Don Marti has an insightful post about net neutrality and public property [2]. When net access requires access to public property then it should be sold in a neutral manner.

Rachel Pike gave an interesting TED talk about the scientific research behind a climate headline [3]. The people who claim to be “skeptical” of the science should watch this.

Mark Peters wrote an interesting article “A Happy Writer Is a Lousy Writer” about the correlation between emotional state and work quality [4]. Apparently watching a film about cancer will make people more careful and focussed on details.

CERIAS has an interesting short article about Firefox security as well as some philosophy on why web browser security generally sucks [5].

Cory Doctorow writes in the Guardian about Peter Mandelson’s new stupidity in trying to legislate against file sharing [6]. This is going to seriously damage the economy of every country that implements it.

Charles Stross has been blogging a series of non-fiction essays about space colonisation, in “The Myth of the Starship” he describes how most ideas of space travel are bad and how the word “ship” is always going to be unsuitable [7].

Brent T. White is an associate professor of law at the University of Arizona who has written an interesting paper about mortgages [8]. He says that anyone who is “underwater” (IE owing more than the value of their house) should walk away. The credit damage from abandoning a bad mortgage apparently isn’t that bad, and there is the possibility of negotiating with the bank to reduce the value of the loan to match the value of the house.

Mako is working on a project to allow prisoners to blog [9]. It’s basically a snail-mail to web gateway as the prisonsers are not allowed Internet access.

PracticalEthicsnews.com has an article about the special status that homeopathy is given [10]. It also notes that homeopathic “medicines” include arsenic and mercury. Such quackery should be outlawed, a life sentence for homeopathy would be appropriate IMHO.

Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting essay about why he is not selling one of his books in audio form (he’s giving it away) [11]. He concludes by noting that he wants “no license agreement except ‘don’t violate copyright law’“. The fact that he can’t get anyone to sell an audio book under such terms is a good demonstration of how broken the marketplace is.

Thulasiraj Ravilla gave an inspiring TED talk about the Aravind Eye Care System – a program to bring the efficiency of McDonalds to eye surgery [12]. Hopefully that program can spawn similar programs for other branches of medicine and spread to more countries. In many ways they are providing better service (both in quality and speed) than people in first-world countries who pay a lot of money can expect to receive.

Scott Kim gave an interesting TED talk about his work designing puzzles [13]. He is also a big fan of social networking, unfortunately (for people like me who don’t like social networking) his web site ShuffleBrain.com relies on Facebook.

Gordon Brown (UK Prime Minister) gave an inspiring TED talk about global ethic vs the national interest [14], with a particular focus on the global effort required to tackle the climate change problem. Now if only we could get Kevin Rudd to listen to that.

Brough has written an interesting analysis of the AT&T network problems that are blamed on the iPhone [15]. His essential claim is that the problem is due to overly large buffers which don’t cause TCP implementations to throttle the throughput. This seems similar to my observations of the “Three” network in Australia where ping times of 8 seconds or more will periodically occur. One particularly nasty corner case with this is when using a local DNS server I can have a DNS packet storm where basic requests time out while BIND uses a significant portion of available bandwidth (including ICMP messages from receiving ports that BIND has closed). To alleviate this I am now using the Google public DNS service [16] (the Three DNS servers never worked properly).

Links November 2009

November 13, 2009 | etbe

Credit Writedowns has a populist interpretation of the latest Boom-Bust cycle [1]. It’s an interesting analysis of the way the US economy is working.

Bono writes for the NY Times about Rebranding America [2]. He praises Barack Obama suggesting a different reason to believe that the peace prize is deserved and describes what he believes to be the world’s hope for the US.

IsMyBlogWorking.com is a useful site that analyses your blog [3]. It gives some advice on how to improve some things as well as links to feed validation sites.

Evgeny Morozov gave an interesting TED talk “How the Net Aids Dictatorships” [4]. I don’t agree with his conclusion, he has some evidence to support his claims but I think that a large part of that is due to people not using the Internet well. I expect things to improve. The one claim that was particularly weak was when he mentioned radio stations in Rwanda as an example of technology being used for bad purposes – the entire point about the first-world discussion about such things is the radio vs the Internet.

