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Al Macintyre's Radio Weblog
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Monday, September 30, 2002 |
Friday, I shared news of the Lindows PC selling at Walmart for $200.00 that uses Linux to provide all the services that people are accustomed to paying a whole lot more from Microsoft, except Microsoft sued to stop them from saying what their PC could do. Now comes AOL with a lawsuit and the comments on this article are also worth a review. Apparently the marketing about some relationship with AOL Netscape was merely clicking I Agree to AOL fine print when making a copy of the new AOL version of free Netscape browser. Thanks V. of TYR for passing on this link to me.
12:10:19 PM 
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Radio Wish Thinking - Recent Radio Discussion Group Posts indicate that there is a very high risk of newbies trying to follow current instructions for adjusting the code in Prefs, and getting error messages that are unintelligible to them. If Radio Userland is ever to be marketed successfully to a large mass of computer users, this is a problem in need of a solution. I can see that one of two solution approaches is needed:
- Plug In Tools be developed in which the end user keys in the name of what is to be inserted, and its url, similar to how we handle adding a link in an editing box, or add a subscription to News Aggregation. This might have to be a subset of a particular standard Theme, because of placement on the left or right side of the screen.
- I think this is probably the more practical of the two approaches that I can think of.
- Wherever an error message could show up on user screen, add a trouble shooting button. This would capture the text of the error message, the actual code that it was reacting to, the location of the scenario (specific Prefs from user perspective and www folder path name), then take the user to some Help resource that analyses the kind of stuff that might lead to this error.
- Experienced XML programmers would not need the trouble shooting button. The error message, and them carefully checking their code leads them to see what mistake they made.
- Intermediate XML programmers would need the FAQ about XML programming to help them see what are the most common human misconceptions that might occur here.
- Beginner XML programmers might need to continue posting questions to the Radio Discussion Group Forum.
11:39:38 AM
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Sunday, September 29, 2002 |
Radio Tips Update: I recently added some stuff to my stories, which are always subject to me adding more thoughts from time to time. I think some of my Radio pals might like to know about this (I call my e-mail friends e-friends ... is there a similar short way of referring to my Radio friends?).
- Blog Money is my preliminary thinking on the various ways (if any) that someone skilled in Radio Weblogging might be able to combine that know-how with adding to one's income.
- Radio Doc Sources get a line or two added typically several times a week. This is my directory, by name of contributor, listing links to people who have provided some kind of documentation or tools for the Radio community. Most recently I added some links to good stuff from:
- Alison Fish text input tips;
- Rick Klau and Mark Mower on Live Topics;
- and Mark Nottingham with RSS Tutorial.
- Search Engine Tips basically provide links to recent good stuff provided by Christian Crumlish, Alison Fish, and Don Strickland.
- Understand Radio News Aggregation got a few more links added to the bottom of this essay.
6:50:26 PM
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Inspiration shared by my sister Susan via e-mail.
Inner Strength
If you can start the day without caffeine or pep pills,
If you can be cheerful, ignoring aches and pains,
If you can resist complaining and boring people with your troubles,
If you can eat the same food everyday and be grateful for it,
If you can understand when loved ones are too busy to give you time,
If you can overlook when people take things out on you when,
through no fault of yours, something goes wrong,
If you can take criticism and blame without resentment,
If you can face the world without lies and deceit,
If you can conquer tension without medical help,
If you can relax without liquor,
If you can sleep without the aid of drugs,
If you can do all these things,
Then you are probably the family dog.
4:58:14 PM
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Saturday, September 28, 2002 |
[Radio Free Blogistan] QUOTE MSNBC.com has launched a new feature called "Weblog Central," which aims to "serve as a perch from which you can observe and participate in the brave new world of personal news." UNQUOTE [Radio Free Blogistan]
I notice that their Weblog Resources section has not yet woken up to the fact that Radio Userland exists, and ought to be included in their listings.
12:10:34 AM
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Friday, September 27, 2002 |
Gary Krakow of [MSNBC] reviews the $200.00 AOL Lindows PC, selling at Wal-Mart.com in which Gary labels this as a very promising work in process, in which it remains to be seen if the Linux community embraces this product that is in bed with AOL. The $200.00 price tag might be just right for people who want to experiment with what can be done outside the Microsoft world, but are not ready to experiment on their primary computer.
2:33:10 PM
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Thursday, September 26, 2002 |
Check out the comments on http://www.sammydman.com/ - this 15 year old was almost expelled for the horrible crime of having a Weblog, and only escaped that punishment by signing a full confession of what an on-line journal is and providing a list of all other students that he happened to know of that were also doing the same kind of thing.
Apparently any use of school computers for a purpose that the school administrators do not understand, is a serious academic crime, and soon there will be a mass trial of all the children who are suspected of the felony of being Internet Literate, who will also escape being expelled by naming names of others they know of. Does that remind you of something? Can you get out of this by naming top officials of the government? That's how the McCarthyism was stopped - someone named top Generals of the Army and top officials of the White House.
Sammy is now doing his weblogging from home.
11:19:51 PM
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[Chicago Sun Times] shares a couple stories about Zero Tolerance of Modern School Administrators:
- A Nebraska 7th grader found some marijuana in his classroom and turned it into to the office. He was suspended because, the act of picking it up and carrying it to the authorities constituted possession of marijuana.
- A Florida sophomore honor student saw a bag of pills on school grounds and did not follow the example of the Nebraska student because she was afraid of getting in trouble for possession of the contraband in the short distance of carrying it to the authorities. She has been told she will be expelled for failure to do so.
This reminds me of in Illinois where youngsters are encouraged to clean up the environment, but it is illegal for them to remove beer cans and alcohol bottles from the road side, because that means that those empty containers inside their garbage bags constitutes possession of those containers by a minor.
The lesson for these kids is to
- Do not touch the illegal substance - drugs, guns, whatever.
- Carefully write up a statement of where you saw this illegal substance, in a report to the authorities.
- Make sure your report is addressed to the authorities before you leave the scene, so that if an undercover officer sees you seeing the illegal whatever and not picking it up, your statement is part of your defense.
- Make a copy of your statement before you turn it in, so that if you later get hassled, you can take your statement to a lawyer, the news media, or where ever your parents think will most embarrass the school authorities into backing down.
3:45:52 PM
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[Chicago Sun Times] mentioned that Shaw's Crab House now offers its menu in Braille and various languages of international clientele. I am wondering how many restaurants have menus in Braille to make themselves accessible to Blind and visual impaired customers.
1:35:56 AM
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Safety of Nuclear Power Plants Again Questioned. VOA Sep 24 2002 9:33PM ET [Moreover - Science news]
We are living in a different world today. In recent years it made sense to
- Build a nuclear power plant right next to a major city, because nothing serious likely to go wrong, but now power plants are potential terrorist targets, so we do not want them right next to major cities.
- Build an airport in the middle of a major interstate interchange so easy to bring passengers real close to check in counters, but now a truck bomb can take out an airport, so we need a different kind of transportation infrastructure to unload the passengers from ground transport further away from the air tranport, and run everyone through screening suitably distant from buildings that might be major targets of terrorists.
VOA = Voice of America ... there's links here to what headlines VOA is sharing in various places in the world ... an interesting site worth revisiting occasionally.
- Africa
- Amnesty International protests torture of child prisoners in Burundi
- Intervention in Ivory Coast
- Uranium Security in Africa - is that an Oxymoron?
- Asia - Pacific
- China ultimatim to Iraq
- North Korea gets special envoy from Pres Bush
- a lot of stories I had not seen on local national news
- Asia - South and Central
- US Troops in Afghanistan discover another chilling al Quaida site.
- Dutch and Germans to take over NATO command in Afghanistan when Turkey time runs out.
- Iran nervous about US troops near their border with Afghanistan
- Suicide terrorists seized an Indian temple, leading to another gunfight.
- Terrorists attack a Christian Charity.
- Americas
- Argentina and Brazil economies still in bad shape
- Chilean Appeals court throws out 7 cases against Pinochet
- Colombian President visits USA President
- Mexican Banker gets record bail
- That storm in the Carribean
- Middle East
- Britain and Iraq
- China and Iraq
- Kuwait hosts USA military exercises
- Lebanon scandal with Israel
- Palestinians
- USA politics and Iraq
- USA and Pakistan cooperation
- USA
- Brushfire in Western USA
- Iraq and Partisan Politics
- Various legislation
12:49:28 AM
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Tuesday, September 24, 2002 |
[spacetoday.net] has links to several stories about various nations planned Mars expeditions
[spacetoday.net] QUOTEs
Energia proposes human Mars mission. Russian aerospace contractor RSC Energia has released plans for its proposed human mission to Mars,...
Japan confident Nozomi will be fixed. Officials with the Japanese space agency ISAS believe that the Mars-bound Nozomi spacecraft will...
UNQUOTEs [spacetoday.net]
Aerospace Daily reports on Russian proposed Human mission to Mars.
Astronomy.com reports that the Japanese Nozomi spacecraft will probably have the damage from the solar storm repaired, now that communications with it has been restored.
3:18:52 AM
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I added a small reference directory of e Discussion Groups: e-commerce; computer security; etc.
3:10:42 AM
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Some Computer Humor urls
- Project Management Proverbs
- IT Devil's Dictionary
- Real Programmers
- MIS Information
- NT Quips and Quotes
2:00:28 AM
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[James Robertson} has some interesting insight on how non-programmers view documentation. It was a surprise to me that some people have actually been observed reading some of the documentation, other than me of course, and a surprise that other people figured out how the documentation was being utilized incorrectly.
1:00:10 AM
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Monday, September 23, 2002 |
developer.* [Blogfish] Thanks for the link to Daniel Read's great collection of essays for Professional Programming Quality, Book Reviews, and project to codify programming standards.
6:23:11 PM
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Sunday, September 22, 2002 |
[Tomalak's Realm] QUOTES SJ Mercury: Valenti presents Hollywood's side of the technology story. Dan Gillmor. I made that offer after I heard from a colleague that Valenti, meeting recently with journalists in Los Angeles, had complained about what I'd been writing. So while I don't agree with much of what he said -- and I'll respond in a subsequent column -- it's only fair to give you his side of the argument. UNQUOTE [Tomalak's Realm]
This is Dan Gillmor's interview of Jack Valenti to get Hollywood's side on this great debate.
- Hollywood wants to make their customers happy, and wants their material on the Internet, but on their terms at a fair and reasonable price, because the Internet provides new ways for people to violate copyright.
- Jack Valenti has been president and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America www.mpaa.org since 1966.
- Dan Gillmor and Jack Valenti could not come to an agreement on how it is possible for Hollywood to get what they want, without denying consumers a continuing ability to do what is commonly called fair use:
- time shift programming to view TV programs at a time other than when they were actually broadcast;
- view digital programming in an analog format;
- peer to peer sharing of content that is typically copyrighted.
9:20:28 PM
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Continuous improvement of our Radio communication efforts, in Al's opinion, requires mixtures of:
- Writing Skills in general ... which we can learn by practicing good examples set by others, such as Novelists, Journalists, and successful Technical Writers.
- Learning broad range of capabilities of Radio, and the relevant vocabulary, then using them effectively, such as links to context, to more detailed stories, and include objects across spectrum of what's possible.
- Alison Fish has been teaching Al Macintyre how to do Images and Permalinks, but not enough has clicked in Al brain yet.
- The learning curve at getting better and better at these tools for me has been:
- Past: Get comfortable with Stories, Shortcuts, and simple links.
- Now: Delve into more advanced links and objects we can connect to our web site.
- Next: Become a student of Radio Outlining.
- Know laws and etiquette.
- Be very careful in quoting not to permit any confusion regarding who said what.
- I have a Radio Wish that a future version of the Radio editing box can have something for us to click on that we could use a particular style for quoting a particular person ... person A B C in a body of text.
- For the moment, just break new paragraph QUOTEs around whoever source.
- But I want to learn how to mix it up ... Person A said this, but on the other hand Person B makes a good point, and it is crystal clear what was said by ME, A B etc.
- I think part of the problem is that we are accustomed to using double quotes when quoting someone, but double quotes have a special meaning in Radio, so we need something else when making it clear we are quoting someone and who.
- Be sensitive to the needs of a broad spectrum of people visiting our web site.
- Understanding how to best use the medium.
- Knowing the subject that we are sharing our opinions on, and being careful to distinguish which of our words are backed by experience and when this is just our uninformed opinion.
- Other topics on Phil Wolff's great lists.
2:06:04 PM
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Topics this last week on Al Mac's Weblog (a review to help see what Categories are needed):
This last week I increased my Categories to:
- 400 on Radio Dial: IBM 400 Interests ... connections to user group activity and lists.
- Brain Exercise: Space for future reviews of favorite books.
- Brain Food: Where I trying to learn new stuff (for me) from other people tips.
- Perma Links and Images, with help from Alison Fish and Rick Klau.
- Outline to help general beginners to Radio.
- Brain to Brain: Techniques for more effective human communications.
- Etiquette of all this.
- I need to review this whole area of doing a better job with writing; accessibility; credibility; etc.
- e Law: Changes in the legal landscape within which we all dwell.
