PGP revisited

Since PGP Corp was bought out by Symantic I've not updated my old version which still happily encrypts my sekrit files but no longer works with Email, something blocking it in Win7 I guess.
So I finally got around to installing an Open Source PGP, which seems to be working after the usual installation glitches.
First I needed GNU Privacy Guard for Windows. It's installation wizard rejected my existing key, but it was willing to add it once up and running.
http://www.gpg4win.org/
Then I added Enigmail, a plug in for Thunderbird, told it to check my Address Book and there were my security minded friends again:
https://enigmail.net/home/index.php

Solar Panels - first year

I received £569 in the government pay back scheme. My electric bill is down by £144, so that's £713 savings in total, a 10.5% return on my investment.
The panels have been almost fault free - the circuit tripped out once.

Ascot

Ascot 2014

One of our Relay for Life Events - a day at the races! From the left Professor and Countess Eldemar, Admiral Beaumont, the Duchess of Trikassi and Lady Oriella. A fine build by Countess Cassie, except for the green starting gate which my own creation. More pictures at Ascot slideshow

Android Kitkat

4.4.2 arrived today for the tablet as a direct download. So far so good...

There is apparently a battery drain problem caused by a Google App. That would explain why it says I only have 8 hours on a full charge! Sony has proposed a temporary fix until Google can sort it out:
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/sony-acknowledges-battery-issue-xperia-z-zl-zr-tablet-z-android-4-4-2-fixes-available-1451677

Maps of nowhere

A map exhibition at New Kadath lighthouse.

Tablet update

At Christmas Sony offered a major update to the tablet, not over wi-fi but via PC. This requires using their 'PC Companion' program to download and then transferring to the tablet using the USB cable that doubles as the charging connection. I guess this is to avoid "Oh noes my internets just died!" problems.

Anyway all went well, Android went from 4.2 to 4.3 and several Sony bits changed. The most obvious change is that the camera interface is a lot easier to use.

Squareworld

Another wonderful Aley creation, it's Squareworld! Anyone who can identify the maps on the walls gets bonus points.

Wireless and useless

The wireless keyboard wasn't working. Oh wait - some keys were, some not.
So I searched the house for PS/2. This is the second temperamental wireless setup I've had, maybe all the other wireless things are interfering. Yes, there were my old gunged up ones, and they worked. Except - why was the mouse running round the screen on its own? Naughty mouse! Could it be... yes, it needed a different surface, light colors but not shiny.
So now all is fine, except for the sticky 'b' key and several unreadable ones that if I don't think my fingers can find by themselves.
Enough of this Mr Tesla, I'm buying a new set with wires.

Solar Panels

Installed three weeks ago.

The UK has referral websites that promise three quotes. The two I tried were both poor - one got me a single reply with a sales visit but no quote, the second also a single reply with an on the spot quote from the salesman. Neither referral site contacted me again. Based on that experience, you're on your own.

I went for my only quote which matched what I was expecting. Installation took half a day with the only problem being that the original plan for 15 panels had to be amended to 13 as the roof was inches too short. That gave me a capacity of 3.4 Kw.
The panels are connected to an Inverter in the loft that converts from DC to AC and that joins the mains supply next to the existing meter under the stairs. A new meter records the panel output.
Right now (computer on) I'm using 0.6Kw. The panels generate 0.2Kw through thick cloud, 1Kw with thin and a maximum of 2.6Kw with a blue sky.
[added: maximum midwinter is 1.9Kw]
So where are the savings? The Government pays a subsidy for 20 years for every KWh produced, plus a lower rate for each KWh exported to the Grid. And, of course, the electric bill goes down. Estimates suggest a 12% return, ie the system will have paid for itself in around eight years.

One thing I looked into was batteries, but they are not cost effective yet. Like panels the technology is improving, and in a few years it might be worth adding them.

Privateers Ball

The nearest Saturday to Pirate Day is the Privateers Ball, and here we are on Nepenthe Bridge again.

World cut off

Sunday, pressed PC ON button, nothing.

So, another good excuse for buying the tablet I thought, activating the Email App.

Tuesday engineer arrived, pressed ON button - fine! Fortunately he didn't assume I was an idiot and as I was paying for an hour of his time tried again, it was indeed a dodgy power supply as I suspected.

Tablet!

Sony Xperia Tablet Z

The new toy! The Tablet Z is a 10" Android, I have the Wi-fi only version. There are plenty of reviews published ranging from 'good' to 'excellent', this is just a personal impression.

Yes, it's pretty: awesome black, thinner and lighter than an iPad, easy to hold one handed. I bought the Sony docking cradle with it, recharge is slow - overnight is recommended. It will recharge while switched off. There are plenty of cases on Amazon for it, I got this one, a bargain at £10.

It is uniquely for a Tablet waterproof as in "drop in a bucket for half an hour", or in my case "coffee spill alert!" On the minus side, that means the ports are sealed by fiddly plastic bits that I hope Sony have tested for durability. The cradle uses contact points to connect. The glass front is a finger grease trap, but this doesn't interfere with vision. The screen has slightly larger pixels than the iPad but not so much as to be noticeable.

The manual... no manual, just a minimal start up guide. Wifi connected easily to my router, and the Support App links to online help pages.

I've never used Android before, this implementation is the reviews say fairly standard. I soon discovered how to delete the free crap and load up some goodies. It comes with 16GB of memory of which I presently have 9GB free.

Apps synchronised easily with their desktop PC counterparts.

Google Maps said it needed a permission switched on to use GPS and that took a while to find:

Settings/Personal/Location services/ON and GPS on

and

Settings/Accounts/Google/Location Settings/ON

Once activated however, fine. I now know where I am if I step into the garden.

I've only caused the OS to get confused once, losing the Wifi connection, and a reboot cured that.

A built in universal IR remote was easy to set up. It does its best to be quick to use, and for simple changes it is.

Apps?

Skype. "Better picture" my first video contact reported, "sound keeps fading though." The microphone is on the top edge, I assume a compromise for the front and back cameras, so tilting affects it. Sony have promised a control with the next update.

Lumiya, a gallant attempt at a Second Life Android Viewer, is a dancing bear. It took several minutes for Ori to work out where she was standing! For checking messages, fine.

Office Suite Pro is an Office substitute.

The Google keyboard is for me simpler than the supplied SonyXperia offering. I tried a Bluetooth keyboard but it keeps disconnecting the WiFi.

SynchMe is a simple folder synchroniser.

Castle in the Cloud

A fairytale castle in Second Life, built for the Relay For Life charity weekend. We all walk round a big course and do silly things - just like in Real Life!

Tall Ships Race

Today was the Tall Ships Race, one of the Privateers Weekend Events for Second Life's RFL charity drive. Here the winner receives her Trophy on Nepenthe Bridge in Winterfell, the map shows the course around our islands.

Science based websites

Contrary to what Google Search often indicates, there are plenty of good science based websites and blogs. They aren't however dedicated to making money by selling you snake oil and blue sky, so they don't try to get themselves onto that all important first page. Here's a few:

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/

Blog for veggies

http://rawfoodsos.com/

Vaccines, fallacies etc

http://www.skepticalraptor.com/

Various nonsenses exposed

http://www.hoaxorfact.com/

Quackwatch

http://www.quackwatch.com/index.html

What's the harm in pseudoscience?

http://whatstheharm.net/

Alliance for Natural Health

http://www.anh-usa.org/

Mostly chemistry

http://blog.everydayscientist.com/

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/

Upbeat stories about how technology can save the planet

http://www.smartplanet.com/

Second tier nonsense

We all know about the quack and fraud industry and its use of the Internet. The front line offenders are regularly debunked and refuted, as Searching on 'mercola fraud' or 'natural news hoax' shows.
Nevertheless they thrive because many people believe anything they agree with.

Backing up the top rankers are a wide network of lesser 'information digest' websites. Below is a selection of them, collected mostly from Facebook friends who posted links to them. This is no reflection on those people, the articles they recommended were generally harmless.

