[ Home | Articles | Account | People | Projects | FAQ ] Iraq Combat Continues: Despite Formal End, U.S. Joins Baghdad Battle
Syndicated 2010-09-06 02:59:00 (Updated 2010-09-06 02:59:40) from proclus
Eddi's Service
I was walking home just now, reciting Eddi's Service by Rudyard Kipling to myself. It's a sad poem about a priest in Saxon times who holds a midnight service on Christmas Eve and nobody turns up but a donkey and a cow. It was a favourite poem of my grandfather's— the chemist/dreamer grandfather, not the soldier/architect grandfather— and he would often recite it to me. There's a refrain "a midnight service / for such as cared to attend", and because I learned it from him, I keep hearing myself slipping into his Nottingham accent when I say it.Syndicated 2010-09-06 03:04:17 (Updated 2010-09-06 03:06:19) from Monument
landmarks in instructions
When you give travel directions, you include landmarks, and "gone too far" points. Turn left after you cross the bridge. Then look for my street and make a right. If you go past the water tower you've gone too far.
System administration instructions are much easier
to follow if you include those kind of check-ins
there, too. For example, if you explain how to set
up server software you can put in quick "landmark"
tests, such as, "at this point, you can run nmap and
see the port in the results." You can also include
"gone too far" information by pointing out problems
you can troubleshoot on the way.
A full-scale troubleshooting guide is a good idea (For ideas, see the Checklist that Samba provides), but quick warning signs as you go along are helpful. Much better than finding yourself lost at the end of a long set of setup instructions.
现在，病菌已经扩散到五个地区，320多人感染皮肤炭疽。
八月后期，孟加拉首次发现炭疽。
炭疽菌可以感染牲畜和人。BBC记者说，现在，首都达卡牛羊肉销量大幅度下 跌。
Gown-spotting with meegons
Syndicated 2010-09-05 23:50:59 (Updated 2010-09-05 23:54:52) from Monument
Lead By way of A Interest
Regardless of whether you are completely new to blogging and site-building, nevertheless would like to understand the right way to make money with blog sites, then it is very important to start off by means of your interest. You may not be acquainted with the workings of what making money with blogs is about, you probably are not the best writer, however if you enjoy a interest or otherwise general experience concerning the specific focus then you'll hold a little to offer. And each internet site has got to offer a little to the world if if it is to make money.
Can I Get In On The Hot Subject matter That Blogger X Is Making Cash With?
If you’ve been catching up on how can one go about making money with blog sites then you’ve no doubt examined several examples. You might even have read about someone building thousands of dollars within a diet niche, as an example. Although this indicates there’s possibility, it doesn’t mean to say that you'd personally be successful with such a subject.
Why? It's true because you will burn out quickly. You won’t retain that appreciation and motivation to continue working on the site, also it will eventually get forgotten not generating a dollar. Such a thing can be exceedingly true with a lot of people that happen to be new to running a blog. Information show that individuals give up on their information sites in as little as barely 3 months time. Would you truly desire to be a part of such a statistic?
After you’re more experienced you will possess added time as well as added capital for contract out writing for topics that you're not as involved in, nevertheless right now it is crucial to select a venture that you'll recognize you will not get board with if you end up blogging with reference to it for months at a time. Reliability is the answer if you would like to make money with blog sites!
Each Journey to Make Money With Blog Sites Is Honestly Unique
One lesson you ought to take away from this editorial is the fact that it will be likely to become profitable in your home, by doing a thing you'll love. Making money with a blog can be pretty exceptional in such a regard! What other career permits you to choose and choose the type of work you would like to take on And to do it with any free time On top of that, you will not even have to put forward too much capital in your blogging path – merely your free time.
mattl: RT @robmyers Wearing a FooCorp-striped tie. Because.
RT @robmyers Wearing a FooCorp-striped tie. Because.Free Software Needs Free Tools
I finally finished an article I've had in one form or another for years about on the use of proprietary tools in the creation of free software. From BitKeeper to SourceForge to Google Code to GitHub, non-free tools and services have played an important role in free software development over the past decade and, I argue, continue to create a number of important, if sometimes subtle, problems for our community.
The article was published in the Spring 2010 FSF Bulletin which was mailed to all FSF associate members. I've also posted the article on my website and in PDF form as well.
TeX4ht: Overview of the Process
TeX4ht system has the ability to translate any TeX or LaTeX document into other markup formats such as SGML, HTML, XML, MathML, OpenOffice format, Braille, etc. The system has an extensive load of TeX packages, hypertext fonts, a post-processor for dvi and another post-processor to generate CSS and image files of math formulae and equations. [...]Identi.ca de 2010-09-04
Powered by modified Twitter Tools.
What are you doing up at half midnight on a Saturday night? Oh, I'm just making MeeGo characters
Syndicated 2010-09-05 04:18:08 (Updated 2010-09-05 04:46:27) from Monument
Thirlmere
I am eating sausages beside an open window. The fan is blowing the smell of outside into the room. With the food and the smell and the breeze, it feels as though if I looked up I would see my tent, and the brook, and the mountain rising above me.Syndicated 2010-09-04 23:51:57 (Updated 2010-09-04 23:55:00) from Monument
mattl: @bkuhn front end of the outbound #orangeline is temple place, on inbound its franklin st. weird.
@bkuhn front end of the outbound #orangeline is temple place, on inbound its franklin st. weird.Identi.ca de 2010-09-04
Powered by modified Twitter Tools.
