dave.ofmassdestruction.com

My history with operating systems is fairly simple. When home computers
were new I started out with an Epson computer(!!) that had its own
operating system which was quirky by today’s standards but was quite
nice in its simplicity. I then moved to an intel-driven DOS machine and
had a love-hate relationship with it. I moved to UNIX/Linux in work and
home life sometime later and obviously concentrated fairly heavily on
that until OS X came along.

I got my first Apple mainly to accommodate my photography obsession
because (even still) using a linux machine with photos absolutely
blows. I enjoy OS X but I also enjoy linux/gnome. However, I have
noticed in the last few years that I have slowly moved away from
OS-dependence. Call it what you will – the Cloud, SAAS, whatev. All I
know is that it is incredibly convenient to be able to sit at any
computer and do all the things I would normally do at my home
computer. In fact, about the only apps I use that aren’t cloud-centric
are emacs and my photo-software. Even still, with emacs I mostly use
org-mode for my work and I keep all my org files online. As long as I
have emacs on a machine, I can do my work. But in a pinch, I could use
another editor on those files since they are simply text-files.

That still leaves photos. The only non-standard,
not-practical-in-the-cloud thing I do. I’ve seen the attempts at photo
editors online, I know that one can use online tools to store and
categorize their photos – but none of those services come close to how I
can do it at home with old-fashioned, closed-source, non-standard,
key-on-the-back-of-the package software. Maybe this means there is an
opportunity in the market or maybe it means that camera manufacturers
are behind-the-times… or maybe it means I am particular with my
photos – I’m not really sure.

I’m not sure what this means for Operating Systems – at least, OSes that
aren’t powering “the Cloud” – but it does feel like a trend that would
lend itself to devices that start quickly and get me online. I see this
progress in the direction the iPad has taken us. Whatever your opinion
is on the particular of that one device – the idea that I can have
a small, “instant-on” device that can get me online is incredibly
appealing. I think the future of such devices in grand.

If you were living in the Mid-Atlantic in the 1970s you probably saw that commercial.

The Joon Rhee martial arts schools started in the Washington D.C. area and I guess we had a D.C.-based channel back in those dark ages of “regional” TV. Still, I will always remember the phone number to Joon Rhee’s school. Always.

Yesterday I was thinking about the commercial and I looked it up on the web, as I am want to do. Its turns out that the great Nils Lofgren wrote that catchy Joon Rhee jingle! Yes, that Nils: E Street Band; Crazy Horse. Nils Freakin’ Lofgren! Its listed on his webpage along with a handful of other T.V. song credits. Who’d-a-guessed that?

Makes me want to call USA-1000

When the idea of web-based apps first started to look more viable there was an interesting debate within the open source community. The debate came down to the question of whether it mattered if you had the source-code of web hosted software. For the most part I think it does – especially if the developer wants faster development and more eyes looking at bugs/holes.

Having said that, freedom for a web-app means something completely different when it comes to the users data. This could not be more evident than with the recent news of hapless Microsoft destroying all data on T-Mobile Sidekick phones. After this news broke the tech-blogs were awash with damnation of “the cloud”. How could we ever trust anyone to store our data elsewhere? What were we thinking?

Well, we were thinking that its nice to always have our apps and our data available no matter where we are or what device we are using. We thought, its nice to have someone else provide storage for our ever-growing bits. But they are right in questioning our reliance on others to always get it right when it comes to protecting that data from rookie mistakes, changes in the direction of the app, or becoming evil.

So for the cloud to work, user must always have access to their data. That doesn’t mean the user simply gets to see their data in the app, that means that the user is at all times able to retrieve their data, and in a format that is transferable to other applications. Period. End of story. Anything less than that is a failure due to the reasons the Microsoft case so aptly showcased. Of course this means that the user must also be proactive in retrieving their data from time to time if it is truly important to them, but that has always been the case.

Its important to note that the largest purveyor of apps “in the cloud”, Google, has had a somewhat quiet campaign to provide this type of data retrieval for a while now. Called “Data Liberation” (and tracked at the Data Liberation Blog) they have been slowly making sure all their apps have some way for users to retrieve their data. The newest tool comes to Google Dos which has just added the “Convert, Zip, and Download” feature which allows you to easily grab some or all of your documents as a zip file (converted to whichever available format you would like). This is the most powerful of Google’s data retrieval tools so far and I hope all of their apps make it this easy (including Gmail which can do better than simply offering POP downloads). Still, it is good to point out Google proactively “not being evil” when so many folks currently attempt to disprove their famous motto.

This morning I was going through my usual start of the day by watching the BBC World Report. On the crawl they had “Rare footage of one of the world’s most strange and elusive mammals has been captured by scientists” and I thought that it was terribly unfair to put such a thing in a crawl and not show it during the actual news show.

Never fear, the internet is here. This is the animal in question – a freakin’ venom-toting mammal named Hispaniolan solenodon. Groovy.

I’d embed the video for your viewing pleasure, with all due credit to the BBC – but they don’t want that so I will honor their system… even though it sucks.

We have a woman at work whose job is to take a look at gender issues in our projects, in other’s projects, and in general. Of course, she mostly focuses on gender issues as they relate to health. This morning I sat diagonally behind her and was prompted to think about the inclusion of females in IT in developing countries (this came to mind as I misread over her shoulder the title of the book she was reading). OK, so lazyweb helped me search on this topic and I’ve found one rather interesting report called Gender, Information Technology and Developing Countries: An Analytical Study. written by USAID and Learnlink.

