Category: Technology

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Quick links: nothing to hide

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

Data retention is coming to Australia very soon.

[Data retained] includes your name, address and other identifying information, your contract details, billing and payment information. In relation to each communication, it includes the date, start and finish times, and the identities of the other parties to the communication. And it includes the location data, such as the mobile cell towers or Wi-Fi hotspots you were accessing at the time…

But surely they’ve included special protections for communications between doctors and patients, and lawyers and clients? No. Never even discussed…

The Joint Committee recommended that the Act be amended to ensure that the metadata can’t be obtained by parties in civil litigation cases (I’ve mentioned before how excited litigation lawyers will be about all this lovely new data), and George Brandis said that would be fixed in the final amendments. But it isn’t there. The final Bill being bulldozed through Parliament right now contains no such protection. The fact remains that, under the Telecommunications Act, one of the situations in which a service provider cannot resist handing over stored data is when a court has required it by issuing a subpoena. In practice, that means that your ex-spouse, former business partners, suspicious insurance company or employer can get hold of a complete digital history of your movements and communications for the past two years, and use it against you in court.

Michael Bradley, Our privacy is about to be serially infringed, The Drum, March 19 2015

Surveillance cameras attached to a building exterior
Surveillance, by Jonathan McIntosh@Flickr CC BY-SA

Noted elsewhere: all this data will be stored by various companies with varying degrees of security awareness, so in practice it will sometimes be available to some criminals too.

Elsewhere:

Image credit: Surveillance by Jonathan McIntosh, Creative Commons Atttribution-Sharealike

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The right to forget, or, that one terrible road stop

I predict that soon the conversation will turn from the right to be forgotten to the right to forget.

Why so? Well, now Google Maps now tries to remember places I’ve been and include them in the maps it shows me. The trouble with this (ignoring any petty privacy, commercialisation, misc concerns you may be about to mention to me) is that there are some places that should be forgotten. In particular, all of Western Sydney’s commerce is now represented to me by one service station that we stopped at on a family trip because someone needed to use the loo, but couldn’t, because its loo was splattered with largely unspecified bodily fluids.

Get it together Google! This is even worse than the way my Youtube suggestions are now and forever filled with Thomas the Tank Engine videos because of an unfortunate and lengthy phase my son went through. I insist on not navigating Sydney in future primarily in terms of which horrible public toilet I am nearest.

 

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Your crontab file should start with “crontab -l”!

I’ve never personally had this problem, but a number of people have told me that they’ve, often repeatedly, accidentally deleted their crontab by typing crontab -r (which silently removes a crontab) rather than crontab -l (which shows you what is in it) or crontab -e (which lets you edit it). It doesn’t help that “e” and “r” are next to each other on QWERTY keyboards.

Create a single backup of your crontab contents

Since I realised this was an issue, I’ve made the first line in my crontabs the following:

@daily crontab -l > ~/crontab.backup

If you ever accidentally use crontab -r, you can use crontab ~/crontab.backup to reinstall your crontab!

Adjust @daily to a time at which your computer is likely to be on, if it’s not always on, eg 0 10 * * * for 10am daily.

For bonus points, writing this entry reminded me that I hadn’t reinstalled my laptop’s crontab on my new machine, and meant it was easy for me to find and install!

Create timestamped backups of your crontab contents

The above is simple and suffices for me, but if you don’t have a backup routine that will grab ~/crontab.backup regularly enough for your needs, you could do something like this instead:

@daily mkdir -p ~/crontab-backups; crontab -l > ~/crontab-backups/crontab-`date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S`; find ~/crontab-backups -type f -ctime +7 -delete

Explanation:

  1. mkdir -p ~/crontab-backups makes a directory crontab-backups in your home directory if it doesn’t already exist (and doesn’t complain if it does exist).
  2. crontab -l > ~/crontab-backups/crontab-`date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S` puts your current crontab into a file named with a datestamp (eg crontab-20140711-124450 so that you can easily have more than one
  3. find ~/crontab-backups -type f -ctime +7 -delete finds all files (-type f) in ~/crontab-backups that were created more than 7 days ago (-ctime +7) and deletes them (-delete)

Warning: you don’t want to put anything else in ~/crontab-backups, because it too will be deleted after seven days.

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Federal election minus 1 day: last minute Coalition announcements special!

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

Mostly via tweeps, info on certain last minute Coalition announcements.

First, people saw the original version of The Coalition’s Policy to Enhance Online Safety for Children (original version), which read:

We will work with mobile phone companies (such as Telstra, Optus, Vodafone and their resellers) to develop online safety standards for smartphones and other devices with mobile network connectivity such as tablets, applicable to their use by children in two age groups: children up to the age of 12 years and teenagers.

