David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, is astonished by Blair's Labour Party: "If I had gone on the radio 15 years ago and said that a Labour government would limit your right to trial by jury, would limit - in some cases eradicate - habeas corpus, constrain your right of freedom of speech, they would have locked me up."
Indeed they would. But there's more, so much in fact that it is difficult to grasp the scope of the campaign against British freedoms. But here goes. The right to a jury trial is removed in complicated fraud cases and where there is a fear of jury tampering. The right not to be tried twice for the same offence - the law of double jeopardy - no longer exists. The presumption of innocence is compromised, especially in antisocial behaviour legislation, which also makes hearsay admissible as evidence. The right not to be punished unless a court decides that the law has been broken is removed in the system of control orders by which a terrorist suspect is prevented from moving about freely and using the phone and internet, without at any stage being allowed to hear the evidence against him - house arrest in all but name.
I'm a little frustrated to read this, even though it's just another version of the well-know tale in our days of prevailing truthiness -- check out the article to also read examples of how authors of such "revealing" journalistic pieces are nowadays getting pressured by their government to Stop It.
The German government with former Minister of the Interior (and former trial lawyer for German RAF members) Otto Schily was not that different. If not in their means (I believe we still have due process, but I'm not so sure), then in their attitute towards authority.
Strange how Governments these days seem to react to the Modern Age, regardless of their political background: with a revival of authoritarian processes.
We finally live in an age where collaborative and social processes on a very large scale are finally feasible, and these guys bring back a weird form of feudalism and secret societies.
(For a while now I've been thinking about how the representative systems of our democracies are more and more obsolete, and should be replaced by systems that integrate people who care, as opposed to those who are simply getting paid to do the job. Maybe more on that later.)
But I'm glad that some members of The Press are still doing their job, even if it seems to be getting riskier every day to simply tell it like it is, on all sides of the Atlantic. (Hm, "risky" is probably not the right word. Getting flamed by your government for documenting what they do is only harmful if you actually believe in their truthiness. But then, most people do seem to believe the flames -- just watch how often "Times of War" gets used as an American discussion stopper.)
I started to think about the different times of day people post on their blogs, and wondered what that said about your personality or occupation. So one day, with a long train-ride ahead of me, I set out to find out.
The goal: for a selection of blogs, plot the time of day and day of week of the 100 most recent articles.
Initial guess: all the cool guys post at really odd hours, and the boring guys only during their lunch break ;)
Update 2006-07-05 -- check out the new version of the graphs. Much nicer, and, err, this time around maybe even with less errors...
# = number of analyzed articles. 24h = posting frequency over the time of day (starting at 0:00, ending at 23:00). 7d = posting frequency over the day of week (starting on Monday). Occupation = author's job description (mostly a guess). Motto = summary of my subjective evaluation.
Interpretation
Note that there is a distinct group of people who don't seem to have stable sleep cycles -- either they travel a lot in completely different timezones, or they must have wildly interesting jobs.
Note that there is a distinct second group of people whose posting count before noon resembles a flat line.
The author of inessential.com is also the author of ranchero.com -- the former site is his private blog. Now compare the slightly different posting behavior. Then compare with "My Boring-Ass Life", who has virtually the same curve, but also posts on weekends.
The prominent spikes of wortwechsel.biz can be attributed to two reasons: the low article count (it's a new blog), and the fact that one of the authors for a long time didn't have an Internet connection at home, which meant he only posted from the office during lunch break and after work. (I asked.)
"23C3 Wiki" is not a blog, it's the Recent Changes feed of the Chaos Communication Congress Wiki for 2006. I thought it would be fun to compare all the blog curves with one 'collaborative' curve.
Acquisition Problems
I originally thought that the data required for this 'survey' was easy to come by: all I wanted was the date and time of the last 100 articles of a blog. Turns out it's not that easy, which means that the number of sites involved in this test is a lot smaller than I initially imagined.
This has two reasons: It turned out to be hard work to extract the data; and some authors don't even seem to publish it.
There seems no simple and generic method to query date and time of an arbitrary number of articles for an arbitrary blog. RSS feeds, usually a good source for extracting such data, generally publish only the last 10-20 articles; but I really wanted more than a handful of articles to make this exercise meaningful. In the end I scraped the data off individual HTML pages, which involves more work than simply parsing a feed (because each site has a different HTML layout and URL scheme).
Another problem was that some sites I wanted to include don't seem to publish the time of day of their articles outside of their feeds -- this includes really cool sites like JoelOnSoftware, DaringFireball, The Dilbert blog, the Macromates blog, and others.