I'm not directly linking to these sites so as not to add to their popularity. Copying, Pasting and looking at them will reveal from their menus that they cover similar ranges of subjects: activism, economy, health food, politics, poverty, rights, GMO, climate, fracking, fluoride, vaccines... you get the demographic. What you won't find is the underlying reality that the quacks hate: critical thinking, basic science, logic and reason.

Some of them appear to be auto-generated, picking up articles from elsewhere and linking to them with no original content. Others are 'citizens' websites, depending on material sent in by others with no editorial oversight. The rest are just unselective, if the content fits it will be printed no matter where it comes from; one of the easiest ways they can be spotted is that they regard the flagship woo sites as reliable sources.

http://www.trueactivist.com/

- Reprints from Natural News

http://www.zengardner.com

- Everything woo in one place

http://www.knowledgeoftoday.org/

- Mostly quantum woo, just reprints nothing original.

www.whydontyoutrythis.com

- Mostly OK but no fact checking, includes the GMO rats, super food cures for cancer and vaccine autism court stories

http://beforeitsnews.com

- Citizens Press website, unedited.

http://tv.greenmedinfo.com/

- Anti-vaxx, chem trails, fluoride mixed with random science that looks alternative

- General niceness and positivity with woo. Anti-vaxx etc

http://naturalsociety.com/

- Another clone. Anti-vaxx. Gullible, unselective.

http://www.collective-evolution.com/

- Anti-vaxx

http://www.wakingtimes.com/

- Health orientated, aggregating.

http://www.realfarmacy.com

- Chemtrails, diet cure for cancer, GMO rats again

http://tv.naturalsociety.com/

- References Natural News and Alex Jones, positive, run by gun nut.

http://naturalsociety.com/

- Generalist, quotes Natural News

http://www.undergroundhealth.com/

- Front for homeopathy store

Being careful with links

You come across a webpage with something useful you want to share so you Post, Tweet or Blog about it on your Social Media of choice. Everyone does this, it's what the Internet is all about.

Yes, but... There always seems to be a "but" doesn't there.

We all want lots of people to visit our webpages - to read good advice, buy our stuff, whatever. To do that they have to find them, and that means Search Engines.
One parameter that Search Engines go by is Links. If lots of people are linking that means they found what they wanted so most likely other people will find that link useful too. Of course they might be saying "I just found this horrible webpage" but let's ignore that one.

So let's suppose you are a conartist, a quack, a fraud, whatever - you are offering something that isn't legit. Your website looks good, you put in all the right phrases like "morphic resonance", "quantum orbs" and "100% natural organic", now you want more traffic. Here's one way - add some pages that aren't nonsense, just general good advice like "eat more vegetables". You don't have to research this stuff yourself you just use someone else's work, with pictures and a video if possible, and maybe put "Source" at the bottom. Like this:
http://news.msn.com/science-technology/
I'm using MSN as a template example. Look carefully and you'll see that the articles come from news agencies or are writeups of information from elsewhere. MSN staff are reporters not scientists, which is fine and good because that's their job. Nevertheless it's always sensible to check the Source out as reporters can slant stories, oversimplify them or simply make errors.

So, I want to find news about Vegetables, I do my Google Search, find what looks to be (and actually is) a rational article and post a link to it. What's the harm in that?

The article was on the quacks-r-us.org website. By linking to it I just helped Dr Evil PhD(Arkham) with his evil plan to stop people vaccinating their kids and buy his homeopathic bottles of magic water instead. OMG. I just killed someone's child!
Now I'm not going to be fooled by Dr Evil and nor (I hope) are you, but those links help more gullible people than us find him. Please don't do it - use reputable Sources for your good advice.

Where's my Start button gone?

So I power on (me cup of coffee, computer big button) and log in and up comes the background pic but nothing else. Uh, oh... CTRL-ALT-DELETE, black screen. Eek. Manually switch off, reboot, everything's fine.
It turned out to be a video card two screen problem, it looks like the latest update of Catalyst, the AMD control program, has deviously changed something that isn't happy with my switching off with two screens and restarting with just one.

Need

Here's a simpler word that has also aquired a new meaning that isn't in dictionaries.
We all know what 'need' means, it expresses a requirement for something. Thus "I need a drink" indicates that the speaker is thirsty.

However consider these:

"You need to read this book"
"What you need to understand is that ..."
"You need to be quiet folks"
- which is a less aggressive alternative for the command "Be Quiet!"

The emphasis here has shifted to the speaker telling others what the speaker thinks they need. The shift in meaning has in some cases reached the point where in context the other person plainly doesn't want to comply:
"You need to give me all your money right now!"

Smirking

Chatting on the Internet gets one close and personal with language as she is spontaneously typed, including an often ignored factor - the differences between dictionaries and how we actually use words. Here's an example I finally got puzzled enough to look up just now, "smirk".
Online dictionaries agree about this word:
Verb: Smile in an irritatingly smug, conceited, or silly way.
Noun: A smug, conceited, or silly smile: "a self-satisfied smirk".

However when 'real people' are asked to define it the negative content mostly isn't there:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090413212934AAMHIBK
"Smiling very slightly, like you are trying not to. Usually one side of your mouth is smiling more. And it usually means that that person is up to something"

Americans use this word regularly, Brits do not, and dictionaries have yet to notice that its meaning has changed.

40Mbps!

The BT Engineer arrived to connect me up to Fiber Optics. It was quick and painless, and my black EE router now has a white BT modem next to it feeding it stuff. I went for a 40Mbps connection (could get more) and that's what testing says I'm getting.

Of course what I get back is unlikely to be that good!

Trikassi in winter

Chateau Trikassi, winter 2012, photo by Wildstar Beaumont. Serra Anansi, Seneshelf of Winterfell, brings snow overnight to her land of dreams.

Do not Press this Button

It was the 'Sleep' button on my keyboard, and it was accidental honest... anyway the system glitched and refused to wake up so I had to reboot. The BIOS decided it was Level 1 Diagnostic time and reset to its defaults.
Fine, except - noisy fans! I had to venture into the BIOS to switch variable speed back on. I hate doing this, even though BIOSes have help screens these days they are in, well this being ASUS it's Chinese English.
So far so good, I tweaked the chassis fan speed down one step from 'whine' to 'hum'. ASUS have a free program called PC Probe that displays this kind of stuff and can set off alarms if things go wrong. Next I'll try going down to Super Quiet Mode!

Is this Fibre at last?

Orange (or EE as they now are) ninja updated my router software with - goodness - a switch to fibre button. Could this be... I looked on the website. Yes, there were the pricing options, a speed estimate (72Mbps) and a number to phone.
And they hadn't told me. Nor have BT, though I'm on their register list to be informed. Grr.
I signed up anyway, and now await a BT engineer to update my connection. In three weeks? Sigh...

BT fail. Again.

Yes, it was time last week for BT to contact me and say superfast fiber optics were ready as they had promised three months ago. And yes, the promised date has been advanced another three months.

Fun with Hi-fi

After twenty years, it was time to update my hifi system. It was sitting on one side of the living room unused with the PC and TV on the other.
I settled on a Sony STR-DH820 A/V as the hub, which though defined as 'entry level' sounds fine to me. It has more sockets in the back than Neo and is awesomely black.

Glitch #1 I managed to press the wrong buttons and disabled the remote control. A Google forum search found the remedy - press a previously untouched button unintuitively labelled 'AMP'. Yes it was in the manual but in the wrong place.

The PC, TV and satellite box connect to the A/V via HDMI cables, and the A/V turned out to have better video output: Channel 4 HD had been choppy but is fine now.

Glitch #2 was (ha!) Windows. Switching from the PC speakers to HDMI output, the only option was Stereo. Where's my surround sound? Back to Google, which suggested some complicated and suspiciously old remedies. So... update driver? Yes, there was a recent update but that made no apparent difference.
Eventually the solution hit me last night: Windows was being clever and looking to see where the sound was going. To a TV with just two speakers? OK, just stereo then. In the A/V settings I needed to disable 'Pass Through'. Now Windows could only see the A/V and up came the speaker options I wanted.