Ray Anderson gave an inspiring talk about “The Business Logic of Sustainability” [5]. He transformed his carpet company, decreasing it’s environmental impact by 82% and it’s impact per volume of product by more than 90% while also significantly increasing it’s profitability. He says that corporate managers who don’t protect the environment should be regarded as criminals. Making his company more environmentally friendly reduced expenses (through efficiency), attracted more skillful employees, and attracted environmentally aware customers. Managers who don’t follow Ray’s example are not only doing the wrong thing for the environment, they are doing the wrong thing for their stockholders! Ray’s company Flor takes carpet orders over the web [6]. They won’t ship a catalogue outside the US, so presumably they only sell carpet to the US too.

Marc Koska gave an interesting TED talk about a new syringe design that prevents re-use [7]. His main aim is to prevent the spread of AIDS in the developing world – where even hospital staff knowingly reuse syringes. It will also do some good in developed countries that try to prohibit drug use.

David Logan gave an interesting TED talk about tribal leadership [8]. His use of the word “tribe” seems rather different from most other uses, and I am a bit dubious about some of his points. But it is definitely a talk worth seeing and considering.

Deirdre Walker is a recently retired Assistant Chief of Police who has worked for 24 years as a police officer, she describes in detail her analysis of the flaws in the TSA security checks at US airports [9].

Brian Krebs wrote an article for the Washington Post recommending that Linux Live CDs be used for Internet banking [10]. Windows trojans have been used to take over bank accounts that were accessed by security tokens, that could only be accessed by certain IP addresses, and that required two people to login. It seems that nothing less than a Linux system that is solely used for banking is adequate when a lot of money is at stake.

The NY Times has an interesting review of the book “Ayn Rand and the World She Made” [11]. It seems that Ayn was even madder than I thought.

Gary Murphy has written an interesting analysis of the latest stage in the collapse of the US Republican party [12].

The ABC (AU) Law Report has an interesting article about Evony’s (of China and the US) attempting to sue Bruce Everiss (of the UK) in Australia [13].

The Guardian has an insightful article about the IEA making bogus claims about the remaining oil reserves [14]. It seems that the experts who work for the IEA estimate that oil is running out rapidly while the US is forcing them to claim otherwise.

Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research has written an interesting article about the economic effects of the war in Iraq [15]. Apparently it caused the loss of over 2,000,000 jobs – considerably more than the job losses that could ever result from efforts to combat global warming.

Links October 2009

October 17, 2009 | etbe

Garik Israelian gave an interesting TED talk about spectrography of stars and SETI [1]. He assumes that tectonic activity is a pre-requisite for the evolution of life (when discussing the search for elements that are needed for life) and that life which is based on solar energy will have a similar spectrographic signature to the chlorophyl based plants that we are familiar with. I doubt both those assumptions, but I still found the talk very interesting and I learned a lot.

Julian Dibbell wrote an interesting Wired article about an ongoing battle between the Cult of Scientology and 4chan [2]. I don’t often barrack for 4chan, but they seem to be doing some good things here – but of course they do it in their own unique manner. The article also links to a hilarious video of Tom Cruise being insane, among other things he claims that Scientologists are “only ones who can help” at an accident site. Has Tom Cruise ever provided assistance at a car crash?

The Independent has an article by Robert Fisk about the impending shift away from the US dollar for the oil trade [3]. This is expected to cause a significant loss in the value of the US dollar.

Robin Marantz Henig wrote an interesting article for the NY Times about the causes of anxiety [4]. It focusses on Jerome Kagan’s longitudal studies of babies and young people. One thing that I found particularly interesting were the research issues of recognising the difference between brain states, internal emotional state, and the symptoms of emotions that people display (including their own description of their emotions which may be misleading or false). The tests on teenage social interactions that involved fake myspace pages and an MRI were also interesting.

Juan Cole wrote an insightful Salon article titled “The top ten things you didn’t know about Iran” [5]. The Iranian government doesn’t seem to be a threat to anyone outside their country.

