Stealing Light

Just finished reading Stealing Light by Gary Gibson.
Really good, solid science fiction. Gibson writes really well and keeps a good pace. I'm really hoping there's a sequel, or even a series out of this, because there was a lot of great detail revealed about the book's Universe, setting the scene for some excellent space opera.
There's super powerful aliens, then even more super powerful aliens, restricted FTL tech, banned head implants, lots of violence and large scale destruction. The books starts early with the the wholesale destruction of a resort-living asteroid full of nefarious and banned activities and the super rich living the good life. The main character escapes with the use of a skin implant that expands to surround her body from vacuum as she and everything on the asteroid are blown into space, and then picked up by her low level AI controlled ship.
The final scenes made this look like a bit of a picnic on a sunny day with a few cold beers.
Great stuff Gibson. I was prepared for a weak ending such as we saw in his novel Against Gravity, but he really nailed this one.

wmain parameters corrupted?

Well, that was frustrating. I was trying to get command line parameters passed into the unicode wmain function defined as

int wmain( int argc, wchar_t *argv[]);

But I was getting corrupt looking bizarre values placed into argc and argv.
My problem was that in Visual Studio, I set the linker option for the entry point as wmain, but it has to be

wmainCRTStartup

Don't make the same mistake.

Fanboys

I just watched Fanboys.
This film is saturated with geek reference to the point of overdose. Awesome. At no point was I bored, as the characters kept on hitting nerdy lines, one after the next, in joyous, unashamed pride. It made my cry. Fantastic. I was also drinking.
Not just Star Wars, although obviously mostly Star Wars, and obscure, geek head-nodding-obscure Star Wars at that, but also, Indiana Jones, Star Trek, various comics, D&D, Willow and others. The various scenes that mirror or recreate scenes from Star Wars are prolific and a lot of fun.
Appearances from William Shatner and Carrie Fisher were satisfying, surprising and very well done. The Carrie Fisher gear was subtle and appreciated.
Star Wars fans and true geeks must see this film. It's purile and stupid, but that doesn't mean it isn't awesome.

Home networking

I've learned a lot about home networking in the last few days, specifically using some of the cool Windows domain features. I've had an Ubuntu server for a while, which I use for DHCP, DNS and some shared directories, but in the last week I've configured Samba on it so that it acts as a primary windows domain controller. That means that the user accounts on the Ubuntu server can be logged onto on any machine that joins the domain on the network. Since Cian is starting to really get up to speed on his computer use, and Neise isn't far behind, this is going to be really useful. The kids could be using either the server, my machine, or one of the various laptops, and being able to log into the same account everywhere is really useful.
There is an option is make your domain account users roaming profiles, but that means syncing data back and forth from the server to client every time you log on and log off, which for large document sets, is prohibitive, so I've just used normal profiles.
I've also leveraged the domain accounts to really sort out my backup strategy at home. When you log on to a domain account, the server sets you up some extra shared drives, including your home account on the server. The really really nice thing is that you can retarget your Documents folder (among others) to point to a directory on the server, instead of the local drive. Vista has really clever tech for keeping these in sync, so it isn't even noticable as remote. The Ubuntu server has two physical disks, so all the users' home directories are on one, and it backs these up to the other one, so a single disk failure isn't going to let you lose any documents.
I've also just purchased a 1.5Tb drive connected by eSata on my main desktop to backup all the public media, videos, photos, music, installers, VM data and other public data not associated with user accounts.
Now for off-site backup. Hmmm. Can I post you a DVD or 20?

Facebook and Twitter

Twitter and Facebook are different and should be used separately and for different purposes. I bring this up, because it is pretty clear that quite a few people are treating Facebook like Twitter, and I find it mildly annoying. Only mildly annoying, because there is an easy way of dealing with it.

First of all though, it is easy to see why people confuse the two. They are quite similar. You use both to inform people of your status, and things that you are doing, or things that are on your mind. They are both in a sense a bit of an ego trip and a popularity contest. They can both contribute to your need to feel wanted and accepted.

But they are very different. Twitter restricts you to 140 character posts. Small tweets. Links. "I'm having coffee.", "This shop sux.", "check this out - ". You can put a lot more interesting detail in there, of course, but it is still fundamentally limited. More limiting, is the level of interactivity. Yes, you can cross reference tweets, but it isn't very convenient, and doesn't really facilitate conversation.
I have used Twitter for a while, and, like 60% of people that try it get bored of it within a few weeks. The top 10% of Twitter users produce 90% of the tweets. Whereas on Facebook and other similar sites, it's much closer to 10% producing 30%. Twitter is more like a news feed. You subscribe to producers you want to hear from.

Facebook is a much richer, engrossing, social experience. People can post quite a bit of detail, images, videos, links, but much more importantly, the threaded conversations under each status post are what really makes Facebook excellent. It's engaging, social and lets face it, a lot of fun. Checking the notifications to see which threads have been updated keeps you immediately up to date with all your conversations.

So, if you are posting small, inane, irrelevant posts about your coffee, or making the bed in Facebook, you are completely missing the point. That is what Twitter is for. And you'll get followers who want to hear everything you dribble out. Use Facebook to post interesting things that may start conversations. Facebook is more like being in a room of friends, start a discussion, but don't update people with what you are doing every ten minutes. It's boring, and people will simply hide your status updates.

Predictions for new Facebook features:
- multiple threaded conversations under a single status update.
- personal stats like, %friends hiding your status, and %friends commented on your status in the last month
- better email style conversation support, and longer term look for Google Wave integration.

Then, there's always blogs for people who really want to get a bunch of stuff off their chests. Like this trollop :_)

Spam rates up

Spam rates are way up.
Spam took a big hit, and was cut tremendously in November, but now, the spammers are back with a vengeance! Have a look at the recovery stats. That is massive growth and it's now worse than it was.
I've personally seen this with my optusnet account spam rates going from 40 over a running 7 days, to 136 as of today.

Here's a sample of my recent spam. Nice.


I use the Spamato plugin for Thunderbird. It's working pretty well.

[update 13/6 - 166 spam in the last 7 days]
[update 16/6 - 184 spam in the last 7 days]
[update 20/6 - 123 spam in the last 7 days - seems to be abating!]
[update 24/6 - 54 spam in the last 7 days - thank the gods.]

Windows 7 due October

Windows 7 is due October 22, in time for both my birthday, and more importantly, before my MSDN subscriber account expires! Hopefully this includes 64 bit. I'm sure it wouldn't be far behind.

V. Remade.

Remember V from the 80's? I remember loving this. It's being remade, to hit US airwaves later this year. Can't wait. It also has Morena Baccarin (Inara) from Firefly.

Google Wave

Google Wave looks really cool. It feels like it could be an important leap for communication in general. I recommend you watch some of the video on the link above.
The email part of it seems incredibly powerful, being able to split up your mail content into separate comment trees, effectively forming a tree of discussion points. I know, especially from technical work discussion email, this will be incredibly useful. Everyone currently has a bunch of techniques for doing this now, from inserting comments, using tab indenting and colouring to form such a tree, but it always seems to fall flat and becomes very un-wieldy and difficult to navigate and understand. And coming to such a thread late is nearly impossible. Google Wave will have a "playback" facility so that latecomers can see the the tree of discussion unfold as it did originally. Awesome.
It also has a very powerful instant messaging feature where in this same structure, you can immediately see responses, and indeed see the actual characters appear as typed if desired.
Also importantly, it will be open source, leaving open the door for plugins and custom behaviour, as well as others being able to host their own servers.
The main problem I foresee for Google here is one of scale. It's going to need fast network responsiveness for the IM side of things. Perhaps people being able to run their own servers can help with this, but that sounds like it may be more for corporates and independent user bases.
Waiting with interest for the beta!

[update - other positive reactions here, and here]

Divergence

Just finished reading Divergence by Tony Ballantyne.
Another very good SF novel from Ballantyne. I thought the earlier novel Capacity, was also very good, but this didn't quite live up to it.
The disturbing concept of Capacity was fleshed out nicely, essentially that of an AI dictator, although a very nice one at that. I thought the novel played out a couple of ideological extreme cases and I don't think either are particularly compelling. The other extreme case is that of software for dealing completely fair transactions and towards the end starts to feel very socialist, and next to the AI dictator makes a very strong contrast. The resulting good vs evil trope wasn't clear for most of the novel, which I liked, but I wasn't convinced at all by the ending. The "Fair Exchange" entity just didn't seem believable, and the explanations and reasoning were more obtuse than a lot of magic you find in SF.
Still, I really like the Dark Seeds, and Dark Plants concept in this novel - now that is really cool.