I love DigsBy but there are three annoying behaviors that could be solved with.... just a few more options :)

1) In popup mode and an IM from person I didn't have a conversation going with comes in, it pops up and takes focus and whatever I was typing starts streaming into the popped up IM window..

I've not found a way to stop it from taking focus - even when turning off "Popup"

The number of times I have almost posted code or a part of an email I am typing to Twitter is quite astounding. I'm removing the Google Talk and MSN accounts and going back to native. I'm still using Digsby to monitor Twitter, Facebook and half a dozen email accounts.  I've been using Twitter via Google Talk and its amazing how much faster the messages come through via Google Talk I'm hoping that's just down to polling speed and not Twitter API issues :)

2) The flashing of the application toolbar icon.

I want to be able to tell it to not flash on every message source. I don't want to know that I have gotten 10 messages from Twitter or ThumbWhere. I want to know if a coworker messages me.

3) I run it at home and at work - and I don't want the same behavior in both environments. These ones should be machine specific as they are specific to the hardware.

It may not work for a pot or a kettle, but thanks to some operating systems giving the topmost focused window process a higher priority, it does work for computers.

This will only really work If the process is graphically intensive and is doing an awful lot of computation eg.

It can be worthwhile just clicking on that window to make it focused and watching time pass by. Hint. Open a web page and do some practical research, just keep bringing that process window back to the top and clicking on it if it goes away because you have clicked on something in the web page.

So next time someone says "A watched kettle never boils", you have the counter argument.

Possibly the best comic form summary of the CDO MBS scandal. (Sub-prime loans crisis.)

http://www.suburbanhousehunters.com/about/mortgage-crisis/

Of note.

1. SPV's is the general term for the more specific term of SIVs (Structured Investment Vehicles).  Expect to hear more about these in the future.
2. They don't mention that some of the ratings agencies and the financial institutions had shared ownership which could be counted as a conflict of interest.  IMHO If nothing is done legislatively to regulate ratings agencies then this can always happen again. They obviously have a large duty of care.

LOL-* (Pronounced "LOL STAR")  is a simple and compact markup language for creating image macros on your mobile phone via MMS.

An implementation of this language has been included as part of the http://rss.thumbwhere.com MMS to RSS gateway.

When you submit an MMS message from a mobile phone you typically send one media element with a subject. A server capable of rendering LOL-* is able to extract the LOL-* markup and render one or more captions or annotations onto the encapsulated media.

Caption Your MMS Submissions

Any text you put at the start of the subject in square brackets.

[Like This]

will be turned into a caption.

The remainder of the subject will be left as is, so if you send

[Fear Me Human]Why is my kitty growling?

It will caption the image with "Fear Me Human" and the subject will be "Why is my kitty growling?"

Why is my kitty growling?

A Caption can be positioned in three rows on your photo, [Top/Middle/Bottom]. The / character is used to switch to the next row.

A more complicated example is

[I/love/these things]Tribbles taste like chicken.

which will caption the image on three lines "I" will be at the top, "Love" will be in the middle and "These Things" will be at the bottom. The Subject of the message will be "Tribbles taste like chicken!"

Tribbles taste like chicken.

You can of course leave the first two rows blank if you want your caption at the bottom as in this next example,

[//I Is Raptor U Fool!!]Why does my Kitty Have Glowing Eyes?

...which will caption the image at the bottom with "I Is Raptor You Fool!". The Subject of the message will be "Why does my Kitty Have Glowing Eyes?"

Why does my Kitty Have Glowing Eyes?

Putting a < or > in your caption will align the text to the left or the right so...

[<Oh hai, can I Ha..//>WTF!!]

...will put a caption at the top, left justified and at the bottom right justified.

All captions are automatically capitalised, they just seem to look better that way.

If characters are already capitalised, they will remain capitalised. Note the WTF!! in the previous example was not converted to Wtf!!

Here is another example.

[//O RLY?]

You don't have to end your caption instruction with a ] if you are not going put some text after it, such that ...

