Toblog

I’ve recently had to upgrade from XenCenter 4 to XenCenter 5 and after the upgrade the console tab was not working: it was just a blank grey window.

After a bit of googling around archived forum posts I found out that the solution is:

1. Uninstall the upgraded XenCenter
2. Rename (for backup purposes) your home directory\Application Data\anything to do with Citrix or Xen
3. Reinstall XenCenter

Today is Open Rights Group’s third birthday. Most of you who read this will know that I care greatly (often to the point of apoplexy) about digital rights and personal privacy. ORG can somehow take all my pent up rage and manages to channel it into civil discourse and lobbying. This is important, both for my stress levels and for the nation as a whole.

As part of the celebrations they have published their 2008 Annual Report and for a slightly more casual approach this blog entry. Please have a read and if you aren’t already a member and have even the vaguest unease at the way our government is encroaching into ownership (and ongoing losses) of our personal data and online lives then give them your support.

Happy Third Birthday ORG!

According to The Register :

Identity checks will normally rely on the biometric data held on cards and passports rather than the National Identity Register

HA HA HA HA HA HA.

Noooo, that’s not going to be open to huge abuse. Not at all.

I predict a FAIL.

Can we please stop wasting much needed cash on this mess now?

The editor of CityA.M., Allister Heath, is right on the money this morning in his editorial. They need to fix their site so with a bit of googling it can be found. I recommend you all read it in its entirety but here is the most important part of it:

The role of US politicians in creating this crisis has been scandalously under-reported: well-meaning, progressive policies to increase home ownership rates, especially among the poor, were the second most important reason for the credit crunch (the first was excessively loose monetary policy by central banks).

As Russell Roberts of George Mason University has shown, the rot started in 1992. Congress convinced Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the quasi-government agencies that underpin the US mortgage market, to boost their purchases of mortgages going to low income Americans.

I would add that Gordon Brown is complicit in our economic downfall as well with his constant bolstering of the property market in the UK. His initiatives such as key worker loans and buy-to-let mortgages are market manipulation. Whether he introduced these misguided policies out of the goodness of his heart or with an eye on political endorsements from the Daily Mail “house prices are everything” crowd I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader…

UPDATE: 16:40 Eric Falkenstein makes a similar point.

UPDATE: 2008-10-20 15:00 The Washington Post agrees.

From those wonderful people at Warp films about Chris Morris’s latest project:

Dear Lion

At the moment the detonator’s going off and you’re part of it but until the effect has gone exponential, your mails are being sorted by one person so bear with me.

Many people have asked us exactly what the Four Lions project is.Clearly we can’t launch the film before its been shot, but I’ve pulled together a few paragraphs from the paperwork that’s been flying around.Its shamelesshype but its accurate – unlike almost everything you will have read in the press. No one who has read the script could disagree with a word here. In three years of research, Chris Morris has spoken to terrorism experts, imams, police, secret services and hundreds of Muslims. Even those who have trained and fought jihad report the frequency of farce. At training camps young jihadis argue about honey, cry for their mums, shoot each other’s feet off, chase snakes and get thrown out for smoking. A minute into his martyrdom video, a would-be bomber looks puzzled and says “what was the question again?” On millennium eve, five jihadis set out to ram a US warship. They slipped their boat into the water and carefully stacked it with explosives. It sank.

Terrorist cells have the same group dynamics as stag parties and five a-side football teams. There is conflict, friendship, misunderstanding and rivalry. Terrorism is about ideology, but it’s also about berks. Four Lions is a funny, thrilling fictional story that illuminates modern British jihad with an insight beyond anything else in our culture. It plunges us beyond seeing these young men as unfathomably alien. It undermines the folly of just wishing them away or alienating the entire culture from which they emerge.It understands how terrorism relates to testosterone. It understands jihadis as human beings. And it understands human beings as innately ridiculous.As Spinal Tap understood heavy metal and Dr Strangelove the Cold War, Four Lions understands modern British jihadis.

As for your offer, we’re hoping to set up a one click pay scheme soon. We’ll let you know.

Hope that helps

Deirdre Steed.

PS Please pass this on to ten more people.

If you feel like assisting such a noble effort then send fundingmentalism@warpfilms.com an email and they’ll add you to their list.

...please stop trying to shore up the property market. Don’t you realise that your previous form on this is one of the reasons that we’re here in the first place?

It would be much appreciated by all of us with an eye on the long term.

Thank you.

Ascension Productions has been busy again!

Here’s the myspace video for The King Blues latest track My Boulder:

My Boulder

(link)

Reason #1:

For those of you that prefer imperial measures:

For those of you that are concerned about safety: we always made sure we had plenty of time to brake in case a car changed lane in front of us.

Reason #2:

The below image was just posted on the Open Rights Group mailing list (you are a member aren’t you?) and I think it’s perfect:

The original seems to have come from the BrokenTV weblog (who will soon be joining my blogroll) here. They have a follow up here and have kindly linked to a larger version of the follow up too, if you feel like distributing it…

I’ve bought the blogroll back since it disappeared during the upgrade. It’s now generated from my google reader opml feed which I export and run though some ruby which means it’s going to be up-to-date more frequently.

Here is the code that takes the opml and outputs the html fragment:

#!/usr/bin/ruby

require 'rexml/Document'
require 'pp.rb'

class FeedData
  attr_accessor :name, :url, :category

  def initialize( name, url, category )
    ( @name, @url, @category ) = name, url, category
  end
end

class FeedDataList
  def initialize()
    @array = Array::new
  end

  def add( name, url, category )
    tmpFeed = FeedData::new( name, url, category )
    @array.push( tmpFeed )
  end

  def eachCategory
    catArray = Array::new
    @array.each do |feed|
      if !catArray.member?( feed.category ) then
        catArray.push( feed.category )
      end
    end

    catArray.sort.each do |result|
      yield result
    end
  end

  def eachItemInCategory( category )
    @array.each do |feed|
      if feed.category == category then
        yield feed
      end
    end
  end
end

def parse_opml( opml_node, feeds, parents_names=[] )
  opml_node.elements.each('outline') do |element|
    if element.elements.size != 0 then
      feeds = parse_opml( element, feeds, parents_names + [ element.attributes[ 'text' ] ] )
    end
    if element.attributes['xmlUrl'] then
      feeds.add( element.attributes['title'], element.attributes['htmlUrl'], parents_names.last )
    end
  end

  return feeds
end

opml = REXML::Document.new( STDIN )
feeds = FeedDataList::new
feeds = parse_opml( opml.elements['opml/body'], feeds )

feeds.eachCategory do |category|
  print "<br /><strong>#{category}</strong> "
  feeds.eachItemInCategory( category ) do |item|
    print "<a href=\"#{item.url}\">#{item.name}</a> "
  end
  print "\n"
end

To make it work:

$ ./opml2html.rb < 

I got the inspiration for the recursive opml parsing code from the Dekstop blog, so thanks are due to them!