Something I didn’t realise until now. GtkHTML, Gnome’s HTML widget, was originally a port of KTHML too. It’s wandered alot since then, but that does imply that the interface itself might be compatible.I wonder if GNOME will be able to suck down Apple’s improvements?
So the UK government has been proposing what they call an Entitlement Card – a universal ID card for every man, woman and child in Britain. Every government seems to propose this the moment they get into office, and ever since 1952, the voters have rejected it. It’s one of those things that civil servants like to slip into the “TODO” list while the Minster isn’t looking.
The usual way of stopping it is to complain that there’s no mandate. The present government are getting around this by holding a “Public Consultation”, where they write a 13MB PDF document (here’s an HTML version we hacked up) talking about how great ID cards would be. They then solicit comments. The government is very pleased with this scheme. Lord Falconer, the government’s ID card point man, keeps talking about how the majority of responses have been positive (they’ve had over 1500 so far).
I’m not so sure that’s true. NTK subscriber Dan Blanchard emailed them to complain about the proposals, and got a nice mail back saying “Thank you for your e-mail in support of the introduction of an entitlement/identity card scheme.”. Whoops.
Now I can’t be sure they’re miscounting here. I am pretty sure that there’s a large number of people who are anti-ID cards, but haven’t spoken up. So we’ve set up an easy front-end to their consultation process: you can just check the boxes, add your own comments, and mail the consultation email address automatically. We’re counting all the messages that are against the proposal, and we’ll see how they match up against the government figures.
Also, I can’t help thinking that 1500 replies is pathetic compared to a good slashdotting. I think the blogosphere might be able to swing the balance around in a week or so.
Anyway, if you’re British and you don’t like the ID card proposal, have a look over the site and make your voice hear. We’ve only been going for a few hours, and we’ve already got around three hundred responses.
Oh, almost forgot to add: Bwahahahahaha.
So they’re calling up the reservists in the UK. The Ministry of Defence is sending out notes to them on Monday, but wanted their employers to know that this might happen before that. So to get the word out, they spammed 100,000 random addresses in the UK. Even stranger, they paid a German company to do it.
Ah, the mastery of the tools of the high-tech info-war. I fear this is going to go down in history as one of those Spanish-American, Lions-Led-By-Donkeys affairs.
Cory’s first novel is out. Buy it, then download it for free. It’s a fun, geekazoid read. I romped through it on the Caltrain back around Codecon (if you’re an NTK email subscriber, you can find a mention of Whuffie hidden in the X-Excuse header around about that time.) The next day, I shimmied up to Doctorow at the conference and insisted that I was the book’s first fan. I began quizzing him on ridiculously fine-grained plot points. He seemed very touched, and answered my questions perfectly civilly even when I went on far too long and the whole thing become very tedious. “How was that?”, I asked, before returning the conversation to more normal lines. Fine, he said, kind of fun. “Good. Welcome to the rest of your life.”
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I for one, welcome our new Konqueror implementation. Actually, it does explain why David “Chimera” Hyatt went over to work at Apple. From a posting of his back in June:
What Gecko has going for it is correctness (and a very large range of implemented standards!), but I’d rather see someone try to do it better. A browser on OS X done right should be able to dust Gecko in terms of speed and footprint. It should be able to just smoke Gecko in startup time and page load time. The fact that this hasn’t been done yet doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
I guess he went over to see if it could be done.
I’ve just found out that Lee Felsenstein will be talking about the Jhai remote IT project at Stanford this Wednesday, 2003-01-08, 4.15pm. If you’re in the area, it should be an interesting talk.
It’s also Saint Joshua Norton‘s birthday deathday. I shall have to find a way to pay my respects at the Bill Gates Building.
I’ve been settling into a slow lazy orbit of gadget-stasis. After a lifetime of craving all kinds of gizmos, I ended up with a shortlist of things I wanted two years ago. I have since failed to add anything new to it and slowed purchased everything else at bargain-bucket rates when they’ve ceased to be fashionable.
