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#i finally got around to installing a french keyboard for this
katabay · 1 year
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monsieur. you are not polite.
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The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas (trans. Pevear)
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ghoul-haunted · 1 year
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finally got around to installing a french keyboard onto my ipad AND spent about ten minutes figuring out which fonts I have include accents, now we can make comics :)
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rottenbrainstuff · 1 year
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The saga of getting my new piece of shit computer up and running continues.
I was wondering why there were two seemingly identical listings for the same model of iMac on the website I bought it from and now I know why: one was the regular one, and one came with a French keyboard. Guess how I found this out! Technically this is my fault for not questioning more what the difference was between the listings, but in my defence, the only mention that the keyboard was French was in a tiny fine print duplicate spec list at the bottom of the page, not even the main spec list that was in the main listing. Guess that explains why this piece of shit arrived from a Quebec warehouse and not the warehouse closest to me.
It’s ok, I will just use the keyboard from my old computer, but I can’t pair it yet because I still haven’t got the files off.
I haven’t got the files off yet because like a total dumbass, I ordered the completely wrong hookup cable. I just ordered the right cable and it should be arriving soon and then I can finally throw this piece of shit off my balcony.
In other news I had a bit of a panic attack when I discovered I could not write to one of my external hard drives from the new computer, then the dusty neuron connections kicked in and I remembered that I stupidly initially formatted it in a format my computer couldn’t read, and that the old computer actually had software installed to make it read it. Since I don’t want to fuck around with that anymore, I’m just going to reformat the damned thing into the format it should have had from the beginning, but first I need to transfer almost 2 terrabytes of shit off it.
I definitely can’t copy all that to this new piece of shit Mac, with its tiny goddamned hard drive! I am going to have to transfer it all to a different external hard drive, format the original external hard drive, then copy it alllll back.
I am REALLY hating computers right now.
On the plus side, I have finally completed switching to a different VPN that will actually work properly, which was the whole initial catalyst for me having to get a new computer anyways. (New vpn needed a newer OS, I tried to update my old piece of shit, bricked it, then needed to buy a new piece of shit)
Lame as hell.
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Fucks not Found
Ghosts
Summary: You hack, that's what you do. Dying to do so freely, wasn't what you had expected. Meeting the weirdest fucking squad; losing the best part of you; falling for a thief : was not planned.
Pairing : Four/Billy (Ben Hardy) - You
A/N: The story goes through the all movie, so I suggest you watch it before reading.
I don't own any characters other than Eight.
English is not my native language, I'm trying to get better at it, please be indulgent.
Tried my best to match Ryan Reynold's level of sass aha
Ch1 Ghosts | Ch2 Florence | Ch3 A Matter of Seconds | Ch4 I need a Backdoor | Ch5 Die Hard | Ch6 White Flag | Ch7 Haunt the Living | Ch8 One, but not done [end]
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This is how you die.
"So you're the one who hacked the wrong guy" You swiftly turn around gasping at the sudden voice in your apartment
"Depends, you’re his hitman?" You were ready to run even if it means jumping by the window.
"Nooo, I'm an angel.” You snort at his sarcasm, unknown to you at this moment that he was full of it.
"Wanna disappear?" he asked taking a seat at the kitchen table eyeing your bags at the door.
"In a body bag? Slowly you make your way to the knives, just in case.
"You are a funny one, aren't you? I know the man you stole from, you won't get far until he got you. But, he emphasized, if you’re willing to do what's right.."
"I've already done my part for the flag." Assuming he was American by the way he talked.
"I'm not talking about shitty drug dealers. But evil war-lovers, genocide perpetrators, that kind of shitty so-called human. Those ones that are above the laws with governments' balls in their hands, ready to squish them.”
"That's gross" your brother appeared from the adjacent room. You let your mind consider the stranger’s offer as soon as you look at your confused brother, knowing he was in danger because of you.
“You two look at lot alike.” The guy leaned in, screwing his eyes at you both.
“We’re twin dumbass” your brother answered glancing at you wondering.
“What’s the deal?” you asked considering the offer
The guy smirked, “Well, to be short you die, and then you take down evil motherfuckers without governments’ backlash on you.” He tapped his fingers against the Formica table.
It took 5 minutes.
"One condition, my brother comes to!"
"What's he good at?" he crossed his arms.
"I can drive…Hold on what? Die? Who the fuck are you!?”
"Already too many questions” he rolled his eyes
"He's a hell of a driver, it got him under surveillance when he got chased by 6 police cars after an illegal race back in the States."
"So they caught up Muttley” the guy clucked his tongue
“Hey!”  
"No, you interfered almost ashamed, I told him to stop the car...I got motion sickness."
The guy erupted in laughter, you two watching him unamused.
_
“I’m more like Peter Perfect.”  Your brother mumbled as the guy left.
You look by the window discreetly, catching a glimpse of the guy mingling in the crowd. “You’re Muttley bro.”
A week later you got a text. The guy who called himself One had planned your fake death. A random trek in Italy’s mountains, an assumed fatal fall, no bodies recovered.
It was never supposed to be your life. But we all know nothing happens as it should.
Papà went to fight a war and disappeared, you were forced to move in America when you were 6.
Mammà never cope the loss of her motherland and husband. She died of a belated broken heart syndrome when you were 16. 
Both you and your brother were placed in a host family. It wasn’t a crappy family like it’s always the case in some tv show, they were nice and wealthy. The father was a tech engineer, somehow you took interest in his work and start learning to code, soon reading about hackers: white hats; black hats; “We are Legion”, you were hooked and skilled in a matter of time.
When you turned major though, things turned difficult, the host family had to let you go and Internal Affairs of your state caught you looking in their network. Which led to you working as a C.I for them, it was that or prison. Not thrilled by the idea but obliged to cooperate was your new motto.
Your brother had some job here and there but nothing steady, so money from the IA was welcome.
After a year and a half, I.A ditched you, it was rather good news in a way, they’ve erased your past mistakes but said they’d keep a distant eye on you.
So you moved on from your shithole that was the 1 bedroom apartment you and your brother shared and went to your parents’ hometown in Italy. Your brother was reluctant at first as he couldn’t even say hello in Italian, you taught him as your mamma had done it with you but he wasn’t that interested.
Working with people was not your forte, you were too bossy, so you got fired ... plenty of times: from a coffee shop, a rental bike shop and a tourist city tour bus thingy. So you started doing what you were good at, hacking for money, it went well for a few years, never being too greedy - until you hacked the wrong person and got in trouble.
That's how you became a Ghost and ended up in the middle of the California Desert.
_
One had built a squad. No names, only numbers to identify each other. Not calling your brother by his name was a challenge, same for him.
There were 7 of you.
One, the “boss”, a mysterious sassy billionaire who decided to fund his own strike team.
Two, a French blonde woman, pretty cold, a spy apparently
Three, a crazy hitman who couldn’t shut up
Four, a young parkour master and reformed thief
Five, a Doctor, but you heard she was actually working at a Dentist
Six, your brother, the annoying driver.
And then Eight, you, the Black Hat somehow becoming a hacktivist.
Why not Seven? Long story short, it was one more condition you’d submitted to One.
_
_SICILY
"Your focus determines your reality.”
“Oh for fuck's sake One, quit your Jedi bullshit!” you loosed your temper typing on your keyboard angrily. An entire week, an ENTIRE WEEK quoting Star Wars!
Four and Five laughed in the comm. One braced himself on the other end of the line. Three cut the heavy silence.
“Eight, Chiquita please stop yelling”
“I’m not a Chiquita stop saying that!”
“Ok ok chi…Eight, damn you’re stressful” 
“God, why do I have to team you up!!” One facepalm
“Now what?” Five asked
Radio silence
“Oh so now no one’s talking! What are you, 4?” One angrily called out to you 2.
“Yeah, uh high, literally.” Four answered One, you snorted.
“No ..  damn not you!”
“You called me Mate!” Four said offended
“No, shush – Eight are you done with the system?” he was about to lose it.
“I’ve been done with it the second Three called me Chiquita!” you crossed your arms in front of your laptop.
“Hey ..” “We’re not talking about that again!” One cut Three
“Can we get going now?” Two interfered, you heard her bike roaring.
“Finally, some sensed words.” One said wrapping it up.
Four entered the place you’d hacked the system of. Six and Two were not far in case of trouble.
“Four, the hard drive is in the main office. Second floor.” One enunciated, you followed Fours progression with the security cameras.
It was enlivening, stressful, but oh so exciting. When you worked with I.A you were never there when they’d go down in action, it was nothing but boring data researched and dealer’s MacBook.
“Freeze Four, guards coming east.” Switching cams you gave him a safe path.
“Ok, you’re clear. Now to your left, third door then turn right.”
Four got his hands on the hard drive containing all you needed to know about the next target.
“Well done.” One congratulated the team
“Thanks, thanks, It helps to have a sexy voice guiding you” Four chuckled, you blushed, sexy voice? is that even possible?
“Great, kid. Don’t get cocky.”
You rolled your eyes at the endless use of Star Wars' quotes.
“Hum that’s my sister, remember?” Six growled tightening the wheel
“Luke grab Solo, meet up in 15minutes at the hotel. Everyone move!” One instructed you smiled at the thought of being Leïa. Gosh, you were as much of a nerd as One.
Climbing down the jeep Three had rented, you laughed seeing your brother holding Four in an arm lock for a few seconds anyway, Four reversed the lock, pining your brother’s arms behind himself.
You passed by them “Easy with my twin please.” Four wasn’t releasing his hold so you stopped, turning back you lift an eyebrow at Four insisting he let him go.
“Oh!” he lifted his hands in defence taking a step back.
Grabbing your brother by the sleeves as he was about to jump on Four “Come on piccino” you made your way in the hotel laughing.
Your first big mission started a few weeks after, everyone gathered in The Haunted House as One called it, an old bunker, cheesy name for an HQ.
“You don’t get it, I need a CAR!”
“That’s a car, Six.” Three argued back.
“No that’s a heap, that thing won’t get us through the paved road of Italy, believe me.”
Four and Five were amused by the situation, Three had rent a truck and an old Volvo for this mission.
“Alright, shut up, we’ll get another car!” One declared, Six flicked to Three.
One resumed the mission’s details. Giving everyone their own missions. A simple mission, retrieve a lawyer’s smartphone.
In the midst of it, your hand flew to your brother’s head next to you. The smacked resonating between the walls of the unfinished bunker.
“Why ..why’d you hit him?” One asked confused, your brother was rubbing the back of his head frowning at you.
“Cain’s instinct.” You replied wriggling your fingers for him to continue. Four snorted, Six nudged him in the ribs.
In a few months, you had learned a lot from this weird squad. Learning to shoot was an obligation, Three was insane but a good teacher.
You’d asked Four to teach you some parkour in case of a chase. Six and Four became close friends in a matter of time. Five was nice, but you were never one to be good at making friends. Two was not a big talker and frankly, she scared you a little.
So you spend your free time hacking and reading, on the hammock installed between a dismantle plane and a dead tree. Not far from there you could hear Four skating in the empty pool and three at the makeshift shooting range.
Suddenly,
“EIGHT!”
Groaning you closed your book “WHAT!?
Your voice boomed against the caravan and lost itself in the desert, but you still hoped Four had heard. It was his thing, screaming your name instead of coming to you directly. At his silence, you wriggle out the hammock and strode to the pool.
“What’d you want skater boy?”
He was lying in the pool his board by his side. “Four?” you made your way to the ladder, “hey” you gently nudge him with your foot but he didn’t move.
“Four? you called out worried, “shit” knees hitting the vinyl liner checking if he was breathing, he wasn’t.
“Hey wake up, seriously dude don’t make me do CPR on you, I suck at it!” suddenly laughter erupted in your ears. Six appearing on the edge, Four chucked on the floor.
“Pranking you..he tried to breathe in, is always the best sis!” Six laughed even harder at your confused face. Still kneeling at Four’s side, he was looking at you laughing, until he wasn’t, catching a glimpse of worry melting with anger in your eyes.
Punching his left shoulder, you hurried out the pool. He stayed on the floor watching you go.
“Don’t make me do CPR I suck at it!” your brother was still laughing his brain's out.
_
“What was that?”
Four leaned on the dead tree near your head, his shadow offering some shade.
“A real bad joke?”
“No I mean, why’d you hit me?”
Sighing you clasped your book closed for the second time today “you really got me worried, happy?”
“No, you propped up on your elbow at his answer craning your head to him, I didn’t mean to scare you.” His warm hand slide in your hair at the base of your neck, he leaned in, letting you enough time to push him away if you wanted.
"Sorry" he whispered, his lips pressing in your temple gently, warmly for a few seconds. Catching yourself leaning in you almost fell off the swinging' hammock as he released his hold, he grinned and left not saying anything more.
"What the hell Four!!" you yelled at him, an ounce of laughter in your voice, a blush creeping into your cheeks, his own laughter filling the desert's silence.
FLORENCE
A/N: don't forget to double tap if you liked it. 🙏
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kemetic-dreams · 5 years
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Ibrahima & Abdoulaye Barry Written by Deborah BachAudio by Sara Lerner
How a new alphabet is helping an ancient people write its own future
When they were 10 and 14, brothers Abdoulaye and Ibrahima Barry set out to invent an alphabet for their native language, Fulfulde, which had been spoken by millions of people for centuries but never had its own writing system. While their friends were out playing in the neighborhood, Ibrahima, the older brother, and Abdoulaye would shut themselves in their room in the family’s house in Nzérékoré, Guinea, close their eyes and draw shapes on paper.
When one of them called stop they’d open their eyes, choose the shapes they liked and decide what sound of the language they matched best. Before long, they’d created a writing system that eventually became known as ADLaM.
The brothers couldn’t have known the challenges that lay ahead. They couldn’t have imagined the decades-long journey to bring their writing system into widespread use, one that would eventually lead them to Microsoft. They wouldn’t have dreamed that the script they invented would change lives and open the door to literacy for millions of people around the world.
They didn’t know any of that back in 1989. They were just two kids with a naïve sense of purpose.
“We just wanted people to be able to write correctly in their own language, but we didn’t know what that meant. We didn’t know how much work it would be,” said Abdoulaye Barry, now 39 and living in Portland, Oregon.
“If we knew everything we would have to go through, I don’t think we would have done it.”
ADLaM is an acronym that translates to 'the alphabet that will prevent a people from being lost.'
A new writing system takes shape
The Fulbhe, or Fulani, people were originally nomadic pastoralists who dispersed across West Africa, settling in countries stretching from Sudan to Senegal and along the coast of the Red Sea. More than 40 million people speak Fulfulde — some estimates put the number at between 50 and 60 million — in around 20 African countries. But the Fulbhe people never developed a script for their language, instead using Arabic and sometimes Latin characters to write in their native tongue, also known as Fulani, Pular and Fula. Many sounds in Fulfulde can’t be represented by either alphabet, so Fulfulde speakers improvised as they wrote, with varying results that often led to muddled communications.
The Barry brothers’ father, Isshaga Barry, who knew Arabic, would decipher letters for friends and family who brought them to the house. When he was busy or tired, young Abdoulaye and Ibrahima would help out.
