Sitsofe's diary for May 2002

31 May, 2002

CBDTPA - copyright legislation so bad it's spawned its own Tinsel Town Club animation (found via Scripting News).

My house mates woke me up at 4am today and I have my Critical Systems exam today. When (at 5am) I told tr that I had an exam today he just said "Yes," and proceeded down the steps and out of the house. I'm so tired... :(

There seems to be a new (well new to me it's been reported at least a week ago) search engine called Kartoo (found via Webreference). It appears to be a meta search engine that draws trees between connected sites with the word(s) that it thinks connect the sites along the edges.

29 May, 2002

I've created a Wiki homepage for myself.

Ah the tetchy infighting on Milliways continues — "The current students are lazy and don't do anything" moan the old skool mw people, "things were crap when you were in charge and since you hadn't noticed, things get organised outside of mw these days" comes the response from the current students. Of course, being the miserable pessimist that I am, I am going to denounce both sides and say they are both right. And both wrong. Things are better... and worse.

Ah who am I kidding? Things were bad before and they are just becoming worse.

Worse is better - a famous article about how programming the less than best thing is sometimes better than programming the "right" thing.

Had my first threat in Puzzle Bobble today. After jibing someone with a joke, they then wrote "u think ur funnie huh... i noe where u live". It's the poor spelling that really scares me though...

28 May, 2002

Well the Internet Computing exam went well. The stuff I'd revised the most came up which suits me.

I am starting to see hits on diary entries from Google but what I don't understand is how this is possible when doing a Google.com search for Sitsofe Diary doesn't return any of these pages. However, a search in the Singapore version of Yahoo (which is powered by Google) and the BBC's Isearch (also Google powered) do. Odd.

10 reasons why you should ditch your IDE (from Coding Style). Isn't the whole point of IDEs that they make you productive by automating boring stuff? Not that I'd know - I do pretty much all of my coding in vi(m).

Today I had confirmation about the Squirrel mail bug that we had been seeing in the SUCS webmail. It appears that it is due to PHP having a race condition with HTTP 1.1.

Oh and I think I'm suffering from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome in my left hand (my middle finger is tingling a feeling numb for days on end). These exercises have helped a bit though.

26 May, 2002

Finished reading this article which Faron Moller gave DaveB suggesting an explanation as to Why Women Avoid Computer Science (ACM registration required but since the department is registered you should be able to read the PDF from University).

25 May, 2002

Plans are afoot in America to force all consumer electronics to have copy protection built in. The suggestion is that all digital content be matched against known copyright material in a central database. They aren't serious are they?

There is a videogame exhibition (from /.) currently running at the Barbican in London. I first read about it in Edge (which seems to be sponsoring the event) but the this is the first footage I've seen of it.

24 May, 2002

The third release candidate for Mozilla 1.0 has been released.

23 May, 2002

The P2P court cases begin to collapse again... I tend to use Gnutella based clients but if Kazaa is successfully snuffed out I'm sure the RIAA will turn their attention towards it.

Trying to be clever can be hazardous. Sometimes what works in theory will not work in practice. Personally, I think Java goes quite aggressively against optimisation, which is fine since we could do with more correct programs rather than more fast programs.

I receive at least two pieces of spam a day to my SUCS email address and that's an address I regulate incredibly strictly. I don't want any more spam and I never wanted any in the first place. Actually I'm not sure where I'm going with this, other than to point out that there is a site called Spamradio which speaks out spam emails with some algorithmic music in the background. It's as daft and silly as it sounds.

As I read more and more of Revenge of the Nerds (an essay discussing how all common/popular programming languages are not "equivalent"), the more I become irritated by the poor choice of words - it repeatedly misuses well understood terminology. What Paul Graham is trying to get across is the idea some languages have a more appropriate syntax for some problems than others, that in turn may lead to more elegant/faster results. Saying that one of the commonly used languages is "less powerful" than another suggests that you can express something in one that you can't in the other (which sounds similar to saying that a universal register machine is more powerful than, say, primitive recursion). Any computer scientist worth their salt will tell you that URMs, primitive recursion and Turning machines are all equally expressive/powerful - there is no program that you can write in one that cannot be written in another. It might not be so straightforward but it is certainly always possible. Oh and I wouldn't underestimate the benefit of libraries - it's certainly the major reason why I knock up code in Java rather than in a conceptually purer language such as Eiffel.

