Out of the corner of my eye

Philosophy: You may not be happy a user has found a bug for you to fix, but at least pretend you are so they’ll keep on reporting them.

An article on the BBC, Searching for the truth online, features statements by the self-proclaimed “antichrist of Silicon Valley” Andrew Keen, author of “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy”. The main focus of the BBC article is on how user generated web content is often unreliable or unverifiable - an argument users of Wikipedia will be very familiar with.

A more in-depth interview on the Guardian explores Keen’s opinions in more detail. His argument is founded on his belief that the mainstream, corporate-owned and run media and Web 2.0 user generated content such as that found on Facebook, YouTube and on blogs, cannot coexist: that Web 2.0 is destroying the establishment.

To be fair, he admits that he could have said more about mainstream media such as The Sun or Fox, and that his book is intended to “start the discussion” — however, my main problem is that his argument is fundamentally based on capitalist principles: Keen is “very uncomfortable with the radical altruism - in some ways it’s a legacy of the hippy culture - that lies at the heart of Web 2.0; the idea that we’re all happy to give it away. I don’t think that’s the case. I think the majority of us need to work for money.”

Does he believe, then, that the philosophers and mathematicians of classical civilisation were motivated by money, and that only “professionals” were capable of contributing to the foundations of science and learning as we know them? Does his notion of “culture” include the many artists and musicians throughout history who lived their lives in poverty, only acknowledged as masters long after their deaths?

Keen’s notion of “culture” is based on the belief that only paid professionals can contribute anything of worth, that if you’re not being paid for something, your heart just won’t be in it. “We need to work for money”.

I suppose Einstein’s ideas were trash then, since he was not being paid to formulate relativity while working as a patent clerk? Che Guevara was an amateur, too, self-educated while he travelled South America dossing and hitching. What about those damn ascetics - their contribution to our culture is certainly lacking, as they disdain worldly wealth! It’s lucky we have such highly paid professionals as Bill Gates to contribute to our civilisation’s culture, eh?

There is certainly a great deal of noise on the web, and for an amateur user of the interwebs, picking out the wheat from the chaff can be challenging. The problem is, simply discarding or attacking user generated content is simply absurd and a gross oversimplifcation of the problem: the issue is really filtering, search, metadata, reputation. The issue is being able to find bloggers who actually do know what they’re talking about (for free), and perhaps taking what Jane Doe’s latest Myspace blog entry says as what it’s obviously intended to be. Is Keen unable to differentiate between Sam Ruby and the tenth fake Killers Myspace Profile?

Culture is by its nature democratic; by the people, for the people. To be a professional, you simply need to have professional standards and write content that is recognised as head and shoulders above the rest. To refuse to acknowledge all the valuable, insightful user generated content out there is simply blind support of the establishment. Keen is nothing more than a luddite, not an inspired author of polemic. The mainstream media is killing itself by its submission to the interests of power and capital; the music industry by its hamfisted alienation of its own customers. Those errors are not the fault of the people, and the people have never been cowed by criticism or oppressive regimes into silence. If I want to say something, I will damn well say it, and leave it to the judgement of my fellow human beings if it is something of worth or not.

Gang-Rape Cover-Up by U.S., Halliburton/KBR

“A Houston, Texas woman says she was gang-raped by Halliburton/KBR coworkers in Baghdad, and the company and the U.S. government are covering up the incident.

Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she’d be out of a job.

“Don’t plan on working back in Iraq. There won’t be a position here, and there won’t be a position in Houston,” Jones says she was told.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court against Halliburton and its then-subsidiary KBR, Jones says she was held in the shipping container for at least 24 hours without food or water by KBR, which posted armed security guards outside her door, who would not let her leave.

CIA man defends water torture

“A retired CIA agent has said a top al-Qaeda suspect was interrogated using a simulated drowning technique but that he believes it was justified.”

