number 9

Firefox just went batshit while using gmail. I clicked a link, firefox sat spinning with the status bar flashing.

I killed the tab, went in again and got a lovely error saying:

Lockdown in sector 4!

Our system indicates unusual usage of your account.
In order to protect Gmail users from potentially harmful use of
Gmail, this account has been disabled for up to 24 hours.

If you are using any third party software
that interacts with your  Gmail account, please
disable it or adjust it so  that its use complies
with the  Gmail Terms of Use.
If you feel that you have been using your Gmail account according
to the Terms of Use or otherwise normally,
please contact us at gmail-lockdown@google.com to
report this problem.

Contact you? With what?

Just been moving the big blog over. The Wordpress upgrade drill is pretty good. (It works, for one thing). But the shit involved in updating “AN_ropey_theme/plugin” has Got Nothing To Do With A Good Time.

I finally found a 1.5 version of Toni for mama, which seems to put the sidebar in the middle of the page. There’s a ‘Toni Tweaked’ but that’s 1.2 only. Aaargh. I’m going to have to do a theme from scratch for stitch, and I really can’t be bothered.

But for true jaw-dropping clankiness, nothing caps the Flickr gallery plugin 1.2 → 1.5 ‘upgrade’ (the plugin itself looks quite nice once you tweak out a coupla bugs).
I’ve Googled for two hours and the official 1.5 solution is ‘use the 8 month old 1.2 version and apply these horrible hacks to get it working with the new theme model’.

This includes brain deadness like copying gallery.php into your active theme directory.
Pardon? What has a Flickr gallery got to do with theming? I’m going to have to go through this each time I change theme? Not to mention the next upgrade… No. If I want to support multiple layers of buggily patched webapp I’ll stay late at work, thanks.

Poor bastards.
It says something for a language that it’s easier to do this kind of evil hack than update 2 pages of PHP against the new framework.

I’m sorely tempted to try the Typo wordpress migration thing and have done with it.

• I doubt it’ll work, but typo is readable so I have a chance at tweaking it in.
• once I have shoehorned it in, I hopefully get less painful upgrades when a new version comes out
• there’s no rush, I can’t switch to 1.5 until I sort the theme and plugin anyway.
• I know enough Ruby to be dangerous, and I’d enjoy learning more. ‘Life is Too Short to Learn PHP.’
• typos theme framework is sane
• I’ll still need to write my own CSS, but it looks like that’s going to happen either way and it beats the hell out of learning PHP…

Just a quick note to self : don’t waste any more time on Bluetooth.

Brief history:

2002: initial impression:

1. Good name
2. A bit like cables, only
   • expensive
   • brittle
   • gives you tumours
3. rubbish *NIX support

2003: on-call bluetooth phone and laptop.

1. buy BT card for Zaurus so I can ssh in and reboot VBCs shit servers from the gutter outside the pub. Waste of time. Sadly turns out
   • GPRS Bad. overly complex way to pay through the nose for 90s era bandwidth.
   • BT Linux support pretty bad.
   • (Open)Zaurus bluez support so bad I sell the little bastard because I am tired of fighting the urge to throw it against a wall.
2. OBEX not that awful, strangely. Load ringtones without calling 0898 numbers. (Wait. OBEX is part of irDA, not BT. That explains it.)

2004-2005:

1. Security issues (viruses, piss poor crypto) makes WEP seem merely dumb by comparison.
2. bluetooth headsets make you look like a plum. With schizophrenia.

about 2 months ago – present :

1. swathe of articles turn up on BT applications.
2. Low power / PAN very attractive from a ‘teeny computer’ point of view
3. get the spec out of the library
4. start looking around ebay for ‘dongles’

But it’s

• pricey
• complex
• still stupid ( and the SIG seems oblivious to these issues – at least the 802.11 guys held their hands up to WEPs holes).

Think I was bewitched by BT as an interface to devices with no UI.
But if I have mains power, I am probably next to a PC. And I live in Wales.
USBnet is just a better ( e.g. securer, faster, less power, OS agnostic) connection than GPRS over bluetooth for 99% of uses. That might tie you to a keyboard/mouse interface, but most mobile/PDAs are as pleasant to use as a lump of hot lead smeared with dog poo (for my RSI blighted wrists anyway).

You know what? Screw bluetooth. If I want wirefree, 802.11 has worked fine for almost a decade..

We don’t need another solution in search of a problem. Its ‘killer apps’ are either irrelevant in the broadband age or never made sense in the first place.

Take the ‘laptop in the boot’ usage profile. Thieves now use this ‘feature’ to find, er, laptops in boots. And not to check their email.
The ‘fix’ is the usual bluetoooth fix- if you want to secure it, don’t use bluetooth. Thanks.

I hereby predict that soon you’ll be walking down a dark alley with a mate and behoodied ne’er-do-wells will emerge from the shadows. One will produce a phone and press a button.
Whichever of you beeps has the expensive phone.

Bagsy not me.

Just rang Lloyds to see if I’d been paid. They have a robot slavegirl who deals with that kind of thing, she tries her best.

• robot slavegirl: please enter your very long account number
• me: beep beep beep…
• rs: thank you. now enter the nth digit of your passcode
• me: beep
• rs: and the nth+2 digit
• me: bee – oh bollocks
• rs: I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that. Please enter you very long account number.
• me: (silently fumes and repeats the above)
• rs: you entered n and n+2. Is that right?
• me: shit. Good job I’m not on handsfree
• rs: I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that. Please say ‘yes’ or ‘no’
• me: yes! fuck sake
• rs: ok, please select ‘recent transactions’, ‘balance’……
• me: (can’t find the little cheatsheet that lets you just press numbers to avoid this farce) uh, ”recent transactions”
• HUMAN IN ROOM: is that a real person?
• me: no, it’s a bot
• rs: I’m having a little trouble understanding you. Please enter your very long account number.
• me: AAAAAAARGH