Author Archives: Josh

Nuke it from orbit

Microsoft Says Recovery from Malware Becoming Impossible

Ripley: I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. “When you are dealing with rootkits and some advanced spyware programs, the only solution is to rebuild from scratch. In some cases, there really is no way to recover without nuking the systems from orbit,” Mike Danseglio, program manager in the Security Solutions group at Microsoft, said in a presentation at the InfoSec World conference.

It’s the only way to be sure.

Digital TV: we should never have gone there

A TV salesman is advocating the government buys a set top boxes for each analogue TV in Australia. He says it’s the best way to save the government money, because it’s costing AUD$50m/year to dual broadcast. And in financial terms, he’s right. Perhaps banning the sale of analogue sets might also hurry things along a little. $150m is his estimate for the government to bail itself out of dual-broadcasting.

But digital signals bite arse; SDTV has the same resolution as analogue, with the upside of no ghosting and the downsides of a loss of colour-depth plus dropouts affecting the audio and video streams. If you’re not getting ghosting on your current analogue signal (or it’s not annoying you), SDTV is a step down. HDTV is a massive improvement in raw data resolution, but no TVs are capable of displaying a raw 1920 x 1080 (the 1280 x 720 signal is academic, because it isn’t broadcast in Australia; and the signal is 1080i, there isn’t enough bandwidth allocated for 1080p) picture.

I don’t remember the step from Black and White TV to colour, but I know that colour sets were happily picking up the B&W signal before the changeover, and B&W sets kept working after the changeover. That would be bi-directional compatability. Same gig with FM radio when it went stereo – bi-directional compatability, because the stereo signal was on a seperate carrier encoded as the difference to the mono signal – cunning. Digital and analogue are co-existing quite happily at the moment, because the signals are being duplicated and transmitted (has anyone noticed the digital signal lags the analogue signal by about a second?), and apparently it costs a pretty penny to keep the dual broadcast going – probably in equipment maintenance costs (I don’t think the electricity is costing $1m / week).

So what do you actually get for your dollars in converting? If you step up to HDTV (no native resolution sets, remember) you get native widescreen capability rather than letterboxing, plus 5.1 sound rather than poxy stereo. Because of the compression, for a given set of bandwidth, you can have more video streams (approximately four SD can fit in the bandwidth of a single HD broadcast). Bitrates and compression can both be played with to improve the signal’s reliability and quality. And channels don’t bump into each other like they do in the analogue world (which is why the stations are on such widely seperated bands). But look at pay TV – like Bruce said, 57 channels and nothing on. Are you fixated by what’s currently available on broadcast TV? Will more channels increase the amount of TV you want to watch?

What was the point in this whole process anyway? What’s wrong with the PAL signal, and why did we rush in and select digital TV formats? Why didn’t the Australian government emulate the Irish government and just sit on it’s hands for a decade, waiting to see what happened in the US, Japan, Europe and China, and then evaluate the technical aspects of the winning systems? Why encourage the public to run around spending $10,000 a TV on technologies that are prone to disappointing failure (pixel death)? Any why are we shipping so much cash offshore to pay for the damn things?

We should have delayed going down the Digital TV road until it became attractive.

Thunderbird extension development hell

I had this great idea for an extension to Thunderbird that was neither trivial nor non-trivial, and thus interesting and doable (time will tell on the doable part). In fact, so much so that I figured someone must have done it already, so I went surfing the Thunderbird extensions trying to find it. I couldn’t. It appeared, so some inexplicable reason, I’d have to do it myself.

I soon found out why someone hadn’t done it before me: Thunderbird development is a nightmare.

The problem with developing for Thuderbird is that it’s a poor cousin to Firefox. All the dev doco revolves around Firefox, so as a function of that Firefox has hundreds of extensions (I think I saw a figure of 750 somewhere), sometimes multiple extensions with approximately the same functionality, whereas Thunderbird has dozens of extensions. Add to that the dev tools seem to be Firefox oriented, and I then find myself in development hell.

