Keys Corner

Tough liberalism

By John, on September 20th, 2004

The British Liberal Democrat party is proposing to send teenage joyriders to go and race cars or learn car maintenance, as well as fining them �40. The proposal is called “tough liberalism” by the party spokesman.

Um – is that supposed to be a deterrent or an incentive to break the law?

Not dishwasher-proof

By John, on September 19th, 2004

Glass muesli bowl

If you see glass muesli bowls like these – they were sold as Villeroy & Boch, but we can’t find them on their web site and they have no identifying marks – and intend to wash them in a dishwasher, then don’t buy them. We have had three bowls crack, like the one above, in as many weeks. We haven’t dropped or mistreated the bowls in any way.

They come in various colors – the commonest is the white / red combination shown here, but they also come in yellow with black rim and with lime green and blue bodies (I can’t remember what color rims).

How good is your spelling?

By John, on September 16th, 2004

Ruth and I both tried this spelling test in the Guardian. I confess, we both got 13 out of 23. Any of our friends or readers who can beat that – without cheating?

Single processor Apple G5 sleeps again

By John, on September 14th, 2004

Apple have issued a patch to the G5 uniprocessor firmware, which I have applied. My G5 now sleeps again without the fans running, which is a big improvement.

It’s not alright

By John, on September 13th, 2004

Now, why am I not surprised? And this is the government that is preaching democracy to the rest of the world…

Evidence of prisoner abuse and possible war crimes at Guant�namo Bay reached the highest levels of the Bush administration as early as autumn 2002, but Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, chose to do nothing about it, according to a new investigation published exclusively in the Guardian today…

… President George Bush signed off on the establishment of a secret unit that was given advance approval to kill or capture and interrogate “high-value” suspects – considered by many to be in defiance of international law – an officially “unacknowledged” programme that was eventually transferred wholesale from Guant�namo to the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Hersh, who broke the story of the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam war, makes his revelations in a new book, Chain of Command, which leaves senior figures in the Bush administration far more seriously implicated in the torture scandal than had been previously apparent.

A CIA analyst visited Guant�namo in summer 2002 and returned “convinced that we were committing war crimes” and that “more than half the people there didn’t belong there. He found people lying in their own faeces,” a CIA source told Hersh…

The above report is based on information from Seymour Hersh, the journalist who broke the story in 1969 of the cover-up of the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam war.

It’s all right

By John, on September 12th, 2004

This leaflet is designed to inform you about what to do in the case of a terrorist attack.
For God’s sake stay calm.
It’s all right.
Firstly, there is no chance of terrorists using nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
Let’s take each of these in turn…

(via Nick Barlow)

Stopping the OS X startup chime

By John, on September 12th, 2004

At the moment, my Apple G5 is suffering from the OS X 10.3.5 update – it refuses to go to sleep. Which means that I am rebooting once a day, if not more often. The loud system chime on startup had been driving me round the bend – I have been looking for a way to turn if off. In the last day or two I have found several ways to kill the chime:

on an ad-hoc basis, you can mute the sound output before shutting down – the sound remains muted when you boot next time
use TinkerTool System (shareware, but you can run it 4 times for evaluation before having to licence it). Licence fee is a reasonable $7.
you can also use StartupSound.prefPane (freeware), which adds a preference in the system preferences pane to allow the sound level to be controlled.

Because the startup chime is effectively part of the startup self-diagnostics, I feel happiest remembering to mute before I shut down, rather than messing with the software solutions.

Traffic jams – on the tube

By John, on September 12th, 2004

A couple of months ago I mentioned the real time traffic monitoring / forecasting site for Nordrhein-Westphalen, which has good forecasts of delays and jams for up to an hour ahead of time.

There are quite a lot of real time traffic services on the web. Did you know, that you can also get a real time view of the disruptions on the London Underground? (Although why Transport for London feels it is necessary to show the date last updated in American format is a mystery to me.)

NeoOffice/J 1.1 Alpha 1 available

By John, on September 9th, 2004

Goody, goody: my favourite Office software implementation for the Mac has been upgraded to use the latest OpenOffice.org release. So far it’s an alpha release, but nonetheless, first reports are positive. No major issues so far, just keep an eye on the patches as they become available (at a pretty amazing rate) in the forum in the previous link – currently Patrick has issued five patch files in some 10 days. Issues are getting fixed almost as soon as they are being reported.

A story of a florist, death and 292 credit card numbers

By John, on September 8th, 2004

Have you ever searched on the internet for your own credit card number? (Better – search for only for the first or last 8 digits or so. You don’t want to put your whole card number into Google’s search cache).

David Heath did – he is an internet security consultant. What he came up with was a list of 292 orders, complete with credit card numbers, expiry dates, email addresses and other identifying information published on a web site owned by a person or company which he hasn’t been able to identify and as the hosting company for the site is also unknown, the web site is still online. But where the numbers come from was easy to identify – a florist’s web site in another country.

The story of what happened after he contacted them is reported here, and makes interesting reading – also for non-techie users of the web.

Update (2004-09-10):
David Heath, the author of the original article that we linked to, let us know today that the web site with the credit card numbers has now been taken down.