- Useful links to commentary grappling with hot topics.
- e Radio Ideas: my input to dws.Radio.FAQ to add to the body of How To.
- HisTech: Comprehending History of General Technology Evolution.
- Latest: reversal of autos and pollution; real antimatter; computer history; anthrax spread by photocopy machines; and more.
- Laugh Track: Miscelaneous Humor.
- Sad but True Banking Stories.
- I basically created this for future posting of humor that used to go on the Home page, and started it out with copies of all humor that previously went there.
- My Friends and Family: Stuff of interest to people I know more off Internet than on.
- Plight of a Nigerian Woman.
- Blind of NH Real World Challenges.
- I need to fix my pictures.
- Personal stuff.
- Security: Computer Security; Homeland Security; Other Security.
- Report on a user meeting whose topic was on Security Testing.
- Links tips opinions and news, on hot topics from a spectrum of sources.
- SF: Science Fiction interests.
- Technological advances into reality with concepts that until recently were Science Fiction, and where various nations space programs are headed.
- Web sites for SF fans.
- Home Page and Stories.
- New Story on some Chess Variants.
- My essay on the Y2K of copying (Mon Sep 16).
4:38:59 AM
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Saturday, September 21, 2002 |
Impact of Emerging Technologies is the focus of [MIT Enterprise Technology Review] with this seemingly unbelievable story about an air powered automobile from France, using Isotherm Dynamics, a process that creates power by expanding air at an almost constant tempterature. If I am understanding this correctly:
- Household electricity cools and compresses the air into a replaceable tank that goes in the car (it uses four such tanks) to run the 1 foot square engine, because ambient air temperature causes the air to expand ... this process takes 4 hours at home, per electric outlet being used for the purpose, or 3 minutes at a special compressed air station that Motor Development International sells for about $100,000.00 to places like today's Gas Stations. It can take in polluted air, filter it, and expel cleaner air as exhaust.
- With fully loaded air tanks, it takes passengers about 120 miles at an average of 30 mph. The car can go from 0 to 50 mph in 7 seconds and seats 5.
- An ABC reporter tested the car saying it ran quite well except it was quite noisy. The inventor says this is something they will fix in later models.
- Buy this car for between $10k and $14k.
Thanks to V. of TYR for passing this link to Al Mac.
4:18:30 PM
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Friday, September 20, 2002 |
I find very interesting people in my referers such as [McGee] QUOTE
There's been some good discussion recently on the interplay between knowledge sharing via weblogs and comfort with writing in most business organizations. (Phil Wolff, David Gammel, Pete Harbeson, Al Macintyre, Alison Fish, Sébastien Paquet, Ron Lusk) The consensus appears to be that fear of writing is one relevant barrier to tapping knowledge in organizations.
Lowering or eliminating those barriers is certainly a worthy effort. I want to explore a deeper issue that this raises. Writing is not simply a mode of expression; it is also a tool for thinking. What's the relationship between facility with writing and the quality of thinking in organizations? Has this discussion of knowledge sharing revealed more important needs in the organization?
These questions started rattling around with some other ideas hanging out in my head and the result grew into "Writing comfort and thinking styles," which I've posted as a longer story using Marc Barrot's activeRenderer.
If oral thinking is essentially linear and literate thinking is two-dimensional, what might three-dimensional thinking look like?
UNQUOTE [McGee]
My interest started out, and continues with the personal need to do a better job of communicating, through continuous improvement. I am a computer geek. I write software. At some point my users need a help screen or an error message. What I deliver had better be crystal clear unambigous, but I recognize I am weak in the graphic digital arts. A picture is worth 1k words but I have been using multiple 1k words when I need to learn how to do the pictures. [Josef the Poet] has shown that it is possible to communicate several pictures using very few words. We need to figure out ways to display computer data so less work for end users. For example, spread sheets can put output using colors, coded so red means some extreme value, to illuminate that which humans need to look at.
I too have found writing to be a tool for thinking. I put my ideas in words, look at the words, get other ideas from the earlier expressions. But often those ideas are non-obvious to someone else reading what I wrote, because there is an implied context of both what I wrote, and everything else in my mind, which in combination provide the new ideas.
The Science Fiction community has something called Oral History. Volunteers go around to Science Fiction conventions to interview the old masters, famous authors. This info is video taped with copies delivered to research libraries around the USA. This gives a sense of understanding those people that you sometimes cannot get from standard literature.
10:21:43 PM
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I recently shared e-mail that I got asking me to sign an Amnesty International Petition to send to the President of Nigeria asking for clemency for Amina Lawal, the Nigerian woman convicted of adultery and having a child outside marriage, and who has been sentenced to death by stoning by the court, the sentence to be carried out after the baby can be rescued from this.
Yahoo's Virus Hoax Busters have some things to say on the subject similar to my views.
- This Nigerian woman has in fact been sentenced to death for allegedly bearing a child out of wedlock (the father denies responsibility, so the woman is automatically guilty). This is real. This is not a hoax. We agree on that point.
- Internet petitions do not have much impact in the West, let alone on this Nigerian culture, says the moderator of the discussion.
- Well we do not exactly agree here. I think this effort raises public awareness of the work of Amnesty International, especially when it results in the European Parliament voting to boycott Miss World contest in Nigeria, and the President of Mexico making a special trip to visit the President of Nigeria to appeal on behalf of the woman's case.
I passed this appeal on to some people who are into that kind of thing, while I seriously doubt Amnesty International is going to get significant change in nations supporting death sentence for violation of Islamic Law, even though they have collected over a million signatures so far (what does this say about the billions of people who have not signed the petition?). I think Amnesty International power is when a nation says one thing and does another, so by illuminating duplicity, the exceptions can be stopped. This is not duplicity. It is Nigerian law and policy.
Here is a directory of links to current Amnesty International themes:
- Stop Torture
- The Death Penalty
- G8 exporting tools for use in Human Rights abuses
- Police Accountability in Human Rights
- Human Rights Education
- Human Rights impact of Economic Activities
- International Justice
- Health Professionals
- Child Warriors before Emotional Maturity
- Guatamala History Repeats
- Diamond Trade's dark side.
Anyhow my referrers are showing someone doing a Google search on the notion that this is a hoax. I found a ton of searches for variations on the woman's name, Nigerian woman, hoax, Amnesty International petition, and all the hits were either on my site, sites about this woman's plight, or Google combining different posts that contained individual words of the search. It is possible that there are a bunch of people doing similar searches. The sad thing is that this happens to many women around the world, and is so alien to our western culture that many people receiving the e-mail appeal info about the petition, their first reaction is to wonder if this is a hoax. So I am looking at some of the other posts on the topic that were in the Google searches, and finding some interesting sites.
Another Nigerian woman, Safiya Husaini, was also sentenced to death by stoning, but an appeals court let her live. But it is a continuing problem because Nigeria is deeply divided between Muslims and Christians, who have different moral codes.
- The President of Mexico will be meeting with the President of Nigeria, and this injustice is one of the things the Mexican President will be arguing against.
- QUOTE
- The man Lawal identified as her baby's father denied the accusation and was acquitted for lack of evidence.
- UNQUOTE
- One would think that a gene test could prove or disprove it one way or the other, and the fact that no such test was done substantiates the complaints of the International Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA).
- Other nations are protesting this at top government levels.
- The Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) labels this as injustice in the name of Islam.
- The punishment for zina (fornication) by unmarried persons is a certain number of lashings, not stoning, and very stringent conditions are needed to verify the crime. For example if Amina became pregnant through rape, then she is innocent of any crime.
- The IHRC has Action alerts on Amina Lawal (Nigeria) and Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (USA). In the latter case, this man got a life sentence in which they are arguing many inconsistencies in the lack of evidence that the right man was convicted.
- Women's Rights Watch update # 2 on the continuing story of the Nigerian woman, Amina Lawal.
- QUOTE
- The judge has declared that Amina should not be executed until 2004, if she loses her appeal, so that she can look after her 5-month old baby daughter Wassila.
- The Nigerian Justice Minister has joined the fight all the way to the Nigerian Supreme Court.
- Here is a Canadian source that seems legitimate to me.
- Exclusive Interview with Amina Lawal published in UK's Mirror.
- QUOTE
-
On Monday, an Islamic court in Nigeria upheld the sentence of death by stoning on Amina. She should be taken, buried to the neck in the earth and perish beneath a hail of rocks, half-bricks... anything conveniently to hand.
-
Summoned before the tribal elders - who traditionally settle matters before police intervene - Yahay accepted paternity and promised to pay medical expenses for Amina and her baby.
But he recanted after his family allegedly convinced him that his acceptance would bring shame on them.
-
UNQUOTE
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Amnesty International says that death sentence by stoning is prohibited by two UN Treaties that Nigeria has signed:
- The United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) has appealed to Nigeria on behalf of Amina Lawal.
- The International Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA) is protesting that this Sharia legal code, as implemented in Northern Nigeria, is unfair to women.
- The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom has listed this appeal on their page of Violence against Women, although the problem here is that of Islamic Law's attitude towards women, whether they behaved in a manner that religion considers immoral, or were a victim of rape.
- The American Women's Self Defense Association (AWSDA) has a link to this appeal (on upper left corner of their home page).
- American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) On_Line forums has a link to this appeal.
- The USA National Organization of Women (NOW) is protesting a couple who were sentenced to death by stoning (both husband-to-be and wife-to-be) for making love before they got married.
- This stuff is no hoax, it is normal Nigerian legal system, and Nigeria is not the only nation like this.
Global Feminist News Wire has several interesting relevant links
Here is a link that indicates that the Amnesty International effort is no Hoax, but some people searching on Google find the site because they looking for the name of the victim, and the word hoax, which are two separate topics on the same site, because lots of people write about both problems like this, and the problem of e-hoaxes. http://crawfurd.dk/africa/index.html#amina
[Crawfurd] shares lots of info about Nigeria such as QUOTE
Hoax Letters / E-mails from Nigeria
Several people has received e-mails with a friendly and very polite business suggestion from someone apparently living in Nigeria (I certainly have received a few of these scams myself). Many of these mails originates from Nigeria, but lately I have also received one which seems to be sent from D. R. Congo. The sender usually claims that he has access to a large sum of money (usually from the government or some private company). The sender asks for help to transfer the money out of the country. This is said to be risk free transaction and you will receive a large sum of money for helping him out. Don't even think about it! Follow this link if you wish to report a scam or read more about this subject: Nigeria - The 419 Coalition Website.
UNQUOTE
I know about this. It is an international scam to get access to your bank account numbers for the purpose of draining them. Honest people should see through the scam, and struggle to figure out which is the correct government agency to report it to (US Secret Service in the USA, because this is a Currency Crime). Unfortunately some big corporations have dishonest clerks, which have led to the corporations bank accounts being drained.
Another very interesting site linked by my reverse searching review, that I want to explore more some time: Crime on the Internet
5:11:37 PM
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[Boing Boing Blog] QUOTE
Antihydrogen created at CERN. a Boing Boing reader sez: "The CERN lab in Europe has created REAL antimatter (antihydrogen atoms).The controlled production of antihydrogen observed in ATHENA is a great technological and scientific event. Even more so because ATHENA has produced antihydrogen in unexpectedly abundant quantities. Wow. Who wants a ride on the Enterprise?" Link Discuss UNQUOTE [Boing Boing Blog]
How fast can a vehicle go that is powered by Anti-Matter? Does Anti-Matter Fall Up?
4:37:27 PM
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~~~
"If you were involved with PLATO in any way, during the 60s, 70s, or 80s -- either as a courseware developer, an educator or faculty member, an engineer or system administrator, a student, a game player, whatever -- I would like to hear from you.
This book is the story of the people that were a part of that online community -- the first real online "virtual community", pre-Web, pre-AOL, pre-USENET, pre-BBS, pre-everything.
Were you a PLATO person? If yes, please help me make this book the most accurate and detailed account of the PLATO story as can be done.
This is your chance to help contribute to the oral history of PLATO."
~~~
He also has a page about PLATO emoticons which is fascinating:
"13 September 2002 -- The news is floating around the Web right now about the "discovery" of the first smiley. What readers and reporters are apparently not aware of is that the smiley being discussed is the first ASCII smiley.
Like so many things, PLATO was doing smileys years earlier. In fact, smileys on PLATO were already an art form by 1976. PLATO users began doing smiley characters probably as early as 1972 (when PLATO IV came out), but possibly even earlier on PLATO III (still to be determined... old-timer PLATO III users please speak up!).
How were these things done? Well, on PLATO, you could press SHIFT-space to move your cursor back one space -- and then if you typed another character, it would appear on top of the existing character. And if you wanted to get real fancy, you could use the MICRO and SUB and SUPER keys on a PLATO keyboard to move up and down one pixel or more -- in effect providing a HUGE array of possible emoticon characters. So if you typed "W" then SHIFT-space then "O" then SHIFT-space then "B", "T", "A", "X", all with SHIFT-spaces in between, all those characters would plot on top of each other, and the result would be the smiley as shown above in the "WOBTAX" example.
UNQUOTE
Thanks V. of TYR for passing this along to Al.
