Category: Internet matters

Posts about the internet

Old v. new economy

Google, a company with 9,378 employees, now has a stockmarket capitalization of $155 billion: about $16.5 million a person. General Motors has about 326,999 employees and a stockmarket capitalization of about $19 billion: about $58,000 a person.

It is impossible for me to believe that Google has enough good ideas to justify such a huge amount of capital per employee. That said, they did earn $1.47 billion in 2005, compared to a loss of more than $10 billion at GM. Also, everybody has known for years that GM’s pension and health care obligations are going to bury the company, barring some massive default.

Wiki restriction in progress

The wiki came under discussion in today’s seminar. As such, it is offline until such a time as I can come up with a robust way to restrict access to seminar notes, while leaving all the material that I have been producing myself available.

Ideally, I would like to either make specific pages of the wiki require a password to access or, alternatively, restrict certain pages to specific user accounts. If anyone knows how to do this elegantly, please let me know.

I expect that I should have my portions available again by Monday. If you care to report any bugs on the blog between now and then, feel free to do so as a comment to this post.

[Update: 4:30pm] Much more quickly than expected, I have been able to establish a content management system for the wiki that allows certain pages to be restricted from public access. This treatment has now been applied to seminar notes from the thesis seminar and the Developing World seminar. It has not been applied to my reading notes, notes related to public lectures, or other such pages. As with any such change (one that requires me to edit PHP script and MySQL database settings), please report any bugs that you encounter.

Once again, I must say that I am impressed with MediaWiki as a platform. All I did was backup the MySQL database and the /images/ folder, erase the old install (except for LocalSettings.php), install a patched version of MediaWiki, run the installer, throw out the config file it generated, add the restriction patch code to the old config file, and then configure user accounts to have access to restriction features. That may sound very tricky to a lot of people, but it was actually a breeze. The whole thing was done in half an hour, with no hiccups discovered so far. Now that it is publicly known, the Lecture and Seminar Notes section of the wiki has graduated out of the experimental grouping.

Replace generic blog templates

Folding bicycle

As more and more friends and colleagues set up blogs, it becomes harder to distinguish between so many identical looking pages. While the default Blogger templates are generally attractive, they have now been used so many times that anything written on one automatically looks generic.

A good template should, above all, be clear and readable. Next, it helps for it to look stylish and professional as well. While it is beyond the means of most beginner bloggers to create their own template, there are masses available to be downloaded for free. Regardless of whether you use Blogger, WordPress, or something else, changing your template is a quick way to make your blog more distinctive and memorable.

If you want to see the snazziest of templates (though many are more beautiful than usable), have a look at Zen Garden.

Listed below are a few places where decent, free templates can be picked up. Dozens more can be found in less than a minute, through Google.

For Blogger:

You can easily find instructions online on how to change your Blogger template. One thing to note: because Blogger generates every page of your blog in advance, before they are requested, you will need to republish the whole blog before the template will appear everywhere.

For WordPress:

There are so many such sites, and they are so easy to find, that it is almost pointless to list them. Instructions for changing WordPress themes are likewise easily available.

If you are using a system other than Blogger or WordPress, Google and ye shall find. You can also find some basic tutorials on customizing a template that you find, so as to make it individualized. Here is an example.

Congratulations Mica

My brother Mica has now won three Google Idol music video contests in a row: two rock contests with his Hives and Arctic Monkeys videos, and one pop contest with his Jock Rock video.

He’s obviously a talented guy. You can congratulate him, or discuss his videos, over at his website. I hope he will have time to assemble an original short film soon.

Note: Google Idol had to be rebranded as Bopsta.com, in the wake of a trademark dispute.

More on Mica’s videos

Mica’s ‘Jock Rock’ video came first in the sixth Google Idol pop music video competition. Previously, his video for ‘Walk Idiot Walk’ won their first rock video competition.

Right now, his video for ‘I Bet That You Look Good on the Dance Floor’ is in the grand final of the 4th rock video competition. Please take a minute and go vote. The competition ends on the 17th and, when last I heard, he was trailing behind the other competitor.

Google Idol seems to have changed their name to ‘bopsta’ because of the rather problematic fact that they didn’t have permission to use ‘Google’ or ‘Idol’ in their name. It’s true that people did often incorrectly assume that they actually had something to do with Google, other than using their video service for free hosting.

Relevant links:

Data exchanged

Grad students in Oxford should definitely make use of the 50GB of free backup space provided by the school. A backup is the best defence against anything that can happen to your computer: from viruses to abrupt falls. Before you can backup your data, you need to register.

After about ten hours, my data is on the HFS server. It seemed like overkill to back up all the music, but this was the default configuration. It took enough tinkering to make it work in the first place, and I was able to tell it not to back up videos. Fifty-four gigabytes, passed across the network at about 800kb/s.

It’s odd to think of the robot arms sorting data backup tapes, in fire safes wherever they may be. I am glad everything sensitive is durably encrypted, as far as I can recall.

New blog on Vancouver speaking events

Most of what I write here is for people attending or interested in Oxford. Here’s a link for people in Vancouver. My friend Tristan is setting up a blog that lists speaking events in that fine Pacific city. If you have something to suggest, please email him through the links provided therein.

People with web design experience are particularly encouraged to help develop this into a useful service for academically inclined Vancouverites.

Oxford Wireless LAN

While it may not be obvious, there is indeed a certain amount of university-run wireless networking in Oxford. Network availability is quite limited, but at least one of these seems to seep into the room where my developing world seminar is held.

In order to use the network, you need to register for a remote access account and get a Cisco VPN client. Mac configuration is detailed here. It is annoying that you need to install special software for the VPN, given that Mac OS X can handle normal wireless networks perfectly well on its own. This means that you cannot access the VPN (say, to use electronic resources) from any computer on which you are not allowed to install software.

Hopefully, wireless networking will rapidly become more widely available in Oxford. That said, I have serious doubts about whether any such change can occur rapidly within such a disaggregated and complex system.

PS. Another OUCS service well worth looking into is their HFS backup system. It is especially valuable for people with finicky and easy to steal laptops:

Three copies of your data are made, each to separate tapes; one copy is held in the automated tape library; the second, in a fire-proof safe located at OUCS and the third in a fire-proof safe at an offsite storage facility outside Oxford.

Snazzy, no? It is only available for graduate students.