Jean-Marc's infotainment stream

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Jeslog

April 20, 2010
19:30
Learning by Trolling
» ‎ Jeslog

I've been following the development of the Go programming language for a few months now and learning more and more about it.divI've actually found that I learn more about it by helping other people than I would on my own. People on IRC and the mailing list tend to get themselves in to messy situtations and wanting to do insane things and encounter problems I never would. In the process of helping those people with their insanity I actually learn a href="http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better-than-you-at-everything.html"alot/a./divdivbr //divdivI tend to have a shortage of problems because I'm very good at planning to avoid them. Which I really think is a disadvantage, especially in any kind of learning or research stages./divdivbr //divdivThe whole reason human beings have advanced technologically has been due to the great number of problems we've had and created for ourselves. /divdivDroughts resulted in the need for farming, farming caused over population, over population caused packed cities of people spreading disease resulting in the need for medical treatments. etc./divdivbr //divdivIf it wasn't for all the stupid problems we wouldn't have the solutions./divdivbr //divdiv class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7931585-4878947928706680185?l=blog.jessta.id.au' alt='' //div
February 12, 2010
17:35
This is Australia
» ‎ Jeslog

divdivFirst they came for the a href="http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pedobear"paedophiles/a and they were sick bastards so I didn't give a shit./divdivThen they came for the a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GYroTdAx3o"interspecies erotica/a kinksters and I didn't mind because I wasn't really in to that./divdivThen they came for thea href="http://secondlife.com/" furries/a, a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_jW0fHcfb-L4/R36CNFtMdaI/AAAAAAAABOc/GH2_tjBqrOM/s400/water+sports+shoes.jpg"watersporters/a and the a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scatman_John"scatters/a and I started getting a bit worried./divdivSoon they came for me, and then the a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Conviction_for_indecency"homosexuals/a, and the a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came..."jews/a and finally they came for the a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/strewth-australia-rocked-by-lesbian-koala-revelation-437806.html"lesbian orgy koalas/a./divdivand I laughed and sang a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_Oil""This is Australia"/a./divdivbr //divdivbEdit:/b someone mentioned that it might be a good idea to mention that this post relates to the plan by the Australia federal government to implement an Internet filter/div/divdiv class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7931585-6399943050221437720?l=blog.jessta.id.au' alt='' //div
February 02, 2010
17:33
My generation
» ‎ Jeslog

a href="http://www.news.com.au/why-bosses-hate-gen-y/story-0-1111114179056"Why bosses hate Gen-Y/abr /br /"THE jury is in on Generation Y and the verdict isn't good. Employers say Gen-Ys are short on skills, demanding, impatient and far from loyal, according to a survey"br /br /and why is this the case?br /Because Gen Y has grown up with everyone trying to screw us. We are sceptical and mistrusting because we have to be to survive:divbr /If someone you don't know says "hi" to you on the street, a href="http://plan.org.au/"they want your money/a.br /If someone you don't know calls your phone, a href="http://www.unhcr.org/"they want your money/a./divdivIf someone you don't know rings your door bell, a href="http://www.redcross.org.au/"they want your money/a.br /Email from someone you don't know? it's probably a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erectile_dysfunction"spam/a or a a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance-fee_fraud"scam/a.br /If someone tells you they're not trying to sell you something, they are.br /That number offering sex with hot sluts on the toilet wall, yeah that's either a gay guy or someone's ex-girlfriend.br /Didn't read the fine print? yeah, you're stuck paying for a href="http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/joining-the-gym-stampede-better-read-the-contract-20100111-m1rq.html"$100 a month for something you don't need/a and can't use.br /An offer sounds reasonable? double check it, triple check it, if it still sounds reasonable it's probably a scam.br /If it looks like a bomb, it's probably not a bomb...but how can you be sure? a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_bomb_scare"better get it checked/a.br /br /People told us a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem"the world would end in 2000/abr /and now it's a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1190080/"ending in 2012./abr /Or a href="http://www.climatecrisis.net/"global warming will kill us/abr /or a href="http://www.cdc.gov/flu/avian/"bird flu /abr /or a href="http://www.cdc.gov/H1N1FLU/"swine flu/abr /or a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africanized_bee"killer bees/abr /or a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder"all the bees will die off/abr /or a href="http://jessta.id.au/bees.mp3"dogs with bees in their mouths/a/divdiva href="http://jessta.id.au/bees.mp3"/abr /Advertisements that claim the impossible a href="http://www.cworld.com.au/images_php/r500_aug08.pdf" "weighs nothing, does everything"/a? (sorry, PDF)/divdivbr //divdivDon't let someone buy you a drink, a href="http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/models-drink-spiking-nightmare/story-e6frea83-1111118787810"they might spike it/a.br /Watch the bartender pour your drink or a href="http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/mediadiary/index.php/australianmedia/comments/drink_spiking_story_causes_a_stir/"they might spike it/a./divdivDrugs? yeah, a href="http://www.methproject.org/"they'll fucking kill you/a.br /br /Did you know your shopping cart has germs in it?br /a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonelygirl15"lonelygirl15/a? yeah, she's just an actorbr /a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104868/"the underdogs always win/a? yeah right!br /love conquers all? except a href="http://www.divorcerate.org/divorce-rates-in-australia.html"relationships don't last/a/divdivbr //divdivLie to a population enough, while also giving them the education and tools to find the truth and eventually you just get apathy./divdivbr /In this world where everyone that isn't a close friend is trying to screw you, how can anyone be expected to trust their employer?br //divdiv class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7931585-3068236816012915652?l=blog.jessta.id.au' alt='' //div
January 29, 2010
10:11
Tag Clouds
» ‎ Jeslog

