jra's thoughts

Playing (cards) with Clojure

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 16:19:18 +0000

I’m learning Clojure, which is a modern Lisp, which is hosted on the JVM. I’m so far really liking the focus on integrating the benefits of functional programming into a modern environment. It is pragmatic and reasonable. It feels like programming for grown-ups, in the same way that Node.js feels like programming for people with more energy than sense.

While riding on the train with my kids, I told them, “Hey, I’m learning this new language, let’s use it to make a card game since we don’t have any cards with us.” Clojure, as a Lisp, is meant to be usable interactively from a REPL and since I was on my phone in a train, I used an in-browser version of Clojure called ClojureScript. The one I used is at http://trycojure.org.

I'm still here...

Mon, 13 Sep 2021 09:19:11 +0000

While I was working for the DEDIS lab at EPFL, I was not writing here.

Now I’m a dad at home, at least until my youngest starts school in a year, and so I’m still not writing here.

I work at Pie Aéronefs, where I do various kinds of open source work, most of it on GitHub.

When I’ve got my head fully back into the kinds of things I like to write about here, I’ll write again.

Protecting private keys in Go

Mon, 24 Jul 2017 13:30:39 +0000

Today I was looking at Upspin and thinking about private keys. I asked myself, “what would it take to make sure that there was one single copy of the private key in RAM, and that Go and the OS worked together to make sure it never went onto disk?”

(Some other people have talked about this too.)

It turns out the answer to that question is much harder than expected, but doable and I’ll try to do it.

My first ever Rust program!

Fri, 21 Jul 2017 11:56:26 +0000

Here, for posterity, is my first ever Rust program. It checks the key log on the Upspin Key Server.

extern crate sha2;
extern crate reqwest;

use std::io::Read;
use sha2::{Sha256, Digest};

fn main() {
    let mut resp = match reqwest::get("https://key.upspin.io/log") {
        Ok(resp) => resp,
        Err(e) => panic!(e),
    };
    assert!(resp.status().is_success());

    let mut content = String::new();
    match resp.read_to_string(&mut content) {
        Ok(_) => {}
        Err(e) => panic!(e),
    }

    let mut hasher = Sha256::default();

    let mut ct = 0;
    let mut last_hash = "".to_string();
    for line in content.lines() {
        if line.starts_with("SHA256:") {
            let mut fields = line.split(":");

            // skip first token
            match fields.next() {
                Some(_) => {}
                _ => {
                    println!("Bad SHA256 line: {}", line);
                    continue;
                }
            };

            last_hash = fields.next().unwrap().to_string();
            let expected = string_to_u8_array(&last_hash);
            let output = hasher.result();
            assert_eq!(output.as_slice(), expected.as_slice());
        } else {
            hasher = Sha256::default();
            hasher.input(line.as_bytes());
            let newline = "\n".as_bytes();
            hasher.input(newline);
            if last_hash != "" {
                hasher.input(last_hash.as_bytes());
            }
        }

        ct += 1;
        println!("Line {}", ct);
    }
}

use std::u8;
fn string_to_u8_array(hex: &String) -> Vec {

    // Make vector of bytes from octets
    let mut bytes = Vec::new();
    for i in 0..(hex.len() / 2) {
        let res = u8::from_str_radix(&hex[2 * i..2 * i + 2], 16);
        match res {
            Ok(v) => bytes.push(v),
            Err(e) => {
                println!("Problem with hex: {}", e);
                return bytes;
            }
        };
    }
    return bytes;
}

I found myself sprinkling mut’s and unpack()’s here and there like the mutation unpacking fairy, hoping something would work. I don’t think that how you are supposed to do it, but we’ll see.

Read it and weep

Fri, 21 Jul 2017 09:56:53 +0000

I searched for “how do I make an HTTP request in Rust?”. I’m a newbie, we do things like that. Don’t judge.

I found this. I still don’t know how, because the answer marked correct refers to a library that a comment from 2016 informs me is no longer supported. There’s also a helpful comment pointing me at cURL, which is written in C, which is the opposite of safe.

It does appear that the right answer, in 2017, is hyper.

A Go programmer continues to learn Rust

Tue, 18 Jul 2017 12:31:05 +0000

I went looking for the equivalent of goimports and didn’t find it. Sad.

I wanted to use std::fmt to do the same thing as sprintf or fmt.Sprintf. I got stuck on “expected &str, found struct `std::string::String`”. I found a blog posting trying to explain it but I don’t understand enough yet to understand it. What I do understand is that it is highly suspicious that a language has two incompatible types for string. WTF, Rust? I’m trying to write a program here and you want me to sprinkle magic to_string()s in it? How about you STFU and let me be a human, and you be the computer doing the boring crap for me?

A Go programmer's first day with Rust

Mon, 17 Jul 2017 15:34:28 +0000

Where is the tutorial? The first Google hit gives a redirect to a page explaining that I should read the book. The first page of the book explains that I should read the Second Edition unless I want to go deep, then I should later read the First Edition also (and presumably ignore the things that had been changed later in the Second Edition?)

OK, let’s do this thing! Get rust-mode installed in Emacs, and get it to call rustfmt on save, because Go taught me that the tab button is from 1960 and I don’t use it anymore.

bzr is the Windows of VCS

Thu, 13 Jul 2017 13:37:13 +0000

That is all.

Python keyword "finally" trumps "return"

Mon, 10 Jul 2017 11:00:01 +0000

Here is a piece of Python that I did not expect to surprise me:

def a():
        try:
                raise 1
                return 1
        except:
                print "exception!"
                return 2
        finally:
                return 3

print a()

In both Python 2.7 and Python 3, that prints:

exception!
3

It seems that in Python, return is just a casual suggestion to the interpreter, and finally gets to decide, “Nope! Your return is canceled and I will do my return instead!”

Now, to be fair, in Go a defer can change the return value of a function as well. But the defer keyword literally does what it says on the tin, it defers some work until after the return, so you can reason about why it might be changing the return value.

Job Searching

Thu, 15 Jun 2017 08:09:01 +0000

I’m looking for a job that will help me reduce my commute, and get the chance to touch new fascinating things. Here’s a post from last time I was looking for a job, which shows some work samples I am proud of. If any of my readers can hook me up with interesting job postings, I’d be grateful.

"ssh server mkdir" on Windows

Wed, 12 Apr 2017 08:33:16 +0000

How to use WinRM to connect from Linux to Windows and make a directory.

Warning, may make your eyes bleed!

In fact, the WinRM stuff is not completely insane, but the PowerShell syntax the guy chose for how to make a directory is pretty ridiculous.

Goman numerals

Tue, 11 Apr 2017 13:35:19 +0000

I made a roman numeral encoder in Go. Nifty.

httptrace, a new Go debugging tool

Fri, 01 Jul 2016 09:39:52 +0000

Today I was investigating why HTTP redirects resulted in more persistent connections staying open than I was expecting. I found myself digging around deep inside net/http/transport.go and I noticed the new net/http/httptrace package. It is new in Go 1.7, which is currently in beta.

net/http/httptrace is lightly documented, and because it is new, there are no examples to look at. So I decided to share what I came up with here.

The SRE book

Tue, 14 Jun 2016 09:11:01 +0000

I gave a Lightning Talk at SREcon16 and I was lucky enough to win the SRE book from Google while I was there.

Here are some notes of things I was thinking while reading it.

First, this is a phenomenal piece of work, that really marks a special point in time: the dawn of the possibility of wide adoption of SRE principles. I say, “possibility” because after getting exposed to the deepest details of what makes SRE work, I think that there are lots of organizations that won’t be willing or able to make it work.

A Kafkaesque Experiment

Wed, 08 Jun 2016 03:57:26 +0000

As part of my interview prep, last night I challenged myself to do the following:

Make a Kubernetes cluster (on Google Cloud Platform)
…running Dockerized Zookeeper (1) and Kafka (2)
…with Kafka reporting stats into Datadog
Send in synthetic load from a bunch of Go programs moving messages around on Kafka
Then run an experiment to kill the Kafka master and watch how the throughput/latencies change.

Since thats a lot of that stuff I’ve never touched before (though I’ve read up on it, and it uses all the same general concepts I’ve worked with for 15 years) it should not be too surprising that I didn’t get it done. Yet.

Interview Questions I Hope I Get

Tue, 31 May 2016 11:11:25 +0000

I have an interview coming up, and so my “keep in shape hacking time” has been recently devoted to interview preparation. I thought I would make a post about what’s in my head, both as a way to solidify it (no better way to learn something than by teaching it) and in case this interview goes bad, so that my next prospective employer can see what I’m thinking about.

If you, my current prospective employer are reading this, would you please not take advantage of this by removing these questions from your list? Come on guys, give me a break. If I’m going to be transparent in my thought processes, the least you can do is throw me a bone and ask at least one of these in person!

git log --grep "Résumé"

Thu, 10 Mar 2016 06:56:07 +0000

(This is an old post, which is missing years and years of interesting commits from my work at the DEDIS lab at EPFL and Pie Aéronefs. But it is still a good representation of what I can do for future clients and future team mates.)

For a while now, it’s become clear that a useful and important piece of data about how a future colleague might work out is their open source contributions. While the conditions of open source work are often somewhat different than paid work, a person’s manner of expressing themselves (both interpersonally, on issue trackers for example and in code) is likely to tell you more about their personality than you can learn in the fake environment of an interview.

I'm speaking at SREcon16

Wed, 09 Mar 2016 17:26:20 +0000

I’ve just been informed that my proposal for a Lightning Talk on HTTP/2 has been accepted for SREcon16 in San Jose, CA on April 7th and 8th.

Come meet me!

Seeking around in an HTTP object

Sun, 17 Jan 2016 08:11:45 +0000

Imagine there’s a giant ZIP file on a HTTP server, and you want to know what’s inside it. You don’t know if it’s got what you are looking for, and you don’t want to download the whole thing. Is it possible to do something like “unzip -l https://example.com/giant.zip"?

This is not a theoretical problem just to demonstrate something in Go. In fact, I wasn’t looking to write an article at all, except that I wanted to know the structure of the bulk patent downloads from the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) from those ZIP files. Or, I thought, how cool would it be to be able to fetch individual images of some of the patents issued in 1790 out of these tarfiles?

Dynamic DNS circa 2016

Fri, 15 Jan 2016 16:00:20 +0000

In the old days, if you had an ISP that changed your IP address all the time but you wanted to run a server, you used dynamic DNS, i.e. a hacky script talking to a hacky API on an hacky DNS provider.

These days, if you bring up a cloud server from time to time to work, it is likely to get a different IP address. But you might want a DNS record pointing at it so that it is convenient to talk to.

The most important thing when go-fuzzing

Sat, 09 Jan 2016 15:00:42 +0000

The most important thing to know, when you are using go-fuzz, is that the cover metric should be increasing.

I didn’t know that and I wasted one 12 hour run of fuzzing because my fuzzing function was misbehaving in a way that made it return the same useless error for every input no matter what. That meant that no matter what go-fuzz mutated in the input, it could not find a way to explore more code, and could not find any interesting bugs. It was trying to tell me this by not incrementing the cover metric it was reporting.

Learning Swift, sans Xcode

Mon, 04 Jan 2016 15:01:38 +0000

Say you are learning Swift. And like a good fanboi, the first thing you do is update to the latest and greatest because that’s like what you do when you are a nerd.

But you live in Osh, Kyrgyzstan. You have bitchin’ FTTH from Unilink, but access outside of Kyrgyzstan is still limited by the great firewall that Putin has put up in Moscow or whatever. I don’t know, but it’s slow as hell.

Strictly HTTPS!

Sat, 12 Dec 2015 11:52:50 +0000

Today I added this to the .htaccess files on my sites ( nella.org and blog.nella.org) in order to make them HTTPS only:

Header set Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000"

You should too!

HTTP/2: Thanks Cloudflare and Go!

Fri, 04 Dec 2015 06:01:13 +0000

Look what happened today:

2015/12/04 11:38:07 fetching https://nella.org 2015/12/04 11:38:08 {200 OK 200 HTTP/2.0 2 0 map[Server:[cloudflare-nginx] Date:[Fri, 04 Dec 2015 05:38:08 GMT] Content-Type:[text/html] Set-Cookie:[__cfduid=d3a3ea49ee46eb6a6803e2eb7f597e26e1449207488; expires=Sat, 03-Dec-16 05:38:08 GMT; path=/; domain=.nella.org; HttpOnly] Vary:[Accept-Encoding] Cf-Ray:[24f529d18893372c-ARN]] 0xc8203bbf60 -1 [] false map[] 0xc8200be000 0xc8206cc420}

Thank you Go 1.6 and Cloudflare. You guys are bringing my website into the bright future of 2016 with no help at all from me. :)

Industrial-scale power storage and waste heat

Fri, 31 Jul 2015 09:38:45 +0000

There will, eventually, be a giant wind farm above my house. I say eventually because though Switzerland is not immune from NIMBYism, our court system deals efficiently enough with oppositions so that if something is allowed by law (zoning laws, eco-protection laws, etc) then it does go through. The opposition (and there’s always opposition) does a few court challenges, it goes up a couple layers, sometimes to the supreme court, and the court rather quickly says, “It’s legal, shut up. If you don’t like it, change the laws, don’t come begging us to do so.”

Hacking cars and fixing them

Fri, 24 Jul 2015 11:52:18 +0000

A few years ago, I read an academic paper on how to hack cars. Today news came out that what was previously demonstrated via direct access is also possible over the air.

I thought it would be fun to look at the firmware update file that fixes this, to see what format it is in, what’s in it, etc. To get an update for 2014 Jeep Cherokees, you need a VIN. It turns out a used car sales website posted the VINs of their inventory on their website, so I found one: 1C4PJMDB6EW255433

The "Listen Up" Pledge

Wed, 17 Jun 2015 07:02:47 +0000

Thanks, Dave, for speaking up for what’s right. I’m with you, buddy. I also find harassment offensive, and I pledge to do the same as you.

We need to draw a line in the sand, and organize ourselves so that healthy, respectful teams are on one side of it, and trolls are on the other side of it.

I’m so thankful that my boss has created a respectful, mixed workplace.

Jon Stewart on FIFA... lol

Thu, 28 May 2015 13:58:44 +0000

LOL:

Swiss authorities… swiss! FIFA is so bad, they got arrested by the Swiss.

See it here.

Doing it the hard way

Fri, 24 Apr 2015 09:21:07 +0000

In my last post I offered to point out some things in Golang Challenge #2 submissions that struck me as “worthy of receiving a (polite) rebuke in code review”, otherwise known as WTFs.

This is opt-in abuse. I don’t mind abusing my colleagues, when I know I can take them out for lunch later and buy them a beer. Hassling random Golang Challenge entrants is not my style. But some have decided they are up for it, even if I’m remote and can’t buy them a beer afterwards.

Golang Challenge 2 comments

Thu, 23 Apr 2015 14:44:32 +0000

I’ve just finished evaluating 40 of the 105 entries to the Golang Challenge #2. The organizer, Satish, asked me to write up my thoughts.

The main similarity I noticed in the entries was not enough testing. The vast majority of the entries used the tests provided in with the challenge unmodified. Taking the given tests without thinking critically about them lead people to make a number of critical mistakes, over and over again. The majority of the entries I graded passed the tests, but would not have stood up to production use. Of the 40 I graded, only 2 or 3 would have received a “ship it” from me in my day job. Those were (not by chance) the ones with extra tests beyond the ones provided in the challenge.

Go Challenge 2 is live!

Tue, 31 Mar 2015 22:49:08 +0000

The Go Challenge for April is now live!

As an evaluator, I’ve already solved it. It was fun, and just the right size. Go try it, you’ll have fun!

Building Go 1.4 when the linker doesn't know about build-id

Thu, 19 Mar 2015 09:52:39 +0000

Today at work, on a Redhat 5.5 machine, I tried to build Go 1.4.

This happened:

` $ cd go1.4/src $ ./all.bash …snip…

runtime/cgo

/usr/bin/ld: unrecognized option ‘–build-id=none’ /usr/bin/ld: use the –help option for usage information collect2: ld returned 1 exit status `

The solution is to retry without the “–build-id=none” option:

diff --git a/src/cmd/go/build.go b/src/cmd/go/build.go
index ad03239..ca45217 100644
--- a/src/cmd/go/build.go
+++ b/src/cmd/go/build.go
@@ -2436,13 +2436,21 @@ func (b *builder) cgo(p *Package, cgoExe, obj string, pcCFLAGS, pcLDFLAGS, cgofi
 	// --build-id=none.  So that is what we do, but only on
 	// systems likely to support it, which is to say, systems that
 	// normally use gold or the GNU linker.
+	retryWithoutBuildId := false
 	switch goos {
 	case "android", "dragonfly", "linux", "netbsd":
 		ldflags = append(ldflags, "-Wl,--build-id=none")
+		retryWithoutBuildId = true
 	}

 	if err := b.gccld(p, ofile, ldflags, gccObjs); err != nil {
-		return nil, nil, err
+		if retryWithoutBuildId {
+			ldflags = ldflags[0:len(ldflags)-1]
+			err = b.gccld(p, ofile, ldflags, gccObjs)
+		}
+		if err != nil {
+			return nil, nil, err
+		}
 	}

 	// NOTE(rsc): The importObj is a 5c/6c/8c object and on Windows

Just in case someone else is looking for it… :)

Go will make you a better programmer

Thu, 12 Mar 2015 17:03:52 +0000

The last line of Dave Cheny’s Gophercon 2015 India keynote is the best: “Go will make you a better programmer.”

It’s true. When I am programming Go, I never think, “OK, is this an OK shortcut to take here? Is this a play context? Is this a work context, but I can push off bounds checking on some other layer? Is this just a little local server, and I don’t care about hackers?”

A Quick Go hack: lines-per-second

Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:24 +0000

Today I wanted to compare how fast two builds were on two different machines. As a rough estimate, I just wanted to see how many lines per second were going into the log file. This is what I came up with:

package main

import (
        "bufio"
        "fmt"
        "os"
        "time"
)

func main() {
        scn := bufio.NewScanner(os.Stdin)

        lines := 0

        go func() {
                for {
                        fmt.Fprintf(os.Stderr, "%v lps\n", lines)
                        lines = 0
                        time.Sleep(time.Second)
                }
        }()

        for scn.Scan() {
                lines++
        }

}

This is a quick hack. It’s not production quality, because there is a data race on lines. I think if I had to fix that race up, I’d choose to use sync/atomic’s ops. This because I’d only need to hit the two places lines is touched concurrently. A channel-based solution would be bigger and messier, not in tune with the minimal nature of this little program.

The Podcast/Spam nexus

Tue, 03 Mar 2015 12:12:15 +0000

I listen to a lot of podcasts. They virtually are all sponsored by either MailChimp or Emma (some new Mailchimp clone).

What I want to know is why spammers (even opt-in, targeted email marketing solutions are spammers as far as I can tell) find that podcasts are listened to by their target market (i.e. other spammers).

Hmm. Maybe I should be spamming more…

Golang on the Geode processor

Mon, 02 Mar 2015 15:39:45 +0000

If you are trying to use Golang on a PC-Engines Alix board, you need to be careful that all the Go code you are using is compiled while the GO386 environment variable is set to 387. The Geode processor does not support the SSE instructions.

If you have Linux directly on the Alix, you’d not run into this because if GO386 is not set, then the compiler auto-detects the right thing. But if you are, for example, running OpenWRT on the device, and you are using cross-compilation to build on another device, you might run into this if some of your Go code (for example, the std lib) was compiled without GO386.

Type safety saves the day again

Mon, 16 Feb 2015 15:07:59 +0000

Recently, I was writing some code to check the SHA256 of a buffer. Simple, right? All you have to do is take the hash you have, get the hash of the data, and compare them. But then you think, “oh, what a drag, I gotta compare two []byte values for equality, and == doesn’t work on them”.

And then you think, “oh, I’ll use reflection!” And now you have two problems.

AR.Drone 2 camera access

Tue, 14 Oct 2014 23:26:53 +0000

There is lots of information out on the net about how to access the camera in the AR.Drone, but it is all for the original model.

In the AR.Drone 2, the cameras have been replaced and upgraded. So settings for v4l that worked to get data out of the camera need to be updated as well.

The front camera is on /dev/video1. If you are talking to V4L directly via ioctls and all that jazz, you need to request format V4L2_PIX_FMT_UYVY, width 1280 and height 720. UYVY format uses 2 bytes per pixel, so a full image is 1843200 bytes. fwrite those bytes from the mmap buffer into a file.

Dual scheme URLs

Mon, 06 Oct 2014 23:41:42 +0000

I just made this blog HTTP and HTTPS, thanks to Cloudflare.

But that made me realize that lots and lots of internal links in the HTML output of my Wordpress point back to the HTTP version of the site.

Part of the solution to this is to install the HTTP plugin in Wordpress which fixes some of the mess. But some of the URLs in my posts need to be fixed too.

Cloudflare Universal SSL totally, completely rocks

Mon, 06 Oct 2014 22:26:20 +0000

Cloudflare was already my favorite non-Google internet company because I’m a Golang fan boi and Cloudflare is vocal about their love of Go.

So when I heard that Cloudflare was willing to help me, for free, put SSL on my website(which I’ve been meaning to do since like forever), I was ready to go for it.

First the rocks. Well, it’s free, for little dinky domains like mine. And that’s a hell of a great way to teach techies like me how their system works. I’d happily sell it to a client who asked me about it. The signup process is fast and easy and interesting. And it works: nella.org via SSL

Unzip -c is a thing, and it's good (as long as you use -q too)

Mon, 06 Oct 2014 22:11:52 +0000

I just fetched a Raspian disk image via bitorrent. It is a .zip instead of the .gz I would have chosen myself.

If you have a .zip and you don’t want to do a temporary uncompress of it to get the .img to use with dd, you can use “unzip -q -c foo.zip” to get the contents of the zip file sprayed onto stdout. Then you can pipe it into dd.

Strange characters in IP addresses

Wed, 24 Sep 2014 08:50:10 +0000

A long time ago, I worked for WebTV. The part of WebTV doing filtering for parental control was comparing IP addresses as strings. I managed to evade the parental controls when I noticed that the IP address parser was using an atoi that treated leading 0’s as octal and leading 0x’s as hex. By converting the octets of one of the blocked IP addresses into octal, I tricked the blacklist checker into letting me access the naughty bits.

Dell and the NSA

Wed, 27 Aug 2014 13:30:15 +0000

While I was reading this blog about how NSA’s bad-BIOS malware probably works, I was struck by a “coincidence”: Dell does significant amount of government contracting work. In fact, Ed Snowden worked for Dell at one point. NSA’s bad-BIOS targets the RAID cards in Dell servers.

Now, Dell servers are widely deployed. I’ve used them in several jobs, for example. So it’s not unreasonable that NSA would target them, to get the best bang for the buck. But it also seems possible that in order to achieve the things Dell’s executives promised to NSA executives in fancy sales calls, some Dell engineers would find themselves using what they know about Dell servers to write bad-BIOS malware to attack those very servers.

Medium, what's up with comments?

Tue, 19 Aug 2014 07:46:35 +0000

Medium.com, why do you require me to use Twitter or Facebook to comment? With all your respect for language, ideas, and design, is it really possible that you think people who choose not to use either of those services don’t have anything useful or interesting to add to your conversations?

Moonrise

Tue, 15 Apr 2014 22:25:08 +0000

[video width=“1920” height=“1080” mp4="//nella.org/maltournee/2014-04-15-21.mp4"][/video]

What fits into Russia?

Tue, 18 Mar 2014 23:36:54 +0000

Apparently Ukraine does, again now.

Moonrise

Tue, 18 Mar 2014 23:10:39 +0000

My time-lapse camera in the attic is still working, though I resorted to adding an auto reboot once a week, because the Raspberry Pi is not acting too stable. And even then, sometimes it hangs. I blame the power supply. Because it’s always the power supply, right?

Anyway watching the sun’s track northward as spring advances has given me a much better instinctive feel for celestial mechanics. And that made me pay closer attention to the moon rise last month. After 40 years on this planet I just realized that the moon, being in the same orbital plane as the sun and earth, traces the same track as the sun. Whoa. That means my attic window is perfectly oriented to catch a nice time-lapse of the moonrise!

Here's a nickle kid, get yourself a better TTY

Wed, 12 Feb 2014 04:37:03 +0000

You know you’ve been doing this too long when nothing in an article like this is new to you.

The first TTY I ever saw and (maybe) used was a TI, like this one. The librarian at my junior high borrowed it and used it to connect into Lexis-Nexis or something.

But the funny thing is, even in the late 80’s this was out of style. PCs were taking over and so I didn’t see a TTY again until university. There I saw plenty of DEC VT-100’s. And jarthur.cs.hmc.edu, our giant multi-processing machine from Sequent had an honest-to-god paper TTY attached to its /dev/console port. The sysadmins liked it that way so that they could see dumps on paper in the morning if the machine crashed at night. I learned about fsck that way, by watching one of them coax the filesystem back to health. (By the way, fsck is for babies. Real men fix filesystems with fsdb. Look it up.)

IPv6 in Mont-la-ville!

Mon, 10 Feb 2014 21:32:10 +0000

When I got my Raspberry Pi up and running, I reactivated my AICCU tunnel to Sixxs.net. But then I remembered that two years ago when I last touched IPv6, Swisscom was running a beta test to do IPv6 in the home.

So today I went looking to see if the test still existed and if I could join it. Why? Well, to be honest, it never even occurred to me that IPv6 to the home was in production. The lack of IPv6 uptake has become one of those “so sad it’s funny” things in our industry. But guess what?

Live from Mont-la-ville

Mon, 10 Feb 2014 21:14:01 +0000

Your browser does not support the video tag.

The last few days I’ve been working on a new home hacking project. The eventual plan is to create a panoramic time-lapse of sunrise as seen from my house each morning. We’ve got a wonderful view, and recording some of those beautiful morning colors as the sun comes up over the Alps should make them easier to appreciate – without setting my alarm for 6 AM!

How to get started blogging

Thu, 16 Jan 2014 21:27:33 +0000

The first step is to think of a really good name. Like Apertura!

Then have your hubbie set up your blog.

Then write stuff!

Taking an MQTT server out for a few holes on the code golf course

Thu, 05 Dec 2013 14:16:00 +0000

A while ago at work, I needed to learn a little about MQTT. After reading the spec and finding this package that handles reading and writing the messages themselves, I decided to write a server.

The result is here: https://github.com/jeffallen/mqtt.

After I finished, I wanted to know if my server was comparable to Mosquitto, so I wrote some load testing tools. I found that my Go server was generally comparable to Mosquitto, in that it had the same order of magnitude for transaction rate and latency (but it was strictly slower than Mosquitto; there is a cost to pay for the benefits Go gives you). As usual, Go programs compare quite favorably to C programs in terms of memory safety, overall length, and readability. It is also useful to consider that my implementation took only a couple of days to get finished. A C program with equivalent safety, correctness, and speed would take much longer to write. I’ve written them, I know.

Qz for Mobile Phones

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 12:43:48 +0000

I love Quartz. however, I find that the best time/place for me to read it is on the train during my commute. And Quartz’s overly clever and overly dynamic website hates my phone’s browser. So I made Mobile Quartz to help me read it. The front page has the current top articles from Quartz. Click the links to see the article.

I used this as a chance to write some Go on Google Appspot code, and it was really a pleasure.

Making a time-lapse in Debian

Mon, 06 May 2013 20:33:33 +0000

Make a script like this called “save”. Make it executable.

#!/bin/sh ct=0 if [ -f "ct" ]; then ct=`cat ct` fi ct=`expr $ct + 1` mv snap.jpg snap-$ct.jpg echo $ct > ct

Run “uvccapture -x648 -y480 -c./save -t20” to take a photo every 20 seconds.

Then you can use a script like this to continually re-encode it and send it to your webserver: #!/bin/sh while true do rm out.mpg cat snap-*.jpg | ./ffmpeg -f image2pipe -r 1 -r 20 -vcodec mjpeg -i - out.mpg scp out.mpg jeff_allen@nella.org:nella.org/jra/geek/3d done

The best safecracking scene EVAR

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 08:02:50 +0000

The Best Safecracking Scene, EVAR. ‘Nuff said.

What I want: a Chrome plugin to report spelling errors

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 10:10:22 +0000

Here’s what I want to do:

See an error on a web page
Select it and right click
In the popup, choose “report a spelling error”.
Have a box come up with three fields and a pair of ok/cancel buttons. The three fields are “change from”, “change to”, and Twitter id. The “change from” and Twitter id are auto-populated. The “change to” could be auto-populated using a web service that suggests spelling corrections.

When I click on “OK”, it sends a Tweet announcing to the world that:

Double take

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 16:10:53 +0000

The nicest thing happened to me on the way home from work… I got one of those movie-perfect double takes from a guy I passed.

Of course, it was probably due to the pretty rainbow umbrella I was carrying, while cruising along on my unicycle. Years ago I realized that if it’s a grey rainy day it is nice to have bright colours overhead. Black umbrellas should be outlawed!

Typically Swiss

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 19:50:04 +0000

We love local products, so we love TerraSuisse. And we love their new advertisements:

A Dinosaur Story

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 19:38:33 +0000

Once upon a time, long ago, long long ago… no… long long long ago, lived two dinosaurs. They had a wonderful life to themselves, since they came after the plants but before the humans. They had a land full of plants with no humans to bug them. They had clouds and rainbows and rivers and waterfalls. And they had plants. Lots of plants.

Which was a good thing, because Bobby the Brontosaurus loved eating plants. He ate like this: “omm nom nom” and he even ate while he talked like this. (Add omm nom nom’s into your talking. If your kid laughs, your doing it right. Then again, if he laughs he won’t go to sleep, so you might not be doing it right afterall.)

Sugru

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 16:36:14 +0000

I had a great first Sugru experience! I scratched my finger on the way to work on my unicycle. I thought, dammit, I’m gonna fix that! So I bought some from my phone on the train. Cool!

A few days later, it arrived in the post. I was having a hard time explaining why I was so excited about it to my wife. So I sat down, cut open my first packet and started fixing. My wife got interested, fast! She asked, would this stick to the door handle to make a bumper? I said, go try! And off she ran with my Sugru, leaving me grinning and cutting open a new packet…

Two more stories

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 19:07:13 +0000

Here’s two stories that worked their charm on a not-very-sleepy little boy, turning him into a sleepy one.

Bep and the Giant Pumpkin: It is October, the official start of pumpkin season in our house. That means it is time to start talking about pumpkins and where we get them. So mommy, daddy, Elio and Emma got in Bep and went for a drive. They drove up up up to the top of Lausanne and then up up up to Mont sur Lausanne, then up up up more to the little self-service vegetable stand above it. Everyone went in and chose their pumpkins one by one. Emma got a little pumpkin because she needed to hold it between her feet in her maxi-cosi. Elio got a bigger pumpkin because he’s strong (Elio e forte!). Mami chose a good pumpkin for soup because she makes the best pumpkin soup. And daddy chose one to make a yummy pumpkin curry. Daddy was about to pay and go, but Elio asked, “What about Bep?” So they looked but none of the pumpkins were big enough for Bep. They went out back and found a perfect pumpkin, 1 meter across, 3.14 meters around and weighing 200 kg! They went to get Bep and asked, “can you carry it?” Bep said “beep beep vroom vroom, no problem” and drove the whole family home, each with their pumpkin on their lap (except mami, who was driving) and Bep with his pumpkin right in the middle.

