montagenik

I have this algorithm...

2010-11-11T12:12:00.000-08:00

Algorithms can solve two kinds of problems.

1) Problems with verifiable answers and...
2) Those without verifiable answers (or the verification is proved by statistically sampling)

Verifiable answers:

Algorithms in this category address problems like, find me all the numbers in this list, or even, find me the fastest route between point a and b.

The value in the algorithm is not the correctness, it is easy to find the answers to these problems, rather the value in these algorithms are the speed with which they are executed and the amount of data you have to solve your problem.

So for example there are many different kinds of sorting algorithms - they all correctly sort, but some are faster and some use less memory. This is where the ingenuity or value of the sorting algorithm comes in.

For the mapping example, it is not difficult to map the fastest route between two points. But you could imagine an algorithm that used realtime traffic data would provide faster routes than other algorithms. The answer these algorithms may be different, but their actual processing of information - the algorithm itself - may be the same. The only difference is the input data used by the algorithm.

Now onto the algorithms with no answers -
these are the interesting algorithms that answer questions like - find the top 10 sites on music, or recommend movies I'll like, or find me a date.

In the case of search - the answer can be the top 10 sites on music are the top music sites that people link to (google's algorithm), or the top 10 sites that my friends like (a facebook solution)

In the case of recommendations, we would have an algorithm like that produced by the netflix prize, a statistical sampling of user preferences run through a barrages of matrix filters. We could also have the pandora algorithm, create a genetic code for a piece of music based on frequency, btm, etc and then find other similar genetic codes.

For dating there is a little less innovation out there. Most sites ask a set of questions (perhaps developed by behavioral specialists), and match those with similar or compatible answers, or let users shop for dates by displaying the answers to these behavioral questions.

But that is it go forth and create algorithms for problems with no answers

transducer

2010-10-04T13:15:00.001-07:00

i feel like on of the big new media memes is transduction.

For example convert stock market feeds into audio sounds, or convert twitter feeds into graphical visualization.

Data visualization and audio visualization are forms of transduction - translating from one form into another. The issue with transduction is how do we perform the translation. This is where the real art of data visualization or data sonification takes place. There are infinate numbers of ways to map the frequency of #brit on twitter to a visual cue. What signifies frequency (line size?), what signifies subject matter (color?), where do you place the visualization on the screen (existence in different social networks?). All of these are arbitrary and the criterion of success is how transparent the visualization is for understanding the data, or how aesthetically pleasing the result is.

I have been writing an application called doh rae tweet which lets you compose music via twitter. Here again the mappings are arbitrary. an 'A' is a note 'a', but a space is S (it could just be a space). The default time signature is 4/4 unless you start your tweet with something else like 8|8. and you adjust the beat of a note by + or - so A- (in 4/4) would be a half note. This is all arbitrary and it is not necessarily transduction but translation. Not transforming one type of thing into something else, but representing something (musical notation) in something else (140 characters on twitter) . In this way it is much more similar to writing a compiler than writing a data visualization.

However doh rae tweet can also can be used as a transduction engine. I can feed through random twitter feed and use the music compilation engine to hear what that tweet sounds like according to my 'compiler' Although it probably wont sound very nice. Most letters will not have an audio mapping. So for this sort of application I would want to replace my compiler or lexical engine with another. Ideally anyone could create their own mapping. I think it would be interesting to do this via a GUI and feedback loop so you could adjust your mappings visually as you hear the effects of your changes.

One final though - I also want to use this mapping for other notation schemes. One that seems a natural is chess. With the 8x8 chess board mapping to the diatonic scale. However, this too would need its own mapping. ( Also what do you play, to just play the chess piece that is moved - or all the chess pieces. ) I went online to see if anyone has attempted sonficiations of chess notation and found the following:

Halfbakery This has some links relating chess to music
Chess History A list of articles and historical documents connecting chess with music (not very informative but interesting from a historical standpoint).
Music and Chess A great website with all sort of information linking chess and music. I got this from that site: "The Oxford Companion to Chess is a comprehensive encyclopedia of chess. It contains articles on history, terminology, chess players, and the relationship between chess and other subjects such as music, art, theatre, literature and philosophy. Many of the terms listed in this book are also musical terms. For example, in chess, a person who creates puzzles and problems to be solved is called a composer, and two different sequences of moves that lead from one given position to another are said to be related by transposition. Some other terms that are used in chess and music are: play, piece, notation, score, tempo, theme, variation, development, minimal composition, round, major and minor, position, second, retrograde, mirror, attack, anticipation, phase and echo."

Blown away by The Sound and the Fury

2010-09-28T15:32:00.000-07:00

Ok - so when I first started the sound and the fury I had no idea what was going on. 'I think they are on a golf course' I told my business partner Paul. 'I have no idea what is going on.' Half way through the book I felt that I was waisting precious moments of my life reading a piece of crap. However, at some point - probably during Quentin's chapter - I reevaluated.

Why did I reevaluate?? I dont know. Perhaps the language... there is a certain lyricism - and i am a sucker for dialogue. But, at the end of the book a few things struck me...

1) Such a wide expanse of time was covered in such a 200 page book. The fragmented storytelling conveyed more information and feeling than a 1000 page tomb of today's magical realism.
2) What is the story?? The book is really about the construction of narrative, or the construction of myth and meaning. At the end of the day - when you read a story or a myth everything seems so tidy - but the construction itself is messy. While the story is being written you have no sense of the whole completed version - the sound of the fury is like a story writing itself
3) Roshimon - Whose point of view is correct? Seeing the compson family through the eyes of the different narrators in a stream of consciousness voice bring home the fact that every story is told from a point of view.
4) It is a mind fuck - the story seems like a puzzle. Not a post modern puzzle, where the whole point of the novel is the puzzle (like paul auster - of whom I am a big fan). Perhaps puzzle is the wrong word... It is coded. I feel like if i diagramed the whole novel out - parsing out the different stories by the different narrators at different times in the life of the characters I would get another story. There is a second story hidden in the story.
5) This is a modern novel. It struggles with modern themes (and it was written in 1930s I think). Sexuality, Economics, Race, Class - the treatment of these issues are not preachy but are integral to the lives of the character. this is great storytelling - bringing up weighty issues as part of the characters struggles

Anyway I am inspired - I may experiment with this sort of writing for some of my short stories. Also reading Sarte's critique of faulkner - I'm into sarte as literary critic (just was gifted book 5 of the family idiot about flaubert).

Local build of ffmpeg

2010-09-20T18:25:00.000-07:00

This was going to be a highminded post about fairy tales and morphology but instead i am going to record my trials and trivails of running ffmpeg on amazon's map-reduce.

So - what i am doing is adding a cached directory of ffmpeg to every map-reduce computer i use

#!/usr/bin/bash
./elastic-mapreduce --create --stream --alive --name $1 \
-c credentials.json \
--input s3n://13bit.videoout \
--mapper s3://13bit.scripts/compression.py \
--reduce s3://13bit.scripts/reduce.py \
--output s3n://13bit.videoout.ts \
--log-uri s3n://13bit.log \
--cache-archive s3n://13bit.scripts/ffmpeg.zip#ffmpeg

in order to build ffmpeg i started up a debian sqeeze box via aleatic ami (ami-daf615b3) http://alestic.com/. I then had to update apt-get (apt-get update), install git, download ffmpeg and related libraries and run the ffmpeg configure switch --prefix to set the install directory. I am now zipping it up and testing it on another instance of the squeeze debian - at which point i will start up the map reduce process again

i am also looking at boston terrier art on etsy (thanks to Jane Kim)
http://www.etsy.com/listing/37552859/boston-terrier-dog-art-original-painting
I am doing this while my boston terrier sleeps and farts next to me.

Living the Dream

2010-09-16T08:44:00.000-07:00

Last night Paul and I attended a fascinating lecture on the postal history of the Congo Free State at the NY philatelic society. This is research for our latest documentary. There is nothing like listening to a lecture by an expert. Not all fields are capable of producing experts - Literary theory for instance. You can only be an expert is something that exists, that has a counterpoint in reality. You cannot be an expert in unicorns, however you can be an expert on the literature of unicorns, the archaeology of unicorns, and the symbology of unicorns. Likewise you cannot be an expert on literary theory, but you can be an expert on the thoughts of literary theorists. However I think expertise in something like stamps of the Congo is much more worthwhile...

On another note- I ran across the following art project by cory arcangle - it culls the internet for blog posts that begin with i'm sorry. I am a big fan of his video work, especially mario clouds video & the the one where he just projects fields of color from the projector. However, this 'sorry' project is sort of in bad taste. What is it? A project mocking people attempting to maintain blog? I am not quite sure what its purpose is. I doubt it is to be inspired by the heart felt apologies - as cory writes on his blog. So what exactly is the point of this project? to call attention to the dead blogs in the world, to show how apologies have become meaningless, is it supposed to just be funny, it it supposed to show how pathetic people are, how people have no imagination (except for cory)? not sure - here is a blog art project i just blew out of my ass - probably similar to the process of other net artists (although my process does not involve weed) - a dictionary of common words as spelled by bloggers ( or twitters)....

More Adventures with Map Reduce and the Cloud

2010-09-15T07:23:00.000-07:00

I am compressing video in the cloud via amazon's EC2/mapreduce/s3/etc... I am using map/reduce for this although it is really not a reduce problem only a map problem and not even that - I just need to spawn a bunch of ffmpeg processes....

The problem is I cant map/reduce on a disk that has ffmpeg. So what I did was compiled map reduce on my machine - zipped it - uploaded it to s3 then added a bootstrap action to unzip and ffmpeg whenever the program starts... lets see how this works - I think I need to recompile on debian though - currently using fedora

As for the arabian nights - i have learned that the arabic oral tradition no longer exists because people sit around in cafes and watch tv instead of telling/listening to stories - ahh technology

Deep thoughts on magical realism

2010-09-14T05:43:00.000-07:00

So I am continuing my romp through Irwin's commentary to the Arabian Nights - although I really want to read a copy of The Ocean of the Rivers of Story- which apparently is the source of all stories. But I digress.

In my romp I found that fairy tales were considered part of the genre of the Arabian Nights - and were very much in fashion in 1600s Europe. The author speculates that these were stories were relegated to children's tales as tales of the fantastic were usurped by science fiction.

Today I suppose tales of the fantastic are usurped by magical realism. It is interesting to think though that much of literature is to satisfy this desire for surprise and wonder. We are normally taught in school that fiction imparts some sort of cultural norms - such as homeric heroism. Rather literature engages our desire for something beyond the real. Literature is metaphysics. Perhaps these days video games have replaced this fantabulism because even magical realist books are not quite fantastic enough. We definitely see strands of this in contemporary tv such as Lost and true blood. Sometimes, however, a simple rendering of the real, in all its absurdity, is fantastic (hence my continued obsession with tao lin).

Genealogy of manuscripts

2010-09-13T05:52:00.000-07:00

I am reading Robert Irwin's "The Arabian Nights" A companion. It was recommended to me as 'the best commentary ever.' I dont really agree. I think the best work of commentary is Herbert Dreyfus's commentary on Heidegger's "Being and Time", "Being-in-the-world." The best work of literary criticism or commentary is Mimesis by Auerbach. I keep a copy of this above my desk - 'being-in-the-world' is relegated to my stacks.

What is interesting about the Arabian nights commentary is its discussion of literary scholarship. This all but disappeared with the advent of ideologies and literary criticism. Rather than the try piecing together of texts from various sources, trying to find the 'true text' in some sort of pseudo-scientific exploration, people now just interpret a text in light of some agenda - in some meta-pseudo-scientific pontification. We are really moving beyond the scientific method - it seems - as a mode of exploration and investigation of the world. String theory is not a result of empirical evidence and nor is the Lacanian interpretation of Pär Lagerkvist.

But back to the Arabian nights commentary. So one of the ideas that caught my eye was that scholars where attempting to create a sort of evolutionary tree of different editions of the Arabian nights. This is sort of an interesting thought to me that works of literature can have a history. Further along, we see that many of the stories in the Nights, have parallels in Chaucer, Boccaccio, various sanskrit works, and other. Here is yet another genealogy - the genealogy of an idea rather than the genealogy of a work. I feel like these sorts of ideas are used in the generation of books themselves, the questionable source of a work is used as a device in Don Quixote and in the "Dictionary of the Khazars" - and probably in 59% of Bevery Borges novels.

The sort of scholarship that went into this sort of detective work seems more apt for the computer age (or the Big Data Age) than the experimental age, however I dont think literature scholars are doing this sort of work anymore -

I leave you with some of my favorite lines from Tao Lin's "Shoplifting from American Apparel"
"On Christmas Eve Sam work around 7 p.m. in his brother's studio apartment in Manhattan. Sam had moved in November into a four-person apartment in Brooklyn but was staying at his brother's studio while his brother was on vacation with his girlfriend. Sam put on music very loud and showered in the dark with the bathroom door open. He put in earphones and walked ten blocks to an organic raw vegan restaurant. He ate a seaweed salad. He drank a smoothie. He walked back to the apartment. He drank an energy drink. He worked on writing for two and a half hours. He lay on his brother's queen-size bed and listened to music. He read most of the newest Stephen Dixon novel and fell asleep around 3 a.m.

The Greatest Work of Our Time Is Lost

2010-09-12T08:44:00.000-07:00

I was just watching the imaginarium of dr parnassus which begins full of promise and then sort of craps out. The most interesting part of the film is the story of parnassus not the imaginary wonderlands of random people who go through parnassus' mirror.

I was totally blown away by the production design of Parnassus' Monastery. After watching the DVD extras about the Monastery, it seemed that one of the great achievements of the film were the props. I often think this is the case with other films, and with theater in particular.

It seems after thousands of years of architectural masterpieces, 500 years of scupltural masterpieces, and about 200 years of painted canvas masterpieces - we are in an age where masterpieces are really transitory and in the service of other even more transitory masterpieces. I guess this is what happens when production is in service of entertainment or the triumph of bread on circuses.

A completely different blog post

2010-09-10T05:03:00.000-07:00

i have been blogging lately to keep track of what I am doing with my streaming video project. The montagenik blog is probably not the best place for this. I should probably keep this info in evernote or perhaps another blog, or perhaps a del.icio.us account, or perhaps a git gist. However, the fact is, that I actually go back in my blog and look for these tidbits. My blog is like my personal search engine repository. When I spread out this information over a bunch of different application I generally dont use them. I find it more efficient to keep everything in one location.

This week has been a good week in the 13Bit getting things done world, but a bad week in the Meredith getting things done world. The jet lag has put me on a really messed up schedule and I am completely useless after 4pm. Tomorrow Paul and I have a short shooting trip to NJ where we will interview two collectors, then sunday Cindy and I will bot in preparation for the upcoming robot parade. Paul and I also have something special up our sleeves for the Ecopocolypse website. It is very cool....

I started out the day by reading from 'The Book of Disquiet' - This is a fantastic, beautiful, inspiring book. "And at this table in my absurd room, I, a pathetic and anonymous office clerk, write words as if they were the soul'd salvation and I gild myself with the impossible sunset of high and vast hills in the distance." I am considering ripping off Mattins and reading parts of this on a daily podcast.

My new love is the OED on the computer.

More EC2, FFMPEG and video streaming from the cloud

2010-09-08T06:06:00.000-07:00

So today I am setting up the compression engine on EC2 to compress video out into 4 formats. I need to do this before I use the segmenter to divide up video out into segments that will then be recompiled on the fly via lexical searches...

Anyway I had a java program downloading my mov files - clips from video out- but it was taking to long. I dont want to have to download the file in order to convert it I want ffmpeg to convert it via http... luckily i found this on stack overload:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2677317/how-to-read-remote-video-on-amazon-s3-using-ffmpeg

evermind, I found an easy way to solve my problem.

I set up an amazon cloudfront download distribution pointing to my S3 bucket.
Via cloudfront the files are accessible with ffmpeg over http:

ffmpeg -i "http://subdomain.cloudfront.net/video.mp4" -ss 00:00:10 -vframes 1 -f image2 "image%03d.jpg"

Incoherent Ramblings on EC2 and ICT4D

2010-09-07T07:57:00.000-07:00

When you are deploying some sort of web based app with some sort of services (mobile, messaging, whatever) in a far away land, one of the largest time sucks is configuring the server. If the server has already been configured, there is generally no documentation. No one knows you decided to config your ssh port on 666. Granted one 'could' provide better documentation, as well as server install scripts (think a list of apt-get or yum or whatever you are doing). However, after working with EC2 on amazon, I think standardized disk images are the way to go.

1) You are actually deploying the same server everywhere. So, why not make that server once, as an EC2 instance and then actually deploy it.
2) Services that rely on a hardware device such as an SMS modem have to be installed on a local box, but, web access, database storage, and number crunching, can all be stored in the cloud. Then, if you want to edit your web interface or Z-score calculation for child malnutrition, you don't have to worry about power outages in Tanzania. And you will probably have less latency as well. The route that your server takes to ssh into a server in Tanzania is Byzantine.
3) Scaling. This is a dream issue but say all of South Africa starts using your service, all you need to do is deploy some more EC2 instances and load balance. You dont have to send over a bunch of techies to set up a server farm.
4) CAVEAT - as i mentioned above if you have a device attached to your box - such as an SMS modem, or rf transceiver or whatever - then you cannot deploy that aspect of your app to the cloud (the aspect that connects with the device) however you can use the EC2 image to create your local server.

EC2 is great for standardization, especially when you lack people, money, and equipment - i love it.

Superbitter AMI

2010-09-06T13:53:00.000-07:00

I am creating an instance for the SuperBitter off the RAILS fedora AMI. I dont use fedora but I decided to use an Amazon recommended AMI and it was fedora or bust.

I added: git, java, csound, ffmpeg, scala, jetty & mavin (for lift)

ffmpeg is still missing some stuff

used this resource for ffmpeg install :http://blog.ryanparman.com/2008/06/28/installing-ffmpeg-php-fedora-amazon-aws/

in the midst of building thrift - (need to update autoconfig), mongodb (sort of a pain), open source segmenter (a pain), http://github.com/mfchang/HTTP-Live-Video-Stream-Segmenter-and-Distributor

For the future I am going to split up the web EC2 (rails) from the backend EC2 (scala, mongodb, csound). But for now I dont want to deal.

Video Server Development

2010-08-16T14:00:00.000-07:00

So this is basically to help me keep track of development for a video application I am developing.
Paul sent me the following link that is super useful:
http://www.ioncannon.net/programming/1015/ipad-streaming-video-and-more/
This is also a useful link: http://blog.kyri0s.org/post/271121944/deploying-apples-http-live-streaming-in-a-gnu-linux

The plan:
I am using http live streaming to stream the video. I am streaming 90 minutes of video.

I need to create different bitstreams so I am going to use FFMpeg.

Then I am going to use an open source segmenter instead of the apple segmenter (this is running on unix) http://svn.assembla.com/svn/legend/segmenter/

I am going to set all this up as an instance on EC2.

This means I need to set up an AMI instancehttp://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonEC2/dg/2006-06-26/creating-an-ami.html.

I may even install csound on the AMI

Reading Marx is Making Me Depressed

2010-08-16T04:46:00.000-07:00

I feel like I have been reading lots of Marxist inspired thought lately, and so I picked up 'A very short intro to Marx'. Thus started my descent into economic depression. To summarize the summary... history is moving toward the freedom of mankind. Freedom, for Marx, means, freedom from alienation. Human beings are alienated from themselves because their work is not an expression of their nature but a means to survive. Alienation - the key point here. Humans are alienated because of economic conditions. That is what separates us from one another, (according to Marx), is economic conditions. This is opposed to religion (Feuerbach) as the crux of alienation. Or our separation from our true selves (Hegel).

Anyway - I find Marx's critique of alienation spot on - even if his economic theories are a bit dodgy. Everything these days is commodified and monetized. Here, I am blogging for the pleasure of it. However, blogger & google are commodifying this blog by integrating it into their ad/knowledge network. This is even more profound than the realized alienation of the wage slave who must sell his time in order to support himself. In this case I am not even aware of my alienation. I view myself as human, while google views me as a commodity.

Also, as a former wage slave to a corporation, but now an independent wage slave to myself, I doubt there is any way to escape the transformation of time into money. In my thought though the greatest achievements of technology are medical and, in a round about way, social. By social, I mean, technology and technological accomplishment is the great leveler. It is not subject to discrimination. The ability and the actual achievement of technological accomplishment by people of all races, gender, sexual orientation, leads to the end of social discrimination.

I started blogging yesterday and then did not finish

2010-07-28T08:08:00.000-07:00

I dont even remember what I was blogging about. But let me free associate here. I am currently reading John Crowley's book "Little, Big." This is a magical realism tale about a new england family that is some how connected with fairies. It is not necessarily plot driven - rather the plot is figuring out what the twist is or why we should be interested in this family in the first place. The book has fairy tale logic.

I have a love/hate relationship with John Crowley's books. I read his Aegypt series on the Kindle when I lived in Hong Kong - and I remember sitting in the IFC court yard during my lunch breaks reading this book and feeling connected to home. I like his ideas. The integration of mystical and magical elements with everyday life. The possibility that esoteric knowledge is practical rather than fantastical. This is not like generic magical realism in that Crowley is integrating historical esoteric elements into his book. He creates a world where the esoteric knowledge, or mystery schools of thought, actually are valid. However, the novels are more like an exploration of these topics rather than a structured story. It is almost like when you are playing a video game and the exploration of the levels is more interesting than the boss fight.

Journey to the west is a tale that treats the 'boss fights' with drama and exposition - fantastic stuff. I like the exploration though, why is probably why I am drawn to Crowley's novels.

Has it really been 3 weeks since my last post!

2010-07-21T07:29:00.000-07:00

I wish I had something to write. I have blogger block tho. I blame it on the intense heat that is making me lethargic, unable to focus, and physically weak. There is something about the heat that makes reality less real. So, it is hard to get worked up about work. The flip side of this lethargy is that I am no longer suffering from a low level malaise. How can you feel malaise if it is hard to feel anything. I need inspiration. I was inspired by the 13Bit road trip to document collectors, however I was to exhausted to turn this inspiration into anything concrete. All I can do now is execute the little things, doing laundry, logging footage, reading a poem, walking the dog, and perhaps a short blog post.

the scrivener

2010-07-06T19:01:00.000-07:00

I use scrivener to write. Paul and I use it to write our screen plays. I use it to write my stories, plays, and currently I'm using it to write a graphic novel. I was once in an airport bookstore and spied Bartleby the Scrivener, and read it on the flight back to NY. How is scrivener the software like Bartleby the scrivener? Perhaps some industrious 11th grade English student somewhere can deconstruct this. Really I like the scrivener software because I have different outline modes, I can write in a corkboard mode, and it is easy to keep track of research and themes related to a particular topic.

So, can I write a game using Scrivener? Good question. I don't know, maybe I should try that.
I'll post here the first paragraph of my latest short story - it is the documentation for a cellular automata program.

"Documentation for a Computer Program"

Out of the IOStream comes theWorld. The stream is blue, not a microsoft blue, but deep sky blue, #00BFFF, and it is not web safe. theWorld is created from a pseudo random number generator. The first iteration of theWorld was created with a Perlin noise filter. But that produced too much geographic diversity. The purpose of this experiment is to see how cells interact, so we need to strip out all extraneous variables - geographic diversity was the first to go. The pseudo random number generator, and that provides much less variation in worlds from one Universe to the next.

The Great American Novel

2010-07-01T05:01:00.000-07:00

My husband always says that I should write a novel. I have no idea where he gets the idea that I am capable of such a feat - but it is an interesting idea to entertain. I have about 20 half finished novels and some new novel ideas, but so does everyone.

A novel is more than an idea. It is not a knock knock joke, a one liner. A novel is not just a good idea - it is the unfolding and refolding and crumpling up and tossing on the floor of everything that surrounds that idea. What novel should I write? I ask my husband. Write that novel about Detroit. I had a idea about a novel that follows generations of a detroit family through immigration, the automotive revolution, and finally to current decay. "How should I start?" I ask. "Dont try to write War and Peace." My husband replies. That is actually very good advice. But the Detroit novel really does seem to have a War and Peace scale, so I try and pick up another idea. Ok - I was thinking about something golem related. For some reason I have been thinking about Golem stories. I have a nascent screenplay on a Golem and World War 2. I also love Jewish esoteric stories (the hasidic tales, tales of nachman) - I like weird esoteric stories in general. So I was thinking about combining the two. A group of jews hiding one night from the pogroms in early 19c russia stay up all night telling stories. Shamelessly stealing from the Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and other stories in a story. I love framing devices almost as much as the stories they frame. I started writing this but all I got was a frame. A fictional story of my grandmother writing down her recollections from this night 50 years later. And my possession of this manuscript after her death, via my aunt. I actually had a beginning and an ending and all i need to do was fill it with stories. This has proven more difficult that I first thought. (I was also inspired by The Manuscript of Saragasso)

I was going to do 10 stories based on the 10 Sephirot (levels of creation) based on Kabalistic ideas. The first story I was writing was based on Daat (knowledge) and was a fictional account of Spinoza - really a glass grinder in Amsterdam. I was playing with ideas of rationality, speculation. But that is all I got - no plot ! I am thinking that there should be a video game based on the 10 sephirot. Maybe I should do that instead.

