Journal - Announcement

This is a private message for the fucktard who waited until I was exactly 1mb short of downloading 24 episodes 1-4 before deciding he’d been generous enough for one day:

One day, you will read these words and discover that some person in the world has forgiven you for your actions. Until you do so, be aware that eternity is an awfully long time to be damned for, and until you do I shall continue to hate you with every fruit and fibre of my being.

I remain, your humble servant.

Aquarion.

(Stay tuned, Responces to the first batch of interviews coming up after the break)

Journal - Scientific progress goes eep

There is now a perl module for ESF.

Yet MT(Moveable Type) still can’t do it.

Journal - Interviews

Okay, fact fans, it's meme time. Currently wandering around most of the LiveJournals I read is an interview meme. So, if anyone feels like asking me five questions, put them in the comment box here, and I'll answer them.

Crossreferences

• Link from http://www.gkhs.net/aquarion/

Journal - Down by the canal

It’s a nice day. The sun is shining in the sky, said sky is as blue as the glasses that gaze upon you from the top left of this page. I decided upon this Sunny Friday afternoon that it I should go and do some writing beside the riverbank. This was deemed Good, and so I packed up my notepad, camera and pens and wandered though Reading Town Centre to the lock, where I sat on a handy wall and gazed across the river, and the occasional barge that drifted lazily by. After a while, I withdrew the notebook, found a new page, and drew a box in the top left hand corner, and wrote something in it. Then I draw a similar box in the bottom right, and wrote something else in it. (Which was, in fact “ATLHEA”, as the first box was “OUAT” standing for, in reverse order, “Once Upon A Time” and “And They Lived Happily Ever After”, for this was a flow-chart of the plot of The Novel) then I thought for a bit, and drew a third box below the first, and labeled it “Lamp-post” before crossing it out and writing “Awake” instead. These things mean things in my mind. As I was drawing the forth box, my pen ran out. Cursing slightly (For I was obviously on a role here, and could have kept going all day) I attempted to withdraw a replacement pen from my bag, (For the price I paid for this box of fifty pens, I would be surprised to see them draw three whole boxes, so I had plenty) but was thwarted by the pens not being there. As I carefully unpacked the bag of reference stuff (Containing, in order, a dictionary, an atlas, a book of Greek mythology, and the camera. My work-centre at home adds the complete works of Shakespeare, a dictionary of Idioms, and an artist’s mannequin to that library) I noticed that there were little red spots moving around the wall I was sitting upon.

For all my resolution to work in harmony with nature and in the piece and quiet by the riverbank, it doesn’t extend to being eaten alive by red ants, so I moved.

I moved, in fact, all the way to Café Italia in the shopping centre where they serve tea and really nice toasted sandwiches, reasoning that since the café was beside the river (Which is actually a canal, but I’m not fussy), then so was I. I drank my tea, ate my sandwich (Toasted baguette style, chicken and avocado) and boxblocked the first chapter or so of The Novel, then wrote a page or so. I resisted the urge to get another cup of tea, and wandered out. I wandered out, in fact, roughly as far as the Kitten Tree.

The Kitten Tree is a pub. In fact, it’s called “The Litten Tree” but will always now and forever not be known as such. It seduced me with a cup of tea when I got a flash of inspiration as I was passing it, which I then wrote while eating croissant and drinking tea.

So, generally a good day then.

On a related note, If I was to suggest that on the 28th June, at about seven-ish, I was going to suggest a Gathering, what would people’s reaction be?

Crossreferences

• Link from http://www.dellah.com/orient/

Article - BitTorrent

So, I’ve been playing with BitTorrent.

BitTorrent works like this:

Someone (Alice) creates a hash (called a Torrent) of a file which has an announce-tracker built in.

(Alice) then runs the BT(BitTorrent) client with the torrent, which downloads this file from themselves (since BT supports resuming, no actual data is transferred), and announces they are sharing it to the announce-tracker.

Someone Else (Bob) downloads the Torrent and runs the BT(BitTorrent) client with it, which goes to the announce-tracker and says “Okay, Alice has the bit of the file (the start) you want. Here’s where Alice is” and Bob downloads part one from Alice.

A third person (Clive) downloads the Torrent and runs the BT(BitTorrent) client (BitTorrent)with the Torrent, which goes to the announce-tracker and says “Okay, Alice has the whole file, Bob has the first part. Go talk to Bob.

Delaney has the choice of Alice, Bob or Clive. Ernie has Alice, Bob, Clive or Delaney.

Assuming a spherical P2P client of average density, infinite bandwidth rate, and standard temperament, there are three problems with this:

1) The Torrent

In order to download an item, you need to find the Torrent. There are a whole range of sites dedicated to hosting Torrents and pointing you at places that are hosing Torrents. In fact, before the bogus BBC story about a DVD-quality rip of Matrix2 being on BT(BitTorrent) there were an awful lot more, but the entire network got swamped just as various hosts said “Ack. the MPAA are going to kill us” and shut down the sites. Yet I digress. Finding Torrents is non-trivial.

2) The Final Sixth

What happens in the above scenario when Alice goes offline? Well, that depends. If Bob or Clive or anyone has got the last part of the file then Delaney and Ernie can get it from them, but if not then everyone is waiting for Alice to come back. Theoretically there is only one torrent for every file in existence, but in real life there is one for every tin-pot server out there. So, I currently own precisely five sixths of each of the first three episodes of 24 Season One (Which I’m trying to find out if I’ll like, hence the download), and until the person uploading them comes back, I’ll carry on with the first five sixths. And, because I’m a nice person and have opened the upload ports too (this isn’t altruism. BT prejudices download speed against people who can’t upload) then anyone can download the first five sixths of the file from me, and they’ll be in the same boat I’m in.

hah.

Of course, Alice is doing this out of pure altruism so probably went offline by accident. Bob, on the other hand, is an evil mean bastard leeching the system for all it’s worth. The BT client (well, the official ones. Bob may have got one of the others that don’t do this) doesn’t automatically close after the download is done, leaving anyone the whole file ready to be uploaded to anyone. Social pressure and niceness guidelines say to leave the window open at least three times longer than it took you to get the dl. Some tracking systems enforce this (TVTorrents has a particularly nice credits system) but most are relying on the social conscious of kids.

3) The Tracker

A single point of contact is a single point of failure. I was exactly 78.8% into my download of a 3 gig file (in this case Scrubs Season One) when the tracker went away. Vanished. So, I downloaded the remaining part of the file from the person my client knew about and then the client connected to the tracker to find the next part.

“The web site will be down until we have the new server.”

Bother.

Bother bother bollocks bother bother.

On top of all this, the l33t warez industry has decided BitTorrent is dissing it’s turf and various members of it trying to DDOS .torrent services. Generally, it’s making it very difficult for me to get my fix of West Wing. Damn them all.

Journal - Other Stuff

No entries recently. Nothing happening. Still no interviews. Though I managed to hit DitM with the return post. Talking of which, Aquaintances got updated with what Mark was talking about yesterday when I wrote strip_evil (raw) and will safely strip (as far as I know) all evil from RSS feeds.

In other news, LoneCat – my other half – has finally finished the first version of Sublime, her diary engine, and therefore her diary is back online. Also my ex-housemate’s diary engine (Adversaria, notable mostly because it impliments the UNIX filesystem and some shell access internally with perl, and is designed to look like a terminal program) is also back online and as sick as ever.

Finally, if you haven’t been following, LondonMark has finished his epic “Case of the Missing …” detective story. If you haven’t been reading it, read it now (The permalinks aren’t, atm, because his archives are broken, but for a limited period it’s all on the front page. If it isn’t, then it starts on the 25^th May)

Journal - Things

Okay, we’re back. This is what happened.

I went on Hiatus. I wrote a Hiatus Page that said, essecially, “Time to try something new”.

Then I got four seperate messages assuming I’d gone overboard again. So I wrote the mixed-font thing that then got linked to inline by BB & Vaughan (That’s Inline as opposed to Blogroll). So far, so hoopy. But what of the hiatus?

The purpose was to rediscover writing, and to get writing done. In this, I both suceeded and failed. I failed to get any new writing done at all, but did manage to clear up a couple of older pieces, and instead sat around fiddling with Aquarionics (Error pages now work properly) New Projects (The ESR Edits Jargon-File thing inspired me to create a Wiki as a better way of handling the Jargon File. More info when I’ve worked out how to import anything into PHPWiki) and stuff like that.

But on thursday I went out and sat by the riverbank with a notebook and a pen, and then in a Café with said notebook and pen, and plotted The Novel from beginning to end. Then I went back home to actually write it, and failed, and went onto IRC, Vice City, Usenet & Weblogs instead.

So the problem appears to be that I don’t have the self-disipline to seperate Work from Play when they are in the same place (I know from experience that given seperate places, I’m fine), and since I don’t currently have the resources to seperate them effectivly (My laptop has no battery-life, and a new battery for my £50 laptop will cost £103.73 inc P&P.) this is causing me a Problem. TBH, I’m not sure how I can counter this, short of getting a new room to be an office, so I’m back here.

And soon, I shall go back to the Riverbank.

This concluded, I’ve managed to tidy up some other works (Including Alinda, below) for online publication, mostly serving as a warmup exercise for Toffia. Meantime, I’m back to the circular world of “We won’t hire someone without experience” for the forseeable, and sitting at my desk:

Crossreferences

• Link from http://diveintomark.org/
• Link from http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/06/11/in_brief_independent_reality_edition.html
• Link from http://www.kryogenix.org/
• Link from http://www.diveintomark.org/
• Link from http://www.phiberweb.com/index.php
• Link from http://diveintomark.org.new.cr.sabren.com/mobile/002289.html
• Link from http://kryogenix.org/
• Link from http://www.diveintomark.org

Journal - Employment

A man goes to an agency in London and asks if they have any jobs.
“Sure”, replies the interviewer, “I’ve got an ace job – working in a
strip club, what you would have to do is help the girls undress and
dress, oil them and all that sort of stuff.”