Fiber optics - BT fail

British Telecom installed fiber optics at my local exchange 18 months ago. Since then, every three months they have been promising to actually extend it to my road. A couple of days before the deadline, they push the date forward another three months.

So I've given up and signed a new internet/phone/mobile deal with Orange. 3Mb speed is fine for me, I can wait for long downloads.

Router change

My Orange Livebox has been suspect for a while, losing connection every couple of hours, so I replaced it with their new dedicated router, Bright Box.
Bright it is not - it's black! Also smaller, paperback sized. It connected up automatically once given my password and hasn't had a dropout yet.

Second Life Mesh Support

A Brief Look at Second Life Mesh Support is a short explanation of why Second Lifers are so excited about Mesh.

Up to now we've had Prims, polyhedrons which can be manipulated using an inworld editor, and 'sculpts', weird single prim objects that are created offworld. Now, finally, we can import 'mesh' objects of the kind used by other computer generated worlds. There are plenty of free editors out there and a common file format, now they have been thrown into the SL sandbox. This is going to be fun.

There is a new Mesh section in the SL Destination Guide that will no doubt be filling up fast.

Virtual reality scripting

Second Life has its own scripting language, without which nothing could move. Since SL is user created, anyone can write their own scripts using the built in editor and see them go wrong! Here is a library with some free samples.
Below is one what I wrote myself, the controller for a magic bridge. Say the password and the bridge appears!

// say password to activate prims in object
// this script must be in root prim
// activated scripts can be in any prim
// Oriella Charik 2010

// Bridge melts after (freezetime) seconds
float freezetime = 30;

default
{
    state_entry()
    {
        llSetText("Bridge Power", <1.0, 1.0, 1.0>, 1.0);
        // set channel to listen on
        llListen(0, "","","");
    }

    listen(integer channel, string name, key id, string word)
    {  
       if(word=="freeze")
       {
        llMessageLinked(LINK_ALL_CHILDREN, 0, "start", NULL_KEY);
        llSetTimerEvent(freezetime);
        }
       if (word=="melt")
      {
      llMessageLinked(LINK_ALL_CHILDREN, 0, "stop", NULL_KEY); 
      }
    }
  
    timer ()
    {
    llMessageLinked(LINK_ALL_CHILDREN, 0, "stop", NULL_KEY);
    }
}

For learning inworld I reccomend the College of Scripting.

Crowd numbers

I just spent a happy half hour googling around on the subject of crowd numbers (yes, the recent rallies in Washington DC sparked this off).

CBS News was slated by supporters of Glenn Beck for its estimate of his rally attendance (87,000), so they published the methodology and here's their estimate for the Rally for Sanity (215,000). Both have a 10% margin of error. Their estimate for the Obama inauguration was 800,000 by the way, lower than others.

• Blog by the expert partnering the survey company. It has plenty of links and information about the subject.
• Plenty of first hand accounts of the latter rally.
• Overhead view of the main crowd areas - in both cases more people were further away:

When I looked up rational estimates by supporters, one reason for disparity was obvious - crowd density. In camera shots taken from the ground (or even the top of monuments) density isn't clear, but the company CBS hired used a robot balloon camera that could do both overhead shots and oblique ones to see beneath trees. It was on the spot and could tour the whole crowd, later estimators were not.

The conclusion is much as usual. How was the data obtained? What is the margin of error? Why do you suppose you can understand any of this without having done Statistics 101 or switched your brain on before reading?

Also, take a look at who is giving you different data with no sources and no proof. If they claim that a source is wrong because they don't like what it says and then next week that the same source is totally accurate, alarm bells should be ringing in your head.

Saint Hill picket report 15th October 2010

Mostly the UK OG tag on to Anonymous protests these days, but this one we set up ourselves being on a Friday:

Three Old Guard and three Anonymous went to rain on Davey's big speech day at the IAS weekend.

After a short stint in East Grinstead High Street we arrived outside Saint Hill about 14:30. Traffic into the grounds was better organised this year with no jams, otherwise things inside seemed much the same as previous years.

Photos

The 'shatter the SPs' plan this year was two big speakers balanced on the perimeter wall connected to bagpipe music. Well, first they had to connect them which took a while but when it got going it was a WIN. Like loud, really loud, right next to Mr Mid Sussex Policeman's car. I don't think he was amused. This was death metal concert head bangingly loud.

And then... a chap from Health and Safety Environmental Protection arrived. With a meter. We didn't call him, and I don't think our glum friends across the road did either. How odd. Perhaps he heard the bagpipes from his office in town. Anyway, he wanted the speakers off, and Tony on the megaphone to turn his volume down from 11. We complied - no one messes with the man from H&S.

After a much quieter second half, we departed around 17:30.

Farmville is eating the Internet

The xkcd webcomic has a new edition out of its Map of Online Communities. Go take a look (the map enlarges if you click on it).

What the map does well is to place otherwise unconnected Internet communities into perspective. For example, political bloggers who suppose the wired world reads their every flame may be chastened to find the map needs an enlarged inset to show them. In some regions one group dominates - Warcraft on MMO island, Skype in messaging, and Facebook as the biggest nation.

Multiscreen

The only problem with my big (37") TV screen that's been doubling up as a monitor is that its text display isn't good; using programs with unadjustable text size (such as Eve Online) causes serious eyestrain. So I looked around for a reasonable size monitor and came up with a 22" LG E2250. It's an 'LED' monitor, an improvement on pure LCD.
Connecting via a DVI-D lead was no problem, Windows7 auto detected and multiscreened - that's where you move the mouse off the edge of one screen and it pops up on the other. The specific LG driver needed a nudge to install.
Text is now clearer by a lot. The LED improves on backlighting, making the picture brighter.

Googlevanned

Mr Google came round last year on a Tuesday afternoon, just after the binmen. My house is in the middle of the terrace.
As you can see it's in a cul-de-sac at the bottom of a valley, the river is at the end of the path (click on pic for full size image).

My (second) life as a film extra

A fortnight ago my Second Life avatar was an extra in a pub scene being shot for a PBS programme that aired last night, online now at Digital Nation.
The programme was wide ranging, the Second Life segment had Philip Linden (creator of SL) showing off both his offices and then switched to a surreal shot of presenter Douglas Rushkoff wandering the corridors of an empty IBM office complex. The staff worked from home now and held meetings in SL, saving Big Blue $1 million last year in travel costs.

Home Networking

Just because I possibly could, I tried networking the old and new machines via the two sockets on the router.
Vista recognised Win7 right away, and after some fiddling with permissions I found out how to add folders. Win7 however... it turned out the firewall I had on Vista was blocking access. There were passwords involved in this, but just like on TV shows guessing only took a few seconds.
Win7 has a new networking for dummies system called Homegroups, but that only recognises other Win7 machines.

More glitches

I have a couple of Win95 programs, a decade old but never bettered, that Windows 7 refused to Install - surprising, as Vista hadn't quibbled. Maybe it's a 64-bit problem. Anyway I transferred the folders over and they ran fine, complete with previous settings since Win95 programmes store those in their own folders.

Webedit is a long lost HTML editor that has enough bells and whistles for me, and WS/FTP LE is the old freeware version of that transfer program.

Windows 7 arrives

My Vista machine never really recovered from its overheating problem and recently lost contact with its graphics card, defaulting to the onboard graphics. So, an early Yuletide prezzie - a brand new Windows 7 desktop, 64-bit OS, with a Radeon 5750.
Overall I'm happy - as promised it's all rather smoother than Vista. I'm slowly loading in stuff and so far the only program that didn't want to know was PGP, I needed the 64-bit version.

Hiccups:
(1) The speakers by default had inputs off, it took me a while to find out how to connect them to Line-in enabling me to use them for the TV.
(2) My Second Life TV isn't working. This seems to be a streaming glitch with Quicktime, I can see other streams in RL and SL and Liz can see it fine - she spotted a friend of hers being interviewed ("look look it's Amber!") and all I had was a blank screen.
(3) Not a single Blue Screen of Death so far! The graphics card has paniced and reset twice in SL, both times when I was working it hard, so I'm guessing at some minor OpenGL problem.
(4) Today, the screen blanked out. It turned out the HDMI cable had come loose, the 5700s only have HDMI output plus a rather grudging DVI socket which I haven't tried. Fortunately the HDTV has several HDMI inputs since I need another for the satellite box.