“They were very hard to read, those letters,” Abdoulaye recalled. “People would use the most approximate Arabic sound to represent a sound that doesn’t exist in Arabic. You had to be somebody who knows how to read Arabic letters well and also knows the Fulfulde language to be able to decipher those letters.”
Abdoulaye asked his father why their people didn’t have their own writing system. Isshaga replied that the only alphabet they had was Arabic, and Abdoulaye promised to create one for Fulfulde.
“At a basic level, that’s how the whole idea of ADLaM started,” Abdoulaye said. “We saw that there was a need for something and we thought maybe we could fix it.”
The brothers developed an alphabet with 28 letters and 10 numerals written right to left, later adding six more letters for other African languages and borrowed words. They first taught it to their younger sister, then began teaching people at local markets, asking each student to teach at least three more people. They transcribed books and produced their own handwritten books and pamphlets in ADLaM, focusing on practical topics such as infant care and water filtration.
While attending university in Conakry, Guinea’s capital city, the brothers started a group called Winden Jangen — Fulfulde for “writing and reading” — and continued developing ADLaM. Abdoulaye left Guinea in 2003, moving to Portland with his wife and studying finance. Ibrahima stayed behind, completing a civil engineering degree, and continued working on ADLaM. He wrote more books and started a newspaper, translating news stories from the radio and television from French to Fulfulde. Isshaga, a shopkeeper, photocopied the newspapers and Ibrahima handed them out to Fulbhe people, who were so grateful they sometimes wept.
But not everyone was pleased by the brothers’ work. Some objected to their efforts to spread ADLaM, saying Fulbhe people should learn French, English or Arabic instead. In 2002, military officers raided a Winden Jangen meeting, arrested Ibrahima and imprisoned him for three months. He was not charged with anything or ever told why he was arrested, Abdoulaye said. Undeterred, Ibrahima moved to Portland in 2007 and continued writing books while studying civil engineering and mathematics.
ADLaM, meanwhile, was spreading beyond Guinea. A palm oil dealer, a woman the brothers’ mother knew, was teaching ADLaM to people in Senegal, Gambia and Sierra Leone. A man from Senegal told Ibrahima that after learning ADLaM, he felt so strongly about the need to share what he’d learned that he left his auto repair business behind and went to Nigeria and Ghana to teach others.
“He said, ‘This is changing people’s lives,’” said Ibrahima, now 43. “We realized this is something people want.”  
ADLaM comes online
The brothers also understood that to fully tap ADLaM’s potential, they needed to get it onto computers. They made inquiries about getting ADLaM encoded in Unicode, the global computing industry standard for text, but got no response. After working and saving for close to a year, the brothers had enough money to hire a Seattle company to create a keyboard and font for ADLaM. Since their script wasn’t supported by Unicode, they layered it on top of the Arabic alphabet. But without the encoding, any text they typed just came through as random groupings of Arabic letters unless the recipients had the font installed on their computers.
Following that setback, Ibrahima made a fateful decision. Wanting to refine the letters the Seattle font designer developed, which he wasn’t happy with, he enrolled in a calligraphy class at Portland Community College. The instructor, Rebecca Wild, asked students at the start of each course why they were taking her class. Some needed an art credit; others wanted to decorate cakes or become tattoo artists. The explanation from the quiet African man with the French accent stunned Wild.
“It was mind-blowing when I heard the story of why he was doing this,” said Wild, who lives in Port Townsend, Washington. “It’s so remarkable. I think they deserve a Nobel Peace Prize for what they’re doing. What a difference they’ve made on this planet, and they’re these two humble brothers.”
Wild was struck by Ibrahima’s focus and assiduousness in class. “He was always a star student,” she said. “He had this skill set and unending patience. He worked and worked and worked in class on the assignments, but at the same time, he was taking all this stuff he was learning in class back to ADLaM.”
Wild helped Ibrahima get a scholarship to a calligraphy conference at Reed College in Portland, where he met Randall Hasson, a calligraphy artist and painter. Hasson was seated at a table one afternoon, giving a lettering demonstration with another instructor, and Ibrahima came over. A book about African alphabets rested on the table. Ibrahima picked it up, commented that the scripts in the book weren’t the only African alphabets and offhandedly mentioned that he and his brother had invented an alphabet.
Hasson, who has extensively researched ancient alphabets, assumed Ibrahima meant that he and his brother had somehow modified an alphabet.
“I said, ‘You mean you adapted an alphabet?’” Hasson recalled. “I had to ask him three times to be sure he had actually invented one.”
After hearing Ibrahima’s story, Hasson suggested teaming up for a talk on ADLaM at a calligraphy conference in Colorado the following year. The audience sat rapt as Hasson told Ibrahima’s story, giving him a standing ovation as he walked to the stage. During a break earlier in the day, Ibrahima asked Hasson to come and meet a few people. They were four Fulbhe men who had driven almost 1,800 miles from New York just to hear Ibrahima’s talk, hoping it would finally help get ADLaM the connections they sought.
Hasson was so moved after speaking with them that he walked away, sat down in an empty stairwell and cried.
“At that moment,” he said, “I began to understand how important this talk was to these people.”
Ibrahima made connections at the conference that got him introduced to Michael Everson, one of the editors of the Unicode Standard. It was the break the brothers needed. With help from Everson, Ibrahima and Abdoulaye put together a proposal for ADLaM to be added to Unicode.
Andrew Glass is a senior program manager at Microsoft who works on font and keyboard technology and provides expertise to the Unicode Technical Committee. The ADLaM proposal and the Barry brothers’ pending visit to the Unicode Consortium generated much interest and excitement among Glass and other committee members, most of whom have linguistics backgrounds. Glass’s graduate studies focused on writing systems that are around 2,000 years old, and like other linguists he uses a methodological, technical approach to analyze and understand writing systems.
But here were two brothers with no training in linguistics, who developed an alphabet through a natural, organic approach — and when they were children, no less. New writing systems aren’t created very often, and the chance to actually talk with the inventors of one was rare.
“You come across things in these old writing systems and you wonder why it’s the way it is, and there’s nobody to ask,” Glass said. “This was a unique opportunity to say, ‘Why is it like this? Did they think about doing things differently? Why are the letters ordered this way?’ and things like that.”
Microsoft worked with designers to develop a font for Windows and Office called Ebrima that supports ADLaM and several other African writing systems.
It was during the Unicode process that ADLaM got its new name. The brothers originally called their alphabet Bindi Pular, meaning “Pular script,” but had always wanted a more meaningful name. Some people in Guinea who’d been teaching the script suggested ADLaM, an acronym using the first four letters of the script for a phrase that translates to “the alphabet that will prevent a people from being lost.” The Unicode Technical Committee approved ADLaM in 2014 and the alphabet was included in Unicode 9.0, released in June 2016. The brothers were elated.
“It was very exciting for us,” Abdoulaye said. “Once we got encoded, we thought, ‘This is it.’”
But they soon realized there were other, possibly even more challenging hurdles ahead. For ADLaM to be usable on computers, it had to be supported on desktop and mobile operating systems, and with fonts and keyboards. To make it broadly accessible, it also needed to be integrated on social networking sites.
The brothers’ script found a champion in Glass, who had developed Windows keyboards for several languages and worked on supporting various writing systems in Microsoft technology. Glass told others at Microsoft about ADLaM and helped connect the Barry brothers to the right people at the company. He developed keyboard layouts for ADLaM, initially as a project during Microsoft’s annual companywide employee hackathon.
Judy Safran-Aasen, a program manager for Microsoft’s Windows design group, also saw the importance of incorporating ADLaM into Microsoft products. Safran-Aasen wrote a business plan for adding ADLaM to Windows and pushed the work forward with various Microsoft teams.
“It was a shoestring collaboration of a few people who were really interested in seeing this happen,” she said. “It’s a powerful human interest story, and if you tell the story you can get people onboard.
“This is going to have an impact on literacy throughout that community and enable people to be part of the Windows ecosystem, where before that just wasn’t available to them,” Safran-Aasen said. “I’m really excited that we can make this happen.”
ADLaM creators Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry in Portland, Oregon.
Microsoft worked with two type designers in Maine, Mark Jamra and Neil Patel, to develop an ADLaM component for Windows and Office within Microsoft’s existing Ebrima font, which also supports other African writing systems. ADLaM support is included in the Windows 10 May 2019 update, allowing users to type and see ADLaM in Windows, including in Word and other Office apps.
Microsoft’s support for ADLaM, Abdoulaye said, “is going to be a huge jump for us.”
ADLaM is also supported by the Kigelia typeface system developed by Jamra and Patel, which includes eight African scripts and is being added to Office later this year. The designers wanted to create a type system for a region of the world lacking in typeface development, where they say existing fonts tend to be oversimplified and poorly researched. They consulted extensively with Ibrahima and Abdoulaye to refine ADLaM’s forms, painstakingly working to execute on the brothers’ vision within the boundaries of font technology.
“This was their life’s work that they started when they were kids,” Patel said. “To get it right is a big deal.”
And to many Africans, Jamra said, a script is more than just an alphabet. ”These writing systems are cultural icons,” he said. “It’s not like the Latin script. They really are symbols of ethnic identity for many of these communities.”
They’re also a means of preserving and advancing a culture. Without a writing system it’s difficult for people to record their history, to share perspective and knowledge across generations, even to engage in the basic communications that facilitate commerce and daily activities. There is greater interest in recent years in establishing writing systems for languages that didn’t have them, Glass said, to help ensure those languages remain relevant and don’t disappear. He pointed to the Osage script, created by an elder in 2006 to preserve and revitalize the language, as an example.
“There is a big push among language communities to develop writing systems,” Glass said. “And when they get them, they are such a powerful tool to put identity around that community, and also empower that community to learn and become educated.
“I think ADLaM has tremendous potential to change circumstances and improve people’s lives. That’s one of the things that’s really exciting about this.”
Keeping a culture alive
Ibrahima and Abdoulaye don’t know how many people around the world have learned ADLaM. It could be hundreds of thousands, maybe more. As many as 24 countries have been represented at ADLaM’s annual conference in Guinea, and there are ADLaM learning centers in Africa, Europe and the U.S. On a recent trip to Brussels, Ibrahima discovered that four learning centers had opened there and others have started in the Netherlands.
“I was really surprised. I couldn’t imagine that ADLaM has reached so many people outside of Africa,” he said.
Abdoulaye “Bobody” Barry (no relation to ADLaM’s creator) lives in Harlem, New York and is part of Winden Jangen, now a nonprofit organization based in New York City. He learned ADLaM a decade ago and has taught it to hundreds of people, first at mosques and then through messaging applications using an Android app. The script has enabled Fulbhe people, many of whom never learned to read and write in English or French, to connect around the world and has fostered a sense of sense of cultural pride, Barry said.
“This is part of our blood. It came from our culture,” he said. “This is not from the French people or the Arabic people. This is ours. This is our culture. That’s why people get so excited.”
Suwadu Jallow emigrated to the U.S. from Gambia in 2012 and took an ADLaM class the Barry brothers taught at Portland Community College. ADLaM is easy for Fulfulde speakers to learn, she said, and will help sustain the language, particularly among the African diaspora.  
“Now I can teach this language to someone and have the sense of my tribe being here for years and years to come without the language dying off,” said Jallow, who lives in Seattle. “Having this writing system, you can teach kids how to speak (Fulfulde) just like you teach them to speak English. It will help preserve the language and let people be creative and innovative.”
Jallow is pursuing a master’s in accounting at the University of Washington and hopes to develop an inventory-tracking system in ADLaM after she graduates. She got the idea after helping out in her mother’s baby clothing shop in Gambia as a child and seeing that her mother, who understood little English and Arabic, could not properly record and track expenses. ADLaM, she said, can empower people like her mother who are fluent in Fulfulde and just need a way to write it.  
“It’s going to increase literacy,” she said. “I believe knowledge is power, and if you’re able to read and write, that’s a very powerful tool to have. You can do a lot of things that you weren’t able to do.”
The Fulbhe people in Guinea historically produced a considerable volume of books and manuscripts, Abdoulaye Barry said, using Arabic to write in their language. Most households traditionally had a handwritten personal book detailing the family’s ancestry and the history of the Fulbhe people. But the books weren’t shared outside the home, and Fulbhe people largely stopped writing during French colonization, when the government mandated teaching in French and the use of Arabic was limited primarily to learning the Koran.
“Everything else was basically discounted and no longer had the value that it had before the French came,” Abdoulaye said.
Having ADLaM on phones and computers creates infinite possibilities — Fulbhe people around the world will be able to text each other, surf the internet, produce written materials in their own language. But even before ADLaM’s entry into the digital world, Fulfulde speakers in numerous countries have been using the script to write books. Ibrahima mentions a man in Guinea who never went to school and has written more than 30 books in ADLaM, and a high school girl, also in Guinea, who wrote a book about geography and another about how to succeed on exams. The president of Winden Jangen, Abdoulaye Barry (also no relation to Ibrahima’s brother), said many older Fulbhe people who weren’t formally educated are now writing about Fulbhe history and traditions.
“Now, everybody can read that and understand the culture,” he said. “The only way to keep a culture alive is if you read and write in your own language.”
‘The kids are the future’
Though ADLaM has spread over several continents, Ibrahima and Abdoulaye aren’t slowing down their work. Both spend much of their spare time promoting the script, traveling to conferences and continuing to write. Ibrahima, who sleeps a maximum of four hours a night, recently finished the first book of ADLaM grammar and hopes to build a learning academy in Guinea.
On a chilly recent day in Abdoulaye’s home in Portland, the brothers offer tea and patiently answer questions about ADLaM. They are unfailingly gracious, gamely agreeing to drive to a scenic spot on the Willamette River for photos after a long day of talking. They’re also quick to deflect praise for what they have accomplished. Ibrahima, who sometimes wakes up to hundreds of email and text messages from grateful ADLaM learners, said simply that he’s “very happy” with how the script has progressed. For his brother, the response to ADLaM can be overwhelming.
Having this writing system, you can teach kids how to speak Fulani just like you teach them to speak English. It will help preserve the language and let people be creative and innovative.
“It’s very emotional sometimes,” Abdoulaye said. “I feel like people are grateful beyond what we deserve.”
The brothers want ADLaM to be a tool for combating illiteracy, one as lasting and important to their people as the world’s most well-known alphabets are to cultures that use them. They have a particular goal of ADLaM being used to educate African women, who they said are more impacted by illiteracy than men and are typically the parent who teaches children to read.
“If we educate women we can help a lot of people in the community, because they are the foundation of our community,” Abdoulaye said. “I think ADLaM is the best way to educate people because they don’t need to learn a whole new language that’s only used at school. If we switched to this, it would make education a lot easier.”
That hasn’t happened yet, but ADLaM has fostered a grassroots learning movement fueled largely through social media. There are several ADLaM pages on Facebook, and groups with hundreds of members are learning together on messaging apps. Abdoulaye said he and Ibrahima used to hear mostly about adults learning ADLaM, but increasingly it’s now children. Those children will grow up with ADLaM, using the script Abdoulaye and Ibrahima invented all those years ago in their bedroom.
