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I remember making my first international phone call when I was in Junior high school. At that time, while my parents were away at work, my Commodore 128 computer was busy on their phone with its 1200 Baud modem, hacking calling card numbers in a process computer geeks refered to as “Phreaking.” After several weeks of processing and thousands of numbers dialed, I had finally scored my first working calling card.

I immediately took it to school to show my clique of fellow geeks, and we agreed we should use it to call someone in China, since none of us knew anyone who lived outside of our area code personally.

Everyone gathered around to listen.

I hung up, “That was so cool!” I exclaimed, pointing at the phone booth, “That guy was totally speaking Chinese! Way cool!”

“Awesome!” my Dungeon Master agreed, “You wanna continue that D&D campaign now?”

And that was the end of my calling-card number crime spree.

I was 32 years old the second time I made an international phone call to transfer a domain name from company in Australia. I had never made one before, and, after several failed attempts, had to look online, where I learned to precede the many numbers with “011.”

It was totally awesome deja vu all over again! I got to speak to a woman with an Australian accent, a real Australian accent originating from someone sitting at a desk in Australia, not some tourist sitting beside me on the DC metro. It was summer at her desk while it was winter at mine. It was 10:30 AM on my cellphone, while her clock read 12:30 AM on tomorrow’s date. Nearly 9,700 miles separated me on the East Coast from her in Melbourne Australia, and yet she sounded as close as my next door neighbor.

Suddenly the whole “Global Village” groked with me. Like when I had to call Dell tech support last year for help with my DVD ROM. The tech support guy in India asked, “Do you mind if I log into your computer to correct the problem sir?”

“Do you mind if I go wash dishes while you correct the problem?” I asked in return.

Then a help desk technician in India logged into my computer and upgraded my software for me while I washed dishes. Way cool!

How interesting it is then, to think that when Herbert Marshall McLuhan wrote about the Global Village, he saw its unifying effect in a negative light, as a path to totalitarianism:

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library, the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.

Seems alien to imagine our WWW playground as a tool for fascism today.

“Some kids get their ears pierced… others it’s a unique haircut… Charles likes people to see his brain.”
- Supervillain Brain Child’s Mother, from The Tick Cartoon

My friend Carolyn and her husband Clint made this really cool animated video from her CT Scan, which I highly recommend. A few months back, I had a series of MRI’s done, but was disappointed to find the quality wasn’t good enough to make my own animated video from the images.

What I have been able to do is turn a few of the image series into animated gifs. The result are what you see below. Click on any image to see a larger version.

Ryan’s MRI Top View of the Head Click Image for 2.1 MB Size Gif

Ryan’s MRI Front View of the Head Click Image for 2.2 MB Size Gif

Ryan’s MRI Side View of the Head Click Image for 1.5 MB Size Gif

Ryan’s MRI Top View of Neck and Chest Click Image for 2.2 MB Size Gif

Extropia Dance Party

In David Brin’s science fiction book Kiln People, people make copies of themselves to aide with multi-tasking. Something we’d all like the power to do at times. Time isn’t money, it’s much more precious.

Extropia

Saturday night, unable to physically travel a hundred-plus miles to hang out at one of the parties celebrating space flight, I decided to go virtual and attend a party in Second Life hosted by Extropia a community of Transhumanists–an international intellectual and cultural movement that seeks to use science and technology to ameliorate human suffering and shortcomings.

Extropia Dance Party

However, I was also very busy that night. So while I was at the party, I set my avatar to dance automatically, while I caught up on some writing. It was awesome! I got to dance with hot cyborg ladies in one window, while keeping up on research in the next.

Extropia Dance Party

I had a great time, and just like real life parties, I don’t remember much of it. Unlike real life parties, I didn’t get behind on my homework.

Extropia Dance Party

Also unlike real life parties, I’m an excellent dancer in virtual reality… after downloading the appropriate dance moves that is. : )

More photos here.

This Saturday Night! Be there! BE THERE!! BE THERE!!!

Head out to Yuri’s Night World Space Party, a series of parties being held across the world to celebrate the 50^th Anniversary of Human Space Flight, and Yuri Gagarin

Find a party in your area, attend, and then tell me about how cool it was… since there aren’t any parties within 150 miles of where I live.

