Paul Graham has recently published an essay titled How To Disagree [1]. One form that he didn’t mention is to claim that a disagreement is a matter of opinion. Describing a disagreement about an issue which can be proved as a matter of opinion is a commonly used method of avoiding the need to offer any facts or analysis. Sam Varghese published an article about the Debian OpenSSL issue and quoted me [2]. The Basic AI Drives [3] is an interesting papar about what might motivate an AI and how AIs might modify themselves to better achieve their goals. It also has some insights into addiction and other vulnerabilities in human motivation. It seems that BeOS [4] is not entirely dead. The Haiku OS project aims to develop an open source OS for desktop computing based on BeOS [5]. It’s not nearly usable for end-users yet, but they have vmware snapshots that can be used for development. On my Document Blog I have described how to debug POP problems with the telnet command [6]. Some users might read this and help me fix their email problems faster. I know that most users won’t be able to read this, but the number of people who can use it will surely be a lot greater than the number of people who can read the RFCs… Singularity tales is an amusing collection of short stories [7] about the Technological Singularity [8]. A summary of the banana situation [9]. Briefly describes how “banana republics” work and the fact that a new variety of the Panama disease is spreading through banana producing countries. Given the links between despotic regimes and banana production it’s surprising that no-one is trying to spread the disease faster. Maybe Panama disease could do for South America what the Boll weevil did for the south of the US [10]. Jeff Dean gives an interesting talk about the Google server architecture [11]. One thing I wonder about is whether they have experimented with increasing the chunk size over the years. It seems that the contiguous IO performance of disks has been steadily increasing while the seek performance has stayed much the same, and the dramatic increases in the amount of RAM you can get for any given amount of money over the last few years have been amazing. So it seems that now it’s possible to read larger chunks of data in the same amount of time and more easily store such large chunks in memory.

• [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html


• [2] http://www.itwire.com/content/view/18376/1090/1/0/


• [3] http://selfawaresystems.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/ai_drives_final.pdf


• [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS


• [5] http://www.haiku-os.org/


• [6] http://doc.coker.com.au/internet/how-to-debug-pop/


• [7] http://www.vivtek.com/fiction/singularity_tales/


• [8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity


• [9] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/opinion/18koeppel.html?ei=5087&em=&en=acf4d20d4c12e559&ex=1214020800&pagewanted=print


• [10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boll_Weevil_Monument


• [11] http://www.youtube.com/v/qsan-GQaeyk

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I maintain a number of web shops for our webmaster cooperative and one of our main challenges is to encourage people who put things into their basket/cart to actually buy them. How to avoid shopping cart abandonment by Graham Jones makes some points that I've identified as possible reasons for people not buying in the past: comparisons, robots and not trusting the site enough to give payment details. There's not much we can do about robots or people comparison-shopping at a technical level, but we try to build some trust by publishing the shop owner's geographic address and telephone number (which I think is required by law in England for most web shops now), making sure the SSL certificate and domain registration details are correct, using reputable payment providers and being clear about delivery charges and terms. The point about the slickness of the checkout process is a good one and one that we've only recently started to work on. We've had pretty good results from making the checkout slicker on one site. It looks like two-thirds of people who click the checkout button now continue to buy, putting it comfortably ahead of current UK averages but I need to tweak our stats calculator to make the report directly comparable. Nevertheless, I think those improvements will be added to our other shops as soon as possible. I share Graham's low opinion of the oft-quoted Amazon. We've also been looking at other web shop software besides OSCommerce for a new project, so now would be a good time to change to something new if it improves the checkout a lot. We've made OSCommerce's checkout a lot smoother, but it's still essentially OSC. Is there a good checkout which you'd want to use as an example? The other challenge is getting visitors onto the site in the first place. How To Build Links By Patrick Altoft explains the basics as well as I've seen recently.

Michelle’s post‡ today on laptops in the classroom (in a similar vein to this article I read last month on the suggestion of Glenn Reynolds) reminded me that I had a few items from the past few weeks still in my Google Reader queue of “things to blog about” related to Margaret Soltan’s continuing crusade against the use of PowerPoint* and its ilk, and specifically Timothy Burke’s partial rebuttal:

What’s the difference between bad usage of PowerPoint in lectures and bad lectures that involve hand-outs, overhead transparencies and writing on the chalkboard? Are we just complaining about old wine in new bottles here? Is the real culprit professorial droning at classrooms of 200+ students followed by recite-repeat-and-forget examinations? I think it’s at least plausible that the technology is just giving us a new reason to pay attention to a pedagogy whose effectiveness has been suspect for two generations.

I dare say I’m among the last doctoral students who was “trained”—and I use that word loosely—to teach prior to the widespread use of PowerPoint. Four years of full-time in-classroom experience, mostly with small lectures and seminars, has brought me basically to agreement with Burke on this point—complaints about PowerPoint essentially boil down to complaints about either instructional laziness or the whole nature of lecturing, or as a Burke commenter puts it, ”[e]xactly how does one teach even 80† students at once without succumbing to passive data transfer?” The non-use of PowerPoint or some other form of instructional technology seems to me to be a luxury confined to those who only teach small seminars and graduate students, and while my personal career aspirations lean in that direction the reality is that I’m several years away (in terms of research productivity) from being there—if I ever get there. Burke in his comments hits the nail on the head, I think, when it comes to any sort of visual presentation in class:

It seems to me that the absolutely key thing is to avoid speaking the slides literally. They’re best as definitions, key concepts, images: the kind of thing you’d stop your flow of lecturing to write on the chalkboard. They’re not the lecture itself.