“That makes us believe ADLaM is going to live,” Abdoulaye said. “It’s now settled into the community because it’s in the kids, and the kids are the future.”
Originally published on 7/29/2019 / Photos by Brian Smale / © Microsoft 
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abyss-mal-blog1 · 5 years
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current mind-space//word vomit
it’s amazing how much can change in a few days, but it hasn’t been a week since my finals ended and i already felt so different. i have been doing f45 everyday this week (if not then some kind of workout, but i’ve really been into that recently). i am feeling so much better now without deadlines, sometimes i don’t know if i function better under pressure or not. i guess not, but then it’s amazing how much i can do and achieve under pressure. i need the right amount of pressure, and this semester it has been a little difficult for me to get around that. 
last friday was kinda my last day of finals, i just had an essay to submit, and i am disappointed in myself and my work ethic because i submitted it at 9pm, went to my cousin’s (disappointing) party, and then professor emailed me to say that she cannot read Pages format (seriously smh @ my tardiness!!!), only got back at 1am that night and sent my mediocre essay. i am a little sad about it because i know that is not my 100%. idk why but college so far has just been a series of 80% effort. this paper was an interesting one, on airbnb, on the sharing economy, it’s a performance studies paper where i analyze the hospitality platform in terms of host-user relationship, parasitism and (attempted) to talk about free online labor. it is a little too late now but i kinda want to work on it again and like, submit for feedback. maybe ill ask taylor. 
last saturday was kinda meh, i agreed to go to a *social* kinda event at a bar/club at chelsea, held for Asian-ivy-alumni-people that yanlin invited me too. it was at up&up and honestly a little...i didn’t enjoy it at all. the music sucked, the people were either too dorky or gross or old or weird, and the whole time i just kept saying to myself, “never again”. they said it was open bar but they only served absolut, which was shit. and then my friend’s two friends were...i feel sorry that this was their first clubbing experience. at the beginning my reaction was look at all these ivy alumni! get hitched with one of them for ~da connectsx~ (and nothing else) but no kidding i was actually interested in talking to them just to get to know what people who graduated from ivies are up to, and what are they doing at such events...and are they actually enjoying themselves because it was really kinda gross. met my friend’s friend who seemed like a really smart engineer (he asked for my number the next day lol), and a german dude at the bar who didn’t want to get me a drink. all i needed that night was a drink.....(i’m glad i didn’t drink tho because recently drinking has made me feel all kinds of bad)  we had ramen after at ramen-ya (most probably the worst ramen and charsiew i’ve had but what can we do at 3am and my friend wanted noodle and soup...)
on sunday i KNow i should have left my house earlier to workout but i didn’t. i was angry at myself that i didn’t. instead, i stayed at home and emotion-ate. i must have eaten more green bean soup than my stomach would have liked. what else...avocado? i remember..two bananas? god. this was the day i felt like i was n’s boyfriend because i had to do what she wanted to do. i know i had agreed on going, but at that point i really wanted to go thrifting or something. i mean when i got to central park it was fine and things were good but the whole day just felt like i was kinda pulled into doing something that wasn’t my first choice of plans, not that i didn’t enjoy myself lying under the sun at the park. it just felt like i was accompanying someone. i was half an hour late to meet her as well, and half heartedly got a burrito-wrap at newsbar. if you think about it it is really kinda funny, we’re just buying food and taking the subway to this grass patch 50 blocks away. we didn’t walk much, we literally only stayed at a little grassy slope overlooking the baseball pitch. anyway we went to a dance class after (the class was an hour long but i felt like n had asked me about when and what time we should book the classes for more than an hour by text so i just got really sick of it) i rushed home and got dinner with my uncle who’s in town for my cousin’s graduation. i was surprised that he chose the same japanese restaurant again, after dissing it half a year ago we ate here. the omakase was crazy and it cost 230 per person. (for the most expensive set) it was also kinda dumb because you aren’t allowed to order a different omakase set from anyone else - everyone on the table has to order the same - because of “timing”. i wonder if this is how it is in japanese omakase etiquette, but in any case it really earned them a hefty amount because my uncle decided to get 230 for all of us. qiyang didn’t like and said qiqi had bad taste, hahaha. the food wasn’t bad, i mean it’s japanese fusion, but the prices were way too steep for the taste. anyway enough about the food, during the dinner i think we talked about many things though. i kinda wanted to talk to my uncle individually because i think he is the only one who knows about ah gong, but he was sick, and i could tell he was exhausted. my aunt got a little impatient because i didn’t arrange plans to take their furniture and they were going to throw all of them away and it was actually the first time i’ve seen her get so worked up - but at the same time trying to control her emotions - because she was talking to me. i could tell she was annoyed though but i tried not to take it personally, and arranged it tomorrow. 
arranging the moving stuff was kinda last minute, i was walking to the library for work one day and i saw a truck that said MakeSpace. i assumed it was a kind of moving company and so i looked them up. they seemed to be pretty okay in terms of their services and so i decided to try them out. confirmation and setting up an appointment went pretty smoothly, except for the part where the guy i think his name was joseph, asked me to give my credit card details over the phone. idk why i did that! i stopped though, and asked him why, to which he replied he wanted to key in with the coupon code. this service has so much gimmicks within the first 2-3 minutes on the phone he was already telling me about how the first pick up is free, and that he will deduct 100$ off the first month...when people give you discounts too easily it just feels like a ploy and a thing they give to everyone, it’s not anything special and it’s probably calculated inside whatever we have to pay. anyway, i was just thinking it would be cheaper (assuming the maximum that i would have to pay is ~$500, as i confirmed with them on the phone yesterday), it’d still be cheaper than starting an apartment lease now and going through the trouble of finding two subletters. 
well. idk, it’s also easy to have things all moved in, i have to find a place to store my perishables!
moving is so much work, and storing things. this reminds me of my paper on airbnb and about the digital nomad lifestyle. it is interesting though, that this is what it has become. but the homogenized aesthetic is something i really cannot stand, in airbnb, in coffeeshops around the world..i am sure you know what i’m talking about. a new york times writer did something about this - he termed it “Airspace” - and apparently it originated from Brooklyn. I guess that’s where the art/avant-garde stuff started. well. keep a look out im gonna write a blogpost about that 
moving on 
nat came to sleepover on sunday night and a few days after because the school kicks you out of the dorms you pay so much for right after your final ends. i forgot if we did something fun but i probably just fell asleep. 
on monday i think i went to f45 and did cardio at Dumbo with Gi. he seems like a pretty nice trainer, the first time i went it was him and another girl Bertha (i think my first f45 was last tuesday) and i felt like i had two personal trainers with me - Gi was cheering me on and Bertha was doing it with me. it felt like such a good workout, one of the best ive had in a while. then work, where i arranged the movers stuff. i also realized i bought the wrong date for my flight ticket as my friends and had to buy one more...............
tuesday was the same f45 in the morning, and the bobst after. didn’t really get much work done at bobst. oh i also viewed a 3BR flex at 160. hella expensive and small, and dates didn’t work out anyway. also the broker who brought us to view the apartment was a very nice tall french man and his name was jean-francois which i couldn’t pronounce and asked nat but still called him jean as in jeen instead of john. this is why i have to learn french. you’re embarrassing. i also went to the itp/ima spring show with shubham which was super cool. there were many cool ideas, and i just wonder if i could create something like that. i didn’t get to see all of the exhibits which i regret, but i remember a few notable projects. one was an installation made with keyboards that randomly clicks, but when you hold your phone up it’ll stop. it’s made using 3d gestures. there’s also one at a gallery for surveillance, this team had a thing they call facebox, and it’s literally a box, that when you open it has a webcam that would capture your face, find you on facebook, and print out an invoice/receipt on how much you have earned for this giant tech company.  what else...an AR project that when you scan a food,  it shows you where the food comes from. nat said that she would love it if menus have something they could scan and then have pictures appear in ~holographic~ format, or maybe in the nearer future something on your phone that shows you a picture of the picture of the food. but isn’t it a surprise tho? sometimes the fun’s in the surprise, you read the description, you know what are the foods you’ll eat, leaving room to imagine or be surprised by how the chef puts it together! anyway, went for dinner with nat and jenny - got vegan shwarma (definitely wasn’t worth $14) and went to get crepes with will after. 
wednesday we were gonna go to the dmv but we weren’t prepared. nat also needed to get her passport and she was lazy. wow the number of times i mentioned her, it feels like she’s my boyfriend at this point. talked to famz, sister, and beatrix. am currently considering if i should even go to beijing or just go straight home. fuck. went to bobst for work but no one was there i was just really sleepy. viewed an apartment at 55 morton (it’s a nice quiet residential street that seems to be tucked away from the loud cars and bars and people) then i went to f45 again-varsity!!! cardio!!!, walked across brooklyn bridge (a little regret although i wanted to walk, but my bag was heavy and there were too many tourists to brisk walk) 
also the reason for this is that after my soba/miso/salad/shrimp dinner last night i was just watching a bunch of netflix shows and it was probably the caffeine from puerto rican roasting company - the barista made me a chai cappuccino with almond milk (3 SHOTS!!!)
me and nat couldn’t sleep, i really think i slept for an hour. i watched so many different shows, yoko and john’s documentary, while we were young, anthony bourdain, i was seriously flipping through all the shows and alternating between amazonprme and youtube and netflix and i even tried watching peaceful cuisine and making the brightness lower and had the sleep mode on and wow i just couldn’t sleep
so yeah the birth of this word vomit 
i am going to create more things
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glottaling-too · 4 years
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character set, character setting
The notion of "character sets" is fundamental to typography. Open any book on typography, and the term "character set" will be deployed throughout, particularly in the definitions of the various specific words that compound the vocabulary used in this literature.
For example, in "Typographic Design: Form and Communication" (Carter et al, 2015):
A font is a set of characters of the same size and style containing all the letters, numbers, and marks needed for typesetting. A typographic font exhibits structural unity when all the characters relate to one another visually. The weights of thick and thin strokes must be consistent, and the optical alignment of letterforms must appear even. The distribution of lights and darks within each character and in the spaces between characters must be carefully controlled to achieve an evenness of tone within the font. In some display faces, the font might include only the twenty-six capital letters. In a complete font for complex typesetting, such as for textbooks, it is possible to have nearly two hundred characters. The font for Adobe Garamond (Fig. 2-17) includes the following types of characters: Lowercase; Capitals, Small caps; Lining figures; Old Style figures; Superior and inferior figures; Fractions; Ligatures; Digraphs; Mathematical signs; Punctuation; Accented characters; Dingbats; Monetary symbols.
Typographic Design: Form and Communication (Carter et al, 2015:35)
Same book, in the glossary:
Font. A complete set of characters in one design, size, and style. In traditional metal type, a font meant a particular size and style; in digital typography, a font can output multiple sizes and even altered styles of a typeface design.
Typographic Design: Form and Communication (Carter et al, 2015:327, Glossary)
The term "character set" is accompanied by the properties that define the set: Size; Style, Structural unity; Visual relation; Weight; Thickness; Consistency; Optical alignment; Tone; Evenness; Consistency; Spacing; Lights-and-darks; Control. And also the number of characters within the set, "only the twenty-six capital letters" or "nearly two hundred". And there are also the types of characters, which are, in a way, sets within the set: Lowercase; Capitals, Small caps; Lining figures; Old Style figures; Superior and inferior figures; Fractions; Ligatures; Digraphs; Mathematical signs; Punctuation; Accented characters; Dingbats; Monetary symbols.
In the second passage cited above, it becomes clear that different typographic technologies define the "completeness" of a set (in the figure of the "font") in different ways. It seems to be related to how easy it is, within that technology, to "choose a different font". In metal type, a font is a case (like a drawer), containing type of a particular style and size. For typesetting, this case (a font) has to be pulled out from the cabinet, and placed in the typesetting area at the typographers' arm's length. A different size will be found in a different case, hence, it is a different font. In digital typography, a font is a file that comes with different sizes within in it. By installing the font file, all sizes (and sometimes variations such as bold, italic) will be there, programmed, in the same file (perhaps the digital equivalent of the drawer?).
In The Elements of Typographic Style (Bringhurst, 2004[1992]) we find that a font is "a set of sorts of glyphs" and that a glyph is "an incarnation of a character" or "a version — a conceptual, not material, incarnation — of the abstract symbol called a character" in which the material incarnation would be the sort. This, again, points to the relationship between how these "sets of sorts of glyphs" or "character sets" are technology-dependent. In Bringhurst, this is clear in two passages,
Font. A set of sorts of glyphs. In the world of metal type, this means a given alphabet, with all its accessory characters, in a given size. In relation to phototype, it usually means the assortment of standard patterns forming the glyph palette, without regard to size, or the actual filmstrip or wheel on which these patterns are stored. In the world of digital type, the font is the glyph palette itself or the digital information encoding. (Bringhurst, 2004:325)
In each technology, a "font" means something different. I want to highlight this because there is no "character set" without "set characters" (as in "characters being set"). A character set is a process, an assemblage / arrangement / agencement: it needs to be made, it needs setting. Quite visibily in "typesettings" in which the types are made to become a set just for the fact that they ended up together in a page, for example, but al the other process of character-setting: the making of the set of a typeface, the way it's arranged in each machine, the availability (how easy it is to access it), these are also processes of character settings / setting characters.
Other notes
I haven't found a definition of "character set". In The Elements of Typographic Style (Robert Bringhurst, 2004[1992] In Appendix C: Glossary of Terms), for example, we find that a font is "a set of sorts of glyphs" and a glyph is an incarnation of a character, but there isn't a definition of "character" (This is, however a "glossary of characters", in which typographic symbols (alphabetic and analphabetic) are listed, named, described.
In Appendix C: Glossary of Terms:
Font. A set of sorts of glyphs. In the world of metal type, this means a given alphabet, with all its accessory characters, in a given size. In relation to phototype, it usually means the assortment of standard patterns forming the glyph palette, without regard to size, or the actual filmstrip or wheel on which these patterns are stored. In the world of digital type, the font is the glyph palette itself or the digital information encoding. (Bringhurst, 2004:325)
Glyph. An incarnation of a character. See sort. (Bringhurst, 2004:326)
Sort. A single piece of metal type; thus a letter or other character in one particular style or size. In the world of digital type, where letters have no physical existence until printed, the word sort has been largely displaced by the word glyph. A glyph is a version — a conceptual, not material, incarnation — of the abstract symbol called a character. Thus, z and z* are alternate glyphs (in the same face) for the same character. (Bringhurst, 2004:331— *z com calda.)
Analphabetic. A typographic symbol used with the alphabet but lacking a place in the alphabetical order. Diacritics such as the acute, umlaut, circumflex and caron are analphabetics. So are the asterisk, dagger, pilcrow, comma and parentheses. (Bringhurst, 2004:321)
There is a whole chapter on "Analphabetic Symbols" ((Bringhurst, 2004. Chapter 7, 75-92)
Resourcessfulness. The use of analphabetic symbols as linguistic repertoire,
Approached through the scribal and typographic tradition, the palette of analphabetic symbols is much more supple and expressive than it appears through the narrow grill of the typewriter keyboard. A typographer will not necessarily use more analphabetic symbols per page than a typist. In fact, many good typographers use fewer. But even the most laconic typographer learns to speak this sign language with an eloquence that conventional editing software, like the typewriter, seems to preclude.