As has recently been achieved in the UK, we expect these standards will involve mobilephone operators installing adult content filters on phones which will be switched on as the default unless the customer proves he or she is at least 18 years of age.

The Coalition will work with internet service providers (which provide fixed line broadband services to the home) to develop online safety standards for those services, recognising that they are very often accessed by children.

As has recently been achieved in the UK, we expect these standards will involve the major internet service providers providing home network filters for all new home broadband services, which will be switched on as the default unless the customer specifies otherwise.

This is a very different approach to the discredited compulsory filter proposal championedby the Rudd-Gillard Government, which was abandoned as unworkable.

The Coalition’s approach aims to empower parents — by giving them the choice of whetheror not to operate a filter at home, but by establishing the default setting as one which provides maximum protection.

The Coalition’s Policy to Enhance Online Safety for Children original/repudiated version, page 7

The Coalition very quickly backed away from this proposal:

Mr Turnbull quickly released a statement to clarify the Coalition’s position.

“The Coalition has never supported mandatory internet filtering. Indeed, we have a long record of opposing it,” the statement said.

Malcolm Turnbull’s statement is available in full on the Liberals’ site. The revised and/or correct version of the policy (depending on if you believe that they did accidentally make an early version public), reads:

Wewill work with mobile phone companies (such as Telstra, Optus, Vodafone and their resellers) and internet service providers (which provide fixed line broadband services to the home) to make available software which parents can choose to install on their own devices to protect their children from inappropriate material.

This is a very different approach to the discredited compulsory filter proposal championed by the Rudd-Gillard Government, which was abandoned as unworkable.

The Coalition’s Policy to Enhance Online Safety for Children current version (as linked from the Liberals’ policy listing), page 7

Moving on to last minute announcements they haven’t backed away from:

A Coalition Government, if elected, will crack down on Labor’s addiction to waste by auditing increasingly ridiculous research grants and reprioritising funding through the Australian Research Council (ARC) to deliver funds to where they’re really needed.

Some of the grants issued by the ARC in recent years have been, frankly, completely over the top.

There will be no reduction in research funding. In fact, the Coalition has announced new research into dementia and diabetes.

The Coalition would look to targeting those ridiculous research grants that leave taxpayers scratching their heads wondering just what the Government was thinking.

Taxpayer dollars have been wasted on projects that do little, if anything, to advance Australians research needs. For example:

  • The quest for the ‘I’ – a$595,000 grant aimed at “reaching a better understanding of the self”;
  • $160,000 on an examination of “sexuality in Islamic interpretations of reproductive health technologies in Egypt”;
  • a $443,000 study into “The God of Hegel’s Post-Kantian idealism”; and
  • $164,000 for a study into “how urban media art can best respond to global climate change” .

Ending More of Labor’s Waste, Liberal press release, September 5 2013

(My Honours supervisor is out there jumping for joy at the punctation used for that list, at least.)

Several research and research-affiliated groups have denounced the policy:

  • Jeannie Rea, National Office, The National Tertiary Education Union: This is a direct attack on the academic freedom of researchers working in Australian universities. If Tony Abbott wins, independent research loses.
  • Catriona Jackson, CEO, Science and Technology Australia:

    Specific research projects – all in the arts and social sciences – have been labeled increasingly ridiculous. But scientists know that the flow of new knowledge is critical to the kinds of real word results that all Australians are proud of, and that the Coalition is calling for.

    It was CSIRO scientist John O’Sullivan’s search for exploding black holes that led to his discovery of wireless technology that has swept the world, and earned Australia $500 million in royalties with probably as much again to come.

You can also review STA’s overview of science policy for the Federal Election, if interested. The Conversation has a couple of pieces about the policy, one noting that we already have a body of expert scrutineers who reject any number of bad and merely only very good grant proposals, and we call it the Australian Research Council, and the other analysing the craftiness of the press release itself.

What else have you seen sneaking in under the radar now that the advertising blackout is in place?

Front page image credit: Election Day CC BY-SA David Morgan-Mar, from the 2007 Federal election.

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Product review updates: Shoeboxed & GoGet

I had some success in 2012 at subscribing to things that made my life a bit easier to organise, so, a couple of updated reviews.

Shoeboxed (original review)

Update February 2017: this service is now known as Squirrel Street, and their smallest monthly pricing is significantly higher than it was in 2013. However much of the review still applies.

Original 2013 update:

What: a service where you package up a bundle of papers to be scanned, and they scan them, do some basic data entry (vendor, date, total amount, total GST) and store them on their website for you.