Here’s a cool spin on a game you probably haven’t played since you solved it in elementary school. You and another player take turns naming numbers one through nine. Each number may only be used once. The player who collects any three numbers that add up to 15 wins. If all numbers are used up without someone getting 15, the game is a draw.

Once two players have figured out all the strategies to winning the game, it becomes easy, and imperative, to prevent the opponent from winning. Just like Tic-Tac-Toe, two experienced players will have games that always end in a draw, which is important for teaching an advanced Artificial Intelligence why nobody wins playing Global Thermo-Nuclear Warfare–sorry, had a flashback to the 1983 movie War Games there.

In the research paper The Game of JAM: An Isomorph of Tic-Tac-Toe, John A. Michon notes how this game promotes a different way of thinking about a classic problem (he refers to this game as “Number Scrabble”):

Although the games are mathematically equivalent, they are likely to differ psychologically, because they require different sorts of information. Number Scrabble is a numerical game requiring addition and subtraction of numbers, whereas Tic-Tac-Toe requires a spatial representation, which can only be disposed of with some difficulty, even by fairly experienced players.

Tic-Tac-Toe and the Numerical version are Mathematically equivalent, and we can plot this out visually. In the table below, all rows, columns, and diagonals add up to 15.

4	3	8
9	5	1
2	7	6

Plaing Tic-Tac-Toe on this grid is the same as playing the numerical version. You can find a shockwave demonstration of this principle to play for yourself. This website calls the game Add Fast.

Taking the number five opens up four paths to victory. The numbers {1, 3, 7, 9} each open another path. {2, 4, 6, 8} are the least valuable strategically.

This seems like a cool game to play with your kids. When they get good at it, show them the relationship to Tic-Tac-Toe. Or you can learn the number-grid, and amaze your friends by kicking their butts at this game.

I had a good chuckle while working on a Database Procedure today, when I spotted the following entry in the Revision History notes:

Revision History Humor

One Gigabyte 20 Years Ago (left) One Gigabyte Today (Right) source

Bill Gates is often misquoted as having said, “no one will ever need more than 640K of memory,” in the 1980s. 24 years ago, my Commodore 64 personal computer ran games like “Mail-Order Monsters” and “Archon” on a mere 64 kilobytes of memory. This was a huge advance over my 1977 Atari 2600 game console, which ran “Pong” and “Space Invaders” on a scant 128 bytes of memory. Today my dual-core Pentium uses a gigabyte of RAM, about 7.8 million times as much memory as the Atari, and, after upgrading to Windows Vista, even that doesn’t cut it anymore.

From bits to bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, and, with impending DVD technological advances, terabytes, our computing power grows exponentially. This empirically observed fact is known as Moore’s Law, named after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who observed in 1965 that the number of transistors on an integrated component doubles every 18 months. In other words, computers double in power every year and a half. This Law of Computing has held true now for over 40 years in an explosion of processing power that allows for what history will record as the Information Age, the times in which we are currently living.

Now it’s time to familiarize ourselves with a new measurement, the exabyte. We can thank research firm IDC’s white paper The Expanding Digital Universe for introducing us to this latest milestone, which estimates the human race collectively produced 161 exabytes of data in 2006.

So what’s an exabyte? To visualize this number, it’s helpful to begin at the smallest measurement of data, the bit. A bit is a 1 or 0, “on” or “off,” “true” or “false.” Up one level from this binary state we have the byte, which is 8 bits. If you open Notepad on your computer, type any one letter and save the file, you have generated one byte of data, which you can verify by right-clicking on the file and selecting “Properties.”

Every additional character typed and saved will add another byte to the file’s size. Every 1,000 characters is a kilobyte, and every 1,000 kilobytes a megabyte. A 90,000-word novel translates into about 0.5 megabytes¹. An exabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of data, or 500 billion novels. That’s 77 novels written for every person on Earth², and we are producing 161 times that much data, 230 billion CDs worth³, or nearly 12,400 novels for every person on Earth every year.

