Thursday, April 03, 2003

HOW TO MAKE A REVOLUTION in three easy steps OK, here's the method for making sweeping, positive social change. FIRST, everybody gets a project.      Join one or start one, but the project has to be directed toward making things better. That's what's called a "positive vector". SECOND, everybody talks with everybody else about their projects.      That's "talks with", not just "talks to" or "talks at". This sets up a "field of communication", with information flowing in all directions. It's very important to the process, and we now have the tools (the Internet and the phone system) to make communication available without much hierarchy. THIRD, be prepared to change your project based upon what you learn by communicating about it.      This is also very important. It "closes the feedback loop" by making the communication consequential, and, with everyone's good sense, sets up a "converging system" in the general direction of the vector.      That's it. Act, especially in concert with others, communicate and re-evaluate. Repeat as often as possible. Oh, yes - keep records of what you try and what happened , both good and bad. The system needs an element of memory to function.      These days I've been looking more and more at the Sixties and what happened then. The civil rights movement was a broad-based social-change movement that made a real difference - a positive one by my standards - in how the society was structured. No one could point to one place, one organization or one leader making the decisions (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was drawn into the movement and knew he was a sacrifical offering to those who always have to believe that one person is pulling the strings).      Inside the civil rights movement it functioned pretty much as I've described above. People started projects, guided only by their morality and their belief that the US Constitution was not being lived up to. There was a lot of communication on what was happening - meetings work not just by top-down communciation but by setting up relationships among participants which provide a basis for person-to-person communication. In fact, often the best thing is to ignore the person on the podium, go outside and talk among yourselves.       And there was a lot of coming and going, of projects folding and new projects blooming. Nothing was THE big one (even the 1963 March on Washington was over at the end of the day - though the world would never be the same) and the flexibility allowed for change as things developed.      Where it all came apart was when mass media, with its hierarchical structure of owners and editors and media stars, became relied upon to "get the message out", to the detriment of person-to-person communication. This broke the feedback loop and inserted elements that directed things toward serving the interests of the media. We then got "The Sixties", a spectacular media presentation.      We don't have to do it that way, though. Establish the vector you think is right, join the field of communication and stay flexible while pushing as much energy through as you can without hurting yourelf. Change your project to be more in line with the overall vector as you sense it developing. Remember that it takes about 6 months to get something established and 18 months to 2 years to get through it. If you aren't doing something different by that time, take a long hard look at yourself and your project.        Come to think of it, don't wait till the two-year point to take that look - do it whenever you aren't doing anything else.      A tip of the hat to Kurt Vonnegut. See you in the field! 10:13:29 AM    comment []

Saturday, October 19, 2002

Take a look at: http://www.jhai.org/jhai_remoteIT.html It's mostly my invention, resulting from Lee Thorn's comment that the Laotian villagers with which he works doing economic development had requested a communication system which would enable them to make telephone calls. They wanted to have market information regarding pricing for their crops. The whole system consists of parts that are available off the shelf and software that is open source. Mark Summer, a German engineer who would have been running an ISP in CAmbodia but for unforseen political events in that country, is taking the lead in implementing it. I am sawing aluminum angle stock to make the folding fram for the computer boards (PC-104 embedded baords). I'm doing this after hours with the knowledge of my empoyer, with whom I have an agreement not to take on clients on the side. I design medical electronics for their cients. This is pro bono publico work ("for the good of the public") that is something every professional is supposed to engage in. And it's also the way to start industries (assuming everything falls into line along the way). I've had to face up to the fact that, at heart, I am a technological adventurer. The problem is getting anyone to pay for it. Fortunately, technology is relevant to economics, and sometimes money will show up after the fact. More often it does not, but at least I improve my skills at engineering, project management, and product design. Often, when I'm describing my latest adventure project, I will get a response to the effect of "We don't understand why you're doing that", usually from serious people who deal with serious money and serious issues. When that happens, I know I'm on the right track. In the case of Jhai (pronounced "Djeye" as one syllable), the future i not clear either. There's a lot of people around the world in diaspora - having emigrated from one place or another. They don't want to lose their ties to the people back home, and they have developed skills and had experience that could be of great value to those back home. Right now they send money back - "remittance income" is a major source of support for many developing countries. There's got to be a payoff in linking up the diaspora people with their lands of origin, using the best the Internet has to offer, if even for phone calls. It's my contribution to the war on terrorism, or as I put it, the war on ignorance, hatred, and vengeance. If I can't see exactly where it's going, that's no reason not to start. 2:27:35 PM    comment []

