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Monday, September 09, 2002 |
[Morgan Wilson's Exploded Library] studies the USA Patriot Act in detail, particularly the sections governing libraries and librarians, and shares with us a bit more detail that we sometimes see when there are accusations flying around.
11:50:58 PM 
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elgooG won elbissecca ni anihC?
Slashdot posts a discussion of a "backwards" Google search engine that appears to defeat China's filter. But how many Chinese will know to use it? Besides, this writer couldn't make it work in Chinese!
That said, the concept is interesting. A New Scientist article on the site is viewable here.
UNQUOTE [Asia Business Intelligence]
I have found really neat things before on New Scientist ... that is a great site to explore.
7:14:10 PM
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[Boing Boing Blog] QUOTE
Ten things the Net got right. Dan Gillmor's new column -- it's hard to pick a quote from this, the whole thing's just so right on.
Link Discuss UNQUOTE [Boing Boing Blog]
I think what helped get it right was for the infrastructure to not be owned by one vendor, putting the Information Highway out there for anyone to connect to and use, having competion between different providers of different services.
Government funding of research has often been healthy for a nation, such as Department of Defense ARPANET into the Universities.
I think some politicians collected votes by pushing for better computer education in the school system.
1:20:45 PM
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Radio Free Blogistan] QUOTE
Weblogged Conversation: Slow Academic Adoption of Weblogs. Seb closes the loop on an interesting multi-weblog conversation about why weblogs have not (yet?) been widely adoped by academics as a research tool:
Stephen over at Blogging Alone mentions Sébastien Paquet's reasons why blogging has failed to become a widely accepted research tool among academia. I disagree with nearly all of these reasons. Below is the list of reasons and my thoughts based on my own experiences:
Follow the link to Seb's summary to get the whole flow of the dialogue. UNQUOTE [Radio Free Blogistan] I inserted into quoting the link to Stephen context.
The flow of the dialogue is not yet clear to me, but I get the drift of it.
I will agree that a lot of people have valid concerns about Privacy on the Internet, and the risk that someone will steal their ideas, if they prematurely share them through the Weblogging medium.
I believe that Weblogging Technology documentation is mainly aimed at people who are not only Computer Literate, but somewhat experienced in tinkering with how things work on their screens. In other professions than computing developers, there are many people who lack this attribute. They just want to use the software. You do not have to know how to change a tire or tune an engine to drive a car - when it needs service you take it to the experts. When TV set or Telephone is broke, either call repairman or buy a new one. There are computer users who want that from their computer experience. Thus it is perfectly legitimate for such people to complain about the learning curve.
I agree that it is easier to publish through some time honored template, even when some new template might be be better suited for the work, especially when there are other players, like employers, who need to approve the new template.
I think that scientists seek to figure out how things work, then engineers apply the results in the real world. Scientists propose a theory to explain the evidence, then come up with experiments to test the theory. Developers have similar approach, by coming up with ways to test new software and changes to software. In that sense, computer people are a mixture of scientist and engineer, but computer science in the real world is still like an artist crafting something. I doubt that I understand social scientists well enought to comment on how they fit into that picture.
1:18:39 PM
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[Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog] QUOTE
I found out via an email exchange that one of the founders of the [newly relaunched] electronic intifada website is Dutch. Arjan El Fassed also posted several comments to yesterday's posting. Of course there are counter posts now as well that is forming a lively conversation.
My advice to Arjan is to re-re-launch electronicintifada as a weblog. Perhaps a multi-user weblog for multiple authors. Currently the site appears to emulate a BigPub and imho detracts from their mission.
As with all aspects of war, be careful not to become what you are fighting against. UNQUOTE [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]
This is also like the appearance of impropriety. The enemies are not clearly understood by government intelligence, let alone anyone else. When any group of people discuss something, the odds are that several are police spies, journalists trying to ferret out a story, pure innocents trying to figure out what is going on, and it may be that none of the participants are any of the bad guys, but in a war, the rules of innocent until proven guilty are sometimes altered into round up suspects before someone pulls another 9/11.
1:15:31 PM
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[Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog] QUOTE
All dutch helicopter companies, including ours, received a fax from the authorities this morning, warning of 'journalists' that will attempt to proove our natuional security is flawed, by staging an 'air assault' over the country on sept. 11th.
Geez guys, get a life already. I've posted the fax on my dutch weblog.
UNQUOTE [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]
I think the threat to National Security is more from Journalists than from Air Companies, from the perspective of doing something stupid.
Many people, who work in Air Companies learned their trade, as military pilots, or have around them people of that patriotic perspective that can provide a sense of balance.
