<$BlogRSDURL$>

(((aum))) 

.:|:ecoLogical:|:progressive media:|:.edu:|:.
.:|:activism:|:antiwar:|:democrazy:|:.
.:|:health:|:foodism:|:sexuality:|:.
.:|:mystic:|:anomalous:|:arts:|:.

Beyond that, uncategorisable -- and fascinating.

Architecture of the World Wide Web, Vol 1 

Now (finally?!) published as a Recommendation by the W3C. Norman Walsh has made a PDF for easier offline reading.

Httrack for offline website browsing 

HTTrack is a free (GPL, libre/free software) and easy-to-use offline browser utility. It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site's relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the "mirrored" website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. HTTrack can also update an existing mirrored site, and resume interrupted downloads. HTTrack is fully configurable, and has an integrated help system. It is also available as a Debian package :-)

Monad (or MSH): future Windows shell 

Jon Udell wrote: Last month I wrote about MSH ("Monad"), Microsoft's new command shell, and demonstrated the software on my blog. The column-plus-demo drew favorable reactions not only from the Windows crowd, but also from Unix/Linux folk who saw the MSH object pipeline as a genuine innovation. They're right.

Programming language popularity 

An interesting popularity ranking of various programming languages (linked from Sean McGrath's blog).

Fully trained software developers 

Tim Bray wrote: But for me, this essay brought into focus the fact that anyone who isn’t comfortable with object-oriented design, and with relational data modeling, and with wrangling XML messages; anyone not comfortable with all three, I say, just isn’t fully trained.

Software Testing Automation Framework (STAF) 

Grig Gheorghiu's STAF/STAX tutorial gives some idea of how powerful the STAF framework is.

Visualising similarity in source code 

Wayne Allen pointed me to DotPlot. Could be useful...

EU lets down software developers again 

The EU software patent directive will be passed by the EU Council next week, at the same time as a law on bathing water quality.
The controversial EU directive that opponents fear will allow software patenting within Europe will be passed without vote or debate on Monday.
According to a Council agenda, the Computer Implemented Inventions Directive will be adopted during an Environment meeting, which is also due to deal with the issues of bathing water quality and batteries.

Postscript: Thanks to Poland this bizarre and absurd sequence of events was halted.
Thank you, Poland!

Stressful deadlines boost heart attack risk 

From the New Scientist: The pressure of meeting a work deadline can produce a sixfold increase in the risk of suffering a heart attack over the course of the following day. And competition at work could double the ongoing risk, according to a new study... Taking on extra responsibility at work over the last year - if viewed negatively by the participant - increased the chance of a heart attack by almost four times in women and over six times in men.

Turning up the heat 

From the Guardian 11-Dec-2004: Even a small increase in sea temperature could dramatically affect penguins, whales and a host of other marine creatures, warns scientist Lloyd Peck of the British Antarctic Survey.
And on Guardian 14-Dec-2004: By 2050 heatwaves like that of 2003, which killed 15,000 in Europe and pushed British temperatures above 38C (100F) for the first time, will seem "unusually cool", the Hadley Centre for Climate Change says. In its report Uncertainty, Risk and Dangerous Climate Change, to be published today at the climate talks in Buenos Aires, it estimates that average temperatures will rise by 3.5C, well above the 2C which the EU says is the limit to avoid catastrophic global warming. It also says that the Greenland ice sheet could disappear, ultimately raising the global sea level by 7 metres. This could proceed at the rate of 5.5mm a year, and this with the 3mm rise caused by the thermal expansion of sea water would soon put large part of Britain, including the London docklands, under threat.

Inequality entrenched in UK? 

Health inequality has grown: Between 1997 and 1999, males in England and Wales who were professionally employed were expected to live 7.4 years longer than manual unskilled workers. This expectancy gap had grown by two years since the period 1972 to 1976. The inequality in life expectancy for women has also increased in this period, yet by a less notable margin. Women who are manual workers are expected to live for 5.7 years less than those are professionally employed. This life expectancy gap has increased by six months since the 1970's study.
Super rich have doubled their money under Labour: Nearly 600,000 individuals in the top 1% of the UK wealth league owned assets worth £355bn in 1996, the last full year of Conservative rule. By 2002 that had increased to £797bn, the ONS said. Part of the gain was due to rising national prosperity, but the top 1% also increased their share of national wealth from 20% to 23% in the first six years of the Labour government. Meanwhile the wealth of the poorest 50% of the population shrank from 10% in 1986 towards the end of the Thatcher government's second term to 7% in 1996 and 5% in 2002. On average, each individual in the top 1% was £737,000 better off than just before Mr Blair arrived in Downing Street.
Source material: the ONS report "Focus on social inequalities"

Why is the election in Ohio certified 34 days after the election? 