Privacy tweaks for browsers?
I talked with Doc Searls about the issue of cross-site user tracking and how people choose to talk about it (previous post here).
The big question is: can you make a browser's privacy defaults closer to what users expect or want (the way that Mozilla tweaked their CSS implementation to avoid leaking history information) without breaking things that users expect to work?
For example, there's third-party content that users are used to: images from CDNs and "recommend this story" buttons from meta sites such as Digg and Slashdot.
What you really don't want to have happen is endless dialogs: "Do you want to accept a cookie from example.com?" "Do you want to run a script from example.com?" The more questions that you ask, the more that people click the wrong thing just to get the dialogs to go away.
So how about this as a starting point for a privacy rule: Don't store third-party cookies, DOM Storage, or scripts from a domain unless the user has already accepted them for first-party use. So if a user actually goes to example.com, and the site uses JavaScript and cookies, then later on, when another site includes third-party scripts or cookies sourced from example.com, allow them. If the user has never heard of example.com and gets offered their cookies and/or scripts when visiting another site, silently block the third-party stuff, or at least expire the cookies when leaving that site.
That should give the user the expected integration with his or her chosen meta and social sites, without the unsettling mystery tracking.
Anyway, this is the kind of stuff you can come up with if you think about how HTTP works and try to put the verbs in the right place when describing web tracking and privacy issues. Would it work?
Great to have IceTea plugin that makes such projects possible.
Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.
Fri.3.SEP.2010 -- Improving Associative
Comprehension
Today in the tutorial
JavaScript artificial intelligence (JSAI) we work on
implementing a powerful feature taken from the
MindForth robot AI -- special
InStantiate code to help the AI Mind zero in on the proper assigning of
associative tags to connect the concepts activated by
English words of human input. In our open-source AI, the
comprehension of natural language depends
upon establishing the conceptual interconnections that
constitute an idea.
We are specifically concerned with connecting an
associative tag between a transitive verb and its direct
object. If the human user clicks on the JSAI
link, lets the AI Mind flit across the 'Net, and types
in, "i have a book", we do not want the software to tag a
link between the verb "have" and the article "a". Instead
we want a mental link between "have" and "book" -- the
object of the verb. Since in MindForth we
have devised a way to skip articles in the search for
semantic links, now in
JavaScript we simply need to implement the
InStantiate algorithm from the
Forth code.
Upshot: We laboriously converted an intricate sequence
of Forth code to JavaScript -- and the JSAI stopped
running. We had misspelled the "lastseq" variable. By
putting the code back together line-by-line from the last
working JSAI of yesterday, we identified and solved the
problem. Through much of our testing, we would type in "i
have a book" and we would get nonsense in response,
because the skip-seq algorithm was not yet fully
implemented. When the algorithm from MindForth became
fully functional in JavaScript, we typed in "i have a
book" and the emergent artificial mind responded
correctly, "YOU HAVE BOOK".
links for 2010-09-03
Gadget Names
Motherboards by maxw (CC-BY-NC-ND)
There are many things in life that we just take for granted and rarely think about. The way gadget companies name their products is one of them. I know, not an interesting topic. But I have always wondered about that since I started using my first gadgets a long time ago: video games, personal computers, VCR, cell phones, etc.
Gadget names such as Nokia 5230, TK2000, Asus Eee PC 1015PE, Canon PowerShot A110 IS, Garmin GPSMAP 62St, HP Deskjet F4580 and others really seem like they are supposed to be readable by machines, not humans. They sound too complicated, too techie, too cryptic, and even scary for people who don’t really care about technology itself. Those names are just unnatural for most of us. I know, you might argue that there’s a reason for using those weird sequences of letters and numbers. It doesn’t matter. Those names just don’t make natural sense for most people.
Some companies are doing a better job on naming their products though. Apple, for example, uses human-readable names for all their products. They even keep same name for different generations of the same product e.g. all generations of MacBook is simply called MacBook. HTC and Samsung are getting it right too with their new Android phones – Captivate, Galaxy, Desire, Hero, etc. And there are many others doing it right these days but it’s still quite common to see things like Panasonic TX-P37X20B and Toshiba HDDR320E04EL_CS, unfortunately.
So, if you’re directly involved in the decision of gadget names for your companies, please, give your next product a meaningful and human-friendly name! Let’s make the technology world a bit less scary for everyone.
GNU-Darwin Action: ACTA Action: Call on Obama to end the secrecy, r eject the treaty
unknownname.out (0 KB) ------ Forwarded message ------
From: "Free Software Foundation"
Subject: ACTA Action: Call on Obama to end the secrecy, reject the treaty
Two weeks ago, we delivered over 4,000 of your signatures on our [ACTA
petition][1] to negotiators meeting in Washington, D.C.
The US government still hasn't gotten the message. President Obama and
his administration are blocking release of the full text of ACTA. They
don't want the public to know what the negotiators are up to, because
they know we wouldn't stand for it.
James Love, director of Knowledge Ecology International, has published
an [article in the Huffington Post][2] today calling attention to
Obama's hypocritical secrecy on this:
[-]
> It is not an unreasonable request that the Obama administration
> join the 37 other countries in the negotiation to support the
> release of the ACTA text to the public, so we can see what the
> negotiators are up to. After all, the Obama Administration does
> share its positions in the ACTA negotiations with corporate
> lobbyists.
