Yesterday, while listening to the speakers at the first day of NSConference, I managed to find the time to tidy up what I had and to make it build and run properly on Snow Leopard.
The code isn�t perfect � I can think of lots of things that need doing to get it to the stage where I�d want to use it myself in an app � and because it was started way back in 2005 and slowly tinkered with over time, I�m sure there�s plenty that could be tidied up too� but it does provide a lot of examples of using all kinds of Cocoa functionality, some of which is not so obvious until you�ve tried it once or twice.
Anyway, it�s available under an MIT-style license from Google Code.
]]>It would be very easy for the 3-D effect to become the centrepiece of a 3-D movie, but it seemed as if it was carefully thought out. Nice touches included the fact that some of the humans' display devices were themselves displaying images with depth and the various things floating in the atmosphere (including the Atokirina� and the dust after the destruction of the Na�vi Hometree).
The only thing really wrong with this type of 3-D right now is that you can�t focus anywhere other than where the camera is focused. Of course, fixing that is incredibly difficult, since you�d need to be able to adjust the focal length for specific areas of the image in the projector, not to mention adding the requirement of being able to film everything in every shot in perfect sharp focus in the first place.
Pandora itself is amazingly beautiful, particularly at night with all of the bioluminescence, and it really is difficult not to marvel at the amount of work that went into designing the lush and importantly believable landscape of the Pandoran forest and its native wildlife.
Anyway, it�s a wonderful film; let�s hope James Cameron gets to make a sequel. Let�s also hope that unlike the Alien series (which has been fatally marred by the awful Alien Resurrection, not to mention a certain amount of stupidity in the AvP films), the studio knows when to call it quits.
]]>The first one was a U.S. bank that decided it'd be a great idea to ask its customers to enter their Social Security Number into a web form on the Internet. U.S. citizens are understandably very wary about giving out their Social Security Numbers on-line, particularly on websites they don't recognise, and it also seems that the bank in question apparently hadn't mentioned to the cardholder that it might go and ask them for this information during a card payment transaction, resulting in a worried e-mail to us asking if it was some sort of scam.
The second incident involved a credit union that had told its members that it would never ask them to enter their credit union member number online. And then it did, in its 3-D Secure authentication form. Again, we get an e-mail asking us if it's some sort of scam.
Most of these problems seem to be due to inept security policies at U.S.-based card issuers. At the very least if you are going to enroll your customers' cards for 3-D Secure, you need to make sure they know what to expect when they see the Verified by Visa or MasterCard SecureCode boxes appear. Otherwise it's actually a major security risk, because someone could set-up a site that pretends to use VbyV or MCSC and asks for information like Social Security Numbers that can then be used for credit fraud.
]]>Then I spent the rest of the day doing customer support. We all do that at Coriolis Systems; it�s good that we software developers get involved with real customers and see what the real problems are with our products. All too often people are divorced from the actual customers because they have (sometimes layers) of customer support staff in between them and the real world. We don�t. The downside of that is that it can be a bit of a drag at times, dealing with yet another �I forgot my password�, �My e-mail address is wrong� query, punctuated with occasional customer angry that �we didn�t reply� (translation: they, their IT department, and/or their ISP are not competent to run a mail server, but are trying to anyway, and have cunningly configured it to ignore/junk/bounce e-mail from us).
Anyway, the remainder of yesterday was spent doing that. We always get a lot of mail to deal with on a Monday, because we don�t work weekends, but I really don�t like not making progress with whatever else I�m working on.
Today, on the other hand, was great. Made plenty of progress with what I�ve been working on. It still isn�t perfect (just checked it remotely, and it�s broken :-)), but it�s definitely getting there, which is good news indeed, as it means I�ll soon be back working on what I was doing before (both more interesting and more fun, quite frankly).
Also managed to do a load of housework when I got home, so that�s good too. Surprising how much work it is to keep on top of all the housework, but I really do love living in my new house :-) :-)
]]>POSIX semaphores currently don’t support this feature on OS X; nor do System V semaphores. Mach semaphores do support timeouts (see /usr/include/mach/semaphore.h), but it isn’t immediately obvious how to pass one to another process.
