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An interesting presentation about teaching mathematics.

In a long tradition of comparing some aspect of computers with some other aspect of real life comes: "If programming languages were religions". There is one flaw with this article, though: programming languages are religions.

I used to pretty much only use my laptop, which was nice, because all my data was stored in one place. However, I now use a desktop computer at work. For the most part, it's OK, because I don't need to access much work stuff from home, and vice versa. However, occasionally it does happen, and so I'm thinking more about online services.

Clipperz is an online password (or other textual data) manager. Now for most security-conscious people, “online” and “password manager” do not go together. However, Clipperz uses JavaScript to encrypt all your data before sending it to their servers. That means that none of your data can be accessed by Clipperz (or anyone else) unless they know your password.

Even better, Clipperz is free/open-source software, which means that if you really don't trust them, you can audit their source code. Or run your own service.

I had thought about implementing something similar, but Clipperz does more-or-less what I want it to, plus some things that I hadn't thought of. The only downside is that I wish it would have better organizational features (in particular, a hierarchical organization).

(see also: /.)

The National Research Council has released a 352-page report that tells us what most of us knew already: trying to use data mining to find bad guys doesn't work very well. The problem being that there are too many false positives.

Whether or not this will actually stop anyone from trying to do it anyways remains to be seen.

Web-based chatrooms. Thanks to the magic of XMPP/Jabber, BOSH, JavaScript, etc. it works just like regular chatrooms, except that it's all in the comfort of your web browser. You can create your own room, set themes, etc. You can even join Jabber conference rooms on other servers.

It's somewhat similar to an idea that I had, except that I'm not sure that the traditional chatroom format is what people want. But I could be wrong. (Who am I to tell people what they want.)

Nevertheless, it illustrates how XMPP can make the web more dynamic and interactive. Like my Talk-to-me web chat. And it looks like the Jabber website will soon have more lively content.

(Speeqe is also Free/Open Source, so you can, among other things, download it and run your own server, and modify it to your heart's content. (As long as you follow the licensing terms.))

(see also: Globe and Mail)

From the article:

CBC News has learned that 16 Canadian lakes are slated to be officially but quietly "reclassified" as toxic dump sites for mines. The lakes include prime wilderness fishing lakes from B.C. to Newfoundland.

Environmentalists say the process amounts to a "hidden subsidy" to mining companies, allowing them to get around laws against the destruction of fish habitat.

...

A local environmentalist who attended the Long Harbour meeting, Chad Griffiths, said of Sandy Pond: “It's easy enough to consider just one lake as just one lake, as a needed sacrifice, right? But it's not one lake … It's a trend. It's an open season on Canadian water.”

Blegh. Stupid government.

Read the article.

I have nothing more to add.

Update: CBC followup story: Fisheries minister defends the move. I like the reader's comment on the story that says:

I can remember back when the Fisheries Minister's job was to protect fish habitat, not peddle it to the highest bidder

(see also: /.)

As we all know, the only way to make sure that terrorists don't sneak weapons onto planes is to require that all airline passengers fly naked, without any carry-on luggage. Well, it looks like we're one step closer to that. Several American airports have installed new scanners that can see under peoples’ clothing.

And, like most recent airport security measures, the security scanners are not only completely unnecessary and useless, they also seem to be completely ineffective too.

The scanners do a good job seeing under clothing but cannot see through plastic or rubber materials that resemble skin, said Peter Siegel, a senior scientist at the California Institute of Technology. "You probably could find very common materials that you could wrap around you that would effectively obscure things," Siegel said.

Yes, apparently you can find some certain materials, wrap them around your body, and hide weapons there.

In similar spirit to “If operating systems were airlines” John Goerzen has written about what it would be like if version control systems were airlines.

For the record, I've used RCS, CVS, Subversion, tla and git, and I generally agree with John's assessments. RCS was horrible. CVS was a great improvement over RCS, and Subversion was a great improvement over CVS. (Except that every once in a while, Subversion would decide that it wanted to change its on-disk format.) tla was revolutionary in its day, but it's complicated (“tla help” is 198 lines long and lists 114 commands), and kind of slow (yes, I know I need to use cacherevs). I've only started learning git, and it seems like a pretty nice system. And it's supposed to be very fast (it was created to handle the whole Linux kernel).