(Bringhurst, 2004:75. In 5. Analphabetic Symbols; 5.1 Analphabetic style.)
The visible invisibility of the marks of punctuation, which is essential to their function, depends on these details. So, therefore, does the visible invisibility of the typeface as a whole. In the republic of typography, the lowliest, most incidental mark is also a citizen.
(Bringhurst, 2004:77)
Symbols that make it to the usual character set, based on availability?
Typographers got by quite well for centuries without quotation marks. In the earliest printed books, quotation was marked merely by naming the speaker — as it still is in most editions of the Vugate and King James Bibles. In the High Renaissance, quotation was generally marked by a change of font: from roman to italic or the other way around. Quotation marks were first cut in the middle of the sixteenth century, and by the seventeenth, some printers liked to use them profusely. In books from the Baroque and Romantic periods, quotation marks are sometimes repeated at the beginning of every line of a long quotation. When these distractions were finally omitted, the space they occupied was frequently retained. This is the origin of the indented block quotation. Renaissance block quotations were set in a contrasting face at full size and full measure.
(Bringhurst, 2004:86)
Typographic ethnocentricity, institucionalized in the workings of machines,
Typography was once a fluently multilingual and multicultural calling. The great typographer of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries worked willingly with North Italian whiteletter, Italian or German blackletter, French script, Ashkenazi and Sephardic Hebrew, orthotic and cursive and chancery Greek. The best typographers of the twentieth century have followed their lead. But typographic ethnocentricity and racism also have thrived in the last hundred years, and much of that narrow-mindedness is institutionalized in the workings of machines. Unregenerate, uneducated fonts and keyboards, defiantly incapable of setting anything beyond the most rudimentary Anglo-American alphabet, are getting scarcers but are still not difficult to find.
(Bringhurst, 2004:89-90)
The luxury of creating special characters, possible in the seventeenth century and now,
Recent digital technology [the book was first published in 1992] has made it possible for any typographer to create special character on demand — a luxury most have been without since the seventeenth century. Prepackaged fonts of impeccable design, with character sets sufficient to set any word or name in any European and many Asian languages, and the software to compose and kern these characters, are also now available even to the smallest home and desktop operations. Yet there are large-circulation newspapers in North Americal still unwilling to spell correctly even the names of major cities, composers and statesmen, or the annual list of winners of the Nobel Prize, for fear of letters like ñ and é.
(Bringhurst, 2004:90)
Advice on remapping the font or keyboard, 
5.5.2 Remap the font driver and keyboard to suit your own requirements [the book was first published in 1992]
The conventional computer keyboard includes a number of characters - @ # ^ + = { } | \ ~ < > - rarely required by most typesetters, while frequently needed character, such as the en dash, em dash, acute accent, midpoint and ellipsis, are nowhere to be seen. Unless your keyboard fits your needs as is, remap it. It should give you ready access to whatever accented and analphabetic characters you regularly use.
Unless your composition software places ligatures automatically, you may find it easiest to insert them through a substitution routine after the text is fully set. Some typorraphers, howerver, (and I am one of them) prefer to rearrange their fonts or keyboards so that all the basic ligatures are accessible directly from the keyboard, as they are on a Monotype machine. Open and close quotes can also be inserted through substitution routines, but most typing and typesetting software will insert them automatically. (This means, of course, that in words or names such as Dutch ’s-Hertogenbosch or Navajo ’Áshᶖᶖh ’Asdzáán, the software will always make the wrong choice, which the typographer must then correct by hand — or through yet another search-and-replace routine.)
Compositors who seldom use accented characters often prefer to set them through mnemonic codes, using a function key that momentarily redefines the keyboard. Software that operates in this way may produce ó from the combination o + /, r from r + v, U from U + o, and so on . But if you use accented characters with any frequency, you may find it worth your while to map them directly to the keyboard. One way to do this is to install the standard prefabricated keyboards for each language you may need. This, however, requires swapping from one to another as different languages or even different names come up in multilingual text, and it requires you to memorize a lot of different layouts. Another solution is to create a custom keyboard (or even several keyboards) that will meet your own particular requirements.
(Bringhurst, 2004:90-91)
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suzanneshannon · 4 years
Text
Chapter 2: Browsers
Previously in web history��
Sir Tim Berners-Lee creates the technologies behind the web — HTML, HTTP, and the URL which blend hypertext with the Internet — with a small team at CERN. He convinces the higher-ups in the organizations to put the web in the public domain so anyone can use it.
Dennis Ritchie had a problem.
He was working on a new, world class operating system. He and a few other colleagues were building it from the ground up to be simple and clean and versatile. It needed to run anywhere and it needed to be fast.
Ritchie worked at Bell Labs. A hotbed of innovation, in the 60s, and 70s, Bell employed some of the greatest minds in telecommunications. While there, Ritchie had worked on a time-sharing project known as Multics. He was fiercely passionate about what he saw as the future of computing. Still, after years of development and little to show for it, Bell eventually dropped the project. But Ritchie and a few of his colleagues refused to let the dream go. They transformed Multics into a new operating system adaptable and extendable enough to be used for networked time sharing. They called it Unix.
Ritchie’s problem was with Unix’s software. More precisely, his problem was with the language the software ran on. He had been writing most of Unix in assembly code, quite literally feeding paper tape into the computer, the way it was done in the earliest days of computing. Programming directly in assembly — being “close to the metal” as some programmers refer to it — made Unix blazing fast and memory efficient. The process, on the other hand, was laborious and prone to errors.
Ritchie’s other option was to use B, an interpreted programming language developed by his co-worker Ken Thompson. B was much simpler to code with, several steps abstracted from the bare metal. However, it lacked features Ritchie felt were crucial. B also suffered under the weight of its own design; it was slow to execute and lacked the resilience needed for time-sharing environments.
Ritchie’s solution was to chose neither. Instead, he created a compiled programming language with many of the same features as B, but with more access to the kinds of things you could expect from assembly code. That language is called C.
By the time Unix shipped, it had been fully rewritten in C, and the programming language came bundled in every operating system that ran on top of it, which, as it turned out, was a lot of them. As more programmers tried C, they adapted to it quickly. It blended, as some might say, perfectly abstract functions and methods for creating predictable software patterns with the ability to get right down to the metal if needed. It isn’t prescriptive, but it doesn’t leave you completely lost. Saron Yitabrek, host of the Command Heroes podcast, describes C as “a nearly universal tool for programming; just as capable on a personal computer as it was on a supercomputer.”
C has been called a Swiss Army language. There is very little it can’t do, and very little that hasn’t been done with it. Computer scientist Bill Dally once said, “It set the tone for the way that programming was done for several decades.” And that’s true. Many of the programming paradigms developed in the latter half of the 20th century originated in C. Compilers were developed beyond Unix, available in every operating system. Rob Pike, a software engineer involved in the development of Unix, and later Go, has a much simpler way of putting it. “C is a desert island language.”
Ritchie has a saying of his own he was fond of repeating. “C has all the elegance and power of assembly language with all the readability and maintainability of… assembly language.” C is not necessarily everyone’s favorite programming language, and there are plenty of problems with it. (C#, created in the early 2000s, was one of many attempts to improve it.) However, as it proliferated out into the world, bundled in Unix-like operating systems like X-Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX, software developers turned to it as a way to speak to one another. It became a kind of common tongue. Even if you weren’t fluent, you could probably understand the language conversationally. If you needed to bundle up and share a some code, C was a great way to do it.
In 1993, Jean-François Groff and Sir Tim Berners-Lee had to release a package with all of the technologies of the web. It could be used to build web servers or browsers. They called it libwww, and released it to the public domain. It was written in C.
Think about the first time you browsed the web. That first webpage. Maybe it was a rich experience, filled with images, careful design and content you couldn’t find anywhere else. Maybe it was unadorned, uninteresting, and brief. No matter what that page was, I’d be willing to bet that it had some links. And when you clicked that link, there was magic. Suddenly, a fresh page arrives on your screen. You are now surfing the web. And in that moment you understand what the web is.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee finished writing the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, in the final days of 1990. It ran on his NeXT machine, and had read and write capabilities (the latter of which could be used to manage a homepage on the web). The NeXTcube wasn’t the heaviest computer you’ve ever seen, but it was still a desktop. That didn’t stop Berners-Lee from lugging it from conference to conference so he could plug it in and show people the web.
Again and again, he ran into the same problem. It will seem obvious to us now when considering the difficulty of demonstrating a globally networked hypertext application running on a little-used operating system (NeXT) on a not-widely-owned computer (NeXT Computer System) alone at a conference without the Internet. The problem came after the demo with the inevitable question: how can I start using it? The web lacks its magic if you can’t connect to the network yourself. It’s entirely useless isolated on a single computer. To make the idea click, Berners-Lee need to get everybody surfing the web. And he couldn’t very well lend his computer out to anybody that wanted to use it.
That’s where Nicola Pellow came in. An undergraduate at Leicester Polytechnic, Pellow was still an intern at CERN. She was assigned to Berners-Lee’s and Calliau’s team, so they tasked her with building an interoperable browser that could be installed anywhere. The fact that she had no background in programming (she was studying mathematics) and that she was at CERN as part of an internship didn’t concern her much. Within a couple of months she picked up a bit of C programming and built the Line Mode Browser.
Using the Line Mode Browser today, you would probably feel like a hacker from the 1980s. It was a text-only browser designed to run from a command line terminal. In most cases, just plain white text on a black background, pixels bleeding from edge to edge. Typing out a web address into the browser would bring up that website’s text on the screen. The up and down arrows on a keyboard could be used for navigation. Links were visible as a numbered list, and one could jump from site to site by entering the right number.
It was designed that way for a reason. Its simplicity guaranteed interoperability. The Line Mode Browser holds the unique distinction of being the only browser for many years to be platform-agnostic. It could be installed anywhere, on just about any computer or operating system. It made getting online easy, provided you knew what to do once you installed it. Pellow left CERN a few months after she released the Line Mode Browser. She returned after graduation, and helped build the first Mac browser.
Almost soon as Pellow left, Berners-Lee and Cailliau wrangled another recruit. Jean-François Groff was working at CERN, one office over. A programmer for years, Groff had written the French translation of the official C Programming Guide by Brian Kernighan and the language’s creator, Dennis Ritchie. He was working on a bit of physics software for UNIX systems when he got a chance to see what Berners-Lee was working on.
Not everybody understood what the web was going for. It can be difficult to grasp without the worldwide picture we have today. Groff was not one of those people. He longed for something just like the web. He understood perfectly what the web could be. Almost as soon as he saw a demo, he requested a transfer to the team.
He noticed one problem right away. “So this line mode browser, it was a bit of a chicken and egg problem,” he once described in an interview, “because to use it, you had to download the software first and install it and possibly compile it.” You had to use the web to download a web browser, but you needed a web browser to use the web. Groff found a clever solution. He built a simple mechanism that allowed users to telnet in to the NeXT server and browse the web using its built-in Line Mode Browser. So anyone in the world could remotely access the web without even needing to install the browser. Once they were able to look around, Groff hoped, they’d be hooked.
But Groff wanted to take it one step further. He came from UNIX systems, and C programming. C is a desert island language. Its versatility makes it invaluable as a one-size-fits-all solution. Groff wanted the web to be a desert island platform. He wanted it to be used in ways he hadn’t even imagined yet, ways that scientists at research institutions couldn’t even fathom. The one medium you could do anything with. To do that, he would need to make the web far more portable.
Working alongside Berners-Lee, Groff began pulling out the essential elements of the NeXT browser and porting them to the C programming language. Groff chose C not only because he was familiar with it, but because he knew most other programmers would be as well. Within a few months, he had built the libwww package (its official title would come a couple of years later). The libwww package was a set of common components for making graphical browsers. Included was the necessary code for parsing HTML, processing HTTP requests and rendering pages. It also provided a starting point for creating browser UI, and tools for embedding browser history and managing graphical windows.
Berners-Lee announced the web to the public for the first time on August 7, 1991. He posted a brief description along with a simple note:
If you’re interested in using the code, mail me. It’s very prototype, but available by anonymous FTP from info.cern.ch. It’s copyright CERN but free distribution and use is not normally a problem.
If you were to email Sir Tim Berners-Lee, he’d send you back the libwww package.
By November of 1992, the library had fully matured into a set of reusable tools. When CERN put the web in the public domain the following year, its terms included the libwww package. By 1993, anyone with a bit of time on their hands and a C compiler could create their own browser.
Before he left CERN to become one of the first web consultants, Groff did one final thing. He created a new mailing list, called www-talk, for a new generation of browser developers to talk shop.
On December 13, 1991 — almost a year after Berners-Lee had put the finishing touches on the first ever browser — Pei-Yuan Wei posted to the www-talk mailing list. After a conversation with Berners-Lee, he had built a browser called ViolaWWW. In a few months, it would be the most popular of the early browsers. In the middle of his post, Wei offhandedly — in a tone that would come off as bragging if it weren’t so sincere — mentioned that the browser build was a one night hack.
A one night hack. Not even Berners-Lee or Pellow could pull that off. Wei continued the post with the reasons he was able to get it up and running so quickly. But that nuance would be lost to history. What programmers would remember is that the it only took one day to build a browser. It was “hacked” together and shipped to the world, buggy, but usable. That phrase would set the tone and pace of browser development for at least the next decade. It is arguably the dominant ideology among browser makers today.
The irony is the opposite was true. ViolaWWW was the product of years of work that simply culminated in a single night. Wei is a great software programmer. But he also had all the pieces he needed before the night even started.
Pei-Yuan Wei has made a few appearances on the frontlines of web history. Apart from the ViolaWWW browser, he was hired by Dale Dougherty to work on an early version of GNN.com, the first commercial website. He was at a meeting of web pioneers the day the idea of the W3C was first discussed. In 2012, he was on the list of witnesses to speak in court to the many dangers of the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA). In the web’s early history Wei was a persistent presence.
Wei was a student at UCLA Berkley in the early 90s. It was HyperCard that set off his fascination with hypertext software. HyperCard was an application built for the Mac operating system in the late 80s. It allowed its users to create stacks of virtual “cards,” each with a bit of info. Users could then connect these cards however they wanted, and quickly sort, search, and navigate through their stacks. People used it to organize their recipes, replace their Rolodexes, organize research notes, and a million other things. HyperCard is the kind of software that attracts a person who demands a certain level of digital meticulousness, the kind of user that organizes their desktop folders into neat sections and precisely tags their data. This core group of power users manipulated the software using its built-in scripting language, HyperScript, to extend it to new heights.
Wei had just glimpsed Hypercard before he knew he needed to use it. But he was on an X-Windows computer, and HyperCard could only run on a Mac. Wei was not to be deterred. Instead of buying a Mac computer (an expensive but reasonable solution the problem) Wei began to write software of his own. He even went one step further. Wei began by creating his very own programming language. He called it Viola, and the first thing he built with it was a HyperCard clone.
