Aquarionics

DRuMs of war.

A quote from Daniel James of Three Rings

DRM takes a big poo on your best customers—the ones who’ve given you money—whilst doing nothing practical to prevent others from ‘stealing’ your precious content juices. Worse, it makes these renegades feel nice and righteous about sticking it to ‘the man’. Stop trying to persuade people to love you more by hitting them a rusty pipe. Put down the pipe, and give up on DRM

Genius Trial

So, Starting with the first track to come up in a random shuffle of my iTunes library, I generated one of the "Genius" playlists from the new iTunes.

The dividing line between genius and insanity has never been so close. The results. These are the tunes that iTunes thinks belong together:

• Here Comes The Flood — The Divine Comedy
• Right Said Fred — Bernard Cribbins
• Pretty Flamingo — Manfred Mann
• Mulder And Scully — Catatonia
• Sunshine On Leith — The Proclaimers
• Heroes And Villains — The Beach Boys
• Love Me Like You — The Magic Numbers
• Half The World Away — Oasis
• Together — The Raconteurs
• Still Take You Home — The Arctic Monkeys
• Life On Earth — The Divine Comedy
• Chemtrails — Beck
• Songs of Love — Ben Folds
• All mine (Portishead cover) — The Divine Comedy
• Substitute — The Who
• Sorted for E's & Wizz — Pulp
• The Ballad of Tom Jones — Space
• Funny Little Frog — Belle and Sebastian
• Someone — The Divine Comedy
• Neighborhood #4 (7 Kettles) — The Arcade Fire
• Disco 2000 (Pub Rock Version) — Nick Cave
• Dog — Ben Folds
• Parklife (Live) — Blur
• Running the World — Jarvis Cocker
• The Size Of A Cow — The Wonder Stuff

Branded Coffee

The Next Wing

SAN DIEGO—On day two of the 2008 San Diego SorCon, the biggest Aaron Sorkin convention in the world, screenwriter and producer Aaron Sorkin revealed plans for his next project, an animated continuation of his most popular franchise, The West Wing.

More details

Leaving Windows Open

Leaving windows open always gets me into trouble, one way or the other.

I overheat easily, and so I tend to leave the windows of my flat open wherever possible. This is good, but it does mean I occasionally suffer from bugs coming in overnight and biting me in the arse. Somehow – and for the first time in my life – I’m having problems with mosquito bites, after leaving a window open let them in while I wasn’t paying attention.

Can you see the metaphor coming, kids? I’m sure you can. Nevertheless, the above actually happened.

Tuesday I made a mistake. Or, rather, a series of mistakes. The first was disabling the active scan of AVG (my virus scanner of choice) because it was fucking up the IO of something I was trying to do. The second was clicking on an EXE from a site I hadn’t used before without the above running. Nothing happened.

Then I got a popup saying spyware had been detected, and did I want to install AntiSpyware 2009?

Then my desktop wallpaper changed to “SPYWARE FOUND! DOWNLOAD ANTISPYWARE NOW!” and I lost the ability to change it.

At this point I ripped the network cable from my machine. I had left Windows open, and now I was being bitten on the arse.

My backup system works, which is fortunate. I have a combination of cygwin, rsync and a framework of scripts to sync my user files to an external location and a backup drive. Within my user files directory are windows shortcuts that the windows version of rsync can treat as symlinks, and these go to things I need to back up outside the general framework of My Documents (Actually, I have a C:Global (Which is also ~aquarion/Global and /Users/nicholas/Global depending on OS) which contains subdirs of Documents, Pictures, Music, Projects and Savegames and syncs up over the machines).

This notably doesn’t include stuff on my Desktop (which is just as likely to be downloads as in-progress stuff) or the contents of my Ubuntu VMWare image which I tend to develop in. I lost everything I hadn’t checked into svn recently, which is probably a good thing to make me do so more in the future.

Windows install was nuked from orbit (It needed doing anyway, it was over a year old) and now I have a couple of days of installing patches (from behind my firewall, natch) and reinstalling things and typing in CD keys.

All while attempting to splatter that fucking mosquito.

Science in rap form

This is a rap about particle physics and CERN's Large Hadron Collider and what it's for.

Pulp Connections

This is a short film about two people discussing the meta-connections between all the films of Quentin Tarrentino.

It’s called Tarrentino|s Mind

Muppetry

Things that have amused me today:

Follow the profile. It appears that Disney/Muppet Studios are publishing a series of new muppet sketches via YouTube. Trials for a new Muppets series?

