antiminke's geek archives

Kill your television

Cos this is seriously creepy: The televised revolution: how the TV set watches you:

By 2011, Sky says it will be able to deliver directed advertising ("Smart TV") by using viewers' set-top boxes to insert commercials targeted to them individually. "All the boxes with a particular profile will take a decision and play a particular advert," Thexton says. "It could be regional, it may link to demographics and age range. The viewer isn't aware of being targeted."

...

Smart TV adds a whole other dimension. "What we'd really like to do is match your digital media consumption - the websites you visit, the TV programmes you watch, the radio stations you listen to - to your shopping behaviour," Humby says.

Linked-in media data is the dream. "If I knew your whole transaction profile - restaurants, travel, fashion - that could be immensely powerful," adds Humby. "You'd need a consent-based model, but you'd understand every aspect of a person's life. The credit-card data tells you how they live generally, the supermarket data tells you their motivations, the media data tells you how to talk to them. If you have those three things, you're in marketing nirvana."

Ick, ick, ick.

Privacy - you used to have it, now you don't

A small collection of reasons why not...

Firstly, private content used to be ephemeral and untraceable, but that's no longer the case. Clay Shirky on privacy in the modern age:

It used to be that the principal guarantees of a conversation being private were that no one was listening and it wasn't being preserved for posterity. Now you'd have to take active steps to hide yourself from the authorities and such steps are suspicious-making.

Secondly, we all use sites that claim rights over our stuff. mashable reports about Facebook's changed Terms of Service in Facebook: All Your Stuff is Ours, Even if You Quit:

Sure, you can choose not to use Facebook at all, but that doesn't mean a thing. Someone can still take your photo, slap it on Facebook, and now neither you nor the author of the photo can stop Facebook from using the photo in whichever way they please.

Looking at it globally, millions of people are uploading bits of information on everyone and everything, to a huge online database, and by doing so they're automatically giving away the rights to use or modify this information to a private corporation. And not only that; they now also waiver the right to ever take it back from it.

Finally, anti-terrorism laws provide an excuse for the government to change the rules. A random example, UK e-mail law 'attack on rights':

Rules forcing internet companies to keep details of every e-mail sent in the UK are a waste of money and an attack on civil liberties, say critics.

From March all internet service providers (ISPs) will by law have to keep information about every e-mail sent or received in the UK for a year.

Human rights group Liberty says it is worried what will happen next.

The Home Office insists the data, which does not include e-mails' content, is vital for crime and terror inquiries.

(And this quote from Clay Shirky just tickled me - it's obvious when you think about it: "I removed "cyberspace" from my vernacular. The idea, which I grew up with, of going into a place separate from the real world, is something my students just don't recognise".)

A bit of Google love

From the Official Google Blog: Our position on California's No on 8 campaign

However, while there are many objections to this proposition -- further government encroachment on personal lives, ambiguously written text -- it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8. While we respect the strongly-held beliefs that people have on both sides of this argument, we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality. We hope that California voters will vote no on Proposition 8 -- we should not eliminate anyone's fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love.

I have new respect for Google.

And I'm still totally bemused by sheer amount of effort some people will put into stopping two people they've never heard of from getting married. Surely it's unhealthy to be *that* obsessed with the love lives of others. 'Homophobes are that way because they're repressing their homosexuality' is a glib line, but it would explain an awful lot.

It's not about China, honest

Really, it's not. Apparently.

I'm not sure what I think about this - I guess progress and an acknowledgement of the importance of human rights and online access to information is important, and it has to start somewhere.

Big three help online rights

Three of the biggest IT companies in the world have approached the US Congress with suggestions on how to bring human rights laws to the online world.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have explained how to extend human rights to the internet and what they could do to help spread the laws.

They suggest a code which would be based around a set of principles to which companies would have to adhere, as well as guidelines on ensuring those rights and frameworks on how to enforce the rules and guarantee accountability.

The move follows up from a development in July, when Richard Durbin, a US senator, asked each of the companies to provide suggestions.

Ethical fashion directory

The Guardian have produced an 'ethical fashion directory'. It's a little tricksy - click on titles and random new windows open, and you have to click on an image to view different sorts of clothes (which opens new windows in the background, not always obvious), but it's still useful: Ethical fashion directory.

Over the past few years I've frequently heard people say "Well I'd love to buy more ethical fashion, but I've no idea where to start ..." Here is our solution. Our directory will provide, I hope, a means of navigating the sometimes confusing world of ethical fashion and make it easy for you, the consumer, to find exactly what you are looking for.

Guess who?

From today's Observer:

'They have amassed more information about people in 10 years than all the governments of the world put together. They make the Stasi and the KGB look like the innocent old granny next door. This is of immense significance. If someone evil took them over, they could easily become Big Brother.'

The clue is in the article title, Google, 10 years in: big, friendly giant or a greedy Goliath?

More:

Chester, however, is an outspoken critic on a crusade. He continues: 'Google have been very hypocritical. They try to place a digital halo around their activities. They should be at the forefront of acknowledging that these are the most powerful marketing tools around and there should be safeguards in place. Google claims it's there to provide information but it's really there to collect data and provide advertising, and they simply can't own up to it.'
...
[Google CEO] Schmidt raised eyebrows on a trip to London last year when he declared: 'We cannot even answer the most basic questions about you because we don't know enough about you. The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask questions such as "What shall I do tomorrow?" and "What job should I take?" This is the most important aspect of Google's expansion.'

A month later, the human rights watchdog Privacy International ranked the company bottom in a major survey of how securely the leading internet companies handle their users' personal information. Liberty, the civil liberties organisation, and the National Consumer Council have also expressed concern.

See also Into the future: Pros and cons of a Google world:

Kate Allen, director of Amnesty International UK

We have long-standing concerns about Google regarding the way it is betraying its own principles in going against established international norms around freedom of information. When you go on a Google search engine in London and look for a picture of Tiananmen Square, you get that iconic picture of a man standing in front of a tank. If you go to google.cn and do the same search you'll get a picture of happy smiley tourists. Specific words such as Tibet, democracy, Tiananmen Square are heavily censored. We think that filtering process should be transparent. The rest of us who know that we're using Google in an uncensored fashion have a duty to stand up for people who don't have that access.

