The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Dave McKean, is a great, fun, read. It was awarded the Newberry medal (awarded annually by the American Library Association, to the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children).

Related: Publishers Fight Progress Again - Against Amazon Kindle - The World at the End of Time - Hugo and Nebula Award Books

Don't Excuse Immoral Looters

I believe those that loot should held responsible for their actions. It is not the fault of international aid donors that Mobutu Sese Seko (widely credited with behavior responsible for inspiring the term: kleptocracy) looted the money meant to help starving people. It is not the fault of government that they don't manage to outlaw and then enforce those laws against all unethical and immoral behavior.

There are too many in the USA to determine which CEOs and board members are most responsible for the current corporate kleptocracy mentality. There are legal boundaries (widely broken in recent decades) where that kleptocracy so far exceeds the self serving behavior of many CEOs that legal action is obviously correct. However, prosecution of CEOs for stealing millions seems to be less supported by those who golf with them than prosecution some kid who stole a few hundred dollars. But even more important is the failure of those that support the unethical and immoral behavior regardless of legal action.

Yes government is partially responsible for not policing corrupt dictators better. And yes government is partially responsible for not enforcing laws in support of regulated markets that capitalism requires (regulating negative externalities like systemic risk, exploiting monopoly profits, pollution...). Looting corporations is mainly a problem of the entitled elite conspiring to take what isn't theirs. In my opinion this huge failure of our society is mainly a problem that needs to be addressed by not accepting such immoral and unethical behavior, not laws against excessive taking by CEO's and executives of the wealth created by companies.

Those responsible for encouraging the moral and ethical failures of our "leaders" are those "leading" citizens sitting on corporate boards and approving the looting. And those lawyers arguing for, approving, and defending such unethical pay for big pay in return. And "experts" making cases for such ludicrous pay packages in return for big pay. And those that encourage the looting by including the looters in their high society in ways that they probably would not include Mobutu Sese Seko (though honestly their behavior makes that highly questionable - maybe they would include him).

I image those that welcome the looters would not support those using child labor in factories (even if say that was not illegal in some country in which they exploited the laws for their benefit). Plenty of things are unacceptable even if they are not illegal. Yet these supporters of looters want to be forgiven for welcoming looters since, well all their buddies at the exclusive country club loot, so I can't possibly expect ethical behavior for any of them.

Even more dis-heartening are foundations, charities, educational institutions that welcome looters without any question of their ethical and moral failures. Those supporting the looters are responsible for their behavior. They are not excused because others also support the immoral behavior. And we should make it any easier for them to excuse themselves for their encouragement of such unethical behavior.

In response to: Stop Blaming AIG

Related: CEO's Plundering Corporations for Personal Benefit - Why Pay Taxes or be Honest - Obscene CEO Pay - Businesses Tell the IRS They Are Not American but Executives Stay in USA - Losses Covered Up to Protect Bonuses - Super Spoiled Brats

Little Watchmen

Little Brother is the novel by Cory Doctorow about individuals using technology to turn the tables on Big Brother. It was an enjoyable read, but I think the enjoyment will have much to do with your political views. If you believe in putting your trust in government (like the mode was for at least 6 of the 8 years of the Bush Presidency) you probably won't like it. If you prefer free speech and freedom from government control, and big brother style spying by government you probably will enjoy it. It also has a dose of techno-geek culture.

Corey Doctorow understand the new possibilities technology allows. The content of the book is also available for free online

Giving away ebooks gives me artistic, moral and commercial satisfaction. The commercial question is the one that comes up most often: how can you give away free ebooks and still make money?

For me -- for pretty much every writer -- the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity (thanks to Tim O'Reilly for this great aphorism). Of all the people who failed to buy this book today, the majority did so because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free copy.

A particularly nice little lesson on the paradox of false positives from the book:

If you ever decide to do something as stupid as build an automatic terrorism detector, here's a math lesson you need to learn first. It's called "the paradox of the false positive," and it's a doozy.

