clouds and computing

August 12, 2008

don’t know if you find this but its always when I’m stupidly busy that there are decent clouds around. I mean, not those clouds which are made up of lots of blade servers and apis or a sound mass consisting of statistical clouds of microsounds and characterized first by the set of elements used in the texture, secondly density, including rhythmic and pitch density or even minor inclusions clustered within a diamond but a visible mass of condensed droplets or frozen crystals floating in the atmosphere above the surface of the earth or another planetary body, remember those? the white fluffy ones? this morning we packed 40 days and 40 nightSAH into about 2 hours and as the tide rose against the window to the cellar and drips perferated the skylight there was the distinct possibility that we would all be submerged as the drains of belezebub preceeded to spew themselves up but as soon as it came it went and now we’re left with billions of tiny white clouds the size of my hand blowing madly about the sky some you can touch and some you have to focus on infinity but its almost perfect to spend an afternoon walking around aimlessly with a dslr pointing it at the sky and tripping over emos.

so naturally that coincides with me having too much work to do so I’m not leaving the office until its done which will be friday so as a petulant virtual foot-stamp of annoyance I’m writing about it in a blog nobody will read and it won’t even make me feel better about it so there. AND there’s lots of deranged people staggering about. dammit.

subscription preamble canal

August 8, 2008

remembering a worm child as he plugs a finger into a watery ballast monger then spews the remains of the day over some repulsive unstable old oaf. lest it be an unseemly end to the day before it even begins there’ll be much iprocurement flurries to unburden yourself of trail after trail after trail whereupon the one time you really need to boil an ocean your kitchen doesn’t have a kettle and you can either buy the kettle which won’t work when you change your kitchen or change your kitchen which has the new kettle in go on heave up and fragment but please don’t touch the beastly random apparatus like those 15th century french undercrofts full of boils

its not ok. protect yourself immediately from the tiny chuffs of deliverance by really doing something rather than just shoving a hollow cracked-up billboard of self experience. you know it might mean something to you but really we’re not convinced that you’ve even moved your chair in the last 2 years so it goodbye from me and its goodbye from him and high on mumble its a tedious extraction of all that is ping. next to you waste your notes on pie and mashchester soap features remember the singer that looks like dave and find that they’re actually living in the same tiny bucket. what else might you need. it’ll blow over at random. by 1 o’clock I’ll be melting lard into a ferret.

I would though.

daft punk kills the messenger

August 7, 2008

for 39 seconds the percentage increase on the download status bar of AIM 6.1 was exactly in sync with the beat of viridis quo from the discovery album which might not sound that thrilling but I can tell at 14:17 on a thursday afternoon when the sun has come out at last and I have 4 hours of prototyping to get done thats about as good as it gets unless you count finding a scrobbler for napster which means my charts that noone has the slightest interest in will be most current thankyou and another 30 minutes can pass as a benevolent stoner pushes the last baby dog into the tree

eeuw. short circuit. brings me the head of john the flatfish and I’ll slap the box with a flappy invitation to climb a pole.

thx jst IMing it now

August 5, 2008

finally found a good use for IM which doesn’t involve trying to make people say rude words while on a conference call or goading them into rustling some paper into their headset microphone at inappropriate moments. if you’ve got 15mb of junk you need to move from one place to another there’s surely no better way to eat the bandy width than to vpn into your corporate network, fire up the old aol IM client and transfer said file through multiple firewalls at 27kb/s while simultaneously IMing with the recipient about how they might spend the time between 7% and 8% more productively. in the end we decided it was probably most useful to fill a lever arch box file with envelopes and bics, but that only really took us to 23% so we had to get the photocopier in the back of the car and repurpose some carpet tiles before we were ready to sign off. which I have. l&rZ.

