Life and code.

Here’s a controversial thought for a sunny afternoon.

George Bush is not a chimp. Not an idiot. Not an imbecile. But rather a reasonably intelligent, quite well-educated chap.

So let’s start from the beginning:

President Bush was born on July 6, 1946, in New Haven, Connecticut, and grew up in Midland and Houston, Texas. He received a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University in 1968, and then served as an F-102 fighter pilot in the Texas Air National Guard. President Bush received a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School in 1975.

OK, I’m happy to admit that perhaps his own biography might want to put a positive spin on things. But still, he has:

• An American high school education
• A degree from Yale
• A diploma from Harvard

I can already hear the keyboards of you all clamouring that Yale and Harvard are rubbish institutions and that anyone can get in and that his Dad bribed them all. To which I say: “get a grip.” Even if these factors are true, there is no chance that this man is as stupid as our newspapers make out.

Since his education, George has reached the dizzying heights of the US presidency.

Yes, OK, he has lots of financial support and assistance. But still, are you all really suggesting that somebody of below-average IQ could reach the top job in the entire United States of America?

Here in the UK, we’ve heard many comments known as “Bushisms,” remarks supposed to have been uttered by George Bush during public speeches. These include such great lines as:

“If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure.”
“The vast majority of our imports come from outside the country.”

But luckily, this Snopes article reveals the truth:

All but one of the 2004 crop of groaners supposedly uttered by President George W. Bush or Senator John Kerry are statements either made by former Vice-President Dan Quayle or ones which have for years been attributed to him.

And the one remaining?

Only a lone entry in the 2004 Bush and Kerry lists was anything other than a Dan Quayle utterance or a Quayleism: “The vast majority of our imports come from outside the country.” Though it is not a word-for-word match, it is close enough to a statement made by President George W. Bush in 2000 to be recognizable: “More and more of our imports come from overseas.” (Although not all imports necessarily come from “overseas,” when President Bush made this statement he was specifically referring to foreign oil imports, even though the two largest foreign suppliers of oil to the U.S. are the fellow North American countries of Canada and Mexico.)

For a long time we’ve heard and read a constant torrent of abuse in the British media directed towards the US Premier. Perhaps some of it isn’t true. Just a thought.

Here at the Consumerist is a great post.

It’s a recording of a guy’s attempts to cancel his AOL account. Listen to the whole thing, it’s great. One of the best moments is when the AOL call centre operator asks to speak to the caller’s father, despite the account and credit card being in his name.

It’s nice to know that even Wikipedia suffers from argument. Perhaps a year down the line we’ll remember the overriding feature of the web 2.0 world was the tendency for flame wars and arguments. Read all about it here.

David Aaronovitch, writing in the Times, makes some good points about the Afghan war.

As I read Christina Lamb’s extraordinary account in The Sunday Times of being ambushed in Helmand my thought was not “too much”, but “not enough”. More helicopters, if they’re needed. More of everything, if that’s required. We should be doing it for Nooria, the 12-year-old girl interviewed by Newsweek in February. A dozen or so gunmen had entered her school, beaten the watchman and then burnt the place down. Then the written threats started.

So classes took place under the trees in the courtyard and other schools lent some of their own books. Nooria, whose ambition is to teach, told the magazine’s reporter that she wasn’t afraid of being beaten or mutilated. “I want to keep studying,” she said.

1. Lesbian, a distribution of GNU/Linux
2. Heatseek, a browser designed for looking at porn.

Mind you, the internet is for porn.

Recently I did a project on Image Compression. One of our test images was a picture of a woman’s head. This picture.

We joked a little that this must be a particularly male subject to study, since it’d be hard to justify using a picture of a woman if there were lots of female students around (bloody feminists). But the truth runs deeper than that.

This page gives more of the story.

From the comp.compression FAQ, we can find that “Lenna” or “Lena” is a digitized Playboy centerfold, from November 1972.

In the Playboy and Wired News, we know that in the early Seventies Lenna’s Playboy centerfold was scanned in by an unknown researcher at the University of Southern California to use as a test image for digital image compression research. Since that time, images of the Playmate have been used as the industry standard for testing ways in which pictures can be manipulated and transmitted electronically. Over the past 25 years, no image has been more important in the history of imaging and electronic communications, and today the mysterious Lenna is considered the First Lady of the Internet.

Important stuff. But such a shame that the image is cropped. Not any more (NSFW link).

Blimey, me distributing pornography. Who’d have thunk it?

