jra's thoughts

Category: Rants

  • The Podcast/Spam nexus

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    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…

  • The SQL backlash

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    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…

  • Trafigura’s West African dumping

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    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…

  • Gates Foundation vs the Lancet

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    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…

  • La promesse grippe – The Flu Code

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    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 à distance des foules quand c’est possible, et je vais toujours…

  • A long trip in Afghanistan

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    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,…

  • Exiting from xsltproc with an error

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    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…

  • Global Warming is going to be an embarassment

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    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…

  • Two things I like about England

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    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…

  • Silverlight on Linux

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    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.…