Sue your developer

David Frum should come clean

2012-01-30T19:26:00.002-05:00

Mr. Frum has practically become a liberal, lawd ha' mussy!

He was heard on the Sunday Morning CBC (a famous nest of wets, pinkos and fellow travelers), complaining with some vehemence about the state of the U.S. Republican party. Basically he says that they have taken leave of their senses. This assumes that they ever had any sense.

Now I don't normally make comments of a political nature, but his cutting comment about the George Bush presidency was too apposite to not immortalize here.

Something along the lines that George W. Bush was the most hapless U.S. president ever. He started with Pearl Harbour, finished with the Great Depression and had Vietnam in between.

Frum's idea is that Reaganism has run to a full stop. I would say that the limiting factor in giving the rich more money is that eventually you run out of it. As Jean Chrétien once said, "I never met a millionaire who had enough money."

Frum is a rational man, he says, and it burns him that "his" party in the U.S. is now dominated by idiots. Come off it, man. They are all Americans. There is no reasoning with them. Come back to Canada, surely Mr. Harper has need of someone as clever as you?

Failing that, you could work for the party formerly known as the natural ruling party of Canada. I mean, their current leader is a born again former socialist and NDP leader of Ontario. Perhaps they could even change their name.

Everyone should be able to throw off childish mistakes and errors of judgement. I see you as a sort of Chistopher Hitchens in reverse. Come back to the light!

They're in your arteries now!

2012-01-30T12:03:00.004-05:00

This doggerel, to the tune of the American folk blues number He's in the JailHouse Now made famous by the Soggy Bottom Boys in the movie "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?", for a number of friends and family (not to mention me):

I have a friend who's name is Bing,

He used to smoke, drink, dine and swing,

His life's the best he thought that it could be.

He was told he had to stop it,

Blood pressure like a rocket,

Those lipids get into your heart and brain.

They're in your arteries now!

I told him once or twice, to stop living quite so nice.

They're in your arteries now!

Spam, being taken seriously

2011-06-16T22:11:00.002-04:00

Good Lord, Holmes! Someone's written a monograph about spam!

Here.

Know your enemy...

Spamalot

2011-05-03T21:00:00.002-04:00

Quote

Spam served fresh every day

2011-02-28T23:35:00.007-05:00

Forgive me, I have sinned. It has been 2 years since my last spam survey in January 2009. What can I say, time flies when you’re having fun, sanding off the bottom paint and removing the marine sanitation system (ew).

However, my predictions have borne fruit. In the face of a swelling thrust from many new and exciting categories, penis enlargement spam has been holding its own. It’s still at 11% of the total, but that now represents the leading category overall. Dicks are solid!

My other prediction was that the poor economy in the USA would result in a swathe of new, exciting categories. Hard Times when we’re faced with rising bills, bankruptcy, foreclosures, expensive tarts, no skills, and no work. There are now nearly 50 distinct categories up from 15. Crikey!

The fragmentation of the spam target audience, as defined by the subjects targeted is showing some interesting trends. Away from the interests of the young (posh watches, hot deals and handbags) and tending to the concerns of the older netizen (wrinkles, health concerns). Presuming the aged are joining the ‘net in droves. This I hadn’t specifically predicted in ‘09, but now that everyone’s mother and grandmother are on Facebook, this is gonna be the biggie. More of this later.

Big losers? The on-line pharma category has lost most over time, down from 56% to 19% to 2% now. On-line software “deals” that were steals are gone, from about 15%. The fake watches are in decline, down more than 10%. And diets have shrunk to almost invisible proportions. Perhaps no-one feels like dieting when the economy is depressed.

Here are the raw results*, with commentary. Remember the nasty things in your spam filter can be hazardous to your health, wealth and self-esteem. We risk ours so you don’t have to.

11% Viagra with discounts of 86%, 85%, 84%, 82%, 78% - all from same address on successive days. Presumably eventually it will either keep declining then drop off or shrink to nothing. Another missive has a mysterious (but true) statement, “They say impotence is a punishment for wrong deeds men do.” Indeed. Drinking, smoking, drug abuse...all help to keep your masculine personhood pointing down for sure.
8% Auto insurance...this must be a “Hard Times” category. “The insurance is too high!” Remarkable amount of it though. Man's best friend is his car.
7% Fake medical certification (pharmacy assistant, nurses)...obviously you can fake it and ca$h in! You’re a dolt for not doing it sooner, clearly. And look at all the free drugs you can steal!
6% Posh watches. Bewilderingly popular. Wear a $25 copy of a $25,000 watch that is not worth, er, $2.50.
5% Credit/bankruptcy fixing. I thought we’d have more of these, US economy being as it is. Nevertheless a respectable showing.
4% Russian wives. Another economic sign of the times in both USA and Russia. I guess interest in renting cheap tarts for 3 years has been aroused in the former. Probably a cross-promotion for cheap Viagra.
4% Laser eye surgery (throw away your glasses). Oh yes, I’m gonna use cheap lasers to fix up my eyesight. Might not need glasses at all after that. And worse things happen.
4% Extended car warranty...your most treasured family member might have a serious illness, act now!
4% Drug or other damages settlements. So you think you might wanna sue Big Pharma or the asbestos industry? Give us money first.
4% Film/photography schools in your area. Coming soon. This seems aimed at the sad geeks in anoraks. Usually a way for men to look closely at lightly clothed women in my experience, what with poking their light-meters in yer erogenous zones.
3% Satellite TV. Never pay for HD Sports again. TV is for non-participants in the game of life, apparently.
3% Work from home - divorced, broke, single? Sit on the couch crying, and make money fa$t?
3% DirectBuy complimentary visitors pass. Must be one of those new private prisons.
2% Replacements/”Pieces” - ambiguous replacement pieces for your things, presumably.
2% Life insurance. One promises, “No Waiting”. Hmm...so, if I insure with them, I’ll die now? Not a great prospect. I guess it’s all about timing?
2% Codeine/Hydrocodone. For heaven’s sake, get help if you’re thinking of buying pain killers on-line. Or perhaps get one of those pharmacy assistant on-line certificates.
2% Hybrid cars. Going for the upper-crust gullible yuppie here. C’mon...not gonna happen.
2% Gambling - you play, we pay. This has got to be the most unlikely promise. Except for all the other ones..
2% On-line Auctions. Send money away to strangers and in return...you’ll be sorry. Guaranteed.
2% JC Penney wants me to text him. Probably some weirdo stalker American. Pass.

Now we'.re down to the one-offs.

1% Cruise deals. Perhaps this should be in the Golden Age section. What’s 900 feet long and smells of urine? Answer: A line dance on a cruise ship. Stolen joke alert!
1% Scrapbooking...probably a false positive, it’s so...wholesome.
1% House of White Bitches - CLEARANCE...woo!... oh...on second reading that's Birches. Sadly this is actually about quilting and also probably a false positive. Thought I’d found my place on the intertubularities** for a moment there. I feel malignant now. Good name for a website though. Or a song.
1% Social Security Disability - or How to Cheat a Bankrupt Nation of Monopoly money. I’m not in the US so I can say, “Get back to work and pay your taxes, ageing slackers!”
1% gapkids deals from 2 for $12. Look, at this price, I’ll order a hundred and send them to the First World. There are people there “trying to have babies”. They might welcome the relief from the pressure, time of the month, temperature testing, shagging to a schedule, lack of restful sleep, crying jags when kids are present etc. They’ll definitely get more sleep now. Promise.
1% 2 years of quilting patterns. Gosh darn, that’s seriously too generous to pass up. Gotta be false positive?
1% Coupons to chain fast food restaurants. Get your obesity, diabetes, hypertension and heart disease at the lowest price possible!
1% Discover your body mass...whoa...I just put my hand “down there” and I discovered it! Yay!
1% Sign up for email jokes. No need of that. Almost all of my email consists of jokes, actually. In the 3 days this spam survey covers I got exactly 5 other emails, including one from an 18-year old Ghanaian admirer via Facebook, also spam. So I do not lack for humour in my life. Seriously.
1% Free psychic readings. I didn’t see this coming. What a dolt.
1% Health test. OK, you tested positive for Magrathea***, which is caused by a fat wallet rubbing against your thighs. Causes incompetence, incontinence and impotence. We can help.
1% Country Store. Far too...nice to be evil, surely?
1% “Is this still your email?” Yep.
1% Bathroom remodelling. Let’s say a few percent of people are doing up their bathroom. Most of the rest are fixing a broken toilet or sitting on it reading “Great Expectations”. Niche market surely.
1% “Have a look at this website from my friend Jamie.” Well he might be your friend, but he’s not mine. Last Jamie I heard of was a character on Dr. Who.
1% “Focus on what's right.” Is that “right “ as in correct, virtuous, libertarian or conservative? This probably belongs in a category called “to sad, puzzled persons”.
1% re: I hope you understand. No, I didn’t send an email hoping you would understand. Understand?
1% Abs diet. White meat only presumably. Food nazis, I fear. Or would that be the pecs diet? Er...
1% Home security. From break-ins or foreclosures I wonder?
1% Gap card. Card with a hole in it? Surely false positive.
1% Grocery coupons - could it be genuinely aimed at the kluless koupon klipperz?

Then there’s the stuff I call the Golden Age categories. Now the first boomer is turning 65 I predict a serious future for this group.

(I think I get most of these ‘cos I told facebook I was 90 years old and their security is about as useful as a proverbial silk stocking condom. They’re all about selling their users anyway. On fb I get ads for incontinence products, wrinkle removers and retirement homes. All good reasons not to go there.)

3% Erase wrinkles/dark circles. Hack no...I earned those b’tards. I intend to take them with me to my grave. Although in honesty this could be aimed at persons of any age after puberty.
2% Power wheechairs(sic) - clearly we’ll need these to whiz around the mall. Unless we have our incontinence pads on.
1% In-home care. Well what with the power wheechair stunt accidents I’ll probably need it.
1% Walk in tubs - ‘cos we can’t get a legover anymore, not even into the bath.
1% Dance schools. Old geezers, wheeing and wheezing along to Beatles and James Last.
1% 50 plus singles - that is code for “over 70’s hot to meet babes”. Using protection in these relationships presumably means the aforementioned incontinence products.

Update: In contemplation of all this, and in talking to a few not-so-computer-literate types, I think that it is obvious (as any fule kno****) that there are a lot of spam messages about older folks' concerns 'cos that's where the naive users are now. It's not hard to imagine my 80-year old mother clicking on a bunch of links promising quilting patterns. Well in her case, it is, but you get my drift.

So a lot of the main categories (e.g. ED) are probably mostly aimed at wrinklies.

* In the interests of Science, I should declare my methodology.

Open my gmail email spam folder.
Read the summaries of the latest 100 declared spam.
Count ‘em.

** Stolen joke alert! Pharyngula started it, afaik. After some beastly US legislator said the ‘net was just a bunch of ol’ tubes. Sauce! I spent much of my working life down these particular rabbit holes...

*** Also stolen.

**** Also stolen.

So...this is where those Compuserve and AoL folk have found refuge

2010-05-07T22:11:00.007-04:00

The doombrains at BigCompany corp have the habit of sending out Korporate Kommunications from their Kommisars at regular intervals to their hapless "Associates". Always a text email, no illustrations, but a vast number of font, colour and style changes. Not to mention spelling or grammatical errors.

This made me feel almost nostalgic* for the start of the 'net. This one is for the Korporate EAP program (of course run by a different and half-way clued-in company).

*Not really.

Chumby

2009-12-03T20:39:00.001-05:00

Chocolate truffle tart for Erin

2009-07-10T11:45:00.008-04:00

Credit goes to Lucy Waverman for the idea in a Globe & Mail food column.

I brought this evil dessert along to the rowing club pot-luck supper yesterday. It's the single simplest and most impressive uncooked dessert that I know. The basis is ganoche which is heated cream with chocolate whipped in.

For 7 inch pan:

10 oz dark chocolate
1 cup whipping cream
2 tbsp liqueur (optional)
2 tsp grated zest of orange/lemon (optional)
1 cup cookie crumbs or nuts (e.g. ground almonds)
2 oz - half stick - butter
Decoration.

Prep time: about half hour plus time to set in fridge - 2-4 hours.

Use a 7 inch spring form cake pan to allow the dessert to be removed easily (but you can make this in any container as long as you line the pan with silicone paper or something like that). This dessert is very sticky at room temperature, but handles well once frozen. If you are taking it to a party you can cut it up when frozen and either serve frozen or thawed.

Method:
Make a crust with your favorite cookie crumbs mixed with melted butter (1 cups crumbs to half stick of butter). Or use half ground almonds instead of the cookie crumbs. Mix the crumbs and the melted butter and press into the bottom of the pan.

Heat cream to just about boiling. Remove from heat break the chocolate into pieces and addto the cream to melt. Stir well until smooth. Sir in the zest and liqueur. Pour over the crust. Leave to set in the fridge. Remove from pan and decorate as you like.

Stored well wrapped in a freezer, seems to keep well for 6-10 months. I find that if I make several at one time and keep them for special occasions it saves on mess and work.

Decoration suggestions.
I find taking the cake out of the pan painting it with orange marmalade and then sticking on sliced almonds looks nice. Add a few curls of chocolate or dried apricots or frozen raspberries...
At room temperature you can shape the dessert, so even if you have an accident, drop it off the plate onto the kitchen counter like we did on one memorable occasion, it can be repaired. Orange slices, mandarin segments, whipped cream...

Variations:

You can build up layers of different flavoured ganoche, once the first has set. Adding a can of sweetened or unsweetened chestnut purée to the ganoche makes a nice contrasting colour. Or use different chocolates; better quality chocolate is expensive but worth it; milk or white chocolate can look stunning as layers.
If you are covering the cake with nuts then just pour on the different layers and allow to set. Gently swirl them if you are not covering the with nuts so that the swirls show a nice effect.
Different fruit toppings or swirl in something like gently crushed raspberries from Dentz farm. M-mm!
Different liqueurs: orange is great. There's a really nice inexpensive orange flavoured drink from the LCBO called Monsard Orange & Brandy. This won't break your budget at $24, and it's nice to drink as well. Forget that over-priced French stuff...although remember "Absinthe makes the tart grow fonder.*"

Depending on the depth of the pan you can make this tart as deep as you like. Hmm...a deep tart...sounds like we could craft some kind of joke around that as well.

* - Stolen joke alert!

Jerk to inflate

2009-06-21T16:49:00.003-04:00

Over the years we have acquired several inflatable PFDs all branded as "Sospenders".

The first 2, bought in 1995, included life harnesses and are auto-inflate. They have a water soluble "pill" which will allow a spring loaded pin to pierce the CO2 capsule and inflate the life jacket, hopefully, in the case where one plunges, unconscious, over the side. They are also suitable for non-swimmers because one doesn't have to have ones wits about one for the things to inflate.

The other 2 PFDs we bought in about 2000 are so-called manual inflation models. These are lighter (no built in harness, so no heavy stainless steel rings and clips) and they have to be inflated by pulling a handle. They are nicer to wear just for a quick run in the dinghy or on a calm day.

When we bought the PFDs we bought about 3 sets of spare gas bottles and retention plastic clips to prevent the handles from being pulled accidentally - you have to pull quite hard: the handle at the end of the cord says "JERK TO INFLATE", which for pathetic reasons I find hilarious.

The thing we noticed at the time we bought the second set was that the design of the inflators had changed and the plastic clips we had for the old ones are not the same for the new ones...same idea, but about 3 mm different in size.

So far so good. In 2001 we had one of the automatic PFDs serviced by Sporting Lives Inc. - a friend had tried out the inflation of the device (at my suggestion) and had pulled the cord off when it didn't inflate. Totally my fault - I had unscrewed the gas bottle to prevent accidental inflation, and had forgotten to rearm it properly. Must be the drinking.

So the inflator was broken and the servicing company had replaced it and serviced the jacket for $40 US including shipping, which I consider to be reasonable.

We have used all the PFDs sporadically for the last few years, but have always taken care of them. Check them regularly and inflate & repack them annually.

We then bought a new boat in 2009 - on board was a non-automatic PFD identical to the ones we already had. It had no gas bottle or plastic retaining clip. So we started the search for our spares (somewhere in the basement) unsuccessfully. No worries, we thought...the product says "Sospenders by West Marine" on it. We'll just hie ourselves to the nearest West Marine and get the bits.

Not so fast, boater...West Marine no longer carry the compatible retaining clips for the brand of inflators that is in all these PFDs. The company that built the PFDs (and serviced them) used other suppliers' inflators and is no longer in business, having been bought out by Stearns in 2005.

Hours of fruitless searching for these tiny plastic clips on the web later...f*ck it, I thought, the only purpose of these clips is to add a bit of impedence to the pull cord so that the thing doesn't go off accidentally when one is moving around. I have experimented with a piece of stiff stainless wire formed into a clip and it works very nicely. I think we can save ourselves a lot of fooling around and just use this for the ones that don't have plastic clips, or to re-arm them in future if we use the PFDs in earnest (which destroys the plastic clips).

So, a pair of needle-nosed pliers (Leatherman Wave, always in my pocket) and some stiffish 1mm thick stainless wire. Cut the wire to 2.5 cm, shape a curl in each end and put the ends of the wire in the holes replacing the clip. About 10 mins of experimenting, including trying the destructive test of pulling the handle and voilà! It is, in my eyes, a better design than the plastic clips, can be created by anyone, anywhere and reduces dependence on the manufacturers whims, design changes etc.

