canspice.org

Remember Science Idol? If you don’t, it was a competition put on by the Union of Concerned Scientists to have cartoonists create editorial cartoons targetting the current United States administration’s efforts to quell scientific thought and debate in the US.

The winner is Jesse Springer’s entry. Congratulations to Mr. Springer! I can’t remember if this was the one I voted for (I said I’d voted for #2, but the UCS website doesn’t have them listed in voting order any more…), but it’s an excellent cartoon nonetheless.

[tags]science, politics, union of concerned scientists, editorial cartoon, jesse springer[/url]

If you weren’t able to get through to canspice.org yesterday, it’s because my hosting provider updated the operating system on the server. The upgrade went a little less smoothly than expected, but Geof plowed through the night and we were the sixth domain restored.

I want to take the opportunity to publicly thank Geof for all his efforts. Not many people would stay up until two in the morning to get stuff fixed, especially when they have to work the next day. Many thanks, Geof!

r0ml (or Robert Lefkowitz for those who don’t know him) is an entertaining speaker who tangents off often and brings in ideas and influences from outside programmers’ typical sphere of interest.

r0ml says that “software is the Trivium of the XXI century.” Rhetoric is the art of communicating through simbols & ideas about reality. Now, the language used by IT vendors in communicating with business intelligence is unclear. This means that there’s a problem with language. The problem is that we don’t know what business intelligence is. We have this habit of rubbing two words together and assert that it means something different.

We should do what the masters do: hang a word off an idea. Invent a word for an idea instead of smooshing two (or more) words together. Then r0ml had an idea: some people (maybe most people) don’t know what incunabula means. It’s the Latin word for cradle, and it refers to books published before 1501. But since nobody knows what it means, we can repurpose it into something that means something completely different.

Aha! What we need to do is find words that were perfectly good words hundreds of years ago and nobody remembers what they mean, but they sound good so we can reuse them! There are plenty of places you can go that very few people these days care about: rhetoric, illuminated manuscripts, heraldry, and fencing are great places to mine for these great words. These are “lexicon frameworks — Words On Rails.”

r0ml’s done this by taking over semasiology: if you search for it all you get is r0ml (or at least you used to — he’s number four now).

“Perl is like the Charles Dickens of the programming world. Perl is literature, of course it’s hard to read!”

r0ml’s goal is to get rid of acronyms: replace GUI with “epideictics”, which means “fit for display”.

There’s a word called “stemma”, which is the reconstruction of the set of changes of a document over time. Sound like version control?

It turns out that there’s an amazing correlation between technical terms used in the early days of publishing, especially for illuminated manuscripts, and the software world.

We need a word for open source, and r0ml modestly proposes “chrysography”, the writing in letters of gold. The alternative is “decretal”, which sounds worse and means papal decree giving an opinion on a point of law.

There’s actually a better replacement for “free as in speech”: “liberal”. “Liberal studies are called this because they render man free,” therefore open source programming should be considered a liberal art.

Of course, “liberal” has been branded these days to mean something different, but r0ml doesn’t want to hear people come to these conferences and say “there’s no English word derived from Latin that means ‘free as in speech’ but not ‘free as in beer’.” So stop saying that!

I decided to take Al’s lead and turn Friday into a fun day. Thus I’m in a talk about hacking with microcontrollers, a subject I know nothing about. I was going to go to a talk about Subversion Worst Practices, but it was pretty full…

Open Source hardware involves a bunch of things: mechanical diagrams, schematics & circuit diagrams, parts lists, layout diagrams, core/firmware, and software/API.

The Make Controller has a 32-bit ARM controller, has pen source firmware, API, and tools to play around with it. It’s not as open or cheap as the Arduino board, however.

So what are these things? Microcontroller boards are essentially computers on a chip. They have analogue and digital I/O, some memory (RAM and flash). They’re an interface to the physical world. The problems they solve are usually simple, and the code you run on them is correspondingly simple.

So how do you get started? Pick an input, first. Decide what you’re going to monitor, and this will usually dictate how you’ll be sending input to the microcontroller. You can use light sensors, tilt sensors, RFID, all sorts of different things. Then choose your output — what do you want your microcontroller to tell you. Again, there’s a wide range of possible outputs, from LEDs to motors to audio/video.

Software is fairly easy for people new to programming to set up — the tools look relatively user-friendly. You just tell hte program which pins to monitor, write a polling loop, then update the output when something changes. Watch out though when writing software to monitor inputs or write to output — sometimes it doesn’t always match the spec sheet.

You can buy all kinds of input sensors: RFID scanners, volatile compound sensors, pressure sensors. A serial-to-WiFi exists that allows you to use your microcontroller to access the internet through a telnet-level interface. There’s even a GSM module that you can hook up via a serial interface, and it has a Python interpreter on it. You can get a GPS module too. Attach it to a Bluetooth module and you can do fun things with other Bluetooth devices like cell phones.

Nat is starting the show by telling us that conference presentations will be up on the website, and video from the keynotes will be put on YouTube. I will have links for those later in the day.

The Thursday morning keynotes kick off with Philip Rosedale talking about open source code and whatnot in Second Life. He says that Second Life and the X-Prize represent two possible escapes for humanity, one is virtual and one is literally leaving the planet. He says that open source (and Second Life) allow for greater return on capabilities over time, because you’ve got a community to help you out. “We don’t set the rules of governance, we just let it do its own thing.” I think that that statement is quite incorrect; Linden Labs does have rules of governance, some of which have greatly upset the Second Life community. Using the tools available, someone’s built a Second Life client that runs within a web browser — you can’t do much with it, but you can login and check messages and whatnot.

Jimmy Wales is up now, talking about the future of search. Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the entire sum of all human knowledge. An encyclopedia was the start of this. This is continued at Wikia, which is becoming a library of human knowledge. A second major project focusses on the “free access” aspect. This should be driven by search, which currently is dominated by a number of large monolithic closed search engines. Why not do the same thing for search what Wikipedia did for the encyclopedia? This is being done at search.wikia.com. This project will be focussing on transparency - openness in how the systems and algorithms operate, collaboration - everyone who wants to contribute can contribute, quality - improve the relevancy and accuracy of search results, and privacy - “Pursuing the Holy Grail of Privacy Protection”. The unfortunately-named Grub (it’s a bootloader, dammit!) has been acquired by Wikia to help the search process.

Simon Wardley is talking about commoditization of IT. An excellent talk, he makes the point that open source is a force behind pushing the new whizzy stuff into an ubiquitous commodity, and things like patents or DRM are attempts by company to keep their products as the new whizzy stuff.

I’ll post links to the last two keynotes when they show up on the web. All I have to say is that Nat’s was excellent and James Larsson’s was informative in an insane way.