There’s documentation on extensions in general, but it all uses Firefox for it’s examples. So there’s nothing to cookbook-style leverage from. The doco says to install ChromeEdit (chrome being most of the user interface of the Mozilla suite), but it’s a Firefox only extension. Alternatively, you get your hands dirty editing user.js – but it’s not an alternative for Thunderbird developers, it’s how you do it. There’s a DOM inspector, but that has to be compiled in (it no longer comes as part of the Windows distribution) … or after a lot of looking, it turns out that the DOM inspector is available as a Thunderbird extension. Neither the recommended Extension Developer’s Extension nor Venkman (a IDE for javascript) work for Thunderbird, only for Firefox. I hadn’t gotten more than a quarter way through getting the recommened dev environment set up, and I’d burnt a few hours by this point, so I figured it was time to tell the world about this joy.

Sunday Quickies

Inventor of the cube-farm “sorry”.

Check out this massive Lego sports stadium. It think it might be at a Legoland. Not to be confused with the Wembly Stadium at Legoland Windsor.

For the Google junkies out there, there’s a list of the highest paying adsense phases – around USD$50 a pop. Brought to you by the Google adsense keyword tool.

In the same way that moving electrons create magnetism, moving mass has been shown to create gravity.

Economics of Digital Cameras

I was reading a backissue of Money magazine where Paul Clitheroe made a remarkably insightful analysis of film vs digital cameras (Money, June 2005, pg 20 am I better off With a digital or film camera?).

One thing he noted is that acquiring a digital camera turns you into a shutterbug; I would suggest spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on a camera has that effect, but the zero-cost of each individual photo certainly does help. He notes that in bangs-per-buck, film beats digital – and he’s right. Not only are digital cameras more expensive to acquire for the features you get, but (at the time of the article) processing costs were higher too. Couple that with the poorer image resolution you get from digital images (super high-end digital cameras are only now approaching the image resolution of $20 compact cameras) and you would have to be nuts to go digital.

Unless you don’t actually process your images. As a general rule, I don’t. In the last eleven months I’ve taken… let’s see… 10,327 images (I was wondering what would happen to the camera when it rolled over 10K images, because the manual hints that you might have to re-format your media; turns out that’s not the case). Recently Cathy and I took advantage of a Harvey Norman promotion and trebbled the number of images we’d printed, to a total of 200. We might have spent $50 on printing all up. That would have bough 240 frames of analogue film in processing costs, but we only printed out the winners. If the full 10K images had been processed we may have spent $2000 on processing. That’s a bunch of money. I suspect I would have husbanded my shots more if I’d spent the same amount of money on a film camera. In fact, there’s no way on God’s green Earth I would have spent that much money on a film camera. Something about perceived value differences. Anyways, the camera has been fun, and I think given the thrashing it’s been getting, I’ve been getting value for money from it. Which I’m a little surprised by, because it was a lot of money.

For me, the big advantage of digital is that I can learn to be a better photographer at no marginal cost. And Paul says that at National Geographic, photographers average 350 rolls of film (almost 12600 frames) per story, with an average of 10 published. So, if I was a professional grade photographer using professional equipment, one in twenty of the photos I’ve printed would be magazine quality.

Matrix displays bite arse

Sure, CRT displays are bulky, consume piles of power and are heavy. But they can change resolution without a loss of … resolution.

See, High Definition TV runs at 1920 x 1080 – which, incidentally, a vanishingly small number of TV sets run at (ignore advertising about sets being HD-ready – all it means is the TV will understand a HD signal and happily convert it down to it’s native resolution). But converting a raster image from it’s native resolution down involves a loss of information; worse yet, if that resolution isn’t an integer multiple of source resolution, the downconversion algorithm has to make some judgement calls about which new pixel to push the old pixel’s information – so you can have some odd looking images, like horizonal or diagonal lines going… funny. Colour transitions can become forced too with a visible loss of colour depth. Converting up can also be a little strange, with some pixels odd colours (making the image look blurry) or straight lines becoming jagged. Given that signals might also appear in 704 × 480 (Standard Defintion) or 1280 × 720 (a high quality high definition signal not broadcast in Oztralia), aspect ratios on the pixels involved mean you need a native resolution not likely to be obtained for many years to get clean conversion between the resolutions.

CRTs don’t give a rat’s arse about conversion algorithms, and happily change the number of lines they throw on the screen in response to the number they’re given. The only difficulty you might encounter is the shadow mask or aperture grille.

LCD and Plasma display screens – generally TV monitors, and LCD projectors (and for that matter, any other matrix-based projection technology) have a failure mode that analogue CRT displays don’t exhibit:

Dead pixels.

