We The Free

No, that’s nothing like teabagging (sadly). I haven’t been bagging and boarding any comics in almost a year, partly because I haven’t bought much (relatively) in that time. So Friday and Saturday I got 400 bags and boards and started on my naked comics. I’ve nearly run out of bags/boards, but I decided to replace all the scungy bags on my New Mutants (vol.1) and my Deathlok comics. but after unbagging all the latter, I decided to sit down and re-read them all.

Deathlok was pretty cool, and almost 20 year later, the stories aren’t as terrible as I was expecting. In fact, they’re pretty good if you excuse all the 1991 “cyber” talk. It’s making me investigate other great comics I miss that were brought back to life, including Grimjack. I think I’ll be poor again soon.

Fuck yeah! Cectic, the Comic Espousing Critical Thought In the Credulous, is back after a nearly one and a half year hiatus.

Here’s an example from the early days:

Funniest comic evar.

60 Minutes Australia did a segment on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Allegedly, BP has asked them to remove the video from their website, but it is available on YouTube.

Part 1:

Part 2:

The transcription of the video is still left available on the 60 Minutes website.

“MICHAEL USHER: Critically, three weeks before the explosion, a crewman’s mistake damaged a crucial safety seal on a device known as the blowout preventer, designed to stop an explosion. The problem was discussed at a safety meeting onboard Deepwater Horizon. Mike Williams says the rig’s owner, Transocean, suggested a temporary shutdown. But BP, which owns the oil, demanded drilling continue.

“MIKE WILLIAMS: I had the BP company man sitting directly beside me. And he literally perked up and said, “Well, my process is different, “and I think we’re going to do it this way.” So there was sort of a chest bumping kind of deal. The communication seemed to really break down as to who was ultimately in charge.”

Click here to read the rest of the transcript

I wrote a bit of a stats reporter for Spam Assassin recently for work. After posting the output on the SA mailing list, I had several requests for a copy of the script, so it’s easier if I just post it here, and point people to this post.

The script is written in gawk and is available here:

sa-spam-stats.tar.gz

I hope it’s of use to someone. If you want changes or have recommendations, please let me know.

Here is some example output:

You’ve no doubt seen a million websites that have Like buttons. When you find content you like, and you’re logged in, you can register your approval by Liking it. Facebook does it, YouTube changed from a point system to a Like/Dislike system, Google Reader has it, Reddit has an upvote/downvote system, and any other countless number of news sites and blogs do too.

As sites like Facebook don’t have Dislike buttons, many people worry that they’re restricted in their ability to properly categorise content.

But we need a better way of categorising or approving and disapproving of content. The Like/Dislike options aren’t always appropriate, and they’re not always appropriate because everyone will use them differently. This was recently discussed on Reddit (but I can’t find the link), and just shows that everybody uses their votes in different ways. Some, of course, maliciously, but most simply have different perceptions of up- and downvoting.

For instance, some downvote a comment simply if they disagree with it. Some will upvote if they disagree with it, but the comment leads insight, or contributes to the conversation in a useful or constructive way. Not that any of those are right or wrong — they’re just different. And with enough of a community, most things should balance out anyway. And that’s fine for comments on articles.

However, what about the articles themselves. When I see an article from BBC on Google Reader about how Catholic priests have been getting away with raping young boys for decades, how am I supposed to respond? If I Like the article, am I trying to indicate that I approve of the molestation of children, or am I indicating that I think this article should be read by as many people as possible?

It’s a bit easier when it’s news on a new fancy gadget that’s coming out. That’s a no brainer — I either like it or I don’t. But the matter can be complicated if the article is badly written, has no insight, is full of grammatical errors, or is just a lazy article. How do I cast my vote so that others can save their time on reading it? If I downvote a badly written article about an Apple gadget, then the Fanbois will assume that all the downvotes are because of ire toward their beloved vendor. If I upvote that badly written article, am I giving the author the impression he or she did a good job?

It’s too easy to give the wrong impression with the Like/Dislike rating system. It’s just too weak and doesn’t even scratch the surface of the nuances of human opinion.

People never cease to astound me. And not in a good way.

Reading mailing lists is an excellent way to really see some of the dregs of electronic humanity. Here are some of my pet peeves:

Top-Posting

Seriously. Do you read upside down? Are you too lazy to reply properly, or have you no concept of “in-line reply”? Back in the old days, back to BBS’s, when you replied to someone’s message, especially one that was going to be read by dozens or hundreds of others — who you knew were also going to be involved in an unknowable number of other related and unrelated threads — you made sure that you left a hint of the previous conversation before your reply. This acted as a gentle refresher on the topic at hand, and let a reader understand the context of your reply.

