* Posts by Karl Lattimer

368 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jul 2006

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Sound-mufflers chuck acoustic sleep blanket at the noise-plagued

Karl Lattimer

Circuit used for a long time

http://electronics-diy.com/noise-canceling-headphones.php

I built one, it worked, circuit I built was terrible so it eventually failed, next time I'll tin the boards properly ;)

Applying this to a room isn't so hard either.

Drone-assisted Swiss construct virtual 3D castle

Karl Lattimer

VisualSFM and more

http://www.qdh.org.uk/wordpress/?p=116

You can do all of this for free, there's a video of a reconstruction I did on a church with roughly 700 photographs taken with a EOS20D (I even had to half the resolution of them to get them to fit in memory) in the above blog post, there's also instructions on how to do this.

Anyway, if you want advice on how not to spend a few grand on doing something which is, actually pretty easy comment on the blog :)

P-P-P-Pick up our PENGUIN-POWERED Pi PIPER of Python

Karl Lattimer
Thumb Up

Speaking of media centers

You could easily add infra red remote control support (and a disco light) to that little pi with my HotPi board, currently on KickStarter :D

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/582604098/hotpi

Baidu apes Google with Chinese Chrome

Karl Lattimer

Honestly?

You're reporting this like they've developed a whole new web browser of their own ... take a closer look - IT'S CHROME - Based on the chromium code most likely, with a little customisation on top to make it 'theirs'.

You should really be reporting this as "Baidu created a chrome clone using the open source chrome code base! SHOCK HORROR!"

Apprentice runner-up becomes Greggs bigshot

Karl Lattimer

Greggs in the south east?

No, it's cheap imitation greggs in the south there be nee stotties in them shops.

Virgin Media frustrates customers with 'intermittent' routing blues

Karl Lattimer

Going on a while

Since they upgraded the upload speeds of users this seems to have been going on. That makes it a week or two. Having issues from time to time myself

Microsoft pulls plug on search bribery machine

Karl Lattimer

I have visions...

I have visions of an angry steve ballmer beating a poor, defenceless and dead horse with a large luxury leather office chair...

IoSafe Solo disaster-proof drive

Karl Lattimer

let me know when

the drop proof one arrives :P

Packing heat gets you shot, say profs

Karl Lattimer

I assume these people have never studied logical fallacies?

Post hoc ergo proctor hoc - just because someone who owns a gun gets shot, does not mean that by the mere ownership they are more likely to be shot.

The correlation is definite. However, maybe it's converse, e.g. people who are more likely to get shot carry a gun...

Moronic interpretation of results here...

btw, i am against gun ownership in all its forms as owning the means to kill merely for the ownership of the means to kill is a poor excuse. "Right to bear arms"... it's just not right

Sky News election petition defaced by prankster hackers

Karl Lattimer

WOW! The numbers

So 9000 people want a live leaders debate,

70,000 want the PM to go... http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/please-go/

I don't think these numbers are convincing enough...

Huge 'vampyrus' bats being hunted to extinction

Karl Lattimer

@ooFie

The largest one on record was apparently 14foot 9inch wing span, the beast that flew from that would probably have been around 6foot tall, and it did fly.

/me thanks his childhood bat encyclopaedia for this information, wikipedia had nothing on that! Although the book was written in 1927 so there may have been a larger one found since.

HTC Hero Android smartphone

Karl Lattimer
Stop

Incorrect assumption

"where they're awkward for right-handers to reach – rather than being spaced evenly around the trackball."

This is incorrect. Putting the buttons on the right makes it easier for you to use them when you're right handed as the device is touch screen people tend to hold touch screen devices with their left hand, the buttons are therefore within thumb distance, and the right hand is used for pointing at the screen.

There's tonnes of research to support this.

I'd say it does make it difficult for left handers to use though.

Wolfram Alpha to venture beyond boron nucleus

Karl Lattimer

Stork?

"even the occasional internet meme ("How is baby formed?" A stork delivers them)."

I think that particular meme may pre-date the internet...

?!?!?!? that was a wtf moment while reading.

Countdown to Conficker activation begins

Karl Lattimer
Linux

@Pride before a fall

These things do in fact happen to linux users, I had one happen to me recently in fact. Twas a terrible affair coming in from roundcube... However I aim to counter your further point. "When the time comes that Linux is a big enough footprint then you will find many of these events happening to you."

