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May 15, 2006
The real Slim Kewney -- random visitor instead of internet expert in BBC interview
Guy J Kewney, internet & wireless journalist, was scheduled to give an interview on the BBC, when he found himself represented on TV by a nice gentleman speaking broken English. The BBC crew dragged the other Guy in front of the camera, to give a short life interview about music downloads and the recent win of Apple Computers over Apple, the Beatles' recording label. Guy #2, reportedly either Guy #1's cab driver or a recent IT graduate from Congo applying for a job at the BBC, played along, and it's a hilarious catch.
I'm not surprised that something like that can happen. The editors that prepare the shows rarely spend much time on getting just the right interview partner - a 10-20 minute phone call is enough to make sure the guy you're eyeing speaks fluently and has something interesting to say.
I don't have experience with TV, but I've done just that job at various radio stations. It's quite likely that the person scheduling the interview on the day before isn't the one running the production of the show - so whoever is in charge of greeting the interview partner (for instance, an assistant producer) will just quickly check that the name in the books matches the visitor's name, and that's it. It's a tough business, things happen quickly (such an interview takes a minute or two!). Mind you, the presenter itself doesn't usually know what's going on - they've been briefed before the show.
The real Guy J Kewney, by the way, can laugh about the whole story.
Posted by dr at 11:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 14, 2006
Raquel
Nothing to rant about today - instead, I hope I can make your day with a pretty girl :-) (Photo taken in February in Rome)
Posted by dr at 11:48 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
May 11, 2006
Martins Tunde, Joy Ray and friends: Greed and Gullibility.
Ever done business with Mr. Martins Tunde ("Manager of Remitant Department LEAD MERCHANT BANK NIGERIA PLC")? He's got millions to bring out of his country, and you're his man!
His friend, Mrs Joy Ray from Libya, almost made me cry: "As you read this, I do not want you to feel sorry for me, because I believe everyone will die someday." But I'm sure that Joy has a lucrative heritage to leave for us.
If you have an e-mail account or two, you will probably have received interesting offers from Tunde, Ray and colleagues, you will have received such offers, which aim to get you involved in a fake transaction, leading you to wire advance fees to Nigera or elsewhere. Jane Austen could have written a novel: Greed and Gullibility.
Indeed, what's really interesting about it is the sheer gullibility of the victims. Otherwise intelligent people get entangled in the Nigerian fishing nets, thanks to their own greed. The New Yorker has a well-researched piece about a very Christian American with a PhD, who ended up losing hundreds of thausands of dollars over the years and got a prison sentence himself - and isn't any wiser. Others seem to be smarter - and scam the scammers.
By the way: the e-mail fraud schemes are known as 419 scams, after the applicable section in Nigeria's code. Yes, there are laws in Nigera.
Posted by dr at 9:48 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 7, 2006
Free and Proprietary Software: the Emacs Lock-In
Microsoft is pretty much out of my world, free software runs on my Desktop and I'm looking at a bright future full of flexibility. Never again will a vendor tell me how I run my computer system. Fantastic!
But guess what: With some free software, I find myself behind bars, in the same old vendor-lock-in situation that I got out just a few years ago. This time, it's not the license. Free software is more about just the licensing. It's the design of the user interface that's at fault when a free programs turns out to be proprietary. Why's that?
But let me start from the beginning and explain what free software is. Free computer programs aren't only free as in beer, but also free as in freedom. You're allowed and encouraged to change the program and pass the new version on to your friends. You're allowed to participate in its development, and sometimes, your needs as a simple user are heard! And most importantly, you're guaranteed that you'll be legally able to use the software in the future - with no fee, no strings attached. A guarantee that you don't have with bread-and-butter software like Word from Microsoft or a professional $1000 Stats package like SPSS: They can and will upgrade and force you to buy their new package to be able to run it on the latest operating system.
Started by Philosopher-programmer-activist Richard M. Stallman, the free software movement has changed the world. His assembly of low-level software tools from the GNU project forms maybe half the operating system of every Linux computer, and some of it helps people develop cool programs for those shiny, hot Apple Macs. Computer geeks of the world are in debt to Stallman and friends.
Unfortunately, GNU/Linux systems are not as easy to use as you would like them to be. There are many reasons for that. I'll point out one of them. Funnily enough, it's about free software actually being closed and proprietary.
Let's look at Emacs, one of the oldest free software projects. Used mainly by programmers and scientists, it's an editor that allows people to quickly and comfortably edit texts, programs and other files. Technically, it's very open. Everything is documented, and you can write your own little extensions in an elegant (Lisp) language that can be very powerful. It's a text editor that you can even play games in. Of course, it's free software. You're allowed to change the main program to make it better and re-distribute it.
