oiling the steel to sharpen the blade to shave the yak

March 28, 2010 in hacker, Internet, open source, pirates, programming, Python, surveillance, Viktor

Progress update on fixing the Vfeed. Dubai Airport has done something awful to their Web site; where once flights were organised in table rows with class names like “data-row2″, now, exactly half the flights are like that, they’ve been split between separate arrival, departure, and cargo-only pages, they only show the latest dozen or so [...]

memetic post you can safely ignore

March 28, 2010 in mastur/metablogging, music

Oh yes, blog theme tune. Auto-suggestion psychology. Elimination policy. The military-industrial pollution of democracy. It’s what we stand for. Oh yes, and bifurcation. In order to honour the essentially dualistic nature of the blog, here’s another version – how David Holmes saw it.

manufactured controversy

March 28, 2010 in unspeak

A question, inspired by this ruckus in Jamie Kenny’s comments. Is the notion of a manufactured controversy analytically useful? I can see that the ideas of fake consensus, or fear-uncertainty-and-doubt, are useful. But manufactured controversy presumes that someone is manufacturing the controversy. Presumably they are doing this to make a point of some sort, unless [...]

science!

March 28, 2010 in statistics, Tories

Here’s something interesting. I grabbed the last 6 months’ worth of national opinion polls from Wellsy’s and graphed the Tory lead in percentage points. On the tiny chart below, you’ll observe that the mean is 10 points; the hatched area shows one standard deviation each side of the mean, and I’ve plotted a linear trend [...]

FAIL

March 26, 2010 in hacker, Viktor

Yes, the Viktorfeed is indeed down. Dubai Airport has redesigned its Web site, and the parser is now not parsing, and the error handling has failed to handle an error where the target page loads but contains unexpected HTML. I’ve stopped the cron job to save filling up the system logs. There will now be [...]

neither Hoon nor Gove, and probably not Opik either

March 21, 2010 in politics

Has there been anyone in British politics quite as depraved as Geoff Hoon? Can my readers help? Probably the worst defence secretary ever. (You have to realise that he was probably one of the Prime Minister’s two designated deputies for nuclear retaliation – Byers, not so much, and at least he got us the railways [...]

and finally…

March 21, 2010 in funny ha ha

A thought: Raj Patel can honestly say that the lurkers really do support him in e-mail. Something quite hilarious about the notion of a blogger getting deified. On the Internet, no-one knows you’re God.

Sunday SDR, Chapter 6 – Key Strategic Questions

March 21, 2010 in MOD, strategy, stupid procurement

And we’re there! Chapter 6 – Key Questions for the future SDR – attempts to sum up the Green Paper and set some deliverable goals for the full SDR process. There are six key questions, which also get their own comments threads here; again, one of the salient features is how little there is about [...]

Sunday SDR, Chapter 5: People, Equipment, and Structures

March 21, 2010 in MOD, privatisation, strategy, stupid procurement

So we’ve had the grand tour d’horizon; we’ve had the self criticism; we’ve had the very rapid skip over the nuclear issue; we’ve had a careful balance of general-purpose capability and counterinsurgent language. Now for some hardcore bureaucracy. It’s Chapter 5 of the SDR Green Paper – People, Equipment, and Structures. This kicks off with [...]

Sunday SDR, Chapter 4: Partnership

March 21, 2010 in Afghanistan, special relationships, strategy, stupid procurement

Next slide, please. At last, we’re there – Chapter 4 of the SDR Green Paper tackles the classic question of alignment with the EU, NATO, and the special relationships. And it’s a highly post-American document. Our current relationships are mutually reinforcing. NATO remains the cornerstone of our security. However, as Europeans, we must take greater [...]