The Internet...

... is a scary place. Presenting Exhibit A for the jury's deliberation.

Good Things

Good Things happened today. One, I got a replacement 19" monitor from Iiyama... I shall be happy to continue recommending them to friends and family. And two, I completed Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Okay, so I'm several months late on the KOTOR bus, but it's a damn fine game. It genuinely feels like playing a Star Wars movie in places - even tho' it's set thousands of years before the events in Star Wars IV.

I'm glad to see that not everything Star Wars related has been turned into golden turds by the vast money-making colon of George Lucas. Can't wait for KOTOR II now.

Monkey Hackers

This story comes from the Least Reliable News Source Ever, but it's great because it involves a monkey.

Tech Support

I've had a terrible time of it lately with my computer.

For several months, it has been intermittently rebooting, with no apparent cause. To begin with, I thought it may have been the graphics card overheating - crashes were more common when I was watching a movie or playing a game. So I bought a new graphics card. Alas, it didn't work in my system - every time I tried to switch the computer on, it would power up for a few seconds and then power down. So I found another graphics card of the same spec as my previous one, and tried that.

It seemed fine for a few days, and then the crashes returned. The graphics card was clearly not overheating, and the crashes were becoming more frequent. I went through all my components and tried to isolate the causative component. Eventually I narrowed it down to the motherboard or the CPU... on the balance of probabilities, I thought it was more likely to be the motherboard.

So, I bought a new motherboard. Alas, my previous motherboard was old and arthritic, and had only PC-133 RAM... I couldn't find a new motherboard that took such old memory, so I also had to buy new memory.

A few hours with a screwdriver led to my newly installed motherboard and memory booting up quite happily, but it would only judge my processor (an Athlon 2200) as an Athlon 1500. Huh!

It was far more stable however, and so I hooked up my new graphics card. Instant power-down. Curse you, technology demons!

So, I bought a new power-pack (my second in about three months), and the new graphics card worked. Huzzah!

I had already replaced the powerpack a few months ago to fix an unrelated problem, so I hadn't considered that as a likely cause of the problem... so, problem solved, although I bought myself £200 of equipment in order to fix it.

Except, no... the front-side bus of the motherboard was set as 100... for my processor, it should be 133. Ramp it up to what it should be, and bam... instant crashes are back. So, begrudgingly I shell out for another CPU. It arrived yesterday, installed beautifully, and viola - for the first time in months, I seem to have a working computer!

Of course, these things come in spurts... and unsurprisingly, as soon as I had a working computer my monitor (a 19" IIyama) decides that the peer pressure is too much and it shuts down and refuses to start up again.

You can imagine the frustration! With the new CPU, I'd already spent £300 in order to get my computer fixed, and now it looked like another £1-200 just to replace a perfectly good monitor. But no!

I called up Iiyama's tech support, and they were phenomenal. A ten minute conversation arranged for them to pick up my broken monitor so they could swap in a replacement of 'equal or better spec'. A small ray of light in my darkened pit of painful expenses.

The sad thing is, I'm thoroughly delighted with their tech support. Why's that bad, I hear you ask? It's bad because, in an ideal world, that's the kind of tech support I would expect. But over the past three years, Iiyama is the only tech support that hasn't had me spitting blood and swearing after a conversation with one of their phone operators. Blueyonder are especially bad - every issue you raise is always your fault, even when it's demonstrably not. My mother was told that the reason that she couldn't connect to the internet was that she downloaded and installed a Java Runtime Environment and that they couldn't help. (The real reason was that the modem had broken).

So, anyway... Iiyama are great. They provide excellent monitors at reasonable prices, and their tech support is great. I am very pleased, and very glad that I've recommended them to so many of my friends and relatives over the years.

Unlisting the Listable

A published writer is me!

Okay, so it's just an article I wrote for a MUD connector site - it's of interest to absolutely nobody unless you're designing quests for computer games... but here it is anyway: Unlisting the Listable.