I remember that before computers there were people using typewriter special characters in various shapes to make art that preceded ASCII art, and there were also people who shared decks of punched cards that drew Christmas Art. No matter what the technology, there is a mentality out there that will figure out how to make it create beautiful stuff, blowing the minds of the ordinary users.
11:10:31 AM
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Wednesday, September 18, 2002 |
[Boing Boing Blog] QUOTE
RIP, Biggle. Science fiction giant Lloyd Biggle, Jr. has died.
Biggle combined an interest in music with his work, which began with the short story "Gypped" in 1956. His notable short works included "Monument" (1961), a Hugo nominee later expanded into a novel, and "The Tunesmith" (1957), recently selected by Orson Scott Card for the anthology Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century, Locus reported.
Biggle's novels, which began with The Angry Espers in 1961, were mostly space operas on social and ecological themes and included the Jan Darzek sequence, beginning with All the Colors of Darkness in 1963, and novels about the Cultural Survey, including The World Menders (1971) and The Still, Small Voice of Trumpets (1968). In recent years Biggle wrote mystery stories and novels. He was founding secretary treasurer of the Science Fiction Writers of America and edited Nebula Award Stories Seven in 1972, Locus reported.
Link Discuss UNQUOTE [Boing Boing Blog]
I loved Monument, All the Colors of Darkness, and The Still Small Voice of Trumpets. Biggle had a way of looking at things that was unique, making for great plot twists. SFWA was founded in 1965. The organization's website is www.sfwa.org
Other SF websites worth noting.
11:08:39 PM
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Aug 17 I posted my notes from reading a great article on improving our web writing skills from [A List Apart], whose subsequent discussion often shows up on my referers. I was intrigued by a post on the middle of the second page of comments from anonymous. QUOTE
I got this tidbit from drop.org :
How Do You Establish Credibility For Your Web Site?
http://www.webcredibility.org/guidelines/index.html
Stanford have compiled 10 guidelines for building the credibility of a web site. These guidelines are based on three years of research that included over 4,500 people. (contributed by David Sim at ecademy.com August 19, 2002)
UNQUOTE
Studying Stanford's Advice and self-grading myself on how I doing so far.
- Make it easy for people to check my sources.
- I give myself an A for links, citations, giving credit where due, etc.
- But this is so easy to do with Radio, that we all ought to be doing a good job here.
- Show that we are a legitimate organization.
- Well this does not really apply to personal weblogs.
- But users ought to know who we are in case they want to contact us.
- I give myself a D here ... I have not yet got a round TUIT on making a who I am statement let alone putting it on my weblog where Y"all can easily find it.
- I basically started out exploring what could be done with Radio Weblogging, and have had a large number of ideas where I would like to go with this, and a small number of them actually implemented.
- Highlight your organizations's expertise in whatever content and services you provide.
- This does not yet apply to me, because I am not offering any of my expertise through this medium. Other than sharing interesting content on hot topics.
- They also say not to link to outside sites that are not credible, that a site's credibility is by association.
- This sounds to me to be quite different than trying to show up high in search engines, where weblogger linking is to interesting sites, where we know many are not credible, but interesting is more important.
- Show that honest and trustworthy people are behind the site and the organization.
- Well I agree with the general principle, but given recent scandals in politics, charities, and on Wall Street, I can't go along with their presentation of how you measure integrity.
- I think it is much more important what we DO than what we SAY, that we avoid entanglements with scandals or the appearance of impropriety.
- I'll give myself a C for my success rate so far.
- Make it easy to contact you.
- I give myself a D here - this is one of the aspects of my weblog I need to improve some time.
- The website should look professional, and appropriate for your purpose.
- I think weblogging makes it very easy to look far superior to the competition, what some of us lack is the ability to stand out against the crowd of other weblogs. I score a lot of non-weblogs as D-F and on that scale I give myself a C (bottom of weblog scale).
- Make the site easy to use - and useful.
- Well I need to add a search engine on this site, and break it up into more categories. Again, with Radio Weblog Themes, you have to work at making the site eye-hostile, and a few people have succeeded at that, but many have used the resources to make a great looking site. I give myself a C because I got a ways to go here.
- Update your site's content often.
- I update it too often. B from their perspective.
- More important, I should spend less time adding stuff and more time fixing the place up.
- Use restraint with any promotion.
- They primarily referring to hostile ads, but also use clear direct and sincere writing style. I think my ego gets in my way too often, and I do some of this well and some not so well. Grade myself a B here.
- Avoid errors of all types.
- I definitely need a spell checker plugged into my writing here, and perhaps also a grammar checker.
- I think I normally write well, although too wordy, but have my share of spelling and other errors - give myself a C for this.
So, overall I have given myself a C average on the Stanford test. Passing Ok but with lots of room for improvement, and I know what I need to be doing better.
9:40:05 PM
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[Ernie the Attorney] QUOTE
Read this CNN article. I'm glad that the government is not going to
- collect money to use for enhancing security (that would just increase the likelihood of preciptious action), nor
- restrict the use of wireless networks (which apparently was a brainstorm of the Bush administration's main computer guru).
UNQUOTE [Ernie the Attorney]
The article identifies government plans based on some government officials not knowing all the facts about what is possible with computer security. It sure sounds like the current administration decided not to get any kind of briefing from prior administration efforts with computer security, so they would make a whole set of new mistakes, without learning from the mistakes or discoveries of the folks who went before. Homeland Cyber Security is too important to be left to a panel of special interests. I sure hope there is more going on than the media is sharing.
2:02:51 PM
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Tuesday, September 17, 2002 |
White House To Unveil New Plan for U.S. Computer Security [SecurityFocus] [dws.]
There's been a lot of press about the role Microsoft's responsibilities should play in the White House big picture as opposed to the role it really is playing. Wasn't there a former Microsoft Security Expert who got hired to become a White House Security Expert? I have to be careful with my big mouth here, since I consider some other places much more appropriate sources of talent for our Government.
Top Story in this week's http://www.eweek.com/ is what should be a copy of the President's Plan for Cyber Security and the notion that they now will seek public support for the plan, and also possibly get second opinions from other people in the know, before the President signs it.
Top Story in this week's e week Security pages is a progress report on how various industries are doing moving towards better computer security, such as mass transit, power plants, communications, etc. followed by a survey of computer security professionals.
The results imply that almost half of the nation's infrastructure has done nothing different about computer security since 9/11/2001, and that this constitutes criminal negligence. Now I think that some enterprises were probably doing proper security before 9/11/2001 and did not need to do anything other than a review. One person was quoted as saying that proper security requires incremental gains in Security each year. I think it is better to get your security as good as you can get it, and keep it that way, except when the security risks are so bad that installing patches to fix patches to fix patches to fix patches to fix ... means that you can get nothing else done with your time, so what you should be doing is learning a different Operating System that does not need that behavior, assuming that other Operating System is not going to be declared illegal by pending legislation.
For my past Weblog posts on computer security topics see
- Sep 16 on Y2K of copying;
- Aug 29 on diagnosing hoax and computer security myths vs. serious downage;
- and Aug 15 on how Computer Security does not have to be rocket science.
11:22:09 PM
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[Radio Free Blogistan] QUOTE
I have a friend in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. With the way things are, I don't think he'd feel safe publishing a weblog, but I wish some of the things he and I discuss in e-mail had a wider audience. He's given me permission to quote him here, but I think it really deserves it's own place, and we have to see how the current crisis plays out first.
This reminds me of when we published Milorad Pavic's first hypertext for computer. Not long after that the U.S. was bombing Serbia (belatedly, as far as intervention goes, and remotely). I contacted Dr. Pavic by e-mail to ask if there was anything he needed, anything I could do to help. He said, "Yes. Stop the bombing!" He wanted me to protest, campaign, etc. My first thought was This is an intellectual, liberal, anti-Milosevich Serb—doesn't he understand why we have to stop the rape of Kosovo?. But the bombs were dropping on him. Who was I to say? Weird digression, but I guess the point is LA vs. NY vs. SF is fun but I'd like to be reading more blogs from Macedonia, Pakistan, and Lagos. UNQUOTE [Radio Free Blogistan]
Perhaps we need a Category or a group of Categories
- Foreign Perspectives = Category for someone like myself who is interested in World Events in General, and likes to read the news IN ENGLISH from various newspapers in different nations, so I can see their perspective on all kinds of stuff. When I start such a category, I will launch it with a Radio STORY directory of some of those foreign newspaper sources, that I have been using.
- e-Afghanistan = posts from your pen pal over there
- e-ANY-NATION = posts from a pen pal over anywhere, that we have had permission to republish
10:38:21 PM
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Monday, September 16, 2002 |
[Krzysztof Kowalczyk's Weblog] QUOTE
High tech martyr. Resume:
Company Name withheld (1995-1998)
- successfully mismanaged multiple projects for clients including Hewlett Packard, Intel, Compaq, Sony, and Toshiba
- poorly documented project status with Microsoft Project, Microsoft Excel, and Task Tracker
- communicated false and/or useless information to top-level management with PowerPoint
- accpeted full responsibilty to save Top level management the embarrassment of failure
UNQUOTE [Krzysztof Kowalczyk's Weblog]
4:22:52 PM
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[Krzysztof Kowalczyk's Weblog] QUOTE
Let's spam the world. It just occured to me: bloggers are spammers. We spam the world with unsolicited opinions. UNQUOTE [Krzysztof Kowalczyk's Weblog]
I think somewhat different terminology is needed, because we are not in people's faces. I get all sorts of junk that can only be stopped by unplugging my telephone, not reading my mail. Unsolicited information on weblogs are like flipping channels on our TV, people have to choose to view our opinions.
4:20:52 PM
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forwarded to Al in e-mail from V. of TYR
QUOTING the forwarded e-mail
Subject: Amina Lawal -- Please support this woman
Look in any search engine for reaction around the world, such as a boycott of the Miss World Contest by women and nations that disapprove of this Nigerian sentence.
You have probably heard about Amina Lawal, the Nigerian woman convicted of adultery and having a child outside marriage, and who has been sentenced to death by stoning. The appeals court has approved this sentence. The judge has decided that she should be stoned to death as soon as her 8 month old baby daughter is weaned. Amnesty International has organised a petition which you can sign on line and which will be forwarded to the President of Nigeria. You can Sign it by clicking here:
Go to the right hand side of the page and click the please sign our
letter. Please sign and pass on to other people - it seems the least we
can do for her.
UNQUOTE - I updated some of the text to help make the post a bit more readable.
4:09:11 PM
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e-mail pass along
Subject: SUNRISE OVER LOWER MANHATTAN
No one will see this again.
This picture was taken by a lady returning on a cruise this past summer (July 28, 2001). It is a sunrise over lower Manhattan.
SHE Writes: As I watched the beautiful skyline of New York City float past me I noticed the sun was about to line up just behind the twin towers. I was lucky enough to snap the picture at exactly the right moment. If you look at the sun rays it is almost prophetic. a little spooky.
When I show this picture to anyone they almost always asks for a copy. I just want to share it with all who want it. Please take this picture and share it with anyone and everyone who likes it. I've been printing them like crazy on my home computer to give to those that want a copy.
[file:///C|/Program%20Files/Radio%20UserLand/www/images/image0016.jpg]
[http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/images/TwinTowers%2016.jpg]
UNQUOTE
Al is having trouble getting this picture so that other people can see it on Al Weblog. Someone tell me if the second url above shows you the image (apparently the first points to Al's hard drive) ... I got to this by looking in Radio Folder / Images / locate which image I had called it when I dropped it into my PC path corresponding to the MY PICTURES in Prefs as suggested by Alison Fish, and I see she has enhanced her how-to since the last time I looked at it.
Here is a copy of it supplied by Paula Allen. Thanks Paula.
3:23:16 PM
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[Ernie the Attorney] had started a discussion about copyright and Professor Lessig, which is extremely important considering the Supreme Court hearing coming up, and some special interest legislation to change the fabric of our computer society. There are several different professional specialities at work here and there is a large element of what seems to me to be deliberate confusion, like the role of the accountants in the Wall Street scandals.
What society needs, in Al Macintyre opinion, is an even more basic for dummies clarification even than Ernie calls for. The powers that be, who vote to change the rules, need to get a distinction between what is being proposed and what can be done, and to what degree that distinction is colored by the proposers desires for something other than what they claim. People propose stuff that seems ridiculous for reasons that sound suspicious. Technologically speaking, can we get protection against piracy without locking down an entire genre of entertainment? I think that is feasable.
There needs to be some clarification of what can be done in the computer security area to protect all interests. As far as I am concerned the problem is not whether fans can continue to enjoy whatever they want, with copyright owners properly compensated, but rather how is the development of that to be financed. I doubt that the competing interests can come together to solve the problem in the absense of a crisis.
Open Source can have some standards of identifying copyright ownership, delivering a code into the data objects showing royalties paid, when permission to use expires, and renewal arrangements, with software being certified as having met the copying of copyright materials artist compensation standards.
But that is extra work for people writing software for Windows, much simpler to close the door on any copying. Ditto hardware development.
