Omnia Mutantur

Gabriele, the very nice lady I’m renting the flat from, left me some breakfast

Someone’s getting fat.

Ricardo Travel Germany, Health, Travel

I’ve never been more grateful for how warm a Macbook Pro can get.

Ricardo Random funny stuff, Science and Technology mac

Fuck it’s cold.

I had forgotten what real cold was. I had experienced it on Romania, a few years ago, and quickly came to the conclusion that any weather in which you can unplug your fridge and leave the food on the balcony without it getting spoiled (not even an open balcony, mind you) was just not designed for humans to live on.

But you know these things intellectually. After a while you forget the experience since, you know, in Costa Rica we consider 22 celsius to be cold. You don’t grok them again until you cross a gate in a sunny Holland afternoon, wearing a heavy coat, and are blasted by freezing air. Air so cold that you’re soon shivering and breathing in short quick gasps.

And Holland was sunny. Coming down into Berlin I could see a large canal full of ice, and found it was very lightly snowing when I stepped off the plane.

Then at the airport I was greeted by this:

Springtime For Hitler. That’s nice and timely.

Ricardo Random funny stuff, Travel cold, Germany, goodwin, Travel

MSNBC piece on a new study saying that “religious belief leads to more crime and other undesirable social problems” (as opposed to all those other desirable social problems, like, I suppose, not knowing what to do with all the surplus money your society has).

Very briefly they mention near the end that it’s only a correlation issue, but of course they lead in with causality. I’m not a religious person by far, but allow me to propose an alternative interpretation: this actually proves the existence of a god and he’s clearly testing the faithful, since clearly the more faithful there are, the more he tests them – that shows both intelligence and intent.

Come on. You’re not doing us atheists any favors with pieces such as that one.

Ricardo News and politics

After hours of travel, our hero finds himself suddenly in the midst of dark woods. Nailed to a tree there is a wooden sign, weather-beaten by the ages. It reads:

"Invalid Cast (check your mapping for property type mismatches); setter of classname"

Right besides the sign stands NHibernate, its expression unreadable. Our hero, unsure of which path to take, asks for directions as to what to fix.

NHibernate: “The problem lies…” – sweeps hand widely at the class – “that way”
Ricardo: “Where? Which way?”
NHibernate: “In a property…”
Ricardo: “Of course, all it has are properties! Which one?”
NHibernate: “No… I’m afraid I’ve said too much”

Ricardo Programming

An almost obligatory post, but I’ll keep it short. Ledger’s Joker is a brilliant gene-splicing of Alex from A Clockwork Orange and Forrest Gump – all that energy with a completely child-like lack of impulse control. He’s that kid who sets your dog on fire, finds it hilarious, and quickly moves on to even funnier stuff. There is some short, but very direct commentary on warrantless spying and what actions are acceptable in order to stop a madman; as well as what a true leader does when his fight with a lunatic gets out of control and the people get scared and demand someone’s blood. It was just as good as I expected but unexpectedly political, and its timing couldn’t be better.

Oh, and Batman’s in it too.

Ricardo Books, music and film, Freedom batman, Freedom, movies, politics

A disgruntled employee locks the city of San Francisco out of their network. There were so many fuck ups on the city’s part that the news article almost reads like a play-by-play on how not to handle this.

he had been disciplined on the job in recent months for poor performance and that his supervisors had tried to fire him

Tried to fire him? And what, missed and fired the wrong person? Even in this socialist country you can fire people pretty much at will, if you’re willing to pay them severance (I don’t think he would qualify for the single exception – you’re employer knowing that you are a pregnant woman).

OK, so there’s some law stopping you from firing him. Is there a law stopping you from revoking his network access and paying him to read the newspaper, from home, while you figure out how to get rid of him?

Officials also said they feared that although Childs is in jail, he may have enabled a third party to access the system by telephone or other electronic device and order the destruction of hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents.

Authorities have searched Childs’ home and car for a device that could be used in such an attack, but so far no such evidence has been found.

Like.. a computer? Thank god they couldn’t find such a specialized tool anywhere.

Vinson said the extra money was apparently compensation for being on-call as a trouble-shooter.

Heh. So you not only keep him on board, but pay him extra because the stability of your system depends on this employee you don’t trust anymore.

Authorities say Childs began tampering with the computer system June 20. The damage is still being assessed, but authorities say undoing his denial of access to other system administrators could cost millions of dollars.

The most basic rule when firing people with access to your organization’s brain is that you fire them on the spot – even if you have to pay them extra to do so. Failing to fire someone and then keeping him with the exact same access rights is just plain stupid, and now San Francisco will pay through the nose for it.