I'd hope that Disney are able to let them make it fun.

An Update

Most of what I’m doing right now is working, and due to the nature of my working, it’s dull. I’m mostly writing unit tests. And because it’s work, it’s occasionally awesome and fun, challanging and occasionally frustrating. We are, however, looking for PHP dev to work in our Kings Cross office, so if you know any PHP devs looking for a new job, fire an email at nicholas care of trutap dot net. I do hope to be able to shout about stuff we’re doing soon.

Because I’ve moved to the place with the most integrated transportation network in the country, it’s obvious that the next thing I need to do is learn to drive. Since my last experience I haven’t actually had any driving lessons at all (Well, not true. I got one while in Bedford, but taking a two hour lunch break meant I missed my bus home and didn’t get back to Letchworth until 22:00. I didn’t repeat the experience), But I’ve just signed up with Go Red for a lesson on the 1st August. Now to pass my theory test for the third, and ideally final, time.

One of the reasons for the above is my current habit of going LARPing, and the fact that lugging all my stuff on trains is annoying. Also, National Rail always seem to schedule line work over me coming back from Maelstrom, which is irritating. A car would make getting there – as well as Treasure Trap in Cambridge – easier. This weekend is another Maelstrom weekend, which should be fun.

This means that I’m going to not only miss LUGRadio Live, which annoyed me, but when it became the very last LR event ever, it just seemed like malice. I’ve listened to, and enjoyed, the show from the first episode, and while I’ve recently not been much part of the community, I’m proud of the bits I have been part of. LUGRadio is a staggering achievement, and I hope someone picks up the idea and does it half as well as the various generations of Gents have over the years. I don’t know what they’re planning to do with the site after it’s over, but if it fractures into a few dozen local LUGRadio divisions – such as was originally the plan for the series, I believe – it will be interesting.

Still not completed GTA4 yet.

Most of my “home” coding right now is being done on AqWiki, which is now running a community wiki for Maelstrom fans as well as one for an Ikariam alliance – pushing the under-developed macro system to the limit with treaty managers and databases. I’m also working on Lampstand, which is an IRC bot again for Maelstrom fans. It’s based on the Twisted framework, which is something of a run-up all of its own, and eventually I hope to integrate it into a django-powered community site.

Pareidol Returns

Long term readers of Aquarionics will remember my various abortive attempts to publish anything with any regularity at all.

Actually, so will short term readers, thinking about it. But I’m not refering to this “journal” thing, as much as LoneCat and my “NSD” thing from a while back, the various short stories and, most recently, Pareidol, a webcomic-type-thing produced with manikins, models, and a Blue-Peter sticky-back-plastic approach to set constuction.

You can find the archives still here, but I’m back producing comics again, and they’re being published every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at Faction Fiction, where also goes various bits of fiction and worldbuilding experiments.

Today’s comic is the final punchline to the multi-part joke started over two years ago

Phonetic

Today, I got an iPhone.

This sounds deceptively simple, but really wasn’t, so here’s how it went. I had an 18 month contract with 02, ready to run out in September. But last month they phoned me up, and when I said I was waiting for the new iPhone, they recommended I switched to the Monthly Sim Only “Simplicity” contract, shaving three months off my contract (since Simplicity is a rolling monthly agreement) meaning I’d be able to get a new contract come July 11^th.

This morning at 08:45 I was waiting outside Walthamstow’s O2 shop, on the reasonable basis that it would be quieter than Oxford Street, and there was a couple of dozen people queuing at the time. At 08:55, I moved to Carphone Warehouse on the basis that swapping being 24th in line for being 5th in line seemed sane. So I was the fifth person to get into Carphone Warehouse, the other people selling the iPhone today.

CPW had 24 iPhone 8 gigs, and two iPhone 16 gigs. The first four people wanted 16 gig ones, and it became a race against the (heavily overloaded) computer system as they went though the upgrade process. Two didn’t make it, and left the store. The other two were on hold for credit checks.

Switching to the simplicity tarrif was the wrong thing, because it meant I’d shifted from being a normal O2 contract user, to a non-trusted base-level user, meaning to get an upgrade I’d also have to pass a credit check. Which was fine, but O2 had apparently been recommending the Simplicity route for lots of people, and so the national queue for credit checks was loooooong.

At 10:20 – almost an hour and a half after I arrived – I left the shop to get to work, late but salvageable. Today was a deadline day.

