I Wander

I wondered as I wandered
what was what,
and who was where,
And I thought a little more
as I wandered up the stair
and 'cos I wasn't looking
I slipped on three pairs of roller blades and two yin and a yang,
I bumped my pore head     and I trod on my hand
I didn't much like it, I shan't say what I said
But that should explain why I'm sitting in bed.

I should be out working
it's true that I'm not,
when I trod on my hand
I'm not sure what I got,
But it got all twisted
and pulled here and there,
which all should explain
why not to play on the stair

Sam Liddicott
December 1991 and March 1992

Brexit: All stick and no carrot

"Travel," as Johnny Morris said in his Around the World in 25 Years, "not only, broadens the mind, but stretches it out and rolls it up like a chelsea bun until you don't know who you are, or what you are."

It also gives you jet lag, which means plenty of time to think about what you are too tired to write; until at last you reduce it so such simple points you have to write them.

In the matter of Brexit, remainers still have it so backwards that they keep shooting chunks out of their own foot under the delusion that it is someone else's foot. Their attempts to convert always lead the other way.

If we want home rule and self sovereignty then they offer even more sovereignty (over other countries) via the EU. Apparently sovereignty can be pooled, and in the EU there should be enough to satisfy our thirst for it.

If we want Britain to be ruled by the British, it isn't because we are worried about the race or nationality of the parliament that implements the final legislation to enact the will of the EU commission; and so no, we aren't easily satisfied that our own elected parliament will have the final say on the form of words used to bind us.

We want to be ruled by our own countrymen because they are like us, and they live within marching distance for an angry mob with pitchforks and flaming torches. It keeps them more honest.

But what about unity? What about international cooperation? What about friends and allies? We can't expect other European nations to co-operate in a true spirit of international friendship if we don't pay the EU to permit it.

Think of the hungry golden curly haired European children whose parents pharmaceutical businesses are failing because the EU won't permit the sale of life saving medicines to the suffering sick British golden curly haired children, and all because we wouldn't pay the yearly fee! Wouldn't we pay any amount of money to save those lives? (You can almost see an accounting with an adding machine).

But that argument hardly deserves an answer.; it portrays an EU that can grant nothing but the removal of barriers which it will otherwise enforce.

Then come the veiled threats: Perhaps we wish to avoid war? They suggest: think of all the wars in Europe to defend ourselves from foreign rule (since world war two) that the EU has avoided through the simple expedience of having member states surrender (I mean pool) national sovereignty in advance without need for battle!

Except for the EU army that is suddenly needed...

Stick and Carrot

Their problem is that EU Membership is all they have as carrot, and it having been rejected, they having nothing better to offer but stick.

In fact the EU is in a very hard and woody carrot, in fact pretty much all stick anyway, but it's all they have.

Blasting the Foot

So in what way are the repeatedly blasting their own foot?

The EU can only be made to look attractive in comparison to it's worst parts, and so remainers actually select and identify the worst parts of the EU and present them as some kind of potential exit deal or indefinite transition arrangement, along with larger ongoing fees.

The basis for this is their strategy to argue that if we can't get unity on what the initial leave arrangement should be, we should stay by default. But this is backwards, as I have written before. Our membership of the EU was never assented to and is illegitimate, and so it rather goes like this: if we can't agree on a way to stay, we should leave. It is the remain terms that need unity for us to remain; we already have a mandate to leave without compromise.

But, under their delusion, and in an effort to make remain look attractive, they start drawing attention to the woodier parts of their carrot in the form of various horror bad deals.

If we don't stay, we might leave but remain as part of the customs union (for the good of the economy, so we don't get thrown into the streets and starve). In the customs union we will have much of the obligations and duties but none of the voice - a condition that has been referred to as a vassal state. But the actual choice is to leave, entirely, in comparison to which their vassal-state deal looks absolutely stupid.

"How terrible, " we say, "we don't like that deal" (after all, it is a least carroty part of the stick), but they can't work out why we don't follow up with "so let's stay".

If we leave we will be required to put up a hard border between Eire and Northern Ireland and cause a shooting match. Required by who? The Irish don't want a hard border, the British don't want a hard border, it looks like the EU is making the problems here. The sooner we leave the better.

So now remainers are almost unaware pointing out the bad parts of the EU, are they close to converting?

Why we won't have a third referendum

Why we won't have a third referendum on the terms of leaving the EU

The 1975 referendum was on single market membership, not EU membership.

There is no authority for EU membership and the associated demonstrated loss of national sovereignty that subsequently occurred, the possibility of which was denied by Edward Heath.

A referendum would be needed to get that authority, and that authority was not obtained in either the 1975 referendum or the 2016 referendum.

