Telecom Kremlinology

Bruce Sterling:

*Tomi Ahonen is my favorite industry analyst. Studying the mobile business is like Kremlinology; it's boring on the face of it, and most of the heavy operators are evil people who lie all the time, even to each other and themselves. And then, by sparkling contrast, there's this Ahonen guy. He's such a committed and relentless contrarian that he comes across like Solzhenitsyn.

*Here he is weeping for an entire half-hour about Nokia. And he's right, y'know; the fate of Nokia really is a fantastic business story. A gigantic story of Gothic High-Tech collapse.

[I've no idea who Tomi Ahonen is, I just adore the description]

Cappadocia in Brooklyn

BLDGBlog proposes Dark City with added spelunking:

It would be interesting to live in a city, at least for a few weeks, ruled by an insane urban zoning board who require all new buildings—both residential and commercial—to include elaborate artificial caves. Not elevator shafts or emergency fire exits or public playgrounds: huge fake caves torquing around and coiling through the metropolis. Caves that can be joined across property lines; caves that snake underneath and around buildings; caves that arch across corporate business lobbies in fern-like sprays of connected chambers. Plug-in caves that tour the city in the back of delivery trucks, waiting to be bolted onto existing networks elsewhere

Time for some more fanboy squee about Sheila O'Malley. I love how, whatever topic O'Malley is superficially discussing, she will inevitably depict it in the light of the same central values and passions. We know what O'Malley loves -- in people, in film, in life. And those values bleed through into everything she writes.

Take this article Melissa Leo, published just after she won a Best Supporting Actress oscar. Leo clearly ticks a couple of O'Malley's boxes. One, professional masochism, or at least willingness to push work to the point of discomfort:

Leo seems to thrive on the challenge of discomfort, especially if it helps to immerse her in the world of the character. From the first closeup of Leo in Frozen River, huddled in her battered truck, smoking, teeth stained yellow, her face worn with desperation, we know that we are in the presence of something genuine

And secondly, the love of emotional intensity and a certain degree of chaos:

As Patricia Neal and Gena Rowlands had done before her, Leo has the capacity to crack open a character’s inner life like very few actresses working today. She is in this job for the mess, for the unresolved issues of her characters, and this has led her through an unconventional and unglamorous path.

FB and the happiness arms race

Facebook encourages a sort of 'happiness' arms race, where most people seek to convey the brightest possible interpretation of their own lives to match the same projections they see in others...
The reason this hits the [Harvard Business Review] crowd particularly hard is because it adds another, ubiquitous front to the battle of positive image. It used to be, you only had to be an assertive, bright, shining star when you were around people or talking on the phone. Then you could go home, pour yourself a belt of Glenlivet, and be miserable for a while to blow off steam. Now you have to keep it up ALL of the time, on a medium that's everywhere and never stops. It hits hard, particularly when you're a hard charger whose career depends on being perceived as relentlessly successful and upbeat.
reply

-- from HN; discussion otherwise unexceptional.

Russian photography bans: just like the UK

Sane FT article about net politics in Russia.

I love that their example of inane Russian bureaucratic rigidity is something increasingly familiar in the UK. Namely, the banning of photography in all kinds of public spaces:

Chief among the inanities in his sights is something most tourists in Russia have encountered: the screaming security guard or elderly woman telling you that you cannot take pictures here, as if your photograph of that supermarket compromises Russian national security. Ternovskiy has used his blog to mobilise Russians to inform these guards and grannies that they are the ones in the wrong: by Russian law, photography is allowed almost everywhere. “Despite the fact that there is no legal basis to ban photography in all the places it’s banned, people will still tell you it’s forbidden,” Ternovskiy says, pouring himself a cup of thyme tea as we sit in a Moscow café. “It’s like a Soviet phantom limb.

