For those of you who missed it the first time around in early 2004, before I knew how wikipedia works or even that it was community owned and run.  Here it is again: On Multilingual Encyclopedia and Dictionary (public domain).

We have an Intel group working just one floor above us in Kendall Square; it will be interesting to see what they think.

Gizmodo sez: “Hell freezes over“, with a delightful jesus diaz illustration (above). But I’d say it only got momentarily cool down there; Intel has been working with open source communities and on education projects for some time. Keep your eyes on the fiery gates, however. My acronymic archnemesis may start open sourcing his platforms one day… See also: slashdot.

Let there be children!  And quotas for restaurants and the like. 

On children …

A behind-the-scenes look at a sugarized and beautiful tamtam.

Also : sugar itself, and abiword.

Sugartam lights up the night …

Threatening to break my longstanding bachelor existance, m[ai]k[oa] offer one cross-cultural otaku’s links to the past and a tracing of another’s roots.

Cultural connections …

One of these days, I need to track down Ezra Keshet and take him to see Borat with me. To the subject: Andrew Lin, web advisor to the film, is a genius. If someone can find me a photo of Mr. Lin, I will be grateful.  Please note: 20th Century Fox didn’t recognize this, and “scaled down the opening [weekend] after its market research suggested Borat wasn’t grabbing viewer interest.“  I wonder if they cared about his 300k myspace friends, and their word of mouth.

The film itself has some long minutes of complete genius, a few moments of extraordinary cameo acting,
and a few pieces with poor cameos and that are childish compared to the
best parts of the film.  Best of all, it doesn’t make the kinds of
sloppy plot, pacing, or ambient mistakes that sometimes afflict films
done by the numbers by a committee of experts.  I might have caught
some staged pieces, but there wasn’t a cue card out ofsight.

I suppose that much of the reason for the abundance of set pieces (as compared to real pieces wreaking havoc and embarrassment) is the weight and bulk
of modern film gear.  Once we have publicly available crude production
gear that can be hidden on the regular clothes of a few people in the
vicinity, without looking like a film crew, this rich and twisted art
can flourish further.  Of course Andy Kaufman and the Yes Men managed quite well without a film crew at all… but found it hard to gross $30m a weekend or get Pamela Anderson involved.  Good news for fans of the genre: there’s another one slated for next summer.

Question: what physical dimensions must one consider when making a custom wife sack?

Question:
what are Trey Parker and Matt Stone thanked for in the closing credits
– for inspiration, help with pulling off reality pieces, help with
casting?  Inquiring minds, &c., &c.

Andrew Lin is a genius …

One of these days, I need to track down Ezra Keshet and take him to see Borat with me. To the subject: Andrew Lin, web advisor to the film, is a genius. If someone can find me a photo of Mr. Lin, I will be grateful.  Please note: 20th Century Fox didn’t recognize this, and “scaled down the opening [weekend] after its market research suggested Borat wasn’t grabbing viewer interest.“  I wonder if they cared about his 300k myspace friends, and their word of mouth.

The film itself has some long minutes of complete genius, a few moments of extraordinary cameo acting, and a few pieces with poor cameos and that are childish compared to the best parts of the film.  Best of all, it doesn’t make the kinds of sloppy plot, pacing, or ambient mistakes that sometimes afflict films done by the numbers by a committee of experts.  I might have caught some staged pieces, but there wasn’t a cue card out ofsight.

I suppose that much of the reason for the abundance of set pieces (as compared to real pieces wreaking havoc and embarrassment) is the weight and bulk of modern film gear.  Once we have publicly available crude production gear that can be hidden on the regular clothes of a few people in the vicinity, without looking like a film crew, this rich and twisted art can flourish further.  Of course Andy Kaufman and the Yes Men managed quite well without a film crew at all… but found it hard to gross $30m a weekend or get Pamela Anderson involved.  Good news for fans of the genre: there’s another one slated for next summer.

Question: what physical dimensions must one consider when making a custom wife sack?

Question: what are Trey Parker and Matt Stone thanked for in the closing credits — for inspiration, help with pulling off reality pieces, help with casting?  Inquiring minds, &c., &c.

