This NPR interview on wireless surveillance with Alberto Gonzales is good listening for anyone interested in the issue.

Google’s self-censorship in China has been the topic of considerable controversy; the official Google response reasonably explains their choice as the least evil among a set of undesirable alternatives.

I can sympathize with Google’s moral tradeoff– living in the real world means making such choices– but am immediately compelled to think of as ways to evade this censorship. I believe censorship-resistance can be baked into the fabric of the blogosphere, such that information is freely discoverable using public search engines like Google despite attempts to censor it.

Let’s assume that Google will not apply too much brilliance and engineering effort to the probem of defeating censorship beaters; that would definitely cross the line into colluding with evil.

Today, it’s easy enough to accidentally evade the filter. As Paul Boutin notes, the Chinese Google filter only works if you can spell. Searching for Tiananmen (spelled correctly) on google.cn gets the censored images, whereas any of a number of common misspellings produces uncesored images of tanks.

What if the process of misspelling censored words could be automated in blogging and searching services? For example, a Wordpress or Movable Type plugin could download a list of censored words for a central server and systematically generate alternate spellings would could be appended as censorship avoidance “tags” at the end of the post. Whenever the page was rerendered, these tags could be dynamically updated to adapt with any new words censored by the search engine.

Similarly, a Google toolbar add-in could be used to automatically augment users queries with alternate spellings of censored words.

How do we know which words are being censored? The easiest course be to ask Google to provide a feed of censored words, in secret if necessary.

If they are unwilling/unable to do that, community effort plus automated comparison between google.cn and google.com could be used to detect words that have been censored.

Would bloggers and web page authors be willing to change their behavior in this fashion to evade censorship? Those who write on sensitive topics certainly would be. Would searchers? Evidence suggests that there are many in China who are apolitical, so not everyone would be willing to take the chance of being detected. But there are certainly some who appreciate and benefit from unfettered access to a diversity of information.

Since RIM OS4, it has been possible to use a Blackberry as tethered modem with a notebook computer, allowing your notebook to connect to the internet anywhere your phone can.

Read all about it in this Blackberry forums article on how to use a Blackberry as a modem for a laptop.

I got this working successfully on my T-mobile 7290; be sure to have your phone plugged in and run the Blackberry Device Manager software before you try testing or using the connection. Naturally, no one would mistake GPRS for broadband, but the connection is fine for emailing, blogging, and light web browsing. (I’m posting this message through my phone connection.) Very cool.

Note that this approach requires a PC and a USB connection. There are also Bluetooth alternatives.

Bluetooth support for PCs:: Mobishark supports Bluetooth modem functionality for PCs and the Blackberry. See Blackberry forums for details. Mobishark is $45 and supports a free trial.

Bluetooth support for Mac OSX: Pulse supports Bluetooth access to the Blackberry on the Mac. Pulse is $50 and also supports a free trial.
. Or if you’d like a free option, try the OSX modem script from fibble.org; it sounds like this hasn’t been tested on as many different devices but the price is certainly attractive.

Here are some photos from my recent trip to Sri Lanka. (Most of the really good ones are by my uncle, Gene Thune.) I hope they give a hint of the the diversity of natural, cultural, and archeological attractions.

Google Mobile now allows you to take your personalized home page with you– you can see (some of) your personalized Google home page on your mobile phone. (Sorry, most custom home page modules don’t work.)

If search for “ig:” in Berry 411, it will now take to your personalized home page. (You’ll need to sign in the first time you get there.)

I have been using the Arachno Ruby IDE for several weeks now and recommend it.

It has just about everything you’d expect in a graphical IDE, with the possible exceptions of “Intellisense”-style completion (which would be difficult if not impossible to do for a dynamic language like Ruby), source control integration, and complete documentation. (It’s still under very active development, so documentation is a work in progress.)

It has (of course) syntax coloring, automatical indentation, graphical debugging (including Rails app), and class and gem browsing. Even though it’s essentially a beta, it’s quite fast and has been very stable in my experience. [Update: Having said that, I should note that Arachno just crashed. The fact that it launches quickly and has autosave made this less of a calamity than it might otherwise be.]

It launches quickly and never bogs down or pauses for garbage collection, unlike say, IntelliJ. IntelliJ is a wonderful Java development environment but also a real resource hog.

Like all good IDEs, it has fast search and file choosing, with incremental filtering as you type file or class names. (The default keybindings are vaguely Emacs-ish, which in my book is a good thing. E.g. Ctrl-P Ctrl-F to pick a file, or Ctrl-P Ctrl-O pick an open buffer.)

The cost is only $29 for personal use, or $89 for the professional edition, with free upgrades for 32 months. I’ll definitely purchase a copy as soon as my trial runs out.

From Andrew Escobar:

Thanks to an update from Apple, Front Row can now be easily installed on any Mac running 10.4.4 Tiger. While you previous had to rely on quirky hacks, Front Row can now be added to Tiger with full support, including keyboard shortcut and sound preferences.

I’ll have to give this a try…

No longer do employers need to judge the caliber of a job applicant based on the keywords in his or her resume. We’re moving to a better world in which links to online content, relationships, and communities give a fuller picture of every candidate.

Jason has written 8 Tips for Landing Your Dream Job in a Web 2.0 World:

1. Turn to the new breed of Meta Job Search Engines. Overwhelmed by the number of job boards to choose from and by the hundreds of corporate employment sites to keep track of? New sites like Jobster.com, Indeed.com, and Simplyhired.com take the hassle out of searching for your next job by providing one-stop-searching across most of the major job sites. Think of these sites as “Google for jobs.” Conduct one search and get results from many job sites and employers. Jobster and Indeed also search jobs directly from many employers, which is helpful as many leading employers are scaling back their job board budgets and shifting their focus instead towards promoting their own employment sites. Jobster now searches more than 5 times the number of jobs as the largest job board.
   
   
   
2. Make Use of Referrals and Social Networks to Get Noticed. Mark Mehler from CareerXroads points out that a referred candidate has a 35 to 1 chance of getting hired vs. 500 to 1 for the typical candidates. That’s because with so many resumes coming in to companies every day, most employers rely on referrals as a way to spot great candidates. New sites such as Jobster and LinkedIn include “social networking” technology which can help you identify which of your contacts may know people at the companies you want to work at. Jobster goes a step further and can help you request a referral directly into the hiring team at many employers. Jobster also has a feature called “My Jobster,” which enables you to keep tabs on jobs that you can get referred for via the people you know and the people they know.
   
   
3. Sign up for e-Mail Alerts and RSS Feeds.   Tired of searching and searching and searching?  e-Mail Alerts and RSS Feeds enable you to have jobs delivered to you instead.  Leading job sites now enable you to receive daily email alerts about the latest jobs which meet your specific search criteria. The meta search engines, Jobster, Indeed, and Simplyhired, provide customizable alerts spanning millions of jobs from thousands of employers and job sites. Subscribe to RSS feeds and get live feeds of jobs as they are posted. Jobster also has a feature called, “insider alerts” which provides email alerts of jobs that you can get referred for.
   
   
   
4. Know where the Jobs Are. If you want to land your dream job, you need to know where it is available. Several sites are now adding interactive mapping features so that you can see what jobs are being posted where and when. Indeed.com provides a map showing where the highest concentration of job postings are. Jobster.com offers two interactive maps: one which shows live job searches as they are conducted in real-time, and another which displays on a Google local map where the jobs are nearest to your search area.
   
   
5. Read Blogs. According to a leading blog search engine, Technorati, there are now more than 14 million web logs or “blogs” and 88,000 new blogs are created daily. Blogs are written by citizen journalists who desire to share their opinions and expertise on specific topics with the broader internet audience. Many employers are turning to blogs to find candidates for their jobs. Increasingly, employers are advertising their positions on blogs, as they recognize that the individuals reading blogs on specific topics are most likely to be interested in working at companies who are pursuing related initiatives. At Microsoft, for instance, more than 2000 employees write blogs about topics pertinent to their work; now Microsoft is using those blogs to develop a dialogue with potential hires.
   
   
   
6. Write a Blog. A common complaint from employers is that resumes don’t tell the full story about an individual’s interests and accomplishments. Write a blog and help potential employers learn about the “real you.” Express yourself freely, but don’t write anything that might be construed as potentially embarrassing or overly controversial. Google offers a free blogging service for beginners called “Blogger.” Moveabletypes’s “Typepad” is also very popular for novice bloggers. I’ve also found wordpress to be quite simple to get started on, albeit a bit less polished than typepad.
   
   
   
7. Maintain an Online Professional Profile.  Another great way to introduce yourself to employers is by maintaining an online professional profile. These profiles typically go beyond basic resumes to introduce your professional experience and accomplishments. Create a public profile on Jobster and have select employers find you. Or, join LinkedIn and establish your profile in the LinkedIn network. Zoominfo is a search engine used by many recruiting organization for mid-level and senior managers; if you are looking for a mid-level position, it is advised that you update your Zoominfo profile as well.
   
   
   
8. Join an Online Group. Associations and affinity groups are often a great source of information about job openings. Whether it’s your fraternity or sorority, your bowling team, or a trade association, networking within your groups can help you learn about and get noticed for great opportunities. Jobster enables members to create and join online groups to share jobs and job search tips amongst people with like interests. Sites like The Facebook for college students can also be helpful.

JiraRuby is a Ruby library by Jason van Zyl that uses Soap to automate JIRA. I used this to create a bulk bug creation tool that combines information from a spreadsheet with common settings specified in a file or on the command line.

I’ve noted in the past the difficulty I had creating a SOAP driver for Ruby due to bugs in various versions of the stub generation tool; if you use the version included with JIRARuby you can spare yourself these difficulties.

JiraRuby also implements a few additional methods not available via the SOAP interface via HTTP Posts.

For whatever reason, I couldn’t get the gem to install directly so I simply downloaded the files from the CVS repository.

One especially tricky point about automating JIRA, which is not well documented in the SOAP interface, is how to set custom properties. I document this here to spare you my pain.

1. You must initialize a RemoteCustomFieldValue with a name field such as “customfield_10040″, where 10040 is a value that can only be determined by looking at some query string parameters in JIRA.
2. The value of the custom field is an array including literal text that you want to set, rather than an ID. This is different from built in properties like status, which use a numeric index rather than the text.

Here’s an example.


issue = RemoteIssue.new()
# ...code omitted to set standard properties...

# set custom properties
bucket = RemoteCustomFieldValue.new("customfield_10040", nil, ["Search"])
issue.customFieldValues = [bucket]

# create the issue
issue = jira.createIssue(token, issue)


Google Local Mobile is now available for Blackberries. The application focuses on graphical, map based searches and driving directions. It’s well done and definitely worth a download. The map scrolling and zooming are noticably snappier than similar products out there, as are the animated, graphical turn by turn directions.

Combining directions, maps, and satellite imagery, Google Local for mobile is a free download that lets you find local hangouts and businesses across town or across the country — right from your phone.

Detailed directions: Whether you plan to walk or drive, your route is displayed on the map itself, together with step-by-step directions.

Integrated search results: Local business locations and contact information appear all in one place, integrated on your map.

Easily movable maps: Interactive, draggable maps let you zoom in or out, and move in all directions so you can orient yourself visually.

Satellite imagery: Get a bird’s eye view of your desired location.