Ironing... TO THE EXTREME

(Or, for shorthand, Ironing^extreme)

 

(even more after the jump)

How many third-party sites have their sticky fingers in the websites you visit?

 
Using NoScript is an interesting experience.

Btw NoScript is a Firefox add-on that disables all the javascript running on any website you visit unless you allow it. What you quickly learn is that a website can (and usually does) run javascripts from other websites, and you have to individually allow each third-party site's script. Which is great for blocking ads from doubleclick.net or frivolous social media widgets from blippr.com. But it also lets you peer behind the curtain at how many other sites are, through some deal with the site you're visiting, getting a taste of your patronage.

Now, there are lots of sites with very few or no third-party scripts running. A visit to wikipedia.org will expose you only to wikimedia.org additionally, which is of course another domain from the same organization. On average you'll see, say, six other sites. But others...

FOUND!

Briefly seen at 3:13 this morning.

Wikipedia outage due to cooling failure in European datacenter

Global Outage (cooling failure and DNS) (Wikimedia Technical Blog)

If you tried going to Wikipedia anytime from ~noon today to shortly before now (6PM) you were treated to either an "unable to find server" message or a page looking like html written by a middle-schooler (luckily Google's cache option is always there to save anyone totally without access).

Anyway, long story short there was a cooling problem in a Wikimedia datacenter in Europe and they tried to route traffic to one in Florida but they messed up changing the DNS entries. And because a lot of ISPs don't follow some protocols that speedily replace the incorrect DNS entry with the right one, the guys giving you your internet connection might not have known where Wikipedia's servers are for a while.

Oh, and of course you can already read about this on Wikipedia.


(By the way yes I am using this to experiment with breaking-news reporting. And no, I'm not sure what the point is when people are more likely to find the blog I'm referencing than this one. But why not take a crack at it? Isn't that what this thing's supposed to be for? Experimenting?)

This cooking show I saw once

Aww, poor rage guy. He thought he was going to get some baking tips!

P.s. If you need some backstory, here's why this makes sense:

Google Voice transcriptions - oooh, pretty linguistics

 (Disclaimer: in case you're unaware, he's kidding; computational linguists love this comic)

So Google Voice's voicemail transcription is pretty cool.

I already assume that it learns its voice-recognition by training its algorithms on samples of real speech: videos with captions, people calling automated systems. That's pretty cool in itself, because it means it's not just teaching the software what "book" sounds like by having someone in a studio say "book". Instead it uses real examples of people saying "book" - quickly, imperfectly, with background noise. So it can understand you when you say it quickly, imperfectly, or with background noise.

But recently I've been getting the feeling that it's using another, very different trick to figure out what people are saying in voicemails. I think it's starting to notice what people usually say at different points in a voicemail. For instance, it's very likely to guess that you're saying "Hello" at the start of a voicemail. Here's an extreme example, where my mother left a totally blank message except for some breathing and "clunk"s:

I've seen this happen a few times recently. What I think is going on is that it's not related to the "beginning" "middle" and "end" exactly, but it's taking into account the wider context surrounding each word. As in, it's noticing what words are usually said one-after-another. Computational linguists have been using this trick for a while. And maybe it's taking into account more than the word immediately preceding, and is considering the context of the whole sentence or voicemail!

The cool new thing is that Google Voice's speech recognition isn't just matching individual sounds to words, but is thinking about the whole context of the message and asking what word would someone normally say at X point in the conversation?

Why is this not all over the interwebs already?

Once again, internets, you have let me down and I've gotta pick up your slack.

Well hopefully now I'll find something when I google "international exit signs Portal"

Compare:

with

Yes, I was snickering to myself the whole Europe trip.

(prompted by Boing Boing)

UPDATE: Apple swings +6 mace of multitouch at enemies

(followup to my previous note that "Apple can now swing +6 mace of multitouch at enemies")

UPDATE to the UPDATE!
Apparently multitouch is not one of the patents Apple is suing over! Very strange, though one theory I've seen is that they aren't confident enough that the multitouch patent will stand in court. Because of the obvious prior art. So that's cool. But my ranting about them patenting it in the first place still stands, so on with the show:
(via This Week In Google via Engadget)

Well, Apple has now officially used its controversial patents on multitouch to sue HTC, manufacturer of Android phones. Apparently Google has, since my first post, added the pinch-to-zoom gesture to its Nexus One phone (joining Palm which went ahead with that early last year).

And, of course, I gotta re-outline my opinion that it's a little ridiculous to patent something like the pinch-to-zoom gesture from the iPhone. It kind of seems like patenting the "shift-to-capitalize gesture" after inventing the typewriter. Plus, there's loads of prior art:

The following demo was made in 2006 and presented in a TED talk.
(jump to 0:44 for the money shot)

Let's talk about "Ke$ha" for just a second.

Only because I just realized why the "rebellion" she's gotten herself famous for seems so familiar (if you need to rebrief yourself, recall this brief moment in the Tik Tok video and this recent.. thing).

Here's the point. Compare all that to this classic scene from a Twisted Sister video. i.e. "Screw you teacher! Your homework's way lame! Now we're gonna have a rad pizza pool party with Hulk Hogan! Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?"

Ok, sorry, got carried away there. But you get the point. It all seems like the same level of throwaway pandering to really young, aimlessly-rebellious kids.

Why I actually care about the iPad, aka "Zittrain Was Right"

Yes, there's various critiques one can launch into about the design of the iPad. But there's one problem that matters a bit more than how hot-or-not this new device is. It's that this is one of the biggest confirmations that tech companies envision a future where they decide what you can or can't do with your electronic life.

Let me step back from hyperbole for a moment to explain myself. With the iPad, Apple has tried to expand the iPhone model into personal computer territory. The crucial difference between the iPhone and PC models is that you can make or download a program to a PC and run it, no matter what it is or what it does. You can make your PC do anything. The iPhone will only do what Apple lets it.

I'm really just summarizing Jonathan Zittrain, so for further understanding of what I'm talking about I'll just refer to his explanation:

If you actually want to get the whole picture, I'd highly recommend him in this talk.

Since I'm not saying anything new here and also because I don't have time for a full post, I'll just refer to the best quotes and posts I've seen that get at what I'm talking about. First, a great summary of the big distinction between an iPad and a real computer:

"Interactivity on the iPad consists of touching icons on the screen to change which application you're using.. ..Unlike a computer, the iPad is simply not reconfigurable."
- io9: Why the iPad is Crap Futurism

And here they spot the greater movement the iPad signals:

"This is Apple's big push of its top-down control over applications into the general-purpose computing world. The only applications that will work with the iPad are those approved by Apple, under very opaque conditions. On a phone, that's borderline acceptable, but it's not for something that is positioned to overlap with regular computers."

And then this great reaction from a disillusioned Apple fan, aghast at the fact that they haven't even included multitasking:

"I feel like a person who just un-jacked from the Matrix. I am taking a step back from being “content” in using Apple’s closed products. I’m scared. I am writing this on my Macbook Pro. Is Apple going to take all of my computing freedom on this thing too one day?"
- The Modern Geek: Apple Has Already Redefined Multitasking

Update: Zittrain has now written his official reaction to the iPad, published in the Financial Times: A Fight Over Freedom at Apple's Core"
It's not as "Look! Look! I was right! They're trying to push out conventional computers!" as I'd hoped, though others have now discussed Zittrain's future with the iPad included: iPad to Test Zittrain's "Future of the Internet" Thesis.