Sheila, revisiting a book by method-acting guru Lee Strasberg, talks about consistency as a primary virtue of the actor

Lee Strasberg was obsessed with consistency and could it be taught. Were there ways to HELP an actor to be able to repeat himself? Certainly there are. Techniques of relaxation and concentration are the bread-and-butter of any regular acting class, and – like an athlete working out every day – like a singer doing scales – like a ballerina at the barre … these things must become rote.
...
actors need to know how to relax WHILE under stressful situations. Some people do it naturally. They come to life ONLY in clutch situations. These are the great talents. They always “show up” when it is demanded of them. They live for it. But many actors need to learn techniques. Relaxation is the key. Learn how to relax while surrounded by a jostling movie crew and you can relax anywhere.

Guttenberg as Net Activist

I've been enjoying the latest installment from Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg. Defence minister and rising star, he was forced out of office this spring, when a cluster of online activists discovered that he had plagiarised his PhD thesis.

Now he's attempting a low-level comeback, advising the EU's internet commissioner on online freedom. In particular, he'll be looking at how the EU can support bloggers and online activists in authoritarian regimes.

Netzpolitik has mostly been having fun with all this ("More Guttenplag-wikis for dictatorships?).

But they also home in on the more important point -- the inanity of separating "internet freedom in authoritarian states" (Guttenberg's beat to be) from internet freedom in the EU. Telling others to be free while cracking down at home -- it does have the kind of arrogance which Guttenberg does so well, but that surely doesn't mean he should do it.

On the other hand, I do have a grudging admiration for Gutenberg's willingness to accept humiliation. He's chosen to go straight back to the world which saw through him, rather than the one overawed by his smooth rich-boy background. Perhaps also, over fading away into a world of business or conference-speaking, the usual stamping-grounds of the disgraced politician.

25000 is a crowd

What's really hilarious about last Saturday's protests is how tiny the numbers are. Perhaps 25000 people on the streets. Anywhere else, protests short of a hundred thousand will barely be noticed. But Russian democracy has been 'managed' so well, that even a few thousand demonstrators can constitute a shock to the system.

жж

I find it hard to tell how much Runet has migrated towards twitter. You'd certainly think so from the international media coverage -- but that can partly be blamed on the journalistic bad habit of only reporting tools the hacks themselves use.

Global Voices does provide a list of tweeple:

@MiriamElder, @ioffeinmoscow, @shaunwalker7, @A_Osborn, @oflynnkevin, @agent_Alka, @courtneymoscow, @PeterGOliver_RT, @mschwirtz, @markmackinnon, @tonyhalpin, @Amiefr_Reuters, @RolandOliphant, @niktwick are tweeting live in English from the big protest rally that is taking place at Bolotnaya Square in Moscow right now; @agoodtreaty is monitoring Russian-language Twitter coverage of the protests in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia.

But Livejournal, even in senility, still seems a far more potent location of protest. It's where Navalny hangs out. It's where Vladislav Surkov, Kremlin insider and puppetmaster of "Managed Democracy", popped up to propose an urban liberal party.

But I can't tell if LJ really is still important, or if I'm just noticing things there because of familiarity.

Apathy is acceptance

Holly might sound as though she's talking about sex education. Maybe she is. But this is wider:

I don't think this apathy makes the lab okay. I think it makes it insidious. "Yeah yeah, sex is dirty, sluts have diseases, just copy the answers off the board and we'll get out of here before ten" is a much nastier and more dangerous thing than if we'd had an overtly ideological discussion of the subject. It makes it a given thing, a thing not needing discussion, that sex is dirty and nothing can be done about it.

A Conspiracy of Bores

Henry Farrell:

It is tempting to see the procedures of
the EU as a long-term conspiracy to bore
the public into submission. The truth is
more mundane. Europe’s leaders fell into
technocracy by accident rather than design.

Rock 'n' Roll isn't the party

This article on Lester Bangs is sharp and appealing:

No, sorry. Rock 'n' roll isn't the party. It's what you do when you're home and miserable alone because you weren't invited to the party. It's what you do to make up for not being at the party. That's why it sounds like a party. A guy wouldn't break out one of those rubber fake-vaginas in the middle of actual fucking, would he? Rock 'n' roll is social masturbation.

It's sort of appropriate for it to be less about Bangs himself than about his position and meaning, about his impact on his readers. After all, that's much of the appeal of Bangs, as far as I can tell. It's hard to know; he's by now so frozen into the hall of fame that I can't really get excited about him.

