Geek stuff – Page 66 – a sibilant intake of breath

AdBlock and Google AdSense

AdBlock Plus is an excellent Firefox plugin that automatically prevents the display of advertising on websites. This includes banner ads, as well as the sort of targeted text ads that Google has made a fortune through. When using AdBlock, the web is a much more functional, uncluttered place with fewer distractions. I highly recommend it.

At the same time, this site does have Google ads embedded in it.

If people want to use AdBlock and, by extension, not see the ads, I encourage them to do so. Indeed, I think there is a certain editorial advantage that arises from using both AdBlock and Google ads, myself. Since the ads are blocked whenever I view my site, I do not know what is being advertised here. As a result, I am not consciously or subconsciously influenced by the advertising. If newspaper and magazine editors could live in a similar state of disregard, when it comes to who is paying the bills, perhaps there might be a bit more journalistic integrity in the world.

Three hung Parliaments

I had a busy weekend, so I don’t have posts prepared.

Here’s a question for readers, though. After the recent Australian election, there are now three Westminster style democracies that lack majority governments. Two went from longstanding left-wing administrations to lacklustre leaders (Paul Martin and Gordon Brown), while the other briefly went from Liberal to Labour before entering the current predicament.

Is there any reason why this happened in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom at overlapping times? Is there some demographic or ideological cause? Have party loyalties weakened, creating a muddle? Or has politics become more polarized, reducing the extent to which parties seek the middle ground?

[Correction] The post above originally claimed that Australia had a Tory government. In fact, the centre-right Liberal party was in power from 1996 to 2007.

[Aside] My A570 IS point and shoot digicam certainly is easier to carry around than the 5D Mk II, but look how much noise there is at 400 ISO!

Starcraft II Mac installer crash fix

The following is a description of the problems I had installing Starcraft II on my 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo iMac, as well as the solution I found. I am running Mac OS 10.6.4.

The bug

Three times, I tried installing Starcraft II from the DVD I bought. Each time, the installer hung at 30% completion, on file 06748/37853. Each time it hung, the only thing I could do was manually turn off my computer. The same result occurred regardless of whether I used an administrator account or an ordinary user.

My fix

Insert the Starcraft II disc
Open the Disk Utility Program bundled with Mac OS X
Select the Starcraft II disc from the list on the left side of the window
Click ‘New Image’
Set ‘Image Format’ to ‘DVD/CD master’ and ‘Encryption’ to ‘none’.
Save the disc image to your desktop
Eject the Starcraft II DVD
Right click on the disc image and select ‘Open with’ and ‘Disk Utility’
From the list on the left hand side of the window, select the .cdr file you created earlier
Right click, and click ‘Open Disc Image’
Run the installer, out of the disc image
Once the game is installed, delete the disc image

Make sure nothing is running in the background while you are running the installer. I found that even such minor actions as muting and unmuting the sound were enough to crash the install program.

This may not solve your problem, but it worked for me! Another option is to download the game files from Battle.net, once you have created an account. Of course, downloading several gigabytes of data is likely to take a long time.

[Update: 24 August 2010] I finally got Starcraft II installed and working. I had to download the game from Blizzard and run the installer about six times, before it managed to get all the way through without crashing. Then, I had to download the 1.0.3 patch from a third party website (because the built-in updater always crashes). Even with the third party update file, it took about five tries before the game updated properly and could be played.

[Update: 14 October 2010] Starcraft II is an extremely frustrating game! It is mandatory for me to upgrade to version 1.1.2 in order to play, but the upgrade program fails every time I run it. It suggests erasing and re-installing Starcraft II, but it was such an ordeal to get it installed in the first place that I am reluctant.

I can’t find a direct download of the update file anywhere.

I don’t know why Blizzard installers are so picky, but I think it may have something to do with anti-cheating technology. They try to prevent users from altering the game’s files, but the protective systems that do that may cause install and upgrade errors.

[Update: 15 November 2010] I finally got the 1.1.3 patch installed, but it took a lot of work. I had to backup all my personal data to external drives, format the hard drive in my iMac, re-install OS X, re-install Starcraft II, and then install each patch.

The fact that it works now suggested that some sort of software problem was causing all the difficulties earlier. Mac users who are having the same problems should consider doing a ‘clean install’ of the kind described above. I tried simply over-writing the operating system files (an ‘archive and install’) but it did not work.

If you need them, the Starcraft II patches can be downloaded directly from Blizzard instead of by using the automatic updater.

Grammar query: punctuation and quotation marks

I remember being taught – ages ago – that the proper way to combine punctuation with quotation marks is to put the former inside the latter, like so:

I remember what he said: “The Trojans cannot be trusted.”

rather than

I remember what he said: “The Trojans cannot be trusted”.

