I was sitting on the subway this evening heading northbound. I opened up my laptop and a Terminal window and started typing commands to try to fix a network problem I was having on some wireless connections.

After a few stops, some chick came and sat down next to me. She was wearing some little pink dress, high heels, and very obviously reading over my shoulder at what I was typing.

In my head I was being mean. "No, I'm not typing in Word", I thought to her. "No, I'm not typing an e-mail to a friend. These are unix commands. That'd be why you have absolutely no clue what I'm doing."

The mean conversation in my head stemmed from a few things: first of all, I was bothered by having my screen read. My second reason was that it bugged me that she would probably suspect that cuz I was a girl like her, that I would be doing stupid girly things on my computer. It made me defensive.

A few stops later, she pulled out a stack of papers and started writing corrections in the margins.

As I tried to brainstorm solutions to my problem, my eyes casually fell to her pile of papers. The word "eth0" was what held my eye.

Reading more carefully, I suddenly realized what I was looking at. She was reading through a proposed network scheme for a set of servers, and was writing corrections to the proposal. "SNMP through eth0 or eth1?", she wrote.

My surprise was very quickly replaced by a flood of guilt. Shit shit shit.

That's right. I just did exactly what I hate what everyone else does. I assumed that she'd know shit about computers because she was a chick and was in a stupid pink dress.

And then of course it forced me to spend the next few hours thinking deep thoughts.

Dear lady on the subway, I'm sorry.

metac0m: "[Catsy], I think we're going to need you to be the point person in terms of this Vietnam data."

Catspaw: "Uh oh. Why me?"

metac0m: "Are you familiar with Vietnam movies?"

Catspaw: "Um. I've listened to the Good Morning Vietnam soundtrack. Does that count?"

metac0m: "No. That doesn't count."

Catspaw: "Oh. Then, no, I don't have enough experience with Vietnam."

metac0m: "In Vietnam movies, there's always a point person who has to go in front when they go through the jungle. It's your turn to do that."

I've been told that apparently I don't talk enough about "the cool stuff that [I'm] doing at work" on insanecats. Okay, okay, I'll try to give updates more frequently. So, for those of you who missed the Slashdotting and the BoingBoinging and all that, we released a report last week that discussed how Telus blocked their consumers' access to 767 websites.

The fun and excitement began when Telus blocked their own employee labor union's website which was set up to publicize their views about the dispute with Telus.

Not only did they block that website though, but they also blocked the hundreds of other unrelated websites which were hosted on the same IP address. This was confirmed by volunteers (including traceroutes by JS and Rappie) which showed that ISPs for whom Telus was an upstream provider (like Interbaun or the University of Alberta) were also affected.

By the time our report was published, Telus had already removed the blocking, but it doesn't remove the issue. Our report discusses how they are potentially in violation of the Canadian Telecommunications Act which has sections set up specifically to avoid this sort of thing.

If you don't feel like reading the report (though it's short and sweet), the summary is this: Telus fucked up, made a legal and ethical bad call, and did so in a way that had unintended consequences -- hundreds of other sites were blocked too. It's a great example of the problems associated with internet filtering, particularly when conducted in an arbitrary and unaccountable manner.

Say that ten times fast.

For those who care about this sort of thing, I've written up an idea for a more formal python web app framework usability test on the PyWebOff blog. Comments welcome.

Some of you will remember my ROSI transcript RSS feed from the blog entry or subsequent gloating in various lectures. Andrey has written his own happy little scripts to do something else useful that ROSI doesn't offer by default: an RSS feed to let you know about course lecture spots.

I thought I should let you know that I took your source and made a
mild spin off -- ROSI Course Lecture spots RSS feed. (rosi.py)

Right now it's set to be executed from command line, like:
   python rosi.py <user> <password> <course> <section>
course being something like CSC369H1, section being something like F or S.

but if you uncomment the line near the end, it should work from a
webserver. (I commented out the rss resource handler bit though.)

It'll return an RSS feed of every lecture section and the number of
available spaces for the course.

It's a bit messy, but it gets the job done, and thought that you, or
perhaps your audience, might be interested. Especially those computer
science geeks that are eager to get into a full class, they can set a
simple hourly cron job to check for available spots.

Also, for convenience, I wrote a quick python dom rss parser which
will tell you how many spots are in a particular lecture section, can 
be used with some wiley piping action, like this:

python rosi.py <user> <password> <course> <section> | python
     getlecspaces.py 0401

And it will tell you how many spots are available for LEC 0401. from
None to 042 or what have you.

