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PlusNet's guide to speed fault diagnosis – much detail on the whoosh tests et al
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All things broadband and ADSL
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How to get ADSL line stats from a variety of routers
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ADSL line capability estimator
Archive for December 2008
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"Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to "democratize" visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis. Jump right to our visualizations now, take a tour, or read on for a leisurely explanation of the project."
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"Wordpress is a great blogging platform. It lets you work with 2 main content types: blog posts and pages. However, Wordpress doesn’t allow users to define new types of content. This concept of “content types” is similar to that of Drupal (CCK), Expression Engine, Joomla, and other professional CMS (Content Management System) platforms. Pods allows users to create new content types (each content type consisting of a uniform set of fields). Wordpress, welcome to the next level."
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Tim Lang on (un)sustainability in modern food production
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"It was breath-taking and depressing to observe the transformation of New Labour after 1997, from the party of open government, human rights and civil liberties into an increasingly paranoid group of power-hogging and repressive political control freaks, who have done more damage to fundamental human rights in the past 11 years than any other (sequence of) government(s) in any comparable-length stretch of time since the Glorious Revolution."
Willem Buiter absolutely nails what New Labour have become. It’s the perfect summation of everything that’s happened since 1997 in two paragraphs.
After even the most liberal-minded, open-government-committed party takes hold of the reins of government, it takes never more than a single term of office, four years – five at the most – before paranoia takes over. Disagreement becomes dissent, dissent becomes disloyalty, disloyalty becomes betrayal and betrayal becomes treason. The public interest merges seamlessly with the private interest of the incumbents. The state bureaucracy, where it has not been taken over by government loyalists on day one of the new administration, is gradually transformed into an arm of the government. Some formal checks and balances often remain, parliament and the courts among them, but they too are often feeble to begin with and weaken further as the term office of the incumbent government lengthens.
I have watched this process at work in the UK since I returned here in 1994. It was breath-taking and depressing to observe the transformation of New Labour after 1997, from the party of open government, human rights and civil liberties into an increasingly paranoid group of power-hogging and repressive political control freaks, who have done more damage to fundamental human rights in the past 11 years than any other (sequence of) government(s) in any comparable-length stretch of time since the Glorious Revolution. Fortunately, despite their worst intentions, they have not been very competent – a more competent government could have done much more damage to our freedom and civil liberties.
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Technorati Tags: politics
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Self portraits made by pushing faces into fresh powder snow. Genius.
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A slideshow of integrated circuits from 1958 to 2008. From one to about 750 million in the same space.
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Arduino / RFID reader / Processing tutorial
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A Mac OS X Leopard developer tool for debugging HTTP services by graphically creating & inspecting complex HTTP messages.
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"Imagine if you could earn money and help the environment at the same time… well now you can! Join a growing community of buyers and sellers, where the more unwanted books you buy and sell, the more trees can be saved and planted – we donate 5p from every sale to the Woodland Trust."
The second-hand model of Abebooks collides with the crowd-sourcing of Ebay. And some of it's for charidee…
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"Welcome to footagevault, supplier of historic, royalty free archive film to tv and movie productions worldwide"
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"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I am not an expert or a scholar or an activist. I am more of an eye-witness. I watched the Soviet Union collapse, and I have tried to put my observations into a concise message. I will leave it up to you to decide just how urgent a message it is.
My talk tonight is about the lack of collapse-preparedness here in the United States. I will compare it with the situation in the Soviet Union, prior to its collapse. The rhetorical device I am going to use is the "Collapse Gap" – to go along with the Nuclear Gap, and the Space Gap, and various other superpower gaps that were fashionable during the Cold War."
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"That’s why we don’t just need a bailout. We need a reboot. We need a build out. We need a buildup. We need a national makeover. That is why the next few months are among the most important in U.S. history. Because of the financial crisis, Barack Obama has the bipartisan support to spend $1 trillion in stimulus. But we must make certain that every bailout dollar, which we’re borrowing from our kids’ future, is spent wisely."
Every word of which could equally apply to the UK – except we don't have the luxury of a British Obama.
This is becoming a bit of a Christmas ritual.
We really don’t need any more crap cluttering up our lives, and the whole “it’s your patriotic duty to keep the economy out of the toilet by shopping on credit for plastic crap that’s been shipped halfway across the planet and will be broken or discarded by Boxing Day” approach to life and politics is really getting on my tits.
On the other hand, you can never have too many books. So rather than wasting money buying things we don’t need as presents, we drop round to the local Oxfam bookshop and buy as many second-hand books as we can physically carry.
They last well into the new year, they don’t come with a cubic metre each of packaging, and when they’re done with they can be shipped back from whence they came for someone else to buy them next year. (Well, that would be the process if I ever got rid of books, but I don’t very often.)
And at an average price of £3.99, it’s easy to indulge the extreme end of catholic tastes in literature. As evidenced here.
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"…Filtering out meaningful data from such a HTML mess is referred to as web scraping and in this article I’d like to show you how to do it with scRUBYt!, Ruby’s probably most popular web scraping framework."
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"ScrnShots is the best way to take and share screenshots of web and screen based design. Upload as many screenshots as you want, embed them in your blog, discuss them with your contacts and become a better designer!"
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"Ubuntu Server on Amazon gives you the power of Ubuntu combined with the flexibility of Amazon's cloud computing service. Ubuntu's modularity, virtualization capabilities, range of applications and optimised performance make it the perfect solution if you're deploying applications on Amazon's Elastic Computing (EC2) cloud."
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A *new* folding rangefinder camera body. OMG.
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"Four IBMers, Joan M. DiMicco, David R. Millen, Werner Geyer, Casey Dugan recently published, Research on the Use of Social Software in the Workplace. It focused on their Beehive social networking website behind IBM’s firewall. Beehive was launched in 2007 by IBM Research as an internal social network site for IBM employees designed to blur the boundaries of work and home, professional and personal, and business and fun. I briefly mentioned BeeHive as part of Looking Closely at Lotus Connections. At the time I wrote that the Beehive tools are exploring how to use Facebook features like fun walls, photo posting, and high 5 inside the enterprise. "