Stallman on Gates, proprietary software, the free software movement

Richard Stallman writes for the BBC in It's not the Gates, it's the bars: "Gates may be gone, but the walls and bars of proprietary software he helped create remain, for now".

Future geek chicks?

From the BBC on Microsoft's survival strategy (innovation and research):

Boku is a video game which is basically aimed at creating the computer programmers of tomorrow.

Principal programme manager Matt MacLaurin, a father of a three and three-quarter year-old daughter, designed Boku "as a tool so that kids can make their own games and its secretly a tool to teach kids what programming is like without getting too bogged down in the detail".

...

Mr MacLaurin says Boku's marriage of creativity and education is a clever way to hook children into this world.

He noted that girls took just two hours to become completely conversant with Boku while he fudged on how long the boys took.

Other interesting ideas include 'E-Science in the cloud':

In the carbon project known as Fluxdata, a group of 400 scientists from across the world are looking at how vegetation is being affected by carbon emissions.

In the past they might well have worked in isolation and only exchanged information via email assuming they would know who else was conducting complementary research.

In other news, yay Eurovision!

Andalucia goes OS

Biggest ever Spanish open source agreement signed

The Spanish government received praise for its continuing commitment to business innovation based on open standards.

Last week, Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth told the BBC that the public was now turning to open source to improve their computing experiences.

Mr Shuttleworth said he had seen a real shift over the last six months, from people seeing open source as either a super-specialist tool for people who run data centres or something only an enthusiast would be interested in, to something which is increasingly popular with the commercial PC industry.

Random grrr at mildy sexist ad

Does Oracle think everyone they send their ads to are white, middle-aged men?

I say 'mildly sexist' because at least it's not a semi-naked chick draped over a server rack.

The visible effect of trawling

The difference a photo makes is interesting.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Loving Our Oceans to Death has a Landsat satellite image of the Gulf of Mexico

The cloudy water that you see is the direct result of commercial bottom trawlers dragging large, heavy nets across the seafloor, denuding it of all life in their quest for a few marketable fish and shrimps. Unfortunately, most bottom trawlers destroy as much as 20 pounds of "bycatch" -- unmarketable corals, sponges, fishes and other animals -- for every pound of commerically valuable "seafood" that they retrieve, while they leave behind huge, choking clouds of mud and sediment that take weeks or longer to settle. ...

"Until recently, the impact was basically hidden from view," he continued. "But new tools -- especially Internet-based image sites, like Google Earth -- allow everyone to see for themselves what's happening. In shallow waters with muddy bottoms, trawlers leave long, persistent trails of sediment in their wake."
...
What can you do to reduce this enviromental destruction? Until the industrial fishing industry proves that they are acting in a more environmentally responsible manner, you can boycott eating orange roughy, Chilean sea bass (Patagonian toothfish), and all shrimps. (Keep in mind that those shrimp species that are not caught by trawling are usually farmed in shallow coastal mangroves, which also leads to tremendous, and possibly irreversible, environmental damages).

But don't just stop buying trawler-caught seafood - tell your supermarket or fishmonger why you've stopped buying it. Your consumer action can make a huge difference.

Tim Berners-Lee on tracking and privacy on the internet

From the BCS, Berners-Lee 'wary' of all web tracking:

Mr Berners-Lee explained that this type of targeting could lead to information about a user's habits getting into the hands of unwanted parties and that instead, ISPs should have to comply with the same rules and regulations that any other utility company would.

...

Mr Berners-Lee said a user's internet activity information was akin to a person's private property, however.

"It's mine – you can't have it. If you want to use [that data] for something, then you have to negotiate with me. I have to agree, I have to understand what I'm getting in return," he said.

All women team run NASA's Mars rover (briefly)

Briefly is better than nothing...

The all-female team of scientists and engineers planned the event after noticing they were occasionally a supermajority on the rover operations team. They designed an action plan and transmitted all the computer codes for the day's activities, including using the robotic arm to take microscopic images of dust while Spirit was stationed on a slope. Though men still outnumber women in space exploration, the gender mix is changing.

More from NASA.

Grace Hopper on YouTube

I had no idea she was so funny - she's very deadpan, and it's a good overview of her achievements too.

So go watch one of my geek heroes Grace Hopper on YouTube.

Woman and men can have equal spatial abilities

Lots of possible questions about the study itself, but the introduction to the article is interesting:

Action Games Improve Women's Spatial Abilities, Says New Study

While research has consistently shown that the male brain has advantages in spatial skills like geometry, interpreting technical drawings and reading maps, a new study says that playing action-oriented video games can equalize the sexes in that regard.

If you're stuck for presents...

intelligentgiving.com rates charity gift sites so you can give a goat or a water pump with confidence.

A small geek grump with Domain Registry of America and phpwebhosting

I got mail (actual physical mail) from the "Domain Registry of America" ( this week, telling me that some of my domains were due for renewal.

Which would be great, except I don't actually use them for my domains and their 'renewal' form is actually a 'switch to us' form. The language is all carefully written so it's legal, but to the casual reader it's just a 'domain name expiration notice'. I think it's just this side of a scam that takes advantage of people's general confusion about technical stuff.

Also on my grump list is phpwebhosting.com, who haven't responded to helpdesk calls for well over a week - so I haven't had email in *ages*. I'm going to switch hosts this week, I'm just waiting on confirmation of ssh access.

Fascinating, and perhaps scary: When work becomes a game

Video games are big business and soon they could be big in business too. ... All of a sudden, say academics and researchers, companies have realised that all the time employees spend gaming in virtual worlds is changing them. ... Companies were adopting game mechanics for several reasons, said Dr Reeves. ... The main reason was for the transparency it gave to the way workplaces were organised and for revealing who got things done.

"It exposes those that do and do not play well," said Dr Reeves. "There is a leader board and you know the rules."

It had the potential to turn workplaces into meritocracies where the most accomplished are easy to spot because they have racked up all rewards, achievements and levels required for a particular post.

