Alan's Ramblings

Well, I've just been on what must be the most depressing patrol of my time as a Ranger. Not only did the weathermen get it completely wrong and I got completely soaked, but I had the disheartening task of recording the serious and systematic vandalism of the new fence that has been put around Bleaklow as part of the attempt to regenerate the moorland. When I got to the Briefing Centre this morning, Fiona said that one of the local Gamekeepers had reported that a fence had been cut above Salter's Brook on the A628, and she asked me if I'd check it out. Sure enough, it was the new stock exclusion fence that had been chopped.

The vandalism started at Far Small Clough Head and I counted 38 places where the fence had been cut between there and Swain's Greave, a distance of about 2km - and that wasn't the end of it, I could see more cuts in the fence as hit headed east towards Barrow Stones. God knows how much further the damage goes but I'd run out of time and had to head for home. I temporarily fixed the first dozen or so sections, but whoever did it had quite clearly come prepared and has spent some considerable time performing their vandalism - the holes are every 50-100m, and they've cut the fence either side of two adjacent posts and entirely removed a section. In some places they've cut it by stiles, and in some places even next to the notices that explain that the fence is to keep stock out and not people. Needless to say, the sheep are already inside the fenced off area.

I'm at a loss to find the words to express my mixture of dismay and fury over what they've done - the damage is not just near footpaths, but right across the open moor. Whoever did this knew the area, had been before and came back with the tools necessary to destroy the fence. I'm sure the morons responsible feel that they were 'justified' in 'protecting their rights' despite the fact the land is actually privately owned and looked after. I'm also sure that if someone came and vandalised their property they'd be the ones baying for the blood of the offenders.

The fact of the matter is that because of their cretinous and downright criminal behaviour, everyone will lose:

• This sort of behaviour undermines decades of careful liason with the landowners to establish access to the land - if it was my fence that had been destroyed I'd be making a strong case for people to be excluded completely from my land - and yes, despite many people's belief to the contrary, landowners can still get access removed - for example for nature conservation purposes.
• The fence is there for a reason - to protect and therefore help to repair the moors, and that's now been jepoardised.
• The damage will have to be repaired, and I estimate that there is at least 5-10 thousand pounds of damage - not only is there the cost of the materials, and the labour to put the fence up, there's also the small matter of having to hire a helicopter at 800 pounds per hour to fly it in as the terrain is too fragile for vehicle access.
• The landowner is paid for maintaining the fence, and for excluding his stock - if the fence is cut, DEFRA stop paying the farmer, so he get's hit by a double whammy.
• The repairs will probably have to be paid for by DEFRA, i.e, the government, i.e. by taxes, i.e. by you, me and indeed the prats who cut the fence in the first place.

Posted by alan at 11:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

According to the BBC, on tuesday US troops in Iraq shot at a car approaching a checkpoint:

Pictures here

How much longer is this madness going to continue?

Posted by alan at 05:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well, my third eTrex arrived today, a nice new one and so far it seems fine - despite the abysmal weather I took a stroll to try it out. I'm still puzzling over exactly where the Bleaklow fence line goes between Shining Clough and Woodhead, so I parked up above Woodhead tunnel and walked up onto the Trans Pennine Trail (the old turnpike road) then wandered westwards towards Woodhead Bridge. That gave me a chance to reccie the other side of the valley and figure out where the fence goes. It appears to come down to the Longdendale trail along Smithy Clough, but I've still no clear idea of where it goes between Stable Clough and Shining Clough. One of the nice things with the Summit is you can use it for doing resections - because it has a built-in compass you can mark your current position, then take a bearing from where you are and project another waypoint along it. If you do this three times from different vantage points and join up the three resulting lines (dead easy in OziExplorer - just set up three two-waypoint routes and display them),you get the traditional 'cocked hat' that shows you where the point of interest is.

As I said in my original post, I'd also paid £20.00 to Geomantics for some cleaned-up SRTM height data for OziExplorer. Well, it eventually arrived - in a format that's completely incompatible with OziExplorer, despite the website clearly saying " We supply geo-edited SRTM data in a suitable format ... for use with 3rd party programs such as Bryce, Terragen, OziExplorer, 3D Studio, Photoshop etc." Bollocks. It's supplied as 5km squares of 16-bit raw height data, and OziExplorer doesn't understand that format at all. Eventually, after repeated requests for information, Geomantics told me I had to download a 3d terrain modelling application, and a plugin, and re-reference and convert all the data - and I have 74 files worth, although I don't want it all. You'd need to have quite an in-depth knowledge of GIS and earth coordinate systems to be able to do this, which leaves me out. Needless to say, I've emailed them and the electronic payment service they use to ask for my money back, it will be interesting to see if I get it. I've also suggested that they remove the frankly untrue claim that the data can be used with OziExplorer from their website - if you get here via google and are intending to buy their data for use with OziExplorer, take my advice and don't.

Posted by alan at 11:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Well, my brand-new eTrex Summit is having to be replaced - it has an unfortunate tendency to turn itself off for no apparent reason, even with a fresh set of batteries. There's no low battery warning, it just switches off. It did this at least ten times on Saturday when I was using it, and despite re-flashing the firmware and doing a factory reset, it still continues to do the same thing at unpredictable intervals. I suspect that it's something to do with the compass / GPS switchover - at a configurable speed it switches over to the inbuilt compass for heading information, and from what I can tell sometimes when it switches to compass it also switches off completely. I got in touch with GPS4Less who I bought it from, and they don't have any more left, and from what they are telling me neither do Garmin - seemingly Garmin have an abysmal inventory control system, and stuff can take 5-8 weeks to come into stock. I spoke to Garmin UK myself and they said it could take up to a couple of weeks to get a replacement to me, and they point blank refused to tell me if they had them in stock for 'security reasons'! The guy I spoke to at GPS4Less is going to see if he can locate me a replacement from somewhere, but I'm pretty annoyed at Garmin - firstly the unit is faulty, secondly they won't tell me if they actually have any of the damn things in the UK and thirdly it seems that even if they do have them it's going to take an unacceptable amount of time to get a replacement to me.

0 out of 10 for customer service, Garmin.

Update

I posted the URL of this entry into Garmin's customer support webpage and also asked them how long it would take to get a replacement, and surprise, surprise, within 15 minutes I had a reply:

This is pretty obviously a boilerplate reply, and it didn't actually tell me anything I couldn't get from their website. It also didn't answer my main question regarding how long it would take to get a replacement. I replied:

And got the following brush-off:

I didn't consider this to be an acceptable answer either - basically 'Go away we don't want to know' seemed to be the gist, so I asked again:

And by now I suspect you can probably guess what the reply looked like:

So it's apparent that Garmin think the answer to the simple question 'Have you a replacement eTrex Summit in the UK that you can ship to me?' is a trade secret that must be protected at all costs - the mind boggles. On that basis I can only assume that anyone who dares to ask for pricing information can expect the Black Helicopters to appear shortly thereafter.

As I've already said, GPS4Less (who have been very helpful) don't have any in stock, and don't know when Garmin will be able to supply them with a replacement, as Garmin are telling them that they themselves don't have any and don't know when they will be getting more - so I'm now back at square one. I've posted the failed unit back to GPS4Less as it's no use to me, so I'm now £149.95 out of pocket, I've had to pay £4.05 to send the unit back (and I bet I don't get that back), and I still don't have a resolution to my question to Garmin, let alone a working GPS. I'm trying to remember when I last received such poor customer service, and I'm struggling - all in all a pretty appalling experience, and it's badly dented my faith in a company that I previously held in high regard.

Garmin, your customer service sucks.

Posted by alan at 01:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Yesterday, a US Bradley fighting vehicle was attacked and disabled in Baghdad. Three hours later, when a crowd of curious onlookers (including children) came to look, two US attack helicopters came back, rocketed the Bradley and machine gunned the crowd, in the process killing at least 13 and injuring about 60 others. One of the people killed was a TV reporter recording a report at the scene. The US military them proceded to tell several different versions of what had happened, all of them clearly contradicted by the graphic TV coverage of the poor reporter who was killed. According to the BBC:

And I wonder just how much coverage this received in the US press? Virtually zero, as far as I can tell. I've searched for 'Mazen Tumeisi' - the name of the journalist who was killed - CNN - nothing. Washington Post - nothing. Fox News - nothing. Google News - one paltry hit from a non-commercial site - they don't even pick up the BBC story. If I didn't know better, I'd say censorship is alive and well in "The Land Of The Free". What's even more ironic is that in the last week the US has been heaping opprobrium on North Korea for not reporting the huge explosion that happened in the north of the country - once again, how is the US news blackout of this event in Baghdad any different to the actions of the North Koreans?

Shame on you, USA, shame on you. And shame on us for supporting you in the first place.

Posted by alan at 10:24 PM | Permalink

I've had 60 comments since I started this site, so I was more than a little surprised to see 200 comment notification emails in my inbox this evening - yes, you guessed it, I'd been blogspammed. Quite a few of my friends don't allow comments on their blogs for this very reason, but I'm loathe to be forced to do the same. I've had a few in the past, but tonight was something else - they all arrived within a ten minute period, they were spread across nearly all the entries on my blog and they came from a range of different IP addresses. At a guess I'd say that I'd been attacked by a swarm of zombie machines.

First thing was to take the website down to stop any more arriving and clean up the mess - MovableType really sucks at this, you have to go through each entry individually to remove them. I did think of exporting the blog content, removing the spam and reimporting it, but I suspect all the entry numbers would change, so any links that people have to the site would break. Half an hour and a case of incipient RSI later I was clean.

I've already deployed one of the more common countermeasures by renaming my comment script, plus my site runs under mod_perl so the URLs aren't the normal ones anway, but whatever hit my site was clever enough to figure out the correct URL for the comment submission script despite this.

I've now added a few more slightly more subtle countermeasures (no I'm not going to tell you what they are :-) and I'll see what happens. If I get hit again I'll have to seriously consider turning off comments, which would be a shame, but my tolerance just won't extend to deleting a series of spam tsunamis.

Posted by alan at 09:30 PM | Permalink

I've been following with interest the various conversations on the meanings of 'open' and 'free' as applied to software, following on from a posting on Groklaw, and spilling over onto Simon Phipps's and Geoff Arnold's blogs. The original trigger for all this kerfuffle was a slightly dubious article on EWeek, which according to Simon Phipps was largely fabricated to make it look contentious. The Groklaw thread contains the usual quota of Linux conspiracy theorist rantings, as evinced by the following fairly representative snippet:

I've expressed my opinion of these paranoid individuals in an earlier post, so I don't propose to rehash that again, I'll merely state that in any ecosystem monocultures are a bad idea, be it a Microsoft, Sun, IBM or even (Gasp!) Linux monoculture.

What I would like to say is that the increasing popularity and consequential commercialisation of Open Source is very much focused on the rights of those consuming OSS and not those producing it, and this has largely removed the attractiveness of contributing. Even the GNU philosophy statement is clearly slanted towards the interests of the consumer and not the contributor - as it says in only the third paragraph (the italics are mine):

A commonly repeated Open Source myth is that it is all 'Free', be that 'free as in beer' or 'free as in speech'. Well it isn't. The GNU GPL certainly doesn't fit my definition of 'free' as in 'completely unencumbered', it places some significant constraints on what I can and can't do with GPL software. I'm not saying that the restrictions are unreasonable, but to pretend that GPL == Free is disingenuous at best. It's also indispuitable that the GNU crowd are pushing a political agenda, which may have been appropriate at one time when the Open Source movement was starting up but I'm far from persuaded that it is still appropriate. However like many radicals who have defined themselves by the presentation of their argument rather than it's content and goals, they seem unable to recognise that things have changed and they should therefore do the same. The other myth is that Open Source is zero-cost. Again, this is palpable nonsense. Most people who develop Open Source software are either doing it with the tacit agreement of their employers, or are doing it in their own time - neither of these are 'free' in my book, and that follows right the way through the entire Open Source food chain. Open Source is a bit like the UK National Health Service - it's free at the point of delivery, but one way or another we all have to pay for it in the end.

When the Free Software/Open Source communities first began to evolve there was an important attractor to them that seems now to be mostly ignored - not only was the software free, but individuals were free to contribute, and the community was open to all. Generally people joined an Open Source community because they couldn't scratch their particular itch any other way - either because their employers didn't provide them an environment in which they could contribute in the way they wanted to, or to get access to a peer group that would have otherwise been inaccessible to them. I remember when I began to contribute to the perl community - at the time I was in a job where I didn't have the opportunity to write code, and I got a real kick out of working with a group of peers, and in fact I still do. However the fact that large amounts of money are now washing around the Open Source world means that I for one would think very long and hard about becoming involved in anything else, when the Venture Capitalists might appear around the corner at any time - witness the MovableType fiasco that I've discussed in earlier posts. I don't think I'm alone in this, I've heard similar sentiments from my friends. Even the perl community has it's share of 'professional pundits' who see it as a quick and easy way to make a name for themselves, but by and large their opinions are only valued by those outside the community - we all know who they are, and how much they really contribute. Nobody minds people who have put a large investment getting something back, but people who take and don't give are generally treated with the scorn they deserve.

One example of the way the old 'grass roots' spirit is fast disappearing is the O'Reilly Open Source Conference. This actually started as the Perl Conference, but over the last few years it has become nothing more than a huge PR vehicle for the various Open Source pundits to read out a stream of press releases to the adoring Open Source wannabees. Rather than being a a chance for grass-roots folks to get together, the whole thing has become completely dominated by the various big-business backed agendas. The last one I went to in San Diego had the not-very-edifying spectacle of RedHat handing out fedoras to everyone who was going in to one of the conference sessions that Microsoft was holding - pretty pathetic really. And if I look at the list of featured speakers for this year's conference it is dominated by CTOs, VPs and managers - people who by and large are only capable of talking about Open Source rather than doing. Several of the people I know in the perl community now don't bother with OSCON, unless someone is paying for their ticket. In fact some of my colleagues went to OSCON last year, and when they came back I was asked in all seriousness if perl was dying, as there were so few perl people there. The answer is no, we've all gone elsewhere, for example the most excellent YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference) series of self-organised grass-roots conferences. I went to YAPC/EU last year both to do the perl-related stuff and to hang out with my friends, and I'll be going to the conference in Belfast again this year for the same reasons - I certainly won't be going to OSCON if I can avoid it.

The current Open Source boom grew out of an unique set of circumstances, however I'm not sure that they actually exist any longer. Oh for sure the software that it has already given birth to will continue, but I just wonder how many of the quiet folks in the background who have put in the herculean efforts necessary to give Open Source life will be prepared to contribute to the new projects which must follow if Open Source is to survive. Big business has latched on big time, and I doubt that corporations with shareholders on their backs are going to be happy in the long run trusting their corporate family jewels to a load of scruffy geeks. It's quite amusing to see people scrambling over each other trying to be the 'Acceptable corporate face of Open Source', but by and large the people doing this aren't actually the ones who are producing the aforementioned Open Source - and if I'm the kind of person who has the skills to contribute and who enjoys working with others and doing cool stuff, why on earth would I be interested in helping out the leeches who just want to make a name for themselves off of my efforts? Any organism that carries too high a parasite burden will eventually succumb, and I fear the Open Source movement is rapidly reaching that point - a dead man walking.

Open Source is dead, long live Open Source.

Posted by alan at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (1)

Having recently being on the receiving end of a particularly nasty piece of unprovoked and downright abusive flaming on the #perl IRC channel, I decided another spoof book cover would be cathartic, so here it is.

Before I get even more flames directed at me, let me quite clearly state that I have nothing against Linux, it is very good at what it does, and is all the more remarkable for being developed by a large cooperative group of altruistic people.

However what I can't abide are the clueless individuals who seem to have adopted Linux as some sort of surrogate religion. It seems to me that the most vocal of these misguided bigots have often never contributed anything to any open-source project. They are quite happy to take advantage of the work contributed by others without giving back anything to the community - but then again, most of them probably don't even have the ability to contribute in a constructive way anyway.

I've observed that these people generally seem to have a common set of dogmas:

• Nothing existed before Linux.
• Everything of any importance was invented by Linux.
• Everything that is not Linux is Evil.
• There is a global conspiracy which is striving to destroy Linux.
• Anyone who actually earns their living writing software is a pawn of an Evil Empire.
• World domination and the destruction of the Evil Empires is the destiny of Linux.

In the real world these people would be prime candidates for psychiatric treatment, but in the alternate reality that these people exist in, this behavior is considered to be "normal".

As I said, I have no gripe about "Linux the OS", just "Linux the religion".

There, that's my little rant over - I feel much better :-)

Posted by alan at 10:52 PM | Permalink

As a result of the torrent of spam I've been receiving from the Sobig.F virus, my tolerance for spam is at an all-time low. Like most people I get my share of 'medical' spam, offering products to increase, decrease or otherwise modify various parts of my anatomy. In the past most of these have gone to an email address I have kept for web use and were therefore easy to catch, but I'm now starting to get them on my primary email address as well. I therefore decided to whip up a procmail recipe to deal with them, using a list of keywords and procmail scoring. However, as I soon learned, the spammers have tried to prevent you doing this by obfusticating the contents of the spam. They do this by sending out HTML-format emails, and obfusticating the HTML so that a simple keyword match won't work. However, with a small perl script and a little bit of procmail magic, this was easily circumvented. I've written this up because I think it show some useful and underused features of both perl and procmail. If you are interested, read on.

Continue reading "Procmail and obfusticated spam" »

Posted by alan at 05:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I've been away on holiday for the last two weeks, and when I got back on Saturday I tried to access my email at work - big, big mistake. I have some procmail filters that catch most of my spam and put them in a seperate folder. This filled up with 2Gb (!) of spam - mostly Sobig.F, then procmail wrote another 2.5Gb of spam into some other files for good measure (filling up the filesystem containing my home directory) and then started to dump everything in my inbox - which also filled up to 2Gb. When I tried to open my inbox, the IMAP server blew a fuse and started dropping 2Gb copies of my inbox on the mailserver, which also filled up - then nobody in my office could use email either. Fortunately it was the weekend, so with the help of a friendly IT support person I managed to unclog my home directory and inbox, leaving me with the mind-numbing task of wading through the 35,000 messages that had ended in my inbox.

After the immediate panic was over I started monitoring the incoming stream of spam. Nearly all of it is Sobig.F or the consequential email bounces caused by it - I'm getting about 1/2Gb of spam (about 6000 messages) a day, which is absolutely ridiculous. Nicholas Clark, a friend of mine, has received over 100,000 copies of Sobig.F since the outbreak started, yet we are told the outbreak is not all that bad!

The direct spams are bad enough, but the bounced emails are the last straw. One of the nasty traits of Sobig.F is that it forges the 'From:' line in the virus-laden emails it spews out. Why do all the people who set up email filtering insist on sending back bounce messages, when 99% of the time the 'From:' address is incorrect? This widespread practice is pointless and only increases the amount of crap clogging up everyone's bandwidth and mailboxes.

Anyway, if anyone else out there in spamland uses procmail, the following recipe will catch Sobig.F:

:0 HB
* ^X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000
* ^X-MailScanner: Found to be clean
* ^TVqQAAMAAAAEAAAA//8AALgAAAAAAAAAQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
* ^AAAA4AAAAA4fug4AtAnNIbgBTM0hVGhpcyBwcm9ncmFtIGNhbm5vdCBiZSBydW4gaW4gRE9TIG1v
Spam

Posted by alan at 10:03 PM | Permalink

Back in April, over the Easter Bank Holiday, there were a series of huge fires in the Peak District National Park. The biggest was on Bleaklow, which burned out 844 hectares of internationally important moorland. The upland areas in the Dark Peak are a rare habitat, raised blanket bog, of which the UK has a significant proportion of the worldwide total. I've included some pictures I took of the fire below. I know I've been really tardy in putting them up despite several other Rangers nagging me to do so, but I frankly wanted to avoid having to look at them.

Continue reading "Easter inferno" »

Posted by alan at 12:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Saturday was a miserable day, so rather than wandering the moors in the murk, myself and one of the other Rangers decided to be environmentally friendly and do a litter pick - what a mistake.

We started in the truck layby on the A628 just down the valley from the Woodhead tunnel entrance, and ended up filling 15 bin bags, plus pallets, plus three lorry tyres. We then moved on to the car park by the Blacks but we only managed to fill five bin bags there. People would have to drive all of about 300m off the road before littering, so I suppose that explains it.

As a result of my endeavours I made some observations, learned some things I would rather not know, and have some questions I'm still puzzling over:

• Empty beer cans are irresistible to mice, but unfortunately once they get in, they can't get out.
• Empty beer cans at the right angle collect rainwater.
• Mice, empty beercans and rainwater make an interesting mix. Tip the can and the fur comes out first, followed by the tiny blue, bloated, decomposing bodies, all topped off by the most revolting stench I have ever experienced.
• Big Macs must taste better cold. I can find no other explanation for the crop of discarded cartons 25 miles from the nearest McDonalds.
• There is someone in the UK who is stupid enough to drive to a layby miles from anywhere and then throw their car keys into the undergrowth.
• A child somewhere in the UK has lost all their schoolwork for the last five years.
• Mandy from Leeds, does your Mum know what your 'modelling' career actually involves?
• There are at least half-a dozen women in the UK who have lost some underwear. The same doesn't appear to be true of any of the men.
• Disposable nappies left exposed to the elements bloat up to about the size of a football.
• Most people who litter prefer Orange Tango.
• Coke left exposed to sunlight goes a colour reminiscent of urine - at least I assume that the label on the bottle was correct.
• Some people are very tidy-minded, they gather up all their litter, put it into a bag, tie it up and then throw it neatly into the countryside.
• Don't pick up unidentified tied-up plastic bags - somebody may have used them as an impromptu toilet.

Posted by alan at 10:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

On the basis that anything that generated such a number of completely polarized reviews on Amazon had to be worth a look, I spent some of my Xmas book tokens on a copy of Micahel Moore's book Stpuid White Men.

Continue reading "Stupid White Men" »

Posted by alan at 11:23 AM | Permalink

Partly prompted by the fact that the cruddy old version of Netscrape I was using wouldn't render the default Moveable Type stylesheet properly, I finally took the plunge and switched to mozilla 1.2.1, at both home and work.

Continue reading "Mozilla is a gorilla" »

Posted by alan at 10:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)