informage

The Lemon has a hit-and-miss satirical Internet history up. Although the humour is patchy, the timeline is pretty accurate. The obligatory swipe at blogging was uninspired:

"1999: Blogging invented. Promises to change the way people bore strangers with banal anecdotes about their pets"

but some other entries were funnier:

"1995: Real Audio released, allowing users to listen to halting bursts of static in real time.

1996: Parenting groups become concerned that spending extended time online is depriving children of important time spent watching television.

2000: EPA warns that entire surface of the earth will be completely blanketed with AOL CDs by the end of 2007"

For the more refined taste, Google has a real history of Usenet, which is in many ways funnier. Usenet newsgroups were around long before the Web provided a more immediate source of idle geek trivia and downloadable images of one's favourite album covers.

From The New York Times Corrections May 13:

"An accounting of reporting flaws on Sunday with an article about plagiarism, misstatements and possible fabrications uncovered in a review of work done by Jayson Blair before his resignation from The New York Times misstated a name in a sentence from a Washington Post article he apparently lifted. The Post article identified the missing serviceman for whom a prayer service was conducted in Cleveland as Brandon Sloan, not Brandy."

*sighs* will it never end?

How's this for spooky. On the very same day, I see on my blog stats that a visitor from Saudi Arabi has been eyeing up my blog, and I get this email:

Dear sir, Let me introduce myself , I am brother to Tariq Aziz , the deputy prime minister of Iraq , before the us led coalition war against my country. I have been working for my brother for past 15 years. My brother have the sum of [46 million Dollars] with me ,which to be send to Europe which has been done already. I have decided to find somebody who can help me to secure the money or establish the money in Europe.Actually my brother has more than that with me. I don't want my identity to be exposed to outside the world, I am now hiding in Kuwait. Please if you are interested in this deal or to be my partner please contact my lawyer through his E-mail address. I know nothing goes for nothing we will be negotiating after you contact my lawyer This is my lawyer E-mail address.... mattarozzi_mirco@rediffmail.com

Thanks.

Aziz.

So what do you think? Should I follow up on this? Sounds like a lot of cash...

I don't know how well discussed this has been back in blighty, but apparently The London Evening Standard are denying that a front-page photo of "Jubilation on the streets of Baghdad" was heavily doctored. The Guardian article runs with the Standard line. Pun definitely intended.

So I took a look at the evidence and it looks cut and dry to me. In fact I spotted the guy in sunglasses who's repeated just from looking at the original photo. It's pretty much cut, paste and dried in fact.

No doubt this kind of doctoring has been going on since The Paleolithic Post, so here's a small victory for the net that deception like this gets some decent exposure these days.

Jack Mottram of Submit Response - a sharply written scottish blog - points to PNAC.info, a site exposing the details of the previously mentioned shadowy Project for a New American Century.

I still can't get my head around PNAC, because the organisation is a strange sort of open conspiracy: it bears all the hallmarks of the shadowy military-industrial complex cabals that litter conspiracy theory, with suitably sinister aims, but it carries out its business in the open. (Of course, the paranoid amongst us will take this as evidence that, if this scary shit is out in the open, the shit behind closed doors must be really scary.)

Personally I feel no need to be so paranoid. I've often thought that shadowy conspiracy theories just take our eye off the ball, there's plenty enough bad shit going on out there in full public view, just most of us are relatively blind to it.

The BBC is running an article criticising schemes that donate old computers to African teaching projects. Apparently inconsistencies in the supplied software and the level of hardware make the teaching task difficult, potentially creating more problems than are solved.

"You have maintenance problems, you have to constantly upgrade your systems," said Theo d'Souza, of the Dar es Salaam headteacher's conference. Of course this problem isn't limited to recipients of donated equipment, but the whole upgrade cycle is harder to deal with if you have limited resources. Microsoft's "Regional Director for Community Affairs for Africa and the Middle East" Garry Hodgkinson says in response "The digital divide is too important not to get bogged down in the debate over software". I'm not sure that's what he meant to say, but in any case I believe that use of open source software, rather than Microsoft's offerings, can help overcome this hurdle. I wrote a piece about this while I was working at UWC.

I feel strongly both about providing access to technology to under-resourced nations - I attempted to set up a project doing much what the article discusses in 1996. The project was called OCNI - Old Computers New Ideas - and we provided a couple of PCs salvaged from British Telecom to a university in Ghana. I didn't quite have the energy to deal with the project and it died a death, but the wide variety in quality of the computers we got suggested to me that providing consistent technology was going to be the big problem.

Now I'm planning to work with a community development project in Khayelitsha, Cape Town's biggest and poorest township, to create a PC resource center. This is very tentative at the moment, but the more and more benefit I derive from my use of IT, the more incentivised I am to work to make it available to people who have transformational uses for the stuff.

Michael Robertson responds to Slashdot interview questions. Robertson founded the notorious mp3.com and now owns Lindows.com, a company attempting to make Linux a realistic option for the average non-geek. They've persuaded Wal-Mart in the states to sell PCs with "Lindows" - their version of Linux - preloaded for $200.

The geek world has had very mixed reactions to Michael, some see him as a hero for attempting to bring Linux to the mainstream, others see him as an alien from the world of flashy marketing and broken promises trying to bring down their ivory-coated elite world. I liked the way he addressed this in the interview:

I attended UCSD and as part of my major I was required to take an assembly language programming class. It was one of the computer science “weeder” classes where 60% of students fail or drop out. I struggled through it with a passing grade and had a great sense of accomplishment. The next year the major requirements were changed alleviating the assembly language requirement. I have to admit I wasn't happy with this decision since it meant that those sharing my degree after me didn't have to go through the same torturous experiment.

Until recently, it was a badge of honor to get a Linux desktop running. LindowsOS makes it possible to install in 3 minutes and have it auto-recognize all your components and then install most software with a single mouse click. Those who went through the “weeder” class path naturally won't be that excited.

I first went through that particular "weeder" class in 1996 or so, and although personally I'm all about access to good technology for non-technologists, I also know the feeling he's getting at. I had a similar sense from him when myself and Ken flew to California in 1999 to try and persuade him to invest in our dot-com-didn't-ever-actually-start-up SomaCity.

We got to talk to Michael because Kurt, the third member of our terrible trio, did the afore-mentioned UCSD degree with him. My impression was that he was a highly intelligent, very blue-eyed/white-teethed Californian with big ideas, big energy, and a big ego. Anyhow he seemed to want us to go through the same start-up pain he'd had to, he was more than willing to ask us difficult questions but had no interest in helping us out with the answers.

Good luck, Lindows.com, I'm all for driving Microsoft off consumer PCs - and it looks like they've got the best strategy so far...

This is deeply disturbing. Two guys get detained and threatened for several hours by police in New York for being in the wrong Indian restaurant at the wrong time. Yikes, and I'm gonna be visiting this country soon?

I had a dream a week or so ago that I was cycling around London, and awoke disappointed that I don't even have a bike here. Independently, Shannon decided to find a cheap bike in Cash Converters round the corner last week, so I went down to check it out and serendipitously they had a matching pair of Peugots. Neither is in great condition, but they were cheap and are rideable. Today I had to drop off a car I've been borrowing - I get my new styling(ish) Honda tomorrow - and so I decided to take the bike and ride home. From Obz to Sea Point is probably about five or six kilometres, so not that far but an evil hill to finish. I made it in about 40 minutes, which given how out of shape I am was pretty pleasing. So there's all sorts of tweaks to be made to my bike, but I'm happy to be riding again.

The front page of the Cape Argus is usually blazoned with either a local or an international tale of woe. Murders, robberies, rape - and then there's all the crime in Cape Town too. Yesterday, however, was an exception. The banner headline was My Gugs liberation move, and this was an upbeat story about a succesful music producer who's moved out of a luxury mansion in the foothills of Table Mountain to a two-bedroom house in Gugulethu, one of the local townships. Gugulethu is the township I know best, Hilda and her family live out there, and through them I've met several other friends like Mphumzi and Msekeli. According to the article his move was inspired by the Landmark Forum.

So this seems an appropriate introduction to a couple of longer pieces, assuming I find the time to sit down and write them. Firstly I plan write about my experiences of integration and non-integration in Cape Town - as an outsider who's tried hard to meet a fair cross-section of Capetonians. I also mean to write something about the Landmark Forum, particularly because Zaid - a fellow Pioneer - has just written an exceptionally sharp critique of Landmark and their technology, to which I've promised that I will respond.

So watch this space...