So i'll have something to compare with at this time next year: P:8+W:6+M:7+R:9 = 30...and yet I still make it through the day.  There is still hope!

Yes, it's true. 9% of all USA Today bestsellers are diet books. Yet today the New England Journal of Medicine reports that two years after going on a diet, on average, people weigh more than when they started. USATODAY.com - Our lives are... [Seth's Blog]

From David Gurteen's knowledge quotations mailing, I really enjoyed todays:

"It is easy to perform a good action, but not easy to acquire a settled
habit of performing such actions."

*** Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC) Greek Philosopher ***

"I count him braver who conquers his desires than him who conquers his enemies;
For the hardest victory is the victory over self."

Make President Bush your Person of the Year for 2004 like Time magazine did.

For sticking to his guns (literally and figuratively), for reshaping the rules of politics to fit his ten-gallon-hat leadership style and for persuading a majority of voters that he deserved to be in the White House for another four years, George W. Bush is TIME's 2004 Person of the Year.

It is not much of a reach to see that, at least in their fantasies, U.S. planners would like to set up what sociologists call a "total institution." Like a mental hospital or a prison, Falluja, at least as reimagined by the Americans, will be a place where constant surveillance equals daily life and the capacity to interdict "suspicious" behavior (however defined) is the norm. But "total institution" might be too sanitized a term to describe activities which so clearly violate international law as well as fundamental morality. Those looking for a descriptor with more emotional bite might consider one of those used by correspondent Pepe Escobar of the Asia Times: either "American gulag" for those who enjoy Stalinist imagery or "concentration camp" for those who prefer the Nazi version of the same. But maybe we should just call it a plain old police (city-)state. [America's Fallujan Dystopia by Tom Engelhardt and Michael Schwartz]

Perhaps we might find a clue in the Bush Administration’s hiring of two ex-KGB chiefs, General Yevgeni Primakov and Alexander Karpov, to work in the now infamous Office of Information Awareness (DARPA) to help design the equivalent of an internal passport for Americans. These two are now Homeland Security consultants.

It would apply what Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt once called the "Four-Prong Devil’s Fork": (1) Gradualism, originally conceived in the late 1800s by the Fabian Socialists, leading to instituting changes over such long periods of time that the masses of people do not recognize what is happening; (2) semantic deception, using traditional-sounding labels as a means of sugar-coating and deception; (3) using an endless supply of taxpayer dollars; and (4) applying Hegelian dialectic (thesis, antithesis, synthesis: the deliberate creation of a problem resulting in a panicked reaction, leading the masses to accept a predetermined solution it would never have accepted before. The entire "war on terrorism" is taking on a character very much like this. [Stephen Yates]

If you've ever wanted to learn Smalltalk now's your chance.  Stéphane Ducasse has contacted a number of publishers and authors of out-of-print Smalltalk books and gotten them to donate PDF versions of their work.  It's a pretty good Smalltalk library.

The Ruby language which I am growing to love, warts and all, has something of a Smalltalk heritage.  It's been described as a cross between perl and Smalltalk although I have to say that I don't see much resemblance to perl beyond a few strange $: variables and syntactic support for regular expressions. Maybe the similarity is in the ease with which you can get started?  I remember Perl4 was very good in that respect.

So Smalltalk is one of the skeletons in Ruby's closet.  Maybe time to rattle some old bones...

Visual Settlements in Weblogs. One the things I'm struggling with is compressing weblog data, in particular links between posts. The ideal solution would be a graphical overview that is crisp and small enough to fit on the screen. An idea that I have seen... [Anjo Anjewierden]

Much quicker than I anticipated Trillian 3 has been released and work on version 3.1 is already underway. Slated for that release are HTML profiles and UPnP support to improve filesharing behind firewalls. Neither feature sets my heart alight I have to say, but progress is progress. I just hope a little time may be found to continue work on the IRC plugin, at least enough to bring it up to the v2 level of functionality. Nevertheless I'm very happy with the new Trillian and didn't hesitate to fork over another $25 to get it. A fair price for an app I use every day.

After my last post about Acrobat Julien Couvreur got in touch to say that he too was having issues with the reader plugin and Firefox.  For myself I don't remember having these problems in Mozilla but FF is so nice that this type of niggle is easy to overlook.  Shortly after Erick Herring got in touch again and gave me the correct way to unhook Firefox and Adobe Acrobat reader:

To disable in-browser viewing in FireFox, you have to do:

Tools -> Options -> Downloads -> Plug-Ins -> PDF (Uncheck)

According to Erick Herring (who left a comment, but no link or email) I should be able to deactivate in-browser Acrobat by opening Acrobat and unchecking "Preferences | Interenet | Display PDF in Browser."  Unfortunately I already have this setting unchecked and yet it does it anway!  Rats! Rats! Rats!