“I don’t see why not,” the general mused, “they are fine masons.”

rather than

“I don’t see why not”, the general mused, “they are fine masons”.

Now, I find myself wondering whether this is one of those dated conventions that older people cling to because they were once taught this way, despite how the world has moved on. Putting two spaces after a period is a prime example of this phenomenon.

Does anybody know what the current and correct rule is?

Software behind Facebook

Given its massive scale, it isn’t surprising that Facebook has cooked up some custom software. What I just learned – which is encouraging – is that Facebook is sharing some of its technologies. One particularly interesting example is HipHop. This software takes the PHP code used by many modern websites (including those running on WordPress and MediaWiki) and compiles it into highly optimized C++ which servers process more quickly. While I don’t know much about it, it seems like something that WordPress might be able to usefully incorporate or reproduce in a future version.

Facebook also contributed to highly distributed database Cassandra, which Twitter also uses, as well as a number of other pieces of open source software.

It is nice to see Facebook providing potentially useful code to the wider web community.

Rights: inherent or chartered?

Reading one of the lengthy historical discussions of anti-Semitism in Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb, I came across a section on how Jews made an agreement with Louis the Pious, the son of Charlemagne, to be granted legal protections in exchange for becoming the ruler’s property. Rhodes says that: “Their rights were thus no longer inherent but chartered.” (p.177 paperback)

This made me think about the distinction between how constitutional rights are described in Canada and in the United States.

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms “guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” It also describes such things as freedom of conscience and religion as “fundamental freedoms,” though it does not directly describe where ‘fundamental’ freedoms come from. Arguably, the preamble to the Charter, which says that Canada is “founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law” provides a clue about where the drafters think rights could come from, though it is ambiguous and unclear.

By contrast, the American Declaration of Independence states that it is a self-evident truth “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It seems clear what the drafters of this document thought about the origin of rights, though this raises the question of what their status and origin are taken to be within a secular state.

I have written before about how I don’t think there is anything inherent to human rights. They are not built into the structure of the universe, and they do not make themselves evident, whole and fully formed, when sensible people think about how human societies should be structured. Furthermore, they are often in conflict with one another, and a simple rights-based philosophy doesn’t provide much guidance on how to deal with situations where different rights-based claims are in competition.

Is it better, then, to have inherent rights or chartered ones? With chartered rights, there is a clear sense of what they are and where they came from. Potentially, there can also be explanation for why they are granted. We could, for instance, explain that freedom of speech exists in our society because we recognize the benefits it creates, and the harms associated with denying it. Inherent rights may, in a certain sense, be more robust. If we pretend that certain human rights really are part of the structure of the universe – or unambiguously derived from thought and logic – then we have a certain defence against the suppression of minority rights by the majority.

Of course, if we are worried about the masses being insufficiently cautious about the rights of minorities, we can express those concerns in a chartered framework. We can underline the value of protecting minority rights, and explain how only granting effective protections against majority bullying can those benefits be maintained.

Google and net neutrality

At Google headquarters recently about 100 people showed up to protest Google’s apparently eroding support for ‘net neutrality.’ Net neutrality is the idea that the internet should not restrict the modes of communication that can be used across it, nor the sorts of devices that can be connected to it.

Lots of companies oppose net neutrality because it means they should not discriminate between traffic from different sources. Data traversing the internet – broken up into pieces called packets – includes everything from pirated DVDs being passed around using peer-to-peer filesharing systems to corporate phone calls being routed though voice over internet protocol (VoIP) telephone systems to songs being downloaded for money from the iTunes store. Lots of companies would like to slow down or block file sharing, restrict services like VoIP, and allow people to pay more for faster paid downloads.

One big reason why this is worrisome is that it could prevent the emergence of new technologies. VoIP seems like a good example. Routing telephone calls through the internet challenges the monopoly of fixed-line telephone companies. Low cost VoIP calls have been a source of competition for them, and have probably produced improved services at lower prices for consumers. A future version of the web where companies can slow down or block traffic of undesirable types could be a version where new such technologies get strangled at birth.

That said, abandoning net neutrality could have some advantages, by improving network performance for those who use relatively low-bandwidth services like email and text websites. It could also facilitate the emergence of interesting new technologies, which are not viable on the internet as it exists now. For instance, the sometimes slow and clunky load times were one of the reasons why Google Wave proved to be a failure.

Given their enormous influence on the content and structure of the internet, the position of Google on net neutrality is of considerable public importance. The full details of their deal with Verizon – which is rumoured to allow special treatment of certain sorts of traffic – have not yet been publicly announced. When they are, there will surely be a lot of scrutiny and interest from the geekier components of the general public, as well as those with a particular interest on how technology policies affect societal change.

In Canada, Bell is probably the most vocal opponent of net neutrality, while Michael Geist may be the most prominent defender. I wrote a bit about net neutrality earlier, as well as about the related technology of deep packet inspection.

Feynman’s Challenger appendix

In the aftermath of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster of 1986, a Presidential Commission was established to determine what went wrong. The most unusual member of the panel was almost certainly the physicist Richard Feynman, some of who’s books I have reviewed. Ultimately, his contribution proved to be controversial and was shifted into an annex of the official report. To me, it seems like a remarkably clear-sighted piece of analysis, with wide-ranging importance for complex organizations in which important things might go wrong.

The full text is available online: Appendix F – Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle

He makes some important points about dealing with models and statistics, as well as about the bureaucratic pressures that exist in large organizations. For instance, he repeatedly points out how the fact that something didn’t fail last time isn’t necessarily good evidence that it won’t fail again. Specifically, he points this out with reference to the eroded O-ring that was determined to be the cause of the fatal accident:

But erosion and blow-by are not what the design expected. They are warnings that something is wrong. The equipment is not operating as expected, and therefore there is a danger that it can operate with even wider deviations in this unexpected and not thoroughly understood way. The fact that this danger did not lead to a catastrophe before is no guarantee that it will not the next time, unless it is completely understood. When playing Russian roulette the fact that the first shot got off safely is little comfort for the next. The origin and consequences of the erosion and blow-by were not understood. They did not occur equally on all flights and all joints; sometimes more, and sometimes less. Why not sometime, when whatever conditions determined it were right, still more leading to catastrophe?

In his overall analysis, Feynman certainly doesn’t pull his punches, saying:

Since 1 part in 100,000 would imply that one could put a Shuttle up each day for 300 years expecting to lose only one, we could properly ask “What is the cause of management’s fantastic faith in the machinery?”

and:

It would appear that, for whatever purpose, be it for internal or external consumption, the management of NASA exaggerates the reliability of its product, to the point of fantasy.

It certainly seems plausible that similar exaggerations have been made by the managers in charge of other complex systems, on the basis of similar dubious analysis.

Feynman also singles out one thing NASA was doing especially well – computer hardware and software design and testing – to highlight the differences between a cautious approach where objectives are set within capabilities and a reckless one where capabilities are stretched to try to reach over-ambitious cost or time goals.

Of course, the fact that the Space Shuttle was more dangerous than advertised doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth the risk to launch them. Surely, astronauts were especially well equipped to understand and accept the risks they were facing. Still, if NASA had had a few people like Feyman in positions of influence in the organization, the Shuttle and the program surrounding it would probably have included fewer major risks.

Photography and social roles

A number of my friends are fairly serious amateur photographers: people who have built up a repertoire of knowledge, various sorts of gear, and who display photography publicly online. Photography is certainly an excellent pastime. It satisfies geeky cravings for toys to play with, while serving as a creative outlet. It also lets you document and share what is going on in your life, with a group of friends who are increasingly likely to be far-flung (as we stay in touch with friends from former schools and employers, all over the world).

In addition to those appealing elements, photography has an interesting role within group dynamics. Everyone wants flattering photos of themselves, so being able to provide them makes you valuable to others. There is also competition between people who take photos. It takes place on the basis of quality of output, creativity, photographing interesting things, and gear. Indeed, photo gear is an increasingly appropriate way of demonstrating wealth. Whereas in some social circumstances, automobiles are probably the premier form of wealth expression, that isn’t well matched to a lifestyle where people move around often and relatively rarely see their friends in person. Photography is useful, visible, and a way of demonstrating capability, access, and wealth.

[Aside] On a somewhat related note, OKCupid has some data on what makes an attractive photo. Specifically, a non-flash shot taken with an SLR or 4:3 system camera at f/1.2 or f/1.8. The average 30 year old iPhone user has also had significantly more sexual partners than the average BlackBerry and (especially) Android user.

Save points in games

Back in the day, there were lots of video games that wouldn’t let you save at all, or that only let you do so intermittently. With the first sort – games like Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo – you just had to get as far as you could with the lives you started with and won along the way. With the second sort – games like Final Fantasy VII on the Playstation – you often had to spend a lot of time or do something difficult between one save point and another.

More recent games have generally allowed players to save at any point, which makes it much easier to try the same small difficult step over and over again. This allows for ever-more-cautious play: darting around one corner to defeat a single opponent, rather than crashing through an entire level. The style of play this can encourage is similar to the risk-averse style characteristic of single-player gaming in general.

The ultimate extension of this trend would be a game that includes a ‘time bar’ like a DVD, and where you can simply click and drag your way back to any previous point in the game’s chronology. That would eliminate the danger of making a false move that commits you later to an unwanted path. Of course, the game would either need to split into two branches every time you went back and played differently, or it would need to discard everything you did after the point on the time bar you returned to. Either approach could produce some interesting game dynamics.