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Thursday, June 30 2005

ACLU Ads to Fight PATRIOT Act

The ACLU is looking for you (or those of you concerned about US citizens' privacy, anyway) to vote on which of 3 ads, warning of the dangers of the PATRIOT Act, they should run in their nationwide campaign. Vote and give.

Wednesday, June 29 2005

The Rise and Fall of Serena and Venus Williams

I thought I hadn't heard much about them lately just because I don't follow sports; apparently, the Williams sisters are faring poorly in the world of professional tennis, but doing alright at starting non-sports ventures.
(Off-the-record looking) quote from their father Richard Williams:

"I never have liked tennis," he [Williams] told me, as we talked in a small hallway between Wimbledon's press room and the players' lounge. "It was the money I wanted."

Tuesday, June 28 2005

Annoying TWiki Registration Issue

If you password-protect your TWiki pages so that users must be part of a specific group to edit pages, then adding a new user to TWiki screws up your TWikiUser page; during registration, TWiki attempts to automatically add the new user to TWikiUser using the new user's username. Since it's not yet part of the required group, the attempt fails, and TWikiUser ends up with the text "No permission to read topic TWikiUsers - perhaps you need to log in?" as its newest version.
Kludgey fix: comment out the addUserToTWikiUsersTopic line in TWiki's register script. 'Twould be nice if the TWiki code made this a TWiki-admin type choice...
(TWiki looks like a nice system for maintaining documentation, and I might introduce it to some clients who aren't currently using it. If I collaborated with more people online about stuff, I might find it even more useful...)

What Would President Kerry Do?

Kerry spells out what needs to be done in Iraq in a New York Times op-ed. (via)

Thursday, June 16 2005

Note to self

When going to anything that's going to feel like a job interview, bring a pen and paper. It's the closest acceptable analogue to the computer that helps you focus thought and explore possibilities when working. (And kind of helpful in the same way the mic stand at karaoke is.)
(Also, reference this AskMe job interview answer.)

Wednesday, June 15 2005

Moving

I'm moving on Saturday. If you've got my old phone number and/or physical address, and I haven't updated you by Monday, feel free to email me about it.
(Cell phone and PO Box remain the same.)

Saving NPR and PBS

From a MoveOn email message:

"You know that email petition that keeps circulating about how Congress is slashing funding for NPR and PBS? Well, now it's actually true."

Commencement addresses

Not that either message should be accepted without criticism, but food for thought from Steve Jobs:

"When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like 'If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right.' It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?'"

"Finding yourself forced to see the gulf between what you are told about the world... and what you yourself can't help but understand about that world -- this is not always a welcome kind of vision to have. It can be burdensome and awkward and it won't always make you happy."

Sunday, June 12 2005

Winer, Wikipedia, Podcasting, History

Dave Winer on Wikipedia getting things wrong:

"The Wikipedia history of podcasting has been carefully rewritten to eliminate any mention of my work. The open approach has the same problem that the proprietary one has, it can easily be manipulated by people with an axe to grind."

Friday, June 10 2005

Technology, energy, environment, recycling

Five articles from the San Francisco Chronicle related to World Environment Day (already gone):
on solar power: "Last summer, the Western Governors' Association approved a plan -- whose co-sponsors included California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger -- to extensively develop renewable energy sources over the next two decades."
on Apple recycling iPods: "The company has been under siege from environmentalists, who say the company hasn't done enough to promote recycling of its products..."
on laptops outselling desktops in the U.S. (not really an environmental story, but I always think of computer purchases and disposal as having an environmental aspect)
on the Alameda County Computer Resource Center: "What started as a one-person operation that cannibalized computers Burgett found in Dumpsters has become a $60,000-a-month operation with 17 employees, most of them former drug addicts and convicts."
on who pays for safe computer disposal: "In California, the first funds are flowing through the state's e-waste recycling program. About $7.8 million has been collected so far, and the first funds are being distributed to the 100 authorized recyclers in the state. They get 28 cents a pound for the devices, some of which they can recondition and sell, and some of which they dismantle for parts or metals. The recyclers in turn pay 20 cents a pound to collectors who pick up trash across the state and deliver the computers and TVs."

Thursday, June 9 2005

Extreme Genealogy

More on DNA race testing:

"She is an ancient ancestor I share with one in 10 people of European extraction, particularly among those from Scandinavia and western Britain (which of course makes for an impossibly large, complex and meaningless family tree)...
"'[Looking back] three generations reveals eight great-grandparents, 10 generations exposes more than 1,000 ancestors. Each one of these individuals has contributed to your gene pool, but by studying only the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA, you reveal only two lineages: your father's father 10 times removed, and your mother's mother 10 times removed.'"

