Haiku is a form of Japanese poetry known for its simplicity and elegance. In English, haiku are written as three lines, with a syllable count of five, seven, and five on in the first, second, and third line.
In The Green Man's opinion nothing softens the blow of a systems failure better than an error message delivered in Haiku. Consider some examples:
Seeing my great fault
Through darkening blue windows
I begin again
-- Chris Walsh
I'm sorry, there's -- um --
insufficient -- what's-it-called?
The term eludes me ...
-- Owen Mathews
A file that big?
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.
-- David J. Liszewski
and perhaps my favourite
Errors have occurred.
We won't tell you where or why.
Lazy programmers.
-- Charlie Gibbs
As anyone can see, this adds a sense of elegance to an otherwise exasperating experience. Now researchers at Kyoto have developed a computer program that can write Haiku on your behalf. It may be the dawning of a new era in error messages.
Existing Haiku courtesy of Salon 21
Flash Fog is a new invention that floods a room, or the interior of a car with harmless dense fog, when the alarm is activated. Here is a picture of it in action in Puerto Rico.
The fog is accompanied by a intense strobe light that disorients people in the fog. There is not snatch and run going to happen here.
Watch it in action
Read more about this innovative security system here.
The astute amongst the readership will notice that I have added Chitika eMiniMalls in the never ending quest to earn some money from the website. It is fair to say I enjoy doing it so will continue but it would be nice if it paid its way.
Chitika seems to be going OK, it has the advantage over google that I have more control over the types of ads it puts on the site. If you want to try it out on your site click on the icon below.
If you must NEVER play them in your PC
Sony released a CD-copy protection systems on its CDs. The CDs install a "rootkit" on your PC. Sony's rootkit code modifies Windows so you can't tell it's there, a process called "cloaking" in the hacker world. It acts as spyware, surreptitiously sending information about you to Sony. And it can't be removed; trying to get rid of it damages Windows.
The code has the effect of destabilising Windows and has virus like qualities that has resulted in the over half a million computers world-wide being infected. Those are amazing infection numbers, making this one of the most serious internet epidemics of all time -- on a par with worms like Blaster, Slammer, Code Red and Nimda.
On Nov 14th after an outcry, Sony agreed to recall the CDs.
If you have a recently purchased Sony CD it may well contain this malware and how can we be sure that all the CDs have been returned. The best approach is simply not to buy Sony BMG CDs for some time both to avoid infection and to punish the bastards for such dishonourable behaviour.
The big question is why they are not being prosecuted in the same way that individual hackers have been.
The picture you see to the right is a RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) device that has been produced for the medical market. These devices can be implanted under a patients skin providing a secure reliable method of identifying patients. Traditionally this has been done by a wrist band however the possibilities for mistaken identity are quite real. The RFID device provides a guarantee of the patients identity even when they are unconscious.
Verimed, the company that markets these devices has donated several hundred of these devices, along with scanners, to Harrison, Mississippi to aid County Coroner Gary T. Hargrove in the unpleasant but necessary task of coordinating the hundreds of corpses that he now has responsibility for. He says
It's better enabled me to do my job as the coroner — tracking and getting people's loved ones back to them quickly/
The device is placed under the skin of the corpse providing a secure way to track each body. It may seem gruesome but theere is complex logistics in managing something as emotive as hundreds of dead, each of which has grieving relatives. These RFID devices are saving unnecessary distress through misidentification of bodies.
source Wired
Although it seems strangely obsessed with religion related matters I usually find something interesting to read at signposts. There was a time however when their site design left something to be desired, well in my opinion anyway. It would have been nice to get the content without the gothic feel.
Innovation by Aaron Boodman, has made this a reality. He has released a plugin to Firefox browser call GreaseMonkey that lets Boodman's JavaScript - or anyone else's - alter a Web page as it's downloaded. The site serves the same old data, but you get to decide what Firefox displays. Greasemonkey junkies have posted more than 600 downloadable site mods, or user scripts, at www.greasemonkeyed.com.
Some mods fix buggy javascript on pages, more complex routines that mix content from multiple sites, upsetting the carefully calibrated sales environments at big online retailers. For example you can modify the Amazon page to add a yellow postit note in the corner with up-to-the-second price quotes scraped from Barnes & Noble, Powell's Books, and other competitors.
The fundamental concept behind greasemonkey is that the code delivered by html is executed on your PC and ipso facto you should be able to have control over what is executed and how. It turns browsers (the people browsing not the software) into active participants rather than receivers of predetermined content. Predictably sites such as Amazon are not amused by this latest development are are placing code on their pages to counter greasemonkey code. Ultimately however they are doomed because their html code is executed in a technical environment which they do not control, your PC.
Never mastered touch typing well shame on you. In these days it is computers this and computers that and dinosaurs who can't touch type are being left behind.
Well they were until the reinvention of tablet PCs. I say "reinvention" because they have been around for 20 or so years but it is only recently that technology has become powerful enough to make them a useful device beyond the domains of architecture and CAD.
To those with challenged dexterity (that is you non-touch-typists) they are clearly a boon but will they take off. My guess is not that well and this is supported with sales figures to date which are falling well short of predictions. The trouble is that the people who buy "bleeding-edge" gadgets want power and tablet PCs to date have been occupying the lower end of the market power wise and the upper end price wise, always a really bad combination.
In their favour, Microsoft is firmly convinced that have a major role in future computing and, let's face it, Microsoft has been phenonemonly successful at predicting/engineering the market for hi tech products. If they are going to make it though they are going to have to improve their power and their gadget appeal.
In Collaboration Suite 10g Oracle has added two important features, an end-user-oriented document-sharing tool and a revamped content management server called Oracle Content Services. Costing $60 per named user the Collaboration Suite can now seriously take on Microsoft for the provision of business messaging, information sharing and web conferencing functionality.
Richard Edwards of Butler Group sees the key benefits as:
- Treats e-mail as a managed information source.
- Accessible from a variety of devices and desktop clients.
- A standards-based product that runs on all major platforms and ably supported by a network of partners.
- Realises Oracle’s strategy to bring together structured and unstructured information.
Part of the functionality newly delivered is a facility for posting shared documents and scheduling information with other employees on a web server.
Called Collaboration Workspaces it is intended as a direct replacement for Microsoft SharePoint and Lotus Quickplace.
Also included is an instant messaging tool Based on the XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) industry standard. Designed to replace Microsoft Messenger it allows for greater security and administrative control, reducing the risk of breaches of corporate firewalls that are possible with Messenger.
Read the Collaboration Suite 10g Preview document here.
Remember the days when the checkout chicks at the supermarket used to take each item you had selected read the price and key it into their cash register. Then along came bar code readers where they simply pass the product over the reader and it reads what it is an adds the cost to your bill. Ooh it was scary stuff and we took some getting used to it.
Wal-mart and Target are about to take the next step which you may find equally scary. RFID or Radio Frequency Identification. Supported by Oracle technology, RFID will allow the check to scan the contents of your trolley without you removing it. In the not too distant future you will be able to push your trolley up to the checkout. The checkout chick will press a button and say "That will be $125.37 please"
Of course the conspiracy theorists amongst the readership will note that RFID allows much more detailed tracking and analysis of your spending activities than ever before. If you pay by anything other than cash the circle will be complete. It will not be all that long before your digital television service will be able to customise its adverts for you based on you own purchasing patterns.
If you live in "the land of the free and the home of the brave" you can expect to pay more for your next passport because the US State Department is covering the costs of embedding a RFID chip in every new US passport. The chip will hold your name, date of birth, place of birth and biometric data such as finger print and iris scan data. Several US states are also embedding these chips in drivers licences.
At this stage the State Department is "considering" adding a layer of protection to the chip to restrict the devices that can read the RFID chips in your passport. If their consideration is that this will not be necessary anyone with a suitable device will be able to read this data when you are carrying your passport. You won't have to get it out of your pocket or handbag and you won't necessarily know that it has been read.
(via TheAcolyte.net and Bruce Schneier)
In th 1960 Olympics Abebe Bikila from Ethiopia undertook the marathon, which he subsequently won. You will notice that there is something significantly different about Abebe, he is running barefoot.
Nike has taken a while to catch up with the concept but the group of their employees charged with the responsibility of thinking laterally have at cottoned onto the idea. Of course in these days of discarded hypodermic syringes and broken bottles you would not want to actually running nude, well not in the foot department anyway. Accordingly Nike are releasing a new range of running shoe called "Nike Free".
Vin Lananna, who was then the track coach at Stanford University, had decided that it was important for his runners to spend some time running barefoot on grass to strengthen their feet and ankles, presumably after the aforemention discarded syringes had been removed. This captivated the imagination of the innovators at Nike and like true innovators it caused them to ask a seemly stupid question, "What about a running shoe for barefoot runners?"
Some videotaping of barefoot runners with high-speed cameras to capture their movements, reflective markers attached to their joints to allow easy calculation of joint angles during stride, and wafer-thin pressure sensors attached to the bottoms of their feet to measure their impact with the earth and Bingo! A running shoe that provides the benefits of barefoot running.
Jeff Pisciotta, a senior researcher at Nike's Sports Research Lab and practitioner of the split infinitive says
There was a very unique pressure pattern that came from running on grass. Everything was happening at the ankle and the foot, that's where we saw the changes. There was a much greater range of motion at the ankle and foot as well. It was like an airplane coming in for a smooth landing -- they were using the whole foot, very naturally.
Well they would be wouldn't they? They were running barefoot afterall.
This whole new approach to shoe design was a big step for Nike (err sorry about that) and they may be brave but not quite as brave as they could be. The new shoe is Nike Free 5.0 which is half way between there fully supportive shoe and barefoot.
So which type of Nike Runner will The Green Man be buying? The Green Man is built for comfort not for speed, he pays $15 for his runners at K-Mart. It is a market Nike is yet to tap into.
via Wired
The time is right to start looking for a new digital camera.
The Green Man's camera of choice is the Nikon D70.
The D70 has enough control for those occasional shots when you want it and excellent automatic settings for most of the times when you don't. Rated as 9.6 (out of 10) by megapixel it is one of the best cameras on the market for non-professional digital photography.
Taking both outdoor landscape type photos and indoor portraits it is going to be great to have versatility that the D70 offers.
Megapixel says
Ergonomically, the D70 is pure SLR. It provides a comfortable grip that imparts it with an excellent in-hand feel. Its controls are logically placed, and easily reached which avoids having to hunt around for them when the camera is at eye-level.To the user though, the most noticeable aspect of the Nikon D70 is that it is immediately ready to shoot when the power switch is pushed to the On position. While all digital SLR are fast, this one is even faster.
I posted some time ago, with some amusement, that The Green Man blog had come onto the radar of the US military. Someone later told me that Green Man is a code word for US soldiers, which may explain it, or perhaps they just picked up on some comments that they viewed as "unAmerican". Which, of course, is OK. Since I am not American everything I say is Australian not American.
Well it turns out that they are not alone and that market research companies have discovered an enormous and free focus group, it is called the blogosphere. (A geekish term for the collection of blogs on the net, if you were not already aware.)
Intelliseek Inc. in Ohio is one company leveraging of this massive unstructured database of consumer feedback. Intelliseek, like a number of other companies, have developed sophicated lexical analysis software that spiders its way through the blogosphere analysing the content of blogs on topics of interest to their clients; reporting back detailed analysis of customer sentiment on everything from the war in Iraq, to hamburgers or what types of shoes are hot.
A look at some of Intelliseeks clients will show you how seriously large corporations are taking this new form of market research, they include Ford, Honda America, Sony and Microsoft. (Shame it doesn't include Motorola. They should know how pissed off I am with the crappy Motorola Razr V3 mobile phone I purchased some time ago.)
As I indicated earlier this software is quite sophisticated and analyses 475,000 individual blogger posts not only determining customer sentiment towards products but also gleening if a blogger is a male or female, what profession they work in, where they live, their rough age etc. You could of course be greatly offended by this but, hey, you probably started the blog as a soapbox, be pleased that the powerful are actually listening.
This whole general area is know within the marketing domain as "consumer generated media" and it is a major new force in the shaping of public opinion vis-a-vis large brandnames. By way of example type "macdonalds" into Google and on the first page you will see
McSPOTLIGHT
Large site spotlighting McDonald's exploitation of animals, people and the environment. Including information, news, public discussion rooms.
www.mcspotlight.org/ - 10k - 17 Jul 2005 - Cached - Similar pages
and
SUPER SIZE ME
Official documentary site features information about the film, director, festivals, reviews, games, and trailer.
www.supersizeme.com/ - 2k - Cached - Similar pages
The same applies to Walmart which contains
The Wal-Mart You Don't Know
Fast Company looks at Wal-Mart's pricing practices and their sometimes devastating pressures it exerts on the companies it does business with.
www.fastcompany.com/magazine/77/walmart.html - 55k - Cached - Similar pages
and
Walmart Class
Sex discrimination lawsuit alleging denial of advancement and training, lower
wages, sexually hostile work environment and retaliation.
None of these sites is owned or operated by a particularly powerful organisation but their opinion and public presence rivals that of the major corporations they are railing against. Suddenly, via the technology of the net, David can take on Goliath in the domain of media presence.
This is the PHILIPS PM5544 electronic colour pattern. You will probably recognise it, it has been the test card of choice for most colour broadcasters since the late 1960s. Test cards are used to calibrate luminance, geometry and colour mixing on film, TVs etc. (courtesy Alan Pemberton who has a fascination with all things testcard)
The image you see to the right is a broadcast image used by the BBC. Everyone has seen something like this from time to time as the final fallback position for a television station when tapes have broken or some other catastrophy has occured at the television station.
Most test cards however will never be seen because that are on rolls of film. Every film has a test card at the start to allow film laboratories to match color tones in the associated film. So it was that camera men, knowing that these images would never see the public light of day, began innovating with the presentation of the test cards and a lively and competitive practice of using female studio production workers to pose, "pin-up girl" style, developed.
This is entitled "Girl # 4. 12 x 15 in." by an unknown studio cameraman. Julie Buck and Karin Segal, artists and film archivists at Harvard Film Archive, have been collecting these discarded film leaders. The heavily scratched and faded images were then enlarged, restored, and edited. The result is a interesting collection of these images that reflect modern culture of the US at the time of their capture. They are currently on display at Sert Galllery at Harvard University.
The exhibition is running until September 18, 2005 and would make a fascinating visit if you happen to live in that neck of the woods.
(via Art Daily)
Oracle has announced that the JDeveloper 10g Java developer tool for Oracle will be made available for free. The product used to cost $995 per developer seat.
Rebecca Hahn of Oracle says
The move marks Oracle's increased dedication to its developer tools and allows the company to compete on an even playing field while simultaneously promoting its standards-compliant technology stack to the developer community.
Whilst some view the move as a response to the growing popularity of the Eclipse IDE, Oracle says
We’re actually doing some work in the Eclipse Foundation as well, but as far as JDeveloper, we really don’t even view it as a direct competitor in a way to Eclipse in a sense that JDeveloper is much more than an IDE
Via The Acolyte
You will have noticed a drop off in postings recently. Sadly paid work takes priority and The Green Man blog has had to take a bit of back seat. I am working on the data migration from SAP HR/Payroll. The organisation has been on SAP R/3 Human Resources for some years so this is a significant chunk of data to migrate and the work and should keep me busy for the next 6 months.
I will publish a data model for SAP HR/Payroll for the interest of those propeller heads amongst you once I have worked it out.
I will still be posting but it will be at a reduced frequency for a while but rest assured I will get back to it shortly.
The Green Man blog is proving a moderately successful blog if it is judged by readership however when judged in terms of allowing me to live in idle luxury based on the revenue from the blog it is proving a dismal failure.
