Global vacation time is over for this year

It is interesting to see how much holiday time affects all our lives. We all know from experience that things slow down in the summer months. But on the UN Job List it is now possible for me to quantify when people are on vacation. Fristly there are a lot of “out of office” replies on the weekly UN Job List e-mail alert (which by the way is also happening during the classic mission times). Secondly the daily visits in the access statistics go down considerably during vacation time of July/August.

Similarly it is interesting to know that over the course of a week Monday and Tuesdays are usually the days with the most visitors. Having Saturday as the “weakest” day and a stronger Sunday indicates to me that the UN Job List is indeed globally used.

Jungle Disk and proxy configuration

The Amazon S3 service is an interesting option to store data. One program that connects S3 directly to your desktop is Jungle Disk. Without a proxy Jungle Disk is installed very quickly and run without any issues for me.

However if you use a proxy, then you might run into issues. In my situation Jungle Disk failed to map the drive with a rather generic “Drive mapping failed” error. To cut the long story short: If you use a proxy you have to make sure that you do not use the proxy for “localxp.jungledisk.com” (under Windows XP) since Jungle Disk decided to have this address for its drive. So if you live in an environment where you have to use “automatic proxy detection” then just add the following line to your hosts file in order for everything to work:

127.0.0.1        localxp.jungledisk.com

That did the trick for me.

45 Years of Amnesty International: Be irrepressible

Amnesty International launched an interesting compaign to foster freedom of expression online all over the world. From irrepressible.info:

Chat rooms monitored. Blogs deleted. Websites blocked. Search engines restricted. People imprisoned for simply posting and sharing information.

The Internet is a new frontier in the struggle for human rights. Governments – with the help of some of the biggest IT companies in the world – are cracking down on freedom of expression.

Amnesty International, with the support of The Observer, is launching a campaign to show that online or offline the human voice and human rights are impossible to repress.

The online compaign includes the publishing of small samples of blocked content to show that information can’t really be stoped. Here is an example of bocked content:

“… security raid against activists in the current affairs, journalists and opposition members is increasing …”

This is an excerpt from: http://www.shrc.org/data/aspx/d8/2658.aspx The site belongs to Syrian Human Rights Committee, and has been censored in Syria. SHRC is a human rights organisation in Syria

The page (irrepressible.info) even provides a Javascript which should display little excerpts (like the one above) on Blogs, Websites etc. to show that ultimatly all pages have to be blocked if one wishes to control information on the internet. But the script is dynamically loading content from fragments.irrepressible.info. This means that by simply blocking fragments.irrepressible.info all info from this page can be eliminated.

It is a good idea, but to make it a real weapon against Internet Content Filtering the script should be improved.