Older blog entries for chalst (starting at number 249)

17 Nov 2009 (updated 18 Nov 2009 at 14:38 UTC) »
Recentspam
Some SEOer is busy, creating accounts rachelmorgen, michaelsm, akeldee, and Ukcarbroker, in the space of a few minutes.

A pro tip for businesses seeking to improve their website's ranking on Google: promoting a website using spam is easily seen using Google searches, and says a lot about the integrity of your business practices. Do you really want to buy a car from UK CarBroker (tel: (UK) 0845 460 6605)? Or a package holiday from Colorful Rajasthan Tours (tel: +91- 7462-222251)? Or book that once-in- a- lifetime honeymoon in Kerala with Rover Holidays (+91 - 9995446909 / 9891001470)? Are you confident of the quality of the products you'd get from Bathroom Accessories (Tel: 1-800-266-1732)?

Because they all use the same spammer SEO outfit...

Postscript (Tuesday 17th) — In the time it took me to write that, spam account hairworks appeared, pushing lace wigs on behalf of Hair Works International (TM), tel: 1-800-311-5514. And also visaviscosmetics on behalf of Vis-à-Vis Cosmetics, who sell "affordable prestige formulas that marry high quality performance with fashion forward color trends for today\'s [sic] modern women" online, and can be contacted by tel. +1 -914.422.3999 / 877.433.6891.

It is surprising that so many sites go to such efforts to get good website design, with lots of care made what the site says about the business to potential customers, and then use spammer SEOs to promote that website. Is it cluelessness or dodgy business practice?

Postscript #2 (Tuesday 17th)redi observes that not all SEO-like accounts need be made by spammers, in particular Adecco NZ claimed to have been targeted by a scammer who posed as an Adecco New Zealand employee on international job forums and [was] luring job seekers in to a money forwarding scheme. Indeed, it is good not to take spam accounts at face value, however in this case, at least some of the links were to a business website that had existed for several months. Phishing scam doesn't look likely to me.

Postscript #3 (Wednesday 18th)ncm is concerned that spammer SEOs might have use for deleted accounts with hyperlinks to them. I'm doubtful, but I've changed the anchors to bolds.

16 Nov 2009 (updated 17 Nov 2009 at 09:01 UTC) »
Recentlog reloaded
Whee! Two short recentlog replies in one day! This is twitteriffic!

fzort mentions base32, I guess with respect to my claim of being near a "readable minimum".

Can't say I find base32 much use for readability, without either spaces or punctuation. It's really a uuencode-like interchange format, not something you might try to compress text to with the aim to still have a reasonable chance of reading as is.

16 Nov 2009 (updated 16 Nov 2009 at 19:25 UTC) »
Recentlog
apenwarr writes that he can't seem to find any actual use in the fact that 32 is 2 to the power of 5. You'd think that since 2 and 5 are so much smaller than 32, and powers of 2 are so rare, that you could use this information to compress the representation somehow. But no.

Oddly enough, I was thinking the other day about a 5-bit, Unicode-based charset, with a mind to efficient string quotation.

The charset consisted of the ASCII lower-case letters, excluding "j" and "q", two bracket pairs, namely "[]()", space, ".", ",", and an escape character. Seems to me to be not far from the readable minimum.

13 Nov 2009 (updated 13 Nov 2009 at 14:17 UTC) »
Recentratings
victory looks like a spam account, but these two pages:
  1. Facebook project for oxagaile and
  2. Oxagile's search results for [open source consulting],
suggest that they may be more clueless about, rather than deliberately exploitative of, the free software community. I've temporarily cert'ed them as Apprentice until I find out whether or not they have any desire to give back to the software commons.
12 Nov 2009 (updated 12 Nov 2009 at 22:21 UTC) »
Recentlog
yosch wrote Tex Live 2009 has been released: I heard it on recentlog first. Funny, I just installed the testing version last Friday. I wonder if anything significant can have changed since then?

shlomif mentions an essay called "But I can't use CPAN": also at the end of last week, I tried to install/update the Text::HTML module, among the dependencies of which were two modules, each of which had a pre-install test that failed. Kind of weird, but emails to each module's maintainer resulted in fixes, each within two hours. I was impressed; kudos to CPAN's module maintainers.

While I'm at it, I've put up my business website's weblog: /var/spool/textproof. No interesting content yet, unless you find marginal annotation abbreviations exciting, but the fact of the weblog's existence is advogato-relevant, since it is compiled using Stevey's fine chronicle.

11 Nov 2009 (updated 11 Nov 2009 at 14:21 UTC) »
Nate's Law
ncm epykudosically[1,2] declares "Nate's Law"; thus: The designer of any new programming language is certain to be an idiot, because only an idiot thinks anybody will ever use their new language.

If it is not true, it would be good if it were widely believed to be true.

Of course, it can't always have been true: e.g., the Algol 58/60 folk had very good reason to think that other people would use their most-eminent-language-design-committee-ever language. But maybe we can say that it became true, once tools such as yacc existed and made creating a new programming language into something appropriate for high-school projects catering to the not-so-especially talented.

[1]: epy + kudos + ically (pointless neologism): to place an honour on oneself.
[2]: There's another epykudosical Nate's Law: The more a game stretches on, the more a game will tend to never end.

27 Oct 2009 (updated 27 Oct 2009 at 14:27 UTC) »
Filesystems for media exchange
Louis Gerbarg (lgerbarg), in The Loss of ZFS, talks mostly about Apple's decision to ditch work on ZFS, but ends with a discussion about filesystems for removeable media, for file exchange, writing: Ultimately somebody should design a filesystem explicitly for use as an interchange format and license it for free, then everyone can deal with their internal FSes and do what makes the most sense for their OSes and markets.

