F.act..Frag.m.ents.

2005-07-08T23:26:00.000+01:00

Post from python

RealClimate

2004-12-19T00:01:00.000Z

..I would recommend you to check out RealClimate. It is basically a bunch of qualified climate scientists who want to dispel any disinformation about global warming that is in the media. What's so refreshing is that as scientists they don't just post and leave it there, but they respond to their commenters and adjust their articles accordingly. This is true science and these guys are doing a great service to their profession.

Depressing stories of the day

2004-12-14T21:13:00.000Z

- George Monbiot writes: "I hope that newspapers do not represent public opinion. If they do, it means that we consider the Home Secretary's love affair more important than the resumption of the most deadly conflict since the second world war. On Sunday, the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), already responsible for 3.8 million deaths, started again. If you missed it, you're in good company."

- Also try to check out Poisoned planet on radio 4: "Up to 75 million people in West Bengal and Bangladesh are drinking water contaminated with arsenic after an initiative to provide safe water went tragically wrong.

It was assumed that underground water which flowed from the Himalayas would be clean, when in fact it is laced with deadly arsenic which has unleashed a human tragedy described by experts as greater than Chernobyl or Bhopal"

Yahoo playing dirty with gmail

2004-12-13T22:01:00.000Z

Here's an interesting fact. If you send a gmail invite to a yahoo address then yahoo classifys it as spam.

Coincidence. I think not!!!!

Bush in this seasons fashion wear

2004-12-12T00:39:00.000Z

Hmmm, I'm not sure if Blair would have worn one of those

digital london

2004-12-11T00:49:00.000Z

....Here's some recent interesting pages on London (my current home):

- Someone has taken a bunch of the BBC traffic cams and stuck them on a single webpage. Interesting page, although a little disturbing (remember the film sliver!)

- Look in any design book and they will mention the underground map as a great example of simplifying something complicated. Its not perfect though. Stations on the tube map may look miles away from each other may actually only be a short walk away. So Rod McClaren decided to draw a tube map with walklines. A great idea!

- NYCLondon blog has some amazing pinhole photography of london buildings

- Site dedicated to photographing derelict buildings, cafes and other premises in london.

Setting up drupal

2004-12-08T22:27:00.000Z

....Here's some notes on setting up Drupal for personal reference. I thought it would be fairly simple and besides from a few quirks it was. Documentation was okay but could again do with a few updates here and there. From my experience I can say that an average user would not be able to install such an web app

I guess I'm a typical user. I have ftp access to a host for my webpages and cpanel access with various features to control the sql etc. The version I was installing of Drupal was 4.5.1

- Download drupal. I want my drupal site to be www.investigata.com/cms (my new empty domain). That means it will be a "subdirectory installation" which makes it a bit more fiddly than a "simple installation" (e.g to www.investigata.com)

- Unzipped and put into the folder www/cms on my hosted site (through ftp)

- Now to set up the mysql databases. Two stages to this. Firstly I created a database through the mySQL maintainance in cpanel. For the purposes of this blog I created a new database "test" in this window which automatically is created as mylogin_test by this application.

- Go to phpMyAdmin (well hidden link at bottom of the mysql admin page) and opens the db management window. Select the database to be mylogin_test.

- Select the "sql" tab in the main frame and browse for a file called database.mysql in the drupal installation in the includes directory. I still had this file in the downloaded zip file on my local machine so I used that version of the file. Click "go". This script should now automatically create all the sql tables.

- Next allow the application to access the mysql database. We need to create a drupal "user" (which will actually be the website). I called it something like mylogin_drupal. This is done in the mysql admin page in cpanel

- Give the user mylogin_drupal access to the mylogin_test database we created. This is done in the mysql maintainance window. Select the appropriate database and user. Tick "ALL" in the privilidges boxes (beware of shoddy interface which means you might tick the wrong box) and then hit the "Add User to DB button". Now we're cookin!!

- Now time to modify some files. This could have been done locally on my machine before I uploaded them to the host.