I have however learnt a lot from running it and will continue to maintain it primarily because it is good fun but it is time to launch another blog with the specific aim of making some serious money. Accordingly I am lauching The Acolyte Net a site that is concerned with the implementation and support of Oracle generally and Oracle HRMS in particular.
Please feel free to drop by and check it out however please do so in the knowledge that there is a "propeller head warning" against this site. It is unashamedly technical.
Here is an early postcard, circa 1905, of an aboriginal warrior and lubra from New South Wales. There is so much that is interesting about this photo. Given the technology of the day it was probably a carefully constructed shot. Photography in 1905 did not lend itself to impromptu activity.
As well as its many other qualities there is one particular quality that that makes it remarkable. It is fast approaching 100 years old. It is an image from a century ago with a degree of permanency that has seen its simple message transmitted through three generations.
If you have a digital camera you have probably been taking lots of photos yourself. Mostly with a degree of carelessness that befits a medium where you can take many shots and only selectively print the good ones. So will those images exist in 100 years? Nope, no chance. The images you are printing on your photoquality printer will be gone in 20 years or so. They do not have the permanency of traditional photography.
The same goes for the stuff you are saving to writeable CDs. You will be lucky if you can read them in 10 years let alone 100.
We are living in disposable times and one of the things that is disposable are our memories.
Here is a scan of a 1954 Popular Mechanics image on how they thought your typical home computer would look in 2004.
Click on the image to enlarge. Ah FORTRAN, now there was a real man's programming language.
Update (from Dave at Raven Banter),
The photo above is a fake you can read all about it at http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/computer.asp. Thanks Dave but I will leave it up anyway. Hey, I like it and it could have been true.
I got a spam attack and moved to a new server and in all the chaos lost the last week or so of comments.
Aaaaaaaaaaah
Sorry to those of you who commented and had them lost. To the spammers well my thoughts probably wouldn't pass my own spam filter. Out of sheer frustration I have temporarily disabled comments whilst I investigate a more robust anti-spam approach.
Please email me if you wish something posted.
Is this one of the most beautiful women you have seen?
Call me idiosyncratic but the freckles do it for me every time. Perhaps the version of feminine loveliness below is more your style.
One thing we know for sure is that at least one person in the world thinks these women are beautiful, their creator. These are both creations of a Brasilian digital artist, Alceu Baptistão. Their names are Kaya and Ilana and both were created using Maya 4.0, Photoshop; Dual AMD Athlon 1.7-GHz processor, 1 GByte of RAM.
They are finalists in Miss Digital World beauty pageant whose promoter, Franz Cerami, is trying to establish the worlds first computer graphic talent agency.If you wish to see the other contestants visit missdigitalworld.com , you can even vote on your favourite.
(via Wired)
Anyone know anything about RIPE Network Coordination Centre in Amsterdam? This month I had 28,380 hits on one visit by them. Very curious!
Below is a map of the world indicating the hotspots for spam, i.e. where it originates. Intrestingly Nigeria doesn't get much representation.
This is a shrunk down version, to see the detailed map visit Postini
Via J-Walk
Here is a photo Robert Miles and James Alleman, formerly of Purdue University, holding a giant slide rule.
"A what?" You say. Hmmmm you're not quite the geek you thought you were. Well not a particularly old one anyway. For 300 years the sliderule was the basic tool of the mathematician, the engineer and the physicist. It was the key calculating device for the sciences until the release of Hewlett Packard's HP35 scientific calculator in the 1970s.
The Green Man remembers buying his last slide rule, discussing with the salesman how it was so sophisticated it would last his scientific career. Little did he know that its position in the scientific community would be usurped within a year or so by the HP35. As Robert Miles reminises
Many people who push the buttons on calculators don’t really know what the numbers mean, while on a slide rule you had to analyze where the decimal point went, and you had to better understand the mathematics
It is elitist I know, but it was a good feeling being in control, to have a sufficiently attuned sense of the beauty of numbers and how they worked to be able to fully utilise this magical device.
Of course the HP35 calculator did not relinquish this domain to the uneducated masses either. Using "reverse polish notation" for its arithmetic, it was completely unuseable by anyone other than mathematicians. (For those of you who have not been shown the secret handshake, reverse polish notation places the operator at the end of the operation not in the middle where it normally is. For example to add one and two together on a normal calculator you would do "1" "+" "2" "=". In reverse polish notation you would do "1" "Enter" "2" "+")
Ah, enough reminising, you can do more yourself by visiting the Purdue University website where there is an article on Purdue's museum of sliderules.
Here is a graph of lost bits of information based on storage type. You will notice that stuff recorded on bits of paper is over three times as likely to get lost as if it was stored in electronic format.
Interestingly this is because we are far more inclined to organise information on our computer than we are in our physical files. This is somewhat ironic because modern search technology makes it far less important to organise your electronic documents. What is more it is predicted to get even easier as our search technology advances. William Jones of the University of Washington is working on a prototype technology called a "universal labeler" that will allow us to tag all sorts of electronic information for easy retrieval later.
It is part of an ongoing National Science Foundation-funded project called "Keeping Found Things Found" whose goal is to understand how to help people to manage their information better regardless of its form or location and you can read more about it at the University of Washington web site here.
