At work we're doing a site with Chinese content (no I can't give more detail than that) and in the standard process of scoping, we checked popular (ie. http://people.com.cn) existing Chinese sites on a few browsers. Imagine my surprise that IE7 and IE8 on XP don't render Chinese characters out of the box. Perhaps you aren't surprised, you say "well sure you just need to install the language pack". To me, who only spends any quality time on IE to test, this seems... bizarre.

Now, I could be that asshole, you know, that guy, who says "I haven't had to do anything like that on Linux distros or OS X in what, like 10 years?" But I won't say that. However true it is. I'm not sure why the Chinese character set isn't available to IE by default, perhaps they were afraid of bloating XP with needless stuff. Needless billion user stuff. And I'm not saying something that has a pretty small install footprint, for free, like xubuntu is already good to go. And it's not that I don't enjoy Windows dialog boxen: "please insert the compact disk labeled windows xp professional service pack 2 CD into your CD-ROM drive [D:] and then click OK. You can also click OK if you want files to be copied from an alternate location, such as a floppy disk or a network server."

CD, Floppy disk? Perhaps other people can chime in here, maybe Vista is a different experience. But XP is the most widely used OS in the world, at least for copies that shipped here in the US, it's a world, by default, without the Chinese web. I'm not sure the age of XP qualifies as an excuse, MS has been pushing hard to get people onto IE7 and then IE8, surely they could've loaded the appropriate language packs with those products? All in all, I can't help but imagine Steve Ballmer throwing a chair across the room and screaming "FUCK CHINA I'LL BURY CHINA".

NYTimes Magazine has a great piece on Freeman Dyson, the Institute for Advanced Study fixture (yes Freeman 'Dyson Sphere' Dyson) who likes to work against the grain. And recently, coming out against if not the claims of environmentalists about global warming, then certainly the ideology:

Dyson says he doesn''t want his legacy to be defined by climate change, but his dissension from the orthodoxy of global warming is significant because of his stature and his devotion to the integrity of science. Dyson has said he believes that the truths of science are so profoundly concealed that the only thing we can really be sure of is that much of what we expect to happen won't come to pass. In "Infinite in All Directions," he writes that nature's laws "make the universe as interesting as possible." This also happens to be a fine description of Dyson's own relationship to science. In the words of Avishai Margalit, a philosopher at the Institute for Advanced Study, "He's a consistent reminder of another possibility." When Dyson joins the public conversation about climate change by expressing concern about the "enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories," these reservations come from a place of experience. Whatever else he is, Dyson is the good scientist; he asks the hard questions. He could also be a lonely prophet. Or, as he acknowledges, he could be dead wrong.

Someone reminded me of "Internet Time" the other day, Swatch's "Internet Time". There are some things so preposterous you wipe the specifics from your mind almost immediately, leaving a husk of freakish factoid behind that just collects in the corners. Like Windows Me or Cop Rock or the Turbo Button or the SciFi channel changing its name to SyFy.

Swatch Internet Time was a time-zone free system where the primary measure was a 'beat' (1 minute, 26.4 seconds each), a day is 1000 beats, and the notation would be prefixed with an "@" symbol, so @621 NYC time is also @621 in Moscow. The rest of the calendar (days, months, years) remains the same. On the face of it, interesting in that there's a nice even number and an easily digestible notation. What makes it insane is both the company affiliation (hunh, who am I going to buy a 'beat' watch from?) and any actual belief people would really use this system.

Now admittedly a couple ideas behind it are much loved by geeks, primarily the elimination of time zones. But if you are a programmer you already have unix time on hand, and you're about as likely to get people to universally use unix time as you are Internet Time. As a programmer you're probably comfortable using it in code but if someone came to you and said "meet me for brunch at 1237730400" I guarantee you'd first say "hunh?" then have to convert it.

There are weird DST differences across the US, Europe for instance is comfortable with the 24 hour clock rather the the 12 hour with the am/pm designation. But the slices of time, second, minute, hour, day, are effectively recognized universally. So how could I possibly go around referencing 'beats' without sounding like a complete ass? I mean I might as well be speaking Esperanto, or using the French Republican Calendar.

