How to use a condom

I posted a link to this image on a local news site that is much more likely to post comments of the kind "Ya, we think the same as you!" on a story about the Commonwealth Games' drains being blocked by condoms. One of the comments suggested that perhaps the condoms weren't being used for sex. A reply to that comment mocked the obviously ridiculous idea that a condom could be used for anything other than sex.

They didn't publish my comment, but then they rarely do. Unless that is I post a comment that says "Ya, I agree with you!". I get bored with that kind of comment - I'm a disagreeable sort of person, if the truth be known.

Anyway, here's a beautiful photo from the BBC's Day In Pictures from 30th September 2010 demonstrating how to use a condom to bring beauty and joy into someone's life. If you've got your 'rainbow pony blinkers' on, click on the small image for a larger version and inspect the top of the balloon near the upper edge of the picture. See?

Facebook / Marijuana / Malaysia

It's time I dusted off this blog. I love commenting on forums and blogs. I've got a lot to say and the great thing about saying it online is nobody tries to shut me up. Except on Malaysian blogs and forums. OK, fair enough - this is a totalitarian state, but when the 'movement for change' is censoring me it does chafe a bit.

Facebook is very popular here. The government have ruined the print information industry by giving licenses only to those information sources which say nice things about them and horrid things about anybody they don't like. Probably a great idea in the short-term - if that's your cup of tea. It has been a disaster in the long term. Nobody reads anything any more because everybody knows it's either written by an idiot or (occasionally by someone who should know better) in praise of an idiot. Everybody just consumes opinion - and it shows. Please overcome your sensitivity to irony and continue reading my humble opinion.

Since the 'political tsunami' of 2008 - in which nobody actually got wet - the government has been fighting back in the information theatre. Everybody who consumes public money now has at least 5 Internet portals each. That's more portals than they have holes! The Prime Minister's facebook page is linked from his shiny 1Malaysia website, as are those facebook pages of many prominent Malaysian members of the mediacracy linked from their respective fundamental portals.

Are facebook pages called 'pages' or are they 'walls' or something? I don't know, I had a facebook profile once, but I closed it and asked AdBlock to never show me anything from facebook ever again. I had to disable AdBlock to look just now. It was as awful as I remember.

Anyway, in today's news a couple of the co-founders of facebook have been putting their Web2.0 windfall to work and are sponsoring the Drug Policy Alliance, a campaign organisation proposing the legalisation of marijuana in California. Far from marijuana being legal to do whatever marijuana consumers and traders wish to do with it in California, drug traficking in Malaysia is punished with the death penalty.

So that makes me wonder: how do Malaysians, who live under threat of capital punishment for involvement in the drug trade, feel about patronising an Internet property whose proceeds are being used to openly recommend the consumption of marijuana? Let's not beat about the bush (!) here: marijuana doesn't magically appear under your pillow when you go to bed wishing you'd had a better day. To consume it, you have to buy it, and to buy it there must be a trade in it. So doesn't it seem odd that a nation should attempt to 'reach out' [bleck] to its citizens using a medium that (however indirectly) supports something they think it's okay to kill people for?

This in a country where the government recently scolded one of the opposition states for giving a "We love you" payment to residents of the state. You see, some of the recipients were Muslims and since the money was public money, some of it had to come from taxes on gambling and alcohol. Those things are haram (forbidden), so the money is also a bit dirty. I don't know - I don't follow the reasoning, but it made perfect sense to the Deputy Prime Minister who is also a Muslim and collects a very fat salary from precisely the same source. Maybe you only have to give dirty money back if you're poor or something.

So anyway - if you're not allowed to accept money from a dirty source, are you allowed to associate with a medium that supports a drug trade that you kill people for participating in? I seek enlightenment. Over to you, Malaysians.

The ‘One’ theme again: 1Malaysia, Unifi, Monopoly

TM has announced its new ‘High Speed Broadband’ products, called Unifi, with the Prime Minister making the announcement. TM is Telekom Malaysia, the telecommunications monopoly in Malaysia. There is an alleged telecommunications regulator called the MCMC (Multimed… Commission, or something) but it doesn’t seem to actually do anything but help TM.

More bandwidth ought to be good news, but TM aren’t offering bandwidth, they’re offering an expensive new bundle which includes Video On Demand (VOD). In better regulated regimes, what TM is doing is against the law – it’s the same practice that resulted in Microsoft being forced to unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows in the EU. Internet access in the EU is fiercely competitive, which is why you can find 20Mbit/s (TM’s new ‘flagship’ package) connections available in the UK for RM35-RM80 per month. That’s in a country where the technicians’ (and customers’!) salaries and business overheads are many, many times that of TM’s!

We had a phone call from TM this morning, offering an upgrade from 512kbit/s to 1Mbit/s for an extra RM5 per month. Before moving to Malaysia, we lived in the UK and had ADSL for about 6 years prior to 2005. After the first two years (starting at 128kbit/s) , BT doubled the bandwidth every year or so FOR FREE. We were on 2Mbit/s when we left, for the equivalent of about RM40 per month, 5 years ago. And it never – ever – had a single problem or slow-down in that time. In the UK we lived in a hill-farming community in a little village of houses which were between 200 and 800 years old. In Malaysia we live in a modern development near a town. Before this year, it was a rare week that we didn’t have trouble (often complete breakdowns for days) with our TM Internet connection.

If you’re not in Malaysia, you might think this kind of thing is a joke. But if you’re in Malaysia and all you want is decent Internet access that works, at a fair price, so you can get more work done (and coincidentally contribute more tax to the government), it is desperately unfunny.

This is a re-post of my article at http://blog.lolyco.com/sean/2010/03/26/the-one-theme-again-1malaysia-unifi-monopoly/, because I want to get the little image to appear on bloggerunited, and this is quicker than figuring out what's wrong with the RSS on my WordPress blog.

Pos Malaysia Shipping Price World Map

The Pos Malaysia World Shipping Map is an example of what you can do with an API. Given a weight and a shipping method, you can draw a global map of relative shipping costs. Now that the Pos Malaysia data has been converted to use ISO3166-1 Country Codes, it’s trivial to take data from it and merge it with useful resources from elsewhere which also comply with international standards.

The map is a public domain SVG file from Wikipedia. The creators of the map specified ids for the countries using ISO3166 2-letter country codes. I generate CSS colour codes from the country code / relative price data obtained from the API, and build a coloured map on the server. The coloured map is about 2MB in size, so I convert it into a smaller PNG image and send the URL back to the browser.

Note that I’m not suggesting Pos should create fancy coloured maps. These maps arguably could be handy for checking completeness of shipping data coverage, or ‘eye-balling’ the global map to spot inconsistencies in charging. The world shipping map is just another example of what is possible for third parties IF Pos Malaysia exposed a usable API.

If you want to play with the world maps, be aware that spider.my is hosted on a tiny VPS (Virtual Private Server) in the USA – it only has 64MB of memory and 2GB of hard disk. It can be a little bit slow to convert the SVG graphics into an image. As long as I haven’t given up on getting Pos to adopt the API, you should be able to access the same features at pos.spider.my – that’s a bigger server sitting on my desk in Malaysia.

If the maps inspire you to try out an idea of your own, make sure you contact me first to encourage me to leave the API online! Better yet, find someone from Pos Malaysia to tell “Hey! Let that guy set up your API for you so we can do good stuff with your data!”.

You can send 10kg by Pos Parcel Surface very cheaply almost anywhere, except Bolivia and is that Uzbekistan?

Pos Parcel Surface doesn’t permit sending 15kg to nearly as many destinations:

And you’ll get eye strain spotting the countries to which you can (by Pos Parcel Surface) send 15kg, but you can’t send 20kg:

These are tiny images, but they’re created from SVG on the server, so enormous versions are available on request!

Lolyco.com offline. Again.

Lolyco.com is offline again. Our network provider, TM Net, tells us a piece of equipment has failed and it will be a few days before it is replaced. They do this fairly frequently, among other assorted problems, so this week we'll be moving to a major webhost. We started off as a 'cottage industry', and would be happy to continue serving lolyco.com from home, if TM could keep their network working.
We hope the move should be completed in the next few days, and our customers will be able to enjoy more reliable access to the shop. Apologies for any disappointment caused by being unable to visit the shop during this outage.

Ubuntu

A slip of the fingers in Slackware recently, and I entered a twilight zone of mis-matched libraries. All I wanted to do was to update a video-editing package, and 2 days later my wife asked me "why is it so hard?". I didn't have a good answer. I've been using Slackware for 7 years, and since most of what I do is editing and compiling code, it seemed Just Right. More recently, I've been drawing logos, editing movies and requiring a bit more integration at the desktop level. It seemed Just Right for that too, until I experienced the library issue.

Perhaps a knee-jerk reaction, but I thought I'd give one of the more glossy distros a try. I'd installed Kubuntu on my wife's PC some time ago, but the 'Skype issue' forced an install of a proprietary operating system. I don't use Skype, and I'm not very keen on the KDE desktop either, so I installed Ubuntu. I got a bit of a shock at the outset, when it failed to start X for the install GUI. I haven't a clue why. I use a 1280x800 laptop screen with a 1280x1024 screen next to it. Perhaps there was a way to get round it more sensibly, but I edited the xorg.conf to change the display driver from 'vesa' to 'vga'. The install GUI was a pain to navigate at 640x480, but the pain soon went away when the install completed.

There's a lot to do, to move from a well-used environment to a new one. It's like moving house. Nothing works at first, and everything you normally use is hidden away in boxes, and they don't quite fit right when you find them. Ubuntu makes life easy with its package management system. At first, I had to exercise extreme restraint to force myself to use only the GUI configuration tools and not to open a terminal and start bodging. It's going okay, it really is. Some click-to-install DVD creation software has meant my 22-month-old daughter has some new movies and cartoons to watch, without me breaking a sweat.

What I'm missing most from my old setup is ROX-Filer. Nautilus works great, at first use, but compared to ROX, there just seems to be a lot missing. And it's SLOOOOOOOWWW. It does have some sort of script extension facility though, so ROX's "Terminal here" facility is available to download for Nautilus via the Ubuntu package management facility. Just now though, I wanted to copy over one of those scripts that I used frequently in ROX (I don't like to use IDEs, instead I start a script for each source file I'm editing that waits for changes using inotify before compiling the file - it makes the text-editor's save button work like a 'compile' button). The first place I looked in the old ROX directory structure had a symbolic link to the original script. In ROX, you can right-click a symbolic link and 'follow' it to the original. There appears to be no such feature in Nautilus. I found nautilus-follow-symlink, but this has yet to be incorporated into the Ubuntu package management system. Compiling this little feature requires a few visits to the package management system to install some extra files, I'm up to nearly 60 files and over 15MB of download so far. It compiles after a few tries, some autoconf issues that it mysteriously gets over, I think. Finally, I restart nautilus and find a link to right click on. Nautilus hangs.

I thought about replacing nautilus with ROX-Filer, but it didn't look straightforward to me, and if I'm going to choose a linux distro based on someone else's guarantee that everything will Just Work, it seems to me that I should interfere with it as little as possible. I'm going to miss ROX. I'm going to check regularly to see if the follow link function turns up in nautilus.

Then a month flew past

And I started a gazillion new projects without finishing any of the others. I must try to think of what it was I did in all that time.

I've just been searching for help for a problem I'm having with IE7. I'm writing a web server to manage a community site that allows access to some local hardware, so I use several different browsers to make sure requests are handled correctly, pages display correctly etc.

It's all going fairly well. I've used a browser almost every time I've touched a computer since I fell in love with NCSA's Mosaic in my first year at uni in 1993. I rarely encounter really awful problems with browsers, they always seem to JustWork(TM). OK, maybe I've got loyal habits, I've followed the Mosaic, Navigator, Firefox path, and only now am I looking at other browsers to make sure I'm not sending goop to people with more adventurous (or commercial) tastes.

Having looked at what a browser sends to a web server, I can't believe all this stuff seems to work so well! I'm writing my web server in Java, just plain old SE, no bells or whistles, so I'm parsing all the requests with my own code. It's a nightmare in there! If you're in the business of writing popular web servers, then you have my respect.

Anyway, back to IE7. I see people having the same problem, but no really helpful replies. My web server uses a cookie to track a user's session. When I browse my site with IE7, I can follow links OK, but on one page, can't use the 'back' button. IE7 gives me one of its very clear, but ultimately very useless, error pages:

(i) Webpage has expired

I include no expiry data in the pages I'm serving (yet), and using the 'back' function in some of the other browsers I'm testing (Firefox, Gecko, Konqueror) works exactly as expected. The page it happens on is generated by a POST request from the previous page - a file upload. That page includes thumbnails with links to original documents. I press the back button on the page with the original document displayed on it, to get the error in IE7.

Perhaps IE is being overly pernickety about the POST request. In the HTTP docs from www.w3.org, the POST request is described as a method to change the content of the server, and should be replied to with a 200 'OK' response, if the new content can't be identified with an URI. The files I'm uploading certainly can be identified by URI again, so I should do what the RFC suggests and return a 201 response, with a new URI. I'll try that tomorrow, and see if that fixes the problem.

Silicon Labs F530 and C2 Flash Programming AN127

This should be the last word on this. The VDDMON change posted earlier is the one change that must be made to the code in AN127. The FPI initialisation sequence is possibly a red herring. I tried the sequence of 0x02, 0x01 from AN127, and it works just fine. Intrigued as to why two different sequences appear to work, I tried 0x02 on its own (doesn't work) and 0x01 (appears to work). The tests were separated by warm resets (RST line low), so there's possibly some chance the initialisation was surviving the reset, but now that this hurdle to progress has gone, I've lost all interest!