Furthermore: August 2004 Part 2

August 24, 2004

Windows Problems

Joel on Software - interesting forum thread on prevalence of viruses and worms on Windows boxes. Scoble has been talking about this quite a bit too.

August 20, 2004

Links

• via Crooked Timber - online Well-Tempered Clavier site with analysis etc - sounds fantastic but I’ve not had chance to delve into it.


• via Joi Ito - Extreme Democracy (extreme in the “extreme programming” sense I think. Again, looks interesting but no time to read it at present.



• Searchblog - on capturing Searchstreams, stories, and the Memex.


• BBC - UK Information Commissioner on dangers of surveillence society.


• Back To Iraq - very thoughtful piece on the stand-off with Moqtada Al Sadr


• via Slashdot - interesting interview with John Gilmore. The stuff about secret laws in the US kind of fills me with horror.


• via everyone [PDF] - EFF wins Grokster appeal



• via BoingBoing - Bruce Sterling’s speech at SIGGraph. The interesting stuff is more towards the end, where he looks at what could happen to consumer products in the future. That said, my wife found this completely unreadable. Caveat lector.

GMail

I just got a GMail account through one of my work colleagues. I haven’t really decided what to use it for yet. I’m thinking of putting my mailing lists and whatnot in there to make them easily searchable.

What would be nice would be if I could upload my existing mail archive (which is only a few meg, even after 10 years or so) and have it all searchable online. RSS feeds for particular streams of mail would be good too.

Useful BoingBoing post on GMail notifier apps.

Update - just discovered this via Slashdot. This chap has written a program to upload your mail to GMail.

John Kerry and BCCI

Just saw a great piece at Crooked Timber on the fact (which I was unaware of) that John Kerry led an investigation into BCCI. There’s also another link on there to a long talk and Q&A with a chap called Gary Webb about CIA-backed drug smuggling to fund the Contras and other matters. The site it comes from is a bit tinfoil-hat, but the material itself looks sound. Depressingly, I’m not at all surprised by what I read there.

August 18, 2004

The Validation Failed - Typekey problem fix

I know I’m slightly repeating myself, but I thought this was worth pulling out into a separate post as I’m sure I won’t be the only person with this problem.

If you’ve activated Typekey for comments, and then when you try to login, you get a message saying “The validation failed”, then the following fix may be for you:

There’s a long thread about this at the Movable Type forums, but the short version is this:

• edit lib/mt/Util.pm, replacing this line:
  
  if ($has_crypt_dsa && 0) { with this:
  
  if ($has_crypt_dsa) {


• you now need the Perl module Crypt::DSA to be available. You can run mt-check.cgi to see if it is already there. If not, your admin should be able to install it for you.

At this point I should just put in a plug for my hosting provider 34sp - I reported that the module wasn’t there at about 3pm, and by about 4.30pm it was sorted. I am extremely impressed.

Movable Type 3.0 problems

Having played with it for a few days, these are the things that are still not working in MT3.0.

• builds seem to hang half way through. I’m not sure if they are working but just not reporting that fact, or really not working. I lean more towards the former, as I haven’t seen any actual problems. I understand there’s a template setting you can change for this somewhere.



• Typekey registration - I have it all set up by the book. When you try to comment though, the Typekey site says I don’t have the feature turned on. I’ve seen a post about this on the MT forums, but no solution as yet.
  
  Update - I’ve followed the advice on there, and I’m now getting a “the validation failed” error after I try to sign in at Typekey so I’m making progress at least.
  
  
  
  
  Update - This also seems to be a known problem - lots of info here
  
  that I need to digest before I try to do anything.
  
  Update - I’ve tried changing util.pm along the lines suggested, but no joy. mt-check reports I don’t have Crypt::DSA, so that may be why. Apparently I may need my hosting provider to do that, so I guess the next stop is the 34sp forums and see if I can get some more information there.


• Buttons not working - I’ve had problems with the delete button for instance. It seems to be button controls that are the problem, rather than link type buttons.



• Blogroll - my bloglines exported blogroll has disappeared, to be replaced with a message saying “The user name you are using does not allow sharing of subscriptions”. I suppose that could be from Bloglines rather than MT, but I only noticed it since the upgrade.

If I get any further with these problems, I’ll let you know.

August 13, 2004

Running Windows with least privilege

Just saw Aaron Margosis‘ blog, which is all about running Windows without being logged in as admin all the time. This is something that should be really useful - at home I run Mandrake Linux, and I almost never need to use root.

Debugging CoCreate failures

Probably every developer in the world knows this except me. I just had a dll containing a COM class that wouldn’t load, and no clue what was going wrong. I found I could use OLEView as the executable to start the debugger from, and that enabled me to track down problems in the DLL without worrying about the caller. Pretty obvious really, but it took me a while to think of it.

August 12, 2004

Tales of the City - Armistead Maupin

I first read this series in 1993 after seeing a BBC documentary about them. I thought they were fantastic then (I was 21 to put things in context) although I’d never been to SF at that time, and I’ve re-read them on several occasions since. Most recently I just re-read the first and last books in the series.

The things that struck me most this time around are firstly how modern the books still seem - even the first one, which dates from the mid seventies, doesn’t seem particularly dated. Perhaps SF is just ahead of the curve, or perhaps its Maupin’s ability to write universal characters, but many of the situations, particularly the relations between the gay and straight characters, could have been written yesterday.

On the other hand, both books have a definite flavour of their time - the 70s and the 80s respectively. The last book (Sure of You) is much more sour than its ancestor, and the effects of AIDS on the gay community are clearly on the mind of the author and his characters.

I do wonder a little in the last book whether Maupin hasn’t let a kind of “all guys together” sexism creep in. It’s hard to say - Mary Anne’s character has become quite dislikeable, and she’s the only straight woman in the books (to a first approximation) so it’s perhaps unfair to make her bear the weight of Maupin’s attitude towards women. I prefer to think that what happens is just the working out of themes that had been present from the start.

Anyway, an excellent series. Do read them if you haven’t already. I always get nostalgic for SF when I do. I feel I don’t want to leave the world Maupin creates. When you feel that, you know you’re reading the work of a master.

Cambridge Links

A couple of useful things found on cam.misc over the last day or two:

• Cycle route to Ely - looks quite good. There may be more useful stuff on that site too I would think. cam.miscers recommend the Fish and Duck pub as a place to eat.



• Graduate Union Forum - quite a lively board for grad students.