Got to love this one. A silly story about data protection sparked by a mother complaining that her first-year student son was “now quite addicted to alcohol, smokes and has spent a great deal of time over the last nine months asleep”. **** on a stick, and she’s surprised?! Frankly, she sounds like a right nosy pain in the arse. I can’t say I blame the kid for going off the rails now he’s away from home.
OK, one thing straight – I never smoked at uni, or ever for that matter. I’m not that ******* stupid. I’ve also never been addicted to alcohol. Hell, I was teetotal when I started at Bradford. But then, my parents aren’t overbearing fuckwads.
Remember this – when someone goes to university, they’re pretty much an adult. I know a lot of students don’t act it but it’s often the first taste of real freedom they’ve had in their lives. First year is a doss compared to later years. It always is. But generally there’s no register taken at lectures. One of the things I loved about uni was being able to skip lectures if I wanted and catch up. If they were doing something I was comfortable with, I could ditch it and spend more time on what I did need to concentrate on.
OK, Muggins in our little story here has opted to spend the time getting wasted, learning how to pollute his lungs (I bet he was doing that at school as well) and snoozing. Big deal. And as for giving his timetable to his mum, I’m glad the university have looked at the situation and told the staff member in question “yeah, technically that’s a bad thing. Just don’t do it again”. Stick to the rules, tell him off but don’t do anything stupid like fine or sack him.
Wish I could embed the video for this, but there’s no way to do it from YouPorn. Just don’t ask why I was looking. You’d never even believe me if I told you someone gave me the link. Obviously, it’s Not Safe For Work although not exactly hardcore porn. Except the pics right at the end.
I’ve avoided commenting on this story because it covers so many bases that get me riled: politics, human rights, children, foreign aid… It’s the Burmese / Myanmaran disaster caused by Cyclone Nargis. I just need to get a lot of things off my chest and also – amazingly – tip my hat to our foreign secretary for his very public statement today that perhaps we should use military force to help those in need.
Frankly, this whole story is making me more angry than sad; more helpless than I felt during the aftermath of the Boxing Day Tsunami. The scale of this natural disaster is being compounded hugely by the uncaring attitude of the fuckwit bunch of ******** who are apparently running this country. Ideas have been bandied around of dropping aid directly onto the country. Unfortunately, these ***** in uniform would see it as an act of war, most likely. Because that’s what countries at war do. Drop food on each other.
Each time a relief aid worker gets a visa, it’s a major headline. For ****’s sake, the embassy in Bangkok was shut for a ******* holiday at the start of this week, so no visas could be issued. People within the country who have money have been told to give it to government offices if they want to make a donation – only they’re not that stupid. Those with cars are having to make umpteen return trips in small groups to ferry helpers around – large convoys of Burmese people, let alone foreigners, are being prevented from moving around to help their fellow citizens. External nations have been told to send supplies, not people, and that the government would deal with things.
Problem one – they don’t have enough resources and people to deal with the distribution. Problem two – who here is retarded enough to believe that those supplies wouldn’t go directly to the cunta…. sorry junta in charge, while the poor got **** all?
David Miliband‘s argument is to use the UN charter that we and other nations have signed up to. It’s designed to allow our military forces to “invade” (for want of a better term) where we have evidence of war crimes, genocide, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Refusing to help well over a million people from dying certainly classes as a crime against humanity – and I would be very easily persuaded to see it as effectively passive genocide. They’re killing their own people by refusing to be helped, for no good reason other than they’re frightened that they might lose some of their own, pathetic grip on power.
If any good comes of this horrendous mess, I can only hope that the people will rise up and crucify these greedy ********. It seems they have 400,000 troops. But how many of these have lost family as a result of this tragedy? And how many of them could have been saved? I bet nobody in power, or their families was harmed as they would have acted on the intelligence they received far in advance of anyone else.
I still want to visit this country. I so wish I could do something to help. I so wish we were allowed to. And for once, I’d fully support an army involving our troops “invading” a country to provide aid. This isn’t Iraq or Afghanistan with a fortune in oil reserves. Let’s see how the Western governments deal with it.
WARNING: very dull techie post coming up. You have been warned.
Had a problem yesterday trying to get a SAMBA share on our Ubuntu box to allow access to one of the PCs. The solution is very simple and I notice a lot of other people online had this issue so I’ll detail it here. Hopefully someone might find it and it’ll be of use.
Our scenario is one Ubuntu machine running as a file-sharer / backup box / web server and several Windows XP desktops. SAMBA controls around half a dozen shares, all bar one of which are publicly read/writeable with no logins required. The other requires a login because it contains accounts data. If anyone wants to see the smb.conf for that, then just ask.
The problem I had was just after I copied all our accounts data from a shared desktop drive to the Ubuntu share. The idea is to get rid of those constant cries round the office of “is anyone in the accounts share? Can you log out because it won’t let me in!” and also to provide some security as well as data redundancy. I copied said files, then went to one of the desktops to access the share and ensure it worked. This PC had already attached with no issues to a handful of the other (insecure) shares.
I added a Network Place of \servernameaccounts and double-clicked. Up popped the password prompt, username and password entered… the usual Microsoft networking pause… and:
Multiple connections to a server or shared resource by the same user, using more than one user name, are not allowed.
Bugger. I went back to the server and checked the permissions. Then I looked at the message. It’s telling me about users. So I created another user with similar permissions and tried to log on again. Same problem. Then I looked at the error again. Carefully.