Being stymied, I decided to get into shape by writing short stories. Short stories are a different beast than novels - and I think most novelist dont get this. At the moment I am enjoying the short stories of George Saunders - he writes some dystopic fiction about amusement parks or modes of entertainment. Really great stuff. Since I was reading about vagueness in philosophy - I thought it would be interesting to write a story that explores vagueness. I sketched out a story about a bunch of adolescent girls who go to an amusement park and the different rides they can take based on the 'You are this high' mark - a sort of exploration of living in vague territory. I was going to end it with a death - but that was really a bummer. I really could not get behind it. It did not seem like a story I would write. And it really did not have a 'turn', a strong idea. A short story is sort of like a knock knock joke. Maybe I should write some science fiction.

This post was written while listening to passion pit.

Know your audience

2010-06-17T20:04:00.000-07:00

I was in Los Angeles last week, and stayed with two friend, Arv and Anjali. Arv is an economist working on developmental economics - so we have lots to discuss - especially the fact that after recent experiences I no longer believe non-profit work is a viable solution to address public health and poverty issues. I have become a die hard capitalist - and believe the only solutions that address issues of poverty and health crises must be self-sustaining and not grant dependent. (More about this in another post perhaps). I am also against pilots (not ones that fly planes, or medical trial pilots). Also with the mass of data available I think that we need to revamp statistics - sample sets are less important - more important is noise reduction, or rather discerning salient information (trends) from the data, rather than extrapolating trends from a sample. (Again for another post)

Anyway, in speaking with Arv I remembered the importance of ethnographic research in the implementation of any solution. Many times projects fail, not because the data collection methodology is incorrect, or because the statistical analysis is not sound, but because people collect data incorrectly.

I was reminded of the passage in "American Caesar" a brilliant book by William Manchester about Douglas MacArthur.
When visiting Japan (before WWI), the Japanese generals said that there was a problem with malaria among their men. The men had prophylaxis (pills), but were still developing malaria - obviously something was wrong with the pills. MacArthur laughed and said something like "If I gave my men pills with instructions to take them every 4 hours - they would be dumped into a ditch and forgotten." The Japanese generals were horrified - our soldiers would never do such a thing. The next week a new batch of pills arrived with a new label - the emperor wishes that you to take a pill every 4 hours. After that there was never a problem with malaria.
No need for any fancy solution involving cell phones or alerts or sharks with laser beams - just ethnography (Arv liked this story too)

Vagueness

2010-06-16T17:20:00.001-07:00

I am reading a rather dull philosophical tomb on vagueness. It is not really a tomb but it feels like one. I am just at the beginning, reading about the sorites paradox and borderline cases, but I thought I would blog a few thoughts about it.

The sorites paradox - this addresses the question of what constitutes a heap of sand or a bald man or a tall woman. If I have one piece of sand, and I keep adding sand to it, at which point do I have a heap of sand? There is a further 'philosophical' problem with these terms, namely how do you determine the validity of a statement that uses one of these vague terms. If I a am tall is someone .10 inch shorter than me also tall?

There are all sorts of philosophical solutions to these problems - most of which seem like utter mental masturbation and contrary to common sense. But what interests me is the intersection between this issue and other issues - in particular mathematics, and in particular thoughts about infinity (set theory) and thoughts about series (infinite series perhaps).

First let me address infinity and set theory. Josef Cantor came up with the idea that there are infinite number of infinite sets.
What does this mean? For example lets look at the set of natural numbers. It goes 1,2,3.... indefinitely. We would say the size of the set of natural numbers is infinity. Well is there anything larger than the infinity of the natural numbers. Cantor said (this was one of his proofs), that there were a greater number of rational numbers between 0 and 1 than in the natural number set. These are different types of sets. Natural numbers are countable, I can generate another number by applying some application to a lower number (such as adding 1, or multiplying by 2). For the numbers between 0 and 1 all I need to do is add a number to the denominator. 1/10, 1/100, 1/1000. I am not generating an infinite set by a mathematical operation but by constructing a new number. (I could go on but I want to get back to the paradox)

Also remember there are more irrational numbers than rational numbers (more holes in the number line than points) but I digress.

Anyway all this talk of different sizes of infinity. his seems like a bizarre question to ask at first, because infinity is not really a size but a description of a limiting circumstance. And does it really make sense to say the infinity of natural numbers is different than the infinity of the rational numbers, or irrational numbers. True the way we generate the number set is different but infinity is infinity.

This reminds me of the sorites paradox. When does a set become infinite, or infinite of a particular order? In this case each is defined by a different mathematical expression. A countable infinite set can be expressed by a function, and a non countable set can be defined by a transformation. But does this mean that the infiniteness is different. If I become bald by shaving my head or by genetics does that change the nature of baldness. Infinity is a limiting condition - it describes what differentiates the set from other sets that with definite boundaries.

Ok and my second thought about sorites - namely series, or rather limits. Perhaps baldness is that which is approached but never reached, like the limit of an infinite series. Rather than express the distance from baldness, or the way we reach baldness, we just default and call the condition baldness. Baldness is never actually reached, so it really does not make sense to ask if one hair added or subtracted makes a person bald. Rather, every hair lost brings someone closer to the condition of baldness which is never actually reached. I had more coherent thoughts on the airplane to LA when I was thinking about all these things - but you will have to deal with the limits of my memory.

Gaming the System

2010-05-26T07:09:00.001-07:00

I have a surefire way to beat the computer at chess - I make very convaluted moves that eats away at the computer's clock and then i win on time. (granted this strategy only works if you play timed games - I play with sigma chess.

This sort of win never feels satisfying. It feels like I cheated, like my win was not really a win. However, it is a win. I am using the computer's strength (reliance on search algorithms) against it. Were I playing a human, these moves would probably signal amaturish play and I would be swiftly beaten as my opponent changes gears and uses a different strategy (the strategy that defeats idiosyncratic chess players).

Winning is not a matter of degree it is a binary attribute. Either you win or you dont. You can have a better win. We may talk about perhaps a better win, a more elegant win, or a win with more points or something like that - but really these are just language games. You either win or you lose - everything else is superfluous to winning-ness. Winning is achieving something over another person according to certain rules.

So are there winners in life? In this I always think of Alan Watts - life is not a game where to goal is to get from a to b, but a dance or a symphony - and a dance or symphony really has no goal other to experience it. Winning only makes sense in a situation where there are rules - does life have rules? Life is just about existence.

I have been thinking about this idea of winningness in regards to one of the options strategies I trade. I have a few strategies that I use in different market conditions, but let me talk about one strategy where I trade various mean reverting stocks and try and anticipate pin action (pin action describes where the stock will end on options expriy day so that the most option holders to lose money). My algorithms are generally good at anticipating the pin, however they are bad at market timing (which means i have to deal with market to market loses sometimes until options expiry day which reduces my buying power)

In any case - I often feel like 'I win' when I successfully guess the pin and make money on my options (and dont have to deal with mark to market losses anymore) But is this really a win? For example, let me use aapl (which I dont use for my options strategy anymore but I used to) if I sell an aapl put (aapl is at 250) - 250 for $7 and my algorithm thinks the pin will be 250 than that $7 will go to $0 theoretically or probably $1.50. I will make $5.50. However in that time aapl may go down to 240 - that put will go up 10 bucks and I will carry a mark to market loss of $10. Now do I buy back the put as it goes down (for a loss) and then sell it again when it bottoms out (for more money)? Do I average in more puts when the cost goes up? Sometimes it pays to close out for a small loss and then get back in at a better price. Does this mean you lose?

Or for example - say if aapl 260 calls are $6. You can sell them and if aapl hangs out at 250 for a few days or even goes down, those may go down to $4. Should you buy them back then, as aapl will probably shoot back up above 250. and those calls may go to $7 (mark to market loses again). My pin algorithm says aapl will go to 250 so they will end up being probably 1.00, but you will have to deal with the mark to market losses

In any case - a win is not necessarily just picking the correct pin. The correct pin is like the perfect chess game. A noble ambition -but you dont need it to win, and it may end up hurting your game.

Focus

2010-05-24T07:08:00.000-07:00

It has been a while since my last blog post. I have written a few blog post drafts that I have not published. The problem with writing blog post drafts is that they quickly become irrelevant to the writer. Blogging for my is a spontaneous activity. I suppose for professional bloggers/writers/journalists this is not true. But for me, blogging is more akin to journaling. And once the inspiration is lost for an entry it is difficult to go back and find that initial spark of enthusiasm.

In the past few weeks I have found it difficult to focus - and this makes it difficult to have cogent thoughts to blog about - or interesting ways to relate my experiences through blogging.

I have attempted different things to get myself out of this rut.
First I attempted to read different types of books: magical realism (Little Big), difficult great fiction (Ulysses), Conspiracy fiction (the secret history of the world), philosophical aphorisms (life & flowers), science (the outer reaches of life), music (one of the grimoire books), books on option pricing, inspirational books (pema) . I could not get involved in any of them - I just could not lock in to the other person's description of reality or non reality.

Then I attempted to play games: nintendo DS (the attorney game), scribblenaughts, zelda. Nothing can focus. I did however become obsessed with playing chess. Sadly, I found myself holding my breath while playing chess - that cant be relaxing.

Even while doing bikram yoga - exercise so exhausting i cant think of anything else - I cant focus. Even while writing this post - I lost focus and started a chess game which reduced the oxygen flow to my brain.

Perhaps I just need more chocolate

Shakespeare & Film

2010-05-12T15:47:00.000-07:00

I am attempting to go read all of shakespeare's plays in chronological order. I am at the beginning of the beginning - Henry VI Pt 1. I think I may have read this in my freshman humanities class - (is this one of the ones with falstaff). When writing films, I have started telling paul that our scripts have too many characters for a low budget film. (I think we had 23 in our last film) This probably betrays my lack of vision, but luckily Paul ignores me and I lack conviction and so we continue to write for too many characters. So does Shakespeare!

Granted it is really not fare to compare plays with films, but in many ways i am not quiet sure why. The most obvious reason is first, in theater there has to be more obvious action to direct the viewer's attention. How do we direct action? Dialogue. Our attention is directed towards the character talking and attends to what that character is doing. Here the playwright holds sway (which is probably the playwright rather than the director is the prestige position in theater.

In film we can manipulate the visual field. We can use a close up or a zoom or a dolly to direct the view towards a particular action - AND we dont have to use dialogue as a signal. We can just use visual cues. So here we have the director as opposed to the writer holding the prestige position, because it is the nuance of the acting and the location of the shots that tell the audience what to pay attention to - dialogue is not less important - but it is not the only tool in the tool chest.

In film we dont need as many characters. Props become characters, environments become characters - I wonder what it would be to film Henry VI pt 1 and turn some characters into 'filmic characters.'

It seems this blog post ended up at a completely different place than I had anticipated when I started, I was going to talk about how shakespeare differentiates his characters with dialogue - but i like this subject matter better.

Ecstatic Literature

2010-05-11T15:44:00.001-07:00

I did not know which blog post to write - so I am writing one about an idea I was thinking about in Greece.
What is ecstatic literature?

I am convinced I stole this expression from some place, but a quick google only revealed some links to ecstatic poetry.
By ecstatic literature I mean a mode of storytelling where the goal is not necessarily to tell a story but to arouse a certain emotional & visceral response in the reader. This does seem more akin to poetry - poetry is an attempt to transcend language with language - to express some unexpressible sentiment or feeling (because language is limited and in every day speech cannot cause us to have such emotional responses.

These sorts of reactions are perhaps more common in film and perhaps the performing arts since they use a wider range of media and in many instances media that is not open to interpretation. When I watch a moving film, the director has selected the particular angle or close up I should view, the attitude of the actor, the music - the audience is there to receive the film not to engage or interpret the film. Reading is primarily an act of interpretation - it does not engage with one of the 5 senses. Watching a film is an act of sense-perception - we dont need interpretation to understand what we saw (unless it is symbolic performance art)

I am no thinking that it is perhaps the element of time that makes these forms more emotionally stirring than a novel which is not bound by time but can be read/re read/pondered upon by the reader. There is one book that is read, and another book that is the dialogue between the reader and the writer in the reader's mind.

Back to ecstatic literature. I was reading the colossus of maroussi by Henry Miller (an author I dont like at all). But this novel is unlike anything I have read in recent memory (except The Fan Man). The florid language, which I normally deplore, transported me to a state beyond that of communicating a story. It made me see the power of literature - which sounds a bit banal - but it is true. Perhaps contemporary literature can do better than roman a clef and magical realism - perhaps we can inject some poetry into the prose and awaken ourselves from dogmatic slumber.

Back to the Past

2010-04-28T23:37:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I spent most of the day traveling back through the classical world.
Landing in Rome and then hopping a lovely Aegean Air flight to Athens.

In Athens, I am attempting to savor the last bits of urban life before heading into the hinterlands to ride horses like the ancient sychthians.

As a one time student of ancient greece, you would think a trip to Athens would be the fulfilment of a lifetime ambition. However, there is a quality of Athens, different than that of Rome, which makes the Agora and the Acropolis not part of some remote past enhabited by Socrates and Pericles, but part of some eternal present - integrated into 'Athens.' Perhaps Athens is the eternal city.

In Rome, you get the sense of living among ruins. That there were different stages of rome and they are all presevered in different strata - all on view in the Museum that is the city of Rome.

Rome is stratified Rock, Athens is metamorphic rock or something (I cant google it now i am being rushed off the computer by german tourists).

The Market and Quantum Physics

2010-04-23T05:11:00.000-07:00

These days many physics (and other math/science PhDs) go into finance - in to trading in particular. Why? Well from the point of view of the scientist there is the remunerative aspect (you will probably 3x an academic salary and possibly much more). Also, the professionalization of science has made much of science an exercise in grant writing, front running hot topics, lab management and other tasks not normally associated with the unfettered search for TRUTH.

I would even argue that the professionalization of modern science has changed the methodology of science so that it is not properly following the 'scientific method' ie -
propose hypothesis
design and run experiments to test hypothesis
data analysis of experimental results to
support hypothesis and create a theory, or to reject hypothesis and start again.

With the professionalization of science and a professional scientific class to crunch data the emphasis on the scientific method has shifted to skew the data analysis section - however with our myriad analytical tools and with our surplus of data one can prove almost anything - so we perhaps need a return to first principals.

But I digress - quantum physicists may now work in finance - designing dynamic models to figure out the correlation of asset prices or what now. But what is the real truth is the market is like quantum physics. Namely you can either figure out the price (or location) of a stock/particle or the momentum of a stock/particle but not both. If I take the price of the stock (and buy or sell a share) - i affect the momentum of the system, if i look at the momentum of the system - i may not be able to buy/sell the stock at the current price (because it is moving).

This is why stock market money is not real until you take it out (or get a dividend)

Freud Vs Meditation

2010-04-19T05:41:00.001-07:00

I am entering my 4th month of my bikram yoga practice. I practice at the Bikram yoga studio on the lower east side of Manhattan. Bikram (or beginner bikram) is a series of 26 yoga postures practiced for 90min in a hot yoga studio with an instructor yelling out commands. It is one of the most intense workouts I have ever had, and also the most meditative. It is so exhausting that my mind cannot wander and attain a certain amount of mental stillness or being in the moment.

This has started me thinking more about meditation. I used to meditate every night as part of my kung fu practice. This meditation was very much focused on the break and on different types of breathes and cultivating your chi. But like yoga meditation (kung fu has roots in yoga), the focus is on emptying your mind.

I think of this tradition contrasted with the freudian tradition, where everything must be put into context, explained away - or given a story. Pathologies are caused by incorrect or faulty personal histories and can be fixed by rewriting these personal histories via talking therapies. With meditation (inspired by Buddhism) there is not wrong personal history. Rather all personal histories are wrong. The self is an illusion and the practice is to become comfortable with ungroundedness (anxiety). Rather than finding the cause of the anxiety and explaining it away - gaining control over the anxiety, with meditation we must sit with our anxiety. We must notice the anxiety and not label it, not give it a story, just accept it and then let it slip away so we can be present to our sense perceptions rather than our mental processes in our brain.

Stay tuned for more meditation musings in a future post - also I have been reading some Pema Chodron that has been inspiring my thinking on meditation.

Future of Books

2010-04-15T09:09:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I went to my local library and got a library card. The awesomeness of this experience was compounded by the fact that I was able to bring my dog otto into the Library. Why the library? My apartment is overflowing with books. This is generally a wonderful thing. Last week after finishing 'Betraying Spinoza' - I went to my personal library and pulled out all my Spinoza books - and some random books by jewish philosophers like 'The Star of Redemption' by Rosenzweig. However there are a few books that might have best been checked out and then RETURNED to the library - such as "The Ultimate Journey", an NYTimes book reviewer's personal memoir on travelling the same path as the Monk in the Chinese classic 'Journey to the West'. Journey to the West is fantastic - The Ultimate Journey not so much. There are also the impulse hardcover fiction purchases that I almost always regret - and regret paying too much for. Also, I hear you can check out DVDs and CDs from the library - and that is very exciting.

The day I went to the Library was also the day that I spent some time playing with Paul's (see 13Bit) iPad - a device that will probably replace the book and I started meditating on what this will mean to a place like my neighborhood library.

I live in chinatown. A few generations ago, when my grandfather was a boy, it was a jewish neighborhood, and during my childhood it was mostly dominican. The thread that runs through all these changes, is that it is an immigrant neighborhood and the little kids probably know english better than their parents.

At the library, there were a bunch of little kids running around, checking out books, checking out DVDs, learning - all for free. What will happen in 10 years when all this 'media' is consumed on a $500 iPad?

This got me

The man behind the power behind the man behind the ...

2010-03-29T05:20:00.000-07:00

One of my guilty pleasures is reading conspiracy literature. It is sort of like reading science fiction and I think I enjoy it as a sort of thought experiment for how society might be. But what we call conspiracy literature has a long and possibly legitimate history as the continuation of hermetic or wisdom literature. Namely the idea that there is a hidden truth or knowledge that only some people can access. In fact, much conspiracy literature eventually returns back to secret organizations (ie wisdom traditions) 'really' running human affairs.

I would write more - but I want to finish reading about how the civil war was a conspiracy by european bankers to create more countries in america leading to a greater market for lending debt. (I guess they never heard of its ok we have municipal bonds - we can still trade credit default swaps on California)

As a final note the argument against conspiracies can also be a similar argument against 'intelligent design' namely it is more awesome and incredible that these events have taken place without central planning - to assume otherwise diminishes the wonder and power of these events.

Back From Blog Haitus - Passions

2010-03-28T05:24:00.001-07:00

I recently read "On Stories" by Richard Kearney that began my mind working in all sorts of directions. I was captivated by his discussion of the limits of storytelling. This refers to events so awesome and singular that they resist a narrative framework that contextualizes them - to narrate them somehow diminishes their importance or their factuality. The example Kearney uses is the Holocost. One of the problems for these events is how do you integrate them into larger histories if you cannot transform them into stories that place them within a historical continuum. How do you represent unspeakable horror in storytelling?

And from here I started thinking about passion paintings - paintings representing the pain and suffering of Jesus. Depending on your belief system this may or may not represent unspeakable horror - but it does share an element with Holocost retellings - the idea that we must remember this event. In the Holocost we must remember so that it never happens again, in the case of the Passion we must remember the foundations of Christianity (the belief that Christ suffered for the sins of man kind) .

Kearney sort of reaches an impasse however in that there are certain atrocities - in the case of civil war it seems - where we want to forget. To paraphrase Alan Watts, just as we need a memory we also need a forgettory. That to hold on to certain events prevent the building of a healing narrative and dooms a people to live in constant turmoil - or to live in their turbulent past. Narratives, historical narratives, allows the past to become history rather than persist as current events. I am not quiet sure what Kearney's criterion for forgetting versus remembering, really where is the limit of storytelling?

So I have been thinking about what modern passion representations would look like. Representing the singular suffering of an individual in an attempt to both memorialize and historicize and communicate.

Finally this sort of singularity of human suffering and the horizon of storytelling reminds me of another horizon of representation - Kant's notion of the sublime (In the Critique of Judgement). The sublime is the pleasure that comes from 1) something we understand with our mind but cannot experience with our senses (what does it really mean that the earth is 238857 from the moon - how can we comprehend that - how can we experience that) 2) something that we experience with our senses but not with our mind - i thing of meditation or spirtual experiences, or extreme physical exertion (bikram yoga).
How do we represent these things?

Apologies for bad Kantian interpretation you Kant scholars out there.

India Venture & Tech Resource

2010-02-10T15:36:00.001-08:00

My new venture in India is spurring me to keep abreast of new tech developments- this post, dear reader, is to remind me what i need to keep in mind

After making this list I have learned this - use BigTable - what whatever else google uses (GFS, Map/Reduce)

Data storage
Mongo db
Big Data from OReilly
Hibernate - Java again
Big Table - google
Languages/Framworks:
Cappuccino/Objective-J Build desktop apps in AJAX -I am not into web AJAX - it does not work well in low bandwidth situations.
Gittr - good ruby blog
Monk
F# - Nice F# Blog (I love F# and started using it 2 years at MS - if only it was interpreted)

good programming blog

Jquery
Jquery
Phone Gap
Fluid db
Sprout Core
Merb
Will I really use erlang?
Sinatra
Camping
Lambda the ultimate - it has been too long

ORMs
Sequel (ruby)
DataMapper (ruby)

The grid:
Hadoop
EC2

Objectified

2010-01-04T11:07:00.000-08:00

Last night Lian and I watched Objectified, a film on industrial design, and the second film by the filmmaker of Helvetica - Gary Hustwit.

Some quick thoughts -
* The production values were much higher than those of Helvetica - very impressive for a second film.
* Loved the historical tidbits - how the ancient chinese tried to 'industrial design' arrows- so any arrow could be used in any bow. Why? Any archer could then take the arrows of any fallen soldier. Before this move each soldier made his own arrows - which only fit his bow. (Looking forward to the movie version of war in the age of intelligent machines)
* Loved the muji designer - I really liked his discussion of haiku's. He made a point that art and literature - in japan at least - is not about revealing all your feelings- this will make the audience uncomfortable. Instead you tell a story, or use a metaphor to draw the audience into your world in order to have her feel what you feel.
* Apple and fixtures - one of the most interesting comments was by an apple engineer. Most of the design is an attempt to build the tools (or fixtures) to design something a certain way. So for example, in addition to designing the apple keyboard - you also need to design the tools that hold the apple keyboard in place so that it is machined properly. 'Building the tools with which to make your art' (a quote from video out). This is nothing new - but I am surprised how much it is left out of the development process. It also makes me think of physics experiments: For example how Rutherford build a custom thin glass container so alpha particles could pass through.
*Industrial Design is about mass production. I never really thought about this, but the movie started out by saying we need I.D. because we mass produce things via machinese and we need to standardize the way that items are made. So I think of my brother who runs a clothing design company JF&Son. His pieces are not mass produced, rather they are hand made by a team of sowers and designers in India. His items are not 'industrial designed' they are short runs of less than 100 pieces. However where the 'industrial design' comes in is in his process. Namely of iterative feedback between himself, his customers who often collaborate on pieces, his co-workers in new york, and his co-workers in India. The supply chain is industrial designed not necessarily the pieces. It is 'industrial' rather than 'artisinal' because the intention is to sell these items on a large scale - not as one off works of art. 'Industrial' refers to 'industrial strength' or robust, rather than 'industrial' as pertaining to an assembly line.

Scribblenauts

2009-12-31T07:26:00.001-08:00

My friend John lent me a fantastic game for the Nintendo DS - scribblenauts. And I am now listening to a podcast on the making of scribblenauts via Kotaku.

What is scribblenauts and why does it deserve its own blog post?
Scribblenauts is a puzzle game. At each level there is a star buried in a landscape - and the players goal is to type in words like, apple, jackhammer, time machine, in order to get to the star. So for example the star is beyond a plane inhabited by brown bears - what do you do. Type in 'steak' and throw it to the bears - then pass through the field while the bears eat the steak.

There are multiple solutions to any puzzle - for example - I could type helicopter and fly over the bears. You get additional points for creating less items and for using ingenious solutions.