Once upon a time...

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 23:04:57 +0000

My son now needs a bedtime story, whispered in the dark, to go to sleep. My wife and I both love good story telling. She even took a course on it once, and told a story to an audience as the final project. We go to le Nuit des Contes every year here in Lausanne, and I’ve picked up some tips from watching the (literally) professionals there. A key to oral story telling, certainly for small children, is to use a structure with repeating sounds and phrases that they can get wrapped up in.

Zero Downtime upgrades of TCP servers in Go

Tue, 29 May 2012 12:09:16 +0000

A recent post on the golang-nuts mailing list mentioned that Nginx can upgrade on the fly without ever stopping listening to it’s listen socket. The trick is to unset close-on-exec on the listen socket, then fork/exec a new copy of the server (on the upgraded binary) with an argument to tell it to use the inherited file descriptor instead of calling socket() and listen(s).

I wanted to see if I could achieve the same thing with Go, and what changes would be necessary to the standard libraries to make this possible. I got it working, without changing the standard library, so I wanted to explain what I did here.

Testing Go's HTTP server for CVE-2011-3192 vulnerability

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 07:53:45 +0000

The recent DoS attack on Apache is caused by sending in a malformed Range header. I decided to send the same header into Go’s range header parser and see what happened. It passed with flying colors, giving the “invalid range” error, which would result in the Go webserver sending back HTTP response code 416 to the HTTP client.

I didn’t test this under load (which is part of what the DoS was doing), but my quick reading of parseRange leads me to believe that the only effect of sending Range headers in like this is that garbage is created under control of the attacker (for example, due to strings.Split(s[len(b):], “,”)). Of course, that’s bad and should be limited. However, this risk is no greater than other places in the server. For example an attacker could send an unlimited number of headers, or headers of unlimited length. This is already mentioned in the net/textproto package’s reader.go.

I love my Chumby

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 20:45:03 +0000

I have been wanting a digital photo frame for a while, so I could see the same pictures I send to the other digital frames in my family. I post pictures of Elio to Picasaweb, and my family sees them via Toshiba digitical frames with built-in wireless and FrameChannel clients.

Here in Switzerland, the digital frames with wireless are super expensive, and don’t even have FrameChannel. Separately, I’ve always liked the Chumby, but considered it’s puny screen kind of pointless. I mean, what’s the point of a Linux machine with a 3 inch screen? If it’s not a phone, I mean. So when I saw the review of the new Chumby 8, I found the solution to my problem!

No IPv6 from CityCable of Lausanne

Sun, 03 Apr 2011 21:47:02 +0000

My home ISP is CityCable of Lausanne. While I have nothing bad to say about their IPv4 offering (fair price, good service, no noticable speed problems) I’ve got nothing good to say about their IPv6 service… because they don’t support it yet.

Shame on you CityCable. You should support IPv6: it’s not so hard, and it’s important to help your customers move forward, at least those of us who want to learn about native IPv6 connectivity before it becomes an emergency. Also, as a not-for-profit service of the city of Lausanne, it’s not like you can argue “there’s no business in it for us”. Part of your job is to enrich the city; that means leading instead of following on technology! Too bad you missed this chance.

Now with IPv6!

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 13:22:34 +0000

I have been learning about IPv6 for work, and getting it turned on for home and for my server at nella.org. It’s been interesting, and a bit depressing just how hard it is to get people to do something that’s so easy…

Anyway, if your web browser is on IPv6, you’ll get a nifty ribbon on the upper right of the page of nella.org. Go give it a try! But don’t complain if you don’t see anything, it just means you are on IPv4, and that you live in the 20th century… you probably also have a bad haircut and a skinny leather tie like I was wearing at my 9th grade end of year school dance…

A trip down the (split) rabbithole

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 11:02:24 +0000

Note: This post is out of date, and will become increasingly out of date when Go’s new contiguous stacks are implemented. I’m leaving it here because it is still interesting, even if out of date.

Go uses split stacks (also called segmented stacks in the literature) in order to allow thousands of stacks in the space that would normally be taken by hundreds of C-style contiguous stacks. There’s a discussion of how to add split stacks to GCC here. Note: it was written by the author of gccgo, around the time he started porting Go to Gcc, so it’s clear that he’s adding split stacks to Gcc to help Go. But if it’s helpful to C programmers as well, then so much the better!

How to control your HTTP transactions in Go

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 13:49:33 +0000

The Go http pacakge has http.Get and http.Post, which make it easy to do GET and POST operations. They are meant for client use. They implement things from the point of view of a naïve client, one that just wants to give a URL and get back the results. They don’t want to chase redirects, they don’t want to set their headers specially, they just want to, in one line, get the results.

A rate-limiting HTTP proxy in Go

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 21:27:25 +0000

Hello Go-fans. Missed a week due to a nice little ski vacation, but I promise I was dreaming of Go while riding the ski lifts, so I’ve got something interesting to share with you this week.

I’ve worked in Africa and Indonesia in the past. There, I saw first-hand the possibilities of the Internet, but also the difficulties of using it in remote areas, over slow links, etc. I came up with ideas years ago for what I’d like in a proxy in the field that would make the limited bandwidth on a satellite connection go further. I’ve never had a chance to implement it until now, because hacking on Squid or other proxies just involved too much C hacking and core dumping to suit my patience, especially for a prototype to test ideas on. But Go, on the other hand; it’s just made for playing with this kind of thing!

Gobs on the wire

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 18:24:54 +0000

This week, I want to talk about how to use Go to write a client/server system with both synchronous requests and asynchronous event notifications.

To help learn Go, I wrote a clone of the Conserver console server. Now, of course, the world didn’t need another console server, but it turned out to be an interesting experiment, because what a console server does is well suited to the tools Go gives a programmer. A console server’s job is to gather the output from one or more serial cables (or, when there’s a terminal server in the mix, one or more TCP connections implementing the Rtelnet “protocol”). It logs that output to files, and makes the output available in realtime to zero or more watchers. It allows one and only one of the watchers to be read-write, to actually control the device.

The impatient producer

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 04:17:52 +0000

Last week I showed how a channel could link a producer and a consumer, and I idly speculated on how you’d set the depth of the queue, relative to the rate and variability of the producer and the consumer’s need for new input.

This weekend, I got to thinking about my next interesting Go project. It will be an HTTP proxy that can do some nifty tricks to offload a slow Internet link. One of the features I thought I might add would be something to send all the new HTML it sees through a secondary processing system in order to find extra assets it might want to cache. This is a case of a producer that wants to act totally independently of the consumer. If the secondary processing goroutine is slow, or hung inserting something into a database, or whatever, the producer (the HTTP reply) can’t hang – he needs to reply to the client.

Using a channel as a queue

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 15:10:23 +0000

I try to write a Go article every Monday, but the holiday season has disrupted me a bit. So here’s a little something I dug out of my stocking to get things going again.

I thought an interesting way to play with the exp/draw package, the http client, and the image decoder would be a program to animate the tiles from Google Maps, showing the world scrolling by, as though you were in an airplane looking straight down and flying in a straight line. It came to me in one of those flying dreams… (not really).

A simpler way to embed data

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 16:23:56 +0000

In my post about how to efficiently put data into a Go binary, I mentioned that strings are immutable, and can be accessed without causing the Go runtime to copy them. This turns out to be the key to a simpler way to achieve what I wanted to do.

By simpler I mean, “no cgo”. That’s a nice simplification, because up until recently, your final static binary image linked to the cgo code dynamically, and that made using my technique impossible in the context of the Tiny runtime, where there is no dynamic linker. Recently cgo has changed, but at the same time, I’ve discovered how to use native strings to do what I want, so let’s see how it works.

RTM's puzzle

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 01:16:25 +0000

Here is a little program to that implements RTM’s series for Cliff Stoll.

package main

import "fmt"

func count(s []int) int {
  i := 1
  x := s[0]
  for ; i < len(s); i++ {
    if s[i] != x {
      break
    }
  }
  return i
}

func next(s []int) []int {
  res := []int{}
  for len(s) > 0 {
    n := count(s)
    res = append(res, n, s[0])
    if n == len(s) {
      break
    }
    s = s[n:]
  }
  return res
}

func max(s []int) (m int) {
  for _, x := range s {
    if x > m { m = x }
  }
  return
}

func main() {
  s := []int{1}
  for i := 0; i < 200; i++ {
    s = next(s)
    fmt.Println(len(s), max(s))
  }
}

Where is bytes.NewReaderAt?

Mon, 13 Dec 2010 15:37:15 +0000

I have a nice source of []byte slices (see last post), and now I’d like to do something with them that resembles a filesystem. I was planning on just using a map from name to file contents, which would work ok. But then I remembered seeing the archive/zip package, and I thought how much cooler it would be to just make my prototype filesystem, zip it up, put the zip file into my Go program (see last post) and then access the filesystem via the archive/zip package later.

Fat Constants, Thin Constants

Mon, 13 Dec 2010 15:23:33 +0000

I play from time to time with a patch for Go that makes the Tiny runtime more capable. My current goal is to get a new backend for exp/draw working which writes to the SVGA screen. It would be cool to be able to decode the Go mascot and have him flying around the screen or something.

In the Tiny runtime, there’s no OS, so there’s no disk drivers, so there’s no filesystem, so there’s no files. Which makes decoding a PNG and showing it kind of hard. But if the program carries along the data with it, in the form of a []byte, then you could use bytes.NewReader to turn it into an io.Reader and then pass it to image/png.Decode. So that’s what I set out to do.

Passing function pointers through channels in Go

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 09:55:23 +0000

Is is possible? Of course!

package main

func add(x, y int) int {
	return x + y
}

func mul(x, y int) int {
	return x * y
}

func runner(ch chan func(int, int)(int)) {
	for f := range ch {
		println("f(1, 2) = ", f(1, 2))
	}
}

func main() {
	ch := make(chan func(int, int)(int))
	go runner(ch)

	ch <- add
	ch <- mul
	ch <- add
	close(ch)
}

Is it useful? Probably, but this demo doesn’t show how yet… have to think about what patterns this makes possible.

Where's all the magic? In the linker...

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 22:06:13 +0000

I have been trying to make a post per week about Go, but that requires learning something interesting during the week. I’m currently cycling between several little Go toys as I get the time. One is to make Go on raw hardware more useful/interesting. Another is a clone of the console server from conserver.com written in Go. Neither one of those little projects is at a point where I can really explain much about it, but not for want of trying… This week my Go console server project taught me that netchan cannot send channels (OK, I wasn’t really shocked at this, but I was hoping that it might work), and so I’ll need to make my own protocol, and include some proxy channel reader/writers at each end of the TCP connection to send the data into the channel like I want. On the raw-hardware side, I got stuck on code that ends up incorrect once it ends up in the ELF file. Go figure.

Who said life is fair? The Go scheduler certainly didn't...

Mon, 08 Nov 2010 08:35:27 +0000

In my last post, I showed a program that had a strange behavior that caught my eye. I was trying to look at how Go handles shared access to globals, but the program also had the unintended effect of measuring the “fairness” of the Go scheduler. Here’s the program again, for context:

package main

import "runtime"

var x int
var ch = make(chan bool)

func f(inc int) {
	for {
		println("f: ", inc)
		x += inc
		ch <- true
	}
}

func main() {
	go f(1)
	go f(-1)
	runtime.Gosched()

	for {
		_ = <- ch
		_ = <- ch
		println("main sees x = ", x)
	}
}

When you run this with GOMAXPROCS=3, and you are on a machine with at least three cores, you get precisely what you’d expect: three system threads, each one running one goroutine, and total fairness: f(1) happens once for every f(-1), and the long-run value of x is around 0, but sometimes higher or lower.

What's happening here? And when?

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 07:25:45 +0000

A while ago, I posted to the Go users list about what seemed like a problem in how Go was choosing registers versus global variables. Roger’s answer was “go RTFM”, which was precisely the right thing to do. However, it took reading it twice (I’d read it before) and some hard pondering to connect what I was reading to what I was seeing.

In order to save you, the reader, from the same experience, here’s a more detailed explanation of how “happens before” applies to programs where coroutines are writing to and reading from globals. Disclaimer: You really shouldn’t be doing this. In Go, you “share memory by communicating, not communicate by sharing memory”. Asking questions about “what happens when two coroutines write to a global?” means you are already thinking about communicating by sharing, and you are in for a world of hurt. But in this case, I was exploring the concurrency model in coroutines in the absence of calls into the runtime (i.e. cooperative or not?) and so I wanted to avoid channels.

Go Fun - the cost of threads

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 06:52:39 +0000

Here’s a little program I wrote in Go. In it, I wanted to explore how it might work to create a giant “onion” of threads, passing messages in towards the center, where they would be reflected and sent back out. Why? Just for fun, to solidify my grasp on the syntax, to see what would happen.

Here’s my program:

package main

import (
  "fmt"
  "time"
)

func make2() (chan int, chan int) {
  return make(chan int), make(chan int)
}

func makeAndEcho(ct int, in, out chan int) {
  var in2, out2 chan int;

  echo := func () {
    for !closed(in) {
      x := <-in
      out <- x
    }
  }

  pass := func () {
    for !closed(in) {
      select {
      case x := <-in: {
        in2 <- x
      }
      case x := <-out2: {
        out <- x
      }
      }
    }
  }

  if (ct == 0) {
    go echo()
  } else {
    in2, out2 = make2()
    makeAndEcho(ct-1, in2, out2)
    go pass()
  }
}

func try(depth, n int) {
  in, out := make2()
  makeAndEcho(depth, in, out)

  before := time.Nanoseconds()
  for i := 0; i < n; i++ {
    in <- 1
    _ = <- out
  }
  close(in)
  after := time.Nanoseconds()

  transits := int64(n*depth*2)
  fmt.Printf(
    "%v round-trips, %v nsec/trip, %v nsec/transit for %v transits\n",
    n, (after-before)/int64(n), (after-before)/int64(transits), transits);
}

func main() {
  try(10, 10000)
  try(100, 10000)

  ch := make(chan int, 1)
  before := time.Nanoseconds()
  for i := 0; i < 200000; i++ {
    ch <- i
          _ = <- ch
  }
  after := time.Nanoseconds()
  fmt.Printf(
    "no threads: %v nsec/transit for %v transits\n",
    (after-before)/200000, 200000)
}

When you run it, you get this:

The SQL backlash

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 08:57:03 +0000

I remember sitting in my databases class years ago and thinking, “This can’t possibly be the right way to store data.” It was a strange class, because it mixed theory and practice in a way that was anathema to the way I think. The theory part bored me to tears, and seemed ludicrously useless (first normal form? third normal form? who cares!). The practice part seemed ridiculously complicated and pointless. Why go to all that effort to write something down? Why not just write it? Yes, yes, I know, ACID and all that. I grudgingly learned it all, and I passed the class. But it never felt right to me. It felt like the students were putting on a performance to satisfy the teacher. It didn’t feel like Theory of Computing (i.e. Turing machines, regular expressions, the halting problem, etc), which just Felt Right.

,

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:45:36 +0000

FOP can get confused and do stupid things. Giving it a nudge in the right direction fixes it. For example, when a table is going to fill the page right up from where it starts to the end of the region available for it, it does ok. But add a footnote onto that table, and the footnote ends up dangling at the top of the next page.

I thought a bit about why this is happening, and I thought about what if you added a keep to the footnote, etc. What I ended up wanting to do is to nudge down something higher on the page so that it created a bit of whitespace in a place where the reader wouldn’t notice. That made the table not fit, which made the table break, which put the table footnote where I expected it to be, instead of hanging in space.

Dealing with a clogged link

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:29:59 +0000

A friend asked me a question that reminded me of some great resources I want to mention here (in case I ever need to find them again…)

They are:

In my response to my friend, I also touched on something interesting I learned from Cricket, and from years as a consultant. Here’s the big lesson:Â Infrastructure projects don’t sell themselves.

Disabling hyphenation in DocBook

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:23:55 +0000

When you are using the chain “DocBook -> FO -> PDF”, it is the FO processor that decides on the hyphenation of your words. This is because it knows the lengths of the lines it is making.

In FOP, hyphenation can only be turned on and off at the level of <fo:blocks>. For some dumb reason, DocBook doesn’t have a way to turn off hyphenation in one region of the document.

Printing a Blog

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:44:27 +0000

I got interested in applying my new XSLT wizardry to the task of printing an entire blog. Like making every post into a big PDF and sending it off to a print-on-demand service. Digital backups = bad. Paper backups = good.

I thought it would be easy, just do “Wordpress export”, then write the XSLT to turn the export XML file into FO, and process into PDF. Well, it is easy, in principle. But in practice it’s not.

Just Married

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 17:03:40 +0000

I’ve been away from the web for a while because I was in Olivone, Ticino, Switzerland getting married!

Thanks to friends and family who came from so far away to witness such a special day.

And thanks also to our wonderful vendors, who made the day go so well. If you are thinking of putting on a wedding in Blenio, give these guys a call:

Restaurant/Hotel Arcobaleno
Osteria Centrale
Casa Lucomagno
Pasticceria Bini for wedding cakes
Viva gli sposi wedding photojournalism
Giramondo Travel Agency for the wedding registry
Sonpalaria, the heartbeat of the Ticinese dance floor!

It feels different to be married. It seems like it shouldn’t… the house is the same, we still sleep on the same sides of the bed. But it’s different. Good. And safe. And happy. And… different.

Apache FOP and document properties

Sun, 24 May 2009 10:31:35 +0000

I am a little bit obsessive about checking out the document properties in PDF files I read. I can’t explain why, but there you have it.

I was sad when I noticed the PDF file being emitted by my XML has no document properties. So I figured, no problem, I can just go find the right FO tags, grep for them in the DocBook XSL and reverse engineer what stuff I need to put into my DocBook to get them set right. I figured it would be something obscure like, or something. In fact, DocBook already knows who the author is, in order to format the title page nicely, so no dice there.

The of

Sat, 23 May 2009 12:25:11 +0000

For a project I am doing right now, I descended into DocBook hell. Not completely unscathed, I made it through the learning curve (why don’t they call it what it is: The Unfathomable and Horrific Tunnel of Learning) and blinked slowly in the light of day.

I realized DocBook is nice, but it’s not actually what I wanted. Doh.

What I wanted was a structured way to represent my data, and I want two things to happen to it. Today, I want to publish my data with DocBook. Tomorrow I want someone to be able to suck the brains out of my DocBook document (leaving it to wander the earth as a zombie) and to put them into a wiki so that my project can become a community-maintained database, instead of being a single DocBook-formatted document that lives in my Subversion repository.

Trafigura's West African dumping

Fri, 15 May 2009 12:01:03 +0000

Here’s an interesting story, well told, about an industrial process that takes refinery waste from the United States (derived from high-sulfur Mexican crude oil), cycles it through Europe, then dumps the result in West Africa.

The company running this racket (or “innovative commodity exchange”, as they call it) is Trafigura.

Learn more here:

Here’s a quick summary:

Gates Foundation vs the Lancet

Wed, 13 May 2009 11:23:27 +0000

The Lancet has published an academic paper analyzing the deployment of funds at the Gates Foundation against a backdrop of the actual burden of disease. The bottom line is the Gates Foundation does not come out looking too good, seemingly interested in whizbang gadgets and not in focusing on the job at hand. Another really interesting and sad note was the extent to which being nearby the Gates Foundation, geographically or culturally gets you in the money. PATH and the University of Washington raked in the cash. African researchers? Not so much.

Just DO It

Wed, 13 May 2009 09:32:26 +0000

There’s a guy in Philly who realized he’s rich, because me makes $30,000 as a community organizer, and many people in the world live on far less. He decided to go on a diet, for his own helath, but also to understand what it means to live on a simple diet.

That’s already an interesting story, but what’s really interesting is this video he posted, where he talks about what held him back from starting the project (fear) and what the reality has been (support). This is exactly the same thing I found when I made the big change to leave IT and be a log for MSF.

50 pennies for your thoughts

Mon, 11 May 2009 10:45:46 +0000

I love Alex Chadwick. He’s proven he’s a real artist for finding stories on 50 cent interviews. He’s Studs Terkel for another generation.

Community Finance in West Africa

Fri, 08 May 2009 14:54:10 +0000

Vasco Pyjama talks about community finance. The ROSCA is known as a “sou-sou” in west Africa, or at least in Nimba county, Liberia. Sousous run for a fixed term, based on the number of members. If there are 10 members and the contribution is $10, each month one of the members will get $90 (9 other members * $10 each). At the end of ten months, the sousou can either be restarted, or the membership can be renegotiated (for example, to drop people who failed to pay on time during the past sousou period). If the sousou is reconstituted with more or fewer people, it doesn’t really change anything, it just runs shorter or longer until the next restart. Sousous run best when they are between 6 and 12 people for social and economic reasons (a 5x - 11x payoff is manageable in a cash society). The order of the payouts is determined randomly at the startup meeting of the sousou. Sometimes people negotiate to trade their places in the payout order in order to assure that the sousou payout would arrive at a time that was convenient for them.

Learning to Love Social Welfare

Thu, 07 May 2009 15:03:39 +0000

When you fall in love with someone from another country, it just happens. Then what comes after that takes more effort. You have to learn to love the other culture you’ve thrown your lot in with. That process is, and will continue to be, a joy for Marina and me.

Here’s an article that describes some of what I’ve learned about how life is organized in Europe. I followed the same course, roughly, as the author. Though I have to admit, I was never as skeptical as he was. Perhaps that’s because I was given humanist values by my mother, and I always understood that something wasn’t working right in my homeland.

La promesse grippe - The Flu Code

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 11:00:00 +0000

Vinay Gupta published something called the flu code. Here it is in French:

La promesse grippe 0.1Beta, version franÃ§ais â€“ Une service dans l’intÃ©rÃªt publique de L’institute pour efrondnomiques

Si j’ai des signes d’une grippe Ã©ventuel, je vais rester chez moi.
Je vais rester Ã distance des foules quand c’est possible, et je vais toujours porter une masque dans les lieux publiques.
Je vais laver les mains a la porte chaque fois je arrive a ma destination.
Je vais me engager de enseigner ces rÃ¨gles aux autres de protÃ©ger tous.

Fishy Accounting Business

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 13:30:57 +0000

Listen to this Planet Money episode, it’s got a really clear example of how banks are allowed to book profits based on people losing confidence in them. It’s really mind bending, and shows two things: one, how the finance industry is a hall of mirrors, and two, how talented Planet Money is at breaking down the mirrors. Keep up the good work guys, when is the Pulitzer prize coming?

Is This the Big One?

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 10:49:03 +0000

We know that a pandemic is coming. We don’t know when and how. Something’s coming out of Mexico (though the index case might have been someplace else, too soon to tell). Is this the Big One, the pandemic that we are overdue for?

I am gathering information here to make sure I understand it, and how to protect myself and my family.

Avian influenza is influenza type A, subtype H5N1. The porcine influenza found in Mexico is type A, subtype H1N1. Influenza type B is much less dangerous, but is unfortunately not what we are dealing with here. The 1918 pandemic was type A, subtype H1N1 – the same that is circulating in Mexico today. Matching subtypes does not mean that there’s matching virulence, but it’s a clear danger sign.

Lemon Custard, or Curd, depending on your skill

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 19:48:02 +0000

I used this recipe to make lemon custard. But I let it get too hot, so it curdled. So Mari got to sample Lemon Curd instead of Lemon Custard as intended. We liked it anyway!

Hint to the reader (i.e. me if I come back to this next time I try it)… you could reasonably start cooking the custard with direct heat, but you should finish it up over a bain marie, to prevent curdification.

The IBM Tax

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 12:18:02 +0000

The IBM tax laid bare, from a promotional spam Amazon sent me:

The hourly prices for Amazon EC2 running IBM are as follows:

Amazon EC2 running IBM DB2 Express - starting at $0.38/hour

Amazon EC2 running IBM DB2 Workgroup - starting at $1.31/hour

Amazon EC2 running IBM Informix Dynamic Server Express - starting at $0.38/hour

Amazon EC2 running IBM Informix Dynamic Server Workgroup - starting at $1.31/hour

Amazon EC2 running IBM WebSphere sMash - starting at $0.50/hour

Amazon EC2 running IBM Lotus Web Content Management - starting at $2.48/hour

Amazon EC2 running IBM WebSphere Portal Server and IBM Lotus Web Content Management Server - starting at $6.39/hour

Interesting prices. How could it possibly be that WebSphere + Lotus Web Content Management is worth $6.39 per hour? Who could justify that price? It’s really inconceiveable, though I have to admit I don’t know enough to judge for sure. My bullshit meter is pegged at 11 though, and it’s pretty reliable.

The Economics of being a Hostage

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 19:50:26 +0000

Wow.

Here’s an incredible inside view of the piracy business. What’s incredible is that NPR’s Channa Jaffe Walt managed to get a CEO of a shipping company on the phone and hear the inside story of the negotiations.

Here’s what’s really interesting. The first thing the CEO says is, “I never thought for a moment that I wouldn’t have to pay anything. The only question was how much, and when.” Channa asks him why and he says, “Look, there’s no one to turn to, we’re on our own out there and that’s all there is to it. You pay.”

Heard in Europe

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 16:08:14 +0000

Overheard here in England (which was, last I checked, a European country):

I found a really interesting partnership we could join, but we’d have to make friends with a bunch of Europeans.

Insert sound of my jaw dropping the floor here…

A long trip in Afghanistan

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 12:42:56 +0000

This is an interesting story by a BBC correspondent, which pulls no punches. Easy to see why he was left feeling bitter.

There are two sides to every story of course, and I’m sure the military folks would tell you about security rules, zero tolerance for violation of force protection imperatives, risk asessments, etc, etc, etc. But that’s all missing the point. When you are doing counterinsurgency work, you have to be close to the people. You have to earn their respect by finding out what earns respect in their culture and then finding a way to do it inside of your own culture. They, in turn, will come to know you and, if you deserve it, you’ll earn their respect in return.

Post to your blog via e-mail

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 13:06:16 +0000

Posterous does the heavy lifting. Nifty.

You have to give Posterous access to your blog. It would be nice if Wordpress had a delegation feature, where I could make a user with a low privilege level for this.

Made me chuckle

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 08:18:05 +0000

I am a Slashdot addict, and one of the reasons are gems like these. The geek sense of humor is omnipresent:

Police in Norfolk, England already have tracking units, The Automatic Vehicle Location System, installed in their cars that allow a control room to track their exact locations. Later this year a similar system will be attached to individual police radios to allow controllers to monitor the position of every frontline officer … the system will allow the force to home in on “shouts” to within yards. The system also lets operators filter a map showing the location of its vehicles and constables to reveal only those with the skills needed for a specific incident, like the closest officer with silver bullets during a werewolf attack.

Repair vs Replace

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 07:56:47 +0000

What are the economic effects of the repair vs replace decision? Interesting question, that.

If you missed “more local employment of the blue collar type”, go read this:

There is a slight diversion of purchasing strategy, repair rather than replace. This feeds a blue collar industry in the local region.

It used to be, when money was loose, replace with new was the norm. If the repair was 75 percent of the cost of replacement a new motor was ordered, the old motor was scraped, and the country of origin (Mexico, China, Taiwan) benefited. These beautiful USA built, 50 year old, 200 horsepower motors, were going to the scrap heap.

My life in DocBook ligature hell

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:24:58 +0000

I am working on a new project. The result will be a document. I want to publish it in several formats, including HTML, PDF, and Word. (Hot tip: if you rename a RTF file to end in DOC, you’re done. Don’t make DOC files, they suck. Make RTF files, which any editor can read. You just have to trick your users and Word into using RTF’s by renaming them.)

The accepted standard these days for formatting a document into PDF, RTF and HTML is DocBook. In fact, the modern implementation of DocBook is just “XML + XSL (+ FO)”. You could do pretty much the same thing with XML and XSL yourself, but then your document would not be compatible with someone else’s formatting instructions, and you’d be redoing a bunch of work other people already did.

Unlocking the 3Skypephone (AMOI WP-S1, WP-S2 and others)

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 18:14:02 +0000

I have a mobile from 3. It has Skype on it. It is the second worst mobile phone I have ever owned. The worst was the Danger Hiptop, a phone with a software bug preventing it from ringing. (You can’t make this stuff up.) The third worst phone I ever used was a Motorola. And while we are on the subject of crappy phones, ZTE makes cheap phones for Africans with prehistoric UI – but they are learning fast and will come eat Nokia’s lunch some day, mark my words. But that all wasn’t supposed to be the content of this post…

Exiting from xsltproc with an error

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 13:50:47 +0000

Does anyone out there know why xsltproc and the DocBooc stylesheets are so stuuuupid? When there’s a processing error, they just keep going. OK, fine, maybe useful. But then there’s no return value to say that there was a problem. The man page for xsltproc says it has return values, but it always returns 0 for me. And I’ve found the place in the DocBook stylesheets where the error is emitted. It looks like this:

The Savior

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 02:04:52 +0000

Check out the image at the bottom of this post. Obama with a halo. Cute.

My favorite things, all at once!

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:07:38 +0000

Yay for old friends, economics, and technology! All at once!

kc wrote a blog posting with her humble ideas on how to use IP address space tax. Wait… there’s a tax on address space? Yes, because it has become a scare quantity, because people are too lazy to move to IPv6, IPv4 address space is running out. The best of all bad ideas about what to do about this is to make an open market for address space, as though network addresses were some kind of useful piece of property with any kind of useful value. (BTW: When the present econolypse is over, and the next bubble starts, it will be an IPv4 address space bubble. Mark my words…) Address space is bits. We can make more bits… Look! I just made some! But because the value of a network exists in everyone who is using it, not just your implementation of the network, you can’t just add bits in your IP stack and get any benefit. So, while bits are free, and address space could conceiveably be free, because we have a network with limited space, we have a scarce asset. And, of course, what do humans do with scarce assets? We make bubbles! Yay for bubbles!

Global Warming is going to be an embarassment

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 00:36:15 +0000

In 15 years, the Global Warming hysteria is going to be one of those embarassing episodes in history. Several sociology and history of science PhDs will write their theses on “how they blew it on climate change”.

The latest person to risk his reputation by coming out and speaking truthiness to the enviro-powers is Freeman Dyson.

As I am not 80 years old, and I have to live with my reputation for a while longer, let me make my position clear again:

Negative Feedback

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 18:22:17 +0000

Planet Money is talking about the new Systemic Regulator, and also talking about other theoretical ways of regulating the banks. It occurs to me that one thing that’s missing, and not just a little bit missing, but radically missing, from the current system is negative feedback.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if we could set things up so that before the next bubble starts, the participants in the market can see that as certain stages of the bubble kick in, as measured by certain predetermined checkpoints, then certain economic brakes will be applied. We’d have to be careful not to take away all the control the Fed has, but perhaps you can invent a new set of levers which fall into this category of automatically triggered negative feedback.

You heard it here first, folks...

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 01:20:36 +0000

More discussion about marks on hard things.

I suppose I should really get around to figuring out the physics of my modest proposal.

The Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Project does something clever, which is to start their disk with big text that swirls into microscopic text. The idea is to tempt the reader to want to keep going, and help him figure out that the next step to read the next scale of text is to go grind himself a lens.

