taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Web: Bernie Goldbach points to a site that’s news to me: AnotherFriend.com. It’s an Irish dating site.

I’ve had the odd discussion comparing dating culture in the US (organised ‘dating’) and Ireland and the UK (where it’s a lot more casual), and I must say, I was really convinced that the Friendster/craigslist-style organised, web-mediated dating just wouldn’t fly.

Seems I was wrong! Right now, there’s 157 people online on the site, with a good half of those being logged-in, chatting users, and about 75% of those in turn being premium, paying members. Wow, not bad.

Politics: TheyWorkForYou.com is a triumph. The most incredibly detailed, and web-aware, hypertextual database of political activity I’ve seen yet. The web-awareness — full of scraping, links, RSS and even community — is what makes it amazing; the concept of being able to read news of your representative’s latest speeches and voting record in your RSS aggregator is incredible. We need to get this out there for every country in the world.

It certainly beats Today in Parliament, that’s for sure ;)

Aside: nice choice of username for the ‘Site News’ weblog:

Some sites linking to this entry

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Wierd: Incredible footage (WMV stream) of a guy who went nuts, converted a caterpillar earthmover into what is essentially a tank, and went on a GTA-style rampage through the streets of Granby, 15 miles west of Denver, Colorado. In the process, he destroys the local bank, the newspaper, and several stores, seemingly working on the basis of (several) personal grudges.

Tags: anotherfriend, com, culture, discussion, error, friendster, lot, news, rss, site, web

Travel: I’ve just spent a week in the UK; much culture was imbibed, I got to see Michael Landy’s Semi-detached at the Tate, met up with some good mates including the pregnant Lean, and was a happy camper overall.

Then I had an 11-hour transatlantic flight, stuck in the middle of a 5-seat row with pointy elbows on both sides; then, best of all, arrived at US Immigration and found myself fingerprinted and had my photo taken, in accordance with their new policies under the US-VISIT program.

Apparently the biometrics equipment providers are a company called Cross Match Technologies. Fingers crossed (arf!) they have better false positive rates than their competitor, Identix.

I’m looking forward to seeing similar false-positive-prone usage of biometric data, for US visitors to other countries in response. (With hilarious results!)

Aside: I wonder how href=”http://use.perl.org/%7eMatts/journal/18915″>Matt’s cooking-related-program-activities injury will affect his biometric profile?

Also of relevance — apparently Boston are introducing random spot-checks of passenger’s papers on their metro transport.

It’s interesting that travel by train requires a passport, driver’s license, or similar heavyweight documentation — but one can zip around the country unimpeded by road. Of course, all of this is moot, seeing as the 9/11 hijackers had perfectly-in-order documentation, including driver’s licenses, and travelled extensively under their real names and passports. One wonders what exactly all this has to do with the War Against Terror, given that.

Funny: Knight Foundation, featuring a downloadable David Hasselhoff Paper Plane! Don’t forget, the song ‘Hot Shot City’ is particularly good.

Tags: camper, culture, documentation, driver, flight, hour, middle, semi-detached, transatlantic, travel, week

Culture: Five killed in separate road crashes. Donncha notes ‘There were 2 terrible road accidents this morning. One of them was just outside Cahir, in Co. Tipperary. I drove past there dozens of times in the past and I was shocked to hear the news.’

It’s interesting to note this cultural difference. In Ireland, a road crash with multiple fatalities is national news, on the 6 o’clock news; in California, as far as I can see, it’s pretty much an everyday fact of life – unless there was a juicy ‘road rage’ story attached, it won’t get reported.

Are there more deaths in the US than Ireland? It seems not. The US department, NHTSA, notes that California had 3,956 fatalities in 2001, which works out at 11.47 per 100K population. The Irish dept, NRA (heh – that’s National Road Authority) notes a 2001 rate of 10.7 per 100K population. (However, Ireland’s rate has dropped since then, due to an increased emphasis on road safety; the 2003 rate is reported to be the lowest since the 1960’s. Not sure what it is now, though.)

So, interestingly, the death rate is comparable — so where’s the difference? I reckon it must be simply a PR issue; Ireland’s road safety authorities have made it a PR priority, so that public awareness of road safety is heightened. As a result, road crashes are headline news.

Tags: cahir, crash, culture, difference, donncha, morning, news, population, rate, road, safety

Software: Joel on Biculturalism: ‘What are the cultural differences between Unix and Windows programmers? There are many details and subtleties, but for the most part it comes down to one thing: Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers.’

I’m not sure I agree; I’ve met lots of Windows programmers who take what Joel calls the ‘UNIX’ orientation, and even a few Unix people who are as user-oriented in their coding as what Joel calls the ‘Windows’ way.

But, talking of the Unix/Win divide — it seems that Ward Cunningham, inventor of the Wiki, is joining MS, who have something called SharePoint Team Services, an editable-web group sharing system as part of Front Page.

If you ever wanted to see an illustration of a Windows-Unix divide in the web age, it sounds like this is it: Wiki has quick-and-dirty links in FuglyBouncingCaps, is text-heavy, has obscure text markup formats, has little in the way of roles, access control, or a workflow model, and has some odd magic pages that live in the same namespace as everything else despite being different.

SharePoint, by contrast, is integrated with everything in Office, is a great success where the MS Kool-Aid is viewed as tasty, uses role-based security and a workflow, and seems to be generally reviled elsewhere.

No better illustration. The only thing that could improve that would be if SharePoint has a talking paperclip I’ve missed.

Tags: code, culture, everything, part, sharepoint, software, the, unix, way, wiki, workflow

Some excellent ‘oddly enough’ stories:

• Giant dog-eating catfish dies: a story mourning the death of Kuno, a 5-foot-long catfish living in the lake at Volksgarten Park in Moenchengladbach, Germany. It’s presumed he died due to a local heatwave and the resulting low water level. ‘Kuno became a local celebrity in 2001 when he sprang from the waters of the lake to swallow a Dachshund puppy whole.’ I had a run-in with giant catfish before; mind you, a bit nearer to their natural habitat, and with less pet ingestion involved.

  Catfish are in the news it seems; this NYT editorial is relevant, if a bit depressing. ‘The next time a … delegation sets off to preach the dogma of free trade abroad, poor nations would be within their rights to thumb their noses.’

• Yahoo! India: Holding severed head in place, he defied death: van driver has road accident, then: ‘His head almost severed, blood oozing and eyes popping out, Balram was in a dazed state when the accident took place… He, however, kept his head attached to his body with some cloth. When no one came to help him, he drove his own vehicle for 30 km to reach a nursing home in Agra.’ Now that’s grit!

• More sex than splendour on academy’s Aztec holiday: ‘When Andrew Humphrey entered a competition run by the venerable Royal Academy to win a week experiencing Aztec culture first-hand, he might have expected a genteel tour of the ruins around Mexico City, perhaps taking in the famous floating gardens of Xochimilco. Instead, he found himself tasting contemporary Mexican culture at a notorious adults-only resort with nudity, a ’sexy pool’ and ‘adult’ shows.’

(All picked up via the forteana mailing list BTW.)

Tags: academy, accident, bit, catfish, culture, death, head, kuno, lake, place