# Notice (Oct 19/05): So ends my stay here on Blogger. This morning Google implemented an anti-spam 'feature' that forces me to answer a challenge phrase when I want to post to my own blog. No notice of the change, nothing. Worse is that it doesn't even work! I type the phrase, submit, "An error occured", post deleted. Damn you, Google. Chances are I will revive my blog somewhere else, sometime soon. I'll post the new coordinates here as soon as they become available. (BTW, I'm unable to post anything to my RSS stream, so I'd appreciate it if readers could spread the word and ask people to take a look at this notice)

Update (Oct 19/05, ~noon): After a frustrating few hours (and not just trying out alternatives to Blogger), I've decided that this is a good time to take a break from all this. A day? A week? Who knows. But I need to step away from it before I pass a heavy magnet over the whole mess.

Update 2: According to this post, the reason I'm seeing the CAPTCHA (challenge phrase) is that Blogger has classified my blog as spam. Thanks. User for five years and now I'm spam. I searched the Blogger site, but there is no mention of how to get the spam flag turned off. There is also no way of contacting anyone at Blogger. Wow. Spam they say I am, so spam I must be. Maybe it is time to take a break.

Recognizing that information is a powerful tool that can be used to combat terrorism, the Homeland Security Department has for the past year established research centers throughout academia in an effort to better prepare for, and possibly prevent, future attacks. Homeland Security last week introduced the University of Maryland as its latest center of excellence with a three-year, $12-million grant.

This speech wasn't just soaring rhetoric. It was a lighter-than-air burst of helium verbiage -- lofty language untethered from the perplexing world we occupy and from the messy events of the last four years, sentences floating off into an empyrean of millennial vagaries.

The PIC is a low cost, sealed fanless PC with pre-installed software designed to help provide 50 percent of the world's population with internet access and computing capabilities by the year 2015 - an initiative dubbed 50x15 by AMD.

I also talked to some colleagues who have read Tufte. They don't like his books. A possible explanation is the following scenario. Imagine you are a Ph.D. student and your supervisor says: 'Read Tufte'. You get the book, have your marker ready and you start reading. After reading more than half of the book you still have not used your marker. You get worried, suppose the supervisor asks specific questions about the book.

The ancient city of Babylon has suffered extensive archaeological damage during the US-led occupation of Iraq, warns a report issued by the British Museum on Saturday.

The report states that prehistoric brickwork has been crushed beneath military vehicles, precious stonework used to fill sandbags and important historical sites damaged by newly dug trenches.

Another emergent way to stay in contact with the KM 'community' is to follow the KM related tags in del.icio.us.

The results reveal that widespread drying has occurred in large regions of Canada, Europe and Asia, as well as western and southern Africa, and eastern Australia. The U.S. experienced the opposite trend, exhibiting increased wetness over the past 50 years. By controlling for rain and snowfall, the scientists determined the amount of drying caused by increasing global temperatures, which lead to elevated rates of evaporation. They found that about half of the change is a result of rising temperatures, particularly in areas at northern middle and high latitudes.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is on the verge of scrapping a $170 million computer overhaul that is considered critical to the campaign against terrorism but has been riddled with technical and planning problems, F.B.I. officials said on Thursday.

In a last-ditch effort to save the program, the bureau has hired a research firm at a cost of $2 million to evaluate the mounting problems in creating a 'paperless' work system and to determine whether any parts of the project can be salvaged, officials said. One idea under strong consideration is for the bureau to use off-the-shelf software instead of the expensive customized features it has unsuccessfully sought to develop.

Oracle appears to be adding insult to injury in its merger with PeopleSoft--taking the unusual step of notifying workers of their termination by sending pinks slips via express mail to their homes.

Shipments to thousands of PeopleSoft employees across the country are expected over the weekend, according to sources close to the company. Those spared pink slips will get packages too--containing new Oracle employment contracts.

And selling the stripped-down Mac mini for much beyond $500 (Cdn.) isn't going to do the trick. Even the $599 street price being charged by the University of Toronto Bookstore ($725 if you want the 80GB hard drive model) still seems a lot for a basic computer these days. For that money you can get a Dell PC with Windows that kicks butt — and it will include a monitor, a keyboard and mouse. Some retailers will even toss in a printer.

