|
 Saturday, February 8, 2003
While the headline is hyperbolic, there are some interesting nuggets in ths report. The major conclusion is that the Internet is vulnerable because it is heterogenous, some servers are more important than others. Doing a better job of distributing the loads would make it more homogenous. They say that this would more accurately mimic social networks. Very nice intersection of many of my thoughts. 8:49:04 AM 
|
|
No, I'm Not Being Ironic. I Genuinely Do Not Understand. No, I'm Not Being Ironic. I Genuinely Do Not Understand
[Semi-Daily Journal]
Read this because I believe it deals with some very important issues dealing with the longterm effects of the coming budgets. But it also has a few comments that I absolutely agree with. It may not fir everyone but i believe it discribes a large perecntage of the people in government But everybody who goes into politics for real--who runs for the Congress, or takes a senior job in the Executive Branch--is a patriot. [...]
Nobody enters politics seeking to make their country poorer, weaker, and more miserable. Only patriots enter American politics. And trying to mold America's mid-twenty-first century politics into a pattern like that of present-day Argentina is not a patriotic thing to do.. 8:42:56 AM
|
|
Market Competition, Microsoft Style. Microsoft's home page tells the computers of people using the Opera browser and only the computers of people using the Opera browser to move the left margin of the page 30 pixels off the left end of the screen.
The natural inference is that Microsoft is doing this in the hope of convincing everyone who uses Opera and visits the Microsoft home page that the Opera browser is broken, and that they should use Internet Explorer instead.
The Register: Opera Software has accused Microsoft of deliberately engineering the MSN home page in order to make it look as if the Opera browser has a serious flaw in it. And the Norwegian company has published the results of an investigation which it says proves this.
Although Opera is convinced it has been deliberately targeted, it seems at least possible that the problem could be put down to some strangely coincidental finger trouble. But if that's the case, Opera has explained how simple it would be to fix it, and one therefore presumes Microsoft will give the matter its immediate attention.
Opera's techies downloaded the page using wget, in three different formats, identifying as Opera 7, MSIE and Netscape 7.01. The files sent to each browser are different, which is not necessarily suspicious, and the one sent to Opera7 has less content and is bigger than the one sent to IE. But that is not necessarily suspicious either.
Where it does get suspicious is when you look at the style sheets MSN sends to the browsers. The culprit, says Opera, is a 30 pixel value set on the margin property in the Opera style sheet. This instructs Opera to move list elements 30 pixels to the left of the parent, which means content moves off the side of its container, which means it looks like Opera is broken.
Opera tried to test whether or not this was deliberate by changing identification to the non-existent browser Oprah. This returns the IE style sheet, which works perfectly well in Opera. In Opera's view MSN is therefore looking specifically for "Opera" in the User-Agent string and sending it a broken style sheet. That, of course, could still be a mistake, as it's perfectly logical to send IE as the default if the browser can't be identified. But as there was no need for MSN to design an Opera-specific style sheet in the first place, one wonders... [Semi-Daily Journal]
I wonder when MSN will start breaking Apple's new browser, Safari. I'm sure it will only be some sort of misunderstanding. 8:30:01 AM
|
|
|
One of the more interesting keynotes at the O'Reilly meeting was one given by Stephen Wolfram. Wolfram was busy getting his Ph.D. at a ridiculously early age at the same time I was an undergraduate at CalTech. While he may think very highly of himself and his work (a trait necessarily shared by a wide number of scientists), he is one of theose people you have to pay attention to. One of the basic premises of his approach is that something's state at time step n+1 is not only dependent on what state it was in at n but also what the states were of its surroundings. An example in biology is that, as a cell develops, its path is determined not only by where it is, but by what other cells surround it are doing. Since there is a wealth of data demonstrating that each cell produces a huge amount of molecules whose only purpose is to influence its neighbors, Wolfram's perspective may be very valuable.
