Watched Big Willy in a movie that was surprisingly forward looking. Unfortunately that meant dreaming about personal privacy, the NSA, PGP, wiretaps and all manner of things last night.

I seem to recall spending most of it trying to pursuade the NSA that all this legislation was completely unfair and that we'd be perfectly happy to accept them trying to intercept our comms on a purely technical level. Which makes sense in some contexts (powerful crypto is available to all of us these days) but not others (I don't have the resources to combat NSA wiretaps or fight back if they decide to make up a criminal record for me).

Fortunately I live in a democratic country (meaning it just hasn't occurred to them yet; although we've had a few blips on the personal privacy radar). Unfortunately it's just bent on screwing us in other, even more imaginative ways.

It's been a long time since I've had to disable the office alarm in the morning. Since we moved out to Kenilworth it's been far easier to get here aiming for just before 9. ADSL at home means we can check our mail before we leave if we really have to. I've had the odd team member wander into my office thinking I was here because I was answering mail :-)

I believe very much in positive action. Especially when it's not obvious what to do. You learn only by doing, and sometimes doing has to take a form remarkably like fumbling around in a dark room looking for the light switch.

Obviously this has it's limitations. If your name is Homer and you work in the control room for a nuclear power station then this approach may not be for you.

So I suppose appropriate positive action is more correct. But it doesn't make for quite as compelling a soundbite.

If something isn't working for you then you need to make a conscious decision to try something else (which in many instances equates to try something (full stop|period)). The risk you run is that you may end up somewhere worse than where you are now. But risk is a part of life and it's the price you pay for avoiding stagnation.

This can be a remarkably effective way of dealing with situations you have no natural talent for. For example, I look after a team of developers. I have strong doubts about whether or not this is something I have any natural talent for. Being able to write decent code does not imply anything about being able to assist other human beings (programmers are people too) in their quest for happiness. I suspect this is necessary to do my current job well.

This means that I'm frequently faced with a situation where something is bothering someone and (in the rare case where I can actually extract this much information from them) neither of us really has any idea what we might do to correct the situation. In these instances I defer to my trusty Positive-Action-omatic^TM. Usually there are a few things that you could try. Sometimes it takes a little brainstorming to see them, but I'm pretty sure they're always there. And there's only one way to determine whether or not they'll actually help: try them.

Does this work? Can I consider my approach a success? No idea. You'll have to ask my team.

Been nursing a headache for the past 24 hours (or somewhere in that region). It started yesterday morning in my shoulders and crept up into my head where it hid briefly behind my left eyeball. This morning it seems to have climbed down only to stand on my shoulders so it can reach up to wrap itself around my brain.

I think it's stress. We're supposed to go into beta come the end of this week. This is a project we've been working for just over a year now. Late Friday afternoon (isn't it always late Friday afternoon when these things happen?) I stumbled across something we've been doing wrong since day one. Well, wrong is a strong word. It works. It's worked all along, but it wasn't our intention to do it this way. We just got lucky.

In a nutshell it introduces an inconsistency into the release which grates. If it were just an application we could live with it and fix it in a later release. But it's a platform for other projects to build on (many of which are due for release a month or so after ours) so if we release like this we're stuck with it for the lifespan of this platform, which is likely to be in the region of 5 to 10 years. We may never get a chance to fix it.

So the question is do we fix it and introduce additional risk into the project at this late stage, and release a more consistent platform. Or do we write it off as too risky and force projects that depend on us to deal with the inconsistency?

And that, my friends, is the conundrum that I suspect is lodged in my skull as I write this.

My God. People take this stuff so seriously. A friend was nominated, and promptly pulled a virtual finger at the other nominees. And now they're all crying because he dared to take the piss out of them because they all keep shovelling up the global cud. Original post. Chew once, post on my blog. Chew again, no no, post on my blog. Bah.

The funniest part is that I actually know him and I know just how much their pitiful ranting has amused him, and just how little he cares about their (or anyone else's) opinions.

And after reading some of your blogs I honestly can't say I plan to come back to them. Same old boring reconstituted drivel.

Okay, far be it for me to be giving these guys any more visibility than they already steal for themselves, but I just can't pass up the opportunity to share this one with you.