[nom nom nom

...will still work as a top caption even though the caption command is missing its final ]

As part of an MMS message standard you are also allowed to send one or more large blocks of text, which ThumbWhere treats as the message body.

If you send a video, the caption will be rendered over the top of the thumbnail and the video will remain unaltered.

If you run out of room in the Subject, keep the Subject blank and use the message body. If the Subject is blank, the Body will be treated as the subject and image commands such as caption and rotation will come from the body.

Image Rotation. Not all phones have sensors to detect if you are taking an image on its side, so you may need to rotate the image from your phone for it to make sense.

Luckily you can do this as part of LOL-*

Rotate Your MMS Submissions

You can add special commands to the start of the subject to rotate your photos. This is useful if your phone's camera functions don't automatically rotate an image before sending it via MMS

< Will rotate the photo left (anti-clockwise)

> Will rotate the photo right (clockwise)

So if you sent in the following subject

>I Love My Kitty!

Your picture will be rotated to the right and given the subject of "I Love My Kitty."

You can rotate your image before applying a caption such that if you sent in the following subject

>[Distinctly Told//Not To Mow During The Day]Australia - Its Hot

Your picture will be rotated to the right and given the subject of "Australia - Its Hot", a top caption of "Distinctly Told" and a bottom caption of "Not To Mow During The Day"

Australia - Its Hot

LOL-* is being constantly extended. I will post updates.

If you think these instruction can be made better - please send me an email.

"A new generic method for exploiting a common problem in software code that was previously thought to be prohibitively difficult to attack is generating a wave of concern and surprise in the security community."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7358792.stm

This is really just another buffer overflow attack. If he is taking advantage of bugs in the VM then it's just an old fashioned exploit.

Because the 'code' you execute in a Virtual Machine or Intereter does not directly access the low level runtime libraries, we assume that the programs we develop can not cause a buffer exploit. If there is an exploit then it lies in the VM itself. Its very easy in a low level language like C or C++ to allow a buffer exploit simply due to the semantics of some of the calls. You have to actively check for these issues and have some knowledge on how these exploits arise. When developing code that is executed via a VM, the onus for this checking for and blocking of this class of exploit is shifted to the application, which in this case is the VM itself.

We trust that a VM is checked and tested thoroughly and is free of these kind of bugs so that as developers we can not worry (so much) that our code has some kind of exploit.

If anything this paper simply reminds us that these VMs are just another application and if they have holes, these can be exploited.

Finally blogging an observation I made last year.

Its very simple.

History is repeating itself.

In the US, "Freed Men" where given the soft and non explicit right to vote by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, although it was 100 years before laws were passed to make it illegal to prevent people from voting based on their race.

Women voted nationwide for the first time in the presidential election of 1920.

There was a battle between the Suffragettes and the "Freed Men" for the public high ground, one of the arguments being along the lines that the American public would not let both groups get the vote at the same time. One group would have to go first.

The fight was dirty and divisive.

"After the American Civil War, both Stanton and Anthony broke with their abolitionist backgrounds and lobbied strongly against ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution granting African American men the right to vote.^"

"Eventually, Stanton's oppositional rhetoric took on racial overtones. Arguing on behalf of female suffrage, Stanton posited that women voters of "wealth, education, and refinement" were needed to offset the effect of former slaves and immigrants whose "pauperism, ignorance, and degradation" might negatively affect the American political system. She declared it to be "a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see 'Sambo' walk into the kingdom [of civil rights] first." While her frustration was palpable and perhaps understandable after her long fight for female suffrage, some scholars have argued that Stanton's emphasis on property ownership and education, opposition to black male suffrage, and desire to holdout for universal suffrage fragmented the civil rights movement by pitting African-American men against women and, together with Stanton's emphasis on "educated suffrage," in part established a basis for the literacy requirements that followed in the wake of the passage of the fifteenth amendment.^"

What we see on our TV's every night seems to mirror this ancient epic struggle.

And if history repeats itself - it will be Obama who gets to be the Democratic Candidate.