Current impressions: it’s still a pretty good fit for our needs: whenever a piece of paper enters our house that we have any belief we may need to access for paperwork purposes, we ship it off to them for scanning, data entry and shredding. The big test was doing our 2011/2012 taxes, and it was great to just enter a search term and have the document we needed show up among the top hits. We’ll keep using it for the foreseeable future. We don’t even really need the numerical amounts entered, since we don’t do personal bookkeeping at anything like that level.

I’ve also started forwarding them PDF receipts I get in the mail, and those work well: the PDF is pulled out and added to the data entry queue the vast bulk of the time. They’re much less good with HTML/text email receipts; it’s a harder problem though.

The major downside that has emerged is the length of time the processing takes, at least on the entry-level plan that we are on. It takes about two weeks from popping the envelope into the mail to the scans being available, and the delay is the scanning itself, not the data entry, so we can’t even access the raw images during this period. (There’s two ways to tell: one is that data entry for documents we upload in electronic form is usually complete within hours, the other is that the scans eventually show up in our “uploaded documents” queue waiting for their own data entry, and that happens about 24 hours before we get the “envelope processing now complete!” email.)

This is slower than the pricing plan states. It is mostly annoying for my business receipts: I do do double-entry bookkeeping for those, and in order to stay on top of things I like to do bank reconciliations sooner than 2 to 3 weeks after spending the money. I expect though that most businesses would subscribe to one of the higher volume plans (ours is 50 scans a month) which also have faster turnaround times.

GoGet car sharing (original review)

This has been a great replacement for car ownership, for us. Neither of us commutes by car (it would be a thoroughly silly way to pay for a regular commute), and we don’t even use cars every single weekend. But we do travel a lot to places where it is either essential or nice to have a car for the weekend, and make shorter trips to places that are a pain to wrangle a young child, associated supplies, and ourselves to on public transport (eg, Sydney’s beaches).

It’s also nice to have access to the vans. I’ve only done amateur furniture removal once this way, but they’re nice and roomy (we got two couches and a double mattress into one trip) without being as difficult to drive as the trucks one gets from rental companies. Also potentially much cheaper for small things, to be hiring by the hour!

For whatever reason, the contention for them has not been as bad since around about April. We can almost always get our first or second choice of car with as little as an hours’ notice. This is excepting the local iMax (8-seater) which you have to book up to 6 weeks in advance, but we very rarely need an 8-seater, luckily. We also regularly are later than we planned to be, and only once have I had to hurry back because someone else had booked the car for the next hour: every single other time we’ve been able to extend the booking into the free next hour. Several more cars have been added to the neighbourhood since around then.

We’re getting used to the child car-seat issue. It helps a lot that one of the nearby cars now has a car seat in it. We still often have to fit or re-fit the seat; I now believe the commonly cited statistic that around about 70% of self-fittings are incorrect. Ours definitely aren’t as tight as a professional fit sadly, but at least unlike everyone else we don’t have the back of the child’s belts wrapped around the adult belt that holds the seat itself. However, fitting a seat is a lot less onerous than carrying a seat to the car (while persuading a toddler to walk with us) and then fitting it! It will be good to have him in a booster though.

It’s not especially cheap: our monthly spend is somewhere between $200 and $500 (the high end in months like December and January, with multiple visits to different family in different cities). And we’re definitely using cars more often than we would if we had to sort out an entire car hire from scratch from a daily company every single time.

If there was one feature I really wish they’d add, it would be the ability to conditionally cancel a booking. The present situation is this: if you cancel with 48 hours before the start of the booking, it’s cancelled and you do not pay anything and the car is available for someone else to re-book. After that, you simply cannot cancel (not even any portion of your booking that is more than 48 hours in the future). What I’d like is the ability to do something like cancel at any time, thereby having the car available for booking by someone else, and, if there was less than 48 hours’ notice, incur the difference between my original hourly fee and any hourly fees they were able to get from any new bookings for that car. Then they have the same situation as now with regard to not losing my booking fee, but the neighbourhood is not locked out of the unused car for the duration of my abandoned booking. We felt this keenly when we had to walk away from our entire Easter weekend trip at the last minute due to acute illness.

We don’t intend to purchase a car again any time soon.

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Ada Lovelace Day: Marita Cheng, Robogals founder

Today, October 16, is Ada Lovelace Day: write or record a story about a woman in science, technology, mathematics or engineering (STEM) whose achievements you admire.
This is a slightly updated version of a profile that has appeared on Geek Feminism and Hoyden About Town.
Marita Cheng was named as the Young Australian of the Year winner at the beginning of the year. She’s been involved in volunteering since she was a high school student, and in 2008, early in her undergraduate studies (mechatronic engineering and computer science at the University of Melbourne) she founded Robogals, which is an engineering and computing outreach group, in which women university students run robotics workshops for high school age girls.

Marita, while still in the final year of her undergraduate degree, is also an entrepreneur and has been previously awarded for her work as founder of Robogals, including winning the Anita Borg Change Agent award in 2011. In 2012 she travelled to several countries with the aid of the Nancy Fairfax Churchill Fellowship to study “strategies used to most effectively engage female schoolgirls in science, engineering and technology.”

While I have heard of Robogals, I hadn’t heard of Marita specifically before she became Young Australian of the Year. One of the fascinating things about starting the Ada Initiative is slowly discovering all the other amazing women who work in technology career outreach and related endeavours. But it’s a little embarrassing, judging from her bio, to have not heard Marita Cheng’s name before the beginning of the year!

Further reading:

  • Marita Cheng’s website
  • Life is turbocharged for Robogals founder (a profile this past weekend)

    • Creative Commons License
    Ada Lovelace Day: Marita Cheng, Robogals founder by Mary Gardiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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    Ada Lovelace Day: Else Shepherd, leading Australian electrical engineer

    Today, October 16, is Ada Lovelace Day: write or record a story about a woman in science, technology, mathematics or engineering (STEM) whose achievements you admire.

    Else Shepherd is an Australian electrical engineer specialising in communications equipment. She has co-founded multiple Australian engineering companies, including Mosaic Information Technology, a custom modems company, and Microwave & Materials Designs, developing microwave filters for mobile phones. She was appointed as the chairman of Powerlink, the state government-owned corporation maintaining Queensland’s high voltage electricity grid, in 1994, and has been a board member of the National Electricity Market Management Company (now known as the Australian Energy Market Operator).

    Shepherd won Engineers Australia’s Peter Nicol Russell Memorial Medal in 2007, their most prestigious award, recognising an engineer with over 20 years of substantial contributions to professional engineering in Australia. As best I can tell, she is the only woman Peter Nicol Russell medallist. She is also a Member of the Order of Australia since 2003, and was the University of Queensland Alumnus of the Year in 2009. She is also a pianist and choral director.

    Shepherd has talked about her experience as a woman in electrical engineering with University of Queensland publications. She and one other woman graduated in 1965, the university’s first women graduates in electrical engineering. She was unable to attend Institution of Engineers meetings in the 1960s, because they were held at the local Men’s Club. She continues to promote workplace flexibility, having used part-time work during parts of her career to care for her two children.

    Further reading:

    Creative Commons License
    Ada Lovelace Day: Else Shepherd, leading Australian electrical engineer by Mary Gardiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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    More falsehoods programmers believe about time

    Noah Sussman has Falsehoods programmers believe about time, including:

    All of these assumptions are wrong

    1. There are always 24 hours in a day.
    2. Months have either 30 or 31 days.
    3. Years have 365 days.
    4. February is always 28 days long.
    5. Any 24-hour period will always begin and end in the same day (or week, or month).

    As is usual with these kinds of things, he’s only scratching the surface (even though there’s a lot more than in that excerpt). Andrew and I came up with several more already, on the subject of timezones:

    1. All timezones are vertical lines around the globe evenly spaced in 15 degrees intervals.
    2. All timezones are a whole number of hours offset from UTC.
    3. All timezones are no more than 12 hours offset from UTC.
    4. Two cities within some sufficiently small distance must be in the same timezone.
    5. Two cities with the same longitude must be in the same timezone.
    6. A city further to the east of another city must have a time ahead of or equal to the more western city.
    7. There will only be one timezone within any political boundary.
    8. Within a sufficiently large political boundary, there will be different timezones.
    9. Timezone designations like ‘EST’ are unambiguous.*
    10. Daylight savings shifts occur on the same day around the globe.
    11. Or at least within a hemisphere.
    12. Or at least within a continent.
    13. Or at least within a nation.
    14. Daylight savings shifts occur on predictable dates announced ‘sufficiently far’ in advance that there can be an exhaustive listing of them accurate for the next couple of decades.
    15. Well, at least the next few years.
    16. OK, surely at least this month?

    * Both Australia and the United States call their east coast timezone this in winter, and guess what: it’s never the same time in New York as it is in Sydney, and the daylight savings status is seldom the same either. (If you’ve seen Australians call it ‘AEST’, well, yes, we do. Sometimes.)

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    Useful LaTeX packages: linguistic examples

    This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series LaTeX packages

    This is the conclusion of a short series of entries on LaTeX packages I found useful while preparing the examination copy of my PhD thesis.

