L

Vastly different basic understandings of religion made for a very frustrating read.

Note: What follows are my comments on a LinkedIn exchange, So What is a 'Large Database'? Minor edits of the online comments for grammatical, clarity, precision and coherence purposes are within square brackets.

PS: No doubt Oracle/SQL Server/etc are designed and optimized to deal with normalized data. That's where the power lies. They're like Sirens though ... those who don't respect them with proper designs are destined to have performance crashes (bear with me on this metaphor will ya? :)

Read more »

zacharye writes "Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets have long been considered the future of computing and a new projection from market research firm Gartner shows just how important the mobile market has become. According to the firm's estimates for 2013, Apple devices will outsell Windows devices for the first time this year. The estimate takes into account sales of Apple's iPhones, iPads and Mac computers as well as desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones powered by Microsoft's various Windows operating systems..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nerval's Lobster writes "For quite some time, there's been a theory drifting around that government can be made more open and efficient via the same crowdsourcing and social-networking tools that created such successes out of Facebook, Twitter and Kickstarter. In that spirit, numerous pundits and analysts have advocated the development of 'e-government' or 'government 2.0.' But what if the idea isn't as great as it seems? That's the angle embraced by Evgeny Morozov in a recent essay for The Baffler. Structured as a lengthy takedown of open-source advocate and O'Reilly Media founder Tim O'Reilly, the piece veers off to fire a few torpedoes at the idea of making government more responsive and transparent through technology (the latter being something O'Reilly readily advocates). 'One of the main reasons why governments choose not to offload certain services to the private sector is not because they think they can do a better job at innovation or efficiency,' Morozov writes, 'but because other considerations — like fairness and equity of access — come into play.' If O'Reilly himself argues that a government should be 'stripped down to its core' into a form more transparent and collaboration-friendly, Morozov counters with the idea that the 'participation' envisioned by most government 2.0 scenarios is limited, little better in practice than the comments section at the bottom of a corporate blog posting."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The world’s central banks are playing leapfrog, each trying to ease faster than the other. Since 2008, the world’s central banks have expanded their balance sheets by a staggering $4.7 trillion. The Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing forced the hand of the Bank of Japan, which earlier this week announced that it would double its rate of securities buying, pushing the 10-year Japanese government bond yield down to an all-time low of 0.43%. The Fed’s easing reduced the U.S. dollar’s exchange rate and boosted U.S. exports, largely at the expense of Japan and Europe. With some of Japan’s top export names at risk of bankruptcy, Japan responded with aggressive easing to reduce the value of the yen. Europe is the big loser, and the European Central Bank this week indicated that it might follow suit.

The central banks have been working straight from the playbook that John Maynard Keynes devised in the 1930s, and it has been a dismal failure. They are competing for a stagnant volume of world trade. Quantitative easing has shifted the pain around the world, but it hasn’t restored growth. Once again, the world has to learn the hard way that Keynesian economics fails. It’s disheartening that no major political party anywhere in the world has articulated a clear alternative.

Many conservatives bought into the market consensus, namely that Fed easing would boost asset prices, asset prices would boost consumption, and higher consumption would drive the overall economy. There was an element of self-consolation in this credulity: if the U.S. economy was indeed recovering, it “explains” the Obama victory last November and takes the Republican leadership off the hook for a devastating defeat. The alternative view — that Obama crushed Romney despite a very weak economy — puts the blame on Republican leaders. The fact is that Obama wasn’t lucky. We did a bad job.

Today’s reports from the Labor Department showed the smallest increase in employment in 10 months at just 88,000 and, more importantly, the lowest labor force participation rate since 1979 at just 63.9%. Americans are dropping out of the labor force because they can’t find work. The Shadow Government Statistics website puts the true unemployment rate (the proportion of Americans who could be working but aren’t) at 23%.

Conservatives (along with the market consensus) gave too much credibility to the supposed recuperative powers of the U.S. economy, and put too much faith in the Federal Reserve’s Keynesian machinations. The Fed has bought nearly $3 trillion of Treasury and mortgage-backed securities since the 2008 crisis, accelerating its purchases in recent months, in order to suppress long-term yields and (especially) the yield on risky securities.

That’s boosted the stock market, but–as we have seen from a week of disappointing economic data–not economic growth. As I wrote in Barron’s March 13, the Fed’s largesse has encouraged investors to lever up existing assets with cheap credit, but not to invest in new plant and equipment:

Optimism about U.S. consumers drove employment gains in February. Evidently the wealth effect from rising equity and home prices has spilled over into employment. About two-thirds of the employment growth came in construction and consumer-related services. This is good for stocks. But you don’t need a growth story to explain the improvement in equities. Leverage is driving stocks. The Fed is persuading businesses to re-lever balance sheets but not to break ground on new plants. Cheap leverage favors existing assets. The recovery remains lopsided with investment lagging badly.

Usually the stock market anticipates economic growth, but under the extraordinary regime of quantitative easing, equity prices reflect the cheapness of leverage more than expected earnings growth. That’s why low-volatility sectors with bond-like cash flows (consumer durables, consumer discretionary, utilities) have led the market while capital-goods producers like Cisco and Caterpillar have lagged.

Even the very modest growth the U.S. has managed to sustain during the past two years depends to a great extent on export growth. That might be the biggest contribution the Fed has made to growth; quantitative easing has helped keep the dollar cheap and that has been helpful to exports. The Fed did not target the dollar — Ben Bernanke simply does not think that way. The Fed, rather, targeted the risk composition of investor portfolios (negative short-term rates and long rates depressed by Fed purchases of longer Treasuries are supposed to force investors to invest in brick and mortar). It didn’t work out that way, to be sure; investors are buying existing brick and mortar with cheap leverage rather than investing in new plant and equipment.