HDMI is fine with graphics, not so good with text but then the TV isn't optimised for that. Tweaking text size and Clear Type has made it readable.

Winterfell pictures

The Primgraph: Issue 8 - October 2009 has articles and pictures featuring my Second Life homeland, the Dark Victorian regions of Winterfell. The link is to the First Life online edition, though I read my copy sat on the bench in my castle garden.


Er, not in this weather though - a photo I took last winter. Brrr! Click on the pictures and they will appear full size. The next one is of Port Amaranthine and Uni Ninetails Disney castle:


And finally another wintery scene, the sky garden above the clouds:

Website Stats

I use Statcounter.com, an excellent free service. It records stats for the most recent 500 visitors, and thus provides a rolling snapshot of Internet user preferences.

Browsers
MSIE 55%
Firefox 30%
Safari 5%
Chrome 4%

MSIE is split between versions 6, 7 and 8. MSIE 6 is the bugbear of webpage designers due to its many faults that require workrounds, but it is now down to 11%.

Resolution
1280x1024 40%
Unknown 27%
1024x768 25%
1152x864 7%
800x600 1%

It now seems safe to regard 1024 as the lowest width that needs to be accommodated. 'Unknown' is surprisingly high, looking elsewhere it seems to be mostly variations on 1280 such as 1280x800.

Operating Systems
Windows XP 54%
Windows Vista 28%
Unknown 8%
Linux 4%

And that with new improved Windows 7 almost here is as high as Vista will go. It remains to be seen how long businesses will hang on to XP 'because it works' and remain unconvinced that upgrading would be a financial net gain.

Spot the religion

Another contest folks! This is a graph of audience reaction to the latest adverts on American television from - let's say a certain well known bona fide religion that isn't a cult. You have guess at which moment in the advert the name of the religion was first given.

24 hours in limbo

On Friday Mr Blue Screen overran my machine and I had to call in the repairman. Fortunately I got a good (though expensive!) one as it took several hours to get everything sorted. It turned out the CPU fan was not speeding up when it should have been, the CPU was overheating and that most likely killed some memory and corrupted Windows.

So it was full reinstall time, after which Vista got down to downloading 30 months worth of Updates while I reinstalled programs. It took 3 days for Service Pack 1 to arrive, presumably Microsoft sensibly had security updates at the front of the queue.
The only glitch so far was overwriting my Firefox Bookmarks (duh). The latest Nvidia drivers didn't work well with my budget never state of the art card, so I reverted to the previous set. Thunderbird made no objection to my copying over all its data files in a single block.

The only problem that threw me was that my router had reacted to all this by dropping its Download speed, causing Second Life all kinds of problems. Rebooting it forced it to renegotiate speeds.

Let there be light

This is really just an illustration of how the Internet just works.

Houses have light switches. But can Second Life houses have light switches? I'm in the dark about this (ha ha), but let's try 'remote light switch second life' in Google.

http://code.google.com/p/secondlifelivelyscripts/
Here's not only the code I need but also two YouTube clips with the author's Avatar demonstrating how to do it. So I can download the code, Cut&Paste it into a Script holder in Second Life, and there it is.

Oh. One alteration required - American light switches are upside down. Easily changed...

Spot the Scientologist (2)

Difficult this one isn't it? The photo was taken outside the Scientology shop in London during an Anonymous protest. It inspired one of my leafleting callouts: "Scientology - the unhappy religion!"

Infinite Complacency

...you'll have to read the Infinite Complacency blog to find out where Jonny Jacobsen found the title! He's a journalist who has been observing Scientology from the sidelines for quite a while, and is now blogging his notes for what may eventually become yet another book on the cult.
Here he concentrates on David Miscavige, the violent psychopath who has led Scientology since the 1980s.

A recent work I'm presently reading is John Duignan's "The Complex", subtitled "An insider exposes the covert world of the Church of Scientology". British booksellers have refused to stock it due to a threat from the cult, it is available from Ireland where it was published.

Google is watching you

I wrote a satirical comment to a Youtube video yesterday with a :-) at the end to indicate humor and got the usual humorless replies such as "let me guess not a real person just a part of the scientology PR machine". Guessing is not necessary however - Google is your friend! My name is almost unique on the Internet, and a Search on it produced this (snipped for brevity):

Results 1 - 10 of about 2,480 for "hartley patterson". (0.14 seconds)
Search Results

1. User:Hartley Patterson - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
2. News From Bree A Tolkien interview, a medieval spreadsheet, a secondary universe and some enturbulating entheta.
3. Hartley Patterson Directory of critical information about Scientology.
4. Protest Activity in the UK
5. Picket Report, Hartley Patterson
6. User:Hartley Patterson - Wikinews, the free news source
7. User talk:Hartley Patterson - Wikinews, the free news source
8. 1972 - A Year in Diplomacy by Hartley Patterson
9. ZoomInfo Open People Directory > Patterson, Hartley
10.Patterson, Hartley | Patterson, Hazel | People Directory | Facebook

Only (9) appears to be spam, the others catch a selection of my Internet interests. but 2,480 of them? Oh no, I've just added the 2,481st! Must get out more...

Do not do this in Real Life

Oriella: Oh
Liz: whatwhat?
Our neighbours have demolished their house again
whaaaaat????
lol
seriously? it's gone again??
I'm standing in a very empty field
i'm on my way
omg
it is gone
phew
I thought I might need new glasses
don't get too happy...they might rebuild

Added: They didn't and abandoned their land. Our present neighbour is an actress currently appearing at the SL Globe Theatre, but not given to drama off the virtual stage.

I don't believe this

This picture is from The Guardian 12 February 2009. The caption reads:



"A mysterious metallic object that crashed through the roof of a New Jersey family's home in January 2007 was not a meteorite after all. Scientists say it is a stainless steel alloy that does not occur in nature and is most likely orbital debris, perhaps remnants of a satellite, a rocket or some other spacecraft component".

Now come on guys, we know what space debris does. It either falls as a pile of recogniseable junk or it burns up as it descends. It does not melt into something that looks like an iron meteorite. A stainless steel object falling from a plane would not melt at all.
Stainless steel is iron with 10-20% chromium, 5-15% nickel added. Whilst all metal meteorites are iron-nickel alloys they include no chromium, hence the mystery. Chromium is mined as FeCr₂O₄, no nickel.
So what is it? I don't know, I merely don't think there is a likely explanation. Some phenomena don't presently have explanations, and 'scientists' shouldn't be grabbing the nearest available one and saying 'that must be it'.

Spot the Scientologist

On Saturday a couple of dozen protesters visited the CoS 'secret' headquarters in rural California. Lawyer Graham Berry's interview with the local Fox News station was interrupted by the Scientology PR Director who handed the reporter contact details but answered a request for a comment with "No".
Larger image, photo by cameraanonymous.
Sorry, no prizes for spotting the Scientologist - the look on Graham's face says it all...
The full story of pickets at 'Gold Base' can be found elsewhere, here's a link to a lot of videos. The current series has kept up the cult's reputation for bizarre and creepy behaviour in the face of Americans standing up for their First Amendment rights to say what they damn well want.

Cosplay

Second Life has several Rosen Maiden costumes, the Gothic Lolita Paradise shopping mall has all of them. Here is one of my avatars posing. They are not visible in the screenshot but I managed Suiseseki's dichromatic eyes by making green eyes in the normal way and then adding a red one as an attachment. Long red hair that spills over her dress would also have to be specially made, and I don't have the patience for that!

Shinku is particularly striking in her crimson outfit, and 'Feather' have a proper teaset for her.
So now I can wander about ~desuing and demanding cups of tea, to the confusion of most mundane residents.

