USA skickar nu en flotta för att bekämpa pirater utanför Afrikas kust. Detta gjorde de också för 200 år sedan, då USA för första gången visade sig vara en stormakt som klarade av att projicera makt långt utanför landets gränser.

De krig som utkämpades kallades för Barbareskkrigen och Sverige var med som allierad till USA på ett hörn.

Handelsfartyg som gick genom Medelhavet plågades av piratattacker från småstater som mer eller mindre brutit sig ur det ottomanska imperiet. Man tog last och slavar från européernas fartyg. Slaveriet motiverades med att de i alla fall var otrogna. Storbritannien och Frankrike hade fått fri lejd för sina skepp med hjälp av militärt hot och mutor. USA gick under samma avtal som Storbritannien fram till sin självständighet och fick sedan skydd en tid av Frankrike. Men sedan drabbades amerikanska fartyg och man beslöt till sist att ingripa militärt (efter att ha provat mutor).

Intressant är att det på Wikipedia står att en svensk flotta slogs tillsammans med amerikanerna:

The First Barbary War (1801–1805), also known as the Barbary Coast War or the Tripolitan War, was the first of two wars fought between the United States of America (briefly joined by a small Swedish fleet) and the North African states known collectively as the Barbary States. These were the independent Sultanate of Morocco, and the three Regencies of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, which were quasi-independent entities nominally belonging to the Ottoman Empire.

(Läs mer: First Barbary War - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Det hade jag ingen aning om! Och detta var innan Nato. Och på denna sida kan man läsa lite om vad som skickades. Danmark verkar också ha varit inblandat. Som det står på sidan så kan det vara så att svenskar blev tagna som slavar så sent som i början av 1800-talet. Tydligen förklarade Tripoli krig mot Sverige, vilket ju var rätt riskfritt eftersom Tripoli inte direkt ligger i Kattegatt. Undrar hur det gick med de tre fartygen som inte förliste i stormen på väg ned.. Nån som vet?

Enligt denna sida hette två av fartygen Camilla respektive Fröja. Jag ser att Sverige nu skickar tre fartyg till området:

Då ska tre av försvarsmaktens fartyg, korvetterna HMS Malmö och HMS Stockholm samt stödfartyget HMS Trossö, med besättning och underhållspersonal på totalt 152 personer, eskortera och skydda FN:s mattransporter mot anfall från pirater.

Sägas skall också att pirateriet denna gång inte är i Medelhavet utan vid Afrikas östkust.

"Insecticides sprayed on house walls or bed nets are some of the most successful ways of controlling malaria," said Read. "But they work by killing the insects or denying them the human blood they turn into eggs. This imposes an enormous selection in favor of insecticide-resistant mosquitoes."

Om det inte är på Twitter har det inte hänt?

[twitation needed]

Läs mer: Organized Online, Students Storm Gov't. Buildings In Moldova

Swed’s are very quiet, sometimes. And not answering a question is also a way of answering a question. Or turning your back to somebody is also a form of communication. So that is something quite special and Swedish, I would think. The idea of silence, and the things that you suddenly hear in a silent community.

Läs mer: ICONS Interview with Tomas Alfredson - Director Of LET THE RIGHT ONE IN

This is how to use your Tahoe node. First, you have to run your own local Tahoe node, as described in running.html.

Portable Ubuntu for Windows is a Ubuntu system running as a Windows application. This system is built with the Colinux Kernel, Xming X server and Pulseaudio server for Windows.

Läs mer: Portable Ubuntu for Windows

När man först införde datorer i organisationer så använde man dem för att snabba upp saker i organisationen på ett sådant sätt att man behöll den hierarkiska strukturen. Man t o m förstärkte denna hierarki. Ur detta tankesätt kom system som kallades Executive Information systems (EIS)  eller Decision Support Systems (DSS).

Idén med dessa är att man har en central kontrollpanel som samlar in, analyserar och presenterar uppgifter som sedan en en chef eller ledningsgrupp använde rör att ge order och fatta beslut. På så sätt blev det att man genom att införa ny teknik snarare cementerade en gammal struktur än skapade något nytt. Detta är inte något speciellt effektivt sätt att använda datorer i nätverk, och genom att decentralisera organisationer får man ofta en bättre kvalitet och effektivitet.

