Dave's Free Press

Last post!

david@cantrell.org.uk — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 23:01:02 GMT

I'll not be posting to Livejournal any more, as I've moved my journal to my own server. All my LJ posts are archived there too, with comments disabled. You will, of course, be able to comment on any new stuff, and on the posts that I'm leaving here.

If any of you want to continue reading my words of wisdom through LJ, you should work the RSS magic.

Now with added freshness and faster-than-light capability!

david@cantrell.org.uk — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 20:24:43 GMT

I doubt any of you care, but I just changed the stylesheet for my webshite, and converted it to use TT2.

Advice to environmentalists

david@cantrell.org.uk — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 22:03:08 GMT

The world is looking for a "green" power source. Wind, waves, and solar are all great, but all require LOTS of BIG equipment if they are to be realistic replacements for fossil-fuel burning power stations. And none of them, of course, are suitable for powering vehicles.

I have a solution - miniature black holes, carefully constructed so that they evaporate at exactly the same rate at which they suck their surroundings into themselves. All you then need to do is use the energy from the synchrotron radiation as stuff falls into the black hole and gets torn apart. A carefully tuned system could probably spit out lots of microwaves which you could use to boil water and drive a turbine in a large installation, or move a complex assembly of shiny brass rods and hinges and stuff on vehicles.

I recommend feeding the black hole with petroleum products, as there is already an efficient infrastructure in place for their distribution, and dropping them into a convenient black hole is carbon-neutral.

Advice to christians

david@cantrell.org.uk — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 22:58:35 GMT

Simon Cozens wrote about this news story in his journal:

" I've been getting steadily more and more angry about this over the past week, and now I'm bloody furious. Angry with what? ... with the church - and that must start with myself - for not being there to offer counselling, unconditional love and the opportunity to value life in a different way "

I can think of plenty of reasons to be angry at the church, but this isn't one of them. I'd bet a large amount of money that the people involved weren't christians. Consequently, I'd expect them to see any attempt by the church - or by a christian proselytiser - to barge into their lives and blather about "counselling" and "unconditional love" as being just unwelcome interference. It would be a different matter entirely, and quite probably more effective too, for concerned christians to do their good works seperate from and without regard for the church. The church is not welcomed in a great many places and by a great many people. Decent caring people, however, are welcomed far more widely, by christian and non-christian alike.

I suppose the root of this is that to non-christians, the church and christianity are at best an irrelevance, at worst a rabid dog which should be shot on sight. Individual christians, however, cover the whole range from rabid dog through loveable puppy to faithful old friend. By approaching a non-christian (and I don't think it makes any difference whether they're not christian because they've examined christianity and found it wanting like I have, or because the church effectively doesn't exist in their environment) as the church, you have no chance of getting a good response and run the risk of getting a bad one. By approaching as a person, you at least have the chance of getting a good response. Once you're doing good works as an individual you might get the opportunity to introduce christianity after creating an environment in which it may be received positively.

Or to put it another way, when you want to say "we're from the church, we're here to help", think what the response would be if you said "we're from the Labour party, we're here to help". And then say "my name's Simon, I'm here to help".

Horror films are all true!

david@cantrell.org.uk — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 15:43:36 GMT

It seems that H.P. Lovecraft, in addition to writing nice stories to read to your children and inventing food, was also a scientific journalist.

update: the linked film is not for the weak of stomach - yes, my large collection of B movies contains a lot worse and I wouldn't warn you about them, but those are all just special effects. This isn't. It's real, and it's cruel.

Currency survey

david@cantrell.org.uk — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 21:05:38 GMT

If you had a thunderbox emergency, where you'd run out of bog paper but needed to wipe away the remains of the curry you just evacuated, what currency would you prefer to wipe on?

Please rate by softness and value.

New words

david@cantrell.org.uk — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 21:11:07 GMT

I just found my second real word that's not in the OED 2nd edition. Yay!

The first one I found was some time ago - hardbody, which appears in print in "American Psycho". The second is prannet, which as well as being in Ian Dury's most excellent little ditty "Billericay Dickie" also appears in Alan Moore's "V for Vendetta".

If I were a suicide bomber ...

david@cantrell.org.uk — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 22:32:35 GMT

I'd be paying attention to the recent whitewash from the Association of Chief Police Officers, which says that the policy that lead to the murder of an innocent man at Stockwell tube station last year is just A-OK.

The conclusion that any intelligent suicide bomber will reach is obvious. "I'll make a dead-man switch out of my kitchen scales, that way I make biiiig badda-boom anyway and get my 70 virgins*, **". And the result of this is that the police will continue to gun down innocent people for no good reason, while not stopping determined naughty chaps from blowing shit up.

