Fidonet lives?!

Boing Boing: FidoNET Web-interface

FidoNET, astoundingly, lives on. Allegedly there's a niche for the underlying technology in some parts of the world. From Boing-Boing:

...Back in the paleolithic era, I was hooked on Tom Jennings' amazing FidoNET system for linking message boards across dial-up BBSes...FidoNET was optimized for linking up conversations at a distance in places where long-distance calls cost a lot and didn't work so well, and that makes it ideally suited to the less-developed world, where FIDONet is still in use.

Now Jon describes the system he's built to bridge the Web into FidoNET, which you can access here...

I am so ancient I remember the pre-FIDONet era. In the really old days, when only universities were permitted net access, a handful of dial-up BBS services ruled the vastlands. Even at night it was costly to phone them, but real nerds (this was before geeks) paid for unused nighttime bandwidth on the pre-Internet packet switching networks. I think there were three such, I believe I used something called Telenet (It's still around. I'd dial in to a local Telenet node, then connect via Telenet's network to another node, then I think that node dialed a local BBS. It was all very geeky.

Once Fidonet (I don't remember it being written as FidoNET) caught on Telenet was no longer worthwhile. Many of the great BBS of the day were eclipsed by lots of small BBSs, each acting as a Fidonet node and each being a local call. I lived in Escanaba then, a small and lovely town in Michigan's upper penninsula. At first my Fidonet node was a low cost long distance call, then a local BBS took over. Fidonet had a pretty steep barrier to entrance, so the community was pretty strong -- albeit favoring technical issues. In those days I was quite keen on OS/2, so I followed that community fairly closely.

Then came the net. My MCI email address acquired an ampersand: 4867991@mcimail.com. The BBS dinosaurs dwindled and disappeared.

Or so I thought.

But it's not so. Fidonet lives on, albeit a shadow of its former self.

Who knows ... perhaps one day when the Internet becomes completely closed, and all interactions require Microsoft's networking and authentication layer, Fidonet may rise again. Stranger things have surely happened (I think).

Where can Bush find a secretary of the treasury? Slate and Salon have an answer.

Salon.com Technology | End of a hatchet woman

Slate and Salon have both covered Carly Fiorina "transition" (The word "termination" doesn't fit with a 23 million dollar severance package). I thought Slate was harsh (but fair) until I read Salon's (arguably fair) hatchet job on the "hatchet woman".

Interestingly both articles came to same conclusion. Carly, a loyal Republican and, one presumes, a major donor, will be offered the Secretary of the Treasury post in the new Bush administration:

As the Fortune article makes clear, Carly's numbers didn't work because they couldn't work, which is of course what folks like Walter Hewlett were saying three years ago. And so a once great company is a shadow of its former self, and Fiorina is out of a job. But don't cry for Carly. Given her way with numbers, there's surely a spot for her in the Bush administration. Secretary of the treasury, perhaps.

Wow. What a perfect fit. Bush can't sink much lower.

The power of the netMind: Outing another GOP fake

Salon.com News | Fake news, fake reporter

A couple of years ago a Rumsfeld project was leaked and then (supposedly) shut down. The project was to facilitate US military efforts by planting fake news stories. Of course anyone who thought it was really shut down was terminally naive. Instead the program evidently mushroomed, and, of course, became a part of a US focused initiative to advance GWB's agenda and reelection.

The silliness of the Talon/Gannon plant suggests the limitations of using pawns and exposes the fundamental philosophies of this administration:

1. The ends justify the means.
2. The public are sheep that must be guided by the wise.

The way this fraud was exposed, however, says something more interesting about the NetMind:

Gannon's star turn quickly piqued the interest of many online commentators, who wondered how an obvious Republican operative had been granted access to daily White House press briefings normally reserved for accredited journalists. Two weeks later, a swarming investigation inside the blogosphere into Gannon and Talon News had produced all sorts of damning revelations about how Talon is connected at the hip to a right-wing activist organization called GOPUSA, how its "news" staff consists largely of volunteer Republican activists with no journalism experience, how Gannon often simply rewrote GOP press releases when filing his Talon dispatches. It also uncovered embarrassing information about Gannon's past as well as his fake identity. When Gannon himself this week confirmed to the Washington Post that his name was a pseudonym, it only added to the sense of a bizarre hoax waiting to be exposed.

