jamezpolley.com

Re censorship of flight details: Tim Bennet at Electron Soup was faster than me and got screengrabs before the details were censored. Go satisfy your curiousity at his blog.

Stilgherrian alerted me to the fact that I got a mention on Crikey today – or at least, yesterday’s post about ASA’s censorship of flight records did.

I’m flattered, but also slightly pissed. If you clicked on that link, you’d have been asked to provide your credentials as a paid-up member of Crikey – or at least, to take a 21-day free trial. I had to do the latter, in order to read what had been said. Hopefully if I’m ever mentioned again on Crikey it’ll be within the next few weeks – because after that my free trial will have expired, and I’d hate to have to pay for a membership just to see how I was being quoted. There’s plenty of good reasons to pay for a membership, and I’ve been toying with the idea for a while – but that’s not the reason I’d prefer to be my primary reason.

So yes, I signed up for the trial and got to read the article. There’s a nice link back to my blog – except with a missing “http://”, so the link directs readers to http://www.crikey.com.au/Politics/zhasper.com/2008/12/censorship-of-flight-details/ and not to my blog. So, of course, I got… well, actually, I got 27 people hitting that page directly, no doubt through manually fixing the URL.

Actually, I should say that I got two half-mentions. I also had 61 visits from http://civilair.asn.au/. Ben Sandilands, the journalist wrote the Crikey piece, seems to be active there as well (at least: I found a story from him just by skimming the front page) – I’m guessing the two are related. As with Crikey, I can’t see the content on this site without registering. Unlike Crikey, it’s not possible to register here – so I’m still in the dark about where the traffic came from.

So, overall, a good day for blogging. Apparently I’m not the only person interested in why ASA censored flight details – I just wish I could see what the other interested people are saying.

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Unrelatedly, I caved and ordered x-plane tonight. If I had a car, I’d be at the airport on one of the mounds right now, having spent the last half-hour watching the last few planes scurrying to get off the ground before curfew kicks in. I seem to be back in *that* phase.

A few days ago, a colleage pointed met at AirServices Australia’s new fancy flight tracker, which allows you to watch planes coming and going in the airspace around Sydney airport. There are plenty of things not to like – MS Virtual Earth , the nasty click-through EULA that you have to agree to before you even find out what the site provides…

But, that aside, it’s fairly cool. Planes, flying, around Sydney! Results from noise-level meters, so you can see just how noisy your new suburb is going to be. Even details about the planes – type of plane, altitude, flight numbers..

So today there was a tragic accident involving two planes with trainee pilots. SMH have a video online which shows the flight tracker, and shows the two planes involved colliding (and then one of them dropping off the radar – literally). According to the timestamps superimposed on the video, the crash happens just after 11:23am

The site lets you see historical data: in the box on the lower-left, un-tick the “Show Current Flights” button, then use the controls to choose the day and time you’d like to look at. So it’s easy enough to go back to 11:20am and run through the next few minutes and see the crash for yourself.

Except… that it’s not. There are no planes in that area at that time. In fact, there’s no light aviation at all. Someone has excised all light aviation records between 11:00am and 11:59:16am. If you set the timer to start art 10:59, you see a whole bunch of planes:

suddenly dissapear:

It’s not a subtle removal either, even if you ignore all the planes which freeze and then vanish from the graph. There’s a nice graph showing you the number of movements per hour for the day – spot what’s odd about today:

I fail to understand this. I… just fail. I really don’t understand why this is considered sensitive, and why it’s been removed.

What’s cuter than a kitty-cat giving you morning cuddles?

Two kitty-cats giving morning cuddles!

The picture below is momentous – it’s the first time both cats have consented to cuddle at the same time.

