Tech – Page 10 – John Leach

Adblock bad, advertising good!

quote: “I do not sympathize with the distaste of standard banner advertisements that pay for all the free content we currently enjoy. … Since day one, I’ve understood the back end reason for banner ads. They are a necessity of free content. … Adblock effectively robs these free sites of their revenue.”– poptech

Advertising is a hugely inefficient method of paying for content. The site creates content which attracts visitors. Advertising agents add a fee and charge advertisers per visitor click. Advertisers (for this example, online shops) sell products to some people, take a cut, and with a proportion of the money, pay the advertising agents. The rest of the money goes to the manufacturer (well, via various others).

So random people are spending money on random products, which slowly (and in tiny, tiny proportion) filters down the chain to the web site creating the content.
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1/6/2005 1 Comment

Everybody loves Eric Raymond

I’ve started a web comic of my own. After literally a *couple of weeks* in the planning, I unveil Everybody loves Eric Raymond.

You’ll only get it if you’re a Linux geek and it’s very high brow. Except for the geek wrestling.

In case my non-geek readers are interested, Eric Raymond is an “open source” advocate. He’s wheeled out by various big companies once in a while to legitimize their forays into open source software. He’s also a gun nut. In fact, just a bit of a nut in general.

Richard Stallman is the creator of the Free Software movement. His emphasis is very much on software freedom which he thinks is very important. He is described as rather eccentric in real life.

Both Raymond and Stallman (or esr and rms, as they are known) are basically fighting the same battle, but they differ on the freedom issue (and probably the gun stuff).

Linus Torvalds is the guy who first created the Linux kernel (now developed by thousands of geeks worldwide). I think he tries to keep out of the politics of it all.

I’ve put them all in a house together without their wives/girlfriends/whatever. Drawing takes me way too long so I’ve done some very subtle and clever photo manipulation, which involves sticking their heads on my friend’s bodies. I’m also lazy so this isn’t done very well. Anyway, enjoy it or don’t.

13/5/2005 Add Comment

authority

Google seems to think I’m the Internet authority on various subjects. I’m in the top 10 for the following Google searches (with my place number in brackets):

corrado vr6 (1)
armley leeds (2)
raid benchmarks (8)
powerbook g4 (8)
linux powerbook (1)
linux pix (4)
xbox kernel (3)
john leach (3)
ntl hell (7)
redhat advanced server (3)

Either Google needs fixing or the Internet is a lame source of information.

11/5/2005 Add Comment

Compact flush card

One of my 256MB compact flash cards containing some photos went through the wash. It was a colours cotton wash at 40 degrees with a spin cycle at the end and then into the tumble dryer for 60 minutes or so.

It still seems to work perfectly, though some of the colours in the photos look a little lower saturated (read: ‘washed out’). If this were a floppy disc I’d expect extreme data loss (though, at 1.44MB, that’s less that one lost photo), and when I’ve washed CDs before, they were completely destroyed.

I bet if this were a microdrive it’d be broken too.

12/4/2005 1 Comment

Black Hat, Amsterdam

I leave for Amsterdam on Wednesday where I’m attending the Black Hat Briefings. I was at DefCon in Las Vegas a few years ago so I’m interested to see what the BHB are like in comparison. I hope it’s not just a big ugly advertis-a-thon. I’m there for a few days courtesy of work and will have photies to post when I get back I expect.

My new Laptop arrived today too (not got it in my hands though). The ickle IBM Thinkpad X40 is very portable, but I’ve been using it for more of a desktop replacement than a portable troubleshooter, hence the new Viao one. Big 17inch widescreen LCD, crazy CPUness (for Doom3 and Half Life 2 fun), and 1G RAM. I expect it’ll weigh more than two Terri Schiavos* but I’m a big guy.

* – Please note: topical reference.

29/3/2005 Add Comment

Cute Little Image Gallery Script (CLIGS)

The Cute Little Image Gallery Script (CLIGS) is a PHP script that autogenerates a nice html index for a directory full of jpeg images. I wrote it to run my photography galleries and have released it to the world under the Gnu Public License (GPL). Download it and give it a bash (needs some setup and Apache trickery to get going).

20/3/2005 Add Comment

postfix obscureness

Quick technical note. This obscure message from Postfix:

postfix/local[3580]: fatal: gethostbyname: No such file or directory

can be fixed by ensuring your the local machine’s hostname is defined properly in /etc/hosts.

I see hundreds of people asking about this and nobody with a clear answer. Go postfix.

11/3/2005 6 Comments

WordPress upgrade and schtuff

I upgraded WordPress, the software I use to make this blog. I took the opportunity to make a new theme too. It’s basically just the new default WordPress theme but with new colours and the random changing photo header thing you see at the top there. WAVE AT THE RANDOM CHANGING PHOTO HEADER THING YOU PHILISTINES.

In other news, I completed Turrican 2 and weined myself back into reading some news. Not much news, and not obsessively. Murder the government people.

24/2/2005 2 Comments

Amiga classic: Turrican 2

I’ve been playing Rainbow Arts’ Turrican 2 now for perhaps 10 years or more. I started playing it on my original Amiga 500 and have recently taken it back up using the WinUAE Amiga emulator (running on my XBOX).

I’m embarassed to say that I never really made it much further than the first level. I wasn’t much of a games player back then (and could hardly be classed as one now) was often beaten by even my Dad. I was much more interested in programming games :)

Anyway, years later and with the aid of a spiced up joystick with rapid fire option and the save and load state feature of the emulator (allowing me to save and reload at any point in the game, read: just before a hard bits) I’ve managed to make some progress. I’m now up to level 3. I’ve had to stop because my hand has got tired hitting buttons.

Have a look at the screen shots so far. Note that these 304 by 216 pixel images are actual screen resolution. The tiny image you see on your super high resolution modern display is what was used to create the full size Amiga montitor or TV output. As you can imagine it was rather chunky.

7/2/2005 5 Comments

suited and booted

Generally speaking, in my own experience, I find people dress smartly only when they aren’t as good as they need to be. This seems to doubly apply in the field of IT.

That isn’t to say scruffy people are immediately capable.

(Upon normalising the above, you get: “humans aren’t generally as good as they need to be”.)

30/11/2004 Add Comment

New encryption key

I’m getting my annual crypto duties in early this year. My new gpg encryption key is online and expires in January 2006. My old key expires in the middle of December 2004, so you won’t be able to encrypt things for me after that date unless you import my new key. It was generated with gpg but should be perfectly usable with PGP.

John Leach <john@johnleach.co.uk>
pub 1024D/26F03047 2002-01-03
B89C D450 5B2C 74D8 58FB  A360 9B06 B5C2 26F0 3047
 sub  2048g/5BA1B231 2002-01-03 [expires: 2004-01-03]
 sub  2048g/964F3014 2003-12-17 [expires: 2004-12-16]
 sub  2048g/36EEE931 2004-11-29 [expires: 2006-01-03]

29/11/2004 Add Comment

Dell not as stupid as I had hoped

Dell seem not as stupid as I had first hoped. I ordered four VGA projectors for £20 each on Sunday from their website. I received a confirmation later that day but as of an hour ago my order has disappeared from their tracking web site. I ignored the clauses in their terms and conditions that suggested they were able to change civil and criminal law on a whim in the hope they’d process the order automatically before noticing. I guess ten million other people also placed an order, immediately arousing their suspicion circuits.
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25/11/2004 Add Comment