Aku Aku

the word 'hack' banned by yahoo! groups

File this under "censorship makes you stupid".

Mark Finnern of Future Salon attempts to write of Technorati's Dave Sifry:

I loved his Etech Technorati Hacks session and I wrote about it in the Yahoo Group Description, but they would not let me save my text, because it contained a word that Yahoo perceives as not appropriate. The word is "Hack". Who would have thought?

I wonder if they also ban 'h4ck', because no script-kiddie would spell it 'hack' anyhow.

Once we had hired a VP of Software Engineering at my company, and I tried to educate him on the proper usage of the word 'hack' ...his understanding of the word more matched the definition of 'kludge'. He didn't really get it. We fired him pretty soon after that.

rosetta disk launch

The Long Now Foundation's Rosetta Project is an international collaboration which has put "a meaningful survey and near permanent archive of 1,000 languages" onto a disk which the European Space Agency is set to launch into space in about ten hours. Jim Mason of the Long Now Foundation has filed this (sometimes surreal) on-the-spot report of the pre-launch atmosphere in French Guiana:

though the concentration of linguists in french guiana has proved to be very low, the concentration of rocket scientists is likely the highest i have ever seen. it is very funny to get on a plane in paris and 90% of those on the plane are the proverbial and much referenced rocket scientists. you get on the bus, it is full of rocket scientists. you have dinner, the table is all rocket scientists. you ask a question about the chemical composition of the second stage liquid booster while having a drink at the bar, and most of the bar starts to answer in great detail. they are all very excited.

[...]

then in cayenne it is carnival every night. it is very steamy and thinly clothed. between the parade groups, the boys like to have little brawls in the street, which when they get a little too heated the police throw tear gas bombs into the middle of everything. then everyone runs away about 4 blocks, as that's what it takes to get the sting out of your eyes and throat, then everyone reforms and they start pounding on the 55 gal plastic cleaning drums that form basis of the drum section for the processions, and the rhythmic mob begins to roll again.

Read the full text here.

conceivability, possibility and actuality

As we race headlong into this new century the world is a whirlwind of new possibilities, revelations and knowledge, but also of age-old problems, conceits and greed. It can be exhilirating and depressing, almost simultaneously. Today I ran across a nice quote at the foward-thinking site WorldChanging:

It's the widening gap between what's conceivable and what we're doing that's sometimes discouraging. It's the narrowing gap between what's conceivable and what's possible that's sometimes electrifying.

That sums it up nicely. Although I would change the first sentence to "It's the widening gap between what's possible and what we're doing that's sometimes discouraging."

alpha66 maps

People like to collect things (be the first on your block to collect all seven!). People also like to mark things off lists. I've made lists of things I've already done or obtained, just for the pleasure of crossing them out. A common mix of these two urges is collecting evidence of travel, such as passport stamps; a friend's wife collects kitschy little regional snow globes depicting such plausible scenarios as the Alamo in a snow flurry.

Today a posting at Creative Commons led me to an online site called world66 that lets you check off your travel accomplishements in a web form and obtain an image and the necessary HTML for posting it to your web site. Very nicely executed.

create your own personalized map of the USA

create your own visited country map
or write about it on the open travel guide

The maps are a lead in for an open travel guide, where travlers create and maintain the content themselves. You can add or update any information you like. The site is basically a wiki, like the much acclaimed Wikipedia. All content on the site is under a Creative Commons license which says that anyone can use, redistribute or make derivate works, for commercial or non-commercial purposes, as long as they give attribution and maintain the license terms for their derived works. Bravo.

no such thing as global warming?

The Observer (UK) Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us

� Secret report warns of rioting and nuclear war � Britain will be 'Siberian' in less than 20 years � Threat to the world is greater than terrorism

I saw this yesterday, and expected it to be top story on CNN et al today ...but then I woke up and remembered that all the mass media news organizations are living in some other reality.

I guess here's some hard evidence of how the Bush administration has been preaching false science to support their agendas.

Update: There is some substance to the report, but the Guardian sensationalized it. I guess I need to beware of that organization as just as hysterical as their Fox "News" counterpart on the other side of the fence. The best analysis I've seen so far is over at BoingBoing.

symbol project

Here's a cool project I stumbled across today: symbolproject.org.

Symbolproject.org is a multilingual wiki project for collaboratively designing ideographic glyphs, working from our own list of core universalist concepts. The idea, in a nutshell it to borrow heavily from Han Chinese characters, using what is usable, and continually polished each design over time.

If I'm understanding correctly, it's rather like an esperanto-like effort for written script.

Here's some more info from the page where I first found a reference to this:

I thought of this idea while studying Chinese characters -- many are easy to understand like person人, female 女, moon 月, middle 中, sun 日, etc. Simple symbols represent concepts and in combination (like sun+moon 明="brilliant") represent more detailed ideas. In Chinese there arise various distortions, due largely to phonetic uses for characters, like the female+horse 媽="mother" because of the "ma1" (mother) sound of ma3 (horse). There are various other reasons fow why Chinese (as it is) is unsuitable for a universal pictographic language.

Neat!

There's some good comments and criticism of the project here.

bush administration on science

This news broke yesterday:

Scientists Accuse White House of Distorting Facts:

The Bush administration has deliberately and systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weaponry at home and abroad, a group of about 60 influential scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, said in a statement issued today.

This seems like important news: not only has the administration lied about WMD, but they're also systematically lying to the American public about scientific information (pertaining to health, environment, etc). Yet 24 hours after I first saw the report (on Canadian newsite Globe and Mail) I still see no mention of it on the front pages of CNN, Washington Post or (of course) Fox "News".

