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Microsoft to blast Google for its copyright policy - Yahoo! News “Companies that create no content of their own, and make money solely on the backs of other people’s content, are raking in billions through advertising revenue and IPOs,” says Rubin, who oversees copyright and trade secret law at Microsoft. Okay, let’s examine Microsoft’s record. MS-DOS 6.0: Stac successfully sued Microsoft for patent infringement regarding the compression algorithm used in DoubleSpace. Softimage: Microsoft was found guilty of software piracy last year (2001) by a French court. Windows Media Player: Microsoft used a cracked edition of Sony Sound Forge 4.5 to make the sound files for the Windows Media Player tour. And it’s fairly well understood that MS don’t make good stuff, they buy good stuff from other people, and make it worse… Pot. Kettle. Black.

I haven’t tried this software yet, but it looks great: Versomatic is automatic version control for all of your files. What it does, is set a service running that monitors changes in the filesystem. When changes are scheduled to be made, the service automatically backs up the previous version of the file. Of course, there’s some flexibility bound to be built in. After all, you won’t want to be backing up cache files, and so on. I suspect you’ll be able to choose particular file types, particular locations, or even just particular files to control the revisions of. Of course, the less work the user has to do, other than install it, the better. Getting back a previous version appears fairly simple, too. You can either right-click on a file and choose a previous version to edit, or use the Version Manager to see all managed files. You can, apparently, set the amount of disk space that will be used (I assume that after this older files will be discarded, or some method of choosing which ones to keep). Apparently there’s little extra resource usage, since it just copies the files to the revision archive, however this would also make disk usage more of an issue. Having a difference between files stored instead would save space, but use a lot more CPU time. Oh, and it’s OS X and Windows.

I don’t have the newspaper article in front of me, but I am riled up by this story. Basically, some church-type fellows have raised a petition about some “anti-religious” laws, that, apparently, “limit people’s right to free speech.” Now, before we get started, let me state that Australia, and South Australia do not have the same rights to free speech for citizens as the USA. Secondly, one of the arguments that is made by the preacher in the article is that it will erode moral values. What makes Christians think they have the dibs on morality anyway? Because the bible tells them so? Let’s have a quote from the bible:

Suppose you go to war against your enemies and the LORD your God hands them over to you and you take captives. And suppose you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and you are attracted to her and want to marry her. If this happens, you may take her to your home, where she must shave her head, cut her fingernails, and change all her clothes. Then she must remain in your home for a full month, mourning for her father and mother. After that you may marry her.

Okay, so according to Deuteronomy 21:10-14 you can take a woman against her will. Nice. We call that rape. But it doesn’t stop there:

Make ready to slaughter his sons for the guilt of their fathers; Lest they rise and possess the earth, and fill the breadth of the world with tyrants.

Hmm, it’s okay to punish people for what their ancestors have done. (Isaiah 14:21) I’m really sorry, Australian Aboriginals.

When a man strikes his male or female slave with a rod so hard that the slave dies under his hand, he shall be punished. If, however, the slave survives for a day or two, he is not to be punished, since the slave is his own property.

Wait, this one’s a triple-whammy. Firstly, it’s okay to own slaves. Secondly, it’s okay to beat slaves, as long as they don’t die from it. Thirdly, if they survive for a day or two, and then die, well, that’s okay too. (Exodus 21:20-21) So, how’s your moral superiority looking now, Mr. ne’er-do-evil god-bothering preacher. I’d guess more people have been killed by believers than non-believers. I reckon it’s we atheists who can take the moral high ground. I spit on your vile, disgusting, misogynistic, racist, slavery-supporting, hate-creating religions. Ahh, that feels better.

The other morning, my power went off. I almost slept through my wake-up time, but just made it to work on time. However, the power failure must have caused some sort of a problem with my NSLU2 server. For some reason, I was no longer able to connect to it in any way shape or form. Samba connections failed, and even SSH-ing in didn’t work, with any of the users I had set up. I finally figured out that it had something to do with not being able to boot off the disk properly. It was booting up, then beeping loudly three times (two different tones). Then, it was responding to pings, and accepting ssh connections, but not authenticating. So I connected using the root account and the default password, and it worked. And, true to form, the disks were recognised, but for some reason not mounted. I tried the turnup disk /dev/sda1 command, which doesn’t do anything destructive, but tells the machine to boot up from that device. It failed, with the following error:

turnup: /dev/sda1: partition does not seem to be a valid root partition The partition must contain a full operating system. To ensure that this is the case it is checked for the following, all of which must exist for the bootstrap to work: 1) A directory /mnt. 2) A command line interpreter program in /bin/sh. 3) The program chroot in /sbin or /usr/sbin. 4) The program init in /sbin, /etc or /bin. One or more of these items is missing. Mount /dev/sda1 on /mnt and examine its contents. You can use turnup disk|nfs -i -f to copy this operating system onto the disk, but it may overwrite files on the disk.

