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Leave them kids alone

Pope Benedict XVI is apparently set to visit Britain soon. However he has also decided to attack the laws giving gay couples similar rights to married (heterosexual) couples, as a variation on the church’s more general disgust with anyone who does not share their own twisted sexual views

Aware that this is unpopular (the laws have widespread support) he has chosen a rather devious and obfuscated line of attack.

He singles out for criticism the UK’s Equality Bill, currently passing through Parliament. He tells us the effect of some of the legislation designed to achieve this goal has been to impose unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs. Unjust. That’s the key word there. And then goes on:

“In some respects it actually violates the natural law upon which the equality of all human beings is grounded and by which it is guaranteed.”

Of course the concept of Natural Law is wonderfully vague. One assumes he is referring to some or other Aquinas-style philosophy of everything is OK, so long as it is OK with God too. However that aside, what is he really objecting to? Well, that is made fairly clear by further Church-comment on the matter. Firstly we are told that:

Religious leaders have voiced concern that the Equality Bill may force churches to employ sexually active gay people and transsexuals when hiring staff other than priests or ministers.

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Passion for nails

I love the Internet. Not for the more typical use of finding what you need to know quickly and easily, but rather for the effortless ability to tell you what you did not need to know.

In the space of ten minutes or so today I moved from fruit juice to triclavianism, via the Cathars.

Started with a quick visit to Wikipedia to get some information on the chemical composition of passion-fruit juice. But then you just can’t resist haring off down those links that you find and end up in the most byzantine (tee hee) backwaters of medieval theology… Or at least I can’t.

So my dull juice enquiry ends up with me discovering that triclavianism was declared a sin by Pope Innocent III, much to the annoyance of the Albigenses and the Waldensians, who heretically insisted that only three nails were used to hang Jesus from the cross, and he got a spear in the left side. The Pope’s infallible word was that four nails were used and he got speared on the right side.

Which is wonderful enough. Until you cross-reference to The Catholic Encyclopedia (“Copyright © 2009 by Kevin Knight. Dedicated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.”), subsection “Holy Nails”, where we discover that there are apparently still in existence up to 30 of the original nails used.

Who’d have thought it?

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BMW France – To be avoided

More fine customer service from the French arm of a large company…

BMW France – you just lost my business. A few weeks ago my wife bought a new car. A BMW. Fine car. Superbly designed and tremendous quality. As a car, we are delighted with it.

Next year I’ll be replacing my car. I had my eye on a sparkling new BMW estate. But so long as I have to buy it from BMW France, it’s not going to happen. Shame, as I really do like the cars. I just can’t stand the company. In the short time we’ve had the new car I’ve had two major issues. Neither concern the quality of the car itself. Read the rest of this entry »

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Bit torrent web clients

As detailed in previous posts, I have a server at home which I use to download and seed torrents (and, before you ask, yes most of the torrent are indeed legal!!) The torrent-side of this server needs to be remotely accessible and manageable to me from a number of places, so some sort of web-interface is required.

There are surprisingly few good web-based applications out there to do this. For a long time I’ve been using torrentflux-b4rt to provide a web-interface to BitTornado. It’s a great piece of software, but I’m now stopping using it. It’s always been a bit bloated and heavy, but once set up the way you want it, this has not mattered too much. Read the rest of this entry »

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Amazon France – Adieu, not Au Revoir

You know how it goes: you discover a company that pleases you and can’t stop raving about it to friends and family. I’ve been like that regarding Amazon for some years. These days I mainly used Amazon France: books, toys, cameras, you name it. In the last couple of years I’ve spent more than 2000 Euros with Amazon France. I was what I would think of as a Good Customer.

I was even, ironically, signed up as one of their Premium Customers, which ensured they got even MORE business out of me!

I liked their prices – not always cheapest, but close enough.

I liked their web-site.

I liked their customer service – when something “went wrong” they would sort it out. It has to be said, though, that my experience of Amazon’s customer service is more based upon dealing with Amazon UK in times past, not so much with Amazon France.

So I was a keen customer and advocate, and spent oodles of money with Amazon. So how come today I cancel my Premium account and, once my final orders have limped in some time next week, will cancel my whole account and never, ever, darken their web site again? Read the rest of this entry »

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Sockstress mitigation on Linux using Shorewall

This week’s hot security issue in the networking world is sockstress.

Nasty little vulnerability, found in all known TCP implementations. Given the right circumstances (read up on it) it allows a very neat DoS attack to be mounted on a large destination with minimal attacking resource. And the really elegant part is that it exploits a fundamental weakness in the very architecture of TCP as implemented on all major platforms. Read the rest of this entry »

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Chrome really is nearly there!

Yesterday I realised Chrome is going to be successful.

Chrome is Google’s web browser. It first appeared just over a year ago. For much of that period I’ve been pretty lukewarm about it. Thought it was more of a symbolic gesture than a serious attempt at muscling in on the browser market.

To a technical person, Chrome had been positioned as nothing so special. The items that stick in my mind are very fast Javascript and better memory utilisation. Also more granular at the process level: one process per tab, or some such concept. Nice sounding. But with Firefox boasting of the new TraceMonikey Javascript engine, and Microsoft doing reasonable work on IE8, I reckoned it was not sounding like anything too unusual.

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Racist Microsoft?

The BBC has a story running about a Microsoft ad on their Polish web-site which has been Photoshopped to change one aspect of the original from the US site. Apart from the translation of the words to Polish, of the three people in the original photo (Asian man, black man, white woman – very PC – and no, I don’t mean personal computer) the black man has now become white – a different head has been used.

As an aside, the article points out that the Photoshopping has not even been done very well – the original man’s hands remain. But that’s just an amusing side issue. The much more interesting aspect is the apparent reaction to it. We have this:

The “gaffe”. What gaffe would that be then? The gaffe of having done a poor job with Photoshop? Of course not. The gaffe is that a black man was replaced by a white man.

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Spark of madness

This week’s Economist has an article about the possible emergence of a market in house-price hedging derivatives. It’s at Housing Derivatives: Spark of Invention and appalls me. Appalls not least because the writer seems to genuinely believe that it’s a great idea. Still hungover and bleary eyed from the last economic piss-up, we’re already planning the next one.

The article starts off by comparing house fire insurance with the idea of house-price hedging. That’s very unreasonable. The business model behind insurance is not a zero-sum game. The execution of that model by many insurance companies in recent times (AIG to mention just the best known offender) may be ridiculous, but the basic model is sound: based upon actuarial risk, a large group pool resources to pay out to the few when something happens. If the actuaries are good at their job everyone is happy: the many who required no payout, the few who did and the insurance company who retain a profit. Maybe difficult to achieve, but sound in principle.

What is being describe in this article, however, is a different beast altogether.

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lighttpd

This site now runs on lighttpd! Apache2 was used previously. It’ a fine web-server, but lighttpd is so much, er, lighter. About 30% lower memory consumption for the same performance. Also, as a side benefit, the config is simpler too.

It does, for me at least, everything Apache2 can do:

• • • Multiple virtual hosts
    • HTTPS
    • WebDav (both unencrypted and SSL encrypted)
    • PHP (and fast too!)

The only limitation I have is the very same one I also had with Apache2: HTTPS only fully works for one on the virtual hosts. If you host a.com, b.com and c.com then you can only have a certificate active for one of them with the correct identify. Say you have a certificate for a.com: if you visit https:/b.com you’ll get a warning that the certificate is only valid for a.com. Of course you can choose to override this and still encrypt the session, but it’s a nuisance. Must be something very fundamental to SSL, given that both Apache and lighttpd have this issue.

So, lighttpd comes highly recommended!

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