- The folder structure I use was www/cms as the base so all folders are referenced from that
\www\cms\sites\includes\conf.php (this is wrong in the online guide)
changed
$db_url = "mysql://username:password@localhost/drupal"
to
$db_url = "mysql://mylogin_drupal:my_password@localhost/drupal"
Here I've set the username and password to that of the database user I set up in the previous step

changed
$base_url = "http://www.example.com";
to
$base_url = "http://www.investigata.com/cms";

- Because I'm using a subfolder e.g www.investigata.com/cms instead of www.investigata.com I need to change some extra settings

www\cms\.htaccess

changed
ErrorDocument 404 /index.php
to
ErrorDocument 404 /cms/index.php

changed
#RewriteBase /subdirectory
to
RewriteBase /cms

- It should be working now. I went to www.investigate.com/cms and the site was ready to roll. Creating a login and a user name trought he site made me the administrator

- So I thought it was all perfectly going, but i discovered a slight problem. When i clicked on some links, particularly in administration I got a "file cannot be created" (or similar) error. To solve this, I simply created a folder called "files" in the directory www\cms. This is not well documented at all and I had to scour the web to solve it

- Cron jobs keep all the cleanup and config files ticking over nicely. It runs the file www.investigata.com/cms/cron.php. I set this throught the "cron jobs" in cpanel. I used the "advance unix style command". To run once a day the command is
0 0 * * * ~/www/cms/scripts/cron-lynx.sh
The file pointed to is a supplied script in drupal which will now run every day at midnight. I had a couple of problems getting this to work (I debugged by switching the cron job to every 1 minute by replacing the 0 0 with * * and getting any error). One problem was that I had to change permissions on the script file to allow the computer to exectute it (this was done inside my ftp application)

So there you have it an, heres a link to the empty site, First time I've installed such a script from scratch. Good bit of fun. As I say most of this info is in the drupal admin guide .

I'm hoping to mess with the look and feel so likely I will document this as well in the future.

Stories from Africa this week

2004-12-07T22:33:00.000Z

1) WHO is making sure that cheap generic ARV drugs that are produced in India won't be around for very long. So the only option for people with AIDS in Africa will be the expensive versions (or nothing)

2) Uk continues to hire all the nurses from Africa and screw up their hospitals

3) Anarchy may sound like fun, but Somalia a country with no central government is proof that it doesn't

Wikalong

2004-12-01T21:49:00.000Z

....An interesting new extension for firefox is the wikalong extension. It is a sidebar, and every single page on the web potentially has its own "wikalong" page that appears in the sidebar.

Uses? Well, the big one is for people to comment on the news stories they read on the web and get equal coverage. A bad example might be the flippant comment I just added here. Anyone with the extension who goes to this page can now chuckle an my biting wit!! (graffiti, or adding some passwords for nyt are the other alternative uses)

Personally, i'd pefer it on the right of the screen but you can't move the sidebar it seems and it feels a bit clunky (still beta). But i'll definitely keep an eye on this one

Clinton and Bush: "A Tight Spot"

2004-12-01T21:09:00.000Z

.....Classic snap of Bush and Clinton at the recent opening of the Clinton library. Bush think he's at a baseball game so tries to squeeze past Clinton and get away quickly to avoid the traffic!!

You gotta love those business presentations

2004-11-20T00:50:00.000Z

....I recently moved into a less corporate job at a university, and one of the joys of working there is that you never hear anyone using "business speak". Yes, it must have been a few months now since I heard anyone using phrases like "lets take that off line" and "synergy" and it feels good.

I think that culture is summed up by this blog entry. How come every scientific and business presentation needs to have some type of Venn diagram in it?

Personally it doesn't beat some of the presentation graphs I saw at my former company, such as the legendary "Parthenon of values" where each pillar of the mythical building contained a "value" the company stood for.

The chaos of walking around in London

2004-11-20T00:34:00.000Z

....After having to deal with the every day chaos of walking around London (people jams, crap everywhere, complicate road crossings), it is great to see that someone is trying to do something.

The public space survey of london (pdf - quite big) entitled "Towards a fine city for people" is a great read with fantastic diagrams explaining the chaos of Londons streets. It is also (unintentionally) very humerous, I'm sure a lot of people will relate to it.

MP3 recommendation for today

2004-11-18T22:41:00.000Z

If you didn't see the spoof educational BBC TV program "look around you" a few years back then you missed a classic. To whet the appetite for the new series coming soon,I've just discovered their section of electronic music downloads from the old series, They're spectacularly good.