Okay, that might help. A quick mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1 showed that the partition was valid. But no /mnt directory inside there. Create one, then run the turnup disk /dev/sda1 command again. Then shutdown -r now. Upon reboot, only a single beep (which, IIRC, I put there!), and everything is normal. Phew!

LMAO!

The new Mitcham Square shopping centre has (kind-of) opened. It’s all very new and clean, and has quite a few shops. The cinema hasn’t opened yet, but it will be nice when it does. No more treks down to Marion to go to the movies. I hate that place. I went into Mitcham Square today to go to the supermarket. The carpark isn’t quite complete, meaning finding a park, and driving around at all was kind of difficult. At least I did find one fairly close to the entrance. Once I went up the escalator ramp, I was in the new place. As soon as I stepped out onto the shiny tiles, I nearly slid on may arse. That floor is very slippery. Old people beware. I wandered around and found the Foodland. Classy new supermarket building; RFID (I assume) price tags on the shelves. That is, no printed labels with prices, but all little LCD screens. Now, I’m all for modern technology that improves our lives, but I have some issues with this particular instance. Firstly, the tags are smaller than regular price labels, and because there is no backlight, you actually need to move in quite close to see the price. And I have good eyesight! Half of the tags had scrolling text ($1.99; Normally $3.99, Save $2.00!), although admittedly the current price was always visible. But small. Secondly, here in (South?) Australia, we have a special Code of Conduct for Electronic Registers. That is, if you purchase an item, and the register records the price as higher than the one written on the shelf, you get the item free. (If you purchased more than one, only the first is free, the remainder are at the lower price!). This is all well and good, but what’s to stop the electronic shelf tag being networked in, and price updated automatically? I’d personally suspect they aren’t (lots of tags -> lots of IP addresses, even inside a private IP range). So, I’d suspect there are programmers that need to be held near the tag to update the price. Okay then, I want one of those. I’d go around changing the prices, and bingo! Everything for free. • My final whinge is against another shop there. I walked up the escalator (yes, they aren’t there to just stand still on!), and thought “Oh cool. An Illy.” However, that sign was misleading. Apparently it isn’t a proper Illy cafe, just sells Illy brand coffee. Except that the Illy sign is more visible (especially when coming up the way I did) than the name of the cafe.

Howard heart-attack email carries virus :: Hack In The Box :: Keeping Knowledge Free What a shame it isn’t true… Anyway, I did some digging, and this is what happens: The site listed pushes you to a couple of other pages, via framesets. Then, there is a clever JavaScript which decrypts another script, this time written in VBScript. This script downloads, and executes, a Windows executable. Which apparently is a nasty piece of work. The clever parts are these: The method of encrypting the JavaScript. It uses a simple replacement method to take a string, which appears meaningless, and return it to a plaintext. Nothing too hard here, except it’s a somewhat complex algorithm to get that far. If you are interested:

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    function makemelaugh(x) { 
        var l = x.length, b = 1024, i, j, r, p = 0, s = 0, w = 0, 
            t = Array(63, 16, 44, 51, 25, 37, 46, 62, 8, 18, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 45, 28, 13, 4, 
                      30, 31, 48, 12, 21, 60, 47, 29, 2, 17, 23, 15, 40, 11, 1, 9, 34, 0, 26, 49, 
                      43, 58, 53, 0, 0, 0, 0, 56, 0, 10, 3, 42, 5, 59, 41, 22, 19, 27, 61, 33, 7, 
                      54, 55, 20, 50, 6, 57, 39, 36, 14, 52, 32, 24, 38, 35); 
        for (j = Math.ceil(l / b); j > 0; j--) { 
            r = ""; 
            for (i = Math.min(l, b); i > 0; i--, l--) { 
                w |= t[x.charCodeAt(p++) - 48] << s; 
                if (s) { 
                    r += String.fromCharCode(170 ^ w & 255); 
                    w <<= 8; 
                    s -= 2; 
                } else { 
                    s = 6; 
                } 
            } 
        temp = temp + r; 
        } 
    }
    