I’ve been reading some fiction books for a change. It’s quite exciting. I read the following tomes:

1984 – George Orwell (full text online)
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

I was struck by the different techniques used to control the population in each book, and, in particular, the different attitudes of each author towards sexual pleasure. 1984 describes the classic totalitarian state, with people not even able to think freely in the language spoken (“newspeak”). Sexual thoughts are the only ones which can’t be controlled by the Party, so it suppresses them as much as possible. Young girls are encouraged to join the “Junior Anti-Sex League” and sex is used only as means of procreation.

The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now.

In contrast, Brave New World doesn’t use sex for procreation at all. Control of the population is done in two ways: breeding, and pleasure. Children are created in bottles and are bred to fit their role in life. Street sweepers are bred to be stupid. They will never be frustrated with the monotony of their task. Meanwhile everyone is encouraged to take as much pleasure as possible from life. The population are drugged with “Soma,” described as similar to alcohol but without the hangover. They are also encouraged to shag like rabbits. “Everybody belongs to everybody else” is a mantra endorsing free sex. Many of the population are born sterile, others are trained to use contraception from their early “erotic play” in infancy.

Both techniques remove the tensions caused by sex. One suppresses the instinct entirely, whereas the other satisfies it completely.

Both books also speak of the problems which ensue as a result of oversupply. As production becomes more mechanised, more goods are produced than can be reasonably consumed by the populace. Orwell solves this problem by fighting a war. An eternal war. War uses resources up quickly. Huxley takes a different approach, describing how his people are trained to consume resources as fast as possible. Their ball games take place using complicated machinery which has to be manufactured.

It’s interesting that both authors tackle these two issues, perhaps more interesting even than the different ways in which the problems are solved. It will be interesting to see how the future pans out with regard to the dual crises of humanity: sex and steel.

I’ve not updated properly for a while, but this kicked me into action.

It references a post by Asa Dotzler with the exciting title “microsoft security manager calls users stupid.”

A couple of months ago, Mike Danseglio, the Program Manager for the Security Solutions group at Microsoft blamed users for the Windows security nightmare, saying “there really is no patch for human stupidity.”

Nice one, Mike.

Actually, Mike, there really is no patch for that kind of blame shifting. We make software and it’s our job to make it work. Designing and building software is an extremely complex process but it is not magic and it is not only possible to make it safe, it’s a requirement.

Of course, if we actually bother to read the original quote…

Danseglio said the success of social engineering attacks is a sign that the weakest link in malware defense is “human stupidity.”

“Social engineering is a very, very effective technique. We have statistics that show significant infection rates for the social engineering malware. Phishing is a major problem because there really is no patch for human stupidity,” he said.

So what our Microsoft security expert is actually saying is that whatever software you build to protect users, they’ll still be vulnerable to attacks which tempt them into doing something silly. One of the best examples of this was the “I love you” bug of a few years ago, which tempted thousands of single office workers into downloading a dangerous attachment. Why did they download the attachment? Because they thought it was a love letter.

And when our Microsoft security expert points out that users need to be smarter in order not to be infected, he gets laughed at by Mr. Firefox. Not argued with, not listened to, but instead his comments are taken out of context in order to make him look stupid.

The Mozilla corporation will never have my support while it continues to act like a 14 year old teenager browsing the internet from his mother’s basement. Get some bloody professionalism.

The new MS Office Ribbon is reviewed here, one of the best descriptions I’ve seen.

Here’s an interesting theory.

Although opinions vary on the reliability of browser market share figures, a quick scan through all the data reveals one interesting commonality across all the data sources: IE6 market share peaked at around 95 percent sometime in mid-2004. If 95% of the world is browsing with IE 6, pursuing browser independence is a waste of time. If you don’t have to worry about browser independence, you are suddenly free to exploit advanced browser techniques like XMLHttpRequest.
The super-saturation and monoculture of IE6 from 2002 to 2004 created an incredibly rich, vibrant development platform where developers were free to push the capabilities of the browser to its limits. Without worrying about backward compatibility. Without writing thousands of if..else statements to accommodate a half-dozen alternative browsers.

Peer-review is the process by which scientific papers get to be published. The papers are first reviewed by a group of “peers.” There’s usually three of them, and they’ll be experts in the relevant field. Thus the nonsense is weeded out, and only papers deemed worthy enough will be published.

Nature, however, have got bored with this scheme.

We will also offer to post the submitted manuscript onto an open website. Anyone can then respond to it by posting online comments, provided they are willing to sign them. Once Nature’s editors have received all the comments from their solicited confidential reviewers, the open website will cease to take comments, and all the opinions will be considered by the editors as well as the authors.