Of course the current generation of inflators has a tiny plastic peg in a hole, that will require some thinking to reproduce...if we ever get one of those.

One interesting thing: the professional servicing of these $150-$300 units seems to be non-existent now. I can't find anyone in North America who does this. Dozens of companies do this in the UK and Autralia, for example. Perhaps there is no market for this here. Perhaps in the UK, people are less ready to throw out an expensive item and take safety seriously so they have them serviced. Perhaps it's fear of litigation in NA...plenty of insurance companies will sue anyone they can think of if someone they insure is damaged by a defective PFD.

(We even heard of a Canadian marine surveyor who killed himself to save his family assets because he was being sued by a US insurance company. He had the misfortune to survey a boat that subsequently sank, killing a woman. However, I digress.)

Personally, having knowingly modified a PFD, I am willing to take the risk upon myself. So sue me :-)

Santa's helper - confession time

2009-02-17T11:45:00.003-05:00

My conscience is troubling me - I fancy myself a rationalist, but in December I took part in the swindling of a little girl (aged 6). She'll hate me when she grows up I know. What can I do? I was begged by her lovely mother to help out:

Santa Claus
North Pole
H0H 0H0
Canada
24 December 2008

A Special Message from Santa

My Dearest Elizabeth,

I have thought long and deeply about the gift you want so much: a poodle. Not just any poodle, but a black poodle. I know that you have tried your best all this year and that you have been a very, very, good girl. Your mommy and daddy say you are a wonderful daughter!

Elizabeth, I am truly sorry, but Santa cannot give pets to anyone! My job is to give toys to good girls and boys - but a dog is not a toy! A dog it is a living, breathing animal that requires a lot of time, money, hard work and constant care and exercise.

Every Christmas there are dogs and cats given to children by their parents. Sometimes the children cannot care for them and the poor puppies and kittens have to go to the Animal Shelter: homeless! It makes them very, very sad!

If the time comes and your parents think that it is right for you and your family to have a pet, then you can talk to them about it. Until then you must be patient.

If you want to keep Santa's magic, please keep this message a secret from everyone except your mommy and daddy. Let me know what you think about it, you can write to me anytime, not just at Christmas.

I will be sure to bring you a special gift instead!

Give your little brother a hug from me!

With much love,

Santa.

National Do Not Call Disaster

2009-02-15T23:12:00.005-05:00

For quite a while this thing has been bubbling under- the fact that the CRTC has sold the National Do Not Call list to a bunch of unscrupulous, possibly criminal elements.

On or around Oct 1, 2008, in my usual got-to-be-first geeky way, I added a couple of cell-phone numbers (Don's and mine) to this list, as soon as it opened for business. The transaction was completely on-line...add number, then another number. I also added another friend's home phone number. The security was so lax I could add any number I wanted. In retrospect I should have added the numbers of the CRTC privacy point person but we can't all be prescient.

Everything was fine for a couple of months. Then this story came from the CBC. People were receiving more calls on their phones than before. The CRTC said that it was "under investigation."

Then in January 2009, this report from Yahoo news Canada - the CRTC basically admitting that they had sold the list, the do-not call list, repeatedly, for $50 to telemarketers. It could then be downloaded.

Now as we all know, telemarketers are honest, decent types, who really don't want to bother you at suppertime.* Clearly they didn't really have a use for this list (of people they shouldn't call, right?) so perhaps through the magic of the internet, the list was, possibly a little bit sort of, passed on and downloaded by a person in the United States. Nothing technically illegal is done.

One doesn't need to be Inspector Maigret to work out what happens next, and what happens next is entirely legal in the strict sense of the word. Don and I start getting automated calls from machines in the United States. Every day. We have never, ever got nuisance calls before. We only use these phone to call one another (very rarely handing out the numbers to anyone). These calls warn us of dire happenings because our car warranty is running out or some such guff. That this phone spam is automated is even more annoying (as we cannot ask to be taken off the calling list and they cannot pretend to do so).

Some research shows that these calls come from the most shady side of the outbound telemarketing world, probably run by organized crime. So Canadians who previously had anonymous cell-phone numbers are now being targeted by this traffic. Uurgh.

I suppose it's only fair. For many years, boiler rooms run out of Canada were targetting U.S. citizens for stock purchasing scams. It took a lot of cross-jurisdictional wrangling to get that stopped effectively.

So I got fed up and wrote to my Member of Parliament:

To Mr Guy Lauzon, House of Commons,

A question of privacy

Dear Mr Lauzon,

Late last year when the National Do No Call List was started, I registered some cell phone numbers, although I had practically never had any unwanted calls on these numbers. Perhaps one in 6 months.

This was clearly a huge mistake! And I am very upset about this.

We have since started receiving daily calls to our cell phones from numbers from numbers with area codes in the United States. These are automated calls, mostly from numbers that are reported to be part of some kind of phone scam e.g. involving expired car warranties (949 256 9179).

I feel that the CRTC, the organization that set up this registration scheme has been dreadfully mismanaged.
Somehow they have allowed my cell-phone numbers to be given to unscrupulous persons (probably organized
criminals).

In addition, when I actually put my numbers on the system using a computer, there was no security
- I put several numbers on, and one for a friend. (I think that this mistake has since been remedied,
but it clearly exposes how poor the implementation of this scheme was).

When I answer these calls, I get to pay for the connection. If I don't answer calls, then I may miss
something very important. I feel that my only recourse is to get another cell-phone number for my phone,
which will leave me paying additional costs and be a serious inconvenience.

If this had been a commercial company and not a federal government agency, I would probably try to
get the transfer fee back from them or some compensation, but I probably don't have that option.

I find this very frustrating and a serious betrayal of my privacy to be exposed like this.

What can be done about this?

Sincerely,

Susan Welsh.

cc. vieprivee@req.lnnte-dncl.gc.ca, privacy@req.lnnte-dncl.gc.ca
(email addresses for the CRTC and Do Not Call list privacy staff)

Perhaps something will come of this. Perhaps pigs will fly.

* IMO telemarketers are pond-slime, second only to email spammers in their evil ways and deserve to be eliminated (see previous spam-related entries). That's right...I'm a pacifist - but we're only talking about eliminating pond-slime so no harm done.

Spam quarterly review - penis enlargement resurgent!

2009-01-23T15:02:00.006-05:00

Once more into the breach...I do this as a public service, so you don't need to worry about the slimy things caught in your spam filter.

The big story, as always, is penis enlargement spam. It's rampantly ballooned in the last quarter! Drugs are down and fake watches are up. There are more new categories than I have seen in one review before. Overall volume is down. This may reflect some serious recent spam-killing actions, metaphorical and actual.

The current profile looks like this:

19% Posh watches practically being given away. This is up from 12% from last quarter.
19% Discount pharmaceuticals, including offers of drug trials for viagra and queries about having "heartaches." (Headaches, heartburn or lovelorn? Perhaps all three). Dramatic decline from 56%.
11% Penis enhancements and help for your (always female) partner. More than doubled in size! That's more like it!
10% Why do you need Adobe software? (Because I'm a pathetic web programmer...) Cheap "genuine" software, with reference to financial crisis as excuse for piracy, presumably. Avast! New category, shipmates! I think MS and Adobe better cut their prices dramatically ;-)
9% We ship worldwide: Hot deals/Member services/Status accessories and attributes/eBay/Payment accepted/Safety information. Unimaginative. C'mon guys you can do better than this!
4% Appeals to update your firewall, O.S. etc. Also a new category. Also lame.
4% Diets endorsed by Oprah...you'd have thought that wouldn't be a recommendation worth having, but I guess she's tried a few. Up from 1% last quarter.
3% Your check is (still) waiting (is that Czech or cheque?) and other bogus sales confirmations. Also up from 1% last time.
3% Dating sites, with transparently lewd come-ons...eew!
2% Activate your Internet TV/Watch movies on your PC. New category.
2% Gambling - who put the bling in gambling? Perhaps no-one, it's down from 6% last time.
1% This is why you are fat. What little me? I've always been told I was robust! New.
1% Appeals to laziness (Why work? Why get out of bed?) Why indeed. New.
1% From "Doctor" Berry; "Clearance: Save up to 75%.-Choose Real Taste™" (which is a Pizza Pizza slogan). Clearance pizza as a cheap medication? Yay! New.
1% Unspecified financial help to fix what ails ya. Well this isn't the flood of financial crisis help offers that I predicted but it's up.

Someone asked why I bother. It's interesting. It only takes 5 minutes. There are only about 10 categories every time. Seeing the patterns, shows that mostly the originators are few, somewhat stupid, and trying to appeal to the more stupid or at least to non fluent English-speaking people. Specifically those who think that wearing a fake Rolex will make women like them and that someone is going to give them health, money, fame and entertainment while they lie on the couch, eating crap.

Hmm...sounds OK, doesn't it?

Chrome - update after 2 months of use

2008-11-09T21:36:00.007-05:00

I downloaded Chrome in a silly fan-boy-like frenzy the first day the beta came out. I must say the product has actually exceeded my expectations. It's delightful to use.

1. It gets out of the way. Very unobtrusive. I really don't notice the browser, I just use it. Searching on the same bar as the URL has just become natural for me.

2. I like the "quick dial" thing they copied from Opera - when you open a new tab without a URL the 9 most commonly browsed pages come up in a 3x3 pattern as thumbnails. The visual cues really make this a fast way to select your fave pages.

3. It's refreshingly honest when something doesn't work. For example, when a plug-in dies, it says "The following plug-in has crashed..."

4. The Gmail integration is very nice indeed.

5. Some interesting stats tools are built in. Plus an easter egg.

I have basically given up on IE, except for testing. Firefox: I like the addons (Firebug, Wizz RSS viewer) so I still use it daily. However, Chrome is what I use most often for generic browsing.

Flash and Subversion backups: Batch file to copy files excluding certain files

2008-10-28T13:50:00.003-04:00

One thing about Flash (or any non-text binary type files) and Subversion, if you check your flas and swfs into a subversion library that is regularly backed up, for example nightly, you will soon be using a huge amount of space.

So the inestimable James (who's price is above that of rubies) found that our main code SVN library was not being backed up ...eek!

When he turned on backups in a reasonable schedule, well, we were checking in flas and swf several times in a day and these copies were all being stored in SVN as binary blobs or something, leading to a huge volume of backup files.

Our solution: Create a new SVN library just for Flash code, and don't bother backing it up except once per month. When we have code completed for the daily build we just drop swfs into the code build folder SVN. When we have significant code changes (finish an app, get ready for the weekly QA build) we drop everything from our new SVN into the traditional place.

To help this, we have this little batch file to copy from the new SVN to the old one:

@ECHO OFF

ECHO.

rem put the ".svn" string and the filename excludefile.txt into the file of things to be ignored

echo ".svn" > excludefile.txt

echo excludefile.txt >> excludefile.txt

rem copy all files in all subdirectories, excluding those with .svn in the path

XCOPY /S /E /EXCLUDE:excludefile.txt "C:\projects\binaryDoc\studentui"

"C:\projects\current\trunk\autoskill\academy\modules\ui\app\src\web\studentui" /Y

rem remove the excludefile

del excludefile.txt

ECHO.

Credit to this board.

What's next?

2008-10-27T22:42:00.005-04:00

I swore I wouldn't put any political stuff here but there comes a point.
What happened to rational discourse? Reasoned debate? Issues?

All we have now is the hate-filled public arena with blood'n'sawdust on the floor and circling hyenas.

...and they complain that there is a campaign of hate against one candidate. Here's another:

It's a Sarah Palin blow up sex-doll. I mean, I think she's unsuitable as a VP, but it's not my call. Lots of folly of that kind in the past...Dan Quayle, for example. However, we don't create a sex doll of Dan Quayle do we? (God I hope not).

This is the kind of ad hominen-plus-extras that women in public life have to handle. Sure I disagreed with Margaret Thatcher and hated her policies, but the idea that people would make a rapeable image of someone like this is terrible and terrifying. And before any of you tell me it's just a joke: I say "Drop dead."

Some Americans have always been good at demonizing individuals, as if that somehow takes the hard work out of foreign relations or politics. I distinctly remember my first visit to a U.S. gun shop (not what you think, I bought a pen-knife). The owner had posters in the form of rifle targets of Colonel Ghadafi the Libyan dictator on the wall. I exclaimed about this and he thought I was complimenting him on his taste. He said: "If only I could get my hands on some of that (expletive) Noriega*, I'd make a fortune!"

Then it was Saddam Hussein, now it's Osama bin Laden.

And on the domestic political side it was Nixon. Carter. And getting nastier, Obama. And Palin. I haven't made a study of this, it's just the things I see as a frequent visitor who lives a half kilometre from the U.S.

It's so easy. Black hats, white hats. Us, them. They hate us because we're good. Why do they hate us? God loves us. We're the best country in the world. I am right. You are wrong and I'll do you an injury because I hate you. God hates you.

Sorry monkeys. At best God doesn't exist. Although perhaps on current evidence I'd say the chances are that she does and she's a Trickster or possibly a cat.

* - Manuel Noriega then the leader of Panama, shortly before the U.S. invasion. I seem to think he's out of prison now.

Sorry but he still sucks

2008-10-27T22:25:00.004-04:00

My oppo sent me this: Neal Stephenson lecture on Sf as a literary genre

So my response is:
OK, well he isn't stupid. And most of what he says is sort-of truthy, at least worthy of an argument. Now you started it; since I spent 38:45 listening to his talk, you're gonna get the full 5 minutes.

He's very centred in his time and place, don't you think? I mean we were just talking about Fred Hoyle and John Wyndham (and there are loads of others*, not just Brits) who were very smart, wrote well and published compelling, yes, literature, 45+ years ago. (Not to mention Jules Verne or H.G. Wells).

Just because he didn't know about a bunch of stuff, it doesn't exist? It's like knowing the Rolling Stones and then realizing they were ripping off a bunch of poor black people.

My main beef with Quicksilver is that it is badly written, or badly edited (it's hard to tell the diff), predictable and was obviously written as a potboiler. It led me basically nowhere (except perhaps to set the scene attempting to force me to buy the next door-step of a book). It is appallingly Ameri-centric (the Crypto-thing is more so, according to Don). I would argue that even Heinlein was more honest in his idea porn. The protagonist as the super-hero is exactly what Quicksilver has. At the end of it I didn't care if the character lived or died, which is a good measure of how involved I was.

However, like I said before, he does have a few nice turns of phrase ("idea porn" being one of them, guilty, compelling pleasures of what might be, right?) I just wish he hadn't become so vastly popular before he became a better writer. If you say his earlier books are good, then I might give it a try.

If you haven't read the Da Vinci Code, you should before you slag it. It's crap but it is popular for a reason and it is quite well-written**.

And I have read one Hairy Potter book and seen one movie. No more, but I now know what I'm bleating about.

Now come back when you're ready for the full half-hour.

S.

* All probably contemporary with Heinlein, far better writers and more typical of the best sf writing of the time:

Samuel R. Delaney,
Doris Lessing,
Harry Harrison (well perhaps not exactly contemporary, but I like it)
Philip K. Dick,
J.G. Ballard,
Ursula K. Le Guin,
Issac Asimov,
Brian Aldiss,
Ray Bradbury.

p.s. “This is not the age of reason, this is the age of flummery, and the day of the devious approach. Reason’s gone into the backrooms where it works to devise means by which people can be induced to emote in the desired direction."
John Wyndham

** Update: OK, I lied. But it WAS a dark and stormy night!

Penis enlargement is still drooping off

2008-10-27T17:36:00.007-04:00

Time for my quarterly review of the world o' spam, from the worms eye-view anyway.

It is my sad duty to report that the comfortable world of P.E. spam has dropped into the single percentage digits in my in-box. Sad but true. Those mellifluous phrases lovingly crafted to set my heart a flutter ("love cannon", fer sure) are being drowned out by mechanistic appeals to buy chemicals on-line with names that have too many x's and z's in them.

There was one little prick of light in the darkness, dear readers: "Get a magic wand to satisfy your lady!" Isn't that nice? Will surely warm the cockles of your kidneys...

Anyhoo, back to the harsh realites of spam watching.

We have now got a profile like this:
56% - Pharma spam*
12% - Posh watch replicas
10% - Girls hot 4 u**
6% - Gambling
4% - P.E. (Oh, how the mighty are fallen! Don't worry dear, these things happen.)
4% - Diplomas granted without study (excluding M.A. Oxon)
2% - Puzzling discount offers, including "exclisive atches" erm...oh...watches? Silly me.
1% - Lame attempts to mimic internet sales confirmations
1% - Peculiar courses: a very promising new category ***
1% - Diet drugs: also promising new category
1% - Twitter spam****

* - does include a lot of Viagra-type stuff, but not nearly so poetic as good old P.E.

** - this is just silly; "I am beautiful girl, I am charming blue-eyed blonde brunette..." WTF, which bit is blonde and which is brunette, m'dear? (Er...perhaps, on second thoughts I'd rather not know). And why are you so hot for an ol' trout like me? I'm not even bi, sweetie.

*** - Ah, for future reference, you saw it here first. A "Christian college network" (sic) offering courses under the banner "Christian careers are right around the corner, learn on-line..." Somehow it seems unethical to offer no-study courses to Christians, poor dears. However, the meek don't get much so perhaps it is nice after all, purely as an example of loser-chic-appeal. Unfortunately the profile, addresses etc. are identical to the offers of "Insurance for Less" and "Culinary Universities" not to mention "Plasma TV Testing Center". So presumably if I were a halfwit, I'd like to let them to give me a plasma TV for free as well.

