Sat Jun 1 17:52:40 BST 2002

I got Amphetadesk working by sending the Perl libs it couldn't find to the apt bot on #debian and installing the packages it said. Only worked for 0.91 thou. At least I know that my RSS feed works.

TBL (not, Tim Berners Lee, another one - who is, I think, the smartest person I've ever met) recommended The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs a while back. Well, I found it online (legally) today, via this page. Reading it on my laptop now.

This is very sweet

ESR has a weblog! (and it's pretty good). A bit gun mad, but that's always been a problem with Eric

Fri May 31 19:34:37 BST 2002

Suggested reading: Notes from the BPDG (fuckware) meeting, BBC article about the new EUP rules on data protection and privacy, Another BBC article about the large fall in street crime in Lambeth (following a relaxing of cannabis laws)

A little while ago, it was found that irssi was backdoored at the source level (someone cracked server and altered the source). Now it's been found that fragrouter suffered the same thing (search BUGTRAQ archives). Two points from this: in the short term we need a little more crypto and in the longer term we need to fix the god-awful UNIX security model.

Irssi has started signing releases at least, but personally I still can't believe that Debian doesn't. It's really not rocket-science and the code support is there (deb-sigs). The general argument is that the number of Debian developers means there are too many keys that could be compromised. Guess what? It's still better than nothing. (As an aside, Debian still doesn't have incremental updates to the Packages file - Debian sucks in too many ways).

In the long term we need to do something about the UNIX security model. The research has been done - that isn't a problem. But I'm lazy. I might quite like to play with more secure systems, but they are marked out by being unusable. Of course, I'm not working to create an EROS distribution or anything so I don't really have the right to complain. Maybe something like this [via Wes] will stay us in the short term.

Wed May 29 18:31:31 BST 2002

This looks like a cool resource for optimising PHP. I haven't done any PHP for a while thou

Be sure to checkout the links from Zooko's weblog for 5/27.

Picked up my photos from the school prom today and scanned them in. My scanner is pretty rubbish. People usually look pretty bad in photos, and after I've scanned them, they look even worse . Anyway, they're here

This link was mentioned on infoanarchy on why ATM is a bad idea. I don't really know much about this, but it seems pretty persuasive. Then again, if I had so much money I could even consider an ATM network I would be pretty happy!

Tue May 28 19:32:58 BST 2002

Dan Moniz pointed out that I've been a total id10t and linked to sweetcode.com, not .org, which is why it's been saying "For Demos". Stupid me.

IV also has an RSS feed now

Also, thanks to Pill for pointing out that mozilla was rendering link borders around the permalink images and for giving the CSS code to fix it. (IMG { border : 0 none; }, BTW)

Mon May 27 19:41:01 BST 2002

BBC piece about the EU Enforcement Directive (an addition to the copyright directive). What they want this time seems to be that all CD/DVD presses put ID numbers on CDs and more powers to search.

AaronSw is pissed with the W3C

BBC News article about the water on Mars that I would have linked to had I had it around earlier

And an article about NASAs money problems (SciAm).

Mon May 27 11:48:27 BST 2002

IV now has permanent URLs for each entry into the archives for anyone who wants to link to a specific entry. Copy the link from the to the left of the time lines

This is getting silly - caffinated soap for a wake up in the shower. About 250 milligrams of caffeine per shower is absorbed through the skin. weird.

Projected deaths in a Kashmir nuclear war. Newscientist is broken with most browsers (it returns a "unavailable at the current time" page). Faking the User-Agent seems to do the trick

This paper has been doing the rounds (thanks to tav on #esp for the link). Kindof scary what a determined idiot could manage to do. So who's going to write a worm which uses stealth-spreading and strikes, encrypting all the hard drives of computers it infected? How much do you think you could sell the key for? (credit to Ian for that idea)

It seems that NASA is set on a manned mission to Mars after the discovery of millions of tonnes of ice just a meter under the surface.

So is NASA going to give up on the ISS and try to capture the nation's imagination (and wallets) with the first manned mission to anywhere since the Moon? The ISS has cost $40 billion so far (it should have cost $8 billion and been finished in 1992) and there's no end in sight. The Russians don't have the money, NASA is practically bankrupt after bad accounting practices were revealed in June 2001 and the other members (European, Canadian and Japanese space agencies) are fed up with the whole project.

Goldin (who ran NASA throughout the 90s) said NASA was going to be "Faster, better, cheaper" after the loss of the $1 billion Mars Observer. Wouldn't the faster, better, cheaper option be another unmanned mission? It doesn't have the glamour, but you have to question the reasons why NASA is doing this. Science or PR?. What does a manned mission offer?

