Y Safle

Three things really annoy me about conferences and meetings with presentations:

1. An agenda that tries to squeeze too much in to too little time!
2. Speakers who, having been allotted 20 minutes to speak, decide to drone on for 45 minutes (and it is always the droners who do this!)
3. Chairs who do not cut the said speakers off!

Bah humbug!

This just in from CNN:

Map of England.

You really don’t want to have someone at CNN teaching you geography!

If you can’t see the problem. Look here:

Map of Wales.

Last week I was made to sit through yet another PowerPoint presentation in which the presenter had decided to enliven his turgidity with the help of the Comic Sans typeface.

I have sat through too many Comic Sans presentations (indeed, if I had only sat through one such presentation, that would still be too many). What is it about the typeface that causes presentations to become so unforgivably dry?

Actually, it may be the typeface itself. It is not a novelty typeface. It is a bog standard run-of-the-mill but hard to read typeface that slows down word recognition (and thus reading) whilst introducing too much pretty stuff to distract from the actual content.

It is a badly written typeface, derivative and unprofessional. And yet there are people who write stuff like this (okay, they are the creators of this abomination at Microsoft):

Comic Sans is the groovy script font which comes with the Windows 95 Plus! pack and is now available for the Apple Macintosh. Although it might be seen as a novelty typeface, which is great for titles, it’s also extremely readable on-screen at small sizes, making it a useful text face.

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/fonts/comicsns/default.htm

Groovy? I’m not sure that Microsoft know the meaning of the term (see their Zune product for example!) Great for titles? Titles of what??? I have never seen a title that was improved for being written in Comic Sans. Readable on screen? I beg to differ. I read comic sans text significantly more slowly than other text (if I bother to read it at all).

If you want to be taken seriously, just don’t do it. Don’t use Comic Sans typeface.

The above site goes on:

These pages are designed to be viewed using Microsoft Internet Explorer, with Comic Sans MS and Comic Sans Bold installed.

Ah.. I see. The reason this typeface looks so bad is that I don’t use Microsoft’s insecure browser. That about sums it up really.

Again I beg to differ. The page is irredeemable. No combination of browser and font is going to help it – because the writers really do not have a clue.

It must be something about vehicle manufacturers, because they seem to be some of the worse offenders for this kind of nonsense:

Upgrade your browser

This website does not support your current Browser version.

For the best experience of this website we recommend you to use
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 and above.

Last time I had one of these, it was when looking up information about Renault cars before buying a new vehicle. We did not buy Renault. We did not even bother go to a Renault show room.

This time it is Scania (don’t ask!)

Now I browse the Internet with either Safari or Firefox. Both are far better browsers than Internet Explorer. Occasionally I use text browsers or browsers on handheld devices, and these stupid sites break with these browsers too.

Now if everybody wrote sites with an eye on web standards, then we would all be much better off, and we would not have brain dead retailers trying to persuade us to infect our machines with Microsoft’s dangerous products, telling us we must “upgrade” to this rubbish before they are willing to sell us their products.

A few weeks ago a local pub leafleted our Church car park on a Sunday morning to advertise some kind of immoral binge whereby one would be locked inside a hot smokey room swilling gallons of alcoholic beverages and doing stupid things that you will forget, but no-one else will! Morons!

It is bad enough having these people leave their litter on my vehicle, but to spend the money and time advertising to the one community in Aberystwyth that would return a zero response is just plain stupid!

I often consider inserting the leaflets left on my car in an unstamped envelope and posting it back to the sender, complete with a “you dropped this” message and a large chunk of masonry.

I have never quite been bothered so far, but one of these days…!

It’s that time of year again. Kids getting ready to demand money (or something) with menaces. Kids dressing up a broom with an old sock stuffed with paper and demanding money (without menaces). Kids throwing fireworks around and loud bangs in the night. Bah humbug!

So where does this all come from? Halloween, we are told, derives from the Celtic festival of Samhain, and heralds the end of the Celtic year, the night when the world draws close to the otherworld. Only it has often struck me as odd that the pre-Romanised Celts would just happen to end their year so neatly on the last day of a Roman calendar month.

And what is Bonfire Night? Isn’t that all about some Guy who wanted to blow up parliament and install a Catholic king? Why mention it on a page all about Celtic interests?

Guy Fawkes, it turns out, has very little to do with Bonfire Night. Yes, the gunpowder plot was foiled on November 5th, but this just happened to be the Bonfire Night already. Guy Fawkes was not burned at the stake, as some suppose. He was hanged drawn and quartered (the normal punishment meted out at that time to traitors).

The bonfires of the start of November were a much older (Celtic) tradition. The throwing of an effigy onto these bonfires was also an old tradition – the effigies were the Celtic green men.

Sir James Frazer wrote extensively about the fire festivals of Europe in his 1922 magnus opus, “the Golden Bough”. In this work he points out that the Celts, early farmers, timed the end of their year with the time when herdsmen would bring their cattle down from the hills to winter pastures, and after the harvest is gathered in and stored.

Since ancient times, Celts have reckoned the year to end on Bonfire Night, and as autumn gives way to winter, this world and the otherworld are indeed supposed to be at their closest point (an idea perhaps helped by autumnal mists which can turn to heavy fogs in early November).

The Bonfire celebration, and the burning of effigies covered in evergreen boughs, are a memory of a log forgotten superstitious past. Much of this is detailed in the Golden Bough, Chapters 62-64.

However, Sir James Frazer missed one point. He speaks, as so many of us do, of the Celtic New Year as starting on November 1st, and Samhain as being 31st October (see chapter 62, section 6). This is a mistake.

Long before the Roman calendar, the Samhain fires were burning year in and year out. We know that Celts based festivals on dates calculated from astronomical recordings, and it is worth noting that the night of November 5th is located exactly half way between autumnal equinox and the winter solstice. Beltain is half way between vernal equinox and summer solstice. Thus the significant date is indeed 5th November. The Celtic festival is 5th November – not 31st October.

Halloween derives from a Christian festival on another date that just happens to have similarities with Samhain, but the true Celtic festival is Bonfire Night. So when some child rings your doorbell this week, tell them to come back next week.

And while you are at it, you may like to point out that guising, of which trick or treat is a mere corruption, involves the recital of a piece of poetry, or the singing of a song for some reward. You can offer them such a reward at your bonfire celebration if you like… at least if they are really obnoxious, you can (however fleetingly) consider throwing them on it instead! On second thoughts, perhaps not… but at least the idea might give you a warm fuzzy feeling. )

I admit it. I am a pedant.

A pretty sloppy pedant maybe, but a pedant all the same.

Many a time I have had to stop someone mid sentence because they have just spoken of “gender awareness” or “the two genders”. And many a time have I been filling in a form that asked me my gender, when to my frustration I find there is no “non edible vegetable” box.

And it is not just the word “gender”. I am apt to speak of two or more octopodes whenever I hear “octopi”, and by extension, platypodes when I see more then than one platypus (admittedly not often). Wrong plurals drive me nearly insane.

If one has more than a single virus on a computer, then these are viruses, not viri (men!) or worse virii (The plural of viri)!

And there are countless more examples. Plural of hippopotamus? Hippoipotamus I suppose! (As in “horses of the river”).

But back to the gender example. For the uninitiated, the word “gender” comes from the indo-european root word “gen” meaning “kind” (via Latin “genus” which translates Aristotle’s grammatical term, “genos”). “masculine gender” refers to the noun category in many languages, and many of these also have “neuter” as well as “feminine”. Furthermore, in languages such as German, a maiden is neuter, even though certain vegetables, including turnips, might be feminine!

But it turns out that there are many languages with classes of noun (and indeed other parts of speech) which are not masculine, feminine or neuter. In his book, “The unfolding of Language”, Guy Deutscher mentions the example of an Australian aboriginal language where the classes of noun include “edible vegetable” and “non edible vegetable”. It turns out that transportation, such as aeroplanes, are usually classed as non edible vegetable. This is presumed to be because dug out boats would be made from wood, and the classification has stuck.

Now as I am frequently primary transportation for my youngest daughter, I believe that my gender should also be non edible vegetable.

Survey writers be warned – if you ask me my gender and don’t give me that choice, I will write it in. If it is an electronic survey, I will not complete it.

Of course, if you want to know my biological sex, then just ask!

Although I feel duty bound to add the caveat that Guy Deutscher’s book describes the evolution of language as an inevitable thing, and pedants like me have as much chance of preventing that evolution as king Cnut had of stopping the tide come in. (Although on that point, Cnut never actually believed he could stop the tide. He was demonstrating the limitations of his power… see, I told you I was a pedant).

I’m looking forward to the day when people start talking about having “genderal relations”… then we will have to find another politically correct word instead!

People are inclined to think highly of their nations. Patriotism is seen as a virtue, and nations that can instill a cohesive patriotism are generally far more successful than those that cannot.

But how much of this sense of patriotism is born in a modern day mythology of national greatness? The U.K. fosters a deliberate ambiguity in the name for its larger island: Great Britain. The Americans think of the U.S.A. as a great nation, and no doubt many more peoples are afflicted with such notions.

But what makes these nations great? What do we mean by the term? Do we mean to imply some kind of altruistic desire to bring peace to the world? Or do we simply mean that the coercive apparatus of the state are irresistable in these nations?

One thing is for sure: I see no sense of greatness in a nation that is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths of civilians in countries they have invaded. There is nothing great about a nation that arms client states to wage war on women and children. There is nothing great about a nation that would sell chemical weapons knowingly to brutal dictators so that they can attempt genocide on civilian peoples and commot war crimes against their neighbours.

There is nothing great about a nation that refuses to reduce its monstrously high greenhouse emissions, condemning millions of people to poverty, suffering and death. There is nothing great about a nation that wants to hoard its wealth without sharing with others – keeping developing countries poor for thye sake of small lobbies of self interest
What makes a nation great? What is the greatest nation on earth?

Then he said to them, “Whoever welcomes this little child in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. For he who is least among you all—he is the greatest.”

Luke 9:48

Steve Gibson is several years out of date in his Security Now podcast, episode 47. He says:

[The October 2002 DDoS against the DNS]  was directed at all 13 of the main DNS servers, the so-called “root servers,” which maintain the master directories of domain names. Nine of the 13 DNS servers were brought down. Only four of the servers managed to stay on the ‘Net. [...]

There really is no defense. The only thing that can be done is that – and this is what some of the commercial anti-denial-of-service service providers have done, is they could have servers connected to very large pipes

Mr Gibson’s analysis is wrong. There is no need for very large pipes to the DNS servers, because since 2002 a program of anycasting has been rolled out for the DNS servers whereby a number of the servers are essentially cloned around the net, and special BGP routes are announced to routers at multiple points across the Internet, such that traffic from a client will be routed to the nearest (in networking terms) DNS root server. This works because packets will be routed to the lowest cost route. It provides failover, because if one server dies, then the next least costly route will be used (which may be another anycast clone).

October 2002 was not the only DDOS attack against the DNS, but of late no attacks have succeeded, because instead of just 13 root servers, we now have many times that number, and we have very successful over provisioning of the root servers.

Last year I wrote this post: http://safle.org/wordpress/?p=4. In particular I looked up the current locations of the root name servers and used the Google Maps API to create this map of where the root name servers are located. The smaller pins show anycast IP duplicate servers. (Note that these are not accurate all the way down to the street level)

The effect of this is that any DDoS against the DNS will be diluted amongst all name servers, and is unlikely to succeed. With every additional anycast clone server, the chances of a successful attack on the DNS are further reduced (and DNS resolution for the new geographic area covered is imporved).

Mr Gibson’s explanation of what the root servers do is also sloppy. These servers do not hold master copys of the domain names. They merely hold data for the TLDs (top level domains) such as uk., us., to., tv., es., ru., … as well as the gTLDs such as com., org.

They used to hold  the next level of edu. I believe, although a quick dig for the edu. name servers quickly reveals this is no longer the case.

Whilst we are talking about this podcast, Steve Gibson gets onto his pet subject – raw sockets in Windows XP. His argument was that raw sockets were a bad idea because they allow someone with admin priveleges (the default user in XP home edition) to run programs that can become worms and the like.

To an extent he was right – but the problem is not raw sockets. The problem is the brain dead decision of Microsoft to continue allowing technically illiterate users run with full admin priveleges on their network connected boxes by default. In Mr Gibson’s dialogue with Microsoft he claims that raw sockets were his one problem with Windows XP. But these were not the problem.

Yes its hard to have backward compatibility without admin priveleges – especially if you are using NT as your operating system. But look at what Apple did with OS X, and you can see how it is quite possible (for a little pain) to make an astoundingly good OS, with backward compatibility and security designed in (thanks to the use of UNIX).

So enough self congratulation in spotting a problem with raw sockets. The question Mr Gibson should be asking is when will Microsoft release an O.S. with security designed in? When will users no longer be logged in with admin priveleges?

 

It seems that every time someone complains about government waste and incompetence, some Joe Public will be quoted as saying “we could have spent that money on hospitals and schools”. Strange that we never hear anyone say “we could have spent that money on killing people in foreign countries” or “we could have spent that money on another tier in the civil service” or even “we could have spent that money on a government national identity computer system”.

No, we live in a utopian world whereby any spending we don’t agree with could have better been spent on health or education.

George Osborne did it yesterday. When interviewd about the hugely wasteful tax credit system, he said “we could have spent that billion pounds on schools and hospitals”. I fast forwarded the rest of his interview. I don’t suppose he bothered to add that the Conservatives never did spend any more on schools and hospitals.

Hey, at least the lib dems used to say “we will tax you more and spend the money on education”.

But honesty never won an election, and no doubt many people said “hear, hear George” as he trotted out the schools and hospitals mantra.