Some Open Source was born out of an alternative to abuses of Commercial Software, where some Open Source philosophers have been rather outspoken on the inappropriateness of copyright in software that has many contributors constantly making improvements to a body of code. People, outside of software development, can rightfully misconstrue those strong views to be from a special interest that cannot be trusted to manage copyrights, especially when we also have an overlapping community of digital product users who appear to favor piracy.
The market can make demands of suppliers of hardware and software, but that is no good when legislation has authorized draconian solutions to the piracy problem.
This is the Y2K of copying.
A panic is apparently needed to mobilize a solution.
The difference between what we have today, and the Y2K of a few years ago is who is behind the panic. I am a Computer Professional who first found out about the Y2K problem (it was not called that then) in 1970, and it was old news even then. We were unable to get responsible action through channels, so we had to go to the general public to avert a general disaster.
I don't have a good handle on the forces behind today's panic, nor if what is being painted in the communications clearly explain their motives, but it does seem extremely ominous calling for excessive drastic action to get a solution, out of proportion to the problem. Comparable to stopping automotive speeding by issuing WW II weaponry to the police in which it does not matter if there are lots of casualities to other vehicles on the road.
QUOTE [Ernie the Attorney]
DRM for Dummies (i.e. people like me) - the discussion below (which I guess I started) about the Lessig article has prompted many interesting responses, including one from the good professor himself (boy do I feel like I'm back in law school). Anyway, after reading all of the responses my brain started heating up like an over-clocked CPU. I like things to be simple, and I don't like to tax my brain so I'm looking for a simple model to understand Lessig's point.
Lessig (if I understand his point) says something like: Palladium is better DRM because at least it's not a blanket system that disables all copying of, say, music CD's. I guess there are other examples, but I don't know enough to come up with some good ones. (Professor Lessig, can you offer us a sampler platter of examples?) Anyway, if all of the examples involve locking down an otherwise-routine computer function like copying then, call me crazy, but that's not "digital rights management." It's digital rights censorship. Now, if there is a system that lets me use a routine computer function, but only if I meet certain conditions, well now...at least that's "management" of my digital rights. So that's how I understand it now, and I think that my brain can handle that.
And so now I can load that model into the "big picture" of DRM. From what I can see, basically, we're talking about which StormTrooper we'd prefer to have watch over us: the really mean one that never lets our computer do anything that might trip over someone's copyright golden goose, or the sort-of mean one that will let our computer do some things, if we have permission from The Empire's duly appointed representative. Yeah, I did misunderstand Lessig. I apologize for branding his description as "optimistic." And I hope that my lackluster class participation will not count too heavily against my final grade.
UNQUOTE [Ernie the Attorney]
Ernie
I have worked on several different kinds of Computer Operating Systems in my career and seen many different Computer Security models, much more sophisticated than what I think is needed to solve this crisis. For security reasons, the end computer user was generally told nothing about how the security operated. Often many software developers not allowed to work with the security area. This has meant that computer security is often like a separate interface between Operating System and Application Software, not well understood by developers who should be using it properly.
My best suggestion to you is much the same as one I made some time ago on Homeland Security. We have people in different professions with specialized know how that is really needed by other professions in our world of evolving challenges. I think we need briefings across professions. What do we _____ (profession A) think that people in _____ (profession B) ought to know about _____ (topics C D E F), from our perspective, so as to get the best possible solution?
I have written about computer security several times several places with links to where you can find professionals far more knowledgeable than I to help you understand what our realistic options are, with nonsense replaced by clarity, most recently Aug 29 and Aug 15 on topics of Computer Security Myths explained for Dummies, with annotated key links to Computer Security Authoritative information like
http://www.pentasafe.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/e-com-sec/
http://www.ifccfbi.gov
http://www.radium.ncsc.mil/tpep/epl/epl-by-vendor.html
I think most reasonable people will agree that we have a bad problem in our society with computer piracy, and one way the problem could be solved would be to ban computers, but that would be a ridiculous solution. A lot of what I am seeing, as proposed solutions to a bad problem, are what I would label as a ridiculous solution.
What the copyright owners seem to be asking for is to throw the baby out with the bath water. There is a serious problem with intellectual property rights piracy, so lock down on what used to be legitimate entertainment, similar to in Greece where they have so much trouble stopping Gambling, they now banned many other kinds of games such as On Line Chess. More details on that here.
I like to play some computer games. There are swap stores where we can take in the box that has all the materials associated with that product, to trade in, and we swear that we have taken it off of our PC. Nothing to put our signature to, and no independent verification that we have done so. It is like the 2 for 1 used book places. The opportunities for people to steal here, in the same way that video rentals could be copied while in customer homes, seem like obvious risk of piracy.
I was not much into copying music until my Sister cut her own stuff and offered to send me what she had composed the music, written the words, performed the whole thing, and now had it in a form that could be sent as an e-mail attachment. I am struggling to understand if she as the copyright owner of this artistic creation even has the right under the new regime to share her work that way. It seems to me that artists are not allowed to be independent of publishers, like authors would not be allowed to get their work to their readers except going through publishers who will own all copyrightable material. Now I could be mistaken, but it seems to me that is the way this kind of legislation is headed.
9:46:30 AM
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Thursday, September 12, 2002 |
Wed topics:
5:11:24 AM
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Wednesday, September 11, 2002 |
e-mail pass along
Subject: 9-11-01 (email not broken)
This has not been broken since 9/11/01, please keep it going...
This has been kept alive and moving since 9/11.
In memory of all those who
perished this morning; the passengers and the pilots on the
United Air and AA flights, the workers in the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon, and all the innocent bystanders. Our prayers go out to
the friends and families of the deceased.
IF I KNEW
If I knew it would be the last time
That I'd see you fall asleep,
I would tuck you in more tightly
and pray the Lord, your soul to keep.
If I knew it would be the last time
that I see you walk out the door,
I would give you a hug and kiss
and call you back for one more.
If I knew it would be the last time
I'd hear your voice lifted up in praise,
I would video tape each action and word,
so I could play them back day after day.
If I knew it would be the last time,
I could spare an extra minute
to stop and say "I love you,"
instead of assuming you would KNOW I do.
If I knew it would be the last time
I would be there to share your day,
Well I'm sure you'll have so many more,
so I can let just this one slip away.
For surely there's always tomorrow
to make up for an oversight,
and we always get a second chance
to make everything just right.
There will always be another day
to say "I love you,"
And certainly there's another chance
to say our "Anything I can do?"
But just in case I might be wrong,
and today is all I get,
I'd like to say how much I love you
and I hope we never forget.
Tomorrow is not promised to anyone,
young or old alike,
And today may be the last chance
you get to hold your loved one tight.
So if you're waiting for tomorrow,
why not do it today?
For if tomorrow never comes,
you'll surely regret the day,
That you didn't take that extra time
for a smile, a hug, or a kiss
and you were too busy to grant someone,
what turned out to be their one last wish.
So hold your loved ones close today,
and whisper in their ear,
Tell them how much you love them
and that you'll always hold them dear
Take time to say "I'm sorry,"
"Please forgive me," "Thank you," or "It's okay."
And if tomorrow never comes,
you'll have no regrets about today.
Please send this on. Thank you.
1:59:28 PM
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Here I quote my source in black then interject my comments in green. but I having troubles with the editing window doing underlining etc. and not letting me kill it.
[ Mike Cohen's Radio Weblog] [dws.] QUOTE
Overview of Changes to Legal Rights By The Associated Press September 5, 2002, 11:44 AM EDT Some of the fundamental... [WIL WHEATON DOT NET: Where is my mind?]
- * FREEDOM OF ASSOCIATION: Government may monitor religious and political institutions without suspecting criminal activity to assist terror investigation.
- Al Comments:
- The reality is that there are people with viewpoints that are contrary to the mainstream, and you are likely to find them by spying on Extremist Belief systems like Militia Groups.
- Recent history has shown that Law Enforcement Agencies need education by National Council of Churches how to tell the difference between a legitimate interpretation of holy books, in which people with odd ball views can be debated by representatives of other churches, and a group that is truely a Cult.
- I sure hope the monitoring does a better job than the last time this was done, like when the FBI Director was convinced that it was communistic to have peaceful civil disobedience to promote equal rights for Black Americans.
- A distinction clearly needs to be made between those people who disagree with some policy, but will stay within the laws in how they go through the procedures of trying to change the policy, and those people who will behave like enemies of the state in trying to achieve their goals.
- * FREEDOM OF INFORMATION: Government has closed once-public immigration hearings, has secretly detained hundreds of people without charges, and has encouraged bureaucrats to resist public records requests.
- * FREEDOM OF SPEECH: Government may prosecute librarians or keepers of any other records if they tell anyone that the government subpoenaed information related to a terror investigation.
- Al Comments:
- The unfortunate fact is that we are at war, and loose lips sink ships.
- The government does not know which people under investigation may turn out to be innocent or our enemies, but they certainly don't want other people tipping off the enemy with any details of how close the investigation is to them.
- * RIGHT TO LEGAL REPRESENTATION: Government may monitor federal prison jailhouse conversations between attorneys and clients, and deny lawyers to Americans accused of crimes.
- Al Comment:
- I think this is a dangerous precedent.
- It means that some guilty people will not tell their lawyers what these officers of the court need to know.
- I think a better approach might have been to make some adjustments to lawyer confidentiality.
- If a lawyer is told by a client something about a crime that has not yet occurred, the lawyer needs some way to alert authorities without being guilty of violating lawyer rules.
- * FREEDOM FROM UNREASONABLE SEARCHES: Government may search and seize Americans' papers and effects without probable cause to assist terror investigation.
- * RIGHT TO A SPEEDY AND PUBLIC TRIAL: Government may jail Americans indefinitely without a trial.
- Al Comment:
- I believe that during the American Civil War, President Abe Lincoln suspended the right of Habeous Corpus.
- Some things do operate differently when a nation is at war than when it is at peace. People suspected of being part of the enemy can get locked up until the war is over.
- There has to be some way to get closure when a war is over, so that it does not lay seeds for the next one, like the Versailles Treaty at end of WW I laid the seeds for Hitler to come to power and give us WW II.
- I believe that after the American Revolution, many of the people who had been pro-British Tory, were so badly mistreated by their victorious neighbors, that they left the USA to go live in Ontario Canada, poisoning US-Canada relations so much that it might have contributed to the war between USA and Canada in 1812.
- In this latest war it seems like the enemy vows to continue the battle irrespective of what happens with their leadership, so that any enemy soldiers released will continue fighting. Thus this war will also need some kind of re-education to eliminate that threat.
- The book, Confederate Covert Action in the American Civil War April '65 by retired CIA and military intelligence Brigadier General Wiiliam Tidwell, shows that the Assassination of President Abe Lincoln was probably part of a larger plot by the Confederate Secret Service, and the individual groups of people involved in the plot might not have known that the Civil War was really over.
- It will be important to prove one way or another which of the locked up people believed to be enemies, are in fact enemies.
- Large numbers of known al Queda terrorists have been captured in other nations, then set free to perform other mischevous acts against us, because those nations judicial systems are not the same as in the USA.
- * RIGHT TO LIBERTY: Americans may be jailed without being charged or being able to confront witnesses against them.
- Al Comment:
- Worth looking at history of Japanese Americans locked up during WW II but not German and Italian Americans, then long afterwards some recognition that this had not been handled properly, and some laws passed to prevent similar mistakes in the future.
- This is why I joined the ACLU.
UNQUOTE [Mike Cohen's Radio Weblog] [dws.]
1:38:04 PM
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For some people, Sep 11 is a day of remembering fallen heros. For me, the whole year has been days like that, and struggling with answers to questions related to how this war began and how to win a political victory against the social forces that lead some people to hating us in the West. I hope that, in time, Sep 11 will become like Pearl Harbor day, and the media circus that makes it seem like to them Sep 11 is bin Laden day, will find some days like VE day (WW II Victory in Europe) to the real celebrations. Did WW II have great days of celebration before the war was over, when our ancestors lacked certainty that the war would be won by the Allies? Well there was the Doolittle Raid over Japan, raising of the US flag on some Pacific island, and Allies liberating Paris. We are going to need some milestones like that in the War on Terrorism.
Tues Topics: Copyright; Current Events; e-Law; Homeland worries; Metablog; Organization in Business, Government, and Society; Radio Future; Software Debugging.
11:44:03 AM
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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[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
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[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
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[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
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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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Sunday, September 08, 2002 |
On a thread in the e-com-sec discussion group, I asked what are we supposed to do when we get spam from known criminals such as the Nigerian Scam. We have a moral obligation to report criminals to the government, but police seem to be ill equipped to deal with individual internet solicitations of criminal activity. The tip lines are so overwhelmed as it is with more serious issues, that GOV has a serious need for a software magnet to find the key needle clues in their information haystack.
I was basically told that we should treat any spam as spam, forget about trying to deal with criminals the same way as is done in the real world outside of the Internet, and given an interesting link to a back issue of Sysmod's Praxis, which I have previously mentioned on my weblog. It included the following stimulating topics:
- Europe's anti-spam legislation.
- Microsoft IE patch
- The person in personal decisions about the computer you think you own, and stuff stored on it, is not you but Microsoft.
