David's World

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May 31, 2005

Procrastination Picture

(Courtesy of Andrea C.)

Posted by dr at 9:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 24, 2005

Star Wars fans hurt in mock sabre duel

News of the day:
Two Star Wars fans are in a critical condition in hospital after apparently trying to make light sabres by filling fluorescent light tubes with petrol.

In case they don't make it, they're good candidates for the next Darwin award.

An unrelated note: I've been way too busy to feed this blog with interesting bits and pieces written by my own. There is Aquamacs, there is my thesis research, there is an entry in this year's Document Understanding Conference (writing a program that produces a concise summary of 50 documents) and finally, I've been working on the big, very secret Project F, which will change my life dramatically. I hope I'll be able to announce it soon, maybe on June 1st.

Posted by dr at 6:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 20, 2005

Censorship at European Universities, too

It's a little surprising, and definitely not positive news about the Spanish Universidad Politécnica de Valencia: they're kicking out a lecturer for his progressive and liberal views about intellectual property. He held a seminar about legal uses of peer-to-peer technology, and was promptly censored and then forced to resign by the dean of his faculty, under pressure of the Spanish music industry. Jorge Cortell writes about his story, and if only most of it is true, it's a sad day for UPV.

If even academics at a university can't speak out against industry consortia, how much is free speech still worth in 2005? We shouldn't forget that for now, this is an isolated incident.

Addendum: Well, good thing I wrote "if only most of it is true". As a reader notes, Cortell has difficulties maintaining his credibility. The university from which he supposedly got a PhD is thought to be a 'degree mill'. It doesn't necessarily affect the fact that a university acted against the idea of free academic discourse. But given Cortell's dubious credentials, one has to ask, how much of his story is true?

As often, the truth probably lies somewhere in between.

Posted by dr at 11:50 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

May 16, 2005

Nerdy blog

Andrea complained the other day that this blog is getting nerdier and nerdier. I don't disagree. To improve the situation, I am posting a picture of the cat that sometimes meets me in front of my house at Leven Terrace, Edinburgh, Scotland, in order to beg for ham or tuna.

Excuse the bad quality. Taken with a 1:2.8 33mm-miniature lens from a SonyEricsson T610 cell phone, less than stellar quality is to be expected. Can't wait to get my hands on a new Canon SLR with DIGIC-III and 8 megapixels and an IS system on a 300mm zoom and beefed-up firmware from Russia to fill up that 1GB CF card with more cat shots.

Posted by dr at 10:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 9, 2005

Filtering MacUpdate/Versiontracker for YOUR updates

Operation Information Overload
In order to become more productive, it's a good idea to use automatic filters. Wouldn't it be good, for example, if those web sites that list updates for software (such as Versiontracker, or MacUpdate, or other sites with an RSS feed) only list the software that you might be interested in, because you've already installed it?

A generic RSS filter
You can get that (for free) by simply filtering their content automatically in your RSS reader. This will work with any RSS Reader program!
You need:

• A web server (optional)
  
• A unix system (OS X or Linux) or an especially equipped Windows box
  
• My little script filter-rss.cgi (download below)
  
• ...to know how install a local CGI or a cron job.
  

So you either need to know how to set up a cron job or, easier and technically better, you have a local web server running. Mac OS X users only have to click that "Web" button in the "Internet Sharing" panel to keep a little web server (Apache) running in the background (doesn't hurt you!). You need to ensure that it'll execute CGI scripts.

Then, you install my little script that acts as a filter (see below for download). On OS X, this could go into /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables, and you ought to do a "chmod +x filter-rss.cgi" on this file. If you've reconfigured the web server, this might need to go somewhere else.

Then, in your favorite RSS reader program, you just subscribe to a link to the cgi. For example, if you'd like to filter Versiontracker's output, subscribe to this feed:

http://localhost/cgi-bin/filter-rss.cgi?source=http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/recent.rss

You can try it out - after installing the CGI script - by clicking on the link.

The script automatically scans your /Applications directory (or whatever) in order to find out what software you have installed. This - and an optional file - serve as keyword list that is used to filter interesting content from the RSS stream.

You can configure it (open the file with a text editor!) to suit your needs. It'll run from a terminal nicely, and you can have it create a local file once an hour (using a cron job) if you prefer that over the webserver/CGI solution. Please don't install this if you're not familiar with the terminal of your system. It won't run on Windows without additional software. This is meant for Mac OS X and Linux.

Filter-RSS script - Download
Download file

Posted by dr at 11:13 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 5, 2005

AquaMacs Emacs 0.9.1 is out

After way too many hours of messing around and hacking Emacs - both on the C source code level and via the built-in Elisp language - I've finished AquaMacs Emacs 0.9.1. It's a vastly improved Emacs for Mac OS X, as Kevin Walzer and I think, providing a better user experience especially for people that work with a lot of different applications on OS X. Kevin has been doing a great job in helping people with their little issues so far, and in promoting the project - I've been keeping with the technical side of things.

Well, Mac OS X is not GNU, and working towards a better user interface can be a tough job if you're dealing with long-term developers (and also veteran users), who are used to a very specific mode of interacting with the editor. Hell, they use Emacs to read their e-mail and newsgroups! In principle, the Emacs modules replace multiple applications - it's a cosmos on it's own.

Emacs develops have been surprisingly upbeat about improving UI things. When it comes to actually making technical changes, debate is more heated and morale low. But who can blame them - augmenting 20-year-old architecture that started before real graphical UIs were invented is hard. And Richard Stallman, one of the founders of Emacs, free-software evangelist and philosopher who is to be honored greatly for starting the free software movement? In early April, Stallman said about the AquaMacs OS X efforts:

The purpose of Emacs is to enhance the GNU operating system of which
it is part, and thus to contribute to the liberation of computer users
from non-free software.

