Odd dream last night that seems to have been surprisingly consistent and sensible. I was on the Enterprise (from TNG) with Beverly and an engineer (dunno who, but a red shirt anyhow). We were returning important information about some plague or something (puts me in mind of Crusade (1999, TNT)Science-FictionCrusade, a spin-off from the Emmy-winning Babylon 5, describes the efforts of the Interstellar Alliance vessel Excalibur to find the cure to a plague released on Earth. This plague of nano-viruses, released by the Shadow's servants the Drakh in retaliation for the Shadow War (see Babylon 5 movie a Call to Arms for details), will kill all mammalian life on Earth within five years if the cure is not found. Unfortunately, the plug was pulled on this series after just 13 episodes, so no resolution was ever achieved.Crusade although I've never seen it), but there had been some damage and we couldn't use the Warp drive to travel there quickly - it was going to take a couple of years to get back. Consequently, the crew had been put into hibernation in their quarters and there were just the few of us to run the ship.

I, for some reason, had to be awake as I had the information or whatever (on this, the dream was not specific - maybe I had the right thing in me but hibernation would destroy it). There needed to be some others to keep me from going crazy on my own - Beverly as the doctor and the engineer provided that, as well as checking that I was still healthy (in Beverly's case) and keeping the ship running properly (in the engineer's case). There had been some event recently that had cloned Beverly, so there were two of her. It wouldn't be necessary to have two doctors, normally, but as they were both identical it would be unreasonable to freeze one over the other - so both were left awake.

That's pretty much it - what surprises me is that it seems pretty consistent and sensible. Usually my dreams don't construct themselves in quite such a well formed way. On the other hand, you would probably want to rotate the crew, rather than keeping just a few awake. Or even keep everyone awake. But, those seem minor.

Freenet6's tunnels have been down all yesterday and today, so I've decided to try setting up a second tunnel, with Hurricane Electric. Their Tunnel Broker is relatively easy to sign up for - you need to give them your local IP address, which needs (apparently) to be pingable. On my Virgin cable router that was hidden in the DMZ settings 'allow ping to WAN IP'.

Once that's given, and a few other details, they have the tunnel configured and you just need to set up the local end to match. They give instructions for many systems, including 'linux-route2', which is the more modern way of configuring things.

I set up a simple script to bring things up and down:

Bringing things up: (/etc/network/he-up)

# Standard configuration

ip tunnel add he-ipv6 mode sit remote 216.66.80.26 local 192.168.x.y ttl 255
ip link set he-ipv6 up
ip addr add client address/64 dev he-ipv6
ip route add ::/0 dev he-ipv6
ip -f inet6 addr

# deprecate the client address
ip addr change client address/64 dev he-ipv6 preferred_lft 0

# Configuration for our local network
ip addr add routed address::1/64 dev eth0

# Now ensure that radvd is advertising our address
/usr/sbin/radvd -u radvd -p /var/run/radvd/he-radvd.pid \
        -C /etc/network/he-radvd.conf

The top section is actually just a copy of what the configration page gave me - with the important note that the 'local' address should be your local address inside any NAT.

Bringing it down: (/etc/network/he-down)

# Bring down the HE tunnel

# Remove route
ip route del ::/0 dev he-ipv6

# Set the link down and delete the address
ip link set he-ipv6 down
ip addr del client address/64 dev he-ipv6

# We *keep* the local address - uncomment this if you want to remove
#ip addr del routed address::1/64 dev eth0

# Disable router advertisements
if [ -f "/var/run/radvd/radvd.pid" ] ; then
  kill `cat /var/run/radvd/radvd.pid`
  rm /var/run/radvd/radvd.pid
fi

This appears to work for me, in any case. Configuring reverse DNS is identical as for Freenet6 really, with a different prefix. You just need to tell Hurricane Electric what your nameserver is. I use my dyndns.org address, so that if my address changes it tracks it.

However - and this is an important distinction for Hurricane Electric - they expect your endpoint to be the same. That is, your IP for the tunnel shouldn't move. So if you do get another address, the tunnel needs to be reconfigured with their web form.

I've updated selected pages of my site to provide some additional metadata in the HTML meta tags, primarily for the 'open graph protocol' used by Facebook. As anyone who knows me, I am pretty categoric in my dislike of Facebook's walled garden, but I accept that other poor deluded folk feel differently . But I happily embrace any useful technology which comes from that which can have general appeal.

