From Slashdot: Corporate Data Centers As Ethernet’s Next Frontier Metcalfe’s (apophrycal) Second Law: Never Bet Against Ethernet ‘Nuff said.

Ethan just posted some rules for innovation which are interesting. The one that speaks most to me right now is #7, which states, “problems are not always obvious from afar”. That’s a big problem with the kind of “innovation” that happens with first-world government-funded NGO IT for Development work. It is easy for a programmer to sit in an office and say, “what Africans really need is more data collection via PDAs!” It is something else entirely for Malian Linux enthusiasts to say, “Downloading is too expensive, I bet I can make money distributing Open Source via a kiosk”. ...

The Long Now foundation took a field trip recently. The pictures are cool, as is the irony that they went to a trade show held once every four years. Miners have a time scale closer to the Long Now’s. What does it mean that mining is a slowly changing industry? The economics of extractive industries push them that direction (capital investment is only warranted by a positive outlook in the commodity price). But workplace safety, which is a special case of universal human rights, demands that industries take advantage of the best available technology as fast as possible. This is an interesting story of the tension between capitalism and social welfare. If a mining regulator pushes an industry too much it will give up and move elsewhere. And apparently the mining industry is especially prone to regulatory capture an euphemism for corruption I especially like (like as in hate; in newspeak up is down, enslaved is free and corruption is regulatory capture). ...

Some stuff I discovered playing with Google Chrome: View source works on the various “internal” pages (i.e. the home page, the about:stats page, etc) so you can see how the magic happens Read the comments in the home page to see how absolutely nutso over-the-top the programmer was about load time. He obsesses about the difference between 20ms and 100ms. You go, dude… make it fast! Also in the home page, you can see that internal UI pages have access to a Javascript object called “chrome” that tells the page what to put on itself. (Attention bad guys: this is an attack surface. If you can find a way to get a handle to a chrome object, baddness ensues. So, please, don’t do that. Thanks.) Embedded images, for example the logo on the home page, use the “data:” URL scheme to embed the picture’s data right into the page. Why? Performance? Or simplification. If view source doesn’t work (like in the UI for “error 404”), then the inspector works, and will show you the source. (What’s the point of disabling view source? Setec Astronomy.) In the inspector, you can click on things in the source and change them into input boxes, then you can change the source on the fly, and the results are shown in the page. Cool. In about:stats, you can sort the columns by clicking on them. View source for a really nifty piece of Javascript I might lift and use someplace else myself. About:network is totally cool. Click “Start I/O tracking” then go to another tab and load something. You get a trace of all the transactions. You can also click “Show current I/O status” to see which HTTP connections are open. You have to type the about:foo URLs, if you click on them you don’t get anything. They are checking the referer. Props to Stikiflem and Redneck Programmer who blazed this trail before me. ...

Marina and I could have used this useful training film before we arrived in England. It seems the film needs to be updated some to reflect the current state of the privatized English bus system: First, be sure to find out which company has bought the route you want to ride from the government. Be careful not to buy a ticket for a competing service, it will be refused. Don’t bother checking the schedules, your friendly First driver will come when he’s ready. In order to assure prompt and reliable First service, we will sometimes send three busses at a time. Sometimes you’ll have to wait 30 minutes or more on one of our “every 10 minute” lines, so as to ensure that three busses can travel together. Be sure to wave at the bus driver as he passes you without stopping. Like that, you are sure he enjoys a pleasant and friendly day, without the bother of carrying passengers. Cheer up, there will be three more buses in 30 minutes!

Here’s a lesson about social policies, politics and economics. In Gaza, tunnels used for smuggling goods have become the major supply line, and an industry in themselves. The market will provide, it will always provide. The question is, how do you use the power of the market to get the other results you want? In this case, it is pretty clear to me that be blockading Gaza on the Israeli border, the Israeli authorities have lost their capacity to control smuggling, not to mention lost tons of tax revenue and economic activity for Israeli businessmen. Clearly, Not Plan A. ...

A wonderful open letter from a fellow stockholder to our new investment’s board of directors. If only it were so easy… This is what justice would look like in a society that craved social justice and capitalism in equal parts.

This is a story a bit like mine from Chad, though we were not faced with bandits/rebels/soldiers directly. The feelings of shame and regret she has are related to the complicated feelings I had on leaving Chad as well. In my case, we had nothing to be ashamed of – we took good care of ourselves and our staff and were not bad guests anywhere. But it does give you a sense of shame that as an expat you are different: you’re allowed to just go away, and your colleagues can’t. ...

Science Friday did an interesting story recently: New research shows that when people perceive they have no control over a given situation, they are more likely to see illusions, patterns where none exist and even believe in conspiracy theories. The study suggests that people impose imaginary order when no real order can be perceived. The first caller reports on how the conditions he experienced working as an aid worker in Somalia showed this. Also, he comments on the rough ride back to normality after suffering a situation with loss of control. ...

Yahoo published some best practices on OpenID, but I have one they forgot. Imran and I were talking at OpenCoffee Leeds the other day and we independently and together came up with this realization: OpenID providers should be required to be OpenID consumers first. Why? Well, the problem OpenID is trying to solve is “too many usernames”, which really equates to “too many authentication providers”. That means that the last thing we need is more stinkin’ authentication providers. OpenID providers who are not also OpenID consumers, are just making the problem worse. ...