- Google Features
- Cyber Squatting
- Euro Glitches
- Euro Zone
- Nigeria Scam Clones
- Worst Web site (warning: protect your eyes)
- Longest domain name
2:06:48 PM
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I am a book-a-holic and recently chatted with another blogger who also is a book-a-holic. Suggestion: We each create a category that has reviews of the books we have loved, and we subscribe to each other's categories. We might only post something once a month, or once a week, depending on how prolific we are.
I would have a story like Radio Doc Sources except it would be a directory of books I have enjoyed on a particular theme or genre of literature. In time we might split our book category into several sub-categories, and there would be SF fans subscribing to what other people have written about their favorite SF books, plus history book enthusiasts, plus other specialities.
Saturday Topics: I mainly updated some of my categories.
- e-Radio Ideas is my input to dws.Radio.FAQ, where I shared dreams for future enhancements to Radio, explained some stuff I have figured out, shared great links with places that do plug-in tools for Radio, etc.
- History of Science and Technology, where I am interested in seeing strange ideas from invention to fruition, and the stumbling blocks along the way, with people figuring out what the new stuff can be used for, and controversies developing. Most of it is based on Physics and Computers, but I have a little Biology and the Humanities.
- My Friends and Family = somewhat personal insights, worries and interests.
- Science Fiction ... so far I have done weird stuff around my SF interests, not dead on, plus I recently been having intermittent Upstreaming problems here.
12:00:01 AM
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Saturday, September 07, 2002 |
[Russ Lipton Documents Radio] QUOTE
It's time to push Radio past the Star Techie crew that so ably helps Captain Dave navigate, and colonize a few of the Federation's planets.
UNQUOTE [Russ Lipton Documents Radio]
I think Radio Open Source is like the Ferengi, with many dreamers trying to figure out if there is a way to make money off of this stuff, when the answer is to make Radio work for the masses of the people on all the Federation planets, so that then the Star Techie crew can make money providing Radio services to all those end users.
There will be documentation services, like Russ is writing about.
There will be people doing consulting to help corporate intranets setup radio behind firewalls.
There will be tools to enhance Radio, that people will download for trials, and while Radio Userland gets $40.00 a year from the end users, the tool users get $4.00 a tool sale, but multiply both by millions of customers.
Various ISPs make money selling additional disk space to categories beyond what Radio Userland now offers.
Perhaps one of my game designs can be played through Radio.
- I would declare a game universe session able to handle X number of players, and here is url of the rules to that game.
- People sign up at a form where they give their credit card number, and are assigned a slot in the game.
- They post their moves to a private category, protected by Rick's code, whose name is assigned in combination with what game being played, and some accounting number associated with which cluster of X players, which the game moderator subscribes to, so that their moves are populated into the total game universe, whose results go out to the players via RSS.
- Some games would allow non players to subscribe via RSS so they can see the flavor of the thing to help them decide which next game openings to sign up for.
8:06:30 PM
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In any search engine, check out Crypto Zoology. Weird creatures that different people believe in. I can accept that perhaps one or two of these are real, but not all.
There's mad science that some people believe in but other people consider them crazy in the head for being so enthusiastic about. Pyramid Power, UFOs, X-Files, Time Travel, Illumninati. Often valid science has its start in crazy theories. Today it is widely accepted that the Dinosaurs were wiped out thanks to Giant Meteor Impact upon planet Earth. Creationists argue how many years ago that was, because Carbon Dating makes planet Earth older than Bible says it can be. But the idea that Giant Meteors hit planet Earth and do various chaos, that was mad science for many many years before it became generally accepted theory.
Now here comes the Atlantic with an interview of Rick Cook, a respected defense and aerospace reporter for Jane's Defence Weekly, whose new book, The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Anti-Gravity technology, documents his ten year search for a mythical technology. This Atlantic connection is worth reading. There's a lot of interesting stuff here, but I will treat it as Science Fiction for a while. I enjoyed Chariots of the Gods, but as fiction, not taking it seriously. Thanks to V of TYR for e-mailing this link to Al.
If this stuff is for real, in which some researchers can really do it on a shoe string, then America had better win the War against Terrorism before the cat is let out of this black bag.
5:12:13 PM
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Radio Lesson
Understanding the 3 buttons ... I do not know if this is correct or not, but it was the clearest explanation I have heard so far, within the Craig Burton Tutorial I recently mentioned, as compared to other explanations I have previously seen in other people Radio Documentation.
- Post
- This saves on your desk top PC your work, that was just in your Home Editing Box..
- I do this a lot when working on a post, just in case my browser connection fails.
- Publish
- Send to the public site ALL your work that you might have posted but not published.
- There could be several pieces you been working on and not yet published.
- Your Home Editing Box could be empty when you do this.
- Post and Publish
- This does both.
- Anything in your Home Editing Box is saved to your desk top PC.
- Anything in your Home Editing Box is also published on the public site.
- Anything else you been working on but not yet published, it now gets published to the public site.
2:43:29 PM
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[Boing Boing Blog] QUOTE
Archive of answering machine greetings. There are some funny ones in here.
"Hi. I am probably home, I'm just avoiding someone I don't like. Leave me a message, and if I don't call back, it's you."
Link Discuss (Thanks, Kevin!) UNQUOTE [Boing Boing Blog]
I also have some favorites.
The Answer Machine is Broke. This is the Refrigerator speaking. If you talk very slowly (the voice does so by example) I will write down what you say and stick it to myself and hopefully someone will see the message.
1:18:28 PM
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Friday, September 06, 2002 |
Thurs & Fri Topics: Radio Education, and interesting Links.
11:20:25 PM
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Checking my Radio referrers, of who linked to my weblog site today, I see that someone was checking on banking mistakes and I was # 45 out of 16402 search engine hits. It amazes me how much stuff is out there on some topics, and how high I show up in some searches.
See my "Banking Stories" for what they found of my prior remarks.
The bottom line moral for Everyone, is that bank clerks are just like you and me.
Everyone makes mistakes, including people who handle your money accounts at your bank. You have to watch them like a hawk. Their mistakes are potentially more serious for you than mistakes made by other clerks that we do business with.
People are more likely to make mistakes right after other mistakes. In other words when something disturbs our normal routine, we get rattled, distracted, more likely to make more mistakes. So one mistake leads to mistakes fixing original mistake.
This means that tech support people need to stay calm and not contribute to the nervousness that is out there.
Checking referers can sometimes find us other stuff of interest ... I was # 3 in an International search for Computer Security Future, and I see a link on the same page to the International Society of Mad Scientists on the topic of Saudi Arabia's interest in Quantum Computing for Security purposes, which interests me now that IBM has the world's first Quantum Computer in one of their labs. ISMS home page has lots of links to weird stuff that I think is really borderline people out of touch with reality.
6:25:58 PM
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Thursday, September 05, 2002 |
Al's Radio Doc Sources got some additions thanks to Lycos search engine finding stuff that Google and Tecoma did not. Here are some highlights of the revised connections.
Clark Venable
- Downstreamer Tool for Radio Userland - the opposite of upstreaming - send other people stuff for you to analyse on your desk top PC.
- This software was written by Seth Dillingham at Macrobyte Resources. (See Unknown)
- Hmm, I wonder if this could help with backup recovery?
- Your PC had a melt down and you not done a backup recently, then you trying reconstruction. You might be able to use this to Publish in reverse from web site to replacement desk top???
Unknown
- Macrobyte Resources offers Form Generation Tool for Radio and Frontier sites. See Clark Venable.
- Oh! Radio is a collection of links to Radio aids: Tutorials; Articles; some I have seen before, and some more places to explore.
Craig Burton
- Documentation Directory
- Tutorial on Radio Userland Channels
- This is one of the best tutorials that Al has ever seen, and in this case also heard. The interfaces are a bit different than Al accustomed to, which is a combination of Craig settings and the fact this was created over a year ago, and Radio has been upgraded since. But Craig explained a lot of stuff, including stuff that was not previously clear to Al. This may be worth viewing again some time, like going to a favorite movie or novel, and picking up more nuances on later trips.
- He has done several tutorials:
- Click on the globe to get at the simple text;
- Click on the hyperlink to experience the education.
- Define the word Blog
- Build a Radio Directory
I periodically reprint my Radio Doc Sources for reference review. It is now up to 8 pages. I may need to move my stuff to a separate page, so the explanation (just over 1/2 page) out of the way for regular visitors, and my elementary efforts at documentation don't pretend to be the equal of the worthies who came before me. The count is now up to 48 sources of tools, tutorials, tips, documentation, examples, inspirations, and lots of stuff I do not grok yet as well as I desire.
10:09:49 PM
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Comment on Al's Radio Doc Sources using Quick Topics. Eventually, Al wants to look into pros & cons of several different commenting systems for Radio, but we have to start some place.
3:23:31 PM
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I miscounted my Radio Doc Sources yesterday - the number of different people there really about 40.
I redid my Radio Wishes collection today - I now have about 20 listed, not nearly all of them there, but my organization is getting better.
I have started cross index of Enhanced Radio Tools but not much there yet.
1:44:50 AM
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Wed topics: Current Events; Legislative Impacts (particularly Greek Games); Radio Wishes.
12:10:51 AM
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Wednesday, September 04, 2002 |
Radio Wishes (I recognize that there may be a plug-in tool that already does this stuff):
I publish some text, then someone's News Aggregator picks up on it, unbeknownst to me, then I realize the text needs editing to fix a typo or mis-statement or misleading or whatever. Meanwhile other people are reprinting the earlier version of my writing, which is fine, but it would be nice if their interface alerted them somehow to the fact that what they had used has since changed.
I go to my News Aggregator, and scroll down many stories, oh here is one I want to react to. But I would also like to remember where I left off, so when I am done reacting to that story, I can return to where I left off. Think one command key combination to book mark where I want to return to (or make it default remember wherever that was), and another to actually go there.
But also some new stuff has arrived on top since last time I was looking here. Just as we color code hyperlinks to show that this or that has been pursued or not, perhaps the background color might be slightly different pastel to say we scrolled past this once already vs. this here is new.
There are some Blogs I not subscribe to because their volume is as prolific as mine, and there is a limit to my comfort level scrolling down the News Aggregation. If I had a command function short cut key combination to say skip down to the end of the current item in the current channel (that's one key combination) or to the end of he current channel (that's another key combination), then I would be subscribing to more channels.
7:41:56 AM
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U.S. may offer evidence of threat [USA Today : Front Page]
I am extremely pleased to see this move by the US government to improve efforts to convince allies around the world, the people of the USA, and the people of the world, in the propaganda war (which I think the USA has been losing when it comes to the hearts and minds of people who do not believe bin Laden is responsible for 9/11), that Iraq is close to both developing weapons of mass destruction, and deploying them. There is another propaganda war there - many nations have WMD and use them responsibly. I believe WMD + Saddam = extreme threat to regional peace, but there are people on the other side of the propaganda war who believe that USA motive is driven by desire for Middle Eastern Oil.
6:05:42 AM
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[Boing Boing Blog] QUOTE
Greek government bans solitaire, mindsweeper, Quake, et al. The Greek government has banned all computer games -- from solitaire to Quake -- in an effort to crack down on Internet gambling. Good to see that Hollings-grade technophobia isn't just an American phenomenon. Link Discuss (Thanks, Two of Four!)
UNQUOTE [Boing Boing Blog]
Have they also banned games off of computers, such as Chess, Ball games (sports football basketball soccer tennis) horse shoes? After all, people watch sports games on TV, which is an electronic means of delivering news of the games to the spectators. Also many spectators have engaged in sports betting on the results since time immemorial. Technically, betting on results of horse races is not Internet gambling if done with a bookie, unless the telephone falls into the collection of gaming by electronic means.
The Greek government clarified the new law, in the wake of public outcry and confusion. They are not banning games that do not depend on electricity. I guess this means sports games indoors or at night (electricity of lights) are out, but some people are interpreting this to mean that games that are purely mechanical are still legal, such as dart board, horse shoes, ball games. How about games played to keep children from getting restless on long auto trips? The Greek Retail Industry must be sighing in relief, because now board games for kids in the Christmas season will not be banned.
In some European nations, an extremely popular game is for the news media to publish a photo of a ball game in which the ball is missing from the photo, then people send in money with their doodle of where they think the ball belongs in the picture, based on the body language of the players. Winner takes all, except the photo service cut. Obviously this game is now illegal in Greece, because photography is published using electricity.
Greek Industries, that are now out of business, are making a case to the Greek government arguing that some games cannot easily be used for gambling, such as space war, driving games, and therefore should be exempted from this ban. I can't see that arguement having merit. Humans will bet on anything. Here is a Petition asking the Greek government to preserve their entertainment industry (are movies and music also threatened?), with lots of links to other information sources on this controversy.
That [Boing Boing Blog] Link is to The Register which says that Internet gambling was already illegal in Greece before this new law was passed, but apparently the Greek government was incapable of distinquishing innocent games from illegal gambling, so the simple solution was to throw the baby out with the bath water.
