Tis the season ... for cute rescued animal stories

First-up this report from the Herald: A dog in remote north-eastern Bangladesh has become a local celebrity by breastfeeding a baby monkey back to health after it was rescued from angry villagers. The monkey sleeps with foster mum and rides around town on her back. It shows no interest in returning to the wild.

Then this report: on how a cat napped in a car's engine and was found 300km later, with a few minor burns but otherwise unharmed. It wasn't even the car of the cat's owner.

Merry Christmas everyone.

Virgin TV's Sunthorpe Problems

In the UK a new system, which automatically checks the Virgin TV programme guide, went into over-drive over the weekend with programmes such as The History of Canals showed up as ‘The History of Ca**ls’, the Will Smith film ‘Hancock’becoming ‘Hanc**k, ‘Charles Dickens’ became ‘Charles D***ens’ even the name of London football club, ‘Arsenal’, was blocked out in a bid to remove inappropriate language from the TV menu. Full article at the Telegraph

Isn't it amazing how they just don't learn? The UK, after all, contains the place that gave its name to the generic name for this effect as the Scunthorpe Problem way back in 1996.

You'd think they'd an*lyse their software better before deploying it.

Give poor children computers and walk away

Interesting opinion piece in New Scientist. The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) founder Nicholas Negroponte is interviewed on his new idea ... give kids a tablet computer and leave them to it.

"OLPC, even after giving out nearly 3 million laptops, is still criticised along the following lines: "Negroponte believes that you can give a child a laptop and walk away." Whether I ever believed that or not is now secondary. It became such a refrain that I finally asked myself about a year ago: "What if you could?" [...]"I am really going into this with an open mind. It is an experiment, and one outcome could be "no, they cannot"."

More at New Scientist

Sounds like a very interesting experiment. Negroponte and the rest of the OLPC team have already proved they could do what the naysayers said they would never achieve. Now they are advancing the experiment further. If they succeed the world will be a very different place in 20 years time.

Apple's Lawsuits Made Galaxy Tab A Household Name

From Tom Holwerda's blog on OS News

This is, of course, a tasty and delightful serving of karma for Apple. The company clearly set out to use software and design patent lawsuits as an anti-competitive club, but instead of reducing competition, they may have actually made the competition stronger. In the end, we can only hope all these anti-competitive offensive software and design patent lawsuits turn out like this. Sure, there's a lot of wasted money here on both sides, but at least the defendant gets rewarded with more sales, and the aggressor punished with lower sales

Full Article:

Killer Snake

Something out of nightmares ... 7 metre long snakes that hunt people :( Ed Jong blogs in discover magazine

"Giant snakes frequently attack people in fantasy and science-fiction stories, but such attacks are not merely the stuff of fiction. Through his extensive work with the Agta, Headland has found that a quarter of all the men have been attacked by pythons. The reticulated python is the world’s longest snake. Females typically weigh 75 kilograms (165 pounds) and grow larger than 7 metres (23 feet). The Agta, by contrast, are a small folk. Adults reach around 1.4 metres (4.5 feet) in height and weigh around 44 kilograms (97 pounds). For a snake that can swallow an entire pig, an Agta would make a mere medium-sized mouthful."

Full text at Discover Magazine:

Chrisco guilty over unfair Xmas hamper fees

Tessa's a great believer in them, but I've long been a bit suspicious of hamper companies like Chrisco and this article from the Herald just helps confirm my feeling

"Quite a lot were hit by huge cancellation fees - not huge by most people's standards, but something like $50 which is huge for our clients," Chrisco charges up to $150 to $200 more for its hampers than the individual items cost in low-priced supermarkets. A Consumer NZ survey in March found that the items in Chrisco's "traditional" hamper could be bought online from Woolworths for $327.84 - about $83 less than Chrisco's price of $10.53 a week for 39 weeks ($410.67). NZ Herald News

Add to that, on the day they will deliver your hampers in early December they refuse to give the customer a time of delivery, expecting their customers to waste a day waiting around for Chrisco to deliver. I don't think this is acceptable in today's busy world.

Canterbury earthquake first anniversary

Today is the first anniversary of the September 4 Canterbury earthquake. The one where there was property damage and we congratulated ourselves on how lucky we were that nobody was killed, largely because it was at 4 AM and nobody was on the normally busy shopping streets where there was damage, that and people whose homes were damaged were just plain lucky.

Sixth months later a smaller earthquake in the same area killed 181 people. Like all New Zealanders I still think about where I was when I first heard about these two earthquakes and still mourn the 181 strangers who died.

We were still lucky. On the 12th of May 2008 there was a massive earthquake in Sichuan, China that caused 69,195 deaths, and even that did not match the 2006 Boxing Day earthquake and tsunami that killed at least 230,210 people. My thoughts, although a little dimmer, are also with the victims of those and other natural disasters.