Internet Time was either a corporate attempt at a new technology cultural cash-in, or an attempt to build a perfect thing. Probably both. Building a perfect thing is worse. Although it's part and parcel to tech life, because fundamentally tech people are compelled to rebuild over and over again -- the desire is to always scrap old systems and replace them with new, efficient, perfect systems. Often with disastrous results since the idea of perfect varies greatly. I'm sure Negroponte really thought Internet Time would be adopted. You gotta admire the energy involved. But attempting to create perfect things from scratch always seems to fail. Instead, the world is filled with things, the things that are used anyhow, that came about by happenstance, by need, to scratch an itch, ad-hoc, and usually standing on the shoulders of less perfect things, warts inherited. Whenever I see someone working on a perfect thing, coming up with a new system of time, reinventing the wheel, calling for immediate revolution/replacement of things we use, I'm immediately suspicious.

So what happened to Internet Time? It's still on Swatch's website. Occassionally it pops up in people's blogs as a relic of the 1990s. Or once in a blue moon suggestion to add support for it in Ubuntu, which invariably brings out Klingon time supporters, which is probably more widely used actually. Viva la revolution.

Microsofts Business Division president Stephen Elop unveiled the latest production from Microsoft Office Labs called Office Labs 2019" at the Wharton Business Technology Conference, starring stock photo men, women and children playing with the next-generation of communication, collaboration and production technologies.
As is so common with perfect future visions, you never see crashes, hangs, pixelation, poor people, disabled folks or bathrooms (not that bathroom technology is important to Microsoft, but it brings up an old Trek meme). How is a blind person or a quadriplegic person going to use a world that is all gorilla arm? I like a keyboard. And how the fuck am I going to use Emacs in Microsoft's future world? A keyboard is like a clock or a watch, the most simple, efficient design to get particular jobs done. These sorts of promo-future things are entertaining, but when it comes down to it, chances are the future will always be dirty and breaky.

My mac at work died last week. And there were no consequences. I always keep an external drive sync on each main computer I'm on, although most of the data lives on the web/cloud/servers. And I didn't miss any work. And it didn't really matter. I moved over to a laptop. If that died, I'd move to my eeepc. If that died I'd move to an anonymous terminal. If that died I'd dig out my old beloved Thinkpad A21m which seems to be unkillable. And if that died I'd go out and get a drink and wait for the cosmic winds or whatever the fuck just happened to die down, cuz that's some bad damn mojo man. One of the things I dislike (perhaps too many things I dislike), is specific location based or application based settings, specifically tailored or tweaked systems -- I want vanilla all the time -- that app you've got should be able to run here, or there, or anywhere, easily, without hours and hours of setup. That includes browsers, web applications, crypto (ie. being able to use TrueCrypt on any system anywhere on files stored in the cloud is, well, awesome). Why build only for Firefox, or IE6? Why build only in Python, PHP, or Java? Why only deploy on Redhat Enterprise? Why only use one music player? Why only one cell phone OS (ok cellphones are still another world for the moment)? When it comes down to it, I guess I don't have love for any one specific bit of technology anymore, the more vanilla, the more I'm likely to use it. And contrary to monoculture, vanilla doesn't have to be financially entrenched if there are common standards, HTTP or HTML or XML, these things out of many, for instance, set standards by which other things can taste vanilla.

I love me some xml, some RSS. Make an easily verifiable, easily http consumable feed of data, for anyone, anywhere? Hell yeah. Take a data object, pass it through some quick little translation class (description equals body, category equals primary category, etc., etc.) and voom, you've got data in the same format as millions of other people to be consumed -- in theory -- in the same way by perhaps millions of apps. Beautiful idea. Unfortunately, what seems so cut and dry is really a hodge podge of personal 'I hate CDATA' or 'I demand a different date stamp format than anyone else uses' in practice. Let's just suppose I have to maintain several dozen seperate feeds, with each one having its own idiosyncratic format. Not content with using the handful of widely accepted and readily available schemas with namespaces like dublincore, each has its own weird "I just picked up a big book on xml and insist on making my own language" philosophy. Worse, I expect the applications consuming the feed were built before the thinking about the kind of xml feeding the application. Much like building applications without first thinking about the model. And this drives me crazy, more than most things should because of all things, RSS (and xml generally) is specifically about consistency and portability -- the feed for Sue should be the feed for Joe, that's the purpose of syndicated xml. IMHO. Sigh.

Two excellent posts recently, one from the usually great Jeff Atwood about a problem worked out in letters between Pascal and Fermat, described in Keith Devlin's 'The Unfinished Game'. Jeff has an updated version, about children:

Let's say, hypothetically speaking, you met someone who told you they had two children, and one of them is a girl. What are the odds that person has a boy and a girl?

You'd think the question wouldn't cause argument. But it does. A lot of it. Is this an "unfinished game" problem? Perhaps because it is equally a language problem as probability, especially for people who argue the odds are 50% -- as one annoyed commenter posted:

You often hear the complaint that people don't understand math. In this instance, however, an equally valid way of explaining what's going on is that mathematicians don't understand people.

Is this at all like the Monty Hall Problem (which frustrated Paul Erdos)? It gets mentioned often (which Antonio Cangiano generates some ruby and python for in response) because likewise, is also frustrating to some people and dependent on presentation. How the problem is presented is crucial:

The mention of assumptions and word games introduces an important caveat. We can't expect to reach the same conclusions unless we all play by the same rules and understand the problem in the same way. A number of commentators - going back to the first wave of controversy in the early 1990s - have pointed out that certain assumptions are crucial to the analysis of the Monty Hall puzzle. In particular, it's important that Monty Hall must always open one door and offer the option of switching, and the door opened can never be the one initially chosen by the contestant, nor can it be the winning door.

In my brief period of owning a console (I may yet get a wii, but I prefer PC games), the only game I really liked was Katamari Damacy. I liked it the same reason everyone else did, people just like to collect stuff, people like to roll stuff up into a gigantic ball for some reason. People do this all day long. And programmers are asked to figure out what's in the katamari. First, make a group of all the green things. Then make a group of all the sharp things. Then, make another group of the things not in the first two groups, but which can be both green and sharp. Now, paginate them each, and when being looked at only on the Moon replace 'green' with 'red'. And this has to happen while the katamari is growing larger and larger, with more and more things and more kinds of things. "Don't worry about airplanes, we don't come across those often at all. But they're green. Sometimes red." And when I'm working on cataloging someone's katamari I always hear this song in my head... (naaaa, na na na na na-na na na na)

Back when I used to do tech support, I was trying hard to get people off of Internet Explorer, there were a couple options even then -- but I kept having this conversation:

- I don't want to use Netscape/Opera/Mozilla, Internet Explorer is perfect.
- And how many other browsers have you used before?
- Well, I haven't used any others, but IE is perfect.

I also had this conversation about word processors (remember them?), and OS's. It was extremely hard to get anyone to look at Linux as a server with MS and Sun around. The conversations always went like:

- I don't want to use another X, this X is perfect.
- And how many other kinds of X have you used?
- Well, I haven't used any others. But this one is perfect.

Google does some things really well, obviously. Which is probably why companies are switching over their mail, their ad serving, some of their web applications, their project management, their collaborative word processing, and their code repositories to Google. What worries me about this is that somewhere down the line, folks are going to forget anything else was possible, that "this one is perfect". It's not going to be now, but maybe years from now, when you realize that you've become Google's bitch. It will be the folks that come after the people who made the decision to switch off of Exchange Server, who have used little else but Google for their mail, search, projects. What frightens me honestly, is the return of old fashioned monoculture, while Google currently feels like little companies grouped together under a brand, there's an unprecedented level of trust in the word 'Google' that gives me shivers.

I once had a Steve-Jobs-Type classic A-personality boss toward the end of the dotcom era who would always tell our team that we were one day going to be the equivalent of plumbers and mechanics (he also had the unfortunate power to make women who worked for him cry almost on cue). I didn't disagree with him, but asked what he had against plumbers and mechanics? Why was this a thing we should, apparently, be frightened of? Who makes and or fixes your shit? Who makes your car run? Where would you be without these folks? I think of Douglas Adams B-Ark, which held a world's middle managers, TV producers, consultants (and phone sanitizers) tricked to be sent off alone to crash on a prehistoric earth. The fictional A-Ark held the world's leaders and thinkers, and C-Ark held the people who made things, the plumbers, bricklayers, carpenters, computer programmers, farmers. I'm quite happy to be on the C-Ark.