Firefox is constantly gaining marked share (especially here in Europe) and it’s little not-yet-so-popular brother Thunderbird is evolving too. While I’m happy that they’re contributing their part to bring Free Software to the masses, I’m concerned that the quality of their software (especially Firefox under Linux) has decreased in the last months. Here are my top 5 annoyances for Firefox and Thunderbird. Some of them only apply to Debian’s version others are more visible on my fairly old and “slow” (1.5GHz/512MiB) Laptop than on current and therefor faster machines: Firefox

• Firefox seems to have a massive problem with font kerning. Sometimes text is hardly readable since several letters seem to share the same one-letter space. And marking messed up text like this gives funny results:
  
• When visiting pages with a fixed background image like this, scrolling the page down causes massive CPU load and very slow scrolling even on fairly fast computers. Konqueror seems to handle pages like this much better.
• When reloading all tabs at once in a session and you have many (read: more than say, 6) tabs open, Firefox takes all the available CPU resources and pretty much becomes unresponsive until all tabs are loaded.
• Firefox literary freezes while loading very large pages (combine this with the previous annoyance for funny results)
• I still haven’t figured out why Firefox on my laptop (correctly) wants to launch kpdf when I open a .pdf while Firefox on my desktop seems to prefer xpdf. I’ve checked all the available options on both systems and wasn’t able to find the difference in the configuration.

Thunderbird

• The most annoying bug in Thunderbird is Debian specific: it doesn’t open links in a browser anymore for months. Since you have to change some non-obvious configuration to fix this, I assume this is the default behavior for many users out there which are now forced to copy-paste links to their browser.
• Like most other mail clients Thunderbird is also able to manage contacts. But it lacks two important features:
  1. No im/export of vcard: Hmm? Even outlook can do that and vcard is pretty much standard for storing contact information platform independent.
  2. No birthdays associated to contacts: Superb! When combining the Mozilla calendar application with Thunderbird you cannot just import all the birthdays from your contacts (which are stored as vcards of course), no you have to separately create those events which then of course are totally unrelated to the persons in your roster.
• The “search entire message” feature in the search box does absolutely nothing when searching in newsgroups. Why is it enabled then? Or: why does it pretend to do something by hiding all threads when entering something, suggesting no match was found?
• Wasn’t Thunderbird 1.x able to work with RSS feeds? What happened to this feature in Thunderbird 2.x?
• What happened to Thunderbird’s icon?

While I’m still happy with Thunderbird (or Iceddove as we call it here) I’m really searching for an alternative to Firefox (Iceweasel). Unfortunately there is currently no alternative available which fits all my needs. Firefox has two extensions no other browser seems to provide and without which I wouldn’t want to work anymore (I wonder if that was a proper English sentence…):

• Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer: which allows me to store my bookmarks on my (that’s right, not just foxmark’s) server to keep it in sync with all my Firefoxes on various places and machines.
• Adblock + Filterset.G Updater: which keeps me mostly ad-free and automatically supplies me with the newest filter set rules.

While other browsers have some ad-blocking functionality too, they all seem to lack the filter set updater. The next best alternatives are Konqueror and Epiphany but besides the lack of the above features every one of them has it’s own little quirks which doesn’t really motivate me to make the switch yet. But Konqueror is making progress and I’m really looking forward to KDE4 which will hopefully bring a usable web browser so I can finally get rid of Firefox. Update: Ooops, I nearly forgot my favorite pet annoyance of Firefox under Linux: Why does it have to insult the user’s eyes with this ugly toolkit when drawing check boxes, line edits, buttons etc? Firefox under Windows paints stuff like that according to Windows’ current theme, Konqueror under Linux as well, but what does Firefox for years?

I read an interesting post on Advogato about IT recruiting agencies (along with an interesting preface about medical treatment for broken ribs). Their report closely mirrored my experience in many ways. Here are what I consider to be the main points for a job applicant dealing with recruiters:

1. Ask more than you believe that you are worth - the worst they can do is say “no” (and you will feel like a fool if the agency pays you less than half what the client pays because you didn’t ask for enough).