I first saw this type of emergent thinking when a group of interested persons working together rapidly exposed an international credit card fraud. That was before blogging, but the combination of a summary document (web) and email/usenet already allowed small slices of many disparate minds to collaborate in solving a problem.

Emergent problem solving through distributed mindslices linked by low bandwidth connections. Hmm. Reminds me of the SETI distributed processing effort, but running on wetware rather than hardware.

This is not new of course. It's as old as newspapers, but it really caught on in the early days of usenet. Web pages moved it up a level. Where will it end up?

Faughnan's Notes: Potemkin Comments

Faughnan's Notes

This blog has had a comments link for some time. I haven''t actually gotten any comments, but that was fine with me. Today, however, I received an email pointing out that the comment link doesn't actually work. Thanks Steve!

I suspect the problem is that I use an old template for this blog, so old it predates Blogger's comments infrastructure. So they've probably never worked. I ought to have tested them myself.

I'll have to change templates to get the comments working; I'll probably get to that in the next week or two. Sorry!

Update 2/10/05: I've updated the template and the comments seem to be working properly.

Search, desktop documents, Gmail, iPhoto and iTunes

I've written recently about desktop search and YDS: Faughnan's Tech: Yahoo! Desktop (X1) is the new champion.

As I noted there and elsewhere, metadata is one of the big missing pieces to desktop document management and search. Not every document I save is of equal value. Some are "five star" documents I want to find easily, others are of less value. Current file systems don't track this data for files. This data is tracked to a certain extent in Gmail (zero to 1 star), iPhoto/iTunes (5 star) and Outlook emails (3 star: low, norm, high).

I'd like my desktop OS to allow me to specify a "value rating" when I store a document, and I'd like to use that star rating as a criterion when I search and sort.

The Medlogs.com Aggregator and my readership

Medlogs.com - The News Aggregator for Medical Topics

I am a compulsive communicator. In the mid-90s I began a hobby web site, which grew over the years. About half the work that goes into that site would have been spent on notes stored on my local hard drive, so I've been able to rationalize my vice. I admit things got a bit out of hand with the international credit card scandal, but they settled down in the 2000s. Mostly the site served my needs, and it if was helpful to others that was good karma.

Then, in 2002, my brother was lost. I needed a way to let friends and family know what was going on during our fruitless search in the mountains; Blogger was a new and handy communication tool. (This was before Google bought them.) Alas, Blogger then turned from a tool into a enabler. My vice had a new dimension - blogging.

In the years that followed I began several blogs, nowadays three are active. One focuses on politics and opinion, one keeps my notes on various hardware/computer topics and one focuses on special education notes and issues. The first serves my compulsion to warn and to bloviate, the second was a handy way to store and index my personal notes for future reference, and the last was also primarily a way to keep notes -- but it might additionally become a way toserve our local special education community.

All along, I assumed no-one really read my posts. My wife likes to read the political blog (she's odder than people think) and I get thank you notes from people who've found the tech posts via Google. I figured that was the extent of my readership.

Then my colleague Jacob Reider, a family physician and academic, started medlogs with the help of David Ross. I've met Jacob only a few times over the years, but anyone who's met him knows he has an extraordinary mind -- and that he's a serious geek as well as being a most likeable person. Jacob, inexplicably, included my opinion blog in the initial feeds his software collected and published. Later I added my special education blog to the Reider/Ross aggregator; I figured that blog might actually be helpful to someone.

The Medlogs aggregator is special, and I mean that in a good way. It's fascinating reading, and the software does a great job of collecting and presenting a range of vaguely medically related postings into several themed streams. It's becoming a cross between a publishing house and a journal, and it has a seriously high Google/MSNSearch ranking.

Recently Jabob/David added a hit count to the articles they aggregate. So I can actually see who clicked on their article header to read my article. Imagine my shock when I saw 8 people had read something I wrote this morning. That's seven more people than my wife.

