How Long Can the Country Stay Scared? , Bruce Schneier

A terrorist alert that instills a vague feeling of dread or panic, without giving people anything to do in response, is ineffective. Even worse, it echoes the very tactics of the terrorists. There are two basic ways to terrorize people. The first is to do something spectacularly horrible, like flying airplanes into skyscrapers and killing thousands of people. The second is to keep people living in fear. Decades ago, that was one of the IRA’s major aims. Inadvertently, the DHS is achieving the same thing.

I think you can safely cross out the ‘inadvertently’ part.

Stiki Wiki, a WYSIWYG wiki platform has been undergoing a lot of changes in the past few weeks. Very cool stuff. I like the previews for the incoming/outgoing links (the hover lines are a nice touch). These are great for giving context to otherwise hard to visualize structures.

Nearly 36 Million Americans Live in Poverty

Some 1.3 million Americans slid into poverty in 2003 as the ranks of the poor rose 4 percent to 35.9 million, with children and blacks worse off than most, the government said on Thursday in a report that fueled Democratic criticism of President Bush.

Follow-up on mefi about Bush’s latest accomplishment.

Ya’ll don’t get it, do you? Poor people don’t vote. And he controls all arms of the federal government and has corporate media in his pocket. Add electronic voting systems with no oversight, and, well, ya’ll are being tooled.

Probably mentioned before:

• Brandeis Information Technology Services – their ITS site is entirely implemented with Twiki and it looks suprisingly good. The next frontiers of wikis (as useful tool) is providing columnar/styled block output
• IT Work at MIT – MIT’s IS&T team has a history of keeping really great project documentation. Most of the projects have their own discovery notebook sites where you can dig through
• University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Advanced Technology Lab – drupal based blog/site
• USC Doheny Office of Technology Support – doesn’t really do anything, but sharp design

• University of Florida – apparently they used our site for inspiration (more apparent in the IA and inner pages), but IMO, the UFL design is better in just about every way. Good job!
• Game Over: Kasparov and the machine – awesome trailer
• The Face of Tomorrow – The Face of Tomorrow attempts to find out what the future face of each city will look like by taking photographs of the current inhabitants and compositing their faces to create a typical face. (see: process)

What I need to do is sit down for a week or two and make a big chart comparing these things. Luckily I’m getting paid to do that. The next thing I need to do is to take the best of these, mix in with my improvements, and build something better. Maybe I can get paid to do that too…

• TikiWiki – LGPL
• Drupal – GPL
• PurpleWiki – GPL
• Confluence – Commercial
• Trac – GPL
• XPlanner – LGPL
• Libresource – Free (unspecified)
• Basecamp – service
• silverorange Intranet – service/commercial

Sony marketing manager Atsushi Kubota said his company wants to promote a wide range of music players in the Walkman lineup, including various types of disks and memory cards, not just the hard drive. Global Walkman sales still total US$20 million a year, according to Sony, compared with more than 3.7 million iPods shipped worldwide so far.

This blurb from a Taipei Times article tries to make it seem like Sony is still in good shape (20M > 3.7M), but when you realize that it’s comparing dollar to unit sales you can see the gravity of the situation. At a conservative 1M units/yr @ $300 (I know it’s more and it’s going up), we’re talking about a 15x (and realistically, probably more like 20x) sales figure difference here. Sony is getting its ass completely handed to.

Don’t worry, I’m sure that converting all music to DRM’d ATRAC is the way to go. People love that.

Dustin, from yesterday’s Andrew WK / They Might Be Giants show.

(file under: improving portraiture)

• Set based algorithms in SQL for directed, acyclic graphs
• CPAN: Graph.pm
• JGraphT – Java, can handle graphs with a few millions vertices and edges
• pydot – an interface for creating both directed and non directed graphs from Python.
• Python Patterns – Implementing Graphs
• Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in Python

I was telling a friend about the IP minefields I had implemented in various folders to keep snoopers out. I remember that I mentioned this at OSCON and other people had also mentioned that it was a great idea (that hadn’t been done before?). It is a good idea, and trivially easy to implement. So here’s the PHP source:

$deny = '# ' . date("D M j G:i:s T Y") . "
";  
$deny .= 'Deny from ' . $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] . "
"; 
fwrite(fopen('.htaccess', 'a'),$deny);