Furthermore

John Crowley news

One of my favourite authors, John Crowley, now has a livejournal. Perusing there the other day, I found this speech that he gave in December 2005. There are some very interesting comments in there about the role of "romances" in literature, but more interesting still to me is that he says that the final part of the Aegypt series is done - there's even an extended quote from one chapter. In the LJ comments he implies that there will be news sooner rather than later. I'm on tenterhooks - I enjoyed The Translator and Lord Byron's Novel, but I've been waiting since 1990 for the Aegypt series to be completed.

Finance Links

• Composing Contracts: An Adventure in Financial Engineering - Simon Peyton Jones - MSR paper on a combinator library for valuing financial derivatives. Looks very interesting.
• LexiFi - company set up to capitalize on the research in the MSR paper above.
• Review of Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat - Edward Leamer - more than just a review. It's a jumping off point for looking at economic geography, and what globalization means for the US economy.
• The Volatility Smile by Don Chance - helped me to understand this concept.

Links

• SF Futures - my friend Jonathan Cowie runs an SF website which I helped set up a long time ago. He's just launched a new section with short, short stories from Nature. Some good authors in the initial selection - Ted Chiang, Charlie Stross amongst others.
• Global Imbalances: The New Economy, the Dark Matter, the Savvy Investor and the Standard Analysis - Barry Eichengreen [pdf] - good survey article of the standard analysis of the problems of US Budget deficits compared with recent ideas on why things are different this time.
• Edge Magazine - Kevin Kelly on the future of science. I like the triple blind experiments - collect lots of data upfront and you can mine it later to test hypotheses you hadn't even thought of when you started.
• b3ta.com - reasons for getting sacked. Pretty funny.
• Boohbah - great site for very young children. Much easier to navigate and more intuitive than CBeebies. My 4 year old still gets something out of it, but it's probably a bit babyish for her.
• Our place in the universe - remarkably precarious.
• via Making Light - painted room illusions
• Deadprogrammers cafe - how to advertise on your blog. Interesting stuff on using Amazon associates etc. I've kind of given up on that here.

Dan Dennett Talk

Links

• NYer - Malcolm Gladwell on pitbulls and profiling
• Greenspun - on early retirement
• Surname mapping - shows dispersal and prevalence of surnames across the UK
• Google Video - walkthroughs of ZX Spectrum games
• NYer - Gladwell again, on social problems with a power law distribution. This is really interesting stuff.
• AskMe - interesting discussion of bullying in public spaces that turns into something of a general talk on strategies for dealing with bullying
• rotten.com - bio of Richard Scarry - click through if the name seems vaguely familiar but you can't remember why. It's safe, honest.

Frivolous and Various Links

• MSN - various little health hacks
• Arbury Camp - the website for what's happening in that mudbath full of bulldozers just north of Kings Hedges Road.
• NYTimes - [no reg] intelligence linked to calculated risk taking
• WaPo - interesting article about a children's entertainer in the DC area. Oblique comment on the child-rearing culture, and much more (it would spoil it if I told you).
• Guardian via Chris L - children tested on a standardised developmental basis are not as advanced now as they were 15 years ago. Education, education, education.
• via Chris L - George Orwell's school memories
• What qualities do parents want in their children?

Political Links

• The K Street Project - good summary of the background to the whole Abramoff corruption story now playing out in the US
• Will Iran be Next - fantastic piece from The Atlantic on a desktop exercise to wargame US options for Iran. Conclusion: basically the Iranians won the Iraq war.
• The Torture Papers - The New Yorker on the background legal justifications for torture at Gitmo, Abu Ghraib etc. Fascinating and disturbing in equal parts.
• Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill - David Howarth (Cambridge MP) in the Times on new insanity from our government. See - it's not just the Americans.

Links

• Meat - fantastic Terry Bisson short SF story showing us as others might see us.
• Kottke - on secret sites. Maybe more to say on this one in a bit.
• Cringely - on the Google box. Very interesting speculation.
• Bike videos - insane urban cycling around New York, SF etc. Mrs Furthermore found these videos made her feel nauseous because of the movement. Don't say I didn't warn you.
• Alternative Last Calvin and Hobbes - apparently well-known on the internets. I'd never seen it before though, and I thought it was good.
• From Google Cache - The Harry Potter Nimbus 2000, with all the original comments still in place.

