I just read two very interesting articles from two commentators I respect immensely: Clay Shirky's The Failure of #amazonfail and Mary Hodder's Why Amazon Didn’t Just Have a Glitch. I won't do their arguments justice here, but I'll try to summarize as best I can.

I presented an overview of the Sydewynder application to Sven Travis's Creativity and Computation lecture class today. I've attached the PowerPoint and PDF below (and an OpenDocument presentation can be posted, if anybody wants that).

Also, I've released Sydewynder 0.1.1, which has the option to take screenshots of the apps as they run (useful for putting together the presentation) and a new "Round Robin" sample app that shows how to send a single SMS messages to multiple recipients and multiple messages to several recipient lists.

The latest version of Sydewynder, our mobile application server for the S60, has been released! With Sydewynder, any S60 phone, like the Nokia N80, can become an automated SMS gateway. You can grab version 0.1 off of the SourceForge site.

This new version features:

• scripts can now connect to WiFi, making Internet-enabled responses possible!
• emulator for off-phone development. Now students don't need to have a phone to develop mobile apps for it
• two tabbed pane view for logging and status indicators
• start up screen -- very pretty!
• a much better UI
• a new example application using WiFi - "We Feel Fine". It taps into the wefeelfine.org API

And these bugs were fixed:

• recipients in the address book could not receive text message responses
• unicode text problems

Much thanks for Sven, Colleen, Chuck, Eric, Albert, and Chloe for their support, ideas, and code.

Almost exactly five hours until chocks away! Staying up all night getting my stuff together and generally trying to wear myself out so I can sleep on the plane.

I'll be working for the Malawi Health Equity Network as part of my fellowship with the Open Society Institute's Public Health Program. I'll be doing a variety of design work in country for the next month, with more work for several months thereafter.

Off to the Warm Heart of Africa I go!

Lovely flag:
Free Speech Flag: The free speech flag, whose colors are: #09F911 #029D74 #E35BD8 #4156C5 #635688. Thanks to badmouth.net for that.

And now it's time for a little more freedom of speech:

0nce upon a time, there were 9 little fairies. These 9 could cast wonderful spe11s that could unlock any secret and reveal the magic of any st0ry.

But, one day, 2 ogres, claiming to represent the storytellers, entered the land of the 9 fairies, the magestic Free Woods. For 7 years, the ogres made it 4bidden to tell stori3s or to even 5peak. These bad creatures even 8 up all the magic m4ch1nes that the fairie5 used to work their craft.

Then, one day, 6 adventurers came from over the Publik Hill5. These 6 h3ros 5lew the bad ogres. Then the 6 held a great feast for everyone, where people could listen to their own stories, view their own movies, use their own software. They feasted and 8 and 8 and no more were corporate ogres heard from again.

0, what a lovely story that was!

The free speech flag, whose colors are: #09F911 #029D74 #E35BD8 #4156C5 #635688. Thanks to for that.

Groklaw - 2 Major Patent Rulings from the US Supreme Court - [My del.icio.us]

Finally, finally, FINALLY some sanity from on high about our screwed up patent system. This is the money quote from one of the decisions:

And as progress beginning from higher levels of achievement is expected in the normal course, the results of ordinary innovation are not the subject of exclusive rights under the patent laws. Were it otherwise patents might stifle, rather than promote, the progress of useful arts.

The Chronicle: 2/9/2007: Caught in the Network - Very interesting development here with academics using Tor, software created for keeping your Internet usage private. A professor at Bowling Green, who teaches about the social implications of authorities censoring Net usage, was asked not only to stop using Tor but to not teach his students about it. Apparently, the university's IT policy doesn't have an entry for irony. [My del.icio.us]

Slashdot | Why You & Yahoo Should Like This Human Rights Law - [My del.icio.us] This is a pretty good article, not only for the human-rights issue, but for government regulation in general. I've blogged about this in the past. This is one of those frequently occurring cases where not only does an industry need regulation, in some ways, it may want it. Since any one company can't act ethically, because of its shareholder obligations, regulating the entire industry allows the "good" companies to do the right things, as well as making the others toe the line.