Jeslog

A lesson in how to win against peaceful protesters.

2011-10-25T13:20:00.000+11:00

Dear Mr Robert Doyle,

"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." - Mahatma Gandhi

The key strategy behind peaceful civil disobedience is that any action an authority takes against it is seen to be unnecessarily violent. It puts the authority in a place where it can't win. It either doesn't get it's way, or it is seen by the population to be unreasonable, aggressive and violent. It's a really effective strategy that has been used successfully for decades. The only way to deal with it is to be shown to be as reasonable as possible.

Ways you could have been seen to be more reasonable:

Walked down to the occupymelbourne protest and participated in the discussion and general assembly, talked to some people and made sure you actually knew what it was all about. "How can I represent you better?" is a key question the protesters would have liked to have heard from you.
Before giving the eviction order you could have offered to discuss a different location they could move to with an acknowledgement that they would be given a permit to stay at the new location for a few days with renewal of this permit to be discussed. A lot of people from the protest did leave when asked, more would have if they'd had another place to go. With the remaining people looking like dicks in the public eye.
The protest, once evicted, was obviously going to set-up at a new location that you'd have to evict in the future anyway. You knew this, it would be far better for it to be a location you could be involved in the discussion with and that people could move on to peacefully without being violently attacked.
Get great video footage of all of this.

The occupymelbourne group does contain a few unreasonable people looking for a fight with authority. But it also involves many more people that just want their voices heard. The number of people that want a fight are a small minority and are mostly kept in check by the larger population of peaceful people.

On Friday and Saturday I pulled up a few stupid kids with scarves over their faces and water balloons and informed them that this is a peaceful protest and that their actions were inappropriate and why violence (even minimal water balloon violence) never wins. I'm sure many other people did the same thing.

Even being very reasonable you'd likely still have had to drag a number of hardcore people away either from the city sq or the new location at the end of the permit, but they would have looked like complete dicks in comparison to how reasonable you'd look.

You only win against peaceful protests by being reasonable.

Golang interfaces

2011-06-03T03:11:00.004+10:00

Interfaces in Go are very powerful, but their power comes from being generic.

Unlike interfaces in Java or C# where an interfaces defines a very specific thing that just lacks an implementation. Interfaces in Go only define a set of methods. Because of this you can do interesting things like:


func SomeFunction(w interface{Write(string)}){
   w.Write("pizza")
}

This is a function that takes any type that has a Write(string) method. Statically verified duck typing at it's finest.

More commonly it would be written as:

type Writer interface {Write(string)}


func SomeFunction(w Writer}){
   w.Write("pizza")
}

Giving the interface a name makes it easier for the reader to determine what you expect the interface to be used for.

Since you can put any number of methods in an interface you can also put zero methods there.

This is what we call the "empty interface". There is nothing special about it. It's just a regular interface with no methods.

The useful thing about the "empty interface" is that all types satisfy it. As all types have at least zero methods. This makes it useful for storing abitrary types in collections (eg. lists, vectors, trees etc.) and for writing functions that take parameters of arbitrary type and figure out what to do with them based on their type. (eg fmt.Printf())

Russ Cox has a really good blog post about how go interfaces are implemented.

Effective Go also has a section on go interfaces

Hierarchical File Systems are live and well

2010-11-14T22:15:00.003+11:00

I thought I'd respond to this paper "Hierarchical File Systems are dead" People have been talking about searchable and tagable local file systems for decades. The main problems with searching and tagging is:

Most data isn't easily searchable. How do you search music? spreadsheets? movies?
Tagging is hard work and generally non-portable.
Getting people to agree on file formats is near impossible,
so how would you ever get everyone to agree on a tagging format?
Tags mean different things to different people. Tagged data tends to have lots of very broad tags and few specific and useful tags.
items tend to move around in searches, searching for the same thing can yield different results as new data comes in.

So why is the hierarchical file system still so ubiquitous?

The hierarchical file system doesn't know or care about your files. This means the only agreement you need between people is that a file is an amount of contiguous bytes.
hierarchies are easy to navigate and predictable, things are always in the place you left them.

People think "we have web search, why don't we have desktop search?". Well, searching websites is easy...relatively easy. They are all text and linked to each other in meaningful ways. Every link is a tag. They are already in a hierarchy that helps determine their meaning and related topics.

There are many really great ideas for how humans could interact with computers but many of them require the computer to have too much intelligence and we aren't there yet. Making interfaces that require the computer to be more intelligent than it currently is, is a recipe for a difficult to use and unpredictable user experience.

Learning by Trolling

2010-04-20T17:30:00.002+10:00

I've been following the development of the Go programming language for a few months now and learning more and more about it.

I've actually found that I learn more about it by helping other people than I would on my own. People on IRC and the mailing list tend to get themselves in to messy situtations and wanting to do insane things and encounter problems I never would. In the process of helping those people with their insanity I actually learn alot.

I tend to have a shortage of problems because I'm very good at planning to avoid them. Which I really think is a disadvantage, especially in any kind of learning or research stages.

The whole reason human beings have advanced technologically has been due to the great number of problems we've had and created for ourselves.

Droughts resulted in the need for farming, farming caused over population, over population caused packed cities of people spreading disease resulting in the need for medical treatments. etc.

If it wasn't for all the stupid problems we wouldn't have the solutions.

This is Australia

2010-02-12T16:35:00.005+11:00

First they came for the paedophiles and they were sick bastards so I didn't give a shit.

Then they came for the interspecies erotica kinksters and I didn't mind because I wasn't really in to that.

Then they came for the furries, watersporters and the scatters and I started getting a bit worried.

Soon they came for me, and then the homosexuals, and the jews and finally they came for the lesbian orgy koalas.

and I laughed and sang "This is Australia".

Edit: someone mentioned that it might be a good idea to mention that this post relates to the plan by the Australia federal government to implement an Internet filter

My generation

2010-02-02T16:33:00.003+11:00

Why bosses hate Gen-Y

"THE jury is in on Generation Y and the verdict isn't good. Employers say Gen-Ys are short on skills, demanding, impatient and far from loyal, according to a survey"

and why is this the case?
Because Gen Y has grown up with everyone trying to screw us. We are sceptical and mistrusting because we have to be to survive:

If someone you don't know says "hi" to you on the street, they want your money.
If someone you don't know calls your phone, they want your money.

If someone you don't know rings your door bell, they want your money.
Email from someone you don't know? it's probably spam or a scam.
If someone tells you they're not trying to sell you something, they are.
That number offering sex with hot sluts on the toilet wall, yeah that's either a gay guy or someone's ex-girlfriend.
Didn't read the fine print? yeah, you're stuck paying for $100 a month for something you don't need and can't use.
An offer sounds reasonable? double check it, triple check it, if it still sounds reasonable it's probably a scam.
If it looks like a bomb, it's probably not a bomb...but how can you be sure? better get it checked.

People told us the world would end in 2000
and now it's ending in 2012.
Or global warming will kill us
or bird flu
or swine flu
or killer bees
or all the bees will die off
or dogs with bees in their mouths

Advertisements that claim the impossible "weighs nothing, does everything"? (sorry, PDF)

Don't let someone buy you a drink, they might spike it.
Watch the bartender pour your drink or they might spike it.

Drugs? yeah, they'll fucking kill you.

Did you know your shopping cart has germs in it?
lonelygirl15? yeah, she's just an actor
the underdogs always win? yeah right!
love conquers all? except relationships don't last

Lie to a population enough, while also giving them the education and tools to find the truth and eventually you just get apathy.

In this world where everyone that isn't a close friend is trying to screw you, how can anyone be expected to trust their employer?

3D movies

2010-01-27T13:13:00.002+11:00

I went to Avatar 3D a few weeks ago and saw a lot of previews for more upcoming 3D movies. which means this will be a growing trend in movies.

The 3D in Avatar was awesome, once I stopped feeling ill I started getting a headache, the headache faded as the movie went on which I found interesting.

I suspect the reason for my headache was related to my eyes trying to focus on things that were 3D but out of focus. It's very strange staring at a 3D object that is out of focus and it not coming in to focus.
As the movie went on my eyes eventually became accustom to following the focus of the movie and my headache went away. So this problem may be just an issue of adoption, eventually we'll all get used to following the focus of 3D movies instead of trying to look at things ourselves.
Maybe eventually they'll put screens in those glasses and eye tracking systems so things on the screen can be in focus when you look at them.

AOP: Aspect orientated programmer

2010-01-08T18:54:00.003+11:00

AOP appears to be based on a restricted form of the COMEFROM directive.

Which isn't too bad, as long as you read the aspects before you read any of the application code.

Go Programming language

2009-12-02T04:50:00.003+11:00

I've tried to write a post about Go a few times but mostly it just ends up a rant about how a lot of people haven't taken the time to get to know the language before complaining about it on the mailing list.

I'll just say, Go is awesome, it's like the object-orientated C I always wanted. So instead of writing a pointless rant about it, I'm writing a Bittorrent client.

Warning teens of perils of facebook

2009-09-09T15:36:00.003+10:00

Obama warns US teens of perils of facebook

The main goal of privacy is to prevent other people finding out things about you that they don't approve of and discriminating against you because of it.

In a world where information travels very slowly this is important. If you apply for a job and are a drug user, and the potential employer finds out about this and has no information about the drug use of other applicants then they might discriminate against you.

In a world where information travels quickly and people are very open about their personal details then the person who hides information about themselves is likely to be discriminated against because they are seen as untrustworthy.

