WillWybrow.com

Wearing things is such a bastard. Everybody’s so happy to have the temperature inside buildings sky-high, and seemingly more so when it’s the winter. I can’t keep dealing with this. To go outside and get to places I’ll put on a jacket and be warm but inside places I’ll have to take it off and be encumbered by it to not be too hot. What’s the answer?

As far as I’m concerned, the solution was worked out long ago back when we were schoolkids and used to tie our school sweaters around our waists by the arms when it was too warm. And if it was cold enough to warrant a coat, there were nice secure coat-pegs you could leave it on during the day. I guess what I want really is for trying jumpers around your waist by their arms to not look so ridiculous and also for university to have (possibly named) coat pegs inside lecture rooms.

It’s hassle at gigs as well. Nobody wants to be bundled up in clothes in the middle of a room full of hundreds of dancing bodies. But the walk back to the train station at the end is always an icy choke-hold that can’t be avoided (unless you bring a coat and put it in the cloakroom at venues which a) aren’t always there, b) aren’t always free and c) require you to queue up for ages at the end with all the other chumps who risked taking advantage of the facilities).

Marty McFly’s jacket in the future was able to automatically adjust size. That’s a pretty shitty feature really, but what I’d like is some variation where clothes can adjust how well they insulate you. That would be just fine by me. But until someone works it out, I guess I’ll just resign to be hampered by lugging a jacket around inside or cold because I didn’t bring one out with me.

Saw this last night. I have a few thoughts on it that aren’t really related to how much I enjoyed the film. Here goes:

Woody’s arm was better

At the end of Toy Story 2, Woody’s arm was all bulbous and poorly repaired. This was a pretty big plot element because his breakage is what sets off the whole story about the broken penguin Wheezy and is how Woody is found accidentally by Al. Thus the resolution of this at the end of the film ties off the whole adventure nicely. But in Toy Story 3, Woody’s back to normal.

Bo Peep is gone

Woody’s love interest is gone! If, like me, you didn’t think much of Bo, this is probably a good thing. She wasn’t good for him anyway. Who wants to date a woman who’s already got sheep? Woody should find someone younger and have some sheep of his own, right? I personally always shipped Jessie and Woody because I like him more than Buzz but we can’t have everything, right?

If there were a Toy Story 4…

…then it’d be worth it just to have Timothy Dalton and Kristen Schaal playing the new toys. And Whoopi Goldberg as that cool-looking octopus was good, and Richard Kind (that hypochondriac, Harvey, from Scrubs) as the bookworm was a nice touch but I don’t think the new characters really had enough to say. The film could have done with being thirty to sixty minutes longer possibly. I reckon it’s a shame they wasted Kelsey Grammer as the villain in Toy Story 2 because he’d have made a good Lotso. It’s good that they didn’t play out the older-and-revered-father-figure-turns-out-to-be-evil thing for very long before the “reveal” that Lotso was the villain because that was basically cut and pasted from Toy Story 2.

Spanish Buzz was hilarious

but very unrealistic. There’s no way an action figure would contain that much processing power. I’m guessing his developing personality would have to be stored in some kind of flash memory and that his ‘demo mode’ would live in some EEPROM on the circuit board inside along with his default settings for Spanish Mode. Maybe Buzz is running a quad-core i7 processor inside his back? Actually, yes, I’m sure that’s it. And if you unscrew his chest there are 2 USB ports and a DVI out and he’s got two SLi GeForce GTX 480s in his legs and can run Crysis at 60FPS on full settings.

“lol Ken is gay”

Also pretty funny I thought. Though it would have been better had he actually turned out to be gay. Not only would it have been a positive message for kids but it’d probably have the religious right up in arms and “controversy” that sparks off those nutcases is always a good thing.

That’s probably enough for now. I did really enjoy the film (though I think I enjoyed Inception more) so thanks, Pixar, for not fucking up for three whole films. I am sure the Toy Story trilogy will enjoy its place amongst the Great Trilogies. That is until some years down the line someone says “why don’t we resurrect Toy Story?” and then they make Toy Story 4.0 where an evil iPad has taken over the world’s digital infrastructure and Shia LaBeouf has to team up with an aged-looking Woody who’s past his prime in order to take down the culprit by using explosions.

God sake, computers, what is wrong with you?

Running Fedora 12 as my main OS at the moment. It’s fine for some things but I honestly prefer Windows Seven to anything else and I long to go back to it.