**** - sigh, I should never have signed up, twit, but this was from a person called blondesHot4u so it's not entirely a waste.

On second thoughts another prediction...we should see increasing spam in the next while to do with the mortgage crisis, bankruptcy, stock market decline and property capital losses, apart for the normal sub-one-percent perennial "make money fast" category. After all spam is nothing if not topical.

One final tip to the P.E. fellas. Chin up chaps. Just buckle down, straighten up and fly right. Increase your visibility, improve your productivity and the world will be your oyster...or should that be clam?

ActionScript 2; replace string any number of times

2008-10-15T22:32:00.005-04:00

The cheeseparing number of useful String class methods released by Adobe leaves something for the programmer to do. Here is a replace function that will replace a substring within another string any number of times. It starts at the first occurrence.



  // replace findThis string from stringIn with replaceWith, repeat number of times
  //repeat must be >=1, anything else it will do 1 repeat anyway
 // if the string doesn't occur nothing will happen

  public static function replaceString(stringIn:String, findThis:String, replaceWith:String, repeat:Number):String {

    var stringOut:String = '';
    var tempArr:Array;
    tempArr = stringIn.split(findThis); //spilt the string into an array based on the occurrences of the target string
    stringOut = tempArr[0]; //get the first split item
    for (var i=1;i < tempArr.length;i++){
        if (i < repeat+1){
            stringOut = stringOut + replaceWith + tempArr[i];// replace the next occurrence and add the next split item
        }
        else {
            stringOut = stringOut + findThis + tempArr[i];// restore the rest of the string as it was
        }
    }
    trace("String in: " + stringIn + " String out: " + stringOut);
    return stringOut;
  }

Book Review - A Liar's Autobiography by Graham Chapman

2008-09-27T15:54:00.006-04:00

A review on the jacket blurb promises this to be "An intercoursingly good book...". While interesting and worth reading, it really isn't really all that good. I remembered it more affectionately than I think of it now. Perhaps I have better intercourse now than the Evening Standard had then.

I read this way back in 1980/1 and have just re-read it again. Unfortunately I find the lasting impression now is just one of sadness. Chapman's life up to that time was a total mess and he spent most of his time drinking hard and creating havoc for friends and family.

There is, thankfully, a lot of silliness to elevate the rather lame narrative but I found myself reacting from the point of view of friends, family and bystanders - is there anything positive about this behaviour?

The brilliant writers he worked with (apart from the Python team) included Marty Feldman, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Barry Cryer. They evoke a memorable time when mainstream British humour was disrupted by a new generation raised on the Goons. However the constant interruptions by shrill excerpts from "Biggles Flies Undone**" by Capt. W.E. Johns do rather spoil the contemplative mood of the book. Quite a lot of the better bits appear to have been ghost-written by Douglas Adams - the style is unmistakable.

Not a must-read for Pythonistas, but a could-read-with-a-wistful-thought-for-what-this-man-might-have-been-if-he-hadn't-been-so-intercoursed-up. Although that may be the reason he was funny.

As always, it's the song not the singer. He left a brilliant body of work and great friends who loved him.

** - stolen joke alert!

Penis enlargement down to 5%

2008-07-29T11:22:00.003-04:00

My spam is down yet again. Thanks gmail! Only 18 messages in 5 days.

Must be the spammer who died in a murder-suicide recently. Bastard...couldn't just kill himself had to do a number on his wife and child as well...

So PE is down to 5% - well I guess if you want it bigger you either know by now that you need to be in the hands of a professional (or at least an enthusiastic amateur) or forget it. The feedback on this kind of traffic must be zero.

The new and rising entrant (10%) is a warning about FaceBook being infiltrated by the FBI. Oh...I'm going to have an attack of the vapors...who would have thought it?

That old reliable source about replica watches...frankly if Chanel makes watches, I not only don't care, but wouldn't get a genuine one if it was free, much less a fake. I already own too much stuff I don't need...

The pharma spam is the other main contestant. Hmm...now if they were tempting me with drugs I actually use...

We also have another category that is coming up - alleged porn websites with depictions of celebrity tarts and 'hot' videos. Tired.

What I want is more interesting spam. After all, if you're going to enslave my machine and make all my correspondents hate me, the least you can do is not insult my intelligence.

FWIW, this guy is my hero: http://ikillspammers.blogspot.com/

Ray Davies @ Bluesfest

2008-07-22T13:25:00.006-04:00

Ray Davies appeared at Bluesfest July 11 2008. We went...for an old geezer* he can still rock.

Apart from the huge irony of him singing I'm not like anybody else and getting an entire crowd of thousands to sing along (with gusto, lol!) it was a really good performance.

Here he is doing a nice version of Sunny Afternoon, more or less unplugged:

Compare with this, from way back in the Dawn of Time (1966):

* Pot: "You're black!"
Kettle: You too!

Richard Thompson @ Bluesfest

2008-07-06T15:13:00.012-04:00

Saturday July 5th - went to the Ottawa Bluesfest at Lebreton Flats outside the Canadian War Museum. Great site and an intercoursingly well-organized festival (in spite of the huge crowds).

The main reason we went was to see Richard Thompson. We also made a point of seeing Michael Burt (da bloos...reel niiice), Luke Doucet (kind of rock, very good), Angelique Kudjo (African dance music - amazing...I'm still jiggling!), Lucinda Williams (oh, she was crap...sorry but she should not have been there, couldn't stand it for more than the first couple of songs, not my cup of alt-c*ntry). We accidentally saw the Kruger Brothers (very nice bluegrass trio, strings only).

So after baling on Lucinda Williams (bleh!) we went to sit in front of the so-called Roots stage to wait for RT. A beautiful spot, with the river behind the stage and the sun going down over the water. The grassy hill formed by the roof of the War Museum rising up to form the auditorium..perfect weather. There were relatively few people to see him; about 500-600, compared to thousands at the folk festival four years ago or so. I guess the kind of people who go to a mainstream sort-of-blues festival will mostly want to see Steely Dan or the Zappa kid, who were headlining on other stages. All the more to our benefit, we were about 30 feet from the stage...purrfect!

Thompson's show was the best I have ever seen or heard him. Fortunately CBC radio will be putting the concert up on their website soon and broadcasting it on Aug 4th (I think). If you haven't heard his music, it may be an acquired taste for the bitter, sordid, LGW-side* of life. I know that after about 3-4 songs a number of people decided to leave and try their luck with the masses listening to Steely Dan. Too bad for them...

Richard Thompson is one of the best guitarists and singer-songwriters around**. Tonight he performed with just one guitar, dressed in his trademark black beret with gold star. He performed many new songs and many old songs with new interpretations - he wasn't just trying to make them sound like they used to in the studio many years ago. The crescent moon was going down in the sky behind the stage. Incidentally the last time we saw RT, at the Ottawa Folk Festival about 4-5 years ago, the crescent moon was sinking behind the stage then as well...)

The only downside was the immense noise coming from Zappa fils on another stage. It may have made RT play louder though - he said that a number of times.

Among the songs I remember that he performed:
From Mock Tudor (1999):
Bathsheba Smiles (ah now...that's sad) started with this one...spectacular
Cooksferry Queen (well not LGW, but strange love anyway)
Crawl Back (under my stone) (audience participation on this one)

From Rumour and Sigh (1991):
1952 Vincent Black Lightning (which is apparently the most-requested song ever on NPR, a folk song about dysfunctional youth, and a highwayman who happens to ride a motorcycle). This time he did some great new (to me) guitar work.
I feel so good (more dysfunctional youth, true crime and social commentary - "They put me in jail for my deviant ways...2 years, 7 months and 16 days...")
I misunderstood (more LGW)

From Across a Crowded Room (1985):
She twists the knife again (LGW to the max...aargh!)

From Daring Adventures (1986):
Valerie (LGW)

From I Want to see the Bright Lights Tonight (1974):
Down where the Drunkards Roll (life gone wrong...)

From Shoot Out the Lights (1982):
Shoot out the lights (Oh yes, more LGW)
Walking on a wire (goes without saying...)

Fom The Old Kit Bag (2003):
I'll Tag Along (more dysfunctional youth)

Not on any album I know about:
Got the hots for the smarts (comic ditty about preferring intelligence over beauty - "Are there any smart women in the audience?" "Yeah!!" "I mean really smart??" "YEAH!!" - "I want a girl who...thinks charm's a particle..." More audience participation.)

A couple of songs from his most recent album Sweet Warrior:
Dad's gonna kill me (about the Iraq war)
Sunset Song.

That's all I can remember until the recording is posted...

* - June Tabor used to joke that her music was pretty well always about LGW: "Love gone wrong".

**Apparently his guitar style is original and much-imitated. Something about the way he holds his er...pick...? Perhaps it's the tight jeans...

Where there is no shower

2008-06-29T11:23:00.006-04:00

Funny thing, I often almost feel like not giving away the secret that many North Americans haven't discovered about getting clean where there is no shower. I mostly resist it 'cos nobody likes a smartipants. However, I have been asked by some younger sailing women so here goes.

When water is restricted, whether you're sailing, camping, or just in the office after a lunchtime run and there is no shower available it's a simple matter to have a refreshing washdown of the body with the old-fashioned simple tools:

a towel,
washcloth (I like the gant de toilette mitt-type),
soap,
bottle or jug of cleanish* cold or hot water (about 1 litre - 2 pints - will do) or water tap,
small container, empty bucket, jug or bowl (or washbasin),
if the floor is dirty, a plastic sheet (or bin bag) about the same size as your bath towel

Most washrooms in North America have a disabled cubicle, which is ideal for this performance because it has most elbow room, but any private space will do. The average aircraft or train loo is perfect.

In addition, you can do this in a more public place, like a campsite or a beach without removing all your clothes at the same time, although people might look at you funny.

Lay down the towel on top of the plastic sheet. Take off your clothes and step on the towel. Put half the water in the bucket. Wetting the washcloth and wringing it out in the bucket, wipe yourself all over rubbing vigorously. This gets most of the dirt off (although not the grease nor all the smell). You might have to get fancy to reach the middle of your back by holding your washcloth at both ends, or asking for the assistance of a friend.

Wet the washcloth again from the "dirty water" and lather the cloth up with a little soap. Rub the cloth over the smelly parts first, then over the rest of your body. Wring it out and wet it again with fresh water. Wipe the soap off yourself.

You are done! You are clean, almost dry, feel refreshed and once you have practiced a bit, you can do this with very little water, so that the 2 litres daily allowance that the BFH** captain has allotted will be enough to have a wash every day or so.

And because your bath towel is not that wet it just needs airing out. The washcloth is a lot easier to hang up to dry.

When you're sailing in the tropics, this technique is infinitely preferable to being in the hot humid bowels of the boat trying to juggle the shower and slowly melting in the steamy heat and humidity of the head compartment. You can do your first washdown and soaping with salt water (or take a swim).

Hair washing is a different exercise. If you have really short hair the above technique will be enough. Long hair needs about 2 pints (a litre) more water and a larger bowl or bucket to lean over. It is best done seated (or kneeling on your towel) leaning forward over the bowl. Pour about a pint (500 ml) of water over the back of your head so that it runs into the bowl. Scoop the water up and do it several times so that your hair is moist. Then rub some shampoo into your hair. Use only a very little shampoo - about a teaspoon or 5 ml - less than half of the recommended amount of normal stuff. (Some people swear by using shampoo*** for both body and hair washing as it saves backpack space - there are concentrated types in tube form).

You do not need to get a lather in your hair - if you do, you are using too much shampoo - the lather represents "unused" detergent that is foaming up and you will need to use extra water to wash it out. Just rub shampoo all over the hair and leave it on for a minute or so. Then start by wringing out your hair and pouring water from the bowl over your head repeatedly until the shampoo feels gone. Wring out your hair the best you can, then run a dry washcloth over it to get it as dry as possible. Comb it through and let it air dry.

Some women (and increasingly men) have a routine of using hair conditioner after shampoo. This is fine, but once again use less than half of what you normally use and rinse repeatedly using only a half litre of water. Or try using a tiny amount on a comb and combing it through your hair without washing it off. Or try going without once in a while.

* you can use river or lake water if you are camping, or non-potable water like that from plane or train washroom taps.
**Bastard from Hell: you know who you are, Bligh-woman!
*** Stolen joke alert! Best to use shampoo, the real stuff stinks.

Firefox 3: nice job guys!

2008-06-21T17:26:00.007-04:00

A couple of days ago, at the insistence of the lovely Janice (her son Mike Shaver is a chief thingy at Mozilla) I downloaded Firefox 3. I don't normally do stuff like this on release day, but what the heck - if it broke something I have other machines to use. Actually nine of my add-ons stopped working, including the JavaScript debugger (aargh!) but today I see that the update for that was automagically installed, so I wasn't without it for long enough to matter.

In all, things went smoothly and it has a few nice features (although the upgrade went so well that I didn't notice them at first) including a silly Easter egg that I found amusing as a sci-fi fan: type "about:robots" in the address bar...Gort!

I've been using Firefox for a long time (the first on my block to use it). It has really set the standard for browsers, has lot of great features that I just expect to work now. And the addons! Well, you can get anything you want...

Because I do web development I still use a number of other browsers for testing; IE, Safari, Opera on as many platforms as I can find. I do have Netscape Navigator 9, but that's strictly a nostalgia trip now. (Remember Mozaic, folks?)

IE* - well aren't you the tedious one to program for? Talk about working with the undead. Die you b*astard! However we have to test on it...people like my 78-year old mother use it because it was pre-installed. But then again, she thinks Yahoo has a search engine.

Safari (for Windows) - very pretty (all those brightly coloured glassy bead-like buttons and bars), adherent to standards, occasionally slow and buggy (the latest release I downloaded 3.1.1 fixed a bunch of broken stuff, including crashing within 20 seconds of login to Facebook, lol). Frustrating when it takes over and ignores input when one is typing into the browser bar. Hey who's in charge here? Very different look and feel. And very pushy of Apple products and services. No, I don't want to download iTunes, cheeky! The Help looks likes it's using WinHelp or some such, it's ugly and doesn't appear to be integrated in the browser.

Opera - nice crisp feel, very easy to use, some pretty features...the speed dial thing is interesting. I like the thumbnail views of the pages opened in the tabs. It has a nice kiosk mode that we found useful to lock students into their training. They did have a browser for the Nokia hand-held N770, but for some reason (probably Nokia's fault) they had to completely reimplement when they went to the N800. So some stuff that had been working was a bit buggy.

There are some other nice browsers on Linux but in my world we only test on Windows and Mac right now.

* no, I'm not including a link to this d*g, rough!

Better protection makes happy workers

2008-06-13T20:59:00.008-04:00

The task: grinding out the rotted balsa core under the cockpit of a glass fibre boat. This is the underside of the top of the flotation chamber and is a small cavity about 1x1 metre (3x3 feet) and about half a metre (20 inches) deep. A hole had been cut big enough to get head and shoulders in from the top. Flotation foam removed. Power tools and lights required...

One of the absolute joys of a boater's life is getting all togged up to do boat work. Painting, grinding, cutting, any kind of power tools require dressing up with ear defenders, goggles, breathing mask. These things are hell to wear for a day's work, especially when it hot (hah...it's merely 31 Celsius today - about 88 F). The goggles steam up, everything gets slippery with sweat and it's really horrible. Vision is really very bad, meaning that the work is slower and quality is lower. The time that I can comfortably work in this before a break is about an hour, but it's an ordeal, and I'd feel persecuted if I had to wear this for more than 3 sessions in a day. Total cost of this gear is about $60-100 depending on the quality of the respirator. You always want a really good respirator...

Now we have bought a Triton one-piece system. It is wonderful. It combines eye, breathing, and hearing protection with a hardhat and a hood. Fresh filtered air is pumped in to the top of the head from a fan in the rechargeable battery pack strapped to the waist. It keeps the user fairly cool. Hearing protection is integral attached to the sides of the hat. Very effective and comfortable. They flip up if not needed. The face plate is polycarbonate and gives great visibility. It too flips up if required. It does not steam up even when you get sweaty.The breathing protection doesn't squeeze the face or touch it at all.
Another benefit is that particles of grinding dust or crap do not end up in the hair or stuck to the skin. And the hat will save your head from bumping, always a good thing. It is a little larger than the other outfit, but a lot easier to keep on (straps don't get tangled etc.)
The hood and air tube can be removed if working on something noisy but not dust generating (vacuuming?)
It does cost a lot more, about $220, but I could work in this for 3-4 hours at a time, for a couple of sessions per day. I feel safer and more comfortable and less reluctant to start work.

Buy your good woman good safety gear and you'll get more work out of her!

This sporting life

2008-06-09T23:25:00.004-04:00

From the writing of Tim Davis comes this quote:

Sport is a pantomime of war, and even during peacetime, we beg its stresses back into our lives. Buying mortgages in the padded cell of Western consumer culture has turned us all into what I call horrorists. Terrorists enact violence on the lives of others; horrorists fill their own lives with ritualized violence: slasher films, roller coasters, video games, 24-hour news, sport.

I threw away my television 15 years ago...too much of everything except thinking: sport pretending to be significant; advertising copy purporting to be news; lies; mind control; insanity; compelling, crappy dramas; bad acting; worse acting; and horror.

One major horror is the feeling after watching a movie/show that your anchor has come adrift - you have taken in a different way of thinking about something, and it's wrong or corrupt. A siren call, a temptation. It's like getting a worm in the ear. It's too much for the immune system to take. I don't watch TV and I am selective about films because I don't trust myself.

I stopped taking part in competitive sports about the same time. I was sailing a dinghy across a lake when a slightly larger sailing boat was approaching on a collision course. Technically he was the give-way boat, however a woman's enraged voice shouted: "Fuck off we're racing!" Although they didn't recognize me, these were people I worked with. I thought about the times that I had been in a sporting event and played really hard to win. "Not pretty," was my conclusion.

There are plenty of other things to do with my time. Some of them give me hope I can be a better person.

Does it matter whether you hate your . . . self?
At least Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music...

Robinson Jeffers

Sufficiently advanced technology 2

2008-06-01T13:13:00.013-04:00

I am impressed with the advances in relatively cheap cameras, the software to use and manipulate images and the ease with which a total noob like me can make pictures that are really quite pleasing.

I asked someone recently, "What is left for the professional photographer to do?"

The story goes like this: when I was young (about 100 years ago) most families owned cameras and would take "snaps". There was then the process of taking the sealed film container to the "chemist's" for processing and printing (for some reason, many pharmacists seemed to do photographic processing, probably to do with inhaling dangerous chemicals.) Then one waited, singing: "Someday my prints will come!"* The pictures were good quality although expensive. There were also camera shops where you could get more expensive processing and better film, if you were interested. When colour film and processing came along, the price increase was so large that many people resisted the change for a surprisingly long time.

There were many professional photographers. From the guys who would stand around at seaside resorts taking quick shots of passing holidaymakers, to the wedding album specialists, all the way to the professional photographic artists. There must have been many, many corner store-type processing labs and darkrooms. Mostly this was because the equipment was expensive and the training to use it properly was not that easy. If you were a serious enthusiast (like my forgettable first husband), you could buy the tanks, solutions, washing lines, enlargers etc. and do a reasonable job, but it took a long time to get good at it and it was tedious. Not for people like me who are into instant gratification.

When I was a teenager there came the mail-order photo "lab" - you sent your film away, and in 2-3 weeks colour prints came back and, they gave you a free replacement film! This impressed so many people so much that they didn't notice that the processing quality was low, the printing was poor and the results pretty awful. What mattered was that it was cheap, half the price of the alternative. 35 years later the pictures have turned a funny orangey colour, when 60 year-old black and white shots are unchanged. The processing and printing was largely automatic and centralized - the equipment was hugely expensive.

The corner store labs died. Some photographic stores went upscale, most closed down. When automatic processing machines became cheaper, some stores bought them and continued working, however the hyper-marchés (big box stores) now built photo labs in their premises. There was still residual send-away processing from small shops in small towns, but the war of technology had reached the clipper-ship of film: I take my film to a person who inserts it in a machine and a few minutes later out come the prints. My prints will come a lot faster these days...ahem.*

The professional photographers were now the wedding and portrait guys, news photographers, and the artists. Considerable training was still required to guarantee results - you had to capture the shot right there and know that it would work.

Then came digital cameras. Film has largely died. Most people have moved to using lightweight, forgiving and cheap cameras, putting the pictures on a computer and printing them only if really needed. The machines are doing the work now. It takes next to no knowledge or training to understand how to use one, especially in the context where many people have some computer access. And you see the results immediately. If it doesn't work, you do it again. A gifted amateur can do a very decent job of taking wedding photos or portraits. A professional will do better, but not so much that one is actually needed. The barrier to entry in this field is much lower. I suspect that most of this kind of photographer had better have a second source of income.

News photographers are probably the next to feel the pinch. When the camera-phone becomes ubiquitous, the price paid for that unique shot is going to be lower, especially when the shot can be cleaned up using software. Completely apart from the threat that comes from decline of print media.

Most artists have probably always struggled. The technology may lower the bar to the actual making of images and software manipulation does make it a lot easier to implement a vision, but the vision is still unique. We will get many more gifted photographic artists as a result. Competition will make it harder for anyone to become a full-time artist, but the ones that make it will probably be better.

Update - Some interesting photographic artists (no particular order):

* Stolen joke alert!

R.I.P. Jake Thackray

2008-05-30T13:13:00.006-04:00

Sad to say he came to a sorry end. I used to go and see this guy when I was a kid. Wonderful dry black humour. I think he translated this song himself.

Also some of my friends think this one is misogynistic. Too bad; it is hilarious, and we should all be prepared to examine ourselves...

Putting your heart into it

2008-05-30T10:16:00.006-04:00

It's been said that Life is like a sewer; you largely get out of it what you put into it. However you can be seriously messed up by other people.

There was a time, long ago, when I participated in a big way on Usenet newsgroups - only to be driven out by the volume of spam, trolls and flaming nasties. This happens. The teenage males (of all ages and several sexes) that do this kind of thing are getting their jollies by the net equivalent of graffitti and muggings.

Now there's the world of blogs. Nasty things happen to, basically, good people; Kathy Sierra is the one that springs to mind. Threatening such a fine human being is wrong, and deeply stupid.

Then we have stuff like this dumb-as-a-post attack on the credibility of Jeff Attwood.

I may disagree with some things Jeff writes but he's always worth reading. It's thought-provoking stuff. Only very occasionally MEGO. Judging by his writing, he's a smart, thoughtful person with opinions on a variety of subjects. I like the phrase strong opinions, weakly held. Generalists are to be encouraged in this world of narrow-minded specialists.

I do admire his courage in exposing himself to criticism. That's what happens to popular blogs. I don't care if he's right or wrong, I can judge that for myself. What matters is that he has something to say. I do care when carping and non-constructive criticism try to discourage genuine debate.

The basis of the attack seemed to be that "someone was wrong on the Internet", and that Jeff had said that he didn't think that learning the C language was necessary. In my opinion it actually doesn't matter if one "learns C" or not. Since I graduated in 1980 I have never "learned" a programming language systematically - it's all been learning by doing and learning by example then discovering the more esoteric stuff. Most of my collection of several hundred books about programming have only been partly read by me. Sometimes skimmed through, sometimes dropped after 100 pages.

(And, incidentally, when did the freaking programming books get to be 700-900 pages instead of a couple of hundred? About 5-10 years ago. My bookshelves are groaning with paper...switching to a tablet device and electronic books might work...it's showing promise so far. Anyhoo, authors are too ready to write immense tomes which really should be a long technical article or blogpost. Where the heck are the editors? I have been buying used books for a while now and encourage others to do the same (ABE books can get almost anything) - in the hope that in some small way it discourages the longer format - silly, I know. A small book giving the essentials backed up with a website containing the long examples and downloadable stuff would be so much better.)

It is arguable that I am a better maintenance programmer because I do not study a language deeply before working in it. This is now called "refactoring" and has become respectable again. I can certainly grok code as fast or faster than anyone I know. I think that I can pick up at least a superficial grasp of new tools, languages and techniques quickly because I am not plugged deeply into the massive amount of library code that most languages develop over time. At least enough to know whether I want to go further. That is not to say that it isn't painful sometimes (I have had some struggles especially with the more organic mutations of, say, ActionScript. I mean why does it have to have four ways of doing the same thing? lol, it's almost as if it was a human language!)

There is a role for the generic "programmer" as a smart person with an idea, or who is open to the ideas of others, or even more importantly, finds an idea and popularizes it.

Programming is ultimately about communication and ideas, isn't it? We are communicating with the machine and to those that follow us. And most great programmers are not sheep who just follow one path. They are usually people who have multiple other interests - such as gaming, sailing, music, mathematics, physics, psychology, art, athletics - and as such, real people bring insight into the largely hermetic world of the coder.

I have lived in the world of software long enough to know lame when I see it. And the self-declared iconoclast who derides the credibility of someone who puts his heart into his writing... well, get over it fella. You can earn your own credibility with your own work. Life is not a zero-sum game.

Total Perspective Vortex

2008-05-19T04:17:00.006-04:00

In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams uses the Total Perspective Vortex as a impossible plot device*. Well, here's one for free and here's one you can buy.
And here's another one which is apparently a free download:

* (Stolen joke alert!) Actually not impossible, just very, very improbable.

Hanami

2008-05-18T11:04:00.008-04:00

Get the picnic hamper out!Ottawa has the most beautiful plantation of ornamental cherry blossoms in an almost neglected corner: adjacent to the Lincoln Fields bus transit station. It is a repeated surprise that, every year, we are the only people to have a hanami picnic in that location. Occasional Japanese stop by, smile and take a picture, but no other parties under the blossoms. We are surprised that the trees are not officially celebrated as they are in other places.

This year we took our picnic lunch there when the weather was perfect; warm and sunny but with a strong wind from an approaching cold front (a storm came later in the day). Petals were falling like a pink blizzard. Cardinals and red-wing blackbirds singing amongst the branches. Incredible.

This was taken at Bonnie's funeral home at the end of my street, not on the picnic!

Update: 2009-04-24 Bonnie has just had this tree pollarded. It will die. Damn her.

Memorable lines

2008-05-17T10:27:00.004-04:00

On American Idol: "The Eurovision Song Contest comes to the Americas"

"Entertain me when I'm drunk, educate me when I'm sober."

"Panic is what happens when you fall off the cliff of procrastination."

"Code control is what distinguishes men from beasts."

Book title: "The Constant Shopper"

"Any sufficiently advanced programmer... will use the shell."

"Bash is your friend."

"If you don't believe in compromise, you'll always be naive."

"Ideologues are naive by definition: 'You're either for me or against me'. The algorithm is simple: if one disagrees then one is defined as unenlightened or evil. If one resists enlightenment then one must be evil."

"Cats don't have owners, they have staff."

Cracker county welcomes careful boaters

2008-05-11T13:53:00.012-04:00

There's merit in living in a small town, apart from the clean air, the quiet environment, the scenery, and the friendly folks...it's cheap, for one thing. My property taxes are a stunning $1200 per year. The property we live in cost us very little to buy* - the price of a down payment on a mortgage in the big city (as if anyone ever does such a radical thing these days as put money down on a house).

For a boater of limited means, one could close such a property and go sailing and it wouldn't cost too much to keep it going. Someone to cut the grass in summer and shovel snow off the driveway in winter does not cost much in a place where people will do casual labour for $8 an hour and a case of beer...

After our 6-month trips to Florida by boat (97-99) it would have been nice to return to a cottage like this instead of selling most of our furniture, putting our remaining stuff in storage and bunking up in my mother's place when we returned.

Another rather endearing thing about the town is that it is so white bread. This has disadvantages (minor for us: we will never fit in, our ancestors weren't born here**; major for visible minorities who are given a hard time, including the nice Sikh family who run the local gas station) but it also has advantages. As a foodie, I can pompously evangelize in the local supermarket. Mick's Value Mart is at the end of a long distribution chain, with (presumably) a computerized allotment of various foods that get shipped to them. This has hilarious results: the store gets all this funny fresh produce shipped from the big city and then it sits around until they throw it out.

No more; as soon as the avocados are thrown into the "99 cents a bag bin" we score big time. They have just reached that perfect state of ripeness to be eaten and 5 for a dollar is a good price compared to $1.49 each on the normal shelf.***

The store has a lot of minimum wage ($8 per hour) cashiers. The checkout is the place for interesting conversations: "What is this?" they ask, desperately searching for the item on the computerized pictorial list of produce.

"Celeriac", "Raddichio", "Anise", "Mango", "Avocado", we breezily answer, "Product code 4538."

The smarter ones then sometimes add: "How do you cook it?" Clearly it's vegetable matter and has to be boiled to buggery to make it edible. A couple of times, I have given a recipe and had feedback: "My friends were impressed with that mango I made!" one said recently. "It goes great with beer!" I agreed.

On the other hand, the Jamaican lady and I who buy the "unusual" produce probably should hope that the locals remain in ignorance; if the demand goes up, so will the cost to us.

Another minor disadvantage is that a depressed town is, well, depressing. More than half of the population are fairly genteel retired people. The smart folk have mostly moved away. When the factories keep closing, the already marginalized part of population gets poorer. When the cable TV is cut off or they can't afford to run their air conditioners, on a summer night obese people sit around on their front porch drinking beer and swearing at their many snot-faced kids. It's a cheery scene, punctuated by the occasional outbreak of even louder swearing as families come into conflict with one another.

To an outsider, this is all totally harmless - we are invisible. The only people that the local halfwits are interested in are other halfwits. We have come to affectionately term this place as "F#ckwit County" in their honour.

I may sound like I'm laughing at them in my elitist way, but I recognize the seriousness of the situation for them and the community at large. Fewer jobs, less money and everyone suffers. However someone is doing well: the lottery machines in the local convenience stores, the supermarket and (what are they thinking?) the pharmacy are rarely silent. The beer store and liquor store do a roaring trade. Smuggling across the border to/from the US increases: people, alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, guns.

There are many houses for rent in this town for $500-$600 per month. They are not bad places to live either. That's all the market will bear.

If you want to feel a frisson of pure horror, imagine being a teenager in a town like this...

* House: 600 square feet(55 m²) on a 75x120 foot lot (23x37m) - for a boater this is huge! I used to lie in bed at night and reach up with my hand to touch...nothing - "What will we do with all this space?" $50,000 to $100,000.

** The United Empire Loyalists settled this place at the end of the 1700's when they were ethnically-cleansed or politically persecuted in the United States. Wagon trains of refugees marching North through Winter to their new promised land. Their descendants are still here. Technically half of North Carolina still belongs to some of these families, if you follow the current Cuban exiles' logic.

*** I refuse to pay $1.49 for a mango or avocado. The very idea! They grow on trees, you know!

Update: OK, as a concession to the kindly folks that undeniably exist in the majority round here, we'll re-title this item from "Halfwit county..." to "Cracker county..."

Penis enlargement rears its ugly head again

2008-05-05T22:24:00.011-04:00

A little while ago, I was convinced that the amount of penis enlargement spam was dropping off. No more. It was me, after all. No appreciable diminution since then. Perhaps even a little swelling.

"You woman will surely appreciate a larger love cannon!" comes the claim. Ow...no. My "love cannon*" is already more than...ahem.

Today the level of spam is steady, and still about 50% P.E. offers, 10% misc. pharmaceuticals (most of which are for Viagra-type effects so that probably counts as a variety of P.E. offer), although deals on various fabulous timepieces is now up to about 40%...with a few odd handbags, bank loans and gambling opportunities thrown in.

However there are 2 new entrants: about once every 3 days an email that consisting of all ????s (presumably in a non-Roman alphabet; by all accounts it's probably "The Dalai Lama is insufferable, insanitary splittist person") and several offers to sell me a "Bacheelor/ MasteerMBA/ Doctoraate" (sic) diploma.

Their claim is probably true though: "No test, no class." Precisely. Couldn't have said it better meself.

And then there's the merely peculiar: "HIII, auntyy sueee and uncle aaarrrttt..." writes brandy lawrence. Hmm - Perhaps Art's the one who needs the bigger equipment. Art? Who ever you are, I got a great offer for you...

* or should I say, the "love cannon" that I use...

Sufficiently advanced technology

2008-05-02T20:42:00.008-04:00

Borrowed the Don's camera to take pictures in the back yard. Crocuses, crocuses and more crocuses (with bee). It not only took great shots but the darn thing puts the pictures' meta-data all rolled into the jpg format. More information than I can shake a stick at anyhow. Isn't technology wonderful? No more working out "Well that must have been the Thursday before Easter..." or burning a digital date on the "film". Next thing you know they're going to have GPS co-ordinates* as well.

Probably already have...to quote Ian Dury "There 'en 'alf bin some clever bastards!"

Only a few years ago you would have needed huge amounts of money, time and an assistant to carry all the gear to get shots like that. Not to mention taking the "film" down to the pharmacy (chemist's) and singing that old, old song:

"Someday my prints will come!"**

Poor old thing, I think it's magic. We're standing on the toes of giants.**

* Don't tell me. I'm roughly 45N 75W...the boat's in the barn and the GPS is firmly turned off...
** Stolen joke alert!

Update:
Geotagging photos

The Incredible Vagueness of Being Microsoft

2008-04-11T20:13:00.004-04:00

Once more we venture into another rant about MS products. This time, not Vista, which I have so far managed to avoid, but MS Office 2007*.

I received a new machine at work, fair dinkum, quad core 2.4 Ghz 3 GB machine. All is wonderful 'cept I had to re-install all me apps, but it gave me a chance to clean up my desktop and bookmarks and update a bunch of stuff so that was OK. However, the pre-installed Office "package" is really a lame chihuahua when I was used to a greyhound.

Vague Windows I call 'em. These kind of ghostly soft-edged pastelly boxes with Outlook, Office, Excel etc. inside. They do not inherit the desktop theme from the OS! Why not, you b*stards! Isn't that the rule of UI, do what the user wants and has come to expect? At my advanced age (100 at least), I do not want to be pleasantly surprised by your UI designers hoopy new ideas. They are really bad for the upgrading user, and I haven't a hope of explaining it to my non-computer literate folks.

I have at least dual 21" monitors and I often have 20+ windows open at the same time so your app is not the only focus of my attention, even when I'm typing in it. It is constantly annoying to be unable to distinguish the border of the window and to accidentally click on the wrong thing. Aack! I did try changing the office theme, and it went from vague grey to pastelly blue to a kind of washed out black. Sigh. I'm surprised the freaking things don't come with doilies and antimacassars. Design can be a lovely thing when done well, when done badly it's worse than no design (or the old design anyway).

