Month: May 2004

Makes us more than just well-fed cows

Astrobiology Magazine interviews Brother Guy Consolmagno. He has a M.Sc. from MIT and a Ph.D. from University of Arizona. He also just so happens an astronomer of the Vatican Observatory. He’s also proof positive that science and theology can coexist together.

…If God made the universe, and he made it good, and he loved the universe so much that, as the Christians believe, he sent his only son, it’s up to us to honor and respect and get to know the universe. I think it was Francis Bacon who said that God sets up the universe as a marvelous puzzle for us to get to know him by getting to know how he did things. By seeing how God created, we get a little sense of God’s personality. And that means, among other things not going in with any preconceived notions. We can’t impose our idea of how God did things. It’s up to us to see how the universe actually does work.

Yes! Fundamentalists, I hope you’re writing this down. Being devout doesn’t mean turning off your neocortex, and being scientific doesn’t mean being an athiest.

The whole scientific enterprise really does coincide well with Christian theology. The whole idea that the universe is worth studying is a Christian idea. The whole mechanism for studying the physical universe comes straight out of the whole logic of the scholastic age. Who was the first geologist? Albert the Great, who was a monk. Who was the first Chemist? Roger Bacon, who was a monk. Who was the first guy to come up with spectroscopy? Angelo Secchi, who was a priest. Who was the guy who invented genetics? Gregor Mendel, who was a monk. Who was the guy who came up with the Big Bang theory? Georges Lema

Innovation is forever

My dad yesterday told me he was going to prepare a presentation on Innovation, and asked me “what is innovation?” The question caught me offguard, since innovation is a pretty broad topic. I thought up a pop science answer to the question and told him this:

Innovation is like a diamond. It can be quantified with 4 C’s:

Creativity: The ability to think laterally. This can be augmented with TRIZ, mindmapping, Blue Sky sessions and other methods of generating that “spark”.

Commitment: A clear focus, tangible support from management, plus consistent flow of resources. If you keep pulling people off research, nothing will be accomplished.

Collaboration: Maximizing knowledge reuse. This may mean creating interdisciplinary teams.

Communication: There is more to collaboration than teamwork. It’s also asking the tough questions, doing to due diligence, networking with experts, and debriefing colleagues.

Open source in Canada

Will be heading to the Open Source Conference tomorrow at the University of Toronto. It takes place between May 9 to 11, and features such speakers as Bob Young (RedHat co-founder and owner of the Ti-Cats), Eben Moglen (FSF), and even a guy from MS’s Shared Source Initiative. I hope it will be informative.

Some industry stats from the Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance:

Open source is becoming an explicit component in enterprise IT strategy and architecture. Only 13% of respondents do not include open source in their strategy. The majority acknowledged open source as both an:

  • Implicit component such as a default option for the web, e.g. Apache (55%) or part of commercial hardware or software (30%)
  • Explicit component such as open source business applications (50%) or custom in-house code (51%), for the purposes of both middleware/interoperability and business solution functionality.
  • Almost half of respondents have defined formal policies and practices for both internal open source development , and only a quarter for external sharing back to the open community.

Most interestingly, Canadian IT departments list OSS’s #1 benefit is reliability, followed by performance and then price. The top two concerns are intellectual property concerns, and the hassle to research and assess the software.

ITBusiness.ca has some extra background on this CATA survey, however: the survey only attracted a few hundred responses, and 75% of them were from SMBs.

I think that many open source applications is at a tipping point right now. They’re maturing rapidly versus the proprietary market leaders, but the market leaders are entrenched in their positions and are fiercely fighting back, sometimes with innovative tech and sometimes with marketing tactics (such as “FUD”). Regardless, I think many OSS applications will either make the big time or never will.

The anti-servant leader

Or, how not to run an IT department. Isen.blog cites a CIO Magazine article which does a post-mortem on AT&T Wireless.

AT&T Wireless tried to outsource everything to save money, demoralized employees by not fessing up to rumours to impending layoffs, and bungled a critical system upgrade. AT&T Wireless was bought up for a song by Cingular last year.