Mac OS is a non-free operating system. Viewed amorally, as mere
technology, it may be useful; but it is fundamentally unethical.
Our goal is to replace it with free software, not to enhance it.
To produce "successful OS X software" is a distraction from the goal.

So I have to think about whether it's right to do something for an intermediate system, until the free software community has come up with usable (UI) operating systems and stable applications. And maybe I'm going to have to pray a rosary or two because I'm a sinner. Oh, I forgot. I don't believe.

Download AquaMacs Emacs 0.9.1 for Mac OS X here.

Posted by dr at 6:20 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 4, 2005

The Trick Bike - stolen

Good bye, trick bike. Avid readers might remember my proud post from December when I got the bike. I didn't get to learn any good tricks before it was stolen an hour ago at Waverley Station, Edinburgh.

As someone who already had plenty of bikes stolen, I've decided to only get really cheap bikes - the trick bike was one of those. So I'm not too sad - letters of condolence may be sent to one of my e-mail addresses. If any arrive, I'll post the funny ones here.

One more thing: I gave a statement at the police station, and the officer, filling out a form, asked me if I wanted to be contacted by victim support. I politely declined.

Posted by dr at 9:08 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 3, 2005

We misunderstood victoriously, obnoxiously, justly.

Who says we need intelligent Natural Language Generation?
I've just received this spam e-mail, that probably only has one purpose: to either come up with statistics or do something virus-like with Windows machines.
Either way, it's certainly nothing short of Noam Chomsky's famous frequency-zero sentence "colorless green ideas sleep furiously", and its text is definitely a challenge for probabilistic spam-filters:

its balance upheld parallel. why ink sang them warmly? monthly operation rode that company beside paint. we bethought that necessary draw for soap. quickly. that fertile paint under cat, that recast certain, thin crowd. Russell rebound its wise cow. (...) quiet silver impulse dug, we misunderstood victoriously, obnoxiously, justly. your separate writing sawed towards his pot; green, cheap column. we unsaid some waiting distribution following that white air, who overspent nervously. it retold me public. he bore black blood, that betook greedily...

Posted by dr at 8:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 2, 2005

Intelligent Design - Society's Leap Backwards to the Pre-Enlightenment Era

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon
the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face
of the waters.

This has always been one of the most beautiful passages of the Bible to me. And it is what leads now to a controversy that makes me worry, and one that makes the world laugh at those Europeans that thankfully left Europe to found what is now called the United States of America.

Creationism has been a big thing in the US for a while: the idea that our little planet was created by an super-intelligent individual rather than by evolution happening over millions of years. The roots of this are Christian, and in a specific interpretation of the passage that starts with the words above.

Ultra-conservative Christians in the U.S. believe that earth and animals and humans were created in seven days. They believe that a day is a day as we know it, and not a metaphor that stands for discrete eras that translate to many hundreds of thousand years each. And these people believe that they have to impose their belief on others, rather than preaching tolerance and allowing people to believe what they want, and to KNOW what humans have found out in a couple of hundred years of scientific research. After the U.S. supreme court has bashed the Creationism on the grounds of separation of church and state (the latter being responsible for school education), after numerous silly attempts of warning stickers on schoolbooks ("Watch out, evolution is just a theory!"), they're now trying to coin a new model, Intelligent Design. Sounds a bit better, but it's the same crap.

"It's very funny to think that the neo conservatives go to war over oil - the compressed remains of million year old creatures, yet believes the world is young", writes JohnFluxx over at Slashdot.
My American friends, eager to defend their country, tell me that Creationism has its proponents in the midwest and the 'bible belt'. I went to high school in Iowa, which is about as midwest as it gets. I wasn't taught bullshit, even though they made me go to lots of school prayers and the like. The religious right has spread further than that. They've made a Texas cowboy one of the most powerful presidents on earth, and they managed to get Creationism into schools even at Dover, Pennsylvania.

Part of the problem is that it doesn't seem acceptable to use reason to criticise somebody else's faith. It's something you don't talk about. Why? Why does someone have to feel "offended" if you contradict what his Bible or Qu'ran says? Nature (subscription required) has a good handle on it:

More fundamentally, most lecturers are unsure of how to handle the concerns of deeply religious students, says Jo Handelsman, a plant pathologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. "When I talk to these students individually I don't feel it's my place to replace what their families or churches have taught them," she says. "There's a lot of confusion about where the line is, and how much it's OK to offend your students."

[Eugenie] Scott, who is perhaps the nation's most high-profile Darwinist, is frustrated by the scientific community's inability to grapple with the issue. "The point here is that Americans don't want to be told that God had nothing to do with it," she says. "And that's the way the intelligent-design people present evolution." Scientists need to do a better job of explaining that science makes no attempt to describe the supernatural and so has no inherent conflict with religion, she argues. "College professors need to be very aware of how they talk about things such as purpose, chance, cause and design," she says. "You should still be sensitive to the kids in your class."

And Benna at Kuro5hin adds as conclusion of a long article:

Intelligent Design would not really be anything of consequence if it were not for its targeting of public schools. There are plenty of people with crazy ideas, conspiracy theories, and the like, who do not cause anyone any trouble. Unfortunately, Intelligent Design's attack on the separation of church and state in our schools is something to be concerned about. It is a slippery slope, from the teaching of a theory with no scientific backing in the classroom, to school sponsored prayer in the classroom. It may seem like a stretch, but as soon as the line is blurred, it is much easier to rationalize each step until an extreme is reached.

I sometimes wonder: is our society is about to make a huge leap backwards to end up in pre-Enlightenment times?