Tuesday, September 10, 2002

FROM [Ray Ozzie's Weblog] Tyranny, Terror, and Technology.  Some thoughts about the intersection between the challenges confronting business, and those confronting government and society. UNQUOTE Ray Ozzie's Weblog] This is a dynamite thought provoking essay - I highly recommend it - my words of wisdom pale in comparison. I believe that beaurocracy, and inter-communications within an organization, is like glue. Too much and the enterprise is all gummed up with rules that get in the way of doing the job. Too little and everyone is flying off in different directions, counter productive. The challenge is to get it just right, so that you have an agile team effort. This is further complicated by the organization fluctuating in size, so you need different strategies for different scales of operation.  Also there is a spread of individual skills of participants in the organization, so until you get everyone up to speed on something, there has to be another way of getting the job done.  Any time things are changed, there will be transitional confusion. Organizations can be too large and unwieldy. Remember the book The Mythical Man Month, which I consider to be one of the classics on software engineering? Basically the permutations of all the different people who need to intercommunicate can bog down some things so that nothing can get done. Thus it is essential to organize focus teams and have a hierarchy such that there is no wasted baggage in your structure that gets in the way of a lean and mean team. An excess of organizations focused on different tasks is good in business. Competition leads to better Quality, Features, Economies. An excess of organizations with overlapping responsibilities is bad in government. They can have turf wars that get in the way of them doing what they are supposed to be doing. 1:38:32 PM

FBI warns of potential threats [USA Today : Front Page] As usual, nothing specific ... if they had something specific they could stop it from happening ... except right before 9/11 both CIA and FBI were independently tailing 2 of the hijackers because of their involvement in a prior terrorist attack on USA and GOV was trying to identify all the conspirators, and what they up to, and build court case, but the 2 hijackers gave their tails the slip and the rest is history.  There is a hard balance there to achieve between ability to get a court conviction, round up evidence what going on, (correlate the masses of clues that they get, many of which might be misleading or erroneous), and actually prevent something bad from happening. Unconfirmed reports of AlQ targeting oil tankers, add that to laundry list of other things identified in past like nuclear power plants, and shipping containers. Question detainees - risk they will share every fantasy whacko scheme any alQ group ever dreamed up, but was abandoned as impractical. I sure hope GOV and MIL doing war game simulations into what might go wrong, and keep secret results until they have plugged holes that the simulations uncover. Historical patterns logic ... Our enemies hate what West stands for, and international western institutions, so they may target meetings of UN or World Bank. Pearl Harbor was on a Sunday when Amercian Air Defense at Peace and high religious ethic what do on a Sunday. Oklahoma City was on the anniversary of Waco because some whacko with no relationship to Waco wanted to do something on that anniversary date. Well, people who hate us are inspired by bin Laden example, people with no contact with alQ. I sure hope long term Foreign Policy goals can include addressing why these people hate us so much, and do something about turning the tide of recruitments into ranks of our enemies, so that potential enemies do not go down that path. 1:18:17 PM

In apparently first professionally published article by [Morgan Wilson] good essay explaining Weblog terminology Weblog history links Weblog applicability to Law Librarianship Good things about blogging: QUOTE [Morgan Wilson] Blogging software makes it very easy to maintain a blog. Blogging blurs the distinctions between reader, author, and commentator. Informality – most blogs have no pretensions about being polished work and there is a general understanding that blog information is not to be taken at face value. News feeds offered by some blogs can help with the information overload problem. Blogs can be very current and are a good way of keeping one’s finger on the pulse of developments affecting the profession. Blogging can be fun and opens a door into the blog community. Bad things about blogging: Blogging is too easy – anybody can maintain a blog. The informal nature of blogs makes it possible for the blogger to add inane or inaccurate comments, or even do more sinister actions like alter /distort another person’s words. There is a lot of redundancy in blogs – many point to and feed off each other – although this is not always a bad thing. Combined with listservs, group emails, automated searches, clipping services, print and electronic journals, and everything else, blogs simply add to the information overload that all law librarians (also known as human filters) must deal with daily. The power of blogging can be abused. Blogs have been to create Google Bombs, a deliberate way of associating one item (usually unfavorably) with another unlike item UNQUOTE [Morgan Wilson]   I disagree about how easy.  I think this is a user beholder issue, in that there is a big learning curve to get into it, and not well defined where the threshholds are.   In PC hardware world there are standards of stuff to have to be able to accomplish certain tasks. In Blogging documentation world it is not at all clear what the prerequisites are to learning how to do things.   Anything can be abused.  e-mail viruses, spam, flames, crackers, denial of service attacks some aspects of computing can be abused far worse than blogging. YOU decide what you want to subscribe to, turn off a subscription if too much duplication, or it diverges from your interests. TOOLS available to manage the information overload   Something else about RSS ... I am getting a list serve archives in headline form, like how we get USA Today headlines.   4:26:31 AM