Anyway, I thought I’d stick together a simple Mach server to implement named semaphores; the idea is very simple… when you want a semaphore, you ask the server to create it for you, giving it a name. If it already exists, the server will simply return the existing semaphore object. If not, it will create a new Mach semaphore and return that.
Once you have the semaphore_t port value, you use it just as if you had called semaphore_create() yourself. When you’re done with it, you can use mach_port_destroy() to release the port in your own process. You won’t be able to destroy the semaphore using semaphore_destroy(), because your task doesn’t own it.
A few notes:
If you’re going to use this code directly in your program, please don’t change the .defs file without altering the definition of SEMSRV_SERVICE to a name that starts with your own reverse domain prefix. Doing that would break anything that uses this code literally as-is.
In a normal program, you probably want to try spawning the semsrv process in the background. If another program has already started the server with the same service name, your copy will fail, but that’s OK because you can just use the other copy.
The semsrv program doesn’t daemonize itself. This might matter to you, or it might not.
It’s possible that you might be interested in re-writing the server to use launchd so that it starts automatically and you don’t need to worry about point 2 (above). Note though that doing that will mean your program needs to install a suitable launch daemon property list, which might be more of a headache than it’s worth.
This code is only really intended as a sample, and has had limited testing. There is obviously no warranty or anything like that.
The code is in the Public Domain. It is not subject to copyright and therefore has no license. If you work for someone too stupid to understand the words Public Domain, you can simply slap a BSD or MIT license on it and carry on with what you were doing.
The code can be built by typing make at a command prompt after changing into its directory. It has a very simple (and not perfect) Makefile, but I can’t be bothered with anything more elaborate. You could add the files to an Xcode project instead if you wanted, in which case you’d need to make Xcode run mig if it doesn’t already know to do that.
To try a few simple experiments, build the code, then enter ./semsrv & at a Terminal prompt to start the server. You can then use the ./semtest program to try various things, e.g.
$ tar xjf semsrv.tar.bz2 $ cd semsrv $ make mig semsrv.defs cc -g -W -Wall -c -o semsrvServer.o semsrvServer.c g++ -g -W -Wall -c -o server.o server.cc g++ -g -W -Wall semsrvServer.o server.o -o semsrv cc -g -W -Wall -c -o client.o client.c cc -g -W -Wall -c -o semsrvUser.o semsrvUser.c cc -g -W -Wall client.o semsrvUser.o -o semtest $ ./semsrv & $ ./semtest create foo Created foo: 4099 $ ./semtest signal foo Signalled foo $ ./semtest wait foo Waiting for foo...done $ ./semtest get foo Got foo: 4099 $ ./semtest create foo Got foo (already exists): 4099 $ ./semtest destroy foo Destroyed foo
Obviously to test more interesting behaviour, you’ll want more than one Terminal window…
The code is in this archive file.
]]>The scam is hard for police or other agencies to investigate because the individual sums of money involved are very small.
I wonder if the political class or the general public realise the implications of this situation, or the true scale of the amount of money that goes missing, entirely without police investigation for the simple reason that the amount is “too small”.
Fairly recently, we had a purchase put through our website from a customer in Paris, France. This customer used someone else’s card to make the purchase, and the owner of that card was understandably irritated and complained to their card issuer who, under the card scheme rules, returned the money, which was subsequently recovered from us along with a so-called “chargeback fee”.
The account on our website was locked and the licenses cancelled so they couldn’t re-activate the software if they needed to at any point in the future.
Subsequently, the same person made another purchase, using an entirely different set of card details belonging to another third party, who also complained at their card issuer, who returned the money as before, recovering it from us and resulting in another “chargeback fee”.
It is entirely obvious that this person has access to multiple sets of stolen credit/debit card details. It is equally obvious that the total amount that is likely to be at stake is many, many times the amount of any individual purchase. Yet when we asked the police to look into the matter, we were told that the French police wouldn’t investigate because the sum of money was too small1.
