This afternoon I did some behind the scenes tidying around Screenshot-ville. I upgraded from Movable Type 3.2 to 3.3 – amazingly, while I backed things up, it went entirely smoothly and I don’t appear to have lost any functionality (let me know if it appears otherwise to you!!!).
I had been getting between 100 and 200 spam comments a day, and while they were mostly getting marked as junk, about 50-60 were coming through as either needing moderation or getting posted outright. I was going to try to install a Captcha plugin, but I noticed that all but a half-dozen of the spam were going to two specific old entries of mine. So, I turned off comments for those entries a couple of days ago and am pretty confident looking at the logs today that, for now at least, this has solved the problem. I’ll go the Captcha route if necessary, but I’d rather leave things as open as possible for as long as possible.
I also finally set up an RSS feed reader for myself; I went with the Sage extension for Firefox. I just went through all of my bookmarks that I usually open up in separate tabs at the start of each day and browse through one by one. Now, the ones with feeds are filtered off to a subdirectory and I’m going to try reading them just through the feeds. It’s another experiment in more efficient browsing that I’ll give a week and then let you know what I think.
The next thing I want to tackle around here is continuing to go back and pull my old archives into the new database….
Extremity Knitting
It just came to my attention that the summer issue of Knitty is out; they’re calling it “the extremities issue”, as it is focusing on gloves and socks and the like. This is very sensible for a summer issue – small projects are way more tolerable in this weather than big sweaters and afghans that lay across your lap. (I, of couse, am quite intelligently spending my summer making a beaded mohair shawl….)
Looking at their new pattern offerings, there’s a pretty toe-up sock design, Widdershins that I might try, or maybe the longer, lacy Baudelaire pair. The Sock Monkey Hat is adorable. While I am not a legwarmer fan, the Manresa pattern makes some that look really comfy and non-80s-flashback – I could imagine pulling these on for a commute over tights, if one’s shoes didn’t accomodate bulky wool socks.
Didn’t they do this scene in Real Genius?
In one of the more bizarre news articles I’ve seen about robotics lately, a professor’s project to substitute an andriod version of himself in his lectures doesn’t actually seem to be very positive about the project.[via AI in the News] From the start, the andriod is labeled as looking “creepily like him”. Looking at the technology behind the article, there’s no intelligence in the system, as the operator wears motion-capture gear and the android reproduces those behaviors. The professor claims he just wanted to eliminate his commute – I would have thought some good videoconferencing equipment would be easier and way less off-putting for the students (there is no indication of whether the android includes microphones so that the professor can hold a discussion). The article’s author is also clearly dubious about this development in education, as he speculates that if such devices take off, soon the andriod double of the professor will just be teaching to a room full of android doubles of students.
Science and Tech Feedback
The ACM”s public policy weblog has a nice discussion of Congress’s need for scientific and technical advice, prompted by a hearing on Tuesday on the topic. As in most other domains, the need for advice comes not from a lack of information, but rather from information overload, and specifically highly technical information overload:
Congress does not face an information shortage. Each day hundreds of documents are dumped on Congress, many of them dealing with technical issues. One witness said that staffers now receive about 200 e-mails daily from advocacy groups. Numerous groups provide scientific advice to Congress including think tanks, professional societies (such as ACM), the National Academies, governmental agencies, and even Congress’ own research service. None of the witnesses argued Congress needed more scientific and technical advice. They argued it needed independent advice that was more closely aligned with Congress’ needs, and that this need couldn’t be fulfilled by the various outside groups.
Particularly interesting was the analysis of how the lack of interest in reconstituting the old Office of Technology Assessment would impact the effectiveness of organizations such as the ACM providing technical advice. There was a definite note of frustration in the article, though I wonder if anyone is really surprised by the observation that under the current system scientific recommendations often take a back seat to political recommendations. Not having a codified method for collecting such input is probably indicative of a lowered interest in such input, but it doesn’t follow that a centralized clearinghouse for technical advice will guarantee that it is listened to.
At its heart, this seems like an education issue to me – so long as it is socially acceptable for even “well-educated” people to say that math and science are “hard” and beyond their grasp or interest, our government representatives are unlikely to have the inclination or abilities to evaluate even well-presented technical arguments.
Bronze Today
Most years I forget to make note until too long after the fact, but today is the eighth anniversary of my first post to Screenshot. I asked a couple of friends what I should do to mark the occasion, and one interesting suggestion was to comment on what weblogs I’m currently reading on a regular basis. It’s an interesting question, because looking back over my years of weblogging (1) I used to read a lot more weblogs than i do now, and (2) I used to maintain a list of favorites, whereas now I keep my bookmarks private. The first change is almost entirely due to no longer being a grad student. The second is due to bad memories of the explosion of the weblog “community” and some of the drawing up of sides that came out of who linked to whom. But it has been a while since I’ve made up a list of favorites, and there are some good sites that I’ve been enjoying recently.
