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Painful experience to blog about later. Need to see if this works

-- Posted from my iPhone

Finally caved and bought blogpress

So I may have posted a while ago about my frustration with trying to blog from the iPhone. At any rate I made this aware to mate Dave someway or another because he emailed to let me know blogpress was releasing a free lite edition that worked with blogger! Woot!

Anyway. That wa around first September. Half way through month still no updates. Been checking app store but nothing. Anyway checked today and full blogpress edition was less than half price. Probably last ditch effort to get money out of folks before free version released, but at close to $1 could justify paying for it.

So here is first blog attempt. Everything smooth so far. If I start to blog more frequently you'll know it's working for me :)

Edit: had to use web front end to add labels to post grrr


-- Posted from my iPhone

Coles has self check in in Toowong!

Stepped into Toowong last night, and the checkouts have all been re-adjusted. They've taken out a couple of the shlowmo normal lanes and put in like 6 self checkouts. This is awesome! I've read about it in the States but doubted we would ever see it here in Oz.

With my job I tend to fly a lot, and I must say one of the coolest things Virgin Blue did is bring in the self service kiosks. Walk into airport, see the HUGE queue but a whole lot of empty kiosks. Since I travel without baggage, I can spend a couple of minutes checking in and done! I think the extra benefit is that those 2 minutes I'm engaged in doing something. Even if waiting in line for a couple of minutes, I'm shuffling along with nothing to do but wait for OTHER people.

People don't like waiting. You see this whenever someone takes a side street to avoid waiting at traffic lights. In my experience, the travel time often ends up longer avoiding the traffic lights, but knowing this I'm still a sucker for taking alternate routes to avoid waiting.

Getting side tracked with analogies on my analogies here :) I didn't actually try the self checkout the other day, but I will next time I'm in. There are friendly staff around there helping people so good time to try it out with the training wheels on. Just think how great this will be when you dash in during quiet times to buy a loaf of bread, and don't have to wait at the only open checking behind the lady doing her weekly shop!

Work unlocked blogger posts?!

So work used to allow us to read blogger blogs, but the url to create posts and comments was blocked. I think it was because *.blogger.com was blocked, which is used for creations, whereas *.blogspot.com was left alone by the proxy overlords.

So absentmindedly commented this morning, then realised I had access! woo! Not sure how long this will ask. Obviously must resist the urge to abuse, so keeping this post short and sweet and not bothering to spell check :P

Go cards, nice idea, poorly implemented

Acursed Go Cards!

This started as a reply comment to one of my previous posts, but as the ranting continued I thought it deserved its own post (especially since its so long since the original post).

So on the way home, Toowong train station is definitely one of the busiest 'off' stops. There is a pyramid set up where steps about 2 carriages apart both lead up to the same platform, and once up that platform, you must move to the single exit point like below:

|---|

X...|

|...|

A...B

|---|

Where X is the exit, A and B are where the two stair cases come up to the platform.

Anyway,X used to be a nice wide exit, which was great, as people would come up the two stair wells at the same time, and a steady stream of people could exit the station.

Now with Go cards, they have put go card 'barriers' up across this exit. There is small exit on the near side (close to A) of the exit, then next to that the barriers begin. Closest is a wide gate that is always open, then 3 or 4 narrow gates that only open when a go card is swiped. So what happens in practice?

For everyone exiting, the nearest exit is the non baricade exit. So those without a go card would prefer to exit there. Those with a go card that have to swipe then prefer the next closest exit, which is the open one that doesn't require a swipe.

So now when coming up the B exit without a go card, you have to cross a sea of people coming up from A and also B trying to get to that very narrow exit. If you can't make it there, you go the only other option, the open go card gate. If there are no go carders, you pass through quickly. But go carders pause and block the gate to swipe there card, so you get a backup.

The backed up line causes another person barrier to form, stopping any go carders from exit A from being able to get to other go card gates. So only the very few Go carders from exit B who have gone right early get a chance to use the narrow gates.

In general, you only see a few people using the narrow go card gates, and I've never seen anyone exitting from stair well 'A' use any of those narrow gates. These narrow gates take up half the previous exit space.

