Half-measures on smoking

France is apparently due to bring in an indoor public smoking ban (though not an entirely complete one) on the 2nd of January. It differs from our one in one glaring way; the penalty for violation is a few hundred euros fine.

Now, in this country, the penalty for violation, especially for a pub or similar, is, of course, an absolutely enormous fine, and possibly summary execution. And even then, once you go outside Dublin, a room with a largish open window is often considered a perfectly reasonable 'smoking area' in a pub. I don't see France's ban working too well.

Today's improbable BBC quote

The cat, made by Japan's Sanrio, will soon adorn T-shirts, bags, watches and other products targeting young men.

You're welcome.

(From here.)

Christmas Fun

You know, while I quite like the run-up to Christmas, I find Christmas Day itself a bit of a downer, generally. I generally eat too much, for a start, and besides that it tends to bring up my insecurities about myself.

So, feeling fat, ugly and stupid right now. And also like no-one'll ever want me, naturally. Oh, well, it'll pass soon, I suppose.

Anamorphic Advertisement

As you know, this is the only day of the year when the Internet's normal traffic of pornography and pictures of cats is displaced, with 99.74% of traffic consisting of emails, skypes, RSS feeds, faxes, telexes, video-conferences, digitised smells and so forth, along with tweets, tumbls and copious other Web 2.0 nonsense words, all expressing trite seasonal greetings.

As I'm never one to go with convention, I would, tonight, instead like to talk to you briefly on the subject of fat people in advertisements. This was brought on by a Paddy Power ad showing a gentleman of extremely ample carriage pretending to breast-feed a baby. Now, quite apart from the obvious issues, like fitting the fat person in the frame (please note that as society has gotten fatter, so too have video formats gotten wider-aspect. Coincidence? I think not!), the big question is how long will the government tolerate this?

You see, ads showing the excessive consumption of alcohol are now banned, and for quite some time, just implying the existence of cigarettes in any sort of advertisement has attracted the death penalty. This is even effecting normal media; when was the last time you saw anyone drinking a lot in American TV? When was the last time you saw anyone non-evil (people like the editor in The Devil Wears Prada are still allowed to smoke) smoking? Sex and the City, that's when. And even then, it was a bit marginal, especially in the later episodes.

However, there are still plenty of fat people in the media. And once the government has dealt with the drinkers and the smokers, they are next. Recall that the reason behind the bans is that advertisements were perceived to be glorifying smoking and drinking. Soon, you won't be able to show someone eating to excess, and the next step will be to entirely ban the depiction of fat people (and also those frighteningly skinny people one sees in fashion adverts, who have somehow managed to escape earlier culls). The result; EVERYONE IN THE WORLD WILL BE HEALTHY. Or, you know, people will continue eating, drinking and smoking themselves to death. Whatever. It keeps Dail committees busy, and that's the important thing. As a side benefit, Mary Harney will no longer be able to appear on television.

Also, Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year, and all that. Hopefully few of you will have read past all that rubbish, so you won't notice I've gone back on my original resolution.

On Eircom's DNS

I'm back home for Christmas, so I'm using DSL instead of my usual 3g thingy. It's much faster, of course... Except for the DNS. Eircom's DNS seems to be more than a little dodgy, and regularly takes a second or so to resolve popular domains. Ridiculous.

And the prize for absurd product description goes to...

The Irish Hospice Foundation, for 'Reindeer Food': 

A Magical Mixture of Glitter and Oats.

It really strikes the balance between 'totally mad' and 'innocuous' very well. You just notice that something is wrong out of the corner of your eye, and then 'that surely doesn't really say that, does it'... And then, it dawns on you. They're a bit crazy.

And the award for scariest URL goes to...

Look what I just saw: http://jim.webber.name/2005/06/23/dbeede6f-4745-443a-bed3-3a556fcd3a36.aspx

Yes, that's really the URL. The bit at the end is what's called a globally unique ID, a randomly-generated thing particularly beloved by Microsoft and much used in the naming of obscure registry fields. I'm not sure what it's doing in a blog URL, though; I thought that old versions of Movable Type (which numbered all articles 000001.html, 000002.html and so on, no directory structure) were bad enough...

