Author Archives: Karl

9/11 Commission Report

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The 9/11 Commission Report came out yesterday and a few questions are on everyone’s mind. Let me try and summarize the best I can (and feel free to correct me folks):

Who is to blame?

The report makes clear that no single person is to blame. It was a collective failure. I’m reminded of the Rolling Stones in Sympathy for the Devil: “I shouted out, Who killed the kennedys? When after all, It was you and me.”

Who will be held accountable?

That remains to be seen. Because blame is so far spread, I doubt there will be any single person.

Are we safe?

The immediate response to 9/11 ad-hoc since we were unprepared. Many more could have lost their lives if not for the heroes doing emergency response: Police, Fire, and EMTs in New York and Washington D.C.. The long term policies of this administration in response have been inadequate and have not made us safe. In some respects it has made things worst.

What about the reports recommendations?

It remains to be seen if they will get implemented or politicized.

Now go read it for yourself and determine what you think about it:

The 9/11 Commission posted the major chapters as a set of downloadable PDFs.

PDFHacks took those and broke them down into bookmarkable sections.

Jason Kottke posted an HTML version of the Executive Summary (very easy to read).

Apple’s iTunes has posted audio testimony from the hearings for free.

Boing Boing has been the clearing house to find these.

John Kerry released a statement that you should read after the report.

The NYTimes has an section devoted to analysis and reactions to it.

Oliver Willis points out some key recommendations in it.

For more reaction, check out the Feedster’s DNC Webloggers Aggregator.

Unix’s Founding Fathers

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Almost everything we do rests on the shoulders of others. Economist.com: profies Dennis Rictchie, who invented C and helped produce the earliest version of Unix:

Because computers were rare at the time, people did not have them on their desks, but rather went to the room, one side of which was covered with whiteboards, and sat down at a random computer to work. The technical hub of the system became the social hub.

It is that interplay between the technical and the social that gives both C and Unix their legendary status. Programmers love them because they are powerful, and they are powerful because programmers love them. David Gelernter, a computer scientist at Yale, perhaps put it best when he said, ?Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defence against complexity.? Dr Ritchie’s creations are indeed beautiful examples of that most modern of art forms.

Economist.com: Unix’s founding fathers

“A dozen things I think I know about working in groups.”

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Clay Shirky wrote a piece back in December of 2002 that should be of interest to anyone working as part of a team:

First, the bad news. Working in groups is not like baking a pie — there is no recipe for getting it right every time. Groups are fantastically complex entities, and groups will sometimes fail no matter what you do.

The good news is that there are a number of things you can do to improve the odds of success. The literature is too large to summarize in any comprehensive way, but here are a dozen things I think I know about working in groups that may help you get more out of group work while you are here. Some of them are things you can do to prepare for group work, some of them are things the group can do together at the outset, and some of them are ongoing habits.

They are:

1. Embrace ego.
2. Use the group for having ideas, not just ratifying them.
3. Beware premature optimization.
4. Structure is not tyranny.
5. Decide how to decide.
6. Settle on social software.
7. Get it in writing.
8. Match roles and goals.
9. Talk about the relationship.
10. Accept inequality.
11. There is no substitute for time.
12. Have a drink. You’ve earned it.

Clay Shirky, December 2002

Go read the whole thing.