Who needs CCTV when you've got this

2004-11-18T22:03:00.000Z

...If you want to the future of surveillance check out this 2.5 GPixel photograph. When you can zoom in on a car that looks like a dot in the original picture to see the number plate then you realise the power. Imagine a camera using this technology. No need for a bunch of puny CCTV cameras just stick a few of these babys up

Take one country, add some badly planned regime change

2004-11-13T23:45:00.000Z

......Even if they had tried intentionally, I doubt the Americans and the British could have made a bigger mess of Iraq (why does everyone just blame Bush, remember Blair should be equally called to account).

Newsnight had an excellent piece in their show last night (ram of show) about a young guy who was basically a rich entrepeneur making soft drinks in Fallujah. To cut a long story short, he describes how his uncle and cousin have been killed, his town has been destroyed to rubble, his business and home were bombed and then looted, and finally he was arrested (if you find plastic in a bottling factory it may turn out not be WMD). This guy is completely reasonable and he doesn't go into any anti western tirades or anything like that. But just to see the anger as he walks thorugh the rubbles of his factory is really sobering.

And Naomi Klein, who has done more to expose the hypocrisy in Iraq than almost anyone else, is talking in the Guardian about the recent bombing raids in Fallujah. There not a great deal new there, but she summarises the whole mess as a tale of two elections. Mainly the American one, and the way the Iraqi election have been cynically manipulated to suit the American elections.

My verdict on firefox

2004-11-13T23:14:00.000Z

Well I've cursed Internet Explorer crashing on me for far too long (and no i never sent them an error report either). So I downloaded firefox.

After 10 minutes my verdict: What's the hype about? This does nothing interesting at all!

After 2 days and adding the delicious, google and gesture extensions: Wow, this is fantastic!

Gestures is definitely the killer funtionality that will make firefox for me. It looks cool and it is amazing useful (particularly when you have a tiny desk and everytime you go up to the back button you have to pick up the mouse).

Blogging fallujah

2004-11-12T23:19:00.000Z

....Kevin Sites has been in Iraq blogging for a while now (formally working for the US conglomorates but due to his blogging, now as a "freelance"). The pictures he's posted today of Fallujah are fantastic. This one of a marine about to attack is disturbing. He looks really young, he looks angry but he also looks really scared. There's something about his expression and those sunglasses that he is wearing that really burnt the picture into my head.

This is the type of thing that make blogging so great and important.

This is the internet

2004-11-12T23:16:00.000Z

.....I'm really enjoying this blog currently. It is written by Tom, a bloke who works on cable boat that travel around fixing cable under the sea. It feels like another world.

Cultural highlights

2004-10-28T22:56:00.000+01:00

....Seems everyones down complaining about politics, complaining about technology, and now winter is coming. Definitely time to do something cultural, Here my recent sources of inspiration:

Music

Music for airports: Brian Eno - From 1979 and still sounding fantastic whilst on the tube. Pioneer.

Evil 7: You can be special too - Check out the track "Crooked" with Def Jux rapper Aesop Rock. Elements of hip-hop, dance and rock all in there somewhere.

Company Flow: Little Jonny in the Hospital - And after hearing the above album, I had to listen to this hip-hop/breaks masterpiece again.

Book:

The Secret Agent: Joseph Conrad - Underground foreign spy networks in London, people blowing themselves up, psychopaths fighting for a cause. Ring any bells?

Film

Repulsion: 60's film about a women losing her mind in South Kensington. A film I can really relate to!!

TV

The Day Today: Oh yes, it may be a few years old, but a recent hmv sale prompted me to buy the videos of the classic news satire . And it is still fantastic to watch. I still chuckle everytime I think about the characters; Brant, the physical cartoonist from the Daily Telegraph, and Jaques Jaques Liverot, providing 24 hour intellectual comment on the incoming news.

Random

If you're in London go and see Bruce Nauman's sound installation in the Tate modern main hall. It's free, it's freeky and it's completely amazing. You walk along and here different voices, that's it.

And whilst your at the Tate modern, pop upstairs and see "Time Zones" an exhibition of modern film/video from around the world. Its not all great (e.g Wolfgang Staehle's live webcam of a castle = shite), but there were two brilliant pieces for me. Fikret Atay super lo-fi film of some Kurdish kids humming next to cash machine, and Fiona Tan super high resolution video installation about a coming of age festival in Japan make it worth the fiver entrance.

RIP John Peel

2004-10-26T21:42:00.000+01:00

....Now two of the greatest English men of recent times have died in the last two months. First Cloughie and now John Peel.

A very sad day indeed. Also quite a surprise, as I was only listening to his Radio 1 show recently. He was only 65 and died of a heart attack whilst on holiday in Peru.

I wouldn't credit Peel as being the sole reason for my love of music. But he's certainly a very large factor. A Radio 1 DJ since it started in the 60's, he has the unique standing of never playing a record from a playlist, except by choice. To last that long without compromise, particular in recent decades is a testament to his integrity. If there were more people like him, then we wouldn't be swimming in the crap of overproduced commercial albums.

This is an interview I was reading the other day and I think this quote sums him up.

Recently I got sent a demo tape by a musician called Jawbone, from Detroit. I thought there was some good stuff on it, and so I played it on the show. Afterwards, he was bombarded with emails from the UK and throughout Europe. He hadn't had much exposure in the US - even in Detroit, nobody seemed to know much about him - but his music generated a big reaction. Because it had, he came over to London and played live on the show: it was an extraordinary moment for him, because he'd never even been to this country before and suddenly there he was, live on air. It would be great to see radio taking the chance of giving more people those moments of personal triumph, of being able to perform their music live for radio listeners in so many different places.

It was amazing how he would literally play anything that he liked, no matter how it came to his studio. Personally, he's cost me a fortune in CD's. Some of bands who became popular, but many more who stayed in obscurity: Smog, Sonic Subjunkies (remember that one? What a track!), Yo la Tengo, Stars of the Lid, Psychic Warriors of Ghia, Orbital, Hydroplane, Boards of Canada, ESG.....

Recently Peel's shows have added a new dimension. He was one of the first DJ's to introduce emailing into his show, and the show recently felt like a parnership between him and his listeners. Someone would email requesting a random post-punk album from 1973 he remembered Peel playing many years ago, and Peel (who presented some shows from his home) would get one of his kids to go out to the shed and get it to be played later in the show.

To be honest I think that to commemorate his passing, Radio 1 should remove the playlist from all shows for a week. Its the only fitting tribute.

Another public terminal crashes

2004-10-23T23:59:00.000+01:00

..... Here's one from the main information board in my home town of Cardiff. Public information at it best!! [found on flickr]

The Power of Nightmares

2004-10-21T00:30:00.000+01:00

...If you think about the ratio of the amount of TV people watch, and the amount of useful knowledge they acquire, I suspect that it would be quite low. So I commend to you an outstanding new documentary series on BBC2, The Power of Nightmares. It is an analysis of the political technique of using fear to control the population, and a history of the "war against terror". It is also the first occasion that I've ever had to get a pen and paper mid program to write some notes, which I will summarise here for my own use as well as anyone else.

So there were two parallel stories, which begin to merge closely:
---

--1. Radical Islam

They start with Sayyd Qutb, an Egyptian who in the 50's, who on returning to Egypt from America became concerned with the slow dilution of Egyptian religious culture by the Westernised values. He joined a political group, the muslim brotherhood which tried to support politicians with similar views in power. They initially supported the incoming president Gamal Abd an-Nasser, but on seeing his close partnership with the Americans they rebelled against him.

Eventually Qutb ended up being jailed for his political work, and during this time he was tortured by Egyptian guards who had been trained by the CIA. In jail he also developed his theories about "Jahiliyya". The philosophies' basis is that individual ideas of prosperity and individualism brought about by western culture are a corrupting disease that destroy society and have to be stopped. The leaders are ripe for assassination because they are themselves "infected by this disease". Eventually in 1966 Qutb was executed by the Egyptians, but his writings, mostly written during his time in prison have lived on.

People such as Ayman al-Zawahiri, the mentor of Bin Laden, and groups such as Islamic Jihad, fighting against secular enemies, extended the philosophies beyond just the evil of the leaders, to all muslims who agreed with status quo. They were also infected by the disease of western society and hence, they were expendable.

--2. Straussian and the Neo-cons

This starts with Leo Strauss who was a political philosopher during the mid 1900's. I won't detail the philosophies here, but in a nutshell, it is about the rejection of the modernist agenda and an appreciation of the dangers of modern Western thought. Well....that might not be an accurate representation, but that's how it became to be interpreted.

So, in the 70's the "Straussians" seemed to be a loose collection of people in Washington with a conservative outlook, who agreed on the potential dangers of individualism in society and the need for an encompassing goal to unite the populace. Come 75: Nixon, Kissenger, Vietnam, Watergate and suddenly they had an opportunity. Wolfovitz and Rumsfeld found themselves in power.

