Simon MacMullen

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 19:51:26 GMT

While we were at work today someone delivered a religious magazine. I took pictures of a couple of the pages in it, about how giving money to the church can solve your financial problems and going into some detail about the problems with feminism. My intent was mostly just to point and laugh. But then I checked Wikipedia and now I'm just angry, in a rehearsing-what-to-say-to-them-if-they-come-round-again kind of way.

(I had a very nice weekend though!)

Smartphones

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 11:33:39 GMT

It'll soon be time for me to get a new phone, and it's clear that the smartphone market is now mature enough for it to be the obvious choice. This is what I'm currently thinking; I'd be interested in your thoughts too.

iPhone
This is the 800lb gorilla, but I'm not convinced it's for me. I don't share Apple's love of locking everything down, I use multitasking all the time even on my semi-smart s60 phone now, I can't be arsed learning Objective-C.

Palm Pre
I was really stoked for this when it was announced but my enthusiasm has waned. People have reported that they're fragile and cheap-feeling, the OS is supposed to be very slow, and the development environment rather limiting.

Maemo / N900
Interesting, but: resistive touchscreen, must be used in landscape orientation much of the time, and the N800 tablet I had was the only gadget I ever got annoyed with enough to sell.

Android
So by a process of elimination this must be it. A reasonable degree of openness, quite a nice UI, choice of phones, development environment I can easily see myself using.

I am not even considering Windows Mobile or Blackberry for hopefully obvious reasons.

This then leads on to the next question: which Android phone? Although for most of the year there have only been a couple available, it seems like there's a real rush of launches and announcements now. I probably don't want any of the models that are available right now as they all have comparatively slow ARM 11 cores - but I'm not sure if this is meaningful or whether I'm just picking up on what the blogs are telling me to think.

A lot comes down to whether I want a keyboard or not. If I do then the Motorola Droid certainly has the right specs, but it really looks weird to me, and that gold accent? Ugh. If I don't then the field is a bit wider - the current-gen HTC Hero is quite tempting but if I can wait for something with no release date yet the Sony Ericsson Xperia X3 looks very nice, even if their UI enhancements look a little overblown.

So, do I need a keyboard or not? Do you have a smartphone with or without a keyboard? What do you think of it? My only experience is with T9 / predictive text phones.

Incredibly minor thing

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 08:57:49 GMT

but does anyone have a use for a 200G SATA HDD? Going to landfill if not...

Coming out day today

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:22:47 GMT

I was going to write something like: "Bi. Poly. SMer. Transvestite. Too busy to write more; check my interests."

But that's a bit minimal even for me, so here are some very rushed thoughts on the topic.

I've found that coming out needs to be a continuous process - I came out as bi at the pub immediately after my job interview at LShift but by the time I started people had forgotten. And I came out as poly at my previous job when my boss read the appropriate copy of The Big Issue, but then he left and it never came up again.

Of course both examples pertain to work; we'll assume my friends know everything anyway.

Raw under Linux (dull, moany, please do skip)

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:11:52 GMT

All the real photographers use raw. At least, that's what I'm told. So I should too, right?

Switching to using raw has been something I've been trying to do for a while. In the abstract I can absolutely see the benefits; more dynamic range, better ability to fix exposure, complete ability to fix white balance. Cool. But I just can't get into it. I tried a few different approaches and they all completely suck: UFRaw, Rawstudio and Canon's Digital Photo Professional under Wine.

UFRaw has no sharpening and very crude denoising. Batch mode requires fiddling with the command line and XML files. I thought despite this that it would be usable (the GUI isn't too bad and it integrates with F-Spot) but when I first tried to use it on some high ISO pictures I found a scattering of solid red and blue pixels in the results. I assume the sensor produces these and the in camera JPEG engine gets rid of them. There's no obvious way to fix this. Since it's impossible to get pictures as good as the camera's JPEG engine it's unusable.

Rawstudio handles batch conversion in a sensible way and has a nice picture-rating feature. It has sharpening but no denoising (you must denoise before sharpening or you just sharpen the noise). There's no integration with F-Spot or any other photo-management program, making it tedious to fit into a workflow. It doesn't know how to read the camera settings out of the shot, so you don't get a sensible starting point for white balance, exposure etc. Shots started very dark and dull and it seemed very difficult to avoid overexposing while getting them to look normal. Although it's possible to get pictures as good as JPEG it takes a long time and is easy to screw up, so it's unusable.

Digital Photo Professional actually can create JPEGs that look as good as the ones from the camera (remember this is faint praise indeed; the whole point is to do better!) and it can run under Wine. But it's very unintegrated with anything else Linux-y (as you'd expect), making workflow a pain again. White balance is fiddly to set; the UI offers the same options as in-camera plus fine-tuning, rather than simple R<->B and G<->M sliders. Every photo forgets the white balance and noise reduction settings you used so you have to click them back into place. The batch mode doesn't allow you to set any options! And when running it under Wine the UI gets corrupted and the top third of the photo doesn't display. Usable in an emergency only.

The Real Photographers all seem to swear by Lightroom and Aperture. Using the first would mean switching to Windows (a VM isn't really ideal for substantial amounts of Real Work) or Getting a Mac. The second is Mac only. I don't really want to do either of those things, but I have the feeling it's in the post.

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 22:04:36 GMT

Not wanting to boast or anything, but I just want to tell you that this photo was taken through the window of the bus at 50mph on the way to the airport. :-p

There are a few other photos but not many, I was too relaxed to pick up the camera much of the time...

Cornwall

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 17:45:27 GMT

Here are some pictures of Cornwall. Most of them were taken at The Eden Project as that was almost the only time it wasn't raining! Had a good time regardless, but glad to be dried out now...

Up a hill, with a candle

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 17:36:13 GMT

No pictures of the candle, it kept blowing out. Windy day!

That anonymous commenting thing

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:19:31 GMT

As done by so many others (baaa, baaa).

Comment if you'd like to say something to me. Post-BiCon-related or not. All comments are screened. IP logging off. Say what you like.

ETA: I just had an anonymous comment that I would have loved to be able to reply to! Do consider signing a name, although that is in no way needed...

Printing XXL

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:42:43 GMT

I want to print out a line drawing at a very large size. The drawing in question is simple black-and-white (it's a copy of the comic book panel of Maggie and Hopey I had in West Ham if you remember that), so spot colour would be fine. Ideally about 2m x 2m.

I can't find anyone who will print something that big on paper. Print shops seem to max out at around A0, which is rather a lot too small.

There are companies that print advertising onto plastic banners - these guys were the cheapest I could find at £81 + VAT + delivery for 1.8m square. That seems expensive though, and it's much "more" (process colour on a relatively robust substrate) than I need. Also I don't know if they're printed in a way that looks good close up.

Anyone got any ideas? Rasterbator and similar chop-it-up-into-A4-pieces suggestions will not be considered</jwz>.

Thanks, Boris

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 12:10:02 GMT

Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant (ClickOnce) Firefox Extension

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 23:47:46 GMT

ms_katonic mentions that Microsoft have added a little bonus to the .NET framework via Windows Update. It's a Firefox extension that enables the use of Microsoft's technology. Others have been talking about this for some time, but that was the first I heard of it.

So, what's the damage?

Well, obviously a lot of people are concerned that Microsoft would install an addon of any nature without asking. To my mind that's somewhat rude of them, but not atypical of the Windows desktop, which often feels like a battleground for warring corporate interests anyway. There's a certain amount of panic over the fact that OMG you can't uninstall it, but really that's more of a limitation of Firefox - any addon installed system-wide gets its "Uninstall" button greyed out (c.f. the "Ubuntu Firefox modifications" and many others). However, Microsoft could certainly have made the uninstall process easier.

But that's not really the point - the point is, how dangerous is ClickOnce? Which really boils down to: is it sandboxed? Well, yes and no. Wikipedia says "ClickOnce employs CAS (Code Access Security) to ensure that system functions cannot be called by a ClickOnce application from the web, ensuring the security of data and the client system in general.". That's a sandbox, this is not ActiveX, so we're fine, right?

