Oblomovka

2005-06-13»

I duly avow that I will only use this blog to shill EFF projects when it I am absolutely, categorically, slightly inclined to do so. But the new Legal Guide for Bloggers is a surprisingly fun casual read, even if you’re not at this moment being dragged away from the wi-fi cafe by the cops.

I particularly like the defamation section

Context is critical. For example, it was not libel for ESPN to caption a photo “Evel Knievel proves you’re never too old to be a pimp,” since it was (in context) “not intended as a criminal accusation, nor was it reasonably susceptible to such a literal interpretation. Ironically, it was most likely intended as a compliment.” However, it would be defamatory to falsely assert “our dad’s a pimp” or to accuse your dad of “dabbling in the pimptorial arts.” (Real case, but the defendant sons succeeded in a truth defense).

(Kurt says he has another great case law example that will go in shortly, based on a detailed discussion of the idiomatic use of “dumb ass”, and what exactly linking a name to www.satan.com conveys about an individual.)

I would love to to find someone who might be interested in doing a similiar document for the UK. God knows we need a blogger’s guide to British libel (if only because the UK is the most likely place for anyone online to be sued), as well as the UK’s implementation of the EUCD and other DMCAish statutes.

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2005-04-28»

Can’t believe Quinn scooped me on this. No wonder I’m quitting journalism.

It’s true. I’m off to the EFF. My title is “Activist Co-ordinator” (make up your own jokes), where I’ll be applying some of the lessons I learnt helping out with STAND and Fax Your MP and They Work For Youin the UK.

One thing we definitely learnt is that even the smallest bit of new information, or the tiniest of tweaks – in user interface, responsiveness, outreach – can have big effects. So if you have any suggestions about any part of the EFF, or you’re running something that you think the EFF should know about, let me know.

Oh, and become a member! That way you can boss me around with impunity.

Will still be carrying on with NTK, To Evil (although objective measurements of evil as conducted by that column may not match the poorer subjective yardsticks used internally by the EFF), and the Irish Times column. The genial demons of O’Reilly’s production department have now begun their gentle poking of my and Merlin’s voodoo dolls, so the theoretical Productivity Hacks book continues apace also.

I don’t know how it’s possible to blog less here, but I’ll try.

And of course, Quinn’s actually doing pretty well in journalism now herself. Which means they’ll probably be some hilarious Hill Street Blues/West Wing-style kitchen-table battle over her reporting of the EFF’s fights in our future. To which: no comment.

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2005-03-23»

You see, now that you’ve helped me fix a problem, I’m obliged to start blogging again. See how the LazyWeb extracts its pound of flesh?

Does Tiger’s Spotlight search the comment field of files in the “Get Info” dialog box? No, no, don’t tell me, I know you’d be breaking an NDA.

But here’s what I’d do, if I’d paid the $500 to Apple for the Tiger starter kit. I’d write a little mini-application (or maybe a QuickSilver plugin), that would let you select a bunch of files in the Finder, and then add a simple line of text to all of their comment fields. Another keyboard shortcut would let you easily delete one of these lines from a selected file. Another would quickly select all the files that contained that line – or, shall we say, tag in the current folder.

And then, whenever I needed to find all my files tagged with, say, “oblomovka”, I’d just type into Spotlight. Actually, that highlights one of the problems with this – maybe they need to be prefixed with something, so you’d search for “tag-oblomovka” rather than the very common term.

It’s a bit of a hack, but it would give you folksonomies for the Desktop. (Unless that’s already in Tiger, of course.)

Comments Off on if i was a tiger developer, but then again, no

2005-03-22»

Well, the server is still down, but the data seems to be okay for now. It’s in a sort of carbonite-like stasis. The machine isn’t stable enough to check to see whether its mobo, drive or IDE controller that’s bust, but I have been able to mount the drive read-only using the Ubuntu LiveCD, and peer at five or so years of mail. I’m living out of Gmail for now.

