maebmij’s blog

…or: Shop Smart, Shop S-Mart.

I started work a few weeks ago.

It’s been interesting. I’m working at the university, which I’m sure is of little surprise to anyone, knowing the gravitational effect it seems to have on honours graduates. The transition from free-time/no-income to income/no-free-time has been weird: I’m starting to feel a little bit robotic. At the same time, it’s a job where I learn something that I actually want to know every day, and get to work with Linux – so I can’t complain.

One interesting thing is that for whatever reason, I’m actually working pretty hard at this job most of the time – in contrast to my honours year where I really didn’t. I kinda miss the idle time spent nattering about the latest Apple hardware or trying valiantly to help people with weird Linux problems… I wonder if there’s a balance I can find between the ghastly (and probably unsustainable) “better be running” corporate attitude I’m starting to develop, and the “eh, I’ll start doing that next week” slack of honours.

I don’t want a pickle,
        I just wanna ride on my motorsickle.
And I don’t want to die,
        I just want to ride on my motorcy.
Cle.

– Arlo Guthrie

I don’t like timezones. I dislike them less than daylight savings time, but they’re still annoying.

Today’s problem: The official name of my timezone (when I’m not on daylight savings time) is EST, standing for Eastern Standard Time, meaning the eastern part of Australia. If I ask a Linux system what timezone I’m in, I get, correctly, “EST”. The problem with this is that ‘EST’ also refers to the USA’s Eastern Standard Time, so it’s ambiguous.

When the blogging software I use, blosxom, goes to attach a date to the RSS feed of my blog, it prints that date as my local date with “EST” tacked onto the end. All looks well so far. However, when an RSS reader reads this date, it reasonably interprets that the date is talking about the USA, and so interprets it as the wrong absolute time, some hours into the future.

I guess if I told blosxom manually what my timezone is – something like “EST-10EDT” (I have no idea) – it might work, but this annoyed me enough that I went and replaced it with PyBlosxom. This one works right, and gives me a happy RSS2.0 XML feed with efficient-looking UTC datestamps like “2005-10-20T04:54:38Z”. This pleases me. On the negative side, anyone syndicating this feed into an RSS reader will have a bunch of new-looking blog entries from me, since the dates of all my old entries have changed. Sorry! (Please let me know if there are any other problems.)

Also, the blog’s html look is seriously basic… but that will do for now. It matches the rest of my site now, at least .

Updated due to former complete lack of understanding of what was going on

Here’s an interesting thing that caused one of my co-workers accidentally to wipe my ssh key out of authorized_hosts on a server, but it doesn’t look like it should. I’ve reconstructed it with toy examples:

-jailshell-2.05b$ vi first
-jailshell-2.05b$ vi second
-jailshell-2.05b$ cat first second
firsttext
secondtext
-jailshell-2.05b$ cat first second >first
cat: first: input file is output file
-jailshell-2.05b$ cat first second >first.new
-jailshell-2.05b$ mv first.new first
-jailshell-2.05b$ ls
first  second
-jailshell-2.05b$ cat first
secondtext
secondtext

Any explanations? (Ah, I think I just figured out what happened. Pretty subtle!)

I stumbled across an old Bruce Schneier entry which made me smile: Ice Cream Locks. He’s making an interesting point: Bullet-proof security is nice, but if what you’re protecting is only marginally valuable then a defeatable system is still useful, and probably enough.

The Guardian covers some upsetness about unsafe sex in movies. Fair enough, but two of the claims seem to be false:

[Of the sex scenes in IMDB's top 200 movies, o]nly once in those sex scenes did a condom feature, and that was a reference to birth control

Well, just the first one I think of, what about #35, Fight Club? Condoms were depicted in relation to the sex scenes – plus Marla’s lovely line: “The condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip one on when you meet a stranger. You… dance all night… then you throw it away.”

American Pie has seven sex scenes, all involving new partners with no condoms or birth control measures.

What the? The boys were shown each taking a condom for the purpose of fulfilling their “have sex by Prom night” pact. And later, Michelle the band geek says “now, I have two rubbers. Wear them both…” to her partner.

I wonder if these researchers just isolated the sex scenes themselves and looked for condoms there, rather than the contextual implications from before or after. But then, movies don’t tend to be explicit enough that featuring actual condom use would be plausible without clumsy camera-avoidance angles…