HD TV arrives

It did several months ago actually.
I live at the bottom of a narrow and twisty valley so terrestrial TV is and always will be poor, the nearest cable is several miles away and across the Thames so satellite is my only option, doubly so when analog is switched off in 2012 as digital doesn't do poor reception. That leaves me with satellite.
Rupert Murdoch used to have a monopoly on this with Sky TV, though in a rare display of determination the government forced him to offer the channels that are normally free for no subscription and I got my dish that way. From the same satellite there is now a BBC/ITV joint service, Freesat which I recently switched over to.
Is it better? It has less rubbish channels including Sky - Sky makes its money from sport and movie subscription channels which are of no interest to me. And it does have HD for free, for which Sky charges an extra subscription on top of a normal one.

So I watched the Olympics in HD, which was excellent except that with its limited number of HD cameras that meant the BBC either showed everything or nothing, with some sports being totally ignored.

As for normal viewing, the BBC offers evening only HD and mostly endless repeats since they don't have enough cameras to do much production. ITV came up with the brilliant marketing strategy of keeping their HD scheduling secret, only putting up an 'also in HD' message up on their main channel at the last moment.
I guess we'll have to wait until the American switch to HD before more is available.

HD TVs do generate a good computer picture though, with a reasonable 1360x768 resolution.

Second Life

I have one. Can't think why I haven't blogged this before!
I had a brief look at SL several years back, but the interface was clunky and I wasn't enthused enough to continue. A few months ago I tried again, found it much improved, and as soon as I got beyond the 'new player experience' I was hooked.

I'll assume you've at least read the media accounts of Second Life, which indicate that it is populated by pedophiles, virtual conferencing business suits and land sharks. Well those people are there in small numbers, but the bulk of 'residents' do other things.

The difference between SL and other online games is that players have the in world editing program. Almost everything you see in SL is constructed by players - buildings, avatars, vehicles and so on. There is a scripting language that enables them to add animations, sound and video. So what do they do with this? Well actually they do what people do in Real Life...

Have sex. Sex in SL is (for me at least) mostly fun, but now and then a good animation with attractive avatars and a good partner can be surprisingly erotic. For others, I gather it works quite well as a masturbation aid, and good luck to them! It's also interesting as part of the overall kick I get out of roleplaying games, which is to be 'someone else'.

Learn new skills. In SL this means finding out how to Create things, something I've only scratched the surface of so far. I've extensively rebuilt my castle, modified clothes, can do textures but my scripting is still Read Only.

Make money. Well, not so far. as in RL that requires a good product, marketing and after sales service with the added twist that the relative values of things are entirely different. A castle is cheaper than a sex bed because of the time spent creating them, since raw material cost is zero.

Anonymous terrorism

My Anonymous friends have just notched up their sixth monthly worldwide protest against the Church of Scientology, and the cult still hasn't a clue about how to stop them. In most locations the cult seems to have retreated inside its buildings, stuck its fingers in its ears and pretended nothing is happening, which would have been a sensible reaction from the start if the leader of Scientology David Miscavige had effective control over his staff.

However with his rational senior staff leaving or locked up in Scientology's prison camp in California Miscavige is increasingly at the mercy of the fanatics, who are telling members that the Nazi Communist terrorists that the multinational drug companies are paying to attack the Scientology religion will be exposed as sex criminals any day, any month, any year, any decade now. Fine - except that they are telling the press the same because they really believe it.

Personally I've been concentrating recently on getting protests going at Saint Hill, the cult headquarters in the UK. It's a big mansion out in the beautiful Sussex countryside, a pleasant day out with pints in the pub afterwards.

ISP, broadband update

My ISP (Orange) like most large mass market ones offer webspace as part of their package. However as they don't actually make any money out of personal websites their wonks keep trying to correct this. Their first attempt was an ad banner, easily circumvented by linking direct to index.html. Their latest is to delete my website, scrap FTP access and tell me to rebuild from scratch using a crap online editor.
Enough! I moved to the company (Freezone) that look after the Newsfrombree domain for me. They have the dreadfully old fashioned idea that providing services that customers want is a good way to run a business.

On the Broadband front however Orange are improving. I switched to their current package which comes with a wireless router though I'm using its Ethernet connection at present, and it has an automatic speed regulator that typically has me at 3Mb. Heh, right now it's 0.7Mb, it does wobble now and then but at least the connection rarely drops.

Stealth upgrading

Did I mention that the 2006 attempt to upgrade my broadband speed from 1Mb to 2Mb failed? The line was dropping too often so Silent Fred, the BT engineer who doesn't tell you anything, reset it back to 1MB.

Easter Sunday, with no warning, my connection went up to 2Mb again and this time it's holding steady without a single dropout. I can only suppose there's been an upgrade somewhere along the line.

It took me a long hunt on the Internet to find a webpage that explained with numbers how to check your own connection, so let me pass this on:

The two parameters that matter are Signal to Noise ratio (S/N, Margin) and Drop off (Attenuation). Both are measured in decibels (Db).
S/N is the difference in strength between the signal and the background hiss. It needs to be >10Db. Attenuation is the difference between the signal strength when it leaves the Exchange and when it reaches your modem, and the higher the speed the lower the limit for this. 1Mb requires lower than 60Db, 2Mb lower than 45Db.

For the copper wire telephone lines we have in the UK, this equates to ~6km maximum for 1Mb and ~3.5km for 2Mb.

My Attenuation is a steady 40Mb so 2Mb is the most I can get. My S/N is 24Db at 1Mb but 17Db at 2Mb, still OK though it can fall to 10Db on a bad day. I suspect that it is S/N discrimination that has improved for me.

We live in interesting times

This is the title of an entry in another guy's weblog. Mr G Allen is he says just an ordinary American who heard about a local protest, went along to take photographs and find out what was all about.

Later he received a legal letter saying he was a member of the protesting group. The letter accused the group of illegal activity such as making bomb threats and demanded that 'his' organisation stop behaving illegally.

An employee of a nearby coffee shop who just happened to be walking past the protesters received an identical letter. He and she had been followed to their cars and had their number plates photographed by private detectives. This was, apparently, the sole 'evidence' the lawyers had.

OK, you've guessed. This is the Church of Scientology again, making new friends.

Ides of March

The second outing for the Anonymous worldwide pickets against the happy fun cult was just as successful as the first it seems, plus better organised and larger. I attended at London as previously, and whilst waiting for Anonymous to arrive I and a suppressive friend popped into a sandwich bar for sustenance. We were soon joined to our amusement by a spy from the Org a couple of doors away - so the DSA recognised me then! - but too late, my contact from Smith-Kline-Pharma had already handed over the thick wad of notes for me to pass on to the Anonymous Central Committee so we were talking about... I forget, was it the ARSCC elections? Nothing of interest to OSA anyway.

This time Anonymous were loaded with cake, chicken, and good humour. They chanted, cheered honking cars and sang Ron 'Happy Birthday' with three Hip-hip-hoorays; the old folk stood at the back and chatted, it was especially nice to meet a lady who had sailed on the Apollo with Ron. I left when the threatening rain finally started around 16:00, but they were good for hours more.

Joanna on webcam

Back in June I started blogging about a remarkable series of Internet pages and blogs concerning the alternate reality of Joanna. At the time I had assumed that she could not possibly be real, that 'Joanna' was a persona devised for purposes unknown that happened by chance to include Scientology, history, the occult, conspiracy theory and other interests of mine. Was this an extended joke, an alternate reality game? Why was I apparently the only person in the world reading this?

I was wrong.

Over the past two weeks the author has made 21 Youtube videos, presumably influenced by the explosion of such clips from Anonymous and others concerning Scientology. They appear to be a restatement of her reality along with some more mundane information, I haven't watched them all yet, too much at once and I'll vanish down that rabbit hole...

Judgement Day

So I'm sitting trying to wipe this grin off my face.

It's crunch day for Anonymous. Could they bring their merry band of virtual personas out of the Matrix, down the Internets and into the Real World? I say 'is' because since we don't live on Discworld results from California are not in yet, but first reports look good.

I arrived at the London Dianetics and Scientology Improvement Centre at around 11:00 for a quick chat with the bobbies setting up barricades. Barricades? Yes, police radio was reporting crowds assembling at the London Scientology Org a couple of miles away. Hundreds of them...