This is the subject line of a piece of spam at the top of my inbox at the moment, one that got through Google's filters. I think the subject line explains why. Somewhere there's a Google spam filter scratching it's head going WTF?

sweating and sudden hoott weaves, sleep disorder? oxen

Oh, and continuing with the life altering theme I mentioned in a previous post, try this one:

This email must vary your biography!

Basically we're seeing natural selection in action here. I only ever see amusing or entertaining subject lines because everything else gets 'killed off' by the trials and tribulations of life as a piece of spam under Google's microscope (substitute your favourite webmail provider if you think Google is Satan incarnate).

I normally avoid referencing articles like this. I've never intended to go head to head with Google but sometimes something is just so ludicrous that it just can't be ignored. Thanks to Sam for putting me onto it (even if he didn't intend to).

Before I go any further, you have to read this.

Basically, these guys are on the rampage at a University up North, and they feel that since negotiations didn't work out (meaning they didn't get their way) the only option left open to them is violence. In the grand old South African tradition. So they're going to kill, or at the very least spill the blood of, the people getting in their way. In this case they just happen to be biased, racist white people.

The absolute gem from the whole story as far as I'm concerned was this:

We are tired of being discriminated against because we cannot pay the fees and because we are not passing.

We feel that this discrimination, which is leading us to fail our courses, must be stopped...

So basically, they're failing because they're being discriminated against for not passing.

Shit, but that would have been a handy argument at varsity. Why the hell didn't I think of it?

Most of the time I do what I can to ignore spam, but every now and then an email arrives with a subject line that I can't help but admire, if only because it highlights what little grasp the author has on the English language (or reality, take your pick).

After one month my spam tally (at home) sits at 3,783. Throw in roughly 3,000 more at the office and my monthly total looks a little stupid. Perhaps it's time for some serious account rationalisation.

We went for a walk this evening and on the way home came across a cat attacking a dove that had clearly just left the nest (their cere is characteristic for a few weeks after they've left the nest).

We chased the cat off and picked the bird up. It seemed ok, if somewhat flustered, so we decided to bring it home and leave it in the garden to regain its composure and hopefully fly off when it was ready. It never did.

Just after we got home it gave one last flutter of its wings and died in my hands. It seems it was more badly hurt than I'd realised. Or perhaps it was just traumitised beyong its limits. It's been years since I had a bird die in my hands, but it's still an unpleasant thing to watch. The final departure of that spark that separates it from the inanimate things around us.

e.e. cummings said it best with the following poem:

l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness

My dream last night was a real mixed bag. DOS vs Unix line terminators seemed to be a running theme, as did something I remember as a 'unique Internet name' made up, cunningly, of my first name and a unique number (single digit in this case so I was either an early adopter or there are very few people with the name James in that world).

Lately I've been missing my alarm more and more consistently. Missing as is not hearing rather than longing for. My current phone's alarm isn't particularly emphatic. I get a short 4 or 5 second burst of 'music' and then it yawns and gives up. I need something that crawls up onto my face and slaps me until there's cerebral activity.

And of course I've been devastated by mosquitoes.

Sometimes things try to be smarter than they actually are and just end up screwing it up.

I've been trying to figure out all evening why I couldn't access this server. Initially I thought it was just an IP change glitch. This box is hosted behind ADSL on a dynamic IP so the new IP needs to be pushed out to a DNS provider (thanks ZoneEdit). Sometimes there's a small delay. So I just assumed it was that. But when it hadn't sorted itself out after an hour I figured something else was wrong.

The IP handed out today smelt a bit odd. The last octet was 255, which (on a class C network anyway) is usually a broadcast address. So when I saw "smurf attack!!!" in my router's logs it finally dawned on me. The blasted thing thought that my ICMP traffic to this machine was a smurf attack and had blocked it. Furthermore, it turns out SMC routers by default block any traffic (any traffic, not just ICMP traffic) outbound to an IP with 255 for the last octet. This is just plain stupid. It will work only if the remote IP is on a class C network, and there's no way to determine that automatically. It's a good attempt, but even given that they should only bloody well be blocking ICMP traffic.

Sigh.

At least this model lets me switch this 'protection' off.