I was going to email it but there’s not nearly so much fun to be had watching the green bar of probability escalate towards zero as chunderbird attempts to throw the packets to the edge and back again while my system freezes in horror at the very thought of it. then again I might even have made a cup of tea or something not being connected to a third party during the exchange which would have meant me dragging myself from my screen which gives me the shivers at the very thought of it away from my screen indeed where would I go.

at which point I’m reminded that I look like a scarecrow.

oh yes life is complete

July 30, 2008

there is a half man half biscuit facebook application

that is all

graphics hardware FAIL

July 29, 2008

ouch. nothing but trouble overly expensive worked for a bit not worth the money xfx 7900gt is finally flashing at me as I try and shift a pixel to the left. its been underclocked for about a year and most acceleration is already turned off so when I get that speckledy vomit dotted around my flat panel which you can actually draw patterns with if you hoik a window around then I know there’s not much life left in the wafers of core memory that have been dropping stuff for months like old shopping bags coming out of bejams. mind you they’re so cheap to replace these days. what I paid 250 notes for a few years ago is now only about 50 quid and I can uberupgrade for about a tun. except I don’t have that kind of money floating around these days do I credit crunch monster munch gone for lunch mortgage payment tescos tescos gas fuel lodging water oil air paper rock scissors bp profits 34 million a day hedge fund negative equity recession confession frank spencer impression.

dammit

spam @ mydomain

July 28, 2008

have you got 1 email address? mwwwuuhahahaahaha. I’ve got billions. I mean, I’ve got a few. well, a few hundred. no, they’re not used to send out bulk gubbins about 1-armed trouser bankers with real estate erection problem lovely 27 girl you like bulgaria pharmacy emily bronte passage v1agr4 authenticate bank proble you log in here crumpled logo snatch. they’re there to stop bulk gubbins about canadian housewares pr0n one-time only special deal business card winner today only personal loan monkey botherer african dirigible implosion banknote fluttering economy bank details please little girl sad story muggings russian syndicate omega chronograph w1n!

since I was a little internet boy all I ever wanted was a domain so I spent all my pocket money on one and immediately blathered loads of meaningless crank to anybody looking for a teasmaid. but, the side-product of being your own domain oligarch is that you can have as many identities as you blummun well like so since day 1 whenever I have entered, registered, purchased, submitted, contributed, discussed, forwarded, passed on, subscribed, or otherwise provided an identity relating to an email address, I’ve created a unique identity. I mean, I’m still me, but the path to my door is slightly different every time. so, even though they are mostly redundant, one-off, single-use, special offer email addresses, there are a few which map to the identities I use most frequently for things like logging in to blog clients to tell people how clever I am that I have unique identities to log in to blog clients.

the benefit and the point of this is that as soon as a unique address becomes a spam target I have the opportunity to deep-six that address and start over with another, but more interestingly, I get to see exactly which of my accounts are the ones that attract the spam in the first place which raises some interesting questions about how those addresses get passed on, when they’re unique to a service, community, business or organization with whom I’ve registered. some I might expect to get infiltrated via a careless bint on a user-created alias that’s left their outlook express client wired into the nigerian backbone. some others just send corporate spam from selected partners and mostly unselected partners who have weaseled their way onto a mailing list they probably bought from a bloke down a back passage. it’s the email addresses that don’t have any reason to be exposed that are the interesting ones. those ones that I have used to register for a service but that are not made public. in theory, the ones that are between me and a specific company, but are used solely by that company and not shared. I know it’s simply not true. and I know which companies have shared it somehow, knowingly or otherwise. and it’s not necessarily the companies you might expect. most recently (i.e. today) it was the company I would least expect and like the most that has somehow let my unique email address known only to them to be shared with someone who, via atlanta.com, via phpwebhosting.com, thinks I might have a bank account with Royal Bank of Scotland AND Nat West AND National Westminter AND Abbey AND Barclays AND Yorkshire Bank and need to be aware of a security error that requires me to update my personal details for ALL of them at the same time. I mean, I’ve seen some convincing spam related to banking before, but this ain’t it.

