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November 26, 2005
Kinky Friedman for Gov
Just so you all remember, I'm a proud supporter of Kinky Friedman, the next governor of Texas. Y'all should watch his cartoon.
Posted by griffjon at 06:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 23, 2005
Development Discourse
There's an old joke about a prisoner confused at his first day in, at lunch. Random people stand up, announce a number, and the whole place cracks up. Consulting an older prisoner, it turns out that since they've all heard all the same jokes so many times, they just number them to save the trouble of repeating it all.
Sometimes I get the same feeling, reading development literature. Some central stories of development successes or failures get told over and over again. I imagine a group of development practitioners sitting around a table:
"Sudan famine, '98"
(all) ooooh. Hm. Yeah...
"..But, Brazil!"
(nodding)
"Korea vs. Ghana, 1950-2000!"
(shocked expressions)
"Toilet festivals!"
(more nodding)
...and so on. (that was an argument about elite capture of goods targetted at underprivilidged targets and misinterpretation thereof, and then gov't policies towards development, and then successful grassroots projects, FYI).
I wonder if this is a case of necessary categorization of recurrent problem types in development projects that humans are predisposed to do, or if it's over simplifying the situation. Probably both.
Posted by griffjon at 11:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 22, 2005
Like anyone's surprised
Throw up your satan-worshipping horns, Pat!
From Fortean Times via BoingBoing
(note the important difference from UT's "hook 'em horns", with the closed fist and thumb over the middle finger.)
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November 20, 2005
"Push"
Some images just beg for slight modifications:
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November 19, 2005
Darwin Award Nominee?
From the Sydney Morning Herald via BoingBoing :
A rugby fan who cut out his testicles with wire cutters to mark a Wales victory is at a loss to explain why he did it.Geoffrey Huish, 31, performed the impromptu self-surgery in February when his beloved Wales beat world champions England.
After performing the deed, Mr Huish put his severed anatomy in a bag and took them to his local social club to show fellow fans.
He collapsed with blood loss and was rushed to hospital but surgeons could not reattach his missing parts.
He was put in a psychiatric ward but has no history of mental illness and was at a loss to explain why he did it.
"I'd told my pal Gethin Probert before the game that Wales didn't stand a chance," Mr Huish told The Sun.
"It wasn't a bet but I said I'd cut my b*lls off if we won...
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November 17, 2005
QOTD: World Bank
"Most critics appear to argue that the [World] Bank would be more culturally adept if it issued ten thousand sandals to its staff and sent them out to attune themselves to local cultures. But is this the most effective strategy?"
-- Sabina Alkire, Culture, Poverty and External Intervention
Is it bad that this made me laugh out loud?
Posted by griffjon at 08:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
A new hero?
Chemical burns, ruined clothes, 11 years, half a million dollars—it's not easy to improve the world's most popular toy. Yet the success of one inventor's quest to dye a simple soap bubble may change the way the world uses color.Tim Kehoe has stained the whites of his eyes deep blue. He's also stained his face, his car, several bathtubs and a few dozen children. He's had to evacuate his family because he filled the house with noxious fumes. He's ruined every kitchen he's ever had. Kehoe, a 35-year-old toy inventor from St. Paul, Minnesota, has done all this in an effort to make real an idea he had more than 10 years ago, one he's been told repeatedly cannot be realized: a colored bubble.
Posted by griffjon at 08:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
$100 Laptop redux
From the BBC, backstory available here.
Although the laptops will initially be available to government only, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is in talks with commercial manufacturers to make it available on the open market.To take part in the initiative, governments have to commit to buying a million machines for around $100 each.
...
To overcome the potential problem of secondary "grey markets" for the machines, Professor Negroponte said the idea was that they would be so ubiquitous and prominent it would deter potential re-selling.
"I hope there would be community pressure so it does not appear in the secondary market. The technology is in it so that the machine is disabled if not connected to the network after a few days," he added.
Now, I'm extending some credit here, based on the laptop's home page, that this "not connected to the network" means any network, not just the Internet. If that's not the case, then it will be a huge problem.
But the plan to avoid grey/black/"secondary" market problems (love those euphemisims!) by ... ubiquity? If companies can make money by bottling tap water and selling it at the grocery store, I posit that there's always money to made in reselling, no matter the ubiquity of the good. Now, make that good a super-useful laptop, and restrict who can acquire it through legal means (students, through gov't initiatives) versus the likely demand (pretty much everyone wants a computer, especially a laptop, for prestige/bling if not functional utility) (Heck, I want one!)... and... yeah.
Community pressure is an interesting thing to depend upon, and I can see some merit in it. With an obviously distinct item (a lime green laptop), I can see a best case scenario where people who aren't children seen with them are immediately recognized as thieves or having bought from a thief, and cultural/community sanctions/attitudes may obtain... Within the region that the project is advertised in... extra-region or international black markets won't be constrained by that social pressure.