There is a database of about 20000 words from apple to centerfuge. The work that went into this game and the fact that it is successful is absolutely mind boggling - and the fact that it is an engaging, addictive game is nuts.

What I imagine is going on is that each landscape feature has a certain set of attributes and each word has an effect on a certain set of attributes. So for example, a bear, has hunger of 5, movement of 3, and vision or 5. If you throw an apple with hunger of 2 then you have to use something else, perhaps a skateboard of movement 2. An apple will not satisfy all the bear's hunger, so you need to use another tool - a piece of meat however with hunger of 5 will completely satisfy the bear allowing you to progress with ease. Does this make any sense?

Anyway, loved the podcast! I discovered that scribblenauts is often used as an educational game. On the podcast, there was an insane story about a little 5 year old boy who learned how to write by playing scribblenauts. He would carry around a book with all of the possible scribblenaut objects and use different combinations to complete levels.
I now want to check out drawn to life.

Thoughts on Pictures

2009-12-29T05:19:00.000-08:00

I have dusted off my point and shoot in an attempt to populate my blog with more photos. To inspire myself I visited fffound this morning and, mirabile dictu, I was actually inspired. Really I was inspired by this photo of angels painting people before they are born - or that is at least what I saw. The artist, Jeremy Enecio - check out his blog - he is super talented= seemed to have other intentions. The name of the jpg is "albinopaint." When I was in college I knew a guy who wrote his senior thesis on the names of art works. Today we don't have names we have file names - and those file names actually have performative value - a file name is an actual index to the work (or a representation of the work) - not some sort of arbitrary linguistic reference.

Anyway albino paint! I love this picture because I immediately started constructing a myth around it. You see - this painting depicts not albinos but the the period before you are born. Here the angels are coloring the people before birth, and fashioning their exterior qualities. I may write a short story about this. It brings to mind the chinese folk tale about the origin of the little indentation above your lip. The painting arouses all sorts of metaphysical/religious questions - where do we come from and why we look the way we do. This, I suppose is what a great painting or image is supposed to do - open up your mind. Most of the time we are bombarded by beautiful images that tell us what to think instead of asking us to create our own interpretations.

Opening of the Day

2009-12-28T16:17:00.000-08:00

I am in the midst of going through old emails and returning to the git rapidsms hornet's nest - and decided to take a break and play some computer chess.

But Chess was depressing. Here I was thinking entering my middle game. Oooh I'm so clever pinning a bishop with my knights. Then out of left field - or B5 (to use funky chess notation) - the enemy queen swoops into my 2 rank (that is the rank with all the pawns).

I know I am a goner.

If the queen is in your pawn rank and you cannot take her out with a bishop or something then she will take all your pawns, and then your rook and then your soul (or just your king). I cant take the slaughter - and restart the game.

Ok this time I am black. I am going to mind-f@#$k the computer - even though the computer does not have a mind. I am going to mimic every move the computer makes until the endgame. The computer moves all the pawns to the 4th rank. The computer is a f#@$king idiot - I think. Perhaps my ELO (chess rating) has gone so low from forfeiting all my losing games - that the computer is on idiot level.

Now that I believe the computer believes that I suck at chess(which I do), I change my strategy. Ahh, I breath a sigh of relief. I dont have to go through all the permutations of every movie and can just play. Sadly again the queen swoops into my pawn row and takes what little pawns I have left - with my rook and has a very funky mating procedure with the knights.

I need to do something about sucking at chess. Perhaps I should play some people - maybe I can beat them. Sadly my online chess membership has lapsed. Instead I visit chessgames.com and look at the opening move of the day and the opening game of the day.

The opening of the day is something called the Caro Kann Defense Steinitz Variation. The salient feature seems to be - the knight in front of the king and opening black pawn at c6. Chessgames asks if I would like to play a game using this opening. Dont mind if I do - and I am swiftly knocked in the 2 rank by the queen - Sheesh. What the hell is the point of this opening - and after googling - I find some answers for the Caro Kann defense but not the steinitz variation. There is a little paper that promises to help me in my goal of maximum procrastination and increased knowledge of caro kann - " In Xanadu did caro kann...." It seems Caro-Kann helps black develop a good pawn structure without contesting the middle. It is an explanation that makes no sense outside the context of chess theory - which is a tangent to a footnote to a conversation between heraclitus and Parmenidies annoated by Whitehead. (and reminds me of all the Foucault and discourse I have been reading for a possible doc on the history of madness and the leather clad philosophers who write about it).

But really, why do I suck at chess? I am generally good at boardgames? I dont suck at chess, so much as I cannot crack it. I cannot game the chess game. In other games such as Settlers of Catan, hearts, or even backgammon - I feel that there are weaknesses that I can exploit.

What is this weakness? Chance. I can only play games with dice rolls, or handicaps- even if I am handicapped. I can only play games that involve luck or chance. And I think this is because I am able to work very well with incomplete information, and because chance invigorates rather than depresses me - even if chance deals me a bad hand. In chess, everything is manifest -there is no chance - and if you are playing the game because you hope your opponent messes up (chance) - you are playing incorrectly. I am constantly telling myself in games and in life "act dont react". In games of chance you are constantly reactingand perhaps I am a better reactor than an actor. (depresssing ?) I also think that once I make a strategy unless I am obviously disturbed by say the capture of a piece - I tend not to notice the other player's strategy and barrel through until the enemy's queen is bayonetting my little pawns.

The one thing I can do is beat computer chess on time - that is the computer uses up all its time trying to come up with moves. My strategy is to make good but convaluted moves that forces the computer to use many cpu cycles and search many nodes in its internal combinatorial chess graph to find the optimum next move. With this strategy - I believe I could become a grandmaster but only against a computer. This feels dishonest and cheating - it does not give you that chess pleasure of figuring out the right move - it does not make a you a clearer thinker. I can use this strategy against a computer, but not against a human. And lo the day when I am to be pitted against a human - his motherboard will not fry when confronted with a bizarro move - instead he will move his queen to my 2 rank and wonk my pawns on the head.

Maybe I should code some more - a strategy game where there is no opponent.

List O things to do

2009-12-02T09:51:00.001-08:00

1) merge adam's and evans git rapidsms repos into my 3 pronged repo
2) work on holistic dissection project
3) down load a copy of taxi driver, cut it and then export the xml file of the cuts to generate an editing template of the movie
4) Respond to Follow up emails
5) Continue work on O singularity
6) drink smoothie

Open Source Culture: Video Mashups

2009-11-30T16:48:00.001-08:00

Why open source?
The most compelling reason is to paraphrase Newton - to see farther by standing on the shoulders of giants.
In software development, this means that I can, for example, use django to publish a content rich website, instead of writing my own web publishing software.
This sort of example though is not very powerful, after all you could make a similar claim about microsoft word.
The additional power comes from the release of the code behind the application.
why?
1) From a pedogogical standpoint, I can look at successful and well architected open source projects and improve my own coding abilities
2) From a practical standpoint, if I think that I can improve say the data aggregation feature in django then I can contribute to the django source code (rather than wait for the team to get around to implementing this feature)

The economic model for open source software is consulting, if I am a large contributor to django then I can go out and assist people in implementing their django implementations. Write the software for free and charge on the maintenance fees so to speak.

Open source software is very compelling as a model to emulate probably because
1) I can use software that other people make and realize my software vision
2) Perhaps I dont have the time to build an entire software package myself, but I can still contribute to an open source product and thus satisfy my desire to be part of this creative/technical/whatever process

Now writers, filmmakers, artists, etc look to the open source and are interested in emulating some of these aspects
Say I want to use the music of miles davis as the soundtrack to an animation, or clips from taxi driver in a movie, or if i want to make an animation staring mickey mouse, or I want to use parts of a the fan man in my own novel about the east village (Walter Benjamin for example kept notebooks composed entirely of quotations from other books)
Why open source culture?
The pedogogical nature is apparent.
I want to make an animated movie but I want to using an existing character, or I want to learn how to edit rather than shoot, so I want to use some existing clips to make into a movie.
However from a creative standpoint - perhaps I want to respond to a particular work by using that particular work, or an aspect of that work (think of all art that uses mass market appropriation like Warhol's brillo boxes, or Richard Prince)

But what does it mean to open source a cultural artifact and how can you use a these cultural atoms to create a work of originality? What are the atoms of cultural that we need to isolate in order to talk about open source culture.
I'll first talk about filmmaking, since I have made some movies.

The building blocks of film is the footage, the assets. In an animation, you could also imagine the assets being a character as well as all the photoshop layers of different character parts that can be animated seperately.

However the building blocks of film is also the score, the dialogue, the script, and the editing timeline.

There is a difference between releasing all the assets in a 'hard day's night', and the wav file of the song 'a hard day's night'. In the case of audio - I can go in and cancel out certain notes and frequencies. I apply certain filters and actually turn the song into an entirely new song. With a clip of a hard day's night - I am in many ways bound to the baked clip unless I want to insert a green screened character or use another compositing technique (for example forrest gump meeting past presidents, or the old coke commercials combining living performers with deceased performers). Now, it is possible that I could take all the clips of say, 'The Shinning' and turn it into a romantic comedy, however I am stuck with the framing, the acting, the lighting, the cinematography of the original movie. It will always look like 'The Shinning' more than my remix 'Winter in the Old Hotel'. A video mashup looks much different from a musical mash up. A musical mashup can still be considered a song, most video mashups dont resemble a narrative.

Another building block of film is the editing timeline. This is an interesting aspect of filmmaking that people dont really look into when considering open source culture, but is another aspect that could be shared. The cutting, the pacing, and the types of cuts will be different for Hitchcock's Rope compared to Lucas' Star Wars. In addition to open sourcing assets, filmmakers could open source editing timelines. In final cut pro, for example, you can export your timeline as an xml document. The clips are referenced as filenames that can be replaced by any other clip. So I can upload the cutting of a film for other people to use in their own films.

Further to build on open source software collaboration is the notion of version control.
In an open source software I different people can build on different version of the same software, diverge for a time, and then recombine into a master version. There is a lineage to open source software. I can see the same thing taking place with open source culture, placing culture within a context, an artistic lineage.

I am going to explore this a bit more in a series of studies providing the editing framework for classic movies - stay tuned!
Also - please contribute comments, criticisms, and suggestions.

Lost in programming translation

2009-11-28T13:31:00.001-08:00

So today I am starting to follow up on some work that has piled up this week...

first up rapidsms on the malawi server. This has been a big issue because we switch ISPs, then I was unable to log on, then it seemed to be an issue with verizon fios (rather than malawi ISP), and now I am actually able to log in from my verizon fios - although we just lost internet.

also up is rapidsms clean up & easy install (setup tools)

For this integration testing I will probably use the
Cruise Control tool developed or adjusted by Jez
Humble. An example with some rapidsms forks is here

Seeing that this is a ruby tool has made me feel even worse about myself not using ruby, but really I dont have all the time in the world to develop on every platform known to man, and I have heard that ruby websites have some performance issues (thats just what I hear). So does python, but not as bad as ruby. Perl is best (really c is the best or assembler)- but it encourages idiosyncratic code. I sort of like to think of all these different programming languages as evolutions of natural language. For example perl (or perhaps assembler) is like egyptian heirogylphics - you need a specialized class of people (scribes) to read and write this language. Then eventually we get coptic (egyptian written in greek), and everyone can read and write it - it is like ruby - but perhaps you lose something in this.

Another analogy - different chinese transcriptions. There are different ways of connecting chinese sounds with the roman alphabet:for example Wade–Giles and Pinyin. Each system captures certain features of chinese, but neglects others, what you get in ease of use in using either system you loose in precision (of using the actual chinese)

Translation is hard

I also succumbed and picked up a git oreilly book. I am sick of scowering the web everytime I something unexpected happens during a merge, or push, or pull and I think I just need to cuddle up with a git book and a hot toddie. My current method of using git is rather sloppy and I would like to be sure and do everything the correct way as I start integrating the rapidsms apps/core etc.. More on version control another day.

Online Friendship

2009-11-16T21:31:00.000-08:00

Should everyone be friends online?

One of my favorite talks at the IDF conference last week at the New School was Sean Cubitt's talk on the immateriality of labor panel. He mentioned friendship in relation to Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics (how there are different types of friendships -his example was between the artist and the patron). He contrasted this with friendship in online communities - where friendship is now commodified and 'has a history.' It becomes more akin to joining a guild or a society than becoming 'friends'. This online friendship is not Aristotle's friendship. But what is it?

First what is Aristotle's notion of friendship? (Book 4 Nichomachean Ethics).
Well the idea is, what good it is to have happiness and success if you have no friends to lavish gifts on, or friends to celebrate you. If you are unhappy friends give you support, if you are airing in your ethical conduct friends will shame you into acting correctly. Friendship is what binds you to society at large. It sort of presiages the panopticon. So how is this different from online friendship?

The main difference is transparency. Online friendship is not really the friendship between two people, but is more of a specticle - it is mediated friendship This is what we are really talking about. It is the impression of friendship and the acts of friendship in an open space so other 'friends' can see that you are friends with other people. This sort of relationship is mistakenly called friendships. Really it is more like social status. Now there is another measure to which people can be judged. With regards to money, position, and popularity.

As I get older I find Aristotle more and more interesting. This probably means that I am becoming more and more boring.
In any case, there are two points in Aristotle's Ethics that I think are applicable to the online community space.
1) Friendship - there are different kinds of friendships - not everyone can be friends in the same way,
2) Gifting - not everyone can bestow gifts (or rather not everyone ought to bestow gifts)

The gifting idea is more radical in a way - namely that the virtue of a gifter is in the size of the gift relative to his capacity to give it. So is it ethical for a journeyman programmer to 'gift' his code in an open source project. Or is it perhaps incorrect to think about open source as a gift economy. Rather the journeyman is paying his dues - in a guild type system - building up capital. Is open source programing really a gift economy. Am I giving a gift when I send someone a cow on facebook, or am I giving a gift when I share my photos? Am I giving a gift - or am I accruing social capital? What sort of transaction is this?

I used to like to say that Morgan Stanley (where I worked) operated on a gift economy. I would need something from the market data team and they would give it to me, even though they dont report to me, because I would give them a mexican interest rate model (for example). A gift though really is not something that should operate in an economy, but rather should be an end in itself, or rather for the glorification of the gift giver.

I suppose capitalism turns everything into a transaction. I dont know if this is good or bad - but it makes it difficult to produce heros in the classical greek sense.

This obviously needs to be fleshed out a bit - but it has already languished a week in my drafts folder so better blogged than nothing

Singularity Song

2009-11-16T21:15:00.001-08:00

I finally was able to get pd-extended to run without crashing and so revisit the singularity song. I think that PD is the way to go other than csound, because with pd it is easier to play around with a composition. I am not sure what frequency I want my sine wave to be in. Tonight I was able to record some voice samples and play them in PD while applying various frequency modulations to them.

I used the B09.sampler.loop.smooth patch to get started and now how to figure out what all the objects are actually doing so I can do this myself.

The work flow for this song will be as follows:
1) Record individual words for sine wave lyric parts
2) figure out what phasor, cos, hip and *441 do - yes it has been that long since I've used PD
3) record gospel/spiritual section. This will probably be manipulated in an audio editing program rather can garage band. My plan is to adjust pitch and tambre and perhaps add some instruments.
4) Finally I will probably add some instrumentation or maybe just beats.

I really have to say that in testing out this song, I really think PD will be helpful not just as a performance tool but as a compositional tool - similar to the use of the piano as a compositional tool. Interactive music applications are not just for performance but for composition (real-time versus batch - csound is batch)
Can I write a script to play PD - probably using pymedia or osc. That is probably the ticket. PD is the instrument, the script, or program, is the score.

Notebook Regained (not really)

2009-11-15T19:49:00.000-08:00

Last week, I tried to cram too much detriteous into my japanese school kid backpack - and my little black notebook fell out. I have tried to develop a zen detachment towards all things - atman/nahman - so this only urked me slightly. However, it led me to consider why I keep a notebook at all. I have kept a notebook rather consistently since graduating from college. I started out with these little spiral bound books, moved to composition books, moved to blue leatherette bound books, used some moleskins (which I seem to have an endless supply of since I people get this for me for my birthday - ps just get me nintendo ds games), some muji notebooks, and now have a large supply of free notebooks from conferences and training sessions, as well as personalized notebooks with my maiden name and Morgan Stanley (my old sugar daddy).

I keep the notebooks in a drawer and in a shelf above my desk, between mass market paperbacks about intergalactic social experiments, and anachronistic digital culture books. I rarely if ever look at these notebooks. These notebooks dont really contain anything terribly deep or legible - I cant spell and my writing looks like ancient Akkadian. So why do I keep my notebooks? I think I keep notebooks so that I can better remember what I write - or so that I can at least go through the process of differentiating somewhat thoughtful thoughts from the endless stream of bunk running through my head.

I further reconsidered journaling (or notebooking) when I read Dave Hickey's article
(I love Air Guitar) on Susan Sontag's redacted notebooks. He posits that Susan Sontag did not actually want her notebooks to be published. I forget why he said she kept notebooks in the first place - and I would go back and reference the on line article, but it is inaccessable unless you have a harper's subscription. I just read Paul V's paper bound copy.

Where am I now? My old notebook lost, my older notebooks potentially used with out a use and might as well be lost. Should I just stop journalling??? No... What I think I will now do is perhaps every now and again review my notes and post journal greatest hits to the blog. That way I can at least review what I attempted to remember and differentiate from my stream of consciousness. My new notebook is a spiral book reporters notebook that Paul gave me after I shamed him - saying that he actually did not use these notebooks (apparently he does).

Greatest Journal Hits Sunday November 14:
a list of things to do: guitar, kf, rapidsms & paper, actionscript for lian, iphone game thing, draw somthing (13bit 1-6), found Foucault Archaeology of Knowledge.
future list of things to do: get novel working on github, iPhone app a week, rack space, where did i put that singularity song i wrote?? it is in the back of a book but which book?
Thoughts o Moby Dick of Code: What is it about obesssion? Obsession with the code as a representation of the world, obession with endless refactoring? Who is obsessed? Be sure to include long boring passages (except to you) on different programming languages, paradigms, and operating systems, and the uses of whale blubber.

"Call me Ishmael??" What is this - he is an outsider?? he is illigit??
What should my protagonist be called?? What are the names of some of my favorite protagonists? Scout, Horse Badortes, Hmm How bout some favorite books? Red and the Black (Julian), Madame Bouvary (Charles/Emma), Man without Qualities (what was his name? Hans Castorp? No that was Magic Mountain (not a fan of Thomas Mann - hate to say it) Tin drum?? Ok Sci Fi? Canopus in Argus, The foundation (Elijah/Jezzibel). Ok that is it

My handle is Je33ibe1. Git novel
(Jezebel was Ahab's wife)

Internet as playground

2009-11-13T10:33:00.000-08:00

Otto and I met Cindy Jeffers this morning and preceeded to the Internet as Playground conference at the new school. Basically it is about labor practices and the internet.

Most basic points are

- we are all exploited because companies mine our internet activities for profit making ventures. But are we being exploited??? Google provides me with blogger, a free tool, in turn, use blogger to post content and links that google can then use again to improve search, sell ads, or take over the world.

- virtual / reality - is virtual labor real?? what happens when people bring up the epistemological status of knowledge gained from the internet? If this knowledge is questionable, then how about digital work - is that questionable too? We need new standards of virtual truth - a socrates of virtual logic to combat virtual sophistry - an aristotle to outline the logical rules of virtual rhetoric.

-what are the economics of open source ?

other thoughts....

everything you do online is a commodity for some company ... companies that use this data are creating data derivatives

I am really enjoying the conference -and the twitter shadow conference.
I am playing the backchannel twitter game and totally want to game the system by tweeting my words. I think you can totally game this game.

Time to go to a talk on immaterial labor.

The Safety Dance

2009-11-11T20:12:00.000-08:00

13Bit may be embarking on yet another documentary - about yet an other forgotten artist. This one is Margie Beales - an improv artist in Manhattan's Tribeca. At first, Paul and I were skeptical about making another documentary like Lumia. But this will not be another lumia - hopefully more fast cheap and out of control. Once we met margie - we were sold. A 73 year old former improv dancer - with no formal improv training - is a true new york personality and a fantastic individual. Her personality is truly compelling. We started watching some of her dance videos from 30 years ago and just fell in love with the idea of a documentary or her, or on ny avant garde dance - or something like that.

I know nothing about dance. In fact, growing up I sort of despised dance as a pansy activity. However, I take Kung Fu, and many of the best Kung Fu students are dancers. So - I am gaining respect for dance. I have especially developed incredible respect for the ability of dancers to remember dance steps - Kung Fu steps are difficult enough to remember.

In order to learn about dance, I am immersing myself in dance literature, dance documentaries, and actual dances. Paul and I will also be speaking to dancers and choreographers. The research phase of a documentary is always a lot of fun. You learn about a new subject area as you grope around for the story.

I just finished The Art of Making Dances by Doris Humphrey and am about to embark on bios on Isadora Duncan and Ruth St Denis and Anna Halprin. But first - I am going to get a background history by reading Ballet and Modern Dance. Over the weekend I read Twyla Tharp's book on creativity. Normally, I shy away from books on the creative process - because really they all say the same thing. But I was curious about the creative process of a choreographer - and I do like her box method of organizing projects. I may try it - it sort of reminds me of the folders in 'getting things done'.

The sustainability doc is going well - we will start logging the footage probably next week - and are planning a field trip down the colorado river in the spring. We hope to be finished by the beginning of summer. The doc will probably be about water usage and water rights with the damming of the colorado and the subsequent poisoning of down river farms in mexico as a focal point. We will also probably discuss the different ways of looking at sustainability (where the footprint metrics come in)

We are almost done with a first cut of lakshmi - except for the motown act dream sequence - which we have rewritten to be a rap by Tia! our resident muse and robot lover. We plan to start sending Lakshmi out to festivals in January. We think it is a great counterpoint to the super slick wall street II.

Anyway - tonight Lian and I have our first opera of the season - House of the Dead - perhaps there will be some dancing

Overwhelmed Overcame

2009-11-10T06:19:00.000-08:00

I was a bit overwhelmed the last few days

I was at capacity and then my little puppy started limping- this sort of put me over capacity, made me angry, and in turn made me exceedingly grumpy and short tempered- which in turn led to more self-loathing and a vicious feedback loop.

Well - so what do you do when you are overwhelmed??? For me there are a few options

1) sleep, read, bury head in the sand. In general this is not a very desirable solution because you dont improve your state but in fact become more overwhelmed as things pile up - (duh!). Also not only that but your escape will be invaded by thoughts of all the things that you are not doing - making your sleep, reading,etc much less useful which brings me to step 2

2) stop multitasking -
for better or for worse I am a multitasking monster - I know most people are anti - multi tasking these are my thoughts on the matter
- you should do everything with utmost mindfullness and focus - most of the time - this actually leads to less stress and more productivity because
HOWEVER if you are learning something or trying to absorb something - i think total mindfulness and focus sometimes hurt me - I need to lull myself into a relaxed state where my unconscious is absorbing information, rather than my conscious self forcing me to focus. I suppose that during a state of mindfulness you should not be thinking about mindfulness and so maybe my multitasking paradoxically make me mindful. I dont know. What I like to think of is context switching and computer processes. A computer has many process running at a particular time - monitoring programs, internet connectivity (just to name a two). These tasks are not running at the same force, but if an event triggers a task, such as incoming email triggering your email application - then your email application will come to the fore. This is how I feel I multitask. There are a number of tasks going on in the background of my mind- many of which I am not (or try not) to be consciously aware of - unless something forces me to put that task in the forefront of my mind.

Multitasking it seems also aids my memory. For example, I generally program to lectures, podcasts and talk radio - not music. Programming for me a mindless activity. I know what I want to do before I start and then I let my unconscious take over and write the software. By simultaneously writing software and listening to talk radio - a strange phenomena occurs. I am able to recall code that I wrote while listening to certain bits of talk. It is a very visual sensation for me - like the code chuncks are lodged in a piece of text. I still remember some trade reconciliation code I wrote about 5 years ago that became lodged in a teri gross piece on Jane Fonda's autobiography 'my life'.

It is sort of like a memory palace I unconsciousnessly stick bits of code in audio recordings. My memory palace is talk radio..

But when I am overwhelmed, I need to stop multitasking - multitasking has the strange habit of making it seem like you have more to do - rather than help you do more in less time - so I stop trying to do it all at once .

3) I Make a list and a schedule. A list itemizes what I need to do - a schedule makes time for everything i need to do. This two acts externalize some of my feelings of stress that accompanies being overwhelmed. Slowly as you cross things off your list or proceed with your schedule you feel physical release. Being overwhelmed is a physical state as much as a mental state.