The main argument I draw against this statement is that Linux is heterogeneous. Windows on the other hand is massively homogeneous. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Irish_Famine

The problem with having one company controlling it all is that if something can get through it's gonna start getting through on a massive scale. So it's not simply to do with the numbers of users it's also to do with the density of variation. Just like in the real world of viruses.

In proof of point, Linux has enormous penetration in the server domain, many millions of websites run on LAMP etc... etc... but these installations are all so varied with so many binary variations, builds, (mis-)configurations and generally not being so homogeneous that you cannot impact on the numbers we're talking with this case.

Apple disables Egyptian iPhone GPS

Karl Lattimer

not sure china are still filtering...

http://images.google.cn/images?hl=zh-CN&q=Tiananmen%20Square&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi

that search used to turn up a shed load of propaganda, now it has a picture of tank man... Anyone in china have a screenshot of their results for that search?

Portsmouth gets crime-predicting CCTV

Karl Lattimer

Sounds a bit like, no infact smells a bit like... bullshit?

"These could range from a gang of youths drinking outside a newsagents"

implies AI that can discern the difference between pepsi and coke!

Unless it's possible to spot what they are drinking, this kind of behaviour is nothing more than a thought crime, waiting to be thought...

Group Test: electronic book readers

Karl Lattimer

Sony PRS

I had a PRS-505, within 4 days, without being touched it was broken. It made absolutely no sense, sitting there in the protective cover, working fine one minute, then the screen was garbage the next. The durability of these devices is more important to me than the looks.

If it can't last 4 days in my living room it won't last going with me around the world.

Reg competition: Cisco goes isup

Karl Lattimer

Obviously

Obviously Mr T sued for trademark infringement...

Google silences Android critics

Karl Lattimer

lefty, the man the legend!

http://www.qdh.org.uk/wordpress/?p=225

read more here, I had the story before you ner ner ner ner ner....

:p

Hummer glummer on high oil price bummer

Karl Lattimer

@Guy

You should probably learn the difference between they're and their and there...

American auto dealer offers free handguns

Karl Lattimer

Second amendment

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed"

Throw back to the times of marauding Englishmen...

Makes me feel a little queasy after thinking about this; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_related_attacks

After Debian's epic SSL blunder, a world of hurt for security pros

Karl Lattimer
Thumb Down

helps with debugging

Saying "if it helps with debugging" is not the same as saying, "go ahead ship it out to all of your users and downstream it into a bunch of child-distros"

If something like that is intended to help debug a certain issue then that's fine, because the random number generator becomes a lot less random and therefore it makes it possibly to debug certain aspects of the code easier than before.

If you want repeatable tests you need to make random numbers predictable for the purposes of the tests, "debugging" this is not simply a golden ticket to ignore the issue. An inexperienced developer made a mistake, string 'em up!

** downward thumb because well, isn't that what the romans did? **

As for the person who said using an unitialised spot of memory somewhere fairly randomly placed in the system is a bad idea should think again, its probably one of the best sources of entropy on a computer system. If for instance hard disk interrupts, they can be manipulated, network interrupts can also be manipulated, also keyboard interrupts etc are all prone to injection.

However, I still agree we should all have some kind of frequency hopping galactic background radiation based hardware RNG system, or something equally as impossible to control.

Karl Lattimer

Quote that says it all

"This is a bit of a nightmare for anybody who used Debian"

past tense. USED debian... I doubt they'll be using it any more! This distribution (and ubuntu) will likely be black listed from all fortune 500ers simply because they have no legal recourse.

This event has highlighted an important computer science mantra. Don't mess with other peoples cryptographic routines, you'll most likely break them.

SANS sounds alarm on Debian OpenSSL flaw

Karl Lattimer
Alert

SANS a bit late on the uptake

This has been a critical situation for a few days, and it isn't that it 'potentially' produced predicable keys, but that is DID produce VERY predictable keys.

I used umbongo for a couple of months last year because everyone was raving about it, and promptly switched back to fedora when 8 was released. During that time of umbongo use I generated my DSA key... Which I now find the private key quite well... public!

feel sorry for the poor guys who runs svn+ssh servers that rely on this!

go here http://metasploit.com/users/hdm/tools/debian-openssl/ for some detail

Verizon shuns Android for LiMo

Karl Lattimer

Re: strange to say

That is a complete fallacy, most of the code that runs the N800, N810 and N810-WE soon to be released is open source, it can be found in public repositories and modified, and installed on the devices quite easily. For instance, the window manager which you mention, "matchbox" is available from both opened hand and Nokia.