• Water boarding: prisoner bound to a board with feet raised, and cellophane wrapped round his head. Water is poured onto his face and is said to produce a fear of drowning
• Cold cell: prisoner made to stand naked in a cold, though not freezing, cell and doused with water
• Standing: Prisoners stand for 40 hours and more, shackled to the floor
• Belly slap: a hard slap to the stomach with an open hand. This is designed to be painful but not to cause injury

Iceland complains to US about treatment of tourist in NY

“During the last twenty-four hours I have probably experienced the greatest humiliation to which I have ever been subjected. During these last twenty-four hours I have been handcuffed and chained, denied the chance to sleep, been without food and drink and been confined to a place without anyone knowing my whereabouts, imprisoned.”

“…according to their records I had overstayed my visa by 3 weeks in 1995.”

Problem

Company A’s app uses the WebBrowser control to view web pages under its own control, and wants to tightly couple the web page presentation to its app’s look and feel.

User B sets his Internet Explorer accessibility options to “Ignore font sizes specified on web pages“.

As a result, you may get issues where text overflows fixed sized containers. While it isn’t really good for accessibility to prevent the user from increasing their font size, it can also cause problems with usability due to controls falling off forms in the web pages.

Solution

Implement the IDocHostUIHandler interface and override GetOptionKeyPath as in the following example:

HRESULT FAR EXPORT  CCustomControlSite::XDocHostUIHandler::GetOptionKeyPath(BSTR* pbstrKey, DWORD)
{
// override the user's internet option settings to stop them
// making the font too big
HRESULT hr;
WCHAR* szKey = L"Software\\Company A\\App X\\IEOverrides";

//  cbLength is the length of szKey in bytes.
size_t cbLength;
hr = StringCbLengthW(szKey, 1280, &cbLength);

if (pbstrKey)
{
*pbstrKey = (LPOLESTR)CoTaskMemAlloc(cbLength + sizeof(WCHAR));
if (*pbstrKey)
hr = StringCbCopyW(*pbstrKey, cbLength + sizeof(WCHAR), szKey);
}
else
hr = E_INVALIDARG;

return hr;
}

Add keys at Software\Company A\App X\IEOverrides that correspond to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer, for example a key called Settings with the string “Always Use My Font Size” set to DWORD 0. When the WebBrowser is initialised, it will load the defaults and any overrides in the key specified by GetOptionKeyPath().

See the MSDN documentation for more information.

Will Smith is great at playing Will Smith, just as Tom Cruise is great at playing Tom Cruise. The Fresh Prince stars in this broadly advertised New Year’s blockbuster, a vampire movie that isn’t really a vampire movie. As far as survival horror goes, 30 Days Of Night was much better. In fact, most survival horror movies are better than this. The plot revolves around Will Smith being the downfall and saviour of humankind, then when the going gets tough, the film finishes with liberal sprinklings (or torrential downfalls) of Deus Ex Machina.

- where did the deer and lions come from? (they blew up the bridges to Manhattan Island at the start)
- how come there’s no rabid deer? If the dark seekers are all starving, how come they haven’t eaten all the deer? (Or do the deer have impregnable fortresses to hide in every night too?)
- the scene at the end where the serum has, actually miraculously worked, and the woman has a butterfly on her neck - it really is God’s plan after all - and they just happen to be attacked by dark seekers that very night - and lucky he had the foresight to build a blast proof den that can’t be unlocked from the outside, or won’t let the smoke in and cause them to suffocate, etc. etc.
- the pier scene where she turned up “just in time” after 1000 days of solitude (God’s plan again!) - how exactly did she manage to stave off the horde of hungry dark seekers and get Will out of his airbagged, seatbelted, upside-down vehicle into her car when he was unconscious? (I guess he doesn’t weigh much!)
- pretty amazing how as well as being a soldier and a cancer-cure-finding scientist, Will also has the engineering skills to fit huge blast doors to his windows 3 stories up (and presumably outfit a cutting edge laboratory with blast proof glass sliding doors, unless that was already built into his house, just in case his cure for cancer turned the entire world into rabid zombies!)

Inspiration

Inspiration is when a spontaneous connection between two disparate facts or thoughts occurs.

After starting to read Koji Suzuki’s thought-provoking “The Loop” last night, then talking to J. about her dreams, I came up with a theory concerning inspiration.

Our minds, probably due to the n-connected nature of neural networks, are immensely capable of metaphorical, lexical and semantic association. We can look at an object and connect it quite logically (to us!) with a myriad of other things, whether they be concrete or abstract. This potential gives us a great capacity for expression through natural language and the arts. We need this very general connection-building potential to form relationships between different forms of sensory data; so that if somebody says a word, we can immediately connect it to something we have read, or even smelled. It is an important component of memory recall, and therefore the way we store memory (in computer science, we’d say we’re using lookup tables and metadata to help store the semantic structure of information).

How about sleep? Studies into sleep have found it has a role in memory processing, suggesting REM sleep is important for the consolidation of procedural and spacial memory, while slow-wave sleep is important for declarative memory. Although there is no direct evidence, Jie Zhang proposes that the function of sleep is to process, encode and transfer the data from temporary memory to long-term. This stream of data is consciously observed and interpreted, causing the cinema-show of dreams to flash past in microseconds.

My theory is that as this potentially massive stream of data is passed through our cognitive centre, we form new connections between the items of information. As the stream of data is not necessarily in order of relation (think of the random nature of dreams whereby seemingly unrelated events and people are joined together), these connections can form between concepts and events that would never normally be associated.

Daydreaming

The role of daydreaming in inspiration then becomes clear. When we daydream, we allow our minds to idle. A computer may store much of a program’s temporary data in a cache, held in its memory. There comes a time, however, when that data needs to be written to disk. Computers typically do not attempt to write back cache data to the disk while their human operators are attempting to perform some work; instead, they wait for idle periods.

When our minds idle, we once again give our minds time to perform some form of processing on our memories - to do some sorting and tidying. Occasionally, a connection is made between two disparate concepts that would never be made by logic alone. A flash of inspiration. My theory is not that this is the only source of inspiration, but that it is one possible source.

A post yesterday on the IEBlog  reveals the latest build of Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid2 test. This is great news for web developers everywhere, as it means the next iteration of the most common browser should just work with most site’s html/css, without the need for annoying tweaks and hacks.

Firefox 2 doesn’t quite pass the test, so I checked to see if Firefox 3 does. I didn’t hear about this in the news, but a quick google reveals a mozilla developer’s blog post - apparently, Firefox3’s layout engine passed the Acid2 test on December 8th.

The future is really bright for web development, and web users will benefit too - less time spent resolving standards compliance issues means greater productivity and more time for functionality and usability.

Congratulations to both teams!

I have been feeding my brain with music from my new iPod Touch. Sounds like God’s Kitchen Global Gathering 2006, Pure Pacha (Pete Tong/Sarah Main), Second Toughest in the Infants by Underworld, liberal splashes of Radiohead and a little Pink Floyd in the blender. I’ve missed having music to accompany my coding while at work.

I’ve read plenty of articles about email obfuscation over the years. Until I got an email address with decent spam protection, I occasionally made a half arsed effort at it too - the old davedx at gmail dot com. That was before I knew much about how powerful web scripting had become.

Email obfuscation is rubbish. Given time, I expect any obfuscation technique will be added to the scripts used by harvester bots that build their email databases to be sold to spammers. The only methods I believe work at preventing most spam are:

1. A decent spam filter

2. CAPTCHA (for web form/comment spam)

Here’s a script I wrote, that took me about 30 mins of googling to find the most popular obfuscation techniques (the ones most people linked to, bumping to the top of the search results, and are therefore probably using themselves), then 1hr 15 to write the actual code.

Email obfuscation breaker (rename to .php)

Here’s a testbed, proving it works.

The hardest part was plugging in the JavaScript interpreter - none of it was rocket science, however.

If your email doesn’t have decent spam filtering, don’t post it on public web sites.

This brings back memories… tracks like this were what got me into house music and the club scene.