Bald Villains

Why are the heroes in movies and fiction stories always provided with a nice full head of hair?

That was what I was wondering when I was shaving my head in front of the mirror. There are not an awful lot of bald heroes in modern (and ancient) fiction. Even if there is a bald hero, he always has a mischievous trait in his character. The bald guy is always an evil sorcerer, scary and unholy priest or some gnome-troll-guy used to break the hero in two. But I really like the image of the mad scientist best with his bald head. Just wondering: does Mojojojo’s glass dome over his head count as being bald? It seems that the ability to join Griffindor is inverse with the length of your hair (did you notice the length of Dumbledore’s hair).

I’ll try and list some of the villains that have shaven heads:

• Blofeld. Tried to make the demise of the world (and James Bond) happen. Played by one of the best known bald people in the world: Telly Savalas a.k.a. Kojak, who, incidentally I’ll also list in the good-guys section.
• Emperor Jagang, from the Sword of Truth series (Terry Goodkind). A very evil villain who is always described as muscular and with a clean shaven head.
• Voldemort. Bald because he likes to be a snake, but still he doesn’t have any hair on his head.
• Any Ferengi.
• Dr. Evil & MiniMe.
• Mojojojo
• Cypher (from the Matrix)

Good guys with bad past are:

• Vin Diesel. Always has a dark past somewhere or is just the villain-became-hero, because there was nothing else to do. That doesn’t really count.
• Bruce Willis, but he always has some dark streak in his past in any role. Or he has a hairpiece, which doesn’t count. Same goes for Sean Connery.
• Kojak.

Fullblown real hero:

• Professor Xavier. Well yes. Because Patrick Steward was voted sexiest man on TV in 1992 because of his role as Captain Picard in STNG.
• Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Duh, although his little involvement with the Borg also gave him some of the ‘bad past’.
• Yoda. Although he is not really bald and also not shaven…
• Morpheus. Although his methods leave things to be desired.

I’ll extend this list when I get more inspiration, but the general trend can be seen. Apart from one actor (Patrick S.) no one can come across as a bald guy with fullblown heroism.

So, if you want to play the bad guy, shave your head. If you don’t, get a hairpiece.

Blackberry Storm

I’ve had the (fortunate) experience of living my life with a Blackberry Storm. These are my experiences with it.

To start off with how this review should end: it’s the worst phone in the mobile phone universe. Ever. I mean it. I’ve used Nokia’s, Sony Ericssons, Blackberries, Samsungs, you name it, but this one is worst. Why?

1. The click-screen interface. The SurePress screen. While in general it might seem that the apparent lack of touch-feedback from other touch screens is a problem, in this case the solution is far from optimal. The screen moves away, which decreases the accuracy of the click itself.
2. The accuracy is quite bad for the SurePress screen, which seems to be a contradiction in terms.
3. It looses contact with the SIM card. Ehm. Yes, I’ve had to reset the phone (as in: remove the battery) about every three days. That breaks requirement number one for a mobile phone: being able to place or receive a call. It also breaks the second requirement for a smartphone: to have connectivity with the net.
4. The GPS works. When you’re not using it, that is. If you start google maps, it’s able to find your location once. After that, remove the battery for a good reset.
5. The SmartEntry/SmartKey (I can’t remember what the sales term was), is sort of a good idea to enter information (SMS, phonenumbers, etc) because it can more or less predict what you’re going to write. But when you don’t want to type what’s suggested, you’re going to have to get around that, and when you’re not really paying attention to what’s on the screen, but only to what you want to say, that can be very annoying.

These five points made me quite crazy. It made me give back the Storm and get something else.

End review: 3 out of 10.

DragThing

TheMacBundles has an offer for a few utilities which are quite nice. But the killerapp, parallels, I’ve already bought, so that’s sort of an un-offer for me. Also, the rest of the tools doesn’t quite appeal to me, mostly because the tools replace some other shareware of payware tool I’ve already got.

One thing made me curious though: DragThing. I’ve had it on my mac before, but I dismissed it rather swiftly the first time around. And I couldn’t think of any reason why I did that in the first place. So, this article contains my testingresults for the DragThing tool.

