jeneralize

As seen on digg:

“I don’t have Web 2.0. I’m still on the old Web 1.0. When was the upgrade and who do I contact to get the upgrade files? I don’t think my ISP is set up for Web 2.0 yet. “

Zak Greant and I wrote an article for Linux Format magazine. (Calling me a “professional open source evangelist” is an unauthorized exaggeration on the part of the magazine editors.)

(…as seen on boing boing), “SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. It uses a hand-written context-free grammar to form all elements of the papers.” One of its papers was recently accept as a “non-reviewed” paper by The 9th World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics. A quote from the accepted, auto-generated paper:

“Our overall evaluation seeks to prove
three hypotheses: (1) that we can do a whole lot to adjust
a framework’s seek time; (2) that von Neumann machines
no longer affect performance; and finally (3) that the IBM
PC Junior of yesteryear actually exhibits better energy than
today’s hardware. We hope that this section sheds light on
Juris Hartmanis ’s development of the UNIVAC computer in
1995.”

The auto-generated drawings are magnificent.

OHOHOH - surely it must be possible to make a Random Software User Guide.

The March 10 edition of “The Economist” talked about the “rise of the creative consumer”, the idea that customers are an under-used source for ideas about product innovation. “… in the past firms have mostly resisted customer innovation or not known what to do with it. American farmers were lobbying manufacturers to make cars with detachable back seats as early as 1909. It took Detroit more than a decade to “invent” the pick-up truck. Even now, carmakers respond to customer modifications such as performance-exhaust systems by voiding the warranty.”

This practice of customer-driven innovation is widely used within the commercial software development industry. Customers drive product innovation because most software companies have few (if any) people who are expert in the domain where the software product will be used. Computing is a “meta” technology. (more…)

From the Xemacs user manual :

“Killing means erasing text and copying it into the kill ring, from which it can be retrieved by yanking it. Some other systems that have recently become popular use the terms “cutting” and “pasting” for these operations.”

I used to think that Internet anonymizers were the purview of child porn aficionados. But these days, it seems that thinking and writing can be construed as a criminal activity, or at least indicative of the intent to commit a crime, at least to the degree of making you someone “of interest”, worthy of getting pulled out of the lineup at the Arrivals terminal in Miama while on your way to Disneyworld with your kids.

As seen on Newsforge: Securing your online privacy with Tor

The CEO’s new Executive Assistant paused at my desk this morning and asked, in a jocular manner, “So, what exactly does everybody over here [in the engineering office] do?”

What an excellent question. Even better because M does not have a software development background - she’s not all wrapped up in the jargon and mystique and assumptions that filter everyone else’s vision. She’s the kid in the fairy tale “The Emperor Has No Clothes” - a bullshit detector. If the activities of the Engineering team and the general purpose of the company’s products and protocols cannot be explained in about ten minutes to an intelligent person who has no domain knowledge, our activities and products are probably bullshit. Or, more probably, our activities and products are so enmeshed in obfuscation and fogginess of purpose that the question is moot, because nothing effective is getting done anyway.

DocBook error:

[INFO] [147]
[ERROR] Areas pending, text probably lost in linecan now remove the process
table entry from thechild (currently in the zombie

In the February 5-11 edition of The Economist, the Economics Focus column discusses a recent paper in the Yale Law Journal by Yochnai Benkler titled “Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production” (available in PDF).

The first question, puzzling to practitioners of the dismal science, is why people - specifically open-source programmers - freely give away the products of their effort done outside of their employment hours. Where’s the “Rational Actor”? Where’s “Self-Interest”? Where’s the pay-back?

The “pure economic” theories tend to run along the lines of subtle pay-back: reputation and prestige leading to greater job prospects. The “social economic” theories talk about communities of reciprocity and trust that benefit all members. (The “geek economics” theories say: “What else would I do with my Friday night?” and “Dude, I need to WiFi my toaster.”)

And then there are characteristics of the computing field itself that influence this economic motivation: (more…)

A DocBook Wiki! (That is, a Wiki front-end to a DocBook back-end, not a Wiki about DocBook) love this idea - mostly because this morning in the shower I thought “The World Needs a DocBook Wiki!”, and, lo and behold, the world has one.

Why is this a good idea?

• because wiki content is not portable - the markup is embedded
• because wiki markup only makes sense to the wiki rendering engine
• because it would be easy to map the limited number markup tags used in a wiki to DocBook tags
• because DocBook is a beatiful thing; wiki content stored in DocBook format becomes data