4) Include your daily habits in your schedule. I always include some music practice time into my schedule (either guitar keyboard or drums) although it is not actually helping you get anything done and feel less overwhelmed - it will make you feel happy and like a human being. other things I try and schedule for are workouts (a run or kung fu) and general inspiration time. In the morning - I always like to pick out some weird book I have and mull it over during coffee. Today I looked at Kites by David Pelham - about kite construction and the history of kites. I am not building a kite - and i rarely think about kites - that is why it is so much fun to pick up a book like this and skim it over coffee.

Note on the dog -
(I took him to the vet and he is on some meds. the limp is improving and hopefully he wont need surgury - phew)

RapidSMS Docs Running Again

2009-11-05T09:25:00.000-08:00

So, last night I finally fixed the rapidsms cron job - which had been offline for about 4 days -every since I updated the software that generates the documentation.

For the RapidSMS documentation we are using sphinx. If you google sphinx, you will come across a text search engine - this is not what we are using.

Why Sphinx?

Well, Django uses sphinx and RapidSMS is inspired by Django - so we decided to use Sphinx for RapidSMS. Sphinx is more like a documentation system than a documentation generator. It is quiet intensive to actually create the documentation. You need to write the tutorials and explicitly set the packages you want to generate documentation for. The autodoc generation from python packages is actually handled by a sphinx reference to docstrings.

So why use sphinx?? You have to learn a next markup (or markdown rather) syntax, and you need to type most the documentation anyway. Why not just use a wiki, or a blog, django, or latex :)

This is a good question?
There is something nice about the linking feature in sphinx - But I am not completely sold.

Early Evening with Otto and Lian

2009-11-04T17:31:00.000-08:00

Lian is reading my last blog post and asking - when did you write this?? Was I up??

I have to say, too much of my time has been spent trying to manage my option trading - which took a big hit due to fslr tanking, and me not understanding how Interactive Brokers allocates margin requirements. I am still in the green, but it is a dim green, as opposed to last weeks neon green. Anyway this has taken up too much time from my other projects (like my yoga breathing iphone app inspired by a conversation I had last week with Jessica H.) Nov options expire next week at which point I am going to take a week off from the markets. I am only going to trade the last 2 weeks of expiry.

I am almost done reading 'The Temptation to Exist' and that is good because I just picked up Paul Farmer's Infections and Inequalities. The Temptation to Exist - I like Ciorian because he melancholic and world weary - like me - and so whenever he writes something I cannot help but say 'so true'. The one thing about Ciorian that I suppose mars many late 19th early 20th century thinkers is their confluence of metaphysics with race.

Today we talk about biology as destiny or not making biology destiny. For example, if I am a woman I should not be relegated to certain roles, or denied access to areas of work and study.
Back then it seems, race was destiny. So for example, the Jew (disclosure I was born to a jewish family) is ascribed all these sorts of pathologies or ways of being in the world on account of him being Jewish, a dessert nomad, members of a legislative religion, etc.

Ciorian spends a few essays discussing the modern world in relation to the Jew - this is sort of like discussing 'the noble savage' and it is sort of unfortunate that his thought has focused on such irrelevant bunk. Is this sort of inquiry really useful for philosophy, or is it some sort of observable art, a pseudo science - anthropology. And is it best engaged by an outsider (gentile in this case) or insider (jew) or both? What is the purpose of such a discourse? The most interesting thing is that this topic was worthy of serious philosophical discussion. I wonder what topics today will suffer the same fate of irrelevance?

But Ciorian, he makes thought provoking pronoucements. Thoughts like: poetry exists on the fringes of society and only an established culture can create a prose literature. I think this is worth exploring. Prose literature is about rules, methods, codified learnings, poetry is about ecstacy and unmmediated expression. Prose is mediated. High culture is mediated, high culture is anything an actual thing itself. It is an aggregate of acceptable culture - it does not exist without someone (a critic perhaps) creating it and labeling it.

Anyway I digress - I have to go fix the permissions on my rapidsms-documentation cron job - apparently it has been failing since I updated sphinx (the documentation system)

Late night with Otto and Lian

2009-11-02T21:30:00.000-08:00

At the moment I am trying to spec out some next steps for rapidsms. I am focusing on a rapidSMS turn key solution - a one step process to install rapidsms (a sms gateway and web interface). What exactly should be installed by this one step process?

I keep using the dreaded W term - wizard. There are lots of wizard haters out there. To you wizard haters - please email me or leave comments - I have forgotten all the anti-wizard arguments.

Why a wizard??? With a wizard a non-programmers can customize a piece of software. I am thinking that perhaps we need a rapidSMS wizard for a rapidSMS easy install. That way users can specify what functionality they would like their rapidSMS deployment to have. The next question is, what in RapidSMS should be available for customization?

Some of the things I think that we need to work out is a way to specify SMS request and response. What messages map to what responses and is there a response flow. This is similar to the web application flow of many early app servers - like apache cocoon. Do people still use this? In the end, RapidSMS should have different modules that you can install for different purposes, an eHealth module, eCrisis, eBusiness... etc. I suppose FrontlineSMS does this with Frontline::Medic. I am not sure how intervention free we can make these modules, but ideally most of the business logic will be developed by engaging in field projects like the Malawi project this summer.

It would be nice to have a forms editor in rapidSMS so you can edit your SMS flow AND then it would be nice to have a HTML flow editor. Does this exist? Is there a GUI where you can edit the flow of your web application. I know this exists for mashups.

Ok now thinking about GUI editors. After the wizard process, where you specify what functionality you want, then you should get a list of sms keywords you need to implement. This means that we need to probably standardize the keyword functionality in rapidSMS. This can probably be implemented via the excellent keyword class that Adam (or Evan) wrote.
With your list of sms keywords you create a sort of flow chart or something similar to patch based programs like max/msp. You link the keywords with certain responses.

Finally, there should be a simple way to set up web reports, and email alerts....

Oooph - I just ran out of steam. I am really shot. I was at Kung Fu for about 4 hours and I cant turn my neck. Tomorrow I will blog more if I can turn my neck again.

My final thought - rapidsms apps need to have annotation to specify what parameters will be defined by wizards. I think this is the first time I have ever found a use for annotation in programming.

Montagenik has a new follower!

2009-10-31T06:35:00.001-07:00

Welcome new follower to montagenik! At the moment I am responding to people who dm'd and tweeted me - and to some email back up... I also need to revise my options P/L sheet as I had to return some profits yesterday when the market suffered a little down swing. (This actually necessitated an early exit from the mHealth summit for me - so I could manage a margin warning. It is not as bad as it seems, but some options moved into the money and some some of out of the money options had big swings in Mark to market P/L that affected my margin. I will live to trade another day. go over to my super secret finance blog to read more...

On to saving the world. Thursday and Friday was the mHealth summit. It was an incredible opportunity to speak with people working in all areas of mHealth, from tracking smokers in the US to developing telescopic additions to phone cameras for telemedicine. The big question is, is in the developing world how to pay for this

better answers to questions - these are some questions that people asked that I gave half baked answers to - here are better answers

1)Why dont you use google sms... RapidSMS (or other roll your own gateway solutions) let you work in any country with any local telecom. I dont think I could have used google sms in Malawi. For us deployment google sms might be ideal. In the us, I have worked with celltrust for developing an SMS service for product validation (eg are you really drinking evian, tropicana, popov vodka). This is a paid service. I think using google sms is a viable solution though. I have no idea how well the service works, so I cannot speak to it. However, it is nice to be able to have your own sms gateway for testing and that is what rapidsms and frontlinesms lets you do.

2) What IVR solutions have you used. I could not think of anything because I was super shot and in SMS mode, but here are some IVR solutions I have worked with (not tried google yet).
some examples
cloudvox
ribbit - you have to use actionscript/flash/flex and/or do some wack AJAX work around

3) can you make money with this stuff?
For mhealth surveillance in the developing world - No.
However I do think there is a market for mHealth surveillance in the developed world. Say for example I want to collect data on a variety of vitals

I have to go take dog to vet - must respond to other questions later

Montagenik goes to DC

2009-10-28T17:11:00.000-07:00

As I was sitting outside Union station I gazed up at the symmetric of the neo-classical architecture of Union station (and really DC) - and I thought what an ambitious project the USA is. I hope it succeeds. In the blink of an eye I saw a sort of post apocalytptic DC with broken columns and sooty statues. But that was only in my minds eye, not in reality.

I made my way to the World Bank for drinks and mingling at the end of the mHealth policy sessions. Tomorrow is the NIH mHealth summit. I will be talking about some of the work that I did in Malawi. I am very excited to hear what other people are doing in the mobile health space. I just was speaking with someone about authenticating perscription drugs. He told me that 80% of drugs in Nigeria (or Lagos I forget) are counterfeit!!!! That is truly insane. Where is the inflection point, where can you do the most damage control. His company is working on a smart phone verification - similar to the Salta solution, Lian, Breu and I discussed a year and a half ago. However, his solution is a bit more elegant. Rather than a key solution, he just has a scratch off label with a secret code. Good idea!

When distributing bed nets in Nigeria (I think) there was a similar problem with supply chain management. Although, in this case, the problem is with missing bednets, not with counterfeit bednets. The solution is, that at each stage of the supply chain you log how many bednets you have. That way you can track where in the supply chain you are losing the most bed nets.

Now both of these, are social problem, or human problems, although we can use technology as a monitoring agent - to let us know when human processes go ary.

I was also recently reading up on microfinance. I am very interested in expanding mobile technology, and leveraging ecurrencies like mPesa, to set up microfinance, or microloan, operations, and using the social networking enabled by these technologies to build communities around collectives. Again, in my readings, the technology is not really a solution - it is an enabler, an extension of the senses. The technology is not a solution, rather we must get the correct processes in place to enable microfinance, and let technology extend our reach.

This may now sound like drivel. It is because I need to analyze my portfolio after today's apple and after hours fslr performance - ugh - I will be selling calls I think

Server Stuff

2009-10-28T04:49:00.000-07:00

So I started migrating to rackspace. A server solution that uses cloud computing. The initial impetus was that I was disatisfied with the django and ruby solutions available for media temple (they are super expensive), and I cannot install various software packages that I want to use in my projects - like csound and pygame.

The potential for rackspace is huge. I get a server that I can install any software on for a minimum of 10 bucks a month. To put this in perspective, in order for me to run django on media temple I need to pay 20 bucks a month. AND I cant even install my own software or my own django server (for example if I want to use cherrypy or apache rather than their serving solution).

Mediatemple temple does let me have my own box for like 50-100 bucks a month -but I dont feel like forking over that sort of cash for a project that is not generating cashflow.

However, I did not realize that I would have to build EVERYTHING from scratch. This is very cool - but it means that it will take a bit longer than I anticipated to set everything up. And I am not a pro unix/web admin so - I really dont think I should be running anything but beta sites on this server (at first).

So... I will keep my media temple account - remove media temple django containers and move projects to media temple from rackspace as they leave beta. This means I will also do email hosting through mediatemple.

That is it!
This morning I am updating changprojects website, I am creating yet another blog - for chang projects - and I am waiting for my new changproject business cards to arrive - yippee

Overpopulation and Kant

2009-10-27T05:59:00.001-07:00

The moral imperative - adopt a maxim and if you can universalize this maxim -then it becomes a moral imperative. Something like that.

This was a thought I had over the weekend while admiring the architecture of Mies and Rem at IIT in Chicago.

procreation and the environment

basically the earth is suffering from a depletion of resources, perhaps we are procreating too much...

if i make it a moral imperative not to have children - i adopt it and everyone else will adopt it - then humanity will cease to exists.
So obviously this is not ethical according to Kant.

but if i have children, and so everyone has children- then we will have overpopulation - again bad .

Number. So we need to include numbers. it is not an either/or question but an amount question. How many children is it ethical for one person to have according to Kant's moral imperative.

Perhaps every person who wants can procreate 1 person - to keep population constant - or reduce it a bit.

This is one of the reasons we need to empower women in developing countries - educated women engage in family planning -
then we wont have to resort to Kant

Some links for the day:
http://www.killerstartups.com/
http://www.gurufocus.com/
http://www.thevalve.org/

In the cloud

2009-10-26T20:34:00.000-07:00

Here I am with working while my boys sleep - Lian and Otto. I am broadening my musical horizons by listening to insound radio.
I am enjoying some Volcano Choir - which I just googled and is apparently according to Pitchfork side project of Justin Vernon (Bon Iver). I like Bon Iver - saw him/it in concert a few months ago. However I do think that indie music needs more of a spectacle - perhaps dancing robots?

Lian just woke up (because he set his alarm and it went off) and he told me to shut down my music! I am allowed no fun!

Well - Lian told me to shut everything down just in time, because mysql just finished installing on my cloud server. I really am not a fan of mysql. I prefer sqllite or just flat files. Relational database (and databases in general) are overused.

I hope I remember the password I set for mysql daemon... that reminds me - I think I need to install cron!!!
I have decided to run my webservers using cherrypy because apache is bloated. I am in the midst of installing sendmail - and I am considering hosting my mail in the cloud as well!

There really needs to be a lamp install script - just as amazon has EC2 instances with different defaults. It is a massive pain to try and remember all the basic lamp apps I need. I just had to install make for goodness sakes.

This evening I had a lovely Tai Chi class, and reconnected with EM Cioran on the subway to and fro TC (as well as some TC buddies who gave me day trading tips - thanks Riz - I cant use them on Lian's account tho - he has forbidden me from trading bank stocks)

I am loving EM Cioran - the Temptation to Exist. He is expressing all these end of empire thoughts about Europe that people are now expressing about America. The funny thing is that he thought the Tartars would win the cold war - oops.

What I find most interesting, aside from a number of quotable tidbits, is his discussion of the impossibility of a westerner to adopt eastern philosophy. The philosophy of Zen, the void, inaction. That inaction in the west is different from inaction in the east. Why - I am not sure - I am still reading the book after all - however it has something to do with the western conception of thinking and action. That all thoughts must lead to an action. Westerners are held captive my phenomena. (I like that thought) It also has something to do with protocol and civilization and rarification. I will update you all more when I finish reading The temptation to exist.

i am back on theory - next up -rereading Foucault the archaeology of things. I need to get back to the nexus of philosophy and anthropology.

Has it really been two days since I blogged?

2009-10-26T06:09:00.000-07:00

I started monday by making a list - I made a list on paper and hope to transfer it to the internet - Remember the Milk. I would love to then display my remember the milk to do lists on my blog. I wonder if I can create a list app using the remember the milk api. I think RTM is super powerful and could become the list equivalent of twitter. But are people not into top 10 lists anymore.

in the absence of api list linking I will reproduce for you below my list of things to do today:

move changprojects.com to rackspace cloud hosting
set up twitter account for changprojects

start blogging at quantitativebitch.blogspot.com - I am hoping this will be a record of my trading activity
set up twitter account for quantitativebitch

take dog on log walk - need a new book to read while I chill with dog at band shell - I have decided to put down Ka - although poetic and interesting- I think it suffers from no editing .

Check up on Malawi RapidSMS stuff
Pull in Claude's Rapidsms documentation - and make sure cron runs properly - on the rackserver

Set up prelim wesbsite for changprojects - (the notes are in the end of my temptation to exist book - i think)

Look at Margie's dvds for dance documentary

set up github for fiction/novel project

continue work on inventory tracking project

Meet with adam clark

figure out when I am going to Morningside heights and see Jess and her baby then

email followup with people I have not followed up with.

Now we get into things I will probably not do today:

move doeraetweet to rackspace and set up csound
move blacklisttweet and other tweet app to rackspace
finish the singularity song on csound - figure out why pd sucks so much
perhaps write rapidsms h1n1 vaccination app
finish interactive brokers options scanner
finish logging footage for Naomi,Alyssa,Joelle,Meredith Barcelona

The good news is I have at least finished one thing for today! blogging at montagenik!
Maybe I will read poetry when I walk the dog today

Chicago (sang musically like sinatra)

2009-10-23T06:52:00.000-07:00

I am writing this in Argo Tea shop in downtown chicago - the loop. I do love Chicago. In many ways it is less oppressive than new york. I am not on my A game this morning. Too much wine from wine parings that Lian and I had at Alinea last night. The molecular gastronomy was divine - and was payed for by my amazon puts - thank you amazon for making money this quarter.

This morning I awoke to a rapidsms documentation email. The current documentation is crap and a place holder. Claude, a rapidsms developer, wrote his own documentation. I hope he merges it with the github master so that my script pulls it and publishes it on the website.

Sometimes my anti social nature makes me wonder why I want to work on collaborative software projects - but then when someone like Claude comes along and does something useful, you see why.

Paul and I may embark on yet another doc - this will make 3 in the hopper. This one is partially inspired by Margaret Beals, an improv dancer and New York Character. I think we should do a podcast called New York Characters. Paul also had a brilliant idea - but I cannot reveal it here - it is too brilliant. But it is somewhat analogous to Balzac's Human Comedy. Margaret is a fantastic lady and real character - I have been watching some of her old improv dance dvds. That is fun. I know nothing about dance, I am not very kinetic or physical - but I would love to learn more.

Blog pileup

2009-10-21T04:29:00.000-07:00

I have 3 half written blog posts for the past 3 days that I have not finished yet.

I blame jet lag and a cold or allergy or something.

But enough! Time to get on the bandwagon.

Last night I had a dream where I over and over again sang 'O Superman'. This is clearly a message from my subconscious to finish The Singularity Song. I was stymied when I attempted to map some words to a sinewave via PD and the PD on my ubuntu netbook kept crashing. Saturday night I got some good software/tech recs from John Chao and so I have renewed vigor. Either that or I will use csound. I dont know if there is a point to using PD rather than Csound other than PD has a nice interface and provides interaction. If I am just composing something do I need interaction? No I just need to compose it. However it would be nice to compose something that could be 'Played'. So PD is an instrument, you can play a song in different ways via the interactive patches. csound is more like a recording. It is baked, you play the same thing every time. To use the distinction in Carroll's philosophy of motion picture book, the first is a template, and the performance is are, the second is a token, and that is not art - its performance is not art. I think those are the terms.

Oh yum. Lian my glorious husband some brought in some coffee made via our very complex vacuum pressurized coffee machine. Yum again!

Now that I have got out of QID my options day trading is going very well - my main strategy is to sell over priced puts or to sell over priced covered calls. - So I am playing with vol(atility). Probably not wise considering the vix is low -but I can live with the risk.

Malawi finally got the ISP working, which is good news because I think the HIV/AIDS scouting team is going out next week. Today I am going to test out the system and hopefully the Ministry can go into the field and continue training next week.

I am also finishing my presentation deck for the mHealth summit next week and preparing for a trip to Chicago where I will celebrate Lian's birthday with some molecular gastronomy.

Flight of the Iron Condor

2009-10-15T06:12:00.001-07:00

Although I am not suffering from sleep symptoms of jetlag, I am suffering from disorientation and crazy anxiety. For the first time since high school I am not receiving a steady paycheck - in return for sitting mindlessly at a desk. I feel like I should be working on my projects all the time, or improving my etrading strategy, or doing something similarly productive. However, our new puppy Otto is reminding me of Alan Watts and reminding me to just play. He likes to sit on my lap and alternatively sleep and try to eat my computer.

So, I am late on my deadline for slides for the mHealth event. I thought it was due Oct 20, but apparently it was due Oct 12. I am trying to extend the deadline, since I am still coming up with the changprojects branding - and i am not sure changprojects is the right name - because people keep calling it changeprojects (probably because you cant spell change without chang :)

I am in the midsts of setting up some spreadsheets for my options strategy - since it is more m than e at the moment (manual not electronic) and I am making tea. All the flying has dried me out.

High anxiety

2009-10-14T05:44:00.000-07:00

After an eventfully pilgrimage with Otto to the juice place on ludlow - Otto and I collapsed on the couch. This was probably not the best thing for my jetlag - but I did sleep through the night. I got up at 6am and was immediately plagued by anxiety. Will Chang Projects be able to help people - does the name suck - and sound too much like Change? My e-options strategy sucks and i will become a pauper. I should have done this years ago - rather than now - when I am old and crotchety.

PLAGUED! BY ! ANXIETY!

And then I started to sweat.

And started to think that I am Madame Bovary. Because I am plagued with flights of fancy and my dog walks around with holes in his stockings.

Then I decided it was time to make a list and cross things off the list.

So the list:
tickets/hotel to chicago (check)
etrade fix (check)
blog (checking)
malawi server bs (checking)
git narrative project (uncheck - email group)
teach class (write syllabus - uncheck)
bltweet *uncheck)
eco carbon sheit (DO TODAY!!!)
joelle naomi alyssa meredith barcelona
MORE ON LIST AHHH

must day trade now - may do crazy stuff with REIT ETFs - Otto von Bismark is sleeping on my lap

I am writing a new novel about the impossible female american hero

NYC Again

2009-10-13T11:28:00.000-07:00

Back in NYC! It seems that that otto still remembers me - although he does not like me working on the computer. He will have to get over that. Lian told me to take Otto out and introduce him to new things. I think I will do exactly that after I have taken care of some basic tasks. I made some headway on the rich application for tracking green inventories - and hopefully i can finish that tonight. Lian will be out late - sitting on an architecture review panel. I will be home bonding with the dog and perhaps engaging in a juice fast. Otto - the dog - seems to go for the eyes of our stuffed animals - this is slightly worrisome - i hope he does not eat the eyes. Lian- it seems - has been unsuccessful in crate training otto -Otto now pees in the crate. Lian thinks we shoud get some cesar books but i think we just need to let otto know who the alpha dog is. Now that mama is back (me)- i think we will be able to make some progress. I hope to also write some beter posts. Oops Otto just tried to bite my computer.

Paris

2009-10-12T06:24:00.000-07:00

Today is our last day in paris. We are spending it eating, shopping and flaneuring, with a brief visit to a museum exhibition on surrealism. Paul and I had some vegan food last night and it sucked all the water out of my body between the hours of 12 and 2 last night. I have been rehydrating all day. Now we must go again for more eating, shopping and flaneruing

Fools Journey

2009-10-11T01:21:00.001-07:00

Yesterday Jamie and I set out on a quest - to pick up a gold bracelet for ma mere. It took us from the right bank to the left bank from the marais to some unknown territory west of Charles De Gaulle star. Along the way we had many adventures. It rained, a flock baby pigeons ate out of my hand - thank god for purel, Jamie and I became separated.

There were also mini victories. I found the mustard shop, La Maille. We saw a very cool public art exhibition at the Tuilleries. And finally, alone, and tired with foot pain - I found the shop with the gold bracelet. The real reason I could not find it was that my father had sent me an incorrect spelling and so I google mapped the wrong place. It is a beautiful bracelet though - and I took some nice picts with my nikon fe2 (velvia 100).

Meanwhile, Paul lay home, sicken by Napoleon's revenge. Although he was able to work up the strength to go across town to the Agnes B store on the left bank. Paul's quest is to visit every Agnes B shop.

The day ended with a sumptuous dinner in a Persian restaurant near the Beaubourg and a walk around the Marais looking for Finkelstainz deli (or whatever).

Today more flaneuring on left bank and perhaps the Palais De Tokyo exhibit (perhaps Pomp. exhibit)

Nighty Night

2009-10-09T13:54:00.000-07:00

Here's to getting some sleep tonight! I am shot. This morning started with breakfast at the bastille, where we silently protested the corrupt aristocracy and proclaimed equalite liberte fraternite- and ate croissants. Then I was induced to take a jog with Jamie. We ran along various side streets from the place des voyges (approx) to the Beaubourg then over to the Seine and across the Seine to Il de La Cite = where we caught a glimpse of Notre Dame, then back through the Bastille and through the place des voyges back to the hotel. It was a great run and helped revive my limbs after 4 days of travel.

Once back at the hotel, Paul informed me that he found another - better - hotel. 13Bit is a company of sybarites. Last night when we checked in, we were utterly horrified at the hotel and began a frantic search to find another reasonably priced hotel or perhaps craigslist share. So Paul finding a hotel was a great relief. This is one of the reasons it is so great to work with Paul. This was excellent news as our current hotel seemed like a flop house and i essential huddled on a chair in the middle of my room trying not to touch anything (or to let anything touch me) .

We packed up and in 10 min were out of the Hotel Saintonge - and on our way to the hotel Du Vieux Marais. As I learned from the fb responses to my twitter post - there are a few of you out in internet land that also like the Marais. Yes, the Marais is great.

After showering we went to lunch in the Marais where a very nice waiter humored by conversing with us in french. Then we made a pillgrammage to the Mariages Freres tea house, the Agnes B for mens, and took in some window shopping and people watching. We walked a big loop from the marais to the place des victories to the louvre, then chateles then back to the hotel. then internet for an hour and made some stoopid option trades and finally ate dinner.