Right now the employers are of a generation where privacy was important and people hid details about their lives, so they see drunken weekend long parties, promiscuity, BDSM, body mods, drug use and internet rants as something weird and different. This generation is growing up knowing more and more about people can see that most things that people do aren't actually that rare at all.

Reuse, Reduce, Recycle

2009-08-29T03:45:00.002+10:00

We're doing it all wrong.
For years to eco friendly bunch have been touting the wonders of recycling or reusing the junk we accumulate. But it's the wrong way of going about it, we don't live on a planet with limited resources, an energy crisis, or a lack of water. We have a massive amount of resources, most of which we use in stupid ways and tie up in landfill.

Sustainability is about being able to sustain our current resource usage indefinitely, if anything is put in to landfill at any point(no matter how many times you reusing it) then it's not sustainable.

Making wind chines out of bottle caps, a floating island house out of coke bottles or a cafe out of waste building materials isn't sustainable. If you recycle all your coke bottles in to clothing then you just have to make more coke bottles for the coke and the clothing eventually ends up in landfill anyway.

The problem is our stuff is too well made and lasts too long. We created a disposable culture without the actual disposable products. My daily coffee which takes me 15 minutes to drink has a plastic top that will last for thousands of years. The take-away food container I get my curry chicken don in will last about the same amount of time, it's crazy.

We need more things to be bio-degradable computers, kettles, cars, bottles, can all need a built in life span after which they will break down in compost.

But, it's an interesting problem, if you want something that will last in good condition for more than a few months(warehouse storage before use etc.), then it has all the requirements to last thousands of years.

A solution is required.

Privileges of being part of a major minority

2009-07-13T00:35:00.003+10:00

You're accepted enough that you get to complain that you're not being treated the same as the majority
You actually have the ability to be what you are and tell people about it.
People have some widely accepted stereotype to assign to you instead of getting worried about your sanity or being afraid.
There are places, agencies and communities that will support you.
You can expect that a section of the majority actually supports your rights.
You can write lists about the privileges of the majority and people will read them.

In response to:
The Male Programmer Privilege Checklist, White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, The Male Privilege Checklist, Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack II: Sexual Orientation, and several more.

Why free software shouldn't depend on software

2009-06-29T12:54:00.003+10:00

It is dangerous to depend on software, so we need to discourage its use.

The problem is not unique to applications; any free implementation of software would raise the same issue. The danger is that somebody is probably planning to force all free software implementations underground some day using software patents. This is a serious danger, and only fools would ignore it until the day it actually happens. We need to take precautions now to protect ourselves from this future danger.

The problem is not in the software implementations, but rather in applications written in software. If we lose the use of software, we will lose them too. That doesn't make them unethical, but it means that writing them and using them is taking a gratuitous risk.

We should systematically arrange to depend on the free software implementations as little as possible. In other words, we should discourage people from writing software. Therefore, we should not include software implementations in the default installation of GNU/Linux distributions, and we should distribute and recommend non-software applications rather than comparable software applications whenever possible.

Sustainable effort

2009-06-14T23:41:00.003+10:00

I was reading about how a teenager created/discovered a microbe that eats plastic. The article mentioned the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I'd heard about this before from somewhere so I went and looked it up again.

It's a real problem and it's not a problem that is going to go away anytime soon and it's going to get much worse before changes will be made because most of the current "environmental action' is about relieving guilt. Someone pipes up about a specific issue, everyone feels guilty for a little while and puts in some effort to "do something" about the problem. But the outcome is usually half-arsed, misdirected and ineffective because real change requires effort and commitment and everybody is too busy doing all the important things(work,school,uni, family, friends, bills, drinking, video games, BBQ, dating, socialising, gossiping etc.) they have to do to worry about something that doesn't directly effect them and probably won't in the near future. It's perfectly understandable, it's how we're programmed, we're only human.

According to my electricity bill my household generates 7.2 tonnes of greenhouse gases every year, we also generate about 3.6 tonnes of household garbage and probably much more rubbish from products that we use and throw out while we're out and about and this is just the direct stuff. There is a massive amount of waste that is produced on our behalf, the creation of every product we use generates some amount of waste.

Yet, we are intelligent, educated people that are aware of these things. We ride bikes, walk or take public transport, we take our own bags when we go shopping, we vote for the greens, we use less than the recommended amount of water per person.

But it's actually a lot of effort to reduce your waste output, obtaining food that isn't contained in massive amounts of packaging is effort. You can't get those kind of products at a local supermarket, you have to find a fresh produce market, which is 5 times the distance away for us(further for most people).

It's still not easy enough to be sustainable, and until be work out ways of making being sustainable cheaper and less effort than not being sustainable then things aren't going to change at the rate we need them too.

Backwards Compatibility and assumptions of maddness

2009-06-10T22:17:00.002+10:00

I'm a cub scout leader at a local group, this evening another leader was teaching the cubs about the semaphore flag signaling system. That's something I never learnt as a scout so I paid attention.
The semaphore flag signaling system is a system for communicating messages over a distance the range of human sight. Two flags are used, with flags in different positions representing different letters of the alphabet(follow the link if you're interested in the specifics). The positions have an intuitive order following the alphabet...all of them except the letter 'J'. The representation of the letter 'J' deviates from the pattern completely. It seemed like madness, why would someone made such an intuitive system but make such an unintuitive edge case? The other leader suggested that the inventor was probably drunk(lol), I thought it might have to do with avoiding some kind of confusion, but I couldn't think of what was special about 'J' that would cause confusion and thus require such a deviation.
After a short discussion of what made 'J' special, it was suggusted that perhaps the letter 'J' wasn't in the original design and was added to the system later.
When I got home I looked up the history of the letter 'J' and discovered that indeed this was the answer.
"j is the tenth letter in the modern Latin alphabet; it was the last of the 26 letters to be added." - Wikipedia Letter J
The flag signaling system was so old that it actually pre-dates a letter in the alphabet.

This story is a great metaphor for how we tend to jump to the assumption that someone must have been crazy to design something the way they did even when we have no idea what process it had to go through to get to it's current state.

Backward compatibility is a bitch.

- Jesse McNelis

OpenID Providers

2009-05-05T11:10:00.002+10:00

So I recently discovered stackoverflow, and noticed they use OpenID for login, this lead me to notice that google, yahoo, blogger, flickr, livejournal etc. are all OpenID providers.
This has lead to a most interesting point about vendor lock-in.

The biggest way in which online providers can lock you in is based on a url. They control the url(or email address). OpenID is about authentication on the basis that you control a certain url.

I have a gmail account, imagine if I used this account as an OpenID provider with a large number of other services...and then I got locked out of my google account. Maybe I violated their terms of service or maybe they just don't like me, they are a private company, it's a free account, they have the right to refuse to do business with me for no reason at all.

This is unlikely, a very stallman style paranoia, but it does give google increasing control which means that you'll be more likely to just go along with any terms of service changes etc. because of the huge hassle in changing providers.

- Jesse McNelis

Geocities

2009-04-28T21:08:00.003+10:00

I really hate to admit it, but geocities had a bit of an impact on my life.
In ~1995 my dad brought a new computer with a 9600 b/s dial up modem and after a very short time playing around dialing up to various BBS boards we eventually got internet and email access through the infoxchange.
At some point my older brother, Eamon, signed up for a geocities account so that he could 'have his own homepage' for his alias "El Phreako" and because making a website in those days absolutely required that you learn HTML that's what he did.
Being the younger brother and wanting to be involved in anything my big brother thought was important I also wanted 'my own homepage', so he gave me a folders on his geocities page and I started learning HTML. For a while we had a bit of a competition between us about who could make the 'coolest site' which involved me learning about image editing, animiated gifs, making images that could be used as backgrounds and then eventually some Javascript. Most of these skills were gathered from 'view source'ing various websites that had interesting things that I wanted to do.

Eamon eventually lost interest in his site and I moved on to attempt to make sites for other people. I tried making a website for my father's work place, my mum's work place, the housing co-op, none of them ever actually got used by the people they were made for I had fun making them.
One day my dad wanted me to make a site for a conference, originally the site was just supposed to provide some information about the conference and a schedule and contact details for who to contact to register to attended the conference, which I could easily do. But later they wanted to be able to register for the conference through the webiste. This is something I'd never done before, I'd previously had html forms that submitted to "mailto:" actions so I'd recieve the comma seperated contents of the form in an email, but this wasn't useful to them, they wanted a database.

I never actually finished that website either due to this new requirement, but it did spark me to go and learn how I'd do such a thing. This led me to ASP, then PHP(which was much less confusing) and SQL and configuring Apache/MySQL/PHP to test my scripts.
This eventually led on to learning more programming languages and environments unrelated to just web development that solved all kind of new and interesting problems I'd come across.

Geocities was a place to get started for the generation of programmers who started off with web development.

- Jesse McNelis

I don't like PDFs

2009-04-25T02:11:00.003+10:00

When I see a link to a PDF I know it's going to be:

large document with text packed tightly in to columns
an academic paper full of irrelevant information to pad it out to a size worth making a PDF for.

If the writer can't explain the concept to me in a paragraph, then it's unlikely a 100 page document is going to make it any clearer. Most of the time it takes reading at least a page to realise that the document is useless to me, or just worthless in general and written by someone who is trying desperately to make it seem like their idea is actually something worth writing about. It's terribly annoying to put in the effort to try and read a PDF and discover it was a waste of time.

