jamezpolley.com

Stilgherrian takes weekly nominations for “Cnut of the Week“. Traditionally the gong goes to Stephen Conroy, for his increasingly futile attempts to hold back the (largely imaginary) tide of paedophiles sweeping over the internet.

Unfortunately I believe this week’s spot has already been claimed. However, I’d like to make an early nomination for next week.

Steve Turner, assistant secretary of the Public Service Association of NSW, said … the blame did not lie solely with the Government as “any computer system can be hacked … even American defence force computers”.

[update 12/2/2009] Nope, there hadn’t been a Stilgherrian Live for a while. There is now though, so consider this a nomination[/update]

Reading the draft Executive Order ordering Guantánamo Bay detention facilities to be closed, one minor paragraph jumped out at me:

(c) The individuals currently detained at Guantánamo have the constitutional privilege of

the writ of habeas corpus. Most of those individuals have filed petitions for a writ of

habeas corpus in Federal court challenging the lawfulness of their detention.

If that was the entirety of the order, it would be a huge step forward for people still imprisoned there – they’ll be able to force the government to justify their imprisonment, a right that was consistently denied to David Hicks and the other detainees.

You can read the whole order from a link at the bottom of the ACLU’s press release.

You know you’re reading a website targeted at Americans when you see phrases like this:

Firefox is particularly strong in Europe, the area over which the EU has oversight.

I’ve been Hatsbied – I think.

Certainly fits the <adjective>salmon pattern. That Y! IM account is listed on my Livejournal user info page. On the other hand, wikipedia reports salmon bots talking to AIM users, not Y! Messenger users.

*shrug* It amused me for a good 30 seconds. I didn’t bother responding. I did note later in the day that there was a story about memristors on the front page of slashdot, but of course I have no evidence that the two are related.

People have been telling me to read STR for ages, but I’ve never got around to it. Pascal just went to the site while I was shoulder surfing – and thus I discovered this review of Ubuntu:

One of the great things about Windows is the ease of obtaining powerful utilities and applications. In addition to hundreds of great titles available on CD-ROM you can download awesome shareware applications: simply click on Setup.exe and most installers will instantly deploy your chosen software, sometimes with cool bonus productivity apps that enhance your browsing experience. In comparison with Microsoft’s common-sense approach, pandemonium reigns on the Linux platform.

The only way to install software is via a tool called the ‘package manager’ which is confusingly also called ‘Synaptic’. This works according to a similar principle as a communist super-market: You have a limited range of software which has been chosen on a purely ideological basis rather than functionality. If you want to ‘think different’, it’s tough-luck again: Another obvious fail for the ‘contender’.

To make matters worse, in order to install an application you must be ‘root’ which entails memorizing a series of confusing passwords. By contrast Windows allows any user to install the applications they need to do their work – a wise productivity gain that endears the flexible NT platform to IT departments the world over.

The rest is good reading too. Very informative! I’m switching away from Ubuntu forthwith.

Firemen here to put out the oven fire http://skitch.com/jdumay/97em/kitchenonfire. about 1 hour ago from twitterrific

One of the downsides of having spent years messing with my old Drupal blog is that I’ve ended up with a bunch of different permalink styles: to pick three posts at random, http://zhasper.com/zhasper/harry_potter_done, http://zhasper.com/2007/09/linkbloggery, http://zhasper.com/?p=631. Fortunately, I’m only running this blog to give myself a place to vent, so I don’t care about lost traffic. If I did care, this would be a problem.

I’m using the “Platinum SEO pack” plugin, which does a good job of handling URLs that don’t quite match the same schema that WordPress is using – for instance, if you visit http://zhasper.com/linkbloggery, it’ll figure out that you meant the second URL in the list above. Unfortunately, it’s not perfect – and my old blog had way too many variations for anything to cope with.

