'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

Okay, what is it with traffic at the moment? Every day since the clocks went back there's been long queues out of Fareham to the motorway in the morning, and there seems to be a lot of accidents over the past few days. Yesterday there was at least three shunts on the M27 (one westbound north of Portchester, one eastbound in the same place, and another over at Whiteley), and today I spotted two separate crashes and a broken down car just in the short distance between Sainsburys and my flat.

I recall reading that there is a noticeable uptick in the number of accidents in general just after summer time ends, before everyone gets used to it getting darker earlier in the evenings. That would explain the evening shunts but not the extra queues in the morning. Maybe something odd's going on with the smart motorway stuff on the M27?

The past few days have been unusually busy for this year outings-wise - Church on Sunday, Goring-by-Sea on Monday, and yesterday the car MOT. Today however is back to the current routine of mostly working from home and not travelling, and I didn't go anywhere at all. It was however just warm enough in the sun to be able to sit out on my balcony for lunch, which made a nice change from all the rain of the past weeks.

Well, I was planning to return a library book before lockdown 2 makes it more complicated, but Fareham library have reduced their opening hours and were closed today, so so much for that then.

So I was chatting with pleaseremove as he was on his way home, and the call dropped. This is not unexpected - his route goes through an area of patchy signal that regularly eats phone calls (Devon is a bit like that).

What was unexpected is that when he called me back, he commented that at the same time as the call dropped his phone received an email. So mobile operators have solved the non-problem of being able to send/receive emails from anywhere, but have in the process broken phone calls. Isn't the future wonderful?

The hilarity is in the past I've worked on phone networks, and so I have some idea of why everything is so broken. The short answer is 4G is awesome for data... and terrible for everything else. And the hilarious answer is there's no need for it to be terrible - voice over 4G should be a straightforward SIP call except that appears to be too much like hard work and so until I think late last year a 4G phone would fallback to 2G/3G to make a phone call. While SMS over 4G is just terrible by design (I should know, I once wrote a IP-SM-GW gateway to deal with it) - there was a wonderful opportunity to remove the 160-character length limit and the crazy 7-bit-packed encoding, and instead the solution is to take the radio-level packets from a 2G phone and tunnel them over SIP.


xkcd #1760


Anyway, after that pleaseremove had the bright idea of trying Skype instead since data seemed bizarrely more reliable than voice calls. Let's see how well that worked...

*** Call from pleaseremove ***
*** Call dropped, duration 01:39 ***
pleaseremove: I give up
pleaseremove: Speak to you whenever

We're not sure what happened. Our best guess is that as he got home his phone picked up his wifi signal, tried to switch to using wifi for data, and ate the call. Because migrating a Skype call from one internet connection to another is Hard... except funnily enough I'm currently working with VoIP tech, and modern VoIP protocols can do this. Theoretically. If whatever WebRTC stack you're using has actually bothered to support it.

Yes, it's time for another post. And today I shall give you a random link that I stumbled across the other day while randomly bouncing round the interwebs:

Random link!

Actually, it's not all that random. What it is is the tie-in website for Mission: 2110, which I've rambled about before (it's also what distracted me until posting at 11:59 pm on Tuesday). The main part of the site is the Cycon Archive, which provides a surprisingly large amount of backstory for the show. Along the way it explains who Caleb and Cybele are, where the Roboidz came from, and just what it was that went horribly wrong.

I do like it when creators take the time and effort required to flesh out their worlds. None of this backstory is needed, in fact you could rip out most of the story bits from the actual show and just turn it into a traditional game show. But the story adds to it and gives the contestants a motive beyond "let's complete this challenge for street cred!". In doing so, it makes it much more interesting to watch.

A game I've always liked because of this is Wipeout 64. The game itself is quite enjoyable, but the manual hints at a massive world, with choice quotes from the virtual designers of the different racetracks, descriptions of the teams, and above all amusing weapon details ("Quake Disruptor: Just try it. Needless to say, causes massive shield energy loss on impact and will make you laugh like an idiot for days."). It's rare to see that much work put in to a racing game, which by definition doesn't need any plot or backstory.

The only downside to being a bookworm and a fast reader is that good, easy-to-read books don't last long. That and I surface from the book to find that the day has suddenly vanished and I've not eaten yet.

This brought to you by Ali Sparkes' Shapeshifter series, which I recommend you all go and read right now. I should warn you that the rest of this post is me musing about the series, and contains massive spoilers.

( Consider yourself warned )

Anyway, having read that I'm now in search of the next series to read. (I'm also reading the Wheel of Time series, but I picked up Shapeshifter as well as I was always waiting for one or the other to make its way to my local library - there's never enough copies!). So, what have you all been reading recently, and do you have any recommendations?

