I declare summer whenever there’s going to be 7 consecutive days in a row above 19 degrees. And as such:
Friday Max 22 Shower or two.
17/09/11 Min 10 Max 25 Shower or two developing.
18/09/11 Min 12 Max 21 Sunny.
19/09/11 Min 11 Max 27 Showers developing. Windy.
20/09/11 Min 12 Max 20 Shower or two.
21/09/11 Min 13 Max 22 Morning shower or two.
22/09/11 Min 12 Max 24 Mostly sunny.
Summer.
In September.
It’s a good thing that global warming is a beat up by the greens, a front for communist interests trying to take control of our lives and introduce excessive and unneeded regulation – or else I might be worried.
Australian consumers can now use their Visa cards to pay for small value transactions of $35 or less without entering a PIN or signing a receipt, Visa announced today.
This requires the retailer to actively persue this strategy, but the payment network no longer demands identification for these “low value” transactions. They claim that security isn’t compromised by this. Their logic goes like this:
$35 isn’t much.
If someone steals your card, they can only obtain $35 worth of goods and services per transaction until the card is shut down.
Your card issuer will eventually notice all of these transactions and phone you to make sure everything is okay.
The retailer wears the risk of these unauthorised transactions
So what’s to stop your teenager borrowing your card to go buy snacks at McDonalds (one of the early adoptors of this security-flexibility) whenever they’re hungry? The card company’s logic goes like this:
$35 isn’t much.
If someone borrows your card without your knowledge, they can only obtain $35 worth of goods and services per transaction.
The retailer wears the risk of these unauthorised transactions
So why would a retailer run the risk of a month’s worth of Coles supermarket purchases (another early adopter) – which could easily exceed $1000 with one or two purchases a day – being fraudently run up? Because when you compain to your card issuer, they require a police report. The police, being a diligent lot, will follow up these $35 thefts, go to the stores, look at the video footage, realise they don’t know what you look like, come around to your house and compare the picture against you and decide it’s not you. Then they’ll think “How did this person who isn’t the cardholder get hold of the card and the cardholder didn’t notice until they got the bill?” and they’ll suspect an inside job, and ask you if you recognise the person in the video footage. If you want your teenager to have a crimal record with 30+ theft convictions you’ll scream “Sarah! Come here!” and that will be that; otherwise you might stay quiet.
Of course, it might not be your teenage daughter with the munchies; somebody at work might borrow the card from the wallet on your desk to buy lunch when they’ve run out of cash, or friends when you’re out “dining” at McDonalds.
Worse yet is the organised criminals who can easily prove their expenditure is not their own – it was in another state! Because there’s no motivation to Express Post your card to an interstate confederate for them to have a quick run around with it before Express Posting it back. In short order it can become quite a bill too – at Apple Stores it’s up to $150 without a signature being needed. These expenditures can be book-ended by legit local purchases, leading the card holder to say “well, I never authorized that, I’ve still got the card, so you figure it out”. The costs of these thefts, which all the video footage in the world isn’t going to connect to the cardholder, and with some precautions the confederate either, goes onto the general costs of running the retail operation, pushing up prices.
Retailers always had the option of skipping the need to sign for a transaction – be it on their own heads. So presumably they think that the video footage will reduce the level of experienced loss.
Now, presumably this fraud will cost less than the expenditure saved – assuming a check-out chick costs $25/hour to employ it implies at least 1.4 person-hours are saved per fraud, and assuming a saving of four seconds per transaction, they’re expecting no more than 1 fraud in 1280 transactions. But I ask: isn’t it better to pay $35 to Aussie Battlers… working Aussie families… our most valuable assets rather than hand over, say $30, to criminals through lax security?
With contactless payments finally with us, there’s even more reason to fear unauthorized transactions, per this video of a guy stealing the identifying information off a smart card:
It appears that in addition to annual fees, international conversion fees, interest charges and so forth, the price of a credit card is the same as freedom: eternal vigilance.
All of this is lovely and academic, but the activity by retailers and card issuers has the effect of turning every card in my wallet into many unchallenged $35 purchases. This acts as a motivator to steal my cards from me. If my wallet is stolen, I can immediately cancel the cards, so no risk there. So to get at the lovely $35 goodness, the thief needs to stop me doing that – clonking the victim on the head is a good way of preventing reporting. I like my head. I don’t mind spending 4 seconds a transaction to prevent a increase in people getting brained.
