Oblomovka

2003-02-17»

According to the latest Perl 6 Summary, Leon Brocard has written a Brainfuck compiler, in Brainfuck, for the Brainfuck interpreter supplied with Parrot, a virtual machine named after a joke, written for a language that doesn't yet exist.

I think I've sprained my head.

AT&T Labs Research Projects. Smells old, and I've seen a few of them before, but never in one big odd pile like this. Everything from Web scraping proxies to Emacs speech-recognition (complete with the voice equivalent of Ctrl-Alt-Shift-Meta) to doodling email apps for the Palm. Some without source (or encumbered in a non-commercial licence), some without binaries.

When they talk about the comparison between blogging and press journalism, they never mention the two strongest differences for me. The first is trivial: it's word length. You can write as little or as much as it takes on the Web. On paper, you have to trim your ideas to fit the pattern of the page: pad out or reign in.

The second is the permanence of print, and the horrible finality of printing. I get a small frisson when I hit ":wq" on this entry, but it's a fraction of the sickening dread I get when I realise that what I've written is is now frozen in time, and printed on thousands and thousands of pieces of paper that can never be backspaced over, can never be undone. Some journalists talk about the pride they gain from seeing their words in print. I can't look at them. I can't stand it. It's all too definite, all too concrete. Words aren't like that. They're too soft. In event of disaster, they should be able to run home and hide under your skirttails.

And every word, when once it is written, is bandied about, alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it, and it knows not to whom to speak or not to speak; when ill-treated or unjustly reviled it always needs its father to help it; for it has no power to protect or help itself.

And they're pretty bad at protecting their parents too: here's a piece written by Isioma Daniel, the woman who knocked out a lighthearted column on how funny the Nigerian Miss World was.

I remember feeling uneasy after completing the piece. It was breezy and sarcastic. My recent time in Britain, studying journalism at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, had made me irreverent - there are no sacred cows in the UK. The tabloids have finished them off. I printed a copy and handed it to my editor. "Make sure you read it," I said. A few minutes later I reminded him. "I have sent the article to your computer, have you read it?" He read a few lines. "It's fine," he said.

Two hundred or more dead later, she's got a fatwa on her head, and is in exile in the US.

2003-02-15»

Google buys Blogger. My take, shamelessly stolen from Quinn: "Google buys Internet stuff it doesn't want to go away.".

My other take: Winer's going to go ballistic.

For those of you who've seen the pictures of the Jhai PC in Laos, and read the note that said that the hardware wasn't working on the launch date, here's the full skinny, quoted from the mailout the Jhai people sent out this week:

Jhai Remote Village IT System Launch Delayed

At 4:30 a.m., Tuesday, 11 February, 2003, in Vientiane, Lao PDR, Jhai Foundation concluded here that the scheduled launch date could not be met.

The Problem

The original design was modified three weeks before launch to include a flashdisk (a data storage device that has no moving parts) at the village computer in Phon Kham. To include the flashdisk required a PCMCIA card. This was a solution developed in order to provide space for the size of the localized KDE, the Linux-based productivity suite, and related software so that the software more closely matched the hardware's ability to do the job the villagers wanted it to do. To integrate this device and this card into the system will take more time due to a variety of issues. The manufacturers are cooperating with the Jhai team on this effort, but the time required for integration is substantial.

This night the data on two hard drives needed for development were corrupted. And a Jhai PC was rendered inoperable. Although data and programs were saved on CDs, the time lost due to this accident makes it impossible to meet our deadline.

"From our team's perspective," says Jhai chairman, Lee Thorn, "the design of the Jhai PC and communication system is more than sound - it remains the best solution we know to meet the needs of the villagers in the Hin Heup district and perhaps to meet the needs of many poor rural people worldwide.

The problem is not the design.

The problem is a combination of factors - money constraints, constraints on volunteers' time, and my insistence on a deadline that turned out to be too optimistic. The responsibility for this delay is mine. I regret any inconvenience my decision has caused others. Any loss of face is my loss and should not be imposed on other members of our team.

Seeking Counsel From The Community

"We will be going to the villages today to seek their counsel on how to proceed from here. We hope to solve our problems before the rainy season begins in mid-April. This is a hope, not a prediction. However, we will not announce a launch date until more information is in hand.

"Jhai Foundation is about reconciliation and this is a reconciliation project of the Jhai Foundation. What is most important to us are our human relationships. We will remain true to our values and true to our friends here in Laos and elsewhere. As my fellow veteran, Kurt Vonnegut, once said, 'The thing is to be honorable.' We will continue to be honorable and we will continue to seek reconciliation of whole - and flawed - people with one another. The opposite of this is war and we will not go down that road. We will do this thing together. It will simply take more time."

Lee Thorn, chairman of Jhai Foundation

2003-02-13»

My RSS feed is eating up bandwidth, so I've implemented a "If-None-Match"/"Etags" caching doobry. Let me know if anything breaks. Not that you'll be reading this if it does.

2003-02-10»

The Ten Minute Haight.

A class browser (of sorts) in vim. I love vim, but only in a false-consciousness kind of way.