After stating for years that security through obscurity doesn't work, some cheeky spammer went and found my supposedly secure-because-noone-knows-where-it-is forum. Hmm.

Security through obscurity isn't really security when you get down to it. It's the principle that something is secure, not because of any solid measures taken to ensure this but through making the secret hard to find. It's rather like hiding the front door key under the doormat, or writing your PIN down with the label "Mum's birthday". The result is that it's only secure as long as no-one knows where it is, but as soon as they look under your doormat and find the key that's it, game over. A better form of security would be to, for example, put the front door key in a box with a combination lock - that provides security by making it Hard to get the key without knowing the code. Of course, one can then reduce that by writing the code down somewhere, at which point you're back to security through obscurity

Anyway, back to the forum. As well as the publicly-available pages and gallery on my website, there's several restricted areas on it. Things like a private forum install for a few friends, the administration pages for the gallery, a set of files from a university group project - stuff that's not meant to be publicly available. Some of this is protected with real security: the university pages require a password. Some of this is both passworded and hidden: the administration pages not only have a strong password, but are not linked anywhere. And some of this is merely hidden in the hope that this is enough.

The forum falls into the latter category, as it was never intended to be particularly secure. And this was all well and good, as for over a year the existence of this forum was known to maybe a dozen people. Unfortuantly, I then placed a link to this forum in the topic of a small, private-access IRC channel. While the channel is private, the topic is available to anyone on the same server. That itself is not a problem, except there's a couple of websites that continually index the channels and keep a log of recent topics. Those websites are public, and since I hadn't added the forum to my site's robots.txt (a small file telling search engines where they're not allowed to go - unfortuantly a bad place to list any hidden areas, as anyone can see this file), Google then merrily followed the links from those sites to my forum. And the spammers (well, spammer, but it's only a matter of time now) followed Google.

The best part? It is now impossible for me to remove all links to the forum. Once security through obscurity is broken, it's usually impossible to repair. On the internet, once something has been made public it is nearly impossible to claw it back (a common quote is "the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it). Fortuantly there wasn't anything private on there, and the forum's own security is adaquate to deal with future spammers. It's still annoying, and serves me right for not making it properly secure in the first place.

Incidentally, the DVD encryption scheme was broken through a similar method. The first DVD key to be found was extracted from a software DVD player that had tried and failed to hide the key somewhere in the program's files. The HD-DVD and Blu-ray keys were discovered through exactly the same method - reverse engineering of software DVD players. The best part? When the HD-DVD key was leaked, the publishers revoked it quickly and released an updated version of the DVD player. The new key was extracted and spread across the Internet about a month later.

I have a strong feeling of wanting to write something for a particular piece of music, Am I Not Merciful?, from the Gladiator soundtrack...

 

It's a very powerful piece of music. Starting off gently, gradually rising over the course of a few minutes to a strong climax of strings, surrounding you with the feeling of a powerful, yet sad, judgement being passed down from on high. The drums die away, leaving the infinite sadness of the strings. And then those too fade away, leavnig the sound of the wheat, calm pipes carrying a haunting, eerie melody. More sadness arrives, with voices chanting. Brass and drums bring in yet more suffering, and the judgement is repeated. There's power in this, but it's not good power...

 

...no, I can't write anything for this. I've the urge but not the inspiration. I blame truely powerful music, and the Gladiator soundtrack is indeed that. Hans Zimmer is a master.

Perhaps I'll manage to work this theme into something else. Maybe even NaNoWriMo, if I'm foolish enough to go through with it (not sure how well it'd go in my original plan though). Meh, I should vary my writing in any case, and try for more original stuff.

 

There is a very powerful part of the movie that goes with this music - the following quote, from Commodus:

( Light spoiler - contains the consequences, but not the actions )

I normally listen to my music quietly, with both the windows mixer and the real volume control turned most of the way down. This is partly because I tend not to listen to my music loudly, and partly because I know what it's like to hear the thud thud thud of someones speaker set at one in the morning.

There are a few, a very few albums on here however that really deserve to have more power from the speakers. Both Pirates of the Caribbean soundtracks, the instrumentals in the Lion King soundtrack, a couple of Evanescence songs, parts of the Narnia soundtrack, and a pair of pieces from the Andrew Lloyd Webber Premiere Collection (the real 1989 one with the actual casts from the musicals, not one of the many imitations).

These tracks are not played loudly because of the thumping bass (mainly because there usually isn't any), or because it's "cool" to do so. They get played loudly because they deserve the extra power behind them, and the extra depth that the increase in volume brings out.

Looking back at this, most of these concentrate largely on tribal-style drumming, though there's a few chillout/trance ones which have little or no bass, and a few chillout/trance ones that have *real* bass (not some cheap thump thump thump).

Is there a point to this stream of thoughts? Not really, other than to say that real music deserves every bit of power you give it. The track I'm listening to right now (Tia Dalma, from the Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest soundtrack) has barely any volume to it, but an awful lot of depth that only appears once you give it some real power.

And for the record, the bass boost on these speakers is enabled. Real speakers need no more than a slight tweak of the bass and treble. These speakers (IBM-branded, came with an IBM Aptiva in 1995), while good for what they are, are not real speakers. They are better than a lot of computer speakers, which says a lot about the quality.

I am seriously considering, as and when I have the time and money, getting hold of a real amplifier, a real soundcard and a real pair of speakers. Not sure what to get for the soundcard, but as far as speakers go if I do this I'll spend the best part of a day at Richer Sounds with my sister and a fistful of CDs from classical to rock, and the current people I'm looking at for the amplifier are NAD. They know their stuff - it's very telling when you see their kit used in the Royal Instution Christmas Lectures.

And yes, it'll be horribly overkill for what I want, but that works in my favour. It should sound better than most of the stuff out there, and still sound that good over 20 years from now.

So life in the house is all fun and games at the moment.

The cooker is currently playing up, and being somewhat stubborn as regards lighting the oven. It still lights, but it takes it's time to do so. This appears to be due to the jet spreader thing being clogged. So Dan has been despatched to obtain the +5 vorpal oven cleaner of the ancestors, which will hopefully de-clog it. Failing that, a replacement cooker may be in the works.

The washer is still refusing to drain, and so the collective has decided to buy a replacement. Unfortuantly, this requires spending money (not to mention the current debate as to the merits of a washer-dryer, and whether or not it's worth the extra cost). As with all things that require the transfer of virtual coinage, this will probably be delayed for as long as possible.

Oh, and to top it all off, our connection to the world as we know it (via the wonders of several lengths of coax, some bits of high-frequency comms gear, and the all-prevading ntl) has recently taken to large droppage.

Picture, if you will, a run-of-the-mill ntl cable modem on top of a large beige box with wires dangling out of every hole. The modem is our connection to the world as we know it, and the beige box is our firewall and guardian. Now the box, which has a long history of being wilful and denying access to all (including those who should be allowed access) by virtue of hardware failures, is currently performing fine (to the extent where it survived two powercuts without batting an eyelid). On the other hand, the modem will, after a few hours, decide to drop some combination of the upstream and downstream links.

This results in much cursing from the various rooms in the house as our internet connections fail one by one, followed by a march on the server cupboard to wrestle with the modem. So far, giving it a hard powercycle by virtue of a good yank on ye DC input solves ye problem, and the populous is appeased and the militia disbanded. Until, of course, a few hours later, at which point the cursing begins anew.

Well, I'm alone at the computer and I've got some time to kill, so I might as well update this LiveJournal.

Some point in the next week and a half I'm going to have to do some homework. In a couple of months I've got exams for everything, and of course the teachers all give you tons of past papers to do. From Chemistry, I've been given 4 (2 per module - these are AS exams, which are 3 modules and we've done the first one in Physics and Chemistry) past papers to do. In Maths, I have 3 booklets of "Delphis" papers (for S1, M1 and P1 modules), which have about ten sample papers of 6-7 questions in each booklet. And the teachers expect me to do most of them, which is not fun. In Further Maths I've got even more Delphis papers to do (for D1, S2 and P-something). At least in Physics I don't have anything to do, as my teacher is against holiday homework (Yay!)

One of these days I'll get round to finishing off the many programming projects I've got. Let's see... unfinished projects include (these are in the order I thought of them, which is not the order they should be done in!):

• VB-based LJ client
• Some little maths-related programs (for probability distributions and route-finding)
• C++ program analyzer (written in C++ too, so it can analyze itself)
• Graphing library (designed to cope with up to 500 updates per second, which almost certainly means it will have to be C/C++)
• Automated web page downloader (which has to have full scheduling capabilities)
• Database management utility related to that
• Computer booking system (which has been on hold for the past year but may be revived soon thanks to some new API commands which make things a bit easier)
• Setting tweaker for XMPlay
• A couple of taskbar utilities (for power and service management)
• Lots more... maybe I'll scare you a bit with a dump of my projects directory :)

I've also got a couple of websites to build/manage/keep an eye on, which I'll get round to doing one of these days (maybe I shouldn't spend so much time on the internet or playing computer games). Still, it is the holidays at the moment, and my carefully created time plan has "doing stuff-all" down for this week and "madly doing homework and generally panicking" down for next week, then it's school again. But not for a week and a half!

NB: this isn't a plea for anything, it's just me writing what I feel like because I want to, secure in the knowledge that nobody's going to discover anytime soon just who "BoggyB" really is.

FYI: this took me 25 minutes to write! Kinda shows just how much free time I have over Easter. Roll on Easter Sunday and chocolates!