Amazon sea freight fail

I like Amazon.

Good service, generally a great company to deal with.

But somehow I managed to buy a some stuff recently and click the sea freight button.

Don't do that.

First off its painfully slow. But then theres the damage endured by the package.

Either the ship was attacked by pirates, or the shipboard soccer team kicked the package around the deck.

Miraculously - probably due to all the airbags the damage to the book inside was minimized - but it was far from unscathed - note the apparent moisture damage and dog-eared corner.

Sigh.

I doubt I will take advantage of Amazon's return policy - the book is readable, and I don't have the time to parcel it up and send it back.

But next time - air freight thanks.

Cursed comment spam

"I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. i thought i would leave my first comment. i don't know what to say except that i have enjoyed reading. nice blog. i will keep visiting this blog very often."

Sounds very genuine doesn't it. "My first comment". Makes you feel very - touched. How nice.

A search for this phrase on Google returns 249, 000 matches.

This. Exact. Phrase.

So despite the fact that it got past the Google comment anti-spammer check, it is not a real comment.

I don't know if this is a script, bot, virus or just a plain army of low paid turks. Whatever, it is very annoying.

I went looking at some of the 249,000 victim websites.

Many that I looked at had this exact "post" inline with many other actual real posts.

In some cases the website owners/original posters had responded back thanking "Elaina" or whoever for their thoughtful comment.

The author of the original article and the other commenters likely have no idea in all of those 249,000 cases.

The weird thing is that for a fairly sophisticated exploit, the website the URL's are pointing to are very plain - they seem to follow this pattern:

• a basic looking wordpress site with 2-3 posts
• no real obvious google-traps, or large collections of advertisements
• commercial sort of angle, real-estate and so on - but no immediate money spinner
• site purportedly run by a single person, with a personal profile
• some javascript links all looking to have something to do with Wordpresses K2 sidebar
  

My current theory for what is going on is that the captcha's are being beaten by a "Turk" type setup.

It could work like this. I want to promote my dodgy website, and pay a service called "Evil Promotions" that promises to raise it up in Google rankings.

The service recruits a small army of low paid workers - or perhaps they are paid in kind with gambling credits or pornography. The workers log into a web interface on "Evil Promotions" website and click a button.

Behind the scenes Evil Promotions run a set of scripts that go around millions of websites, looking for ones that have a comment facility.

Then the automated script finds such "Victim" websites, in their hundreds-of-thousands and it "clicks" on the buttons and makes a post. The script drops the very human sounding text above into the comment field.

The "Victim Site" sends back a captcha - an image with some distorted text, which only a human could read - the script passes the captcha on to the workers via Evil Promotions website. The worker types the response to the captch and clicks a button.

The Evil Promotions script sends the captcha response back to the victim website, which faithfully logs it as a human comment.

The worker just types responses, and clicks, over and over again, never seeing the websites that the responses are going to. I don't know what they could get out of such mindless repetitive work, but I hope for their sakes its worth it.

To me, if I'm half right, the whole thing stinks.

A low act.

Now - I have had an idea - maybe I can fight back. I just left comments on two of the websites I found, explaining what I just found. I asked the authors to do two things:

• delete the comment
• contact two other sites that had been spammed and suggest they do the same

Lets see what happens.

Lighting in D&D

For ages the rules in Dungeons and Dragons about lighting and concealment have driven me mad.

Not only are the details around these critical elements of the classic pencil-and-paper roleplay game spread throughout the players handbook in sections on stealth, perception and combat - but also in the latest 4th edition rules new errata sections released by Wizards of the Coast have changed how the rules work.

Now I finally understand.

So I have written a lengthy and carefully detailed article about the subject.

It includes:

• details on portable light sources and how they work in the game
• explanations of how the 4th ed errata affect the rules (and where to find the errata)
  
• an explanation of hiding and how it works in combat
• tips for DM's on how to run games where light, concealment and combat are involved

Hopefully it sheds some light on this tricky area for those of you who were in the dark on it.

Roll a will save vs bad puns, or take 2d6 psychic damage...

Busway

This won't be news to my friends in Brisbane.

But over here the answer to the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transport rail service) is a thing called the Busway. 

A clean, ultra-modern, high-speed dedicated mass-transit system, it is built on clean running natural gas powered buses, like this Translink Transit Authority articulated bus.

