Category: Idiots

They exist, so they must be blogged about.

Rock Band pricing takes ripoff Britain to a new dimension

~ Inquisitor

Rock Band is going to cost £179. £179. It’s $169 in the States for an identical package, that is to say £85. No way that VAT can explain this one.

I was actually considering buying an Xbox 360 and Rock Band was one of the main reasons. Paying £100 to Electronic Arts’ special party fund means that that pretty big reason has now been taken away. They won’t have a good explanation for this either, I’m betting…

When asked why the game will be so much more expensive in the UK than it is in the US, Kay cited VAT and the higher price of consumer electronics generally. “These are definitely not excuses so much as contributing reasons,” he stated.

“I can’t talk to the explicit pricing – how it gets split down between retailers and distributors and the whole chain – because I don’t actually know that much about it.”

In other words, no.

If this actually happens…

~ Inquisitor ~ 2 Comments

Virgin Media can get fucked. I am not having every web site I visit sent to China so some server can send back ‘targeted’ advertising, “anonymous” or no. It’s effectively unavoidable, ISP level spyware with a crap “anti-phishing” (read DNS hijacking) justification. The first thing I will be doing if this happens is getting a BT phone line installed and any non-BT ADSL ISP that doesn’t subscribe to this shit, probably Be.

This is of course assuming that this is even legal, and if it is it shouldn’t be. Who the hell thought this was a good idea, and why the hell haven’t they been fired already?

Edit: See here, here, here and here (the latter two contain a lot of great detective work about how dodgy Phorm actually are.) Let’s hope resistance isn’t futile on this one.

A mainstream attitude

~ Inquisitor

So the nominations for the NME Awards‘ Villain Of The Year category are:

  • George W. Bush
  • Tony Blair
  • Gordon Brown
  • David Cameron
  • Johnny “Razorlight” Borrell
  • Amy Winehouse.

Exactly what has she done to deserve this? All she’s done is have a breakdown while having the indignity to not totally submit to everything the paparazzi want to do to her. Not that it matters, of course, because Bush will win just as he’s done every year since 2003, but it’s the principle of the thing. Of course, the NME love dealing in pap photos of her, so I can guess whose side they’re on…

The Hero Of The Year list features a guy named Ryan Jarman, who in a first for me with current musicians I actually had to Google. He’s the singer in the Cribs, so I think that pretty much decides how hopeless this list is; worse, he said this:

“The mainstream attitude of indie bands today is a bigger problem than global warming”

meaning that indie bands shouldn’t actually try to make, you know, interesting music – an “indie” attitude in NME terms isn’t about how many copies you sell, it’s how many XTC riffs you can rip off in a much less appealing way without any form of originality or tune.

Half the awards are sponsored, too – very indie. The live act award is of course sponsored by Carling, whose brand is on what’s possibly the worst toilets in Glasgow (at least that I’ve had the misfortune to use) and the Best Video award features only one interesting video (Justice’s “D.A.N.C.E.”). Best Album Artwork is abominable. Many of the artists in the Worst Band award could do with being swapped with the Best Band award; they’d look about the same (you can keep the Hoosiers though).

If you want to vote on this tawdry excuse for an awards show you have to give IPC (that is to say Time Warner) your address and navigate a whole bunch of this-is-opt-in, this however is opt-out check boxes. Privacy invasion much? They can go please themselves; I certainly won’t.

A warning

~ Inquisitor

PHP’s date generation function is mktime(second,minute,hour,month,day,year). AAARGH. If you’re going to put a date function in a language mostly designed for doing web database work, at least do it using ISO style year-month-day-hour-minute-second increasing significance dates; say, in the same style as MySQL. The mktime function as it is now is hideously counter-intuitive for anyone who isn’t American. Worse, the format to convert dates from strings strtotime isn’t configurable and is fixed as m/d/y except where the first parameter is above 13, so I had to write a parser to convert strings from British d/m/y and put them in the mktime function manually.

Still, I’ve got to use it so might as well deal with it.

Mel Gibson has a lot to answer for

~ Inquisitor ~ 2 Comments

Scotsman.com: Hero Wallace voted greatest Will in history (8th January 2008)

SCOTS legend William Wallace has been voted the “greatest Will of all time” in a new poll.

English poet William Shakespeare, often considered the best playwright in literary history, was pushed into second place in the Co-operative Legal Services (CLS) survey of 3000 people.

Nothing whatsoever in Braveheart is actually at all anything like what Wallace actually was and did; he was from a Borders noble line and would thus have been an English/French/Latin-speaking non-clansman, his family wasn’t massacred when he was a kid (which is a massive corruption made by the movie from even the hideously unreliable Blind Hary), he spent much of the period 1298-1303 in France lobbying the Pope rather than hanging out with a useless guerilla army as the movie implies (which he only did for a matter of months in 1304-05 before stupidly getting himself captured, and he wasn’t betrayed either), ordered a series of slash-and-burn raids on northern England’s villages and monasteries that would nowadays be seen as a war crime and he didn’t shag Isabella of France – and a good thing too, as she was ten at the time he died and hadn’t even met the future Edward II yet.

