Archive for April, 2004
In an earlier post - More Robot Stories - I expressed concern about how the rapid pace of development in robotics could lead to widespread unemployment and a massive disruption of the economy. It looks like I’m not the only one thinking along those lines. Marshall Brain has written a series of essays on the topic. He outlines the nature of the challenge in Robotic Nation, and then describes other aspects of it, along with an idea for a solution in Robotic Freedom. This guy is a technologist and a successful entrepreneur, so these are not the writings of a Luddite or a socialist. He has a number of related essays, and I haven’t read them all yet, but the two I’ve linked to are well worth reading.
I’ve begun work on a daunting task: the Mike Toppa Archiving Project. I have many shoeboxes full of floppy disks: Commodore 64 5 1/4″ disks, old PC 3 1/2″ disks, Zip disks, and a few Mac disks. These contain research papers, correspondence, software (including programs I’ve written), games, and lots of data. With my current PC, I obviously can’t access the C64 disks, and I can’t read about half the data on my old PC and Mac disks due to file format incompatibilities. For current versions of MS Office, Microsoft no longer provides filters for my old Ami Pro (word processor) and Quattro Pro (spreadsheet) files.
Aging computer files are actually a very serious, worldwide problem, as described in this excellent Technology Review article: Data Extinction. “The layman’s view is that digital information is more secure, when in fact it’s far more ephemeral…We know how to keep paper intact for hundreds of years. But digital information is all in code. Without access to that code, it’s lost…more and more of what matters to us is digitally produced, and we can’t guarantee that any of it will be usable 100, or 10, or even five years from now.” The article describes four possible solutions (see the table at the bottom of the article) but the only one that’s practical for your average person is “migration,” so that’s what I’m doing.
I mentioned in an earlier post that I got may hands on a newly developed network card and a web server for my C64. I spent some time this weekend trying to get it talking to my home network, but haven’t succeeded yet. Once I do, I can transfer C64 disk images through its web server, onto my PC. At that point, there’s a PC program I can use that will extract files from the disk images. My primary goal is to get at text I’ve written (mainly letters and research papers - I used my C64 all the way through 1992). The C64 used a variation of ASCII, so I should be able to extract the majority of the text. It would take forever to migrate the hundreds of games that I have, and others have already migrated most of the old games anyway, so I don’t think I’ll bother (you can download C64 games to your PC from various sites and then run them with C64 emulator software).
For my old PC files, I still have the install disks for the old software that can read them. But I don’t want to pollute my PC with those programs (since they’re Windows 3.1 programs, I doubt they’d uninstall properly). Maria’s old laptop is overdue for a full re-install of the OS, so before doing that, I’ve installed my old versions of Ami Pro and Quattro Pro there. I’m converting everything to rtf and csv format, which I’m hoping are generic enough to keep them compatible with whatever kind of software we’re all using 10 years from now.
The last step is to put everything on CD-Rs. I’ll go from 5 shoeboxes of floppy disks to probably less than a dozen CDs. Of course the problem there is - despite claims that they’ll last 100 years - you can actually end up with unreadable disks in as little as two years. See The Myth Of The 100-Year CD-Rom. So I guess I’ll just have to regularly make copies of them until something more durable comes along.
Wish me luck!
Yesterday Kai was on his sit n’ spin, and he called it his “spit n’ sin.” I tried to correct him, but he insisted his pronounciation was the correct one.
We have started calling him “delay fish” (it’s an obscure quote from Finding Nemo - I wouldn’t expect you to recognize it unless you have a toddler who’s made you watch that movie 5,000 times). He’s become very good at prolonging his bedtime routine, so as to stay up as late as possible. Last night, after he was already in bed and had exhausted his usual options (I need to pee again, I need another hug, etc.) he actually offered to get up and clean his room. We declined the offer. He’s getting very good at probing for our weak spots, and that attempt was a clever one (I know he was thinking “they can’t possibly turn this one down!”), but it didn’t quite work.