2. Put lots of terms in your CV that will work for grep or other searches. A human who reads your CV will know that if you describe 3 years of Linux sys-admin experience that you can do BASH shell scripting and sys-admin work on other versions of Unix. But if a search doesn’t match it then the typical recruiting agent won’t offer you the position. I have idly considered saying things like “Perl (not Pearl) experience” to catch mis-spelled grep operations.


3. Recruiting agents will frequently demand that you re-write your CV to match a position that they have open, they will say things such as “you claim 3 years of shell scripting and Perl experience but I don’t see that on your CV” and insist that you re-write it to give more emphasis to that area.


4. Most recruiting agents are compulsive liars and don’t understand computers, you have to deal with the fact that to get most of the better paying positions you need to have an incompetent liar represent you. Avoid the stupid liars though. For example I once refused to deal with an agent who told me about his plans for stealing the CV database from the agency he worked for and selling it to another agency - not because he was shifty in every possible way, but because he was so stupid as to boast about such things immediately after meeting me on a train.


5. Expect that recruiting agents won’t understand the technology. If you politely and subtly offer to assist them in writing a letter to a client recommending you then they will often accept. Why would they go to the effort of assessing your skills and writing a short letter to the client describing how good you are when you can do that for them? On one particularly amusing occasion I was applying for a position with IBM and the recruiting agent had been supplied with a short quiz of technical skills to assess all applicants - they gave me the answer sheet and asked me to self-assess (I got 100% - but it was an easy test and I would have got the same result anyway).


6. Some levels of stupidity are so great that you should avoid dealing with the agent (and possibly the agency that employs them). Being unable to view a HTML file is one criteria I have used since 1999 (every OS since about 1998 came with a web browser built in). Another example is an agent who tried to convince me that “.au” is not a valid suffix for an email address (I was applying for a sys-admin job with an ISP). Job adverts that mis-spell terms (such as Perl spelled at Pearl) are also a warning sign.


7. Gossip is important to your business! Some agencies will pay you what you earn and merely terminate your contract when things go wrong. Other agencies will refuse to pay you when things go bad, or even demand that paid money be returned and threaten legal action. Talk to other contract workers in your region and learn the goss about the bad agencies. Also track agency name changes, when a bad agency changes name don’t be fooled.

When applying for a position advertised by an agency you will ideally start by seeing an advert with a phone number and an email address. The best strategy in that case seems to be to send your CV with a brief cover letter and then about 5 minutes after your mail server sends the message to their mail server you phone them. I found that I got a significantly higher success rate (in terms of having the agent send my CV to the client) if I phoned them when my CV arrived. Sometimes a fax number is advertised, unless there is some problem that prevents sending a document via email (such as the agency having a broken mail server) then do not FAX them. A faxed document will have to be faxed on to the client and will look bad after the double-fax operation and will prevent the agent from grepping it. Rumor has it that agents will often post fake adverts for the purpose of collecting CVs (so that they can boast to clients In most situations a recruiting agent should insist on meeting you for an interview before sending your CV to a client. The only exception is if you are applying for a job in another country. Meeting an agent at a restaurant or other public place is not uncommon (often they want to meet you while travelling between other locations and sometimes their main office is not in a good location). I suspect that some agencies start with a “virtual office” and perform all their interviews in public places (this doesn’t mean that they will do a worse job than the more established agencies). If an agent is prepared to recommend you to a client without meeting you then they are not doing their job properly. It used to be that there were enough agencies pretending to do their job that you could ignore the agencies that will recommend any unseen candidate. But now an increasing number of agencies do this and if you want a contract you may have to deal with them. When an agency has a fancy office keep in mind that they paid for it by taking money from people like you! For contract work a recruiting agent is not your friend, they make their money by getting you to accept less money than the client pays them - the less they pay you the more money they make. A common claim is “we only take a fixed percentage of what the client pays”, but when you ask what that percentage is they refuse to answer - I guess that the fixed percentage is 50% or as close to it as they can manage.

Share This

I read an interesting post on Advogato about IT recruiting agencies (along with an interesting preface about medical treatment for broken ribs). Their report closely mirrored my experience in many ways. Here are what I consider to be the main points for a job applicant dealing with recruiters:

1. Ask more than you believe that you are worth - the worst they can do is say “no” (and you will feel like a fool if the agency pays you less than half what the client pays because you didn’t ask for enough).