The truth is, most successful product innovation requires imaginative insights and incisive action from heroes in the lab and in marketing. Indeed, whether it was wizards in Menlo Park or Xerox PARC who came up with the concepts, the most effective product development and commercialization processes have always been based on a dynamic and complex exchange of ideas and interests among engineers, marketing experts, and, most importantly, the end-consumer.

Yet few companies are good at managing this exchange, particularly when it comes to capturing and incorporating customer insights into product design, according to product innovation experts at Booz Allen Hamilton and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. While it’s difficult to measure the cost of such missed opportunities, these experts say that this failure to incorporate the customer’s perspective often seriously limits the potential financial and competitive value of corporate innovation.

We are not, as many seem to believe, moving at top speed toward a flatter, more open and democratic management style. Ask anyone who works in an outsourcing situation where things are headed, and he or she will tell you that it is back to strictly hierarchical working methods. I recently encountered an outsourcing center that measures how many workable minutes there are in the day and how many tasks they expect each worker to complete in the day, then reviews on a weekly basis the worker's performance by second or minute against each task. We may not like it, but the world of business is a complex and contradictory place.

We expect to see over the next 18 months the re-emergence of KM in the workplace. In many instances, it will not be labeled as KM, and the term information management will come more and more to the fore.

Again to quote my colleague Eric Woods, “Knowledge management should reinforce the need for human values in an increasingly automated world." That is true, but cynicism and the relentless drive to reduce costs is more likely to be the key driver over the foreseeable future.

Still, consumers pay for the style of Mac Mini. The $599 model comes with a 1.42GHz PowerPC processor, 256MB of memory, an 80GB drive and a DVD/CD-RW drive. A similarly configured Gateway 3250 (2.66GHz Pentium 4, 80GB drive, 256MB memory, same drive) costs $499; $100 less with a rebate.

But the Gateway also comes with some important extras--namely a keyboard, a mouse and a 17-inch screen. The Mac Mini has none of this. Cool industrial design with an artsy interface or a monitor? It depends what you're looking for.

First of all, I just installed Adium as an alternative for iChat. Don’t get me wrong—I love iChat. I love the way it works, the way it looks, the AV support, etc. But it only allows me to log into an AIM account—and only one AIM account at that. I maintain two AIM accounts, one for day-to-day personal and professional work, and one specifically for students and office hours. It was a pain to have to log out of one to be in the other, or to have to run two different programs.

Dividing the waters: Can We Live Sustainably and
Harmoniously in a Water-Short World?

Sandra Postel, Director, The Global Water Policy Project
Monday, January 24, 2005
Moyse Hall, Arts Building, 853 Sherbrooke Street West
6:00 to 7:30 p.m.
Free Admission. Open to the Public.

Renewable but finite, fresh water is increasingly scarce in many parts of the world. Mounting competition for water is evident between countries, between states and provinces, between cities and farms, and between people and ecosystems. One of the biggest challenges now facing society is to satisfy the food and water demands of a growing human population while simultaneously safeguarding the health of aquatic ecosystems and the valuable services they provide. Meeting this challenge will require a fundamental shift in how we use, value, and manage fresh water.

McGill University's Middle East Program in Civil Society and Peace Building has a big name, a small budget -- and a strong influence in the region. Launched in 1997, it trains Palestinian, Israeli and Jordanian social workers in Montreal -- on the condition that, after they get their degree, they collaborate on helping the region's poorest residents.

The connection between Banda Aceh and Montreal's McGill University runs deep. Since 1989, funding from the Canadian International Development Agency has allowed young Indonesian scholars to pursue graduate degrees from McGill.

Montreal's Board of Trade is worried about the state of Montreal universities and is proposing a series of measures to make universities healthier and more competitive.

Although keenly aware that it often takes a disaster to pry open a donor's wallet, charities are eager to remind the public that it is mundane diseases that actually kill far more people in the Third World.

And as tsunami relief swells to a torrent, there are growing concerns that the vast amount of money earmarked for that one cause will deflect much-needed attention away from other problems in poor nations.

But what if they priced it at $399 or even $349? Now make it $249, where I calculate they'd be losing $100 per unit. At $100 per unit, how many little Macs could they sell if Jobs is willing to spend $1 billion? TEN MILLION and Apple suddenly becomes the world's number one PC company.

