Category: Internet matters

Posts about the internet

Photo backup

I’ve copied the 160 or so digital photos that I have taken so far onto this internet cafe computer. Due to a less-than-zippy internet connection, it would take about ten hours to transmit the 155 megabyte file. As such, I have squirreled it away in a system folder, to return to when I can come back with my USB memory stick. The only alternative would be sacrificing all the music on my iPod Shuffle, which would hardly be wise with another noisy fourteen hour bus ride in a few days’ time. Simon & Garfunkel, along with my noise isolating Etymotic ER6i headphones, are the only reason I got any sleep last night.

The reason for burying the folder with my images is mostly an observation that dozens of people have left similar little caches of Turkish holiday snaps in more conventional places. There is some voyeuristic pleasure to be gleaned from skimming over them. They range from shots so professional that I am tempted to steal them to those that would prompt me to offer the photographer a few basic lessons.

With the sun down, it is now well and truly too cold to type in this unheated and open-doored cafe. Adieu until tomorrow.

Data protection

After another serious failure of a computer used by a friend or family member, I feel obliged to remind people that Oxford provides excellent free comprehensive data backups. If you are basing your entire M.Phil or D.Phil project on files in a (theft-vulnerable and breakable) laptop, this is something you really must do.

I already wrote about it here.

As a special bonus – prompted by passing the 40,000 visitor mark on the blog – I will personally configure the Oxford backup system for the first graduate student friend of mine who leaves a comment requesting it. Call that a special bonus for people who are reading the blog in syndication.

[Update: 22 January 2007] Bad news for people with Intel-based Macs: the TSM backup client for Mac OS does not yet support them. Supposedly, a new one is being released in February. Until then, keep making backups to external hard disks or optical discs.

Live-blogging Keohane

Anyone interested in reading about Robert Keohane’s presentation to the Global Economic Governance Seminar can do so on my wiki. There is still nearly an hour in the session, so if someone posts a clever question as a comment, I will try to ask it. I doubt anyone will do so in time, but it would be a neat demonstration of the emerging capabilities of internet technology in education.

Since this is a publicly held lecture, I don’t see any reason whatsoever for which the notes should not be available. Those who don’t know who Robert Keohane is may want to have a look at the Wikipedia entry on him.

[Update: 7:30pm] Robert Keohane’s second presentation, given at Nuffield on anti-Americanism, was well argued but not too far off the conventional wisdom. I am here taking “the conventional wisdom” to be that in a survey on Anti-Americanism that I am almost sure ran in The Economist during the last couple of years.

Basically: it does exist, more so in the Middle East than anywhere else. The Iraq war has exacerbated it almost everywhere, but the biggest turn for the worse has been in Europe. The policy impact of Anti-Americanism is not very clear. Finally, lots of what would be taken as a legitimate political stance if expressed by an American at home is taken as Anti-Americanism elsewhere.

Keohane distinguished four sorts of Anti-Americanism, three of which have been expressed on this blog. The first was the kind grounded in the belief that the United States is not living up to its own values: what he called Liberal Anti-Americanism. Guantanamo, and everything that word conjures up, gives you the idea. The second is social Anti-Americanism: for instance, objections to the death penalty of the absence of state funded health care. The third is Anti-Americanism based on fear of encroachment into the domestic jurisdiction of your state, what he called the state sovereignty variety. The last was radical Anti-Americanism, which I would suggest is distinguished more by the language used to express it, the degree to which the positions taken are extreme, and the kind of actions justified using it than by the kind of analysis that underscores the rational components thereof.

New interface for comedic news

Comedy Central has rolled out a new interface for showing Daily Show and Colbert Report clips. The player seems to be rather more stable than the previous version, with no errors discernible in Firefox 2.0 and Mac OS X. The videos themselves are a bit bigger and seem to load faster. Perhaps the biggest improvement is that clip videos now play in sequence, in the order in which the bits were included in the actual episode.

The two biggest new problems are that the window in which the videos now play is very large and cluttered, and that video advertisements are now shown before the first clip you watch and sometimes in between them. For me, this is an acceptable price to pay for an improved viewing experience. It was very annoying to have to go through them one by one before, especially given how about one in three would encounter an error that prevented it from loading.

It would be better to just have it all on YouTube, but I can understand that Comedy Central needs to extract advertising dollars from we web-viewers. Of course, I won’t be de-activating my AdBlock extension or the Filterset G updater for it anytime soon. After a few weeks of using it, the web seems truly garish when viewed in a normal web browser. You need never be troubled by annoying banners again. Flashblock is also a godsend, since almost all the flash on the web is either advertising or potentially malicious.