This is, quite probably, a good idea, opening the scientific process slightly and allowing more democracy. But somehow, I just can’t stop worrying.

Just how many Daily Mail journalists are going to sign up to this scheme so they can view the latest health scare-stories before anyone else? Even if those scare-stories cannot be verified by anyone else, and don’t even get published in the journal.

(With thanks to The Scientific Activist)

Who said this:

Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

Who could it be? Perhaps some <texas>left-wing lily-livered liberal douche scum</texas> who doesn’t believe in this country?

No, you’re all wrong. It was Hermann Goering. But it rings true even today.

This article seems to think so.

Standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Linux distributions from “niche” open source vendors, are offline more and longer than either Windows or Unix competitors, the survey said. The reason: the scarcity of Linux and open source documentation.

And there’s the rub. Open-source software suffers greatly from it’s lack of decent documentation. It isn’t simple to use, either.

Many Linux users (and Firefox users) believe that they are superior to Windows (and IE) users in every way. They’re cleverer, faster, quicker. Technical support staff are famously impatient when dealing with ordinary users.

I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say this: Computers are not obvious or intuitive.

I first started programming at the age of 10 or so in BASIC using a Commodore Amiga 500. Eventually I moved onto the IBM PC, into Assembler, into C++ and the rest is history. To me, computers are generally fairly simple. I can usually guess what to do, even with unfamiliar software.

If you haven’t been using computers since age 10, but only since you started your new job a month ago, then this isn’t the case.

Whereas Windows and Mac OS are designed to be user-friendly, GNU and Linux aren’t. They’re designed to be functional. And that’s what’s holding back their chance at real popularity.

When you buy software off the shelf, you’ll use it for a number of years, and then decide that it’s too old. It’ll get creaky and slow, and the formats it uses will become obselete. It won’t be supported on newer computers, and newer versions will become available.

Eventually you’ll upgrade.

The great thing is that you do it all at once, at your convenience. You get confused for a week as your favourite features move somewhere else, but you get used to it.

Web applications are updated when the engineers decide it’s appropriate. OK, you don’t have to pay for the latest version, but what happens when a critical feature gets moved when you are racing towards a deadline. You’ve got 3 hours to finish a large project, and suddenly you can’t find the “Bold” button. (I’m exaggerating slightly). I don’t think this is a good thing.

This is my limited memory of the post which Blogger lost.

Google have just launched an online spreadsheet application, Google Spreadsheets. It’s all over the Blogosphere, so I thought I’d add my two penn’orth of limited viewpoints.

My first problem with the application is right there in the middle: Formulas. Is that a word? Formulae, please.

I also have another problem with this idea, of streaming applications off the web.

The Free Software Foundation was founded on the principal of software freedom. “Open-source” is a derivative of this freedom. Basically, the principal is that you can download the source code of any application, and edit it to suit your needs. You don’t like the way your word processor does tabs? Reprogram it, and publish your work so that other people can use your modification.

Most current desktop software, such as the MS Office suite is not free. Open-source software is spreading, however, with products such as GNU/Linux gaining ground. One day, perhaps, all software will be free.

Online software is not free. It can never be free, as its source code never leaves the server. The server handles your requests, and gives you an output. Nobody can reprogram it. I see all the progress in software freedom being dashed to shreds by the one company which might have helped push it – Google.

Do no evil? If only.

Dr. Crippen makes a really good point in this post. Unfortunately, it occurs half way down the page, so I reproduce it here:

The journalists have just discovered (see the BBC report here) that no one knows the optimum treatment for patients with early prostate cancer. Doctors have been saying this for years but have been ignored by the journalists who have campaigned to increase the demand for routine PSA screening. Trouble with journalists is that once they discover something they did not previously know, they assume that no one else knew either. Now they will be telling us we do too much screening.

I love that line near the end, so I’m going to print it again, bigger:
Trouble with journalists is that once they discover something they did not previously know, they assume that no one else knew either.

And now I turn to Sunday’s edition of the Observer:

Down on the bottom, there is a mathematical formula in the headline, heralding a great new way to predict football results. The formula itself is that for the Poisson distribution. I first learnt about this in my A level maths course at school, but I think that it might be even older than that. In fact, it was originally published in 1838. Hmm. Not as new as we’d first thought.

