Week Notes 17 & 18

Another fortnight with no blog posts.

Health

Getting used to paying close attention to what I’m eating and how much I’m exercising. And for the first week of this fortnight that was starting to work and I shifted a few pounds. This week I’ve been staying in a hotel in Edinburgh and all of my good work has been undone. Just need to start again I suppose.

Last time I mentioned how my had suggested that I bought a Fitbit as it would encourage me to take more notice of what my body was doing. Turns out that this is a really good idea. And it also turns out that’s it’s a bit of a growing movement. O’Reilly have just published a book called Fitness for Geeks which looks at this whole area in some detail. I have a copy which I’m looking forward to reading. Once I’ve finished it, I’ll write a review.

Training and Speaking

As I mentioned above, I’ve been in Edinburgh all this week. I ran five days of Perl training for staff at Edinburgh University. Everyone seemed happy with the way it went and there’s a chance I’ll be invited back again at some point in the future.

But in the previous week I arranged another training course. It all happened rather quickly and, to be honest, took me a bit by surprise. It was a case of a few things all coming together at the right time.

Five years ago, the London Perl Mongers, with lots of help from the BBC, ran what we called a “Perl Teach-In”. It was a one-day, free Perl training course. It was a great success. The fifty places on the course were all booked in a couple of days and everyone who came on the day agreed that it was a great idea.

For a few months now, as we approached the fifth anniversary of the Teach-In, I’ve been thinking that it would be nice to do it all over again. I spoke to a few people to get a few ideas, but nothing really came together. A couple of months ago, I heard about Google’s new Campus venue in London and I contacted them to find out what they would charge to hold a training event there. For several weeks I got no reply.

Then, about ten days ago, Google got back to me asking what date I wanted to hold my event. I asked them what it would cost and they told me it would be free. So we set a date of 4th August for the second free Perl Teach-In. This time all the places were booked in just under 24 hours. Which seems pretty successful.

If this works, then there’s a good chance that I’d like to make it a more frequent event. But (obviously) I’d like to find some way to make a bit of money out of it. Perhaps I need to look for sponsorship.

Week Notes 15 & 16

Another fortnightly week notes. That really wasn’t how this was supposed to work. Only one other blog post in that time too. I’m a lazy blogger.

Health

With my leg feeling much better, I’ve started to concentrate on losing weight. About a week ago I bought a Fitbit. It’s a bit like a pedometer, but it measures more than just the number of steps you take – it also measures the number of flights of stairs that you climb and monitors the quality of your sleep. There’s a USB transmitter/receiver thing and whenever you’re close to that, it uploads the latest data to the Fitbit web site. It was my wife who suggested it. She realised that the challenge of measuring things and having little targets to beat (can I walk further today than I did yesterday) appeals to my geeky nature. She’s probably right too. I’ve lost three pounds since I’ve had it.

Alongside that I’ve also signed up with My Fitness Pal, which I use to track the number of calories I eat and the the amount of exercise that I do. It also pulls data down from the Fitbit site and takes  that into account when working out how many more calories I can eat in a day.

Calorie counting is a real pain. Who knew that calories tasted so good?

Technology

I’ve had a couple of run ins with technology in the last couple of weeks. Devices that were more complex than they needed to be to use with Linux.

The first problem was the Fitbit. it turned out that there was no way to do the initial set-up on Linux so I reluctantly booted my laptop into Windows for the first time in months. But having done the initial configuration I’ve been able to do the day-to-day data uploading quite happily from Linux. There’s a libfitbit priject on Github which seems to have stalled, but works pretty well in its current form.

Then there was a new printer. I got a free Dell P513W when I bought my new laptop recently but I hadn’t got round to setting it up until last weekend. Once again I needed to be in Windows in order to run the initial configuration. It connects to a wireless network and there was no Linux software to configure that.

But having got it up and running and working successfully with a PC running Windows it should have been simple enough to get it running across the network from a Linux system. For that to work I needed a PPD file for the printer. So I went to the Dell site to find it. This README file implied that the correct file was available, but it proved hard to track down. So eventually, I resorted to writing to Dell customer support who gave me some of the worst support I’ve ever come across and didn’t solve my problem. I don’t have space here to describe how incompetent they were. I should write a blog post.