It's important to go a step further than James Love and also reject
the propaganda term ["intellectual property"][3] when criticizing the
agreement, because the term itself rigs the debate in favor of these
same corporate lobbyists.
Please take a minute to read the article, and write to Obama at
urging him to end the hypocrisy
and release the text of the agreement.
We don't need the current text to know ACTA is bad. We know from
previous releases of the text -- by other countries -- that the treaty
is [full of measures that attack the public's freedom][4]. But forcing
governments to have this conversation in public would make it much
more difficult for them to succeed.
We've also still left our petition open for signing, so we can deliver
more signatures at the next opportunity -- please continue telling
your friends, colleagues and family about it so we can stop this
assault on our freedom.
# Take Action
- Read and share James Love's article:
- Demand that Obama release the current text of ACTA:
- Urge others to sign the FSF's petition opposing ACTA:
# References
[1]: http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/acta/acta-declaration
[2]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-love/white-house-blocks-disclo_b_704676.html
[3]: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html
[4]: http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/acta/why-acta-declaration
Posted via email from #p
Syndicated 2010-09-03 22:24:00 (Updated 2010-09-03 22:24:09) from proclus
SSL certificates and man-in-the-middle attacks
Important security topic: browsers enabling government MITM attacks
Coverage of the problem: The Internet's Secret Back Door by Danny O'Brien on slate.com, and discussion on Bruce Schneier's blog.
Verizon and Etisalat thread on mozilla.dev.security.policy
Potentially problematic CA practices at mozilla.org
EFF is starting the EFF SSL Observatory and asking Verizon to revoke one certificate for one high-profile problem company.
But there's a bigger problem: Web Security Trust Models. "This is also an inflexible model because there is no reasonable way to impose finer-grained control on the authority of the CAs. The standard used is called X.509. It doesn't allow you to trust Verisign to a greater or less than the Chinese government -- it is essentially all or nothing for each. You also can't tell your browser to trust CNNIC only for sites in China (although domain name constraints do exist in the standard, they are not widely implemented). It is also inflexible because most browsers intentionally make it difficult for a user to change the certificate list."
Potential solutions:
Ditty against translation
Something I wrote this morning, somewhat after Walter de la Mare.Syndicated 2010-09-03 15:22:23 (Updated 2010-09-03 17:36:48) from Monument
Being on a train would not normally be worthy of a diary entry. However, I'm travelling not as part of my heretofore stable academic enquiries, but as a mostly-fledged member of the high-flying technological startup community. No, I haven't quite sold out; as of yesterday, I work four days a week for a bright-futured company in the general area of mobile and wireless broadband; the other working day will continue to be spent at Goldsmiths, where I retain most of my responsibilities (but not the management of the music-informatics OMRAS2 project, which finished at the end of August); this arrangement with Goldsmiths will continue for a year.
So, why? A number of factors came together to make this a very attractive opportunity. Firstly, as I've already mentioned, the research project whose technical side I was responsible for came to an end last month; although the project itself was interesting, and its existence was at least partly responsible for me having a permanent academic position, I think it's fair to say that there were all sorts of wetware headaches as a result. The end of the project was therefore a natural point to start afresh — and in particular, to try to focus on aspects of work that I enjoy. Secondly, my PhD students are largely getting towards the end of their studies; most should be submitting their dissertations in the next few months. While PhD students are usually an asset to an academic, it is true that they can take up significant amounts of time, particularly in the early stages; not having to guide any in the early stages of their research next year gives me the freedom to investigate other activities, and to try to broaden my experience. Thirdly, when the person who comes calling is as awesome as our CTO, and when the rest of the gang is full of names I recognize, well, I expect to learn a lot. (I already have!)
And of course, the fact that some of the underlying technology used in the company uses is software that I'm fairly familiar with is attractive; it would be good to show the world that there are more SBCL-using companies with a healthy business than just the poster child. If I'm lucky, the Free Software and Lisp-related content on this blog should noticeably increase, because although the academic life gives a huge freedom to think, it doesn't actually give a large amount of time to do very much with those thoughts; in this newly-acquired business role, as well as the inevitable all- hands pitching in until the small hours to make the demos work with bits of string and glue, I hope that there will be time to implement and reflect on interesting things.
Thurs.2.SEP.2010 -- Implementing the "prsn"
Variable
Today we have imported the "prsn" variable and some
associated code from
MindForth into the
JavaScript AI (JSAI). In so doing, we have also
switched the
SpeechAct() module from conditionally adding an
inflectional "S" for a third-person verb, to merely
outputting an "S" if directed to do so by the
VerbPhrase() module.
In the JSAI
WhoBe() module, we have brought in the following code
if (subjpsi==50) prsn=1; // 1st person "I"; 2sep2010 if (subjpsi==53) prsn=1; // 1st person "WE" 2sep2010 if (subjpsi==56) prsn=2; // 2nd person YOU; 2sep2010 if (subjpsi==49) prsn=3; // 3rd person HE; 2sep2010 if (subjpsi==80) prsn=3; // 3rd person SHE; 2sep2010 if (subjpsi==95) prsn=3; // 3rd person IT; 2sep2010 if (subjpsi==52) prsn=3; // 3rd person THEY; 2sep2010
as a mutatis mutandis solid block from
MindForth. WhoBe() does not yet make use of the above
code, but we install it right away because in MindForth we
have learned that tracking the person and number of verb-
subjects makes the general AI coding easier.