External Links Clicked

I've been using MyBlogLog to track outgoing links from the site since about July. The free service seems to work pretty well. I've aggregated all the outgoing links and the top 12 are below. Why 12? I had about 920 outgoing clicks, so I took the top half. As you would imagine, the distribution looks like it follows some kind of power law.

• Gmaps pedometer (120 hits) - the original site. You should probably use this link now.
• my survey of Cambridge blogs (90 hits) - somewhat moribund. Try Geoff Jones wiki for this instead
• Realist personality type (60 hits) - from the BBC Myers Briggs personality test show
• Gmaps pedometer route (37 hits) - a running route around Cambridge
• Freesat from Sky (33 hits) - I was surprised how many hits I got on this.
• AAA Watch Club (22 hits) - 24 hour dial watches
• ThinkGeek (18 hits) - more 24 hour dial watches
• cam.misc (17 hits) - lunch recommendations around Cambridge
• pic of me from Wiki Wednesday London (17 hits) - taken by Geoff Jones, I now notice
• Myers Briggs personality types (16 hits) - a more in depth site than the BBC show
• Tony Robinson (15 hits) - but not Baldrick. A chap in Cambridge who had a site with info on estate agents
• Dunster Castle (12 hits) - well worth a visit

Links

• via MeFi - insanely great new Dr Who adventure staged with GI Joe dolls and basically whatever comes to hand. It's incredibly professionally done.
• Charlie Stross - good, if rather terrifying piece about the requirements of a good chemical weapon for terrorists. The point of the piece is that both terrorists and counter-terrorist agencies tend to think in terms of "movie-plot" threats. I hope some of the good guys read this piece. I'm sure the bad guys will.
• via CT - videos of basically insane cycle races through New York, SF etc. Mrs Furthermore was rendered quite ill by the motion of the video (helmet cam footage). You have been warned. Also, big downloads on that site.
• CT again - I found the link above in the comments to this piece, about a short video of a chap driving through the centre of Paris at top speed in a Ferrari. This in 1978 I believe, but even so, it's still damn fast. More arty than the cycle vids, but I kind of prefer them to this. It's still cool though.

Links

• Open Rights Group - now has its permanent home on the web. The Pledgebank pledge only needs another 80 or so people to complete.
• George Dyson at Google - via Kottke I think. Interesting discussion of some aspects of computation from a historical viewpoint, plus a quick look at what's happening at Google.
• Skyscraper database - via MeFi. The page I linked shows the tallest in the world, but you can get all kinds of views out of it. Nice drawings too.
• The Register - ATM fraud and the British banking system. Interesting stuff about phantom withdrawals and security weaknesses that could have brought down the whole banking system (maybe).

That's all for now. I'll probably be at the No2ID pubmeet at The Regal this evening (from about 8.30 I'd guess).

Links

• Kottke - GoogleOS etc - lots of interesting thoughts about applications migrating to the web and how the main players are positioned around this idea.
• BoingBoing - long Charles Platt piece on the neutron bomb and its inventor.
• Robotic Nation - I read this a long while ago and found it again recently. It's about how low skill jobs can increasingly be automated, and kind of a thought experiment about what happens if you robotize all labour. The author comes to the conclusion that we need to start sharing that wealth via a citizens salary or end up in a situation of extreme inequality. To some extent it's not even necessary to assume robots - people in China working for very low salaries (compared to the EU/US) have a somewhat similar effect on our economies. I'm not sure I have the right background to think about what flaws there might be in this analyis, but it's certainly thought-provoking.

Links

• Tim O'Reilly on Google Text - Tim kind of sums up my own view on this in his post on September 27, 2005 08:19 AM (near the bottom of the thread at time of writing this). Interesting to me that this ties up with Brewster Kahle's talk on access to all human knowledge that he gave at NotCon in 2004. I'm sure it's more than coincidence - I'm not sure what happened in Kahle v Ashcroft though, and I can't be arsed to google for it at the moment.
• And I for one welcome our new * overlords - I thought I was all clever doing this search pattern a la Robot Wisdom. Turns out Language Log did it over a year ago. And coined a term for these fill in the blank template sentences. They call them snowclones.
• New Yorker - Genesis redone by designer deities.
• Making Light - how to do triage. No really, it's very interesting, and potentially very useful in certain kinds of terrifying situation.
• Guardian - Stan Robinson interviewed. I kind of gave up after Red Mars, but I'm thinking I need to read the new eco-gloom stuff, if only to see what the future's really going to be like. Maybe should re-read Brunner's The Sheep Look Up
• Rolling Stone - depressing stuff about the process of US government. I'm not sure ours would look much prettier close up, mind.
• Steve Pavlina - life lessons from Blackjack. Some interesting thoughts in here. I like the bits about the danger of losing out by being over-cautious when things are going your way.
• Cambridge in Colour - fantastic deep colour photos of the city.
• FoldedSpace - digest of How to Get Rich - type books.
• Bob McNamara - on US foreign policy and nuclear deterrent.

Links

Yes, I know, it wasn't meant to be a link blog, but I want to get rid of what I keep accumulating in delicious, since I seem to be no nearer to actually integrating my delicious stream into a sidebar

• Whiskey Bar - quite old now, but a post that sums up some of the reaction to the re-election of Bush. I kind of think that come the next US election, we'll either be looking at this and laughing at how over-wrought we all got about the Christian Right and Neo-Cons, or it will seem horribly prescient.
• via delicious popular links - wildly inappropriate Japanese ad for The Passion of Christ
• Drowning By Numbers - my favourite Greenaway film, and not just because it has Joely Richardson in it. Greenaway's site has a lot of interesting stuff, although it's not so easy to navigate. I like the idea of DBN as a version of The Three Billy Goats Gruff which he mentions. Lots of notes on symbolism, where all the numbers are, list of games, stars etc.

Couple More Links

• Etymology of Grimpen - you have to scroll down to Sherlock Holmes adds a Word. I thought this was interesting - I only realised the other day when I was watching the drama about Arthur Conan Doyle on BBC2 that he coined the term in The Hound of the Baskervilles. I'd thought it was a proper word because I thought I remembered reading it in a translation of Dante. Turns out I was half-right - I was mis-remembering reading TS Eliot's East Coker but he lifted the word from the Holmes story. Very interesting.
• Kevin Drum - typical, go visit progressive US websites for political news, come back with a big thread on the ending of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. Lots of interesting stuff here, but major spoilers if you haven't read the book.
• Bloody Pledgebank again - looks like the Opentech conference (couldn't make it unfortunately) saw the start of something like a British equivalent of the EFF - a kind of clearinghouse for UK digital rights issues. Click the link if you want to give these people money to get going.

Links

I seem to be accumulating many links:

• BBC Cambridgeshire - long interview with Peter Greenaway. I'm quite intrigued to see some of the Tulse Luper stuff, but I'm not sure I'd actually like it.
• Crooked Timber - well out of date I'm afraid, but I just re-read this round up of the Lancet study of Iraqi deaths as a result of the invasion. D-squared does a great job of defending the basic methodology against the more egregious slanders levelled against the study.
• MeFi - good round up of the reports that the US blew the cover of Naeem Noor Khan last year which may have compromised UK anti-terror operations that now have some links to the London bombers. I haven't seen this on the news, so it's either nonsense or just too hard to put over in soundbites.
• via cam.misc - open air sculpture in and around Cambridge.
• 1up.com - pretty amazing stuff about people being hired to perform repetitive tasks in MMORPGs in order to build up credit that can be traded for real cash. Read it and see.
• ICE - just spreading the meme a little. Add ICE to your mobile phone address book for In Case of Emergency contact.
• via Kottke - David Foster Wallace commencement speech. Good stuff.

Political Links

Hopelessly out of date as usual. With a surveillance flavour this time

• The Register - UK Automated Number Plate Recognition
• The Register - The Met Chief on ID Cards
• Bruce Schneier - comment on a report on Global Surveillance Infrastructure
• Statewatch - the report on Global Surveillance infrastructure (big PDF)

Cambridge Links

• Cambridge 2000 Project - lots of photos of the city
• John Beardsworth - lots more great photos. I recognised some of his Cambridge ones from our calendar.

