(Things I found interesting recently.)
Architecture: For reasons which I won’t go into here, I wound up doing a Google Image Search for ‘toilet’ which turned up a link to this page: Toilets of the World. However, he’s missing one very important variety: the world-famous Goan ‘Hog Bog’.
Here’s a tasteful pic of an expectant pig waiting for lunch (local mirror) — and then, if your stomach can take it, a rather more graphic account here. (warning: not safe for lunch)
Ireland: Pledge to take a trip to Iceland. Daev says ‘pledge to visit Iceland as a tourist if they stop whaling’ — if he gets enough clicks on this campaign, he’ll get a trip on one of Greenpeace’s ships!
Security: SCO accidentally leaked their previous lawsuit plans — to sue Bank of America — through MS Word’s ability to retain prior changes in a Word document.
This seems as good a time as any to re-plug
find-hidden-word-text, a quick perl hack to use ‘antiword’
to extract hidden text from MS Word documents in an automated
fashion, based on
Simon Byers’ paper Scalable Exploitation of, and Responses to Information
Leakage Through Hidden Data in Published Documents. It works
well ;)
Safety: Great Malcolm Gladwell article on S.U.V.’s. My favourite bit:
when, in focus groups, industry marketers probed further, they heard things that left them rolling their eyes. …. what consumers said was ‘If the vehicle is up high, it’s easier to see if something is hiding underneath or lurking behind it.’
Bradsher brilliantly captures the mixture of bafflement and contempt that many auto executives feel toward the customers who buy their S.U.V.s. Fred J. Schaafsma, a top engineer for General Motors, says, ‘Sport-utility owners tend to be more like ‘I wonder how people view me,’ and are more willing to trade off flexibility or functionality to get that.’ According to Bradsher, internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills.
… Toyota’s top marketing executive in the United States, Bradsher writes, loves to tell the story of how at a focus group in Los Angeles ‘an elegant woman in the group said that she needed her full-sized Lexus LX 470 to drive up over the curb and onto lawns to park at large parties in Beverly Hills.’
Social: Ted Leung: Google requires that its employees spend 20% of their working hours on ‘personal projects’. Wow.
Hardware: So IBM Thinkpads come with a predesktop area — a hidden 4GB partition of recovery files, Windows XP install disks, windows drivers, etc. taking up space on the hard disk.
I haven’t used Windows much at all on this machine, given that I don’t use Windows when I can avoid it, but I did pay several hundred dollars for it — since it’s now impossible once again to buy an IBM laptop without doing so (or without paying quite a lot extra). So I want to keep it around, and I want to make sure I can reinstall if things go wrong.
Having a hidden partition just isn’t quite safe enough for me — because I’ve had hard disks go belly-up before, or scribble on the partition table, or so on — these things happen. Thankfully it’s easy enough to get CD-ROMs shipped from IBM support if you ask nicely, so I did so yesterday afternoon at about 3pm.
This morning at 9am, there was a knock at the door, and I received a package shipped from Durham, NC containing the reinstall CDs.
It’s great dealing with professional hardware companies again ;)
Linux: wmctrl and Devil’s Pie — two nifty tools for window control. Both are command-line tools that use NetWM, a standard for X11 window managers, to hook into window manager policy and apply scriptable control to windows as they appear (in the Devil’s Pie case) or to pre-existing windows (in the wmctrl case).
I’ve just reverted back to sawfish from KWin recently, in order to get this control back; I probably wouldn’t have if I’d found these in time.
(In case you’re wondering why I reverted: specifically, sawfish allows the user to control window position very efficiently from the keyboard using corner.jl, and the KWin folks weren’t interested in a patch to do the same there. In addition, sawfish has wclass.jl , which allows windows to be controlled by name; it’s very handy to say ‘Show Mail’, and have xvoice de-iconify your mailreader in response. Both are killer features for rodent-free use of a UNIX desktop.)
Funny: Dr. Evil’s monologue about his childhood from the first Austin Powers movie. Sheer genius. ‘Sometimes he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy, the sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament.’
Open Source: Tim Bray goes through a couple of open-source studies; first is the clueless ‘Where do you want to go, Aiden?’ essay I mentioned here a couple of days ago, but the second is a study from a couple of French economists I hadn’t heard of. I’ll just reproduce the translation:
Choosing software is not a neutral act. It must be done consciously; the debate over free and proprietary software can’t be limited to the differences in the applications’ features and ergonomics. To choose an operating system, or software, or network architecture is to choose a kind of society. We can no longer pretend that free and commercial software, or Internet standards and protocols, are just tools. We have to admit at least that they are political tools. After all, fire and the printing press are ‘just tools.’
Ireland: Some new Irish weblogs:
Spam: Kottke passes on news of the second coming — in spam:
It is now that blacklisting and filtering and blocking and Blocking of Port 25 and Blocking SMTP connections and filtering out email and anything related that does not allow any person in the United States of America to send email to anybody and then have opt-out or opt-in and that COMPLY with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 are doing something that is ILLEGAL and you are a CRIMINAL for doing this you have CRIMINAL LIABILITY and CIVIL LIABILITY and your company CANNOT protect you in the slightest. If your company asked you to murder somebody would you do this? Of course not for most. Then do NOT do illegal and criminal things now that are out side of the law and outside of Federal Law now with the passing of the CAN-SPAM Act of
What, no divine retribution?
Networking: FOAF is really building steam now.
In the meantime, Tribe.net plans to announce RSS feeds and Jabber support this Friday.
It’s good to see some open-standards based stuff being used to compete. Given this, I think we might see more useful possibilities emerging as these sites become true web services.
eVoting: Are you an academic, or do you know any academics, working in the field
of computer science in Ireland? If so, you should consider signing, or
collecting signatures, on
this ICTE statement.
It’s eminently reasonable — ‘since computers are inherently subject to
programming and design error, equipment malfunction, and malicious
tampering, we join with (the ACM) in recommending that a voter-verified
audit trail be one of the essential requirements for deployment of new
voting systems.’ (thx for the pointer, Simon!)
Open Source: Clemens
Vasters: Where do you want to go, Aiden? Sadly, Clemens misses the
point dramatically.
Point one: I’ve worked on open-source and proprietary software. I still do. I work on them both simultaneously (or, at least, proprietary 9-5 and open-source outside work hours ;). I have a good few of the things you’re supposed to have ‘by the time you’re 30’.
It’s not an all-or-nothing thing; working on open source doesn’t mean retreating into a garrett and staying up all night. Nothing is black-and-white like that, and surely Clemens should be able to recognise that aspect of the real world by now. ;)
Point two: Open source work does found a career. It acts as a fantastic testament to your ability — especially if you’ve written good code or organised a team. I’d be much more happy to hire someone who had demonstrated that ability, over people who had no OS dev experience, if I was interviewing candidates in the day job. (In fact, I have in the past. ;)
For one thing, a tar.gz from Sourceforge is a lot easier to verify than some assertion that when you worked for some big company, you were Very Important and did Amazing Things, but sorry, they were all secret and proprietary so you have no proof.
Point three: ‘It doesn’t matter whether you love what you are doing and consider this the hobby you want to spend 110% of your time on: It’s exploitation by companies who are not at all interested in creating stuff. They want to use your stuff for free. That’s why they trick you into doing it.’
This is total FUD — pretty much just shouting ‘it’s an IBM conspiracy!’
For the record, I’ve never even talked to anyone from IBM about open source, as far as I know — aside from when I stood up once at a conference and attempt to ask an IBM manager about their crappy software patent policy and how it conflicted with their avowed support of open-source. (Obviously their payoff cheque was late that month ;)
More good comments on slashdot, believe it or not (with the threshold at 3, that is).
(finally, an aside: I suspect the guy’s name was ‘Aidan’ BTW.)