We produced more data last year than has been produced in the last 5,000 years of human history. That’s just for 2006, and that’s only the beginning. “In 2010, the amount of digital information created and copied worldwide will rise six fold to a staggering 988 exabytes,” that’s 12 Petabytes short of having to adopt yet another term of measurement, the Zettabyte.

The search engine Google is named after the largest number the nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner could think of, the googol. It is the number one followed by 100 zeros. By one recent estimate, it takes 450,000 computers networked on server farms to run the Google search engine, indexing 8 billion Web pages every year. I wonder when we’ll be talking about our hard drives (or maybe they’ll be flash drives by then) in terms of googlebytes?

And then we still have the googolplex waiting for us in the distant future, the number one followed by a googol of zeroes.

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¹500,000 characters in Novel based on a Microsoft Word Count and Character count of one of my novels, which came out to 450,000 characters for a 82,000 world novel. So this is a very conservative estimate.

²1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes translates to
1,000,000,000,000 megabytes which translates to
500,000,000,000 novels divided by 6.5 billion human beings

³CDs hold 700MB of Data
700,000,000
161,000,000,000,000,000,000
230,000,000,000

So I got my OLPC XO-1 in the mail about a month ago, and I’m still wrestling with my opinion of it. Personally I think it’s the bee’s knees. Everyone who comes into the comic shop fawns over it. I’m the envy of the local geek crowd.

I love it when people ask me, “What’s that?” and I get to extol the virtues of Nick Negroponte’s beautiful vision of supplying underprivileged children all over the world with their own laptops to learn art, reading, mathematics, programming, science, and connect them with the entire world as their classroom. Just like so many people here in America have done through the Internet.

“Huh. But don’t those poor kids have more pressing concerns, like survival, that need to come first?” they always reply in some form or another, and the heart-bubbles floating around my head all pop and I wake up, blinking dumbly.

Which brings me to my conflict. While I dig the OLPC XO-1, will it serve its purpose of enlightening young minds all over the world? Even I laughed at Newt Gingrich when he suggested we provide the homeless with laptops, but now I’m not so sure.

People get stuck in this idea that other nations need to repeat every step of America’s history to achieve America’s quality of life. China can either work through America’s entire history of building a middle class that will demand its own fair workplace standards, or Americans can exert economic pressure on China to do away with its sweatshops. Similarly, third-world countries can step through fossil-fuel power plants, or they can skip straight to renewable energy.

Why reinvent the wheel? The OLPC is a shortcut for lesser-developed nations. Why not help them skip being a second-world country and go straight to the Information Age, with all its collaborative memetic innovation? I say get them into the Global Village ASAP. The sooner they start using LEDs, solar panels, and well-water pumps, the sooner they’ll start contributing their own inventions, software, art, and literature to the world.

OLPC as an E-Book Image Courtesy OLPC Foundation

On the downside. This laptop is hand-me-down softwares and technologies. The hand-me-down 433mhz processors with hand-me-down 256k RAM. Hardware-wise, this brand new laptop is my brand new PC from 1993. Software-wise the hand-me-down Sim City is the same one that ran on my Apple IIe in Junior High, but I’ve got a better opinion of the rest of the software suite further down.

So is the $200 price tag justified? The software’s open-source, so there’s $0 of the total. A refurnished Thinkpad runs $200-$300, but this is brand new. Former OLPC CTO, Mary Lou Jepsen, is now working on a $75 laptop. How they intend to accomplish this when they couldn’t accomplish it with the OLPC is anybody’s guess, but the competition among charities will definitely spurn more innovation. The $200 price tag is very prohibitive to the OLPC’s ultimate success.

On the plus-side, the hardware has features that are uniquely perfect for the OLPC’s intended recipients. Practically speaking. This is a rugged little #$%@ of a machine. A fully charged battery runs for hours (three hours for one of my sessions). The twin wifi antenna are rubberized and folded in to serve as a locking mechanism for the laptop when closed. With flash memory storage, I don’t have to worry about bouncing it around and wrecking the hardrive, and stuffing all the main components behind the screen means it doesn’t make your sperm-count decline uncomfortably when it sits in your lap.

