Outsourcing to India in Business Week and at MIT… – now this is some harsh practical education…

The more sophisticated portion of ocw.mit.edu is a 100 percent Microsoft show. A student asks the speakers why they chose Microsoft Content Management Server, expecting to hear a story about careful in-house technical evaluation done by people sort of like them. The answer: “We read a Gartner Group report that said the Microsoft system was the simplest to use among the commercial vendors and that open-source toolkits weren’t worth considering.”

Students began to wake up.

A PowerPoint slide contained the magic word “Delhi”. It turns out that most of the content editing and all of the programming work for OpenCourseware was done in India, either by Sapient, MIT’s main contractor for the project, or by a handful of Microsoft India employees who helped set up the Content Management Server.

Thus did students who are within months of graduating with their $160,000 computer science degrees learn how modern information systems are actually built, even by institutions that earn much of their revenue from educating American software developers.

• Friendster Usability Analysis – This is a usability analysis of the Friendster Internet service, collaboratively created by the students of MIT course 6.171 in November 2003.
• Where Are The Founders Of The Dial-Up Revolution? – /. discussion on the Hayes article
• Yahoo! Photos redesign – what Ernie’s been working on the past couple of months; OK, working, just intermittent server wonkiness
• Good lord that’s a huge DSL bill – and for transferring only 24.5Gb? That’s pathetic

Got around to upgrading to Panther on the ol’ 12″ and setting up the Treo 600 w/ iSync. Some discussion on TreoCentral, but it appears to have gone pretty flawlessly. The only I have left to do is to import the vcards I’m generating from my hiptop scraper.

Instead of doing work, I sat down and finally finished watching the rest of The Elegant Universe sitting on my hard drive (hence writing a simple SMIL file to err, string everything together). There were some good moments (the M-brane visualization was good), but over-all felt like a lot of repetition, not a lot of insight. Personal, I would have liked more talk about supersymmetry, compactification, how string theory impacts the standard model, and also touching on competing theories, like loop quantum gravity. This is a perspective of someone somewhat familiar with the ideas, but seeking deeper understanding on a layman’s level.

• Wikipedia:
  • String theory
  • Superstring theory
  • M-theory
  • Quantum gravity
  • Loop quantum gravity
• Qgravity.org – a site on quantum gravity, physics and philosophy
• MIT’s Lisa Randall: Two Branes are Better Than One
• String Theory Acquires Rival In Loop Quantum Gravity
• Throwing Einstein for a Loop
• String Theory: An Evaluation [PDF] – Peter Woit’s criticism of string theory, see also Is String Theory Even Wrong? and various responses
• tloh on Superstring theory and Michio Kaku
  • Dr. Michio Kaku’s Speech on Cassini
  • Kaku on Sept 1997 Science Friday show
  • A Scientific Critique of the Accident Risks from the Cassini Space Mission

Trying to figure out making QuickTime Playlists right now. There’s a free program called QT Xlist which will play text lists, however one can’t navigate sections… There’s also a program called QT Playlist Maker, but it’s $15. It looks like it’s just generating SMIL, so I’m putting together something to do just that.

• QuickTime and SMIL
• Getting Started With SMIL
• The SMIL Tutorial
• Learning SMIL with a SMIL
• Playing Shoutcast or Icecast Streams in QuickTime

• TreoCentral: Hacked the Logo, Now Hacking the Rest – go go go
• Juan Cole: Bush Sneaks in and Out of Baghdad
• Well-Designed Weblogs
• Seagate Exec: Sub-$200 Terabyte Storage Two Years Off – so, maybe I don’t need to worry about more than 4 drives, I can just quadruple storage in two years by swapping my old drives out
• del.icio.us – Delicious is a social bookmarks manager; w/ REST API; brilliant (via veen, via waxy)
• Classical Madness – japanese classical music videogame
• MarrowSoft Xselerator XSLT IDE and Debugger
• NYTimes: Decoding the New Cues in Online Society
  

  Devon Lake, 25, a high school teacher, discovered that this fall when she was bombarded with requests from former students to accept them into her Friendster circle, which she uses to keep in touch with her friends from Burning Man, the annual primal gathering in the Nevada desert. The potential costs of putting one part of her network in contact with the other part were too high, so she rebuffed her students and cleaned up her profile by removing anything that could be interpreted as a reference to drugs. “I’m a young teacher, so drawing that line is already a careful balancing act,” Ms. Lake said. “It made me feel on my guard about what I posted to the site.”

• [this is dumb] – frickin awesome

One of my drives died on me yesterday (what a pain). However, this did make me stop putting off building that file server. So, I went ahead, caught up on research, and did the deed today. If you’re interested, you can compare what I ended up with and what I spec’d out back in February.

Qty	Component	Price
1	SuperMicro SC733T-450 (black)	$245
1	Panasonic 3.5″ FDD (black)	$7
1	SuperMicro SUPER X5DPA-TGM (MBD-X5DPA-TGM-O)	$191
1	Intel Xeon 2.4GHz (533MHz bus)	$165
1	Vantec CCK-7015 1U Heat Sink/Fan	$17
2	Crucial 256MB DDR PC2100 ECC	$134
1	LSI Logic MegaRAID SATA 150-6	$360
4	Western Digital 250GB SATA Caviar w/ 8MB cache (WD2500JD)	$972
1	APC Smart-UPS 700VA	$286

The final result, will either be about 700GiBs of RAID 5, or about 475GiBs of RAID 1 storage. Actual cost w/ shipping, tax, etc: $2,515; about $3.50/GiB or $5.30/GiB respectively.

The case was probably not the best idea for future expandability, but the Enermax I was looking at had been discontinued, and the SC942s were just way too expensive… Hmm, now that I’m looking, the SuperMicro SC742T-550 might have been a good idea for future epandability ($352 @ GGS). Well, not going to worry about it too much.

• Happy Thanksgiving – there doesn’t need to be a link does there? Actually, a friend has told me that The National Dog Show that follows the Macy’s Parade on NBC is a can’t miss. Like Best in Show, but… err, real
• Simon on Google, Microsoft and Tall Poppies – I know they’ve gone on tape (wasn’t it on Triumph of the Nerds) w/ the MS s/w in every home; maybe they’ve changed their line recently
• Feedster on what do w/ problem blogs like mine – actually, I wouldn’t spend too much effort on this special case. ie, in all my web travels over the last few months I can’t recall really a single blog that generates feeds and doesn’t have permalinks. That being said, caching in general might be a good idea. There is a lot of ‘ephemeral’ RSS, I’m thinking about news services and other channels. Also, many of the permalinks given in RSS feeds point to fragments within the home-page, which become invalid once it rolls over. Of course, Feedster is doing better than Google. It’s almost surprising that Google still doesn’t try to make any effort at all to track content to permalinks
• Neurotech Vendors Seek to Exploit Cortical Plasticity
• End-to-end is a BIG political statement
• vi Complete Key Binding List
• The End of RSS
• Cases of ‘living dead’ growing in India
• /. Google disc: Fortune Magazine On Google Growing Up, Google Blocks ‘Optimized’ Pages
• Latest map of the internet
• XML-RPC Progress – Harry Fueks has taken Simon’s IXR class to the next level
• MachL 3.8 desktop machine; expensive hardware in an ugly case (neat readouts though), w/ Apple ripped-off website design

Jason Nolan (PhD, Knowledge Media Design Institute, UToronto) gave a presentation on Journaling Communities for Scholars @ RCAT recently. Ahh, video online. Also interesting: KMDI – an institute in the School of Graduate Studies and is dedicated to research and graduate education in all aspects of knowledge media design (KMD). [yay referer logs]

Hmm, I still have yet to write/present on blogging in academia… or doing more fun exploratory tech (what I’ve done at work so far). (Technically, I’m in the ‘Center for Scholarly Technology’) Although something interesting did come up today… social software technology built into a student portal? That might be *very* interesting.

• Basic Survival Techniques for Incarceration
• Send an SMS from AIM (or iChat)
• Estimating the Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow
• Teen idol Jonathan Brandis dies at 27 – saw the coroner’s confirmation of suicide on the wire; sorta weird
• Hellboy Trailer – hmm, hopefully this won’t suck