April 2005

EFF has posted a short paper on how to blog without getting fired, breaking it down roughly into (1) blog pseudonymously, (2) limit your audience and (3) know your (lack of) legal rights.

It’s unfortunate that (4) come to a reasonable agreement with management about what’s acceptable wasn’t even in the running. That’s a tricky negotiation though, both because once you broach the subject it’s much harder to go back to being anonymous and because your management might feel OK about looking the other way but when pressed might feel the need to say no rather than yes. And when it comes to protecting themselves from upper management or angry stockholders should your blog embarrass the company, they’re probably right.

I’m of two minds when it comes to pseudonymous writing. On the one hand, I still want more choice of soft walls when it comes to managing what I write. Mailing lists and things like LiveJournal‘s friends lists are good starts, but what I really want is a publish-this-to-everyone-except-those-who-would-get-me-in-trouble-for-what-I-wrote button. But on the other hand, I can’t help but see such a button as a kind of cowardly way out. Maybe it just stirs some deep emotion implanted during half-listened to high-school discussions of Thoreau, but isn’t the measure of a writer, at least in some small way, just how much trouble his writing gets him into?

Comments are working after being down for a day, now that I’ve finished installing MT-Keystrokes, the latest weapon in the anti-comment-spam arms race. It’s a plug-in that uses Javascript to detect whether a person has typed something on the form prior to submission — it’ll be pretty simple for spammers to code around, but it may give me a month respite in the mean time. (Note that this also means you’ll need Javascript enabled to post comments… shouldn’t be a problem for the one or two of you who comment every month, and hopefully it’ll be slightly more of a problem for the hundred or so spambots that try to post and clog my filter box.)

Movable Type has so much effort going into trying to block spam — I wish they’d put even half that effort into making a half-decent interface for just deleting comments in bulk…

It’s interesting how the Google satellite pictures differ ever so slightly from the Google map.

In particular, notice how the NW-to-SE roads are skewed about 5 degrees clockwise from true while the NE-to-SW roads are skewed about 5 degrees counterclockwise from true. (Click on the image for higher-resolution.)

On second thought, it could be that the map is correct and the satellite images are skewed to locally fit the Google perspective. Maybe the map is the territory after all!

Google just upped the ante again with Google Satellite. Satellite images curtsey of Digital Globe and EarthSat.

As a side-note, the Google Maps URL includes GPS coordinates, so given a street address you can get both GPS coords and satellite map quickly and easily. You can also just erase the part from q=Blah+blah& part of the URL to get a nice clean satelite image, or just add &t=k to an existing Google Maps URL to turn it into a satellite image. (I really hope that doesn’t become an issue for some well-meaning panic-stricken patriot who thinks terrorists couldn’t get that info quickly and easily in dozens of other ways — I always missed that GPS feature when it was taken out of earlier mapping software.)

Update 7:40pm: Note that you need to click on “Link to this page” in the upper right-hand corner to get the full URL to show up in the address bar.

OK, this amused me enough I had to share. My fraternity brother Nivi just lost his voice, so he went and purchased a nice-sounding text-to-speech voice for his Mac at Cepstral and piped its output into Skype with Soundflower. Voilà — instant TTS phone.

I remember David Ross once told a story about how the Model T Ford (nicknamed the “Tin Lizzy”) was adapted to all sorts of things unexpected things, from winching wagons to pumping water. The key was the car’s simplicity: it was just a motor on wheels, and it didn’t take an expert to that motor for something besides driving. It’s a lesson that keeps repeating itself: tools made up of simple, powerful components with straightforward interfaces for linking the pieces together find their own new uses.