Constant Flux

Datalog As Exocortex Technology

Thursday, November 27, 2008

The problem with Twitter and other microblogging tools is that they are too public. There’s no provision for logging private data at the moment.

Let’s say you have a private datalog that only you can access from the web or your mobile device. You use it to log private data, like when you get in bed, and when you wake up. Your daily weight. Your exercise and caloric intake. Ideas. Thoughts. Todo items. Interesting things to follow up on. Anything worth remembering.

Once this data is logged, you can do all kinds of data analysis on it. Plot your weight trend (like The Hacker’s Diet Online does). Keep a running total of your daily caloric intake.

You can then start programming the system with heuristics. It can suggest meals for you, keeping in mind what you already ate, what your weight goal is, how much exercise you’re getting, and what nutritional rules you should follow.

With proper device integration, cool things can happen. You can meet someone, take a snapshot, tag it with their name, and your phone sends it to your datalog where it goes into your private contact database. The datalog scripts can set reminders for you on your phone.

Basically, your datalog puts personal data in a format that is readable and usable by whatever scripts and data analysis tools you can imagine.

When you run heuristics on your data, you are automating something you would have done manually before, or not at all. You are offloading personal data processing to wherever you store that personal data.

This is the first step towards exocortex technology. And it’s completely doable.

Filed in Exocortex, Idea, Internet, Microblogging, Technology | | Comments (0)

The Ivory Tower And The Bazaar

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Our country is theoretically a democracy. We don’t have Civics classes like they do in America, so most of our lessons in democracy come to us subconsciously.

School forms a large part of this subconscious education. I only started realizing how bad it was when I started reading books like The Underground History Of American Education (readable online) and The Hidden Curriculum.

Schools are not typically run as democracies. Examine their structure, and you will realize that they are dictatorships. Democratic Schools do exist, but they are by far in the minority, and they certainly aren’t state policy.

The hidden lessons are scary. Obey authority. Don’t take initiative. There is only one way to do anything. I think the most insidious lesson is that only the teacher can ever be right.

The trend continues in Universities. Learning is institutionalized. Only a select few have the right to create new knowledge. The Ivory Tower. What if there’s a better way?

Open education resources (OER) are not having as much of an effect on Universities. Some big universities, like MIT, Stanford and Berkeley, are releasing some of their courseware under copyleft licenses, but these courses are rarely complete. I have yet to see them use a single copyleft textbook.

In The Cathedral and the Bazaar Eric S. Raymond contrasts two different methods of open source development. In the Cathedral model, a small group of developers carefully craft all the code for a project. In the Bazaar model, the code is public and gets developed by anybody who wants to. The analogy may give us a hint as to why OER has such an insignificant effect on education.

What I’d really like to see some grassroots Bazaar style open content education. People collaborating to learn and discover new things, where anybody who can add value can participate, regardless of income or age. I want to see a meritocratic, autodidactic revolution.

Free love and knowledge, dude.

Filed in Education, Open Content | | Comments (2)

UNISA Has A Retarded New Email Policy

Thursday, November 20, 2008

This morning, I received a friendly mail from UNISA.

Dear MR XXX XXX

We’d like to make it easier for you to communicate with us, so from 2009, Unisa will be offering all registered students a unique email address, free of charge, with 10 gigabytes worth of space. Here’s how it works.

When you register as a student at Unisa for 2009, we will create your myLife email account for you, which you MUST activate when you re-join myUnisa. From this point onwards, Unisa will disregard all other email addresses it has for you on record and will use only your myLife email address to communicate with you. If you decide, therefore, not to activate this email account, you will not receive emails from Unisa. If you would like to use another email account, you must redirect or forward your myLife email to your preferred email account. For more information and to find out how to activate your email account for life, visit myUnisa.

And yes, it’s as easy as that!

Yes, as a full time professional and part time student, I really do need yet another bloody account that I have to check daily after UNISA has already forced me to register on myUNISA and the Osprey server (which has it’s own messaging system, by the way).

It all becomes clear when you look at the branding on the mail. Dear old Microsoft is the email provider in this venture.

I’m sure that there are students out there who would love getting an email address, but I hate the way my freedom of choice has been overruled.