Anyway, frightening. It seems to be an old version of the scary blogging software so beloved of Microsoft types, because it uses ASP.NET.

My blog may use an antique scripting language that no-one likes anymore (Perl), but at least it has nicer filenames!

In the interests of fairness, and to prove that I'm not a total bigot, a site I quite like, written in Common Lisp, uses an arguably even more scary URL scheme (http://www.cl-user.net/asp/Bgqh4/sdataQIrORIcy9N5SDQ35-G8X8yBX8yBXnMq=/sdataQu3F$sSHnB==). In its defence, I suspect that's some sort of hash, rather than a randomly-generated number.

Facebook Thrift - less horrific than SOAP

A while back, Facebook publicly released their internal RPC thingy, Thrift. For some reason, perhaps because it altogether lacks the flashiness required for Web 2.0, it has barely gotten any notice at all. I only found out about it accidentally this week.

It seems, though, to be very good. Very, very good. At least very, very good compared to the competition, which, when it comes to it would not be hard.

You see, if you want to do cross-language RPC, you have few choices. There's CORBA, which is ancient and scary. There's ASN.1, which is not strictly for RPC, and which I have never heard of anyone using, ever. There's DCOM, which is particularly frightening, Windows-only, and basically dead. Then there are the two people are most likely to be familiar with, XML-RPC and SOAP. Both of these are XML-based, and thus take a lot of bandwidth, and are in many cases slow. XML-RPC verges on feature-free (it won't even do 64bit integers) while SOAP can do just about any data type, assuming that you can figure out how to make it do so and your SOAP libraries on different languages get along. This post on SOAP really isn't exaggerating at all.

XML-RPC and SOAP are often used for webservices, but for high-volume communication in a distributed system, they are less than useful. Unsurprisingly, then, most giant webapps with lots and lots of different server software don't use them for that. Amazon and LiveJournal and so on all seem to have their own internal stuff, but to my knowledge, Facebook is the first to make theirs public.

So, what's it like? Well, really, really good, actually. It comes with libraries for each supported language (the usual suspects like C++, Java, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, plus a few oddities like Erlang, Haskell and OCAML. .NET is conspicuous in its absence, and indeed the whole thing is pretty Windows-unfriendly, at least for the moment). You write a service definition in a special language, and run it through their compiler, tellling it which languages you'd like it to produce bindings for. You then write simple code to interface with the bindings, and you're done!

It's designed so that you can use multiple transports and data encoding protocol. In practice, the only data protocol supported over a decent range of languages is a simple binary one, for the moment, but if you wanted something else, it would be quite easy to implement. Most languages have socket and HTTP interfaces.

The license is extremely liberal; as far as I understand it, about all it requires you to do is to include a copy with any derivative code you produce. Refreshing; so many otherwise useful libraries these days require you to send your first-born to Richard Stallman if you so much as look at them.

As a little project, I'm writing a Common Lisp backend for Thrift. Currently, I've got the transport and most of the protocol done, and was able to use it to talk to a Python server. Actual code generation is still to come, but should not be overly difficult.

Nuclear reactors for all!

I mentioned a while ago that Toshiba, noted manufacturer of, well, just about everything, was designing a small low-maintenance nuclear reactor for use in remote areas.

It turns out that they are also designing an even smaller (6 ft x 30 ft) nuclear reactor for use in things like factories and apartment buildings, due to go on sale next year.

Now, this is all very well and good, and, as I've mentioned many times before I am all for using nuclear power. However, I don't see the apartment block thing flying. Estate agents are, of course, great at, well, bending the truth; the standard definition for 'tiny shack' being 'cosy and rustic', but there are few reasonable euphemisms for 'small nuclear reactor underneath your bathroom'!

