Technology: December 2005 Archive Page

The Hard Way to Learn and Program

Aggression is the only way to accomplish anything. If you want a port,
grab it, if you want a channel, fight for it, if you want a channel off,
flood it, if you want a MOO, make yourself uncomfortably toaded over and
over again. If you want a port, play up to sysadmins, then stab them in
the back, take the machine over, grab superuser status as fast as you can
- you've got to do all of this with determination, aggression, and a sense
of occupied territory. Believe me, there's no other way - no possibility
of any other way. It's aggression that gets machines where you want them,
hundreds of them cross-connected on platforms, wired in/out, LANS, WANS,
and it's aggression that gets them disconnected as well. Why agro? Be-
cause no one knows what they're doing in this space - it's too new, the
territory still in the process of being charted, taken over by corporate
greed - but not quite there yet. So there are interstices, back doors,
back channels, undernets, darknets, trojan horses at work at war every-
where and you NEED them to get going, you NEED them to get going in the
morning, you NEED them for respect for the fast buck slow dance. Go for
it! You get violent, threaten violence; you get mean, flame once or twice,
make promises you can't keep, never intended to keep - there's not the
HINT of a problem with this, social engineering, causeways to hell and
back just where/wherever the action is. You @create the action, you Make-
file, breakfile, do whatever it takes.

You can't be afraid of anything. You have to vandalize, scavenge, use
whatever passwords you find lying around on slips of paper placed in the
back of porn novels where you'd most expect to find them. You've got to
use the same passwords everywhere you can, moving through systems. But
most of all you have to DEMAND a port because you need to connect to the
Net and be PART of it, not just email, but running your tongue along the
silver wires through the cables of light filmed and reduced to the last
degree. Listen: It's like this. This is the only way it is. It's not
popular. It will kill you. It will keep you going. You'll die broke but
someone will see what you have done and marvel marvel marvel. --Alan Sondheim --The Hard Way to Learn and Program (Alan Sondheim)

Insert "blogging" or "love" or "safety" and you've got an essay on any human endeavor. But the geek-specific language really grabs me. I'm about to start teaching my first online-only course, and I feel like it's really going to stretch my abilities. This post really helps get the adrenaline going!

Via MGK

WashingtonPost.com will now offer articles for free for 60 days, instead of the previous 14, before putting them behind the paid for subscription wall. --Pamela Parker --WashingtonPost.com Extends Free Content Window (ClickZ News)

Hooray! I have in the past few years consciously avoided blogging many good Washington Post stories because 2 weeks is simply not long enough.

The race to transmit a simple message, staged by an Australian museum, was won — at a dash — by a 93-year-old telegraph operator who tapped it out using the simple system which was devised by Samuel Morse in 1832 and was the mainstay of maritime communication up until 1997.

Gordon Hill, who learnt to use the technique in 1927 when he joined the Australian Post Office, easily defeated his 13-year-old rival, Brittany Devlin, who was armed with a mobile phone and a rich vocabulary of text message shorthand. --Mark Henderson --A race to the wire as old hand at Morse code beats txt msgrs (TimesOnline)

ol jn hnry
txd hs cptn
wl a mns gt2
txt lk a mn...

Strangely enough, the web took off very much as a publishing medium, in which people edited offline. Bizarely, they were prepared to edit the funny angle brackets of HTML source, and didn't demand a what you see is what you get editor. WWW was soon full of lots of interesting stuff, but not a space for communal design, for discource through communal authorship.

[...]

So this is for all the people who have been saying I ought to have a blog. --Tim Berners-Lee --So I have a blog (timbl's blog)

Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the World Wide Web.

Why do you love online publishing?

Here's why I do: As an American, I feel so fortunate to be alive at a time when, 200-some years after the ratification of the First Amendment to our nation's Constitution, the people of this country finally have a medium at their disposal which allows any person to speak and be heard by a global audience. If freedom of the press belongs to those who own one, now, we all do. And the world, ultimately, will be the better for it.

