John Breslin – Eugene Eric Kim

Eight Random Facts

Published August 4, 2007 by Eugene Eric Kim

I’m breaking my longest blog silence in a while (over a month!), thanks to prodding from Mark Oehlert, who tagged me with the “Eight Random Facts” blog meme. I actually enjoy these memes; you learn a lot about folks that they might never otherwise reveal. Plus, it’s a good way to get people to post something. In Mark’s case, not only were all eight of his facts interesting, I was surprised to learn that he knows how to count to eight in Korean. How many non-Koreans know how to do that?! (MFV)

Here are the rules: (MFW)

Post these rules first, then give the facts. (MFX)
List eight random facts about yourself. (MFY)
Tag eight people, listing their names and linking to them, and letting them know they were tagged. (MFZ)

I’m actually using Mark’s modified rules, tagging seven people and leaving the eighth open to any and all of you. (MG0)

Here are my eight random facts: (MG1)

I sang in a Korean children’s choir when I was ten. My singing career included a “music video” of me singing a Korean folk song at the beach, which played on the local Korean television station every night for a week. Unbelievably, no agents ever contacted me, and my singing career ended soon thereafter. (MG2)
My body is on the March 1997 cover of Dr. Dobb’s Journal. They replaced my head with a computer monitor, leaving me with head-image problems that persist to this day. My boss at the time promised to serve as my agent, but once again, no one ever contacted me. I tried to fire him, but he claimed that I couldn’t fire someone I wasn’t paying. (That, of course, was libel. I was paying him on commission.) Thus ended my last foray into what we from Los Angeles call The Business. (MG3)
I discovered a bug in the very first computer program, Ada Lovelace‘s code for computing Bernoulli Numbers, which she published in 1843. I briefly mentioned my findings in the sidebar of an article I coauthored with Betty Alexandra Toole on Ada Lovelace in the May 1999 issue of Scientific American. Frankly, this alone should qualify me for my own Wikipedia page. Take into account my glorious accomplishments in the entertainment industry, and the fact that I don’t already have a page is even more mystifying. What’s up, Wikipedia community?! (MG4)
I am the proud owner of three bobblehead dolls: Steve Garvey (my favorite baseball player growing up), Tommy Lasorda (my favorite overweight Italian baseball manager), and Mr. T (everybody’s favorite mohawked, bejeweled tough guy). I’m looking to add James Worthy (my favorite basketball player growing up) and Bruce Lee (everybody’s favorite butt-kicker) to my collection, but I’m not sure they even exist. (MG5)
I have two non-family portraits hanging in my office: Doug Engelbart and Thomas Kuhn. (MG6)
My favorite book is Robert Penn Warren‘s All the King’s Men, which I read at least once a year. All of my computers are named after characters in the book. (MG7)
My secret passion: Watching cooking shows. I’m a bit of a cooking show snob. I think the shows on KQED are much better overall than the ones on Food Network. My favorites are Lida Bastianich, Rick Bayless, Bobby Flay, Jacques Pepin, and of course, Iron Chef. I was also a big fan of Julia Childs, the most famous alumnus of my junior high and high school. (MG8)
My two sisters (one older, one younger) are my favorite people in the world. My nephew, Elliott, is my favorite person under three feet tall, although he’s growing like a weed. (MG9)

As for folks I’m tagging, it was hard limiting myself to seven people. Please participate even if you weren’t tagged! Those I chose in the end are all great people doing brilliant work and writing interesting, insightful pieces. They all also have lower Technorati rankings than me. In some cases, it’s because they don’t blog that often, although each of them has posted at least once in the last two months. In other cases, it’s because they’re not as well known as they should be. If you’re not already following them, you should be. It will be well worth your while. (MGA)

WikiMania 2006, Day One

Published August 4, 2006 by Eugene Eric Kim

Day one is over. Brain is overloaded. Very tired. Attending conference during day/evening, then working late into night — bad. Law school dorms with no air conditioning in Cambridge in August — also bad. (KWO)