Tag clouds seem to be the current way to display tagged data.br /A cloud of tag words with the more popular ones being bigger and bolder than the less popular ones so as to get your attention.br /br /The problem is that all too often the most popular tags are also the most generic and are therefore mostly useless.br /br /I was just looking at the Freshmeat.net tag cloud, the two top tag words are "internet" and "software development". They are largely more popular than any other tags because they are so generic that they apply to pretty much every project on freshmeat. I've seen this pattern on plenty of other tag clouds as well. br /br /The problem is that Freshmeat allows projects to have multiple tags and there isn't any kind of ranking of how relevant or specific a tag is to the project. Multiple tags are great, tags with rankings are much better.br /br /and that's pretty much all I have to say about that.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7931585-9218365867047308101?l=blog.jessta.id.au' alt='' //div
January 27, 2010
14:13
3D movies
» ‎ Jeslog

I went to Avatar 3D a few weeks ago and saw a lot of previews for more upcoming 3D movies. which means this will be a growing trend in movies.br /br /The 3D in Avatar was awesome, once I stopped feeling ill I started getting a headache, the headache faded as the movie went on which I found interesting.br /br /I suspect the reason for my headache was related to my eyes trying to focus on things that were 3D but out of focus. It's very strange staring at a 3D object that is out of focus and it not coming in to focus.br /As the movie went on my eyes eventually became accustom to following the focus of the movie and my headache went away. So this problem may be just an issue of adoption, eventually we'll all get used to following the focus of 3D movies instead of trying to look at things ourselves.br /Maybe eventually they'll put screens in those glasses and eye tracking systems so things on the screen can be in focus when you look at them.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7931585-2595275602784378496?l=blog.jessta.id.au' alt='' //div
January 08, 2010
19:54
AOP: Aspect orientated programmer
» ‎ Jeslog

a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect-oriented_programming"AOP/a appears to be based on a restricted form of the a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMEFROM"COMEFROM/a directive.br /br /Which isn't too bad, as long as you read the aspects before you read any of the application code.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7931585-1957152011723842053?l=blog.jessta.id.au' alt='' //div
December 02, 2009
5:50
Go Programming language
» ‎ Jeslog