And don't even get me started about the "ribbon" thing and moving familiar landmarks and tools of the expert Word user to new and unexpected places.

I truly think this UI is an abomination. Open Office for me, I think.

* Pay no attention, I'm taking antibiotics and feel horrid.

A fella writes...about dog by-products

2008-04-11T20:03:00.003-04:00

In mild hysteria here in the frozen wastes, the white stuff is melting...Don received this on one of his boating forums in response to someone mentioning that the first bikini siting would be a sign of Spring:

...But,truth be told,the bikini is only the
first sign of Summer, not Spring. Around here, it is common
knowledge that the only real sign of Spring,which I define as the
moment no further snow will fall,is when the soft warm winds carry
with them the not altogether pleasent ordour of.......dog shit.Yup,
that's right folks, the lowly dog poop finally being released from
decades(in doggy years) of its' snow and ice prison. Like the
Siberian wooly mammoth, these un-collected artifacts from mans' best
friend begin to rise from their frozen lairs like blackheads on a
teenagers face.Tickled by the ever warmer rays of the sun, the
microbes and bacteria various,which had once cuddled up close to the
turd for warmth, begin to eat their way through this impressive
buffet of un-used doggy nutrients.Although I doubt these microscopic
creatures have ever eaten a bowel of genuine Texan 911 chili sauce,
you would never know it judging by the thunderous flatulance
festival produced,en masse, by thses critters.Ah yes.....many has
been the warm Spring day when I have silenced my inner voices,pushed
the beer bottle away and listened to these rude expulsions
emminating from orifices most tiny.A veritable miny sphinctoral
orchestra(in D maj,for the music fans amongst us),apparently without
a conductor and whose symphony pollutes the very air we breath.
That is when I willingly open another beer,tilt my head back,stare
into the sun,momentarily go blind and raise a toast to Mother
Nature, the giver and taker of all things living and say," Thanks
Mom!"

Sincerely,

Peter "Bat Ears" Lenihan, busy with interior finish details and
looking forward to the bright splash of eye focusing summer spandex
colours disguised as bikinis.........

Movie review: Compare Harold and Kumar go to White Castle with Bachelor Party

2008-04-11T17:33:00.010-04:00

For inexplicable reasons, I recently watched these two movies almost one after the other.

"Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle" is definitely aimed at immature teenage boys, so I fit right in to their market demographic. However I found it hilarious. Well worth watching for a bit of a laff. A couple of scenes I classify as IWM¹ funny. Kind of Cheech and Chong for the current crowd of wannabe drug-swilling hetero nerds. Mostly formulaic and predictable (except for the appearance of Neil Patrick Harris as a degenerate pervert called "Neil Patrick Harris", and the controversial use of the "goto" instruction²) but it struck me that this film illustrates the current state of censorship (perhaps self-censorship) of Hollywood. Lots of references to violence, soft drugs, and "strong language", but very little nudity (a few bosom flashes only) or serious sexual references. Acting was strong, scripting pretty good and the plot, FWIW held together. Production is actually pretty good.

I contrast H&K with "Bachelor Party", the 1984 film that was one of the first big-screen appearances by Tom Hanks. In this movie, pretty well aimed at the same age group of teens, there is a lot more nudity, sexual situations, orgies, S&M, bestiality, hard drug use (admittedly mostly by a donkey) and depictions of prostitutes³. The acting (apart from Hanks) varies from bad to seriously bad (his leading lady appears to be made from some kind of sap wood); the first half is more or less unwatchable. You won't lose anything by skipping to the middle. I would guess it was a very low budget film at the time.

Perhaps I should have watched "Cheech and Chong" alongside H&K, but I think we are can say from this experiment that teen movies have cleaned themselves up as far as sex is concerned. Disappointing, really. The last part of BP is kinda fun.

One constant between 1984 and today is the design and structure of North American school buses. How can it be that these are the only vehicles that remain unchanged in 25 years?

¹ IWM: I Wet Myself
² Sorry, but I do make programs for a living & don't get out much
³ This is therefore literally "pornographic", pedant.

The Post-Modern 7 Dwarfs*

2008-04-11T12:08:00.010-04:00

I wrote this about 15 years ago to cheer up an acquaintance. When I asked him how he was he would always respond "Crappy!" When he was obviously worse I sent him this...

How are you Steve?

I'm not well right now. I feel like the post-modern* 7 dwarfs:

Crappy,
Lousy,
Smelly,
Dirty,
Nasty,
Horny and
Richard Branson

(Also rans: Filthy, Scummy, Itchy, Rummy, Scratchy, Huggy, and HRH Prince Charles.)

* or perhaps that should be pre- post-modern neo-colonial brutalist, I'm not much aware of architectural movements.

Dealing with seasickness

2008-04-03T21:06:00.009-04:00

I have done a lot of small boat sailing in my life. I love it, yet I get very seasick. I am often asked how I deal with it, so here is what works for me.

The knowledge that you will get seasick can be daunting. You may already know if you are susceptible to seasickness; if you got car-sick as a kid or if you find it nauseating to read a book on a bus or in a car, you will probably get seasick in a small boat. For everyone else, there will probably be times that you get seasick. There are a few robust individuals who appear immune, but even Don has been known to spew in the cockpit (admittedly immediately after chugging an entire can of soda pop).

Preparation: before the trip
Do not eat a hearty, rich, fatty meal before a voyage. Not even the night before. The stereotypical sailor's meal of pizza and beer is exactly the kind of thing that will ensure a "Roman incident". Have a light meal of some bread and fruit. Drink water or watered fruit juice.

Do not drink alcohol at all before or during a trip. After you have the hook down, fine. Same for any other recreational drugs. You want your head clear and your balance to be as normal as possible.

Get lots of sleep. It's a very busy time provisioning, loading, doing last minute repairs, weather routing, chart planning and so on. Try to build up a "sleep surplus" - even if you are not seasick it will help out on those first night watches as you get used to life at sea.

Prevention is way easier
There is a theory that explains seasickness thus: your brain detects signals from your ears (balance) and eyes that disagree and thinks that you have been poisoned, thereby triggering a vomiting reflex to remove the toxic substance that it thinks you have eaten. Whether this is so I don't know. However, it is certain that seasickness is the cause of a lot of anxiety and unhappy crew members. For some reason, in my experience, women are more susceptible than men.

Take your medication for seasickness well before you start sailing. Usually two hours before. Follow the directions. It is a lot easier to stop seasickness before it starts than to interrupt it once it has got hold, in my experience.

Types of medication:
Dramamine - available as pills, liquid and suppositories, branded as Gravol in North America, this is quite good, although it does make me a bit sleepy.
Scopalamine - this is available as Transderm Scop, the famous transdermal patch that has helped a lot of sufferers. It is also available as Scopace, which is in pill form. I have found it quite effective, although the side effects of extremely dry mouth and weird giddyness are disturbing. It is a very strong drug and smaller people (especially women) report many weird psychological effects. The 3-day patches do stick well but in a very warm climate (where you sweat even behind the ears) they may come off.
Meclizine - branded as Bonine/Antivert, in the form of pills. Didn't help me much but it may help you. It is said to have fewer side effects.
Cinnarizine - branded as Stugeron these pills are very effective for me. Unfortunately they are not sold in U.S. You can get them in Europe and Canada.

Other remedies:
Chewing very hard. Funnily enough, although I am not an alternative remedy kind of person, I do find chewing ginger helps. I am not sure if this is because of the strong flavour or the chewing action, or because it has some drug-like action. I find that chewing beef jerky or anything really salty also helps. I have not tried chewing gum. The very strongly flavoured bright red salted semi-dry ginger slices sold in Chinese food shops are very good. Or Tamarind. I've been addicted since childhood.

Bracelets - some people swear by the elasticated bracelets with so called "accupressure" plastic knobs on that press into the the tendons on the inside of the wrist. I think "Sea Bands" was the brand name. Hey, I wore them, and a scopolamine patch, and chewed ginger, and didn't get seasick so they obviously work...

Aromatherapy - on occasion a strong whiff of a pleasant perfume or essential oil has appeared to avert the start of seasickness. I keep a few vials of the stuff around. It worked one time for me and not another time. Although I'm sceptical, it can't hurt.

During the trip
If the weather is calm, many folk do not get seasick. However the long gentle swells that come from a distant storm are actually worse for me than more violent waves. For example, I was fine over the course of many hours with the 3 metre waves we encountered on Lake Ontario probably because they were close together. A long 2 metre swell in the Atlantic made me feel sick within an hour.

Avoid leaning down below, or being out of sight of the horizon unless you are lying down. Try to keep in a fresh flow of air. Get something to do, like navigating or steering the boat. Sit on deck in the wind and look at the horizon (fasten your safety harness to the boat. You are wearing your safety harness above deck, aren't you?) Avoid strong greasy smells (like lasagna cooking on the stove, or diesel fumes). Try to avoid listening to other people puking as this can set you off as well.

Once I start to get seasick, the first signs for me are a headache and mild nausea. Then immediately before the first vomiting attack, a rush of saliva in the mouth. You must get to the rail or over something impervious to fluid or you will be wiping up puke from the carpet. If you make someone else do it you will not be popular. (Fortunately no serious cruising boats have carpeting.)

If you are like me, you will vomit a number of times until you have emptied your stomach. Then you will vomit some more. And more. For me it's every 10-20 minutes. It is exhausting, but do not give up, try to serve your watches. The danger here is of dehydration. Once my stomach is empty, I carry around a bottle of water and a large cup. The cup is for vomiting into (nothing much left inside so it is big enough) the bottle is for taking a few swigs whenever I can bring myself to. With practice you can almost work normally for 19 minutes out of 20. Not pleasant (for others either), but it will pass.

The seasickness stops in one of two ways, for me. Either I get my "sea legs" and it just stops (after about 2-3 days), or I get tired and dehydrated and collapse into a whiny, incapable, self-pitying mound of misery and lie down in a corner to die. Warn the other crew members that this is to be expected, tell them to bring you a cup of water once in a while (every couple of hours) and perhaps a slice of fruit to suck on. You will probably reject their offerings with hideous moans and curses. If they are really good friends tell them to bring you anti-nausea medication in the form of suppositories and get them to make sure you use it.

Keep taking your medication even if you are constantly vomiting. Pills or suppositories.

After the trip
You will live. You will at some point want to die, and this will continue, but you will be OK if you are sensible and the crew help you. It is like magic; as soon as you sail into calmer waters or as soon as you get off the boat you will be cured! You will feel fragile but relieved to be alive. Drink plenty of fluid and get some sleep - unless you have just made Port of Spain and have an appointment with Carnival!

H. Pylori and why it's important

2008-04-03T18:14:00.010-04:00

All my life, well, since I was a teenager, I had had mild acid reflux "indigestion" especially after eating cooked plum tomatoes, and food "allergies" to shellfish (mussels, oysters, clams, etc). I lived with it without much thought. If I accidentally ate a scallop in a restaurant I would have a horrible bout of vomiting a few hours later, silly me.

In 2003, after Don had been living with me for 10 years, he got a serious ulcer. He became very ill from blood loss. Our doctor put him on some kind of acid reduction pills and told him to stop eating spicy food and take iron supplements. "Oh the stress of our life is making him sick," we thought. Actually we, and she, were wrong.

When Don got ulcers again a few months later (he recognized the symptoms before he got very ill) we did some research. We found that ulcers are caused by a bacterium (Helicobacter pylori), which can also cause cancer of the stomach and esophagus. It is likely transmitted by water or oral-oral contact, however it is not very contagious. There is a simple breath test for the infection.

Our doctor took a lot of persuasion; she was a technophobe and considered anything we read "on the Internet" to be akin to reading a supermarket tabloid. Don went to see her, armed with a lot of serious references, and she was very surprised. When he went back for the next appointment she had read up on it and, knew everything there was to know :-)

Don was sent to a gastrenterologist who put him on a course of simple antibiotics to kill the H.Pylori, but his post test still showed positive. I went along to his next appointment and suggested that I might be reinfecting him. That doctor admitted the possibility, but also said the organism was hard to kill - it hides in the stomach lining. I was tested and found to be positive, so he put us both on the next level of treatment. This is the so-called triple-therapy: high doses of two different antibiotics and a drug to reduce stomach acid; in our case metronidazole, tetracyclin and pantoprazole, along with use of bismuth in the form of Pepto-Bismol.

I developed a lot of sympathy for people who are on serious long-term drug therapies. These pills had to be taken in a strict schedule, every two hours starting two hours before breakfast (!) and washed down with generous doses of Pepto-Bismol. I came to associate the wintergreen taste of "Pepto-Dismal" with the nausea caused by tetracycline. It was one of the hardest two weeks of my life, although it sounds trivial: "keep taking the tablets." Constant nausea, lowered mental function - I could barely work, even from home. Yuck.

However, a month later we were tested again. We were apprehensive; the GI guy had made the point that there was a third line of attack against H. Pylori - but he suggested that we should sincerely hope that we didn't have to have that. Fortunately we were both negative.

The result is good news; Don has had no more ulcers and I have had no indigestion since. I can eat shellfish again - although I don't see the point of eating tasteless bivalves that live in the sea filtering out any shit that happens to float by. Whether the reflux was caused by H.Pylori (probable) or by other organisms that were offed by the treatment (possible) I am not sure.

I was probably infected when living in Fiji as a child, over 40 years ago - this bacterium is very long-lived and much more common in the Third World. My mother was also positive, and also had reflux as long as she could remember. Fortunately she responded to the simple therapy.

So if anyone still has a doctor that thinks ulcers are a lifestyle disease, get yourself tested. Marshall and Warren are two Australian doctors who got the Nobel prize for medicine in 2005 for this discovery. It is also possible that if you experience constant reflux, chronic indigestion, or weird food "allergies" that change from one year to the next you have this potentially serious infection.

In Ontario the simple blood test for antibodies is free to residents, however the more definite urea breath test costs about $60. It's required after the therapy because the antibodies persist for a long time giving false positives.

BS bingo

2008-02-24T16:08:00.009-05:00

One way to occupy one's mind during sales/marketing bun-fights (apart from open criticism and ruthless mockery à la Heather Mallick) is to keep track of the surreal forms of language used. Many of these phrases have a proud provenance in management stories from airline magazines way back to the '90's:

Paradigm shift (1962)
Low-hanging fruit
Back to base
Crossing the chasm (1991)
Reorient internally
Commitment to be visible in the market
Outwardly focussed
Abandon the status quo
Rebrand the company
Market relevant products
Be proactive
High impact events
High profile
Resonate with the customer
Leverage the brand
High touch, high value
Fly below the radar
Barely tapped the opportunity
Learn how to play in those markets
Lifecycle of customer
Load up model
We moved the boat a lot last year
Smart investments
Helping your customers buy you
Cover off the bases
Create excitement
Synergy
Touch the customer
Take it to the next level
Stay on the radar
Execute and trust the person next to you
Be counted
Top of mind
Care passionately about
The takeaway
Biting off more than we can chew
Focus on bigger market niches
Drive additional revenue

"C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre: c'est de la folie." Pierre Bosquet

Movie review: Lust caution

2008-02-23T20:10:00.011-05:00

This Ang Lee epic (aren't they all?) drama is well worth watching. It's also disturbing - a serious work about love, death, war, fascism, youthful idealism, and of what, depending upon your POV, it takes to make either a freedom fighter or a terrorist. An espionage drama with a gritty Grahame Greene feel to it.

The protagonist is Wong Chia Chi, played by the absolutely gorgeous and talented Tang Wei. She is the unwanted daughter of a rich man who has fled China. At school in Hong Kong at the end of the '30's, when China is torn by warring factions and the Japanese are very much the enemy, she falls in with a group of politically-minded students who form a patriotic drama group. She becomes the star of their show to provide support for the Chinese cause. Afterwards, realizing that they haven't actually done anything useful, the group of five, now friends, resolve to take action. They decide to assassinate an important collaborator, Yee (played by Tony Leung) who has arrived from the mainland. Since their target is well-protected, they invent a honey trap baited with Chia Chi, disguised as the neglected wife of a businessman, although she has no sexual experience.

Their efforts nearly succeed. Yee, middle-aged and with a boring wife, is intrigued by her youth and charm. However he returns to China before the group can take action, and the messy murder of a minor thug drives Chia Chi away from them.

A few years later with the Japanese and Kuomintang now in full murderous control of South China, members of the cell, discover Chia Chi living in poverty in Shanghai. They recruit her back to finish the job, supported by mysterious Chinese resistance agents now that Yee has become head of the secret police. The last half of the movie details her successful attempt to become Yee's mistress and her struggle to bring him to be murdered by the group. Needless to say, it does not end happily.

The mind and behaviour of the character Yee, is very disturbing. A powerful and ruthless killer, he is apparently completely amoral. He even knows that the collaborationist regime he supports is doomed. We are seeing corruption taking place as his civilized exterior is eroded by his lust for his work. His internal conflicts appear only when he is shown in the home with his rich, spoiled wife. When alone with Chia Chi he can give rein to his brutal nature. This includes some of the most violent but compelling sex scenes that I have seen in a serious movie. Most of them have been cut from most distributions. The reaction of the woman who is raped and tortured, and cannot flee because of her commitments is breathtaking - she hates it and yet she is consumed by it. In a horrible irony, her compliance actually changes her abuser; he comes to some form of love for her, although he is still a monster.

