ICT

While I was at the Caribbean Internet Forum, the focus was on innovation - and one younger man brought up to innovate, funding needs to be provided. Due to the context of the conversation, it was implicit that someone had to provide the funding. I responded, saying that if you're looking for funding then you're not innovating. Two broad brushes met and disagreed, but for brevity I didn't really explain my position.

A fellow came up to me afterward - from one of the telecommunication regulation agencies - and told me he understood what I meant. In Cuba, to get something laminated, he'd seen people use two steam irons and some plastic. Innovation. Using what you have to do things that need to get done. And this is where funding agencies and philanthropists fail and, in my opinion, will continue to fail. My problem has been that I haven't explained the inductive kick that got me to my theory on failures of funding agencies and philanthropists. Watching Thomas Friedman talk about bubbles on Jon Stewart while doing some PR for his latest book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America¹, got me thinking about how to explain this all.

Since my experience with funding agencies and so forth is in the Caribbean, my examples will focus there. I've seen Caribbean initiatives die lingering deaths after funding was cut because there was no 'exit strategy' of worth - or the 'exit strategy' was not implemented. { Read more }

When I was a teenager who put technology on a pedestal for reasons best described as self-preservation, Byte Magazine was a thick hobbyist magazine that had all manner of interesting articles for a curious young mind - things that stretched the mental blocks of what was possible. One of these articles described Apple's Hypertext, something that beckoned my inner autodidact in ways that cannot be described as anything other than an odd mixture of hope, relief, and anticipation. The thought of being able to click a word and find a tangent of information was very appealing. I often read my father's engineering texts much to his consternation, and spent more time trying to find things in the Appendices than actually moving forward.

So the hypertext idea was very appealing. A click, and I could find out what the heck the word meant. Who wouldn't like that? About 10 years after the article - maybe 15 - the Internet came along, and this whole HTML thing came with it. And it was 'Oh-So-Very-Close-But-Not-Quite'. When the Internet first started off, it seemed that one could get lost in tendrils of hyperlinks. Then came the frames in HTML, but frames were and continue to be remarkably less than genius. Search Engines came along and indexed all the monstrous amounts of information and misinformation available, with Google leading the charge on how important pages are based on an algorithm described as 'Page Rank'. People tried pop up windows for a while, but the minority of spammers destroyed the majority of usefulness in what, in terms of geology, could be best described as the amount of time a Tyrannosaurus Rex took to chew it's food. { Read more }

Yesterday, having spent some time out on the land exercising the the new puppy, Tesla, I dropped him home and went to the hardware to pick up some locks. Since I was close, I stopped in at Haagen Daz outside of Gulf City - a treat for myself where I could peruse some magazines while indulging a very rare and specific Belgian Chocolate craving.

I found myself reading a Scientific American article, 'Web Science: Studying the Internet to Protect Our Future', by Nigel Shadbolt and Tim Berners-Lee. I was reading a paper magazine where, not 6 feet away, a single woman quietly tapped out her instant messages on her laptop in an odd semblance of Morse Code.

Dot. Dash. Dash. Dot. Dash. Dash. Dot. Dash. Dash.

About 3 feet away from her, about 4 young men crammed into a booth said nothing to each other while they all studied their laptops as if they had a final exam on anti-glare screens the next day.

The women who worked there, dressed in pristine white Haagen Daz uniforms, looked on and seemingly took on the role of librarians. I almost expected one to suggest I was turning the pages of the magazine too loudly, but they did not. It was quiet there, aside from the pitter-patter of little keyboards. { Read more }

My email address, which I've had for about 9 years at this point, is finally killed dead. Not dead as in someone else took it - that would be altogether unlikely - but dead as in 'my host ate it'. But they didn't really eat it. The spammers infesting my host have made my email address null and void.

I found this out after going through about 48 hours of the ISP's hiccoughs - TSTT can be stable, but has yet to make a habit of being stable. In other words, for all intents and purposes, it's unstable. When I finally found that the light at the other end of the cyberpipe was not a SysAdmin with pizza breath, I quickly downloaded emails. Within the moldy, spam laden emails I found a few treasures, and of these treasures the diamonds were some offers to review some books that looked pretty interesting. So I sent off emails to the masked publisher, saying that 'yeah, verily, I wish to read your books and write about them!'.

In response I got the emails bounced. In the world of snail mail, this isn't a 'return to sender' - rather, this was 'We don't want your stinking email because people from your zip code keep trying to sell us adult haberdashery'. I don't sell adult haberdashery. I'm not even sure what it is. Even so, the problem is that my host appears to be a spam haven at the time - which means that my host enters the blacklists of organizations who do not want Spam (how dare they!) and thus my email address is likely to be tossed out like a green thing lurking at the back of the refrigerator. { Read more }

As the story of open source licensing being upheld by copyright law bounces around the Internet, there's been quite a bit of commentary on it. Today, I came across yet another article which made a very important distinction. From How not to get sued by open source coders:

...Specifically, those policies should include a list of open source technologies in-house developers can use, a procedure for obtaining appropriate approvals for usage, and most importantly, a process for tracking the code. The latter – tracking how the code is used and modified – is often the root of the issue, said Abe, when a business wants to start selling its products.