Which means I’m also slightly more dependent on my PowerBook than I like. And as if by magic, MacOS X has started acting in a “I hope you don’t think that three years of OS reliability is an indication of future stability, do you?”

Does anyone have any clue about what’s going on here, for instance?

Selected icons (including the Trash) have turned bright blue. It started after I rebooted the machine after the last security update. It only happens on my login, which makes me suspect that it’s some debugging feature I turned on in the past, and has now come back to haunt me. As far as I can work out, it’s icons that are stateful – ie probably drawn in Quartz rather than painted as Icons.

I’m damned if I know what to do about it. Any suggestions?

Update: I moved ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.systempreferences.plist out of the way, and that seems to have fixed it. Cheers, Jason! (This is like a BoingBoing post in so many ways, isn’t it?)

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2005-03-18»

Something awfully hardwaric has just happened to my main mail (and everything else) server. As it traditional, it happened while I’m still two days away from home, so it’s tricky to diagnose. If it’s the hard drive, I’m in for a minor planetoid of pain. Anyway, suffice to say that if you sent me mail in the last 24 hours, I won’t be able to read it for a while. And replying to other mail will be slow in the next few days (there’s a nest of filters on that box that make coping with my mail bearable).

Hooray for checked out CVS versions, that’s all I can say…

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2004-12-29»

1. In America, a sign that says “Open!” in bright flashing neon demonstrates that the store in question has electricity, and is shut.
2. Make a career out of being sarcastic, and the gods will give you a sarcastic toddler.

   Ada: Mvy! Blz Ftzzz! Mvy! Blz Ftzzz!
   [MAKES SIGN FOR “MOVIE”, “BLUES CLUES”]
   Ada: Mvy? Blz Ftzzz?
   Me: Would you like to watch “Blue’s Clues”?
   Ada: [IN TONE OF GREAT SURPRISE] Noooo.
   Me: You mean yes?
   Ada: [LOOKS ME STRAIGHT IN THE EYE] Yas.

3. According to my Kidde fire extinguisher, dry chemical consists of: Sodium Bicarbonate, Mica, Calcium Stearate, Nuisance Dust, Irritant.
4. The average fire extinguisher containt sixteen tons of dry chemical.
5. When used to extinguish a toaster fire, it can expel this chemical at a rate of six Niagaras a second.
6. In the event of dry chemical spill, toddlers will absorb the “nuisance dust”. Parents will absorb all the “irritant”.
7. The best way to clear up the remainder of the dry chemical is to move house.

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2004-11-02»

My memory of the election: milling around the aisle of the Houston-San Jose flight, waiting to step off into the dark. After all that time in the air, the captain announces: “Bush is winning”. General mutter of groans from the strangers around me. And distantly, from first class, a little patter of cheers.

Comments Off on so, what did i miss?

2004-11-01»

I’ve been spending the last few days in Florida, which is currently battened down under Hurricane Crucial Swing State. It’s hard to convey quite what it is like here. Campaign ads appear more often than Proctor & Gamble ads on the radio. Everyone’s house has a fistful of spoo-oo-ooky negative campaign leaflets that come through every door, every day. Friends start phone call with pitch-perfect imitations of the automated phone solitations: “Hello, Danny, I’m calling you about your voting intentions this Tuesday”. My friend’s answerphone is filled at the end of the day with messages from Al Gore, George Bush, Theresa Heinz, Barbara Bush…

That’s the local colour I was expecting; it’s what all the news reports will start their slice-of-life “portraits of a state under sieges” pieces with. What I wasn’t expecting was the oddity of being in a real 50/50 state.

I played around with Fundrace.org before I came out here, and was a bit surprised by how incredibly Democratic my neighbourhood back home in Californai was. As in, Kucinich/Dean democrat. I suppose that just checking the election results would have told me what a hotbed of communist sympathisers downtown is. Nonetheless, you do rather assume some diversity in your neighbours; that your idiot neighbour three blocks down must be of an opposing political opinion to you, even if he’s too cowardly to say so with a garden sign. With a bloody car like that, he’s got to be on the other side, right? Nope. Maybe he’s a Liebermann fan or something.