I'm not normally one to pat the backs of the incumbent administration about anything, but I think all those in Brisbanes infrastructure teams, councils and bus administration should be proud of this hi-tech, environmentally sound and user-friendly mass transit system.

After living in Silicon Valley, home of high-tech everything, and traditional source of world leading transit systems like the BART and cable cars, it is great to see Brisbane leading out with a technology solution.

The buses themselves are a big part of the success of the busway.  Air-conditioned against Queenslands often stifling heat and humidity, they are typically clean, safe and comfortable.  Although not as quiet as an electric solution would be, the buses are flexible (literally in the case of the articulated bus) and can route around road-works or other problems that cause trains to stop in their tracks.

While trains can be electrified mass-transit marvels, often they are loud, inflexible and don't play nice with other linking transport systems. The BART in California and the VTA trains that it meets with are still noisy and create many eyesores. Certainly they get more folks out of car trips and using mass-transit, but while there I saw low utilization and lots of environmental impact.

The busway stands out because it mixes the best that rail can be - high-speed dedicated routes & customized large capacity low-emissions transports - with the best that road can be - flexible, resistant to disruption and well integrated with feeder transports and peripheral systems like bikeways, and pedestrian routes.

The shot above shows the busway station at Mount Gravatt in Brisbane Australia. Its immediately adjacent to a large shopping centre, but the buses fly underneath all the commuter and shopping vehicular traffic through fast tunnels, and then emerge to race down parallel with the freeway towards the city. Pedestrians can access the inbound and outbound lanes safely and quickly via overhead access ways that are at the level of the shopping centre.

Travellers with mobility issues can use a lift to get to the platform, and many buses can "kneel" providing level access for wheelchairs. In many cases buses can take bicycles on a front mounted rack.  Lockers are available also for bikes, with keys available from the Busway folks on request.

Ticketing really was the last piece of the puzzle to make this a breeze-on / breeze-off service. A proximity card holds a current balance, and the card can be updated via the internet, or at a busway kiosk. Zap the card when boarding and then again when leaving the bus - the fare is calculated and deducted with no hassles about pricing, figuring out your destination with the driver or fumbling for small change.

This also makes loading the bus much faster during commuter peak times.  Given the frequency of busway buses timetables are optional too.  Just rock up and jump on - in commuter times the electronic displays on the platform usually let you know you have less than 10 minutes to wait.  

Down at the Technology Park at Eight Mile Plains, one stop away from the one shown above, you can see a great testament to the success of the Busway. The park-n-ride areas are full of cars, even despite works recently that have seen the areas more than double in size. All those cars represent commuters who have been lured out of their one- or two-occupant vehicles, and who are travelling in highly utilized air conditioned comfort.

So until my electric car arrives, I at least have a high-tech transport solution that gets me there without a carbon footprint, and without getting hot and bothered.

Ikea Matter Transfer Service

As Jonathon Coulton points out in his great song, everyone knows how to furnish their home using Ikea:



So what's new?

Ikea also offers a great Matter Transfer Service!



In this shot an Ikea employee dispatches a load of furniture via the Matter Transfer Service.

How it works.

At the source location, you tear down your existing furniture by flogging it off on Craigslist, transferring its constituent parts into your bank account in the form of cash.



An Ikea furniture item travels thru time and space

At the destination on the other side of the planet, you simply visit the local Ikea store, streaming dollars out of your bank account into the Ikea machine.

At this point the exact same cabinet is reconstituted.

Amazing!

The weird thing is that you also wind up with a pot-rack, floor rug, and two lamps as well.

So clearly there's a few bugs.

Fighting green car FUD

Its amazing to me that the FUD spread by big oil and big autos around climate change and green car technologies actually continues to get recycled.  I'm talking about the bogus claim that electric cars are not green because they only use power from dirty coal fired power stations.

We've been through this stuff before when the tobacco industry tried to convince everyone that their product was not a toxic killer.

Filter cigarettes are lighter, and therefore OK to keep smoking, they said via pseudo-scientific sounding mouthpieces.  Anything to convince their public not to give up the fatal but profitable tobacco product.

Now no-one that still smokes cigarettes are in any doubt what the product is doing to their health, with all packets covered with grisly depictions of the medical hazards, and the net of legislation tightening to restrict its use even further.