Some pointers to things I've recently liked

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 02:58:18 +0000

Here’s a random smattering of links to things that I’ve recently checked out, and that I really like:

Children of Men: A well made film about an interesting story in dystopic England (though, to be perfectly honest, it’s a bit hard to tell the difference between that England and the one outside my window). I had the “last generation” story idea last weekend. I sent it to Curtis, and he told me about Children of Men. I made the link go to the Wikipedia page and not the IMDB page, as is customary. The Wikipedia article on the movie is really nice, with great director’s commentary, as well as other goodies.
Jungle Disk: Best solution to off-site backups. You pay USD 20 one time for a nice piece of software, and you have perpetual rights to use it on as many computers as you want (Mac, PC, Linux). It helps you put data into your Amazon S3 account. You pay your bills to Amazon. You own your data, Amazon makes sure you don’t lose it (Jungle Disk has published their schema, so even if you decided to throw away their program or they go out of business, your data is still available to you). Key points: Amazon S3 is cheaper than any possible backup medium you could choose in your own house (include amortized hardware costs, energy costs, and the hassle factor – don’t cheat on the hardware, you have to have reliability as high as S3, which means both your hardware cost and your hassle factor will be much higher than you think it is), because you have a direct relationship with Amazon, there’s no markup on storage or bandwidth. The price of your backups can only go down relative to the on-line offsite backup market as a whole.
Onlive: Karl, Cary, and Arnold are finally out of stealth mode! Yay! It seems like “Xbox over vnc” to me, but what do I know. I never really mastered minesweeper. Just give me a good book…
…like The Shadow of the Wind: A good book. Multiple layers, several stories running at once, from different times, coming at you at once, all set in beautiful and atmospheris Barcelona. Good stuff.

Knock it off, you two

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 21:53:08 +0000

You’re both right.

But Dave comes off looking more mature, with more useful things to say. Asa, you made yourself look like a prick, and it’s too bad, since Mozilla seems to be letting you speak for them.

A Kaleidoscope of Languages

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 14:20:14 +0000

By way of procrastinating doing my French homework, I found myself on a webpage which has the Universal Declaration on Human Rights in more languages than you knew existed (including, to absolve some of my guilt, French).

That’s a little bit of hope right there. That’s a message in a bottle that says, “we might not get it right all the time, but this is what we as humans stand for, and you are allowed to hear it in the language that your elders speak when they teach you about the old ways”.

Something Interesting is Happening

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 11:34:55 +0000

Take a look at this article from Bunnie Hwang, reporting on the copycat industries in China.

Bunnie’s nailed it, there is something interesting and important going on. Writing these guys off as copycats is exactly the wrong read on the situation. These guys are going to be a cornerstone of the foundation that science fiction writers are going to launch themselves from in order to help the rest of us understand what things are going to look like in 30 years.

Comparing Geographical Sizes

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 21:41:59 +0000

A long time ago I thought it would be fun to open two windows and see two things on Google Maps next to each other. That way, I could compare the sizes of them. But getting the scale set the same on both maps was not easy. Wouldn’t it be neat if the scale of the maps was set to the same?

I finally got around to implementing this with Google Maps API:

Phone blogging

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:56:02 +0000

Is way too hard. But results in interesting t9 errors, like clogging instead of blogging.

User Hostile UI

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 18:24:08 +0000

I don’t really like Facebook, but I have to use it because that’s where my friends are. (Well, my fiancÃ©e is there, and she makes my friends for me. So I use it. Begrudgingly.)

At first what I didn’t like about Facebook was that it is a thinly veilled CIA front, and even if that weren’t true, they are grossly negligent about privacy, meaning that the CIA could get all my data even if Facebook wasn’t using Langely for offsite backups. (And they are.)

The Gopher-verse, averted

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 00:46:15 +0000

This is insane.

At the time the web came into being, AOL was already offering a content-driven text and graphics medium. And Microsoft was hard at work making “Blackbird”, which was a content authoring technology for MSN that never saw the light of day because of HTML. Microsoft ditched it and launched MSN over PPP and HTTP, and embarrassed AOL by showing them the future.

Also, network administrators are not technophobic reactionaries. They are professionals with conflicting responsibilities. Like all professionals, they do what they have to do to get the job done. Sometimes it is appropriate to filter something in order to maintain the breathing room for the network to do the job. In the early 90’s, filtering technologies certainly existed that could have killed off the web, but there was a critical mass of academic networks, and under-critical-mass of commercial ISPs. The academics were interested in seeing what new things were coming. The commercial ISPs were split between common carriers like UUnet, and walled gardens. As I already mentioned, the walled gardens had their own content technologies and wanted to move past the limitations of Gopher. The common carriers didn’t care what went over the network, as long as it drove demand for the network itself.

Losing Faith

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 11:39:05 +0000

NPR’s Planet Money (which I have been known to describe – without hyperbole – as “the best journalism on any topic in any media, in the entire existence of journalism”) published an interesting blog posting. A reporter goes to the Treasury Department to find out that the US government is going to lend billions of dollars to the IMF, but will do it in an off-books deal (you know, like Enron).

The killer is the last two sentences:

Vanity Fair on Iceland

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 12:29:01 +0000

I became aware of Iceland’s bankruptcy through a curious route. A local geek mailing list had a posting from a friend of one of the guys on the list. She was Icelandic, and she was really in distress – able to understand how serious the situation was, unable to understand it at the same time, scared for the future, and reaching out to a friend. It was really touching. I replied to the guy that it was a shame I couldn’t access any of the Icelandic news as an English speaker, and that perhaps his friend would like to start a blog translating it, so that I could understand her country’s situation better. I offered to donate some money for the service.

Twin Peaks

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 16:38:25 +0000

This is the scariest evidence yet that this recession is not a normal one:

This was brought to my attention by an excellent This American Life episode. The conclusion of Alex and Adam’s story at the top of the program is chilling… there’s several ways to read the tea leaves, and none of them are very good.

An excellent song from the future

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 18:52:25 +0000

I heard about these guys from Stack Overflow’s podcast. Really fun.

A Secret of the Economics of Manufacturing

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 14:01:27 +0000

I saw this quote in an article on E-Ink:

If you ever want to make a billion of anything cheaply, you print it.

What an interesting observation! With such interesting far reaching consequences:

Nano Solar is on the right track, crystaline solar is not.
Diamond Age-style nano-assembly is not quite a sure bet, and mass-customization by table-top fabs will clearly never be able to compete on price with items that are printed. Though another way of looking at nano-assembly is to recognize that nature manufactures far more, far cheaper, than all the printing presses in the world…
Things that are flat, flexible, and where the complexity is expressed in 2D will always be cheaper than their competitors which violate one of those constraints of printing presses.

It also further informs my day dreaming about clay tablets: a system for preserving data needs to be flat, flexible, and 2D. My “dots on ceramic” design might still be able to fit the bill, but the kind of uber-cheap ceramic I was thinking of (i.e. the same stuff in the 20 cent porcelin plates at Ikea) won’t be the material, something else will be. But what? What can go roll-to-roll in a printing press environment, but has the chemical stability of ceramics? I’m feeling like I really wish there was a layman’s introduction to ceramics on my reading list right now. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Two things I like about England

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 15:21:11 +0000

I’ve been known to complain a bit, now and then, about my current hosts, the English. I reserve the right to continue complaining, to be sure, but I’d like to take a moment to point out two things I like about England:

ICICI Bank UK: This is one of the largest banks in India. In England, they are a very little fish in a very big nasty pond. English banks are incredibly expensive, arrogant, rude, and customer unfriendly. But because ICICI is tiny, and because it is focused on a small niche (immigrants who are sending remittances home), it gives excellent service. Go ICICI! I love you!
Muffins: The English make very nice muffins. The chocolate/chocolate-chip ones are totally decadent, so when you want to take it easy, go for the ones which merely have lemon curd inside and crystalized sugar on top.

PS: The English also display enormous muffin tops, but they are not really something you want to have…

Couldn't happen to a nicer guy (or a nicer country)

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 15:06:57 +0000

Carl Malamud + the Government Printing Office is a match made in heaven.

Please, President Obama, make it happen. This guy is one of us, one of the good guys who cares about transparency, about good government, about the freedom to know, to learn, to discuss and to criticize. He’s a person who speaks not with words, but with actions. I’ve followed his career and his dreams for years, always being pleasantly surprised when something I wanted to know or find had become available to me because of his tireless work.

Silverlight on Linux

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:10:11 +0000

Microsoft, what’s your problem? Why are you so stupid?

My current irritation is with Silverlight. First, it’s a redundant technology. Bringing .Net into browsers is not a compelling argument for redoing everything that Adobe Flash already does better than Silverlight. But fine, I’m not a shareholder anymore, you can waste their money all you want.

I wanted to see how well Moonlight (the Linux version of Silverlight) works. It’s partly because I’m compelled to poke my nose into the train crash that is Linux + Firefox + plugins + video + audio. It’s one of those things… so horrific, you can’t stop watching.

Anathem

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 16:57:27 +0000

I’ve finished Anathem, and I’m happy to report that it’s not just Hogwarts with math. There’s a whole lot of other stuff going on in there, and it’s fun. You have to like Stephenson’s style, and you have to enjoy learning and thinking about a whole new planet. Luckily, the planet is based on principles of cultural evolution familiar to anyone who has studied the history of technology, media, and religion on planet Earth. So it’s not too hard to understand what’s happening.

Bad Passwords - problem or opportunity?

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 10:52:04 +0000

This article includes some interesting analysis of passwords found in the wild. A reasonable first impression would be, “good god, those people are sure stupid”. But I had another idea… isn’t it interesting that a lot of people prefer pattern-based passwords, i.e. pressing the buttons in a certain order, without respect to the semantic meaning of the password. That means they are thinking visually, storing their password as a picture of the keys, and a mental model of the shape and direction their fingers will go to enter the code.

Stop reading this right now: Go read 512 Words!

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 12:20:07 +0000

My friend Curtis writes 512 Words of fiction every week, then posts both the story and a reading of the story every Friday. Today’s story was his best ever, even better than Ghosts of Earth my previous favorite (though hard to choose, really…)

Be sure to listen to the reading of this week’s story, entitled “Better”. Today’s story really profits from the ambiance of the great music Curtis chose and his deep voice.

The (confusing) State of Streaming Video in England

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 12:19:39 +0000

Something really amazing happened to me the other night. Marina was brain-fried from a long day at school, and she said, “I wish I could just sit in front of the TV and zone out to TSI1 (Italian Switzerland’s public TV station)”. I said, let me see what I can find…

I searched on the net, and struck out pretty thouroughly finding a live stream for TSI1, but I did find some British TV on Zattoo. My laptop was booted in Linux at the time, so as I was grumbling about rebooting, I noticed they have a Linux player. So then I grumbled about how nothing ever works right in Linux while it downloaded and installed. It told me it wanted some more codecs, so I grumbled about how the state of video encoding is so complicated that nothing ever works without 1000 plugins while they automatically downloaded and installed with no intervention from me (save the grumbling).

Quotable Quotes

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 10:42:23 +0000

Here’s a new feature on Google News: Quotes. If you search for someone by name, and Google noticed that they’ve been quoted, then one of their quotes will be on top of the results. Then you can click for more.

Here’s an example from a quotable politician.

Veg Box Blues (and Blacks)

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 20:27:41 +0000

Marina and I are experimenting with what the Brits call a “veg box scheme”. Everything here is a scheme, but that’s a post for another day.

One of the benefits/problems with veg boxes is that you never know what you are going to get. And you get stuff you might not have bought yourself. If you didn’t want it because you hate it, that’s a problem. But if you didn’t want it because you didn’t know what to do with it, that’s an opportunity!

A "Told You So" Moment

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 10:09:29 +0000

One of the risks of being a person who is constantly processing information, forming opinions, and trying to predict the future is that when you get it right-ish, you tend to say, “I told you so”. Or if you are polite, you just think, “I told you so”.

I’m not so polite so I blog it instead.

Right this moment, the top two stories on Slashdot make me say I told you so. I don’t have the time to dig into them right now, but the headlines lead me to believe my gut instinct has been on the right track for a while:

O'Reilly Ignite, UK North

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 16:03:22 +0000

Tonight I am giving a talk the Old Broadcasting House at O’Reilly Ignite, UK North. Here are my slides.

Update: There’s a video here.

The power of debt

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 02:33:38 +0000

Here’s a quote that turns everything you think you know on it’s head:

When the debt is big enough, it’s the debtor who has the power, not the creditor.

That’s Niall Ferguson talking in Vanity Fair. It’s for stuff like that I read Vanity Fair. Well, the photos don’t hurt either…

What he said...

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:48:32 +0000

Marina and I saw Slumdog Millionaire a few days ago, and it was really excellent. Curtis agrees.

Go see it. That is all.

Roger, Agent Carebear, Clear to Engage Enemy

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 12:24:27 +0000

Check out this picture of the FBI mobile command center that’s been deployed for the inauguration:

And this picture from inside:

WTF? Carebears on the video screen of our nation’s most elite mobile command center? Perhaps this photo is counter-FBI propaganda promulgated by the Secret Service… inter-agency rivalry is a bitch!

Anathem

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 12:00:38 +0000

I am reading Anathem by Neal Stephenson, and it’s pretty darn good. I can’t shake the feeling that it’s basically “Hogwarts with Math”, but that’s not Stephenson’s fault… he’s telling a perfectly good story, it just happens that Rowling was also telling a perfectly good story and the two seem a bit the same.

There are some really excellent one-liners, and some great “no one understands my audience like I do” things in the book. This is something Stephenson is really good at, and though it is pandering, it is pandering to me, and that’s OK, of course.

Back to school

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 11:00:37 +0000

I was sick last week, and in my drug- and virus-induced haze of incoherence, the idea that I should write a Scheme interpreter in assembly language came to mind. I cannot explain from where, but there it was. So I started looking into it, wondering if I still had it in me to dig into a computer problem and get it done. I’ve been feeling a bit burned out on different aspects of the IT world, and I was thinking maybe that getting back to the basics of computer science might help. The course that I remember mostly vividly (not fondly: vividly, like in nightmares) was my Programming Languages class, where I wrote a Scheme interpreter in (wait for it, wait for it…) Scheme. It was hard, really hard. But I was also young and stupid. I don’t think it would be so hard now.

Landlords - Les PropriÃ©taires

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 16:37:22 +0000

This posting on Boing Boing reminded me of something I wanted to mention about Switzerland. Though I sometimes makes it sound like heaven, with beautiful Swiss girls begging to marry you, cows that give chocolate milk when you milk them, and every man with an assault rifle, that’s not the whole truth.

Swiss landlords are crazy. And Swiss people, who have a certain zeal for social harmony, indulge them. Here are some examples:

Welcome to the USA

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:45:41 +0000

The new ESTA (Electronic System for Travel Authorizations) that the US has instituted is really, really lame. Everything about the system screams, “Stop! Don’t come here! You are a suspicious foreigner and we don’t want you.”

Check out this insane message that pops up on the website before you can even start:

You are about to access a Department of Homeland Security computer system. This computer system and data therein are property of the U.S. Government and provided for official U.S. Government information and use. There is no expectation of privacy when you use this computer system. The use of a password or any other security measure does not establish an expectation of privacy. By using this system, you consent to the terms set forth in this notice. You may not process classified national security information on this computer system. Access to this system is restricted to authorized users only. Unauthorized access, use, or modification of this system or of data contained herein, or in transit to/from this system, may constitute a violation of section 1030 of title 18 of the U.S. Code and other criminal laws. Anyone who accesses a Federal computer system without authorization or exceeds access authority, or obtains, alters, damages, destroys, or discloses information, or prevents authorized use of information on the computer system, may be subject to penalties, fines or imprisonment. This computer system and any related equipment is subject to monitoring for administrative oversight, law enforcement, criminal investigative purposes, inquiries into alleged wrongdoing or misuse, and to ensure proper performance of applicable security features and procedures. DHS may conduct monitoring activities without further notice.

Grub 2 and the Law of Software Envelopment

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 17:54:34 +0000

I was reading a bit about Grub 2’s modules, including this page for gfxterm, a reimplementation of VGA console mode for Grub 2 – VGA console mode isn’t good enough because it cannot display Arabic, simplified Chineese, nor Inuit glyphs. And, let’s face it, the kinds of Inuits frobbing their boot loaders can’t possibly be expected to only get along with Latin-1 characters, right?

This reminded me of Zawinkski’s Law of Software Envelopment:

Of words, arms, and freedom

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 13:56:30 +0000

I’m sick, and back in England. Not that the two are related… no, not at all. But the fact that I was irritable and chanting “I hate England” in my head all morning as I made my way in to work doing various errands on the way, might be due to one or the other thing… or both.

While I was chanting my not-too-Buddhist chant to calm myself, I was thinking about all the differences between jolly old England and Switzerland. I realized at least part of it comes down to the freedom that comes from a durable social contract… a sense of solidarity and interdependence springing from deep down in the Swiss culture.

Why I work for MSF...

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 20:39:49 +0000

Here’s someone else who has taken control of his life and chosen exactly what he’s doing and why. That’s part of why I work for MSF. It occurred to me about the time Silicon Valley was getting ready for another lap (which came to be called Web 2.0) that I didn’t want to make the lap with them. And that if I was going to do something, that it should matter.

The New Yorker on Aid Work

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 15:22:16 +0000

There is a really excellent article on aid work in The New Yorker.

Though this is pretty much a write-only blog at this point, and I don’t really know if anyone cares, here are my reactions to the article:

It is remarkably candid, but…
it is too hopeless…
because it focuses too much on the UN and not enough on independent actors.

Of course, any reader of mine know my biases: I am a cynical humanist capitalist from Silicon Valley (engaged to be married to a practical humanist socialist from Switzerland), who chose to work with MSF due to it’s independence. Because this article speaks to the core of my identity, of course my biases are going to be the key to my understanding of it.

Royal Mail and the Colour Red

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 11:27:03 +0000

I just got a little note from Royal Mail telling me that I need to come pick up a packet at the post office. It has this choice bit of stupidity on the back:

Royal Mail, the Criciform, and the colour red are registered trademarks of Royal Mail.

Christmas - Sorry you were out, Copyright (C) Royal Mail Group 2008.

What I want to know is who is the idiot lawyer who actually thinks that not only can he trademark red, but that he can copyright “Sorry you were out”?

350

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 19:11:09 +0000

No, not 300, that’s a movie. 350. Parts per million CO2 concentration.

Pass the word. Oh, right, it’s just a number, not words…

PS: This posting does not constitute an admission that CO2 causes global warming. But I happen to agree with everything that anti-carbon campaigners believe in, even if I think that global warming is a hoax. And this is a nifty animation with cool music, so I’m posting it anyway.

The OC

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 18:22:46 +0000

(Good lord is this a day for blogging. I suppose sometimes the dam breaks and the thoughts spill out…)

Today I got a question from Jon:

What is OCA and OCP? MSF is getting into the acronym business like everyone else!

The simple answer: OC = Operating Centre, or Cell depending on the person.

OCB - Brussels
OCA - Amsterdam
OCBA - Barcelona/Athens
OCG - Geneva
OCP - The mythical Parisian OC, which does not exist as far as I know

An OC is supposed to be a reflection of the difference between the hosting section, which has a responsibility to communicate with the people of the country for temoinage and fundraising, recruit, etc and the OC, which has a responsibility to all of the donor sections that contribute to it to get the work done, and report back what got done, so that the donor section can explain to their constituency what got done with the $$.

Long Term Data Storage

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 17:56:58 +0000

I was thinking about data archival the other day because David Hagan was telling me about one time when he spoke to a group of librarians and told them to expect a data gap starting in 1950 and extending until we get serious about data preservation. According to David, the time when we stopped being able to save data was in the 50’s because xerography (which is the same as laser-printer technology) came into existence then. All other data archival techniques (magnetic storage on tape or disk, recordable CD’s, etc) are inferior to toner pressed onto paper, which is itself inferior to ink soaked into paper fibers. And, come to think of it, ink on paper is inferior to marks on clay tablets – though ink on paper has proven to be stable enough, since we use knowledge today gleaned from papyrus scrolls from thousands of years ago.

Malaria Medicine Advice

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 16:01:02 +0000

A friend sent me this question:

Speaking of healthy, when you’re in Africa, do you take malaria medication the whole time you’re there? Is 45 days too long to take it?

First, taking it 45 days is no big deal. It’s taking it for months on end (9, 18, 60) that is not recommended – not because of actual risks, but because of not enough study.

Second, here’s Jeff’s “cut-through-the-crap” guide to malaria meds:

The Skills Exist, Use Them!

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 22:51:23 +0000

One of the headlines that came out of my trip to Freetown was “The Skills Exist, Use Them!”

First, a bit more about what I was doing there. I was on a contract with the Health Metrics Network, which is a project running under the auspices of the World Health Organization, but funded by the Gates Foundation. HMN is supposed to go around building a network, not of routers and switches, but people who understand the challenges of constructing and running health information systems. Those people should be researchers, technologists, and public health people. And those people should be a mix of those talking about it (easy to find in Geneva, they are douze pour une centime) and those doing it. The latter are a little harder to find…

Hello, I'm back!

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 15:26:38 +0000

I am back from Freetown, freezing in Leeds. I’ve spent today trying to get software working including reinstalling Chrome (which started marking all words as misspelled) and Word Press which inexplicably started hanging.

I’ll write a note, maybe this weekend, about what I was doing in Freetown. It was fun, and we got a lot accomplished, so it’s a worthwhile story to tell.

Locations Database in Gnome

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 00:59:10 +0000

There’s a nifty feature hidden in Gnome that’s interesting to play with. Click on the date in the upper right. You get an applet with a calendar. Below the calendar is “Locations”, click on that. Nifty little map showing the line where sunset and sunrise are. Click on edit, and you get to add your favorite locations to the map. But not just your favorite timezones, you get to pick from a huge list of geographic places. My hometown, little Roseburg Oregon is in there. African capitals are in there, though sadly Monrovia got missed. And when you add the clocks, you get weather too!

An Interview with a DVD-man

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 16:54:34 +0000

Rare is the dinner in an expat restaurant in Africa which is not (politely and quietly) interrupted by a DVD-man. They have a stock of DVD’s in their backpacks, and work their way through the restaurant giving you a chance to peruse their wares. You have to see the DVDs to believe them, they are made up of several pirated Hollywood movies, with many different versions, all on one disc, enclosed in a professional-looking full color envelope. They have titles like “Segal vs Chan”… a DVD full of Steve Segal and Jackie Chan movies. Another great title is “Superhero Schoolwork”, including Spiderman, Superman, and Wonderwoman (and all the sequels thereof). The DVD’s are billed as “50 in one”, though it requires some clever counting to find 50 movies on one disc. Typically, there are more like 12 movies on a DVD – in itself an impressive achievement of DVD mastering and compression-algorithm optimization.

Hello from Freetown

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:09:28 +0000

I started a two week trip to Freetown, Sierra Leone yesterday. I am here as an IT consultant for the Health Metrics Network, part of the World Health Organization. We are taking a bunch of random hardware that the government bought with a not-quite-complete architecture and putting in place a foundation for IT services related to the Health Information System. Of course, the HIS relies on lots and lots of low tech forms and paperwork “up country”, but there’s also a need for a datacenter in the capital.

A message...

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 15:54:22 +0000

…from America, reaching out to every corner of the globe, into the hearts of those who have watched us struggle and fail to meet our potential over the last 8 years:

Yes We Can!

Like a drug-addled celebrity, we’ve hit rock bottom, and now we’re ready to turn our lives around and meet our potential.

Now, if you will excuse me, I’m going to go celebrate the near destruction of the English parliament. (Guy Falkes was clearly a democrat.) Another example of why England is backwards: normal people rejoice at the idea of blowing up their corrupt and greedy legislatures. Bonfire night is unfortunately apparently about celebrating that the plot was foiled!

Baby Season

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 14:14:14 +0000

Marina is doing a project right now in her Public Health class where she has to make a project proposal (the whole thing, with the Gant charts, the budget, etc) for a Maternal Health project in a fictional health district in a fictional country in Africa.

As we were discussing it, I came up with a question… what is the variation in pregnancy over the course of a year? Is it seasonal? If so, in which cultures yes and which cultures no? Why?

HQ folks: Don't Do This

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 16:19:12 +0000

Hopping on the meme-wagon for a second here… if you care enough, read these three posts about paper pushing in the NGO world:

In the last one, Paul considers what happens after the reports make it to HQ, from the point of view of field people:

…it seems there is no such impact. Country offices receive little or no feedback on their reports, and individual staff receive none. It’s also hard to identify any link between the reports that are generated in-country and any strategic decision-making, although it’s clear that there is some benefit there.

Economic Meltdown in Iceland

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:30:03 +0000

Read this thread on a local geek social group in Leeds. That’s the voice of one scared girl, and perhaps the reality is not so bad. But just the fact that there is one Icelander who’s feeling that freaked out makes my heart go out to her.

I’ve suggested to her that one problem is translations, and that she could earn some hard currency by starting a blog with translations of the articles describing the meltdown and then putting a TipJoy widget on it. I’d pay to hear the voice of Iceland from inside, instead of mediated by the Mainstream Media.

More ideas on how to innovate to serve poor communities

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 13:07:09 +0000

Another reference I don’t want to lose: Innovation in Africa Tips.

Also, why is it “in Africa”? What happened that Africa got so far behind, or is getting so much of the attention? Why don’t we advise people how to make a new clean water technology stick in SE Asia, or in South America anymore? Even a few years ago when I came to this world, there was much more discussion of all the poor places, and not just Africa.

In Search of Deviants

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 13:03:49 +0000

Positive Deviance is a somewhat unnecessarily complicated name for something deeply humane and useful:

In every village, there is at least one woman (usually a few) whose children are healthier than the rest. For whatever reason, that woman is better at navigating the complexities of village life and child nutrition. That woman has knowledge and skills which can be taught. You find her, you learn from her, you support her to teach her peers. That is positive deviance.

Why doesn't this already exist?

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 18:43:17 +0000

Yesterday, I was walking in town and there was a nice guy playing a clarinet in front of North Face. I intentionally fumbled with my coins for a while so as to enjoy his music a bit. Then I paid him a tip and walked along, enjoying the clarinet as it faded behind me.

Why can’t I do that for the gigabytes of copyright violations I illegally download? (Note to RIAA lawyers: this is a hypothetical situation. No need to sue me. Thanks.)

With all due respect Mr Holmes...

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:36:20 +0000

You can kiss my ass.

Talking about the risks faced by humanitarian workers, you said:

People in this business have always accepted the risks, there have always been losses, there have always been horrific incidents

There is NO SUCH THING as acceptable losses for humanitarian aid. Period.

PS: I noticed that, according to your bio, you’ve never even worked in the field. So please do not count my life and the lives of my colleages as “acceptable losses”. Thanks.

MoveOn: Wrong on the environment, wrong for America

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 14:58:59 +0000

MoveOn suggests that the best way to further your liberal agenda of reduced carbon emissions is to… (wait for it, wait for it…)

Driving Change: Carpool to a swing state

If you don’t live in a swing state, how can you volunteer in one? Drive!

You can’t make this stuff up…

This is like Daily Show funny. This is like irony at 11 on the irony scale. This is like the look on Tina Fey’s face when Palin kicks her off the stage.

Too Much Travel is Bad for the Soul

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 15:31:32 +0000

There’s an interesting little nugget of reality near the end of the first page of Ask the Pilot this week:

If I have grown more cynical in recent years, it is travel, I think, that has pushed me in this direction. Exploring other parts of the world is beneficial in all the ways it is typically given credit for… But traveling can also burn you out, suck away your faith in humanity. You will see, right there in front of you, how the world is falling to pieces; the planet has been ravaged, life is cheap, and there is little that you, as the Western observer, with or without your good conscience, are going to do about it.

Don't Bet Against Ethernet

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 17:37:18 +0000

From Slashdot: Corporate Data Centers As Ethernet’s Next Frontier

Metcalfe’s (apophrycal) Second Law: Never Bet Against Ethernet

‘Nuff said.

Ethan Zuckerman's Rules for Innovation

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 13:52:53 +0000

Ethan just posted some rules for innovation which are interesting. The one that speaks most to me right now is #7, which states, “problems are not always obvious from afar”. That’s a big problem with the kind of “innovation” that happens with first-world government-funded NGO IT for Development work. It is easy for a programmer to sit in an office and say, “what Africans really need is more data collection via PDAs!” It is something else entirely for Malian Linux enthusiasts to say, “Downloading is too expensive, I bet I can make money distributing Open Source via a kiosk”.

Big Mining Machines

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 12:25:24 +0000

The Long Now foundation took a field trip recently. The pictures are cool, as is the irony that they went to a trade show held once every four years. Miners have a time scale closer to the Long Now’s.

What does it mean that mining is a slowly changing industry? The economics of extractive industries push them that direction (capital investment is only warranted by a positive outlook in the commodity price). But workplace safety, which is a special case of universal human rights, demands that industries take advantage of the best available technology as fast as possible. This is an interesting story of the tension between capitalism and social welfare. If a mining regulator pushes an industry too much it will give up and move elsewhere. And apparently the mining industry is especially prone to regulatory capture an euphemism for corruption I especially like (like as in hate; in newspeak up is down, enslaved is free and corruption is regulatory capture).

Behind the Scenes of Google Chrome

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 18:02:44 +0000

Some stuff I discovered playing with Google Chrome:

View source works on the various “internal” pages (i.e. the home page, the about:stats page, etc) so you can see how the magic happens
Read the comments in the home page to see how absolutely nutso over-the-top the programmer was about load time. He obsesses about the difference between 20ms and 100ms. You go, dude… make it fast!
Also in the home page, you can see that internal UI pages have access to a Javascript object called “chrome” that tells the page what to put on itself. (Attention bad guys: this is an attack surface. If you can find a way to get a handle to a chrome object, baddness ensues. So, please, don’t do that. Thanks.)
Embedded images, for example the logo on the home page, use the “data:” URL scheme to embed the picture’s data right into the page. Why? Performance? Or simplification.
If view source doesn’t work (like in the UI for “error 404”), then the inspector works, and will show you the source. (What’s the point of disabling view source? Setec Astronomy.)
In the inspector, you can click on things in the source and change them into input boxes, then you can change the source on the fly, and the results are shown in the page. Cool.
In about:stats, you can sort the columns by clicking on them. View source for a really nifty piece of Javascript I might lift and use someplace else myself.
About:network is totally cool. Click “Start I/O tracking” then go to another tab and load something. You get a trace of all the transactions. You can also click “Show current I/O status” to see which HTTP connections are open.
You have to type the about:foo URLs, if you click on them you don’t get anything. They are checking the referer.

Props to Stikiflem and Redneck Programmer who blazed this trail before me.

How to ride a bus

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 15:01:05 +0000

Marina and I could have used this useful training film before we arrived in England.

It seems the film needs to be updated some to reflect the current state of the privatized English bus system:

First, be sure to find out which company has bought the route you want to ride from the government. Be careful not to buy a ticket for a competing service, it will be refused.
Don’t bother checking the schedules, your friendly First driver will come when he’s ready. In order to assure prompt and reliable First service, we will sometimes send three busses at a time. Sometimes you’ll have to wait 30 minutes or more on one of our “every 10 minute” lines, so as to ensure that three busses can travel together.
Be sure to wave at the bus driver as he passes you without stopping. Like that, you are sure he enjoys a pleasant and friendly day, without the bother of carrying passengers. Cheer up, there will be three more buses in 30 minutes!

