Month: January 2003

Route-About

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date January 11, 2003

Dave is collecting links to a growing story about Blogger weblogs being blocked in mainland China. Eatonweb portal has a list of Chinese bloggers many of whom use Blogger.

From this list, the About China blogger, leylop, writes:

Proxy
Wow, I’m really excited ! Finally, I’m able to access by own blog and any other banned sites in China because of proxy service . I’ve been trying to get one for quite a whlie, but none of them worked. Now I know it’s all my fault, there’s wrong during the setting. Glad that everything is OK now 🙂

The use of proxies is a known workaround for censorship. I found this page on the use of proxies. Hopefully others will point out additional proxy workaround techniques and addresses so that we can pass these along to our Chinese compatriots.

Update

More on Chinese censorship and workarounds at P2PNet, Can China’s Net Censorship be beaten? (thanks to Openflows).

Weblogging

Suffer the little children

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date January 10, 2003

I want to refer you to two compelling, powerful essays, both related to a very difficult subject: child abuse.

The first is Tansu by Jonathon Delacour. The second, written by Loren Webster and inspired by Jonathon’s work is The Simple Hell People give other People.

Hell is for Children

They cry in the dark, so you can’t see their tears
They hide in the light, so you can’t see their fears
Forgive and forget, all the while
Love and pain become one and the same
In the eyes of a wounded child

Because Hell
Hell Is For Children
And you know that their little lives can become such a mess
Hell
Hell Is For Children
And you shouldn’t have to pay for your love with your bones and your flesh

It’s all so confusing, this brutal abusing
They blacken your eyes, and then apologize
You’re daddy’s good girl, and don’t tell mommy a thing
Be a good little boy, and you’ll get a new toy
Tell grandma you fell off the swing

Because Hell
Hell Is For Children
And you know that their little lives can become such a mess
Hell
Hell Is For Children
And you shouldn’t have to pay for your love with your bones and your flesh

No, Hell Is For Children

Pat Benatar, Hell is for children

Political

North Korea from south of the border

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date January 10, 2003

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I do not understand why we continue to focus on Iraq, whom I think we all know, deep in our hearts and minds not to be a threat, when we’re faced with situation far more chilling: North Korea’s withdrawal from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

I watched the Berlin wall come down and thought to myself at the time that I would no longer need fear the specter of nuclear war. That was such a bright and shiny, albeit naive, moment.

Chris from Emptybottle, who lives and teaches in South Korea, has written about the situation, providing a viewpoint I think is important for us to understand before we follow ‘axis of evil’ tangents

Web

Setting the stage

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date January 9, 2003

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Clay Shirky took what is basically an informal, distributed, totally loose system we’re all calling LazyWeb (because, well, we tend to like catchy terms), and formalizing the hell out of it.

He writes at O’Reilly:

However, the coordination costs of the LazyWeb as a whole are very high, and they will grow as more people try it. More people can describe features than write software, just as more people can characterize bugs than fix them. Unlike debugging, however, a LazyWeb description does not necessarily have a target application or a target group of developers. This creates significant interface problems, since maximal LazyWeb awareness would have every developer reading every description, an obvious impossibility. (Shades of Brook’s Law.)

I think the concept of LazyWeb is good, but formalizing and even centralizing it is just following the same old patterns established back when Tim Berners-Lee was a pup trying to figure out how to impress his college professors.

The LazyWeb works within weblogging not because it’s promoted by a few elite technologists, or centralized to one feed; but because we have the ability to disseminate requests and solutions at an incredible pace. This is true distributed, peer-to-peer technology and social structure in action.

We use a combination of links and popularity (Daypop), sticky strand technology (comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks), and even syndication (RSS) to connect idea creators and idea suppliers.

Ben’s idea of posting a LazyWeb request to his weblog is what works — putting a procedure into place and giving it a position within social strategies, doesn’t.

(P.S. Too bad O’Reilly doesn’t implement Trackback, so we could let Clay know we’re talking about him, and what we have to say.)

Diversity Technology

Gasp! Women…speak?

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date January 9, 2003

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Sorry, but this is all just too good and I must share:

Don’t invite only male speakers

If all your speakers are always men, women will notice and not feel welcome. Role models people can identify with are important to staying interested in a field.

Do ask women to speak

It’s surprisingly easy to find technically brilliant female computer scientists willing to come speak to your group. If you explain that you are trying to encourage women in computers, many women will be even more likely to speak at your event. Women speakers are probably the number one way to get women to come to your event. They will be able to see a role model, ask her questions about her experiences, and for a few hours at least, not feel like the only woman who’s interested in computers. Be sure that when you do invite a woman speaker that you advertise the event well, especially to women.

One woman says that she noticed her LUG paid less attention to and was ruder to women speakers. She thought it might be because the members dismissed the possibility of her knowing anything they didn’t already know. Be sure not to let this happen to your women speakers.

And the next time you go to attend a technology conference, and see that the male speakers vastly out-number the women, send an email to the conference planners, ask them what the problem is. And then you might want to shop around for a conference that doesn’t equate ‘geek’ with ‘male’.