As part of his alleged sabotage, Childs engineered a tracing system to monitor what other administrators were saying and doing related to his personnel case, law enforcement officials said.

Of course. Such network sniffing tools are readily available, and are at their most usable when in the hands of a person with network-wide access. Like Mr. Childs here.

If the city employees had used something as simple as Skype or Pidgin with OTR, it would probably have been harder for him to track them, forcing him to install a key logger or using some more invasive methods that could have been detected earlier. But of course, only criminals could possibly see some use in encryption.

Ricardo Freedom, Science and Technology

The Spore Creature Creator has been released. Pretty. Me Want. However, the demo requires admin rights to install on my Mac, instead of simply allowing me to drop it on the Applications folder.

I’m very suspicious of EA’s track record – specifically, I smell robots. I’m not installing it.

Update: Yes, it’s got robots. It seems that the Mac version is a port of the Windows version using Cider, so the admin rights might also be to install the relevant libraries, but there’s definitely home-phoning DRM in there.

Ricardo Science and Technology, Uncategorized

I’ve just updated my OS X to the latest 10.5.3, and now Erlang refuses to run – I keep getting bus error. I uninstalled and attempted to build it from source using Macports, but that did not help – I get the same error when building hipe:


=== Entering application hipe
/opt/local/var/macports/build/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_release_ports_lang_erlang/work/erlang-R12B-2/bin/i386-apple-darwin9.3.0/hipe_mkliterals -e > hipe_literals.hrl

erlc -W +debug_info +warn_obsolete_guard +inline -o../ebin hipe_rtl_arch.erl
make[3]: *** [../ebin/hipe_rtl_arch.beam] Bus error
make[2]: *** [opt] Error 2
make[1]: *** [opt] Error 2
make: *** [secondary_bootstrap_build] Error 2


Still haven’t found a fix, but thought about sending this out as Googlebait just in case.

Update: there is now a bug report at Macports.

Ricardo Programming

The internet is full of assholes, there’s no denying that. It’s not as much a statistical anomaly – the whole world is full of assholes – but a combination of having said bastards on a medium that allows them easy reach to the whole wide world, with enough range that they don’t get punched in the nose. I guess it’s all John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory at work.

I’m a big proponent of anonymity, which is one of the components of Gabe’s evil brew – people just need to exercise better judgement when dealing with someone who they don’t know at all. On a case in the U.S., a woman signed up on MySpace under a fake name and harasses a girl, who then kills herself feeling she was being taunted by a boy she liked. Let’s leave aside the fact that the girl trusted this person she didn’t know, and then took such a rash decision based on their remarks. The woman who was taunting her was just convicted of charged with several felonies. She’s a immoral bastard for sure, but the problem is that the reasons they’re charging her with felonies amount to her breaking not the law, but MySpace’s terms of service.

There’s a pretty good analysis of the decision at SecurityFocus.

“Yet, legal experts argue that charging a person for violating computer-crime statutes because they broke the terms-of-service agreement of an online site could lead to the ability to charge nearly anyone with computer crime. Using residential broadband for business purposes? A violation of the terms of service and, thus, potentially a crime. Checking sports sites while at work? A violation of corporate policy and, thus, potentially a crime.”

While the discussion over at Technocrat sometimes veers off too much into someone oughta do something, Jim Hill asks a very good question:

The thing I can’t figure is why the ordinary homicide statutes don’t apply. “A person is presumed to intend the reasonably foreseeable consequences of his voluntary act.” That’s why we can and do outlaw “Fire!” in a theater and fighting words in a bar: you’re presumed to have intended the consequences.

If elaborately befriending a depressed 13-year-old girl by pretending to be the boy of her dreams, spending weeks earning her trust and adoration, and then publicly humiliating her with the kiss-off line “the world would be better off without you” isn’t an indicator of intent, then neither is pulling the trigger knowing which way the bullet’s going to go.

Why indeed? Maybe the prosecutor thought he couldn’t just win a manslaughter case with the evidence. Or maybe there’s a cherry on top for someone if the case was decided this way. From the same SecurityFocus analysis:

Making a violation of such agreements a crime would allow prosecutors the ability to investigate nearly any Internet user, Scott Greenfield, a criminal defense attorney, stated in an online analysis.

“Violating a website’s ‘TOS’ is carte blanche to an imaginative prosecutor,” Greenfield said. “We are all felons if this flies.”

Ricardo Freedom, News and politics, Science and Technology