Internet Freedom - the SOPA/PIPA protest

Six days ago, over 115,000 websites including Google, Wikipedia, Freethoughtblogs, Craigslist, and many other popular websites "went dark" -- effectively went on strike -- for a 24 hour period to protest the SOPA and PIPA legislation that is being considered by the American government.

We are all connected, and what happens in America affects all of us, as law professor and copyright expert Michael Geist pointed out on his blog, in an article entitled Why Canadians Should Participate in the SOPA/PIPA Protest. From Professor Geist's article:

"...millions of Canadians rely on the legitimate sites that are affected by the legislation. Whether creating a Wikipedia entry, posting a comment on Reddit, running a WordPress blog, participating in an open source software project, or reading a posting on BoingBoing, the lifeblood of the Internet is a direct target of SOPA. If Canadians remain silent, they may ultimately find the sites and services they rely upon silenced by this legislation."

Writer, consultant, and teacher Clay Shirky explains why this legislation is a bad idea even for Americans:




[Thanks to Lorna for pointing out this video]

The day of protest on January 18, 2012 was mildly inconvenient for me, but annoying to many others. That annoyance translated into political action which raised the awareness of American lawmakers and caused the SOPA and PIPA legislation to be withdrawn. But the final point raised by Clay Shirky in the video is still valid -- there will be other attempts in the future to censor and regulate the internet.

Calypso Pork

I got an e-mail from a friend this morning describing a system problem -- the classical "I turn it on but nothing happens" problem, feared by computer users everywhere. Over GoogleChat through the course of the day, we agreed that my friend would come by this evening and we would check out the hard drive from the failed system, and if it worked, we would lift some data off of it.

I offered to provide dinner in addition to technical consulting.

Dinner would be Calypso Pork, from a recipe from a British cooking show called "Ainsley Harriott's Barbecue Bible", done by an English chef of Jamaican origin. The TV series dates back to sometime in the late 90's. The Calypso Pork recipe grabbed my imagination when it was described:

Marinade:
2 tablespoons of minced ginger
2 cloves of garlic
2 tablespoons of Muscovedo sugar
(I used demerara sugar because it was what I had)
a pinch or two of allspice
2 tablespoons of pineapple juice
2 tablespoons of corn oil
(the chef suggested any oil except olive oil)
2 tablespoons of RUM!
(should have been Jamaican dark rum, but I used what I had)

Combine all ingredients, mixing thoroughly

Add pork chops. Marinate for a few hours (3 and a half in my case).

Barbecue the pork chops -- approximately six minutes or so per side, on low heat.

I got the ingredients in the afternoon, scaled up the quantities to feed five people, and got the meat marinating.

When my friend arrived, we found that the drive he took out of the malfunctioning computer system was still good. We determined this by connecting the drive up to an interface device designed to connect to an IDE or SATA hard drive, provide power, and provide a data connection through a USB cable -- a must-have geek tool. When we connected up the drive, we found that we could read data from it, a highly desirable outcome, which meant that we were all set to copy over the drive contents to the high capacity data drive that my friend brought along for just this purpose.

Unfortunately we had problems getting the high capacity backup drive to work (refused to be recognized under either Ubuntu Linux or Windows XP despite repeated attempts), so we ended up only copying some critical files onto a flash drive. We agreed that my friend could borrow the nifty USB-to-IDE-and-SATA disk drive interface device for a while.

It being late in the evening, I barbecued the pork chops, and served them with roasted potatoes and a romaine lettuce salad.

Verdict -- this recipe is a definite keeper. I had never made this before, but everyone, even N1S, thought it was pretty good. The combination of flavours in the marinade worked well with the pork -- the ginger added some bite, while the rum blended everything else together into a savoury-sweet combination that accented rather than overpowered the meat.

15 Useful Guides

The MakeUseOf website has an article containing links to 15 (actually 16) useful guides that provide a lot of (not necessarily obvious) information for day to day geekly living. Here is the list of guides that the article links to, with my comments:

1 – Internet Guide for the Movie Addict - includes a discussion on how to fix bad/corrupted video files. Unfortunately, nothing on how to remove Vodei encoding.

2 – Internet Guidebook for An Audiophile - this is a howto guide covering internet music, including free sites.

3 – The Incredible Free Manual for Every Mac User - Mac users probably should read this.

4 – The Underground Guide to the iPhone ditto for iPhone users.

5 – Twitter: Best Practices & Tips - some thoughts on how to best take advantage of this (relatively) new communication tool.

6 – The Ultimate Guide to your Windows Mobile Phone - for anyone whose phone runs Windows CE

7 – A Computer Geek’s Smart Productivity Guide - all about time management and productivity. See also the (unrelated) Pomodoro strategy over on the Lifehacker site.

8 – Building a Media Center for your Home - instructions on how to set up a media server for your home theatre/home audio system.

9 – The Only Easy Guide To Computer Networks - this won't teach you how to manage a Cisco-based network with hundreds of hubs, but will help you set up your home network and get it working.

10 – The Big Book of BitTorrent - how to use BitTorrent to download files. The more generic parts of the discussion should also apply to uTorrent and other Torrent apps.

11 – A Newbie’s Getting Started Guide to Linux - Linux is the future of computing, and this guide will help you get started. [Note - I am presenting the title as they appear in the original source, but my editorial instinct here really really wants to change "to Linux" to read "with Linux".]

12 – The Idiot’s Guide To Photoshop - this guide won't replace a formal course in how to use Photoshop, which is one of the most most capable (but also most complex) software packages out there. However, the guide will give you a starting point -- with the guide, and hours of practice, you too can plant a moustache on your co-worker's Christmas party photo.

13 – The Big Book of iTunes - I don't use iTunes or an iPod myself, but I will probably read this guide anyway just to get a handle on the technology.

14 – The Idiot’s Guide to Building Your Own PC - an important document if you are going to either build a new PC or if you plan on swapping out and upgrading a motherboard on an old PC.

15 – Laptop Buying Guide for 2009 - a guide to all things laptop.

(BONUS) PSP Up- and Downgrading Guide - a howto guide for PSP owners to help with getting around those pesky lockouts that prevent homebrew apps from working properly.

Cables Make All The Difference

Recently, I had to buy a length of network cable for $22 from Staples. I resented the price, until I saw this offering:

For *only* $500 you can buy a cable made by Denon, composed of "pure copper". Presumably that price is in US dollars so all us Canuckie types will need to add roughly 20 percent - call it $600 loonies for discussion purposes.

And why would anyone pay $600 for a cable?

Well -- this product will allow you to "Get the purest signal from multi-channel DVD and CD playback through Denon receiver". One way that it achieves this is that the "Connector and cable structure designed to thoroughly eliminate adverse effects from vibration". Because, ya know, vibration causes all those little electrons to jostle together and not get to where they are supposed to go. Clearly, a product designed for audiophiles who operate at a level that I can barely imagine.

But don't take my word for this -- read the reviews. There are others, who like me, stand in awe and amazement at this product, and anyone who would buy it.

UPDATE - Audioquest make an ultra-deluxe speaker cable for $6800. This relegates the Denon offering to the little leagues. The $22 network cable I was bitching about doesn't even register. People who use this product probably aren't even in the same species as those of us who meet our cabling needs from the Dollar Store.

A supercomputer cluster for Christmas

Physorg has an article about two scientists who built a supercomputer using 8 Sony Playstation3 consoles. The instructions for creating your own are here, released under a Free/Open Source license.

So if we can find eight PS3's that no one is doing anything with, we're all set. The other route that we could go is to use older PS2's, which we could get cheap from gamers upgrading to newer/faster hardware. We could build a beowulf cluster using 70 PS2's like the National Center for Supercomputing Applications did a few years back.

Once we get it built, I'm thinking the first problem we can work on is to simulate the massive nuclear explosion at the earth's core that a recent theory postulates as the cause of the moon's formation. This satisfies two goals -- research on something that goes bang, and research on something that might further the Ultimate Goal of World Domination.