I came across the Open Graph Protocol whilst parsing various news sites. Some sites like their metadata a lot, like the BBC and The Guardian. But coming across the 'og:' property made me look into it. Essentially it makes it a lot easier to provide semantic information about a page. Seemingly Facebook uses this to create useful 'likes' links and show other information when users enter URLs or otherwise reference a site. Seems like a reasonable plan to me - other attempts had been made but I think that this probably has enough weight behind it (well before I saw it) to be more widespread.

And, lets be realistic, the meta element really hasn't had a good time of things really. Aside from a few names, there were never any attempts to standardise information, so it became less useful. The 'keywords' in particular aren't even observed by some search engines (apparently).

Anyhow, the root page, diary months, and the rambles will be given their OpenGraph details. I might expand that to other pages if it makes sense, later, hut it's nice to see that it can actually do something useful.

Aside from the seeming abuse of the meta tag (the things keyed by meta are 'name' attributes, not 'property' attributes) it seems like it's a useful thing to have. Having websites that think about metadata is no bad thing.

I've been doing a little mini-project in the evenings to try to produce statistics about news sites. It's coming along quite nicely. I trawled all of Drobe and The Icon Bar last night and today, which produced some vaguely interesting details - not least of which was the amusing use of HTML across both. The other sites I've dealt with have been far easier to handle due to better HTML, semantic markup (Dublin Core, Open Graph, even HTML 5 semantic tags in places), and generally using structured styles.

I also found out why I don't listen to Brand New Day, by Sting any more - Ghost Story tends to make me upset .

Found a bug in the 'style' tool which blew up my graph generation earlier today. It appears to access off the end of the array and was very obvious when fed data under 'valgrind'. Fortunately it's an easy fix. That's the first time I've reported bugs up to debian, I think.

I'm quite tired this evening, but I cannot seem to sleep. Over the weekend I put together some nice statistics for Chris Williams to have a look at. Actually it's more because I wanted something that was different to writing about past stuff, and to do some real code for a change. It turned out quite well, and I added a few more processors this evening to handle more stuff. Then I couldn't sleep so I added some graphs to go with the figures. I didn't sleep well last night either, so maybe there's a pattern here.

I've been trying to work out how to split up some of the rambles - what's the most appropriate length for each one, assuming they can be broken at sensible points. I had thought that around 2500 words per ramble would be good, but I'm not certain. Given that most news articles tend to vary depending on content, but be in the 200-1400 range. On the other hand, I'm only publishing one ramble per day, so maybe 2500 isn't unreasonable.

I woke up at about 7am this morning, thinking it was Saturday. So I went back to sleep and didn't wake up until a little late.

Been feeling a little sad and lonely this evening, and didn't manage to get anything useful written. I'm coming to the conclusion that I'm not going to make the start of November deadline that I set myself. I might defer for a month and see where we are as we get close to the start of December. It's hard writing stuff. Some of it's not going to be interesting to people, but it's interesting to me in some little way.

As I didn't feel up to writing anything today - I only managed two sentences at lunch, 'cos I was chatting to Ed - I knocked up a simple module to produce readability statistics the 'style' command. It seems to be quite useful on producing stats, and I like having lots of figures I can compare to one another and stuff. It's pretty hard to interpret some of them, but at least they give someting fun to look at .

After I added ETag support to my HTTP server, I thought it might be useful to pay attention to the persistent connection requests that are made by HTTP clients. It might reduce the number of connections that are performed, and make things a little more efficient. At least that was my thought. A little bit of the code needed reworking so that the requests could be handled multiple times, but it wasn't too hard. I did find some amusing use of variables in one of the functions, but nothing that couldn't be fixed.

However, once I managed to get it all working testing it with Chrome and Opera showed it worked - but it was significantly slower than the non-KeepAlive version. A little surprising really. I think it's probably because there are only 6 concurrent persistent connections whereas there are more non-persistent connections that it would usually perform.

Today I learnt about readability metrics, semantic HTML5 elements and how to add scrollbars to <pre> elements. In addition to writing about 1400 words and having my head turned inside out trying to remember how things worked. There's a firefox add-on called 'Readability', and it does a pretty good job of making things readable on the 'net. My diary suffers because of some hidden elements appearing (which I kinda knew about and whilst I wasn't happy, still kept), and doesn't have headings for the entries (which I think is due to them not being in '<h#>' elements). I think some HTML5 semantic elements might help for the latter. Readability manages to strip everything extraneous from The Register articles, so that's a big bonus in my eyes.

I've been chasing XSLT trying to work out why I'm getting out double <br> whenever I use <br /> in my template, because it was making the output look ugly. I finally discovered the reason after a lot of faffing and searching - it's not. What it's producing is <br></br>, which the browser is interpreting as two breaks. This makes a mess of my layout. Oh well, I need to re-think that I guess. On the other hand, this might be a real bug - the XSLT standard says that it should be written as a single element.

