Rants

I listen to a lot of podcasts. They virtually are all sponsored by either MailChimp or Emma (some new Mailchimp clone). What I want to know is why spammers (even opt-in, targeted email marketing solutions are spammers as far as I can tell) find that podcasts are listened to by their target market (i.e. other spammers). Hmm. Maybe I should be spamming more…

I remember sitting in my databases class years ago and thinking, “This can’t possibly be the right way to store data.” It was a strange class, because it mixed theory and practice in a way that was anathema to the way I think. The theory part bored me to tears, and seemed ludicrously useless (first normal form? third normal form? who cares!). The practice part seemed ridiculously complicated and pointless. Why go to all that effort to write something down? Why not just write it? Yes, yes, I know, ACID and all that. I grudgingly learned it all, and I passed the class. But it never felt right to me. It felt like the students were putting on a performance to satisfy the teacher. It didn’t feel like Theory of Computing (i.e. Turing machines, regular expressions, the halting problem, etc), which just Felt Right. ...

Here’s an interesting story, well told, about an industrial process that takes refinery waste from the United States (derived from high-sulfur Mexican crude oil), cycles it through Europe, then dumps the result in West Africa. The company running this racket (or “innovative commodity exchange”, as they call it) is Trafigura. Learn more here: Coker gasoline A small pawn in the game Vast Tank sweetens gasoline BBC Newsnight on Trafigura’s dumping Here’s a quick summary: ...

The Lancet has published an academic paper analyzing the deployment of funds at the Gates Foundation against a backdrop of the actual burden of disease. The bottom line is the Gates Foundation does not come out looking too good, seemingly interested in whizbang gadgets and not in focusing on the job at hand. Another really interesting and sad note was the extent to which being nearby the Gates Foundation, geographically or culturally gets you in the money. PATH and the University of Washington raked in the cash. African researchers? Not so much. ...

Vinay Gupta published something called the flu code. Here it is in French: La promesse grippe 0.1Beta, version français – Une service dans l’intérêt publique de L’institute pour efrondnomiques Si j’ai des signes d’une grippe éventuel, je vais rester chez moi. Je vais rester àdistance des foules quand c’est possible, et je vais toujours porter une masque dans les lieux publiques. Je vais laver les mains a la porte chaque fois je arrive a ma destination. Je vais me engager de enseigner ces règles aux autres de protéger tous.

This is an interesting story by a BBC correspondent, which pulls no punches. Easy to see why he was left feeling bitter. There are two sides to every story of course, and I’m sure the military folks would tell you about security rules, zero tolerance for violation of force protection imperatives, risk asessments, etc, etc, etc. But that’s all missing the point. When you are doing counterinsurgency work, you have to be close to the people. You have to earn their respect by finding out what earns respect in their culture and then finding a way to do it inside of your own culture. They, in turn, will come to know you and, if you deserve it, you’ll earn their respect in return. ...

Does anyone out there know why xsltproc and the DocBooc stylesheets are so stuuuupid? When there’s a processing error, they just keep going. OK, fine, maybe useful. But then there’s no return value to say that there was a problem. The man page for xsltproc says it has return values, but it always returns 0 for me. And I’ve found the place in the DocBook stylesheets where the error is emitted. It looks like this: ...

In 15 years, the Global Warming hysteria is going to be one of those embarassing episodes in history. Several sociology and history of science PhDs will write their theses on “how they blew it on climate change”. The latest person to risk his reputation by coming out and speaking truthiness to the enviro-powers is Freeman Dyson. As I am not 80 years old, and I have to live with my reputation for a while longer, let me make my position clear again: ...

I’ve been known to complain a bit, now and then, about my current hosts, the English. I reserve the right to continue complaining, to be sure, but I’d like to take a moment to point out two things I like about England: ICICI Bank UK: This is one of the largest banks in India. In England, they are a very little fish in a very big nasty pond. English banks are incredibly expensive, arrogant, rude, and customer unfriendly. But because ICICI is tiny, and because it is focused on a small niche (immigrants who are sending remittances home), it gives excellent service. Go ICICI! I love you! Muffins: The English make very nice muffins. The chocolate/chocolate-chip ones are totally decadent, so when you want to take it easy, go for the ones which merely have lemon curd inside and crystalized sugar on top. PS: The English also display enormous muffin tops, but they are not really something you want to have… ...

Microsoft, what’s your problem? Why are you so stupid? My current irritation is with Silverlight. First, it’s a redundant technology. Bringing .Net into browsers is not a compelling argument for redoing everything that Adobe Flash already does better than Silverlight. But fine, I’m not a shareholder anymore, you can waste their money all you want. I wanted to see how well Moonlight (the Linux version of Silverlight) works. It’s partly because I’m compelled to poke my nose into the train crash that is Linux + Firefox + plugins + video + audio. It’s one of those things… so horrific, you can’t stop watching. ...