Words can never describe how.. how very... how very something that image is.
From the ever-wonderful Ectoplasmosis!
If you're a BT Internet customer you may see a page like this come up in the next few days while you browse the Internub:
My advice to you would be to say 'no' and keep saying 'no' until you've changed your Internet service provider. Regardless of whether you say yes or no, if that page has appeared at any point then all un-encrypted HTTP (web) data you request on the Internet will be sent through Phorm's systems.
What's the problem with that? Phorm used to be known as 121media - peddlers of spyware, rootkits and all kinds of nasty shit, and BT is sending them every link you click, and every page you view.
Make you feel all warm and fuzzy? No. Me neither.
More at Dephormation, BadPhorm, and NoDPI.
The arches has long been the venue of choice if you want to go out and get completely fucked.
Apparently, some took this more literally than others.
I want to know who exactly goes to a night called 'Burly', then complains to the police after witnessing indecent acts. That's kind of the point, isn't it?
Next we'll be having Inside Out punters complaining that the music's really loud in there, or that there's people taking drugs.
Evening all. Long time.
David Blaine hanging upside down? I think El Reg says it best: a twatdangle.
Just string the weird fucker up, upside down or otherwise, and leave him there.
Update: There's now a twatdangle website.
I'm trying to get a Googlewhack for 'chunkus molunkus'.
Don't ask.
ILikeJam's gonna be suffering some downtime while I move all my shit into the new Hotel du Geek (Partick, baby. Real deal. Shawlands is not the new West End, and you know it). I've got me some swift broadband off of the very nice people at Be, so downloads from here should be a bit faster once we're back up and running. I may even put up something worth downloading. No promises.
Much to my chagrin, the router Be send you is, to put not too fine a point on it, shite. Crap web interface, keeps losing settings, and for reasons yet unrevealed, it refuses to forward ports properly. Absolutely nonsense.
I've got a Linksys router I rescued from the 'damaged goods' bin at work (now working after a firmware upgrade), but it doesn't boot automatically when the mains is switched on, so it's not a lot of use to me either.
So now I'm 63 quid lighter after a trip to Amazon for a Netgear effort (a DG834GT, if it matters to you). Hopefully all my woes will be at an end.
Anyway, the flat's filling up to a satisfying level of geekery - one server, one desktop machine and a router and we're all set. Good Times.
Are you getting shafted by your ISP?
Why yes. You probably are.
Particularly injurious to me is that my ISP throttles encrypted traffic, which may explain why dialling into work is so painfully slow. What a bunch of arseholes.
I was DJing at John and Colin's party in Ad-Lib on Friday, which was nice. It's been years (literally) since I've played records in front of more people than the teddy bear that's jammed down the back of my wardrobe, so it was cool to break out some choons for folk to nod their heads to.
Unfortunately, most of my set was played with the mixer volume set waaaayyyy low and the sound system set waaaayyyy high, so it sounded crap until we got the barman to turn the amps down. Right at the end of my set. Never mind, at least I got The Resident out while it was sounding good.
Si brought his Traktor setup, since he's too lazy to use vinyl any more. Impressive stuff.
Equally impressive was the monitoring for the decks - a big fat PA speaker, hooked up to the booth output (yay!) on the DJM 500 (yay! we love the 500) for fingertip deafness control.
Unimpressive was the way that the bar sound system was louder than the dance floor system.
Anyway, this gets me to thinking - maybe a page on basements/bars you can hire out for wee DJ nights is in order. So far I can think of:
Ad-Lib
O'Henry's
The Rockgarden
McPhabbs
The Iron Horse (maybe not, though...)
Anyone got any more?
It's customary for Solaris admins to slag off the patch system, so I guess I'll have a go. For the sake of full disclosure: I used to be part of the 1st / 2nd line support team that does global support for smpatch / Sun Update Connection / Update Connection Enterprise. If you raised a Sun case on these products between November 2005 and April 2007, you very probably spoke to me at some point. That said, most of what I have to say is based on my experience working with Solaris, rather than supporting it...
smpatch is broken, but you already know that.
The dependency tree required for a working smpatch install is vast - so vast that Sun won't (didn't?) support anything less than a full end-user (SUNWCuser) install cluster for smpatch. Put together a minimal install for a boundary system and want to patch it? Get yo' Recommended Cluster on, dawg.
Any kind of slow-ish or intermittent Internet connection, and you'll have to supervise patch downloads, lest the 'Error: null' beast be awoken from its slumber (just re-run the 'smpatch download' - you'll usually get at least one more patch down before it errors out again). This is typical of the error messages from smpatch - largely useless, mostly misleading, occasionally deceitful.
Circular dependency in your smpatch database (recent kernel/zones patches, for example)? Ha ha haaaa, sucks to be you. smpatch can't figure it out, so you'll just get a load of patchadd failures during the smpatch run and subsequent shutdown. Re-running smpatch won't work, so don't bother. Time to hit SunSolve and work backwards down the dependency tree manually. You'd better hope SunSolve's feeling perky (gateway timeout anyone? Yeah, thought so), 'cause you're going to be there for a long time.
sconadm is as broken as smpatch, but with the added advantage of weird database issues at the Sun side which may stop you registering anything on your support contract. "Registration failed!" it will challenge. "What the fuck?" you will retort. Do not attempt to debug sconadm issues - your sanity is more valuable than your pride. Call Sun and get hold of SWUP_SUPPORT - they'll give you a script to run that will detail all the packages and patches missing from your system, including a Java update you can't install because your Oracle instance depends on a particular JDK version. But maybe that's just me.
Update Connection Proxy? Don't put yourself through the agony.
The enlightened (with similarly enlightened management) among us use PCA and avoid the smpatch/sconadm brain damage. I heartily recommend that you do too.
Giggle as your patches download without error. Rejoice in the HTML patch list output, with links to the READMEs for each patch. Bask in the glory of the caching PCA proxy.
Unfortunately though, the horror runs much deeper than just the automated patch tools...
The way patches are rolled is insane. Any one patch can update several packages, all-but-one of which may not be installed on your host at the time of patching. What happens if you install one of those not-installed packages after patching? That's right. The patch tools see all your applied patches, so won't recommend any of them again despite the just-installed, unpatched package on your system. Cue headaches trying to work out why you just got pwn3d by 1337 |-|4x0rz despite apparently being patched up to the eyeballs.
On no other Unix (that I've ever worked on at least) does a kernel patch clobber your sendmail config. This is a result of the way the patches are rolled, as above. You were told during the patchadd operation that the sendmail config had been moved, but you weren't expecting what was allegedly a driver update to affect userland apps, and you don't have the time to review 1000 lines of smpatch output for each of 30 odd machines at the end of a 12 hour shift caused by smpatch failing. to. download. every. second. patch, so you missed it. Say goodbye to the free space in /var as the mail spool fills up over the next few days. Say goodbye to your email-based system monitoring.
Ah well, I suppose it's a living. Say hi to SWUP_SUPPORT for me next time you raise an smpatch case. There's also a pretty good blog by one of the PST team at Sun which goes some way to explaining the madness: Patch Corner. Not pretty, is it?
Daddy's feeling linky.
Penny Arcade's one of only two webcomics that I visit on a daily basis (the other being XKCD). A lot of it's heavy gamer stuff, and not suitable for general consumption, but some is brilliant in its own right.
As is the latest.
Also, funky 3D puzzle action to slake your geekish thirst.