Still, much to share. And amazingly enough, I will — at least a bit. There’s something about this conference that actually gets me to blog, rather than simply promising I will. Besides, I’m going to set a new record for responsiveness to Tom Maddox, even if it is via blog. (KWP)

It is incredibly surreal to be back at my alma mater surrounded by post-college friends and colleagues. What makes it even more surreal is that folks from all facets of my professional life seem to be here, not just Wiki folks. I mentioned having my fingers in a lot of pies, right? Well, all those pies are unexpectedly well represented this weekend. It started yesterday when I discovered that Chris Messina and Tara Hunt were on the same flight to Boston, and culminated at dinner with Greg Elin (whom I first met at the FLOSS Usability Sprint, and who invited me to join him for dinner), Daniel Perry (a lawyer who’s been an important contributor to recent Identity Commons discussions), Tom Munnecke (first introduced to me by Jack Park when I was just starting Blue Oxen Associates), and Doc Searls (who needs no introduction). Also at the dinner: Ellen Miller, Micah Sifry, David Isenberg, Britt Blaser, and Yochai Benkler. Quite a contrast from last year, when I was hanging with grassroots Wiki peeps every night. I’m not complaining, though. The conversation was fascinating, even if we didn’t talk much about Wikis. (KWQ)

Keeping with this theme, I didn’t hear much about Wikis today, other than my interview with Ward Cunningham. I kept my questions pretty basic, as a lot of folks there had never heard him speak, but I managed to slip in a few probing questions for myself. I asked Ward about the evolution of Wiki culture, and I specifically mentioned the culture of anonymity that he strongly encouraged in the early days, but that seems mostly absent in today’s Wikis. Ward seemed resignedly ambivalent. I asked him about what makes a Wiki a Wiki, and he was decidedly agnostic in his response: anything that facilitates a permissive spirit and mode of collaboration. I’m not sure whether he was being political or whether he truly feels this way. My guess is a bit of both, but I’ll press him on this if I get a chance later this weekend. (KWR)

I showed up late to Larry Lessig‘s keynote, but I was unconcerned, as I had heard him give his Free Culture speech before. It’s excellent, but he recycles it often. Sure enough, he was doing the same speech, and I started tuning out. Fortunately, my brain was paying partial attention, or I would have missed what may end up being the most intriguing development of the conference. (KWS)

Larry started talking about the interoperability of licenses, and how it was silly that the FDL and Creative Commons BY-SA licenses could not be relicensed interchangeably, even though the two licenses were equivalent in spirit and intent. He then proposed an interoperability clause as well as a neutral organization whose purpose would be to classify equivalent licenses. His talk was followed by a really good panel discussion between him and Eben Moglen. This stuff is really complicated and important, but it looks like Larry and Eben are serious about working together towards a common solution. Apparently, Jimbo Wales deserves a lot of credit for getting these two to cooperate. Did I mention that I love this community? (KWT)

Quick hits: (KWU)

I shared a flight and T ride here with Chris Messina aned Tara Hunt. (Chris was presenting on Bar Camp.) Chris extolled the virtues of Voodoo Pad, which apparently has autolinking features a la my Markup Free Auto Linking Wiki idea. (KWV)
Was excited to see two of my roommates from last year: Kurt Jansson, a German doctoral student and president of the German chapter of Wikimedia Foundation, and Juan David Ruiz, a Chilean lawyer. (KWW)
Saw Erik Zachte in the morning, who does awesome Wikipedia work. Erik immediately told me about two cool projects I had never heard of: FON and Wikimapia. (KWX)
Caught up with Rory O’Connor after my session with Ward. Rory’s a filmmaker who came to last year’s Wikimania to make a documentary on Wikipedia. What I didn’t know was that he was so inspired by the proceedings, he decided to release all 13 hours of his footage under a Creative Commons license to encourage folks to mix their own documentaries from the event. Check it out, and mix away! There’s some interview footage of me somewhere in there, and I make a cameo in Rory’s 11-minute rough cut, in the background of Jimbo’s interviews yukking it up with John Breslin. (KWY)
Somehow, I got recruited by multiple Wikipedians to help with the lightning talks due to my process expertise. My expert advice: “Move those chairs into a circle, and be firm with the time limit.” Yes folks, this is why I get paid the big bucks. (KWZ)
Briefly got a chance to chat with Tim Starling about the OpenID integration in Mediawiki. Tim explained that they’re going to unify the user databases across all the different Wikimedia properties. This was further validation that Yoke‘s identity proxy approach is useful. Of course, one of these days, I’m going to have to actually write down what that approach is, so that I can convince people of its utility. (KX0)

