Wikipedia is electing a board. Interesting example in the space of how to structure your goverance.

In order to vote you must have at least 400 edits prior to 00:00 May 30, 2005 (UTC) on the Wikimedia project from which you cast your vote. The first edit must have been 90 days or more before the time of voting. Please note that the Election Officials have the power to disqualify votes from permanently banned users or sockpuppets.

Oh, so they have decided to disenfranchise the sock puppets. Beware the angry sock puppets!

New England towns often end up governed by a peculiar demographic because they have open town meetings. It’s the people who can spare a few hundred hours a year to pick nits at meeting. That “400 edits” rule implies a simplistic model of the distribution of value across the space of edits. Edits are not like bushel’s of wheat. I guess they have a lot of faith in the law of large numbers.

I’m such a sucker for charts like these. This one shows the amount of energy consumed per person in various nations or regions. Each dot is one year. You can see the US reacting to the energy crisis of the late 70s, and then once the supply recovered returning to form. (via infectious greed)

Meanwhile over at Oil Drum (one of the less hysterical blogs on peak oil) they mention that one idea being toyed with in the UK for limiting carbon emissions is that old stand by – create a carbon market. Except in this version they have a new twist, grant each citizen a carbon alotment.

Gizmo appears to be a another SIP client. A soft phone that uses the SIP protocols to talk to… well it appears to be hard wired to one VOIP vendor’s SIP proxy. That would be SipPhone. SipPhone peers with FreeWorldDialup, so I could reach my basement asterisk server thru that. At that point I’m back in the open VOIP world.

I can see the hard wired sip proxy and tun server in the object library. I guess, I could use DNS spooffing to point it directly at my asterisk server.

Michael Robertson, SipPhone’s owner, when accouncing it wrote: “This week, a product called Gizmo is being unveiled – the first viable Skype alternative built on open source that pledges to connect to all.” Which translates as “We used open source and we are standards based (pretty much).” and it doesn’t mean “We are giving back everything we wrote to the commons.”

He has a classic column fodder product comparison table in his posting. Make’s Skype look pretty bad. Needs a few more rows, for things like encryption, what codex are supported/required, how many adopters, and how much of VOIP traffic flows thru an middleman. Needs a few more columns for other vendor’s offerings

None the less, this is a provocative offering. It certainly is much more spritely than the X-Lite softphone/SIP-client. X-Lite, on the otherhand, can register with a dozen or more VOIP vendors. Hard to displace Skype at this point. But it is not impossible. More open would help.

Update: My experiance so far has been spotty. Sometimes it works great. Other times it behaves like Alpha quality software with lots of rough edges, intermittent connections, and occational crashes. The Gizmo discussion forums are an excellent resource and the postings there are similar to my experiance. Hopefully over the next month they will work out a lot of the rough edges. One nice thing, it will allow you to call sip URL’s, though I don’t seem to be able to enter them in the address book. If it was open source all these rough edges would be attracting contributors :-).

I recall seeing and discussing how you could help users avoid entering their password into the phishing UIs by presenting each user with a graphically distinctive user interface back in late 1999, or possibly early 2000. Its a fun idea; and Bruce Schneier points out a paper (pdf)with lots of particulars sketched out.

This is a perfect opportunity for a grease monkey script!

I just wanted to post that.

The survey site doesn’t work in Safari, but it’s fine in Firefox. It also seems to think that I “posted” a lot of the links that WordPress bundled with my blog.

Go see it.

Cat bloggers tremble as Ted Leung breaks open a whole new frontier in blogging – laundry-blogging!

I too have retained some nostalgic rags…

The only good part of the pending demise of my powerbook is that the “genius” at the Apple store found the diagnosis both facinating and obviously entertaining. It took us both a long time to figure out the following. When I came in the machine wouldn’t boot, and the battery was dead.

My battery only charges when the machine is asleep or turned off. When running the power from the adaptor is insufficent to run the machine. The battery slowly discharges when the machine is running. If the battery fully discharges; which happens if I don’t keep an eye on it, then it is impossible to start it. If fully discharged it doesn’t charge. At that point I need to find another machine of the same kind and recharge the battery on that machine.

The charging subsystem is on the main logic board; so that needs replacing. Since my case has a small dent Apple insists that both are fixed. Total cost of repair is the cost of both the case and th logic board, i.e. around $900. Machine’s is about two and half years old.

Looks like I’ll be buying a new machine and then disassembling this one and selling it’s organs one part at a time on eBay (except of course the failed main logic board).

I didn’t really want to be this kind of spending money at this instant, but I am grateful for firewire.

“Customers have a tendency to become like the kind of customers you treat them.”

That quote really goes to the heart of something I’ve observed in plenty of senarios, but then I don’t even like the word customer.

It really is true, you get back what you sow. For example I bought a hundred dollar item today. This purchase involved a price match, a rebate, a coupon and 15 minutes of waiting while various assistent managers sought ways to decline to deal. The three vendors involved treat the entire exercise as a form of gaming for the benefit of their advertising and discrimitory pricing schemes. The customer service people treated me if I was very likely a criminal. The entire relationship created by these games is a train wreck. No trust at all anywhere in the transaction. What a mess! Not really worth saving 40$ on a 90$ purchase; but they created the game and I’m playing.

One of the facinating things about Open Source is the how the people that consume the output of the projects are treated. No coddling customer support lines staffed by people who though they never ever loose their temper but sadly know little about the product. But instead the users are treated as peers. Always a hope that this user will become a contributor. Always the expectation that everybody is in this together. And yes, if you treat people like that they tend to grow into the role.

The quote also reminded me a bit of one company I work with: T-mobile’s prepaid cell phone service. When you call these guys it’s great. You always feel as if they are happy in their work. You always feel as if you have a bit of common cause with them against the mysteries of modern telecom systems. Not that your allied against the company, but that your allied against your joint problem. I don’t know how they manage this; but I like it.

Scott Lofftesness pulled it from an essay that otherwise didn’t greatly impress me. But that quote is exactly right and it runs deeper that it might at first appear.

Many many years ago I was working on a project and we were optomistic that a large firm might partner with us. It was going well until our contracting people got involved. Suddenly the folks at the big firm called up and announced that don’t work with people who worked like that. They were right, you shouldn’t. When you start to realize your going to have to mirror the behaviors of the other guy, and those behaviors aren’t constructive – well bleck.