Neil Turner

Memory upgrade

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Today I finally got around to upgrading the memory in my Mac Mini. Since buying it last year it’s had 512 MB of RAM, which is fine for general computer-ry stuff (reading email, browsing the web, maybe running iTunes in the background) but lately it’s been used more and more for playing World of Warcraft, which is a very memory-intensive program. With it running, doing anything else on the system is, at best, difficult – switching between World of Warcraft and, say, Firefox takes a long time.

I ended up buying the memory from Crucial – I’ve bought from before and had no problems, and this time was no exception. I ordered the memory yesterday morning, and despite going for the free delivery and not the more expensive guaranteed next day delivery it still came today, which is excellent. Crucial also happened to be cheaper than buying Corsair memory from either Scan or Dabs, and I’d rather not have generic memory if I can avoid it.

The reason why I have been putting the upgrade off isn’t so much the cost aspect (which ended up at £85 for 1 GB of PC2700 DDR RAM), but the actual upgrade itself, and in particular taking the unit apart. It’s a very small unit and the case isn’t screwed on – you actually have to pry it open with a knife – I used a standard putty knife from Wickes. Because my unit also has Airport and Bluetooth, you have to then detach one of the antennae before then lifting the RAM out and inserting the new module. Thankfully, there are videos which explain this process – I really would not have bothered if I hadn’t seen it being done first. One thing I did do, however, was boot the computer before putting the lid back on and making it sure it worked – after going through all the effort of taking the machine apart I didn’t want to have to do it all over again just because the module wasn’t seated correctly, for example.

Thankfully, the upgrade worked, and now the Mac has double the memory to play with. It’s not a seismic difference in speed but it does feel snappier; still, my MacBook, with its Intel Core Duo processor, beats it when playing WoW. But not by quite so much.

Akismet and Data Protection

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In Britain, we have this law called the Data Protection Act, which dictates what companies and organisations can and can’t do with data about its customers, clients or employees. It basically puts a duty on organisations to ensure that a person’s data is kept private and cannot be compromised, that the person is aware if that data is being shared with third parties (and seek their permission if needed) and that the person is aware if data is to be processed in another jurisdiction, where data protection laws are not equivalent to this act. There’s more to it than that – Wikipedia goes into more detail and the full text of the act is here.

So how does this relate to Akismet, the spam-filtering web service that I conveniently mentioned in the title of this post? Well, I use Akismet on this site as a way of stopping spam (though to be honest it’s been largely redundant since I started using Comment Challenge). This site is based in the UK, and therefore falls under UK law, but Akismet is a US service, and right now every comment submitted (bar those from approved TypeKey and OpenID commenters) is being sent through it.

Though I haven’t yet got a privacy policy on this site – it’s something I’ve been working on now and again for some time – this does bring up some privacy implications. Without Akismet, the privacy policy would say something like this:

Upon submission of a comment, the details provided (name, email address, URL and comment), along with your IP address, will be stored in a database. Your comment will also be displayed publicly on this web site.

Any comments you have made can be removed at any time, by contacting the site owner and requesting their modification/removal.

With Akismet brought into the equation, we have to add the following:

The details you submit will also be sent to the Akismet service, for the purpose of identifying possible spam comments. Akismet is based in the United States of America and falls under the laws of the State of California. The details submitted will not be stored, unless the comment is marked as a ‘false positive’ (a legitimate comment which is automatically identified as spam) in which case it may be stored for some time for diagnostic purposes.

For more details, please consult the Akismet Privacy Policy.

Now I’m not a lawyer and my experience with data protection mostly comes from a university module that I took recently, so this is certainly not legal advice. But it’s something that I hadn’t thought about until reading an email from the Six Apart Professionals Network this morning.

Akismet is done by the WordPress guys and I’m sure they’re trustworthy, and it’s also not entirely fair to pick them out as this could be any other web service – it just happened to be the topic of conversation at the time. But while a few bloggers using it isn’t going to cause much of a kerfuffle, a big organisation could land themselves in hot water if they’re not totally upfront about what is happening to their users’ data.

It’s here

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The MacBook is here, and currently downloading about 10 system updates. Unfortunately, I have an exam in 3 hours so I can’t play with it much, but for now I can say the following:

  • Wow, it’s so small and light
  • The battery seems to be charging up really quickly
  • I really wish my Mac Mini had an Apple Remote

More later (including photos), after I’ve spent 2 hours sat in a room writing about internet security and encryption protocols.

The Un-Funny Truth about Scientology

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Screenshot of the Un-Funny Truth of Scientology

This was originally a guest post at Stupid Evil Bastard, re-posted here following that site’s demise.

If you have a few moments to spare, watch The Un-Funny Truth about Scientology over at YTMND. It’s a presentation showing how people’s lives have been affected by the Church of Scientology and how events have been covered up. If you were ever in doubt about just how cooky these people are, then this should confirm your suspicions. Beware of some disturbing images, however.

A sequel has also been published which details the Church’s reaction to it.

Things

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Thanks for all of the birthday wishes over the past couple of days – I had quite a good birthday but most of my presents aren’t coming until tomorrow. Not entirely sure what I’m getting but I think they will mostly be vouchers for driving lessons.

