Links June 2013

June 30, 2013 | etbe

Cory Doctorow published a letter from a 14yo who had just read his novel “Homeland” [1]. I haven’t had anything insightful to say about Aaron Swartz, so I think that this link will do [2].

Seth Godin gave an interesting TED talk about leading tribes [3]. I think everyone who is active in the FOSS community should watch this talk.

Ron Garrett wrote an interesting post about the risk of being hit by a “dinosaur killer” [4]. We really need to do something about this and the cost of defending against asteroids is almost nothing compared to “defence” spending.

Afra Raymond gave an interesting TED talk about corruption [5]. He focussed on his country Trinidad and Tobago but the lessons apply everywhere.

Wikihouse is an interesting project that is based around sharing designs for houses that can be implemented using CNC milling machines [6]. It seems to be at the early stages but it has a lot of potential to change the building industry.

Here is a TED blog post summarising Dan Pallotta’s TED talk about fundraising for nonprofits [7]. His key point is that moral objections to advertising for charities significantly reduce their ability to raise funds and impacts the charitable mission. I don’t entirely agree with his talk which is very positive towards spending on promotion but I think that he makes some good points which people should consider.

Here is a TED blog post summarising Peter Singer’s TED talk about effective altruism [8]. His focus seems to be on ways of cheaply making a significant difference which doesn’t seem to agree with Dan Pallotta’s ideas.

Patton Oswalt wrote an insightful article about the culture of stand-up comedians which starts with joke stealing and heckling and ends with the issue of rape jokes [9].

Karen Eng wrote an interesting TED blog post about Anthony Vipin’s invention of HAPTIC shoes for blind people [10]. The vibration of the shoes tells the person which way to walk and a computer sees obstacles that need to be avoided.

David Blaine gave an interesting TED talk about how he prepared for a stunt of holding his breath for 17 minutes [11].

Links May 2013

May 28, 2013 | etbe

Cameron Russell (who works as an underwear model) gave an interesting TED talk about beauty [1].

Ben Goldacre gave an interesting and energetic TED talk about bad science in medicine [2]. A lot of the material is aimed at non-experts, so this is a good talk to forward to your less scientific friends.

Lev wrote a useful description of how to disable JavaScript from one site without disabling it from all sites which was inspired by Snopes [3]. This may be useful some time.

Russ Allbery wrote an interesting post about work and success titled ‘The “Why?” of Work’ [4]. Russ makes lots of good points and I’m not going to summarise them (read the article, it’s worth it). There is one point I disagree with, he says “You are probably not going to change the world“. The fact is that I’ve observed Russ changing the world, he doesn’t appear to have done anything that will get him an entry in a history book but he’s done a lot of good work in Debian (a project that IS changing the world) and his insightful blog posts and comments on mailing lists influence many people. I believe that most people should think of changing the world as a group project where they are likely to be one of thousands or millions who are involved, then you can be part of changing the world every day.

James Morrison wrote an insightful blog post about what he calls “Penance driven development” [5]. The basic concept of doing something good to make up for something you did which has a bad result (even if the bad result was inadvertent) is probably something that most people do to some extent, but formalising it in the context of software development work is a cencept I haven’t seen described before.

A 9yo boy named Caine created his own games arcade out of cardboard, when the filmmaker Nirvan Mullick saw it he created a short movie about it and promoted a flash mob event to play games at the arcade [6]. They also created the Imagination Foundation to encourage kids to create things from cardboard [7].

Tanguy Ortolo describes how to use the UDF filesystem instead of FAT for USB devices [8]. This allows you to create files larger than 2G while still allowing the device to be used on Windows systems. I’ll keep using BTRFS for most of my USB sticks though.

Bruce Schneier gave an informative TED talk about security models [9]. Probably most people who read my blog already have a good knowledge of most of the topics he covers. I think that the best use of this video is to educate less technical people you know.

Blaine Harden gave an informative and disturbing TED talk about the concentration camps in North Korea [10]. At the end he points out the difficult task of helping people recover from their totalitarian government that will follow the fall of North Korea.