Kia kaha, Christchurch

Kia kaha, Aotearoa

Kia kaha

Indians call centre training teaches Australians are stupid

In this morning's Herald was a piece on how trainee Indian call centre staff are taught that Australians are the world dumbest people who drink constantly and are touchy about animals.

The trainees are told to speak slowly as according to the trainer, Australia is the dumbest continent. I'm wondering if the trainer just didn't like being called a "Brown Bastard" (Apparently the Australian name for Indians) or if they have just been closely studying what Kiwis, Yanks and Poms say about Australia.

More on NZ Herald

Heads up to the Indians: The comments about Australians being dumb are just a joke. There are a large number of intelligent, cultured, articulate people in Australia. They crossed the Tasman Sea to get away from here; what's India's excuse?

Google ranking algorithm no longer secret

Or, if you prefer, Black boxes have hair

A "black box" is something that is known only by its inputs and its outputs, in principle nothing is known about what is actually inside the box. It's reasonably well known that if you allow someone to analyse a sufficiently large set of inputs and outputs of the box then they can analyse it. This is the principle behind the belief held by most cryptographers that there is little point keeping the algorithms secret and now this has happened to Google's search ranking algorithm.

Researchers took a limited number of ranking criteria and a set of search results and fed them to a machine learning algorithm. After a bit of churning the machine learning algorithm spat out a formula that gives a reasonably close match to Google's actual ranking. They only used 17 factors while Google actually uses over 200, but they have proved the point that this type of reverse engineering can reveal what's going on inside the black box that is the Googleplex. More Here

 I can see others taking their work forward and doing the analysis on many more factors. Maybe they will publish, maybe they won't but either way the genie's out of the bottle.

It will be interesting to see what Google's reaction is.


Thanks to Leo Kobes for the pointer.

How AV Researchers Deciphered Stuxnet

The fascinating story of the people who decoded the Stuxnet worm and how they did it.

"Stuxnet a one-shot weapon. Once it was discovered, the attackers would never be able to use it or a similar ploy again without Iran growing immediately suspicious of malfunctioning equipment. “The attackers had to bet on the assumption that the victim had no clue about cybersecurity, and that no independent third party would successfully analyze the weapon and make results public early, thereby giving the victim a chance to defuse the weapon in time,” [...]. In the end, Stuxnet’s creators invested years and perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars in an attack that was derailed by a single rebooting PC, a trio of naive researchers who knew nothing about centrifuges, and a brash-talking German who didn’t even have an internet connection at home."

More at Wired.com ...

It's also being discussed here in Bruce Schneier's blog.

And the moral of the story is "If you find a USB stick lying around, do not plug it into your computer. Especially if you work for a super secret research facility."

Switching To Debian Testing

We've been using Kubuntu for a few years on all our home PCs, but on Monday Kubuntu on my main desktop machine suffered a "misfortune"; I was halfway through the 11.04 upgrade when the lights went out. When they came back on, Mr PC, he no boot no more.

I probably could have fixed it given enough time and inspiration, but my / partition wouldn't mount despite fsck assuring me it was fine and I've been wanting to try Debian Testing as my main desktop for a while.

Back in 2003 I ran Debian 3.0 Stable as a desktop before reverting back to SuSE and I've used Ubuntu for the last 3 years or so, so Debian isn't exactly a stranger to me. More recently, for the last several months I've had a non-gui Debian Testing VirtualBox client server and Testing seems stable enough for my purposes. The reason why I'm interested in using Testing is to avoid the whole upgrade process and simultaneously avoid Debian's release cycles ... For a production server their philosophy is correct, but I really want to play with newer software.

So far I've installed the base system and added KDE to it. As I refer synaptic, I've added in quite a bit of gnome. I'll probably be rebuilding for a couple of nights more before restoring my home directories. Fingers crossed that that goes smoothly.

I've had one incredibly annoying problem where my screen would flicker every 10 seconds or so and at the same rate all consoles received a message "[drm] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: No native mode, forcing panel scaling" A bit of Googling found me the solution to this on a Debian mailing list

edit /etc/default/grub

change the Linux command line to read
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet drm_kms_helper.poll=0"

sudo update-grub2

reboot

I've also got another annoyance that "sudo kate" (or other X program) can't access the display. I'm working around that for now by running root commands through a terminal session that I've sshed back to localhost

ssh -X -l root localhost

Not the world's most elegant solution, but it works for now, I'm sure I'll find the answer when I budget time to look.

I suspect I'll be finding out more little annoyances as I go, but for now I'm quite happy with how things are going

A Link Builder's Guide To Directory Submission

SEO involves a lot of tasks and one of those tasks is link building, getting other websites to make quality links to your target website. There are only a few sources of quality incoming links, and internet directories are one of those sources.

What many SEO engineers don't realise is that directory owners are also actively involved in SEO, the successful ones have been around for several years and understand exactly what they are doing. They are fully aware that their directory is at least in part an SEO machine. I'm one of "Them", I own and run over a dozen directories, listed at http://www.hosted.co.nz/links/Internet/Directories/, that accept public site submissions; my oldest directory has been running since late 2006, my newest ones have been running just over a week.