Sunday, June 5 2005

Pop and Politics: DNA Race Testing

Two short personal essays from African-American women on the possibility of getting tested to determine their racial makeup - what percentage Indo European, Sub-Saharan African, East Asian and Native American they are.

Thursday, June 2 2005

More charity...

I don't update the charity list as often as I should (and the donations don't always go out in the month listed; just trying to average 1 check a month) but it's been updated to reflect donations to: OxFam America ("Oxfam has assisted 165,000 people in Indonesia since the tsunami struck the shores of Aceh province."), the ACLU ("A federal judge has ordered the Defense Department to turn over dozens of photographs and four movies depicting detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq as part of an ongoing lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union."), Free the Slaves ("In 2001, Free the Slaves worked with other nonprofits, members of government, and representatives from the Cocoa Industry to produce the Harkin/Engel Cocoa Protocol, in which all parties involved pledged to eliminate slavery from the production of cocoa around the world."), the San Francisco Food Bank ("Nearly 150,000 people in San Francisco live with the threat of hunger..."), and Amnesty International ("Evictions [in Zimbabwe] are being carried out without notice and without court orders in a flagrant disregard for due process and the rule of law. During the forced evictions police and other members of the security forces are using excessive force -- burning homes, destroying property and beating individuals.").
Give early and give often.

Newsweek, Anonymous Sources, Deep Throat

FAIR on the Newsweek Quran toilet story: Newsweek sends story to Defense Department for comment before publishing it; Defense Department doesn't contest report-will-say-interrogators-put-Quran-in-toilet aspect; Newsweek publishes story; White House criticizes report-will-say-interrogators-put-Quran-in-toilet aspect.

ACLU: "In one 2002 summary, an FBI interrogator notes a prisoner’s allegation that guards flushed a Qur'an down the toilet." (FOIA'ed documents on detainees held overseas by U.S.)

Josh Micah Marshall on anonymous sources and Deep Throat: "The revelation of the identity of Deep Throat should throw in sharp relief again the simple truth that the most important stories almost always rely on sources who -- precisely because they are in a position to know key details -- cannot reveal their identity to the public."

And on coverage of the Deep Throat/Watergate story, much of it apparently involving interviewing members of the Nixon administration: "Nixon was a crook, as were most of his cronies. And Felt was a law man who ended up getting that all busted. As I note below, Felt's motives may not be black and white. But it's hard for me to see where any of these jokers gets off passing judgment on him."

Meetup Starts Charging

Happened a while ago, but I just found out: Meetup is starting to charge organizers for using the site. (The official announcement seems to be here.)
Meetup was pretty instrumental in helping the 2004 Dean campaign organize and charge forward, and fairly heavily used for political campaigns and groups in general. But apparently it wasn't making any (or enough) money. Like a lot of Internet and Web services: good idea, useful to a lot of people, but not a moneymaker. And, now that they're charging fees, they'll most likely lose most of their "customers."
Some groups like MoveOn.org, which had the time and money and expertise, have used their own infrastucture for organizing meetings all along. They're pretty tightly focused, though; as far as I can tell, MoveOn.org meetings only occur when their central committee chooses to gather members, without an opportunity for members to create meetings (even those that dovetail with the org's purpose) on their own.
And of course there are services/sites like evite.com, Yahoo Groups, and tribe.net that provide the same services to some degree of success, with varying degrees of ugly advertisements to view. (Up-and-comers like SocialText don't require advertising, but are not completely free, either.)
All of which is to say: Meetup.com - good idea, but few will want to pay for it, and ideally, your local tech friend should be able to set up your group with similar locally-run software.

Wednesday, June 1 2005

useit.com 10-year anniversary

Jakob Nielsen, a pretty smart guy for whom self-esteem is not a problem, celebrates the 10-year anniversary of Alertbox - 300,000 words dedicated to usability on the web. (Having been on Google's advisory board early on, he probably had a lot to do with their spare, efficient interface.)
(And, on another note, my own personal web adventures started over 10 years ago, with an announcement on April 1, 1995; started putting my site on my own domain name in December 1995.)

About this site

This is the personal web site for Edward (Ed) Piou. Consisting mainly of a blog (operational since 1999) and various photos.

Some online projects I'm working on

Politics

Charity, Non-profits...

A while ago, I decided to put my money where my mind is on a (roughly) monthly basis and give to:

Photos

Public events documented through pictures...