masterkill

mjs@masterkill.com — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:32:55 GMT

The price of a thing is largely wages. (What proportion is wages? I guess it depends on the thing. But, say, a computer or car is mostly wages; a restaurant meal has a larger real estate component.) Anyway, if you buy a Prius, but Toyota's workers spend their money on virgin forest furniture and dirty electrical power, have you really achieved anything at all? Does the environmental behaviour of a company's employees matter?

How does Meraki work?

mjs@masterkill.com — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 23:34:20 GMT

Meraki is evidently some sort of combined wireless router and ad-supported public wifi provider. The website doesn't explain how it works very well, though. From what I can gather, it seems that in the standard/normal one-device residential deployment, you plug a Meraki device into your cable modem, and it provides wireless access to the internet. The difference between this a regular wireless router is that it offers two sorts of connections: (a) a WPA password protected connection that works pretty much exactly the same as a wireless router; and (b) a public (throttled) connection, open to anyone, that delivers ads. (You can disable (b).)

Another significant difference is that instead of configuring it via connecting to a webserver built into the device itself, you use an admin area on meraki.com. So, by design, it "phones home". I can't figure out how often it connects, or what information it sends and receives. (It must be getting the ads from meraki.com.)

It looks like the ads are served by rewriting HTML--is this correct? And if so, are all other ports untouched? Do https pages work?

The Meraki also supports some wifi mesh system, whereby you can essentially connect a whole bunch of Meraki devices to power and the internet (at least one needs an internet connection), and it will create one big wifi network and figure out how to route traffic from one device to another and finally out onto the internet. But I'm not so interested in this bit.

uPNP isn't supported and port forwarding is difficult (maybe impossible on the smallest Meraki).

The Meraki business model seems to be somewhat similar to that of fon--how do they compare?

mjs@masterkill.com — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 00:54:15 GMT

Róisín Murphy, "Dear Miami"--ooh that's a good track.

Leopard is nice.

I moved the Dock over to the right side straight away, and it looks okay there now.

I might be able to replace Quicksilver with the (much faster) Spotlight--still experimenting.

Virtual Desktops was something that I really missed after switching from Linux to a Mac. (Especially since my Mac had a 12" screen.) I'm not completely comfortable with Spaces yet. It would be nice if you could switch from one space to another by scrolling with the mouse. (Though that breaks the otherwise infinitely high menu bar, I guess.) Some windows and dialog boxes seem to pop up on the wrong screen though (they way they do all the time on a dual-screen Windows machine).

Time Machine seems incredibly wasteful but I'm going to use it anyway, and try not to fret that a movie I just downloaded has ended up on my backed-up-for-all-time external drive. I guess I should exclude the "Downloads" directory from Time Machine? If a directory is added to the exclude list, does it retrospectively get removed from Time Machine backups? What directories and extensions are excluded by default?

mjs@masterkill.com — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 10:49:06 GMT

What you get when your gallery is all about pretentious tat: my Chinese-speaking co-worker, in describing what he did yesterday, managed to pronounce the "Tate in "Tate Gallery" Ta-Tay.

mjs@masterkill.com — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 22:43:00 GMT

I heard a strange and beautiful story tonight. One of the founders of Vice magazine built—for his girlfriend, and with his own hands—a bed. They slept together in this bed. Some time afterwards, a friend of the person telling this story seduced the girlfriend—this was a female friend—and convinced the girlfriend to cheat on the founder of Vice, in the bed he built. An emasculating circumstance.

Radiohead’s new album is surprisingly good. I especially like “Reckoner.”

Fierce Little Midgets

mjs@masterkill.com — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 22:23:32 GMT

Time was so short, the Executive Committee [of Chicago's World's Fair
of 1893] began planning exhibits and appointing world's fair
commissioners to secure them. In February the committee voted to
dispatch a young army officer, Lieutenant Mason A. Schufeldt, to
Zanzibar to begin a journey to locate a tribe of Pygmies only recently
revealed to exist by explorer Henry Stanley, and to bring to the fair
"a family of twelve of fourteen of the fierce little midgets."