We need to port a lot more of MindForth
into the
JavaScript AI -- especially the recent seq-skip code
that vastly improves the comprehension of input -- and we
expect the JSAI
to prove to many Netizens that
MindForth is worth looking into.
Visiting English towns
Brighton
This year, Carol and I decided to plan for some quick visits to smaller cities around London. The reason is twofold. First, we wanted to explore a bit more the country where we live. Secondly, we wanted to “practice” how it was to travel with our little daughter before our vacation in Brazil. We’ve made 1-day trips to three towns: Windsor, Cambridge, and Brighton.
Windsor. We visited Windsor in the end of 2009 when my father and his wife came to London to spend Xmas and new year with us. We went there for an obvious reason: the famous Windsor castle, one of England’s most popular places for tourists. It was a quite cold day but we managed to enjoy the sightseeing anyway. Windsor, the town, is cute and very quiet.
Cambridge. This was the first time we made a trip with Julia. Cambridge is a university-oriented town full of students all around. We took the sightseeing bus and walked around quite a bit – a very tiring experience to carry Julia in a sling during the whole time. We went to some of the Cambridge’s classic locations such as King’s College Chapel and Fitzwilliam Museum. Got a pretty good impression of Cambridge, even though it seemed a bit too crowded with students.
Brighton. That was definitely our favourite town. Brighton is on the south coast of England. The pebble beach is a nice place to relax. Brightonians seem to be easy-going people. It’s amazing how the sea affects people’s behaviour and attitude. To be honest, Carol and I even considered moving there after the visit but it would be a bit impractical to work in London and live there.
What all those towns have in common? A very obvious thing: you see more English people. It may sound weird to say that but in London you don’t really experience English culture because the city is very cosmopolitan. Even though those towns are not so far from London, it was interesting to notice that they are more homogeneously English than London. I took some photos from all three towns.
Where are we going next? We have some obvious suspects in mind: Oxford, Bath, Stonehenge, Cotswolds, and others. We’re also planning a weekend trip to Edinburgh and surrounding locations. There’s so much to see that is hard to decide! But we have no hurry and summer is almost gone now. Maybe next year, let’s see.
Changes for add-ons in Fennec alpha
Last week we released a new alpha version of Firefox for Android and Maemo (a.k.a. Fennec). This release brings some major changes and new features for add-on authors. Our Fennec add-on documentation now has the details you need to start updating your Fennec add-ons or creating new ones. <h2>What's new for add-ons?</h2>
One very big change in this release is Electrolysis, the project to move content and chrome into separate processes. Any add-on code that interacts with web content through the DOM must now be in a separate script that runs in the content process. For details, see the Electrolysis guide for add-on authors.
Fennec 2.0a1 also features new APIs for extending the context menu and site menu. See the User Interface Guide for links to documentation and example code.
The upcoming beta releases will include even more changes. Add-ons that use Fennec's panning and zooming features will probably need significant changes for the new graphics code in Fennec 2.0b1. We will also include APIs for for add-ons to customize sharing and other new features. If you are working on an add-on that is affected by these changes, please let us know. <h2>Get started</h2>
To start updating or creating your Fennec add-on, download our Fennec alpha for Android and Nokia N900 or download the emulator for Mac/Windows/Linux. When you're ready, update your addons.mozilla.org listing and set the maxVersion to 2.0a1. Or you can start getting ready for beta by setting your maxVersion to 2.0b1pre and keeping up-to-date with our pre-beta nightly builds.
I don't know, I've met some pretty affected people in Cambridge
Syndicated 2010-09-02 23:11:46 (Updated 2010-09-02 23:13:07) from Monument
it's analog because it requires two people. although they use digital technology, the critical switch from channel to channel is always done by a person who trusts the other person will be able to detect the switch and continue the conversation on the new channel.
a man uses zero or more personal communication devices each of which enables realtime exchange of digital information, such as a pager, a radio, a cellphone, email, telnet, ssh, and many other ways to communicate electronically.
part of the conversation is conveyed in one channel, and part of the conversation is conveyed in another. The switch between channels is initiated by one person and detected by another person.
The more people do this, the more our encrypted messages will be indecipherable to anyone except the intended target. This is because the resources required to record, analyze, and act upon information becomes exponentially more expensive with each additional channel. A wiretap is less compelling in court if it only contains 10 percent of the conversation which is spread across nine other channels, none of which are available.
The more people do this, the more difficult it is for ANY oppressors to abridge our rights to freedom of speech.
When you're ready to join, just start using multichannel analog encryption with your friends until you're good at it.
Here's an example:
email: how are you?
chat response: i'm excited! I discovered a really cool and simple way to encrypt ordinary conversations.
sms: great news. how easy is it to break?
cellphone: it's less easy to break the more people use it. do you want to go to lunch?
facebook chat: sure, now would be a great time to take a break.
twitter: It'S 2:48! I forgot to eat lunch. Leaving now.
A well-crafted conversation on classified subjects could be conveyed just as easily as this trivial lunch example. Feel free to use this technique to encrypt whenever you need just one more layer of security.
O velho e bom SQL...
Appengine, SQLAlchemy.. e nada mais deu mexer com SQL cru na vida 
Até o dia de hoje. Mexendo com Drupal Montei uma queryzinha simpática, só pra relembrar os bons tempos de SQL no Ministério das Cidades. To criando taxonomia pra um monte de items, e queria ver quantos faltam. Sim, fazer count(*) no postgresql não é nunca uma boa idéia. Eu seu disso.