Looking at the weblogs I visit on a regular basis, there are a few categories – I’ll offer you one from each set.
The huge ones that everyone reads – they don’t need plugs from me, but I will say that Boing Boing probably has the best staying power for me.
The old ones I’ve been reading since the 90s – a lot of them are gone, or have morphed into something other than what they were, but Bifurcated Rivets has been keeping on with the old-school Robot Wisdom style snippets and Ghost in the Machine continues to be an interesting mix of, well, everything.
Education themed – I found a whole bunch of these about a year ago, and the best are a good combination of useful insights and cathartic venting. Favorites include Learning Curves and New Kid on the Hallway. Not surprisingly, the summer is a bit of a downtime for these weblogs.
Feminist themed – my favorite in this catagory, Bitch Ph.D. actually overlaps a bit with the preceding catagory as well.
Craft themed – not martha seems to consistently find the coolest projects out on the web.
Pop culture themed – I’ve been reading Pop Culture Junk Mail forever and it’s a lot of fun. More recently, I’ve been laughing at (and not with) the comics over at The Comics Curmudgeon.
This isn’t everything by any means, but it’s a pretty good snapshot of the types of things I look at – this month at least!
Friday Geek Humor
A new favorite is the geeky, surreal, math-and-linguistics-infused webcomic xkcd [via Boing Boing]. The two that made me laugh raucously were Stacy’s Dad and Computational Linguistics (caution, bad language). However, I highly recommend paging through from the beginning. If you don’t have the patience, some of my other favorites are Copyright, Fourier, Self-Reference, Hyphen, Geico, Hobby, Graduation, Pillow Talk, Wright Brothers, and
Centrifugal Force.
Dangers of Web 2.0
An interesting pair of articles about the privacy implications of Web 2.0 applications came through on Slashdot and Digg respectively last week. The first linked the Louisiana State University in Shreveport’s Career Services reprint of an article about the impact of social network sites on getting hired. It mentions that even people who think they are being careful by restricting access to their on-line content might find it accessed by a potential employer, citing a specific case in which a state agency obtained access to restricted Facebook pages due to provision of the Patriot Act. It also reiterates the necessary point that these sites need to be treated as public, not private spaces. Interestingly, the article also suggests that it is ethically questionable for an employer to look at these sites for background on a potential employee. I think that it is a mistake for an employer to take standard goofiness too sereiously, but I think that it is totally natural for them to Google applicant names or look in other public sites. That is, at least, content that an applicant has power over, as compared to employers asking colleagues who previously knew the applicant for feedback, which definitely happens.
The second article talks about steps you can take to clean up your on-line presence, particularly prior to a job search. Soberingly, its first recommendation is to Google yourself, but suggests that if there is something unflattering that appears about you, there is little you can do about it.
Back to Firefox
I ran through my planned trial week with Opera, and I’ve decided to go back to Firefox. I definitely think that Opera has fewer memory leaks, which is a plus, and I really like the session manager. However, it never felt right – there were differences switching from IE to Firefox, but Firefox was never irritating. Opera never seemed intuitive about when it opened things in the same window as compared to in a new tab, as compared to some strange sub-window to a tab. I had trouble getting it to put and keep my bookmarks in the order I wanted. I couldn’t right-click on a bookmark or tab to change its properties or open it in a new tab or window. All together, it didn’t work for the way that I wanted to use it.
So, I set up a Firefox extension to enable a session manager for it, which will also enable me to close Firefox on a regular basis even if I haven’t finished with all of my tabs. I’m almost tempted to try out the Firefox 2.0 beta, but I think I’ve had enough browser fun for the month.
The Look of Your Book
This weblogger describes their job, book interior designer, and describes the number of things that it makes perfect sense someone has to do when producing a book, and yet which I never really thought about as part of the process. It’s not just choosing the font, as they note, but layout and material issues that have to balance attractiveness and readability with the financial considerations of publishing the book. For example, they are told how many pages the book will have (based on non-design considerations), and then have to find the best way to put the book into that many pages. There’s also an interesting bit on the picking of a font for a book. If you like the entry, definitely check out the archives, as there are other goodies about designing books in there.
Photoshop Tricks
I have a basic familiarity with Photoshop, and use it for the little photo editing that I do, but I know there are lots of capabilities to the software that I am not utilizing, so this description of using Photoshop filters to sharpen focus on a photo element was really useful, though I haven’t found a photo with which to try it yet. I like how the article uses terminology like “depth of field”, but doesn’t assume that I know exactly what that is or how to use it in my photography. It’s really a lesson in how to take good photographs, but explains how you can use Photoshop to tweak settings instead of having to get everything perfect at the moment you take the picture. I’ll definitely be trying some of this out. [via Digg]