Blog posts with itinerary litnies are boriing -I understand - but I am tired and hopefully tomorrow with my 8 hours of sleep I will be able to post something more enlightening

Creer une blog

2009-10-08T15:39:00.000-07:00

Is it une or un ?

Finally got into Paris after about 4 hours on various trains through the benelux. Last night I had a fun evening eating fried mushrooms in Eschede, reading 'The globalization of water' and googling the history of the netherlands and the linguistic history of dutch. Dutch means some think like low german (german of the lowlands - neider means low). There was an interesting graph showing the relationship between Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian. Danish and Norwegian share vocabulary but not phonology (same words sounding different) while Danish and Swedish share phonology but not vocabulary (sound alike but mean different things). This of course brings me to my pet obession - Finnish - a linguistic isolate (totally unrelated to the other germanic languaes)- and so obviously a holdover from our alien forbearers who seeded our planet (JK :)

The doc interviews went smashingly. We learned a lot - and we want to go and shoot some dried up river beds. Also Paul and I discussed the idea of next time interviewing people for two days. On day one have the first meeting and wow them with our fantastic conversational skills and personal hygine, and day two get into the heart wrenching interview.

The Malawi ISP is STILL not working properly - although this will hopefully be fixed tomorrow - The UNICEF Malawi crew is on the case. I'm trying to push off the field work another week - arg!

We got into to Paris too late to eat. I am dehydrated and carbohydrated - I hope my room does not have bed bugs - I have fond memories of staying in Paris as a college student and my roommate getting scabies - yuck - i am too old for scabies. I am super exciting of getting up tomorrow - doing some tai chi in the place des voyges and eating croissant and cappucino and dipping my croissant into my cappucino just like Proust did. Ahhh ... Paris.

Enschede En-ska-day

2009-10-07T07:44:00.001-07:00

I am here FINALLY in Enschede. It took 4 trains from Antwerp to get here - but I'm here and looking for stroop wafflen. This is all to shoot interview with the founders of the Water Footprint concept - Derk and Arjhen. I told Paul we cannot have any talking heads in this documentary, which immediately caused Paul to argue with me and swear to make the entire doc talking heads. 'Why are we going to Enschede and shooting these people if not to have talking heads.' Good point, for research - I say and to start building relationships with people in this field. I was also hoping to maybe get a water field trip out of this -but we had to reschedule our interviews so they all take place in one day - making a field trip on this trip impossible. We can still do interesting things with talking heads but I would like it for either voice overs or dramatic content - I basically want more visual content than verbal content, I want some compelling drama, why is this a documentary and not an interview, book, podcast, lecture, or something else (laser light show).

In our first doc, Video Out I though it would be interesting to some how tell the story of VJing by producing a VJ type movie -this did not happen - but I think we made a compelling movie. With Lumia I had no structural asperations - I just wanted to make a second movie. The interesting thing about lumia was that it was a story about a piece of history and an artform that has no history, so it was an exercise in constructing a story and constructing a narrative. In retrospect it might have been interesting to make a Roshimon doc (I am using lots of Roshimon analogies lately) about the subjective nature of documentaries and histories in general - have different histories of light art and thus comment not only on Lumia but on documentary filmmaking- DEEP! too bad I just thought of that. Perhaps I should have been blogging while we made Lumia.

Then we made two features - The Discrete Charm of the Hipster Class (aka game theory, aka the system). This is still out has festivals - it does not seem to have the festival success as Lumia and Video Out - However I think it is a MUCH BETTER MOVIE! I think the reason for a poor festival run is 1) No name actors 2) strange format. We made DCHC as a bunch of very loosely related vignettes about games. All kinds of games: mind games, video games, games of chance etc. It was sort of unconventional, but I thought it was different and engaging.

Now we are finishing up our feature narrative about a indian financial analyst who people think is the messiah- its a comedy.

But about the water documentary... what will it look like. I am not sure. We may even end up making the documentary about the history of measurement (the water footprint being another type of measurement). This is a serious issue - we are using up the non renewable resources of our planet. There are other questions - who is being most affected by the problems of sustainability, what are their stories, what are the groups funding methods like the water footprint, carbon footprint, eco footprint - what are their stories. All these measures are couching the problem of sustainability in in the language of mathematics. This is the language of epistemic superiority (in the 21st). This is opposed to the language of ethics (or perhaps religion) that some instinctively feel is the domain of sustainability - we have a moral obligation not to destroy our environment - and we could probably look to different 'theories' utilitarianism etc. to defend this. The metrics of sustainability also appeal to the semiotics of economics. Economics is the king of policy, perhaps similar to sophistry (given a bad rap by socrates) in the Greek Agora. Economics drives policy. I hope that the efforts of the metricicians (mispelled neologisim - you heard it here first folks) results in large scale change. It is more than a mental game, it is really about the future existence of the human species. So what will the water documentary look like? I'll tell you when we get some more interviews.

Tonight I am finisihing Arjen's tomb I have to finish their tomb - The Globalization of Water - which I cannot start until I finish obsessively compulsively reading The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. Hopefully I will start on that tonight.

Also in Antwerp we we stumbled upon this beautiful church: http://www.aviewoncities.com/antwerp/cathedral.htm.

Ok feeling jet lag brain freeze - must log off

Blog Marken or something

2009-10-06T09:33:00.000-07:00

I am a bit loopy from jet lag. My internet is a bit slow - BUT faster than Lilongwe. I am sitting in the lovely Banks Hotel in the sort of SoHo of Antwerp. I have already had some Belgan waffles - yum! 13Bit is having deep conversations in beautiful cafe lobby of the Banks Hotel, but truly I am too tired to follow. My mind is wondering why the F*#$k the dow is going up (I am long QID). That is about all my mind can do right now, due to jet lag. I need to do some action script for a carbon footprint web project, and attempt to log into the malawi server (Malawi UNICEF changed Internet Service Providers, but I am enjoying a great email relationship with the new Malawi Ministry of Health Webmasters. I also need to finish updating the website for ChangProjects - and other things - wow I'm tired now.

I am reading Noel Carroll's The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. I really enjoyed Carroll's book on criticism - which is one of the few lucid discussions of the philosophy of art and criticism. What is it about a film that makes it art? Or, as Pirsig would say, what is Quality in film? Hopefully I'll figure something out before the water footprint interviews this week. Next post from Holland.
Now I am going to sell all my stock.

Is Backgammon Broken

2009-10-02T15:45:00.000-07:00

I distinctly remember learning backgammon while on a family vacation. Every year we would vacation to the same place and I would watch the old men (old they seemed) play with these leather bound sets with leather bound dice cups. It was all very tactile and I can close my eyes and remember the smell the beach and the yummy hot dogs.

It has been 20+ years since I last played backgammon, but I am a gamer. The other day I decided to play backgammon on my iphone instead of chess. I was trying to remember the rules, learning from my mistakes as I went along - and then I got my backgammon mojo back.

I think backgammon is much easier than chess. At least easier for me. I think this is because there are limited backgammon strategies that work. If your opponent lacks skill, you dont even have to take his/her strategy into account. In chess, you really cannot avoid acting or reacting to your opponents moves. (Maybe this points to my chess weakness since really you should be acting not reacting)

The chance element, the dice roll, indicates a weakness with the game core mechanic. It means you cannot play the game on strategy alone - that to keep the game interesting you need to include chance. I wonder if you explicitly use probability to guide your moves if you could 'break the game'. Chance, although a weakness, is not a game killer. If the game is long enough I suppose the law of large numbers will remove any bias. The doubling of double rolls, however, really provides an unfair advantage beyond skill.

Is backgammon broken? Perhaps. But the weakness is from the limited strategies, but not because of the chance element.

Let the backgammon savants flame me - I am ready

More Shots

2009-10-01T05:19:00.001-07:00

Yesterday 13Bit interviewed Manny Kirshheimer for a blog,video podcast, future documentary. Manny is a completely independent filmmaker who has been making documentaries for the past 50 years. We spent a fantastic few hours talking to him about the craft in his apartment on the upper west side of manhattan - that he has lived in since 1964! We even got to see a few snippets of Manny's new documentary about war protest prints- it is a visual masterpiece.

I cannot believe that 13Bit is leaving monday for europe. It feel like I just got back and the to do list is growing out of control. I think the Malawi servers are back on line today - so I am going to follow up with that - along with the proposed field training. I am in the midst of putting up a new website and I am considering using django to host the content but I sort of dont want to deal with it Perhaps that is too much complexity for a dinky little site.

I ate too many brussel sprouts yesterday and I am considering a juice fast.

Doc Progress

2009-09-29T22:56:00.000-07:00

Today Paul and I embarked on one of our many 13Bit documentary road trips. A documentary is lots of fun to make. It is sort of like playing detective. In the beginning stages, you go out to different locations and meet interesting people to sus out the story for your doc. Today Paul and I went to Bethlehem PA to meet with Greta Browne, a woman who recently walked for climate change. Paul first read about her in an article in the New York Times.

She is an average american, well I don't know how average really. I mean not many people would dedicate 6 months of their lives to walking route 11 to 'Witness' climate change. 'Witness' is Greta's description and I think it is a very evocative word. Her mission during the 6 months was just to 'be there', to experience the country and to 'state for the record', in a sense, her concern for the climate. We spoke a bit about buddhism and mindfulness and the state of mind that allows for you to fully experience your current experience - what it means to 'witness'.

We are slowing building the pieces to this documentary - and the final shape is not all together clear yet. We have not found our story. It is like Michaelangelo finding David in a block of marble. We are finding a story in a block of human experiences.

Day Off

2009-09-28T04:18:00.000-07:00

Between the Robots and Sunday night dinner I forgot to blog.

I am really doing badly with my daily deadlines and I attribute to my inability to stop writing code once I start. This morning I am not going to code. Instead I am going to finish some web design/business card designs and some writing that I started. I would like to also update my iphone firmware and download a flash card app so i can study kung fu.

I am redoing the chang projects website. I accidentally deleted the files the other day to I am redesigning practically from scratch. The good thing is that I am off tables forever and have totally converted to css (about 5 years after starting css). CSS is hard for me, because I have bad memories of div and layer problems in IE and Netscape from the dawn of the internet age.

I am exploring web hosting on the cloud via rackspace. This seems much cheaper than mediatemple's virtual server. I also bought a very cool url for my social networking software and I will probably be revealing it in a few days. The server in Lilongwe is down for 3 days because they are transferring ISPs. I have been communicating with the Ministry of Health, and there are massive problems with managing expectations. So, now, I am managing expectations and making people feel good. Tomorrow 13Bit is going to PA to interview a woman walking across the US to raise awareness for global warming.

Today I was reading "My Mother was a Computer" by Hayles. I was looking for inspiration to finish my song about the singularity and I think it did the trick. It is not a bad book, although I think it probably does not belong all in one book. Most interesting to me is the treatment of computer code as an art, and the discussion of code as performative. (Ah-hem I presented a paper on this in 03). Ok so this is a philosophical idea - Performative statements. I think AJ Ayers talks about it. So you look at something like marriage. The justice of the peace, by performing the marriage ceremony - by saying 'i now pronounce you man and wife' - has a meaning beyond pure linguistic communication. It is performative in that it changes the status of the couple hoping to be married. This statement 'does' something within our judicial system (unless you are a same sex couple) - but then you sort of enter the world of language game - the performance only takes place in a particular judical system.

So code is like saying 'you are man and wife' - it 'does' something. Code is performative.

Anyway, Hayles disregards the literary content of code, saying that the only meaning of code is the execution. This is myopic. The clearer the code the greater lifespan (ie more people will reuse it). Same goes for speed. In this case memory management could probably be sacrificed for speed unless you are developing for microcontrollers. The language of code perpetuates English language dominance since most code structure is written in English (I did not go to Brown so I dont use the word Hegemony).

To break it down there is
1) A poetics of code: This is the language of code, the names of your functions and variables, the types of patterns that you use, the architecture of your project. The clearer a book the easier it is to transmit information, same as code. Code is executed by a computer but it is compiled by a human. As long as humans are writing code, they will need to read something and the clearer and more elegant the the code is, the easier it is to communicate the ideas within the code.
2) An aesthetics of code: In thought aesthetics is truth. Truth is beauty or beauty is truth. In code speed is beauty. The elegance of a piece of code is the optimization of its algorithm.
3) A politics of code: Who can use the code. Copyright issues. Power structure. What sorts of metaphysical assumptions are built into software paradigms. How does the use of English perpetuate a certain western power structure? How do the rules of code perpetuate Aristotelian logic?
4) An ethics of code. What does code do? What ought it do? What constraints should we build to control the effects of code? Once we control 2nd (and 3rd and 4th) order effects our notion of ethics as a 1st order personal or interpersonal interaction must change.

This is all completely irrelevant in the face of horrible diseases that affect the bottom billion. I need to do more RapidSMS now.

I will post my singularity song soon

The Triumph of Video

2009-09-26T08:15:00.000-07:00

This morning I have been watching some ted conferences while working on my social software projects:
Some enjoyable ones were: Taryn Simon, Theo Jansen, and Hans Rosling

I also like watching concerts on youtube - I dont look for audio anymore i look like video.
It is an evolution that I am watching/listening to video while working because I used to watch/listen to audio tapes/lectures. Now I am moving from audial to video.

So what is going to happen when everyone has a video camera? Is everyone going to make little narrative fictions? I dont really think so, rather I think there will be lots of 'instructables' . I wonder though if fiction is at a lull right now? The new media/democratized media in a sense is creating a fiction itself and the challenge is to find the reality in that narrative rather than the unreality in that narrative. Once we figure out what is true we can then create fictions. People have always told stories, but what is the content of those stories? Histories, mythologies, philosophies, fictions. At some level they are all instructables - telling people what to do, what they ought to do, what has been done, etc. We no longer couch most of our instruction in narrative frameworks. I dont know if this matters. The reason to include a narrative framework is to probably improve recall. Recall is now unnecessary because everything is on the web (I dont believe this but this is the prevailing view)

I just started reading Madame Bovary right now, and Charles is disparaged for his memory. He is a mimic not an original, or i suppose he is re-acting not acting. What is with the western war against memory??!?

I am listening to some Rexalls which I really enjoy - it reminds me of The Doors- Very cool stuff!

The Pseudoscience of Phonology

2009-09-25T15:45:00.001-07:00

This morning I finished a version of BlackListTweet. This is an application that tracks and blocks twitter spam from twitter accounts. While writing this I also wrote an application to track twitter favorites, I dont have a name for this app yet. Please email your suggestions... I am thinking something like PopTweet.

I still need to design a front end and start the back end process (cron job). I hope to finish the front end tonight. Tonight is web nite. I accidentally deleted my web templates for my new site - chang projects. So, I need to re do those as well. Once those are complete, then I plan on moving the site, and the twitter sites, over to a media temple virtual server. That way I have complete control over the server and I can install csound (and finish doeraetweet.

This morning I reread some of The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics, which is actually a fantastic book and very readable. I am slowly adding different algorithms and heuristics for detecting spam tweets, and I wanted to check up on some NLP (natural language processing) algorithms. I could not help, but start rereading the book, starting with the chapter on Phonology. It sounds like phrenology- which is a pseudoscience- phonology is just a social science - which I suppose is also a pseudo science. Phonology is the study of sounds in language.

Science on the one hand refers to a methodology, however I think that science also refers to subject matter. Scientific subject matter can be verified and falsified via scientific methodology. Really I think linguistics is a set of heuristics and does not meet the possibility of validity via scientific method that should be required of things that are a science. I suppose phonology is in fact a pseudo science.

The section on phonology covered something called free variation, and this really piqued my curisosity. The t in ten, the t in net, and the t in water, are all different types of t sounds. In english we do not have two words ten: one pronounced with the t as in ten and the other as the t in net. In some languages we do have this difference -ten can have two meanings and two pronunciations (or more).

There are myriad ways one can say ten. If I say ten ten times, the t will sound slightly different each time. This diversity is called 'free variation.'

I want to the idea of free variation into my robot singularity song, because a robot really does not have free variation - or a mechanical device does not have free variation (or does it). Speech is a motor process and if the motor process is constant there will be no change. I suppose as components wear down in a robot for example, you will get free variation as well. This is interesting for me to think about. I may to an audio project about free variation.

First Interview for Eco Doc

2009-09-24T08:40:00.000-07:00

I was out the door at 7:30 this morning. That is my usual blogging time, so this blog post will be rather short.

I was out so early because 13bit interviewed Mathis Wackernagel of footprint network at 8:45!

It was a fantastic interview and we are really excited about the potential of this documentary. The whole idea is that human beings are consuming more than is being replenished, and certain countries and cities are really consuming more. The eco footprint is looking at adding an ecological measure to economic analysis similar to the GDP. So for example, Argentina might have a low GDP but its eco footprint (use vs possession of natural resources) is actually quite good. I can totally see Latam Traders using eco footprint to push latam bonds.

Its amazing how everything must be put in economic terms, but that really is the driving philosophy behind contemporary life.

Jamie is over at the 13Bit compound taking care of some logistical issues involving trains, Thalys, and our october trip to europe to speak with various footprint people. It seems like we may set up some streaming site with our first two docs.

I finally was able to fix the dns/ip issues with the Malawi Servers - Now the site is up, although I think there is still an SMS problem that I need to fix.

Other than that, I am busily knocking things off the todo this today, and I may start trading my new options strategy.

Over and out

Is it Wednesday already

2009-09-23T05:54:00.000-07:00

Where does the time go!
Today I need to set up a backup server for RapidSMS Malawi. I have no idea why I cannot access the server over there - even though it is running. I really dont want to do it this - I foresee 5 hours of pain. I think running cherrypy on media temple will be painful. Tonight will be an all nighter -after kung fu fun. The things on the todo list are really piling up.

I have a version of BlackListTweet running over at http://blt.s61754.gridserver.com/blt/ - I need to create a front end and finish coding the first spam filter algorithm. Since twitter only lets me make 150 api calls in an hour, what I am doing is basically running a cron job at the end of every hour to test as many BlackListTweet registered accounts as possible. If BLT takes off, then I suppose I can cut a deal with Twitter and make BlackListTweet real-time. I still need to do web maintenance.

Tomorrow 13Bit is interviewing Mathis Wackernagel for the water/geopolitical power doc. It is not going to be a talking heads doc, but a wacked out espionage thriller like chinatown - but not as well lit. However, you do need to talk to talking heads, that is part of research. Wackernagel is pioneering something called the ecological footprint. This is a metric (like the carbon footprint) to determine how much ecological resources a person or country consumes. The idea is that perhaps we can integrate this into our economic system - it is sort of absurd that GDP and other measures of economic strength completely neglect consumption of environmental resources. In many ways, it reminds me on the Sen book I was reading in Africa (that I accidentally left at lake Malawi). Namely that, an increase in income does not necessarily lead to economic development. Development depends, as well, on the cultivation of personal liberties that enable people improve their own circumstances. THIS then leads to economic growth. At the core of both of these analysis are the ideas of incomplete or inadequate metrics (either for gauging economic health via GDP or gauging economic development via Income levels). With all this talk of metrics, you cannot help but feel how arbitrary it all is. After all, behind CDOs and S&P ratings were metrics designed to create safe securities out of risky securities. You can make a metric to prove anything. Man is the measure of all things.

13Bit is also collecting material for a potential documentary on the history of measurement, and on the history of money.
Odin is the god of wednesday

Oauth, O Superman, O judge, O Mom and Dad

2009-09-22T06:32:00.000-07:00

I am still on my Big Science kick.

This morning I received an enlightening email from Pawan, the head of IT over at UNICEF Malawi. He told me the reason why I cannot log on to the Malawi UNICEF servers is because there is a problem with the service provider. Ahhh. This makes me feel a bit better, because it means that I did not destroy the system with my attempt to fix dns mapping.

It is unfortunate that the Ministry of Health is in the field this week training health workers. RapidSMS should still be working (cell network no relation to internet-work). But who knows, I cannot log in to see. Stanley has a big rapidsms presentation this weekend, so I am going to put the site up over on one of the ChangProject sites and let him use that. Then at least I can work with Stanley to make the UI look as fantastic as possible - and bring glory to RapidSMS.

I did not implement my new plan of blogging at night. Rather I came home and worked on BlackListTweet and read the fate of africa. Last night, Lian and I got home at about 10:30. Instead of going to kung fu, I went to a fantastic Jivamukti yoga class with JF&Son. It was a great class, but I think Kung Fu is a better work out - and Kung Fu has weapons. It is also true that Yoga people are in general more insane than Kung Fu people. But Yoga and Kung Fu are related. Yoga is in many ways the foundation of Kung Fu (in particular the I Chin Ching). When the first kung fu master - whom I forget - came to china to teach the shaolin monks - the monks would fall asleep during his lectures. They had no energy. So he forced them to do yoga (I Chin Ching) to bring up their constitution and their energy level.

After yoga - we met diametrik and the parents and ate cold candle cafe. It was a momentous occasion. My mother stayed up past 9:30, and my father and brother continued the finkelstein family business of hiring the most obnoxious and incompetent people possible and then berating one another about it. (Katie this does not refer to you, as you may be where JF is breaking out of this tradition)

This morning I am working on BlackListTweet. I lost some time due to mediatemple's implementation of django. I wish I could just have my own box and do my own hosting - but that, too, is a pain in the neck. I had to recreate a database and deal with some fcgi issues. Now I am implementing some oauth functions, so I can access twitter via oauth. Django has some nice code snippits I have been cannabalizing. Maybe TOMORROW I will have an alpha up.

The Robot Parade is coming - I need to work on my singularity song!

And I need to get my eyebrows waxed - it hurts to be beautiful

Django Reinhardt

2009-09-21T07:31:00.000-07:00

I have decided to implement a new blogging work flow. I will blog at night, save a draft, and then edit and post in the morning.

The mornings are my most productive time of the day, so I would rather spend that time working on projects than blogging.
I am slowly adjusting back to NYC. The good thing about jetlag for me, is that it gives me super human abilities to not sleep (for the period of jet lag). I generally need a lot of sleep, so I sort of enjoy this phase.

At the moment I am attempting to coordinate with the folks at UNICEF malawi to check on the server and figure out why it is down. There is a UNICEF holiday, so I may be forced to wait until later. Stanley is presenting the project in 7 days, so I would also like to add some bells and whistles to the UI. However, the UI is rather slick as it is and generates oohs and ahhs - so perhaps I should not over design. I am just taking the lead from Stanley on this.

This morning I was engaged in some housekeeping. I moved all the social software development and ICT/humanitarian type work under a separate Chang Projects - so I was involved in a site redesign and branding exercise. (My husband - the design guru diametrik , gave me some excellent feedback - solicited). I may eventually further break off the ICT to its own entity, but I am going to give that time.

I have a list of projects that I have been putting off while working in Malawi, so I am excited to start working on those again.
This morning I built the django framework for my twitter application - blacklisttweet. Blacklisttweet (blt) lets twitter users track and block spam twitter accounts. I have a NLP (natural language processing) algorithm that I came up with a few months ago, and I hope to program that tonight, along with a simple view. Maybe tomorrows blog post will contain a link!

I also need to move this software over to a media temple account with its own server, so I can install crazy software like csound. (That is for my next twitter project).

This weekend marks the 5th annual Robot Parade. Really it is the 3rd parade - we took a 2 year hiatus. Cindym Paul and I will have a robot work day this week. I am composing a song about the singularity - inspired by Laurie Andersen's Big Science record. Lian likes the chorus which goes something like:

I am a sine wave
I am a sine wave
The singularity
The singularity

It may not sound like much, but the melody is very satisfying - and follows a sign wave. I am recording my own voice (and synth) and manipulating in pd (pure data).

I also started start work on my radical narrative/documentary/mashup - Joelle, Naomi, Alyssa, Meredith Barcelona. A recutting of barcelona vacation footage with a narrative ala the kid stays in the picture. I am starting to log the tapes now - which include 20 minutes of bird love in Gaudi's park.

At 12 I have a 13bit lunch with Paul. We have some interviews this week for our next documentary on Water and Geopolitical power. I am thinking we should call the documentary Water/Power but that might be too cheesy. I am looking forward to getting back to the water research. We are going to also continue editing the current feature, which we hope to finish before January.

I also have some ETF research/reading to do. I want to expand my e-trading option strategy for ETFs. Right now it only exists for american style stock options.

Lian told me all the tea I started drinking in Malawi has stained my teeth - going to the dentist friday to beautify.