I've tried to write a post about a href="http://www.golang.org"Go/a a few times but mostly it just ends up a rant about how a lot of people haven't taken the time to get to know the language before complaining about it on the mailing list.br /br /I'll just say, Go is awesome, it's like the object-orientated C I always wanted. So instead of writing a pointless rant about it, I'm writing a a href="http://github.com/jessta/gobit"Bittorrent client/a.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7931585-6570127221244032168?l=blog.jessta.id.au' alt='' //div
September 09, 2009
17:36
Warning teens of perils of facebook
» ‎ Jeslog

pa href="http://www.itnews.com.au/News/155270,obama-warns-us-teens-of-perils-of-facebook.aspx"Obama warns US teens of perils of facebook/a/ppThe main goal of privacy is to prevent other people finding out things about you that they don't approve of and discriminating against you because of it./ppIn a world where information travels very slowly this is important. If you apply for a job and are a drug user, and the potential employer finds out about this and has no information about the drug use of other applicants then they might discriminate against you./ppIn a world where information travels quickly and people are very open about their personal details then the person who hides information about themselves is likely to be discriminated against because they are seen as untrustworthy./ppRight now the employers are of a generation where privacy was important and people hid details about their lives, so they see drunken weekend long parties, promiscuity, BDSM, body mods, drug use and internet rants as something weird and different. This generation is growing up knowing more and more about people can see that most things that people do aren't actually that rare at all./pdiv class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7931585-5836288032048174977?l=blog.jessta.id.au' alt='' //div
August 29, 2009
5:45
Reuse, Reduce, Recycle
» ‎ Jeslog

We're doing it all wrong.br /For years to eco friendly bunch have been touting the wonders of recycling or reusing the junk we accumulate. But it's the wrong way of going about it, we don't live on a planet with limited resources, an energy crisis, or a lack of water. We have a massive amount of resources, most of which we use in stupid ways and tie up in landfill.divbr //divdivSustainability is about being able to sustain our current resource usage indefinitely, if anything is put in to landfill at any point(no matter how many times you reusing it) then it's not sustainable./divdivbr //divdivMaking wind chines out of bottle caps, a floating island house out of coke bottles or a cafe out of waste building materials isn't sustainable. If you recycle all your coke bottles in to clothing then you just have to make more coke bottles for the coke and the clothing eventually ends up in landfill anyway.br /br /The problem is our stuff is too well made and lasts too long. We created a disposable culture without the actual disposable products. My daily coffee which takes me 15 minutes to drink has a plastic top that will last for thousands of years. The take-away food container I get my curry chicken don in will last about the same amount of time, it's crazy./divdivbr //divdivWe need more things to be bio-degradable computers, kettles, cars, bottles, can all need a built in life span after which they will break down in compost./divdivBut, it's an interesting problem, if you want something that will last in good condition for more than a few months(warehouse storage before use etc.), then it has all the requirements to last thousands of years./divdivbr //divdivA solution is required./divdivbr /br //divdiv class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7931585-4745902280030366776?l=blog.jessta.id.au' alt='' //div
July 13, 2009
2:35
Privileges of being part of a major minority
» ‎ Jeslog

olliYou're accepted enough that you get to complain that you're not being treated the same as the majority/liliYou actually have the ability to be what you are and tell people about it./liliPeople have some widely accepted stereotype to assign to you instead of getting worried about your sanity or being afraid./liliThere are places, agencies and communities that will support you./liliYou can expect that a section of the majority actually supports your rights.br //liliYou can write lists about the privileges of the majority and people will read them.br //li/olbr /In response to:br /a href="http://lafalafu.com/krc/privilege.html"The Male Programmer Privilege Checklist/a, a href="http://www.amptoons.com/blog/files/mcintosh.html"White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack/a, a href="http://www.amptoons.com/blog/the-male-privilege-checklist/"The Male Privilege Checklist/a, a href="http://www.cs.earlham.edu/%7Ehyrax/personal/files/student_res/straightprivilege.htm"Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack II: Sexual Orientation/a, a href="http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2006/09/26/a-list-of-privilege-lists/"and several more/a.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7931585-2758182811122326017?l=blog.jessta.id.au' alt='' //div
June 29, 2009
14:54
Why free software shouldn't depend on software
» ‎ Jeslog

