jamezpolley.com

You know you’re read­ing a web­site tar­geted at Amer­i­cans when you see phrases like this:

Fire­fox is par­tic­u­larly strong in Europe, the area over which the EU has oversight.

I’ve been Hats­bied — I think.

Cer­tainly fits the <adjective>salmon pat­tern. That Y! IM account is listed on my Live­jour­nal user info page. On the other hand, wikipedia reports salmon bots talk­ing to AIM users, not Y! Mes­sen­ger users.

*shrug* It amused me for a good 30 sec­onds. I didn’t bother respond­ing. I did note later in the day that there was a story about mem­ris­tors on the front page of slash­dot, but of course I have no evi­dence that the two are related.

Peo­ple have been telling me to read STR for ages, but I’ve never got around to it. Pas­cal just went to the site while I was shoul­der surf­ing — and thus I dis­cov­ered this review of Ubuntu:

One of the great things about Win­dows is the ease of obtain­ing pow­er­ful util­i­ties and appli­ca­tions. In addi­tion to hun­dreds of great titles avail­able on CD-ROM you can down­load awe­some share­ware appli­ca­tions: sim­ply click on Setup.exe and most installers will instantly deploy your cho­sen soft­ware, some­times with cool bonus pro­duc­tiv­ity apps that enhance your brows­ing expe­ri­ence. In com­par­i­son with Microsoft’s common-sense approach, pan­de­mo­nium reigns on the Linux platform.

The only way to install soft­ware is via a tool called the ‘pack­age man­ager’ which is con­fus­ingly also called ‘Synap­tic’. This works accord­ing to a sim­i­lar prin­ci­ple as a com­mu­nist super-market: You have a lim­ited range of soft­ware which has been cho­sen on a purely ide­o­log­i­cal basis rather than func­tion­al­ity. If you want to ‘think dif­fer­ent’, it’s tough-luck again: Another obvi­ous fail for the ‘contender’.

To make mat­ters worse, in order to install an appli­ca­tion you must be ‘root’ which entails mem­o­riz­ing a series of con­fus­ing pass­words. By con­trast Win­dows allows any user to install the appli­ca­tions they need to do their work — a wise pro­duc­tiv­ity gain that endears the flex­i­ble NT plat­form to IT depart­ments the world over.

The rest is good read­ing too. Very infor­ma­tive! I’m switch­ing away from Ubuntu forthwith.

Fire­men here to put out the oven fire http://skitch.com/jdumay/97em/kitchenonfire. about 1 hour ago from twit­ter­rific

One of the down­sides of hav­ing spent years mess­ing with my old Dru­pal blog is that I’ve ended up with a bunch of dif­fer­ent perma­link styles: to pick three posts at ran­dom, http://zhasper.com/zhasper/harry_potter_done, http://zhasper.com/2007/09/linkbloggery, http://zhasper.com/?p=631. For­tu­nately, I’m only run­ning this blog to give myself a place to vent, so I don’t care about lost traf­fic. If I did care, this would be a problem.

I’m using the “Plat­inum SEO pack” plu­gin, which does a good job of han­dling URLs that don’t quite match the same schema that Word­Press is using — for instance, if you visit http://zhasper.com/linkbloggery, it’ll fig­ure out that you meant the sec­ond URL in the list above. Unfor­tu­nately, it’s not per­fect — and my old blog had way too many vari­a­tions for any­thing to cope with.

So, I’m going through and doing what I can to fix the low-hanging fruit. URLs in the sec­ond form, /YYYY/MM/title, already work fine. URLs in the first form need to have the /zhasper/ removed, and need all the _s turned into -s. I accom­plish both of these through a bit of RewriteRule magic:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule (.*)_(.*) $1-$2 [R=301,L]

This is quite def­i­nitely not the neat­est way to achieve this. In the exam­ple above, it requires three excess round-trips between the server and the browser:

• Browser requests /zhasper/harry_potter_done
• Server sends a redi­rect to /harry_potter_done
• Browser requests /harry_potter_done
• Server sends a redi­rect to /harry_potter-done
• Browser requests /harry_potter-done
• Server sends a redi­rect to /harry-potter-done
• Browser requests /harry-potter-done
• Server sends a redi­rect to /2007/07/harry-potter-done/
• Browser requests /2007/07/harry-potter-done/
• Server sends actual content

The 301 in the RewriteRule means that the server tells the client that this is a per­ma­nent redi­rect — the con­tent will never be at the old address, please update your book­marks. This doesn’t make much dif­fer­ence to your browser — but crawlers such as Google should use this as a sig­nal to update their index, and send any link-love directed at the old link to the new link.

If you didn’t have the redi­rect at all, Google wouldn’t know that /zhasper/harry_potter_done and /2007/07/harry-potter-done were the same page — it would think that the lat­ter was just a more-recently-seen page which mys­te­ri­ously had sim­i­lar con­tent to the old page.

If you go with a tem­po­rary redi­rect (by just using R on its own, or by stip­u­lat­ing [R=302], Google won’t know to update its index: it will still come back later and check the old URL, just in case the page has moved back there.

There are def­i­nitely bet­ter ways to achieve this — sug­gested enhance­ments are wel­come

From the nor­mally staid ABC news web­site comes this gem:

Para­noia is much more com­mon in mod­ern soci­ety than pre­vi­ously thought, says a British doc­tor, who warns it could lead to major prob­lems in society.