Unfortunately, the Internet is also being used by those who favor schmoozing the wealthy and well-connected at the expense promoting the welfare of all fellow citizens. I love that the Internet allows the rest of us a powerful collective voice with which to give all readers an alternative to such smarmy propaganda. Now it is up to us to be smarter, sharper and louder than ever when using this medium during the year to come. --Robert Niles --Why do I love online publishing? (Online Journalism Review)

--Editing He-Man (Penny Arcade)

Who's been vandalizing the Wikipedia entry for He-Man?

(Warning, punchline requires knowledge of 80s pop culture.)

Thanks for the link, Matt.

It's true that young offenders who have committed school shootings in America have also been game players. But young people in general are more likely to be gamers ? 90 percent of boys and 40 percent of girls play. The overwhelming majority of kids who play do NOT commit antisocial acts. According to a 2001 U.S. Surgeon General's report, the strongest risk factors for school shootings centered on mental stability and the quality of home life, not media exposure. The moral panic over violent video games is doubly harmful. It has led adult authorities to be more suspicious and hostile to many kids who already feel cut off from the system. --Henry Jenkins --Reality Bytes: Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked (PBS)

Because so many deaf children have problems with basic language skills, they get a disproportionate number of exercises related to these "abstract little pieces." And unfortunately, that's exactly what most educational games offer--more of the same thing that's been shown not to work for these people.

So what do I propose? For one thing, I think deaf students, like everyone else, need to write and get responses to work that's relevant to them. That's where blogs come in. --Tom Wright --Literacy, the deaf, and blogs (Kairos News)

Another thought-provoking passage: "[O]nline classes provide environments in which hearing isn't relevant. So do many educational games for children, although some of the preschool-level ones are useless for deaf children, because their directions are in audio. (It always annoyed me that I couldn't help my kids with these.)"

For some volunteers, LibriVox is a way to combine their love of literature with their passion for the spoken word.

Kristen McQuillen, 39, has recorded 21 different chapters across nine different books from her home in Tokyo. For her, reading a book aloud to someone can make the work more understandable.

"I'm giving people who wouldn't have exposure to some of these classics in a way that's not so intimidating," she said. --The Web Will Read You a Story  (Wired)

I've been thinking about ways to work podcasting into my Intro to Literature course this spring. I'll probably also introduce some kind of recorded audio presentation for my Videogaming course in January.

Google Inc., the leading online search engine company, will open a new engineering and research office in Pittsburgh next year to be headed by a Carnegie Mellon University professor, the company announced Thursday.

The facility will be charged with creating software search tools for Google. It is expected to create as many as 100 new high-tech jobs in the Pittsburgh area over the next few years, said Craig Nevill-Manning, director of Google's New York engineering office. --Google to open new research facility in Pittsburgh (AP | Mercury News)

Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively. --Internet encyclopaedias go head to head (News @ Nature.com)

Wikipedia stood up fairly well against Encyclopedia Britannica, in a review by Nature science writers.

Update: Wikipedia's articles were, on average, longer than EB's. So it's possible to spin these findings such that the news is Wikipedia has fewer errors per byte than Encyclopedia Britannica.

Many American academic libraries have sought to provide journals in both print and electronic formats for the past 5 to 10 years. The advantages of the electronic format have been clear, so these were licensed as rapidly as possible, but it has taken time for some faculty members to grow comfortable with an exclusive dependence on the electronic format. In addition, librarians were concerned about the absence of an acceptable electronic-archiving solution, given that that their cancellation of print editions would prevent higher education from depending on print as the archival format. Eileen Gifford Fenton and Roger C. Schonfeld --The Shift Away From Print (Inside Higher Ed)

Interwoven into the scarf material are pixels containing red, blue and green light-emitting diodes (LEDs), so adjusting the brightness of each type of diode turns the scarf a different overall shade. --Chameleon scarf coordinates with your outfit (NewScientist.com (will expire))

O brave new world, that hath such gadgets in it!
(I Googled for photos but I found none. Thanks for the link, Rosemary.)