The Market Goes "Underground"

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 14:10:18 +0000

Here’s a lesson about social policies, politics and economics. In Gaza, tunnels used for smuggling goods have become the major supply line, and an industry in themselves. The market will provide, it will always provide. The question is, how do you use the power of the market to get the other results you want?

In this case, it is pretty clear to me that be blockading Gaza on the Israeli border, the Israeli authorities have lost their capacity to control smuggling, not to mention lost tons of tax revenue and economic activity for Israeli businessmen. Clearly, Not Plan A.

Banks: You're Under New Management... Listen Up!

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 23:24:20 +0000

A wonderful open letter from a fellow stockholder to our new investment’s board of directors.

If only it were so easy… This is what justice would look like in a society that craved social justice and capitalism in equal parts.

Shame and Aid Work

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:06:00 +0000

This is a story a bit like mine from Chad, though we were not faced with bandits/rebels/soldiers directly. The feelings of shame and regret she has are related to the complicated feelings I had on leaving Chad as well.

In my case, we had nothing to be ashamed of – we took good care of ourselves and our staff and were not bad guests anywhere. But it does give you a sense of shame that as an expat you are different: you’re allowed to just go away, and your colleagues can’t.

When Not In Control, People Imagine Order

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:04:22 +0000

Science Friday did an interesting story recently:

New research shows that when people perceive they have no control over a given situation, they are more likely to see illusions, patterns where none exist and even believe in conspiracy theories. The study suggests that people impose imaginary order when no real order can be perceived.

The first caller reports on how the conditions he experienced working as an aid worker in Somalia showed this. Also, he comments on the rough ride back to normality after suffering a situation with loss of control.

Better Practices in OpenID

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 18:10:55 +0000

Yahoo published some best practices on OpenID, but I have one they forgot.

Imran and I were talking at OpenCoffee Leeds the other day and we independently and together came up with this realization:

OpenID providers should be required to be OpenID consumers first.

Why? Well, the problem OpenID is trying to solve is “too many usernames”, which really equates to “too many authentication providers”. That means that the last thing we need is more stinkin’ authentication providers. OpenID providers who are not also OpenID consumers, are just making the problem worse.

A Call for Help

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 13:09:20 +0000

Something very wrong is going on on South Africa, and the world is missing it:

“It is better for us to be here than go for reintegration. The South Africans want to kill us and the government is trying to kill us. Reintegration’s a death sentence. We’d rather die here together,” said Johnny Kaka.

MSF is only one voice, and though they are speaking out, the immigrants in South Africa need more people to speak for them.

NSA is Spying on MSF

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 10:29:36 +0000

Here’s a story that’s, unfortunately, not a surprise:

KINNE: And over the course of my time, as we slowly began to identify phone numbers and who belonged to what, one thing that gave me grave concern was that as we identified phone numbers, we started to find more and more and more numbers that belonged not to any organizations affiliated with terrorism or with military … with militaries of Iraq or Afghanistan or elsewhere, but with humanitarian aid organizations, non-governmental organizations, who include the International Red Cross, Red Crescent, Doctors Without Borders, a whole host of humanitarian aid organizations. And it also included journalists…

Same conversation, different venue

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 12:53:14 +0000

The dirty secret of aid work… it always comes down to this… the navel-gazing, “why am I here”, “why is it so ineffective” conversation.

Usually it happens around the campfire, over a bottle of locally made beer, or perhaps for the lucky coordination team in the capital city, at the nearby expat-only restaurant over a nice bottle of South African wine. As with everything this century, it’s moved onto the Internet. But the essential tone of the conversation, and the impossibility of resolving the problem remains.

21 words that should change your life (but probably won't)

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 09:05:01 +0000

Clarity on what’s wrong with our economy and our society, and advice on how to correct it, all in just 3 lines, and 21 words:

You buy things and you don’t need. With money that you don’t have. To impress people that you don’t even like.

From Aaron Stewart, " Our economic woes in three lines".

dnsmasq versus gPXE

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 16:52:14 +0000

gPXE and dnsmasq do not get along, beware.

gPXE wants to find the boot filename in the dedicated slot in the reply packet. dnsmasq does something clever/stupid (I’m not sure which) and puts it someplace else. You have to use the --dhcp-no-override option to dnsmasq to make gPXE see the filename.

I don’t have proof, but I suspect this inflexibility in gPXE also makes it incompatible with the DHCP replies sent by qemu’s built-in DHCP server.

And now a word from your local public health authorities...

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:29:08 +0000

Headline from a Scientific American blog posting:

Measles is back, and it’s because your kids aren’t vaccinated

There was a measles epidemic in the canton of Vaud in Switzerland this year. MSF was thinking about intervening and setting up a vaccination site in Place Ripon, but the corrupt, inefficient, and chronically underfunded local health authorities managed to handle the crisis themselves and MSF just monitored the situation from it’s base in Geneva.

Let's Map Africa!

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:53:25 +0000

I found a great post on Google’s Africa blog today announcing Map Maker, a wiki-like way of increasing Google Map’s coverage of places where there’s very little data available for them to start with. As with everything Google, the launch version is a little not-smooth, and it is hard to understand how the moderation feature works. Am I supposed to be able to moderate other people, or is it the invisible Hand Of Google that moderates me? I can’t figure that part out yet, but I assume it is community moderation. That’s Not Evil, and when I last checked Google was Not Evil…

SneakerNet Kiosk

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 09:00:04 +0000

I was poking around on Kunnafoni to see what they are up to. Check out la Source (“the spring”) a kiosk that makes software and media available for installation onto USB keys.

My readers are English speaking, so I will include subtitles for the video here. Adjust your windows so you can see both and click play!

Hello!
Hello, really!
How’s it going?
Fine.
I’ve come to talk about la Source that I heard about the other day. It’s that?
Yup.
In there I can find programs, books, and videos for my mobile phone and my laptop computer?
Yes. (he demos it)
Do you have pirate programs in there?
No! They are free programs, distributed for free. If you are an IT guy, you can even change them yourself.
But how do I get the file?
You choose ok, you transfer it onto your key, and you give me 100 francs. (20 cents, US)
But you said it was free!
Right, but I’m making it faster and easier for you to download!
OK. Can you give me other stuff?
In la Source you can also find movies and books (fiction, non-fiction, classics).
Thanks Moussa! I will come back and buy something even bigger.

This is what I was talking about on Aid Worker Daily: Open Source lets people adapt software to the circumstances they find in their culture.

Morning Coffee Notes

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 08:26:00 +0000

With apologies to Dave for the title…

This morning I see that Jon over at AidWorkerDaily.com has added his ideas to my article there, and asked me to comment. I did, go read it.

While I was researching stuff for my reply, I stumbled across these resources on African IT that I’m going to start following:

Appfrica: African IT, Industry News and Culture
Google Africa

Crowd control in Ethiopia

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 10:10:49 +0000

My major job in Ethiopia this summer was crowd control. As a log, I am responsible for setting up the facilities where we work – a little bit of pioneering merit badge, architecture, and a whole lot of crowd control.

Here are two pictures from MSF’s interventions in Ethiopia that give you an idea of what my job looked like: the lines, talking to mothers.

MSF training didn’t prepare me for crowd control, which is too bad. There are some simple principles, and learning them by trial and error is dangerous and not very much fun (not for the log, not for the medical team, and especially not for the beneficiaries). The basic principle is “calm people are safe, scared people are dangerous”. Everything else follows from there. Keep people informed, and set up your site so that even if they don’t understand or can’t hear the verbal instructions, they can see what’s happening and be confident that they are waiting for something of value, and that it won’t run out before they get it.

The real reason for Google Books

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 09:15:32 +0000

I was reading about vdash and inside the presentation, I found this interesting quote:

“We are not scanning all those books to be read by people,” explained one of my hosts after my talk (at Google). “We are scanning them to be read by an AI.”

That came from George Dyson, in this article on Edge. And as always with Edge, if you read on through the piece to the end, there’s some big ideas. Smart people thinking about important things over there.

Compare the Candidates

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 15:34:07 +0000

Compare The Candidates is a nifty web app that I found when looking into AppSpot, a Google cloud computing thingie. It shows a new style of design that rose in the last few years. I really admire it, and I love interacting with sites like this.

It’s a little scary though, it feels like a generation gap. I don’t really feel like I know how to make something that feels like it. When HTTP and CGI came on the scene, I had my feet under me right off the bat. With this generation of design sensibility, I feel a little lost still.

512 words

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 18:25:54 +0000

I am looking forward to Curtis’ 512 words. If he sucks and doesn’t do it often enough, I’ll do them myself here on this site and embarrass him. How’s that for a helpful, encouraging friend? :)

Curtis’ adventure to take the time to be a professional writer is really inspiring, and it is part of what brought me back to my blogging. I am also considering to do some recreational fiction writing. Perhaps 512 of Curtis’ words will inspire me even more.

Indian Risotto

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 18:23:08 +0000

Here’s a tiny blurb about life in my new environment:

Tesco is down the street. They are the UK’s largest supermarket chain, think Safeway in the US. Generic, filled with irritating British mothers and their unruly children, with prepared food as far as the eye can see and bad produce. (Good arugula though, I have to admit). Tonight Marina and I had our hearts set on risotto. And Tesco, with 500 types of frozen pastys, has only one brand of arborio rice. And it is out of stock.

Some tech stuff: DreamHost, WordPress and OpenID

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 09:21:34 +0000

Since I am getting back to tech life, a good first post would be about tech.

What caused the big downtime was a not-very-careful switch from a friend’s Linux server to DreamHost. I switched because I am too old, too lazy, and too impatient to do Linux sysadmin anymore. I outsource it now. Especially mail system setup, which has become an infinite nightmare as a result of spam. With just a few clicks at their really excellent control panel, DreamHost let me outsource all the hassles of email to Google, while still keeping control of my web server. And actually DreamHost helps me with that too, because with a few more clicks on the control panel, I installed WordPress in my blog, then upgraded it a few months later.

I'm Back!

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:17:15 +0000

After an extended downtime due to lack of give-a-shit on my part, my blog is back, and I am back to blogging. Expect something here daily, which is my goal.

Lots and lots of news… where to start? I suppose at the last post. Since then, Marina and I were evacuated from Chad due to fighting in the town where our project was located. We then found a nice little meningitis emergency in DR Congo. When we came home we had a little vacation, then I went to the USA to see family after close to a year away. We found separate postings with MSF for the summer, which was hard but worthwhile. Marina worked in Myanmar doing mobile clinics from boats, and I went to Oromyia, Ethiopia to participate in an nutritional emergency intervention.

About me

Tue, 27 May 2008 15:19:33 +0000

You can learn more about me here.

I have spoken about MSF sometimes on this blog. I have worked for MSF sometimes in the field. Neither of the two are connected, and when I am working in the field, I do not post to the blog, because during those times, 100% of my life is MSF. It is the policy of MSF that we talk about our experiences according to the needs of our beneficiaries, and not as individuals.

Very Happy New Year News

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 12:30:20 +0000

Hello everybody, and happy new years. 2008 is going to be really great for me, I have some news to share here to get all those who are interested in my travels back up to date with my life and my plans.

First, the most important thing in my whole life… I’ve finally found the perfect girl for me. Her name is Marina, and we’ve been together over a year now. She and I weren’t ready to talk so publicly about our relationship until now, but now the time has come, so that’s the first really great piece of news for the blog in 2008.

One of a kind

Sun, 09 Dec 2007 09:36:02 +0000

I was looking for something else and ran across this somewhat ridiculous part of LinkedIn’s web site: Allen, J.

This is why in every place my name is used publicly, especially related to work, that I am very careful to use the exact string, “Jeff R. Allen”. It is a habit I started in college when my first academic paper was ever published. When you work with computers from an early age, you have a good understanding of namespaces, and how to best deal with the sub-optimal namespaces favored by humans and their idiosyncratic language.

Won't you blog about this song?

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 11:48:21 +0000

This is the next Internet meme, ladies and gentlemen… and just remember you heard about it here first.

This is from the group that my friend Curtis Chen belongs to, the The Richter Scales.

Atomium

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 12:13:37 +0000

Today I had the afternoon free so I went to Atomium. Here are the pictures I made there.

Hello from Belgium

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 11:13:32 +0000

Hello again after a long time away from writing.

Since I wrote last, I took a nice trip around the west coast, then hung around California doing some IT work. Then I moved to Lausanne, Switzerland where I studied French for two months for 4.5 hours a day. I also enjoyed riding my bike a lot, up to 200 km a week, through the Swiss countryside. I moved to Geneva and stayed with friends there during September and some of October. I volunteered at MSF Switzerland’s headquarters, doing special projects for the Logistics department there and continuing my French with a private tutor.

Daily Show fodder

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 13:10:49 +0000

This came from a heretical Lutheran friend of mine:

Vatican airline takes to the skies

I love the Ryanair quote:

“Ryanair already performs miracles that even the Pope’s boss can’t rival, by delivering pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela for the heavenly price of 10 euros,” Ryanair said in a statement.

So many questions:

Will the Swiss Guard perform TSA or Air Marshal duties? Will they get to carry their halberds?

Bencode, Bdecode in shell script

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 05:57:12 +0000

I have been playing around with OpenWRT recently, to see what IT tools you could deploy to the bush using cheap, low power computers as a base.

One of the really interesting things about writing systems to live in the embedded Linux world is that you want to try to do as much as possible with the stuff that’s there out of the box. This is because smarter people than me have stuffed the tiny 8 meg flash images with useful tools, leaving no room for my bloated Perl-ware. So the question becomes, how can I live with what they gave me and still get what I want done.

A Look at Field Life for Tool Makers

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 04:41:07 +0000

I have recently been talking with some folks about IT tools for humanitarian aid workers. I gave a real-world reality check to them, not to discourage them, but to make sure they knew their audience as well as possible. After all, what good is a tool that looks good in demos, but fails with the users? A good step towards avoiding abject failure is to sit with your users and watch them work. That’s not so easy with humanitarian field workers. A tolerable substitute is to collect testimonies from them with the same kind of data, and try to design a system that has a chance of working in the context.

"squat toilets + leaping cockroaches = unhappy expats"

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 23:42:39 +0000

Check out the great blogs at MSF Canada. The quote in the title came from Made in Bangladesh by Julia Payson. James Maskalyk is also writing sublime postings.

My mom asked me, “How come MSF Canada’s volunteers get to blog and you couldn’t?” The answer is just a matter of comfort level with the new medium. Like all organizations have in the last few years, MSF is currently digesting what blogs mean and how they can be used. It is not much of a surprise to me that MSF Canada, some of whose volunteers work at MSF Holland, would be ahead of the curve on this one. Canada is a small place full of curious people. Of course they are going to experiment with blogs!

April Fools!

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 11:53:04 +0000

Here’s a new book from two great guys in the Unix/Internet/Cranky-old-bastards community (of which I am apparently a member, based on the third category).

The Complete April Fools RFCs by Thomas A. Limoncelli and Peter J. Salus. You an buy it on Amazon here.

According to Tom:

This is a compilation of the best April Fools jokes created by the IETF, the group that creates the standards for how the Internet works. It’s pretty technical but fun to read for anyone that is in software development, system administration, or any kind of computer geek. A good, cheap, gift for the geek that has everything and is impossible to shop for.

Getting Podcasts out to the Bush

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 02:49:50 +0000

Here’s my problem. I work for Doctors Without Borders/MÃ©decins Sans FrontiÃ¨res (MSF). I go out to the bush for 6 months and have only very low bandwidth access to e-mail, so no podcasts! It gets lonely and boring out there sometimes. We try to bring things with us to entertain ourselves, but it’s never really enough, and it is not topical. In MSF we are lucky that it is fairly easy to get postal mail, because we have a lot of people coming and going from the field, and a well developed system of “pony express” mail.

Debugging our way around Sumatra

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 02:04:13 +0000

I last wrote from Padang, where we were looking into the state of the technology and looking to see if NGOs responding to the earthquake there needed help with it. What we found is that the technology needs were well in hand, either because the needs were not dire or because people had what they needed already. We met the operator of a small wireless ISP who educated us on where he buys equipment, how much locally purchased things like towers cost, and so on. It was a really excellent visit.

Hello Pandang, Indonesia

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 21:15:39 +0000

So I have neglected to write an update for a very long time. Here’s a tiny update to give you a taste of things to come in the next few weeks.

I got back from Morocco and settled into my home away from home in Switzerland. I met Marina, a former coworker from MSF who I met in Liberia. We traveled around Switzerland seeing old friends of hers. I practiced some Italian, went cross country skiing, and spent quite a while sick as a dog from a stupid cold I got in Ticino.

Another theory of climate change

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 09:47:13 +0000

I have from time to time astonished, annoyed, or otherwise aggrieved my friends by denying that greenhouse gases cause climate change. This is like standing up in an atheist convention and yelling, “Long Live the Pope!” Everyone knows that all civilized people believe in Global Warming, and the Grand Conspiracy to Prop Up Big Oil by Denying the Action of Greenhouse Gases. It gets even uglier because these days I mostly hang around Europeans, who have been brainwashed about the Global Warming story for much longer than Americans, and consider it one more indication that they are the more highly advanced lifeforms. (Regarding foreign policy and cheese, I will admit that Europeans are in fact more advanced lifeforms than Americans. The jury is still out on the state of the press, as I happened to read a few UK celebrity rags recently, and it appears that not even American journalism has yet fallen that low. But I digress.)

Visiting the Atlas Mountains and the Sahara

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 10:06:57 +0000

I got back a few days ago from a big trip across southern Morocco. I signed up for a four day trip but it got extended to a five day trip because a storm came in and dumped snow in the pass.

The main thing I remember from the trip is how cold it was! The weather in Morocco is about like weather in California. It gets cold in the winter, cold enough that we all have heaters in our houses. This is the difference between rich pampered Americans and Moroccans. They know the cold only lasts through January and February so they just put on a coat and a blanket and get on with it. The problem is that there is literally nowhere that is heated, so you spend days and days never really getting warm. Like you come in out of the van with windows that don’t quite close and a heater that doesn’t really work, and you go into the restaurant which is really just a terrace and a kitchen, then after you check in to your room where the tile construction makes it feel just like a meat locker. The hotels do not have hot water, or certainly not enough to take a shower. When I put water into the sink to wash and warm my hands the sink itself cooled the water down to less than lukewarm as it was filling!

Lost in the Souk

Wed, 24 Jan 2007 08:52:30 +0000

I have been in Marrakech two days now and I have been lost in the souk (marketplace) at least three times. Far from being a problem, that means I am doing things right.

After traveling in Dakar, the touts, faux guides, and various other types of urchin are no problem for me. In fact, as they are incredibly effective at reading people, I get approched a lot less because they can see that they will have no power over me. Still, I get my share of them. I turned into an alley yesterday and immediately realized it was a mistake because this guy launched into a speech. I ignored him furiously, staring at my feet and pretending to be deaf. Out of desperation he started guessing nationalities: Vous etes francais? American? Spanish? Greek? England? Taiwanese?

Rome, Paris, then Morocco

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 14:53:32 +0000

I am still alive! Just a little post to keep something on the front page of my blog.

I am in Rome right now staying with the lovely and hospitable Kristin. Tomorrow I fly to Paris and meet the lovely and resourceful Lisa, who has scored us a room with the lovely and hospitable Nancy. In Paris, I will take Lisa to the lovely and educational Musee de Orsay, then go to MSF France to beg for a DVD of training films. I am heading on to Morocco to meet the handsome and helpful Aly, who will send me into the Atlas mountains on the back of a slovenly and surly ass, no doubt.

Liberian Civil Servants

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 07:03:26 +0000

This photo essay shows pictures of several Liberian civil servants. The picture of the governor of River Gee brought back memories. I met village chiefs in offices like this to talk about how MSF could work with the community.

Beautiful spheres, beautiful music

Sat, 30 Dec 2006 18:45:42 +0000

Some serious wandering on Google Video lead me, by way of the brilliant Bravia commercials, to this fun remix for what seems like a nice product line. And that in turn lead me to Bev Lee Harling’s music, which is another pleasurable discovery.

And I realize that somehow I am 2 years late, but I just discovered One Ring Zero, and I am also in love with them as of right this minute. So there.

Handover

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

It has been a long time since I wrote last, so here is a tiny update. I am doing the handover to the new November 2 right now. It is a very strange thing to have him here and be able to literally count the days. Also now I have to pay particular attention to issues of respect, authority, control, and so on. I need my staff to see that this is an orderly transition and that I trust and have confidence in the new guy so that they do too. It is a different set of things to think about, but not too hard to figure out.

Quiplu can't count to four

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

One of our cars is broken. The differential was making noise. In Liberian English, car parts can be “fine”, “not fine”, or “finished”. The mechanic took it apart this morning and found that one of the bearings in this differential is finished. It was interesting to see the insides of the differential, and I spent a while poking at it on the workbench, and having the mechanic explain the finer points to me (“This can spin, but those don’t so they have dicks and not bearings. Dicks, yes, dicks. Discs? No, dicks. And these, they can’t spoil too easy. You put different spacers in like so when these are not too fine, but you can’t file the spacers yourself, you have to get them from Toyota.”)

Busy and also not so busy

Sat, 18 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

We were really busy here in October because of the need to plan 2007’s activities. We had to make a Plan of Action, then we had to make the budget. The whole process was eye opening into how MSF plans its activities, and working on the budget was sometimes boring drudge work, but sometimes it was really interesting. I understand the MSF budget system much better now, and in the future I will be able to quickly see what work was envisioned by the previous people when I get to a new project. I put in a bunch of nifty things that I think the next log/admin will appreciate, including major repairs to the radios and some replacement equipment for stuff we have worn out.

I don't know what I'm going to get, but it'll be fine

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 12:29:00 +0000

I just had the most profound sense of peace wash over me… not of the spiritual variety, but of the logistical. I was out checking up on the carpenters to make sure they understood my instructions right and were building the right stuff today. I held the plank for the guy as he was sawing out the handle for the drawer he is making. I puzzled for a while about the two pieces he was making, trying to figure out how he’d make a handle out of them. Then it dawned on me, “I don’t know what he’s going to make, but I’m sure it will be fine.”

Birthday wishes from the WFP

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 17:54:12 +0000

Just a quick note to tell you all that I had a great birthday here in Nimba. The day went much better than could be expected, starting with the surprise arrival of the chief mechanic who fixed three cars today. It was not really a surprise, but it sort of felt like it, because he arrived on Saturday when I wasn’t around, and then came in to work on Monday morning and started waving his magic wrench around like a fairy sprinkling motor oil and fixing cars.

Back at work

Sun, 22 Oct 2006 21:20:00 +0000

This week was a regular work week for me, but a couple days were shaved off it while I was in transit back to Nimba. It has been nice to get back to the normal schedule of Nimba life. None of the normal annoyances really bugged me because I was happy to be back “home”. I started looking forward to the second half of my time here and realized that because I took my break a little late, the second half is actually only 7 weeks or so. And it was a strange feeling indeed to imagine that that won’t be enough time to get everything done. When I got here, the 6 months seemed like an eternity, but once I figured out how to keep the trains running on time I realized how little time there is for new work. And how few months to get it done in.

Hello from Nimba again

Wed, 18 Oct 2006 21:40:00 +0000

I am back in Nimba now, back with my adopted family here. The work is hard (even just one day has already presented a terrifying array of problems), but I am really happy to be back with the team and in my “own” bed. I brought back a new expat from Monrovia with me. Pierre is a Frenchman, an architect who worked in San Francisco for several years, and returned to France, then quit his job to work on real problems, instead of the somewhat unreal ones that architecture offered. He said that it annoyed him that people designed buildings that they do not know how to make. I don’t know yet if he knows how to make buildings, but I really like him and I think he will do well. His job is to build the replacement building for the pole and plastic sheeting hospital that I am supposed to keep limping along.

Back to Accra

Sat, 14 Oct 2006 17:27:31 +0000

I am back at Accra, at the same place I stayed in the first night. Not very adventurous, but it has Internet and hot water, and is in a nice neighborhood.

Here is a quick list of things I did while I was here: bought some craft items, saw the fort at Cape Coast, walked on the catwalk at Kakama National Park, swam (pool and ocean), got a mild sunburn from being too relaxed to even notice, had a massage, listened to drums over a bonfire. I am leaving out the less-than-glamorous things that always happen in a week of traveling. It was a nice week, and I’m rested enough to go back to Nimba.

Hello from Ghana

Mon, 09 Oct 2006 00:14:27 +0000

So I’ve made it to (and past) the halfway point. I am on my vacation in Ghana and I thought I would give you all an update of what it islike to go from a post-conflict context to one of the richest countries in West Africa in 24 hours. In a few words, culture shock!

The culture shock started as we drove out of Nimba. I had been out as far as Phebe Hospital, where the two cars meet when we do a “kiss movement” which is where one car leaves from Monrovia and one from Nimba at the same time, then they both meet in the middle. I rode out to Phebe hospital with our normal driver, Elijah, and read my Lonely Planet for West Africa on the way. I played with a kid in the car (a patient with a broken leg, who I coincidently mett while riding in the car weeks ago), giving him my little Altoids container with a rock inside it to rattle, and also making a paper airplane for him. Then we tranferred into the car from Monrovia, and that’s when the culture shock started to set in.

I'm still alive

Sun, 01 Oct 2006 23:35:12 +0000

Just a quick note to tell you all that I am still alive. Things have not been super busy, but I haven’t felt too much like writing.

This week a logistics helper came from Monrovia and completed a renovation of the building that used to be our food store into a new office building. After we finish moving out of the office this week, we will have more bedrooms for both the new expat arriving soon, and for guests. Right now, there are no rooms in the inn. I kept the rehabilitation plans really simple in order to get them done fast. I had planned to leave the wood trim unpainted and only whitewash the walls. But it turned out that we had some white paint left over from the health post renovation at Lepula. So I gave the team that paint to use. Then they complained that you can’t paint the walls white and the trim white. Fashion nazis! So we dug around some more and found some Jade Green paint that was also incorrectly bought for Lepula. Ministry of Health standard for health posts in Liberia is whitewashed walls with Forest Green trim, so the Jade Green was right out. I gave them that to mix with the white. The result is a shade of green that reminds me of the United States Forest Service every time I see it. Everyone really likes the new office because of the green windows and doors. They are pretty snazzy, actually.

ER

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 09:02:24 +0000

Twice now, we’ve gotten huge numbers of injured people from vehicle accidents. Things are difficult in a hospital made of poles and plastic sheeting in the best of times, but with an influx of 15 to 20 injured people at night, it can get ugly fast. Luckily Emir (our doctor) is really good at handling situations like that. The team works together really well, and we all know our specialties well and how to anticipate problems, so it’s exciting, but not utter pandemonium,

"Jeff is BRAVE!"

Fri, 15 Sep 2006 23:58:36 +0000

Today we had a little excitement in the compound. The storekeeper came to me really agitated. He said that he’d gone in the food store to check that things were ready to deliver food on Monday. But when he opened the door he found a big snake. He showed me that it was as big as his forearm. Now, we have snake scares from time to time. It results in a frenzy of activity, as all the expats run for digital cameras, and the Liberians who grew up in the bush get their slingshots, cutlasses and sharp sticks ready, and all the city boys from Monrovia scream like girls. I tend to try to steer clear of the circus and watch the country boys to make sure that the snake is dispatched swiftly and safely.

Toys for TFC

Tue, 12 Sep 2006 23:24:08 +0000

The TFC is the Therapeutic Feeding Center, where severely malnourished patients can be fattened up. This is significantly harder than it sounds since it turns out that human bodies do not take well to severe starvation. As you put in fluids and carbohydrates, the body needs to adjust and deal with the new chemical balances. You can kill a person by feeding them. So the medicine in the TFC is actually a specialty, like urology or proctology, but less icky. Unfortunately for all the malnourished people in Africa, it is also a rare specialty, so we here in Saclepea are just sort of doing our best to run the TFC according to the books the experts in Europe wrote and sent to us. There’s a certain amount of “if it works, don’t change it”, which is OK, but can be dangerous if things aren’t actually working, but you don’t understand what’s happening enough to be able to tell.

Learning the Lingo

Sun, 03 Sep 2006 15:36:48 +0000

Hello from the middle of a huge rainstorm. It has been threatening to rain all day, and getting muggier and muggier, so it is nice that the rain and the cool breezes have finally come. It means, of course, that when I am done writing this and try to send it, it will fail because the satellite signal is blocked, but this is a small inconvenience to trade for the cool breeze coming through the office.

Priorities

Wed, 23 Aug 2006 20:44:19 +0000

I have been quite busy here recently and my energy level is flagging because a Sunday that was supposed to be restful ended having several fire drills in it, so the whole team pretty much missed a day of rest. We have 4 guests here right now from Swiss Development Corporation, so they take a bit of attention. But luckily, tomorrow is Flag Day, a Liberian holiday, so we get an extra day off.

A Rainy Sunday

Sun, 13 Aug 2006 16:18:00 +0000

I haven’t mentioned the weather here much yet, but today weather dominated my activities, so I have it on the mind.

When I first got to Monrovia a month and a half ago, I was welcomed back to the tropics by the heat and humidity I had become used to in the Peten, in northeastern Guatemala. As we were on the ocean in Monrovia, we got nice breezes, and the temperature was quite mild. But still it was the kind of heat and humidity that makes you sweaty just five minutes after a shower.

The MSF farm

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 01:10:00 +0000

The rules say you aren’t supposed to have any pets in the expat house so that there’s no problem with allergies or fleas. But rules were meant to be broken.

Our compound has: one dog, one cat, one hen with three Guinea fowl chicks as big as it, another hen with 9 chicks, 2 roosters (well, on Saturday we had two, read on to find out their fate), and two goats (like the roosters, this statistic is now out of date). In case someone from headquarters in Geneva is reading this, I would hasten to add that these are not pets but “program resources for maintenance of employee morale”. Are the bean-counters gone yet? OK, I can tell you about all our pets then…

What we do on a holiday

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 12:26:00 +0000

I got lots of stuff done on my “day off” yesterday due to the Liberian Independence Day. The threat of unrest on a national holiday meant that we were confined to the compound all day while the staff had the day off. Even though I had a day off to catch up, I had a really hectic morning with a thousand little problems to solve. The most embarrassing one is that we ran out of rice for the hospital. Last week we ran out of tea, which was a big crisis because the staff is so touchy about missing a tea break. Running out of rice and tea were basically both squarely my fault, but each time they were easy to fix, and I’m confident that we’ve got things set up right for August.