As planned they moved to Tottenham Court Rd a couple of hours later. It was a noisy but well behaved crowd, improving their chants by the minute - some football fans amongst them I'd say. Placards, masks, leaflets of all descriptions, and an anarcho-syndicalist flag.

My fellow critics had followed them, and it was good to see old friends who had come out of the shadows for the Big Day. There were several Youtube wannabes filming, including a livecam.

Cult reaction? Exactly what I'd hoped for in London. They came out to play, but could only watch in bemusement.

There can be only one doll

Rozen Maiden is a Japanese TV anime series that ran for two seasons 2004/5 plus a 2006 Christmas special. It was popular there but will never be shown in the UK, but then no Japanese anime series of this kind will be shown outside Japan.
Why not? It's a cultural difference. Rozen Maiden is made for teenagers not children. The central (human) characters are all teenagers, and the human plotlines revolve around specifically teenage concerns.

Oh, sorry, go read some background. Read, now!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rozen_Maiden

I watched the whole series over the holidays, it was my treat one episode a day since the TV had nothing I wanted to see except for Kiki's Delivery Service which is, oh dear, an anime. It was... wonderful, the best anime I've watched since 'Scrapped Princess'. I could type pages over how wonderful it is, but I don't expect to convince anyone so, duely noted.

Now my question: am I the only person who can see this? Rozen Maiden is 'Highlander' as played out by magic dolls. Consider: immortal beings who are destined to fight until one is left who gains a great prize? A story which has amongst its themes the consequences of being immortal; the effects on the mortals around them who will grow old and die as they go on?

Hackers destroy Scientology

Well not as such, but it's been an interesting couple of weeks.

Jan 15th, Andrew Morton's much heralded unauthorised (by a long way) biography of Tom Cruise was published. It revealed two shocking facts - Tom was heterosexual and he was a Scientologist. Not many people knew that.
So Tom isn't suing. Being caught lying about having been cured of dyslexia by his religion is it seems a small price to pay for a 'Not Gay' certificate.

The famously litigious Church of Scientology however was distressed to find that the book was in its second half mostly about it and its hitherto publically unknown leader, Mr David Miscavige. As Chairman of the Board of Religious Technology Center and the most ethical being on the planet, Mr Miscavige has been the absolute dictator of the Church since the death of founder L Ron Hubbard in 1986.
The Church put out a 14 page non-denial of the lies in the book but that as I predicted at once was it - no libel writ has been served.

It was then that the bombs began to go off. Cue repeat of the Panorama disaster - a short clip of Cruise from a 2004 Church promotional video, long known about by its critics, popped up on YouTube. Since it appeared to show that Tom had gone raving mad four years ago but we somehow hadn't noticed, the Church tried to get it off the Internet but failed, as it always fails against sufficiently annoyed Freedom of Speech advocates. More clips from the video were posted, and other videos are (I happen to know) queued up ready to roll.

A niece of Mr Miscavige blew her top and wrote an incensed open letter to the Church, which had made its routine denial that it broke up families. "Oh yes it does", she refuted, claiming she had been cut off from her parents.

From out of nowhere an Internet prankster community known as Anonymous (because they are) suddenly got serious, announcing in a series of hilariously over the top video manifestos that they were going to drive the cult off the Internet starting with a DDos attack. That's where you get lots of people to access a website all at once, so it overloads and crashes.

If they were expecting moral support from the existing critics of the cult they didn't get it, indeed a chorus of condemnation resulted. DDosing and hacking were Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Internet vs Scientology war, held by both sides but not used. Alarmed, Anonymous switched tactics and surprisingly decided to try to get their previously virtual people out onto the real life streets for a worldwide protest February 10th, which we await with some trepidation.

Spam

A survey of the spam situation on my main Email address:

Orange, my ISP, stores Email in a webmail system before I collect it with my regular Email program, Thunderbird. It has an optional spam filter. Yesterday there were 7644 Emails in its 7 day Junk folder, 45/hour. About 3/hour get through.
There are very few false positives, mostly receipts for shopping online. Orange also seems to use an IP blocking database, so I've had to whitelist a few friends.

What Orange misses are recent spam types such as Image only, so I have my own filter built in to Thunderbird, which reduces that 3/hour to 3/day.

Googling around I found that resetting Bayesian filters and giving them fresh spam to eat can help. So I have, and we'll see if things improve.

Halloween updates

In a 26 October 2006 post I noted that an AVG anti-virus program update had fixed some Email problems. It just happened again! Spooky...

The latest AVG update (7.5.503) appears to have not only restored the Email scanner without disabling PGP but also cured the problem I was having with not being able to send Emails via my ISP's server, though weirdly the Google Gmail server was fine. I've had my Email accounts happily Emailing each other PGP encrypted messages anyway.

Picket

This Orange Multi Media Message was sent wirefree from an Orange MMS phone.

Blogged from the pub! Back home, here's another - Gingernut modelling an XL Clambake shirt.




Reports elsewhere, but it was an uneventful event.

Hello world

...or blog anyway.
Having acquired a camera/phone/txt/USB/blog/Email thing, I spend a happy weekend persuading it to do so, acquiring another pageful of passwords, secret codes and stuff along the way.

Facebook cleverly cross referenced my mobile number which it knew with the number of the phone that was calling it and linked up without needing confirmation. Clever but spooky as it didn't tell me it could do this.

Blogger wouldn't reply though. It seems Orange affix the international code when messaging abroad and then won't accept incoming messages using that code, which is dumb. I had to Email Blogger for help, which they quickly provided.

PC Interface OK, except that it wants to Synchronize with programs I don't use. Oh well, at least deleting messages is a lot easier on a PC monitor than on a phone screen.

False positive

For the first time in Vista, AVG found a virus this week. Or... it was a trojan in the DLL and EXE for a popular install program, so I had several copies scattered in Temp folders going back six months to the modem driver install. That seemed unlikely.
There are several online virus checkers for suspicious files. I tried a couple and the files came up clean, so this was an AVG only alert.
I typed the name AVG came up with into Google, and several forums were discussing Generic6.UMS already. It looked to be a 'false positive', an error which we'd all downloaded with that day's AVG auto update, and sure enough the next day's update removed it.
So AVG working correctly then, and this is the first time I've had it do this. I expect there are lots of reformatted hard drives and new installs out there now!

Medieval II - Total War (2)

The default shortcut provided goes to Launcher.exe, a small program that accesses the Internet to provide details of updates and mods. Unfortunately Launcher on Vista takes 50% of CPU doing absolutely nothing and the main program fails to unload it, even when exited. It has to be turned off using Task Manager.
The solution is to create a shortcut to medieval2.exe.

Creative's sound driver for Vista remains buggy after 9 months, they seem to be unable to fix it. They did come up with an EAX patch, so that kind of works with Windows and more importantly with the range of games that don't have a 'plain vanilla' Soundblaster setting such as Medieval II. And then, knowing they had hordes of pissed off customers of Mongolian proportions, they charged $10 for it.

The game? It's fine, lots of epic battles.

Another rabbit hole

A favorite website of the anti-Scientology crowd is Religious Freedom Watch (RFW), a 'Dead Agent' website which vilifies enemies of the Church of Scientology. It is so nasty and over the top that only crazy culties could imagine that anyone aside from themselves would believe it.

This month a blog appeared here called joelphillipsreligiousfreedomwatch. It purports to be written by Joel Philips, the owner of RFW, though the contents suggest it is a parody of Mr Phillips' rantings. I assume this is the material referred to on RFW's front page under the 'Harassment Notice' header, wherein Mr Philips denies being the author.
The first post on the blog, 'Why I Hate Russia', first appeared elsewhere, causing speculation as to whether it was genuine or just disinformation.

So is this another rabbit hole? We have a reference to Wiccans, Indonesians and Russians. The Wiccans, two people claiming to be British black witches who have posted to ARS for several years threatening to cast spells on cult leaders, would seem to predate RFW. Certainly Mr Phillips, happy to attack others, reacted immediately to their brief attack on him by offering a still valid reward of $5,000 for information about them.
The Indonesians and Russians look to be part of the blogger's alternate reality, not Mr Phillips'. But maybe the blogger is just throwing us clues...