In other news, it doesn't look like I'll be doing much blogging from the office. Our network has slowly been degenerating over the past few weeks as we pile more and more shit onto it (the crowning glory is a sales management tool we use which basically just replicates the 'central' database over the wire to support a kind of disconnected-distributed-centralized-who-knows data model). Coupled with the fact that our traffic is piped up through London via BT, then over to New York, down to Atlanta, into our office there and only then does our request for james.cshons99.net (hosted no more than a few hundred kms from here) get considered and actually handled. Between our generally limited international bandwidth and the functionally pipette-like network connection we seem to have left at the office, and the 4 pages I need to get through simply to add an entry I don't really stand much of a chance.

Maybe its time for some procmail magic.

People are the best cure for nostalgia. They don't even have to be people I know.

One of the trips down memory lane this morning involved digging through the filesystem of this website. It's been around pretty much untouched for just over 5 years now. It's been through about 5 physical hosts, including 3 different operating systems. In each case the contents were moved pretty much wholesale, so it's had 5 years to gather odds and ends. This exercise got claustrophobic pretty quickly and I've been thinking about why that should be.

I suspect for most people sitting in front of a terminal window must be an essentially 2D experience. But for me, and I have a feeling this applies to many people I know, there's a very real 3D aspect to it. An SSH terminal window to a remote machine has depth. I experience it as being within something. That's just how my brain presents it to me. It's quite hard to explain, but it does provide some justification for the feeling of claustrophobia this morning, because a lot of my nostalgia today was grounded in these odds and ends I found on a box that is about 200km east(ish) of here.

I long ago decided that I don't really like being alone. Not physically anyway. But that's not to be confused with keeping to yourself.

It's one of the reasons I don't believe I would ever be happy working 'from home'. I tried it once, for a large part of my Honours year I worked at home for Andrew-suck-your-soul-out-through-your-eyeballs-Lobel. It's too quiet. And I suppose it gets lonely.

I like to have people around. Even if I'm not interacting with them. The background noise is its own kind of fellowship. Maybe it's the herd mentality.

I'm not even particularly sociable. I'm sufficiently capable when the need arises (or at least I believe this to be true). But it's not a stated preference of mine. I have a (fairly small) core group of people that I'm more than happy to spend time with, individually, or even in a group. This collective consists of a range of different people, and many of them I haven't actually seen for months or even, in some cases, years. And sometimes we don't speak or see each other for months at a time. But there's some sort of kinship that seems to have weathered the test of time. Most of us met during our studies at University. I think there's something about that crucible that forges certain types of bonds. I haven't added significantly to that core group in subsequent years.

I suspect that's as much a comment on me as it is on that period. I don't think I make close friends particularly easily. University (and I would imagine this goes for almost any tertiary institution that is not structured like school) throws groups of people together for hours and days and weeks on end who usually share fundamental commonalities. So these kinds of bonds are in some way inevitable. Initially I expected something similar to come from working life. The group I work with are in many respects similar to me.

But it hasn't happened. Not in the same way or to the same extent as University. Contrasting the two periods and looking at the differences suggests a few reasons. Chief among them is that for most people University still meant living at home, or perhap in a University residence. This has significantly fewer responsibilities than living in a digs with friends, or in your own place with a significant other. Your goals at work are also different. At University you're usually studying something you enjoy (or thought you'd enjoy). And there are periods in between the work spent with others. Skipping lectures to have coffee at the Purple Haze, or spending the entire morning in SciLab on IRC or playing with this newfangled email thing.

At the office there are always more priorities than you can fit into the day. Coffee or lunch with friends is still possible, and even happens from time to time, but there's an element missing (probably something along the lines of if-I-really-don't-feel-like-it-I-don't-have-to-go-back-anytime-soon). You get some of this living in digs with friends. Especially if it's a large digs. Smaller digs have a different character about them. Especially if there are only two of you. It's all to easy to fall into a routine where you go your separate ways and soon the digs is just a convient means of keeping rent down.

It seems to be how much leisure time you can spend as a group, coupled with circumstances contriving to get you together frequently. That seems to apply to University, and in general it's a good description of a large digs. Looking it all of this it appears that the next 'stage' in life that fulfills these requirements would be kids. Except that kids bring with them their own set of responsibilities, so I suspect it's only when they're largely old enough to look after themselves (or to move out) that this happens again.