I think there are three useful aspects to a lecture: what you put on the board (or slides), what you say, and the general outline. If you’re preparing a handout or something to stick on Blackboard for students, the outline or outline-plus-slides is what they need, along with space to fill in the gaps. An alternative approach is to make the slides/board material the outline; several of the more effective teachers I had (my high school history teacher and a political science professor at Rose-Hulman) took that approach. But you can’t shovel your script into PowerPoint and expect that to work well, any more than you’d expect that writing it up on the board, or for that matter reading a paper verbatim at a conference would be a good presentation, to work. All this discussion leaves aside the question of teaching anything that involves symbols (chemistry, mathematics, statistics) which I think requires a different approach than bullet-points. In class, mathematics and statistics (and, by extension, social science research methods courses) lend themselves to a combination of “passive” PowerPoint-style presentation and more spontaneous problem-solving and brainstorming; for example, one of my early activities is to have the class try to operationalize (define in terms of a measurable quantity or quality) a concept like “globalization,” which you can’t really do with a static slideshow even though you can define terms like “operationalization” that way. Similarly, while you can step through the process of solving a problem in a slideshow I think it’s more effective to demonstrate how to step through the process on the board. Unfortunately, many classrooms aren’t set up to allow you to present and use a board simultaneously; some of TAMIU‘s lecture halls have a nice design where the projection screen is above the board, so you can write on the board without having to do anything special with the slideshow, but rooms most places are designed for “either-or” which can be a real pain—fiddle with the control system to blank the screen, raise the screen, write on the board, then lower the screen, switch the screen back on. After a few iterations of that in a single class, you’ll never do it again. I freely admit I haven’t figured everything out yet; my current methods slides are pretty good lecture notes but pretty rotten for projection. One of my projects for this summer (postponed from last summer after I learned I wouldn’t be teaching any methods courses this year) is to work on my research methods lectures to incorporate advice from Andrew Gelman’s book so I can lay the groundwork for my plot to take over the world effort to produce a workable, but rigorous, methods curriculum at both the undergraduate and master’s levels for political science, sociology, and (at the grad level) public administration. More on this theme from Laura at 11D, who takes note of some of the more positive technological developments associated with academe. And, another of Burke’s commenters links this hilarious example of what not to do with your slides.

* I use “PowerPoint” as shorthand for the use of a computer-projector based slideshow-style sequential presentation of items associated with a lecture, a technique obviously made famous by the Microsoft software package but also available with many other software packages such as Apple’s Keynote, OpenOffice.org Impress, and several PDF viewers including Adobe Reader, xpdf, and GNOME‘s Evince.
† I’d put the cutoff significantly lower, at around 30–40 students. Beyond that point, one might as well just blow the cap off the class.
‡ By the way, it’s nice to see Michelle’s blog back from haïtus! (Where else would I keep up with current Mexican politics?)

I'm just old enough to have only discovered the internet at about the time I graduated from high school, and have been using it for about 15 years. Every once in a while though, it comes back and hits me just how cool the whole thing is. Not "yeah, neat", but a serious wow at just how amazing it is to be able to communicate with people the world over. I think the first time that happened was when I had been exploring some of the early nineties internet - gopher and the web with lynx. Which was neat, but not in the "wow" sense. Then I stumbled on to IRC somehow, and since at the time I'd already started taking Italian courses, I thought I'd see if there was an Italian channel. There was, and I think the conversation went something like this:

me: so, where are you guys? someone: Italy, and you? me: Oregon, but, no, seriously, where are you? someone: Italy! me: Seriously?!

It was a very concrete demonstration of the fact, that, thanks to this new thing, I could talk to people all over the world, for free! Of course I've grown used to this, and take for granted that I can call my parents in Oregon via Skype for free, and a lot of other cool things, but once in a while something makes me take a step back and say "cool!". Most recently, a web site I follow that I follow has had an interesting back and forth between Paul Graham and David Heinemeier Hansson, with additional comments by the likes of Paul Buchheit, which, agree or disagree with their modus operandi, is an impressive cast of characters to be able to interact with, and learn from, without moving from my perch up here in the middle of the Tyrolean Alps.

Not done one of these round-ups for a while and I'm really pushed for time today, so here are some sites that I've written on:

1. Property of a Lady Wicca on House
2. Ross Burton: The End Of Homeopathy?
3. Enough with the dried yoghurt covered raisins Korerorero: Just random ranting and raving
4. How to host a free software advocacy event Free Software Magazine
5. Raw Output: AGPL
6. One for the Morning Glory: Facebook comments
7. Sam Liddicott GPL3 Questions and Implications
8. Drugs and an Election etbe
9. New Tropicana images
10. robmyers - Support BY-SA/SFDL Compatibility, Not BY-SA/FDL Compatibility
11. Internet Psychology: Teenagers do not need our help online - we need them to help us oldies by Graham Jones, Internet Psychologist
12. Wanting Your Opinions about Blog Comments and City Attorneys : David Lee King
13. Zookoda - I Don't Recommend them Anymore
14. Solar Water Heating :: ShowBlog
15. Internet Psychology: Forget email - it's old hat by Graham Jones, Internet Psychologist
16. Drake.org.uk: That's a wrap! Time to roll the end credits..
17. Internet Psychology: Internet criminals are going to have a field day by Graham Jones, Internet Psychologist
18. A Cambridge Co-operator: Rebranded Stores
19. robmyers - Two Common Errors
20. Lucas Nussbaum's Blog Blog Archive Where is the NM bottleneck?
21. NM: FD is fixed - MadBlog

Reading Paul Graham's latest as well as having written a few things today that involved considerable rewriting before I sent them out (this blog entry not^W amoung them!), I'd like the following: A way, when saving a file in vim, to have it replay the undo buffer in reverse, outputtng whole series of snapshots documenting the changes that were made to the file. And an easy way to commit those snapshots, in order, to git, at the same time the final file is checked in. This would address that period in the lifecycle of a file when it's too new, its author too busy, and its situation too precarious, for it to be checked in yet. These early stages can be very interesting, and generally go unrecorded.