The Green Man blog has been a bit quiet lately. One reason is that I have been off on a course, "PRINCE2 For Practitioners" to be precise. PRINCE2 is a project management framework for the management of large multidiscipline projects and you will be pleased to know that I passed with flying colours.
So, in addition to many years project management experience, I now have a certification. It looks like Project Management is the domain in which I will be spending quite some time if the current trend in revenue from the blog is anything to go by. Never mind it is a suitably entertaining way to pass the time.
Oh, and by way of an advertisement, I will be looking for a new project management assignment soon and I am happy to discuss the same with any of you in control of suitably large budgets to need one. Here is my email address, you will have to fix it up before you send it of course.
Now what is the reason for holding the Olympics again. Something about promoting world harmony through sporting endeavour. An opportunity for people of the world to get to know sports people from other countries. To realise that these people from foreign countries are human beings with hopes and fears just like you. What better forum for this than the internet and blogs inparticular. On blogs athletes can share their experiences of the Games, post personal photos they have taken, tell the world their unique and exciting story. Just imagine reading, in the athlete's own words, how they felt when they crossed the line to become the fastest person in the world, or to share their sorrow at just missing out.
Oops, my mistake. What was I thinking? That's right the Games are about TV broadcast rights. No wonder athletes can be stripped of their credentials, and presumably their medals, if they are caught engaged in anarchist behaviour such as posting their thoughts on a personal blog. Where would the 6pm news be and after all they spent on the broadcast rights too.
Those athletes are really selfish. Imagine them having the cheek to think they can post a photo they took themselves at the Games on their own website. Even after the Games finish they are only allowed to post professional photos they have purchased.
As part of the privelege of representing your country you must sign a contract with the IOC that bans you from writing firsthand accounts for news and other websites. You also are prohibited from posting any video, audio or still photos you take yourself, even after the Games, unless you get permission ahead of time.
Ahhh that's The Olympics for you, the friendly personal face of international sport. What was their raison d'etre again
to contribute to building a peaceful and better world by educating youth through sport practised without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play.
cough, splutter, cough, splutter. Yeah right
What is worse that being a computer nerd? Being a computer manager nerd of course and, over the years The Green Man, in his alternate incarnation confesses to having occupied this role. One observation from this time is that when you place an advert for staff no women apply. IT is just not a woman's domain and don't blame me, I'd have employed them if they applied.
Eileen Trauth, professor of information sciences and technology at Penn State university argues against the hypothesis that nerdiness is determined by a gene on the Y chromosome. She looked at how the combination of an Old Boys' Network and the male-dominated IT workplace affected women. Looking at ways that women used to break into these networks. The Green Man suggests, having known quite a few men belonging to these networks, that many women look at them and think "Why would you want to?" It would involve talking to these men afterall and many of them are extremely boring. (Not The Green Man of course. He is very interesting to talk to.)
The researchers think that employers should
create a variety of social networking opportunities beyond playing golf or being on the company baseball team
You have to belong to a baseball team to progress in computing? Boy the US is more different to Australia than I thought. In Australia the only form of exercise many computing professionals get is carrying their 3 litre bottles of coke from the car to their desk.
Anyway read more about her research here.
Ah, the power of The Green Man. Only one after the article on the manipulation of Blogspot by porn sites on The Green Man and the players have sprung into action. (The fact that it also appeared in Wired which has 1,000 times the clout of The Green Man is entirely co-incidental)
Cyberquest claims it was an affiliate and had no knowledge of the practice. They said
We try to run a clean business, even though we're not in the cleanest of businesses.
Google, who owns Blogspot, has disabled the blogs in question and have said
The blogs ... were taken down because they violated Blogger's terms of service
Damn, I suppose they will be back pestering The Green Man in the comment section yet again.
Like most other corners of the web Blogs are plagued by spam. In the case of blogs this is in their comment section and it is used primarily by peddlers of porn sites to increase their ranking in Google, and other like minded search engines.
The Green Man still gets the occasional attack but generally speaking the implementation of mt-blacklist has put paid to most of the comment spam. Most other blogs with reasonably high traffic have also implemented these sorts of mechanisms.
So it is that Cyberquest has taken the third party blogger out of the equation by setting up numerous free blogs on Blogspot all linking back to their pay porn sites.
"It's blogging Jim, but not as we know it" (a little allusion to Star Trek for the devoted)
Whilst using the blogging technology they are not a blog in the way we typically understand them. There are porn related blogs such as Fleshbot and others that include sexually explicit material such as GoodShit but what distinguishes these Cyberquest blogs is that their sole purpose is to increase the Google ranking of another site, ie the pay for view site.
Good luck to them I say as long as they keep off The Green Man it is fine by me.
I had a dream this morning that there was another comment spam attack on The Green Man. About half an hour later I got up and checked and there was actually a spam attack in progress. Spooky!
I disabled comments and cleared them out. I will switch the comments back on, hopefully he has lost interest in The Green Man by now.
Type in an invalid web address and you can expect to see something like this
"HTTP 404 - File not found",
returned by many web servers, how rude. On The Green Man you don't get such an impolite message. (Click here if you want to see)
Naturally The Green Man is correct. There is a rising tide of dissatisfaction with rude and accusatory error messages. This is the finding of Jeng-Yi Tzeng at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. His research showed that the vast majority of users found using a computer more pleasurable when error messages were apologetic rather than implying that user had made a mistake.
