Please Start Again

I can't help it; I want her to start smoking again.

On TV in this neck of the woods is a advertising campaign for a smoking preventative. A lozenge or gum or patch or knitting needles or something.

It is presenting in the form of a video blog of a woman's successful battle against cigarette cravings. And somehow they are the most irritating they could possibly be. Of course she is happy about cigarettes not getting the best of her. And her kids are supportive. And the story about visiting her two pack a day mother with all its mental imagery is heart warming. In the most opposite sense of the phrase.

So I want her to start smoking again. So the ads will go away. So she will stop her 2am musings on the plight she is overcoming.

But K had an extra insightful insight... There is another way to stop her - and that is if everyone stops smoking. If everyone stops smoking, then there would no need for nicotine supplements, and then no need for these ads.

For a moment I wondered if this was the intent of the ad. But it isn't being run by an anti-smoking company, it is a company that makes products for smokers to help them stop. Except of course, these companies wouldn't want people to actually stop smoking, because their market would evaporate like so much smoke in the wind.

So I can only conclude that this ad is serving two simultaneous goals. To raise awareness of their product line, and also to annoy reformed smokers to the point that they take up smoking in desperation after seeing the advert, and hence need their products again.

Zencore Takedown II

An interesting sequence of events - and the moral of the story (always best up front) is: If you use a DNS host, do not use one of the domains they host for you for the email address you register with.

I use 123-reg.co.uk, who are based in the UK. I am in Australia. My website is hosted in Florida I think. So cogent in Florida got their routing mixed up and the IP address my sites are on went dark. Cogent apparently were going to take their time fixing the problem, so my web hosts gave the servers a new address.

So all I need to do is repoint my dns at the new address and viola. So I go to log into 123-reg, and hmmm... what is the password?

No problem, I forget every time, and all that needs to happen is I go through the lost password routine and they reset it and email it to me. I probably had the old one in an old email somewhere, but it was on another machine.

I realised my blunder as I clicked submit. Because now they have changed the password from something I had recorded somewhere, to a new random password and they have emailed it to my domain. The one that is broken.

Damn. Ok, so now I have to leave them a support call. The half a quid a minute phone line is out, as it cannot be called internationally. So I use the webform.

Days pass. Nothing happens.

Damn... try the fax number! Nope. Nothing happens.

Email has been down for several days now. So time to get creative. First I try skyping the 0900 number - perhaps skype can break out to pstn locally, so it isn't an international call. But no - barred.

So 123reg is a part of pipex, so I call one of the other pipex companies. Lots of hold music later, I get a guy who cannot help, but gives me the number for "123reg" that can be dialled internationally.

Of course it isn't really, it is another pipex company that still isn't 123reg. Their tech people tell me the only support provided to international customers is via email. I explain that I have already sent an email and got no response, so actually, there isn't any email support to speak of. And then I point out I sent a fax too.

He repeatedly tells me there is nothing he can do - even though when asked said he had a number for 123reg, but couldn't give it to me.

He said try customer support. Fine. Whatever.

With customer support things got better. The woman tried to divert me a couple of times, but I stood my ground, and finally she capitulated and put an email together to 123reg. She took all my details, and I had the new password minutes later.

I am finding it amusing in hindsight that the best way to get responsive support from 123-reg is to actually phone a different company entirely.

Screen Screen

Continuing my enthusism for screen, the terminal multiplexer (on most linux dists), I found the


following post in response to another post about the wonders of screen.

Basically, some tips for using screen within screen - which comes in handy when you want to kick something off but still have a terminal session attached to it - and you already have a screen session in play.

The deal is that the "outermost" screen hears the Ctrl-a sequence and responds to it.. so detaching from inside the second screen sessions detaches the first (you'll understand when you start using it)...

For anyone that dislikes C-a as the command key (e.g. emacss or bash users) one of the two following keys may be convenient. Put one of these lines in a file called ~/.screenrc:

#to use C-] as the command key
escape ^]\
or

#to use C-\ as the command key
escape ^\\
it’s useful to use different escape sequences on different machines so that ssh’ing from one to the other and running screen within screen doesn’t cause an aneurism.

another useful customization is to show the current screens at the bottom of the page:

hardstatus alwayslastline ” ] H]{= Bw} %w %=”

notice that that has a ] as the first character; this helps me remember which escape key I’m using at the moment. On a machine with C-\ as the escape key, it should be:

hardstatus alwayslastline ” \ H]{= Bw} %w %=”

Blacklander at Dilbert.blog

Scott Adam's blog is good reading at any time. But this post wasn't even by him. Scott recently caused a new wave of commenting in response to his recent post and follow-up where he considers the effort required to fear all the things that we are required to these days.

Some serious discussion came out of this, along with the usual Bush-banging and Bush-loving nonsense. But out of it all came a comment that Scott thought so well of that he promoted to a post.

Blacklander offers incisive thoughts about the reality of the "us" and "them" rhetoric we hear every day, from the perspective of "them".

Cliffskis Mumblings...: Kudos Video Trailer

Oooh, excellent, Cliffski has posted a google video of his latest masterpiece, and it is looking good:

Cliffskis Mumblings...: Kudos Video Trailer

Check out other Positech titles here: Positech Games

Dark Ages

With Dark Energy, Dark Matter and Inflation, I can't help but think that in 50 years or so that cosmologists and physicists are going to snigger a bit about the lengths we would go to to protect a deep belief in relativity.

Perhaps a few years more than fifty, as doctrine often takes a long old while to shake off.

So you start with the axim that relativity is right - and absolute. Then find a bunch of observations that say that it doesn't seem to fit the whole picture... then rather than look for ways to refine it, start inventing undetectable stuff that makes it all hang together just like Einstein says.

Inflation - the universe looks the same in all directions. So what? Well the universe is too big for light to have traversed it in the time available considering how old it is. So there hasn't been time for all the everything to even out like that.

Dark energy and matter were invented to cater for the fact that there isn't enough gravity to hold galaxies together.

Of course there is no conceivable explanation for inflation, or for what dark energy and matter might be.

So if it was me, I would be saying "yes I know that relativity is excellent and all, but it doesn't work at small scales or high energies so should we seriously be focusing so much time and effort trying to make the universe fit to it (when quite frankly, it doesn't give a damn), instead of trying to find a theory that better matches observation? A theory being something testable remember?"

Making the command line more commanding

Nircmd is a great little utility for making the Windows command line just that little bit more useful.

nircmd will let you manipulate many aspects of what is going on in your windows session, such as closing, minimising and restoring windows (even by class), stop/starting services, turning off the monitor, shutting down, even making windows varying levels of transparent.

This greatly enhances what you can accomplish with batch files without having to resort to vb or other scripting languages.

Screen is the Answer

The question is "How can I make my command line life easier in linux (and other unix style os')?"

Screen is the answer, but it is the answer even if you aren't asking the question. Screen is so fundamentally useful that should be a fundamental part of the kernel if you ask me.

So what is it? So there you are, connected to your linux box, and you kick of a compile. Before you know it, there a zillion dependencies to consider and it is going to be there a while. So now your session is tied up, so if you want to get on with something else, you need to make a new connection to the box. But what if you need to restart the machine you are connecting from while a day long compile is taking place? Killing your connection to the linux server will kill any processes associated with that session.

Or what if you want to try something in one session and see the output in another session? SecureCRT is a great ssh client, and version 5 supports tabs, which is cool. But of course each time you need make a new session, you need to authenticate.

Anyway, "screen" is the answer, as you already know because I told you at the start.

What screen does is decouple the console session from the console itself. When you create an ssh session, you are providing an input/output tty. So that you can tell the box what to do, and it can talk back to you.

What screen does is provide a proxy for that session. So screen is where your input and output go to, and you can either be connected to screen or not. When you are running screen it is transparent, it is just like you are carrying out a normal session.

But if you close your ssh session, and then reconnect from another terminal, typing screen -r will let you carry on where you left off. And it doesn't matter whether that is another ssh session, or a telnet session, or if you walk up to the physical console.

So thats useful right? But this isn't all of by a long stretch. screen isn't limited to one console session. You can have a number of them. You could have 10 different sessions going to your linux box simultaneously and then disconnect them all and resume them all somewhere else.

screen is controlled with the ctrl-a meta by default, and here are a bunch of useful commands:

ctrl-a c Create and enter a new screen
ctrl-a n Switch to next screen
ctrl-a p Previous Screen
ctrl-a " List screens
ctrl-a M Monitor screen for activity (will bell other screens if something happens)
ctrl-a S Split screens
ctrl-a Tab Switch between split screens

So there is a handful, and note that you can cut and paste between screens, which makes it massively useful when on the console.

This concludes this screen article and it will now sit amongst the millions of others on the net. There is a reason why they are all there: screen is the answer.

Windows Redefines "Don't Delete"

Finally it was time to build Windows from scratch again. I had been using the same Windows XP installation for the past three or four hardware platforms. I know, this is sheer lunacy, but Windows takes such an effort to get together, and after all these years I had it working how I want it, and to start over always seemed too daunting a task.

Except for all the bluescreens of course. A few too many, and a windows build of several years old almost takes as long to boot up - so a bluescreen is a double wammy. I lose whatever I was working on, plus have to wait 15 minutes boot time before it is usable again.

But the point of this story is user account deletion under Windows XP. At one point in my migration from old to new, I needed to delete the account on my old windows install and recreat it on the new. This was carried out in the new Windows installation on a new partition, but the user account profile I wanted to delete was pointing to the old Windows installation on the old partition. If that makes any sense.

Nevermind. So I just wanted to delete the account. Just the userid. And when you attempt to delete an account, Windows says "do you want to delete it all, or just the account and leave the files?"

Which is great - I just wanted to delete the account. And leave the files. So I agreed to this with good old windows, which then informed me that it would move all the files of the user to a folder on the desktop. And off it went. Now the old profile and the current profile were on different partitions, so this move would actually be a copy and delete - so would take forever to move the 4gb profile I had accumulated (thanks Google Desktop Search). So I waited.

Then bing it was finished. So the account was gone and the files were in this folder here, and I could start moving them to my new account. Except of course they weren't. Oh the folder was there, and in it was another couple of folders, containing my old desktop icons, my documents, my music and my photos. But nothing else.

So where was the Application Data folder? Where was the Local Settings folder? Gone. Deleted. Deleted even though Windows promised me that it wouldn't. Because now I discover that what it meant was: "I'll copy every thing that I think you should be concern with, but delete the rest." And of course, why would I want to concern myself with all those system folders? Apart from the fact that the Application Data folder contains my email. And my bookmarks. It also contains a whole ton of other data that the various applications I use rely on.

And I'll bet bottom dollar that if I was using outlook, it would have saved the pst, and if I was using ie, it would have saved the bookmarks folders.

But no, apparently "don't delete" means, delete most things, but leave the documents. The moral is to not use the control panel account management for this, but to get into the Users and Groups MMC plugin and delete from there.

zencore Take Down

Suddenly, one of my scripts at zencore.com / biz / co.uk started causing issues on its hosted server. To the point that the entire server would crash. Understandably, my hosts at http://www.livehost.net weren't keen for this to happen and so suspended my account.

But what caused the errant script causing the problem to become errant? It certainly hadn't changed in months even years. The script in question was a redirect script that was used for outgoing links and I wonder it if it might have been hijacked by someone for purposes unknown.

However, this means that zencore is down, and in the main that isn't a problem. The content was mainly me going on about stuff. However, "gridstat" was a service provided to give people a way of putting their http://grid.org statistics on their websites as a graphic image. This needs to be addressed as there are still many people using it.

So while zencore itself needs a bit of a refactor for new purposes, the gridstat service needs to come back online.

Soon

Spam Shrapnel

I thought I had it sussed. Spam. Careful use of throwaway email addresses. A "honeypot" spam address that is all over the internet that I can use to develop Bayesien spam filters to clear out the one or two items that sneak into my real email.

It was all looking good for just a few months. Perhaps a couple of years even.

But then... Some git spammer has decided to use my com and co.uk domain as the source domain for their spam. But not the .biz interestingly. So now I get hardly any spam at all, but I get stacks and stacks of undeliverable emails where mailservers have responded to the fake spam address on the spam email sent to a fake email address, because the address didn't exist. Or it did exist and they are full. Or the mail server recognised it as spam and incomprehensibly sent an email back to the "spammer" saying so (if you are not clear on why this is brainmeltingly pointless, please ask).

So now I have had to train my spam filters to recognise undeliverables and just about any other mailserver type communication and consign them to the spam bin. Which of course means that if I ever send an email now to a typoed address, I will never see the undeliverable.

This is immensely frustrating. Somewhere there are teams of spam servers sending spam to mailservers all over the world, and I am getting the fallout.

Was this intentional? It is just part of the process these days to use real domains as source addresses, or is this aimed at me? It cannot be, but it is hard to consider it just bad luck.

A few goes at looking through the mail headers from the kind mailservers that forward the original email to me in its entirety seems to show no commonality. No clues as to who is doing this and where from. It is doubtful that the IP addresses that I glean from this process are anything more than zombie relays, so following this up and reporting to the Russian and Chinese IS abuse addresses aren't likely to help.

So that leaves me with precisely nothing to do except wait for it to stop...

Unless someone out there on the internet has any ideas...

ATI Introduces Physics - Time for 3 Video Cards in Your System

So a couple of posts ago I put out the suggestion (which was in fact ATI's (sort of) in the first place) that old Shader 3.0 cards could be used as physics engines rather than consigning them to the bin.

Clearly, ATI are playing attention to my blog. Only not too closely it seems, because they are suggesting buying yet another graphics card to handle the physics.

Its like all they want to do is sell more and more graphics cards.