The journalists, of course, are totally correct. Given an average number of goals in a match, the Poisson can be used to provide probability estimates for the scores. None of this, however, is particularly novel. The article moves on to mention the “advanced techniques” now used to predict goal scoring. The Poisson distribution isn’t mentioned. Of course, that could be because actually the Poisson distribution isn’t particularly suitable. After all, goals can’t even be assumed to be independent events. And the value of lambda (the average number of goals) has to be tailored to the individual match.

Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Point 1: The term “Web 2.0” was originally coined by O’Reilly – the computing book people – in this article. Since then, they’ve tried to obtain a “service mark” (trademark) on the term.

Point 2: The term “Web 2.0” is used throughout the web. In this sense, it is clear that O’Reilly cannot pretend to exercise “ownership” over the term, in the same way that “Hoover” and “Linoleum” are valueless trademarks. (Although my father still calls it a “vacuum cleaner”).

Point 3: CMP Media Ltd., on behalf on O’Reilly, have sent a cease-and-desist notice to a not-for-profit company, IT@Cork, who are organising a half-day Web 2.0 Conference. Apparently O’Reilly have decided to pull the plug on the Web 2.0 term; they own it and the rest of us can go to hell.

This post contains a good summary of the events.

Result: The whole blogosphere has erupted. There’s tales of people cancelling contracts with O’Reilly and binning their books. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the matter, much of the anger is for one reason. Web 2.0 is all about collaboration and community building. O’Reilly have just spat on that ideal.

… but I think that this is interesting.

Biased BBC are making a big fuss over this article in the Times.

THE BBC has persuaded the creator of the 1970s television series M*A*S*H to turn his fire on the Bush Administration.

President Hillary Clinton is in the White House, and George Bush is on trial for crimes against the American people in Abrogate, a one-off radio comedy written by Larry Gelbart. Radio 4 is rushing the “merciless” satire to air in tomorrow night’s Friday Play slot. Radio Times acclaimed the play, saying that “every line is a barbed swipe, a dazzling barb that hits home”.

…

Abrogate is set during an imaginary congressional hearing which is “sifting through the debris of the post-Bush regime to discover what, if anything, went right”.

Originally, I think I agreed entirely with their summary, that “persuading the creator of M*A*S*H to turn his fire on the Bush administration” isn’t entirely impartial. But, in the interests of “balance”, I’m happy to entertain some alternative viewpoints. The take-home messages are:

– Firstly, this play appears to be a satire. Satire is inevitably going to criticise somebody. Perhaps we should just shut up and let them get on with it.

– The BBC’s definition of “satire,” however, seems to be “criticism of George Bush.” Now, I know that the Bush administration gives a well-polished impression of ineptitude, but one could easily argue that they must be doing something right – after all, they got voted in again. It’d be nice to see a satire of liberals, or of the Democratic party’s bungling, or of Michael Moore’s production crew. When pigs fly. Original programming is obviously no longer important.

– The line “Hillary Clinton is in the White House” is rather amusing. I recall a time a few years ago when the BBC news was constantly speculating that she might make it to the Oval Office. American opinion now seems to indicate that this is unlikely, but the BBC still entertain this fantasy.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating, of course. I’d be perfectly happy to listen to a well-written, witty satire that made me laugh, no matter who it was pointed at. But there’s some indications that it might not be:

– Satires of George Bush are never funny. The chimp jokes only last so long, and his trademark garbled speeches soon run out of steam. The gag-writers soon run out of material.

– If it were a well-written, witty satire, then one imagines that the Radio Times reviewers might have noticed, and said so.

– “Every line is a barbed swipe, a dazzling barb that hits home” is what they did say. As the B-BBC commentator pointed out: “With a write-up as jut-jawed as that we can safely assume that it was awful and the Radio Times knew it was awful.”

But now, of course, it’s Saturday. I even went to the BBC website to see if I could listen to the programme itself. But they wanted me to download RealPlayer. So I had to make do with this review:

I listened to the first 20 minutes. It was a total rant, totally unfunny.

Thanks to PCWorld.com, the 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time. AOL at the top, no surprises there. Interestingly, RealPlayer came second worst. I still wonder why the BBC insist on using RealPlayer for their online streaming service. Is it because they want us to break our computers?

Today I’ve had to turn on comment moderation. I didn’t want to, as I think it kills the conversation (not that there is much).

But unfortunately, some f*cking spamming halfwitted tw*t has added 250 comments advertising his stupid product, which are going to take me about a week to remove.

The worst part of it is, that he’s only had to sit and wait for about 2 seconds while his script executed, whereas now I’m going to waste a metric assload of time.

B*stards.