jcm's blog

Wanna see how long I can write through the night, powered only by caffeine? Let’s find out…

I’ve got a bit of a lag on the book and some stumbling blocks came up, so I’m using my holiday tomorrow to good effect and writing through the night to get things back on track. I got the toolchains chapter in last week, tonight it’s time for chapter 5 – Software Configuration Management (SCM) and the introduction to get written.

[UPDATED] Turns out I’m only going to get one chapter done tonight. But that’s not too bad – one whole chapter from start to finish in an evening is a great burn rate. I should get the Portability material finished off later today, and the introduction done by tonight. Then, sleep, and to get myself in a writing routine so it doesn’t get backed up going forward. This was my own fault for procrastinating over the writing thing – but I’ve fixed that now. Now all I need are more evenings with working broadband and I should be ok.

Jon.

I was searching for some Linux Standard Base documentation earlier and came across the wikipedia user by the same name. I love the talk on that page. Let me quote a few items for you.

Turns out (as you may know) that the name LaShawn Barber is a little well known. So, some helpful wikipedia person decides:

We don’t allow the usage of celebrities’ names as User names

To which the reply comes:

Ahem, this is my real life name. Just because a celebrity has the same name doesn’t mean they can copyright it

Then a lot of activating and deactivating of the account follows, ending in a discussion of how this person can change their wikipedia name so as to not possibly cause offensive to some “celebrity”, for example:

La Shawn, it would definitely save you hassle to choose another name

Great. Just in case you ever thought wikipedia wasn’t filled with far too many annoying people, go take a read of that link. Maybe we should just perfect some test and name everyone unlikely to ever make it big with a random alphanumeric string to avoid bothering wikipedians? Would work until a dude called 15GQRHE89 became famous.

Jon.

Apparently, I’m now the top fan of Runrig on last.fm, having listened to Runrig tracks over 2249 times that it’s logged (it doesn’t log the listening I do on my iPod). That’s almost 5 days of continuous playback, but I’d guess in reality we’re talking weeks (I only started listening to Runrig last year). I should so go to a concert – anyone else interested in coming along to one?

There’s a concert in NYC on April 4. I’ve got to go over to Boston/NYC around then anyway so I think I’ll try to swing by, if I can.

Jon.

I’m with a small London ISP called Mailbox. For the past five years, their service has been absolutely excellent and I have really enjoyed being a customer – even when things didn’t work out, I could call up and speak to a really tech savvy support person or two. I like small ISPs because they usually care about you a little.

Mailbox recently got bought out by 186K, who have immediately closed down the London office (making various cool people redundant in the process). Last night, I had another dropout in my ADSL (completely unexplained, no logs on their site, no known infrastructure issue but my Linux box was unable to establish a ppp connection over an ATM circuit). I tried calling them today but just got through to a silly phone system and email has been unreliable too. I’ll speak to them on Monday, but I’m not a happy bunny. ADSL Guide surveys show that I’m not alone in thinking things have gotten worse.

Looks like I might be in the market for a new ADSL provider. I’m thinking of going with Blackcat (they’re the most competent people I know who run a full time ADSL service for a living), in which case I’ll have to sink a few hundred GBP in running two parallel services and in having the second ADSL connection installed while things are moved over. It’s just plain annoying. I feel bad for the guys at 186K too because they can’t enjoy having to put up with the upset people I’ve spoken to IRC about the Mailbox situation.

UPDATE: strike two! ADSL went down again the next night for a period of time. Three strikes and I think Mailbox are outta here.

Jon.

I was over in the States for a few days a couple of weeks back. On the weekend, Dave Jones, his wife, myself and another person went for some hiking in the White Mountains in New Hampshire. It was fun. There are some photos. But before I get onto posting links for those, check out my snow angel:

Jon.