If you can’t open it, you don’t own it

Umbrella

Make, a community of tinkerers and open-source affectionados, has published a list of gift suggestions. Some of their projects look really cool. Among them:

They are also selling a neat Leatherman warranty voider, in case you know a geek that does not yet have a multi-tool. (I have two: a Swisstool X and a little SOG Crosscut on my keychain). Their philosophy of “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it” is increasingly relevant in a world where manufacturers are allowing fewer and fewer things to be done by those who purchase their products.

I have long been a huge fan of open source software. The blog runs on Redhat Linux, using Apache Server, and both WordPress and MediaWiki are open source projects. All of these pieces of software can be used for free, even more usually, your right to take them apart and rebuild is limited only by your creativity. Wikipedia is probably the best website ever created, and it is all about collective effort and shared information.

Old v. new economy

Google, a company with 9,378 employees, now has a stockmarket capitalization of $155 billion: about $16.5 million a person. General Motors has about 326,999 employees and a stockmarket capitalization of about $19 billion: about $58,000 a person.

It is impossible for me to believe that Google has enough good ideas to justify such a huge amount of capital per employee. That said, they did earn $1.47 billion in 2005, compared to a loss of more than $10 billion at GM. Also, everybody has known for years that GM’s pension and health care obligations are going to bury the company, barring some massive default.

Wiki restriction in progress

The wiki came under discussion in today’s seminar. As such, it is offline until such a time as I can come up with a robust way to restrict access to seminar notes, while leaving all the material that I have been producing myself available.

Ideally, I would like to either make specific pages of the wiki require a password to access or, alternatively, restrict certain pages to specific user accounts. If anyone knows how to do this elegantly, please let me know.

I expect that I should have my portions available again by Monday. If you care to report any bugs on the blog between now and then, feel free to do so as a comment to this post.

[Update: 4:30pm] Much more quickly than expected, I have been able to establish a content management system for the wiki that allows certain pages to be restricted from public access. This treatment has now been applied to seminar notes from the thesis seminar and the Developing World seminar. It has not been applied to my reading notes, notes related to public lectures, or other such pages. As with any such change (one that requires me to edit PHP script and MySQL database settings), please report any bugs that you encounter.

Once again, I must say that I am impressed with MediaWiki as a platform. All I did was backup the MySQL database and the /images/ folder, erase the old install (except for LocalSettings.php), install a patched version of MediaWiki, run the installer, throw out the config file it generated, add the restriction patch code to the old config file, and then configure user accounts to have access to restriction features. That may sound very tricky to a lot of people, but it was actually a breeze. The whole thing was done in half an hour, with no hiccups discovered so far. Now that it is publicly known, the Lecture and Seminar Notes section of the wiki has graduated out of the experimental grouping.

Replace generic blog templates

Folding bicycle

As more and more friends and colleagues set up blogs, it becomes harder to distinguish between so many identical looking pages. While the default Blogger templates are generally attractive, they have now been used so many times that anything written on one automatically looks generic.

A good template should, above all, be clear and readable. Next, it helps for it to look stylish and professional as well. While it is beyond the means of most beginner bloggers to create their own template, there are masses available to be downloaded for free. Regardless of whether you use Blogger, WordPress, or something else, changing your template is a quick way to make your blog more distinctive and memorable.

If you want to see the snazziest of templates (though many are more beautiful than usable), have a look at Zen Garden.

Listed below are a few places where decent, free templates can be picked up. Dozens more can be found in less than a minute, through Google.

For Blogger:

You can easily find instructions online on how to change your Blogger template. One thing to note: because Blogger generates every page of your blog in advance, before they are requested, you will need to republish the whole blog before the template will appear everywhere.

For WordPress:

There are so many such sites, and they are so easy to find, that it is almost pointless to list them. Instructions for changing WordPress themes are likewise easily available.

If you are using a system other than Blogger or WordPress, Google and ye shall find. You can also find some basic tutorials on customizing a template that you find, so as to make it individualized. Here is an example.

Congratulations Mica

My brother Mica has now won three Google Idol music video contests in a row: two rock contests with his Hives and Arctic Monkeys videos, and one pop contest with his Jock Rock video.

He’s obviously a talented guy. You can congratulate him, or discuss his videos, over at his website. I hope he will have time to assemble an original short film soon.

Note: Google Idol had to be rebranded as Bopsta.com, in the wake of a trademark dispute.