Ying Tong Iddle I Po

Just trying to change my password for $COLLABORATOR’s network. Does anyone have any idea what sort of password would satisfy this? I’ve tried many, many different things :).

Your new password does not meet the following password policy requirements:

• The password must contain: 0 lowercase characters, 0 uppercase characters, 2 alphabetic characters, 8 unique characters, at least 2 digits, digits in positions: 0, 0 ending digits, at least 2 special characters, special characters in positions: 0, 0 ending special characters. The check is case sensitive.

Update: I found the following command somehow generated a valid password:

$ dd if=/dev/urandom bs=10 count=1 2>/dev/null | uuencode - | head -2 | tail -1

The BBC Archive have released a number of old Tomorrow’s World episodes. One particular episode has the infamous ‘beachball’ opening sequence. The moment I saw that I was immediately transported back to my childhood, having just got out of the bath (Tomorrow’s World day was bath day) and sitting downstairs freshly washed in a dressing gown.

Tomorrow’s World is one of my happy recollections of a time when the BBC’s science output actually excited and engaged me. The pre-Peter Snow and Phillipa Forrester Tomorrow’s World was an excellent programme that celebrated the innovation and optimism about technology before the cynical 90s killed it all. Similarly I remember the two-programme Horizon special on the Voyager space probes as an excellent high point before the ’single scientist against the world with strange camera angles and visual metaphors’ rot that has reduced the once proud flagship science programme into the stupid dumbed down claptrap is is now.

The canonical source for this blog has moved server. Hopefully all the cross-posting magic has retained its power. This post acts as a test for this :).

The second night in Edinburgh is about to begin. The first one doesn’t really count given that the entire day was pretty much lost to travelling. The train trip up was fun though. Having people to talk to, and space to breathe really does make a hell of a difference. The second leg (Stevenage to Edinburgh) took around 6 hours but I hardly noticed.

Today we had a bit of a practise in the morning followed by a relaxing day to prepare us for the stress to come. Laila, Alex, Jon and I went to the seaside. Photos of which can be seen on the Project Steve blog. After the beach, there was a well deserved pub.

I really love Edinburgh. The quality of the air up here is always so crisp and refreshing. Just breathing makes me feel like I’m cleaning my insides out.

Tomorrow is our get in. Luckily it is at the civilised time of 2pm but before that I have a publicity meeting with TSOB at 12pm and a Steve meeting at 10am. This, coupled with the inevitable flyering, means I should be pretty busy tomorrow.

The Internet connection here can be described as ’spotty at best’. My phone, when it has 3G + HSPDA is absolutely wonderful. When it has 2G, it sucks donkey balls. Luckily I have found a magic location within my room where 3G goodness can be had. One bar of goodness, but goodness nonetheless.

If you, like me, are trying to port a big GObject-based codebase with Python bindings over to OS X you may have run into the problem that the py-gobject port links agains Python 2.4. If, like me, you use CMake as a build system you’ll know that it is tricky to persuade CMake to do the same. The solution is to install the py25-gobject port.

Someone left an anagram on the whiteboard at work that we had to solve. As everyone knows, anagrams only have a single unique solution and we found it.

We also added a picture of Nick the Filthy Pencil. We work hard. Honest.

Here is a trailer for Once Upon a Time that I’m in for a bit of. It is terribly fine and Cat did an amazing job of learning all her Final Cut Pro and Blender-fu to do all the CG.

Once you’ve seen An Improvised History of Absolutely Everything, make sure to check this out too!

Update: The original script is also available if you want to compare the final product to it/discover some in-jokes :)