A Blustery Day

2009-09-20T07:50:00.000-07:00

It is a blustery day in gotham. You can never say that you dont have jet - because perhaps one night you seem not to have jet lag, but the next night you do. I, by force of will, can overcome jet lag. Last night I woke at 4:30, looking for my wedding ring and not quite sure where I was. At the moment, Lian is playing 18 musicians and I am resisting the urge to fall off the coffee wagon - sipping some english breakfast from mcnulty.

This morning I logged into the Malawi server and lo and behold the server cannot be located. I am trying to track down the IT guy at the Lilongwe office so he can check on the server. I think we need to change the ip/dns server mappings again so I can log in. The security system over there is sort of labrynthine.

We went live with the system about 1 week after I finished writing it. This is sort of insane, yes. But hey, its malnurished kids, we cant wait. What I am learning about deploying tech projects in Africa, is that you need to map out a detailed deployment plan. People are not used to releasing software products, and so there is no concept of testing/debugging/soft launch. It is great that at UNICEF you can deploy a project a week after you finish. Generally this is impossible because of all the red tape at most organizatons. I believe in rapid deployment and iterative design/testing. I attempted to orchestrate a soft launch with the Ministry of Health - and this week is the soft launch, in 2 weeks is the hard launch. Launching is hard. Like Math and Titanium.

I am now focusing on my tea and finishing the Fate of Africa, an excellent book. However, I wish the Fate of Africa was more analytical and less descriptive, or to use Kant's terms, more synthetic and less analytic.

First post in NYC

2009-09-19T08:10:00.000-07:00

So after 24 hours in transit I am home in lovely NYC. I am holding up rather well. My husband however wants to nap - I dont think he has been sleeping well this past month.

Before I left Lilongwe, we finally had a meeting with the Ministry of Health. They finally got funds to go into the field and engage with training. Let me say that this rapidsms system we are deploying is essentially a new system built in 3 weeks and the MoH wants to roll it out without any testing! In the future, I think it is important to build testing time and deployment time into these RapidSMS projects and to help stakeholders understand that this is not a trivial task to build and deploy one of these systems.

I sat down with the MoH and we revised the deployment plan. Rather than start monday and roll out to all 15 sites, they are going to roll out to 5 sites monday. I will monitor from NY - and bug fix the following week. If I am happy with the program - the MoH will roll out to the other 10 sites the following week. If necessary the MoH will also redeploy to the initial 5 sites.

I think this will be fine - all that matters is that the sms messages generate appropriate responses. I am not even concerned with if everything flows properly through the db - although it should. Worst comes to worst, I am logging all messages with the logger app - so we can go a post process the messages later. The most important thing is that the sms service works as expected for the heath workers and the trainers.

I think the travel is starting to catch up with me - my head is swimming -

On Way Home

2009-09-17T23:12:00.000-07:00

This is my last morning in Lilongwe. I am looking forward to going home. Once I get home I will change all my passwords! I will also vet my bills - it looks like my hotel at the sunbird charged me twice. Good thing I payed with american express - they will take care of me. I am not sure when the Ministry of Health will roll out to the new sites. We were supposed to do it this week, but they have not been returning phone calls. Since, I will not be here for the final roll out, I am hoping to hire a local developer who will oversee the final roll out. I am really going to push for this.

Anyway I am looking forward to returning home and taking care of logistical issues.

Last full day in Lilongwe

2009-09-16T22:53:00.000-07:00

Today is my last full day in Lilongwe. It looks like I am not going to the field after all. Who knows...

I had a very productive meeting with Stanley and the folks at Zain. Zain is one of two cellphone providers in malawi. The other is TNM. We/UNICEF have a toll free number with Zain and TNM that health workers can sms their medical reports to. The problem with Zain, aside from the fact that their number did not work, was that in order to send sms (even to a toll free number) you need to have 10 cents on your card.

What we decided to do was have Zain look at all the cell phones sending sms messages to our tollfree number and bypass that restriction. The only problem is, with the first message that identifies the number to the system. Next solutin - when MoH trainers go to the field to train health workers, they are all going to have the health workers add themselves to the system. If anyone needs cell credit to do this, then it will be provided by MoH. We will see how the system fares as health workers move between health centers or change phone numbers.

What is the deal with the cabal of cellphone operators? It issomething I need to learn more about.

Thats it for today folks - over and out

Deploying RapidSMS

2009-09-15T23:58:00.000-07:00

Oh help me Thomas Jefferson - patron saint of secular humanists...

This morning I am working from under the mosquito net of my lovely bed at the lovely kiboko town hotel. Now that Kiboko gets wifi (at the steep price of $13/5 hrs) - I am a bit happy. It means I dont have to sit at the internet cafe (which is not really a cafe).

For the past 3 days I have been trying to run the new version of rapidsms on the servers here in Lilongwe. This is difficult because I cannot access ssh through the UNICEF firewalls. The firewalls keep everyone from sshing out -but seem unable to prevent viruses from coming in (as seen my the prevalent nakedlady.vbs virus on my unicef computer). I am going to change all my passwords when I return to the US.

So I have to do all this server work at night, or if I am lucky enough to get a ride to UNICEF headquarters - on the mian server there - in the server farm. This the story of my rapidsms server deployment.

1) Monday night 6:30 (started late because of blackout) - log in to malawi rapidsms server attempt to run django - oops no django wget django tarball (this takes 20 min). update git (this takes 20 min) down load rapidsms source from git. oops - git does not seem to work. ok lets try http://git. oops git says I have a commit error - damn! open up rapidsms source code - pull commit (oh nothing to commit - wtf)
ok what else is going on - try ssh into git. ok git recognizes my ssh. Oops its 8:30 - blackout - time for green beer.

2) Tuesday 4:30 finally get a lift to unicef server. This was difficult because all drivers were in the field save 1, so the illustrious Stanley, savior of the RapidSMS Malawi Project, gave me a lift. Ok I copied a tarball of my code onto a usb drive because i dont know wtf is up with git. Ok how do I mount again. oh no need to mount i see my tarball. Wha - I cant unpack it - there is a problem .... ok lets recopy a version on to the usb hard drive. plug in the usb - where is my tarball? crap i need to mount - how do you mount again. Due to nice unix guis - I have not mounted since 2003. ok mount /src /dst -f usbfs . something like that. where are my files! Crap. Oh its 5:30 - have to get home before dark - there is Stanley - ok will try and get git to work from internet cafe. Look Stanley - I need to work from the hotel tomorrow because I cannot use any of my programming tools from unicef and I am going bonkers.

3) At Kiboko - suffering from Shaka's revenge - is it the water or the nali sauce or belharzia - who knows?

ok after dashing off some emails that go ignored in the noosphere (did I mention how my petpeeve is people not responding to email) - ssh -vv, ok. I look at the config file - ok what is going on here - we are sshing on port 443???? lets blow all this away and generate some new ssh keys and link it with my git hub (this took an hr to figure out) after trying various other things. ok now git works - 20 min later i have rapidsms on malawi. I shut down the rubysms site - which does not really matter because the UI has not updated in 4 months. Ok lets run this sucker - where is the webserver? oh - need to download apache - oh no - rapidsms uses cherrypy - phew -ok cant set the ip to malawi.rapidsms.mepemepe.com hmmm.. hacked the cherrypy ok that does not work - lets look at other peoples rapidsms.ini - where do i set the server name. Perhaps adam knows - but i think he has been eaten by hungry gorrillas in Uganda.

after intense googling i email the rapidsms group -but in the back of my mind i think - dns issue - this is some dns issue - so i fire up trusty ifconfig to find my ip. then i see it and i say ./rapidsms runserver static_ip_address:8000. Now I need to map this. But you know what, I forget how to do it - and will leave that to the dev we hired. Perhaps I should have brought my unix sys admi purple book with me... So the site is now up on a super secret ip address. I had to remove the io functionality - because the version of python does not have it and i am not installing a new version of python. Actually Matt Berg caught this bug 2 weeks ago- but i thought my server could handle python io - I was wrong. I replaced it with something else that may totally crap out - we will see. At least the site is up! I am ready for the field

almost 12pm Malawi time - need to pay my hotel bill and go to the UNICEF office - where I can rewrite the training posters.
tomorrow going to the field I think - and friday hiring a local developer to test/bug/fix and set my mind at ease- and then hop a plane to JFK. On the plane i look forward to finishing some as3 projects that I have put off because this rapidsms became a many headed hydra guarded on all sides by sychlla charbidis and other mixed metaphors and mythological creatures.

Returning home to 13Bit, where I can finish our current movie, and continue working on the docs in progress - automate my e-trading option strategy, finish some web2,0 apps, some iphone games, and of course start selling some ace ICT projects with my crack team of project managers and developers

I send love into the world

Sloop John B

2009-09-15T01:02:00.000-07:00

I've been here a month in Malawi. That means a month of blogging daily. Upon returning to the USA I may consider making my blog posts more topic oriented. But, I may also discard that thought in favor of writing the blogging equivalent to finnegan's wake. I plan to continue subverting tag etiquette. Today is my first day using blogger spell check. I really love it. Blogger spell check highlights all misspelled words in your document and allows you to edit at your leisure. I prefer this to the serial spell check of all word processing programs.

RapidSMS Malawi
I have a beta cut of the new Malawi RapidSMS Malnutrition app. We demoed to the Ministry of Health yesterday, who were very pleased with the project. Yesterday, I updated the server with django and related apps. I am having problems using git on the Malawi server because of some firewall issue. I am considering blowing away the .bashrc and .bash_profile files because they set display commands that make it impossible to use sftp.

But enough jargon. The project is wildly successful. I am thoroughly exhausted. Tonight it is is Shona's last night in Lilongwe, so we are going to party over at diplomats. But first I am going to gorge myself on pasta since I finally have cash again after being near destitute for 4 days.

Thursday I go to the field for more training and HSA visits. I was supposed to go to Mzuzu today-Thurs to hold a mini bar camp at Mzuzu University. This was canceled when Stanley came back from vacation and decided to plan a field visit for Thursday. What can you do?

Passed Kenyatta road on the way to work this morning,and thanks to "The Fate of Africa" I now know who Kenyatta was. We took a short cut to work this morning, driving down a pedestrian dirt road. It makes me wonder where the other pedestrian dirt roads are. There are secret roads everywhere!

I was reminded of Gilbert Ryles Mind Body theory today. The question is -where is the mind?: Analogously we ask: where is the Hey University? And you take me to Hey's library, and classrooms, athletic facilities and dormatories. And I say, this is all nice, but you have not taken me to the 'University' where is the university. And you say, well the whole thing is the university. Or I say, show me team spirit, and you take me to a soccer match and show me people with facepaint, and cheerleaders, and players hugging each other after a goal. But where is the spirit? Well - there is no spirit, all of these things are expression of spirt. Same thing, where is the mind, I show you all these things like memories, and emotions, and rational decisions, and irrational decisions, and you say nice - but where is the mind. And Gilbert Ryle says, well its a category mistake, mind is like team spirit and the university - it is not a thing, but a description of an aggregate of things or a state of being - an abstract class, an interface, the walrus.

I am thoroughly exhausted. I am happy with the project. Say no to vaporware.

Gov 2.0

2009-09-13T23:42:00.000-07:00

I opened up my browser this morning and what did I see??? Unicef won a Gov 2.0 award for RapidSMS! The Unicef Story,Gov2.0

What is Gov2.0? A buzz word. Database fetishism. I read a blog post this morning on Quinn said - and one of the points was the lack of imagination in database driven websites/communities. The net is a dialogue and database driven systems are just online versions of old media catalogs. I think this is correct. But the web is not only a dialogue but a cybernetic dialogue/a feedback loop. I think these databases become useful when they are analyzed to provide targeted feedback - a cybernetic system. For example to analyze the data quality in the malnutrition system to better understand which health centers need more training. Communicate and then use the communication to improve the system. I also think that transparency of gov data is fantastic. Perhaps we should not call this Gov2.0, but call it Society2.0. I think we should strive for transparency in all our social systems political, economic, medical.

But should Gov2.0 be more than online catalogs. I dont know- I dont know if for a large country like the US - if we really need public referendums on all issues (This does not really work for California). However, in this age of military-industrial-finacial-government complex, I think that government 'online catalogs' are necessary in maintaining an educated populus. For example,I have a partially working program called congresscal that puts all legislation before congress on a shared google calendar. Perhaps I should enable it so you can subscribe to the calendar and only show those bills related to certain issues - and see which congress people are supporting them etc - but still there is not a feedback loop.

I dont know how the Gov2.0 feedback loop will work or will look. I think it will necessitate a new form of interaction -lest we collapse into mob rule, or technocrat rule,or wacko fringe rule (oh - we just had 8 years of that) Looking at RapidSMS in Malawi, I see Gov2.0 as being able to target resources (malnutrition resources, vitamins, suppliments), immediately to children in need. It is not really about improving the democratic process. Rather it is about government services - streamlining the channels of communication between the governement and the people who need government services.

I wonder if legislation on farm subsidies could be automated to tie into agricultural economic, and world crop yields. Should legislation itself be changed, is it obselete. Do we only need human legislators for gray areas like cloning human? Could most legislation be automated ?

Kudos to RapidSMS it is a fantastic system. I am in Malawi right now, where I have rewritten a version of the software to conform to the new python/django rapidsms framework. (The old version was written in ruby). I am 90% done, and I am very happy with the outcome. I will post some screenshots later. I wish performance was better. I have backpopulated the system with data from 2003 and as a result the database queries are quite slow especially when calculating stats. (I think my love affair with the django orm ended with aggregation) I think I may cache stats or store calc'd stats in a db table. Really I would like to consider generating the data in flat files and storing it in the cloud (s3). If these sorts of issues are cropping up now, then they will only persist - so we need to create a robust solution.

So anyway, Gov2.0! Yes there are many ways that RapidSMS can solve problems in places with wide cellphone penetration and low internet penetration. All sorts of problems. Remote data collection with real-time feedback,tracking distribution of medicine, food, vitamins, receiving feedback on the quality of goods and services, crisis management,etc... I also think that the the simplicity of SMS is perfectly suited to these sorts of problems, sometimes a limited feature set is a blessing in disguise.

I am waiting for my MoH training session. Today I am training the MoH, tomorrow I will make the final changes to the system, and wednesday I will go into the field for our first training session.

There is so much more we could do. If you are delivering a great innovative product (like the RapidSMS nutrition package) it always generates more pathways and more ideas.

This afternoon I will be reviewing integrating the database system with epipen (I think this is an R system) or another epidemological system to track data quality and provide feedback on those health centers that need more training, as well as to track seasonal trends for malnutrition. Data analysis is powerful stuff !

I have been watching lots of Hitchcock the past few nights, I think vertigo is the best Hitch - vertigo and charade! The worst is the movie with paul newman and julie andrews about cold war espionage.

Sunday Dispatch from Lilongwe

2009-09-13T00:00:00.000-07:00

So I have less than 1 week left in Lilongwe. This morning while I was eating my daily breakfast of 2 eggs over medium on toast with a bowl of fruit and a cup of tea, I looked up at the masive tree shading the patio.

Its a type of tree I have never seen before coming to Africa with a medium size barky trunk, and little tubular smooth branches. There are experiences of newness everywhere if you stop and take a breath and refresh your eyes.
I'm sure this is also the case back home in the US, where we walk around with blinders in a tunnel.
My room is above the kitchen of a resturant - to which I owe the proliferation of cockaroaches. At night I can here the chatter and bustle, like I am living above a jazz cafe. This is especially true, when I put on some Don Cherry Mu (Thanks to Chris Barke).Yesterday, I did some negotiations at the market, and brought some tzschatkies for people back home. I did manage to exchange some tee shirts and pants, and all my video out and lumia DVDs. When you go to Africa, bring discmans, mp3 players, old phones, old cameras, sneakers, baseball caps. Use these as
currency. These are worth something, they are like bicycles on the black market.Something happend with my bank card and I cant get cash. I topped off my cellpone credit and called chase 7 TIMES! They said they removed the block but I still cannot get cash out. I am hoping it is some weird Malawi ATM issue. I will take care of it at Monday. I am looking forward to Stanley returning. I asked Benson last week to help me call the US, and it took him 3 hours to help me out.Im not brining tzchotchies back for Paul. Paul wants a local tee shirt. I am looking for a tee shirt - but I dont think there are local malawi tee shirts.

Clothing in Malawi -I was acutally discussing this with people the other day. Most Malawians wear clothing from the US - perhaps donated. There is a high prevalence of AIG shiny shirts. I saw one guy wearing a red socks cap. This is actually a detrement because it underminds the local Malawi manufacturing efforts, which cannot compete on price with the US products. There are a fair number of chinese emigres who have ope
ned up clothing factories here - but I am not sure what has come from it yet.
Back at Kiboko:I have become friends with an older french man and 2 guys from Liverpool. I take this as 13bit sign - because Paul is rereading the Beatles biography - one of the 13bit canonical books. The older french man is reading a bio of Sarte by BHL. One of the things I love about France is that they read philosophy. It is like Argentina where Homeric epics and Freud are sold in trainstations and airport kiosks
.
I am working this weekend, since it is my last weekend here and I still have some work to do. This is because I foolishly refactored my code - which in some cases has resulted in some worse code - espcially in my breadcrumbs functionality. I really should not have refactored. NEVER REFACTOR IN THE FIELD - that being said I think my refactoring will pay off in the long run - but it has caused me grief - and I still have to write some spaghetti code because I am running out of time.

The most important reasons to be in Malawi for this project are:
1) The ability to go into the field and get feedback from HSAs
2) The ability to meet with the ministry of health and gauge their technical capacity
3) Other related work that people are doing in Malawi.

On step 3, when I met with Isaac yesterday I asked him how the local healthworkers at his hospital - St Gabriel's finance their SMS fees. Well, apparently, Josh Nesbit of Frontline Medic (another SMS eHealth company), received a grant fromStanford U last summer to implement a basic SMS health alert system - like 911.
He had 5 grand at the end of the summer and used this to fund the SMS messages -its a year later and they still have 1 grand left.

Now, while this is not necessarily a sustainable solution - IT IS AN EXCELLENT USE OF GRANT MONEY. It will help the system to gain a toe hold while a more sustainable financing solutions are explored.

So if you get a grant for a software project what you should you do with the money? I think a good use is to pay for something on the ground where your project will be implemented (rather than a new prada handbag perhas). For the Malawi INFSS project - I would hire a local developer on contract for a few thousand dollars. I would have spend most of my time working with him/her to spec out the systme and to work on social/process engineering, training materials and some iterative coding. This would have probably added 3-5k to the cost of the project, but it is these sorts of details that make the difference between tranquility and 100% success and stress and compromise . However - You still have the problem of no stakeholder committment. I think stakeholders need to contribute something, if you expect them to take the project seriously.

I have learned so much from working in Malawi and implementing this project. In many cases, the only way to learn how to implement one of these projects, is to implement one of these probjects.

Hapita

Are you a Christian?

2009-09-12T02:08:00.000-07:00

In Lilongwe, after getting to know people for a bit, they invariably will ask - 'Are you a Christian'? I am not quite sure what the analogue is in America, perhaps are you a democrat/republican. I've started saying no - I'm a secular humanist. (This unbeknownst to me is my husband's twitter ID!)

Then I explain that, I believe in Christian ethical values, but not necessarily in a Christian god or Jesus who interferes in world affairs - aka a God with divine providence. But this leads me to think what exactly are Christian ethics? During the crusades, would it be meaningful to speak of christian ethics - these ethics would be different from christian ethics today.

I suppose what I value is the humanist tradition expressed in the teachings of jesus, the rational tradition, preserved by Aquinus - and the scientific tradition that was actively repressed by the medieval church, and of course the legal/judicial/debate tradition of Judaic teachings.

More about this later - I think my internet connection may soon give up.

Last night I had a lovely dinner with Isaac Holeman of Frontline SMS at Huts, a well recommended Indian eatery in Lilongwe. It was good - but my pricest meal in Lilongwe 4800k for the two of us! It was good, and I am not feeling any digestive side effects but not worth the kwatcha.

I returned home to finish the fixtures for my new refactored data models and low and behold the fixtures revealed some issues with my class structure. Basically I had a person class (an abstract class) that was inherited by a healthworker class and a childpatient class. Prior to this project my only experience with django was writing fast backends for iphone applications. This project has been a django learning experience. When I started loading fixtures for my healthworkers and patients, they would not show up in the django admin page as separate entities, but as aggregated, unclickable items on the admin page (something like 20 patients). Exhausted and exasperated - I chucked the possibility of polymorphism and added a person object to healthworkers and children. Then because of my super slick - with some spaghetti code - dynamiclayout model I remapped the report columns to the new function/method names and everything worked as in a dream.

FIXTURES ARE IMPORTANT

Also in looking at the data - it is really bad. I am not going to be able to clean this data before I leave. I would if I could, but it really is not in the scope of this project - and already I have been unsuccessful in staving off feature creep. In software development it is important to have strict boundaries for a given project. You could conceivably work for ages on a project making minor tweaks and assisting with various automated tasks. You cannot work indefinitely with out appropriate remuneration on a project. People generally only value a service that they have to pay for - and in this case they will take ownership in the project. In the case of the INFSSS project. It is paid for by a Columbia grant - and I think this is reflected in the lack of interest by stakeholders. Everyone wants the sun, the moon, and the stars, if its free. However, if there is money then the hard decisions in terms of scoping - are made. Then, too, people will take active interest in the project and in its success. How this works into open source software - I will discuss at a later date.

I am now debugging my stats and graphing - and then will add 2 more sms messages. I should be done tonight. Tomorrow hopefully will be spent wandering around and trading video out CDs for tzchakies. Hopefully going to Mzuzu next week, but need to speak with Stanley on Monday.

Travel to Africa

2009-09-10T23:46:00.000-07:00

Here at the office, putting some final touches to the malnutrition application. This weekend I will integrating data from the existing rapidSMS system, and some more data munging with the historical data so all data will conform to my new data model.

I built a kind of insane layout/flow manager that I think should be autogenerated at runtime to import the apps in the rapidsms.ini. It needs a bit reengineering, but I think the foundation is solid.

There is trade off between realtime calculations and storing the calulations in a database table, (data storages vs. speed and ease of programming). As a result I am storing patient status and boolean values for various levels of malnutrition (MAM, SAM, SAM+). This makes my job easier when generating reports because I dont have to calculate these values I just have to pull them from a db.

The excel download functionality is partially wonky,and should probably be converted to a jQuery/Javascript function. That way, you load the data in your page once - and via js - you both display the data and download it as excel. I think the javascript classes for rapidsms probably need to be built out a bit.

Next week I train the ministry of health in the system and supposedly go to Mzuzu where I will be holding workshops. I hope to have a workshop also next friday at Baobab before I go to the airport! Yes I am leaving in one week. I love it here, but I miss home - and i am sort of sick of trying to tune out the myriad coackroaches and malaria carrying mosquitoes that cohabitate with me. Also, I am running over budget - basically my budget did not take into account wifi and food.
I could probably have spent less money on accomidations if I was able to find a houes to share, but I think there were less people in Lilongwe this year due to NGO cutbacks. Also I think I was sort of limited in my living arrangement, because I dont have a car.

Anyway, when you go to africa here are somethings you should bring:

CASH! - you have to pay 16% sur charge if you use credit (including for hotel rooms)
soldering iron
wirestrippers/allegator clips
extra power adapters
extra soap (dr bonners)
listerine
sandals
gnu bars/seitan strips/little bitsize pieces of chocolate (i lov choklat)
extra clothing/shoes/old electronics - you can barter with these at the market
malarone - pay extra
ditch the adapters and use usb power when possible
usb harddrive - I use this A LOT
dont worry about wearing long sleeve shirts/long pants - no matter what the mosquitoes will get you

i have not used my candle, my water uv disinfectant, my rope
i did bring a sleeping bag - which I use - if my hotel room seems nasty.

i have my kindle - and i've had no problems

Free Jazz

i've been listening to lots of Don Cherry thanks to Chris Barker - it turns even the most delapidated hotelroom into a hep nite spot

Back in the Office

2009-09-09T23:07:00.001-07:00

Yesterday was my final trip in the field.

The RapidSMS Malnutrition project was originally deployed in 3 health centers in 3 different districts. Now we are scaling up to add 4 other health centers in these 3 districts. I went to the pilot health centers to collect feedback on the existing system, and also to collect feedback on some changes that I plan on implementing.

On change I am making is associating every report with a health worker and a health center. Originally, tracking was done by the number that send the malnutrition report, but workers share numbers and numbers change, so I thought we should just explicitly send the health worker number.

The health workers thought that was a great idea, because it would be easier for them to get credit for the work they were doing. Before, you could do this by looking up the phone number, but this is sort of a usibility issue. By explicitly sending their HSA id number,the health workers will feel a more personal connection with the system.