What about all the old BSD file formats? I favour tar for moving files between computers: it's pretty flawed as a general-purpose filesystem, not being random access, and being effectively append only, but for this particular purpose that's fine. Mac OS 10.* supports it the usual way (read/write to raw device), on Windows WinMount seems OK: gratis, non-free; apparently no free alternative.

If you want a random-access fs, UFS, is supported out of the box on Mac OS 10.* (even Finder is happy with it) and is apparently supported via 3rd party tools on Windows, via ufs2tools (which I haven't used).

In any case, while these formats are not necessarily in the normal vocabulary of Mac OS and Windows users, they have been around long enough that there can be no patent issues with them. If we were to start standardising fs-for-exchange formats, I'd suggest one of these two.

26 Oct 2009 (updated 26 Oct 2009 at 14:37 UTC) »
Converting Word to lATEx
Thinking about the RefRuns citation-reflist matching tool, and the kinds of doument for which it falls over, has reminded me of a couple of nice papers about techniques for converting Word to tEx/LAteX:
  1. The BA thesis of Michal Kebrt, Word-to-LATEX convertor, which does a nice job of summarising possible approaches to the task;
  2. T he TUG'08 talk, docx2tex: Word 2007 to TEX of Krisztián Pócza, Mihály Biczó and Zoltán Porkoláb, which is a more demanding read, but which explains what I consider the best, most robust technology for the job.
docx2tex, like word-to-latex, only runs as a win32.exe binary, but the underlying technology uses fairly light use of win32 services, which are mostly provided by Mono. The crucial component missing from Mono is, IIRC, the System.IO.Packaging .NET class, which Alan McGovern seems to have an appetite to tackle. Using the packaging class to iterate over OOXML documents seems to be the right way to go about this sort of task, and will maybe be linux-friendly in the near future.

Postscript: Apologies to laTex purists about the gratuitously disrespectful capitalisation.

23 Oct 2009 (updated 23 Oct 2009 at 11:31 UTC) »
Two thoughts on Shuttlewart brouharhar
  1. "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society" — Finding people that agree with you doesn't mean that your view is not profoundly fucked up.
  2. It's not about offence. The offence caused is not the problem. The women who got angry voiced it, or decided they did not care enough to speak up. The problem is giving the impression that the hackers who count don't include women.
Don't be a complacent shit. Use gender-neutral language.
7 Oct 2009 (updated 24 Oct 2009 at 06:37 UTC) »
Shuttlewart brouharhar: insults and inferences
ncm writes: worry you to find yourself falsely inferring that I am "hot and bothered". I am not about to be worried by such inferences: I am aware of the imprecision of language, and use it carefully. I don't know the exact physiological nature of your reaction to what I write, but your last response did strike me as uncharacteristic, and somewhat defensive, so allowed a guess to be cast as an assertion. I do try to give signals that I am doing this, btw, but they are often not obvious.

can't tell the difference between "dumb hick" and mainstream language usage — I can't call a sexist space cadet from the Orange Free State a dumb hick? Awww! What insult should I use?

where is the chalst I knew? — I've been free with insults for much longer than I've kept an Advogato diary. I think maybe this is the first time you've come close to the line of fire, but maybe you should look at a few of my older posts here, e.g. from 1st Feb 2002. I'll clarify these last few posts: I think you are dead wrong about the whats and whys of gender-neutral language, but that I like you, I don't think that you are sexist, I think that you essentially want the right thing for women hackers, and I share your admiration for Val Aurora. I'll rub you the wrong way on this matter if I think that's what it takes to make you a bit uncomfortable with what I consider to be pernicious beliefs, but I do so as a friend.

Merriam-Webster notes it is "used in plural to refer to the members of a group regardless of sex <saw her and the rest of the guys>" — Sure. Its 10th edition says that a sense of bitch is "a malicious, spiteful, or domineering woman", weakly qualifying this as "sometimes used as a generalized term of abuse", i.e., if a woman is domineering, it is perfectly non-abusive to call her a bitch, although it would be abusive to call her one if she wasn't domineering, or malicious or spiteful. Don't count on M-W as an authority on gender-neutral language.

what you confuse with sexist language — You really don't give the impression that you have given the matter much thought, or indeed paid more than cursory thought to the substantial points I made in my last three points. I'm not impressed by what you perceive as confused.

problem that drives off ... potential participants ... is the reflexively derisive attitude many adopt toward people they disagree with — Snubs and insults are dangerous: they are the stuff of social exclusion, itself a big feminist issue. But there's not a whole lot in the way of better tools out there, since people who behave badly are usually not keen to repair their behaviour if you don't make it an issue for them. I'll continue to use insults when I think they are the right tools for the job,

of failing to value non-coding expertise, is also better addressed within the Ubuntu project than elsewhere. Yes, actually, I agree with this; KDE too. Maybe I should change my insult to Sometimes-Dumb-untu? A bit weak, maybe?

I guess that ultimately, like graydon, if the movement part of Free Software can't get its act together with respect to women, then I don't want to be a part of it, and I don't wish it well. I'm more optimistic than graydon is, but if one of the undisputed FS leaders can't make the effort to check some passages of a major keynote with a non-sycophantic woman or two, and the broad reaction to complaints about this is denial, then things don't look so great.

Postscript (24th October, 2009) ncm writes apparent that you enjoy slinging insults — Well, no, "enjoy" is not the right word. It's a sense of obligation that drives me. Here I don't care about offence caused — it seems like offence- sensitivity training is needed around here. Not that offence caused is the point, mind you, but awareness of it would be a fine thing. Titled edited for consistency with next entry.

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