This has been a little incoherent. I suppose what I'm kind of circling around is that I miss University. Or at least the period of time I associate with it. I'm not daft enough to believe it was a period of nirvana, but I think it brought together a group of people, under a set of circumstances, neither of which is going to be easy to repeat. And now we've to some degree gone our own separate ways, blown away by the winds of change if I can wax lyrical for a moment.

As I said. A day of remember-whens.

Randomly threw on a collection of MP3s last night, and the CD was
still in this morning when I started to attend to the aftermath.

It's basically a slightly filtered collection of MP3s from Honours.
Which is all a hopelessly nostagic case like me needs. Today, it
appears, is a day of remember-whens.

Which has it's own problems.

I can't believe I wasted so much time waiting for something so
inconsequential, when I managed to almost dismiss something of such
consequence. One of the MP3s puts in mind of another which is always
going to be hard to listen to. But I'll continue to listen to it
because it's important. And I hope, in some way that you have realised
that its important because you were important. Are important.

It may not have been forever, but it was. And that will have to be enough.

I battle when these moods come over me. it's as if the world is too
big and too small at the same time. It's hard to deal with
claustrophobia and agorophobia all rolled into one neat little
package. Outside there's too much of the world to drink in, while
inside the world is shut away and too much is happening and being
missed.

This always puts me in mind of you.

As I lay me down - Sophie B Hawkins

It felt like springtime on this February morning
In the courtyard birds were singing your praise
I'm still recalling things you said to make me feel alright
I carried them with me today, Now

As I lay me down to sleep
This I pray
That you will hold me dear
Though I'm far away
I'll whisper your name into the sky
And I will wake up happy

I wonder why I feel so high
Though I am not above the sorrow
Heavy hearted
Till you call my name
And it sounds like church bells
Or the whistle of a train
On a summer evening
I'll run to meet you
Barefoot barely breathing

As I lay me down to sleep
This I pray
That you will hold me dear
Though I'm far away
I'll whisper your name into the sky
And I will wake up happy

It's not too near for me
Like a flower I need the rain
Though it's not clear to me
Every season has its change
And I will see you
When the sun comes out again

As I lay me down to sleep
This I pray
That you will hold me dear
Though I'm far away
I'll whisper your name into the sky
And I will wake up happy

Had another small troop of people around for a potjie this evening. That's basically a stew cooked over an open fire in a large cast iron pot for my foreign audience (potjie literally means small pot).

Quite an experiment this one. I'm a meat and potatoes man, so a potjie with freshly ground cardamom seeds and a cinnamon stick is not an everyday occurrence. I also had to play with the measures because the recipe aimed for a smaller group than we had (as it turns out we only just had enough). I don't think it was executed particularly well, and to be honest I wasn't mad about the result, but our visitors seemed quite happy, and yet you insist it's the best one you've tasted to date.

I think the same thing happened with the last one. Again, I wasn't wild about it but you loved it. Quite odd.

But all in all a pleasant evening. Quite an amenable mix of people, in itself a pleasant surprise. Some groups you're just never sure how they're going to mix. You never know when you're going to get oil and water.

Dunno why, this song just appeals.

Bubbly Toes - Jack Johnson

It's as simple as something that nobody knows
that her eyes are as big as her bubbly toes
on the feet of a queen of the hearts of the cards
and her feet are all covered with tar balls and scars
It's as common as something that nobody knows that her beauty will
follow wherever she goes
up the hill in the back of her house in the wood
she'd love me forever,
I know she could

I remember when, you and me, mmm how we used to be just good friends
Wouldn't give me none
But all I wanted was some

She's got a whole lot of reasons
She cant think of a single one
That can justify leaving
and he got none but he thinks he got so many problems
and he got, too much time to waste

His dreams are like commercials
But her dreams are picture perfect and Our
dreams are so related though they're often underestimated

It's as simple as something that nobody knows that
Her eyes are as big as her bubbly toes
On the feet of the queen of the hearts of the card
feet are infested with tar balls

and La da da da da da La da da da da da da La da da da da da

Well I was eating lunch at the D. L. G.
When this little girl came and she sat next to me
never seen nobody move the way she did
Well she did and she does and she'll do it again

When you move like a jellyfish
Rhythm don't mean nothing
You go with the flow
You don't stop
Move like a jellyfish
Rhythm is nothing
You go with the flow
You don't stop mmm

It's as common as something that nobody knows that
Her beauty will follow wherever she goes
Up the hill in the back of her house in the wood
She'll love me forever, I know

she La da da da da da

If you would only listen
You might just realize what you're missing
You're missing me
If you would only listen
You might just realize what you're missing
You're missing me

It's as simple as something that nobody knows that
Her eyes are as big as her bubbly toes
On the feet of the queen of the hearts of the card
feet are infested with tar balls

and La da da da da da

Along with many others we suffer under a common Capetonian scourge: the cockroach.

There's a curious behaviour I've yet to find a reasonable explanation for. I frequently come across cockroaches lying on their backs. Initially I assumed they were dead or dying but I very quickly discovered that they're in fact fully compos mentis (inasmuch as this can be applied to something with a brain that's probably only a few pixels in diameter).

If you disturb a cockroach in this state it will frantically immitate backstroke for a bit until it finally manages to flip itself right side up. At which point it will race off.

Initially I thought I was imagining it, or we had a rare sub-species of well trained circus cockroaches. But a quick search on Google (all hail Google; long live Google) seemed to hint that others had seen it too. There was some speculation as to the cause, but to be honest, not a hell of a lot of info exists (apparently). It's as if no one finds sunbathing cockroaches worth investigating.

A few theories were put forward:

• They're feigning death because they think I'm potential prey. This is a bit daft though, because most of their enemies would probably eat them dead or alive.
• They're warming their butts. The proponent of this theory didn't offer any reason why they'd need to warm their butts but hey, who are we to question?
• They're lording it over us because they know they've reached the pinnacle of evolution (after all, it's only cockroaches and scorpions that will survive the inevitable nuclear war we're gearing up for).

My money's on the latter theory. It also explains why I never see adults on their backs (admittedly, very few cockroaches make it to adulthood in our house): youngsters have always been the most likely segment to taunt the incumbent authorities.

Maybe they're mooning us at the same time and the butt-warming theory has been planted to make us look like fools.

Why does some fruit taste better in pieces? Is it just me? Take apples. On their own they're generally a pretty mediocre fruit. Occasionally you hit a rich vein of apples, crunchy, juicy, just the right sweetness, but most of the time they're almost tasteless, floury, small, an generally nothing to write home about.

But take even a mediocre apple and core and quarter it, and suddenly it's a whole different kettle of fish (apologies for mixing my food groups).

Or grapes. One of my favourite snacks is fruit salad and yoghurt. Grapes for a staple part of this particular diet. But only if they're sliced in half (tedious enough so that it limits my intake somewhat). Why? Hell knows.

If you're in Cape Town and looking for good quality, reasonably priced sushi, then I can definitely recommend Sushi Zone in Observatory, Cape Town (try the Rainbow Nation rolls).

I'm stuffed. I don't think I've ever managed to fit quite that much raw fish into my stomach in a single sitting.

Okay. So there have been a lot of posts in the last two days. I expected that. It's the new toy thing I mentioned earlier. But it's also the result of nigglies coming out of the woodwork with each addition. Or things I don't quite like the look of yet.

But we're getting there.

Quote from a book I'm reading:

Strange to think that each new life was only a few years long - that one passed through several in each bodily span.

This captures succinctly how life seems to me from time to time. I look back on my primary school years, my time at high school before moving down to the Cape, my years at school here, and even my degree, and they each seem to be their own lifetimes. Foreign and so far removed from me now that they may as well have been lived by someone else.

Recommended reading: The Blog From Another Dimension.

They have a collection of character sketches on 'dubbya'. I really recommend them.

In second year I started a personal project to produce a visual teaching tool for mathematics. It started as a result of a numerical methods course I did in my Applied Maths course, and the original intention was to play with splines.

Well, I never got anywhere near splines, but when I was finished, I had a package that would graph arbitrary functions (one and two variables), step you through numerical integration, differentiation and various root finding algoriths, plot 2D and 3D parametric curves, 2D and 3D phase portraits, and slope fields. I can't take all the credit for it. My friends were determined beta testers and without the comprehensive help written by Clare Johnson Newt wouldn't be anywhere near as accessible as it is today.

