onefang's rants

After much googling, I think I have this all sorted out. PayPal have not helped with the confusion.

Your PayPal account can have money in it, it can also be linked to a bank account, and it can also be linked to a credit/debit card. One of these can be designated the “backup” account.

PayPal has two different payment methods, which are called different things in different countries.

eCheque/eCheck takes the money out of your bank account, and thus has to wait for a bank clearing period before being available in your PayPal account.

Direct/Instant takes the money from your PayPal account, or credit/debit card, and the money is instantly available in your PayPal account.

In my case, once the money is available in my PayPal account, I can spend it straight away with merchants that accept PayPal, or transfer it to my local bank account. The bank transfer has a bank clearing period.

According to google, these bank clearing periods can be anywhere from three to fourteen days in practice, even though PayPal usually quotes three to four or three to five working days. In my case, the eCheque bank clearing period usually takes four working days, and the transfer to my bank clearing period is usually three working days. Both together add up to seven working days, so one or two weekends must be added. So an eCheque/eCheck payment to me could take two weeks to get to me, while a direct/instant payment will probably get to me in less than a week.

Now comes the hard part. I would prefer direct/instant payments, as would a large number of web sites I have seen. How do you get the payer to do a direct/instant payment? As far as I can tell, the process is this -

If the payer believes all the PayPal “payment is instant” propaganda, they may just ignorantly select an eCheque/eCheck payment, or the payer may select a direct/instant payment.

If the payer has not enough funds in their PayPal account for the direct/instant payment, then PayPal has to use a “backup” funding source.

This is where it gets interesting. The backup source could be a credit/debit card with enough funds AND an expiry date in the future. In this case, it is still a direct/instant payment.

With no credit/debit card, or one that can’t cover the funds, or one that expires soon, the payment is converted to an eCheque/eCheck payment made from bank account funds.

Any conspiracy theories about banks or PayPal using these “clearing periods” as piss poor excuses to just abuse the money on the short term money market are left to the readers imagination. I’ll just point out that PayPal and credit/debit companies can send money around the world instantly, but banks can’t.

The CEO of Terra Soft Solutions likes to go mountain climbing. He starts at the bottom and laboriously climbs to the top using all sorts of safety equipment. Wuss. I prefer to go the other way, start at the top and dive off. No parachute, bungee cord, or any other safety equipment. In fact, I prefer to do it naked. Very exhilarating.

OK, so I’m a fat, lazy, geek, and this is virtual mountain diving. It’s still good fun. In the Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion game there is a place called Dive Rock. It’s high up in the mountains, overhangs a large cliff, and it’s shaped like a diving board. My theory is that it was designed as a diving platform. Just diving off in an act of virtual suicide is no fun, so my guess is that your are supposed to survive the dive. It’s not called “Suicide Leap” or “Lookout Point”, it’s called “Dive Rock”. It’s built for diving.

Sure, just plain diving off it is very likely to get yourself killed, but you can survive if you do it right. Sounds perfect for an extreme sport.

One of the ways you can train your acrobatics skill is to jump off things, the longer the distance you jump, the better (assuming you don’t kill yourself). Dotted all down the face of this cliff are small rocks, some are good for landing on then making your next dive. Just at the base of this cliff, directly under the diving platform, is a small camp, with one occupant, the master acrobats trainer. In this camp is also a bed. So you can jump as far as you like when you dive off Dive Rock, land on a small rock, heal yourself, and make the next dive. Eventually you get to the camp, where you can rest, heal, then travel back to the top to dive off again. If you get tired of jumping, the master trainer can train your acrobatics the easy way, for a price.

I suspect that Dive Rock was designed for speedy acrobatics training. It also has an awesome view, showing off some of the great graphics in Oblivion.

So the object of the Extreme Mountain Diving sport is to dive off Dive Rock, making as few dives as possible to reach the camp. There is a limit to how far you can dive and not kill yourself, but this limit depends on all sort of factors. The biggest factor is obviously how much health you have. Certain techniques allow you to take less damage when diving down cliffs. A high acrobatics skill slightly lessens the damage from a fall. There is armour you can wear that will fortify your health.

On the other hand, since the cliff under Dive Rock is sloped, there is also a limit to how far you can fall before you hit the cliff. It’s still enough to killl you, but it does mean you need to make more dives to reach the camp. Where this limit is also depends on a few things. You can take a running jump and try to leap off the furthest point of the dive platform, thus getting both higher up and further out to increase the length of the fall. Various factors are involved in how far out you can leap. This being a game, it has the usual falling physics, moving the joystick can move you around while falling, so if you keep moving the joystick further away from the cliff face, you can fall further before landing.

The rocks are small enough that it can be hard to see them in time to steer towards them. Some times it snows or is foggy, reducing visibility. So familiarity with the cliff face can help a lot.

Putting all this together, there are lots of things to tweak to make the difference between a deadly fall, a short fall, and a perfect “only one hit point left” dive. Making the perfect dive is the essence of the sport, and can involve hours of fun. Like all extreme sports, experience is the key. Lots of practice gives you the edge on performing the perfect dive.

It could even be possible to turn this into a competitive sport. Least dives needed to reach the camp fire in the camp below wins. A mod could be written by someone that records details and creates a leader board. The competition should be split into classes based on health, say 100, 200, 300, 400, 500, and Open. There could also be Naked and Assisted categories. Naked is where you dive wearing only painted on underwear and carrying no equipment. Assisted is where you can wear, carry, and use any amount of safety equipment. Wusses.

This competition should have rules to keep things fair and stop cheats. For instance, limits on how far you can travel downwards between dives. A certain amount of downwards travel between dives is very likely to happen unless you land perfectly on one of the rocks that stops you sliding. You will likely need to heal yourself between dives, this can take time, and there may be no convenient rock to stop you sliding slowly down hill.

Points can be given or taken away to help differentiate between competitors with the same number of dives. Award points for landing in the fire itself instead of just inside the marked area of the fire place. Deduct points for traveling too far down by means other than falling. Award points for perfect landings on rocks, the smaller the rock, the higher the points.

I’ll go back to diving off mountains now. See you at the bottom Kai.

[This was originally published in issue 9 of PSU3 magazine.]

I should start by explaining “source code”. The languages that computers use internally are very different from the languages that humans use. The bridge between these languages is source code, it is something that both humans and computers can understand. The humans write their programmes in the form of source code, which a computer then translates into machine code (called compiling). It is this machine code (called binaries) that a computer actually uses when running the finished programme.

In open source development, the source code is freely available, usually anybody can download it from the Internet. The machine code version is often freely available, or you could translate it into machine code yourself using your own computer. In closed source development, there is no source code freely available, it is kept a secret by the person or organisation that developed it. Only the machine code part that is really hard for humans to understand is available, sometimes for free, but usually you have to pay for it.

If there is a problem, or you need a change, with a closed source programme, then you have to rely on the company that made it to fix it for you. They may not have the time to fix your particular problem, or they may not have the interest. The company may fix it, but not quickly enough, or not quite they way you want it. In the open source world, you have a world full of programmers that may fix it for you. If you are a programmer, you could fix it yourself. If you really needed to, you could find some random coder that will fix it your way for a fee. Some open source coders will fix it for a donation to a charity, or maybe merely for a slab of beer (actually a form of currency here in Australia). With freely available open source code, anybody with the skill can get a copy and change it. With closed, secret source code, only the few people that have the secret can change it.

Some people think that because open source code is so freely available that it is in fact a free for all, and that this is a security nightmare because any cracker or virus writer can insert dodgy code at will. It is only your local copy that you can change, it is only their local copy that the cracker can change, they can’t make you run their copy. The original source code should be well protected from naughty changes. People have to convince the owners of the original source code that their changes are worthy before they will get applied to the original copy that is freely available. The owners are quite happy when other people help to write the code, that’s why they made it open source in the first place. They are also quite careful about approving changes, and about who else they let make changes. Even if naughty code somehow makes it into the original copy, so many people are looking at the code that someone will notice and tell the owner.

Some people think that if the source code is freely available that it will make it easy for crackers to find the weak spots and make it easy for them to break into your computer. Surely secret source code is safer? Anybody in the computer security industry will tell you that security through obscurity is no security at all. It’s the equivalent of hiding your house key under a rock in the garden and thinking that no one knows which rock to look under. The naughty people are watching, and they will figure out which rock. Since open source code is freely available for everybody to see, there are a lot more people looking at the code than there are for closed source code. Most of those people are not trying to do naughty things. So it tends to be that security problems get spotted quicker, and fixed quicker. If you know everybody is watching, you can put your house key in a safe made out of bullet proof glass that is firmly attached to the front of your house, and a friendly neighbour is likely to point out that your combination is too easy to figure out, and that you should install a finger print scanner instead.

The machine code that computers use is hard for humans to understand, but not impossible. With heavily guarded, top secret, closed source code, only the people that wrote it understand it. Oh, and the cracker that goes to the trouble of translating it into human readable form. So now only a tiny group of people know about the security flaws, the programmers at the company that owns it, who are too busy creating the next new features to spend too much time on security, and the crackers that have nothing better to do with their time than use this secret information maliciously. The ordinary people that use this software are none the wiser.

The same things apply to other problems in the source code that are not security related. Many eyes looking at open source code make the bugs easy to find and fix. Many people want different features for the code, and those that are programmers will write those features even if the owner hasn’t got the time for it. The owner may think it is worthy of inclusion though.

The drawbacks are that there is not as much money in open source development. Money can be made, but it is easier for the big companies to close things up, get people hooked on their code, then charge them lots for the next upgrade to whatever the big company decides to give them. You can make money from open source, and one way is to do like Terra Soft Solutions (TSS) is doing. Pre installing Linux onto PS3 can make money. Releasing an entire operating system to the paying customers first before releasing it to the public a few weeks later can make money. Selling support can make money. Selling supercomputer services can make money. Did I mention that a variant of Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) is used by TSS to build supercomputers?