Oh noes! Ram­pant para­noia! Is this what’s been mak­ing me think crazy thoughts lately? Our soci­ety is in dan­ger! Quick peo­ple: we must be vig­i­lant! Exam­ine your own thoughts for any hint of para­noia, NOW!

Dr Daniel Free­man from the psy­chi­a­try insti­tute of King’s Col­lege Lon­don says almost a quar­ter of the pop­u­la­tion expe­ri­ence reg­u­lar para­noid thoughts,

One in four? Then it’s almost cer­tain that I’m para­noid. Woe is me! What­ever could be caus­ing this epi­demic of paranoia?

dri­ven by an avalanche of sen­sa­tional sto­ries in the media.

Oh. Right. Good to see that you’re help­ing there, doc!

Re cen­sor­ship of flight details: Tim Ben­net at Elec­tron Soup was faster than me and got screen­grabs before the details were cen­sored. Go sat­isfy your curi­ousity at his blog.

Stil­gher­rian alerted me to the fact that I got a men­tion on Crikey today — or at least, yesterday’s post about ASA’s cen­sor­ship of flight records did.

I’m flat­tered, but also slightly pissed. If you clicked on that link, you’d have been asked to pro­vide your cre­den­tials as a paid-up mem­ber of Crikey — or at least, to take a 21-day free trial. I had to do the lat­ter, in order to read what had been said. Hope­fully if I’m ever men­tioned again on Crikey it’ll be within the next few weeks — because after that my free trial will have expired, and I’d hate to have to pay for a mem­ber­ship just to see how I was being quoted. There’s plenty of good rea­sons to pay for a mem­ber­ship, and I’ve been toy­ing with the idea for a while — but that’s not the rea­son I’d pre­fer to be my pri­mary reason.

So yes, I signed up for the trial and got to read the arti­cle. There’s a nice link back to my blog — except with a miss­ing “http://”, so the link directs read­ers to http://www.crikey.com.au/Politics/zhasper.com/2008/12/censorship-of-flight-details/ and not to my blog. So, of course, I got… well, actu­ally, I got 27 peo­ple hit­ting that page directly, no doubt through man­u­ally fix­ing the URL.

Actu­ally, I should say that I got two half-mentions. I also had 61 vis­its from http://civilair.asn.au/. Ben Sandi­lands, the jour­nal­ist wrote the Crikey piece, seems to be active there as well (at least: I found a story from him just by skim­ming the front page) — I’m guess­ing the two are related. As with Crikey, I can’t see the con­tent on this site with­out reg­is­ter­ing. Unlike Crikey, it’s not pos­si­ble to reg­is­ter here — so I’m still in the dark about where the traf­fic came from.

So, over­all, a good day for blog­ging. Appar­ently I’m not the only per­son inter­ested in why ASA cen­sored flight details — I just wish I could see what the other inter­ested peo­ple are saying.

–

Unre­lat­edly, I caved and ordered x-plane tonight. If I had a car, I’d be at the air­port on one of the mounds right now, hav­ing spent the last half-hour watch­ing the last few planes scur­ry­ing to get off the ground before cur­few kicks in. I seem to be back in *that* phase.

A few days ago, a col­leage pointed met at AirSer­vices Australia’s new fancy flight tracker, which allows you to watch planes com­ing and going in the air­space around Syd­ney air­port. There are plenty of things not to like — MS Vir­tual Earth , the nasty click-through EULA that you have to agree to before you even find out what the site provides…

But, that aside, it’s fairly cool. Planes, fly­ing, around Syd­ney! Results from noise-level meters, so you can see just how noisy your new sub­urb is going to be. Even details about the planes — type of plane, alti­tude, flight numbers..

So today there was a tragic acci­dent involv­ing two planes with trainee pilots. SMH have a video online which shows the flight tracker, and shows the two planes involved col­lid­ing (and then one of them drop­ping off the radar — lit­er­ally). Accord­ing to the time­stamps super­im­posed on the video, the crash hap­pens just after 11:23am

The site lets you see his­tor­i­cal data: in the box on the lower-left, un-tick the “Show Cur­rent Flights” but­ton, then use the con­trols to choose the day and time you’d like to look at. So it’s easy enough to go back to 11:20am and run through the next few min­utes and see the crash for yourself.

Except… that it’s not. There are no planes in that area at that time. In fact, there’s no light avi­a­tion at all. Some­one has excised all light avi­a­tion records between 11:00am and 11:59:16am. If you set the timer to start art 10:59, you see a whole bunch of planes:

sud­denly dissapear:

It’s not a sub­tle removal either, even if you ignore all the planes which freeze and then van­ish from the graph. There’s a nice graph show­ing you the num­ber of move­ments per hour for the day — spot what’s odd about today:

I fail to under­stand this. I… just fail. I really don’t under­stand why this is con­sid­ered sen­si­tive, and why it’s been removed.

What’s cuter than a kitty-cat giv­ing you morn­ing cuddles?

Two kitty-cats giv­ing morn­ing cuddles!

The pic­ture below is momen­tous — it’s the first time both cats have con­sented to cud­dle at the same time.

Bur­rito licks Linus’ ear while I cud­dle them both