Category — General

August 22, 2003.

Raymond Chen has been running a series of interesting articles about the history of Windows and its API. Ever wonder why the time zone map no longer highlights the zone you're in? Or what the BEAR35, BUNNY73, and PIGLET12 functions are named after? Or why you turn off your computer by clicking “start”? I've bookmarked his site.

In particular, “The secret life of GetWindowText” should be required reading for anyone trying to understand API lockin. Describing one aspect of this simple and fundamental part of the Windows API takes a couple of pages. And then notice the kicker:

The documentation simplifies this as “GetWindowText() cannot retrieve text from a window from another application.”

As Raymond says, “the documentation tries to explain its complexity with small words, which is great if you don't understand long words, but it also means that you're not getting the full story.” (Actually, Raymond, the documentation does tell the whole story, look closer.)

[Joel on Software]

Mr. Chen's articles are well written and informative. I'm not sure why people would actually want to use windows, but if you are going to do that, then you should at least ally your thoughts with bright people like this.

Random Proposals for Communications Courses. Theory.org.uk has an interesting course description generator. Keep clicking “Next” for more. This might come in handy now that it's syllabus time! [CultureCat: Rhetoric and Feminism -]

this is funny, but somehow seemingly almost and surely on occasion true, take any set of things jam them together and voila.

On 13.-15. Octobre 2004 the project C2 Between Online-Religion and
Religion-Online: constellations of the transfer of rituals in the medium
internet of the collaborative research centre Dynamics of Rituals at the
University of Heidelberg (http://www.ritualdynamik.uni-hd.de/) arranges the
international research meeting Online-Religions and Rituals-Online?

The research meeting will deal with the topic of religion on the internet
with special regards on the ritual discourse on the internet from the
electronic publication of traditional ritual scripts to presentations of
innovative design of rituals. Several aspects of the dynamic change of
rituals by the use of the internet will be discussed.

The research meeting is dedicated to the exchange and discussion of
methodological questions of the analysis of religious websites. Hence,
methodological contributions as well as reports from current research,
which deal with the topic of religion on the internet, are highly appreciated.

The conference will take place at the university of Heidelberg (Germany).
The conference language is English. We do not plan to take a conference fee.

Propositions for contributions are requested to be send to Oliver Krueger
(oliver.krueger@urz.uni-heidelberg.de) till 12. Octobre 2003.

In this paper, i will argue why what many people argue are power law models of social networks on the internet are usually not really that at all. By critiquing the assumptions built into the data gathering and measurement, combined with the theoretical modeled used, it is easy to see that through considering time in different ways and by fragmenting the data set, that there are much more complex and interesting phenomena involved in these power law situations that is being masked and hidden by the generalization. In the end, separating out the individual phenomena that seem to map to power law situations usually illustrate the the phenomena as a whole is not related to the power law, and that by using the power law to describe the phenomena, we end up losing much of the unique understandings that could make or break the application of technologies in this arena for a variety of purposes.

The Day Email Died?. Between 10:45pm last night and 6am this morning, I received 1,470 pieces of spam (a run rate of nearly 5,000 per day). Most of them were from the SoBig worm, which seems to be the worst yet. And as far as I can tell, it's still getting worse.

I wonder if this is the last straw that will convince people to move in droves to challenge/response or whitelist mechanisms, as I argued last year. And I'd be surprised if these volumes don't overload mail servers at major ISPs. We're seeing the closest thing yet to the Morris worm that shut down the Net in 1988.

The good news is that my lovingly tuned filtering guantlet, including the rule-based SpamAssassin, the Bayesian POPfile, and a couple dozen hand-coded rules, has held up well. All 1,470 of the messages were auto-routed to the trash. The bad news is that, with this many spams, it's impractical to check manually for false positives (good email accidentally deleted as spam). My overall filter accuracy is well above 99%, but I'm still seeing occasional false positives (maybe two per week) when I search for them.

We have to confront the reality: either email is broken, Microsoft's email software is broken, or those two statements are the same. If it's the middle statement, Microsoft and other vendors can close holes and improve filtering in their products. Email itself isn't going to change. It's too widely deployed. I still think a combination of steps will tame the spam epidemic, but we're not there yet. [Werblog]

College Degrees Lose Their Magic in China: Graduates Flood the Job Market. By Peter S. Goodman, Washington Post. [A blog doesn't need a clever name]

this sounds remarkably like a getting a ph.d. and that job market.

Blogging and the Job Market…. I've been thinking about writing something on this for a while (I'm finding that I'm mentally writing blog posts to work out ideas, but once I write it in my head I don't bother to write it out when I'm… [Epistemographer]

as i understand it, with a surplus of qualified individuals, like in STS, committees look for reasons to not hire a person, blogging is a sufficient reason i would think. i can see it here 'look here, x said y' which could then be taken out of context to kill an application. the way you get a job is not to fire blindly apparently, but to network, when people know you, and know you are good, they hire you unless there is someone else they want to hire. network, network, network.

dötournement. In a conversation today, i learned a new word/concept that intrigues me, but i still don't fully grasp…. dötournement. It… [zephoria]

According to Simon Byers, computer researcher at AT&T's research laboratory, documents published online may unintentionally reveal sensitive information that could be used for corporate espionage or identity theft. Mr. Byers found that, using an ordinary search engine, the free software tools 'antiword' and 'catdoc', and a simple home-made script, he was able to collect 100,000 Word documents, many of which contained sensitive hidden or deleted information. Mr. Byers focused on Microsoft Word documents because of their ubiquity, but he believes other documents formats may be equally vulnerable. Microsoft is working to develop ways to ensure sensitive information isn't inadvertently left in files. The next edition of Office 2003 will include tools that will allow users to remove personal information from a document, according to Neil Laver, UK group marketing manager for Microsoft Office products.

——

I've only done this to a few very close friends that have asked me to or i wanted them to stop sending word documents. I very easily go inside word documents and tell people the information that i now have and they never suspected that i did. Word documents are dangerous people, well if you work on anything that you want to keep private. a person who posts word documents is basically sharing far too much information, post things as html or ascii text only, you don't want some of this information shared, believe me.

Monica Ali for Brick Lane
Martin Amis for Yellow Dog
Margaret Atwood for Oryx and Crake

Carol Birch for Turn Again Home

Melvyn Bragg for Crossing the Lines

JM Coetzee for Elizabeth Costello

Julia Darling for The Taxi Driver's Daughter
Gerard Donovan for Schopenhauer's Telescope

Damon Galgut for The Good Doctor

Barbara Gowdy for The Romantic

Mark Haddon for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

Zo‘ Heller for Notes on a Scandal

Francis King for The Nick of Time

Shena Mackay for Heligoland

Clare Morrall for Astonishing Splashes Of Colour

John Murray for Jazz etc

Julie Myerson for Something Might Happen

Tim Parks for Judge Savage

Caryl Phillips for A Distant Shore

DCB Pierre for Vernon God Little

Jonathan Raban for Waxwings

Graham Swift for The Light of Day

Barbara Trapido for Frankie & Stankie
——-

well no one else posted this yet, and I've only listened to Oryx and Crake from Audible, and i think it would be better in text. it was good in audible, but audio is so much more passing to my mind than text, so i don't track audio as well over that many hours.