SELECT total_nodes,
total_term_node,
total_nodes - total_term_node AS faltantes
FROM
( SELECT
(SELECT COUNT(*)
FROM drupal_node) AS total_nodes ,
(SELECT COUNT(*)
FROM drupal_term_node) AS total_term_node ) AS diff
Syndicated 2010-09-02 19:56:00 (Updated 2010-09-02 19:56:37) from devlog
White House Blocks Disclosure of Secret Intellectual Property Trade Text
Let's get these negotiations into the open. Do you suppose that the ACTA advocates have something to hide? You bet!
Syndicated 2010-09-03 22:21:00 (Updated 2010-09-03 22:21:44) from proclus
Another rig explodes in the Gulf
Have you seen the news? Another oil rig 80 miles off the coast of Louisiana exploded. As I write this, the rig continues to burn and Coast Guard helicopters have rescued thirteen oil rig workers.
How many more explosions will it take to end offshore drilling?
We have to stop this. I just signed this petition telling President Obama to drop ALL offshore drilling plans and focus on clean energy instead. Can you do the same thing?
This website makes it really simple:
http://act.truemajorityaction.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=116
Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/
http://act.truemajorityaction.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=116
Posted via email from #p
Syndicated 2010-09-02 18:12:00 (Updated 2010-09-02 18:12:48) from proclus
mattl: #downtowncrossing #mbta #orangeline #washington
#downtowncrossing #mbta #orangeline #washingtonscribbling in the margin
I found, as I walked in a yellow wood,Syndicated 2010-09-02 15:33:49 (Updated 2010-09-02 15:36:36) from Monument
Snaxx 23
For the 23rd time we’re gathering friends in the Stockholm Sweden area who’re interested in technology, open source, beers, Monty Python, reverse engineering, rewriting things into assembler for the fun of it and similar very important topics.
Haxx happily invites you to waste an evening by talking and drinking at October 18th 2010 with us and friends in our spirit.
[ we should get ourselves a snaxx logo, so if you're reading this and have some talent consider yourself wanted and appreciated! ]
MathML 3 and TeX4ht
MathML 3 is about to be formalized and going to be released as the new standard for encoding mathematics in web. It differs from the previous standard 2. The main changes that have a bearing on the functionality of TeX4ht are discussed here. Linking MathML 1 and 2 didn’t have any built in provisions to [...]Motorola announces "Ming" phone with Android
For those who don't know: The Motorola Ming was the A1200, a commercially very successful Linux-based phone in China and other parts of Asia, using the EZX software platform, i.e. the kind of hardware that we once built the OpenEZX software.
Motorola has recently announced that they will follow-up with some android based ming phones. It is my suspicion that apart from some mechanical design aspects, those phones will not resemble the ming in any way, neither on the baseband hardware side, nor on the application processor side, and particularly not on the software side.
So it's probably nothing than a marketing coup, trying to connect to successes of the past. Not interesting from the OpenEZX point of view, I guess.
HCI at Canonical
Over almost three decades, the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) has produced a rich and varied literature. Although the focus of attention today is naturally on new work, older contributions that played a role in shaping the trajectory and character of the field have much to tell us. The contributors to HCI Remixed were asked to reflect on a single work at least ten years old that influenced their approach to HCI. The result is this collection of fifty-one short, engaging, and idiosyncratic essays, reflections on a range of works in a variety of forms that chart the emergence of a new field.If you're into HCI, learning from others, and discovering new sources of inspiration for your own work, this is simply a must-have book :-)
Syndicated 2010-09-02 10:00:00 (Updated 2010-09-02 10:56:08) from Duncan McGreggor
Apple's ping isn't anything like a social network
Apple just created another social network around music named Ping. So this morning I thought let's give it a try and see what this can bring to my weblife. I'm already using last.fm and Sptotify as social web services. Like these two to access ping you need to download some software - ie the latest version of itunes.
The first thing one needs to do, is to create an account. I already had an AppleID, but didn't remember my password. So after a quick password reset, I tried to connect to ping. But my ID wasn't fully filled according to Apple - so I updated it. This included the need to give away credit card information as the ping service is really tied to the itunes music store.
Second things I usually do when I join a social network is quickly fill in my profile. On Ping I failed to upload a picture - but I can live being faceless. Then I choosed to share everything I was doing with my friend (this includes : Things I like, review or purchase). Added a few things to my bio page relating to music. I then could choose Genres I liked, but that's limited to 3, I don't get why this is restrained to only 3.
Now that my profile was "complete", I started looking around to see how I could connect to people I know (which is what social implies). So Apple nicely promotes artist I should follow - but these don't even fall into the categories of music I had selected (so to me it looks a lot like a marketing push - to try to sell me music, more than anything else), and three users. Frankly I have no clue why three users where presented to me as possible interest in following - so I didn't try following them. I started looking for a few friend, but was unable to locate any, probably because they don't use the service yet. Then I looked into the options I usually have on social networks - ie harvest the other social networks I'm present and find people that I'm connected on these services and also use Ping. Well this is a complete failure, the only thing I can do, is send emails to friend to invite them to join - manually. I don't think my network is going to grow a lot on Ping. Too bad because I do manage my music in iTunes so apple could have done something really nice here.
I've been listening to music and rating two new tracks in order to see if it had any effect on my profile (when I see it ) and the answer is no. So I'm there but no activity is visible. And I'm not willing to buy a track to get some activity.