Andrew Lin is a genius …

Borat’s Friend Space:
Borat has 257073 friends.

Update: now slowed down to 484286 friends, 16 months later. talk about pan-flashes.

Welcome to my country. The country of Internets.

Why social networking matters. …

Haldane was definitely the bomb.  Where is that extended family now? 
Update: some days I forget the cardinal rule: Ask Wikipedia First.  Of course Haldane’s family is a topic of note, garnering its own main-namespace article and cross-namespace redirect (something generally forbidden; but this is clearly a special case).

This essay is similar to how to LearniT, but wit 60% less PowerPoint.  And how to GaMiT… now that one’s on the desk across the way .

How to FakiT …

Software brilliance : in blog form

Anxious, supportive, collaborative, prototyped, united, more practical, recyclable, and other views on laptops.

Sometimes, entering the factory to see how sausages are made can be fascinating and rewarding.  Wikipedia is a fun factory in this regard; you never know if you’re going to be rewarded or confused.

“How NOT to steal a Sidekick 2” was an article created last week based on an internet meme, garnering 70+ edits before being deleted for insufficient notability (not to mention poor article titling).  The deletion discussion I linked to above ran for a standard 5 days, and included new and veteran contributors to the site (as most such do).  It demonstrates many aspects of how this new breed of information amateur (in the traditional sense) is helping define relevance, utility, and authority (in the authority file sense) online.

The motivations and suggestsions made on that page are fascinating, and make me proud to be part of that community.  As does the ever-improving Manual of Style; one of the three great Wikipedian products… but that’s a thought for another post.

Travel scholarships are available for Wikimania attendees.  Applications are due by June 26. 

Travel scholarships for Wikimania …

Dear all,

The Wikimedia Foundation is pleased to announce the second annual Wikimania convergence, Wikimania 2006.
The event will bring together members of the Wikimedia project
communities, internet professionals and visionaries, and academics from
a wide range of fields sharing the nexus of ideas and technology
surrounding Wikipedia and its sister projects. The conference will be
held August 4–6, 2006 at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Attendees can now register online; with discounted rates available for community members.

Help is being made available for overseas travelers in need of US
visas… We are looking forward to another huge get-together; come join
us!

Wikimania 2006 release : festivities planned for Cambridge in August …

Verizon Online is an unusually poor service provider.  I have suffered through two ‘once in a lifetime’ catastrophes with them, and do not wish to wait for a third.  VZNO have no warning system in place for outages, repairs, or changes;
and offer minimal information in their reports and summaries.  This all
falls under ‘general incompetence‘; Comcast Cable and most broadband providers have similar issues.  When they mistakenly disconnect a line, and then say it will take
12 hours to verify and over 24 hours to fix due to ’standard
paperwork’, that goes a bit beyond.  When 24 hours later a supervisor says that due to insurmountable bureaucracy and employee error on their part there will be another 48 to 72 hour delay, as though this were the most natural thing in the world, one wonders what ritual incantations they must perform to coax bandwidth from the Baby Bell routing daemons. 

In the past eight months, there have been two additional 12+-hour outages thanks to infrastructure failures … it is only through inertia that we still use their DSL.

The Company Formerly Known As Wikicities, the world’s largest provider of MediaWiki hosting (and employer of an increasing number of my friends), this month closed a $4M round of series A funding from Omidyar and Bessemer Ventures (whence new board member Jeremy Levine) and a few lucky individuals (including one-name stealth disco star and serial board member Joi).  Congratulations all around.

Finding times when all board members are on terra firma at the same
time may be difficult… but with modern technology, also increasingly
unnecessary.  (I look forward to a photoset from inside Wikia Force One.)

The company is now known as Wikia (sometimes
“wikia.com”), a name which you may recall fromits former life, adorning
a related search engine portal.  It continues to host the world’s drollest wiki, and will hopefully be yet another channel for MediaWiki development, so that all those fine programmers still sitting on the fence about which wiki platform to use with can make up their minds with light heart and easy conscience. 
Perhaps we need a live ticker…”MediaWiki.  Powering 3.00001542% of the world’s public web pages.”