Saturday, August 03, 2002

I spent much of the Labor Day weekend at ConJose, the World Science Fiction Convention, having been invited as a specimen. I had been invited to be on two panels more or less centered on computer history and was comp'ed for the days in question. On one of the panels I opined that we needed more boosts for the imaginations of 13-year-olds both in fiction and in reality. I pointed out that early in high school I had stumbled upon the "Heinlein juveniles" - a series of books written by Robert A. Heinlein between 1948 (Rocket Ship Galileo) and ending in 1961 with Starship Troopers. These were books aimed at exactly my segment, in which an adolescent hero enters into a relationship with technology (and usually a father figure) which lead to an adventure and some additional maturity. The wonderful thing about these books was that they built up your self-esteem and led you to believe that you could actually get your hands on technology and do things - things that mattered - and have adventure in the process. I must admit that I have been attempting to follow this path ever since. So I wonder, what today fills the place of these novels? How do kids get turned on to the opportunities for romance, adventure and growth offered by technology? Or do they? Heinlein, who apparently grew his own audience with these novels and became perhaps the highest-earning science fiction writer of all time, coined a phrase that has developed legs: "you can't pay me back - pay it forward". I interpret that to mean help someone who's coming up as you were helped on your way up, in recompense for the help you got. Accordingly, I have started thinking about what I might be able to create that would provide the kind of support for kids' involvement in technology that I had gotten from various sources. I learned a great deal about electronics and its implementation by poring over a book which consisted of a series of manuals for building radio (and TV!) kits. I had access to a mound of junked radio and TV chassis' and my father helped me haul them away in his car. The technology of vacuum tubes was, in many ways, more accessible and forgiving (if you didn't mind the 450 volt plate supplies) than today's transistor and IC devices. You could modify a radio into an intercom or phono amplifier, and dream about making a transmitter out of one, but you can't do that with electronic stuff today. It takes too much engineering to change it. Thus, I began wondering a while ago what kind of kit would work well to introduce kids to digital technology. The principles I came up with are: - programmable at the most basic level, - leading logically to hardware or software depending upon the kid's interests, - capable of creating interesting effects quickly (impress your friends!), - made of units that interconnect and encourage kids to come together to build larger things than they can alone. I decided that the starting point should be "microcode" - the lowest level at which programming and hardware come together. This is represented by the "programmable logic device" (PLD), and chose one of the first designs - known generically as the 16R8. It had an 8 bit wide register whose outputs fed back into an array of programmable AND-OR trees. 9 or 10 inputs also fed into the programmable array, which was implemented by fusible-link technology (later by electrically-erasable technology. 16R8s were chips, programmed by special boxes under control of software that ran on computers. The first few generations could not be reprogrammed. They weren't very attractive to 13-year-olds. I added retro sensibility. Make them not as chips, but as circuit cards built pretty much with the technology of mainframe computers of the '60's and '70's. Make them with a row of red lights along the front that would display the state of the registers. Make them programmable by hand - no special boxes and no computer programs necessary. Provide for slow, pushbutton clocking so you can see them go through their paces. With one card you could make eight lights do a few interesting tricks, and in the process gain skill and confidence. Bring together four or five and you can assemble some basic digital devices like a decade counter, a tic-tac-toe game, or a pseudorandom number generator. With enough boards (and some memory boards) you could assemble a computer. Not a store-bought computer, but one built entirely by your gang of kids. Using real technology you can touch and understand and see the red lights blink, not just a grey lump of plastic. In one direction leads the path to electronics, in the other the path to software. Each one will quickly involve the acolyte in using simulation and design software, but the participants will have a visceral understanding of what makes the stuff underneath run. I know how to design these cards, but that's the less important part. Who reading this thinks they know how to present it to the kids, what "courseware" would work best, and how to assemble the package into something that would make sense economically as well as technologically? The keyword for this discussion will be KidzPALS (the first PLDs - invented by Jon Birkner - were branded as PALs - for Programmable Array Logic). 8:31:48 PM    comment []

In memoriam - Bob Bickford (submitted on the occasion of the memorial service in Seattle) I was the younger brother of the family as I grew up - and continued to play that role till I met Bob and  found myself relating to him as a surrogate older brother. We met at the Homebrew Computer Club some time around 1980. He attended in company with another fellow who was a glib, ultra-critical Libertarian, and under whose influence Bob got into serious tax trouble. Although Bob was a follower, in my experience he never was a believer. A few years later when I mentioned to Bob that I was put off by the sneering tone of certain libertarian publications, I was surprised to find him agree when I might have expected to be sneered at. From what I can tell my experience was not unique - I see many people mention that Bob never let his humanity be masked behind ideology or any argumentative position of the moment. This is to his credit. I invited Bob to the Odd Sundays gathering at the Edinburgh Castle pub in San Francisco in the '80's, where an interesting crowd occupied the large round table, drank and talked of everything. It was there that Greta met Bob, so I feel I have a minor role in that story. He participated in the first Hacker's Conference, as a volunteer, I believe, and came to serve on the Steering Committee of the later conferences. I recall visiting with him in Corte Madera and the two of us deciding to act on the committee's decision to zero-base the invitations list, whereupon we both were blackballed from the committee. Bob was just not good at political maneuvering, preferring to be straightforward and let things fall as they may. There was a darker, hidden side to Bob, too, which should now come as no surprise. In 1991 When he worked at a startup in which I was involved the issue of the use of the product by the military was discussed in the very small office. Bob worked on silently for a while, then just got up and walked out the door. The CEO pursued him and talked him back, discovering that Bob had misgivings about the military application of the product (a wearable information-retrieval system). We all discovered then that Bob could take precipitous action to his own disadvantage based only on an undetected inner dialogue. While one could sometimes compare him to an enthusiastic puppy, one could also detect a shadow of moroseness that would creep into his disposition. Bob's exit leaves me and many others in turmoil as we try to understand what happened, and why, and to accept that we never will. And now I, who never had a younger brother, has lost one. I am sure that, were it possible, he would apologize for upsetting us. We will each have to find our way to acceptance of Bob as he was, not as we would have had him be. At that time we will be able to accept his apology, and forgive him as we would be forgiven. Until that minor resurrection, we are all left in pain and sorrow, as the bell truly tolls for us. 3 August, 2002 2:26:55 AM    comment []

Friday, August 02, 2002

Hello, World! I wasn't exactly born yesterday, but this is my first entry on a Blog. Programmers-in-training (a state which may never end) strive to write a program that sets up a nice window and shows the words "Hello, World" - a great accomlishment. I did the equivalent back when things were much simpler and doing things was thus a bigger accomplishment. The year was 1970, the computer was a Data General Nova minicomputer (an extinct breed). Programming was done on a Teletype 33, punching a paper tape of machine language, with a set of instructions represented by three-letter mnemonics like LDA and STA. When you had it all typed up you threaded the paper tape through the reader and held your breath while the 33 rattled through it and into the Nova. I was (and am) a hardware design engineer, but making the computer do something was the ultimate purpose of the exercise. So I wrestled with the arcana of the instruction manual which described one way of getting the thing to cause the Teletype to print a character. Any character. It turned out that their way of doing it made use of "self-modifying code". That is, you entered a program that said, in effect, "make the Teletype print the chracter immediately after...This One!" Then at the address "This One +1" you entered the intended character into the memory. I need to explain that "This One" was not how we referred to memory locations. Labels like those takes more programming. I dealt with memory using actual addresses. What did we know then? So at last there came the moment when my paper tape rattled and I loaded the binary code for the letter "A" into the proper memory location. And pushed the Run switch. The mute Teletype coughed and smacked an "A" right onto the paper! The feeling was indescribable. Power! Elegance! Infinite possibility! Like someone wrote in a satirical song about the Pope - "he don't even have to use dope". So - here goes! I've spent my time typing, now it's time to push the Run switch. Hello, BlogWorld! 11:06:38 PM    comment []