The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence.

• Security Flaw Links BitTorrent Users to Skype Accounts
  I never was a big Skype fan in the first place, but it’s articles like this one that make me even more wary about using the service.
• This economic collapse is a ‘crisis of bigness’
  Nice intro to the writings of Leopold Kohr who already predicted the collapse of growth-driven systems in the 1950s.
• “Das Cannabisverbot wird fallen wie der Eiserne Vorhang”
  Interview with an Austrian lawyer, who predicts that Cannabis may be decriminalized in a lot of countries in the near to medium future (in German).
• Why Socialism?
  One of Albert Einstein’s most well-known political works, which in some regards still seems pretty up to date, despite being written in 1949.
• The Chilling Story of Genius in a Land of Chronic Unemployment
  A somewhat older article, that may give you a different perspective on the spammers and scammers commonly associated with Nigeria.
• The Lairds of Learning
  I posted some articles on academic publishing lately, this is another one.
• Katholische Kirche macht mit Pornos ein Vermögen
  The Catholic Church in Germany owns one of the country’s largest publishing houses, which also sells a lot of pornographic literature and other things that her followers don’t approve of. But when people complain, the usually get ignored (in German, short summary in English).
• Your DNA may carry a ‘memory’ of your living conditions in childhood
  An interesting result from an epigentic study shows that early childhood living conditions influence DNA methylation.
• How secure is HTTPS today? How often is it attacked?
  The EFF’s contribution to the current “SSL is broken” disucssions.
• Just Cool It
  Interesting device that regulates the core temperature of our bodies with — for me — surprising results.

Sometimes the hardest thing about committing the perfect crime can be keeping your genius to yourself.

I’m currently reading the early access version of MongoDB in Action, so I felt like playing around with it a bit (in fact I do use it for Happynerds.net, but that’s not very exciting). I then remembered that I recently stumbled upon a service called The Exporter, which I had used to download all my tweets from Twitter (as of October 4th 2011). So why not use MongoDB to find out which users I retweet most often?

In case you wonder if Tom and I gave up on reading papers, the answer is a resounding no! In fact there’s one we finished sometime around mid-September, which for various reasons hasn’t been summarized yet. This is about to change.

The paper

The paper in questions was “Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?”, a Turing Award lecture by John Backus.

A very brief summary

At the core of his lecture, Backus argues in favor of functional/applicative programming. This is done by first exploring shortcomings and bottlenecks in the von Neumann architecture, followed by an exploration of concepts from his own FP) (Function Programming) language.

Difficulty of the paper

Generally this is very easy to read, and provides good food for thought, even today. The more mathematical parts in the middle might deter some readers, but aren’t really that important.

Takeaway

Alas the age of the paper shows a bit. While some of the points are still valid, there undoubtedly is a much wider appreciation of the benefits of applicative style programming nowadays, as can be seen by various functional languages slowly finding their way into the mainstream. It’s still very interesting to see how early Backus already thought about all of this though, and also that the language he envisioned seemed to be more in line with the APL school of thought that e.g. Haskell, which in all fairness wasn’t around back then. I wonder how Backus felt about the latter, which can be very declarative (see pointfree style). For example, here is the inner product function from section 5 of the paper translated to Haskell:

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ip :: [[Integer]] -> Integer
ip = sum . map product . transpose

If you like programming languages and also like to think about them, and learn about their history, this is an interesting paper to read. Also it’s quite ironic that Backus actually won in large parts for his contributions to Fortran, a language that influenced so many other imperative languages.

The Internet is a radical medium: it mostly reflects polarized positions.

