Mike Meredith

Firing Jeremy Clarkson?

 General, Media  No Responses »
Mar 102015
 

Today we learned that next Sunday's episode of Top Gear is not to be shown, and Jeremy Clarkson has been suspended pending an investigation. Apparently because of a "fracas" with a producer.

Which is all a bit mysterious, but it is interesting to see people assuming that Clarkson is in trouble because of his mouth. It would be hardly be a big surprise if his mouth has gotten him into trouble again; his public persona is a bit of a loud-mouthed idiot so it is hardly surprising if he says something dumb, obnoxious, or even offensive at times.

When he goes too far, he usually apologises (here, here, here, and I dare say you can find plenty more).

But if this latest fracas has anything to do with the something stupid he has said, the BBC are being a bit two-faced about suspending him. The Top Gear show was a bit of a dreary bore before Clarkson's brand of idiocy spiced it up into something even car-haters can enjoy on occasion. If you employ an obnoxious idiot because he's an obnoxious idiot, it's wrong to suspend him for being an obnoxious idiot.

Of course we're all making assumptions about what went on today. And frankly a "fracas" sounds a bit more serious than just a few badly chosen phrases, so I think we should all wait and see how this develops.

 

 

An Awesome Custom Help Screen

 Computing, Linux, Working Notes  No Responses »
Mar 072015
 

So there I was, wandering down the street thinking about :-

  1. Sometimes being unable to remember custom key sequences that I've configured.
  2. That my "Help" button on my keyboard was unused.

And I thought that it would be fun to knock up a little application that would pop up a window and show a file. Then I got real, and realised that the application was already written and allowed fancy formatting of the help file(s) – it's called a browser.

Now for a whole bunch of reasons, you probably don't want to use a full blown browser, but something a little simpler and without any fancy controls, and I plumped for dillo. Turns out that the "-f" flag turns off the fancy menu and toolbar, so what I needed was to persuade my window manager (Awesome) to run it when I pressed "Help" :- 

	awful.key({ }, "Help", function () awful.util.spawn("dillo -f /home/mike/lib/help-files/index.html") end))

If you need help adding that to your Awesome configuration file, you're in the wrong place!

And of course it works :-

2015-03-07_1457

(And now of course I need to spend some time writing some help files!)

Too Offensive For Nashville?

 Politics, Religion  No Responses »
Mar 032015
 

(Click on the banner for a link to the source story). Turns out this advertising banner was too "offensive" to be put up in Nashville. In the same country that allowed this :-

The acid test for freedom of speech is to allow speech that you do not agree with; looks like America fails.

My Triangle Is More Secure Than Your Penny Whistle

 Computing, Security  No Responses »
Feb 282015
 

This is a little rant about those people who feel the need to jump on every announcement of a security issue with Linux or Windows, and claim their favourite operating system is more secure. These days such rants are little more than fanboyism, and childish at that. 

I'm an old Unix guy (and thus am into Linux rather than Windows), and in the past did used to ramble on about how insecure Windows was. And Windows used to be a complete disaster area when it came to security.

But that has changed. Whilst I'm still not a big Windows fan, the security of Windows itself has improved to the point where it's not too bad.

Of course there are plenty of software vendors out there who are completely clueless when it comes to security, so any time you add some piece of cool corporate software to a Linux or Windows server you're running a big risk. 

But back to the haters. 

The most irritating thing about the whole 'my operating system is more secure than your operating system' is a simplistic comparison of Linux and Windows. They are not directly comparible. – simply counting the number of security vulnerabilities in "Linux" and "Windows" is an overly simplistic comparson.

First of all, Linux has many more components than Windows; partally because Linux tends to throw in the kitchen sink, and partially because of a different philosophy – the "Unix way" is to build many small tools rather than one big tool. But just because Linux includes tons of stuff, doesn't make insecurities in all that stuff a problem on your server – for example, none of my web servers have a web browser installed so all those hundreds of web browser bugs are irrelevant to my servers. 

Windows itself has caught onto the trick that has been standard practice for decades – only install the stuff you actually need. Whilst there are popular Linux distributions that do the same thing (Debian, and Ubuntu amonst others), there are still some that tend to install far too much (RedHat, SLES, etc.).

Secondly the number of vulnerabliities does not take into account how serious each vulnerability is. Ten privilege escalation vulnerabilities comes nowhere close to a shellshock. 

When you come down to it, the choice of which operating system to run has less of an effect on how vulmerable your server is than who runs your server. A tightly controlled Windows server that is patched often and well configured is far more secure than a Linux server that is patched when installed (if then!) and then left alone by an administrator who assumes that "out of the box" configurations are suitable.

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