Writing about web page http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/search/?q=Newswipe
Charlie Brooker's back with another series of Newswipe. This week, amongst other things, why journalists not revealing their sources can be a bad thing.
Mike Willis
27 Jan 2010 13:10
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Flash as in the ubiquitous Flash Player from Adobe rather than someone who can save every one of us.
Cookies as in the things website use to keep track of you rather than delicious sugar and preferably chocolate based snacks which in this country we call biscuits.
The other day I learnt that Flash can use cookies. Not cookies that show up when you tell your web browser to show you a list of cookies it has stored, but cookies which it stores independently of the web browser. It's one of those things I read about and think 'how did I not know about this?'. I became aware of it from a from a comment on a Slashdot article (I forget which one) then looked for more info found this Wired article which helpfully tells you where the cookies are stored on various operating systems. So take a look, if you feel so inclined. I found loads of cookies. Which I then deleted.
I initially thought it was a little sneaky keeping the cookies in a directory called macromedia given that Flash is an Adobe product, but I guess it's a legacy thing left over from when the days before Macromedia was consumed by Adobe. So it's backwards compatibility rather than sneakiness. It is rather irritating, and just a bit odd, that they decided to call the directory #SharedObjects though. Yes, that's a filename that starts with a #. (*nix minded people know what I'm getting at.)
The comment on Slashdot recommended removing the write permission from the #SharedObjects as a way of preventing Flash from writing cookies. Out of curiosity I gave it a go. Unsurprisingly, it does indeed stop Flash writing cookies. However I quickly discovered a downside to doing this when I started watching something on iPlayer. About ten seconds in to the programme the picture froze and shortly after Flash popped up the message "A script in this movie is causing Adobe Flash Player 10 to run slowly. If it continues to run, your computer may become unresponsive. Do you want to abort the script?" I clicked yes and the programme continued to play but the timeline indicator didn't work. After I pressed stop it didn't know where to restart from when I hit play again. So remove the write permission clearly isn't a sensible thing to do unless one doesn't mind such breakage on some websites.
What's most interesting is that sites where you haven't consciously used Flash, such as iPlayer, are also setting cookies using Flash. After deleting all my Flash cookies and taking a look in the directory the next day to see what was there I found one from ia.media-imdb.com. I'd visited imdb since deleting the cookies, but nothing I interacted there used Flash. I might give Flashblock a go.
Mike Willis
24 Jan 2010 17:08
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Writing about web page http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/8471187.stm
N.B. Since this post was written, the linked BBC story has been updated to indicate that export of the device has been banned.
A BBC Newsnight investigation has found that a so-called "bomb detector", thousands of which have been sold to Iraq, cannot possibly work.
Basically it's a stick, some wires and some swappable cards that have those flat anti-theft tags you sometimes find attached to stuff in shops. Each card supposedly allows the device to detect a different substance. There's no power source of any kind. They're produced by a British company. They cost around £40k each. Which seems like rather a lot for something which is apparently as effective at bomb detecting as cornflakes packet with 'bomb detector' written on the side.
I like this paragraph from the story:
In 1999, the FBI put out another alert: "Warning. Do not use bogus explosives detection devices."
Presumably issued by the FBI's Bleeding Obvious Advice Unit.
See also article on Bad Science which links to an article the New York Times published on this more than two months ago. (Here - requires login which you can get from here. If you use Firefox, you might like to install the BugMeNot extension.)
Mike Willis
22 Jan 2010 16:57
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Writing about web page http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/phd_students/backus/girlfriend
Discovered via Slashdot.
Mike Willis
14 Jan 2010 13:18
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Writing about web page http://2010book.tumblr.com/post/310745454/cover
Some guy has dug out an old book written in 1972 that posits what life will be like in the year 2010 and posted the contents online.
It reminds me of the books in the library at school about what life might be like in 'the future'. Full of colourful illustrations of futuristic houses with robots delivering parcels and filling up the freezer with the food it had automatically ordered for you via an outside hatch.
A woefully inaccurate prediction stuck in my mind is that by the year 2000 people will be living on the moon and speaking latin. It's possible it's only stuck in there because I made it up though.
I'm slowly coming to accept that we won't have flying cars by 2015 as depicted in Back to The Future II.
Mike Willis
13 Jan 2010 19:34
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Writing about web page /jchronicle/entry/boring/
Writing about an entry you don't have permission to view
Julian has a point. So in half hearted attempt to address this, post in the comments the answer to the question "What sort of animal would you like to be and why?" Humorous (clean) answers only. Terrible puns are allowed.
My housemate is preparing for a job interview and mentioned that the above question is a favourite of HR managers. Apparently it's a trick of sorts. If your answer contains reference to characteristics of that animal then it means you aspire to posses those characteristics which in turn means you don't currently posses them. So if your answer is say, a Lion and you make reference to qualities such as strength and leadership it means you currently lack strength and leadership type qualities. Or something like that. Maybe.
