Let’s face it, the concept of privacy does not exist on the web. That’s already a given. Your friends knows that, your mom knows that, even our dog knows that. However, I don’t think people realize just how much they are giving away and for what.  And this is where Facebook comes in: it’s the gleaming, shimmering example how much of a cesspool of privacy problems the web can be. To their credit, much has changed since then, but few issues still remains.  The biggest of all is just how much of personal and private information third-party apps can collect about you.  A seemingly innocent game of Facebook poker or scrabble might not seem innocent once they start scraping your personal data without you, or Facebook knowing.  This might sound hypocritical since Google et al. essentially does the same, but you’d imagine that a sole web application that harbours that much personal information might be a little more considerate and upfront about what it does to the drunken pictures you post on your page.

Thus, while Facebook continually overhauls its policy, here are some tips on how to defend yourself against the seemingly losing battle for right of privacy.  Thus, you shouldn’t be surprised the next time you login to Facebook and  see a picture of yourself plastered in a dating advertisment.  You’ve been warned.  As for me, I’m still staying away from Facebook…but that’s probably because I’m just lazy.

Lobbyists and the government: Holding Canada back technologically since the 1900’s

…and here you’re thinking that it can’t happen in this day and age.

Moral Lesson? Don’t dismiss it too quickly the next time that script-kiddie wannabe CS freshman or that know-it-all coworker brags about finding a bug in GCC. There’s always hope for everyone.

Although smart people (read: not an idiot like me) would already know this from IMDB, there were things that I didn’t know about ‘Good Will Hunting’ ’til I saw it again this weekend:

• It was directed by Gus Van Sant (same guy who directed Elephant…no? ok, how about Milk? still nothing? seriously, you need to go watch something other than a Michael Bay movie)
• Casey Affleck was there. (did you know he was in the American Pie franchise as well?)
• Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier were co-producers of this film.  Not surprising considering Kevin, Matt and Ben knew each other for quite a while now, but that the View Askew productions have this movie in their repertoire alongside Mallrats and Jay and Silent Bob The Movie is mind-boggling.
• The in-classroom shot in the first 5 minutes in the movie was filmed in one of the classrooms in Maclennan Physical labs at University of Toronto, specifically the same room where I spent time dozing off to Physics 100 and CSC373.   Apparently, most of the interior scenes of MIT and Harvard was shot at U of T as well.

As I’m nearing graduation (next Tuesday), I guess no time’s any better than right now to reassess what things I want to accomplish in the next year or so.  I apologize if this is the most random list that you’ve ever seen:

• Get my G (and M) driver’s license
• Do volunteer work overseas
• Buy another guitar and amp
• Donate to Amnesty International
• Do the CN Tower climb
• Pay off my school debt
• Go back home
• Buy a house
• Gain 10 pounds (half-way there)
• Install OS X Leopard on a netbook
• Build my own PC
• Get your own host and domain
• Finish my personal projects
• Go to Las Vegas
• Visit (again) the new AGO and the not-so-new ROM

Let’s see how many I can cross off this list by the end of the year.

@twitter I hope #not…

Happy golden anniversary, COBOL! Java’s catching up on you!

There was a time when the only thing I listen to was the music that blares on the radio during morning commutes.  This was a time when boy bands ruled the world and when 17-year-olds become famous for wearing skimpy schoolgirl outfits and beleagueringly cry that they did it again.  Yes, it was unfortunate.  It was, as Alan Cross has hypothesized, the trough of a rock cycle.  However, all that changed in a single day when I was on a bus just finishing  a regional journalism competition (I was in 4th year then back home).  My friend was listening to something on his Sony walkman, when he came up to me and said, “listen to this”, and came Metallica’s Enter Sandman flooding through the headphones.  Given that I had repressed music expression since childhood, it felt weird. It was different. It was metal rock.

It’s something that I distinctively remember, opening my eyes for the first time to a whole different genre of music. Before that, all my music tastes were limited to only what my other friends listen to or what they play in MTV (which was still big back then).  Growing up on our household probably didn’t help either as hard music was considered “unfavorable”, to put it mildly. I even remember catching a glimpse of Marilyn Manson’s Antichrist Superstar, or Prodigy’s Firestarter, and I can feel my insides in a knot and almost wants to puke (sort of like the first time you played Doom for 3 hours).  Yeah I was that repressed.

Fast forward a few years when music was also evolving on the internet, when Shawn Fanning released Napster. That was also the time that I migrated to Canada, and with all that angst from separation, it was bound to happen.  I ended up being friends with two guitar players daydreaming of becoming a rock band.  I was also a (sort of) guitar player, but because it was rare to see a band with three guitar players and nothing else, I ended up becoming a drummer instead.  It was like Jack Black teaching rock history to the kids in School of Rock, and I was absorbing every minute of it.  Every weekend, we’ve watched DVDs of bands like Oasis, Black Sabbath, Sound Garden, Rage Against the Machine, Foo Fighters, Nirvana, Satriani, Page..you name it.  And it wasn’t just for the sake of watching, we were there to learn.  We were watching and admiring intently as to how they accomplish the harmonics on the strings, or how they use pentatonic scales on their leads, or as to how different the key they’ve played a song in.  School was in at that time.