One drawback is that something like YDL can still get pirated. TSS include some of their own code and content on YDL, it’s not entirely made up of other peoples work. This TSS work is covered by the TSS license, and TSS use this as a way to make money. Each new version of YDL is released to paying costumers first, then a few weeks later it is made available to all, including source code. Source code for everything except the TSS work is available for all straight away. It has happened that pirates have grabbed the entire YDL and made it available to all comers before TSS has had it’s few weeks. This pirating eats into TSS’s profits. TSS is not a large, rich company, and they do give back to the open source community, so it’s not fair that their small profit window is closed early by the pirates. To make matters worse, some “customers” of these pirates think “It’s Linux, it must be legal to spread it this way” (I’ve seen it happen). Linux is only part of Yellow Dog Linux, it’s not legal to spread the Yellow Dog until Terra Soft Solutions says it’s legal.

Blogs are often self centered, opinionated whines about whatever is pissing off the author at the moment. This blog will follow that grand tradition.

A few years ago I paid $700 for a brand new, ultra small, latest technology, top brand, mobile phone. In some countries you call these cell phones, but here in Australia we call them mobile phones. I don’t want this to be confused with the Cell processor that I’ll be talking about later, so I’ll use the term mobile phone.

A couple of months ago the power button became a bit erratic, sometimes it would work, sometimes it didn’t. This power button is used for other functions, mostly to back out of the current mode. Closing the phone will usually back out of the current mode, so as long as I never turned the phone off, all was sweet. Then the power button failed completely, and has never worked again. A bit later the left smart button started to fail, then the display went funny colours, followed shortly by the left side of the cursor pad failing.

It was obvious to me that there must be a ribbon cable between the two parts of the phone, and that constantly opening and closing the phone was wearing out this cable. The ribbon cable was slowly starting to fall apart. I can no longer use certain functions, but it still works as a phone. For now. So long as I never turn it off.

I went out today to see if I could get it fixed. I had done some preliminary research on the net, and it was not looking good. Sure enough, when I asked at the store I had originally bought it at, they said flat out that they could not help, I should try the mobile phone repair place on the next street. The mobile phone repair place told me that my three year old phone was too old, and they could not even get spares. They didn’t even have a service manual for me to look at.

Three years is a long time in the technology business, and anything with moving parts has a good chance of wearing out in three years. So expensive, brand name, mobile phones are not expected to be repairable three years after they were latest technology. $700 is a lot of money to pay for something that is expected to be disposable. Chances are the $1000 mobile phone you purchased today is just as disposable.

Mobile phones have reached what I like to call Seikel’s limit. It’s a little rule of thumb I discovered many years ago. Any type of consumer electronics technology will reach a point where it has gotten as small as it will ever get, then fashion will take over and it will get bigger, you will never see that technology get as small as that ever again. It’s happened so often that I have a good feel for when that limit has been reached, and I usually go and buy the “smallest it will ever get” version. This mobile phone of mine is Seikel’s limit in this country. One or two mobile phones are smaller, but not available here.

When fashion takes over after Seikel’s limit, features are often the next thing to stop getting added. The result is that after I buy the Seikel’s limit device, there is never likely to be a device as small or feature packed available ever again. Small, feature packed devices are so yesterday. So if I want to replace my slowly failing mobile phone, I can only ever replace it with something bigger, with maybe one or two more features if I’m lucky.

Expensive disposable technology sucks.

Computers are expensive technology that sometimes suck, and sometimes are considered disposable. Linux is good at extending the life of old computers that would otherwise get thrown away. Terra Soft Solutions (TSS) is willing to support old PowerPC (PPC) hardware that the manufacturers long ago declared to be obsolete. Even after the manufacturer declared PPC itself to be obsolete (it isn’t), Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) will keep it running. On the other hand, TSS is only a small company, with not enough people to support all the ancient PPC hardware. Even we have to draw the line somewhere.

The CEO can give a sigh of relief now that I have tied this blog to the company in a positive way and thus earned my pay. B-)

“Tails from the Yellow Dog Down Under” (coming soon) is not about supporting old hardware until it rots into oblivion, we have YDL.net, various mailing lists, web forums, and IRC channels etc for that. “Tails from the Yellow Dog Down Under” is all about the shiny, the new, and the interesting things people are doing with YDL on computers. On the other hand, we don’t care if these shiny new things are being done on ancient, decrepit computers, or the latest next gen gaming console. We only care that it is running YDL.

In other words, blogs.ydl.net is for blogs by YDL enhanced account members and TSS staff. “Tails from the Yellow Dog Down Under” will be for building a community of potential new YDL users, ones that have not already payed us money for an enhanced account. It’s not ready yet, so I’ll probably write some teasers in this blog of mine. I’m from Australia, hence the “Down Under” part.

Once I get up the nerve, I’ll open up my phone and try to fix it myself. This will require careful planning, because I wont be able to turn it back on again until I fix it. I have no idea what I’ll find inside, or even if it’s repairable. If I cant repair it, I’ll not be able to turn my phone back on again. Ever. So I’ll have to rush out and buy a new mobile phone. I’ll get a cheap one this time, mobile phones are so disposable.

P.S. Siemens, I’m a registered developer, you have my contact details if you are feeling generous with spare parts.

I’m a WordPress virgin, so please forgive me while I play around and test things out.