[...] At the bottom of the article Paul does talk about Turning equivalence and demonstrates an example program given that is inelegant to do in languages such as C and Java. There is very little surprising about this - some problems really are better suited to different programming languages. He then goes on to give an anecdote talking about how sufficiently complicated problems always end up (poorly) implementing Lisp machines. Given equivalence, isn't it inevitable that there going to be some overlap into something that Lisp does better than other languages if the problem is big enough?

22 May, 2002

Nothing much to report other than Google labs being driven into the ground, a day of Internet Technology revision and more Puzzle Bobble to recover from said revision.

A comparison between Intel's C++ and GNU's gcc/g++ compilers has been updated to take into account the 3.1 release of gcc. The good news is that this new release is faster than the old one meaning it is more of a match for the Intel compiler.

21 May, 2002

WOW. I'm impressed by Google Sets which allows you to give a few items in a set and then have Google try and predict what else belongs to that set. As a quick experiment I tried it with three HiFi manufacturers (Aiwa, Sony, Panasonic) and it returned other companies like JVC, Sharp, Philips and Samsung. While not perfect it's an interesting application and it has already managed to deduce Welsh places from Cardiff, Newport, Swansea.

...it's not so good on chocolate bars - I gave it Twix, Mars, Milky Way and got back Starburst (although after growing the group I noticed that Kit Kat was there).

Of course the above is the application of data mining. Actually, there is a sweet irony in the link I've just posted. The article talks about forgetting where you read something and of course, when I wanted to link to the article I couldn't find where I had first learnt about it or (more importantly) where I had actually read it. It took quite a few Google searches to find it.

I was going to write about how the navigation keys for the Google keyboard navigation were the same as those in vi but up and down are u j rather that k and j and left and right are h and k so there is only a one key overlap between them. On another note, I do like the deceleration as you move about the page though - it's great for orientation.

I think cameras make me grin far too much. I'm not that smiley in real life.

The latest copy of Edge has arrived and as someone who has read all but two of its one hundred and twelve issues I think I'm qualified to say that some of the most recent issues have been the best in its history.

I knew there was a reason why I still kept Windows 98 around - games. Puzzle Bobble Online is, er, an online version of Puzzle Bobble/Bust-a-move/Frozen Bubble. Supporting up to six people this is an absolutely outstanding use of a franchise and something I've been predicting for some time (although I was thinking that the game would be Puyo Puyo). The site is completely in Japanese and there are claims that it was the poor behaviour from western gamers lead to segregation of Japanese only players on one server and English speaking players on the other. Inevitably it will become too popular and eventually swamped by pathetic so and sos cheating their way to victory. Still, enjoy it while it lasts!

20 May, 2002

Looks like the Mexican government is allying with Microsoft. Ever get the feeling that the big picture is much bigger than you? Opensource software will forever face an uphill battle as long as people perceive their problem (amazingly lack of money being the primary one cited in this article) as not being solved by it.

Interesting picture on this BBC story about a virus outbreak on Kazaa (a file sharing program). Just for the record, it is highly unlikely that you can catch a virus from regular music CDs (I'm not going to rule it out though).

While I was down at the SUCS room Doug was showing me his latest program (which appears to be an API to connect streams of music together so you can convert say a XM module to an Ogg). It was then that we learned the BBC are no longer streaming Radio 1 in Ogg format.

19 May, 2002

Hyperlinks matter - a story about SOAP and REST.

OpenBSD 3.1 was released today along with its theme song (which seems to be German rock with the lyrics such as "Secure by default" in it).

18 May, 2002

Reverted back to an older Mandrake Mozilla RPM because the new one was broken in too many ways. Looking in the changelog it appears that all these things are known. This massive breakage may be enough to force me away from the Mandrake RPMs and over to the mainstream RPMs for Mozilla and Galeon (I can't see RealPlayer being compiled with GCC 3 any time soon).

[...] I was doing a search on RPMfind and I have found that someone is building new Mozilla RPMs which work with Mandrake 8.2 in the unsupported directory.

Ever noticed that when you visit one of my pages (on SUCS) the URL doesn't have www in front of it? There are quite a few reasons why I set it up some of which are discussed in this Removing the Ws from URLs article. One reason that it missed out is that doing so makes links uniform (so those search engines that are not intelligent don't count a single page as two different ones).

Whowhere (http://www.whowhere.com/) seems to have been broken for what feels like forever. It has been at least two years since I last managed to correctly update something over there which says a lot. I guess Lycos just don't care about it.

Yes, I think it's time to call the revision a day... or something.

