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Miscellaneous Links n Things

Some stuff from reddit today:


A bit of fun
--------------

Create your own Dan Brown novel at http://tobyinkster.co.uk/Software/dan_brown/

Read some hilarious warning labels whicj have been prompted presumably by our highly litigious society:
http://www.mlaw.org/wwl/pastwinners.html



Other General Interest
------------------------------

"Sound Off" - a blog about remix culture, open society, and collaborative works:

http://mutednoise.com/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=1879



An extremely interesting article about sexuality and social roles in male prisons:

http://www.spr.org/en/stephendonaldson/doc_01_lecture.html


The author is an academic/activist/counsellor who has himself spent a total of four or five
years in a number of different US prisons.

This (probably fairly unusual ) perspective has given rise to one of the most thought-provoking and
heart-wrenching indictments of our own main-stream culture I have read in some time.

I am surprised that this area has not been covered more extensively in the popular post-modern
academic realms of cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, sexuality, gender identity, and so on. The
article seems to be quite old - 1994?, and maybe there has been more study since then - I am not
sure. It is perhaps a mirror into which we would usually prefer not to look.

Privacy in the 21st Century

Privacy in the 21st Century
===========================


I am trying to keep abreast of issues related to privacy, (both in general and also specifically in relation to the internet). I thought I would create this post as a repository for links to anything I find which is relevant. I am interested in all aspects of privacy - technical, political, economic/marketing, psychological, sociological, etc etc.

Stuff here is not currently in order of relevance or importance - I'll just chuck it in chronologically.


So here are my first three links:

The Google Cookie
--------------------------------

Whilst I don't believe that currently there is much evidence that Google is becoming evil, or even a little bit mischievous, we of course all need to keep an eye on what they do just as much as on anybody else. Who knows what they will be, who will own them in 20 years....

If you ever wish to search google without being tracked by ip, you can (as of the 6th January 2006) use the marvellous scroogle scraper.


http://www.scroogle.org/scraper.html

No cookies, access logs deleted after 7 days. I still use google, as actually I think they are not only non-evil but actually 'quite good', and I use many of their features - qotd, top news, gmail [for some stuff] , google maps ( the new google earth looks insanely impressive - haven't actually tried it out yet though :) etc etc. But I wouldn't feel nearly so good about using google if I didn't know there were alternatives such as scroogle for if I ever want to search privately.


"Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists"
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.applefritter.com/bannedbooks



mySpace & similar
-------------------------------

http://www.applexnet.com/trent/blog//index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=50

privacy tips
-------------------

http://redtape.msnbc.com/2005/12/new_years_perso.html#posts


anonym.OS
----------
Really Interesting article from wired about 'anonym.OS', which I had never heard of before.

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/internet/0,70017-0.html?tw=wn_tophead_1

"Titled Anonym.OS, the system is a type of disk called a "live CD" -- meaning it's a complete solution for using a computer without touching the hard drive. Developers say Anonym.OS is likely the first live CD based on the security-heavy OpenBSD operating system.

OpenBSD running in secure mode is relatively rare among desktop users. So to keep from standing out, Anonym.OS leaves a deceptive network fingerprint. In everything from the way it actively reports itself to other computers, to matters of technical minutia such as TCP packet length, the system is designed to look like Windows XP SP1. "We considered part of what makes a system anonymous is looking like what is most popular, so you blend in with the crowd," explains project developer Adam Bregenzer of Super Light Industry."

Reading, Listening, Watching

For when I don't know what else to blog!

Definitions:

currently reading = I tend to dip in and out of books, it's only novels that I read in a straight line - so the following list may seem like a lot, but it's all stuff I kind of will have off the shelves for a few weeks, will read bits or reread bits, but not read cover to cover. Then at some point they'll go back on the shelves and others will come out.

currently listening to = stuff I have listened to in the last few days.

currently watching: telly = mostly what I watched last night.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
currently reading:
-----------------------------------

Wednesday, January 04/2006

**Meditation week by week(David Fontana)
**The Runes of Earth (Steven Donaldson, it's the latest in the 'Lord foul's Bane' series)
**"First Things First (Steven Covey, author of 'The seven habits of highly effective people")
** Test-Driven Design (???)
**"The Linux Cookbook." (O'Reilly)



Friday, January 06/2006

Those listed previously are still 'off the shelves', and some new additions are:

** 'email to the universe and other alterations of consciousness', a fascinating, and highly readable collection of prose articles, interviews, essays, and some haikus by the illimitable Robert Anton Wilson. Topics include byut are not restricted to:

' The Passion of the Antichrist; The Celtic Roots of Quantum Theory; Paranoia; Black Magick & Curses; LSD, Dogs & Me; Left and Right: A Non-Euclidean Perspective; Sexual Alchemy; Cheerful Reflections on Death and Dying; The Relativity of "Reality" '
[from blurb on back]

If you forgot who he is, or didn't know inn the first place, the guy that wrote the Illuminatus Trilogy. Also possibly one of the grand-high poobahs of the /Paratheo-Anametamystikhood Of Eris Esoteric. /Or possibly not. Don't tell them I said anything.

** *Stephen Donaldson, /A Million Jockers, Punks, and Queens, Stop Prisoner Rape: Sex among American Male Prisoners and its Implications for Concepts of Sexual Orientation/, Stop Prisoner Rape, Feb. 4, 1993.

*This article is both heart-wrenching and highly provocative. A must-read for anyone interested in psychology, cultural studies, sociology,
anthropology, gender issues, sexual identity, and so on. An extremely interesting article about sexuality and social roles in male prisons:

The full text of the article can be found online at http://www.spr.org/en/stephendonaldson/doc_01_lecture.html


The author is an academic/activist/counsellor who has himself spent a total of four or five
years in a number of different US prisons. This (probably fairly unusual ) perspective has given rise to a description of a highly specific culture embedded in a highly specific set of circumstances.