Links

I'm using del.icio.us for links now, and I want to push the feed onto this site, but I haven't got round to writing the bits of script yet, so here's a little catch-up:

• Petals Round the Rose - yeah, everyone's seen it, but it's still a nice little puzzle.
• Joseph Mugnaini - when I was very little, my dad read Ray Bradbury's The Hallowe'en Tree to me and my brother. This guy did the fantastic illustrations.
• cam.misc - interesting thread on the workings of Cambridge City Council.
• How ID Cards were abolished - I heard David Howarth tell this story at the No2ID public meeting, but I couldn't remember the details. Thanks to Richard for posting this.
• British Roads FAQ - via cam.misc. Ever wondered how the roads are numbered?
• How Rich Are You? - rough reckoner for your position in the global wealth list. Lots of quibbles could be made (and are in the CT comments) but it's still a bit of an eye-opener.

Amazon Yellow Pages and Keyhole

I love sites that let you zoom into maps or aerial photos, even better are the ones where you can navigate at street level such as the late, lamented DizzyCity.

Anyway, to fill the gap left by DizzyCity, Amazon are now doing Yellow Pages for some of the big US cities. For instance I was pretty impressed with this Yellow Pages link to New York which shows the part of 8th Avenue where the Incentra Village House Hotel is (stayed there last time I was in New York). I think it's pretty amazing the way you can walk up and down the street. They cover SF and some other places too.

Over at Google, if you have broadband, you can download a trial version of Keyhole. It's like having a geographical globe you can zoom right into. Coverage is better for some places than others, but I was impressed with it as something to play with - I can imagine the educational value for instance.

Political Links

• Crooked Timber - interesting links and discussion on Putin's power grab after the Beslan tragedy. Should have posted this months ago of course.
• Spy Blog - National Identity Register and Citizens Information Project
• Spy Blog - Childrens Bill
• Spy Blog - Civil Contingencies Bill

There we go, one global worry, and three pieces of truly dreadful local legislation. The thing that bothers me here is that most people have only the vaguest idea that there even is a Children's Bill never mind what it says. I have to admit I'd only heard of the Civil Contingencies bill in a snippet on the radio before I read about it on Spy Blog. Bit late to complain now. Oh well, there's still ID cards - more on that soon.

Links

• via James Tauber - Dragon Optical Illusion. Very cool cut out and make illusion that works by making you think something is convex when it's really concave.
• Jabberwocky Translations - what it says on the tin.

Links

• via Crooked Timber - John Crowley on Pogo
• Juggling Lab - cool Java app to perform juggles based on the standard notation.
• via Slashdot - Techworld on the hardware behind the Echelon surveillance system.
• Juan Cole - interesting piece of analysis of the Pentagon spying scandal. No, not the Plame thing, the other one.

Links

• Crooked Timber - Zen Judaism (well, it made me laugh anyway)
• via CT - interview with Michael Marmot. He did some very interesting studies on the effects of status on health.
• Gilmore vs Ashcroft Homepage - the US seems to have a secret law that requires you to produce ID to fly internally. This guy wants to fly without showing id, but the Govt doesn't want to show him the law that says he can't.
• New York Review of Books - Terrific piece on Abu Ghraib reports.
• The Reg - Andrew Orlowski on the music industry and DRM. Most of it seems pretty sensible.
• via BoingBoing - cool app that overlays a virtual train onto real track. You can see and control the train via a PDA.
• Scoble - thoughts on how to keep up with the information flow that is enabled by RSS and similar technologies.
• Gothamist - text is about the anniversary of September 11. What I thought was interesting was the visualisation of the proposed Freedom Tower.
• CT on the US budget deficit - I liked the quote from CBS Marketwatch, "Get out now while there's still an ample supply of fools." I'm long gone.
• The New Yorker - on Kirkuk.
• The New Yorker - on Russia's declining population and impending AIDS crisis.