Bruce Schneier has an interesting blog post about the use of a motherboard BMC controller (IPMI and similar) to compromise a server [11]. Also some “business class” desktop systems and laptops have similar functionality.

Russ Allbery wrote an insightful article about the failures of consensus decision-making [12]. He compares the Wikipedia and Debian methods so his article is also informative for people who are interested in learning about those projects.

The TED blog has a useful reference article with 10 places anyone can learn to code [13].

Racialicious has an interesting article about the people who take offense when it’s pointed out that they have offended someone else [14].

Nick Selby wrote an interesting article criticising the Symantic response to the NYT getting hacked and also criticises anti-viru software in general [15]. He raises the point that most of us already know, anti-virus software doesn’t do much good. Securing Windows networks is a losing game.

Joshua Brindle wrote an interesting blog post about security on mobile phones and the attempts to use hypervisors for separating data of different levels [16]. He gives lots of useful background information about how to design and implement phone based systems.

Links March 2013

March 31, 2013 | etbe

Russ Allbery wrote an informative post about how to determine which charities are worth donating to [1]. He has a link to another article about the charities to which he donates and concentrates on ways of analysing the effectiveness of charities. So someone who has different ideas about which types of charity are worthy of donation could still learn a lot from his post.

Adam Green wrote an interesting article for The New Yorker about Apollo Robbins who is one of the world’s best pick-pockets [2]. Apollo picks pockets as a magician to entertain people and always returns what he steals. Now he is working with neuroscientists who are devising experiments to determine why his tricks work.

Rick Falkvinge wrote an insightful article describing the way that the copyright monopoly is in direct opposition to the freedom to make contracts [3]. It’s a good rebuttal of a common argument in favor of copyright law.

Seth Godin gave an interesting TED talk about the problems with the education system, how and why it teaches conformity and little else [4]. One of his suggestions for improvement is to have students spend their evenings watching lectures by experts and class time asking questions. He also says that everything should be open book and that there is no value in memorising anything – it’s a bit of an overstatement but it’s essentially correct.

Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting article for The Guardian about positive externalities and copyright law [5]. I think that he didn’t choose the best way of framing this issue, but he makes some very interesting points anyway.

Andrew Norton wrote an interesting article about how to reduce corruption in the police force and other government agencies [6]. A large part of this is based on making them subject to the same laws as everyone else, which seems to be a radical idea.

Valerie Aurora wrote an insightful blog post about suicide [7].

Emily Oster gave an interesting TED talk about the factors that determine the spread of AIDS in Africa [8]. It’s quite different to what you probably expect.

Links February 2013

February 7, 2013 | etbe

Aaron on Software wrote an interesting series of blog posts about psychology and personal development collectively Titled “Raw Nerve”, here’s a link to part 2 [1]. The best sections IMHO are 2, 3, and 7.

The Atlantic has an insightful article by Thomas E. Ricks about the failures in leadership in the US military that made the problems in Afghanistan and Iraq a lot worse than they needed to be [2]

Kent Larson gave an interesting TED talk about how to fit more people in cities [3]. He covers issues of power use, transport, space use, and sharing. I particularly liked the apartments that transform and the design for autonomous vehicles that make eye contact with pedestrians.

Andrew McAfee gave an interesting TED talk titled “Are Droids Taking Our Jobs” [4]. I don’t think he adequately supported his conclusion that computers and robots are making things better for everyone (he also presented evidence that things are getting worse for many people), but it was an interesting talk anyway.

I Psychopath is an interesting documentary about Sam Vaknin who is the world’s most famous narcissist [5]. The entire documentary is available from Youtube and it’s really worth watching.

The movie Toy Story has been recreated in live action by a couple of teenagers [6]. That’s a huge amount of work.

Rory Stewart gave an interesting TED talk about how to rebuild democracy [7]. I think that his arguments against using the consequences to argue for democracy and freedom (he suggests not using the “torture doesn’t work” and “women’s equality doubles the workforce” arguments) are weak, but he made interesting points all through his talk.

