Well, after a bit of searching I found it...
http://download.medion.de/downloads/treiber/gpl86162de.exe (121MB)
It's a self-extracting file which contains two tarballs. Haven't had a chance to trying building it yet, but it looks promising and looks like it should contain the most recent updates.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
PDF Pad - Flags, custom graph paper, calendars and charts.
I'm in the process of going through my bookmarks and rediscovering useful links.
One site that is very useful if I need to print out grids is PDF pad, which has all sorts of PDFs and PDF generators to print plain graph paper, engineering or science graph paper, isometric grids, polar charts, etc.
What's handy is that there is also a collection of flags, custom calendar generators, storyboard layouts and even a sudoku generator.
It certainly beats trying to throw something together in word or excel.
Some previews from the site (copyright PDF Pad)
One site that is very useful if I need to print out grids is PDF pad, which has all sorts of PDFs and PDF generators to print plain graph paper, engineering or science graph paper, isometric grids, polar charts, etc.
What's handy is that there is also a collection of flags, custom calendar generators, storyboard layouts and even a sudoku generator.
It certainly beats trying to throw something together in word or excel.
Some previews from the site (copyright PDF Pad)
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Note to Eric
Articles on BBC news about this collecting of wifi data streams by the Google street view cars.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8684110.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10122339.stm
If you brought your front door key into a shop to get a copy of it and the operator made their own copy for "research", would you be happy? Even if they never used the key, would that make it OK? No harm, no foul, right?
Playing devil's advocate - On the other hand, if people have an open wireless system then they are effectively saying, "Here is a network, do what you want with it", which I think they should be entitled to do. If you were to open up your garden as a right-of-way that would be your decision. If people trample all over your grass and reduce it muck, well that was your fault, but if people are going to be prevented from doing (or not doing) their own risk assessment, then how are we going to evolve into anything other than automatons.
Back to the original point, however; If you archive the raw data, then what you're doing is storing a potential time-bomb of personally identifiable information that could be cross-indexed with all your other data. Plus, who knows what kind of correlations could be made if dumps were obtained and traded in hacker networks. Say you wanted to look at web traffic to a particular site to look for vulnerabilities, what better way than to dig out that huge data source and start filtering SSL negotiation sessions or comparing secure vs insecure traffic to the same server to help work out encryption keys. The only saving grace is that it appears to have been sampling packets rather than streams.
In short though, it's one thing to say "your data was on an open network, anyone could have looked at it", but it's quite another to take that data and archive it, with who knows what kind of security protecting it from widespread dissemination.
If you think I'm being a bit extreme, there isn't much difference between this and Google opening up a cable Internet box on the street, sniffing everybody's network data and uploading it to their servers for later perusal. The only difference being that they'd have to answer to another large corporation and regulatory mechanisms instead of relatively powerless individuals.
in other words, common sense is something that was sorely lacking in the decision to archive publicly available wifi traffic. What's been done is that disparate local area networks, which in themselves would have little value have been aggregated into a potentially very lucrative source of demographic and behavioural information.
Google deserve to get smacked around for this mistake. Not because they did something bad or evil, but because they did something greedy, stupid and inconsiderate. Being acquisitive is not an admirable trait in people and neither should it be in corporations.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8684110.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10122339.stm
If you brought your front door key into a shop to get a copy of it and the operator made their own copy for "research", would you be happy? Even if they never used the key, would that make it OK? No harm, no foul, right?
Playing devil's advocate - On the other hand, if people have an open wireless system then they are effectively saying, "Here is a network, do what you want with it", which I think they should be entitled to do. If you were to open up your garden as a right-of-way that would be your decision. If people trample all over your grass and reduce it muck, well that was your fault, but if people are going to be prevented from doing (or not doing) their own risk assessment, then how are we going to evolve into anything other than automatons.
Back to the original point, however; If you archive the raw data, then what you're doing is storing a potential time-bomb of personally identifiable information that could be cross-indexed with all your other data. Plus, who knows what kind of correlations could be made if dumps were obtained and traded in hacker networks. Say you wanted to look at web traffic to a particular site to look for vulnerabilities, what better way than to dig out that huge data source and start filtering SSL negotiation sessions or comparing secure vs insecure traffic to the same server to help work out encryption keys. The only saving grace is that it appears to have been sampling packets rather than streams.
In short though, it's one thing to say "your data was on an open network, anyone could have looked at it", but it's quite another to take that data and archive it, with who knows what kind of security protecting it from widespread dissemination.
If you think I'm being a bit extreme, there isn't much difference between this and Google opening up a cable Internet box on the street, sniffing everybody's network data and uploading it to their servers for later perusal. The only difference being that they'd have to answer to another large corporation and regulatory mechanisms instead of relatively powerless individuals.
in other words, common sense is something that was sorely lacking in the decision to archive publicly available wifi traffic. What's been done is that disparate local area networks, which in themselves would have little value have been aggregated into a potentially very lucrative source of demographic and behavioural information.
Google deserve to get smacked around for this mistake. Not because they did something bad or evil, but because they did something greedy, stupid and inconsiderate. Being acquisitive is not an admirable trait in people and neither should it be in corporations.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Slow news day?
So Jeff at Coding Horror decides to post something pointless. Well, perhaps not because it somehow manages to become topical because of today's successful Ariane launch and the clarification of the Ariane failure in 1996 (read the comments for that.)
All programmers know the term GIGO. If they don't, then perhaps an alternative career should be considered. Accurate number storage has always been an issue, so I would expect that any post about it in the 21st century should be putting forward a practical solution, not leaving it as an exercise for commentators.
All programmers know the term GIGO. If they don't, then perhaps an alternative career should be considered. Accurate number storage has always been an issue, so I would expect that any post about it in the 21st century should be putting forward a practical solution, not leaving it as an exercise for commentators.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Another great article by David McWilliams
I always like to check out David McWilliams's web site every so often to see what he has to say, as well as to read some of the surprisingly cogent comments attached to his blog entries. This recent article by David is a good synopsis of what is wrong with this country at the moment.
The question is, who is going to be able to make the necessary changes to get us on the road to recovery? Unfortunately David no longer has the brilliant "Agenda" programme anymore (possibly the only thing TV3 ever did that justified their existence) to bring these issues into visibility to a wider audience (on a side note, I always thought it was a little convenient that the programme should be dropped as his predictions of a property market decline were starting to tally with the signs on the horizon). So, incisive and eloquent as he may be, unless he has the ears of those with influence, there are very few other people in a comparable position to change the current way of thinking in those towers of ivory.
What's always been lacking is a coherent and consistent opposition, and that doesn't look like it's going change anytime soon, despite the occasional spark.
In a related article, he takes a look at the cultural aspects of the bank-manufactured property boom. There's nothing particularly new there, we've been aware of the scam that's been perpetuated in this market for a long time, but it's interesting to see the workings of the US valuation system and how it could (or should) apply to our situation.
The question is, who is going to be able to make the necessary changes to get us on the road to recovery? Unfortunately David no longer has the brilliant "Agenda" programme anymore (possibly the only thing TV3 ever did that justified their existence) to bring these issues into visibility to a wider audience (on a side note, I always thought it was a little convenient that the programme should be dropped as his predictions of a property market decline were starting to tally with the signs on the horizon). So, incisive and eloquent as he may be, unless he has the ears of those with influence, there are very few other people in a comparable position to change the current way of thinking in those towers of ivory.
What's always been lacking is a coherent and consistent opposition, and that doesn't look like it's going change anytime soon, despite the occasional spark.
In a related article, he takes a look at the cultural aspects of the bank-manufactured property boom. There's nothing particularly new there, we've been aware of the scam that's been perpetuated in this market for a long time, but it's interesting to see the workings of the US valuation system and how it could (or should) apply to our situation.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Code vs Pseudocode
I just read this post over at Coding Horror and find myself agreeing with much of it. I always found that writing pseudo code was more of a hindrance to writing proper code in the first place.
It probably makes sense to write pseudo code if you're not going to be doing the actual code yourself. Otherwise, there are a few traps you can fall into - You can get bogged down in putting more detail than necessary in the pseudo code because you're thinking of the actual code that's going to be written and you can also lock yourself into a particular way of thinking that blocks the process of writing the code, because the pseudo code described the functions in such a way that the language being used to write the code doesn't translate well.
I would say writing pseudo code is a particular skill, best left to those who are good at it - They may or may not be coders, or good coders at that. I've found that when writing code, I tended to go straight from the big picture into code, and trying to think about how to get there ended up muddying the waters.
My guess is that for a large project which is going to need long-term maintenance, it makes sense to have someone look at the overview and break it down into pseudo code before any coding is done, otherwise it's probably better to have the coders build up the higher-level documentation as the code is written.
Perhaps the way of thinking that makes most sense to me is that as a writer, you wouldn't write your table of contents first and then the book unless you have a very firm idea of what's going to be in the book. I'm sure most authors would block out their ideas, come up with their characters and motivations, and main plot event and let the story grow from there. A lot of people don't realise the creative input that's needed to write code - It's a bit more than just putting blocks together, no matter how many design patterns have been learned off by heart.
It probably makes sense to write pseudo code if you're not going to be doing the actual code yourself. Otherwise, there are a few traps you can fall into - You can get bogged down in putting more detail than necessary in the pseudo code because you're thinking of the actual code that's going to be written and you can also lock yourself into a particular way of thinking that blocks the process of writing the code, because the pseudo code described the functions in such a way that the language being used to write the code doesn't translate well.
I would say writing pseudo code is a particular skill, best left to those who are good at it - They may or may not be coders, or good coders at that. I've found that when writing code, I tended to go straight from the big picture into code, and trying to think about how to get there ended up muddying the waters.
My guess is that for a large project which is going to need long-term maintenance, it makes sense to have someone look at the overview and break it down into pseudo code before any coding is done, otherwise it's probably better to have the coders build up the higher-level documentation as the code is written.
Perhaps the way of thinking that makes most sense to me is that as a writer, you wouldn't write your table of contents first and then the book unless you have a very firm idea of what's going to be in the book. I'm sure most authors would block out their ideas, come up with their characters and motivations, and main plot event and let the story grow from there. A lot of people don't realise the creative input that's needed to write code - It's a bit more than just putting blocks together, no matter how many design patterns have been learned off by heart.
Sure you did a grand job there, Charlie!
Wouldn't be it be great to able to live your life without ever having any doubts about what you did? Some people obviously do.
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