The program focuses on Rumsfelds conviction, in disagreement with President Ford, about the dangers of Russian to America at the time, his underlying "Straussian" philosophies being an influence to his beliefs. The CIA disagreed with him about Russia, but Rumsfeld managed to get an inquiry into the issue, which was headed up by a team of Straussians, called Team B. It resulted in a report that exaggerated the danger of the Russia to the US. An example used in the program, is of the Russians not having any "Acoustic Measurement" devices on their subs, so Team B concluded that they must have newer and more dangerous secret weapons. Was this their genuine belief or just a tool to increase their control and exert their philosophies in government?

The Strausians campaigned together behind their growing influence and one of their members was Reagan. They supported him in his campaign for president, the first real campaign to use the religious vote. Reagan campaigned partly on a ticket of the moral degeneration of society due to the liberals, and how the religious had to vote to take back that power. In the program they described the religous right vote as being effectively "the troops for the neo-cons" at the time.

In power the neo-cons again tried to increasingly demonstrate the threats of Russia, but this time in a new way. The new idea was that most of the flashpoints in the world at the time, Ireland, PLO, Baader Meinhof, Afganistan etc were being financed by the Russians. The CIA again disageed, but a secret policy of eradicating this new threat from the Russian was agreed by Reagan.

--And so part 1 ends
-----

Very important and very insightful stuff. Wierd though how the Islamists and the neo-cons are using virtually the same philosophys in their respective parts of the world. Certainly something that made me jump out my chair that I hadn't thought about before.

This is exactly what you'd expect from director Adam Curtis who's previous documentary on the BBC was the equally enlightening "Century of the Self", which described the history of the Freuds and their massive influence of modernism.

Have you heard the one about Toys R Us and Iraq?

2004-10-17T00:28:00.000+01:00

....Naomi Klein has written an important article in the guardian today. Just when you thought the iraqis couldn't get more impoverished. Now they've got to pay money to KFC, toys R us and pepsi.

You couldn't make it up.

newspaper double speak

2004-10-17T00:23:00.000+01:00

....Well, I'm not usually one for shouting about the junk that you get from the tabloids in the UK, it just provokes them more. But there was particularly bad piece in the Sun today, which I happened to pick up when I was travelling on the tube. Its not archived online thankfully at the moment, but its a nasty piece written by Clarkson.

He trying to be his normal provocative self, by trying to put down the myth of multiculturalism and political correctness in the context of a number of recent shootings in the UK, but he's overstepped the mark this time.

"Spare us from these multi-cultural killers"

This is the title...What a start. You couldn't write "spare us from these black killers" because that's blatantly racist so he's gone for multicultural instead to disguise the fact

"we have seen Sol Cambell playing for England but where's the multi-culturalism in that? He doesn't lope about at the back in a fug of cannabis smoke, with a big picture of Haile Selasse on the back of his shirt"

Well here he's either implying that anyone who believes in multiculturalism is a pot smoker or he could be saying that most black people smoke pot???

"you have the NHS which we're told wouldn't function without Indian doctors or Nigerian nurses. True, but they don't bring their culture to our hospitals. They don't try and cure ear ache with the bark of the jojoba tree"

This is an absolutely discraceful line. Clarkson is implying that the inherent culture for these countries is some type of voodoo or tribal medicine. This is completely untrue as anyone who has been to these countries will know. So he is using a blatently untrue fact to belittle whole culture or race. I would say this line certainly comes within this definition of racism

"Its multi-culturalism that this week alone has seen a 14-year old girl killed and a toddler hospitalised"

Here comes the doublespeak again. Its like a code language multi culturalism, political correctness, asylum seekers. If you hide an article behind this language you can effectively write anything you like and know one will care

"You can bring your exotic food and your work ethic. You can bring your religion and you clothes. But if its not too much bother, we'd rather you left your tendancy to shoot people with disrespect in the back strrets of Kingston"

mmm...what else is there to say....

Beyond the post-it note

2004-10-14T23:05:00.000+01:00

....Whilst doing some work on a closely related project recently, I've hit on the beginnings of a possible great social platform based around collage. I guess the first step is something like this . The work i'm doing is kind of related and if i can just shoehorn the project the right way, I could be a conversion to flash away from a new supercharged social platform...(at the moment its just wishful thinking)