I'm currently part way through testing Chronicle and I'm probably going to change the address of my blog (with Redirects) as part of that. I don't much like having blog in the address and some research seems to agree with me. I've lived with this mistake for four years now, through various software upgrades, so I'll take the chance to change. But what should I change the path to? /writing/reflections/ /news/ /notes/ /articles/ or something else? Vote now by leaving a comment! Oh and about the debian project leader vote: reluctant candidates are good, teams are good, people who already have had high office are less good. Go vote on that too if you can.

Nick Leeson: The financial storm is not over yet

Surreal to see his byline on an article the same day as a rogue trader comes to light... "Cutting interest rates has stemmed the flow for now, but 2008 will see higher energy costs, higher food costs and higher importing costs which will damage consumer confidence. Right now we can only look to Davos and hope that the global economic leaders can keep positive and stop the markets from spiralling further downwards"

SFinfo TV Schedule for Sunday

SFinfo is carrying some of the Davos meeting live again (where corporations tell governments how to direct their populations). Only interesting thing left in my opinion is the Climate Change forum on Sunday morning. Watch and see where our glorious overlords will be taking us.

How to block all Facebook application and message spam

Practical freedom from Matt Lee's Exploring Freedom.

Valuing Users by Allowing Comments : David Lee King

It makes sense - you know it does.

Internet Psychology: Podcasting? That's old-fashioned - video is the online future by Graham Jones, Internet Psychologist

Maybe I just forgot the obvious, or maybe we haven't really seen what people can do with podcasting yet.

Gaba en San Pancho Blog Archive what things to check when buying an used car

Worst used car I ever saw had a split hose leaking petrol from the carb feed onto the engine block - switching that one off when I asked was the fastest I ever saw a car salesman move!

Modern Communicator: Imarco Activ-Media have been acquired

Personally, I find one of the benefits of working in cooperatives is that it's very difficult for us to be acquired and good collaboration is much more common than merging.

sab39 ... O noes, somebody I don't like did something I agree with!

I feel the point about the bozo bit is well-made. Is one of the few features of my weak memory a low probability that I keep the bozo bit set in the long term?

How You Can Fine-Tune Your Blogger Personality Perception

How do you repair a broken perception? Can you repair it, or is it time to delete the blog and start again at a new address? Can you start again, or does web.archive mean past mistakes will hurt you forever?

robmyers - My Ogg Player

I never succeeded in accessing anything besides basic file upload/removal on my YP-U2 and Samsung Support broke promises they made to me.

another blog is possible Give cyclists a break

"Those of you drive should read this article and change your behavior towards cyclists. You may not like cyclists in the road, but they have every right to be there."

Pelican has decided to abandon his efforts to scale the walls of the legal academy and proposes this simple eight-step program for others who would follow in his footsteps:

1. Don t do interdisciplinary work. The legal academy doesn t know what to make of it unless it is economics.
2. Don t go to a school without a law review or grades. I did and it was a huge problem.
3. Get on law review, clerk, write.
4. Check the faculty listings at most law schools. Go to the most often listed schools: Harvard, Yale, etc. It does matter as law faculty select their own, usually. I was told by a faculty member as a 1L expressing interest in the academy that I should transfer immediately to Harvard if possible. I didn t.
5. If you think you want to be a legal academic, look at what is on the FAR form in your first or second year. Orient your academic career to produce a good looking FAR.
6. Remarkably, the legal academy does not care about your ability to raise research money or bring in grants.
7. Don t publish in interdisciplinary journals. Publish only in law reviews writing only dense and impenetrable texts.
8. Demonstrated impact of your work in policy or law is not relevant.

This critique could be extended broadly to much of the academy (not just law schools). I had once thought I might like to teach law, but now I can only really see myself as a clinician. Two contradictory academic trends:

• The tendency toward dense, impractical writing that only makes sense to other insiders. This is often but not exclusively the influence of postmodernism. Steve recently brought Chomsky’s response to postmodern thought to my attention. It boils down to this: sure, it might be complicated. But there are lots of other fields that are complicated–quantum mechanics, nanotechnology, even game theory–in which an expert can still explain to a bright layperson the contours of the field sufficient for the layperson to get the gist of it, even if they can’t grasp all the details without extensive study. This doesn’t seem to be true of postmodern philosophy. Is the emperor naked? Paul Graham’s How to Do Philosophy reflects a similar attitude with less of a political bent, although my friends pursuing philosophy doctorates claim Graham has got it all wrong.
• The tendency to reduce all disciplines to a science, particular the humanities and social sciences. This can either mean approaching the study with some method that approaches “scientific rigor” or literally basing the analysis in an already recognized science, preferably neuroscience. While I can see some sense in incorporating neuroscience, cognitive science, and certainly psychology into fields such as economics, I don’t think this is a good thing to the extent it overwhelms other modes of analysis, particular for literature. Neuroscientist/author Jonah Lehrer discussed this phenomenon (and its drawbacks) with Christopher Lydon in an episode of the newly-revived Radio Open Source. (Warning to Debian readers: Radio Open Source has very little to do with open source software.)