It's Worse Than You Think

Bucking the Orwellian trend of bowing to the administration's pressures to report only good news from Iraq, Newsweek have published a very interesting article about Iraq. The title says it all: It's Worse Than You Think.

Except, it's not - it's pretty much exactly what you'd think if you didn't let yourself be forcefed the falsely optimistic stories that cloud the true facts. Iraq is in an awful state. Afghanistan, its forgotten ancestor, is likewise in an awful state. There is no end in sight, and things are only getting worse.

Ralph Nader

Ralph Nader has the potential to be the biggest wildcard in the November elections... it's not for nothing that republicans are supporting his efforts in the election. There are a number of things that are fundamentally wrong about the two party system, not the least of these reasons being that marginal candidates like Nader cannot participate without substantially improving the chances of the candidates on the other side of the political spectrum.

Consider this line of political proclivities:

Left <----------------------------------------------------------------> Right

           |                        |                      |

        Nader                  Democrats             Republicans

You may disagree with the placements, but hey - get your own blog you whiny bitch.

Consider people on the mid-left part of the spectrum. Who are they going to vote for? Some are going to vote democrat, and some are going to vote nader . What about people on the mid-right? Well, they're not going to be voting for Nader, regardless of what he may think.

But in all of this, it's important not to fall into the trap of thinking that Nader is stealing votes from the democrats - that's ludicrous. The votes don't belong to the democrats, they're just where the votes went in the absence of a better alternative. However, like many people, I feel this election is too important on a deeply immediate, practical level to risk it on the grounds that 'Nader has a right to run'. He does, and I applaud him for his willingness to fight for a three party political system - but this year, getting Bush out of office is vastly more important... and many previous nader supporters agree.

There's too much being risked here - I'm not sure that the world can survive another four years of the Bush-Cheney junta.

New Orleans

Yikes... best get out your canoe if you're planning a visit to New Orleans!

Map of Springfield

Jesus, what is wrong with people??

Bush by the Numbers

A typically excellent article from the Independent.

Update: As has been pointed out in the comments section, this article is no longer free... so here's a mirror!

You got Served

Woo... you go, Congress!

1,000 Deaths

That grisly milestone was reached on Tuesday, sixteen months after the 'end of major hostilities'. I wonder if anyone has actually done the arithmetic and found out exactly how much money each life earned, if you calculate profits from Iraq against the death-toll. Whatever it may be, it wasn't worth it.

Chatham House

This is an interesting report issues from Chatham House, home of one of the world's leading independent think tanks. Whilst everyone's attention was focused on the tragedy in Russia, they released a troubling report about Iraq:

The report ‘Iraq in Transition: Vortex or Catalyst’ claims that the hand over will lead to three likely scenarios:

1. If the Shi’a, Sunni and Kurd factions fail to adhere to the Iraqi Interim Government (IIG), Iraq could fragment or descend into civil war.
   
2. If the transitional government, backed up by a supportive US presence, can assert control, Iraq may well hold together.
   
3. A Regional Remake could overtake the other two scenarios if the dynamics unleashed by Shi’a and Kurdish assertiveness trigger repercussions in neighbouring states.
   

The first scenario is the most likely. Kurdish separatism and Shi’a assertiveness will work against a smooth transition to elections while the Sunni faction continues to engage in resistance.

Whoops!

Last time I mentioned Project Censored, I gave Misleading Information... this is the place to look for Hot Censory Goodness.

Saddam Trial

Hoo boy... the trial of Saddam is likely to begin as the Presidential elections are heating upaccording to this article. In some ways, I can see this as being a great boost to the Bush campaign, but there's such a huge chance of this backfiring that I bet even Dubya is nervous. It all depends on how much of a say Saddam actually gets, and how much coverage his testimony receives. Although it's an 'open secret' that the US and the UK supported Saddam in the 80s, up to and after his gassing of the Kurds (which was only made possible by Western intervention) - I don't see this open secret getting a lot of coverage in the press.