    Today’s entry is a package for displaying linguistic examples (ie, samples of text which you then want to discuss and analyse).  The LaTeX for Linguists Home Page is a good general resource for linguists and computational linguists using LaTeX. I discuss gb4e here because I had to do some messing around to get it to display example numbers the way I want (and the way my supervisor wanted: he likes in-text references to look like “example (4.1)” rather than “example 4.1”), and to get it to work with cleveref, and no one seems to have written that up to my knowledge.

    gb4e

    gb4e is a linguistic examples package.

    usepackage{gb4e}

    Input looks like:

    begin{exe}
ex This is an example sentencelabel{example}
ex This is another example sentence.
end{exe}

This is a cleveref reference to cref{example}.
This is a normal reference to example (ref{example}).

    You can mark sentences with * and ? and so on:

    begin{exe}
ex[*] {This is an sentence ungrammatical.}
ex[?] {This is an questionably grammatical sentence.}
end{exe}

    You can do sub-examples:

    begin{exe}
ex This is an example.
ex
begin{xlist}
ex This is a sub-example.
ex This is another sub-example.
end{xlist}
end{exe}

    A few things to do to make gb4e play really nicely. First, some cleveref config. gb4e doesn’t yet automatically tell cleveref how to refer to examples, so you need to tell it that the term is “example”, and second, if you want braces around the number (“example (1.1)” rather than “example 1.1” you need to tell it to use brackets:

    % tell cleveref to use the word "example" to refer to examples,
% and to put example numbers in brackets
crefname{xnumi}{example}{examples}
creflabelformat{xnumi}{(#2#1#3)}
crefname{xnumii}{example}{examples}
creflabelformat{xnumii}{(#2#1#3)}
crefname{xnumiii}{example}{examples}
creflabelformat{xnumiii}{(#2#1#3)}
crefname{xnumiv}{example}{examples}
creflabelformat{xnumiv}{(#2#1#3)}

    Also, by default, the gb4e numbering does not reset in chapters. That is, your examples will be numbered (1), (2), (3) etc right through a thesis. You probably want more like (1.1), (1.2), (2.1), (2.2), ie chapter.number. Change to this with the following in your preamble:

    % Store the old chapter command so that
% our redefinition can still refer to it
letoldchapterchapter
% Redefine the chapter command so that it resets the
% 'exx' counter that gb4e uses on every new chapter.
renewcommand{chapter}{setcounter{exx}{0}oldchapter}

% Redefine how example numbers are shown so that they are
% chapter number dot example number
renewcommand{thexnumi}{thechapter.arabic{xnumi}}
    You could also get it to reset in sections by replacing chapter and thechapter with section and thesection in the above.

    Thanks to the TeX Stack Exchange community for their help with this. See Section based linguistic example numbering with brackets for more information.

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    Useful LaTeX packages: within document references

    This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series LaTeX packages

    This is part of a short series of entries on LaTeX packages I found useful while preparing the examination copy of my PhD thesis.

    Today’s entry is packages relevant to preparing within document references. These are both fairly new to me, although not absolutely now.

    hyperref

    This package turns cross-references and bibliography references into clickable links in your output PDF (at least if you generate it with xelatex or pdflatex), without you having to do anything other than the ref (or cleveref’s cref) and cite and so on commands.

    usepackage{hyperref}

    You will probably want to modify its choice of colours to something more subtle:

    usepackage[citecolor=blue,%
    filecolor=black,%
    linkcolor=blue,%
    % Generates page numbers in your bibliography, ie will
    % list all the pages where you referred to that entry.
    pagebackref=true,%
    colorlinks=true,%
    urlcolor=blue]{hyperref}

    Use black if you want the links the same colour as your text.

    One note with hyperref: generally it should be the last package you load. There are occasional exceptions, see Which packages should be loaded after hyperref instead of before?

    cleveref

    cleveref is a LaTeX package that automatically remembers how you refer to things. So instead of:

    see chapter ref{chapref}

    you use the cref command:

    see cref{chapref}

    It handles multiple references nicely too:

    see cref{chapref,anotherchapref}

    will generate output along the lines of “see chapters 1 and 2”.

    Use

    Cref{refname}

    to generate capitalised text, eg “Chapter 1” rather than “chapter 1”

    To use it:

    usepackage{cleveref}

    It shortens the word “equation” to “eq.” by default, if you don’t like that, then:

    usepackage[noabbrev]{cleveref}

    For some packages that don’t yet tell cleveref how to refer to their counters, you will get output like “see ?? 1” rather than “see example 1”. You use the crefname command in the preamble to tell it what word to use for each unknown counter, examples of crefname will be shown tomorrow for gb4e.