It should be immediately apparent to anyone with half a brain that this attitude results in the perverse outcome that even large-scale credit or debit card fraud involving multiple small transactions in foreign countries, ideally spread across many online retailers, will go undetected and more importantly unpunished, while vendors (particularly of digital goods and services, where the losses are almost invariably passed on by the card issuer) are unfairly penalised for being the final victims of this fraud.
This amounts to nothing less than a license to defraud and is, quite frankly, a disgrace.
1 In reality, I suspect that it is not the police per se, but rather a diplomatic agreement between the U.K. and France that cross-border crime below a certain value will simply not be dealt with, since, as I understand it, such cases need to be funnelled through the respective diplomatic services — though I am hardly an expert in this and I could very well be wrong.
This isn’t exactly news as far as copyright holders are concerned. We’ve known for ages, because of the capricious and unhelpful way that ISPs act when we ask them to remove illegal copies of our material, that they are, on the whole, supporters of copyright infringement. They may not admit it, of course, but since it drives use of bandwidth, encourages customers to use their services and results in a net revenue stream for them, it’s pretty easy to see why they would support it.
It’s also interesting to consider the comments of Rupert Goodwins, one of ZD Net’s editors. Interesting because the press, particularly the dead tree variety, has also been largely pro-infringement—as long as we aren’t talking about their content, anyway. Predictably, therefore, Goodwins trots out the ISPs’ tropes about how expensive and impractical it will be, how it might infringe peoples’ human rights, how there isn’t enough evidence that it’s really harming peoples’ livelihoods and so on. He even at one point talks about ISPs having to “cut off their own customers… for no reason”. Not to mention implying that the changes to the proposals have something to do with Peter Mandelson’s meeting with David Geffen.
]]>Hows this for the NHS - My Dad had a heart attack 2 months ago, within 4 minutes the paramedics arrived with in 25 mins we were in A&E and within 2 hours he was on a specialist ward, life saved! - All this for Free, Oh forgot it must be Evil! - MURRRHAHAH!!
Since then I have been so impressed by the NHS and their staff, I have been applying for jobs with them, even on less salary than I currently am.
This is one Brit with pride in our NHS and its staff
john s, wigan
where the commenter appears to think that the NHS is free. It isn’t. It’s free at the point of use, but that just means that we pay for it through taxation.
And boy, do we pay for it. Government spending on health is listed in the 2009 Budget as £119bn, much of which is covered by the £98bn that was collected in National Insurance payments. National Insurance, for those who don’t know, is an over-complicated form of income tax that is paid by both employers and their employees so that the government can increase it by a notional 1% and actually get 2% extra (of your gross salary) in tax. It’s widely criticised (and rightly so) as being a tax on employment, and the excuse for its existence is that it’s there to pay for the NHS and the state pension scheme1.
But it’s very unlikely that the health figure on that graph includes payments related to debt interest on NHS-related projects, or the costs of PFI, all of which must come from somewhere (hint: that’s your pocket, stupid). See, for instance, this or this. Quite a chunk of the £28bn of debt interest payments shown in the Budget will relate to these kinds of things. There’s also a very suspicious £72bn of “Other” shown in the Budget…
Anyway, even if we believe the figure of £119bn (and I don’t know about you, but I’m skeptical that that number is the whole truth of it), the NHS costs us each around £2,000 per annum (or between US$3,000 and US$4,000 depending on exchange rates).
In reality, not all of the population pays National Insurance; it’s only paid by those in employment, and even then not everybody pays. The Office of National Statistics tells us that 28.93 million people are currently in employment, so the figure per working person is more like £4,000 per working person, per annum, assuming that everyone pays which I’ve already noted is not the case. (For the benefit of U.S. readers, that’s between US$6,000 and US$8,000 depending on exchange rate fluctuations!)