Browsable Paris

Just happened to see this as I was checking out what happened to a site I used to like - dizzycity.com. They had photos of practically every street intersection in Manhattan, plus loads of shops and restaurants - you could really browse the city. Anyhow, it's gone, though there's a shadow of the original in the Internet Archive.

Anyhow, there's a similar site for Paris, that runs from their Yellow Pages site. It's quite amazing. I put in the address of the hotel (good, but I wasn't paying) I stayed at when I won a weekend break there back in December 2000 and you can go from there up to the Champs Elysees. Awesome.

Oliver Sacks

Two pieces I recently saw about Oliver Sacks. I've been fascinated by his books since I discovered "Awakenings" and "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat" back in the early nineties.

• Wired - The Fully Immersive Mind of Oliver Sacks
• LiveJournal - Oliver Sacks and the Iridium Ingot

Links

• New Yorker and Crooked Timber - interesting pair of views on wine.
• via Kottke - The Vice Guide To Everything - pretty funny list of things you should and shouldn't do. A sort of modern manners guide?
• via Scoble - Google and the Semantic Web. Only a hundred years after everyone else read it. Very interesting ideas about what Google could expand into.
• via Ken McLeod - War Nerd on South Ossetia. Not heard of this site before, but I thought this was quite a good overview of some of the issues behind the conflict, told with a unique style.

Links

• via Crooked Timber - online Well-Tempered Clavier site with analysis etc - sounds fantastic but I've not had chance to delve into it.
• via Joi Ito - Extreme Democracy (extreme in the "extreme programming" sense I think. Again, looks interesting but no time to read it at present.
• Searchblog - on capturing Searchstreams, stories, and the Memex.
• BBC - UK Information Commissioner on dangers of surveillence society.
• Back To Iraq - very thoughtful piece on the stand-off with Moqtada Al Sadr
• via Slashdot - interesting interview with John Gilmore. The stuff about secret laws in the US kind of fills me with horror.
• via everyone [PDF] - EFF wins Grokster appeal
• via BoingBoing - Bruce Sterling's speech at SIGGraph. The interesting stuff is more towards the end, where he looks at what could happen to consumer products in the future. That said, my wife found this completely unreadable. Caveat lector.

Links

• Animated stick figures - bizarre. Apparently works as a stereogram, but I can't bear to look at it that long. via BoingBoing.
• Atlantic - overview of Dave Allen's "Getting Things Done" system.
• Brain Hacks - looks like a really interesting idea for a book. A kind of engineering guide to how the brain does stuff and where the gaps are.
• Searchblog - on how the software industry should become more like the car industry.
• via Scoble - Tools for .NET developers

Links

• Hiring a Sales Guy - good piece on when you need sales people.
• New Yorker - excellent piece on the Madrid bombings, and online terrorism.

Links

• Getting Things Done - good article on self motivation via JoS
• Geometric Origami - amazing paper folding (including curved folds) from the guy who invented Huffman encoding!
• Stock Markets - interesting piece (again via JoS) on share dealing and trading.
• My Dinner with Bill - description of one intern's visit to Bill G's Xanadu. Via Scoble.
• cam.misc thread - on TV licensing and broadband PCs. Remember you heard it here first.

Links Round Up

I seem to be accumulating links at the moment, so here's a bit of a brain dump:

• Economist via Crooked Timber - article on the results of the Copenhagen Consensus project to evaluate where governments should be putting their development money for best effect. I haven't had time to look at whether climate change really is such a (relatively) low priority, but the top projects suggest really impressive things could be done to reduce the spread of AIDS (for example) with relatively little money (only 20 billion or so) and an enormous benefit for the investment made.
• Public-Domain.org - sign up to lobby the BBC to make good on its project to release a substantial part of its archives into the public domain under Creative Commons type licenses. This is a fantastic idea - there are lots of links to background under the Public Domain page.
• NotCon - I hope to be there on Sunday, and afterwards maybe go to Joi Ito's meetup (depending on various factors out of my control.
• BoingBoing - on an adaptation of Rudy Rucker's Master of Space and Time. I hope this happens - it's my favourite Rucker fiction book, although my absolute favourite is Infinity and the Mind - really mind-breakingly weird stuff.

