Eva Lacy

An important part of monetizing your work is creating a situation where people are willing to give you money.

One of the ways, in desktop software, to create that situation is to prevent your software from being used or used fully without giving you (enough) money.

So I was ignoring the #SlaneGirl controversy until she ended up sedated in hospital.

Then I hit the twitters and started engaging people who were slut shaming #SlaneGirl

What I’d like to show you is what people said on twitter about her.

I have no issue general issue with those who identify as Christians, there are many who have a rather compassionate outlook on life they claim is heavily influenced by their faith.

My attitude is: as long as you aren’t affecting any non consenting parties then it’s none of my business.

However I think it’s important to address dishonesty wherever it occurs. Including when religious people live their lives contrary to the what is stated in the book they claim to live their life by.

Jesus spoke countless times against the rich people of his day. He said that it would be more difficult a rich man to get into heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of an needle. He didn’t mean an actual needle, it was the name of a small gate into Jerusalem, the camels had to bend down to get through. The point is that the rich would have to lower themselves.

In my view, to be a true christian you have to lower yourself, and I don’t mean just physically once a week, I mean you can’t have more things than other people.

Jesus said how hard it is for a Rich man to enter heaven:

Mark 10

23 Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the Kingdom of God!” 24 This amazed them. But Jesus said again, “Dear children, it is very hard to enter the Kingdom of God. 25 In fact, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God!”

Let’s look at it in context, why did he say that? What happened right before?

I have a way of improving people. If you want to improve people then you might find it useful. However you are going have to bear with me, because what I’m really saying is I believe I have a method of building successful mutually beneficial relationships with people that you would like to improve. So what I’m going to have to do first is convince you that building a relationship is necessary for effective improvement.

I’ll start by explaining the background to my thinking. I have a pattern of behaviour where I try to improve others. When I was a Christian I tried to convert people to Christianity, now that I no longer have supernatural beliefs I want to convert those with supernatural beliefs to a state of non-belief. I believe I do this so that I feel superior, so that I can validate and smooth rough edges from my own ways of thinking, and so that I don’t have to deal with the results of what are, from my point of view, bad ways of thinking.

For those of you who have me in your RSS, I’m sure your surprised to see my blog reappear. I’ve taken on a new challenge to start talking about any work I do, I hope it will enhance my career and encourage me to do more of it. The problem as per usual is that I don’t have the motivation to do much after work and the more I consider how to resolve such an issue the more I find myself becoming anxious. So in a new effort to combat that I’ve started trying the Pomodoro Technique.

I’ve come across a problem with backing up Solr. Before 3.6 if you try to back it up you will have to unload the core or stop the server that hosts Solr before backing up the files.

The standard response to how do I create a YouTube BBCode is

I have a technical book that will help me in my career sitting on my book shelf gathering dust. I was able to get through a similar book before, one chapter a day but for some reason I find this book far more intimidating.
I imagine that once I actually pick it up for the second time it will be a lot easier given I know more about the subject than I did when I first picked it up, but I’m lazy.

A spokesman and member of parliament for Golden Dawn, a far far right (neo nazi) party in Greece assaulted another member of parliament on national TV. I wonder if the kind of people who voted for this kind of person will change how they vote after seeing this. Perhaps it will simply effect who Golden Dawn can go into government with. A lot will depend on how the party leadership handle this incident. I expect they will attempt to down play it, make excuses and shift the blame, however anything less than a full apology and firing the spokesman would be disgusting even if unsurprising.

It seems like a large number of western countries have plans in the works to heavily reduce Internet freedom.

Yesterday SOPA Ireland, a law the power for judges to force Internet Service Providers to block websites took effect. The law follows the example of many other countries who similarly block websites for various reasons including child porn, phishing and copyright infringement. Inevitably these black lists are kept secret and when they are leaked to the public they inevitably contain web sites with perceivable legitimate reason for being on the blacklist.

So while this is about copyright today, it reduces our internet freedom, future generations of Irish men and women will likely never come to expect the same freedom on the internet that we enjoy today.

Today Sean Sherlock, the minister responsible for it’s introduction called for those opposed to copyright law to call off the dogs. I’m opposed to copyright law and the most I’ve ever done in relation to Irish SOPA is go to a protest. Maybe he could clarify what he meant?

He mentioned that people shouldn’t refer to this as the Irish version of SOPA, I don’t understand his point of view, SOPA = Stop Online Piracy Act, the Irish law is designed to stop online piracy by blocking websites, so is SOPA. What exactly makes these laws different except their wording?

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IIS 6 by default uses MD5 hashing and low security encryption.
if you put the following into a reg file and run it it should remove some of the less secure cipher suites used by IIS.

Update 1 : Go to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948963 to enable AES 256 (requires restart)

Update 2: If you install the above update or turn on FIPs compliance in your local security policy this will make you vulnerable to the beast attack.

Personally I’m a big fan of the Santa Clause myth. At an early age it’s hard to imagine that your parents can be wrong let alone intentionally mislead you. Learning the fact that Santa Clause doesn’t exist is an important part of developing an awareness that authority figures lie and their lies are almost always self serving.

The loss of Santa Clause is important because it destroys magical thinking. You may find it cute that when your child wishes upon a star, but you don’t want them to be vulnerable to manipulation.

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I’m not an expert in economics, I’ve been trying to understand the situation as much as I can in terms of things that I already know.

I watched a documentary on Enron, a company that had a culture of risk taking, that promoted those who were driven to make money, thus who had the hunger for more power, those who knew how to play the game.

What I took away from that film is that the problem isn’t an economic system, it’s a culture that gives power to those who desire power

It’s shocking when you consider how little protest there was when the government put us in so much debt that the IMF would inevitably be called in. It’s scary that I live in a country where according to the official figures 3 in 20 of us are unemployed and yet there are only 40 tents at Occupy Dame Street and 2000 come out to march

Stand around the camp site and very quickly you will find out why, regularly people will come up to you and commend you on your protest but ask “you don’t think it’s actually going to make a difference though do you?”.