While it may not sweep away systems of privilege or end nepotism it had the potential to make workplaces fairer and take some of the grind out of the day job, he said.

BBC, When work becomes a game

But what if you don't play games? Will familiarity with gaming conventions give some people an advantage? Could you 'game the system'?

IT recruiters are crap

The BCS website puts it more diplomatically: No skills shortage just poor recruitment practices

The only way employers will regain access the IT skills required to support key business initiatives is to reject current practices and take more direct control over their recruitment. Great IT skills are out there and they don't cost the earth. The only thing standing in between IT and the right contract staff is commoditised recruitment practices.

The ethics of computing

This article from the BCS makes some good points about the ethics of computing.

It also says,

There is a view that the storage of personal data is only problematic for those with something to hide. But we cannot know for sure how data we supply today will be used tomorrow - goalposts shift, governments change - and not all are benign. When in 1933 the population of Germany provided their personal data for census purposes, they could have had no knowledge of ultimate consequences.

Berners-Lee attacks "stupid" male geek culture

Berners-Lee attacks "stupid" male geek culture

The scariest bit:

One academic went through a sex change, submitted the same papers under both identities, and found that papers were accepted from a man but were rejected when they came from a woman, said the web inventor. This bias is unaccountable but adds to institutional bias, he said.

City guides for iPods

Apparently PodCityGuides has free guides to over 300 cities.

Have we outsourced our brains?

Wired:

My point is that the cyborg future is here. Almost without noticing it, we've outsourced important peripheral brain functions to the silicon around us.

One good thing about the London tube strike

The Guardian posted this list of 'useful maps during the Tube strike', including the Tube lines superimposed on a real street map so you can see how the Tube map relates to the real world - very handy if you're new to London and don't know when not to bother with the Tube, two walking sites and a map that shows how long it takes to get to each station from a particular station.

One good thing about the London tube strike

The Guardian posted this list of 'useful maps during the Tube strike', including the Tube lines superimposed on a real street map so you can see how the Tube map relates to the real world - very handy if you're new to London and don't know when not to bother with the Tube, two walking sites and a map that shows how long it takes to get to each station from a particular station.

The BBC "asks why search engines are so keen to keep hold of our personal data" and raises some interesting issues:

"This is a general problem with free services," she added. "You have the impression that you don't pay for this, you don't pay. In fact, you pay a very high price, because you pay with your own privacy, your own intimacy. You pay with yourself." ... With Web 2.0 now moving so many of our desktop applications, and therefore data, online, campaigners feel we would do well to get these privacy issues sorted out sooner rather than later.

I've upgraded MovableType

So there might be a few glitches along the way... it's quite a good upgrade process, but it would be helpful if it tested that the config file had the right paths for some of the necessary files (though it was my bad for initially getting the mt-static directory name wrong).

I had some stuff to display post categories and link to a category archive that I'll have to fix cos it doesn't recognise anymore, but that's ok. I haven't figured out all the new functionality yet but it looks like they've made a good effort at catching up with Word Press.

While on the geek thing, my favourite RSS reader is testing new functionality. They have feedback forums, so I posted something from my wishlist:

"I would love a 'drip feed' feature that would load a small set of posts from a feed, so that you could skim read them, mark them as 'keep new' to read properly later, etc; then click to call up the next set of posts from that feed.

Basically it would let you page through a feed so that you don't have to skim through every post because the entire feed will be marked as read when you've let a particular feed build up (cos you've been on holiday or busy or whatever)."

At a first glance the could apply to anyone but if they're based around what women have been bad at doing, they're worth posting. Seven Rules for Women in IT

1. Expand your frame of reference. Get technology experience in a variety of areas, such as sales, consulting, customer service and operations.

2. Work for standouts. Work with name-brand companies or on important, high-impact projects.

3. Choose projects with weight. Don’t work solely in support roles or the “people” aspects of projects. Work on at least one project that is operationally oriented.

4. Speak clearly and with integrity. On risky or troubled projects, break through political correctness and be forthright.

5. Soften the edges. Be hard-charging and results-oriented, but also develop people skills and a relationship orientation.

6. Raise your own flag. Publicize your team’s successes.

7. Reflect. Assess your leadership qualities, style, values and what you want your career to look like.

Are you ready for Web 3.0?

A cynical ha!

all software and all data are simply complements to Google's core business - serving advertisements - and hence Google's interest lies in destroying all barriers, whether economic, technological, or legal, to all software and all data. Almost everything the company does, from building data centers to buying optical fiber to supporting free wi-fi to fighting copyright to supporting open source to giving software and information away free, is about removing those barriers.

And yes, this probably sums it up:

Web 3.0 involves the disintegration of digital data and software into modular components that, through the use of simple tools, can be reintegrated into new applications or functions on the fly by either machines or people.

From Rough Type.

I have a new intellectual crush. It's partly because of the way she didn't let the interview be derailed by stupid questions, and partly just her sheer enjoyment of her area:

Math Book Helps Girls Embrace Their Inner Mathematician
"The actress who played Winnie Cooper on The Wonder Years, Danica McKellar, is a self-proclaimed math advocate for girls who might otherwise shy away from a subject that Barbie once famously described as "hard.""

I also admire Beth Wilson's personal courage:
"Health Services Commissioner Beth Wilson has revealed her own emotional experience with abortion in a bid to persuade MPs to support a push to remove abortion from the Crimes Act."
Health chief tells of abortion experience

It's one of the top whinges about Macs in mixed environments, so hopefully this will help hush the whinging: Wired How To Share Files Between Windows PCs and Macs on a Network.

Funnily enough I was thinking this just yesterday.

Wired on how to get music off your iPod

Both via the filesystem and with third-party applications: Get Your Music Off of Your iPod / Wired How To's.

Mainstream DRM-free tracks

"Vivendi's Universal Music has said it is to test the digital sale of songs from artists without the customary copy-protection technology." BBC

This is great news - I can buy tracks from a mainstream publisher without worrying about whether I've got it on my home or work computers and without being slightly illegal.

For some reason this last paragraph made me laugh:

Rupert Murdoch, who bought MySpace in 2005, has already expressed concern about the growth of Facebook. His executives will now be under even more pressure to find ways of making MySpace fashionable again.

