VIDEO: Largest hand­writ­ten Koran in Kabul. One of the world’s most exquis­ite copies of the Koran, has been unveiled in Kabul. It is the world’s largest hand­writ­ten copy of the Koran. [BBC News]

Afghanistan is not a very safe loca­tion for his­tor­i­cally sig­nif­i­cant reli­gious arti­facts. They’d bet­ter get that across the bor­der to Iran, or into some other coun­try with an appre­ci­a­tion for his­tory and no Impe­r­ial Stormtroop­ers to set it on fire.

How ASCAP Takes Money From Suc­cess­ful Indie Artists And Gives It To Giant Rock Stars. The short ver­sion of the story is basi­cally that, to make its own life eas­ier, ASCAP just pays those per­for­mance roy­al­ties to the top 200 gross­ing tours in the US, and every other tour­ing musi­cian is more or less screwed — unless you can con­vince ASCAP that you play “seri­ous music.” [Techdirt]

I know a num­ber of indie artists, and I can’t remem­ber ever hear­ing any of them say any­thing, good or bad, about ASCAP.

I decided to test the Dic­ta­tion fea­ture on my new iPad to see if it actu­ally worked. Here is my sam­ple text:

I say to the gods and the sons of gods the things that whet my thoughts; by the wells of the world there is none with the might to make me do his will.

Dic­ta­tion ren­dered that as:

Mes­sage the gods and the sons of guns the love my thoughts for the Wilson’s the world there is none within the com­mit­ment do his will

It’s a good thing I’ve got­ten bet­ter at touch-typing with an iPad.

From an arti­cle title Born This Way? in the May issue of Rea­son Mag­a­zine (not yet avail­able online):

In a study I con­ducted with col­leagues Jesse Gra­ham and Brian Nosek, we tested how well lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives could under­stand each other. We asked more than 2,000 Amer­i­can vis­i­tors to fill out the Moral Foun­da­tions Ques­tion­naire. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out nor­mally, answer as them­selves. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a “typ­i­cal lib­eral” would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a “typ­i­cal con­ser­v­a­tive” would respond. This design allowed us to exam­ine the stereo­types that each side held about the other. More impor­tant, it allowed us to assess how accu­rate they were by com­par­ing people’s expec­ta­tions about “typ­i­cal” par­ti­sans to the actual responses from par­ti­sans on the left and the right. Who was best able to pre­tend to be the other?

The results were clear and con­sis­tent. Mod­er­ates and con­ser­v­a­tives were most accu­rate in their pre­dic­tions, whether they were pre­tend­ing to be lib­er­als or con­ser­v­a­tives. Lib­er­als were the least accu­rate, espe­cially those who described them­selves as “very liberal.”

I’d real­ized years ago from talk­ing to both lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives that con­ser­v­a­tives gen­er­ally under­stood lib­er­als pretty well (they just dis­agree with them) while lib­er­als are so far off base about con­ser­v­a­tives as to bor­der on delu­sional. I’d won­dered if this was true in gen­eral, or just a pecu­liar­ity of the peo­ple I came in con­tact with, so it’s inter­est­ing to see a study con­firm­ing that it is in fact true in general.

I really like the git blame com­mand. In CM it’s pretty com­mon for an irate devel­oper to com­plain, “The build is bro­ken, fix it!” Tools like this are very use­ful for fig­ur­ing out what hap­pened. Although I’ve found that in prac­tice there’s a pretty good rule of thumb: the devel­oper who com­plained is almost always the per­son who broke the build.

Seen on a mail­ing list:

“On demand” could con­ceiv­ably include any film that Kodak has ever man­u­fac­tured. Some­one in the audi­ence asked the inevitable ques­tion: “Includ­ing Kodachrome?” [Bev­erly Paster­czyk of East­man Kodak Co.‘s] answer: “Yes, includ­ing Kodachrome”. She added that while small runs of Kodachrome were unlikely, it was not out of the ques­tion, since they have had numer­ous inquiries.