The prayer of every true partisan.

From J.S. Mill, via Lionel Trilling, via John Holbo (in a discussion of one of Pragmatic Dave Thomas's alter ego's books), a "prayer of every true partisan of liberalism":

Lord, enlighten thou our enemies... sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers. We are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom: their weakness is what fills us with apprehension, not their strength.

Trilling comments:

What Mill meant, of course, was that the intellectual pressure which an opponent... could exert would force liberals to examine their position for its weaknesses and complacencies.

Isn't that a nice sentiment? And not just for political partisans.

P.S. A duty to attend to an opponent's thought is not a duty to argue with that opponent. I've in the past shrugged and walked away from arguments. Citing this post won't shame me into resuming them.

[Exploration Through Example]

Does anyone know how to safely remove Adobe Acrobat integration from Mozilla and Firefox on Windows?  I absolutely hate the way the it clogs up the browser, seemingly freezing the whole thing while the plugin laboriously starts up, and it never shuts down cleanly either.  I'd rather just have things open in native Acrobat and avoid a lot of bother...

December 16, 2004.

“When you're setting a price, you're sending a signal. If your competitor's software ranges in price from about $100 to about $500, and you decide, heck, my product is about in the middle of the road, so I'll sell it for $300, well, what message do you think you're sending to your customers? You're telling them that you think your software is ‘eh.’ I have a better idea: charge $1350. Now your customers will think, ‘oh, man, that stuff has to be the cat's whiskers since they're charging mad coin for it!’”

Camels and Rubber Duckies

[Joel on Software]

Fun with micro-economics and with pretty graphs too!

Yogi Berra On Social Capital. Yogi Berra on social capital: "If you don't go to their funeral, they won't come to yours"... [Get Real]

I've just made my first use of the userScript extension which I mentioned before. I'm still a user of the Radio Userland built in aggregator despite it having many issues which bug me. Fixing the aggregator inside Radio is a non-starter because your changes can get arbitrarily trampled and, anyway, I dislike working inside the Radio base code.

My first thought on seeing the the userScript extension was "can I write a Javascript overlay to add new controls to the aggregator?" The answer is yes:



As you can see from this screenshot I have a Javascript in place which adds a select and deselect option to the posts from each feed which controls the checkbox next to each post in the group. This script is only invoked for the Radio aggregator page. For good measure it also scrolls the first post of the next group into view.

This fits well with my reading style where I have checkboxes default to unchecked and I manually check items I know I won't read or respond to further. This is often quite a few (especially with the bug in Radio which causes Typepad and some MT feeds to repeat themselves endlessly).

Now I can quickly scan down hitting select and moving on to the next group. At the bottom of the page I can hit delete.

Given that the HTML generated by Radio is so nefarious this was a somewhat tedious task, nevertheless I now have a useful application overlay which did not require modifying the Radio code in any way. I have other ideas but they'll have to wait. If anyone else wants to try this here is how:

1. Be using either Mozilla or Firefox browser
2. Install the userScript extension
3. Download my userScript.js
4. Install it in your profiles chrome folder (mine is C:Documents and SettingsMattApplication DataMozillaFirefoxProfilesypznbsa4.defaultchrome)
5. Make sure the file is called userScript.js (I renamed it to prevent conflicts)
6. And, of course, don't blame me if anything horrible happens - you installed it!

I've often lamented the fact that you can't write to the Javascript Console.  When trying to debug scripts which use iteration you really can't use alert() because the popup nature is too intrusive and you can't break out of it (you only have to leave an alert() in a script that goes through a few hundred iterations once to learn this lesson).

This morning I was trying to figure out whether Firefox offered a way of writing to the Javascript console and I found that it does but you have to use signed scripts.  That's impractical for most uses but the authors have a useful alternative.

You can start the browser with a -console option which will give you a separate console window to accompany the browser window. From Javascript you can then use dump(str) to write statements to this window.  Very neat.

I meant to go to bed early tonight but got hooked by an intruiguing Spanish film called Intacto.  Even though I missed the beginning I was compelled to watch the end.

It concerns a small group of the extraordinarily lucky and the strange wagers they make with each other. At the centre of everything is concentration camp survivor and lord of fate, Samuel Berg (played by Max Von Sydow), who lives in a casino and plays a very dangerous game with those few who reach him.  Other protagonists include: Alejandro (the bullfighter), Federico (earth quake survivor and Bergs right hand man), Tomas (a bank robber on the run whose plane crashes leaving him sole survivor of 238 passengers), and Sara (the cop who is on his tail).

If I'm lucky I'll catch the beginning some day.

The great irony of divide and conquer is that it does not succeed against guerilla movements. In fact, the opposite is true. Because guerilla movements do not cooperate permanently with each other, but only on an ad hoc basis, the divide-and-conquer strategy becomes a blueprint for disaster: endless negotiations that never root out the resistance movement.