The risk from Air Companies is that in the management of costs, there will be a trade off that sacrifices safety and security.
It is self evident to anyone, who lives in a democracy, that various national monuments and institutions can be seriously hit by something like the Oklahoma City Bombing, if the perpetrators do not care if they get caught, and the only way to protect ourselves is to become a police state.
If you doubt this, show me your credentials (such as a policeman badge) that you have need to know my theories on how bad guys could hit the very stuff that is sacred to our democracy, such as various government buildings and important places to the infrastructure of our economy, and I will tell you how, but not via a public forum.
Now some commentators seem to have an attitude that parallels that of Juvenile Computer Crackers ... hey, here is a weakness not properly protected ... broadcasting it daring someone to find a solution, and meanwhile the bad guys have been delivered of an idea that perhaps they might not have dreamed up for a while, so the article has just made the job of Homeland Security that much more difficult to get done.
This is reminiscent of past wars where journalists pretended to be impartial. Remember Saddam's troops shooting up various air conditioning ducts in downtown Kuwait? Why did they do that? Well some refugees crossing the border to freedom were surrounded by journalists to cover their story, and among other things they said they hid in air conditioning ducts of some office buildings. Saddam's military intelligence was watching Western media and picked up on that information, and other clues about how people were escaping, and some refugees did not make it out safely, thanks to many journalists not understanding that loose lips sink ships.
What we need are private briefings in executive session to Legislators and Homeland Security agency workers, to make sure that they are aware of things that people in other professions can see.
- Architectural Design Professionals
- Computer Professionals
- Journalism Professionals
- Public Health Professionals
- Security Professionals
- Transportation Professionals
1:08:41 PM
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Reference Directories to Blogs by Profession, organized by
Sebastien Paquet
12:58:37 PM
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Sunday Topics:
- Some of the stuff I posted on earlier days finally made it to some of my categories, after being missing in action too long.
- More Category ideas; Euro Glitches; Homeland Insecurity; Humor; e-justice; e-law; Personal Computer Hassles; Radio Ideas.
4:10:57 AM
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[Boing Boing Blog] QUOTE ... I am not sharing the whole bit here
The DRM vendor's mantra is, DRM needs to be invisible, it needs to get out of the way of legitimate activity and only crop up when the user tries to infringe on copyright.
The Mobilphone is an iPod clone with a 5GB drive and a USB 2.0 interface. For security reasons, the Mobilphone will only play music that has been encrypted with Toshiba's proprietary cipher. The encryption happens when you use Toshiba's software to synch your Mobilphone with your PC.
This means that without (illegally, under the DMCA) reverse-engineering the crypto, no vendor except Toshiba and its licensees will ever be able to deliver a client for the Mobilphone (so forget about Linux, BSD, Mac or device-to-device apps).
UNQUOTE [Boing Boing Blog] so Al Mac can interject a comment here
Hey, they doing this deliberately, so obviously they want to limit their market to a portion of the people who otherwise might be interested in such a product. If vendors involved with Linux, BSD, Mac or device-to-device apps want a piece of this market, they have to pay Toshiba to be a licensee.
continue QUOTE [Boing Boing Blog]
Leave that aside, because there's an immediate, non-hypothetical reason that Toshiba's brainless crypto-scheme is a stupid, anti-customer idea. The encryption of your music happens on the fly, as you synch your Mobilphone with your PC. That encryption process is CPU-intensive, so much so that it slows the USB 2.0 interface to USB 1.1 speeds. In other words, despite the presence of some truly azz-kicking, bleeding-edge interface technology, the Mobilphone synchs no faster than it would have if it had a poky old 1.1 bus.
Pracitically speaking this means that synching ten albums takes eight minutes instead of fifty seconds. I have an iTunes "Advanced Playlist" that grabs 5GB of random, high-rated music from my pool of 20GB of MP3s and synchs them every time I plug my iPod in -- it takes a minute or two. With the Mobilphone, it'd take all afternoon. Rip. Mix. Wait. Link Discuss (via Gizmodo) UNQUOTE [Boing Boing Blog]
Al Comments: If Toshiba decision makers can take these remarks to heart, then their literature needs to warn users about these performance standards, and arrange a tie in with the IBM chip that exclusively handles encryption math on a computer, so that as this kind of burden is added to the data stream, it does not slow things down, or else they need to put the IBM chip in the Mobilephone.
4:00:10 AM
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An interesting news item, that I missed seeing because I not watched CNBC MSNBC FOX etc. in a day or two, but then sometimes they not share everything that is news.
[Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog] QUOTE
The Netherlands has publicly announced it supports a US war against Iraq with or without United Nations Security Council approval. Personally I'm against any bombing at all and am appalled by the Dutch support.
UNQUOTE [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]
I think US Policy Makers are between Iraq and a hard place. They want to protect their intelligence, but they need to share something to help fight the propaganda war. US leaders say intelligence about Iraq tells us thus and so, about this growing risk, and if we do not take action soon ....
Al paraphrase ... it would be like if intelligence info was better managed before 9/11, or Hitler's Holocaust, or Pearl Harbor, or in the war of 1812 when Washington DC was set on fire ... if we saw that coming, we have a duty to take action to prevent it ... so US leaders are saying today that their military intelligence is saying something equally bad is coming our way if we do not take pre-emptive action, but for security reasons, we can't tell you what it is exactly, you have to trust us
Well the problem with that is that there are a lot of people out there with long memories of when they think they been lied to by the government before ... nuclear safety, veterans ailments, Waco ... there's a bunch of people whose knee jerk reaction is to demand to see the evidence before they willing to approve national action.
We are approaching a world in which the time from enemy threat to have to block it is such that there is no time for thorough debate. That's why the President has the nuclear weapon intercontinental missile launch codes.
3:42:56 AM
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Radio Education
I hope none of this gets duplicate posted because I have been having Microsoft problems ... I push Post or Publish button and it is like I lost everything and Windoze says something about trouble accessing that page.
Warning: This is another rather long post by Al Macintyre, with an abundance of interrelated nuances. It has to do with referrers and perceptions and more connections, and how we hopefully can figure out what is going on. Al is at a stage of learning Radio, with an occasional Eureka! when something clicks in Al's mind, but still a lot of Duh factor as to why some things work the way they do.
Referers are a list of places that have linked to our weblog in the last 24 hours, supposedly (more on my aside, doubting this simplistic assertion, later). I think what happens is that someone posts something on their web site that is a link to us, but that does not show up on the Referers until someone actually uses the link.
- I post something on day 1.
- On day 2 person 2 sees my post, finds it interesting, publishes something on their site about it, with link to my weblog giving credit.
- That link is not to my actual post, but to my weblog.
- On day 3 person 3 sees the stuff on person 2 site, follows the link to my weblog.
- That causes a hit on my referers, identifying person 2 site for the first time for me.
- Person 3 is not identified by this process.
- The referer points me to person 2 site, not to the actual post, so I am scrolling around the site looking for it.
- Persons 4 5 6, also not identified, mean additional hits, all identifying person 2 site as to what connected to me.
- I have a Radio Wish that the Referers and News Aggregation reposts did a better job of linking back directly to the actual item post, not just to the general site.
Because our referers only show the last 24 hours worth of stuff and are cleared in the middle of the night, I have been trying to visit them each evening, cut paste what is there to my Referer Archives collection to see what is new connection to me that I might want to explore. I am making a Radio Tip here that other people might want to do something similar. I believe there are some tools out there to simplify the process, but I want to understand what is going on before I complicate my situation with some Tool.
It is not clear to me exactly when the Referers get cleared ... is it Midnite USA Eastern Time? Is it same time every nite, or when the servers get a round TUIT with other duties? Where exactly are the referers stored ... on some Userland or Weblogger site? I notice Userland has a Yesterday link that might be a nice tool, if the data is available from the server right before they wipe out the latest story. That is more a Radio Question than anything else.
I am finding a lot of strange stuff on my Referers that I am having a hard time figuring out.
Someone had done a Google search asking about some topic of posting stories on our Radio Weblogs (specifically Radio express copy text from browser to weblog). I had done a post some time ago about how something works, and pointed at a Radio Userland site as having many of the answers how to do that. The Google search showed me giving the answers. But the answers text not actually on my site, it is on the Radio site that my text linked to. Someone looking at this kind of information could very easily be led to the conclusion that I said something that was actually said on some other site that I linked to.
Saturday Sep 7, I commented on a news story at Atlantic Monthly, giving link to the story, an interview with Rick Cook about his book on Anti Gravity. Then I find in my Referers the Atlantic story refering to me. Well I am nowhere in that article. I linked to them, why are referers saying they are linking to me? My working theory is that someone on one of the Atlantic forums made some remarks about me comparing Rick Cook book to stuff on UFOs, Pyramid Power, and Mad Science, and the Referer software has some bugs in it.
We say something. Someone else thinks it is interesting and comments on it. Unless we are very careful, it is not clear to a third party who said what. Then a third party is asking me to clarify something they thought I wrote. I try to clarify who is doing what, but the way the software works, that muddies the trail.