 

Japan, meanwhile, has gotten the other end of the stick. As the yen rose, Japan’s exports collapsed. Top Japanese names like Sony and Panasonic saw their stock price crater and their cost of credit soar. This forced the Bank of Japan to act aggressively and force down the yen exchange rate.

 

http://veja.abril.com.br/blog/reinaldo/geral/gays-estao-sendo-usados-como-massa-de-manobra-para-projeto-que-busca-solapar-a-democracia-representativa-esta-e-apenas-uma-etapa-da-luta-no-fim-do-tunel-esta-o-controle-d/ www.cienciabrasil.blogspot.com

Raven Software has open sourced the Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast and Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy games under the GPLv2 as a tribute to the soon-to-be-closed LucasArts game studio

PostgreSQL Global Development Group has just released updates for all currently supported versions of PostgreSQL.

From the release announcement:

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has released a security update to all current versions of the PostgreSQL database system, including versions 9.2.4, 9.1.9, 9.0.13, and 8.4.17. This update fixes a high-exposure security vulnerability in versions 9.0 and later. All users of the affected versions are strongly urged to apply the update immediately.

A major security issue fixed in this release, CVE-2013-1899, makes it possible for a connection request containing a database name that begins with “-” to be crafted that can damage or destroy files within a server’s data directory. Anyone with access to the port the PostgreSQL server listens on can initiate this request. This issue was discovered by Mitsumasa Kondo and Kyotaro Horiguchi of NTT Open Source Software Center.

I wanted to highlight a couple things from the FAQ we developed for this release.

1. There are no known exploits for the major security issue fixed by this release. The vulnerability was discovered through security testing conducted by NTT.
2. Only users of 9.0 PostgreSQL and higher are affected by the major vulnerability.
3. Affected users are those who allow unrestricted access to the network port PostgreSQL listens on. If you allow anyone, without IP address whitelisting, firewalling or some other kind of network-based access control, to connect to your network port, you are especially vulnerable.

Upgrading from minor version (9.2.3 to 9.2.4, for example) only requires that you install the new binaries and then restart PostgreSQL.

Additionally, if you are using GiST indexes, read the detailed notes in the release announcement to see if you are using features that require you to REINDEX your GiST indexes.

Please update as soon as possible!

Many thanks to our volunteer packagers who worked hard for the past several weeks to make this release possible. All PostgreSQL software releases are managed by volunteers.

Barence writes "Major British retailers such as Argos and Tesco are mis-selling Windows RT devices as Windows 8 PCs, PC Pro has discovered. The confusion over Microsoft's ARM-based version of Windows could lead to consumers buying the wrong machines, and the wrong software to go with them. Argos, for example, recommends Norton Mobile Security as an add-on for its mis-labelled Windows 8 machine, despite that product only working on Android and iOS."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Carewolf writes "In a blog post titled Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project, Google has announced that Chromium (the open source backend for Chrome) will be switching to Blink, a new WebKit-based web rendering engine. Quoting: 'Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit-based browsers, and supporting multiple architectures over the years has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium projects. This has slowed down the collective pace of innovation... This was not an easy decision. We know that the introduction of a new rendering engine can have significant implications for the web. Nevertheless, we believe that having multiple rendering engines—similar to having multiple browsers—will spur innovation and over time improve the health of the entire open web ecosystem. ... In the short term, Blink will bring little change for web developers. The bulk of the initial work will focus on internal architectural improvements and a simplification of the codebase. For example, we anticipate that we’ll be able to remove 7 build systems and delete more than 7,000 files—comprising more than 4.5 million lines—right off the bat. Over the long term a healthier codebase leads to more stability and fewer bugs.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

seagirlreed writes "During this year's cicada swarmageddon, make a cicada smorgasbord by selecting the tastiest bugs from the richest cicada hunting grounds. They taste like asparagus!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

harrymcc writes "Over at TIME.com, we've published David Greelish's interview with Alan Kay, the famously quotable visionary whose Dynabook proposal has provided much of the inspiration for advances in mobile computing for over 40 years now. Kay talks about his work, laments that the computer has failed to live up to its potential as an educational tool, and says that the iPad betrays the vision that he and others created at Xerox PARC and elsewhere in the 1970s."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

dcblogs writes "PC manufacturers may try to corral Chromebook, much like Netbooks, by setting frustratingly low hardware expectations. The systems being released from HP, Acer, Lenovo and Samsung are being built around retro Celeron processors and mostly 2 GB of RAM. By doing so, they are targeting schools and semi-impulse buyers and may be discouraging corporate buyers from considering the system. Google's Pixel is the counter-force, but at a price of $1,299 for the Wi-Fi system, reviewers, while gushing about hardware, believe it's too much, too soon. The Chromebook is a threat to everything, especially PC makers, as its apps improve. Compare Tweetdeck's HTML5 version with its native app. Can you tell the difference? It might be a year or two before Adobe delivers Web-only versions of its products, but if it doesn't it will be surrendering larger portions of its mindshare to users of Pixlr, Pixel Mixer, PicMonkey and many other interesting and increasingly capable tools."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“Short of Money, Egypt Sees Crisis on Fuel and Food” is the headline of David Kirkpatrick’s dispatch running the length of the right-hand column of Sunday’s New York Times. Two years after Egypt’s impending economic disaster became apparent, it leads the liberal newspaper of broken record. As Kirkpatrick belatedly observes:

Egypt is running out of the hard currency it needs for fuel imports. The shortage is raising questions about Egypt’s ability to keep importing wheat that is essential to subsidized bread supplies, stirring fears of an economic catastrophe at a time when the government is already struggling to quell violent protests by its political rivals. Farmers already lack fuel for the pumps that irrigate their fields, and they say they fear they will not have enough for the tractors to reap their wheat next month before it rots in the fields.

