Zorac's LiveJournal

I've been meaning to do this for ages. I am intrigued to find out how people pronounce the words in this poll's eponynymous song.

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Bill Gates, in his memo "Toward a Spam-Free Future":

Like almost everyone, I receive a lot of spam every day, much of it offering to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It's ridiculous.

One of the comments on the BBC News article "If not smacking, then what?":

Parents now have the ultimate sanction: "No Harry Potter". Or worse, you could threaten to tell them that [censored] dies on page [censored].

In other ...er... "news", I've done further LJ style tweakage, in the form of graphical threading on entry pages. Unfortunately, to see it, you'll all have to post lots of comments. Muahahahaha!

Today saw Steve Jobs' keynote speech at the Apple WWDC, so lots of nifty product announcements. First up is the sneak preview of Mac OS X - Panther. Lots of interesting and innovative stuff that I'd like to see in action - Exposé looks really handy, and I love the eye-candy Fast User Switching - "Because we can".

The other big thing in Panther for me (as a full-on geek) is Xcode. I'm still trying to wrap my head around it, but it sounds like the face of software development to come - distributed building, predictive compilation, etc. The most interesting sounding concept is "Fix and continue" - rebuilding parts of an app whilst it's running - I can't figure out how that would work, but I can see it being a real time-saver.

The second big announcement was, of course, new hardware: The Power Mac G5. Now that is one kick-ass machine. After years of the PC world sneering at slow Macs, here's something that hits back with a vengeance - with a dual 2GHz G5 comparing very favourably with a dual 3GHz Xeon (and probably even price-wise with that level of kit). I so want one of these - just with a slightly lower price tag...

lasultrix has given zorac socks! zorac is free!

This post is SPOILER FREE - mainly as it is DISCUSSION OF THE BOOK FREE.

So, I t00bed into town at around 8 yesterday evening, to meet up with cygnusfap for a spot of food, and we were soon joined by owlman. After eating we retired to a now empty Cygr00m for a chat before going to scope out the bookshops (yay! piles of OotP!) then moving on to G&D's where we met up with kay_taylor. After ice-cream we proceeded to the coach station to collect lasultrix, then back to Borders to join the queue. There was no queue. A short while later, a queue was created with us at the front of it. We then had a 40 minute wait observing the t00by wizard costumes of the staff and their giant quaffle, and squeeing when boxes of books arrived. Cyg tried to attract the attention of other fandomers in the queue - to discover that the girl immediately behind us was a fan of thegraybook's work...

Finally, the announcer came on the tannoy and got us to count down the final 10m seconds of the wait before we lead the stampede to the checkouts - and I go to be the first person out of the store proudly brandishing a copy of the book :-). Outside, I was impressed by the length of the queue to get into the shop (in addition to what was inside), and the similar length queues at Waterstones and Smith's down the road. Soon we were on the bus in the direction of Chez Zorac - Las already ready the book, while the rest of us held back for our Evil Scheme. A couple of the folks behind us suggested that possibly we were a bit Sad. HP Gay porn was mentioned. They shut up.

Back home, Cyg, Kay, Simon and myself started our reading plan - one chapter at a time, stopping after each one for discussion. This may sound a bit longwinded (it took us around 17 hours to get through the book, including lunch break), but I though it worked really well, helping to build the tension - plus other people's insights are always interesting. As we were all reading at slightly different speeds (and Las was going straight through the book as she needed to leave early), there was considerable squeeage and wibbleage - accompanied by page numbers for reference. I shall definitely be reading books 6 and 7 in a similar fashion if at all possible.

This post was brought to you by Tesco's Kick (Red Bull, but at 98p for 2 litre bottles) and T00blerone (yes the one where each triangle weighs about 1lb).

A few random thoughts for today:

1. Am part-way through Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Another 500 pages to get through before Saturday. Anyone posting uncut OotP spoilers will be disemboweled with a rusty spork.
2. The Matrix Reloaded gets its UK IMAX release on 4th July. You know you want to.
3. The latest S2 code has gone live, allowing me to port my style across from my test journal, but am a perfectionist, so much tweaking still to be done.
4. Gacked from marysia, Harry Potter in the style of musical Buffy: Once More, With Cursing! - very funny, even if the scanning and rhyming is a little off in places (not that I could do any better)
5. Really should post Punt00bage update, but many of you already have, so apathy is winning at the moment...