I still don’t have that printer working under Linux, but I have a few avenues to explore.

Training and Speaking

Preparations are in full swing for my trip to Edinburgh. I’m going up next weekend and spending a week running training courses for Edinburgh University.

I’ve also been talking to another client about perhaps doing something up in the north of England later in the year. No firm plans yet. Not even sure if it’ll be public or private courses.

Gigs

Two gigs in the last three days. And both of them were at the Union Chapel. On Thursday night I saw June Tabor and the Oysterband and last night I went back to see John Renbourn, Robin Williamson and Wizz Jones.

I’ve been buying tickets for things coming up later in the year. One particularly mad event is the Crystal Palace Garden Party on June 23rd. Rick Wakeman, Hawkwind, Focus, The Strawbs, Curved Air and Barclay James Harvest. It’s like it’s still 1975.

Films

I saw and very much enjoyed Cabin in the Woods. Rather strange ending though.

Looking forward to seeing The Avengers (or as it’s now known, Avengers Assemble) when it opens next weekend.

Android Applications

For the last two years I’ve been using an HTC Desire. In the last few days I’ve upgraded to an HTC One X. Whilst I liked the Desire a lot, one thing that really let it down – the lack of space to install apps. I spent most of the last year with the “short of space” notification on. At times I was running a “one out, one in” policy where I could only install a new app if I removed one first.

The One X has a lot more memory, so I’m hoping that I won’t have so much problem installing apps and can try some new and interesting ones. I’ve started by installing what I consider the essential apps.

Then I installed a few apps that I used to use, but that I had to give up when I ran out of space on the Desire:

There’s one app that I used to use that I can no longer find. I think it was called Movie Finder and it listed all the films that were on at all the cinemas in London (or, perhaps, the UK). If anyone knows what it was – or can recommend a replacement – then please let me know.

I’ve installed some semi-random apps that caught my eye:

  • Gigbeat – Who seem to have beaten Songkick to producing an app that uses Songkick data.
  • Instagram – But it currently doesn’t support the camera in the One X. I’m sure that’ll come soon.
  • Night Clock
  • VirginMedia TV guide – currently just a TV guide, but it’ll be awesome when I get a Tivo as you can program it remotely.

That’s as far as it goes so far. But the Android market (sorry, I mean the “Google Play Store”) is now huge. I’m sure I’m missing out on interesting and useful apps. Or, perhaps, there are better apps available to replace the ones I’m currently using. Is Tweetdeck still the best Twitter client? Is there a better augmented reality app than Wikitude?

What am I missing out on?

Week Notes 14

Blogging

Just one blog post this week. Everyone was talking about Samantha Brick, so why shouldn’t I?

Health

Halfway through the week I noticed that my ankle was no longer affecting the way I move at all. It still aches a bit at times, but I seem to have lost my limp.

All of which means that I should get back to trying to lose a bit more weight. To that end I have just ordered a Fitbit from Amazon. It’s like an enhanced pedometer. It measures all sorts of movement and uploads the data automatically to the Fitbit web site. It should arrive in the next few days so there will, no doubt, be more to say about this next week.

Technology

Last week I mentioned that I had bought a Google Nexus. It didn’t last very long. It arrived on Saturday and at some point whilst it was being charged overnight on Monday, it died. I’m not sure what happened to it, but there was no way to turn it on. I’ve seen people on the internet claiming there’s a known issue with the battery in that phone, but I don’t know how accurate that is.

Of course, I was able to return the phone to Amazon, but the question was should I get a replacement or a refund? Then I saw news articles saying that the HTC One X would be available through T-Mobile (my current mobile provider) from 5th April. And the reviews of the One X all seemed to be very positive. So I returned the Galaxy Nexus, asked Amazon for a refund and bought a One X on Thursday.

My initial impression is that I did the right thing. The One X is even more lovely than the Galaxy Nexus. And it has already last a day longer and shows no signs of breaking down.

More detail (hopefully) in the next few days.

Programming

I did some more tweaks to a couple of my Perl modules. And yesterday I did more work on a new (and more substantial) project. I’ve put this new code on Github.

I’ve also had a brilliant idea for a web site. But I have no idea when I’m going to find the time to build it.

