Ranting and Roaring

(From an e-mail I wrote earlier today).

I thought I’d give you a better answer on why hAtom should be supported (by blogging tools). hAtom has the same potential benefit of any other (HTML-based) microformat—it will allow applications to deal with objects in a blog as a natural chunk. For example, ”reblogging” an entry (i.e. responding to someone else’s blog post), contact the author of this post, take the authors of this post and add to my address book, print this blog post (without all the comments, blogrolls, etc), and so forth. Search engines would be able to know in exactly what microcontent chunk a piece of text is in, rather than “it appeared on the front page of instapundit”. If people reblog using hAtom, it becomes easy to generate BLOCKQUOTE and Q elements with the correct CITE information and now we can start reliably linking in place conversations on the web.

hAtom also has the benefit of being a natural “microcontent container” so that other microformats in the future can be composited on top of it. I’m considering my next project in the blog/microformat space to be a “blog archive” microformat; combined with hAtom, this will give tools and people the ability to walk through weblogs in a structure fashion.

I know there’s a hand-wavingness quality to this argument—these tools do not exist. However, the bootstrap for this is quite small—the amount of work it is to put hAtom into a weblog template is less than 30 minutes work and it’s easy to test a validate that that will continue to work. Once there’s hAtom content out there, Javascript, Greasemonkey, TIDY + XML parsers in many languages will make it easy to get the content out. We’re already seeing this happening with hCalendar and hCard.

Interestingly, a lot of people on the microformats list think this is a way of combining syndication into HTML. I do not. Why? 1. size, 2. crud. First RSS provides a channel for delivering the data that’s relevant for syndication; a weblog is… well, a weblog, and usually much bigger. Size does matter and I don’t think hAtom will ever be used for syndication in more than a fringe # of cases. Secondly, if people can barely compose legal-XML for RSS and OPML, what’s the hope for correctly formatted XHTML delivered content? IMHO: none. Thus, you either have to have a super-parser available like Mozilla’s (and not that many of the apps I’m talking about above will already have access to a parsed DOM in the browser!) or they will run the result through TIDY, which is CPU intensive and less than guaranteed to have a happy ending.

Just to briefly bring up this discussion I had with Randy [Morin] on “why not just store it as XML”, as per his resume example. Last night I quoted the 2NF of DB development—i.e. don’t duplicate your data. If we didn’t have hAtom, how could you write the reblogging tools, the printing tools, etc.? Cross reference through the RSS? I’ve tried doing that and it’s surprisingly difficult because as an outside tool person, there’s no guarantee that the URIs match up and whether you can know all the text is there and what format it is in. So likewise with all microformats: if I have someone’s contact information as HTML (which is being eyeball-validated on a continual basis), why encode it as XML when I can just embed the semantic information in place.

Tagged: microformats, hAtom

London Fog:

Gee, who would have ever thought that human rights commissions would be used by totalitarians to intimidate their political enemies? Well, apart from anyone with any familiarity with history and an appreciation for the arguments for the rule of law, that is. Human rights commissions operate outside of the court system, respect no traditional reason-based rules of evidence, and judge scientifically non-investigable matters such as hurt feelings and offended sensibilities. These third-world style troikas are tailor made for cretins who have no respect for other people’s consciences and want the police to judge disputes about what kind of art is offensive to fictional characters.

My only change to this would be “who would have ever thought that human rights commissions would had any other purpose than to be used by totalitarians to intimidate their political enemies”.

Ilya Somin:

The truth is that Hitler and Goebbels were much more reflective of German opinion in the immediate post-WWII years than Kant. According to a series of surveys conducted by the US occupation authorities in 1951–52, 41% of West Germans saw “more good than evil” in Nazi ideas, compared to only 36% who said the opposite. In a 1949 survey, 59% of West Germans said that National Socialism was a “good idea badly carried out,” compared to only 30% who said that it was wrong. 63% in a 1952 poll said that German generals held on war crimes charges were innocent and only 9% said that they were guilty. Well into the 1950s, large numbers of Germans rejected liberal democracy and expressed sympathy for various forms of authoritarianism. By the time the 1951–52 surveys, were conducted, West Germany had been occupied by the Allies for 6 years, and had had its own democratic government since 1949. Thus, German support for authoritarianism and even for many aspects of Nazism was quite deeply rooted. For these and other survey data from postwar Germany, see Anna J. Merritt & Richard L. Merritt, Public Opinion in Semisovereign Germany (1980).

[...] Obviously, German opinion changed over time and today Germans are as supportive of liberalism and democracy as most other Westerners. But it was not German affinity for liberal democracy which led to its successful imposition. Rather, it was the success of liberal democratic institutions that gradually led Germans to support them – an important historical lesson that we would do well to learn.

I’ve converted the main index, category and monthly archives of this blog to hAtom. You can see a parsed example of this blog here.

Reuters reports:

The world’s largest electronics firms have decided to use Bluetooth wireless technology to send high quality video between devices in the home, two industry associations said on Tuesday.

The decision is expected to determine how hundreds of millions of televisions, video recorders and personal computers will be connected without wires by the turn of the decade.

Until now, the global electronics industry has been struggling to choose a single wireless connection that is fast enough to connect a new generation of digital devices.

The two associations, which contain members like tech heavyweights Intel, Nokia and Microsoft, said they will cooperate to have Bluetooth-enabled devices by 2008 that can send and receive multimedia at speeds that are more than 100 times faster than current Bluetooth.

[...] The new version of Bluetooth, which uses Ultra Wideband (UWB) radio technology, will enable connections of 100 megabits per second, compared with transfer speeds of well below 1 megabit per second for most phones available now.

[...] Ultra wideband uses a high frequency radio band, which limits the possible distance between devices to 10–15 meters, just like the current, much slower Bluetooth technology

Notes:

• Why not 802.11x? Too much infighting?
• 10–15m is good – someone will make cheap repeaters. I was expecting 5m.
• 100 Mb/s sounds… slowish for what is possible. I was expecting 480 Mb/s.
• TCP/IP over Bluetooth? Is anyone doing this in a practical way? An open networking standard is need to make this technology explode; closed proprietary standards that have to be licensed from corporations are not only so 70’s, it’s also a technological dead end.

See also:

• Wikipedia
• Intel
• Intel: Ultra-Wideband (UWB) Technology: Enabling high-speed wireless personal area networks

Move over, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. Sure, you guys likely got a few hundred million each from eBay for your stakes in Skype. But at 30, Friis is almost over the hill in dot-com terms, and Zennstrom is almost 40, which makes him officially a geezer. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of the wildly popular university social network Facebook.com is 22, and his company is reportedly on the block for as much as $2-billion, according to an article at Businessweek Online.

Funny that I should read this (þ Peaktalk) yesterday:

Women and ‘gendercide’

One United Nations’ estimate says that between 113 million and 200 million women around the world are “missing.” Every year, between 1.5 million and 3 million women and girls lose their lives as a result of gender-based violence or neglect. As the Economist, which reported on the policy paper, put it last November, “Every two to four years the world looks away from a victim count on the scale of Hitler’s Holocaust.” How could this possibly be true?

In countries where the birth of a boy is considered a gift and the birth of a girl a curse from the gods, selective abortion and infanticide eliminate female babies.

and this today:

When a pregnant mother is asked if she would prefer a boy or a girl the response is pretty formulaic – “I don’t mind as long as it’s healthy.” Which, put another way, means: “I don’t mind as long as it’s not impaired in any way.” But what if the expectant mother or father actually preferred it if the baby wasn’t “healthy”, in the sense that we understand the word, but instead was profoundly deaf?

This is how Paula Garfield, artistic director of the London-based theatre company Deafinitely Theatre, felt when she was expecting her baby daughter, Molly. “When I was pregnant I did hope the baby would be deaf. Obviously, I would have loved a hearing baby equally, but inside, I really hoped she would be deaf like me.”

In ten years time, the only reason a woman will have “the right to choose” is if she knows nothing about the baby and can demonstrate the choice is for lifestyle reasons; the pressure to do this will come from the left, not the right.

Bob writes (about this):

Hands down, the funniest thing I’ve read so far this year (which, in a three month span which has witnessed the horrible cartoons of blasphemy and its attendants caterwaulings is saying quite something). The “public space” is sacrosanct! There cannot be any private encroachments on the public space! Private property is evil! Except when people are homeless! Then they should have property rights! In public space! Auuuggghhhh!

Note that we see a similar contradiction when hearing about intellectual property rights wrt. biotechnology. Corporations are patenting (for twenty years) “life” which is evil, but we’re also using seeds, grains and plants breed by “ancient” aboriginal cultures – without compensation, which is evil too! I.e. the ideal situation is whitey: 0 year patents; aboriginals: infinite patents!

As per usual, I’m maxed out. However, here’s a little project if anyone has some free time. It was inspired by this post on Strategy Page.

• the media has shifted into “civil war” mode when talking about Iraq. I believe this is mainly because the whole “insurgency” meme really hasn’t taken off as expected and they are trying to find a new way to cast Iraq as a defeat; you may have your own opinion. There is the appearance of a decline in coalition deaths though this may just be a short-term statistical oddity.
• the Sunni Arabs are basically analogous to the whites of South Africa, during and post Apartheid.
• Whites in South Africa, as a group, were very nasty in power. Likewise, the Sunni Arabs.
• the Strategy Page notes that the bulk of the killings are now of the revenge/score settling variety

OK, that’s the background. Now some numbers

• Iraq’s population is 26 million
• the IBC project says just under 38,000 Iraqis have died since the invasion (i.e. in 3 years, including the initial attack implying a yearly death toll of about 13,000)
• South Africa’s population is 44 million
• in 2000, 22,000 people were slain in SA

So:

• can anyone find a reliable death rate for the post-Apartheid years in SA? (this may be a good starting place)
• can anyone find a daily/monthly civilan death toll in Iraq for 2005 and 2006?
• why is Iraq being called a civil war, but not SA?
• bonus: why is there not as much concern for White SAs as there is for Sunni Arab Iraqis?

See it here.

• World of Warcraft

I’m debating whether to install it this weekend or wait till next week when I have more free time.

It’s funny that I had a very similar conversation the other day to this and this. I was remarking that the reason I refuse to get the Pink Panther series on DVD is that I remember it as really good and I just know it’s going to suck if I watch it now.

Bill Gates likes microformats. I guess that’s why they’re using them.

Jon Udell writes about Amazon S3 (previously mentioned here). I won’t quote any of it—if this is the sort of thing you’re interested in, go read it. Of note is that you clearly share files through a well-known URI and so this may make a very interesting podcast distribution network.

Here’s a nice paper (PDF, unfortunately) from the Cato Institutue about how nasty the DMCA is.

Nice quote:

WWhen the next breakthrough media device is invented, its inventor should not face a legal system in which the deck is stacked against him, as Streambox and DeCSS did. He should be free to focus on hiring the best programmers, designers, and marketers, rather than on shopping for a good law firm. If industry incumbents attempt to prevent his product from working with theirs, he should be allowed to circumvent the restrictions as Accolade did in the Sega case. And if the device has a “substantial non-infringing use” and is developed and marketed for such use, Congress and the courts should uphold its legality, even if it threatens the business model of an established industry.

I plan to get the second one printed on a pair a sweat pants right over my ass.

How is this a story?:

More than 1,000 anti-war protesters marched through the streets of downtown Toronto Saturday, joining worldwide demonstrations marking the third anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

I.e. in any meaningful sense, no one came out. 20,000 people came out to celebrate (or protest?) some dead Irish snake charmer on Friday. I didn’t see that ending up as headline news. And on the subject of headlines, the laughable tag of “Worldwide protests condemn Iraq war” … how has this ended up being the #1 story on CBC for the last 24 hours or so? Give me a break. At least this para acknowledges some truth:

By May 1, Bush said major combat operations were over, but Iraqi and anti-American militants from other countries have continued to fight against the Americans, Iraqi government forces and each other.

Normally, the CBC works under the “they all look the same to me” theory and implies they’re all Iraqi.

• Olympos [Hardcover] By: Dan Simmons (Author)
• Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power [Paperback] By: Niall Ferguson (Author)
• Big Trouble in Little China [DVD]
• Blue [Audio CD] By: Joni Mitchell (Artist)
• When It Falls [Audio CD] By: Zero 7 (Artist)

Notes:

• Olympos is the second-half of Ilium, which I loved. I’m taking Trinity-Anne this weekend to Newfoundland, so I’m hoping I can dig into this on the plane.
• I’m a closet Kurt Russell fan, what can I say
• I decided to get Joni Mitchell after the last Right Wing Movie Night. Sorry Rick.
• Zero 7 was the best thing I found on Pandora

This is me and many other members of my family (through my mother’s side). I go to bed at 8 PM and I’m generally up between 3:30 and 4:30 AM:

It is 5:45 a.m. I am sleeping in a rented Ford Expedition, outside a grocery story in Liberty, Missouri. My producer David Steck and photojournalist Dominic Swann are inside, following our subjects Clay McQuerry and his 16-year-old daughter Bethany. Clay and Bethany are shopping for breakfast, alert and chipper.

“We normally come early like this,” Clay tells the cashier. “This our best time of the day.”

As I snore in the back seat, Clay and Bethany have already been up for two hours. They have a condition called Advanced Sleep Phase Syndrome, or ASPS. Doctors say it’s a genetic condition where the body clocks are moved forward—in their case by about three hours.

“I’ll fall asleep on the couch about 6:30 to 7:30,” says Bethany. “I’ll wake up around 3:30 to 4:30.” (Watch a day with Clay and Bethany—6:55)

And her dad is the same way. Both of them have had this pattern since birth. Interestingly, Clay’s wife, Janel, and his son, Casey, don’t have the genetic trait. They sleep at conventional times.

Sleep disorder experts at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, explain to me that the human brain has what’s called a circadian rhythm, something of an internal clock in the brain. That clock can be altered by the light of day, physical activity, hormones and heredity. In fact, there are a number of sleep disorders where the circadian rhythm is off. A more common condition, Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, is often the most disruptive, because folks who go to bed late may get to work late.

But Clay and Bethany have adapted so well to ASPS, they hardly perceive their disorder as a disorder. It’s more like a routine. Without being too intrusive, we wanted to see it for ourselves. So we lent the McQuerrys a video camera to document what happens during a typical night.

Dirty little secret—we kept them up late. They hit the hay at the shocking hour of 8 o’clock. And they woke up late too—4:16 a.m. for Clay, 4:37 a.m. for Bethany.

According to the book Sync, this has been traced to a mutation on a single gene (I don’t have the book handy so I can’t tell you which one off hand).

Miss Deaf Texas struck by train, killed:

AUSTIN, Texas (AP)—The reigning Miss Deaf Texas died after being struck by a train, officials said.

Tara Rose McAvoy, 18, was walking Monday near railroad tracks when she was struck by a Union Pacific train, authorities said.

A witness told Austin television station KTBC the train sounded its horn right up until the accident occurred.

• Joanne: what was the Hydra?
• Trinity-Anne: a giant snake – he was a monster.
• Me: how many heads did the Hydra have?
• Trinity-Anne: 9
• Me: who killed the Hydra?
• Trinity-Anne: Broccoli

BTW: this isn’t me cue card parenting—Trinity’s initiating all the star and constellation talk.

Something I forgot to mention: hAtom 0.1 is now official. Expect more from me on this soon—I’ve been very very busy but this is fairly important to some tech plans I’ve been working on.

Amazon has introduced a highly reliable (99.99%) service for storing and distributing files on the Internet called S3. I’m very excited.

Fees:

• $0.15 per GB of storage per month
• $0.20 for each GB uploaded/download

This means I could fairly practically back up the important stuff on my hard drive for less than $USD 20/month ($USD 240/year) and probably much less. From a home user perspective this isn’t that great but from a small business perspective, it’s probably entirely worth it.

Notes:

• there’s apparently a security system built into this so that I can specify which user (or a group of users?) can retrieve it
• it isn’t clear to me whether I can put up a file, say XXX.MP3, and have it retrievable by a “normal” user as a file ending in extension MP3 and having the correct mime type (audio/mp3).
• HostMatters charges me USD $36/month for 40Gb of transfer and 1Gb of storage. Under the Amazon S3 system, that would cost me about $15 USD.
  • This argues for blogging software that can use a low tier of a hosting service for the CPU power and use S3 for file large file distribution (archives, images, media files, and so forth).
• I guess I’m going to have to look at Amazon Simple Queue Service again too, if Amazon insists on being serious in the pay-for webservices world
• Amazon should develop desktop tools for utilizing this stoage (i.e. a backup interface and a file folder integrated into Windows Explorer/the shell)
• if there was a UNIX FS interface to this, I could integrate this into some apps right away. This would be very very slick.

Related Links:

Amazon’s Newest Product: Storage

Huh? That’s right, the online store with “Earth’s biggest selection” of everything from books to zithers will announce Tuesday morning that it’s adding a new and different kind of service: an unlimited data storage service aimed at software developers who are creating new Web sites and services.

This could help spur a whole bunch of new Web mash-ups and other services. Already, a few groups have been using the service, among them a UC Berkeley team running NASA‘s Stardust@Home project that involves 60,000 images to 100,000 volunteers worldwide so they can scan them for comet dust, the podcasting transcription service CastingWords for storing MP3 files, and FilmmakerLIVE.com for sharing digital storyboard elements.

Amazon: Grid Storage Web Service Launches

I was able to speak with Adam Selipsky (Amazon Web Services VP of Product Management and Developer Relations), Dave Barth (Product Manager for Amazon S3) and Andrew Herdener ( Seniro Public Relations Manager for Amazon) today about the service.

They’ve built the back end for the number one requested company that I wrote about late last year – reliable and cheap online storage. I’ve been watching this space very closely, even profiling a number of new entrants, and I have to say that S3 changes the game entirely. Move over Google Drive, Amazon just stole your thunder (for now).