Take a look at the CIO’s uh, unique brand of driving employees to success…or something:

Former employees say morale wasn’t helped by [AT&T Wireless’s CIO Christopher Corrado]’s first presentation to the IT group, in which they say he proclaimed, “Come in every day and expect to be fired.” Intended to inspire the troops to greater effort, the talk backfired, says another former employee. “We all came away saying, ‘Who is this arrogant jerk?'”

The comments are pretty amusing too, if depressing. Ex-employees regale tales of having their warnings and recommendations given less attention than those of contractors, having to train their H1-B replacements before they were terminated, and of Corrado having his Ferrari delivered to the company parking lot during layoffs.

Portal potty

BCE has finally decided to leverage its extensive media saavy to provide high-bandwidth content to Bell Sympatico subscribers. The web portal is currently in the works, but if you are on Sympatico, you can take a sneek peak at Sympatico Fast Lane: Members Only and speed.sympatico.ca.

Most portals are pretty blah. Half the MSN.ca portal are advertisements cleverly fastlane.jpg disguised as news articles. Sympatico.ca’s current portal is not easy to customize. And don’t get me started on Yahoo!

However, Sympatico Fast Lane seems to have some truly interesting, unique features in the works:

NHL SnapShot: Watch an abridged 20 minute clip of any hockey game from the previous night. Today, you can see the Leafs lose the playoffs :(.

2004 Juno Awards: Exclusive live webcast.

Off the Air: A compilation of funny TV commercials to watch. An intriguing feature, considering AdCritic is no longer around.

Download Centre: Members-only download site for game demos, movie trailers, etc. Never wait at FilePlanet again.

SayMail: You can create your own email greetings, complete with images and a voice recording.

However, I await the day that CTV (part of Bell Globemedia, which is a subsidiary of BCE) offers their TV shows online as video downloads, kinda like what the BBC is doing now.

Like fighting with one hand behind your back

New York Times had an article today on how VoIP will change the competitive landscape in Canada with regards to data communication.

One thing’s for sure, there will be more competition around – the question is how substantial it will be. I’m still not 100% convinced that the likes of Primus and Vonage have the killer app, but they’re products are definitely decent.

An interesting quote about how regulated the ILECs are:

…The phone companies are especially concerned that VoIP technology will give cable operators a free hand to offer “triple play” bundling, or discounted prices for packages of TV, Internet and local phone service.

B.C.E. and Telus also bundle services, but they are not allowed to offer a discount of more than 10 percent on the usual retail price. These restrictions do not apply to new suppliers of local phone service or to unregulated services, like wireless, cable, Internet and long-distance phone calls.

Sabia and others are calling for the CRTC to loosen the leash around their necks so that they can better compete with the new smaller, faster players. Sabia cites the impending convergence of IP, voice and wireless will easily give competitors a massive upper hand if BCE is not allowed a level playing field.

For now, the CRTC is satisfied with giving the ILECs a handicap via VoIP regulations that the CLECs do not have to follow.

Patently absurd

Microsoft accidentally receives a patent for a kind of apple tree: Apple patented by Microsoft. It should be noted that Canadian patent law does not allow you to patent living things, although one could patent the techniques in genetic engineering or breeding.

In other news, Wired reports that the NRC is recommended some “decisive steps” to fix the US patent system:

Those steps include, among other things, hiring new patent examiners, creating a more open system for challenging questionable patents, and rejecting more patents on processes that are deemed to be “obvious” by people in the field.

Chris Pratley weighs in with some thoughts on patenting at Microsoft (and gives a few potshots at open source software too, but what can you do):

“Microsoft gets “submarined” quite often. A small company or individual has an idea, which they patent as quietly as possible. Then they sit back and wait (years if necessary), until some big company develops something (independently of course) that is sufficiently similar to their idea that they can surface and sue us…The people involved often never had any intent of developing their idea, and they also make sure to wait until we have been shipping a product for several years before informing us they think they have a patent on something related, so that “damages” can be assessed as high as possible…

Another view is that big companies patent lots of things, and then by the implicit threat of suing the “small guy”, prevent innovation from moving forward.”