So, I’m going through and doing what I can to fix the low-hanging fruit. URLs in the second form, /YYYY/MM/title, already work fine. URLs in the first form need to have the /zhasper/ removed, and need all the _s turned into -s. I accomplish both of these through a bit of RewriteRule magic:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule (.*)_(.*) $1-$2 [R=301,L]

This is quite definitely not the neatest way to achieve this. In the example above, it requires three excess round-trips between the server and the browser:

• Browser requests /zhasper/harry_potter_done
• Server sends a redirect to /harry_potter_done
• Browser requests /harry_potter_done
• Server sends a redirect to /harry_potter-done
• Browser requests /harry_potter-done
• Server sends a redirect to /harry-potter-done
• Browser requests /harry-potter-done
• Server sends a redirect to /2007/07/harry-potter-done/
• Browser requests /2007/07/harry-potter-done/
• Server sends actual content

The 301 in the RewriteRule means that the server tells the client that this is a permanent redirect – the content will never be at the old address, please update your bookmarks. This doesn’t make much difference to your browser – but crawlers such as Google should use this as a signal to update their index, and send any link-love directed at the old link to the new link.

If you didn’t have the redirect at all, Google wouldn’t know that /zhasper/harry_potter_done and /2007/07/harry-potter-done were the same page – it would think that the latter was just a more-recently-seen page which mysteriously had similar content to the old page.

If you go with a temporary redirect (by just using R on its own, or by stipulating [R=302], Google won’t know to update its index: it will still come back later and check the old URL, just in case the page has moved back there.

There are definitely better ways to achieve this – suggested enhancements are welcome

From the normally staid ABC news website comes this gem:

Paranoia is much more common in modern society than previously thought, says a British doctor, who warns it could lead to major problems in society.

Oh noes! Rampant paranoia! Is this what’s been making me think crazy thoughts lately? Our society is in danger! Quick people: we must be vigilant! Examine your own thoughts for any hint of paranoia, NOW!

Dr Daniel Freeman from the psychiatry institute of King’s College London says almost a quarter of the population experience regular paranoid thoughts,

One in four? Then it’s almost certain that I’m paranoid. Woe is me! Whatever could be causing this epidemic of paranoia?

driven by an avalanche of sensational stories in the media.

Oh. Right. Good to see that you’re helping there, doc!

Re censorship of flight details: Tim Bennet at Electron Soup was faster than me and got screengrabs before the details were censored. Go satisfy your curiousity at his blog.

Stilgherrian alerted me to the fact that I got a mention on Crikey today – or at least, yesterday’s post about ASA’s censorship of flight records did.

I’m flattered, but also slightly pissed. If you clicked on that link, you’d have been asked to provide your credentials as a paid-up member of Crikey – or at least, to take a 21-day free trial. I had to do the latter, in order to read what had been said. Hopefully if I’m ever mentioned again on Crikey it’ll be within the next few weeks – because after that my free trial will have expired, and I’d hate to have to pay for a membership just to see how I was being quoted. There’s plenty of good reasons to pay for a membership, and I’ve been toying with the idea for a while – but that’s not the reason I’d prefer to be my primary reason.

So yes, I signed up for the trial and got to read the article. There’s a nice link back to my blog – except with a missing “http://”, so the link directs readers to http://www.crikey.com.au/Politics/zhasper.com/2008/12/censorship-of-flight-details/ and not to my blog. So, of course, I got… well, actually, I got 27 people hitting that page directly, no doubt through manually fixing the URL.

Actually, I should say that I got two half-mentions. I also had 61 visits from http://civilair.asn.au/. Ben Sandilands, the journalist wrote the Crikey piece, seems to be active there as well (at least: I found a story from him just by skimming the front page) – I’m guessing the two are related. As with Crikey, I can’t see the content on this site without registering. Unlike Crikey, it’s not possible to register here – so I’m still in the dark about where the traffic came from.

So, overall, a good day for blogging. Apparently I’m not the only person interested in why ASA censored flight details – I just wish I could see what the other interested people are saying.

–

Unrelatedly, I caved and ordered x-plane tonight. If I had a car, I’d be at the airport on one of the mounds right now, having spent the last half-hour watching the last few planes scurrying to get off the ground before curfew kicks in. I seem to be back in *that* phase.