Technorati Tags: Law, Legal Academy, Postmodernism, Neuroscience, Jonah Lehrer, Paul Graham, Philosophy, Noam Chomsky, Christopher Lydon

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I bought this book by Daniel Silva last week at SFO, faced with a long wait for the red eye back home, since I recalled hearing about it on NPR, and reading a review in Time magazine, or was it the New Yorker? Anyway, the review said he is his generation s finest writer of international intrigue, one of America s most gifted spy novelists ever. I guess Graham Greene and John le Carre belong to an older generation. Anyway, everything I read or heard about it was very positive. Daniel Silva is far less cynical than Le Carre, and his world does not gel quite as well, to my ears, as Smiley s circus did. The hero, Gabriel Allon, does have some super human traits, but, thank the lord, is not James bond. I was impressed by Silva s geo-politics, though - paragraphs from the book seem to appear almost verbatim in current event reports in the International Herald Tribune and BBC stories. I like this books (to the extent of ordering another 7 from this author from Amazon today), and appreciate the influx of new blood in the international espionage market. Lately, the genre has been treated by lack luster, mediocre knock offs of the Bourne Identity and the engaging pace of the original has never been successfully replicated in the sequels. And Silva s writing is better than Ludlum s.

Pia writes about the difficulty in getting young women and young people in general into the computer industry [1]. While I agree that having more women in the computer industry would be a good thing, I have difficulty believing some of the claims that Pia makes. For example the claim that “[girls] are more career focused earlier in their school life“. I chose my career when I was about 11 years old [2] and several of my friends made similar decisions at similar ages. I would be interested to read anecdotal evidence from women in the computer industry about how old they were when they decided on their career and if their friends did the same, a reference to any research on this topic would also be useful. I tend to believe that boys are more career focussed at all stages of their life but have little evidence to support this idea. One fact that seems obvious is that the idea that “if you don’t succeed in your career then you can always marry someone who does” is almost non-existent among boys. It seems likely that such ideas have a statistically relevant affect on the focus on career of boys vs girls. Also the Australian Bureau of Statistics reports that the MEDIAN income for women is significantly lower than for men [4], I find it difficult to imagine that girls could be more career focussed from a younger age and yet get significantly lower pay (note the fact that it’s median not mean income is very significant as it removes the “glass ceiling” effect). Phillip Greenspun writes about why there are so few women doing scientific research [6] and makes some good points about why scientific research is generally not well paid and therefore a university student would choose a career in some other area and suggests that it’s a macho thing that guys enter such competitive fields for relatively low wages. Maybe some women correctly assess the costs and benefits of a career in scientific research and then make the mistake of equating Computer Science to other branches of science. But the median income suggests that although there may be some valid reasons for avoiding science that would only cover a small portion of the problem (the difference in median income can not be explained by misplaced attempts to maximise income). One problem that is significant is the quality of school education for girls. Not only is there the issue that boys may crowd-out girls for some subjects that are supposedly traditionally for boys (such as all science) but even girls schools aren’t as good as they should be. Some time ago I was talking to a teacher at an all-girls school, the school was moderately expensive and parents were paying the extra money presumably to give their daughters educational opportunities that they might miss in a co-ed school. However the school did not teach hard maths (”Maths B” was the official name at the time) and only taught the easy maths (official name “Maths A” and unofficial name “Vegie Maths“) because they didn’t have many girls demanding it (which is probably difficult to measure if you don’t offer it as a reasonable option) and the girls who wanted to study it could always move to a different school. So the choice facing girls at the exclusive school in question was “skip the subject that is most useful for further studies in most science subjects” or “go to a different school and miss most of your friends“, this sort of decision would surely discourage some potential female computer programemers. Also I think that the difference between boys and girls in regard to studying computer science has a lot to do with the fact that given a choice between missing most of their friends and missing out on something related to computers would be a no-brainer for most boys. Paul Graham’s article about Nerds has some interesting points to make in this regard - maybe the problem is that girls aren’t Nerdish enough [5]. Pia also writes about parents and teachers advising children not do study IT because of a perceived lack of jobs. I think that the problem here is not just bad advice, but also a bad tendency to take advice. Someone who wants to study in an established field which changes little over time (law and accounting spring to mind) probably should take careful note of the advice that they are given - things haven’t changed much in the last few decades. But someone who wants to study in a field that changes rapidly and where every year has new and significant developments (of which the best example is the computer industry) should probably be quite skeptical of all advice - most advice about the computer industry concerns how things used to be not how things are. Finally when considering whether to accept advice you should consider who is offering it. For example advice from a hiring manager should be carefully noted (as the manager will tell you precisely what factors influence their own decisions on hiring). Advice from people who are successful in the industry should also be noted. Advice from a school career advisor who gets paid about 1/3 what any 25yo can earn in the computer industry should be entirely ignored. I wonder whether being hesitant to ignore advice is a problem for girls in this regard. When I was in year 11 I had to take a subject related to career planning. It covered some things that were of minor use (such as writing CVs) and had an assignment of writing a fictional CV for yourself a few years after leaving university. I received bad marks for preparing a CV that involved changing jobs as companies went bankrupt or projects failed due to bad management, I was told that if your employer fails in the market it makes you look bad! However my fictional CV did bear some resemblance to what really happened… In terms of what industries have jobs available, the best advice I can give students is to actively do some research of their own. It’s not difficult to get the jobs sections of some newspapers and do a quick scan to see how many positions are open in a field, and it’s even easier to do some searches on online jobs sites (which usually tell you how many positions posted in the last X days match your criteria). For example I just visited jobserve.com.au and found 1724 Engineering jobs and 5622 IT jobs advertised. If you compare this to the university intake (I visited the Swinburne university courses list [3] and found 25 IT courses vs 29 Engineering course) it seems that the ratio of Engineering graduates to jobs is not likely to be as good as that for CS graduates. Of course it may be that all the other universities have hardly any Engineering courses and balance the ratio out (but I doubt it). In any case this would be a good way of injecting some facts into a discussion of the relative merits of different career choices and avoiding it being an issue of parents/teachers not liking computers vs children liking them. Determining the relative pay rates of different industries is a lot more difficult (and requires a significant amount of work), some recruiting agencies publish statistics - but those stats only apply to the positions that they fill (which is a sub-set of the actual positions). Finally as a piece of advice for children, try and find a job that you enjoy. If you earn $30K doing something you enjoy then you’ll probably be happier than if you earn $100K doing something you hate. Also if you enjoy your work then you will probably be able to take the extra steps needed to become successful - often it’s not a choice between having fun or making good money but a choice between fun and good money or the absence of both. If someone tells you to avoid doing what you love and instead do something boring for some unsubstantiated belief that there would be more money in it then be a nerd and tell them that their opinion is not relevant (it does tend to make teachers angry though).

