Liudvikas Bukys

Las Vegas has keyless encounters of the weird kind:

Was it the storm clouds, sun spots or Area 51?

By late Friday afternoon, some locksmiths, car dealerships and towing companies had been flooded with calls about mysteriously malfunctioning keyless vehicle entry devices.

[via Wi-Fi Networking News]

MIT Technology Review:
Mars Rover Image Interfaces

[Thanks to Dave Winer for the link.]

Robert Tolksdorf: Programming Languages targeted for the Java VM: there are a lot of them. It’s not just Jython any more. Thanks to
Sean McGrath for the link.

Targeted Email Newsletters Show Continued Strength (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox):

We’ve also found that users often employ their spam filters to avoid newsletters that they no longer want. Instead of unsubscribing, which users often view as too cumbersome, they simply tell their spam-blocker that the newsletter is spam. Voila: the newsletter no longer arrives in the inbox.

The fact that many users will declare a newsletter to be spam when they tire of it has terrifying implications: legitimate newsletters might get blacklisted and thus ISPs might block their delivery to other subscribers. This is a compelling reason to increase the usability of the unsubscribe process: better to lose a subscriber than to be listed as spam.

See also Techdirt on the same subject.

Real reporting on the events leading to the blackout: SecurityFocus News: Software Bug Contributed to Blackout:

A previously-unknown software flaw in a widely-deployed General Electric energy management system contributed to the devastating scope of the August 14th northeastern U.S. blackout, industry officials revealed this week.

The bug in GE Energy’s XA/21 system was discovered in an intensive code audit conducted by GE and a contractor in the weeks following the blackout, according to FirstEnergy Corp., the Ohio utility where investigators say the blackout began. “It had never evidenced itself until that day,” said spokesman Ralph DiNicola. “This fault was so deeply embedded, it took them weeks of poring through millions of lines of code and data to find it.”

The next day GE Energy acknowledges blackout bug:

A U.S.-Canadian task force investigating the blackout said in November that FirstEnergy employees failed to take steps that could have isolated utility failures because its data-monitoring and alarm computers weren’t working.

Without a functioning emergency management system or the knowledge that it had failed, the company’s system operators “remained unaware that their electrical system condition was beginning to degrade,” the report said.

At the time, task force members said it remained unclear whether the software malfunctioned or if FirstEnergy’s computers had difficulty running it that day.

DiNicola said Thursday that the company, working with GE and energy consultants from Kema Inc., had pinned the trouble on a software glitch by late October and completed its fix by Nov. 19, coincidentally the same day the task force issued its report.

GE Energy spokesman Dennis Murphy said the company distributed a warning and a fix to its more than 100 other customers the following day.

[via Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram]

The ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) and ITSM Directory web site has many other useful pointers,
including some links to ISO 17799 material.
“The IT Infrastructure Library, ITIL (®), is a series of documents that are used to aid the implementation of a framework for IT Service Management (ITSM).”

Via
Dann Sheridan: ITIL Self Assessment:

The self assessment should be used continuously to measure the progress toward the initial ITIL implementation objectives. It takes about an hour and a half for one person to complete. Relatively speaking, ita good way to get a quick read on the state or your IT processes

See also ITIL Survival. (I also picked up that link from Dann Sheridan.)

Gary Robinson,
inventor of the novel clever and useful
chi-squared non-bayesian evidence combination method,
that in practice seems to work pretty darned well for classifying spam (better than Naive Bayes), has written an article on
Training to Exhaustion.

I think he has re-invented a less general version of the AdaBoost
algorithm, in which training inputs are weighted according to classification error. The specific weight adjustments in AdaBoost will probably converge much more quickly than the small incremental reweighting in training to exhaustion, and Schapire’s paper shows some nice properties overall.

While bag-of-words models work remarkably well considering how simple they are, I think that progress will come from elsewhere.
Instead of training harder (weighting hard examples in the training set), an algorithm could train “smarter” (applying more expensive techniques [e.g. extending n-gram length] but only for the hard examples). I’ve been contemplating experimenting with
the tradeoffs in cost/performance but haven’t had the time (yet).

Now I have received my first Orkut invitation.
Interestingly, it came from an actual friend — probably a good sign for Orkut, as the quality of their system depends on the utility of actual relationships, not random diffuse connections.

It’s good timing for Orkut.
Our distance from the Six Degrees era, and the current spontaneous blossoming of intellectual/social relationships as seen among intertwined weblogs, make it seem fresh, and not just another selling-eyeballs.com.

Yet-another fatigue is now a barrier to entry for Orkut competitors.

Will I go out and spam all my colleagues and friends with Orkut invitations?
No, it seems a little too close to a MLM pitch.
I think I’ll just pick on a few who I know are in the right frame of mind.

Previous: Orkut[0]: Out with the out crowd

Sigh,
LifeLog,
DARPA’s project to capture, store and interpret mounds of data collected on or about a person, is basically a good idea, and will happen one way or another on the road to augmenting human abilities with technology.
Wired News: Pentagon Kills LifeLog Project says it’s done. I deeply sympathize with critics over privacy concerns, but can we look at the merits and avoid knee-jerk reactions to every government project?

[See also Techdirt: DARPA Ditches Backup Brain Plans]

Shlomi Fish (ONLamp): The New Breed of Version Control Systems compares
CVS,
Subversion,
GNU Arch,
OpenCM,
Aegis,
Monotone,
and the non-open-source BitKeeper. The conclusion:

You probably should not use CVS, as there are several better alternatives,
unless you cannot get hosting for something else. (Note that GNU Savannah provides hosting for Arch, and there is documentation for using it with SourceForge). You should also not use
the free version of BitKeeper because of its restrictions.

Other systems are nicer than CVS and provide a better working experience.
When I work in CVS, I always take a long time to think where to place a file or
how to name it, because I know I cannot rename it later, without breaking
history. This is no problem in other version control systems that support
moving or renaming. One project in which I was involved decided to rename
their directories and split the entire project history.