jra's thoughts

Category: Geeking

  • Let’s Map Africa!

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    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…

  • SneakerNet Kiosk

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    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…

  • Morning Coffee Notes

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    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…

  • The real reason for Google Books

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    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…

  • Some tech stuff: DreamHost, WordPress and OpenID

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    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…

  • One of a kind

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    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…

  • Won’t you blog about this song?

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    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.

  • Bencode, Bdecode in shell script

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    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…

  • April Fools!

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    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…

  • Getting Podcasts out to the Bush

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    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…