2. Put lots of terms in your CV that will work for grep or other searches. A human who reads your CV will know that if you describe 3 years of Linux sys-admin experience that you can do BASH shell scripting and sys-admin work on other versions of Unix. But if a search doesn’t match it then the typical recruiting agent won’t offer you the position. I have idly considered saying things like “Perl (not Pearl) experience” to catch mis-spelled grep operations.


3. Recruiting agents will frequently demand that you re-write your CV to match a position that they have open, they will say things such as “you claim 3 years of shell scripting and Perl experience but I don’t see that on your CV” and insist that you re-write it to give more emphasis to that area.


4. Most recruiting agents are compulsive liars and don’t understand computers, you have to deal with the fact that to get most of the better paying positions you need to have an incompetent liar represent you. Avoid the stupid liars though. For example I once refused to deal with an agent who told me about his plans for stealing the CV database from the agency he worked for and selling it to another agency - not because he was shifty in every possible way, but because he was so stupid as to boast about such things immediately after meeting me on a train.


5. Expect that recruiting agents won’t understand the technology. If you politely and subtly offer to assist them in writing a letter to a client recommending you then they will often accept. Why would they go to the effort of assessing your skills and writing a short letter to the client describing how good you are when you can do that for them? On one particularly amusing occasion I was applying for a position with IBM and the recruiting agent had been supplied with a short quiz of technical skills to assess all applicants - they gave me the answer sheet and asked me to self-assess (I got 100% - but it was an easy test and I would have got the same result anyway).


6. Some levels of stupidity are so great that you should avoid dealing with the agent (and possibly the agency that employs them). Being unable to view a HTML file is one criteria I have used since 1999 (every OS since about 1998 came with a web browser built in). Another example is an agent who tried to convince me that “.au” is not a valid suffix for an email address (I was applying for a sys-admin job with an ISP). Job adverts that mis-spell terms (such as Perl spelled at Pearl) are also a warning sign.


7. Gossip is important to your business! Some agencies will pay you what you earn and merely terminate your contract when things go wrong. Other agencies will refuse to pay you when things go bad, or even demand that paid money be returned and threaten legal action. Talk to other contract workers in your region and learn the goss about the bad agencies. Also track agency name changes, when a bad agency changes name don’t be fooled.

When applying for a position advertised by an agency you will ideally start by seeing an advert with a phone number and an email address. The best strategy in that case seems to be to send your CV with a brief cover letter and then about 5 minutes after your mail server sends the message to their mail server you phone them. I found that I got a significantly higher success rate (in terms of having the agent send my CV to the client) if I phoned them when my CV arrived. Sometimes a fax number is advertised, unless there is some problem that prevents sending a document via email (such as the agency having a broken mail server) then do not FAX them. A faxed document will have to be faxed on to the client and will look bad after the double-fax operation and will prevent the agent from grepping it. Rumor has it that agents will often post fake adverts for the purpose of collecting CVs (so that they can boast to clients In most situations a recruiting agent should insist on meeting you for an interview before sending your CV to a client. The only exception is if you are applying for a job in another country. Meeting an agent at a restaurant or other public place is not uncommon (often they want to meet you while travelling between other locations and sometimes their main office is not in a good location). I suspect that some agencies start with a “virtual office” and perform all their interviews in public places (this doesn’t mean that they will do a worse job than the more established agencies). If an agent is prepared to recommend you to a client without meeting you then they are not doing their job properly. It used to be that there were enough agencies pretending to do their job that you could ignore the agencies that will recommend any unseen candidate. But now an increasing number of agencies do this and if you want a contract you may have to deal with them. When an agency has a fancy office keep in mind that they paid for it by taking money from people like you! For contract work a recruiting agent is not your friend, they make their money by getting you to accept less money than the client pays them - the less they pay you the more money they make. A common claim is “we only take a fixed percentage of what the client pays”, but when you ask what that percentage is they refuse to answer - I guess that the fixed percentage is 50% or as close to it as they can manage.