Now double the people are trying to fit through the left side of exit, and half of that space only allows oner person through at a time.

They took a very streamlined exit and screwed it up. Wish they'd looked at crowd dynamics. I choose to presume they were absolutely boneheaded in screwing this up, and it wasn't intentional to frustrate everyone into getting a go card.

Words to remember - Demonym

So I was watching a movie the other day (one of those set in WW2) and noticed that Jewish people were called Jews but German people were called Germans. Found it odd/interesting that in a few rare cases we have a different word between the generic adjective for things that come from a place, and the people that come from a place. I found I could distinguish the two by saying:

A [x] is [y]

So a Jew is Jewish

But a German is German.

Using this to stop myself getting context confused, I started running through different countries to try and figure out how often this occurs.

Australians are Australian, Americans are American, Canadians are Canadian. Seemed like most places I could think of were all boring and used the same variants.

Then I though to Great Britain and surrounds:

An Enligshman is English

A Scottsman (or Scott) is Scottish

An Irishman is Irish

A Frenchman is French.

Not as boring as being the same, but still pretty boring.

So I wanted to look this stuff up, but couldn't think what to look up.

Then stumbled across this on wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demonym

Turns out Demonym is the word for a name of a person derived from their location name. Quite interesting reading on that page, recommend it. For instance, sometimes the reverse is true, and a place is named after the inhabitants, such as Thailand. Never made the connection before that Thailand is the land Thais inhabit.

Anyway, found all this a while ago... then forgot the words demonym, so now i've posted it somewhere i shouldn't forget again!

One example of why government web filter would suck

Look at smaller examples to see how bigger ones work.

In many work places, internet filters are put in place to prevent access to things that shouldn't be allowed at work.  Obviously if you are going to look at certain things on a work computer you are an idiot, but blocking of some other 'time wasters' happens as well, so things like facebook and myspace get blocked.  At the end of the day if you really feel the need to look at something blocked, whether you believe it is rightfully blocked or not, you can view it on your personal internet when you get home.

Anyway, interesting thing is the false positives that happen.  The other day I was googling some semi-work related stuff to understand stress as an engineering/geological idea.  This lead me to wiki page on Buckling, which appeared oddly to be blocked by works filter.

Couldn't figure this out, but someone who had seen the filter rules said there was something in there to block "uck.in" .  Looking up uck.in when I got home, I saw that this is a site which provides lists of anonymous proxies, so understandably the kind of site you would want to block at work (where such proxies would allow you to bypass all works filters).  However the filter for "uck.in" does not just block the hostname.  This blocks any url with "uck.in" appearing anywhere in the address, be it the host, path, or part of the query string.

Confused about why uck.in would match buckling?  The filter list uses regular expressions.  In regular expressoin, a period is a wild card for ANY character.  So will match "uck.in" as well as "uckain" "uckbin" "ucklin" "uck?in" "uck/in" "uck5in" etc... you get the idea. 

A few days later, xkcd put up this comic: http://xkcd.com/537/ but the image would not display? What was going on?  The image was called duckling.png.  There's that nasty regex again, better block it!

So obviously there was a flaw in the filtering.  We raised a ticket with the relevant group in charge of the filter, pointing out how they had mistyped the pattern and were blocking extra content.  The response was "thanks, we'll take that as a suggestion", which effectively means we can't be bothered fixing it, you can't show you need access to a site for work purposes which is being blocked.

So the annoying part?  If during my day to day job I one day I hit a URL with that in it, how do I know if I need access to it?  It might have the exact answer to a problem I need, or it could be a bogus link trying to sell a product (this is what happens when googling for solutions).  It would be very hard to show that I do need access when I obviously can't no in advance what's behind that url.

So I can see the same thing happening with government filter.  They get over zealous, block extra content, but they have no motivation to fix it so why would they?  Once something is falsely blocked, how can you prove it is erroneously blocked when you cannot access it in the first place to prove their is no objectionable content there?

Many other examples of why government filter would suck, this is just one.