The Warm Thrill Of Confusion » Internet

The Right Attitude

Daniel — Fri, 16 May 2008 10:47:59 +0000

Recently there was a thread on one of the Linux user group mailing lists I follow about privacy concerns while traveling in Italy. Apparently Italian law requires you to show valid ID or passport in Internet Cafés. Add to this the fact that you need ID to sign up for a home connection and your passport for a hotel room (where you usually have internet access these days). In Italy, therefore, it is almost impossible to get online completely anonymously. Unless you can find open WiFi perhaps.

In any event, be that as it may, I particularly liked the reaction of a crazy ex-colleague of mine:

[ILUG] ID for Internet access

From: Conor Wynne
Date: Thu May 15 18:13:20 IST 2008

[snip]

You're on holidays, feck t'internet! :-)

Drink vino, eat and shop is all that should concern you. If your on business, then you will have a business laptop and use the hotel's / business wifi.

Otherwise drink & be merry!

Conor.

See the full email and thread here.

Ye Olde Upgrades

Daniel — Wed, 14 May 2008 13:10:45 +0000

The pythonesque approach to a system upgrade conversation (as seen on IRC today):

       in my day, we had to upgrade a thousand
              packages a day, uphill both ways, and
              then we'd go home and have a cold pile
              of punch cards for supper, and then our
              sysadmins would jump up and down on our
              graves singing "Hallelujah"

 Upgrade? Count yourself lucky! We had
              to downgrade a million packages day on
              minix systems, stay up all night manually
              backing up the servers bit by bit, and
              then get slaughtered by our users the next
              morning!

Glad I wasn’t working back then ;-)

Animoto Test

Daniel — Thu, 01 May 2008 12:24:24 +0000

Check out animoto.com. It’s main premise is putting your photos to music, but it’s not a slideshw. It actually works really well! See for yourself (my first):

You can upload everything yourself but it also pulls in your photos from other photo sharing sites and they have a library of licensed music. Short embedded clips are free, but anything longer than 30 seconds or to be able to download as a file you have to pay.

Double Speed

Daniel — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 17:02:32 +0000

That’s right. My Internet goes twice as fast now. I know, I know: Just about anyone that reads this is likely to be on something that ends in ‘mbps’ and not ‘kbps’. Nevertheless, 256 kbps is still double 128 kbs. See…

And what’s more it’s 265 k both ways now, where before it was 64 kbps up. And. It also.. costs.. the same. Rather nice.

Welcome

Daniel — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 17:29:42 +0000

Welcome. To yet another blog. Yet another domain. Hopefully this domain is location-agnostic enough and unrelated to anything else too specific to me and here and now that it can survive future changes in my life and can remain a little hub of me-ness on the intarweb.

Welcome. Enjoy. Drop by again.