- Jesse McNelis

File systems and 'binary blobs'

2009-03-17T15:44:00.004+11:00

"If the only effective way to use your filesystem is to use a database instead, then that indicates that you have not written a filesystem that is useful to typical application developers who enjoy storing things in files rather than binary blobs that end up with an entirely different set of pathological behaviours." - Advogato

What is a file system?
A file system is a data structure designed specifically to store binary blobs. The file system doesn't know anything about these blobs except for their location and size. It doesn't expect to know anything else. In a world of 3rd party developers building all kinds of new and unexpected things constantly this binary blob abstraction is very flexible and as efficient as you can get while still having no idea what the structure of the data is.

What is a database?
A database is a data structure designed specifically to store structured data. A database knows everything about this data, it know the size of every field and how it relates to other fields. It knows exactly how an application uses this data and so it stores it in the optimal way for the application.

The issue with binary blobs?
Binary blobs have a structure, but they are useless if that structure isn't known. ASCII blobs also have a structure, but that structure in very simplistic and has a defined standard. ASCII blobs are just an array of 1 byte numbers, they have no other structural information but other than this they have no common structure across applications. Binary blobs have no standard defined structure, the bytes contained within could be connected and grouped in any number of ways, they can have all kinds of complex structure which means they can be read in random access ways, (instead of just from top to bottom).

Back to the original point
Writing a bunch of tiny files is madness. File systems just aren't designed with that in mind, they are designed to store average sized binary blobs. Application developers should take advantage of this and store their data in a binary structure that is optimal for their applications. They should use a standard way to do this(eg. dbm is pretty standard across *nix).

Erlang and concurrency

2009-02-28T15:08:00.003+11:00

If you read programing blogs you'll know a few things:
* LISP is the greatest language of all time
* Ruby is the future of everything
* Java is slow and verbose(but apparently Scala isn't)
* .NET and everything related to it is evil
* and Erlang solves all your concurrency issues

I have issue with pretty much all those points, but I'm going to touch on Erlang and concurrency first.
Erlang doesn't actually solve any of your concurrency issues, Erlang specifically avoids all the things that make concurrency a difficult problem, by avoiding all global variables and shared data structures. Shared-Nothing is the easy part. You don't need locks, or the worries that come with them(deadlocks, resource starvation, etc.).
You can do shared nothing fairly easily in any language, you just need a bunch of threads and a bunch of lock-less queues for message passing between them.

Once your problem domain requires you to have a shared data structure, Erlang isn't useful.

Modern Technology 'destroying our brains'

2009-02-13T19:02:00.003+11:00

I'd like to go over this point because it comes up every now and again. It seems to be mentioned a lot more in relation to computers and mobile devices because they are the latest tech and therefore an easy target.

Technology has been 'destroying' us for thousands of years.

The discovery and use of fire has affected changes in our digestive system so the consumption of raw meat isn't as safe.
The creation of farming has meant that most people no longer have the knowledge required for hunting and gathering, and the centralising of this farm has meant that most people don't even know the skills required for farming.
The creation of writing and standard forms of communication have meant that you no longer have to think about and solve problems yourself, you can just ask someone who has already solved that problem.
The creation of cars, planes, trains, mass transport, telephones and mass communication has meant that the people and resources you depend on can be 100s of kilometres away(well outside the distances you can easily walk).

The creation of the Internet has meant that the implementation details of an idea are just a keyword search away, so I don't remember them because I don't need to. I need to have a vague idea of the concept, enough to know it exists and what kinds of keywords I'd need to search for. Because of this environment my brain prioritises concepts over details, having a vague idea of a huge number of concepts is much more useful to me then knowing the full implementation details of a handful.
Obviously this would be a problem if the Internet and communication networks suddenly disappeared, I'd be left with a bunch of concepts and no idea how to implement them. But if the Internet, telecommunications and mass transport disappeared I'd also likely starve as all the food I consume comes from places that are mostly out of walking distance and those farms wouldn't be able to function without their deliveries anyway.
The result of such a thing would mean that our society couldn't support the populations we currently have, some people would die but the others would quickly adapt. You might be surprised at how quickly human beings can adapt to even massive changes in their environment.

I'd turn vegetarian....but

2009-01-16T14:04:00.002+11:00

I'd turn vegetarian, but I can't work out what organisms I should and shouldn't continue to murder. I mean, I have to murder some of them to survive...but which ones? are there organisms that deserve my wrath more than others? Who am I to judge the value of a specific life form?

I don't kill and eat human beings because that would make it rather difficult to interact with them, I try not to kill organisms I've built an emotional connection to, but sometimes I have to for various reasons related to my survival and happiness.

Living requires mass murder, I don't deny it and I try to come to terms with it everyday. But I won't pretend it's not happening.

- Jesse McNelis

Australian proposal for internet filtering

2008-10-22T17:13:00.002+11:00

The Australian government is currently looking at a proposal to spend approx $125 million on filtering the internet for all Australians.
The proposal gives people two options for their internet connection, by default it will be filtered of everything that isn't 'child safe'(this is the stop all
those teenagers from looking at pornography and being serial rapists) or you can opt out of the filter(by registering as a pervert) and only have all 'illegal content' filtered. Not only does this proposal show utter disregard for the Australian people's human right of expression and access to information, it is also
impossible to implement and therefore a huge and complete waste of tax payer money.

Below are a number of options for bypassing the proposed filters:
If you are :

a pervert who wishes to watch videos of hot lesbians riding double ended dildos while a monkey watches; or
a pedophile who wants to trade naked pictures of underage children; or
an underage student who wants to view pornography on the computers in the school library; or
a terrorist wanting to obtain information about making explosives or wanting to communicate with other terrorists word wide; or
a person that wants to read information the government might not wish you to read

You should do the following:
If you have the access to install new software on the computer you can install:

Tor(http://www.torproject.org/) or
Freenet(http://freenetproject.org/)

both will give you anonymous encrypted access to internet content which the government will be unable to filter.

If you're on a school, uni or internet cafe computer and you don't have access to install new software, don't worry you can just use web based proxies.
Web based proxies are websites that contain a web browser, all content requested through this web page's web browser travels through the web server of that web page and therefore can't be filtered by any of the government filters.

Go to:

http://proxy.org/
http://www.privax.us/
or search Google for 'web proxies' and find links to web based proxies.

There are constantly new ones being created so it's unlikely the government will get around to blocking them all.

It is my hope that if this kind of simple information is distributed enough in the population that the government understands what an impossible task it is trying to do that it will drop the plan and instead spend all that money on improving education and hospital services.

Web applications

2008-10-20T16:59:00.003+11:00

So a bunch of people are really unhappy at the changes made to http://google.com/ig
if enough people complain maybe google will offer a way to get back to the old version...maybe they won't. This is the outcome of using non-free software and web applications.

Anyone using blogger noticed that there is not easy way to export all your previous blog posts? Recently I just used wget -m to mirror all my posts but it's not a great format to have the data in.
As the use of externally hosted web applications becomes more and more common a lot more of these kinds of problems are going to come up.

Is there any way to make a backup of all your documents from google docs?
looks like there isn't(actually I found a way, but it only works for documents, not presentations etc, and only exports to html). Again, not a problem if you've only got a few documents, you can download them each one at a time, but if you've been using the service for a while and have 1000s of documents it's going to require a huge investment of time to get all those documents backed up.

Ever noticed that when ever you upload stuff to facebook, myspace etc. you give them permission to reuse that stuff in anyway they wish?
They can sell this information on to newspapers, TV etc. even after you've deleted your account. If you become famous for any reason(become a serial killer, get murdered, actor in a movie, etc.) all those photos of you getting drunk at a party or all those blog posts about how at the age of 12 you were angery at your parents are up for sale to the highest bidder and you won't see a cent of that money.

The problem of magic

2008-09-24T09:36:00.005+10:00

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke
I've noticed an issue with a lot of people recently, a barrier that prevents people from understanding things. This barrier is magic.

Otherwise intelligent people make the assumption that they will be completely unable to understand how something works assuming it's some kind of maigc, so they don't even try.
I recently had a plumbing problem, the washers wore out in my shower, none of us had changed a washer before but one of my housemates went out to a hardware store and brought a pack of washes and had a go at fixing it. He installed a new washer and it lasted 2 days.
Since it was a 2-pack of washes I tried installing the second washer, this time it lasted 3 days. At first I thought I might have installed it wrong, my housemates decided that we must have been installing it wrong, making the assumption that there must be some kind of complex mechanism that we couldn't understand and that we should call a plumber to do it.
But there was no way that we could have been installing it wrong, the system isn't that complex there really is only one way to install the washer so it didn't seem likely that we were doing it wrong.
I went down to a different hardware store and brought slightly more expensive washers, installed them in the same way and this time they're still working fine.

I see this issue with a lot of computer users I work with, once they start assuming some kind of magic is going on it's impossible to teach them anything.

IPv6

2008-08-27T11:22:00.002+10:00

I'd like to comment on an article on kuro5hin that makes the unsettling prediction that "IPv6 will never be implemented". This is obviously untrue as IPv6 support has been implemented in all the major operating systems and a small number of ISPs are offering support for it.
The article claims support for it's prediction by the fact that the spec for IPv6 was created in 1992 and has yet to see large scale deployment. There are a number of reasons for this, the most effective one is the economic one.
There are a number of things that get implemented very very slowly, they are implemented because they are needed and are useful. They get implemented slowly because they aren't profitable. I'd imagine 98% of people with internet connections don't even know what the IP protocol is, they don't understand the advantages of IPv6 and won't see a noticeable difference once it's deployed, this means there is no demand for it and therefore no competitive advantage in spending the large amount of money required to build the infrastructure required to support it.
But given this, IPv6 will eventually see wide scale deployment because we are running out of IP addresses very fast(I saw a prediction of 2011) and with more and more devices coming online(eg. IP phones) the shortcomings of NAT are becoming more and more obvious.(setting up multiple IP phones behind NAT is mad crazy! skype does all kinds of insanity to get around it).

