brainsnorkel.com

• Scorcher at John Quiggin
  Review of Clive Hamilton’s “Scorcher: The Dirty Politics of Climate Change.”

  “Overall, the story told by Scorcher is one of a series of tactical victories for the greenhouse mafia leading to what appears certain to be a massive strategic defeat.”

  (tags: review book co2)
• Zero-day sales not “fair” — to researchers
  “Two years ago, Charles Miller found a remotely exploitable flaw in a common component of the Linux operating system, and as many enterprising vulnerability researchers are doing today, he decided to sell the information.”
  (tags: security vulnerabilities software research markets)
• Opus day! | Salon Books
  Berkeley Breathed!
  (tags: milo cartoons satire opus bill cat)

• Urgent Medicine recall – COMPLETE MoisturePlus contact lens solution
  Oops. Guess which contact lens solution I’m on my 2nd day of using.

  Acanthamoeba keratitis doesn’t sound real nice either.

  (tags: recall contact-lens Acanthamoeba keratitis)

• The Audit Office of NSW: Responding to Homelessness
  “On census night in 2001 there were 26,676 homeless people in NSW. This means more than four out of every 1,000 people were homeless.”
  (tags: nsw brief audit homeless)
• YouTube – Paul Merton in China Mr Woo Robots
  Paul Merton in China Mr Woo Robots. Just amazing.

  h/t William Gobson

  (tags: video robots steampunk)

• The Importance of Branching Models in SCM (Walrad & Strom 2002)
  A nice examination of software configuration management branching models — a rarely written-about field.
  (tags: scm development branch tag release “configuration management”)
• The Audit Office of NSW: Responding to Homelessness
  “On census night in 2001 there were 26,676 homeless people in NSW. This means more than four out of every 1,000 people were homeless.”
  (tags: nsw brief audit homeless)

I did like the opening line in the Sydney Morning Herald’s editorial on the Prime Minister’s emissions task force report today:

THE Howard Government’s script on climate change might have been written by Saint Augustine: Lord, make me chaste – but not yet.

Apparently we can’t set targets this year. This year is too early. However, a target that we can all agree on is 2012. 2012 is not too early, not too late. In fact 2012 is just right for setting targets and implementing a carbon trading scheme.

Sheesh. It only takes a bad poll result to drop a few billion dollars on water in the Murray Darling or a temporary front-line fighter of arguable merit, but we can’t set up a CO2 trading scheme for 5+ years?

• VoIPong – Voice over IP ( VoIP ) sniffer and call detector
  A good reason to love SRTP
  (tags: software voip security tools networking)
• Bill Gates and Steve Jobs interviewed at D
  Some old-school PC & Mac history from Bill & Steve.
  (tags: apple microsoft video not-a-grudge-match)
• The Next Net: Microsoft Introduces Surface Computing
  Great. A coffee table that dynamically generates its own coffee stains.
  (tags: coffee touch computing UI)
• Google Gears API Developer’s Guide – Home
  About time. Offline is the new online.
  (tags: api google offline online development code)
• Polemica: Gillard and the Liberals of yesteryear
  Rawr: “[...]sad to see a once intellectually certain and politically purposeful administration so desperate it feels the need to pretend to capitulate. The best days of the Howard Government aren’t just behind it; they’re now receding into the dark,
  (tags: “Julia Gillard” politics IR australia rants)
• Arianna Huffington: Notes from the D Conference: An iPhone Tip from Steve Jobs and Genetic Info from 23andMe | The Huffington Post
  O brave new world that has such iPhones and companies in it.
  (tags: gattaca iphone “reality distortion field”)