The keyboard is a rubber mat, which is awesomely spill-proof and would feel great if it wasn’t so tiny. I read one hacker’s first mod to his XO-1 was to convert it to a Dvorak keyboard layout. What’s the point? I’m reduced to hunt-and-peck mode using my forefingers when I type on it, but that’s okay because the keyboard isn’t meant for my adult hands, and when my friend’s five-year-old daughter got her hands on the laptop, she looked like a pro typing utter gibberish into it’s Journaling Software.

The monitor flips completely around and folds flat on the laptop, turning it into an e-book reader. This is a really nice feature, and one that makes this laptop a real keeper for me. If nothing else, I’ve now got a screen bigger than my cellphone to read all the free books I download from Project Gutenberg, and a laptop with the battery life to survive a long flight.

OLPC Network Neighborhood Image Courtesy OLPC Foundation

So this is a sweetly innovative, however overpriced, bit of technology. Which brings me to the second most common objection I get to the OLPC, “Are kids in third-world countries even going to be able to use that thing?”

The assumption here is that this learning toy is beyond the technological grasp of children living in villages without electricity. That somehow people deprived of Best Buy, Cinema Multiplexes, and the mind-numbing inanity of American Idol lack the cognitive foundation for Computing 101. Whenever a Baby Boomer raises this objection, I just remind myself that they are from the same generation that couldn’t program a VCR.

The reality is that the OLPC’s linux user interface sorta takes me back to my Commodore 64 days, when computing was just the basics. Only my Commodore’s interface was a command line, (LOAD *,8,1 anyone?), whereas the OLPC is cartoony and graphical. Kids will get into this thing and make it sing in ways the developers never anticipated. Just like kids run technological circles around their elders in modern America.

The OLPC provides plenty of pre-loaded software that will educate in a well-rounded fashion. The Video, Picture, and Sound Capture capabilities using the built in video and microphone introduce students to multimedia. The journal provides a creative writing outlet, while the Paint and TamTamJam softwares allow for art and music creative outlets.

Etoys and Turtle Art introduce kids to programming logic, while Pippy introduces kids to the joys of Python Programming, the easiest, most advanced programming language out there. Through these, kids are introduced to mathematics, building their own software toys, and logical constructs.

Most of all, the web browser introduces them to the world’s knowledge. The chat introduces them to world’s people.

They’re doing all this on an open-source operating system, where they can eventually incorporate what they learn into publishing their own improvements and innovations to the World Wide Web, where the rest of us will enjoy them.

That’s dream worth supporting, not to mention a huge return on our investment.

Roborally

Allow me to introduce you to one of the coolest board games you’ve never heard of. In RoboRally, players steer robots around a factory filled with lasers, pits, and conveyor belts in a race to reach the finish line. Each round, players are dealt a random set of instruction cards, with which they must program their robot with the five moves that will best get them closer to the finish.

I’ve set up a little demonstration of how a typical round plays out. Here are Spinbot (red) and Twonky (purple), racing for the first goal post (green).

Twonky VS Spinbot

Players controlling the robots Spinbot and Twonky are dealt seven random cards, and each pick out five to lay face down in the sequence they think will best serve their goals.

Twonky	Spinbot
1. Move 1	1. Move 1
2. Move 2	2. Rotate Left
3. Move 1	3. Move 1
4. Rotate Right	4. Rotate Left
5. Back Up	5. Move 1

Spinbot’s Program

So Spinbot is programmed to move one onto the conveyor belt (1), which will then move it downscreen one square. Spinbot will then turn right (2) and the cog wheel will rotate it another right turn. Spinbot moves forward one, conveyor belt moves one. Spinbot turns left (4), conveyor belt pulls it to the left, forward one (5) and goal!

Twonky’s Program

Twonky’s going to move one (1), get pulled downscreen one, move two (2), get turned right, move one (3), get pulled left one, turn right (4), get pulled left one, back up one (5) and goal!

So what happens when these programs execute simultaneously?

Programs Execute

How this actually plays Out is Spinbot and Twonky move, they both get pulled downscreen one, Twonky is facing Spinbot, so it shoots Spinbot for a point of damage (the more damage a robot takes, the less programmable it becomes), then Twonky moves forward two, pushing Spinbot into the pit, gets turned right, and is free to carry out the rest of its programming code to reach the goal. Twonky wins.

