The Blog of Lucien Stals

US pledges $350m in tsunami aid

Nice one.]]>

Tim Berners Lee web site. There was an interesting question in his FAQ in the General Question, 1998 section.

Q: How could the Web be a more interactive, creative medium?

Nothing can be perfect, but the Web could be a lot better. It would help is we had easy hypertext editors which let us make links between documents with the mouse. It would help if everyone with Web access also had some space they can write to — and that is changing nowadays as a lot of ISPs give web space to users. It would help if we had an easy way of controlling access to files on the web so that we could safely use it for private, group, or family information without fear of the wrong people being able to access it.

It seems to me t!
hat the rise in popularity of blogs and wikis is doing a lot towards realising this goal. While neither of these technologies are new (the original wiki, Portland Pattern Repository, is dated 1995), they are emerging into the public awarness in a big way recently. It reminds me of the early days of the www when early adopters flooded the internet with personal web sites, armed with a little knowledge of HTML. That precipitated the great need of search engines to be able to find everything. Of course people soon realised that the signal to noise ratio was grossly in favour of the noise.

I guess what we are seeing is a second wave. Blogs put even greater creative freedom in peoples hands. So many blog sites have sprung up offereing blog accounts, and there is much less of a barrier to entry than before. The blog engines are pretty slick. People don't need to get their hand!
s dirty in the code at all. That opens up the way for people who may h
ave been put off by the learning curve.

To Be Continued…]]>

Finger pointing aside, I was pleased to see that the US has significantly increased it's contribution to this disaster after the UN comments. Australia has already trippled it's own contribution. I think everyone will be reaching deep.

I can't find the exact quote just now, but I recall that the UN predicted, in the late 90's, that this decade would be the decade of the natural disaster. As human populations expand, we have to find new places to live and find ourselves in more and more dangerous place!
s and in greater numbers. Look at how many died and were left homeless in the wake of huricanes in the caribbean earlier this year.

This quake was only the fifth strongest in the last 100 years, but the wave it generated struck such populated areas.]]>

Oxfam

I'm working on the SD1 lecture notes, but can't take my eyes off the BBC world news site which is keeping me up to date with tsunami news. (death toll 60000 and climbing at the time of me writing this)

Apart from the human tragedy of it, I am appalled by the interviews with returning tourists. I can understand wanting to come home, but to bi*ch and moan about how bad your holiday was because of this natural disaster (”disaster” seems to slight a word for what has happened) is just the grossest form of lack of human compassion. I saw an interview with one guy who was complaining that the Australian government wasn't doing enough. He said that Australia sent aid in the form of water and blankets, “but we already had blankets and water, so it was useless.”! Did this guy stop to think that perhaps the aid wasn't for him? He's alive and well, back home in Aust!
ralia now. A little shaken perhaps, but at least he can have a hot shower, turn on the tap to have a drink, and sleep in a clean bed inside his own home.

It just made my blood boil.

And people who are saying that they are comming home because all the shops are closed and there is nothing to do!? Why don't you help clean up? Pick up a few dead bodies or something? Help hand out aid? But to come home just because you are bored!?!?!? What plannet do these people live on? Surely not the same one as me?

And on the subject of countries helping out…

I saw a break down of the amounts of aid different countries are sending. Australias aid contribution was a little over half of what USA is sending. I'm sorry, did I read that wrong? Half? What is USAs' GDP compared to Australia? I bet it's a bit more than double. What bloody cheap skates. The biggest human tragedy since who knows what, and the USA is being chea!
p about it. Probably don't want to put to much strain on their wa
r efforts.

And while I'm paying out on the sepos, I was watching the news at about 4am yesterday (as you do with a one week old son who need feeding) and it was some syndicated American news service (NBC, I think). Now their coverage of the disaster was good (but notably, none of the reporters on the scene were American. Just Aussies and English), but the news anchor was only interested in asking about “the vacuum effect” of the tide being drawn out before the wave hit. All th reporters were ignoring him and just went on reporting the story, but the insenitive prick just kept saying “did you see the vacuum effect? Did anyone see the vacuum effect?” like it was some bloody side show. And then once the coverage of the disaster was over, the anchors just moved right on into the next story, plastic smiles in place, about how to get the best out of the boxing day sales in America, and some bits about consumer law so you can get refunds for pr!
esents. I'm sorry, but if you don't like the socks uncle Bob gave you, send them to somebody who just lost everything!