...

The divide-and-conquer strategy works when the conquered do not have access to cheap weapons in a free market. It works when the conqueror can move the terms of engagement from the battlefield to politics. It does not work when a decentralized supply chain for low-tech weaponry keeps the guerrillas in the field. It does not work when hit-and-run tactics replace a strategy of direct confrontation.

[Gary North]

Trillian 3.0 has just updated itself to build #956.  According to what I read in the CC forums it's also moving into beta so we're probably only a month or two from a release.  Certainly the last couple of builds don't seem to have crashed one me and 3.0 is head and shoulders better than v2 so this is all good news.

Except, well there is one piece of bad news and that is the clunky IRC support.  They've done a ground-up rewrite of the IRC plug-in (woo!) which they haven't finished (boo!) and the scuttlebut is that it won't be until a putative 3.1 release or even later (hiss!)  It works, but you're back to using command line /msg's as most of the contextual options have vanished.  As someone who uses IRC a lot this is sucky but I guess I'm going to have to live with it.  The silver lining is that the new plugin, when finished, should put IRC support on a par with the other connection types and be a much sounder base for developing new IRC features.

Wow.  Now even the spooks aren't safe.  But don't fret, I'm sure you are.

In the latest revelations, documents released Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) showed that U.S. special operations forces (SOF) threatened Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) officials who witnessed evidence of abuses inflicted on detainees in Iraq if they reported what they had seen. [US Attacks Global Court as Its Soldiers are Sanctioned]

A quote attributed (by The Guardian) to Bernard Kerik - Bush's new Secretary of Homeland Security (sic):

One of his most notable aphorisms: "Political criticism is our enemies' best friend."

Excellent post (from Oct 2003) by Julien Couvreur introducing Bayesian networks. I've had a quick skim of it and I understand more than I did, I need to read it again properly though and also the two sources he sites. The last few months I've really regretted that, like brussel sprouts when I was a kid, I dodged so much of stats and probability at College.

I've just come across a really interesting Firefox plug-in called UserScript.  This plug-in automatically inserts the contents of a userScript.js file into every page loaded into the browser.  This is a close approximation to the facility I was looking for back at the end of November.

I've tried the plug-in and it does just what it says on the tin, which is very neat!  What would be great is an interface for specifiying multiple .js files to include and to allow enabling/disabling of individual scripts based upon the browser location (for example I probably want to disable all foreign scripts when doing ibanking -- just in case).

12/09/04: The China Syndrome. If You Want to Understand IBM Selling Its PC Division, Just Look East [I, Cringely @ PBS.org]

I just got a phone call at 18:15 from some woman in a market research company. I didn't quite catch the name of her company (which I now believe was deliberately mumbled). I told her I wasn't interested in doing her study and asked her how she got hold of my number.  At first she wouldn't say but I pressed her and she spun me a yarn about them using a computer which, given an area code, makes up random 4 digit suffixes and dials them. If this is true it is presumably to get around the no-dial lists.

I pressed her further about what company she worked for and she wouldn't respond, eventually cutting me off. Using 1471 revealed that they were witholdhing their number.

It's a shitty way to do business and I hope they enjoy all the bad karma that is coming their way.

Today as part of my psychology reading I was reading "Interpersonal Dynamics in a Simulated Prison" which is the 1973 article about the infamous Zimbardo Prison Experiment in which Stanford students became prisoners and guards in a simulated prison environment.  The article is pretty readable and describes the aims of the experiment, how it was set up, how it operated, and how they evaluated the results.

The results suprised them.

The prisoners really became prisoners, came to identify themselves as prisoners and act accordingly.  This can be seen in two observations which came from the study:

1. Fully 90% of all conversations among prisoners were related to prison topics and not the outside life they had just left and to which they knew they would shortly return.  "Thus, in their private conversations when they might escape the roles they were playing in public, they did not.  There was no discontinuity between their presentation of self when under surveillance and when alone."
2. When each of the five prisoners eligible for parole (i.e. they wanted to bug out) was asked whether they would forfeit all the money earned in order to be paroled (released from the study) three of the five said yes.  Notice that the original incentive for participating in the study was had been the promise of money, and they were, after only four days, prepared to give this up completely.

Or another guard who detained an "incorrigible" prisoner in solitary confinement beyond the duration set by the guards' own rules and then he conspired to keep him in the hole all night while attempting to conceal this information from the experimenters who were thought to be too soft on the prisoners.