Then I tried to play around - but ended up way to often on the itune store :-(. I really think that Ping isn't social, because it's not centered around me, but it's more or less centered around the store and selling music.
Things I think could have been done way better :
I don't think I'll use Ping as it is a lot, but will continue to use last.fm and spotify for my social music needs.
Syndicated 2010-09-02 06:19:21 (Updated 2010-09-02 07:02:56) from Ludovic's weblog
KohaCon10
Russel Garlick writes on behalf of the KohaCon10 Organising Committee:
“KohaCon10 starts on October 25th in Wellington, New Zealand. We have an exciting line up of speakers on a range of topics related to Koha and [Free and] Open Source and Open Standards in libraries. See our programme for details.
KohaCon is an opportunity for the entire Koha community, librarians and developers alike, to come together, meet each other, swap ideas and learn something new.
The conference is split into 2 parts.
The community conference will be held over 3 days – 25-27th of October. This is not just a developer’s conference. There will be presentations from librarians and developers alike.
The second part of the conference is the Hackfest for Koha developers that will be held from 29th-31st of October.
For more information see our website
KohaCon10 is a free conference (that is right it will cost nothing for you to attend), but you still need to register to reserve your place.
Registrations from the international Koha community have been very strong. Over half of all available spaces are already taken.
If you have been holding off on the premise that you will have plenty of time to do this later, then please register now. Please do not rely on there being free spaces on the day.
Registration is quick and easy via the website.
We look forward to seeing you in Wellington!”
Our co-op will be represented there. Will you?
Syndicated 2010-09-02 05:00:51 from Software Cooperative News
Raw Satire Usually Fails on the Internet
Sarcasm and satire usually don’t work on the Internet. One cause of this is the lack of out of band signalling via facial expression or tone of voice. Another issue is the fact that in real life people usually know something about the person who they listen to while on the Internet it’s most common to read articles without knowing much about the author. So the reader can’t use “I know that the author isn’t an asshole” as a starting point to determine whether a message should be interpreted literally.
This is really nothing new. The standard in printed communication for a long time has been to use Emoticons (Wikipedia) to indicate emotion and other interpretation that might not be deduced from a direct reading of the text. The Wikipedia page cites examples of emoticon use dating back to 1857 – although the combinations of characters used for different emotions has changed significantly many times. The common uses that we now know on the Internet date back to 1982.
In my experience the symbol :-# is commonly used to note sarcasm or satire. Unfortunately it seems that none of the Internet search engines allow searching for such strings so I couldn’t find an early example of this being used. While I haven’t found a reference describing this practice, I regularly receive messages annotated with it and find that people generally understand what I mean when I use it in my own email. But that is usually applied to a sentence or two.
For a larger section of text a pseudo-HTML tag such as </satire> can be used to signal the end of satire. It seems that a matching start tag is optional as recognising the start of satire is a lot easier once the reader knows that some of the content is satirical. In spoken English a phrase such as “but seriously” may be used for the same purpose, but such a subtle signal may be missed on the Internet – particularly by readers who don’t use English as their first language.
Another way of signaling a non-literal interpretation is by using Scare Quotes – the deliberate usage of quotation symbols to indicate that the writer disagrees with the content that is written. That is common for the case of referencing a phrase or sentence that you disagree with, but doesn’t work for a larger section of text.
A final option is to make the satire or sarcasm so extreme that no-one can possibly mistake it for being literal. This is not always possible, Poe’s Law holds that “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won’t mistake for the real thing” [1]. I think that Poe was understating the case, it is impossible to create a parody of religion that most people won’t mistake for the real thing without signals or context. For an example read LandOverBaptist.org and Chick.com, of course if you know those sites then you will know whether they are satirical or serious – but I expect that most readers of my blog won’t invest enough effort into either of those religious sites to determine whether they are serious or satire.
But satire and sarcasm without signals or a reputation usually fails. One example of success is The Onion which is a long running and well known satirical news site [2]. But even The Onion it is regularly mistaken for being serious – the number of occasions when people forward me Onion articles for amusement are vastly outnumbered by the number of occasions when I see people taking it seriously.
Even when material is known to be satirical it can still fail grossly. An example is the Chaser’s satire of the Make A Wish Foundation [3]. Even material that is well known to be satirical seems to fail when it attacks bad targets or attacks in a bad way. One difficulty is in satirising bigoted people, to effectively satirise them without attacking the minority groups that they dislike can be a difficult challenge.
Finally, when you write some satire and members of your audience don’t recognise it you should consider the possibility that you failed to do it properly. If you can’t get a hit rate close to 100% for people with the same background as you then it’s probably a serious failure.
Hypothesis
<center>Speaking Klingon makes you see the world in an aggressive way.</center>links for 2010-09-01
coreutils inbox - Aug 2010
Latest news in the coreutils project<!--1283153689-->pbranch curiosities
I've started using pbranch extension for hg more seriously. It works nicely but is a little rough around the edges, in particular:
Syndicated 2010-09-02 00:13:00 (Updated 2010-09-02 00:27:38) from John Levon
Re-enable Ctrl-Alt-Backspace in Xorg
Create the following as /etc/hal/fdi/policy/30user/10-x11-zap.fdi:
Syndicated 2010-09-02 00:05:00 (Updated 2010-09-02 00:09:08) from John Levon
The sad evolution of wikis
I set up my first wiki in 2001, in preparation for hiring our very first software developer employee. Until then, software development at NITI had been handled entirely by me and the other technical co-founder, dcoombs. And since we knew everything already, documentation was unnecessary. When it came to hire a new person, documentation suddenly became very necessary. I had to do a brain dump, and a wiki seemed like a great solution. The original NitWiki was born.
