Autistic Happiness

Ours is the first age where autistic children can be happy.

It's because we have Google and youtube. Google is good -- it searches, and if you've got a special interest a search engine is part of what you need.

Youtube goes a little further. For certain we have the train videos posted by all the sainted spotters who have made the more mad son contented, stimulated and entertained from a nice safe indoor seat. That's very good. We have the Thomas videos -- very naughty, very welcome -- which have come back into his life now he's starting to get a glimmering of relationships and consequences. It goes further than that.

This picture shows why. It's the logo you'll find in the front of a lot of Thomas tapes from the eighties and nineties. Others are Strand and VCi. So it's no surprise I grabbed it off a youtube post.

What is a surprise is that this isn't the opening frames of a pirate post. It's from VCI Backwards, one of dozens of posts composed from these publisher's logos. No content, just the logos and jingles, forward, backwards, foreign variants, compilation sand the Dear knows what else.

And they're popular! VCI Backwards shows 31,000 viewings. My thesis is that the vast majority of those viewings is from ASD boys who have found whatever spark of interest lies in collection and comparison of these snippets.

Certainly Ravy D's a fan. He won't know to post fan art so I'm doing it for him: this is his interpretation -- perhaps tribute is a truer word -- of The Video Collection.

The original was created in Windows Paint as a 1.7MB BMP. This extract -- a 6KB GIF -- includes all the non-white content and was prepared in Irfanview.

Cider Outcomes

Well, the cider took. The mostly-Bramley fermented nicely to produce a splendid but very strong and tart drink by Christmas. The brew from the mostly-Spartan was slow to start and hasn't conditioned as well, and is indeed rather bland but just as strong and it softens the Bramley rather well. They're both still improving and drink very nicely in a fifty fifty blend in the glass.

Key point one seems to be that a pressure barrel is well worth the expense. Neither brew is as good after going flat in the fridge. And the second is that fining doesn't seem to make much difference -- it threw a lot of sediment but it was still cloudy. The unfined Bramley brew is probably the clearer of the two now.

The truly shocking thing is how much the supermarket bill has gone down after I started drinking homebrew. That decline in revenue is probably why Alastair had to put the booze tax up in the budget.

Terrorist Spies

I found out whether I believe in evil terrorists reconnoitring for their next target.

Rather to my surprise, it appears that I do.

At 06:50 I saw a clean-looking man in a hi-vis vest photographing an iconic tower, leaning back to get the upper parts in. After a few shots he hopped into a clean-looking, unmarked refuse lorry waiting at the curb and his mate drove him away. The photograph, the building just didn't hang together with the refuse lorry, and everything was really much too clean, so I noted the number of the lorry, and when I got to work, I wrote it all down.

I wasn't too happy with claiming that it was a terrorist planning exercise, though, so I tried it on a few people to see how it sounded. But I couldn't persuade myself it was even slightly normal and so I dropped it on the Met's reporting site.

Am I perhaps an hysterical old bat?

Messages from the Divine are Ever Clouded in Mystery

Last week I laid a fleece before the Lord. I washed the worst of the mud off my boots and determined that if they stayed clean, I could conclude that winter is over. That's important -- I look pretty eccentric commuting in boots -- I'd rather wear my regular shoes.

This week my boots are cleaner than ever. But the reason is that I've been wading through vast pools of standing water from the storms. The fleece is dry, but my shoes would be very wet indeed.

So what's the message? Simple: God is cleverer than me.

This Job is Weirding Me Right Up

I was sitting next to a man on the train and noticed that he was looking at porn photos on his telephone. I didn't think "Blimey, that's a bit much on the train!" I didn't think "I wonder if that's his missus." I didn't even think "Ooh gissa look!"

No. The first thing in my head was: "I hope that's not a work phone."

Spring

It's trying so hard. Hedging is over -- the first buds broke on the hawthorn three weeks ago, but they haven't done much since. The bees in the new hazel coppice are out looking for catkins in warm sun, but I daren't open them up for a look. I've tidied up the woodshed, but there's still a stream of logs going indoors.

All I can do is wait. I don't mind -- it's just so exciting.