Clay Shirky wrote an insightful post about TV being a heat-sink for excess spare time and considers the number of projects of the scale of Wikipedia could be created with a small portion of that time [6]. It seems that the trend in society is to spend less time watching TV and more time doing creative things. In a related note Dan Meyer has an interesting blog post about trolls who say “You Have No Life” [7].

The Making Light blog post about Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize has some insightful comments [8]. I doubted that he had achieved enough to deserve it, but the commentators provide evidence that he has achieved a lot. I wonder if he will receive a second Peace Prize sometime in the next 10 years.

The Making Light blog post about bullies and online disputes predictably got diverted to discussion school bullying [9]. The comments are interesting.

Making Light has a mind-boggling post about homosexuality and porn [10]. US Senator Tom Coburn’s (R-OK) chief of staff Michael Schwartz made the case against pornography. “All pornography is homosexual pornography”, said Schwartz, quoting an ex-gay friend of his. Among other things there are many good puns in the comments.

Cubicle Jungle is an amusing satire of the computer industry [11]. It’s shocking how long it goes before it gets to the part that’s obviously fiction.

The WikiReader is an interesting new device [12]. It costs $99US and has a copy of Wikipedia on an SD card, they have a subscription service that involves posting you a new SD card every 6 months, or you can download an image from their server. They state that they have a filtered version of Wikipedia for children, I wonder how they manage that, I also wonder whether they have an unfiltered version for adults. The device runs on two AAA batteries and is designed to be cheap and easy. Naturally it doesn’t support editing, but most of the time that you need Wikipedia you don’t need edit access – or access to content that is less than 6 months old.

Exetel are scum, customers who complain are cut off [13].

Making Light has an interesting post about a New Age scumbag who killed at least two of the victims who paid $10,000 for a sweat-lodge workshop (others are in hospital and may die in the near future) [14].

The NY Times has an interesting article about Jamie Oliver and his latest project [15]. He is trying to reform the eating habits of the unhealthiest area in the US. The 15 pound burger sounds interesting though, I wouldn’t mind sharing one of those with 14 friends…

Links September 2009

September 14, 2009 | etbe

The NYT has an interesting article about research into treating insomnia over the internet [1]. I wonder how many other psychological issues can be effectively treated over the net.

From next year all Cadbury Dairy Milk Chocolate sold in Australia will be made from fair-trade cocoa [2]. Cadbury Dairy Milk Chocolate is the most popular type of chocolate sold in Australia so this is a significant market shift. For a long time Cadbury has sold fair trade chocolate under the name Green and Black. Of course we now have to wait for Cadbury to use fair trade cocoa in all their other chocolate varieties.

Mike Rowe gave an interesting TED talk about the value of manual labour [3]. He suggested that there should be a PR campaign for skilled manual labour jobs and noted that his observation (through his work on his “Dirty Jobs” TV series) was that the people who do some of the less popular jobs appear to be happier.

The GapMinder.org web site has some interesting analysis of statistical information on countries and regions [4]. It is based on the work of Hans Rosling who is well known for his high quality TED talks [5]. Unfortunately the web site requires Flash, I will probably try it out with Gnash some time.

Miru Kim gave a TED talk about her work photographing herself nude in abandoned buildings and industrial spaces [6]. Among other things she photographed herself lying naked on a pile of bones in the crypt underneath Paris which is fairly dangerous. I’ve visited the crypt, it’s an interesting experience but I was very careful to touch nothing – you never know which of the bones came from victims of smallpox and other nasty diseases. Strangely they have an ongoing problem of visitors stealing bones, when I visited there were several bones at the exit that had been confiscated from visitors – some of which had mummified flesh attached…

Steinar H. Gunderson wrote a good description of the basics of how the TCP protocol works [7]. He also links to a web page he wrote that will measure your potential TCP throughput and give you information on the link. This is really handy if you are behind some sort of firewall and want to know what is being done to your TCP stream when it’s in transit.

Apparently Christian couples tend to use a shared email account to reduce the risk of cheating [8]. It’s hardly a surprise that Christians have a much higher divorce rate than atheists and agnostics [9].

