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Monday, August 30th, 2010Every now and then, someone stumbles across my blog and asks me how they, too, can work in development. I try to be supportive, but usually find myself actively discouraging them, at least at first.
You’d better be strong, flexible, resourceful, good with languages and have more than the normal allotment of patience.
I’ve been stuck in [...]
You Are All Driving Pintos And I Want You To Stop
Thursday, August 26th, 2010I’ve lived with it for a while now, but really, it’s getting intolerable. The vast majority of you are using the computer equivalent of a Ford Pinto. Poorly built, underpowered and yet inefficient, lacking both in style and substance. And unsafe at any speed.
Worse still, you’re not even driving it.
Back in 2007, Vint Cerf, one of the inventors of the Internet, stood up at the Davos Forum and announced that, out of about 600 million personal computers worldwide, about 150 million are remotely controlled by criminals. These ‘zombies’ or ‘bots’ as they’re commonly known, are formed into legions of compromised machines called ‘botnets’.
Let’s put this in perspective: If your own PC is not infected, then odds are very high that one of your immediate neighbours is. When you factor in the strict security and controls that many enterprises maintain on their corporate resources, the odds that your home PC (and your neighbour’s) is a bot increase significantly.
An American Dreamer
Tuesday, August 10th, 2010The world is not gentle to the innocent, but no matter how it battered him, Tim Drefahl never let it win. Vanuatu offered solace for a while and, on an island ringed by an azure lagoon, there are people who will never forget his duty, his devotion, his love.
Snippets
Friday, August 6th, 2010On the bus ride back to the office today, I eavesdropped (as I often do) to a couple of women speaking one of Vanuatu’s hundreds of local languages. While I can speak exactly none of them, I know dribs and drabs of about a dozen or so, and it serves as a pleasant game to try to figure out whence the interlocutors originate.
Cheap Shots
Sunday, August 1st, 2010Aspiring photographer? Trying to make an impression on an online world with your nascent mastery of a century-old craft? Allow me to offer a few words of advice…
Tonga Declaration
Friday, June 25th, 2010There’s been lots of discussion in the region recently of the recent ICT Ministers’ meeting in Tonga. In order to help things along, here’s link to the actual Tonga Declaration 2010 document.
Update:
Here’s the OCR’ed text below the cut. Any errors are mine….
Wikileaks – Who Cares?
Saturday, June 19th, 2010Glenn Greenwald builds the case that bad boy hacker Adrian Lamo deliberately duped and betrayed Spc Bradley Manning, the young soldier notorious for having leaked the ‘Collateral Murder‘ video depicting an Apache helicopter crew gunning down unarmed civilians as they tried to aid a wounded journalist in Baghdad.
In the discussion on Slashdot, someone asks if this isn’t just a distraction from the real story?
That’s what’s bugging me here as well. Who cares how the footage was released? The important thing is WHY we have soldiers killing unarmed civilians.
I do. I care a lot. Why does someone have to face a lifetime in prison just to allow us to discuss ‘WHY we have soldiers killing unarmed civilians’?
Invention
Tuesday, May 18th, 2010People invent because it’s an innate part of human nature. So is jealousy, of course, so it’s more natural for us to talk about ‘my’ idea than it is to talk about ‘an’ idea. Like three-year-olds, we exchange ideas, insights and other intellectual tidbits in exchange for social advancement. But when that advancement is not forthcoming, we try harder, not less. We change our conception of reward. We change our audience.
We do everything except stop inventing.
Human, All Too Human
Saturday, March 13th, 2010People often complain that the Law is impersonal, an uncaring instrument whose application too often punishes the innocent and allows the guilty to walk free. In practice, it is capricious and too often selectively applied. All of this is true, from time to time.
But the alternative is summary judgment and mob justice. Far too often, they’re driven by hysteria and a deep-seated desire to find a scapegoat in order to externalise the worst aspects of human nature that exists within all of us. A recent Daily Post story on the recent murders Lolowei village reports that villagers had long made use of the two accused poisoners to settle their own petty differences.
The very people who had commissioned these despicable acts were the brothers’ accusers and ultimately their executioners.
Global Village or Digital Island?
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010The PiPP report, “Social and economic impact of introducing telecommunications throughout Vanuatu”, offers numerous examples of the inordinate lengths that rural merchants go to just to keep stock on their shelves, putting paid (one hopes) to the stereotype of the indolent islander waiting patiently for the cargo to come. If it serves no other purpose, it is invaluable for this insight alone.
But there is a great deal more to it than that. The image it conjures up is not so much of new entrants to the Global Village as of residents of Digital Islands: While communication has improved –and social and economic well-being along with it– the distance from one island to the next has diminished only slightly.
Mobile telephony in and of itself is a boon in most regards, but without complementary infrastructure and services, it is of limited value.
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