Eric Horvitz, manager of Microsoft's Adaptive Systems and Interaction Group agrees
As computers have got more powerful, people have come to expect them to behave more like collaborators and less like tools or appliances
And he should know, working for Microsoft he will be no stranger to error messages.
Jonathan Klein believes it should be taken one step further, with the software providing the facility to vent your frustration at the failure. Hey! The Green Man provides that too, there is an "Email me about the problem" link on the 404 page. Such good design, if only The Green Man could work out how to make large chunks of money out of it.
John Walkenbach runs the famed J-Walk Blog, a blog that, each day, usually provides The Green Man with some completely useless information, which is of course the most important information of all.
One of John's hobby horses is the requirement to login to sites to access information. The Green Man humbly draws his attention, as well as the rest of the readership, to Bug Me Not a site that will give you a login name and password for most sites requiring compulsory user registration.
It is now firmly in the list of favourites for the The Green Man
This village is in the Pamir mountains in Tajikistan in one of the most remote parts of the world. In central Asia there is a huge mountainous region that is the home to around 40 million who still live what is essentially a subsistance existence. It is an area that is home to Ismaili Muslims and there leader, the Aga Khan, has big plans for education for these people. He is planning a university to provide education in disciplines that are essential to all communities.
The university is now possible because of the advances in communications technology. Plans are in place to enable students to communicate with lecturers from the finest educational institutions around the world, such as the Harvard School of Medicine.
The Aga Khan is due to lay the foundation stone on Wednesday. Work will then begin on a campus designed by the post-modernist Japanese architect, Arata Isozaki.
The first students should begin their studies in 2007.
If you live in the UK please don't visit TheyWorkForYou.com. At this site you can assess the performance of your MP based on his/her contribution to the political debate. This is scary stuff. The Green Man cannot think of any more effective way of undermining the confidence of the proletariat than to allow them detailed access to the performance of their MPs.
Also The Green Man thinks the site is poorly named, perhaps YouPayFromThem.com would have been more appropriate.
The Green Man is aware that he is occasionally visited by a person who does not easily fit into the ever growing section of the community termed "computer geeks". For those individuals here is a quick lesson in how a part of your computer works. Persist with it, it has an interesting conclusion.
Your computer has "random access memory" (RAM) in which it runs the computer programs you are using at the moment, Internet Explorer for example. The amount of RAM is rarely enough to hold all the stuff so your computer grabs a bit of the disk drive (called paging space) and stores things temporarily there.
Here is the interesting part.
If you have just used internet banking the RAM of your computer holds your account number and password. If this gets swapped out of memory onto disk then it is not lost when you exit the program. New research by Tal Garfinkel at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California has found that this information can persist on the hard drive for long periods, possibly even years. Now really really clever viruses/worms are interrogating the paging space on PCs and extracting these usernames and passwords and mailing them off.
The scary bit is that you have absolutely no way of stopping Windows or Linux from writing this stuff to the disk and you have no way of deleting it off the disk except by reformatting your hard drive.
If you are motoring along a highway in the near future you may find yourself confronted by a rather unusual sight. Lane markers moving themselves, as if by magic, into place to close off or open up a lane. These robot lane markers have been developed by Shane Farritor, a roboticist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
They consist of a "shepherd" lane marker who contains a GPS and communicates with a laptop. The laptop provides the GPS coordinates of the location of the first marker. The shepherd lane marker then takes responsibility for placing his sheep along the road. The sheep use much simpler and cheaper technology, making the whole system much more affordable.
The principle benefits of the system are a more rapid deployment and collection of road markers because the normal issues of the safety of the workers placing the road markers has been removed. The controller can simply indicate via the laptop where the road markers are to be placed and leave the shepherd road marker to complete the task.
Read more in New Scientist.
This is not a cute little girl who has been taken along last month to be left by her tearful mother at the gates of the local primary school for her first day. Melissa has the dubious honor of being the first computer worm that infected the internet. She was launched onto the unsuspecting internet community on 26 March, 1999. A the time she infected 1 million computers, which we all thought was horrendous and it probably was, the internet was much smaller in those days.
So what have we learnt in 5 years? Not much really according to New York-based systems administrator Tom Finkle.
Back then, though, for most people a computer virus was new and interesting and a little scary. Now it's just annoying -- we're still saying the same thing each time a virus is released. I bet most of the people who clicked on Melissa five years ago also clicked on MyDoom, Netsky and Bagle virus attachments last week.
Melissa was written by David L. Smith who was caught a matter of days after its release but, the court system being what it is, was not sentenced until May 2002 when he received a 20 month jail term. At his sentencing he said he thought the whole Melissa episode was "A big mistake". Well it may have entered us all into an era of inconvenience but it certainly provided a lot of employment in the virus checking companies.
Sky News has announced that they are releasing a new coverage of the Australian parliamentary sessions. Using the new digital technology it will allow the choice of 50 cameras recording the action in both chambers.
The next proposed step in this technology is for your average Australian citizen to hone in on their parliamentary representative to see what they are up to. Based on the television coverage of yesterdays sitting of parliament where only about 15 MPs could be observed in the chamber some of our parliamentarians will have a lot of explaining to do.
Overstated has a transcript of a conversation he had with a nanniebot. Pretty uneventful really but interesting when you think it is a computer on the other end.
Read his discussion of it here and the actual transcript here.