Story at Digg

This morning ATI got a few of us together in order to show us their new physics technology. Godfrey Cheng showed off what he referred to a �Boundless Gaming.� ATI�s goal with Boundless Gaming is to provide the most immersive gaming experience as possible.

read more | digg story

Yeah, I know. Digg. Well it isn't all bad.

Skype Let Down

Skype just got knocked down a bit in my estimation today. I have had a few dollars in a Skype account "just in case". And I just got an email saying it expired. With a bunch of fluff saying how they tried their best and all. Crap.

So I sent them an email back:

I just received an email saying my Skype credit has expired.

Within the email it tells me how you "tried to make our expiration policy as user friendly as possible", and how you must "comply with normal accounting rules".

If either of these things were true, then you would have sent the automated email *prior* to the credit expiring to provide the opportunity for people to maintain their account presense.

And regardless, to determine an account "dead" simply because the credit was unused rather that the account being unused is absurd. Which is reflected in the fact that you do not deem an account "dead", but just the credit. You know full well when an account is genuinely dead when the skype user no longer connects to the skype network.

So the reality is that this is simply a money grabbing opportunity and a blatant one at that.

This is very disappointing.

I hate it when a service seems to do it right and then punches you in the face.

Mythtv Adverts

Some stuff just works. The things that you would want to work more than any other just don't most of the time however.

MythTV can be grief to put together. Like all linux things, it is a journey, rather than a product. I have learnt more about linux through putting a MythTV deployment together over any other activity. You want to learn linux? Give it a try. Not for the fainthearted linux newbie.

So with a freebie, there comes a set of expectations. One of them being that you don't fully expect it to work all the time. You kind expect it to work most of the time, but realise there is going to have to be a bit of mucking around to keep it afloat. What else?

But it doesn't. I had a whole bunch of flakiness to contend with with the initial Ubuntu MythTV have-a-go, but after binning it and starting over with Gentoo, I discovered that it was all down to the hardware. For some reason if the processor goes at its rated speed, I am in for trouble. I didn't get the same problem when the same hardware was running Windows, but I guess that even when Windows is running full tilt it does it pretty inefficiently, and didn't stress all of the components enough at the same time to kick it over? Who knows, that is just idle anti-windows speculation.

So each night a script goes off and gets new listings for the guide. Whenever my shows come on, Mythtv just records them. No fuss. If the disk is getting full, it deletes old stuff. If you say you want to keep something, it keeps it.

It just gets on with it.

But best of all is the ad skipping. After recording, a script runs that does ad detection, and puts markers in the recording. Now clearly determining where ads start and end isn't science? I mean, sometimes it is a right giveaway, but often it isn't... sometime ads seem to flow seamlessly from the show. So you roll out your expectations once again, and accept that some of the time ad skipping will work, but mostly it is going to dump you right in the middle of next segment causing you to rewind to find the start.

But it works. And I am not even watching US tv, which it must be mostly optimised for.

You press the skip button, and it skips the ads.

Rock and roll.

Physics and Graphics

So.. AGEIA bring out a new idea - a year ago - where you have dedicated hardware for modelling physics. Similar reaction to when the first 3D accelerators were introduced. Who would buy specific purpose hardware where games were the only real place for them to be used. How frivolous!

Of course, the environment is different now, what with quad SLI and all, but still. Then ATI (I think) pointed out that a lot of physics calcs could be done with Shader 3.0 hardware. Graphics hardware.

Now I thought, "surely the Shader 3.0 hardware is going to be busy shading pixels?". My point being that you would have to sacrifice the dedication of the graphics hardware to do the physics. Robbing peter to pay paul as they say. I can see how putting the physics chip on a graphics card would be a winner - excepting of course the size of the bloody things already. And anyway Asus have gone ahead and made a card, and there is Physx support in games already. So it looks like it is going to happen. And why not really? Games are an entertainment medium unlike any other, and immersion is key to the enjoyment of any game after gameplay. And good graphics and physics help immensely.

But back to that ATI idea... Using Shader 3.0.

My mobo has an AGP slot, and a PCIe. I chose this because my current graphics card is AGP, and my next one will be PCIe. But ultimately, I am going to have a card that can support Shader 3.0 doing nothing once I employ a spanking new card. I mean, I cannot run them SLI for example, and I am not going to be playing games on two machines. Oh perhaps if Vista comes out and I want two windows machines and Vista is worth a damn, then it might get used I suppose. But that spare processing power can be used in the same machine.

So. My thinking is that you can open the world to hardware physics to a wealth of people by simply using their old Shader 3.0 cards to do the physics while their new card runs the graphics. It is subgenius I tell you.