Bruce Sterling

Links

• Foe Romeo - I saw the slides of her presentation Y'know, for kids! from the O'Reilly emerging tech conference and I thought it looked interesting, as I have a young daughter who is going to grow up in a pervasively connected world. The site is a goldmine of stuff - I'm sure I shall be mentioning it again soon.
• Paper CD Case - may have mentioned this before, but it generates a printable page, with labels, that you can fold into a CD slip case.
• Little, Big - subscription venture to create a really nice 25th anniversary edition. I'm very tempted.
• New Yorker - scary Sy Hersh backgrounder on the Abu Ghraib scandal.
• Back To Iraq - subscribe! Interesting independent journalism from Baghdad.

Plan of Attack

Other odd links

• Big Ball of Mud - didn't know someone had actually written a paper on this "design" pattern.
• Wired - short interview with John Poindexter. I didn't realise he had a techy background.
• Ongoing - Tim Bray on Jython.
• Eric Lippert - writing code on blackboards is hard. Also some good links to Microsoft interview sites.

Three Links

Three terrific pieces from Crooked Timber:

• John Negroponte for Iraq - the comments on this have some of the best analysis of the distinctions between traditional US foreign policy and Neocon thinking that I've seen.
• The Right of Return - I learned a huge amount about this aspect of the Israeli - Palestinian conflict. Plus, it turns out I ought to read Robert Fisk's Pity the Nation
• Europe and the War on Liberty - just to make my blood boil. More on sneaky back-door data-retention proposals. Time for a faxyourmp session I think.

More Links

• Daring Fireball - great piece on software useability and Linux
• Kottke - interesting piece on knowing left from right, finding your way etc. Mainly for the comments - I had no idea there was so much intrinsic variation in the ability of people to orient themselves in space.
• The Register - why ID cards are a dumb idea.
• Howard Waldrop online! - if you haven't read this guy's stuff yet, start now. It's sort of SF, but not really like anything you've read before.

Various Links

• Histon Parish Council - very comprehensive objections to the Guided Bus scheme
• via Bob the Angry Flower - hideously formatted discussion between Dave Sim and Alan Moore. I need to paste this into something where I can manipulate the fonts and colours before I actually try to read it in full.
• Simpol - idealistic, but quite a good idea of defining some global democratic standards, which you then ask your political representatives to sign up to, on pain of not voting for them.
• Crooked Timber - Europe and the War on Liberty. Very interesting piece on how the EU decision making process works in respect of Justice and Home Affairs matters.

Design of C#

An interesting article on the language design of C#

Links

Links of the Day

• Markdown (via BoingBoing) - a very minimal markup system for generating XHTML. The source text is almost "just" plain text with some simple conventions to allow the Markdown scripts to parse it.
• Europe and the War on Liberty - depressing but essential Crooked Timber piece on the post-Madrid attempts to further restrict our civil rights by the back door of European legislation.
• Situated Software - a new and thought-provoking piece by Clay Shirky on software which works because it works within a particular social sphere, without attempting address the issues that large scale deployment requires.

New Morrissey Album

I'm a big Morrissey fan, so it's great to see this [PDF] (via Morrissey Solo). I'm particularly looking forward to seeing the Jonathan Ross interview and the Later... performance.

Abel Prize

I had no idea this existed until I saw this link on Slashdot yesterday. It seems the Abel is basically the Nobel Prize for mathematics. There've only been two so far and this year it was Michael Atiyah and Isadore Singer for the Atiyah-Singer Index Theorem.

Despite having a degree in maths, I still have relatively little comprehension of what the theorem actually says, other than that it links algebra and topology in a deep way and that it's provided something of a bridge between pure mathematics and theoretical physics. I was mainly pleased to see that the omission of maths from the Nobels has been corrected.

Links

Just a few that looked interesting:

• Jon, Mark and Robbo - my wife kindly bought me a bottle of this very good whisky for my birthday. There are three types - all vatted malts I think - and although the site is pretty lame (basically marketing whisky to trendy people) it does have some useful information on what's actually gone into the blend of each one of the whiskies.

Not really a link, but I just bought the soundtrack to Amelie, which I finally got round to watching when it was on at Christmas. It's really good.

