Quoderat

Late in 1963, shortly before he was assassinated, U.S. President John F. Kennedy asked Canadian Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson for his opinion on how the U.S. should cope with escalating unrest in Vietnam.

Peason: “Get out.”

JFK: “That’s a stupid answer. Everyone knows that. The question is how do we get out?”

How, indeed? As JFK had finally come to understand, military conflicts, justified or not, are like a Chinese finger trap: it’s easy for a political leader to order the troops in, but very tricky to pull them back out (just ask the British about Northern Ireland, the Russians about Chechnya, or even Pearson’s Canadian successors about southern Afghanistan).

Good luck to President Clinton, President McCain, or President Obama (alphabetical order) in January 2009 — they’re all smart and well-intentioned people, but they’re going to find that the trap has already been pulled very tight, and there’s not much room left to wiggle free.

Some people compare blogs (and mainstream media) to an echo chamber, constantly repeating and amplifying the same messages, but the echoes usually die out quickly. Not so, today, when I found this story on the planenews.com aviation news feed:

21 Feared Dead in Munich Crash.

About twenty one of the 44 passengers and crew of the British European Airways airliner which crashed yesterday near Munich carrying the Manchester United football team and many journalists are feared dead. About eight others are in hospital, seriously injured. Frank Swift, the former international goalkeeper, who had become a journalist, died in hospital.

I didn’t hear about any crash yesterday, but according to the Wikipedia article on Manchester United, there was a crash near Munich on 6 February 1958 that killed eight of the team’s players. In fact, when you follow the full story link in the posting, there is a story about the crash. The phrase “From the archive” is hidden in the deckline, but the dateline is “Saturday February 2, 2008″ (probably automatically updated by the site). There’s nothing else in the online version to indicate that this is an archived story from 7 February 1958, though a Brit would probably know that British European Airways ceased operations in 1974.

This is an easy mistake to make trying to keep up a blog of current events, and I don’t mean to suggest that the maintainer is stupid, or that I couldn’t do the same thing — in fact, next December, watch this spot for postings about an air attack on Perl Harbor.

This might be of interest:

Amazon SimpleDB

Today, around 12:30 pm EDT, the Canadian loonie was worth more than the US greenback for the first time in 31 years (CBC story). By contrast, the Canadian dollar hit a low of somewhere around US $0.63 in the late 1990s.

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!

A number of years ago I was working on the scenery system for the open source FlightGear flight simulator. Due to the nature of geodata and the scenery building system, I ended up with tens of thousands of tiny files on my hard drive, many only a few bytes long, and I was constantly running out of disk space.

Then I read about an alternative filesystem for Linux called ReiserFS, part of a new generation of journaling filesystems. Unlike the others, however, ReiserFS had a special innovation: it allowed multiple very small files to share the same block, so that a 5-byte file would not automatically take up 512 bytes (or whatever your block size was). I switched over, and bingo! There was suddenly a huge amount of free space on my previously-full hard drive, and I noticed no performance problems (aside from the occasional tiny zombie file that I couldn’t delete).

I’ve been running Reiser ever since, but the filesystem has fallen on hard times. On 14 September 2006 (via Tony Coates), Jeff Mahoney announced that the SuSE Linux distribution would no longer use ReiserFS as its default. Mahoney is also one of the principal ReiserFS developers, and he wrote that ReiserFS3 does not scale, that it has a small and shrinking developer community inadequate to maintain it, and that ReiserFS4 is “an interesting research file system, but that’s about as far as it goes.” Then, on 10 October 2006 Hans Reiser, the principal maintainer, was arrested and charged with the murder of his estranged wife Nina.

SuSE was the only Linux distribution that used Reiser as its default filesystem. This c|net story links the SuSE decision with the murder charges, but it’s worth noting that Mahoney’s message predates the charges by almost a month. Whatever the cause, however, Novell (SuSE’s owner) had contributed significant resources towards the maintenance of ReiserFS. It no longer looks like ReiserFS has any future at all, and in its current state, it has performance and scalability problems that prevent its use in high-demand environments. ReiserFS was a big help to me when I needed it a few years back, but the next time I install Ubuntu, I’ll use the default ext3 filesystem instead. Hard disks — even for notebook computers — are a lot bigger and cheaper now, anyway.

Early in the week, I posted about the end of the Google search API, and speculated that — since everyone else tends to copy Google — it might be the start of a general trend away from open data APIs and in favour of server-side AJAX widgets. In response, Amit Kumar of Yahoo sent me an e-mail message (after failing to get past Spam Karma in the comment system for my blog):

You don’t have to worry. We just posted a blog entry on this topic. Yahoo Search APIs are going strong - we welcome developers to use our APIs.

http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000393.html

Amit Kumar
Manager, Site Explorer

Thanks, Amit. Fortunately, megginson.com isn’t popular enough that it will break Yahoo’s 5,000 queries/day quota.

SOAP, REST, JSON, XML, and Serialized PHP

Note that Yahoo has a REST interface that can deliver results in XML, JSON, or serialized PHP, so if people get tired of the REST vs. SOAP perma-debate, there’s some alternative material for you here (if you want a good roaring debate, be careful to avoid reading Tim Bray’s carefully balanced view).

[Update: hacking the Google Search AJAX API — see below.]

[Update #2: Don Box is thinking along the same lines as I am.]

[Update #3: Rob Sayre points out that there is, in fact, a published browser-side JavaScript API underlying the AJAX widget.]

Over on O’Reilly Radar, Brady Forrest mentioned that Google is shutting down its SOAP-based search API. Another victory for REST over WS-*? Nope — Google doesn’t have a REST API to replace it. Instead, something much more important is happening, and it could be that REST, WS-*, and the whole of open web data and mash-ups all end up on the losing side.

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.

Update: corrected Encyclopedia Britannica link.

A lot of people — publishers, the press, public figures, and bloggers — spend a lot of time agonizing over Wikipedia, and the general conclusion is either (a) Wikipedia is dangerously untrustworthy (from its detractors), or (b) Wikipedia is great, but don’t trust everything you read there (from its supporters).

Here’s a different perspective: don’t trust anything you read or hear anywhere, guys. If you have the stomach for it, take a look at the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica article for NEGRO, remembering that this edition was published within living memory, 48 years after the American Emancipation Proclamation, and 104 years after the end of slavery in the British Empire, in what was probably the world’s most authoritative and trusted reference source. What do you think the odds are that our grandchildren will react with the same disgust and disbelief when they look back at how our mainstream media and other publications covered the issues of our day, from their almost total ignorance of Iran (guys in black with long beards and nuclear bombs) to their glorification of war (support our troops, too bad about [non-first-world] victims) to their lazy republishing of the spin and just simple lies from the press releases of just about every public-interest pressure group (from the environmental to the gun lobby, from the gay rights movement to the fundamentalist Christian movement).

If the occasional (and rare) error or vandalism in Wikipedia finally teaches people that they are responsible for verifying everything they read, that will be a good thing. Wikipedia is still usually my first source for information, but nothing is ever my last source. Overall, however, because Wikipedia has an international authorship, I find that the information in it is generally of a much higher quality than I can get from the mainstream North American publishers or media (and I’m not talking only about Fox News).

I recently upgraded my notebook from Ubuntu Dapper Drake to Edgy Eft (which is about to be officially released). The upgrade was almost 100% painless, except that I had to reselect the gnome-desktop package after it got deselected somehow. Everything just worked, before and after I rebooted.

There’s a small change in Edgy that means a lot to people like me, who have been building kernels (first Minix, then Linux) for over a decade and a half: all of the specialized X86-related kernels have vanished from Ubuntu, and now there’s just a linux-generic: no more linux-386, linux-686, linux-k7, linux-686smp, etc. Have the Ubuntu people decided to make us all live with substandard performance, just for the sake of simplifying installation for beginners? No. Instead, someone actually went and tested the different kernel variants, and discovered that there was no measurable speed benefit for any of them.

This is a huge disappointment, of course, for people who build and optimize their own kernels (I gave up on that a year or two ago), but it’s also symbol of the change in focus from techie tinkerers to more general users, whose main goal in life is not to be able to boast that they got 0.1% more bogomips out of their system after only three nights of hacking.

Stephen Dubner is the co-author of Freakonomics, a book that stands out for its ability to move past conventional wisdom and commonplaces to look at evidence that others either ignored or couldn’t understand. Dubner recently posted a blog entry about Stephen Colbert’s attack on Wikipedia.

On his show, Colbert edited Wikipedia to introduce deliberately false information into the article about his show, and then encouraged his viewers to do the same for articles about elephants. Many viewers took Colbert up on his offer.

Is that proof that Wikipedia is undependable, as Dubner suggests? In fact, all of the incorrect information was almost immediately removed, some articles were temporarily locked to avoid vandalism, and Colbert’s account was suspended. Wikipedia can be temporarily undependable, but (at least for any frequently-read article) it is quickly self-correcting — its biggest problem is the articles that are rarely read, where vandalism or errors can last for a longer time. Conventional encyclopedias have no (or extremely little) deliberate vandalism, but their information is usually out of date, they have significantly less coverage (a tiny fraction of Wikipedia’s), and unintentional errors can take years or decades to correct.

I’m a bit disappointed that Dubner was satisfied simply to repeat the obvious, commonplace criticisms about Wikipedia without any critical thought — that’s not the Freakonomics way.

Tony Coates is celebrating the elimination of the Australian federal government’s net debt. During the 1970s and 1980s, Canada carried a brutal public debt, to the point that our federal government was spending more on interest than on any major government program (healthcare, defence, education — you name it). I suspect that Australia was in a similar situation. It’s a vicious circle, where the government ends up spending more and more but delivering less and less.

The ratio between public debt and GDP in a rich country shows how capable that country is of dealing with its debt; less directly, it also shows how fond that country is of big government (though high debt can also simply indicate undertaxation). With that in mind, the following table destroys a lot of the stereotypes about how well different governments manage their finances and how fond they are of big government:

(Source: CIA World Factbook; all figures for 2005.)

Anti-big-government U.S.? Impoverished Spain? Debt-ridden U.K.? Soviet-Canukistan? Forget it. On the other hand, however much Americans may complain about financial mismanagement under their current administration, things could have been worse — at least they didn’t have to deal with five years of Silvio Berlusconi.

In conjunction with the XML 2006 conference from 5-7 December in Boston, IDEAlliance will be awarding the first XML Scholarship. This scholarship is open to anyone who is enrolled as a student in a diploma or degree program at a post-secondary institution.

The scholarship winner will receive the following:

• An award of USD 1,000.00.
• A travel stipend of USD 500.00 to attend the conference.
• Free conference registration.
• Two nights accomodation in Boston.

A team of well-known XML specialists will choose the winning paper: for 2006, the scholarship committee consists of Dr. Mary Fernández (AT&T), Dr. Michael Sperberg-McQueen (W3C and University of Bergen), and Dr. Henry Thompson (W3C and University of Edinburgh).

We encourage the submission of case studies and project reports as well original academic research. This is a great chance for a student to present her or his work to an audience of industry specialists, including senior people from many large technology companies; it’s also a great chance for us in the XML community to learn about and encourage the next generation of specialists — I’d like to encourage people to publicise this as widely as possible, especially if you have connections with an educational institution. Full details about the scholarship are available at http://2006.xmlconference.org.

(Technorati: xml2006)

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.

Ottawa had a little earthquake (magnitude 4.5) yesterday evening at 8:39 pm EST. Ottawa is Canada’s biggest high tech centre (or at least was before the dot.bomb, drawing more investment than Toronto). Like the San Francisco Bay area, Ottawa is built on top of a series of geological fault lines; however, ours never result in worse than a minor tremor every 5-10 years. Our tech industry is (relatively) minor as well. Does the severity of fault lines correlate with high tech success?

Maybe a little danger gives people an edge. Tech people in the Bay area live every day wondering if they’re going to fall into the Pacific tomorrow, and bus ads in San Francisco talk about stocking up on food and flashlights (I don’t think anyone’s every going to count on timely help from FEMA again). What are we worried about in Ottawa? A bad skating season on the Rideau Canal?

Note to Route 128 companies: to find the edge you’ll need to compete seriously with the Bay area, you’ll have to come up with a looming natural disaster. A mega tsunami caused by a volcano in the Canary Islands might fit the bill.

Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) has started a small controversy by casually mentioning that the Y2K crisis was a false prophesy (his more detailed followup posting is here; he also points to a paper that I didn’t bother reading, but probably does a better job than my posting of going over the issue).

While I never advertised myself as a Y2K consultant, I made money from the Y2K panic like everyone else in IT — even if I didn’t do Y2K projects directly, systems were being replaced early because of Y2K, IT departments were getting bigger budgets and spending on whatever they wanted, etc. And like many (most?) people reading this weblog, I went out of my way to try to explain my customers at every opportunity why the Y2K threat was exaggerated.

The logic was simple: the scare stories in the press talked about everything shutting down at midnight on December 31 2000, but in fact, times and dates in IT systems are much more complicated than that: information and events go through lifecycles that have starts, ends, and often many stages in-between. Here are some examples:

• If you took out a 20-year mortgage in 1980, the expirty date would have been 2000.
• If you were 55 in 1990, you would have been 65 in 2000.
• If you received a new credit card with a five-year term in 1995, the expiry date would have been 2000.
• When your credit card bill arrived on 15 December 1999, payment was probably due in 2000.

So how many of you received notices in 1981 that your mortages were 81 years overdue? Or how many of you received pension benefits for 156-year-olds in 1991? How many of you found that your credit cards were declined in 1996 because they were 96 years past expiry? Or how many of you were charged 99 years’ interest for an unpaid credit-card bill in 2000?

Of course, some of these things did happen to some people in the decades leading up to Y2K, but only very rarely — rarely enough, in fact, that every case was considered newsworthy. 2000 was going to be the peak of a curve that started decades before and ended decades after, but since the curve was still so close to zero by the 1990s, it was obvious to anyone who cared to spend time thinking (even a statistical numbskull like me) that the Y2K consultants screaming doom and gloom were either not fully competent or not fully honest. It was important, of course, to check the most critical systems, like hospital equipment or nuclear power plants, but Y2K was hardly going to be a real operational problem for most organizations.

Those same consultants defend themselves now, of course, by claiming that they averted a catastrophe, but that is trivially easy to disprove — countries that spent very little on Y2K preparedness, like France, had no more problems that countries that spent a lot, like the U.S. and Canada. Of course, France benefitted from some spill-over from the North American IT work, but there still should have been a significant, measurable difference between the two. There wasn’t. QED.

Bob DuCharme, author of many successful books and a long-time XML expert, is leaving Lexis-Nexis.  If you’re looking to hire a senior XML person with good name recognition, you might want to make their loss into your gain.

Here’s a genuinely heartwarming story. The RIAA is after David Greubel of Arlington, Texas for having 600 downloaded songs on his family computer, and is trying to get him to pay USD 9,000 to settle out of court. Greubel’s 15-year-old daughter wrote an e-mail about the case to the punk rapper MC Lars (Download this song), and Lars passed the e-mail on to his management company, the Nettwerk Music Group, which also manages Sarah McLachlan, the Barenaked Ladies, and Avril Lavigne, among others.

Terry McBride, the head of Nettwerk, decided to help Greubel, and says he has the support of all the artists he manages (including those whose songs were found on Greubel’s computer). He has offered to pay all of Greubel’s legal costs to fight the RIAA and all of his fines if he loses. He says that he does not necessarily agree with downloading ripped songs (which happens to be legal here in Canada, where Nettwerk is based), but that suing fans is just bad business:

My hope is that this (Nettwerk’s support) will create a positive concrete conversation between the artists, their managers and the record labels as to what the future is . . . The fan is the future. Suing the fan is like shooting yourself in the foot.

Note: I don’t read Slashdot any more — I’m sure this is also there, so apologies for any duplication.

(Updated to include MSN response; updated again for the China thing.)

According to this CBC article, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL have all willingly handed over search records to the U.S. government (they claim that no personal information is included, but personal information can often be inferred from search URLs). Google said ‘no’, and is now taking the fight to court.

The request is unrelated to national security — instead, the government is gathering background evidence to defend an anti-porn law in court.

Update: Ken Moss defends MSN’s action (via Dare Obasanjo). Ken’s comment repeats the point made in the CBC article that MSN believes it released no personal information.

Update #2: And now, Google has agreed to censor search results for China.  It guess this pulls Google back down to a karmic break even: defender of privacy rights in North America, but anti-free-speech collaborator in Asia.