In the end, I realised that there was only one thing left on the list – a USB key drive. You know, one of those 64MB widgets you can hang off a keyring and plug straight into a USB port, where it magically appears as a normal drive on Mac, PCs and Linux. When I first decided I wanted one, they cost hundreds of dollars and were highly first-adopterish. Now they’re cheap and ubiquitous, I thought it was time to take the plunge.
Never quite works that way, does it? About the same time, I read on Slashdot about a new generation of these little drives, with a new generation of chipsets. As well as store files, they could work as MP3 players and voice recorders too. I got the cheapest of these, the splendidly named Yo!Fun 130 for Christmas. It does MP3 playing and voice recording as well as file storage – and it can take SmartMedia cards. It’s also very diddy and wee.
Unfortunately, it’s the strangest engineered piece of consumer electronics I’ve seen. Inside it, I estimate it has an MP3 player/voice encoder chipset tied together with rope to a mass storage chipset, with a complicated pulley and winch to connect one of them to the outside world at a time. Neither know of each other’s existence. You switch one or the other in, you have to crank a switch on the side of the box. If you sniff the USB output, you can watch this happen. One moment, the USB is saying “Hi! I’m a perfectly normal USB storage device made by Dull Company of Taiwan”, the next the winch activates and “Zzzzt! Wait! No! I am, in fact, an MP3 player made by Somebody Different of South Korea”.
Each chipset uses a different storage format. So every time you switch, you have to reformat all the memory. Want to copy some files across, then listen to MP3s? Forget it – you’ll need to delete one or the other before you can move that lever. This isn’t systems integration: it’s systems smooshing.
Yo!Fun also isn’t Linux compatible – not really surprising, I suppose, given that it’s not even compatible with itself. So I took it back, and got a Cendyne Gruvstick. Bit more expensive. Slightly better. At least that presents itself as just one thing to the USB interface. Unfortunately, it’s not anything that anyone outside of its own device driver would care to comprehend.
The Gruvstick uses the STMP3410 chipset which, in theory, supports the USB mass storage protocol (the standard that lets you just slam these things into Macs, PCs or Linux without needing drivers). But the Gruvstick spurns this petty interoperability for what looks like its own magic moon language. Having your own language is, of course, the very definition of proprietary. But I have to say, after poring over dozens of specs and snooped USB traffic – what a weird way of doing things. The standard says, 0x28, when it wants to read some data. The Gruvstick has exactly the same function, only *it* uses something like 0x03. Thus, presumably, doubling the work for the engineers, and rendering it utterly incompatible with anything other than their specially written drivers. Drivers which crashed Quinn’s Windows 2K machine. (I may be wrong about the details of this, incidentally – and this is a blog, so it’s almost obligatory to be a bit wrong. But it still looks like the Gruvstick is being proprietary for proprietary’s sake. And there’s not a single thing its software does that the standard USB storage protocol doesn’t support. Except, I guess, DRM.)
Anyway, the upshot of this is that the Gruvstick needs its own drivers. Drivers you can only get for Windows. Now this makes it useless for my purposes – not just because I’m such a Linux wonk, but because I want to use it as a replacement for floppy disks. How can I transfer files, if I need to install drivers to get the storage device to be even recognised on a foreign machine?
So I took the Gruvstick back. Then, finally, I did the sensible thing. I went to the Linux USB working devices list and searched for what I wanted. There, I found some optimistic reviews of the Daisy Diva MP3 Player/File Store/Voice Recorder/Compact Flash reader. This, it looks like, does it all right. Normal USB Storage protocols; no weird hybrid shit; Linux support – plus, it’s pretty much the same price as the Yo!Fun. And it’s got a slightly less silly name.
I haven’t bought it yet – because I made the mistake of visiting the rest of their catalogue. Now I’m wavering between that, or the Daisy Music Pen, which is all the same stuff (sans CF reader) in a pen-sized form factor. Again, it’s cheaper than the Gruvstick. Or should I really splash out and get the same company’s PhotoClip? Which is – glad you asked – a combined MP3 player, file store/CF reader, voice recorder, still camera, webcam and video recorder. $149, although I don’t know how much of that is Linux accessible.