The NY Times has an interesting article about iPhones overloading the AT&T network [10]. Recently I’ve been having some problems sending MMS with my Three phone, some relatives who use Three have been having connection problems in certain areas with marginal signal quality, and the download speed of my Three data connection is significantly reduced (used to be ~70KB/s, now I’m lucky to get 20KB/s). I suspect that the new smart phones that are being sold are largely to blame. But the up-side is that when they engineer their network to work properly with the smart phones then my Internet use (ssh and basic web browsing) will work really well.

Michael Tieman wrote an interesting blog post about software patents which compares them to Land Mines [11]. Of course this analogy falls down badly while the US is still leading the world in manufacturing land mines.

Rebecca Saxe gave an interesting TED talk about how brains make moral judgeents [12]. In her research she did some tests with using magnetic pulses to decrease the function of the region of the brain that allows people to judge the others and she was able to significantly affect the results of judgement tests.

Brendan Scott analyses the netbook wars and concludes that it has been a significant loss for Microsoft [13]. ArsTechnica has an analysis of the real word-processing requirements [14], they suggest that in most cases MS-Word (and other word-processor) documents could be replaced with HTML or Wiki pages for a better end result.

Links August 2009

August 12, 2009 | etbe

IQ as a Social Multiplier – Michael of Accellerating Future summarises some research into the effect of increasing IQ [1]. It seems to me that increasing the health of children and giving them adequate education is the best thing that can be done for developing countries. When smart children become smart adults they can fix all the other problems.

Richard Dawkins gave an interesting TED talk about militant atheism [2]. I’m not convinced by his central point, I’m happy to get along with anyone who doesn’t want to compromise a legal or educational system regardless of the myths that they believe.

Freeman Dyson gave an insightful TED talk about the search for life in our solar system [3]. He suggests looking for the reflections of lenses that could be used to keep life forms warm. He also suggests that if there are no such life forms there already then we should create them, that sounds like a good idea to me.

Arthur Benjamin gave a brief but insightful talk advocating statistics as a better candidate for the peak of high school mathematics than calculus [4].

Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuro-scientist who had a stroke, she describes the experience of having the left half of her brain shut down in a passionate TED talk [5]. It’s one of the most unusual lectures I’ve watched.

Alain de Botton gave an insightful TED talk “A kinder, gentler philosophy of success” [6]. One of his most striking points concerns the concept of a “meritocracy”. If everyone who deserves to be at the top gets to the top then by implication everyone who is at the bottom is there because they deserve it. He quotes St Augustine as saying “it’s a sin to judge any man by his post“. It seems to me that perhaps we shouldn’t push the meritocracy angle so much in the free software community…

Eve Ensler (who is most famous for the “Vagina Monologues” gave an insightful TED talk about security [7]. Her main point is that people who concentrate too much on trying to achieve security will end up not enjoying life – and not being particularly secure either. I believe that her work with women in Africa and the Middle-East who have been mistreated makes her better qualified to comment about security than most people. Bruce Schneier recommended her lecture.

Willard Wigan gave an interesting TED talk about his micro-sculptures, he typically creates a sculpture on the head of a pin [8]. It is interesting to note how his interest in art developed from being forced to wag school due to being treated awfully by the teachers.

Elene Gabre Madhin gave an interesting TED talk about economics in Ethiopia [9]. She describes how when people were starving in the north of Ethiopia there was a food surplus in the south and the problem was a lack of a functional market. She left her position at the world bank to create a functional commodities market in Ethiopia to solve this problem and increase the GDP of the country at the same time.

Michael Pritchard gave an interesting TED talk about the Lifesaver filter [10]. The primary product is a bottle that appears to have a volume of about 1.5L which contains a 15nm micro-pore filter. The smallest viruses are apparently 25nm in diameter so the filter will stop all viruses, as opposed to current filters which have a 200nm pore size which allows the smallest bacteria to get through. He gives a live demonstration of using a tank of water that came from rivers, a pond, and with some sewage thrown in and drinking the water that comes out of the filter! The filter in the bottle can produce 6,000 litres of clean water and can then be replaced. The other product that he is developing is a jerry-can size device that can filter 25,000 litres – enough for three years use by a family of four!