The American foreign policy consensus is riding a dying horse. The Obama administration’s hopes for Muslim democracy have run up against reality, along with the illusions of the Republican mainstream. As recently as March 8, Charles Krauthammer, the pundit who gave the name “democratic realism” to these illusions, argued that “we should not cut off aid to Egypt,” that “we should remain engaged,” because “there is nothing inevitable about [Muslim] Brotherhood rule.”  That is true, strictly speaking. Egypt’s military might seize power, but that’s not what Krauthammer meant. The trouble is that Washington is still arguing about the disposition of deck chairs on a Saharan version of the Titanic. The question is, rather: How do we deal with a Middle East in which social chaos becomes the new normal?

As I predicted last September and on several subsequent occasions, the Obama administration’s silver bullet–a $4.8 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund in exchange for tax hikes and budget cuts–never will be fired. Kirkpatrick:

United States officials warn of disaster unless Egypt soon carries out a package of tax increases and subsidy cuts tied to a $4.8 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund. That would persuade other lenders that Egypt was creditworthy enough to obtain billions more in additional loans needed to meet its yawning deficit. But fearful of a public reaction at a time when the streets are already near boiling, the government of President Mohamed Morsi has so far resisted an I.M.F. deal, insisting that Egypt can wait.

Egypt is not going into an economic and social tailspin because the government of Hosni Mubarak fell in 2011; the government of Hosni Mubarak fell because Egypt already was headed into an economic and social tailspin. We stand not before a glorious era of Muslim democracy, comparable to the revival of Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism, but a prolonged period of chaos. We cannot prevent this; at best we can limit the damage. The problem with the Republican Party isn’t that our generals are stupid or malicious. On the contrary: with great intelligence and good will, they have been fighting the last war rather than the new kind of war that confronts us. A war arising from civilizational failure is a circumstance that never entered their imagination.

A nova modinha política do momento é a malhação pública do deputado Marco Feliciano, presidente da Comissão de Direitos Humanos e Minorias (CDHM). “Artistas” e “intelectuais” têm aderido em número cada vez maior aos protestos contra o parlamentar, e um zilhão de pessoas acharam conveniente desabafar toda a sua revolta nas redes sociais sob o lema “não me representa”. Não quero aqui entrar nos detalhes dessa demonstração coletiva de imbecilidade, mas analisar uma de suas muitas utilizações – demagógicas em sua maioria – para outros fins.


Vejam a foto acima. Ela tem sido compartilhada pelo grupo libertário Estudantes Pela Liberdade (EPL) para lembrar o movimento cívico-militar de 31 de março de 1964, que depôs João Goulart e interrompeu os sonhos totalitários de muita gente dentro e fora do Brasil. Podemos analisar a imagem por duas perspectivas: o que ela quis dizer e o que ela efetivamente disse.

A mensagem que o EPL quis compartilhar, acredito eu, é a de que todo o Regime Militar não os representou. E, nisso, estou com eles. O Regime Militar também não me representa. Muitas políticas adotadas pelos governos dos generais foram autoritárias e deram ensejo à perseguição de pessoas inocentes. Além disso, os governos militares tiveram um caráter essencialmente estatólatra do ponto de vista econômico, algo com o qual não posso concordar – o livre mercado é a forma mais eficiente e justa de promoção da inclusão social e do desenvolvimento econômico. Mas, ao fim e ao cabo, suspeito que o último governo que possa ter minimamente me representado tenha sido o de D. Pedro II. No entanto, a pergunta realmente pertinente é: qual foi a mensagem que o EPL conseguiu, de fato, passar?

Ao contrário do que a historiografia oficial e oficiosa conseguiu sedimentar no imaginário do povo brasileiro, o movimento cívico-militar de 1964 não foi fruto das aspirações sinistras de poder e glória de um punhado de generais rancorosos com o conluio e o apoio entusiasmado de potências estrangeiras (diga-se, Estados Unidos). O que aconteceu no dia 31 de março de 1964 foi a resposta aos anseios da própria população brasileira diante da escalada de violência política e de instabilidade institucional pela qual passávamos então. Doze dias antes, quase 1 milhão de pessoas havia saído às ruas de São Paulo protestando contra o discurso que o presidente João Goulart proferira no Rio de Janeiro, em 13 de março de 1964 – em que garantia que “com ou sem o congresso, na lei ou na marra”, iria promover as reformas coletivistas que tanto queria. Já havia grupos de guerrilha devidamente montados, com apoio militar e financeiro de regimes comunistas (notadamente Cuba e União Soviética), e em atuação no interior do País. Pessoas do alto escalão do governo e aliados próximos de João Goulart, como Leonel Brizola e Miguel Arraes, trabalhavam dentro do governo brasileiro a soldo desses mesmos países que financiavam a guerrilha rural brasileira. No dia 2 de abril de 1964, quase dois milhões de pessoas saíram às ruas do Estado da Guanabara (Rio de Janeiro) para mostrar seu apoio aos militares e agradecê-los por terem demovido um presidente que diuturnamente rasgava a Constituição e pavimentava o caminho para a implantação de um regime totalitário em solo pátrio. Tudo isso está devidamente documentado.