Military exercises in D.C. [USA Today : Front Page] This is NORAD exercise to test military readiness, there is no specific threat.  There will be air units, and missiles protecting the Pentagon. I have some concerns, and I hope the authorities have this well in hand. Budget exists for training, equipment maintenance.  Surprise events happen, guess what budget gets drained?  Nice to know budget has been replenished. Remember at end of Cold War we had a new peaceful world and could downsize military and close military bases all over creation because did not need as much?  The new military budget was to be able to fight two regional wars at same time. So how many military bases exist as backup in case one gets zapped by Earthquake, or bad weather, like Hurricane, or Tornado?  Does the logic of centralizing military in a few places in Homeland make sense given the new reality?  Remember that kid in Florida who hijacked a plane and flew it into Bank of America?  In transit he flew over a US Bomber Command base.  Well I do not want it public known if base had SAM defenses, or other stuff to protect if the kid had flown into side of a hanger or Air Traffic Control Tower, or if not then does now. I sure hope deployment is being rethought in light of new threats. How fast can those ground vehicles with the anti air missiles get to where they may be needed in DC or any other city?  I sure hope that some Federal Buildings have in the underground parking garages, away from public view, a few military units that can be deployed on very short notice. Need missile defense in front of the Capital?  Get there on extremely short notice. Star Wars can protect any city from the big stuff, but doubtful how long before get it working. 4:03:14 AM

Radio Wish When you are at the Radio Home Browser - look at Top Command Menu ... all the way on right is HELP, then just before it is PREFS ... this is where we can tweak some rules regarding how our web site functions - each of the links has a brief statement on top saying what it is for Radio Wish - I want all those brief statements together on some reference page that I can scan down to find which preference it is (if any) that does whatever I happen to be looking for at a particular moment. I soon need to look into getting a search engine on my weblog, to find Radio documentation if nothing else.  I see that [Phil Wolff] has a choice of two different search engines on his site.  I had occasion to use them tonite.  According to my referrers, someone linked to my site from Phil's   http://dijest.com/aka/2002/09/02.html#a1974 but Microsoft IE went on strike about linking to it, so I went to Phil's home page, searched for the Calendar (1/2 way down on the left) intending to go to Sep 2, but Sep 2 does not have a link on the calendar,  So I used search engine to locate post mentioning me by name, and it was Sep 2, which means Hey Phil, do you know your Calendar is broke? 3:02:49 AM

Monday Topics:  Accessibility and Usability; Copyright; History of Technology; Homeland Insecurity; Individual Responsibilities; Infrastructure; Iraq; e-Law; e-Libraries; Professional Choices; Radio Education. 1:54:47 AM

[Phil Wolff] found a great article in [New Scientist] QUOTE Professors developed a system that automatically converts Pascal source code into simple "music".  Vickers and Alty assigned particular musical phrases to different Pascal language constructs, such as conditional statements and loops. A synthesised chord, for example, represents conditional statements such as "IF TRUE". A loop could have an ascending string of synthesised notes associated with it. When different sections of code are put together, they should form a harmonious tune. But if a loop, for example, does not execute properly, the music would not ascend properly and the programmer should hear the error. Similarly, a duff statement would produce a different chord that would be immediately apparent. It worked in tests: listeners caught more bugs. UNQUOTE 1:29:06 AM