Say you have a new disease, called Super-AIDS. Only one in a million people gets Super-AIDS. You develop a test for Super-AIDS that's 99 percent accurate. I mean, 99 percent of the time, it gives the correct result -- true if the subject is infected, and false if the subject is healthy. You give the test to a million people.

One in a million people have Super-AIDS. One in a hundred people that you test will generate a "false positive" -- the test will say he has Super-AIDS even though he doesn't. That's what "99 percent accurate" means: one percent wrong.

What's one percent of one million?

1,000,000/100 = 10,000

One in a million people has Super-AIDS. If you test a million random people, you'll probably only find one case of real Super-AIDS. But your test won't identify *one* person as having Super-AIDS. It will identify *10,000* people as having it.

Your 99 percent accurate test will perform with 99.99 percent *inaccuracy*.

That's the paradox of the false positive. When you try to find something really rare, your test's accuracy has to match the rarity of the thing you're looking for.
...
This is the paradox of the false positive, and here's how it applies to terrorism:

Terrorists are really rare. In a city of twenty million like New York, there might be one or two terrorists. Maybe ten of them at the outside. 10/20,000,000 = 0.00005 percent. One twenty-thousandth of a percent.

That's pretty rare all right. Now, say you've got some software that can sift through all the bank-records, or toll-pass records, or public transit records, or phone-call records in the city and catch terrorists 99 percent of the time.

In a pool of twenty million people, a 99 percent accurate test will identify two hundred thousand people as being terrorists. But only ten of them are terrorists. To catch ten bad guys, you have to haul in and investigate two hundred thousand innocent people.

Guess what? Terrorism tests aren't anywhere *close* to 99 percent accurate. More like 60 percent accurate. Even 40 percent accurate, sometimes.

What this all meant was that the Department of Homeland Security had set itself up to fail badly. They were trying to spot incredibly rare events -- a person is a terrorist -- with inaccurate systems

"I'd recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I've read this year." - Neil Gaiman

I wouldn't agree with that but it is a fun read, though with quite a strong worldview that some will find overwhelms the story. I myself and tired of tired of incompetent government harassment, so that wasn't a problem for me.

Related: Watching the Watchmen - Freedom Increasingly at Risk - Systemic Failure of SWAT Raids - Photographers are not a Threat

Terrorist watch list hits 1 million

Terrorist watch list hits 1 million, doesn't that seem a bit high? It seems to me the processes being used to provide safety are faulty.

The government's terrorist watch list has hit 1 million entries, up 32% since 2007.

Federal data show the rise comes despite the removal of 33,000 entries last year by the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center in an effort to purge the list of outdated information and remove people cleared in investigations.

It's unclear how many individuals those 33,000 records represent — the center often uses multiple entries, or "identities," for a person to reflect variances in name spellings or other identifying information. The remaining million entries represent about 400,000 individuals, according to the center.
...
About 95% of the people on the list are foreigners, the FBI says, but it's a source of frequent complaints from U.S. travelers.

In the past two years, 51,000 people have filed "redress" requests claiming they were wrongly included on the watch list, according to the Department of Homeland Security. In the vast majority of cases reviewed so far, it has turned out that the petitioners were not actually on the list, with most having been misidentified at airports because their names resembled others on it.

There have been 830 redress requests since 2005 where the person was, in fact, confirmed to be on the watch list, and further review by the screening center led to the removal of 150, or 18% of them.

Without specific rules for who goes on the list, it's too bloated to be effective, says Tim Sparapani, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union.

Related: Watching the Watchmen - Freedom Increasingly at Risk

Tips for Your First 24 Hours with Ubuntu

Ubuntu Newbie Guide: First 24 Hours With Ubuntu

Q: How do I find and install new software?

A: Here comes the fun part. Go to System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager, type in your password when prompted, and welcome to the world of finding new software! At this point, you can either browse or search. Browse around just to get an idea of what’s available. Search if you know what you want.

