Matt O’ Rama

IEEE Spectrum: Re-engineering Iraq

It would be hard to find another endeavor, anywhere, anytime, in which so much was asked of engineers, personally and professionally. Never before has so vast a reconstruction program been attempted in the face of enemy fire or managed in the shadow of geopolitics, where infrastructure itself became a battleground.

This is a great and very informed article about getting electricity flowing again in Iraq. When it comes down to it, this is where the real work is getting done in Iraq. This is also the reason we cannot leave Iraq right now. If we leave completely, the way a lot of people want to, all of the work we’ve put in to rebuild Iraq will go down the toilet. This isn’t even getting into the fact that if we leave them in the middle of a huge mess that we in large part have created, we’re turning on another terrorist factory full of people who have a great many reasons to hate the U.S. Right now we’ve put the military in an almost impossible position of being warriors and waging peace. We need to have less guys in trucks driving around looking for people to shoot and more guys protecting the electrical system, the oil pipelines, etc. We need twice as many engineers over there with enough money and oversight to bring their system up to what other countries have enjoyed for 50 years. One of the most telling statistics in this article is that the biggest concern for most Iraqis is electricity, not terrorists. Giving people more electricity is probably the best way to put a damper on terrorist activity right now. It should have been our top concern immediately after taking over. Once enough people start relying on their air conditioners and refridgerators they’ll be less lenient with others blowing up the power plants and shooting at the people keeping the juice flowing.

Tags: grommes, iraq, electricity, terrorists, terrorism, ieee

Public Campaign — A New Kind of Reform Politics

Very, extrememely excellent article by the always great Bill Moyers on the real story of corruption in Washington and at the end a possible solution. A good read for everybody.

Tags: grommes, politics, bill+moyers, campaign+reform, money, delay, abramoff

Femfox.com
This is probably the most pitiful thing I’ve seen all day. A fan-created “advertising campaign” that consists of nothing but pictures of women in their underwear along with the Firefox logo. How better to say that you’re a basement-dwelling nerdling than to have your wallpaper be a lingerie covered ass and an ad for a freaking web browser. Way to go team, you’ve managed to offend almost all of the potential audience (i.e., women and men who aren’t stupid) for Firefox in one fell swoop. If I were the Firefox team I’d find a nice way of asking these people to back away from the web and come up with some other way of advertising for the browser.

Tags: grommes, firefox, advertising, femfox

In Which I Encounter Difficulties Before Even Starting Out

I’ve mentioned a website I’ve been building a few times here but I haven’t really talked too much about it. It’s just not ready yet (Real Soon Now). But I’m going to start talking a bit about what I’ve been going through putting it together.

I’m just about to the point where I’m going to start doing what’s called Beta Testing. That’s where you have a mostly finished version of the product and you start showing it to people to bang on it and find bugs and just to see what they think. You see Beta a lot these days on the web, most notably at Google. Lots of their products stay Beta long after they’re released. I’m not going to do that nonsense, my beta tests will be real beta tests. I want people to mess around, try things out, and expect it to break for a short time. Then it’ll be released. Of course it’s a web app so I’ll be constantly adding things but when I get the sort-of core functionality ready, it’ll be released. But what I’m working on now are the necessary but hard parts of a website: the server and bandwidth.

I’m going to be building a server myself because it’s cheaper and because I can. Renting a server starts at like $300 a month for a basic system at most places. I can’t afford that right now. I’m a sysadmin so I know how to build a good but cheap server. I’ve priced a good box out at about $700 after shipping from Newegg.com (the only online computer retailer I’ve shopped at for many years). The stumbling block I’ve run into is that I had two potential sources of free bandwidth that have both gone away on me. The ISP I used to run, Spinn.Net, was sold to a larger outfit a few months ago and all the people I knew there left so I have no ‘in’ with them now. I also thought I might be able to put the server in temporarily in the rackspace we have for our servers where I work at my dayjob but our guy in charge of Engineering said no for various reasons, but it’s not my call and I respect his decision. So now I’m looking around. I’m going to talk to the data center we host our servers for work at and see if they might be able to do something for me. My boss at SpinnNet used to get people to let him do a ramp-up period where he wouldn’t pay anything or he’d pay a fraction for the first few months until some revenue started coming in. Hopefully I can get somebody to do that for me. I’m not as good with people as he was though so I don’t know what’ll happen.

I’m doing this on the extreme cheap so it’s presenting a great many challenges. Just coming up with $700 for a server was work. And everytime you see people talking about starting a company they always say flip things like “If you can’t raise $10,000 for your business, you shouldn’t be in business” which I think is dumb. I don’t have rich friends, rich family, anybody who could give me that kind of money (or even half that) for whom the money wouldn’t hurt them if I never am able to pay them back (a real possibility for any business starting out). I’ll have more to say about that later. Maybe in the end that flip wisdom won’t seem so flip but for now I’m counting on my cluelessness to get me going.

More later.

Tags: grommes, business, startup, web

United Press International – NewsTrack – Australia goes after Rollins for book

Punk rocker, pontificator and IFC TV star Henry Rollins is being investigated in Australia for his choice of reading material.

Rollins told Monday’s New York Post a passenger seated near him on a flight to Brisbane, Australia, was disturbed because he was reading Ahmed Rashid’s best seller, “Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia.”

There is so much wrong about this it’s hard to know where to start. Watch for things like this to start happening here in the US any day now. I read in public a lot and I’m waiting for the day somebody notices which book I’m reading and turns me in to the authorities for it. Sheesh.

I had a great idea the other day that anyone is free to steal since I’ll never have time to do it. A website called something like bluetoothdoofuses.com (which is available) where people post pictures of doofuses wearing their bluetooth wireless earpieces in innappropriate places. Sort of like FUH2.com without the middle fingers. Or with them, I don’t care. I got a Jabra bluetooth headset for free with my trusty T610 2 years ago and thought they were somewhat goofy then. That was before I had to deal with stifling snorts of laughter at Grandma walking through the grocery store not talking on her wannabe-futuristic headset hanging on her ear. Now I just want to point and laugh and inspire others to do the same.

Don’t get me wrong, if you’re using the thing, great. But unless you’re getting calls every 2 minutes and are Important, take the damn thing off when you’re not talking on it. Or else you’re liable to get your picture taken and posted for ridicule on the net.