pIt is dangerous to depend on software, so we need to discourage its use./p pThe problem is not unique to applications; any free implementation of software would raise the same issue. The danger is that somebody is probably planning to force all free software implementations underground some day using software patents. This is a serious danger, and only fools would ignore it until the day it actually happens. We need to take precautions now to protect ourselves from this future danger./p pThe problem is not in the software implementations, but rather in applications written in software. If we lose the use of software, we will lose them too. That doesn't make them unethical, but it means that writing them and using them is taking a gratuitous risk./p pWe should systematically arrange to depend on the free software implementations as little as possible. In other words, we should discourage people from writing software. Therefore, we should not include software implementations in the default installation of GNU/Linux distributions, and we should distribute and recommend non-software applications rather than comparable software applications whenever possible./pdiv class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7931585-7851915638360456775?l=blog.jessta.id.au' alt='' //div
June 15, 2009
1:41
Sustainable effort
» ‎ Jeslog

pI was reading about a href="http://www.mnn.com/technology/research-innovations/blogs/boy-discovers-microbe-that-eats-plastic"how a teenager created/discovered a microbe that eats plastic/a. The article mentioned the a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch"Great Pacific Garbage Patch/a. I'd heard about this before from somewhere so I went and looked it up again.br //ppIt's a real problem and it's not a problem that is going to go away anytime soon and it's going to get much worse before changes will be made because most of the current "environmental action' is about relieving guilt. Someone pipes up about a specific issue, everyone feels guilty for a little while and puts in some effort to "do something" about the problem. But the outcome is usually half-arsed, misdirected and ineffective because real change requires effort and commitment and everybody is too busy doing all the important things(work,school,uni, family, friends, bills, drinking, video games, BBQ, dating, socialising, gossiping etc.) they have to do to worry about something that doesn't directly effect them and probably won't in the near future. It's perfectly understandable, it's how we're programmed, we're only human./ppAccording to my electricity bill my household generates 7.2 tonnes of greenhouse gases every year, we also generate about 3.6 tonnes of household garbage and probably much more rubbish from products that we use and throw out while we're out and about and this is just the direct stuff. There is a massive amount of waste that is produced on our behalf, the creation of every product we use generates some amount of waste.br /br /Yet, we are intelligent, educated people that are aware of these things. We ride bikes, walk or take public transport, we take our own bags when we go shopping, we vote for the greens, we use less than the recommended amount of water per person./ppBut it's actually a lot of effort to reduce your waste output, obtaining food that isn't contained in massive amounts of packaging is effort. You can't get those kind of products at a local supermarket, you have to find a fresh produce market, which is 5 times the distance away for us(further for most people)./ppIt's still not easy enough to be sustainable, and until be work out ways of making being sustainable cheaper and less effort than not being sustainable then things aren't going to change at the rate we need them too./pdiv class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7931585-1521426678480366953?l=blog.jessta.id.au' alt='' //div
June 11, 2009
0:17
Backwards Compatibility and assumptions of maddness
» ‎ Jeslog

I'm a cub scout leader at a local group, this evening another leader was teaching the cubs about the semaphore flag signaling system. That's something I never learnt as a scout so I paid attention.br /a href="http://www.anbg.gov.au/flags/semaphore.html"The semaphore flag signaling system/a is a system for communicating messages over a distance the range of human sight. Two flags are used, with flags in different positions representing different letters of the alphabet(follow the link if you're interested in the specifics). The positions have an intuitive order following the alphabet...all of them except the letter 'J'. The representation of the letter 'J' deviates from the pattern completely. It seemed like madness, why would someone made such an intuitive system but make such an unintuitive edge case? The other leader suggested that the inventor was probably drunk(lol), I thought it might have to do with avoiding some kind of confusion, but I couldn't think of what was special about 'J' that would cause confusion and thus require such a deviation.br /After a short discussion of what made 'J' special, it was suggusted that perhaps the letter 'J' wasn't in the original design and was added to the system later.br /When I got home I looked up the history of the letter 'J' and discovered that indeed this was the answer.br /b"j/b is the tenth letter in the modern Latin alphabet; it was the last of the 26 letters to be added." - a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J"Wikipedia Letter J/abr /The flag signaling system was so old that it actually pre-dates a letter in the alphabet.br /br /This story is a great metaphor for how we tend to jump to the assumption that someone must have been crazy to design something the way they did even when we have no idea what process it had to go through to get to it's current state.br /br /Backward compatibility is a bitch.br /br /- Jesse McNelisdiv class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7931585-1320468562317674550?l=blog.jessta.id.au' alt='' //div
May 05, 2009
13:10
OpenID Providers
» ‎ Jeslog

