Google’s Gmail accounts are by invitation only, and I have 7 invitations to give out. So if you want one, send me an email and I’ll give you one.
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Category: Tech
The geek is strong is this one
I was eating in Grandma’s Kitchen last night and I met a cool guy from Seattle named Charles Kuai. He came up to me to ask about my Palm Wireless Keyboard as I was working on email after dinner. He has a Palm Tungsten W and was interested in buying such a keyboard. So, on my Palm, I quickly looked up the contact info I have for a PalmOne wholesale dealer here in Beijing, and handed it to Charles. Now if he actually had his Palm on him, I could have wirelessly “beamed” him the data. But alas, we had to resort to old fashioned pen and paper.
It was a fun encounter. And I made a new friend.
I couldn’t sleep last night, so I used my time to work on putting Moon phase information for the new year into my Palm’s calendar. I already have a Python script that will calculate the times of the phases of the Moon based on the algorithms found in Jean Meeus’ Astronomical Algorithms (2nd Ed., 1998). But I still needed a way to import this data into my Palm in an automated way. Last year, I did this by hand. Yuck! So I used the Palm Desktop application and the vCalendar file format for exchange of calendaring and scheduling information. I had never used the vCalendar format before, but I found the specifications online and soon modified my Python code to output into this format. Here’s an example of what I produced:
BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:1.0 BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART:20050103T174530Z SUMMARY:Last Quarter 01h45 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART:20050110T120238Z SUMMARY:New Moon 20h02 END:VEVENT ... END:VCALENDAR
Note that the times DTSTART are given in UTC (the “Z” is for “zulu”), but I wanted the event description to be in local time (8 hours ahead for China). Since China doesn’t observe daylight savings time, I could apply this +8 h correction into the Python code quite trivially.
If you want to see the code that I used to do this, just email me.
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Free as in Freedom
![[Free as in Freedom (cover)]](/darren105/freedom.s.gif)
I started reading the book Free as in Freedom (2002), by Sam Williams last night, based on a tip from schwuk.com. The book’s subtitle reads, “Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software”, and the book is a biography of Stallman’s Life.
Stallman is a software-genius-turned-political-activist, responsible for the creation of the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation. His main tenet is that software should be free: free for the users of the software to use it, understand it, improve it, and share it. The “free” adjective does not refer to the monetary value of the software. It refers to liberty.
In this document, Stallman describes how he arrived at his philosophy:
When I started working at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1971, I became part of a software-sharing community that had existed for many years. Sharing of software was not limited to our particular community; it is as old as computers, just as sharing of recipes is as old as cooking. But we did it more than most.
The AI Lab used a timesharing operating system called ITS (the Incompatible Timesharing System) that the lab’s staff hackers had designed and written in assembler language for the Digital PDP-10, one of the large computers of the era. As a member of this community, an AI lab staff system hacker, my job was to improve this system.
We did not call our software “free software”, because that term did not yet exist; but that is what it was. Whenever people from another university or a company wanted to port and use a program, we gladly let them. If you saw someone using an unfamiliar and interesting program, you could always ask to see the source code, so that you could read it, change it, or cannibalize parts of it to make a new program.
But outside of his lab, a dark practice of Non Disclosure Agreements and proprietary code was beginning. Stallman made the choice to re-create this community of resource sharing by creating the concept of free software, and he has worked towards building a computing environment of free software tools. These are known as the GNU Tools and have culminated in the GNU/Linux Operating System.
The thing that has struck me most about this history of free computing is the following passage from Chapter 4 of the biography:
Members of the tight-knit group called themselves “hackers”. Over time, they extended the “hacker” description to Stallman as well. In the process of doing so, they inculcated Stallman in the ethical traditions of the “hacker ethic”. To be a hacker meant more than just writing programs, Stallman learned. It meant writing the best possible programs. It meant sitting at a terminal for 36 hours straight if that’s what it took to write the best possible programs. Most importantly, it meant having access to the best possible machines and the most useful information at all times. Hackers spoke openly about changing the world through software, and Stallman learned the instinctual hacker disdain for any obstacle that prevented a hacker from fulfilling this noble cause. Chief among these obstacles were poor software, academic bureaucracy, and selfish behavior. [Emphasis mine.]
Changing the world through software. That idea really speaks to me. I guess I never considered it before, but Stallman and his supporters have certainly done that. I’m discovering my heroes, and they’re turning out to be the great hackers.