But at the core of the court ruling, is the fact that the business had infringement on copyright – not just in breach of the license contract – by not following conditions imposed by the license agreement, like crediting the author, reference to copied files, a description of modifications to the original source, and where to find the original source...

I suppose that I've been using, writing and writing about Open Source and Free Software that I think that this is a no-brainer. That being said, it seems that at least a few organizations and companies are using open source code as Commercial Off The Shelf Software (COTS). And COTS is something that a lot of companies decide to use based on development and process tracking costs: if, for example, a company is trying to maintain a SEI level of 3 or better and they want to avoid having to track a project, they may plug in some COTS. { Read more }

Perhaps because what I do tends to be as diverse as the DNA found on the planet, I don't really fit too awfully well on LinkedIn. If there is one thing I cannot do, it is to define what I do in a subset of some logic that a social networking site is programmed for. If you held my feet to the fire, I would admit to being tenuously linked somehow to the human race. Call me a chimpanzee. I'd probably think of that as a step up from homo sapien. In my formative years, a few people made the mistake of telling me that I could do whatever I wanted. And so I have. And that doesn't fit into any career rut other than 'Writer' or 'Consultant', both of which are accepted forms of addressing anyone from street bums or the real menaces, alleged experts.

I'm a beach bum. But I don't get to the beach as often as I would like.

All of that being said, I got a message today from someone who wanted to connect on LinkedIn. I have no idea who the person is, but the word 'Recruiter' leaps out at me. And, the mandatory part of the message: "Please don't say that you don't know me..."

BAM. I don't know you. There isn't even a picture of you around so I can see a picture of someone I don't know. Why do you want to know me? Because I might have a skillset that can be pawned off to a company looking for a pawn? No, no, that won't work. I did my time in the intellectual coal mines of corporate America. I'm not better, but I've been spoiled by 8 years of doing my own thing - and somehow managing to survive and get ahead. { Read more }

Groklaw has an interesting story about a possible takeover attempt by Microsoft on the Open Document Format (ODF) standard. While I don't have the time or inclination to read and analyze all the gobbly-gook that is put out in the form of standards, Groklaw has, as usual, done a serious analysis after research. It certainly looks like the committee is stacked in Microsoft's favor, which should probably be no surprise.

Of course, to someone on the fringe of technoville, this seems a bridge too far to understand. What needs to be understood by everyone is that this is about the future of how documents are passed around and who they can be passed to. An open standard allows people to share their work more easily; a closed standard creates all manner of trouble - as Microsoft itself has exemplified.

However it works out, one has to wonder what Microsoft's interest in ODF extends to. Microsoft's interest in ODF isn't sufficient to sentence Microsoft; many people (including myself) have often pointed out that Microsoft's lack of support for standards other than it's own seems like an extension of it's monopolistic practices. Before we start arming the villagers with torches and pitchforks, we might want to consider the motive of Microsoft. Historically, Microsoft's involvement could be seen as an attempt at sabotage of the open standard since Microsoft has a tendency to do this with private companies. Will it do it with an open standard? It's hard to say, but I must admit a bit of suspicion.

Even so, if Microsoft were to see my optimistic side, I could see how Microsoft could add value to ODF - like permitting royalty free use of it's patents to assure compatibility of ODF with it's own standards. { Read more }

I came across a copy of the September 2008 issue of the Harvard Business Review a few weeks ago, and have had it in the pickup for emergency reading. I'd never read the magazine before, probably because it is almost never seen in Trinidad, so despite the exotic price of TT $149.99 (US $23) I picked it up. It's always good to read what others are writing, and reading broadly is something I do as a reflex.

Within the magazine were some interesting articles, yet the one that bothered me the most was Don't Try This Offshore (HBR Case Study and Commentary). I couldn't quite put my finger on why - the article is well written, funny and a little controversial for American businesses. I re-read it, as well as the commentary, and re-read it again. I thought about it for days. Then it struck me: the premise of the article is what disturbed me.

To summarize the article in one paragraph, the article is about a fictional business in the United States - 'management-metaphor boutique Serendipity Associates (SA)' - is suddenly challenged by a competitor with a lower price tag, and that lower price tag is linked to outsourcing creative work. This comes as a surprise in the story to Serendipity Associates. And that, you see, is what I found disturbing. That people even thought in this way - that creativity is geocentric or, in the Internet era, business-centric. Is this the way that people really think? That an accident of geography or hiring creates the perfect creative business? I don't think like that, but the article's premise clearly demonstrates that at least some people think like that. { Read more }