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Thomas

[ website | Beware the Jabberwock... ]
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[ archive | journal archive ]

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Browser UI [Posted on Thursday, the 9th of July 2009 at 7:41 pm]
[Tags|]
[Who |Crisis Healing Salve (Mint) ~ Hemophiliac, Christian Pacaud/RTIST OverClocked ReMix]

A usability question for you all: of the four following layouts, which of the following positions for the address bar in a web browser is the best? Apologies for the quality of the screenshots - I hacked together the bare minimum of a VB program needed to make these.

Poll #1427428 Browser UI
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Which address bar position is best?

View Answers

1: Address bar, menu, toolbar, tabs
1 (11.1%)

2: Menu, address bar, toolbar, tabs
3 (33.3%)

3: Menu, toolbar, address bar, tabs
1 (11.1%)

4: Menu, toolbar, tabs, address bar
4 (44.4%)

Why?


It's interesting that the major browsers use very different layouts. Internet Explorer 7 and 8 both use layout 1, while Firefox and IE6 are closest to layout 3 (ignoring the lack of built-in tabs in IE6). Opera uses layout 4, while Chrome doesn't really fit into any of these (though it's most like 4).
Link[ 10 pennies | Penny for your thoughts? ]

Music poem meme [Posted on Tuesday, the 7th of July 2009 at 6:33 pm]
[Tags|, , ]
[What | silly]
[Who |What I Have Vowed ~ Matt Redman/Intimacy]

It's meme o'clock! Blame [info]sarshin for this randomness.

Instructions: put your MP3 player on shuffle, and write down the first line of the first twenty songs. Post the poem that results. The first line of the twenty-first is the title.
Lord, I am not my own, no longer my own

Follow me
Kiss me now with your sea salty lips
Cope sent a challenge frae Dunbar
And this is the constant question

I took a chance
Late last night when the squire came home
Came upon an ancient forest
It's 4 in the morning

Red alert red alert it's a catastrophe
Should you hear somebody cry
Swaz hie gat umbe
I came into this world as a reject

Footsteps down the stairs then at the door
Once in Royal David's City
Magic for me
Where are we?
Link[ Penny for your thoughts? ]

(no subject) [Posted on Tuesday, the 30th of June 2009 at 10:15 pm]
[Tags|, , ]
[What | thoughtful]
[Who |Idea 19 ~ Bullfrog/Populous: The Beginning]

Raymond Chen (of The Old New Thing blog) recently linked to a post asking, "How much does a gigabyte weigh?" The original poster had gotten confused (or is an excellent troll) and thought that as he installed stuff on his laptop it actually got heavier. Obviously that's not the case.

But it got me wondering. Does reading from or writing to something actually change the mass of it? See, if you apply a charge to something you do actually change the mass of it by a really tiny amount, as you're adding or removing electrons from the object. This probably means that flash memory will actually get heavier as you write to it, since it stores binary ones by trapping a charge on the chip.

I'm not sure if the same principle applies to hard disks (since they operate by storing a magnetic field rather than a charge), but nonetheless it's an interesting thought
Link[ 3 pennies | Penny for your thoughts? ]

(no subject) [Posted on Monday, the 29th of June 2009 at 9:10 pm]
[Tags|]
[What | surprised]

Rather than incorrectly report a flat battery as being fully charged (which is the usual failure mode for laptop batteries), my laptop is instead reporting a fully charged battery as being completely flat.

Apparently this laptop runs on pixie dust.
Link[ Penny for your thoughts? ]

(no subject) [Posted on Thursday, the 25th of June 2009 at 6:47 pm]
Someone from 08450554454 has been trying to call me for a few weeks now, always hitting the answerphone and not leaving a message. Today they called while I was in, and surprise, surprise it's a telemarketer!

"Can I interest you in a professionally designed kitchen?"
"Firstly, I'm not interested and secondly, I'm pretty sure I'm registered with the Telephone Preference Service"
"Ah, ok, bye" >click<

The magic incantation "Telephone Preference Service" makes for a very strong anti-telemarketer charm over here.
Link[ 3 pennies | Penny for your thoughts? ]

I have a soldering iron. Ph34r. [Posted on Sunday, the 21st of June 2009 at 9:48 pm]
[Tags|]
[What | accomplished]

It's really disappointing that so many people now will just bin broken devices, without even considering trying to repair them. So it was rather satisfying to discover that my electronics-fu hadn't degraded too much over the years, and to successfully repair two devices.

First victim casualty was a Charg-E (a mini r/c car), mainly as a test that my soldering skills hadn't evaporated. The antenna wire had broken where it was soldered to a small tag, giving it an effective radio range of 2 metres. So, heat it up and suck all the old solder away. Strip the wire, resolder with new lead-free stuff (no-one seems to stock real solder anymore). The joint doesn't look spectacularly good, but does it work? Put the whole thing back together and the signal range is now at least the length of my flat. Result! Now to get a replacement ni-cad for it...

