2003-02-15»
well that came out of nowhere»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.
Currently:
Author Archive
more details on the jhai pc»
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»
whoops.»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.
once more, with vim»
A class browser (of sorts) in vim. I love vim, but only in a false-consciousness kind of way.
2003-02-07»
another idol falls»The Guardian said he coded it, and the truth is only slightly less shocking. Whitfield Diffie’s code was the inspiration behind Powerpoint. Is nothing sacred?
Diffie has long gray hair and likes to wear English suits. Today, he works for Sun Microsystems, as an internal consultant on encryption matters. I recently had lunch with him in Palo Alto, and for the first time he publicly acknowledged his presence at the birth of PowerPoint. It was an odd piece of news: as if Lenin had invented the stapler. Yes, he said, PowerPoint was “based on” his work at B.N.R. This is not of great consequence to Diffie, whose reputation in his own field is so high that he is one of the few computer scientists to receive erotically charged fan mail. He said he was “mildly miffed” to have made no money from the PowerPoint connection, but he has no interest in beginning a feud with an old friend. “Bob was the one who had the vision to understand how important it was to the world,” he said. “And I didn’t.”
As if Lenin had invented the stapler? As if Lenin had invented Standard Oil more like.
(Thanks, Matt. Yeah, thanks a lot).
2003-02-06»
three hours later…»Here’s an ASCII copy of the EU draft constitution, as requested (thanks, Dan!)
(I guess it wasn’t scanned in after all.)
the united states of plaintext»
You’d think that with something as important as the draft of the forthcoming EU Constitution, they’d stick it into something more readable than a scanned- in PDF. Anyone got an ASCII version?
blog zero»
Ben links to an Dear Raed, an Iraqi blog from Baghdad. Utterly fascinating, from its examination of the latest Saddam gossip (“Saddam is still meeting officers daily, and we have the pleasure of watching these meetings three times every day. Each batch he meets leaves the place with a 1.5million Iraqi Dinars check and a brand new car. The latest cars to be put in the warehouses I pass by are Toyota Corollas, all white. The warehouse has around 150 of them”) to bitchy responses to pro-war Americans (“Well you pooped on me buddy, don’t expect me to be all ah-great-america-we-love-you, and your government will be pooping on me some more, now how does that make me feel?”). Not to mention the Neuromancerish psy-ops that caught Ben’s eye.