Books

I finished reading A Game of Thrones. I enjoyed it, but there’s an awful lot of it. And it seems that the rest of the series just get longer and longer. Need a rest before embarking on A Clash of Kings.

I’ve started reading Finding Moonshine by Marcus Du Sautoy. It’s about symmetry and group theory. Not far into it yet, but I’m enjoying it.

TV

Watched the first episode of the second series of Game of Thrones. It looks like it’s going to be as good as the first series. And I spotted Cassie (from the first generation of Skins characters) as one of Craster’s daughters.

We’ve finished our rewatching of Lost. And have started to rewatch Six Feet Under from the start.

Other Stuff

Due to an organisational mix-up we ended up eating in our favourite restaurant, Lamberts, to consecutive nights this week – which was great.

Our boiler has broken down. And it was clever enough to time its breakage to the only four-day weekend in the year.

Thick As A Brick

But your new shoes are worn at the heels and
Your suntan does rapidly peel and
Your wise men don’t know how it feels to be thick as a brick.
[Jethro Tull - Thick as a Brick]

Yesterday was a fun day on the internet. It was one of those days where a Daily Mail writer writes something spectacularly stupid and the internet (or, at least, the small part of it that follows the UK media) spends a few pleasant hours taking the piss.

Yesterday it was the turn of Samantha Brick. She wrote an article called ‘There are downsides to looking this pretty’: Why women hate me for being beautiful. You’ve probably read it, but if you haven’t the summary is that she thinks she is really attractive and this means that random men often do nice things for her, but random woman often take an instant dislike to her.

There are so many holes in her theory that it’s hard to know where to start. I’d guess that a lot of women don’t warm to her not because they are jealous of her irresistible beauty, but rather because she comes across as a bit of a shallow airhead who defines herself by her level of attractiveness to men. Oh, and about that irresistible beauty. I don’t want to sound rude, but I think she’s slightly deluded there.

If that article wasn’t enough for you to form an opinion of her, I invite you to peruse the list of previous articles she has written for the Mail. Just reading the titles should be enough. No need to wade into the content unless you have a particularly strong stomach.

So the internet had its day of fun laughing at Ms Brick and her nonsense. And it would have probably ended there, but the Mail just wouldn’t let it lie. Today they bounced back with two follow-up articles. One was reporting on how Ms Brick had become an “internet sensation” (where the Mail sees a sensation, the rest of us see a laughing stock) and the other was by Ms Brick herself. In it she claims that yesterday’s reaction just proves that her original theory was right.

Once again she shows that logical thinking is not her forté. Let’s bring the argument down to the simplest level and see if we can spot any flaws.

Ms Brick: Most women hate me because I’m so beautiful.
The Internet: You’re wrong and here’s about a billion reasons why.
Ms Brick: See! Everyone hates me. My original theory was right.

I really don’t think that stands up to the slightest amount of scrutiny, do you?

The article includes a photo of Ms Brick standing next to her husband. She’s wearing the same purple dress that she wears in a lot of the photos from  the last couple of days. But he’s wearing combat fatigues and carrying a rifle. Which takes on a slightly worrying meaning when you read what she wrote a few paragraphs below the photo when talking about her husband’s reaction to the furore.

At first, he shrugged it off, saying they were just the spiteful remarks of a few jealous women. But as the storm brewed . . . well, I’ve had to hide the worst of it from him; the tame few I’ve read out have riled him enough to want to take his own form of action.

Have you got that? Be nicer to her or her husband will come after you with his rifle.

Of course, Ms Brick and her delusions of superiority aren’t the real issue here. The real issue is the way that the Mail (and, in particular, Mail Online) have become so good at drawing in visitors who wouldn’t normally go anywhere near the paper. The Mail’s core audience obviously don’t spend as much time on the internet as the readers of some other papers. So the Mail have come up with a couple of strategies for getting readership from outside their core audience.

The first of these is the “sidebar of shame” so brilliantly reviewed by Steven Baxter recently. And the second is the liberal outrage strategy that we all fell for yesterday. I guess this was a lesson they picked up from the Jan Moir/Stephen Gately sage a couple of years ago. If you print things that annoy the (still largely liberal) Twitterati, then they will tweet and retweet their outrage. And every tweet brings more clicks. And every click brings more advertising revenue. As long as you don’t go too far (as Jan Moir did) and end up having to remove adverts from the page everything is wonderful. This morning I read an estimate that Samantha Brick’s article could have made the Mail £100,000 in advertising revenue.