The first NitWiki ran on zwiki. Then we migrated to WikkiTikkiTavi, which we hacked up resulting in what we called HackyTavi, which we then cleaned up and renamed to GracefulTavi. (Note: the original WikkiTikkiTavi is very nice and rather graceful. It was just HackyTavi that wasn't graceful. No offense intended.)
GracefulTavi performed wonderfully; at NITI's peak, we had more than 30 internal developers, plus all our technical support staff, using it daily. All our technical documentation was in there, and it was easy to read, easy to find, easy to link to, and (perhaps most importantly) easy to write. There was also tons of non-technical stuff; all sorts of company culture, office games, product plans, newsletters, and everything else got dumped into the wiki. The wiki was the default place to dump stuff, and it was all full-text-indexable and made it easy for anyone to provide feedback and fix typos.
It's the most fun I've ever had doing documentation. Even more fun than GourD, which was fun too in its own way. But that's another story.
GracefulTavi had a long and happy life; it was still in use in late 2006 when I left, and I suspect it's still alive at IBM (which acquired NITI) even today, at least as a read-only reference material.
As great as it was, however, I don't think a NitWiki would be easy to make successful today. At least, I've seen people try, and it doesn't really work out. One of the problems is Wikipedia Mentality.
Wikipedia changed a few fundamental ideas about wikis that had been taken for granted:
"Oh," I thought to myself. "So that's why wikis aren't wikis anymore."
The Wikipedia changes make sense; absolutely. They're great changes. Without them, Wikipedia almost certainly would have failed. But if you make those changes, you don't end up with a NitWiki, you end up with a Wikipedia.
Wikipedia-style wikis are written primarily for outsiders. There's a community, but it doesn't come through in the articles; if you want the community, you have to go elsewhere, to the User or Discussion pages. And of course, the User and Discussion pages aren't part of the product; they're the necessary junk produced as a side effect of producing the product. In Wikipedia, the community is overhead.
Same with the Git wiki. It's treated as a product - a set of documentation. Anything that's not "an information source about git" is unwelcome. Which is fine, I guess, and git already has an active mailing list where the community hangs out (as you can see from the vigorous discussion inside that thread I linked to), so there's no reason to have a community in the wiki. Having two community hangouts might actually be detrimental.
But I miss having a community wiki. The very original wiki, at c2.com Wiki, is such a wiki, and it's a beautiful thing. I was never a member of that wiki, but it's a fascinating place to lurk nonetheless. And our interns at NITI used to call NitWiki the "electric babysitter."
The c2 wikiers also apparently have their own version of this rant that I'm writing and you're currently reading. Theirs is called WikiIsNotWikipedia.
So yeah, a "real community wiki" is nothing like Wikipedia. That's not so hard. We can just start a new un-wikipedia-like wiki and just do it the "old way." It wasn't very hard to teach people to use a wiki who had never used a wiki and who were used to writing Microsoft Word documents for everything. Just stay away from MediaWiki (which strongly encourages the Wikipedia way of doing things) and you'll be fine.
Unfortunately, outside of wikis, the world itself has also been busy evolving, and in a way I don't know how to deal with. The new problem is: teams are the wrong size now. Thirty dedicated, full-time programmers was an ideal number for NitWiki. But who has 30 dedicated, full-time programmers now? I mean *really* dedicated? You can be a very successful Internet startup with way less than 30 developers. Maybe you need only two. Maybe those two aren't even working full time on the one project. And two people don't need a wiki.
That lack of dedication - lack of single-minded attention of one team to one goal - is a serious problem in building a project-oriented wiki. A lot of developers at NITI *lived* in the wiki; that was where they went when they were bored (instead of to a news site). It was where they went to ask a question, or answer a question, or design a new module, or plan a party. And as the wiki expanded, more and more WikiWords that you invented - planning to fill it in next - turned out to already exist, and to already have the content you meant to write. The WikiWord effect is kind of magical that way. It's really fun and rewarding when it happens.
But when there are too many wikis - more than one is too many - it stops happening. Instead, you get the opposite effect, and it's frustrating: you know you wrote a WikiWord page that describes a particular concept... but that page isn't in the current wiki, it's in some other wiki. So you use the WikiWord, but it comes up as missing. Argh. That defeats the whole point. You might as well be writing emails or Word documents or Wikipedia articles.
We even had this problem at NITI, and it was a bad one. In fact, we had two wikis: the internal-only NitWiki, and the public now-defunct OpenNit (open.nit.ca) wiki. In theory, we were supposed to put all our public-facing stuff in OpenNit, and all the private stuff in NitWiki. But it didn't work because you never knew quite what would be "private" until it happened. What if you're discussing something in public, but you want to add a related comment about some private project we're working on that we haven't announced yet? It kills the discussion. Or more likely, it results in all discussions just being done on the internal-only wiki, which is mostly what happened.
Internally, we had some really great documentation. But the documentation of our open source stuff was mostly garbage, because it was mostly on the internal-only site and nobody internally visited the public one.
We never solved this problem. I wish we had; our NitWiki was fun enough that I would have liked to share it with more people. Of course, people would have been more afraid to post if they had to do it in front of everyone on the Internet, so making it public never would have worked.