Ah-ha... it's because the default namespace was XHTML that it wasn't honouring that. I'm not sure that that's entirely right but for now I'll accept it.

I had a dream last night that I was starting a postgrad course at University and had to find where everything was. I'd started late so didn't know anybody or where anything was and had to ask a lot of people where to go and who I should see.

I had a bad dream this morning about coming back home (to our old place in Weeting) and someone being in the process of stealing everything. It's sort of similar in theme - if not location - to one a little while back, where I had similar problems with the place I was staying. I guess it's just an insecurity thing .

I'm playing again with some XSLT. I wrote a whole load about 5 years ago and looking back at it now... I don't understand a lot. XSLT is very much a write-only language, probably because I'm less familiar with it now. Good commenting will help. Once you get into it, it's not too bad. I remember having real problems jumping back and forth between the XSLT and XPath specifications to understand how it worked. I think some of the stuff I've misunderstood is from an early version of the xsltproc implementation.

Most of the problems I'm seeing are due to the 'node-set compared to string means is there a node in that set which matches the string' being different to what I expect. In a few places I have comparisons like "@href = ''" to mean 'if there is no or empty href attribute', which is wrong. I think it should be "not(@href)" or "not(@href) or not(@href != '')". Neither of which are at all friendly or obvious as to what is being done.

Managed just 900 words today, which really wasn't enough. On the other hand I did manage to write - and test - some C code this evening. That's the first time I've written any C in about a year and a bit. I just don't get any opportunity with what I'm doing.

Woke up this morning about 5am with a nasty headache. It hadn't gone off by 6, so I had some tablets. I didn't really get back to sleep but I did rest a bit, then went in to work and had some more tablets as the headache still hadn't really gone.

And my editor crashed and took about 2 hours of work with it - quite why there was no backup and I'd not saved in that time, I'm not sure, but it was a little bothering.

Normally, with freenet6, if you connect from the system that's using the IPv6 tunnel, the connections will appear to come from the interface address of the broker, not the address allocated to the home network. This only applies if the configuration in gogoc.conf is set to 'router'. To change the address used as a source it's necessary to mark the broker address as 'deprecated'.

To do this automatically on connection, change the file /usr/local/etc/gogoc/template/linux.sh so that immediately after adding the prefix to TSP_HOME_INTERFACE the following is done:

# Deprecate the broker address, so that we prefer the home address
Display 1 "Deprecating the broker address in preference to home address"
Exec $ipconfig addr change $TSP_CLIENT_ADDRESS_IPV6/$TSP_TUNNEL_PREFIXLEN \
   dev $TSP_TUNNEL_INTERFACE preferred_lft 0

This will ensure that connections made from the gateway will not use the broker address - they'll appear to come from the home address. You may need to sort out reverse DNS so that you have a name for that site, but I've covered this before.

Last nights dream was about me and Caroline (I think) visiting a friend who had produced some RISC OS things in the old days and we had agreed to meet. They lived on the edge of a run down town and there was nobody around as we drove up to where they lived - unsure if we'd got the right address. There weren't make people around because it was Christmas day, and there was a foot of snow all around. We'd driven around for a little while until we found the place, because it was a little out of the way.

Their house was actually a little special. It was oval shaped, white around the outside except for a couple of windows, and sat on top of a tower about 2 stories high - imagine a flying saucer on top of a short tower. We climbed up inside and the place was a bit of a mess, with papers and flyers dotted around. We had a great view down the road and over the river that it was beside.

We left the house, down a ladder that was set into the tower, and walked along the street, kicking snow around. My friend arrived and apologised for being late. We went back up to the oval and talked about things for a while.

I don't really remember much more.

I went in to work for about 3 hours today before deciding I wasn't really feeling good enough to stick with it. So I went home and tried not to feel quite so icky. Finally managed to wear off to a reasonable state about 8pm. I decided to use the few hours to do something 'simple' that didn't matter if it didn't work out. I got rid of the links to the 'comments' page at the bottom of every diary entry.

Instead of actually being a link to the page, they now have an inline comment form. The idea is that it should reduce the amount of rubbish that bots crawl when they hit my site. 50-70% of the hits on my site are to the comments page, entirely from bots. This is both wasteful and skews my statistics a little - not that I'd looked at them. If I had looked, I'd have noticed this pattern a while back! It's only 'cos I was looking at what's available that I noticed the statistics links in the administration page.