Of course, we can also look at this another way, which is to consider what “the man on the street” actually pays in National Insurance contributions, including his employer’s contribution (which, whether he knows it or not, comes out of what his employer is prepared to pay for him to work there).
According to average weekly earnings figures from the ONS, in May 2009, average weekly earnings were £440. Using the NI tables HMRC publishes, we can work out roughly2 how much someone on average weekly earnings pays £36.30 per week in Employees’ contributions, and a further £42.24 per week in Employers’ contributions that they usually don’t see (though it still effectively comes out of their pay, of course). That’s £78.54 per week, or a little over £300 per month. Or £4,000 per annum. Yes, that’s right, a person on average income has to pay over £300 per month for the NHS (that’s US$450 to US$600 depending on exchange rates).
So is the NHS free? No, it isn’t.
How does it compare with the U.S.? That’s a difficult question to answer sensibly and I’m not really going to attempt to do so here. But I note that here in the U.K. it’s quite likely that a family of four will have two parents out to work, especially if both are on average incomes (in which case the total NI contribution is around £8,000pa, or US$12,000-ish), while the National Coalition on Health Care estimated that in 2008, employers paid on average US$12,700 for a health plan for a family of four. Again, as an employee you may only be expected to front up US$3,400 of that, but the rest still comes out of what your employer is prepared to pay for employing you.
There are lots of other factors, of course. While the NHS theoretically provides dentistry and optometry and so on, in practice those are usually paid for separately. And I know in the U.S. there are excesses, limits and co-payments to worry about.
1 Astute readers may notice that I have omitted the cost of the state pension scheme from the following discussion. This is true, however:
2 Calculating the actual figures for National Insurance can be quite complicated, thanks to everything from bizarre and mathematically unjustifiable rounding through to the plethora of exceptions and special rules that apply in one case or another. Here I have simply multiplied the amounts between the thresholds by the percentage rates.
— people thought that what Google meant by “beta” was what everyone else means by “beta”.
on the basis of this from Google:
…particularly those who subscribe to the traditional definition of “beta” software as not being yet ready for prime time.
Thing is, that isn’t the “traditional definition” of beta. Beta simply means that the software is undergoing an external test period of some description. It doesn’t imply anything about quality, and it never did.
If the version that was released as a beta turns out not to have any major bugs, it’s entirely possible that that same code (albeit with the beta tag removed) will subsequently be released.
I don’t know where this whole “not ready for prime time” thing came from—though I’ve seen mention of it before elsewhere—but it’s simply not true.
]]>The developer, Hazeley Developments (tel. 01962 764500), is excellent, and in particular the project manager Simon Machola deserves some praise, both in terms of the specification and the attitude towards the development. If you have any need for new residential property, I would be quite happy to recommend their work.
Also, if you’re in the market for carpets or alternative flooring in the Southampton or Winchester area, I can thoroughly recommend Triad Carpets. I’ve been dealing with Ian and Kevin over at the Winchester branch, who have been nothing but helpful, in spite of my mucking them about a bit over the installation date for the remaining bit of carpet.
Not only did I have half their shop apart when I was originally choosing my carpets, but they went away and researched the best kind of underlay to use in my lounge (which has underfloor heating and therefore a tog limit). Plus, when installing the carpets originally, the builders found a water leak and so the carpet fitter very sensibly refrained from installing one of the bits of carpet (not something that would happen with some of the chains, I shouldn’t think) because of the amount of traffic through that area while he was there.
Anyway, it’s refreshing to find such great customer service, and they really know their stuff flooring-wise as well.
A few other things worth mentioning that I’ve bought and think are worth recommending:
Bosch BSG8PRO1 cylinder vac.
Expensive, but worth the money in my opinion. Even on half power, it’s still quite capable of sticking the vacuum head to the floor, and the construction oozes quality. I’m particularly fond of the swivelling castors on the base. (Yeah, I know, I sound like Kryten… they are nice though.)
I’ve always had an upright in the past, but this Bosch has stronger suction, better construction (especially compared to the appallingly flimsy Dyson models), is smaller and lighter and comes with a good selection of attachments.