• [1] http://pipka.org/blog/2007/10/09/getting-girls-and-gen-y-into-it/


• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/08/23/the-start-of-my-computer-career/


• [3] http://courses.swinburne.edu.au/


• [4] http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs%40.nsf/7d12b0f6763c78caca257061001cc588/96e08af8f4178a45ca257306000d4fd4


• [5] http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html


• [6] http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

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It seems that the majority of blog traffic (at least in blogs I read) is time-based. It is personal-diary entry posts, references to current events, predictions about future events, bug reports, and other things that either become obsolete or for which it’s important to know the date. For such posts it makes sense to have the date be part of the Permalink URL, and in the normal course of events such posts will tend not to be updated after release. Another type of blog traffic is posts that have ongoing reference value which will (ideally) be actively maintained to keep them current. For such posts it makes sense to have no date stamp in the Permalink - for example if I update a post about installing SE Linux on Etch once Lenny is released (a significant update) I don’t want people ignoring it when it comes up in search engines (or worse having search engines score it down) because the URL indicates that it was written some time before the release of Etch. Wordpress supports Pages as separate entities to Posts, and the names of Pages are direct links under the root of the Wordpress installation. However there is no RSS feed for Pages (AFAIK - I may have missed something) and the Wordpress themes often treat Pages differently (which may not be what you want for timeless posts). Also it is not unreasonable to have Pages and timeless posts. I’m thinking of creating a separate Wordpress installation for posts that I intend to manage for long periods of time with updates (such as documenting some aspects of software I have written). The management options for a blog server program provide significant benefits over editing HTML files. The other option would be to use a different CMS (a blog server being a sub-category of a CMS) to store such things. What I want is a clear way of presenting the data with minimal effort from me (an advantage of Wordpress for this is that I have already invested a significant amount of effort in learning how it works) and editing from remote sites (the offline blog editing tools that are just coming out is a positive point for using a blog server - particularly as I could use the same editor for blog posts and documents). Any suggestions as to how to do this? Then of course there’s the issue of how to syndicate this. For my document blog (for want of a better term) I am thinking of updating the time-stamp on a post every time I make a significant change. If you subscribe to the document feed than that would be because you want to receive new copies of the documents as they are edited. The other option would be to not change the time-stamp and then include the feed along with my regular blog feed (making two feeds be served as one is not a technical challenge). If I was to update the time stamps then I would have to write posts announcing the release of new documents. Does anyone know of someone who writes essays or howto documents in a similar manner to Rick Moen [1] or Paul Graham [2] who also does daily blog posts? I’d like to see some examples of how others have solved these problems (if there are any).

• [1] http://linuxmafia.com/


• [2] http://www.paulgraham.com/

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Since the closure of SoFlow and adding myself to LinkedIn, I've been thinking a bit about Professional Associations and using Social Networks (SNs) for business. I've not worked out my answers, so this is a "dear lazyweb, what pieces of this jigsaw am I missing?" post. Much of the recent mainstream news has been about the legal problems of SNs - for example, see BBC: Web networkers 'at risk of fraud' (which was also in items on a recent Click show on BBC World and News24) and BBC: Facebook site faces fraud claim - or about how they could Save The World, like BBC: Social net offers new perspective I think there's a bigger problem which will stop SNs making a deep-change to online activity. Each time a SN like SoFlow closes, it wastes some resources of its members. I'm starting to side with other developers in being tired of seeing my input turn to bitrot, through buggy software or buggy business models. I'm not alone: see Gunnar Wolf: On social networks for example. A good idea seems to be on Slashdot: It's Time for Social Networks to Open Up but how? Each SN seems to guard its dark corners as vital elements of its business model. Should we look to our Professional Associations to create new Open Social Networks (OSNs)? After all, SNs aren't the core money-makers for professional associations. But, the biggest problem with Professional Associations is picking a trustworthy one - one which will do what it says on the tin, instead of taking your subscription, then undermining you. Consider the British Computer Society and its OSSG License: how many of its members really wanted another software copyright licence? Fortunately, it was spotted - Volunteer brickbat thrower needed in London (Tuesday 24th 6pm) - and the Report from BCS OSSG meeting on a new FS license suggests the negative feedback was loud and clear, so hopefully we won't see that again. If I was a BCS member, I'd probably not renew after helping to fund that harmful activity. librarian.net: choosing your battles and choosing your professional associations talks a little about some library associations as a sort of case study which many will recognise as familiar, but there's an interesting comment from Blake there:

"I think there's an association out there for everyone."

