I Eat Rainbows

(To the music of Rocket Man, by Elton John. I don’t claim to be a writer, so this is licensed under the GPLv2. Feel free to use, modify, and build upon this. Maybe we can get a proper tribute out of it.)
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(Note: this is part of a series of posts where I publish the essays I have had to write for the International Baccalaureate. I might as well get some mileage from them, right? See the index page for more details.)

For some reason this essay got a C. I still haven’t figured out why, and the IB doesn’t tell you.

This essay is released under the GNU General Public License, version 2. Here is a pdf, and source follows. Read the rest of this entry »

(Note: this is part of a series of posts where I publish the essays I have had to write for the International Baccalaureate. I might as well get some mileage from them, right? See the index page for more details.)

This essay is released under the GNU General Public License, version 2. Here is a pdf, and source follows. Read the rest of this entry »

I am angry today.

I am angry because today I have seen the culmination of something I have been dogged with ever since I learned to think rationally. I am also angry because I could have seen this before, but chose to placate myself instead, thinking “Oh, it can’t be that bad.”

I am angry because of an idea.

I have seen this idea in many different guises and forms in my life, from be courteous, have manners to if you can’t say something good, don’t say anything. It’s disguises and cloaks also include being wrong is bad, don’t speak until you are certain, and don’t question authority. A common masquerade is I am older than you, and thus I know more than you, and another common one is respect other people’s beliefs. I am angry that this idea has found its way into our vernacular, and currently goes by the name of politically correct speech.

What this idea boils down to, in all its forms, is don’t make waves. Don’t rock the boat. Don’t speak your mind, you may offend. Don’t try to change anything. Stick to the status quo.

I am angry because this is a horribly wrong, destructive and retarding idea. I am angry at the number of people that I respect who have succumbed to this idea, and I am angry that they are trying to force it upon those who disagree.

I am angry that people feel that change is bad purely because it causes a difference. I am angry that we, a species that prides itself on being intelligent, still have issues with avoiding stagnation.
I am angry that, as a culture, we still haven’t gone beyond the archaic trappings and imaginary friends of religion.

I am angry that a concept such as “social proof” even exists. I am also angry that I have caught myself succumbing to it.

I am going to attempt to combat this, as much as I can. I am going to adopt the motto Being wrong is not a bad thing, but feeling something is wrong and not speaking up terribly, horribly bad.

And no, I will not close that rant tag. I will only be closing it once I feel that this issue has been addressed.

It could be a while.

Some updates to HAL and/or dbus were posted to feisty-backports yesterday. After updating my system, I tried to connect my iPod.

No can do. dmesg spouted some random error I didn’t look too closely at. I had school, so I turned off the machine and left.

Reboots do work wonders, including broken automounting, apparently, so everything is fine on that front. On the other hand, seeing about 50 bazillionty thousand new podcasts waiting for sync in Amarok started me thinking.

I use my iPod primarily for podcasts. It seems rather … useless, to me, at this stage in my life, if it does not have fresh podcasts on it. I have formulated a rule describing this, even though this scenario is not the best application of it. Someone else has probably thought of this earlier as well, and it is entirely possible that I have read this somewhere and then forgotten I’ve read it.

Here it is: For any potentially-internet-enabled device, a seamless and usable connection to said internet increases the utility of said device by orders of magnitude.

It can be followed in stages, as with my iPod. It does not have an inbuilt connection to the internet, but it is able to sync with a desktop application, which does. This is near enough to seamless that it increases the utility of my iPod my quite a bit.

(The next stage is obviously built-in Wifi, like in the iPhone.)

My cell phone would seem to have done this, at first glance. However, EDGE networks = waiting ten minutes for wikipedia to load != usable. (It’s nowhere near seamless, either, but this problem is undershadowed by the EDGE).

This can also be extended to future items. Why shouldn’t cars have an internet connection, to automatically fetch fuel prices and traffic info? Why shouldn’t my TV be internet enabled, so I can watch pirated Youtube videos directly on it? Why shouldn’t our Extended Brain Memory Plus Enhanced Interface Embedded Chips (patent pending by Microsoft) be internet connected, so as to query Google whenever the answer wasn’t found in your brain?

I listen to a podcast called Buzz Out Loud. They used to do a thing where, every day, they would have some wacky holiday that it was, and they would mention it on the show. They stopped doing that sometime ago, but they pointed us of BuzzTown to where the calendar could be found.There was a Google calendar version, so, naturally, I decided to add it to my calendar.

So I was going over my calendar today, and I noticed that the 29th of May, 2007, is End of the Middle Ages Day. This is the same day that the overly Christian school I go to will shoehorn us in a hot sweaty room with blazers on for a one-point-five hour chapel service about Jesus and Christianity and how God wants you to put his trust in him, as they do once a term.

Isn’t that ironic.

I just had an experience, which I would deem to be typical of a large subset of “the average user”.
I was reading A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection (if you haven’t read it, and will have something to do with Windows Vista in the future, even looking at a box, do so. Now.)
Guy walks up. “What’re you reading?”
I show him the title.
“Vista? Yeah, I heard about Vista. Didn’t it fail, or something?”
“What do you mean, fail? Anyway… the point is that Vista by it’s very existence deliberately cripples…”
“What do you use? Oh, I know, you use a Mac, right?”
I shake my head.
“So you use use Windows?
Head shaking repeats.
Sputter. “But what else do you use then? I mean, you have to use Windows or Mac…!”
“I use Linux.”
“Linux! That sucks! Isn’t it free? So how can it be good?”