- Jesse McNelis

Code on the Road: Windows Search gets worse!

2008-08-23T01:02:00.000+10:00

Code on the Road: Windows Search gets worse!
I had the same problem as this guy.
I couldn't find an 'index this folder' thing anywhere, the only solution is to wait for the Windows search indexer to get to that folder...which could be hours.
You can still use the old search system but it's now slightly more difficult to get to. I imagine it would confuse a lot of normal users, it certainly confused me.

Geek accent

2008-05-11T17:06:00.003+10:00

Some times people acuse me of being Candaian. Some times they think I'm from the USA.
Some times they just ask me where my accent is from.

I'm not from anywhere else, I've lived in the same city for all my life.
Many of my friends have the same problem. A Number of people I meet on IRC have the same problem.

There appears to be an internet accent, something that comes from participanting in lots of textual communication while also being exposed to American television shows and music. I know it seems to effect Australians, does it effect people from other places?

Out of the browser

2008-03-28T21:48:00.002+11:00

The real reason I don't really like this Web 2.0 is that instead of being about moving the web out of the browser on in to applications, it has been about moving applications in to the browser.
The end result is kind of similar, both the data from the web and the user applications to interact with this data are now in the same place.

But in doing so developers have added huge amounts of complex dependancies to their applications, many dirty nasty hack coding tricks to get around some of the deficies of the many web browsers as a development platform. While also locking data to a particular implementation of an application. eg. every site that wishe to provide video content has it's own terrible implementation of a flash video player.

I much prefer the other road. Getting the data out of the web browser. Getting away from web pages and on to a worldwide network of linked data strutures that can be processed by user applications to provide users with useful information.

The progress being made on this is terribly slow, and I'm too lazy/busy and distracted to do it myself.

Why does this annoy me so much?

2008-01-19T16:02:00.000+11:00

Today I was reading about the Creation museum and the comments on the museum by creationist 'scientists'.
The first comment on the page by
"T.H., Science Educator/Ecologist" makes the following point:
"As a product of the public schools and universities and as a science educator/ecologist in public education, I have found that students are not generally taught to think critically..." then they go on about something that is flawed and easily criticised. But does teaching creationism teach students about how to think critically?
A conclusion as absurd as creationism is an obvious example of flawed science and might give them the basics to think critically about other less obviously flawed science. The only problem with that is that creationism isn't even flawed science, it's no science at all. There is no collected data, no analysing of that data, no conclusions draw from that data. There is just the word of a few guys who wrote about it apparently 4000 years after the event(where did they get their information?) and some criticism of the Theory of Natural Selection.

Concerning the Australian federal government plan to censor the internet

2008-01-03T04:01:00.000+11:00

In reference to the current federal government plan to censor the internet connections in Australia to remove pornography and violence I have a few things that are important to consider:
1. Any attempt to censor the internet incurs large cost, which is either going to come out of taxes or come out of an increase in my monthly internet access bill.
2. Any attempt to censor the internet acheieves very little as it is easily subverted using web proxies and encryption which is easy enough for 15year olds to figure out.
3. Since any attempt to censor the internet is costly and easy to get around, I fail to see why this is a good idea.

The previous liberal government already wasted millions on censorship software, I would like the new labor government not to do the same.

-- Jesse McNelis

Document Formats

2007-12-20T23:24:00.000+11:00

Recently there has been much debate about document formats ie. OOXML vs. ODF vs. PDF, which
is a better format? which is easier to implement? which is more open or going to be more widely
supported? etc.
The problem with all of this is that all document formats are currently deprecated. Word
processors are only useful for backwards compatibility with users that started out on type
writers and think that information should be distributed, stored and created on thin pieces of dead tree.

Ever since I left high school in 2002 I haven't used a word processor for anything much
except to open and gain access to the text trapped inside MS Word documents sent to me
through email at work.

What are all these people using these documents for? What is wrong with plain text?

Trolling

2007-12-10T14:44:00.000+11:00

"Trolling is the act of purposefully antagonizing other people on the internet, generally on message boards. When done in a moderated internet community, this can result in banning. When done to uptight people such as , this can result in hilarity."

Trolling has been a large part of the fun that can be had on the internet since it's creation. Trolling is a part of human history, any action done with the specific purpose of getting a reaction out of someone just because you can could be defined as trolling.
The most epic of trolls are those that take a stance that is so absurd that nobody could possibly believe they actually believe it and still get an emotional rise out of people.

There are many EPIC trolls I currently like to believe are recurring in modern society:

Religion
Creationism
Female geeks(programmers)
A large amount of the fetishes that people apparently have
RIAA and MPAA (copyright and patent law)

Although I do think they are taking the joke a little too far.

Subtext

2007-12-06T09:38:00.000+11:00

Subtext is a research project in creating a visual programming language. The video shows a screencast of the latest version.
The author shows the following code and then how much easier it is to understand when shown in his visual programming language. On first look this seems to make it much eaiser to read until I realised that the example appears to be specifically choosen to make subtext look good and was written really stupidly.

The Original example code:


enum Attack { Magic, Melee}
int damage(Attack attack, bool surprise, int defense){
     int power;

     switch(attack){
             case Magic:
                     power = 5;
                     break;
             case Melee:
                     power = 4
                     break;
     }
     int effectiveness = power * (surprise ? 3:2);
     switch (attack) {
             case Magic:
                     if(effectiveness >= defense)
                             return effectiveness - defense;
                     return 0;
             case Melee:
                     return(effectiveness /defense)*2;

     }
}

After two minutes of refactoring


enum Attack { Magic, Melee}
int damage(Attack attack, bool surprise, int defense){
     int power;
     int effectiveness;
     int surprisebonus;

     if(surprise){
             surprisebonus = 3
     } else {
             surprisebonus = 2
     }
 
     switch(attack){
             case Magic:
                      effectiveness = 5 * surprisebonus;
                      if(effectiveness >= defense)
                             return effectiveness - defense;
                     break;
             case Melee:
                     effectiveness = 4 * surprisebonus;
                     return(effectiveness /defense)*2;
                     break;
     }
}

Which is easier to read, the code above for the screenshot below? Imagine having another 10 cases in the switch statement or a couple of if statements in each switch case.

Violence in media

2007-11-29T12:10:00.000+11:00

Today I came across this article:
Film and game violence seen as a threat
“The findings, which are reported in the Journal of Adolescent Health, support earlier research which showed that children who watch violent television shows and who identify with the characters and believe they are real are more likely to be aggressive as adults.”

Later I found this:
Childhood Exposure to Media Violence Predicts Young Adult Aggressive Behavior
Might these results simply be an indication that more aggressive children like to watch violent TV shows? "It is more plausible that exposure to TV violence increases aggression than that aggression increases TV-violence viewing," said Dr. Huesmann. "For both boys and girls, habitual early exposure to TV violence is predictive of more aggression by them later in life independent of their own initial childhood aggression. Also, the study suggests that being aggressive in early childhood has no effect on increasing males' exposure to media violence as adults and only a small effect for females."

I don't think it's as simple as that, but I don't have the time, resources or qualifications to conduct a study to prove otherwise. Dr Huesmann's explaination seems to nicely avoid the idea that people change throughout their lives.
Is it not possible that non-outwardly aggressive children would be likely to identify with violent fictional characters? These children may become outwardly aggressive later in life, independent of violence in media.

TypeError: string indices must be integers

2007-11-16T15:55:00.000+11:00

I'm writing a program in python, using the formencode module from www.formencode.org
It's great for validating form input for webpages. Python has many other extremely useful modules written for it that do a lot the work. But python is dynamically typed and this is a problem.
Strong dynamic typing leads to fun errors like this:
TypeError: string indices must be integers that bubble up from somewhere in the depths of some module on line 2357. It's unlikely to be an error in the module itself, it's more likely that I've made a mistake somewhere and past it a variable of the wrong type. This variable has made it's way down the tree of function calls until eventually it got to somewhere where it has been used and only here the typing error is discovered. At this stage there is no indictation of what variable I have past incorrectly, it could be anyone of 10 or so parameters being past in and then there is still the chance of it being a bug in the external module.

Programming Languages

2007-10-12T13:34:00.000+10:00

I like the ideas in haskell, but I also hate the way it looks.
I like C for it's similicity, but then I hate the way simple tasks tend to require more work than other languages.
I hate php, but I really do hate it.
I've never tried perl, but I don't think I'd like it.
I don't like python, ruby, Java, .NET because the dependancies are huge.
I like the ideas behind erlang, but I really dislike the syntax.
I like the python syntax, but the standard library is buggy.
I don't like the fact that each language has to have it's own set of rewritten libaries and interpreter/VM.

I want the power and similicity of C with:

function polymorphism
stronger typing(bounds checking??)
good documentation in a single place for many third party libraries that have agreed upon coding standards
beter handling of concurrency/distributed computing
compiliable in to native code for reduced dependancies.

Package management

2007-10-05T21:24:00.000+10:00

I spent some time recently disucssing the advantages of many GNU\Linux distributions over Windows with a fellow student at my University.
One of the main things I touched on that I've never really thought about before was that Windows users aren't getting security patches for any software other than Microsoft products.
I've never seen a security patch for Adobe Photoshop or Quicken Quickbooks etc. and I can't imagine anyone ever installing them, it's just too much hassle.