The worst part is there’s no way to opt out of this reduced security; I can’t say to Visa: “No, for my card, only pay money when a PIN is supplied.” It’s forced on everyone. I remember when these PIN things came out, and I was repeatedly assured that they were more secure than a signature, and I could assure them that it wasn’t – the damn PIN is encoded on the mag strip of the card (precisely copied in seconds!), and any fool can see you keying your PIN in. Now another layer of security has been whittled away, leaving… video investigation.
The census delivery chick turned up and offered us the option of paper or electronic form.
Two programmers looked at each other, thought about how they value their time and the response was a no-brainer:
“We’re programmers,” I explained, “we’ll take the paper form.”
“There’s a phone number you can call if you have any trouble filling out the electronic form” reassures the collector.
Cathy thinks: “Sure, that line won’t have any trouble when twenty million Australians simultaneously log into the web site to fill in the forms via a broken SSL link, using IE specific controls (that only work under some versions Windows assuming they’re correctly patched and have the right libraries loaded), demanding full round-trips to the underspec’d Windows servers to populate unnecessarily complex custom controls, some of which will no doubt demand Flash or COM. Come to think of it, it probably won’t even be web based, and we’ve only got two Windows boxes, one of which is tucked under a table (Yay! Census night on the floor swearing at the ABS’s programmers!) and the other has a screen resolution that went out with buggy whips (I’ve had programs barf and refuse to run because the resolution was unacceptable).”
We chose paper. For another view of the world, I’m looking forward hearing to how census night worked for Daniel…
Alas SQL Server Management Studio isn’t as friendly as it could be for pasting in data. You’d think Microsoft would have this humming, but when I tried to paste from Excel, it attempted to paste the entire first row from my spreadsheet into the first column (in one row) of the database.
Using MS Access to open up the database probably would have worked, but I didn’t have it on that machine.
Trying to import using the SQL Server Import And Export Data wizard from a CSV text file worked for a small amount of data, but the 80,000 rows I was trying to import from the world ports code list didn’t. Time and time again it would report an error (unspecified) and give me the option of Abort, Retry, Ignore. No matter option I chose, it crashed.
While the 64-bit version of the wizard on my 64-bit Win7 machine didn’t allow you to import from Excel/Access, the 32-bit version did (presumably because MS Office, at least the version I have installed, is 32-bit).
The next problem was that it only supported Excel 2003 format, which can’t handle more than 64K rows. I ended up having to split the data into two and import the two spreadsheets separately. Then it worked.
Shame the wizard is so flaky, and of course it’s a big shame that Management Studio doesn’t do copy/paste like one would expect. (Maybe that too was a 32-bit/64-bit issue.)
I’m not happy when I see someone technical quoting a time in summer (eg during daylight savings) which claims to be “AEST”.
It’s almost certainly actually AEDT.
A summary of the abbreviations, which looks reasonably official, is here: Australian timezones.
In summary, AEST, ACST and AWST apply in winter. AEDT, ACST and AWST apply in summer.
The other issue I had with a recent email was it said 12:00pm AEST. I think in this context, they meant midnight AEDT, but it’s confusing. Better to either say Midnight, or use 24-hour time: 00:00.
I had a quick look at Facebook’s Download Your Information feature — evidently added a few months ago due to criticism about the accessibility of people’s data once it’s dumped into the Facebook bottomless pit.
You can find it via the My Account screen, by clicking Download Your Information.
It asks for some time to compile all the information — in my case this took about half an hour — then emails you to say it’s ready to download, and provides a link and re-checks your password.
It comes as a single zip file, with HTML and pictures inside it.
Opening the index.html file, you’ll find a version of your Profile page, with links to all the other information in the archive, including Wall, Photos, Friends, Events, Messages.
The Wall in my case was 1.5 Mb of HTML, going back to 2007, and I suspect is every Wall post (and replies from friends) I’ve ever made. Friends is just an unlinked list of all your friends (name only). Messages has all your message threads, and replies.
You can browse the photos via the directory of the same name; subdirectories reflect the folders. It looks like all the photo files are at the size that Facebook shrunk them down to when they were uploaded.
To actually get this information into another service, you’d need to do some trickery with munging the HTML. The code they’ve used seems relatively clean and easy to parse.
So all in all, quite a handy feature, and goes a long way towards dispelling fears that information pumped into Facebook was lost forever behind a zillion clicks of to show “Older Posts”.
(It doesn’t appear that Twitter has a comparable feature.)
Unlike many organisations, the BBC has a very enlightened policy on leaving old content up on their web site.
Among other things, it says:
Our view is that these pages often contain a lot of information about the programme or event which may be of interest in the future. We don’t want to delete pages which users may have bookmarked or linked to in other ways.
In general our policy is only to remove pages where the information provided has become so outdated that it may lead to actual harm or damage.
Was dealing with a big Powerpoint presentation (PPT) file.
In the older PPT format, 6063 Kb.
When zipped, 4826 Kb. Not a bad saving given the number of pictures in it.
Here’s the interesting thing: in PPTX format: 3293 Kb.
Remembering that PPTX and other Office Open XML formats (DOCX, XLSX etc) do their compression on the file as a whole, not the individual componenets, so this is an interesting result.
Perhaps the old binary format is inherently less efficient/compressible than the new XML format.
Mind you, another big PPT I tried it with didn’t compress down as much; the PPTX was about the same size as the ZIPped PPT, so it obviously depends on the exact content
Disney DVD’s slogan is Moves, Magic and More. They got the more part right for sure.
There I am trying to back up my copy of Wall_e_lic2_d1 so that once the kids have scratched the living bejesus out of the playing version, a new one can be generated from the master. And also as to avoid the annoying ads, language selection and other remote-control-based activity at the start – just shove it in the DVD player and walk away. Thankfully Australian copyright law lets me do this.
The studio have been dicking around with the disk’s table of contents, giving it over seventy files it claims are five gig in size – which, giving the DVD specification, is not possible. What you need to do in circumstances like this is play it in some player that will tell you what the magic track that actually contains the movie, not some hacked version of it. Then back that one up.
In the case of this particular disk it’s track 53, 1:33:26 long weighting in at 5425.95MB in size.
Thing is, DVDShrink barfs on it. Like it does Cars, but for different reasons. Thankfully I’ve recently discovered that Linux has an equivalent to DVDShrink, but this one is still being maintained. K9copy is it’s name; Cars was processed with no problems, and it was only the tomfoolery on Wall-E that caused a pause in activity.
So there’s one less application that I need a copy of Windows to run.
I’ve decided that I’m only going to look for properties with 4 (or more) bedrooms. I enter this as a search criteria, and the website says quite clearly “Results for properties for rent with 4+ bedrooms in {suburb}”.
So why do I get presented with 3 bedroom properties?
Facepalm. Five years, and these web sites still suck balls. Not only do searches not work, it appears that the site pegs my CPU at 100% when the rendered page is just sitting there. Some of their lovely JavaScript goodness I suppose.
If you ask nicely I might dig up and dust off my rant from five years ago…
I’ve run the Google Chrome on Linux beta since it first become available, and my impression is: slow. I might be unusual, in that I typically have dozens and dozens of tabs open, and that may break Chrome’s model of shoving each page into its own process, and this PC has “only” a gig of RAM, but it’s slower than FireFox for the same task. Things were a lot worse before I loaded AdBlock and FlashBlock for Chrome. Now my CPU isn’t pegged at 100%.
Embedded JavaScript is affected by this performance hit, so that particular tools that I have help do my stuff, well, don’t anymore.
Most annoyingly, it seems, although I haven’t confirmed it, that the back button causes a page reload: it doesn’t come out of the cache. Or the slowness could make it look that way. But how long can it possibly take to render a page anyway?
On the upside, it hasn’t crashed, and I would have expected FireFox to mysteriously die without any explanation by now (a sign that Firefox is going to die soon is that tab-swaps/page loads become very slow, indicating a similar root cause which I’m guessing is memory exhaustion). Firefox has always done the mysterious death thing, and I was hoping that upgrading to 3.5 would fix things, but no dice.
I’m trying to decide whether it’s preferable to have my browser snappy, but occasionally fall in a big pile and get back up again, or a laggard that rolls with the punches. Perhaps I’ll split my browsing between them simultaneously; vital stuff on Chrome and throw-away stuff on FF, but that’s going to be a bit tough on my brain.
[UPDATE]
Well, it turns out that Chrome is a memory hog. I bought another gig of RAM, and wouldn’t you know it, the PC is flying. My suspicions were tripped when all of the RAM was in use, most of the paging file and the little orange disk activity light was slowly burning a hole in the wall on the other side of the room.
If you’ve ever wondered how election results make their way from the ballot boxes onto the screen on the ABC, Antony Green’s written a fascinating post about how it how it all works, and how the technology involved has changed over the years from paper slips to XML feeds.
I had a quick look at Facebook’s Download Your Information feature — evidently