Let me back off; I do think there is a lot that is being done well with this project -- the laptop has some good design features (particularly the crank-power option!) for the 3rd world situation. Hopefully the keyboard is dust/dirt/water resistant too. I just hope that the implementations, costing at least 100M, are as well thought out, and I don't think this part has really been shown as yet.
Posted by griffjon at 01:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 14, 2005
geek lust
I haven't had desire for a material good like this for years:
The Hard Drive Coffee Table top is an original 26" diameter hard drive platter from an early storage device (circa 1970). The center hub of the platter is solid aluminum. The custom-created pedestal is also solid aluminum; a cylinder measuring 5.9" in diameter and 18.5" in length. It has a machined top and bottom to fit into the hard drive hub and base, respectively. The base is a solid aluminum 12" diameter, 1.75" high round obtained from a now-defunct government laboratory. Four bolts are screwed into tapped holes in the pedestal in order to secure the hard drive platter and the pedestal is press-fit into the base. It is covered with standard 1/4" table glass. The completed design measures 19.5" high and weighs 64 pounds.
Posted by griffjon at 07:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 11, 2005
Dogs and Cats... living together! CHAOS!
The RIAA/MPAA-friendly Bush regime chides Sony's use of a rootkit to "protect" their CDs as going too far:
Stewart Baker, the Department of Homeland Security's policy czar warned would-be DRM makers: 'It's very important to remember that it's your intellectual property -- it's not your computer. And in the pursuit of protection of intellectual property, it's important not to defeat or undermine the security measures that people need to adopt in these days.'
Posted by griffjon at 03:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 10, 2005
Wha..huh?
Not only did the Alaskan oil drilling get pulled out of the budget-cutting bill, but then the entire bill which attacked a lot of social programs instead of cash-cow programs has fallen apart.
More at dailyKOS
...what's with all this good news? (At least on the federal level.)
Texas of course passed all of its conservative-twitch legislation, including it's anti-gay proposition. There's something to be said here about divorce rates among republicans, but I'm not sure exactly what.
Posted by griffjon at 09:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 08, 2005
Leaky
So, DailyKOS and CNN are reporting on the call and return fire for investigation into the leak of the information about the "black site" prisons. The initial call seemed like a way to balance the Plamegate scandal, but then the backfire was that Lott reveals that he suspects a Republican senator. (DKos story.
DKOS is all celebratory at the ongoing implosion of the Reps, but I wonder that this came out mere days after McCain said, "If necessary - and I sincerely hope it is not - I and the co-sponsors of this amendment will seek to add it to every piece of important legislation voted on in the Senate until the will of a substantial bipartisan majority in both houses of Congress prevails. Let no one doubt our determination." (referring to an anti-torture piece of legislation).
I remain... dubious and curious.
Posted by griffjon at 04:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 07, 2005
"Rights Management"
Putting a "Digital" before that... does that really change anything of note? DRM is the practice of restricting what you can do with digital files you've purchased. Like, can you listen to this CD on your computer? Can you copy it? Can you make a mix of it for your car with a few favorite songs from different CDs? Can you back-up a DVD (something I certainly wish was easier, as I just had to buy a second copy of Life and Debt as mine got too scratched). Wikipedia explains DRM.
Of course, the current news is Sony's DRM on recent CDs. It installed a program that kept you from being able to copy the CD, and was forthright about that. What it wasn't so upfront about was that it was doing so using a rootkit -- a blackhat method of getting around Windows' security (what little there is) to hide files from the system itself. And that any program could take advantage of this humongous hole by renaming itself to with $sys$ at the front -- poof! gone.
Any malicious program could use this hole and suddenly be invisible from virus-scans, spyware-scans, etc.
In fact, people immediately, once it got reported, found ways to use the hole to cheat at World of Warcraft, and even to get around Sony's DRM itself using the same hole.
Sony has now provided a (painful, many-email method) way to have in uninstalled (doing it yourself disables your CD-ROM drive completely), but refuses to admit that it was any sort of security blunder.
What's worse, the same guy who discovered this dug further and found that it sends the CD name and your IP information to Sony each time you play the disk, to get updated info on the CD -- even though the license agreement says that this is a one-way data transfer, not bi-directional.
Sigh.
Lots more information from the guy who discovered all this.