Fighting WikiSpam: Eaton and Shared Blacklists

Published October 20, 2005 by Eugene Eric Kim

WikiSym 2005 was awesome. Massive props to Dirk Riehle and the program committee for throwing an outstanding event and drawing tons of great, great people. With Wikimania last August and WikiSym this past week, the Wiki community is really starting to gel. And it’s about time. Can you believe Wikis are 10 years old? (JXD)

Now the bad news: I walked away with some action items. How do I get myself into these messes?! (JXE)

The first action item can be traced back to an ad hoc meeting that happened at Wikimania regarding WikiSpam. On August 6, a group of Wiki developers — me (PurpleWiki), Alex Schroeder (OddMuse), Brion Vibber (Mediawiki), Thomas Waldmann (MoinMoin), Sven Dowideit (TWiki), Janne Jalkanen (JSPWiki) — along with John Breslin and Jochen Topf, got together to discuss ways we could collaborate on fighting WikiSpam. Our goal was to identify the simplest possible first step and not to get mired in process discussions. (JXF)

Since all of us were already maintaining URL blacklists, we decided to merge them and host it as a Sourceforge project. We agreed on a standard format (which I’ll document and post soon), and we agreed to send our respective lists to Alex, who already has scripts to slice, dice, and merge. (JXG)

One of my action items then was to create the Sourceforge project. I did that immediately, but for some reason, the project was rejected. Thus began a month-long go-around with Sourceforge support where I tried to discover why they had rejected the proposal. In the end, the project was approved, and I never got an answer as to why it was rejected in the first place. At that point, I was mired in other work, and so I never followed up. (JXH)

WikiSym was the kick in the butt I needed to follow-up. On Sunday, Sunir Shah hosted an antispam workshop, which about 40 people attended. First, Sunir reviewed techniques (many of which are listed at MeatBall:WikiSpam). Then we broke out. (JXI)

In my breakout, I described what we had agreed on at Wikimania. Then Peter Kaminski described a very cute idea he had for making it easy to fight WikiSpam. In a nutshell, Peter suggested we write a simple drop-in replacement CGI wrapper that would filter a POST payload for spam and call the real CGI script — be it a Wiki, a blog, or anything else — if the payload were spam-free. Such a wrapper would enable users to install spam-protection for any CGI script without having to write a single line of code and without having to do any complex configuration. It wouldn’t require any special access to your web server, since it would just be a CGI script. And you could easily add other spam-fighting measures, such as throttling and IP blacklists. (JXJ)

I thought it was a brilliant idea. So Peter and I sat down afterwards and whipped it up. Took about an hour. It’s called Eaton, it works, and it’s Public Domain. Peter Kaminski has already blogged about it, and there’s some important commentary there from Jay Allen, the creator of MT-Blacklist. (JXK)

It’s a proof of concept, and it won’t scale. It can and should be improved, and I’d encourage folks to do so. Nevertheless, it’s pretty cool. Bravo to Peter for a very clever idea. (JXL)

By the way, the first person to figure out the origins of the name “Eaton” wins a cookie. (JXM)

Celebrating German Culture

Published August 4, 2005 by Eugene Eric Kim

(JM5)

Enjoying a brew at Restaurant “Haus Wertheym” in Frankfurt am Main. Photo is courtesy of John Breslin, who rescued me from tourism hell by recommending this restaurant for lunch. Also see John’s picture and comments of a group of us (me not pictured) at our prelunch discussion. I accidentally came out of the closet and revealed myself as an idealist, much to the amusement of Ward Cunningham. Countries represented in that picture: Canada (Ray), China / France (Feng), the Netherlands (Andre), U.S. (Ward). (JM6)