Juvenile Senility
Posted on November 18, 2008
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Sometimes my brain won’t function, which is a problem when I’m at work in a job that requires thinking. It sits in my skull and sulks like a child shoutiing “No! I’m not doing it!” whenever I ask it to think about something for a minute. Coffee will usually get it moving in the right direction, but not always.
Today is one of those days where it doesn’t even bother shouting back at me because it’s not listening. Caffeine sloshed around my bloodstream and got filtered out before it did any good up in my head.
So, this afternoon I spent a couple of hours trying to solve a coding problem. I won’t bore you with the details. At the two hour mark I asked Aaron if he had any suggestions; his response was simple and elegant, so much so that 10 minutes later I’d finished that task and moved on to the next one. I’ve hit Refresh a few times to make sure I’m not imagining things that the site works as it should.
I’m sitting here wondering why I didn’t think of the solution myself. It was bloody obvious in hindsight and I’m probably giving Aaron too much credit for something he thought was bloody obvious before I finished explaining the problem. Am I the only one whose brain is becoming calcified while they’re still young?
If the current trend of irreversible brain impairment continues, my 30th birthday present will be surprise senility instead of my very-much-hoped-for plan of renting a Porsche and revisiting some rarely used roads that I like.
Mel In The News
Posted on November 17, 2008
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Someone in the Curtin PR department got wind of Mel’s award win and wrote a news article about it. The quote is not entirely hers - the writer used some creative licence.
Zombie Bacteria, Arrgg! Brains.
Posted on November 11, 2008
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Before I left for Melbourne, I had set up an experiment to test how well the bacteria I was working on fixed nitrogen. This test ran for 7 days. After this point, I terminated the experiment and took some readings including cell numbers and iron oxidation. By looking at the cultures under the microscope, I determined that the bacteria were dead. I saw no movement or budding (bacterial division). Now because I was lazy I left the flasks containing the dead bacteria on my bench, instead of autoclaving and discarding them. I have had to give a few presentations and attend meetings since returning from Melbourne and as such, I haven’t been at my bench. Today I walked past the flasks and saw that the media had changed colour.
This was interesting because the bacteria should have been dead and therefore no iron oxidation possible, and no alteration of the media. There is always some abiotic oxidation (chemical processes) where ferrous converts to ferric without a biological catalyst (think rust on your car), but not to this extent. I re-examined the cultures under the microscope and to my shock they were alive. They are physically identical to the bacteria that I inoculated the flasks with, indicative of it not being a contaminant. So either they weren’t dead when I analysed them previously, which is entirely possible as they can hide on iron crystals, or something strange has happened. The conditions in which they were grown during the test were optimal in regards to temperature and movement, while on the bench there have been fluctuating temperatures and no agitation. In essence these conditions shouldn’t support growth.
I now have to set up this experiment again, and monitor any changes early on prior to cell death. Hiding zombie bacteria isn’t an explanation that I can publish.
Sweet Service
Posted on November 3, 2008
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I bought a pre-owned copy of Bioshock from EB Games in Hay Street yesterday. When I got it home, I discovered a big gouge in the disc, which caused the game to freeze while loading the first level. Today I took it back to the shop with the receipt and got a replacement (still pre-owned) copy of the game without any hassles. I was in and out of the shop in under a minute.
It was a very pleasing experience that made me want to shop there again. I even left some feedback on their website about it.
Got A Spare Grand?
Posted on October 31, 2008
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I got an advertisement from Curtin via email today. They send out a lot of garbage email. This one was about John Cleese coming to Perth.
Curtin University and its Graduate School of Business is delighted to offer you the opportunity to be one of the first to register to attend UpClose with John Cleese. As a Curtin alumni, you receive the exclusive member rate of $995.00 for Individual bookings and $7160 for a Corporate Table booking of 8.
A grand per person to see a half-day seminar featuring John Cleese not being funny? I think Curtin is the one being funny.
Sorry, Neighbours
Posted on October 28, 2008
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Sometimes the music does need to be that loud.
Creature Of The Night
Posted on October 26, 2008
Filed Under General | 3 Comments
6:15PM: Mel drops me off at poker. Drink some beers.
3:15AM: Get home and go to bed.
4:45AM: Realise we missed the 4:00AM alarm and we are running late for the plane.
5:00AM: Drive Mel to the airport.
6:15AM: Get home from the airport and go to bed again.
No, I have not become a creature of the night.
Give It Grudgingly
Posted on October 21, 2008
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The Sun has published what could be called an article (some would call it advertising) on sex tips for wives in 1894. Some funny quotes from the book:
Give little, give seldom and above all give grudgingly.
By their tenth anniversary many wives have managed to complete their child-bearing and have achieved the ultimate goal of terminating all sexual contacts with the husband.
Big Boy Ride
Posted on October 19, 2008
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I read my law book for three hours this afternoon and only managed to get through 100 pages. It requires a lot of re-reading and looking up cases to understand things, and by 4pm I was so sick of it that I offered to go on a bike ride with Mel.
I can hear your stunned disbelief as I type. Yes, I chose exercise over sitting in the bean bag with a cup of tea and this particular textbook.
I chose it so much that we ended up riding 25km as I didn’t want to go home and go back to the book. That’s the longest distance I’ve ever ridden in one go. Mel cheekily commented that unlike my short 8km trips to work, this was a “big boy ride”.
There are some very big and tasteless houses in Nedlands and Crawley. One in particular is a lovely shade of poo brown with chrome plating. Maybe Xzibit pimped their house.
Australia: The Nanny State
Posted on October 18, 2008
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Not content with the Howard government’s $84 million waste of taxpayer dollars buying licences for end-user filtering software that went almost completely unused, the Rudd government has had a policy for a couple of years now about mandatory filtering of the Internet in Australia. Just like the Great Firewall of China, our current government wants to install the Great Firewall of Australia to make the Internet safe for children.
The filter is intended to have two modes of operation. The first mode is a strict, theoretically child safe mode where anything slightly questionable is blocked. The second mode only blocks prohibited online content, which includes “real depictions of actual sexual activity, child pornography, depictions of bestiality, material containing excessive violence or sexual violence, detailed instruction in crime, violence or drug use, and/or material that advocates the doing of a terrorist act”.
There is no unfiltered or “off” mode. You and I do not have a choice in this matter. We are going to be told what we can and can’t see online.
I should note at this point that the system is not implemented, it is only a policy, and that this has come to light because a report has been released about how effective it might be:
Closed environment testing of ISP level internet content filtering
Six unnamed filtering products were tested. The test method was to set up their own “simulated internet” (p36) network with a web server and a few clients running WebBench, with the filters in between them. The test network was not connected to the real Internet.
The report goes into some complex technical details, such as the ethernet frame format (p34), typical ISP network structures (p32), the test network structure (p42) and even quotes Andrew Tanenbaum while repeatedly misspelling his name as “Tannenbaum”. It ignores simpler technical details such as the operating systems and web server software used and the actual URLs that were used in the test. I expect that, being the government, they instructed the testing company (Enex TestLab) to use fake websites rather than making copies of the real websites that they want to block.
The test method only looked at filtering HTTP traffic, although the products claim to be able to filter or block other common traffic such as HTTPS (ie. internet banking), email, instant messaging and BitTorrent downloads. Filtering HTTPS traffic is going to be noticed by everyone, as man in the middle attacks will cause browsers to display warnings that the site certificate has something wrong with it.
In principle, this has me a bit worried. Censorship in all its forms is contrary to the ideals of a free and open society. Australia already censors far too many books and films for my liking and I want that to improve, not worsen.
In practice however, I’m not concerned for myself. This firewall will be trivial to work around if I become affected by it, but having to do so will be annoying and make my downloads a little bit slower. There are paid services such as VPNOut, where you get an encrypted VPN for $5/month, or I could just set up my own VPN or ssh tunnel with an endpoint in another country, and split the costs between a few people.
So far there has been no mention of why this internet filter is being pursued. Rudd is a practising Anglican, so it may be a personal crusade for him. It is also possible that he is courting the Christian vote, in particular the support of the Family First party. Steve Fielding is the only Family First senator in Australia, and he just happens to share the balance of power with Nick Xenophon and the five Greens party senators. “You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours” seems to be the obvious move here.
There is currently no known date for the implementation of the proposed filtering system, or when it will be voted on in Parliament.