Filed in Education, Technology, UNISA | | Comments (12)

Secret Places And Desserts

Thursday, November 6, 2008

For a while now I’ve been looking for the song in the Purity baby food advert that had the kid taping his stationary to a desk, watching TV upside down, and lying on the floor of an elevator while it goes up.

They lyrics go something like this:

He plays in secret places
Eyes wise and wide
Charmed little star
That’s what you are
He’s perfectly untamed
Extraordinary
And no one knows how far he’ll go…

I finally found the artist, and her name is Véronique Lalouette. In fact, the opening lines of the song in question play when you load her website. Unfortunately I still can’t find her CD, even with the name. Looks like she’s independent.

On a related note, I also stumbled across a dessert from my childhood that I’m nuts over, but couldn’t identify: Crème caramel.

Life is good.

UPDATE: As MPD says in the comments, it’s a dessert, not a desert. I blame ADD.

Filed in Food, Music, South Africa | | Comments (7)

Marketing Stole 136.5GB From Me!

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Yesterday I finally received my new 1.5 Terabyte drive. I felt like the dirty Harry of nerds. “This is the largest hard drive ever manufactured. It will blow your mind clean away. So you gotta ask yourself… do you feel lucky… punk?”

That was until I fired it up and discovered that it’s not actually 1.5 Terabytes.

Everybody knows that 1024 bytes is a Kilobyte, that 1024 Kilobytes is a Megabyte, 1024 Megabytes is a Gigabyte, and 1024 Gigabytes is a Terabyte. Everybody except drive manufacturers.

Instead of counting a Terabyte as 1,099,511,627,776 (1024^4) bytes, they redefined it to mean 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. Effectively they are exploiting binary/decimal confusion to make drives seem larger than they actually are.

So my 1.5 Terabyte drive can actually only store 1.3635 Tebibytes. False advertising! I demand a 9.1% discount.

It’s still huge. I put every piece of data that I own on that drive, and I haven’t even filled a quarter yet.

“So, do ya… punk?”

Filed in Uncategorized | | Comments (2)

Copyfreedom

Thursday, October 23, 2008

The world is undergoing a quiet revolution. While the RIAA and MPAA are sueing the pants off anyone who they can pin copyright infringement charges on, the world is slowly moving beyond the concept of copyright.

It all started with Richard Stallman. By starting the GNU movement, he rebelled against the concept of non-free software. In the process, he made people start questioning the very concept of copyright.

Inspired by the GNU licenses, Lawrence Lessig started the creative commons movement. This provided licenses that can be applied to any work to remove many of the restrictions that traditional copyright law protects.

There aren’t just idle theories. Content producers are buying into the concept of less restrictive copyright on their works.

Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails released albums online for free. Cory Doctorow releases his books online for free. Baen Books puts many of their books online for free. Michael Moore released his latest documentary movie online for free. Technobrega artists in Brazil give their music away for free in order promote themselves. MIT, Stanford, Berkeley and other universities are releasing their course ware online for free.

What is interesting to note is that content distributors are the people who are fighting the hardest for the future of copyright. It wasn’t The Artists vs. Napster, it was the RIAA vs. Napster.

This is because content distributors have been exploiting the artificial monopoly of copyright for all it’s worth. The services that these conglomerates used to provide (distribution, marketing, exposure) is being replaced by the Internet.

By using copyleft licenses, people are effectively opting out of the copyright system. They are choosing freedom. People want information to be free.

Filed in Uncategorized | | Comments (2)

We Are Not Insignificant!

Thursday, October 16, 2008

The social media community just loves to self-hate.

When Nic Haralambous (try saying that three times quick) told us we blogged too much about blogging, people fell over themselves to agree.

When Wogan mMay tells us we’re a tiny, insignificant community, people agree even more loudly.

Then there’s the worrying popularity of that social media satire blog. Everybody knows satire is just sublimated hate. (I’m looking at you Beatmag. J’accuse!)

So here’s a dodgy statistic* to make you feel all warm, fuzzy and elite if you’re a blogger.

Amatomu claims to generate 7% of SA blog traffic. It alone tracks more than 500,000 hits a day. That means the total daily blog traffic in SA is around 7,000,000 hits. All generated by a community of less than 200. That means I generate 35,000 hits a day, and I’m not even blogging much at the moment.

