Chenla: weblog

Naga For Beer Party

2014-06-12T00:00:00+07:00

We're throwing a party on Monday 16, June, 2014 ostensibly to let people know about StudyHall and our nascient Naga Shop that will help further cryptozoological studies in the Greater Mekong River Basin :) But actually this is just an excuse to get together, drink beer, show off our new office (still very much a work in progress), and see how people might be able to contribute to our menagerie of eductional and real research projects (it's just a shop folks). Did I mention the beer? See the map on our contact page if you don't where we're located. If you have any problems call Brad 010 628 234.

Hope to see you there.

We Are Large We Contain Multitudes

2014-04-09T00:00:00+07:00

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

– Walt Whitman

The full breadth of what we are working on is somewhat difficult to grok at times. This organizational chart shows all the different pieces of how Chenla and our commerical sister company Repozit I/O fit together should help. Some of the items in the chart haven't been publically released yet. All will be revealed in good time.

The chart is available as a pdf and a somewhat large png.

What a Difference a Month Makes

2014-03-31T00:00:00+07:00

Our Web server went down a month ago. Sorry about that. We're now back up, using Github Pages to host the site. Thanks Github!

Our new building is no longer the ghost (but not rat or coackroach) infested, decrepit shell that it was when we signed the lease. We've made an enormous amount of progress in the last six weeks as these photos will attest.

We have installed awnings on the side of the building as well as a fixed metal awning on the first floor and a rollout vinyl awning on the ground floor.

The first floor (American 2nd floor) is all but finished with the walls and ceiling patched up, cleaned and painted, and the floors sanded, the screws resunk, and stained and shellacked. We have also completely replaced the chaos of electricical wiring and the fuse box. We can now handle the load from all of the computers that we will be adding and nothing will short out.

We have also changed our original idea, and have swapped the office and conference/podcasting studio. Below is what will be the studio side.

And the side with the windows will become the office side. We can comfortably fit up to 12 desks into this space.

Heading downstairs, we have cut a new door that connects the downstairs to the staircase leading upstairs. Before, if you wanted to go upstairs you had to go out the front and down and alley to get to the entrance.

The toilet still needs some work, but looks much better already. The tile floor was replaced, the plumbing fixed and a new sink installed.

Behind the toilet is the server room. There isn't much to see, it's just a plain white room with a tile floor. We can fit up to four full height racks in here.

The awful cabinates and several walls were knocked out for the tutorial center, which will have enough round for five or six workstations which can comfortably seat both a tutor and a student together.

The last of the demolition was done here in the Naga Shop less than four days ago.

There was a large window between the Naga Shop and the Cafe dining area. This has been removed and replaced with a wooden counter. This is Ruben working on the wood for the counter.

The door has been removed going into the kitchen, the squat toilet turned into a pantry and a large window and pickup counter has replaced a lot of the wall. This is very much still a work in progress.

There is still a lot of work left to be done, but we've come a long long ways in the last six weeks.

Our New Building

2014-02-11T00:00:00+07:00

We are very pleased to announce that we have finally managed to lease a building here in Phnom Penh. We had been promised a building last year by persons who shall not be named. But the national elections and the uncertainty after the elections were contested put many things on permanent hold. So we made the decision to go ahead and rent a building ourselves.

The new location is #155 E0/E1 on Street 110, in Daun Penh in Phnom Penh. The location is very good. The building can be clearly seen from Nordodom Blvd. and is only a street over from our present office that is located in Brad's flat on Street 108.

As you can see from the next few shots, the ground floor will need a bit of work.

The left side will be a cafe, with a large kitchen in the back – the wall with the door will be largely knocked out and replaced with a counter.

The right side will need the most work. The half floor will be knocked out entirely and turned into our Naga General Supply shop.

Behind the shop, this forlorn looking area will be enlarged and become the studyhall's tutorial and scanning center.

Don't worry, the toilet will be completely rebuilt.

Behind the tutorial room, not pictured, will be our server room which will be large enough to hold four 19" racks.

There is also a very nice patio at the back of the building on the first floor.

The first floor, which we will be using as office space is in far better shape than the ground floor.

We got the keys about five days ago and are starting the long process of rennovation. The building will be the headquarters for Chenla and our sister for-profit company, Repozit as well as the location for our first Studyhall.

We'll be blogging our progress as things move along.

Douglas C. Engelbart (1925-2013) R.I.P.

2013-07-04T00:00:00+07:00

Doug Engelbart died on Tuesday at the age 88 from kidney failure at his home in Atherton, California. Engelbart is best known as the inventor of the mouse. Let's just get it out of the way for those who haven't seen it. Here is the YouTube video of Engelbart's famous Mother of all Demos:

But Engelbart's vision and contribution went far beyond the mouse. Dave Crocker said it best on the IETF mailing list:

Besides the considerable technical contributions of Doug's project at SRI, theirs was a group that did much to create the open and collaborative tone of the Internet that we've come to consider as automatic and natural, but were unusual in those days.

Engelbart's real goal was to augment human intelligence. Bret Victor has an excellent post that dispells many of the misconceptions of Engelbart's work.

You can find an archive of all of his papers at the Doug Engelbart Institute. There is a very good page at CIS 471 which has collected a bunch of images and links that you might be interested in.

Here's the obligatory link to his wikipedia article. And obituaries from NYT, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, Rueters and The Register.

