Joe Strupp, "Reporter at Richmond Paper Fired for 'Fabrication'," Editor & Publisher, 2006-05-27
A recurring theme in this blog is dishonesty by journalists and scientists -- two groups for which discovering and communicating truth is the raison d'etat.
The sixth most popular Firefox plugin was VideoDownloader. I installed it, and found that it does very little in the
browser, and instead hands off the request to videodownloader.net.
It appears that the owner of the domain and the author of the plugin are the
same person.
This constitutes an undocumented and unauthorized sharing of
private browsing information. I therefore decided to add
videodownloader.net to my Privoxy actions file for now, where it joins approximately 7000 other rules for
blocking Web content.
To familiarize myself with the latest Web frameworks, I briefly looked at J2EE and various Python ones, and decided to start with a pilot app using Ruby on Rails.
I want to reserve most comment on Rails until I know it better. There's definitely an urge to rework this in a more Schemesque fashion, but I should first be sure I understand why Rails does things the way it does.
What I will say is that I'm glad I learned Scheme instead of Ruby four years ago (see 2002-03-29), since I think Scheme has "made me smarter" in ways that most programming languages do not.
President George W. Bush has bestowed on his intelligence czar, John Negroponte, broad authority, in the name of national security, to excuse publicly traded companies from their usual accounting and securities-disclosure obligations. Notice of the development came in a brief entry in the Federal Register, dated May 5, 2006, that was opaque to the untrained eye.
—Dawn Kopecki, "Intelligence Czar Can Waive SEC Rules," BusinessWeek Online, undated
One cause for concern is that there's credible evidence that Negroponte has a history of enabling abuses.
Harvard Book Store is excited to announce that on Thursday, June 1st James Carroll, Robert J. Lifton, and Irene Gendzier will discuss their respective books House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power and Crimes of War -- Iraq, in light of the past and future of American foreign policy. Daniel L. Shapiro, Associate Director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, will moderate the discussion.
Some of James Carroll's opinion pieces in the Boston Globe have caught my attention from time to time as being especially thoughtful and well-written. I've not yet seen his books. The last paragraph of a recent article of his seems telling:
It takes a habit of the heart to feel antiwar anguish now, and that is what has driven so many gray-haired ones into the streets. Not that the young care less, nor that they are more readily anesthetized. Older people, for better and worse, are grooved thinkers. It is not to our credit that we've been here, done this. We still recognize a worldwide cataclysm when it threatens, especially when mainly from Washington. And no, as it turns out, we never got over it.
—James Carroll, "Old hands against war," Boston Globe, 2006-05-22
The Harvard Book Store talk might be interesting. If you're going, I suggest getting there early, since I've seen other author talks hit audience capacity, and they aren't selling tickets for this one.
Someone just pointed out to me that the Cadroids page had disappeared from Google. This happened despite several links to the page existing. I've added a link from my home page, so hopefully the Cadroids page soon reappears in Google, where people can find it.
Immigration of Mexicans to the US is a set of complicated, sensitive issues.
A Times article today points out an important historical fact that I suspect would turn some people's arguments on some issues, and it certainly helps answer one of the questions in my mind:
The Texas cotton lobbyist tried to reassure Congress that the tens of thousands of Mexicans who labored in the fields of the Southwest were not a threat to national security. There "never was a more docile animal in the world than the Mexican," he told the Senate committee. [...] "If you gentlemen have any objections to admitting the Mexicans by law," he said, "take the river guard away and let us alone, and we will get them all right." They did -- and that was in 1920.
—Nina Bernstein, "100 Years in the Back Door, Out the Front," New York Times, 2006-05-21
David M. Herszenhorn, "Graduates at New School Heckle Speech by McCain," New York Times, 2006-05-20
I think McCain would've gotten a warm reception, had he not apparently decided that running for President necessitates selling out.
Today's great domain name already snapped up by a squatter:
blogroll.com
The blog tagline practically writes itself!
(If you don't get this, ask a UKer.)
A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.
—Brian Ross and Richard Esposito, "Federal Source to ABC News: We Know Who You're Calling," The Blotter blog, ABC News, 2006-05-15
We all saw this coming.
Link courtesy of TPM 2006-05-16 11:35 EDT.
Saturday evening, during a New England spring several-day downpour, with the girlfriend out of town, is as good a time as any to be either contemplative or preachy...
A month or so ago, I was offered the CTO position at a very promising startup. (That's something that hasn't happened since the dotcom rush of HBS and Sloan startups, when I kept insisting to befuddled MBAs that I'd prefer to miss the bubble and finish my PhD instead.)
A former colleague is a co-founder of this new startup, which is how they heard of me. I can say, without disclosing any sensitive information, that this startup is savvy, connected, and hard-working, and will probably have first-mover on something big that is going to happen. Their business also presents some technical problems that would be fun to solve.