Wei felt that the biggest limitation of HyperCard — and by extension his own hypertext software — was that it lacked access to a network. What good was data if it was locked up inside of a single computer? By the time he had reached that conclusion, it was nearing the end of 1991, around the time he saw a mention of the World Wide Web. So one night, he took Viola, combined it with libwww, and built a web browser. ViolaWWW was officially released.
ViolaWWW was built so quickly because most of it was already done by the time Wei found out about the web project. The Viola programming language was in the works for a couple of years at that point. It had already been built to accept hyperlinks and hypermedia for the HyperCard clone. It had been built to be extendable to other possible applications. Once Wei was able to pick apart libwww, he ported his software to read HTML, which itself was still a preposterously simple language. And that piece, the final tip of the iceberg, only took him a single night.
ViolaWWW would be the site of a lot of experimentation on the early web. Wei was the first to include an early version of stylesheets. He added a bookmarking function. The browser supported forms and embedded media. In a prescient move, Wei also included downloadable applets, allowing fairly advanced applications running inside of the browser. This became the template for what would eventually become Java applets.
For X-Windows users, ViolaWWW was the most popular browser on the market. Until the next thing came along.
Releasing a browser in the early 90s was almost a rite of passage. There was a useful exercise in downloading the libwww package and opening it up in your text editor. The web wasn’t all that complicated: there was a bit of code for rendering HTML, and processing HTTP requests from web servers (or other origins, like FTP or Gopher). Programmers of the web used a browser project as a way of getting familiar with its features. It was kind of like the “Hello World” of the early web.
In June of 1993, there were 130 websites in the entire world. There was easily a dozen browsers to chose from. That’s roughly one browser for every ten websites.
This rapid development of browsers was driven by the nature of innovation in the web community. When Berners-Lee put the web in the public domain, he did more than just give it to the world. He put openness at the center of its ideology. It would take five years — with the release of Netscape — for the web to get its first commercial browser. Until then, the “browser makers” were a small community of programmers talking things out the www-talk mailing list trying to make web browsing feel as revolutionary as they wanted it to be.
Some of the earliest projects ported one browser to another operating system. Occasionally, one of the browser makers would spontaneously release something that now feels essential. The first PDF rendering inside of a browser window was a part of the Midas browser. HTML tables were introduced and properly laid out in another called Arena. Tabbed browsing was a prominent feature in InternetWorks. All of these features were developed before 1995.
Most early browsers have faded into obscurity. But the people behind them didn’t. Counted among the earliest browser makers are future employees at Netscape, members of the W3C and the web standards movement, the inventor of cookies (and the blink tag), and the creators of some of the most important websites of the early web.
Of course, no one knew that at the time. To most of the creators, it was simply an exercise in making something cool they could pass along to their Internet friends.
The New York Times introduced its readers to the web on December 8, 1993. “Think of it as a map to the buried treasures of the Information Age,” read the first line. But the “map” the writer was referring to — one he would spend the first half of the article describing — wasn’t the World Wide Web; it was its most popular browser. A browser called Mosaic.
Mosaic was created, in part, by Marc Andreessen. Like many of the early web pioneers, Andreessen is a man of lofty ambition. He is drawn to big ideas and grand statements (he once said that software will “eat the world”). In college, he was known for being far more talkative than your average software engineer, chatting it up about the next bing thing.
Andreessen has had a decades-long passion for technology. Years later, he would capture the imagination of the public with the world’s first commercial browser: Netscape Navigator. He would grace the cover of Time magazine. He would become a cornerstone of Silicon Valley, define its rapid “ship first, think later” ethos for years, and seek and capture his fortune in the world of venture capital.
But Mosaic’s story does not begin with a commanding legend of Silicon Valley overseeing, for better or worse, the future of technology. It begins with a restless college student.
When Sir Tim Berners-Lee posted the initial announcement about the web, about a year before the article in The New York Times, Andreessen was an undergraduate student at the University of Illinois. While he attended school he worked at the university-affiliated computing lab known as the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). NCSA occupied a similar space as ARPA in that they both were state-sponsored projects without an explicit goal other than to further the science of computing. If you worked at NCSA, it was possible to move from project to project without arising too much suspicion from the higher ups.
Andreessen was supposed to be working on visualization software, which he had found a way to run mostly on auto-pilot. In his spare time, Andreessen would ricochet around the office listening to everyone about what it was they were interested in. It was during one of those sessions that a colleague introduced him to the World Wide Web. He was immediately taken aback. He downloaded the ViolaWWW browser, and within a few days he had decided that the web would be his primary focus. He decided something else too. He needed to make a browser of his own.
In 1992, browsers could be cumbersome software. They lacked the polish and the conventions of modern browsers without decades of learning to build off of. They were difficult to download and install, often requiring users to make modifications to system files. And early browser makers were so focused on developing the web they didn’t think too much about the visual interface of their software.
Andreessen wanted to build a well-designed, performant, easy-to-install browser while simultaneously building on the features that Wei was adding to the ViolaWWW browser. He pitched his idea to a programmer at NCSA, Eric Bina. “Marc’s a very good salesman,” Bina would later recall, so he joined up.
Taking their cue from the pace of others, Andreessen and Bina finished the first version of the Mosaic browser in just a few weeks. It was available for X Windows computers. To announce the browser, Andreessen posted a download link to the www-talk mailing list, with the message “By the power vested in me by nobody in particular, alpha/beta version 0.5 of NCSA’s Motif-based networked information systems and World Wide Web browser, X Mosaic, is hereby released.” The web got more than just a popular browser. It got its first pitchman.
That first version of the browser was impressive in a somewhat crowded field. To be sure, it had forms and some media support early on. But it wasn’t the best browser, nor was it the most advanced browser. Instead, Andreessen and Bina focused on something else entirely. Mosaic set itself apart because it was the easiest to use. The installation process was simple and the interface was, relatively speaking, intuitive.
The Mosaic browser’s secret weapon was its iteration. Before long, other programmers at NCSA wanted in on the project. They parceled off different operating systems to port the browser to. One team took the Mac, another Windows. By the fall of 1993, a few months after its initial release, Mosaic had feature-paired versions on Mac, Windows and Unix systems, as well as compatible server software.
After that, the pace of development only accelerated. Beta versions were released often and were available to download via FTP. New features were added at a rapid pace and new versions seemed to ship every week. The NCSA Mosaic was fully engaged with the web community, active in the www-talk mailing list, talking with users and gathering bug reports. It was not at all unusual to submit a bug report and hear back a few hours later from an NCSA programmer with a fix.
Andreessen was a particularly active presence, posting to threads almost daily. When the Mosaic team decided they might want to collect anonymous analytics about browser usage, Andreessen polled the www-talk list to see if it was a good idea. When he got a lot of questions about how to use HTML, he wrote a guide for beginners.
When one Mosaic user posted some issues he was having, it led to a tense back and forth between that user and Andreessen. He claimed he wasn’t a customer, and Andreessen shouldn’t care too much about what he thought. Andreessen replied, “We do care what you think simply because having the wonderful distributed beta team that we essentially have due to this group gives us the opportunity to make our product much better than it could be otherwise.” What Andreessen understood better than any of the early browser makers was that Mosaic was a product, and feedback from his users could drive its development. If they kept the feedback loop tight, they could keep the interface clean and bug-free while staying on the cutting edge of new features. It was the programming parable given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow come to life in browser development.
There was an electricity to Mosaic development at NCSA. Internal competition fueled OS teams to get features out the door. Sometimes the Mac version would get to something first. Sometimes it was Bina and Andreessen continuing to work on X-Mosaic. “We would get together, middle of the night, and come up with some cool idea — images was an example of that — then we would go off and race and see who would do it first,” creator of the Windows version of Mosaic Jon Mittelhauser later recalled. Sometimes, the features were duds and would hardly go anywhere at all. Other times, as Mittelhauser points out, they were absolutely essential.
In the months after launch, they started to surpass the feature list of even their nearest competitor, ViolaWWW. They added forms support and rich media. They added bookmarks for users to keep track of their links. They even created their own “What’s New” page, updated every single day, which tracked the web’s most popular links. When you opened up Mosaic, the NCSA What’s New page was the first thing you saw. They weren’t just building a browser. They were building a window to the web.
As Mittelhauser points out, it was the <img> tag which became Mosaic’s defining feature. It succeeded in doing two things. The tag was added without input from Sir Tim Berners-Lee or the wider web community. (Andreessen posted a note to www-talk only after it had already been implemented.) So firstly, that set the Mosaic team in a conflict with other browser makers and some parts of the web community that would last for years.
Secondly, it made Mosaic infinitely more popular. The <img> tag allowed for images to be embedded directly inline in the Mosaic browser. People found the web boring to browse. It was sterile, rigid, and scientific. Inline images changed all that. Within a few months, a new class of web designer was beginning to experiment with what was possible with images on the web. In some ways, it was the tag that made the web famous.
The image tag prompted the feature in The New York Times, and a subsequent write-up in Wired. By the time the press got around to talking about the web, Mosaic was the most popular browser and became a surrogate for the larger web world. “Mosaic” was to browsing the web as “Google” is to searching now.
Ultimately, the higher ups got involved. NCSA was not a tech company. They were a supercomputing lab. They came in to help make the Mosaic browser more cohesive, and maybe, more profitable. Licenses were parceled out to a dozen or so companies. Mosaic was bundled into Spry’s Internet in a Box product. It was embedded in enterprise software by the Santa Cruz Operation.
In the end, Mosaic split off into two directions. Pressure from management pushed Andreessen to leave and start a new company. It would be called Netscape. Another of the licensees of the software was a company called Spyglass. They were beginning to have talks with Microsoft. Both would ultimately choose to rewrite the Mosaic browser from scratch, for different reasons. Yet that browser would be their starting point and their products would have lasting implications on the browser market for decades as the world began to see its first commercial browsers.
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lewishamledger · 5 years
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Hitting the right note
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Tunday Akintan has played the sax with stars like Amy Winehouse and the Foo Fighters. Now he and his wife Jasmine have opened a bar in Lee that combines their passion for music and food
WORDS BY NIKKI SPENCER;  PHOTO BY JOHN YABRIFA
Saxophonist Tunday Akintan and his wife Jasmine opened Lagos Bar on Lee High Road at the end of last year so they could share their love of music and food.
Tunday was born and lived in Lagos in Nigeria and came to London aged 17. “There was a place near our house [in Nigeria] where people used to go and play music and dance,” he recalls as we sit in his cosy bar and chat over coffee.
“As a young child I was drawn to the music and when I was about seven or eight I would run errands for the musicians just so I could be around them and watch them play. I still remember that joyful noise and the idea with Lagos Bar is to replicate that here.”
From an early age Tunday – who cites Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti as another musical inspiration – wanted to play the saxophone, but his father had other plans.
“My dad was very against music and there was no question of me having lessons. He just thought that musicians were a nuisance and that they didn’t have any money. He wanted me to follow him and become an accountant.”
However, Tunday began to teach himself to play other instruments by accompanying his mum to church. “My mum is a big churchgoer so she took me with her and there I got to play the drums, the tambourine, the cowbell and all sorts.”
Tunday’s father had previously lived in London for many years and had family here, so when Tunday was older his dad asked if he wanted to study accountancy in the capital. “I said yes, although I knew in my heart I didn’t want to be an accountant.”
He went to stay with his father’s cousin in Elephant and Castle but after six months he dropped out of college and decided to pursue his own dreams. He found a music shop on Walworth Road where the owner let him pay for a saxophone in instalments and he bought books to teach himself.
One day he was on a 53 bus that took him past Goldsmiths in New Cross.
“When I first arrived in the UK I chatted to a girl at the airport who mentioned she was going to be studying at Goldsmiths. I just remembered that name and that you could study there, so I got off the bus and went in.
“I found the music department and introduced myself to Colin Crawley who was a music teacher there. I said, ‘I have come from Nigeria and I want to study music’.
“I didn’t have the qualifications to do a degree but he told me about a six-week summer course. By this time I had started playing drums and keyboard in local churches and I used the money I was paid to pay for the course.”
Over the next five years Tunday enrolled on dozens of short music courses at Goldsmiths and eventually got a place on a music degree. “Every time I did a course I asked what I could do next. I could paper a wall with all the certificates!”
He began to fund his studies by playing saxophone in bars and clubs. “One night I got chatting to a DJ on the street. He noticed my saxophone case and asked me to come and jam with him at Cafe de Paris. The manager liked it so much he hired me on the spot and I played there for five years.”
For a while Tunday worked with Amy Winehouse. “I met her at a gig and we worked together before she was famous. I wasn’t surprised she got noticed. She had a passion and belief in what she was doing.”
Since then he has played saxophone alongside everyone from Jools Holland, the Foo Fighters, Songhoy Blues and Lemar to French rapper MC Solaar, and he also has his own band that tours and performs every year at the Southbank Centre.
He met his wife Jasmine at Goldsmiths and they have always talked about opening their own bar.
“I love making music and Jasmine loves making food and they go hand in hand. We just wanted to share what we love with people who we knew would love it too.
“As a musician I am booked to play at other people’s venues all the time but I have always dreamed of creating somewhere of my own where I could play saxophone, where other musicians and DJs could play too, and people could come and listen and drink and eat and chat.”
After years of looking at places all over south-east London they finally came across the former Flames restaurant on Lee High Road and set about transforming it. “The vision we had would have been impossible if the bills were mounting up so we have done everything ourselves.
“We got the keys last July and spent months doing it up. We changed the entire place, removing the low ceiling and painting everything. Friends said we were mad and it was very tiring, but we did it.”
All the fixtures and fittings are recycled, from the bar top, which they found on the street near where they live in Bermondsey, to the lights, which Tunday made out of old trumpets and trombones.
“Aside from making music, I love making things and using my hands,” he says.
Six months on, Tunday says he and Jasmine are overwhelmed at the response they have had to the bar. “People often walk in and just say, ‘Wow!’ which is so lovely after all the hard work.
“We are only small but customers say we have created something very special and it’s personalised. Everyone who buys a drink gets to request a tune from me on the saxophone.
“We have big windows at the front and one evening recently a couple were walking past and stopped to look in.
“People started beckoning them inside and made space for them at one of the tables and they ended up chatting with everyone. We love the way that music brings people together.”
As well as playing live music and hosting DJ sets in the bar, they also have a space downstairs, where Salsa Motion offers salsa classes every Thursday evening. Lagos Bar is open during the day for coffee too, with the added bonus of being able to listen to Tunday rehearse.
“I usually practise for about seven hours a day so rather than doing that at home I now do it here.”
The final piece of the jigsaw has been put in place with the opening of their kitchen. They have started by serving a small European menu cooked by Jasmine on Friday and Saturday nights.
“We wanted to get everything else right before we started serving food,” Tunday says. “As they say in Nigeria, before you invite the king and queen you need to prepare the palace, and now the palace is ready.”
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cryptswahili · 5 years
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Review: The Ledger Nano X Adds Bluetooth and a Fussy Mobile App
There’s a lot to love about Ledger’s hardware wallets. There’s also a lot to loathe. From a design, manufacture, and presentation perspective, they’re a dream. From a software perspective, they’re capricious, prone to connecting and disconnecting on a whim. The new Ledger Nano X continues that tradition.