Let me know if you want me to include additional sites -- or even better, send me the data.
In case you wonder about the article title: while scraping the data I sent this HTTP UserAgent-header: MidnightBot 0.1 (http://dekstop.de/midnightbot/)
I finally found a decent way to produce music on my PowerBook. That was the last thing missing after I switched. I haven't been producing tracks for ages -- it's been a frequent pastime for years, but I just couldn't persuade myself to work on Windows just for the music.
Anyway. This track is pretty representative of the stuff I did in the last 2-3 years, if a bit more focused. I still haven't learned how to properly use an equalizer (and probably never will -- I'm just not interested enough). Any professional audio engineer will blush when he sees me at work ;)
Short production info: I like to re-record semi-finished tracks with a microphone held against a loudspeaker, and then to add the recording back into the mix, which results in varying degrees of phasing, and additionally enriches the frequency spectrum. So if you thought you heard Flanger or Chorus effects it's kinda true, but not really.
The piano is from a soundtrack, the drum sounds from various sources; add some soft synths and lots of editing in the audio domain.
And yeah, I like noise. ;)
Update 2006-06-28 -- added the 1 Pixel Out Audio Player so you can play from the page (and from some aggregators, if you enable Flash). It's a well-rounded tool to quickly add a player to a page -- and in contrast to many others (e.g. the del.icio.us playtagger) it has a trackbar to skip around. Doesn't seem to support IDv3 tags though.
You can find lo-fi versions of some older tracks at dekstop.de/mp3/.
Did you notice Sam Ruby's new preoccupation with ETags? When he's talking with founders about their new web services, "the first thing I ask is; 'do you support ETags?'"
I'm so glad that he's doing that, and talking about it publicly. I've been a web developer for a number of years now, and from the beginning I knew about some basic caching issues and about the HTTP 304 (Not Modified) response -- but it took me a while to figure out that in my scripts it's my responsibility to send this header.
Request caching on this level is simply something most people don't think about when they develop web applications, and I'm glad that, thanks to Sam, this may change.
Yesterday at 19:00 local time I sent out this email:
From: Martin Dittus
To: info@(domain)
Subject: Your crawler is _very_ impolite
I'm the owner and webmaster of the domain dekstop.de.
Since yesterday morning I've been getting thousands of hits by your "Virtual Reach Newsclip Collector" aggregator from sp.virtualreach.com. These were requests to virtually all comment feeds from blog articles I offer on my domain. Apparently someone imported the OPML file I offer that links to all those feeds.
Which is all fine and dandy.
But when I looked at my logfiles today I thought you guys must be kidding... You can't just request thousands of feeds per day, and then not support ETags/If-modified-since, which means every request results in a full download of the respective file! And you don't even seem to request robots.txt to allow webmasters control over such requests.
The result: today alone (it's 7pm local time) there were ca. 30MB traffic from my domain to sp.virtualreach.com, which means you will use up nearly 1 GB of _my_ traffic per month. For reading feeds that virtually never change.
Fix this ASAP, it's just not polite to waste other people's bandwidth that way.
And by fixing it I don't mean 'remove my site from your aggregator', but I mean that you:
1. Implement ETags/request caching
2. start to respect robots.txt files
Regards,
Martin Dittus
This morning, just before 8:00, their requests to my domain stopped. There was no reply to my email yet.
I wonder what their developers are doing right now.
Just listened to a recent edition of Radio Open Source on the NSA wiretapping case, and was struck by how well the topic maps to social networks as we know and use them. Data mining, degrees of separation, pattern analysis, and more. With comments by William Gibson!
Apparently it's not about surveillance, it's about mapping social networks. For these large-scale operations the content of each individual phone-call becomes irrelevant; what's more interesting is to find the degrees of separation between everybody, and then to be able to map out interesting subgroups. (See also my Datenspuren 2006 report.)
Patrick Radden Keefe links this new superlative level of data mining with the aftermath of 9/11:
After 9/11, after we learned more about the highjackers involved, some actual network scientists said: We have these 19 highjackers, let's look at who each of them is communicating with, and who shares apartments with whom, and who communicated with whom, and lived with whom, and let's connect them. And what they found was that of those 19 highjackers none of them was separated by more than two degrees of separation, they all had links to another, and a disproportionate number of links converged on Muhammad Atta, as a 'ringleader'. And I think in hindsight there was this idea that "boy if only we'd been able to put those connections together beforehand. If only we'd been able to see those in realtime."
