Confession is good for the soul, and too many tech people are incapable of admitting they made a mistake. So with that in mind:
I wasted several minutes of someone’s time this week because I mistakenly thought a URL was syntactically invalid. It was invalid according to RFC 1738, but I’d forgotten the EBNF for relative URLs in RFC 1808.
Apologies to anyone who thought I was infallible.
All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if you can’t get them together again, there must be a reason. By all means, do not use a hammer.
—IBM maintenance manual, 1925
This morning on the T there was a really stinky guy with psoriasis and matted grey hair who insisted on standing shoved up against me, and breathing with his mouth hanging open. Obviously the psoriasis isn’t his fault, but the rest I hold him responsible for. I still feel soiled…
Got a henna tattoo at the weekend. It’s a geometric sun symbol, on my left upper arm. I’m deciding how I feel about tattoos and trying out various ideas before possibly getting the real thing.
I used to think it was something I’d never do; I was never that into self-decoration, and I couldn’t think of anything that would still be meaningful to me in twenty years.
And then I did. I’m considering getting the logo of the Weimar bauhaus as a tattoo. The bauhaus is a constant influence on me—from my web designs at work, to the choice of furniture in the living room. (I refuse to give up capital letters, though. You can thank me now.)
Coming home, I was sat next to the guy with Tourette’s Syndrome. At least, that’s what I assume it is; I’m no expert. He’s often travelling either to or from Davis Square. He sits and basically babbles whatever enters his head. Sometimes he tries to read a book or magazine, and you hear bits of the text incorporated into his vocalizations. Tonight it was mostly unintelligible; if it was a foreign language, it wasn’t one I recognize.
Sometimes he can clear a radius of two or three seats around him. When I failed to move, he moved a seat closer; perhaps hoping I’d try to strike up a conversation.
According to The Independent, UK police are being told that they can’t use words like “homosexual” and “bisexual”, because those are medical terms “used to criminalize lesbians, gay men and bisexuals in the nineteenth century”.
Which makes me wonder—just what the hell am I supposed to say instead of “bisexual”, in order to be politically correct? (This is a serious question.)
It seems that Microsoft Internet Explorer keeps a record of all web sites you ever visit, and all search engine terms you type in to any search engine—even if you tell it to clear the history! It also collects all your cookies from every site you visit, in a separate set of secret folders hidden away from the normal cookie folder—so even if you think you cleared out your cookies, you probably didn’t.
They’ve clearly gone to a lot of work to prevent people finding these hidden files too—they’re specially flagged to stop them displaying in the DOS shell or Windows. Even if you unflag them, special code in Windows will hide them again next time you reboot. The code is hidden away in rundll32.exe, which is supposed to be just the tool that runs 32-bit DLL libraries. Sneaky or what?
In fact, only the old Windows Explorer program (left over from Win3.x) will show the directories. Even then, Windows is specially patched to prevent you from looking at the files unless you copy them somewhere else first!
So what’s in these files? Well, looking at my own machine, I see a log of sites I’ve visited that I know I haven’t been to this year, and searches for stuff I was researching last year as well. There are I can think of no legitimate reason for this information to still be stored in database files on my disk. Even ignoring the possible privacy implications, all this unencrypted secretly logged data represents a significant security risk. Do I want anyone who gains physical access to my machine to be able to get my online banking account details? I don’t think so.
For more information and a guided tour of what Microsoft have secretly stored on your hard disk, see <URL:http://www.f***windows.com/content/ms-hidden-files.shtml> I think I’m about to switch browser, now that Mozilla seems stable enough to use… I’m glad I’ve never used Outlook Express.
To finish off the day, we had a power cut at around 22:30. It continued until 05:30, so we had to try and sleep through one of the most stiflingly hot nights this year without the benefit of any air conditioning.
Consequently I am feeling a little delicate this morning.
Well, I got home and discovered that the kitchen ceiling wasn’t where I’d left it. It’s probably just my getting conventional in my old age, but I can’t help feeling that ceilings are best kept overhead, rather than strewn in large soggy chunks over the countertop and floor.
I walked through the result several times before I could quite convince myself that it was real. It looked rather like something from the set of The Young Ones. I could hear Zack noises faintly from upstairs; he’s the teenage son of our landlord, and I have a sneaking suspicion that he might be somehow involved in the remodelling of our kitchen. If he is, I hope he’s working on a really good excuse. I’m not sure if Michael is the kind of father who goes apeshit; but if he is, I think today might be his day.
I spent the next hour and a half cleaning the ceiling off of the floor, disinfecting everything, and otherwise tidying up. After that, the sweat was literally dripping from me, so I took a shower. In a little while I’ll probably take some pictures of the remaining ceiling tiles, which have some interesting brown bulges that weren’t there before and look somewhat ominous.
I did not lose my temper, rant, rave or scream. I just calmly cleaned everything up.
Today has been particularly hot and sticky. As I walked to work this morning, Boston was bathed in a thick haze of moisture—almost fog-like. As I arrived at the office, the locusts in the park were playing their “Oh boy, it’s going to be hot” rasp.
The net has been not-so-hot. I’m not sure whether it’s Code Red II or a backhoe through a fiber or what, but I’ve been pretty much unable to reach the Internet for much of the day.
At the weekend I went to a colleague’s wedding. It was a big Italian wedding, which was kinda interesting as I’d not seen much genuine genuflection before. All the hymns and prayers and stuff seem to be completely different and unfamiliar. Like the other big weddings I’ve been to in the last couple of years, it made me glad that our own hitching was a quiet and relatively informal affair.
I took the digital camera to the wedding and reception. It seems to behave strangely in low light - it copes better than film, but you get a really interesting ghosting/smearing effect on anything that moves. The end results often look like deliberately arty Photoshop work.