If what we today know as "Wikipedia" had started life as something called, let's say - "Jimbo's Big Bag O'Trivia" - we doubt if it would be the problem it has become. Wikipedia is indeed, as its supporters claim, a phenomenal source of pop culture trivia. Maybe a "Big Bag O'Trivia" is all Jimbo ever wanted. Maybe not.

For sure a libel is a libel, but the outrage would have been far more muted if the Wikipedia project didn't make such grand claims for itself. The problem with this vanity exercise is one that it's largely created for itself. The public has a firm idea of what an "encyclopedia" is, and it's a place where information can generally be trusted, or at least slightly more trusted than what a labyrinthine, mysterious bureaucracy can agree upon, and surely more trustworthy than a piece of spontaneous graffiti - and Wikipedia is a king-sized cocktail of the two.--Andrew Orlowski --There's no Wikipedia entry for 'moral responsibility' (The Register)

While Orlowski makes many good points, he's a bit misleading. At the time he wrote the article, there wasn't an entry on "moral responsibility," but there was an article on "ethics" and an article on "responsibility."

And, Wikipedia being Wikipedia, of course there is an article on moral responsibility now.

A man who posted false information on an online encyclopedia linking a prominent journalist to the Kennedy assassinations says he was playing a trick on a co-worker.

Brian Chase, 38, ended up resigning from his job and apologizing to John Seigenthaler Sr., the former publisher of the Tennessean newspaper and founding editorial director of USA Today. -- Wikipedia author: False entry was joke (CNN)

I used a dissasembled version of this story for part of my news writing final. It seemed appropriate.

Doctor Says Long-Term Video Game Playing Is Likely Cause

A central Iowa mother woke up over the weekend to find her daughter having a seizure.

After a trip to the emergency room, a family learned that the cause was most likely from playing video games too long, Des Moines television station KCCI reported.

Doctors said such incidents are not common, but they do happen. Certain people are prone to it because of the way their brains work. --Girl Has Seizure After 5 Hours Of Video Gaming (WTAE-TV)

The videogame marathon was not, in itself, sufficient to cause the seizure. The article does specify that some people's brains are susceptible to seizures induced by flashing lights.

Note the mom-focused anecdotal lead and the prominence given to videogames as the cause (as opposed to patterns of flashing lights, which can be distributed in other media). Theatre performances often mention whether strobe lights or other startling special effects will be used. See also the news coverage of Pokemon seizures.

Now if the story were about a guy who had a seizure after spending five straight hours of marking final exams -- that would be news I can use.

Folding seems clear; you might fold a card to fit in an envelope, or a pocket. But you're not supposed crease these cards; that would jam the machine. Punch cards aren't to be used in your ways, for your purposes, but for those of the company that issued them. "Spindle" is the word that most confuses people today. Spindling is an old filing system; a clerk would have a spindle, an upright spike on his or her desk, and would impale each piece of paper on it as he or she finished with it. When the spindle was full, you'd run a piece of string through the holes, tie up the bundle, and ship it off to the archives. (The custom still survives in some restaurants; the cashier spindles the bills as customers pay.) But you shouldn't spindle the cards: they are part of someone else's system of paperwork, not your own; they demand special attention.

"Mutilate" is a lot stronger than the other words. It expresses an angry intention on the part of the mutilator, or, from the viewpoint of the punch card user, a fear; people might take out their frustrations on their punch cards.... (Indeed, punch cards were mutilated: users could buy machines advertised to "recondition mutilated punch cards."[13]) Why would people mutilate punch cards? Punch cards were the interface between the public and the billing system. Metaphorically, they were where the person meshed with the corporate world. --Steven Lubar (Originally published in 1991.) -- (Steven Lubar's home page)

"Do not fold, spindle or mutilate" is right up there with "Abort, Retry, Fail" of the DOS era, "CTRL + ALT + DEL" of Windows, and the following dialogue from Marlowe's Doctor Faustus:

Faust. Come on, Mephistophilis, what shall we do?
Meph. Nay, I know not. We shall be curs?d with bell, book, and candle.
Faust. How! bell, book, and candle,?candle, book, and bell,
Forward and backward to curse Faustus to hell!

[Blogging[ makes everyone a producer of news, for one thing. Not everyone does create news, some just transport them also. Every blogger does a bit of both, I guess. And that adds up to a sort of global brain, which digests ideas or discovers facts and such. The speed and variety of this conversation might be something very new in world history ? we?ll have to see where it takes us, and if it improves certain things.

Personally, the strongest effect blogging had on me was that I could finally talk to people through my website in a sort of standardized way that would just work. I had a certain other site which I just shut down because it didn't find its audience? it was a ?homepage? in the worst sense of the word. Every news bit I added to it was structured into some sort of navigational hierarchy, which is totally meaningless in terms of talking to someone. A blog is simple to explain technically, but the fact that it allows you to start a conversation is really what makes it so different from regular ?homepages.? --Philipp Lenssen --10 Questions with Philipp Lenssen (The Geek Guy Rants)

I stumbled into the blogging format for similar reasons. My blog started as a collection of instructional handouts that I was adding to regularly as I noticed patterns in my reaction to student work. It was a huge pain to change menus throughout my website every time I added a new document. Plus, every time I expanded a certain idea into a whole paragraph, I felt the need to rewrite other handouts on a similar topic.

It's one thing to create a single website or a collection of web pages, but it's another thing entirely to maintain a huge site as it develops and grows organically. Lenssen here does a good job capturing the essence of that difference.

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that allows anyone to contribute articles, is tightening its rules for submitting entries following the disclosure that it ran a piece falsely implicating a man in the Kennedy assassinations. Wikipedia will now require users to register before they can create articles, Jimmy Wales, founder of the St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Web site, said Monday.

The change comes less than a week after John Seigenthaler Sr., who was Robert Kennedy's administrative assistant in the early 1960s, wrote an op-ed article revealing that Wikipedia had run a biography claiming Seigenthaler had been suspected in the assassinations of the former Attorney General and his brother, President John F. Kennedy. --Dan Goodin --Online Encyclopedia Tightens Rules (Breitbart | AP)

This is an important change in the techno-idealistic principle that formerly animated Wikipedia. Reality has come crashing through the door.

Non-registered users will still be able to edit existing articles, and the registration process does not sound difficult.

# If neither player makes a mistake, the game is drawn (but we knew that already).
# This is an exercise in examining the objective properties of a game. There are two interesting sides to this:
# 1) The objective properties of Tic Tac Toe really matter for our enjoyment of it: It is a boring game because there are so relatively few combinations.
# 2) On the other hand, humans clearly play the game in a different way than the computer. The computer's playing style lets us make some observations about how humans play games.
# To the computer, the first move is the most complicated (takes around a second on my 2ghz machine). This is unlike human players who seldomly have any problem deciding what to do on the first move.
# The program assumes that the opponent does not make any mistakes. Humans do make mistakes, of course, so in actuality the program isn't playing optimally. --Jesper Juul --Tic Tac Toe (Half-Real)

From the website for Juul's new book. Looks good.

Computers were still huge assemblies of vacuum tubes and transistors when the German-Jewish émigré and computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum published a paper called ?ELIZA ? A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine,? in Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 9. It was 1966, and Weizenbaum programmed ELIZA to simulate the ?active listening? psychoanalytical strategies of the Rogerian therapy in vogue at the time.

[...]

When so many other games these days incorporate decision-tree ethics ? good or bad choices constantly influence your digital avatar'smoral and physical evolution ? Nintendogs seems to be missing the finishing touches. Ding Dong will never fully suspend disbelief as a permanent puppy, and a cheerful one at that. Nintendo personnel have recently hinted that dogs in the next iteration would have a broader range of behavioral development and would age. They should go one further and let them die. Consciousness has no stakes if it'snever-ending. For machines to become man'sbest friends, there must also be the prospect of losing those friends. --Joshua Bearman --Pass the Paddles: Man's Best Friend (LA Weekly)