I just couldn't get over it. It's like they didn't even care. But then I remembered something from my own time in America. It was always difficult to get international news in the US, since the only time they report stuff from over seas is when Americans are directly involved. So far, I have not heard of any American deaths in the floods, so perhaps they just don't care? ]]>

Aparently millennium fever griped the West a little over 1000 years ago just as it did for us as a prelude to the recent millenium. Charicterised by the proliferation of dooms day cults and a ground swell of fundamentalism. Everyone looks to the bible for signs that Judgement Day is upon us. I think that even the hysteria over the Y2K bug was a manifestation of this fear of the end of all things.

But as we all know, nothing happened. It was a big fizzer.

What I find particularly interesting is that in the wake of the unfulfilled anticipation over the first millenium, religious passions were running hot, and these passions spilled out in the form of the crusades when the Christian West went to war with the Islamic East. The First Crusade was launched in 1095. The Crusades were ideaolgical wars fought over religion, not land, and were charicteristicly bloody and cruel. The infamous quote “Kill them all, God will recognise his own.” came from this time when entire villages were massacred for suspected harbouring of non-christians, the idea being that the souls of the devout would be ushered into heaven thus justifying the killing of everyone .

If we fast forward 1000 years, what do we find? The Christiam West at war with the Islamic East in the wake of another unfulfilled millenium. We didn't wait 95 years this time, but then everything happens so much faster these days. You can substitute the term “terrorist” for “non-christian” if you like, but we find the same indiscriminate killing where the ends justifies the means. Take the recent battle for Falluja where the entire city was bombed to oust a few non-christians millitants.

Am I reading too much into this? Or is it synchronicity?

this article on the Python site about a Python port for a Nokia phone.

Scripting languages just keep getting cooler and cooler

I noticed they have a wikiquote project. There is a bunch of Neal Stephenson quotes, but not the one I just mangled in my last post.

Neal Stephenson @ Wikiquote

Shootable Demo

The wiki is one I'm concidering as a replacment for mediawiki which we are currently using. Given the massive amounts of data mediawiki is designed to handle (can you say wikipedia?), probably slight overkill for the use we are giving it.

It reminds me of a line from a Neal Stephenson book:
Their idea of subtle made me look like a tacticle nuclear strike.

Not sure how that relates, but I've always loved that quote a I just had to put it in

With added enzymes, for extra cleaning power!

I took on teaching SD1 over summer semester with the hope that I could use the time to field test some changes to the current SD1 curriculum that I had in mind.

Now I do have a habbit of wanting to customise things a bit just to mark my territory. But this was more than change for the sake of change.

The failure rate for SD1 has always been high, and there have been some questions raised about the level of competancy of SD1 graduates. (I should clarify that. SD1 students have been laerning stuff, but have they been learning the right stuff?)

So the motivation for change then becomes: can we imporove the pass rate; and can we make them better programmers.

For these reasons, I wanted to take some of the focus off high level design concepts, and put more focus on low level programming concepts.

Now, the first half of the semester is pretty much just low level coding. Yesterday I delivered the big “Here’s how objects work” lecture. It was bloated and ran about 20 minutes over.

Next I have to write the rest of the lectures. Mainly this will consolidate and extend the material I have covered so far, btu I still need to go into inheritance and polymorphism. This is a sticking point at the moment. Cay Horstmanns’ book Big Java, and the Barnes and Kolling Objects First with Java(no it doesn’t. I got that one wrong.), both teach polymorphism through introducing Interfaces, then go onto inheritance.

Currently the SD1 curriculum teaches polymorphism in the context of inheritance. The question du jour is “I!
nterfaces first? Or Inheritance first?”

But I’ve spent enough time on this post already. Better get back to writing the lecture on Strings.