Aku Aku

Mukhtaran Bibi

From NY Times article Sentenced to be Raped:

In June 2002, the police say, members of a high-status tribe sexually abused one of Ms. Mukhtaran's brothers and then covered up their crime by falsely accusing him of having an affair with a high-status woman. The village's tribal council determined that the suitable punishment for the supposed affair was for high-status men to rape one of the boy's sisters, so the council sentenced Ms. Mukhtaran to be gang-raped. As members of the high-status tribe danced in joy, four men stripped her naked and took turns raping her. Then they forced her to walk home naked in front of 300 villagers. In Pakistan's conservative Muslim society, Ms. Mukhtaran's duty was now clear: she was supposed to commit suicide. [....] But instead of killing herself, Ms. Mukhtaran testified against her attackers and propounded the shocking idea that the shame lies in raping, rather than in being raped. The rapists are now on death row, and President Pervez Musharraf presented Ms. Mukhtaran with the equivalent of $8,300 and ordered round-the-clock police protection for her. Ms. Mukhtaran, who had never gone to school herself, used the money to build one school in the village for girls and another for boys - because, she said, education is the best way to achieve social change. The girls' school is named for her, and she is now studying in its fourth-grade class. "Why should I have spent the money on myself?" she asked, adding, "This way the money is helping all the girls, all the children."

Unfortunately, the money is running out and the Pakistani government has reneged on promises to provide more funding. Members of the "high-status" tribe are allegedly planning on murdering Bibi and her whole family as soon as the police protection leaves.

geek valentine

Dear Mie, You are sweeter than Sagittarius B2. Love, Dav

Getting Things Done

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen This is a book about a system which purports to make you more efficient and productive in all that you do. I kept hearing about it, and I've been following a new web site 43 Folders that talks a lot about implementing the system especially from a Mac OS X using geek's viewpoint (hey, that's me!). I feel like I'm joining a cult.

The City Trilogy

The City Trilogy: Five Jade Disks, Defenders of the Dragon City, Tale of a Feather (Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan) by S. K. Chang S.K. Chang was responsbile for bringing science fiction to China. He started in the 50's translating the works of authors like P.K. Dick and Asimov, and later began creating his own works. The City Trilogy is considered his masterpiece. In Hollywood-speak, it's Crouching Tiger meets Star Wars.

Google Local

<sigh> /me stares dreamily. "Google, is there -anything- you can't do?". Google Local Upgrade (Google Weblog)

* Enhanced user interface - a new, cleaner design that now includes maps on results pages displaying the location of businesses in the search results
* New mapping capabilities - users can now zoom and pan different directions on the maps without reloading the page
* Improved comprehensiveness - search results provide links to even more web pages like business homepages and related ratings and reviews
* More relevant results - improved relevance technology returns even more precise results

Demo: take me to geek heaven.

lumps and splits

Dave Weinberger's Sunday session at FOO Camp was an introduction to his book in progress with a working title of Lumps and Splits (working subtitle is Messiness as a Virtue). It was an example of what I consider to be the most prevalent track at this conference: categorization/tags/pivot points/ontologies. Here's my notes from the session:

- Lumps and Splits [Messiness as a Virtue], Dave Weinberger
  - [way cool email address deleted]
  - How we draw lines defines culture (romans didnt have dff word for baby/adolescent)
  - book is about changes in how we classify
  - typical
    step 1 arrange items (books)
    step 2 make index (card catalog)
  - new
    step 3 - the owners of the info no longer control the organization of the info
      - no penalty for having multiple tags
      - job of librarian changes from coming up with useful taxonomy to building as much meta
        data as possible into object so users can catalog as has meaning to them
  - chapters
    - lumps and splits, why isn't everything miscellaneous?
    - dewey decimal system, why is it so racist? (less digits for christianity than "other")
      - Classifications are tools, not mirrors of reality
      - Steven Pinker (is 64 more even than 4? people say yes)
      - worst classification system: the colon system (facted classification)
    - better to have a wrong system than waste time fixing it
    - bar codes and rfids as transitional elements between real world and digital
      - value of implicit meta data
      - history of spaces between worlds and history of capitalization
    - trees (branching trees)
      (google kicked yahoo's ass but there are places for trees 
      - (game of 20 questions, 20 hops gets you anywhere))
    - farce of knowledge, attempts to make universal taxonomies
      - Celestial Empire of Benevolent Knowledge
      - perhaps history of SGML will go here
      - how do you knit disparate ontologies together
      - del.icio.us tag choice as popularity contest
  - historical controversy of the introduction of alphabetization as an affront to God's Plan
  - object model of OWL as differnt sort of obj model than that of a programming language
  - people cluster around prototypes (name a bird, unlikely to name an ostrich)
    - dow jones had a boolean search engine which failed because it was too exact, what worked
      better was a fuzzier search that lets the human skim more results
  - scientific name for blue whale means "winged little mouse" ...all that matters is it has a name