• The Drive to Be Different
  Wired has a piece on our drive to be different and how that can be compensated by satisfying other desires.
• Will your computer’s “Secure Boot” turn out to be “Restricted Boot”?
  The “Secure Boot” feature that hardware vendors have to support for getting a Windows 8 compatibility logo could have disastrous consequences for users of free software. Inform yourself by reading this article and then sign the statement to show your support!
• Malaria scientist celebrates success after 24 years
  While not perfect, this already has a success rate of around 50% and is an important step forward in the fight against malaria.
• First genome-wide association study for dengue identifies candidate susceptibility genes
  Speaking of mosquito-borne infections, there also are some new research results on Dengue, the second most common one after malaria.
• How to create a language in one day
  I’m a language nerd, no matter if you talk about natural or programming languages. So an article where somebody creates an artificial language using Python obviously makes me very happy.
• Programming language development: the past 5 years
  I said I’m a programming language nerd and this is another excellent blog post by Michael Fogus.
• Hacked!
  After his wife’s Gmail account got hacked, a journalist started contemplating the security of data in the “cloud”. This is a good link to forward to your less techy friends.
• What If We Paid Off The Debt? The Secret Government Report
  Would a debt free U.S. be bad for the world economy? There’s also an interesting link at the end of the article, make sure to look at it too.
• The politics of no alternatives or How power works in Russia
  A very long but super interesting interview about the power structure in present day Russia.
• Super bad: First State set police on man who showed them how 770,000 accounts could be ripped off
  And of course he was threatened with legal action. Why do companies with bad security always try to shoot the messenger?

Interestingly, this desire for distinctiveness could be quelled by giving the aroused males a candy bar.

On October 29th the local Google Technology User Group is hosting a Chrome Hackathon, in which I’ll participate. As a little warm up exercise I created a small extension for my favorite microblogging service Soup.io, which basically just wraps their bookmarklet.

All in all this was a very nice experience, since the developer’s guide is thorough and well written. After reading the “Getting Started” tutorial, almost all my questions were already answered. The others — which were generally caused by my poor JavaScript skills — could easily be solved by consulting Google and StackOverflow.

When I rebooted my new work notebook (a very nice x201s, with a dual-core i7, 8GB RAM and an SSD by the way), it seemed that for whatever reason there was no Grub installed. Strange, but not the only problem I had with the alternate Ubuntu installer that I used for setting up LUKS-encrypted root and swap partitions. Since this turned out to be more involved than I originally thought, I decided to document what I did to maybe save others the trouble. BTW: You’ll need a Linux Live-CD for this, I recommend the excellent Debian-based Grml.

First we need to open the LUKS partition, which can be done with cryptsetup.

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$ cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/<device> <name>
# you'll be asked for your password

With that out of the way, you’ll have to mount your LVM volumes. This took me a bit because my VG wasn’t active, but thanks to an excellent blog post I found (see sources) this problem was solved quickly.

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# do a lvm disk scan
$ lvmdiskscan
# activate the volume group
$ vgchange -ay
# make sure the VG is active now
$ lvscan
# mount the actual volume
$ mount /dev/<volume_group_name>/<volume> /mnt/external

I then needed to mount the unencrypted /boot partition as well as some special filesystems (with bind mounts) at the appropriate mount points.

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# mount the boot partion
$ mount /dev/<device> /mnt/external/boot
# bind mount some things we need in the chroot env
$ mount --bind /dev /mnt/external/dev
$ mount --bind /proc /mnt/external/proc
$ mount --bind /sys /mnt/external/sys

With everything set up, all that’s left to do is chrooting into the system and fixing Grub.

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$ chroot /mnt/external
chroot$  grub-setup # grub-install, whatever you need

Sources:

• Creating and mounting a LUKS encrypted disk
• mount: unknown filesystem type ‘LVM2_member’

Above all, remember the more harm you cause, the more hate you feel, and the more kindness you deal into the world the more you come to love the people you help.

• The Benjamin Franklin Effect
  A very interesting article on cognitive dissonance and how we tend to rationalize things.
• Letter from a psychopath
  An email copy/pasted into TwitLonger, giving great insight into the world of a (claimed) psychopath.
• Hearing Bilingual: How Babies Sort Out Language
  Research shows that language development starts really early on, and that the brain adopts to bilingualism easily.
• Benford’s Law and the Decreasing Reliability of Accounting Data for US Firms
  This article uses some math to show that accounting data is becoming less reliable and also how deviations from Benford’s Law seem to coincide with outside events.
• Huaxi: the village that towers above China
  A small town in China builds a 328m high skyscraper because of one very influential man.
• Die Andersdenkenden
  Autistic identical twins are studying philosophy at a German university and surprise their teachers and fellow students with the depth of their though processes (in German).
• That’s Italian
  Italian journalists Beppe Seevergnini gives 10 reasons why Silvio Berlusconi gets away with being how he is.
• On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning
  Peter Norvig’s rebuttal to a statement by Chomsky on statistical learning in regards to language.
• The Toughest Little Bird You’ve Never Heard Of
  A small species of birds migrates every year from Alaska to New Zealand.
• Tired of Being Tired
  I know that occasionally I should take some of the advice offered in this article.

