jcm's blog

Panorama just had an interesting feature on the Stockwell police murder of an innocent Brazilian citizen. I found this episode interesting for one of the interviews they ran with police officials – one guy sat and repeatedly tried to claim that there is no “shoot to kill” policy because they only “shoot to incapacitate” by shooting people in the head.

Ok. So, you might not kill someone by shooting them in the head, but you’ve got to figure that the odds are good that they’re never going to be quite the same afterwards and that they’re more than likely very dead in the process. But no, that’s not a shoot to kill policy because that’s not very politically correct with your average British television viewer, so they can’t have a police spokesperson stand up and claim that on TV.

I also found it interesting that in Israel, the police have to know that there is a suicide bomber (by seeing their weapon) rather than just having a cup-of-tea senior police officer think that it might be a good idea to pop off a few rounds in someone’s head over breakfast. Good to know I live in a country where even the Israeli policy wasn’t good enough.

Jon.

Looks like I might be visiting Zurich on the weekend of the 18th and 19th to hang out with a friend. Debating about whether to be around the whole weekend or just bits of it, depends really if one of you randomly mail me to say you’ll be there too. Anyone?

Jon.

“Our technical experience is vast, allowing us to support Macintosh, Windows and all flavours of UNIX”
– Mailbox Internet

So Mailbox are running SA or somesuch on outgoing mail. They might have been doing this for a while, but in any case have the level (10) set too low to prevent legit. mail from getting rejected. I’m getting bounces on certain mail sent out using them and it’s got to a level that I’m noticing it.

This is a point of principal. I don’t care what they do with their own systems (though I think filtering people’s mail for them because you presume them to be stupid is not cool) but I do care when I’m not warned about it. I didn’t know they were doing that – how do I know mail that I’ve sent out has been going where it should be?

I don’t run a direct delivering mailserver at home because some people who enjoy drinking the ORBS/MAPS koolaid far too much think it’s a good idea to also reject mail from ADSL type address ranges. Until panic.printk.net appeared, I also needed to have a second MX where mail could be delivered to in order to have redundant copies of mail – the current setup allows me to live with the loss of either colo or home and still have access to all mail (eventually, I’ll have triple backups setup and get this all nicely streamlined…maybe). So home is a valid MX for delivery but doesn’t send out directly all on its own.

Anyway. Colo is now handling all my outgoing mail, but I’m just annoyed once again that something happened and I didn’t get to know about it until things broke. Ok. I’m getting that other ADSL ordered in the next couple of weeks – I just need to get a line moved before it’s possible to do that.

Jon.

So Virgin finally closed their “Megastore” in Reading. I think I can recall casually wondering when that would happen. They’re “old”, in the wrong place (the older shopping mall) and there are too many alternatives. More importantly, they’re around the corner from FOPP and I like to think that it was they who put Virgin out of business. This is a good thing because FOPP seem to care a little more than the big corporates (read: they’ll let you return music – though I’ve never actually had cause to do this) and it’s good for consumers to have that kind of thing.

I did something a little dirty. I bought the Pussycat Dolls album earlier. I know. But they don’t take things too seriously and they’re quite fit, so there’s some kind of motivation. The music isn’t as bad as it could be either. I did buy Coldplay X&Y as some kind of compensation for this minor musical taste indiscretion.

On a related note, there’s a second Starbucks at the Oracle shopping mall now. I wondered who it would be. That takes the number of Starbucks outlets in Reading to 3 or 4 that I know of now. It’s not quite like the US, but bear in mind that a few years ago there were none at all here. I bought one coffee in the older Oracle store and a tea, but I did also go to Pret for some variability. I love their veggie soup (though Hannah rightfully points out that it’s probably not suitable for vegans – it’s got to be fun if you’re vegan and want to eat somewhere even like Pret).

This is a random post. The point being that I hadn’t been into Reading for months (how cool is that? I got over the need to pointlessly go into town for no reason!) and it had changed a little in a semi-progressive kind of way. Though I couldn’t see a newspaper store I wanted to check out (I hope it’s not closed down). My final bit of consumer advice for the day is that Woolworths are repeating their Espresso machine offer – I have two of these stainless steel machines because they’re great and only £40 if you buy one now. I dislike Woolworths in general these days (they seem to want to sell themselves to chavs) and had to leave quickly, but it’d be worth going in there to buy one of these nonetheless.

Jon.

I got $50 sent to my paypal account for filling in a survey a while back and decided to waste it on random ebay purchases. So I just bought myself a X100P digium FXO (in English this is a piece of hardware that allows me to connect regular telephone lines to any computer and can be used to build my own telephone exchange) . I’ll use that as part of an Asterisk installation that I keep threatening to actually get done. It’ll help me bridge calls seemlessly from the UK to wherever I happen to be. My main UK cellphone will be handled differently, probably through a dedicated VoIP relay service, but I might also have it forward to the line I’ll have this setup to use.

I also bought a couple more wireless cameras. Hannah and Joe had their car attacked by a vandal the other night and my dad recently had someone attempt to break into his car. No longer! For we shall soon have motion watching their every single move with various unpleasant automated reactions, depending upon how evil it is felt must be the response to complete fuckwits fucking around with people’s cars.

Jon.

Well it turns out that the FSF have announced that their annual Associate Meeting will take place on April 1 at the MIT campus. I don’t know if they deliberately timed this to co-incide with Linux World or some other event, but in any case I am looking forward to it.

I’ve booked for the evening dinner and am a member of the strong set, so am keen on participating in the keysigning activities happening too.

Jon.

I finally got around to joining the EFF having previously bought t-shirts or whatever. The work they’re doing now is more important than ever.

Perhaps you’re interested in joining too.

Jon.