The second victim patient was my right computer speaker. After prodding it for a bit and unsuccessfully trying to presuade a bead of solder to jump across the gap, I chopped off a 2cm length of solder and tacked it down either side of the break. The joints look nice and shiny, the resistance across it is low (and I've previously measured the current draw on the track as being a few dozen mA, so it's unlikey to heat up), and most importantly I'm listening to James May on the Moon right now with them. Yay!
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Proof that not all "CPU Idle" utilities are snake oil [Posted on Saturday, the 20th of June 2009 at 3:37 pm]
A while back, I set up a spare computer here as a server. Unfortuantly, computers require electricity, and this resulted in a bit of a surprise when my electricity bill came through. But I looked at it, and it all added up and wasn't that much bigger, and so thought nothing more of it.

Today my next electricity bill came through, with a substantial underestimate on my actual power usage, and so I decided to do the maths. Turns out that Metis (the spare computer) sucks about 120W, and is responsible for over a third of my power usage. Ouch.

So I did some digging, and it turns out that sometimes Windows doesn't properly idle the processor for various reasons. Instead of executing a special "go to sleep until something happens" command, it just sits there doing the computer equivalent of jogging on the spot. There's many CPU Idle programs that purport to actually reduce your CPU temperature, but I've always been a bit sceptical of them.

Well, I downloaded a shareware one to see if it actually did anything, and just starting up the program was enough to drop the power consumption down to 70W. This is without even running the utilities "idle loop" - some hardware poking it does at startup is enough to make Windows start idling the system properly. That'll make my next bill nicer.
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(no subject) [Posted on Friday, the 19th of June 2009 at 11:53 pm]
Things you don't want to hear at 11:50pm: someone's smoke alarms going off (due to yet another false alarm, judging by how it stopped after a few seconds).
Link[ Penny for your thoughts? ]

(no subject) [Posted on Tuesday, the 16th of June 2009 at 7:19 pm]
So, among other weird and wacky plans from the Digital Britain report (such as switching off FM/AM radio within 6 years and shifting to overcompressed DAB), the governemnt intends to tax all fixed phone lines to the tune of £6/year, so that those in places where it's not economically feasible to get broadband will be able to join the Web 2.0 revolution. This money will be going into some mystical pot, to feed an undefined set of commercial network operators.

I'm sure I'm missing something here. BT is the fixed line operator here - surely all that's needed is to make it BT's problem to provide internet access to the population. The vast majority of UK internet connections in any case use BT's wiring and BT's hardware (and even if your ISP has local loop unbundling and you pay someone else for your phone it's still BT's wiring to your house).

Plus there's the blindingly obvious fact that a large chunk of those not experiencing the joys of 2Mb/s ADSL don't actually need or want it. In a recent report OfCom did, 43% of those unconnected said they weren't interested even if it was completely free.

'Course, the way the government's looking at the moment it'll all be scrapped this time next year.
Link[ Penny for your thoughts? ]

TV show meme [Posted on Thursday, the 11th of June 2009 at 6:52 pm]
[Tags|]

Found via [info]shebit

Rules:
- Bold all of the following TV shows which you've ever seen 3 or more episodes of in your lifetime.
- Italicize a show if you're positive you've seen every episode of it.

( Results behind the link )

This must be an American list of shows - where's Red Dwarf?
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Eyesight test [Posted on Monday, the 8th of June 2009 at 6:42 pm]
[Who |Nothing, due to a broken pair of speakers]

What's wrong with this photo?

The image above is roughly identical in size to the actual device. It's from the main PCB of my computer speakers, which died last night. The failure is visible in the photo, but needs good eyesight!

If you can't spot it, then try the original photo.
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Security through obscurity [Posted on Friday, the 5th of June 2009 at 11:00 pm]
[Tags|, , ]
[Who |Rumours of Angels ~ Graham Kendrick/Rumours of Angels]

After stating for years that security through obscurity doesn't work, some cheeky spammer went and found my supposedly secure-because-noone-knows-where-it-is forum. Hmm.

Security through obscurity isn't really security when you get down to it. It's the principle that something is secure, not because of any solid measures taken to ensure this but through making the secret hard to find. It's rather like hiding the front door key under the doormat, or writing your PIN down with the label "Mum's birthday". The result is that it's only secure as long as no-one knows where it is, but as soon as they look under your doormat and find the key that's it, game over. A better form of security would be to, for example, put the front door key in a box with a combination lock - that provides security by making it Hard to get the key without knowing the code. Of course, one can then reduce that by writing the code down somewhere, at which point you're back to security through obscurity

Anyway, back to the forum. As well as the publicly-available pages and gallery on my website, there's several restricted areas on it. Things like a private forum install for a few friends, the administration pages for the gallery, a set of files from a university group project - stuff that's not meant to be publicly available. Some of this is protected with real security: the university pages require a password. Some of this is both passworded and hidden: the administration pages not only have a strong password, but are not linked anywhere. And some of this is merely hidden in the hope that this is enough.

