Geek Stuff category archive

UK Electoral Edition.

At Psychology Today, Christine Louise Hohlbaum asks

Are we losing our ability to actually interact with other people on a personal level? I’m wondering if we are.

(snip)

In response to a private conversation my PR colleagues and I were having about this topic (yes, via email!) , Herdon, VA-based PR professional Diane Johnson said, “We’re cultivating a culture of mushroom people who want to sit in front of their computer or on their PDAs and believe using their fingers (while keeping them off each other) counts as human interaction.”

To share your reaction, use your mobile phone to connect with the Pine View Farm mobile site (the URL is the same) and text in your comments.

Phantom Facebook user brings police to school:

Clearview Superintendent John Horchak III said the students reported the posts around Tuesday to school officials, who alerted police.

The person posting the comments called himself David Prezet, according to students, and students were concerned Thursday because the poster indicated he was coming to the school that day.

Horchak said the poster claimed he was going to enroll that day. That did not happen, nor is there a student at the Mullica Hill school by that name, the superintendent said.

It started with friend requests. Once the poster had a number of “Facebook friends” amongst the students, the posts turned creepy–from the story, apparently more nasty than threatening.

Having been a teenager and (probably contrary to the theories of my children, being able to remember what it was like) I suspect the posts were pretty creepy to motivate the kids to complain to the administration.

Why can’t they be like we were, stealing the occasional stop sign and tping the occasional teacher’s yard and driving fast on back roads on dark nights perfect in every way?

And this surprises us how?

Facebook users are inadvertently providing access to their names and in some cases even their friend’s names to advertising and Internet tracking companies, through some popular applications, the Wall Street Journal said.

According to the Journal’s investigation, the issue affects tens of millions of Facebook app users, including people who set their profiles to Facebook’s strictest privacy settings, the paper said.

Ethan Gilsdorf considers role-playing, Dungeons and Dragons, All Hallows Eve, and Facebook in the Boston Globe. A nugget:

Role-playing? Like that conflict-resolution exercise your sales team endured last year? Or role-playing, as in Dungeons & Dragons — that strange and wondrous game I (and perhaps you) played back in the Reagan administration, rolling dice in a basement and slaying goblins and dragons and snarfing bowls of Doritos?

I’d argue all these experiences — including posting a witty Facebook update — are cut from the same role-playing cloth. We all share that desire to be someone else. To be better, stronger, faster; to appear more handsome, more clever, more attractive than our fleshy selves might ever be. “My, aren’t we having fun?’’ say our photos, snapped while we’re half drunk and posted in a day-after haze. On my Match.com profile, I offer clues that might seduce. I suggest, in a whisper of pixels, “I am your ideal man.’’

Jen McCreight, grad student and aspiring biologist, thinks she has found part of the reason that scientific information is poorly received. Scientists can’t write, and the conventions of scientific literature accentuate their inability to write:

Most scientists are terrible writers.

And when I say terrible writers, I’m not just talking about English skills – though that certainly is a problem. When I had to read some of my classmates’ papers in undergrad, I was often thankful to find a sentence that wasn’t a fragment or a run-on. I don’t have perfect grammar, especially when informally blogging, but I can usually get general concepts across. And don’t even get me started on the organization of some papers. Your methods are where?

But most science writing is simply impenetrable. Everything seems to be lingo and jargon, to the point where they might as well be speaking another language. This problem gets worse with time, since fields are becoming more specialized, not less.

I think she has a point. Much academic writing is execrable.

I once had a boss who had recently earned a doctorate in an education-related field (not teaching or guidance–he was in business, not in the school system; it was in ed. psych., instructional design, or something like that).

He told me that, when his advisor read the draft of his dissertation, his advisor told him to rewrite it.

He said, “Why? I think it’s very well-written.”

The advisor said, “It’s too well-written. It’s too clear. The sentences are too short. The language is too straightforward. Go back and replace the sort words with long ones.”

Thirty additional pages later, his advisor told him the dissertation was ready to be submitted to the examining committee.

Yesterday I used the Trinity Rescue Kit Linux Live CD to clean up a balky Windows computer. The computer has been washed, dried, and pressed, and is ready to be returned to its owner.

Today I wrote a blog post about it at Geekazine.

From the Chicago Tribune:

With the election weeks away, Fremd High School teacher Jason Spoor asked students in his government class, some of them first-time voters, to research local candidates vying for office.

They would have 15 minutes and one learning tool: their cell phone.

(snip)

The lesson would have been impossible in the past. But with cell phones tucked in the book bags and pockets of three-fourths of today’s teens, many high schools are ceding defeat in the battle to keep hand-held technology out of class and instead are inviting students to use their phones for learning.

