jcm's blog

On The Office of Antiboycott Compliance

(The following is a rant. Skip to the next entry if you don’t want to read my views on recent reading I have done about US politics.)

Did you know there are laws in the US against Boycotting countries the US doesn’t officially hate? (that’s not us by the way, we have a “special relationship” in which we do whatever the US says about using the same ID card system they’re just forcing through and everyone stays happy thanks to the clipper chips they’ve had implanted in their heads by the MPAA). There’s even a Beurocratic body that helps to regulate these silly laws. Yay! The Office Of Antiboycott Compliance. Yes, it’s a real government body – one of the most pointless I’ve managed to find yet.

What a wonderful waste of taxpayer’s money. How about we worry about things that actually matter like race, sex, age and other forms of discrimination against particular groups of people? What about a welfare state? Free public heathcare for all people, etc. No! Let’s waste money on anti-terrorism (how about a multi-billion dollar missile defence system for commercial aircraft? Get a clue dudes! There’s never been an attack of this kind, there are many other more likely situations that could occur and it’s not likely your system is going to guard against a determined whackjob with a grudge – but it’ll still cost you many billions that feeds shareholders in certain special companies who get paid to produce this stuff) and pointless government bodies like this one.

They might have half had a point in the 1970s when this office was set up. Might. I don’t think it’s a good thing to Boycott countries but I don’t think it’s necessary to legislate against it. But what the heck, the States just pulled in $600 Billion to help plug their budget problems so the federal government can rest a little easy that the lynch mob aint gonna turn up for a while. It’s not as if our government hasn’t done really stupid things lately, but I enjoy a good laugh when following the politics of certain countries I don’t live in. I like to think we’re not just as bad but the reality tends to speak for itself.

On breaking the US Constitution, one piece at a time

Robert Love made an ironic point in his recent blog entry about the teaching of the constitution: did you know that it used to be illegal for the federal government to mandate what is taught in schools? What gave this right? Oh, just a little document we know as the Constitution! (one reason for disparity in education between States – in particular, the Governator should be proud of his steps in California to funnel school funding into other areas that need propping up – and to give me something to rant about as an outsider looking in on a foreign political system). Except, it’s not illegal any more under a spending bill passed in 2004. So now it’s required to teach about the contsitution itself. Yes! The whole point of preventing the federal government from interferring has been undone by one do-gooder who didn’t think it through.

Yes, a spending bill. See, this is what’s great about US politics – they shove totally irrelevant items onto “must pass” legislation (as I’ve moaned about before). I know we do similar things here, but someone might actually care if our government tried to get away with some of the things I see passing in random bills before Congress. So now every school has to teach about the Constitution on or around (if there is a weekend or some holiday) 17 September. Wonderful! Yay! Won’t be long before some whackjob tacks on a “we must teach about terrorism”, “we must educate people about $whatever_we_don’t_like_and_got_paid_to_promote” or “we must teach about the evils of Darwin’s theories” or other crap onto the curriculum. Perhaps Bush will stick a personal lesson in there on his religious beliefs and how he thinks they are revelevant to his daily job as president of the US. He seems to think it is relevant to everything else. Great – that’ll really serve to increase my enthusiasm in the abilities of the US to handle education (George: can you spell ed-u-cation? Really? Can you? I very much doubt it).

Oh dear. It makes our whole little mess over UK education academies seem trivial in comparison. We do have a national curriculum which is mandated by the Department for Education – but it’s not usually dictated through commons bills which subjects will be taught (just that people of certain ages must be subjected to pointless targets and assessments). Every now and again I think to myself that I could run this whole system a lot better – and I’m probably right (if I belive in my own arrogance in this regard) but I wouldn’t want a job in politics as I’ve got more exciting things to do and haven’t quite got the level of arrogant vanity-cum-elitism usually required.

Jon.

Photo: A narrowboat navigates the canal outside Tom’s place. I tried finding the Valley View geocache but must have had the wrong co-ordinates or something as it wasn’t where I thought it should have been. I went to visit Tom in Congleton last Friday and we met up in Manchester beforehand for some dinner in Chinatown. I realised (after tasting some duck) that I don’t miss meat particularly any more.