Here’s an amusing anecdote about airport security [11]. An interesting link from the comments section of that page is the Bill of Rights Security Edition – the US Bill of Rights printed on solid sheets of metal [12]. I guess that carrying that through airport security makes some political point.

Links July 2009

July 16, 2009 | etbe

Katherine Fulton gave a TED talk about the future of philanthropy [1]. She started out well with an overview of some of the technical methods, but I felt that the ending was lacking. At the end she made an emotional appeal for people to be philanthropic, it seems to me that you can’t easily convince people to do such things so it’s best to try to develop the tendencies that people already have in that regard.

My friend Rik van Riel is a member of the Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists, and the Non-Religious lending team in Kiva [9]. Kiva is one of the philanthropic organisations that Katherine Fulton mentions.

Seth Godin gave an inspiring TED talk about “tribe” leadership [2]. His use of the term “tribe” differs from the common use in that he only refers to a cultural group rather than kinship (the more common definition of a tribe). So his definition seems to be best described as followers of a meme – although it doesn’t sound cool that way. He has some great ideas for how to motivate groups of people which should be useful for anyone who wants to influence people to get things done.

Phil Zimbardo (who is well known for the infamous Stanford Prison experiment) gave an insightful TED talk about the psychology of evil [3]. His main point is that largely good or evil actions are determined by the environment. A secondary point he makes is that people should be taught that they can be heros by merely deciding to refrain from following a crowd into evil or doing small things to help others. He suggests that “super heros” give children bad ideas about heroism. He also co-wrote an interesting paper the Banality of Heroism [4]. It’s published on the EveryDayHeroism.org site.

Steven Pinker gave an informative TED talk about the decline of violence throughout recorded history [5]. This is clear evidence that people who are nostalgic are wrong. One interesting part of his lecture concerned changing standards in society towards violence. One issue is that the claims that society has a problem with violence are in part based on changing standards, it used to be that genocide was well regarded by most people (he cites the Bible for an example of this) but now society is increasingly intolerant of violence so things generally seem worse.

Steven Pinker also gave an interesting TED talk about his book “The Blank Slate” [6]. He describes some research that reveals the innate traits that are programmed into people and discusses some of the implications.

CNN has an interesting article about a drug that prevents the cravings that recovering alcoholics experience [7], of course that is only part of the solution to the problem of alcoholism – but it is a significant part. According to research by Canada’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and published in Lancet 1 in 25 deaths worldwide can be attributed to alcohol [8], so it seems that many lives could be saved by this new drug use (the drug was previously prescribed for other ailments).

Google is about to release a new distribution of Linux with a new GUI that is designed for running the Chrome browser on Netbooks [10]. This will be interesting to see, hopefully they will have developed some new way of making a GUI take good advantage of low resolution screens such as 800*480 in the EeePC 701.

Cory Doctorow writes about the issues relating to unauthorised distribution of pre-release movies [11]. When movies are shown for review cinemas are being forced to confiscate mobile phones from the viewers which will supposedly prevent unauthorised copies being made. But apparently most movies are leaked by insiders before the reviewers even get to see them. Also for the duration of the movie the phones are not stored in a secure manner which allows a variety of personal data to be accessed by security guards and anyone else who gets to play with the phones.

The Pope has written an encyclical criticising “excessive zeal for protecting knowledge through an unduly rigid assertion of the right to intellectual property, especially in the field of health care” [12]. It’s good to see a religious leader take a stand on a moral issue.

Links June 2009

June 19, 2009 | etbe

KickStarter.com is an interesting new service that allows creative people to solicit funding to start new enterprises [1]. Note that it is not for investing in projects, sponsors give the money and the result is that the work gets done. Unfortunately it only allows people with US bank accounts to receive money at this time.

Corey Doctorow and Charles Stross gave an interesting public discussion about privacy on the net titled “Open Rights – the All Seeing Eye” [2].

Ray Kurzweil announced the Singularity University at TED [3]. It will be run from a NASA research facility and teach all the core areas of technology related to the Singularity.