Another interesting characterization was that of the students; young, well-educated, idealistic, and with a sense of justice and righteousness on their side. They take to the life of a terrorist cell as a desperate measure to do something in an attempt to help their cause. This seems to me to be the real explanation for ideologically driven espionage and terrorism, from the Cambridge group in the '30's to the people who brought down the World Trade Center towers. Once people are caught in a web of ideology in their formative years it is easy to see how they can be used to do almost anything.

The incidental scenes of life in China in the 1939-1943 are also very striking: rich collaborators having polite tea and mahjong parties while the poor are brutalized by soldiers; destitute multitudes passing through security checkpoints and in breadlines; lost White Russians washed up in Shanghai working as prostitutes and rickshaw runners.

All told, a brilliant, serious work.

Pair programming: an experience

2008-02-14T02:22:00.006-05:00

As with many of the Agile techniques, pair programming may be counter-intuitive when you first hear about it. Having worked like this for about 6 months now, I think I can say that it can be very successful.

This particular experience has been productive, fun and a very effective way to transfer knowledge. I was, prior to this, a Java/JSP developer for a couple of years. I consider myself a professional programmer. My oppo, Derek, was a very experienced Flash designer/web programmer. Two totally different domains with practically no intersection.

Our mission was to pick up the pieces of the ASK Flash client apps (the previous incumbents having departed 3 and 12 months previously) and to develop the first of the oral reading training activities for students using the red5 media server for recording/playback.

These previous apps had been under development for about 5 years and in that time server-client traffic had become a bottleneck. The apps needed to hold the server's hand when they did anything. The Flash apps are pretty and intelligent and could do a lot more of the heavy lifting. So we also had to implement a new way for the apps to function in the system.

Working together, often at the same computer, I found that I learned a huge amount about Flash apps, and, of course the programming language AS2. I am now quite proficient. I am still a beginner at the design side of Flash, although I can follow what Derek does - this is truly an alien way of thinking for a text-based worker like me.

Derek for his part was not an object-oriented programmer before this, but is now a pretty fair coder.

Together we have made 3 major apps, now working on the 4th, each of them is better than the last in both design and code. It has been very effective for us to actually work at one desk for a lot of the time, especially when coding and building the logic of the apps. It's also been a lot of fun. This has been perhaps the only drawback - I've heard a manager grumble about "splitting us up", as if we were just being social - lol.

Interestingly, almost but not quite the same degree of collaboration can also be achieved remotely from our homes about 80 km apart, VPN'ing in to the company network. We use IM and Skype to talk and run local dev environments as well as Remote Desktop to our office machines.

One major consideration is code quality; we catch a lot more errors earlier than I would alone. Also I think that talking through the logic really makes it more robust.

Another advantage is that the two of us really understand the apps and code in considerable depth. I trust that Derek can make code changes, and I think he'd let me make mods to the Flash apps.

All considered, I'd definitely recommend pair programming in the case where two experienced developers can complement one another's skills.

Book review: The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton

2008-02-10T01:42:00.001-05:00

Definitely worth reading. I picked this book up last year to read on a long flight, and it kept me completely engaged. I re-read it again recently, and it still speaks to me, which is what I like in a book that I have spent money on buying new.

This book is a collection of 6 extended essays each called "Consolation for" a particular problem. The problems for which the author uses philosophy to give us consolation are: "Unpopularity", "Not having enough money", "Frustration", "Inadequacy", "A broken heart" and the rather generic "Difficulties". It's probably fair to say that every human over a certain age has encountered one or more of this group of obstacles (or the modern idea is to call them "issues", probably in an attempt to diminish their seriousness. Happy clappy crap, lol ).

As an attempt to make philosophy relevant to Everyman, this is a very readable, entertaining, informative and encouraging book. The approach is quite interesting; in each essay de Botton gives an account of a particular philosopher's life and work, and tries to encourage us to take comfort in our own lives.

There is a layered approach to the essays: presenting paintings and photos of the various subjects, landscapes, and people, together with lists of things to be considered on the various topics, lists of counterpoints, with biographical details, extensive quotations and commentaries. This is certainly makes the book interesting and gives a multi-media feel. Apparently it has been turned into a television series - "Philosophy: A guide to Happiness".

The first four essays are very effective. His accounts of Socrates (unpopularity, of course) and Epicurus (not having enough money) are fresh and thought provoking.
Frustration's consolation is illustrated by the life and thought (or mostly the death) of Seneca.
Inadequacy (including sexual, cultural and intellectual) is covered by a survey of the life and work of Michel de Montaigne.
Up to this point everything was going very well and I was fair entranced by the author's arguments.

Things started to fall apart somewhat when his consolation for a broken heart covered the life and work of Schopenhauer and the consolation for difficulties was the life of Nietzsche. The ideas of these two are perhaps more a reason for gloom than a consolation. Interesting though.

De Botton's explanation of Schopenhauer's ideas about the heart are a bit histrionic, in my opinion. I was not convinced at all about the reasons that people fall in love and may or may not be rejected, especially in the light of subsequent biological and psychological research or even my own life experiences. The idea that our subconscious is assessing everyone for fitness as a parent of potential children is surely not sufficient to explain the full range of human sexual response and the wide variety of misery that everyone may encounter when the course of true love runs over a cliff. Every person is different and we all have our hot spots, as it were, but it's not just about reproduction. The mind is the biggest sexual organ, after all; and for a wide range of non-reproducing potential shaggers (elders, same sex lovers, one-night stands and so on) there must be other reasons for attraction. Certainly there is some kind of imprinting that happens in childhood or youthful early sexual experience that appears to determine the kinds of people we find interesting.

The idea that the life of Nietzsche could console anyone for anything, is also bit of a stretch. The Nietzsche essay was, frankly, mealy mouthed. The fact that this fellow spent most of his life miserable and then made his own suffering into a kind of virtue is, well, sad, but it doesn't translate into making me (or anyone I would think) feel better about confronting difficulties. The idea that striving for something makes the achievement sweeter is worth pondering, and the journey can be the reward - especially if one never arrives. However, what about all the people who struggle without achievement, or those who give up in despair? Somewhat harsh to say that they are unworthy weaklings and that the struggle is worth it because it somehow makes one more of a human. At best it may be a totem to keep up the spirits, but is it a real consolation for an intelligent person? Where is the room for compassion, recovery or redemption? Or is it all "Arbeit macht frei"?

Conclusions and quotes:
Unpopularity: "The philosopher offered us a way out of two powerful delusions: that we should always or never listen to the dictates of public opinion" To follow his example, we will be best be rewarded if we strive instead to listen to the dictates of reason."

Not having enough money: "Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial."

Frustration: "What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears."

A broken heart: "We must, between periods of digging in the dark, endeavour always to transform our tears into knowledge."

Difficulties: "Not everything which makes us feel better is good for us. Not everything which hurts may be bad."

However, in spite of minor quibbles, this is a book worth reading, re-reading and, yes, buying new. Fancy that!

Tumblr

2008-02-07T21:08:00.003-05:00

Looking at Tumblr, which is like a cross between a blog and Twitter. We can embed a link or the entire thing in a web page FWIW:

Steel Junk rig schooner Pilger

2008-01-27T17:58:00.001-05:00

This file is hereby released into the public domain by its author, Don Taylor. This applies worldwide. Don Taylor grants anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

Avast behind!

Does a free market inevitably bring slavery?

2008-01-21T21:25:00.000-05:00

I came across some interesting writings recently. Julian Edney, a psychology professor in California has written a number of very interesting articles, collectively called Greed. They are very well-researched, calm, rational arguments against our present North American societal conditions.

A quotation from Greed III:

The free market system, which generates great wealth, is running on a clutter of bizarre contradictions. Our nation is touted as a nation of abundance, yet it is a nation in which scarcities are common, and man-made, because scarcity creates value. It is a nation united, and the country is cleft. Everybody benefits from America’s business, but the poor are paying the price of the success at the top. It is a nation founded on the notion of happiness, and anxiety abounds. A nation in which teamwork is urged and individual competition is urged. A nation which ships out surplus food, and has hungry people. It is a nation which touts itself as cultured and humane, in which ruthlessness and winning is openly prized. In a nation which claims to be given over to democracy, half the working population spends its days in business workplaces which are dreaded little dictatorships.

Compared with our bright founding papers, this is a foul outcome.

The greatest casualty is justice. The nation now runs less on justice than on wealth.

There are a couple of other parts to the essay. Greed Part I and Part II.

In my opinion these are important and worth reading.

Why people are interesting

2008-01-18T23:56:00.001-05:00

This list of quotes contained some thought-provoking ideas, including this:

"Someone walking down the street with absolutely no scars or calluses would look pretty odd. I suspect having a conversation with someone who'd never taken any emotional or mental damage would be even odder. The line between "experience" and "damage" is pretty thin."
-- Aliza, from the Open-Source Wish Project

Does anyone truly want to be completely healed?

XO laptop: first test

2008-01-15T20:30:00.001-05:00

This entry is being typed from the OLPC XO laptop that we just received - it's very nice. First impressions are very positive. Since it comes with no instructions, I decided to just fool around with it and see how far I got.

The interface and operation is quite natural, I like the keyboard a lot. It has positive feedback when you click a key, which is nicer than the Internet tablet-type machines I have where the keys are just screen images. The mouse pointer/buttons thing is slightly different from my other mousepads (which allow you to click by tapping on the mousepad, you are not forced to use the buttons) but that's OK. It will take a bit of time to get fast with it, but it is a real computer.

Booting up takes a little time, but a lot less than Windows. No surprise there.

The absolutely great things are the media handling programs.

"Record" camera/video/audio recording stuff just worked...really nice.

"Paint" does what you imagine it might. Maybe more...moving on...

"TamTamJam" The music creation program just made me giggle with delight at the point where I worked out how to put a loop on cricket noises. The animal noises are fantastic! All the instruments you can think of, plus many other sounds can be used with the keyboard to make music. I guess it can record sound also, but I was too busy making the fart sounds with the foghorn to get to that point. All the programming is visual; drag an element onto the screen then click to activate it. Play notes based on that sound on the keyboard (not being a musician I am a bit vague on the mapping of the qwerty keyboard to a clavier). Drag a loop onto the sound. The add in shortcut keys to cue the loop. Only complaint is that the speakers do not go up to 11. It's a tiny bit louder with headphones, but I guess we are not trying to destroy the hearing of the next generation.

"TamTamEdit" - I opened up the this, and it is clearly some kind of sound editing program, but I couldn't do much except play the recording that was there when I started. More study required.

"TamTamMini" is really, really fun. Simpler to user than the TamTamJam, it's for creating music, you set up a beat, then click on a matrix of images (or use keys) to make the appropriate sounds. Scrolling through the sounds on the grid gives some really great effects. More giggles.

There are some interesting programming applications:

The "TurtleArt" application is interesting it teaches programming, with a visual (or largely visual) language. The various operations are represented by coloured tiles, with name labels and value tags. For example: Forward, 100. You drag the tiles and they click together to make a visual representation of the program. You can modify the values. The program drives a little turtle around on the screen and it draws a trace. I've only played with it for 30 mins, but already I can make the turtle do tricks...hee,hee!

"Pippy" seems to be a Python programming development interface (I can hardly call it an IDE) that, well, runs Python. However there are a lot of examples given to illustrate most of the concepts, and they are simple and they work. This bears more study later on.

"Terminal" is exactly that, the Linux command line. Yay! I remember this stuff...long ago and far away...it has to be at least 6 years since I worked on Unix. Wonder if I have root permissions?

"Acoustic Tape Measure" - it looks like if you have 2 of these things they can tell how far apart they are. Well I don't have another...online the nearest guy seems to be 80kms away.

Perhaps it's been too long since I played on a computer. All serious stuff with documents and programs, building and testing. All on Windows :-( I guess this is what Fake Steve means by "a sense of childlike wonder." Chortle! I'm having fun!

How to find a mate

2008-01-13T21:41:00.002-05:00

Apropos of not much, I found this post about the 237 reasons people have sex on the Daily Irrelevant. 237? Is that all?

One comment mentioned that dating self-help guru David DeAngelo advises men to be annoying in order to attract women. Apparently nice guys and wussies don't rate. He's right about one thing though: a sense of humour is important. Unfortunately I don't think it can be taught by buying this guy's product. Although the YouTube samples are unexpectedly hilarious with some bizarre and suitably nerdish research-type psychologist showing graphs of menstrual cycles and lots of earnest lonely lads 'fessing that they're changed by the experience of shelling out $2500 for a 3-day course learning how to charm the birds from the trees.

A quote:

Recently, Men's Health interviewed hundreds of men, who while lying on their deathbeds, were surveyed about their biggest regrets in life. Some said "I wish I made more money." Some said "I wish I traveled more."

To my astonishment, but hardly a surprise, the number one regret that men face right before their final departure in life, is "I wish I had slept with more women."

Well, perhaps no surprise there, but the question of what kind of person would systematically poll dying men for their biggest regrets is not asked.

There was this creepy promise though:
Discover how to interpret anything a woman says as an indication of interest.
Er...hello? Did I misunderstand?

"Please give me 500 grams of sliced kielbasa."
"Oh, you just want it don't you, you horny little slut!"

Ahem...

Of course hope is what is being sold here and there's an almost infinite demand for that. Look at the cosmetics or hair care industries. Huge sales of shampoo to make one more attractive. It's a gold mine! Billions of dollars for the taking.

When I was a lot younger, during the late Paleolithic, there were huge sales in chemical attractants, from musk to pheromones. Guaranteed results, or your money back. (The question of who would declare himself a dating failure by sending the product back never seemed to arise.)

And there's more, of course. You can pay a mere $1200 to have yer DNA matched to find your perfect partner. A miracle of technology!

For $0*, I can tell you the secret to attracting a mate:

Be nice
Be cheeky
Be clever
Be playful
Be humourous
Be interesting
Be mildly disinterested

Or, disregarding all of this:

Be rich

I can't tell you how to be these things. All in the eyes of the beholder. And keeping that person interested in you is yet another complete set of books and DVDs.

Perhaps you should pay for a pick-up coach to tell you how to find a mate. Alternatively, buy some shampoo; the real stuff stinks**.

* and as usual you get what you pay for.
** Stolen joke alert!

Passing values between Flash AS2 and JSP/HTML

2008-01-12T05:51:00.000-05:00

We often use a Flash movie embedded in a JSP page to do something like make a nice dynamic report with media server features, for example.

To pass information to the Flash movie, there are several options:
1. Pass it in the movie load invocation: thing.swf?param1=value1 etc
2. Pick up the values you want from Javascript functions on the host page.
3. Collect the values you want from the server directly - send a request for xml data (for example) from the Flash movie, without reloading the page.

To pass information back out of the Flash movie:
Call a page Javascript function to set a value in the form
Send a post of data back to the server directly out of Flash.

(In preparation)

Book reviews: compare "The Da Vinci Code" with "Quicksilver"

2007-12-30T21:12:00.002-05:00

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown vs. Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson

Quicksilver:
Not recommended. This book was disappointing. All style and not enough substance. I was looking forward to something that would be informative or entertaining but it really dragged.

The idea is that in the late 1600's to early 1700's an imaginary individual called Daniel Waterhouse was involved indirectly and directly with all of the luminaries of the day; Cromwell, Charles II, various nobles, various proto-scientists of the Royal Society, or alchemists (Hooke, Boyle, Newton, Liebniz etc.) Of course, he lives in Cambridge with Newton, he assists Hooke with vivisection experiments and is somehow on the scene when anything vaguely significant or exciting happens in this time period. The Plague, Great Fire of London etc. etc. Plus, our hero founded MIT, as well as naming New York city. I mean, who writes this stuff?

An early cameo, which introduces Ben Franklin as a boy was, shall we say, a really obvious plot device...and this was page 8...a mysterious stranger meets a smarty-pants kid in Boston in 1713, the kid's called Ben...Oh, I thought...it's going to be Benjamin Franklin . Sadly, it was. One of those books that's grown out of the effluent of the creative writing courses so popular in the USA. "Imagine yourself meeting an important historical character..." Well, why not imagine meeting all of them? Sigh. At least with Ahab's Wife (Sena Jeter Naslund) which is of a similar vein, the writing was compelling.

The style of Quicksilver, is unfortunately sorely lacking an editor's lash. We're not really sure why it's called Quicksilver, except that various characters are trying to poison themselves with it (mercury). Kind of a shame it didn't work faster, really. The few passages that read quite eloquently are usually abruptly followed with a short paragraph of jarring drivel. In addition the writer persists in following an especially irritating spelling scheme which feigns the language of the period - but only about once in a hundred words - adding in something like "philosophickal" or "fabricks". Together with a lot of modern-sounding expressions and occasional fairly modern puns, it just doesn't ring true.

The plot is unconvincing. There is occasional excitement to be sure, albeit a gratuitous and long drawn out encounter with pirates (Blackbeard no less, none but the best for our hero!) but again, I was unmoved. By the time this 440 page martyrdom was half done, I was ready to give up. Who cares about this...but, gentle readers, I persisted. Shame, it got worse if anything.

There are a number of gruesome depictions of everyday life in the period. Crap everywhere, toothless rabble, grotesque punishments (assorted hangings, brandings, nose removal, heads on pikes etc.) but again, unconvincing. Even the walk-on parts for actresses and whores (about the only female speaking roles) didn't have any life to them. Not to mention the laughably ungraphic sex scene, about page 418/440, which basically means a long wait for very little hide-the-sausage.