AEG Lavamat 16850 washer dryer.
Not cheap, but again worth the money. A-rated for wash performance, and B-rated overall which is something of a miracle for a washer dryer. It runs almost silent, and unlike many machines it only vibrates slightly on full spin. Oh, and it can actually dry clothes, if you’re using the drying programmes, which is a novelty for me as previous washer dryers I’ve used have been, well, useless.
I.O. Shen knives.
Sharp seems to be an understatement. Sturdy handles and nice weight as well. I had an interesting time choosing these — there are lots of good sets of knives out there at various different price points. I think the I.O. Shens are a good compromise; I wasn’t going to shell out for e.g. Tojiro knives and I don’t really like Globals for the money. Henckels look OK, and there are even some cheaper ranges from people like Meyer that look fairly good. You could also look at the various Sabatier brands (but take care — there are lots of different companies selling knives marked “Sabatier”, and they do vary in quality).
The only thing I will say is that the magnetic knife block doesn’t work quite as well for the bread knife as for the other knives, I think because the former is quite heavy.
Meyer Anolon Professional pans.
These are just genius. Nothing sticks, you only need a low heat to keep things boiling, they’re easy to clean (though you can’t shove them in the dishwasher, but then as I said they are easy to clean) and oven safe too.
I originally bought a square grill pan from this range as a present for my dad, and I knew he liked it a great deal so I thought this was an easy choice.
I’ll close by saying a big thank-you to all of the customers who have purchased copies of iDefrag and iPartition. We aren’t some big faceless company — we’re doing what we do to make a living, and it’s sales of our products that mean that I’m able to fulfil my dream of owning my own home.
The original version of iPartition took me more than a year to write, working full-time entirely unpaid, and I’m still not sure how I found the time to write iDefrag and do all the customer support for iPartition as well… since then it’s been wonderful watching the products (and the company) improve and grow and also seeing the level of support from the Mac community for our work.
]]>I’ve been working on adding keyboard support, which is now nearly complete. The only thing left to do before releasing the code is to add support for renaming items, just like in Finder.
After that, as promised, I’m going to enable the view for accessibility (it is currently completely devoid of accessibility code), so that we have a worked example of making this work for a complex custom view.
]]>I should say, in the interest of disclosure, that I do not pay myself over £150,000 (or even over £100,000), so I don’t have the inherent bias that would derive from being the victim of this new measure.
However, being a natural conservative, I do have a few things to say about Pilky’s argument.
Taxing people 50% on their earnings over £150,000 isn't taxing the successful. It isn't really taxing the rich either. It is taxing the greedy.
The first thing I take issue with is that anyone earning (or paying themselves, which is really what most of Pilky’s blog talks about) over £150K is necessarily greedy. Maybe they really have earned it. Perhaps their business doesn’t need more staff, and makes more than enough money to afford to pay this much. In that case, it seems to me that it’s entirely their business whether or not they pay that much, and it’s entirely their business what they choose to do with it if they do.
The problem is with those who earn a lot of money each year, more than £150,000, and then spend it on themselves.
This is a fatuous argument; in order for it to work, the money that is spent must only benefit the individual spending it, which clearly isn’t how capitalism works. When you spend money on something, that money goes to somebody else (probably a retailer, who takes a cut, then a distributor, who takes a cut, then a manufacturer, who takes a cut, each cut being used to pay staff and also generating tax revenue for Government).
There is a similarly fatuous argument that “the problem” is with those who earn a lot of money each year and then don’t spend it. In which case, the money is probably in a bank being used to finance businesses, mortgages, car loans and the like. Again, it’s being put to good use, even if the person who earned it has decided to become part of what used to be called “the idle rich”.
The only real problem is with someone who earns lots of money, then somehow sits on it, without investing it, without depositing it at a bank, and without spending it. But who exactly would do that? Only a madman.
If you are running a successful business and taking £150,000 a year in wages or more then you're being greedy.