Now consider this scenario with four factory layouts (in the core set), eight goals, and eight robots running around shooting and pushing each other, with factory layouts confusing the mix and players mis-programming their robots (I am a master at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory with a mis-programmed move into a pit right in front of the finish line). It’s easy to see why this game becomes an exercise in out-thinking chaos.

There are also plenty of free resources online too, as fans have made their own boards that people can print out and add to their collection. So not only is the game a great learning experience in spatial problem-solving, computer programming, and forward-thinking, but it has a strong DIY aspect as well.

So enjoy some “computer-driven chaos!”

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had little misunderstandings explode into full-blown flame-wars in my e-mail inbox. One second I’m having a polite debate with a friend over the comparative merits of government-sponsored versus third-party payment methods for health coverage or whether Captain Picard was cooler than Captain Kirk on Star Trek (Totally Picard. Totally.), and the next second we’re at each other’s virtual throats.

Later, after an adequate cooling off period, one of us will ask, “Why were you so angry?” and the other will invariably reply, “I thought you were the one who was angry!”

E-mail is cold, impersonal. It doesn’t convey tone of voice or facial expressions. Compound these shortfalls with the fact that the average American adult can only read at an 8th grade level, and it’s easy to see how simple misunderstandings in our digital correspondence can accidentally leave us with hurt feelings.

The solution to this technological sterility and staggeringly sub-standard literacy was to start supplementing our messages with ideograms that communicated visually what text wasn’t linguistically; in other words, we started interjecting smiley-faces everywhere.

: )

According to Yahoo, this year marks the 25th anniversary of the emoticon, but the first emoticon was -) and it meant “tongue in cheek” in 1979, all the way back in those ancient times when the Internet was just a bunch of computers calling each other directly on the phone. So maybe Yahoo isn’t counting that one. It was the “smiley,” the most recognizable of emoticons, which first debuted in 1983.

A picture paints a thousand words, as the saying goes, and emoticons do this in a nearly universal language. People flavor their e-mails with emoticons all over the world. Westerners make their emoticons sideways, eyes followed by a mouth:

: P or : D or :-S

While East Asianers make their emoticons upright, eye, mouth, eye:

(*_*) or <(^_^)>

Cars could use emoticons. When behind the wheel, people tend to become very uncivilized. They exhibit rudeness on the road they would never dare exhibit to pedestrians on the sidewalk. Psychologists hypothesize this has to do with anonymity and impersonal nature of vehicular interactions. We don’t associate a human being with the back-end of the SUV that just cut us off.

Imagine how quickly our anger and resentment at other drivers could be assuaged if they could just flash us a cute embarrassed emoticon on their rear windshield:

(*^_^*)

Awwww… Can’t you just feel all the tension melting away seeing that cute wittle character? It almost makes all that hot coffee spilled into your lap worth it. You can’t make an angry emoticon. It would look too cute.

I’m angry. Grrrr. }:-(

Truly, the world would be a much happier place if everyone simply used more emoticons, online and in real life. The physical act of smiling improves our own moods and the moods of those around us. Like the Chinese proverb says, “The world is like a mirror, smile and it smiles back at you.”

My blog doesn’t drive the most traffic in the world. In fact, it’s pretty sad in comparison to some of my friends, but I write, not because I enjoy it, but because I have to write. It’s in my blood, it always has, and it slave drives me like an obsessive compulsive scrubbing permanent marker off his hands.

Still, it is nice to be read. So I like to watch my blogtraffic, despite the way wordpress’ blog stats leave me wanting for details. Over at what I now refer to as ideonexus beta, my former blog life, I took a glimpse at my stats on statcounter and saw this single spike of activity:

Ideonexus Beta Traffic Spike

So there were 96 page hits in one day, but only six unique visitors. I immediately drilled down on my web stats to learn more about who was taking so much interest in my blog that day. It began at 6:06 AM Eastern Time, when google.be referred this user to my Science Fiction VS Fantasy article, which led them to read Things are Getting Better and Legalize Prostitution at 6:27AM my time. They then meandered about the site for a bit, glancing at, but not reading, my Anthropogenic Global Warming article, until they found an extensive essay I’d written in May 2004 on Fascism in Film at 7:08AM. From this point they continued on, reading more than 16 articles from the site (These were from back in the days when my articles were New Yorker in length.).

