One smart guy

This interview with AarowSw is probably the most intresting thing I’ll read all day. Great thoughts on the S-Web, tribes in human culture and just what Arron has been up to.

[later] One thing I would love to have in my MonoLoco music app is a feature mentioned at the top “what bands that my friends like are playing around here in the next week?”. The idea would be that the app knows your friend because you IM program and email program have been creating a certialized FOAF file for you (hey maybe your phone is bluetoothing info about how you talk to the most as well), so you can collect who you talk to a lot (at least via computer). Then MonoLoco knows who you listen to, using MusicBrainz identifiers to catalog it. It should also use a yet to be written feature of Musicbrainz to find the bands homepage, and autodiscover their RSS file with news (which monoloco will display on screen while you play that bands songs), and another for tour info.

Dying languages

One of my favorite authors, Warren Ellis, linked an an article about dying languages, a topic dear to my heart. I work at Shellbook Publishing Systems were we are writing a program that might go along what to preserve these languages. The idea is that a person understands information best in their mother tongue, and 20 percent of the world’s population speak one of 6,000 lesser-known languages. Our software enables speakers of these smaller languages to adapt books into their own language.

Um, speaking of which I have deadline tomorrow, so back to the dungon…

Funny thing for the day

I’m now subscribe to cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net. Beyond funny. 4 horsemen of the infoapocalypse and all that.

PyMonitor

Way cool:

PyMonitor module is used to add support for enable runtime monitoring of an Python application.

After creating an instance of the MonitorServer and starting the thread it publish and XML-RPC interface that provides methods for listing all all current instances. For a specific instance the MonitorServer can provide information about all attributes and class methods for the given instance.

The screen shot of the wx client show what you can do. I can’t wait for some free time to play with this and Mnet.

Quick Link: Creative Class War

Creative Class War from Washington Monthly

But having talked to hundreds of talented professionals in a half dozen countries over the past year, I’m convinced that the biggest reason has to do with the changed political and policy landscape in Washington. In the 1990s, the federal government focused on expanding America’s human capital and interconnectedness to the world–crafting international trade agreements, investing in cutting edge R&D, subsidizing higher education and public access to the Internet, and encouraging immigration. But in the last three years, the government’s attention and resources have shifted to older sectors of the economy, with tariff protection and subsidies to extractive industries.

Meanwhile, Washington has stunned scientists across the world with its disregard for consensus scientific views when those views conflict with the interests of favored sectors (as has been the case with the issue of global climate change). Most of all, in the wake of 9/11, Washington has inspired the fury of the world, especially of its educated classes, with its my-way-or-the- highway foreign policy. In effect, for the first time in our history, we’re saying to highly mobile and very finicky global talent, “You don’t belong here.”