Sun May 26 12:39:28 BST 2002

Essential Blogging by O'Reilly is in draft form for download (ZIP file of PDFs). Deals with using common blogging tools and a little about blogging community. Worth a skim even if you blog with XHTML and a few custom Python scripts like me

This is quite a neat little utility for modern IDE drives. It uses the SMART interface to read the temperature sensor and spits the value back out. I didn't even know IDE drives *had* temperature sensors built in.

I'm not sure what's going on with Sweetcode. It just reads "For Demos" and has done for quite some time. Noone seems to know what Demos is (other than the plural of demo).

Two of my four SCSI drives seem to fail to startup until they've been on for a few minutes. I'm pretty sure it's not the drives (since it's two of them at exactly the same time). I'm thinking maybe I shouldn't have used a cable from the "SCSI Bucket of Bits" from work.

Sat May 25 17:16:25 BST 2002

From Ian:

I will

Another Paul Graham link

Fri May 24 16:48:15 BST 2002

Ok, I've improved the IV generating scripts to break up blog entries into 10 on the front page and a series of archive pages (20 entries each). You can access the archives from links at the bottom of every page.

I went to a talk by Simon Singh (author of The Code Book) on Wednesday (part of the Cheltenham Science Festival). It was a crypto talk (nothing I didn't know already really, but very well done and with a real live demo of an Enigma) during which he went through the solutions some of the 10 challenges he sets at the end of The Code Book. Nothing remarkable here except that he admitted that the toughest code to crack (RSA wrapping 3DES) was done wrong. Rather than Enc1Dec2Enc1 he did Enc1Dec1Enc2 - which is just the same as single DES. Implimentation issues again.

But the part that got me thinking was a little aside when he said that Quantum computers might cripple factoring schemes, but that's ok because we have Quantum crypto. Now I need to go lookup exactly what algorithms exist for QCs - but if we assume that it breaks all pubkey systems we know then Quantum crypto doesn't replace current crypto at all. It requires a direct fibre link in order to preserve the all important quantum states of the photons. This puts us back to the days where very few people have crypto (those who can afford direct fibre links between themselves) - a major step back.

It would be a sorry state is this happened - someone please reassure me that it wont.

Fri May 24 15:18:00 BST 2002

School's out for ... ever

Scary

Thu May 23 19:17:28 BST 2002

From pupok:

Really? I don't even notice it. I guess IV is very non-personal and I would feel awkward about posting some things here. But there is a little of that good old Bristish stiff-upper-lip around - but very little

I'm not sure about this site yet. Looks very complete and well designed but I haven't really had a chance to read much of the content yet. Doesn't really matter if someone pulls off a singularity

Landscape page updated. Metis was down for a while today since the IP address jumped (again!). Damm Telewest keep on telling us that it's static. They now say, however, that it really will be after maybe one more jump. Wonderful

Followup to Paul Graham's Revenge of the Nerds, here. Thanks to AccordionGuy.

Tue May 21 20:25:10 BST 2002

Downtime: Metis (and thus IV) will be down from early June 5th for about 2.5 days while the language center is wired up at school. Zooko has very kindly offered to be backup MX during this time

Today was the last semi normal school day. I'm not in tomorrow, I have exams all Thursday and Friday will just be wild. Biology practical went fine this morning (even though the exam board contacted school yesterday and told them that the experiment doesn't actually work and to just give us the results). It feels very weird to be finishing school - I can't remember not going to school. Feeling displaced

I've written up the starting notes on Landscape. It's just a bitch about the importance of IDEs at the moment - not even sure if I want people reading it yet. I guess my main point about IDEs is separate at the moment and not clouded by and sketches of LS proper yet

A new addition to the Common Links: E7L3. My common links are so incomplete at the moment but it's fascinating to see social webs in action. With blogs you can actually see the arcs of similar interrest. Now I want a tool that gathers recent blog entries and cross links them by keywords. Answers on an email to agl@imperialviolet.org. (I know IV is guilty of not having an XML version - I will fix this at some point

Mon May 20 19:10:20 BST 2002

New article from Paul Graham

This site runs some pretty sweet music in MP3 format (thank god it's not all RealMedia or WinMedia)

Following a link from JWZs weblog to here which has lots of really neat stuff on fractals and the like

Sun May 19 10:39:15 BST 2002

Joey on Attack of the Clones (which I watched yesterday). The love scenes are, quite frankly, pants and if I had been editing it most of them would have been left where they belong (on the cutting room floor). However there is more then enough action to make up for it and Yoda with a lightsaber is worth the ticket alone!. Go see it.

Aaron has posted an annotated ETCon programme with links to the blogs which covered each session.

Wolfram's book is out (and my order is lodged with Waterstones). Wired have some good, extensive coverage. But, unfortunately, it doesn't look like Wolfram Research Europe are getting any copies until the end of the month, so god knows when I'll get mine.

I've now taken to leaving notes for myself in root.inc (the file which generates this page) and it works pretty well

Fri May 17 21:22:56 BST 2002

Don't you just wish you had a digital camera which could take pictures like this or this?. That could almost be rendered - ouch. (bigger versions for those on better connection, play with the URL to get 1024x768 and 2272x1704).

Frost looks like a very interesting extension to C++ (it's not general as far as I know, only for G++). It allows multimethod dispatch with syntax like:

Just great. Go read it.

Some good procmail rules for filtering spam out (works really well for me)

Thu May 16 20:30:05 BST 2002

Ah, at last. Maybe something which can explain what the hell Aspect Programming is (I expect I'll be disappointed).

GCC 3.1 is out (changelog). And they have a MMIX backend! Woohoo, now all I need is a JIT compiler to translate MMIX into IA32 to run it

An article on arch (the CVS replacement)

About 6 people have put their keys through the verifier and it seems to be working pretty well now that I've hacked the GPG source to stop it asking questions. GPG is a total bitch to interface with - we need 1.1 with the g10 library.

Wed May 15 20:35:10 BST 2002

Well, I now have 4 of the 5 aforementioned SCSI drives in a RAID 0 array (I can't fit all the drives in the case). Nice to see my PSU didn't melt and it's pretty sweet speed-wise. You mke2fs and the count shoots up to about 120 right away. Then all the drive LEDs light up and the room shakes for couple of seconds before the mke2fs finishes

Another Lisp Love story

Five Little Languages and How They Grew

NYTimes story about how a company is buying out a whole town (for 20 million dollars) in order to stop the people sueing them over pollution. (registration required for NYT - try user:strsnyt, Password:strsnyt). You gotta love the American disregard for the enviroment. Five percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the pollution.

New articles on SciAm

Tue May 14 18:08:29 BST 2002

New project time! A big welcome to the key verifier. As much as we would like the web of trust of GPG keys to work, most people don't know enough people who use GPG for it to work. So as a little helper (and a pretty small one at that) the key verifier will sign your key once you've proved you control the email address in the UID. Thanks to AaronSw and Ian for testing it out.

Introduction to the Semantic Web. It would be nice if this works. At least the SW people realise that they are never going to create a pretty system if it's going to be worldwide, I only worry that because they're aiming pretty low, they are going to hit far too low. Time will tell.

JWZ has a new weblog. For those who don't know, JWZ is famous for lots of things: writing xscreensaver, working at Netscape/Mozilla for a while, owning the DNA lounge and (most of all) for ranting

USENIX2001 report. Ok, so it's from last year - doesn't mean it's not interesting thou! (from Lambda).

I was looking about for places to take me on for the summer yesterday. (It's stunning how disinterested people suddenly become when you mention internship). On the top of my (remaining) list was a company called Innovative Software which I was going to call today. And guess what the headline on the local paper is?? Microsoft sues Chelt Computer Company. I guess there's a chance they might be looking for a Linux knowing intern now - but more likely they are just going to get swatted.

Matrox's new card is out. Drooooool.

Sun May 12 11:32:41 BST 2002

One virus has infected another. Namely CIH and Klez to make a fast spreading, nasty payload virus.

Befunge is a language with a 2D `memory' and the IP advanced in 1 of four directions. Crumbs

Nice is the nicest (no pun) Java based language I've seen in a long time. It uses an ML type system (pretty much the best one around) and compiles to Java byte code. Very, very sweet. Need to play with this a bit.

Debian finally has GNUPG 1.0.7! All apt-get

Details of the new Matrox card are surfacing (also see /.). I still very happy with my G400. In other aggle hardware news, I've not got an SLI MegaRAID SCSI controller and 5 9GB UW3SCSI drives to make a nice RAID array with. I just need a SCSI cable with enough connectors and a power supply which won't melt now.

A video of a Lisp Machine in action. I'll have to download this at school as it's a little big. Lisp machines were waaay cool thou.

Fri May 10 21:42:46 BST 2002

Imperialviolet's DNS has been upset for the last couple of days as netsol get off their fat arses and update stuff. DNS sucks. I might design a replacement.

I'll catch up tomorrow evening with posting stuff