To the ques­tion “How could this be made pos­si­ble?” her answer was intrigu­ing. “Vol­ume is the answer. Con­sumer groups of large num­bers of indi­vid­u­als could peti­tion for the return of a spe­cific film. This would include not only large com­pa­nies, but also indi­vid­u­als banded together such as cam­era clubs, espe­cially those with a large enough base such that they could col­lec­tively join on a national or even inter­na­tional basis”.

The ques­tion of pro­cess­ing isn’t really addressed here. I seem to remem­ber read­ing that Dwayne’s sold their pro­cess­ing equip­ment after they stopped pro­cess­ing Kodachrome. How­ever, if that were dealt with, it occurs to me that another com­pany could con­ceiv­ably order a pro­duc­tion run and then resell it, like the way that com­pa­nies buy graph­ics cards from a man­u­fac­turer and then resell them with their own com­pany name.

Ask Ars: how safe is my data stored in iCloud? [Ars Tech­nica]

An inter­est­ing arti­cle which ulti­mately con­cludes that it’s “safe enough.” How­ever, right there in the arti­cle is some­thing which con­tra­dicts its conclusion:

As far as your Safari book­marks or iPhone pho­tos, how­ever, that infor­ma­tion is only given out when required by law, such as when it’s required by court order. “We may also dis­close infor­ma­tion about you if we deter­mine that, for pur­poses of national secu­rity, law enforce­ment, or other issues of pub­lic impor­tance, dis­clo­sure is nec­es­sary or appro­pri­ate,” Apple wrote in its pri­vacy policy.

In other words, it’s not really safe at all. If it were, it would be impos­si­ble for Apple to ever dis­close any­thing, for any rea­son, because they wouldn’t be able to get to it to dis­close it.

Per­force is a Git Devel­oper. We’ve been study­ing Git for some time. We like to keep an eye on play­ers and tech­nol­ogy in our space, partly because it’s some­thing we think our cus­tomers appre­ci­ate, partly because it’s due dili­gence as a leader in the SCM/Version Man­age­ment space, and partly because it’s just plain inter­est­ing! But some­thing unex­pected hap­pened last sum­mer as a result of this study of com­pet­ing tech­nolo­gies: the rela­tion­ship between Git and Per­force turns out to have syn­er­gis­tic appeal with a peanut but­ter twist, as out­lined in my blog arti­cles Per­force and DVCS: Two great tastes that taste great together and Git as a Per­force Client.

[…]

But if you want to use Git and Per­force together today, you’ll likely be look­ing at the git-p4 fea­ture of Git as either a tool or a start­ing point. So to get you a lit­tle fur­ther along the road, we’ll be mak­ing an increased effort on git-p4 in the com­ing months. Here’s where you can give us a hand: let­ting us know what’s impor­tant to you in a git-p4 fea­ture set. Please add your sug­ges­tions to the com­ments below! [p4 blog]

I just started try­ing out git-p4 yes­ter­day for a very small inter­nal tool, so this is really good news. As a CM Engi­neer, I pretty much live in Per­force, but it’s a bit awk­ward for work­ing on small inter­nal tools where I might want to have sev­eral exper­i­men­tal branches. I’m quite new to git, but I’ve already found that its capa­bil­ity for that sort of work more than lives up to the hype.

Ana­lyst: Only one in ten tablets sold has a cel­lu­lar con­nec­tion. It’s clear that peo­ple are will­ing to pay for new tablets, but it’s also clear that they aren’t yet ready to take on the fee for cel­lu­lar con­nec­tiv­ity to their tablets. [Mac­Cen­tral]

Per­son­ally, I don’t care about the fee, but I refuse to vol­un­teer to carry a track­ing and sur­veil­lance device around with me. The idea that I’d pay to carry one is just insulting.

There’s either a sports game on TV, or a large group of men is being tor­tured in the house next to mine.

Terra Naomi