Geeking

I found a great post on Google’s Africa blog today announcing Map Maker, a wiki-like way of increasing Google Map’s coverage of places where there’s very little data available for them to start with. As with everything Google, the launch version is a little not-smooth, and it is hard to understand how the moderation feature works. Am I supposed to be able to moderate other people, or is it the invisible Hand Of Google that moderates me? I can’t figure that part out yet, but I assume it is community moderation. That’s Not Evil, and when I last checked Google was Not Evil… ...

I was poking around on Kunnafoni to see what they are up to. Check out la Source (“the spring”) a kiosk that makes software and media available for installation onto USB keys. My readers are English speaking, so I will include subtitles for the video here. Adjust your windows so you can see both and click play! Hello! Hello, really! How’s it going? Fine. I’ve come to talk about la Source that I heard about the other day. It’s that? Yup. In there I can find programs, books, and videos for my mobile phone and my laptop computer? Yes. (he demos it) Do you have pirate programs in there? No! They are free programs, distributed for free. If you are an IT guy, you can even change them yourself. But how do I get the file? You choose ok, you transfer it onto your key, and you give me 100 francs. (20 cents, US) But you said it was free! Right, but I’m making it faster and easier for you to download! OK. Can you give me other stuff? In la Source you can also find movies and books (fiction, non-fiction, classics). Thanks Moussa! I will come back and buy something even bigger. This is what I was talking about on Aid Worker Daily: Open Source lets people adapt software to the circumstances they find in their culture. ...

With apologies to Dave for the title… This morning I see that Jon over at AidWorkerDaily.com has added his ideas to my article there, and asked me to comment. I did, go read it. While I was researching stuff for my reply, I stumbled across these resources on African IT that I’m going to start following: Appfrica: African IT, Industry News and Culture Google Africa

I was reading about vdash and inside the presentation, I found this interesting quote: “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people,” explained one of my hosts after my talk (at Google). “We are scanning them to be read by an AI.” That came from George Dyson, in this article on Edge. And as always with Edge, if you read on through the piece to the end, there’s some big ideas. Smart people thinking about important things over there. ...

Since I am getting back to tech life, a good first post would be about tech. What caused the big downtime was a not-very-careful switch from a friend’s Linux server to DreamHost. I switched because I am too old, too lazy, and too impatient to do Linux sysadmin anymore. I outsource it now. Especially mail system setup, which has become an infinite nightmare as a result of spam. With just a few clicks at their really excellent control panel, DreamHost let me outsource all the hassles of email to Google, while still keeping control of my web server. And actually DreamHost helps me with that too, because with a few more clicks on the control panel, I installed WordPress in my blog, then upgraded it a few months later. ...

I was looking for something else and ran across this somewhat ridiculous part of LinkedIn’s web site: Allen, J. This is why in every place my name is used publicly, especially related to work, that I am very careful to use the exact string, “Jeff R. Allen”. It is a habit I started in college when my first academic paper was ever published. When you work with computers from an early age, you have a good understanding of namespaces, and how to best deal with the sub-optimal namespaces favored by humans and their idiosyncratic language. ...

This is the next Internet meme, ladies and gentlemen… and just remember you heard about it here first. This is from the group that my friend Curtis Chen belongs to, the The Richter Scales.

I have been playing around with OpenWRT recently, to see what IT tools you could deploy to the bush using cheap, low power computers as a base. One of the really interesting things about writing systems to live in the embedded Linux world is that you want to try to do as much as possible with the stuff that’s there out of the box. This is because smarter people than me have stuffed the tiny 8 meg flash images with useful tools, leaving no room for my bloated Perl-ware. So the question becomes, how can I live with what they gave me and still get what I want done. ...

Here’s a new book from two great guys in the Unix/Internet/Cranky-old-bastards community (of which I am apparently a member, based on the third category). The Complete April Fools RFCs by Thomas A. Limoncelli and Peter J. Salus. You an buy it on Amazon here. According to Tom: This is a compilation of the best April Fools jokes created by the IETF, the group that creates the standards for how the Internet works. It’s pretty technical but fun to read for anyone that is in software development, system administration, or any kind of computer geek. A good, cheap, gift for the geek that has everything and is impossible to shop for. ...

Here’s my problem. I work for Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). I go out to the bush for 6 months and have only very low bandwidth access to e-mail, so no podcasts! It gets lonely and boring out there sometimes. We try to bring things with us to entertain ourselves, but it’s never really enough, and it is not topical. In MSF we are lucky that it is fairly easy to get postal mail, because we have a lot of people coming and going from the field, and a well developed system of “pony express” mail. ...