WombatNation

CNN.com - Education chief’s ‘terrorist’ remark ignites fury - Feb. 24, 2004

Education Secretary Rod Paige’s most newsworthy action so far (who knew this Administration even had an Education Secretary?) was to embarrass himself by declaring that the National Education Association, the union for 2.7 million school teachers, was a terrorist organization. While I’m glad he apologized for his ridiculous statement, it’s a worrisome sign that calling someone a “terrorist” has become the 21st century version of calling someone a “Nazi”.

Mike Godwin developed the following adage around 1990:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

It appears that American culture after September 2001 requires an update to this law:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving terrorists approaches one.

Mr. Paige’s gaffe is evidence that the law may apply equally well to offline discussion.

My personal experience has been that the Nazi comparison is made about equally often by members of the political left and the right (and the middle), but perhaps a bit more by the left against the right. Your mileage may vary. The terrorist label, however, seems to be most commonly applied from right to left.

In my observation, terror is used just as often as a weapon by conservative factions as by liberal ones. Furthermore, wouldn’t you say the Nazis were terrorists? Maybe we are just broadening our brush with the shiny new terrorist pejorative to include even more people we don’t like.

As in the comparison to Nazis, people seem quick to call someone a terrorist if that person is doing something they don’t like. The terrorist label seems to be more frequently applied by the ruling power to whomever is challenging current government policy. Perhaps the current trend of right to left usage is just because conservatives are currently in power in the US.

Maybe the direction of terrorist-calling versus Nazi-calling really is about who has more power, rather than any political ideology. The Nazis were a governing party that used terror and despicable tactics to get what they wanted without regard to loss of human life. Terrorists are generally thought of (unless you are Rod Paige) as underground revolutionaries who use terror and despicable tactics to get what they want without regard to loss of human life.

If you’re not in power, call your enemies who are in power Nazis. If you are in power, call your enemies who aren’t in power terrorists. Life really is simple when we can break it down to such easy to remember rules.

W3C risks patent tussle in standard push | CNET News.com

A software patent problem continues to hang over VoiceXML 2.0, which reached proposed recommendation status this month. The problem is that the Patent Advisory Group that was supposed to make sure that any relevant patents would be offered on royalty free terms never got Rutgers University to respond in regards to a relevant patent. Rutgers previous position was to offer it under Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory Terms (RAND), which could mean license fees.

While the patent is an immediate concern for the VoiceXML standard, I believe it is an equal concern for the SALT standard that is primarily advocated by Microsoft. It may also be an issue for certain types of software used to audio enable the web for blind users. Furthermore, it could affect proprietary IVR systems that use URLs to retrieve “audio enabled pages”.

Last year the W3C established a Royalty-Free Patent Policy with respect to software patents affecting potential standards. The policy states that the W3C will not adopt any standard that cannot be implemented on a royalty free basis. While it is acceptable that a relevant technology be patented, the owner of each relevant patent must offer the patent under a royalty free license, as opposed to RAND.

The patent that is assigned to Rutgers University is titled “Method and system for audio access to information in a wide area computer network” and was originally filed in December 1996.

I am not a lawyer and I have not read the entire patent filing, but it seems fairly clear to me that this patent covers some uses of VoiceXML and SALT. Specifically, the patent makes claims regarding the use of an audio web server to make data from resources on a wide area network available through an audio interface. The patent focuses on audio enabling existing data resources that are accessed a WAN, and it suggests that the WWW is an example of such a network.

While audio enabling standard websites is a common use of VoiceXML and a likely use of SALT via Microsoft Speech Server, it is by no means the only use. However, the patent also refers to audio enabling databases. I could not find any claims related to conducting transactions, only accessing data.

But, many of the claims (and there are 31 of them) are very vague. Hopefully, that backfires and reduces the effectiveness of the patent. Many of the claims refer to other claims and are very difficult to keep straight.

The common reaction of software engineers to software patents that they hear about in the news is that they are obvious ideas and should never have been granted. Of course, lots of inventions sound obvious once you hear them described. Although I am obviously biased, I do think much of this particular patent falls into the obvious category. There are some novel and interesting ideas, but those ideas account for only a small handful of the claims. Also, very similar work was conducted at Lucent, and possibly at IBM and Motorola, as early as 1994.

• ComfortStand - Music label producing interesting, free, downloadable music. I had wondered whatever happened to the brilliant R. Stevie Moore.
• SIPWiki - Dave Beckemeyer’s Wiki contains lots of good overview info (plus more) about SIP
• Vertigo Then and Now - Still photos from the movie Vertigo compared with recent still photos of the same locations in San Francisco
• Eclipse Con 2004 Report - Report at TheServerSide on the Eclipse conference. I wish I had been there.
• WebMonkey RIP - The site from which I initially learned how to code with JavaScript is no longer
• VoiceGlo Browser Based SoftPhone - Potential Skype competitor. Advantages are that you can call PSTN numbers (but not for free) and they are porting their software to Linux and OS X. Although international calls aren’t free, they’re very cheap. VoiceGlo is owned by theglobe.com.