Mike Willis
13 Jan 2010 12:48
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North Coventry, this morning.
This is the lowest temperature I have ever observed my car report. On the bright side, I found my gloves in the boot.
Mike Willis
07 Jan 2010 19:21
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Today I found myself wondering if it was possible to find the current screen resolution from the command line (and hence from a shell script) in Mac OS X. My first thought was to try the same method I use in Linux which is extract it from the output of xdpyinfo. That turned out to be no use though. Firstly running xdpyinfo causes X11.app to launch, which is messy. Second, I rather suspect that if X11.app isn't installed then neither is xdpyinfo and X11 is an optional install pre-Leopard. Finally, it gives me the wrong value for the vertical resolution. My screen resolution is 16080x1050 but xdpyinfo says:
case:~ mike$ xdpyinfo | grep dimensions
dimensions: 1680x1028 pixels (445x272 millimeters)
It's probably incorrect to say that it's giving the wrong value for the vertical resolution. More likely I expect is that it's the correct value for what it's measuring but what it's measuring is not what I want to measure. I find myself wondering if the Mac OS X Menu Bar (MenuBar? Menubar?) is 22 pixels high but I don't feel inclined to check.
I couldn't find any other method of getting the screen resolution via Google so the method I came up with to get the horizontal resolution is:
$ defaults read ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.windowserver.$(/sbin/ifconfig en0 | grep ether | cut -d " " -f 2 | sed 's/://g') | grep " Width =" | cut -d "=" -f 2 | sed 's/[ ;]//g'
To get vertical resolution replace 'Width' with 'Height'. It's rather long winded, but it works. I don't like the grep cut sed stuff at the end but I couldn't find a way to get the defaults command to directly read the relevant value.
Mike Willis
28 Dec 2009 17:40
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Writing about web page http://www.badscience.net/
Homeopathy is a system of medicine which is based on treating the individual with highly diluted substances given in mainly tablet form, which triggers the body’s natural system of healing.
Dilutions are made up to either 1 part tincture to 10 parts water (1x) or 1 part tincture to 100 parts water (1c). Repeated dilution results in the familiar 6x, 6c or 30c potencies that can be bought over the counter: the 30c represents an infinitessimal part of the original substance.
Quotes copy/pasted from http://www.homeopathy-soh.org/about-homeopathy/what-is-homeopathy/
So a 30c dilution will be a one part tincture diluted in to 100 parts of water, which is diluted with another 100 parts of water, which is diluted with another 100 parts of water, repeat another 27 times. Homeopaths claim that the result of this process is an effective medical treatment.
In Bad Science, Ben Goldacre describes a 30c dilution thus:
Imagine a sphere of water with a diameter of 150 million kilometres (the distance form the earth to the sun). It takes light eight minutes to travel that distance. Picture a sphere of water that size, with one molecule of a substance in it: that's a 30c dilution.
If you read the above linked homepathy page you will of course find an explanation of how such a substance can be an effective medial treatment. The explanation is not one I find credible, but there are plenty of people who do.
Another part of this book which has stuck in my mind is the manner in which HIV and AIDS has been handled by the South African government.
South Africa's stand at the 2006 World AIDS Conference in Toronto was described by delegates as the 'salad stall'. It consisted of some garlic, some beetroot, the African potato, and assorted other vegetables.
Ben Goldacre is a medical doctor who works for the NHS and the topics covered in this book are almost exclusively of a medical nature. It's not just about medicine though, or even just about bad science. It's very often about the appallingly inaccurate and/or misleading manner in which most science stories are reported by the media. It's about how a study which finds that under certain circumstances the number of instances of X appears to have risen from the previously observed 4% to 6% will appear in a newspaper as 'new study finds 50% increase in cases of X'. It's about how a lot of medical studies have flaws but how, despite what some people mistakenly believe, those flaws do not necessarily invalidate the findings. It's about how some people can't understand that when the scientific community decides that something previously considered to be true is not actually true after all, or is only true under certain circumstances, this is called progress, not failure. It's about how in this country a storm of controversy can rage for the best part of decade regarding the use of a vaccine, whilst in the rest of the developed world it's use continued unabated by any such contraversy. It's about how some people will dress up common sense as something proprietary, the difference between someone who lies and someone who bullshits and about how people who do one or more of these things in relation to matters of science have managed to make a lot of money out of it.
You should read this book.
Mike Willis
21 Dec 2009 16:08
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I can't remember the last time I built a snowman. Arguably I didn't build one today, the above portrayed attempt being more of a heap and a small heap that took the collaboration of two men in their thirties to create at that. (The wrong type of snow... honest) The nearly-three year old girl who commissioned it seemed reasonably satisfied. Although shortly after the photo was taken I was told it needed ears.
Mike Willis
20 Dec 2009 18:19
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