A little excitement

Sun, 23 Jul 2006 15:57:00 +0000

I sat down to do my Sunday blog posting at about 10 pm but was immediately interrupted by our night watchman. He came to me to tell me that the hospital staff had an UNMIL (UN Mission in Liberia) vehicle there asking MSF staff to go with them out into the night to fetch an injured patient from the site of a motorcycle accident halfway to Tappita. I knew we probably couldn’t do it, because it breaks several rules (staff don’t leave the hospital to treat patients, we don’t travel at night, and we don’t ride in UNMIL vehicles), but I went and got a second opinion from the field coordinator, who is the most senior person on site. She agreed, so I had to give the hospital alternative instructions: give UNMIL dressings for one patient and instructions on how to stabilize them and transport them. I also got the guards on the radio and reminded them of their responsibilities with respect to UNMIL, which is that their vehicles must stay outside the hospital gates, no matter how insistent the driver or how urgent the situation seems. MSF staff may go out and carry in any patient that UNMIL drops off (no questions asked; it could be a soldier, as long as he’s unarmed). The watchmen know the drill, but emergencies get people excited, and sometimes people forget rules. I figured it was better for the voice of reason to remind them of the rules than to have someone make a bad decision and then have people talking tomorrow about how the new log lets UNMIL come in the hospital.

A day in the life of a log

Sun, 16 Jul 2006 05:16:18 +0000

I figured I should give people an idea what exactly a logistician does. The glib answer is that we do everything the medical team either cannot or do not want to do. But actually in this project, at this time, it is a combination of upper management (meetings and signatures on slips of paper) and construction planning and management.

I get up each work day at 6:45 am. I spend 15 minutes or so getting awake, and then I meet my assistant and chat about how the day is going to go. The drivers are arriving at 7 am and getting their vehicles ready. Sometimes they arrive late, so they are put away dirty, so there are people washing cars, checking oil and other fluids, etc. The stock keeper, who is responsible for the fuel store, is fueling vehicles. Once I have a general idea that things are going according to plan and which vehicles will be ready to work that day, I head in to share breakfast with the team.

My first week in Nimba

Sun, 09 Jul 2006 06:14:14 +0000

Well, I survived my first week as the log/admin for the Nimba project!

The big event this week was me taking over financial responsibility for the safes and all the cash in the project. At the same time, I also helped close the books for June. We had a troublesome 281 USD to track down, but thanks to my training in Geneva, which happened to cover the precise tricky bit accounting we were having trouble with, I got it fixed. Of course, the majority of the work to prepare for closing the books was done by my assistant, Mr. Toe. He brings me the books ready to go, and I review them. He tried his hardest to get them to balance, but this time it was up to me to find the remaining errors.

Made it to Nimba County

Sun, 02 Jul 2006 01:23:05 +0000

On Friday, Jerome and I made the drive up to Nimba County. We took 2 patients, their 2 caregivers, and a baby. In Africa, hospitals budget for two people for every admitted patient. The second person is a caregiver, who is responsible for feeding and washing the patient. This doubles the amount of logistical needs related to patients (food, transport, etc) but it dramatically reduces the per-patient workload of the skilled nursing labor, which means the few nurses the countries have go farther. But the downside is that the families are more profoundly disrupted by someone going to the hospital, since typically the wife/mother is the caregiver. That means the older children at home have to do the work their mom was doing (gathering firewood, farming, doing the laundry) which may mean they leave school temporarily. So you can see that the ripple effects go out and out when MSF decides to admit a patient.

Heading out to Nimba

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 02:39:11 +0000

Today Jerome (outreach nurse in the Nimba project) and I are heading out to Nimba. The roads are in good shape, so it is only a 6 hour drive. We drive halfway and meet a car coming from the other direction. We transfer ourselves, our two patients, their two caregivers, and our cargo over to the other Land Cruiser. Then each car returns to it’s own base. That way each base only loses a vehicle for one day, instead of one base losing a vehicle for two days and one night.

My first few days in Monrovia

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 11:58:01 +0000

Hey, just a quick update to let you all know I got to Monrovia safely.

Arriving in Roberts International Airport was an interesting experience. First, the runway could use a paving job, so while the landing was perfect the deceleration part of the flight was a bit hair-raising, even for someone like me who doesn’t worry much about flying. Then as we taxied off the runway and almost immediately came to a stop, we passed about a million UN planes. They really gave me the “we’re not in Kansas, Toto” feeling! Getting through passport control and customs was very easy, but then all my baggage had MSF logos on it, and I was wearing my MSF t-shirt. I’m told it helps immensely with customs.

Got to Monrovia

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 01:43:54 +0000

Just a quick update to let you all know that I have arrived safely in Monrovia. We rode in from the airport last night in an MSF Land Cruiser through an evening rainstorm. The weather here is comfortable… it is quite hot and humid, but not as bad as Mississippi or Guatemala was. The tropical rainstorms are strong, warm, and short, so they are easy to deal with. My room is comfortable, with a nice mosquito net and screens on the windows.

This one goes out to all the proud moms out there...

Sat, 24 Jun 2006 03:57:07 +0000

(Click for a huge version suitable for printing and fridge posting.)

Wrapping things up here in Geneva. I’m staying the night with Sima and Steve, and they are dropping me off at the airport tomorrow morning at 7 am. I fly through Brussels, Dakar, and then I arrive at Roberts Field outside of Monrovia about 6 pm.

I’ll send an update from MSF’s office in Monrovia in the next couple of days.

Life in Geneva - La vie genevois

Thu, 22 Jun 2006 02:02:51 +0000

I am currently in Geneva for my briefings. I’ve been having fun in the evenings with friends from the old days at Bunyip in Montreal, Steve and Sima. During the day, I go around meeting people and getting verbal briefings, and doing self-study with various materials. Yesterday my biggest problem was that I was overwhelmed with reference material and couldn’t figure out what to look at.

So far I’ve had a “general advice” briefing from Kath in New York, a meeting with the PR guys in New York (they are getting these updates; Hi Michelle and Michael!), a meeting about the political and program context in West Africa, a meeting about the purchasing system, and a briefing on how the IT and communications stuff works. My temporary office is in the logistics department, so I’m learning from them by osmosis, but I still need to make time to talk to some of the subject matter experts in detail, like how to maintain Nimba’s water system, what to know about the generators in use in Liberia, and how to maintain the fleet of vehicles.

What I've been up to

Sat, 17 Jun 2006 15:36:07 +0000

During the last two weeks I’ve been pretty busy. I worked for a week at International Medical Corps in Santa Monica. During that time I spent a lot of time with a new mentor, Jon Thompson. He and his wife have worked in Liberia, and it was partly them that gave me the confidence to accept the posting with MSF.

At the end of the week I visited old college friends in Los Angeles, then I drove back up to Redwood City (6 hours). I spent the afternoon and evening doing errands. The next day I drove to Roseburg (9 hours). I visited with family there. Mom made a great combination congratulations and bon voyage meal. The next morning I drove to Portland and commenced work on the Humaninet Simulation Day event.

Off I go to Liberia

Thu, 08 Jun 2006 03:06:24 +0000

I got my posting! And so the real adventure begins… the rest of this has just been academic.

I’ll be working as a “log-admin” in an MSF-Switzerland project based on Saclepea, Nimba County, Liberia. The log part of my job is making sure things go smoothly so the programs keep running. The admin part of my job will be to handle paying salaries and keeping the books. My contract is for six months.

Where's Jeff?

Sun, 04 Jun 2006 23:23:33 +0000

Sorry I haven’t sent out an update in a while. I’ve been visiting family and doing paperwork to get in the MSF system. I got my medical clearance from my doctor, extra eye glasses, etc.

Kat the Dog and I traveled up to Oregon to see my parents and grandparents. A consulting job back in the Silicon Valley fell through, so Kat and I continued north to Seattle where we helped prepare my step-brother’s house to be sold. Good thing too, because he bought a new house while we were there!

I'm an MSF volunteer now!

Mon, 01 May 2006 18:52:17 +0000

I got the letter from MSF in New York today, and I have been entered into their pool of available volunteers! This is what I’ve been working towards for over a year, and I’m really happy! As well as the good kind of scared you get when ambitious tasks present themselves to you!

The next step is an orientation in New York City, and the process of finding the right first posting for me. I’ll learn more about that process in the coming week, probably. Because the final decision on deploying me is out of their hands, the New York office can’t really guess when I’ll be deployed. However, the fact that I have very few limitations on the timeframe or location of my posting means I’ll be considered for more postings than some other first timers will be.

Visited Countries

Mon, 24 Apr 2006 10:21:40 +0000

World66 is a nifty website, kind of a cross between Wikipedia and Lonely Planet. But the coolest thing they have is a map generator showing which countries you’ve visited:

My interview with MSF

Wed, 12 Apr 2006 23:55:58 +0000

Today I had my interview with MSF. It went pretty well, I think. I was well prepared, both for the interview and for the multiple choice test they give logisticians. In the interview I got a number of chances to explain how I think my past experiences will help me do the job. Molly asked me how I’d deal with the inevitable problems of close team living, and I had an answer that I think pleased her.

Woofer for hire!

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 21:24:36 +0000

Just in time for my upcoming MSF interview, I’ve finished my WFR (pronounced “woofer”) certification. I don’t know if my interviewer will ask about first aid skills, but I can guarantee you that I’ll find a way to tell her! I’m really proud of this certification, not just because of the skills it gives me in case I need to provide emergency care for a colleague someplace remote, but because it shows I have taken the initiative to continue preparing myself for my chosen career. You wouldn’t think, while working with doctors and nurses, that you’d need to know medicine, but Jon told me a story from his MSF days that made me decide to get the WFR training. He found himself in a situation where he was the best hope half a dozen meningitis patients had to survive the next 24 hours… as he said, “it’s not supposed to work that way, but sometimes it does”.

Wilderness First Responder in the making

Sun, 26 Mar 2006 23:01:02 +0000

I haven’t posted in a while. I’ve been hanging around the Bay Area. I did a contract for my old boss at his new employer, and some other random undirected hanging out I can’t really remember. Oh, I think it involved postponing writing code by taking the dog to the dog park. I’ve also been working on the unread books from my bibliography, including some new ones I found. One is really gripping; it is a memoir of a Canadian nurse who worked for MSF for four years. So much of what she says is familiar to me after all my reading.

Got an MSF interview!

Sun, 12 Mar 2006 11:49:52 +0000

Some great news on the relief work job hunt: I got a phone call from MSF USA the other day to set up an interview. It will be on April 12, here in San Francisco. The nice lady from MSF told me that what made the difference were recommendations I got from ex-MSF volunteers. Thanks Jon and Amy!

A humanitarian aid bibliography

Thu, 09 Mar 2006 00:26:38 +0000

Here’s a list of the books I’ve been reading over the last year and a half as I figure out how the relief world works.

Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures. A sometimes funny, sometimes scathing, sometimes touching story of three aid workers working in the UN system in the 90’s. Will not leave a good taste in your mouth for the UN, or in fact, for some of the characters. But they get points for honesty, I guess.
Triage, a well written novella about a terrible story of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder)
The Man Who Tried to Save the World: The dangerous life and mysterious disappearence of Fred Cuny. An profile of a legendary aid worker, and of his mysterious death in Chechnya. This book made me strike Chechnya from the places I would accept a job. (Well, the book and the fact I don’t even read Cyrillic, so I’d be useless there.)
A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis. A careful look at mistakes made and how to move forward. Pays special attention to the problem of the “humanitarian-military complex”.
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. The best book to understand the genocide in Rwanda. Nothing good comes of reading this book, you just feel sad and empty. Perhaps the only good that can come from it is educating people so that it never happens again. But clearly that’s not happening, since it’s happening right now, again, in Sudan.
Another Day in Paradise: International Humanitarian Workers Tell Their Stories. Does a really good job of letting aid workers speak in their own words about their motivations. Understanding your own motivation is key to being effective, I’m told. Hint: “I just want to help” isn’t going to get you through the hard days.
Engineering in Emergencies : A Practical Guide for Relief Workers. Volumes of information in a form even gung-ho IT guys can use when the real engineers aren’t around.
Transitional Settlement: Displaced Populations. The overall philosophy of this book is deeply humane, and reflects a quarter century of aid agencies completely screwing up. In addition to making the case for reform in the understanding of migrating people’s needs, it also has really cool sample layouts for refugee camps and the various other types of camps you may be called on to set up.
Condemned to Repeat?: The Paradox of Humanitarian Action. Haven’t started this one yet.
The Humanitarian Companion. Nuts and bolts things to know, checklists, etc. I haven’t read too much of it yet, but the chapter on preparing to deploy was really interesting.
Cause Celeb. From the author of Bridget Jones’s Diary. Essentially a trashy book for British women to read in the tube on the way to work, except the portrayal of aid worker life and frustrations seems to be very well researched and accurate. The earliest known reference to the MMM theory of aid worker motivations.
Hope In Hell: Inside The World Of Doctors Without Borders. The latest book on MSF. Gives a very good overview of the organization, where it came from, and how it thinks. But if you really want to know the dirt, you have to talk to a returned volunteer. And let me tell you, do you hear dirt… :)
The Selfish Altruist. A critique of non-self-aware decision-making by aid agencies, from an experienced and passionate aid worker. His point is we have built in biases, and not paying attention to them results in wrong decisions.
A good New Yorker article on life in Chad.

Books I’ve been meaning to get and study, but haven’t yet:

The Onion knows why I want to work overseas

Wed, 08 Mar 2006 22:55:44 +0000

The highly respected journal of international development and humanitarian aid, The Onion, has a fascinating article on relief worker motivations.

Wink, wink.

Update: MSF’s own website backs up the Onion’s claims. Check out the contents of the life support kit for 8 staff members (KADMKLIF08). Yeah, there on the third page… CONDOM, lubricated + RESERVOIR (quantity 144!). Yeah baby… queue porn music (played on African instruments).

How my talk went

Wed, 08 Mar 2006 10:50:25 +0000

My talk on Monday went just fine. It was fun to see people that I’d met in Hancock County again, and the hard work I’d put in to the supporting documentation paid off. I saw several people reading my report.

One interesting thing was that though everyone was dressed in suits to show proper respect for the proceedings, some people were “suits”, and some people were just “in suits”. There were a whole lot of vendors there with their hands out trying to sell something. Everyone could tell within the first few words our of their mouth. What kept it interesting was that both on the panel, and of the invited speakers, there was at least 30%, maybe more, who were just “in suits”. They were people like me who had real-world experience, didn’t care for meetings, or having their time wasted, or getting sales pitches. They were there to make things better, and they didn’t have a lot of patience with people who weren’t there for the same reason. Very inspiring.

Giving my talk today

Mon, 06 Mar 2006 07:58:19 +0000

I’m in Jackson, Mississippi today giving my talk on the work Radio Response did in Hancock County. I’ve been burning the midnight oil the last few days getting the following documents ready:

The Little Talk (100 kilobyte PDF file)
The Big Report (2.2 megabyte PDF file)

If you find a typo, please don’t tell me until next week! I know about the repeated picture, which I’ll fix in the next version.

Mr. Allen goes to Washington (well, Jackson)

Fri, 24 Feb 2006 19:13:56 +0000

I have been invited to give a 10 minute talk about our team’s work in Hancock County, Mississippi in front of the FCC Independent Panel Reviewing the Impact of Hurricane Katrina on Communications Networks. My talk will be in the afternoon of March 6, in Jackson Mississippi.

Feel free to drop by if you are in the neighborhood and give me some moral support!

My report on my work after Hurricane Katrina

Fri, 24 Feb 2006 01:46:25 +0000

I finally got my report done on the lessons I learned while working for Radio Response after Hurricane Katrina.

Hopefully it will be useful to anyone contemplating starting a group to do work like this.

Screened out

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 22:57:20 +0000

I got a letter from MSF today informing me that they have reviewed my application and I won’t be getting an interview, and won’t be working for them any time soon.

I’m disappointed, but not deterred. This simply means I can’t get off easy and fill in only one application, as I was hoping to do. I now have a huge amount of work in front of me as I research other organizations and chose some to apply to.

Loneliness

Sat, 14 Jan 2006 16:42:15 +0000

A development worker in Kabul made an interesting post today. The final paragraph was the most insightful, I thought. And a little bit scary for what it will be like.

When I started telling people what my goal is, I was afraid they’d think I lost my mind. Instead, almost without exception I get good feedback about what I’ve set about to do. The other day a woman I really like told me, “We’re all really proud of you.” Which made me feel really good, and made me confident I was on the right track, and I need to keep my eye on the prize and land my first job.

Google Video hacking

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 20:56:18 +0000

I decided to look into Google Video a bit, now that they are selling stuff.

First things first, I looked into how the Google Video Player works for free files. (I’m a cheapskate.) It’s Google Engineering at it’s finest; the simplest thing that will work, and no simpler. When you click to see a movie in the Google Video Player, you download a tiny text file (with file extension GVP). That causes the Google Video Player to launch. It reads the file and starts to download the video via HTTP, just like the Flash player is doing in the web browser. The GVP file is just a text file, so you can open it and find the URL. If you fetch the URL yourself with wget (i.e. no cookies, no javascript, etc) you get a big binary stream. The content-type claims that it is “video/x-msvideo”, but it does not play in Windows Media Player.

GPS satellites are spy satellites too

Tue, 03 Jan 2006 14:21:47 +0000

I ran across this intriguing sentence in a GAO report on Los Alamos National Labs:

LANL fabricates suites of sensors for Global Positioning System satellites that are used to monitor nuclear detonations.

Interesting. Wonder what else GPS satellites do…

...and to all a good night

Sun, 25 Dec 2005 00:10:56 +0000

I’ve just (barely) beaten my self-imposed deadline of “before Christmas” for turning in my MSF application. They say that I should hear back from them in 3 or 4 weeks. The next step would be an interview. Don’t know how soon it would happen.

I haven’t sent out an update in a while, so here’s where I am… I am visiting my parents in Roseburg, Oregon. While house-sitting in Redwood City during December, I worked a week and a half as a consultant. I also refinished the bathroom of the place I was staying. (Here’s where it gets complicated: it was actually the bathroom in a building I partly own, but I was there as a housesitter, not an owner. Get it?) I couldn’t mention in my updates that I have been refinishing a bathroom, because it was a surprise gift for Karl (my fellow owner).

The real reason to do humanitarian aid work

Fri, 16 Dec 2005 15:38:06 +0000

Guys, here’s the real reason to do humanitarian aid work.

Ladies, fear not, I’m on my way, as soon as I get around to putting my MSF application in, and they realize I’m the perfect candidate…

Cyberpunked Dog

Sun, 11 Dec 2005 16:41:08 +0000

Today in addition to getting her shots, Kat got microchipped. I’m a little jealous; I figured my criminally invasive government or one of my evil employers would have chipped me before a pet I owned got it done.

Anyway, in case you care (or happen to be searching the Internet for Kat’s number because you’ve found her), Kat’s number is 467B7B4F03.

Kat the Dog: Cuter on video

Thu, 08 Dec 2005 19:00:03 +0000

Last night I made a video out of the random video clips I’d gathered with my and other people’s digital cameras. Instead of emailing the 45 megabyte movie to y’all (Bad Idea), I put the video on Google Video (Good Idea). The other nice thing is that instead of being in the stupid Windows-only movie format that Windows Movie Maker gave me (Bad Idea), Google translates it into a format that virtually any web browser can use (Good Idea).

Feature wish

Thu, 08 Dec 2005 03:28:05 +0000

I want a Firefox extension that lets me select some text on a webpage, right click, and get that HTML in a box to edit. Once I edit it, I want the extension to compute the diff between my edited copy and the copy in the web page, find an address to send it to the author of the page via e-mail, and send the diff to them. To find the e-mail address, it will look in the HTML for a hint via some standard HTML or some semi-standard HTML dealie that it defines itself. If it doesn’t find the e-mail address that way, then maybe something like trying to send e-mail to the technical contact for the domain name, according to Whois. Or maybe just “webmaster@$domain”.

I love the IRS

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 19:46:15 +0000

I like the IRS. I’ve never really minded paying taxes, and though I have some complaints with the complexity of our tax code, I know that’s not the IRS’s fault. They do the best they can with the mess given to them each year by congress. I think the way the IRS does e-filing is stupid, but I suspect it’s one of those things that simply can’t be any better than it is, for a bunch of reasons out of control of the reasonable people at the IRS. (There are unreasonable people everywhere, even at the IRS.)

Google WiFi

Tue, 29 Nov 2005 03:57:16 +0000

Info on Google’s proposal to the City of Mountain View to put in a WiFi network is publically available (490K PDF).

There are some interesting things:

It will be using mesh technology. There will be about 400 mesh nodes, and 3 uplinks to the Internet (which Google says will use fiber, as though the media really matters).
The system will use a captive portal, requiring you to log in. The username and password will be a Google account (i.e. the same one as Gtalk, Gmail, customized homepage, etc.) The tinfoil-hat crowd will point out that this will allow Google to snoop all your packets and associate them will all of your e-mail and your chat logs.
The installs will be on city-owned light poles. Parts of Mountain View will not get service immediately because their light poles are owned by PGE and Google and the city have to negotiate with PGE more. Don’t hold your breath on this, folks. PGE’s probably got some powerline Internet thing it wants to do instead.
The equipment taps power to the light poles, and as such is unmetered. Google will pay $36 per pole per year for power. That’s $0.0041 per hour. If electricity costs the city 4 cents per kilowatt hour, that means the devices use 100 watts of power. Seems like a fair price.
There is no mention of solar power or battery backup, which means that this system will be useless for disaster response. Also, because the equipment taps the utility power for the lights, it will not be possible to use generator power to fix some portion of the mesh. Finally, if street light circuits were de-prioritized for repair by the power company during an emergency (as seems likely), the Google wifi mesh would come back slower than other networking technologies.
There is talk of running a VLAN over the network in the future for city services use. It is not going to be in 1.0. The security aspects of having city services data running over a wireless mesh would need to be thought about. I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, but it’s a sizable liability for Google to take on.
There are grainy, useless pictures of the proposed hardware. No surprise, it looks like commodity stuff. Google’s value-add will be in software.
There is no discussion of how the boxes will get installed. I suspect Google will contract that job out to someone with a fleet of boom trucks. Perhaps they will have Peek do it, who you see around town fixing traffic lights.

This project is significant for more than the normal “Telcos Battle Municipal Wifi” reason. This is going to be a real mesh network. Mesh networking is one of those urban legends among networking people. Everyone says that they are nifty, but no one has ever seen one work. Perhaps Google will nail this like they have so many other things.

Google Local for Mobiles

Sun, 27 Nov 2005 01:58:57 +0000

If you have a phone that can download Java games, and you know how to make it go visit URL’s outside the walled garden your provider desperately wants to keep you locked inside, you can go to this URL: http://google.com/glm to get Google Local for Mobiles.

It will let you do everything that Google Maps can do on your phone. including satellite images! With my tiny screen, it’s probably mostly a geewhiz thing. With a hiptop it would be pretty neat, I bet.

Back at home

Sun, 20 Nov 2005 20:01:47 +0000

I got back home to Redwood City on Friday. The drive was uneventful. The puppy dog seemed a little sad to leave Roseburg, where Mom had made a comfortable home for Kat, and had spoiled her rotten. But after a bit, she got back in the swing of being a traveling dog, and settled down in her crate in the car. When we arrived at my house on Arch Street, I excitedly told Kat that we were home and showed her around. She seemed scared and uncomfortable… afterall, this was just another place I was dumping her and (in her eyes) threatening to leave her again. After I set up a comfortable little temporary pen for her in the garage, she settled down a bit. We took a nice walk around the neighborhood yesterday and she liked that a lot. Everyone who saw her stopped to say hi. Everyone loves a puppy!

My first nephew

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 03:25:16 +0000

I just arrived in Roseburg for a few days with family. We just drove down from Seattle, where the whole family was present for the first day of my newphew’s life on earth. Pretty neat seeing a baby less than one day old.

Here I am being cute with him. His name is Keiden William Bagley. He was 20 inches long and weighed 7 pounds 3 ounces.

It was fun watching all the adults turn in blubbering idiots while holding Keiden. I was, of course, not immune to his effects.

Kat the Dog

Sat, 05 Nov 2005 18:01:55 +0000

Here’s a couple pictures of Kat, the dog I brought home from Mobile, AL. Her full name is Katrina, but she goes by Kat. She’s perhaps 10 weeks old now, meaning that she was born about the time of Hurricane Katrina. She was abandoned in a hotel room in Mobile. I encountered her while taking a rather random walk in Mobile with Angela. I decided she’d be good company on the drive to Oregon. (She = the dog, but as it turns out, Angela made good company too!) In Oregon, I expected to find her a home by writing an article for the hometown paper. On the drive across, I fell in love with Kat, so she’s found a home a little closer to home than I expected.

Hello from Moab

Wed, 02 Nov 2005 06:50:30 +0000

I am on my way home across country. I’ve picked up a couple of traveling companions, Angela and Kat. Angela is a girl from Alaska with family in Oregon. Kat is a puppy. Yes, it’s a dog named Kat. (See below for more on Kat).

We left Saturday, going to Mobile AL to drop off Angela’s car. We spent the night in Rayville, LA with Sharon Dearman (wife of Mac, my boss at Radio Response). The next morning we drove to Dallas, and saw Cliff McCarthy there for a late lunch. After that we tried hard to get out of Texas in a day, but predictably failed: no one escapes Texas in a day. (But I’m happy to report, the puppy did choose to poop on Teaxs, which delighted me.)

Seen in the newsletters sent out daily by the Emergency Operations Center

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 21:02:37 +0000

Another snippet from the other side of the looking glass:

If you need to have a car that you own towed from your property, contact your insurance company.

If you need to have a car that you don’t own towed from your property, contact a local towing company.

If you need to have a house that you don’t own removed from your property, contact the Army Corps of Engineers.

Such is the power of 30 feet of salt water driven by a storm 300 miles wide.

Late night thoughts

Mon, 17 Oct 2005 23:02:21 +0000

This afternoon and into the evening I was working on the Waveland water tower. (Yes, on the water tower, 100 feet up.) We put in a long day of debugging in the lab before we went, then working on the tower when we got into the field to install the equipment. So when we got off the tower, I was looking forward to dinner. We’d worked too late for dinner at Waveland Cafe, and Don had already declared tonight Pizza Night. We’d noticed that the pizzaria had won the “first restaurant to reopen” contest, and were looking forward to spending a little money in Hancock County. Turns out, it is a lunch place that closes at 4pm, so we missed dinner there. We came back to the completely remodeled Sonic drive-in (complete with girls on skates!) and had dinner. I ordered a large Coke, which might explain why I’m wired and not asleep right now.

Live from New Waveland Cafe!

Fri, 14 Oct 2005 17:21:21 +0000

We are streaming live music from the New Waveland Cafe over the Radio Response network:

Live from the New Waveland Cafe: Wailin’ Wally and the Killa Sharks (The Last Band Standing in Waveland)

Tune in! (Until 8 or 9 pm, CST).

Nearing the end of a long week

Tue, 11 Oct 2005 23:11:11 +0000

I’m nearing the “end” of a long week here. I put “end” in quotes, because despite my best intentions, my “weekends” (one day breaks) seem to be separated by increasingly long “weeks” (my last break was last Monday, so I’m only a day late this time, assuming I manage to get away tomorrow, which seems unlikely).

Talking about breaks like this sometimes feels indulgent, but when I got here I could see that the project needed some continuity. Since I was in a position to offer some, I decided to take care of myself so as to be able to provide a lot of energy over a long time.

Tragedy in Santiago Atitlan

Mon, 10 Oct 2005 20:49:06 +0000

This just in from my friend and coworker in San Pedro la Laguna:

Mis queridos amigos, queria mandarles algunas fotos acerca de la tragedia ocurrida con el huracan stan, fue muy duro mas para el pueblo de san pedro la laguna, pero tambien fue un reto para mucha gente de poder ayudar, barrio con todo un canton en santigo Atitlan, el canton panabaj,no me hubiera gustado ir pero la necesidad de ayudar y tomar evidencia de todo fue lo que me empujo a hacer todo eso. En san pedro gracias a Dios todo esta bien, excepto los 6 dias de luz, el telefono que no tuvimos y el agua potable que nos hizo falta, ahora que tenemos luz, todo poco a poco se esta volviendo a la normalidad, Saludos a todos y que Dios les bendiga y gracias por sus preocupaciones.

New York Times on our work here

Wed, 05 Oct 2005 09:01:27 +0000

The New York Times wrote about us. I’m in the picture!

Frustrating couple of days

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 06:03:15 +0000

The last few days have been the kind of frustrating IT days you can have anywhere. It’s just that here I’m sleeping in a classroom, showering in a portable shower unit, and eating wilderness fireman food in between the continual IT hassles.

As has been observed countless times through history, this job would be OK if it weren’t for the customers. They have this expectation that things will work, and when they don’t they come find us and ask us to stop everything and fix our network. Of course, usually we have already noticed that things are broken, and have already stopped everything to work on the broken stuff instead of the new projects we were hoping to get done.

Life in the EOC

Wed, 21 Sep 2005 21:56:45 +0000

First, be sure to read the Radio Response website. I am the primary author there, so reading that is as good as reading this. Except there I have to be a bit more professional and circumspect.

A few days ago I moved to Bay St. Louis. The work was really heating up down here for IT generalists (as they charitably call people who aren’t allowed on towers…). The cynic would also point out that once the Bay St. Louis team’s lodgings were upgraded to include air conditioning I consented to go to Bay St. Louis.

Superfast update

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 08:41:27 +0000

Super-fast update, since I am in the middle of stuff here, but also realized I haven’t written in a while.

I have visited Bay St. Louis. The destruction there is incredible. I have not seen the water front, just the wind and flood damage several hundred yards inland. Our team is kicking butt here, but it just takes so much longer to get things done than you can possibly imagine. It’s frustrating, but we won’t give up. It’s no one’s fault. We are now tied into the systems here so that we are no longer being actively prevented from working by the authorities. Now it’s simply a complex situation, and you have to work around problems one at a time.

First full day

Fri, 16 Sep 2005 06:06:29 +0000

Yesterday, I worked my first full day. So I’ve been at work 1.5 days. In that time, two new people have come in. I made a minimal system to get people up and running, and tried it out on the next two after me. I suspect that as I start working in the field it wil fall by the wayside, but at lesat two people know what new people should get told.

Day 1

Thu, 15 Sep 2005 06:58:13 +0000

My first day was half a day because I got here and got put to work after noon. I spent the first while getting the lay of the land, the people, etc. The Bay St. Louis team was getting loaded up to head south, so there was some work to do there. Once they left it calmed down quite a bit.

I identified two needs and a guy named Alecs and I self-organized into a little team to chip away at them. We need a single public website, and also a single internal place for a couple web apps people have thrown together with Ruby on Rails. We could also use a better “new volunteer arrives and gets to work” process. So those are the things I am working on.

Arrived in Ponchatoula

Wed, 14 Sep 2005 13:22:47 +0000

I arrived in Ponchatoula a little while ago. I can tell I am going to like working with these guys. The trick now is to find a job and start doing it. I think perhaps I will start the same way I did in Guatemala, by drawing a network diagram of the staging area here so that I know how things work (and so that the next guy knows too).

With Cliff in Dallas

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 23:36:55 +0000

I dropped in on Cliff McCarthy in Dallas for the night. Cliff and I enjoyed dinner and chatting, then a big shopping trip at Walmart. Came in way under budget on food and water, so either I am going to starve, or I was being pessimistic when I budgeted. Cliff reminded me that not only is everything bigger in Texas, but everything is cheaper too. Which might explain why every one in Texas is bigger too!

Flagstaff

Mon, 12 Sep 2005 20:32:45 +0000

I am in Flagstaff right now. I will have dinner here, then hit the road to get another hour of progress eastward then bed down for the night. I will hit the road again at dawn.