At 11:30 CPW phoned me (I’d left a card) to say my check had gone though, and they had a phone for me, but I would have to collect it by 12:30. Since I’d got in at 10:50, I felt that leaving at 11:30 for my lunch hour was taking the piss slightly, but left dead on 12. Kings Cross to Walthamstow takes exactly 26 minutes, I have found, if there’s a train when you get to the platform and it’s the middle of the day (so stops at stations to exchange passengers are brief). I ran. I don’t run often, but I ran today to get an iPhone.

I got it. It’s shiny. I bought insurance for it after what happened to the one I borrowed.

This doesn’t end here, though.

First, my shoes were not built for running, because they dissolved by my running though the rain. By eight this evening (when I left the office) the soles were falling off.

Second was trying to migrate contacts.

One of the really cool features about OS X is the phone support. For 10.4 it supported the latest Ericcsons, and would bluetooth sync to them, and when they got a text message it would appear on your desktop. For the brief period I had a compatible phone (a few months, the on-call phone for Those Who Evolve was one) it was great. However, it’s not been updated to support any phone since then, so it falls to feisar who provide plugins for many phones.

My first attempt was to sync the old phone to the mac, then the iPhone to the mac. But for some reason whilst my old z310i would sync quite happily with the Feisar plugin, the newer one won’t (I suspect it’s because of the newer one’s Orange replacement firmware), and in attempting to fix this plugin (they’re all scriptable) I ran the unit test suite, which overwrote my entire phonebook.

I swore.

Nevermind, I thought, I’ve got backups. If nothing else, I’ve got all the contacts on my machine from the last fight with phone syncing at Christmas.

Er, no. Gone. No idea where. Fail.

After a certian amount of faffery (including grepping my entire hard-drive for a known-saved number to see if Outlook, ActiveSync or something had left a backup somewhere. Incidentally, the XDA (from the previous article) still has all the numbers, but no longer charges) I remember the existence of…

Bluebook

O2 run a service called bluebook. Bluebook is part of their data network, and (once you’ve signed up) stores SMSs for you from the wire as they go to your phone. Which is Really Fucking Handy. But not as useful as its ability to look like a valid syncing service for contacts, which my phone has been merrily syncing away to since I signed up a few months ago, silently and automatically. A perfect backup.

It’s even smart enough to allow export of your entire contact list in a sane and rational format!

And from there I can import into Windows Address Book (I’m now at home), and from there into iTunes, and from there onto the iPhone, which now has all my contacts.

All for only… 70% of the time of typing them all in manually.

But I have an iPhone, and it’s shiny. Sorry, that’s as interesting as my life gets right now. You should talk to my brother, he’s being eaten alive by doomed crabs.

A useless post

This post is entirely useless.

I mean, you already know that Warren Ellis is writing a free webcomic, issues released every friday, called FreakAngels, don’t you?

And you already know he wrote Transmet, and various other important things like the novel Crooked Little Vein which you should also read if you haven’t.

You know all this, so there is no point in mentioning it.

Is there?

Magic Trees, Level II

A while ago, I invented a concept of “Magic Trees”, named after the story of a vicar who chopped down a 140 year old tree and justified it by saying “A paedophile might have been hiding behind it”. This was later expanded to include invisible terrorists.

This morning a different story caught my attention. A social network site I’ve never heard of has recently banned a large number of its users over 36, possibly all of them, because:

Having discussed the use of our website with the home office and the police, and further some pretty serious crimes caused by older users, we were left with no option but to terminate a huge amount of accounts, and without notice, immediately. We understand that only a minority of older users are sex offenders, but you must understand that we cannot tell which – we can only delete all to make the site safe and we apologise for that. However, we are following the law and you cannot think we are wrong for doing that.

Basically, there is the the new legislation requiring sex offenders to have their details held by the government (Under the “But we would never let that data leave officialdom” clause we know so well) and there is a blindingly stupid proposal to require social network sites to validate against a pre-existing list of known email addresses belonging to sex offenders. The original database is scary in and of itself, I have enough trouble getting off SMS spam lists, and those have a documented legal procedure. If your address – physical or metaworld – is in that database you’re many degrees of screwed, but the blindingly stupid addition of requiring email addresses?

I have currently got three email addresses I look at on a day to day basis. Without thinking too long about it, I can think of a dozen that will get to me eventually, plus another few that won’t anymore (like my old uni address, or my Evolving Media or BrowserAngel addresses) I could have signed up for another dozen in the time it’s taken you to skim-read this article.

