Some Thinks about everything: January 2007

Sunday, January 28, 2007

Big Brother is getting bigger and bigger

Details of millions of English people could soon be shared by bureaucrats on a giant database. This database is said to improve public services but it will sweep away privacy protection laws too. A lot of civil liberties groups condemned the project as another step towards a Big Brother state! England is already leading the world in video surveillance with more than 4 million CCTV cameras in the country... and now Tony Blair unveils the Big Brother project... It is time that English people put a halt to this and take care about their privacy... English government has already proved its incapacity in big IT project (NHS, or register of criminals...) but when it is matter of money they are always ready for the worse... Let's see if English people will stand up for their privacy... Just a little quotation that everyone should keep in mind:

First they came for the hackers. But I never did anything illegal with my computer, so I didn't speak up. Then they came for the pornographers. But I thought there was too much smut on the Internet anyway, so I didn't speak up. Then they came for the anonymous remailers. But a lot of nasty stuff gets sent from anon.penet.fi, so I didn't speak up. Then they came for the encryption users. But I could never figure out how to work pgp5 anyway, so I didn't speak up. Then they came for me. And by that time there was no one left to speak up."

Alara Rogers (Aleph Press)

Saturday, January 27, 2007

A personal wiki for Math

A few weeks ago, I presented Tiddlywiki: a marvellous Javascript

which enables you to have a wiki on your computer without apache… I also explained you that it is very difficult to make maths in HTML and on the occasion, I had spoken about jsMath, which enables you to do it

… Why not to combine both, to obtain the dream tool to make maths, to take some notes… I will explain you how to make:

1. install Tiddlywiki: it is as easy as pie but you should install it in a dedicated directory…
2. download jsMath , decompress it in the same directory as Tiddlywiki
3. Then open your new personal wiki, “options>>” then “ImportTiddlers”
4. enter the URL of the plugin allowing to make the connection between Tiddlywiki and jsMath
http://bob.mcelrath.org/tiddlyjsmath-2.0.3.html#%5B%5BPlugin%3A%20Scientific%20Notation%5D%5D
5. click fetch and select the good plugin:
Plugin: jsMath /*** |Name|Plugin: jsMath| |Created by|BobMcElrath systemConfig systemTiddlers
6. reload the page (by pressing F5 for example)
7. Normally that should work.

Personally I had a small problem, it did not find def.js… I have thus to create in the file jsMath, this list of directory: fonts/cm-fonts/alpha/ and I copied there the file def.js which could be found in the directory uncompressed. Now it works perfectly. I hope to allow the development of mathematics

Friday, January 26, 2007

Against !!!

Yes I am against programs like Big Brother, I was not very clear in my previous post... It makes me sick to think that I pay TV for doing such things. I have never watch it, but it is programmed every day! All this wonderful program which cannot be broadcasted because of this headless program... Yes it makes me sick! Moreover it is not enough to pollute the TV, it pollutes the newspapers too! What a society! Where is the progress of the mankind? People who watch it will explain you that this is a great experiment... Rubbish it is only an experiment about spectators... How many million of pounds can you do with old "has-been"?

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Big Brother

Whereas France forsakes Loft Story for the Star ac… (Frankly I wonder which one of these two emissions is the worst

) the English are fond for the Celebrity Big Brother (the name is self explaining…) even if at the beginning the audience were not very high, only a little media buzz around behavior of Jade Goody against the Indian actress Shilpa Shetty is necessary to create audience … the whole powdered with the word “racism” and the audience flies away

personally if I were the producer of this show, I would be very happy

. Personally, I do not think that Jade Goody is really racist, I think especially that she is stupid… that is all… Moreover the participants all are more or less stars on the end which hopes to give an electric shock to their career hoping to make beat the heart of the public one last time while keeping their electroencephalograph to 0

. Small list of participants:

Carole (journalist in Sunday Mirror)
Cleo Rocos
Danielle Lloyd
Dirk (the face in the A-Team)
Donny (a rocker…)
Ian Watkins
Jack (… friend of Jade Goody…)
Jackiey (mother Jade Goody)
Jade Goody (she did absolutely anything… she was only finalist in another Big Brother… )
Muhammad Abdul Aziz (the big brother of Michael Jackson)
OJ (the singer of S Seven Club (that's great artists))
Ken Russell (director of Tommy of Who)
Leo Sayer (a former singer)
Shilpa Shetty (an Indian actress)

I told you that they are all great artists

in England, one can make fortune with anything

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

The Foie Gras

The town of York could be the first English city to prohibit the sale of Foie gras! The production of Foie gras is already prohibited in the country. The city council man Labour Paul Blanchard is at the origin of this motion of banishment. The text must be submited Thursday evening to the vote of the town council of York. The foie gras is the result of the cramming of ducks and of geese, that everyone knows it… I visited even this kind of breeding and attended cramming. Mr. Blanchard estimates that it was about “cruelty towards the animals”. Personally I do not think that it is crueler than to lock up thousands of chick in barraque nonenlightened… I do not know… In any case the foie gras is much better than the chicken

poor English people, lucky geeses…

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Big Brother Awards

Not! it is not a post aboout a stupid English program

and I will not speak either about Jade Goody… Big Brother is the “character” created by George Orwell in his book 1984 (if you have not yet read it: you should)… and became synonymous with monitoring, or breaking the private life… and in fact precisely the French personalities (especially politicians) having acted like BigBrother “were rewarded” on January 20… One can find Jacques Lebrot, Paul Anselin, Pascal Clément… Nicolas Sarkozi being declared out of the competition

. Follow the link it is realy amusing!

Saturday, January 20, 2007

How to remember several very very complicated passwords?

in fact you only need to remember one password

I have just discovered “Password Composer”: the principle is simple: when you install this Greasemonkey script, each time it discovers a password field, it colors this field with green… If you double-click on the fields… a new dialog box appears and asks you for your master password… Script add then this password with the address of the site (with a change or two) and hash the result (md5)… This gives you a quite complicated password

Why not use the same password for all the Web sites, because if one of the Web sites is cracked (and that happens very often…) the hacker can retrieve your password with a “rainbow table” or by brute force… he will have both your login and your password… It then he uses Google to know where you connect also and then can access to quite all your accounts… It is then enough to use different passwords but the complicated passwords are difficult to remember…

The only disadvantage of this script is that you will not have any more access from anywhere on your account, you will always need this script to connect you

if safety is at this price, it does not bother me

you can always take your key USB with firefox on it

but you are likely to become as paranoiac as me and to crypt it

Thursday, January 18, 2007

Benjamin Franklin and the security

Security is not only a problem of the 21st century...

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety

Benjamin Franklin

This quotation is dedicated to all the people who think that the new biometric identity cards will prevent terrorism, but which often forget that nothing distinguishes a terrorist from an honest citizen and that consequently the only manner of fighting against this plague would be to read the most intimate thoughts of each one… I am sure that you are a little less enthusiastic now… If it is not the case, I advise you highly the reading of 1984 of George Orwell.

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Google from scratch

Why not become the new Google? Indeed all the ingredients are today at your disposal… the Lucene search engine + an open source crawler like Nutch or Hadoop… You miss nothing except memory and computing power… Just ask Amazon, which for a very competitive price will provide you computing power and space