This is one of those movies you watch on TV because you have nothing else to do, and when it finishes you wonder if your two hours would have been better spent doing nothing at all. It has a bit of charm, I’ll admit, but it grates after a while.
Does your computer keep giving you impromptu 60 second restart countdowns? Cleanup instructions. Microsoft Patch for RPC vulnerability. If you’re having problems getting on to the net because the worm keeps restarting your computer, my solution is:
– Start menu, all programs, administrative tools, Services
– Look for RPC service (NOT RPC locator service). Double-click it.
– Recovery tab
– For First, second and subsequent failures, change drop-down boxes to “Restart the Service” instead of “Restart the Computer”
– Press OK.
– Also, it doesn’t hurt to end the “msblast.exe” process in the Task manager.
This should give you enough time to download Microsoft’s patch. (Of course, if you’re reading this, you’re already connected to the net…) Very reminiscent of the CodeRed/Nimda worm that went around a couple years ago. I can already hear the Linux people laughing it up again.
Dave and I lost a chunk of sleep last night. Someone buzzed our doorbell at abour 12.30am, which is not a completely unusual occurrence, save for the fact that we weren’t expecting anyone. I picked up the handset which links with the speaker at the front entrance to our apartment complex and was greeted by a foreign voice on the other end of the line. It was a rather strange voice. A woman’s – strange accent of undiscernable origin with a very trembly/warbly tenor – not trembly as you’d find in the elderly (she sounded middle-aged), but more a peculiar, anxious type of trembly. Anyway, she intoned that she was after a certain address, which wasn’t ours, so I just told Her that she had the wrong address. Hearing nothing else on the other end, I hung up.
Now, this requires a bit of contextualisation to understand why what happened next makes us seem like a bunch of pansies. At the time the doorbell rang, Dave and I were watching this rather surreal B-grade thriller/horror flick on the TV. We’d tuned in half way to find that this stewardess was wandering around a plane in which everyone had mysteriously died (thus leaving the plane pilotless). Unfortunate timing, given the mood it set.
The doorbell rang again, and I decided to ignore it – I told Her once already it was the wrong address. Our doorbell is such that it will ring continuously as long as the button is depressed. A few seconds later, the doorbell rang again and kept ringing until Dave got annoyed and went to answer it.
“No you’ve got the wrong address… what? A parcel? You what? … Hey Stu she wants to deliver a parcel.”
“A parcel?! At this hour, you gotta be kidding, tell her to come back another day.”
“Err, can you come back at another time? … Really? … She says she came yesterday afternoon already.”
“Huh? Whatever, who in their right mind goes around making deliveries at 12.30 in the morning?”
“Look we don’t know anything about a delivery, can you come back at a reasonable hour? What? … Hey she says she wants to talk with us.”
“Man, this sounds dodgy, tell her to get lost.”
“No thanks, come again, good bye.”
A few moments later, the bell rang again, but we ignored it. So now we were a little spooked, because the situation was turning bizarre. Over the next full hour, the doorbell rang sporadically and Dave and I began to get increasingly edgy. Nothing good could come out of this. It wasn’t long before we could hear the loony downstairs buzzing other apartments as well. Luckily, no one let Her into the building. Dave remarked that while he was speaking with the mystery woman that he heard other voices in the background. We decided to go to sleep, but had the slight problem of the racket the doorbell was making. Since we were too chicken to tramp out onto the balcony, wave a dragonboat oar about and yell, “You want some of this, bitch?! Keep ringing that doorbell and we’ll come down and give you some!!”, we ended up taping down the phonehook, smothering the receiver with two towels and shoving the whole lot into a gym bag so we didn’t have to put up with the infernal buzzing noise. Then I called a friend who lived across the road, waking him up in the process, and asked him if he could see the person at our door from his balcony. Unforunately, neither he nor we had a clear line of sight down to the front entrance. If someone had let her into the apartment complex, we’d have called the cops, but luckily it didn’t come down to that. Dave borrowed one of the oars from my room for “protection”, and then we eventually got to sleep.
Got relocated today up to L26! Window seat, semi-decent view of the city. Should bring my camera along next week.
Raffles Junior College teacher blasts student (Quicktime movie). The background to this video can be read here. The wonderful thing about this is that it was caught on video.
