Having gone through the pain of trying to bust up Apple’s shitty patents around Widget Security, I learned that if you have a good idea, then you should put into the public record as quickly as possible (unless you intend to patent the idea, for fun and profit). It seems that the US patent office will grant a patent for just about anything, probably even a knife and fork. The state of the United States patent system truly is an embarrassment (for more info, thepublicdomain.org).
Idea: Web Actuators, an API for Web Browser to allow control of physical output component, including, but not limited to LEDs, speaker, motors, or anything detectable by any human sense (sight, touch, smell, taste, hearing).
This Actuators API would compliment a general purpose Web Sensors API: an API for detecting and reacting to events generated from reading “low level” sensor data (e.g., a flew sensor, a switch, a pressure sensor, a temperature gauge, etc…. any sensor that can take a reading).
Everybody Draw Muhammad Day was a reaction to an angry mob of Muslim attacking Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks, as well as a reaction to threats of death made against political satirists/creator of the TV show South Park. Lars Vilks is the Danish cartoonist whose cartoon drawings of Muhammad fired up a small number of muslim extremist in 2007. Wikipedia provides a good background to the controversy. According to Wikipedia, Lars Vilks was attacked for attempting to show a banned YouTube video made by an Iranian artist Sooreh Hera entitled “Allah ho gaybar”. The artwork is a montage of religions and homoerotic imagery set to the tune of “I want to take you to a gay bar” by the band Electric Six (YouTube video).
Attack
The video below shows the reaction of the protesters.
Reaction
My initial reaction to seeing the YouTube video was a sense of outrage and anger. But I wanted to understand exactly why I was angry. That is, to go beyond the simple “fucking Muslims! here they go again.” that is most people’s reaction and really does not help anyone, to a more reflective analysis of my own moral position that causes me outrage (well, enough outrage to sit down and “blog-it-out” here). I knew on the face of it that what angered me was that people would react violently towards homosexual imagery and towards Lars Vilks – doubly outraged in an academic institutional setting, which establishes itself as a place of tolerance, debate, dissemination of knowledge, diversity of ideas, and scientific inquiry (things that are a direct affront to religious dictates, which are generally inward looking and discourage questioning and self analysis – I don’t need to give examples of religious persecution of science, women, other religions, etc., as they are so common in history). Upon reflection, to me, the purpose of art is to challenge the viewer and to seek an aesthetic reaction – that reaction may differ from one individual to the next. However, to suggest that attacks were simply motivated by an aesthetic reaction to what was on screen is of course naive. It is clear that the crowd had already gathered there with the intent on disrupting the talk that Lars Vilks was about to give and had no intention in engaging in a well-mannered debate about, well, anything.
In order to understand my outrage, I need to frame what to me constitutes “the good life”: that is, that highest moral authority and rights to which I must afford all human beings in the way I interact with them, and what I expect back from all human beings – something that is clearly at odds with Muslim protesters, for why else do I feel outrage? For this I turn to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDoHR). Faith-wise, this means that I believe that globally applying the UDoHR would yield a better world in which I want to live and in which I want others to live (for an atheist who is influenced by Immanuel Kant, this is a matter of faith). What this also gives us a simple set of criteria by which we can judge our own actions and the action of others upon us in terms of justice, rights, and morality. The assumption being that the UDoHR are, in fact, universally applicable and do not seek to impose a higher (read religious or “god-given”) moral authority, and that the declaration is timeless. It also does away with intermediaries (God, churches, religions) and puts the responsibility of just action and behaviors on individuals: to be clear, you do things because it is the “right” thing to do at the individual level, and not because it suits the norms of a particular time or pleases some community (e.g,. “everyone in my church says abortion is wrong”), commercial entity (e.g., “I signed an NDA”), nature (e.g., “I’m hungry, so I must eat you”), or some constructed moral authority (e.g., “God said being gay is wrong”) – I give the examples because they demonstrate subtle forms of coercion – in each case, the individual is not free because something is influencing what they do. From my understanding of Kant, turning to innate sense of human rights provides a sound basis on which to makes particularly if you apply a “maximizing principle”: simply take a situation, like suppressing someone speech, and maximize it globally. The act can only be moral if it does not violate someone else’s right – that is, justify an action on socio-economic terms, or in the interests of “the good of the people” is immoral (see the deeply flawed Utilitarianism, which seems to dictate much of American foreign policy). It is also fundamentally different from “do to others what you would like to be done to you” (the Golden Rule), for, as stated nicely by George Bernard Shaw and quoted in the criticism section in the Wikipedia article, “The golden rule is that there are no golden rules … Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.” Lastly, what is nice about the UDoHR is that it provides us some clear text to point at and quote from, as one would quote from a religious text.