Does anyone doubt that we have a crisis with climate change now?  I think there are no doubts here in Australia.

David Jones, the acting head of the National Climate Centre of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, says the recent heatwave conditions in south-eastern Australia, were related to climate change.

In this heatwave temperatures went up beyond 40 degrees celsius (104 fahrenheit) across 3 states. In Melbourne, Victoria the local morgue filled with victims of the heat.

"People will need to get used to these sort of heatwaves. As the climate heats up though this century, they are going to become much more common." says Jones.  The Bureau of Meteorology has a good summary of the reality of Global Warming and our role in it.

But incredibly we've still not learned to critically examine the claims of well-funded private sector "studies" when they support the exact line pedalled by big corporations.

The first of the FUD was the "Prius is less green than the Hummer" story.  This was back when folks were still laughing up their sleeves about climate change, and loved to seize on any chance to get one over the "greener than thou" Prius.

The story rested entirely on a "study" done by market research company CNW which never had any supporting science.  Most of their "research" was phone enquiries.

David Friedman, research director of the Clean Vehicles Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, says “This study has been completely contradicted by studies from MIT, Argonne National Labs and Carnegie Mellon’s Lifecycle Assessment Group. The reality is hybrids can significantly cut global warming pollution, reduce energy use, and save drivers thousands at the pump” (quoted in a recent article).

The latest FUD is this line that electric cars don't reduce pollution because they just use electric power generated by coal fired power stations. Incredibly this hogwash is getting traction amongst car fanciers here in Australia.

Here is the reality: if electric cars were introduced tomorrow across the USA, without any change to the way electricity is currently produced, a 27% reduction in pollutants would result.  This is from a Department of Energy Study - not from a market research firm.

Why is this so?

There are two main reasons - pretty obvious really:

• not all electric power is from coal fired power stations, already some power comes from clean sources such as hydro-electricity; and 
  
• electric cars are more efficient per trip than petrol cars
  

So there are immediate upfront gains.

But the real story comes from long term benefits.  There is no feasible plan to clean up the pollution coming from a billion exhaust pipes.  But there are plenty of ways to clean up the pollution coming from power stations.  

Carbon sequestration is science fiction right now.  As far as I know it is not currently possible to run a clean coal fired power station, despite the hopes for it.  Same as hydrogen fuel cells, and clean diesels.

But we have a range of other clean power generation options, and every saving made there is a saving in clean transportation when vehicles are electric.  This is real and available now.

There is no magic filter, to make our smoking exhaust habit healthy and clean.

But we can switch to non-polluting electric cars.  Lets stop believing the FUD.

We have lots more to worry about with climate change than the beach getting closer.  We are killing our world.

Lets start doing something about it.

Coolangatta++

Just spent a superbly relaxing and contemplative several days high above the beaches of beautiful Coolangatta in the south-east corner of Queensland.

A friend (thanks Mark!) had a couple of spots free in a time-share apartment over the New Year and invited us down.

We got out paddling on the golden sands, walked up to the monument on the dividing line between New South Wales and Queensland, and did some shopping in Pacific Fair.  Several mornings I got the red corpuscles moving with a swim in the pool on top of the building.

And I did lots of lounging about.  

From my comfy apartment bed I could look back to the green green bush of the Gold Coast hinterland, up the coast line toward Surfers Paradise, and around out to sea and the Coolangatta beaches.

And I could code.  :-)

While Ray munched several novels I spent several days reminding myself why I love and why I hate C++.  Of course I could not leave my laptop behind - at least I had no internet connection. So that's sort of like unplugging, right?

Battling with templates and code that would compile but not link, but eventually I made some progress.  Member methods with template arguments were not a good plan.  G++ seemed to get a nasty headache and generate some intermediate files I have never seen before.

Bit more cleaning up and I will submit this dogpile.  I think there must be some sort of rule that says XML serialization code has to look butt-ugly.  I really will have to write some unit-tests for DndTool to harness this beast.

In other news, I have just gotten a call from Nokia who have offered me a job at their offices in Brisbane.

I think that just about clinches it and it looks like I will be staying here, signing off from Google, and supporting Mr Smith while he spends time with his folks.

Wistfulness ensues.