tech
aardvarchaeology | September 6, 2007My blog has so far landed me one paid writing assignment, and today I got a copy of the mag where it was published. Sort of.
Vice Magazine is a wannabe-controversial fashion mag. Its June issue has a glue-huffing teen boy on the cover and there are web-cam boob pics inside. You get the picture. They commissioned me to write two 700-word pieces on a three-day deadline back in March. The topic was polluted places in Stockholm. I spent about one day's work on the job and they paid me peanuts after I nagged them. But it was fun to do a bit of real journalism.
Only they threw one of the pieces out…
aardvarchaeology | August 29, 2007There's been some discussion lately about chess-playing software and intelligence. Some smart humans play chess well. Certain software can beat them at chess. Does this mean that the software is smarter than those humans? Of course not.
For one thing, intelligence is about versatility, about being able to perform innumerable different and unfamiliar tasks that take smarts. No software in the world, least of all chess software, is anywhere near passing the Turing test. If you talk to present-day software you soon become aware that there's no intelligence in the box. If we came across a human…
aardvarchaeology | August 16, 2007
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
The original text adventure game, ADVENT, was written in the mid-1970s by Stanford student Will Crowther. This game begat Zork, then King's Quest, then any number of other adventure games on various computer platforms until the present day, when Second Life and World of Warcraft are scarcely recognisable as its descendants.
ADVENT is still around and has been ported to pretty much every machine in use today. But this is a late version of the game, expanded and beefed up by Don Woods. Crowther's original version has long been considered…
aardvarchaeology | July 17, 2007Yesterday at the beach, Charles Stross's 2005 novel Accelerando in hand, I introduced my dear friend, the Aard lurker and professional logician Tor, to the concept of Singularity. Explains Wikipedia:
The Technological Singularity is the hypothesized creation, usually via AI or brain-computer interfaces, of smarter-than-human entities who rapidly accelerate technological progress beyond the capability of human beings to participate meaningfully in said progress. Futurists have varying opinions regarding the time, consequences, and plausibility of such an event.
I.J. Good first explored the…
stoat | July 10, 2007I'm using VNC to view unix through windows and very nice it is. One irritating feature was lack of cut-n-paste between the VNC window and the outside world, but I could live with that. Then I wanted to run a different window manager, so ended up reading the documentation (:-) and discovered, in the "vncconfig" section, that this only works if you have a vncconfig running. Is this a weird way to get cut-n-paste working or what?
[Andrew?]
aardvarchaeology | July 10, 2007
I've embarked on three weeks of summertime solo fatherhood as my wife works for a cookery mag in town. Today I sent the kids and their friends out to the overcast playground for an hour, listened to the Pixies and re-boxed my computer odds-and-ends, discovering innumerable useful cables and connectors, three old Sportster modems and five or six mouses, most of which have no scroll wheel.
Parenting tip: to get kids to eat veggies, hand them out while they play video games. Zombie-like and unfazed, they will chomp carrots and cucumber as they stare at the screen. Anything that isn't directly…
aardvarchaeology | June 19, 2007Me and my Internet Service Provider go way back. I got my account with algonet.se in early 1995 and put up my still current web site there after a few months. I've been using my e-mail address there as my main one ever since, publishing it indiscriminately all over the web and UseNet, and still I don't get too much spam.
Algonet is a legacy domain. There is no longer an ISP by that name: the domain and its user accounts have passed from ISP to ISP and are currently handled by an outfit called Glocalnet. Since new Algonet accounts haven't been issued for years, I guess us users are a dwindling…
aardvarchaeology | May 30, 2007[More blog entries about neuroscience, lamprey, computationalmodeling; neurovetenskap, nejonöga, datormodellering.]
In Stockholm on 14 June, my psychedelic friend and fellow honorary Chinese Mikael Huss will present his PhD thesis in engineering (available on-line). He has built software models of bits of the lamprey's spinal cord. The book's title is Computational Modeling of the Lamprey CPG. From Subcellular to Network Level -- CPG means "central pattern generator".
I understand little of this. I just want to eat the lamprey.
Thesis abstract below the fold.
Due to the staggering complexity…
aardvarchaeology | May 22, 200715 years ago, the word processing software I used was WordPerfect 5.1. It wouldn't be able to compete with any current software, except for one thing: hyphenation. I have yet to see any word processing or type setting software with hyphenation as good as that of WordPerfect 5.1.