First off, DragThing is supposed to be a Dock replacement. Some people don’t like the dock, at all. Personally I’m rather indifferent. It’s nice to know which applications are running at any given time, and for that purpose it works. I use too many tools, like shells, mail, browser, textmate, etc. open in various configurations that I’m not using the dock for keeping the most-frequently used tools (other than mail (postbox at the moment, but that’s for another article) and safari. Which got upgraded today to a real 4.0, instead of 4beta. It didn’t crash, so that counts as good). I’m really not using the document stacks.

In DragThing, you can keep drawers for your apps, documents, folders, urls etc. All nicely together in a thing called a Dock. Of which you can run two incarnations (in the non-paid-for version): one for holding apps, docs, etc and one for the ProcessDock, which has a list of all running processes. The paid-for version also has a disk and window dock, which might come in handy when you have too many safari windows open. Personally I don’t expect much from that, because I use tabbed browsing, so I don’t have many windows open from one application.

You can associate hotkeys with certain things you want to have done, but, frankly, I’m all out of hotkeys right now. Probably the first thing I’m really needing is a two-key hotkey (like emacs with Control-x as prefix), but that’s a topic for another time.

All in all, I’m of the opinion that DragThing is not what I need to manage the stuff I do. It’s not particularly nice looking (a big, who cares topic, but on a mac, well, I do care), and the other needs aren’t that big to have them satisfied by purchasing DragThing.

Gems documentation

When trying metric_fu, gem told me quite gently, though persistently, that it did not know about metric_fu. Blimey. You’ve got to look around the Intarnetz, but then you can find the stuff you need to get more than one repository.

So, what’s the trick?

gem sources

lists the sources that are already available.

gem sources -a http://gems.github.com

adds that source to the other sources. Jay! That’s what we needed,

RSpec and Forensics

I’m currently reading the beta edition of the RSpec book by David Chelimsky et.al. Because a book like this can only be comprehended when actually using the content, I’ve decided to start documenting a new project I’m doing with it.

So far, it has been about Behavior Driven Design (BDD), which is an acronym I’ve head before, but I didn’t have the time to read more about it.

It feels a bit weird specifying stuff using mostly natural language, but on the other hand it’s naturally very cosy to do so. What’s really neat is that you start using the api you want to specify right up, instead of first formalizing a design for it. That way you known that all the methods in your api really belong there and actually work.

While I was busy to code up some small project I received the new linux journal, which had an article on metric_fu. It contains a lot of code that can measure the quality of your code. That is always good to do, because the more checks you perform on your code, the bigger the chance that you run into a bug waiting to happen. Of course, you also run into false positives faster, and most people stop using checks like these because they run into false positives too often.

But reading the article I was thinking to myself: why don’t we use BDD combined with something like metric_fu on hour one-off tools we create to solve a case? Most forensic practitioners I know are bound to run into the situation where all the available tooling is not adequate to perform a certain job. Things that come to mind are refiling images based on camera, but oh wait, based on resolution first, or extracting all email addresses from an image and compare them to some filter, These things should be rigorously tested before put in use, because a simple code snafu can dump all your stuff in the bin and will cost you valuable time to clean up again. There is in this case an obvious tradeoff between codingtime, solvingtime, clean-the-errors-time and the time you need in court to explain that you did everything in your power to not botch up the code. For that last part you would ideally show testing output that shows that your testcases have a 100% coverage and pass every test you thought was possible.

Installing FreeBSD 7.2

As a friday night expedition, I decided to install FreeBSD on one of the old PC in the proximity of my desk. An Amd Athlon 2400+, 1GB mem, a cdr-drive and two 50G PATA disks. Should work, shouldn’t it?

For some reason the installdisk from the full CD set did not boot. At all. Reason unknown, but the situation persisted. OpenBSD ran like a charm, but OpenBSD wasn’t the intended goal for reasons I will not go into, at this point. Using the OpenBSD bootloader to boot from the CD also wasn’t an option as even OpenBSD found something wrong with the install cd. I was getting tired of the sh*t, so I tried one last thing: use the boot-only disk to do a network install. Guess what: no problem. At all. So, that took care of that. FreeBSD was running on the old box, I could login.