Awesome. Thanks to Andrey (come say hi in some class some time so I know who you are ;) ) for the useful scripts.

Guess what? I got an e-mail from Google today. Guess what about? My blog design :)

"It has come to our attention that you may be using Google Brand Features, including Google trademarks, logos, web pages, screen shots, or other distinctive features on your site without prior consent from Google."

How awesome is that? I wonder what part they object to in particular. Was it the logo that Rochelle made for me from scratch? The search box with links above it? The toolbar to the right with green and grey font? Was it highlighting things through a light colour and using top-and-bottom lines of a darker colour on that highlight?

"If you continue using these Brand Features on your site, you may be further contacted by a Google representative."

If they don't like me having a blog that looks like Google, I wonder how they'd feel about me wearing the Google logo t-shirt around the city. Where's the love, Google? Where's the love?

Am I going to continue to show my unwavering Google support by changing skins? Am I going to keep the skin and say "Damn the man"? No one knows.

....except for Google. They know everything.

None of you are cool enough to hear about the cottage extravaganza that was last week --- except for those of you who were there, but you already know what happened --- so I'm just writing an entry to let everyone know that I'm still alive.

This week is moving week, so I'm going to be fairly quiet again for a few days.

But afterwards, if you're all really, really good and get your homework done before supper, maybe I'll tell you some moving horror stories that will no doubt occur during my wacky broadway musical version of a life.

If you've got this month's Wired, turn to the spread on pages 46-47 to read a bit about our work on internet censorship.

Despite the fact that we practically held the hand of the reporters (see the words "University of Toronto" there in passing? Yeah, that's us), they still managed to make a whole whackload of mistakes or phrase things in misleading ways.

For example, they say that Saudi Arabia blocks "100% of porn sites". What this should say is that Saudi Arabia blocks all porn sites that we tested. What's the difference? It's subtle but important. No one can block 100% of any category of sites because filters aren't perfect. They'll either overblock or underblock. The fact that filters aren't perfect brings up a lot of questions of accountability during filtering and such things.

Anyway, despite the fact that a few phrases make me cringe, there we are.

By the way, see where it says "network interrogation software"? That's "Mr Turtle" my little python script. I'm so proud.

Joss could write a screenplay about a used toothpick that was dropped on the ground and eventually rolled into a gutter, and it would still be better than anything else on TV.

So who's organizing the Serenity party?

Scene: it's a lovely Tuesday and I'm sitting in my chair at work sipping on a cup of coffee. Suddenly the phone rings. It's for me.

The bank is calling to inform me that my cheques are bouncing.

"What?! How? The money's in my account!"
"Yes, ma'am. We know it is. It's just that...well...your account isn't set up to write cheques."
"But you just sold me a book of cheques last week."
"Yes."
"How could you sell me cheques if my account isn't set up to write cheques?" (Crazy pills??!)
"Your account is allowed to purchase cheques, it's just not allowed to write those cheques."
"So I can buy cheques but just not use them?!" (Crazy pills.)
"Exactly."

After a few minutes of discussion, it soon became clear that not only was this insane problem causing insane fees on my account, but that it also wasn't repairable on the phone. I had to go to my branch to fix it.

Then the guy at the desk said that he didn't have the authorization to fix this problem. I'd have to make an appointment with Someone Upstairs.

A few hours later and I'm sitting with yet another guy, explaining that all I want is to be able to write some goddamn cheques.

It turns out that there's no way to change my account into one which is allowed to write cheques. What they can do (the guy offered "helpfully") is open a new plan for me, open a new account which can write cheques, then link my old account as a secondary one to the new one, then transfer my debit card to pull from either the old or the new one then configure my credit card so that it knows about the new one and then I would have to manually transfer money from the old one to the new one every month but not more than ten times per month or I would start paying transferring fees.

"And this doesn't seem bizarre to anyone here?", I asked, "That I was given a book of cheques for an account that isn't allowed to write cheques."

"You can buy cheques for any account", he shrugged in response, "there's just some accounts which would cause those cheques to automatically bounce."

"But if I can't write the cheques, they're useless!"

"Pretty much", he nodded. "That's why people only buy them for accounts that won't cause the cheques to bounce."

ARGH! Worst - design - ever!!