It also pains me that I seem to know more about the US political system than that of my own country.

Its pains me more that I seem to care more about the US elections but as I said in 2000. "The US elections effect the world to such an extent, they are too important to be left up to Americans". I think history has borne that one out so far.

Yet again, we are the bridesmaid and not the bride.

And the winner in our category of Best Interactive Channel was http://www.wedigtv.com/

So its congratulations to everyone involved - its an honor just to be nominated!

Next Year Gadget! Next Year!

Coming from Perth Western Australia and remembering the Annual Birdman Rally from the 1970's, I could not miss the the RedBull Flugtag.

Arrived at 11am. According to the announcements they were expecting 20,000 people but got 50,000. The crowd was stretched all around from Mrs Macquarie's Chair to the Opera House. The Point of action being in the Harbour about half way down Mrs Macquarie's Rd.

The second half was fine, but the first half was pure hell.

Yes this is going to be a whiny post.

Managed to find a spot, then some large Cruisers moved in blocking the view.

Found a new spot.

Then the Red-Bull boat parked in front of the ramp occluding the fun for the vast majority of the people that had not camped out from 6am.

If you were between the yellow lines, the Red Bull staff boat meant that you didn't get to see a thing.

Then the crowd started to get ugly.

In the end I performed the classic outflanking maneuver.

Found a spot where through a tube of foliage you could just make out the action. But then of course as soon as the action started everyone stood up and we found ourselves behind a family who liked to brag about their level of education by calling everyone in front of them a 'pack of c*^%s' .

We ventured on, hid behind a steam powered zeppelin and ended up deep in the heart of the staging area and by pure luck managed to score a partially obscured view of a large LCD screen...

Which spent a lot of time not working...

But worked enough that we didn't miss too much.

Although it went on and off just as people were about to smack into the water so many times that Kew wanted to crawl away into a paper bag.

If its on HTDV next year, I'm staying at home or at least taking a bottle of wine with me to dull the pain.

Its the end of Daylight Saving in NSW Australia this morning.

I managed to patch my phone the day before so that changed over fine.

A number of devices in my house however failed to change over correctly. I think their operating systems systems are no longer supported or the updates failed to come through automatically.

I would appreciate some help tracking down the OS patches or configuration changes for these ones.

This device broadcasts time to my lounge-room. It clearly failed to update itself.

This device broadcasts time to my kitchen. I suspect if the problem with the lounge-room clock is resolved it may provide some insight into the solution for this clock.

This crept into my room and jumped on me one hour earlier than it should have. This one is going to be a problem to solve I suspect, simply because its going to involve updating a large number of upstream devices that are outside of my direct control. The obvious ones that come to mind are the dog next door and the large ball of nuclear plasma that rises in the sky in the morning.

If anyone knows where I can download the timezone updates for any of these, I believe a large number of people in Australia will be very grateful.

The cool thing about being able to work at Massive is that you straddle the extreme technical end of making things scale, in the web 'C10k problem' sense, combined with the demands of the general public TV audience.

It combines both of my passions for the hard core Computer Science of making machines work at optimum capacity, providing developers with a simple and sensible API while also involving my eternal pathological psychological passion for the creation of an intuitive interface that combines the essential ingredients of a compelling first impression and the fugue that comes with immersion.

At Massive we are fortunate enough to get to combine web technology with the world of mass entertainment which puts us a little bit closer to Hollywood.

Or in this case Cannes.

Yes. We have been nominated for another Emmy, which makes that two Emmy nominations in a row.

http://www.iemmys.tv/awards_nominees.aspx

Check out the V8 Supercars Showreel if you want to get an feel for what the site is all about and what it delivers to viewers.

Anyone who knows me personally knows that the V8 project has been one of my focal projects for the last 3 years. Many a person has been denied my weekend company because I have been devoted to making such an awesome system and concept work. I've blogged about algorithmic success and the trepidation of designing a new version. Sometimes its all for Science!