Our very own BMF (Burr Metadata Framework) was largely inspired by several of Englart's papers. They are well worth the time spent reading them and we hope that his work will continue to be remembered and inspire others for many years to come. Thank you Doug Engelbart, we all owe you an enormous debt of gratitude.

Studyhall Presentations

2013-07-02T00:00:00+07:00

Just uploaded the Studyhall Slide Deck on our Presentations page. This will be the primary presentation that we will be using when pitching the Studyhall. This took a suprisingly large amount of work to put together. I hope the effort was worth it. We expect the Presentation will evolve over time, as we fine tune our pitch over time, so expect it to change from time to time. As always, feedback is welcome.

The CD3WD Project

2013-06-30T00:00:00+07:00

I'm nearly finished reading Annalee Newitz's Scatter, Adapt, and Remember. I will have more to say about her book when I'm finished, but I wanted to mention a the CD3WD project which she wrote about in the book. Newitz described CD3WD as something that could potentially be used as a primer to rebuild civilization after a collapse.

CD3WD stated mission is a little more down to earth. Their website says that CD3WD's purpose is to create "a free but high quality collection of practical How-To Technical Development Information - helping the 3rd world to help itself." But Newitz is correct, in many respects CD3WD could be used as a source for rebuilding after a collapse. The person behind CD3WD is Alex Weir, an expat Microsoft-stack software programmer, based in Botswana. He has obviously been trying to sell the project to the NGO community:

The International Community and International and local NGO's for some strange reason have zero or even negative interest in cd3wd - maybe they can see the writing on the wall - a dynamic and self-sufficient 3rd world which has democratically and peacefully shaken off its pro-Western and its anti-Western charlatan dictator-presidents will have little or no need for NGO's. This lack of interest and hostility is however regrettable, since their involvement could hasten their own departure.

I think a case could also be made for encouraging the adoption and use of OSS (Open Source Software) in developing countries, where vendor lock-in is used as a means of keeping whole countries dependent on multi-national corporations like Microsoft and Oracle.

Aside from that, Weir has put together an invaluable collection of material and is making it available for free via the Web, Bit Torrent, as well as on DVD and other physical media.

The danger is, that if he can't get NGO's and governments interested, the project could be lumped in with the people who are most interested in the collection at the moment; doomsday preppers, survivalists and the every man for himself crowd. That would be be a shame because the everything they stand is a complete opposite of what Weir is trying to achieve. Weir wants to build a better world, not give up hide in a bunker while everything falls apart around them.

I believe that part of the disinterest on the part of many NGO's is that many people working for NGO's are from developed countries. They are middle-class latte slurpers, with iPhones and 3G access to the Internet. It's difficult to get them to understand why such a collection was needed, because you can swipe your finger across your phone any time and just Google it.

The second problem, from my perspective, is that the collection is pretty much just a JBOF (just a bunch of files). There is little structure to the collection, and no context. A very large number of the documents only make sense in the context for the audience they were intended for. There are all sorts of files that describe methods for doing things like building with bamboo, but they are worthless in SE Asia because they are written so that people from Western countries can understand Asian building techniques. They are a terrible way of documenting those techniques for people who live there.

And that contexual mismatch will only grow over time. Weir has undertaken a task of heroic proportions, but it is only a first step. Plan CDDR is designed to take collections like this, and capture the context that is needed to make the collection useful irrespective of where it is used, and to remain useful for a very long time into the future.

Making Sense of Things

2013-06-23T00:00:00+07:00

The days since my last post, I've been trying to make sense of where to go next. I'm terrible at the way most people blog. This post is a perfect example of what I don't like about blogs. Lot's of pointless little posts that provide bit-sized knee-jerk reactions to things for the sole purpose of posting something.

That defeats the purpose of the concept of the Long Now by giving in to the Short Here. And we don't want that. But at the same time, in a world of exponential change, out of sight for a couple of weeks, isn't just out of mind, it's completely forgotten. So we need to strike some kind of balance between the two.

So instead of doing that, I'll start posting drafts of sections that will become part of Plan Cddr and the StudyHall Template. I'm not that far away from having a complete outline of Plan Cddr, which we will start publishing on http://chenla.org, which will be where we will put all of the standards, designs, software and content that will make up the body of work we've been talking about.

Once we have the outline in place, I won't have to worry so much about jumping about, because each post can point to the context of where it fits into the big picture in the outline. Otherwise, I might post one day about cisterns in toilets and the next about the future of the nation state and there will be no idea of how all of it is part of a coherent big picture. Context is everything folks. No context, no meaning.

Plan Cddr: Backup, Primer & Restore

2013-06-19T00:00:00+07:00

Just uploaded Plan Cddr: Backup, Primer & Restore. Plan Cddr is Chenla's Big Vision, that pulls together all the work we've done going back to 1997. The Burr Metadata Framework, was developed as the data structure for the Backup. The Saltmine Server software that we are developing will manage very long term archives and libraries encoded in BMF. And Studyhall Template provides a base unit for establishing educational programs, research and development communities to build a global, multi-lingual, distributed federated network of very long term archives and libraries.

We would love to hear a from you. Since comments on the site are still down, send email to Brad or Ruben.

Website Comments & Tags

2013-06-18T00:00:00+07:00

I've spent a fruitless day trying to get Disqus Comments and Tag links on the blog working. No joy.

So I've commented out both Comments and Tag links out until I can get this sorted out…