Matt's Blog

I was persuaded by my friend Gary to take over the webmaster position for his dive club. I can't dive myself, except into a swimming pool, but Gary can be quite persuasive and seeing as Gary is president this year and the previous webmaster was having serious health problems I just sort of fell into it. The site is www.wssc.ca and is centuries old in web years. My plan has been to make the fewest possible changes without being lynched. It is a simple static site that is hosted for free by Kelcom, so any server side automation is out of the question.

This is one of those flow of conciousness posts, but given the present state of my conciousness that could result in a awfully looking mess. I seem to be unable to keep up with my correspondence, despite the exceedingly small volume I am getting. I labour over three word replies for hours. I lose threads of conversation and don't pick them up again. There are things I should (must) do that do not happen.

Web technology fascinates me, even though I'm far too lazy to put the knowledge I accumulate to any use. And I do accumuate, like a magpie accumulates shiny objects, rather than synthesize that knowledge. Not actually applying this stuff limits one's ability to learn. It used to amaze me that these technology pundits and analysts spent years covering computer topics yet still seemed to miss all the essentials --- now I know why --- it is amazingly seductive to read and read and read and never actually learn a thing.

I have a fever, my stomach is in turmoil, all my muscles hurt and to top off my woes I just bought a wifi router from dlink. It was the lowest end 802.11g router, and even though I overheard someone in the store say they would never buy dlink again, I had done well with the low end motorola and belkin stuff I had bought in the past --- it seemed unfair to pass them by on the evidence of a single aside --- that and it was $20 cheaper than the belkin, a big difference in this low-end commodity stuff.

So my sister has bought herself a new MacBook. Naturally I snatched it from her hands as quickly as possible, she's barely been able to touch it. It is a very impressive piece of industrial design, and Apple has certainly mastered the art of designing a graceful user interface.

I struck an owl with my car yesterday, which might go some way to explaining my evening's --- well there is no real word to explain it --- it requires a physical component --- or rather you wish that you could have avoided the physical component, but by some quirk of cosmic significance beyond our comprehension you just couldn't. It started out harmlessly enough. I was to meet my sister at the Tulloola Cafe for a little bit to eat and an early evening's entertainment listening to a short programme of Trevor Malcolm on the piano accompanied by his digital self.

Teach Yourself Piano is a Windsor duo that deserve to be linked to. So Teach Yourself Piano. Their CD Sweet Waltz, Bitter Waltz came out recently, and hopefully the rumoured Pictures by Sandi Wheaton will also become available soon.

There seem to be so many people who think that the DRM style signing of binaries is unavoidable and easily circumvented, but I am convinced this is not so. All that the FSF need do in writing (or just in interpreting) there upcoming licence is to consider the one-way hash functions on which cryptographically secure signatures depend (and in particular, on which any economically viable means of DRM depends) as being a binary with respect to the source from which it is generated. Then any entity that wishes to bless just one particular version of a piece of code by DRM means would, by virtue of the GPL, be conveying the binary they are trying to control, and thus subject to all the requirements and provisions of the GPL.

I just went over with a friend and his laptop to a more distant acquaintance who was having problems connecting to the Internet. Her daughter had been over earlier with her own computer so that she could read her own email, but that computer didn't work either. I was accompanying a third machine to be connected to a neat little RCA box that Cogeco cable uses as their black box connection to the internet. You merely connect to the box, et voila, you're online at 100Mb/s. Or at least that's the theory --- when it works.

So here I was tagging along in a purely supporting role as machine three tried its luck. And lucky it was. So everything seemed ok and we reconnected the original machine and it was working too --- for a while. Then it started to complain that various web sites didn't exist. You had to hit them two or three times before they responded, but eventually they did respond, and quickly too. "Aww, that's just the domain name servers acting up", I chimed in, "That's easy to fix --- don't do anything and Cogeco will eventually fix it for us. It's not our problem at all". I was wrong, as it turned out. This wasn't just a transient problem but the final stages of chronic net rot which had been going on for some time.