password generator bookmarklet

Friday afternoon soon after I arrived at FOO Camp I opened up my powerbook and logged onto bloglines.com. I quickly realized that I'd forgotten to set my browser to proxy through a ssh tunnel like I usually (always) do on public wifi networks, meaning my password just got sent in the clear. I set up the secure tunnel immediately and hoped for the best. On Saturday afternoon I went again to check bloglines and found out all of my feeds were missing. On one hand I figured I got what I deserved for being a dumbass, on the other hand I thought deleting all my feeds was a pretty shitty way to teach me a lesson. If -I- had been sniffing passwords and wanted to teach someone a lesson I think the most I could have brought myself to doing would be to add a feed to a dodgeit.com address with a message explaining the virtues of ssh tunnelling, or something like that. Still, it could have been worse. I immediately set about looking at all of the other websites where I use the same password, and I didn't find any other damage. I started changing all of the sites to a new password, but of course I was still using the same password on each site. Who can remember a different password for all the damn websites they use? It actually felt good to be changing my password all over the place because I'd been meaning to change it for -years-. I'm going to remove all doubt of my dumbass-ness right now with this revealing fact: I'd been using the same usual password for over 10 years. I first used it on a MUD back in the 80's. Saturday night someone mentioned the Password Generator Bookmarklet and I realized that this was exactly what I needed, a solution so devastatingly obvious and simple that it took 10 years of web existence for someone to think of it. The creator of this clever morsel of ingenuity, Nic, had the same problem we all do. He didn't want to use the same password for every web site, and he didn't want to have to remember dozens of different ones. Says Nic:

So, I wrote a bookmarklet to make up passwords for me. It asks for my master password, which is all I have to remember, and uses it to make a unique password for each site. It even types the password into any password fields on the current page for me, whether I'm registering for a new account or logging in on a subsequent visit. How does it work? It gets the hostname from the page's URL and mixes it together with your personal master password using a little cryptographic magic we call MD5. It will always get the same result if given that hostname and master password, but will never get that result if either changes. (Well, once in a few billion times it might.)

So now I use a bookmarklet to create and enter my password for all my different web accounts. Each one is different but I only have to remember one master password which never gets stored on any remote server. This doesn't -solve- web security, but it's leaps and bounds better than what most of us have been doing. It's a breeze to install and use assuming you're not using Internet Explorer (but if you are you've got bigger problems to address anyhow). Highly recommnded: Password Generator Bookmarklet Oh, and on Sunday when I checked bloglines again, suddenly all my feeds were back. I hadn't taken the time yet to start rebuilding them, so I guess bloglines just had temporary problems! I'm glad the password issue was forced to resolution though, so no regrets.

Napkin Swing Look and Feel

Lots of good stuff today at FOO Camp, I'll try to post my sparse notes in a bit, but for now here's a link to Ken Goldman's Napkin Look & Feel, which is an optional set of GUI widgets for Java applications.

The idea is to try to develop a look and feel that can be used in Java applications that looks informal and provisional, yet be fully functional for development. Often when people see a GUI mock-up, or a complete GUI without full functionality, they assume that the code behind it is working. While this can be used to sleazy advantage, it can also convince people who ought to know better (like your managers) that you are already done when you have just barely begun, or when only parts are complete. No matter how much you speak to their rational side, the emotional response still says "Done!". Which after a while leads to a later question: "That was done months ago! What are they doing? Playing Quake?".

I ran across this while googling Ken during his session titled "Writing APIs as if People Used Them" (a subset of a longer talk called "Random Thoughts on Good Object Design"). I had downloaded napkin and had it running in an app I'm working on within minutes. Later in the afternoon he held a session just to go over Napkin. It's well thought out and implemented for something that is supposed to be about conveying a sense of spontanaiety :), definitely the most useful Swing Look and Feel I've run across. It reminded me of this slide presentation for the Open Dynamics Engine that I really liked.

FOO Camp 2004

Hot on the heels of our return from Burning Man, Mie and I find ourselves at O'Reilly HQ north of San Francisco for the now annual FOO Camp (Geeking Man). The great conversations started early this year as I gave a couple of friends, Anselm "Andy" Hook and Jason Harlan, a ride up from San Francisco. Anselm has been working on Thingster, a location-enabled personal content publisher and global search engine. He's also using the thingster code base as the back end for a book recommendation service called books we like. Friday morning before we left I mentioned to him that I have never entered my books into one of these systems like books.burri.to (now defunct) or mediachest.com because I'm too lazy to type in all my ISBN numbers and my cue cat is fritzing. I told him that I ought to be able to take a digital photograph of my bookshelf and submit it to a service that analyzes the image to indentify the books. The software would need to separate each individual book and then use either OCR or a similarity index to previously identified books to generate the appropriate book title. It could probably even identify the publisher edition. Anselm mentioned my idea to lemonodor and within minutes the lisp master had whipped up a demo app that could extract just the spine of a book from a photo of his desk. Unfortunately his code is owned by his employer, but it's an encouraging proof of concept. Jason "everything I own is in two bags" Harlan has been living a nomadic hacker lifestyle, travelling through Eastern Europe and elsewhere along the thematic lines of locative and art technologies. He says he's met at least 150 interesting artists and technologists in the past year or so, and that by having so little possessions and anchorage it has forced him to become very skilled at networking in order to meet such needs as places to stay, work, things to do, etc. As a perennial introvert his life seems to me to be a bit like learning to swim by jumping into the deep end of the pool, but I find myself wanting to follow his lead as I'm sure it will pay off major dividends for him, personally and professionally. The Saturday sessions are about to start, so I'll post this and be off. I'll try to post some session summaries later.

fox: right to lie

Pretty much everyone who cares about Truth is of the opinion that FOX "News" doesn't put much stock in it. I wasn't aware until reading this summary of a recent court ruling that FOX had set its lawyers out to defend its right to lie to its viewers though.

During their appeal, FOX asserted that there are no written rules against distorting news in the media. They argued that, under the First Amendment, broadcasters have the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports on public airwaves. Fox attorneys did not dispute Akre's claim that they pressured her to broadcast a false story, they simply maintained that it was their right to do so.

This century sucks.