blog.world3.net

Firefox tweaks

22/04/2008 – 22:48

Having just installed a couple of fresh systems I once again had to set up a fresh Firefox install. Here is a little collection of the tweaks I usually make.

about:config stuff:

Open links that point to new windows in the current tab:

 browser.link.open_newwindow = 1

Single tab close button on right:

 browser.tabs.closeButtons = 3

Open bookmark folder by appending new tabs instead of overwriting the current ones:

 browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace = false

Move to next tab rather than parent on tab close:

 browser.tabs.selectOwnerOnClose = false

Disable tab scrolling:

 browser.tabs.tabMinWidth = 0

Faster mouse wheel scrolling:

 mousewheel.withnokey.numlines = 10
 mousewheel.withnokey.sysnumlines = false

Disable tab list drop-down via userChrome.css:

 .tabs-alltabs-button {display: none !important;}

Transfer old profile stuff from FF2 to FF3:
1. Import bookmarks
2. Copy key3.db, signons2.txt

Plugins:
- AdBlock+ and Element Hider
- British English Dictionary
- Cookie Button
- Copy Plain Text
- Fetch Text URL
- Flashblock

By mojo | Posted in software | Comments (1)

EU to expand definition of criminal terrorism

20/04/2008 – 11:24

I was reading over at Ars Technica that the EU has agreed to harmonise what acts are considered criminal in relation to terrorism. In particular, they want “public provocation to commit a terrorist offence” to be a crime.

Problem is, who determines what is provocation? It’s that old chestnut again – who defines what kind of speech is acceptable. The police in London have in the past arrested peaceful protesters for causing too much embarrassment to Chinese officials in the past. George Washington was labelled a rebel by the ruling British powers of the day, and if he had lost would have been considered a terrorist.

To give a real world example, what if I were to suggest that America, having invaded Iraq causing over one million Iraqis to die, is seen as the mortal enemy of many Islamists, is that incitement? I mean, if they are the enemy of believers, then surely they should be fighting them? And, well, if you don’t have a military capable of taking on the US, perhaps guerilla/terrorist tactics, especially in a warzone like Iraq, are probably the best/only option?

Even better, what if I said that the US was justified in grabbing people in foreign countries and torturing them, and that they should expand their operations? Surely an incitement to terrorism if ever I heard one.

If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

- John Stewart Mill

The other worrying aspect of the decision is to criminalise “training for terrorism”. Paintball is training for terrorism. Studying American torture methods could be terrorist training, if the intention were to use yourself.

Ultimately the decision of what is okay and what is not will come down to judges and juries. That is unacceptable in my opinion – the law must be clear about what is legal and what is not.

By mojo | Posted in idiots, law, politics | Comments (0)

Sabotaging open source

15/04/2008 – 14:00

Following on from my previous post about new forms of internet trolling, it seems that sabotaging open source projects is also a popular new pastime for asshats.

Take avr-libc. It used to have two functions sbi() and cbi(). These two functions are incredibly useful, pretty much the bread and butter of what microcontrollers do. So, the asshats managed to get them removed, on the grounds that they were redundant since you can write some less readable code and rely on the compiler to optimise it back to a sbi/cbi assembler instruction.

Relying on the compiler to correctly and reliably optimise your code is a very bad idea. All sorts of things can influence how the compiler decides to optimise stuff. For example, in the latest version of avr-libc the _delay_ms() and _delay_us() functions can be optimised into oblivion, resulting in no delays, and despite them being marked as not optimisable. I spent hours trying to figure out why it wasn’t working, until eventually examined the assembler code in the debugger and noticed what had happened.

So, now we have less readable, error prone code and an avr-libc that is not backwards compatible with all that legacy code you write a year or two ago. The asshats have managed to sabotage it, with the justification that sbi() and cbi() are “too close to the metal” and it’s philosophically better to just pray that the compiler does what you want it to.

Trolling really is evolving.

By mojo | Posted in avr, idiots | Comments (0)

Never Mind The Bastards

11/04/2008 – 23:56

Wikipedia is a fantastic resource, just as shame so many editors are bastards.

AVRs are wonderful little microcontrollers – easy to learn and work with, very versatile and very cheap. Unfortunately, the AVR community are mostly bastards.

There seems to be a new kind of griefer on the internet – the academic griefer. Rather than troll in an obvious way, they play the long game and pray on the poor guy who is just getting started.

Witness, for example, the Wikipedia bastards. They operate in subtle ways – adding pointless [citation needed] tags. Deleting articles because they lack “notability” (the entry on Encase was deleted, despite it being the most popular computer forensics tool with hundreds of training courses being offered and hundreds of law enforcement agencies around the world using it). They have got the rules set in to their favour, and use them to clobber anyone who objects. They are clearly not interested in creating a useful repository of information, but rather in just pissing off other editors and slyly wrecking the whole affair.

AVR communities are a bit more blatant. Take this thread on AVR Freaks, a wretched hive of asshattery. The guy asks a fairly simple question, and rather than help him the respondents simply berate him. I can understand them being fed up answering the same questions over and over, but I only found that thread because I was having trouble with similar code and Google failed (turned out to be a serial port issue in the end, as I suspected since the code is trivial).

It is far from an isolated incident though. Knowing what was expected of me I started this thread. I laid out the situation in as much detail as I could. Again, Google and previous threads on AVR Freaks had failed. The first respondent (dbc) was remarkably helpful. I guess “theusch” must have been asleep because it took him a while to jump in with his troll post. Tut tut, fp is almost mandatory for trolls these days. Anyway, he couldn’t find any of the usual failings in my post so just made some up, asking about why I couldn’t get a ‘scope in my organisation (when did I say I was in an organisation?). Rather than finishing with a useful example of how to clean a bouncing signal up, he just asks a rhetorical question. As it happens I know what he was referring to, but god help anyone trying to get started with AVRs.

The DIY Audio Forums are just as bad. Apart from the generally crappy interface, they could at least offer a less hardcore forum for people who are trying to learn or ask more basic questions.

Even the /b/tards on 4chan are friendlier than these guys. As long as your post is not an epic fail they will usually at least entertain it.

Luckily, it’s not all doom and gloom. ~ ladyada’s tea party ~ is a friendly place to ask questions. HeadFi is good for general audio stuff too, even if it is focussed on headphones.

By mojo | Posted in idiots | Comments (1)

AVR-USB with AVR Studio

03/04/2008 – 14:55

I have been experimenting with AVR-USB recently. It has a lot more features than Igor Cesko’s code, but the downside is larger code size and the fact that it’s partly written in C which makes interfacing assembly code a bit trickier. I wanted to use it because it has good native support for HID devices, unlike Igor’s code which I had to implement the HID stuff on top of.

The USBtiny project also looks like it might be a good bet. Although it’s also in C, the layout and interface code is a lot clearer than the AVR-USB ones IMHO. The AVR-USB stuff is more in the style of computer targeted code I think. USBtiny seems more like a microcontroller project. Maybe it’s just the way I think.

Anyway, as for using AVR-USB with AVR Studio, one problem I found was with the supplied makefile. It doesn’t work with AVR Studio directly. I tried to make another one with MFile, but it produced non-working code in every configuration I tried. It sucks that a C project can be broken by the makefile. I think the problem lies somewhere with the way MFile tries to define everything in the makefile, where as most sensible people (including the AVR-USB guys) define it in the code. The makefile should just be instructions for building the output files, not influencing the compiler or defining stuff used in the source code. Anyway, in the end I modified the original makefile to work and producing a working .hex file from it.

I will post the makefile along with the entire project shortly.

By mojo | Posted in microcontrollers | Comments (0)

BT and Phorm secretly tracked 18,000 customers in 2006

01/04/2008 – 13:28

This article posted on The Register is quite alarming – apparently BT secretly trailed the Phorm tracking system in 2006 with 18,000 of it’s customers. Apart from the fact that the trial was probably illegal, it shows just how little BT care about their customers privacy.

The second page of the article has an amazing quote from Phorm claiming that their service “enhances privacy” by not storing any data. Well, Google don’t store data about me either, because I delete their cookies every time I close my browser and my IP is both dynamic and shared. Unlike Google, I can’t simply opt out of Phorm by blocking their cookies or just not using their service.