Se hoje gozamos de alguma liberdade – curiosamente tornada cada vez mais exígua por aqueles que pegaram em armas para derrubar o governo militar e implantar regimes totalitários –, isso se deve em muito ao movimento cívico-militar de 31 de março de 1964. Esses homens atenderam ao chamado da população naqueles dias cumpriram seu dever constitucional e institucional de salvaguardar a nação contra um perigo iminente, homens esses que, em sua quase totalidade, não se locupletaram no poder nem o utilizaram para garantir um futuro dourado para si próprios.

E a mensagem que o EPL quer passar é que esse movimento das Forças Armadas em atender o legítimo clamor popular, cumprindo seu dever de proteger a nação, e ao menos atrasar a instauração de um regime totalitário comunista no Brasil não os representa. Isso tudo pode não representar o EPL, mas representa aqueles que conseguem enxergar a realidade dos fatos por trás da densa cortina de fumaça alimentada zelosamente pela esquerda brasileira há décadas.

Por isso eu digo: o movimento cívico-militar de 31 de março de 1964 me representa, sim! O que não me representa é a utilização demagógica e pouco refletida de armas retóricas da guerra cultural, forjadas pelos verdadeiros inimigos da liberdade para confundir e cooptar, na construção de um bom-mocismo daninho e perverso.

http://aluizioamorim.blogspot.com.br/2013/03/31-de-marco-de-1964-revolucao-que.html www.cienciabrasil.blogspot.com

bugnuts writes "Nearly all modern DSLRs use a Bayer filter to determine colors, which filters red, two greens, and a blue for each block of 4 pixels. As a result of the filtering, the pixels don't receive all the light and the pixel values must be multiplied by predetermined values (which also multiplies the noise) to normalize the differences. Panasonic developed a novel method of 'filtering' which splits the light so the photons are not absorbed, but redirected to the appropriate pixel. As a result, about twice the light reaches the sensor and almost no light is lost. Instead of RGGB, each block of 4 pixels receives Cyan, White + Red, White + Blue, and Yellow, and the RGB values can be interpolated."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Building upon my previous blog post, where I declared Postgres was "good enough", I want to explore what "good enough" means. I will use an aircraft design analogy. (You might remember me exploring a Postgres/aircraft parallel before.)

In aircraft design, everything is a tradeoff between weight, cost, reliability, and safety. Let's look at safety — what would be the safest material to use in constructing an airplane? One logical selection would be to make it from the same material as the flight data recorder, i.e. the black box. It is designed to withstand the most serious crashes, so obviously, it would be the safest.

Of course, the problem is that an aircraft made with material of the same strength as a flight data recorder would be so heavy it would never get off the ground. A material must be chosen that is safe enough, and light enough so the plane can fly. Obviously, measuring best in only one dimension leads to impractical problems in other areas.

Continue Reading »

Note: Minor edits 3/29/13.

In an online discussion initiated by the question Does It Matter If Data is BIG or not? MQ commented:

I still feel the discussion around Relational Modelling is confusing the point, and should be put aside until the problem is understood. If a company came to me and said 'Help me solve my big data issue - I have a billion emails I want to analyse' my answer is not 'just create a logical model using relational model theory' because this does not supply an answer. I will make more ground if I say 'right, lets discuss what this is, what technology you have, where the fail points and choke points are, etc and model (relational model) that as part of the process'.

I've built data models for 25 years (all levels) and firmly believed in Relational Theory across this entire period, so I am not saying drop Relational Models, just saying don't start there. Interestingly, I don't get any backlash against relational modelling using this approach - so perhaps the issues mentioned are about how the concept is sold to clients (a weapon rather than an intellectual concept)?

Read more »

Google has announced an initiative to help protect open source software from patent claims. "Today, we’re taking another step towards that goal by announcing the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge: we pledge not to sue any user, distributor or developer of open-source software on specified patents, unless first attacked. We’ve begun by identifying 10 patents relating to MapReduce, a computing model for processing large data sets first developed at Google—open-source versions of which are now widely used. Over time, we intend to expand the set of Google’s patents covered by the pledge to other technologies."

SLR Magic launched a new MFT lens. Here is the full press release:

—–

NEW: SLR Magic Monster Lens II 12-36×50 ED Spotting Scope for mFT Digiscoping

Hong Kong, China (Mar 28, 2013) – SLR Magic introduces the second edition SLR Magic Monstor Lens 12-36×50 ED Spotting Scope lens for Digiscoping and expands their Micro Four Thirds lens lineup.

The SLR Magic 12-36×50 ED Spotting Scope for Digiscoping gives you the highest resolution and brightest view possible by three key elements. It features an over sized eye relief, utilized Extra-low Dispersion optics, as well as fully Multi coated glass to help you with spotting the rare bird species. The SLR Magic 12-36×50 ED Spotting Scope alsooffers stacked, dual-focus controls, so you can make both rapid and fine-tuning adjustments.

The main difference from the first edition include improvements in image quality due to a new mFT adapter objective offering increased sharpness and contrast over the first edition.

The field of view of this spotting scope on the micro four thirds camera corresponds to a a 840-2520mm lens in 35mm format. The user friendly design allows you to attach your camera by mounting it like any other camera lens. Everything you need comes with the package and there is no need to have a compatible lens to use it. This is the perfect solution for amateur digiscopers who want to take photos or video of wildlife.

The 12-36×50 ED Spotting Scope will be available from authorized SLR Magic dealers by June 2013.

