The Thoughts of Smiffy

CAPTCHAs don't exist because cultists of the Crawling Chaos, Nyarlathotep, introduced them to confound mankind, or anything like that.

CAPTCHAs exist as a solution to a problem - albeit a solution that shifts a minor problem for the one to a major problem for the many.

The problem won't go away, so needs to be re-evaluated from scratch. Not to look for an alternative to CAPTCHA, because doing so will only result in narrowness of thinking, but to consider means to solve the problem of comment spam.

I propose - and this is the approach I have taken with systems I have designed - shifting the issue away from interaction in the user interface and handling either server-side, possibly enhanced by client-side code that is handled by the user agent, not the user.

Not only does a system that directly involves the user present accessibility challenges, but it provides an opportunity for those trying to breach the system to do so without scrutiny. Should airline passengers be made to do their own security screening? If not, why should web users bear the brunt of what is really someone else's problem?

When I saw the ChromeOS laptop, I was transported back in time and space
some 15 years to the offices of Sun Microsystems in Basingstoke, Hants.

I was being persuaded - with a reasonable degree of success - that thin
clients (JavaStation) were the Next Big Thing(tm).

I still like the idea of a thin client replacing a dumb terminal - or a
more expensive PC doing the job of a dumb terminal - connected to an
organisation's corporate IT infrastructure. Processing load is
distributed, the whole thing can be managed centrally.

The thought of transferring this concept into 'The Cloud,' however,
makes me shudder, when The Cloud is Google. Whilst I am not averse to
this idea when dealing with a provider with whom one has a contract and
negotiated Service Level Agreement (SLA,) pushing it out to some crowd
that offers it as a freebie AND USING IT FOR CRITICAL BUSINESS
INFRASTRUCTURE, no way!

I think that it is bad enough using free e-mail services as primary
communications is bad enough, but to use this un-guaranteed
infrastructure as an office suite - that scares me. Whilst I'm sure
that it is possible to use ChromeOS in an offline mode, I want all my
files where I can get at them - either under my own control or those of
my internal IT people.

(Disclaimer: Smiffy is a GOO-Skeptic.)

I feel that the case of Julian Assange/Wikileaks is getting somewhat blurred and that there are multiple issues involved, which should be considered individually:

1) Wikileaks should not exist. That is, Wikileaks should not NEED to exist - by its very existence we can be assured that there is something rotten in government. I regard governmental transparency as a fundamental part of democracy; without transparency, democracy is just a farce where the best liar gets to rule. Kudos to Assange for starting Wikileaks - governments need selective pressures so that they can evolve into more transparent systems.

2) Assange has been arrested on charges of sexual assault. These are serious charges that cannot be ignored, irrespective of what Wikileaks (which is NOT Assange, it is a separate entity) may have achieved and even if Assange had cured cancer and given everyone a free pony. These charges need to be answered, justice needs to be done, no matter which way the verdict falls.

If Assange really did commit the alleged offences, doing wrong to him does not make him innocent/good/right - it merely means that more crimes are being committed than are being heard before the courts.

3) I am concerned that the chances of justice being done with respect to (2) are somewhat slim - despite assurances of the Swedish authorities, I cannot see how there will NOT be political influence brought to bear on the outcome of the trial and would not be surprised if there were not interference with the plaintifs, if not the judiciary.

4) The Australian government has rushed to defend the reputation of itself and the US government rather than one of its own citizens. Shame on you, Julia!

5) The whole leaks thing - governments should be fully transparent except where national security is at risk. I would like to point out that the embarrassment of individual politicians, departments or parties are NOT issues of national security. These are issues which most certainly should be known to the public, so that it is sufficiently informed not to vote for them the next time.

Whilst I welcome the concept of 'Are You OK? Day' as an awareness
raiser, and the possibility of some lives being improved on the day, I
have to wince just a little. This, to me, is like another Earth Hour
or, for the religious, going to $place_of_worship on $weekly_worship_day.

