again - so that it's not so possible to recover. Finally we remove that file. The only information left is in the FAT table itself. In typical DOS file systems to mark a file entry as deleted a NULL character would be stored on the first character of the FAT entry, the remainder of the file information would be left untouched. I don't care about the manufacturer getting this as it's not useful to them anyway - it will only reveal file names dates and sizes (possible the cell information at the time - but so what).
Oh yeah at some point in time I'll be adding a tag could to this - when I get time to code it that is.
I've also made a simple searchable database because I don't like running find on NFS shares. This is available here fat.pl it depends on sqlite3. Have fun - it's public domain and doesn't really do anything unique but it's for general use.
2008-05-01 iron man
Today I had some time to spare so I decided to go to the cinema and watch a film that caught my eye on a Sky trailer - Iron Man. The special effects and theme were both brilliant and absorbing.
Ten GBP will get you a seat and a regular sized fizzy drink, which isn't really a great value for money. If you're in a position where you have to get a drink from a fast food style counter you should ensure that you avoid having ice as this is just their means of holding back on the fluid which is more expensive for them than some ice in the cup which has the effect of padding.
Still this film is great and I advise that you watch it when you can. On some levels it is a lot like transformers but with a slightly more sinister plot.