PD Consulting and Security

Heroes, gods and dogs

peterw — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 11:53:00 GMT

Watching an episode of Heroes, an opinion my mother held crossed my mind. We were talking about comic books (I was a kid). She said that Americans keep inventing superheroes because they cling to the idea that someone will save them. She didn't use these terms, because I was only ten, even if I did understand her general thesis, but she meant that they dream of salvation by external intervention. They want absolution too. They want someone else to take responsibility for their sins and their...(read more)

Rooting powder

peterw — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 12:09:00 GMT

At a party today someone told me about rooting powder. It's made from willow bark, or something like that. You mix it with water and apply it to... your cuttings. To encourage them to strike. Sounds good to me. I wonder whether I can get Stephen to take some cuttings from that avocado tree and strike them. I'm sure he'd like to fast-track his own orchard, and while he's at it he can organise some for me. They don't like wet feet and they need a lot of feeding... at least that's...(read more)

All creatures green and tasty

peterw — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 12:13:00 GMT

I've got a mulberry cutting from a big healthy tree. I'm going to try and strike it in some potting mix. It can't stay potted forever but I'll have a while to think about it. Possibly out at Brett's place, since he has adequate water and plenty of room on land he owns. I also have an avocado in a big pot. Curiosity overcame common sense and I excavated it to see whether it was germinating. It's cracking like a hatching egg, exactly as I've read. Roots had yet to emerge...(read more)

Piss-poor journalism

peterw — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 01:23:00 GMT

Last night I saw a TV show about climate change. Propaganda isn't necessarily a bad thing, and these people certainly mean well, but they got most of their facts wrong and misrepresented a great many truths in order to make them support a particular conclusion. In particular, they interviewed some woman whose primary claims to fame are (1) they interviewed her, and (2) she likes diving on the reef. This woman saw some bleached reef. Because she remembers it as once being vibrant with colour,...(read more)

Dangerous government

peterw — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 12:00:00 GMT

Friedrich Hayek says that in centrally-planned economies, an individual or a select group of individuals must determine the distribution of resources, these planners will never have enough information to carry out this allocation reliably. This is true but incomplete. All centralised systems are intrinsically unable to scale efficiently because the number of interactions is a geometric function of the number of participants: the overheads are crippling. Moral, social, ethical and other justifications...(read more)

No, you can't teach someone how to solve problems

davidr — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 12:58:00 GMT

You can't teach someone to think for themselves, and you can't teach them how to really solve problems...(read more)

ActiveSync: Consumer Email means Windows Live

davidr — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 08:00:00 GMT

For Exchange ActiveSync Policies, AllowConsumerEmail doesn't mean what you think it means ......(read more)

The Great Firewall of Australia

davidr — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 06:43:00 GMT

In recent times Australia has been cursed with a series of clueless, idiotic communications ministers each seemingly more ill-informed than the last. The most recent addition to this list of incompetents is one Hon Stephen Conroy, our Minister for Communications, Broadband and the Digital Economy. One would think that the view on Ministerial function espoused by Yes, Minister would be over the top and exaggerated, yet it appears that this particular Minister is truly hell bent on destroying Communications, Broadband and the Digital Economy in Australia....(read more)

Truth, justice and taking the law into your own hands

peterw — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 04:51:00 GMT

If we can't take the law into our own hands, whose hands should it be in? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who watches the watchers?) Lawyers are professional weasels. General public consensus -- as well as private experience -- is that they are deceitful grasping sneaks and not to be trusted. Public servants don't care. Politicians are untrustworthy. They are expected to lie. They are also demonstrably detached from reality. Nearly all of them have declared conflicts of interest, too -- party...(read more)

Reporting Services and the intarweb

peterw — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 02:00:00 GMT

Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, IIS7 and Reporting Services 2008 - latest and greatest, made for each other. ASP.NET developed using Visual Studio 2008, showing the reports in the Microsoft supplied ReportViewer web control. "Oh, that's easy! " said the documentation. "You just use the ReportViewer control. The server-side part of it acts as a proxy that runs in the process of your ASP.NET application's AppPool, so you just need to give database permissions to the AppPool...(read more)