Finally, at 10:50AM, they’d finished browsing this old blog for the day, having spent almost five hours reading my old writings. What an incredible ego boost this person has given me, and who I only know as this little red dot in Brussels:

Visitor from Brussels

This has happened on my old blog maybe a few dozen times in about four years of writing for it. Not much at all, but knowing that a few dozen people enjoyed my writing so much that they burned the better part of day immersed in it makes this obsessive behavior of mine almost worth it. : )

My cell phone has been waking me up an hour early all week because it thinks that Daylight Savings Time (DST) began last weekend. I can’t change the time because it’s managed by Cingular, so it’s the fault of their systems. Several local banks in Elizabeth City are broadcasting the incorrect time as well.

This is because the American Government adjusted the beginning and end dates for DST for 2007. Microsoft and Sun have both experienced a plethora of software glitches thanks to the adjusted dates, as have a multitude of other softwares across the world. Many programmers suffering from the change have whined about it (also see comments on this thread), but it happened anyways.

I have to agree with Daniel Read, when he says the programming problems are purely the fault of the programmers, and not a problem with DST changing. It took us a few minutes to adjust DST in the software we work on for the Coast Guard, without so much as a blip in our functionality.

We do have an ongoing issue with flights that occur at the change-over moment at the beginning of DST. This is because the hour from two to three in the morning doesn’t exist, which fouls up our flight time calculations, but this is the fault of the way our Ingres Database calculates times and out of our control. So we live with it.

As for all those software developers who were hurt by the change in Daylight Savings Time, and are trying to scapegoat it off on American politicians, I’m sorry that you are crappy programmers, but thank you for posting your rants. It lets the rest of us know who was too stupid to program an adjustable DST into their softwares! Ha! Ha! Thpppt!!! You suck! Fart on you!!!*

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*Note: This does not apply to programmers who are suffering problems, but blame themselves. Don’t worry about it. Stuff happens. You can’t program the whole freaking world into your software. One day you will. Not today. Get your patches out and best of luck!

Note Note: Happy Halloween! Is it possible that DST has been extended into November because of pressure from the Candy Lobby?

October was once Computer Learning Month, supported by the Computer Learning Foundation between 2000 and 2002. Apparently it’s now defunct, but I’m upset that I missed out on the fun, and, if you haven’t figured this out by now, I’m a sucker for modern-era holidays that serve as a celebration of scientific thought and Enlightenment Era ideals.

Plus, through the wonders of Googletubing and Webernetting, I was able to find all these cool educational materials for teaching kids about computers, posted in honor of this event, still archived online!

For instance, Crayola posted some cool coloring pages with all sorts of nifty fun facts. Did you know that we call programming errors “computer bugs” because in the early days of computing, real live bugs would get into the computer and short out the wiring! Actually, I think some of the old-timey programmers where I work told me about this, but I just rolled my eyes at them (”There goes gramps babbling about the ‘good old days.’ Probably forgot to take his anti-dementia pills again.”).

Apple has a great front page to a portal with teaser-descriptions of all sorts of great articles about how you can use computers to train teachers, let kids express themselves with digital video, promote scientific literacy, and a myriad of other ways computers can enhance education. Unfortunately, the teaser descriptions are all you get at this portal, because all the links are now dead. So Apple computers can go $%&# themselves for not paying the few pennies it would have cost them to keep what was probably at most 100kb of data available online. Jerks.

Anyways! On to happier items. Christopher Farms Elementary School, in Virginia Beach, has a super-dupper list of links to all sorts of jolly old interwebslinging sites with fun and games. I especially liked the It’s Raining Letter! typing game, it’s the bee’s knees! Not all of the links still work, but some of them do, which makes Christopher Farms Elementary School a whole lot cooler than those frakwits at Apple. Jerks.