Hooray! The death count in The War Against Terrorism rises! We have always been at war with East Asia!

* or reincarnated as an astronaut, or to sit on JAYSUS's right hand (cos he likes fondling arses), or whatever their silly superstition tells them.

** why they want virgins instead of an elite team of whores, trained in every form of depraved perversion both known and unknown to man, I'll never know.

Mmmm, tasty baby-meat

david@cantrell.org.uk — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 20:47:16 GMT

Baby cow, that is.

For my tea tonight, I boiled some taters, then set them aside to drain. Then I fried a chopped onion a bit, and added the taters, some herbs, some chopped green thing which was sort of like spinach but not quite, and a splash of beer. Cooked that for a few minutes until it was nicely steamy and moist and the green thing had reduced somewhat. Transfer that to plates. Add a little more oil to the pan and wait for it to get hot enough, then fry a couple of veal escalopes, turning occasionally so they're cooked evenly and don't burn. I added a little Worcestershire sauce half way through. When the veal is decently cooked (about like a medium-rare steak, so still pink in the middle but not dripping with blood) and beginning to ooze nice meaty juices, serve.

And keep the meaty juices from the pan for to re-use them later in the week.

The veal was very nice. I'm sorry to say that the veggies weren't up to my normal standard, they were a bit bland.

Cooking à la Jazz

david@cantrell.org.uk — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 13:10:10 GMT

I started to make a pea soup (sort-of like that recipe but not quite) but only when I was some way in did I realise I'd run out of peas. So I am Improvising. I have a Mysterious Red Vegetable that the tame hippies delivered a couple of weeks ago. I have no idea what it is, so I chopped that up and am using it instead.

The soup now seems to be changing colour every couple of minutes. I think that's a ~~good~~interesting sign, right?

[update: it has settled down on Mud colour]

The bad-tempered clavier

david@cantrell.org.uk — Sat, 04 Mar 2006 21:52:57 GMT

I have recently been listening to DJ J.S.Bach's bitchin' dance album "The Well-Tempered Clavier". And I looked it up on Wikipedia, where I found out that grown adults spend their professional lives argufying and theorising about what the curlicues in DJ Johann's hand-writing can tell us about the precise frequencies at which he tuned his instruments.

What none of them seem to have realised is that Bach had no way of knowing what those frequencies were and that while the knowledge existed for contemporary natural philosophers to have taken a stab at figuring out the relative frequencies (eg that this C is twice the frequency of that C) they would not have been able to make usefully accurate measurements of the one or two Hz differences - which are down in the quarter of a percent range - that these stupid academics are arguing about.

In fact, I can't really imagine a Baroque-era experimenter getting results more accurate than within 5%. And 5% is as near as damnit a semitone.

Grrr

Happy Lent!

david@cantrell.org.uk — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 21:39:16 GMT

I am going to abstain from biting anyones ears off, even if they're on public transport and deserve it.

What are you going to abstain from?

Sprouts are tasty

david@cantrell.org.uk — Sun, 26 Feb 2006 21:29:15 GMT

At least, they are provided you don't just boil them for hours and serve them with a dull dry lifeless turkey once a year on christmas day.

I just posted a sprout recipe to the snake_soup community.

Stilton and kipper soup

david@cantrell.org.uk — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 19:00:26 GMT

I am about to try something new. I am about to try making stilton and kipper soup.

Towards the end of every fortnight, I am left with some veggies which I have to use up otherwise they go manky. This time, I have a head of broccolli and half a leek. I've had both before in $foo and stilton soup, but I've never tried making anything like it. So I'm about to ...

Saute a couple of huge onions, add beer and water and seasoning, bring to a gentle simmer, add chopped broccolli and leek and a kipper (which I also need to get rid of before it makes everything in the fridge stink of fish), simmer some more, add a wege of cheap nasty stilton what I just bought from the stupidmarket, broken down into small chunks, simmer some more, then hopefully yum yum yum.

[update: it was good, and I've posted the recipe with a leeeeetle more detail (but only a little) to the snake_soup community.]

What were they thinking?

david@cantrell.org.uk — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 22:29:03 GMT

Cumbria Storage Systems Ltd's website lives at http://cumstore.co.uk. What an ... unfortunate choice of domain name!

To make matters worse, they are based in Cockermouth.

an rant

david@cantrell.org.uk — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 11:18:09 GMT

It has come to my attention that some illiterate non-people write and even say "an homage". For instance, in this wikipedia article (which I have since corrected, so that's a link to an older version). No doubt this error was made by analogy with the somewhat more widely used "an hotel", which is also an error. Neither the OED nor Fowler support this hatefulness in modern writing.

