TDDPirate’s Ideas

One of the clichés to which the Hearing World subjects us deafies countless times is the remark, by some sufferers of the so-called “noise pollution”, that we are fortunate not to suffer from the noise.  Nevermind the fact that the hard of hearing are even more bothered by noise than the normally hearing.

Few days ago, I witnessed a new twist of this cliché.
Recently, I started working for another company, meaning that I have new co-workers.  One day, at lunchtime, one of them remarked to me how fortunate am I, as a deaf person, to have no use for cellphones.  Obviously he got tired of the constant interruptions due to cellphones.

With glee, I pulled out my cellphone and showed him that I, too, was assimilated by the culture of the cellphones…

Now he knows what he needs to know about SMS and 3G video chats.

After 2^nd Lebanon War at Jul-August 2006, the government of Israel set up a committee of inquiry - the Winograd Committee.  A domain has been registered in behalf of this committee - http://vaadatwino.co.il/ (the contents are in Hebrew).

Fast forward three years.  The Israeli government is trying to build a biometric database with data about all Israeli citizens, and concerned people are protesting this plan.  The strongest argument against the database is the risk of data leak, which may lead to rather adverse consequences.

To prove that the government does not know to protect its digital assets, the above domain was hijacked when its registration expired because someone in the government forgot to renew the domain registration.  The Website now contains a statement against the biometric database.

One famous anniversary is the 25^th anniversary of the GNU project, which happens today.

One much less famous 25^th anniversary will happen three days from now, on Sept. 30, 2008.  This is the best choice for an official starting day of the Israeli TDD Project.

On Friday Sept. 30, 1983, I at last went to the computer shop, plucked down my money and bought my Commodore 64 home computer.  This model was chosen because it supported software-defined fonts, and because it had a cheaper brother, known as VIC-20.

My game plan was to use the Commodore 64 to develop software for both VIC-20 and Commodore 64.  This software was to serve as terminal/chat program, which supports textual communication in Hebrew.  At the time I already had a 300bps modem connected to an ADM 3A terminal, which belonged to my employer at the time, and which I used to connect to my employer’s computer systems and monitor jobs, which ran overnight.

When I returned home with my spanking new computer, I found in my mailbox a letter, which took 23 days to reach me.  The letter was from Susan Bullowa, who subsequently partnered with me in the project.  It took us a while to meet, but when we met, it turned out that she has a lot of useful information which complements my own information.  And on the other hand, I had in my possession technical information and experience, which complemented hers.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

The 4^th Blog Day was held yesterday, but I was too busy to notice this, so my contribution was postponed to today.

More information about the yearly Blog Day.

I apologize to my fellow Hebrew language blog writers for not mentioning any Hebrew language blog this time. To my defense, I’ll point out the common denominator of the following blog recommendations. They all deal with various aspects of bullshit. Good and bad stories about disaster recovery (some of the bad cases are accompanied by bullshit), bullshit as “security theater” (which is a nefarious kind of bullshit), IT project failures (again, frequently due to bullshit), amusing software related bullshit stories, bullshit gadget designs, and bullshit in general.

• Amanda Ripley’s Blog
  Amanda Ripley wrote the book “The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - And Why” about behavior of people, who were caught in natural and human-made disasters. Her blog expands upon the theme of disaster recovery.
• Schneier on Security
  Bruce Schneier is the foremost computer security expert in the world, and is also the author of the book “Applied Cryptography”. His theme is that security is a system property. No technological means assures security if there is a security vulnerability in the rest of the system. He blogs, among other things, about stupid security policies.
  Not related to security, he blogs also about his hobby - squids.
• IT Project Failures
  Informs the readership about big IT project failures and their causes.
• Worse Than Failure
  Amusing stories about the foibles of less than top notch computer professionals and software developers.
• Commonsense Design
  This blog has the slogan: “Nathan Zeldes writes on the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of everyday product design”. I cannot improve upon this slogan.
• The War On Bullshit
  Opinions, which are sometimes politically incorrect, about various bullshit attitudes in sociology and politics.

Matzliach (מצליח) is an Hebrew word meaning “successful”. The Matzliach Method is asking for more than what you are entitled to. If the other side does not object, you get more. If the other side objects, you get what you are entitled to. This method works when there is no penalty for trying to get more than what you are entitled to.