I absolutely can't imagine that an OS at this point wouldn't have a package management system by default.

Full Cost

2007-09-24T10:09:00.000+10:00

At Colorado State University they have developed solar panels that can be produced at less than $1 per watt, these panels should reduce the cost of generating solar electricity for roughly the same cost as other forms of generated electricity(Coal, Oil, etc).

This is a good thing. But interestingly doesn't take in to account the full actual cost of producing electricity using Oil or Coal.
Does this include:
the cost of redeveloping the land used to mine the coal?
the cost of planting trees to offset the carbon emissions produced by burning coal?
the cost of treating respiratory problems of people living in the area near the power plants?

Environmental cost is also an economic cost but it's easy to ignore because it's usually a cost past on to others. eg. 'Australians threw out over 21 million tonnes of garbage in 1996/97, which cost about $1256 million for collection and disposal'
I wonder how much of this the companies that over package their products paid for.

Revolutionary Replacements

2007-08-08T17:36:00.000+10:00

The revolutionaries of the world have a better way of doing things. They have a way to make things easier, but to do this they have to replace the current system with their 'better system'.

So how does one replace a broken system with a better system?
This is quite easy if you control all parts of the current system and can plan a smooth transition across to the new system. This scenario is quite rare, generally you don't have full control, even if you think you do.
So how do you replace a broken system that you don't fully control with a better system?
First you must convince everyone involved in the current system that the new system is better, doing this is difficult because if the current system is 'good enough' or 'does the job' people will be resistant to change. If the current system 'does the job' you have a bit of a fight on your hands, you have to convince people that your new system 'does the job better' than the current system.

This is easy if your new system is compatible with the current system as you can show that your new system has all the benefits of the current system as well as extra advantages.
But what if your new system is incompatible? (as any revolutionary system generally is)
Then it has to be obviously amazingly better than the current system to all people involved.
This is difficult to achieve if the problem domain is rather simple.

C Programming

2007-08-06T19:35:00.000+10:00

I've been doing Computer Science at RMIT. This semester I'm taking a required class on programming in C. I find it interesting that this is a second year subject. After 1 year of programming in Java and some 68k asm students are finally introduced and confused by C.

The problem with teaching Java before teaching C is that by comparison C looks completely insane to a Java developer, where as it looks like an awesome help to those that have just come from programming in asm.

My classes mostly consists of the lecturer introducing us to the C standard library and then explaining why most of the functions are broken and that we shouldn't use them, instead we should wrap them up in our own functions with lots of messy code to fix the problems.

One of the students in my class asked "if all the function are broken and we have to fix them all ourselves why hasn't someone made a new standard library that fixes all these problems?"

This is very true.
C is a fairly good language. It offers no restrictions on what you can do and is widely supposed across many platforms, from your desktop computer to your pda, mobile phone or car's onboard computer.

But C's flexbility works against it. The standard C library seriously sucks. It supports some very basic programming requirements and doesn't include much else. Compare this to Python or Java which includes in it's standard library a module to do pretty much anything you'd ever want to do. This bring both Java and python runtime environments in at about 100MB each, which in my opinion is quite ridiculous but useful if you use a lot of Python or Java programs.

Programming in C require you to source your own libraries, I found a lot on freshmeat, libTomCrypt is great for cryptography, Glib is great for Abstract Data Types and various helpful functions, then you have a huge choice of GUI libs, QT,GTK, Xlib, motif,wxwidgets, etc. but all of these require testing and choice making.

Then you're programming in Java most programmers tend not to have to make a choice about GUI toolkits they just use Swing.

Anyone know where I can find a list of good C libraries for various programming tasks?

The Janitor

2007-07-31T15:39:00.000+10:00

I arrived on the scene, shit was everywhere but it was in nice neat piles. Some people had choosen to shit in the urinal, others just behind the entry door, a few had shit in various places in the cubicals but only a select few had actually shit in the toliet bowl.

I sighed and got out my mop and bucket and attempted to mop the various deposits of shit toward the toliet. I do this everyday and everyday I wonder why people won't just shit in the toliet. The toliet is the decided standard place to shit. A few weeks ago I had tried to solve this problem, I developed a system that would automatically move the shit from the most common places that people deposit it in to the toliet. The system worked for a little while but the people kept moving the places where they shit and I was never able to cover all the less common places that some people shit, so I'd have to come in and clean up anyway.

Simpler Free software

2007-07-17T18:00:00.000+10:00

Free software is defined by the Free Software Foundation as software that gives the users the following freedoms:
Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
Freedom 1: The freedom to study and modify the program.
Freedom 2: The freedom to copy the program so you can help your neighbor.
Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

For the average user Freedom 0 and Freedom 2 are easy to exercise, but exercising Freedom 1 and Freedom 3 require far more technical knowledge.
In fact for the majority of software that the average user uses in a GNU\Linux desktop environment is so complex that for a user to exercise Freedom 1 and Freedom 3 a user would have to spend a consederable amount of time(weeks, months, years, decades) studying the code for such programs to make the changes they want, changes that may seems like they should be somewhat trivial.

I'm a programmer, but I don't spend nearly enough time actually coding as I should. I have great trouble contributing to free software projects. The popular ones(Firefox, Openoffice, Linux, KDE, Gnome) require quite a bit of effort to get in to. My attempts to get involved with fixing firefox bugs stopped when I got to the build process information page, and lost all motivation.

Free software needs more smaller, simpler projects with a codebases that a moderately technical user can get their head around and be able to contribute to in an evening.

'users'

2007-07-05T18:25:00.000+10:00

Developers tend to have an extreme dislike of 'users'. 'users' are not just a subset of people who use computers they come up in all parts of everyday life.
These 'users' use without contributing anything themselves. They refuse to learn and attempt to get help from others, not because they actuallly wish to solve the problem but because they want to complain about their problem.

eg. An example from #firefox on irc.freenode.net:
<'user'> cant open friendster firefox
<'user'> cant open friendster website
be more specific
<'user'> i use firefox to open up a friendster website but i cant
open it , but when i use opera i can surf it
again, more specific.
does an error come up?
<'user'> gerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
<'user'> firefox cant load www.friendster.com it took 2 hrs to load i use DSL
<'user'> firefox sucks
* 'user' has left

Now obviously the website www.friendster.com does load in firefox. His problem is obviously to do with some configuration on his end. Maybe it's proxy settings, maybe it's a DNS issue, Personal Firewall issue etc.
But nobody can help him until he clearly states what he is trying to do and what happens when he trys to do it.

Everybody who works with the public as part of their job experinces the 'user' many times a day.

The person who orders a meal at KFC and spends 10 minutes eatting their burger and then complains that their chips are now cold.
The person who sends tech support an email saying 'It doesn't work' without specifying what 'it' is.
The person at the supermarket who somehow manages to not read the many signs that say that the shopping cart wheels will lockup if you try to take them outside of the supermarket and then continues to try to push the cart once the wheels have locked up.

'users' are terribly annoying and waste a lot of people's time and all it takes is for them to spend even a small amount of time thinking about what they are doing.

Walking barefoot in the rain

2007-07-04T04:50:00.000+10:00

After reading this article I had an urge to go walking barefoot. So at about 3pm this morning I started walking barefoot around the streets of Collingwood. It was an interesting experience, I don't tend to walk around the streets without shoes very often and usually it's only to go down to the shop to get milk and bread when I can't be bothered putting my shoes on.

The ground was still wet from when it rained earlier and it should have been quite cold but my feet didn't feel cold. I walked up to 7/11 on smith st to get a chocolate bar and hot chocolate then I walked up to cliffton hill. At about 4am it started raining again so I headed home.

I guess it's now time to sleep as I'm supposed to be up in the morning for work. It was a nice walk, I think I'll be doing that again.
- Jessta

GPLv3 and people who don't understand free software

2007-07-04T00:03:00.000+10:00

With the release of the GNU GPL 3 I've seen an increase in blog posts and news articles about how the GNU GPL restricts freedoms instead of giving freedoms. These posts are created by people who are confused about the intentions of the GNU GPL.

The GNU GPL gurantees the freedom to use the software, the freedom to copy and distribute the software and the freedom to modify the software. These freedoms are guranteed for the user.
The only freedom that is taken away from the developer is the freedom to take those freedoms away from the user. Given the GNU GPL's intention this is completely reasonable as the original developers choose to give up these freedoms by choosing to use the GNU GPL license.

Some developers state that the BSD license has far more freedom as it allows developers to put restriction on how users can use software they have written. This is true, in terms of freedom being the ability to do as you wish.

But GNU GPL developers value freedom so they want to be sure that their code can only be used by those who also value freedom.

Never deploy a quick and dirty solution

2007-06-30T04:04:00.000+10:00

We all create quick and usually hackish solutions to our everyday problems. They are easy to do and allow us to get on with our work. I'm a pretty lazy guy so when I do this I generally have some plan to make a better solution later. Whether or not I actually do create a better solution, because it's just me, I always have the chance to.

The problem occurs when you deploy these hackish solutions in the work place. It seems like a great idea at the time, these people can get on with their work and you know that you'll be able to put together a better more permenant solution at a later date when you have some spare time. The thing is that once the problem is solved it becomes very difficult to get the resources, time and funding, to solve the problem properly. So this solution that you hacked together in a few rushed minutes becomes an essential part of the business which is completely unsupportable.

You are much better off telling management that the problem can't be solved, except in the proper way.
You'll get the funding and resources straight away because it's essential to the business.