The BigPond V8 broadband site combines live streaming, PVR time-shifting and the synchronisation of disparate data sources to bring together a coherent behind the scenes in the car narrative to the end consumer. I have loved working on this project so very much and I'm really chuffed to get this recognition.

Of course this was a team effort, with many other people involved in the project at Massive working in Design, Flash and Project management. Without many others at Massive and some of the brilliant people at BigPond and Chief Entertainment this project would not have been possible.

Check out the Massive Showreel as well if you want to get a feel for the kind of projects we work on at Massive.

Adobe is planning to release a security update for Flash Player 9 in April 2008 to strengthen the security of Adobe Flash Player.

This security update will make the optional socket policy file changes introduced in Flash Player 9,0,115,0 mandatory.

• A socket policy file will always be required for all socket connections
• A policy file will be required to send headers across domains.
• The allowScriptAccess default will always be "sameDomain"
• javascript:" URLs will be prohibited in networking APIs, except getURL(), navigateToURL(), and HTML-enabled text fields

This is probably a good thing, but I am expecting a lot innocent flash applications to get stuck in the crossfire if their developers are not prepared  or are not aware that their application will be nobbled by this update.

If you just try and install it normally from the Microsoft Live website, the installer Bork's and tells you that its not for Server 2003.

Its just that the installer does not work under the 2003, not Messenger itself.

The solution is to.

1. Hunt down version 8.0.XXX.
2. Install it.
3. Let it upgrade itself.
4. Joy!

I installed Windows Live Messenger 8.0.0787 and it worked fine on Server 2003 R2

If you set up a TeamCity server, don't tell it to check out your project into a path that is root of a drive.

Don't Try This At Home Drive

You would think that checking out ModuleX into "Checkout Directory" C:\ would result in

C:\ModuleX\

That's how CVS and SVN clients normally operate and you would expect.

But it looks like TeamCity takes the root of the module as the path itself OR it decides that the checkout directory needs to be emptied for some reason, possibly at config time to prevent any issues with dross left behind from previous builds?

So now I have established that TeamCity by default seems to empty the "Checkout Directory"

Which in this case is C:\

I managed to fry two machines before working out that TeamCity has this highly dangerous gotcha.

The first time I thought this was a Windows Update that went rogue.

In the second machine I tried this on E:\ where TeamCity was also installed. 

Now I can't uninstall TeamCity at all.

That's two machines to rebuild.

Out Poor System Adminstrator (He made me type that) :)

I would not be upset if I thought I had done something stupid, like pressed the button that said "Delete Everything And Your Little Dog As Well".

The default settings telegraph nothing of the impending right hook to your hard drive.

Mostly Harmless

My recommendation would be that the Config page warn that the directory will be emptied and maybe even give an obvious shrill warning if that's the root of a drive.

Maybe C:\ should be right out?

Telling you where files would be created (and destroyed) would go part of the way to deciphering what you are going to end up with. At the moment its a black box of string concatenation via hidden logic with hidden results.

Now that I have the model of what is going on in my head I won't make that mistake again.

Its just a pity that I had to learn it.

Matter by Ian M. Banks

May contain spoilers.

Thank goodness because its been 8 years since the last novel featuring The Culture and I was beginning to give up. Mind you I consider "The Dwellers" from The Algebraist to be the "The Affronters" from Excession which could put it in the same Universe, although probably Pre-Culture - a stretch I know, but their description and behavior seem identical and ...

...yes I like the Culture books that much and you can start slowly scrolling quietly backwards now.. :)

The book delivers on some good Culture ship names ("ROU: You'll Clean That Up Before You Leave"), a possibly homicidal Drone disguised as a dildo and some "Special Circumstances" action. For my liking there is not enough Knife-Missile play, but is there ever?

The final showdown takes 95% of the book to set up, and is set in a medieval shell-world using the plot device of "the boy who would be king usurped by his regent". Per weight the book is more of a medieval political thriller with a guest appearance by the Culture.

Despite that, the 5% at the end is full of some some hard and fast anti-matter lobbing, field flicking and plain old nuking from orbit till they glow in the dark, cause as we all know its the only way to be sure :)

Everyone who dies does so suddenly.