You and the directory owner both want to get quality links into their directory and as long as both sides play by the rules, you are allies and not adversaries. This article is to explain the real rules and why those rules exist.

Domain Admin for Drupal 7

With over 100 small sites deployed using a mix of technologies, I'm always on the look-out for things that will make my life easier. I currently have 3 Jojo CMS installs, 8 phpLd directories, 6 active blogs on b2evolution and manage 2 Wordpress installs for family members. Each of these pieces of software has limitations and a lack of scalability so the other 100 odd sites I have are created with straight php, but sharing menu structures within the sites and templates and a simple library in a cross-site back-end. There's no database, no CMS, I edit them with the kate text editor on my home PC and then publish them using rsync. Horrible as this sounds, this scales remarkably well. I can manage it pretty well and see myself being able to manage 2 or 3 times as many sites but eventually it starts to get limiting. Currently I can grep the source for common strings I will want to update, but ....

Fossil fuels deadlier than nuclear power

Interesting snippit.

"Yet again, popular perceptions are wrong. When, in 1975, about 30 dams in central China failed in short succession due to severe flooding, an estimated 230,000 people died. Include the toll from this single event, and fatalities from hydropower far exceed the number of deaths from all other energy sources."New Scientist

So hydro power is more dangerous than fossil fuels which are in turn more dangerous than nuclear? At least the nuclear people don't just dump their spent fuel in the oceans the way the hydro people do :)

New Zealand, Three Countries in One

Today is the first day of Blog4NZ (Facebook) (Twitter #blog4nz). I'm all in favour of this campaign, but what can I say to you about why New Zealand is a great country to visit? I've been pondering it for a couple of days and have come to the conclusion that there isn't really a New Zealand, there's three almost completely different things covered by the concept. And there are three different places.

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Best Interest Rate Home Loans Online

In a bit of a follow-up to yesterday's piece about competitive insurance quotes, what do I find on-line but mortgage services like this one Five Star Mortgages in the US that help people find the lowest cost mortgages. They proudly proclaim "We Specialize in low rate lending across the united states. Lowest Interest rates online!" and go on to say "Our professionals specialize in helping people just like you find the right type of mortgage loan to suit their needs. In addition, our goal is always to find the right program and the right lender to help you save money on your home purchase." In other words they are like an on-line version of Mike Perro with no need to go into the office and with the ability to go through the process at your own pace. Anything like this here? The best I could find was a spreadsheet-like display of current bank mortgage rates, sorted alphabetically.

On a roll

I seem to be on a roll tonight. I had a good day at work documenting a part of our development process ... normally, like most developers, I can't stand doing documentation but this was developer documentation and partially involved writing some skeleton code to improve the way we develop.

The evening started off badly though, after cycling home I got straight off the bike to go for a 6km walk in practice for the Round the Bays this Sunday. I got about a kilometre down the road when the heavens opened. I sheltered under a shop awning until it eased to light rain and then walked briskly home arriving more than a little damp.

Competitive Quotes Car Insurance

There's obviously a lot of margin in car insurance. You only need to look at how much AA Insurance and Tower have spent on their recent TV ads, or if that doesn't convince you go over to clixGalore and have a look at the affiliate scheme offers by major insurance companies, you can see the offers without having an account or logging in. One (I won't name them) are currently on the front page and offering 12% commission.

The Rat Is Back

Sometime around 1995 I started using "Kiore", the Maori word for "Rat" as my nickname for on-line bridge. It became my off-line nickname as well then my ISP email address and in 2000 I registered Kiore.com to get the email address I wanted. The url of this blog comes from the same source, the original name for the blog was My name/Kiore.

Starting a few months before I created the Muffins blog I had Kiore.com set up on my PC at home as a simple php-Nuke CMS that was mostly a blog as an experiment, I eventually exposed it (dynamic IP and all) to the public internet so I could demo it to friends. Eventually it migrated to the same storage as I later set the muffins blog on. Like a rat crossing the motorway, disaster befell it a couple of times, like the muffins site it had to be restored and rebuilt, eventually becoming a Drupal site before dieing badly early in 2007 leading to the, I won't say "abandonment" as I always intended to restore, but failure to actually restore. I still used the domain name, but only for mail until yesterday.

Revision 3 - R3: b2evolution server

After a not very fortunate attempt to set up the b2evolution blog software a few weeks back that was cut short by the 9:37 event, I had another go during the week. As always with these things it took quite a while to get it right. When I did I blew it away & started afresh.

The b2evolution software has multiple domain support built in, but based on what I learned from my experiments, it is clear that the first domain has special properties and I didn't really want my other domains relying on a real domain name, so as this is my third b2evolution install and I was informally referring to it as "R3" I deployed r3.co.nz and the site is now officially  "R3 (Revision 3)".