That is all.

The haX0rising starts here. :-P ;-)

Punt00bage on Friday is at my flat, from midday onwards. I shall post proper directions and contact details in a locked post tomorrow when I am awake and have done maps. Until then, the following comedy directions supplied by the lovely hermorrine will have to suffice:

From the bus station: Walk through marketplace. Notice cobblestones you are walking on. Go past shops and restaurants. Go down alley. When you reach Border's there is a bus stop. Wait for bus. Get on bus when it arrives and not a moment before. Get off bus when you reach Mark's Secret Lair. No, I cannot tell you what street it's on! It's a secret!

Here continueth my weekend report from Bristol.
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This weekend I'm down in Bristol visiting my sister. The story so far:
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Inspired by this statement by constantine, this is a response of sorts to this posting on gryffindortower which is claiming proof that two individuals are the same based on lists of IP addresses. I’ve looked up all the addresses mentioned using DNS (matching forward and reverse) and WHOIS (using whois.arin.net initially and rwhois.verio.net for more specific information on Verio addresses).

68.82.0.0-68.82.255.255        = Comcast Cable Communications, Inc.
68.82.67.208    = pcp01484347pcs.frncht01.de.comcast.net

130.94.107.128-130.94.107.255  = Anonymizer
130.94.107.137  = (No reverse DNS)

130.94.123.160-130.94.123.191  = Anonymizer
130.94.123.171  = (No reverse DNS)

167.21.0.0-167.21.255.255      = STATE OF DELAWARE
167.21.1.228    = eduproxy2.k12.de.us.
167.21.1.230    = eduproxy3.k12.de.us.

168.143.113.0-168.143.113.255  = Anonymizer
168.143.113.142 = (No reverse DNS)

168.143.123.64-168.143.123.127 = Anonymizer
168.143.123.83  = (No reverse DNS)
168.143.123.88  = (No reverse DNS)

209.234.128.0-209.234.223.255  = GST Telecom / Time Warner Telecom
209.234.157.44  = 209-234-157-44.gen.twtelecom.net
209.234.157.68  = 209-234-157-68.gen.twtelecom.net
209.234.157.104 = 209-234-157-104.gen.twtelecom.net
209.234.157.106 = 209-234-157-106.gen.twtelecom.net
209.234.157.228 = 209-234-157-228.gen.twtelecom.net
209.234.160.75  = 209-234-160-75.gen.twtelecom.net

OK, so we have a whole bunch of addresses mapping to Anonymizer - clearly traffic coming from these addresses could be anyone. The various similar GST Telecom addresses (usually multiple for one person) are highly suggestive of dialup - in which case you could justify pointing fingers if two identities were seen on that address at virtually identical times - but equally they could be some form of proxy or cache servers. The "State of Delaware" addresses map to "eduproxy..." which it seems clear to me are proxy servers, most likely for (some of) the state's schools - again, any number of people could be behind those proxies.

The only address which may well map to a single location if the Comcast one (but that is merely speculation). This is apparently the address that was used by fermatojam to sign up at Gryffindor Tower - but wasn't Fermatojam originally a real Stalker whose accounts were only later misused by others (as described in this post on the GT LJ, which would surely mean that that address is associated with the *real* Fermatojam - and this address is only seen on one other person in that list, pottersginny.

To summarise:
• PottersGinny and msscribe have both used Anonymizer
• PottersGinny, msscribe, clarabella21, sarahkjames and melodyannsings have all used (most likely) dialup connections through GST Telecom.
• Fermatojam (unknown whether real or impersonated), MelodyAnnSings and "Kellie" have all used (most likely) an educational establishment in Delaware
• Fermatojam (presumably real) and PottersGinny have both used the same Comcast IP address (possibly a cable modem)

The only remotely convincing connection I can draw from this evidence alone is between the real Fermatojam and PottersGinny - and even that relies on a couple of assumptions. The claim that "all these posts were made from msscribe's computer" seems ludicrous.