Robert Synnott

Eek, political cartoonists predicting future

2009-07-11T18:02:00.000+01:00

Remember how during Obama's campaign one of the standards slurs from the right wing that was certainly not a racist attack, dear me, no, was 'uppity'?

Here, the rather wonderful Tim Kreider predicts its use, in 2004.

Peggy Noonington

2009-07-11T01:44:00.000+01:00

Oh, I do love these. They are beginning to get a little over the top, possibly, but really, so funny!

Quick Amazon EC2 tip

2009-07-09T21:53:00.000+01:00

Amazon EC2 is Amazon's 'cloud computing' thingy. You run virtual machines on a per-hour basis. It's all very handy.

But, say something goes wrong, and you have a frozen machine. That machine doesn't have a permanent disk or IP address, so if you have to shut it down and bring up a new one, it will likely be rather inconvenient.

Except! It turns out that there is actually a reboot button on the control panel, which reboots it without trashing the disk and IP address. No doubt everyone who uses EC2 except me knows about this, but I was quite surprised and charmed to find it; very convenient!

Important Palin-related warning

2009-07-08T23:55:00.000+01:00

Robert Heinlein was a science fiction writer who, amongst other things, successfully predicted the nuclear power plant, the mobile phone, the Internet, sexual liberation and the end to institutionalised racism in the United States. (He also had a few major failed predictions, notably an imminent (in the 40s) world food crisis which would keep the population below three billion, but the Green Revolution would not have been particularly obvious from that point.)

Anyway. One of his famous novels deals with life in a Fascist/theocratic America around 2100. This state was created after the election of a Christian religious fanatic as president, followed by Hitler-style enablement act. In 2012. Eek. Wonder who that could be?

Terrifying many-limbed Michael Jackson statue

2009-07-08T23:53:00.000+01:00

Seen in the window of an art shop in Dublin (click it to see it in its full glory/horror):

Eeek. Da Vinci must be turning in his grave.

Beware New Hampshire

2009-07-05T23:36:00.001+01:00

From Wikipedia, on the 2012 US Presidential Election, on Republican sorta-candidates:

The following are 10 potential candidates who have either formally, or informally expressed interest, which is defined by anyone who has visited Iowa and/or New Hampshire, or is planning to campaign in those states or around the country.

Hear that? A candidate is defined as someone who has visited Iowa and/or New Hampshire. So don't go there, or they may force you to be the Republican presidential candidate! And that means you would have to share a plane with Sarah Palin, noted mad person! Eek!

Yahoo still really making no effort at all

2009-06-28T17:42:00.001+01:00

There's a lot of talk recently about how Yahoo(?!) is allegedly trying to improve, and getting in new managers, and improving processes, and bla bla bla.

Now, for some obscure reason, the iPhone can do push email from Yahoo Mail accounts, but not Google or anyone else free. I thought it would be quite nice to have an email account where urgent things could go, that would update my phone RIGHT NOW, but I'm damned if I'm paying $99 a year for MobileMe, and the less said about Exchange the better. So, I signed up for a Yahoo account. And gave it my normal gmail email as a secondary address. I duly went to confirm this address, and got this:

Er... Duh...

Now, if a website I made, on my own, did something stupid like this, I would be embarrassed, and would quickly fix it. Apparently Yahoo, with its thousands of employees, feels no such shame about giving stupid bloody error messages like this. By the way, I did 'Sign Out & Continue', and got exactly the same message.

By the way, after all that trouble, Yahoo push to iPhone does not actually appear to work. Grr.

In which Google demonstrates that it is better than Yahoo at product names

2009-06-28T16:28:00.000+01:00

We all know YSlow, right? It is a Firefox/Firebug plugin from Yahoo!?# which tells you how disgracefully, awfully slow your revolting little website is, and gives you tips on how to fix it. It is actually very useful!

Google has now released their own one. Which is basically the same thing, but is called Page Speed.

See, Yahoo[insert random punctuation here], Page Speed is not a good name. It doesn't really convey anything specific. YSlow, however, is a terrible, god-awful name. Learn from this.

IBM now making chicken-related cartoons

2009-06-27T02:11:00.000+01:00

World has gone mad.

State Muffin!

2009-06-27T01:56:00.000+01:00

Minnesota has a state muffin. By statute! (It is blueberry.) Note that the page with the important muffin statute is only available by HTTPS, presumably so that someone sniffing your network traffic can't tell that you're looking at something so very stupid. Featured right beside a 'visit Minnesota' link. Yes, visit Minnesota because it is so boring that we have to appoint state muffins to pass the time!

Minnesota also has lots of other state things. Apparently it was the first state to have an official state mushroom. Goodness, I wonder why?

And here are some proposed symbols! There have been laws which attempted to bring in state parasites and reptiles.

I mean, I realise that it's probably rather boring being a politician in Minnesota. This is the first thing I have ever seen about Minnesota in any context other than lists of uninteresting US states. But surely they can find something else to do with their time than appointing state cakes?

Update: Okay, this is apparently a more common problem than I had realised. Four states have state muffins! And two of them are blueberry! Utah has a 'State historic vegetable'! The sugar beet. Has it been eradicated now, or something? Also, everyone's state fruit is an apple, though some go so far as to specify a variety. West Virginia is clearly identified as an EVIL state, as its state fruit is the horrible, revolting 'golden' 'delicious' apple. About half the state beverages are milk, presumably because just about everyone can manage a cow or two.

Wikipedia also has a state seals page. I had high hopes, given the presence of state muffins, but it's only tedious ol' heraldry. I was expecting something more like this!

Hmm, maybe Ireland needs to start designating national goat varieties and national toasters and so forth.

Google now advertising in Blogger posting interface!

2009-06-23T22:52:00.004+01:00

In this week's (literally; this was not here last week) edition of 'You know it's a global economic meltdown when...':

Note that the ads are actually vaguely targeted vaguely at my previous post, about how the Patent office hates gray (or 'grey', as we say in proper English). Google is giving itself unfair advantages here; normal AdSense users have to use hidden text, like common spammers, if they want that sort of result.

I wonder does anyone click on them?

Also, is a global IP leader just like a proper global leader, except more pathetic? Do they wear silly uniforms and threaten the IP UN?

Update: Hmm. This seems to be something they're trialing. The first time I saved this article it didn't show me one at all, then the next time it showed me a smaller flash ad for web design, of all things, in a different position.

Important ridiculous thing

2009-06-23T22:35:00.000+01:00

Have you ever seen yourself in a career in intellectual property rights? The thrills, the excitement, the documentation!

That is the trademark application for ImageMagick's wizard thing. Note that it was rejected not once, but twice, for being in gray without mentioning gray. The Patent Office does not like gray!

The process seems to have taken just under two years. I mean, can you imagine?

Worse from the patent office person's perspective, I suppose, having to constantly write tedious missives about the forbidden non-colour.

Monotremes...

2009-06-21T22:42:00.000+01:00

Live longer with Calgon!

Sorry, couldn't help myself.

QuickPigeon - Missing the point, rather

2009-06-21T22:40:00.000+01:00

As you know, iPhone OS 3 just came out, and has this wonderful instant push notification which barely anyone uses (it's fiddly to implement, and Apple seems to be holding back on approving apps which use it, presumably so that their notification servers, which also operate MobileMe, do not catch fire). One of the very few applications actually available which uses it (along with the Associated Press application, which will send you one piece of breaking news approximately every three days, assuming that you pretend to it that you are in America) is QuickPigeon.

QuickPigeon is a bit of a puzzler. What it does is, you type in a question, and give it an email or emails. It then sends those people emails, which they get whenever they check their email. If they then click 'yes' or 'no' in the email, it sends you a message instantly. Which is all very well, but surely it would be better to just let people send instant messages in the first place? It is Japanese, which goes some way towards explaining it; the Japanese have their own parallel universe Internet, where things are rather different. Look at a Japanese blog-analogue, if you believe me not.

Two terrifyingly stupid Microsoft things

2009-06-20T17:50:00.000+01:00

As you know, due to the market finding Windows Vista almost universally resistible, Microsoft is rushing out Windows 7.

These days, people are buying a lot of netbooks. Netbooks are cheap, in part due to their operating system, which is generally Windows XP or a Linux of some sort. Vista never really made it on netbooks. So, Microsoft is releasing a special cheap version, Windows 7 Starter, for netbooks. WinXP will, at least theoretically, become unavailable to OEMs.

Windows 7 Starter users will not be able to change their desktop background. Further, the OEMs won't be able to change it. Yep, that'll endear the netbook users to Microsoft, and not at all encourage them to just buy a Linux one. I wonder what the mandatory default will be like? What image would best say 'Welcome to Windows, poor person'?

Stupid thing the second, then. Here is an article on MSN, syndicated from PC World, on how to illegally install MacOS on your computer. Tune in next week for Apple's article on how to download Windows Vista Ultimate from bittorrent!

iPhone OS 3.0!

2009-06-17T22:47:00.000+01:00

Well, I just installed this; by the time I got home from work there was already much talk of difficulty with communicating with iTunes, so I thought it best to leave it a couple of hours.

First impressions: it's brilliant.

MMS - I must say, I'm not too bothered either way about this feature; I would generally opt for email if sending pictures to someone.
Safari - The new version of Mobile Safari is noticeably faster than the old.
Spotlight - This is great, especially for quickly finding media.
Landscape keyboard - This is nice for writing emails and similar; quite a lot quicker to use than the normal portrait one.
Youtube account integration - Nice, but, well, look at the dialog box for entering your details. I suspect Apple haven't been sticking to their own UI diktats.
Push service - There aren't actually any applications using this at the moment, though some are due to show up very soon.
Copy and paste - Quite nicely done once you get used to it.
Voice memos - Why? Weren't there already third party apps which did exactly the same thing? And why the picture of the microphone? Weird.
Improved stocks app - Watch the economy collapse with greater ease!
Camera - They didn't make a big deal about this, but taking photos is now considerably faster.
Password autofill - Yay! Why don't they have this in desktop Safari?

Just one major criticism. The launch. They really should have staged it; quite a few people were left with dead phones for a few hours while they were waiting for an iTunes connection to re-activate. Why does it even activate through iTunes, anyway?

Well-intentioned stupidity in protesting

2009-06-14T21:00:00.002+01:00

Update: I heard from someone in Tehran; Iran's Internet connectivity is apparently considerably better than I had thought. I still, mind you, feel that DDOS is a very poor form of protest, but it is at least less likely than I thought to cause serious disruptions for normal people.

People on Twitter are encouraging participation in a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack on an Iranian government website, to protest the outcome of the recent almost-certainly-rigged election. This sounds like a very nice form of peaceful protest; it is anything but.

Politically motivated DDOS has been going on since public Internet access was available. It's old news. Even the tech media can barely be bothered to report on it these days. And it does no good. Does Khamenei really care if a government website is a little slow? Will it persuade him to have proper free elections? Of course not. It won't even be particularly embarrassing; there's not a major government who it hasn't happened to at one time or another.

So, they don't do any good. In this case, interestingly, it could actually do some harm.

You see, it seems that the offending website is actually hosted in Iran. Iran is not your modern open developed nation with gigabit links coming out of its ears. It does not have unlimited transit, and it is likely that all its transit it through one or two carriers. If these links are overwhelmed by armchair protesters DDOSing the website, then Internet access from Iran to the outside world may be disrupted, and it's even possible that the carrier, which will also be catering to other under-developed nations in the region, will simply pull the plug to protect the rest of their network.

This is a particularly large problem because the Internet is probably about the best source of uncensored news in the country at the moment. Iran, of course, does censor the Internet, but such censorship is never entirely effective. Its current attempts to jam international radio and regional satellite broadcasts, on the other hand, seem to be going rather well.

So, you can click the handy ready-made DDOS link, and feel smug about making Khamenei cry. You may, however, be preventing actual Iranians from getting real news about the current situation. Your call.

Music videos

2009-06-14T02:19:00.001+01:00

Had far more transvestism in the 80s.

Eeeeeeeeek

2009-06-13T19:57:00.000+01:00

I just realised that in less than a year I will be a quarter of a century old.

Lessons learned: Do not think about age in terms of centuries. Urgh.

Desperate times call for mass emailing

2009-06-10T21:42:00.000+01:00

Erm, why, precisely, is Microsoft spamming me about their stupid search engine?

If there's one thing that I like about Google, or WolframAlpha, or indeed any other search engine, it's that they rarely send me junk mail.

A Great Day!

2009-06-08T21:56:00.001+01:00

1) Lots of fancy Mac stuff announced, including new iPhone!

2) Sinn Fein failed to secure any European Parliament seats, and noted mad person with whom I nearly share a second name Kathy Sinnott lost hers!

3) And best of all.

You're not going to believe it.

Declan Ganley, lord of evil, plagiarist of Hitler, and noted Libertard, not only lost, but is quitting politics! Yay! Remember that recount he demanded? He lost an extra 3,000 votes on it! So, he's leaving, on the midnight train to Georgia. Or, well, wherever he likes to hang out when not trying to engage in sinister machinations.

But not, of course, before he eats this impudent RTE reporter's face.

Horrid quotes from TV

2009-06-04T00:12:00.002+01:00

Quote the first, from 'Celebrity Wife Swap'. A 'suburban' ('suburban' is, for some reason, media code for 'tedious bigot') celebrity swaps with half of a filthy gay couple:

Well, if you let gay people marry, you'll have to let paedophiles marry!

Er, what? (Also, aren't most paedophiles married?)

Quote the second, from some awful reality tv show about rich kids in the US:

People in our group don't care about race any more, they only care about money. "He's poor" is better that "He's black". That's better.

I wonder is there a law of conservation of bigotry?

The things you hear...

2009-06-03T20:25:00.000+01:00

Heard on the way home from work.

Enraged woman in pink tracksuit to woman in pyjamas (this was at 8pm, mind you) outside pub:

"Every time I see you, I'll kill you!"

Eek.

The ambiguity of the 'bachelor penguin'

2009-06-03T20:23:00.000+01:00

The BBC has an article, entitled 'Gay penguins' rear adopted chick, about those gay penguins with the egg that we hear so much about. Except in this case they are two "gay" male penguins. The BBC, of course, likes to occasionally indulge in odd quotation ('North Korea' tests atomic bomb and the like), but where we have not just quotes, but two types of quotes, and two different subjects! (While in the body the penguins are allegedly gay, in the headline the birds are only allegedly penguins!)

I assume this is to fend off religious zealots outraged about the idea of gay penguins. Or, indeed, about the existence of <<'"penguins"'>>, as clearly God would not have designed something so ludicrous-looking.

The penguins are, apparently, quoted-gay males called Z and Vielpunkt. Sounds like a goth lesbian couple, quite frankly.

Sunny!

2009-06-01T14:21:00.001+01:00

The weather today is really quite amazing. I was out earlier; it was like being in a city in France or Spain or somewhere.

Of course, this being Ireland, it will probably be hail-stoning within the week.