So I gave way to my inner troll, and created a trolling persona, however, I wanted to stick to some  rules. These basically were:

• My troll had to stand on his own, no multiple personalities to help bolster him up.
  
• No crapflooding. Trolling can be an art, but crapflooders should just be killed with no mercy.
  
• Diaries are completely fair game, however serious tech stories are generally off limits. Crap political stories and religon are bulls eye targets.
  
• I don't troll people I know from here - as a rule, unless it is just begging...

That was pretty much it.

Well, I had not been for a while and did not notice that Ruston had changed the ratings system. Bizarrely the new system appears to work. My Troll (MT) runs amuck in the diary section (along with all the other trolls) but the few times MT has trolled in a story (especially a good story) he has been zeroed out pretty quickly. I'm impressed. I also have noticed that the story quality appears to be a lot better than when I was there last.

Basically MT is a good indicator of story quality. If he leaves a comment and it gets zeroed, then people care, if a comment left there is still there the next day then the story will probably go down in flames anyway.

New Toy Arrives !
My smart card reader turned up - w00t ! I had been doing some investigation about how to get it hooked into and working on the penguin, and I gotta say, Linux is just teh gey these days.

I downloaded the linux pcscd daemon, grabbed the device driver and did the classic configure;make;install thing. Started the daemon up, plugged in the reader, pushed in the card, ran the sample Pyhton script and...

it worked.

WHAT !!! where was the 3 days of pulling out what's left of my hair, the endless posting to the mail groups, the mailing of the writer of the device driver. SHit, next thing you know is that I will no longer have to hand mount my USB stick.

Maybe its time to move to plan9 or some other obscure thing so I can maintain my l337 h4x0r reputation !

Interestingly I got my card reader and comms working quicker on Gentoo than a mate of mine did with Windows - the amount of special SDKs  he had to download, configure and install - and the amount of scaffold code he had to write was quite surprising. Who'd thunk it? That it was actually quicker to use an open source unix with the latest piece of hardware than Windows...maybe it was because he was using Delphi?

On a more serious note, now I'm going to have to study the EMV card manuals so I can actually do something with it.

Misc
Worked from home yesterday for a change. Got lots of code done - whether it's working code is a different question, as I don't have remote access,  and there is no PC cross compiler.

Listening to Mrs C try to edumacate the kids was, well, interesting. You can tell the kids have a tough time of working out when mum is mum, and when mum is the teacher. They pull shit that they would just not do in a school room.

I think I will stick to my day job.

I also got the syntax highlighting in Kate to work for TALs bizarro ! comments ! - most excellent.

Speaking of TAL - time to do some work...