Sure, for the UK it's fairly easy for the government to say 'That was an old cabinet, not us'... but with Bush, there are a lot of the same people involved. The 'we changed our mind on the issue of cosying up to repressive dictators' stance holds no water - after all, that's a flip-flop, and we all know what the Bush administration thinks of flip-flops (at least, flip-flops by Kerry. It's okay when Bush does it - that's just 'strong leadership'). But moreso, the evidence doesn't support that kind of denial - the US is still cosying up with repressive dictators, and until that changes, Saddam's testimony could easily be a timebomb ready to topple Bush's chances of re-election.

Fingers crossed.

Shafting the Workforce

This is a typically upsetting piece from Greg Palast, detailing the fact that the Bush administration now plans to end mandatory extra overtime pay. Sure, the plan isn't quite so clear cut, but it's pretty obvious what the intention is, as Mr. Palast indicates:

Now I should say, according to Chao's press office, the changes will actually extend overtime benefits to 1.3 million burger flippin' managers. How does that square with the billion dollar "benefit" to business owners? Simple: The Chao hounds at the Labor Department suggest that employers CUT WAGES so that, added to the new "overtime" pay, the employees won't actually take home a dime more.

Now, I don't get overtime pay from my employeer, despite the fact I'm often working evenings and weekends on something or other - that's fine, that's something I knew going into the job. But I'm also a union rep, and as a 'solidarity, brother!' thing, this is really infuriating. Unions in both the UK and the US have slipped to the point where they are virtually powerless and unable to put up a decent resistance. This isn't helped of course by the fact that the leaders of certain unions actively roll over and present themselves for their shafting. There's an old Robert Burns poem that expresses his discontent at the rule of Scotland by the English... in it he expresses the sentiment: 'We're bought and sold for English gold. Such a parcel of rogues in a nation

We're still in the same situation, except that it's not Scotland and England - it's the workforce and the corporations. We're bought and sold for corporate gold. Such a parcel of rogues in a nation.

Considering President Bush's willingness to send US troops into pre-emptive conflicts, it's especially ironic that he's spent so much of his administration shafting the benefits and wages of veteran and serving soldiers. What a great deal - you get to die for the president's deceits, come under fire whilst protecting US transnational interests, and you can have your wages slashed from under you for the privilege.

Jesus Christ, the thought of four more years of Bush keeps me awake at nights. I hope the majority[1] of the American people feel the same way.

[1] Except that it's not the majority who decide it - funny old world. Even without the gross misconduct of the Supreme Court and the Florida administration, Al Gore still received more votes than George Bush. But still, that's the electoral college for you.

Microsoft Word

I like Microsoft Word. I know in my line of work that's akin to saying 'I like butchering small children by the side of the road', but I think it's a pretty nifty product. In the past, I was an Apple Macaholic (oh, shut up and stick your nazi Linux agenda up your arse), and as far as I'm concerned, Word 5.1 on the Mac was the absolute apex of word processor technology. Small, elegant, effective - it was like a wet dream.

I've been battling with Word XP over the past few days - the start of term is approaching (if you're curious, its approach sounds like the damned hoofsteps of a thousand angry devils), and I needed to finish off my Javanomicon before sending it off to the printers. This will be the beta draft that goes to my students - the one that indicates whether it's something worth getting published or if it's something I should burn and deny all later knowledge of. So I've been picking at that, adding a glossary, an introduction and... here's the tricky bit, an index.

Let me just say this - setting up a useable index in Microsoft Word is a bitch. In the end, I went with a simple word concordance file that generated a half-arsed couple of pages. I'm sorry, but I couldn't bear to work with it any longer. It's there for the appearance of the thing, and because you should never trust a book without an index. Anyone reading who has any suggestions for how to generate a proper index - well, I'm listening!

But yeah, it's done - 670 pages of Java goodness, wrapped into one tasty textbook omelette. Now we play the waiting game!

...

The waiting game sucks. Let's play Hungry Hungry Hippos.

Project Censored

Project Censored have weighed in with their most neglected stories of 2004... in here you'll find a pile of stuff that you can only read about (mostly) in the alternative press. It's well worth having a look - and if you find it interesting, check out their back archives too.