Month: September 2003

Gollum’s song

Where once was light
Now darkness falls
Where once was love
Love is no more

Don’t say – goodbye
Don’t say – I didn’t try…
These tears we cry
Are falling rain
For all the lies
You told us
The hurt, the blame!
And we will weep
To be so alone
We are lost!
We can never go home
So in the end
I will be – what I will be
No loyal friend
Was ever there for me
Now we say – goodbye
We say – you didn’t try…
These tears you cry
Have come too late
Take back the lies
The hurt, the blame!
And you will weep
When you face the end alone
You are lost!
You can never go home

Spine-tickling.

xml.gov

If you take Paul Ford’s article on xml in the government

In April, 2002, the General Accounting Office (GAO), published Challenges to Effective Adoption of the Extensible Markup Language. This document recommended that the US government as a whole “develop a strategy for government wide adoption of XML” to ensure that the technology is used across agencies.
In addition, the Government Paperwork Elimination Act of 1998 requires federal agencies to use electronic documents and accept electronic signatures as of October, 2003, another potential use of XML. Taken together, all of this means that not only is there a certain historical pressure to use XML that comes from the historical use of markup in organizations like the IRS and the DoD, but there’s also a legal requirement for agencies to pay attention to XML and deploy it to manage their documents and data.

and this news item

Massachusetts, the lone holdout state still suing Microsoft Corp. for antitrust violations, will become the first state to adopt a broad-based strategy of moving its computer systems toward open standards, including Linux.

together, it makes for some interesting possibilities. It gets even better with semantic technologies for eGovernment

Openoffice screws Kucinich

i have a confession to make. i almost obliterated a good chunk of kucinich supporters (well, their email addresses). i was trying to be helpful, offering to do some data mangling / cleanup tasks as a token of appreciation for henri, who graciously hosted me in san francisco.
so i sat down with the openoffice spreadsheet and went into tinkering mode. after a while, i had the procedure down, and was happily getting rid of dupes and sorting the addresses in various ways. scanning through the dataset, i noticed something odd: entire letters were missing from the alphabetically ordered list. openoffice had somehow munged ~30% of all records (~100k email addresses). fortunately, i had backups. redid the job with excel, without a glitch.

Rethinking public radio

I am in a session at Berkman Center listening to Chris Lydon explaining how he, with the help of internet technologies, plans to be the next NPR. NPR, one of the standard-bearers of the american intelligentsia, has fallen to commercial pressures. One thing I miss with recorded voice is the ability to search through the voice stream. Clearly, speech is still much closer to the stream of consciousness than all the writing you can get done in a day. Capturing more of the worlds great thoughts though audio, and making it accessible to search strikes me as killer.

Shaky foundations

i am constantly amazed how shabby the financial infrastructure in the united states is. arguably at the bottom of the list of the civilized world. some data points

  • transactions based on checks
  • low quality bills that invite counterfeiting (making the higher denominations unusable)
  • the inability to process international credit cards at many locations

there are more indications, such as the absurd reliance on debt financing, but lets not go there.. i am all the more amazed that you can build the largest economy in the world on top of that.

Customs customs

All the Arab countries in general and the Gulf countries in particular do NOT want any business done between them. It is probably much easier doing business with even Israel (no we can’t) and Bahrain than Bahrain and Saudi.
…
It took 3 hours this morning to find the big boss who in turned called DHL to find out if this is true and if it was alright to use DHL’s declaration form numbers rather than the government’s! Finally, after a long struggle he gave his go ahead. It took the supervisor assigned to rubber stamp the documents more than 30 minutes just to produce the bloody rubber stamp, photocopy some papers, and fill in the spaces in that rubber stamp!
…
Bottom line. If you don’t know how to be a crook and stick by the book, don’t go into business and most certainly don’t even CONSIDER doing business with your neighboring countries who claim to want integration, customs union and single currency!

such are mahmood’s experiences with the new gulf customs union. this is very much in line with the fact that third world countries are much more protectionist amongst themselves than the supposedly evil west is towards them. if they were to abolish these trade barriers, they would leapfrog 10 years of development (granted, with big turmoil, but taking a collective leap of faith, and a suffering today for a better tomorrow may not be such a bad thing)

honorable mention

Neue Zuercher Zeitung mentions Wyona again:

Eine Vielzahl von Schweizer Software-Entwicklern leistet so ganz im Stillen einen betraechtlichen Beitrag zur Open-Source-Gemeinschaft. Zu nennen ist etwa die Zuercher Firma Wyona, die ihr urspruenglich fuer den Online-Auftritt der NZZ entwickeltes Content-Management-System der Apache Foundation, einer der wichtigsten Open- Source-Organisationen, uebertragen hat.

A multiplicity of Swiss software developers make a considerable contribution to the open source community. Such as Zurich-based company Wyona, who transferred their content management system, originally developed for NZZ, to the Apache Foundation, one of the most important open source organizations.

Mobile video


i am toying around with my new webcam. the quality of the pictures is nothing to write home about, and the tripod of the cam broke the second day. then again i got it for $50. i look forward to explore the combination of wifi and webcams, should add another dimension to the moblogging theme.