Random data from the road: gas in Bakersfield was 3.35. The higest I saw was 3.65, on the border with CA and AZ. On the AZ side of the border the gas was $2.99. It is inconceiveable to me that within 10 miles the price changed by 66 cents!

Leaving Redwod City

Mon, 12 Sep 2005 07:01:04 +0000

Leaving Redwood City about 7:15 am. Next stop, Albuquerque.

Change of Plans, again

Sun, 11 Sep 2005 10:39:06 +0000

I’ve gotten in touch with some great guys who are installing WiFi in shelters in Louisiana, and have decided to make a trip out there in my car to work with them.

Being outside the Palo Alto area will likely disrupt my attempts to get placed with Red Cross, so I plan to drop by the Red Cross office today and have them stop my application from going onwards. When I check in to the farm where I will be staying in LA, I will also check in with the Red Cross there and let them know that if/when it makes sense for me to transition from tech work to shelter work, I’m ready to do so.

Football in Guatemala, Now Back in California

Sat, 10 Sep 2005 02:10:56 +0000

I am back home in California. I had a safe and comfortable trip from San Pedro to Guatemala City, then on to San Francisco by three American Airlines flights stopping in Dallas and Los Angeles.

In Guatemala City, I got to go with Ben, his girlfriend and her brother to the World Cup qualifying game between Guatemala and USA. Ben and Maria had a Guatemala jersey for me to borrow, so that I wouldn’t stand out too much as a gringo and get us all killed. They also asked me several times pointedly who I was going to be rooting for. (I assured them Guatemala!) The reason for their concern is that they had bought preferred tickets for the Guatemala section. The stadium is laid out into several sections. The cheap seats are on each end. They go for Q50. Our section was on the sidelines on the far side from the sky boxes and the TV cameras. We paid Q150 ($20) for our seats. There was a tiny section devoted to the visiting team’s fans (in this case, about 35 ex-pat Americans, flags waving proudly). All of the sections had huge barbed-wire fences bordering them. The visiting team section also had a line of guards protecting it on each side. Also, there was a huge fence with several layers of barbed wire and concertina wire between the stands and the game. You actually watch the game through chain link fence. There were security guards with riot shields on the edge of the field. There were emergency exits out of the chain link cages we were in but they were chained closed. There was a fireman stationed at every exit who’s job was to stand holding the release device on the chain for the entire night.

What is the price of security?

Sat, 03 Sep 2005 17:55:19 +0000

Sounds like a really deep question, right?

But in this case, it was esay. With help from my parents and grandparents, I traded in my complicated itinerary home for a simple e-ticket on American Airlines from Guatemala City to San Francisco.

The old itinerary involved a too-expensive flight from Guatemala to Cancun, or a really long bus ride, followed by traveling standby out of Cancun. The new itinerary has all the random earth-bound connections taken out, and replaces them with a boring old two-stop flight directly to SFO via Dallas and Los Angeles. And it didn’t exactly break the bank, because I told a teensy weenie lie to American Airlines and told them I was sure I could fly back to Guatemala City on Oct 8. We’ll see if I am really in a position to keep that promise to them.

Katrina Gives me a Change of Plans

Thu, 01 Sep 2005 14:23:10 +0000

Over this year, some people have asked me, “Why do you seek to work for an international organization when there are so many problems that need to be solved inside the US?” It is a good question, and until Hurricane Katrina, my answer was, “I choose to work overseas because the US has enough good people, who can’t leave their families and work overseas, and who time and again give their time inside the US.”

Boring Rice

Tue, 23 Aug 2005 13:16:54 +0000

Just a quick blog entry so that I don’t forget to write down something funny that happened the other day…

At home, I was served a dish which was very close to risotto, one of my favorite dishes of all time. I commented on it to Gladys, but she said, “No, it is just chicken and rice.” I then explained that in the US (and Italy, where it comes from) we use a kind of rice called aborrio rice ( arroz aborrio) to make risotto. She chuckled and said, “You use boring rice?” ( Â¿Usan arroz aburrido?)

Busco un mecÃ¡nico de motores dieseles

Mon, 22 Aug 2005 15:32:41 +0000

Hoy he tratado una vez mas de encontrar un mecÃ¡nico de motores dieseles. Quiero aprender las cosas principales que necesito aprobar antes llamo un mecÃ¡nico verdadero, y las cosas que puedo reparar facÃlmente con solamente mis manos y mente. Cuando navigaba en Wonderland, leÃa los libros sobre motores de mar, pero todavÃa necesito escuchar a un maestro y ver un motor verdadero. Varios veces preguntaba a personas como mis compaÃ±eros de trabajo y mi familia donde puedo encontrar un mecÃ¡nico, pero todos no sabÃan.

The Last Chapter on Airtech

Mon, 22 Aug 2005 10:36:01 +0000

I flew to Cancun using Airtech for just $250 round trip. What a deal! The only thing you have to do to get such a good price is not have any fixed plans and be willing to put up with slightly bizarre customer service.

Today, I got this email from the President of AirTech. I asked him if I could post it because it seems to provide a fitting close to the story of my AirTech customer experience. He gladly gave his permission, and commented that one of the nice things about owning your own company is that it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. Indeed!

Robbed in Santiago Atitlan

Mon, 22 Aug 2005 09:56:02 +0000

Well, it had to happen sooner or later. The good news is I didn’t get hurt, and they didn’t get very much from me.

I went for a day trip to Santiago Atitlan yesterday. It is an easy trip; you just take the boat over and back. I was only planning on walking around town, seeing the market, having lunch, and coming home, so I didn’t take much with me, not even my backpack. Just my camera in one pocket, and my wallet in the other.

Big News in the Family

Mon, 22 Aug 2005 09:03:09 +0000

This weekend one of Paulina’s daughters (Paulina is mi abuela or grandmother, here) flew to Canada for a 4 month internship. She will be working with a program in Saskatchewan that provides services to rural communities. She’s pretty good at English (about as good as I am at Spanish, I guess), but she’ll be getting quite a lot more practice in Canada, that’s for sure! She will be in Vancouver the first week for some kind of orientation, then she will move to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan for the duration of her visit.

It's a small Internet

Mon, 15 Aug 2005 11:10:40 +0000

An ex-coworker made an interesting survey of HTTP headers. During which he found my own comments on apparent typos in HTTP headers.

Hi Andrew! It’s good to see you are still hacking!

Proof!

Mon, 15 Aug 2005 09:13:48 +0000

Upon re-reading my own words, not even I could believe myself. How could the showers possibly be that scary? So I decided I should show you:

I talked to a tall guy from Australia, who says that he gets shocks all the time, because he’s up so much closer to the showerhead. I don’t know whether this is typical Aussie bluster, or if it’s true. I can only be thankful that I am much closer to the average (tall) Guatemalan’s size.

A day in my life in San Pedro

Fri, 12 Aug 2005 19:26:26 +0000

I’ve been working here in San Pedro for two weeks now, and I owe people an update on what I’m up to here.

The first week, I slept in a hotel and ate at the house of my coworker’s parents. I was going to move in with them when they got a bed for their spare room, but they couldn’t find a convenient one to borrow or buy. So, after a week in the hotel, I found the family I lived with before at the top of the hill and asked them for a room. They were delighted to have me back with them.

Un Entierro Guatemalteco

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 16:07:51 +0000

Jarachik, one of the restaurants/hotels in town is owned by a father and son team from Holland. This week Hank, the father, died of heart failure. It was a big shock to such a little community, and he will be missed. His son has a good support network here, so hopefully he will find the strength to get sorted out in his new life alone (his mother is also dead).

What a year!

Fri, 05 Aug 2005 16:00:33 +0000

It’s just over one year since I’ve worked full time, and I thought it would be fun to make a bunch of lists of what I’ve done in that year.

Distance

About 33000 miles by airplane, visiting 14 airports
Around 6000 miles by car
2000 nautical miles by sailboat
1000 nautical miles on the Alaska Marine Highway (a car ferry)

Types of vehicles

My Slumbaru
Airplanes
Buses
Taxis
Pickup trucks
- with dead goat
- without dead goat
Boats
- Wonderland
- Ferry from Haines, AK to Bellevue, WA
- Ferry on Lake Geneva
- Senegalese water taxi
- Lanchas in Guatemala
A camel
A horse
My hiking boots
A zipline

Places

Apple's new mouse

Tue, 02 Aug 2005 17:02:50 +0000

Apple released the Mighty Mouse today. Leave it to Apple to “innovate” themselves into making a zero button, four button mouse. Yes, they added some space-age alien technology to sense your “clicking” through the shell so that there would BE NO BUTTONS.

Because, seriously, the fact that there are buttons on my mouse is the BIGGEST SINGLE PROBLEM in my daily digital life.

Idiots.

The entire product is captured nicely in this quote (from here):

Hola, otra vez, San Pedro

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 11:01:09 +0000

LleguÃ© con securidad en San Pedro ayer por la noche. Mi viaje de San Cristobal a San Pedro era fÃ¡cil. Me plazco a volver a San Pedro. Es aÃºn mÃ¡s bonito en invierno que verano. No hay mucho lluvio ya, solamente sol y poco nubes.

Ayer en la noche, dormÃ en la hotel Sak’cari. Esta noche, voy a domir en el Hotel San Francisco, porque es mas barrato. En algunos dÃas, voy a moverme al casa de parientes de Juan, mi compaÃ±ero de trabajo.

In San Cristobal

Sat, 30 Jul 2005 11:57:36 +0000

Well, it turns out things don’t go like you planned when you travel. Who knew?

I was feeling pretty smug in Cancun, with my ticket bought, plenty of time to go around and get dinner, then shop for snacks on the bus, use the Internet, etc. Only problem was my watch was two timezones wrong, so I had two less hours than I thought. I feel so dumb now, because there were three things that should have tipped me off. First, the clock in the bus terminal. I ignored it because Mexican clocks are always about 2 hours off. It turns out the clocks that taught me the “always ignore the clocks in Mexico” rule were the ones in the Metro, where the time of day has little to do with getting a train. In a Mexican bus station, the clocks are right. In fact, they are right to the second, like in a Swiss train station!

I made it

Thu, 28 Jul 2005 18:18:09 +0000

Well, traveling with AirTech was a breeze, except for the having 12 different backup plans part. I simply showed up at the airport 2 hours early (no big deal for an international flight) and the nice lady behind the counter gave me a confirmed seat on the plane in minutes. I’m sure it is not always like this, but it was pretty painless.

I am booked on a 20:30 bus out of here, and will arrive in San Cristobal tomorrow around noon. (16 hours… ugh!) That probably means I’ll be too late to get to Panajachel tomorrow, but it will give me plenty of time to arrange my ride to Pana for the next day. I happen to know a great hostel in San Cristobal from last time, so no problem.

On my way, maybe

Wed, 27 Jul 2005 22:53:27 +0000

Tomorrow morning, I am going to attempt to board a Suntrips flight to Cancun using AirTech.com’s standby travel system. So, the adventure begins.

From Cancun, I will take an overnight bus to San Cristobal de las Casas. There, I’ll find myself a tourist bus making the trip to Panajachel and then onward via boat to San Pedro. The whole trip will last from early Thursday morning until Friday afternoon, if it all goes according to plan. But it’s likely something will go wrong along the line. So much the better, at least for the stories later.

In their own words

Tue, 26 Jul 2005 14:06:27 +0000

MSF has a culture of civil (and not so civil) disagreement among it’s volunteers, executives, sections, field offices, and so on. To me, this shows that it is a vibrant community of passionate people. The only times in my career when I’ve really gotten angry about something was when I cared enough to fight for it.

Because the actors in the mini-dramas of MSF are widely dispersed, they seem to have developed a habit of using written communication to fight their battles. I suppose written communication is the most amenable to translation, too. It’s great for observers like me, because it means that if you can get your hands on the what the organization is saying among itself, you can see how it works, even as an outsider. Try that with Microsoft!

The Skeletons in MSF's Closet

Sat, 23 Jul 2005 08:56:25 +0000

I might have just gone too far in my quest to learn ever more about MSF. I came across this article (107 kb PDF). It has interesting details about the internal struggles in MSF’s history and in it’s current operations.

Some interesting things:

MSF-Belgium was created as a separate legal entity with MSF-France’s blessing. Quickly MSF-Belgium’s differing interpretation of the mission angered MSF-France, so much so that MSF-France attempted to strip MSF-Belgium of the MSF name in 1985. They failed.
The 5 current operational sections used to be 6: MSF-Greece was created to be operational. However, in 1999 MSF-Greece was expelled from the MSF movement over its stance on intervention in Kosovo. It has been reintegrated into the MSF movement as of early 2005, but its operations are now done under the authority of MSF-Spain.
Government funding dropped from 50% in 1999 to 20% in 2003. That was due to the increased private-donor fundraising power of the new sections (Australia, Japan, USA, etc).
MSF-France relies on MSF-USA for close to 40% of it’s operational funds.
MSF-Holland has only 20% Dutch citizens in the field. They rely on other sections to make up the other 80%.
Internal controls meant to ensure external communications are consistent and do not jeopardize any operations are sometimes (perhaps routinely?) ignored in order to prevent the consultation and coordination process from watering down the message.

None of that really changes my desire to work for MSF, but it does explain where some of the friction I’ve heard returned volunteers talk about comes from. One volunteer told me that it’s not true that MSF doesn’t play well with other NGO’s. But he went on to say that MSF-X is more likely to work with Oxfam or GOAL than to cooperate peacefully with MSF-Y! (Take that with a grain of salt, of course…)

GoogleEarthing

Tue, 12 Jul 2005 10:16:12 +0000

There’s a fun virtual hide and go seek game that tests your knowledge of geographic trivia. It’s called GoogleEarthing.

I won puzzle #12 by recognizing Tombouctou, Mali. It was the first thing I thought of when I saw the picture. It reminded me of a picture I saw a few years ago in a National Geographic about how the city is being overtaken by the desert.

Air Hitching

Fri, 17 Jun 2005 20:26:35 +0000

When an airplane is about to leave, and there’s still room on it (taking into consideration pre-planned, unchangeable limits, like “we only put in enough fuel for 170 people”) there are sometimes seats the airline would still like to fill, if they could get some money for them. They know about these seats so late, they cannot offer any kind of reservation system for them. They let third-parties sell vouchers to get people onto the planes, but the airlines don’t want the third parties competeing with them, so the third parties are prohibited from advertising. So there’s this little micro-industry of people who sell these vouchers, and you basically have to hear about it from someone who has done it to know about it. It’s called air-hitching, or standby travel. I heard about it from Erika of Pangaea.

Au revior, GenÃ¨ve

Tue, 07 Jun 2005 14:24:12 +0000

Tomorrow morning I will be getting on my easyJet flight back to London. I have been having a nice time here, and so I’ve postponed and delayed and conveniently forgotten to write anything down about my time here until the absolute last second. Which is now.

I have been meaning to write in Spanish, to keep from losing what I’ve learned so far. But that takes a long time and there always seems to be something more interesting to do. At least some of the things I’ve been doing here are preparatory study for my RedR class next week, so it’s not like I have been completely slacking off.

Bonjour, GenÃ¨ve

Fri, 27 May 2005 04:23:38 +0000

I arrived in Geneva this morning to see my friend Sima, who I met in Montreal a long time ago. Better not to count the years back, at least in public. I will stay here a week or so. Sima and I don’t really have a plan, but it will involve a little of me on my own, since she has to work next week.

Here’s a little globalization for you. All through my trip to Guatemala, I was haunted by this annoying song called Gasolina. It’s like the song for the Macarena, but about gasoline. Well, if you listen to the lyrics and the interplay between the man and the woman, it’s pretty clear she’s not at a gas station when she chants, “Give me more gasoline!” Ahem.

Mi primera clase de RedR

Sat, 21 May 2005 14:48:40 +0000

Hoy tomÃ© mi primera clase de RedR. Este clase se llama “Â¿Etonces, piensas querer trabajar como ayuda humanitaria?”

En sentido estricto, no era necessario, porque yo se querer trabajar como ayudar humanitaria. Pero visitaba Londres en cualquier caso, etonces uno mas clase era facÃ¬l para atender.

Eran muchas ingenieros civiles allÃ¬, y algunos ayudantes de sanidad. Pero eran poco trabajadores de informatic, solamente yo y uno otre. Estoy comenzando a pensar que debo haber sido ingeniero civil.

Rest at the Cabin, on to London

Wed, 18 May 2005 11:17:10 +0000

I just enjoyed a few days with my parents up at the cabin. I got lots of my stuff cleaned up and ready for a new trip. Mom and I cooked one of my favorite dishes we cook together (Vegetarian Lasagne). Dick and I finished cleaning up the lot so that it is ready for the summer fire season.

Alas, my cold did not abate.

I’m on my way to London in a few hours now!

Heading home

Thu, 12 May 2005 19:59:33 +0000

According to Karl, who is picking me up at the airport tomorrow night, I am flying home tomorrow to SFO.

So ends several days in Mexico City, and over two months in Guatemala and Mexico.

My time in Mexico City has been spent on three things: feeling a little crappy, being hassled moving around the city, and seeing cool stuff. So in absolute terms, I guess it was more bad than good, but it doesn’t feel that way.

In Puebla

Sun, 08 May 2005 14:01:53 +0000

It is the weekend, so I’ve decided I don’t have to write in Spanish. Also I am in a bit of a hurry, so here’s what I’ve been up to the last few days.

I spent several relaxing days in Oaxaca. I spent a morning doing museums. I found an artist I think Evi would like. I kept hoping some of his seascapes would have a sailboat instead of big passenger ships, but no luck. I think it was Francisco Guiterrez, but I’m not very good at rememberinbg artist names.

MirÃ© Palenque, ahora en Oaxaca

Wed, 04 May 2005 11:41:18 +0000

Anteayer, pensÃ© no visitar Oaxaca porque el viajar allÃ tomarÃa demasiada hora. Pero encontrÃ© un bus de la noche de Palenque a Oaxaca. Etonces, llegÃ© en Palenque para los 8 horas de la maÃ±ana y salÃ a los 5 horas de la tarde. Dos noches en buses serÃan mortal en Guatemala, pero el buses de Mexico son mucho mas confortable que lo. De hecho, los buses de Mexico son mas confortable que todos lo que voy.

Todavia en San Cristobal

Mon, 02 May 2005 11:45:00 +0000

Hoy estoy todavia en San Cristobal de las Casas. Tambien, no tengo dicionaire, pero decidÃ no es una buena excusa. Etonces, hoy posible esta diario es un poco mas malo, pero esta es solamente para mi mente.

Algunas veces una hospedaje tiene personas muy interasante. AquÃ en Backpackers Hostel, estan un chico y una chica de ingleterra quien quieren viajar a Tejas, despuÃ©s alquilar un carro y conducir a Alaska. Tambien, lo tiene un hombre de un universidad en Chennai, India quien escribÃa muchos libros. Y tambien una chica de ingleterra quien quiere trabajar como un nutritionalista en paises quel necesitan ayudar para desarrollo.

En Mexico

Sat, 30 Apr 2005 11:54:15 +0000

No tengo mi dicionario, etonces hoy voy a escribir solamente ingles.

I left San Pedro yesterday and started my trek north to Mexico City. Yesterday morning as I got ready to leave I thought I might go to Chichicastenango for the world famous market. But it turns out I was off by a day and would have needed to kill some time. Time is not on my side right now, as there are lots of fun things between here and Mexico City airport.

Mas tarea

Mon, 25 Apr 2005 16:15:07 +0000

Â¡Hola! Hoy es Lunes y estoy volvo para mas tarea. Tengo various cosas para escribir hoy, etonces no tengo un titulo mejor.

Aventura

Este fin de semana, fuimos arriba en las montaÃ±as para visitar un “zipline”. Â¡Fui muy divertido! Las nubes rodearon las montaÃ±as, etonces la cuerda desaparacÃ en las nubes, y yo tambien. En el otro lado, todo el mundo aparacÃ tambien. Hubo dos “ziplines” allÃ, corto y largo. El largo fui 250 meteres.

Mi semana

Fri, 22 Apr 2005 11:00:35 +0000

ExtraÃ±Ã© dos dis para escribir por que fui enfermo. Hasta ahora no tuve nada dolores de estomago, pero aqui en San Pedro, supuestamente todos los gringos son enfermo uno vez. Ne se por que.

Mi familia fue bueno para mÃ. Dio yo comida buena por mi estomago, y medicina tambien. Mi madre dijo la medicina fui natural. Pero cuando leÃ© los ingredientes, yo reconocÃ ellos. Son los mismos como la medicina norteamericano “Pepto Bismol”, pero sin la tinta rosa. Etonces tomÃ© por tres comidas. Tambien, tomÃ© mi doxycyclin, quel traÃ© por eso razÃ³n. Voy a tomar doxycyclin por 5 mas dias, por seguro muerto los microbios.

Mi fin de semana

Tue, 19 Apr 2005 16:40:11 +0000

Spanish speakers… put on your thinking caps. This entry will be using a fair amount of imperfect tense, because it is doing double duty as a homework assignment. If you don’t remember how to decode it, just strip off terminations like -Ãan and -aban to get back to the root verb. Ready? Here we go!

Mi fin de semana fue divertido. Todos los fin de semanas viajaba a algunas nuevos lugares en Guatemala. Este fin de semana, viajÃ© a Monterrico en sur de Guatemala, en la costa del mar pacifico.

Vida en San Pedro

Mon, 18 Apr 2005 16:38:12 +0000

(Note: English translation is below.)

Â¡Ahora, ese diario tiene dos idiomas, espaÃ±ol e ingles!

Estoy muy contento con mi decisiÃ³n para viajar a San Pedro. Ese ciudad estÃ¡ en la mitad entre San AndÃ©s y Xela. No es desmasiado poqueÃ±o, y tambien no es desmasiado grande. San Pedro me recuerda de San AndrÃ©s por que el tiene una buena vista del lago y montaÃ±as.

Mi familia aquÃ es fabulosa. La casa es nueva, con agua caliente en la ducha. La casa recibe brisas frescas de la montaÃ±as. Los mismos brisas hace olas muy grande en Jabalito en el otre lado del lago, pero aquÃ pienso no hay muchas olas en la tarde. Â¡Estes bueno por a nadar! Tal vez, maÃ±ana voy a nadar en el lago. Mi madre cocina la misma comida de mi madre en San AndrÃ©s. Â¡Me gusto! Para desayuno comÃ tres panqueques y atol de plantano sazonÃ³ con canela. Para almuerzo, comÃ pollo con tomates, arroz, y tortillas. Â¡Por fin, mi mano izquierdisto estuvo occupado!

Weekend in Monterico

Sun, 17 Apr 2005 15:38:56 +0000

As predicted in my last post, I decided to ditch Xela and find someplace else to study for the next two weeks. Because I liked Lake Atitlan so much, and because I am trying to meet up with Ben from Planet Online to explore the possibility of working for them for a few months, I decided to plan myself in San Pedro a little village on lake Atitlan. I have not been there yet but it seems to be much more like San AndrÃ©s, which I liked so much, so I’m hopeful.

Life in Xela

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 10:36:36 +0000

I’ve had a few days to settle in to Xela now, so here’s some info about life here.

Xela is Guatemala’s second biggest city, but it is a distant second to Guatemala City, with only 120,000 residents. It has several universities, so it is rumored to have the benefits of a university town. I did notice a flyer for a tofu store last night, so I guess that’s one of the benefits (?) of a university town. However, it is still a big city, which turned out to be a real shock to my system. I knew it was a city when I decided to come here, but I didn’t realize how accustomed I had become to rural Guatemala. The city is dirty and noisy and drove me crazy for the first little bit. I might still flee.

Lake Atitlan

Mon, 11 Apr 2005 10:51:12 +0000

This morning I arrived in Xela, and have found my Spanish school, and the house where I will be staying. It is not as opulent as my last house, but mi madre seems much more communicative, so hopefully I’ll feel a little more at home here, and a little less like a foreigner.

As an aside, I found my school despite the best efforts of the Lonely Planet cartographers to leave me baffled on a street corner in Xela the rest of my life. New travel tip: use the addresses, not the dots on the maps. Apparently the dots are added to the map by a blind left handed dart thrower.

More Guatemala Observations

Thu, 07 Apr 2005 14:13:47 +0000

Some more random observations about Guatemala…

Guns

People say Americans are crazy gun toting cowbows, but the real Americans who love their guns are the Central Americans of Guatemala. I have never seen so many guns as I have here. That includes growing up in a working class, rural city in the US.

You see guns on the belts of police, and there are an average number of police here by US standards. But that’s just the beginning… lots of stores hire private security guards, and they are almost without exception armed. Every bank has an armed guard quickly questioning every person who wants to come through the door (one bank had a man-trap too, which is a pair of doors forming a vestibule, wired so that only one can be open at a time). Probably 70% of the delivery trucks have an armed security guard literally riding shotgun. When the truck stops, the guard gets out and watches the truck while the driver makes the delivery of Coca-Cola or whatever.

Antigua

Thu, 07 Apr 2005 13:12:45 +0000

I got to Antigual yesterday afternoon after a long bus ride most of the way aross Guatemala. From Puerto Barrios to Guatemala City it was pretty comfortable. We were on a Mercedes bus which dated to the 80’s, judging by the decor.

I invented another of my somewhat random travel tips. (You might remember the last one: when out of ideas on how to solve a problem, sit down and wait for something good to happen.) This tip is simpler: always sit on the side of the bus where a thief will pick up your luggage from. Here in Guatemala it is the right side, because they only load and unload it from that side. Then you can watch whenever bags come and go and see if any look a little too familiar. As it turns out, I need not have worried because they issued actual bag tags, and the guy actually checked the number before giving me my pack! That doesn’t even happen in Amerian airports!

Got to Puerto Barrios

Tue, 05 Apr 2005 18:02:07 +0000

I made it out of Livingston this morning with no problems. My plan to stiff the hotel worked perfectly. I feel about this bad (fingers really close together), but I’m certain the hotel lady will find a way to get the money out of the guy. He eats at her house all the time. In fact, he did while he was scamming me, which is part of why I fell for it. Afterall, if the nice lady in the hotel feeds him, he’s got to be a good guy, right?

Hello from Livingston

Mon, 04 Apr 2005 18:41:21 +0000

I’m in Livingston, a weird little leftover from the past. Here, a bunch of black people who speak Spanish live without any roads to the mainland. Their food is very different than mainland Guatemala, and they sprinkle Carribean slang into the middle of their Spanish. Kind of strange.

Also, there are more hustlers here, and they are very good. So good in fact, I got cheated out of a tour this morning. Luckily I still had time to get signed up for another tour and take that. I have a plan to get almost all the money back that the guy nailed me for. He is in cahoots with the place I’m staying. I have not yet paid for the last night in the hotel, and it so happens the hotel price is just a few quezales less than the amount he cheated me out of. So I plan to stiff the hotel and leave a note telling them to get their money from him. The worst that happens is that the hotel lady calls the police on me, to whom I can explain that she helped her friend steal from me. Should be interesting. I’ll tell you how it turns out, as long as there is Internet access in the Livingston jail.

My first Spanish essay

Sat, 02 Apr 2005 16:59:09 +0000

I wrote a couple paragraphs as a homework assignment, and I thought it would be fun to post them here, to look back on when I am more fully literate. I have applied all the corrections my teacher made to the essay here. They were mostly small changes, but at least one sentence needed to have it grammar all sorted out by her!

Mi padre en San AndrÃ©s y mi abuelo tienen elgo en comÃºn. Ambos hombres trabajaron como operator de sierra en una fÃ¡brica de madera. En inglÃ©s, le llamamos “a sawer”. Â¿Le llamamos en espaÃ±ol un serrador?

Thoughts from the last few weeks

Thu, 31 Mar 2005 15:19:39 +0000

I’ve had a lot of time to think, and wanted to put down some of the stuff I came up with in the last few weeks. Here’s a rather disorganized ramble of stuff.

Guatemaltan Engineering

Guatemalan engineering is remarkably similar to Senegalese engineering. I think this stems from a basic prinicple at work in poor places, which is do it just well enough to get the job done, and cheaply as the job will tolerate. This is a common reaction sharp humans have all over the world, but in less developed economies, the handicraft of the clever engineers is somehow more on display.

Where's Jeff Going?

Thu, 31 Mar 2005 14:57:52 +0000

After three weeks in San AndrÃ©s, I have decided to move on. A different crowd has moved into the city (I’m one of the old hands now!) and though some things are better, it feels like the right time to move on.

The new crowd is a 40 person group from TrekForce.org.uk. They have had a 2 month adventure in Belize, and are now here for 4 weeks learning Spanish. There are four of them staying with my family, so it is easy to slack off and speak English instead of Spanish. In fact, it is required right now, because they don’t speak a word. Some are learning faster than others, but as 18 year old British youth, they don’t have very broad horizons and are taking a while to catch on to Spanish.

Where's Jeff Now?

Thu, 31 Mar 2005 14:04:45 +0000

I have been off the radar for a while. The reason why is that the Internet is a 30 minute boat ride away, or a 1 hour bus ride. So I don’t get over here to Flores to send out updates very often. When I do, the unreliable power system has been foiling me. Last time I was in Flores, I hardly had enough time with power on to get critical stuff like bills taken care of. Then the power inside the Internet cafe failed, partially. During this week’s visit, we have already had two city-wide power outages, so I am going to be saving this early and often!

No Commenting?

Fri, 25 Mar 2005 15:36:48 +0000

Some people have asked why I do not allow comments on my blog. The answer is that this is my space, and I want total control of what’s here. Fighting comment spam is a losing proposition, and I don’t want to be involved in it.

I have trackbacks turned on, so if you are using a blogging system that supports them, anything you say on your blog that links to my blog will be crosslinked between the two blogs (and i will see it, just as if you posted a comment to my blog). If you don’t have a blog and feel like you are muzzled by my decision to not have comments, I have a simple solution for you: get a blog, and post to it. (If you don’t know how to get your own blog, ask me and I’ll help you.)

Questions

Fri, 25 Mar 2005 15:30:29 +0000

Some answers to questions I have gotten…

Yes, mom, I am drinking plenty of water. The water system in San AndrÃ©s apparently used to be unreliable, but seems to work fine now. However, it is untreated water, and used for everything but drinking. Drinking water is delivered by the aqua pura man every morning (unless mi madre yells manaÃ±a out the door to him). I have no idea how much it costs, or when he gets paid. I suppose it is weekly or something. Drinking water is readily available at the school and at home, and I drink about a liter and a half every day, including several glases at dinner. Sometimes mi madre serves heavily diluted pineapple juice instead of the fruit punch they call fresca. It tastes great!

A weekend trip

Fri, 25 Mar 2005 14:59:06 +0000

Last weekend I took a trip with some other gringos from San AndrÃ©s. We rented a minibus for the weekend and drove south to Semuc Champey. It is an area with lots of limestone and lots of water. Predictably, there are caves there, and other interesting things to see.

