New blog for Mica in the works

As an evolving Christmas gift, I am working on a new website for my brother Mica. As of now, there are three big things I mean to do: find and customize a very nice WordPress template, categorize his old posts and make sure the image and video links in them work properly, and try to configure the Broadcast Machine so that people can view and download his videos through iTunes.

I expect that finishing all of that will take me a few days, but I made a good start tonight.

Holiday to-do lists

Academic

  1. Complete first paper for Developing World seminar
  2. Complete second paper for Developing World seminar
  3. Complete masses of thesis reading
  4. Draft thesis introduction
  5. Draft thesis literature review
  6. Draft thesis background to case studies
  7. Finish the two issues of The Economist that arrived while I was in Turkey

Web / Photographic

  1. Post the best photos from Turkey to my Photo.net page (Done on 19 Dec)
  2. Post scanned T-Max images
  3. Post non-“photo of the day” images to blog and link into standard structures
  4. Create a new banner / theme for the blog for the new year?
  5. Help Mica migrate from his Blogger based site to a WordPress site with better capabilities?
  6. Work through some old bugs and feature suggestions.

Employment related

  1. Find a job for after June 16th

Time remaining for completion: 27 days. Probability of having time for another trip this break: low and falling.

Fresh ‘Papa Fly’ offering

My brother Mica has a new video online: Red Light. This one is heavier on the special effects than any of the previous ones, and I find it quite entertaining. Here’s a direct link to Google Video.

The twenty minute filming time would be the envy of major studios.

[Update: 19 December 2006] Mica has been interviewed about his films by one of the people affiliated with Bopsta (formerly Google Idol).

Back in the UK

Istanbul cats

Back in the comparative warmth of Oxford, I am enjoying how it feels to be on a computer with a properly calibrated screen and a keyboard familiar enough to require no peeking. It is gratifying to see how much better my photos look when properly displayed.

Since this is my father’s last night in England, I am not going to spend the three hours or so that it will take to sort through my photos from Turkey, just now. You can expect my previous entries to start getting illustrated as of tomorrow, as well as additional batches on Facebook and Photo.net.

PS. Both my iPod Shuffle and my USB flash drive picked up a few viruses over the course of visiting hostel and internet cafe computers. Thankfully, they are all viruses that only affect Windows machines. Travelers with laptops (or computers running Windows back home) beware. I do feel bad about spreading viruses between all those machines; no wonder they were so slow.

Irksome spammers

My spam problems have become very acute, with five or so spam comments appearing on commonly visited posts each day. In response, I have kicked up the sensitivity of Spam Karma 2 by a couple of notches. My apologies if this makes it more difficult to leave legitimate comments.

Judging by some of the search strings that are leading people to the site, I think blogs that use Spam Karma 2 are being specifically targetted. I may need to adopt a new system once I get back to Oxford on the 16th or 17th.

[Update: 29 December 2006] I am having two spam problems now. One is annoying and one is just odd. The first is that some spam comments are getting through Spam Karma 2, even with the Akismet plugin. They have karma values of over 1000, which I think must be the result of a clever hack. I changed the page footer with the number of spams caught, to make it less obvious that I am running SK2. The odd thing is that the number of spams caught figure just doesn’t go up anymore. I have no idea why, or how to fix it.

[Update: 31 December 2006] For no comprehensible reason, the spams caught count has started rising again: jumping immediately by forty points. The best thing to do seems to leave it alone.

[Update: 2 January 2007] For some reason, today involved a veritable cascade of comment spam. At midnight yesterday, my filters had caught 870 spam comments. 24 hours later, they have caught 1065. That is 22% of all the comments received thus far, all on a single day. I am impressed that my new combination filtering system (details top secret) managed to catch every single one, without catching any real comments by mistake.

[Update: 21 January 2007] Because of aggressive spammers, I had to disable the ability of people in general to register accounts with the WordPress installation for a sibilant intake of breath. People who want one should ask me by email, and I will set one up on their behalf.

[Update: 15 April 2007] I am surprised to see that I thought five spam comments a day was a large number, back in January. Now, I get more like 50. Thankfully, I have some better protections in place. As such, I am allowing user registration again. We will see how it goes.

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.