I’ve made it less dangerous by replacing the document.write(r) with temp = temp + r. This way, I could just get the text, rather than have my browser execute it. This function, makemelaugh(), is run on a block of text, resulting in a script that, as mentioned, downloads, and then executes a file. I think the first half of the script is based on the second half, as the second script block points to a file that doesn’t exist. And the first part is a little cleverer, in that the filename it chooses for the executable is random. Meaning that a virus checker can’t rely on a particular filename when scanning. The file appears to be exactly 2006 bytes in length, but I don’t have the tools on the machine it’s stored on to look further at it. And I don’t want to bring it to the PC I’m at now in case I accidentally execute it! Apparently the virus isn’t anything to do with John Howard, that’s just the delivery vector. Basically, you are safe from this virus if you are using a Mac. You are safe from this virus if you don’t have JavaScript, or VBScript turned on. And, I think you are safe from this virus if you are using Firefox. But I’m not so sure about this. However, if you are using IE, on a Windows machine, don’t go to the address… Nah, I’m not going to link to it…

Internet Explorer has some interesting foibles. And by interesting, I mean annoying. For instance, if I’ve visited a page on my site, such as: http://schinckel.net/wp-admin/ Internet Explorer seems to remember it as http://schinckel.net/wp-admin Notice that the trailing slash is missing. Blogsome will report that “Page Does Not Exist”, or if it looks like a Post page, “No posts made”. With access to the HTTP server, this would be easy to fix (just create a rule in the relevant place that allows for URLs of this form), but on Blogsome this is a bit harder. You need to be able to check the last character of the URL string, and if it isn’t a /, append one. This should work fairly well in all cases, since every reader visible URL ends in a /. So how to do this? Getting the URL is easy: {$smarty.server.REQUEST_URI}. However, getting the last character is a bit more difficult. Or so it appears. But Smarty allows for accessing strings as an array, so {$smarty.server.REQUEST_URI[0]} will get the first character. To get the last is a therefore possible. {$smarty.server.REQUEST_URI[-1]} fails, so I’ll need to get the length of the string. {$smarty.server.REQUEST_URI[$smarty.server.REQUEST_URI|count_characters ]} also fails, but {$smarty.server.REQUEST_URI[smarty.server.REQUEST_URI|count_characters ]} works. Now, we just need to test if this value is “/”, and if it isn’t, then reload the page with that added. Which I can’t seem to figure out how to do with Smarty… • Of course, doing the same with JavaScript is a piece of cake: if (document.URL[document.URL.length-1] != "/")     document.location = document.URL + '/'

I’m teaching Stage 2 Information Technology Studies this year (it’s turning out to be a fair bit of work, but I’m quite enjoying it), and I have to come up with some project topics. The students have to do two projects, one on each of the Option Topics we will be studying. At this stage, I’m planning on Application Programming (using python, and some form of GUI), and Website Programming (HTML+JavaScript). What I do need to do is think of some suitable project topics. Something that is challenging enough for Year 12, but not too difficult. I’ve got some ideas for Websites, as there is a bit more scope to do something cool. It’s a bit easier to implement cool stuff with a more limited level of skill in HTML than it is in an application program. I also have to write some skills tasks, that assess each of these topics. I’ve got some good ideas here for the application programming one (give them the GUI code, and get them to make the backend, and for the other, give them some working application code, but as a series of functions, and get them to combine the functions into a full application). I’d love to be in a situation where I could teach ObjC, since I do have a Mac computer room at school, but since I don’t know it that well myself, that might be a future task. I seriously wish anygui had taken off. But, even late in the game then, I wasn’t really keen on how the backend interface was turning out. I came across Dabo yesterday, and that looks cool, though.

There’s a new show starting soon on SBS, Wilfred. After seeing the advertisements a couple of times, it looks really good. The premise is that a girl’s dog, the Wilfred of the title, loves his owner, but hates the boyfriend. He manages to sabotage just about everything about the relationship. Sound interesting? It’s a comedy, and did I mention that the dog(s) in the show are men in dog suits. However, something I just read might turn me off it, before I’ve even seen it. Apparently, it’s by the same guys who created the despicable excuse for a comedy that is known as The Wedge. The only saving grace may be that SBS has picked it up, rather than one of the commercial stations (notably Channel 10?) Perhaps that will mean it is actually good. </TV Snob Mode&rt;