Also read: Ledger Unveils Bluetooth-Enabled Hardware Wallet
Nano X: Has Potential, Needs Work
I’ve got something of a love-hate relationship with Ledger hardware wallets (HWs). I love their aesthetics and theoretical functionality. I hate their practical functionality, because in practice, Ledgers never work for me. I’ve got four of ‘em sitting in a drawer somewhere, one of which I purchased myself and the others sent by Ledger for reviewing purposes. I managed to get all of them to work, eventually, after much cursing and teeth-gritting, but predicted that I would be unlikely to use those particular devices again. I’ve kept my word.
My review edition of the Nano X was great until I unboxed it.
The new Ledger Nano X, unveiled at the start of this month, is a device I want to crush on, or at least develop as much of an affinity for a HW as it’s natural for a man to have. And, straight out the box, I feel all those feels. No other HW manufacturer makes devices that look as good as Ledger. You name them – Cold Card, Ellipal, Cobo Vault – I’ve reviewed them and found them functional, but none looked as slick as Ledger’s wallets when the cellophane was peeled off.
There’s a much more desirable attribute of hardware wallets, however, than looking good in the palm of the hand, and that’s where Ledger and I don’t see eye to eye. I don’t know if it’s my laptops or my attitude, but Ledgers hate me. I had been hoping their new Nano X, scheduled to ship in March, would end my lousy run of luck with Ledgers, but it wasn’t to be.
‘Our Most Advanced Hardware Wallet Yet’
Ledger’s “most advanced hardware wallet yet” is basically the best-selling Nano with Bluetooth bolted on, an extra button, and the new Ledger Live mobile app as a companion. The X is the future of Ledger’s production line, with the original Nano now reduced to 70 bucks, as the French firm looks to get shot of stock and make way for the sleeker Nano X, which will retail for around $140.
The Nano doesn’t feel dated until you look at the Nano X, whereupon it feels as obsolete as a first edition iPhone. That’s not to slate the trusty Nano however – it remains a highly regarded hardware wallet, and there is no need to upgrade to the X. If you’re shopping for a new Ledger, however, it’s all about the X. It’s hard to overstate how much utility is added by simply upgrading from one push button to two. Entering your PIN into the device is much easier now, with the buttons serving as left and right respectively, while pushing them in unison acts as ‘enter’.
The Nano X comes with 5x the storage capacity for applications as its predecessor, allowing it to store more cryptocurrencies than any other major HW on the market. The test version of the device I received came with instructions noting that “Many things will be improved [in final production] including firmware, battery life, laser engraving quality, screen luminosity, general quality.” So pretty much everything then. The build and finish quality of the X look perfectly good to me. My only issue – and it’s a major one – is with the software.
In theory, software is a lot easier to fix than hardware, not least because it doesn’t require recalling 100,000 devices. That said, Ledger have been working on their Ledger Live wallet management software for over six months now, and it’s yet to work for longer than a few minutes at a time for this reviewer.
My laptop would ideally have one Ledger application – not four.
A Long and Fruitless Week
When it comes to product reviews, my policy is to wait until everything’s working correctly before putting fingers to keyboard. After a long and frustrating week with the Nano X, however, in which far too many hours were frittered away on fruitless troubleshooting, it behoves me to write this review. As I type these words, I have yet to send or receive cryptocurrency using my Nano X, but despite this failure, I feel well qualified to expound on what the X can and cannot do.
Given that bluetooth and a standard mini USB are fitted to the Nano X, there are two ways to install the Ledger Live software onto the device. If I can’t get Ledger Live on desktop to work, I figure, I’ll just do it over bluetooth using the Ledger Live mobile app. It was a nice idea, but it wasn’t to be. I was stymied at first by this error message:
After reaching out to Ledger support, I was informed that “Yesterday, we announced a new firmware version. Our servers were overloaded that’s why you have this error message. Can you retry tomorrow?” I certainly could. Only, the next day Ledger Live was still producing the same error message – on two desktop devices and also on mobile. The next day it was the same. And the day after, and the day after that. This evening, however, while the desktop software was still being unresponsive, I made a breakthrough on mobile at the umpteenth attempt.
Hope Springs Eternal
With some relief, I sat down to write my Nano X review in the knowledge that I was just a few clicks away from having the device fully operational. The last step was to install a cryptocurrency app, because Ledger insists on forcing users to install apps within apps. If you want to store 100 cryptocurrencies on the X, for example, you have to install 100 apps onto the HW. Utter madness.
Pretty soon, I’m installing the BTC app, though I can’t tell from the onscreen prompt whether it’s being downloaded onto the mobile app or onto the HW itself. Whatever the case, it doesn’t matter, as I’m soon greeted by a message that reads “Operation was cancelled. Something went wrong. Please retry or contact us.” I try a different app, ETH this time. “Installing Ethereum. The installation of Ethereum app may take a while, please keep the app open,” I’m informed. Again, I’ve no idea whether this means the app on my phone or that I should keep the Nano X open and powered on. A moment later, I’m greeted by an entirely new error message:
And that’s about the point where I gave up. I would have no problem cutting Ledger some slack on what’s an early production model of their Nano X, were it not for the fact that the problems with this device have nothing to do with manufacturing and everything to do with coding. The Nano X works as well as its predecessor, which for this reviewer means barely/not at all. I still want to find a Ledger HW I can love, and I still dream of opening one of their devices to find it works straight out the box. Until that happy day arrives, however, I’m resigned to composing verbose reviews that don’t even begin to convey the lengths I went to in order to get this damn thing to work. Better luck next time.
What are your thoughts on Ledger’s hardware wallets? Let us know in the comments section below.
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skipbifferty-blog1 · 6 years
Text
Can’t Afford a New Computer Because of Software?
2018-05-02 11:38
Within the past couple months, several people have told me that---although they have computers that are old and behind the curve in performance,---they cannot afford a new computer because they will have to buy all the Microsoft programs like Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, and such, since they cannot be transferred legally (or practically) to a new computer, and that is hundreds of dollars of additional cost thus making it too expensive to upgrade.
Feeling 'locked-in' to expensive Micro$oft productivity suites in this era is simply unnecessary.  I have been using open-source, free alternative programs since before I got back from Germany, having experimented with converting while in Germany but still using Windows, and ultimately switching away from Windows to Linux around 2011.  But one does not have to leave Windows to use the open-source alternatives as most are available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, although I now much prefer Linux to Windows for a multiplicity of reasons.  Germany is a place where even slight additional cost is a killer in everything of life---which is why you never hear music in stores or restaurants, because of the royalty fees that must be paid to play it.  Most Germans I was acquainted with, turned to the alternative and free open-source programs more than a decade ago.  I finally took their cue and tried them.
Thus, it has now been over 10 years that I have been using the free alternatives to Microsoft offerings.  I can read other people's messages and documents and they can read mine.  All these alternative programs can save documents in a Microsoft compatible format.  I have even used the 'redlining' editing and correction features of the word processors, and sent corrected files back to the authors, who usually have no trouble opening and dealing with those modified documents.
If you're leery of leaving Microsoft, then just install the alternative programs on your current computer and try using them for a while.  That is what I did over in Germany.  They work, and do not require the hundreds of dollars M$ wants you to send them to activate their software which is nowadays preinstalled but disabled after a trial period on every computer you might buy.
When you use an Android phone, you are basically using Linux (a stripped down version), so if Android is your phone, you are already exposed to an alternative system.  iPhones are Mac OS-oriented, so if that is your phone, you are using yet another alternative to Windows, too.
I am currently upgrading to a new computer---a big Dell 17-inch touchscreen laptop that Costco was selling for an extremely good price, and which has AMD video that is about the only video card that will work properly when editing video.  I'm not going to say it is easy to install Linux as an operating system---one of the reasons computers are preinstalled these days, is because installing any operating system can be difficult, and both Apple and Microsoft have tried to eliminate the hassles encountered in using computers by preinstalling everything on the computer, so there are no hang-ups when you first turn a new computer on.
This is not the place to go into a detailed description of problems I encountered, but a little patience and willingness to try the different alternatives presented during installation has paid off.  I am a guy who brings computers to their knees.  Typically I run 3 desktops with email, calendar, daily calibre downloads for my Kindle (it functions to load my Kindle up with what are the equivalent of several daily newspapers), financial software tracking expenses, my Google Keep lists of grocery and to-do items, and general web browsing, all in desktop 1; the weather reporting tools and audio recording/editing for the daily weather reports I do for a community radio station in desktop 2; and radio automation software that runs 24/7 as an experiment in desktop 3, which feeds an MP3 server that sends the output of the automation to a LAN connection that I can access from anywhere in the house.
For the past 6 years, all of that has run on a small 13” notebook that is hooked into an external 27” monitor, keyboard, mouse, and professional speaker system.  My estimate is that any computer more than 5 years old is by then ancient technology (the notebook does not even have Bluetooth, which is now completely ubiquitous), so I try to upgrade every 5 years.  This change is actually overdue, and so are you if your computer is more than 5 years old.  I especially liked the portability of the smallish 13” computer, but video editing is nearly impossible with its incapable nVidia video card---which is fine for gaming, but absolutely terrible for video editing.  The 17” Dell came to my attention because of the AMD video card, and so I will have a much larger laptop for a while.  Not really what I wanted, but a necessary improvement for the video editing.
Those I have discussed the alternative of using productivity suites other than Microsoft, are literally very scared to leave Microsoft.  Again, I suggest just trying it on your current Windows computer first.  Once I installed the alternative programs while over in Germany and began using them, I never went back to the Microsoft ones.  Ever.  Not even tempted.
Here is a list of all the programs I use regularly:
**Evolution (Linux only) - email/calendaring substitute for M$ Outlook
**LibreOffice (all OS platforms)- substitute for Microsoft Office with word processing, spreadsheet, Powerpoint compatible alternative, drawing program which I use as a replacement for the now defunct M$ Publisher and which imports old M$ Publisher files, and a math program for statistics people
**Firefox - web browser with the following add-ons:  NoScript to prevent websites from reaching into your computer; AdBlock; Blacken to turn grey print solid black; One Tab, which allows saving tabs in a list when you have a bunch of tabs open; Video DownloadHelper which allows downloading video/audio files to your local computer.  Before the Quantum release of Firefox, I also formerly used Tab Mix Plus, which allows a lot of useful customization of Firefox, and Down Them All, which came in handy for things like downloading 30 episodes of “Danger Man” without having to manually do those one at a time. Hopefully those add-ons will eventually be made compatible with Quantum and later versions of Firefox.
**GnuCash - financial program similar to Quicken, but capable of double-entry accounting
**calibre - a Kindle organizing, library, and downloading program which allows converting practically any document into a Kindle file, and will also unlock files you paid for that often only work on a Kindle reader when you may have a Kobo or Nook reader---or in the other direction if you bought a book that only works on Kobo or Nook.  Additionally, I download several news sources daily, including BBC News, Washington Post, local TV news station feed, and several economic or industry blogs and newsletters related to my field that I can then read anywhere on my Kindle.
**Gimp - image editor similar to Photoshop, only far more flexible
**Xsane (Linux only) - a program that operates scanners
**Pidgin - a program similar to the old AOL Instant Messenger which can connect to many different messenger programs.  With cellphone texting, I have not used Pidgin for years.
**Audacity - an audio recording and editing program
**Cinelerra CV (Linux only) - video editing program
**gPodder - an automatic podcast downloader program.  I do not use gPodder since returning from Germany, where I commuted an hour each way to work on the train and listened to several news podcasts daily (primarily BBC).  If I listen to podcasts now, it is in the car and from my cellphone using the Bluetooth connection.
**puddletag (Linux only) - a Linux metadata tagging program for audio files similar to MP3Tag in Windows
**Rivendell (Linux only) - the radio automation program with many modules for creating logs, automatically downloading and carting up programs, and managing the audio library of radio stations
**Jackd and JackCTL - a patch panel program for routing audio to and from various programs
**VLC - the most universal and versatile video and audio player for computers ever, devised and maintained by French developers plus very lightweight in size
**wxMP3val - an analyzer for MP3 files to find quality problems
**Spotify Player - for Linux
**WINE - a Windows emulator program which I use to run Exact Audio Copy, a CD ripping program, and IrfanView, an image display and manipulation program that only work in Windows
**R - a very deep and complex program for math people like my son and used by statistics people for manipulation and publishing of math stuff, which includes access to special characters used only by math folks
Maybe there are those who need other programs, but for my work, the above fulfills all of my particular needs.  And in 7 years without Microsoft, I never miss it.  In fact, with no regrets at all, I blew away all the Windows stuff that was preinstalled on the new Dell.
All new computers come with Windows, and---as you can see---almost every program above can be loaded into a Windows computer, negating the need to send Microsoft any further money at all.  Try them on your old computer, then have no fear in going out and getting that new computer and saying, “bye, bye Micro$oft, I don’t need your pricey office suite anymore,” thus joining what I have done for well more than 7 years now.
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nofomoartworld · 7 years
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The Dead Minitel Orchestra
Graffiti Research Lab France, The Dead Minitel Orchestra
Graffiti Research Lab France, The Dead Minitel Orchestra
Graffiti Research Lab France, The Dead Minitel Orchestra
Graffiti Research Lab France, The Dead Minitel Orchestra (Minitel Pong)
In 1982, the French public telecommunications company launched a revolutionary system combining the telephone and information technology. It was a beige, plastic box and it was called the Minitel.
The screen-keyboard set was delivered for free to French homes. People could electronically check the weather or their horoscope, find local restaurants, apply to university, book a holiday, buy shoes, monitor their bank accounts, etc. They could even chat online and have some rudimentary forms of cybersex. It was the world wide web before the world wide web and actually it wasn’t even world wide because it was limited to the territory of France. I grew up in Belgium feeling left out, envious and cheated.
Yves Denais using the Minitel on his dairy farm in the Brittany region of France. Photo: Ed Alcock for The New York Times
It was an avant-garde domestic technology and millions of people were still using it when France Telecom decided to pull the plug on the service in 2012.
In 2013, members of the Graffiti Research Lab France decided to set up a DEad Minitel Orchestra, a series of live performance and artistic installations that explore the sonic and visual afterlife of the defunct Videotex online service. The result is experimental, joyful, often charming and sometimes absurd.
vimeo
DEad Minitel Orchestra, performance at Photophore festival, 2015
Minitel sex ad in Roman Polanski’s 1992 movie Bitter Moon
The Dead Minitel Orchestra is a project by Antoine Bonnet, Martin De Bie and Jerome Saint-Clair. I’ve been loving what the G.R.L. F.R. have been doing for years so the DeMO gave me the perfect excuse to contact them and ask for their opinions on quaint devices and extinct technologies:
Hi Jerome, Martin and Antoine! I grew up in French-speaking Belgium and was hyper envious of all these 36 15 services French people seemed to enjoy. Each time i hear the name Ulla, i still think of a brief sequence from a film by Roman Polanski. Minitel seemed to be the acme of sophistication and modernity at the time. Is the Minitel still present in French contemporary culture? Has some kind of nostalgic cult developed around it?