This is what istyosty was about. Allowing people to read Mail stories without giving the clicks. And that’s, of course, why the Mail had it closed down. It hit them in the bottom line and they really didn’t like that.

I don’t have any solutions. I’m as guilty as anyone of passing round Mail links in order to spread the outrage. I wish I could just ignore them, but they’ve got under my skin. I even run a site which exists purely to link to Mail stories. I’m addicted to the outrage.

[Note: I wasn't planning to blog on this topic. But a friend pointed out the Jethro Tull link and I knew I just couldn't resist. Thanks Gareth.]

Update: Chris shares some thoughts about reading (and sharing) Mail content without giving them the clicks.

Week Notes 13

Week 13 must mean we’re a quarter of the way through the year. Tempus fugit and all that.

Blogging

Two blog posts here this week. The first invited people to the third Mediawatchery Blogging Meet-Up Thingy which will take place in Reading on May 12th. The second was a bit of a rant about how certain web sites are still encouraging people to be cavalier with their passwords.

Health

I was invited back to St George’s hospital this week. It turned out that it was just for a talk with the Osteoporosis Department’s Liaison Nurse. Because my fall wasn’t particularly spectacular their systems automatically flag it up as potential osteoporosis. She had the results of the bone densitometry tests that I had in February. They are well within the normal range and haven’t changed since I last had the tests five or six years ago. She’ll ask my GP to do some blood tests and recommends getting another set of bone densitometry tests done in five years time. But she doesn’t think I have osteoporosis.

Yesterday I did the longest walk I’ve done since my fall. We went up to Highgate and spent a few hours wandering around the cemetery.

During the week, I saw that the Biobank data has become available to researchers for the first time. My data is in there somewhere. It’s all anonymised of course, but I’m the overweight, unfit 40-something.

Technology

It’s new phone time. I’ve bought a Galaxy Nexus. The change from Froyo (Android 2.2) to Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) is pretty huge and some changes are taking some getting used to.

One big change is that the phone no longer presents itself to a computer as USB Mass Storage. It now uses the Media Transfer Protocol. Support for this in Linux seems a bit flaky right now, but I’m sure it will improve as more and more users (and developers) get their hands on devices using Ice Cream Sandwich.

I only got the phone yesterday, so it’s early days. Expect a more detailed review in the next couple of weeks.

Films

I really enjoyed The Hunger Games. Obviously it’s really simplified from the novel. But that’s, of course, inevitable when turning a relatively complex novel into a two hour film.

While we’re talking about films, the Fantasy Film League is about to start its new season. It’s a bit like Fantasy Football League, but about things that are interesting. You choose a director and six actors for your film and you score points whenever your stars are in films that are in the UK or US box office top ten. If you fancy entering a film, then please also consider joining my league – just use the code 2857ed1a. Four of us took part last year and it was a lot of fun.

TV

This week was all about Mad Men. It wasn’t at all difficult to find the first episode of series five – so we watched and enjoyed that on Monday. This week we’ll do that again and also add Game of Thrones into the mix.

Internet Security Rule One

Internet security rule one is “do not share your password with anyone”. There should be no exceptions to this rule. If anyone asks you to share your password with them, your answer should always be no.

Sometimes people say “oh well, it’s only a password for [some unimportant web site] – what harm could it do?” And, of course, perhaps giving someone your password for that particular unimportant web site won’t do any harm. But it’s a chink in your armour. By revealing your password for that site you’ve set a precedent. You just might be that little less protective the next time that someone asks you to share your password.

It’s called the Password Anti-Pattern and its shortcomings have been well-documented for several years. I wrote about it with specific reference to Twitter a few years  ago.

There are two levels of problem here. Firstly there’s the fact that you’ve given a third party complete access to interact with the web site for you. If it’s your Twitter password you’ve given away then the third-party service can do anything to your Twitter account that you can do yourself – right up to closing your account.