Ernesto Sirolli gave an interesting TED talk about aid work and development work which had a theme of “Want to help someone? Shut up and listen!” [8]. That made me think of Mary Gardiner’s much quoted line from the comments section of her Wikimania talk which was also “shut up and listen”.

Waterloo Labs has some really good engineering Youtube videos [9]. The real life Mario Kart game has just gone viral but there are lots of other good things like the iPhone controlled car and eye controlled Mario Brothers.

Robin Chase of Zipcar gave an interesting TED talk about various car sharing systems (Zipcar among others), congestion taxes, the environmental damage that’s caused by cars, mesh networks, and other things [10]. She has a vision of a future where most cars are shared and act as nodes in a giant mesh network.

Madeleine Albright gave an interesting TED talk about being a female diplomat [11]. She’s an amazing speaker.

Ron Englash gave an interesting TED talk about the traditional African use of fractals [12]. Among the many interesting anecdotes concerning his research in Africa he was initiated as a priest after explaining Georg Cantor’s set theories.

Racialicious has an insightful article about the low expectations that members of marginalised groups have of members of the privileged groups [13].

Rick Falkvinge has a radical proposal for reforming copyrights with a declared value system [14]. I don’t think that this will ever get legislative support, but if it did I think it would work well for books and songs. I think that some thought should be given to how this would work for Blogs and other sources of periodical content. Obviously filing for every blog post would be an unreasonable burden. Maybe aggregating a year of posts into one copyright assignment block would work.

Scott Fraser gave an interesting TED talk about the problem with eyewitness testimony [15]. He gave a real-world example of what had to be done to get an innocent man acquitted, it’s quite amazing.

Sarah Kendzior wrote an interesting article for al Jazeera about the common practice in American universities to pay Adjunct Professors wages that are below the poverty line [16]. That’s just crazy, when students pay record tuition fees there’s more than enough money to pay academics decent wages, where does all the money go to anyway?

Links January 2013

January 4, 2013 | etbe

AreWomenHuman has an interesting article about ViolentAcrez and the wide support for trolling (including by media corporations) [1].

Chrys Stevenson wrote an important article for the ABC about the fundamentalist Christians who are trying to take over the Australian education system [2].

Tavi Gevinson gave an interesting TED talk titled “A teen just trying to figure it out” about her work starting Rookie magazine and her ideas about feminism [3].

Burt Rutan gave an interesting and inspiring TED talk about the future of space expploration [4]. One of his interesting points is that “fun really is defendable” in regard to tourism paying for the development of other space industries.

Stephen Petranek gave an interesting TED talk about how to prepare for some disasters that could kill a significant portion of the world’s population [5]. Some of these are risks of human extinction, we really need to spend some money on it.

John Wilbanks gave an intresting TED talk about the way that current informed consent laws prevent large-scale medical research [6]. He says “I live in a web world where when you share things beautiful stuff happens, not bad stuff“.

Joey Hess was interviewed for The Setup and the interview sparked a very interesting Hacker News discussion about workflow for software development [7]. Like most developers I prefer large screens with high resolution, I have an EeePC 701 which works reasonably well for an ultra-portable system but I largely don’t use it now I have an Android phone (extremely portable and totally awful input usually beats moderately portable and mostly awful input for me). But Joey’s methods are interesting and it seems that for some people different systems give the best result.

Jeff Masters gave an insightful TED talk about the weather disasters that may seriously impact the US in the next 30 years [8]. Governments really need to start preparing for such things, some of them are really cheap to mitigate if work is started early.

Bryan Stevenson gave an inspiring TED talk about the lack of justice in the US justice system [9].

Wouter Verhelst wrote an insightful article about some of the criticisms of Linux from Windows users [10]. He references a slightly satirical post he previously wrote about why Windows isn’t ready for desktop use.

