Below are the most recent 7 friends' journal entries.

Monday, December 21st, 2009
gerald_duck	5:47p	Turning the corner Happy Winter Solstice, folks. The nights are as long as they get and we're now heading back towards Summer. Or, at least, we would be if it weren't for seasonal lag. Drat! Current Mood: Prospective Current Music: In The Bleak Midwinter (1 Comment |Comment on this)
pjc50	2:28p	Get off my lawn No, really - our neighbour just had a visitor who drove their car across our lawn and a bit onto their lawn, rather than park on the drive. I have no idea what they were thinking .. by the time I'd got moving and got my winter gear on they'd made their escape. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, December 20th, 2009
gerald_duck	12:51a	Sometimes you're better off dead Recently, I read The Secret Life of Words. I enjoyed it. It wasn't a fantastic book that changed my life, but it was a pleasant enough bimble for the most part. Henry Hitchings said on a few occasions something along the lines of "it is often said that ABC, whereas in fact XYZ". Either there was an outrageous fluke at play or this was code in every case for "Bill Bryson got this wrong in Mother Tongue". Bill Bryson seems to get quite a lot of stuff wrong; he's especially good at apocryphal anecdotes. On the other hand, Mother Tongue is a much better read. Henry Hitchings seems to have written a history of England from the perspective of its language more than a book about the language, and in that respect it's no match for The Isles, to pick one example. However, even with all of the historical context, it still in places comes across as one dry list of words after another. I wish he'd told a deeper and more involving story about the sources of a smaller selection of words. One thing I thought curious was that Hitchings claimed "ohrwurm" is a common loan word from German, without acknowledging that its calque, "earworm" is found much more frequently. Personally, I saw and heard "earworm" off and on for many years before I even knew its Germanic origin. But all of this is a digression. There is good news and there is bad. The bad news is that I have an earworm: the Spice Girls cover of Christmas Wrapping. The good news is that it's actually of them singing West End Girls to the same tune, which is altogether more surreal and gratifying. Current Mood: Earwormed (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
fanf	4:45p	stupid email disclaimers Dear morons, I'm glad to know that this important marketing message is confidential, and that I shouldn't tell anyone about your branding change even though it's obvious because you are changing the signs on your buildings. PS. if you are going to use an email service provider to send this shit, at least you could hire one that is able to delete your misleading disclaimers first. Received: from mail.highford.com ([213.210.16.63]:53904) by ppsw-6.csi.cam.ac.uk (mx.cam.ac.uk [131.111.8.146]:25) Message-Id: <curu/yjjezx3xvv8q6i5ew@hearfrom.com> From: Bradford & Bingley <news@savings.bradford-bingley.co.uk> To: Mr Finch <dot@dotat.at> Subject: Update Bradford & Bingley Savings changing to Santander Dear Mr Finch, As of 11 January 2010 Abbey National plc which includes the Bradford & Bingley savings business will change its name to Santander UK plc and operate under the brand name of Santander. [...] This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify the system manager. [...] (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009
pjc50	4:11p	OooooOOeeeEEEEoo (waves hands) That's right, I've built a Theremin :) It's angua's kit one. Spent several hours building it at her house while watching Middleman. The parts count was fairly high - somewhere near 50 components, including 3 ICs and various things mounted off board, but soldering was straightforward (single sided board, no surface mount). I'm extremely proud that when I powered it up for the first time it actually made a noise! No debugging or rework needed. Playing it may not be as straightforward as it looks. By the time I'd finished it was quite late so we didn't spend a long time on it, and it needs tuning. Tuning is a fiddly process; I don't have the plastic screwdriver needed, and the thing is very, very sensitive to any parasitic capacitance. It doesn't have a very clear tone, that may be improved by tuning, and overall it doesn't seem to have quite the sensitivity one would expect - you have to be quite close to the antenna for the effect to kick in. It's very pleasing to have built a bit of analog electronics that works :) The Theremin is also a handy demonstration of the heterodyne effect (used by all modern radios, TVs, etc) and body capacitance; it's the same effect that's used by the iPod touch, although there all the electronic magic is hidden away in a single chip. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, December 11th, 2009