A random collection of today’s ramblings.

(Nat Friedman might have a point about ADD).

I’m going to visit Portland, Oregon again. Yes, I’m psyched. I wasn’t sure I’d make it but since I’m in the process of changing jobs (from July 1 I will work with a large Embedded Linux company who shall remain mostly nameless in this forum as per my usual not blurring work and blog too much) I should have a bit of holiday time to play with around then and it turns out that ATP can change my return flights from Ottawa to the UK. So all I need to do now is get a 300 quid return from Ottawa to Portland. Cool. Managed to get an invite to the kernel BBQ too. Always good.

This makes my summer of crazy travelling roughly go like this:

London Heathrow->Amsterdam->Vancouver->San Francisco (sailing on the bay with Sven and Bill) ->Vancouver (board the train to Toronto and Ottawa) ->Ottawa (OLS/hiking/anything else after OLS->Portland (visit Deepak and co, Kernel BBQ) ->Ottawa->London Heathrow->Amsterdam(optional)->London Heathrow.

Not bad for someone who’s afraid of flying. There’s the possibility that I’ll get a train to New York in the week between OLS and Portland if there’s nothing much else organised since a friend is already going to Montreal (where the train leaves from). Might as well totally push the envelope to the max. I get back to the UK in time for the last day of UKUUG 2005 (if I can get a day return to Swansea) and the LBW 2005 up in Scotland.

Photo: Geocaching in central Oxford after Thursday afternoon’s driving lesson (note the Unicef filming in the background) . I found University Challenge 11 but gave up on one of the others after the GPS was wondering around all over the place. I probably want to get a better one if I do this more often as my old 12XL (thanks Jamie!) is cool for its age but much better and lighter ones are on the market now. Mark Lord has a super uber Magellan which works even in woodland under trees – I think my poor old unit would really struggle to get any single in such an environment.

I’ve been pissing around with realtime patches lately and battling with SuSE kernel builds in an effort to figure out the whole initramfs/klibc/etc. thing that is 2.6 Linux kernel booting. Having gotten myself excited enough to start breaking stuff, I decided to figure out gnome-volume-manager, HAL/udev and how I get it all working together to make my ipod “just work”. It’s not quite there on my Debian testing box (read: I’ve gotten the plug and play stuff working but need to fix pumount and get it to unmount and eject the ipod – less of an issue for me right at the moment). I need to use the sysfs destroy_node entry to occasionally kick my ipod into behaving itself – and it looks as if I might need to document this since people moan they can’t make their ipod work. If your ipod doesn’t come up properly and you get nasty kernel logs about the node in question, take the GUID from the message and send it to the sysfs ieee1394 control node after removing the ipod:

jcm@perihelion:~$ echo “$GUID” >/sys/bus/ieee1394/destroy_node

Then plug it back in and watch it come to life. Seems sometimes Linux can’t login to the device. I’m not yet an sbp2/firewire expert (but I know a man who is) although it could be something fun to play with. I think IEEE1394 makes my original paranoia about USB actually have a substance in the sense that average PCs without IOMMUs will freely give 1394 devices the ability to play with bits of the host’s memory (as I understand the protocol anyway) so you probably wouldn’t want to give general access to 1394 buses in a public terminal environment without better than white/grey box PC hardware available. Probably not a problem on the newer 64 bit platforms since they do tend to have IOMMUs.

I realised that Eric Gaumer is probably one of the most interesting and intelligent people I’ve met. There are few people who actually take that level of interest in the subject they study, and I like the ongoing efforts with python (puts my python ability to shame but I’ll work on that). If you don’t read Eric and Matt’s blogs then check them out (now linked from here) – and as to the elitism question in blog writing, Eric, it’s not particularly elitist and I agree with you, I enjoy writing too and that is my main motivation (aside from being increadibly vain at the best of times). Shannon’s photos are pretty cool too. Yes your South Park characters are pretty accurate , I need to do my own South Park/Hackergotchi character for this blog. Meh, I’ll get around to it by the time they’ve gone out of fashion (anyone want to do me one? go on, loads of you are better at using the GIMP than me).