I did an upgrade to the latest gtkpod via an apt pinning to the testing release (0.99.2) and had a play around. I still don’t get to see my OTG (On The Go) playlists, but I’m not too bothered about that. I asked it to create a playlist of most listened to music. Of course, much of this is inaccurate as the iPod doesn’t bother to sync these stats to disk often enough that if I run out of juice (which I often do these days) it’ll preserve what I’ve had on. It also doesn’t sync with xmms (yet) and none of this is tied into audioscrobbler either – so there’s room for error. Here’s a list of tracks and artists though:

• Madonna – The Power Of Good-Bye
• Runrig – Rocket To The Moon
• Jefferson Starship – We Built This City
• The Corrs – Give It All Up
• Runrig – (Stepping Down The) Glory Road
• Captain Tractor – Pitcairn Island
• The Cranberries – Dreams
• Runrig – Protect And Survive
• Runrig – Running To The Light
• Runrig – Canada
• Runrig – The Greatest Flame
• Runrig – Amazing Things
• Runrig – Siol Ghoraidh
• Electric Light Orchestra – Calling America
• Runrig – Alba
• Runrig – Ravenscraig
• Pet Shop Boys – In The Night

All of these are fantastic artists I listen to all of the time, except for two. Firstly, Madonna has been quite variable over the years – I’m not such a bigtime fan of the material girl any more (but heck, she’s been in the game for so long that that in itself is pretty cool). Secondly, I don’t know Jefferson Starship well enough to say whether I enjoy their whole catalog in general. I have most music ever released by Runrig and Captain Tractor though (much of that is on CD, the rest tends to come from iTunes or similar). In fact, Runrig had better release some more albums soon because in the last year I’ve gone from never having listened to them to pretty much owning their entire 30 year back catalog and a lot of live recordings besides. Hurry up with that.

What’s the Runrig and Captain Tractor connection? They’re both Canadian on some level. Runrig have a Canadian singer these days (Bruce Guthro), who replaced Donnie Munro. Captain Tractor are a Canadian band anyway. I also have a Great Big Sea fascination (thanks Andrew, Telsa and Alan) and they’re Canadian too. Then there’s the Arrogant Worms, who aren’t in this list but I listen to quite often too. So there’s a big Canadian influence in my musical taste these days. Mostly because it’s all damned good. Did I mention that I like Canadian music? I actually also like a growing amount of US music too. The 10,000 Maniacs are on my playlists right now. As are a few others – recommendations for little known US artists are welcome.

Incidentally, the iPod is shittily designed in playlist management terms anyway – clearly I want to be able to edit more than one persistent playlist when on the go and actually delete tracks from that too. But meh. Apple didn’t seem to care enough about that or about the whole let’s use FAT32/HFS+ so we can have things corrupt when the attached laptop runs out of juice. And many other wibbles I could add about technical mistakes made in the iPod design. Who am I kidding? I love these things as much as the rest of you and Joe’s shiney new black photo/video one has made me think mine will be two whole years old this summer…

Jon.

Edit: For the pedants out there I added a reference to HFS. It doesn’t matter whether Apple use FAT32, HFS, or my_super_dooper_filesystem on the iPod. If the host PC/laptop can trash it when it runs out of juice and the iPod is incapable of doing something about it, then that’s just dumb. At least have it able to rescan its own disk for music if needed. One of the two times I lost all of my music (music still on disk but Apple’s nasty database was damaged) I was running iTunes on OSX plugged into an iPod running the Apple firmware (see, no Linux involved in any of that) when the laptop ran low on battery and went to sleep, taking the mounted filesystem with it. Just before a long haul flight. Thanks. Now I just use gtkpod and keep a backup of my music database from time to time. I don’t trust Apple iTunes or OSX with my laptop/music any more. Use Linux, it’s the only enlightened choice.

I’ve just been reading Mark Russinovich’s blog posting entitled Inside the WMF Backdoor. From the looks of it, that exploit, the one where graphics files can be used to take over a suitably badly configured Windows PC is actually just bad design. Mark explains the whole thing, so there’s no point in repeating it here. I liked this story because I think Mark expertly explains the situation and calms hysteria – and you probably want to buy his fantastic books on Windows Internals too if you’re interested in learning about the evil enemy in WA (I admit I only use that book as a source for Microsoft-bashing these days).

The story just goes to make one fundamental point. Software is stupid and contains bugs. If you insist on running everything as “Administrator”, “root” or whatever your privileged user account name is actually called, then you deserve precisely everything that is coming to you when one of those bugs is exploited on a webpage you decide to visit. Steve Gibson has been whining for years (shields up! red alert!) – I liked some of the comments about Gibson on that blog, but I’ll let you read them to get the point.

Jon.