Let’s go ahead and install one nice little utility right now, so you can see how it works. Type “sysinfo” (without the quotes) into the Quick Search box. You see one or more listings come up, with a checkbox to the left of each. If the checkbox is empty next to the sysinfo listing, you can check it by clicking on it, and choosing Mark for Installation from the resulting drop-down box. This often brings up a box letting you know that in order to install this app, you’ll need to also install a list of other things. Just agree by clicking on the Mark button. Now that you’ve chosen to install sysinfo, click on the big Apply button (with a green check mark in the menu) and when asked if you want to apply the changes, click Apply.

50 Wordpress Tutorials

Glen Stansberry provides some nice links in Top 50 Wordpress Tutorials including: Multiple Wordpress Installations Using a Single Database, How to Create a Wordpress Theme in 5 Minutes, Dynamic Sticky Pages, How to Write a Simple Wordpress Plugin and How to Add Photo Captions.

12 Good Ideas for Scaling Rails

Building and Scaling a Startup on Rails: 12 Things We Learned the Hard Way

The HTTP protocol lets you tell browsers what static content they can cache. You set this in apache. Rails automatically will put timestamps in the IMG / javascript / CSS tags, assuming you're using the helpers. The Firefox plugin YSlow coupled with Firebug are your friends here. The improvement is significant and well worth your time, especially if you add gzip'ing. 100KB initial page load can be brought down to 5K (just the HTML file) on subsequent clicks around your site.
...
Fix your DB bottlenecks with query_reviewer and New Relic
This basically saves your ass completely. Everyone complains that Rails is slow. Rails is not slow, just like Java Swing is not slow. Rails makes it easy to shoot yourself in the face. If you do follow-the-textbook-example bumbling around with Rails ActiveRecord objects, you will end up with pages that drive 100 queries and take several seconds to return.

Very good post, definitely worth reading.

Related: Ruby on Rails Tutorials - Joy in Work for Software Developers

Publishers Fight Progress Again - Against Amazon Kindle

Once again publishers are talking a stupid stand on copyright. They are claiming the ability of Amazon's Kindle 2.0 to read aloud the text on the screen violates copyright. Neil Gaiman, provides a Quick argument summary of his discussion with his agent:

When you buy a book, you're also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the voices properly, and no-one's going to confuse it with an audiobook. And that any authors' societies or publishers who are thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and promoting what audio books are and what's good about them with it.

Publishers really seem to be out of touch with the way the world is moving. Pretending the world doesn't change and holding onto outdated ideas is not useful.

Related: What is Wrong with Copyright Taking Public Good for Private Special Interests - Innovation and Creative Commons - Recent Reading - Publishers Continue to Fight Open Access to Science

Why Copyright Extension is a Very Bad Idea

Related: What is Wrong with Copyright Taking Public Good for Private Special Interests - Lessig Video: Information Revolution

Watch the Full I Have a Dream Speech

Sorry EMI Music Publishing has blocked you from seeing Martin Luther King's I have a Dream Speech. Sadly our society's historically important moments are not considered something people should see to the copyright cartel and those they pay in congress to push their agenda. I can't imagine Martin Luther King would have desired to restrict those seeing his message. I do understand that it isn't uncommon for those that gain the rights to material created by great people seek to cash in rather than to promote the work the great person did (and still would be doing if they could).

Today is Martin Luther King Day in the USA. Watch the entire I Have a Dream Speech.