Pick Any Two

There is the famous security story of the honest consultant offering a system to a client: He asks them to pick any two from

• Cheap,
• User-friendly, and
• Secure

Reading the news today, I saw the latest idiot scheme to put every child on a secure government database, and I realised that it's the same thing.

"Secure Government Database?"

Pick any two.

Microclimate

Clear skies left yesterday afternoon much warmer than the morning. But this morning I was crackling through frost again -- except for a moment: as I crossed the river I felt a waft of heat and my glasses misted over.

The end of the World

I think there are currently two ways for mad scientists to destroy the world.

1. The new accelerator at CERN has a sort of chance of creating quantum black holes, depending apparently on how tightly the insensible dimensions are rolled up. Good looking theory says that they should evaporate in a tiny gamma burst, but no-one can be sure how relativity works at that scale. If they don't evaporate, they will fall to the earth's core and then consume the whole planet. The first few atoms might take a while, but after that, they'll be unstoppable.
2. Craig Venter's team expect to be loading their carefully written DNA into a cell this year. If they cock up and build a replicator, there's no easy telling what it'll manage.

In the past, the best bet was fusion bomb tests: could they ignite light elements in the planet's crust? Well, no as it happened, and I'll guess we'll be alright with these two, too.

Be Careful What You Wish For

Five years ago, I was effectively unemployed, failing to keep on top of the household jobs, and wishing I was riding on the commuter trains going past.

This evening, long after I should have been back, I was sitting on a commuter train wishing I was at home.

Advice

I was cutting down the hedge in front of the house today. Quite heavy work, a little sawing through the beech trunks, but mostly figuring out how to use the loppers to undo the tangle and pull out the heavy brushings.

Every Sunday walker that came along the lane had the same piece of advice: "That's a heavy job -- you need a chainsaw."

Now I'm a power tool enthusiast -- in the right place -- and I know a professional hedger would automatically use a power saw. But why on earth would anyone imagine that a middle-aged, middle-grade bank operative with almost no training or experience would do better with a chainsaw than with the bowsaws I've been using since I was a child?

It's not easy running a website

I think I have this right: There are currently two large-scale ways in which you can have lost control of your website.

• If your site admin was compromised, there's an Apache "rootkit" (not actually rooting the host, but invisible to the admin) that serves a stealthy javascript downloader to all your visitors. As the site admin, you don't see this in the site content.
• If you deliver content from an ad network, you may end up serving malware.

Either way, you won't know about it until the customers are complaining.

Secrecy Preserving Protocol

From the Metro 2008-1-15:

.... he claimed a mystery royal had warned that Princess Diana's intimate conversations might be bugged. In a bid to protect the person's identity, Mr Burrell insisted on writing the name on a piece of paper and passing it to the coroner. Lord Scott-Baker then revealed three members of the family not named -- the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Duchess of York....

Nice balance.

Pain Allergy

I didn't do any hedging today. Last Sunday I was tidying up a monster hawthorn stool and a branch whacked me in the head, leaving me with a dirty great big thorn stuck in my scalp.

It didn't infect, but my inability to remove it -- I couldn't see it -- resulted in a sequence of increasingly desperate requests for help as the lump went down and the splinter made itself increasingly uncomfortable. It ended in the Barts Minor Injuries unit with a nurse on each side of the couch each pressing hard on her side of the lump while one of them used a free hand to wield the forceps.

Some people would pay for that, but for me, before I go back, I'm getting one of these. In the mean time, I had a happy day trying out my new compressor.

Pollen Allergy (The Attack of the Online Florists)

I was talking to the helpdesk team meeting about safe browsing yesterday. I went round the table asking for guesses about the site category that caused the most virus blocks this week. All the usual categories came up: social networking, webmail, blogs and one wag offered the BBC. All good tries except the last, and all wrong.

The real answer was online florists.

Well, that was my route into saying that no site is really safe, (in fact it's a really good security story) and that's why I was going to have another review of their privilege, but I didn't really give it the thought it deserved.

Happily, Mary Landesman has. But I wish she had been able to figure out what was going on.

UPDATED 16/1/2008

It's being reported that all these sites were on Fasthosts when they had that mass site admin password reset in October (and then waited till December to enforce it). Looks as if the malware dropped at that time was left quiescent until last week which makes this a really good security story: Hackers are willing to wait, and there really is no logical end to the consequences of a root compromise.