Isle of Thadk
Quotelog Excerpt: "In the engineering world, you need to know pi to only 39 places in order to compute "the circumference of a circle girdling the known universe with an error no greater than the radius of a hydrogen atom" --The Man Who Loved Only Numbers.

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Tanzania Phone Tricks -
This is a reworking of “Kenyan Phone Tricks” by Paul Blair for Tanzania Because no one should ever have to remember all this nonsense, or have to track it all down, here is a Tanzanian Internet Phone: Phone Cheat Sheet.  If this doesn’t make sense to you, read the text below and then return to the [...]
East African Development -
At the midpoint of my service I took a vacation to visit Uganda where a fledgling American-Ugandan startup incubator Appfrica had been working with local NGOs and the regionally famous Makerere University to enable computer science graduates there to find opportunities to build in their country. In the past month, they’ve been rightly and brightly [...]
Latest initiative -
So I am still hard at work in Tanzania until after November this year. Students for this term are arriving next week so that will be a change of modes. For now I have been working on a blog for Information Computer Technology (ICT) Teachers College trainers around Tanzania at TZ’s 33 Teachers colleges. I’m really [...]
Semi-arid Seasons -
10/2008     1/2009
Abr. Serious Glass: Part 3, A hint of rain -
<p style="margin-left: 1pt">So, in my final episode of abbreviated glass I review my last few weeks with my D90 DSLR before it broke due to mysterious manufacturing defects. Also I am pleased to report that a friend from my training group managed to return with a new camera to me on her trip back from America. Thanks! <img src="http://thadk.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/011309-1451-abrseriousg8.jpg" alt=""/> </p>

Linkblog:

retroLink:How to clean a windows machine, guaranteed
Why bother? I wish the helpdesk could just remotely wipe our clients computers clean with the snap of a finger. We have a few other tools at our desk but the names arn't coming to mind presently.6 Feb 2005 at 8:13am UTC
Durable Signal
My 2007 Senior Project on the downfall of the Kuro5hin community, fulfilling my undergraduate degree at Miami University. If you are just glancing around, the graphs in the appendices revealed some strong trends and curious dynamics.12 Oct 2009 at 5:17pm UTC
800,000 stolen social security numbers: a 22-year-old scapegoat? - TECH.BLORGE.com
via Slashdot.
A backup tape was stolen from his car last month containing at least 770,000 social security numbers (with the corresponding names) for Ohio taxpayers. It also contained the social security numbers for another 64,000 state employees. Today the intern issued a statement with his side of the story.

God, Ohio, come on, read Schneier's blog or something. Storing backup off-site tapes at intern's houses? Is this real? I know three people that got SSN-theft notifications this past month, even before this. It is ridiculous.

It is real: "Although OAKS is a $158 million IT project and the State of Ohio is a $52 billion business enterprise, OAKS administrators had not encrypted the data on the stolen backup tape and had authorized a succession of interns to take the tapes home for the previous two years with only an admonition to store the tapes in a safe place." from http://watchdog.ohio.gov/investigations/2007190.pdf30 Jul 2007 at 4:47am UTC
Crossword Cheaters
NYT: "possessed girl in the exorcist"27 May 2007 at 10:41pm UTC
Summer of Code ideas: God, yes, please, somebody, anybody!
Add OpenID support to Mailman accounts.
* This would allow one account to be used for all Mailman installations
* It would also get rid of the monthly email reminders Mailman often produces
16 Mar 2007 at 9:04am UTC
World from Books
A google engineer uses a bit of code floating around to generate a sort of map of the world using books written up to that point. Truly amazing, really shows the value of plentiful data.15 Mar 2007 at 11:26am UTC
Powers of 10
but on a quite large plotter's print strip.30 Jan 2007 at 5:27pm UTC
Howard Rhiengold and the Whole Earth Catalog crew speak.

Originally spoken on 11/9/2006, just posted online this week. After exploring a bit of these guys work for my undergraduate research I heard about this panel. Quite topical. It ranges from the early non-Luddite commune culture that the WELL grew out of, the making-to-test nerd environment that silicon valley embodies, through our current ire at the phone companies un-silicon-valley-like world (premonitions of The Steve's iPhone announcement), the Libertarian ethic, its ups and downs, and even a bit of discussion about Google's growing power and "what if the Government took it over".

The last reminded me of the note from Cringely this week that Google has leased huge quantities of fiber across the nation. He suggests they have plans to offer peering agreements to ISPs. This would make super-high-bandwidth internet usage by the masses sustainable for these companies who for years have been over-booking and over-selling their real capacity.

21 Jan 2007 at 7:47am UTC
Swivel: Flickr for Data

Inspired by NerdTV show with Dan Bricklin, there is now a website where visitors can upload data and assemble graphs from it to find interesting things.

Relatedly, I came up with a funny technique that I performed over a couple hours to generate a user growth curve of Kuro5hin.org with 35 (fairly solid) samples and posted the data. I took first posting date of two to five userid-sequential users until I was fairly certain that was the day that that region of users had joined. I didn't really expect the sampling to work but after I got a reasonable number of data points down I couldn't break it.

On a side note, I'm not sure why this particular graph (out of the twenty or so autogenerated ones), the most valuable on in the set, despite being rated well by me, is not on the front page for the dataset.

7 Dec 2006 at 9:32pm UTC
Video: Euclidean Crisis
Amazing game that is controlled by a stylus. Home page Wow. Now I'm depressed that I lost my Tablet PC stylus last week.7 Dec 2006 at 8:40am UTC
ISS docking with shuttle in front of sun.
19 Sep 2006 at 9:19pm UTC

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