But my stupid Windows installation is fucked. Some bits in the registry must seriously be corrupted beyond all hell. I don’t know where the Windows serial number information is stored in the registry but it cannot currently be a valid entry because selecting Computer » Properties displays some generic error message under serial information. And I can’t read or edit it using third party tools so I don’t know what’s gone wrong there. I tried reinstalling it at one point but I’ll lose all my settings if I do a from-scratch installation and it won’t allow me to do an in-place upgrade because my user data is on a different partition from my Windows installation (some monumentally stupid restrictions on Windows installation there that amounted to the most trouble I’ve ever had with a Windows upgrade when I switched from Vista to Seven).

What’s more is that my Windows BCD is also fucked. That can’t be read or written by BCDEdit.exe or EasyBCD for again some unknown (and maybe unknowable) reason. But my Windows Seven installation still boots when I ask it to. Could this be my GRUB bootloader interfering? Maybe, but I’m pretty sure EasyBCD should know what’s going on there. It doesn’t, and it doesn’t even load to the main interface to let me see what it thinks is going on. Great. But my Windows installation’s serial information is still messed up so Windows thinks it’s not genuine and therefore powers off after whatever set amount of time that is. A few hours maybe? It’s not long, at any rate.

I really want to reinstall Windows Seven but I can’t decide how to go about doing it. If I format everything it means a long, drawn-out reinstallation of all my Windows software (Office, browser, games, μTorrent etc.) and reconfiguring it to have all my custom shell folders and appearances and everything else that I’ve had to do to make Windows less of a piece of shit to use. But I can’t see any other way around it and I’m very wary of putting in installation CDs because they tend to silently change boot settings that will make it impossible or difficult to boot back into Fedora which is currently my most usable OS.

If I get some time this weekend in between all the other real-life jobs I’ve got to get done in preparation for my trip the following weekend, I might image my whole boot drive to my spare HD and then go about trying to patch up my broken installations. It’d be useful to be able to dual-boot Fedora and Seven until someone gets their act together to make one OS that can do all the good things of both but failing that I’d much rather have my Seven installation fully-functional than have it broken and dormant on my hard drive while I use Linux, forever lurking in the back of my mind and brought to the forefront every time I am frustrated by how pathetic Gnome is for anyone who actually uses a PC (Nautilus seems to have this great feature that means sometimes windows open with no address bar and navigating the filesystem spawns new windows every time I want to change directory – as if anyone’s ever found that Windows 95-esque interface helpful at all, ever) which is basically every time I want to open a file.

This isn’t really a request for advice although I suspect many of you will have “opinions” on the matter and suggestions from “learn2Linux” to “go and buy a Mac lol” which I of course would read and give full consideration to. And if anyone tells me to just scrap the box and all of technology and go live in a cave somewhere, well, I might take their advice because at the moment avoiding all the hassle forever and becoming a hermit is a very tempting option.

I figure I spend a bunch of time Googling syntax or functions in code if I can’t remember them. And sometimes I’ll even lift out a whole section of example code from a search result and try and change as little of it as possible to maximise the time I spend not doing work. These little shortcuts make life bearable.

So I’ve decided to invent a new programming language. Each line is a search query you’d type in to bring up a reference page and an example of what you’re trying to do. Then, at compile time, the compiler does the searches, lifts out the example code from the top hit and then builds the binary from the collection of sample code.

It would probably be a fruitless and very tiresome (if not never-ending) effort to list ALL the things that could do with being shaken up around here. So for the moment I am going to settle for this very brief but presently high-profile list of some shit that needs changing.

1. Decriminalisation of Drugs

   I am sure I don’t need to link you to any of the number of articles online about the decriminalisation of drugs in Portugal. Google it if you want to. This, from the TIME.com article about it:

   “Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success,” says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research [into its success]. “It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does.”

   In light of the news about the mephedrone deaths that have just happened, the government will inevitably end up adding it to the list of banned substances, like they did with synthetic cannabinoids at the end of last year. That they still have to keep banning the new ways people find to get themselves high suggests that people are going to try it regardless. The only real way we can increase the safety of those who do choose to try it is by regulating the quality of the drugs sold (so that they’re not cut with rat poison) and to fully understand through scientific experimentation the effects so any short- and long-term effects can be made clear through education. Legalising the old-school drugs that everyone knows about will cause users to gravitate towards them. They’ve been more extensively studied than these new ‘legal highs’, so that bodes better for education and treatment of ill-effects and addiction.

2. Libel Law Reform

   In case you haven’t been keeping abreast of one of the most (if not the most) high profile libel lawsuits of late, Simon Singh was recently accused of libel by the British Chiropractic Association. He wrote that any chiropractic practitioner who claimed to be able to cure things like colic in babies was lying, with plenty of demonstrable evidence showing it to be ineffective. As well as in being counter-intuitive to assume that spinal manipulation can solve all your problems. While with any reasonable set of laws, the chiropractors would have no hope of achieving anything from suing someone with stacks of scientific evidence to back up their claims, actually suing someone for libel is no longer about who wins or loses. Because of the incredibly dramatic cost of being sued for libel, often the accused has no choice but to back down and not fight if the accuser is financially well-endowed. With a relatively small cost to a corporation, it can silence any individual or small organisation it wants to with the threat of expensive legal action, and thus hide any of its wrongdoings. The Libel Reform campaign seeks to raise awareness with the ultimate goal of getting this changed. And while it might not benefit the majority of people directly, it is a freedom of speech/censorship matter that needs to be addressed and corrected lest it remain an affront to liberty forever.

3. The Digital Economy Bill

   Sometimes I think Lord Mandelson doesn’t see things the way the rest of us do. His perspective on certain subjects is so skewed, I think maybe he might benefit from some psychiatric evaluation.

   Even if he passes the lunatic test, though, this doesn’t make his Digital Economy Bill any less insane. Mandelson wants to be given unlimited power to amend copyright legislation. He wants rights holders, via the courts, to be able to disconnect people suspected of filesharing without requiring any proof. He is willing to deny internet access to whole households to punish (and that’s punish, not rehabilitate or force repayment from) copyright infringers. There has also been a clause added that says ISPs would be obligated to block access to certain websites that facilitate copyright infringement (which could even include YouTube and possibly Google), but again this seems to only take place at Mandelson’s command.

   I’m also interested in the overlooked modifications to Nominet. It’s a kind of nationalisation of the service for registering domain names in the UK. Might not mean much to most people, but putting more of the internet in the hands of this government unnecessarily (Nominet is functioning fine as an independent body at the moment and can’t possibly benefit from being under government control) is an unmistakably bad thing. Some of us have registered domain names and don’t want ownership of them revoked at the whim of Lord Mandelson.

That’ll be all for now, I think. I will do some more when I get back to my chat logs and assemble all the ideas I came up with when Chris put me on the spot yesterday evening with all the policies I’d have if I formed a political party.

You may have heard of two technology-related stories in the news recently.

The first is that Gordon Brown is going to spend £300 million on his Home Access scheme to bring free laptops and one year’s worth of free broadband subscription to poorer families across the country.

The second is that Lord Mandelson is pushing for tough counter-piracy measures for internet filesharers, including disconnecting entire households from the internet.

What Labour seem to be doing is giving out internet access with one hand while taking it away with the other. Education Secretary Ed Balls has declared that there are educational, economic and social benefits to being on the internet that cannot be ignored. Indeed, the internet is so vital that part of the criteria you need to fill to qualify for the Home Access scheme is that you are a child on free school meals. That means these laptops and free internet access come with a similar priority level as providing food for underprivileged children. If that doesn’t sound like an opinion leaning towards classing internet access as a human right, I don’t know what does.

But Mandy obviously is unconvinced, since it is still his intention to cut off entire households from the internet because of the action of one of the house’s residents – or even the action of a neighbour – even when there’s every likelihood that a disconnection would result in more ‘innocent’ people (non-filesharers) than ‘guilty’ people (filesharers) being denied all those social and educational benefits.

A disconnection from the internet today is more crippling than ever. Apart from the real inconvenience it would cause to people no longer being able to look things up or check their online banking at their leisure, it would also stand in the way of anyone who occasionally works from home (seemingly more and more people nowadays), and it’s tantamount to capital punishment for anyone with lots of social networking contacts they can’t see very often in person.

And so far I haven’t even addressed the real problem. Buying DVDs and music is fine for those able to afford it and who are also ignorant enough to presume that £15 is a fair price for a DVD or CD (it isn’t). But those more technologically inclined will find ways around being tracked if they want to continue filesharing. Downloading will never, ever stop. But handing out free laptops and free broadband to poor children is going to give them the previously unseen option of downloading music or watching TV shows online. What will the Government do when its own broadband users commit copyright infringement? Disconnect them as fast as possible?