The Green Man is a big fan of the internet but, like every powerful tool, it can be misused and one of the most repulsive misuses of the net is the preying on children in chat rooms by paedophiles.
New Scientist reports that Jim Wightman, an IT consultant from Wolverhampton in the West Midlands in UK has developed a new weapon in the fight to detect and report this predatory behaviour. The software call ChatNannies generates applets called Nanniebots that engage in conversations in chatrooms listening for predatory convseration styles. Conversations that are identified by the software as being likely to be predatory are reported with the address of the suspect to the police for investigation.
The nanniebots are so good at imitating a childs chatroom behaviour that to date none have been sprung. Wightman currently has around 10,000 nanniebots chatting away in chatrooms ever vigilant to small inconsistencies in conversations that hint at an adult pretending to be a child. Based on a neural network the software is continually learning about the use of language and adapting its conversations to make them more realistic.
Follow the New Scientist link above and see if you can pick which is the child and which is the nanniebot.
There is increasing angst in the gym/swimming pool operators over the use of the camera facilities of modern mobile phones within certain areas of their complex. It seems that certain members of their clientelle are taking exception to their images appearing on web sites in somewhat less than their full attire.
To address this issue the establishments have taken to posting signs regarding the acceptible use of mobile phones on their premises.
One would hope that general courtesy and common sense would make it unnecessary to post such a policy,"
says 29-year-old Debbie Goodson, a San Franciscan whose gym recently put signs about its ban in locker rooms. Unbeknownst to Debbie, you can find some interesting pictures of her at www.amateur-hornbags.com. Oh well, it seems common sense is not that common after all.
Did you click the link?
Tut tut, I just made that one up.
hmmmm I hope it isn't actually a real website.
There are only 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
(via Ming)
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Security experts warned on Monday about a new virus outbreak that was spreading quickly across the Internet.
The new virus, dubbed MyDoom or Novarg, is a mass-mailing worm that arrives as an attachment with an .exe, .scr, .zip or .pif extension and can have a subject line of "test" or "status."
It mails itself out to addresses in the victim's computer and is clogging mail servers and degrading network performance at companies, experts said.
"Mailboxes at large corporations are infected and reporting multiple infections throughout their entire organizations," said David Perry, global education director at Trend Micro.
The worm was discovered on Monday afternoon and spread so quickly that Trend Micro, Network Associates, Symantec and other anti-virus companies were rating it a "high" outbreak.
Security experts said they were still analyzing the virus to discover what it does to the victim computers.
Meet George Jetson, err sorry Paul Muller. Here is a picture of the latest version of his "sky-car", the closest we have to George Jetson's snappy little get-about. It seats 4 and is capable of speeds of up to 380km/h.
Paul has been working on this project for around 20 years and his latest model looks like it has legs, or more correctly wings.
He is accepting orders at the moment and one will set you back about $1,000,000. For a mere $100,000 deposit you can ensure that you are one of the first on the block with one of these rich kids "must have" new toys.
Visit his site to find out more about this high tech get-about. Click here.
Running a blog is an essentially egotistical thing to do, assuming that you are assuming that someone will want to read what you write. (This does not apply to The Green Man of course because he is full of ancient wisdom that he knows you will all want to share.)
Well having got the vehicle for your ego up and going you need to look at ways to expand the ego stroking that you can derive from it and what better way than to publish it in your own hand writing.
Fontifier is offering a service to create a true type font from your handwriting. Simply create a gif of a sample of the alphabet written in your own inimitable hand and send it to them. They will return your ttf file.
Of course for people to see your blog in your own hand they will have to install the font on their machine. Imagine that, your handwriting style installed on millions of PCs around the world. Now there is an ego trip.
That should attract some visitors (if you are one of them have a browse around, I am sure you will find some things to interest you)
Google reports the top searches for 2003 as follows:
1. britney spears
2. harry potter
3. matrix
4. shakira
5. david beckham
6. 50 cent
7. iraq
8. lord of the rings
9. kobe bryant
10. tour de france
It has The Green Man intrigued, sure Britney Spears is a bit on the cute side, but you would hardly call her the most devastatingly beautiful woman in the world. She must, however, have that something that keeps the geekdom searching google for new and tantalising images of her.
Whilst we are on the general topic of most popular things of 2003 we will take a dip into the mind of the scientist and see what they are most interested in. Any guesses? Well unsurprisingly it is sex, same as everyone else, although with a slight twist (so to speak).
New Scientist reports the most popular topic for the year was Horrific venereal disease strikes African baboons , closely followed by Masturbating may protect against prostate cancer. Yep it can be a lonely life as a scientist.
You can find the full list here.
The Green Man has signed up for Paypal and a "Donate" button is now in the right hand pane. I could try and spin some rubbish about being impoverished and hosting fees being so expensive but I don't expect readers of the calibre that The Green Man attracts to fall for that line (otherwise I'd use it).
Everything on the site will remain free but if I start making some money off it then I will be able to spend more time on the site; unearthing and presenting more valuable factoids of the calibre of the post immediately below. So take an opportunity to get rid of some of that excess cash that you have left over after Christmas and encourage The Green Man in his embryonic journalism/creative writing endeavours.
On the other hand you could buy a hand painted t-shrit, The Green Man expects you will be able to resell it for bags of money when The Green Man becomes famous.