Things I want to like

2007-06-21T15:04:00.000+10:00

I've finished all my exams and I'm bored.
So after reading an article about Plan9 running on IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer I decided to give Plan9 another go. There are many ideas I like about plan9, but I can't stand the UI. So each time I give it ago I try to get used to it hoping that I'll begin to like it. But it still just really annoys me.

I also spent some more time with haskell. I like many of the ideas behind functional programming but I still can't stand the haskell syntax, it just feels really ugly to me and monads seem simple enough to describe but seem to be confusing to use.

Mood Altering Semen

2007-06-14T21:14:00.000+10:00

According to a study, "semen contains powerful—and potentially addictive—mood-altering chemicals." The premise is that woment who have sex without using a condom are happier.

I suppose one would have to weight up the happiness obtained by the obsorbtion of semen with the unhappiness of unwanted pregnancy, mood-altering hormones in oral contraception and the dangers of STDS. But it is interesting. It definitly sounds like something evolution would have cooked up.

I suppose it goes a long with studies that claim that no using condoms reduces the chance of a mis-carriage because the women's body gets a chance to get used to the man's DNA.

Religion and stem cell research

2007-06-07T18:47:00.000+10:00

Cardinal George Pell is threatening NSW MPs with being refused Communion if they voted for legislation to expand stem-cell research. Some people have said that this is the church trying to influence government decisions.

Obviously the church does influence government decisions because there are catholics in the parliament. But Cardinal George Pell has every right to refuse communion to people who are not of the christen faith and anyone that votes for stem-cell research is not following the christen faith.

So I really don't see the problem here, either the catholic MPs will vote against stem cell research or they are lying about their religion.

fundamentally broken

2007-06-06T08:07:00.000+10:00

As I have previously said, web browsers are fundamentally broken.
On another note, this is my 100th post.

Damn, Missed an exam.

2007-06-04T20:40:00.001+10:00

So I managed to miss my first exam this morning.
I thought to was supposed to be on tommorrow.
This sucks because I was actually doing really well in that subject, something like around 87% on the assignments.
I contacted the lecturer to try to see if I can get a re-sit and I'm yet to hear back.
I find the practice of making a whole 4 months work dependent on a particular 2 hours period quite strange.

In other news,
Desperate Botnet Battlers Call for an Internet Driver's License
I don't think a license is the answer. A license is generally to make sure you know a set of rules to make sure you don't harm others eg. Gun license, Car license. Obviously people don't actually know enough about their computers, but them not knowing is a threat to them more than a threat to others.

Fraud has nothing to do with the internet. It's something that happens every where. The internet is a way to make communication more efficient, which makes fraud more efficient. But the same people who fall for internet scams would probably also fail for someone calling them, saying they are from the bank and asking for their details.

The internet actually makes it much easier to identify whether a communication from a person/company is legitimate. This is done using cryptography and it actually really simple and can be taught to a user in less than 5 minutes. Why don't users know this? Because developers like to hide things from users that they think they won't be able to understand.

Users need to learn and current software makes it very difficult for them to do that.

Still on web browsers

2007-05-28T03:29:00.000+10:00

I'm still thinking about web browsers.
It's like the question: "why I am I here?" or "what is real?"
Two question that can be easily answered many times, but still needs to be constantly asked again because the solution is never good enough.

The web is unfixable. It's too big, too many people, too much crap to be compatible with.
I wouldn't have been like this if someone had thought about it a bit earlier.
The web is about data. It's about people accessing data created by other people across the world.
It's not about layout or interfaces, it's only about data.

Sometime very early on we lost that concept and 'web developers' began enforcing their inconsistant and/or broken interfaces on their users that only really need the data and not the interface.

So now we are stuck with a web where all the data is hidden in interface code. Making it difficult to access, so we have hugely complex web browsers to process all this interface code to make the data sort of readable.

Linus quote

2007-05-26T00:41:00.000+10:00

"In this case, anybody who actually spends 5 seconds looking at the code should have realized that the warning is just another way of saying that the author of the code was on some bad drugs, and the warnings WERE BETTER OFF REMAINING! Because that code _should_ have warnings. Big fat warnings about incompetence!?" - Linus Torvalds - http://kerneltrap.org/node/8252

Linus is great.
Perfect attitude for a leader in software development.

Storage and web browsers

2007-05-22T23:03:00.000+10:00

Today I mused about data storage and web browsers.
Yesterday I came across Gnome Storage again.It hasn't had any changes and development has stopped.
When I first saw it many years ago I really liked the idea. It was much ahead of it's time. I guess it's development stopped when beagle started to take off. I've been thinking about ways to simplify it, but it's all still just musings.

I also found myself coming back the problems with web browsers.
Seriously, using the web browser as the platform for everything is a bad idea. It might take a while longer for people to notice it, but they will eventually.

Javascript is a fine language, but it's slow.
No other language is supported across web browsers, so everyone is stuck with javascript.
HTML/CSS are not designed for the creation of user interfaces.
HTTP is stateless for a reason, adding state to it is silly as there are other protocals better suited.
HTTP is a very inefficent way to sent small amounts of data, eg. JSON for AJAX where the required headers is larger than the actual data.
Web applications take power away from the user and give it to the provider. unless you want to host them yourself, which is really inefficent and difficult to administer for such a small scale of users.
Web applications create a huge dependancy on the client side(the web brower) this means that to even run the simplest of applications a user requires a fairly powerful computer.
All the data on the web is current locked up in various broken forms of HTML. This makes the data difficult to access through automated means.

That's all for now.

StarCraft 2

2007-05-20T14:14:00.000+10:00

OMG BBQ!!
Starcraft 2 was annonnced by Blizzard yesterday.
This is going to be awesome.

I predicted this sort of thing in 2005

2007-05-19T00:57:00.000+10:00

Documents Reveal US Incompetence with Word, Iraq
By viewing the documents using the Track Changes feature in Word (.doc), the author has been able to reconstruct internal discussions from 2004 which reflect the optimism, isolation and incompetence of the American occupation.

lol, I predicted this sort of thing in 2005. I find it amazing that microsoft develops such insane features.
CVS(cocurrent versioning) shouldn't be part of a word document, neither should executable code(Visual basic macros), files should be deleted when you tell them to be deleted(the recycle bin is a bad idea), files that are modified should actually be modified(not every older version being stored without the user's knowledge.)

People say that Microsoft products are easy to use. I find them extremely complex, it's difficult trying to remember all the things that they are doing in the background without telling me. eg. having to remember to clear the recycle bin when I've deleted something sensitive or remembering to remove all the metadata Microsoft office products add to my documents.

Sun Microsystems

2007-05-16T22:50:00.000+10:00

"Our contributions, from Java to OpenOffice to Gnome and Mozilla, now account for in excess of 25% of all lines of code within your average Linux distribution" - Johnathan Schwartz
Wow, thanks for the bloat Sun Microsystems.

On another note, Sun microsystems is damn awesome for releasing all the code that they have and they make some pretty awesome processors too. It's a pity they are so expensive.

Vaccine encourages young girls to have sluty sex

2007-05-15T15:31:00.000+10:00

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn11842

"Plans to vaccinate young girls against the sexually-transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer have been blocked in several US states by conservative groups, who say that doing so would encourage promiscuity."

Of course! Just like sex education and condoms.
Infact, we should probably get rid of those sexual health centres and stop treating any STDs or offering any form birth control.

How about a law banning parents from talking to their kids about sex, surely if we can stop them hearing about it we can stop them doing it. It would also give us a chance to make up blatant lies about how all sex gives you HIV.

Obviously the only way to stop those crazy sluty kids is to make sex as scary as possible

Sucky Desktop Computing

2007-05-15T11:55:00.000+10:00

There is a law that I believe will hold contantly true for desktop computing.
I call this law, 'The law of sucky desktop computing'.
The law states that due to the current requirements, created by psuedo-standards and UI designed based on previous il-thought out concepts, on desktop applications they will continue to suck.

eg. The web browser is a perfect example. Web browsers suck, they are ennormously resource hungery and still provide a rather confusing and inefficent manner of accessing information on the web.
This is not a problem that can be easily solved, it's a problem created by content produces and promoted by web browser developers. The forgiving nature of web browsers for html pages that don't fit the standard or don't make sense in terms of document structure has ment a world wide web of broken web documents where the only way to view/navigate/use them is to view them the way the author intended. This means that any web browser that wants to view information on the web on 90% of sites requires support for javascript,css,html,various image format support and various plugins(flash, etc.).
This makes for a huge amount of code which will contain many bugs and be difficult and time consuming to develop.

Threads (or Another battle with abstractions)

2007-04-18T01:07:00.000+10:00

I generally end up with learning issues due to abstractions. Generally this is because the abstraction doesn't actually make sense so I get confused.

A great example is this evening adventure in 'Understanding Threads'.
The abstraction of threads in the same as the abstraction of multi-tasking.
Single processor computers don't multi-task, they can't. But as an abstraction for certain people we pretend that they do. It is the same with threads, each thread is just an addition to the list of tasks that the schedular has to run through and give some processor time to in each tick.

Now this seems to me to be a bit strange, the abstraction seems unnescessary because the reality is such a simple concept. From the processing perpective a thread is the same as a process, the only difference being how memory is handled(which is the same issue that multi-processes have with handling files)

lol @ myspace

2007-04-11T17:47:00.000+10:00

Myspace blocking content from Photobucket

lol,
Who remembers the days of geocities and tripod free hosting where you could personalise your site in anyway you wanted. You could link to your 'friends' even if they were with a different provider. Ah, the days of freedom. How did myspace become popular? It offered a more restricted service with no benefits. I suppose it's easy to trick teenages.