He’s actually become a much better sleeper than he used to be. He’s now averaging somewhere between 0 and 1 wakeups/night. That’s a huge improvement over his 3-6 average while we were in CA. All of us hardly got any sleep for his first two years (Maria and I were quite often stumbling around like zombies during that time), but since moving to PA he’s settled into a decent routine, and we’re all finally getting some sleep 
We are living in some bizarre, alternate universe. That’s my only explanation for the fact that I agree with Pat Buchanan in his latest column. In general I don’t share his isolationist sentiments, but I draw the same conclusions as he does about how flimsy Bush’s explanations are for what we’re doing in Iraq.
Update: I ended up abandoning this project, because of lack of time, and the rise of the excellent pho-king site.
In an earlier post I mentioned a new site I’m working on - phonatic.org. My goal is to make it THE pho destination site on the web (pho is Vietnamese beef noodle soup). One thing going for it already is that there’s no competition (if you Google “pho” you won’t find much beyond individual restaurant sites and recipes). The main feature will be restaurant reviews. For the traveller seeking pho, the site will be a godsend, as there are few things that are more satisfying than a good bowl of pho, and few things more disappointing than a bad one. I’m hoping that the content will be community driven, so I won’t have to do much beyond admin once the site is up and running.
I’ve been building the site with TikiWiki, but it’s been an exercise in frustration, so I’m going to try something else. I started with TikiWiki because I was unfamiliar with CMS (content management systems) and TikiWiki was the first one I came across. I was dazzled by the massive feature set. But TikiWiki is just big and ugly. The installation requires installing the files for all the features, even if you only want to use a fraction of them - it can really eat into your disk quota. The admin screens are a maze, and it takes a lot of effort to become familiar with where all the controls are. Many of the included themes don’t really work (bad css), and it’s fairly opaque in terms of understanding the modularity (i.e. figuring out how to customize anything involves a lot of hacking). Even with the nicer themes, it also just doesn’t look very good.
So I’ve been exploring some other options. I was on the verge of installing PHP Nuke, but then I found XOOPS. XOOPS looks like it’s very lean and modular. It appears to have a slower development cycle than PHP Nuke, which is a good thing (with only a handful of new versions of the core each year, module developers have a more stable environment to work in). Also, it seems to have a smaller and more professional community of developers - there aren’t a bazillion maybe-it-works-maybe-it-doesn’t add-on modules, and from what I can see the add-ons they do have are fairly stable. Lastly, it looks like someone already developed a “reviews” module, which may save me some work (XOOPS, like most CMS systems, comes with a built-in news/articles module, but that doesn’t quite provide everything you need for doing something like restaurant reviews).
If anyone reading this knows a thing or two about any other good CMS options, feedback is appreciated, Thanks.
We had beautiful weather this weekend, and since my Aunt Tisha was visiting from San Francisco, I just had to go out and enjoy myself. We had a fun afternoon at Fairmount Park, which is not far from downtown Philly. We took pictures, which I’ve incorporated into a new “Spring 2004″ Kai photo album - check it out! There’s some other pictures in there too. I’ll add more pictures to it as we go further into Spring.
How’s that for a headline? I’m shutting down Kai’s email account for a while. I made the mistake of providing it to United for his frequent flyer program membership, and I overlooked the pre-checked checkbox about receiving offers from “carefully screened 3rd parties.” Those 3rd parties are now sending him numerous messages every day for Viagra knock-offs, blind-date services, home refinancing offers, etc. I know United’s the culprit because:
- before I signed him up, he got absolutely no spam
- the spam started coming right after I signed him up
- I haven’t given his email address to any other organizations
- I signed myself up at the same time and started getting the same messages in my account.
It’s really quite despicable.
Hopefully if the spam bounces from his account for the next year or so, his name will come off the spam lists. He doesn’t really need an email account just yet anyway.
This is Kai’s first free-hand artwork that consists of something recognizable. These are four different renditions of “Thunderbird 1″ - a rocket from Kai’s favorite show. Unfortunately the scan did not come out very well - he drew on high quality paper, which apparently is very reflective when you scan it. But if you squint you can see the green, red, and blue ones have the nose cones on top, fiery exhaust on the bottom, and the number 1 emblazoned in various spots. The orange one didn’t quite work out - the nose cone and the fiery exhaust are both on the bottom.
And this is Kai’s first school mug shot. As in all such pictures, the subject looks a bit goofy. Yet his cuteness cannot be denied.
Yesterday I predicted that Bush’s press conference would be dull. But it wasn’t - it was painful. My heart actually went out to him - as he struggled and stammered his way through the Q&A, it was clear that he’s really just not up to these appearances. At one point he actually said, “I wish you would have given me this written question ahead of time, so I could plan for it. ” And later: “…you just put me under the spot here, and maybe I’m not as quick on my feet as I should be…”
Mr Bush: you are the President of the United States - it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a reporter will put you on the spot.
All this despite the fact this press conference was as planned out as possible. Like last time, Bush let slip that the selection of reporters to ask questions was pre-planned: at one point when several reporters were jockeying to be next, he said “I’ve got some ‘must calls,’ I’m sorry.”
Beyond the stammering, his tendency to meander is breathtaking. In his answer to a question about reorganizing the FBI, he started talking about feeding hungry people in North Korea and fighting AIDS in Africa.
There were a couple statements he made that really got my attention. One was his response to the inevitable “Iraq / Vietnam quagmire comparison” question. He did of course reply to the question, but he didn’t come close to actually answering it. He said the analogy is false, implied that it was dangerous to even ask the question (it “sends the wrong message to the enemy”), that we “must stay the course,” and that “freedom is not easy to achieve.” He didn’t say the slightest thing about what actually might prevent it from devolving into a “Vietnam quagmire” scenario. Although responding to a question with vague generalities is hardly unusual for a politician, given the number of soldiers dying and being wounded every day, it’s a question that is in desperate need of a substantive answer (while the number of dead soliders is dutifully reported by the major media outlets, the staggering number of wounded and the extent of their suffering are glossed over).
The other statement that got my attention: “Even knowing what I know today about the stockpiles of weapons, I still would have called upon the world to deal with Saddam Hussein.” What? Prior to the invasion, we were hit over the head repeatedly with the Bush administration’s bedrock justification: the incontrovertible assertion that Saddam possessed WMD. There’s been a lot of evidence accumulating that this wasn’t the real motivation, but the Bush administration has stuck to the position that it was simply led astray by bad intelligence. The foregoing quotation is from the part of the press conference where he was really struggling the most for words, so I think it slipped out unintentionally. I’d call it another drop in the bucket of evidence that he was indeed obsessed with getting Saddam. He did quickly recover by going on to say that he thinks evidence for WMD will ultimately be found. But given David Kay’s exhaustive investigation and his conclusion that the weapons weren’t there and never were, Bush is just daydreaming.
This is a followup on my recent post about Bush’s press conference: I argued that, prior to the Iraq invasion, Bush was holding back on discussing what he must have known would be a tough situation in Iraq, post-Saddam. But maybe he wasn’t. Middle East History Professor Juan Cole was just interviewed on NPR, and he made the statement that the Bush administration has some bright people in it, but when it came to understanding what we’d encounter in Iraq, they were “completely ignorant.” He pointed to an interview with Paul Wolfowitz before the invasion, in which he stated we wouldn’t have trouble with the Shiites in Iraq, because Iraq didn’t have holy cities like in Saudi Arabia (!), and that the Iraqi Shiites were mostly secular (!). He also pointed out that it looks like the Bush administration chose to get much of its information from a small group of exiled Iraqis who were eager to return to Iraq and gain power. Not exactly a source for unbiased information. So maybe Bush wasn’t holding back, maybe he surrounded himself with yes-men and really did believe post-invasion Iraq would be a cakewalk.
It’s a sad state of affairs when you’re trying to determine whether your leaders are either assiduously Machiavellian, or just blinded by ideology.