Royalty-Free, International Standard for XML-Based Electronic Business Documents Approved

[...]

"Joanne Friedman, CEO of business-technology advisory, ConneKted Minds Inc., observed, 'The combination of a fixed tag set for electronic business (UBL) together with a transport protocol designed for the same purpose (ebXML messaging) is analogous to the foundations which built the World Wide Web. Where HTML provides consumers with information ubiquity, and HTTP a transfer protocol designed for the same purpose provides universal access, the UBL/ebXML combination will bring industry the boundary-less, barrier-free information needed to catalyze economic growth and foster inter-industry global trade."

"EAI used to be a big-budget project that required the building of an entire middleware layer of composite applications that replicated legacy processes. With the standardization that Web Services brings, applications can be linked with fewer lines of code, and often within a much shorter time frame," said Joe McKendrick, an analyst with Evans Data. "The savings potential of Web Services is enormous."

The Pentium 4 570 processor at 3.8GHz will have the fastest clock speed of any processor available from Intel for an indefinite period. Intel has decided to cancel a planned 4GHz Pentium 4 processor and improve the performance of its desktop chips by adding cache memory.

We have site-monitoring technology, and Brent is constantly checking, catching errors. When he sees a problem, he calls several people to see what's going on. It doesn't matter what time it is, he calls. He calls me at 1a.m. and 2 a.m., and then he follows up at 7 a.m. I don't think he sleeps at all. I can't imagine him lying prone for more than a few minutes at a time. I think it frustrates him that other people do. One weekend, we were rolling out a software release, and I had been in the office for 24 hours. Brent was there too, and he had me call someone from marketing at midnight to find out about a voucher deal. She was stunned and appalled to hear from me.

I don't think Brent is ever happy, and I think that's a good thing. If he was happy, we just wouldn't do as much.

Nearly 40 Montreal patients will need follow-up exams after their abnormal radiology exam results disappeared in a computer glitch at a new hospital.

You may disagree with Apple's vigorous pursuit of leakers, but this is not a case of big bad Apple putting the screws to a little guy. Fried's report at CNet makes it clear that Apple Legal has warned Think Secret (and, one presumes, other rumor mongers) repeatedly in the past few years. [...]

If Think Secret wasn't prepared for this, it's because they're foolish, not because they weren't fairly warned.

CNN said goodbye to pundit Tucker Carlson on Wednesday, and with him likely the Crossfire program that has been the granddaddy of high-volume political debate shows on cable television.

CNN will probably fold Crossfire into its other programming, perhaps as an occasional segment on the daytime show In side Politics, said Jonathan Klein, who was appointed in late November as chief executive officer of CNN's U.S. network.

[...]

The bow-tied wearing conservative pundit got into a public tussle last fall with comic Jon Stewart, who has been critical of cable political programs that devolve into shoutfests.

“I guess I come down more firmly in the Jon Stewart camp,” Mr. Klein said.

The job is sysadmin-like. You'd be in charge of maintaining 3 Redhat Enterprise Linux IBM eBlade Servers which provide services web-based services for the campus. When not maintaining the servers, you'd be coding in PHP and/or Perl working on separate small projects each involving setting up a test environment on the server and then later putting it into production. You'd also working with Oracle Application Server, JDeveloper, and J2EE. Honestly, the nice part about the job is that you're never really doing the same thing.

Requirements:
- You must strictly be considered a student (ie. registered)
- You must be very comfortable working in Linux: installing it, setting it up on machines, installing/building software, using package systems, building kernels, setting up devices, etc.
- You must have some experience in either PHP or Perl (pref. both).
Database programming in either or both scripting languages an asset.

It would be for 21 hours (3 days: Mon/Wed/Fri) but that's negotiable.

Anybody that's interested or have questions please send me their CV.

Added to this knowledge is the sickening understanding that before and since the tsunami, tragedies of even greater magnitude have gone ignored.

First, trying to choose a career based on a current business fad is foolish. Second, programming is incredibly good training for all kinds of fabulously interesting jobs, such as business process engineering, even if every single programming job does go to India and China. Third, and trust me on this, there's still an incredible shortage of the really good programmers, here and in India.