Because we were piss-poor (probably still is), we started renting out music studios and commuted with guitars and amps on our backs riding the TTC. The good thing about being a drummer is you only need to carry your sticks with you.  Sometimes, it would even just become an impulse to us – one minute were eating at Tim Horton’s, the next minute we’re jamming at a studio, around 1am in the morning due to lack of decent studio schedule availability. We would also go down at Steve’s and Long and Mcquade every weekend drooling over the Epiphone Union Jacks and Les Pauls, and jam with $2000 electric guitars for hours. It was like a playground for us.

So why am I blogging about this?  Well, because it was something I was reminded of when I was watching Sam Dunn’s Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey.  It made me reminisce that thrill of discovering something musically and taking it to heart: understanding it from an outsider’s point of view, starting from the basics.  It was heavy metal 101.  I wasn’t really that big into heavy metal rock; some of it still scares me (which other metalheads admits to as well).  But from an anthropologist’s point of view,  it was more than just people wearing dark eye lashes and tights.  Metal, for some means social repression, gender and sexuality, and even religion. It doesn’t just break down metal rock for you, it scrapes underneath it. And if that’s not enough Dunn expanded more in Global Metal on the culture of heavy metal, a response to the overwhelming replies gotten from the first doc. It was interesting to see it on a global perspective, uncovering different agendas for each one of them.  I think this has spawned attention to the rockumentary genre, and it’d be interesting to see if Dunn can bring the same level of scrutiny for other genres as well.

conjure up the sea and sing songs
of gladness and of tears
whence the inspiration comes
a mighty shove disappears

twisted and fertile, the womb of many
brings forth rejuvenation,
a celebration among those; be merry
the last of which ends abruptly

the lonely neighbor of the world tonight,
catapults my mind into wanderlust
soul and strong its character awaits,
devours the heart of any doubts

wax and wane the body troubles,
as it lays itself to rest
the christened sun arises
as the troubles shooked its guests
invade the weakness and vacate the spot
come forth and be merry; be still and be nigh

- g.f.

So I was at Pages with a friend last Saturday browsing through some books and oddities while trying to kill some time, and found this book called Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar…. The premise of the book seemed intriguing enough, so I impulsively bought it. I’ve always been curious about what Philosophy really is all about besides drooling over the Dalai Lama on a regular basis, so I thought that spending $13 on a paperback beats an $800 course registration for an Intro to Philosophy course anytime.  Here’s one of the “enlightened” jokes from the book:

A seeker has heard that the wisest guru in all of India lives atop India’s highest mountain.  So the seeker treks over hill and Delhi until he reaches the fabled mountain.  It’s incredibly steep, and more than once he slips and falls. By the time he reaches the top, he is full of cuts and bruises, but there is the guru, sitting cross-legged in front of his cave.

“O, wise guru”, the seeker says, “I have come to you to ask what the secret of life is.”

“Ah, yes, the secret of life,” the guru says. “The secret of life is a teacup.”

“A teacup? I came all the way up here to find the meaning of life, and you tell me it’s a teacup!”

The guru shrugs. “So maybe it isn’t a teacup.”

The great thing about the book is that it gives context to the Far Side-y jokes you’ve heard before (and probably didn’t wholly understand like I did…or didn’t) and dissects the philosophy behind it all.  For example, the joke above (if you can call it that) tries to illustrate the principles of Teleology, the metaphysics of trying to explain our purpose in life (with a hint of stoicism). But the more interesting thing is that while I was reading it, I can’t help but connect it as to how some concepts in Computer Science has philosophy written all over it. Take duck-typing as an example:

In computer programming, duck typing is a style of dynamic typing in which an object’s current set of methods and properties determines the valid semantics, rather than its inheritance from a particular class or implementation of a specific interface. The name of the concept refers to the duck test, attributed to James Whitcomb Riley [...], which may be phrased as follows:

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, I would call it a duck. [wikipedia.org]

If you’re a philosopher, you might probably pick up some underlying Essentialism in this concept, as illustrated by this comic from the book:

“Why is an elephant big, gray and wrinkled?”

“Because if he was small, white, and round, he’d be an aspirin.”

However, in the case of duck typing, accidental attributes of objects can be perceived as something inherent, and construed as an essential property of the object instead.  The accidental nature of how a duck walks and quacks suddenly becomes inherent in trying to define an object’s “duck-ness”.  This can lead to some problems as illustrated by this point:

In essence, the problem is that, “if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck”, it could be a dragon doing a duck impersonation. You may not always want to let dragons into a pond, even if they can impersonate a duck. [wikipedia.org]

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by all of this, given that the topic of philosophy within modern technology has already permeated into mainstream ideology.  Even the fundamentals of Computer Science is embedded in philosophy as exemplified by program correctness proofs and even binary logic.  But the fact that philosophy has influences and applications in language design for example, is mind-bending for me.  Languages embody certain philosophical principles that can change a programmer’s mindset and approach to programming, and problems in general.

And that’s only the beginning. If you want to get your mind blown as to how deep the rabbit hole goes, try reading this and this (the second one’s heavy reading, but it’s worth it at the end).  Maybe this is a thesis in the making.

Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids.