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2008-10-29 Out Of Step
The number of states actively seeking to censor online content and access personal information is growing.
And the means employed - technical, social, legal, political - are increasingly sophisticated.
Interesting that the Australian government is charging ahead full gallop and damn the cannon to implement mandatory internet filters at the same time that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are talking about the need for "companies... to step up to the plate and be more aggressive in challenging unwarranted government interference".
Of course it's more than just a little ironic to hear that, of all the intrusive, controlling corporations out there, Microsoft are signing up for
privacy [as] "a human right and guarantor of human dignity,"
Read more at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7696356.stm
2008-10-24 Fear
Check out the latest dirt on the Australian government compulsory internet filtering initiative.
It turns out that promised "out opt" provision really means the ability to opt out from the "child safe" filter to the "adult safe" filter. Which is probably best described as the "intrusive government and controlling corporate interests safe" filter.
So, tell me again who gets to decide what I'm allowed to know?
No, really, it's ok. It's for the children!
Hmmm. So if I set up an encrypted tunnel between my laptop and my virtual host in Oregon by, say, logging in with ssh, will I breaking the law? After all, I could use the encrypted tunnel to browse the web, virtually, from Oregon. Or some other wild and lawless hotbed of criminality.
This is the very worst kind of government 'inititiave'. Expensive, flawed, unenforceable, intrusive, and 'for our own good'.
2008-10-19 Observation
Update: It turns out that no less a person than Alexander Downer has already noticed this and held a press conference about it. Years ago! That hissing sound you hear is my ego deflating...
Somewhere in my dark geeky past I found and downloaded a wonderful picture of the Earth at night as seen from orbit.
When recently, in a fit of unbridled creativity, I decided to change my desktop background to use this image, I noticed something a bit odd.
Seen from space at night, China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are brilliant, dense galaxies of city stars. And winding across the north is the distinct linear constellation of the Trans Siberian Railway.
But between an outflung arm of the sprawling stars of China and the dense galactic mass of South Korea are just a few lonely stars drifting in the void.
The poor people of North Korea are truly living in the light of the Glorious Socialist Revolution.
2008-10-03 Reliable things
I've recently had to write a web frontend to a trivial one table database for The Day Job.
I asked a couple of times if I could use Java, which I'm much more familiar with, but I was, shall we say, encouraged to use Perl instead. In the spirit of making lemons from lemonade, I took this little project as an opportunity to learn the Catalyst web framework.
And although Catalyst isn't the easiest thing to learn, for a while there things seemed to be going down smooth. Defining the object relational mapping was a matter of dozen lines of code or so. Using FormFu, I could define the form in a couple of dozen lines of YAML markup in a configuration file and get validation and error messages and so on automagically.
Deploying my freshly minted little Catalyst application to run as a CGI script on Solaris was quick and easy too, requiring only a couple of days of intense mental effort and building a whole new perl interpreter from scratch while reciting the mystic incantations required to make it 64 bit, and then installing all the various CPAN modules required to make it work.
Having broken the back of the project and got it basically working, it was then time to go back and fix the little things. Like date formats.
In the first cut of the application, dates displayed as "2008-01-01", which is some kind of ISO or IEEE standard or something.
"Right," thought I, flush with the success of my battles with CPAN on Solaris, and lulled into a false sense of security by the deceitful veneer of efficiency and simplicity of Catalyst and FormFu, "This should be simple. After all, everyone needs to pull dates out of a database and display them prettily formatted on a web page. It's such a common thing to have to do, it's probably just an entry in one of the config files somewheres..."
Two, or perhaps three, days pass...
I won't bore you with a catalogue of all the different things I've tried to get these dates to display in dd/mm/yyyy format, or a list of the CPAN modules I've installed, or the tutorials and documentation read, or the profanities uttered.
Once again we discover that black magic is alive and well in the 21st century. And like magicians of old, the practitioners of this modern black art find that even once they have wrested the book of spells from the clutches of a fire breathing fell beast of evil odour; and translated the strange inscriptions; and gathered all the rare and mysterious compounds the magic requires...
nothing works!
2008-10-03 Oh well
Had another rehearsal with Mandyleigh and Fabio this evening, this time with a really good drummer, Paul.
But I've just heard that I'm not going to get the gig after all... Awwwww....
Oh well - that gives me more time for The Jade Diary! :-)
Tags: music