Share This

Some weeks ago we started developing KTrace, a graphical KDE frontend for strace. We quickly managed to have something which worked, but development stalled after that. Today we are holding the first KTrace developers meeting to make some decisions about the next features that will be coded. If you want to propose a feature that you would like to see in KTrace (or just a better name proposal), feel free to write a comment

There was a time that a small-ish (ca. 70 office workplaces) company bought almost all of its IT products from Dell, with 3 year on-site warranty to be on the safe side. There was a time when all was well and, in the rare cases that something needed to be replaced, a gentlemen would arrive and magically fix all that needed fixing. There was also a time, a bit later, when this enterprise wishes it could get rid of all the remaining Dell devices immediately (but of course you don't buy 100-odd desktops, servers and printers just because you no longer like the vendor.) One, if I buy a 4h-reaction-time warranty contract and tell them that I have a problem and that probably a part needs replacing, I don't expect to have to play ticket ping pong for a whole week until they agree that there even is a problem. Two, if there is a problem with a range of computers (leaking condensers) and more than half of our workstations are affected, I'd expect Dell to care about this and be at least ready to discuss mass-replacing the faulty motherboards in one go instead of having to send a tech every three days for yet another case of this problem. I'd think it's cheaper for them as well.... Three, not that I really care, since it's covered under warranty so I don't pay for it, but if I have two defective computers at the same site I'd expect one tech to fix them both, not two techs to come out (missing each other by 5 min) to fix one computer each. Again, you'd think they'd do the maths on how much these techs cost. Four, wouldn't it be nice if you could buy two laser printers and the toner cartridges would even be the same? HP, for example, manages to use the same toner cartridges for a whole range of printer models. Dell apparently can't do this. (Admittedly, I've only seen it in the case of the 5100cn/5110cn printers, and sometimes there are reasons to change the toner cartridges. But then I'd expect the printer model to be significantly different. Those two printers look exactly the same from outside, and the innards also look identical at first glance, including the toner cartridges, except for some coded plastic pieces ensuring that the cartridges don't match.) Five, wouldn't it be nice if toner cartridges could be bought at your regular office supply store, where we buy every other brand of cartridges? No, of course nobody but Dell themselves sells Dell supplies. Since supplies are not dealt with by IT stuff, this is really annoying. Especially beacuse Dell has repeatedly, for unclear reasons, disabled our login to the Dell online store (and we can't just create a new login as we have special discounts, so our account needs some special handling.) Six, how long is the usual life expectancy of a Laptop battery? For the Inspiron 9300 80Wh and the 53Wh battery, it's apparently 18 months, after which the battery doesn't charge anymore or only holds power for 2 minutes. Dell customer support confirms this is normal behaviour for these batteries and this is not covered under warranty accordingly. What now? Printers: HP. Desktops, Displays and Laptops: Lenovo. Servers: IBM. Network Switches: D-Link. Not sure if these choices are ok, but so far we've had less problems than with Dell. But of course the Dell stuff is older and so more prone to failure, so probably we'll just have to re-evaluate 3 years from now.

The API for asynchronous device communication under Linux is totally on crack. The only notification for completed requests is a realtime signal (for which there seems to be no allocation method -- let's hope that everyone else in the process checks whether a signal is set to "default" before using it); however these are difficult to get synchronised into your event loop. It appears as if people are supposed to write kernel modules instead of talking to USB devices from userspace. I wonder if that is desired, since having a stable userspace API would make writing closed-source drivers easier; however I see a kernel driver as overkill in most cases -- all it ever does is copy data around. Maybe it would make sense to have a simple template driver that can be set up with a request from userspace and some udev trick.

Here's what I wrote on other people's sites last week:

Drake.org.uk: Welcome back..

MartynD reboots his blog yet again. This time with added eyetests.

Two Questions for All Serious Free Software Contributors

I answered, as did many others.

ProBlogger Redesign - Bedding Down for the Night

Much easier-to-read, but I still had an enhancement suggestion.

Blowing bubbles niq's soapbox

Comment on house-building and house-owning in England today.

gravityboy: This Is My Good Free Software Experience

I think the GPL is useful for things other than programs and CC is confusing about DRM for everything.

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho I am going to rank MJ Ray low from now on

Commented more on my blog, but also directly. The criticism might be fairer if the SPI ballot were secret, but it isn't.

WEBlog -- Wouter's Eclectic Blog - Voting tactics

Is this about SPI? How is IRV broken?

Constitutional amendment: reduce the length of DPL election process

Amending the amendment proposal - got enough seconds to reach the ballot, for a change.

Amendment to: reduce the length of DPL election process

This one doesn't look like it will get onto the ballot. Informative subthread on combination of amendments.

Here's some of what I read last week:

talks with Linus Torvalds

He's much ruder than I am, but can get away with it because he's done more.

The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Richard Stallman - Edward O'Connor

He's much ruder than I am, but doesn't get away with it because he's done more.

Mayor wants London to copy Paris bike rentals News This is London

I saw those bikes in Paris. Seemed like a good idea.

Parisian-style hire bicycles to beat London traffic jams - Independent Online Edition > Transport

Slightly inaccurate report.

Hacking gadflies: Open Document Format

It's almost September again.

dgh: Bike power

Interesting idea.

apenwarr's log

quite a funny letter to google

Bristol Climate Protesters En-Route to Camp

My legs hurt after cycling only 6 miles yesterday. Not sure what I did wrong.

The Weston Mercury - Call to 'have a say' on the future of Britain

Pensioners to save country. Or not.

BBC NEWS Technology UN's website breached by hackers

Can't be bothered to check netcraft.

Little's Log: North Norfolk Councillor defects to UKIP

Little's still raging against the media.

Inspired by Joey's wiki compiler I've been toying with a blog compiler. Very similar idea - you give it a directory of text files, and it creates a static blog complete with tagging support, RSS feeds, and all that good stuff. Feel free to have a look - probably the demo is the most interesting bit. The only obvious downside is that people cannot easily leave comments... However that might be a plus for some people, especially those that don't want to touch MySQL / PHP / etc

Productive week-end on the Debian front: 10 uploads including 3 new upstream versions, 3 newly orphaned packages and 2 packages converted to quilt.

Apart from that, one of my favorite movies. And sukiyaki.

When I got myself a widescreen LCD monitor, it didn't quite work as expected. The image showed up on the screen, but squeezed down to the wrong format. Fixing it was not trivial. Apparently, X uses the video mode supplied by the monitor through EDID, but the video mode is wrong. Whether this is because the monitor sends the wrong information, or because of a limitation in the EDID format, I don't know. Anyway, here's how I got it working. Note that I have an Intel graphics card and I use the new "intel" video driver. It might not work for your particular configuration. First, I generated a modeline with the cvt command. CVT means "Coordinated Video Timing", and it's some kind of VESA standard. Run the cvt command with the horizontal and vertical resolution as arguments:

$ cvt 1680 1050
# 1680x1050 59.95 Hz (CVT 1.76MA) hsync: 65.29 kHz; pclk: 146.25 MHz
Modeline "1680x1050_60.00"  146.25  1680 1784 1960 2240  1050 1053 1059 1089 -hsync +vsync

Now, put the modeline in the Monitor section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier  "Generic Monitor"
    # 1680x1050 59.95 Hz (CVT 1.76MA) hsync: 65.29 kHz; pclk: 146.25 MHz
    Modeline "1680x1050_60.00"  146.25  1680 1784 1960 2240  1050 1053 1059 1089 -hsync +vsync
    #
    Option "Preferred Mode" "1680x1050_60.00"
EndSection

The Preferred Mode option is needed so that the mode is actually chosen. In my case, I have a laptop, so there's also a built-in display, but the mode will not be used on it (the card knows the supported resolutions somehow). In order to be able to switch to a higher resolution when initially using a lower one, the framebuffer needs to be initialized to be big enough. This can be done in the Display subsection:

Section "Screen"
    ...
    SubSection "Display"
        Virtual 1680 1050
    EndSubSection
EndSection

Here's an interesting thing: the old Modes directives are not needed anymore. They are ignored by the intel driver. You only need one generic Display subsection. That's about it. The display should work automatically if it is connected when X is started. If it is connected afterwards, you can enable it with:

xrandr --output VGA --auto

It can be disabled with:

xrandr --output VGA --off

At least when running Gnome, the window manager automatically fits everything to the right screen size. See the xrandr(1) manual page for more options.

The gloom from my last entry has more or less lifted. To refresh, my desktop died shortly after a lightning storm; no definite cause and effect relationship, but a strong correlation. I shut it down, and after the next reboot I got scary errors all over the place, starting with this disclaimer:

HARDWARE ERROR. This is *NOT* a software problem!
Please contact your hardware vendor

Now, that may be true, or it may not be. Certainly the disclaimer is sensible, since machine checks are usually caused by failing components. And it persisted for most of a day every time I tried to boot the machine, but there was quickly a new addition: different scary errors on ata1. And it got rapidly worse. On Friday morning, having let the machine cool and relax overnight, I brought it up on a rescue CD and could get at /boot (a separate partition), but not at /etc (from inside my RAID/LVM setup). I went out and bought a new SATA drive and attempted to recover /boot onto it, but I had waited too long; at this point I could still get at the partition table, but not the contents of /boot. Some things to note here.

• As far as I know, you still need a separate /boot if your root uses RAID + LVM.
• Therefore your /boot is obviously not backed up by your carefully constructed RAID.
• But that’s fine because all that really mattered was your kernels, and you have them still lying around on your mirrored disk. Right?
• Of course, right. But dynamically generated initrds, while technically awesome, are awkward to recreate from a rescue CD. Especially a 32-bit rescue CD when your root filesystem is all 64-bit.
• It can’t be hard to find a rescue CD with a 64-bit kernel, right? No, not right either. I did eventually find a 50MB Gentoo install CD that worked serviceably well.
• Your laptop has a convenient CD burner, right? No, not right, turns out it doesn’t write CDs after all. Oh well, Windows file sharing plus the wireless plus the Mac Mini in the other room… there you go.
• You didn’t need anything else from /boot, right? Like your carefully constructed voodoo incantation to boot Windows… whoops… hopefully you remember how that worked…

So, after some futzing around I was able to boot the Gentoo rescue CD, partition the new hard drive, mount the remaining disk in degraded mode, reinstall the handy Debian packages of my kernels, have it magically recreate ramdisks, and then reinstall grub. By the way, --no-floppy obviously means something different to grub than it does to me, as most of the reinstalling grub process was still spent waiting for my non-existant fd0 to time out. Then I added the new disk to the array, let it reconstruct for two hours, and rebooted. Lo and behold… no more machine checks! I am a happy camper. Despite the tribulations above I came out remarkably well, since I seem to have lost nothing but my grub menu.lst file. And now I have rdiff-backup configured to back up /boot onto the array in case I ever need to do this again.

Hah! Usually I don't like to post when I'm travelling so that I don't advertise when a good place to break into my house is. But hey, since we don't actually live anywhere anymore...

Angie, Leif and I are at Opus and ConCentric cooking with Chris Wulff and Sera Star! We're having lots of fun. Everyone's giving Leif all the lovin' he wants, and there's still time for both swimming, worships, and all the cooking that needs to happen. After the chaos that was last year's kitchen, it's not hard to improve on it, but I think we're managing to recreate the type of kitchen environments that got me into hanging out in the kitchen in the first place.

I miss lots of you who are usually here but aren't this year. Hugs&Love to y'all!

I maintain the Debian package of mkelfimage, a tool to produce Etherboot images for use with thin client environments such as LTSP, which recently entered the Debian archive. The key difference between mkelfimage and the aging mknbi is that mkelfimage does not reply upon any traditional BIOS call to produce the bootable code in the ELF image, which makes it possible to boot thin clients with LinuxBIOS as their firmware, such as the Linuterm and several other products designed by Artec. mkelfimage accomplishes its BIOS-less operation using a simplified kexec implementation. However, this also means that explicit support for each architecture must be implemented with Assembler code. As it currently stands, the upstream tarball only includes support for i386 and ia64. Since amd64 boots in 32-bit mode, it should also work there, but this is untested. This leaves support for several architectures completely uncovered for. LinuxBIOS developers have taken over the upstream code and they welcome patches towards improving support for other architectures and towards cleaning up the autoconf implementation currently in use.

James Purser writes about the current plans for Internet filtering in Australia and concentrates on the technical issues (whether it will degrade the ISP service) and the issue of who’s moral standards should be enforced for the entire country. But the fact is that children have never had any problem accessing porn. When I was in grade 4 at primary school (~9yo) a group of boys decided to walk to the local shopping centre at lunch-time and I joined them. At the shopping centre the other boys read Playboy (that was before such magazines were required to be displayed in sealed plastic bays). I didn’t read Playboy because there were some electronics magazines that were more interesting. When in grade 6 (~11yo) a friend told me about his parents video collection which featured fellatio and sodomy. I don’t recall whether he offered to show me the videos but being a good friend I’m sure he would have done so if I had asked. In the early years of high school some boys ran a black-market for second-hand porn magazines (ick), they also sold new magazines that were significantly more expensive. When in year 12 digital porn was just becoming popular and the exchange of porn on floppy disk began. I’m sure that now children use USB sticks to exchange porn that they get from the Internet or other sources. When I was in year 10 a female dancing instructor ceased working for the school after an up-skirt picture of her was stuck on a notice-board (I guess that her resignation was related to the picture but can’t be sure). The evidence that I witnessed while at school is that 15yo boys are prepared to photograph unwilling women and exchange the pictures, and that the exchange and sale of all manner of porn is not uncommon at school (including primary school). I don’t think that the schools I attended were in any way unusual in this regard. When I was at school cameras were large. Unless you had a polaroid camera (which was even larger) the film had to be developed - and the staff at the photo company were potential witnesses. I expect that these factors significantly decreased the amount of such activity. Now a significant portion of children have a mobile phone and it seems that a built-in camera is a standard feature in all new phones now. Digital cameras (which have much better quality than phone-cameras) are becoming quite cheap. It’s widely regarded that giving a teenager a mobile phone is good for their safety (and it certainly makes it easier to discover where children claim to be) and it’s also widely regarded that a digital camera is a good toy (babies as young as 2 are often given the old camera when their parents get a new one). We should expect that the number of children who have digital cameras to rapidly approach 100% of children who desire them. Given these factors it seems to me that it would be a good idea to allow teenage boys access to better quality porn than they are unable to produce (with either willing or unwilling subjects). It has already been shown that increased access to porn reduces the incidence of rape. I expect that the same also applies to the issue of making porn, people who have good access to porn will be less inclined to make their own. There is some nasty porn out there. If they were to try and prevent access to porn that is illegal under Australian law (IE pictures of children, animals, rape, etc) then I don’t think that anyone would object. But preventing access to soft porn such as Playboy (which is so tame that it’s hardly porn by modern standards) is a really bad idea if it will increase the risk of up-skirt photos and the production of child rape movies. Let’s be sensible and accept the fact that children who want to see porn will see it and focus our attention on what type of porn will be seen by children and whether the “actors” are consenting adults. PS I spent several years living in Amsterdam and working as a sys-admin for ISPs there.

Share This

I'm running Network Manager on my Ubuntu laptop. It's a really neat tool when it comes to selecting an open wireless network when traveling, but it has one major flaw: you cannot tell it to prefer some "homebase" among a swarm of available Access Points; it insists upon using the first AP it finds, regardless. Has anyone figured out a solution to this common situation? Meanwhile, the OpenVPN front-end that Network Manager offers only covers a fraction of available parameters, which means that I cannot use it to connect to my dayjob's LAN from outside the company, because the few Windows clients we have connecting to it expect a VPN to work in a specific way and cannot adapt to non-Microsoft approaches to VPN concept, which means that we Ubuntu users are the ones who have to adapt. Thus, the OpenVPN front-end would need to be able to configure MTU, MSS and other arbitrary parameters supported by OpenVPN. Looking at various BTS, I notice that I'm not the only one who needs this. Are Network Manager developers listening? :-)

Note to self: It's a bad idea to change a list in the middle of a loop iterating over it. The following doesn't work:

for item in list:
    if foo:
        list.remove(list)

And must be replaced with:

for item in list[:]:
    if foo:
        list.remove(list)

On the wrong way, the loop doesn't execute on items positioned immediately after the removed ones. This has cost me a big amount of debugging time...

While investigating planet formation (to justify support complement a PhD proposal on ocean planets), I found this discussion over at physicsforums following a blog entry by Dr Steinn Sigursson. (He uses Planet X in his posts but that is too frequently linked with the dwarf planet Xena Eris, and besides, Pluto has been demoted, so its Planet 9 we're looking for ). The question is, how was our solar system created ?

"Looks like the outer solar system, with late heavy bombardment, would have come together nicely if there was another Neptune out there to begin with."