I’m still in the middle of deciding. But I’ve learnt three lessons: one, the folk who make the sensible engineering choices are probably the smarter and cheaper manufacturers too. Two: you always do your best consumer research in the two hours after you bought the goods. Three: no matter how long you stay out of the gadget rat race, there’s always one more object of desire.
It was back in February of 1998, and I’d written a throwaway line in NTK about a story I’d heard regarding John Carmack, creator of Quake.
A few days later, I got an email. From Richard M. Stallman. He’d had my rumour forwarded to him. Would it be possible for me to put him in contact with this John Carmack, so they could confirm that he’d like to make a donation, and work out the best way of doing so?
So I found myself writing a reply to Richard Freaking Stallman, with Only Bloody John Carmack in the cc: field. It ended:
Bcc:d on the same mail was almost everybody I knew in the whole world ever.
I was grinning for days. I had done practically nothing, of course – but what a great way of doing nothing: putting other people’s money, opportunities and genius together and then standing well back.
Which is why Lee Felsenstein is such a personal hero to me. As the moderator of the Homebrew Computer Club, Felsenstein made it his life’s work to introduce opportunity to genius, in a framework where everyone benefitted – and maybe made money too. He pushed Jobs and Woz closer together, stitched together alliances between dozens of fledgling Silicon Valley companies in the Seventies, and encouraged them all to co-operate openly, without proprietary controls. He saw his job as putting the right people together to make the world a better place.
Oh, but there’s more. Felsenstein wasn’t just a co-ordinator of genius: he was an engineering genius himself. He designed the Osborne-1, the first popular portable computer. He was rolling out free networked public-access terminals in the Bay Area in 1972. In 1993, he wrote a piece for Dr. Dobbs Journal, whose mere title should give you a taste of how far-thinking it was. It was called “The Commons of Information”, and it ended with this call to arms:
Our task, as technologists, is to build the tools that get us through … to the future we want. We’ve already done half the job by creating the personal computer such that it took on a life of its own and evaded capture. Now the task of furnishing the agora remains. Anyone up for another adventure?
I often wondered what adventure Felsenstein was up to these days. Earlier this year, I got a chance to interview him and find out. A lot of the details are in this Irish Times piece, but here’s the capsule summary:
Felsenstein’s friend, Lee Thorn, was a bomb loader on an aircraft carrier in 1966 and participated in the US bombing of Laos, between Thailand and Vietnam. Years later, he formed the Jhai Foundation with a Laotian refugee, by means of small reparation. Last year, he approached Felstein with a challenge: could he spread the power of his revolution to the agricultural communities of Laos?
Felsenstein got to work. He’s built the solution. It’s a bicycle-powered, ruggedised luggable, with a localised version of Linux and constructed from cheapo commodity parts. It’s got an aerial, too: it uses WiFi to connect to a central Internet hub in the market town.
Using it, villages that currently have no electricity, telephone or decent roads can monitor the prices of crops, negotiate group purchases with other villages, and make business deals without spending days away from the farm. And with email and built-in VoIP, the families will be able to make direct contact for the first time with the Laotian Diaspora – the relatives who left the war-torn zone to earn money in the capital and beyond.
It’s an incredible project. The New York Times named it one of its best ideas of 2002. And Felsenstein, using his old-style Silicon Valley wiles, has brought the cost of full five village system to just $25,000.
Unfortunately, it looks like the international grants they secured to do this won’t come through in time before the first Monsoon rains begin in May. So they’re scouting around for this tiny amount, before the whole project gets flooded out.
Here’s Lee‘s email plea in full. Here’s his list of what the money can do:
Your donation will pay for:
You can PayPal the Jhai Foundation on their donations page (mention that it’s for “Remote IT”).
Better still, send them ten bucks or more and then blog about it.
You see, I’m no good at this. I’m trying to give the foundation publicity, but I’ve already screwed up. I must have scared away 99% of the potential donators just by talking about Stallman and Carmack. I wrote the Irish Times piece too early – and I even mispelled the name of the Foundation in the print version. This entry is too long. It’s in this titchy little font. Dooomed!
