I recently bought a copy of Mobile Python, Scheible and Tuulos’ guide to Python for Nokia S60 devices. First up, I’d like to point out that Scheibe and Tuulos adhered strictly to the well-known titling convention, Programming Book: Really Long Subtitle You’ll Forget And Have To Fetch Your Copy To Cite It. No wonder they…
Read More Review: Mobile Python BookThis is interesting. Jim Bates, an expert witness for the defence in some of the Operation Ore cases we discussed, has been convicted of misrepresenting his qualifications. Specifically, the charges relate to whether or not he claimed to be an electronics engineer, despite not being one, and to his career in the Royal Air Force.…
Read More The PaybackAs a change from the austere scientism hanging around this blog after Arthur C. Clarke’s death, Michael O’Hare reminded me of another wonder of British postwar culture today. Among the religious doctrines that run me axle-deep in the mud whenever I try to follow them is literal resurrection to eternal life. I’m astonished to learn…
Read More I always hoped there’d be dogsI liked this comment from Chris “Chris” Williams regarding Arthur C. Clarke: What future? A better one than we’ve got: a worse on than we’d have had without him. Several million fanboys and girls grew up exposed to clear prose, opposition to nationalism, scepticism about organised religion, faith in technology, faith in humanity, and some…
Read More Appreciating ClarkeHa! Fixed. Despite the Mozilla Foundation telling you to install the Java Runtime like this: su rootpassword: yourrootpasswordherecd /usr/java/chmod x+a jre-6u5-linux-i585-rpm.bin/home/yourusername/Desktop/jre-6u5-i586-linux.rpm.bin It won’t work. But if you follow the rest of these instructions it should. Assuming you want Java in a directory called /usr/java/ and you downloaded the thing to desktop by default, that is.…
Read More Plugins for Firefox 2 on OpenSUSE – resolvedWhen Pakistan Telecom tried to kill the Internet in an effort to stop the public seeing evil things on YouTube the other week, there was instant media-reaction and a fairly swift fix by the organisations involved. Things are different when you’re a small Kenyan ISP, though; for about a day now, Africa Online (AS36915) has…
Read More On the African Internet, no-one can hear you screamThis is hilarious, and depressing: you may find tech-libertarians annoying, but just think yourself lucky we got Paul “Van der” Staines, and not this guy. Dmitri Golubov, for it is he, was nailed in 2005 for running a massive credit-card phishing operation (in that case he was probably behind some percentage of the spamwave I…
Read More Hands across the sea continentVia comp.risks, across the wire the electric message came: German students crack encryption on over 2bn RFID smartcards made by NXP Semiconductor. The cards in question are NXP’s MiFare Classic type, and are used for public transport….but also for access control in sensitive government installations, it turns out. Inevitably, NXP threw up its hands –…
Read More Can Haz RFID? Noes? I HAZ FN FAL!So they arrested Viktor Bout, in the same week the ID cards scheme saw its latest rightward slither and the government’s ragingly impossible road-pricing scheme bit the dust. And I cleared my to-do list on our report on new forms of voice and messaging. What next, it rains ponies? as PZ Myers said. Something like…
Read More What next, ponies?My ISP just did something naughty. BT, Virgin Media, and Carphone Warehouse have been caught in a scheme to sell details of all your Web activity to marketers (…and anyone else) without your knowledge or consent. And the full details are genuinely worrying. The Register has a major scoop, in that it’s got hold of…
Read More Who needs remote control?