Another change I am making is something called a short id. So every health center has about 30 health workers. If we numbered health workers squentially on a national level we will easily hit 3 digits - and this would complicate sending messages. So what I did was create a key based on a short id (1-30) and the health center number. This is linked to a longer nationwide id number, but health workers can keep simplier numbering system in their centers. I also implemented the same change for patients.

One of the most interesting things about this process, is that it is not just a technological issue. The 3 health centers I visited varied widely on patient drop out rate and data quality. For example,the health center in Kasungu had a large drop out rate. Care givers just would not bring their children in, and health workers would not follow up.

In Dedza, however, only 8 children missed measurements, and only 1 child dropped out of the program - because he moved. The reason for the success was that they partnered with the local head man in the community. If a care giver missed a measurement session, the head man followed up.

In Salima, the success rate was also high, not as high as Dedza though. In Selima, health workers would go into the field if a care giver missed a measurement session.

All three locations stressed the importants of explaining to the caregivers and perhaps the head man - the goal of the malnutrition survelliance project.

In Salima and Dedza, the health workers overwhelmingly in praised the rapidSMS system for reducing child malnutrition. In Kasungu, the reports were not as positive. The success of the project lies not in the technology but the processes surrounding the use of technology.

The 13Bit Labs is going to spin off a humanitarian technology company. Our implementations will be holistic solutions integrating technology, with process and people management, and education. Too often technology is seen as the solution, but the solution is really a process enabled by technology. It is these other less 'rational' and perhaps less tangible aspects that make a system successful.

I am thinking of Ellul's The Technological Society. We should not reduce everything to a optimized process, where human beings are treated as interchangable commodities and completely compartmentalize in their execution of one particular task. However, we should put systems in place that allow projects to succeed - and to ignore this is to doom projects to failure.

Obsessivly reading Martin Meredith's the Fate of Africa

In the Field Day 2

2009-09-08T21:52:00.001-07:00

The feedback was a bit more positive at this health center. The workers said that due to the SMS feedback from the RapidSMS system, they were able to take malnurished children to the hospital immediately. The system actually reduced cases of malnutrition.

At this health center, there was not as much of an issue with children/parents not wanting to participate in the program - The health workers went to the parents rather than waiting for the parents to go to the children.
At this health center, there was not as much of an issue with children/parents not wanting to participate in the program - The health workers went to the parents rather than waiting for the parents to go to the children.

These different practices between health centers illusrate that the problem with SMS is as much a process management project as a systems development project. Part of these technology project must also be devoted to standardizing and specing out processes.

The different health centers want to meet with one another, share information, and see how they compare to one another in the implementation of the RapidSMS system. I think this is a good idea and I tell the health workers this, however, in my mind I dont think this will happen. There is no budget for this, there is no one that will plan this. The Ministry of Health wants a complete package, not something that will need by yearly followup and group meetings. It makes me a bit sad, but I think this is the truth.

The health workers at Selima were very organized. When I got there, they set out an agena and started diagnosing specific benefits and criticisms of the system. It was so different to see how two HSAs could be so different. On the wall of the room where we met, there were make shift charts graphing cases of measels, polio, and other childhood diseases. These HSAs were very ingenious and serious. However, the physical health center in Selima was in worse shape than the one in Kasunga. It is really useful to visit these centers - and I think the health workers also appreciate the opportunity to give feedback. The health workers are the only ones who can make the system work. As I left one of the health workers informed me that next time I need to bring fanta for everyone - oops.

We hit a few roadside stands where Edwin and my drive bought charcoal and a reed mat. We stopped for food and I had an entire chambo fish! I have a picture. I got back early and was able to do some more programming. At this point there are no uncertainties left, I have everything working: graphing, mapping, pagination, my displaymanager. I am just working on implementation. By friday I will have a re-engineered version of the system complete, and will spend the weekend rationalizing data, testing, and fixing fixtures. If I decide to use RapidSMS as the foundation of a mHealth package, I may do some additional refactoring back in NY. I think that for rapidSMS to be successful, then on the django front end it needs to be MORE than django. I am thinking of class generation for the dynamic reporting and so forth, SMS message flow files, and perhaps more consistant use of message.py files for choice tuples, error messages, and other constants.

Last night my friend Kyran left so we had a big dinner at Mama Mia! Yum Pizza. I am burning through kwatcha this week. I just found out that there is a 15% sur charge on credit card payments at the hotel. When you go to Malawi - bring cash!

Into the Field

2009-09-07T10:34:00.000-07:00

Today I went into the field. I visited a health center in Karonga and spoke with local health workers there about the rapidsms malnutrition survellance system. It was incredible and really made me connect with the work I was doing. This was necessary because I was becoming bogged down in beaurocratic hastles and was losing hope. But, thanks to the field visit I have renewed vigor.

The health center was fantastic. While I was there, about 10 women came in for vaccinations and blood pressure readings. Twomothers brought in their children, and there was one sick girl hanging out who looked like she had a very very very bad cold and drippy eye. I think she probably could have used some chicken soup from Katz's deli - and maybe vitamin A. Vitamin A is very big here. All the health workers I have spoken with have expressed distress at the lack of vitamin A (why vitamin a I asked - eyesight?) - yes but really vitamin A is good for the immune system. One of the best things I have had in Malawi are the carrots. I dont like carrots, but I love Malawi carrots - they are incredibly sweet. So I asked Edwin, my escort and the local instructor at the university - why Edwin dont people eat more carrots? Ahh, Edwin said, people dont like vegetables. Well what do people like (I asked) - Meat! Well there you have it.

The surprising fact about Malawi is that it is a fertile area. There are fruits and vegetables being sold everywhere on the roads. I have yet to come across someone who has looked under fed. So I think the issue has more to do with educating people on what a balance diet consists of, and with making sure that everyone in a family is fed a balanced diet. I can also see the case where some girls in a large family, are perhaps thought of last, after the boys, interms of nutrition and health.
In addressing health education, I have a tech idea - but first I need my wolfram alpha API!

Back to the health center. It was on a campus with a girls school, a hospital and a church, and was very peaceful. The landscape of the north of Malawi is a bit different from the south. No Baobab trees, lots of tall grasses and the occasional lone large mountain rising up out of the landscape. I did not take pictures. People are not into pictures here (except children). At the Health center we met with about 5 health workers - they seemed young - maybe in their 20s. Some were very happy to talk to me and some I think were a bit skeptical and hostile. My main concern was in the usability of the system. I was planning a few changes such as linking a health worker's id with a report and expanding the id numbers for children.

The health workers like the idea of adding a health worker id. They thought that would encourage better measurement taking - because you could identify the health worker. People were not so keen on changing the id system, so I am going to go back to the system and create unique keys made up of health worker ids + clinic ids , as well as children ids + clinic ids.

I think this may be specific to malawi so I will not push this to the child health app that I am working on.

There were also issues with stunting and wasting cut offs. Right now we are using WHO stunting and wasting cut offs - as expressed by weight for height - but apparently Malawi has other metrics. So, children will go to the hospital for wasting/stunting because of rapidsms diagnosis, but then are sent away because their measuments are fine for Malawi. We need to rationalize these systems.

Another issue I found was with parent participation. The survellance system takes 70 children, randomly, and takes their measurements every month. I dont think I will blog about the randomization process used but I was sad to hear it did not involve geomancy ala Eglash. One of the problems with the survellance system is that parents have no incentive to bring their children into the clinic for this trial. I can understand that - when I was at university we always paid people to participate in trials. One woman, a health worker, suggested that we educate the parents about the rapidsms system. I think that is a great idea. Another woman, a health worker, suggested that we turn it into a game, the child with the best attendance wins a prize (a candy or extra sms credits).

I really liked this game idea. I was trying to think of a way to make the rapidsms interaction more fun and less burdensome - ie to turn it into a game. But I really had no ideas. This game idea is great. I am thinking that we can also expand it to HSAs, you know the health worker with the most texts but the least errors - gets extra sms credits.

The health workers were very interested to see how they fit in with the rest of the country, and I think this is very important to develop a larger sense of mission and connect with other people doing similar work around malawi (and perhaps bitch about crazy americans and their rapidsms system - I dont know)

The other complaint was that the toll free phone numbers did not work. I am going to put Stanley on this case. When I got here, I knew Zain had a problem with their toll free number. (There are 2 cell providers in Malawi Zain and TMN) Stanley said he would take care of Zain, perhaps when he returns from vacation we can go to Zain together.

On the way back we stopped at a massive open air market selling all types of food, clothing, etc. Me, Edwin and the driver stopped to take a look around and Edwin bought me some roasted corn. He said he once tried american corn and it tasted bad. I said he should read the omnivores dilema. Well I ate the corn - it was delicious -it sort of tasted like popcorn. It has been a few hours and I dont feel sick, so I think I'll be okay!

We also stopped to visit Edwin's sister who just moved near Karunga. She works for AdMark - we met her friend who is the granddaughter (but not real granddaughter) of the other UNICEF driver Lindsay! crazy

Finally, we also stopped to get some tangerines - 12 for 150k ($1!) yumm. Edwin said, you see, fruits are much cheaper here. Yes, I said. Perhaps we have malnutrition in the US. My husband is vitamin D deficient because he does not get outside enough.

We had fantastic discussions about developing systems for sending farmers text messages for the price of commodities at the local market, and for developing intelligent measurement devices - I would like to investigate this more back in the US.

I am not going to engage the internet vs sms debate. SMS is in Africa NOW so lets develop for it, we can always adapt systems and front ends for technology that comes in the future. Why develop something for future infrastructure that no one can use. Its like the market - it doesn't matter if your right - it matters if you match the market.

Tonight I added graphing to my rapidsms app. I did not add a graphing app, but just implemented flot in my app. FLOT IS EASY. I am doing something slightly bogus with generating javascript from django. I think sometimes it is better to be bogus than to over-design a system. That being said, I think there there should be an app that graphs any two+ values in a datamodel (line graph, scatter plot & correlation, histogram). I am going to do some more debugging with my layoutmanager. This can really add some value and become a robust part of rapidsms. It is in areas like this where rapidsms can offer some value in django integration.

I am learning a lot about how I want to manage future projects - and people I want to work with. I am feeling better about the project. I'll feel EVEN better when some of the stakeholders start responding to my emails.
Time for dinner - I am going to live it up and get some food at Don Brioni.

Rest Cure Success!

2009-09-06T12:38:00.000-07:00

This weekend I got to spend a lovely weekend at Lake Malawi with my new friends Kiran, Shona and Cornelius, and a local Malawian who I will call T (because I cant spell his name).

Well at the end of last week I was going kind of nutty. I was feeling a bit exhausted - luckily I got to spend a fantastic weekend splashing around lake malawi, talking about human rights and going to a black missionaries concert. I sadly left my sen book at the hotel - but thats ok - I have some renewed vigor to read Rawls and some works on cosmpolitanism (which does not sound profound because of its relationship to cosmo magazine) For now though, I will turn to poetry and my kindle and read some Meredith on Africa.

But back up to last friday I went to a local Windows 7 tech presentation at the Lilongwe Sunbird hotel - everyone's favorite malarial swap. I don't have a windows computer. Those of you who know me - know that I actually worked at microsoft briefly - where I had my infamous meeting with Bill G to discuss social networks. Ahh the salad days of youth. Even then I did not use microsoft products, but while working at MS I had to develop in C++ or C#, MS SQL Server, and Visual Studio. Make sense, a company should use the products that they sell. At the other MS( Morgan Stanley) I recently was working in F#, which is a cool language - although it would be much cooler if it was interpreted rather than compiled into .NET bytecode. I do think Microsoft has great desktop software development tools - but with applications moving online, or to the cloud, I think that this bonus will become irrelevant.

At the tech event, I met the guys from Baobab again. They are a linux/ubuntu house and were groused by the windows presentation leader. I also met some tech people working on various projects (bank projects/government projects). It was cool. I should have taken a picture but I did not. Again, I had a meeting the Legnani, a local python/Django developer, and his business partner. It was there that I discovered Ushahidi's deep dark secret (really not that secret) - it is written in PHP! Oh the HUMANITY! On of the Baobab guys, Soyapi, a RAILS guy, contributes to Ushahidi - but only writing AJAX - he told me. PHP! Oh the HUMANITY (again). DISCLAIMER - I LOVE USHAHIDI - I think its a GREAT service - I just like making fun of PHP, Visual Basic, and ocassionally java - even though I program in all three languages.

I really hope I can work with some of these developers, I have given them all rapidsms demos and information about how to install and develop on the platform. Josiah, up at Mzuzu U is the only one so far who has seemed to try anything out. As I said before, I am not going to hire a local developer for this project.

1) My main UNICEF contact who would approve this hire is on vacation for 3 weeks - so it would be pointless to hire someone without being able to work with him and train him for a few weeks.

2) Most of the software development will be done (by me). I am under such a time constrain here, and have so much work to do -that it would take more time to actually hire someone and have them do the work. Especially considering there is no one at UNICEF who could budget this at the moment .

3) UNICEF is starting a big AIDS/HIV project that will need a software person with similar skills. There is actually funding for this project - so that developer could also maintain the INFSSS project (that is the project I'm currently working on)

So my solution was/is to train two webmasters. I did that last week - although I still need to write up/print up some training manuals - that will probably happen once I return to the US. At least I got the word documents for the Rwanda training manuals so I dont have to do this from scratch (THANKS EVAN!)

I will write about my fantastic weekend at the Lake tomorrow. Tomorrow I will also write about my first day in the field. Finally! This took a lot of arm twisting. When I first got here Stanley, my contact, said I would be spending my first two weeks in the field. Although probably due to some cultural misunderstanding on my part - we are actually spending the last two weeks in the field. I am going with a junior staffer, Benson, who has been my main contact while Stanley has been on vacation. I think Benson is living it up while the boss is out. He really did not want to go to the field (we were supposed to go last week - and he balked) - and then this week we are only going to the field for 3 days. I really miss Stanley - I wish I was able to work with him longer.

Also - I would like to thank everyone who responds promptly to my emails - you are the best!

Saturday Travels

2009-09-04T23:25:00.000-07:00

I am off to lake Malawi. Cape something - I forget the name. I could use some R&R. I've been working like a dog on this project and I could use a vacay.

So yeah - I refactored my code so that there is as little hard coding as possible - I created a display manager class that is totally misnamed and should be broken into two classes. It lets you specify report formats through a data model, as well as section headers and other things. I regret doing this. Who cares if there is hard coding - just get something out the door. I plan on selling some rapidsms projects back in the states - so at least I will be able to use what I have already written.

I still need to do graphing - that will probably not happen till next week. I have the SMS code written for the pre-refactored code. I am also going to regenerate my json files and stick them in the appropriate model/fixture dicrectories. I'll also integrate the data for the last four months into my data set.

Still reading development as freedom - but I think i'll leave it home this weekeed and bring some poetry to the lake. Development as freedom while interesting is super dry - I dont know - i think there is a better way to make this information more compelling because it really is interesting a useful framework for thinking about development.. What do I mean by dry? (well for example Kant is not dry he is just dense and slightly convaluted - but I enjoy reading him)

I need beach and belharzia ! Lake Malawi here I come.

Vodka prevents Malaria

2009-09-04T06:07:00.000-07:00

I am currently at Mamma Mia for my weekly pizza. Today I also had an espresso that tasted like dirt. I hope I dont get sick.

Today I am working from old town, rather than the UNICEF office. I dont see the point in spending 2 hours in transit to stay for 4 hours - unless I have a meeting. Well, I did NOT have a meeting. I was supposed to have national level training on the new INFSSS SMS system protocol, but the Ministry of Health rescheduled. This is both good and bad. Good because it gives me more time to refine, bad because it gives me more time. Do you know what I did with that time??? I refactored by code.

After speaking with Sean who is working on a malnutrition project in Rwanda, I decided I had to make my framework super flexible. So I stripped out everything hardcoded, report formats, headers, everything - and made a class called LayoutManager. I will eventually have to refactor this class to include two classes, HeaderManager and Variable Manager.

For example, you define columns for a report, you link these columns to a function or variable (thank you getattr), and then you link these to a view and a class. (You can also do things like associate a link with the column.)

I also broke out the wasting and stunting tables to their own class -I renamed nutrition to childhealthindicators. I made an abstract class/app Person and then in childhealthindicators I have two classes ChildPatient and Healthworker. I have health status and other strings in messages.py. Here I will also define the SMS response flow. Messages should also be its own app - Probably one app called SMSFlow, and one called appconstants.

This would be a singleton - a singleton - for those of you who dont know - is a class that only has one instantiation. This is useful for keeping things that dont change - such as constants - and that are initalized at system startup.

The pagination was super simple- thanks Adam - but means that I need to rewrite my layout engine so that I dont corrupt the model objects - before I would turn the model objects into strings. It just struck me that there is something wrong with my solution -arrg.

The interesting thing about developing out here - is that all my research is done in batch. I cant be programming and think - ok what is the proper way to do that in django semantics and then google it.... instead i need to file it away until i get internet access and then do all my research all at once.
This is also making me reconsider webmail. i think I am going to start downloading all my mail into evolution and just respond off line. Then the message will go out when I sync. Ahh -living in a batch world.

So I am hoping to get my refactoring done tonight. Tomorrow I may go to Lake Malawi. If I dont - I will get started on Graphing. That is the last piece I have left - I download flot - the graphing library - so I can read up on it tonight.

Monday I go to the field. I have to rewrite the questionnaire for the local health workers. Really I want to know if they find it difficult to enter in children's ids or that sort of thing. My good friend Joelle is a questionnaire master - I will seek her advice for all future questionnaires.

Tonight I am planning to go to a local tech meetup - I am also supposed to give a demo at 4 to a local techie - but I have not heard from him - so I am not sure if that is still happening.

I have been watching a few movies - via paul V. Most recently, family plot and my man godfrey. I sort of OD'd on Kung Fu. Next on my list are Marnie and Vertigo (which I have never seen). I sort of prefer the old hitch. modern hitch is creepy flirty sexy. That is also an inside joke from the new 13bit movie. I may breakdown and rewatch some lynch (blue velvit)
And thank you Chris Barker for the Free Jazz (Don Cherry) It is great. I still need to download the second package!

This is probably enough - but I met a man who had Malaria 14 times. He told me the secrets of how to detect malaria carrying mosquitos (apparentl i was wrong). He also said mosquitos dont like gin or vodka - so drink up.
~

Twas brillg and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wave

2009-09-02T23:52:00.001-07:00

Good news from lilongwe! My RapidSMS training session has been pushed back 10 days. This is good because I really need some feedback from the field as regards the current system. I am slightly changing the way patients are registered and the way local care providers are registered and i want to see if there are any usage patterns I should be aware of. I wish I had done this earlier, but its been sort of chaotic.

Last night I revisited the Malawi RapidSMS specifications. This project has taken a slightly different turn. Originally I was just supposed to be tweaking the system. However the last Malawi RapidSMS implementation did not adhere to the RapidSMS application structure, and the refactoring was not finished by the time I left for Malawi - so I had to rebuild the logic and front end of the system. By tonight - I hope to have completed the SMS logic. Then all I will have left is graphing. There are some other bells and whistles I would like to add - but if no one complains - then I will probably not ask forit.

It is very important to prioritize in software development. I often see people spending tons of time on features that no one uses. I myself am guilty of that. Yesterday I spent 2 hours implementing an upload/download documentation feature. This feature will probably not get much usage, and probably would not have been missed - by my OCD got the better of me and I had to finish it.

When I was a trading strat - I would prioritize by only doing work for traders that were making money. If you were losing money - you were probably going to get riffed - or would not contribute much to my bonus - so I would put those projects on the bottom of the list.

Anyway as I was rereading the specs last night, I saw a few features that I had overlooked. I had primarily been implementing features that exist on pilot version, but there were other features that the specs included - and it really only took me about 2 hours (while I was concurrently rewatching Hitchcock's family plot). This however destroyed the beauty of my data models - I would like to refactor. I am doing all sms processing in the nutrition app (which I will eventually rename). Then I am dong all sms response in the infsss app - since this is implementation specific. For example, we want different responses in Malawi and Kenya, but the protocol for registering a patient remains the same. I have to figure out how to get this to work.

I am hoping to work from old town tomorrow. I need an additional cell phone and its a half day anyway - besides I want to enjoy my breakfast - rather than having 5 minutes to eat.

Yesterday I started training two women from the Ministry of Health in maintaining the system. I am really not concerned about system maintenance. In about a month there will be more RapidSMS developers working on a new HIV/AIDS project, and they will hire local developers to maintain the system. However, as I was speaking with the Ministry of Health people the other day, I said, are you interested in understanding how the system works and in perhaps working on the system (ie becoming developers). They seemed very interested- they had studied IT and knew visual basic, and I thought it would be fantastic if they could program the system.

When they first came to the meeting they seemed sort of bored. One woman kept checking her cellphone. They became a bit more animated as I walked them through the nuances of the system. Its amazing how much body language influences your perception of other people. I am constantly guarding against judging people's intention by their body language - especially because I think that I must have some bad body language. People often think I am disinterested in what they are saying, or bored (especially when I am focusing the most!). This has probably predisposed people against me. I wish I could change this body langauge - but really I dont know what I am doing.

Anyway I sent an email out with various links describing the system, and a study plan - and the response i got back. "Thanks for the email - I did not get a chance to look at the links because I was too tired" - ok so maybe they really were disinterested.

This brings me back to my last thought. Education. There is no reason why these women were not taught to program. Right now, there are so many things people can learn that will directly empower them to control their own destiny. It is amazing that this is not a focus of education. I think that programming should be taught with reading, and that calculus should be taught in 10th grade. Sadly education is not about teaching people - but rather about indoctrinating them into industrial society.

I saw a sign on the outskirts of Lilongwe, "Annual Reunion for Malawi Institute of Management." Operations Reserach and Management is really legacy from the Napoleanic wars, where superior logicstics enabled Napolean to supply his troops (I think I stole that from Manuel Delanda - war in the age of intelligent machines). But, it is only useful when you have an army to coordinate - but in Malawi where there is a lot of actual work to get done, perhaps we need experts in irrigation farming, nursing, telecommunications infrastructure, computer programming. Then when we have a mass of pepole in these areas we can focus on operations research and management. What are we optimizing - there is nothing to optimize.

Lets have less optimization and operations research and more nonsense - that make sense

Kwacha shooting star and put it in your pocket

2009-09-01T23:20:00.000-07:00

I am down to my last kwacha - the local currency in Malawi. This week I spent 8000K, not including my hotel. It is about 150K to 1$. Where does the money go. Well I spend about 400K a day on internet - because I cannot connect with my computers at UNICEF and so must go to the internet cafe to sync with github, and invariably get caught up in gchat or in fixing some git merging problem. (5K a minute). Then I spend 200K on beer - it is a small price to pay for happiness. And the occasional coke - 150K. And of course dinner at mamma mia (pizza) 1500K or don brioni 1000K or lunch at UNICEF/Market 200-600K. It adds up. A cab around Lilongwe, if you share one, is about 500K. I take one probably twice a week. So there you have it.

I read the Stanley Fish piece in the New York Times today. I sort of think he is a crank,but other than that - one thing struck me. A reader commented on his last piece that he was writing about two topics and it diluted the force of his essay. Fish acknowledged this, and pledged to TRY and keep his writing to one topic.

Let me rail against this for a moment. Why must everything be commoditized and informatized for maximum information processing? This is something that I am thinking about now that I am reading poetry every morning. You cannot speed read poetry or keep to the point with poetry. You must experience poetry. You must roll the words around in your mouth like cold-eze or jello. - hmm jello. You must strike the balance between focus and peripheral awareness. Too much focus and you miss the setting, too much periphery and you miss the details.

Today I banged out the final throws of the User Interface until Adam (please please please) finishes the Flot Graphing class.I really hope I dont have to write the graphing class - I want to go to Lake Malawi this weekend and get Belharzia.

I am enjoying programming in Django. I think that RapidSMS (mainly Adam and Evan) have written some great classes that are an excellent foundation for future rad RapidSMS development. Working in the field, however, you really get a sense of how these applications are used - you can't develop in a vacuum, otherwise you will build something like Chandelier.

Let me take a moment to discuss DoeRaeTweet. DoeRaeTweet is an application I wrote that translates twitter messages into audio and lets people collaborate by adding their own audio - For example, if you tweet: AAAABBBA @drt - DoeRaeTweet will translate this into the musical note A A A A followed by B B B B followed by A. There is more syntax for rests and beats and timbre.I basically have a python script that generates csound files and then run csound. I was trying to use pymedia and then generate opensound (something) files that interface with PD but I could not get pymedia installed because Ubuntu only lets me have one version of GCC installed at a time - blah blah. Anyway I need to upgrade my server to run csound - so stay tuned.

