The Lair

Despite the somewhat strange title, I try not to confine my learning to a specific time or time period. This week however, has seen some interesting (well, obviously interesting to me - perhaps not quite so interesting to you) facts emerge.

Newton Gunasinghe and various links between culture, economics and civil war was interesting. Is it promoting an academic theory after the fact or the fundamental reasons for 1983? I guess that’s open to interpretation but it sounded like a plausible angle to me.

It is possible to run a ssh server that listens on multiple ports. Why this is necessary is a long, tedious and probably inappropriate explanation for this forum - but suffice to say that I needed it; and I was gratified to find that it was so simple.

I am going through another period of text-editor upheaval these days. I do this periodically, for no apparent reason. It’s not discontentment with my existing editor(s) of choice - merely an evaluation of the field for something that might be just a little bit better. Thus far - I’ve examined UltraEdit (very nice, but oh so oogly), Intype (pretty, but somewhat dubious in functionality) and a Windows port of the text editor making a splash in the Mac world (TextMate) - the almost-there-but-not-quite E-Text editor. No clear winner yet, but I’m trying to find out why people rave about TextMate.

Apropos of nothing, I had not one but two people express surprise and possibly astonishment when I walked them through the cuteness of xargs and then took them back to my trusty Windows desktop for a demonstration. Clearly, knowing about Linux is verboten if you deign to use the desktop of the evil empire. I must have not read that memo. (The link is only necessary because I’ve been calling some other place an evil empire for a while this week. It’s necessary to disambiguate these things, ye know).

She has at least one tune with an addictive riff in the chorus. (Did I mean riff? Probably not. More like a popping and clicking noise). I know this sounds horribly judgemental (so what else is new) but I had her pegged as a media manipulator and possibly something of a [interesting-backstory-sells-records] publicity shark. She might be all of those, but I liked what I heard so far.

Also, bwahahahahahahaha to everyone who wrote off the Clinton juggernaut. I expect the story editors at the BBC to look embarassed (actually, pretty much everyone will). An interesting factoid I picked up last night though - Clinton the hubby lost 6 primaries on the trot in 1992.

ircatwork. For those with tedious firewalling or connectivity problems. Tried it out this week, was gratified to find that it works. Even better, a quick google revealed a few more sites like it.

In this story, a scientist (or several thousand) huddle in a dusty laboratory somewhere. After years of hard work (aided and abetted by a manservant with a Slavic name and questionable clothing tastes); the scientist finally makes a breakthrough discovery. “It’s alive, [name of Slavic origin]“; he shrieks in triumph. Only the discovery happens to be something that turns around and does him in.

Frankenstein? Almost. This little discovery is called personalization.

A couple of weeks ago, I read The Polarization of Extremes - arguing that the internet makes it incredibly easy to self sort, or find a website/news outlet which caters to precisely the editorial slant that you prefer. In the old days, this was considered a good thing. Your news, your way. The article, however, paints a very different picture. It is now possible to swan from one site to another without ever seeing a dissenting or alternative point of view. If your push button issue happens to involve the birth of someone two thousand or two thousand five hundred or however many years ago, if you believe that the aliens will take us all away, if you believe that the Bush dynasty is good, bad or something other than ugly - well, there’s apparently a site or two dozen on the internet just for you.

Is this a bad thing? Well, if it stopped there - then maybe it isn’t. However, there is another interesting effect described.

The creation of enclaves of like-minded people had a second effect: It made both liberal groups and conservative groups significantly more homogeneous — and thus squelched diversity. Before people started to talk, many groups displayed a fair amount of internal disagreement on the three issues. The disagreements were greatly reduced as a result of a mere 15-minute discussion. In their anonymous statements, group members showed far more consensus after discussion than before. The discussion greatly widened the rift between liberals and conservatives on all three issues

So, what they’re really saying is that people actually discuss things within their own group and come to a consensus. Not bad, huh? Or, I suppose left unsaid, they leave the group and find somewhere more amenable. But it doesn’t end there either.

A key consequence of this kind of self-sorting is what we might call enclave extremism. When people end up in enclaves of like-minded people, they usually move toward a more extreme point in the direction to which the group’s members were originally inclined. Enclave extremism is a special case of the broader phenomenon of group polarization, which extends well beyond politics and occurs as groups adopt a more extreme version of whatever view is antecedently favored by their members

Does this sound familiar? Having observed a few online communities, it certainly struck a chord with me.

Clearly, despite its fairly recent lack of popularity, holding an extremist position is not all bad - the article cites a few instances where holding an extremist, contrary position was a good thing (ie:, the antislavery movement). Then again, a counter example can be found in the actions of some of the more militant environmental campaigners. Even a good stance can be diluted, dismissed or simply made easier to ignore by the actions of extremists. (Use your own examples here. There are lots).

The problem is, can people who have held an extremist position change? Dunbar’s Number seems to indicate that, the larger the community - the less likely the chances of change.

There are times when three hours of fascinating clicking on Wikipedia links can produce something useful. This is most likely not one of those times.

Update: I found this link which I really really like - it breaks down and quantifies Dunbar’s number into other spheres of activity.

A good while ago (maybe six months or longer), I decided to write a small logminer bot. Nothing very special, most likely a solved problem; you’d contend. I’d agree. Parsing webserver logs is like constructing a text editor in 2007, most often a useless reinvention of something that has already been done to death. There are log mining programs aplenty. The world really doesn’t need any more. I could do something more productive, like sleep. Watch television. Read more comics. Or (at the time), write a thesis.

Yes, you’d say that. I know I certainly thought it. Yet, as these things transpire - it turned out that I did actually need this bot. Some logminers (hell, most of them) give statistical overviews of website visits. Problem status? solved. Other bots (like fail2ban or denyhosts) are used for security purposes. My bot? Somewhere in the middle. What I wanted to do was present myself with an overview of visits and (this is the interesting part); have the bot do some trivial cross checking if the access was legit. And by legit, I mean not a spambot and not from an open proxy.

By and large, the bot works reasonably well to sift out the most suspicious looking IPs from the scores of legitimate accesses. But a consequence of having the bot running is that I tend to get a fairly detailed, comprehensive summarized list of the most interesting accesses on a given day - something I wouldn’t have bothered to check otherwise. Of a few days ago - this included some visits via archive.org - the internet archiver.

Which leads seamlessly onto the earliest sightings for El Goog here. And although I didn’t really stop to work this one out till now - the internet archive is a place of fascinating discoveries. For example, Last Man on Earth (an old skool version of the fairly terrible I Am Legend). Lots more feature films (including Beat The Devil, which I haven’t seen for a while). Probably best to start at the movies and films index.

It’s like Wikipedia in fascinating discoveries and potential to waste time - but without the flamewars on every Talk: page. Interesting stuff.