Still, I'm not sure I quite buy the idea of Rock 'n' Roll as the antiparty. Because unlike music or poetry or painting, music makes far less sense alone

Despite London Calling being one of my favourite albums, I'd never before realised what the cover was about:




[via Sheila O'Malley, whose now-waning period of Elvis obsession has been a joy to encounter]

Greek minister: axe-wielding fascist

Mark Ames on Greece:

See the guy in the photo there, dangling an ax from his left hand? That’s Greece’s new “Minister of Infrastructure, Transport and Networks” Makis Voridis captured back in the 1980s, when he led a fascist student group called “Student Alternative” at the University of Athens law school.

Withnail is not gonzo

David Edelstein on the Rum Diary:

Rollicking car chases, colorful carousing in tropical settings, psychedelics jags with outlandish special effects: It should be just what the Doctor of Gonzo ordered. But Robinson doesn’t have the gonzo touch. Even if his Withnail & I featured a spectacularly dissolute antihero, it was soaked through with cold rain and the melancholy specter of alcoholism and failure. To work, The Rum Diary would need to make the case for all the excesses that killed Thompson, and Robinson’s heart (or talent) isn’t in it.

[why Edelstein? Because Sheila O'Malley recommended him, entirely accurately, as "best when he dislikes something"

Laurie on sexy women we love to hate:

Sometimes it's Lady Gaga, but Gaga is weird and confusing and you never quite know when she's going to turn up dressed as a man, a lobster or all three volumes of Marx's Das Kapital at once, as opposed to the standard alien vinyl barbie look of which certain sections of the curtain-twitching middle classes love to disapprove.

Bacchus Shrugged

The London Beer Flood occurred on 17 October 1814 in the parish of St. Giles, London, England. At the Meux and Company Brewery[1] on Tottenham Court Road,[1][2] a huge vat containing over 135,000 imperial gallons (610,000 L) of beer ruptured, causing other vats in the same building to succumb in a domino effect. As a result, more than 323,000 imperial gallons (1,470,000 L) of beer burst out and gushed into the streets.
The brewery was located among the poor houses and tenements of the St Giles Rookery, where whole families lived in basement rooms that quickly filled with beer. Eight people drowned in the flood.

The brewery was eventually taken to court over the accident, but the disaster was ruled to be an Act of God by the judge and jury, leaving no one responsible

What kind of bonkers legalistic theology is that? God as lord of the storms I can see, stirring up hurricanes against the unholy and smiting his enemies with lightning. But breaking beer vats?!

Sexy gadgets

Jonathan Franzen stumbles on a parallel between 'sexy' as applied to humans and to gadgets: it's inherently one-sided:

Do I need to point out that — absent some wild, anthropomorphizing projection in which my old BlackBerry felt sad about the waning of my love for it — our relationship was entirely one-sided? Let me point it out anyway.

Let me further point out how ubiquitously the word “sexy” is used to describe late-model gadgets
...
Let me toss out the idea that, as our markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer.

Multiuser screen

To make a screen multiuser:

-a : multiuser on

You can also include _multiuser on_ in .screenrc to make all screens start multiuser

Then you connect to it with screen -x

Mongol tolerance

The Mongols, famously, were not much interested in religious conformity. People who managed to avoid being massacred during the Mongol invasions were at least unlikely, subsequently, to be persecuted for their religious beliefs. What interested the Mongols was that holy men of all religions should both pray for the Khan (for there was no knowing who might have the best hotline to heaven), and, at least as important, provide the regime with access to their specialist skills. The Mongols were nothing if not pragmatists.

-- David Morgan (?) in the TLS

[you hear this a lot. I do wonder how psychologically true it ever was]

Donations and university admissions

Large donations to prestigious universities, so goes the common belief, will help your offspring get places there.

The universities deny this with varying amounts of vigor.

The rumour, though, probably does them no harm at all. If the rumour were mostly baseless, they would be in the best possible position. They can whip up donations with the belief, and not be constrained to live up to their not-quite-promises.