Emacs makes you more productive - after a while. When I first started using it, Emacs was a shock. Even though I would consider myself a computer expert, having two decades of intense computer exposure and a degree in computer science, Emacs seemed difficult and impenetrable.
Why's that? Do you know what a keyboard command in Emacs can look like? "Press Control and x together, then press control and r together, then press the space bar, then 1." This will earmark a piece of text, so you can jump back there later on (with C-x C-r j 1 - logical, isn't it?). And there is no help while you're typing the command - it's not a series of menus or so. You need to remember the command - otherwise you'll have to look it up.
Those key commands are a pain in the beginning, but they're Emacs' virtue in the long run. It's what makes editing blazingly fast. No need to use the mouse. Your fingers will remember those commands soon, once you've figured them out.
Unfortunately, Emacs uses totally different key commands from what you're used to. If you're used to a Windows machine, you expect Control-C to copy and Control-V to paste. Not so in Emacs, where it's Win-W and Control-Y for historical reasons. Emacs has used the concept of temporary storage, a clipboard, long before operating systems have picked up and standardized the idea. But other applications have set the standards, and Emacs (in its default configuration) hasn't adapted.
Mind you, when I'm talking about you and me being used to certain user interface standards, we're not talking about computer illiterates and people with AOL accounts. They won't ever use a plain text editor anyways. But those of us who know are not afraid to write a little configuration script or implement a little Python program to test their latest scientific theory, we need text editors all the time. More so if you're a professional developer, working on things like web sites, database backend or computer games.
But we're not geniuses. We don't just know 500 keyboard commands out of the top of our heads. We rely on what we are used to. That means that people, once they've learned Emacs, will stick with it. Or be stuck with it.
And that's exactly where we touch the limits of the freedom of free software. When it comes to user interfaces, free software suddenly becomes proprietary. Here, the keyboard commands are only one thing that hinders me from switching to other software when I want to, and keyboard commands are relatively easy to change. What's much worse is that Emacs uses its own language. Not English, not the Computerspeak your average 2005 computer science graduate is used to. What's probably Win-W or maybe Option-W on most modern computers is called M-w (or: Meta-w) throughout in Emacs. Again, this happens for historical reasons: back in the days, keyboards on Unix machines came with a Meta key. Here's a few more examples for Emacsspeak:
| Emacsspeak | more common idiom |
| Kill | Cut (cut out selected text) |
| Save | Copy |
| yank | Paste (the copied text) |
| Find or Visit | Open (a file) |
| Point | Cursor |
| Key Bindings | Keyboard Shortcuts |
| Frame | Window |
| Window | "pane", or part of a window |
| Faces | Styles (for headings e.g.) |
Confused yet?
I don't know if there are any linguistic advantages in
killing and yanking over copying and pasting. But
since the turn-of-century philosopher De
Saussure described the (arbitrary) relationship between words and
their meanings, we know that language is largely a matter of
consensus. We agree on meanings, codify them in words, and that's
(part of) how we communicate. When two people start using different
terms to mean the same thing, communication becomes more
difficult. It's what happens between strangers, not friends, and it's
the opposite of the
What's happening with Emacs and some other free software is that parts of the user community insist on a terminology that is special to Emacs and meaningless in other contexts.
Sometimes, new technology is innovative and hasn't been adopted widely. Take Skype, for example, which uses a special but good protocol to enable people to make phone calls over the internet, or the iPod, which is the best-known MP3 player available. But such technology soon becomes proprietary: it is unavailable for others to use in their competing products.
Emacs terminology is an example of such a case. It started out because there were no words for the features Emacs had to offer. But now, everyone and their grandma are using several frames and windows and buffers in the application, but they call them differently. Emacs terminology has become insular. It's a classical proprietary system!
Emacs has a closed user interface. Once you've learned the codes, you'll stick with them because other editors use a different (standardized) interface. The same issue occurs if you are familiar with another text editor, say, BBEdit, TeXShop, TextPad, WinEdt, XCode, C++Builder. They all behave in very similar ways. Switching between them is easy, but switching to the free Emacs is daunting. Here, otherwise free software causes a perfect vendor-lock-in, without the need! Sometimes, people attempt to make Emacs more compatible with the outside world, for example as we've done with Aquamacs. But Aquamacs is available for the semi-proprietary Mac OS X only, because it's harder to nail down UI standards on GNU/Linux.
Emacs is indispensable. Not only because it's a productivity-booster, but also because we're getting so used to its interface. In effect, Emacs creates what Stallman and friends always wanted to avoid: proprietary software which cannot easily be substituted for an alternative. This time not for technical reasons, but because of the human factor.
The conclusion? Freedom in computing is more than a matter of the right license. It's a concept that should affect software at its design phase. Developers should work to make their software human-compatible with the standards of the platform it runs on.
Note: the author of this article is a friend of free software and uses his own distribution of Emacs daily.
Posted by dr at 2:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack