Mark's Blog

Again students are demonstrating against the unjustified rise in tuition fees that will bar many people from middle and poorer backgrounds from being able to afford an education and have a life afterwards. The students organising the marches have again worked with the police and are now in the process of being “kettled”, a term for collective punishment and humiliation where people are crowded into small areas and denied access to food, water, toilets or any other basic amenities regardless of age or infirmity. Now at previous demonstrations a small minority have misbehaved and only joined in to cause trouble so instead of the police targeting those people they police have targeted everyone. This is the same lying violent police force that has gotten away with 2 murders, lying to the press, false arrest and false imprisonment to name but a few issues over the last five years.

I really don’t know how anyone can trust the police as an organisation anymore, in fact if I was in the place of the protesters I would in future limit what I tell the police to the bare minimum they have proven time and again to be violent(charging horses at kettled protestors last week and denying it publically, the murder of Ian Tomlinson) and untrustworthy(just look at the “kettling” already happening today when following the approved route). The commissioner of the metropolitan police at the time of the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes by officers of the metropolitan police who later lied at the inquest into the death of Jean, lied himself to the press repeatedly for the 24 hours after the death of Jean. We then have the disgusting tactics used by the police FIT teams who break and bend the law and intimidate political activists who have committed no crime and are not even suspected of breaking the law. To even consider protesting against a government policy such as the war in Iraq or against the construction of weapons of mass destruction in the country(aka nuclear weapons) runs the risk of being stopped under any pretext, being photographed and added to a database of “domestic extremist”

I just wanted to add some comments re my earlier post. I am not anti police they do a difficult job in sometimes very difficult circumstances. Dealing with the nastiest people around including violent and sex offenders. I believe that the vast majority of policemen are there to protect and to serve the public and do the job for the right reasons. However there are bad apples and the police are far too reticent to stand up to them. When senior commanders make huge mistakes like Commander Cresswell did when she ordered an innocent man to be shot there appears to be little or no accountability. For the public to trust the police they need to be honest they need to make sure the bad apples are drummed out. They need to apologise when they screw up. They need to be accountable for there actions see thug who murdered Ian Tomlinson and Commander Cresswell.

If they expect demonstrators to work with them they need to rethink the intimidatory and quite frankly disturbing tactics of the FIT teams. They also need to ensure that riot control is done in a more propionate way, I dont think anyone can claim that kettling thousands of people for the actions of less than a hundred idiots is in any way proportionate. As it stands the police as a group (not as individuals many of who are good people who care about protecting the community and the public) risk further alienating many in the country especially the young. Deal with people proportionately, fairly and honestly and admit your mistakes and ensure those bad apples that you have are punished and reprimanded properly and maybe you will start to earn the trust of many of the people out there who are currently distrustful of the police.

I have to admit I watch the coverage of the latest wikileaks incident with interest. I find it unbelievable that any one person could have gathered this much information from a secret network and then be able to copy if off and walk away with it from a secure location. This is a huge amount of data when you consider the Afghanistan files, the Iraq files and the state department cables.

Basic security measures do not seem to be in place or at least weren’t at the time of the theft. What possible valid reason could there be for an army private to have access to all this state department related data? It appears that the data he collected in many cases wasn’t in any way related to his duties. Where is the basic access control to the data? Where is the oversight from his superior? Surely it would make sense for his superior to be sent a report of everything this analyst was accessing? Why is there no security analysis flagging up how much information this low level individual was accessing? I would have expected some sort of automated log file analysis to flag this unusual usage. Now I know no technical detail of US secret network(I mean how could I being a Brit) but I suspect it will encrypt traffic and run on totally separate and private network, so why put all this level of technical measures when you don’t do the basics of ensuring that people have appropriate access to information.

Then the next point is where is the physical security? This is an army base and a room with access to a secret network, so even when you consider how insecure the access to data is, its just as bad that physical security failed. I can’t believe that the USB ports were left enabled on the terminal that was allegedly used to download the data. Furthermore I can’t believe there was access to a CD/DVD Burner that was so accessible. It then beggars belief that the person alleged to have downloaded the data was able to walk in and out of an area with access to a secret network with a USB and a writeable CD without being stopped.

I suspect before this is over there will be a lot of lessons learned and these measures will be addressed but that’s not exactly a process that can be completed overnight. Additionally I suspect governments and corporations world wide are now starting to think how exactly can we stop our private data being passed to wikileaks? I would be very surprised if there is not more legislation worldwide covering data theft and copyright, although I do hope that this balances the fact there are times when whistle-blowers are needed.

My main concern about these leaks is that it has endangered people around the globe who are named as having helped Americans world wide. Was there any need to publish the documents directly onto the internet why not just pass them to media organisations to extract the informative information without endangering the lives of others. I am really not convinced with the latest release of embassy communications, I don’t so far see any overwhelming public interest. At best there was some slight naughtiness to monitor and spy on UN officials and other foreign dignitaries but I bet that all countries do the same to some extent. The rest just seems to be little more than gossip. The earlier releases of Afghan and Iraq war files there was some disturbing evidence of war crimes and atrocities committed that I really hope are followed up on. War crimes can never be accepted or tolerated and if we expect others to treat us with respect we need to do the same in return.

I do have some other thoughts on wikileaks and its current direction but I will leave those for another post.

As you have no doubt noticed I have made a few changes and added a few plugins for wordpress. The biggest change I have made is to change commenting over to the DISQUS system. I did this as it allows people to make comments without creating an account and you can use whatever form of login is most convenient be it facebook, twitter or openID. Unfortunately this does mean the internal user database is no longer used for comments. You can still comment anonymously for the time being but if spam or abusive comments ever become a problem this will be blocked forcing people to login with an account from facebook, twitter, DISQUS or openID.

Whilst you use facebook or twitter to login and post your comment I have no access to any of your confidential facebook or twitter information. You do not enter your login details to this site but if you have any further questions please check the DISQUS website directly.

As some of you already know I am a huge Harry Potter fan having seen all but the first movie in the cinema, and having read all the books including queuing up in the middle of Crewe at midnight waiting to get a copy from Waterstones on release night. My love of Harry Potter started when I rented the first movie on DVD, I wasn’t expecting much I had pretty much only borrowed it because I didn’t feel right trashing a movie I hadn’t seen. What can I say I loved that movie it was the first movie I had since since a kid which felt magical. Since then I have enjoyed all of the other films in the cinema, although weirdly my favourite book was always book 4(Harry Potter and the goblet of fire) but I didn’t really think much of the movie. Conversely I was never fond of book5(Harry Potter and the order of the phoenix) but up to the recent move that was my favourite of the movies. If you have yet to read and/or see a Harry Potter book and/or film I can thoroughly recommend them.

Now onto the film itself I really liked it. The acting of all three was superb with some really great scenes from Emma Watson at the beginning. It is very true to the books possibly truer than the other films have been. Now ultimately I don’t want to give any spoilers to either those that have read the book as to where it differs from the book although generally this is only slightly, and neither do I wish to spoil it for those who are following the movies and not the books; so I am very carefully considering how I put this. My biggest gripe is there were a few scenes where Ron is not with Harry and Hermione part way through the film the reason for this I will let you watch the film and see, but the point being there was a hint of something there in these scenes that I did not like. They did not portray the feeling very well and actually hinted at something else in my opinion. Elsewhere solid performances from the other actors, Beatrix by Helena Botham Carter was as usual amazing. A snivelling Mr Malfoy was always going to be a winner and portrayed so well by Jason Isaacs. Tom Felton is developing into a great actor his scenes in this movie just like in the half blood prince were brilliantly done. I have always loved Mr and Mrs Weasley and Mark Williams and Julie Walters have always played them brilliantly. Julie Walters is exactly as in the book a warm loving mother type I dont think they could have found a more natural person for the role.

Now onto the trio itself I have always thought that Rupert Grint as Ron was an amazing match this continues into this film and along with Emma Watson as Hermione they have always been great. I didn’t really think much of Daniel Radcliffe’s acting in the first couple of Harry Potter films always seemed forced and unnatural although admittedly that might have been due to what the director wanted, however in the last few films he has been excellent and I am really looking forward to seeing how he does the final battle in part two, he has possibly the toughest role coming up and judging by his recent performances he is well up to the role.

For me I think this film deserves a 9/10 only spoiled by those few scenes I mentioned earlier otherwise it would have been a 10/10. All in all great fun and really can’t wait for the second part. If you are going to watch bear in mind this is a two and half hour film, and I really started to regret that large diet coke towards the end!

If you want to regularly post comments and want a custom picture of your own then this blog works with gravatar to give you a custom avatar that follows you from site to site. For it to work however you will need to ensure that you sign up with the same email address here as with gravatar. You can feel fairly safe signing up for an account as I would never use your email address inappropriately and would never pass it onto a third party for any reason.

Well I have been having issues with my laptop for a while as I have been unable to use the trackpad. I thought it was just a Linux funny with a rogue update or similar but it wasn’t a really bad problem as I have a trackball that I normally use. As you can imagine this is tedious if just wanting to browse in bed or about the house so thought tonight I am going to fix this problem once and for all. I searched via google tried various solutions I found all to no avail so thought I would just boot to windows for a change. Now I am guessing you can see where this is going…

So windows vista loads…eventually and I try to click on my portrait to login and as you have probably guessed the trackpad wasn’t working. So I finally had the proof that I wasn’t looking for that it wasn’t a Linux problem. My next assumption (you would think by this time I would stop assuming) was that the problem MUST be hardware related(by this time I have given up on windows and snuck of back to Linux) and I dutifully loaded up Google and searched for “Acer aspire 5720 trackpad doesnt work” . I cant remember which link it was in the list now but it was in the top 10 finally gave me the answer, Press Function and F7. It was as simple as that! No need modprobe this that and the other, read device entries or edit half a dozen text files!

It really was a case of Doh! And is a perfect example of why even those of use who consider ourselves to be knowledgeable users and administrators should sometimes look for the easy solution first! Be very careful with your assumptions people you could waste an awful lot of time!

Being a semi regular player of Lord Of The Rings Online(LOTRO) I was glad to see the new teaser trailer for the next Lord Of the Rings Online(LOTRO) expansion!  It should be fun however this is past the release date for SWTOR which I have been looking forward too for the past five years. I just hope SWTOR lives up to the hype as if it does I don’t expect to see much of Rise of Isengard. But I thought that when Age of Conan was released so we will see!

My main concern about this expansion being that turbine have in the past been very good at promising lots of new things and when it comes to release people are disappointed. Case in point the mines of Moria expansion and legendary weapon lottery and the raids that were first promised. The last expansion Siege of Mirkwood was again a big disappointment, Mirkwood consisted of a very small part of Mirkwood and was just dark and rather dreary. Still hopefully the influx of new people with the release of free to play will release additional money to fund the development of a much loved game.

Well I had vaguely heard of RockMelt in the media over the last few weeks and wasn’t really sure what to make of it. The fact that it was backed by one of the founders of netscape a company with a product that defined the early internet; before the anti competitive behavior of a certain multinational company killed it added extra weight to the product.

A work colleague and friend (@ronbrett) was able to hook me up with an invite so I decided to take a look. What initially struck me was how much like Google Chrome(or the opensource chromium which chrome is based on) it looked which for was a plus as I have been using Google chrome for a couple of years now and its by far my browser of choice. I know some get very uptight about the live search bar as yes unless you turn off the functionality the address bar also functions as a Google search bar and every letter is searched upon to help you either search Google or to auto-complete the URL you are trying to access. Now this of course means that Google have a record of every URL you have visited which can be used by them to amongst other things better target and tailor adds that Google deliver, now basically you have to make a choice does this amount of information worry you or not? Whilst it might be able to enable Google to create a fairly accurate picture of who you are, I always tend to decide well I am one of millions its not like anyone at Google is tracking me and if they are so what? This is something you have to decide for yourself, for me I love the functionality of the search in the URL box and the auto-completing of URLs for me. However I digress as the point of this is that RockMelt is actually based on the open source chromium project. This for me is a very big plus point as I like chromium/Chrome. I’m not sure how close they are to latest Chromium code and if it supports HTML5 and other newer standards that Chromium now supports I hope they are quickly porting over the good updates to improve RockMelt.

I have to admit I actually quite like RockMelt and I think its definitely something worth keeping an eye on if you are a user of social media such as Facebook and twitter. It also handles RSS feeds really well. As the screen shot shows the interface is a tabbed browser very much like Chromium, there are a few interface tweaks like moving the menu button up to the top left, chromium users will again find this menu very familiar and I actually find it to be a very usable place for the menu. The usual options from chromium are available including incognito browsing which of course people only use to do such innocent activities as buying gifts for others who might also have access to the computer.

What really makes RockMelt stand out is the extra bars to the left and right of the window, the left bar is basically your Facebook friends list where you can then use Facebook chat to talk to friends, or even see there recent Facebook activity stream. To the right is your feeds bar this includes your Facebook and twitter streams but any other RSS feeds from your favorite sites. I have to admit I really like this layout and its the first time I have seen RSS feeds in a browser in a position which feels natural and not just tacked on somehow. There are a few changes to the address bar too, the bookmark button has been moved to the left hand side of the address bar, and like the more recent versions of Chromium the initial http:// has been removed from the address bar. I feel this is a minor but very nice tweak to remove superfluous information that people really have no need to see, as with chromium if the page you are visiting is SSL secured it shows the https:// and either red or green depending on the site as per chromium. The final changes on the browser interface from chrome are a status button so that you can update your twitter or Facebook status, disappointingly however there appears to be no option to update your status on both services at the same time, a functionality I like in tweetdeck and gwibber. To the right of the address bar there is a share button to quickly share your currently displayed page on twitter or Facebook, and again disappointingly no option to update both services. There is also a seperate search box which seems pointless given that it appears the main address box functions as a search box too, I guess this might be useful if you have disabled the live search in the URL bar. Lastly there is currently an invite button to invite new people to try RockMelt I guess this will be removed or replaced in the release version.

All in all I really think its a nice idea and worthy of a trial. At the moment I am not planning on replacing chrome but I am very interested and at some future date this may very well replace Chrome as my browser of choice, although the question is will Google add similar or even better functionality to Chrome in the future.

I just wanted to finish off with a list of the things that I really would like to see addressed before I am likely to make this my browser of choice.

• Its good that RockMelt currently supports Windows and Mac, but I do most of my browsing on my laptop which is 99% of the time running Linux(Ubuntu 10.10 to be exact). The lack of Linux support is probably the biggest show stopper for me.
• One of the things I really like about Chrome is the bookmark, extension and theme sync with my Google account. Because of this every time I open Chrome on any machine on any operating system it always looks the same. I have the same extensions installed, the same bookmarks and themes for me this is killer functionality and I wouldn’t consider switching to a browser that lacks this.
• Import of bookmarks from Chrome really isn’t handled very well at present, given that its basically the same browser I find it lazy that my bookmarks are just copied into a new folder called imported from chrome, and my previous favorites on the bookmark bar are not placed back onto the bar. It should really be a very simple job to copy my settings from chrome over directly including extensions and bookmarks.
• Given that this is supposed to be your social media hub its lacking email which whilst a bit of a dinosaur is still used by many and is still a very useful form of communication.
• There appears to be no support for other social media facilities such as four-square, blogger or WordPress. Infact there is no inbuilt support for blogging at all I find this to be a major omission. I hope they not only add more social media facilities including blogging but also put in a framework so that new social networks can add plugins and extensions that give parity with Facebook and twitter.
• My final bug bear in this first release is the lack of instant messaging with other protocols than Facebook chat, Facebook chat is based on jabber/xmpp but there is even no support for other services based on gabber/xmpp like google talk. Yahoo and MSN messenger are also not present and neither is the veteran irc which is still very much in use.
• As a suggestion I would also recommend that tools to browse and use forums based on software such as phpbb and vbulletin are added. Many people use forums but there seems to be a real lack of browser tools to warm people of new posts and replies.

I’m not sure if the product actually deserves all the hype that has so far been attached and writing this final section I realize it would be nice to be able to hide the side bars so I can properly concentrate on what I am doing.  The status changes of people in the friends bar is very distracting. This is certainly a very interesting project and I hope it gives others in the browser market some ideas so to what people want in the future.

Finally I now have four invites send me a message on Facebook if you want to try it out for yourself, as unfortunately this product is very tied to Facebook and the only way to give out invites is via Facebook.

I fully support the peaceful protests of the students in London. Its a shame that some are ruining it by violently clashing with the police and damaging property. I think most right minded people will agree the proposed fee rises are horrendous and a HUGE betrayal of what the liberal democrats pledged.

It makes the liberal democrat challenge of that arse Phil Woolas ring hollow. He lied to get elected, they lied to get elected so why isnt Nick (the dick) Clegg getting his arse kicked out onto the street?

They cost a fortune, are uncomfortable, unreliable and take forever to get anywhere. Hmm watch this space post on public transport coming soon!!!