The ban includes all kinds of games supported by computers, software, any electronic means, such as video arcade games, pac man. I assume this means the Casino business has now been banned in Greece, which of course is good for Nevada and other places where the Casino business is still healthy. Meanwhile Germany has imposed a tax on the coins that are stuffed into video arcade amusement games.
This of course means that On Line Chess is banned from Internet Cafes. Internet Cafes can still do other stuff in Greece, but anyone who operates a PC in a public area for commercial purposes must pay a tax on each machine. This includes hotels, cybercafes, and clubs. The rationale here is that such machines must be primarily used for Internet gaming. Does this mean that hotels that have computers for reservations of rooms will be presumed guilty of Internet gaming, because of the mere fact the computer is in a public area (the hotel check in desk)?
Do they have public libraries, computers in public schools? I see a cottage industry in software to remove solitaire games from Windows. Bill Gates may offer a special version of Windows that is legal in Greece, sold at excessive high price since he has a captive audience - buy the upgrade or we will report you to the Gaming Police.
Since 9/11, Insurance Rates have skyrocketed for thrill rides in amusement parks in Australia, because of the increased risks of a terrorist bombing. This is forcing some of those activities to shut down entirely.
In the Discuss above it was brought up that Athens is hosting the 2004 Olympic Games, and didn't they just make the Olympics illegal? ... debate is over definitions ... the Olympics uses electricity for tracking the rankings and scores and showing people the judge's rulings, and also people at home watch on TV, which uses electricity. I am sure Spectators pay money to attend, and there is a lot of money in the sponsorships.
Another related story [Boing Boing Blog] QUOTE
Bridge player stripped of medal for refusing drug test. The World Federation of Bridge is attempting to get bridge recognized as an Olympic Sport, so it is requiring that bridge athletes be drug-tested. This year's silver medalist has been stripped of her title for refusing to pee in a cup. Link Discuss UNQUOTE [Boing Boing Blog]
5:56:08 AM
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Tuesday Topics: Links; me and my PC; Radio Education; Search Engine Links; Updates to various stories, particularly added links to my Radio Doc Sources one of my e-Radio Ideas dreams of how we can help fuel Economy Recovery, and other dreams of a better future.
5:51:43 AM
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Radio Tip: Never metadata I didn't like
N.Z. Bear, Philip Pearson and some other folks have created a project to establish some standards for Weblog metadata -- i.e., standardized ways for blogs to tell software more about what they are and what they're all about. More here. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ]
I don't know that I fully Grok this, but I happy to see people working to improve contextual interconnectivity, implementing our Radio Wishes.
5:47:45 AM
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Tuesday, September 03, 2002 |
Thanks to [Richard Chlopan] who apparently enjoyed my Aug 27 Cat Physics humor, and passes this along from [Boing Boing Blog] QUOTE
Dewie the Internet Safety Turtle: Give a hoot, don't look at Internet porn!. The FTC has launched "Dewie," the cartoon Internet Safety Turtle, companion to Smokey the Bear and Woodsy the Owl. Ah, nothing connotes the lightspeed changes on the Internet like a turtle in a sportscar.
 Officials said the Dewie campaign is part of the federal government’s broad effort to promote a “culture of security” and the view that every person who uses computers and networks, such as the Internet, has a role in keeping cyberspace safe.
Link Discuss ( Thanks, Stefan) [ Boing Boing Blog]
10:55:45 PM
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Latest Wow! added to my Radio Doc Sources:
Emmanuel Decarie
- This guy is offering an e-commerce Inventory Application using Frontier and Radio Userland. Documentation is in French and in English. He also has an early warning system. If your Frontier Server goes down, it will still manage to call home via e-mail, which presumably some people can convert to notify people via pager or IM or some other communication method. You can read his DocServer2Man via Unix. He has Frontier documentation. He has instructions how to do Manila in Chinese. Do you believe this guy? Wow!
How do I find these people? I hope some of my referers, who are checking out the links that I am finding, will be doing reviews on some of these services, and are contacting these people and inviting them into the dws.Radio.FAQ community etc.
Well some of them because someone else with Radio documentation has recommended links, and when I visit to verify the url is still valid, sometimes I stick around at that person site trying to Grok what it is all about, which can lead me to other links. A lot of my referers are due to people finding my site through one of the search engines, so I was wondering what might turn up if I used one to look for Radio Documentation. Different search engines turn up different interesting patterns. I really like the Expert drill-down options of www.teoma.com for example.
10:41:56 PM
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Latest major addition to my Radio Doc Sources:
Scott Loftesness
- Notes on Customizing Radio with links to the various tools he found, and links to Radio Userland documentation that he found to be particularly helpful, and other people like I have listed here.
Do I really have 35 different sources there or am I miscounting? Wow, they really beginning to add up since I started this.
4:04:23 PM
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I'm available for hire to analyze K-Log requirements, design solutions, facilitate deployment and ongoing evolution. ~ dws. |
 Radio Dreams: From Seb's Open Research to Alison Fish's Blogfish to Al Macintyre to Phil Wolff's a klog apart to [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] (Al may have mixed up the precise path, by accident):
Alison Fish of Blogfish:
I suspect that beginning bloggers and kloggers are often inhibited..
If we set up a k-logging community for our company intranet, I suspect there will be an initial _hump_ of hesitation among the employees. Maybe having a few designated posters at the beginning would ease the transition. Must think on this.
Seb's Open Research:
Lessons learned from a large scale K-logging implementation.
- Most people don't like to write. We've had a difficult time designing interfaces that encourage adding information instead of just reading.
- There's no substitute for good, accessible writing. We have several people who write consistently for the system. The logs show that postings from one writer get far more attention and prompt far more linking than those from the other writers.
Al Macintyre's suggestions for preparing for a company intranet were posted Aug 26, and I can see that someone downstream has enhanced my ideas with links to additional aids.
Why don't people write?
 Fear.
Fear of failure.
Fear of criticism.
Fear of reprisal.
Fear of looking stupid.
Fear of being stupid.
Fear of permanence.
Fear of strangers.
Fear of invaded privacy.
Fear of falling behind.
Fear of the blank page.
Motive.
I'm thinking a lot about folks who haven't written a paragraph since high school. Folks who never got more than a C in English. Paralyzed by a blank sheet of paper. By permanence.
UNQUOTE [a klog apart] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ]
To the list of fears I would add uncertainty about job security. The style of my writing might antagonize management sufficiently that they will start looking around for someone to replace me. We can be in a company in which with turnover a lot of relevant education and training in how to make the enterprise a success, just walked out the door in the head of the departing co-worker. However, if that knowledge could be captured in a k-log, the employee, doing the transplant from their brain to the k-log, might feel that the company has less need of having their brain around, so it might impair raises, and they not feel so bad about the person leaving.
In other forums I have suggested that we would all be much better off in the future if more youngsters were encouraged to have pen pals in other cultures. Start with the New Democracies that came about because of the end of the Cold War. The connection has to be through whatever mediums work over there, where they not have good infrastructure like we do, the phone connections are intermittent. I think News Aggregation is better than e-mail.
What this does for the next generation is that they will write more coherently, and better understand the problems around the world, and why some solutions fail. Awareness of how much worse off other people are, but for the Grace of God where we were born could be us there, means that we may be less materialistic, less subject to temptation, more appreciative of what we have.
What this does for the next generation in other lands that our kids are pen palling with, they have a better understanding of our values, how capitalism can work.
Now can this concept also be promoted at the adult level to fill out the Sister Cities concept? Our city wants to encourage more trade, and educational exchanges with the people of the cities we have partnered with. I think Radio Categories, for people in enterprises that support the Sister Cities movement, is an ideal way to develop relationships that will be to the benefit of that e-trade growth. Have the school systems host weblogs by the students, in which they can interconnect with the youngsters at the schools of the Sister Cities.
Helping get something like this operational will also educate Radio developers as to what is needed in the area of Radio documentation so that this software can be used by any person, regardless of past computer experience, thus opening up Radio to the mass market.
3:06:00 PM
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This e-organization challenge shared by [Radio Free Blogistan] how to best utilize what Radio can do for our Knowledge Management, inspires another Radio Wish:
Think of a plug in tool which:
- uses a resource like [Organica] to capture all the urls we have linked to,
- except also have it link to the anchor story or item post where they found our url links,
- Also show info about each url similar to what we see in News Aggregation Radio Channel Subscriptions.
- In addition to capturing urls we have linked to,
- also link to each item post to which we have assigned a subject title.
- This is something I have not yet figured out how to work it.
- Let us optionally populate a small data base,
- associated with each entry,
- similar to the concept that Eaton Web has.
- in which we have several columns of info that we can key into,
- relating to our subject descriptions.
- Let us then sort the entries by those subject descriptions we have assigned,
- Incorporate this stuff in the search engines.
- People can then see what a particular person has written on a particular subject.
- Ask the Search Engines if they would be willing to host web site pages where people would go to download this tool, and engage in discussions how best to utilize it.
[Radio Free Blogistan] QUOTE
Left-Brain Blogging. The Raven talks about the impression he gets from a long blogroll:
I don't know about you, but when I visit a blog that has 395 navigation links running down the side I get a funny feeling. Is this clown trying to tell me, "Look at all my friends!" Or am I supposed to check the list and see if I know anyone. Either way, the eyes tend to glaze over and you say to yourself, "Yeah yeah yeah, a bunch of links. Bully for you, pal." In my case, I'm trying to keep the list short ... real short. In my grouchy world, this is called "utility value," and in today's hypernet bitstream it's called, "Guess he doesn't have any friends."
Raven goes on to explain his categories. This got me thinking that logging (journaling, blogging, k-logging) has solved the problem of "how do I keep my website fresh?" by making it trivially easy to refresh the content. That's great for the right-brain—I'm stereotyping here—free-associative, creative part of the brain. I like the guilt-free lack of structure, being the chaotic type myself, and left-handed and kinda red-headed to boot. But I think we also, as users, want to see organized links.
There's a reason why some people like drilling down into the Yahoo!/directory model of information indexing. I know others will say, "That's so 1999. Just Google it." But that I believe has more to do with the speaker's personality and personal preferences. Here in Radio, I should probably be learning more about OPML so I could build a hierarchical or otherwise relational set of links that might be output as a blogroll but also browsable in other ways. What I'd really like to see is a tool that tentatively organizes all the links I embed in this blog, stored in some way so that i can reorganize, overrule filing choices, etc. Ideally it would even suggest reorganizations eventually. Because, face it, you can't design the perfect filing system in advance, unless you are replicating a perfectly worked-out process, and even then I'd doubt it. You need to start with some system, but as long as you can split big files and eliminate or merge small ones, you're golden.
Not every project has a project manager with a KM database in tow. Sometimes we're just one person trying to manage one complicated third millennial life. I'm starting to learn that keeping the house clean works that way too. UNQUOTE [Radio Free Blogistan]
2:20:54 PM
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My Radio public site disk space consumption just went another percentage point to 95% available.
| Space used: |
2.2MB |
| Space remaining: |
40.0MB |
5:42:50 AM
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I just made some additions to my Radio Doc Sources, thanks to suggestions from various people.
- Tools to upgrade our Radio from
- Paolo Valdemarin; Radio Userland; Unknown; Mark Paschal; Doug Kaye; Andy Fragen; David Davies; Marc Barrot.
- Documentation aimed at Beginners
- Radio Userland; Jon Udell; Dws.Radio.FAQ; Steve Outing; O'Reilly; Al Macintyre; Russ Lipton; Scott Johnson; Discussion Groups;
- Since I am barely out of the Beginner stage myself, it is difficult to judge what the next stage should be called.
- Just over 30 different sources
- I do not want to provide an exhaustive list of all documention by each individual, rather I want to have a good list of initial links to each person, and an idea of the scope of what they have done.
- If you print it out for use as a check list of where you want to explore, it is now 5 pages.
5:39:18 AM
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Monday Topics:
- Copyright and Freedom subtopics
- Computer Crime; Consumer Rights; Copyright; Cyber Citizenship; Entertainment; Government Beaurocracy; Hollywood; Intellectual Property; Journalism; Judiciary; Law Enforcement; Law Suits; Links; Music; Publishing; Quality; Quests for Truth and Accuracy NOT; Special Interests; Steve Jackson Case;
- e-Learning subtopics
- Documentation; e-mail vagaries; Fonts; Links; me and my pals; News Aggregator and RSS Enhancements; Radio Education; Referrer Links;
- Miscelaneous other
- Biology; Chemistry; Humor; Links; Medical Engineering; Science and Technology;
3:14:06 AM
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My Radio Education Notes turn out to be a big help to other people on parallel learning curves, such as [Alvin Borromeo]. But lots of other people are supplying useful documentation that I need to incorporate into my reference sources, as I check them out. [Lisa L. Spangenberg] shares info on the help she got in moving her stuff from another Weblog software vendor to Radio. [Radio Free Blogistan] just added a Tutorial on TSS, and my first question is What is TSS? I never heard that acronym before. There's also a continuing flow of tips on the various discussion groups.
