CrisisCampTO

Yesterday was the first CrisisCamp in Toronto. I heard about it from Jacqui Maher’s presentation at CUSEC, and I decided to attend not really knowing what to expect. It turned out that there were six projects to tackle, and I tried to help with the machine translation project.

The idea was to provide an easily accessible translator for people on the ground. At the time the project started there was no Google Translate project that worked back and forth between for English and Haitian Creole. I think it was Chris that got a translator working based on moses after it’d been fed a corpus of every piece of Creole that he could get his hands on. The CCTO team’s job was to put together a web front end, and an API.

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Liveblogging for #CUSEC 2010

I’m still at CUSEC 2010 in Montreal. My plan was to take notes and quickly publish here, but then at the last minute I decided to liveblog for CUSEC instead. It’s at http://live.cusec.net/. So far my favourite talk was from Matt Knox, talking about ethics and how the human brain has a remote root: we bend to authority and do wrong too easily. The Milgram experiment as well as the more recent pranknet arrests illustrated this.

You can see the notes by visting the site and clicking on the archives. Unfortunately I can’t do permalinks very readily, so I might export and clean it up later.

The last reason I didn’t post my notes here is due to my blog being in need of spring cleaning. I need to switch to a cleaner, less busy theme, so might pick one up from WooThemes. I’ll be taking another look at that later tonight, as well as merging my categories. [...]

Links about the Haiti earthquake disaster

By now everyone has heard of the earthquake that hit Haiti.  There isn’t much of a food reserve, there isn’t a great deal of domestic rescue equipment or personnel, and there isn’t an abundance of shelter. I recently read a report saying that none of the hospitals in Port-au-Prince were operational.

Since most of my readers are American, I’ll start off by linking to the MSNBC list of suggested aid organizations. Many groups in the list have Canadian counterparts too.

I tried to decide between Doctors Without Borders or Red Cross. It seems that they’re neck and neck in terms of their administrative cost, so I went with the Red Cross due to their shelter programs. I donated using their online donation box.

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The EC-GC spoof is toast, whodunnit?

(Screenshot snagged from straight.com.)

I remember when Telus shut down thousands of websites to take down their union’s website. Serverloft might have just done the same. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has an article on the takedown of the Yes Men site. I did find an article from straight.com which claims to have the original complaint. The IP address in the complaint there is the same one that ec-gc.ca is currently hosted on. Ole Tange is the contact for PiWeb listed in the IP address for that whois.

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Block printing at the hacklab

Alex is here to lead us in a print workshop. My previous printing experiment failed with intaglio style printing. I meant to try imitation letterpress but didn’t get around to it. Alex is showing us block printing and she knows what she’s doing. Here I try to liveblog what she’s doing. It’s not going to be complete so you’ll want to watch the video too, and probably search for block printing on instructables.

You can see her laying down markings in pencil. The marks are slightly bigger than the blocks we’ll be using. After she marks them, she uses a syringe to lay out drops of water along the lines. You can see in the photo that the water is beading. She fixes that by scoring over the lines so the water can absorb. After that, she can tear.

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Worthwhile vim tips

David Wolever is the man who made me productive in vim. Not from the ground up, mind you. I already knew the basics from my internship like how to swap between modes. I’d internalized that each string of keystrokes forms a command with a verb^[0] and, if applicable, movement keys. It was enough to use as a lowest common denominator if I had to edit a configuration file on a server but I was fooling myself by thinking I knew enough to use it as a development environment.

Here he puts into writing the same tips he gave me last year when taking an operating systems course together. (It was the first time I had to use vim on a project of a considerable size.) [...]