So I recently discovered stackoverflow, and noticed they use OpenID for login, this lead me to notice that google, yahoo, blogger, flickr, livejournal etc. are all OpenID providers.br /This has lead to a most interesting point about vendor lock-in.br /br /The biggest way in which online providers can lock you in is based on a url. They control the url(or email address). OpenID is about authentication on the basis that you control a certain url.br /br /I have a gmail account, imagine if I used this account as an OpenID provider with a large number of other services...and then I got locked out of my google account. Maybe I violated their terms of service or maybe they just don't like me, they are a private company, it's a free account, they have the right to refuse to do business with me for no reason at all.br /br /This is unlikely, a very stallman style paranoia, but it does give google increasing control which means that you'll be more likely to just go along with any terms of service changes etc. because of the huge hassle in changing providers.br /br /- Jesse McNelisdiv class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7931585-6069980543509717895?l=blog.jessta.id.au' alt='' //div
April 28, 2009
23:08
Geocities
» ‎ Jeslog

I really hate to admit it, but geocities had a bit of an impact on my life.br /In ~1995 my dad brought a new computer with a 9600 b/s dial up modem and after a very short time playing around dialing up to various BBS boards we eventually got internet and email access through the a href="http://www.infoxchange.net.au"infoxchange./abr /At some point my older brother, Eamon, signed up for a geocities account so that he could 'have his own homepage' for his alias "El Phreako" and because making a website in those days absolutely required that you learn HTML that's what he did.br /Being the younger brother and wanting to be involved in anything my big brother thought was important I also wanted 'my own homepage', so he gave me a folders on his geocities page and I started learning HTML. For a while we had a bit of a competition between us about who could make the 'coolest site' which involved me learning about image editing, animiated gifs, making images that could be used as backgrounds and then eventually some Javascript. Most of these skills were gathered from 'view source'ing various websites that had interesting things that I wanted to do.br /br /Eamon eventually lost interest in his site and I moved on to attempt to make sites for other people. I tried making a website for my father's work place, my mum's work place, the housing co-op, none of them ever actually got used by the people they were made for I had fun making them.br /One day my dad wanted me to make a site for a conference, originally the site was just supposed to provide some information about the conference and a schedule and contact details for who to contact to register to attended the conference, which I could easily do. But later they wanted to be able to register for the conference through the webiste. This is something I'd never done before, I'd previously had html forms that submitted to "mailto:" actions so I'd recieve the comma seperated contents of the form in an email, but this wasn't useful to them, they wanted a database.br /br /I never actually finished that website either due to this new requirement, but it did spark me to go and learn how I'd do such a thing. This led me to ASP, then PHP(which was much less confusing) and SQL and configuring Apache/MySQL/PHP to test my scripts.br /This eventually led on to learning more programming languages and environments unrelated to just web development that solved all kind of new and interesting problems I'd come across.br /br /Geocities was a place to get started for the generation of programmers who started off with web development.br /br /- Jesse McNelisdiv class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7931585-7454063837717353329?l=blog.jessta.id.au' alt='' //div
April 25, 2009
4:11
I don't like PDFs
» ‎ Jeslog

pWhen I see a link to a PDF I know it's going to be:/pullilarge document with text packed tightly in to columns/lilian academic paper full of irrelevant information to pad it out to a size worth making a PDF for./li/ulpIf the writer can't explain the concept to me in a paragraph, then it's unlikely a 100 page document is going to make it any clearer. Most of the time it takes reading at least a page to realise that the document is useless to me, or just worthless in general and written by someone who is trying desperately to make it seem like their idea is actually something worth writing about. It's terribly annoying to put in the effort to try and read a PDF and discover it was a waste of time./pp- Jesse McNelisbr //ppbr //ppbr //pdiv class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7931585-7086287307640597754?l=blog.jessta.id.au' alt='' //div
March 17, 2009
16:44
File systems and 'binary blobs'
» ‎ Jeslog

blockquote/blockquoteblockquote"If the only effective way to use your filesystem is to use a database instead, then that indicates that you have not written a filesystem that is useful to typical application developers who enjoy storing things in files rather than binary blobs that end up with an entirely different set of pathological behaviours." - a href="http://www.advogato.org/person/mjg59/diary.html?start=195"Advogato/a/blockquotespan style="font-weight: bold;"What is a file system?/spanbr /A file system is a data structure designed specifically to store binary blobs. The file system doesn't know anything about these blobs except for their location and size. It doesn't expect to know anything else. In a world of 3rd party developers building all kinds of new and unexpected things constantly this binary blob abstraction is very flexible and as efficient as you can get while still having no idea what the structure of the data is.br /br /span style="font-weight: bold;"What is a database?/spanbr /A database is a data structure designed specifically to store structured data. A database knows everything about this data, it know the size of every field and how it relates to other fields. It knows exactly how an application uses this data and so it stores it in the optimal way for the application.br /br /span style="font-weight: bold;"The issue with binary blobs?/spanbr /Binary blobs have a structure, but they are useless if that structure isn't known. ASCII blobs also have a structure, but that structure in very simplistic and has a defined standard. ASCII blobs are just an array of 1 byte numbers, they have no other structural information but other than this they have no common structure across applications. Binary blobs have no standard defined structure, the bytes contained within could be connected and grouped in any number of ways, they can have all kinds of complex structure which means they can be read in random access ways, (instead of just from top to bottom).br /br /br /span style="font-weight: bold;"Back to the original pointbr //spanspanWriting a bunch of tiny files is madness. File systems just aren't designed with that in mind, they are designed to store average sized binary blobs. spanApplication/span developers should take advantage of this and store their data in a binary structure that is optimal for their applications. They should use a standard way to do this(eg. dbm is pretty standard across *nix)/spanspan style="font-weight: bold;".br //spandiv class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7931585-5047716744923804063?l=blog.jessta.id.au' alt='' //div
February 28, 2009
16:08
Erlang and concurrency
» ‎ Jeslog

If you read programing blogs you'll know a few things:br /* LISP is the greatest language of all timebr /* Ruby is the future of everythingbr /* Java is slow and verbose(but apparently Scala isn't)br /* .NET and everything related to it is evilbr /* and Erlang solves all your concurrency issuesbr /br /I have issue with pretty much all those points, but I'm going to touch on Erlang and concurrency first.br /Erlang doesn't actually solve any of your concurrency issues, Erlang specifically avoids all the things that make concurrency a difficult problem, by avoiding all global variables and shared data structures. Shared-Nothing is the easy part. You don't need locks, or the worries that come with them(deadlocks, resource starvation, etc.).br /You can do shared nothing fairly easily in any language, you just need a bunch of threads and a bunch of lock-less queues for message passing between them.br /br /Once your problem domain requires you to have a shared data structure, Erlang isn't useful.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7931585-3701836581154463609?l=blog.jessta.id.au' alt='' //div
February 13, 2009
20:02
Modern Technology 'destroying our brains'
» ‎ Jeslog

I'd like to go over this point because it comes up every now and again. It seems to be mentioned a lot more in relation to computers and mobile devices because they are the latest tech and therefore an easy target.br /br /span style="font-weight: bold;"Technology has been 'destroying' us for thousands of years. /spanbr /ulliThe discovery and use of fire has affected changes in our digestive system so the consumption of raw meat isn't as safe. /liliThe creation of farming has meant that most people no longer have the knowledge required for hunting and gathering, and the centralising of this farm has meant that most people don't even know the skills required for farming./liliThe creation of writing and standard forms of communication have meant that you no longer have to think about and solve problems yourself, you can just ask someone who has already solved that problem./liliThe creation of cars, planes, trains, mass transport, telephones and mass communication has meant that the people and resources you depend on can be 100s of kilometres away(well outside the distances you can easily walk)./li/ulThe creation of the Internet has meant that the implementation details of an idea are just a keyword search away, so I don't remember them because I don't need to. I need to have a vague idea of the concept, enough to know it exists and what kinds of keywords I'd need to search for. Because of this environment my brain prioritises concepts over details, having a vague idea of a huge number of concepts is much more useful to me then knowing the full implementation details of a handful.br /Obviously this would be a problem if the Internet and communication networks suddenly disappeared, I'd be left with a bunch of concepts and no idea how to implement them. But if the Internet, telecommunications and mass transport disappeared I'd also likely starve as all the food I consume comes from places that are mostly out of walking distance and those farms wouldn't be able to function without their deliveries anyway.br /The result of such a thing would mean that our society couldn't support the populations we currently have, some people would die but the others would quickly adapt. You might be surprised at how quickly human beings can adapt to even massive changes in their environment.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7931585-3177590101815118949?l=blog.jessta.id.au' alt='' //div
January 16, 2009
15:04
I'd turn vegetarian....but
» ‎ Jeslog

I'd turn vegetarian, but I can't work out what organisms I should and shouldn't continue to murder. I mean, I have to murder some of them to survive...but which ones? are there organisms that deserve my wrath more than others? Who am I to judge the value of a specific life form?br /br /I don't kill and eat human beings because that would make it rather difficult to interact with them, I try not to kill organisms I've built an emotional connection to, but sometimes I have to for various reasons related to my survival and happiness.br /br /Living requires mass murder, I don't deny it and I try to come to terms with it everyday. But I won't pretend it's not happening.br /br /- Jesse McNelisdiv class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7931585-2478562420677859112?l=blog.jessta.id.au' alt='' //div
October 22, 2008
19:13
Australian proposal for internet filtering
» ‎ Jeslog

The Australian government is currently looking at a proposal to spend span style="font-weight: bold;"approx $125 million/span on filtering the internet for all Australians.br /The proposal gives people two options for their internet connection, by default it will be filtered of everything that isn't 'child safe'(this is the stop allbr /those teenagers from looking at pornography and being serial rapists) or you can opt out of the filter(by registering as a pervert) and only have all 'illegal content' filtered. Not only does this proposal show utter disregard for the Australian people's human right of expression and access to information, it is alsobr /impossible to implement and therefore a huge and complete waste of tax payer money.br /br /Below are a number of options for bypassing the proposed filters:br /If you are :br /ulli a pervert who wishes to watch videos of hot lesbians riding double ended dildos while a monkey watches; or/lili a pedophile who wants to trade naked pictures of underage children; or/lili an underage student who wants to view pornography on the computers in the school library; orbr //lili a terrorist wanting to obtain information about making explosives or wanting to communicate with other terrorists word wide; orbr //lili a person that wants to read information the government might not wish you to read/li/ulbr /span style="font-weight: bold;"You should do the following:/spanbr /If you have the access to install new software on the computer you can install:br /ulliTor(http://www.torproject.org/) or /liliFreenet(http://freenetproject.org/) /li/ulboth will give you anonymous encrypted access to internet content which the government will be unable to filter.br /br /If you're on a school, uni or internet cafe computer and you don't have access to install new software, don't worry you can just use web based proxies.br /Web based proxies are websites that contain a web browser, all content requested through this web page's web browser travels through the web server of that web page and therefore can't be filtered by any of the government filters.br /br /Go to:br /ullihttp://proxy.org/ /lilihttp://www.privax.us/ /lilior search Google for 'web proxies' and find links to web based proxies./li/ulThere are constantly new ones being created so it's unlikely the government will get around to blocking them all.br /br /It is my hope that if this kind of simple information is distributed enough in the population that the government understands what an impossible task it is trying to do that it will drop the plan and instead spend all that money on improving education and hospital services.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7931585-6098462278909117921?l=blog.jessta.id.au' alt='' //div
October 20, 2008
18:59
Web applications
» ‎ Jeslog