How did I find out about this blog? I had an Email from Joel Phillips!
"Hartley you should update your FAQ about these people. Joel"

More fun in space

My carebear trader character is leaving a totally safe space station in her cargo ship. But nowhere is safe in Eve...

Oriella undocks, a small ship warps in and blinks red at her

[ 2007.05.06 12:36:44 ] (notify) ACiD360: You have foolishly engaged in criminal activity within sight of sentry guns and must suffer the consequences.
[ 2007.05.06 12:36:46 ] (notify) ACiD360's Ishtar has started trying to warp scramble you.

WTF? I'm taking damage, but not a lot. Maybe I should repair shields or something? Oh nevermind, here they come...
A squad of police ships warp in.

[ 2007.05.06 12:37:06 ] (notify) CONCORD Police Captain has started trying to warp scramble ACiD360's Ishtar

BOOM

ACiD360 > lol
ACiD360 > damn
ACiD360 > this aint lowsec
ACiD360 > im so stupid
Oriella Trikassi > er.... yes
Oriella Trikassi > especially against a transport
ACiD360 > yep
ACiD360 > shit happens^^
Oriella Trikassi > nearly spilt my beer there

Another Joanna blog

Documentary video vlogger talent appears to be on a networking MySpace lookalike called Ning. It has three members who may not be real, but the fourth is Joanna. She has several posts which seem to lie chronologically between the original set and Deconstructing Judas, June 3-14th. They talk of making videos about her obsessions.

Correction: more veils

One early Joanna blog I missed is
http://markrowberryfreakout.blogspot.com

There are others listed at

http://www.blogger.com/profile/02914820102062616373
but they are presently inaccessible.

More from beyond the veil

Deconstructing Judas is a second blog from the author of Babble's evil twin, see earlier entry.

The supposed author now believes Judas to have been an earlier incarnation of L Ron Hubbard, whereas her ex or possibly fantasy lover was Adam, St John the Evangelist and Ludwig II of Bavaria.

I remain fascinated and puzzled. Who else could possibly be reading these blogs? What are their purpose? Is this one of those Alternate Reality games that I've stumbled into? The Game is a favorite movie of mine. And Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius a favorite story.

The first blog is presently invited access only.

Safari for Windows

Apple’s Safari for Windows wins first battle in browser war

Microsoft Windows users are rapidly downloading Apple’s Safari Internet browser, with more than 1 million downloads in the last 48 hours. But will this be enough to compete against Internet Explorer and Firefox?

So I did too, but because that will enable me to check webpages I've written with Safari which is the most used browser on Apple computers. I'm assuming the actual HTML/CSS coding is the same between Windows and OSX of course.

Javascript isn't working properly yet, otherwise everything looks OK.

Networking

"You should be on Facebook", The Guardian said.

So after an hour wrestling with yet another bloggy interface I am, but no you can't see it unless you too have a Facebook page and we are friends. That's how networking works. You can see the Photo Album bit of it though, with some annotated picket pictures.
In a narcissistic piece of programming you can also get your blog to copy onto Facebook automatically, so this note entry will shortly be appearing there.

You can also check your Address Book to see who is already on Facebook. To my surprise, some people were...

Medieval II - Total War

I buy computer games rarely since I prefer open ended long lasting ones, just Civ IV and Zoo Tycoon 2 recently. However the local wargames group said it was best thing since Attila the Hun...

Vista note: it's fine. It guessed my optimum settings wrong and the sound was stuttering, but I knew what that was - as previously noted the Creative audio driver doesn't like pushy graphics. Dropping quality to medium cured the stutter and enabled me to push the resolution up to normal as well.

The graphics are impressive, whether the AI is as good remains to be seen. I seem to be winning but in the style of Pyrrus rather than Alexander.

XENU IS LOOSE!

The Edinburgh Fringe will include a show from Collapsible Theatre:

Xenu is Loose is a new satirical Sci-Fi Musical based on the beliefs of the Cult of Scientology.

Jennifer, a young, beautiful high-school student finds her life transformed when she discovers the purifying power of L Ron. Hubbard's Scientology. But when Xenu, Alien Overlord and timeless nemesis of all that is good, escapes his ancient galactic prison; she and handsome Scientologist Troy must summon every ounce of cunning and resourcefulness to save the world from, like, Total Atomic Destruction.

A combination of live rock music, spectacular laser combat, cutting-edge multimedia projection and stunning design will make this the most exciting new musical on the fringe!

Good Grief. Is nothing sacred?

Babbles has an evil twin

Barbara 'Babbles' Schwarz is alt.religion.scientology's mad baglady:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Schwarz

Yes, I know the Wikipedia article looks like fiction, but it's real.
Now we have a parody blog, written in an alternate universe by 'Joanna':
http://henleyonthames2001.blogspot.com/

This is wonderful stuff. 'Joanna' is fixated on 'Mark Rowberry', which is an amalgam of two well known names in Scientology. His photo website is
http://www.wayn.com/waynprofile.html?member_key=7240501

She met Mark in 2001, and believes that Hubbard is controlled by Jesus.
They are all out to get her of course.

Whoever is writing this knows all about Scientology and Babbles. She knows about England, lots of local references - I live a few miles away. It's recent, with references to Panorama. And I've *no* idea who did this.

YouTube - Babylon 5: lost tales

OMG! OMG! It's a trailer!!!

YouTube - Babylon 5: lost tales

Lost Tales on Wikipedia.

First Day filming

More on set

Desynchronized

I forgot to blog this, it actually happened last month.
After several lengthy cutouts my broadband connection finally went down altogether. The modem diagnostics program said I was 'desynchronized'. So I phoned the Orange call centre, and after the usual long list of irrelevant questions we came to 'do test'.
"The test says your connection is desynchonised'.
[Yes, that's what I said half an hour ago]
"I am going to ask BT to do an intrusive check. Please leave your modem plugged in and switched on but do not try to connect for four hours".
This worked fine, evidently the BT Engineer located the fault. Orange even phoned me the next day to make sure I was indeed synchronised again.
Call centres do work, you just need the patience of a saint.

Where does that expression come from? Saints were often irritating, impatient and eccentric people who annoyed the regular clergy no end.

Did we not kill them?

How do I introduce this one? It's a conversation overheard on a chat channel within Eve, my online game. In a star system in a distant galaxy two spaceship pilots are in conversation, unaware that I'm listening...

KtB > Hey sam :)
sammual > hye man
KtB > How ya doing
sammual > great u
KtB > not bad not bad man
sammual > cool
KtB > Right, when i say :)
sammual > kk
KtB > rdy?
sammual > ye
KtB > hardeners on.
sammual > ye
KtB > Go go go

{they set off bombs in the hope of blowing up larger ships in a surprise attack. This alerts Concord, the police, who warp in and blow their ships up. They are now, Darth Vader style, in their escape pods}

sammual > argh
KtB > Lmao!
KtB > did we not kill em?
sammual > er no
KtB > eh lol
sammual > damn
KtB > have you gotta target em? lol
sammual > i dunno
sammual > maybe
KtB > holy shit look at concord lol
sammual > lmao
KtB > lmao
KtB > eh wtf
sammual > k lets go back to station
KtB > lol
sammual > lol
KtB > confused lol
KtB > erm
KtB > ive got a mining drone
KtB > stuck to my pod
sammual > lmao
KtB > :S
KtB > can you see it?
KtB > look at me when ya get to station
sammual > man we suck
sammual > lol
KtB > haha i know lol
KtB > how did it not work :S
sammual > dunno

{and this is why I play these games!}

1 second of fame

Yes, I was there on the Monday 14th edition of Panorama. Near the end, the guy in the red anorak and placard in Tottenham Court Road picketing the Scientologists. And I've spent the past two days trying to keep a webpage up to date with the storm that resulted which shows no signs of dying down.

It was worth it though. To be accused of being 'orchestrated' by the BBC was hilarious.