From Jesse Jackson's testimony to the Conyers hearings: Ohio, 34 days. Suppose five states had to wait 34 days for certification of their elections. And they could be if people had the will to contest it. Suppose the Ukraine or South Africa or Iraq had to wait 34 days before election certification?
Why 92,000 “unprocessed” ballots, mostly among the poor, under-counts and over-counts, often a result of a breakdown in machinery. Why 150,000 provisional ballots in 88 counties, using different voting machines and standards for counting and dis-counting votes? Why in 2004 do we have an uneven field, different standards and faulty machines characterizing the vote in too many places?
Why in Warren County did election officials issue a “homeland security threat,” then lock out the press and independent observers while they secretly counted the vote? Why are voting machines still used that are privately owned by partisans, still subject to glitches and manipulation. Why are absentee ballots and military ballots still issued in an inconsistent, inaccurate, and untimely fashion?
Who is accountable? The integrity of the voting machines, and the machine tabulation, is an issue. We need a forensic computer analysis of the voter machines, and the machines left in the warehouses must be impounded.

Democracy for Ukraine but not the USA 

The United States lacks a coherent and consistent set of standards for registering to vote, voting, counting ballots or recounting them. Thus, every election cycle brings new instances of disenfranchisement and doubts about the validity of the process.
On the eve of the Conyers hearing, the new group Progressive Democrats of America released a well-reasoned list of electoral reforms which can and should become central to the activism of everyone who is dissatisfied with the process--and the result--of the November 2 election. PDA argues that America needs:
  • A Constitutional amendment confirming the right to vote.
  • A required paper record for all electronic and electronically tabulated voting systems.
  • Same-day registration for all Americans.
  • The creation of unified federal standards for national elections.
  • Meaningful equal protection of voting rights by such means as equal voting systems, equal numbers of machines, and equal time to vote.
  • An end to partisan oversight of the electoral process.
  • Extended voting periods to allow all voters a meaningful opportunity to vote.
  • Instant Run-off Voting and Proportional Representation.
  • Publicly financed elections for federal offices.

That's a long list. And the best place to begin is with the basics: guaranteeing the right to vote. During the Supreme Court deliberations in 2000 on the Bush v. Gore case that ultimately determined the occupant of the White House, Justice Antonin Scalia went out of his way to establish that the individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for the president of the United States.

Tough goals and strict limits crucial to protect sea life 

Policing protected areas and limiting fishing outside them will be crucial to the network of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) proposed in a report on fish conservation by the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. Euan Dunn, Head of Marine Policy at the RSPB said: 'MPAs, where fishing is banned or restricted, can protect whole food chains, from sandeels to seabirds and vulnerable slow-growing fish species.
'A fishing ban in up to 30% of UK waters is the target we must aim for to safeguard our marine environment. That goal is as appropriate to the North Atlantic as anywhere else.'
'This report should confirm to ministers that a network of Marine Protected Areas should be included in the Marine Bill. It should also concentrate minds on moving away from traditional, but failing, fishing management policies and towards a set of measures that makes fishing sustainable. If that means compensating fishermen who no longer have work, then that is what the government and its European partners must do.'

"everything you do is a baboon" 

When I was visiting my ex-colleague and long time friend Jeff Martin I dragged him over lunch into the Association of Photographers gallery to look at their winter exhibition Capture (pictures from the summer Open exhibition can be seen here). I thought that the most striking photo was one of a nun in front of the misty Guggenheim in Bilbao, but all the images were excellent and worth taking the time to see.
[The title of this blog is taken from some graffiti outside the sandwich shop - where I got an excellent baked potato to eat.]

US policies - not presentation - fuel anti-Americanism 

Sidney Blumenthal writes in Salon.com: "Muslims see Americans as strangely narcissistic - namely, that the war is all about us. As the Muslims see it, everything about the war is - for Americans - really no more than an extension of American domestic politics and its great game. This perception is ... heightened by election-year atmospherics, but none the less sustains their impression that when Americans talk to Muslims, they are talking to themselves." Actually, this is the conclusion of the report of the defence science board taskforce on strategic communication - the product of a Pentagon advisory panel - delivered in September. Its 102 pages were not made public in the presidential campaign, but, barely noticed by the US press, silently slipped on to a Pentagon website on Thanksgiving eve. [...] "Thus the critical problem in American public diplomacy directed toward the Muslim world is not one of 'dissemination of information', or even one of crafting and delivering the 'right' message. Rather, it is a fundamental problem of credibility. Simply, there is none - the United States is without a working channel of communication to the world of Muslims ... Inevitably, therefore, whatever Americans do and say only serves the party that has both the message and the 'loud and clear' channel: the enemy."
See the Antiwar.com Blog for more analysis of this critical report.

This food racket just can't go on 

From The Guardian: "The way we eat is not just ecologically unsustainable but also morally and even biologically unsustainable. Making it better requires radical structural change. It needs tighter competition policies. It needs reform of subsidies and trade rules. It needs regulation of business, none of which government is inclined to do. So making our food better will also require a massive consumer rebellion. In my experience when people are well-informed about how this globalised food is made, they no longer want to eat it."

Open source gets UK public sector boost 

From Yahoo! ZDNet News: An organisation aims to help small open-source companies win government contracts.
A group of open-source providers that aims to promote the deployment of open source in the public sector was launched on Monday.The consortium, known as the Open Source Consortium (OSC), has over 60 members, the majority of which are based in the UK.
Mark Taylor, the executive director of the OSC, said it is primarily aimed at promoting open source in government organisations, where there are barriers to its adoption."

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?