So a bunch of people are really unhappy at the changes made to http://google.com/igbr /if enough people complain maybe google will offer a way to get back to the old version...maybe they won't. This is the outcome of using non-free software and web applications.br /br /span style="font-weight: bold;"Anyone using blogger noticed that there is not easy way to export all your previous blog posts?/span Recently I just used wget -m to mirror all my posts but it's not a great format to have the data in.br /As the use of externally hosted web applications becomes more and more common a lot more of these kinds of problems are going to come up.br /span style="font-weight: bold;"br /Is there any way to make a backup of all your documents from google docs?/spanbr /looks like there isn't(actually I found a way, but it only works for documents, not presentations etc, and only exports to html). Again, not a problem if you've only got a few documents, you can download them each one at a time, but if you've been using the service for a while and have 1000s of documents it's going to require a huge investment of time to get all those documents backed up.br /br /span style="font-weight: bold;"Ever noticed that when ever you upload stuff to facebook, myspace etc. you give them permission to reuse that stuff in anyway they wish?/spanbr /They can sell this information on to newspapers, TV etc. even after you've deleted your account. If you become famous for any reason(become a serial killer, get murdered, actor in a movie, etc.) all those photos of you getting drunk at a party or all those blog posts about how at the age of 12 you were angery at your parents are up for sale to the highest bidder and you won't see a cent of that money.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7931585-4876301654464479033?l=blog.jessta.id.au' alt='' //div
September 24, 2008
11:36
The problem of magic
» ‎ Jeslog

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke" title="Arthur C. Clarke"Arthur C. Clarke/abr /I've noticed an issue with a lot of people recently, a barrier that prevents people from understanding things. This barrier is magic.br /br /Otherwise intelligent people make the assumption that they will be completely unable to understand how something works assuming it's some kind of maigc, so they don't even try.br /I recently had a plumbing problem, the washers wore out in my shower, none of us had changed a washer before but one of my housemates went out to a hardware store and brought a pack of washes and had a go at fixing it. He installed a new washer and it lasted 2 days.br /Since it was a 2-pack of washes I tried installing the second washer, this time it lasted 3 days. At first I thought I might have installed it wrong, my housemates decided that we must have been installing it wrong, making the assumption that there must be some kind of complex mechanism that we couldn't understand and that we should call a plumber to do it.br /But there was no way that we could have been installing it wrong, the system isn't that complex there really is only one way to install the washer so it didn't seem likely that we were doing it wrong.br /I went down to a different hardware store and brought slightly more expensive washers, installed them in the same way and this time they're still working fine.br /br /I see this issue with a lot of computer users I work with, once they start assuming some kind of magic is going on it's impossible to teach them anything.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7931585-4830594563989388052?l=blog.jessta.id.au' alt='' //div
August 27, 2008
13:22
IPv6
» ‎ Jeslog

I'd like to comment on an a href="http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2008/8/23/161150/550"article/a on kuro5hin that makes the unsettling prediction that "IPv6 will never be implemented". This is obviously untrue as IPv6 support has been implemented in all the major operating systems and a small number of ISPs are offering support for it.br /The article claims support for it's prediction by the fact that the spec for IPv6 was created in 1992 and has yet to see large scale deployment. There are a number of reasons for this, the most effective one is the economic one.br /There are a number of things that get implemented very very slowly, they are implemented because they are needed and are useful. They get implemented slowly because they aren't profitable. I'd imagine 98% of people with internet connections don't even know what the IP protocol is, they don't understand the advantages of IPv6 and won't see a noticeable difference once it's deployed, this means there is no demand for it and therefore no competitive advantage in spending the large amount of money required to build the infrastructure required to support it.br /But given this, IPv6 will eventually see wide scale deployment because we are running out of IP addresses very fast(I saw a prediction of 2011) and with more and more devices coming online(eg. IP phones) the shortcomings of NAT are becoming more and more obvious.(setting up multiple IP phones behind NAT is mad crazy! skype does all kinds of insanity to get around it).br /br /- Jesse McNelisdiv class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7931585-239241449087711634?l=blog.jessta.id.au' alt='' //div
August 23, 2008
3:02
Code on the Road: Windows Search gets worse!
» ‎ Jeslog

a href="http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2008/08/windows-search-gets-worse.html"Code on the Road: Windows Search gets worse!/abr /I had the same problem as this guy.br /I couldn't find an 'index this folder' thing anywhere, the only solution is to wait for the Windows search indexer to get to that folder...which could be hours.br /You can still use the old search system but it's now slightly more difficult to get to. I imagine it would confuse a lot of normal users, it certainly confused me.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7931585-7286352088245115809?l=blog.jessta.id.au' alt='' //div

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I'd turn vegetarian....but

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