ragged blog

Summary: sorry for late moderation of some peoples comments, this post is a rant about spam, and i’ll be off wordpress as soon as I can be.

I haven’t been through the comment moderation list in over a month. Shame on me.

Sorry to those who’s comments were not posted until far later than they should have been.

Spam, spam, bloody spam. </rant>

Time for a Javascript based comment submission I think, and to move away from run of the mill blogging software, because there are few other solutions these days that actually seem to work, and in some ways, I have better things to do with my time than sift this crap.

Right ok. This is probably a really crap idea (almost worthy of an obscenity? you decide.), but I want to start filtering all urls in my comments into a list I’m going to publish as a DNS blacklist, which I will start distributing to anyone who desires it.

Screw you spamming gits. I’m going to filter all of my google searches from now on. Anything with your crap or something within a link catchers eye of your crap is not going to go near me.

What if comments can be flagged as comments for google, and google stop ranking sites by links left in comments?

In fact, links in comments should gain -ve weight, and the people should just be told.

I want a box on my site where i can publicly shame these fuckers and the google results will actually respond in a decent manner.

Sadly, that’s not possible because it’s subject to an attack by it’s very nature, with that you could demote the rank of competing sites. cryface.

Still I want to publicly shame them, but in order to not help them it must be private. Maybe I should e-mail _why and ask him to hide a spam site ban list in hoodwink.d for me…

I guess the rant wasn’t really over. Anyone else feel the pain?

I had been told a long time ago by an engineer, that it was probably best to go through longer charge cycles with Li-ions. It seems that advice was not really correct, according to Wikipedia, and the Battery University.

Apparently Li-ions should be charged more frequently, although I am certain I have heard reports of people suffering ‘memory’ style patterns in some Li-ion batteries when charging really frequently. Maybe this is just the low number of charge cycles these batteries can actually cope with. I should think charging at around the 10% mark is actually the way to go, but not to drain them too low, as apparently this is bad for them too.

Li-ion lifetimes can be extended by cooling the batteries too!

I remember the advice I got regarding AA batteries when I was using a Psion 5, in those days, gently crushing the battery and / or leaving it on a radiator for a few minutes would generally give you enough lifetime to make a short trip home etc.

Battery specs are a pain still, but hopefully it won’t be too long before that changes.

Article in The Royal Gazzette (Bermuda)

Illegal prime - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

wow.

Download details: Consolas Font Pack

Competing On The Basis Of Speed - Google Video

Very worth watching.

Techdirt: Daylight Savings Change Could Spell Doom For The World (Well, For An Hour, Anyway)
I’m sure everyone feels this is being overblown due to the ‘overblown’ Y2K issue, however….

Whilst the issue is WELL known in areas where the change is occuring, it is NOT well known in other areas.

The issue will come with international time based billing services, and I can be almost certain that issues will occur, and it will cost people money.

Furthermore, there isn’t such a good fix for this problem - time servers have fixed slotted time zones, they will not be aware of the change, and with many time dependant services out there, one will have to:

- patch the time server, and client
- stop time correction services
- correct all interactions with all other proprietary systems

I know of at least 20 telecommunications networks globally that due to lack of support for the networks (X.25 based paknet, some Smartzone systems and many others) these software issues will not be fixed, and I also know of at least a few areas where major billing mistakes could arise as a product of the time alterations.

The biggest issue will occur in the instances where ‘automatic time correction’ occurs, as it is more like to become ‘automatic time mis-correction’ from now on - leading to a loss of ‘base-truth’ in the logs - which means the billing information cannot be reliably recovered.

In this event the carriers loose legal standing to bill for that usage, as most would require ‘base-truth’ proof that calls occured, which is now no longer held to be reliable.

Life or death issue? I hope not…

Expensive? Most probably.

Oh, and I forgot to mention the dangers occuring with GPS and Time based encryption services. Oh dear.

Dig in….

MIT OpenCourseWare | OCW Home

Fantastic resources

Hello readers,

I’ve recently found these talks, and they are absolutely fantastic. Some truly excellent speakers talking with the confidence of true knowledge and understanding behind them (at least as I’ve seen so far). Some of these things are ideas more than fact, however, others are truly astounding views of actual reality.

You can find them here: TED Conference

Some that I have enjoyed so far:

November 14, 2006: Technology, history and destiny - Kevin Kelly
This is a very interesting and quite ‘personalised’ view on technology, but well presented and an very thought provoking view on development.

