Yelp Mute on Full Sail University

Full Sail University is a non-accredited degree mill that has good ratings at yelp.com. A friend asked about them so I looked them up. I noticed that yelp had reviews, and was surprised at how positive they were. However, it turns out that most of the reviews were quite negative, as one would expect for a school that exists largely to separate students from their money. However, yelp had filtered most of the negative reviews. Most disturbing.

Note: Full Sail might take issue with the non-accredited statement at the opening, but they're not accredited by a regional accrediting body and so their credits will not transfer to a real college or university. For all practical purposes, they are unaccredited.

Thunderbolt (1947)

This is a very good documentary about US P-47 pilots flying from Corsica during the second world war. It outlines the goals and how they planned to attain the goals of cutting off German supply lines in Italy, gives one a feel for how the pilots lived, and provides very good war footage. You can stream it from the Internet Archive:

http://www.archive.org/details/thunderbolt

As Seen on the Daily Show

In this video, posted on youtube by RickSantorum, and approved by Rick Santorum, Rick Santorum spreads santorum on Mitt Romney:

The Threat of Literalism

Ken Kovacs wrote a very interesting piece in a local newspaper, which greatly deserves a wider audience: http://catonsville.patch.com/blog_posts/the-threat-of-literalism

Ad Attitude

If it moves or makes noise, kill it.

Virginia Senate Votes to Loosen Gun Sale Restrictions

In a move suggesting a belief that not enough innocent people have been killed in Blacksburg over the last decade, the Virginia State Senate has voted to remove the limit of one gun purchase per month. The hope is that the state can become a gunrunner's paradise.

Escaping from the Google+ Minus

Sharing Picasa albums doesn't work well with Google+. When I would send a link to an album, the receiver would be redirected to a Google+ photo page. The album maps would be removed, and the user would have to click to see entire captions. Almost as bad was a big, obnoxious entreaty to join Google+ at the top of the page. This morning I deleted my Google+ profile, which I never saw a practical use for anyhow, and Picasa is returned to full functionality.

The instructions are here: http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=98083

Above I said that I had never seen a practical use for Google+. This is not strictly true. A few months ago I had circles and stuff, and would have been fine with it, but the Gmail page would always announce activity among those in my circles. It was distracting, and though some of what was going on was interesting, little of it related to anything that needed the sort of immediate attention Gmail seemed to suggest.

Our Recent Trip to Northeast Italy (and Slovenia)

• 12 January 2012: The area around the Venice train station and then much of Trieste.  https://picasaweb.google.com/martensjd/NEItalyDay1VeniceAndTrieste
• 13 January 2012: Trieste, Opicina Tram, and Škocjan Cave (in Slovenia).  https://picasaweb.google.com/martensjd/NEItalyAndSloveniaDay2OpicinaTramSkocjanCaveAndTrieste
• 14 January 2012: Trieste, Castello di San Giusto, the harbor and the city from above.  https://picasaweb.google.com/martensjd/NEItalyDay3Trieste
• 15 January 2012: Leaving Trieste and walking around Venice.  https://picasaweb.google.com/martensjd/NEItalyDay4Venice
• 16 January 2012: Venice, Murano, and Burano, largely by Vaporetto (the Venice water bus system).   https://picasaweb.google.com/martensjd/NEItalyDay5Vaporetti
• 17 January 2012: Padova/Padua and Vicenza. Vicenza may be the most architecturally-impressive city I've seen.  https://picasaweb.google.com/martensjd/NEItalyDay6PadovaAndVicenza
• 18 January 2012: Verona, particularly the Roman Arena, the medieval Castelvecchio, the Roman bridge, and the Roman theatre.   https://picasaweb.google.com/martensjd/NEItalyDay7Verona

Proud to be a Geek

21st Century, this is more like it!

I Hate Google Plus. I Really Hate Google Plus

Now when one gives a friend a link to Picasa albums, it redirects instead to Google+ and as a result, long captions are cut off, album descriptions are not shown, album maps and photo locations are not shown, etc. We already know Google+ is a load of dog crap, but why does Google have to destroy Picasa as well?

Eternal September

The Wikipedia page on Eternal September, or the dumbing down of the Internet, is interesting in that it doesn't mention the Web. In summary, AOL allowed it's users access to Usenet starting September 2003 meaning there was a steady stream of neophytes on the 'net rather than just the "traditional" surge each September as a new school year began. I'm not going to dispute the date, but rather the suggestion that it was entirely a Usenet phenomenon. AOL opened the floodgates about the same time as Mosaic became available. Wikipedia puts the availability of Mosaic as April-October 1993, depending on client OS. So two things happened that year: AOL began a steady stream of newbies for the 'net, and the WWW started to gather momentum.

I disagree with those who think Eternal September is over simply because Usenet is now seldom-used. Rather, as society dumbs itself down more and more, Eternal September worsens.

Conference Spam

I keep getting spam claiming to be CFPs for obscure conferences, usually in India, but sometimes in east Asia. I assume that the conferences are bogus since (a) they resort to spam for publicity, rather than using legitimate channels such as professional societies, (b) their URLs are bogus, and I've never heard any of them.

Here's one of the current batch:

*The Fifth International Conference on Network Security & Applications (CNSA-2012)*
http://coneco2009.com/cnsa2012/index.html

Why does the domain name refer to a 2009 conference? Click the link? I don't think so.

Wikipedia Can't Spell Mate, No, Wait, the Gnome Project Can't Spell Mate

All along I've been spelling mate as mate, which is the spelling that seems to prevail within the Linux Mint 12 Documentation. I was annoyed that Wikipedia spells it  maté, an example of hypercorrection. Mate is an herb or a tea made from the herb. This is what the project is named after, and is the correct spelling. Someone decided that Americans would be more likely to pronounce correctly if it is misspelled as maté. The problem here is threefold:

1. the misspelling maté puts the emphasis on the wrong syllable,
2. the misspelling maté is a different word, and
3. maté is first  person preterit form, I killed. Okay, two and three are arguably the same objection.

The discussion at the Wikipedia maté page saved me from making a change to the page that someone would have to back out of later. Someone pointed out that the spelling is incorrect, but someone else pointed out that the spelling is the one used by the gnome project, and it's not Wikipedia's place to correct the spelling of a project name, but rather to use it as-is. I agree, but I will not be using the misspelling.

Emacs 23: But Text is Text, Right?

I've lately been annoyed that emacs no longer seems to understand the structure of a text file. When editing a long line that wraps, the down arrow and ^n will often take one to a later portion on the same line rather than the current column in the next line. The idea is to consider lines as seen on the screen as more fundamental than lines in the file, even though in almost every application it's the file contents that matter.

It didn't take long to find the workaround--thanks to Nilesh Kapadia who commented at http://emacs-fu.blogspot.com/2009/07/emacs-23-is-very-near.html.

Insert the following into the .emacs startup file:


(setq line-move-visual nil)

<flame>
This seems to be yet another case of someone wanting emacs to act less like a text editor and more like a word processor. People that want emacs to act like a word processor should use a word processor, and not lobby to cripple emacs' ability to treat text like text.
<emalf>

A More Interesting WWW

Weirdly Warm Weather