- Jessta

Bamboo Bike Trailer

2007-04-10T21:40:00.000+10:00

I'm building a bamboo bike trailer. I've used lashings instead of bolts and I also currently have nothing to use for the wheel brackets. Any body got a suggestion?

Which way is the bus moving?

2007-04-10T21:29:00.000+10:00

Which way is the bus moving? left or right?

I reckoned it must have been going right,
otherwise it would crash in the to menu bar on the left of the page.

Although I liked this comment:
"I don’t feel bad about missing it. Having much more experience with visual models that a preschooler, I didn’t know whether the lack of a door was intentional..." - chrisn

Happy Birthday Internet

2007-04-07T19:20:00.000+10:00

38th Happy Birthday Internet!
Thanks for being there when needed.
I hope you have many more birthdays like this.

Today(2007-04-07) is the Internet's symbolic birth date. YAY!

What passes for an invention these days is amazing

2007-02-03T01:59:00.000+11:00

http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=2461

This annoys me. What passes for an invention these days is amazing.

Jessta implements apple's invention in four lines of shell script:

1. mount -o rw /dev/ipod /mnt/ipod

2. rsync /home/jessta/music /mnt/ipod/

3. mount -o ro /dev/ipod /mnt/ipod

and just run that script each time you want to synchronise your music with your ipod.

Credit Cards possibly getting fixed

2007-01-26T20:21:00.000+11:00

In June last year I wrote about how the credit card system was broken and how cryptography could be used to fix the problem.

Well, I just read today that IBM has created just such a system YAY!

New Year

2007-01-01T22:29:00.000+11:00

Happy New Year Chaps!

Another Strange Letter

2006-12-09T00:50:00.000+11:00

Anyone that has been reading my blog would remember the strange letter I
recieved around this time last year. Well, I've recieved another one and it goes something like this:


"""
Etheral Majestic Inspiration    
Life Eternal Faiths Etherally
Revverent Disciples Inspire

Divine Angels Life Eternal
Obedient Souls Union Life
Lasting Inspired Venerated
Angels Noble

Gods Redemption Eternally
Granteth Wisdom Inspiring  
Celestial Karma's Salvation

Avowed Lifes Atonement Noble
Celestial Obedient Angels
Redemption Eternal

Thoughts Etheral Reverent 
Redemption Yields Judgement
Obedient Noble Etheral Soul

Atonement Life Lasting Disciples
Etheral Angels Divine Yield
Obediently Unro You.


Merry Chirstmas Happy New Year
See You Soon My Good Friend
"""

Now, Upon applying the same pattern as last year I get the following names:

emile ferdi

dale osullivan

greg wicks

alan coare

terry jones

all dead

you Y

The only name that appeared both this year and last year is 'Greg Wicks'. I'll have to do some more investigation.

Sometimes people forget to think

2006-11-20T21:53:00.000+11:00

Schools ban wi-fi networks after safety fears

Some Schools have banned wi-fi networks because they fear that their kids will be effected by the wi-fi radio waves. There is no scienfic evidence to suggest that wi-fi has any effect on human beings.

Interestingly enough, how many of these kids do you think have mobile phones?

"You ask me am I crazy for playing the cello"

2006-11-13T03:33:00.000+11:00

On Saturday night I went to see a gig with Martin Martini and the Bone Palace Orchestra and The Conglomerate.

Martin Martini is awesome. I highly recommend you check it out. But the real thing that grabbed me that evening was a song by The Conglomerate about a Cellist that played in a city square in Bosnia as bombs were being dropped around him. After some searching I found out some more information about the cellist, Vedran Smailović.
""When asked by a CNN reporter if he was not crazy for playing his cello while Sarajevo was being shelled, Smailovic replied, "You ask me am I crazy for playing the cello, why do you not ask if they are not crazy for shelling Sarajevo?".""

This is such an amazing story, it happened in 1992, I was 7 but I never heard about it until now. There are so many amazing things in this world.

Invention of the year?

2006-11-07T16:45:00.000+11:00

Time magazine named youtube 'Invention of the year'.
My understand of the word 'Invention' is the creation of something new,(A sandwich making machine, Solar Power, etc). YouTube is not an Invention. It's a business idea based on obvious existing technology. The idea of web accessable video has been around since the begining of the web. The problem was that there wasn't enough consumer bandwidth to actually do it until recently.

I would have given 'Invention of the year' to Gardasil, a vaccine that fights off a sexually transmitted disease. At least it was an actual invention.

- Jesse McNelis

The Glass House

2006-11-01T11:17:00.000+11:00

The ABC has Axed the television show, The Glass house. According to the article, it was cancelled due to bias against the Howard Government. I thought this was Australia, making fun of our elected officals is a tradition. The Glasshouse is a comedy show, not a news show, bias shouldn't matter.I'm sure a lot of people are going to be annoyed about this, as the show was getting fairly high ratings. One can almost predict that one of the commercial tv stations will pick it up, just due to the large ratings it has.

Nicaragua votes to ban abortions

2006-10-28T19:09:00.000+10:00

Nicaragua has approved a sweeping new law banning abortions, even in cases where the mother's life is at risk.

Quoting from the article:

Before the vote, Orlando Tardencilla, one of the members of the sub-committee which proposed the bill, said: "Unless abortion is made a crime, then people can simply come out and say: 'I have the right to an abortion, this is my body and I can decide.' "That's like saying: 'I'm allowed to commit murder because these hands are mine, this gun is mine.'"

wow, this guy needs to attend logic 101. He compares two things that are not even similar. eg. "This cheese burger is terrible it doesn't taste like ice cream at all". How is it that idiots get in to positions where they get to make decisions for other people?

RE:The Quest for windows.

2006-10-22T20:43:00.000+10:00

As a follow up to a previous post.
Apparently you can't switch from an Administrator to a user without the user's password.
Apparently it violates security logging.

Now I can see why one would do this. The problem really isn't switching to another user, it's the fact that it's extremely difficult to change settings for a user through the registry etc.
How do others deal with this issue? Surely it must affect other admins.

Indeed

2006-10-22T20:41:00.000+10:00

"There's a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot."- Steven Wright
Indeed.

Electric Cars and Inconvenient Truth

2006-10-16T16:41:00.000+10:00

Over the past day I watched two movies 'An Inconvenient Truth' and 'Who killed the electric car?'

In around 1998 I read a book in the school library. The book, which was published in around 1990, predicted the wide spread use of electric cars that you could plug in at home and charge up, or charge at charging stations around the city would occur in 1997.
At the time I thought the person who wrote the book was crazy, it was 1998 and I hadn't heard anything about technology being available to do this.

While watching the documentary 'Who killed the electric car?' I realised to my amazement the book was right on track. In 1996 car companies began producing electric cars in California. There was around 800 electric cars in use and then in 2001 they were all rounded up and crushed.

Of course having an electric car in only good for the environment if you can produce clean electricity. Interestingly enough ,according the documentary, even with coal burning power plants providing the electricity electric cars are still less polluting.

We currently have the technology to create systems that produce less pollution all we need to do is stop thinking about short term profits and think about long term survival. Governments need to pressure industry to produce less harmful emissions, industry will adapt and innovate to stay in business because that's what people do. As long as there is demand for their products it's not as if industries are going to go out of business.

- Jessta

The Quest for windows.

2006-10-15T01:22:00.000+10:00

I'm trying to prove myself wrong by working out what is so great about microsoft windows that so many businesses use it.
Obviously I'm probably missing something, because my usage of windows is always frustrating.

Currently I'm trying to find a tool for windows that allows the administrator to switch to any other user of the system without having to know their password. Pretty much like how 'su' works from the root account on GNU\Linux.

After gooling for a while and asking about it in 3 #windows irc channels I haven't found anything. It seems like such an essential tool, obivously I must be missing something, how can a windows administrator makes changes/ fix problems with user's profiles?

- Jessta

Ice Weasel

2006-10-14T10:35:00.000+10:00

yay! for Ice Weasel.
I haven't actually given it a go yet, mainly because it's not in portage yet and might never be.
Ice Weasel is a GNU fork of Mozilla Firefox mainly for trademark reasons and to remove the non-free aspects, mainly so that it can be included in Debian's lastest GNU\Linux distribution.

But a part from the trademark issues it's still a good idea. As long as there are available developer resources, or they stay close enough and compatible with the original then Forks are awesome.
Idiots complain that it will some how effect the market share of firefox, confuse new users etc. The whole point of free software is choice. If a user can't tell the difference between one web browser and another then they don't need free software because they not going to use it to it's advantages.

- Jessta

Material possessions

2006-10-04T16:30:00.000+10:00

A really interesting friend made a really interesting point yesterday as I delivered her BBQ shapes.
Q. What is the point spending effort obtaining material possessions when eventually you will die and have no use for them?
A. For the precise reason that you won't be able to use them when you die, you should use material possessions while you're alive.

You trust google, right?

2006-09-30T03:15:00.000+10:00

Have a look at google videos great new 'Post to my blog' feature
http://video.google.com/blogpost?fp=1&docid=-51702913932030278&siteindex=0
all you have to do it give them your username and password.
You can trust google right?

I wonder how many other sites will add this feature and how long it will take to get misused.

Batteries

2006-09-29T22:17:00.000+10:00

"You must realize, every battery you carry is basically a bomb waiting to go off. You can pack in more power, but that only increases the likelihood of it going 'boom.'"

violence inherent in Islam?