But somehow, for all the seeming specificity, the story told here about this particular demographic (Male American Prison Inmates) serves only to reflect back one of the most horrifyingly clear images I have ever seen of the ways in which questions of power and sexuality, law and violence, gender and community can sometimes feed back on one another to mutually create and recreate one another. It is undoubtedly one of the powerful indictments of our own main-stream culture I have read in some time.

I am surprised that this area has not been covered more extensively in the popular post-modern
academic realms of cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, sexuality, gender identity, and so on. The
article seems to be quite old - 1994?, and maybe there has been more study since then - I am not
sure. It is perhaps a mirror into which we would usually prefer not to look.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
currently listening to:
-----------------------------------


Wednesday, January 04/2006

**'Love songs' - Aretha Franklin.

This is a new cd I just bought myself for chrissy - I haven't gotten to know most of it yet, but I really like the first song, 'A Rose is Still a Rose'. It's actually written by Lauryn Hill from the Fugees. I always hear it as a song about personal power, and recovering from any kind of a setback, rather than a 'love betrayal' song, although if you take it all literally it's obviously a love-betrayal song. If you substitute ther concept 'Thins that happen to you' for 'He' you'll see what I mean. Of course it wouldn't scan nearly so wass as 'He'!

‘Cause a rose is still a rose
Baby, girl, you’re still a flower
He can’t lead you and then take you
Make you and then break you
Baby, girl, you hold the power"


** Wave sounds for sleep - a thirty minute cd of waves, nice for falling asleep to :)
** Vivaldi's 4 seasons. ageless, always fresh, always wonderful.


Friday, January 06/2006

No change, really
---------------------------------------------------------------
Watched last night (telly): nothing
------------------------------------

Python Zen

Python Zen, Or, The Zen of Python.

I have recorded these zennish python guidelines here in my blog for quick reference.
This particular rendition found at Bruce Eckel's website: http://www.mindview.net/Books/Python/ThinkingInPython.html

I presume it was based originally on something by Tim Peters though ;)


[update 6th Jan 06] I have just learned that these sayings can indeed be attributed to Tim Peters, and also that if you have access to a python interpreter, you can read them and consider their wisdon whenever you like simply by typing 'import this' at the interactive prompt. Enjoy!


----------------------------------------------------------
The Python Way
By Tim Peters
(Who I assume will speak up if he doesn't want me to post this)

* Beautiful is better than ugly.
* Explicit is better than implicit.
* Simple is better than complex.
* Complex is better than complicated.
* Flat is better than nested.
* Sparse is better than dense.
* Readability counts.
* Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
* Although practicality beats purity.
* Errors should never pass silently.
* Unless explicitly silenced.
* In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
* There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
* Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
* Now is better than never.
* Although never is often better than *right* now.
* If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
* If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
* Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!
----------------------------------------------------------

Here is a graph of the temperature in Melbourne over the last couple of days. It's been pretty hot, which is why I first made a graph by pasting some data from the australian bureau of meterology website:

http://www.bom.gov.au/

The vertical axis shows degrees celsius and the horizontal axis shows time in hours EST. (*)


I just wanted to visualise it a bit and also watch as well as feel for that lovely moment when it starts to drop, compare it to yesterdays profile, etc.

Please note that I selected the 'B-splice' option when graphing it, so this graph is smoother than the actual measurements warrant - but this is also probably a more realistic look for a general sense of what temperatures do.

You'll notice that it appears to have jumped up 3 degrees quite late in the evening, between 11:30pm and 12:00 midnight on Dec 31st. This is not deceptive, it really did go up that much, at least if the bom published observations are anything to go by!

(Please someone let me know if the following links are broken!)

The original data is mostly taken from the following part of the site , which lists observations on the half-hour for the previous 72 hours:

http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDV65360/IDV65360.94868.shtml

The exception is a couple of in between measurements which I added manually from the 'bleeding edge' last 10 minute observations at:

http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDV60034.shtml

(the disadvantage of this one is that, while very fresh, it is just the single measurement )

Anyway, I had my reasonably nice little graph for my own purposes which gave me a feel for how today compares to yesterday.

Bill then suggested for his own insane reasons that I could put it on my blog, and I found myself strangely unable to resist the idea. Even though it meant I had to muck around a whole lot more to make it more presentable ;)


Yes, I know there's a big pink bit around it. I'll see if I can fix this later.

So far, I've simply cut the chart out of openoffice calc, pasted it into openoffice draw, fiddled a little, then exported the resulting openoffice 'draw' file as a gif.

This was done on the principle of 'Do the simplest thing that could possibly work'. And it did work. Kinda.

Is it just me, or, despite surface appearances to the contrary, does OO calc work in a manner that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike MS excel?

Or am I just a crazy monkey pounding a keyboard? ;)


Maybe if I have time I'll write something that scrapes the temperature data straight off the bom site and graphs it here. Maybe not. Regardless of the probabilities though I almost certainly probably should go to bed soon.


(EST = Eastern Standard Time, which is defined as utc + 10 hours, or '10 hours ahead of Coordinated Universal Time'. It is also sometimes referred to as AEST = Australian Eastern Standard Time.)


And now for something completely different...

Here is the photo of the emergency balloon landing described in Kerry's comment to this post:

Happy new blogmas !

Happy New Year everybody :) Happy and Glorius and hopefully-not-too-hot

Or as my t9 predictive phone would say, 'glorgus new year' :)

And indeed I do wish you all the most glorgus of years.

As you may have guessed, this is my first blog-posting on my first blog.

Stay tuned for more of my wonderful and fascinating thoughts.