Wordpress 2

Hello! In addition to continued outrages in Russia and China, there’s another change going on that you should know about: ¡Oye, vato! is now running on Wordpress 2, just in time for the New Year!

What Are We Doing?

What are we doing becoming so cozy with China? How long can we continue to turn a blind eye to things like this, a new crackdown on China’s most liberal media, as reported in the International Herald Tribune? Here’s some more coverage by Guardian Unlimited.

Ukraine and Yuschenko Stand Firm on Gas

Forbes reports that Ukrainian President Viktor Yuschenko has rejected a Russian loan as a means of coping with impending hikes in prices by Russia’s state-controlled Gazprom. According to the article, Gazprom is forcing a 4-fold increase in prices upon the Ukraine. Others have speculated that this action comes as retribution for the defeat of the Kremlin’s candidate in Ukraine’s elections last year, in which Viktor Yuschenko overcame poisoning and election fraud to stymie the Kremlin’s undue influence in that nation.

Congratulations to Ukraine for refusing to become entangled with Russia by accepting the Gazprom loan.

The Return of Russian Despotism

This Washington Post article sums up the state of affairs in Russia. Key points include:

• Supression of free media outlets

• Forced nationalization of key economic sectors, such as the oil industry

• Punishment of neighboring countries using oil prices as a weapon

• Manipulation of the national legislature to make it subservient to the Kremlin

The net effect is a removal of most of the checks that originally existed to contain the power of the executive. All of this prompted resigning Kremlin economic adviser Andrei Illarionov to say that “[Russia] is no longer a democratic country. It is no longer a free country.”

Please also see this Freedom House press release concerning recently approved legislation to restrict the activities of Non-Government Organizations in Russia. Note that Freedom House has recently lowered Russia’s rating from “partly free” to “not free.”

Longing and Delight

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things — the beauty, the memory of our own past — are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. — C.S. Lewis

Performancing - What’s the License?

The folks over at Performancing are offering a pretty nifty Firefox extension that allows blogging integrated into the web browser. Here’s a screenshot. But what license is it released under? Is it open source so I won’t have to worry about it suddenly not being free anymore? If anybody knows, drop me a line.

Wikipedia: no muy autoritario

So, there’s all kinds of stink lately as a result of Wikipedia’s defamatory information debacle. Today, I got back a paper back in my Spanish Literature class. In that paper, I cited Wikipedia’s Spanish language article on the Ultraism movement in Spain in the early 20th Century. I also cited Wikipedia for some information on Jorge Luis Borges. My profesor wrote a comment referring to Wikipedia on my works cited page: “Cuidado con esta enciclopedia que es de entregas voluntarias. No es muy autoritaria.” (Caution with this encyclopedia, which is from voluntary submissions. It isn’t very authoritative). Of course, I know that already, but when you’re pressed for time it’s often the most convenient source. So my question is not, Should I find different sources? My answer to that is already “yes”; if I’m doing a research paper I’m never going to cite Wikipedia! (This paper was just a literary analysis.) My real question is, What can we do to make Wikipedia - or some similar project - factually reliable?

Over at j’s scratchpad, a blog by a news librarian over at Harvard, there is some convincing evidence that the majority of edits on Wikipedia come from registered users. The latest incremental reform attempting to make Wikipedia more dependable [is ???]. But that’s not enough. It doesn’t prevent the sort of defamatory comments that have gotten Wikipedia into trouble lately. Here are a few thoughts on what would be enough:

1. Create a fact-checking review team. These would be registered users charged with checking the validity of articles. These users would rate each other based on the accuracy of articles that have passed their inspection. Every article would show in a prominent location its fact-check rating, which is essentially a rating of the people who have reviewed the article. Because articles are frequently revised, readers would have the option of viewing a “certified version”, the version that the reviewers have approved. We do have to consider that Wikipedia sees 15,000 new articles a month. Odds are the fact-checkers would never in the near future get close to covering the entire encyclopedia, but it might lend additional credibility to the articles that are checked.
   Eventually, Wikipedia’s growth and modification rate may decrease as its topic coverage and article quality mature. This might allow the fact-checking teams to eventually cover a large proporcion of the articles.