Prime Minister Cameron, doing his best (we assume) was unable to find terms on which to get voters to accept membership.

As voters never accepted EU membership and associated loss of sovereignty, our EU membership is illegitimate, and so the default position is therefore to not be a member.

It becomes ludicrous then to seek for national agreement of the terms under which we won't be a member; it is membership that is illegitimate, the non-membership does not need legitimising in the least.

How could a possible rejection of the specific initial terms of leaving be construed as implicit legitimisation of EU membership, in the face of the explicit rejection of membership?

Should we remain by default simply because a few mardy ministers or civil servants will persistently to a bad job and refuse to facilitate a "good deal" in order to continually fail to get national approval?

No, we should assume the legitimate position of non-membership, and give them that to work from.

This is why we shan't have a third referendum on the terms of leaving.

We might have a third referendum on whether and on what terms to re-join the EU, in a few dozen years or so.

Vodafone Broadband

Using your own VDSL router

Thanks to aquazi who reports that you can use your own broadband router if you add @broadband.vodafone.co.uk to the end of your PPOE username.

Others report that Vodafone will no longer give out the PPOE username and password to you, however I just had online support chat and was given the POE username and password complete with @broadband.vodafone.co.uk at the end!

Someone pointed that Vodafone currently supports Vodafone supplied hardware only, and doesn’t allow the use of third party routers or modems which is not something I was aware of and seems like a pretty severe limitation to my unlimited broadband.

Avoiding Content Control

Although content control may be disabled, many HTTPS MITM warnings are given for image sharing sites like imgur.

Thanks to its5am who reports that changing to not use Vodafones DNS solves the problem of Vodafones content control performing man-in-the-middle attacks on your HTTPS traffic. (And presumably also returning bogus DNS resolutions).

Better update your photo with powershell for windows Outlook/Lync/Skype-for-business/etc

Yesterdays post required the Remote Server Administration Toolskit installed.

Here I show how to do it without that, just using powershell. Thanks to maxx-ode who gives the answer on this Microsoft Technet Forum post .

This code will set picture.jpg as your thumbnail picture.

$root = [System.DirectoryServices.ActiveDirectory.Domain]::GetCurrentDomain().GetDirectoryEntry()
$search = [System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher]$root
$search.Filter = "(&(objectclass=user)(objectcategory=person) (samAccountName=$env:username))"
$result = $search.FindOne()
$user = $result.GetDirectoryEntry()
$user.put("thumbnailPhoto", [byte[]](Get-Content "picture.jpg" -Encoding byte))
$user.setinfo()

or you want to delete the photo:

$user.putex(1, "thumbnailPhoto", "")
$user.setinfo()

but if you are re-using $user you may want to precede with: $user.refreshcache()

If you get an error like this:

Exception calling "setinfo" with "0" argument(s): "A constraint violation occurred."
At line:1 char:1
+ $user.setinfo()
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    + CategoryInfo          : NotSpecified: (:) [], MethodInvocationException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : CatchFromBaseAdapterMethodInvokeTI

then it could be that your picture is too big, keep it less that 100K, and ideally much smaller than that.

A 100x100 picture should be around 4K which is more ideal.

Update your photo with powershell for windows Outlook/Lync/Skype-for-business/etc

NOTE: See my following post which does not required the Remote Server Administration Tools to be installed.

Thanks to the EZ IT guy who writes explaining that by installing the Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 10 (or Windows 7 if you need it) you can then read your windows domain thumbnail photo picture.jpg like this:

$record = Get-ADUser $ENV:USERNAME -Properties thumbnailPhoto
$record.thumbnailPhoto | Set-Content "picture.jpg" -Encoding byte

And, provided that your photo is less that 100K you can also upload it:

Set-ADUser $ENV:USERNAME -Replace @{thumbnailPhoto=([byte[]](Get-Content "picture.jpg" -Encoding byte))}

All this requires that you be logged into your domain. Also thanks to the WOSHUB for help simplifying it.

If only there were a way that didn't require installing Remote Server Administration Tools.

Also some talk here from heyscriptingguy.

Putting self-tests in a C header file

You can compile a header file to C using gcc -x c like this:

gcc -x c -o feature-test feature.h

Without the -x c options it would have built a pre-compiled header instead of a program you can run.

But of course the compile will ultimately fail as you don't have a main( ) function, and when you think about it you know that you won't normally want one.

Except when compiling the top level header file directly.

The pre-processor symbol __INCLUDE_LEVEL__ is conveniently 0 for the top level file, which lets us do:

#if __INCLUDE_LEVEL__
int test1( ) {
  ...
}
...
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
  return test1() && test2() ... ;
}
#endif

So if the top level header file is build directly, then it gets a main and some test functions too.