The internet is either a vital resource or it isn’t, Labour. Perhaps Brown should make sure everyone in his cabinet agrees which before they start making contradictory comments to the media.

Or just lynch Mandelson and let the crows have his eyes, whichever.

I would say that the best training you can have prior to switching to Windows Vista is a good knowledge of Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Windows XP.

2000 Advanced Server got me to grips with the Microsoft Management Console; a thing useless in itself but that comes with “snap-ins” — sets of settings and how they can be altered — which correspond, I am starting to think, with raw entries in the Windows Registry.

There is a directory full of these snap-ins in a start menu folder called “Administrative Tools” that can be turned on in your start menu properties. They come turned on by default in 2000 Advanced Server, and they can be turned on in 2000, XP and Vista. Some can also be accessed in other ways (right-clicking on “My Computer” and clicking “Manage” will bring up the “Computer Management” snap-in, for example).

Times when I’ve looked up how to make Vista Ultimate Edition less of a wimp and put some of that blunt Windows 2000 charm back into it — things like htting CtrlAltDel to log on, typing your username in instead of selecting it from a list (one thing you should never have to worry about, ladies and gentlemen, is what “display picture” the Adminstrator account has) and activating the built-in Administrator account — I’ve come across tutorials on the web that give you a guide on how to change the registry or run a shell command or (worst case) “download this .reg file and run it.” These tutorials might get the job done, but they’re stupid. That’s why I never used them. All the settings that you’ll need to change are found in the Administrative Tools snap-ins.

Note, however, that I’m not against hacking the registry when it’s necessary. I love finding and messing with the dirty, gritty Windows system settings to get something extraordinary done. But things like enabling user accounts or changing the logon screen just shouldn’t require so much work, especially when mentioning the Windows Registry to a user who doesn’t know what it’s all about is just paving the way to irreversible system instability.

Moving on, Windows Vista is not as bad as everyone makes out. The problems with it come when you install it on a laptop (because no laptop will ever be able to run Windows Vista well) or a computer that just isn’t ready for it. I believe that Microsoft should keep supporting and updating XP for those who are using low-end machines.

But install it on a system that is actually capable of running it and it becomes quite natural to use. Not a huge deal has changed since XP, really. The start menu is upside-down and doesn’t pop out properly, and the taskbars are a bit more shiny. Oh, and Windows Explorer now looks like IE8. That’s virtually it.

One thing I am having a difficult time making my mind up over is the new file structure for “My Documents.” Instead of one directory for all user files, there are now lots. Desktop, Downloads, Documents, Music and Pictures, to name a few.

Only some of these appear in the start menu by default. “Downloads” isn’t one of them. To add it, you have to add it as a normal shortcut, and it is placed somewhere else on the menu. That’s quite annoying. Adding your own directories isn’t particularly advantageous either. There’s no reason you should create a directory there instead of anywhere else on your hard drive, which makes us less inclined to use Microsoft’s directory structure. This is a customisation option that I’d like to see — the ability to specify your own often-used locations.

At least in XP, you had one root directory, and your pictures and downloads and music went in subdirectories from there. Now you’ve got many; it doesn’t make sense to have to click two times to get to some of them, and three times to get to others. It should be all or none, Microsoft.

Finally, I suppose I should mention something about the UAC. I like it. It’ll be good against stuff that tries to install itself to my registry without my consent, and it doesn’t get in the way nearly as much as it seems to do on other people’s (slower) Vista machines.

I’ve got the Windows 7 beta around here somewhere, I think I’ll try that one next.

The next step in human evolution, guys, is polydactlyism.

Make sure you find this kid and breed with him so we can have more fingers in the future.

As promised, here is a list of specs for you all to go “wow that looks cool” or “ah man, why’d you get that shitty thing?”

• Processor: AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition (Quad core, 3.0GHz)
• RAM: 8GB Dual-channel DDR2
• Graphics Card: ATi Radeon HD 4870 1024MB

That’s the essentials, I guess. I could give you the model of my motherboard or the capacity of my hard-drives but they’re much more boring.

Hope you all followed the excitement this morning/afternoon on Twitter — unless you were all too fucking distracted by the weather.

Tower Complete

This is the bomb site of my bedroom about three hours after the DHL man came and gave me three boxes. Blogging from the laptop right now as I’m still setting up software. Not even got to Office yet. Wow, Windows!