2. Require an extensive bibliography for any article before it can be “certified” by the fact-checkers. Some articles currently include decent bibliographies, but many more do not. Additionally, there is little guarantee that the bibliographies are not simply padded. What I want to see is not just general bibliography entries, but specific citations. That means page numbers and text within quotes. That means some sort of a system of footnotes or in-line citations. This way, an article would be verifiable.
   I’m fortunate enough to have BYU’s Harold B. Lee Library just up the hill from me, but not everybody has access to such a research library. I imagine that there are a sufficient number of university students involved with Wikipedia that this isn’t an entirely unreasonable requirement. We have already discussed the point of the percentage of articles that can receive such detailed attention in #1.

I’m more or less a fan of the general idea of Wikipedia. A combination of these two and perhaps other “reforms” could improve the quality and reliability of Wikipedia without throwing out the speedy, wide-ranging coverage that its open editability provides.
Comments? Contradictions? It’s a very interesting debate.

Amigote: a blog identity crisis!

Ok, I’ve begun the process of developing my own theme for this blog. It’s ancestry goes directly to the c3ro theme, and basically it is exactly the same… for now! The name of my version of the theme is “Amigote” which as we all know is Spanish for “big jerk friend” (approx. translation). I figured, Hey, the name of my site is “¡Oye, vato!” for as-yet unexplained reasons, so why not make the name of the theme be “amigote” for similarly unexplained reasons?

Which leads me to a much needed digression: it’s time that “we” here at “¡Oye, vato!” suffer our first blog identity crisis! Everybody cheer!

The first problems are, What the heck does “¡Oye, vato!” mean? and ¿do you always have to write the upside down exclamation point? From the lovely website Pachuquismos we get this definition of ‘vato’:

Vato: Used instead of “homeboy”, “dude”, etc.

So pretty much this blog could be retitled en inglés, “Hey, Dude!” Except that’s not nearly as cool and was the name of a ridiculous TV show on Nickelodeon a million years ago (does anybody else remember that?)

Moving on (without addressing the exclamation point issue)…. “We” “staff member(s)” here at ¡Oye, vato! are realistic about the amount of exposure our astoundingly insightful commentary on world events and the state of software receives; so far, we know of one semi-regular visitor: The Shark. You know, the fellow who brought you such moving posts as Russian squirrel pack ‘kills dog’ and… Anyway, «the editorial board» here, while grateful for the consistent high quality of The Shark’s contributions to the ¡Oye, vato! community, acknowledges that a greater diversity of worldviews and a greater number of eyes looking for psycho news stories are both in order. For this purpose, we are now listed with Technorati in an effort to increase The Vato’s sphere of influence.

So, as we wrap up this identity crisis, let’s review:

1. always refer to the first person singular using the first person plural

And that’s pretty much it. Thanks for tuning in, and sorry if the sarcasm was a bit too thick. Good night!

Shanwei/Dongzhou Massacre

Please read and compare the Chinese state news agency’s report on the massacre to this one in the Epoch Times. As you can see, the official version of events is a bit watered down!

Additionally, there is a very good photo gallery by the Epoch Times. I’m surprised they were able to get these sorts of pictures of the villagers facing lines of soldiers.

Should we really be trading with this nation? We at least have reason to hesitate continuing our cozy trade relationship with the world’s largest totalitarian government.

What Happened to Open Debate? (More on Lieberman)

This article at the New York Times reveals an interesting perspective on Senator Lieberman’s position on the Iraq war:

[Senator Lieberman] said the two sides were making too much of his comments, and he argued that the overreactions reflected how politically polarized the debate over the war had become.
…
“The positive and negative reactions may have less to do with the substance of what I said than with the fact that a Democrat is saying it,” Mr. Lieberman said. “It reflects the terribly divisive state of our politics.”

The senator has a point. I made a big deal out of his seemingly pro-Iraq war comments in my recent post. I think my reaction and that of many others was guided at least partly by politically polarized, agenda oriented motives.

The general idea we can distill from all of this is that in the current state of things, there is little openness or even freedom of thought and expression for our nation’s leaders because partisans and special interests try to force them into one or the other ideological mold. Perhaps the most creative and effective solutions to our nation’s problems are being quashed in the contest of ideas that has become — instead of a fair fight in which the best ideas win — a war of attrition.

Date With Destiny

Here is my group’s film for the 2005 Oscars competition: Date With Destiny. [Note: Don't expect this to work any more!]

Firefox 1.5 Bursts Free? Sneaks Out

Firefox 1.5 has been released. For a list of the crazy new features, check here. I think that all the hype is waiting for the Firefox Flicks ad competition.