It’s a Windows error, not an Ubuntu or SAMBA one. It’s complaining that this user – the one on the XP box – is trying to access the server twice with different usernames. Which he (in this case) isn’t allowed to do. He’s connected as “nobody” to access the insecure shares, and now I’m trying to connect him as “accounts” to get to the secure one. This has to work as some staff will need simultaneous access to both types of share. Windows has no functionality to “log off” network shares – even a reboot doesn’t always disconnect it, though I’m aware of a registry key fix that solves this.
A dig on the internet offered a few clues, most relating to deleting permanent net shares and mapped drives. Then I spotted something ridiculously simple. Windows itself is what’s preventing you doing this. It stores the name of the server you’re accessing and the user name you’re connecting with. If you make another connection to “servername” with a different “username” without ditching the first, then the error appears.
Thing is, it’s very literal how it stores the server name. And it seems there’s no genuine reason why you shouldn’t be able to connect twice. Windows just stops you. I assume you need a “better” version of Windows to be allowed to do it or something (like the inbuilt crippling of filesharing in the desktop versions, limiting the number of connections so you have to move to a server OS).
So you should be able to connect, but Windows stops you. So how do you get around it? It’s stupidly simple, really. Refer to the server differently.
For all the insecure shares I’ve now got all the PCs configured to go to \servernamesharename.
For the secure share it’s \server-IP-addresssharename.
Easy as that. Same server, two ways to refer to it, error ignored, two fingers up at a pointless restriction. I’m curious to see if mucking about with the hosts file would allow infinite connections to the server, by providing multiple aliases for the same IP address.
Anyway, problem solved and another step closer to heading home in a couple of weeks.
For those with a knowledge of Thai, “Tom yum goong” translates as “prawn soup”. Something I’d normally find rather repulsive, but when it’s the title of a Tony Jaa film I’m prepared to give it some leeway. It’s Western title was The Protector which isn’t quite so classy. if you can, get hold of the Thai version (subtitles help) as it’s almost 15 minutes longer than the international release.
First off, this is not the sequel to the superb Ong Bak – that’s still being worked on and is due out later this year. Tom yum goong is a completely separate film and, though not as good as Ong Bak, certainly has its moments.
It can be a little hard to follow as times as the action jumps from Thailand to Australia about half an hour in. At the beginning, it’s all in Thai. Once we reach Oz, the film features Australians, Thai and Vietnamese. In many instances – and sometimes for no apparent reason – characters interact in badly-accented English. Not too hard to understand, but I think it would have made more sense for the Asian characters to converse in Thai and leave the subtitles for us slow Westerners to follow!
The editing early on is also a little over-zealous. Often things happen far too quickly or appear disjointed. Whoever story-boarded the boat chase has some great ideas, but the director could do with studying the Bond films a little more before his next outing. Regardless, it’s pretty spectacular for something coming from a country not (yet) famous for its cinematic output.
Productions values can seem a little low, and the sound effects in particular hark back to ye olde days of Bruce Lee with over-loud smacks, cracks, crunches and pops as various acts of violence are done upon fleshy bits. This isn’t too bad, but in the earlier sequences it does seem out of place. The scenery in the gangsters’ den, for instance, is very 70’s and makes it look almost like a film from that period.
Then we jump to Australia, as I said. And one of the best martial arts action sequences I’ve seen since Jackie Chan was in his prime. In fact, this sequence in my eyes puts Tony Jaa up there as the only actor in modern Asian cinema worthy of taking Jackie Chan’s crown. Let’s be honest – Chan was a master. Now he’s sunk to using wire-work and simpler films with big budgets from American studios. Fair enough – he’s 54 for crying out loud. He’s earned the right to take it easy after the huge archive of classic films he’s created.
The scene I’m talking about takes place in a warehouse as Jaa is attacked by around 20 extreme sports enthusiasts on rollerblade, BMXs, moto-x bikes and a quad-bike. The camerawork is sublime and as there are virtually no cut scenes – it’s almost all just one, continuous take.
The thing is, this feat is partially topped later in the same feature as a fight sequence coming in around the 4-minute mark is completed with no cuts whatsoever. Just some amazing choreography, superb editing and bloody hard work from those involved. When watching it, I did think that Jaa looked dead on his feet – and rather sluggish – by the end. This is why. He’s filmed it six times, on the trot, being treated with smelling salts between each as they re-set all the breakables.
OK, he’s not broken most of the bones in his body, and you can’t see his pulse via a hole in his skull like you can with Chan. But this is the kind of work ethos that makes a man a star. He deserves is a hell of a lot more than most of those Hollywood lot.
Tom yum goong (or however it’s spelt – even Jaa’s official page has two or three variations) is no classic plotwise. Which is why I’ve not bothered going into that. OK, if you insist. Boy grows up with elephant. Bad man kidnaps elephant. Grown boy goes in search of elephant and kicks ass. Happy now? Thing is, the “plot” is just something to hang some outstanding fight sequences off. And there aree some cool elephants in it as a bonus. Oh, and a pretty cool CGI animation segment.
If you like this kind of stuff, then make sure you don’t miss this film. It really does rock. I can’t wait for Ong Bak 2 to come out. Hell, I’m crossing my fingers that the release date is when I’m in Thailand. Where better to go and watch it?