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Skype internet telephony
![[Skype Me Button]](/darren105/skypeme_btn_green.gif){kind=small}
I just signed up for Skype at www.skype.com. It’s a free service that lets you make computer-to-computer voice calls over the internet. For a low fee you can also make calls to regular phones. I’ll get Bruce to sign up and we can test out the quality over a China-to-Canada link. Then maybe I’ll get my Mom to try it out. My cousin Corinne, who’s living in Changsha, China, is using it to talk to her family every week. So maybe it’s got promise.
If you want to sign up and give it a try, you’ll need to know my Skype username: madphilosopher.ca
In an IT Conversations interview, publisher and open source advocate Tim O’Reilly talks about a paradigm shift taking place in software. To give an example of the failure to realize the new paradigm, he asks the question, “Do you use Linux?”. He makes the point that even if you use Microsoft Windows as your operating system, chances are that you use Google, and Google is running on Linux. Therefore you are a user of Linux. The point is that the PC no longer matters, nor does the operating system. Services that exist on the network such as Amazon, Google, eBay, etc. are becoming much more important than the software used to access them.
Have a listen to the following excerpt where he discusses this issue. (The full interview can be found here.)
Tim O’Reilly – Do you use Linux? (0.5 MB)
Hey, my website is back up. I hope I didn’t lose anybody in the outage. Bruce didn’t give me any explanation, but the IP address did change and the machine failed to notify me.
Oh, and Happy Winter Solstice everybody! I just spent the day with Eydie at the Forbidden City here in Beijing. I learned that the Winter Solstice is one of the special ceremony days for the Emperor in Old China. So it was a great day to go. We wore many layers of clothes cause it was a cold day, but we stayed mostly warm. Eydie is at home now warming up her toes.
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Google: A Computer Scientist’s Playground
From the BrianStorms weblog, I found this talk given by Urs Hölzle on the infrastructure, commodity hardware, and distributed software used by Google to support its many services. I enjoyed learning about how Google works and what goes on behind the scenes when a user submits a query. Hölzle also gives an overview of the programming framework that is made available to Google’s data mining engineers.
- Google: A Computer Scientist’s Playground (Streamed RealVideo, 60 min)
Over the last five days, I discovered audio content on the internet, namely Linux radio shows, audio blogs, and podcasts. But this post isn’t about this. One of the gems I found is a site called IT Conversations, which hosts audio programs of interest to IT professionals. But this post isn’t about that either. A specific recording I found on IT Conversations was a talk given by Wil Wheaton at Gnomedex 4.0. People either remember him as the actor who played the young writer in Stand by Me or as Wesley Crusher on Star Trek, the Next Generation. Well, it turns out he’s not just a geek, but a blogging geek, and he’s published a couple of books from his weblog WilWheaton.net: Dancing Barefoot and Just a Geek.
It’s a great talk. I really enjoyed it. He talks about his life on Star Trek, his decision to leave the show, the 15 years of regret that followed, and his coming to terms with himself and the demon inside named Wesley Crusher. It was entertaining and even touching. I cried.
So, go have a listen. Maybe you’ll even buy his books.
I’ve begun the process of backing up my music collection. I’ve got most of it on my portable 60 GB harddrive in mp3 and ogg format. Since the drive is portable and I sometimes carry it in my backpack, I’m worried about losing it. So, I’ll be dumping all the music files onto 700 MB CD-ROMs in the coming days.
The harddrive collection is about 7.4 GB large. Some of this is duplicated in the original collection of 6 CD-ROMs that I brought with me to China two and a half years ago, but not all. So I need to figure out what exists on CD-ROM already and what needs to be backed up. Once this is done, I’ll be in a better position to estimate the true size of my music collection, both in terms of Gigabytes and in terms of minutes. The later should be an interesting figure.
Before I came to China in April 2002, I commissioned my friend Bruce to rip my entire CD collection to mp3. Taking up 6 CD-ROMs, this was a compact way to bring my music with me. Since that time, I’ve acquired more CDs. But it’s not all just album music. About 1 GB of the above figure consists of radio shows I’ve “taped” off of CJSR, having Bruce record them onto his harddrive so that I could download them to China. Another part of the collection consists of my childhood LPs that I first recorded onto minidisc and then recorded into mp3. I’ve since burned these albums onto audio CDs for my nieces to listen to. And lastly, I’ve got a growing collection of spoken word stuff, including lectures by Alan Watts and Ram Dass.
When I figure out the final statistics of my backed-up music collection, I’ll post the figures in a new entry.