Looking a little deeper though, the picture is more worrying. Yes, there's a sandbox, but it's perfectly possible for an application to request privilege elevation, all the way to the user's privilege level - the user will just be prompted with a single dialog. For reference, here's the dialog for a signed application which requires no privilege escalation and just wants to add itself to the Start Menu, and here's the dialog for an unsigned application which requires privilege escalation in order to add your machine to a botnet.

In case you're having trouble telling them apart, the difference is in the shape of the icon in the lower left hand corner.

The trouble is, there's a large segment of the population for whom either dialog may as well say "If you want to tech the tech, you need to tech the tech with the teching tech tech. Tech the tech? Yes / No". And they have the right to expect their machine won't get compromised either, especially after that nice friend or family member installed Firefox for them and told them they were now safe.

So yeah, remove the addon if you're running Windows. But by being the sort of person who removes the addon, you're pretty much the sort of person who's perfectly safe with it installed. Ah well.

Paid account extension

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:33:28 GMT

A couple of days ago someone gifted me an LJ paid account extension. Thank you whoever you are, but if you're at all able to let me *know* who you are, I would really appreciate it. don't feel you need to comment, just send me a mail.

Free technology!

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 16:32:03 GMT

Please comment if you would like any of the following and are prepared to take them away:

Mission m73 floorstanding stereo speakers (large!)
Gale centre speaker
~~Hauppauge NOVA-T PCI freeview card (Windows disks lost, works great with Linux / MythTV)~~
~~Generic 17 inch TFT monitor (1280x1024, VGA only)~~

Please please please only comment if you are actually prepared to actually come here and actually take the item. I don't want to be "reserving" things for people for six months, I am trying to get rid of them. That is the point.

Tower of Babel

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:47:10 GMT

So, I now have a cron job which backs up trishpiglet's and my LJ twice a week.

Just one thought: all these backup tools produce different file formats don't they?

Not that I care about this stuff you understand

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 18:40:05 GMT

I predict that the 20th Doctor will be underage, and the 27th Doctor will be a newborn baby.

Caveats:

1) I calculated age by (year first appeared) - (year born) which is incredibly lazy and wrong.
2) Linear regression may not be the best approach, the correlation looks mediocre. But it was easy to do in OpenOffice and I'm lazy (see #1).
3) Paul McGann doesn't count.

For those who don't read bicon

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 15:59:53 GMT

All ~~The first tranche of~~ my pictures are up here.

I'm still trying to contact some people to get permission to post pictures of them, so more will probably be added. In particular, if you are:

alethia_juturna
ebee
lydiasings
solace_aderyn
yoyoangel
Melissa

then please get in touch and let me (or ideally the rest of BiCon) know!

Geek: Sun and VirtualBox

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 10:53:43 GMT

http://www.virtualbox.org/debian/ => "Sorry, we cannot provide a Debian/Ubuntu repository anymore. Please download your desired package from the Sun Download Center!"

You know, I've specifically championed VirtualBox over VMWare because Innotek bent over backwards to make it easy to start using it. A confusing and messy website is not equivalent to an APT repository.

Sun, please please try to stop loving your products to death.

Objective historical evidence

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:41:02 GMT

I promise not to turn into ciphergoth, but...

Someone on wildeabandon's LJ posted a link to the objective historical evidence for the bible.

I am absolutely stunned at the emptiness of the arguments found therein. Let's look at the article The Evidence for Christianity, since it's the featured article on the site. It's of intermediate difficulty, a quality that it shares with myself.

However, I'm more at an entry level when it comes to theology, so I'm going to summarise what I think yer man is saying, and then if you want you can tell me I'm wrong. The paragraphs are handily numbered for the purpose, although not in a very clear manner (I assume because Microsoft Word works in mysterious ways).

I. Bertrand Russell was an atheist. I have spoken at many universities, and met many atheists, some of whom were university professors.

II.
A.

1. Many people are apathetic about religion.

2. Many people are ignorant about religion. Even university professors.

a. Many university professors are mean atheists. They don't know anything about religion. I visit lots of universities.

b. Most atheists don't know anything about religion. I myself am ignorant on many topics.

c. Weak evidence is enough.

d. Why should the evidence be strong?