This release seems like a much more subtle event than the bold release of 1.0, for example. This is because when you open up the new version of the browser, all you notice (at first) is that some of the menus are rearranged, and the preferences window is horizontal instead of vertical. However, the things you don’t notice are more significant. Try, for example, integrated SVG support. Or XForms. Or the fast forward and back navigation. Or perhaps the expanded accessibility features. We shouldn’t fail to mention the new automatic updates, closing the only real gap between the security capabilities of Firefox and Internet Explorer.

One feature I’m not sure about is the “Clear Private Data” tools. This allows the user to clear all data such as browsing history, cookies, etc. that leave a trace of what they have been up to. This has some definite benefits, such as making it safer to use public kiosk computers. It just might also enable easier unauthorized or otherwise unwanted use.

And those are my thoughts.

Russian squirrel pack ‘kills dog’

Another sign that Russia’s welfare system has seen much better days. Read it here.

Thanks to Shark of The Shark’s Byte for the hilarious tipoff.

Another Call for Sanity

Another call for sanity has been issued by Jem Matzan of the Jem Report:

I’m getting desperate for a word processor made for writing — letters, articles, books, essays, and that sort of thing. I don’t want to design banners, fliers, brochures, or hand-outs. If I need to do those things, I’ll use a desktop publishing program like Scribus. I don’t need to draw in my document; I have The GIMP and Inkscape for drawing. Please, somebody do for OpenOffice.org what Firefox did for Mozilla, and cut down Writer into something that resembles its name. If people really need to do all of that extra stuff, maybe it should be in its own separate desktop publishing program instead of jammed into a word processor.

And another appreciated insight:

The uselessness of a meeting is directly proportional to the complexity of the PowerPoint presentation. If you want to quote me on that in the future, mark it down as Jem’s Law.

I don’t agree 100% with the ideas in this article, but thought it was interesting to see another recommendation to Firefox-ify OpenOffice.

MORE OpenOffice

There’s some more discussion over here and over here that resembles some of my thoughts on the development of the OpenOffice.org office suite (a replacement for Microsoft Office).
Once again, my take on it is that:

1. While each individual OO.o application should be pared down and allowed to have “extensions” like Firefox does, the applications should be kept together as a complete suite. Otherwise, individual applications could lose steam/critical mass;
2. OpenOffice should be ported to a standard toolkit such as GTK+ so it doesn’t look so ugly! That is to say, so that it has an interface that really blends with the rest of the desktop rather than using GUI hacks to almost blend in.

Perfidia?

And now she has a boyfriend! Salt in the wound, insult to injury, a slap in the face. But really, it’s not so bad. I hope she finds happiness. I don’t suppose I want to be around her, at all really. There’s a lot of pain tied up in my memories of her. So, may she find joy and peace, but may I never see her again!? That doesn’t seem right. Well, I’ll think about it.

Meanwhile, there are a lot of great things to do around here. Here’s tonight’s nighttime hike to Stewart Falls up by Sundance:

Along with the usual suspects, of course: All of my roommates with their dates. We got going a bit later than planned, so by the time we got up to the falls it was pretty much pitch black. That did have the great advantage of allowing us to see the beautiful, clear night sky as we ate Paul’s famous chili with some grilled-cheese sandwiches.

Tomorrow I’m supposed to be going to Salt Lake with the BYU Interpretation and Translation Training Club. We’re going to take a tour of the Church’s translation and interpretation facilities at the Conference Center. I plan on sleeping on the ride up!

Also, I did a long phonetic transcription of Bob Vila explaining in Spanish how to prepare for a hurricane. “Estamos en estado de alerta por un huracán….” I listened to that recording many more times than I really wanted to, but hey, it’s Bob! There are worse things.

Good night!

OpenOffice

I’d also like to say that in general OpenOffice.org is a pretty lame piece of software. is rather good but has quite a number of areas for improvement (sorry about the previous negative attitude ;-)

First off, does it even use a standard GUI toolkit? No. Why not? Because it’s legacy software: OO.o has a long history, dating back to its StarOffice days before coming under the auspices of Sun Microsystems. First order of business: move over to Qt or Gtk, both of which are ported onto every significant platform OO.o would want to be involved in.

Second: it’s huge and slow. The “Options” window is cluttered worse the the KDE Control Center (and that says quite a bit). Some of the components depend on Java. The “Draw” program can’t even import SVG files and never prints correctly. Because it doesn’t use a standard toolkit, it has issues with some Unicode characters, even when using a font that supports those characters. Usability and UI design also seem to be a low priority for the project (I know it’s not, but it appears so).