YouTube - Scientology Yellow Tent

YouTube - Scientology Package

This is an excellent Video from Josh M Peterson in which he visits the Volunteer Minister Yellow Tent that tours around the world advertising the Church of Scientology.

Vista Aero

Aero is a fancy GUI for Windows that is optional for Vista. Switching it off seems to have cured several persistent bugs for me, as well as freeing up a chunk of memory.

The Creative Audigy soundcard had a stutter that became continuous when running DirectX in a window. It's gone.
Firefox had a nasty though infrequent memory leak that became a disk rattling virtual memory fight after a few seconds. It seems to be gone.
The Internet connection has almost stopped dropping out.

Vista modems

The saga continues...
I have an old 'green frog' Speedtouch ADSL modem that is not going to have Vista drivers as part of the 'throw away your old junk, buy our new junk' drive. So I bought a cheap Zoom ADSL and downloaded their just out of Beta Vista driver. The install notes were long and if followed exactly worked.
Except that the line kept dropping. I tried this and that and the other, until one day I plugged into a different USB port... and the dropouts stopped.
I poked around in Device Manager. There are two USB Hubs on my machine, one 'full speed' the other 'high speed'. That must mean 1.1 and 2.0 USB. I'd switched to 1.1 - the slower connection!
The Data Rate meter says I'm not losing out, so I plain don't understand this one. I have the current Speedtouch modem on its way and its Beta driver ready and waiting, but I may have wasted my cash on it.

So all I need now is... more memory. 1Mb plainly isn't enough, Civ IV and Vista start to fight over memory around 1950 game time. Eve isn't bothered, it used to memory leak but this has been stamped out.

Fried!

My power supply fried my motherboard. This was a sign from God, or possibly Bill Gates. I bought a Vista PC (Athlon Dual 3800, Nvidia 7300).

It's been a fun week. Vista is still in Gamma and I had some retro Blue Screens of Death and one total panic - I mean Vista panicked and wanted to System Restore, but I knew all it needed was a reboot.

Nvidia has a way to go. The current driver is slow, and DirX 10 has only reached the 8300. Setting for other than max Performance causes upsets. The Creative Vista sound driver stutters now and then but doesn't crash, and it can't cope with Direct Sound in a window at all.
There are no Vista modem drivers in the UK. I had to download... oh. I had to phone my sister and talk her through downloading one for me. "The one with the logo and the three green lights at the front please". Thank you Wendy, you were as always a treasure.

Some old peripherals are junk - Zip drive, scanner. One new buy I can recommend, an external USB hard drive case from X Craft. It whirred away transferring all my old data into the new machine very quickly.

On the software side, most XP programs just have mildly annoying bugs. AVG won't scan Emails, Firefox crashes now and then, Winamp won't Drag n Drop.

The big test was Eve Online. I went for the full 631Mb download, crossed fingers, and it ran first time. FPS are better but nothing exciting, and it seems stable. Full marks for the Devs there, though I gather it's pot luck with graphics cards still.

The GUI I'm just tinkering with, it is of course prettier but 430Mb???

Xenu Day International!

Xenu Day International is on Saturday March 10th, 2007.

Are you a Xenu sympathizer? A drunk? An irate ex-scientologist? A freezoner? An ElRon apologist? A cacophonist? A Santarchist? A trouble maker?
Then XENU DAY Is just the event YOU'VE BEEN LOOKING FOR!

In the spirit of the Cacophony Society and Santarchy, a fun new yearly bar crawl and troublemaking event is planned for L RON HUBBARD'S birthday.

iframe (2)

Firefox was happy with OBJECT menus, MSIE was not - it ignored target="_top" and thought I wanted to replace the menu with the page. Fortunately it did accept targetting with IFRAME.

And the really annoying bug in MSIE that keeps warning me about unsafe Javascript that becomes safe when uploaded is driving me nuts.

iframe, scrollbars and mozilla

I wanted to embed a menu on all the pages of a website so I wouldn't have to change every instance of it. This can be done using IFRAME, but not content with that I wondered if it could be done with OBJECT since strict HTML doesn't have IFRAME.

It turned out to be possible:

<object data="sidebarframe.html">

The size of the object could be set in the website's Style Sheet. The problem then became the scrollbars that I didn't want. IFRAME has a scrolling="no" style setting, but OBJECT does not. Some CSS in the BODY of the frame solved that, complete with a Mozilla hack:

<style type="text/css">body {border:0; overflow:visible; }</style>
<style type="text/css">body {overflow: -moz-scrollbars-none;}</style>

A very obscure bug

I found that bit of javascript that creates snow falling down the screen. Actually I found two versions, one had the snowflakes as tiny GIFs, the other as ASCII stars. Too late for this Xmas, but next year I'll be annoying people with them (they eat CPU time).

Except that the ASCII version didn't work in Firefox. After steadily cutting out the usual suspects - other javascript for example - the culprit turned out bizarrely to be the URL part of the DTD:

!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"

So there you are, my first trivia for the year.

Picket video

This is a link to a flash video of a Scientology picket in London last Saturday:

http://xenutv.wordpress.com/2006/12/13/the-internet-is-scientologys-worst-nightmare/

John in full rant, me telling an entheta story and at the end our cameralady being politely asked to leave.

My two days on the help lines

I asked my ISP if it was possible to upgrade my Broadband connection. I'm a long way from my local Exchange, so I wasn't surprised to get an Email back saying it wasn't possible yet.

Two days ago, I got a 'wrong Username or Password' message. In successive phone calls, we established that
The connection was OK.
My account was still active.
Then I noticed that my diagnostic program was saying I was connected at 2Mb.
Next phone call, we found that the engineers had retested my connection, switched me to 2Mb but not told me.
Finally we deleted my connection, carefully reinstalled it, and everything was fine. The only difference I can see is that I am now connected to a different place - 'bb4' instead of 'bb3', so either that or the reinstall was the solution.

Oh, and the next day my phone calls prompted the independent call centre assessment people to call. Did I think my ISP had responded well? I gave Orange 8/10, though if I hadn't been a geek it would have been 0/10 as I'd still be disconnected.

Fixed

My virus checker is AVG, my secret decoder ring is PGP. PGP 9.0 uses the same Email intercept method as AVG, so they weren't compatible. Until...
AVG popped up to tell me that it's Email checking component wasn't running. Yes, I knew, I'd turned it off. So why was it telling me? Because the daily AVG update had updated it?

I turned it on, and sent myself an encrypted message. It worked...
and then I made the mistake of playing around with settings. It stopped working and refused to display its activate button.

So I upgraded to AVG 7.5 and it's working again on default settings, so I'm leaving it alone this time. AVG 7.5 setup has a repair option, so hopefully I can use that if it stops.

Now my only minor problem is that Thunderbird won't download Email when it starts up, only by request. A PGP glitch? Some dumb ISP setting as my Email box often locks up?

Exploder 7

It's happy day, testing out Internet Explorer 7 to see what unexpected things it's done to webpages...

It defaults to Medium Font size instead of Smaller at last - excellent! People will stop complaining about being unable to read the text, and thousands of websites that only look good in 'smaller' will be screwed.

It defaults to Clear Type! I guess this makes sense with CRTs being displaced by LCD/Plasma.

CSS has absolute positioning enabled! Or... only in compliant mode. I had a lot of trouble kludging one layout to get round this on IE, but unfortunately I have to leave this until everyone has switched to IE7 unless someone can come up with an 'except for IE7' hack.

So far I've spotted only one positioning difference from Firefox, but it's not an important one.

Discworld Cake

This is just so cool.
Discworld Cake

Fighting good roads and fair weather

Barbara Graham just wrote this article about her experiences as a critic of the Scientology cult. If you still think this is a Church, read it. Churches don't lie to the police, harass their opponents' relatives or send private detectives to follow their friends' cars.

YouTube: scientology shorts

YouTube - The Friend of Mankind (1/4)
This link leads to a selection of short videos poking fun at the cult of Scientology.

YouTube also has a series of official videos published by the Cult of Scientology such as the Anatomy of the Human Mind course. These will give you a good insight into some of scientology's pseudoscientific beliefs.