Author: Benjamin Mako Hill

My IRC nick-highlighting is such so that today, all messages directed toward a new person named imako on #ubuntu triggered my attention. While this is easy to fix, it made me consider how frustrating IRC with nick-highlighting must be if you have a nick that is also a common word in a language you communicate in.

I spent a few moments on Freenode today with nicks including the, and, is, it, to, an, as and a.

I was surprised that everyone of those nicks was registered with the nick server. I was not surprised that all were available at the time I tried and that all but the and and had been untouched for the better part of the year.

Let’s face it, if your nick was it, you wouldn’t enjoy IRC very much either.

There are at least two things funny about this (non-staged) desktop screenshot that a friend took a year or so ago:

The background image is a picture of myself and my brother Nate. We were cold and less than completely comfortable and trying to convey this feeling through body language.

The first funny thing is the degree to which my friend has embraced the Windows folder naming conventions as illustrated by this closeup:

I’ll let you all speculate about what the funny things might be on your own.

Greg Pomerantz recently purchased a light bulb called a "black body bulb." When he told me this, I misheard him and thought he said he had purchased a "black hole bulb."

A small electrically-powered black hole that could be installed into a lamp is not only more technically challenging than building a light bulb. It is also, when you think about it, exactly what a light bulb isn’t.

Many people have probably followed the plight of the Russian sailors stranded 190 meters under water in a mini-sub. It was nice to see militaries around the world put aside their differences and come to the mariners’ aid.

But it’s worth pointing out this article lest anyone believe that the air of camaraderie in crises diminished the sense of machismo, competition, and old fashion "mine is bigger than yours" boosterism that is so central to our militaries. I quote:

Britain, responding to a request from the Russians, was sending a Scorpio remote-controlled underwater vehicle capable of descending 925 meters.

A U.S. Navy spokesman said a Super Scorpio, an unmanned deep diving submarine capable of reaching a depth of 1,515 meters, would be airlifted to the scene from San Diego naval base in California.

I’m glad to see that nobody was distracted from singing the praises of their expensive toys’ 900 meter plus diving capabilities by the fact that the stranded mini-sub in question was only 190 meters below the surface. It’s a shame that the British did not have time to arrange for an "Ultra-Scorpio." Something like that could have really saved the day.

After a 3-4 month break, I was catching up on mail in the Unicode email list and I noticed a number of threads about the interrobang (my favorite punctuation point and perhaps my favorite Unicode code point (U+203D)).

At Debconf5, I was talking with a number of the Spanish speaking developers about the lack of an inverted interrobang in Unicode which renders the glyph less useful in Spanish which normally prefixes questions or exclamations with inverted versions of the glyph at the end of the sentence. Why shouldn’t this carry over the interrobang as well‽ I was, quite seriously, thinking about writing up a proposal for the inclusion of an inverted interrobang myself when I found this message from Michael Everson on the Unicode email list:

N2935: Proposal to add INVERTED INTERROBANG to the UCS http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/n2935-interrobang.pdf

This will be posted to the WG2 and L2 sites in due course.

After composing a message to Michael thanking him for his proposal, I realized (helped by the announcement to withdraw the entire Unicode Standard immediately after Michael’s proposal) that the proposal has been sent on April 1st and was, in all likelihood, a joke. How cruel is it to toy with my emotions like this‽

Sent about a month later, I found another message from Michael saying:

I suppose I should note that despite the date of its publication I am completely serious about: http://www.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2935.pdf

I have written Michael to confirm that he is serious. In any situation, I think it is important that all supporters of the interrobang (and it’s inverted cousin) make their voice heard in Unicode to ensure that the inverted interrobang gains a much-deserved spot of its own in the standard.

Update: Michael Everson has told me that the Unicode Technical Committee has asked him to first find Hispanic support for an inverted interrobang. If someone knows of this or of a list for Spanish typographers where we can ask, please let me know.

Over the last few months, it’s been disconcerting to see the reported cases of people getting fined (or worse) for using open wireless access points without permission.

I travel frequently and the use of open APs is an important (if not always reliable) way that I get online. Every time my Internet connection at home goes down, I take advantage of one my neighbors APs. To balance things out, I make sure I always run an open AP for others out my home.

There are many smart reasons not to run an open AP but, for me, doing so is about being a good neighbor. I’ve found that even for the most cautious and conservative, most of the serious risks of running an AP can be mitigated by a measured combination of firewalling and monitoring.

The most ridiculous part of this crackdown is not how common and completely normal intentional "transgressive" wireless sharing is but how how often people do it completely unintentionally and without ever knowing.

Once I was in New York City with Micah and Biella and, knowing that we were technically proficient, a member of Biella’s extended family invited us over to help fix his printer which he was unable to print to over his wireless network. What eventually became clear was that his wireless AP was set of incorrectly and had never worked. His laptop couldn’t find the printer because the printer was on his home network and he had, without his knowledge, been using his neighbor’s wireless since he moved in. He had been paying for DSL which he had never actually used.

In densely populated places — New York in particular but any Western city probably falls into this category — this is incredibly common. Punishing people for doing what so many people do completely unintentionally — and almost entirely without negative consequences I might add — would be silly if what was at stake was not so serious.

What the Hack starts in a couple days and I’m already in the area. It promises to be a fantastic outdoor hacker summer camp.

Howver, I’m a little worried about one thing. It’s raining now. A lot. It’s basically rained every day in the last week. I feel like that many people, that much electrical power, and that much water is a bad combination.

My plan is to stick with with my friend Andreea. That way if the worst happens, at least we’ll be putting the cute in electrocute.

I’ve been somewhat disappointed with the lack of community participation in some of what I feel were my most fun and potentially contagious blog entries. For example, after spending almost two hours forming a list of packages useful in writing package name poetry, not a single person added to the body of work in the genre.

I think the problem may be lack of incentive and I’ve stepped up to remedy that. I have purchased 10 Dutch Bottle Scrapers (also known as flessenlikkers or flessenschrapers in the Netherlands) and I will be giving them away as prizes for small competitions I coordinate on my blog in the near future. While they are not expensive in the Netherlands, for the rest of world, these wonderful kitchen tools are absolutely priceless.

To learn more about flessenlikkers, read the Wikipedia article I wrote on the subject. While they may not look like much, I’ve been walking around with 10 flessenlikkers in my backpack over the few days and I often feel that I’ve found the true source of ultimate power.

A couple weeks ago, I realized that one of my eyebrow hairs was long. Like really long. Like 3cm plus. Other hairs were long too. What’s weird is that as far as I can tell this is the first time I’ve ever really looked at my eyebrows closely in my entire life.

I’m almost embarrassed to admit this since they are, after all, less than a centimeter from my eyes. Then again, this close proximity both makes it logistically difficult to scope them out and introduces a sense of assumed familiarity.

Then again, perhaps these are just rationalizations and I am just the sort of guy who wouldn’t notice a mustache if it were right under my nose.

I come from a pretty diverse family. I have a sister adopted from Korea and two sisters from Ethiopia.

Once I entered a Men Who Cook competition and the winner in the deserts category was someone who had brought a habanero and lime cheesecake. It was very tasty and I’ve made it several times since then. Since the cheese and the lime both tend to cancel out of the heat, the cake is usually just like a cheesecake that bites back a little bit.

Once though, it was really hot. It was tasty but there was a limit to how much one could eat. Since it wasn’t going fast, I suggested that my mother could serve pieces of the cake at her book club meeting. One of my Ethiopian sisters, apparently very worried, warned me, "You have to be careful! That cake could kill a white person."

If you don’t mind a little bit of heat, you can try the recipe for Habanero Lime Cheesecake That Can Kill White People yourself. Sorry for the Imperial measurements for those of you outside of the US.