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

Leeds film festival tertiary bit

Steamboy coverTwo anime films back to back. First of all, Katsuhiro �tomo’s Steamboy. Truly impressive artwork, amazing sound engineering, utterly poop story. I enjoyed the film but a second or third viewing would only be to check out the visuals. Set in Manchester and London in the steam powered 19th century, young Ray Steam has to help his father and grandfather do some crazy shit protecting their high pressure steamball invention. It’s insanely surreal to see an army of steam powered soldier-robots and flying steam powered attack kites fighting against a Japanese-speaking British army led by Robert Stephenson in the centre of 19th century London. Really, it is, you’ll just have to take my word for it.

What this film lacks in plot, is almost perfectly balanced with lovely things to look at. Almost. Apparently I’m one of very few people outside of Japan to see this film. Don’t I feel so goddam elite.


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8/11/2004 Add Comment

Leeds film festival: About Baghdad

About Baghdad is a video collage of interviews and scenes from the streets of Baghdad shorted after the 2003 war (after? is it over?). Sinan Antoon, an Iraqi writer and poet who fleed to the US during Saddam’s regime, revisits his home and talks to other Iraqi people about their views. This was really interesting. What wasn’t suprising was that a majority of the views of Iraqi people are very different from how the mainstream press report them. They are of course very happy that Saddam is gone, and largely thankful to America for this but they basically feel that they need to be running things themselves now, and if this doesn’t happen soon there will be rebellion. Remember these are interviews from a year ago. Also remember all the violence going on currently and how it’s portrayed as a small number of “insurgents” who are going against the wishes of the real Iraqi people.
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8/11/2004 Add Comment

Leeds film festival secondary phase

Now I’ve seen two more films. First up was Vera Drake. Vera is a “working-class” 1950s abortionist. She performs the “operations” because she genuinely believes the girls need help, and charges no money for doing it. Eventually she gets caught and prosecuted under the ‘Offences Against the Person Act of 1861’.

Directed by Mike Leigh and with Imelda Staunton as Vera the film is absolutely wonderful. It primarily tells Vera’s story, but comments on many other things, including the story of an upper-class girl who pays for a professional operation and everything goes fine and dandy. Being rich rocks eh? Also, Reg and Ethel were the cutest couple I’ve ever seen, heh.
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5/11/2004 Add Comment

Leeds film festival begins

Leeds Film Festival 2004 logoMy first film of the festival was Garden State, an amusing but pretty dark film starring Zach Braff and Natalie Portman. My favourite scene was the 5 second shot of the main character modelling the shirt his auntie made from room decorating offcuts, but that’s not to say the rest of the film wasn’t great, just that I was considerably amused.

My second run was the short film panorama containing a number of short films made around the world. My favourite’s being “The Best Of Lukas M.”, “Scherubel”, “Handicap” and “Plasticat”. I’m not rating the films as requested by the organisers, as rating *anything* on an entirely arbitrary numerical scale is, well, entirely arbitrary.
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1/11/2004 Add Comment

Halloween

I’ve cable-tied my gate shut. Trick or treat.

31/10/2004 Add Comment

The Sirens of Titan – Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.This story pokes some fun at war, religion and life in general. It’s certainly science fiction, but that’s hardly at all important to the story lines.

It’s co-incidentally linked to a number of other books I’m reading at the moment in that it strives to provide some perspective on life with a view to have us stop worrying about the larger ‘cosmic’ purpose of it.

It’s also amusingly written, in a style that perhaps influenced the late, great and inflated Douglas Adams.

It’s also utter insanity. Winston Runfoord is a space traveller who gets caught in chronosynclastic infunidbulum. He now mysteriously appears in certain places at certain times with his dog, can read peoples minds and knows the future. He works out a big plan to sort the world out, which seems to kind of work. I’ll just leave it at that.

28/10/2004 Add Comment

The Meme Machine – Susan Blackmore

The Meme Machine - Susan BlackmoreSusan Blackmore explains the theory of memes; what they are and how they affect us. She suggests that memes are as intertwined with recent human evolution as genes, explaining much of our strange behaviour and our huge brains.

I’m sure this will upset a lot of people due to the suggestion we are at the mercy of the memes and that they basically control us. With a good understanding of memes, you see the modern world in a interesting light. You begin to see more clearly why people gossip, why everyone wants to have David Beckham’s hairstyle and why people waste their entire lives following an illogical, pointless and largely suspicious religion, like Christianity for example.


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29/9/2004 Add Comment

grsecurity and selinux

I’m playing with the grsecurity patches for Linux. Unfortunately 2.6.8 changed in a way that causes major headache for the grsec team, so no planned release date for a new patch. Having some problems with strange enforcements of rlimits, potentially linked to the rlimit auditing code. I’ll hopefully get time to tinker with SELinux too.

28/9/2004 Add Comment

NTL hell, Amazon + Pixmania idiots

NTL phone message tells customers to fuck off. “We don’t give a f..k about you… we just will f..k you”. I’m just pleased they are being honest for once.

I managed to re-apply for an Amazon account with the same e-mail address and gained access to my previous purchases history and credit card history. I’ve e-mailed a number of time but Amazon just don’t care. I actually want to make a book purchase but cannot (as I now have two accounts with the same e-mail address (i.e: username) and it gets confused). I’m just going to purchase them elsewhere.
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27/9/2004 2 Comments

2.6.7-8 default window scaling settings

My new Fedora installation was playing up with certain web sites resulting in *very* slow download (I could see the words drawing on my screen one by one). A ethereal dump showed a nice big window size, but max 120 byte packets and an ack for each one!

Well it turns out since about kernel 2.6.7, the default tcp_window_scale setting has been 7. The problem is, as was with ECN, there are lots of broken routers out there which break window scaling (they strip the TCP options, which is totally against RFC, and common sense). So the other end doesn’t know you’re scaling, so it’ll think you set (or you think it set) a tiny ikle window size.

Anyway I fixed it for now with a ‘net.ipv4.tcp_default_win_scale = 0’ in my /etc/sysctl.conf, but there is a new kernel patch floating around which seems to be a bit cleverer and will be due in the next kernel.

4/9/2004 Add Comment