So, why did I ultimately turn down a position that would've opened an interesting new career track, and quite possibly have let me retire in 2-3 years?
I found that, although I might find the technical work interesting, I had a personal aversion to the particular market space they were in, which I'll characterize as being "heavy on pop culture."
If I ever tackle the role of CTO, I want to be able to build and motivate a first-class team by, in part, convincing them that they're making the world better in some appreciable way. Likewise, I'd have to be able to evangelize honestly to customers, partners, analysts, press, etc.
I played with business ideas for a couple weeks before finding that -- imagining the kind of people I'd like to hire -- I could see myself trying to hire them at the same time wishing that they were off working on something else. And I didn't see plausible scenarios under which my business could soon be the something else. (Again, I'm talking only about my own personal "true belief" in this particular business, and certainly many other people find it extremely compelling.)
There's a time for simply doing what must be done, no matter how unglamorously perceived, and leading others to do the same. But a CTO role in which that's the only forseeable mode is not for me.
Last weekend, I photographed a two-hour modern dance rehearsal in a converted old church. This was only my second time shooting stills of dance, and I'd improved a lot since the first. The experience also prompted me rethink my lens upgrade paths. Here's a few notes.
The space this time was a dance practice room with off-white walls and lighting both from the sun through stained-glass windows, and from some small halogen ceiling lamps. The first time had been a tech rehearsal in a much larger, black-walled, performance space, and the piece had a generally dim lighting design.
I used my usual Canon XT body, and ended up using all three of my lenses. I started off near a front corner of the room with the 17-85 IS on the tripod. This still didn't give a wide enough field of view, and was obstructed by a piano, so I quickly moved to handheld. Handheld seemed as sharp as tripod in this case, since the speed of the dancers was more an issue than shake. I worked from aperture-priority, as I almost always do, generally as wide as I could go. I soon decided to take the noise hit of ISO 1600.
The 17-85 did the bulk of the shots, although I did at least half a dozen lens changes over the two hours and 3GB of JPEG. The 50/1.4 was of course much better at motion-freezing, but the close quarters (on 1.6x FOV crop) meant it was usually best for shots of head and upper body of 1-2 dancers, or from outside the door. I think I also got a few full-body shots of individual dancers in portrait orientation with the 50mm. The framing with the 70-210 was similar at the wide end, and much poorer -- but near the long end, at f/4.5, it took some rather nice head shots with OK bokeh.
A preliminary culling pass over the photos showed a lot of keepers. I might share some here, once they've been picked over, Gimp'd, ImageMagick'd, and approved.
Regarding lens strategy... I'd been planning to upgrade the 17-85/4-5.6 IS to a 24-70/2.8 or a 24-105/4 IS. Two new pieces of information are: (1) I could really use the motion-freezing extra stop of f/2.8; and (2) I'll sometimes want wider than 24mm for locations like this one. This might mean pairing a 24-70 with an ultrawide rectilinear prime (Canon or non), or perhaps the EF-S 10-22/3.5-4.5 or 17-40/4L.
I whipped up a new utility library, numspell.scm, as a warmup exercise after being away from Scheme for a while.
It's been submitted to PLaneT.
I actually wrote a similar function for Pascal in the 1980s (back when I had an eight-incher).
In MPlayer, if you press the 's' key to take a screenshot, but the
screenshot filter isn't loaded, then the message "sending
VFCTRL_SCREENSHOT!" will be printed to console, but no screenshot file
will be written.
To cause the screenshot filter to always be loaded, do
something like adding the following line to your ~/.mplayer/config
file:
vf:screenshot=yes
I say "do something like" since, if you already have a
config file, you might have to integrate the option in some way
other than simply appending the above line to the file.
When a screenshot is successfully taken, a message like the following will be printed to console:
*** screenshot 'shot0001.png' ***
Kaavya Viswanathan's publisher canceled her two-book contract yesterday, killing a short-lived plan to scrub the plagiarism from the Harvard sophomore's debut novel and reissue it.
—David Mehegan, "Harvard novelist's book deal canceled," Boston Globe, 2006-05-03
For more on plagiarism and dishonesty by writers, see: 2005-01-19, 2004-07-14, 2004-04-21, 2004-02-23, 2003-10-05, and 2002-02-25.
Saturday, we saw the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre troupe in Boston at the Wang Center for the Performing Arts. The three pieces were "Reminiscin'" (2005) by Judith Jamison, "IFE / My Heart" (2005) by Ronald K. Brown, and "Revelations" (1960) by Alvin Ailey. I couldn't choose between "Reminiscin'" and "Revelations" as my favorite.
Several times during "Revelations", I was sorely tempted to whip out my compact camera -- decorum be darned -- simply because the visuals of held pose, lighting, and costume were so stunning.
Site © 1994-2008 Neil Van Dyke neil@neilvandyke.org XHTML 1.0 Strict CSS2 Legal