1. You have to want to be religious to be religious.

2. The evidence is there, if you believe it is there.

B. Weak evidence is enough.

1.

a. Popularity of religion varies over time. Time magazine has documented this fact. Many philosophers are Christians, and they are clearly not losers.

b. The Big Bang must have been caused by something, right? There is exactly one turtle.

2 The universe supports intelligent life, which is unlikely. There is exactly one universe.

2.
a. Some radical people say that only 20% of the words Jesus is claimed to have said are accurate, but this is crazy! Jesus clearly existed.

Also, Jesus claimed to be the son of God; if he was lying that would mean he was blaspheming. Ridiculous.

b. Lots of people used to think that the disciples were hallucinating when they saw the resurrection. Now lots of people think the disciples really thought they saw the resurrection. These are FACTS.

I once went to a university and met a university professor who had a crazy theory.

Therefore it's obvious that Jesus rose from the dead, as long as you want to believe it.

III. You know I said "You have to want to be religious to be religious"? That's not true. Actually, God has to want you.

Pascal was religious.

"Arguments" and "evidence" are not as important as God.

Read along with the original for the best effect...

John Barrowman

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 21:27:06 GMT

Oh my god! The science, it burns!

Thoroughly de-Sparkled

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 09:17:03 GMT

We had a lovely weekend at Sparkle - not the life-changing event that I think many people have for their first BiCon, but fun all the same. More details and of course photos in a later post.

Unfortunately when we got back we found we'd been burgled. TV, laptop, SLR and Wii are all gone. Forced entry, rear window, some time Saturday.

The laptop was backed up and the insurers are so far being cooperative, so we're not too badly upset, but you can imagine it's not a great deal of fun. The police are not helping with my mood by telling us not to touch anything but being very slow to send the forensics team.

Sympathy comments are appreciated but by no means expected. Comments telling stories about unpleasant burglar behaviour or police uselessness will be Considered Unhelpful and probably deleted.

Monkey on my back

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 08:47:25 GMT

Long shot I know, but I don't suppose anyone has an old MP3 player they could lend me for a month or so until I can afford a new one.

And yes, I did leave my old one somewhere and forget about it - why do you ask?

Panda Flooring - don't use

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 15:55:35 GMT

My patience is really getting stretched this week.

Carl The Fitter just rang me up to tell me he's run out of flooring. This is apparently My Problem.

When I ordered, I gave David The Owner the size of the room, and he said: "right, you need x cartons of this, one pack of underlay...". Unfortunately he got the sums wrong or something, and so there's not enough.

In order to fix this mistake of his, I need to buy more flooring. OK, that's perfectly fair, I need a certain amount, and I need to pay for it.

Oh, but if I want it fitted, I'll need to pay for another day of Carl's time.

Oh, and I also need to pay for delivery again.

Obviously it's unfair that either Carl or David should lose money by this mistake.

And this means the decorators can't put skirting boards on and thus continue with their work until it's resolved. (The skirting boards that the flooring people were meant to sort out, but let me down on.)

At the moment we're having a *lot* of stuff done to the house. The living room floor is just one part of this, but it's definitely caused me more headaches than the rest put together.

TV

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 10:24:16 GMT

Before I go to the trouble of ebaying it, does anyone want our TV?

It's a 28 inch widescreen Sony WEGA from back in the days when they made nice CRTs. Flat Trinitron tube. 2 SCART sockets, stereo, analogue tuner only.

Free to a good home, but it's heavy (around 40kg I think) and you have to collect it.

LiveJournal auto-post

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 22:29:11 GMT

Update: The following is a nonsensical post generated by LiveJournal's new Auto-Post thing. Nothing you see is true. In particular, it is not trishpiglet's birthday for months!

It's the immensely lovely trishpiglet's birthday today. I love her more than anything else in the world. Just in case you didn't see this already, SCO accidentally leaks disputed code; it's from V7 Unix (circa 1979, now BSD licenced).

http://lwn.net/Articles/45019/

Not too much of a needy manipulative twat he was.

#15 was an American FTM punk with spikes in his face who lived ina squat.

#16 was tag-team pulled by #13 and me on the landline. The phone (which has been emitting a gentle fizzing noise for a while) started to make a drony whine too. I had to keep asking her to speak up so I could hear her over the drone.

Cordless stuff - grrrrrrrr.