Earlier this year my AOL had a melt down, thanks to a collision with some Microsoft flaws when I was trying to reinstall my computer security after my mother board had a melt down. I lost a month of favorite bookmarks and e-mail addresses, learning that recovery is not as simple as restoring from a backup. I have 1,000 bookmarks in my AOL archives that can be moved elsewhere by the simple expedient of cut and paste two times each - url and description, but lazy me wants to stay on the look out for an alternate solution. Putting them some place in Radio is one possible target. I thinking of doing something like my Radio Education Notes and Computer Security stuff (Aug 29 for example) to package my url archives by general subject essays.
When first learning any software, a newbie worries about making a nuisance of self, in the community of people who are struggling to figure out how best to use the same stuff, and when I first got started with contributions to [dws.Radio.FAQ], I felt a bit self conscious that perhaps I was dominating the discussion, for a few days, with an expression of what might be an excessive volume of dumb ideas that might improve the quality of the product. I have been at IBM conferences submitting suggestions for product improvements only to be told that most all of my ideas were invented long ago and I just managed to somehow miss out on seeing them. How embarrassing. However, I have been gratified to see that several people thought enough of my recent Radio Wishes to repost them on their sites, with credit to me.
I wonder how much I missing by not checking Radio Referers more often. Perhaps I should search Google, or some other search engine, for combination of my name and stuff I have written about. Apparently another Search Engine crawler found my weblog this weekend. [Organica] reports that if found 4 sites linking to me (I am sure there are more}, with me linking to 434 which it lists.
[Terry Frazier's Blunt Force Trauma] writes Al Macintyre meet [Rick Klau] and, in combination with Phil Wollf's [A Klog Apart] and [Seb's Open Research] , they like the way I have organized my Radio Doc Sources directory. As time permits I want to cross-reference this stuff several ways, such as where to go to find info on a particular topic, or mega area like Manila, like I have done with Categories and News Aggregation, but I did this one that way because when I need to look up something, I vaguely remember that so & so had something on such and such a topic. I want to strengthen that mental association and periodically return to those people documentation sites to see what they have added since the last time I was there, that is relevant to what I want to be learning, and also alternative sources relevant to those areas where I had trouble learning Radio. Also, down the road I hope for a search engine in which I can say to search these guys sites first. If you like my style, use my radio url number system figuring out to access the stories and categories I have populated so far.
1:51:33 AM
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Monday, September 02, 2002 |
Jeremy Zawodny Dreams of the Perfect RSS Aggregator. Jeremy has done a good job of breaking down several approaches to RSS aggregation and providing his own wishlist:
Radio Wish: I'm on a quest to find the perfect RSS aggregator.... I'm thinking of a server-based process that can gather all the data and give it to me in one of several ways. Maybe I can just point my browser at it and catch up on the news—just like AmphetaDesk. That's great for when I'm on-line and in a surfing mood. I'd like it to do RSS auto-discovery. I'd like the option of having updates sent to me via e-mail and possibly instant-messenger. Heck, I'd like to be able to subscribe via e-mail or IM as well
[Christian Crumlish (xian): radioactive] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ]
Radio Answers and more Wishes: Al Mac also is interested in what's out there to enhance our News Aggregator experiences, making it easier to subscribe to sites, and easier to organize what we get. Many sites talk tough copyright, in which that talk does not make it through the RSS filters. I plan to be adding what I find to my directory of Radio documentation and related resources. Obviously different people have different desires.
6:12:29 PM
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[Scripting News] QUOTE
Paolo: "How to open a weblog and get sued in less than one week."
UNQUOTE [Scripting News]
[Paolo]'s friend Simone's weblog (in Italian but the child's maze is understandable irrespective of your language) criticized an article printed on a local newspaper. Simone alleged that the article had lots of errors. He notified the article author of this, and got back legal action against Simone. Simone's site shares the traffic involved and now there is an article (in Italian) covering this on one of Italy's main technology news sites.
4:51:51 PM
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[Scripting News] QUOTE
A mostly user-level discussion on Blogroots about syndication and aggregation. It's good to get grounded with users every once in a while to relearn that what to us seems neat and cool, often trips up people who have expertise in areas other than ours.
UNQUOTE [Scripting News]
[Ken Dow] also shares links from [Dave Winer's Scripting News] from [Wired] QUOTE
"[Verizon] refused to comply with the order, arguing the entertainment industry is presuming the guilt of its users without any due process."
UNQUOTE [Scripting News]
While reading related stories on [Wired] I came across a law suit against Hollywood by people who want the right to Edit the Movies to remove material that they find to be objectionable. The suit has been brought by someone who has a patent pending that will help home users, such as parents, to edit what Hollywood delivers to the home, to remove material unsuitable for their children.
You have probably heard my opinion on this before. But I restate it and revise it as reality shifts.
- Intellectual Property Rights need to be protected, so that there is good incentive for people to improve the quality of what we get, be it literature, music, movies, software.
- If we accept a society in which anyone can take whatever they want, without proper compensation to the artists and authors, then the market place quality will be driven towards crud.
- We are in a society in which the mass consumers seek the lowest price and are getting what we are paying for, and the intellectuals are having a hard time getting a decent income.
- The publishers of the intellectual property are getting the lion's share of the income, and there is rebellion against them by both the consumers, who want freedom to get the stuff at low price, and the artists who think they are not getting fair share of the income.
- There needs to be ways that we can get the entertainment that we want and pay a fair price for it.
- My sister composed and performed music which she sent me by e-mail. Is that kind of artist to audience delivery to now be banned because so many people are abusing the communication links for delivery of entertainment for which the copyright has been violated?
- I am extremely unhappy about the degree to which advertisements are intruding on the content stream, and law suits by the advertisers to try to block the ability of consumers to switch channels, fast forward, etc. to get around having to view the ads. The main product should be packaged at a price that we can get it without having any of the advertisements in the first place.
- Computer usage can get complex. Business Accounting is complex and difficult to understand. Some of it is that way deliberately, where special interests lobby Congress to make it complex.
- Consider our Income Taxes ... how many people figure it out themselves without help from some software or going to a Tax place to figure it for us?
- Those tax places lobby Congress to keep it so complicated that we have to go to them to figure our taxes.
- Decisions are made that rule our lives by people who not understand the implications of what they are mucking with.
- One thing that really alarmed me was when I bought and read a book by a former National Security Advisor about cyber threats, it shows that he seemed to be really ignorant about some computer stuff, reminiscent of the kinds of thinking that Bruce Sterling wrote about in his book The Hacker Crackdown.
- We've talked about some of these things in Computer Community and it is evident that some of this is hogwash (threat is not real) and some of it is naive (threat is much worse than these people realize) but the news media repeats the book author stuff without much review by people who theoretically can comment on how much the author got it right and how much should have got expert advice before finalizing these writings.
- I believe that the computer community needs to give seminars to the law enforcement community to bring them up to speed on where the risks really are, and which of the risks in the popular media are really Science Fiction.
- End consumers ought to be allowed to obtain entertainment in one form, and listen to it in another form, be it put those tapes into your car stereo, boom box, walkman, home appliance, or whatever. Just so long as the original obtaining was legally purchased or legal copies.
- End consumers ought to be allowed to obtain information or software onto their computers and make reasonable backup copies. The issue should be related to the number of users and the number of platforms, and the licensing agreement should make it clear what the ceiling is, with a way to upgrade the ceiling, or to move your stuff from your old computer to a replacement one. Just so long as the original aquisition was a legal purchase or legal copy.
- End consumers ought to be allowed to remove software, like games, or entertainment, like music, from their computers and personal places, like home and auto, then sell or trade that with some other consumer. Just so long as the original user no longer keeps the copy.
- It seems like Government Beaurocracy is growing out of control. All those agencies competing with each other and not doing a great job of communicating with each other in a national crisis.
-
- Is there any hope for simplification, or will that have to wait on another generation?
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- New ordinary users of computer technology often do not understand e-etiquette let alone all the stuff their software is doing, so they learn by emulating the other users around them.
- We see this blind leading the blind process with all the people on the public highways who are oblivious to speed limits, and the accident rate from drunk drivers.
- We see this blind leading the blind in the cyber-plagues of our own making, popularly known as computer viruses, and how people get infected.
- Consumers are smart enough not to be wearing t-shirts with their credit card numbers emblazened for anyone to use, or take the doors off of homes for anyone to help self to contents, but there seems to be a widespread misconception that there is such a thing as Internet Privacy. That is an Oxymoron. If you not want anyone to copy your stuff, do not connect it to the Internet.
- A generation or so ago, before PCs invented, students were stealing computer time to play space war simulation games. The students had no conception of intellectual property rights, a problem that continues to this day. The owners of the stolen computer resources had no conception of security, a problem that continues to this day.
- Now that the price of computer power has dropped so that anyone can use it, we have new generations of people making the same mistakes. Put your stuff on the Internet and have this fantasy that no one is going to use it.
- Professional places, that post stuff to the internet, do a really good job of confusing the customers.
- Visit just about any news organization web site.
- With one message they clearly state that to copy anything from that site without their permission is a violation of copyright. In other words reading the data from screen through my eyes to my brain is in violation of their rules.
- With other messages you can push a button and get a printer friendly copy, e-mail it to some discussion group, or copy the pages.
- Who reads the contract that comes with software?
- Radio license clearly states that this is not to be exported outside the USA and a very narrow range of countries.
- Anyone who looks at the popular sites and discussion lists can see that Radio is being sold all over the world.
- Does this mean that their contract is meaningless, or is there some law that called for putting some phrases in their contract and at some point 100% of Userland executives are going to be in trouble with the government for export violations?
- Documentation exists but where is the motivation for software vendors to do a good job with it ... how many end consumers bother to read the documentation before they have some kind of a problem?
- A potential problem exists with the acronyms and new uses for new technology.
- Can we reasonably expect any new buyer of Radio to know what RSS means?
- New users see something on other people sites and want to do that on their own sites, but do not know the right terminology for the phenomena. This is like looking up the correct spelling of a word in the dictionary, when you do not even know what the word is. That makes it difficult to pose good questions to the discussion groups, or use search engine to find prior answers.
- With Radio Referers we can see who is reading our stuff and giving us proper credit for it. We can not see who is quoting us without attribution.
- I am learning how to give good credit to my sources, but many sites (most recently Slashroot), in combination with the software that I am using, won't let me edit to just do part of their story.
- It is getting difficult for me to figure out how to do credit when information flows through a series of people before it gets to me.
- When something is written with a summary statement at the beginning like a journalist story, then it can make sense to copy just the headline with a link to the source for full details, but many beginning webloggers are not that good writers to provide something that can be extracted like that.
- Some web sites have strict copyright rules, but those rules don't get into the RSS feeds.
- Many newbies don't give any credit until someone points out to them the need to do so.
- Different people want different things. You can't blame software for being a square peg that you try to put in a round hole. If you want a round peg, buy one.
- This does not bode well for the long term health of the Republic.
- The bulletin boards taken down by the government that led ultimately to the Steve Jackson case ... those BBSes were not selected at random. There was stuff going on that gave the government reason to suspect criminal behavior. It may or may not have been sufficient probable cause had the case been appealed all the way up the court system, but they did not move in with zero evidence.
- There were criminals using the bulletin boards to trade information on how to break into private computers. Now people can always argue whether hacking is not illegal immoral etc. and what the responsibility of the host of a network has to help authorities catch abusers of the services, but the fact remains that there were serious assaults on the nation's infrastructure, such as a cracker bringing down a 911 service, attacks on computers in hospitals whose work was essential to the health of patients there. Locating the responsible people was no easy task for the early cyber cops.
- Steve Jackson was working on a simulation game about cyber criminal activity. As research for this game, he had employees trying to infiltrate the cyber criminal underworld. Now when a bunch of people sit down to discuss their criminal behavior, the odds are that at least one is a police spy, and at least one is a journalist, but the police spy does not know which one is there as a journalist and which is there as a criminal.
- Journalists need some sources protection so they can get the information they need to do stories, but they also have an obligation to the nation. When we have knowledge of criminal behavior, we ought to make an effort to inform law enforcement of this, or risk being treated as being part of the criminal conspiracy. This applies equally to journalists, authors, game designers, computer professionals.
3:54:58 PM
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[Brian at Counter Moon in Evansville] has link to interesting story at [Slashdot] that perhaps [Bob Morris with Politics of Water] might like to add to his collection. QUOTE
 Water + Salt + Energy = Clean! |  Posted by chrisd on Sunday September 01, @07:59PM
from the don't-know-that-I'd-drink-it dept.
codesmith.ca writes "CTV News is reporting about a device built at the Russian Institute for Medical Engineering that can convert standard water and salt into an antimicrobial solution. Apparently it's works on almost anything (virii, bacteria, cysts...) and it's safe for human consumption to boot. I can't find a site for the institute, but there are articles around. This one is fairly detailed, but hard to reach. Here's the Google cache. Here's one about a paper shows it's not exactly super-new technology." Any chemist care to comment on what sounds to be too good to be true?
UNQUOTE [Slashdot]
This is real interesting cut and paste - I tried to snip out what was not relevant but was unable to do so. I will be interested to see how this Renders to my Radio Site.
1:39:43 PM
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Sunday topics: About Me; Abuse; Finances; IBM 400; Links; e-organization; Privacy; Radio Education; Stock Market; Technology Advances. I am currently subscribing to 20 Radio Channels, have stuff in 5 Categories, and have been adding a trickle of stuff to my stories.
I fell asleep in the middle of the Star Trek TV marathon, so I really did need to catch up on my rest.
Dave.W at Global mentioned that some of my e-mail was a bit difficult to read because of the fonts, so I shared 10% of the fonts that I have, in which I wrote the name of the font using the font. He really likes Century Gothic, so I shared that with some other people, who also like it. I am always unsure whose e-mail software is able to digest the odd ball fonts available to me.
These Radio sites have more standard Fonts available ... my correspondents might let me know which they prefer here.
- This is in Arial
- This is in Verdana
- This is in Time
- This is in Courier
I did a series of tests with the e-mail that was being rejected by the language cops, and I now believe that the sticking point was my sig having Mark's [Stock Market Scandals] Map as my favorite url.
1:59:43 AM
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I was checking my referers (two web sites in Germany ([Der Schockwellenreiter] and [Webdagboek Lucasvdr]} comment on [my post] to [Manila Newbies] about documentation sources for Manila) and got curious about # 15 on the list. It pointed to something in my news aggregation which now was unrelated to me. I figured that someone I subscribe to had quoted me, then by the time I noticed this it had fallen off bottom of my news aggregation, so I started visiting sites I subscribe to and I did not find anything about me there, but I got a geeky page for Dave Winer Radio Userland.
While noodling around, before giving up on this quest, I stumbled over the most popular Radio Userland sites read Yesterday, and where the documentation is for Frontier Newbies, two things that perhaps I ought to mention in my directory of documentation sources on Radio Userland products. The voyage was worth while because it woke me up to the fact that [Radio Free Blogistan] has just added to the collection of Tutorials, but now I have to wrap my mind around What is TSS?
1:35:04 AM
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Sunday, September 01, 2002 |
Understanding Stock Market
[Don Strickland] shares a useful link QUOTE "WorldCom scandal's deep roots", by Jonathan Krim, THE WASHINGTON POST [Don Strickland] UNQUOTE and he also has links to [unpleasant story] from [diJEST: a journal of extrapreneurial strategy and technology] about where the market for jobs for computer people is going.
I watched [Suze on CNBC] as she explained something about the [Stock Market Scandals] that I think a lot of people can be confused about, and I think her explanations were great. The person, who called, said that he was not asking about some financial challenge he was facing, but a need to better understand something about the Stock Market.
It seems clear to all of us that the financial health of a company has an impact on how its stock goes up and down in the market, but what impact does the value of the stock going up and down have on the financial health of a company? That is a great question, and [Suze on CNBC] gave a great answer. I have expanded on her answers quite a bit in sharing my revised understanding, so it is possible I have said stuff that she would never agree with.
When a corporation goes public with its shares being traded on the stock market, those shares of ownership in itself that are released, is part of the value of the company, called capitalization. As the value of the stocks go up, the value of the company goes up. As the stocks go down in value, so does the value of the whole corporation. Now this value gives the company power in the capital markets when it comes to getting good financing.
We can make a parallel for understanding this by looking at our ordinary lives. Our credit rating has an impact on what kind of loan we can get from a bank.
- What is our credit rating like?
- If it is very bad, we end up paying like 10% interest and have to sign over our automobile or other assets as collateral for the loan, such that if we cannot pay off the loan, the bank gets to keep our personal automobile - it is theirs now, and they will sell it for whatever they can get, subtract that from the debt, and we still owe the difference.
- If we have a pretty good credit rating, we pay like 5% interest and do not have to sign over ownership of something to risk losing.
- A large enough loan, and that difference in percentage that we have to pay, over how many years of the loan, that can be a pile of change.
- If we have a fantastic super excellent credit rating, the bank might give us a loan in which there is no interest, and we not have to put up any collateral, because the bank wants our business in other areas.
This explanation of our credit rating mentioned our FICO score which I want to review further later. It has to do with how well we pay our bills, what debt we are carrying, and other stuff. How do we find out what our FICO score is? How do we find out what the ingredients are into that score? How do we check to see what impact there is on it by our efforts to improve our credit situation? In times past I was not too concerned about this, because a person with a good credit rating is inundated with people trying to sell me something, and I figured that one way to turn off the junk advertising was to let my credit rating slip a bit. Then when I do need a low interest loan, I will crank up my credit rating a few months in advance of that, but I would like to know how long before I apply for a loan that it is a good idea to start cranking it up again.
Well this credit rating that we mere mortals can have, that influences how we are treated by banks, this is also a reality for big business whose shares are traded on the stock market, and one of the factors in the scoring by banks as to whether or not they are a good credit risk is the value of their stock. So as their stock price goes down, the banks financing interest rates go up, and vica versa, so the stock price does affect the company's capitalization, if they are borrowing money from banks.
But there is another impact, that of employee morale. In many public corporations, employees, from the top executives on down, own stock in the company they work for. Martha Stewart's downfall began thanks to the timing of her selling 4,000 shares out of the 36 million shares she has in her own company. The problem with the timing is explained by [Stock Market Scandals]. At that time, each of her 36 million shares were worth about $20.00 each. Now they are worth $7 to 10 each, so her net worth has dropped to 1/3 to 1/2 of what it was, and it is still dropping.
I have stock in Intel, Microsoft, IBM, and other companies that I had thought were almost blue chip. My rationale in selection of tech stocks was that I was looking for the building blocks of the infrastructure: Operating Systems; Modems; Servers; the Chips that are the basis of the hardware; so that no matter which hardware or software companies won out or lost in the big competition, I would be invested in the building blocks the winners used to make their products, or float them down the information superhighway.
My total holdings were worth $50,000.00 a year ago, I have not purchased or sold any stock for over a year. My total stock market holdings are now worth $25,000.00 and continue to slide down. This has an emotional impact on everyone who is affected by stuff like this. My sister's husband is an unemployed stock broker, and I was reminded from that source that a lot of money in the stock market is like play money, we have to diversify.
At what point does it make sense to buy more stock at these bargain prices? No one can tell when it has really bottomed out, whether a rally is just a blip on the downward spiral.
No one knows where the economy is going to go, except some manipulators of the [Stock Market Scandals] until they got caught. When Bin Laden does his next major attack, and gets away with it, the stock market will go down some more. But the War on Terrorism will not be forever. It could be for the rest of my lifetime through retirement. The Cold War was almost 50 years long and we still are reaping the damage from it. In history there are things like the Hundred Years War. I am confident that America is going to win this one, but I will not be surprised if it takes 20-30 years. Perhaps we should be focused more on what it takes to win sooner, and less on our own personal financial misfortunes.
So you have these employees who are hurting because their company stock value has been crippled, plus the cost of running the business is climbing because of the bank interest going up, and all the stuff they have to do because of the investigations. File extra reports to the government, all those lawyer fees. Customer confidence dropping, business moving to the competition.
So the answer to the question is that the stock market prices do have an impact on a company and its employees and stock holders, and in deriving this answer, we got a bit of an educational review of reality.
11:14:28 PM
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Donald Larson has a Category just for the Articles that he finds interesting each day. I like his approach, but for me I would probably need to split such a category a bit by the subjects that interest me - computer / politics / intellectual freedoms.
I am interested in the non-standard but nice technique he used to let a casual visitor to his site know that this existed.
Here is his summary of summaries. http://radio.weblogs.com/0108730/2002/09/index.html
Do I have one like that? Let's see. http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/2002/09/index.html
Here would be August if I have deciphered this correctly
http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/2002/08/index.html
I perceive an update to Radio url number system coming on.
Well I am getting error 404 when I try to link. I wonder if this is related to the new archiving system. My Radio Preferences are set for automatic update each nite (if my Radio is on then) of software upgrades, but I have been having a lot of MS BSOD strike in middle of nite when I am sleeping, so I not know what happened right before they struck. My Prefs / Weblog have 15 options (used to be 14) in which # 15 is Archives. I shall enable this new feature here and see what happens.
2:20:43 PM
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Thanks to V of TYR for e-mailing me these urls.
- Holographic imaging scanner sees right through you
- There have been several news stories with privacy concerns about an airport scanner in which passengers are rendered like naked.
- This technology, developed by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (http://www.pnl.gov/), has had some enhancements to try to solve the privacy concerns, while still addressing the security topic.
- The computer data can now be split so that the naked body is not shown on the screen, instead all the objects the person is carrying under the clothing is put on an image of a manikin. Here is a
-
There are some other future applications of this technology, discussed in the article, such as the clothing industry getting a perfect fit.
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There are also implied applications not discussed, such as what pornography enthusiasts might use it for. Think X-Ray glasses worn by dirty minds, that would just look at the bodies, forget the objects. Think hackers into the Airport Security bit stream to look at the portion that is censored on the screen.
11:32:19 AM
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I have just started a category called 400 on Radio Dial which will be for stuff related to my interests in that part of the IBM world which has nothing to do with the PC world, other than issues related to connecting PCs to IBM midrange networks and OS, like Linux, Unix, or OS/400. This category will not show up on various lists until stuff I post there gets upstreamed ... you will then be able to find it via my directory of stories and categories.
Midrange-l is a technical discussion group for people who work with IBM's midrange computer system, which used to be known as AS/400 but has been rebranded iSeries eServer.
Midrange-l discussion group now has its archives such that we can subscribe to them through our Radio News Aggregation, but where Radio Subscription Channels are identified by rss.xml at end of the Channel's url, here you have to select
http://archive.midrange.com/midrange-l/maillist.rdf to join up.
Posts to the Radio News Aggregation then show up in the format of the title of the post with in parentheses the name of the person who made the post to the discussion group. Clcking on the link then takes you to the actual post, looking exactly the same way as it does when you go to the archives of the group, and you can link from post to post within thread, just like being at the archives.
This link announces the service and gives instructions for subscribing.
*** ADMIN: RDF / RSS files now available (David Gibbs) [midrange-l mailing list]
This service is also available for the RPG400-L list.
For random visitors to Al's Weblog who may be unfamiliar with RPG, it is an extremely popular business language used on mid sized IBM computers. I guess common languages for software written in the IBM world include: COBOL JAVA RPG SQL
RPG is an acronym meaning Report Program Generator. At one time I knew what most all languages acronyms stood for, except perhaps ENGLISH. " :-}"
Important context, when discussing this technology, is that UserLand wrote and deployed the first RSS-based news aggregator, in the spring of 1999
2:13:24 AM
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Weekly review of most significant references and stories added to Al's weblog, or updated, off the home page, in terms of my content that is not just saying this or that is interesting, but contributing some serious stuff, include:
- Banking Stories
- Anecdotes about funny and not so funny financial incidents.
- Blind of NH
- Raw stuff about e-Accessibility and plain old Accessibility.
- Tons of links for folks interested in helping resolve Accessibility problems.
- Computer Security Essays Aug 29 and earlier
- Radio Doc Sources
- Tutorials for Radio, and nuance clarifications.
- A road map to about 25 different Radio documentation destinations.
- Some of these are to Manila and Frontier documentation - I think a similar directory might be constructive to serve people who working with Manila but not Radio, then down the road connect to a Tutorial for people moving from one to the other.
- I think there may be a need for this kind of topic using the dws.Radio.FAQ model, to grow a directory of all shareable Radio documentation that anyone knows about.
- Radio url number system
- A road map to Radio urls for the newbie that I am.
- I need to add, for beginners, how you get at this kind of info in the first place.
- When I get versatile in Navigation Links I might not need this any more.
- But people following behind me will still need this kind of tool.
- Search Engines against our Weblogs see Aug 22
- Understand Radio Categories
- Grok overall concepts, then step by step implement them.
- Lots of links to other people documentation.
- I think this documentation model worked out quite well.
- Understand Radio News Aggregation
- Grok overall concepts, then links to other people documentation for the actual implementation.
- I added a couple more relevant documentation links into this one this weekend.
- I plan to do more later like this Understand Other Topics, as I figure stuff out.
I plan to repost a directory like this one, from time to time, as my collection gets significant updates worth sharing.
I have done some posts on the home page that I think are a bit excessive in length and ought to be moved to stories, with just short links on home page.
1:08:48 AM
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I implemented titles, I posted one and I thought I lost this box. I never did see the title that I posted.
Macro error: The file "C:\PROGRAM FILES\RADIO USERLAND\www\#prefs.txt" wasn't found.]
That file does exist so the error is in whatever software is looking for it.
12:57:15 AM
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Saturday Topics: Civil Liberties especially Freedom of Speech; Humor; e-organization; Politics; Updates about me, my place, some friends. Today I made some changes in my Radio Preferences, trying to have a little less stuff on Home Page, more stuff in Archives, various things to hopefully help me be better organized, more stuff in News Aggregation but access it less often, so less drain on CPU and memory, but use a bit more home PC hard disk space, as I plan to be adding another channel that has a lot of activity. I tentatively plan to open a category related to my IBM interests, ie. computer stuff outside the PC world.
Friday Topics: e-art; current events; e-organization; radio education.
12:53:08 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Al Macintyre.
Last update: 09/30/2002; 12:30:02 PM.
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