I liked it.

PS. Read past the liberal Appendix or you will have no idea what happened at the end.

From Andy...

My first "post" of the year - work has been keeping me very busy.

Looks like there is a lot happening in the world of Wii homebrew :)

http://www.virtualhosting.com/blog/2008/how-to-homebrew-wii-games-73-tips-tutorials-and-resources/

Pebble bed reactors will be safe and available in 20 years. We will be left with the moral question of who disposes of the waste, the country that used the fuel or the country that mined and sold it, and of course how do you stand guard over it for hundreds of thousands of years. I favour dropping it into the sun, mind you if we had the energy to do that we would not need to build more reactors :)

There is of course one non technical reason that will stump the pro-nuclear lobbyists for a few generations to come.

When someone mentions "Nuclear Power Station" the first thing that pops into my head is.

Homer J. Simpson

I foresee in twenty years time a rewriting of history, a publicity campaign at which the core will be the redemption of Homer as Nuclear Plant Safety Officer to defuse this little gem of bad publicity. 

Got a report that by blog has stopped working in Firefox. "Bad Element in position 1,1"

Tested it myself and all I got was Blank page.

I decided - now was the time to upgrade to the latest version of dasBlog.

Alas when I went to the dasBlog site I got the following message.

I think I will wait for the bugfix :)

Elizabeth Sladen is to me, what Felicity Kendal is to Rick, The People's Poet

When I was a lad watching Dr Who, Elizabeth Sladen (Who played Sarah Jane Smith) was certainly one of the sexiest things on TV.

After watching the 2007 pilot for The Sarah Jane Adventures, I can confirm she is still as cute as a button.

Elizabeth Sladen holding back the hordes of 30-something Dr Who fan-boys

I remember 15 years ago talking about the logical progression of gaming hardware and predicting that consumer demand would end up putting superior performance in the games consoles, and then they would then be used for "evil".

The future is weirder than we can imagine.

Hot on the heels of the more esoteric hijacking of a gazillion parallel 4x3 matrix operations in video cards to crack passwords.. we have...

"Security researcher Nick Breese used a PS3 to crack supposedly strong eight-character passwords in hours.

...

In a presentation given at the Kiwicon security conference in mid-November, Mr Breese said a powerful Intel chip could crank through 10-15 million cycles per second.

The architecture of the Cell processor meant it could speed through 1.4 billion cycles per second."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7118997.stm

My next prediction is that every Iranian child will get a PS3 for of all things, Christmas, only to have them  mysteriously taken away on New Years Day and installed in a giant underground bunker where they will be set to work simulating nuclear criticality. That, or the worlds largest Virtual Reality porn server farm.

Probably both.

There is an unwritten social contract between we the punters and social networking sites that make money by data-mining our activities and targeting ads at us.

That contract is essentially that we will let them have our personal data in return for cool services.

So far this has gone rather smoothely for both parties.

Google with its “You can make money without doing evil.” seems to be the poster-child for this relationship.

At first people were weary, even paranoid about putting personal information online, but this has relaxed as we dipped our toes into services and found that nothing really bad happened.

Bad things did happen, but it happened to other people using other services.

Trust has grown and people have moved into these sites in droves.

As long as the services didn’t cross some invisible line and offend or scare us personally it was all pretty good.

Maybe the worst that could happen is that the site would secretly stab you in the back and sell your email address to a mailing list, fine – my spam filter just works a little harder.

Now Facebook’s Beacon which tells your Friends what you have purchased online, seems to have crossed that line – the social network equivalent of “What happens in Las Vegas, stays in Las Vegas” no longer seem to apply.

Its not like Facebook are stabbing you in the back privately, they are doing it in a room full of people and broadcasting it on a loud hailer.

It seems that people are noticing.

Facebook is targeting people who are active on the net, who trust the net to make online purchases.

