Two Second Memory

I’ve just done a brief analysis of the amount of spam that Kathryn gets on her blog. The number is … wait for it … 94.13% spam!

Kathryn had a comment from a Troll recently ranting (he’s apparently famed for being a troll) about Limes & Lycopene being broken because she uses Spam Karma. The troll proudly announced that he moderates all his comments. Go for your life matey, if you want to moderate 16998 posts then you can only be described as a fool.
So the moral of this story is make sure you use a good anti-spam tool.

Filed by rgh at 14:27 under General
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I’ve just finished reading ‘Getting Real‘ by the 37signals’ guys. It’s a very, very impressive book, one that everybody involved in any aspect of software development should read at least twice.

But instead of writing a review (How can I compare to the mighty Seth Godin?) I want to focus on the chapter “Beware the Bloat Monster”:

You don’t have to become an outer space pen that writes upside down. Sometimes it’s OK to just be a pencil.

“Sometimes it’s ok to just be a pencil” is such a wonderful sentence. It needn’t even apply to software engineering, it could apply to anything. We strive for so many, often unatainable, things but forget that it’s OK to just be a pencil.

I shall revel in my pencilness

Filed by rgh at 20:17 under Books
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Not a word that most of you will be familiar with but the concept of disemvowelling is oh so cool. To disemvowel means to remove all vowels from a word. And … you might say. Well it was started by Teresa Nielsen Hayden as a way of reducing the effectiveness of a troll on her blog. The expression was coined by Arthur D. Hlavaty in the comments. You can see the post here.

So if someone is trolling a post on your blog you just remove all the vowels from the post and lo and behold the sting from the comments is gone. As an example the first part of this sentence would be transformed from:

Not a word that most of you will be familiar …

to:

Nt wrd tht mst f y wll b fmlr …

Now as far as I’m concerned this is a stroke of genius. You are not censoring the comment but you are making it very hard for people to read. The troll generally loses interest at this stage and then stops making everyones life a misery.

For the geeks amongst you this is very easy to implement programatically — but I guess you already know this! In ruby, for example, you would do the following:

‘Not a word that most of you will be familiar … ‘.gsub(/[aeiou]/i, ‘’)

For the non-geeks interested in what this means gsub mean global substitute and the /[aeiou]/ is a regex class meaning any of the letters between the []; the i means ignore case. The ‘’ is what you substitute each matched letter, i.e. nothing.

Filed by rgh at 21:26 under Internet
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I was walking to work today and I noticed a banner in a clothes shop saying “Spend over $250 and get a free …”. I didn’t read the “…”, I read it as “Spend more and we will give you a pointless piece of junk that you didn’t even know that you didn’t want”. Now you might think “oh thank goodness you pointed out that I want “…”. I didn’t actually know I needed it, yet alone how much it will improve my life”. Well, you might. You might not of course but the sad thing is that some people will. Why would they put the sign up in the first place.

So to recap; you go into the shop to spend $125 on a pair of trousers you see the sign and think, “um I could get a new shirt as well”. So you buy the trousers and the shirt (you wouldn’t normally spend $125 on a shirt but hey I’m getting “…” for free). The net result? You spent twice as much as you intended and have a expensive shirt you didn’t want, but might come in handy and a “…” that you will discard on the ever growing pile of “…s”.

And the economic rationalists tell us this is a good thing?

Filed by rgh at 10:41 under General
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If anyone is wondering I’ve decided to get rid of my blog roll. I don’t update it and I tend to manage the blogs I read via RSS or Atom it makes life somewhat easier. It is with this in mind that I’ve decided to remove my blog roll.

Filed by rgh at 17:36 under General
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There is a lot of talk at the moment about the amount of carbon dioxide in the air and governments arguing over whether it’s man made or not. This argument is gaining acceptance but it is by no means universal.

Lets just pause for a few moments and think about this slightly differently. That atmospheric CO2 is increasing is an incontrovertible fact. There is also a very strong correlation between temperature and atmospheric CO2 as this graph shows (this graph also indicates the current levels of CO2 which is horrifying). So irrespective of what people think there is going to be a significant temperature rise so instead of whinging about who’s fault it is we should just accept the facts and try and reduce the amount of CO2 that is being pumped into the atmosphere.

Filed by rgh at 17:17 under Environment
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Change gtk_key_theme to Emacs to get ctrl-U to work in GNOME. It seems that you can also use .gtkrc but I need to do more research on that.
Does that count as a blog post?

Filed by rgh at 08:46 under Notes to Self
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Well as you can see this is my first post for a while. The last few months have been fairly hectic, we’ve had friends over from the UK and New Zealand and my life at work has been an utter, utter nightmare. Suffice to say that I have left that company.

But in reality these are just excuses. So I’m aiming to update my blog at least once a week from now on. In my first post I said that I was starting a blog so that I write more, which lets face it hasn’t really happened so this is it, I going to be updating my blog much more often.

Filed by rgh at 10:55 under General
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There is a very, very interesting article: “Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers” in this week’s New Scientist about a drug that could potentially work on all cancers. The same edition’s editorial is about how it might not come to fruition due to the drug been old and therefore not patentable as the pharmaceutical industry won’t make any money from it.

In a normal cell energy is produced in the mitochondria but in a cancer cell another process called glycolysis is used. This is common to all cancers. It was generally thought that cancer cells used glycolysis because the mitochondria was irreparably damaged but it turns out that it just shuts down because there is not enough oxygen. The problem with this is that the mitochondria controls apoptosis (or cell death — which is a normal part of a cell’s life cycle) so the cell becomes immortal and cancerous.

Now if a patient is treated with dichloroacetate (DCA) the mitochondria restarts and apoptosis starts working again and the cell is shut down in the normal manner thereby killing the cell. Well that’s the theory anyway!

This all sounds amazing stuff and it has been tested on human cancer cells outside the body and on rats that have been infected with human cancer cells and the results have been very good. There have been no human trials as of yet. And this is where it gets to the sad part. This drug has been around for years and therefore not patentable. What’s more there is no incentive for any of the pharmaceutical companies to develop this drug as they are not going to make any money from it. This I think is absolutely reprehensible and is a stunningly example of how neoclassical economics has once again let us all down (If you want a full analysis of why neoclassical economics is so utterly screwed I suggest the you read “Economia - New Economic Systems to Empower People and Support the Living World” by Geoff Davies. It is quite an amazing read). In a more just economic system there would be a mechanism that forces the pharmaceutical companies to at least contribute to the development of drugs that profit society but not the pharmaceutical industry. After all corporations were started to benefit society not the other way around.

Now I am not saying that this drug is going to work — I’m an engineer I am so not qualified to make that statement — but I am qualified to say that it should as least be trialled to see if it does work. As the New Scientist editorial says:

It is a safe bet that drug companies will be falling over themselves to find patentable compounds with a similar action to DCA.

It goes on to say:

It would be a scandal if a cheap alternative with such astonishing potential were not given a chance simply because it won’t turn a big enough profit

It would an absolute scandal.

Further reading:

Pharmaceutical Corporations and Medical Research

Filed by rgh at 07:13 under General
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My grandmother is no longer with us. I can’t speak to her. I can’t visit her. She is gone. It is a weird feeling to be both incredibly sad and relieved at the same time. Nan had been ill for a very long time you see. She suffered so much. But she is suffering no more.

Now she is gone and I have only memories of her. But they are fond memories. They are happy memories. They are funny memories. And they are silly memories. They are memories that I will take to my grave.

I love you Nan.

Filed by rgh at 14:56 under General
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