We caught the bus at 5 AM from the shack with no walls that serves as the bus station in San AndrÃ©s. We drove south for a couple of hours over fair roads, then headed up into the mountains. The driver knew a “short cut” that would make the trip take less… something. We weren’t clear what, but he seemed to know where he was going. 6 hours later, after 70 kilometers of dirt road, we got there. It turned out that the short cut was meant to save diesel, and as we had neogotiated a fixed price for the trip out and back, it was to his advantage to try to save gas. I’m personally highly skeptical that a mountain road traveled at less than 20 km per hour saved any diesel over the slightly longer trip over pavement, but who am I to argue with a Guatemalan bus driver?

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 15:37:52 +0000

I have more time to write today, so here is a better description of my new life for the next few weeks.

First, a look at how my day goes. At 5 am or so, the roosters start making noise, which in turn wakes up the pigs who make snuffling noises in the street. In some parts of town, diesel powered corn grinders start up to grind the corn for the morning torillas. One gringa friend of mine here has one next door, and cheerfully uses it as an alarm clock. There are happily none near me, so I can sleep in. (I think my mama gets her tortillas from a tortilleria down the road.)

I made it!

Tue, 15 Mar 2005 14:50:37 +0000

Those of you who have been wondering, I made it to little San Andrés, Guatemala and am settled in with my family. I do not have time for a full update today, but I am doing fine and am really happy with my choice of programs. Already I have had 5 hours of instruction and have homework, and got to visit an animal rehabilitation clinic.

More in a few days when I get back to Flores. San Andres does not have Internet (but does have electricity, gas, and cold running water).

Where's Jeff Been?

Sun, 13 Mar 2005 00:42:04 +0000

I’ve been having some more sedate adventures during the last couple months, so I’ve been remiss in telling y’all what I’ve been up to. Well, now I’m about to start some new stuff, I figured I better flush out the queue!

My last update was from New Years. I spent January in Arnold. I occupied myself there by working on DTN2, the reference implementation of the emerging Disruption Tolerant Networking protocols. This work will be useful both for the Interplanetary Internet, and also for getting information to parts of the world where networks don’t reach reliably, like developing regions. For more information about how this (and other technology) can improve people’s lives in emerging regions, see the TIER website at Berkeley.

Small world!

Fri, 11 Mar 2005 11:13:20 +0000

A coworker of mine from when I was at Tellme has started a new blog to show and tell what he’s learning and thinking about network configuration management. In his most recent posting it turns out he’s found a paper written by a friend of mine from college! What a small world!

This problem is an important one. Automated system administration is a well accepted concept at this point. You simply cannot run 10,000 node clusters without extensive automation, and there are a lot of clusters that size these days (not to mention service providers who use over 10,000 computers to implement their service). Networks were growing in absolute size due to the pervasive nature of the computers they connect now. But as if that wasn’t enough to demand automation, network admins are adding a myriad of devices on top of (and embedded within) their networks, all of which have configurations that depend on the overall configuration. Over and over again, we see in outages in production networks precipitated by seemingly unrelated changes in far-off parts of the network. Assuming you can predict the dependencies and write some software to address them, automated network configuration management should be able to nip some of these outages in the bud.

Jabber

Thu, 20 Jan 2005 00:40:53 +0000

I’m on Jabber as jra@nella.org. I’m running my own server, and supposedly other Jabber servers are supposed to be able to contact mine and send me messages. I’m not convinced it’s really working because my test case didn’t seem to do what I expected. So if you use Jabber and want to talk to me, give it a try.

The Jabber guys ship their stuff configured to talk to MySQL instead of to BerkeleyDB. Doesn’t make sense, since the average Fedora Core install has the right BerkeleyDB, but doesn’t have MySQL. Dumb, dumb, dumb. We need to lower the bar to non-commercial chat systems, not make it harder.

Easter Eggs in Open Source Software

Mon, 17 Jan 2005 02:27:07 +0000

They say that the nice thing about Open Source software is that all the users are looking at the source checking it for bugs, so it will be higher quality than closed-source software.

Heh. I have proof that people don’t read the code they are installing.

Since the earliest widely-distributed releases of Cricket, there’s been an easter egg in it. It is hidden in code that should arouse the curiosity of anyone doing a security audit, but it is hidden well enough that someone poking around in the code won’t see it. To my knowledge the only person who’s ever found it was Javier Muniz, my officemate when I was writing Cricket. And that was only after I dropped a hint that I’d put an easter egg into Cricket. Javier’s a bright guy, and it didn’t take him long to find it.

Dr Evil's family

Sun, 16 Jan 2005 21:33:16 +0000

Austin Powers is on TV. I totally forgot about the hilarious monolouge by Dr. Evil about his family background:

Dr. Evil: The details of my life are quite inconsequential.

Therapist (Carrie Fisher): Oh no, please, please, let’s hear about your childhood.

Dr Evil: Very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize, he would drink, he would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Some times he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy, the sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. My childhood was typical, summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we’d make meat helmets. When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds, pretty standard really. At the age of 12 I received my first scribe. At the age of fourteen, a Zoroastrian woman named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles. There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum, it’s breathtaking, I suggest you try it.

Gmail continues to rock my world

Fri, 07 Jan 2005 12:09:08 +0000

I just noticed a really cool feature of Gmail. This is subtle, so hang in there with me…

It, like other mail programs attempts to automatically maintain your address book for you by adding entries for addresses in mail you send. When you reply to someone who’s e-mail arrived without a real name, just an e-mail address you’ve got a problem: how do you add a useful address book entry for that?

Sam Spade search plugin

Thu, 06 Jan 2005 03:47:42 +0000

I use Firefox, and I like the little search box thingie in the upper left. I decided it might be fun to figure out how it works by making a search plugin for the website SamSpade.org. Sam Spade looks up whois data and other interesting things about websites, and I find myself using it from time to time.

If you’d like to get the Sam Spade plugin for Firefox, visit this page. After installing it, you’ll have a new search type in the popup menu in the upper right. Look, ma, no restart!

A New Year's update

Wed, 05 Jan 2005 17:52:19 +0000

Hello, all my travel-watchers! Hope you all had a good holiday season. Thanks to those of you who put me up, and those others who asked, “Where are you?”

Since I last sent out an update, I’ve returned to the US from Dakar, Senegal. I made my way home by a sequence of trips that, if the TSA had known about them, would have put me on the no-fly-list for life. I flew one way from Dakar to Lisbon, spent the night, then caught the second half of a round trip I bought back in October. I landed in New York and made a bus trip north to Boston, then spent several nice days there with Jennie Hango. It was cold outside, so we did traditional winter things like hang out and play video games, and make chicken soup from scratch. Jennie makes really good noodles, and she does it like an Italian grandmother, without a bowl; she just puts the eggs into the flour and goes for it with her fingers!

Senegal Observations

Wed, 08 Dec 2004 11:51:25 +0000

Some random observations about Senegal:

You must bargain over virtually every purchase. I would have thought that would drive me crazy, but you get used to it. And the Senegalese sense of humor makes it fun, since a huge part of the bargaining process is making the other guy laugh. If you are at a place where negotiations seem to be at an impasse and you add in some Wollof sprinkled with even more broken French, they crack up into gales of laughter, and give in on the price. Once a guy told me that he could not possibly go any lower because the money was for his mother. I countered, “But this is a Christmas gift for MY mother, and I cannot go any higher!” (Sorry Mom, it was actually something for me!)

Made it to Senegal

Fri, 26 Nov 2004 08:33:43 +0000

Hi everyone! We made it to Senegal!

This passage was much easier than the last one. It was over 850 miles, so we were prepared for it to take over a week to get here. That’s a long time on a little boat!

The weather was pretty much in our favor all the time. That meant almost the entire way the wind was behind us, or on our port beam (perpendicular to the boat on the left side). When the wind is exactly behind you, you can put the main on one side and the jib on the other in a configuration called wing-on-wing. It’s really beautiful to behold! And it makes the boat go fast, so we got here in just 7 days!

Crepes

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 07:27:40 +0000

It was my night to cook dinner tonight. I’d been looking at the crepe page in the Moosewood cookbook for ideas for dinner crepes ever since I made them for breakfast a few days ago. They were a hit for breakfast, so I figured dinner was the logical next step!

Moosewood suggested a spinach and ricotta filling. That sounded ok, but a little bit boring. I was also a little worried about finding ricotta here. Spanish supermercados are a little funny about cheese. There are often 15 variations on manchego, but no other kinds. Want parmesian, ricotta, or brie? Too bad!

Autopilots

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 07:18:09 +0000

I said before that on watch we only need to check for traffic and other changing conditions. If that’s all we have to do, then who’s steering? The answer is the autopilot!

Wonderland has two autopilots on board. The first one is an electronic one. The other one is analog and operates off of the power of the wind and the boat going through the water. They are both pretty interesting, so I’ll explain them both.

Passagemaking

Thu, 11 Nov 2004 09:02:56 +0000

You may have noticed I’m not sending out many updates. Plenty is going on, it’s just hard to squeze in time to go write an update at an internet cafe. So I’m trying a new system where I write updates offline when I get a chance, then upload them when I am online.

My last update was from Graciosa, a small island in the northeast of the Canaries. That’s where we made landfall after our passage. It was a great place to unwind from the passage-making lifestyle and get back into the cruising lifestyle.

In the Canaries

Wed, 03 Nov 2004 09:37:40 +0000

Well, I survived my first open ocean passage! We are now in the Canaries on an island named Graciosa. It is very rural, with no paved roads. All the cars here are Land Rovers and models of Toyotas meant for use in Africa! It’s pretty neat to be in a place so different in architecture from Europe. The culture here is still very European, which I guess is good, because it makes the culture shock less. As we head south toward Cape Verde, things will get increasingly less European.

Tracking Wonderland

Sun, 24 Oct 2004 05:30:51 +0000

You can see Wonderland’s position by visiting this link.

We will update it every day or so. The technology we use to do it is nifty. I’m learning lots of cool stuff about packet radio. I’ll write up some info on it when we get to the Canaries.

Back to boat chores. It really looks like we’ll make it out to sea today!

Setting Sail (maybe)

Sun, 24 Oct 2004 04:22:08 +0000

This might be my last entry from Ayamonte, Spain. We are working furiously to get all the last minute chores done to be ready to set sail for the Canary Islands this afternoon. The trip should take 5-7 days. I’ll be off the net until we arrive there, but I’ll send out an update as soon as I can.

I had a great birthday dinner with Evi and the girls last night (thanks Evi!). We ate tapas until we almost burst. The baked tuna was really amazing, so we had two!

Through Portugal to Spain

Tue, 19 Oct 2004 05:04:22 +0000

When I last wrote, I was on my way to Newark airport. The trip to there, then on to Lisbon was uneventful. Lisbon airport was small and efficient, so getting through the airport, then into the town center was also uneventful.

Portuguese sounds nothing at all like “Spanish with a French accent” as someone suggested to me. In fact, I never understood a single bit of Portuguese spoken to me the whole time I was there, it seems. It’s easy enough to read, as it is a Romance language, and at this point my brain pretty much translates written Romance languages on the fly into English (that survival skill comes from all my time not speaking French in French speaking places). So I wasn’t exactly incommunicado, but close. The people are nice, and enough speak English to get by, but it’s not exactly smooth sailing.

New York City

Fri, 15 Oct 2004 14:06:38 +0000

My first big trip after leaving Tellme has commenced!

I am writing this from Jim Fanning’s apartment in the Upper West Side of New York City. I got in yesterday at 3:30pm, and took the subway in. I had time to kill before visiting Doctors Without Borders/MÃ©decins Sans FrontiÃ¨res (MSF) for a prospective volunteer open house.

I went through Grand Central Station on the way to the main branch of the public library. I gawked at both of those for a while, then walked along 42nd Avenue toward Times Square. I hit an internet cafe there, got dinner, and took the cab to MSF. Perfect timing!

Another Measure Q blogger

Sun, 10 Oct 2004 22:25:48 +0000

I got an email from Chris Shipley today, who is also writing a blog about Measure Q.

Chris is right, I did vote no on Measure Q when I sent in my absentee ballot last week. I did so for two reasons, each of about the same importance to me. For one thing, I feel like the Yes on Q campaign is bought and paid for by a developer who is ramming this development down our throats, and I want to send the developer a message that democracy still works, and money does not buy votes. The other reason that I am against it is because I believe such high density development should be within walking distance of Caltrain. I don’t mind the idea of high-rises on the Peninsula, but I want to see them someplace which will at least make it possible for people to live car-free.

Yes on Q gets it's revenge

Sat, 09 Oct 2004 13:52:10 +0000

So, I’m sitting here minding my own business on a sunny Saturday afternoon. I hear a car pull up, and some pounding in the front yard. I look out the window, and it now appears I am a Measure Q supporter, because I’ve got a brand new Yes On Q sign in my yard.

So I go ask the guy what’s up. He says, “you’re on the list for a sign”. I say, no, that’s a mistake, the only list I should be on is the do not call list. “Take it away!”, I say.

Astroturf or Concerned Citizen?

Fri, 08 Oct 2004 18:13:01 +0000

Today, I got a letter in the mail hand addressed to Lisa Long, who has her mail sent to my house while she’s in London. The return address is just down the street, which is confusing, since I figured Lisa would have introduced me to any family she had in the neighborhood. Then I notice on the back that it says, “Yes on Measure Q”.

Aha! So it’s astroturf, right? The developer has his wife rent an apartment in the neighborhood, then outsources the hand-written address part to a sweatshop in Liberia, then they send them out, and voila: instant grassroots support.

A visit to Yes on Q headquarters

Mon, 27 Sep 2004 18:35:13 +0000

So I hopped on my bike and rode down to Yes On Q headquarters. It is, not surprisingly, located in spacious offices owned by the same organization that wants to build the high rises. Sigh. Democracy at it’s finest.

I talked to a nice guy there named Bill Ferguson. Here are the things we talked about:

me: Get me off your freakin’ list!
him: No problem. (He scribbles down my name and number.)
him: Your phone number is public knowledge once you register to vote, and we’re allowed to call you.
me: Yes, you are allowed to call me. ONCE. Then I’m allowed to ask to be on your do not call list.
me: Your telemarketers are not respecting do not call lists, and treating callers unprofessionally when they ask to be removed
him: I don’t know how the call centers feed that back that list to us.
me: Please figure it out, because I will file a formal complaint against your organization if it happens again.
me: This reflects very poorly on your organization, and makes me unsympathetic to your arguments. I’m likely to vote “no” now.

So, a constructive conversation was had. I expect to keep getting calls, and I expect to have to learn how to file a formal complaint. Luckily, I’m currently unemployed (by choice, thank god) and so I have plenty of time to make Bill Ferguson’s life hell.

Measure Q tele-spammers

Mon, 27 Sep 2004 17:51:47 +0000

If you are searching the web for info about the Marina Shores development in Redwood City this might interest you:

I’ve been getting a number of call and hang-up calls on my cell phone with “caller id unavailable”. This is usually an indication that you are in a predictive dialer system’s phone list, and they are having trouble matching the call they made outbound to you with an telemarketer on their end. I kept answering them hoping to finally get someone to talk to to get me on their do not call list.

An interview with an insurgent

Mon, 27 Sep 2004 12:08:38 +0000

The Guardian carried a really scary article recently about the new face of the insurgency in Iraq.

One quote that surprised me was this one:

Black soldiers are a particular target. ‘To have Negroes occupying us is a particular humiliation,’ Abu Mujahed said, echoing the profound racism prevalent in much of the Middle East. ‘Sometimes we aborted a mission because there were no Negroes.’

Wow. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me to find racism here too, as I’ve found it in Europe and the US too.

Gmail doesn't use RAID

Fri, 30 Jul 2004 11:14:34 +0000

This guy arranged for thousands of email messages to be sent to his Gmail account at once, and surprise, surprise! It fell over. What a jackass. One way to know for sure he’s a jackass is the theory about compression and RAID.

First, Gmail doesn’t use RAID. It uses the Google Filesystem. It is like RAID, but implemented in user space, which lets Google play games with filesystem semantics you can’t do when you are restricted to one of the Unix filesystems on top of a hardware RAID box. It also leverages the CPU power you get for free when you buy thousands of PCI busses and IDE interfaces. The mainframe guys figured out long ago the key to throughput is lots of I/O paths. The Google Filesystem lets them use lots of CHEAP I/O paths, instead of the insanely expensive I/O paths that Netapp and Sun sell.

Firefox 0.9.1

Sun, 04 Jul 2004 00:44:53 +0000

First the good news: Firefox 0.9.1 for Win32 fixes my crashing problems. (So all you Mozilla zealots that found this page last time I said something about Firefox, please don’t spam me.)

The bad news is that Firefox 0.9 was a crashy mess, and it stomped my icons such that my HTML files that I saved out of Excel no longer had the “Excel generated HTML” icon, and no longer had the “Edit” option on the context menu.

Fahrenheit 9/11

Sat, 03 Jul 2004 01:29:10 +0000

Karl and I went to see Fahrenheit 9/11 tonight. There are fewer classic Moore scenes in it than his other movies, which is a huge improvement. His message is way too important to be lost in the noise of his wacky hijinks. In some ways, I think the criticism of his previous movies have taught him what Moore-moments are defensible, and which ones he needs to just leave out of movies. (The bank-rifle scene in Bowling for Columbine scene is a case where he was fairly excoriated by the critics, I think. To my knowledge, there are none of those in Fahrenheit 9/11.)

My evil twin

Sat, 19 Jun 2004 00:56:16 +0000

It turns out the cool guys who made Trooper Clerks are Jeff and Kurt Allen.

So which one of us is the evil twin?

Smarter

Thu, 17 Jun 2004 21:04:38 +0000

There must be something in the chemical they use to deodorize urinals that makes you smarter, because every time I have a hard programming problem and take a break to take a pee, I come up with the answer.

Some good clean fun bashing OSes

Thu, 03 Jun 2004 00:00:44 +0000

Check out these two funny posts: The Mac is a harsh mistress … and Linux is your psychotic ex.

For the record, my computing environment is as follows: Windows XP on a laptop with SSH and PPTP (depending…) over 802.11 to get connected to work. The VNC viewer gets me in touch with a bunch of xterms on a FreeBSD server where I do my real work on real computers (at Tellme, that’s Solaris on Intel). I use Mozilla Firefox almost exclusively. I often go a week or so between using Internet Explorer for some bogus website that requires it. I have Microsoft Office installed on the laptop. I abhor Word, but I really like Excel. I use it to work on clues for the Game, to visualize data while debugging systems, and even to draw rack diagrams! I also love PowerPoint… but I use it as a poor-man’s desktop publishing system, rarely for giving talks. I prefer impromptu talks with whiteboards to prepared talks.

Hugs!

Tue, 25 May 2004 10:40:26 +0000

A special girl is in town, so I’m getting “Hugs!” from her. Yay!

This morning we listened to Here Comes a Special Boy by Freeze Pop. It is stuck in my head, and that’s just fine with me!

Gmail Rocks

Fri, 14 May 2004 21:54:31 +0000

Google’s Gmail is pretty cool. In fact, I’m using it as my primary user interface for my personal mailbox right now. Now I’m trying to figure out how to make mailto: links result in a jump to the Gmail compose screen. The first step is getting Windows to turn “navigate to a mailto: link” into a jump to a parameterized URL of my choosing. Then the second part is to figure out what a Gmail compose URL looks like.

The Founders Letter in Google's S1

Fri, 30 Apr 2004 03:08:39 +0000

This is well worth reading. Something special is happing at Google, and with luck they will chart a new course that other companies can follow as they go public. Perhaps my employer, Tellme, will choose to follow such a course, though it seems unlikely. Our core values are probably as strong as Google’s, but are not exactly aligned with theirs.

Freezepop

Wed, 28 Apr 2004 14:25:16 +0000

I ran across Freezepop today as a result of reading a bit of Achewood. Two great cultural influences in one day! Yay for sickpuppies.

101st entry

Wed, 28 Apr 2004 14:20:39 +0000

Why are people strange about powers of ten?

If we had 8 fingers, would be be a really big deal when the car had 32769 miles on it? And what if I lost a finger, would I start getting excited about rollovers in base 9? And what about yakuza, who screw up and lose a half or a third of a digit? What is the meaning of fractional bases?

Just wondering.

Island of Dr. Moreau

Tue, 30 Mar 2004 00:18:13 +0000

Karl and I watched The Island of Dr. Moreau tonight. Luckily we were, uh, enhanced, by several beers, a white Russian, a screwdriver, and a glass of Kamikazes.

The move sucked. But at least Karl uttered these memorable lines:

“He’s getting the hang of the boom stick.”

“Quonset hut madness!!!”

“Cat versus Dog!”

“He’s not dead YET.”

I think maybe I need to redeem myself by reading the H. G. Wells novel now.

Budapest

Sun, 21 Mar 2004 23:43:26 +0000

A friend is on her way to Budapest, and I wrote some of this to her. I’m copying it down here so that I don’t lose it.

I was in Budapest in the fall of 2000 on my way to Oradea, Romania. There, I helped build a huge house to be used for a family-style orphanage. It had 8 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms, 1.5 kitchens, 2 living rooms, and a dining room. We had to finish it from a finished foundation and framed walls to “pillows and sheets on the beds” in about 8 days.

Cool Toy!

Fri, 19 Mar 2004 16:55:48 +0000

This is the coolest keychain tool ever.

Moving my Vote

Thu, 18 Mar 2004 15:59:35 +0000

I currently live in California. It is not considered a “key battleground state” for the presidential election. Both parties have essentially conceded the electoral votes to Kerry. As long as Californians as a whole vote the way everyone expects them to, Democrats in California can afford to ship some of those votes off to other precincts in the nation, where the election will be more competitive. The same reasoning would allow Republicans to move some votes from states like Texas to the battleground states.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

Thu, 18 Mar 2004 02:42:30 +0000

I had forgotten it was St. Patrick’s day until I checked my personal email and discovered mail from Michael Mullen giving last-minute notice of a Tempest show in the City. Karl and I headed up around 7 pm on the train.

We ate at Cha Cha Cha, which was interesting fare for an Irish holiday (things got stranger later when the Swedish lead singer of an Irish band started playing Swedish folk songs). We went down the street to 12 Galaxies to hear Tempest.

McDonalds settlement

Sat, 06 Mar 2004 01:16:35 +0000

McDonalds is running a giveaway billed as a “thank you to our customers”. If you read the fine print in the advertisement, it turns out this giveaway is a settlement to a lawsuit. Here’s the allegation made in the complaint:

The Complaint alleges that Plaintiffs and Class Members, were deprived of the chance to win certain prizes offered as part of McDonald’s Promotional Games, as advertised and promoted by Defendants. Specifically, the Complaint alleges that the promotional games were a sham because Jerome Jacobson, an employee of Simon Marketing, Inc., the company retained by McDonald’s Corporation to administer the promotional games, and others unrelated to defendants Simon Marketing, Inc. or McDonald’s Corporation, rigged the games by misappropriating many of the winning game prizes totaling at least $20 million.

Taxes

Thu, 04 Mar 2004 14:59:04 +0000

Georgia is considering an e-Lottery because, according to the sponsor, “We’re trying to target a market that may not be part of the lottery now – techies or professional people tied to computers all day.”

I’ve always been taught that lotteries are a tax on people who don’t understand probabilities. Perhaps the reason professional people don’t play the lottery is that they understand it is not a good investment.

Peak Oil

Tue, 02 Mar 2004 13:49:14 +0000

Psst… want to be terrified?

Take a look at this.

It’s this guy exploring the worst case scenario of what happens when we run out of oil. It goes as far as cannibalism! Real end-of-the-world stuff. At some point, it’s not terrifying anymore, because clearly the guy’s just off his rocker, right?

OK, now go read some of the writing here, which is a group of reputable experts discussing the same thing and coming to the same conclusions.

DRM revisited

Mon, 23 Feb 2004 10:57:38 +0000

Another take on DRM. We come at the issue from different points of view, and end up at the same place: just wanting to make unencumbered MP3’s to work around the whole thing.

Veggie foods that aren't

Fri, 30 Jan 2004 14:31:30 +0000

Today I came up with a vegetarian food that doesn’t exist, and probably should not exist.

Vegetarian procuitto could be simulated with heavily processed and colored shitake mushrooms. It would be called “pro-shit-o”.

Cue rimshot…

Link it, dude!

Mon, 26 Jan 2004 11:17:42 +0000

It’s 2004 for God’s sake. Why do idiots still insist on putting URL’s in plain text in a web page, so that I have to copy it and paste it into my URL bar?

Is it because they are afraid I won’t come back to their website, and want to dissuade me from visiting the other website? If that is really their attitude, I want to run away screaming from them anyway.

DRM, cracks, and my buying habits

Mon, 26 Jan 2004 11:01:13 +0000

The iPod, WMA, and DRM get Scobleized. The point he makes is that having many players available to you is important because once you commit to buying media locked up via DRM, you are locked in to whatever platforms support the kind of DRM your content uses.

The problem with that argument is that I don’t accept the premise that content I buy should be locked up. I am responsible in the way I use and distribute digital music files. I do not share them more than I shared CD’s when I used to use them. My behavior might not be squeaky clean to the letter of the law, but I’m certain that I am not sharing my digital content more than the industry was able to bear in the early 90’s. But in order to exercise the same rights I used to enjoy with content I bought, I need it to be unlocked.

Clueless critique of RSS

Thu, 22 Jan 2004 16:17:14 +0000

Wow, is this list of “Ten Reasons RSS is not ready for Primetime” clueless.

He makes some fair points. But out of the ten, these are either simply false, irrelevant, or seriously debatable: 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10. I’m not going to rebut them one at a time, because I expect others to jump down his throat for me.

Vegetarians Take Note

Thu, 22 Jan 2004 15:19:55 +0000

Turns out plants are thinking too.

So there’s only one non-sentient food product left on the planet: Right-wing Republican Ribs! Finger lickin’ good. (And if you happen to get Rush’s ribs, you’ll get a nice buzz from the residual oxycontin.)

Seriously, this is neat stuff. It is further proof that cellular automata are a critical part of the working of the world. Far from being simply a mathematical curiousity, they appear to be the mechanism by which complex behavior emerges from simple systems.

Free World Dialup

Tue, 20 Jan 2004 00:42:25 +0000

This posting reminded me of something I discovered last night. When you make a toll-free call to a US number using FWD, the ANI (if you’re not a telco guru, think “Caller ID”) shows up as a fixed number. This fixed number has nothing to do with your FWD account number, and it is the same for all FWD member who make outbound calls to toll free numbers. As a result, if you call a service which is personalized based on your ANI (like Tellme) you get whatever personalization someone else set up, or worse, other people can mess with your settings.

Image recognition to prevent casual forgery

Fri, 09 Jan 2004 15:30:50 +0000

This is so cool!

That explains why there are all those silly yellow “20”’s in the background of the new US 20 dollar bills.

The political/social/freedom aspects of this story leave me totally irritated. But the technology involved is pretty nifty, and the fact that the authorities managed to get this integrated into software for image editing, photocopiers, etc without any public scrutiny is just absolutely unbelievable.

So now the countdown starts. How many days until a hacker writes a tool to fix this brain damage in Photoshop? All that is required is a program that takes a bitmap with EURion constellations in it as input and creates as output a bitmap missing the minimal amount of data so as to not trigger the EURion detection algorithm.

Binary Clock

Thu, 08 Jan 2004 17:54:23 +0000

Jhango is throwing a party Friday night to Saturday morning to celebrate when Unix time rolls over from 230-1 to 230. Since I can’t be there in person, I made her a binary clock that runs under Win32.

It was surprisingly easy. I had it working in under 2 hours. I’ve made a few Windows apps before, but nothing like this. Yay for good documentation and an IDE that literally forces you to do it their way. (But I’m still glad my day job is not making Win32 apps.)

Long drive home

Mon, 05 Jan 2004 00:39:42 +0000

I just got home from a long visit with kc in San Diego.

I took Highway 101 down and most of the way back. It is so much nicer than I-5. Today, on the way back, I strayed from 101 and took some back roads. I ended up coming up state route 25 from south of Pinnacles National Monument. There are some absolutely stunning vistas down there. Was nice to trade some time for some driving on twisty roads with no traffic and no sprawling wasteland on the side of the road.

Kiss My Ass, Chronicle

Mon, 22 Dec 2003 13:44:45 +0000

This article in the Chronicle, describing confused visitors to the city of San Fransisco during a power outage, is just over the top. Its treatment of the suburbanites who subsidize San Francisco’s excesses is offensive, and I hope they get called on it.

You know, we don’t need to come to Union Square to shop. We have malls in San Mateo and Santa Clara county too. Perhaps we only go to the City because we have some deep seated desire to be insulted by the city dwellers, to be reminded of how inferior our suburban lives are. Or maybe we come offering a few dollars of tax revenue that your city can use to get the bums off your streets, so that we can bring our relatives to your city next summer without being ashamed by it.

A Taste of Things to Come?

Sat, 20 Dec 2003 16:12:49 +0000

This article details a successful attempt by a Chinese man to get real-world repayment for stolen virtual goods.

What effect will it have on the economies of the world when the economies of virtual worlds are harmonized and integrated into the real economies? One of the central ideas of the Western, market based economy is that infinite growth (or at least, growth for the forseeable future) is possible. I’ve always considered that idea suspicious. Perhaps these virtual spaces will give the real economy more room to grow. At least the virtual economies do not yet seem to have the same old externalities (pollution, class divides, mono-culture, etc). What externalities do these economies have that we just haven’t noticed yet?

CAIDA's Network Telescope at work

Fri, 12 Dec 2003 12:11:00 +0000

Interesting new report from CAIDA on the DOS attacks against SCO.

Crosswords

Wed, 19 Nov 2003 22:31:29 +0000

Karl’s been doing the crossword online at Yahoo for a while now. I worked one at lunch the other day with him, and found it really enjoyable. This was a really easy one, suitable for a newbie like me.

When I was a kid I used to watch my grandparents working together on the crossword. I liked watching them do them, but I couldn’t get any clues, so I disliked the crossword itself.

iTunes gripes

Wed, 05 Nov 2003 01:47:21 +0000

On the first day it was released, I installed iTunes for Windows. I figured something from Apple has a chance of dislodging WinAmp as my music player. They pay attention to important details, and except for the ongoing Quicktime debacle, make software most people seem to like.

Using it to edit MP3 metadata has been a disappointment. Though other people claim it makes perfect sense to them, I can’t for the life of me understand how to make a playlist. Part of the problem is that I keep right clicking on stuff, and nothing useful happens.

The donkeys own "ass"

Sun, 26 Oct 2003 23:42:02 +0000

On a whim, I typed a few naughty words into Mozilla’s URL bar, just to see what would happen.

I typed “ass”, and I got sent to the DNC blog.

WTF?

Happy Birthday to Me

Sat, 25 Oct 2003 04:25:37 +0000

Tonight I had a little get together for my closest friends for cocktails, cards, birthday cake, and good conversation. I don’t normally like card games too much, but under the right circumstances, they are a blast. The circumstances tonight was studying up for next weekend when I might need to know the details of some card games. As usual, of course, the studying will prove completely useless. So, not a blast, but worthwhile anyway.

Having friends for parents

Fri, 17 Oct 2003 11:33:15 +0000

Going through the transitions where your parents go from “the people who’s job it is to form you”, to “fellow adults living in this world with you” is tricky. Not everyone goes through it, but my parents and I did, a few years into college. Happily, it went so well that we even progressed to being friends, which I suppose some people never do.

My parents came to visit California this weekend. They are homeless right now, because they’ve sold their house, but their new one is not ready to move in to yet. So they came to the cabin, and then down to Redwood City to see my house. We had a good time at the cabin, doing the normal 50% work, 50% play.

Discretion is the better part of valor

Tue, 02 Sep 2003 01:54:46 +0000

I was up at Westerly this weekend, and wanted to go for an overnight camping trip while I was there. I decided to hike 4 miles up Noble Canyon to Noble Lake, then sleep under the stars and reverse the whole process Monday morning. I like summer camping trips like that, where you can keep the pack light by ditching the tent.

On the drive there, I noted a fair amount of thunderstorm activity. When I got to the trailhead, there was moderate to light thunderstorm activity. The clouds were all up above the top of the canyon, and I’d be hiking in the floor, with plenty of room between me and the storm. I decided to get hiking, and make one final go/no-go decision at 2 miles in. Either it would be a 4 mile day hike, or an overnight as planned.

Security in Bee Society

Wed, 20 Aug 2003 12:29:54 +0000

Biology is neat, and is making huge progress towards being able to explain human nature. Check out this article on security mechanisms in bee populations.

Perhaps someday we’ll know how to overcome human nature. Will we choose to do so?

Google Can't Spell, pt 2

Sat, 16 Aug 2003 17:26:29 +0000

It occured to me that if you were trying to remove the Connection header from in the middle of a char * buffer, the absolute fastest way to do it would be to use strstr() to get a pointer to it, then do a byte swap to change the token from “Connection” to “Cneonction”. If you choose to optimize for CPU cycles and not bandwidth, that’s a valid optimization.

The question is, who would be motivated to optimize like that? A content provider pays for their bandwidth. If I caught one of my developers pulling a trick like that, I’d walk over to his desk and wack him up side the head with the 2x4 Of Justice. CPU cycles (especially the 20,000 or so it would take to excise the string correcetly) are cheap compared to bandwidth. I suppose, in fairness, I’d have to make a spreadsheet proving my point before I won the right to whack the developer. But my gut instinct is so strong on this, I’d probably at least shoot them with a Nerf gun before I went to do the spreadsheet.

Sending Microsoft Packing

Sat, 16 Aug 2003 17:10:44 +0000

Hpaul turned me on to Mulberry when I was bitching and moaning about something stupid Outlook Express did the other day. I decided to give it a try, and I’m delighted.

In addition to being much faster than Outlook Express, it also supports server-side address books via IMSP. I set up an IMSP server, which was not as easy as one would like, but not too bad either. I arranged for it to run inside of stunnel, so no passwords in the clear.

Skipper Jeff

Sat, 16 Aug 2003 16:58:21 +0000

Last weekend I passed my BCC certification, which means that I’m allowed to charter boats up to 25 feet from anywhere in the Bay Area (and around the world, too). On Thursday, I went out on my first solo trip. Our crew worked together well, and we had a good mix of just relaxing sailing, splashing through waves, and practicing. The only problem is that the ladies didn’t get as much time on the tiller as they probably deserved. But it’s difficult to make it fair when people steadfastly claim they are “fine” and don’t want to get involved.

NPR

Mon, 04 Aug 2003 11:02:28 +0000

Heard at work: “I don’t listen to NPR, they are too conservative. They are National Pentagon Radio.” And in reply: “Or National Pentagram Radio, depending on your point of view.”

Perhaps this wide range of viewpoints is why we can never make any progress in American politics.

Weblogs are the ultimate profiling tool

Mon, 07 Jul 2003 14:28:16 +0000

Paolo makes a great observation about how accurate ad profiling can get when the advertiser is reading your weblog.

Great folk music

Sun, 06 Jul 2003 23:49:56 +0000

I enjoyed great music tonight at the Little Fox. The first set was Four Shillings Short, second set: Broceliande, third set: all 6 of them together.

The venue was great, the bands were fun, the sound mix was awesome (that’s a big deal when the music itself is intrinsically acoustic), and the people I went with were fun. I even got up and danced a waltz at the end, and the band seemed to appreciate it.

String Cheese

Tue, 01 Jul 2003 17:11:20 +0000

I just stumbled across The String Cheese Incident via Hooping. It’s cool music. It makes me want to sit on a lawn with people I like talking to and enjoy a beer. Alas, the show coming up in the Bay Area is at the Warfield, which is not an outdoor venue.

IBM makes metamaterials

Thu, 26 Jun 2003 05:17:12 +0000

This sounds important. Humans now have the ability to make materials with properties never before seen in the universe. That’s a big deal.

You can get semi-conducting behavior out of natural substances (search for “crystal radio” and “razor blade” for an example). But you’ be hard pressed to find anything on the planet outside of an IBM lab that can switch optical energy using magnetic fields.

Always a bit behind the curve, I’m finally understanding why nanotech is a big deal.

Back from vacation

Thu, 26 Jun 2003 04:37:53 +0000

I’m back from a really cool 2 week vacation sailing in Croatia. I’ll be filling in weblog postings for the days of vacation in a bit. For now, let me just say it was wonderful, and I’d recommend Croatia to anyone!

Great band names

Fri, 06 Jun 2003 02:16:10 +0000

Sometimes I come across a saying and I think, “that would make a good band name”.

Tonight, which watching Insomniac, there was a steel mill on. In the furnace control room, there was a dial labeled megawatts. Megawatts! I immediately realized I just HAD to have one for a coworker. So I searched on ebay, and on Google. Nothing came up. Perhaps it was the search terms I used. I tried different things until I ended up with the search terms “megawatt gauge”.

SCO Claim credible, according to incredible analyst

Fri, 06 Jun 2003 00:32:04 +0000

Seen in Information Week: “My impression is that [SCO’s claim] is credible,” says Laura DiDio, a Yankee Group analyst who was shown the evidence by SCO Group earlier this week.

Who is this chick?

Here’s her bio, from the ITF2003 speaker list.

Laura DiDio, Senior Analyst, The Yankee Group

Laura DiDio is a senior analyst for the Yankee Group’s Application Infrastructure & Software Platforms Planning Service, which is closely aligned with the Enterprise Computing & Networking Planning Service. In this capacity, Ms. DiDio focuses on desktop and server operating systems, with a particular emphasis on Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, Active Directory, and Novell, Inc.’s NetWare. Additional areas of coverage are Web services platforms and standards including Microsoft’s emerging .NET services and the rival J2EE. She also covers the directory services arena and interoperability and migration issues associated with Active Directory, eDirectory, and Sun’s iPlanet, as well as desktop and server operating system security, software distribution, and third-party performance monitoring and management tools.

VMWare on Servers

Tue, 03 Jun 2003 11:29:32 +0000

Another interesting Joel note is about using VMWare on servers. When VMWare came out years ago, smart sysadmins I hung out with realized that it would be useful this way. But it hasn’t really taken off among folks I know.

At Tellme there are a couple reasons why we don’t use it. First, it doesn’t run on the Solaris x86 servers. Second, we are very price sensitive, since our business model calls for us to deliver a complex and potentially very expensive service via a large set of very cheap systems. So, when we consider a change that involves putting new commercial software on all those little machines, the costs can add up quickly and overwhelm the benefit. I haven’t done a specific investigation at Tellme, but my gut instinct is that it wouldn’t fly.

Mozilla Firebird is ready to rock

Tue, 03 Jun 2003 11:14:18 +0000

Mozilla Firebird is almost ready to replace IE on my desktop. It is fast, and almost all of my habits from IE carry over. Joel’s review of it is what got me to try again. I’ve tried Mozilla several times in the past and just given up because it was such a pig.

I have two complaints. First, the middle-click and drag scrolling behavior of IE is not supported. Second, the Moveable Type entry body editing box does not have the useful little “make link” button, which I use a lot.

Google can't spell?

Tue, 03 Jun 2003 00:59:36 +0000

Google’s HTTP replies have headers like this in them:

Cneonction: Close

NnCoection: Close

The first one happens for responses with result code 200. The second one happens with responses of 403. (If you are asking yourself how I got Google to give me a 403, try http://google.com/wml with a user agent that does not include “Mozilla” in it. Weird.)

Google is too smart of a company to do this by mistake. But what crazy bug could they possibly be working around with this?

Sailing Vacation comes through

Sat, 31 May 2003 20:42:35 +0000

OK, it is official, I am signed on to the trip to sail for 9 days off the coast of Croatia! Wow, this is going to be amazing! The sailboat we’ll be chartering is really swanky! We will be picking it up in Split, Croatia. From there we’ll probably be heading south in to the archipelago off the coast there.

I really need to read up in my Lonely Planet to learn more about that area before I get there.

Smart people doing important things

Wed, 28 May 2003 11:38:25 +0000

I get this certain feeling when I read some things on the net. It’s this “click” in my brain that says, “This is a smart person, making good progress on an important problem.” I get it almost every time I read philg. Today’s dose of that feeling came from this article about what’s happening at OSCOM.

SF Bay Bloggers

Tue, 27 May 2003 18:35:32 +0000

SF Bay Bloggers is a website for bloggers in the SF Bay Area that some geeky chick put together. Congrats Courtney!

Friendster Critical Mass

Tue, 27 May 2003 10:42:06 +0000

Friendster has critical mass. I just recently met two new groups of people, and both are hooked into Friendster. I knew about it a while ago, but I prefer to be a follower, instead of a leader in these “invite your friends” things. Looks like it is time for me to follow along and invite some friends to join.

Hopefully Friendster will last longer than Six Degrees did last time this idea came around.

Beter Speling

Sat, 24 May 2003 23:26:07 +0000

You should be seeing better spelling on this weblog from now on, since I added MTSpeling.pl to my MoveableType installation. Unfortunately, you have to patch MT itself to integrate it, but it was no big deal.

There’s no way to add words to your personal dictionary on the server side, but I have an idea for how to do it, which I might try out. If I get it figured out, I’ll post it here. Basically, I’ll write a CGI script called “add-word.cgi” or something. Then I’ll arrange for every potentially misspelled word to be a link to a javascript function which submits the word to the CGI, and possibly even makes changes using the DOM so that the word is no longer a link, and no longer marked as misspelled.

Sailing Lessons

Sat, 24 May 2003 23:17:39 +0000

I took my first real sailing lesson today. It didn’t really cover much more than previous lessons, but getting more practice is always welcome. Also, you can learn the same thing a different way from two teachers, then integrate the best of both. Today’s teacher dislikes judging the wind direction using the weathervanes on the top of the mast, and instead taught us how to judge the wind direction by looking at the ripples on top of the waves. That’s a useful skill!

A sailing adventure

Fri, 23 May 2003 17:11:04 +0000

Wouldn’t it be cool to charter this boat for a week or so? I might get a chance to. More info when I know it for sure…

More on the Matrix Reloaded

Thu, 22 May 2003 02:13:20 +0000

Corporate Mofo discusses the Matrix universe in detail too deep for a philosophical lightweight for me to comprehend. But he picks up on, and explains something I noticed too.

He says:

Not coincidentally, most of the people in Zion seem to be black or Hispanic, which makes perfect sense: If you’re a white suburban Matrix resident, driving your Matrix SUV to your Matrix golf club, why doubt the nature of reality?

blog.meetup.com

Thu, 22 May 2003 00:13:51 +0000

I went to the blog.meetup.com meetup for San Jose tonight. I met a cool group of people there. Conversation was good enough I forgot to leave and go get dinner, so tonight I’ll just have to subsist on a cookie and a mocha. Geek food!

A while ago, I went to one other meetup, which was only so-so. It seems that bloggers are naturally a bit, uh, different socially, and that feeds into a successful meetup. Like the blogosphere itself, any lull was immediately filled with an interesting tidbit, keeping the conversation going. And then the brainstorming on any given topic ran to unpredictably strange ends. Somehow we manged to invent outsourced bus driving and coffee drinks with bacon bits.

Alas Ars Digita, I knew thee well

Wed, 21 May 2003 03:48:08 +0000

I watched Ars Digita, because I sensed something important and interesting was happening there. I was saddened when it all fell apart. To me, it was an important part of the tale of the dot-com days.

I found an article that looks to be an interesting insider’s view on things there.

Update: Eve has removed the article from her website.

Matrix Reloaded and Stephen Wolfram

Wed, 21 May 2003 01:28:14 +0000

I saw Matrix Reloaded today. It was pretty good, I guess I’d score it a 4 out of 5. Not like the original Matrix, which was an 11 out of 5! I remember leaving the theater after the first Matrix thinking, “Wow, that movie has changed the playing field of Sci-Fi movies forever.” And it turned out I was right. This time I left the theater thinking, “That was a good movie, and I’m glad I went to it.” Which, compared to some of the crap that you see in the theaters, is a pretty huge compliment.

Frog Jumping

Mon, 19 May 2003 09:40:13 +0000

When I got up to Arnold, I heard on the radio that the Calaveras County Fair and Frog Jumping Contest was running this weekend. So after I finished my chores (restack the woodpile, clean the gutters, sweep the roof, replace the disposer), I went down to check it out. It has been so long since I’ve been to a county fair. It was fun. I called Andrew and Holly and alerted them to join me. They had a good time too, and Holly says she got lots of up-close pictures of people just being people.

Cabin-ho!

Fri, 16 May 2003 19:00:16 +0000

I was really looking forward to sailing lessons this weekend, but I got the schedule wrong and it turns out the first class is next weekend. I’m going to use this weekend to go up to the cabin and get it ready for the summer. Got to get all the flammable stuff away from it before the vigilantes (also known as the “Meadowmont Property Owners Association”) send us a nastygram.

Finding IDE drive firmware version from Solaris

Thu, 15 May 2003 19:23:07 +0000

I am working on a mysterious bug at work, and absent of any other promising theories, I decided to compare the firmware revision of all the hard drives involved to see if that correlated with the pattern of problems. If you aren’t a sysadmin, that will either not make any sense at all, or will give you some insight into what our lives are like.

So I figured it can’t be too hard, right? Getting this info from a SCSI disk turns out to be easy, as long as you have Veritas NetBackup server installed, and are on a Sparc. You run “sgscan”, which uses the SCSI Generic driver to scan the buses. Fine, but I was on Solaris x86, and though I did have the NetBackup client package available to me, sgscan is only available in the server install.

Happy Mother's Day!

Fri, 09 May 2003 16:35:25 +0000

I’m driving up to Roseburg today for Mother’s Day weekend and my mom’s retirement party. It’s a long drive, but going home for a visit is always worth the trip.

I surprised mom for Mother’s Day a few years ago. That was really fun. This time she knows I’m coming, but it should be just as fun.

This may be one of the last times I visit the house on Glenmar. Mom and Dick are downsizing into a smaller house, and a smaller mortgage for their retirement. That wasn’t quite how they had planned things, but the down stock market and economy is hitting everyone just a little.

Hello, I'm back!

Tue, 06 May 2003 12:08:34 +0000

nella.org dropped off the net because of some nameserver difficulties. I took the chance to also change registrars, which added to the downtime. I am back now, so if you sent mail and it bounced and you want me to see it, please send it again.

Gender differences in navigation

Mon, 21 Apr 2003 13:32:26 +0000

Some usability researchers reported that with a 35 degree viewing angle, women are slower at navigational tasks than men, but when the viewing angle opens up to 70 degrees or more, the gender difference disappears. The improvement only shows up if the animation is smooth like reality, not jumpy.

Somehow I feel just a little bit pleased and superior as a result of reading about this. I know I’m not supposed to, but I still do.

Everlasting Bliss

Fri, 18 Apr 2003 15:10:01 +0000

Why would you pay $200 for a ketchup bottle? If it made me smile like that guy is smiling, I’d pay. Isn’t $200 a small price to pay for everlasting bliss?

Life at Microsoft

Fri, 18 Apr 2003 14:25:26 +0000

This description of life at Microsoft is pretty accurate. There’s more to it, of course. Every big company has politics and culture “issues”. Also, not every employee of Microsoft is so privileged to work at a level where they can control their own fate as much as the article implies. But for a certain class of Microsoft employees, it really just as he says it is.

I didn’t leave because I was being overly controlled or constrained by The Borg. I left Microsoft because I was dissatisfied with the business ethics of the company, and was not willing to commit my effort to changing it. Instead, I chose to put my effort into a smaller company where I could more easily reinforce the behaviors I wanted to see in my employer.

Shoes

Wed, 16 Apr 2003 04:20:56 +0000

Girls, listen up!

Aggressive Caching in TiVo.pm

Wed, 16 Apr 2003 03:55:20 +0000

So, it appears that too aggressive caching in TiVo.pm is the culprit. Even after I changed which services it was supposed to be advertising to the TiVo, it still sent down the old stuff it had cached in files in /tmp. Removing everything in /tmp owned by apache solved the problem. Not graceful, but it worked.

Hello, TiVo? Is there someone there I can report these bugs to?

Update to tivo-beacon

Wed, 16 Apr 2003 03:48:51 +0000

I made a new version of tivo-beacon, with the length bytes included that TiVo seems to send on TCP connections. That makes it quite a bit happier. Now I just need to figure out why TiVo.pm is sending down messages about services (“Music” in my case) that are commented out of example.cgi.

TiVoConnect Hacking

Wed, 16 Apr 2003 02:59:42 +0000

Tonite I set out to make my Tivo use my remotely-hosted Linux webserver as my MP3 server. The eventual goal is to teach WinAmp to play from the same collection of files, so that I can have one copy of my mp3’s in the “cloud” and still get access to them easily on each device.

The first step was to investigate the TiVo Developers info. There I found a tar.gz file with some stuff in it that implemented the funky XML messages TiVo needs to know what’s in the directory tree. I fetched it put it in a directory on my webserver.

College of the Future

Tue, 15 Apr 2003 11:02:14 +0000

Why is it that so few people ask the interesting questions that turn institutions on their heads? Philg contemplates colleges optimized for learning.

MySQL making in-roads in enterprises

Mon, 14 Apr 2003 03:01:47 +0000

You heard it here first folks. And it appears MySQL AB’s intends to make version 5 the one that really puts the hurt on Oracle and MS SQL Server.

Note to Larry: Sell short.

Countrywide Home Loans

Mon, 14 Apr 2003 02:07:55 +0000

The little loan on my house got sold to Countrywide (though a closer inspection of the paperwork makes me think it was probably sold to the Bank of New York, which is having Countrywide service the loan for them). They kick ass, because they have real people, not lawyer-automatons write their letters. Here’s an excerpt:

Welcome to Countrywide Home Loans, the nation’s largest independent home loan lender. Your home loan servicing was recently transferred to us and this is your official notice, as legally required. So please excuse the formality.

First Hike of Spring

Mon, 14 Apr 2003 01:58:45 +0000

I just wrote a big post about a 10 mile hike I took today, but I lost it. I hate web-based UI’s!

The hike was awesome, because it kicked my ass and will help get me in shape for more hiking and camping this summer. It took me all over the Purisima Creek Open Space.

Your tax dollars at work

Sun, 06 Apr 2003 22:06:37 +0000

I was poking around the WHO’s website and I found something called the Codex Alimentarius. Sounds mysterious, huh? Turns out it’s like the IETF, but for international exchange of food products. Guess what type of “nutritional packet” comes in these varieties:

Sweet-fig, Pisang Mas, Amas Date, Bocadillo, Ney Poovan Ney Poovan, Safet Velchi, Cavendish Dwarf Cavendish, Giant Cavendish, Lacatan, Poyo (Robusta), Williams, Americani, Valery, Arvis, Gros Michel, Highgate, Pink Fig, Green pink Fig, Ibota, Apple Fig, Silk, Pacovan, Prata Ana, Mysore Mysore, Pisang Ceylan, Gorolo.

Free Wireless

Fri, 04 Apr 2003 10:33:25 +0000

This weblog post, and the last one, brought to you courtesy of the owner of adsl-34-22-231.mia.bellsouth.net. Whoever you are, thanks for making it possible for me to sit in the shade on a Fort Lauderdale street and use the net. If you are ever on Arch St. in Redwood City, I’ll happily return the favor.

Hobby Horses

Fri, 04 Apr 2003 10:30:30 +0000

I used to work for Arnold de Leon. He has a method of teaching his coworkers lessons that Dave Winer just explained:

Moore did coin a new phrase, and like all good bloggers wanting to initialize a new meme, he repeats it over and over. This is not a new idea. Jake Savin was a music major at Reed College. He told me his composition teacher taught him that a good theme is worth repeating, many times.

The Cathedral and the Shed

Thu, 03 Apr 2003 13:54:27 +0000

I spent yesterday reading, debugging, and then fixing a Java program. What a pain in the ass. If I manage to go another 5 years until I do Java again, I’ll be happy.

The problem with Java is that the language provides the tiniest little basic units, and everything else you need you have to build. Or use other things that other people built for you (but first you have to learn about them and understand their quirks). That all makes sense from a theoretical viewpoint, but it is just much harder to use than a language like Perl which has very well developed, robust primitives whose quirks I already mastered years ago.

Advice from an Englishman

Tue, 01 Apr 2003 17:35:27 +0000

In the Daily Telegraph, Patrick Bishop writes of American soldiers, “In short, they must work harder to show that they belong to the human race.”

I don’t know who he is or if he has any credibility, but if the difference is visible to him, it probably is to the Iraqis too.

Government by and for the people

Mon, 31 Mar 2003 15:42:04 +0000

Dave Winer points to a paper from a new colleague of his. His thesis is that a new super power is coming into existence to hold in check the United States. It’s about time, since it looks like we really need one.

This brings to mind something else I heard on the radio, I forget where. Many people in other countries say, “We don’t hate Americans, we just hate their government.” And it would be nice if we could just shrug off our current administration’s deplorable diplomatic manner so easily. But we can’t, because our government is a government of the people. If you don’t like my government, you don’t like me.

Stealth Blog

Sun, 30 Mar 2003 23:43:52 +0000

If you have a blog, and no one reads it, is it really a blog? Or is it like the tree that falls in the forest with no one around?

I’ve told exactly one person I have a blog, and even that was by mistake. I didn’t tell him the URL, though he is enterprising enough to find it himself. I’m not keeping it an Official Secret or anything. I guess I’m just trying an experiment to see how long I can be part of the blogosphere without people noticing.

TDMoIP

Sun, 30 Mar 2003 22:00:28 +0000

There’s a new technology to learn about… TDMoIP.

VoIP (Voice over IP) has been a big disaster. Lots of engineering effort in, little success out. I had a Vonage phone line for a while, and the call quality (mostly due to latency) was terrible. I was using my Vonage endpoint under significantly less than ideal circumstances, so it might not have even been their fault. But I’ve seen VoIP stuff take up lots of time and deliver very little value at work too.

16-bit Internet?

Sun, 30 Mar 2003 20:58:35 +0000

Check out this snippet from the “Having trouble connecting” help screen for AOL Instant Messenger:

You might not be able to sign on if:

Your Internet connection is only 16-bit. AIM needs a 32-bit connection. Contact your ISP if you are not sure.

snip…

16-bit Internet? What they hell are these guys smoking?

Wooden Clockworks

Sat, 22 Mar 2003 17:26:39 +0000

Here’s a collection of links about wooden clockworks.

First, you need to search for “wooden clockworks”, not “wooden clocks”, since lots of people make wooden cases, put a quartz clockworks in them and then list them as “wooden clocks”.

This site would win the awards for both “most irritating website ever”, and “most useful information”.

This site looks really promising, and is what pointed me at the first one. It even has a beginner’s project, which has only a weight and an escapement which runs for 10 minutes.

Some things I'm thinking about doing

Sat, 22 Mar 2003 01:45:48 +0000

I have broad curiousity, which I’ve made the best of, given that it tends to limit my ability to focus on something for long periods of time. I’m currently, though not permanently, at peace with the fact that I tend to progress just past “beginner” in all that I do, then lose interest in making progress.

One way I keep this from being a total character flaw is that I do keep committments, like running a Game, or being in a dance performance. So while you may not be able to count on me to stick with something new more than 6 or 9 months, you can count on me to stick with those things for which I sign up.

I'm still here

Sat, 22 Mar 2003 01:15:04 +0000

I just haven’t posted in a while, that’s all.

Hmm, why? I haven’t been extraordinately busy. I just haven’t had anything to say. I’m hoping to break the trend by saying something about not saying anything.

One reason I haven’t had anything to say is that some of the things I have to say are not for public consumption. And though I have no readers of this blog that I know of, I know that this is a public space. One reason I decided to start this blog (apart from the simple need to understand this technology) is that I know that to be a good writer, you need to write. I value keeping a broad set of skills in good working order, so I want to be, among (many) other things, a very good writer.

Thoughts of a man far away

Tue, 18 Mar 2003 00:16:34 +0000

Hong Kong has turned out to be the epicenter of a serious outbreak of SARS.

There is an incredibly moving article in BBC about the silent killer in the midst of the healtch care workers in Hong Kong. I found the e-mail address of the doctor and sent him a note. It is included below.

To: andrewburd@cuhk.edu.hk
Subject: God bless you

I read your interview in BBC and it really touched me. Tonite I
had been feeling sorry for myself and my country (I'm an
American) because we've gotten ourselves into such a mess in the
mideast. Your interview reminded me that the real fight is
against nature itself.

Good luck to you, take care of yourself. May all your colleagues
recover. You have my thoughts even in this trying time, when
these obscene distractions try to pull my attention from your
very human story.

Jeff Allen
Redwood City, CA, USA

If you feel like it, please send him a note too.

Happy St. Patrick's day!

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 14:40:16 +0000

I went with Dan to St. Steven’s Green today for lunch. I ordered Chicken Strips with salad. When I got mine, the first chicken strip looked just like the island of Great Britain. I picked it up by Scotland and dipped Wales in Ranch dressing before I noticed the similarity. So I immediately started digging through this pile of chicken to find an Ireland. And I found one! It was so cool to have my own little map on my plate.

Magazines

Sat, 15 Mar 2003 03:00:07 +0000

I only subscribe to one magazine at a time right now, because otherwise my curiousity would bury me under a pile of magazines every month. I try different ones from year to year, just to see what all is out there. I’m currently subscribed to Atlantic Monthly, as a result of William Langewiesche’s interview on Fresh Air. I also had read a few Atlantic Monthly articles on-line and that was so tedious that I gave up and bought the subscription.

Meat eaters

Sat, 15 Mar 2003 02:34:08 +0000

Now, as Karl reminds me all the time, I do eat meat. But I am not a Meat EaterTM. My mother happily taught me to eat a lot of chicken and fish, and then dating a vegetarian pushed me over the edge to where I eat meat only a few meals a week, and even then it’s usually turkey sandwiches or something. The inexplicable rules I use to decide on which foods to eat would seem to make me something other than a vegetarian. One friend suggested “arbitrarian”. Suits me.

Genealogy of place

Thu, 13 Mar 2003 22:40:15 +0000

Megnut came across an article about something I’ve been thinking of as the new owner of a house from 1921.

At my housewarming party, a neighbor showed up who had lived next door, looking at and wondering about my house for 37 years. She had never been inside it. She has now!

Go fly a kite!

Thu, 13 Mar 2003 21:39:43 +0000

Rule number 1 of “How to be Jeff” is " Always have a kite in your car, just in case."

I looked up from my computer at about 5:30 pm and noticed that the impending storm was bringing with it gusty winds and interesting clouds. I decided it was high time to get back out to the Shoreline Park Kite Flying Area.

I got to watch a nice sunset, and fly my kite backwards! The prevailing winds at the kite flying area usually are on-shore from the Bay. Today they were coming from the mountains. I also discovered an interesting new form of recreation. It combines kite flying (for relaxation) with wind sprints (for exercise). See when you are flying a stunt kite alone, every time you crash the kite you have to go to the kite, reassemble it (ok, only after really big crashes!), and set it up for another launch. I was in a hurry to get as many flights as I could before I ran out of light, so I sprinted up and back to the kite after every crash. It also had the nice effect of keeping me warm, since I left my jacket at home today.

No Go Game

Thu, 13 Mar 2003 15:55:16 +0000

Alas, the Go Game has been rescheduled to April 5 due to the weather. That’s probably a good idea. We played Amnesia in the rain, and it was really miserable.

Lots of games coming up

Wed, 12 Mar 2003 17:34:04 +0000

Last night I went with the rest of Team Snout to the Dutch Goose to get interviewed for The Goonies Game. It went really well, and the things we prepared for GC went over well too. Clever bribery goes a long way. We happened to answer two of our trivia questions just by the things we chose for a bribe. Pretty cool, huh?

Of course, it’s all a bit easier now, since we can think like GC thinks now that we’ve been GC.

Blogchalking

Wed, 12 Mar 2003 04:27:18 +0000

This is my new blogchalk: United States, California, Redwood City, Central, English, Jeff, Male, 26-30. :)

If only...

Wed, 12 Mar 2003 03:53:56 +0000

If only there was a Tristan and America nearby, I could be fashionable. Perhaps it is time for another trip to Montreal. Maybe in time for their amazing spring?

Living in an sci-fi novel

Wed, 12 Mar 2003 01:22:05 +0000

In Estonia, they have a public program to let people get their genes sequenced.

I just can’t get my head wrapped around what this kind of thing will do to society. I’m not against it, I just feel a little like I felt when I saw the first web browser. I knew that things were going to get really complicated, but I didn’t really feel like I knew where things were heading for a few years there.

It's not IBM that Oracle needs to worry about

Tue, 11 Mar 2003 12:07:15 +0000

TechNewsWorld reports, Top Dog Oracle Losing Database Market Share.

At work, we are using mySQL for new projects, and looking seriously at replacing Oracle in old projects with it too. Oracle is too expensive when mySQL, which is free, will do the same job.

Update: Fortune picked up the story, but probably not from me.

Afganistan gets a top level domain

Tue, 11 Mar 2003 11:51:01 +0000

On March 10 2003 the UNDP made the “af” top level domain go live. Coverage is here: CNN, UNDP.

I decided to look into this to see what it looked like. I found to my delight that ns.undp.org was allowing zone transfers for the entire “.af” namespace. Unfortunately, there’s still not much there to see.

The interesting thing is the list of second-level domains they have started out with. Where did those come from? Do you suppose that some geek in the basement of the UNDP set those up for fun? Why aren’t any of them in the local language?

Egosurfing, pt 3

Thu, 25 Jul 2002 00:00:00 +0000

After yesterday’s musings about my copious net presence, it was interesting to run across this article.

Egosurfing, pt 2

Wed, 24 Jul 2002 03:16:00 +0000

OK, I really need to stop egosurfing and get to sleep. But look at this bizarre thing I found. I grew up in Oregon, and I’m all for wilderness conservation programs. Maybe they named the fund after me, once I left for California?

Egosurfing

Wed, 24 Jul 2002 02:55:00 +0000

Look what I found… When searching for the old article about WebTV, I found a version of it translated into Japanese.

My friend Lisa was pretty blown away by how much stuff she found about me on the net. Even I’m blown away to find a Japanese article quoting me.

Old News

Wed, 24 Jul 2002 02:49:00 +0000

There are two things wrong with this story: MSN TV prank creating “emergencies”. One, that it could happen at all, because the design problems and bugs that made it possible have been known for a long time by people smart enough, but too busy to fix them. Second, that people are calling it a virus. It’s not a virus, just like it wasn’t the last time this came up.

The press can be so frustrating to deal with. The day I gave that interview, I had to get out of the office and go watch people flying kites to unwind.