Nokia have gone to a great deal of effort to foster an open community around the internet tablet line so please do not insult them with completely flawed reasoning.

Welsh Darth Vader dodges jail

Karl Lattimer

That's about...

1.2l of alcohol (ethanol), consider a maximum absorption rate of around 0.15l of alcohol per hour, and the size of his stomach it is possible to drink 10l of wine.

It would just take about 8 hours to do so, and because of the water/alcohol ratio in the wine, over the course of those 8 hours he would probably loose around 60% of his body's water content through urination. Giving him one hell of a headache, stomach ache, general feeling of being quite dehydrated and lacking essential minerals... You know a hangover.

Without replenishing the water without any alcohol in it and giving it at least 20 minutes to absorb, he'd probably be passed out crying for his mother after 10l of wine in 8 hours.

Well, if we factor in the time taken to replenish the water, approximately on 20 minute water break for every 40 of drinking that increases the amount of time to around 12 hours of solid fluid intake, and a total probable volume of 15-20l including the water.

This is why I prefer scotch... Less water to alcohol, ergo you don't go to the toilet as often and get quite pissed quite quickly.

PC World, Currys staff to be dumped in DSGi rescue plan?

Karl Lattimer
Linux

I can see the headlines now...

"Vista kills PC world"

-- and the article will probably include something like, after the enormous flop that was windows vista, and the over purchasing of vista installed laptops by teen-employment-office PC world, the company is now closing the doors of its many sites because, nobody wants to buy cruddy windows PCs anymore.

When asked whether or not PC world would allow windows XP to be installed on the machines the company had said they would charge for the privilege. If they had the foresight to allow users a CHOICE of operating systems they wouldn't be heading down the pan at such a fast rate...

I honestly can't stop laughing, I think I might cry I'm laughing so hard.

Retailers risk libel nightmare over 'no-work' database

Karl Lattimer

I'm no lawyer

but I can tell you, I saw that coming a mile off.

Phone-theft hotspots named and shamed

Karl Lattimer

soft southerners

"one tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor."

where I come from (newcastle) thats

one tequila, two tequila, three tequila, four, five tequila, six tequila, seven tequila, floor...

NASA confirms manned mission to 10 Petaflops

Karl Lattimer

Does this mean what I think it means?

"NASA reckons that such machines will be needed to fuel the manned missions to the moon"

as in... an actual admittance of... erm, well faking the whole thing in 69?

MySpace stripped of myspace.co.uk domain victory

Karl Lattimer

Re: Justice

Actually because of habeas corpus in the UK you REQUIRE proof that there IS a body, not necessarily the body itself but at the very least blood + missing person is enough.

If you fail to prove that someone has come to an untimely end it can only be filed as a missing persons case.

BT bundles MS Office with Linux laptop

Karl Lattimer

Office works great on Linux!

http://wine-review.blogspot.com/2008/03/office-2007-on-linux-with-wine-install.html

http://wine-review.blogspot.com/2008/03/microsoft-office-2007-update.html

Well, its not 100% out of the boxable, but it does work...

So this implies BT are offering commercial support for wine :)

(especially for you phil)

/sarcasm

The terror dam of doom that looms over Boise, Idaho

Karl Lattimer

*NEWS FLASH*

Beware of mulsims carrying upkeeps

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouncing_bomb

South Koreans clone sniffer dog

Karl Lattimer
Coat

eating dog...

personally I wouldn't want to eat anything that spends half its life licking its own arse and the other half licking its balls.

Call me old fashioned.

Anti-paedophile police treble arrest figures

Karl Lattimer

pretty easy to do this...

I mean all they're doing is increasing the number of people arrested. Something like this is pretty effective also...

PcPlod: Oi you you're under arrest for fiddling kids...

Victim: I didn't do it

PcPlod: We've got to hit our targets somehow.

... later that day ...

Victim: So you're letting me go... I told you I didn't do it

PcPlod: Thanks for your time, we really need to waste your time, our time and tax payers money, never mind it won't be going to court...

... There are lies, damned lies and statistics... And of course 82.7% of statistics are made up on the spot.

PETA offers $1m for test tube chicken

Karl Lattimer

god damn hippies

My idea for the ethical treatment of animals...

Cow goes into a narrow chamber with a bright light at the end of it, at the far end of said chamber they see A wonderfully bullish, well BULL...

They get a little "horny" they're feeling like they're slowly drifting to heaven...

And before they notice, BAM! A bullet goes through the brain...

/me is a member of the other peta organisation, the people for the eating of tasty animals.

Were the snatched Brit sailors in 'disputed waters'?

Karl Lattimer

@Matt

Don't think you're qualified to comment until you can actually get the iraqi and iranians the right way round...

EPIC FAIL

Commodore goes titsup (again)

Karl Lattimer
Coat

gravel

wow, the gravel looks way cool! I'd like one... seems like a better device than my ipod...

Wonder if you can run homebrew linux on it... /me scurries off to ebay

Choose and Book mixes up patient appointments

Karl Lattimer

RE: big dose of clap all round

I'll thank you to keep the clap to yourself...

Microsoft soothes Vista pain with Bossploitation flick

Karl Lattimer

Oh come on!

Does anyone really believe this was an "internal" gag? Its called viral marketing people...

Billy Bragg: Why should songwriters starve so others get rich?

Karl Lattimer

Job offer: Lynch mob

Heh, want ads on the reg, well here it is;

WANTED: Three or four individuals of high moral standing, which can compromise some morals for the good of humanity.

Your duties will include, mobbing, and thereafter lynching of Simon Cowell, plenty of room for artistic and creative outpouring, enjoyment of this fixed term contract can be found in the following areas, torturing: for instance, putting him in a shipping crate subjected to his pop creations including but not exclusive to Five and Westlife, Water boarding - not considered torture "if we do it", and of course my personal favorite, defecating on his shoes!

applications in the usual way.

ICO queries Heathrow T5's huge fingerprint scam scan

Karl Lattimer

fatally flawed

if there only reasoning is that people can swap tickets, then a) you shouldn't have had a combined lounge f*ckwhits, b) you maybe should have realised it is also trivial to use fake fingerprints...

DARPA releases 'Blackswift' hyperplane details

Karl Lattimer

barely-practical plane retired nearly 20 years ago

yeah, the plane that could only take off with an almost empty fuel tank, and had to be refueled in air because otherwise the skin would leak fuel on takeoff and could only store enough fuel for a single high speed fly over of the USSR.

Less than barely practical... On the other hand, the Vulcan, now that was a plane!

Pitcairn Island relays most spam per person

Karl Lattimer

I wonder...

why google, yahoo and hotmail... ok so maybe not hotmail, but certainly google and yahoo don't use spamassassin on email going OUT as well as email coming in!

That'll kill off most of that webmail based spam I recon

Cassini to surf Enceladus's icy plumes

Karl Lattimer

velocity?

Wouldn't a jet of ice going at "400 metres per second (800mph)" be somewhat hazardous to the course of the spacecraft? I mean if the thing veers off a few degrees it could get completely lost...

UK presses car ferry to ship powdered plutonium

Karl Lattimer

What such devices?

"The shipment from Sellafield will contain enough plutonium to make a large number of such devices"

Is that a partial quote? I don't know what such devices they're referring to. I'm also not sure that Plutonium dioxide can be used to build an atom bomb (if that's the device in question), AFAIK you need fairly pure metals, and finding something to take the oxygen from plutonium would probably be more difficult that obtaining fissible uranium or plutonium.

I thought the whole point of MOX fuels was that they were difficult to turn into weapons, easy to recycle, easy path to decommission fissible plutonium or uranium and fairly safe when leaked into the environment.

Make vendors liable for exploits

Karl Lattimer
Happy

Wouldn't this be an economic nightmare...

For Microsoft?

If vendors are made responsible for their security in way of fines or sanctions, then surely MS would be broke in a week.

Roll on the legislation

Brit apiarists demand £8m to save honeybees

Karl Lattimer

Monsanto?

So, nobody is going to blame the pesticides on monsanto now?

Good, I must have really rammed home the point that genetic engineering of crops reduces the need for pesticides...

My work here is done...

Software engineer builds straw house for £4k

Karl Lattimer

£600 - Supplies for volunteers?

He must have kept the beer pouring, sounds like a great site foreman...

Has your shifty foreign neighbour got 16 mobes?

Karl Lattimer

I have more than one mobile!

SHOULD I REPORT MYSELF?

This seems like an obvious spies poster, (with reference to "the spies" in 1984)...

If you want to watch everyone, make everyone watch eachother...

filed under FUD

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