Is there? What association is out there for liberal hackers and webmasters? I don't think I've found it yet. So, should we be looking at ourselves, rather than existing professional associations? Can we do Open Social Networks peer-to-peer in a meaningful way? Are we already doing it with blog feeds? How should we expand on that? Although I disagree with the conclusion that using another Social Network site with an uncertain business model is How to succeed with social networking, the article also mentions that

"social networking is in its infancy and that it will not really get underway until we have portable profiles and interconnectivity"

In other words, it's our revolution - let's steal it back. (Update: 2007-09-27: 1 comment)

Great essay from Paul Graham about why college prestige doesn’t matter. (I wish I had both the time and ability to churn out his volume of high-quality writing.) My favorite parts were the following two footnotes:

…No one ever measures recruiters by the later performance of people they turn down.[2]…

[2] Actually, someone did, once. Mitch Kapor’s wife Freada was in charge of HR at Lotus in the early years. (As he is at pains to point out, they did not become romantically involved till afterward.) At one point they worried Lotus was losing its startup edge and turning into a big company. So as an experiment she sent their recruiters the resumes of the first 40 employees, with identifying details changed. These were the people who had made Lotus into the star it was. Not one got an interview.

…Obviously you can’t prove this in the case of a single individual, but you can tell from aggregate evidence: you can’t, without asking them, distinguish people who went to one school from those who went to another three times as far down the US News list. [3]… [3] The US News list? Surely no one trusts that. Even if the statistics they consider are useful, how do they decide on the relative weights? The reason the US News list is meaningful is precisely because they are so intellectually dishonest in that respect. There is no external source they can use to calibrate the weighting of the statistics they use; if there were, we could just use that instead. What they must do is adjust the weights till the top schools are the usual suspects in about the right order. So in effect what the US News list tells us is what the editors think the top schools are, which is probably not far from the conventional wisdom on the matter. The amusing thing is, because some schools work hard to game the system, the editors will have to keep tweaking their algorithm to get the rankings they want.

As an alum of a fairly prestigious institution, I think I endorse Graham’s conclusions.

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One problem with the blog space is that there is a lot of negativity. Many people seem to think that if they don’t like a blog post then the thing to do is to write a post complaining about it - or even worse a complaint that lacks specific details to such an extent that the subject of the complaint would be unable to change their writing in response. The absolute worst thing to do is to post a complaint in a forum that the blog author is unlikely to read - which would be a pointless whinge that benefits no-one. Of course an alternate way for the recipient to takeg such complaints as suggested by Paul Graham is “you’re on the right track when people complain that you’re unqualified, or that you’ve done something inappropriate” and “if they’re driven to such empty forms of complaint, that means you’ve probably done something good” (Paul was talking about writing essays not blogs, but I’m pretty sure that he intended it to apply to blogs too). If you want to actually get a blog author (or probably any author) to make a change in their material in response to your comments then trying to avoid empty complaints is a good idea. Another useful point Paul makes in the same essay is ““Inappropriate” is the null criticism. It’s merely the adjective form of “I don’t like it.”” - something that’s worth considering given the common criticism of particular blog content as being “inappropriate” for an aggregation feed that is syndicating it. Before criticising blog posts you should consider that badly written criticism may result in more of whatever it is that you object to. If you find some specific objective problem in the content or presentation of a blog the first thing to do is to determine the correct way of notifying the author. I believe that it’s a good idea for the author to have an about page which either has a mailto URL or a web form for sending feedback, I have a mailto on my about page - (here’s the link). Another possible method of contact is a comment on a blog post, if it’s an issue for multiple posts on the blog then writing a comment on the most recent post will do (unless of course it’s a comment about the comment system being broken). For those who are new to blogging, the blog author has full control over what happens to comments. If they decide that your comment about the blog color scheme doesn’t belong on a post about C programming then they can respond to the comment in the way that they think best (making a change or not and maybe sending you an email about it) and then delete the comment if they wish. If there is an issue that occurs on multiple blogs then a good option is to write a post about the general concept as I did in the case of column width in blogs where I wrote about one blog as an example of a problem that affects many blogs. I also described how I fixed my own blog in this regard (in sufficient detail to allow others to do the same). Note that most blogs have some degree of support for Linkback so any time you link to someone else’s blog post they will usually get notified in some way. On my blog I have a page for future posts where I invite comments from readers as to what I plan to write about next. Someone who prefers that I not write about topic A could write a comment requesting that I write about topic B instead. Wordpress supports pages as a separate type of item to posts. A post is a dated entry while pages are not sorted in date order and in most themes are displayed prominently on the front page (mine are displayed at the top). I suggest that other bloggers consider doing something comparable. One thing I considered is running a wiki page for the future posts. One of the problems with a wiki page is that I would need to maintain my own private list which is separate, while a page with comments allows only me to edit the page in response to comments and then use the page as my own to-do list. I may experiment with such a wiki page at some future time. One possibility that might be worth considering is a wiki for post requests for any blog that is syndicated by a Planet. For example a wiki related to Planet Debian might request a post about running Debian on the latest SPARC systems, the first blogger to write a post on this topic could then remove the entry from the wish-list (maybe adding the URL to a list of satisfied requests). If the person who made the original request wanted a more detailed post covering some specific area they could then add such a request to the wish-list page. If I get positive feedback on this idea I’ll create the wiki pages and add a few requests for articles that would interest me to start it up. Finally to encourage the production of content that you enjoy reading I suggest publicly thanking people who write posts that you consider to be particularly good. One way of thanking people is to cite their posts in articles on your own blog (taking care to include a link to at least one page to increase their Technorati rank) or web site. Another is to include a periodic (I suggest monthly at most) links post that contains URLs of blog posts you like along with brief descriptions of the content. If you really like a post then thank the author by not only giving a links with a description (to encourage other people to read it) but also describe why you think it’s a great post. Also if recommending a blog make sure you give a feed URL so that anyone who wants to subscribe can do it as easily as possible (particularly for the blogs with a bad HTML layout). Here are some recent blog posts that I particularly liked:

• Security Anti-Pattern: Path based access control from Joshua Brindle (feed). A fairly strong criticism of path based access control (as used in AppArmor). I’d have written something about this myself but Joshua did it so well that there’s no need. His post about Status Quo Encapsulation is also a good read. It’s a pity that Joshua doesn’t write more than two posts a month.


• Federico’s post about concrete for housing. Some technical data and some good pictures. (feed)


• Tim Connor’s blog posts about Australian politics (feed), particularly this post about interest rates (especially his latest comment). It’s a pity that Livejournal seems to offer no good options for searching and the comment in question has broken links. I would be happy to offer advice if Tim wanted to switch to a self-hosted Wordpress installation (as would some other bloggers who are members of our local LUG).

Here are some blogs that I read regularly:

• Problogger (feed), I don’t think that I’ll be a full-time blogger in the forseeable future, but his posts have lots of good ideas for anyone who wants to blog effectively. I particulaly appreciate the short posts with simple suggestions.


• Mega Tokyo (feed) - A manga comic on the web. The amusing portrayal of computer gaming fanatics will probably remind most people in the computer industry of some of their friends.


• Defence and the National Interest (feed). The most interesting part of this (and the only reason I regularly read it) is the blog of William S. Lind (titled On War. William writes some very insightful posts about military strategy and tactics but some things about politics will offend most people who aren’t white Christian conservatives.
  
  It’s a pity that there is not a more traditional blog feed for the data, the individual archives contain all posts and there seems to be no possibility of viewing the posts for the last month (for people who read it regularly in a browser and don’t use an RSS feed) and no search functionality built in.


• WorseThanFailure.com (was TheDailyWTF.com) (feed) subtitled Curious Perversions in Information Technology. Many amusing anecdotes that illustrate how IT projects can go wrong. This is useful for education, amusement, and as a threat (if you do THAT then we could submit to WorseThanFailure.com).


• XKCD - a stick-figure web comic, often criticised for the drawing quality by people who just don’t get it, some people read comics for amusement and insightful commentry not drawings. It’s yet another example of content beating presentation when there’s a level playing field.

Finally I don’t read it myself, but CuteOverload.com is a good site to refer people to when they claim that the Internet is too nasty for children - the Internet has lots of pictures of cute animals!

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Growing up in Eugene, Oregon, which like Berkeley or Boulder could have the label "People's Republic of" applied to it, I always thought of "business friendly", as something along the lines of helping huge corporations avoid laws against pollution, or other antisocial behavior. Only after moving to Europe did I begin to get an idea of what the very positive side of "business friendly" is in the US. Truth be told, all countries tend to protect their 'big players' to some degree, be it the US propping up creaking airlines after September 11th, Italy finding various clever ways to get around rules about funding Fiat and Alitalia, or France finding it in their 'national interests' to discourage a potential bid for Danone (yogurt!) by PepsiCo. Some are better or worse (the UK has been pretty good about not interfering), but there is a tendency to want to intervene. Leaving be the discussion over whether those sorts of policies are good, bad, or ugly, the biggest difference between continental Europe and the US is the ease with which new companies - 'startups' can be created and enter a market. As a first hand example, I decided this summer to create DedaSys as a real company in order to better separate my business and personal financial dealings. Were I to do that in Italy or Austria, we would be talking about fees upwards of 3000 Euros (about 4000 dollars at market rates), which is a great deal of money for something that is not making a lot of it at this point in time. Contrast this with what it took to create a Limited Liability Company (LLC) in Oregon, my home state. To have things done up professionally, it's certainly possible to lay down a bit of cash there too, but by trading my time for money, and with the assistance of some nolo.com books about the creation and maintenance of an LLC, I was able to register DedaSys with the state of Oregon for the grand total of 55 dollars, and was actually able to complete the process remotely from Austria prior to going home on vacation, where I did the only thing I needed to do in person: open a bank account. So it costs 1% of what it costs in Italy or Austria to open a company that provides limited liability... a very impressive difference, especially to a small, new company that does not have the connections a Ford or a Fiat will likely have to enable it to deal with all the other paperwork, rules, and regulations to deal with. Add to that a culture of greater risk taking (meaning also more acceptance of failure), better funding opportunities, and... one comes to the conclusion that Paul Graham is right. It's a pity, because the people in Europe are top notch. In Italy alone, I know a bunch of really bright hackers. Granted, some of them aren't interested, and are probably better off not starting a company or otherwise dealing with the business side of the equation, but it's always nice to have that opportunity. In closing, here is another example of bureaucracy in action, from my personal on line journal about life in Italy, and now Austria, which I recently revamped by moving it to the Typo platform: Confronting the bureaucratic beast - registering an Italian domain Two months to accomplish what can be done in ten minutes with a .com!

