Tuesday 30 December 2014

List of torrent sites ...

... courtesy of the UK Courts!







If you search on Google for anything like "torrents" and happen to click on one of the links that are blocked the above is what you'll get.  I presume this page will increase as more sites are blocked by UK Court Orders.

The ISP I am currently using is BT, I believe that they, and other major players in the market, e.g. Virgin, TalkTalk, Sky, are all following the blocking list above.

I guess there may be similar blocking in place in the US.

However, I'm pretty sure the blocking list isn't in place in *every* country - many are against censorship of any kind.  So, assuming you can find a proxy in a more 'liberal' country then you can happily use the above list as a nice starting point to find those torrents.

I think this raises two important points:

1) Did someone *really* think this through?  Irrespective of the arguments for/against this kind of blocking, was it wise to publicise the list?  Or is this actually a requirement for this kind of blocking?  I hope it's the latter since there absolutely SHOULD be transparency in such matters.  In fact, if this is the route we're going down then it should be impossible to block a site without such a block being made public - it would allow accidental blacklisting to be avoided/contested.

2) There was an article this morning on the BBC about GMail being blocked in China.  This is not entirely the same argument since pirated copies of films, music, and games are, at least in the UK, currently illegal, GMail, social media sites, and other communications are not.  However, it's also been argued that alot of the torrent sites are simply search engines, they themselves do not host any content.  Google will return torrent results, though these are starting to be removed from search results.  Do we really want tampering with search results?  Are alternatives available without such tampering, e.g. DuckDuckGo which supposedly doesn't filter.

Personally I'm not a fan of censorship and I don't like the idea of the blacklist/blocking approach because I think it has many technical and philosophical weaknesses.  I know there is definitely content out there that is illegal and unpleasant but I suspect the people accessing that are already using methods to circumvent the above blocking.  So censorship like the above list really comes down to big media companies throwing lots of money around.

So, as I've always said, why can't they throw that money at making decent online distribution services that are easy to use, fair, and provide greater benefit and features to the customers.  This happened with music on the whole - iTunes, Amazon, et al distribute music without DRM restrictions in place and seem to make plenty money doing so.  It's now more attractive to use those services for music (albeit for some hard-to-find or ridiculously over-priced items) rather than resort to torrents.

Do the same for video - stick that back catalog of old movies (80s, 90s, etc) and charge $1 a download rather than trying to sell old DVDs which cost money to ship, store, shift.

Tuesday 2 December 2014

Satellite Broadband

I am incredibly lucky to live in a nice rural area, while it's lacking sometimes in some amenities it is, frankly, absolutely beautiful! Oh, and certainly much cheaper than trying to live in a city (which is another one of the reasons we ended up here).

Anyway, despite the estate being relatively new it appears that our internet connection is delivered via a damp piece of string and the maximum that ADSL 2 can give us is about 4.5Mb/sec. BT have started offering FTTC but even that only gets to 13Mb/sec according to the availability checker.

So we've had to go with keeping the rubbishy ADSL line for now (which is also on our landline) and getting Satellite Broadband as both a backup and for speed when needed - both of these really are to support my working/contracting from home where it's vital that I can connect to the office over VPN

Delivery

Actually arrived within a couple of days of the order! Big box with modem and TRIA and even bigger box with a white/cream Tooway satellite dish assembly.  This is a BIG dish and rather heavy too.  You could probably set it all up yourself but it's a fair weight to take up a height to fasten onto your wall so best to pay for someone to do that!

Fitting

Getting a professional fitting service meant that we had everything installed about a week after the order and it took about 2hrs to complete including running the cable to the sitting room and gettting it through the wall - same kind of procedure to having Sky TV installed.

Modem

The really important thing about the modem is that it is pretty basic.  No configurable DHCP, no wireless, and no easy configuration to allow it to have a static IP address or play nice with the rest of your setup in anyway whatsoever.  I can understand that the main 'cleverness' is in the satellite gadgetry but really the companies that make these things need some serious UX help

To insulate my carefully setup network from the modem I bought a TP-Link TL-R460 which is a neat little router that has a WAN port that can talk to modems over ethernet (it gets an IP address for this network via DHCP - yes, the SurfBeam2 Satellite Modem does have DHCP but it's not configurable) and then has a LAN network that 'looks' more like a normal router.

Usage

Primarily I'm using ADSL for now with the Satellite as backup.  Eventually I'm going to use some sort of crude load-balancing or sharing of usage of the two links.  The ADSL though slow is still quite responsive.  The satellite has ping times around 700ms - 2000ms depending on site (I think the satellite ping time is around 600ms).  That said it does still seem reasonably responsive.

I found the performance of the link to be extremely slow during the first week.  The bandwidth was slower than the ADSL connection.  After about a week of light usage/testing the performance started to get close to the promised 20Mb/sec download and 2Mb/sec upload.  I need to carry out more tests though.

Overall

Definitely I need to make more use of the satellite to get a feel for performance and usefulness but for now it seems like it would be perfectly usable in an emergency and could also be handy for off-peak downloads/uploads.  Despite the dish looking a bit of an eyesore it's at least hidden at the side of the house and isn't in the way.

I would also have to admit to a tiny glow of geekiness in that I'm using the internet over a satellite link!  It's pretty cool that traffic can be sent direct from a dish on the house, up to a satellite, bounced back down to earth and then on to it's destination.

Thursday 11 September 2014

And now for something completely different ...

Thankfully I have many cultured and amazing friends on FaceBook, Twitter, etc such that things like the video below I get to see/hear/experience when I would likely not be priviledged enough to have my relatively tiny mind expanded if left to it's own devices.



I have no idea how to categorise this music nor the vocabulary to describe or critique it.  All I can say is the video was fabulously enjoyable to watch and I look forward to learning more.



John Dowland | Now, O Now | Lute Song by Les Canards Chantants

Please, please, please, give this a watch and like/share/retweet

Sunday 1 June 2014

I should be shunned

I haven't written much for a while and I've certainly not written anything serious.  I thought I'd got most things out of my system and there was nothing of any great consequence left to report.  These things are often phases I guess and you just need something to be able to get things off your mind and written down.

The problem is that being a parent and transexual is apparently so unspeakably wrong and hurtful that I can be considered sub-human and therefore ignored and treated like a worthless person because of this most heinous crime.

Okay, this is not entirely what has happened, rather it's how I feel I am being treated.  What has happened, which I was convinced wouldn't (I'm different, my ex is a nice person, it can't happen to me, I'm a nice person, why would such horrible thing befall me, etc, pick your delusion), is that I have reached the point where my son is not wanting to see me nor even send me an e-mail, txt, or even answer my phone calls.

This hurts. 

I've had to deal with a general background level of dislike, blame, suspicion, distrust, disconnection, secrecy, blame (again), and a general up-hill struggle to have my feelings, rights, and thoughts even accepted as worth considering (it's all my choice and therefore my fault after-all folks, what was I thinking to expect it to be otherwise).  So, because of this, I've developed a reasonably thick skin or probably just naive optimism or out and and out denial.  Also, in complete fairness, I have been lucky and preoccupied with many other things in life being hard work but good and having battles to fight but with the odd victory.  In short, I've just dealt with things the best I could and tried to keep on trucking (metaphorically rather than literally, my in charge of a truck would be a dangerous prospect).

There are two things that are frustrating and extremely hurtful about the recent turn of events.  The first is that I tried, maybe not in all the right ways, but at least put the effort into looking after my son (and my ex) as best I could.  I tried to be fair in the divorce and not just let the solicitor grab everything they legally could (trust me, divorce is a horrible, almost blood-thirsty thing).  I've tried to be a 'good' person throughout and no matter what contribution I've made it's either something like "the least you could do" or "not enough".  No gratitude, just an expectation that I should do that.

The second issue is that any problem is my fault.  Everything is down to what I have done.  There isn't the slightest thought that maybe my behaviour isn't the complete picture, there might actually be other peoples opinions and actions that have led to some of the problems.

Children hear and pick-up on lots of things, how others talk (or fail to) about someone is something they are going to feel.  Given that I have been shouted at and told-off in front of my son it's quite possible my name is mud in the family generally.  The fact that all contact has been severed and that I'm treated 'differently' is probably enough of a negative things that it's had an impact.

Related to this is the fact that there is the constant message that it's understandable for my son to be upset at me and that it's okay to be sad and want me to be the way I was before and to exhibit all sorts of emotions and have these be a reason not to see me, to phone, or to talk about things.  That's acceptable, I'm in the wrong, I've done a terrible and hurtful thing.

My ex once commented that it would have been better if I'd had an affair.  Really I think she is right, that would have been more socially acceptable in hers and her families eyes.  In fact it often seems that lots of 'bad' things would have been better than this.  Seriously, how fucked up is that?  When someone dealing with a diagnosed mental illness, to wit, Gender Identity Disorder, and having (there is no choice, everyone please understand this concept if you don't, this isn't a lifestyle option) is "wrong" and cheating is actually better than that.

Technically adultery is a sin yet it's more socially acceptable these days than someone having treatment for a condition that can be (and thankfully wasn't in my case) life-threatening due to sufferers often having to deal with depression and suicidal tendencies also.  Maybe if I had more extreme symptoms it would have been acceptable then?

However, I'm getting off the point.

I have reached the stage where I feel there is a very real possibility that my son will not want to see me and either the visits/calls will reduce to such an infrequent rate or will stop all together.  I never thought I'd get to this, I didn't believe it could happen.

For anyone else out there going through a similar journey, trust me, you could reach this point too.

So, what is the solution.  Well, in the short term there probably isn't one.  I'm wrong remember, I'm the "bad" one here all of this is my fault.  Why should anyone do anything to help me, I brought this all on myself.  Starting from this point of view nothing is ever going to change.  So until my ex and family and all the people on the "other" "side" make a conscious effort to try and learn any understand what I went through and why and drop their bigotry and ignorance then nothing will change for me.

The overall solution is education and awareness; someone once said trans is the next gay - there has been a long hard fight for equal rights for gay individuals and couples.  It seems lots of progress has been made in this country and some others.  There are still things to fight for but there is at least some important equality in law and at the very least a much greater awareness.  Famous people are coming out as gay, it's becoming more acceptable and hopefully better understood.

This progress has also had a positive knock-on affect on trans people too and there is more awareness out there.  Speaking from a personal point of view my life would be better if awareness, understanding, and acceptance developed in very specific areas/people and that's going to be the same for anyone whose family, friends, and children are faced with this.

I did a little bit of research (should probably do more) and found the following resources that hopefully may be of some help:

GIRES - Gender Identity Research Education Society

Kid's Of Trans - seems America-centric on the whole but still useful information and explanations

A gay or trans person is still a person, they still have feelings and emotions just like everyone else and their dealing with their sexuality or gender identity doesn't suddenly render them unworthy of consideration, compassion or just being treated like a fellow human being.

A gay or trans parent is still your parent who loves you and hopes with all their heart that you still love them.




Wednesday 5 February 2014

Altera Quartus II and EDS on 64bit CentOS ... Eclipse won't start!

In a HHGTTG way* I will point out now to avoid any undue stress that Eclipse is now working fine (well seems to be as far as I have had time to test at the moment) so thankfully I can get on with learning about FPGAs, NIOS II and other geeky things :)

However, I thought I'd record my trials in getting this working so that anyone else that hits the same problem can fix it - or possibly suggest what I did wrong in setting everything up in the first place.

Anyway, we're having a look at FPGAs at work at the moment and they've purchased a little DE0 Nano board (available from Farnell in the UK prices £66.06 - need to save up as I want to buy my own to use at home now!).  I downloaded the Quartus II 13.1 Web edition from Altera which includes all the design tools and EDS (Embedded Development Suite) for these experimenter boards.

The software claims to support 64bit RedHat Enterprise Linux 6 (I went for the CentOS equivalent) and setup a VM.  Download (or a 7.5Gb ISO - eeek) and installation all seemed to go well and I followed the instructions in the readme to install a couple of 32bit libraries.

To cut a long story short; I was in a rush and just expected everything to work.  And in fact Quartus II did seem to startup fine.  Eclipse however, didn't start at all.  And more annoyingly, it just failed silently without any clue as to why.  I ran the eclipse-nios launcher as well as the eclipse executable directly.  No errors they both just start, appears to do some thinking and then quit :(  Weird.

After some investigation (ran strace and had a look at what it was doing) it became clear that I was missing a load of 32bit libraries!  Installed these and voila, Eclipse all working now :) 

While 'researching' for this blog post I came across the actual installation/licensing instructions/release notes which contain the following

"The following RPM packages are required to install and run the Altera Complete Design Suite (ACDS)
on systems running Red Hat Linux Enterprise 6:
• 32-bit libraries: compat-libstdc++-33.i686, expat.i686, fontconfig.i686, freetype.i686, glibc.i686,
gtk2.i686, libcanberra-gtk2.i686, gtk2-engines-2.18.4-5.el6.centos.i686, libpng.i686, libICE.i686,
libSM.i686, libuuid.i686, ncurses-devel.i686, ncurses-libs.i686, PackageKit-gtk-module.i686, tcldevel.
i686, tcl.i686, and zlib.i686
• XWindow libraries: libX11.i686, libXau.i686, libXdmcp.i686, libXext.i686, libXft-devel.i686, libXft.i686,
libXrender.i686, libXt.i686, and libXtst.i686
• GIMP toolkit: GTK+2
• For more information about RPM packages, visit the Red Hat website"


So, ultimately RTFM! 

I think I've got alot of RTFM to do with all this stuff now so will post when I've managed to understand some of it and maybe got something running!


* - I just re-listened to the audio book of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and it makes reference to stress being such a serious problem in the Galaxy that to avoid further increasing this the following points would be made clear about no-one getting hurt apart from a bruised upper arm. 

Friday 10 January 2014

Script, script and more script

This year I'm going to try and learn some more geeky-type stuff, specifically I'd like to have a go at some Ruby (and Rails) coding, bit more Python, CSS3, HTML5, PowerShell, and lots of other stuff.

As an aid to memory I'm going to dump a load of stuff I find out here so that I can always go back and see what I (should have) learnt.