I’ve been listening to The Faders. Yes, they’re female (which I admit got my interest initially), but they’re also rather good. I went to Hickies in Reading and bought Laudate Dominum to see if it’s practical to learn it in time, and a copy of another piece I should be learning too. My violin practice has improved since I made some fundamental changes to my bowing technique last week – I decided to throw away all of the advice about technique and adopt one that works for me based on how I’ve observed professional violinists actually holding their own bows. Interesting that certain teachers seem to try to make you hold it in really really stupid ways. Meh.

I saw Star Wars last weekend at The Electric on Portabello Road in London. This was courtesy of some free tickets received through the magazine and I took Hussein as my guest. We had some juice mixes and nibbles, chatted, then lounged on a giant leather sofa with leg rests (I just rolled around like a beached whale and ended up with my boots on the floor and lying with my head on my hands the wrong way around – twas very comfortable however). The complementary popcorn was good and the screen was pretty cool. Having a bar in the audatorium is definately a big selling point for those who want to have caffeine and an almond croissant with their film

That’s enough for now. Time to actually do something with this holiday weekend. I’ve got writing to do and a trip to Totnes to see Richard and Charlotte. Monday is hopefully an opportunity for an afternoon meetup for printk. Maybe we’ll get around to having some drinks and a BBQ if the weather holds up and we don’t suffer from too much apathy.

What is Your World View? (updated)
created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Materialist. Materialism stresses the essence of fundamental particles. Everything that exists is purely physical matter and there is no special force that holds life together. You believe that anything can be explained by breaking it up into its pieces. i.e. the big picture can be understood by its smaller elements. Materialist 100% Modernist 88% Existentialist 88% Postmodernist 50% Cultural Creative 50% Romanticist 25% Idealist 0% Fundamentalist 0%

Onwards and upwards!

Jon.

Photo: My friend Trevor Parsons celebrates a special birthday. Plenty of candles around.

I went to my friend Trevor Parsons’ birthday party yesterday, having decided it was too much (train hassle) to try going into London after getting back from Birmingham on Saturday. I took a 18:09 train from Reading but it experienced delays and took an hour to get to London – in time to miss various potential connections (see previous postings about getting annoyed with engineering work and its inspiration to get my driving license/a car sorted out). I took a tube over to London Victoria and then an overground service to Brixton. I needed to head towards Tulse Hill. After I few minutes, I decided to get a bus part of the way, and then used my trusty GPS to locate the party. I had earlier pulled some rough co-ordinates off streetmap.co.uk but they ended up being half a mile out (wrong end of a long road, probably further). Still, enough to find the right road – Google Maps need to offer co-ordinates (have I missed a feature that they already have?).

On the way back to Reading, Paul (who decided to randomly come along to Paddington – which was cool, I enjoyed the chance to talk about some bits and pieces we needed to discuss) and I ran across the “Jesus Guy” in London Paddington. This is the guy I’ve mentioned before, the one who will risk all manner of person injury by standing at the bottom of a tube escalator on a Friday/weekend evening and tell people to turn to Jesus. Although I have little interest in his choice of Religious practice, I do find him fascinating – simply that he spends so much time wondering around London without showing signs of bodily harm from drunken jobs is quite amazing.

Photo: The “Jesus Guy” at London Paddington Station Underground.

Tech News website meets Reality Distortion Field – film at 11.

This is a fantastical load of bollocks. Like, read the paper dudes. You linked to it, but did you actually read it? It would seem from your flawed discussion that you, like, didn’t. The SMT vulnerability doesn’t let you do “copying” of crypto keys, it’s actually a contrived and difficult to pull off side-channel crypto attack which exploits systems that have more than one path to memory.

Interestingly, having actually read the paper (no, I don’t claim to understand every aspect of the attack – I’m not a crypto expert and Colin Percival had many months to work on it since October), it would seem (to me) that any multi-processor architecture with multiple predictably weighted memory paths (e.g. with any caching) is vulnerable. This much is obvious. But it might not have been so obvious that such an attack would be possible against the G5 and other decent processors. Intel are in hot water because their Pentium designs share L1 cache (ewww, yuck, icky, sick) and so it’s a lot more practical to take the^W^W exploit.