What is clear from the video is that the protesters seem to be angry about some lack of respect for their particular moral norms (by Lars Viks specifically, and by Western Society in general). To show these images or videos seems to affect them as, for instance, an atheists being shown the video of Lars Viks being attacked by a group of Muslims (!) – that is, my reaction of moral outrage is because I see them attacking something that is normal, just, and right to me: the discussion and presentation of art and politico-religious satire within an academic context. This is where a point is drawn about what is just (in the sense of justice) and where religion though and institutions begin the threaten the liberties of individuals. In other words, when one group of people start to attack another group of people on the basis of religious morality (rather then human rights), religion breaches its boundaries and threatens, basically, everything (in the sense that “religion poisons everything”, as Christopher Hitchens puts it ).
The angry protester’s reaction then is framed as one that challenges another norm that is held as a pinnacle: that of freedom of expression. Article 19 of the Universal Declaration for Human Rights declares that, “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” The protester’s violent attack and violation of norms within a university setting certainly violate that right. The protester go on to violate their right, and other’s participants right to peaceful assembly – Article 20 “(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.” They take the right away of Lars Vilks to speak, and for others to listen, and even from themselves.
This outrages me: someone (Muslim protesters) has violated someone’s rights. Violation of rights are not just- they are immoral and not in line with my view of “the good life”. If someone’s rights can be violated by this group (Muslim protesters), then one day they might come and violate my rights. And I need my rights to do the right thing by people.
Response: A Picture of Muhammad
Article 18 states that, “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.” But religion cannot be used to violate people’s rights.
Exercising my right to freedom of expression I give you a picture of the Prophet Muhammad. I drew this picture to portrait Muhammad just standing there. I don’t seek to mock the “prophet” by drawing him as an animal or something offensive.
I recently had the opportunity to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. Meru with my friend Anne and his dad. For Kilimanjaro, we hiked the Machame route, know also as the Whisky route. The hike took six days, and we successfully reached the summit! I want to share some thoughts about the experience here with regards to equipment, the mountains, Tanzania and human matters. However, before I get to that, I thought of some general rules for climbing Kilimanjaro.
Three General Rules
Don’t skimp on equipment: buying cheap equipment will likely come back and bite you hard. Equipment is intended to keep you alive, so if you value your health, then get good equipment (see my equipment list below).
The mountain will try to kill you: ok, this is a little over dramatic, but if you pretend it is, you will have much more fun. The mountain does, in fact, kill a lot of people per year. According to Wikipedia, nearly 35 people die on average on the mountain per annum (around 15 tourist, 20 porters).
Always carry your wet weather gear with your because nothing dries on the mountain: Kili is a massive mountain surrounded by tropical rainforest. It creates it’s own weather system, which is extremely unpredictable. Expect rain, snow, high winds and blistering hot sun – all in one day! Despite all the crazy weather, there is a general pattern however: nights and mornings are usually clear and quite cold, particularly the higher you get. As the day heats up, the forests below releases moisture and soon you will find yourself in cloud. By mid afternoon it will likely be raining. When it rains, you need to have your wet weather gear handy. Don’t be an idiot and leave it in your backpack, as it is unlikely you will see your porter throughout the day. You and your equipment will get wet. But how wet you get is up to you. If you don’t protect your backpack and your sleeping bag gets wet, you risk pneumonia or worst. If your boots get wet, you risk blisters and infection. Also, you need to be prepared to drink 3-4 of water liters a day to keep hydrated. And, on the final ascend, protect your water from the cold (which can be extreme, we had at least -10c to -15c). If exposed, your water will freeze or you will end up drinking extremely cold water, which will cool your body temperature and make you feel unwell.
