The Lair

There are lots of things that you’d want computers to simplify for you – but the obvious methods for simplification don’t actually work. For example, finding out if a user entered email is actually valid. The description and code involved (see here and the monstrous chunk of code here) belies the apparent simplicity of the task.

So it was for my own little task. What I wanted to do was write a general purpose method (in PHP, actually – but the language itself is unimportant) to infer the blog address, given a permalink. So, given any post URL – I wanted to find the address of the blog itself. You’d think that this was a relatively straightforward task. But, if the preamble didn’t alert you already, it wasn’t quite as simple as I first envisaged.

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In any social encounter of significance, there are always things that I really shouldn’t say. No matter how pithy or accurate those observations may be, opening my cakehole inevitably leads to recriminations, raised eyebrows and the descent of an uneasy silence on the conversation (also see: dropping a clanger, putting your foot in it, open mouth-insert foot moment etc).

This then, is part of the problem.
Paul Graham »

Nerds are always getting in trouble. They say improper things for the same reason they dress unfashionably and have good ideas: convention has less hold over them.

Of course, this isn’t to say that I have either good ideas or I dress unfashionably. (One of those is definitely true, I have the clothes to prove it) – but I hold an opinion about any number of things, some of which seem to fly against the conventional wisdom, or prevailing fickle winds of online opinion, or whatever you may want to call the consensus. Actually, so does everyone else for their little niche. As Scott Adams observes, everyone is an idiot at something.

Let’s start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?

Even calling it consensus is strange. Take politics. An entire country could be overwhelmingly conservative in its political outlook. As these things work, the more liberal (or conservative in the opposite extreme, take your pick) congregate online. That makes voicing a conservative opinion online pretty much a no-no – lest you be shunned, called a rethuglican and all manner of other epithets. Substitute any other political divide as you see fit. I’ve seen this repeated in many different places.

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Yet another act in the umpteenth rehashing of “Yes, I’m a [random nationality]. My opinions – they are like a single falling leaf in autumn” kicked off recently. I’m slightly nonplussed why people actually think this is worth nattering on about any longer. Is this the same sort of misplaced optimism that has a website asking whom the world would elect? Because I don’t think the Americans are really interested in having their presidential elections determined by the six billion odd inhabitants of the planet; regardless of (or in spite of) what said inhabitants may think about GWB.

And since I made a reference to GWB, it’s only fair that I link to MoveOn. Which is taking aim at Facebook. Yes, new advertising scheme. The most disturbing part about this whole setup is that it may use cookie sharing (like Microsoft Passport). Help Pages here – a tad sparse on information. But really, if you’re in the UK – then this is pretty much nothing. 25 million personal records lost in the post. Yes – names, dates of birth, bank account details. The lot.

An interesting observation about news coverage of the data security incident. I know the field reasonably well. I probably can’t spot the sophisticated half-truths, but I can pick out the idiots. The number of idiots interviewed in the past couple of days about the incident makes me wonder if all the stories are spun in the same clumsy haphazard way.

And finally, ah, England. Did you really deserve to qualify at all? At least now you’re rid of that bumbling underachiever who allegedly coached you for 18 odd months. And on a different sport, the tour match scorecard almost looks like the scorecard for the Aussies in the tests.