luv-talk June 2013

luv-talk@luv.asn.au

30 participants
29 discussions

by Tim Josling

I would like to get various youtube channels transcribed so I can access the content without the tedium of slowly listening to the words one by one. So it occurred to me that I could get them transcribed for a reasonably price using Amazon's mechanical turk. Alternatives: * Youtube does give a transcript but it is very rough * With html5 you can speed up the youtube videos but this does not work on my tablet (Android) Has anyone used mechanical turk? Do they have any suggestions of hints? Alternatives? Specific issues: How do I ensure quality work? I am happy to pay for this but not for shoddy work. My task would be something like: Provide a transcript for X videos, cleaning up text into proper sentences and correct words.. You can can the youtube transcripts but they need to be fixed up. Tim Josling

8 years, 11 months

Android e-mail client, multiple from addresses

by Petros

Hi all, over the weekend I was searching for a good e-mail client which gives you the opportunity to change the "from" address. So I would like to change "me@domain" to "it@here" or "accounting@somewhere" before I send a mail. I wasn't successful to find this option using the Android standard client, as well as K-9 which is open source. Do you know a MUA that has this feature? Thanks Peter

8 years, 11 months

http://TrainsNotTollroads.com.au - public campaign needed to put fire under the arse of politicians failing Melbourne

by Petros

Hi all, as Kenneth Davidson pointed out repeatedly, last in yesterday's The Age: http://www.theage.com.au/comment/why-tunnel-vision-will-cost-all-victorians… the building of the East West tunnel for an overall price of 15+ billion dollars will cripple Victoria's ability to tackle transport woes for a decade or more. Just recently Terry Mulder, minister for transport, abandoned his former support of the Metro Rail in favour of the toll tunnel. It just adds another episode to the decade of procrastination and favouritism of private interests by both sides of politics. As Kenneth Davidson pointed out: "The only defence against bad government now is outraged public opinion." Here is a recently launched campaign to support rails not toll roads: http://TrainsNotTollroads.com.au Personally, I see the need for the Metro rail tunnel every day, as a commuter on the Northern lines coming through North Melbourne and Southern Cross. More often than not the train stops before North Melbourne and then before Southern Cross, making a two stop journey from Macaulay or Kensington a 20 minute ride. The most common announcement: congestion by the combined traffic, including V/Line trains, coming into North Melbourne and then to the city. An airport train? Forget it as long as you don't have the North Melbourne corridor cleared. The same happens for trains coming from the South East frequently standing in the Federation Square area. Politicians have failed Melbourne for the last dozen years at least (the time I am living here), it is time to build public pressure. Please stand up, don't be quiet sheep that vote every few years according to colour preferences, start to make a difference, start to make _your_ representatives work! Any ideas to build pressure is welcome. We are gambling away Melbourne's future if not. Regards Peter

8 years, 11 months

Re: [luv-talk] Android e-mail client, multiple from addresses

by Petros

Quoting "Trent W. Buck" <trentbuck(a)gmail.com> > Petros wrote: >> over the weekend I was searching for a good e-mail client which >> gives you the opportunity to change the "from" address. >> >> So I would like to change "me@domain" to "it@here" or >> "accounting@somewhere" before I send a mail. >> >> I wasn't successful to find this option using the Android standard >> client, as well as K-9 which is open source. >> >> Do you know a MUA that has this feature? > > You want to run this from android? Or a GUI, or a tty? Oops, wasn't specific enough, it seems. I am looking for a "native" Android app - it's not me using it, so I don't want to make it too geeky. Regards Peter

8 years, 11 months

More on spying

by Tim Josling

Basically this article is saying that given the comprehensive access that the NSA has to the communications of the powerful and the weak alike, no-one can stand up to them for fear of blackmail. J Edgar Hoover of the FBI used to employ similar tactics. I have read a couple of reports from a fund-raising dinner in which Obama was asked why he had not done much of what he promised to do before his election? His answer was "Remember what happened to Dr King". NSA Whistleblower: NSA Spying On – and Blackmailing – Top Government Officials and Military Officers | Zero Hedge http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2013-06-20/nsa-whistleblower-nsa-spyin… I retroespect it is obvious that computers would enable this kind of thing, even though in the early days there was a lot of hope that by bypassing gatekeepers using the Internet we would have a lot more freedom. Tim

