Weblogs and Writing

Dave Winer hosts a bevy of webloggers at Harvard to talk about ... what else: weblogging. From Donna Wentworth's account of the conversation (what a monumental effort on her part!), there's this:

Harvard prof: When I was the age of most of the people in this room, people communicated with telephones...I've observed that with weblogs, you've brought writing back into the world.

Dave Winer: Yes, writing is good. Let's write.

Adam Medros: Yes, you've brought back an emphasis on the skill of writing persuasively...you've brought back trying out ideas/arguments.

I've seen this in my own writing. There's no substitute for regular practice!

11:14:29 PM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []  

Blind Date

Uzbekistan Diary:

All I can say, when it comes to this blind date, he lost me at hello.

2:38:59 PM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []  

Monoculture

In the middle twentieth century, Dutch Elm disease spread thru the midwest, reducing once tree-lined streets to virtual deserts. This decimation included the University of Illinois quadrangle, which once had American Elm trees gracing its sidewalks. After the elms came the Sycamores, dutifully planted in abundance along those same well-trodden paths. And these in turn fell victim to disease, leaving young plantings along the quad where the monocultures have twice now failed.

When NASA retooled its Control Center in Houston, a decision was made to buy only DEC Alpha workstations. They were undoubtedly impressive machines for their time, and a good deal was had for buying them in bulk (at least initially), but today the facility is fundamentally based on these workstations, even though DEC was long ago gobbled up by Compaq that has since been gobbled by HP. And the Alpha chip at the heart of these machines will soon be no more. The long term costs of hardware monoculture are beginning to rear their ugly heads.

Finally, recently a simple, relatively harmless "worm" crawled across the face of the globe, infecting the monoculture of Wintel servers running Microsoft software that had a vulnerability of which the worm was well aware. It gave the Internet global indigestion. Today many point to the worm as an example of the evils which we must be prepared to fight in the dawn of a new age of cyber-terrorism. Yet although they have discussed this worm and the security issues it raises, precious few have spoken to the perhaps more significant problem, and the one that has perhaps the easiest solution: software monoculture.

Oh for diversity!

What a simplistic platitude. Yet this diversity not just some abstract aesthetic. It is no mere shadow for philosophers to admire. It is a real solution out of the real pit into which we seem to have really dug ourselves.

Pass the shovel. I've got a tree to plant!

12:27:19 PM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []  

Josh Marshall has some critical observations about the Bush administration's foreign policy:

The president and his crew are acting like that not-as-smart-as-he-thinks-he-is high school kid who's always running into reverses and always blaming it on someone else. At first you think he's getting a bad shake until you see the same thing happening over and over again. It's always someone else's fault. The South Koreans are lame. The Europeans are lame. Our Arab allies are lame. Everybody is lame. We're given excuse after excuse.

8:38:56 AM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []