therning.org/ magnus

Am I the only one who finds this absolutely terrifying?

If you haven’t seen DCLugi’s Snakes On A Plane auditions on YouTube you need to!

Bruce Schneier reported on this a while ago, I need to keep the link around. What to do when your neighbour is using your internet.

Our “honourable” EU politicians are finally worrying about the right things when it comes to Microsoft. Microsoft is all about lock-in, they’ll use security to achieve it if they can. Microsoft is of course responding. I wonder if they’re ever going to inhabit the same world as I am? Vista creating 100000 new jobs? Only if changing the title of a position from “Windows XP Developer/Administrator/Shithead” to “Windows Vista Developer/Administrator/Shithead” counts as “creating a new job”. I think Linux Journal is too kind when they call it Microsoft’s Masterpiece FUD. I think it only shows just how desperate Microsoft is to get Vista out the door.

Digital Rights Ireland are challenging the Data Retention Directive. I hope they are successful, I don’t there are many citizens in Europe who would be sad to see that invasive directive go away.

A good article on “open vs. closed” from the Financial Times—A closed mind about an open world. FT is increasingly “getting it”.

I couldn’t help but laugh out loud when reading this article trusted computing—Trusted computing a shield against worst attacks?. Let me see if I got it right. Phoneix Technologies, who happen to make a TPM module, pays analyst firm Trusted Strategies to have a report on digital attacks done. Then, surprisingly, the analysts come back and say that a TPM would have stopped most of those attacks. Who would ever read and put any faith in a report like this? Besides other analysts of course. I can’t help but think that the computer analyst firms are locked in a circle-jerk that’s paid for by computer companies. It is a very strange world we live in.

Thinking of writing a media app in Python? This seems like a good place to start.

My blog can by no stretch of the imagination be called popular. Just looking at the number of comments will tell you that. Given that I can’t help but be amazed that my most popular post is my rant against ComputerWebstore. With 10 comments it has a comfortable lead.

It looks like there are quite a few people out there who are learning the same lessons I learnt, in an equally painful way.

This is the configuration I used to get lighttpd to serve up the results of AxMan.

server.document-root = "/home/magnusth/tmp/axman/www/"
server.port = 8080

index-file.names = ( "index.html" )

mimetype.assign = (
  ".html" => "text/html",
)

Sometimes RAII is difficult.

The following code compiles without errors or warnings on Windows using Visual Studio 2005:

#include <iostream>
#include <memory>

namespace Test
{

    class Foo
    {
    public:
        bool should_do_stuff() { return false; }
    };

    class Bar
    {
    public:
        Bar(std::auto_ptr<Foo> fp) : _fp(fp) {}

        void do_stuff() {
            if(_fp->should_do_stuff())
                std::cout << "Do stuff" << std::endl;
            else
                std::cout << "Don't do stuff" << std::endl;
        }

    private:
        std::auto_ptr<Foo> _fp;
    };

} // Test


int
main()
{
    std::auto_ptr<Test::Foo> fp;
    fp = new Test::Foo;

    bp->do_stuff();

    return(0);
}

However, it throws an exception just at the end of execution. Hmm, strange. Compiling it using GCC fails—it complains about the lack of an applicable operator= function.

This is what the assignment should look like:

fp = std::auto_ptr<Test::Foo>(new Test::Foo);

With that change GCC accepts it, and Microsoft’s compiler generates exception-free code.

Last Friday I sent back my new music player to Amazon. Later that day I received an email saying that they had already dispatched a new one to me. On Monday my new player was at the office waiting for me. In short, Amazon rocks!

This one works perfectly, no signs of any problems with using it as USB mass storage.

Now, why are politicians repeating what the unrivaled masters of FUD say?

I thought our elected politicians were supposed to look out for our best interest, not suck up to foreign multi-nationals who have been found to indulge in nti-competitive behaviour.

It seems Microsoft is having problems getting the next version of their flagsship product into a state where it can be released and they’re grabbing for straws in order to pass blame. The business world seems fully capable of running on XP/2000—is has been for quite a while now—waiting a few extra months for Vista won’t hurt anyone but Microsoft.

madduck, I’ve also been missing tagging and virtual folders. Mairix I see as a search tool, not something I’d like to use to force virtual folders onto mutt. I did use Gnus for a while, years ago, but nowadays it’s a no-no for me—I saw the light and switched from Emacs to Vim.

Matt Palmer, the new patch didn’t just work around Microsoft’s “fix”, it added features too

Unfortunately I’m forced to send back my brand new Samsung YP-U2. I love the little bugger to bits! It does exactly what I want out of a portable music player. The problem is that it doesn’t always show up as a USB device.

I’ve tested it on three different computers, running two different OSs, in 7 different USB ports (all which work perfectly with other USB devices). It works sometimes but not always, a rough estimate would be 1 out of 10 times. I think it’s pretty safe to say it’s the player that doesn’t behave. That isn’t good enough, so it’s going back to Amazon to be replaced.

This wasn’t a serious mistake and the only reason it took a while to sort out was my amazing thickness.

I had removed pciutils (and thereby lspci) from the system thinking that “now everything works, so I won’t ever need it again”. Just to show me the error of my ways the benevolent Debian decided to punish me by not giving me network. It turned out that Linux’ excellent support for a multitude of network cards worked against me on this one—which one to insert? After several uninspired thoughts I had an inspired one. Brute force! Insert them all!

# cd /lib/modules/2.6.17-2-686/kernel/drivers/net
# for f in *.ko; do insmod $f; done

A few error messages later I tried ifup eth0, and it worked Quick download of pciutils. Now I know the machine in question requires eepro100 to get network. I recorded that in /etc/modules.

At the moment I’m having a hard time resisting removing pciutils. I mean, now everything works, I won’t ever need it again, right?