However social network science as used to analyze phone protocols apparently is still in its infancy. And Patrick illustrates another problem in analyzing the phone protocols:
If somebody uses a credit card and buys two dollars worth of gasoline and an hour later buys tens of thousands dollars worth of stuff at an electronics store a red flag goes up for the [credit card] company [...] because that pattern of activity correlates very very closely with instances of fraud. A big problem for the [federal] agencies is that we don't know that much about the patterns of activity of terrorists.
;)
And all the talk about call pattern analysis made me aware that I'm not using my phone lines that much any more, as most of my communication has moved to the 'net. Maybe it's time to move back, for my privacy's sake... (I use Google as a sort of spam filtering email proxy for ~50% of my private email.)
William Gibson in a side-note:
I don't think humanity knows why we're doing any of this stuff. A couple of hundred years down the road, if people look back at what the NSA has done the significance of it won't be about terrorism or Iraq or George Bush or the Constitution, it will be about how we're driven by emerging technologies, and how we struggle to keep up with it.
I'm an avid OS X user, but that doesn't mean I'm not curious about other systems. At the moment I'm watching out for new Vista screencasts, and with the recent release of Beta 2 I got plenty of those.
While watching a screencast on AlphaJunkie I was thoroughly entertained by the amount of dialog windows that randomly pop up to interrupt the user's workflow whenever he opens an application or uses an OS-level feature. "Windows need your permission to continue", "Do you want to get the latest online content when you search Help?", and my personal favorite, "Did you notice the Information Bar?"
Read on for details and screenshots, and a look at the future of documentation L10N.
I've been suffering from a minor iTunes annoyance for a while now and finally decided to look into it: There is no 'clean' way to import an audio podcast file into your main library. Audio files that come from a podcast feed are treated differently to 'normal' audio files in a number of ways, and sometimes that's not what you want.
The simplest solution in most cases is of course to re-download the file from a browser or the commandline -- but in my case that didn't work because the file was no longer online. And dragging it to the desktop and then re-importing it to the library didn't work either -- the file was still being treated as a podcast.
I finally solved the problem by simply stripping all ID3 tags -- read on for details.
A couple of days ago Chaosradio Express published another great podcast: "Programmiersprachen und Dylan", a conversation between Tim Pritlove and Andreas Bogk on the subject on the Dylan programming language, and programming languages in general.
The podcast has a duration of nearly two hours, but if you speak German and are interested in topics of such an abstract nature it's well worth your time.
Read on for Dylan's (and Ruby's) relationship with Lisp, some surprising Dylan language concepts, and a brief look at podcasts and online video as alternative teching methods. With links to some excellent Google TechTalk videos.
So I made this instead: Pointless Waste of Time RSS Feed. It's really just an approximation, as Feed43's limited pattern matching abilities clash badly with the handwritten (and inconsistent) pointlesswasteoftime markup.
Go visit, it seems like an interesting site. I'm not much of a gamer by any measure, but I'm a sucker for pop culture references and insightul commentary.
By pure chance I just stumbled over a Pandora's box of weird podcasts.
Starting point was a great experimental/minimal techno track by Aldo Tamarind in the de-bug podcast -- see http://www.de-bug.de/pod/archives/1197.html. The music for that episode used to be stored on http://tamarind.podspot.de/, but by the time I got there (i.e., now) all content on that page was gone. Damn!
So I started googling which led to some page on podspider.de -- don't go there, the page sucks hard, but the podcasts the page referenced were amazing. Quote: "related categories: eccentric, classical, religion & spirituality". Chrchrchr.
E.g. http://cba.fro.at/show.php?lang=de&sendungen_id=14 -- Recordings of concerts at Posthof in Linz (where I used to live for a while), with among others Chikinki (go see them live!), Denyo, Tomte, Roisín Murphy, Adam Green, etc.
Or http://siemers.podspot.de/ -- "kraut mask replica", partially 80ies noise rock and partially modern weird guitarry stuff. Excerpts of radio programs, concert recordings, demotapes. Judging from the credits on some of their recordings the podcast is made in or around the Stuttgart area (where I'm from originally).
Then http://phlow.net/dp/ -- which looks kind of like a commercial bastard child of the debug podcast and viva2. (Though the videocast looks more interesting.)
And http://www.friedrich-witt.de/ -- a 76 year old double bass player who used to tour with Herbert von Karajan as part of the Berlin Philharmonics, telling the story of his life as a musician.
Etc.
There are thousands that regularly release new weird stuff from their kitchen tables, daily. And we as listeners can only touch the surface -- someone help me find the good stuff!
I'm now off listening to some of that stuff. And I need a bigger hard drive, I'm constantly deleting files to make room for videos and podcasts.