Don't waste your time with this book. When I got to within 20 pages of the end and realized that I'd have to wade through the sequel (and, of course, the obligatory last book in the trilogy) to get to a resolution of the plot, I decided that I wasn't going to waste any more time or money on this.

The Da Vinci Code:
One star, is that the lowest I can give? Too much for this junk.

I know it's popular but it's crap folks. Pseudo-scientific claptrap with ancient conspiracies, romance and a gripping thriller theme.

I mean, grow up, y'all. While the plot is OK, if you like that kind of thing (ripped off though), the characters are really poorly-drawn, with motivations about as obvious as if they had signs hung around their necks:
"I'm the masterly, athletic, scholarly hunk from the good ol' USA who's going to sort out this den of foreign rogues and charlatans." I mean have you seen what a literary scholar looks like after getting a PhD and spending years in the stacks? Not credible.

As for the improbably gorgeous French tart oo talks like zees and was mysteriously traumatized by seeing her grandparents shagging in front of a bunch of party animals; does anyone seriously believe this? Doesn't anyone edit this stuff anymore? This is a teenage wet dream, surely.

The crippled but wealthy British nobleman who appears to be a friend but is really a villain...that has to be to stupidest comic book characterization that I've read in many years. Anyone who didn't see this one coming is an idiot.

It's just the kind of thing that grown up fans of Harry Potter will love, but it's a bodice ripper. The sex scenes are well done, and the villains are pretty compelling. However, don't waste several precious hours of your life reading this, when you could be walking the dog or emptying the cat litter box. Don't buy it for heaven's sake. If you must, borrow it from the library. You'll have to beat 40 housewives and pensioners to get it, fer sure.

Summary:
In summary, I think the Da Vinci Code is the better book, although it is crap. Dan Brown (and his editor) do a reasonable job of keeping the plot moving and you can't see the joins. Certainly it has more excitement, and cynical suspension of disbelief apart, is a much better read. At least it wasn't a struggle getting to the end, although I felt as guilty as if I had binged on a whole box of Turkish Delight. Quicksilver is a waste of time; should have been much more tightly edited. Stephenson has got some interesting turns of phrase here and there, but it doesn't work in the full-length novel form. Could do better.

Loyalty in the workplace

2007-12-23T13:53:00.000-05:00

I picked up a copy of some sheet music when I was a co-op student in IBM (1978, Havant U.K.)
These were of three old (1930's ) songs written for and about IBM. One of them here will give a taste. They were hilarious in the '70's, perhaps rather sad now, I think. Simpler days.

The idea that one would give up spare time to go and sing in front of a company rally is pretty funny. Wearing a company uniform? Hilarious. Aren't we all just wandering journeymen now? Well not exactly.

There is a lot of leverage in having a team that is loyal and in-harness so to speak. Very responsive to changes, willing, happy even. Most people will work like dogs if they are interested, engaged and have the respect of their peers. Even old farts like me will pull long days to get the job done, keep learning and try to be smart. And you do want your staff to be smart.

My observation, from working at IBM as a student in those long gone days (when that company prided itself on never having laid off a worker! lol) until now, is that the loyalty unit has got smaller and smaller. Sometimes to small companies, perhaps to teams, then to individuals. Obviously finally, to self. This subdividing of loyalty is not the most productive configuration. The power of one is, well, small.

There are some people, whom everyone respects, wants the respect of, and to whom people will be loyal. If you can hire and engage those folk, they will make it easier for other people to find reasons to work hard. They are not always the hierarchical team leads or ranking managers. They are not always the best designers or programmers. They are always smart. There's a light in their eyes when they get enthusiastic about something.

The rewards people get from their teams are simple. Respect. Sometimes it's just having someone you respect compliment you about something you've done. Sometimes it's being taken seriously when you want to discuss something. It's working alongside someone who can actually help you. Sometimes it's playing with a toy, or sharing a cool site or vid. It's about pleasure, sharing, joy and love .

We are exploiting the "belonging" slot in a person's mind. If we have to work, it is better than using goads! However it is exploitation at the end of the day, or manipulation at least. The question is perhaps, if the victims like it, is it wrong?

The test of a team is the reaction when the stress levels rise. When a team is stressed or has started to turn on itself (failures, layoffs etc.) there's often a mass-exit of the good people. The remaining people usually consist of the incompetent but politically savvy (can't find other jobs), and the competent but naive (don't know they should find other jobs), along with the usual group of turned-off and can't-be-arsed types who coast along regardless. The team binders' reaction is important. They can sometimes bring a team through a short crisis, even though the logical reaction would be for everyone to flee.

User Interface enormity...guess who?

2007-12-22T18:33:00.000-05:00

So, there I am at the office, with a mailbox in a work email account (on MS Exchange, feh) and an old friend sends me a cheery greeting. When I get home, I decide to reply to it and, instead of logging in to the VPN, Remote Desktop and all that jazz (which takes a couple of minutes to fire up and requires entry of the same password twice), I open up the POS grandly called "Microsoft Outlook Web Access". First mistake. Normally I only do this to look at incoming stuff and send quick replies, this time, I decided to compose a slightly longer reply.

'Swelp me guv'nor, I only took 5 minutes to reply, about 5 short paragraphs...how's the family... yak...yak...

I clicked the Send button. Second mistake.

What came back was the Web Access login screen. I floundered around a while, trying the back button, logged in again, (note it says "you replied to this mail..." on the original email from my friend). But my message was gone. Not in the Sent items, nor in the Drafts. Augh!

I was, and am outraged. Perhaps I've been working too hard or more likely my standards have been raised by using professional strength web applications. Losing the user's data in this way is unforgivable. I don't care if my session timed out, or if my administrator had put too short a timer on the app. I don't care if the note was just a personal "Hello there!" to a friend. They lost my effing data!

I will never use it again...Microsoft Outlook Web Access...and I will try to forward all my work email to a proper web app. Gmail or whatever...for example, if I click away from a Google compose mail form, I get a nice courteous dialog, saying:

"Are you sure you want to navigate away from this page? Your message has not been sent."

Now that's a real gent! Helpful, kind and giving me the opportunity to at least save my data.

Solstice celebrations

2007-12-22T12:25:00.001-05:00

The rural Ontario folk around me are preparing their environment for the winter holiday. Indeed the whole of North America, perhaps half the world, is nuts. Pretty lights, buying crap made in China to give to their loved ones, which will end in a landfill within the year. It's infuriating that the world's resources end up being wasted like this. My thinking would be to buy something long-lasting, if you must, or give money to a charity* on behalf of someone else.

When can we get back to the true meaning of the solstice celebrations? The dark is going to lessen bit by bit over the next few months. The season is going to get worse but there is hope for a return of Spring. Celebrate the fact that we're alive, have good friends and that we can love our fellow man (at least until his wife gets home)**

Happy secular humanist winter solstice. And something from a favorite blogger. 'Nuff said.

* How about this one.
** Stolen joke alert! First heard by me in an old Doors' song: The Soft Parade.

Silly Songs

2007-12-08T13:40:00.000-05:00

Parodies of song lyrics are a weakness of mine...pathetic really.

My Generation A tribute to the late '60's hit of the same name by The Who.

People want to put us d-down (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Just because we can't get around (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Things they say are awful c-c-cold (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Yeah, I didn't die before I got old (Talkin' 'bout my generation)

That was my generation That was my generation, baby

Why don't you all f-f-fade away (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
'Cos we can't hear what you all s-s-say (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
I'm not trying to cause a big s-s-sensation (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
I'm just talkin' 'bout my g-g-g-generation (Talkin' 'bout my generation)

That was my generation That was my generation, baby

Old stupid and fat
To the tune of Nina Simone's late '60's hit "Young, gifted and black":
_{(I considered using the line "Old, stupid and white" but fat scans even better than the original).}

To be old, stupid and fat,
Oh what a lovely precious dream
To be old, stupid and fat,
Open your heart to what I mean

In the whole world you know
There are billions of silly farts,
Who are old, stupid and fat,
And thats a fact!

Old, stupid and fat,
We must begin to tell our young
Theres a world waiting for you
This is a quest thats just begun

When you feel really low
Yeah, theres a great truth you should know
When you're old, stupid and fat,
Your souls intact

Old, stupid and fat,
How I long to know the truth
There are times when I look back
And I am haunted by my youth

Oh but my joy of today
Is that we can all be proud to say
To be old, stupid and fat,
Is where its at!

Help me shovel through the shite
Kris Kristofferson had a big one with "Help me make it through the night", but really he just wanted to get in yer pants...

Take the cat fur from your hair, sweep it up and out the door,
It's another lovely sight, like the puke stains on the floor,

Come and lay down by my side, while they prowl through the night,
All they're taking is our life, help me shovel through the shite.

Rolling down to old Meow-ee

Our cats:

Do not have telephones
Do not like plain crisps
Love cat food

They sing:
_{(to the tune of Rollin' down to old Maui)}

It's a damned hard life full of toil and strife,
We pussycats must endure.
And we don't give a damn when we're eating our spam,
What it costs you to procure.

For we're always going to go out that door,
And we're always going to come in.
And we always say, when we're on our way:
Let me out, right now, meow-ee!

Let me out, right now, meow-ee, me boys!
Let me out, right now, meow-ee!
And we always say, when we're on our way:
Let us out, right now, meow-ee!

Self-customizing computer interfaces

2007-12-07T17:05:00.000-05:00

Developers do a lot of arcane stuff on a computer. Building, deploying, content mapping, code repository check-ins, viewing/approving code fixes, bug tracking...and so on. All of this requires a set of tools, sometimes chosen by an employer, sometimes a collection whacked together as an ad-hoc suite in order to get the code done.

The use of these tools is often blindingly fast...you don't need to look at that menu or dialog box to know that you should click here...or here...you know the path to the particular group of files by heart...you don't read an entire file path, you grok it. Recognize it by sight. This is another kind of automaticity and is, probably, the same kind of thing that any craftsman does, whether it be building a house or machining a piece of metal.

Having learned to use a set of tools, with a habitual technique for performing various tasks, it is very irritating when the computer, or part of the software on it, decides in its wisdom, to reconfigure a menu, change a dialog box, change a familiar icon, or move all the shortcuts on the desktop.

Windows is dreadful for this. Unix didn't do anything remotely like this. It's clearly some kind of prank pulled on the unsuspecting public, in order to "help" someone who is a dope*. It is really bizarre, perhaps there are usability studies that say that this does help the hapless, I doubt it. Most people learn to use a windowing interface in a rather geographic way...the icon for a tool is a nice bright thing in the middle of the second column on the left hand side of the desktop for example. So when the computer is updated with some "security"** fixes, and the icon changes colour to a kind of wishy-washy wimpy thing and gets moved...well...steam emits from orifices, I'd say.

It's one thing to set up ones own machine and stop these things from happening, but when you go and use another machine, or have remote access to dozens of desktops, finding a way of achieving your objectives becomes a more interesting challenge.

This is like the negative billing of the software world; programs usually do this - without asking- and you have to find a way to turn it off. Eventually you give up, live with it and try to "f%ckin' stay awake" (to quote Billy Connolly).

However, when I suddenly got the error pop up above, and I found that Windows has rearranged the Right-mouse click menu on my machine so that the previous "Open with MyEclipse" is now just number 4 on the list (and double-click doesn't work the same as it did yesterday), I thought...why? Why do we do this? What possible reason could there be for the machine customizing my interface in any way? I've been doing it this way for months and it didn't interfere before. Did I do something stupid***? The arrogance of the people who decided to do this renders me, well, not speechless, more's the pity, but I'm left feeling that this is horribly wrong.

There's got to be a better way...how about a nice conversation?

"BTW, Sue, I've noticed that you use this thingy more than you use these thingies in this menu. Or you're installing something to do with this thing. Can I make it easier for you by putting this on the top of the menu, or by reminding you of the keyboard shortcut you so obviously need to remember?"

"No, get lost."

"OK! CU later."

* - only a dope wouldn't be disturbed by this behaviour.
** - unlikely, but now everything's about security apparently. The new 's' word.
*** - well, that goes without saying.

Two types of programmers

2007-11-27T22:49:00.000-05:00

iBanjo's post and Jeff's about the 80-20 rule when it comes to indifferent-excellent programmers are a bit harsh IMO. It's an exaggeration to make a point I guess. I'm sometimes in the 20%, sometimes in the 80% - depends on what applications, environment, level of expertise, and interest.

However, it brings up something very interesting, which is programmer productivity. I do strive to improve my personal productivity, and tell colleagues about useful tools. As the tools get more and more capable, people get more productive - as long as they can be arsed.

For text, computers allow people to produce more than typewriters which were more efficient than fountains pens which were better than quills. At each step the productivity mapping against the cost of a skilled worker, was to the benefit of everyone (well...perhaps that is arguable; imagine the ink well-fillers laid off when the fountain pen was introduced. :-)

With programmers, a higher degree is not necessary to be able to write a program. We no longer have to enter every character in a form for a data-entry clerk to type in. Or use a card punch. We do our own typing and the systems give us far more leverage than they used to. At the same time, we are encouraged to become lazy with things like memory allocation or cleaning up comments (yes, children, there were systems that only allowed 1000 lines of code, comments included. You have never seen such a sad girl as when I had to strip out all my lovely comments to get that darn thing to take the rest of the code :)

So we are all the more productive, in theory, and there are a lot more of us, and we're producing more...but...a heck of a lot of it is ending up being thrown away. All these startups, perhaps one in a hundred is still going after 5 years*. Perhaps one in a thousand is flourishing**. Most code that is written is being discarded without earning a real penny (I don't count IPOs and other stock market artifacts, I mean real profit for code). I think my most long-lived code was for a hydroelectric plant...embedded in the display panels representing a switch yard, it will probably live longer than I will, but the company I worked for took a big loss on the project.

I am not sure what can be done, apart from contributing to open source projects. That does seem to be a way to give the useful parts of a project to some kind of posterity.

* - unsupported assertion
** - unlikely

The first spam in the world*

2007-11-27T19:57:00.000-05:00

This is how I got a shiv in to one of the first spammers. There's a footnote to explain why I think spam should be punishable by the death penalty. This is going to be a long post, so get comfortable.

In the late '80's and early '90's, my children, I used a discussion network called USENET
in the same way people today use on-line forums, interest groups and social networking sites. I was a contributor to a couple of groups about recreational sailing. I owned a boat, had some experience and I was able to pontificate to the grateful and less-experienced masses.

All this changed, when spam started to load up my email inbox. Every post I made started to become the subject of a couple of lame attempts to sell things to me. It wasn't even sailing-related stuff. Eventually, the volume of spam became so large that got I fed up, changed my email address and stopped participating in the groups. It had been a pleasant pasttime, and I was very unhappy that it couldn't continue, as there isn't much sailing up here when the water gets hard.

In the couple of years between the arrival of the first spam and my surrender of my right to free speech (which is how I feel about it), I encountered a particularly hapless spammer. She (for it was apparently a female) had strung together a couple of email messages each containing advertisements for about six different products. (These were the days when there were few enough spam messages that I wrote indignant responses back to senders :-)

Among the products in her messages were these:

Printing company in North Carolina
Adult videos for sale somewhere unspecified
A sale at a lumber store in Raleigh
"Wedding party favors" and wedding services (whatever they may be)
Pet store

You get the picture.

I leaped into action...because the spammer had given out her customers' email addresses in each of the little ads, and the email addresses were all from the same domain name, I thought that a little direct action was worth trying. Of course...the sender of the spam had blocked responses, but her customers were relying on incoming email to do their business (I presume that was her pitch to them).

I sent a dozen little emails, along the lines of "your message is unwelcome because I am paying to pick up my email" (yes we did pay per byte in those days). The best one was like this:

Dear wedding party favors vendor,
I am shocked and appalled that I have received your commercial message along with that for a pornographic film purveyor, obviously from the same service. I would not use your company because you are associated with this service provider who is promoting unsavory and possibly illegal material.
Yours etc.
Sue W....

(slight emphasis on nice female persona, presumably a target for wedding party stuff.)

The reaction was gratifying. Within the day I received a choleric email from the spammer. This was nearly a thousand words of outrage, threats, denial of wrongdoing, denial that I could possibly be upset by a suggestion that I should consider her porn-vending customer's products, how could I stop her constitutional rights to free speech, etc. and in closing, with the fact that she had blocked responses from me in future. I guess it would have been excessive to ask if I was now off her mailing list...

It was a good day. I felt much better. Obviously she (or perhaps a disguised he) had been reamed out by some or all of the targets of my messages. Revenge is a confession of hurt, but it was sweet.

Footnote: Why I think spammers should be executed:

I do not think that the death penalty is right. I've lived in both England and in Canada and capital punishment hasn't been allowed in either country for a long time. However, I think that spammers and those that enable spammers should be taken out and shot. Nah...something more spectacular.

These people are clogging up the arteries of the Internet, costing millions, infringing on the rights of the digital commons, if you like, to sell me stuff I don't want, can't use, can't understand. They try to take over machines for nefarious purposes, but most of all, they have cost me and many others, their right to free discourse in such as USENET groups and many other forums. The fact that many sites require registration, login, visible-only code words and other tedious impediments is due largely to these scum. They know better, but do it anyway.

Off with their heads!

* - an exaggeration, and a downright lie.

ActionScript 2.0 function to convert milliseconds to HH:MM or MM:SS

2007-11-15T22:33:00.000-05:00

These functions are basically the same, convert a Number in milliseconds to a displayable time string HH:SS or MM:SS:

public function convertMillisecondsToHHMM (millisecs:Number):String {
    var hour:Number;
    var min:Number;
    var hourStr:String;
    var minStr:String;

    var lenMin:Number = millisecs/1000/60;
   
    if (lenMin == undefined || lenMin <=0) {
      return "00:00";
    }
    else if(lenMin > (99*60)+59){ // greater than can be shown in 99:59
      return "99:59";
    }
    else {
      // work out how many hours and mins and concatenate them for the time
      hour = Math.floor(lenMin/60); //get the number of hours
      min = Math.round(lenMin%60); //get the remainder 0-59 mins
     
      // convert to strings
      hourStr = hour.toString();
      minStr = min.toString();
     
      // if minStr is 2 character, leave it alone, if it's 1 char, pad it, if it's more than 2 make it "99"
      if (hourStr.length == 1) {
        hourStr = "0" + hourStr;
      }
      else if (hourStr.length > 2) {
        hourStr = "99"; // this is impossible!
      }
      // if secStr is 2 digits, leave it alone, if it's 1, pad it, if it's more than 2 make it "99"
      if (minStr.length == 1) {
        minStr = "0" + minStr;
      }
      else if (minStr.length > 2) {
        minStr = "59"; // this is impossible!
      }
     
      return hourStr + ":" + minStr;
    }
  }
 
  public function convertMillisecondsToMMSS(millisecs:Number):String {
    var min:Number;
    var sec:Number;
    var minStr:String;
    var secStr:String;

    var lenSec:Number = millisecs/1000;
   
    if (lenSec == undefined || lenSec <=0) {
      return "00:00";
    }
    else if(lenSec > (99*60)+59){ // greater than can be shown in 99:59
      return "99:59";
    }
    else {
      // work out how many minutes and seconds and concatenate them for the time
      min = Math.floor(lenSec/60); //get the number of minutes
      sec = Math.round(lenSec%60); //get the remainder 0-59 secs
     
      // convert to strings
      minStr = min.toString();
      secStr = sec.toString();
     
      // if minStr is 2 character, leave it alone, if it's 1 char, pad it, if it's more than 2 make it "99"
      if (minStr.length == 1) {
        minStr = "0" + minStr;
      }
      else if (minStr.length > 2) {
        minStr = "99"; // this is impossible!
      }
      // if secStr is 2 digits, leave it alone, if it's 1, pad it, if it's more than 2 make it "99"
      if (secStr.length == 1) {
        secStr = "0" + secStr;
      }
      else if (secStr.length > 2) {
        secStr = "59"; // this is impossible!
      }
     
      return minStr + ":" + secStr;
    }
  }

getDateString: ActionScript 2.0 function to make a readable numeric date string

2007-11-15T22:15:00.000-05:00

The getDateString returns the present date/time in the form of a readable (just) string down to milliseconds e.g. 20061231135901999. It uses the leftFill function below:

//get the current date/time and make a string
//in the form yyyymmddHHMMSSmmm
private function getDateString():String
{
var today:Date = new Date();
var dateString:String = today.getFullYear().toString()
+ leftFill((today.getMonth()+1).toString(),"0",2)
+ leftFill(today.getDate().toString(),"0",2)
+ leftFill(today.getHours().toString(),"0",2)
+ leftFill(today.getMinutes().toString(),"0",2)
+ leftFill(today.getSeconds().toString(),"0",2)
+ leftFill(today.getMilliseconds().toString(),"0",3);
return dateString;

}//getDateString

// This function will take a string (1-3 characters)
// and right justify it with fill characters padded to the left for the width required.
// Designed for use with Date/time fields 1, 2 or 3 in length
// if it is called on the wrong size inString it will return the correct size field of fill chars
private function leftFill(inString:String, fillChar:String, fieldWidth:Number):String
{
//make sure the fill character is only one character long!
var fill = fillChar.substr(0,1);
if (inString.length == fieldWidth)
{
  return inString;
}
else if (inString.length == fieldWidth-1)
{
  return fill + inString;
}
else if (inString.length == fieldWidth-2)
{
  return fill + fill + inString;
}
else
{
  return ((fill + fill + fill).substr(0,fieldWidth));
}
}//leftFill

removeString: ActionScript 2.0 function to remove delimited strings

2007-11-15T21:27:00.000-05:00

This function is quite useful.
It will remove strings that are delimited by known characters, any number of times from a target string. For example to remove all the markups in an XML node and just leave the text, call it with this snippet:

tempString = pNode.toString();
while (tempString.indexOf("<") != -1) {  
 tempString = removeString(tempString,"<",">");
}

function removeString(input:String, sDelim:String, 
            eDelim:String):String {
  var startIndex:Number = 0;
  var sDelimIndex:Number = input.indexOf(sDelim);
  var eDelimIndex:Number = input.indexOf(eDelim);
  var endIndex:Number = input.length-1;
  
  var output:String = "";
  
  if (input == undefined || 
    input == "" || 
    sDelimIndex != -1) {
    //get the substring before the delimiter, if any
    if (startIndex < sDelimIndex) {
      output += input.substring(startIndex,sDelimIndex);
    }
    if (eDelimIndex != -1) { // if any end delim 
    // get the substring after the delimiter, if any
      if (eDelimIndex < endIndex) {
        output += input.substring(eDelimIndex+1,endIndex+1);
      }
    }
  }
  else {
    //nothing to be done
    output = input;
  }
  return output;
}

Windows batch file syntax

2007-11-08T12:16:00.000-05:00

http://labmice.techtarget.com/articles/batchcmds.htm

Spam going down

2007-11-07T12:16:00.002-05:00

Is it me, or has the level of spam gone down?

Gmail has a good spam filter (I've only had to mark 3-4 spam messages in the last few months). But I do scan the list of spam in case there are any false positives (only one, years ago). In doing so I had noticed that the level of spam was going up and up and the subject was largely what is delicately called "enlarging one's manhood".

As an aside, I have never, ever, had trouble enlarging a man's penis at will, by at least four inches (10 cm). And it only takes a minute or so, not four weeks...ahem.

Anyhoo, I was reading in the Economist that a second Russian spammer within a year or so had been assassinated (hooray!*). Guy was making a couple of mil a year spamming on behalf of dodgy on-line pharma-product outlets.

However, in the last couple of days, I have noticed the torrent of spam is less...perhaps it's just me, but in 3 days I have only 18 messages, and the profile is this:

Watches: 2
Penis enlargement: 7
Pharmacy: 6
Make money/loans: 3

So penis enlargement is definitely going down.

* I have never been, nor ever will be, an advocate for the death penalty, except for spammers. They are the worst kind of parasites and should be put down. More in another post.

Flash: You're _so_ modal!

2007-11-07T10:34:00.000-05:00

It's interesting to pick up and try to use a technology after it's been around for a while. Back in the '90's I had the experience with Microsoft tools, but since then I have been working in Java web technologies starting from when they were fairly new.

I have spent the last few months digging into Flash development, learning the IDE (CS3) and ActionScript. The IDE is fairly strange and rather old-fashioned feeling. Perhaps it's just a different way of thinking from the "Dreaming in code" text-based world of conventional programming.

Flash is extraordinarily powerful in some respects but, in my opinion, lends itself to poor design decisions, less than easily supportable code and lots of maintenance headaches. All the more work for developers in the future, I think!

Some areas of the IDE have been neglected, the ActionScript editor and the debugger most prominently. Modal search boxes that have to be dismissed...grrr!

I have been guided by our new Flash designer, Derek. He can really do amazing things using Flash to create visual components and interactive demos etc. He's been working in this tool since the advent of Flash, focussed on the visual aspects, less on the programming ones. However, I would not have easily discovered some of the more esoteric things without him.

The most irritating thing about the whole experience, and this might seem petty, is that Flash is so...modal...everything that is does (publish, test movie, debug movie) takes control of the entire computer. It's all about you, isn't it, Flash? An incoming IM which takes focus in the middle of a Flash publish (compile/build movie) can crash the IDE! You cannot start publishing a big movie and switch to another window...Flash doesn't play well with others.

I'm told that until recently one couldn't run anything else on a development workstation except Flash. Resource hog...however we have an OS that can do multitasking windows and why should Flash be the one to say "Wait up everyone, I'm about to Publish a Movie! Stand back!!" Sounds like poor fundamental tool design to me. Very 1980's.

It's a clipper-ship technology. Huge, useful, really impressive, very elaborate and so on, but labour intensive, accident prone and inefficient. I hope there is a steamship coming up somewhere.

Derek's predecessor, Chris, who moved on to a better life in another place, tells me he is using some newer Adobe tool chains: Flex and ActionScript 3. More stuff to look into!

I have loaded ASDT into Eclipse and this helps a lot when editing ActionScript. However for the price that Adobe charges for their tools, am I wrong to expect more?

Java links

2007-10-28T07:16:00.000-04:00

Searchable Java examples: http://www.jexamples.com/

Flash links

2007-10-28T06:07:00.000-04:00

Flash resources by Adobe

Flash ActionsScript plug-in for Eclipse (ASDT)

ActionScript Language reference for Flash Media server 2

Colour links

2007-10-28T06:05:00.000-04:00

Colour chart

Useful HTML links

2007-10-28T05:55:00.000-04:00

http://www.htmlgoodies.com/beyond/reference/article.php/3472851

http://www.webmonkey.com/reference/html_cheatsheet/

Typing codes for special character symbols

2007-10-18T13:58:00.000-04:00

The symbols for special characters can be typed on a normal keyboard by holding down the Alt key and typing the 4 digit decimal character code on the numeric keypad (with Num Lock on).

These are not the same as the key codes generated by the keyboard when you type, but are the Unicode (formerly ASCII) representation of the characters.

Some useful character codes:

© - 0169 (also hex 00A9)
® - 0174 (00AE)

à - 0224 (00E0)
ç - 0231 (00E7)
è - 0232 (00E8)
é - 0233 (00E9)
ê - 0234 (00EA)
ë - 0235 (00EB)

÷ - 0247 (00F7)
x² (squared) - 0178 (00B2)
x³ (cubed) - 0179 (00B3)
µ (micro) - 0181 (00B5)
¼ - 0188 (00BB)
½ - 0189 (00BC)
¾ - 0190 (00BD)

For full information about characters and codes see the Unicode web site.
The codes in PDF form are in the code charts section. The ones I use most are Basic Latin and Latin-1.

The proof-readers are a different bunch...

2007-10-18T11:20:00.000-04:00

DOS commands for Windows

2007-10-18T10:35:00.000-04:00

Some information about how to use windows command line commands. Some of this is actually useful.

For a Windows DOS-type command box (Start button | Run | cmd)

Windows folders, directories and filenames
The command line operates by default at a command line pointer, that is at a particular folder, on each drive. This is the command line prompt. Example, C:\temp>, commands will operate in this folder.

cd fred will change the directory setting to C:\temp\fred>
cd.. command moves up one directory level (back to C:\temp>)
d: command moves the command line pointer to the d drive (at the directory previously set for that).

Hierarchical folder (directory) names are separated by \ (contrary to Unix and web "folders").

/ is used for command switches for example: dir /w c:\t*

Most filenames have a three-letter "file extension" for historical reasons, file.txt for example.

*.* is the wildcard for file name match to anything (any name, any file extension).
*.txt for any file with extension txt

The following keys are sometimes useful in command line commands

Enter
submit the current command line to DOS and add it to the command line buffer at the end.
Left/Right arrow
moves cursor in the command line by one character left or right
Ctrl+Left/Right arrow
move cursor left or right to next word of cmd line (words separated by spaces)
End/Home
puts cursor at start or end of current line
Ctrl+Home
delete from current cursor position to start of current cmd line
Ctrl+End
delete from current cursor position to end of current cmd line
Delete
delete next character - that which is under the cursor
Ctrl+H/Backspace
deletes previous character - to left of cursor
Insert
toggle Overstrike/Insert mode. Overstrike will overwrite at the cursor. Insert will insert to the left of the cursor
ALT+ENTER
takes your command prompt to fullscreen mode and back again

Moving through the command line buffer
- repeating previous commands (or bits of them)
Up/Down arrow keys
move through the command lines buffer one line at a time.
Up goes to previous, Down goes to next (or nothing if we're viewing the last one)
PageUp
moves to first command in command line buffer
PageDown
moves to last command in command line buffer
F7
pops up your command history list, navigate with the up/down arrow keys and use Enter to select an entry
F9
brings up a dialog to enter the required number of the command from the buffer to be repeated
F1
brings up the next character of the previous command (starting at the first one)

Tab completion of commands is supported
For example, type edit *.ini then hit TAB to iterate through all matches.
Use SHIFT+TAB to move to the previous match.
This works for partial filenames as you would expect, and in all commands.

You can change the size of the command line buffer
Right-mouse on cmd.exe window title bar, then Properties | Options | Command history | Buffer size:

If a window output is going too fast to read, or a program is out of control
Ctrl+C will terminate the program (make sure you have clicked on this window to get focus!)
Ctrl+S will pause the output
Ctrl+Q will restart the output

Other stuff that has not been particularly useful
Ctrl+C clears the current command line
Ctrl+I insert a tab in the command line at current position
Ctrl+M Same as Enter key or CR (submit the current DOS command)
Ctrl+S Stop - ignores next keystroke

Continue (pagination shows --MORE--) Enter key (default is no pagination)

Copy and paste Window contents
Mark (right mouse, choose Mark)
start capturing a selection using the left mouse key & dragging.
End selection using Enter key.

Copy and paste into the command line
You can drag n' drop files or folders from an explorer window into a command prompt; this inserts the quoted path as if you had manually pasted it.
Ctrl+V does not paste into the command line, you have to Right click and select paste.

Dos commands help
help gives list of windows cmd line commands
help the_cmd give details about that command e.g. HELP DIR

Windows folders, directories and filenames
The command line operates by default at a command line pointer, that is at a particular folder, on each drive. This is the command line prompt. Example, C:\temp>, commands will operate in this folder.

cd fred will change the directory setting to C:\temp\fred>
cd.. command moves up one directory level (back to C:\temp>)
d: command moves the command line pointer to the d drive (at the directory previously set for that).

Hierarchical folder (directory) names are separated by \ (contrary to Unix and web "folders").

/ is used for command switches for example: dir /w c:\t*

Most filenames have a three-letter "file extension" for historical reasons, file.txt for example.

*.* is the wildcard for file name match to anything (any name, any file extension).
*.txt for any file with extension txt

IDEs: Eclipse and MyEclipse

2007-10-09T12:57:00.000-04:00

My first Java IDE was a free version of JBuilder. After the dotcom/telecom meltdown, I spent 3 months with this IDE, learning Java while doing a pro bono project with a social worker from Northern Quebec. It was pretty good for the time.

When I started working for my current employers, they had standardized on IntelliJ-IDEA, which was a very good tool by comparison. However it cost a lot of money per person (some hundreds of dollars) and because we were cheap (or broke) we didn't upgrade at all. After a few years the tool was very out-of-date.

At that point 3 years ago, we decided to use Eclipse. IDEA would have cost too much when we had 10 developers. Eclipse had the tempting promise of being open source and more importantly free!

I must say it has lived up to the promise. It is a wonderful developer tool. The great thing about open source is that there are many plug-ins available that are really useful. Some are free, some are commercial, but relatively cheap.

The bad thing about open source is that things that work can get broken when you upgrade. For example I once had a really nice combination of Eclipse, Subversion (Subclipse) integrated with the Eclipse Navigator tool showing file decorations, version numbers, authors, dates, etc.. When I upgraded my Subversion client (Tortoise) a while ago, this all stopped working, in spite of many attempts to fix it. Pooh. Never mind.

One nice commercial integration is MyEclipse. I fell in love with this because of the jsp debugging (breakpoints!) and some nice XML editor features. Recommended. $30-50 per year and it's well worth it. They also bundle the full Eclipse download if you want it.

So, some free plug-ins I use quite often:

ASDT (ActionScript Development Tool) because the Flash CS3 ActionScript editor is still
horrible (frustratingly so, considering the cost of CS3!)
Implementors plug-in http://eclipse-tools.sourceforge.net/implementors/index.html
Subclipse (although it's not working with my present setup)

The paid-for plug-in (IDE suite):

MyEclipse

Windows Quick Launch management and obsolete links

2007-10-09T12:34:00.000-04:00

Our sainted IT person, Sean the Magnificent, removed a network drive from our Windows network and caused all the system desktops to go nuts, presumably hunting for the lost resource ad infinitum...

Over the course of 2 days, my system crept to a halt. Finally Sean told me to edit the registry to remove all the occurrences of the offending drive name...aack!

Using regedit to edit the registry is like going into an abbatoir in satin ballet shoes! No...perhaps doing brain surgery with a teaspoon... not to be undertaken by the faint of heart.

Anyway After deleting about 90 entries...and removing references in the "Network Places" thingy, everything was back to normal...or so it seemed.

After about 2 weeks I started tidying up the Quick Launch part of my Toolbar (being lazy I like to have about 40 items in here). Any obsolete shortcuts here that referred to the removed drive could not be removed directly via the Quick Launch icons. Clicking on the or right clicking on them caused the machine to go have a little think for a long while. And then did nothing.

Hmm...so we open up the C:\Documents and Settings\[your.name]\Application Data\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch "folder" and remove them there. Silly Windows.