BBC: Social sites battle for new users

Which reminds me - DesignDyke, I emailed you about my other blog that talks about social software a lot more, but it was probably eaten by hotmail.

Google PageRank explained

Apparently.

Google PageRank: What Do We Know About It?

From the depths of the internet, lists of unusual and lost words.

Wired: Suddenly, the Paranoids Don't Seem So Paranoid Anymore

Have you noticed? We've become a people that no longer respects, or apparently desires, privacy. Our own or anybody else's.

That's a remarkable thing, when you stop to think about it. We Americans, historically, have fiercely guarded our personal privacy. It's one of our defining characteristics. Others, who live in societies where personal privacy isn't so easily taken for granted, have looked on with a mixture of admiration and bemusement. "Mind your own business" is a singularly American expression.

I'm not sure about the last statement, but generally, I'm glad to see this article. I'm not sure how or when the onus switched from the need to show why a loss of privacy was necessary to the need to show why privacy is important and necessary, but it annoys me.

When did privacy go from being a right to just barely being a privilege we're allowed?

James told me about More Words, which is mostly for word games but also has nice random words on the bottom of the page.

Kinda basic but possibly thought provoking: What search engines know about us

Randomly, some choice insults from AWAD: "Ignorant blackguards, illiterate blockheads, besotted drunkards, drivelling simpletons, ci-devant mountebanks, vagabonds, swindlers and thieves..disgraceful gang of pettifoggers"

The .Net course goes on, and time crawls. The lab sessions are really annoying because they spoon feed you everything. The exercise might say, create a new instance of blah, declare an array of whatever, call this method, set properties, la la la... and then it gives you all the code, right there on the page. Fair enough some people might not have all the syntax to hand, but surely they could provide a primer and refer to it - how are you meant to learn if you're just typing in someone else's code? No wonder Microsoft certification doesn't mean anything in the real world... ignorant blockheads. The instructor is quite good and I suppose I'm learning some useful stuff but overall, bring on Friday.

Slightly irritated geek

I'm really quite bored. I'm on a week-long ASP.NET training course and since I don't particularly want to learn .Net, I feel like the bored rebellious teenager in the back of the room. By coincidence, I even have the dodgy leather jacket. I haven't fallen asleep so far but it's probably only a matter of time.

The training centre is full of tellingly over-cocky people with regional accents who've travelled in from the further reaches of the world outside London (it exists, apparently), and the 'coffee' is Nescafe but at least it's near Old St so I can pop into the office afterwards and keep the plates spinning there.

I'm already annoyed at some of the stupid things about Visual Studio .Net, like wtf is up with storing the project files in My Documents? What kind of idiot thought a development environment that stores config and header files in the login of a single user was a good idea? The worst part is I'll actually have to do some work with the damn thing when the course is over.

Actually, that's not the worst part - the worst part is they don't provide lunch or luncheon vouchers!

I've only just came across this entry about geek companies/conferences producing t-shirts in sizes and shapes that suit women. It's all true, dammit:

This is partly tongue-in-cheek, but still...the t-shirts are a metaphor for--or at least a reflection of--the way the company feels about users as individual people. The shirts matter, and they speak volumes about your company.

This is as much to keep the link handy for the next time someone asks as anything else but moneysavingexpert has an article on free anti-virus and anti-spyware software, and firewalls.

Preserve public spaces on the net

"The services we are all using and increasingly dependent on, like Flickr and YouTube and FaceBook, are not there to make our lives better or enhance the quality of public participation. They are there to make money for their founders and owners.

Just as the purpose of commercial television is not to make good TV programmes but simply to deliver an aggregated audience to advertisers, so the real point of social networks is not to transform our ways of life but to find new contexts within which we can be exposed to approved commercial messages.
...
However, in the process of privatisation we have given up an important third space, somewhere between the university network and YouTube, a space which we can all use equally and which is dedicated to the public good.

We have lost the online equivalent of parks and roads and shopping streets, where the limits on what we can reasonably say and do are set by society as a whole and not by the commercial interests of one company." BBC

From Wired, How to Explain Digital Rights Management (DRM) to Your Dad.

Google Maps is showing New Orleans as it was before Hurricane Katrina, not as it is now. Much weirdness.

Wi-fi buses drive rural web use

"Buses equipped with wi-fi are being used to deliver web content to remote rural villages in the developing world.

In rural India and parts of Rwanda, Cambodia and Paraguay, the vehicles offer web content to computers with no internet connection."

"Computer giant Dell will start to sell PCs preinstalled with open source Linux operating systems, the firm has said.
...
Dell has not released details of which versions of Linux it will use or which computers it will run on, but promised an update in the coming weeks.
...
Big business and governments, particularly in the developing world, are also starting to exploit the flexibility of open source code.

The UK Cabinet Office recently evaluated the operating system and approved it as a viable alternative to proprietary systems." BBC

I was talking with a workmate about our first computers, and admittedly my experience was different because Dad brought home an old machine from work (a CP/M?) with a magazine of code that you typed in to make games, but generally it was just a conversation about computers... until she said, "wow! that sounds like the 80s" as if we were talking about the 1940s. It was the 80s but I've never before felt like it was so long ago.

Still, it's made me laugh for half an hour so it's not that bad.

Flickr sucks a bit now

A quick geek whinge about the Flickr/Yahoo! linked login thing. I use Flickr a lot less these days because of it, which is a shame.

Before, I would stay logged into Flickr all the time, which was lovely because I could see all my and my friends private photos and leave comments whenever the whim took me. Now I only log in to do specific things, and I log out again afterwards. It's partly because it's a pain being stuck with a particularly linked Yahoo! ID whenever I'm active in Flickr, and partly because I don't see why Yahoo should get my data for free when I paid for a Flickr Pro account.

And the login process is really annoying - there's a link saying 'Old skool members, please sign in here' but it doesn't work if you've linked your Yahoo! account already.

BBC: Privacy bodies have welcomed Google's decision to anonymise personal data it receives from users' web searches.
"By anonymising our server logs after 18 to 24 months, we think we're striking the right balance between two goals: continuing to improve Google's services for you, while providing more transparency and certainty about our retention practices," a statement from the search giant said.

It added: "Unless we're legally required to retain log data for longer, we will anonymise our server logs after a limited period of time."

MIT to offer all courses free online

Interesting... for some reason I'm fascinated by the idea of subliminal messages.

"The brain is open to what's around it. So if there is 'spare capacity', in terms of attention, the brain will allocate that resource to subliminal activity.

"These findings point to the sort of impact that subliminal advertising may have on the brain.

"What this study doesn't address is whether this would then influence you to go out and buy a product." BBC

I love the idea but actually buying and wearing the t-shirt is possibly too geeky, even for me:

If I had more braincells and more time, I'd read this Critical Thinking on the web Top Ten but as it is I'll have to pick up skerricks of wisdom where I can.

This is just... I'm not sure how to describe it. Suddenly this technology is serious, it's being used to save lives instead of just showing apartments for rent or where photos were taken on a map. And FWIW it could just as easily be Yahoo or another map with a public API.

"Google is playing an unlikely role in the Iraq war. Its online satellite map of the world, Google Earth, is being used to help people survive sectarian violence in Baghdad." BBC

Surely no shock?

"Women are failing to sell their IT skills effectively
...
research shows that over half (54 per cent) feel they need proof of qualifications to reinforce their experience whereas their male counterparts would simply talk their way into new jobs and projects.
...
An investigation by Computing (Computing, 18 January) found women working in the IT industry still feel they need to outperform their male counterparts to achieve the same level of success."

But is that perception or is that reality? Either way, no wonder this is happening:

"The number of female IT workers is declining, representing just 16 per cent of the industry compared with 19 to 21 per cent in 2000 according to figure released last year by IT trade association Intellect, despite government and industry initiatives to attract women to the profession. " Computing

Clive James, my hero

I think I've always had a mild intellectual challenge on him and in a way it's nice to acknowledge the previous generations of Australians who shaped the UK as we know it now.

He's about to start a podcast on the BBC, and has a website (though I wouldn't have called it 'the first personal multimedia extravaganza of its type anywhere in the world'): "His impressive multi-media website, which acts as a one-stop shop for much of his work, may encourage other broadcasters and writers to follow suit. There is work by James and his favourite authors, plus webcasts of dozens of interviews conducted in his living room with the likes of Julian Barnes, Martin Amis and Cate Blanchett."

Is it wrong that I want one of these?

And if you don't already have an RSS reader, I'd recommend bloglines because you can use it from any computer and you can organise your feeds into folders. Make sure you choose the feedburner feed instead of the locally hosted ones.

I'm moving my feeds to Feedburner, so if you're reading via RSS, please update your links! The new feed is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/Antiminke. I'll keep the old feeds for a while but they'll eventually be turned off.

"A poll by data and marketing company CDMS found that 31 per cent of top UK firms were guilty of flouting the EU directive on privacy and electronic communications, which provides internet users with the right to refuse emailed adverts and marketing material.
...
many firms are jeopardizing their reputation by permitting themselves to be regarded as 'junk emailers'." BCS

I'm glad to see this study because I develop an immediate hatred for any company that spams me (or is slightly dodgy in how they add your email to their list - explicit opt-in only, please) and I'm glad to know it's not just me.

They've sold out but in a rare moment of consumer lust, I want one of those. Perfect for the garden in summer.

Yes, I am a geek, but this is funny.

I came across www.9031.com via boicozine (where Michael describes it much better than I ever could so go read his description).

This article really makes sense for me. Not in terms of what should be taught in American schools, but in terms of why I'm a geek and what that actually means. Once you get past the barrier of what could be described as a formal language system - syntax and vocabulary - programming is all about the fuzzy stuff:

"The majority of his contemporaries apparently claimed that using the logical, left-brain symbols associated with their work was NOT how they did their work. These were simply the tools they used to communicate it. What they used to do the works was much... fuzzier. Intuition. Visualization. Sensation (Einstein talked of a kinesthetic element). Anthropomorphizing. Metaphors."

Also, from Code like a girl:

"Because caring about things like beauty makes us better programmers and engineers. We make better things. Things that aren't just functional, but easy to read, elegantly maintainable, easier--and more joyful--to use, and sometimes flat-out sexy. A passion for aesthetics can mean the difference between code that others enjoy working on vs. code that's stressful to look at."

I've been thinking a lot about the differences between good code and bad recently because I've been migrating someone else's codebase to new templates and it's been a bit of a nightmare. I feel almost tainted by dealing with such dodgy code but in some ways it's been a good learning experience because it's reinforced that elegance and the ability to abstract and refactor code is really really important. Though I'm not too sure 'code like a girl' works as a generalisation because apart from the gender stereotypes, this ugly code was written by a woman.

I've only recently discovered Creating Passionate Users but it's a joy to read.

I've posted about her before, but I think she's so damn cool it's worth another post:

"The 100th anniversary of the birth of programming language pioneer Grace Hopper was celebrated on 9 December. Widely credited as being the "mother" of the Cobol computer language her work was hugely influential.
...
Her inspiration was to create a computer language that read more like real English rather than the tortuous machine code used by many other programming languages of the time." BBC

Free Office software: the equivalent of Word, Excel and more for free is written from a money saving perspective but it's a good source of information on non-Microsoft office and productivity software.

I came across thedailywtf.com during a search for 'spaghetti code'. Geeks being mean to other geeks is always tragically amusing. This particularly amused me, probably because I'm working through someone else's (spaghetti) code at the moment.

This is absolutely humbling: "The delicate workings at the heart of a 2,000-year-old analogue computer have been revealed by scientists.
...
Writing in Nature, the team says that the mechanism was "technically more complex than any known device for at least a millennium afterwards"." BBC

It's The Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator. It's funny cos it's true.

Getting music off your iPod onto your computer. Cos I'll need to do this sooner or later.

"In Britain's hi-tech industries, barely one in five workers is female. Genevieve Roberts meets the bright sparks from last week's BlackBerry Women & Technology Awards to hear how they make their presence felt"

Indy

"It is the 21st century, and we are all each other's Hummel figurines." (Wired)

Winter is definitely coming. It's going to be grey and rainy and cold and damp and miserable for months. Last night's sunset was spectacular - the sky was filled with gold - but it was dark really early.

But, in cheery geek news, students in Australia are coming up with innovative applications for mobile phone-based technologies.

I love phpMyAdmin's Bookmarked SQL queries.

I found this snippet of sql that closes comments on blog posts that are more than 14 days old somewhere, but couldn't remember where. Luckily, I'd stored it as a bookmark on the SQL tab of the table interface.

And for reference, the code is below. Change the interval to suit.

UPDATE mt_entry SET entry_allow_comments = 2, entry_allow_pings = 0 WHERE entry_created_on < date_add(curdate(), interval -14 day)

PostgreSQL vs. SQL Server, Oracle

I'd like to see a comparison with MySQL on similar terms, but that's possibly only because PostgreSQL admins tend to be more beardy and grumpy than any others. More rationally, I suppose MySQL tends to be a little more accessible and has become a de facto standard as part of LAMP applications.

It's a shame they don't expand on 'somewhat more limited' stored procedures, because they can be such an important DBA/developer tool, particularly in a multi-tier environment.

And while Microsoft have some good tools, they also have lots that suck. And Oracle's tools are ok but are supplemented by free or cheap third-party tools.

"We're Greenpeace, and we want a fresh green Apple.

Right now, poison Apples full of chemicals (like toxic flame retardants, and polyvinyl chloride) are being sold worldwide. When they're tossed, they usually end up at the fingertips of children in China, India and other developing-world countries. They dismantle them for parts, and are exposed to a dangerous toxic cocktail that threatens their health and the environment."

Write to Apple to demand they:

• Remove the worst toxic chemicals from all their products and production lines.
• Offer and promote free "take-back" for all their products everywhere they are sold.

via greenmyapple.

I added this to the form letter part:

"I've been a Mac fan for a long time, and I was really disturbed to learn that Apple scored so badly on environmental impact. As much as I've loved my Macs, if I have to choose between my green values and my Mac, my green values are going to win."

Entirely too relevant this week: procrastination.

"If you want to work on big things, you seem to have to trick yourself into doing it."

And this is far too true: "I've wondered a lot about why startups are most productive at the very beginning, when they're just a couple guys in an apartment. The main reason may be that there's no one to interrupt them yet. In theory it's good when the founders finally get enough money to hire people to do some of the work for them. But it may be better to be overworked than interrupted. Once you dilute a startup with ordinary office workers-- with type-B procrastinators-- the whole company starts to resonate at their frequency. They're interrupt-driven, and soon you are too."

And frustratingly, "What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you?". Based on that, I must also read You and Your Research, where the questions, "What are the most important problems in your field?", "Are you working on one of them?" and "Why not?" are posed.

Geek joy, 1985-style.

While doing some research on podcasts for work, I came across this really useful BBC online courses site.

"Internet firms have been criticised by UK MPs for "collaborating" with state censorship of the web in China.

Businesses such as Microsoft, Google and Yahoo blocking some information was "morally unacceptable", the Commons foreign affairs committee said." BBC

Having seen that even in Ukraine some cafes seem to block gay or lesbian content, it's clear that internet censorship is still an important issue that has a real effect on the lives of a country's citizens.

In other news, while looking for an internet cafe, I managed to stumble across one of the very few gay bars or clubs in Kiev. Woo!

(And in other news, Stary Kiev, listed as a 'gay cafe', has closed).

Tomorrow is Ukraine Indepedence Day (Den Nezalezhnosti), so it's a great day to be in Kiev. IYP says, "to give you an idea of what Independence Day on the streets of Kyiv is like, imagine a cross between a huge outdoor rock concert and civil unrest."

Train to Kamynets-Podilsky tomorrow night.

It's a brave new world - I just checked in for tomorrow's flight to Istanbul online. I still have to pick up my boarding pass and drop off my checked luggage when I'm at the airport, but otherwise I'm good to go.

Now all I have to do is finish enough work to get out of the office, figure out what documents I need in print or on the memory stick, work out how much luggage I can take once I've weighed the laptop and the tent, pack, clean the flat, leave instructions about the flat, blah blah blah.

And I also have to bite the bullet and book somewhere to stay in Istanbul, finally pick a train or bus from Istanbul to Bucharest and work out how I'm going to get to Lviv or Kamyanets Podilsky or Chernivsti from Simferopol. Eek. I just hope I don't forget anything important.

I am procrastinating, badly. Shame on me. But did you know that the number one hit on Google for 'princess etiquette' is my Princess Diana advice page?

Learning Guide: SQL is quite good on common SQL questions.

All things 'minke' are cool

"Star Wars" Sound Traced to Dwarf Minke Whales

I've finally gotten around to adding a better rss feed.

And I've taken a look at the only version I still have of the first page, and that suggests the first entry was written in December 1996. I think I bowdlerised it at some point because it was really ranty about people we knew as well as randoms yelling things out in the street outside Kirsty and Fraser's flat.

"US politicians have rejected attempts to enshrine the principle of net neutrality in legislation.

Some fear the decision will mean net providers start deciding on behalf of customers which websites and services they can visit and use.
...
An amendment to the Act tried to add clauses that would demand net service firms treat equally all the data passing through their cables.

The amendment was thought to be needed after the FCC ripped up its rules that guaranteed net neutrality.

During the debate House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, said that without the amendment "telecommunications and cable companies will be able to create toll lanes on the information superhighway". " BBC

We were evil, Google founder admits

"Google Inc. co-founder Sergey Brin acknowledged the dominant internet company has compromised its principles by accommodating Chinese censorship demands. He said Google is wrestling to make the deal work before deciding whether to reverse course." SMH

dnsstuff.com is really handy for dns/IP (and reverse) lookups.