Death of Newsprint

End Times by Michael Hirschorn

The thinking goes that the existing brands—The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal—will be the ones making that transition, challenged but still dominant as sources of original reporting. But what if the old media dies much more quickly? What if a hurricane comes along and obliterates the dunes entirely? Specifically, what if The New York Times goes out of business—like, this May?
...
And it will seriously damage the press’s ability to serve as a bulwark of democracy. Internet purists may maintain that the Web will throw up a new pro-am class of citizen journalists to fill the void, but for now, at least, there’s no online substitute for institutions that can marshal years of well-developed sourcing and reporting experience—not to mention the resources to, say, send journalists leapfrogging between Mumbai and Islamabad to decode the complexities of the India-Pakistan conflict.
...
Common estimates suggest that a Web-driven product could support only 20 percent of the current staff; such a drop in personnel would (in the short run) devastate The Times’ news-gathering capacity.

The benefit of a free press that also has resources to investigate is very important. I would think it would make sense for Google, Microsoft... to buy trophy media outlets if they were in danger. My guess is setting up some type of foundation might well make sense. The company that buys it would want to benefit from the purchase by having content to make money on, but I don't think they would want to manage the media outlet as part of their organization.

The exactly solution going forward is not easy to see. But some solution that provides for a free press with funding is important to any country and so we need to find a solution.

I also have no doubt the value of this to society is lost by many watching what passes for our free press today. With all sorts of useless, superficial, stories that mainly seem to just be splashy graphics, exciting sound effects, and almost no content. There is no loss to society if that goes away. There is a great loss to society if work of those like Bill Moyer's went away, Here is an example David Heath and the Seattle Times exploring congress hiding earmarks while claiming reform. This is the type of free press the founding fathers had in mind to check the power of corrupt government officials paying out public dollars to award those giving them checks and hiding those favors from public view.

Related: Programmable New York Times On the Way - Deming and the New York Times - Washington Paying Out Money it Doesn't Have - Time to start a newspaper by Seth Godin - Lobbyists Keep Tax Off Billion Dollar Private Equities Deals and On For Our Grandchildren

PageRank Distribution

Continuation of Last Google Toolbar PageRank Update of 2008

I see very few pages with a PageRank of 1. This doesn't make that much sense, logically. The vast majority of pages should have a page rank of 1. Now it could be those are pages that no one (or at least I) never see. I would think, roughly, the distributions of 211,111 pages would be

no pagerank 100,000
pagerank 1 100,000
2 10,000
3 1,000
4 100
5 10
6 1
7 0
8 0
9 0
10 0

Now this isn't exactly true because there would be natural clumping... So a higher number of high page rank pages would make sense to me. But I think that means if you had say 2 more pagerank 6 pages that you would lose hundreds of pagerank 2, I would think.

Also my choice of 100,000 at no pagerank and pagerank 1 is basically arbitrary. But the whole area of no pagerank I find confusing to reconcile with the logarithmic scale. Some pagerank 0 could be so low a pagerank it is less than .5 and so not displayed as 1. However, some are also penalized to that "rank"... Anyway I just made it up completely. The rest I am just making up to but based on the idea if a logarithmic scale were used a very quick estimate that is at least better than no concept of just saying well 211,111 and 11 possible "ranks" means each rank should have about 19,192. I think the above estimate I made are at least more accurate than the true distribution than a estimate that each pagerank has an equal number, even if my rough guess isn't very accurate.

Well part of the problem in trying to figure this out is that I don't think Google ever confirms it is a logarithmic scale. But I think it is (or something close to it). I'll try to do some research on this - just because I find it interesting.

Related: Multi Site PageRank Checker - Google's Search Results - Should Factors Other Than User Value be Used

Ruby on Rails Tutorials

Nice post with a bunch of Ruby on Rails Tutorials

Ruby On Rails Tutorial: The Basics A two-part tutorial to getting up and running on rails by Huw Collingbourne.
...
Catching rails error messages An easy example of how to use the 2.x approach to catching errors in your rails applications.
...
Stop Rails from sending email A useful way to check that mail is getting sent, without actually sending it.
...
Ruby on Rails Rake Tutorial Gregg from RailsEnvy again running through how to make the most of rake. If you’re not already writing your own custom tasks in rake you should definitely take a look because there is probably a handful of things your could (and should) be doing in it.
...
Ruby on Rails Security Guide Storing and protecting the session, user management, projecting from injection, and more.