Such is the benefit of being a powerful player in an illegal market, where most of the other participants will only play once, have poor information and jdugment often clouded by emotions.

[vaguely in rsponse to Tyler Cowen, and more indirectly to the New College of the Humanities]

This is fantastic, and fantastical. It's something like the origin myth of k-punk, in a self-consciously edgy philosophy sub-faculty over-exposed by Simon Reynolds:

Still nominally affiliated to the famously poststructuralist Philosophy Department of Warwick University, England, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit is a rogue unit. It's the academic equivalent of Kurtz: the general in Apocalypse Now who used unorthodox methods to achieve superior results compared with the tradition-bound US military. Blurring the borders between traditional scholarship, cyberpunk sci-fi and music journalism, the CRRU are striving to achieve a kind of nomadic thought that to use the Deleuze & Guattari term—“deterritorializes” itself every which way: theory melded with fiction, philosophy cross-contaminated by natural sciences (neurology, bacteriology, thermodynamics, metallurgy, chaos and complexity theory, connectionism), academic writing that aspires to the future-shock intensity of jungle and other forms of post-rave music.

stdout.be argues that shortage of metadata is specifically an internet problem:

It’s kind of humbling to see that even a quarter of a century ago, news formatted in International Press Telecommunications Council standards like IPTC 7901 , NITF or NewsML had more metadata associated with it than a lot of websites of today.

The “big blob of text” phenomenon we’re stuck with now wasn’t caused by newspapers sticking to their old, wary ways, but by the transition to a new medium, the internet.

via the mojo list

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe

There's a quote from Blade Runner which has long irritated me. It's sampled in some Juno Reactor track, and so slides into my subconsciousness every time I try to zone in/out with the trance:

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the darkness at Tannhäuser Gate.

Out of context, it just seems so petty. You're describing the wonder and immensity of the universe, I thought, and this is the best you've got? All the cosmos can offer you is the pretty pictures? It's the equivalent of dropping acid, then just admiring the hallucinations as pieces of theatre.

I was planning a blogpost to that effect.

Then I looked up the video, and suddenly I'm a convert:


I probably shouldn't try to put the effect of the clip into words. Suffice it to say, all is forgiven. This isn't somebody bragging, it's the hopeless attempt to telegraph into dying breath the most intense moments of a 'lifetime'. The machine will not communicate -- it can't, any more than a human can verbalise hir innermost thoughts. But there's glory in the attempt.

Removing whitespace with sed

Use sed to remove leading whitespace:

sed 's/^[ \t]*//'

The particular reason I want to do this is to turn my todo-list (a tree of tasks, marked off by when i completed them), into a sorted record of what I've done on a particular day. In other words, I want to go from this:

Code
 Thule
  OED javascript
  other tasks
  2011-04-17 16:57:33 Sort out markdown for vim 45m
  blah
 Thing I haven't done
 

To this:

2011-04-17 15:58:32 update blog with more cmds 3m
2011-04-17 15:58:59 modify timestamp to include date 20m [,,T,,D wil do for now]
2011-04-17 16:57:33 Sort out markdown for vim 45m
2011-04-17 17:39:04 [email to ejc about resources for journalists

Which can be done by removing whitespace, limiting to lines containing dates, and sorting

$ cat todo/todo.otl| sed 's/^[\t ]*//' | grep 2011 | sort

mode function in python

Oddly, there seems to be no mode function in the python standard library. It feels like something that should have an optimized C version squirreled away somewhere. 'Mode' is too ambiguous to be easily searchable, alas. Anyway, here's a version that should be reasonably fast

from collections import defaultdict
def mode(iterable):
    counts = defaultdict(int)
    for item in iterable:
        counts[item] += 1
    return max(counts, key = counts.get)

Should be reasonably fast (for pure-python), though could eat up a lot of memory on an iterable contaning large items.

back to the future with ellis

Warren Ellis is on an urbanism/retrofuturism jag:

the real world was always moving faster than science fiction: it’s just that back then the real future was broadcasting at 4.20 in the bloody morning and no-one was around to see it.

[more]

Firefox switch to tab

FF4 has a feature by which, when you try to open a second copy of a page, will flip to the existing tab rather than re-opening it.

This drives me crazy.

I usually have several dozen tabs open, across multiple screens, some not visible. When I re-open a tab I want it to appear right in front of me. Not (as happens now) to be brought to the front of a window I can't even see.

this blogpost offers some solutions, most of which don't seem to work.

What does seem to work is adding some junk to the end of the url. A hash should do it, or in extreme cases a hash followed by some random characters.

More B&T

More B&T:

BRIC - MIST - MAYHEM: "the creation of random geopolitical blocs is kind of fun. I mean, if you group Mexico with Afghanistan, Yemen, Haiti, Egypt and Moldova then you have MAYHEM; as indeed you do."

Libyan nukes:

Actually, come to think about it there seemed to be a fair amount of ritual involved in Libya giving up its nuke programme.

Step one: Libya buys a bunch of stuff from the Khan network

Step two: Libya hands it over and renounces its programme

Stepo three: Welcome to the international community! Here's a guy we jugged earlier.

I always wondered if step one was taken in anticipation of taking step two.

On Torygeddon

it's important not to get paranoid about this. Just because the management of the economy resembles something from a political science textbook about the period of destabilisation engineered to lay the groundwork for a coup doesn't mean that it's actually happening that way.

On Tunisia: "It obviously wasn’t a twitter revolution, or a wikileaks one for that matter. It was a "man burning himself alive in despair" revolution. The only thing digital about it was when he flicked his bic"

Empire numerology: "So, Britain as superpower, 1759-1945. US as superpower, 1919-2008. USSR as superpower, 1945-1989. Clearly there's a pattern here; each new power lasts approximately half the length of its predecessor. ..Unfortunately, this only gives the Chinese from 2008-2033 or thereabouts. Which sounds about right for a really serious demographic/elite incompetence crisis. India and Brazil only get 12 or 6 years, and at some point in the 2050s the world order starts to move like a singulatarian's fantasy"

Quickly creating a shell script

Suppose you want to create and run a short script. It's often faster not to bother opening up a text editor. Instead, use shell history to write a file, then chmod and execute it:


$ cat > /tmp/me.py
#!/usr/bin/env python
print('hello world')
$ chmod a+x !$
chmod a+x /tmp/me.py
$ !$
/tmp/me.py
hello world
$


Qatar arms to Libya

The New York Times reports that:

for the first time, Qatar put the question of supplying arms to the rebels on the table, but no agreement was reached.

Well, not really for the first time. Qatar has been pushing for arms shipments to the rebels for a long time:

"If they will ask for weapons, we're going to provide them," the amir, who is on a visit to the United States, told CNN in an interview. [xinhua, 15 April]

And the New York Times itself has reported on the rebels receiving foreign weapons, and speculated that Qatar is one source of them.

Kenneth Rexroth

Bruce Sterling, Kenneth Rexroth. Rexroth was columnist in the San Francisco Examiner, through the 1960s. Elegant, thoughtful, panoramic. While I don't quite share Sterling's enthusiasm ("there are no blogs this good"), there's good stuff here:

Looking back, it seems now that most of our crises have been crises of talk. We have been able to take it out by abusing each other. That is just dandy. Nobody pushed those banks of buttons over the U-2. The Chinese have not invaded Laos or Taiwan. The Marines have not landed in Cuba. The Congolese seem to be tiring. The UN proved able to cope with Khrushchev.

Who knows? We may talk ourselves out of the woods yet.

vim: firefox-like tab controls

I approve of this tip to make tab navigation in vim the same as with firefox. Life is too short to memorize multiple sets of commands.

:nmap  :tabprevious
:nmap  :tabnext
:map  :tabprevious
:map  :tabnext
:imap  :tabpreviousi
:imap  :tabnexti
:nmap  :tabnew
:imap  :tabnew

following irc with inotail

Being always in a several irc channels, it's helpful to have an overview of what's going on without tabbing through a dozen windows. Fortunately I can follow the logs using inotail:

$ find /home/dan/.purple/logs/ -name "`date +%F`*" | xargs inotail -fv

This would also work with tail -- the only problem is that _tail_ with so many files would put some strain on the filesystem.