Therefore, when I become benevolent dictator of the world, anyone committing these linguistic sins will be shot.

And lo, stupidity did begat stupidity in the land of Artaxerxes

david@cantrell.org.uk — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 23:12:32 GMT

And there was much begatting.

Dear spammers ...

david@cantrell.org.uk — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 19:16:35 GMT

if you want me to look at your "Valentines Day ecards" might I recommend not pretending to send it from "Darren". The only Darren I know really isn't very attractive.

Arabic translation needed ...

david@cantrell.org.uk — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 15:49:17 GMT

for this

More Olympic cost over-runs

david@cantrell.org.uk — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 00:20:05 GMT

Quelle surprise, the Olympics is going to cost Londoners even more money. Thankyou very fucking much Seb Coe you midget Tory CUNT.

More on moron anti-free-speech demonstrators

david@cantrell.org.uk — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 22:32:38 GMT

According to the press, this chap is dressed as a suicide bomber. Funny, apart from the gloves he's dressed pretty much how I often am when out a-hiking. The only significant difference is that he seems to be dressed in darker skin than I habitually wear.

I hate burglar alarms

david@cantrell.org.uk — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 00:51:08 GMT

Specifically, I hate mine. When I moved in here nine years ago I was assured that the alarm had been disconnected.

It just went crazy, and for the past half hour has been making a fearful racket right about when I want to go to bed. The first eight alarm companies who advertised in the yelow pages as doing 24 hour call-outs aren't answering their phones. When I finally did manage to get someone, he said he'll be with me in forty five minutes. Oh joy. My neighbours are going to hate me.

Anonymity using Tor

david@cantrell.org.uk — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 19:45:06 GMT

Warning: cryptoanonyparanoiac-geeking ahead

Being anonymous on the interwebnet is hard. Whenever you do something, the packets you send and receive contain your IP address. From your IP address, it is trivial to determine who your ISP is, and your ISP can, given a date/time and IP, determine who was using that address. If you were to try to get around that by using a subscription-free dial-up connection then your phone line can be identified from the telco's call records - even if you try to with-hold your number. All CLID with-holding does is set a bit telling end-user equipment not to display the number. The number is still embedded in the data, as it is used by all the telcos involved for billing purposes.

You might try using a service like The Anonymizer, but while they might hide your identity from most of the people you connect to, there are still two significant flaws. First, they can store information about you and correlate it with what you do. While they do have an admirable privacy policy, they are subject to things like court orders, and just like all other companies, they may have dishonest employees. Second, if you sign up for an account (and their service is very limited otherwise) you may very well have given them your credit card number, which can be tied back to you.

Even with those flaws, Anonymizer's service is very good. I've been a satisfied customer for a number of years and if you can live with those drawbacks, they're a good solution.

So what's a tin-foil-hat-wearing paranoid to do?

I recently discovered Tor. As far as I can tell, it protects against all the problems enumerated above, by hiding all the information about what you're doing including where the connection is going from and to behind good quality cryptography. Your traffic is tunnelled through numerous proxy hosts, all of which only know the "neighbour" hosts on either side of them in a chain of hosts that your software has determined. Crucially, only the very last tunnelling proxy knows where you were going to, and only the very first knows where you are coming from, as each host successively unwraps a single layer of cryptography* to determine what it should do next**. These two features mean that to identify you, or to identify what you are doing, the whole chain of proxies needs to be compromised for an attacker to be able to identify you and what you are doing from your network traffic. Given that those hosts are likely to be scattered all over the place, that is highly unlikely. Therefore I have switched from using The Anonymizer to using Tor.

If you decide to use Tor, then please remember that there are other ways of identifying you and what you're doing. For example, the DNS lookups your client makes (be careful to read the notes about setting up your web browser to avoid this) or with malicious code sent to you through the onion in response to a request, such as some Javascript. For anonymity, disable Java, Javascript, ActiveX and all plugins in your browser, including toolbar add-ins. Other caveats apply to anonymising things other than web use.

If Tor sounds interesting to you, I'll be happy to help you get started with it if I can, or to explain how it works in more detail over a pint.

* these layers, like the structure of an onion, give Tor its name - the Tor Onion Router.

** it works in reverse for data being sent back to you, re-using the network connections set up the first time round so that again all proxies only know their neighbours.

Tolerance and reason

david@cantrell.org.uk — Sat, 04 Feb 2006 17:26:25 GMT

Way to convince people that you're someone who has an opinion worth paying attention to! What a twat.

You know you're drunk when ...

david@cantrell.org.uk — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 01:59:35 GMT

... you get home and watch The Sky At Night.

And decide to buy a monocle.