I think that I am being realistic rather than cynical in saying that
making these things a single recurring event - especially if it is only
annual - will do far less good than something more persistent, continuous.

Ask someone to check up on their mates or turn their lights off once a
year will salve the conscience, give warm fuzzies, and let people feel
that they have discharged their responsibilities until next
year/day/etcetera. Then they can move on and ignore that
depressed/depressing guy, turn on the Christmas lights wasting umpteen
kWhrs of power (not to mention the light pollution,) go back to being
wicked (for the religious) until next time comes around.

Unless these events are coordinated with a view to getting the great
unwashed public to make actual lifestyle changes, I won't say that that
they are a waste of time, but I will say that they are hitting short of
the mark.

Remember: a dog is for life, not just for Christmas. A friend is for
life, but we need to work to make it so (like by saying "Are you OK?")
And an environment is for life - if we're lucky. Make one day every day.

I have been out of the Twitter 'Follow Friday' habit for a while, mainly
because I like to say something about the targets, er, recipients of
this accolade. 140 characters is barely enough to talk about one
person, let alone several.

@elpie was the first I saw using this approach - a blog entry - for the
purposes of Follow Friday. Whilst it would be somewhat cumbersome to do
this with my blog - I wrote the software for publishing long articles
rather than small snippets - @posterous makes the process very simple
for me as I can compose as an e-mail.

So - whilst I have already made a couple of Follow Friday tweets today,
I'll start over:

@vavroom I have known since pre-Twitter days through various web
accessibility channels. Disabled rights advocate, chef, photographer,
International Man of Mystery and general Interesting Person residing in
New Zealand.

Melbourne writer, @paulhassing, has an interesting way of doing his
Follow Fridays by maintaining a Twitter list of Kind, Clever, Cats.
(That's real people - not all the accounts people are maintaining for
their pets.)

@burntsugar, another Melbournite, is an IT trainer - something for which
I totally lack the patience and for which I therefore have a great
degree of respect. Source of some off-the-wall and interesting tweets.

@katetribe, @fridley, @untangle, @hollingsworth, @franksting,
@glebe2037, @leahmac, @michaelfieldcom, @damovan, @RadhikaR,
@ian_maclean (not a prolific tweeter ;-) are really nice people. I know
this because I met them on my trip to Sydney back in August, where I was
made to feel welcome and at home in a strange city. If you were there
and I've missed you, please post a comment to that effect ;-)

...and that's all for now because I'm already writing 'below the fold'
and I need to leave material for future weeks!

Enjoy your weekend.

Depression is a problem. I have experienced it myself in both chronic and acute forms. Thankfully, the treatment regime addressing my Chronic Fatigue and other endocrine related issues has consigned the 'Black Dog' to my past. But not so for so many people. The medical establishment does not appear to be very effective at treating this condition - often using symptomatic treatments such as anti-depressants rather than looking to identify and fix the underlying physiological causes. Depression also carries the stigma of 'mental illness' which can result in people trying to cover it up rather than seeking help and in the community not giving those with depression the support that could help live with this debilitating illness.

What can be done about depression? One of the things that everyone can do is to spread awareness. An aware community can provide support that can not only help improve quality of life for sufferers, but also save lives through a reduction in suicides.

My learned colleague, Tony Hollingsworth (Twitter: @hollingsworth) is joining the Black Dog Ride, a fairly major undertaking in depression awareness-raising in Australia. You can see his blog, including a video blog and learn how you can help fight the Black Dog through Tony's ride. The inaugural fund-raising event takes place in Sydney on Monday, August 23rd 2010. Tickets are still available and I do hope that people in Sydney can tear themselves away from election coverage long enough to attend.

I wish Tony and his associates all the best in their ride against depression and look forward to a good outcome.

My last missive regarding Facebook (http://bit.ly/ayKnRp) was published
on the last day of May this year. What has changed in the last 46 days?
Quite a bit actually.

I successfully deleted - really deleted, at least from public view - my
Facebook account in a simple operation pointed out to me by the
estimable Mark Pesce (@mpesce.) After a fourteen day period following
this simple operation when the account may still be reactivated, it is
now gone.

At no point did I think this was the end of my involvement with
Facebook; I already had an account, with no profile data other than what
is required to sign up, set up for development purposes. Whilst, in my
line of work, I felt it inappropriate to be associated with the world's
biggest privacy breach, I knew it was inevitable that I would have to
work with Facebook tools on behalf of my clients.

Rather foolishly, I created my development account with an e-mail
address that I no longer use, but which it appears a good few people
with whom I had lost touch had in their address books. The upshot of
this is that I now have a heavily locked-down account with no profile
information, and a small handful of contacts from my previous life -
some of whom I have known since I was only seven.

Yes, I will grant that Facebook is a means of re-establishing contact
with one's past. With all of my previous caveats regarding privacy. It
irks me somewhat that Facebook is the ONLY means of contact I have with
most of these people - inasmuch as Facebook is the ONLY means they have
in keeping in touch with each other. To the best of my knowledge, none
of these people are Twitter users.

Comparing my Facebook account now with the original one, now deleted, it
is possible to see that I have had two very different approaches to it:

When operating my original Facebook account, the vast majority of the
contacts I added were already in my primary network - Twitter. Exactly
why I thought I should have this duplication, I don't know. But then, at
the time and up until I closed the account, I was unable to see exactly
what the point of Facebook was, or why anyone would want to use it.

The second account, with all its accidental contacts, shows me a use:
getting back in touch. I still fail to see why anyone would want to use
is as I find the interface and many of the concepts loathsome pieces of
loathsome loathsomeness. (Yes, you have gathered correctly, my love of
Facebook has not grown any.)

To answer the question of my learned colleague @ryonaitis, which led to
this article:

"I wonder how many people keep facebook but only update it via twitter.
Is it really the same audience? What do you think?"

...I would say "it depends." In the beginning, for me, the audience was
the same as it was primarily the same group of people seeing duplicate
content - so I all but gave up posting anything to Facebook. Now, I
have a different audience and would only post to Facebook directly, not
wishing to enable Facebook's data mining to build any (well, too many)
associations between the Matthew Smith on Facebook and the Smiffy of
Twitter and LinkedIn. If I were to post to Facebook at all.

I will conclude by saying that I will be changing the "discoverable"
e-mail address currently associated with my Facebook account to
something that will just make it another of the millions of Matthew
Smiths in the world.

Excluding SQL, I use three programming languages on a regular basis: Perl for most things, Javascript (reluctantly) for client-side web application enhancement and C for microcontrollers (for which I wish I had more time) and small things that I want to go fast.

The three computers I use hands-on (as opposed to over an SSH connection) are a pair of Linux laptops and my (also Linux) Nokia N900. I have certain utilities written in Perl that I would like to be able to use on my N900 but cannot - at least not easily - due to the N900's limited Perl implementation. (Old interpreter version, no CPAN.)

Looking for a way to be able to write for both laptops and N900, I decided to investigate Python, which various of my contacts had been trying to persuade me to try for quite some time.

My utilities are currently all command-line based. (If 80x24 was good enough for me 20 years ago, it's good enough for me today.) As it can be a bit fiddly starting multiple xterm sessions on the N900, I decided to look at building a GUI application.

On any self-respecting Linux installation, PyGTK - Python bindings for the GTK GUI toolkit - is just there. This looked a good way to proceed.

This just left me with the Python language to tackle. I have a simple rule for new languages: if I don't get on with it in an hour (which includes liking it as well as understanding it,) I don't take it any further. I only apply this rule to languages for my own use - if a client has specified a language and is not open to negotiation (and if I accept the work) - I will use languages that I might otherwise choose not to. Which is how I first came to use the ill-begotten piece of nastiness masquerading as a language called PHP ;-) [I should point out that I am no fan of JavaScript, but am forced to use it due to lack of alternatives within its niche.]

You have probably guessed from the title of this article that my venture into Python was short-lived. Whilst the persistence of my learnèd colleague, @hortovanyi, has encouraged me to re-visit it in the future Python has, for me, one serious show-stopper: syntactically significant whitespace.

Rather that use { braces } found in C, Perl, JavaScript - and a fair number of other languages, Python makes use of indentation instead. Getting indentation wrong is as significant as missing off a closing brace in other languages. Whilst others may have no problem with this, it is totally alien to my nature.

So, for that reason, my initial problem will remain unsolved and the Python language will remain unused - at least for now - by this user. It is most likely that I will have to install the Maemo development environment on my laptops so I can re-code my utilities in C - and continue to use them from the command line, putting up with the inconvenience of launching new xterm sessions on the N900.

[This article typed with two thumbs on my N900]

Anyone of a technical set of mind who is not up to speed with IPv6 may
wish to consider HE.NET's IPv6 certification:
http://ipv6.he.net/certification/

I am so far up to 'Professional' but can't do the test to get to 'Guru'
until the DNS record of the domain I'm working with expires, sometime
tomorrow. (Pro tip: don't delegate the domain you use for the
certification tests to ns1.he.net - you won't get through the Guru level
test as it doesn't have an AAAA record. Have to delegate ns2 through
ns5, then add ns1 AFTER completing the test.)

HE.NET provides you with up to 5 free IPv6 tunnels and up to 25 free
IPv6-friendly DNS zones. (Reverse-delegation of an IPv6/64 counts as a
zone. Also see caveat above.)

All in all, I have found the process so far to be quite enjoyable and
entertaining (for a sysadmin.) There is no learning material other than
the tasks and questionnaires - if you don't know or can't work out the
answers, you get them through Google - not a bad way to learn, as the
search for answers encourages serendipity and further learning.

What you need to provide: time, a desktop machine, a server, a domain.
Stuff that any self-respecting sysadmin will already have in abundance.

Have fun!

My first awareness of the works of Howard Phillips (HP) Lovecraft came many years ago through a reference to the (fictional) Necronomicon on the sleeve insert notes of the Toyah album 'Anthem.'

In more recent times, I have become familiar with parodies of some of Lovecraft's creations through (Sir) Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. I should point out that I only discovered these to be parodies, and indeed actually heard of Lovecraft, relatively recently.

The Great Cthulhu entered my awareness (yet I remain sane*) through various sources over the last three to four years, mainly through the User Friendly online comic strip. For some reason, I have rather taken to the character - a really evil villain with a hint of calamari.

Until last week, however, I was unenlightened. Having finally decided that I should read a first-hand account of the Great Old Ones, I discovered that little of Lovecraft's work appears to be in the public domain (ie: not available from Project Gutenberg) so scoured Abebooks, my favourite online second-hand book brokerage, to see what it would yield.    The result of my search arrived last week, a paperback anthology, apparently the same age as myself and in far better condition: 'The Colour Out of Space and others.'

Lovecraft reads easier than I had anticipated and his writing is, may I be forgiven, nothing like the 'pulp trash' I was expecting. Two-thirds of the way through the anthology, I have already determined that I intend to acquire every one of his published works on which I can lay my hands.

Language: a trifle archaic for the period, but I like it, even if I do have to consult a dictionary (actually Wikipedia) now and then.

Genre: I would put the works I have read so far more under the heading of Science Fiction than Horror.   My visualisations tend to be primarily in black and white, with a distinct B-movie flavour although I would stress that this is neither a criticism or intended belittlement of the works in question. (I LIKE B-movies, although I very rarely watch any form of moving pictures these days.)

I am nearing the conclusion of 'The Shadow Out Of Time,' and the end of this particular compilation. Whilst I await the arrival of all three volumes of the H P Lovecraft Omnibus, I will be re-reading Pratchett's early Discworld novels to see if I can spot any HPL references I may have previously missed.

All in all, I am loving Lovecraft.

* This has been subject to debate.