Technical Data

SLR Magic 12-36×50 ED (Premium Extra-low Dispersion glass) for mFT
Lens Type: Spotting Scope
Compatible Cameras: All micro four thirds mount cameras
Magnification: 12-36x

35mm equivalent focal length: 840-2520mm
Objective: Φ50
Lens Coating: Multi Coated
Close Focus: 15 ft.
Weight (oz./g): 28.2/800, 45.86/1300 (with mFT adapter objective)
Water Resistant/Fog proof: Yes
Eyepiece: Straight Zoom
Eye relief: 23mm

Accessories: mFT adapter objective with tripod collar

MSRP: $799

Andrew Chan
Product Manager

—–

These are the other SLRmagic lenses for sale on eBay:

Current SLRmagic lenses for Micro Four Thirds:
SLR magic 11mm f/1.4 lens you can preorder on eBay (Click here).
Toy Lens 26mm f/1.4 lens on eBay (Click here).
SLR Magic 35mm f/1.7 MC lens on eBay (Click here).
Noktor SLRmagic 50mm on eBay (Click here)

The Third Manifesto formally describes tuple types (RM prescription 6), tuple values (prescription 9), tuple variables (prescription 12) as well as other tuple-related elements. As mentioned in the previous post, a tuple value is a set of ordered triples each consisting of attribute name, type and value.

Class Tuple of the TTM-inspired interface to PostgreSQL models TTM tuples as Python lists of TTM Attribute objects. Lists were used rather than sets because for many practical purposes the order of the attributes is useful (or has “meaning”), e.g., the first attribute listed is most often –even in purist relational theory presentations– the primary key or part of the primary key.

The interface stores the Tuple heading as a (Python) n-tuple of name-type tuples, in the “internal use” _heading attribute. The n-tuple was chosen over a list due to its immutability. The interface also sets each Attribute as a Python attribute of the Tuple object. Thus, if you define a Tuple variable as follows:

film = Tuple([
    Attribute('id', int, sysdefault=True),
    Attribute('title'),
    Attribute('release_year', int)])

You can then assign or access an Attribute using simple Python syntax:

film.title = "Seven Samurai"
if film.year == 1954:
    do something

The interface also stores two other internal use lists, one for nullable attributes and another for attributes that allow default values. These are to be used by upstream classes such as RelVar.

Class Tuple has a __setattr__ method tailored to deal with assignment to TTM Attributes. It disallows assignment to internal attributes after initialization, with one exception: the _tuple_version attribute (used by RelVar for optimistic concurrency). It also doesn’t allow assignment to undefined Attributes, e.g., given the film variable above, attempting to assign to film.length will raise an AttributeError. Finally, the assignment is “filtered” through class Attribute, so that an attempt such as film.title = 8.5 will result in a ValueError from that class.

The pyrseas.relation.tuple module defines a standalone function: tuple_values_dict. This is used to generate a dictionary of attribute values suitable for passing to Psycopg’s cursor.execute method. For INSERT, a single currtuple argument is expected. For UPDATE, the modified Tuple is passed as a second argument and tuple_values_dict will return a dictionary solely for the attribute and values that have changed.

Filed under: PostgreSQL, Python, User interfaces

A Spanish association of Linux users has filed a complaint with the European Commission over Microsoft's control of Windows 8 PC installs through the UEFI Secure Boot technology

jfruh writes "The Swedish Language Council is a semi-official, government funded body that regulates, cultivates, and tracks changes to the Swedish language. Every year it releases a list of new words that have crept into Swedish, and one of 2012's entries was 'ogooglebar' — 'ungoogleable,' meaning something that can't be found with a search engine. After Google demanded that the definition be changed and the Council add a disclaimer about Google's trademark, the Council has instead decided to remove the word from the list altogether."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "As reported by Slashdot, Nokia recently notified the IETF that its RFC 6386 video codec (aka VP8, released by Google under a BSD license with a waiver of that company's patent rights) infringed several dozen of its patents; furthermore, Nokia was not inclined to license them under FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminating) terms. While the list provided by Nokia looks intimidating, Pamela Jones at Groklaw discovered that many appeared to be duplicates except for the country of filing; and even within a single country (e.g. the U.S.), some appeared to be overlapping. In other words, there may be far fewer distinct patented issues than what appears on Nokia's IETF form. Thom Holwerda at OSNews also weighed in, recalling another case where sweeping patent claims by Qualcomm and Huawei against the Opus open source audio codec proved to be groundless FUD. The familiar name Florian Mueller pops up again in Holwerda's article."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes with some news that might make you think twice before getting a network-enabled camera. From the article: "Users' desire to share things online has influenced many markets, including the digital camera one. Newer cameras increasingly sport built-in Wi-Fi capabilities or allow users to add SD cards to achieve them in order to be able to upload and share photos and videos as soon as they take them. But, as proven by Daniel Mende and Pascal Turbing, security researchers with ERNW, these capabilities also have security flaws that can be easily exploited for turning these cameras into spying devices. The researchers chose to compromise Canon's EOS-1D X DSLR camera and exploit each of the four ways it can communicate with a network. Not only have they been able to hijack the information sent from the camera, but have also managed to gain complete control of it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A ONG Rio de Paz está promovendo um abaixo-assinado em favor da libertação de um casal de missionários presos injustamente no Senegal. Vamos participar?

Para saber mais, clique aqui e aqui
Para assinar, clique aqui

Eu não os conheci, mas eles são da Igreja Presbiteriana Betânia, em Niterói, onde fui batizada.

From September to December 2012, I had a tumblr.

It’s no use preaching to the choir, & I figure everyone already knows what’s wrong with the Social Web. The Last Psychiatrist: “The problem is the cycle of wanting outsiders to tell you who you are”.

Ovid’s Narcissus:

Credule, quid frusta simulacra fugacia captas?
quod petis, est nusquam; quod amas, avertere, perdes.
Ista repercussae, quam cernis, imaginis umbra est:
nil habet ista sui; tecum venitque manetque,
tecum discedet, si tu discedere possis.