Getting server messages via irc

irccat is a bot designed to facilitate sending server messages to an irc channel

The irccat bot joins all your channels, and waits for messages on a specified ip:port on your internal network. Anything you send to that port will be sent to IRC by the bot. IRCCat - as in, cat to IRC.

Using netcat, you can easily send events to irc from shell scripts:

echo "Something just happened" | nc -q0 somemachine 12345

That will send to the default channel only (first in the config file). You can direct messages to specific combinations of channels (#) or users (@) like so:

playing mp3s in orer

I often use mplayer to play all files in a directory:

mp ./*

*mp*, by the way, is simply an alias for mplayer, used to play things faster and with speed control:

$ which mp           
mp: aliased to mplayer -speed 1.21 -af scaletempo=speed=tempo

But what if I want to play them in date order? (useful to replay a stream with streamripper). I need a shell loop. A for loop will choke on filenames with spaces
:

$ for i in `ls -tr`  
do
mp "$i"
done

A while loop seems to give me some problem of mplayer reading too much from stdin:

$ ls -1tr | while read i       
do; mp '$i'
done  

So I end up using an array:

$ mp3files=( ./*mp3 )         
$ for d in "${mp3files[@]}"; do
  mp "$d"
done

phew! that was far too much work

urban agriculture

Via robokow, news of plant cultivation in an old IBM typewriter factory:

The location for the first commercia nursery in the world in an office is the former IBM typewriter factory on Johan Huizinga Avenue. The large factory building has already been empty for eleven years

It goes without saying that this is an area where the cannabis cultivators have a *big* headstart :)

Stuxnet under the bed

Botnets are convenient enemies, providing justification for the introduction of spyware and restrictions on computers.
Walter and Amelia have good posts on the subject, particularly in South Korea.

South Korea, it seems, is further along a path that can be expected also in Europe and elsewhere. The country's infrastructure has repeatedly been attacked by botnet-fuelled DDoS. These attacks strengthened demand for official regulation:

Popular support is rising for a helpful Zombie PC Act giving a government-controlled authority the mandate to access and scrutinize commercial, official and private datasystems. The authortity will help the government determine if the system is infected by any potential virus. Lacking appropriate anti-virus software shall, according to the bill, lead to repercussions.

That is, there would be a requirement for official intervention in every computer. With intervention comes inspection. And thus, the threat to alarm the paranoid -- a sideways approach by which governments could seize computers. Walter:

Your computer may become a target for a serach (and seizure) just because it is a computer. The cherry on the cake is of course that we also should expect governmental bodies to take enough care that backdoors installed for this very purpose will not be abused by those very nefarious people, the Zombie-operators, it aims to fight. To quote Top Gear: what could possibly go wrong?

ETA: Amelia has another post, laying all this out much more clearly.

To joyfully watch the fumbling coalescence as a community becomes self-aware

He had the sense, at the moment, of groping for intellectual support, of casting about and dimly receiving a hint here, a hint there. Like a radio technician delicately picking signals out of background static, he'd learned to recognise voices worth listening to, voices that meant something distinct even when they ued hte same compulsory words as everyone else. Here and there, people were speaking with secret passion

-- Francis Spufford, Red Plenty p.65

Cory Doctorow on the joys of writing for teenagers:

That's one of the most wonderful things about writing for younger audiences — it matters. We all read for entertainment, no matter how old we are, but kids also read to find out how the world works. They pay keen attention, they argue back. There's a consequentiality to writing for young people that makes it immensely satisfying. You see it when you run into them in person and find out that there are kids who read your book, googled every aspect of it, figured out how to replicate the best bits, and have turned your story into a hobby.
...
young people live in a world characterized by intense drama, by choices wise and foolish and always brave. This is a book-plotter's dream. Once you realize that your characters are living in this state of heightened consequence, every plot-point acquires moment and import that keeps the pages turning.