Worse than all the historical inaccuracies, the movie isn’t even any good; it’s clichéd rotten, has some awful acting (only Patrick McGoohan seems to be having any fun, hamming it up as Edward I, or “Longshanks” as the movie keeps on repeating) and is quite possibly the worst film in my lifetime to win the Oscar for Best Picture. At least the battle sequences work, and Hollywood hasn’t made a hagiography of Robert Bruce yet (although Braveheart does go some way in that direction).

Wallace is only #1 on this list because of the publicity around Braveheart making people believe that it was actually the True Story; what I’m bitter about is that this has pushed Shakespeare, a figure of infinite importance to English-speaking culture who happened also to write some bloody good plays, to #2 in favour of a minor historical figure blown up by romantic delusion, hagiography and Mel bloody Gibson.

And as for the Scotsman’s headline, one thing is definite: he was no hero. Hardly anyone actually is.

My interests, according to Ticketmaster

~ Inquisitor

Ticketmaster semi-spam: interests

Considering that I’ve only ever bought one thing from Ticketmaster, and that was some very sold out elsewhere Nine Inch Nails tickets, you might think that this might not match my interests at all. You would be right too; I use them for ticket alerts for bands I actually like (before finding any other ticket site to buy the actual tickets from), and there’s no Pop Idol/X-Factor/Max Martin Identikit Machine alumni amongst them. Hey, at least it’s funny.

Amusing wannabe

~ Inquisitor

Looking at today’s security run output that FreeBSD likes to send to me by default, I find an interesting hack run amongst the several I usually get a day:

Nov 27 14:03:16 [anonymised] sshd[48794]: Invalid user ryback from 218.1.65.241
Nov 27 14:03:49 [anonymised] sshd[48810]: Invalid user ryback from 218.1.65.241
Nov 27 14:04:44 [anonymised] sshd[48844]: Invalid user ryback from 218.1.65.241
Nov 27 14:07:41 [anonymised] sshd[48979]: Invalid user ryback from 218.1.65.241

The script kiddie in question is trying to use the username ryback to get into my machine. Casey Ryback, of course, is Steven Seagal’s ex-Navy SEAL character in the Under Siege series, kicking large amounts of terrorist arse with kung-fu, knives and in Under Siege 2 a Newton MessagePad. This “ryback”, however, is just hitting against a sshd which has password access disabled completely and as such will have no success whatsoever to anyone who doesn’t have my private key – that is, everyone but me.

The IP address is in (sigh) China Telecom space, Shanghai province; no chance of tracing that then. Wonder where they got the name from.

Idiots at the BBC

~ Inquisitor ~ 5 Comments

This news article on a recent parenting case is alright in itself, but falls apart in two respects.

The only weblinks it provides in the related links section are to “father’s rights” organisations, one of which is the infamously horrible Fathers 4 Justice, a bunch of people whose favoured tactics for gaining support were dressing up as superheroes and scaling public buildings, performing occasional security breach stunts and committing serious vandalism on family court offices. (As an aside, I don’t link to their Wikipedia article here as I usually would do because it’s very very poor. Even for Wikipedia. You have been warned.) This should at least be balanced by a link to someone who’ll actually tell the truth rather than just ill-informedly rant. They’re also given far too much time in the article itself.

Worse, the “Have Your Say” boxout, giving a sample of the latest drivel from the BBC’s should-have-been-shut-down-years-ago comments section, currently has a quote from a “Jon” interspersed with the actual article:

So I presume the mother will expect the state to be paying for the childs upkeep, instead of the father!

The article itself, however, points out that

[The woman] said she wanted the baby girl, who is now 19 weeks old, adopted at birth without the knowledge of either them or her father.

So no, Jon, she bloody well doesn’t, you presume wrong, you’re a woman-hating berk who believes all that Fathers 4 Illiteracy tell you about the family courts system and whoever picked that entirely wrong quote out from the Have Your Say Fascist Wannabe Comments Pile should really think about what bias actually means the next time they do such a thing; the place where the comment quote is positioned makes it look a lot like an actual quote from the story, which is way wrong.

Besides, it’s worth pointing out the context of the story: the woman is an adult. She lives on her own. Why should a court anywhere in Britain even consider forcing her to tell her parents (which is how it got to the Appeal Court for this ruling), which we can assume from the context to be something that would cause a massive amount of embarrassment or possibly serious repercussions? That they would decide to do so is in itself worrying; this appeals decision, on the other hand, is probably the right one for everyone involved, hence why the F4J crowd think it’s wrong. Still, can’t win ’em all.

Edit 26/11/2007: Also note this much better Guardian article, with the detail that the idiot local authority actually wrote to the woman’s parents by mistake and without half the article taken up by comments from pressure groups.

Guess who’s partly responsible for the child benefit cockup?

~ Inquisitor ~ 1 Comment

EDS, that’s who: who would charge the child benefit people £5000 for a SQL job of the sort that would take a couple of minutes, thus resulting in a civil servant using an old dump with all the data intact, burning it to CDs and then unfortunately ending up with another stupid outsourcing partner (that is, TNT) losing them. Oh, what a surprise. It’s not like EDS haven’t ripped any British government agencies off before… (They even have occasional problems doing corporate IT outsourcing properly.) This failure is exactly the reason why no government IT services should be outsourced under any circumstances: good practice is swamped under charges and contracts.

Unity at Ministry of Truth has the best analysis of the details of the emails so far. Also, b3ta have by far the funniest comment on the issue. Probably more to come.