I assume that everyone can work that out for themselves. But the second problem is more subtle. Obviously any web site where I have an account is storing my password somewhere (probably in a database). And any third-party service that I want to share my password with also stores that password. So what’s the difference?

The difference is that the original web site is (hopefully) following basic password storage principles and storing my password using non-reversible encryption. The third-party site can’t do that. The third-party site needs access to the plain-text version of the password so it can be used to log on to the original web site. Oh, sure, they’ll hopefully store the password in their database in some encrypted format, but it will have to be a reversible encryption so that they can get a plain-text version of it back when they need to use it to log in to the original site.

So if someone somehow gets a copy of the original web site’s database, your password is held in some industrial-strength non-reversible encrypted format. But if they get a copy of the third-party service’s database, they’ll have your password in a far less secure format. If, at the same time, they manage to grab the third-party service’s source code then they’ll know exactly what process to follow to get the plain-text version of your password from the encrypted version.

Of course, you’d hope that their data centre is secure and no-one will ever steal their database or their source code. But it could happen. And the more passwords that you share, the more chance there is that someone, somewhere will get hold of data that you’d rather not have.

There is, of course, a way round this. It’s called OAuth. With OAuth, you don’t need to give anyone your password. You can authorise certain applications (or services) to take certain actions on your behalf on particular web sites. So, for example, I can let Twitterfeed post to my Twitter account without giving it my password. And that’s all it can do. It can’t follow new people, maintain my Twitter lists or close my account.

Twitter is a good example. In 2007 and 2008 a whole ecosystem grew up around Twitter. Many services offered cool and interesting services to add on to your basic Twitter account (Twitterfeed was one of them). But they all needed your Twitter username and password, so anyone who was at all security-conscious couldn’t use them. But in 2009 Twitter implemented OAuth. And, a few months later, they turned off the old authentication scheme so that you now only use OAuth to talk to Twitter.

The remaining problem is that OAuth only works when the original web site has implemented it. And that’s quite a lot of work. There are still many web sites out there which have lots of useful information out there locked behind a username and password with no other way to access it.

All of which brings me to what prompted this post. Earlier today a friend pointed me at a web site which provided a really useful service. But when I looked, it did it by asking for my login details for another web site. I’m not going to name either of the sites involved (my friend works for the third-party site and I don’t want to embarrass her), but it was a really useful service and it made me sad that I couldn’t use it.

Of course, as my friend explained, they had no alternative. The original site didn’t have OAuth support, so the only way they could get hold of the useful data was to log in as the user.

To my mind, that’s not a good reason for implementing the password anti-pattern. To my mind that’s where you say “oh well, that was a good idea – shame it’s not going to work” and start to lobby the original web site for some kind of OAuth support. But that’s not likely to happen as the point of this service is to compare different offerings and make suggestions of how the user could save money by switching to competitors. I can’t really see the original companies being keen to support that.

So we’re left with a situation where this third-party has implemented the password anti-pattern. And, as far as I can see, they’ve made quite a nice little business out of it. But makes me really uncomfortable to see what they’re doing. I’m pretty sure that I can trust them with my data, but I’m not prepared to compromise my principles in order to access this useful service. They are teaching people that it’s okay to share their passwords. And it’s not. It never is.

And it doesn’t stop with this company promoting their own service. On their site they have testimonials from a number of well-known web sites, newspapers and television programmes saying what a wonderful service it is. They have technology correspondents, who I would expect to know better, singing their praises and encouraging people to sign up for the service – telling people to break the first rule of internet security.

It all makes me rather depressed.

Look, I’ll tell you what. I’ve got a really good idea for an add-on for your online banking service. Just leave the login details in a comment below and I’ll set it up for you.

Mediawatchery Blogging Meet-Up Thingy 3

We’ve done it twice before and they just can’t stop us. So we’re going to do it all over again.

This is that occasional thing where the authors of some media-watching blogs get together in a pub to drink a couple of lemonades and make plans that will solve all the world’s problems.

The first two took place in London, but we’ve been reliably informed that there’s life outside the M25 – so this time we’re going to test that theory.

We’ll be at the Back of Beyond in Reading from 3pm on Saturday 12th May. There’s a Facebook event thingy if that kind of social conformity is your thing but feel free to just turn up if you don’t want to share details of your movements in advance.

