Live panda video by pressing F12.

Link: Panda Cam - Dashboard Webcams

Someone has done a great job researching which American fast food chains have food suitable for vegans. Overall the situation isn’t great, but in many cases this isn’t really surprising: should a steakhouse be expecting vegans?

If you’re looking for the most available chain with decent options (not just salad), it looks like Taco Bell is still the best bet.

Link: Vegan eating in any restaurants

Britain could save huge amounts of money on Government IT, not least by demanding the source code to large projects and reusing it for future projects. As far as I can tell (and I’ve got no direct experience) most government IT projects are very large “CRM” systems with domain-specific functions: they store people’s names and addresses with associated data, and then have extra functions for the project itself. It seems a waste to pay for this to be rewritten and slowly debugged again and again.

I would much prefer the same money and programmers were used to improve systems, rather than just make the same mistakes again and again.

In this case it appears that a government project wasted £9,000,000 writing a search engine, when they could have bought a Google appliance for a few thousand.

Link: Burning our money: £9m Technology Breakthrough

This great site catalogs many strange Japanese mythical creatures.

Link: the Obakemono Project

While we were walking through the town centre a few days ago we noticed that police vehicles were blocking roads around Piccadilly and the Northern Quarter. Then we saw crowds gathered between Debenhams and The Arndale. Hundreds of people were just standing, quietly, staring down the street.

Someone was standing at the top of the Arndale carpark, beyond the railing. I don’t know if they were male or female, old or young, they were just a clearly defined human profile, silhouetted against the sky.

We walked on. It felt wrong to move away as if the scene didn’t matter, but it felt wrong to stay. I’m sure most people there were watching from concern and the strange horror of what was going on, but just those few seconds felt too intrusive, someone else’s crisis and possible death, even in public, is too private to watch.

I hope whoever was up there is safe and getting help. We’ve seen nothing in the local news, and I hope that’s a good sign.

I’ve been ‘tagged’ to answer a series of questions by a friend, so I will.

Four Jobs I have had:

1. Dustbinman and street cleaner in the Midlands: I’ve eaten lunch sitting next to a very dead sheep and been hit by juice from an exploding cat. It was very ‘character building’.
2. Multimedia Content Coordinator in the North East: I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
3. Systems Administrator in the North East: Learned a lot, found I was prevented from using much of what I learned.
4. Systems Administrator in the North West: I can now use what I’ve learned, and learn more. A near perfect job, I love it.

Four Movies I could watch over and over:

1. ‘Princess Mononoke’. Try to see with eyes unclouded.
2. ‘Fong Sai Yuk’. Jet Li’s finest.
3. ‘Star Wars Episode 4’. (Fortunately for domestic harmony) With Han shooting first.
4. The Matrix. I know, I know… but it has hidden subtlety and skillful violence. Really.

Four Places I have lived:

1. Warwickshire. Grew up in a large rural village. The county of Shakespeare, George Eliot, Tolkien. All dead. Probably not as bad as I thought it was.
2. Manchester. A dirty and exciting city. First lived here as a student, then returned 12 years later.
3. Missouri. Stayed with my girlfriend’s family. It’s a nice place with nice people.
4. Newcastle upon Tyne. Lived in a nice street in a less than nice area, it’s greatly improving since I left. I miss the fresh air of Newcastle, and the great people I worked with.

Four TV shows I love to watch:

1. ‘Firefly’
2. ‘Lost’
3. ‘Channel 4 News’
4. ‘Ultraviolet’ (short-lived 90s series, but still the best ever TV vampires)

Four places I have been on vacation:

1. Lyme Regis, South West UK
2. Keswick, Lake District, UK
3. Kristiansand, Norway
4. Chicago, USA

Four blogs I visit daily:

I use RSS feeds so I don’t really visit them daily, but these spring to mind:

1. BoingBoing
2. Fafblog
3. Guy Fawkes
4. Random Acts of Reality

Four favorite foods:

1. Dark chocolate.
2. Rooibosch tea
3. Fried tempeh (any fried edible plant really. Aubergine. Chillis. Doughnuts.)
4. Saurkraut

Four Places I would Rather Be:

I can’t really answer this one. Here more?

Four Albums I can‚Äôt live without: I could live without all albums, but here’s four I like:

1. The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld, The Orb
2. A Collection of Great Dance Songs, Pink Floyd
3. Drukqs, Aphex Twin
4. Converting Vegetarians, Infected Mushroom

Four Vehicles I have owned:

1. A large red pedal-powered pickup truck, with a little crane thing I think.
2. A very heavy wooden sledge.
3. A very, very heavy wooden go-kart (the sort with pram wheels)
4. A raft that I helped build, and which sank mid-journey.

At this point I should ‘tag’ four other bloggers I know. Unfortunately the only two I know well are the ones who passed this to me, so this is a leaf node. It goes no further. Just like me.

For the very first time, I’m tempted to get satellite TV to watch sport:

Decades after the movie’s release, the temple is planning to lure outstanding kung fu players worldwide via television, Internet and mobile phones to participate in a kung fu competition. “Our efforts will reach more people and be more effective by using modern technologies and media channels,” said Shi Yongxin, abbot with the temple, at a recent press conference in Beijing. The eight-month competition, to be shown on television across China through satellite transmission as of March 16 next year, will allow Chinese audiences to vote for their favourite kung fu exercisers through the website or mobile phone messages.

Link: Shaolin Kung fu fights for fame in hi-tech era

I’ve recently been pondering the benefits of adding an extra header to email messages to carry details of the sender’s XMPP/Jabber address. Something like:

X-XMPP-Identity: binaryape@jabber.org

This header could be added by the sender’s email client, or added automatically by an organisation’s gateway SMTP server for all outgoing email.

At first I thought that this header could help the email message recipient switch to a alternate (or just better) form of communication for their reply, and maybe look up some more information about the sender. A mixture of gentle propaganda and convenience. Now I’m wondering if putting XMPP headers into legacy email messages could be much more useful…

SMTP is a fire-and-forget protocol. Once a message has been sent the sending mail client and gateway server have nothing more to do with it. The message is passed along from server to server and altered at each stage of the process. When the email message reaches it’s destination it offers no more information to the recipient than that contained in its easily forged headers. SMTP servers’ conversations are about passing a message along, nothing more.

As a result, the problems of spam, viruses, and identity issues are threatening to make SMTP email unusable, and require a large waste of sysadmin’s time and network resources to resist.

The XMPP protocol is much more flexible. Conversations between servers can be varied, rich and stateful. Message origins are difficult to forge. Clients and gateway servers can look up information about the message’s sender and organisation. Jabber is rather spam-resistant.

I’m not alone in thinking that SMTP mail is beyond help. Could XMPP and Jabber replace SMTP and conventional email? I think so. With a few more extensions to the current Jabber protocol, all of SMTP email’s functionality could be provided by XMPP.

Unfortunately the SMTP user-community is the biggest, stupidest, most conservative group of people using the Internet: it’s everyone. Migrating the Internet away from SMTP is going to be difficult and slow.

This is where an X-XMPP-Identity header in SMTP email could be very useful. Instead of trying to prise people away from SMTP mail, a small set of headers linking an email message to an XMPP identity could be used to create a hybrid, XMPP-enhanced SMTP. People with Jabber accounts could send SMTP messages that refer to their Jabber account, and traditional email software could use this information to access services provided by Jabber. For the sake of brevity I’m going to call this idea “XSMTP”.

The receiving email client (Thunderbird for example) or the receiving gateway server (Postfix) could use the X-XMPP-Identity header to:

• Look up information about the sender using Jabber Service Discovery
• Check the authenticity of the message and the identity of the sender
• Provide the sender with information about the message’s progress
• Provide a faster, privileged route for “XSMTP” messages
• A message could be sent and received by SMTP email, but replies “upgraded” to XMPP

The problem, of course, is making sure the X-XMPP-Identity header is not forged. All I can think of so far is:

a) When sending a message, the email message id is registered with a Jabber service. The sender’s Jabber service would confirm via XMPP that an email with that message-id was sent at a particular time from a particular IP address. This seems a bit too involved.

or

b) Some form of calculated hash value is included as “X-XMPP-Hash”. When this hash is sent to the “XSMTP” component on the sender’s Jabber service by an XSMTP, it can be checked programatically by the component, which can then reassure the receiving client or gateway server. The hash would be made up of elements unique to the message (id, time, sending IP address) and a magic phrase known only to the sender’s client and the Jabber component providing the XSMTP service. Would this be enough?

XSMTP features could be easily implemented entirely within existing email filters such as Spam Assassin or MailScanner, or added as an extension to clients like Thunderbird or Outlook. Deployment would require a Jabber account and access to relevant Jabber services, but many large organisations already provide these and encouraging Jabber is one of the benefits of this idea anyway.

I’ve not thought this through enough yet, and there is probably some horrible, obvious flaw that I’ve missed, but so far I’m rather excited by this idea. It seems to offer a way of improving existing SMTP email without breaking compatibility, and provide a gentle route from SMTP to whatever Jabber offers as a replacement.

If you have a GMail account then you also have a Google Talk account, and a Google Talk account is really just a Jabber account.

Until now Google Jabber users could send messages to each other but not to users of other Jabber services, which limited its usefulness somewhat. Today’s good news is that Google have opened up their server-to-server connections, and joined the wider world of Jabber networks.

Link: Google Talkabout: XMPP Federation

Of course this didn’t come from Blair! Our Beloved Leader would never want to spy on MPs as his authority crumbles and leaks become an almost weekly occurence.

Link: MP phone tap ban ‘may be lifted’