Just to clarify, these are indeed two different reactor types. Toshiba seems to be jumping the gun on poor old Adams Atomic.

Are you there, .NET? It's me, Margaret.

In her latest missive to the Internet, the wonderful Verity Stob asks, amongst other things, that question that Microsoft never likes to hear; are there, in fact, any proper non-internal desktop applications written using .NET, at all?

It is interesting to note that she asks her readers to name some; while lots of people respond on other grounds, no-one seems to be able to think of a single .NET application.

Why is this, I wonder? Is it so very awful? I mean, I haven't written anything in it myself, naturally, but I've played with that free Visual Studio thing that you can get, and it doesn't seem totally unusable. C# is more or less the same as Java, and there are various nice dynamic languages. I'll refrain from commenting on VB, if you don't mind.

Of course, to distribute an application with it, you really have to make sure that the user has the runtimes or is willing to download one, but Java faces more or less the same situation, and yet there are real life applications which you can buy written in Java. It doesn't even have the "but it's really hideous" excuse that people had not to use Java on the desktop until SWT turned up; .NET applications aren't weird-looking.

And yet people keep writing Windows desktop stuff in C++. And Delphi, for gooness sakes. Bizarre.

Web 2.0 stars are, well, not as smart as you'd think

Here is a post by Leah Culver, who writes horridly-spelt Pownce. She, being an expert Web 2.0 programmer, tells the world, with breathless admiration of her own solution, how to round a number to the nearest .5. You know, by rounding it to the nearest .1, turning it into a string, splitting based on the '.' character, and using if statements to figure out what both parts should be. The way we all do, right?

Commenters helpfully showed her how to do it, and lightly poked fun at her. The one with the hashmap is a particular stroke of genius. She then thanks people for their help, and mentions that she should have looked around more for a solution beforehand. Because, of course, these days we program using Google.

Sadly, though probably wisely, she has closed the comments many moons ago. Still, what fun! The worst of it is that she no doubt has gallons of funding, and gets to go to trendy Silicon Valley parties. Bah.

(I should clarify that I don't think that all Web2.0 developers are idiots. Just this one, and perhaps the people who wrote Bebo in such a way that, until recently, if you used the back button, your comments on peoples' profiles would go to more or less random other people.)

Thanks to Uncov for pointing out this absurdity.

Hilarious Criminality

Apparently, an ex-Wikipedia high-up-person is a criminal. That's not the funny bit.

Hobbies include crashing into people with a car while drunk. That's also not the funny bit.

Her record also included convictions for passing bad checks, theft, petty larceny, additional DUIs, and unlawfully wounding her boyfriend with a gun shot to the chest.

I'm sorry, but how many times does the average person lawfully wound someone with a gun shot to the chest?

Also, she's a little scary looking...

MovableType spam protection

As I've previously mentioned, I've been having rather a lot of spam comments, lately. This is, of course, an inconvenience, and also uses more processor time than I would necessarily like.

I think I've sorted it out, though. First, and this is surprisingly effective, I renamed the comment and trackback scripts. A lot of automatic spamming software assumes that they're in the correct place. Just rename them to whatever to like, and insert the following lines (with your new names) into mt-config.cgi:

CommentScript new-mt-comment.cgi
TrackbackScript new-mt-tb.cgi

Then rebuild, and you're done!

The other thing I did was to install a plugin called AutoBan. It's great. If you get more than a specified number of spam comments, it modifies your .htaccess file to block the offenders. Amazingly effective.

Finally, I enabled FastCGI for MovableType, which reduces processor time required per comment, and makes the interface a bit snappier. It is a good idea to reduce the total number of running FastCGI processes allowed; MovableType's scripts can take quite a bit of memory. This should do it:

FastCGIConfig -autoUpdate -idle-timeout 120 -killInterval 3600 -maxClassProcesses 6 -maxProcesses 15

Yet more incompetent public relations - BlogNation

BlogNation is a sort of TechCrunch-like thing run by one Sam Sethi.