But you – you’re good at this meme-spreading thing. Your blog has bazillions of readers. They’re all rich, sensitive, and good-looking just like you. You can just link to the Jhai donation page and mention the project and why it’s cool, and it will become cool, and have enough money to make it to Lhaos before the rainy season. Put in a link to the New York Times piece or my Irish Times piece for more info, if you like.
And remember, because this is charity, you don’t have to worry about how popular it is. You can blog it even if it’s already on Daypop! Everyone will still love you and admire your charity. Lee Felsenstein, the rabble-rousing fomenter of the digital revolution, and you, the best goddamn fomenter in the Distributed Republic of Blogistan, working together at last. Or, in other words:
Mr and Ms Blogger, meet Mr Felsenstein.
Anyone up for another adventure?
So my first New Year’s Resolution was to catch up with the 140 or so old unreplied mails that I’ve had hanging over my head for years. And I did! (Green line line is my inbox, blue box my must-reply sword of Damocles)
Welp, all downhill from now on in. Cheers!
PS DON’T EMAIL YOUR CONGRATULATIONS.
As you may have spotted, I’m college-educated, and English-speaking. I’m also currently in the midst of converting my position here in the US to the status of permanent resident. There’s no real hurry – I’m on a journalist visa at the moment which is valid for five years and is renewable; it’s just that now I’m having my child in this country, I’d like to make my stay here as secure as possible.
When I say, “in the midst of”, let me tell you what that involves. I’m on my third attempt to have the documentation even processed. Twice it’s been sent back because of a filing error on my part. This is not surprising: the documentation needed to even apply for permanent residency is so vast, and so often changed, that even with the best explanations in the world, there are dozens of ambiguities. And the explanations are not the best in the world. INS requirements differ from office to office: official Website explanations contradict one another. This is hard. Here’s the first step in my application process:
Included in that wodge are a couple of detailed notarised documents from friends, tax returns, about eight photographs (in several differing but precise sizes, not shown), and a partridge in a pear tree. And remember, there are interviews and cross-checks with the CIA, FBI and the American consulate before this finally gets through to the point where I can have an interview. And after the interview, I will have to notify the government every time I move house – or any time my friends move house, or I’m in violation.
I can honestly say it’s been the most inpenetrably complex bureacratic procedure I have been involved with in my life. If my livelihood and my residency in this country depended on it, I’d be terrified.
As I say, I’m lucky. For me, it’s just a way of securing my status. My immigration attorney says my case is “relatively straightforward”. I’m on a long-term visa here already. I can speak English. They’ve recently changed the rules in San Jose to allow me to file by post, so I no longer have to pitch a tent outside the INS offices here and wait in a queue from 1 in the morning until they open at 8.00 (think I’m joking? Go check the temporary encampment that emerges every night. There’s a video clip of it here.
But most of all, right now, I’m lucky because I’m not from an Arab country. Because the simple form-filling errors that I’ve made in the past – me, English-speaking, college-educated, was-studying-to-be-a-lawyer-at-school – would have got me handcuffed, arrested and thrown in jail this week.
Estimates by immigration lawyers suggest that a quarter of the people in LA who traipsed off to the INS to take part in yet another bureacratic hoop-jump were taken away to prison Tuesday. I wonder what the other three-quarters think? If you come from Iran, or you come from Syria, Iraq or the Sudan you know what to do in this situation. Don’t ever come forward when the government calls your name again. Hide. Because in those countries, such sudden, unexpected, disproportionate and ethnic-group specific roundups (of just the men, by the way, not the women) by government are usually a prelude to something very nasty. Of course, as they say, that couldn’t possibly happen here. But they don’t know that, do they? They’re not English-speaking, college-educated, white, and safe in their homes like me, are they?
Anyway, I’m buying myself a Christmas present. I’m joining the ACLU. It only costs $20, which is certainly less than the $600 or so my immigration application costs. There’s only one form to fill in – and I can do it online. And nobody is going to round me up and throw me in jail because I decided to come forward and hand in this paperwork. Or at least, that’s the general idea.