I have a new UNICEF driver. He is AWESOME and he is driving me into the field next week with Benson, my UNICEF coworker. He told me that I should stay overnight in the field all week- I will bring my stash of gnu bars in case there is no candle cafe in the bush. I dont think benson will be into it, but I need a coding break, my mind is totally in the code-i-verse and I am having problems related to reality - like last night when I may or maynot have taken my malarone malaria pill. I am really sick of gnu bars and long for the day when I can eat some seitan jerky.

Tomorrow the Ministry of Health is sending some IT people over and I will train them as webmasters on the RapidSMS system -
I am hoping to reuse some very slick RapidSMS documentation from a Somalia project. If I dont get the SVGs by tomorrow then we are just going to wing it - and I will send documentation later.

My idea was to train a webmaster rather than a programmer, because going forward I really dont see a need for additional programming for the INFSSS system. All that is needed is someone to add data, to answer questions about the user interface, tell people where the anykey is, and to update django and rapidsms when the time comes. This last bit may be a gigantic headache- but I am hoping that it will some how be rolled into the massive malawi hiv/aids post-natal project.

Friday I train the national health workers in the SMS protocol, so I will be coding the SMS backend tomorrow and thursday. Friday I am meeting with a local django developer and then going to a tech meeting for local techies. I have also been working with a great dev, Josiah, at Mzuzu University. He is getting up to speed on RapidSMS and Django and I am hoping to work on some projects with him, and perhaps his wife who is a CS student in AI.

This is my second week in Malawi. Even though I am drinking lots of beer, I dont think I am gaining weight. That is because I am living on gnu bars -as the food here is too expensive - except the local food in the market near UNICEF - but then that is not vegi friendly.

I am attempting to push to git tonight -I had some issues the other night - and gave up in dispair. I may wait till tomorrow.

Started reading Sen again - Development as Freedom, and I am enjoying it. I think the intro is not very engaging, too bad we can't get Susan Sontag to rewrite it - she was the master of the philosophical intro. So the main question is - What should we do in helping developing countries 'Develop' - what what is Development anyway? The typical answer is economic - well lets help people make money/generate income. Sen's idea though is - lets help people develop freedom (political freedom, economic freedom, social freedom) and this will lead to the 'development' of 3rd world economies. The basic idea is that development is dependent upon people's access to acting freely. (So poverty is slavery) For example, if I am starving, all of my actions are governed by my animal desire to satiate my hunger - I am not 'capable' of engaging in economic acts that are traditionally felt to bring people out of poverty. Reminds me of my favorite quote from Rousseau - Man is free but everywhere he is in chains (and as Foucault would add - 'I wish'). Freedom construed in this way is (as Sen writes) is a end, and a means (the more freedoms I develop the more freedoms I can develop. I feel like there is something Kantian here. We are all both subjects and sovereigns in the kingdoms of ends, but are we all sovereigns? Not if we are starving, or die young because of crime or poor healthcare, or are repressed because we have no say in our government practices. And then how are we expected to 'develop.' This also reminds me of the desire in Buddism to live as long as possible so that we can have as much time as possible to develop spirtuallly in our current incarnation. The ability to spirtually progress is dependant upon the biological or physical ability to stay alive. (Apologies for poorly expressing Sen - don't attack me - I am sensitive I'm banging out a blog not crafting a dissertation)

My bathroom is crawling with cockaroches, and the internet cafe I think is closing early due to Ramadan - A sex worker is walking the halls of the Koboko.

I would like to send a special shout out to Paul. Happy birthday Paul - this post is dedicated to you.

Brought to you by vi and carlsberg green beer

The Joy of Fixtures

2009-08-31T02:29:00.000-07:00

I have had a thoroughly unproductive morning - I suppose to balance out my productive weekend. However, you cannot be productive all the time, because it is in those moments of unproductivity that provide the well springs of productivity.

I am about to break for lunch and will perhaps go to the market near the UNICEF building. It is a series of thatched stalls serving local delicaies that Sima and intestines, and of course sim cards. Down the street, there are about 300 worshippers dressed in white - a Christian sect I believe. They have been camping out in an open field for the past 3 weeks, and apparently will be staying another week. I wonder what the occasion is? I figure I could move to the hotel close by - the Sanctuary Lodge - and then walk to the office.It would take me about 15 minutes. I may actually do that.

I spent the weekend shoring up my datamodels, building the basic front end template system and building fixtures. I also joined the local IT listserv and I have already met developers in Blantyre doing SMS development. Will SMS work become obsolete once Africa gets wide GPRS penetration?

This morning I am praising the joy of fixtures.

There are all sorts of methodologies in place in order to control the quality of software. The intention is good. Something like 80% of all software projects fail (this may be an outdated number). I've seen pair programming, extreme programming, agile, object oriented design is supposedly a methodology, then you have aspect oriented design - and the list goes on .

Design patterns are good (Object oriented design for example). The main goal is to provide reusable chunks of code. So like - oh you figured out how to print something - good. I'll use that code in my application for the printing functionality. Design Patterns however also provide a a meta language with which to understand software in general. I write software in at least 5 languages at a given time, to say - oh this piece of code is decorator, or oh this is a singleton - is analogous to saying oh this is a noun, or this is in the subjunctive. It gives me a framework for cross-language comparision. It is a software grammar.

For quality control people are very excited about Unit Testing. Basically with Unit Tests you are writing bits of code that attempt to simulate how someone will use (or misuse a software ). Unit tests are for the smallest atomic element of your software project. For each atom, you write a unit test. The thing is, the person writing the unit test is not really the user. You will never anticipate the real world issues that crop up by writing a unit test.

I am a big believer in fixtures however (a part of unit test methodology). This is why I spent a few hours this weekend writing them. Fixtures are data that essentially 'Fix' your system at a certain state, so that you, or another user, can actually use and test the system. Essentially it is dummy data. The good thing about fixtures is that you see quickly if there are problems with your data model, and with the interactions between your datamodel. Sure there might be something wrong with a functional piece of your code - (ie you may want the maximum height for something but you are actually getting the minimum height). However, this will reveal itself in testing and iterative design. You cannot iterate if you have no data, and if you data models are buggy.

Software quality control is a thorny issue. Software is only as good as the programmer, and the way to become a good programmer is to be naturally talented or to find a good mentor, or to read good code (and perhaps contribute to an open source project), and of course to write code - in a variety of languages.

So this morning, while enjoying my Kiboko breakfast of eggs, fruit salad and tea (I have quit coffee!) I read a poem 'Stepping Westward' by Denise Levertov. When I first read it, I thought it was written by a man. I thought it was absolutely ghastly! Just a terrible poem. (I's about being woman / among other things). But when I went back and reread the poem, after discovering the poet was a woman, I absolutely fell in love with the poem. I often experience the same thing when watching one of my films with different audiences. Some audience make you love your film, and some make you want to go out and play in traffic - what is in the work and what is in your mind?

Some links of interest:
AfNog - african network operators group
Maker Faire Africa
Nubian Cheetah
Dream Manufactory
White African post on SMS vs GPRS in Africa

Lilongwe Holiday

2009-08-30T03:41:00.000-07:00

I have run across some linkings (mainly through other people's twitter) and I though i'd put them up:

- Malawi school girl studying at US prep school for the Summer
- Zinc combating diarrea in Africa
- Sex workers in Swaziland (sex work is legal in Malawi and currently there is a legislation attempting to criminalize HIV transmission - something for a future blog post)
- Git articles (I’ve been using this a lot to keep my code in sync)

I took another look at the original specifications for the RapidSMS/Malawi Health project as spec’d out by the SIPA students (aka Mobile Development Solutions). So now I have a good idea of the SMS protocol I need to use, and the UI look and feel. It also gave me data for stunting and wasting metrics - so I added that to my data models and I’m creating fixtures for those pieces of data. I am upgrading my jsonmedusa script because I see future deployments of RapidSMS will involve lots of data munging.
Right now, with the nutrition app as it stands (on the shoulders of giants by the way), I think RapidSMS could deploy a basic malnutrition alert and monitoring system ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. I would like to do this somewhere in China, mainly because I am desperately craving Sha lum Bao/Soup dumplings (apologies for the non Pinyin transliteration).
Last night I went to a new night spot in the outskirts of lilongwe - ‘Sol Farm.’ We then drove back via the posh neighborhoods of lilongwe - enormous homes/beautiful. I took some pictures. So much of this trip cannot be captured on film (or sd card): the smells, the feel of the sun and the dust, the song of the birds and the call to prayer at 5:30 in the morning. I tried to record the call to prayer last week - but it sounded rather crappy. I may go out and play pool at ‘The Diplomat’ tonight, a bar with a modest amount of sex workers. I am feeling out of sorts so I may just stay in work, read a book, and watch one of the films I have on my hard drive. I did some meditation in the late afternoon, and then I fell asleep. It is sometimes hard for me to stay awake during meditation.
Can lists be poetry?

"We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry." William Butler Yeats

I have finished the totally awful Globalization anthology - I think I may leave it in the hotel library, but then I feel that is unfair to future people who might pick it up. Many of the essays in Globalization brought up really interesting topics, but then became mired down in jargon and academic ass kissing. To cleanse my palate I picked up my copy of Mayes poetry handbook. A fantastic book that I usually travel with it. I always try to memorize poetry, so that when my mind starts to wander to negative thoughts I can have something beautiful (like a mantra) to focus my mind. Poetry reminds me of drawing, it involves intense focus on something and the recreation of that thing in your own likeness (to be biblical) but really - this is what lets the experience become integrated into your person.javascript:void(0)

It is weird - this time last year I was living in Hong Kong. Hong Kong was way more lonely than Lilongwe although there was more to do and the food was better (and my accommodations were nicer). I never feel alone in Lilongwe - although I do feel like I am at the ends of the earth lost in another time.

RapidSMS is AWESOME

2009-08-28T02:20:00.000-07:00

Many things have changed since I last posted.

1) I have decided to change my nutrition architecture and reuse the location app and the reporter app for locations, reporters and patients. I need to make some minor tweeks to this code to accomidate patient type things like gender and date of birth - which really all people have. I am trying to use rapidSMS to the fullest of its RAD capabilities - what this means is that I am spending time writing scripts to translate csv backdata to json to import as data into the RapidSMS databases. This is probably going to be a typical use case for RapidSMS implementation - as little reinvention of the wheel as possible.

I strongly urge developers/interested parties who want to use RapidSMS to look at the locations app and the reporters app - they are really well architected. I am going ahead with my malwai health app - eventually I think it would be useful to have an indicators app similar to the locations/reporter paradigm. But for now, I am going to stick with my explicit/non flexible model- which will work.

2) I have stopped drinking coffee
3) I can now identify malaria carrying mosquitoes
4) I have totally destroyed my local git hub repository and need to regenerate a ssh key. This is leading to massive ssh key proliferation that I need to stamp out.
5) I am on a good UNICEF bus pickup/drop off schedule

We end at 1:30 on Fridays - at which point - I think I am going to go and eat pizza at mamma mia. It is SOO good - I am dreaming about it- but pricey (I had to dig into my stash of gnu bars yesterday to save up for it)

Last night there was no bar volleyball -very sad. Instead I took myself upto the Kiboko bar, which is completely deserted, sat infront of a roaring fire (it is cold here), had a beer (a green one as we call Carlsberg in Lilongwe) - and cracked open 'Globalization' - the anthology I am reading. I think this book was written in 99, and it is a bit dated, however some of the articles are excellent (like the memory article from a few posts back). Last night there were two standouts, a piece on the Chinese Artist Wang Jin and his work 'A Chinese Dream' by Wu Hung and 'Inside the Economoy of Appearances' by Anna Tsing.

So the first piece was basically an analysis of this piece of artwork - a replication of a traditional chinese opera costume recreated entirely in plastic. Of course the author gives treatment to the artist as capitalist/cosmopolitian producer (the piece is manufactured by old ladies in rural china),artist reappropriating traditional forms - that are realy ersatz. (Chinese opera these days is akin to Disney world). I really was touched aesthetically by Wang Jin's artwork and its different manifestations (as performance art, as photograph, etc). I though the article was excellent as an thorough investigation into all aspects of the work: production, consumption, reappropriation,etc.

Second article, ok this one was bit long. In 13Bit filmmaking we would say it needed a little choppy choppy (ie editing). However,this was really an incredibly fascinating article and I recommend it to anyone interested in Gold, mining, and the markets. Basically it follows the rise and fall of Bre-X, a Canadian mining company as it attempted to look for Gold in Indonesia. The article touches upon how the 'scientific-izatio' of the field (now we have geologists exploring rather than miners), makes in palatable to wall street. How there was this transformation of part of Indonesia into frontier land fit for explorers and fortune hunters (like the Brazilian Amazon). How antropological tropes have been mapped on to this capitalist venture. How Bre-X was able to pull a magnificent swindle on the stockmarket - and yet how people were still able to make money from stock speculation. It is truly a rich article that is told in a narrative and entertaining fashion- I will probably reread it.

Caveat Emptor - I know I am discussing this book - however I dont recommend purchasing it. The quality of the articles are really uneven and I would probably be better off reading Shakespeare. That being said, if you still want to read it, borrow it from your local library.

So after my thinking and reading - I settled down into my queensize bed covered with mosquito netting, and listened to the philosophybites podcast - the most awesome podcast evar! http://www.philosophybites.com (well its a toss up between that and coverville)

OOp - just got the rest of the location codes from the Malawi ministry of health! They are really on top of things. More csv to json - via my jsonmedusa.py script.

Next time I hope to be reporting on my RapidSMS Malawi version2 test.
TGIF!

In the code

2009-08-27T05:20:00.000-07:00

Score 1 for UNICEF Malawi - they picked me up from the hotel this morning.

Sadly, I was unable to visit the internet cafe and sync with github. The internet cafe opens at 8 and the unicef car picked me up at 7:10.

Today was also my first day without coffee, I drank tea instead. The only coffee here is nescafe and i'm not so into it. If I am able to kick my coffee habit - then a true miracle will have occured. I am now grumpy with a bad headache. I guess its a good thing I am half way around the world from people I could seriously alienate.

Another milestone today (today is very momentus it seems) I got my 'Malawi Health' RapidSMS version up and running. Exciting Exciting. For the next few days I will be editing templates to improve data display andd data navigation.

There is a big discussion in the RapidSMS world over apps. Where in the repository should apps go, are there core apps, where should 3rd party apps go, should some of this move to a library, what about projects- are projects apps?

Well - I will leave that to the list to figure out.

What I did was create a MalawiHealth app. I've attempted to make it exensible for future Malawi Health projects.

Classes:

Models.py - this contains 3 classes. a GMC class (that represents a health center). I inheret adam's Location model (from the location app). Then we have a Patient, this should probably inheret from something. Finally I have a INFSSS model that includes 5 heath indicators (muac, height,weight, oedema,diarrea) and calculators for age and malnutrition. 82 lines of code. Apparently this was originally written with the reporter app, but I think it is perhaps a good idea to build out a datamodel for clarity.

App.py - Here is where I parse the sms message. It is very brute force. I intend to spend my last few weeks working on this, especially as I get feedback from the field. Basically, I implemented a tokenizer and a bunch of conditionals that add data and send responses. It is not pretty, but not THAT ugly - and fine for v1 (74 lines).

It seems that many things I have been thinking about have already been included in RapidSMS - isn't RapidSMS awesome! I am very keen on using the Keyword parser (an app) to improve my message parsing in the coming weeks.

I have a urls.py, views.py and templates - and this will take most of my time over the coming days. I almost forgot - my fixtures - creating fixtures right now in order to backpopulate the data with data from 2003. Got this 2 days ago from the Malawi Ministry of Health.

Some other apps I will be using are the excel exporting app (although I think this is tag library), and perpahs the ajax app, and of course the admin app (I already mentioned the locations app). I will probably add a document app (I need a better name). This will associate documents with a rapidSMS project - e.g., a sidebar of relavent & downloadable reports/powerpoint presentation etc). We are hoping to turn the Malawi INFSSS system into a one stop shop for all things INFSSS related - so I am trying to aggregate as much useful content as possible.

In this case, since I am bulding the Malawi INFSSS rapidsms system for a particular scenario, I am going to sacrifice some reusability. As I build more health systems, I will probably be able to build out a health app, but perhaps this is a future project for the 13Bit Labs.

Final note on the documentation system:
RapidSMS uses sphinx for documentation. We copied Django. Sphinx is really powerful and an awesome document management system. According to the Sphinx documentation, autogenerating code documentation was an afterthough and that is really apparent when you use the system. Yesterday I build a directory walker that generates a rst file with the classes availabe explicitly stated. Perhaps when RapidSMS is done - I can take a look at the Sphinx code base.

I have been a hermit the last 2 nights. Staying in my room/internet cafe writing code and watching Kung Fu. Tonight though I will go and hang with some of my new friends, maybe we can play bar volleyball again!

I will try not to use demorgans law to reduce all my conditionals to booleans inorder to assign them to variables

Turn your computer into an SMS gateway

2009-08-26T07:35:00.001-07:00

At about 8:30 I gave up on the UNICEF shuttle and decided today would be SMS gateway hacking day, along with RapidSMS programming day.
Tomorrow - I plan on taking a cab (thanks Chris).

Last week, during a RapidSMS demo, the AC adapter for my GSM modem blew out. Thankfully this is my only electrical malfunction in Africa to date (although I do lose electricity now and again).

What is a girl to do with RapidSMS but alas no modem with which to receive and send the SMS messages.? I figured that I would go look for a soldering iron and solder the AC adapter tip to an extra power supply. Perhaps think of some clever way to integrate it with my iGo power kit....

I did see some dodgy multi-tipped power adapters at the local market (see pictures), but they **really* looked dodgy. Would I be able to find a soldering iron in time?

This morning, I went over to the cellphone shop across the street and asked about his usb enabled phones. Amazingly, he had a wire that connects my crappy loaner Nokia 1110 to usb. I bought the wire - went back to my System76 ubuntu netbook - plugged the sucker in and guess what I see on my /dev. ttyUSB0 - Halleluja. Fantastic.

To celebrate I took myself to lunch over at mama mia and ate an entire margarita pizza - that was divine - and half a coke - there I banged out some emails, wrote some docs, and started work on the new INFSSS rapidSMS system.

I am creating two apps - a Malawi app and a INFSSS app
the Malawi app will hopefully be reusable with the Mother/Child HIV/AIDs Project.

First I am creating the data models:
patent ids, and HSA ids (finally got the IDs that the ministry of health uses) for Malawi app
muac, height, weight etc for INFSSS app

next I'm loading in the historical data - will be doing that in a bit - I just finished cleaning/rationalizing it.
then I am going to start working on the views.

I have some time to get the message parsing to work - since I am not going into the field for another week - However I want to get the web interface finished asap - so people can start navigating the data and feel good about the project.

In terms of messaging. I am thinking about building an app that uses regular expressions and callbacks - similar to Urls.py. There should be an elegant way that RapidSMS handles sms parsing. Another consideration is message flow. I remember back i the internet stone age, when I was programming in Java, and Tomcat did not exist and I had to use servlet exec in order to run servlets - anyway I used an xml doc that outlined application flow (most java web frameworks have this today). I am thinking of a way to adapt this for SMS messaging.

All this deep architectural thought is nice - but in the end - I just want something that works for the end user and looks nice for the web/data user - so who knows the app just be a rough and ready brute force app.

Time to load the fixtures

peas

The Lilongwe Server Farm

2009-08-25T09:04:00.000-07:00

Today brought me to the UNICEF/Lilongwe server farm/cage. I'll post a picture later.
Here I inspected the source of all that is good and holy in the Lilongwe RapidSMS project - the RapidSMS server.

This is the hardware system: One computer, 2 serial modems with serial to usb adaptors. There are 4 usb ports total so we can add 2 additional modems out of the box, without adding a usb hub.

There are some questions that we are asking about RapidSMS implementation. RapidSMS is going to support 2 different projects in Malawi, a Malnutrition project and a mother child HIV/AIDS project. I dont think these should run under the same rapidsms instance, but has anyone tried running 2 rapidsms projects at the same time,on the same port.... I've done this with Django - but media temple did all the heavy lifting.

I still need to do some more work planning the barcamp. My goal is to work on a RapidSMS based twitter app. Similar to the Naijapulse - Nigerian Twitter. I'm planning two barcamps here. My UNICEF collegue Sean suggested that I communicate with MobileActive and do some sort of NY-Mzuzu remote barcamp. I dont know if Malawi has the bandwidth for it.

Today I was also thinking of marriage. Is marriage a raw deal for women in developing countries?

I am a liberated western woman married to a liberated eastern man - and I think our marriage has advantages - FOR ME. My husband and I share work, pool income, share expenses, provide support - and my husband cooks delicious food for me and begrudgingly picks up my socks which I hide around the apartment. I'm trying to figure out what he gets out of the relationship, but I digress.

Professionally, as a working woman, I think some men find it easier to work with married women. Pehaps marriage seems to confirm a certain level of maturity or perhaps acceptability. I dont know, I have not conducted a scientific study, but I have experienced different treatment pre marriage vs post marriage.

Marriage is such a hot topic in the United States. People want the ability to get married (gay rights), there are tons of dating sites dedicated to finding the right match, and there is certain social pressure to be married if everyone in your social circle is married. When we go into the third world we assume these same circumstances exist.

DO NOT BE FOOLED, I think marriage is a raw deal for women in developing countries. Today I got a lift to the main UNICEF headquarters from a woman named Lindsay. I dont know her age, but she has 5 children, works a full time job, and her husband lives in a different city (Blantyre) 5 hours away. She is a no nonsense woman - we did share some laughs though. Lindsay has no time for nonsense, raising 5 children by herself. What has marriage given her - 5 kids, a full time job, and an absent husband.

Did she choose to get married? How old was she? Was it an arranged marriage? The woman that runs the front desk at my hotel signs her email with Mrs. Is this empowering or enslaving?

Marriage rights in the US, but lets also have Singles rights around the world.

The NYTimes - amazingly enough since I am really down on the nytimes - ran a great magazine issue on woman's rights in the third world. I recommend it.

In the data

2009-08-24T06:27:00.000-07:00

Back at UNICEF after a relaxing weekend of lollygagging around lilongwe.
I am finally feeling myself, after a stressful morning of moving hotels, and looking for the UNICEF van.

I am moving back to the Kiboko - which seems like The Hong Kong Four Seasons after a weekend at the malarial swamp that is the Sunbird Lilongwe (servering real coffee and wifi enabled though it may be).

Today I am taking care of some administrativa - coordinating trips to the field, coordinating RapidSMS training sessions / barcamps at Mzuzu University and at Baobab. Soyapi - a local RoR developer at Baobab is going to add me to the local developer listserv! I am also specing out my interface changes to the templates.

In terms of rapidsms development - I am planning to make all the changes to django/rapidsms templates and then, time permitting, I'll move some functionality over to apps. I want to add a basic stats app, a graphing app, and a email app (does one exist), a scheduler app - in that order. I also have to check something on my cron job that builds the rapidsms documentation. It threw an error this morning - good thing no one is checking in documentation - or is it.

I am also backpopulating the malnutrition data from the Ministry of Health. This goes back to 2003. The idea is to make the RapidSMS Malnutrition - a one stop hub for Malawi Malnutrition data. This is one way to ensure that the system is continually referenced, used, monitored, updated, not abandoned - etc.. I am having some problems copying the data - I think the disk drive has a virus.

We are going to do fun stuff with data - scatterplot, bargraph,correlate, regress - Where is my Tufte book? We are also going to integrate the website with documentation about the project - oh another app - perhaps a document manager app. These are all simple apps - but you need to break them out so that other people can use them and integrate them into their own projects. There should also be a RapidSMS tag based template library for rendering responses on sms or other devices.

I am also thinking about looking at jython integration with RapidSMS. This might be a useful way to interface with Java libaries like OpenMRS and FrontlineSMS. I know that django supports jython. It has been a while since I did jython development - the last time was in 06 when I wrote a jython soduku app.

But enough shop talk - tonight I will return to my beloved Kiboko. I will resume the ancient practice of drinking alcoholic beverages and the modern practice of pulling code from adam's github rapidsms fork. Then perhaps some RapidSMS coding, some coding on DohRaeTweet perhaps some coding on my IB options strategy, some reading, tai chi and my malaria pill.

I am convinced I have malaria, although I am taking prophylaxis (malarone). It is grossing me out as I envision little parasites in my blood - a worm in the blood - did Spinoza have malaria. A scottish nurse that I met over the weekend, told me about her parasite. It was diagonosed by the local healthcare center as a sunburn. Apparently she is going to megadose on malarone and some anti parasite drug when she returns to UK.