Internet är ett exempel på ett decentraliserat system, baserat som det är på TCP/IP och ofta under detta Ethernet. Båda teknikerna är självorganiserande.

Men, vi är inte i närheten att utnyttja den potential som finns i datorer och nätverk. Det gör att det finns gott om utrymme att inför godtyckliga restriktioner, och det är det som håller på att hända nu med större och större övervakning. Och det är en farlig och ineffektiv väg att slå in på. I någon mening skulle vi kunna använda all ny kapacitet till att styra all information enligt godtyckliga regler. Men då anpassar man inte lagstiftningen till verkligheten utan bygger en simulerad godtycklig värld ovanpå.

Vi kan ödsla nätverkskapacitet och processorkraft på att övervaka, styra och förhindra, eller vi kan bygga det nya samhället med de fantastiska förutsättningar tekniken har givit oss.

use

dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

as root if you are on Debian, or:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

on Ubuntu. You will get to a GUI that works in a terminal, where you can set your location. Daylight savings will automatically be included.

webworks@host3:~$ date
Tue Mar 31 19:53:28 UTC 2009
user1@host3:~$ su -
Password:
host3:~# tzconfig
WARNING: the tzconfig command is deprecated, please use:
 dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
host3:~#
host3:~# dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
Current default timezone: 'Europe/Stockholm'
Local time is now:      Tue Mar 31 21:58:50 CEST 2009.
Universal Time is now:  Tue Mar 31 19:58:50 UTC 2009.
host3:~# date
Tue Mar 31 21:58:57 CEST 2009

tzselect only gives you a view of the time at a particular timezone. to change the timezone use "dpkg-reconfigure tzdata" instead

"Open source code will contain text ads in comments and variable names, and Google and other text ad companies will scan the open source code repositories and fund the projects based on what they find in the code"

We all remember when ads on a page were mostly big, colorful and sometimes even blinking banner ads. It turned out people learned to steer clear of them and preferred pure text links, and some companies including the ubiquitous Google [GOOG] has made a big business from them. Most analysts today agree that we are moving into an open source world as far as software is concerned. This is where the future money is, and it is a no brainer to see text ads moving into this realm.  A larger and larger percent of Internet users are active open source developers in one sense or another and it is therefore natural to put the messages into what these people read - source code.

Revenue stream

"Ads in source code puts the money where the real effort is" says Martin L, an on and off open source writer. "With this kind of revenue potential I would probably code open source around the clock", he quips while sipping on a caffeinated drink. And he is not alone. "We estimate the market to be worth $2.9 billion, if you include naked default credit swaps and leverage", says a leading IT Open Source analyst on Wall Street. In short the ads may put substantial amounts of money into open source code development.

Comments and placement

Here is an example of what we might see in the future. This is some python code from an Open source project (buildout.eggnest) that gives an impression of what lies in wait.

Before:

    for directory in src_dirs:
        if os.path.isdir(directory):            
            for file in os.listdir(directory):
                if os.path.isfile(os.path.join(directory, file)):
                    try:
                        content = _open(os.path.dirname(file),os.path.join(directory, file),[])
                    except MissingSectionHeaderError:
                        continue

After:

#Jolt Cola makes it a lot easier to write this stuff   
for directory in src_dirs:
        if os.path.isdir(directory):            
            for file in os.listdir(directory):
                if os.path.isfile(os.path.join(directory, file)):
                    try:
                        content = _open(os.path.dirname(file),os.path.join(directory, file),[])
                    except MissingSectionHeaderError:
                        continue
                       # Takes a sip..

Ghostwriters

"Major sponsors will most likely want to have commit access to the code, so that they can insert ads themselves" says Tim, an ad placement strategist at one of the major Internet ad firms. "Special deals will be done with prolific open source coders, so that they can get their own persona, or ghostwriter, pretty much like the way celebrities' Twitter feeds work today", he continues.

Harmony

Major advertising clients have declared their willingness to divide the open source market in between them and not clobber each other's ads in the source files. "A pilot project two years ago got derailed in a fork war on the Linux kernel between 2.6.16coke and 2.6.16pepsi" shrugs an industry insider of some stature.

Timeline

Just after March 31, that is on the first day of quarter 2, ads in code will roll out in a big way. Stay tuned.

The User experience has dramatically improved over the past few years, resulting in rich and responsive user interface. AJAX, javascript and CSS are widely used to offer users the dynamic interaction that they have come to expect from advanced, sophisticated, professional solutions.

Läs mer: 10 Creative & Rich UI interfaces & How to Create Them | Noupe

Man ska äta vitamin D3 snarare än D2 och doser mindre än 400 internationella enheter gör igen nytta, i alla fall inte på benskörhet.

Doses under 400 international units a day had no discernible effect, but for doses larger than that, the pooled data showed a 20 percent reduction in the risk for all nonvertebral fractures, and an 18 percent reduction for broken hips. The type of vitamin D made a difference. The effect of vitamin D3 was significant, with a 23 percent risk reduction, but there was no significant reduction with vitamin D2. The authors suggest that D3 is more effective in maintaining blood levels of

Läs mer: Vital Signs - Vitamin D Pills May Prevent Fractures in Older Adults - NYTimes.com

Hennes DNA länkades till 40 brottsplaster i Tyskland, Österrike och Frankrike. Jakten pågick i femton år. Polismördare, tjuv  och mycket annat kunde hon lägga till sina titlar. Fast till slut så verkar det som om det var en kvinna som paketerade topsarna man tog DNA-spår som förorenat dem. För ett år sedan skrev BBC om fantomkvinnan som man inte fick tag i:

The suspect, known as the Phantom of Heilbronn, is wanted in connection with 30 crimes, including six murders and dozens of robberies.

Ska bli spännande att se vad som händer i framtiden, nu när vi tex vet att en människa kan flera människors DNA i sig, pga gravididet, transplantion eller vara en naturlig chimera. I Tyskland har man f ö just släppt ett par tvillingar ur häktet. Man tror att båda gjort juvelstöten, men man kan inte bevisa det riktigt...

She was one of Germany's most-wanted criminals. Dubbed "The Phantom of Heilbronn" and "The Woman Without a Face," she apparently committed an extraordinary series of crimes across Germany over more than 15 years, including murders, break-ins and theft. Lab tests showed her DNA at 40 different crime scenes. Investigators had to admit they were stumped.

Läs mer: Q-Tip-Off: Police Fear 'Serial Killer' Was Just DNA Contamination - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

The most notorious case was in April 2007 in Heilbronn where a 22-year-old policewoman was shot dead and her colleague (25) seriously injured. On the back seat of the police car, detectives found what they thought was DNA from the mysterious killer. As part of the investigation, 800 previously convicted women were questioned - but there was no match to the sample. Her DNA was found over and over again: in bottles, tank lids, on bullets – and once even on a biscuit! Traces were found in southern Germany, Austria and France.

Läs mer: Phantom killer was a myth: Police track DNA of a cotton bud maker for two years - Bild.de

Det finns inte klimatförändringar - bara fel kläder.

Finn Ahrenkiel, Malmö Der findes ikke klimaforandringer - kun forkert påklædning.

Läs mer: Politiken.dk - det levende net

En nu 93-årig man var på affärsresa i Hiroshima när atombomben föll, och inte bar det sig bättre några dagar senare hemma i Nagasaki. Man måste ju undra just hur mycket posttraumatisk stress man får efter att ha blivit prickad av två atombomber...

Tsutomu Yamaguchi had already been a certified "hibakusha," or radiation survivor, of the Aug. 9, 1945, atomic bombing in Nagasaki, but has now been confirmed as surviving the attack on Hiroshima three days earlier as well, city officials said.

Ok, han blev nog inte rakt av prickad, men fick bl a brännskador.

Läs mer: Japanese man certified as double A-bomb victim - Boston.com

Scientists say the discovery is much more than a mere curiosity, because the colony consists of what are known as social amoebas. Only an apparent oxymoron, social amoebas are able to gather in organized groups and behave cooperatively, some even committing suicide to help fellow amoebas reproduce. The discovery of such a huge colony of genetically identical amoebas provides insight into how such cooperation and sociality might have evolved and may help to explain why microbes are being found to show social behaviors more often than was expected.

Läs mer: Oozing Through Texas Soil, a Team of Amoebas Billions Strong - NYTimes.com

The bottom line of both studies is that P.S.A. screening does find more prostate cancers — but finding those cancers early doesn’t do much to reduce the risk of dying from the disease.