Here, you see Bush and Gore bumper stickers sit uncomfortably close to each other in carlots; neighbourhoods front yards flicker between the two. Churches are quietly split; political conversations sway nervously from left foot to right foot, as everyone tries to keep balance.

I haven’t learnt anything about what will happen here. Standing in the interzone doesn’t mean you know the shape of the edges of the territory. There’s a part of me that, electoral college or not, thinks it’s good to have some kind of hothouse, some kind of ground zero, somewhere in the process. It feels viscerally close here.

Not that anyone in this country needs to move to Florida to feel that. I’ve felt sick with a dread of this election since the beginnings of the Iraq war. The whole country has been pulling at its collar and chomping down antacid for weeks.

And for good or for bad, I’m going to float up and away from it all. I’m catching the flight at 3PM Florida time (-0500) tomorrow, and landing in California by nine Pacific Time (-0800). If it’s going to be decided tomorrow at all, I’m thinking it be decided between those two times. I’ll be in radio silence. No drinking games, no state by state plays, no screaming at CNN, no cellphone trees.

I shall watch 1776, read “Alternate Presidents”, and look out the window on the breadth of America, right coast to left coast, until we all land, hopefully in one piece.

Have a good trip.

Comments Off on on a jet plane

2004-10-14»

The important thing about being in a self-contained bubble (or circle jerk) of people who are otherwise unrepresentative of the world of the whole, is knowing that you’re in a bubble, and trying to find out the approximate shape of that bubble. Everybody is in a bubble of some sort, and I often think the ones who are the most sneering about other people’s parochialism demonstrate the most ignorance, by assuming they speak for everyone.

And I think I speak for everyone when I say that.

What prompted this was a look through some of my old notes on things to blog. They’re so old as to be mostly incomprehensible, but the ones that do still ring true look to have some permanent worth to them. One of them was my first note about this:

JWZ has pretty much ascertained that almost everybody can now cope with HTML mail. I always use HTML mail as my own personal reminder of how small a bubble I live within. Almost every mail I get that I read is text-only. HTML mail for me is a freakish exception. That’s the exact opposite of the majority experience. Mail for all intents and purposes these days is HTML.

I worry a little that my Bayesian spam filters are slowly coming to the conclusion that I must never ever be allowed to see HTML mail – even if it’s from my sister and the message is “Would you like some of this 80 million pounds I just won in the Lottery?”. Actually, that does sounds like spam. Bad example.)

Note that this has nothing to do with whether mail should be in HTML. If you think it shouldn’t, you’re probably part of my bubble, which is large — certainly so large that I can’t see its end horizon, although I know that it’s not very large compared to the rest of the online world, and tiny and irrelevant compared to the global population.

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2004-10-06»

The Wired News piece on Marshall Beddoe’s work with bioinformatic algorithms to crack protocol reverse-engineering has had some good results, in the sense that it’s shedding a bit more light on possible crossovers between bioinf and Net applications. (I’ve written about this sort of genetic cyborg weird-ass mutie crossrbreeding before, for New Scientist).

In the discussion I had with Marshall about his next steps, he commented that a lot of his future work had less to do with number-crunching, and more to do with visualisation. One bioinfodesign innovation that got pointed out to him as a result of the article was sequence logos.

Sequence logos are graphics used in bioinformatics to visually highlight commonalities between multiple sequences. The rows shows how often letters in a gene sequence occur at each position (the GATCs – the taller the letter, the more often the nucleotide appears) together with a measure of how much commonality is preserved over all the sequences (the curve).

If you’re trying to spot patterns in long data sequences, some adaptation of this might be useful to you too. I’m really interested in seeing what Marshall comes up with next.

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