The UCT Maths Department have been using Newt for the last four or five years in their first year maths course. For various reasons the version they had was tied to their network and expired annually. This year I decided I'd just give them a non-expiring build that students could use at home. In retrospect I don't know why I didn't just do this from the start. I suppose I had grand dreams of becoming a millionaire or something silly like that.

So, if you're an educational institution, or just someone who's battling to visualize calculus (or even trigonometric graphs at high school) and would like a copy of Newt drop me a line. I've yet to put a full build up for general downloading but I'll get there, eventually. After all, it only took me five years to get here.

The Newt web site has more details covering what Newt can do, and includes a range of screen shots.

I haven't released the source code, and I'm unlikely to mostly because it's some of the most horrible code I've ever produced. It truly is awful and I'm surprised Newt works as well as it does. Just don't contrive to use it in any life-support systems.

The problem with blogging is that it's addictive.

I noticed this the last time I got my blog setup. It seems to wane a little bit but it's especially noticeable in the beginning. I think it's a combination of suddenly having a 'voice' (maybe it's the vague anonymity it confers) and having a new toy with which to express yourself.

The new toy is a big part of it for me. Suddenly I've got categories, preview capabilities, and new templates to get looking 'just right'.

The last bit isn't limited to blogging. I knew a guy at varsity who studied for about five years in total and spent four of those setting up his desktop (we got Unix accounts in 2nd year for the first time in our lives; so much to configure!)

With blogging, at least for me, it sometimes escalates into wanting to record everything I'm thinking about or discussing (which can be a lot, but is often more quantity than quality) but that degenerates quickly. Without relay teams to feed me and give me sponge baths (mind the keyboard luv) it's tricky to record every waking moment. Mind you, Intel are playing with EEG technology (can't find the URL, it was a while back) with an aim to being able to record your 'state of mind' for future generations. The idea is that someday we'll be able to haul granddad out of storage and 'watch' selected highlights from his life.

Break out the popcorn, granddad's coming to dinner.

I'm a little hazy on the details but I remember enough to know that last night's dream involved most of the cast of Friends with a backing soundtrack from the same show.

Usually I can find tenuous links between recent events, concerns, or something. Sometimes, I can't.

I started logging referers (yes, that's how it's spelt, thank the HTTP spec for that; it will live with us forever).

I was interested in which search terms (if any) would point people this way. We had our first match this evening: TOGA LADS PICS and search.msn.co.uk sent someone this way. Actually, I can explain this one, but it's a little embarassing.

I'm still not convinced I want the overhead (and security risks, and general pain of other people's software) that I expect to come out of a move to one of the blogging engines out there.

After all, I don't need anything more than somewhere to make a noise, right? Right.

Anyway, this is a trial. We'll see how it progresses and I'll make a call at some point. Then, it's either into the trash can, or I move this lot down a directory to take over the old index page.

This blog uses the MovableType engine. Why that particular engine? Well, my first requirement was no backend database. Don't get me wrong, databases are wonderful things. But when it comes to putting a blog up they're overkill, and it's enough of a pain in the ass to move a blogging engine from one machine to another without having to drag a database along with it. No, it's not hard. Yes, anyone reasonably clued up should be able to do it with their eyes closed. Do I want to waste hours of my life reconfiguring MySQL? No. Not a chance in hell.

The other, more compelling reason was sheer laziness. I got this up and running without too many hassles and after that, who could be bothered trialing candidate number 2? In fact, I'm so lazy I don't even have a candidate number 2.

Mind you, it's not like this exercise was a time-saver itself. I've spent around 4 hours fiddling with this. Yes, I got caught up in the stylesheet (I still can't make two span tags under the same div tag align left and right respectively, I gave up after about 30 minutes of fiddling). No, I didn't read the manual (I kept writing some failing javascript off as a bug; eventually I was forced to dig into it and it turned out one of the .js files needed to be somewhere else). And for some reason this engine keeps trying to render my posts in Czech.

I'm not allowing comments. That was never something I wanted, and it just opens you up to spam which I get enough of thank you very much. And I'm still going to watch these scripts carefully, because there are way too many .cgi scripts floating around for me to feel completely comfortable deploying them. Fortunately, Apache is chrooted on OpenBSD by default, and I'm running it with a very restricted user too, just in case. But if I'm paranoid enough to run OpenBSD then nothing will ever be enough.