I wanted X to work, because I might actually decide to use BSD from some development I’m doing right now. But, setting up X is rather awkward. For some reason FreeBSD doesn’t accept that I have a normal keyboard and a simple mouse. X insists that the machine has a sysmouse. Hmm. Because of this insistence I did not have a mouse or a keyboard. But Ctrl-Alt-Del seemed to work ok, go figure.

Finally, I found an answer: add the following to /etc/rc.conf:
hald_enable=“YES”
dbus_enable=“YES“

What happens is that FreeBSD’s default X configuration (or xorg’s default config) wants to autoconfigure all input devices, but the default FreeBSD config does not enable the features to actually enable the autoconfiguration stuff.

That took a while and cost me some gray hairs, but that now works. Next step: getting nfs4 to properly work. It sort of worked, but the idmapd did not arrive at the proper ids. Looking further on the net, it was revealed that nfs4 was kinda, well, pushing up the daisies. It was no more than an abandoned carcass. Sigh. No lovely kerberos + nfsv4, but plain old insecure nfsv3.

Package management is a bit harsh, when you compare it to other package managers out there. At least pkg_add has an -r option to get stuff remote and it actually resolves dependencies. But there is no real equivalent for ”apt-cache search foo“, which is a bit of a nuisance since I like to search the package repository before building myself (I’m lazy, and totally fed up with dependency problems)

But now everything works, and the system is very fast. Faster than it used to be running other stuff, at least, that’s how it feels to me.

hotdogsladies: remark

Seen on twitter.

Multitasking is like driving or cunnilingus; most people assume they’re great at it until they start asking around…

As always Merlin Mann has something to say that is obnoxious, but to the point as well. Yes, people are very bad at multitasking. I thought I did okay, but recently I find that hard to believe of myself. It’s not to bad to switch between tasks that combined only take less than the whole of your attention span. However, if you have a task where you need your whole brain, not just the left or right part, it starts to fall apart.

What can you do in this case?

• Well, I try to get away, if possible. That works like a charm when I do not need my computer. When I do, well, I’m (literally) stuck.
• Posting a note on the door telling everybody they can come in during ‘visiting hours’ does not work. At all. Unless you get very impolite, which is rather against my nature, I suppose. You can tell people to come back another time, but if you break that rule once for somebody, anybody feels they can break the rule as well. So, visiting hours, yes, if you can keep the discipline of telling everybody to, basically, come back during visiting hours or send email.

But, people walking in, even if you tell then to come back later, take your focus away from the task at hand, and you need time to get back in. That’s when I get sidetracked: “Ok, I’ve been interrupted anyway, I’ll check the email before I get back to the groove.” At that point in time, I’ve lost the flow and takes me even longer to get back in.

MacJournal test

I’ve been using Ecto for a long time now, but it still feels a bit clunky. The stuff I like are the way you can add pictures and make them scale, but for the rest… Nah. Not really.

The raving review on MacHeist suggests that you can do better with MacJournal, even though it might not be actually usable for blogging. We’ll find out, won’t we.

So far, setting up the account is quite easy, it found WordPress by itself.

That also works like a charm. Wow. I’m impressed.

What I’m, however, not very impressed with is my rate of blogging. It wasn’t spectacular in the first place, but it’s rather terrible.

Really, it became a wasteblog, like so many other blogs out there. And why would mine be any different. Well, maybe this is a “I’ve got to change my life sometime” event, where I really get things done (thanx David Allen).

Update:
So far I have been using MacJournal to actually keep a list of my ideas and early drafts of pieces I want to write. For that purpose it’s working like a charm so far. The only thing holding me back is that way in which it handles various fonts which is, to say it mildly, strange.

Serious flaw in CA certs.

Oh boy. People are still dumb enough to use MD5 for anything important? Well, it’s all over the net of course, so this is the reference to the original research. Wow.

Leadership, done properly

I think the CEO of Japan Airline (JAL) really gets it. He doesn’t save himself from the hardships he’s laying down on all the other personnel. And I always thought that Japan was the pinnacle of hard work but if all the managers were doing this as well I can imagine why you’d work hard, and still feel good about it.