I'm off to see Attack of the Clones. Hopefully I'll have a review of it up some time tomorrow.

17 May, 2002

Why go to College/University? What hits home most for me are the people pointing out non degree jobs that involve having to work long hours away from your family. I don't want that (nor do I want to become burned out which is why I will not program in the games industry).

Today it absolutely tipped down with rain. I guess the weather is making up for lost time.

16 May, 2002

Well the exam wasn't a disaster but I really struggled with the end of the two questions I attempted. I really wanted to do well in this exam (at least 60%) but I don't thing I've done that well. I guess I should be happy that I passed.

It seems that NTL changed our cable modem's IP address when they were doing maintenance. Irritatingly I did not notice this and now the firewall logs have filled up with bootp requests. Gah.

15 May, 2002

Thanks for nothing Scour (http://www.scour.com/). Just because I'm using Linux I can't even see your website unless I turn Javascript off.

Napster's dead. Seems weird to think that just under three years ago I arrived at Uni at it was turning into the biggest thing since sliced bread.

I keep forgetting to write about how the computer shop that was round the corner from me has moved away.

'Twas a very hot day and I'm not used to sunny weather in these parts.

14 May, 2002

Weighing coins puzzles (and solutions).

I'm upset that Mandrake ditched the penguin faces too. After I realised that the curly haired one was no longer there, I found an 8.1 RPM and pulled it of there.

Comb? Teeth? Permutations? Bleurg!

13 May, 2002

Today the NVidia drivers decided that the horizontal sync of my monitor was "" and thus prevented me from starting X.

11 May, 2002

I found this a bit late for me but if you ever need to do research on other people's research papers take a look at Citeseer. It looks good, easy to use and comprehensive.

Anyone from Macromedia - please can you see this Bugzilla post about the Flash crash on Linux. There is an offer of BSD licensed code that may help to fix your plugin and it would be wonderful if this bug could be fixed (I have seen it in the SUCS room myself). It looks like Troy Evans is already CCed on the bug so I hope that a resolution will be reached soon.

According to Nintendo, the battery life of a Game Boy Advance is about 15 hours. The original Game Boy could apparently manage 30 hours!

10 May, 2002

Noticed named[6936]: send_msg: sendto([ipaddress].32769): No buffer space available In the router logs. I checked through the logs and noticed that this seems to have started happen just after I made a change to sysctrl.conf, so I think it could be due to my trying to optimise the TCP window size with the following in sysctrl.conf: net.inet.tcp.recvspace=65535 net.inet.tcp.sendspace=65535 I have changed them back to the defaults of 32768 so I'll see if this problem goes away.

This is a good Opensource article (registration required).

Hmm...

Good article on making Printer friendly web pages without making a completely separate page.

9 May, 2002

As I put my washing up on the line today, I am reminded of last week's washing incident. Just like today, I had put all my washing on the line and was feeling fairly smug with myself. Then I thought, if I hoist the line a little bit higher, then my washing will be higher up and dry faster.

I pulled on the rope and the washing climbed up. Then just as I'm tying down the line into its new position, it snaps causing my washing to fall to the ground. Just typical. I then spent the next hour trying a bit of the line round a drain pipe in a makeshift repair.

[...] As I was taking the washing off that same makeshift line it snapped for the second time in a completely different place. Sometimes I wonder why I bother.

I have submitted the Internet Computing coursework for what I hope is the last time. Yesterday I noticed that Gareth had a second page on the submission guidelines that I hadn't seen before. I had checked the website but there hadn't been anything up there...

Earlier this year I tried to install Debian on the Sparcs in SUCS room. After setting everything up I told the Sparc to do a netboot. Unfortunately I found that the Sparc would download the boot image but then freeze/hang. The good news though is that it looks like there is a workaround. On further inspection it looks this addressed in the FAQ and could be due to the Sparc not having enough space for the RAM disk and a TFTP image.

One week until my first exam.

Here's a link to Juan Jose Quintela's Mandrakesoft page. As far as I can tell, Juan was the one who cleaned up and maintained the supermount patch for Mandrake in the more recent kernels (supermount allows a device to be automatically mounted when you try and look at it).

A quick review of an an OpenBSD desktop system. The point about the partitioning tool is very true - I really would not like to use it on a system that had important data that could not afford to be lost because in its current form it is not always obvious what you are doing.

8 May, 2002

Looks like the BBC have launched their own search engine but it only took me one search to realise it was nothing more that a rebranded Google.