8 years, 11 months

Re: [luv-talk] Fwd: [luv-ctte] [general inquiry] Connect with developer

by Chris Bouwmeester

Thanks for this. I didn't go into too much detail because I wasn't really looking to solve the problems via the forum, more to get in touch with someone with appropriate expertise who we can contract to help. Lock-down is really only to keep children in their area and disabling some keyboard shortcuts - not BIOS, hardware, etc. Main question is about running AIR apps - we have 80 flash games built already, so if flash is no longer the way to go, too late. I was looking in the direction of Linux (to move away from Windows) because I'm keen to: 1. simplify the whole setup 2. boot faster 3. make the disk footprint smaller and therefore faster to re-image 4. stick with one OS version - at the moment we have XP and W7 and variants of that. 5. have something more stable. For example, we are experiencing a lot of cases where XP just reboots over and over. When we reimage the disk, it is fine. Other thing I forgot to mention is that these are touch screen computers. Don't know if that is something linux allows for. Not sure if my email address appears - bouwmeester.chris(a)gmail.com Happy to make contact with anyone who might be able to assist us further. Chris Bouwmeester wrote: > Hi. We have an application which at the moment runs on Adobe > AIR/flash under windows. I'd like to explore the suitability of > running it under Linux instead. The application is for preschoolers > and we also need to make changes to the operating system to lock it > down and prevent them getting out of the application, etc. Are you > able to point me towards someone who can do/assist us with that sort > of thing? Thanks, Chris. The lockdown part can be achieved mostly by running the app full-screened in X, enabling DontZap (on by default these days), and disabling the gettys (or disabling Ctrl+Alt+Fn). Unless the app itself offers e.g. a shell, you should be fine. Preventing users from hijacking the boot sequence is harder -- you have to worry about getting access to the BIOS, the bootloader, the initrd (esp. recovery shell), plus anything you leave enabled in init. This is not particularly onerous iff you can get a custom BIOS compiled by your hardware vendor (if you have homogeneous hardware). Also you will need to worry about physical security, esp. access to jumpers and cables to disk &c off the mainboard. If you're just worried about a preschooler dropping to a shell by accident and rm -rf'ing the disk, you can probably forego my 2nd and 3rd paras -- it's more concerned with deliberate malice. I won't even bother to comment on the flash part -- I'm sure plenty of other people here will have articulate rants about that. Though, perhaps I should have started by asking: why do you want to switch from Windows? _______________________________________________ luv-talk mailing listluv-talk@lists.luv.asn.auhttp://lists.luv.asn.au/listinfo/luv-talk

8 years, 11 months

Fwd: [luv-ctte] [general inquiry] Connect with developer

by Daniel Jitnah

Hello Luvers The following message was received by the Committee and is being forwarded to Luv talk list as is. No endorsement of content is to be implied. Please respond directly to sender if interested. Cheers Daniel. -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [luv-ctte] [general inquiry] Connect with developer Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2013 11:42:03 +1000 (EST) From: bouwmeester.chris(a)gmail.com Reply-To: LUV Committee private mailing list. <luv-ctte(a)luv.asn.au> To: luv-ctte(a)luv.asn.au Chris Bouwmeester sent a message using the contact form at http://luv.asn.au/contact. Hi. We have an application which at the moment runs on Adobe AIR/flash under windows. I'd like to explore the suitability of running it under Linux instead. The application is for preschoolers and we also need to make changes to the operating system to lock it down and prevent them getting out of the application, etc. Are you able to point me towards someone who can do/assist us with that sort of thing? Thanks, Chris. _______________________________________________ luv-ctte mailing list luv-ctte(a)luv.asn.au http://lists.luv.asn.au/listinfo/luv-ctte

8 years, 11 months

Re: [luv-talk] Just a warning if you're writing shell scripts...