It also shows how little my site is viewed, although I'm not fussed about that either. Interestingly, though, about 30% of the hits are for the RSS or Atom feeds - it varies from month to month.

In making the comments page work, I also discovered that when I added a AAAA record to my home server I forgot that the services I run on there aren't actually available over IPv6 - they're both firewalled and they don't listen on IPv6. I spent a little while updating them so that they work - now I have them working on both IPv4 and IPv6, and because it's my core library that handles all the requests which has been updated... everything will be capable in the same way.

I spent a little time this evening tidying up the layout of the diary entries as well, just by changing bits of the CSS. It's not hugely better but the top of the entry and the month-calendar line up now, which is much nicer.

Couldn't sleep this evening, so I added IPv6 support to Colloquy. It's rather hacky and it's not done in a way that you'd want to use in general, but the code was sufficiently clean initially that it wasn't hard to update the luasocket.c to handle enough of IPv6 to provide a simple IPv6 server. The resolver and any other connections it might make are still resolutely IPv4, but being able to connect to the talker over IPv6 is nicer.

Reading back yesterday's mini-rant on freedoms, or the lack of, I think I should also remember that a freedom includes the right to choose to live under a set of rules, and that everyone's view of the rules that they will live under is different. And of course it's wrong to view society as seen through my own little window as a whole.

The front page now has a link to the 'coming soon' Rambles section of the site. I've been writing bits and pieces for this for a couple of months now, on and off, and it's pretty hard going. Sometimes it's hard to focus on a topic, sometimes there's more interesting things happening, and sometimes it's very easy to get distracted looking at things that I did and boggling.

At present, I'm pretty certain that there's not enough written to cover half of what I want to say, but there's not long left now until my self-imposed deadline. I guess I'll probably just delay if things aren't ready. It's not like it's really going to matter - I'm not on a delivery schedule in any case.

Feeling a little icky this evening, but I think that's entirely my own fault for trying to have some pasta this afternoon.

There was a time when people viewed things that you 'signed up for', that weren't clubs, with extreme skepticism, even fear. Things like 'free' magazine subscriptions, free holidays that were just for high-pressure presentations, mail-order deals that got you with initially cheap offers but required you to buy things weekly, and of course the usual collection of political groups, religions and cults that encouraged you to sign up for information, in the hope that you'd follow up or they'd brainwash you with their literature...

But these days 'sign up for free' just seems to be the norm for every little thing and people will willingly give up information about themselves in the knowledge that they're being tracked. If I put this argument together with the amount of information that people give away to people like facebook, google, surveys and others, and the relentless pursuit of 'free' software under licenses like the GPL - not to mention the efforts that governments, police and other groups go to in the name of 'security' to protect people in this country and others - the only conclusion I can draw is that people (in the general sense) don't know what Free or Freedom is. Or maybe they just don't want to be free.

The average man doesn't want to be free. He wants to be safe. [ Freedom; Henry Louis Mencken ]

... suggests Chris Williams.

Of course I say that from my own safe world.

In Fringe (2008, FOX)Action and Adventure/Drama/Science-FictionTeleportation. Mind control. Invisibility. Astral projection. Mutation. Reanimation. Phenomena that exist on the Fringe of science unleash their strange powers in this thrilling series, co-created by J.J. Abrams (Lost, Alias), combining the grit of the police procedural with the excitement of the unknown. The story revolves around three unlikely colleagues - a beautiful young FBI agent, a brilliant scientist who's spent the last 17 years in a mental institution and the scientist's sardonic son - who investigate a series of bizarre deaths and disasters known as "the pattern." Someone is using our world as an experimental lab. And all clues lead to Massive Dynamic, a shadowy global corporation that may be more powerful than any nation.Fringe episode "Fringe4x03
"Alone In The World"Two young bullies are found dead and in just a few hours they rot to an advanced state of decomposition. The Fringe team investigates and uncovers an amorphous figure claiming more victims. Walter becomes increasingly distracted with his mental state.Alone In The World" today, I noticed William Sadler as the doctor again - but in the credits as 'Bill Sadler'. I know him from Wonderfalls (2004, FOX)Comedy/DramaSet against the backdrop of Niagara Falls, Wonderfalls is a quirky one-hour family dramedy about an underachieving twenty-something souvenir shop worker named Jaye Tyler. Her life is forever changed when inanimate figures including toys, cartoons and anything in the form of an animal, begin to talk to her. In each episode, the creatures' cryptic messages set into motion a chain of unpredictable events that invariably lead Jaye into the lives of others in need. Throughout the series' bizarre situations and madcap adventures, Jaye seeks advice from her best buddy Mahandra and befriends Eric, a local bartender who tries to help answer her unrequited questions. Is the universe conspiring against her? Is this real or just her imagination? Should she struggle with fate or surrender to destiny? Whatever the outcome one thing is for certain - Jaye will discover that the world around her is a magical place and that the seemingly random event.Wonderfalls but it just surprised me to be listed as 'Bill'.

After being sufficiently hot last week to mean that I needed to move the fan upstairs overnight, it's now sufficiently cold that I'm going to have to turn the heating on. The weather does change a bit here.

I spent quite a bit of this evening being rather ranty about RISC OS things on the phone, which is a little frustrating, but hopefully gets it out of my system and lets us move on a little .

Rang Mum this morning as well, to wish her a Happy Birthday. They are currently in Monte Carlo as part of their Holiday - sounds like they were having a nice time and they were a lot warmer than I was this morning!

I was dreaming of taking a little girl to the park and the zoo, and it was all quite nice, and a little sad when she had to go .

I'm not sure what happened to Castle (2009, ABC)DramaRick Castle is one of the world's most successful crime authors. But when his rock star lifestyle isn't enough, this bad boy goes looking for new trouble and finds it working with smart, beautiful Detective Kate Beckett. Inspired by her professional record and intrigued by her buttoned-up personality, Castle's found the model for his bold new character whether she likes it or not. Now with the mayor's permission, Castle is on her case and in her way. Kate's initial disdain for Castle turns to grudging respect as he quickly proves that a background in plotting murders can be a valuable asset in catching killers. As they solve a new crime together each week, their partnership grows as does their love-hate relationship. These two may not always see eye to eye, but together they might just write a whole new chapter in crime-solving.Castle episode "Castle4x03
"Head Case"A murder scene complete with lots of blood but no victim and high tech life-extension science are all part of the investigation as Castle and Beckett try to solve a murder without a body. Meanwhile, Alexis waits to hear news about her application to StanfordHead Case" tonight, but Castle was basically just stating the obvious all through it.

Managed to get a thousand or so words down this evening, which makes me feel a little better. I'm running out of time so I really need to get a whole lot more done. It might be my own schedule, but I do hate to let myself down.

Fringe (2008, FOX)Action and Adventure/Drama/Science-FictionTeleportation. Mind control. Invisibility. Astral projection. Mutation. Reanimation. Phenomena that exist on the Fringe of science unleash their strange powers in this thrilling series, co-created by J.J. Abrams (Lost, Alias), combining the grit of the police procedural with the excitement of the unknown. The story revolves around three unlikely colleagues - a beautiful young FBI agent, a brilliant scientist who's spent the last 17 years in a mental institution and the scientist's sardonic son - who investigate a series of bizarre deaths and disasters known as "the pattern." Someone is using our world as an experimental lab. And all clues lead to Massive Dynamic, a shadowy global corporation that may be more powerful than any nation.Fringe episode "Fringe4x02
"One Night In October"As the victims of a highly intelligent serial killer "Over There" stack up, the Fringe Division "Over Here" is asked to assist. As the two sides tangle and innocent people remain at risk, the suspect's doppelganger "Over Here," a professor who teaches Forensic Psychology, is brought into the fold and forces the team to consider the notion of sending civilians to the other sideOne Night In October" was quite strange tonight, with a professor from one universe investigating a serial killer in the other - his alternate. Also a bit strange to see alternate-Broyles still alive, as he'd been killed in the previous season. No Joe Flannigan in the credits, though, so I guess his 5 minutes was all he had to do for a screen credit, which is a little odd.

I'm sure I saw a watcher in the hospital, near the end, too. Standing silhouetted in a doorway.

I've made a minor change to the diary this evening so that the heading doesn't take up quite so much room. Most modern browsers should cope with this (modern being 'produced in the last 10 years', I think), so it's not any worse than the rounded corners on my diary entries.

Very very hot day today, and I lost the broadband for some of it, which was just devastating. Not really, though, as it's not actually required all the time .

I have, however, written an RSS feed creator (another one, for a different purpose) and tidied up some bits of the publication code on my website. I also had to fight a bit with the Date::Manip module's understanding of working week which doesn't match mine - at least not when it comes to the concept of 'next day'.

I was hunting for the old code that Chris and I wrote to create a fake Internet stack when we were at University. I cannot seem to find it, and I've really looked. I found a whole bunch of things that I'd forgotten, but no Fake Internet. I'll try to catch up with him later,