I think the post-high school maturation period definitely changes a person. My initial response to the video was that if I had a teacher like that, I’d slap her silly. I love it when she says, “you’re trying to cover up your insolence, your defiance, your laziness, your apathy, your lethargy and your bad attitude!” and then pauses like she’s expecting applause because she learnt some extra vocab from her “training as a university student”. But then I thought back, and the world appears a lot different to a 15 year old (even if you’re taller than the teacher). School’s pretty much run like a dictatorship, and I sure have personally come across teachers that were much more fiery than the one caught on video. One particularly memorable occasion was witnessing a student being interrogated by a teacher. He was so hysterical, that as he shouted, a long glob of saliva slopped out of his mouth onto the floor and he kept screaming without missing a beat. In year 4 I remember our teacher shrieking at someone because he wasn’t ruling straight lines – she took his ruler and snapped it. In year 6 I remember my maths teacher had this abnormal abhorrence towards beeping digital watches. On more than one occasion, some hapless student’s watch would beep on the hour and the teacher would confiscate the watch. Not only that, but he’d throw the watch onto the ground, then proceed to place his foot on it. The watch, subjected to the not inconsiderable weight of the teacher, would then transform into a work of abstract art, never to beep again. Then you have Chemistry teachers purporting to squirt acid at talking students – it wasn’t acid, but legally speaking you’d be able to sue the teacher for assault. And don’t get me started on cadet camps! Ah, those were the days. If only Clie PDAs were available back then (not that I could’ve afforded one)… but I do have some tapes of some lessons secreted away somewhere, and I also recall a friend getting so incensed at a teacher’s gruffness that he taped the lesson to use in a complaint against the teacher (but never followed up with it).
I passed the link on to Dad, who is coincidentally an alumni of Raffles Institute. His abrupt response: “I didn’t think that it was that bad. I have seen teachers that are worse.” heheh
Also, there’s a point in the video where I swear I’m hearing this from the teacher: “I said, ‘Actions speaks [sic] louder than words!’ So you are a sly fucking old brat. Aren’t you? That is using the literary language from my training as a university student.”
My ears must be deceiving me, but I really can’t figure out what she’s saying other than the profane phrasing above. Maybe it’s the Singlish accent :).
Fog Screen technology. From what I gather it’s an area with fog particles suspended in a special “laminar” airflow which is non-turbulent and fairly uniform, so much so that you can project an image onto it. The image can be translucent or opaque. Imagine the applications! I can see these things popping up in clubs and bars all over town; curtains; opaque, but insubstantial doors! (Thanks Vic)
James Bond is a stylish hero you know. Whenever people ask him of his name, he answers in his own branded style – “Bond, James Bond”.
Last year Bond came to Bangladesh for a quick visit. In Noakhali Swimming Complex, he met Pasha.
Pasha asked: Hey, what’s your name?
James Bond replied: Bond. James Bond.
Then Bond asked Pasha the same: And what’s yours?
Pasha replied:
Pasha
Choudhury Pasha
Rahman Choudhury Pasha
Saidur Rahman Choudhury Pasha
Ibne Saidur Rahman Choudhury Pasha
Khan Ibne Saidur Rahman Choudhury Pasha
Rahman Khan Ibne Saidur Rahman Choudhury Pasha
Fazlur Rahman Khan Ibne Saidur Rahman Choudhury Pasha
Mohammad Fazlur Rahman Khan Ibne Saidur Rahman Choudhury Pasha
Kalam Mohammad Fazlur Rahman Khan Ibne Saidur Rahman Choudhury Pasha
Abul Kalam Mohammad Fazlur Rahman Khan Ibne Saidur Rahman Choudhury Pasha.From that day on, whenever people ask Bond of his name, he simply replies James Bond.
Asking on behalf of a friend: Anyone know Flash? Does anyone know how to stop a Flash file if it detects the computer it’s running on is a certain platform (like a Macintosh)? Basically if I have a Flash file that I run independently from a CD-ROM, I want it to check the platform it’s running on. If it’s a certain platform, I want the run to stop. Otherwise the flash file will play. Solutions would be very much appreciated.
Last year, Eddy Stevens was sued by Sony for selling modchips which, among other things, allowed Playstations to play burnt games. Yesterday, the Full Court of the Federal Court unanimously reversed the decision of the trial judge (Sackville J). The SMH reports that this decision has led to an X-Box modchip manufacturer to suspend its sales.
