I've had an interesting time with environmental awareness, concern and/or action over the last couple of years. I am, basically, a believer. We do everything a western family realistically can to reduce our footprint - we recycle, use cloth nappies and "green" light bulbs. Over the last few months I've begun wondering exactly how much of our environmental panic is for real. Certainly there are some truly stunning environmental catastrophes taking place round the world right now but there is also some fudging of figures and (knowing the scientific establishment) some somewhat desperate scrabbling for research grants. Hmmm.

So in the middle of this someone takes a hugely fast offshore powerboat and starts shining lasers in the eyes of a ship's crew and throwing stink bombs on the deck. Regardless of your feelings on whaling this is both not-exactly-friendly and in clear violation of international law. Then yesterday there's finally collision between a Japanese whaling vessel, the Shonan Maru, and said offshore powerboat and both sides come out shouting "wahhh wahhh wahhh" as you might expect - the crew of the Ady Gil claiming they were rammed and the Japanese whalers showing video evidence to the contrary.

And it is to the contrary. The video starts with the Ady Gil dead in the water and maybe 20-30 degrees off the starboard bow of the Shonan Maru. As it approaches the Japanese fire water cannons on to the Ady Gil and after a few seconds the crew of the Ady Gil engage their engines and accelerate forward into the path of the ship. Crunch. The still above shows the Ady Gil just before the collision - note the significant wake from both the engines (showing power was applied) and the hull itself (showing the craft was moving at the time). Idiots. The reverse view from MV Bob Barker (standing off at a sensible distance) shows the Shonan Maru not exactly holding a steady course, either but it does show that the Ady Gil covered a good 2-3 boatlengths in just a few seconds - something that the captain of the Shonan Maru would not have been able to avoid under any circumstances.

It pisses me off. There is clearly no need for whaling and it's just another example of mankind doing frankly immense damage to the planet but Sea Shepherd's actions are exactly the kind of pitiful toss the environmental cause does not need to be associated with. Idiots.

Because Steve Ballmer never creates a half-arsed clone, never, Microsoft are supposed to be unveiling a "slate PC", ahhh, tomorrow. Bags I call it "Zune PC".

Wing sails were starting to become news while I was a budding naval architect. Initially they were being used by the crazies doing the "Little America's Cup" in C-class catamarans, the technology was used in the infamous "Cat and Dog" America's cup by Stars and Stripes and by the time I left the field, the speed sailing record was held by a wing sail boat - Yellow Pages Endeavour. They always held a lot of promise, but the main promise was one of almost unending maintenance and vast vast expense, particularly if one were to capsize.

So I was a little surprised to hear that BMW Oracle are now running a wing sail on their 90ft square trimaran. Built by two Kiwis, no less. I mean, gawd, look at that thing - 190ft tall (80% bigger than a 747 wing) and presumably almost entirely carbon fibre. And what an entirely beautiful boat. I so want a go :)

The page you're looking at was served by a tiny 256MB VPS slice (that can obviously grow with the addition of some money) that also performs a number of other tasks some of which are quite important. One of these important tasks is to run a Django download, authentication, billing, licensing, media serving (kinda) and other-important-stuff server whose performance was beginning to bother me. The root of these performance issues appeared to stem from not really having enough Apache processes around and while I might like to use the worker mpm module to get static file performance basically the same as trendy webserver du jour I can't because while Django is threadsafe (and the wsgi gateway positively embraces them) the situation with php5 is cloudy at best and, in fact, Debian enforces a "no multi-threading php" rule by yanking libapache-mod-php5 whenever you try to install apache2-mpm-worker. Bad nerd, no biscuit.

Hence the murky world of fastcgi awaits. Thankfully I found this somewhat tasty how-to for running php5 under fcgi on Debian including suexec'ing the user that the php5 process is run under and with some more-or-less following of the instructions (notably limiting myself to just one php process - it's not like it's actually all that important after all) we now have it whizzing along nicely. In the tradition of all amateur benchmarks I shall declare the resulting application to be "snappy" and get back to the serious business of what I was supposed to be doing.

But in all seriousness, Apache2's worker MPM is a thing of beauty if you can make use of it. And there is absolutely no need for a separate "special" webserver for serving static files - it's all bullshit.

We still have this daft thing with >600cc paying more but we're down to sub-Arab-prince levels once again: $426 instead of $745, up from $252 so still nearly double. 50cc scooters, probably the most environmentally friendly form of transport that doesn't involve some fat bloke shoving his arse against yours, are still getting it in the face with the rate going from $59 to $129. Yeah, more than double.

The >600cc thing is daft. There are, out there, plenty of 650 singles (adventure bikes, generally) generating perhaps 40hp max. There are also loads of 620 v-twins in Ducati Monsters (60hp) and the 650 parallel twin used in the ER-6 and Versys (70hp) will also attract the higher tax rate. In the cheaper bracket you can still get a Yamaha R6 - 120hp odd and a machine designed entirely to go very very fast. So as a way of discriminating it doesn't work very well and is clearly the work of some daft pencil pusher. FWIW I'm 675 and probably about 95hp.

Hate it. But I can live with it. Still won't be voting for National.

The feature set was off the mark but it appears our usability is good - I just got this from the CTO of a web development company:

iShowU is so quick to use that the easiest way to show a client how a new feature works is to send them a screencast of it.

That's kind of mindblowing.

Heh. Awesome.

Unbelievably the government have hired someone publicly against the "anti-smacking" law to conduct a three month review on how the law is working in practice. His conclusion: that the law works fine and that Family First (the leading pro-child-beating group) have been telling porkie pies when they make claims of ordinary parents being turned into criminals...

The claim: A father claimed he shook his rebellious 15-year-old daughter on the shoulder to get her out of bed after she sneaked home at 4am.

The report says: Police responded to a call from a 15-year-old girl that she had been punched at least three times in the face.

Aaaaha.

Google now run a public DNS service. The addresses are 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

A short article from MIT about DFT, what it is and how it works.

Kurt Greenbaum is a B-league commentator for a website you wouldn't have heard of unless you live in an somewhat bland city in America. He remained this entirely unexceptional human being until a week or so ago when someone placed a comment he didn't like on one of his articles. A website-you've-never-heard-of staffer sees the comment and deletes it - being what you should do. However, it gets posted again and our man decides to go postal - tracks down the commenter's IP (because reverse DNS was working so no rocket science there), rings his workplace and gets him fired.

Now, other than being a complete overreaction to gosh not being taken seriously as a blogger of only marginally greater relevance than (say) me, this is in violation of the legally binding ToS for the site and just about every piece of Internet ethics, ever.

So let's do our part. Let's ensure the words "Kurt Greenbaum" are forever associated with being the least competent "director of social media", ever and that the next words spoken to him in a place of employment are "Yes, I would like fries with that".

Of course I went.

The National party came in on a platform of lower taxation. First thing they do that actually affects me is to treble my ACC levies. $500/yr extra, post tax so more like $800/yr pre. This takes my bike registration fees to around $900/yr - getting beyond what I can reasonably pay for such a wholly egotistical piece of transport. Realistically this means I need to sell the bike, wearing a huge loss because the market price of bikes over 600cc has just plummeted for a very "Adam Smith" reason, and buy a car. Another car. To make traffic worse, block up the road and prevent you from getting from A to B.

Bastards. No more bike. Thank you government. I won't be forgetting.

A Commodore 64 emulator that includes real time visualisation and modification of the memory and graphics chips. That is so cool. I am such a nerd.

This report from Cenzic appears to be a well researched and generally speaking fine piece of work. Of note:

Of the Web vulnerabilities, Web Browser vulnerabilities comprised eight percent of the total vulnerabilities found, and Web servers comprised two percent. Vulnerabilities in the code of commercial Web applications was 90 percent of the total Web related vulnerabilities.

It aint apache, it's you.

I had no idea:

>>> import turtle
>>> turtle.forward(100)

Really. Pops open a window and does the ol' LOGO thing right there. Nice!

You said I'd get a tax cut. Instead my ACC levies trebled.

The thing is that this isn't about bikes, bikers or what's fair. It's about the ACC being founded on a principle of shared risk. It's not, and was never supposed to be an insurance company. Besides, this crap is the thin end of the wedge. They don't want bikers, it's just we're the easiest target (yeah, how's that going for you Mr Key?). They want the really expensive stuff - people that play netball or rugby and especially home DIY'ers. Yeah, completely unqualified people with circular saws - are we really surprised it costs $600M/yr?

Dammit. Labour are going to just walk in at the next election.