As you know, SCO, Eolas, Patriot and Forgent have pulled this stunt recently. Did you know there are many other companies like these out there whose major source of income is from litigating other companies for patent infringement? Pretty sad but true.

I get less insults in Counterstrike

Starting about two months ago, I started going to badminton sessions at my local community centre. I figured it was a good way to hang out with Juice, get a little cardio, and basically stay out of trouble four hours a week.

I confess, I never played badminton until two months ago. I played tennis only briefly in university, and own a tennis racquet that’s never been used in five years. I have lousy depth perception to boot.

However, I’ve trudged along, and Juice has encouragingly told me I’ve already improved immensely.

So it came to my surprise to be insulted twice for my beginner’s skill last night.

One of the “regulars” confided with me that I was a poor player, and I was cramping everyone’s game. “They are just too nice to tell you,” he said. He continued on this point, and concluded by saying I should practice at home before coming.

I’m not entirely sure how I’m supposed to practice badminton by myself in my apartment. Unfortunately, he was not as helpful in providing tips on this regard as he was on commenting on my apparently pathetic skills.

It was if he told me not come back to the public swimming lanes until I did enough few breast strokes in my bathtub to keep up with the other participants.

The second fella, my playing partner, was even more blunt. Right before a serve, he noticed I was wearing a Goodlife Fitness t-shirt, and remarked, “You should go to Goodlife more often.”

This was from a guy who wasn’t exactly Mr. Universe himself, although he wouldn’t look out of place at a hotdog eating pageant. I seriously wanted to point this out to him in an equally derogatory way, but just playfully wagged my finger at him and continued playing.

Later that night, I noticed that I’ve never seen a single person compliment another person on the courts. With attitudes like these, it’s no surprise that many novices decide to quit. I won’t, but I’m not terribly impressed right now.

I apologize to everyone. I thought I was in a community centre, not the World Badminton Championships.

On ne marie pas les poules avec les renards

More on the Doyle vs. O’Reilly thing. The National Post somewhat sensationalizes the situation, claiming the feud is “escalating”:

[O’Reilly] also urged his supporters to initiate a writing campaign at Doyle’s expense. Many obeyed, apparently, flooding Doyle’s e-mail box with hundreds of hateful retorts, many of them with expletives to be deleted. Even the New York Times paid attention with an article this week that reprinted many of the postings.

“You’re lucky we don’t attack Canada next. We hate communists here,” wrote John from Virginia.

But the hate mail was also followed by a flood of missives from sympathetic Americans, according to Doyle.

“I think most of these people live in parts of the country that CSI couldn’t use for their storylines because all the DNA is the same and there are no dental records,” wrote Jami from Omaha.

A fellow Globe columnist also reminisced about her public appearance on Fox, opposite Bill O’Reilly in a well-written column:

It’s not enough to show compassion to people you love, the [Dalai Lama] told Canadians this week. You also have to show it to people who hate you. This was lingering in my mind as Nate Fredman, the nice assistant to Mr. O’Reilly, the man who once said to the son of a Twin Towers victim, “Get out of my studio before I tear you to fucking pieces,” urged me to appear.

Ultimately however, she found the meetup rather frustrating.

It was like talking to a manic child who had eaten 800 cherry Pop Tarts for breakfast. He kept interrupting, so that no point could be made that could win a reply, much less a reasoned response — not so much a gabble of sound bites as a howling from Bedlam.

The best quip I’ve heard this week about Fox News is that it’s the newsroom equivalent of the WWE.

The Internet’s way of testing gullibility

Let’s say that one day, you receive a package in the post. It has a strange return address you’ve never corresponded with. Inside, there is a small bottle of mysterious liquid with a note attached that simply reads: “Drink me”.

Would you just shrug your shoulders, open the bottle, and guzzle down its contents?

Hell no!

Then why oh why, when people encounter mysterious emails beckoning them to run attachments of executables, they just dumbly click on?

For the average user, there is absolutely no reason to send or receive executable programs or scripts (anything with an EXE, BAT, COM, PIF, VBS, etc. extension) through email.

Executables can be viruses. Especially ones where you cannot guarantee their origins. So use some sense.