Again, this is pure jealousy. I reckon it would be easy to burn through a £150K salary in the South East and end up with a fairly modest lifestyle (particularly in London, and particularly if you had a family to support and wanted to buy a house).
But what about the other £100,000? Well that could be given to charity. Think about how much good you could do with £100,000. Or how about hiring some more staff. You could hire three people for £33,000 a year.
Doesn’t this suppose that you think the charities are worthy of your money? And that they won’t (for instance) squander it or use it to pay their Chief Executive’s salary? And who’s to say that they’re more worthy of your money than the artist that made the painting you bought? Or the carpenter that made your table?
And why should businesses create unnecessary jobs? If they don’t need additional people, they shouldn’t be made to employ them no matter what the unemployment figures look like.
The taxes being taken from a business's profits aren't really a loss of money, but an investment in the business.
It depends what the money is spent on, and all too often the Government demonstrates that it is not only bad at spending your money, it is uniquely bad at spending it (I should probably attribute that phrase, but I forget where it comes from). Partly because the people doing the spending simply don’t care; it isn’t their money — they didn’t slave away for hours to make it, and so they don’t appreciate its value.
We hear every day about inane non-jobs (“street football co-ordinator”s and the like), and about daft regulations that mean that people are now expected to have a certificate to use a step ladder. These stupidities cost money. No business in its right mind would ever waste money doing those kinds of crazy things, but Government isn’t spending its own money; it’s spending your money, and my money. And it can even spend it before we’ve even earned it — indeed, here in the U.K., some of us actually have to pay tax on money we haven’t yet earned.
The silliest thing about the new tax rate is that as you increase the upper rates (particularly the upper rates) of taxation, you increase the benefit in paying expensive accountants, off-shore banks and so on to help their clients minimise their tax bills.
You also increase the motivation of businesses to offer salary sacrifice schemes and all kinds of non-cash perks for which they can minimise the taxable impact on their employees.
This is especially true when you do something as blatantly unfair as removing the personal allowance when someone’s income trips over a particular threshold, which can result in an extremely high marginal rate of taxation for people near the boundary.
I shall make a prediction here: if the 50% rate and the removal of the personal allowance goes ahead, the Government will bring in nowhere near as much extra tax from it as it is claiming now.
One of the big problems I have with the current taxation system here in the U.K. is that it is just plain unfair.
The general public has been hoodwinked into thinking that it is only because of the “Progressive” taxation system that the rich pay more tax, and that it is right that the tax rate should increase because “after all they
can afford to pay more”. Even the word “progressive” is now used mischievously by the political classes; they use it to mean a Marxist taxation arrangement where the rate progressively increases with income, whereas the general public uses it more in a sense of “modern”, “fair” and “decent”.
Yet if you sat most people down and gave them an apple each, they would agree that a fair “tax” system might be for “Government” to take the same sized bite of each apple. And now if you allowed people to give their apples to other people in exchange for (say) making them laugh, they would probably still agree that a fair system would be for “Government” to take the same sized bite from every apple, such that someone with two apples would lose two equal sized bites while someone with a single apple would only lose one.
Now, you might say, we can’t have a flat rate tax system; it isn’t fair because it means that the poorest in society have money taken from them when they can’t really afford it — everybody has basic needs and we need to deal with those first. And you’d be right.
So a proper, fair, taxation system would have a (large) personal allowance, to which everybody is entitled free of tax, followed by a flat rate thereafter. The personal allowance would be tailored such that it was roughly equal to the basic cost of living, so that the poor are effectively removed from taxation altogether. (Of course, this would still technically be a progressive taxation system, albeit a much less complicated one.)
I think by adopting a system like this, and (ideally) scrapping all other taxes, allowances and so on, the tax system would be easier to understand, easier to police, more visibly fair and less likely to be subject to widespread avoidance. And the rich would still contribute more of their income than the poor; in fact, it would be harder for them to avoid doing so.
]]>Then there wouldn�t be any need for a second home allowance, or any kind of overnight allowance for that matter either.
]]>