Here's a nice scenario; the U.S. education system has been crippled for decades, mass-media journalism has been replaced by shills for the military-entertainment complex and now we're being fed false science. Reality is being changed before our very eyes. My friend Christopher says that if you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water it jumps out, but if you drop a frog in a pot of cool water then heat it to a boil, the frog sits there complacently until it dies.

Our pot is boiling.

i, for one, fear our new robot overlords

The iRobot marketing assault at eTech was the scariest conference keynote ever. Props to Burtonator for asking the ethics question. (thanks to g10 for locating the original strip used in the presentation, in which the original dialogue had been replaced by some roomba propaganda) Update: ha, I guess I'm a tree hugging hacker.

conference scheduler

Boris talks about the effort to plan his schedule for the O'Reilly 2004 Emerging Technology Conference, reminding me of the 2002 Open Source Convention where there were big problems with the size of session rooms compared to popularity of the session. For instance Bruce Sterling's wonderful rant on Open Source was in one of the smallest rooms and seemed to have more people squeezed into the room than attended that morning's keynote in the big hall. It was so crowded that the organizers interrupted Sterling halfway through and moved everyone into another room! Other sessions in cavernous rooms were sparsely attended.

I emailed Rael, O'Reilly's conference tech monkey, about creating a schedule application that would help attendees plan their schedule and also help avoid such room scheduling mishaps. Here's what I sent:

1) Allow the regstrants to create and change their planned session schedule on your web site, even after the conference starts.

2) Allow the registrants to see the relative numbers of planned attendees at each session. I say relative because I guess you probably don't want to let out the real numbers (just a guess). The important thing here is to allow the registrants to be aware of a building buzz about a session before they get there. Otherwise when they find out about the buzz they are more likely to not follow their planned schedule (defeating the purpose). I think this is an important part of making this useful to you, and needs to be implemented with a smart UI.

3) Encourage use of this system by printing the daily schedules a user has chosen when they check in at registration. Print them out on the same size paper you use for the badges, one per day, so they can be slipped in behind the badge (facing out, this way the attendees can always check their schedule quickly by looking at the back of their badge). If you do this, they will use it. I'm sure of it.

4) Encourage people to change their schedules online after the conference starts by allowing them to print out the new versions on site. This will let you continue to have up-to-date attendance information. Honestly I'm not sure how well this would work out, I'm not even sure I'd bother, but I know that I wouldn't if I didn't get a new printout. However, steps 1-3 are probably enough to ease most of your room scheduling woes. Throw a little prolog in there and the system could even assign the rooms for you.

I never heard back from Rael, so being the hacker monkey (hey, it's Year of the Monkey) that I am, I started coding it myself. But also, being the ADD Dilletante Hacker Monkey that I am, I decided to implement it using this new data storage technique I was reading about at the time called Prevayler and promptly got distracted by the intricacies of Prevayler and never finished the Scheduler App once I got the storage part working.

I'm still toying with the idea of finishing this. It's mixed in amid a few dozen other hobby projects in various stages of development right now. Maybe I'll have some free time after the conference!

globalization of IT jobs

I apologize in advance for this inchoate rambling, but I wanted to make some record for myself of my thoughts on this matter at this point in time....

/. recently linked to a WiReD article titled The New Face of the Silicon Age. The titular face is not an American one, of course; it's Indian.

It would probably be smarter if I had mixed feelings about this movement of software engineering and other "high tech" jobs to countries like India and China, but the fact is I'm not torn up about it at all. I do believe the jobs are leaving, and I don't think they're coming back. I also believe that this is not the best for me financially. Still, it doesn't bother me too much because:

1) There's not a lot that can be done to stop it. It's just nature doing what's natural.
2) I'm happy for the countries getting the jobs. They need them more than we do.

Here's a dose of reality:

Patni's head of human resources, Miland Jadhav, compares the Pissed-Off Programmers' efforts to the protests that greeted Pizza Hut's arrival in India. When the chain opened, some people "went around smashing windows and doing all kinds of things," but their cause ultimately did not prevail. Why? Demand. "You cannot tell Indian people to stop eating at Pizza Hut," he says. "It won't happen." Likewise, if some kinds of work can be done just as well for a lot cheaper somewhere other than the US, that's where US companies will send the work. The reason: demand. And if we don't like it, then it's time to return our iPods (assembled in Taiwan), our cell phones (manufactured in Korea), and our J. Crew shirts (sewn in Indonesia). We can't have it both ways.

I'm still a bit at a loss at what I should do since I am convinced that the US tech market is not going to ever "recover" to the levels on the late 1990's (which I've always believed were inflated by two-bit carpet-baggers anyhow). The article makes an effort to point out that the off-shoring of the more tedious high tech work will cause a boom to more domestic creative positions, much like how the advent of the computer eradicated jobs in the 70's and 80's yet ended up creating even more jobs in the high tech industry. I'm not sure I buy into that though. I'm sure creative / innocative jobs will increase, but not necessarily enough to deflect the losses this time.

I feel I'm creative enough to compete in such a job market, but the article also emphasizes a need for people-person qualities.

After a week in India, it seems clear that the white-collar jobs with any lasting potential in the US won't be classically high tech. Instead, they'll be high concept and high touch.

Sigh. I'm a solid INTP. The tech boom (AKA the rise of the introverted geek) was perfect for me. I'm glad I got to see the golden years where you could keep your head down and be judged by merit and not personality/politics :)

Things will be OK though. It helps that I'm acutely aware of how well off I am in the global sense.