Wolfram gave a very nice example demonstrating how some of the very complex patterns he can create using very simple rules are recreated in the patterns of shells. This was very nice and the mechanisms behind this can easily be understood. What will be interesting to see if whether this really is a new kind of science, leading us to entirely new ways of understanding the world around us, or simply the restatement of basic observations that others have made. 8:14:49 AM
|
|
"N.C. Congressman OK With Internment Camps" [Daypop Top 40]
The "they needed to be interned to protect them" rationale has been discredited as any sort of major reason for the internment of the Japanese. Politicians that reacted with compassion at the time were turned out of office while those that spoke rascist slogans got elected. It had little to do with protection and everything to do with the majority trampling the rights of its own citizens, and ignoring the principles under which iour own government was supposedly founded, because it was at war. How we react under pressure and conflict tells us a lot about who and what we are. WWII had a huge number of incidents demonstrating that we are an extremely great people, but, being human, we also demonstrated some very sorry attributes. Sometimes you may have to break some of your values for immediate and expedient reasons but you had better know full well that you are doing so and fully understand the potential consequences. Perhaps we need to make a pre-emptive attack against Iraq. But it is an unusual and unprecedented role for us to take. There are lots of potential pitfalls that can result in failure, along with erosion of the very values we try to uphold. The discussions we are having are an important aspect of what makes us an effective form of government, at least for fallable humans. We make mistakes but we usually do try to fix them. Sometimes much later than we should, but we do fix them. 7:26:37 AM
|
|
"Air Force imagery confirms Columbia wing damaged" [Daypop Top 40]
If you want to learn so much more than the big media companies are telling you, read this. Aviation Week is always a good read. None of the hysteria or conspiracy stuff found on TV. Detailed and well-written, it provides, nonetheless, some every emotional facts. 'No other accident in aviation history has been seen by so many eyewitnesses than the loss of Columbia -- visible in five states.'It highlights just how dangerous space flight can be. Read it. 6:42:03 AM
|
|
"Justice Dept. Drafts Sweeping Expansion of Anti-Terrorism Act" [Daypop Top 40]
This is apparently still an early draft and something that will change a lot, ONLY because a lot more people look at it. The problem that happens when you start making secret decisions is that you DO NOT have a lot of people looking at it, dramatically increasing the chances that you will do something stupid. Do we want some secret agency to decide just what is a terrorist organization? These sorts of decisions have been well-abused by our government in the past. The temptation is too great. Big lies always sound very reasonable. 6:26:03 AM
|
|
Thursday Morning Photos from the Bioinformatics Technology Conference. Thursday morning keynotes featured Alvis Brazma and James Gosling. Then attendees had an opportunity to squeeze in a few more sessions, and possibly browse for a book or two to read on the plane for the journey home. [O'Reilly Network Articles]
Lats day photos. I was beat when I got home late Thursdya night but it was a very enjoyable conference. I learned lots and meet some great people. 6:08:18 AM
|
|
X11 and OpenOffice on Mac OS X. X11 for OS X allows you to build graphical Unix-based applications on your Mac. While you may not be a programmer, knowing how to install X11 on your system allows you to run hundreds of programs under X11, including the focus of this article, OpenOffice. Here's how to do it. [O'Reilly Network Articles]
O'Reilly does a lot more than publish books and run conferences. These sorts of tutorials are incredibly useful. 6:06:59 AM
|
|
A couple of articles looking at the way.... A couple of articles looking at the way we program. - Coding from Scratch [via email from Matt Jones], in which Jaron Lanier makes the good point that programming languages can't handle variance, and if nature worked like this there'd be trouble. A scale problem: a single byte difference can have enormous consequences. The reason for this, he says, is that language design follows the metaphor of the telegraph. Passing variables to a subroutine is imitating the wire. And so he talks about phenotropic, pattern-recognition, computing as an alternative paradigm. Emit and collect?
- They Write the Right Stuff [via ext|circ] is about how to write bug-free software in the current paradigm, in this case for the space shuttle. 420,000 lines of code with one error. The commercial equivalent bug rate would lead to 5,000 errors. How do they do it? Detailed design, many levels of testing and proofreading, and a culture unlike the commercial world: no pulling all-nighters, no sending out for pizza.
Two approaches to the same problem. [Interconnected]
Making computer programming more like life is interesting. I'm sure there are lots of scientists working on something like this, over and above the sorts of genetic programming sorts of things. 6:05:34 AM
|
|
|
|
|