Fool, why try to catch a fleeting image, in vain?
What you search for is nowhere: turning away, what you love is lost!
What you perceive is the shadow of reflected form:
nothing of you is in it. It comes and stays with you,
and leaves with you, if you can leave!

So I left.

The cognitive style of Tumblr

We are influenced by our tools. What kind of formal structure does tumblr nudges one towards?

Tumblr favours what is

1. short,
2. visual,
3. shared,
4. social,
5. gamified,
6. and walled.

So the default tumblr action is: repost an image created by someone else, to get people to validate you with imaginary points, hosting all this under the Domain of a particular capitalistic company, John Maloney’s Tumblr, Inc.

My top tumblr post was a gif I reposted from reddit; it got 28637 imaginary points. Almost all of my text posts—either original efforts, or quotes from linguistics articles or the classics—got between one and zero imaginary points. Of course, you and me are sane adults and we don’t care about imaginary points. Right?

Of Tumblr’s cognitive features, the combination of 4, 5, & 6 makes for a particularly unholy mindtrap. Of course, it isn’t a trap specific to Tumblr—we can detect the signs of this trend already in Slashdot & Kuro5hin & their brethen, and today, for this generation raised to think iOS/Facebook games are “games”, this is just The Way The Web Works. The new empires, Google and Facebook, are literally marketing companies (people keep asking: you worked at Google, what’s it like, you want to understand Google? read Klein, then read Žižek), and their monopolization strategies put old Microsoft to shame. What we have here, gentlepersons, is nothing less that Marketing 2.0, aka applied neuroeconopsychology. It’s designed to be addicting: casinos + brand-identity + high-school sociopolitics. Stop reading & consider this equation carefully. It’s terrifying.

The fact that the Tumblr community turned out to be feminist and queer-friendly, and Reddit (The Worst Thing that Ever Happened to the Internet) libertarian and openly misogynistic, and Facebook (definitely The Worst Thing that Ever Happened to the Internet) mainstream, is entirely besides the point; it’s just a random consequence of the fact that they originally vampirized Livejournal, Slashdot, MySpace respectively. The point is the structure, not the contents. The point is, they’re all echo chambers, they’re all Echo, they’re the reflecting pool.

The point is, the pool cannot make you happy.

Look back at the list of Tumblr formal features. Feature 3 isn’t necessarily bad. In fact, I miss a place to post selections and references to other people’s work—since free software is dead, there’s no self-hosted tool nearly as convenient as Tumblr to repost images, links, book quotes. But I’m done with walled gardens, & gamification, & social hooks, so I’ll just live without a sharefeed for now.

Point 1 & 2 aren’t necessarily bad, either, and many writers and artists have done wonderful things with the Tumblr format. But it’s not what I, personally, want to do. I wish computers were better at images, yes, and so I should be happy with Tumblr for its visual bias—but computers still suck so much at them, that my interest wanes. I can ask even a toddler to find “which picture has a sad dog” and it’s trivial, but Google can only find it if it’s annotated by text, and this redundancy is exactly the wrong way of integrating images and texts—they should complement, not duplicate each other—and the only thing Google knows about an image it’s “it’s big, and kinda blue, and perhaps it might have a face around here?”. Let’s not even talk about making images—computers are still such a far cry from a simple sketchbook. I’ll pass on the polyhassles of scanning and processing and alt=ing and tagging and and.

And I like texts to be long.

Tumblr was an enlightening experience; it taught me what kind of blog I don’t want to have. But it was harder to find out which direction I did want to go. I had to look elsewhere. Elsewhen.

Goals

Some questions can be very satisfying, if you chew them the right way. “Where do ideas come from?” is one, very productive in the work of 80s British comic book people. “Where do heroes go when the story ends?”, something my wife asked me once, is a facet of the reverse question, and can also take you a long way off (Moore actually ran with this in his Supreme run, but there’s a lot more to be said).

The Edge magazine has an annual feature where they ask interesting questions to intelligent people (a self-selected group that unfortunately is tending to the militant-atheist Echo-chamber). It had some great ones (“What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?”) and some not-so-great (“What should we be worried aboud?”). The last one had some guy worried that the Internet is runing our ability to write, which is utter bunk, but buried in his rant I found a great question—

Personal letters have traditionally been an important literary medium. The collected letters of a Madame de Sévigné, van Gogh, Jane Austen, E.B. White and a thousand others are classics of western literature. Why have no (or not many!) “collected emails” been published, on paper or online? It’s not only that email writing is quick and casual; even more, it’s the fact that we pay so little attention to the email we get. Probably there are many writers out there whose emails are worth collecting. But it’s unlikely that anyone will ever notice. And since email has, of course, demolished the traditional personal letter, a major literary genre is on its last legs.

The question isn’t why email “demolished” letters—it didn’t, we did—but: Why can’t we have collected letters anymore? And notebooks? And journals? This is not like Polaroid film. Pen and paper still exist. What’s holding us?

Letters: Chekhov, Rilke, Joyce; Journals: Plath, Kerouac, Marco Polo, Shōnagon, Shikibu, Kenkō, Chōmei, Bashō, Takuboku; Notebooks: Leonardo, Darwin, Hemingway, Valéry. I look at those wonderful human creations and think this is so cool and think: I want to do something like this. This is inspiration. Rule 1: aim high.