suffice to say, I’ll be changing the email address I use with the not-aforementioned organization today, but I know at least hundreds of people who will likely get the exact same spam, but won’t know how they got it and won’t be able to do anything about it but will soldier on bravely with that and the other 199 spam emails a day they get to their single email address. that’s just the way the internets is though hint it.

software update FAIL

July 25, 2008

it’s nice when applications update themselves you get that nice feeling that they’re being nice to you in such a way that they might need to protect your from a spam king or a 12-year-old in oregon who’s trawling IP for a quick hack but when they update themselves in such a way that they don’t update themselves because they can’t update themselves because something you’re doing isn’t to their liking but you can’t figure out what that is then that’s just annoying and leads me to waste my time writing this about it which I never would have done and really don’t need to but you know I work from home and I don’t think if I interrupt the cake making downstairs to let everyone know I’m in the middle of a thunderbird software update FAIL that they will be particularly interested in why I might want to update a bird.

my fault for not unchecking the box the says ‘allow me to update yo ass’ but here I am in a FAIL loop that may only stop if I throw something heavy at my computer which began as I was reading mail and google reader at the same time (thunderbird + firefox) which rudely interrupted my perusal of alec’s giles coren comment tree which I finished and then agreed to restart. restart now. can’t. you’ve got something running or you’re not allowed. I’m allowed dammit. ok, I’ll stop firefox I guess you might have dependency on that, ok try again. FAIL. you’re running something or you’re not allowed. I’m allowed allowed allowed. allowed. I’ve only got a pesky sun virus scan running now which is an equally annoying 12:00 popup. I guess that might be doing something you don’t like. I’ll close it, just for you. FAIL FAIL FAIL. you’re running something or are not allowed. ALLOWED ALLOWED ALLOWED. ADM1N15R4T0R HaX0R r0X0r 733t d00d. I’m not running anything now. oh, except YOU, software update FAIL who is now in an infinite FAIL loop because I don’t have anything to stop running and did I mention I’M ALLOWED. I HAZ PERMISSON.

I’m giving you one last go. thunderbird is installing your updates and will start again in a few minutes. good. FAIL! not good. if you think I’m going to reboot just to fix your problem then you’re very wrong. Software Update Failed. DAMMIT. ctrl-alt-del.

LINUX Is coming

July 22, 2008

I stubbed my ubuntu. how it hurts.

netbeans netbeans shared library art thou netbeans I’m creating checkpoints upon checkpoints because look out I installed glassfish and liferay and it all works and the last thing I’m about to do is let 6.1 write some files as the aDminIstrAt0r and mess it all up. pointing myself at the faqing help pages is a backwardly compatible but not currently versionable snail trail so whereupon I might want to try htemeliorating some prototyplasmatic category gubbins I’m not about to poke some students with a crystal stick and fail! their portal. should I quiver about the virtual black box and bone kick solaris I may as well get dem linux transplants and be wholly r0x0r engineer espresso cod4 tweetmeister egg man. I could config -s for breakfast once upon a time but knowledge seeps out like manky pears and I’m really only about to squish out the occasional ant -f these days.

way behind on entropy registers right now. 40 quid just to not turn up is too much for my trouser so another year as a haystack and a promise of more of everything packed up and saved until the new year.

waiting for google street view

July 18, 2008

I know its in our town. everybody’s seen it. except me. and this is becoming a problem. there’s only so long I can stand naked in the office window waiting for it to come by. if it doesn’t come down my street today, I’ll have to take the norse helmet back to the fancy dress shop and take a shower. the full size photo of me that I made with the rasterbator just isn’t the same thing. I mean, it might look like me, but I won’t, in all honesty, be able to point to it in google maps and say ‘look! that’s me! yeah, it’s a norse helmet!’.

I expect the best I can hope for is that it captures a pavement cyclist as it careens past my gate or someone lobbing an empty bottle of corona into the front garden. maybe there’ll be, oh, hang on, is that a black opel? where my helmet? dammit.

Things what I writ