Radio Suggestion: When quoting someone, and then commenting on what they said, be very careful to make clear who is saying what in the quotes. Look at what I have recently done on my web site, with QUOTE before and UNQUOTE after, with both of them adjacent to who I am quoting. I know it gets complicated when a story has multiple quotes from multiple people, I just saying we all need to strive to improve the state of our writing so that we minimize risks of misleading other people as to who originally said what.
I share this because I am recently in a struggle with someone who is asking me why I did something, and I think it is very easy to misread what is going on in the Radio Weblog world. The documentation says one thing, the software works subtly differently, there may be bugs, the software may have been enhanced since the documentation was written.
Radio Suggestion: When writing documentation, state that this is for Radio version 8.0.7 or whatever, so when someone is trying to correlate what we see with what the documentation says, the version that the documentation is for or about can help us reconcile the differences. In time we might be able to use Search Engines to find who has documented a particular topic for range of versions where we reasonably sure that topic not changed in a while. Likewise the people who have done documentation can then see that something changed at version 8.1.3 say, and search for everything they have written on that prior to that version change, then adjust their text to be up to date, and change their version reference accordingly.
Before anyone else has a misunderstanding about me, let me try to clearly state that I am a Radio Customer struggling to figure out this stuff, in which I learn a lot by bouncing stuff off other people who seem to be in a similar learning curve boat. I do have some past computer experience which technically it is rather alien to the Radio reality.
However, what is parallel is the user experience. We see something weird happening. We speculate what is going wrong. We call the help desk to complain, not about the weird details, but we pass our speculation on. Well our speculation might be totally off base. The help desk has to figure out what is really going on, and our speculation tends to lead them astray. Then there is the need to figure out what the end user really needs.
Lawrence Lee of the Radio Discussion is to be commended for his skills, talent, and diplomacy at rapidly cutting through user confusion to provide a translation of what is needed to solve our problems.
I think I am emerging from the beginner newbie stage of many aspects of this, but there are some areas where my knowledge is pretty low. There is high risk that I will state something incorrectly because of where I am on learning about this. I have had some very serious misconceptions along the way. If someone asks me a question, I try to help them. I learn a lot from the Radio Discussion and try to give back to the community.
There is stuff that can't be learned by reading the documentation, which assumes the reader knows a lot, that many readers do not in fact know.
Open Suggestion: The user community needs to develop and access better standards for Radio documentation. We might learn from Academia, Journalism, Past Big Company Computer Products, general books and magazines on PCs like www.smartcomputing.com and I am sure other people can suggest other places to use as models to emulate.
We have to do things, then watch see what happens and try to figure out from there. Thanks to my Radio Doc Sources, I have made connections that I could not have made without them.
For someone to be participating in dws.Radio.FAQ, then showing up on Al referers because they have linked to Al's Radio Doc Sources, which were announced through Radio Discussion and dws.Radio.FAQ and people subscribing to this stuff, such users have to be a bit beyond the beginner stages, because to make this work, they have to be skilled in:
For someone to learn this, that implies a certain level of experience figuring out how to work Radio. I think there are two types of skills or talents that need to be combined. There is the geeky stuff related to figuring out how to work the software. There are the communication skills associated with giving proper credit to where we got something. These skills are often found in different people, not often in the same person.
Thus, if someone's web site links to me, I assume that person is not a beginner. They may have other stuff that I can learn from. If I had not posted stuff on my weblog that they found to be interesting enough to link to from their site, I would never have learned about the useful stuff they have that I can learn from. Thus, my Radio Doc Sources are like an introduction that leads me to cool stuff, some of which is relevant to making additional updates like these latest additions.
Matt Mower
- Live Topics tool enhances Radio Knowledge Management.
- If I am understanding this correctly, we get some macros added to the Radio collection, which lets us assign topics or subjects to our posts, existing ones and any new ones. We can then get a table of contents that links to what we have done on the subjects we have assigned.
Thomas Burg
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His weblog, which is in a mixture of English and German, has some links on the right side. Go down to section headed Relevant and open up the Outline on Radio then Tools. He has links to over 20 tools there that you could use to enhance your Radio experience. Lots more stuff to explore as our time permits.
This stuff to my Radio Doc Sources might not yet have upstreamed. I notice different things (Categories, Home, Stories) tend to upstream on different schedules. For example, I posted my stuff on the Rick Cook book to my category History of Technology and also to Science Fiction interests, at the same time, but there was over 24 hour lag between the two publishings reaching my public site.
12:12:01 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Al Macintyre.
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