The Minitel was definitely a thing in France in the 80s. Imagine a pre-WWW area (year 1982) where suddenly every person with a phone landline can go get a revolutionary device for free from the national phone company (named PTT at the time) and connect to online services.
Some of those services were free to connect to (ie: white and yellow pages), some others were super expensive pay-per-minute (forums, adult and porn chat services among others). Looking back, it feels strange to realize, while watching archived national news dealing with the Minitel, that there was a real nationalist pride accompanying it. There was a real struggle to stay competitive against others countries in terms of technology and industry, to remain autonomous. Remember, every country had its computer company (Olivetti, Sinclair, …)
As a consequence of this mass adoption and national exception feeling (you know how French people are), everyone above 20 yo in France has a story with the Minitel. For the youngest ones, it’s the weird computer sitting near the telephone at their grand-parents’ place. For the others it’s the first connected terminal they have ever used. And it’s true.
Each time we perform or exhibit Minitels for a show, we notice a real nostalgia in the eyes of the audience. So much nostalgia that we are sometimes thinking of doing a “People staring at Minitels” project. We would end up with totally different portraits than Kyle McDonald‘s People staring at computers.
It also sometimes becomes an intergenerational transmission thing. Kids (who are too young to be aware about it) are usually super curious about it and their parents are always proud to tell them what it is and the relation they had with the Minitel. Maybe some sort of “finally a technological item my kids don’t know about and that I can explain” effect.
Despite all this, we wouldn’t say there is now a cult developed around it. But it was definitely part of people’s everyday life. Not only as a device they used, but also through TV and billboard ads and also many wild ads for the “pink minitel” services showing nude women, along the roads, in abandoned gas stations … The Minitel was also present during turning points of people’s life: you were able to check online if you passed the baccalaureat, or register for University. And that’s the kind of story we hear each time. The Minitel is our digital Madeleine de Proust.
Internationally speaking, views are quite divergent. Envy for some like you, Régine, and sometimes curiosity. But also jokes. Golan Levin told me he knows some. I’d be curious to hear them.
Graffiti Research Lab France, The Dead Minitel Orchestra
Graffiti Research Lab France, The Dead Minitel Orchestra (minitel Boobs)
Antoine: When I was kid (I was around 8, I guess) , there were huge ads for “minitel rose” on the roads. They were everywhere and particularly on the roads leading to highways (Paris peripherique). I really enjoyed seeing these ads because when I was seeing them, it meant HOLIDAYS !!
I never got curious about these ULLA, CUM,… services but I really liked the way these ads were placed under dark spots (under bridges, in corners,..), how they were aging, losing colors, ungluing or scratched,… The girls on the pictures were almost naked but it never shocked me… I think I didn’t notice until I became a teenager​.
Martin: I remember my parents using it to access information when I was a kid. It was some kind of mysterious device I hadn’t really access to, except when I was using it by mimicry, more as a toy, without even connecting to any service (hopefully for my parents’ phone bill). It’s only later when I was 15 and that I did connect under my mother’s supervision to check school grades that I started to realize how it could be used for. I really understood how revolutionary it was when I first experienced the Internet, a few years later. Being able to use it now, in my own artistic practice, is way more satisfying than typing pointlessly on a bizarre device.
Jerome: I personally remember going to the post office (the phone company and post office were the same national company at the time) with the paper my parents received in the mail to go get a Minitel. And also some years later take it back to get a newer version, probably the Minitel 1B. I remember my father checking the National lottery results and my mother placing orders on La Redoute (a mail order company).
youtube
Ad for ‘online sex’ service 3615 ULLA, 2003
Does the Minitel have some specific, technological or other, features that make it particularly interesting to use to generate sound and images? Or is it producing the same kind of audio and images as any other type of old bits of electronics?
It is worse than what you can imagine. What’s funny is that people’s memory tend to be biased and blurred with later computers or game console they used.
In fact, the Minitel does a single and monotone beep. It’s not even 8 bit music capable. On a graphical point of view, it has 2 display modes (text and graphics), using grayscale colors (late models, difficult to find allow color though). In addition to that, the graphical mode is not even pixel based but rather character based, with, for each block of character, a 2×3 stack of rectangles whose color can be either the foreground or background color of the character. This explains why it has its own aesthetic in terms of graphics and that’s what makes it so interesting.
Graffiti Research Lab France, The Dead Minitel Orchestra
Graffiti Research Lab France, The Dead Minitel Orchestra
Why is it the Dead Minitel Orchestra instead of just the Minitel Orchestra? Does the ‘Dead” word refer to the fact that you’ve completely re-purposed and modified the functioning of the device? Or is it there to highlight that it’s one of those dead tech that came to be supplanted by another one?
We picked “dead” for two reasons. The first one because we wanted to use the De.M.O. acronym, which is also a reference to the demo scene.
The second one because the Minitel, in its original form, is actually dead. It is just a passive terminal, by design, and all the services (remote servers) have been unplugged on June 30th 2012.
As a consequence, we’re not murderers but rather Victor Frankenstein trying to resurrect a dead body of electronics. It is repurposed and its functioning was modified because we had no other choice if we wanted to be able to keep using it.
It has not been totally supplanted by another technology. It kept living along with the Internet until Orange decided to cut the services. Lots of people were still using it, back in 2012. Mostly because those persons were used to it and they had a single use case: car mechanics checking parts availability, farmers having a look at the weather forecasts, individuals checking the stock market, …
We used “Dead” because we start working with the Minitel a few weeks before Orange shuts down the service on June 30th 2012. Our first Minitel exhibition was a tribute, a death notice of the service. We remake some emblematic “3615” pages and create some visuals and animation to say goodbye. Since this exhibition we worked to “get the hell out of it” to get some kind of DemoScene practice with it, we even tried to modify the electronic to generate some generative visuals.
The idea of making music came later, and the name came naturally, from a dead technology we make experimental music as an orchestra, and using visuals and interfaces to get control over sound as a D.e.M.O.
vimeo
DEad Minitel Orchestra, performance at Plateforme Gallery, Paris in 2013
Graffiti Research Lab France, The Dead Minitel Orchestra (Minitels Electrocardio)
Is the DeMo a comment or reflection on planned obsolescence and on our throwaway culture?
We wouldn’t say it was planned obsolescence. It doesn’t fit the “give it for free and make money on the services” business model of the Minitel. It was built to last. Hopefully for us, the Minitels we own are still working, more than 25 years after they were manufactured. It’s not too bad when you know that CRT (cathode ray tube) screens have a life expectancy of 20 years. Of course, some of them are a bit tired. The almost-dead-CRT effect is not bad though. However, sooner or later, all of our Minitels’ screen will be dead. We’ll have to figure out something else to workaround that.
What are the challenges of working with a dead technology like this one?
There are indeed various challenges. The first one was to find a starting point. Florent Deloison pointed us to Fabrice, Renaud, PG and Phil (from the Toulouse Tetalab) Webcam to Minitel project. That’s how it all began. We also found some good technical documentation.
We made the Tetalab’s original code evolve to work offline and we ended up creating a dedicated Minitel library for Arduino. Mostly because we wanted to be able to easily recreate classical Minitel screens: 36-15 ULLA, the yellow pages landing screen. And, moving forward, a Minitel-like Nyan Cat, a non playable Pong and an intermittently flattening electrocardiogram (using the single beep of the Minitel). Our goal at that time was to repurpose the Minitel as a low-tech photo frame. Either to host the screens mentioned above or for our 36-15 Selfie project.
vimeo
36-15 Selfie
Later came the idea to use it in a totally different way and make music/sound with it. At the very beginning we were using screen luminosity variations (either by circuit bending the graphical chip or by displaying random characters) to generate or modulate sound. We later used a homemade MIDI clock to sync the Minitels. In our last setup, we only use the Minitel and its keyboard as an interface and everything is sent to Raspberry Pis handling both MIDI and audio output. We’re also using one Minitel to display graphics and use it as a source for realtime VJ effects through another Raspberry equipped with a camera. The project is shifting to include more of the Minitel culture, using sound samples of Minitel TV ads or news saying how great the Minitel technology was. That’s really a work in progress.
Each time we have a performance planned is an opportunity to move forward on this project.
vimeo
Jerome Saint-Clair and Antoine Bonnet for GRL FR, Traffic Booster
Also and completely unrelated Traffic Booster! I find it hilarious, maybe because i don’t even have a driving license. It must be one of the most irritating invention for car drivers though. You could get lynched here in Italy for setting up something like that at a traffic light. I suspect that people in Paris where you’ve installed it have not been very amused by it. Why did you make the Traffic Booster? How obvious is it to drivers that the beep doesn’t actually come from an impatient driver?
Jerome: That’s a project people really enjoy. I mean they enjoy it when they watch the video, not as victims. In the meantime I’m pretty sure drivers didn’t even notice it was automatic. They are so used to stress and angriness.
I made the traffic booster as a reaction to the need for speed (not the video game) in our society. When you live in a large city you’re absorbed by its pace. You have no other choice than to conform with it. If you don’t comply, it makes people angry. Try to walk slowly in the corridors of the metro when people are rushing to the office in the morning and you’ll notice. Same thing on the road. Driver will put themselves or others at risk to save only a few seconds, without realizing that they’ll have to stop at the next traffic lights and actually not gain time at all. This mechanism applies to a lot of things in our occidental societies. Plus there are devices and rules to force you to do so and to record that. Fixed office hours along with time recorders, personal objectives along with variable pay, Uber-like companies along with smartphone apps, … In the end, technology is not a real progress but is used to control people. And people don’t step down. They comply and compete. The traffic booster is there to remind that: beware of what’s forcing you to go faster without giving you the time to actually step aside, look around and think of what’s really going on here.
Thanks Jerome, Antoine and Martin!
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suzanneshannon · 4 years
Text
Chapter 2: Browsers
Previously in web history…
Sir Tim Berners-Lee creates the technologies behind the web — HTML, HTTP, and the URL which blend hypertext with the Internet — with a small team at CERN. He convinces the higher-ups in the organizations to put the web in the public domain so anyone can use it.
Dennis Ritchie had a problem.
He was working on a new, world class operating system. He and a few other colleagues were building it from the ground up to be simple and clean and versatile. It needed to run anywhere and it needed to be fast.
Ritchie worked at Bell Labs. A hotbed of innovation, in the 60s, and 70s, Bell employed some of the greatest minds in telecommunications. While there, Ritchie had worked on a time-sharing project known as Multics. He was fiercely passionate about what he saw as the future of computing. Still, after years of development and little to show for it, Bell eventually dropped the project. But Ritchie and a few of his colleagues refused to let the dream go. They transformed Multics into a new operating system adaptable and extendable enough to be used for networked time sharing. They called it Unix.
Ritchie’s problem was with Unix’s software. More precisely, his problem was with the language the software ran on. He had been writing most of Unix in assembly code, quite literally feeding paper tape into the computer, the way it was done in the earliest days of computing. Programming directly in assembly — being “close to the metal” as some programmers refer to it — made Unix blazing fast and memory efficient. The process, on the other hand, was laborious and prone to errors.
Ritchie’s other option was to use B, an interpreted programming language developed by his co-worker Ken Thompson. B was much simpler to code with, several steps abstracted from the bare metal. However, it lacked features Ritchie felt were crucial. B also suffered under the weight of its own design; it was slow to execute and lacked the resilience needed for time-sharing environments.
Ritchie’s solution was to chose neither. Instead, he created a compiled programming language with many of the same features as B, but with more access to the kinds of things you could expect from assembly code. That language is called C.
By the time Unix shipped, it had been fully rewritten in C, and the programming language came bundled in every operating system that ran on top of it, which, as it turned out, was a lot of them. As more programmers tried C, they adapted to it quickly. It blended, as some might say, perfectly abstract functions and methods for creating predictable software patterns with the ability to get right down to the metal if needed. It isn’t prescriptive, but it doesn’t leave you completely lost. Saron Yitabrek, host of the Command Heroes podcast, describes C as “a nearly universal tool for programming; just as capable on a personal computer as it was on a supercomputer.”
C has been called a Swiss Army language. There is very little it can’t do, and very little that hasn’t been done with it. Computer scientist Bill Dally once said, “It set the tone for the way that programming was done for several decades.” And that’s true. Many of the programming paradigms developed in the latter half of the 20th century originated in C. Compilers were developed beyond Unix, available in every operating system. Rob Pike, a software engineer involved in the development of Unix, and later Go, has a much simpler way of putting it. “C is a desert island language.”
Ritchie has a saying of his own he was fond of repeating. “C has all the elegance and power of assembly language with all the readability and maintainability of… assembly language.” C is not necessarily everyone’s favorite programming language, and there are plenty of problems with it. (C#, created in the early 2000s, was one of many attempts to improve it.) However, as it proliferated out into the world, bundled in Unix-like operating systems like X-Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX, software developers turned to it as a way to speak to one another. It became a kind of common tongue. Even if you weren’t fluent, you could probably understand the language conversationally. If you needed to bundle up and share a some code, C was a great way to do it.
In 1993, Jean-François Groff and Sir Tim Berners-Lee had to release a package with all of the technologies of the web. It could be used to build web servers or browsers. They called it libwww, and released it to the public domain. It was written in C.
Think about the first time you browsed the web. That first webpage. Maybe it was a rich experience, filled with images, careful design and content you couldn’t find anywhere else. Maybe it was unadorned, uninteresting, and brief. No matter what that page was, I’d be willing to bet that it had some links. And when you clicked that link, there was magic. Suddenly, a fresh page arrives on your screen. You are now surfing the web. And in that moment you understand what the web is.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee finished writing the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, in the final days of 1990. It ran on his NeXT machine, and had read and write capabilities (the latter of which could be used to manage a homepage on the web). The NeXTcube wasn’t the heaviest computer you’ve ever seen, but it was still a desktop. That didn’t stop Berners-Lee from lugging it from conference to conference so he could plug it in and show people the web.
Again and again, he ran into the same problem. It will seem obvious to us now when considering the difficulty of demonstrating a globally networked hypertext application running on a little-used operating system (NeXT) on a not-widely-owned computer (NeXT Computer System) alone at a conference without the Internet. The problem came after the demo with the inevitable question: how can I start using it? The web lacks its magic if you can’t connect to the network yourself. It’s entirely useless isolated on a single computer. To make the idea click, Berners-Lee need to get everybody surfing the web. And he couldn’t very well lend his computer out to anybody that wanted to use it.
That’s where Nicola Pellow came in. An undergraduate at Leicester Polytechnic, Pellow was still an intern at CERN. She was assigned to Berners-Lee’s and Calliau’s team, so they tasked her with building an interoperable browser that could be installed anywhere. The fact that she had no background in programming (she was studying mathematics) and that she was at CERN as part of an internship didn’t concern her much. Within a couple of months she picked up a bit of C programming and built the Line Mode Browser.
Using the Line Mode Browser today, you would probably feel like a hacker from the 1980s. It was a text-only browser designed to run from a command line terminal. In most cases, just plain white text on a black background, pixels bleeding from edge to edge. Typing out a web address into the browser would bring up that website’s text on the screen. The up and down arrows on a keyboard could be used for navigation. Links were visible as a numbered list, and one could jump from site to site by entering the right number.