I’m having a brief experiment with Trackback. A while ago I removed the block of code that allows other weblogs to discover the trackback URL and post to it, in an effort to reduce trackback spam. This turned out to be very successful, making the trackback problem almost non-existent, however since then I’ve been getting almost no trackbacks at all which makes the feature almost useless. So I’ve re-added it, but now I’ll only be opening trackback on a handful of entries (with it off by default). I’ll see if I start getting more pings this way, or if the spam problem becomes intolerable again.

I’m looking at alternatives to trackback, such as getting data from Technorati and displaying a list of blogs that link to that entry, but I’d like to give trackback another chance before I give up on it.

Poorest Brits are healthier than Richest Americans

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This was originally a guest post at Stupid Evil Bastard, re-posted here following that site’s demise.

A study published by the American Medical Association shows that even the poorest Brits are healthier than the richest Americans:

Middle-aged, white Americans are much sicker than their counterparts in England, startling new research shows, despite U.S. health care spending per person that’s more than double what England spends.

A higher rate of Americans tested positive for diabetes and heart disease than the English. Americans also self-reported more diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, lung disease and cancer.

The gap between the countries holds true for educated and uneducated, rich and poor.

The study focused only on non-Hispanic whites and took factors like smoking, drinking and obesity into account – Brits tend to drink more heavily and more Americans are obese. It concluded that Americans tend to have a worse diet (eating more junk food) and took part in less exercise, but also that in Britain the primary health care provision was better, so that ailments were being picked up and treated earlier.

The media on both sides of the Atlantic constantly derides Britain’s state health care system but actually it does work nearly all the time, and studies like this show that.

British racist politician tries to justify his views on TV

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This was originally a guest post at Stupid Evil Bastard, re-posted here following that site’s demise.

Sky News, a 24-hour-news channel partly owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., held an interview with Dr Phill Edwards, the press officer of the British National Party (BNP) – a far-right political party. Though the BNP claims it is not racist, it is essentially opposed to all forms of immigration and several of its members have been taken to court charged with making comments which may incite racial hatred, which is a crime in the UK.

The video of the interview is here – in it, Edwards stands by comments made to a student in January 2005 where he says that young black people have low IQs and are likely to mug you, and that black people generally are not high achievers. Edwards has a PhD and he claims that black people are genetically disadvantaged.

It’s worth a watch.

Eve of Valentines

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Tomorrow is Valentines’ Day, and for once I’m actually looking forward to it. This is the first February 14th where I’ve been in a relationship, and so rather than sulking about the fact I’m still single, I can enjoy the fact that I’m not.

Because we’re both quite busy tomorrow with various things, Hari and I are not doing anything special tomorrow, though we are planning to go somewhere nice on Wednesday instead. Wednesday also has more significance to us since it’ll be 4 months since our first date. It doesn’t feel like 4 months but I suppose time flies when you’re in love.

(Feel free to throw up now if you like.)

We spent the weekend at my parents’ house in York. Saturday was spent shopping, where we bought lots of chocolate, hot chocolate, and meat (over 2.5kg of beef mince between us), and yesterday we went around the Yorkshire Museum.

The user experience of email encryption

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Matt Haughey has written about the poor user experience provided by email encryption. And in doing so he hits the nail on the head:

I’ve often heard prominent computer scientists lament the low uptake of email encryption — that in the age of many gigahertz machines we still send plain text to each other (usually) over non-secure connections. Every couple years, just for the sake of my personal freedom and curiosity, I make an attempt to try and use encryption for a few days. Every time I do this, I am disappointed.

Late last year, I installed GnuPG and Enigmail again to see if the experience would be much better than last time. It certainly has improved, but it’s got a long way to go. A newbie user would struggle to even follow these step-by-step instructions and it involves lost of commands in a command prompt window which really end users should not have to do. Even if you follow these instructions to the book, you will only have GnuPG set up for email – to use it for verifying and encrypting files or the clipboard contents you need to download other programs like WinPT and GPGee as well, and configure them. It’s a lot of work and not a whole lot of benefit, really. It’s a bit different with PGP as the interface is much better, but PGP is now a commercial product.

Someone needs to come up with some kind of security suite for Windows, which integrates with all common email programs (Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird and Eudora) and also Internet Explorer and Firefox, and provides a common user interface for working with GnuPG. There should be wizards for key generation and any complicated tasks and seamless integration with Windows Explorer, too. Is that so much to ask?

Cleaning out my closet

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Pile of old clothes

When I came home 3 weeks ago, it was the first time I’d brought most of my clothes back with me since Easter, during which time I’ve amassed additional garments. Trying to fit all of this in my drawers and wardrobe at home became somewhat of a challenge, so today I had a clear-out of clothes that I no longer wear or that don’t fit. This came to:

  • 7 t-shirts
  • 6 shirts
  • 3 jumpers
  • 5 pairs of trousers
  • 1 coat

These will all be going to a local charity shop sometime soon. There was another pair of trousers that won’t, on the basis that it had that many holes in it that it wasn’t really fit for anyone. That’ll be going to a textile bank for recycling.

I also found some clothes that I hadn’t seen for years which still fitted, including a pair of jeans that are probably 4 or 5 years old that fit almost perfectly. I’m guessing they get relegated to the back of my wardrobe because they were too big for me at the time, or because I was starting to lose favour with jeans in favour of khaki trousers with big pockets.

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