Basically, it appears as though there is a planet or substellar companion star out in the Oort cloud. This is not likely to be the Nemesis object of Hut's/Muller's theory, but would have been responsible for the Kuiper belt. Most of the discussion is about brown dwarfs, but following links leads to a paper by Gomes et al., simulating the possibility of outer Neptunes or Jupiters at 4000 AU or 5000 AU. The thread is all about the dynamics of such bodies, but what would they look like?

• How bright would they be? Not very. Grabbing some used envelopes and the usual definition, we get magnitude 27 for a Jupiter at 5000 AU, or 29 for Neptune at 4000 AU. The limiting magnitude for Hubble is about 30; finding one would be hard at those brightnesses. This is from reflected (visible) light from the Sun (solar irradiance at 5000 AU is down to 5 uW / m2 !); perhaps it might radiate a bit more from internal heat in the infrared.
• Whats the temperature? At the surface, this depends on how much sunlight it absorbs and how much it reflects: its albedo. Using albedos of 0.3 ( typical for an asteroid, "dirty snowball; see eg. Delbo et al.) , 0.39 for Earth, or 0.8 for clean ice, we get effective temperatures of 2.5 to 3.5 Kelvin ( -270 ° C)

Now, Hydrogen freezes solid at 14K, Helium is liquid at 4K. So we're talking about a liquid helium ocean on top, with no atmosphere worth speaking of. But Could it sustain life? Not as impossible as it seems. Ehrenreich and Cassan point out that an Ice Giant could host a liquid layer underneath an ice shell surface, heated by radiogenic energy, that could last for billions of years before freezing. So where would it be? This is the time to submit a grant proposal for more envelopes ... Tags astronomy, ocean-planets, planet-formation, neptune, ice-giants

Here's a new release of DebTorrent, containing only bug fixes. This release fixes 2 bugs, one minor, and one serious. The serious bug would probably have caused anyone using a recent (0.7) version of APT to experience hangs with APT saying "waiting for headers". If you had this issue and you're using APT 0.7, please update to this new version. If you had this issue with an older version of APT, please report it as a bug. Agian, if you do find any bugs or have any problems, please submit them to the DebTorrent mailing list, or come and find me (camrdale) on IRC in the #debtorrent channel on OFTC. Here's the changelog:

• First debian package release (again) (Closes: #428005)
• fixed: cached HTTP 404 responses get passed properly to APT
• fixed: downloading the same file from a previous torrent works now

My systems run cron-apt with an hourly rhythm, running off ftp2.de.d.o. Once in a while, some of them complain about invalid signatures on release files:

CRON-APT LINE: /usr/bin/apt-get update -o quiet=2
W: GPG error: http://debian.debian.zugschlus.de lenny Release: The following signatures were invalid: BADSIG
A70DAF536070D3A1 Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key (4.0/etch) 
W: GPG error: http://debian.debian.zugschlus.de sid Release: The following signatures were invalid: BADSIG
A70DAF536070D3A1 Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key (4.0/etch) 
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems

This usually happens in the late evening CEST. In the next cron-apt run, things are fine again. What’s going on here? Is this part of a mirror update process where the Release and Release.gpg files are inconsistent? Any idea how to get rid of these error messages?

From time to time, especially when I move to a new city, I throw myself into craigslist to check out the local scene and flavor of the classified ads. Today I came across what I think is about the most comprehensive equal opportunity statement ever:

We are a results oriented, goals driven team with a strong commitment to excellence. We hire the best and the brightest individuals without regard to race, color, religion, creed, age, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy, national origin, ancestry, marital status, veteran status, citizenship status, alienage, mental or physical disability, genetic predisposition or genetic carrier status, on the basis of knowledge or belief that the employee or applicant has tested positive for AIDS, AIDS-related complex or HIV, or any other basis protected by federal, state or local law. TheLadders.com is an equal opportunity employer.

Two questions: 1) Has anyone seen a list so extensive? 2) Are they missing anything? So if you are a Puerto Rican, Dominican, twice-divorced lesbian, polyamorous, pregnant, into a mix of Santeria and Catholicism, Iraq war vet wheel chairbound, not quite a citizen bc you enlisted through Mexico, mildy autistic, with sickle cell anemia, and are a kick ass Linux Wizard/system administrator, please, do apply.