The committee gave Lieutenant Schufeldt two and a half years to
complete his mission.

Erik Larson, "The Devil in the White City", p. 121.

I am making progress, slowly.

On not knowing how to spell "internet"

mjs@masterkill.com — Sun, 06 May 2007 10:30:58 GMT

So, I have this friend that has been doing her PhD thesis for a very (very) long time. Every time I see her I try and get her to finish it because: (1) she needs the kick in the ass; and (2) her computer is very old and I'm worried it's going to die before she finishes. Yesterday I discovered her computer is so old that it does not know how to spell internet! It's Windows 95 + WordPerfect 6--the internet was around then but I guess it hadn't made it through to WordPerfect's spell-checker? I need to redouble my persuasive efforts.

mjs@masterkill.com — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 14:36:26 GMT

I saw some superficial anti-globalisation ad recently which whined that globalisation was bad because it'll mean that we all end up liking (a.k.a. "buying) the same movies, soft drinks, burgers, etc. which got me thinking ... is there any sci-fi vision of our space-travelling future where the people of Earth are not united and/or ruled by the same government? A necessary precondition for space travel seems to be the elimination of all conflict, and the establishment of a monoculture on Earth.

Risk management in Afghanistan

mjs@masterkill.com — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 00:17:41 GMT

How to you figure out whether opening a copper mine in Afghanistan is going to be profitable? The Aynak copper deposit is 30km south of Kabul, and is estimated to contain 240m tonnes of copper, putting its value at $30 billion. However: (a) developing the mine would cost around $1bn and take at least 6 years (probably 10); (b) the security (and political) situation in Afghanistan is uncertain; (c) as well as developing the mine, you'd also need to run a power station--Kabul itself is supplied by a single 19-megawatt generator, and the mine would need 50; and (d) copper is now $7,000 per tonne, but five years ago it was $1,300.

(From an article in the Economist, "Copper bottomed?", 2006-11-25. The piece also says that a whole lot of Afghan mines use basically medieval technology: men work with pickaxes, and many are supported by pine beams which must be replaced every three days.)

Hawking on scientific method, and string theory

mjs@masterkill.com — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 00:10:43 GMT

Stephen Hawking on scientific method, and (obliquely) string theory: "One can not ask whether a theory reflects reality, just whether it agrees with observations. A good theory is one that explains a wide range of observations on the basis of an elegant model, and makes definite predictions for new measurements. ... Some very elegant theories predict extra dimensions to space time, above the usual three space and one time dimensions. If the extra dimensions were curled up very small we wouldn't see them. We can't rule out theories with extra dimensions, but so far we have no observations that require them."

(I hadn't realised string theory was completely unsupported by evidence. From a BBC Radio 4 interview.)

What Livejournal Is

mjs@masterkill.com — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 00:08:12 GMT

Livejournal: "big among teenage girls who blog for their friends." (From an Economist story about Mena Trott, 2006-11-25.)

Phrase least likely

mjs@masterkill.com — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:36:00 GMT

A game played by Statesman staff: think of the phrase least likely to be uttered by each member.

Christopher Hitchens got:

"I don't care how rich you are, I'm not coming to your party."

Martin Amis got:

"You look a bit depressed, why don't you sit down and tell me about it?"

(From a profile of Christopher Hitchens in The New Yorker, 2006-10-16.)

Australia's national debt paid of by selling land around the Australian Embassy in Tokyo?

mjs@masterkill.com — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 13:43:00 GMT

My Economist Business Miscellany (free small book that came with the Economist) claims that during the height of the Japanese property bubble in the 1980s, the Australian government paid off its national debt by selling "a small parcel of land around its embassy." Does anyone know anything more about this?

mjs@masterkill.com — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 13:40:43 GMT

Is the reason that smells and sensations are much more evocative than images or sounds: (a) because they're fundamentally more evocative or (b) there aren't any reasonable simulacrums, so you're not constantly exposed to evocative smells and sensations the way you are with sounds and images?