Amnesty to target net repression

"Internet users are being urged to stand up for online freedoms by backing a new campaign launched by human rights group Amnesty International." (BBC)

"Just try logging on to the BBC News website from an internet cafe in China. You can't. The same goes for websites for The New York Times, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and a host of others which could hardly be described as pornographic or "dangerous".
...
In its quest to control the internet China has sought help from overseas. Some large, US-based computer software companies are believed to have sold Beijing the sophisticated software needed to run its filtering system. Companies like Google and Yahoo! have also been accused of co-operating in China's internet censorship." (BBC)

"Some 45 years after an Observer article launched Amnesty, The Observer and Amnesty International have teamed up again to campaign against a new threat to our freedom - internet repression." (Observer)

Find out more at http://irrepressible.info.

You can add a badge to your site or email with content that is censored somewhere in the world:

This SQL Function Reference: Oracle vs. SQL Server page is pretty handy. If you're a geek.

Via http://www.worldwidewords.org, the brilliant news that people "in England (but not the other parts of the UK) are now likely to have free access to several of the major archive resources of the Oxford University Press through their local library membership. All participating libraries have access to the Oxford Reference Online, the Oxford English Dictionary, and the Dictionary of National Biography. Most also give access to Grove Art Online and Grove Music Online. The best part is that you don't need to visit your library: you can log on to the sites from any computer at any time using your library card number."

Links to the participating libraries and URLs of the resources.

"Bloggers and internet pundits are exerting a "disproportionately large influence" on society, a report by technology researchers says.
...
More than half of the continent's internet users are passive and do not contribute to the web at all, while a further 23 per cent only respond when prompted. But the remainder who do engage with the net - through message boards, websites and blogs - are helping change national conversations, the study says." (Age)

The study seems to be more about the impact of grass roots campaigns but it would be interesting to examine whether dissatisfaction with traditional media also had an effect.

"Search users 'stop at page three'" (BBC)

I'm surprised they get that far, as earlier studies showed that most people didn't go beyond the first page.

This has all kinds of implications: "It also found that a third of users linked companies in the first page of results with top brands."

This is kinda encouraging, however: "And 41% of consumers changed engines or their search term if they did not find what they were searching for on the first page."

"...science has come to the rescue with a wearable computer system that alerts speakers when the person they are addressing is becoming bored." (Age)

A.Word.A.Day was quite amusing today, stating:

"In late seventeenth century, William III of UK imposed a window tax, levied on each window in a house.

Three hundred years later, William III of US imposed a Windows tax, levied on each personal computer manufactured, whether it had Windows or not, but I digress."

It's been ages since I've had a properly geek post, so here you go: one really annoying thing about SQL Server 2000's stored procedures is that it doesn't automatically update the relevant script if you update the stored procedure name. The solution is to manually update the name in the script, or you'll get a lovely SQL-DMO error 21037.

The World Lecture Hall is "your entry point to free online course materials from around the world".

"Platial provides a home for people who love quirky geographical information or just want to mark the locations that have meaning to them.
...
You might say Platial is a cross between MapQuest and LiveJournal. Built on the open interfaces for Google Maps, the 2-month-old site is one of a new breed of map mashups -- web applications created by mixing an already-existing open mapping platform with original software.

Platial co-creator Di-Ann Eisnor says she built Platial for what she calls "neogeographers," who use digital maps to tell stories and chart eccentric routes through familiar terrain." (Wired)

Tim Berners-Lee on Web 2.0 (and other topics): "Mash-ups are called Web 2.0, but they are data integrations - taking a piece of display technology like a map application and doing a handcrafted data integration. I've yet to see a mash-up that uses semantic Web data and crafts it - the fact that everyone has their own mash-up tells the story. What I've always wanted to do is take an arbitrary thing, a data file, and if it's got something that can be mapped, drop it into a map and see what occurs without programming." (BCS)

And he has a blog!

How to get music off your iPod for Mac and PC.

Real-life Frogger

"I was like, this is a really bad idea," said Fried. "Let's do that!"

"Europe's "Little Ice Age" may have been triggered by the 14th Century Black Death plague, according to a new study." (BBC)

I haven't yet tested whatshouldireadnext.com but I hold out great hopes for it.

"A new search engine for programmers promises to alleviate that problem by making it easier to find and share code. That in turn could increase programmers' productivity and give a fresh boost to the open-source movement.

Krugle, which launches officially next month, indexes programming code and documentation from open-source repositories like SourceForge and includes corporate sites for programmers like the Sun Developer Network." (Wired)

"In a recent study of 30 undergraduate students, researchers from the University of Chicago and New York University said the tone of an email message was only correctly interpreted 50 per cent of the time.
Psychologists Nicholas Epley and Justin Kruger paired the students off and gave each a list of 20 statements about general topics such as campus food and the weather and were asked to e-mail the statements to a partner introducing either a serious or sarcastic tone.

The senders of the messages expected their partners to correctly interpret their tone nearly 80 per cent of the time, but in fact they only scored just over 50 per cent, said the report in Wired.

Those attempting to interpret the message believed they had scored 90 per cent accuracy, according to the results which have been published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology." Age

"The Age's report on the greenhouse row, in which leading scientists assert they have been muzzled for trying to lay their science and their expert opinion before the public that funded them, is the latest development in an alarming trend in which our science is being taken away from us - because somebody deems we ought not to know of it.

This trend is pervasive in our scientific institutions today. For various reasons, including political influence, commercial influence, managerial pressure, institutional control, publisher influence, stakeholder pressure, national security and bureaucratic interference, scientific findings and opinion are increasingly withheld. The consequences could be grave, both for Australia and for science." (Age)

This article on Radia Perlman as the 'Mother Of The Internet' starts with a situation familiar to lots of women in IT, but her work (and her perseverance) is really inspiring.

"Radia Perlman had a solution for an information routing problem. Unfortunately, no one was listening.

It was the mid-1970s, and Perlman was a software designer for computer network communication systems � and one of the few women in the field.
...
"At the end of the meeting, the organizers still called for a solution after I had just given them one, which really irked me," she said.
...
Perlman, now a distinguished engineer for Sun Microsystems specializing in network security, has helped speed up and protect data that move along computer network systems. Her spanning tree algorithm � software that helps direct information traffic on the Internet � earned her the nickname "Mother of the Internet.""

