Quoderat

The Wikipedia article about me was vandalized yesterday (vandalized version) by someone from the IP address 24.225.66.95, which seems to be in or near Raleigh, North Carolina.

What should I do?

1. Edit the article myself to remove the vandalism? — OK, that’s a really bad idea
2. Go in anonymously and edit the article? — also a bad idea
3. Rejoice in the fact that my article is important enough to be vandalized?
4. Despair in the fact that my article is not important enough for anyone else to have noticed and fixed it?
5. Reconcile myself to the idea that the edits are not vandalism at all, and I am, in truth, “a freaking looser who knows nothing” and “a noob”

I’m leaning towards #5, though I’m disappointed that kids these days seem to have forgotten how to swear properly: “a freaking loser”???

Image: Thomas Penn, second proprietor of Pennsylvania, not as nice as his dad William.

Almost a year ago, I wrote that Open data matters more than Open Source — it doesn’t matter (to you, the end user) whether a web site is using Open Source software or not, if they still keep your data locked up.

Here’s a nasty example: Robert Scoble has just had his Facebook account disabled for running a script to try to scrape his personal information off the site (since Facebook doesn’t provide him with any other way to get it).

I understand that Facebook needs to protect against malicious bots — and they might decide to restore his account once they know what Robert was actually trying to do (though for now all traces of him have vanished) — but do we really want to have hope for the good will of social sites and beg for our own data every time we want it? Are web site owners the new version of the Proprietors in the early American colonies, who can grant rights as favours when they see fit?

Update: I read that the school concert went ahead, with Frosty the Snowman replacing the modified Silver Bells as the token non-religious song on the programme (Frosty makes no reference to any religious holidays).

Both of my children attended Elmdale Public School here in Ottawa from junior kindergarten to grade six. Now, my kids’ alma mater has triggered a nation-wide moral panic by changing the line “it’s Christmas time in the city” to “it’s festive time in the city” in the song Silver Bells for a grade-two and -three concert.

I’ve already gone on record saying that it’s OK to wish me Merry Christmas — I’m as proud of my Christian background as some of my friends and neighbours are of their Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu backgrounds — but that’s not what this was all about. The primary choir was already singing songs about Christmas and Hanukkah, and the choir leaders decided to add an additional song that was non-religious. I think that the existing non-religious songs Jingle Bells or Winter Wonderland would have been fine, but they decided to take Silver Bells — an otherwise secular pop song about shopping downtown in a city — and replace the word “Christmas”. Silly? Probably. An attack on Christmas or Christianity? Hardly.

Update: the site shopping cart is broken, and doesn’t properly remove items from the total owing — too bad.

Here’s one easy way: via TechCrunch, Deutsche Grammophon, the gold standard in renaissance/ baroque/ classical/ romantic/ orchestral/ opera/ etc. music (often confusingly referred to collectively as “classical”, roughly equivalent calling all popular music since 1890 “rap”), will start selling their catalogue as unprotected MP3s at midnight German time tonight (6:00 pm in New York City) at their new site dgwebshop.com.

As a teenager in the late 1970s, I used to visit the House of Sound in Kingston (Canada), where they had thousands of DG records — probably most of the catalogue — packed in tight on on shelves lining a wall of the store. I couldn’t always afford them, but I loved being able just to pull them out and take a look at the covers of the different famous recordings. These days, the so-called classical music section of any but a couple of specialized stores in big cities like New York or London have maybe one or two rows of worthless classical-pop compilations hidden behind the DVDs of TV series nobody watched in the 1980s — no wonder people don’t shop at record stores any more.

We tech types have been claiming for a while that music companies could make more money selling unprotected digital music, so here’s the test. I plan to give them a lot of my own money if the site actually works, though I should note a couple of caveats:

1. Many current DG buyers are audiophiles who won’t be satisfied with the sound quality of MP3s (which are optimized more for boom-boom music), so this will probably open a new market for DG rather than leaching their current one.
2. DG’s market is mostly affulent people outside the intense social environment of high school or university, so people will be less likely to share these MP3s — and even if they do, it will probably just act as a promo for the higher quality recordings.

I hope the site can handle the traffic. Rock on, Deutsche Grammophon!

Gunner William Henry Ranson (born 1843) has started a blog about his life in the ranks of Royal Artillery and as a civilian in Canada right after Confederation:

http://whranson.blogspot.com/

Gunner Ranson was my great-great-grandfather. After serving in the Royal Artillery during the 1860s, he ended up settling in Canada permanently in the 1870s. While many British officers kept diaries and wrote memoirs, very few men of the ranks did — although a good number could read and write, few had the inclination and the available time (and light) to do so — but my great-great-grandfather was an exception. While we don’t have the original diary, we do have a summary that he wrote later in life as a memoir, based on the lost diary, giving a working man’s view of both the British military and of later civilian life (often more brutal) in Victorian Canada.

My brother Tom has had the memoir for some years and has been trying to decide the best way to edit and publish it. In the end, he has decided to publish sections serially as a blog. I encourage anyone interested in British or Canadian history to read this. The blog format reminds me very strongly of the serial magazine publication common during the Victorian period.

Summary: Perhaps the women who don’t choose computer programming are making a good choice, especially with the deteriorating working conditions, stagnant or falling salaries, and offshoring.

Recently, we’ve had a few postings about women in computing (or the lack thereof) — see Bray, Wood, Tenison, and Bray (again), all ignited by a piece in devChix.

These postings all assume that we need to do something to pull more women into coding. Why? Do we think there are there lots of women would be happy coding, but aren’t smart enough or motivated enough to choose the right careers for themselves, or are too timid to deal with any barriers unless someone comes along and dismantles them first?

Godwin’s Law has finally left the geekier corners of the net and gone mainstream: political opponents and the press are lambasting Canadian Green Party leader Elizabeth May for an immature and totally gratuitous Nazi reference.

According to Godwin’s law, that means that the debate is now over and the environment has lost. Gee, thanks!

Dare Obasanjo just put up a posting with the title Open Source is Dead. Dare does happen to be a Microsoft employee, but his posting is none of the standard anti-Linux/OpenOffice/Apache/Firefox FUD. Instead, he voices a question that’s been floating around for a while:

… how much value do you think there is to be had from a snapshot of the source code for eBay or Facebook being made available? This is one area where Open Source offers no solution to the problem of vendor lock-in.

Even if you don’t know whether I’m Christian, I promise not to take offense. I’m tired of watching friends, neighbours, and colleagues tying themselves in knots trying to think of a culturally-sensitive thing to say to me (usually “have a nice holiday” or something similar). You’re also welcome to wish me a happy version of any other holiday, religious or not — I prefer a world where we celebrate all cultures and religions to one where we pretend religion and culture don’t exist. I live in a big, multi-ethnic city, and my acquaintances who are Muslim, Sikh, Jewish, or Hindu seem to have no problem using the C word, so the awkwardness seems limited to, well, Christians (or at least people whose ancestors were Christians).

Actually, since my ancestors were Christian, I’d also be happy if you wished me a “Merry Xmas”. During the 70’s or 80’s, there was a wrong-headed reaction against this spelling, along the lines of “put the Christ back in Christmas.” That’s not an “X”, folks — it’s the Greek letter Chi, which starts the word “Christ”. “X” was very much used among early Christians as an abbreviation for the title of the person they believed was the son of God, with the added bonus that the letter makes the shape of the cross they believed he died on.

So, on that note, Merry Christmas, everyone!

Like many Canadians, I grew up in the Protestant United Church of Canada [Wikipedia] and then stopped going after confirmation, though in my case it was not apathy but teenage experimentation with Christian fundamentalism (I didn’t inhale, much) that kept me away. Today, while our American cousins to the south enjoy their election day — at least, those Americans with access to working voting machines — I’d like people to reconsider some of their negative stereotypes about religious organizations by taking a look at the United Church’s new ad campaign, featuring such attractions as a shopping mall Jesus, a bible filled with Post-it bookmarks, and whipped cream intended for non-gastronomic purposes. Enjoy.

I signed up for Skype a while ago, put EUR 10 into my account, and made a few calls. It was cute, it worked, but after a couple of experiments I couldn’t see the big deal. After all, Skype lags by a second or two (like the old trans-Atlantic cables), it has poor sound quality even compared to my cell phone, and phone calls in North America, even long distance, are so close to free that Skype hardly matters.

Over here in the Amsterdam this week, it’s a different story. My North American cell phone doesn’t work (of course), calling from the hotel is ridiculously expensive (even calling a toll-free number), and there are very few public phones. All I need is a wireless Internet signal, though, and I can call home on Skype to my heart’s content for (literally) pennies. Even more importantly, I can call North American toll-free numbers directly, something that’s not otherwise possible at any cost from Europe. OK, now I get the excitement around VoIP.

Instant messaging (aka chat) has been around in various guises a lot longer than Skype, but I’m in my fourties, and thus, a little too old ever to have used it socially. What finally changed that is Google’s integration of IM right into their webmail service. While I’m reading my GMail, a little green light goes on when anyone I know is reading at the same time (the joys of AJAX). After midnight Amsterdam time last night, I ended up with three chat windows open — one for my spouse, and one for each of my kids — carrying on three separate private conversations about how their days had gone. I could have called on Skype, of course, but I couldn’t have talked privately to all three at once, and I wouldn’t have known when they were all free without those little green lights. While typing furiously and switching among windows, I got perhaps a tiny taste of what it’s like to be a hyperactive 16-year-old girl.

XTech, AJAX, and Rails

Speaking of AJAX, IDEAlliance staff has told me that the AJAX developer’s day here at XTech 2006 has been so popular that it’s almost overwhelmed, with a huge number of last-minute walk-ins. The Rails tutorials have also been popular. There’s obviously a lot of demand for AJAX and Rails information over here — good job, Edd.

Now, back to age-appropriate communications. When’s the penknife to sharpen my quill? …

As most of you probably already know, Dan Brown, author of the (unintentionally) hilarious novel The Da Vinci Code, has won a copyright-violation case suit brought against him by authors of one of the books he used as a source (CBC story).

When trying to explain the absurdity of software patents, I’ve often used the example of books and movies. Imagine if someone could patent the idea of, say, a guy starting out badly and then redeeming himself, or of a man and woman appearing to hate each-other and then falling in love. While the Brown case used copyright rather than patent law, it came terrifyingly close to my example, since two authors (who do not deserve to be named or linked to here) accused Brown of stealing the idea of Jesus marrying Mary Magdalene and having kids, etc. from their book. Fortunately, the judge seems to have laughed the plaintiffs out of court, even referring to them as “authors of pretend historical books.”

There’s something else here that you might initially miss, however. Not only did the plaintiffs lose, but the judge ordered them to pay Brown’s publisher’s legal costs — that’s very common in Canada, and apparently also in Great Britain (where this case took place), especially when a judge believes that a lawsuit was unjustified. The two authors who sued Brown will have to pay a few hundred thousand pounds now. If U.S. courts commonly did the same thing, then maybe spurious law suits fishing for big settlements would be a lot less common down there.

Take a look at this SUV commercial parody, sent to me by an acquaintance (quickly, before GM pulls the link).

General Motors has a new online marketing campaign for the Chevy Apprentice, where you can design your own TV commercial and play it back using Flash. You can also enter your commercial into a contest. Inevitably — especially with the SUV’s reputation (deserved or undeserved) as a poster child for environmental destruction and a high roll-over fatality rate — such a contest can attract, say, less-than serious entries.

The parody linked above is side-splittingly funny, but I’m posting about it here because the Flash always begins with the message “Loading XML…” That led me to a few observations:

1. GM is using XML to save the scripts for the customized commercials (does any Flash-type know how to get at the raw XML? I’d love to see the markup.)
2. GM is advertising the fact that they’re using XML to save the commercials (or else Flash is forcing them to, but I don’t remember seeing that message with other Flash animations).
3. Perhaps XML is so cool that people want to point out that they’re using it.
4. Or, perhaps GM wants to make sure that XML gets the blame if the commercial loads slowly.

Statistics Canada has just published statistics about Canadian television viewing in Fall 2004 (via CBC). I loved TV once, and as I sit by its deathbed, I’m torn between wanting to hold onto it just a little longer and hoping for its suffering to end.

Not many years ago, before panicking about the Internet became fashionable, Moms-Who-Like-To-Worry were concerned that their kids were watching too much TV. Many moms even restricted or banned TV in their houses, ensuring that their kids would spend most of their after-school and weekend time at friends houses doing <so-called>homework</so-called>. Well, it turns out that by the middle of this decade, kids couldn’t care less — Canadian teens spent only about 12.9 hours/week watching TV, half the average for all ages. Men 18-24 spent only 12.4 hours watching TV. That still represents nearly two hours per day, which seems to me like a lot, but it’s been declining steadily over the years.

In contrast, now that their kids have left the nest and it’s safe to turn the TV back on, the Moms-Who-Once-Liked-To-Worry cannot tear themselves away — Canadian women over 60 watched 35.6 hours of TV a week, which is pretty close to a full-time job in North America or three full-time jobs in France. I wonder if their now-grown, formerly TV-deprived kids phone home once in a while just to yell “HYPOCRITE!” at them.

Teenagers don’t watch much TV, I think, because it cuts into their text messaging time (except maybe as background noise). Young males would rather play videogames or misrepresent themselves on MySpace. So who watches TV? Same as it always was: the Baby Boomers. TV was born with the boomers and perhaps it will die with us, even if we don’t get most of the jokes on the The Daily Show.