The forum falls into the latter category, as it was never intended to be particularly secure. And this was all well and good, as for over a year the existence of this forum was known to maybe a dozen people. Unfortuantly, I then placed a link to this forum in the topic of a small, private-access IRC channel. While the channel is private, the topic is available to anyone on the same server. That itself is not a problem, except there's a couple of websites that continually index the channels and keep a log of recent topics. Those websites are public, and since I hadn't added the forum to my site's robots.txt (a small file telling search engines where they're not allowed to go - unfortuantly a bad place to list any hidden areas, as anyone can see this file), Google then merrily followed the links from those sites to my forum. And the spammers (well, spammer, but it's only a matter of time now) followed Google.

The best part? It is now impossible for me to remove all links to the forum. Once security through obscurity is broken, it's usually impossible to repair. On the internet, once something has been made public it is nearly impossible to claw it back (a common quote is "the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it). Fortuantly there wasn't anything private on there, and the forum's own security is adaquate to deal with future spammers. It's still annoying, and serves me right for not making it properly secure in the first place.

Incidentally, the DVD encryption scheme was broken through a similar method. The first DVD key to be found was extracted from a software DVD player that had tried and failed to hide the key somewhere in the program's files. The HD-DVD and Blu-ray keys were discovered through exactly the same method - reverse engineering of software DVD players. The best part? When the HD-DVD key was leaked, the publishers revoked it quickly and released an updated version of the DVD player. The new key was extracted and spread across the Internet about a month later.
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(no subject) [Posted on Monday, the 1st of June 2009 at 6:28 pm]
[What | hot]

I declare it to be much too hot.

Fortuantly I have a smoothie and icecubes. Mmmmm...
Link[ Penny for your thoughts? ]

(no subject) [Posted on Thursday, the 21st of May 2009 at 6:42 pm]
Today's random achivement was quoting Jabberwocky in a meeting at work.
Link[ Penny for your thoughts? ]

(no subject) [Posted on Saturday, the 9th of May 2009 at 6:41 pm]
Bah, my Roomba has started to do the circle dance (going round and round in very tight circles). While it's somewhat cute (as with anything involving a Roomba), it also likely means the tachos in the wheels are gunked up.

Time to dig out the support number for it. Apparently you can get a dongle from iRobot that reprograms the Roomba and somehow fixes this in software (probably by ignoring the tachos, but a software fix for a hardware problem is still impressive).
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Guess the Movie Meme answers [Posted on Wednesday, the 6th of May 2009 at 7:34 pm]
[Tags|]
[Who |Tia Dalma ~ Hans Zimmer/Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest]

By popular request, here are the long-awaited answers for the Guess the Movie Meme! (original comments are now been unscreened)

  1. You offend reason, sir. I should like to offend it with you!
    John, Peter Pan (2003 version)
    Guessed by [info]the_hunter
     
  2. Oh! Where did you find *this* strength?
    I'm not about to tell you!
    Sephiroth to Cloud, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children
    Guessed by nobody!
     
  3. I am invincible!
    Boris, Goldeneye
    Guessed by [info]pleaseremove, [info]the_s_guy, [info]ariskari, [info]the_hunter, [info]shebit
     
  4. Dodge this
    Trinity, The Matrix
    Guessed by [info]jecook, [info]pleaseremove, [info]link007, [info]the_s_guy, [info]ariskari, [info]cooba, [info]shebit
     
  5. Little hand says it's time to rock and roll
    Nicholas Angel, Hot Fuzz
    Guessed by [info]pleaseremove
     
  6. If you find yourself alone, riding in the green fields with the sun on your face, do not be troubled. For you are in Elysium, and you're already dead!
    Maximus, Gladiator
    Guessed by [info]pleaseremove, [info]the_hunter, [info]mirrordreams, [info]shebit, greenB
     
  7. Come with me and you'll be in a world of pure imagination
    Willy Wonka, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (musical version)
    Guessed by [info]jecook, [info]the_s_guy, [info]the_hunter, [info]shebit
     
  8. Do you not know that in the service one must always choose the lesser of two weevils?
    Captain Jack Aubrey, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
    Guessed by [info]ariskari, [info]shebit
     
  9. Savvy?
    Captain Jack Sparrow, Pirates of the Caribbean
    Guessed by [info]jecook, [info]pleaseremove, [info]the_s_guy, [info]ariskari, [info]mirrordreams, [info]shebit, greenB
     
  10. I swallowed a bug
    River, Serenity
    Guessed by [info]jecook, [info]pleaseremove, [info]the_s_guy, [info]ariskari, [info]shebit
     
  11. You shall not pass!
    Big Furry Wizard Gandalf, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
    Guessed by [info]jecook, [info]pleaseremove, [info]link007, [info]the_hunter, [info]mirrordreams, [info]cooba, [info]shebit, greenB
     
  12. Gold-3 to Gold-2 and 1. I'm getting out of here right now, and you guys are invited.
    Flynn, Tron
    Guessed by [info]the_hunter
     
  13. If anyone asks, there were fifty of 'em... And, uh... They were rattlesnakes.
    Diego, Ice Age 2: The Meltdown
    Guessed by nobody!
     
  14. It's a pie machine, you idiot. Chickens go in, pies come out.
    What kind of pies?
    Apple.
    Mrs Tweedie to Farmer Tweedie, Chicken Run
    Guessed by [info]jecook, [info]pleaseremove, [info]link007, [info]the_s_guy, [info]ariskari, [info]the_hunter, [info]mirrordreams, [info]shebit
     
  15. Red light! Green light!
    Ethan Hunt, Mission: Impossible
    Guessed by [info]pleaseremove

And the scoreboard!

9: [info]pleaseremove
9: [info]shebit
7: [info]the_hunter
6: [info]jecook
6: [info]the_s_guy
6: [info]ariskari
4: [info]mirrordreams
3: [info]link077
3: greenB
2: [info]cooba

Link[ 3 pennies | Penny for your thoughts? ]

Xen FAIL [Posted on Thursday, the 30th of April 2009 at 8:02 pm]
[What | pissed off]

Well, I *was* intending to finish testing my code today. Unfortuantly, my work desktop had other ideas. As best as I can tell (because providing useful debug is not the Linux way), the Xen hypervisor committed ritual seppuku no less than four times today. And because in Xen, the host OS is itself partially virtualised, this resulted in my desktop resetting with no warning or error message four times. So, instead of doing useful work, I spent most of today rebuilding my test environment (consisting of multiple interlinked virtual machines) multiple times.

For added annoyance, two of those resets managed to trash my Firefox profile. And there is no way to recover from a corrupt Firefox profile short of creating a new profile, restoring bookmarks from a backup, reinstall all of your addins and reapplying every single configuration change you've ever made. That reminds me, I need to set the "self-signed certificates are not made of utter evil" option so that I can actually use all those hardware management pages on our servers.

Remind me why people put up with this?
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(no subject) [Posted on Tuesday, the 28th of April 2009 at 6:31 pm]
So, there's all this grand fuss about how if the EU Telecoms package gets passed as-is, the Internet as we know it will be destroyed overnight and we'll have to pay mega wonga to get at anything not supplied by the ISP. And that a set of amendments are the only possible chance ever to prevent this happening.

Could someone please explain to me, with references, how this will break the Internet? I've read the amendments, and I really don't see how this is such an Internet-destroying situation. I'm sure I must be missing something obvious, but it doesn't help that everything seems to state OMG WTF THE SKY IS FALLING!!!!111one without actually saying why.
Link[ Penny for your thoughts? ]

Guess the Movie Meme [Posted on Saturday, the 25th of April 2009 at 6:53 pm]
[Tags|]

I'm bored. That means it's time for a meme!

Guess the Movie Meme, found via [info]kotukawi.

  1. Pick 15 of your favorite movies.
  2. Go to IMDb and find a quote from each movie.
  3. Post them here for everyone to guess.
  4. Strike it out when someone guesses correctly, and put who guessed it and the movie.
  5. NO GOOGLING/using IMDb search or other search functions.
  1. You offend reason, sir. I should like to offend it with you!
  2. Oh! Where did you find *this* strength?
    I'm not about to tell you!
  3. I am invincible!
  4. Dodge this
  5. Little hand says it's time to rock and roll
  6. If you find yourself alone, riding in the green fields with the sun on your face, do not be troubled. For you are in Elysium, and you're already dead!
  7. Come with me and you'll be in a world of pure imagination
  8. Do you not know that in the service one must always choose the lesser of two weevils?
  9. Savvy?
  10. I swallowed a bug
  11. You shall not pass!
  12. Gold-3 to Gold-2 and 1. I'm getting out of here right now, and you guys are invited.
  13. If anyone asks, there were fifty of 'em... And, uh... They were rattlesnakes.
  14. It's a pie machine, you idiot. Chickens go in, pies come out.
    What kind of pies?
    Apple.
  15. Red light! Green light!

I'll screen comments for a few days, to give everyone a chance to guess

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(no subject) [Posted on Thursday, the 23rd of April 2009 at 6:46 pm]
Today's surprise was a 5-second power glitch while I was on the loo. Small, windowless rooms can get *really* dark.
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