The conversation was cut off here by circumstances out of my control (specifically, the arrival of my teacher).

This sort of people, who have either never heard of open-source or have very prejudiced ideas about it’s capability, is very common, in my informal survey.

Linux needs to reach out to these people as well, I think. Education is a large component of reaching the masses, and nothing educates better than a few well-designed clips of viral video, methinks…

And it came to pass, that on the first day after Lucifer fell from Heaven, he formed his dominion.
On the second day, he summoned one of the angels that were loyal to him. And he spake unto him thus,
Verily, I say unto thee, that God hath a plan for mankind.
And the angel replied thus,
This I know. But God hath not divulged much of it to anyone.
And then Lucifer spake in reply,
But he hath told me, that in the future, he shall bring technology onto the world.
And the angel was surprised, and asked Lucifer,
Technology, Lord? But technology is very powerful. Why does God want to give his children that much power?
And Lucifer replied thus,
This I do not know. But I shall corrupt technology. I shall dumb its power down so much, that people will say,
Why do I need technology?
And the angel marveled, and spake thus,
But that would require much power, Lord. How shalt thou do that?
And Lucifer replied,
I shall corrupt one man. And he shall create technology that is so easy to use, that many people will use his technology. But his technology will not work with other technology, so more and more people will use his technology.
And then the angel interrupted, and spake thus,
The snowball effect. A clever plan, Lord.
And Lucifer continued,
And he shall make his technology so powerless, that no-one will be able to do much. And thus I shall corrupt technology.
And thus it came to pass…
The Book of Lucifer, 1:5

That was a post on my old wlog, at http://sohumonline.tiddlyspot.com.

It’s pretty much defunct, me having ignored it for a while now.

It was my original attempt at a blog, and I kinda liked the feeling that to find a topic to blog about, all I had to do was find an uncreated page.

Ah well. It was plagued by errors, being built on the decent-for-light-usage TiddlyWiki. It had some interesting posts, which I might move here someday.

In the meantime, I really enjoyed that rant against Microsoft reposted above.

Christopher Mims posted on the Scientific American blog earlier, talking about Gates’s keynote at CES. Apparently, Microsoft’s vision is:
Everything -> Windows Media Center 2012 -> (Xbox 1080 -> TV)|Zune|Ford|Some other Microsoft product, and eventually, walls.
Everything means all content: movies, pictures, the internet, TV, games, music,…
He rightly points out that this is doable without Microsoft. However, he has an issue with the increasing amount of work people will have to do to set it up. He says that that is why

the core audience for all this stuff remains, and will continue to be, teenagers and geeks–people who either have lots of time on their hands or little else they’d rather do with it. Call me when the computer has literally disappeared into the walls instead of just becoming them; when I can engage it in a clipped, relatively sane conversation about my immediate needs, like in Star Trek or countless other sci-fi visions of the future.

I don’t agree.
I think that people will either
a) be fascinated by this new&better (TM) way of putting content in their lives.
b) be unaware/uninterested, but have it thrust upon them, and therefore will find the nearest (a)-type to do it for them.

This is somewhat similar to his vision, and very similar to what is happening today, but I believe that there will be a ceiling.
Some companies will ‘get it’ earlier than others. But eventually, they will realize that if you have a userbase, 90% of whom are dependent on other people to use your product, you do not have a happy userbase. The poster child today is Apple. There is no five-button iPod because Apple figured out the simplest way to incorporate all the functionality into four buttons.
(Well, actually, if you count the center button, there are five buttons. But since Mims seems to have ignored that, I will as well.)

This is why, eventually, they will become easier to use.
This is why, eventually, people will ‘get’ technology.
This is why, eventually, tech support calls from hell will cease.

Earlier, on Sohum’s brain

Here comes 2007. About 8 seconds left now. The noise is like a dull roar in my ears. Oh look, there are the fireworks! Ha.

And now 2007 is officially here. Funny. I don’t feel very different.

————————————————–

What is it with people and celebrating New Year? So the Earth has reached the exact point it was one year ago. You can say that for every other point in its orbit.

We celebrated the new millenium at midnight on December 31st 1999, not December 31st 2000, so that’s not right already, but how is one point in the orbit of this planet around it’s parent star, given significance by the number of appendages coming out of the major grasping limbs of one particular species living on it, any different from another?

It’s completely arbitrary.

Most of our holidays have lost whatever significance they had by random decisions. The alleged-but-probably-incorrect birthday of a guy who Douglas Adams famously described as “nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to each other for a change.” The eve of a holy day for the praising of saints; now a carved pumpkin.

Independence Days don’t make sense, now that the whole world sees itself as an entity (see the United Nations). Celebrating the day you killed Saddam Hussein (as I bet people will, in the future) is idiotic, as you’re celebrating the wilful, purposeful murder of someone who didn’t conform to your worldview.

I resolve for the New Year that I will be less cynical.

We enjoy celebrating things. It makes us feel as if something is going right. And since there is not much in the world to celebrate, we pick random things out of the air and decide they’re important.

Do we really have anything left to celebrate?