A cursory skim of French J’s judgment in the case (Kabushiki Kaisha Sony Computer Entertainment v Stevens) reveals that the primary issue was whether or not Sony’s copy protection measures constituted a “technological prevention measure” under s 10(1) of the Copyright Act 1968. Under s 116A(5) of the Act, a person selling devices aimed at circumventing such prevention measures can be sued. Playstation games are copyrighted by having an encrypted code written into a part of the disc which can’t be burnt onto by normal burners. The Boot ROM then checks discs for this code. Together, the code and the Boot ROM was purported by Sony to be a “technological prevention measure” (TPM). The trial judge held that:
the focus of the definition of “technological protection measure” was on a technological device or product designed to bring about a specified result, namely preventing or inhibiting the infringement of copyright in a work, by a particular means. His Honour did not think the definition was concerned with devices or products that did not, by their operations, prevent or curtail specific acts infringing or facilitating the infringement of copyright in a work, but which merely had a general deterrent or discouraging effect on those who might be contemplating infringing copyright in a class of works, for example, by making unlawful copies of a CD-ROM. (at para 13)
In other words, Sony’s copy protection was not a TPM because it merely served to deter or discourage game copying. The Full Court disagreed, and after engaging in a bout of statutory interpretation, preferred a purposive approach to interpreting the term: paragraphs 16-20. This broader definition meant that Sony’s codes and Boot ROM did form a TPM, and so Stevens lost the case. He still has the option of appealing to the High Court.
As much as I hate how exorbitant console games are (partially the reason why I don’t a console), I would agree with the Full Bench’s interpretation in this case. It is fairly clear that the intention of the Copyright Act would be to encompass copy protection measures such as that implemented by Sony. It’s obvious to any computer gamer that what Sony has done to prevent copying their games constitutes a TPM. Nonetheless, this reminds me of how they brought out that CD copy protection technology a while ago that could be bypassed by scribbling around the CD’s outer rim with a texta or permanent marker. The Courts wouldn’t outlaw the sale of textas (I’d imagine that this would be because their predominant use is not for copyright circumvention), but it does raise interesting questions about what might be considered a circumvention device. What if the mod chip’s main purpose is to bypass the DVD region locking (I think that’s still legal)?
(Thanks Shish for passing on the news.)
MB20 was absolutely fantastic. After a couple of very tepid supporting bands, Rob Thomas and his crew came on stage and kept the crowd going wild for almost two hours. Just about all the band’s hits were done, both new and old (I only noticed that “Girl Like That” was missing). The tempo was mixed, with the few traditional rock songs spaced out with slower piano pieces. “If You’re Gone” was done unplugged, although it felt emptier, missing the brass that fills in the gaps in the album version. “Downfall” was also missing the gospel choir, but a choir would have been a bit troublesome to bring along with them! I was also hoping to hear “You and I and I” which they only seem to play live, but unfortunately no luck. Nonetheless, excellent stuff. Good to sing along with, good to move along with. If you like MB20, I highly recommend seeing and hearing them in concert.
Set List: Cold, Real World, All I Need, Soul, Disease, Could I Be You, 3 AM, Mad Season, Feel, Hand Me Down, If You’re Gone, Bright Lights, Bent, (Cover), Unwell, Back to Good, You’re So Real, Downfall, So Sad So Lonely, Long Day, Push.
Click above for more photos (600kb)
Random Blog Link: A Bright Cold Day In April. I think it’s kept by another grad law student (at USyd?). This post was rather amusing to me.
Interesting:
The Pentagon is setting up a stock-market style system in which investors would bet on terror attacks, assassinations and other events in the Middle East. Defense officials hope to gain intelligence and useful predictions while investors who guessed right would win profits. …
The market would work this way. Investors would buy and sell futures contracts essentially a series of predictions about what they believe might happen in the Mideast. Holder of a futures contract that came true would collect the proceeds of investors who put money into the market but predicted wrong.
Some are naturally up in arms about it. Read Article.
Wired Article: “Quebec teenager Ghysl[ain] Raza was the target of worldwide mockery when a private video he made of himself practicing his lightsaber moves was uploaded to the Net by kids at his school. Now his parents are claiming damages of $160,000 from the families of the four classmates who digitized and published the video. Ghyslain’s parents claim their son was so humiliated, he is undergoing psychiatric care and may be marked for life by the experience.”
Also, a related article mentions the E/N genre.
Uni’s started up again. Half of the subjects this session are continuations from the last: Contracts and Criminal Law (which will hopefully be much more substantive than procedural this time around), together with Torts and Administrative Law. They all appear very interesting, save for Admin Law which is basically about bureaucracy, bureaucratic decision making and judicial review of that. The first Admin class today was only an hour but I somehow managed to microsleep throughout the last half hour of it. Shan jabbed me in the side at some point to wake me up, telling me afterwards, “Your head was nodding up and down as usual, but at one point your headed drifted down… and down… and kept going down and I thought, ‘uh oh, I don’t think that head is going to come back up if I don’t do something’.” Not a good way to start session sitting 2 metres away from the lecturer in a subject with 20% participation marks. And also, browsing through the course outline, the required readings for Admin are a load of up to 50 pages per class. It’s gonna be one of those subjects…
Dave came back from the land of $4/hr snooker and proceeded to beat me 4-2. Fluke artist.
Going to the Matchbox 20 concert tomorrow. Should be awesome.
Fantasy League is starting up again for this season. I have yet to select my team… have to set aside some time this weekend.
Brownie points if anyone can track down the female artist/band that covered The Beatles’ “All My Loving” – the version played at the end of 2-DAY FM’s Hot 30 show (with Kyle and Jackie O) each night just before the greets and shoutouts. I haven’t managed to turn up anything.
Five of the BITs got together again last night at dinner for what is now going to be a quarterly event. The location for dinner was Quay, a restaurant situated on the overseas passenger terminal at Circular Quay. It sits directly opposite the Opera House and offers almost a 270 degree view of Sydney Harbour. We scored a beautiful table placing us by the floor-to-ceiling windows, providing an excellent backdrop for the evening. Quay took out the SMH’s Good Food Guide best restaurant award for 2003, and it did not disappoint. The menu was à la carte, with no degustation menu, consisting of Mod Oz cuisine featuring influences from Asia, Europe and the Middle-East. I ordered a very succulent, melt-in-your-mouth pork belly and scallops, a chicken dish with a naturally fancy name I don’t remember, and an excellent “passionfruit and lime fusion” dessert (passionfruit ice cream, lime meringue brulée). The serving sizes are surprisingly decent, as well as the prices. The bill, including the three courses, two bottles of wine, drinks, a couple sides for the table, coffee/tea and tip worked out at $140pp, which is actually quite palatable compared to some other reputable restaurants around town.
For me, Quay wins hands down for ambience, atmosphere and view, even compared to 41. Nothing like being at the water’s edge, with a view of the CBD buildings, the Coathanger, the Opera House and the boats on the harbour drifting by the window. Their service was not the most polished, nor amiable, but that might have in part had something to do with Jay rocking up an hour late, thanks to Cityrail! The food is exceedingly good value, although I found Tet’s range more exciting. Time flew and we ended up spending five hours (7pm – midnight) there. The timing of the dishes was well paced. (And the dinner conversation highly engaging, including some interesting news about a friend who has made a not insignificant amount of money (and frequent flier points) off what we’ve termed “bookie arbitrage” combined with long-term “investing”, a concept centered around treating the bookmaking industry like the stockmarket. I found this quite interesting, as the bookie industry tends not to have the same systemic risk inherent in stockmarkets.) Quay is highly recommended – it’s very good value for money.
Kev and I went down to inspect The Block at Bondi. I must say, the apartments have been renovated very nicely. The two things that stood out for me was the giant bubbling urn ornament in the back garden, and the bathroom that was picked as the best one out of the four on the show. The faucets, the glass, the mirror, the sink, everything – beaut bathroom! All those apartments are going to be horribly, horribly overpriced. Especially if they are predicting 10000 curious onlookers on auction day. Each of the couples stands to make nearly six figures in profit I reckon.
Haven’t been up to a terrific amount of stuff these holidays, mostly a mixture of work, relaxing, and heading into uni for competition preparation. I was selected to the team representing UNSW at the BCG intervarsity business strategy competition. The competition simulates a management consulting case and centres on preparing a 10 minute presentation recommending business strategies to a Board of directors, after 3 hours of preparation time. This is followed up by a 10 minute Q&A session where the judges (mostly BCG consultants) grill you on the strategies you’ve proposed. It’s an extremely intense 200 minutes. We had the state finals today, and unfortunately we placed one place off progressing to the nationals. After being initially overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data they gave us (about 60 or so pages), we eventually digested the key points of the case, which was about the Australian wine industry. The flaw with our preparation was that we missed the target audience of the question, which is a fatal flaw in any sort of answer. Normally cases revolve around improving the growth of a single business entity. This case focussed on improving the growth of the Australian wine industry, as a whole, relative to the rest of the world. Not only this, but the advice delivered was meant to be to an industry body (not in itself a wine producer) charged with promoting the growth of Australian wines. While we delivered strategies targeting key markets around the world, the strategies as they were were not implementable by that particular industry body (as they were not a company, but an entity which facilitated dialog between companies in the industry).
Q: “So, we being an industry body with no reach into these markets, how do we implement these strategies to expand into them?”
*dead silence*
A: “Uh… talk to the companies about it?”
A much better answer would have been that, given the role of the industry body, to perhaps encourage Australian wine producers to enter into alliances when expanding overseas. Resulting economies of scale would be beneficial to both firms, and the potential for growth internationally is highly lucrative for all Australian companies. While they are normally competitors in the domestic market, and competition regulation prevents consolidation within Australia, there is nothing preventing them from jointly entering foreign markets. The industry body’s ability to facilitate dialogue between Australian wine producers would thus play a key role in notifying industry of potential markets and potential entry strategies centred around domestic alliances.
Nonetheless, despite the disappointment, it was a terrific learning experience and something I’d definitely do again next year should I get the chance. (Unfortunately, 4 out of our team of 6 graduate at the end of the year, so we need a fresh bunch of people, but that shouldn’t be a problem given that none of us knew each other at the start of the holidays and we gelled quite well when it came to the competition today.)
Got my law results back for all but one subject: 1 D and 3 HDs. Uni starts again next week.
Pete, a colleague back from when I was at OneSteel, sent me in this (and I wonder if the fact that I spent a bit of time designing an intranet shop for OS had anything to do with it? :)
They have taken the job off the site now, but this was the actual job description advertised on the seek site for this position http://it.seek.com.au/showjob.asp?jobid=2810116
———————————————————–
So you were a top Web Developer, once, many years ago, until the “correction”. Now nobody cares and you are shunned in public, much as lepers were in the fifteenth century. Your modern-day equivalent of the chiming bell and vile burbling exclamations of “Unclean! Unclean!” is the obnoxious ringtone on your expensive mobile. There’s a good chance you listen to either Sisters of Mercy and Bauhaus or elaborate Paul Oakenfold remixes, with a bit of bootlegged Chemical Brothers thrown in for good measure. Maybe you find yourself missing the ashtray completely, and your ESC through F3 keys are thoroughly clogged up with burned, cancerous grey flakes. For better or for worse, you’re familiar with such repugnant images as goatse.cx and know what STFU means. In all probability your beverage of choice is Jolt/Columbian Cola, and you have the weeping stomach ulcers to prove it. You give copies of Photoshop 7.0 to your friends, thereby depriving a fat CEO somewhere of a heated driveway. You have a world-crushing collection of MP3s. Your author of choice: Neal Stephenson or William Gibson. You have every volume of Gaiman’s Sandman series, though you decided after Volume III that it`s all a bit of a wank. Sometimes, you pretend you are in The Matrix. Your half-elf mage/rogue is at Level 9, and has actually worked out how to put a Bag of Holding within another Bag of Holding without imploding Ravenloft. You can pronounce “Urotsukidoji” without hurting yourself, and can rocket-jump better than anyone you know. You have a bit of an attitude when it comes to Windows XP, and you like to recompile kernels.Your spine looks like a u-bend.
Others may call you freakish. We call you lovely. And in reward for your loveliness, we would like to offer you this mildly exciting opportunity, if your idea of excitement is a RAM upgrade:
This is a fun little two week contract for a reasonably experienced Web Developer with plenty of HTML (well, duh), JavaScript and ASP know-how. Ideally you will also be fluent in the, and I quote, “uploading of ASP pages from a SAP business connector”. I said that out loud and Shub-Niggurath appeared and attempted to devour my soul through some impressive shambling and ominous tentacle-writhing, so I won’t investigate it any further.
But anyway, that’s the deal. Either you like it or you don’t, and we’re not about to tell you either way. It’s a two week contract for a company here in the city, and will probably be paying about $25 per hour, commensurate with experience. So apply now (or don’t), or call Gary Fernandes for more information.
Please contact Gary Fernandes quoting reference number SK/GFWD on: phone (xx) xxxx xxxx * fax (xx) xxxx xxxx
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12:34am (GMT +10.00) tomorrow 