[Russ Lipton Documents Radio] QUOTE Even though I spent over 20 years consulting to corporate America, I would rather write Radio book(s) for a non-biz audience. Just seems like more fun. Nevertheless. Radio (not to mention Frontier/Manila) deserve to be used by every business - and every school - everywhere. Even granting that BigCo's judge UserLand a heavy counter-cultural risk (as if being slaveboys to BigSoftware is safe), that leaves a million or ten other candidates. It's time to demystify the what-where-why-when-who of Radio for a computer literate, professional but non-technical audience. The paradigm for that audience is the friend of Jon Udell's (don't have the link) whom Jon stepped through a Radio installation. It was just way hard and the jargon way confusing. To some degree, this is unavoidable. It doesn't mean Radio is hard to use. Given what you can do with it, hard to use compared with ... ? Still, Radio/RCS embeds a decade of design and lore covering the entire history of the Internet: Web servers. Browsers. Scripting languages. Authoring products. Web design tools. Desktop clients. Interoperability. Publish-and-subscribe. ... and the acronymns that support them and more: HTTP. FTP. HTML. XML. XML-RPC. SOAP. RSS. OPML. Nor are these mere jargon-y acronymns (yeah, we have plenty others of those). The ones above support entire worlds of functionality over which Radio is layered. Layered well or poorly? Well. Very well. But not so well that weblogging/K-logging isn't still terribly confusing to millions of people who are as smart (and often smarter) than 'our kind of people'. So, my audience will be: Technical management - decision-makers for determining corporate standards. Project leaders - they need to understand how Userland's products support a wide variety of shared spaces. Professional end-users - journalists, marketers, sales, lawyers, doctors, teachers, scientists et al. The goal will be to show how Radio can be interwoven across a given organization or project team through specific use(s) to support a hierarchy of shared spaces that mediate identity and knowledge. Profound mouthful. No, this ain't gonna be a mere white paper-ish book. If I wanted to do that, I wouldn't focus on Radio (and, behind Radio ... Frontier/Manila). I'd keep it vaguely generic. Au contraire, I'm betting on these specific products, which means: how to think about them (sure) but also and emphatically how to USE THEM. With weblogging, 'philosophy' and 'use' converge entirely. On Wednesday, some thoughts about the theme I will emphasize to this audience. Can you find it signalled above? What do you think? Right audience? Wrong audience? Who cares? UNQUOTE [Russ Lipton Documents Radio] Compare this to the electric typewriter.  Once upon a time business people had an army of clerks using typewriters and another army proof reading, and then it had to be retyped to remove the mistakes, and the cost to get one error-free business letter produced was astronomical.  Then we got word processing with built in proof reading.  Well now in today's reality, people want web sites, but to get the job done they have to hire an army of expensive consultants to lay them out.  Radio Weblog to that reality is like Word Processing was to the electric typewriter. Now Word Processing threw that army out of work, so at same time perhaps we have responsibility to see how we can stimulate the economy so the out of work people have new stuff to keep them productive, and getting pay checks.  I do not believe that beginners need to get into News Aggregation and Blogrolling and various other esoteric stuff.  The software developers can make a good living supplying end user beginners with tools to automate stuff that now people have to tweak stuff inside Radio to get to work.  Have a focus on getting the masses comfortable with Weblogging. There is a potential hunger out there with all the people who are sick and tired of spam, computer viruses, flames, and all the baggage that goes with e-mail, but not willing to give up e-mail, like years ago I knew people who gave up the telephone because they could not stand all the anonymous obscene phone calls.  Hey but give them an alternative, and provide a smooth path to learning the basics, and the Radio customer base can really take off, thus supporting an army of Open Source Tool makers to support that new customer base. Years ago, when I went to computer stores, there used to be a hand out folder of basics that any new computer buyer needed to know, like Do you need Intel inside or not, and what is the significance of that question? (No you do not need Intel inside.) Can you run a home PC with an alternate to Microsoft (yes) and what are the practical alternatives? What kinds of things should any computer have (anti-virus, power protection, expandability to more memory disk etc.)? Well for potential new Radio customers, we need to identify what are the basics that they have to know, and no more. When I go to Barnes and Noble, or Books a Million, or one of those other book stores, there are wall to wall shelves of how to books on scores if not hundreds of different computer topics, but narry a thing about Radio Userland or Blogging.  Many people like the old fashioned how to book to help them figure out how to work some computer product.  What there should be is a whole shelf of books devoted to Weblogging, with many authors providing competing products, so that the overall documentation quality will improve. We get magazines with computer tips.  There should be not one but several that have a regular column on Radio Userland tips.  But also get the Journalist Bloggers to explain to Big Business and Big Government what the value is to them getting on this bandwagon. Add to the audience top executives of mid sized companies.  How will this benefit their company?  How does one setup a trial of this over a period of a few months? Think Law Enforcement.  The cop on the beat in the patrol car keys something into wireless PC (that has proper security) or verbally records, or uses camera that is in the cop car.  This goes to the weblog for that police patrol area, inside the city's intranet, so the data is only seen by authorized people. The fact that a cop recorded some info is picked up by Instant Outlining, which knows the location of the cop, because of Global Positioning gadget tied into the cop technology.  This means that back at HQ, a map lights up with a little icon indicating where some report was just made.  Some human can click on that icon to read the report.  The icon will be color coded as to whether this is general information, or seriousness of an emergency. Add to the audience low level politicians who want to climb the ladder of their profession.  They can use their weblog to let the folks back home see what a good job they doing, and along the way they get an education in copyright and privacy issues. Mom and Pop stores have computers.  I order a Pizza and they look up from my phone number, about my last order (I can say, this is Al Macintyre, and I want my usual), and where I am located.  I am not sure that some of these places need Weblogging.  They just need a good system for tracking their inventory consumption for reorders. But if they want to advertise on the Internet, a Weblog is a cheap way to get a splashy presence.  This applies to all kinds of small retail outfits. The newbie discussion lists are getting some developer questions.  There needs to be some gradation, perhaps a hierarchy of peer groups that are at various stages of learning Radio. 12:56:53 AM

[Morgan Wilson's Exploded Library] shares [How Appealing] news that The Eldred v. Ashcroft reply brief was filed in the U.S. Supreme Court and the 29 pages can now be viewed online at this PDF link. There are obviously a bunch of heavyweight petitioners on behalf of many solid interests, such as preserving our early heritage, and placing public domain literature in a form that it can be read to the blind (Doesn't the US Disabilities Act have some requirement that things should be accessible to the Blind and people with other disabilities?) But lobbyists who asked Congress to do the other side of this are also a bunch of heavyweights. What a shame there can't be some compromise that offers copyright owners an option of opting in or out of this deal, and also provide exemptions for public domain, proprietory systems (open and closed) that have independent protection schemes. 12:00:11 AM

© Copyright 2002 Al Macintyre.