Not only that, but this proposal is just that, a proposal yet to go though the bad ideas filter. Now, the social network providing this story, which is known as “Faceparty” and I’m not going to link to, claims they were dived upon by “A gang of paedophiles” who attacked their younger audience. If I was uncharitable, and I’m tending towards so, I’d wonder if this actually happened, or is a pre-emptive strike, or – even less charitably – if it’s all an attempt to get people to realise they exist. Browsing their site as a non-user, it does appear that they enjoy pushing a reputation for “edgy”. Their front page featured article links though to a page using the current-most-forbidden word (Four letters, begins with C, Rhymes with stunt, as in “Publicity”) as punctuation, and it’s all… very…

...interesting…

Of course, it’s entirely plausable that this is a genuine over-reaction to a genuine problem they were having with paedophiles and my cynical analisis that it’s all a publicity drive under the pretext of chopping down a magic tree could be entirely off the mark, but I’m not linking to them anyway.

Fortress One

When we reached the cliff face, we knew this was where we were supposed to be. Around us was the green grass and trees, the freshwater lake, the clean path from the mountains for the caravans to come though. The rocks behind us were Jet, and there was clay to the south and – unless my faithful hammer tap decieved me – oynx in further down. So we stopped, and we layed out our belongings and broke down the wagon for wood. Our fortress would begin here.

I personally struck the first blow into the mountainside, an honour I won from Offla – our miner – in the game of stones the night before. The rock disolved at the crack of my axe and I could hear Dwalin behind me marking out areas for the spoil to be placed. Within days we had our entrance hall and some workshops, within a week the door was sealed. That spring passed me by in a maze of late nights in the workshop – at least until Flalin finished the beds – and early mornings in the sunshine. Dwalin (our leader, another stones game) was also our primary source of food, with his fishing line and net. Between his fishing and Catlin’s meals, we did well. Even Slalin, trained as the jeweller we didn’t expect to need for many moons, found her niche as a decent miner and farming our clay-based indoor fields.

Spring flows into summer, and the crops harvested. Our food stocks high enough to last us to the winter, hopes were high. One day, as everyone else toiled deep in the fortress and by the lakes, I made my own mark on our home. Our great hall, where we slept of a night, was a wonderful piece of dwaven sparcity, but I took my chisel and my hammer and covered every inch of it with the best engraving I knew how to. Our great hall was finally somewhere to go home to, and that night we drank heartily.

As Summer gave way to autumn, our council hinted at the problems to come. Offla reported that his deep-shaft to the heart of the mountain had failed to hit the iron ore he was expecting. He suggested, and we agreed, that we should buy some metal from the trade caravan due in a couple of weeks. We drank to this, and it fell from our minds. We hadn’t bought any metal with us – it was bulky in the carts, and prevelant in the world beyond – save an iron anvil upon which to beat.

The caravan had no metal.

No bars, no ore, not even an iron bucket we could melt down. The only metal thing in the entire cart was a steel cage containing a donkey, which we couldn’t afford. We picked up some food from them, traded some mechanisms, and went back to our fortress, and drank ourselves to sleep.

The lake froze early that winter, and our supplies of water and drink did not last long. Without metal, Slatin – training as our blacksmith – couldn’t forge a chain with which we could build a well. We tried wooden and stone chains, but they splintered or cracked. We had no cloth for rope and it was too cold to for-go our coats. We all went onto mining duty, every one of us. We dug though the mountain looking for ore, and down looking for water, but found nothing but more Jet and Oynx. We could buy a lake with the stone we’re shifting out, but no traders come at this time of year. Nobody will come.

Catlin died last week, Flalin shortly afterwards, taking his secrets of woodwork with him. Important for us, because none of us know how to build coffins, and so they lay on the stone floor of a storage room designated a graveyard in a hurry. Dwalin, or fearless leader, died trying to dig though the ice. Slalin quietly in her sleep two nights past, never saying a word. Offla took her death personally, blaming himself for failing to find the ore that must be here, and started hammering with reckless abandon, digging though the mountainside desperatly. I believe he has driven himself mad – the thirst having taken us all part of the way – and I could hear him screaming down the echoing stone corridors around my workshop. That stopped a few hours ago, and I believe I will not speak to my friend Offla again in this life.

His work – and mine – will echo on in the engravings I made long after the rest of this place crumbles to dust. This will be found in the spring, I suspect, when our liason to the mountain returns with the promised steel.

Our fortress fell.

And that concludes my most recent game of Dwarf Fortress, unsuccessfully