New Zealand Post are at it again with their New Zealand Lifestyle Survey 2011 -- a prize-driven inducement to invade your privacy.

The survey comes in either a personally addressed envelope or it can be completed online. Both versions comprise six pages of detailed and highly personal questions. In addition to your name, address, phone number, mobile number and email address, they want to know about your;

• Interests
• Vehicles
• Home
• Finances
• Shopping habits
• Travel

and then a bit of "General Information" such as your;

• Age
• Sex
• Ethnicity
• Marital status
• Children (ages and sexes)
• Job
• What you spend your free time doing
• Annual income
• Sources of income
• and even what charities you support

I've complained about this before. Why? Because of clauses like this;


On their website, the company take pains to sooth privacy concerns;


But what about that data being supplied to companies and other organisations from New Zealand and overseas? It may only be names and addresses, but the granularity of the survey allows marketers to ask extremely detailed questions such as;

"Give me a list of all married couples in Ponsonby with a before tax income of at least $100,000, who own a late model Honda, have two or more cats, shop at Pak'n'Save and who are not satisfied with their electricity supplier."

Are you happy with anyone -- and in particular a private company -- having this much information about you for sale to whoever wants it?

So am I advocating binning or boycotting this survey? Not at all! Fill it in by all means, there's a remote chance you might even win a prize. Just remember, nowhere does it state you have to provide them with truthful answers. Imagine if half the respondents simply lie. Rather pollutes that "valuable" data pool, doesn't it?

Now, what model of Rolls Royce do I drive again ...?

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 8:05 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

I've long been a fan of The New Hacker's Dictionary, and indeed have a hard-copy sitting before me as I blog. ("Hacker", in this case, is used in its non-pejorative sense.)

The book is a mix of computer science, tech-speak, history, folklore and fun, and was originally compliled by Eric S. Raymond, (he of The Cathedral and the Bazaar fame), to "to help the general public to get a truer and more positive image of hackers than they seem to have".

Sound a bit ... well ... nerdish? Quite the contrary. Here's few examples;

magic smoke: n.
A substance trapped inside IC packages that enables them to function ... Its existence is demonstrated by what happens when a chip burns up — the magic smoke gets let out, so it doesn't work any more.

lots of MIPS but no I/O: adj.
Used to describe a person who is technically brilliant but can't seem to communicate with human beings effectively.

field circus: n.
[a derogatory pun on ‘field service’] The field service organization of any hardware manufacturer, but originally DEC. There is an entire genre of jokes about field circus engineers:

    Q: How can you recognize a field circus engineer with a flat tire?
    A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one is flat.

    Q: How can you recognize a field circus engineer who is out of gas?
    A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one is flat.

    Q: How can you tell it's your field circus engineer?
    A: The spare is flat, too.

404: n.
[from the HTTP error ”file not found on server„] Extended to humans to convey that the subject has no idea or no clue -- sapience not found. May be used reflexively; ”Uh, I'm 404ing„ means ”I'm drawing a blank.„

FISH queue: n.
[acronym, by analogy with FIFO (First In, First Out)] ‘First In, Still Here’. A joking way of pointing out that processing of a particular sequence of events or requests has stopped dead.

heisenbug: n.
A bug that disappears or alters its behavior when one attempts to probe or isolate it.

washing machine: n.
Old-style 14-inch hard disks in floor-standing cabinets. So called because of the size of the cabinet and the ‘top-loading’ access to the media packs — and, of course, they were always set on ‘spin cycle’.

walking drives: n.
An occasional failure mode of magnetic-disk drives back in the days when they were huge, clunky washing machines. Those old dinosau parts carried terrific angular momentum; the combination of a misaligned spindle or worn bearings and stick-slip interactions with the floor could cause them to ‘walk’ across a room, lurching alternate corners forward a couple of millimeters at a time. There is a legend about a drive that walked over to the only door to the computer room and jammed it shut; the staff had to cut a hole in the wall in order to get at it!

Walking could also be induced by certain patterns of drive access (a fast seek across the whole width of the disk, followed by a slow seek in the other direction). Some bands of old-time hackers figured out how to induce disk-accessing patterns that would do this to particular drive models and held disk-drive races.

wave a dead chicken: v.

To perform a ritual in the direction of crashed software or hardware that one believes to be futile but is nevertheless necessary so that others are satisfied that an appropriate degree of effort has been expended. ”I'll wave a dead chicken over the source code, but I really think we've run into an OS bug.„

like kicking dead whales down the beach: adj.

Describes a slow, difficult, and disgusting process. First popularized by a famous quote about the difficulty of getting work done under one of IBM's mainframe OSes. ”Well, you could write a C compiler in COBOL, but it would be like kicking dead whales down the beach.„

Microsloth Windows: n.

(Variants combine {Microshift, Macroshaft, Microsuck} with {Windoze, WinDOS}. Hackerism(s) for ‘Microsoft Windows’. A thirty-two bit extension and graphical shell to a sixteen-bit patch to an eight-bit operating system originally coded for a four-bit microprocessor which was written by a two-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition. 

There's plenty of serious stuff in it too. But fun and quirkiness are never far away. For example, at the end of an erudite entry on quantifiers (kilo-, mega-, giga-, etc.) comes this...

Morgan Burke has proposed, to general approval on Usenet, the following additional prefixes:

We observe that this would leave the prefixes zeppo-, gummo-, and chico- available for future expansion.

TNHD is also available online, where it's called The Jargon File. You can browse it, download the latest version, check out recent changes, and even see what's been deleted over the years. There's even a dict version available so you can add it to your desktop dictionary server. Just search for "dict-jargon" in your package manager.


(All examples are taken from The Jargon File, version 4.4.8)

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 2:28 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

Adobe appear to have found a major flaw in Adobe Flash Player that's prompted them to release an update outside their usual quarterly updated schedule, and on a Sunday to boot.

In a bulletin dated 5 June they report on a universal cross-site scripting vulnerability that "could be used to take actions on a user's behalf on any website or webmail provider, if the user visits a malicious website."

The affected versions are Adobe Flash Player 10.3.181.16 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris operating systems, and Adobe Flash Player 10.3.185.22 and earlier versions for Android. So update now!

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 7:52 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

SMART - or Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology - is built into practically every hard disk drive with the aim of detecting electrical and mechanical faults that could eventually cause the drive to fail. Adding the SMART Monitoring Tools ("smartmontools") package to your system can give you advance warning of impending problems.

Most distributions include SMART in the default installation. If it's not present, add "smartmontools" from your package manager, or download it from smartmontools.sourceforge.net.

The package consists of two utilities - smartd and smartctl. The first is a daemon that runs in the background, the second a control and monitoring tool.

Tests take two forms. A short test will check the drive's electrical, mechanical and read performance, and will typically complete within a minute. A long test may take considerably longer because it scans the entire surface of the disk. Here are the commands to use ...

sudo smartctl --test=short /dev/sda

sudo smartctl --test=long /dev/sda

... where /dev/sda is the device to scan. (You can list all drives on your system with sudo fdisk -l.)

View any error output with:

sudo smartctl -l error /dev/sda

Or view detailed information about the driver with:

sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda

The SmartMonTools FAQ has a lot more information.

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 4:21 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 )