Posts from — August 2003

Familiar Faces?. The Qualifying Exam Meets the Cult of Personality. I did abysmally on Marcel's People test. How 'bout you? [MetaFilter]

everyone looks the same after a while. no?

Project Gramophone.

Project Gramophone is a new project that aims to become a definitive source for early recordings that slipped into the public domain. The goals are similar to Project Gutenberg, but with audio instead of text. For now, the project features a mailing list open to anyone interested in contributing to the project.

[Creative Commons: weblog]

another great project!

sign the petition.

Single Mac keeps company running while Windows machines fail due to Blaster worm. A great story and it belies the point that Macs do not get attacked because of their small market share. It has more to do with their better default security. And, in my opinion, it is much easier to update that applying patches to a windows box. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

best quote:

n fact, several have scheduled meetings with IT to figure out how to prevent such a mess in the future and one thing they seem to want is to “mix in some Macs around here for safety,” as one manager put it.

you know i've argued that informational monoculture is a very bad thing for so very long, that seeing other people actually come to the same conclusion.

Interesting article in the NYT on some books about the history of the family and the role of children in them:

A good deal of our intellectual life in the past half century has been ruled by the following pattern: First, a French person, with great brilliance and little regard for standards of evidence, promulgates a theory overturning dearly held beliefs. Second, many academics, especially the young, seize on the theory and run with it, in the process loading it with far more emotional and political freight than the French thinker÷who, after all, was just ãdoing theoryä÷had in mind. Meanwhile, other scholars indignantly reaffirm the pre-revisionist view, and everyone calls for more research, to decide the question. In the third stage, the research is produced, and it confuses everybody, because it is too particular, too respectful of variation and complexity, to support either the nice old theory or the naughty new one

I was talking to some colleagues the other day and we were discussing when we sort of made the decision to take the path that we were going to take. I remember that I thought i was going to go into academia or engineering sometime when i was young around 8 or so, and that was pretty much that…. I knew i was going to college, and i knew pretty much that i would get a ph.d. …. However, you an talk to people who even have a ph.d. these days and they still don't know what they want to do, they hang in some sort of existential angst of choosing, not realizing that the choice is not really an issue, but they have to start pursuing, i.e. doing something. It doesn't particularly matter what you do in the end as long as it makes you happy, but to me it seems as if people are floating around much like they always did i guess wondering if someone will do something for them or whether the system will change and they will ultimately benefit…. its been my experience that this doesn't happen often. All in all my minor rant is to say for many people once childhood has been constructed into their identity, they never really escape it again…. they never find a way to take control of their life and move forward.

Activistology. American colleges and universities have for years been in the business of training students to be political activists. Participating in… [Critical Mass]

if we aren't helping students to be well rounded citizens who pursue their interests then we are probably not helping them at all….

Take Web Data Analysis to the Next Level with PHP. 12 Aug 2003: A simple one-way Chi Square analysis procedure discussed in this article can be fruitfully applied to different types of data streams such as access logs, survey results, customer profiles, or customer orders. It will provide you with the hidden awareness and understanding of website statistics beyond simple tabulated raw counts and turn raw data into actionable knowledge. [RootPrompt.org -- Nothing but Unix]

this is an interesting article, well worth the look if you are thinking about using web based data analyis

Postfix Attack. 12 Aug 2003: In this weeksSecurity Alerts, we look at problems in Postfix, DB2, stunnel, OpenSSH, up2date, eroaster, wget, xfstt, xpcd, pam-pgsql, xtokkaetama, and Half-Life. [RootPrompt.org -- Nothing but Unix]

time to check the mail servers, all seems good here.

(Re)Touching Reality.

Greg's Digital Archive

Damn, ever wonder why so many women have body issues? Here is one big reason shown in action. Its not all good when it comes to photoshop. Well its nice on the eyes, but nasty on the psyche.

[Abstract Dynamics]

The whole and extensive manipulation of reality is the problem, not so much the body issues. as computing power becomes cheaper and techniques become standard how long of a delay in a live broadcast will you need to do this sort of thing on the fly? probably not much. Just pull the semi trailer with the computers right next to the production truck and tada…….

You Don't Own What You've Bought. Just a sad reminder that, thanks to ridiculous software licensing practices, if you buy used equipment on eBay, you might not be able to use it. In fact, if it's from some companies like Cisco, you might want to make sure you hide it from anyone who works there. People who have bought used equipment, and then had the original company find out about it are discovering that the company is saying their software license is not valid and they need to buy a new one – even though the equipment was already paid for by the original owner. Apparently “owner” is the wrong word, because these companies are basically saying you never actually own what you've bought. This is nothing new, of course, but the stories included in the article demonstrate just how ridiculous this practice is. Buy a data storage system for $4,000, and then have the company tell you you need to pay $15,000 if you actually want to use it? Have a Cisco rep spot a router you bought on eBay and have them demanding relicensing fees and an “inspection”? Thanks to bizarre intellectual property rules, you no longer own what you buy.
[Techdirt]

Apparently, owning something is an Industrial Age pint of view. In the Information age, we only get to lease something, even if we have possession of a physical object. What happens if the company goes belly up? Well, someone still holds the rights and can keep anyone else at bay. This is one problem of copyrights in the digital age. Incremental value can never be added because of the often stringent licensing agreements made, usually by lawyers who have no clue to the real worth of something. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

This is why GNU exists… You own you nothing, you license everything, well software-wise most of the time. If you write software you could own it, but in all likelihood you do not because you were working for someone else and they own a part.