Jon.

I just spent a while looking at mortgages and came to some realisations:

• I could afford to buy a small house/flat in Reading/Bracknell if I started saving now, so I should do that.
• I need to save around 5-10K to make this practical. I’m 23 years old, would be buying on my own, and could take a 30 year term. Letting out a room makes this cheaper than renting.
• I’ll continue paying my parents (folks) rent for the time being, since I have part of the house to myself and it’s better than throwing money away with someone I don’t know. We seldom actually want to kill each other anyway.
• Even if I eventually moved elsewhere, having a small house/flat in the South East is disirable enough (note the property shortage) that renting it out would be very practical.
• Not commuting to Oxford each day by train/bus/taxi will save me over 75 pounds each week. That’s more than buying/running a cheap car.

I’m having a family lunch, then I’ll go out to London for this party Trevor is having. I look forward to seeing him and it is such a nice day that I should go – I have other stuff to do, so I’ll probably try to get back before it’s too late tonight. I also would like to take my bicycle with me, but one of the tires is suspiciously flat. I should probably buy a decent bike too as/when I switch over jobs and can get to work a bit more practically on bike. I can spend the savings on more tech – like a Mac Mini.

Jon.

Photo: Gloucester Cathedral, Gloucester. A visit with Frank Pohlmann to discuss our work in progress proposal. A-ha! We meet in person at last!

I popped up to Gloucester for supper on Friday evening. The afternoon was really great from a weather perspective and I enjoyed seeing some of the countryside en route. Unfortunately, the trains screwed me over yet again (so I’m now totally committed to getting a car – sorry, if “long distance” rail travel in this country were practical, then yes, but I’m fed up with it by now) by making me miss the connection in Swindon (at least I got to see a bit of the shopping area while I waited). Since my friend doesn’t have a mobile that I know a number for (if he has one), I asked Swindon to have a call put out at Gloucester at 17:30. Not a difficult question – it’s not my fault that the trains were delayed. The pleasant woman in the ticket office (who agreed that it wasn’t practical to travel by train if you want to be on time) tried to get through to Gloucester. Eventually I was told the call was put out, but when I arrived, I discovered that Gloucester doesn’t have the ability to make manual announcements any longer (it’s all wonderfully automated now – how does that help when the system fscks up?). They made the call by shouting along the platforms as soon as they got the call (before the 17:30 time I should have arrived, so pointlessly before my friend would have been there) but at least they tried.

Photo: My sister rolls down a bank. I tried it too, but felt dizzy enough after one go that I didn’t feel like going again (having just eaten lunch).

I went up to Birmingham with my family for a lunchtime picnic in the aboritum near to where my sister and Joe’s new house is. We took with us some light provisions and enjoyed a very civilised lunch on the green, separated with a little walk to and from the cars. We then tried to do the “ASDA (Walmart) Living” thing, but the carpark was full, so we went straight to Ikea. This was my first visit to an actual Ikea store (having managed to avoid it up until this point) and I obviously enjoyed it. How can you not enjoy the Ikea nesting instinct and the temptation to buy wonderful amounts of stuff you don’t really need, all at reasonable prices? Seriously, I thought it was ok, but had to fight off the temptation to buy some more coffee mugs that just happened to look pretty cool. After some tea back at the house (and a check for nearby caches – there’s one 200m away from the house for my next visit), we headed back home. I gave up on going to Manchester and/or Scunthorpe since I couldn’t be bothered with the trains being screwed.

I just saw The Terminal. Quite aside from the laughable Hollywoodisation and trivialisation of real world problems, this is a reasonable movie. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough faith to believe that events wouldn’t transpire in exactly the fashion decribed by the screenplay – I don’t have that much faith in the TSA/Home Security. Of course, the UK is just as bad, we’re apparently holding a Canadian citizen without bail for playing paintball (just when was that on the national news headlines here?). Great. And I have to defend my anti-ID card/government intrusion tendencies to friends and family? Can’t anyone else see how the world around us is going to the government megalomaniacs? Interestingly, they don’t. Most people in this country (and elsewhere) are probably quite happy to read trashy newspapers (if they do in fact ever read) and believe governments of the world are doing a good job. If they need to hold a few thousand people on trumped up terror charges, then ok, it’s in the interest of the “war on terror” the Bush administration invented to keep itself in a job and in office. Anyway, I finally got around to joining the Lib Dems – the pragmatist’s choice of liberal thinking political party for UKians.