It seems that Adventure was not the end of an era and the introduction of knock out graphics did not see the end of games in this style. In the comments section of yesterdays post on Adventure Dennis Jerz kindly points us to some resources on the genre, known as Interactive Fiction. Not only can you play it, there are resources available to study it and write your own.
Visit his site to learn more about the genre or explore more of these imaginary worlds at Interactive Fiction .
Thanks for the links Dennis but I am sure it will have an impact on the productivity of a number IT Departments as the readers of The Green Man discover this addictive pastime.
The mind is a strange thing, if you had asked me this morning about a natural language computer program developed in the 1960s I would have looked at you blankly. After writing the previous entry on Adventure the name of the said program sprang to mind in an instant. It's name was Eliza and it can hold a conversation/counsel you based on the things you type in. It was developed in the mid 60's by Joseph Weizenbaum of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and released in a paper entitled "ELIZA--A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine" in January 1966.
When in conversation with ELIZA, the user types in some statement or set of statements in natural language using normal punctuation and sentence structures. . . ELIZA then analyzes the user's statement and generates some response which it types out. Control is then again with the user.
After all these years Eliza is still dispensing her advice. She has moved with the times and now converses via a web page. Click here to discuss your problems with her. Click continue reading to see a sample conversation.
Men are all alike.
IN WHAT WAY?
They're always bugging us about something or other.
CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE?
Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE
He says I'm depressed much of the time.
I AM SORRY TO HEAR YOU ARE DEPRESSED
It's true. I am unhappy
DO YOU THINK COMING HERE WILL HELP YOU NOT TO BE UNHAPPY
I need some help, that much seems certain.
WHAT WOULD IT MEAN TO YOU IF YOU GOT SOME HELP
Perhaps I could learn to get along with my mother.
TELL ME MORE ABOUT YOUR FAMILY
My mother takes care of me.
WHO ELSE IN YOUR FAMILY TAKES CARE OF YOU
My father.
YOUR FATHER
You are like my father in some ways.
WHAT RESEMBLANCE DO YOU SEE
You are not very aggressive but I think you don't want me to notice that.
WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I AM NOT VERY AGGRESSIVE
You don't argue with me.
WHY DO YOU THINK I DON'T ARGUE WITH YOU
You are afraid of me.
DOES IT PLEASE YOU TO BELIEVE I AM AFRAID OF YOU
My father is afraid of everybody.
WHAT ELSE COMES TO YOUR MIND WHEN YOU THINK OF YOUR FATHER
Bullies.
DOES THAT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE FACT THAT YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE
If that nonsense word brings a nostalgic smile to your face then you are not only a computer geek but an old one and you will recognise this sentence
You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.
For the uninitiated XYZZY was the "magic word" in the first truely pervasive computer game, "Adventure" and that sentence is the start of a game that will lead you through a mysterious cave in search of precious items and adventure.
Adventure was initially deployed on a DEC PDP 10 but soon it could be found on most computer platforms (PCs weren't invented at the time this game originated); it was purely a text based system and relied on the fertile imagination of the players to supply the graphical images.
The software was based on the latest artificial intelligence software techniques available at the time and could interpret sentences typed by the user. The player typed in instructions which the computer interpreted and responded with a written description.
For those of you who are the veterans of the geekdom, like The Green Man himself, you can find some very nostalgic material on the history of this game at http://www.rickadams.org/adventure/a_history.html or if you would like to reenter the cave one last time click here.
(via j-walk)
The Green Man has added a new, long overdue, category to the blog, "Frivolousness". The dictionary describes Frivolousness as "Inappropriately silly" or "Unworthy of serious attention; trivial". A category that could fill rapidly based on The Green Man's current track record on postings.
There will be a new icon up the top for this category when I find an image that is suitably frivolous.
Someone placed a comment on an entry saying that they needed to contact The Green Man and couldn't find an email address on the site. Obligingly The Green Man replied and, to stop the problem arising again placed an "Email The Green Man" icon towards the top of the page.
Within 24 hours Mr. KUMAYE DADA had emailed me informing me that he had US$30.5 million that he would like to store in my account and was willing to pay me 20% commission for the privilege.
Doesn't it warm your heart to know how well our internet technology is working these days. Oh and by the way, you will need to edit the To address in the Email me section in future to make it work.
The current economic model of the internet is based on "cut glass/jewel" model. Web sites provide for their casual visitors shiny pieces of cut glass and semi-precious stones to pick through for nothing.
The precious jewels on the site are for sale once you have become tired of the cheaper free material. There is a significant problem with this model, namely that the jewels for sale must be of sufficient value to justify a significant payment. It is just not economic otherwise. Paypal, for example, charges 2.9 percent of a sale plus 30 cents so any transaction under say $1 is clearly uneconomic and besides would you go through the complexities of a Paypal payment for a $1 item, probably not.
Think of parts of the internet as a local market with stall holders, like The Green Man, providing home made goods for sale for small amounts of money. Much of your time at the market is spent browsing but occasionally there is a trinket, or jar of jam, that takes your fancy, it is cheap so you buy it on a whim. This is a problem in the virtual domain that is begging for a solution. Think of placing $20 in your virtual pocket and browsing the virtual market; spending 20c at this stall, $1 at the next one, 50c at another. Establishing this “virtual local market” structure will make the person responsible very rich. Establishing it, however, will not be simple, like the telephone is only truly useful when most people have one, so this system will only be useful when a large number of websites and visitors are participating.