How do you create a vibrant community, but allow for private topics and discussion, but allow for public topics and discussion, and allow me to work for more than one company at a time with multiple private discussions, and have my WikiWords always end up pointing where they're supposed to?
I have no idea.
Dear Internet: please invent the solution to that for me. Thanks.
P.S. You don't get any bonus points for saying, "The answer is Google; just blog about it, don't worry about hyperlinks, and let Google full-text index the rest." That answer is funny, but it doesn't work for my private stuff.
Syndicated 2010-09-01 23:25:35 from apenwarr - Business is Programming
The perfect explanation for all "In Soviet Russia…" jokes
Syndicated 2010-09-01 21:26:41 (Updated 2010-09-01 21:27:06) from Monument
More GPL enforcement work again.. and a very surreal but important case
In recent days and weeks, I'm doing a bit more work on the gpl-violations.org project than during the last months and years. I wouldn't say that I'm happy about that, but well, somebody has to do it :/
Right now I'm facing what I'd consider the most outrageous case that I've been involved so far: A manufacturer of Linux-based embedded devices (no, I will not name the company) really has the guts to go in front of court and sue another company for modifying the firmware on those devices. More specifically, the only modifications to program code are on the GPL licensed parts of the software. None of the proprietary userspace programs are touched! None of the proprietary programs are ever distributed either.
If that manufacturer would succeed with such a lawsuit, it would create some very nasty precedent and jeopardize the freedom of users of Linux-based embedded devices. It would be a direct blow against projects that provide "homebrew" software for embedded devices, such as OpenWRT and many others.
I've seen many weird claims and legal strategies when it comes to companies trying to deprive developers of their freedom to modify and run modified versions of Free Software. But this is definitely so weird that I still feel like I'm in a bad dream. This can't be real. It feels to surreal.
It's a pity that I cannot speak up more about the specific company in question right now. I'm desperately looking forward to the point in time where I can speak up and speak out about what has been happening behind the scenes.
Testing 2-digit year numbers in cookies
In the current work of the IETF http-state working group, we’re documenting how cookies work. The question came up how browsers and clients treat years in ‘expires’ strings if the year is only specified with two digits. And more precisely, is 69 in the future or in the past?
I decided to figure that out. I setup a little CGI that can be used to check what your browser thinks:
It sends a single cookie header that looks like:
Set-Cookie: testme=yesyes; expires=Wed Sep 1 22:01:55 69;
The CGI script looks like this:
print "Content-Type: text/plain\n";
print "Set-Cookie: testme=yesyes; expires=Wed Sep 1 22:01:55 69;\n";
print "\nempty?\n";
print $ENV{'HTTP_COOKIE'};
You see that it prints the Cookie: header, so if you reload that URL you should see “testme=yesyes” being output if the cookie is still there. If the cookie is still there, your browser of choice treats the date above as a date in the future.
So, what browsers think 69 is in the future and what think 69 is in the past? Feel free to try out more browsers and tell me the results, this is the list we have so far:
Future:
Firefox (year 2069)
curl (year 2038)
IE 7 (year 2069)
Opera (year 2036)
Android
Past:
Chrome (both v4 and v5)
Thanks to my friends in #rockbox-community that helped me out!
(this info was originally posted to the httpstate mailing list)
First Friday bloggin ....
Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.
Adobe acrobat is possibly the worlds slowest software
See title. It took about 5 minutes to open a pdf that evince opens in a second or two and that xpdf opens essentially instantly. I was ready to xkill acrobat. Unfortunately for whatever reason evince did not allow me to click checkboxes in a form so I needed acrobat.
Talking about slow applications, the cannon mp560 printer scanner is taking about the equivalent time to scan a single page now. But here I assume it may have to do with the fact that I am using it over wifi.
Goodreads+webcam+python+zbar == hackfun!
I am a big fan of GoodReads a social network for people who read books.
I read a lot, and I like that I can see what other people think before starting a book, and I can put my short reviews, and I can see what I have been reading, and lots more.
In fact, goodreads is going to be a big part of a project I am starting with some PyAr guys.
One thing I have been lazy about is adding my book list to goodreads, because it's a bit of a chore.
Well, chore no more!
Here's how to do it, the hacker way...
Cute, isn't it?
Here's the code:
import os p=os.popen('/usr/bin/zbarcam','r') while True: code = p.readline() print 'Got barcode:', code isbn = code.split(':')[1] os.system('chromium http://www.goodreads.com/search/search?q=%s'%isbn)
note to self, how to change the definer of a mysql stored procedure
This is a useful one if, like us, you find that the account used to create the procedure doesn't have the privileges required to execute it, or perhaps you've revoked the original definers grant. (DoH!)
Syndicated 2010-09-01 16:25:00 (Updated 2010-09-01 17:46:04) from Danny Angus
Facebook, you make me want to cry!
It seems that the way in which facebook chooses an image to show alongside a posted link differs for links posted in different ways.
Syndicated 2010-09-01 15:48:00 (Updated 2010-09-01 15:58:08) from Danny Angus
FOAF updates: Trust rankings are now exported, making the data available to other users and websites. An external FOAF URI has been added, allowing users to link to an additional FOAF file.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!
| Users | 13945 |
| Observer | 9824 |
| Apprentice | 747 |
| Journeyer | 2348 |
| Master | 1022 |