Mighty Mouse Review

mjs@masterkill.com — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 07:44:42 GMT

A thought struck me the other day: I've had pretty good luck with buying Apple products and not having them superseded in the next, like, month. I've had my 12" PowerBook for about two years; this was on sale until the MacBook came out (around April?), and it was probably only 15% slower/different than the best portable until the MacBook Pros came out in February. I've also also have an Airport Express, Shuffle, and Bluetooth keyboard for at least 18 months, all of which haven't been upgraded. I've had the video iPod since that came out 9 or 10 months ago.

Anyway, I've been pretty happy with all of these except for the mouse, which was felt too heavy and big, didn't right-click, and wouldn't work smoothly on the lightly polished wood of my (Ikea) desk. (I did get a mouse mat for it eventually after putting up with the jerky action for a while, but the mat slides around the desk--not the mouse's fault, but it still makes me resent the mouse anyway.) So, when the Bluetooth Mighty Mouse came out I ordered it straight away. It arrived the next day, which seemed pretty quick.

The Bluetooth Mighty Mouse is an improvement over my old mouse in several ways: it's lighter, it tracks properly on my desk it feels smaller (from looking at it, it actually isn't smaller, so this must be just because it's lighter), and it RIGHT CLICKS! There's a few things I don't like about it though:

* The squeeze function requires a surprisingly strong squeeze--I basically can't do it without inadvertently moving the mouse.

* The scroll ball is very small which makes it difficult to scroll smoothly through documents. The big scroll wheel on my Microsoft Mouse at work is much better. You do get used to it very quickly though. I'll probably find it difficult to go back to a mouse without a scroll wheel/bar.

* The maximum tracking speed is too slow! I want a faster mouse! I'm pretty sure the maximum tracking speed is "slower" than the old mouse.

* I haven't had any problems with the needing to lift the left finger up to right-click.

* Not being able to see anything coming out from the bottom of the mouse is ... strange! (There's a small green LED that tells you whether the mouse is on or not.)

Overall, I'm pretty satisfied: it's an expensive mouse, but it's quite an improvement over the old mouse, and I think the small problems I do have with it I'll work out/get used to over time.

mjs@masterkill.com — Wed, 31 May 2006 20:54:15 GMT

Haven't updated this in a while, sorry. Just got back from Paris. Before that I was in NYC. (Turns out I was managed to get to NYC, London and Paris in the same week.)

Let's play with some American stereotypes!

"An American girl visited Beethoven's home, saw the piano at which he wrote the Ninth Symphony, flung herself at it and banged out a few notes. 'I suppose you get a lot of famous people in here', she said
to the guide. 'Ja, Fraulein. Paderewski was here a few days ago.' 'Say, did he play too?' `Nein, Faulein. He thought he was not worthy.'"

-- Bruce Clavering, Sunday Referee, 9 Aug 1936. (In Frank S. Pepper, Contemporary Biographical Quotations, pp. 223-4.)

(Wasn't he deaf by this time? Would you still use a piano if you were deaf? Oh, it's in a book so it must be true.)

Quick OS X test

mjs@masterkill.com — Sun, 30 Apr 2006 12:20:18 GMT

Can someone who's on a Mac run xmllint (or some other XML validator) on

/System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Resources/StandardKeyBinding.dict

? It's not valid XML for me, but Apple are sending my bug reports back with "can't reproduce".

Newsweek

mjs@masterkill.com — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 23:35:06 GMT

Lufthansa gave me a copy of Newsweek recently, and it was no good.

First of all, I don't like the first-line caps--it leads to really awkward breaks:

GM CHIEF DESIGNER ED
Welburn sweeps into his...

Or even worse:

HOME TO ONE OF THE MOST DIVERSE COL-
lections of marine life in the world, the Coral Triangle...

Perhaps this reflects my personal (web-shaped?) typographic aesthetic, but there's stylistic sloppiness too. For example, you quite frequently get things like: “Sure, the vast majority of [European] workers already rely on their mobiles for everything from listening to music, to taking pictures, to watching pictures, to blogging.” They rely on their mobile phones? For blogging? Way to weaken a piece with lame-ass rhetorical exaggeration…

(Decent piece on the founders of the USA, and how they viewed religion.)

Salinger on Judas

mjs@masterkill.com — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 22:11:18 GMT

“I remember I asked old Childs if he thought Judas, the one that betrayed Jesus and all, went to Hell after he committed suicide. Childs said certainly. That’s exactly where I disagreed with him. I said I’d bet a thousand bucks that Jesus never sent old Judas to Hell. I still would, too, if I had a thousand bucks. I think any one of the Disciples would’ve sent him to Hell and all—and fast, too—but I’ll bet anything Jesus didn’t do it.” J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

(Remembered after reading Hitchens on Judas.)

Reading Lolita on the tube

mjs@masterkill.com — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 22:05:29 GMT

What do people think about Lolita? Like, should I be even vaguely self-conscious about reading it on the tube? Or is that just silly talk? (I've only read about 60 pages so I'm not entirely sure what happens yet.)

mjs@masterkill.com — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 20:51:15 GMT

Across multiple continents, and multiple ISPs, my browser-embedded QuickTime regularly gueses wrong when it figures that if it starts playing now, the whole clip will have downloaded by the time it finishes playing. Is there some way to get it to be more conservative?

Humility

mjs@masterkill.com — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 16:46:55 GMT

You know that joke, "I don't understand why people find it so difficult to admit to their faults--I would if I had any"? Well, superstar lawyer David Boies comes oh-so-close!

"Strength as a lawyer: Patience."

"Weakness as a lawyer: I don't know. If I knew I'd have worked on it for the past 40 years."

mjs@masterkill.com — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 08:58:05 GMT

Been working on some web toys recently! Yahoo Term Extraction + del.icio.us + Perl = Beebo Tag Cloud. (Apparently, I use the word apparently quite a lot.)

PHP Obnoxiousness

mjs@masterkill.com — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 01:33:48 GMT

I've been working on a PHP project for the last few weeks. I don't mind PHP all that much--it's an awful language, of course, but it's not bad for getting things done. (The on-line man pages, in particular, are much better than that of any other language.)

However. PHP does pull some really stupid shit sometimes. Today I was trying to do a simple insert into a database and it kept failing with a "file not found" error message. Eventually I got it down to three lines; this may not be exactly right, but it was something very close to:

$dbh = odbc_connect($DATABASE, $USERNAME, $PASSWORD);
$sth = odbc_prepare($dbh, "INSERT INTO ArtObject('name') VALUES(?)");
$res = odbc_execute($sth, array("'j'"));

And still it gave the error message! Worse, if I created a file "j", it would do the insert without complaint!

As it turns out, this is by design. If you insert a string that begins and ends with a single quote, the bit between the quotes is treated as a filename (!) whose contents make up the value of the placeholder (!!). It might help to be a programmer to appreciate this, but this behaviour is utterly insane.

Everyone knows there are quoting issues with database inserts, but: (a) in every other language/library, if you use placeholders, you don't have to worry about this; and (b) if there is some quoting issue you get broken SQL or similar--you don't get the insert function trying to read from a file.

Google analytics

mjs@masterkill.com — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 00:05:43 GMT

What's up with Google analytics at the moment? Any page that links their stat-collecting urchin.js takes forever to load (example). I've ripped out this code from all the pages on Beebo (I'm currently pointing to "/urchin.js", which redirects to a local file; I'll switch it back once Analytics is working again), but this is really annoying. And also ... I don't like Google Analytics all that much--it doesn't seem to be collecting the data I want, and the data is does collect is really badly organised. Is there any stats package that produces nice page- and directory-level statistics, and that works well with external and internal referrers? I had some stats code that did pretty much this, but then I lost interest in stats for about four years during which time it stopped working. Are there any measure map screenshots floating around? Should I wait for that? (I'm not that impressed by Mint.)