Stewart Brand gave a short but interesting TED talk about squatter cities [4]. He predicts that the population movement from rural areas to squatter cities will defuse the population problems as the rate of reproduction in cities is much closer to the rate needed to sustain the population (2.1 children per family) than that in the country. He didn’t mention the fact that disease spreads rapidly in squatter cities which culls the population. A related TED talk by Paul Collier describes how a Marshall Plan could be used to help the poorest billion people in the world [5]. He focuses on good governance as a required part of such a plan because that is the least immediately obvious requirement.

Here is a link for a famous TV clip of a man dancing in Sydney to celebrate the end of WW2 [6].

Zeke M. Vanderhoek is starting a school in the US where each teacher will get a salary of $US125,000 plus bonuses [7]. The school will primarily accept local students from the Washington Heights area, primarily students who do not perform well academically and who are from low income households. The class size will be 30 and the aim is to show that great teachers are the key to good education not small classes. The article notes that some teachers seem great on paper but perform badly in the class – like most jobs it’s easy to say that you are good. I hope this experiment works.

As a counter-point to Zeke’s work Caulfield Grammar School has introduced a “Learning Mentor” program for years 7 and 8 [8] which involves having a second teacher in the class. It’s an interesting concept, but I think that it’s unlikely to do much good given the other things that they are doing. Caulfield is also implementing some awful ideas such as having lots of specialised sports coaches and spreading the VCE over three years instead of two. The two-year VCE is itself quite awful, if it had been introduced one year earlier I would have had to do year 12 in another state to avoid it.

The Atlantic has an interesting article about the Harvard Study of Adult Development and it’s long-time director George Vaillant [9]. The conclusion seems to be that the secret to happyness is to employ mature adaptations to adverse situations, be well educated, have a stable marriage, don’t smoking, abuse alcohol (and presumably don’t abuse any other drugs), get some exercise, and have a healthy weight.

Adam Harvey has a good post summarising the current Microsoft actions in advertising it’s new web browser [10]. I doubt that this will go well for MS.

Links May 2009

May 30, 2009 | etbe

An interesting opinion post in the NY Times describes the research on early education and how it can affect IQ [1]. Among other things children from poor families who are adopted into upper middle-class families tend to end up with higher IQ scores. The article notes that half the population in 1917 would be regarded as mentally retarded by today’s standards – finally we have an explanation for WW1!

Two Dominos employees tarnish the brand’s image with a prank video on Youtube [2]. The next obvious step is for activists to seek jobs at such companies for the purpose of influencing companies. The animal rights protesters outside KFC stores haven’t achieved much, but if they worked for KFC and made some nasty videos they would really encourage a change of action. I predict that chain stores will be spending a lot more on security and background checks for their employees in the near future.

Cory Doctorow has written an amusing article titled “Big Entertainment Wants to Party Like It’s 1996” about how the entertainment industry is killing itself by conducting back-room negotiations about new copyright laws [3].

Nate Silver gave a TED talk about racism in elections [4]. The most interesting point was demonstrating statistically that people who don’t meet people of other races tend to be more racist. It seems to me that the use of the X-Face: header in email and the use of HackerGotchi in Planets can help reduce the level of racism on the Internet.

Cory Doctorow writes about his Geeky writing [5]. His idea for an organised system for donating books to libraries will hopefully be fully implemented soon – it should be easy to do and the incremental costs will decrease as the scope increases.

Cory Doctorow writes about the perverse laws that protect criticism of copyright works but stifle praise [6]. In a similar note he has documented a plan for trademark and copyright holders to allow fans to create derivitive works while preserving the original rights AND sharing the profits [7]. So if Cory’s idea became popular someone who wanted to create some art work based on a Coke bottle (which is trademarked) could pay the Coca-Cola company a reasonable rate, include an appropriate disclaimer, and things would work out well for everyone. Also this would allow small artists to develop new products that could be used by the large companies (I’m sure that anyone who legally released an artwork that turned out to be an effective advert for Coke would receive a lucrative job offer).

Bruce Schneier’s blog has an interesting article about the poor quality of software used for breath alcohol detectors [8]. It’s a great concern that innocent people are being punished due to bad software, but it’s only a small part of the problems with the legal system.