October 18, 2006: Broken states and how to fix them - Ashraf Ghani
I have not had time to watch this one all the way through as yet, but is very interesting. Particularly the strong views on economical problems and developmental methods in ‘developing’ countries. Certainly the first half ties in well with the video I have enjoyed most so far:

June 27, 2006: TEDTalks Premieres - Hans Rosling
An absolutely fantastic and encouraging view of the world shown entirely from well presented real statistical data. Well presented, well spoken, and very impacting.

I hope someone else finds these and gains as much from them as I am planning to.

Apparently Mi5 think there are alot of targets growing in the UK. the decisions of the UK Government over the last decade has a clear link to this I am certian. However we can only move forward from here and I hope that the relevant people can learn to keep (reasonably) quiet, so as not to further enflame the situation. BBC NEWS | UK | MI5 tracking ‘30 UK terror plots’

I was caught in particular by this line:

MI5 has increased in size by nearly 50% since 9/11 and now stands at roughly 2,800 staff.

And an amusing anecdote from Prejudice:

We’ve noticed terrorists, so we’ve started hiring new people!

Surely this idea is absolutely stupid. Some right honourable old bats inconcieved idea of ‘hardening intelligence services’ when the number of terrorists they KNOW ABOUT are in number as large as their organisation apparently started before 9/11.

Having been through Uni within the last decade, I also know that the number of opinionated and fanatical (entirely british) students out there is increasing. They are able to find and push resources which may or may not contain accurate data (e.g. the film entitled ‘The Corporation’ which takes a very hard-line standpoint and broadly innaccurate measure on the reasons for business decisions) leads to alot of these students believing their ‘hippy’ ideals might save the world. Some of them may even go so far as to become a threat to those of us that are trying to really just help (by being productive human beings, and friendly to the world around us).

One of the classics I remember is:

“we should just stop all of the oil tankers from going accross the atlantic if their over X years old”.

The impact of these thoughts is never appreciated by these people. Having spent some time around EMO groups during periods where they become active, I’ve learned myself a few hard lessons with regard to this sort of problem. Just how much fuel is available in the local area? What is the impact to life if it’s no longer available? The answers to these kinds of questions often make said students recoil and become quite quiet, or they simply resist the reality and keep going with more vigor in the hope to dispell the unwanted commentry over their opinions.

My wonderful girlfriend has many friends who fall into this ‘hippy’ category, and whilst not active, some of their ideas are bordering on similarly destructive. Equally some of their ideas are priceless and I would hope that both sides of the coin can be remembered by people from all sides of these rather blurry lines. My belief is that a global culture shift towards true understanding (or at least people having a desire to really understand, rather than rely on here-say) is the only thing that could save this planet. I’ve sen just as much marketing bullshit from ECO warriors as I have from DOLLAR warriors.

A few words of warning on how to approach these problems in general though:

1. Changing the world rapidly is contrary to nature (even when the world you are changing is man-made). Rapid change is generally a dangerous operation and should not be done lightly.
2. Removing key resources from places they are required can KILL PEOPLE. If a hospital looses power, a power station looses oil/coal, people can DIE.
3. Removing necessary transport mediums for human requirements is dangerous and again, can KILL PEOPLE, although less directly. Observe fuel riots.
4. Your opinion is always limited by your knowledge which is bound by the sum of your experiences and your imagination. Research needs to be done properly. I know you may feel it is too urgent to do this, but if you don’t you’ll make it worse - see attempts at ecological balencing by species introduction.
5. Bounce-back or reaction effects can do more damage to your cause than good. If you want something to change, and you force change on people, when they get back what they want it often comes back in more force (because they get so upset for having lost it, or in business they lost so much money).

Finally, as I mentioned ‘The Corporation’ I’d just like to point out that I’m building a business currently, and we have no aims to generate revenue at any cost. This is written into the core culture of our business plan and our investors DO take an active role in ensuring they see good ethical practices from our business. The crux of this is, it’s not ‘Corporations’ who make evil decisions, it’s a person making the decision inside the company, and often their reason is regardless of the real world events (and often they will never experience the events either). I’m sure the families of the people who make these decisions (in most all cases) do not consider their relatives to be evil people. Somewhere this understanding gets lost in ‘hippy hype’ and I’d like to see it not in future. If you want to be so arrogant as to actively preach and push your ideas on everyone else, you should make damn sure that they’re correct first, otherwise you’re just another marketing idiot pushing ideas on people that they don’t need.