Given the recent demise of so many juicy and useful pseudo-threats, politicians and other fearmongers are probably watching this with anticipation. After all, it’s never too early to start planning your strategy of terrifying people into giving you more money and power.
“Old toy for teaching children to accurately drop atom bombs”
With paranoid parents banning everything from comics to children’s books to toy guns, it’s kind of shocking to look back and see what their own parents must have played with in their youth.
“Swiss space-cleaning bot grabs flying junk, hurls itself into furnace”
What is this, the Roombas-in-Space hour? Now the Swiss are getting into the act too!
“A New Tone for Health Authority?”
This article by Ben Hamamoto makes the case that how we see and judge authority is changing, and that the Internet could be responsible:
[…] with science and health, we do value a certain cold detachment. Public health organizations in the U.S. have traditionally been very careful to appear serious, probably because appearing too casual would undermine their authority/credibility and, therefore, ability to be persuasive.
There are examples, though, of this changing. […] What I think this reflects is that, in many fields people’s perception that seriousness/sternness is the only indicator of credibility is changing. […]
To really find out what’s driving this trend of “humanizing” authority, we’d need to do research, including real interviews with everyday people. However, the democratizing power of the Internet is a likely suspect.
Aspects of the web question the wisdom of authority — the largely anonymously crowd-sourced Wikipedia is more comprehensive and accurate than anything compiled by experts and published traditionally. And the abundance of information flowing through various Internet and media channels means there is much more competition for any given person’s attention, (but also more niche channels do it).
I find his suspicion likely. The Internet is a democratizing force; it’s hard to believe that any group is so much better than you when you can watch them screw up on FaceBook and Twitter just as often as — if not more often than — the people around you. Just to pick one example, who now thinks that politicians we elect have any kind of claim to wisdom and morality, after the Internet shenanigans of the past several years?
It’s fascinating to see how society has adapted, and is still adapting, to an ever-more-connected world.
“The cyber-weapons paradox: ‘They’re not that dangerous'”
Oops, another perfectly good disaster scenario down the drain. Unless something like the metavirus from the novel Snow Crash appears, capable of infecting both humans and computers, I think we’re fairly safe on that front.
At this rate, right-leaning politicians and other fear-mongers must be seeing a new disaster on the horizon: running out of disasters. 🙂
(Here’s some further information, including warnings about politicians and others hyping cyber-threats for their own purposes.)
“Global warming COULD SHRINK THE HUMAN RACE”
Apparently the historical size of horses is inversely proportional to the temperature — in other words, when temperatures were hotter, the ancestors of modern horses were smaller, and vice versa. It makes sense, since smaller bodies are easier to cool.
Unfortunately it’s also well-known that reptiles have just the opposite response, getting larger as temperatures go up. That might make this sort of “solution” to global warming rather less appealing. 😉
Git makes website maintenance easy too!
We’re gearing up to release our first program for the general public in quite some time, so we’re going to need a real website again, rather than the one-page placeholder that I put up several years ago.
The last time I had to design a website was before the turn of the century. I started with FrontPage (which we had as part of a copy of Microsoft Office from the era). It had a wonderful feature where it collaborated with some FrontPage extension on the server to update your site after any changes. I didn’t know enough to appreciate that at the time, and apparently at least some web hosts really don’t like it, because when we changed hosting companies a few years later the new one flatly refused to support it.
At that point we bought a copy of DreamWeaver. That was supposed to be the very best website editor, and it was quite expensive, but when I started using it I was REALLY disappointed. It seemed more primitive than even that aging copy of FrontPage, and required you to use the ancient and insecure FTP protocol to upload your work to your site.
Fast forward to the present.
Since GoddessJ and I are collaborating on the HTML/CSS stuff, I set up a Git repository on our internal office server (not the same machine as our web server) so we could keep our copies of the files synchronized, and the files would be automatically backed up with the rest of our source code repositories. As I finished that, it suddenly struck me that it should be possible to use Git to sync the files to the server too, right? That would have some major advantages over doing it manually or via something like DreamWeaver.
A web-search said that, if I had SSH access to the server and could run Git on it, then the answer was yes. 😀
The first problem was setting up SSH to access the web server properly. I’d already set it up for basic access, but it required manually entering a password each time; it needed to use public keys instead. (This is using Linux on the local system, where an always-available “keyring” program caches the SSH key password, which is different from a login password. Windows machines don’t have anything similar, so far as I know.)
I’d previously set up webserver as an alias to the web server in ~/.ssh/config, with the alternate port that our hosting company uses and some other configuration stuff it needed, so based on this page, all that was necessary was to copy the local key file (already on my machine) to the server. There was no SSH directory on the server yet, so after creating one (via mkdir ~/.ssh from an existing SSH session), this command uploaded it from the local machine…
scp ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub webserver:~/.ssh/authorized_keys…and then back to the existing SSH session to set the permissions…
chmod 700 ~/.ssh
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keysWe don’t have root access to the web server, so I didn’t try to chown the file to root as described. Despite that, it worked: now a simple ssh webserver takes me directly into the server. 🙂
According to another page the search had turned up, the currently-preferred way to use Git to update a website is described here. The directions there worked like a charm: after following them, I tested it by making a slight modification to the index.html page, committing it to the local repository, then doing a git push web… and IT WORKED! The copy of Git on the server apparently used the post-receive hook set up in those instructions to check out the changes as soon as I uploaded them, because when I refreshed the index page in my browser, I could see the change! GoddessJ and the cats were quite startled when I let out a loud cheer. What can I say, I love it when technology works as advertised. 😉
This setup will be a LOT better than using FTP. scp (the SSH secure-copy command) does the same things as FTP but securely, but you have to upload each changed file separately. With this, Git takes care of uploading everything (compression automatically included) and unpacking it to the proper directories on the server, and will only update the pages that have actually changed. You can also easily back up and restore the entire repository, via a single git clone command. With the main copy on our automatically-backed-up office server, it’s a pretty tough combination to beat.
If you’re setting up a web server, give it a try yourself. I’m pretty sure you’ll like it, especially if you’ve dealt with the other methods.
“DIY ‘Back to the Future’ hoverboard actually hovers”
Nice. I might even be tempted to buy something like that.
“RIP: Peak Oil – we won’t be running out any time soon”
It’s so hard to find a good, credible, looming disaster to panic about, and then those pesky scientists keep destroying the few that we manage to find. Runaway global warming keeps getting kicked in the teeth by inconvenient facts. Nuclear power disasters persistently refuse to be anywhere near as disastrous as people hope. Scientific advancement constantly fails to cause the end of the physical universe. Mother Nature is just too sentimental. And even God won’t even help.
You can’t even count on humans — hundreds of thousands of jihadist suicide attackers are just tauntingly refusing to blow themselves up on us, even when our governments go out of their way to give them reasons.
And now it looks like Peak Oil has joined the damp squib parade.
I think all we have left is the end of the Mayan long-count calendar, and most people stubbornly refuse to believe that.
Come on guys, give us a break — our politicians need disasters to whip the masses into a frenzy. How else are they going to keep us scared and manipulable, and from noticing their hands constantly in our pockets?
“How to remove your Google Web History”
I did this (thanks for the early heads-up, Ploni), though I had a few problems getting to the history page. Once I managed it, I was appalled to see how much stuff they’d managed to associate with me… nothing damning, just massive amounts of it. If someone wanted to cause me problems, or wanted to know what I was up to, that list would probably give them some good clues.
If you’ve got any Google account, I suggest you at least take a look at what the company has on you. Up to you whether to remove it or not, but once you’ve seen it, I suspect you will.