Paul Carr wrote an interesting article comparing “disruptive” business practices of dot-com companies to the more extreme aspects of Ayn Rand’s doctrine [11]. In reading some of the links from that article I discovered that Ayn Rand was even more of a sociopath than I had previously realised.

Lindy West gave an amazing Back Fence PDX talk about dealing with nasty blog comments from the PUA/MRA communities [12]. After investigating them she just feels sorry for the trolls who’s lives suck.

Hang from the Vlogbrothers explains gender, sex, sexual orientation, etc [13].

Rick Falkvinge wrote an interesting article about recent political news from Brazil, they had a proposed law that was very positive for liberty on the Internet but it was sabotaged by the media and telcos [14]. We should try to avoid paying any money to the media industry so that they can go away sooner.

Amy Cuddy gave an interesting TED talk about body language, power, and the imposter syndrome [15].

Caleb Chung gave an interesting TED talk about toy design which focussed on Pleo a robotic dinosaur with a SD card and USB socket to allow easy reprogramming by the user [16].

Links December 2012

December 11, 2012 | etbe

Steven Johnson gave an interesting TED talk about where good ideas come from [1]. He starts by attributing coffee replacing alcohol as a standard drink for some good ideas and then moves on to how ideas develop.

Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel gave an interesting and amusing TED talk about the ngram analysis of books that Google scanned [2]. Here is the link for the Google Books ngram search [3].

Clay Shirky gave an insightful TED talk about how the Internet is changing the world [4]. He cites Open Source programmers as the modern day equivalent to the Invisible College based on our supposed great ability to get along with other people on the Internet. If we really are so much better than the rest of the Internet then things must be bad out there. He ends with ways of using Git to draft legislation.

Hans Rosling gave an interesting TED talk about religion and the number of babies that women have [5]. His conclusion is that it’s more about income and social stability and that the world’s population can stabilise at 10 billion if we provide family planning to everyone.

Alexis C. Madrigal wrote an interesting interview with Genevieve Bell about her work at Intel and the way people use technology [6].

Indigogo is raising funds for the “Cuddle Mattress”, it’s a mattress with foam slats and a special fitted sheet to allow your arm to slide between the slats [7]. So you could have your arm underneath your SO for an extended period of time without risking nerve damage. They also show that when sleeping on your side your shoulder can go between the slats to avoid back problems.

Nate Silver (who is famous for predicting US elections gave an interesting TED talk about racism and politics [8]. One of his main points is to show the correlation between racism and lack of contact of members of other races.

Sociological Images has an interesting article by Lisa Wade about whether marriage is a universal human value [9]. In regard to historical marriage she says “women were human property, equivalent to children, slaves, servants, and employees”. The general trend in the comments seems to be that there are so many types of marriage that it’s difficult to make any specific claims to traditional marriage unless you count a tradition of a short period in a single geographic region.

Plurality is an excellent sci-fi short movie on youtube [10].

TED has an interesting interview with Hakeem Oluseyi about his research about astrophysics and how he achieved a successful career after being a gangster as a teenager [11]. He has some good ideas about helping other children from disadvantaged environments become successful.

Paul Dwerryhouse wrote an interesting blog post about his work in designing and implementing a filesystem based on a Cassandra data store with FUSE [12]. Paul also wrote a post about using Apache Zookeeper to lock metadata to permit atomic operations [13].

The documentary “Monumental Myths” provides an interesting and insightful analysis of the processes of creating, maintaining, and explaining monuments [14]. It focusses on some significant monuments in the US and explains both sides to each story. Howard Zinn makes the insightful point that “when people present a certain point of view of history it’s not controversial, as soon as you present the other side they call it controversial“. That happens even in debates about current issues. Howard also says “to criticise whatever the government does is not anti-America, it’s anti-government, it’s pro-America, it’s pro the people, it’s pro the country“. The song that plays during the closing credits is interesting too.

The music video “Same Love” is one of the best presentations of the argument for marriage equality [15].