Posted by griffjon at 09:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
DC Area Politricks
DailyKOS has been following the pleasantly horrific gov race in Virginia, where the Republican candidate has been sending out flyers and now automated phone calls advertising themselves to be from the Dem. party and the Dem. gov. campaign office. From the Raising Kaine (the Dem candidate) site:
All told, this (ironically named) group has given $2,852,603 (100%) of its money to Jerry Kilgore this year, and $0.00 (0%) of its money to Democrats. It’s also Jerry Kilgore’s #1 donor - by FAR! Hmmm…doesn’t sound like a bunch of Tim Kaine supporters to me. So how can this group be making robocalls that begin, “I’m Tim Kaine and I want you to know where I stand on the issues.” Isn’t that a bit strange, at the minimum? Illegal? That’s up to the State Board of Elections to determine, along with possible civil and/or criminal penalties.
The Republicans have found the best strategy in politics -- campaigns are non-repeated prisoner's dilemmas, so dirty, illegal, and suboptimal actions are "preferred" -- so what if these fraudulent phone calls earn the candidate a stiff fine a few months down the road? Probably no jail-time, and by then who cares? They'll do their damage just in time for elections, and the legal system is far too slow to catch up and do anything, the election result will be final...
Regardless, the Dems need to stop whining and retaliate. Either blanket out phone calls decrying this practice; "
Dear resident, phone calls that begin with "..." were in fact made fraudulently by the opposing campaign. If you don't support this kind of outright lieing to the people of NoVa..." or pull out the same damned dirty trick in return.
Posted by griffjon at 08:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 06, 2005
DOOM
So, I failed to lure even the most die-hard geeks from my program to go see DOOM for fun. So, I downloaded a cam of it and watched it last night. It wasn't as horrible as I thought. It was still a pretty bad movie, throwing out very, very predictable plot "twists" and some horrible one-liners. But, to give 'em credit, they didn't over-use the first-person perspective, and they did take on a Demon-Dog with a chainsaw.
I do like the idea that the human genome has an evil bit.
I wish they'd kept closer to the DOOM story line (man, that's hard to say!) and gone with the whole hell-unleashed-through-the-teleportation-devices; it allows for more cool CGI critters, and you can ditch the whole Mars-evolution craziness.
It is definitely a Carib movie -- that is to say, it almost makes me want to fly down to Jamaica and go to the 2-for-Tuesday special at the Carib 5 theatre downtown to see it, it'd be a riot. Maybe literally...
Posted by griffjon at 10:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 04, 2005
MIT's $100 laptop
I wrote an extended comment to a post in Slashdot and figured I'd duplicate it over here. To get the background, check out Laptop.media.mit.edu
Technology is not the answer to every problem.
Sure it is, you just have to frame the question differently. e.g.:
Problem: "Our school doesn't have a roof over it!
Answer: "You should have a fundraiser to buy roofing construction supplies and some alumni to volunteer labor"
Results: New roof for the school, community strengthening, cost of roof spread out among the entire community via the fundraiser.
Whatever. That might be cost effective, sustainable and useful. Really, you should say:
Problem: "Our school doesn't have a roof, we need CAD software, new computers and a trained IT specialist to help us design one!"
Answer: "Let us give your education ministry a loan from the IMF or DevBank to pursue a CAD-in-Schools project, delivering top-of-the-line CAD-capable desktop computers with the latest non-F/LOSS software on it, spending millions of loan-dollars that we'll have to repay later."
Results: New computers in every school which get ruined as they got delivered during the rainy season to schools with no roof.
But seriously. The problem of course is Negroponte can create buzz with a $100 laptop-for-every-child program, whereas "put a roof on every rural school" just doesn't quite get the same level of interest from most folk, despite the fact that the cost would be lower and benefits per cost much higher. Try arguing that for the value of ventilated pit latrines (or, gasp, running water) -- people blink at you, because they don't get the fact that that is a need for many schools in the developing world. Cheap computers, they grok.
This is not in defense, just explanation and frustration from my own experience.
Basically, I agree -- If you're gonna pony up $100US/child, lemme suggest, oh, maybe, a billion better projects you can direct that towards.
On the other hand, if you've got some of the basics, not having basic computing skills can be a real barrier in getting a good job. Current solutions (that I've seen enacted in programs!) are keyboards with a tiny lcd screen and palmOS for $200+, so a fully functional laptop with some made-for-3rd-world ruggedizing, solar/handcrank power, etc. concepts built in is a potentially valuable idea.
I find it interesting, however, that (according to http://laptop.media.mit.edu/):
"Please note that the $100 laptops--not yet in production--will not be available for sale. The laptops will only be distributed to schools directly through large government initiatives. "
I for one would pay twice the price to get a ruggedized, hand-crankable, low-end, paperback-book-sized Linux laptop. I smell something funny, economically speaking, going on here. Either the hardware cost will be at a loss and there's service/support/gov't contracting fees to balance it, or (as the website seems to indicate in the FAQ), it requires huge production runs to make it feasible, or possibly something else funny. I'd imagine the demand for these in the developed world would be reasonably high, so by doing this he's killing his profits that he could use to improve the design for the developing
world...
Posted by griffjon at 02:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack