While reading a magazine article about blogs (OK, if you insist, it was Fortune Magazine ) I stumbled at the line :

"... most blogs involve kids talking about their dates, people posting pictures of their cats, or lefties raging about the right (and vice versa)."

I'm not allowed to date, I don't stand on a political soapbox,
so here's a picture of my cat (answers to the name of scumbag).

The boss of the House

I've just about given up complaining about the advertisements at the start of the movies. I don't put up with them at home, why should I go out and pay to be assaulted by them. Local cinema management don't seem to be able to even comprehend that someone might find LOUD adverts offensive. The fact that these are mostly re-cycled television adverts, suffering by being projected onto a large screen, is even more irritating.
Didn't I already pay for this movie?
Captive Motion Picture Audience of America

It had to happen ...
As flock is to geese: "A wank of bloggers"?

This quote for Bruce Schneier took my fancy ...

Security is orthogonal to functionality. Security has nothing to with what the product does, or how well it does it, or how good the user interface is.

You can't give a product to a thousand random people, have them beta test it for a month and really learn anything about the security. They can tell you if it works and how functional it is, but they can't tell you if it's broken or not.
Generally, to test security, at least in the real world, you just put the product out there and experienced security professionals, either working for industry, or in academia, or working on their own (commonly known as hackers), find flaws and alert the New York Times and you get your feedback that way. Not terribly useful. But it's where we've ended up.

B. Schneier, "Security in the Real World: How to Evaluate Security Technology," Computer Security Journal, v 15, n 4, 1999, pp. 1-14.

It seemed to appear too quickly, and I was suspicious that it is going to be a band-aid on a gushing wound... next to useless, 'cos it wasn't thought through. Adding the attribute rel="nofollow" to links in comments, will not prevent comment spam, it will merely change the spammers' behaviour.
This post on kuro5hin.org confirms my suspicions.

Spam 101

I'm going to take a bit of a risk here and go on record as saying that this will not solve comment spam at all; in fact, it'll probably make the problem worse. The reason for this is that there are currently two kinds of spammers:

* One kind, let's call them "Group A", spam weblogs and discussion forums for the PageRank bonuses.
* The other kind, "Group B", spam because they want their address or brand name to be seen by as many people as possible. They don't care about PageRank, they just care about the (fairly constant) percentage of people who will hit their site after seeing the address or name. This is the same motive and method we're all familiar with from USENET and email spam.

Obviously this can stop Group A in its tracks if widely implemented (and the Google announcement sports an impressive list of weblogging tools which are already on board, with more likely to follow), but it does nothing about Group B. What's more, the Group A spammers are unlikely to say "Aw, shucks" and give up; they're probably just going to become Group B spammers, because the marginal gain of visibility is better than nothing.

On the BBC news site they have this story.

An attempt to hack into the website of the Disasters and Emergency Committee (DEC) that was set up after the Asian tsunami, is being investigated.
Officers from the Metropolitan Police's Computer Crime Unit have begun an inquiry after BT blocked the attempt on New Year's Eve.
A 28-year-old man from east London was arrested and released on bail in connection with alleged offences.
Police are examining computer equipment seized during a search.

But on BoingBoing it reads like this:

A Londonder (sic) made a tsnuami-relief donation using lynx -- a text-based browser used by the blind, Unix-users and others -- on Sun's Solaris operating system. The site-operator decided that this "unusual" event in the system log indicated a hack-attempt, and the police broke down the donor's door and arrested him. From a mailing list:

For donating to a Tsunami appeal using Lynx on Solaris 10. BT [British Telecom] who run the donation management system misread an access log and saw hmm thats a non standard browser not identifying it's type and it's doing strange things. Trace that IP. Arrest that hacker.
Armed police, a van, a police cell and national news later the police have gone in SWAT styley and arrested someone having their lunch.
Out on bail till next week and preparing to make a lot of very bad PR for BT and the Police....
So just goes to show if you use anything other than Firefox or IE and you rely on someone else to interogate access logs or IDS logs you too could be sitting in a paper suit in a cell :(

I'm thinking that more people should be using lynx, after all it doesn't suffer all those irritating pop-ups and animated advertisements.
So why the hell are we making browsers more & more complicated, just so that we can see the content of a site, when lynx has been there all along!?
*nix users should make a point of cranking up lynx on a daily basis. The NZHerald's site quickly becomes quite easy to use...

I can claim at least twice. When the statistics on "misplacing" a mobile device are projected, it starts to get scary ... and this is just stuff lost in taxis.

In the last six months alone, the nine-nation survey of leading taxi companies in Australia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Great Britain, and the U.S. indicated tens of thousands of digital devices were left behind inadvertently. The U.S. company polled in the survey, a major Chicago cab company, reported the highest number of losses per taxi of all firms studied, both in mobile phones (3.42 per cab) and PDAs/Pocket PCs (0.86 per cab).

Based on the large size of the Chicago company's fleet, the statistics indicate a staggering 85,619 mobile phones, 21,460 PDAs/Pocket PCs, and 4,425 laptops left in the firm's licensed cabs during the six months covered in the study. Only London, with 0.21 laptop PCs lost per cab versus the Chicago firm's 0.18, was higher in any category.

The point of their investigation is that it is more and more important to use passwords and encryption in mobile devices, particularly highly data capable smartphones which would slip under the radar of most corporate IT departments (they worry about the laptops, meanwhile the phones take over the mobile data function).

So you've converted to Firefox.
Discovered lotsa useful features (as basic as tabbed browsing).
Installed a bunch of extensions.
Popup blockers, an ftp client, gmail tracker, text editor, games ...
(as a Pete said: "Who needs a desktop?")

What about trying to write your own extension? ... ew scary!
If you were to go there, this would be the starting place as an overview.

So it's another year, and another bunch of calendars on the wall etc.
I have often mused on the possibility of decimal time but I have always *assumed* that the months and weeks being organised into a year would not be capable of decimalising.
There is a proposal however, which is a good substitute. This guy has suggested a standard calendar which is the same every year! The whole year becomes predictable, the same date each year becomes same day of the week. So you can paint the calendar on the wall.
Simply taking the year as 364 days long means that it can be divided into exactly 52 weeks. Months are then organised into 4 cycles of 30, 30, 31 days. (All months are 30 days except March, June, Sept and Dec). Every 5 or 6 years there is a week long holiday (mid-winter) called a "Newton Week" to do the leap year thing (I always thought leap years were a bit of a cludge anyway).
I can't see anything wrong with it, but I can't see see how it could be wheeled into place either.

Shane Mahuta is definitely a hero in my books.
Reading the story in the NZ Herald about how he saw a situation, decided to get involved, and then was able to think his way through to be able to do something really useful.

"I got in front of her and let their truck hit the back of mine."
Mr Mahuta then gradually applied his brakes until the following truck hit.
"There was a bang and a bit of a nudge."
Slowly he tried to bring the two trucks, each about 16m long, to a halt as they drove locked together down the motorway.

That's over 50 tonnes of barely controlled machinery! He's certainly a driver who is worth his weight in diff-oil!

What better way to spend New Year than creating a new template for the blog.
It shouldn't look too much different, but there are no more tables.
It's now purely CSS and liquid design (at least what I interpret that to mean).
There's probably a few bits to fix yet, but as a 3-Column presentation it works OK.
I hope the font is a bit more readable, and I have no access to a Mac to check for Safari compatibility. ( ... and I wonder at the wisdom of doing the IE5 cludge, considering that this stuff would be of no interest to anyone using such a shit browser.)