Follow the link for many more.

Related: What Does This Error Mean - ruby on rails posts - Ruby on Rails Job Opportunity

Last Google Toolbar PageRank Update of 2008

Matt Cutts has confirmed that Google has again updated the PageRank displayed on the Google Toolbar. Looking at my blogs it seems to be effective approximately Dec 16th. I have some blog posts from the 15th and before with pagerank. On the 16th I have one post with a pagerank and several without. On the 17th none of my posts have pagerank. This means while the pagerank was displayed today, the data used is from about December 16th, I believe.

The displayed pagerank is more fun than a measure that can be relied on. But I still find it fun to look at the pagerank values - except when they go down for my sites :-(

Check the current pagerank on your sites using our related site: Multiple Site PageRank checker. Updates from our Google PageRank Update, July 2008:

Curious Cat Investing and Economics Blog - 4 (July 2008), 4 (December 2008)
Curious Cat Engineering and Science Blog - 5, 5
curiouscat.com - 3, 3
externs.com - internship directory - 4, 4
Statistics for Experimenters - 3, 4
CSS 4 Free - 4, 5
Wordpress Themes for Free (new site from November) already a 3 Google pagerank.
Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections (one of my most popular pages since 1997) - 3, 3
Multi Site PageRank Checker - 1, 3
John Hunter 4, 4
Life and Legacy of William Hunter (my father) ?, 4
Justin Hunter (my brother) ?, 2
Curious Cat Articles and Links (this blog) - 3, 3
Curious Cat Management Improvement (v.1) I started the blog on blogger and then moved it to my own domain using WordPress in 2006, still it retains a pagerank of 3
My Kiva page ?, 3
Reddit management (new in September) 0
Curious Cat Web Directory 3, 4
Rocky Mountain National Park photos ?, 2
Boston Museum of the Fine Arts, Glacier National Park Photos, Parfrey's Glen, Wisconsin Photos, The Cloisters Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, Kentucky ? , 0 ( much of the Curious Cat Travels seems to be without pageranks - which seems odd to me but...)

The Curious Cat Engineering and Science Blog has actually been a pagerank 6 before, but I think it is a high 5 (of course I may be biased and that is just wishful thinking). Many brand new posts for example have ranks of 4, likely because they were on the home page when the snapshot was taken - Bird Brain, Passion for Mechanical Engineering, High School Inventor Teams @ MIT...). Another thing this means is those pages are really not pagerank 4 even today. The toolbar snapshot from Dec 16th shows them that way but only because that was the value on Dec 16th.



Now, I would guess they are probably really pagerank 2 or so. If I just look back at say random posts in August 2008 (or really any month) they will be between 0 and 3. I really don't understand the differences between say 0 and 2. While there is some difference, most of those pages have 0 links from external sites. And then I will have a small number of posts that get significant external links that maybe be 3,4 and even 5 pageranks: The Engineer That Made Your Cat a Photographer, Sep 2007, pr 3, Best Research University Rankings, Sep 2008, pr 4; Economic Strength Through Technology Leadership, Jul 2007, pr 4

In my experience it is often more telling how the pagerank of internal pages. I find it that there are many sites with say a pagerank of 3 or 4, or even 5, on the home page but almost no pagerank on internal pages. While other sites with a pagerank of 3 or 4 have many internal pages with pagranks of 1, 2, 3 and 4,

Related: Google's Displayed PageRank - Web Page Authority

Festivus

Festivus airing of the grievances.