MJ Ray posted a couple of short summaries as to how the election would have turned out if alternate voting systems had been used. A couple of people asked about others, so here's a nice long list:

Borda,
Borda Elimination,
Minmax,
Nanson,
Ranked Pairs,
Condorcet (SPI),
Condorcet (Debian):

• Bdale Garbee
• David Graham
• Luk Claes
• Joshua D. Drake
• Martin Zobel-Helas
• Joerg Jaspert

Bucklin:

• Bdale Garbee
• David Graham
• Joshua D. Drake
• Luk Claes
• Joerg Jaspert
• Ian Jackson

IRV,
Pluralty:

• Bdale Garbee
• David Graham
• Joshua D. Drake
• Martin 'Joey' Schulze
• Luk Claes
• MJ Ray

Most of these seem to come out in favour of the result we achieved with Condorcet. Plurality (aka: First past the post) and IRV put heavy emphisis on the voters first choice. It doesn't really make sense to compare results from a condorcet ballot with either of these methods. Bucklin is rather meaningless in a multi-winner election.

In answer to "is this type of Condorcet ever likely to elect someone who polarises views", it's possible, but unlikely. IRV and Pluralty are the ones to go for if you want the majority of people unhappy, unlike the others, which produce the majority of people happy.

I wasn't elected to SPI's board. I didn't think I would be once I saw all the other candidates (I nominated before all declared), but it looks like I would have been elected with those votes under some other common systems. I think both first-past-the-post and alternative vote (also known as instant run-off voting, reportedly recommended by Robert's Rules for election-by-mail) would have resulted in this same board:

1. Bdale Garbee
2. David Graham
3. Joshua D. Drake
4. Martin 'Joey' Schulze
5. Luk Claes
6. MJ Ray

Instead, the results were:

1. Bdale Garbee
2. David Graham
3. Luk Claes
4. Joshua D. Drake
5. Joerg Jaspert
6. Martin Zobel-Helas

Nevertheless, well done to the new members. On one hand, I'm happier, because there's still two of my top four there and now I've less required work. On the other hand, I would have liked a crack at it myself and both boards are disappointing because there's no Ian Jackson. An interesting thing is how many times I appear in each position in voting lists: (5, 1, 2, 1, 9, 6, 6, 3, 3, 4, 2, 9, 37), or as a bar chart:

1. st
2. nd
3. rd
4. th
5. th
6. th
7. th
8. th
9. th
10. th
11. th
12. th
13. th

A fairly acceptable middle-of-road candidate for most of it, but then a huge spike at the low end. Note that a majority of voters put me in positions 11-13. There wasn't much warning of that one coming during hustings. WTF? There seem to be some 30 or 40 voters who really dislike me, but didn't tell me that straight, preferring to be silent then vote me down. Are you cowards, or what? More generally, is this type of Condorcet ever likely to elect someone who polarises views, or who many inexplicably dislike? What does this say for any plan to use a Condorcet for debian's social committee? Could majorities always prevent minority reps? Update: Neil McGovern posted a few comparisons of more complex systems (I only did the easy ones) and AJ posted STV results which completes the main systems, I think. It seems Condorcet-SPI wasn't as unusual as I first thought. Finally, as I understand it, turn-out was 25% of voting members (not the 25% of SPI members that some press reported). Why was turn-out so low? (2007-08-08: 1 pingback, 3 comments)

Bloomberg: Tour de France TV Audiences Rise in Europe Even After Scandals (tip tdfblog ) reports audiences are up 6% in France, 11% in Spain and 40% in Denmark (to over 800,000). Italy's RAI reports 1.2million viewers, while ARD/ZDF averaged 1.4million until they pulled the plug over half a dope test. In the UK, the BARB Weekly Summaries show the tour's London-Canterbury Stage 1 charting with 178,000 viewers on itv4. That's up from 143,000 for 2006's stage 1 (up 24%). Last year's itv4 coverage seems to have peaked at 197,000, so it'll be interesting to see how later stages fare, as details are announced. Stage 1 was also shown on the more widely available (analogue+digital) itv1 channel. The itv1 coverage didn't chart, so it must have had less than 3.41 million viewers, but I can't see exactly how many. British Eurosport's reported audience for Stage 1 increased from 84,000 last year to 118,000 (up 40%). Their 2006 peak was 100,000 for the last Thursday highlights, so that's already broken. They've been advertising pretty widely, with really annoying Franglais adverts that mispronounce the race name ("Tardy France" eh?). There was also an overspill into other channels, which we don't usually see. Two of my favourites: Graham Jones: What do the Tour de France and a Victoria sponge have in common with your social networking web site? Channel 4: Tour de France's UK appeal (video feed) mms://a1167.v15478c.c15478.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/1167/15478/v0004/origin.channel4.com/news/2007/07/05_bike.wmv