Stuck on or stuck off, dead pixels are a one way street. You don’t see that kind of failure in CRTs. And I’m not aware of any TV manufacturers who guarantee their product against this particularly annoying failure. No-one is told about it at purchase time, but I’m predicting in three to five years time there’s going to be an uproar about it.

Anyone bought a new matrix TV lately? Happy about it?

Parenting magazines and Witchcraft

The difference between Science and Witchcraft is peer-reviewed double blind tests.

I have hearing loss as a result of an ear infection, so seeing this baloney annoys me on a deeply personal level – I don’t like the idea of kiddies ears going down the same path as mine because of faith-based approach to healing. I’ve discovered back issues of parenting magazines can be borrowed from our local library, and I stumbled across this issue of Practical Parenting.

Practical Parenting Magazine
July 2005, pg 74
Homeopathy for Ear Infections

The article started off with

“Editor’s Note: PP brings you this information in the interest of presenting a balanced view, but it should not take the place of medical advice: Make sure your GP knows the approach you are taking.”

Which shows they know they’re fooling around with fire. I want to know, why? The best answer I can come up with is that so many people are using homeopathy that the editors wanted to caution them against turning their backs on modern medicine and whatever benefits it may offer (peer reviewed double-blind tests not withstanding).
When are they going to run the article on the pros of paedophilia, in the interest of presenting a balanced view? Or, for the same reasons, something on balancing the humours? Can’t something just be plain old wrong? Can’t you slap your readers around like Stupid Lemon Eaters?

“Homeopathy works well together with the care offered by modern medical practice.”

Which can be restated as “drinking water will cure you, if you’re using antibiotics at the same time.” Or, summarily, “if you’re using antibiotics, drinking water won’t stop you getting better.” I say: if you want to experience the placebo effect, get your doctor to prescribe some Obecalp.

So Cathy and I looked at each other and decided this magazine was crap and that we’d only read the competitor in the future. After all, on their Editorial board, Woolworths Australian Parents Magazine have got an Obstertrician, a Midwife, a Paediatrician, a Dietitian, a Clinical Psychologist and a Breastfeeding counsellor; the magazine’s branded by Woolworths (the second largest retail company in Australia). They may as well call themselves Evidence-based ‘R Us. Then I see in the current issue:

Woolworths Australian Parents Magazine
Feb/Mar 2006, pg 62
Alternative treatments for glue ear.

Unlike Practical Parenting, Australian Parents saw no need to give a disclaimer that these alternative treatments at best don’t actually work and at worst will injure your child.

However, there are a range of alternative health approaches that are very effective either used on their own or in conjunction with traditional medicine.
(emphasis added)

I can smell a lawsuit. Medical advice without a disclaimer is one thing, but wrong medical advice and you’re up the creek without a paddle. And believe me, I looked for the disclaimer; plenty of information about the publisher of the magazine, nothing saying “don’t take our word for it, actually go to a doctor and get laughed at.”

Homeopathy is, says Patricia, a route that requires patience. Children will be prescribed oral drops which they may have to take for up to a year.

Given that these infections can last as long as six weeks, I’d hope that a year would “cure” the disease. Glue ear is a combination infection and mechanical failure; unless the homeopathic remedy is being shot up the Eustachian tubes, it’s not going to be any help. As double-blind tests have proven. And I can assure you from personal experience, a middle ear infection and the resultant injuries is no barrel of laughs.

The article goes on to recommend, amongst other quackery, ear candling as a remedy. I hate to tell you this, but setting your child on fire is not a safe way to deal with a middle ear infection; worse yet, it doesn’t work. Ear candling is dangerous.

Why not run an article on the healing effects of prayer, which is not only safe and cheap but proven to have some effect?

In the good old days, witches used to be burnt at the stake.

Science or Witchcraft – you choose.

Vegan Lunch Box

Wow, blogging is an insane new media. One gal posts daily photos and descriptions of what she packs her in her kid’s Vegan Lunch Box. The public exposure of this has got to improve the food quality dramatically. If only my Mum was doing this, perhaps I would have opted for something more sophisticated than peanut butter and jam sandwitches every day.

Now, you’re not going to see a column in a newspaper on this, are you? You’d have to be a homemaker like the blogger, but she must be making mad coin given she’s getting 50-80 comments per entry; if I could see the ads it’d be peppered with them! Look at this place. We’re excited when we get one comment!