Who will be there? Ah, well that’s confidential information. And the guest list is still in flux. But you know your favourite media blogger? He’ll definitely be there. He told me he was looking forward to meeting you. So you’d better be there.

Week Notes 11 & 12

It’s been a pretty quiet fortnight all in all.

Blogging

I’ve written Nothing here, but there was a post on my Perl blog which has attracted a pretty impressive number of comments. And a few more stories from ten years ago got published on Wasted Inches.

Health

I appear to have reached a bit of a plateau with my ankle. I’m getting about on it just fine, but it doesn’t seem to be getting much better. It still aches quite a lot. And it swells up towards the end of the day.

I thought I was free of the hospital, but they’ll set up another appointment for next week. This time it’s with the Osteoporosis and Rheumatology department. Which all makes me feel rather old.

Programming

I did a bit of work on a couple of my Perl modules. And I’ve returned to an older project which I’m hoping to make some good progress on in the next few weeks. More information when it’s in a usable state.

Films

I saw John Carter. I thought it was terrible. Today I’m going to see The Hunger Games. I really enjoyed the books and the reviews for the film have all been pretty good.

Last week I was invited to a free test screening at the Clapham Picturehouse. They didn’t tell us what the film was until we got there. It was a film called Liberal Arts. Afterwards a dozen of us were invited to a focus group to discuss the film and how it might be marketed. I enjoyed the film, but it seems my view was in the minority.

TV

Our rewatching of Lost is drawing to the end. We’re in the middle of series six. I know I’ve seen series six before, but I’m finding that I can’t remember very much of it at all.

Over the next week there are new series of both Game of Thrones and Mad Men. But they are both on Sky Atlantic which still isn’t available on Virgin Media, I’ll looking to the internet to provide copies.

Week Notes 10

Blogging

Blogging gets a section to itself this week as I’ve finally done a reasonable amount of it.

Early in the week I wrote three posts about Cardinal Keith O’Brien and how his article in last Sunday’s Telegraph was complete nonsense. Later in the week, I combined those posts into a report for the Pod Delusion.

Yesterday I wrote a post introducing Wasted Inches – where I’m looking back as what I was blogging about ten years ago.

Also yesterday, I wrote a post over at my more technical blog, Perl Hacks.

Health

I haven’t used the crutch for over a week. I still limp a bit as I’m walking and I’m probably not quite as quick as I would like to be. But my ankle seems to be improving in leaps and bounds (not literally!)

On the other hand, as I’m now back doing everything that I was doing before the accident, all the weight I lost while I was sitting around at home is creeping back on. I had a slight embarrassment during the week. I went to buy some trousers. I grabbed some pairs in the size that I like to think I am and went to try them on. Only to find that I couldn’t do them up as my waist seems to have grown by about an inch.

Looks like I need a couple of weeks of Wii Fir hula-hooping before buying those trousers.

Speaking and Training

Nothing new to add here. But I’ve confirmed all my travel and accommodation for the week in Edinburgh at the start of May. I’ll be staying at Ten Hill Place from April 29th to May 5th.

Films

I don’t seem to have seen any films this week. I am, however, booked to see John Carter this afternoon.

Gigs

My improving ankle meant that I could finally get to see a couple of gigs this week. It’s been far too long.

On Wednesday I went to the Hammersmith Odeon to see Laura Marling. It was quite a difference from seeing her at the Conway Hall in 2010. I really like her and the set was really good. It was just all a bit too short. She played for an hour and a quarter and then left. No encore (that’s a policy of hers) and the house lights came up straight away.

Last night I saw Sinéad O’Connor at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. I haven’t seen her play since a Finsbury Park Fleadh in the early 1990s. To be honest I was worried that she might not still have it, but I needn’t have worried at all. Her voice is still as wonderful as it ever was. I’ve only played her new album a couple of times, but the news songs already seemed familiar and fitted right in alongside the old favourites. Highlights for me were “I Am Stretched On Your Grave” and “Last Day of Our Acquaintance”.

An interesting thought struck me. What difference does it make to the gig-going experience when you can be sitting there with your smartphone displaying the set-list from a recent gig so that you’re pretty sure what is coming next?