And a Java tip I’m likely to otherwise forget, use the command line option -verbose:class when starting a JVM to get a list of from where each class is loaded. The Sun documentation has lots of other useful options.

Mozilla FireFox (note the new name) 0.8 is the best web browser ever. The new release has been massively blogged everywhere, but I have to mention it in case anyone reading my blog is still using that sad little tragic, archaic, full-of-security-holes web browser - Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, my website reports suggest that many people still are.

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I had been using Mozilla Firebird for the last few months and had been quite impressed. But the new 0.8 version is significantly better. I’m amazed they haven’t gone to version 1.0, yet. It’s been incredibly stable for me. Even 0.7 was very stable.

The new download manager is exactly what I wanted. The bookmark manager is slightly improved and is a thousand times better than the shockingly awful bookmark manager in IE. The default qute theme is very clean and attractive. Lots of minor fits have been fixed and many cool little features have been added throughout the application. It’s incredibly easy to install.

I can’t say it enough times. Dump IE and use Firefox. Of course Windows users will need to keep IE available in case they need to access some non-standard websites that have been coded to proprietary IE features, but you would be surprised how few of those sites are still left.

The first thing you need to do to learn how to get good photos from your Treo 600’s camera is to read this article at wireless-doc.com. Lighting, lighting, lighting.

And if you still don’t believe you can get decent photos from the camera, check out his portfolio of photos taken with it. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t slowly been getting better and better photos from my Treo 600.

The next thing you need to do is download QSet (requires free registration with MyTreo.net before downloading). QSet lets you set the compression factor that the Treo software uses. The default is 65. If you bump it up to 90, you will often get significantly better photos. The photos will take up more space, but it’s a small price to pay. With the Q set at 90, my photos are usually about 65 KB each. With a Q of 65, they averaged about 45 KB.

Timing is key. Since the Treo doesn’t have a flash to illuminate the scene, the software gets very aggressive about boosting the gain. In low light situations, I’ve noticed that when I switch to the camera, the image starts out very dark. After about five seconds, the brightness and contrast start looking okay. But, after about ten seconds (the exact timing depends on the light level), the infamous blue pixels start appearing near the edges, and sometimes dance across the whole screen. The problem is that the Treo software has boosted the gain so high that the signal is clipping. Apparently they made the max value a blue pixel instead of a white pixel. Otherwise, it would look like snow.

So, what you need to do is get the time right between when you switch to the camera and when you snap the photo. That’s a hassle, but it’s usually an issue only in low-light situations. Obviously, you also need to hold the Treo as still as possible when taking photos, especially when indoors.

Of course, you shouldn’t waste too much time trying to use it indoors. What can you expect from a tiny camera with fixed focus, no flash, and no manual settings to control the gain? But if you are outdoors with moderate lighting, you can take some surprisingly acceptable photos.

Covad Announces Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) Deployment Plans

Just after commenting that I haven’t been motivated enough to try out a VoIP service provider as a wireline home phone option, I learn that my DSL provider, Covad, plans to roll out VoIP service for businesses and consumers later this year. Since this service probably won’t be available to me until around the fourth quarter of this year, I’ve got plenty of time to look around.

Internet phone service blossoms / But it still may not be ready for the masses

This article in the San Francisco Chronicle provides a nice overview of some of the trade-offs involved with using an IP telephony provider like Vonage or 8×8 instead of a traditional voice service provider, like SBC. Though I fit the category of early adopter technophile, I don’t make enough phone calls from home to justify making the change based on practical purposes. While it would be a fun experiment, I have no shortage of items on my To Do list of time-consuming geekery. For now, getting a software-based SIP phone working on Linux is a higher priority.

I spent entirely too many hours this weekend installing and writing up installation notes for setting up a MoinMoin wiki on a DreamHost-hosted website. But, as in all these exercises (Movable Type, Gallery), I learned a lot. I still have a couple tweaks I would like to make to my install, but at least everything seems to basically work.

MoinMoin Wiki is a Python-based implementation of Ward Cunningham’s original Wiki concept. For me, a Wiki is a great tool for managing unstructured knowledge over the web. Since Wikis are designed to allow anyone to easily edit the content, they are fantastic for collaboration.

What they aren’t so good for is highly structured, hierarchical data. They also don’t initially appeal control freaks, although the level of versioning control that the better Wiki tools offer really should appeal to them.

Ward’s Wiki Design Principles capture the overall ideas quite well.

CNN.com - Cubans try floating vintage car to Florida - Feb. 5, 2004

The first time this group of Cubans tried to immigrate to the US, they set sail in a 1951 Chevy pickup. This time they upgraded to a 1959 Buick that they sealed up to make seaworthy. They were halfway to Key West when they got caught. They even hooked up some kind of propulsion system, presumably a propellor, to the V-8 engine. I wonder how many knots per gallon they got.

This story reminds me of an episode of Junkyard Wars. The two teams had to build boats out of scrap equipment and engines that they found in a prepared junkyard. I think the show would have been a lot more exciting if they had made the two teams pilot their car-boats through shark infested waters.