“Polé Polé,” is the key: Polé Polémeans something like “slowly slowly”, which is the key to getting up the mountain (but seems to be a way of life in Tanzania). If you go too quickly, you will quickly be overcome with altitude sickness and you’ll find yourself with you head between your legs vomiting up your lunch and with a massive altitude headache. Not nice. Quite a few keen hikers found themselves in this predicament and promptly had to turn back. Also, don’t let anyone rush you. Go at your own pace, particularly as you get closer to the summit. People experience hallucinations as they get closer to 5000 meters. One of the groups we were with started seeing hands on their shoulders and the felling they were being followed by people that were not there… perhaps Kili is haunted by the hundreds of people that have died there over the years; Alas, as an atheist, I’m not allowed to believe in such things
Don’t be an asshole, your are there as a team. Porters are not your slaves! Just because you pay the tour company to provide you with porters, it does not mean you should not help them carry things. Remember, porters get paid to what basically amounts to less then US$5 per days. The first day is the hardest for everyone, so do everyone a favor and carry your own pack up the mountain. If you see a porter struggling to carry food, then help them! don’t just stand there like an asshole saying “oh! they should not carry so much stuff! that is really sad.” If it starts raining, don’t be an asshole and just stand there while the porters get wet. Help them put up the tent. Help them with the dishes. Help them with whatever you can. And give them a good tip (see end of this post for tipping info)
What we paid
We went with a company called Victoria Tours. The team they assigned to use were ok for Mt. Meru and excellent for Kilimanjaro. More on that later. We paid US$4000 for both walks for 3 people, excluding tips for porters and guides (which totaled around 10%). The money also paid for 3 nights accommodation at a 1 star hotel (they cost about TZ$15,000 per night). We stayed at the Mt. Meru House, where Victoria Tour’s office is located.
Mt. Meru
Mt Meru
I strongly recommend you hike Mt. Meru before you hike Kilimanjaro.
Not only is Mt. Meru more challenging than kili, it also offers a great opportunity to see wildlife (particularly on day 1 – we saw all the usual suspects: giraffes, zebra, buffalo, gnus, baboons, etc. which you don’t see on Kili), get fit and acclimatized, and provides some amazing views of Kilimanjaro, which just makes you want to climb it more.
Equipment for Kilimanjaro
Prior to going on the trip, I spent a lot of time trying to find the appropriate equipment to take. I spent nearly 1000 Euros (AU$2000) on new equipment, which complimented some old equipment I had. If you are considering getting into hiking, you probably need close to 2000 Euros worth of equipment (see list below). Yes! hiking equipment is expensive, but there is a good reason for that: it’s purpose is to keep you alive in extreme conditions. This is not so relevant on Kilimajaro, where you are usually hiking with a lot of people; but more so if you are planning to hike at other locations alone (as I sometimes like to do).
If you intend to climb Kilimanjaro, tour companies will tell you that they will provide you with the equipment you need. DON’T USE THEIR EQUIPMENT, IT’S MOSTLY CRAP! You SHOULD take your own equipment. The equipment that the companies in Tanzania have are mostly unsuitable for Kilimanjaro and will likely fail you. By fail, I mean, for instance, that any water proof jacket they give you will not be water proof or the tent they give you will leak, etc.
Equipment (MUST take, and by MUST I mean MUST in the RFC2119 sense!)
day pack (~20-35 liter backpack)
Plastic (or synthetic) pack cover for day pack and for backpack.
1 short sleeves shirt (quick drying synthetic material, no cotton – you will wear this for 3 days!)
1 long sleeves shirt (quick drying synthetic material, no cotton – you will wear this for 3 days!)
4-6 pairs of good quality hiking socks
1 t-shirt (spare, cotton ok)
1 pair of hiking boots (waterproof/goretex)
1 pair of sneakers (or sandals)
1 pair of warm heavy weight gloves/mittens
1 pair of gaiters
1 pair of light weight gloves (inner gloves)
1 pair of cycling gloves
1 bandana (good for first day, and when it gets hot)
1 wide brim hat
1 pair of sunglasses
1 balaclava
1 wool hat
1 warm scarf
2 x 1.5 litres water bottles or camel bag (4 liters)
1 head lamp (plus spare batteries & bulb)
1 pair of walking poles
1 pocket swiss army knife (or better)
1 travel pillow (optional)
1 small first aid kit (it is unlikely that your guide will carry a first aid kit)
1 toiletries bag (what to put in it is below!)
3 Large black garbage bags
8 small plastic bags
In toiletries bag you MUST bring:
antibacterial soap
antiseptic cream
deodorant (roll on)
sunscreen (35+, but 50+ preferred as you get burned really easily at high altitude)
anti-fungal talc powder (for feet and to stop any crotch-rot)
12 imodium tables (Liperamide HCI BP 2mg) – diarrhea pills
Malaria pills
Moleskin (or some kind of blister protection)
Insect repellent (only for first day)
Leukoplast – Natural rubber adhesive medical tape (2.5cm x 5meters)
toothpaste/toothbrush/dental floss
water purification tablets
antibiotics (if you have trouble getting them from your GP, just get ‘em in Tanzania at any pharmacy; they are happy to sell you anything there! )
40 panadol/aspirin/ibuprofen (even if you don’t need them, there is always someone who does!)
Equipment you MAY want to bring
Tent (4 season): We had a tent from the company. It leaked and generally sucked. Don’t go bringing a 5Kg, 10 person tent! get a light tent that weights no more than 2 kilos!
Purely Optional
mobile phone – There is reception on the whole mountain. Txt your love ones and let them know your progress and that you are OK.
mp3 player – loaded with music and audio books: like all hiking, it is a good time to do some soul searching and pondering while listening to your favorite tunes. It’s also a great time to get in some reading. My favorite book to listen to on walks is Neil Stepherson’s Snowcrash. The book made new sense to me in Tanzania: where the rules of the society and commerce are governed by monetary corruption and turbo capitalism, which has led to widespread poverty as a result of IMF/World bank imposed deregulation and the selling off of state assets to foreign interests. Essentially, Tanzania has no industry so the general economy seems to be made of up of people just selling little bits of food, clothing, and daily necessities to each other. In a lot of ways,
gps – always fun to know how high you are, especially if you don’t take drugs.
Some useful suggestions for when you are hiking
Wear two pairs of socks all the time: this will stop you from getting blisters.
Always wear pants: shorts suck.
Always wear your gaiters: this will stop little stones and sticks getting into your boots. It will also protect your if it suddenly starts to rain or snow.
Clean your water bottles every few days as they may become septic (you will know this because they will smell bad). If bottles become septic, it’s your fault. Don’t blame your porters. Your mouth is full of bacteria and other nasty stuff, which, if you are not careful, will contaminate your bottle and can make you sick.
Tipping on the walks
Tip 10% of what your group paid. But at the same time, if you can, give a little more. Unemployment rate in Tanzania is over 60%. In the areas that supply the porters it can be as high as 80% unemployment. Remember, these poor dudes get about US$5 a day to carry all your shit up the mountain. That’s what most westerners on the mountain make in like 20 minutes of work per day. The least you can do is honestly ask your self, “how much would they have to pay me to carry my own stuff up the mountain?”. Ask yourself that on the last day, when you are up above 4000 meters and then you will get a sense of how hard-core being a porter or a guide is.
Having mentioned tipping, I really hate tipping. I think that Tanzanian companies should just include the tip into the price and standardize their prices and compete on features, etc. I think the whole way Tanzania’s do business is really fucking backwards and really fucking stupid (I have no kinder words for it). All the bullshit about not having standardized prices reinforces the corruption in the society. All the bargaining for everything is an absolute waste of time and seem to be motivated by infantile greed. I’m sure it can be shown to be universally detrimental to the economy as a whole.
A while a go (September 2007), I asked some sales guy from Microsoft what the penetration rate of Siverlight was compared to Flash. I asked him in front of a large audience (a) because I was really interested, and (b) because I felt like being a bit of a smart-ass as I guessed it would be really really low. The sales guy seemed quite unimpressed by my question and refused to give me a straight answer, but he had promised to give away a Microsoft prize for each question (I got a crappy ugly Silverlight hoodie, which I promptly returned to one of their marketing chicks).