It’s very hard to find a good edition of Leonardo. They keep trying to fit him into little boxes: here are “The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci”, but the audience are engineers, so it’s all machine diagrams & formulæ; here’s another “The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci”, but it’s for artists, so it’s just plant sketches and anatomy studies and how to estimate the proportion of this or that; here’s “The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci” again, and this time it’s about his “thought” so it’s all words, fables, aphorisms, essays. Dude. Leonardo da Vinci does not work that way. Leonardo doesn’t categorize his posts. Leonardo doesn’t cater to the audience. I mean we’re talking about Mr. Facil cosa è farsi universale here. I have no friggin idea of how to think 10% as widely as Leonardo but one thing I know, and let it be rule 2: Do not specialize. Do not hold back.

This is, of course, a SEO sin. But that’s just great, since SEO is an abomination before the Lord. “The problem is the cycle of wanting outsiders to tell you who you are”. How to break the mental conditioning of the Social Web? Rule 3 is aversion therapy: Embrace the antisocial web. I’ve been writing for a long time without feedback: that in itself should prove that, whatever it is the reason that I write, it’s not feedback. Since comments are intoxicating and a gateway drug to “likes”, I hereby declare Zero-comment Pride. Valéry worked feverishly on the Cahiers for 50 years with zero comments; if it was good enough for him, it’s good for me.

If I try to understand what attracts me in these journals and notebooks, I’m drawn to the way they expand outwards in all directions like probing trees—they look at everything, really look, and we can follow their sight & be delighted (Goethe: “Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking”). I think it was R.A. Wilson who once said that everything you do with your own projections is masturbation, whereas what you do with the world is sex. Question: when is masturbation bad? Answer: when it prevents you from meeting people & having sex; when it’s a crutch for fear; when it’s an excuse to run away from nonfantasy, to avoid the annoying, gory details of reality. Rule the 4: Sex with the world is better than mental masturbation.

This is far from a complete answer, but for the first time in years, I have an idea of the direction I want to go. Accordingly, the blog had an overhaul, and now has a “theme” and a “name”, because we respect traditions (why not? respecting traditions is fun, as long as one is aware of their arbitrariness).

Infrequent updates

Writing is hard work. I’d rather incubate for a long time and try my best than feel guilty about not matching some artificial schedule. Therefore, posts will have to be sporadic.

(English translation pending)

O Felipe me convidou a colaborar com a revista livre que estava organizando, a Rosa. Abaixo, minha resposta.

Dae,

Antes eu tinha dito que sua proposta de ajudar com uma revista/fanzine/ezine era tentadora, mas devido ao tipo de vida que ando levando, tinha medo de não conseguir manter os compromissos. Também me comprometi a dar uma resposta decente depois. Passaram-se dois meses; esta é a resposta decente. Pra começar, gostaria de falar de Shigesato Itoi, sobre quem eu estava pesquisando precisamente no dia em que você fez a pergunta.

Shigesato Itoi é um japonês mais conhecido no ocidente (sei que você odeia essa palavra; aqui ela significa simplesmente “fora do Japão”) como o autor do jogo que provavelmente é a obra-prima do gênero narrativo (RPG), Mother 2, que saiu nos EUA como Earthbound em 1995, e cujo autor depois desapareceu completamente (do nosso ponto de vista), sem lançar mais nada além de um jogo de de pesca de robalo (como dizem no Final Fantasy, “…”). Doze anos depois finalmente apareceu a seqüência, Mother 3, ainda mais fascinantemente literária; ela ficou fora do mainstream ocidental e nunca foi traduzida oficialmente, mas pode ser jogada em inglês em uma excelente versão de fãs (o fã na verdade é um tradutor de jogos profissional). E depois disso Itoi sumiu de novo, deixando os adoradores querendo mais.

Esta é a narrativa que você encontraria em um site de videogames americano típico. No Japão, Itoi é uma celebridade menor (tarento), mas não como autor de jogos. A Wikipedia japonesa descreve ele em primeiro lugar como copywriter—Itoi talvez seja o mais famoso da área, tendo criado pequenas frases de grande impacto como a marca “Game Boy” ou o slogan da Seibu, oishii seikatsu (“vida gostosa”—em japonês “gostoso” não é usado metaforicamente como no português, então a frase fica mais carnal). A propósito, acredito que a técnica de copywriter foi o que possibilitou jogos narrativos tão acima da média. O texto de RPGs é dramático, i.e. na segunda pessoa, como no teatro (com o suporte de atores e cenários); mas é também curto, direto, casual, visual, como nos quadrinhos. Por exemplo, no Mother 2, em dado momento da aventura, você está caminhando no deserto com seus amigos, suando, sofrendo; o deserto é amplo, cheio de inimigos, passar muito tempo nele causa insolação, um “status negativo” especial para esta ocasião. Um pouco antes você tinha encontrado um “gergelim preto”—um único pixel na vastidão—que disse estar arrependido por ter ofendido o gergelim branco, com quem gostaria de se desculpar. Agora você está vagando atrás do pixel branco. No meio do deserto, eventualmente, você encontra um sujeito no chão. Ao falar com ele, ele diz: “Sempre durmo no deserto, por isso as pessoas pensam que sou um cadáver. Mas um cadáver não estaria de sunga, não é?” Esta é a única fala dessa personagem; você nunca mais vai vê-la (nem os gergelins); e a coisa toda é completamente inconseqüencial para o resto da trama (como Tarantino, Itoi rotineiramente viola a máxima de Chekov, o que reforça o humor absurdista). Dizer que esse personagem é “bidimensional” seria um eufemismo; ele é pouco mais que um traço sugestivo; o termo para isso, em teoria da arte japonesa, é Superflat—tão plano que vira uma outra coisa, um fragmento pop. No formato jogo de RPG, a grande maioria das personagens são feitas assim de um único encontro, um parêntese, uma frase solta. O que, por acaso, é precisamente a especialidade dos copywriters. Itoi faz frases memoráveis, rítmicas (na língua original), cheias de personalidade; ele quis o jogo inteiro na escrita fonética simples (hiragana) para incentivar os jogadores a ler em voz alta; ele fez questão que cada um desses personagens secundários tivesse seu próprio desenho, sua própria cara, mesmo que ela só vá ser vista uma vez (a maioria dos jogos multi-milionários atuais não têm esse cuidado, e reusa ícones simbólicos genéricos).

