So, I'm flying to the Ajax Experience, from the UK, via Frankfurt to Boston and I'd like to avoid the delays and the lottery associated with hold luggage, so I'm trying to travel carry-on.

I'm well aware that all liquids recently became potentially explosive, so I prepared; I left my toothpaste behind, and bought some more in the airport duty-free having already gone through security.

BUT in Frankfurt, having flown once already with my newly purchased bomb toothpaste, I was stopped. My toothpaste was a risk to the second flight! The toothpaste was safe for the first flight, but I guess they had no way to be sure that the toothpaste had already flown and therefore been checked already - I could have walked out of the security checked zone, and couldn't be trusted to have picked-up the non-explosive sort of toothpaste.

But here's where it gets strange. It appears that explosive toothpaste suddenly becomes safe if placed in a clear plastic bag. The first security guard guarded my things while another security guard escorted me back through security to the bag zone to collect the plastic bomb disposal device. They then placed my toothpaste, complete with it's neutralizing device, back in my bag, exactly where it was before, and allowed me to carry on.

I jest not. Plastic bags are supposed to defuse explosive toothpaste.

I wonder if it became explosive again when I removed it from the bag?

This got me thinking: What else can be made safe just by placing it in a clear bag? Clearly I've got body parts that fit into that category, and next time I take up smoking I'll remember to filter the nicotine through plastic to save me getting lung cancer.

Maybe the tin-foil hat brigade have got it wrong? What they need is a plastic bag to keep their heads safe. And this makes something else fit into place - all supermarket plastic bags have written on them 'Do not place on head'. Clearly the supermarkets are in on the conspiracy to keep us from adequately protecting ourselves.

My guess is that the plastic bag is supposed to be some sort of a marker to say "we've checked this", but since it's so easy to remove stuff from the bag, I don't see how this can work properly either.

Does anyone get the point behind this security measure?

Update: On the way home I think I worked out what it was all about.

I was supposed to arrive at the security desk with all gels/liquids in a plastic bag. The bag would then act as a declaration of potentially dangerous items. Liquids/gels outide of the bag could then be assumed to be 'hidden' dangerous items, which would make them extra dangerous.

So when German security started giving un-bagged toothpaste a free upgrade out of the 'hidden' category, it effectively made a nonsense of the bag rule. Not that the bag rule was sensible to start off with. In fact I expect that the Germans were giving out the free upgrades because the rules were so stupid in the first place.

I flew to Sweden recently and had all sorts of checks for illegal toothpaste flying out of Stansted, but nothing at all on my return. The Swedes had obviously decided that the rules were so stupid that they would totally ignore them.

So why do we have the liquid rules? Can it be true that the US and the UK know something about liquid explosive that that other countries don't, and despite the obvious risk to inbound flights, they're not telling?

Or maybe someone made a knee-jerk reaction to a sensationalist press story fueled by the hype of the war on terror, and now we're teaching the world to ignore our security policies to avoid having to admit that we were wrong.

Update: In the comments someone linked to this YouTube video that is about the same thing.

Responses[16]

Posted by Joe Walker on 25 October 2006 08:21:00 BST #

Update: How it went; see below.

You may remember my plan to create a really interactive conference talk - one that would help people learn by getting them involved.

I'm doing a 2 talks at the Ajax Experience next week. The first of the talks is a fairly straightforward intro to DWR, the second is the really interactive session where we are going to write a simple multi-player game using DWR on the free wifi.

We're going to keep the source readable by anyone as we go so you can really get involved with what's going on.

I'm not going to attempt to write the game from scratch because that would be very boring. I'll arrive with all the support stuff in place, and just put together the important pieces live. So it's going to be fast paced, and it's not *that* likely to go wrong.

Update: How it went

All the feedback I got for the talk was really good. But, perhaps the best was the notes saying the talk was simple. That's great feedback, because the talk was not simple. However, that it came across as simple, is fantastic news.

There are 2 reasons it wasn't simple: We covered a lot of ground, there were areas of DWR that I've never talked about before. I recently spoke on DWR and Ajax for Calista in Sweden for 5 hours, in a more conventional format, and we covered topics in this slot that were not in the 5 hour version.

Bram (who did all the typing) and I were not prepared for all the firewalls that we would have to evade. The hotel wifi totally blocked all inter-pc comms, which is kind of a problem for multi-player games. Our solution was an ssh tunnel bounced off this server. It killed bandwidth, but the game worked anyway.

Responses[6]

Posted by Joe Walker on 17 October 2006 08:44:09 BST #

Apparently the new Google Code Search thingy can also be used as a repository browser. This is a screenshot of the DWR repository:

There are several options I know of for browsing open source repositories:

• Usually the hosting provider will have one. Both java.net (DWR/java.net example) and Sourceforge (DWR/sf.net example) use ViewVC.
  Both look poor in my opinion, are slow, don't give you anything but source view, but are totally up to date.
• Cenqua makes their excellent FishEye available to open source projects. Screenshots don't do it justice - see the DWR/Fisheye example.
  It looks much nicer, gives you nice "who-changed-it" and "how-is-it-growing" type features, but it is a bit slow and lags CVS by a day or so.
• And now Google Code Search (DWR /Google example).
  I think it wasn't really designed for this use, so the URL is terrible and there's no index of projects (that I know of), but it is way quicker than the alternatives, and it doesn't look as bad as ViewVC.

Responses[3]

Posted by Joe Walker on 05 October 2006 10:18:50 BST #

I see that Tibco have decided to open source their Ajax toolkit - General Interface and that they've added support for Firefox too. Wow!

"General Interface, which was rated as the best AJAX Rich Internet Application toolkit by IDG's Infoworld this year."

Open sourcing your library certainly helps it's adoption. The Ajaxian market share survey had the top 8 places, and well over 90% market share, go to open source libraries. So this should help GI a lot.

Responses[3]

Posted by Joe Walker on 02 October 2006 14:55:00 BST #