Burrito licks Linus' ear while I cuddle them both

From his tweetstream overnight (my time):

Well, sitting in JFK lounge. Flying to LA this morning. Sharp contrast. But, you know, it’s possible to love LA and NYC x about 7 hours ago from Tweetie

It’s possible to like the Beatles and the Stones. x about 7 hours ago from Tweetie

You can love Mozart and Wagner x about 7 hours ago from Tweetie

You can like Dickens and Austen x about 7 hours ago from Tweetie

You can like iPhones and BlackBerries x about 7 hours ago from Tweetie

Carbs and protein x about 7 hours ago from Tweetie

Bach and Mahler x about 7 hours ago from Tweetie

Coke and Pepsi. (Coke and Ecstasy for that matter …) x about 7 hours ago from Tweetie

But NOT Vista and OS X. Non posso. Unmöglich. x about 7 hours ago from Tweetie

Well praps I went a bit far with coke and pepsi. Should’ve tweeter “you can dislike both coke and pepsi” x about 7 hours ago from Tweetie

From Stilgherrian, via twitter:Leaked Rod Blagojevich / Rahm Emanuel wiretap transcript. So this is how politics works, eh? http://is.gd/by9q

one of the juicier bits:

BLAGO: What’s that supposed to mean?

EMANUEL: Um, I don’t know, what’s it supposed to mean governor? A.) You’re a fucking crook. B.) You’re a fucking asshole. C.) All of the above.

BLAGO: I’m clean Rahm, you know this. You think that fucking Fitzgerald would being twiddling his fucking thumbs if he had shit to go on?

EMANUEL: I gotta go, Gov. You appoint who you want, we really don’t give a shit.

BLAGO: What if I appoint Valerie, what if she takes it?

EMANUEL: What do you want me to say? We’d appreciate it, I’m not gonna fucking kiss your ring over it.

BLAGO: “Appreciate it”? Come on, this is a senate seat we’re talking about. It’s worth a fuck of a lot more than appreciation.

EMANUEL: You asked us for a list, we gave you a fucking list, you want to make your own list then make your own fucking list. [Raising voice] But if you’re asking for anything else from me, or Barack, or Valerie, then you can fucking stop talking right now Rod.

Awesomely amusing. Be nice if the veracity of the transcript could be verified.

Update: Nope, the first comment confirms that it’s parody.

So. 2.7 is nice and shiny, yay.

Other plugins I’m using:

Akismet of course, for comment-spam (it’s already detected one, which Drupal’s anti-spam probably would have missed).

FD Feedburner Plugin, to redirect feeds off to Feedburner. I foolishly migrated from feedburner.com to feedburner.google.com yesterday, so now there are two redirects when you try to grab my feeds, but otherwise this works fine.

Friendfeed Comments, in case of the unlikely event that anyone comments on any of these posts over on FF.

Google Analyticator, for inserting of Google Analytics magic codez in all the right places (and not inserting when I’m logged in, so I don’t track myself)

Google XML Sitemaps, for better indexation by Google

MobilePress, for a funky iPhone interface

OpenID, for OpenID auth, commenting, and registration

Platinum SEO Pack, because it has magic which corrects for the fact that URLs to posts aren’t quite what they used to be.

Register Plus, so that you don’t have a boring registration experience.

Subscribe to Comments – for the cool “email me updates” option below the comment form

Use Google Libraries, to send a small part of the bandwidth for the site to someone else (and hopefully make page loads faster for you)

WP Super Cache, for caching of the site (and again, hopefully faster loading and diggproofing)

What else is cool that I should be using?

Typical. The *day* after I stay up all night migrating from drupal to wordpress 2.6, they release wordpress 2.7 (Coltrane). How dare they give me shiny new goodness!

It’s very shiny indeed. It took me all of 5 minutes to upgrade (with only one false attempt; fortunately, “bzr revert -r 1″ saved me).

Is every day of being a wordpress user like this?

I’d just like to mention Alan and Laura Dove, who have a nice little walkthrough (complete with mashed up mysql script) for turning your drupal database into a wordpress database – at least, the posts and the comments.

Very handy, worked as advertised, yay.

Thanks!

If this works out the way I think it will, I now have a second user account solely for posting from my iPhone. Neat!

Time for bed.

Oh, the picture below is my cat, Linus.

Hrm. Seeing lots of 404s – although the articles came across, they have different urls now. Need to do something about that.