Passel o' Links

I'm sure to forget some things, but here's a few:

• MySociety - a project for creating tools to enhance public participation in politics. They've recently been given some money and chosen a set of initial launch projects.
• DowningStreetSays - MySociety project to provide better publicity to Downing Street press releases.
• Lord of the Rings - The Musical - link to lyrics courtesy of Crooked Timber.
• BeyondTV - software PVR. I may get round to doing something about this eventually.
• Reg on Google - useful overview of the kind of things that can be searched for to look for security holes.
• Bruce Sterling at SXSW - usual amazing stream of consciousness stuff (via Cory Doctorow)

Random Links

Just a few things of interest I've seen over the last week or so:

• The Register -- BBC plans to release archives via P2P networks
• via Language Log -- pretty funny cartoon about the difficulties of working out other people's thoughts.
• Slashdot -- actually quite interesting piece on the Indian perspective of the IT market, tech culture etc.
• WikiTravel -- looks like a good project. Hope it can work as well as Wikipedia.

Meme of the Day

Just saw this via BoingBoing: Life Hacks - Danny O'Brien's talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Tech Conference. Lots of it is sort of obvious, and sort of the thing I try to do at work - or here - but it's interesting to see it put together. I particularly liked the comment:

Edd Dumbill: Ideas rot if you don't do something with them. Don't hoard them. I blog them or otherwise tell people.

This is a way to look organized, "That guy has lots of ideas, what a genius."

You only have to be right once -- people google for some idea and find your ramble about it and are impressed.

Passel o' Links

Mostly saved from Bloglines

• Muppet Origami - via BoingBoing
• Textile2 plugin for Movable Type - via Crooked Timber
• Books Every Educated Person Should Read - via Crooked Timber

Couple of Links

Two pieces of software I've found useful recently:

• Bloglines - web-based RSS aggregator. I tried Newsmonster before and didn't really get on with it, but this one seems like a good system. Having it on the web is really better than having a local aggregator because I can use it from home and work. Plus it also works on mailing lists, which is a boon as I read the Urth list about Gene Wolfe, which is quite high traffic, but only (to me) occasionally interesting.
• Doxygen - automatic documentation generator for C/C++ and other languages. Rather like Javadoc for Java. I've found this very useful at work, even on completely undocumented code it builds up useful information on where everything is defined, which files depend on which others etc. I'm adding doxygen comments to all my new code as I go along.

Tranquility Bay - Observer Article

I read about this place in an Observer article via a link on Robot Wisdom and I've never quite been able to get it out of my head.

It's a place where you can send your teenager (if you are in the US - UK law wouldn't permit it I think) to straighten them out. I don't know quite why the thought of sending children to this place bothers me so much - far worse things happen to many children around the world, after all.

I think it's partly the fact that it's considered okay for the parents to do it without oversight from some sort of independent child welfare body, and partly that it's so easy to imagine yourself into the children's situation - more so than it is into, say, the much more horrific position of a child soldier.

Whatever. It disturbed me, but there's not a whole lot I can do about it except say what I think: it ain't right.

Old Links - Privacy/Tech Politics

Some old links on technology and privacy issues. This is a subject close to my heart as I think it's an area in which new technology potentially has the ability to damage rights that we currently take for granted. I'm not a privacy fundamentalist by any means, but I do think the UK government (and others) are in the process of a land grab of these rights before most people even realise they had them to lose. I'll definitely be writing more about this.

• Bruce Sterling on Geeks and Spooks
• Short interview with Echelon architect
• New Yorker via Oblomovka - Nice short piece on TIA and Phil Dick. Nice punchline
• Washington Post - Good piece on identity theft - registration required.
• FIPR - State of play in interception of communications.

Old Links - Politics

A few old links on broadly political topics:

• D-Squared Digest - Storming article on the lack of rights of pension holders
• Slashdot - conflict diamonds - interesting links

Old Links - security

Links on system security and related topics:

Old Links - various

Old Links on various topics:

• via Joel on Software - Paul Graham on nerds.
• via CryptoGram [PDF] - Paper on vulnerability of (physical) master key lock systems
• wiki - Design Style and Creativity Book List
• wiki - Leadership Pages
• Wired - Individualisation of Markets and Negotiation
• Clay Shirky - Speculation on WiFi and VoIP rollout
• Infoworld - The Disruptive Web - lots of interesting stuff on how the blogosphere could evolve
• via Clay Shirky - Collaborative filtering for books mentioned in blogs
• Fast Company - What do you want to do with your life?
• Clay Shirky - DNA as a distributed primary key
• Popular Science - Battle scene animation techniques in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
• via Ross Andersen - Dr Korner's parody of Cambridge University proposals on intellectual property
• The New Yorker - Ice Cores and Climate Change
• goodthink.com - long, but fascinating story about a chap who cashed a junk mail cheque.
• Porn Clerk Stories - perhaps not for the easily offended, but I thought it was really interesting.
• Lego Geeks - MC Escher pictures in Lego
• Asimov's - "Lobsters", a Charlie Stross short. v.good.
• Game of Life - including neat Java applet that runs Life
• Wired - on Flywheels
• Clay Shirky - groupware as political organisation
• Image Converter - to ascii art
• Google link browser - very cool
• via RobotWisdom - Fascinating article on Facial Action Coding System (FACS)
• Village Voice - interesting response
• gladwell.com - Malcolm Gladwell on how we use paper.
• gladwell.com - Malcolm Gladwell article index. Almost everything is really interesting.
• FastCompany via Oblomovka - Great article on pricing. No, really.
• Caring For Your Introvert
• Another point on the Nature vs Nurture Graph

Old Links - Humour

A set of old links reflecting my sense of what's amusing. YMMV.

More Old Links - Developer

Various old developer interest links:

Mayer Hillman

Links - people

One more for tonight. This is my old list of links to sites about or by people who I find of particular interest (the list is skewed towards technology because they tend to have the websites)

Old Links - Securities Industry

A few old links I have on the securities / financial industry:

Old Links - Java

Just to clear out my closet of existing links before I start posting anything new:

• Sun - the bundled versions of various Java APIs (eg for XML) in Java 1.4.1 override anything you might try to use from a JAR file unless you perform the appropriate voodoo. This piece on Sun's site explains what you have to do.
• O'Reilly - Fluffcore level intro to distributed programming - Web services, J2EE etc. Quite a good high level overview of the topics.
• via FreshNews - functional approach to cacheing in Java
• IBM Research - Using JUnit with Ant
• DJ - Useful Java decompiler
• via Slashdot - Java unit test framework - better than JUnit?
• NetBeans - Flexible java application platform - used as basis of Forte. Eclipse is the other similar system.
• Java Animation
• Meshy
• Blebs
• Stripe
• JavaWorld - JUnit best practices
• Dr Dobbs - on the evils of Java new
• JavaWorld - Socket pools and threads
• JavaWorld - mutexes

Existential Horror Song

Clay Shirky on Weblogs

I have an ulterior motive in posting this, as it's a posting to demonstrate how the site works to my mum. However, although they're a few months old, the following posts by Clay Shirky are still well worth a look:

Social Software and the Politics of Groups
Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality

Mum -- try posting a comment below...

Personality Tests

A big bunch of personality tests at: Similarminds.com

I've done the Myers Briggs (and at another site too) and I seem to be mainly INTJ shading occasionally into ENTJ when I have to do too much managerial type work.

Both the main description and this page seemed quite accurate to me, so the tests are measuring something -- either that or any type would seem equally applicable (I checked a couple and they don't).

Just tried the test again now and I got ISTJ, so the results are a bit flexible at least. But it's interesting that over several goes, I seem to only move in one dimension at a time.

Royal Scandals

Normally I wouldn't dignify this kind of nonsense with attention, but the current situation is absolutely ludicrous. While the mainstream news media can't report anything about the story because of various injunctions, 10 minutes of Googling will bring up (for instance):

• Throneout
  
• Republic.org
  

I have no idea if the story is true or not, but there's no serious case for suppressing it, since anyone who cares to find out already can.

Political Compass

Old news, I know, but I just saw the Political Compass which adds another dimension onto the traditional left-right dichotomy and administers a test to see where your views fall. I seem to be left-liberal which sounds about right.