Feeling so tired I went to bed during the day.

6 May, 2002

I always feel a slight twinge of sadness when people (are forced to) move away from Linux as an operating system (especially servers).

It's Gareth's Birthday today.

I picked up Princess Mononoke on DVD today (making it the first DVD that I've bought for myself) and I have to admit it's one of the best pieces of Anime that I've ever seen (not that I've seen that much though). Might be a bit sappy for some but be warned - there are rolling heads too. I didn't manage to watch it all in one go (my bad for starting to watch it at 10:30pm) but I did see it to the end the next day.

5 May, 2002

Finally the Internet Computing 2 coursework is finished. Two days after I thought I had it all sussed, it really is all done. It is submitted and it is over. I missed Jo party and was forced to heavily reengineer parts of it to get this done, with the threading proving to hold unforeseen pitfalls. I haven't had a chance to hang out on #kill-unco for the past two days. I sure hope I get a first for this - I've worked really hard to implement as much as I could (and implement it well and correctly). It would have been easy to have taken a shortcut with the threading and handed in something that didn't really work when multiple clients were sorting at the same time.

Things it does - Supports multiple clients all sorting at the same time, supports multiple slaves on the same host, supports one or more remote hosts for sorting, skips over broken hosts/slaves. It could do more (incremental sorting as the file is read for example) but this is enough for me.

The work drought is finally over. Now I just hope I can finish all the work I need to in time...

4 May, 2002

Nearly finished Internet Computing 2. Oh so nearly.

I like this demonstration of threads because what the applets show is the efficiency of different sorting algorithms in a really cool way.

The default Java Integer object (not so much the static methods) is close to useless due to lack of a set function. This helped me to do silly things when I was trying to adjust a thread global Integer refcount variable by making it point to a new Integer object.

A GPL explanation in a Pulp fiction stylee.

Be careful what you put in a blog. There are plenty of things I don't like but posting them to the web just doesn't seem like the right way to do it (or at least not the right way to start doing it).

Vanity searching. I know it's lame but I want to see if Google has started to index my diary yet.

I have to work on some sort of most recent entries page. Should be dead easy really.

People keep reading my bio (which is now horrendously out of date). Since this continues to happen (it's one of the most read pages on my site) I think it will have to be updated.

AGHHHHH! - From a Sun RMI tutorial: "Note that for security reasons, an application can bind, unbind, or rebind remote object references only with a registry running on the same host [...] A lookup, however, can be requested from any host, local or remote".

(From an Introduction to programming in Java course). If you want to handle System.out and System.err (which are both PrintStream objects) the same way as you would a regular PrintWriter object you can! Just wrap System.out (or System.err) like so: new PrintWriter(System.out)

3 May, 2002

Fighting with Java thread synchronisation. It is important to remember that if wait() and notify() need to go inside a synchronisation block for the same object that they are being called from (otherwise they won't work).

2 May, 2002

Googlebot has been spotted indexing the #kill-unco FAQ page along with some older content. Hopefully it will start on the diary soon.

1 May, 2002

I guess it's time to release one of my favourite support scripts to the world. Back in the second year I wanted to have beautified code listings in the coursework Word documents I was handing in (yeah I'm that sort of person). I knew vim could do syntax highlighting and had seen the HTML output script but how could I automate things so I could highlight lots of files from the command line? So I resolved to take vim source code apart, rip out the highlighter and make it a standalone tool.

Of course, I never got even close to looking at the source code. What I ended up doing was poking a few vim scripts and changed a few settings and produced a small shell script that did what I wanted. Not so glamorous but here it is:

code2html.tar.gz - a small archive containing my gvim script to turn code into black and white syntax highlighted HTML. It can be made to work with regular command line vim but the output isn't as good in my opinion. This script was made on RedHat Linux and may need slight modifications to work under other OSes/Linux distributions.

Much later I learned that there were actually tools that did this already (and output in a range of formats). The computer science department told us about a2ps (which not only produces syntax highlighted postscript output but can also put several pages on one side). It's good but not for me (since I usually want to integrate the output with a Word document). There is also enscript, which has an overwhelming number of options and syntax highlight a fair few different languages. Finally I'm certain Emacs can be made to do (and since Emacs does seemingly does everything and anything this is no surprise) with something called HTMLize. I'm not a heavy Emacs user but there seems to be a Mandrake RPM of it available.

It's officially pick on Gareth day today (especially if their surname is James).

Lots of hits from bored people on the diary today.