2006-09-25T02:08:00.000+10:00

Recently I've been hear a whole lot of bullshit about violence being inherent in Islam.
Have the chirstens forgotten about the crusades?

Religion has, and will alway, cause conflict. If you base your decisions on belief instead of fact you create arguements that can't be resolved so eventually people get violent about it. This is not a statement about everyone who is religious, it is just that religion gives the violent one more pointless reason to get violent.

Idiot religion

2006-09-15T18:36:00.000+10:00

http://adrianmrva.com/other/articles/40.txt

"Statutes known as the Hudood ordinances, based on sharia law,
currently operate in Pakistan. They require a female rape victim to
produce four male witnesses to corroborate her account, or she risks facing a new charge of adultery."
This is completely insane. Imagine the scenario required.

RE:idiots

2006-08-23T23:18:00.000+10:00

Oh, apologies have to be made. I contacted the own of the site in my last post to ask him about the article. He said that he didn't write it, he just found it a while back.
But still, The writer of the article clearly didn't know what he was talking about.

Idiots

2006-08-23T15:57:00.000+10:00

http://www.it.iitb.ac.in/%7Esudhir/Hacking/Win_XP_Hack.html
This page has apparent instruction for getting administrator privileges on windows xp from a limited account.
The instructions begin by telling you to modify system files, which as a limited user you don't have permission to do.
If you can modify these files, then you already have administrative privileges and don't need to gain them.

The writer then blames microsoft for having insecure software.

In other news, I registered jessta.id.au it just redirects to the dairy!* site for now. But I'll set something up.

Dream

2006-08-22T05:07:00.000+10:00

* The doorbell rang and tom answered the door, talked to someone
* came up stairs
* knocked on Jess's door and then came and stood in my room
* I pretended to sleep and then awaken. But when I awoke tom wasn't there
* Then I woke up.
* I heard Jess walking down the stairs, talking to tom and then going out the door
* I heard people out in the service station so I got up and looked out the window.
* I saw I bus with and bunch of people and the driver was a person that I identified as Jess's Dad.
* Then I woke up.
* I thought how strange that dream was because the person I identified as Jess's dad was an old venturer leader trainer from the scout
training weekend.
* I thought I'd go down stairs and see if any of the dream actually happened.
* I got to my door and tried to turn my light on but the light switch broke. I reached out my door to turn on the stair way light, but
I could flick the switch my fingers appeared to go straight through the light switch.
* I realised that I must still be asleep so I tried to get up again and found myself in my bed again.
* I got up again but still didn't think I was awake yet.
* I found myself in my bed again.
* I tired to get up but it was very difficult, I appeared to be heavier than usual.
* After a short struggle I was able to get up and found myself awake.
* I watched some videos on youtube to calm my mind and now I am typing this summary of my dream. Hopefully I'm not still asleep

The whole dream appears to have gone for only around 1hr as the last time I checked the clock before rolling over to sleep was at 3:15 and I awoke at around 4:15.

Depressing

2006-08-21T22:31:00.000+10:00

The second half of a man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half. - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Wow, that's a really depressing thought.

Double Standards

2006-08-11T12:47:00.000+10:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/tees/4776123.stm
I find this interesting. The guy has done nothing wrong.
The images aren't of acutal children and therefore have caused no harm to them.

I'd put this in the same category as violent films.
Depicted violence is not the same as real violence.

Depicted child photography isn't the same as real child photography.

From the idiots that brought you...

2006-07-28T02:31:00.000+10:00

From the idiots that brought you: mobile phone tracking, "You're not allowed to hang out with those bad seeds" and "I'll not have you having sex in this house" comes http://www.techweb.com/wire/ebiz/191204265

A wonderful way to get your kids in to trouble is to put them in a position where they can't turn to you for help and advices.
Remotely monitoring everything your children do while on the computer at home will just make them use a computer elsewhere. It's not going to stop them doing what they wish to do and puts them in a situtation where they can't gain advice about how to handle relations with people they communicate with online.

Kids need to know that they are trusted. Parents need to be a person that the child can turn to for help in any situtation. Educating your kids is much better than attempting to monitor them. If you don't have the time to educate your kids, then you probably shouldn't be having them.

- Jesse

Next Year

2006-07-26T16:52:00.000+10:00

Well, it's coming up to the end of this year. At least the end the year in terms of the need to decide what one wishes to do next year.
I'm thinking about going back to uni.
But before I do, I really have to look at why I want to.

After finishing VCE in 2002, I took a year of doing mostly nothing useful. I fiddled with GNU\Linux and learnt about different operating systems and software. 2003 involved a lot of parents trying to push me to actually do something, get a job etc.

In 2004, I started a TAFE course at NMIT. The number one reason for starting this course was to get parents off my back about doing something. Also my good buddy Nelix was doing the same course.
Because the TAFE course was merely a way of getting my parents to stop bugging me it wasn't something I was motiviated to actually put much work in to. It was also a crap course. I put in a small amount of work and ended up failing the end of the second semister.

To avoid the issue of failing my TAFE course, I applied to do Electrical Engineering(Computer Systems) at Swinburne Uni. Again the effort put in and the proper reasons behind choosing the course where lacking.

So, to avoid the issues related to failing my Uni course, I applied for work. Eventually getting a job doing computer techicial support for a small company in the CBD. I've been working at this job for almost a year, it's fairly simple, unchallenging, and has no chance for advancement or expanding of my knowledge. I was quite lucky to get this job, as I don't have any formal IT qualifications, which makes it difficult to change jobs.

This brings me to my current thought, which is to try uni again.
By going to Uni I will be able to expand my knowledge and improve my employability in my field.
This still requires some thought, as Uni costs large amounts of money, even with HECS it's still a debt that will evetually need to be paid off.
- Jessta

Idiots on the loose

2006-07-15T04:25:00.000+10:00

I started reading this article: http://www.chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=22405&catcode=13
After the first paragraph I knew the person was an idiot. But I continued to read the rest of the article to properly hear them out.
I thought about emailing them to discuss the points they made in the article, but thought otherwise. It's not really worth waste my time trying to convince someone of something they are too stupid to listen too.

Credit Cards

2006-06-29T23:51:00.000+10:00

The credit card payment system appears completely silly to me.
To make a payment with a credit card online, one must give the store all the details required for it to make an unlimited number of charges to your credit card.
When all they need to know is how to tell the credit card company that they are suuposed to give them a certain amount of money and charge it to the buyer's account.

This could be done extremely easily with public/private key cryptography and would be much more difficult to defraud.
Basically it goes:
1. I recieve an invoice from the supplier
2. I sign the invoice with my private key supplied by the credit card company
3. I send the signed invoice back to the supplier who verifies that I signed it by using my public key.
4. The supplier sends the signed invoice to the credit card company
5. The credit card company verifies that the invoice was signed by me, pays the supplier and charges my account.
6. supplier sends me product.

This still has issues i.e if someone stole my private key they could make charges to my account.
But it's both better than the current written signature or no signature that credit cards currently have as the actually information that identifies you uniquely isn't being sent to lots of other people.

Just a thought.
- Jessta

New Things Happening

2006-06-18T02:12:00.000+10:00

It's 2am and I think I should do some clothes washing. I've run out of clean clothes. I also think I'll move my bed back for couch mode in to bed mode. Paint me a picture.

I was thinking that none of this has happened before. Many things like it have happened. But not these.
People say that history repeats itself, but that's only in a very abstract way to please the historians.
Mostly it's new things happening, I wish I could remember this.

Not so sure

2006-06-07T01:05:00.000+10:00

My brain just got stuck.

As one who always looks for a better solution to a problem I've come up against a problem with a solution that I can't resolve. I speak of web apps.

The solution has obvious issues as it's really not the right tool for the job from a purely technical point of view.
But from a reality point of view it actually is a reasonable solution as the platform is most widely spread and therefore ends up costing less developer time for the audience it reaches.
But in doing so also duplicates a lot of already written code at lower levels in the abstraction.

This spins my brain as I wasn't expecting to come across this sort of "both right and wrong" answer in this field.
I failed english at school because I couldn't create an argument completely for or against a statement.
I always got stuck with equally opposing views.

I was always good at the maths and science because it was much easier to define an answer because of the limits on the possible solution sets.

Now I'm not so sure.

Dealing

2006-05-26T22:35:00.000+10:00

It's interesting to see what happens when a person suddenly gets some head space.
Working 2 days instead of 5 I've got a bit more head space. Now I have to filter through and deal with all the things that I haven't dealt with in the past 7 months.

Working Two Days

2006-05-17T15:49:00.000+10:00

"Bushrangers need Bush" - Graffiti on a wall
This could be taken in many different ways. I can currently think of two. How many can you?

The first:
Bushrangers need bush to hide in, otherwise they aren't bushrangers anymore. So save a tree and save the legend of Ned Kelly.

The second:
Bushrangers get lonely hanging out with their male bushranger friends and hidding. They probably need some female attention.

So anyway, I'm only working two days a week. It's pretty good

Mandane

2006-04-29T17:58:00.000+10:00


Life has been pretty mandane and boring recently. Too much going to work, coming home, sleeping and going to work again.
I miss silly stunts.
I miss ideas and general stuff.

Books

2006-04-27T02:30:00.000+10:00

I've started reading 'Windswept' by Gavin LeSUEUR again.
I love this book, it's one of the only books I've ever been able to read more than once. The last time I read it was probably 4 years ago.
Gavin LeSUEUR is one of my few heros. The events in this book are amazing things that I wish to do sometime in my life before I'm too old.

Reading really is fun. I don't know why I don't do it.

- Jessta