Quite straight forward and courteous, really.
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I had previously disabled creation of accounts, and had the settings configured to only allow posts from existing accounts. I’ve just installed a spam checker, so have enabled posts from people who aren’t signed in. Account creation is still a manual process, partly because I don’t expect anyone to care enough to create an account, and partly because the user list will still get filled with spam accounts regardless.

I don’t fancy playing whak-a-mole with the accounts. But if you want an account, just email me and ask.

The other option is to comment through Buzz, and I’ve just added a Buzz button to the posts to promote that.

More to the point, do you trust Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook?

In this telling article from The Register, Zuckerberg apparently is more than happy to give his friends private info on Facebook users. The chat transcripts were from 2004, when Facebook was primarily being used by students.

But moreover, the more press their recent privacy changes are getting, the more Zuckerberg and his cronies show their true colours. They think it’s your fault that everyone can see your information, because you’re publishing it. If you want it private, they say you shouldn’t put it online. They also say that most people are happy with the new public “privacy” settings. But I’m going to take a stab in the dark that most people simply have no idea of the consequences. Some say they know, but think it isn’t as bad as everyone’s making it out to be, while others are just blissfully ignorant of the whole debacle.
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After holding off a long time, and only succumbing last November, I finally signed up to Facebook.

And earlier this week (or end of last week), they rolled out a bunch of changes that really fucked things up for everyone’s privacy. The changes they made were designed to help you “connect” to everything and everyone you like. A new API was rolled out that allowed websites to add code that would link users’ Facebook accounts to the site — in fact some sites now allow you to log in to their site with your Facebook credentials. Yeah, that’s not likely to cause any security issues, huh?

A lot of people have been posting about these, but a few links (below) really stand out for me.

Facebook Timeline of privacy settings

A security hole that lets people view their friends’ live chats

Some stuff you need to know about FB with its current settings

Websites have been adding apps without your authorisation. This bug has apparently been fixed, but only for sites you visit from now on. It’ll still pay to check your app list for anything that’s been added for you in the last few days.
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Sony recently announced that they are going to stop producing floppy disks in March 2011. It seems they’re only halting production to the Japanese market, but humans being what we are have naturally assumed that this means global production will stop. Perhaps it will. Perhaps there’s an announcement about global distribution I missed.

Interestingly, the BBC posted a question asking who still used floppy disks, and got their response. Turns out only a few are legitimate uses. Reading through them, one struck me as most fascinating. One old man who still uses floppy disks because they’re easier to catalogue like a paper filing system. Write a label on them and put them in a flip file. Yep, I used to do that and only a couple of months ago threw out boxes and boxes of Amiga floppy disks, many of them in flip box thingies.

Floppy disks, after going through a few incarnations of varying sizes and capacities from 8″ to 5.25″ to 3.5″, eventually gave way to CDs and memory sticks. A modified version of the media was released called a Floptical, which according to Wikipedia started life as a 21MB disk, but I only remember the 120MB LS-120′s. Maybe the 21 meggers never saw their way into the NZ market. Anyway, they were 3.5″ disks that had different media allowing it the higher capacity.

Then there was Iomega’s ZIP and JAZ drives, which had 100MB, and 1GB respectively, and those were quite popular for a while.

Blah blah blah, OK, who gives a fuck? They’ve all been and gone, past their use-by dates, and the world is a happier place. Well, not completely happy, USB flash drives are sooooooo slooooooowwww..

CD-RW’s and DVD-RW’s can be used as portable, removable media, but I don’t think they’re very reliable. It may be different with DVD-RW’s, but I remember using a CD-RW many years ago as backup media for my docs. After a while, files started disappearing. I don’t know where they went. Maybe the file allocation table was limited, so it started dropping files off the front. I dunno. But it did sour me off that media.

And like the old dude, I’d like to be able to have some kind of “permanent,” or more appropriately, shelvable (is that a word?), rewritable media that I can file. A medium that doesn’t require anything mechanical to operate. CD-ROMs and floppy drives are spinning media, and require lots of moving parts. On laptops in this day and age, that’s unforgivable. Don’t start me on netbooks with spinning hard drives and CD-ROMs..

I’d like to see a “drive” that read some kind of flash memory (preferably bypassing a slow bus like USB — attaching them to the SATA bus could be interesting), about 2″ square — making them big enough to write labels on, and allowing us to file them away. Any smaller just makes labeling them impossible, and handling them difficult.

While Micro SD cards are frikkin awesome feats of technology managing to pack in decent capacity into stupidly small form factors, it’s tough to make them the removable media of choice because they’re so damn small that they’re too easy to lose. Imagine something 2″ square that had the same thickness and data density of a Micro SD card.

That’d be a whole lotta win in my book.