Chris Samuel wrote an interesting post about systems locked down for Windows 8 and options for purchasing PCs for running Linux [16]. His solution is to buy from ZaReason. I saw his laptop in action at the last LUV meeting and it looks really nice. Unfortunately a byproduct of the extremely thin form factor is the fact that it lacks a VGA port, this meant that Chris had to use my Thinkpad T61 (which is rather clunky by comparison) for his presentation.

Links November 2012

November 26, 2012 | etbe

Julian Treasure gave an informative TED talk about The 4 Ways Sound Affects US [1]. Among other things he claims that open plan offices reduce productivity by 66%! He suggests that people who work in such offices wear headphones and play bird-songs.

Naked Capitalism has an interesting interview between John Cusack and Jonathan Turley about how the US government policy of killing US citizens without trial demonstrates the failure of their political system [2].

Washington’s blog has an interesting article on the economy in Iceland [3]. Allowing the insolvent banks to go bankrupt was the best thing that they have ever done for their economy.

Clay Shirky wrote an insightful article about the social environment of mailing lists and ways to limit flame-wars [4].

ZRep is an interesting program that mirrors ZFS filesystems via regular snapshots and send/recv operations [5]. It seems that it could offer similar benefits to DRBD but at the file level and with greater reliability.

James Lockyer gave a movingTEDx talk about his work in providing a legal defence for the wrongly convicted [6]. This has included overturning convictions after as much as half a century in which the falsely accused had already served a life sentence.

Nathan Myers wrote an epic polemic about US government policy since 9-11 [7]. It’s good to see that some Americans realise it’s wrong.

There is an insightful TED blog post about TED Fellow Salvatore Iaconesi who has brain cancer [8]. Apparently he had some problems with medical records in proprietary formats which made it difficult to get experts to properly assess his condition. Open document standards can be a matter of life and death and should be mandated by federal law.

Paul Wayper wrote an interesting and amusing post about “Emotional Computing” which compares the strategies of Apple, MS, and the FOSS community among other things [9].

Kevin Allocca of Youtube gave an insightful TED talk about why videos go viral [10].

Jason Fried gave an interesting TED talk “Why Work Doesn’t Happen at Work” [11]. His main issues are distraction and wasted time in meetings. He gives some good ideas for how to improve productivity. But they can also be used for sabotage. If someone doesn’t like their employer then they could call for meetings, incite managers to call meetings, and book meetings so that they don’t follow each other and thus waste more of the day (EG meetings at 1PM and 3PM instead of having the second meeting when the first finishes).

Shyam Sankar gave an interesting TED talk about human computer cooperation [12]. He describes the success of human-computer partnerships in winning chess tournaments, protein folding, and other computational challenges. It seems that the limit for many types of computation will be the ability to get people and computers to work together efficiently.

Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting and amusing article for Locus Magazine about some of the failings of modern sci-fi movies [13]. He is mainly concerned with pointless movies that get the science and technology aspects wrong and the way that the blockbuster budget process drives the development of such movies. Of course there are many other things wrong with sci-fi movies such as the fact that most of them are totally implausible (EG aliens who look like humans).

The TED blog has an interesting interview with Catarina Mota about hacker spaces and open hardware [14].

Sociological Images has an interesting article about sporting behaviour [15]. They link to a very funny youtube video of a US high school football team who make the other team believe that they aren’t playing – until they win [16]

Links October 2012

October 31, 2012 | etbe

The F Word has an informative post about men commenting on Feminist blogs [1]. Most of it applies to any situation where a member of a powerful group comments on an issue related to a minority group. Near the end they say: I’ll also paraphrase and flesh out the most useful piece of advice I ever read, when I made the effort to research white privilege: don’t expect the minority to trust you. Trust is earned, and you’re just another commenter who they can’t tell apart from any other commenter. You’re entering someone else’s space, where different rules apply. You get to have the rest of the world for people to assume you’re a wonderful person. Here, you’re just another one of ‘them’, and given the track record of ‘them’, it’s up to you to listen, learn and prove that you’re being thoughtful and honestly trying to examine your privilege.