The Home School Learning Network, for xenophobic parents who fear the possibility of their children developing social skills, has a list of online activities and information for parents and children to improve their sheltering skills. Because we all know, despite the Interweb’s vast seas of information, it is a “network,” which means it can be just as dangerous as going outside! Stay away from the evils of the Hello Kitty chatroom children! Stay far far away!

I did find a link to a memo stating Virginia Governor Gilmore issued a Certificate of Recognition for Computer/Technology Learning Month in Virginia. So technically I think Virginians are supposed to still be observing it, but then again, this was Gilmore, and he signed a lot of things he had no understanding of.

Anyways. There you have it, October is still Computer Learning Month as far as this blog is concerned, and I plan on using it as an excuse to post some of my experiences working in programming and also as an excuse to really, honestly for-real-this-time learn the Rules of Database Normalization (PDF) well enough to explain them here so that non-computer literate folks can understand them. There is a high probability you will never hear mention of this again.

In honor of Software Freedom Day, I am making a concerted effort to install Ubuntu on one of my computers. I would much rather be hanging out at Bug Fest in Raleigh, but I don’t have the gas money or time this weekend. Unlike all my previous attempts to install that stupefyingly complex OS, Linux, I hear Ubuntu is much more accessible. We’ll see.

Software Freedom isn’t just about shareware, copyrights, and copylefts. It’s about transparency in applications that have become an indispensable part of our lives. If we don’t have access to what’s going on under the hood of Microsoft Windows or Mac OS, then we are susceptible to unscrupulous corporate schemes such as the Sony Rootkit Scandal, where the company installed spyware on computers playing its CDs, opening security holes for viruses and crashing Windows computers everywhere.

Closed-source software also prevents users from being a part of computer science, stifling programming innovation and competition. Every single time a new version of Windows has come out, I’ve had to buy a new computer to support it. Open-source operating systems don’t get more bloated and hardware-intensive with new versions. They get more efficient and more secure, because everyone is hacking them and everyone is improving them. Microsoft Vista is bad for the environment, and I’m not installing it. Fart on you Bill Gates.

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Here are some of my favorite open-source projects:

Ubuntu: An operating system with a philosophy. That alone makes this user-friendly flavor of Linux way past cool. There are many flavors of Ubuntu also, from the children’s educational Edubuntu to the scientific Scibuntu. The world “Ubuntu” is a Southern African in origin and reflects the ethics of humanist philosophy. My favorite translation of the word is, “I am because you are.”

One Laptop per Child (OLPC): Although these laptops have failed in their goal of coming in under $100, the OLPC laptops do include some incredible design innovations, from a hand-crank power source to a picture-based operating system that overcomes language and literacy barriers. The laptops will bring Internet access to third world countries and will automatically network with other OLPCs in their vicinity.

Freedom Toaster: The first world is flooding the third world with our old computer equipment, and we all know Microsoft doesn’t support anything but its latest version of Windows; therefore, these countries must turn to open-source operating systems to bring them into the Information Age, but access to such programs are difficult when you don’t have an internet connection. Freedom Toasters are computer kiosks running Ubuntu that are set up to burn CDs of the latest open-source softwares for distribution and overcome the bandwidth hindrance.

MIT OpenCourseWare: Open source is egalitarian. If everyone has access to the Internet, then theoretically everyone could have access to a College Education. MIT is working to make this a reality by putting videos of their courses and course materials online for free.

Open Office: This software is just like Microsoft Office, fully compatible with Microsoft document file types, and it’s free and open source. I’ve heard mixed reviews from fully positive to cautiously positive. My attempt to get it running today failed miserably, but that might be a bad hard drive in what is now my Ubuntu box.

Second Life: This virtual world is now open source, and is free so long as you don’t want to own property in it. As popular as it is, however, it will remain restricted until it becomes like the World Wide Web, and allows everyone to not just play in it, but host it as well. I see a lot of potential here.

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Ubuntu has finished loading, and now I’m looking into the multitude of free softwares I can run on it. I’m already digging the multiple desktops and the screensavers, which include cosmos slideshows, galaxy collision simulations, and this nifty MC Escher ants on a mobius strip 3-D model:

Happy Software Freedom Day!