Here is a Google Custom Search for Planet Linux Australia (homepage):
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I’ve just been experimenting with Google Custom Search [1]. Below are two custom search engines I created to generate searches for Planet Debian and Planet Ubuntu (for each Planet it searches all the blogs that are syndicated – and doesn’t just get the category that is syndicated). It’s interesting to compare search terms such as “selinux” to get an idea for how much topics are being discussed in the two communities. I’m going to set up cron jobs to update these CSEs as the Planet subscription lists change. Also it would be quite easy for me to set up a custom search that covers both Debian and Ubuntu, and other planets as well. If nothing else this will save me from the problem of finding a blog post that has just scrolled off a Planet that I read. Planet Debian (homepage): Planet Ubuntu (homepage): I have just added two new categories to my blog, one is for the most popular posts [1] (as indicated by the number of hits on the permalink pages). The other is for the best posts [2]. My criteria for adding a post to the best-posts list is that it provides some information that is new or some analysis that others do not appear to have performed, that it doesn’t get refuted by someone else (sometimes an idea seems good but someone points out a flaw), and that there is some level of interest in it from readers (based on page hits, comments, and links from other blogs). Both of these categories may be added to posts some days or weeks after they are published. So adding the feeds for them to a syndication configuration might not be a good idea as they will always include posts that are old. I expect that a typical Planet configuration would never display posts from those feeds. I suggest that other people consider adding similar categories to their blogs. It will allow readers who quickly browse your blog to see the posts that you regard as your best content and other bloggers in the same space to see what gets the most hits (which is worth-while if you don’t consider blogging to be a zero sum game). I expect that someone will suggest that I only write posts that are eligible for the best-posts category. However this is one example of a post which I don’t consider to be eligible but which will still be useful to some people. On scienceblogs.com there is an interesting article about statistics and “The Surge” in Iraq [1]. It explains how there is not yet enough data to statistically determine whether The Surge is succeeding in improving the situation in Iraq. Some of the comments point out that the “ethnic cleansing” in some parts of Iraq has been mostly completed. When one of the groups in a disputed area is annihilated or driven out you can expect a reduction in violence. The Guardian reports that Alan Greenspan has stated in his memoirs [2] “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil“. His meoirs are published as The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World I have just read an interesting post by Ted Ts’O about copyright protection on the net [1]. Ted is well known as a free software programmer, but it’s slightly less well known that he is an avid Science-Fiction fan. In the Free Software community most people seem to be interested in Sci-Fi, but Ted is more interested than most. Ted’s post concerns the irresponsible actions of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America [2] (SFWA). To summarise it they issued DMCA [3] take-down notices for any web page that matched a search on the names “Asimov” or “Silverberg“. I don’t approve of the DMCA laws as a collection, but take-down notices are not necessarily bad (I have issued such notices for unauthorised copies of my own work in the past). The problem in this case is that the words in question are extremely common, not only might they be used as the names for other people (authors or characters) but Asimov in particular is a well known term when describing the potential development of intelligent computers that operate robots (see the Three Laws of Robotics [4]), the term “not Asimov Compliant” has been used by Alastair Reynolds in Century Rain Among the fall-out of the SFWA actions was the removal of a free novel by Cory Doctorow [4]. Incidentally my favourite free to download Cory Doctorow book is Eastern Standard Tribe [5]. craphound.com has Cory’s blog as well as links to other free Sci-Fi that he’s written. Reading the links from Ted’s post took me to a blog entry by the current SFWA vice-president [6] which describes authors such as Cory Doctorow as “webscabs“. This offends me greatly. My work and that of my friends in writing free software could be described in the same way (and in fact is described in a similar way by some software monopolists). Every blogger could have their work described in a similar way by paid journalists. The fact that the SFWA VP is not representing SFWA when writing such comments does little to allay concern about this. It seems to me that people with such ideas are intent on attacking my community, and that it would be wrong of me to give any of them $0.50 by buying one of their books. I resolve to not buy any more Sci-Fi books until I have read all the freely available books that I want to read. After that I will prioritise my book purchases with a significant factor being how well the author gets the concepts of copyright etc. If nothing else an author who can’t understand how copyright (something that is essential to their own livelyhood) interacts with current computer systems will have significant difficulties in predicting how technology and society will develop over the next hundred or thousand years. My problem in reading Sci-Fi books is not in discovering books that are enjoyable and which contain interesting concepts, but in finding time to read them. Thanks to SFWA for giving me an extra criteria to cull the list of books to read. Recently my iRiver [1] H320 had some milk based drink spilt on it. I’m not sure what the drink was (I discovered it when my iRiver stopped working and the drink was dry) but it smelled like coffee or hot chocolate when I washed it off (I considered tasting it but decided that knowing exactly which drink had damaged my iRiver probably wouldn’t help me fix it). The initial problem was that no buttons other than the play button (which is also used to turn it on) worked. When I first discovered