If you imagine what the heuristics of Beacon are to maximize ad audience, those targeted probably have a larger than average number of Friends they can complain to, so I suspect the maths is against Facebook on this particular feature.

Now a Facebook group has been created to fight it.

Hoisted by own petard I think.

"Gracenote Music Map" - Flash application that displays visually information garnered from requests to the GraceNote online database of CDs.

http://www.gracenote.com/map/

"Study Finds That P2P Users Not Less Likely To Buy CDs" - A newly study commissioned by Industry Canada, which includes some of the most extensive surveying to date of the Canadian population on music purchasing habits, finds what many have long suspected (though CRIA has denied) -  there is a positive correlation between peer-to-peer downloading and CD purchasing.

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2347/125/

I have a money box that I put my spare change into. When it fills up, which normally takes a year or three, I buy myself a toy, normally a console of some kind.

Its that time again.  Its full. Despite shaking it up regularly to make best use of space, It can hardly fit another coin. I can hardly even lift it. 

On my day off on Monday I will break the puppy open, count my cash, torture a bank teller and go buy something with my son.

I've opted for the Wii because I have 6 year old.

If it was just for me I would get getting a PS3.

Being asymmetrical like the PS2, its cell processor based architecture is still brain drillingly complicated to program, but apparently not as hard to develop as the PS2. 

Much like what happened for the PS2, each new generation of games is always going to bring a surprise as developers manage to get progressively more tricks out of the hardware. We saw it happen for the PS, PS2.

The other clincher for getting a PS3 would be that I have had all the previous incarnations and I like Katamari Damacy.

And of course - Little Big World

But I am getting a Wii - because I have a 6 year old.

Beyond Wii sports and Zelda there seems to be a lack of what are considered "good" games for the Wii.

Its been out for a while now - so where are the great games? I can see a lot of games under development so it looks like it has lots of promise.

I guess time will tell if its going to be a bad purchasing decision.

There was a bad cable when we moved the servers around. All is good now.

Thanks to the people who pointed this out, unfortunately I was was so busy I didn't get to attend to this for a week.

Now the bad news. Everything is going down again this weekend due to a major change to the power in the building - the good news is that this is the last of the major infrastructure changes and things should then settle back down again.

After that should have some really cool stuff to start demoing.

Just very very very busy...

There should be a word for a conversation that is made online when both parties are Googling what the other is saying. It kind of enters a hyperspace of profound references - at times you are digging deep into a topic; researching because... you can... you have Google at your fingertips and you have the inclination, at other moments you are jousting with obscure references - laying clues to see if they can keep up.

I shall name you "Googpartee"

Should be an Olympic sport.

The blog and javascript server was down for a few days. Should all be good now.

"One of the Keating! musicians lived in in a warehouse in Sydney's Cleveland Street known as Lanfranchi's - so called because the laneway behind it was where, in March 1981, Roger Rogerson shot Warren Lanfranchi in that memorable scene from Blue Murder - another very Sydney story.

Lanfranchi's was a great labyrinth of rooms that had been performance venues, recording studios, installation spaces, a cinema and living quarters for several generations of Australian musicians. On June 25 the scores of young musos living, working and developing in Lanfranchi's were finally evicted.

Four weeks ago Lanfranchi's was one major strand of our city's cultural DNA. Cut off. This is a city where pubs, the traditional live music venues, are pulling the plug more and more to make room for the pokies spreading like a blight across our city."

http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/we-need-a-place-to-breed-our-cultural-dna/2007/07/27/1185339252792.html

As indicated in a previous post, we're homing in on the launch of Silverlight 1.0, and today marks another milestone with the launch of the first release candidate. Since the beta we released at MIX, we've fixed approximately 2000 bugs and work items and we're now feature complete with the final JavaScript-based API. This version of the runtime is vastly more stable than the beta release: our stress test runs show improvements of two or three orders of magnitude in many cases, and the product demonstrates the polish one might expect from a near-final release.

http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2007/07/27/silverlight-1-0-rc1-is-here.aspx

I'm hoping this fixes some of the video bugs I found.