Mas, no artigo da Wikipedia sobre o Itoi, “copywriter” é apenas o primeiro adjetivo de uma enumeração interminável. Muita gente de lá deve conhecer Itoi melhor como locutor de rádio, devido ao seu programa de entrevistas informais, o “Conversa com Chá”. Outros devem lembrar dele como um jurado comicamente lírico no programa de TV pioneiro do gênero da competição culinária, Iron Chef (“a carne aqui se torna um veículo, um simples acompanhamento para realçar o pimentão… ao mostrar outro ângulo deste ingrediente tão profundo, estou certo que você conseguiu trazer felicidade para o pimentão”). Itoi dublou a voz de Papai em Meu Vizinho Totoro—o desenho de Miyazaki que inaugurou a categoria “desenhos de Miyazaki”, que viria a ser a que mais conquistaria prêmios em festivais internacionais de cinema cult. Itoi uma vez lançou um CD de jazz; Itoi uma vez escreveu um livro de contos fragmentários com Haruki Murakami, o perpétuo-candidato ao Nobel; Itoi fez o design da agenda (de papel) mais influente do Japão… Enfim.

Você está se perguntando o que Shigesato Itoi tem a ver com a vaca fria. Em primeiro lugar, a principal ocupação atual dele é manter um site de notícias e ensaios, sem propaganda. Ele o descreve como “jornal”, mas a gente poderia considerar um blog—inaugurado em 1998, mesmo ano de origem da palavra “blog”. O nome do site é Hobo-nichi, que significa “mais ou menos diário”; uma espécie de pedido de desculpas preventivo, para o caso de ele eventualmente não conseguir escrever algo novo todo dia.

Até hoje ele escreveu algo novo literalmente todo dia.

Em segundo lugar, caso não esteja evidente, eu morro de inveja da vida do Shigesato Itoi. Estava lendo uma entrevista com ele no Japan Times, porque queria saber mais sobre o trabalho social que anda fazendo desde o terremoto de 2011, tentando atrair trabalho criativo para ajudar as áreas devastadas. Mas o jornal perguntou algo sobre como evitar a morte dos jornais, e esta foi a resposta:

If you compare hand-written and typed information, the hand-written version will seem more precious and make you happier because it feels heartfelt even if, functionally, it is inferior because the writing is bad and hard to read.

As regards the heart being happier, though, I think many newspapers have forgotten how readers feel when they read the paper, and they just think it’s a plate on which to communicate information.

But think about ceramic plates. There are different kinds of porcelain, and some plates are made by well-known potters. The plate is part of the dish, so there must be something good about it. Unless newspapers think hard about what that is—and re-evaluate their strengths—they will be defeated because, functionally, they may be inferior to other platforms people have available today.

I’ve seen one of the TED presentations by a guy whose redesigns of newspapers led to a rise in their circulation. I was very impressed with that. As I saw his presentation, I thought, “It’s a extension of posters—they are selling 20 pages of nice posters.”

Isso ressoou comigo de várias maneiras (e não só porque acho que a principal razão que jornais estão morrendo não é a Internet, e sim o fato que os jornais são uma droga—malfeitos, condescentes). Eu ando sentindo que caí na famosa armadilha paulistana, isto é, viver para trabalhar ao invés de trabalhar para viver; larguei a carreira de ciência da computação porque queria uma vida com mais arte e literatura e décadence, mas ando com tantos compromissos acadêmicos que não consigo mais sentar e ler por prazer; fico com a sensação apocalíptica que logo vai acabar o prazo disso ou daquilo e eu deveria estar fazendo algo produtivo. Gostaria de, de alguma forma, voltar a poder sentar calmamente e tomar um chá lendo algo simples e agradável, como um jornal ou revista. Mas não consegui achar uma revista que realmente tivesse gosto em assinar, e absolutamente nenhum jornal chega perto do que eu queria. O problema é que eu não conseguia definir direito o que queria. Só sabia que todos os jornais brasileiros não tinham.

Ler o trecho acima causou uma epifania. O que eu queria, esse tempo todo, era um jornal que me fizesse feliz. Isso envolve também design & qualidade de material (como, aliás, o papel da agenda do Itoi—os japoneses têm uma tradição milenar em explorar a sensualidade dos papéis); mas também envolve, de forma mais ampla, um cuidado com os detalhes, uma vontade de ter qualidade, ou, em uma palavra, amor. Entendi então que o que eu tinha inveja, no fim, era a capacidade de usar palavras como “felicidade” ou “amor” da maneira que o Itoi usa, não-ironicamente.

A sua proposta veio logo depois. Eu gostaria de colaborar com a revista? Sim, desde que seja possível (e isso depende mais de mim que de qualquer outro fator, mas) desde que seja possível manter isso como um trabalho amador (no sentido etimológico); embora isso vá soar simultaneamente brega e pretensioso, eu gostaria de tentar criar algo com o que alguém possa relaxar, tomar um chá, ler calmamente, e ficar um pouquinho mais feliz. Só não tenho como me comprometer a trabalhar “quase diariamente”. Mas “quase trimestralmente”, quem sabe rola.