If he went to see a basketball game, he’d walk out taller.

I finally found some time to give this blog a less generic look, which was really easy thanks to Octopress’s great theme and customization support.

First I changed some colors in sass/custom/_colors.scss:

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$header-bg: #000;
$subtitle-color: lighten($header-bg, 58);
$nav-bg: desaturate(lighten(#FF7100, 18), 5)
$link-color: #FF7100;
$footer-bg: #CCC;

Then I reduced the width of the body, the size of the dates and article titles as well as the codeblocks (all of this can be done in sass/custom/_styles.scss):

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body {
  max-width: 1100px;
}
time {
  font-size: 14px;
}
h1 {
  font-size: 2.2em;
}
section {
  > h1 {
    font-size: 1.5em;
  }
}
codeblock {
    font-size: 1.1em;
}

Last but not least I found some excellent free social media icons for the sidebar.

I hope you like the changes, I do and I was also pleasantly surprised how easy it is to change the look of an Octopress blog.

Thus, tweeting "Down with capitalism" from your iPhone for those around the world to read seems to be the most ironic thing a person can do.

• What it costs to live in Japan
  A foreigner living in Japan gives an interesting breakdown of the cost of living there.
• Belgian ISPs Ordered To Block The Pirate Bay
  Two Belgian ISPs received a court order to block the Pirate Bay after the Belgian Anti-Piracy foundation won a court appeal.
• The Life-Changing $20 Rightward-Facing Cow
  Game designer, lecturer and author Ian Bogost was so bothered by “social gaming” and “gamification”, that he bothered to release a satire game, which turned out become his biggest success. Great read!
• Brazil Drafts An ‘Anti-ACTA’: A Civil Rights-Based Framework For The Internet
  After already being big on FOSS and open content use, Brazil now also pushes for a new Internet regulation, that actually has a strong civil rights focus.
• The Plan to Bring an Asteroid to Earth
  I love when science starts sounding like science fiction.
• Destruktive Dynamik im Handelsraum
  A study found that financial traders act more ruthless than psychopaths. Who’d have thought…. (in German)
• Vladimir Putin, Action Man
  Vladimir Putin, the James Bond of politics. Joking aside though, this photo series is a great summary of the public image he has created in recent years.
• Independent reporting of #OccupyWallStreet
  An insightful article about the current protests, with a fair share of media criticism and good observations about the protesters. I often find myself liking things written by people who label themselves libertarians, but it still is a philosophy I have strong doubts about.
• Computer virus hits US Predator and Reaper drone fleet
  A hard to remove virus on military infrastructure and once again it seems like external storage media was the culprit.
• Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization
  This article on hipsterdom feels so contemporary, I hadn’t even noticed that it’s more than 3 years old until I finished it.

If only we carried rocks instead of cameras, we’d look like revolutionaries.

I used to be a big gamer, especially when it came to console games. Nowadays I don’t have much time for that anymore, but I’m still quite interested in gaming culture and games as a medium. I’m especially fond of indie games, since their authors can afford to explore stranger concepts than more mainstream development teams. Here’s a list of some of my favorites, most (all?) of which should be available on Windows, Mac and Linux:

• And Yet It Moves: Awesome physics-based platformer, featuring a very unique design.
• Atom Zombie Smasher: Probably my absolute favorite at the moment. Great presentation, awesome music and an interesting twist on the tower defense genre.
• Braid: Cute puzzle game that utilizes time as a central element of the game mechanics.
• Crayon Physics Delux: Ok, I’m a sucker for physics based games, and this is no exception. The great visual style definitely helps.
• Desktop Dungeons: While the developers are working on a “proper” version now, the original alpha is still available for free. Think of it as the bare essence of rogue-likes.
• Osmos: I really like this one for it’s almost meditative quality.
• Sword of Fargoal Legend: Another dungeon crawler that proves that good game mechanics are more important than fancy graphics.
• Trauma: Maybe the most unique game in this list, this point and click adventure deals with the psychological trauma of a young woman who survived a car crash. Eerie atmosphere, great presentation.
• VVVVVV: A 2d puzzle platformer that I’m quite fond of. Messing with gravity while listening to chiptune music? Count me in!
• World of Goo: The cute Gooballs alone are a reason to play this one.