this I had no way of hitting the reset button so my iRiver played until the battery ran flat. I tried to disassemble it by removing the five tiny phillips-head screws from the sides, but that didn’t make any part of it loose. I tried using a small amount of force on the front piece of plastic and broke two of the clips that hold it in place while getting another two loose without breaking (but there were still at least four clips to go). Then I realised that the problem was that the keys were physically sticking and that maybe if I washed the keypad out I might get it to work. So I spent some time in a cycle of dripping water into my iRiver, pressing the buttons to get some of the nasty stuff dissolved, and then using a towel to soak up some of the water with milk or whatever. After repeating this for a while the buttons all seemed to work well apart from the play button which kept registering presses when I wasn’t touching it. This meant that it always automatically turned on and then played a song in a stuttering manner as the play button is also the pause button and it paused and played as rapidly as it could. Finally I left it in the sun to dry for a few hours, which seemed to do some good. The play button mostly works now. Also it seems quite easy to get water between the front layer of protective plastic and the layer behind (which actually houses the keypad). So I have several large drops of water spread out between the layers which move around as I squeeze it. I think that if I get that dried out before algae can grow then everything will be fine. I recently wrote about problems with Google Earth [1]. In comments it was pointed out to me that there are some Debian packages of it in contrib. Installing the package ttf-bitstream-vera solved the font problem and running it directly (not through ssh -Y) on a machine with DRI support made it run reasonably fast on a machine with identical hardware to my mother’s. The animation is quite slick when the hardware works, and I have used it a bit. However I’m still disappointed in the program. The animation should be disabled for hardware that doesn’t support it at a reasonable speed (a reasonable default would be to disable animation if the display is :10.0 so that it doesn’t try to do animation over ssh). Also the feature of having movement continue should be disabled if there is any question about the performance. When performance (of scrolling and network access) is good it’s nice to be able to swipe with the mouse and have the scenery slide past until you tell it to stop. When performance is bad it’s annoying to have it keep trying to slide somewhere and make the entire machine run slowly. After having read Brice Goglin’s post about what to expect in X for Lenny [1] the thing that seemed most exciting is the support for Multi-Pointer X [2]. This allows multiple keyboards and mouses with a separate keyboard focus for each. So you can have two people typing two different things on the one desktop. This should be good for training related to GUI programs and will also have some interesting possibilities for large displays. I wonder if the concept of Pair Programming [3] could benefit from having two keyboards and mouses. The idea is that one person isn’t actively coding, but following what the active coder is doing may require reviewing other code that is not visible on screen. Another interesting feature is XACE [4] the X Access Control Extension. Among other things this is used for Security Enhanced X. Hopefully I’ll be able to find time to work on SE-X in Debian before Lenny is released. Eweek has an interesting article about Microsoft’s latest bad hiring idea [1] (their previous one was hiring a model to try and give the idea that IT work is cool [2]). They have created a web site hey-genius.com to try and get people who consider themselves to be geniuses to work for them. One significant problem with this idea is that the amount of ego required to claim the title of genius is significantly greater than the amount of ego that makes it impossible for two people to work in the same office. Google’s methods of trying to attract candidates are much more sensible, for example setting mathematical and logical problems and inviting people who can solve them to apply for work. People who can solve maths and logic puzzles tend to be good programmers because essentially programming is about solving such puzzles while also relying on having memorised a huge number of facts and numbers. If you can solve the logic puzzles then you are probably half-way to becoming a decent programmer. The next problem is that the web site doesn’t work very well. In fact it works so badly that some people have suggested that the aim of the exercise is to make job offers to the people who give the best suggestions as to how to improve the web site. It gave a black window with Konqueror and with Firefox it didn’t appear to offer full functionality (and required a pop-up for no good reason too). But one useful thing about it is that it links to the Microsoft Jobs Blog [3] which is a really good recruiting idea. There are posts about various benefits that MS offers it’s employees, about visits by MS representatives to schools, and other things that will surely be of interest to people who like MS. I recommend that everyone who works in HR reads that blog and considers whether something similar would work for them (I think it would work for all large companies). Another interesting thing to note is that there are glamour photos of recruiting agents. I suggested in my previous post that they should “find some cute female MS employees and get them to do the promotion”, well it seems that MS was already doing similar things before I suggested it! One significant thing that they could do to improve their jobs blogging is to have a blog with job adverts with category based feeds for all the different categories. This would permit someone who is interested in XML work to get a feed of the XML jobs category and wait for something suitable to come up. I believe that every company that advertises more than two positions per year should have a RSS feed of the job adverts. It allows syndication feeds of adverts from multiple companies which job seekers can poll for positions that match their skills. |
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. I’ve added it to my 
to refer to a class of military robots that have no compunction about killing humans.