Simpsons and Fox News

This has to be one of the funniest things I have seen on youtube in a long while.



Alasdair

Thoughts on boxes, religious ones.

Over the years one of the things I have noticed is that many of my friends (and I doubt my friends are unique) like to box me. To my Islamic friends I am Christian, to my Christians friends I am an Atheist, and to my Atheist friends err, well it does not seem to have come up. The point is I have always resisted being boxed like this, and frequently claim to be agnostic.
The problem is I have become increasingly dissatisfied by this idea. My main issue being how is being an agnostic different from being an Atheist. This weekend I found the following video on YouTube:

In some sense the distinction makes a lot of sense. The problem is it misses out one critical factor. How much do people care! Although Laci (the person who made the video) describes herself as an agnostic atheist she clearly cares about it. I expect (although I would hate to speak for him) that Richard Dawkins is a gnostic atheist and he clearly cares. Most people on the other hand I expect do not care. People who do not care will typically answer, when asked, that they do, or do not, believe in God, but otherwise take no action.

This still does not help me though, because I still object to being in the atheist, or theist box, and all I just did is create another two. I would still say I do not care, but I do not care because I have decided that whether God exists or not I'm going to live the same way, rather than not really thinking about it. My flawed thinking goes as follows:

1. If God exists and is the wonderful all forgiving God Christians believe in then I really do not think he would send a good person to hell just because they did not believe in Jesus.
2. If God exists and is like the jealous God of the old testament then I want nothing to do with him because he commits mass murder, created us so we could worship him, making us his slaves. These are things I consider wrong, even for God.
3. If God does not exist I would not want to spend my life worshiping something that does not exist.

I also take issue with the following ideas:

1. All good things comes from God
2. All bad things come from the Devil

I feel that these statements absolve Humans of responsibility for the good and evil we do in this world, it allows us to justify all kinds of evil on the grounds that "God wanted me to". I think Humans have the unique capacity to commit both good and evil and we have a choice which we do.

As a result I will put myself in the following boxes:

• agnostic about God
• a humanist
  

At least until I change my mind.
Alasdair

Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) FAIL!

Since the beginning of this year the US government has required people visiting the USA to preregister their intent to travel via the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA). This is a website. This does not need to be done once per trip, but once every two years or so. I often travel to the USA at short notice so reminded by a facebook status I decided to give registering a go. So the first thing I did was to use trusty google to search for ESTA. Here is a screenshot of the results:
Question: Which link is the right one? Think carefully. It is obviously not the last one, but most people would probably go for the first sponsored link, and would get it wrong. It is in fact the fourth result (ignoring the sponsored links). The one titled welcome, with a domain of esta.cbp.dhs.gov. I missed it completely. It looks amateurish and as a result my brain passed it over. The page title did not say ESTA. Come on DHS, you could at least have the page title be Welcome to the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, maybe include the DHS abbreviation in there. FAIL number one. Now look very carefully at the url, note the HTTPS at the front. This shows they are taking security seriously, which is good, but I tried accessing using http, and instead of being redirected to https I got no response back. Most people typing the address in wont put HTTPS at the beginning, so I call this FAIL number two (note I am only suggesting http://esta.chp.dhs.gov point to https://esta.chp.dhs.gov/, not any subpage). FAIL number three though is amazing. When accessing the page I get the following javascript pop up:
I suggest you read it closely. It says two things:

1. The data you are submitting, don't expect us to keep it private. You give us the right to do what we wont, don't expect data protection you weird European types.
   
2. If you access this system and you are not allowed to expect the FBI (or similar) to appear at your door with an arrest warrant.

The first I do not really have a problem with. I don't expect the data I hand over on the green I-94W to be private, and this is really no different.

The second is alarming. How do I know if I am authorized or not? This is FAIL number three. I get told I need authorization, but no one has told me whether I have authorization or not. I found a public website on the Internet, the official ESTA system, which I need to use to enter the USA, so I am probably authorized, but they have this big scary warning and often ignorance is no defence in a court of law. In fact given the info you provide them when using this site it would be very easy for them to pick you up if you are not authorized.

I wonder if I'm being too paranoid.
Alasdair

How people really go about decrypting all your secret data

I thought today's cartoon from xkcd was brilliant. It is going on my list of all time favourites along with 327.

Alasdair

Leaving Carphone Warehouse

I now have a Jesus Phone. I have had a phone on O2 for years, but I was billed via Carphone Warehouse. I was fed up with them. It took me years to get them to accept that I had moved, they neglected to sell me a 3G sim card when I bought a 3G phone, and finally because they were unable to update the address they had for me on record they could not sell me a Jesus Phone. They even told me the problem was that my bank did not have my address down correctly. The bank that sends me stuff monthly (unlike Carphone Warehouse).

So on Friday I phoned up to ask for my P.A.C. I was put through to someone who claimed to be from O2 Direct who sold me an iPhone and sorted out so I would no longer be billed by Carphone Warehouse. Woo Hoo!!!

Except. Over the weekend it turned out the PAC O2 had been given had expired, the trouble was O2 (or was it carphone warehouse) generated the PAC and never gave it to me. I then discovered that the guy from "O2 Direct" worked for carphone warehouse. So I started phoning. First I called Carphone Warehouse, who gave me a new PAC. Then I phoned O2, only to discover that the details Carphone Warehouse gave me for the new phone were incorrect, O2 had never heard of them. At one point O2 told me that my iPhone was setup for my new phone number, and then I found out it wasn't. Argh. Argh. Argh.

So finally after speaking to 7 people my number is going to be ported to the iPhone on Thursday 11th. I sooooo hope this time it is sorted, because if not I have to learn a whole new phone number, and tell a whole load of people my number has changed.

Alasdair

Logging and Tracing in software

If your not a software developer this post is not for you.

I read with some interest Jeff Atwood's post on logging. He makes some interesting points, and it got me thinking once again about this whole area of logging. I think a lot of the debate misses an important point. Who is the log data for? There are essentially two answers:

1. For a developer or service engineer to work out what went wrong after a problem occurs
2. For a user of a system to check on the state of the program.

To cope with this I have always separated the concept of logging from tracing. Tracing is for the first group, it is an aid for debugging. Logging is for the user. In normal operation trace is disabled and logging is enabled.

The example in Jeff's post I would use info, error and fatal for the second class of user, not the first. Following this the info messages would become debug statements. I would also count the "handled exceptions" as debug data.

Two important things to note from Jeff's post is that logging (or tracing) is not free. If it is not enabled the overhead should be zero (or as close to zero as possible), and the messages for the second class of user should be easy to read, perhaps via a user interface of similar.

In WebSphere Application Server every info, warning and error message is written to a file and results in a JMX notification. At one point the overhead of this was 79ms per message, as a result I aim to only output exceptional messages.

Alasdair

FailBlog

Thanks to youtube I just discovered failblog. I discovered it via this video:



I wouldn't say this made me laugh, I was too surprised, it did make me go and look at the blog which has a mix of surprising, confusing and funny clips and images. I just hope the confusing ones are me lacking a cultural reference. Oh, and one other I thought was worth capturing:



Alasdair