By mojo | Posted in idiots, networking, privacy, security | Comments (2)

Virgin to start threatening customers over file sharing

31/03/2008 – 19:14

According to the telegraph, Virgin Media will start sending warning letters to suspected file sharers, and will eventually disconnect them if they don’t stop. File sharers will be identified by the BPI. The mind boggling stupidity of this plan is hard to comprehend, but here is a short list of reasons why it will fail:

It wasn’t me, my wifi was hacked
It wasn’t me, you got the wrong name to go with that IP address
It wasn’t me, my MAC has been cloned
It wasn’t me, my PC was infected with a trojan
It wasn’t me, I run a Tor node
It was a legal download
I’ll sign up for a cheap VPN service anyway
If you disconnect me I’ll sue you in court for falsely accusing me of a crime and libel
Copyright infringement is a civil offence, so you had better sue me as well and have the evidence to prove it
People will just move to another ISP. If you try to ban them from all ISPs, people will definitely sue you.
These are just pathetic scare tactics

It either won’t happen or it will fail massively. I guess we will have to wait and see which one it’s going to be.

By mojo | Posted in idiots, networking, privacy | Comments (0)

HD being wrecked by over-compression

31/03/2008 – 15:10

With HD imminently becoming more accessible and common in the UK, I read this forum post with despair. I looks like Comcast have just dropped the bitrates on all their national HD channels, severely reducing picture quality.

The issue of available bandwidth on cable and especially Freeview has been holding HD back in the UK. In fact, Freeview is pretty much full and adding any more channels, let alone HD ones, is going to mean removing or severely reducing the quality of some others. The biggest issue is that all current Freeview receivers, including those built in to most new TVs, are only capable of decoding MPEG2. For HD, ideally you want t move to MPEG4/H.264 because that would allow HD channels to be broadcast at only slightly higher bitrates than SD channels in MPEG2. Sky has proposed this as a subscription HD option, but it is unlikely to be accepted because Ofcom wants free-to-air HD channels, preferably without requiring everyone to buy new equipment.

Perhaps Comcast’s move is a sign of things to come. Unfortunately a lot of media companies seem to be of the opinion that their customers should eat their shit and like it, but I think if I were a Comcast customer I’d be switching, probably to fibre. Don’t get me started on fibre in the UK…

By mojo | Posted in idiots | Comments (0)

Muslims attacking free speech again as movie site DOS'ed"

24/03/2008 – 17:23

From BBC News: “A website that a Dutch right-wing politician was planning to use to release a film expected to be fiercely critical of Islam has been suspended.”

Seems that once again an “outcry” from Muslims has got a website taken down because it was offensive. Once again, free speech looses.

The irony is, Geert Wilders’s film makes the point that Islam is the enemy of freedom. I tend to agree with him on this point – while there are many non-violent and less radical Muslims, a lot of the stuff in the Koran and which forms the basis of the religion is highly objectionable. It’s offensive to me, but I don’t seek to have the Koran banned. Parts of the Bible are no better either, but I defend people’s right to read it.

There is an interesting interview on YouTube where Wilder explains some of his views:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0jUuzdfqfc&hl=en]

Even if you don’t agree with his views on Islam, it’s hard to argue against his right to express them.

No religion should get special treatment in any modern, democratic and secular society.

By mojo | Posted in idiots, law, networking | Comments (0)

Bruce Schneier – a man everyone should listen too

21/03/2008 – 14:14

Reading Bruce Schneier’s latest blog post, I can’t help but think that this is a man everyone should listen to. Especially anyone thinking of implementing a national ID card scheme.

If this quote doesn’t get you to read it, I don’t know what will: “SmartWater is a liquid with a unique identifier linked to a particular owner. “The idea is for me to paint this stuff on my valuables as proof of ownership,” I wrote when I first learned about the idea. “I think a better idea would be for me to paint it on your valuables, and then call the police.”

By mojo | Posted in genius, privacy, security | Comments (0)

たとえ溺れても梦はゆめでしかない