"A leading US digital rights campaign group has warned against using Google software which lets people organise and find information on their computers.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation said the latest version of Google Desktop posed a risk to privacy. " BBC

"Online reference site Wikipedia blames US Congress staff for partisan changes to a number of political biographies.

Computers traced to Capitol Hill removed unpalatable facts from articles on senators, while other entries were "vandalised", the site said." (BBC)

Looks like Google's China deal has taken effect:

Check out http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen versus http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen

"Luxury car maker BMW has had its German website blacklisted by Google after it was caught trying to artificially boost its popularity ranking on the world's leading internet search engine." (Age)

As this is my year for working on various projects, Life Hacker is bound to come handy at some stage.

I should probably do a budget but I don't think I want to know how much I spend on travel. Speaking of, I'm off to Porto tomorrow (Ryanair 1p flights), back late Wednesday.

"Internet users make up their minds about the quality of a website in the blink of an eye, a study shows.

Researchers found that the brain makes decisions in just a 20th of a second of viewing a webpage." BBC

I've realised that it's ten years since I started blogging. Not that blogging was really invented then - I was just making ranty web pages about people, things and news articles that annoyed me. I think it all started when I made a page based on an email conversation between Kirsty, Fraser, Zora, Paul and I.

Looking at my 1996 entry, I must have started on December 17, 1996, so I'll try and have a little celebratory post on December 17, 2006.

If I ever get around to making more web pages, I'll be checking out this Colour Scheme Generator.

I went to the London Girl Geek dinner last night. I met a variety of people, and there were some interesting speakers - I was particularly interested in the talk on mobile usable interface design.

Not everyone was technical-geeky but in some ways it would be missing the point to have a 'geekier than thou' attitude there, and I did meet some wonderfully technical women. And I guess that's the difference between 'Girl Geek' as defined on the page, and the 'traditional' 'geek grrl'.

But generally, even though we might not understand the details of each other's technical or sector-based specialities, I love that we don't have to explain basic tech facts to have a conversation, and that we don't have to deal with the misconceptions (and under-estimations) about women in IT/new media.

Science 'not for normal people' BBC

In the US, annoying someone via the Internet is now a federal crime.

Well, you can still annoy them, but you must disclose your identity. So, not much use in the lesbian world, then, where you'd generally know who's annoying you.

God only knows how they'll interpret 'annoy', and no idea what impact it might have on internet usage in the rest of the world.

In other news, I'm going to have to ditch nedstats because they seem to be putting a pop-up in their code.

To balance out my excitement over having a TV (and University Challenge again), I've decided to keep a record of the books I've read this year. There's an excellent library in the flat I'm minding, and I'll have to be careful not to stay up late reading every night.

So far I've read Amy Tan's "The Hundred Secret Senses", which was much better than I thought it would be. Slightly less sentimentality, and I like the way she handled characterisation. It might not be terribly subtle, but it worked.

I'm currently reading Alan Hollinghurst's "The Swimming-Pool Library", which I'm enjoying, but it does seem to be an early version of "The Line of Beauty": handsome Oxbridge graduate with a bit of a thing for black guys sleeps around a lot and enjoys the privileges of the British upper class.

I've also read Judith Butler ("Imitation and Gender Insubordination") for a theory reading group, which has been great fun. I can feel my brain getting used to thinking about critical theory again.

I read "The Mill on the Floss" just before moving, but that probably doesn't count.

Cool butterfly science.

"A Turkish court has fined 20 people for using the letters Q and W on placards at a Kurdish new year celebration, under a law that bans use of characters not in the Turkish alphabet, rights campaigners said." (CNN)

Since I've spent the day battling table mutation errors I thought I'd post this link to 'PL/SQL's Top Annoyances'.

Ig Nobles time.

"A machine that can make anything sounds like the stuff of the distant future, but a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) program is making personal fabrication a reality.

Around the world, MIT is helping to build Fabrication, or "Fab" Labs, and they are reaping results." (BBC)

What kind of thinker are you?

Is Google the new Microsoft? "Trust is a precious commodity and almost impossible to regain once lost. Google's instinctive reactions to several controversies to date have been marked by na�vety and evasiveness. It often gives the impression that it's blissfully unaware of the responsibilities it carries." (The Register).

Molecules with Silly or Unusual Names. Arsole, anyone?

"Google has refused to speak to reporters at CNET's online news site after it ran a story that used Google's chief executive to illustrate how easily the company's search engine finds personal information.

Google told News.com, the online tech news service of CNET Networks, last week that it would not speak to any of its reporters for a year, according to News.com's editor.
...
The crux of Mills' story was about the vast amounts of information Google collects that is unavailable to the public. For example, Google software scans user emails to learn what kind of advertising might appeal to the user.

Mills wrote in her story that "hackers, zealous government investigators, or even a Google insider who falls short of the company's ethics standards could abuse that information."" (Age)

Handy Latin and Greek phrases. You never know when they'll come in handy.

"A human version of the classic arcade game Pacman, superimposing the virtual 3D game world on to city streets and buildings, is being developed by researchers at Singapore.

Players equipped with a wearable computer, headset and goggles can physically enter a real world game space by choosing to play the role of Pacman or one of the Ghosts." (BBC)

Australian librarians archiving entire .au domain.

Macs not more expensive after all, so nyer.

I went to a conference yesterday, and someone mentioned a website full of archived net.art. I used to be really into net.art, so it was a big nostalgia trip for me. Well worth checking some of classic sites like jodi.org and superbad out, whether you saw them the first time around or not.

"A man has been sentenced to nine years in jail by a Virginia judge for sending millions of junk emails, or "spamming"." (BBC)

And yes, I am kinda breaking comments. That's what I get for trying to do twenty million things at once before I go on holiday.

It's still in beta but scholar.google.com might be worth checking out.

When I get a chance, I really must read this article on women as cyberpunks on chicks in IT.

Handling Binary Files in cvs

Handling Binary Files in cvs from a site called CVS Version Control for Web Site Projects seems to be written especially for web developers and has a nice explanation of cvs wrappers for binary files such as images, animations etc