So what do I recommend? Since the likelihood of OpenOffice ever actually being ported to a standard GUI toolkit is essentially zero, I recommend that development effort be focused on bringing apps such as Gnumeric and Abiword up to speed with the featurefulness of OO.o.

My dream recommendation, given any amount of resources being made available, is that OO.o be ported to Gtk. Then, it would be restructured to be the Firefox of office software - a lean core functionality and a flexible “Extensions” mechanism. This would hopefully lower the barrier-to-entry for programmers sufficiently as to encourage wide participation by people interested in improving the office suite. The lean core could then be focused on and maintained more effectively than the massive bulk of the do-it-all office program.

Cute Girls

They look wonderful. They smell wonderful. They’re wonderful to hug. I’m a big fan of cute girls.

In other Ramblings… I love to spend time with people. Really, I love to. That’s why this first half of the semester is driving me crazy. I’m taking a First Block class that requires at least 10 hours of time in class each week. It’s made me so wildly short on time that I almost never get to spend time with friends, or even make many friends in the first place. I’ve decided that while yes, I do need to be busy and have things to do, I also need time to be a person. I need to be able to play a little bit and remind myself that there is a life to live! That I’m not in college for its own sake, but to be able to support myself and a family so I can live that life.

I’ve also decided lately: I don’t think Spanish Teaching is for me. Here are some of my reasons. First, I have a lot of really negative memories from my school experience growing up. I mean, I had some teachers who did some pretty crummy things that I didn’t know how to deal with when I was so young. They honestly were complicit in the production of the negative atmosphere upon which some of my most difficult times in life festered. I had a lot of teachers who were just plain bad teachers - only the teachers union seemed to be keeping them in place. Teachers with emotional issues that should have kept them from teaching. Those memories make it so school is not the #1 place I want to go back to.

Second, I love learning to speak Spanish, but I don’t love Spanish. On top of that, my Spanish skills really aren’t so wonderful. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve really come a long way and I’m proud of where I’m at considering the limits of my learning opportunities. However, I don’t think that my proficiency will ever get to the point it needs to be at to do justice to the subject and to the students who enroll in it. The main issue here, however, is that I don’t enjoy the subject itself enough.

Finally, I don’t want to be stressed out all the time about finances because I’m trying to survive on the meager salary of a teacher in America’s public schools. This reminds me of the talk Elder Dallin H. Oaks gave at the last General Conference of the Church. Describing the differences between the use of the priesthood authority in the Church versus in the home, he said, “Church callings are always temporary, but family relationships are permanent.” I believe that that can be extended to imply that because family relationships extend into eternity, whereas career/profession/employment is only a temporary situation during mortality, the good that I could do to society through my career is secondary to the good I will be able to do for my family by supporting them and being an emotionally-available father for them. I doubt I would be able to operate at top capacity if I was constantly fretting over finances.

So those are my latest thoughts. I also recently discovered that BYU has a “Computers and Language” minor that I could combine easily with a Linguistics major. Hmm… now to find myself one of those cute girls!

"That's a Promise!"

In a recent interview, KDE developer Zack Rusin made some bold and (from my point of view) much-welcomed promises about the future of the Linux Desktop as a result of the Plasma and (by implication) Appeal subprojects of KDE:

Plasma will blow you away. Nothing you’ve ever seen or will see in the coming years will come even close to what you’ll experience with Plasma. And that’s a promise.

Personally, I’m way excited about this. You know how you can use “Extensions” to add to or modify the functionality of Mozilla’s Firefox web browser? Well, one component of the Plasma project is to allow that sort of functionality, for your desktop. Apparently this function is already available in Mac OS X’s latest incarnation.

Photography and Computational Linguistics

***The albums aren’t working right now ***

Now you get to see a random image from my photo albums on the side of my blog page. I think its pretty cool! All of the pictures on there right now are from the trip that Paul, Mark, and I took to Britten’s house in San Diego during memorial day weekend.

Other news: I took my Spanish 321 final yesterday, heralding the end of Spring term and the beginning of a lazy summer. Yahoo!

Also, I have lately been working on a computer program called NetLing that is designed to do some analysis of word usage patterns in online mailing lists over time. Hopefully I can get some neat results out of it and perhaps get published someday(???)

Last thing: I’m trying to get blogs and photo galleries set up for everybody (my family, my roommates and friends here at school, etc.) Hopefully I’ll have things worked out soon. I’ll let you all know!

It Begins

Thus begins the new blog of Josh Hansen. Behold its awesomeness!