Mary Roach gave a TED talk “10 Things You Didn’t Know About Orgasm [9]. Not as insightful as the usual TED talk, but strange and interesting.

Links April 2009

April 23, 2009 | etbe

P. W. Singer gave an interesting TED talk about the use of robots in war [1]. He briefly covered some of the ethical and social issues related to robot soldiers as well as showing many pictures of existing robots.

Since November 2007 there has been a request for Google Gears to support “Iceweasel” (the Debian name for Firefox due to trademark issues)[2]. Apparently supporting this different name is not easy for the Google people. If you visit the Google Gears Terms and Conditions page [3] then it will work with Iceweasel on the i386 platform – but not for AMD64 (or at least not my Debian/Lenny AMD64 system).

Charles Moore gave a disturbing TED talk about the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” [4]. Pollution in the oceans from waste plastic is worse than I realised.

Ressuka documented how to solve the Time went backwards problem on Xen DomUs [5]. Run “echo “jiffies”> /sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0/current_clocksource” or use “clocksource=jiffies” in your DomU kernel boot parameter list.

Nassim Taleb [6] has written Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world [7], this is in regard to the current US financial crisis. It’s worth noting that he made a significant amount of money due to successfully predicting some aspects of the crisis.

James Duncan Davidson has some good advice for speakers based on his experience in filming presentations [8]. Some of the ones that were not obvious to me were:
Take off your name-tag – it doesn’t look good
Stay in the part of the stage with the best light

Links March 2009

March 30, 2009 | etbe

Cory Doctorow has written a column for The Guardian titled “You shouldn’t have to sell your soul just to download some music” [1]. One really interesting point he made was “The same companies that spent decades telling lawmakers that they were explicitly not the guardians of the morality of the young that they couldn’t be held accountable for sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, for gangsta rap, for drug-fuelled dance-parties did a complete reversal and began to beat their chests about the corrupting influence of downloading on the poor kiddies“.

The pt4me2 organisation advocates that the Victorian government spend more money on public transport infrastructure [2]. Recently the congestion on Melbourne roads has been getting worse, the costs of private car parks in the central city area have been increasing, and during peak hours all public transport is over-crowded. Some significant improvements are needed, and more trains, trams, and buses are the only possible way of coping with the number of people working in the city. Also there’s the issue of suburbs that lack any public transport, I wouldn’t want to live near one of those areas when petrol hits $8/L (as the CSIRO predicts for 2018).

Michael Tiemann writes about Microsoft’s latest patent attack against Linux [3]. He doesn’t pull any punches which is a very noteworthy thing. It’s pretty rare to see someone in a senior position in a company blog in a way that makes any significant comment about another company.

Dan Ariely gave an interesting Ted.com talk about “Our Buggy Moral Code” [4]. One of the points was that people who declare themselves to be atheists are less likely to cheat when asked to swear on a bible first, another was that if someone who is identified as a member of the same group cheats then others will follow, but if an outsider cheats then they won’t. It seems that if you want to minimise cheating then you want to have only outsiders be seen to do it, and you want everyone to swear to follow some sort of moral code.

Flame has written a good rant titled “Anarchy is Dead” about the lack of popular outrage against the Australian government’s censorship plans [5].

Rolling Stone magazine has a good article about the US banking crisis [6]. A moderate amount of bad language, but no more than is deserved.

Amazing video of rounding up sheep that are fitted with LEDs at night [7].

Here’s an interesting TED talk by Saul Griffith about using kites to generate electricity [8]. Unfortunately he didn’t give much engineering information, it was more of an “executive summary” of what he has done. He claims that if a wartime level of effort was put in place then wind could supply all the electricity needs of the US within 10 years.

Adam Savage (of Mythbusters fame) gave a talk for TED about his obsession with the Dodo [9]. One thing that surprised me is how his manner in that talk differed from his appearance in Mythbusters. It seems that most of his crazy antics in Mythbusters are an act to entertain the audience. The information about the dodo was really interesting too. He then went on to talk about his recreation of the Maltese Falcon. His work can serve as inspiration for other geeks who want to try sculpting.

etbe – Russell Coker

Linux, politics, and other interesting things

Category Archives: Links

Links December 2009