Sociological Images has an interesting article on people’s perception of the sky colour – it seems that the “blue sky” meme is modern [2].

Charles Stross wrote an interesting article about the possible uses for future low power computers [3]. He gets a bit over-excited about the possibilities for sensing – making a tiny computer that can sense so many things isn’t going to be easy (DSLRs are big for a reason). But having lots of powerful computers everywhere does provide lots of interesting and potentially bad opportunities.

Martin Bekkelund has an interesting article about Amazon wiping DRM infected books that it had sold to a customer without giving a refund or an explanation [4]. If you want to buy ebooks it seems that the sensible thing to do would be to immediately crack them or download them from The Pirate Bay so Amazon can’t steal them back.

Rebecca Saxe gave an interesting talk about trying to develop methods for conflict resolution through neuroscience [5].

Barry Eisler has written an interesting article about the corruption of journalists [6]. It’s really worth reading, some of the methods of corruption apply to even the more casual bloggers.

Krebs on Security has an informative article about the Microsoft Tech Support phone scams [7]

Links September 2012

September 30, 2012 | etbe

Scott Adams has an interesting idea for political debates he calls “Fact Bubbler” [1]. It sounds implausible the first time you read it, but then so did Wikipedia.

Arstechnica has an interesting article on software defined radio [2]. This could change many things.

The Nieder Family has another update on the way patents threaten their daughter’s ability to communicate [3]. Also Apple is making things worse by taking pre-emptive strikes against iPhone apps which are involved in legal disputes – never use an iPhone (or other proprietary system) for anything important if you have a choice.

In more positive news crowd-funded gene sequencing has found an explanation for Maya Nieder’s developmental delays [4]. This will revolutionise medicine!

Steven Cherry of IEEE Spectrum has an interesting interview with Peter Cappelli about the difficulties that computer and engineering companies have in hiring talented people [5].

The Guardian has an interesting article about the non-profit investigative reporting organisation ProPublica [6]. See the ProPublica.org site for some quality news reports [7].

Michael O.Church wrote an interesting and insightful article about the fate of a “Just a Programmer” in a startup funded by Venture Capitalists [8]. It doesn’t sound good at all.

EyeNetra is developing a smart-phone based system for testing eyes [9]. It’s apparently possible to manufacture glasses for $0.75 so the cost and difficulty of performing eye tests is the main factor that prevents poor people in developing countries from getting glasses. So a cheap portable eye testing system is going to help many people get the glasses they need.

Bryan Gardiner wrote an interesting article for Wired about the “Gorilla” glass that is used in most mobile phones and tablets [10].

Maco wrote an interesting article about crochet and reverse-engineering along with a Python program to print a crochet pattern [11]. I wonder whether anyone has tried to make a crochet robot, something like a 3D printer but which crochet’s things rather than printing them. Holding the wool would be a real challenge, it’s not nearly as easy as printing on something that’s stuck down and incapable of movement.

Links August 2012

August 31, 2012 | etbe

Google are providing some really good employee benefits including benefits to a life partner of a deceased employee [1]. It’s not known if all those benefits are available outside the US, in any case the US is the first world country with the least social security so they need it most there.

A recent Australian legal case had a father petitioning the court to have his kids take his family name [2]. According to the news report no good reason was given for renaming the kids, merely tradition. The mother won.

GlassDoor.com is a site for reviewing companies [3]. It also has job adverts, it seems that they get people in to read the reviews and then advertise jobs.

Sarah Resnick interviewed Jacob Appelbaum (of Tor fame) about privacy issues and published the article as “Leave Your Cellphone at Home” [4]. It’s very interesting and references some resources such as riseup.net that I have to try using.

Systemd in Fedora 17 has multi-seat support [5]. They support plugging USB terminals in at run-time to dynamically add new consoles for GNOME sessions.

The Coding Horror blog has an amusing and informative post about why people shouldn’t learn to code [6].

etbe – Russell Coker

Linux, politics, and other interesting things

Category Archives: Links