We are giving it away:

. . . a study commissioned by security company AVG found that 92 percent of U.S. children have some type of online presence by the time they are 2 years old. A third of U.S. mothers posted pictures of newborns, and 34 percent of U.S. moms said they had posted sonograms of their as-yet unborn child.

The study, conducted by Research Now, surveyed 2,200 mothers with young children in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan during the week of September 27. American parents, according to the study, are more likely to share baby pictures and information online than parents from other countries in the survey. Seventy-three percent of parents in the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Germany, and Italy said they were willing to share images of their infants.

Full Disclosure:

I use and recommend AVG products.

Via GNC.

I am trying to shape up my friend’s daughter’s Windows computer, which is feeling poorly and has lost several steps in its jump off the bag.

A day of struggling with anti-virus and spyware software, ill behaved programs that insist on starting at boot-updespite what I tell them to do, and other stuff like that there reminds me why I don’t miss Windows.

Addendum:

Next time I do this, I’m going to charge for it.

Also, Trinity Rescue Kit rocks. Nothing fixes a Windows box like a Linux CD.

Persons forget that the internet is a public place.

Bloomberg:

Porsche AG is blocking employees’ access to social-networking platforms such as Facebook Inc. and Xing to shield the sports-car maker from industrial espionage.

Porsche, based in Stuttgart, Germany, is concerned that foreign intelligence services may be spying on workers posting “confidential” information on Facebook and other Web-based services, exposing the carmaker to unwanted observation, Dirk Erat, a Porsche spokesman, said today by phone.

The story does not indicate whether Porsche is following to lead of certain American sports leagues in forbidding employees to use personal devices to twit, only that it is blocking access through the company network.

I suspect that Porsche is over-reacting. But, after all, one’s employer’s computers belong to one’s employer. Persons tend to forget that.

Click for a larger image.

Lately, I’ve been spending most of my on line “social” time in forums trying to learn and teach stuff.

Via Blue Ridge Data.

Facebook is playing privacy games again, this time with phone numbers.

I wrote it up at Geekazine. If you have a Facebook account and don’t know about the stealth entries in your Facebook Phonebook yet, you really must read this. Then turn it off (if you can; I haven’t been able to yet–the “turn it off” link crashes I finally got through, but turning it off did not seem to affect entries from other persons’ accounts. Dammit, I don’t even want a Facebook Phonebook).

Zuckerberg keeps supplying evidence that he is not a very nice nor respectful person.

Joanna Weiss considers sincerity and social networking in the Boston Globe. A nugget:

With its elegant user interface, its privacy holes, and its vast popularity, Facebook has changed our relationship with the world — allowed us to project ourselves so broadly, so completely, that it feels like a revolution.

(snip)

Facebook is easy to love because it’s all about self-love, the ultimate online ego boost.

Aside:

I would hardly consider the Facebook interface “elegant”; contrasted to Myspace, though, it’s not actively annoying.

Malcolm Gladwell thinks that social media will not change the world.

Computer hackers managed to steal $600,000 from a New Jersey shore town’s bank account.

Officials say $200,000 still hasn’t been recovered.

TD Bank notified Brigantine on Tuesday that multiple wire transfers had taken place from its account.

There’s a reason I don’t pay bills on line (I will order merchandise on line).

Electrons are easier to forge than paper.

The stuxnet malware is getting lots of gee-whiz coverage in the news lately.

This, from the Christian Science Monitor, is typical:

The Stuxnet malware has infiltrated industrial computer systems worldwide. Now, cyber security sleuths say it’s a search-and-destroy weapon meant to hit a single target. One expert suggests it may be after Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant.

One thing that is hardly mentioned in most of the stories is this:

It’s a Windows virus. It works only on Windows computers. Here’s what Symantec has to say about it (emphasis added):

We’ve been analyzing W32.Stuxnet, which is a threat that uses a legitimate digital certificate from a major third party and takes advantage of a previously unknown bug in Windows; ultimately, it searches for SCADA systems and design documents. The findings of our analysis are being documented in a series of blog articles.

Also, take the golly-gosh-gee-Batman-It’s-the-Joker coverage with several grains pounds of salt.

Pretty soon, they’ll sue Sesame Street for being “brought to you by the letter i.”

From El Reg:

Steve Jobs & Co submitted the voluminous document in a dispute with Sector Labs, a startup that’s developing a projector called the Video Pod, Wired.com reported. The Reg has been unable to confirm this because the filing (PDF, we’re told) was evidently more than the Patent and Trademark Office website could bear.

Apple is reportedly arguing that a video projector with the word “Pod” in its name would cause confusion with its own iPod products.

(snip)

A lawyer representing Sector Labs tells the publication there’s a growing trend of dominant tech firms trying to assume ownership of ordinary words.

From the BBC.