It was designed that way for a reason. Its simplicity guaranteed interoperability. The Line Mode Browser holds the unique distinction of being the only browser for many years to be platform-agnostic. It could be installed anywhere, on just about any computer or operating system. It made getting online easy, provided you knew what to do once you installed it. Pellow left CERN a few months after she released the Line Mode Browser. She returned after graduation, and helped build the first Mac browser.
Almost soon as Pellow left, Berners-Lee and Cailliau wrangled another recruit. Jean-François Groff was working at CERN, one office over. A programmer for years, Groff had written the French translation of the official C Programming Guide by Brian Kernighan and the language’s creator, Dennis Ritchie. He was working on a bit of physics software for UNIX systems when he got a chance to see what Berners-Lee was working on.
Not everybody understood what the web was going for. It can be difficult to grasp without the worldwide picture we have today. Groff was not one of those people. He longed for something just like the web. He understood perfectly what the web could be. Almost as soon as he saw a demo, he requested a transfer to the team.
He noticed one problem right away. “So this line mode browser, it was a bit of a chicken and egg problem,” he once described in an interview, “because to use it, you had to download the software first and install it and possibly compile it.” You had to use the web to download a web browser, but you needed a web browser to use the web. Groff found a clever solution. He built a simple mechanism that allowed users to telnet in to the NeXT server and browse the web using its built-in Line Mode Browser. So anyone in the world could remotely access the web without even needing to install the browser. Once they were able to look around, Groff hoped, they’d be hooked.
But Groff wanted to take it one step further. He came from UNIX systems, and C programming. C is a desert island language. Its versatility makes it invaluable as a one-size-fits-all solution. Groff wanted the web to be a desert island platform. He wanted it to be used in ways he hadn’t even imagined yet, ways that scientists at research institutions couldn’t even fathom. The one medium you could do anything with. To do that, he would need to make the web far more portable.
Working alongside Berners-Lee, Groff began pulling out the essential elements of the NeXT browser and porting them to the C programming language. Groff chose C not only because he was familiar with it, but because he knew most other programmers would be as well. Within a few months, he had built the libwww package (its official title would come a couple of years later). The libwww package was a set of common components for making graphical browsers. Included was the necessary code for parsing HTML, processing HTTP requests and rendering pages. It also provided a starting point for creating browser UI, and tools for embedding browser history and managing graphical windows.
Berners-Lee announced the web to the public for the first time on August 7, 1991. He posted a brief description along with a simple note:
If you’re interested in using the code, mail me. It’s very prototype, but available by anonymous FTP from info.cern.ch. It’s copyright CERN but free distribution and use is not normally a problem.
If you were to email Sir Tim Berners-Lee, he’d send you back the libwww package.
By November of 1992, the library had fully matured into a set of reusable tools. When CERN put the web in the public domain the following year, its terms included the libwww package. By 1993, anyone with a bit of time on their hands and a C compiler could create their own browser.
Before he left CERN to become one of the first web consultants, Groff did one final thing. He created a new mailing list, called www-talk, for a new generation of browser developers to talk shop.
On December 13, 1991 — almost a year after Berners-Lee had put the finishing touches on the first ever browser — Pei-Yuan Wei posted to the www-talk mailing list. After a conversation with Berners-Lee, he had built a browser called ViolaWWW. In a few months, it would be the most popular of the early browsers. In the middle of his post, Wei offhandedly — in a tone that would come off as bragging if it weren’t so sincere — mentioned that the browser build was a one night hack.
A one night hack. Not even Berners-Lee or Pellow could pull that off. Wei continued the post with the reasons he was able to get it up and running so quickly. But that nuance would be lost to history. What programmers would remember is that the it only took one day to build a browser. It was “hacked” together and shipped to the world, buggy, but usable. That phrase would set the tone and pace of browser development for at least the next decade. It is arguably the dominant ideology among browser makers today.
The irony is the opposite was true. ViolaWWW was the product of years of work that simply culminated in a single night. Wei is a great software programmer. But he also had all the pieces he needed before the night even started.
Pei-Yuan Wei has made a few appearances on the frontlines of web history. Apart from the ViolaWWW browser, he was hired by Dale Dougherty to work on an early version of GNN.com, the first commercial website. He was at a meeting of web pioneers the day the idea of the W3C was first discussed. In 2012, he was on the list of witnesses to speak in court to the many dangers of the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA). In the web’s early history Wei was a persistent presence.
Wei was a student at UCLA Berkley in the early 90s. It was HyperCard that set off his fascination with hypertext software. HyperCard was an application built for the Mac operating system in the late 80s. It allowed its users to create stacks of virtual “cards,” each with a bit of info. Users could then connect these cards however they wanted, and quickly sort, search, and navigate through their stacks. People used it to organize their recipes, replace their Rolodexes, organize research notes, and a million other things. HyperCard is the kind of software that attracts a person who demands a certain level of digital meticulousness, the kind of user that organizes their desktop folders into neat sections and precisely tags their data. This core group of power users manipulated the software using its built-in scripting language, HyperScript, to extend it to new heights.
Wei had just glimpsed Hypercard before he knew he needed to use it. But he was on an X-Windows computer, and HyperCard could only run on a Mac. Wei was not to be deterred. Instead of buying a Mac computer (an expensive but reasonable solution the problem) Wei began to write software of his own. He even went one step further. Wei began by creating his very own programming language. He called it Viola, and the first thing he built with it was a HyperCard clone.
Wei felt that the biggest limitation of HyperCard — and by extension his own hypertext software — was that it lacked access to a network. What good was data if it was locked up inside of a single computer? By the time he had reached that conclusion, it was nearing the end of 1991, around the time he saw a mention of the World Wide Web. So one night, he took Viola, combined it with libwww, and built a web browser. ViolaWWW was officially released.
ViolaWWW was built so quickly because most of it was already done by the time Wei found out about the web project. The Viola programming language was in the works for a couple of years at that point. It had already been built to accept hyperlinks and hypermedia for the HyperCard clone. It had been built to be extendable to other possible applications. Once Wei was able to pick apart libwww, he ported his software to read HTML, which itself was still a preposterously simple language. And that piece, the final tip of the iceberg, only took him a single night.
ViolaWWW would be the site of a lot of experimentation on the early web. Wei was the first to include an early version of stylesheets. He added a bookmarking function. The browser supported forms and embedded media. In a prescient move, Wei also included downloadable applets, allowing fairly advanced applications running inside of the browser. This became the template for what would eventually become Java applets.
For X-Windows users, ViolaWWW was the most popular browser on the market. Until the next thing came along.
Releasing a browser in the early 90s was almost a rite of passage. There was a useful exercise in downloading the libwww package and opening it up in your text editor. The web wasn’t all that complicated: there was a bit of code for rendering HTML, and processing HTTP requests from web servers (or other origins, like FTP or Gopher). Programmers of the web used a browser project as a way of getting familiar with its features. It was kind of like the “Hello World” of the early web.
In June of 1993, there were 130 websites in the entire world. There was easily a dozen browsers to chose from. That’s roughly one browser for every ten websites.
This rapid development of browsers was driven by the nature of innovation in the web community. When Berners-Lee put the web in the public domain, he did more than just give it to the world. He put openness at the center of its ideology. It would take five years — with the release of Netscape — for the web to get its first commercial browser. Until then, the “browser makers” were a small community of programmers talking things out the www-talk mailing list trying to make web browsing feel as revolutionary as they wanted it to be.
Some of the earliest projects ported one browser to another operating system. Occasionally, one of the browser makers would spontaneously release something that now feels essential. The first PDF rendering inside of a browser window was a part of the Midas browser. HTML tables were introduced and properly laid out in another called Arena. Tabbed browsing was a prominent feature in InternetWorks. All of these features were developed before 1995.
Most early browsers have faded into obscurity. But the people behind them didn’t. Counted among the earliest browser makers are future employees at Netscape, members of the W3C and the web standards movement, the inventor of cookies (and the blink tag), and the creators of some of the most important websites of the early web.
Of course, no one knew that at the time. To most of the creators, it was simply an exercise in making something cool they could pass along to their Internet friends.
The New York Times introduced its readers to the web on December 8, 1993. “Think of it as a map to the buried treasures of the Information Age,” read the first line. But the “map” the writer was referring to — one he would spend the first half of the article describing — wasn’t the World Wide Web; it was its most popular browser. A browser called Mosaic.
Mosaic was created, in part, by Marc Andreessen. Like many of the early web pioneers, Andreessen is a man of lofty ambition. He is drawn to big ideas and grand statements (he once said that software will “eat the world”). In college, he was known for being far more talkative than your average software engineer, chatting it up about the next bing thing.
Andreessen has had a decades-long passion for technology. Years later, he would capture the imagination of the public with the world’s first commercial browser: Netscape Navigator. He would grace the cover of Time magazine. He would become a cornerstone of Silicon Valley, define its rapid “ship first, think later” ethos for years, and seek and capture his fortune in the world of venture capital.
But Mosaic’s story does not begin with a commanding legend of Silicon Valley overseeing, for better or worse, the future of technology. It begins with a restless college student.
When Sir Tim Berners-Lee posted the initial announcement about the web, about a year before the article in The New York Times, Andreessen was an undergraduate student at the University of Illinois. While he attended school he worked at the university-affiliated computing lab known as the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). NCSA occupied a similar space as ARPA in that they both were state-sponsored projects without an explicit goal other than to further the science of computing. If you worked at NCSA, it was possible to move from project to project without arising too much suspicion from the higher ups.
Andreessen was supposed to be working on visualization software, which he had found a way to run mostly on auto-pilot. In his spare time, Andreessen would ricochet around the office listening to everyone about what it was they were interested in. It was during one of those sessions that a colleague introduced him to the World Wide Web. He was immediately taken aback. He downloaded the ViolaWWW browser, and within a few days he had decided that the web would be his primary focus. He decided something else too. He needed to make a browser of his own.
In 1992, browsers could be cumbersome software. They lacked the polish and the conventions of modern browsers without decades of learning to build off of. They were difficult to download and install, often requiring users to make modifications to system files. And early browser makers were so focused on developing the web they didn’t think too much about the visual interface of their software.
Andreessen wanted to build a well-designed, performant, easy-to-install browser while simultaneously building on the features that Wei was adding to the ViolaWWW browser. He pitched his idea to a programmer at NCSA, Eric Bina. “Marc’s a very good salesman,” Bina would later recall, so he joined up.
Taking their cue from the pace of others, Andreessen and Bina finished the first version of the Mosaic browser in just a few weeks. It was available for X Windows computers. To announce the browser, Andreessen posted a download link to the www-talk mailing list, with the message “By the power vested in me by nobody in particular, alpha/beta version 0.5 of NCSA’s Motif-based networked information systems and World Wide Web browser, X Mosaic, is hereby released.” The web got more than just a popular browser. It got its first pitchman.
That first version of the browser was impressive in a somewhat crowded field. To be sure, it had forms and some media support early on. But it wasn’t the best browser, nor was it the most advanced browser. Instead, Andreessen and Bina focused on something else entirely. Mosaic set itself apart because it was the easiest to use. The installation process was simple and the interface was, relatively speaking, intuitive.
The Mosaic browser’s secret weapon was its iteration. Before long, other programmers at NCSA wanted in on the project. They parceled off different operating systems to port the browser to. One team took the Mac, another Windows. By the fall of 1993, a few months after its initial release, Mosaic had feature-paired versions on Mac, Windows and Unix systems, as well as compatible server software.
After that, the pace of development only accelerated. Beta versions were released often and were available to download via FTP. New features were added at a rapid pace and new versions seemed to ship every week. The NCSA Mosaic was fully engaged with the web community, active in the www-talk mailing list, talking with users and gathering bug reports. It was not at all unusual to submit a bug report and hear back a few hours later from an NCSA programmer with a fix.
Andreessen was a particularly active presence, posting to threads almost daily. When the Mosaic team decided they might want to collect anonymous analytics about browser usage, Andreessen polled the www-talk list to see if it was a good idea. When he got a lot of questions about how to use HTML, he wrote a guide for beginners.
When one Mosaic user posted some issues he was having, it led to a tense back and forth between that user and Andreessen. He claimed he wasn’t a customer, and Andreessen shouldn’t care too much about what he thought. Andreessen replied, “We do care what you think simply because having the wonderful distributed beta team that we essentially have due to this group gives us the opportunity to make our product much better than it could be otherwise.” What Andreessen understood better than any of the early browser makers was that Mosaic was a product, and feedback from his users could drive its development. If they kept the feedback loop tight, they could keep the interface clean and bug-free while staying on the cutting edge of new features. It was the programming parable given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow come to life in browser development.
There was an electricity to Mosaic development at NCSA. Internal competition fueled OS teams to get features out the door. Sometimes the Mac version would get to something first. Sometimes it was Bina and Andreessen continuing to work on X-Mosaic. “We would get together, middle of the night, and come up with some cool idea — images was an example of that — then we would go off and race and see who would do it first,” creator of the Windows version of Mosaic Jon Mittelhauser later recalled. Sometimes, the features were duds and would hardly go anywhere at all. Other times, as Mittelhauser points out, they were absolutely essential.
In the months after launch, they started to surpass the feature list of even their nearest competitor, ViolaWWW. They added forms support and rich media. They added bookmarks for users to keep track of their links. They even created their own “What’s New” page, updated every single day, which tracked the web’s most popular links. When you opened up Mosaic, the NCSA What’s New page was the first thing you saw. They weren’t just building a browser. They were building a window to the web.
As Mittelhauser points out, it was the <img> tag which became Mosaic’s defining feature. It succeeded in doing two things. The tag was added without input from Sir Tim Berners-Lee or the wider web community. (Andreessen posted a note to www-talk only after it had already been implemented.) So firstly, that set the Mosaic team in a conflict with other browser makers and some parts of the web community that would last for years.
Secondly, it made Mosaic infinitely more popular. The <img> tag allowed for images to be embedded directly inline in the Mosaic browser. People found the web boring to browse. It was sterile, rigid, and scientific. Inline images changed all that. Within a few months, a new class of web designer was beginning to experiment with what was possible with images on the web. In some ways, it was the tag that made the web famous.
The image tag prompted the feature in The New York Times, and a subsequent write-up in Wired. By the time the press got around to talking about the web, Mosaic was the most popular browser and became a surrogate for the larger web world. “Mosaic” was to browsing the web as “Google” is to searching now.
Ultimately, the higher ups got involved. NCSA was not a tech company. They were a supercomputing lab. They came in to help make the Mosaic browser more cohesive, and maybe, more profitable. Licenses were parceled out to a dozen or so companies. Mosaic was bundled into Spry’s Internet in a Box product. It was embedded in enterprise software by the Santa Cruz Operation.
In the end, Mosaic split off into two directions. Pressure from management pushed Andreessen to leave and start a new company. It would be called Netscape. Another of the licensees of the software was a company called Spyglass. They were beginning to have talks with Microsoft. Both would ultimately choose to rewrite the Mosaic browser from scratch, for different reasons. Yet that browser would be their starting point and their products would have lasting implications on the browser market for decades as the world began to see its first commercial browsers.
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