Läs mer: Well - Screen or Not? What Those Prostate Studies Mean - NYTimes.com

Learn how to salsa dance, including demonstrations of the basic steps, moves, turns and footwork of salsa dancing, in this series of free video dance lessons for beginners.

Läs mer: Salsa Dancing for Beginners | Expert Village Videos

Eller rättare sagt, våra vokalljud ligger ofta på intervaller som stämmer med musikaliska skalor. I alla fall i engelskan och på mandarin, tycks det som:

When people say the 'o' sound in rod, the ratio between the first two formants corresponds to a major sixth - the interval between C and A. When they say the 'oo' sound in booed, the ratio matches a major third - the gap between C and E. Ross found that every two in three vowel sounds contain a hidden musical interval. Her results didn't just apply to English either. Ross repeated her experiments with people who spoke Mandarin, a vastly different language where speakers use four different tones to change the meaning of each word.

Läs mer: Not Exactly Rocket Science : Why music sounds right - the hidden tones in our own speech

Det verkar som om en människas ansikte ger en viss vägledning till hur bra de är på att hantera pengar och inte sätta sig i skuld. Forskare använde webbsajten prosper.com, som kopplar ihop långivare och låntagare, för att få tag på information om folk som ville ta lån. Man anlitade sedan arbetskraft från Amazons mechanical turk, som fick sitta och avgöra kreditvärdighet från bara fotona på dessa personer. Mechanical Turk's sammanlagda bedömning korrelerade med låntagarnas ekonomiska bakgrund vad gäller att kunna hantera pengar.

The researchers looked at 6,821 loan applications, 733 of which were successful. Their first finding was that the assessments of trustworthiness, and of likelihood to repay a loan, that were made by Mechanical Turk workers did indeed correlate with potential borrowers’ credit ratings based on their credit history.

Läs mer: Physiognomy and moneylending | About face | The Economist

Recently, this blog was moved from one ISP to Amazon EC2. At the old location I used a perl script to periodically download 60 odd news sources in Atom and RSS formats, and then used some custom python code in combination with the feedparser module, to parse and present this in Plone. I used this for years and since the results were publically available I know at least one more person who used them (hi Johan!).

Yahoo pipes

With the new location I decided to ditch those old scripts and go for an external solution. The reason? It was so darn simple to do. Yahoo has an Internet control language called Yahoo pipes. It works by stringing together, visually, modules that each does a specific task, such as collecting data, filtering or aggregating. Data flows through connectors between the modules. The way it's done  brings back memories to me from the old visual programming language ProGraph.

With the old system I presented the five last entries for each news source, grouped by source. An effect of this is that I had to visually scan through a number of "stale" news sources that hadn't had anything updated for a while. Another way to present news feeds is to mash them all together and sort the on the item level. This is callled to make a "River of news". This is how I did it with Yahoo pipes:

That is just three modules, a fetch feed modules with a looong list of feed urls (the blue connector is coming up from the bottom of that module in the screen shot), a sorter, and the output. The sorter auto detects what criteria can be sorted on. You can see the output here. Click at the list tab to get away from the image flow.

To the left in the screen shot above you can see the modules available: Sources, user inputs, operators and more.

When you get what you wished for

Now, when I have a river of news feed, I realise that it is not always what you want. On of my sources lists popular keywords on Swedish blogs. That source is updated so frequently that the keywords often make it to near the top of my river of news. Some sources seem to give the same pub date to all their items, which means you will have to wade through them as you are, ehrm, I suppose "wading" in the river of news. Some news sources seem to give a new pub date for an item on any update of the item; I notice some news  persistently turning up among the top twenty items, when I know for a fact that I read that piece twelve hours ago. I also do not know right now how good Yahoo pipes is in mashing together different feed formats, such as Atom, RSS and versions of these.

Update 2009-03-23

There are a number of pipe construction on pipes.yahoo.com that deal with news feeds, and some are a lot more complicated than what I show above. This indicates that there is a lot of complexity to deal with still. About my complaint that some news items turn up on the front page long after they've been published, this seems to be a side effect of a subscription feed that shows the top x blogged about news items. So, the same news items "sticking" near the top of the combined feed is expected behaviour.