Israel has two high volume dailies - Ma’ariv and Yedioth Aharonot. The issue price for both is 4.80NIS during the week, and 10.50NIS on Fridays, when the issues are larger. The holiday eve issues are usually larger and cost 10.50NIS apiece, even when the holiday eve does not fall on Friday.

Today is the Israeli Independence Day eve. Today, Ma’ariv and Yedioth Aharonot put out larger issues. Ma’ariv charges 10.50NIS for its issue, whereas Yedioth Aharonot charges 4.80NIS.

This discrepancy in prices let the groceries and other vendors of newspapers enjoy a windfall by applying the Matzliach method as follows.

The shopkeeper claims that the printed Yedioth Aharonot price is a typo and the real price is 10.50NIS. If a customer buys this argument, the shopkeeper makes a nice profit. If the customer argues back, pointing out the absence of any billboard notice about this, the shopkeeper backs off and lets the customer buy the newspaper for 4.80NIS.

10 ways for support techs to stay healthy and safe on the job offers the following advice:
#2: Wash your hands between visits.

As I was enjoying the article DNA seen through the eyes of a coder, a link caught my eye and it directed me to Ensembl Human Web site, which lets you explore the Homo sapiens genome.
The home page showed the usual 23 chromosome pairs. However I was startled to find yet another chromosome mentioned - MT.
I made the quick guess that it is the mitochondrial chromosome, and wanted to confirm or refute this guess. However, the Web site search function yielded nothing when I looked for the phrase “chromosome mt”. I was provided instead with a form for sending E-mail to the Web site’s helpdesk. I took advantage of this.
Few minutes later, they answered me - yes, it is indeed the mitochondrial chromosome.

One additional comment in their answer was made, because I phrased my question in an highly emotional way, as follows:
“I was looking for a short paragraph describing what the hell is ‘Chromosome MT’.”

The comment woke in me nightmare past memories of a primary school teacher in USA, who subscribed to the DEAF-L mailing list (a mailing list devoted to deafness related issues), but her censorware filtered out innocent messages because they included phrases, which could have been interpreted in objectionable ways. And furthermore, there was no way to bypass the censorware to tell her that a legitimate message has been blocked.

In spite of my boring, depressing, isolated and small life, I nevertheless managed to get my 15 minutes of fame more than once over the years. At the 1980’s, newspaper news items appeared about the Israeli TDD project, of which I was one of the leaders. There was even a brief TV appearance. I was also interviewed at 1991 about my life as deaf. In the early 2000’s, my name was again mentioned more than once as associate of someone else, who was interviewed as a Deaf businessman.

There was even an interview, about my work in Intel as a deaf engineer, which yielded no publicized article because I insisted upon reviewing it beforehand for inaccuracies.

With the benefit of hindsight, I am startled to realize that I did not come to grief due to grave inaccuracies in those interviews and exposures. Those interviews were mostly arranged by people, who were experienced in public relations.  So the journalists probably got good coaching. One of the interviews was printed almost verbatim from the transcript of a chat I had on the computer with a journalist and then I printed and gave her at end of the interview (this was before the era of Internet chats).

Unlike me, Sarah Hornik was upset by a newspaper interview, which had serious (from her point of view) inaccuracies. She at least turned this trauma into a learning event.

According to A Deluge of Facts KOs OOXML (Office Open XML), OOXML does not provide for weekends different from Saturday+Sunday.  So this proposed standard would be problematic for Israel and several Moslem countries.

Few years ago, when there was a lot of bad blood between Deaf identity adherents and the medical establishment over the subject of cochlear implants, I sometimes used the following E-mail signature:

I am the Cochlear Corporation of the Borg. All resistance is futile. Deaf Culture is irrelevant. YOU SHALL BE IMPLANTED.

Now it seems that the real Cochlear Corporation, which is based in Australia, considers all human languages - spoken or signed - to be irrelevant, unless they are spoken English. The news item in question did not clarify the status of American English, which has several differences from Australian English.

More about the bad blood:

• Cochlear Implants - Opinions
• Warning: false claims about CI in ads