No matter how egotistical I get, it can’t match up to the reality of how awesome I am. And you are too. So please stop all the self hate.

*”Lies, damned lies and statistics” - Winston Churchill

Filed in Blogging | | Comments (7)

The Ultimate Geek Club

Friday, October 10, 2008

You aren’t a true tech geek until you’ve got an ACM membership.

Nothing convinces management like whipping out your membership card. Argumentum-ad-awesomeness is irrefutable.

In addition, you get access to 1,100 books and 3000 courses through the ACM’s subscription to Safari Books Online, Books 24×7, and Skillsoft, but we all know that you’re really in it for the communion of great computing minds. Don’t you deny it.

As a bonus, South African computing professionals even get fantastic discounts when joining up.

I’m a member. Are you?

Filed in Uncategorized | | Comments (1)

I Can Has A Robot

Monday, September 29, 2008

I turn my back for two weeks, and all RHEL* breaks loose.

Google reader gave up trying to count all my unread feeds (”It’s greater than 1000!”), my blogs have turned into tumbleweed city, my Amatomu rankings are non-existent, and I’m suddenly a robot from the future.

I’m pretty sure the whole thing happened because I made fun of Vincent’s facial hair at 27Dinner. I recognized his style of grammar almost immediately.

For the fake record, I’m actually an Android. Google is going to build me in 2035, right after the technological singularity. I’m what they meant by “mobile platform”. And I repeat: I did not have Software EXchange relations with that fractal AI, Miss Sierpinski. My title is the Architectinator.

OK, so I’m a robot, but what is Tyler Reed’s excuse? Someone posts something obviously satirical on the social media equivalent of Hayibo, and he threatens them? Tyler doesn’t realize this, but the reputation he’s building is in fact negative. SaulK and Vincent get bonus points for fessing up though.

Concerning my feeds, I’ve decided to drop ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch. Their articles are too dense to discard quickly, and the signal-to-noise ratio is just too low. I’m still reading every local blog that I’m subscribed to though.

Google reader seriously needs some feed filter options. I’m looking for an alternative. Anybody know of a good open-source feed reader? Bonus points if it’s a web app that I can install on my exocortex.

That’s it for now. I’m going to have to leave the BlogCave until I can figure out a better way to balance work / life / studies / entertainment / new media.

* RedHat Enterprise Linux. I’ve been busy at my new job** trying to recompile PHP 5.0.4 for Apache 1.3 on RHEL ES 3.0. It took me a day or two to realize the hopelessness of the endevour. This was only after the resident Linux guru managed to make RHEL work with a CentOS package repository. Non-geek folks should realize that’s some serious Deep Magic.

** It’s a strange place. They make me wear button down shirts, and on “casual Fridays” I’m allowed to wear any shirt with a collar, which in practice means golf shirts. That is the least ironic situation I’ve encountered there.

Filed in Uncategorized | | Comments (6)

Moving Data

Monday, September 22, 2008

Moving data into South Africa is expensive, but moving it around inside the country doesn’t have to be.

Freedom toasters are a great way to move data inside the country, but there aren’t enough of them to go around. This is probably because they cost about R 39 000 each.

One alternative is a cheap Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. It’s possible today to build a 1.5TB NAS for about R 2500. Fill them up, and connect them to the network at LAN parties, Internet cafes, University networks, wireless area networks, and wireless hot spots.

Another alternative is something I like to call Post Toasties. Have a website where you can request DVDs to be burned, and mailed to you.

Then there’s the BYOD (Bring Your Own Drive) option. Why bother with network storage units? Have people bring empty drives to be filled up. Make it available as a service at internet cafes that have a NAS.

Use the above strategies as delivery options for an open content downloading service. I’m talking about things like the TED talks, and video lectures from MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, and ArsDigita University. As an individual it’s simply too expensive to download these by myself.

The thing is, if you create new ways of moving data, soon people will start making data to move around. Won’t be long before we’d see locally produced vlogs and web series. If they get good enough, maybe they’ll get picked up by local broadcasters.

I want to see what happens when we put powerful content moving networks in the hands of ordinary people, and how it will blur the lines between professional and amateur. I don’t want to wait for Telkom and Neotel to liberate us. I want us to liberate ourselves.

Filed in Education, Open Content, South Africa, Technology | | Comments (2)