I co-edit two journals typeset by two different people, and the beyond all comparison most common proof error I have to correct is crappy hyphenation. This is a big deal in Swedish where composite words are written without spaces or hyphens, just like in German. Automatic hyphenation always screws up when the second…
aardvarchaeology | April 22, 2007For a few weeks, I've been slowly, slowly learning my way around the Open Source operating system Ubuntu Linux. Lots of things work just fine. Indeed, they work incredibly well considering that I downloaded an entire operating system with office software for free from the net. But every now and then I run into things that force me to boot Windows XP or lower my expectations. They may be fully possible to do in Ubuntu, though too complicated for me to accomplish at my current level of ignorance; or semi-possible to do in Ubuntu through an ugly kludge that's not worth it; or they may simply be…
aardvarchaeology | April 21, 2007Ubuntu Linux is a free Open Source operating system with office software, intended to empower the Third World by freeing it from dependence on Western software companies. It shares its name with a humanist ideology promoted by people such as Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. The software is also popular in the West, where most of the development takes place and where most of the installations running it are likely located. The project's Swedish homepage prominently features a fine piece of inadvertent colonial condescension. It's actually quite heartwarmingly naïve in its complete lack of…
aardvarchaeology | April 15, 2007Another one of my favourite podcasts hits 100 instalments: the R.U. Sirius show. It's cyber-counterculture talk radio with ample references to sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, but done in a geeky, distinctly literate manner. R.U. Sirius himself used to be the editor of seminal cyber-mag Mondo 2000 back in the day, and is now an elder statesman on the trippy fringe of technology. By his own admission, he likes to spend a Sunday afternoon reading a thick book while stoned, and him and his posse of witty co-chatterers are a delight to hear.
Among recent guests on the show we find security expert…
aardvarchaeology | April 10, 2007I've run Firefox 2.0 under three different operating systems on several machines. And every time I start this otherwise excellent program after re-booting, it gives me the following error message
"Your last Firefox session closed unexpectedly. You can restore the tabs and windows from your previous session, or start a new session if you think the problem was related to a page you were viewing."
My method of turning the thing off is in fact uncontroversial: I just click the "close window" button top right. So why does it consistently give me this buggy message? I don't know. Maybe it's because…
aardvarchaeology | April 9, 2007This week I'm doing fieldwork in Östergötland with friends, colleagues and Aard regulars from the Gothenburg Historical Society, the County Museum and the State Excavation Unit. We're continuing our metal detecting campaign from last spring, returning to the sites in Kaga and Hagebyhöga, and having a look at four new ones in Heda, Varv, Askeby and Östra Husby. Our objective is to find aristocratic farmstead sites of the period AD 400-1000. Swedish State Broadcasting's science show for kids, Hjärnkontoret, will pay us a visit.
One thing I miss since moving to ScienceBlogs is the ability to…
aardvarchaeology | March 30, 2007In recent years, I've bought three copies of a useful piece of software as part of package deals on computers. The software licences include free on-line upgrades, and hardly a week goes by without an offer of some tweak or patch to improve the workings of things. I gratefully partake.
I've been a loyal customer of this software company for almost 20 years. But when I heard what the newest version of their product is like, I began considering alternatives. And in the past few days, I have received offensive messages from them that made up my mind real quick.
Dear Reader, have you heard of…
aardvarchaeology | March 21, 2007As reported profusely in the mainstream media, the Chinese government is investing in iffy African regimes to secure access to the troubled continent's raw materials. For years, Robert Mugabe's regime in Zimbabwe has for instance received Chinese tech and training to control information flow: phone-tapping, radio jamming and internet-monitoring. You scratch my dictatorial back, I'll scratch yours, little brother.
British-run short-wave radio station SW Radio Africa is routinely jammed in Zimbabwe's cities. Now, reports the BBC's global tech news program & podcast Digital Planet, the radio…
stoat | September 4, 2006I have a load of files encrypted with pgp (2.6.2i, since you ask). But the machine at BAS this runs off is soon to be turned off, so it seems I need to upgrade to gpg instead. So... in a break from climate, can I ask the security gurus out there (are any of them reading this?)...
Can I read pgp in gpg? (I tried it a year or so ago, and failed on importing my old keys into gpg: just tried again: died on some message about missing self-signature)
Otherwise I have to decrypt 200-odd files and re-encrypt them as gpg. Not too tedious. Except I have a few others out on the web in odd locations I…