Jon.

Photo: Geopunting along the River Cherwell in Oxford with Dom.

I went Geocaching with dom last night. This was allegedly an OxLUG event, but nobody else turned up until the food at Cafe Uno later on. We hired a punt and went along the river for a while, until we reached a strip of land known as Parsons Pleasure, where GCJP8G should have been. We ended up decoding the clue and coming to the conclusion that the cache had been trashed by muggles. Bah. Annoying. On the way back, we were going to find more caches but didn’t get time to do so. I’ve got the details of a central Oxford cache and might have a look for that next time I am walking around the city centre.

The food session was originally a non-starter, but three of us turned up in the end. Which is still a tiny number, but several people had said that they couldn’t make it. I was not too disappointed since we had some reasonable food and chat. I think the OxLUG wiki shall be used next time I organise a food session – then we can put “likes” and “dislikes” on a calendar of prospective days. Maybe that’s a bit too organised, but I think the voting concept is most fair to those who might want to turn up. Next month’s official meeting is not yet organised and I tried to convince Dom that the idea of doing a keysigning is not a bad one. I think he’s coming around to the idea.

Off to Gloucester for the rest of the afternoon. Birmingham tomorrow. Some hacking still to do on interrupts on this board but at least the Embedded stuff at work was vaguely useful to them.

Jon.

This is the sick reality of the police state we are trying to become in this country. When we live in a country where a man with a wooden table leg is gunned down mercilessly, then we have to question whether something really went wrong somewhere. Now, I wasn’t there at the time and I am only looking at this as an outsider, but I feel it vindicates my instinctive reaction upon seeing police officers with guns – I move away from them as fast as possible. I don’t want to be there when the voices in their heads take over or they otherwise decide it’s a good idea to shoot innocent people.

Papers, please!

I read various blogs about the “REALID” (see the UnREALID website for more informtaion) addendum to an illegal conflict (Iraq/others) war bill going through US Congress. It disgusts me that they do this – tack on completely unrelated legislation onto “must pass” bills to provide some other critical funding. But, on some level, I do wish this kind of legislation upon the U.S. – it might, just might, start getting ordinary people to take an interest in Freedom and politics once again. Maybe. Do you want ID cards? Do you think it’s a good idea? I think it’s a monumentally stupid idea but it seems to be popular right now – must have come up as a strategy at some private international governance convention or something. Can’t we just pay these people just to do nothing at all? I’m all in favour of “wasting” tax dollars/pounds/whatever on these people if we can pay them to just sit and feel important and pass no laws whatsoever.

Deary me, we’ve got a UK government being put back together from previously fallen ministers. Blunkett is back, albeit he can’t introduce ID cards quite so easily in his post in charge of the DWP (goodness help those poor, poor people) – but he’ll probably force the elderly to wear giant identification badges or something – there’s always something he and Straw can try to do. The cool thing about changing ministers is that they’re never around to account for their actions. I once wrote a letter to the European Court of Human Rights about Jack Straw’s human rights violations (evil legislation, incompatible with the Human Rights Act and designed to make our lives more unpleasant if at all possible) and he was well out of office by the time I got a response. Canada isn’t doing much better – a confidence vote is coming up on Martin’s government. Did I say confidence? Apparently that’s not a sexy term any more, so they’re trying to rebrand it as something far less serious than it really seems.

I’ve been pondering thusly: The US is in this case gigantic mess over fighting in certain “axis of exil” countries arbitrarily chosen from around the world. When’s it the UK’s turn? We’ve got nuclear weapons, George, and we’ve got 4 subs with potentially active nukes ready to go, surely we should be your logical next target? No? Why ever not? Oh, we’re not “officially” evil. Ah.

Jon.