I’m still delving into the report, and I am sure there are other reports out there, but a couple things already stand out to me. First is the complete lack of data on the subject from Africa. I think this is mostly a matter of these data not specifying gender at all, but I sure would love to see something for the continent most of my work focuses on. Second is this nugget of information:

Statistics by country are particularly puzzling because there does not appear to be any correlation between women’s Internet usage and expected indicators such as female literacy rate, female GDP per capita, female representation in professional and technical jobs, or gender empowerment. Developing countries with high female Internet use have low overall Internet use. In countries where the Internet is used primarily by an urban elite, women are well represented. But as GDP rises, the overall dominance of men edges the percentage of female use lower.

At first this paragraph gives a brief hope that as a country develops, the “digital divide” wouldn’t be affected by literacy rate and GDP in developing countries (HUGE problems for females many of these places) but then the last sentence seems to quell that hope.

This is really quite interesting – there must be loads more to learn in relation. Of course, I’d also love to see more information about females working in IT, not just using these technologies.

As a side-note, I am convinced that the larger software companies have so disruptively hijacked IT education in the developing world (more attempts to get folks tied into their licensing just in case there is an IT bubble in that region) that the options for anyone to enter the industry is limited by the costs of learning, and the narrow scope of that education.

Tomorrow we are heading to Ocracoke, N.C. for a long weekend. I don’t think I’ve been to Ocracoke since a 1 was the first number in my age. That’s a shame as I have always been fascinated with the N.C. Coast, its history, ecology, and culture. And Ocracoke is unique as its only accessible by ferry.

The wonders of the island aside, where we are staying ain’t exactly “wired” – at least when it comes to the introwebs. And I say good. I need to unplug every once in a while. So… see you on the other side.

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I read Clay Shirky’s new book Here Comes Everybody – and loved it. Clay set up a blog to accompany the release of the book, good news since his writings and postings have been few while working on his book (I keep up with smart people).

I found this very interesting post on Clay’s blog which talks about a website Hillary Clinton set up to talk publicly about how she intends to win the election with super-delegates instead of popular vote. Of course, the problem with the website is just that (as Clay points out) – she is showing her hand. She is letting everyone know that she intends to steal the election with delegates instead of relying on those silly little votes.

Of course, Clay’s post is about the repercussions of this in the sense of community, and network – but it just makes me want to join in on that conversation in my blog. Its no secret that I am against Hillary winning through such methods. What I hope is that this strategy fails and that a popular movement is then started (post general election) to remove the super-delegate process from the Democrats primary process.

I’d prefer we start such a popular movement using the tools offered up by the Internet instead of having 1968-convention-style tactics as history tries to teach us .

Should I go ahead and purchase “bansuperdelegates.com”?

What I know is that veteran songwriters Gerry Goffin & Carole King wrote The Porpoise Song for the Monkees.

The Monkees actually played the instruments on the song and recorded it for the soundtrack for their film Head (which is an acerbic and trippy criticism of themselves – the movie was written by the Monkees and Jack Nicholson).

I have been obsessed with The Porpoise Song for many years and have collected recorded versions of it. Oddly, the first version I ever heard (and perhaps my favorite) was Bongwater’s cover of it which is on their double LP Double Bummer.

Now you can enjoy the original and all the cover versions of The Porpoise Song too thanks to:

http://porpoisesong.muxtape.com/Update: No you can’t – ’cause the man took muxtape down

If anyone knows of other versions please pass along the information.

I have been using Google Docs pretty steadily for a few months now – and I really like it. It has been great for me except in one instance – when I was in Rwanda at one point the connection was far too slow for me to use it. A bit surprising considering Google was one of the few “ajaxy” sites that still had very low page-load times. Yes, “ajaxy” is a technical term.

That problem disappeared today. I’m sure I’m one of a billion people today to write about Google adding “offline documents” action but I’ve been pretty damn impressed with the whole suite for quite a while and wanted to share with those who may not know.

Now they just need to make a build of “Google Gears” that works with Firefox 3 beta.

On Friday I am off to Rwanda. Finally. This trip was supposed to happen… um… back in September I think. Then contracts weren’t signed, paperwork got complicated – other work came up. So the trip was rescheduled for the 15th of Feb. But Dave… its the 20th today! Very true. After all the months of postponement, after we scheduled the 15th and booked hotel rooms, we were informed that we have been kicked out of those rooms to make way for Dubya and his enormous entourage (we’re talking thousands of people here). So great, the President has just been in Rwanda and I’ve got to follow up behind him?? Did he piss them off? Did he say anything untoward to their President? Am I going to have to hear about it?

For the curious. I will be starting work on a project in which we will be building a system that allows health workers to collect public health information door to door via cell phone/pda. They collect this data already on paper and we want to take advantage of Rwanda’s very strong mobile phone network to make the process easier and quicker. I’d tell you more if the funders would only approve an announcement (red tape – mumble mumble). Oh, like everything else we do, this will be open source and the Rwanda Ministry of Health’s to own.

To put it very succinctly – internet access going out of Africa is bad. Very bad. Don’t believe all the hype of all the cool new ways of opening up Africa with the Internet. Its not here yet, and won’t be without some major investment. At any rate, I’ll try to post some while I am there but I doubt I’ll have the patience to put any photos up. Hmmm… maybe I will reacquaint myself with text browsers!