• On the experiment as a whole Zimbardo had this to say: "I learned that people can easily forget that others are human."
• "Most dramatic and distressing to us was the observation of the ease with which sadistic behaviour could be elicited in individuals who were not "sadistic types" and the frequency with which acute emitional breakdowns could occur in men selected precisely for their emotional stability."
• In a world where men are either powerful or powerless, everyone learns to despise the lack of power in others and in oneself.  It seems to us, that prisoners learn to admire power for its own sake - power becoming the ultimate reward.  Real prisoners soon learn the means to gain power whether through ingratiation, informing, sexual control of other prisoners or development of powerful cliques.  When they are released from prison, it is unlikely they will ever want to feel so powerless again and will take action to establish and assert a sense of power.

I just keep finding things in Firefox 1.0 that I like:

Today I found that the "Add Bookmark" context item allows you to file the bookmark into a folder in one go without a lot of run-around, that's neat.  And I've just used the new Ctrl+F find feature.. very nice.

Truly I am now a convert (although I'll probably still install Mozilla 1.8 when it's released).

Hmm... not the best evening I've ever had. As I was walking home from the tube station tonight I got assaulted, out of the blue, on a busy main road right by a bus stop, passengers were getting off the bus even as it happened.

Fortunately all limbs are still present & correct. All I suffered were some nice cuts & abrasions to the face, a headache, and the loss of a rather scratched and beaten pair of glasses. And some people have to go diving or skiing for excitement!

The police officer I reported it to was very helpful and thorough and even offered to have me driven around to try and spot the offender. Little point of course since, without glasses I can't see much more than 10" from my face.

Oh well, time for a cup of tea.

Could anyone over there throw my hat back?. When I first started this blog, I decided that it was important for me to resist the urge to pretend I was some enlightened, got-it-all-together kind of guru. I wanted to share occasional glimpses of the uncertainty I encounter along... [The Occupational Adventure (sm)]

I'm running with a newer alpha release of Trillian 3.  Crash dumps & reports should go to the beta bugs forum at CeruleanStudios.

Gurteen Knowledge Quote of the Day - Friday November 26, 2004

For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but will not fly.

*** Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) Lebanese-American Poet Philosopher & Artist ***

For more information on this quotation and the author see:
http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/X00070B96/

I just went to a page, using Firefox 1.0, that required Macromedia Flash and, of course, I don't have the Flash player installed yet.  Inwardly I groaned at the thought of having to find it, do the install, restart the browser, go back to everything I was doing... uck...

But the install in Firefox was laughably smooth (well, actually too quick for me to laugh).  It popped up a little window plug-in options to install with the Flash player pre-selected.  I said okay and it downloaded & installed it in 2 seconds (having a 1.5mbps connection helps) then, and I really liked this bit, it reloaded the page... I didn't even have to restart the browser.  Nice.

The Firefox people seem to have really thought through the browser experience - everything seems so slick.  I'm impressed.

Does anyone out there have an iPAQ pocketpc phone like the 6315?  I'm interested in the real use battery life and what compromises they've made.  Can anyone enlighten me?  Alternative does anyone know anywhere in North or Central London where you can see one side-by-side with an O2 XDA?

"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."
[Albert Einstein, "Religion and Science", New York Times Magazine, 9 November 1930]

I've finally made the plunge and switched from Mozilla 1.7 to Firefox 1.0. It seemed to install easily and imported my bookmarks, preferences, and passwords. It's got quite a clean cut look and is somehow "brighter" than Mozilla. Early days, but so far I'm happy with it.

"Practice Makes Perfect" - a follow up

Harold commented on my post with a story about a gymnastics instructor. Her main method of teaching was to provide only positive encouragement after each attempt, without criticism. Just before the next attempt, she would give some corrective advice, like "keep your elbows tucked in this time". [sic] I still believe that the only way to develop a skill is through practice and feedback,

- Albert Ip [Random Walk in E-Learning]

I was reading Timothy Leary's The Politics of Self-Determination recently and noticed what I thought was an odd typo, using hir instead of him.  Given that Ronin Publishing seems to be a small, independent, I must admit my first thought (which I apologize humbly for) was bad editing.  But the mistake was consistent, there were no (him or her)'s to be seen.  And then it hit me.

I'm not sure if it was an invention of Leary but he consistently uses hir as a gender neutral alternative to him and her.  I really like it and have started to use it myself in some writing.  In checking it out a little more I came across a Gender-Neutral Pronouns FAQ.  Some of them are just bizarre but I do like hir.

Not good.  My laptop has developed a fault and now the keys on the "8-i-k-," column don't work.  It's not as bad as it could be as I mostly use an external keyboard but it does mean that the luggable isn't even a portable unless I get it fixed - and that means talking to Dell support.

I've had a chequered past with Dell technical support.  My issue has always been resolved however, despite the next-business day warranty I purchased, it hasn't always been easy.  Once I had to track down the UK MD's office and rattle hir cage before I got a reasonable level of service.  A lot of mental and emotional energy was wasted on that occasion.

But this time will be better I'm sure. [crosses fingers]

Will I find somewhere to buy a magic 8-ball in London?