Anyway, I just read an article that stated MS has released Silverlight 2 beta and that people are installing Silverlight,
And over the last several months Microsoft has seen an increase in the number of Silverlight downloads, Guthrie said, and users have been downloading Silverlight to the tune of 1.5 million downloads a day… In comparison, however, in a recent interview with Adobe Systems’ chief technology officer, Kevin Lynch, Lynch said Adobe’s Flash is downloaded up to 12 million times a day
I’m still unsure as to what percentage of browsers now run Silverlight, but does not yet seem to be making as much of an impact as good ol’ Flash.
Now, IE8 will show pages requesting “Standards” mode in IE8’s Standards mode. Developers who want their pages shown using IE8’s “IE7 Standards mode” will need to request that explicitly (using the http header/meta tag approach described here).
That’s great news. However, the fact that they are keeping the meta switch is a bit disappointing. They should really dump that altogether.
While I was in Boston for the TPAC, I bought myself an IPod touch and a Nokia N95. The first thing I did when I got my iPod was to jail break it. I have to say, the iPod touch is simply awesome… however, I wont go into a rant because I don’t want to expose myself too much as an Apple fanboy:) The first thing that struck me as I was navigating the list of apps to install on the jail broken iPhone was the availability of the Apache Web Server and PHP. When I saw that, I instantly thought “OMG! this changes everything: I am a server!”. Sure enough, I installed them and they worked. I got my friends from Australia to log onto my IPod – very cool! It was only a few weeks later that I heard that Nokia was also going to release a phone with Apache, PHP, and MySQL (APM) which I’m keen to try out on my N95. I think this is a significant development while we wait for the standardization and eventual implementation of HTML5 (which will provide similar functionality).
Putting aside all security and privacy concerns for a minute, I think the idea of everyone now being a web server is a very exciting and disruptive innovation. Imagine a widgets ecosystem that intertwines phones and desktops and integrate ideas from social networking and the unique aspects of the mobile in a single container (widgets).
I don’t know what Nokia is going to do with their APM phones (and I am sure that Apple Iphone/IPod and Google Android will both feature web servers really soon), but here is a simple future scenario: I buy a new phone with the APM capability. When I connect the phone to the internet, people can access the phone via its IP address (which kinda sucks, but fixable… more on this later). Pre-installed with the phone is a widget engine, which allows the user to either manually install widgets or use pre-installed widgets. The widget engine provides an admin interface, accessible only via, say, “http://widgetengine/” or something, which allows me to add/customize/remove widgets. Widgets in this contexts are little PHP apps, packaged to conform with the widgets 1.0 spec. Lets says the default widget that ships with the phone is a Nokia-build one that shows some info about the phone, and generates a photo gallery of the pictures stored on the device. Although impressive, is not really of much use to me because everyone I care about is on Facebook ( or some OpenSocial network).
Given that the phone has a widget engine that runs on top of the server, a developer could create a Facebook widget that gathers all the phone numbers and details from my facebook friends list and packages them into a widgets. When the widget is installed, all those phone numbers and details get stored into the MySQL database. I can then ask the widget to either SMS or simply message, via Facebook, all the preferred contacts to let them know that my phone server is up. Better still, the widget, via PHP, can monitor the phone to see when it is assigned an IP address, and automatically connect to Facebook to let my contacts know that I am online. From there, my contacts can check out, for example, photos that I have just taken on my phone or other things the widget may allow viewers to do.
The things that I would want to share as a user (my profile: things that define me publicly as an individual and associate me as part of a group) and some simple app ideas:
My location (exact (gps) or derived (eg. brisbane) or abstract (eg. the office))
Apps: Where am I now? Where I’ve been (recently, travelling, etc)? What exercise path did I take (and times, calories burnt)?
My pictures (sortable, in sets, searchable)
Apps: my picture gallery; my picture gallery and with pictures taken from similar location (eg. mix locally stored pictures with flickr)
My music (what I’ve got on my device, what I am listening to right now)
App: my music and music people around me are listening to?
My details (maybe my social wants and needs. link to my blog online)
App: a dating widget? Syndication of my blog combined with my locally stored pictures?
The effect of these apps is very interesting because it means that I can bypass services such as flickr, or I can integrate both flickr and my phone. I can also merge the means of communication with my contacts, via SMS or the web.
These applications require additional infrastructure to connect me to other users:
Global peer-to-peer infrastructure: when my phone connects to the internet, I want my contacts to know about it!
Local peer-to-peer infrastructure: when my phone connects to the internet in this place, let those near me know: eg, for playing location-based games, or other multiplayer games; or, for example, for letting people know at this place that I’ve arrived.
This also requires a place where phone widgets are distributed by developers and scrutinized by the community for security and quality.
The future looks pretty nice if AMP enabled phones and services take off…. and if the security and privacy issues are handled with care.
This New York Times article seems to suggest that Google has the potential to threaten Microsoft’s software reign by undermining it in the “cloud computing” space (web apps). Although the numbers don’t add up (yet), Google has the potential to steal a significant part of Microsoft’s market share in the Office space in the future by creating great web-based software. This will eventually weaken Microsoft’s because of its inability to adapt/compete due to its archaic software development/release cycle. If Microsoft implements HTML5 in all its awesomeness, will it leave itself more vulnerable to companies developing software for the web? Or, as the dominant browser vendor, will Microsoft be able to adapt many of it’s products to run on HTML5 before the rest of the industry can respond… I guess it depends, to some degree, on how much market share other browser vendors can steal from Internet Explorer. Hixie is right, this may just be “a good position for the industry to be in.”
The hard drive in my laptop decided it had had enough today and decided to crash (with only two days before I depart to Boston for a W3C meeting!). Luckly I was able to recover all my PhD stuff and work I had been doing today on Widgets. I’m currently in the process of reformatting my drive with Windows XP. I was able to recover almost everything using BartPE, which creates a cd-bootable stripped down version of Windows. BartPE is very useful as it allows you to map network drives. To get my data, I just copied all the stuff that I could onto one of our development servers. It took me about 2 hours, as BartPE kept crashing trying to copy files.
Tomorrow I’ll have to waste time reinstalling all my apps and testing the system to see if it is stable enough to take to the US… otherwise, it’s “off to the shop” to for a new hard-drive If all else fails, my girlfriend has offered to lend me her new MacBook which I will happily take over my PC any day :)
Update: went to get a new 160GB hard drive, but once I started reinstalling Windows the installer kept crashing with IRQL_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL (new BSoD error, which I had not seen before). Did a google search and all evidence pointed to either that the RAM or CPU was overheating. One of the IT guys here at QUT ran a memory tester and we discovered that it was infact one of the RAM chips that was fried. Sucks, as I only bought the new RAM about one week ago . Anyway, all seems semi-stable now… currently reinstalling Windows XP. I made a 40Gig partition to install Windows Vista so I can agian play with SideBar Gadgets. I previously unistalled Vista because I found it so shockingly bad to use and unstable.
Yesterday I started writing a paper for WWW2008 about widgets (and given the highly competitive nature of the WWW conferences, I doubt it will be accepted). Anyway, the conference mandates that citations conform to ACM’s referencing style (eg. smith [1] says, “bla bla”), which is not currently supported by Microsoft Word. My immediate thought was, “Right! Word’s style files are just (OO)XML so it should just be a simple matter of changing some angled brackets to create the ACM style!”. My plan was to base the ACM style on the already supported ISO 690 style, which is similar except it uses parenthesis “(1)” instead of brackets “[1]“. So I went into MS Word’s program file directory, and located the bibliographical styles. To my shock, the reference style file was an impenetrable XSLT file (7093 lines long and completely uncommented!). I spent about 20 minutes trying to work out what the hell the file was doing… but eventually I gave up . I compared ISO 690 XSLT style file to the ACM Bibtex sytle file. The bibtex style file is only around 1700 lines long, and nicely commented I might add.
Article 18 states that, “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.” But religion cannot be used to violate people’s rights.
If all else fails, my girlfriend has offered to lend me her new MacBook which I will happily take over my PC any day :)