So I have a sort of readership. Hello! You have my condolences ...

Something to remember in Saint Paul

The New York Times > New York Region > In Barrooms, Smoking Ban Is Less Reviled

Bacck in 2002, when the City Council was weighing Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's proposal to eliminate smoking from all indoor public places, few opponents were more fiercely outspoken than James McBratney, president of the Staten Island Restaurant and Tavern Association.

He frequently ripped Mr. Bloomberg as a billionaire dictator with a prohibitionist streak that would undo small businesses like his bar and his restaurant. Visions of customers streaming to the legally smoke-filled pubs of New Jersey kept him awake at night.

Asked last week what he thought of the now two-year-old ban, Mr. McBratney sounded changed. "I have to admit," he said sheepishly, "I've seen no falloff in business in either establishment." He went on to describe what he once considered unimaginable: Customers actually seem to like it, and so does he.

In Saint Paul Mayor Kelly has been vetoing our smoking bans.

David Sheff writes of his son's addiction to methamphetamines

The New York Times > Magazine > David Sheff > My Addicted Son

A father who is not perfect writes of a father's nightmares. He ends the story on a hopeful note, but he's had experience enough to know that there are no cures, only remissions.

...Since reason and love, the forces I had come to rely on, had betrayed me, I was in uncharted territory as I sat at a corner table nervously waiting for him. Steps of Rome was deserted, other than a couple of waiters folding napkins at the bar. I ordered coffee, racking my brain for the one thing I could say that I hadn't thought of that could get through to him. Drug-and-alcohol counselors, most of them former addicts, tell fathers like me it's not our fault. They preach ''the Three C's'': ''You didn't cause it, you can't control it, and you can't cure it.'' But who among us doesn't believe that we could have done something differently that would have helped? ''It hurts so bad to think I cannot save him, protect him, keep him out of harm's way, shield him from pain,'' wrote Thomas Lynch, the undertaker, poet and essayist, about his son, a drug addict and an alcoholic. ''What good are fathers if not for these things?'' I waited until it was more than half an hour past our meeting time, recognizing the mounting, suffocating worry and also the bitterness and anger...

...Through Nick's drug addiction, I learned that parents can bear almost anything. Every time we reach a point where we feel as if we can't bear any more, we do. Things had descended in a way that I never could have imagined, and I shocked myself with my ability to rationalize and tolerate things that were once unthinkable. He's just experimenting. Going through a stage. It's only marijuana. He gets high only on weekends. At least he's not using heroin. He would never resort to needles. At least he's alive....

I'm reasonably sure I'll face some of what David Sheff has seen with at least one of my children. I can only hope it won't be as bad. That thought makes every moment I have with them now even more precious. I am no libertarian; to give my children a better chance of surviving this I would surrender some of my freedoms, and some of yours too.

The Onion predicts the future of Google - offsite backup

The Onion | Infograph

The Onion has a gem amongst a minor satire of Google: "Finally get around to making back-up disks of everything."

I recently browsed a Slashdot thread on CD-R longevity. It was quick reading -- Slashdot is a shadow of its former self. One theme did emerge -- the posters, a tech savvy bunch, were struggling with backup.

Imagine then, how well 97% of the population does with backup, particularly with digital photos. No wonder the best advice given to most digital photo hobbyists is to print what they like. Odds are, somewhere in the next twenty years, some digital accident will obliterate the rest. (My favorite -- get mixed up in some migration and accidentally delete a photo collection.)

The public needs invisible offsite backup. Google has the expertise and infrastructure to provide offsite backup for the world. They have the engineers to build the UI. They have the money to buy or lease the patents. What they lack is a public willing to pay $25/GB/year for the service. I'd pay the $300 or so I need, but few others would. Yet. After enough have lost their most beloved images, they may be willing to pay.

The power of identifiers and the end of privacy

AdCritic Interactive - ACLU

This is a wonderful little video. Pizza Palace takes an order, but they've moved a bit beyond Caller-ID. Using the new national ID, they link to a wide variety of databases covering health, Library, travel, shopping, crime and finance.

It's nothing new, but it's very well done. I don't see how we'll avoid this 'transparent world'.

The Darwinian Interlude: A digression by Freeman Dyson

The Darwinian Interlude

Freeman must be about 200 years old. So now he's only five times as smart as the rest of us. Here he has a brief essay that connects an old idea, that humans are post-Darwinian (in 9th grade I wrote an essay on how to resolve pre-gene engineering issues with being post-Darwinian -- I suggested inter-ethnic marriages as a stopgap maneuver), with a newer hypothesis that pre-bacterial "life" was also non-Darwinian (pre-Darwinian). Hence the Darwinian interlude. A clever metaphor.

The literature of the fantastic - out of the dark ages

In Which It Is Shown That All Human Things Are But A Dream | Metafilter

Metafilter has a link filled post featuring the "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili", a novel of the fantastic thought to have been published in 1499. When I read things like this, I wonder too about what has not survived. One wonders what this author would make of our world. From one of the links:

The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, with its unpronounceable title, indecipherable text, and unidentifiable author, is one of the most puzzling, enigmatic and fascinating books ever conceived. Since its publication (1499), it has surprised its readers with its vast knowledge of architecture and landscape and garden design, but also engineering, painting and sculpture. Part fictional narrative, and part scholarly treatise, the book is, in addition, an extreme expression of erotic furore, aimed at everything, especially architecture, that the protagonist Poliphilo encounters in his quest for his beloved Polia, whose name translated from the Greek as meaning "many things." The book is also a political manifesto defending the right of women to express their own sexuality and the superiority of Eros, beauty and knowledge over aggression and war. Liane Lefaivre, in her Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, is the first to attribute this strange, dreamlike manifesto in defense of humanism to Leon Battista Albert.

The power of open source and collaboration: spam from hell

Spammers' New Strategy (washingtonpost.com)

The new method of attack reflects the evolving sophistication and efficiency of top spamming groups, a community of people who support each other by trading intelligence, products and services.

Spammers are refining and extending the collaborative environments of the open source community. They are now masters at using the internet to share and develop techniques. They behave very much like "strategies in a game"; where the game follows the rules of natural selection and adaptation.

An individual spammer is a feeble thing. A community of collaborating spammers is a terrible weapon of great intelligence.

Hive mind. Market economy.

Fascinating.

Did you think you understood Abu Ghraib? Another part of the story.

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: Triage at Abu Ghraib

As I wrote ages ago, an idiot could write a play set in Abu Ghraib. A playwright should write a story for the ages.

In the meantime, two researchers write in the New York Times about an Abu Ghraib inquiry they conducted for NEJM. The bottom line: A general should take the heat. Ideally Rumsfeld should, but that's only in an alternate reality. (For the uninitiated, running out of chest tubes is a bad sign. These are used when someone's has an open chest wound, often from a sharp object.)

... During an inquiry we conducted for The New England Journal of Medicine, the doctor, Maj. David Auch, told us that some of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib were psychotic and out of control. One, he said, would repeatedly strip off his clothes and smash his head against the wall. After handcuffs and a helmet failed to stop him and with straitjackets unavailable, some soldiers suggested the leash. Major Auch granted their request. "My concern was whatever it took to keep him from getting hurt," he said.

It is easy to criticize Major Auch for allowing M.P.'s to use a leash, but it is difficult to say what he should have done instead. He had antipsychotic drugs on hand but no psychiatrists to prescribe them, and he lacked the experience to give these powerful drugs himself.

So the leashed detainee went untreated, as did hundreds of others with mental disorders. The lone psychologist who accompanied Major Auch, First Lt. Joseph Wehrman, was troubled by what he found on their weekly visits. Up to 5 percent of the detainee population (which averaged 2,000 in late 2003 and early 2004) was mentally ill, Lieutenant Wehrman told us, but to his knowledge, none of the prisoners received medication.

The atmosphere at Abu Ghraib hardly promoted sanity. Mortar shells landed almost daily, according to military personnel we interviewed, and prisoners often rioted, sometimes using smuggled weapons, with deadly effect. In late 2003, Major Auch's unit set up a field hospital, bringing a full-time medical presence to the prison for the first time. For the dozen or so clinicians assigned to the hospital, the daily routine was surreal.

At times the hospital lacked basic supplies, according to members of the clinical staff, and at times it maintained a surgical service without surgeons. Sometimes the hospital ran out of chest tubes, intravenous fluids or medicines. Medical staff members improvised, taking tubes from patients when they died and reusing them, without sterilization.

Physician's assistants and general practitioners amputated limbs, a dentist did heart surgery, and Major Auch begged and bartered with other medical units for drugs and intravenous fluids. When they ran out of blood sugar test strips for Abu Ghraib's many diabetics, according to a medic assigned to the unit, they gave insulin by guessing the dose and watching for bad reactions.

Amid murderous shortages, there were paradoxes of plenty. Major Auch's men received sophisticated equipment like digital X-ray machines, several said, but they weren't taught how to use it. And in fact, a psychiatrist was assigned to Abu Ghraib for a few months. But he treated no patients; that wasn't his job. He was supposed to help military intelligence make interrogation plans....

...But we are not inclined to blame Major Auch. The men and women who risked their lives to care for Iraqis and Americans alike were put in impossible circumstances by indifference or worse from above.

... at Abu Ghraib, the Army all but abdicated its responsibility to provide care to the thousands of people it kept in custody. This neglect bred dire conditions and desperate measures.

The catastrophic failings of medical care at Abu Ghraib put American lives at risk and violated the United States' obligations to care decently for detainees. The soldiers who snapped and posed for the photos of abuse are being called to account. But the focus on their culpability diverts attention from the causal relationship between the Pentagon's priorities and the hellish conditions that both prisoners and their captors endured. This larger story, of conditions that ensured neglect and invited cruelty, is being ignored.

Fame of a peculiar sort for an amateur reviewer

Mac Mini: The Emperor's New Computer

Update: This is indeed a parody. I think the author was a bit too subtle, but it is arguably a work of genius. I live in St. Paul, so Garrison could be my neighbor -- though since Garrison Keilor is a famous figure here I wonder if his "pseudonym" is a pseudonym as well. As noted in Macintouch:

I had an inkling I'd heard of "Jorge Lopez, MCSE" before. I recalled a similar article creating quite a stir in the Linux community about a year ago. And here it is: "Windows vs. Linux on the Server and the Desktop" from October 2003.

The divisiontwo.com site is the home of quite a bit of edgy social and political satire. Though the "columns" are attributed to several people (with photos!), it's apparently all written by one Garrison Netzel of St. Paul, MN. Netzel is to be congratulated -- he's even managed to get a fawning review of WindowsXP by "Jorge Lopez, MCSE" published in a couple of computer club magazines in Florida!

I'll let my original comments stand. Yes, I was taken in!

---

Jorge Lopez has written a review essay exposing the shocking truth about the Mac Mini -- it doesn't have a 5.25" drive bay. Also, it can't run Norton AV and Ad-Aware. And since Safari doesn't render MSN as expected, it's not standards compliant.

I really thought this was a parody, but it looks quite sincere. Yes, he's also getting millions of links and buckets of emails, but the absence of Google AdWords suggests there's no method to his madness. The review is more than just conventionally bad, it has the same peculiar fascination as those "write like Hemmingway" essays. Awful yes, but artfully awful.

Perhaps, given the volume of such reviews (see mine for example), this is the inverse of a horde of monkeys tapping out literature. Among tens of thousands of amateur reviews, a small number will go beyond being silly to being awful yet fascinating. (Ok, so John Dvorak has been doing this professionally for over twenty years ...)

Anyway, I hope Jorge doesn't take this too seriously. He is transiently famous and it would be good if he can laugh about it. It's something he can tell his kids about.

On the other hand the fact that Jorge has bought and tested a Mac Mini does suggest the darned machine might be some kind of a breakthrough. Maybe Jobs will decide to fix Apple's $#! bundled iPhoto 5 app ....