fanf	5:06p	Signing the root zone. If you are a DNS, network, or firewall operator, you need to be aware that the root zone of the DNS is going to be signed with DNSSEC in stages during the first half of 2010. You need to ensure that any packet filters between your recursive DNS resolvers and the public Internet do not block UDP DNS packets larger than 512 bytes, and that they do not block fragmented UDP packets, and that they do not block ICMP "fragmentation needed" packets, and that they do not block DNS-over-TCP. The reason for this is that DNSSEC makes DNS packets larger, since as well as the answer they must also contain a cryptographic proof that the answer is correct. Misconfigurations that are benign with insecure DNS can cause problems with the move towards DNSSEC. The DNS Operations and Analysis Research Centre has a reply size tester which you can use to check that your systems are compatible with large DNS reply packets. See these presentation slides for some details on the process of signing the root zone. See this blog post from RIPE, operators of the K root server, for some information about how they are preparing for the change. ICANN have published a paper about the predicted effects of DNSSEC on broadband routers and firewalls. Gaurab Raj Upadhaya has published a few slides about EDNS0, the DNS extension protocol that enables large packets. Please go out and check your DNS resolvers before they break! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, December 10th, 2009
mjg59	6:33p	Nook update My nook arrived today, along with an email asking for my shipping address in order to be sent a CD with the source on. So that's progress. The nook itself is an interesting device - it comes in impressively well produced packaging, which looks easily as attractive as any Apple product I've laid hands on lately. Except that it then includes a double-sided sheet of instructions in the outer packaging to tell you how to get the damn thing out. And so far, that seems like a pretty good summary of the device. There's a huge quantity of form here, but the function is lacking. The initial registration was made infuriating by the lag between hitting a key on the keyboard[1] and anything happening. I'm not talking about the understandable lag due to the latency of updates on e-ink screens - I'm talking about the seemingly non-deterministic time between tapping the screen and it indicating that I've pressed a key. The coverflow feature for books is better than selecting from a menu of items (e-ink lends itself badly to interactive displays), but slow and jerky. Worse, it's limited to B&N content. Anything you obtain elsewhere and then copy onto the device (which presents as USB mass storage) ends up in a separate menu without any coverflow. And, even more infuriatingly, you can't catagorise the files you copy on there. It's just one big list, sorted alphabetically by author (surname) and then title. Once you're in a book, things aren't bad. It reformats the text every time you enter a book (no caching), but that takes much less time than my Sony did. The default font is very readable, even at small sizes. But there's clearly something horribly wrong - various epub files I have take up to 4 seconds to perform a page turn, which is way longer than the second or so my Sony took. There's no way to skip to a given page number, which seems like an insane oversight. And, though it's a minor point, the next/previous page buttons are the opposite way around to the Kindle or Sonys, and it's taking a while to get used to that. It's a promising device. The hardware's clearly capable and the software is mostly there, with the features I'm really missing being ones that shouldn't be hard to implement[2]. But those features are pretty glaring, and right now they make this less functional than the Sony, let alone the Kindle. I'm also kind of surprised that it doesn't ship with any kind of cover at all. There's ample opportunity for physical trauma to turn one of these into a paperweight. Side note: My nook managed to include the QA checklist slip, presumably by accident. The nook's internal manufacturing designation appears to be "X2", and mine was built on 2009/11/25. Which would seem optimistic for an intended shipping date in the US of 2009/11/30, which does support the idea that the shipping delay was due to some kind of delay in the hardware production. [1] Presented on the LCD panel [2] Of course, this being closed-source, I can't do so myself. Sigh. (6 Comments |Comment on this)