“sounds good” says the man.

“Great, can you get to Newcastle for 9.00 am tomorrow?”

“Why, is that where the job is?”

“No, that’s where the queue starts…”

rec.humor.funny

Journal - Everyone loves Spam Statistics

This is a graph of my spam-count:

This is how I created my spam-count. It’s a combination of spamassassin, procmail, shell-script and PHP, and therefore full of Stuff Wot No Man Was To Wot Of. Or something.

First, I run spamassassin, which just generally rocks. All my email comes into one mailbox, aq which is at gkhs dot net. That includes every mailing list, every aquarionics dot com address, all my suespammers mail, and my hotmail account (via the really quite nice program, gotmail. It then gets fed though procmail which uses various script-fu to deposit mailing-lists into newsgroups on the local news server (I prefer reading discussion via usenet), and everything else gets sent though Spamassassin like this:

:0fw:/home/aquarion/logs/sa.lock
| /usr/local/bin/spamassassin

:0:

• ^X-Spam-Status: YES
  $MAILDIR/spam/`date +%Y-%m-%d`

meaning that everything that SA thinks is spam gets forwarded to a mailbox within my spam folder with the name as the date. Most solutions I saw for this kind of statistics generation put all the mail into one box and then grab the date from it. For the way I’m doing it, that’s a waste of processing, plus it ignores Rule One: Spammers Lie. The date on the spam usually has no relation to the date you got it.

So, we now have a box called – for example – 2003-06-09 containing today’s Spam (On the second day of every month, a cron-job wraps all the last-month’s spam into a tarball and dumps it somewhere to rot). Every morning at 1:12am, the following runs:

#!/bin/sh
DATE=`date +%Y-%m-%d`
SPAMTODAY=`from -f ~/Mail/spam/$DATE | wc -l`

echo $DATE, $SPAMTODAY >> ~/logs/spam.log

(@from@ is a program that displays the from: header of every mail in a mailbox. In this case, it generates one line per mail which is what we want). Giving us a file like this:

--snip--
2003-06-02, 328
2003-06-03, 134
2003-06-04, 130
2003-06-05, 152
2003-06-06, 125
2003-06-07, 123
2003-06-08, 267
--snip--.

Which we can do whatever we want with. In this case, a PHP script (or you can view that nicely formatted) which generates a graph.

And thats how I know I get about 100 to 300 pieces of spam every day.

Best yet, that’s the only way I know I get 100 -> 300 pieces of spam a day :-)

Writing - Alinda

There once was a man who married for breasts of a woman he hated.
During the day, he regreted this, for he worked hard for his citizens and to see them suffer beneath the tyranical whims and impossible desires of his desire was almost more than he could take. But at night he realised he could never leave, and she could never go, as they made love in the castle bedrooms, he vowed he could never again go back to the woman he had married for love.

For he had – once – married for love. For the desires and dreams of a young baron overruled the politics of the court, and he married his childhood sweetheart in a lavish ceremony, which had tales of the food, of the wine, and of the extravagance spread over the kingdom for many years. But no tales were told of the beauty of the bride, for the baron’s love was for a plain girl.

And so, in time, she bore him a son and a daughter. Twins. Alike as two new pins, and just as sharp. And the twins loved each other, and the family was happy, and the baron’s land was at peace.
But all did not remain well, for the son caught a disease in his seventh year, and his mother did dote upon him, and stay with him night and day.
But alas did the son die, three days before his eighth birthday, and the kingdom morned the loss of it’s heir, and if the mother looked pale, then it was only to be expected.
When the mother died, a month or two later, the baron was devestated. For an entire week he locked himself within his chambers, and the land floundered without a leader, but eventually he came once again into public life, although thereafter wore black.

Seasons turned, Time moved on, and the kingdom was still without a male heir to the throne. The king announced his intention to re-wed, and from around the country – and indeed the world – single women of an appropriate age flowed into the Great Hall, and – just as quickly – back out into the world until Alinda walked, swayed, glided into the throne room with every man’s eyes on her. Alinda shone with the deep, enticing kind of beauty carefully calculated – from the deep red lipstick to the carefully arranged – and expansive – cleavage seeping from the tight black corset – to make her target disolve into a puddle of drool.

So Baron Hardup married Alinda, who brought with her the two daughters his own would hate so very much, and began to live upto his surname, for Alinda was expensive. Alinda hated the fact that Cinderella would get half the fortune if he died, and so spent it before he had a chance.

Strange things are done for love, and even stranger things for hate.

And that’s where the story began.