by Tim Connors

On Thu, 20 Jun 2013, Trent W. Buck wrote: > Tim Connors wrote: > > Maybe it would be best if the SOE they're trying to push out to all govt > > agencies removes our right to execve() /bin/bash. > > In 3.9 you can turn of shebang support... Nah, we just need to remove all support for execve() and related system calls. Security risk, you see. -- Tim Connors

8 years, 11 months

Gonski

by Tim Josling

As background... I recently visited my old high school. They have the same staff levels that they had when I was there, but less than half the students. The outcomes are worse however. Gang activity is now a problem. This is consistent with figures I have seen across the board of a doubling of per student real spending since I left school, while outcomes have deteriorated. Can someone enlighten me about the rationale of the Gonski reforms? I got onto the government's web site http://www.betterschools.gov.au/ and tried to derive some content from what is mostly PR hackery. What I managed to glean was: * More money will be directed to underprivileged students, with the objective of achieving more uniform outcomes across the social classes. * More detailed policy direction ("uniform standards") and reporting to Canberra (referred to as "accountability"). * Numerous mandates such as Asian languages; each school must be paired to a school in Asia, each school must have detailed policies about bullying, each student must have a "reading plan" etc. * A more politicized process for selection of trainee teachers (eg based on interviews and assessment of applicants' "community involvement"). * Make it harder to become a teacher by requiring more training initially (and ongoing), although there are some nods in the direction of providing more assistance to beginning teachers. * Teachers may **optionally** be assessed in part based on student performance but it seems this will generally not happen. Some of these policies may seem plausible but in social policy plausible solutions often produce no results, and often make things worse ("drugs are harmful so let's ban them"). Most notably, attempts to level the social classes by spending more on disadvantaged students - above a very moderate level - have consistently produced minuscule outcomes. As I suggested above, throwing money at the problem has been a miserable failure in the past, yet we seem to be embarking on an exercise of "if it doesn't work, then do even more of it ". In all my reading on the topic over the years, the one thing that seems to matter in student outcomes, once you factor in the student cohort, is teacher quality, specifically intelligence. Class sizes, within a fairly wide range, don't seem to make much difference (though they do affect teacher workloads). Yet teacher quality, including getting rid of under-performing teachers, is conspicuously absent from the agenda. There is no mention of paying teachers in in-demand fields more and trying to get a higher quality applicant. Can anyone reassure me that my hard earned tax dollars are being spent wisely here? Tim Josling

8 years, 11 months

Re: [luv-talk] Gonski

by Petros

From: "Russell Coker" <russell(a)coker.com.au> > I think that a large part of the solution to the current situation is in > removing some students from the regular school system. I'm sure > that everyone > here went to school with some kids who never had a chance of going to > university and probably weren't going to pass year 12. Having such students > in school only make things worse for everyone else. The "separation of kids" is one of the main differences between my upbringing in East Germany (where more or less all kids stay together until year 10) and the West German (and now in all of Germany) where most states separate kids after year 4, in three different school systems. To end up in the "low end school" (Hauptschule) is more or less the entry ticket to a failed life. There you have "no future kids". Why bother to learn? Take your drugs and learn for an underworld career. The selection is only partially based on merits. Everybody knows that well-off parents have more means to ensure their kids avoid these kind of schools even if they are not that bright. And the kid with he black fingernails is more likely to be there even if it's smarter than the rich one. Yes, having all kids learning together has some downsides but it has upsides too. School is social education too, and it is good to know how other people fare in life, what there problems are etc. Social separation happens anyway, by location, and the last years of houseprice explosion will speed up this process. Personally, I enjoy to see my kids growing up with a positive attitude. As most Australian kids do, I believe. I haven't seen many 12 years old who already feel that they are "the leftover" of a society that doesn't need them. That is good for everyone. It makes living in Australia a pleasant experience. My daughter learns in a public college, in a SEAL program (selected entry accelerated learning). The separation is much less intrusive than separation by school, and it seems to be the best of two worlds for her: an inclusive school and a challenging, stimulating learning environment. These facilities are there for all kids, not just the SEAL classes, as art curses, sport hall, science labs etc. BTW: The inclusive Australian education system fares better in international comparisons than the separating German one. Regards Peter

8 years, 11 months

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luv-talk June 2013