Black swans and Google failure {Ramble}

Re-reading this article from last year in the Times (via George Dvosrky and BoingBoing) concerning Nassim Nicholas Taleb and black swans.

As I write Google seems to be going through a bit of a crisis, flagging all sites it's searches return with "this site may harm your computer" (it even spawned a Twitter hashtag #googmayharm) and redirecting you to an interstitial site:


Anyway it occurs to me that Google going bankrupt or suffering some huge failure that wipes out all the data stored in, say, blogger would be a black swan event. High impact and widely unpredicted.

This is exactly why I've taken to making local backups of my blog with this software using Blogger Backup. In the event of Google getting fubared I can be back up and running within two shakes of a Wordpress template.

I've also been doing something similar with my Delicious account, by using this website to create a local xml copy of all my Delicious bookmarks.

Incidentally Delicious is now becoming really useful: it's got to the stage (with 2096 tags and 2009 saved URLs) where it acts as a sort of private search engine of stuff I know I'll already be interested in.

But my obsession with long term data storage (and I mean for Long Now values of long term) has since been piqued by this article by Charles Stross. Stoss is talking about data formats being essentially forgotten after a few decades and data stored in those formats becoming inaccessible.

But the value of something like my Delicious xml backups may change for me because those websites might drop off the web.

So I'm currently looking for some software that will save all the pages associated with the URLs in my Delicious account as local html files.

LATER: Well Google is working properly and I found something like what I just described (a means to acquire local copies of all my Delicious sites) using the wget tool on UNIX based systems.

wget actually looks really awesome.

I know I should bite the bullet and switch to either Apple or Linux but I haven't got round to it yet, so in the meantime I'm looking for something similar to wget but for Windows...

The nolinkvisit rule of worthwhile Internet stuff

Like all denizens of the Interwubz I have, over the course of several years, collected records of everything I've read, touched, looked at, linked to, discussed, commented on, or visited - the sticky trail of webby spoor that will undoubtedly follow me for the rest of my life.

I back up bookmarks at Delicious, Google bookmarks, and locally, both in my browser and in big HTML gloms in my weekly monthly backups.

The other day when I did this I realised that the blog of Scottish science fiction writer Ken MacLeod was not included in any of my bookmarks! I realised that over the years I've been reading his excellent weblog I've simply got into the habit of (I've never liked RSS aggregators - I've tried FeedDemon but found it deeply unsatisying somehow) clicking through when I visited Charles Stross' similarly excellent weblog.

It occurs to me that this behaviour can act as a kind of litmus test for genuinely excellent online stuff.

If you care enough about something to remember it without creating a link on your desktop or browser then it's almost certainly worthwhile.

Called it the nolinkvisit rule.

R programming language

A new programming language, R, designed specifically for data mining and statistics is discussed in the New York Times:

“R has really become the second language for people coming out of grad school now, and there’s an amazing amount of code being written for it,” said Max Kuhn, associate director of nonclinical statistics at Pfizer. “You can look on the SAS message boards and see there is a proportional downturn in traffic.”

[via Slashdot][image from R Project Website]

Wikipedia visualisation tool

Interesting Wikipedia visualisation tool here called WikiDashboard from PARC [via Magical Nihilism]. It gives a real insight into who edits what when in Wikipedia:

New webcomics &c

A brilliant new webcomic Suburban Panic! here.

A nice mix of the humanist, atheist, rationalist, scientific, Epicurean, and general political whimsy.

Also a good use of the ComicPress WordPress theme.

I've tried said theme on XAMPP locally, and it works. I'm going to have to upgrade my hosting package but I think I'll wait until I'm comfortable with ComicPress and the general look'n'feel.

I mean it's OK at the moment, just a little web circa 2001 for my liking.

Finance and computers: an analogy

A computer takes digital data and transforms it in fairly basic ways. Adding, subtracting, logical statements etc.

Computers are powerful tools because we can make them perform more complex tasks than these basic functions by building new layers of abstraction on top of these basic processes.

Machine code can be used to make a compiler for the C programming language, which can in turn be used to make an operating system, on top of which can run applications, which can be used in ever more complex and elaborate ways.

Abstraction and "higher order" properties are important in computing, but when the same ideas are applied to finance things go all gooey.

The basic unit of economic interaction is not a bit or a logic gate; it is a human being, an absurdly complicated thing, and one that we don't fully understand.

In computing, logic gates and machine code are fairly simple. Because they are simple and well understood, we can build a layer of abstraction on top of them and rely on them to function correctly whilst we pursue higher order things (like writing and reading blogs).

This is what SF writer Iain Banks calls the "dependency principle" - complex software is based on a simpler layer beneath it, which is in turn based on an even simpler layer beneath it, until you get out of software and into the bare metal.

In the recent economic troubles - the credit crunch caused by the insidious spread of bad mortgage debt and the fact that banks now don't know how much these assets are worth (if anything) - can be thought of in similar terms to the structure of software.

A layer of abstraction is based on a simpler substrate: derivatives that are based on the risk of a given mortgage defaulting.

The difference between finance and computers is the layer beneath the abstraction isn't straightforward and predictable.

New Firefox 3

It is actually surprisingly good. Websites load appreciably faster. Other than that usability seem to be about the same.

There was actually a picture of an attractive woman in a Firefox top. But how could I pass up the crop-circle reference? Tears.

Firefox 3 has yet to do anything that seriously irritates me. This means I already consider it to be good software.

Ubuntu Update

This is by way of being an update, rather than a full blown review.

There are many aspects of Ubuntu that I like and there are some I dislike. The ones I like are:

1. There is no need for tedious and memory-consuming virus scans.
2. When new hardware is plugged in Ubuntu waits for me to do something about it, instead of trying (and failing) to be helpful by providing Autorun features as Vista does.
3. Change is good. It's refreshing to use something other than Windows.
4. There seems to be much greater scope for personalisation than with Windows.
   

All these things said, for the average and casual user there isn't a great deal in any of this. Most of the above points are more to do with the general crapness of Windows rather than anything good about Linux/Ubuntu.

Things I don't like about Ubuntu:

1. After dual booting Ubuntu with Vista I can no longer disable my Synaptics touchpad.
2. Ubuntu does not include native support for DVDs or mp3 players. I know that this is a niggle and shouldn't be a big obstruction, but for the casual and lazy user (like myself) it is just irritating.
3. New things scare me.
   
4. Ubuntu defaults to being so like windows that there doesn't really seem to be much point.
   
5. I've been prodding the bash shell or whatever it's called and it's all very oldschool and cool but to be honest I don't want to have to learn a whole new language just to get my PC to work when a GUI would do. And yes, I know that I can do pretty much everything through the GUI but I'm lazy.

OK - my conclusion so far is that there really isn't much point to Linux. If it's ever going to go mainstream it will be through things like the Asus Eee, which Charles Stross comments on at length here.

I'm still having trouble understanding the ubiquity of Microsoft Office in business, when OpenOffice is free and does exactly the same thing (at least as far as 90% of corporate users are concerned).

I think when I buy a new PC or laptop the first thing I'll do is install Ubuntu and use it from day one. This way I will avoid falling into the habit of using Windows.

Ubuntu Linux

As of today I am officially an Ubuntu Linux user. So far everything works very well.



Hooray!

Your move, Mr Doctorow...