Now, BlogNation seems to have a problem. According to an (possibly-ex; it is, as you will see, it is unclear) employee, writers aren't being paid the salaries they were promised.

In response, Sethi makes a comment (the UFO one) implying that the writer is insane. He doesn't seem to dispute the claims, as such, but does say writers will be paid by Christmas. He may or may not have fired said writer last month; the writer claims that proper notice wasn't served, and he was writing for the site until pretty recently. Sethi even commented on one of his posts.

Here, Sethi threatens a business partner. Charming. That post also has another mention of the money situation. One wonders if Sethi is entirely mentally stable himself?

Other writers for the site have also mentioned that they've had trouble.

So, dead website walking, anyone?

The whole thing really illustrates why the madder CEOs out there are in desperate need of PR people, or even just someone to make sure that they don't act insane in public. If Sethi had responded sensibly, and maybe even tried to justify his position, I don't think there'd be such a problem. I shall, in any case, watch this one with great interest. Assuming this is all true, they're screwed.

Bonus screenshot of alleged fake payment.

Update: He responds on his website. Not really very impressive.

ESB, where efficiency is king

I just received a small stack of letters from the ESB, as a result of me signing up some time ago.

So, the way it works is as follows.

If you are paying by cheque, send it to an address in Finglas.

If you are paying by direct debit but for some reason didn't want to set this up over the phone, send the mandate form to an address in Sligo.

If, for some unearthly reason, you wish to contact ESB Networks (a separate company who manage the grid), write to an address in Athlone. ESB Networks, by the way, seem to be unclear on how many phases our connection has; I find this a little worrying.

I hope that that is clear.

Incidentally, all of this came in three separate envelopes. Yay!

One more interesting piece of post; a public consultation thingy from the Railway Procurement Agency. It comprised two big glossy descriptions of all the railway lines they wish to scatter randomly around Dublin, and a postcard. Why two glossy things? Well, one is in Irish, and one is in English. For a project in Dublin, mind. I have three questions. How much did it cost to print however-many Irish copies, how many people will read the Irish copies, and how many people are there in Dublin who are able to read the Irish version but not the English one?

I mean, there's such a thing as political correctness gone too far, especially when it comes to wasting ludicrous amounts of money translating things into Irish which no-one will ever read. This is insane! No wonder the LUAS projects go over-budget.

Facebook Apps; yet another reason to keep Scoble at arm's length

One of the nice things about Facebook is that anyone can write applications for it. Now, an interesting thing about these applications is that on each page-view, Facebook seems to send your server-side bit a list of all the friend IDs the user has. Or possibly all of the the friends who are using the application; I don't recall.

That, of course, isn't a huge problem with most users.

However. Robert Scoble, noted person who talks vaguely on the Internet about Web 2.0 a lot, has repeatedly complained that Facebook only allows him to have 5,000 friends; now that he's reached that lofty figure, he can't have any more. Poor Scoble! Presumably one can join a waiting list to get a place as they die off.

Anyway, this has implications for Facebook applications; each user ID is a nine-digit number, and they are sent in the format "[1,2,3,...]". This means that one single page-view from Scoble involves the transfer of about 50 kilobytes. This could add up, especially if your app involves clicking around a lot, and if other Web 2.0 darlings use it. Imagine the bandwidth bills!

And this, of course, is why it is vitally important to have your users confirm that they are not Robert Scoble on sign-up.

(Obviously, I am, to an extent, joking. People do take offence so easily these days!)

I can't believe they're not links - 3 December 07

The sad this is I can actually sympathise with this guy...

A boxing nun. Who wouldn't want one?

The BBC on highly important news, again.

More earth-shattering news from Auntie.

We need this game here. Who wouldn't want to take a shot at, well, certain political types?

Google does make the most helpful suggestions.

We make World of Warcraft, now!

It seems that Activision has merged with Vivendi, or been bought by it, or something. I never could follow all of this financial stuff.

I now worry that the office will fill with posters of dark elves, or whatever...