Don't Forget Your About Page

The about page of a blog is often neglected. There are different options for what to emphasize, but I think it is wise to include an overview of the blog and links to some posts you would suggest for first time visitors. Think of it as a way of helping someone decide if they want to subscribe to the blog feed. Here are some of my blog about examples:

Curious Cat Engineering Blog - Curious Cat Investing and Economics Blog - Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog - Free CSS Web Site Templates Blog

Related: Build Your Online Presence - Gallery of Free WordPress Themes - Seth Godin on Marketing and the Internet

Is The World Finaly Growing Wise

Related: Code Monkey - Dancing Around the World - Computer Speakers

16 Useful .htaccess Tricks and Hacks For Web Developers

16 Useful .htaccess Tricks and Hacks For Web Developers

6. Hotlinking protection with .htaccess is very important because anyone can hot link to your images and eat up all your bandwith of your server. The following code will help you to prevent that.

Options +FollowSymlinks
# Protect Hotlinking
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?domainname\.com/ [nc]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg|png)$ http://domainname.com/img/hotlink_f_o.png [nc]
...
11. Block access to your .htaccess file - By adding he following code to your htaccess file will prevent attempts to access your htaccess file. This extra layer of security protects your htaccess file by displaying a 403 error message on the browser.

# secure htaccess file

order allow,deny
deny from all

To Do List

I think that is pretty funny. More funny political cartoons.

Related: Fun Rant on Arguments - Code Monkey - Kids on Scientists: Before and After - Quantum Teleportation

Watching the Watchmen

Unfortunately I have grown to question the trustworthiness of the system of justice. This doesn't mean I think it is totally corrupt but I think the amount of lawlessness by those given the responsibility to serve society has grown too large. It seems to me more oversight is needed. And unfortunately those with such responsibilities are doing the opposite. For example, the despicable political actions by the Justice Department undermine the public's confidence in honest government just when we need to have a government we can trust to protect us from terrorism and increasingly well armed criminals.

Cop Busters is a program that is headed by a man that is most likely in it significantly for the publicity. I would wager the vast majority of those in the law enforcement community are honest and law abiding, in general. However, the community seems to be far too tolerate of abuses by those in their ranks. Given that shows like cob busters may help. Why doesn't the law enforcement community itself find the corruption and illegal practices and eliminate those involved themselves?

Gotcha!

There was no probable cause. So a couple of questions come up. First, how did the cops get turned on to the house in the first place? Cooper suspects they were using thermal imaging equipment to detect the grow lamps, a practice the Supreme Court has said is illegal. The second question is, what probable cause did the police put on the affidavit to get a judge to sign off on a search warrant? If there was nothing illegal going on in the house, it's difficult to conceive of a scenario where either the police or one of their informants didn't lie to get a warrant.

Cooper chose the Odessa police department for baiting because he believes police there instructed an informant to plant marijuana on a woman named Yolanda Madden. She's currently serving an eight-year sentence for possession with intent to distribute. According to Cooper, the informant actually admitted in federal court that he planted the marijuana. Madden was convicted anyway.

What we need are watchmen inside the government that are trustworthy and vigilante. What we need are people at the Justice Department that put the safety and security of the public first. What we need are people that put the rule of law above the rule of their personal desires.

10 years ago (whether I was right or wrong) I would not have said the abuse of law enforcement authority was a huge concern. Yes, any time you have many thousand of people involved in something, some are going to abuse their authority. But I thought on the balance that abuse was minimal and the danger from such abuse was much less than the danger from actual criminals. Now I am sadly much more inclined to side with the founding fathers worries about the unchecked power of the government.

As those in law enforcement fail to address these problems they make the situation much worse. People are losing the ability to rationally believe the law enforcement community is most interested in enforcing the law. Seeing so many examples of abuses of power by the watchmen is a dangerous thing for society. And when the law enforcement community is more interested in protecting those inside their ranks engaged in unlawful behavior than in upholding the law it is very dangerous for society.

It is not acceptable for those with the awesome responsibility to protect society from criminals to behave as too many are now.

Related: Freedom Increasingly at Risk - Tired of Incompetent Government Harassment - Photographers are not a Threat - More SWAT Failures