Virtual worlds and VOIP

Seems like Second Life is a step closer to, from what I noted earlier on this blog, is a step closer to becoming a viable ODR platform for those who have the bandwidth & graphics processing power needed to run it in full glory. Second Life now sports VOIP – currently in beta, but with a progressive roll-out.

The biggest draw, for me, of Second Life, is that it runs natively on my Mac. However, as a reader notes in the TechCrunch post here, Second Life rival There has had this feature as part of its sims for a while now.

Having just installed Windows XP through Bootcamp on my Macbook Pro, I’m going to try out There, after around 2 years of meanderings in Second Life, to see whether it matches up to that which I’ve come to expect from Second Life as life virtually online.

See also my other posts on Second Life and Online Dispute Resolution.

The limits of online freedom and activism?

“Citizens now have much greater control over how and when they receive information and, much more than ever before, they can react to it if they choose, they can participate and they can be active towards it,” said Timothy Balding, CEO of the World Association of Newspapers, which organized the conference in Paris with the World Press Freedom Committee and UNESCO.

“On the negative side, the internet has opened up extraordinary new possibilities for the widespread, damaging and sometimes dangerous manipulation of information which is difficult if not impossible to stem,” he said. “In my view, this phenomenon will increasingly place a heavy responsibility on professional journalists to maintain high standards of fact-checking, honesty and objectivity. The very fundamentals of our societies and democracies will be lost if we are unable any longer to distinguish between true and false in terms of information.”

New media increases freedom but holds dangers, conference told

As the dotcom boom and bust fades into history, the business press is again celebrating the revolutionary potential of a wired world. The discomfort of the mainstream media is just the start of it, they argue. The net is humbling big business as consumers compare the price of everything from gas to bank interest rates and take their custom to the corporations offering the best value. Meanwhile, doctors face patients who can find out if the NHS’s treatments they are offered are the best available and politicians must cope with an electorate that can investigate the claims of soundbites and manifestos with a click of a mouse.

The cheerleaders are right in many respects. The net is changing the world, but not all of it. Contrary to the optimism of the Nineties, that it would allow oppressed peoples to escape censors and read forbidden opinions, the net is proving surprisingly easy for dictatorships to control.

A connected world proves no threat to tyrants

The first excerpt, from an international conference on the press freedom dimension of new media at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris, succinctly articulates a position that is increasingly finding favour with many web and online activists – that the advent of new technologies, in and of themselves, are liberating or empowering, and that dictatorships and repressive regimes often use these very technologies to further stifle dissent and rights. I fall squarely into the camp of cautious optimists who recognise the power of new media to challenge governments and States which seek to curtail fundamental rights and democratic dissent. However, living in a country that is increasingly intolerant of those who articulate human rights concerns, I am deeply aware that the fate of an Egyptian blogger of late, despite the growth of online activism in the Middle East, may well be a trend that we see increase in the future around the world.

The second excerpt, and one that has generated a number of interesting comments, is from Nick Cohen in the Guardian Unlimited. Nick’s point is simply that dictatorships and repressive government will always have the power to block and limit access to the web. As the Human Rights Watch Global Report 2007 points out:

The “war on terror” did not cause, but did exacerbate, the trend towards restriction of the internet and the proliferation of surveillance through modern technology. Governments that once invoked child pornographers as a good reason to censor internet publications shifted emphasis to terrorism as a rationale. Corporations became willing assistants in the fencing and filtering of access, even while justifying their cooperation with repressive governments in terms of expanding public access to information (and of course, their own access to markets). Surveillance and data collection grew exponentially, not only because developments in modern technology made such practices more economically feasible, but also because security fears made them more politically palatable.

Nick’s point is a shade too simplistic and ignores the point that the world over, bloggers and mainstream media are equal in their condemnation of the Egyptian’s regime action to jail a blogger and act against the freedom of expression. Before the advent of the web and internet, news of such blatant displays of repression would have taken weeks, or even months, to get global attention. And while attention itself may not prevent or in any way convince governments to stop acting against the rights of citizens, the global scrutiny afforded by the web – in the form of text, audio and video – is in itself a powerful case for the power of new media to bear witness to the gross abuses of power and the use of terror tactics the world over, be it by a State, a repressive government, a local law enforcement authority, or by terrorists.

Technology may not be neutral, but its progressive use can help shape democratic dialogue and citizen driven activism for human rights and peace with justice, bridging local initiatives to international rights campaigns. While it may be the case that the same tools we use as rights activists are used by governments for diametrically opposite ends, by exposing the criminality of corruption, nepotism and the seedy underbelly of governments who violently silence their opponents whilst purporting to uphold international human rights norms, those who use technology to secure and strengthen rights & democracy will always hold a slight edge that cannot be erased completely even by the most vicious government.

Somehow, from somewhere, the news will always trickle out. A single photo taken on a mobile phone or an SMS is all it takes.

Mobile phones for advocacy and social transformation

NTEN and MobileActive.org are announcing the second MobileActive Guide, profiling strategies and civil society organizations using mobile phones in their work to make the world a better place. The second MobileActive Guide focuses on using mobile phones in issue advocacy. The guide features case studies from around the world, strategies for using mobile phones in advocacy work, and a how-to section for advocacy organizations considering using mobile phones to advance their causes.

MobileActive recently released their second strategy guide on using mobiles for non-profit, civil society activism. Titled Strategy Guide #2: Using Mobile Phones in Advocacy Campaigns it’s an interesting, albeit short, look at the manner in which mobile phones have been, and can be used in social transformation and advocacy campaigns. As the documents notes, SMS can add value to advocacy campaigns augmenting the speed with which messages travel, with corresponding increases in response times by the target audience, broader reach and more effective coverage leading to a larger footprint for outreach activities, the ubiquity of mobile phones lending themselves as devices for communication and information dissemination, the accessibility to young people and the ability to support a campaign by disseminating key information to activists on a just-in-time basis.

The document goes on to mention several interesting case studies from around the world,and in particular highlights FrontlineSMS, which looks like a tremendously powerful tool, free to boot, that organisations can download and use for SMS campaigns. The only caveat I can see is that the programme only runs on WindowsXP, and as I’ve noted elsewhere in this blog, when the trend is to be platform agnostic and move into a web services model, this lock in to a platform that for many in the Global South is only accessible through high prices or piracy, is unfortunate. It looks, however, a powerful application and I would be interested to hear the stories of any NGOs who use it.

The document ends with a couple of interesting lessons learned. Lesson learned #2 is particularly interesting, given my own experience with a very large mobile telecoms provider in Sri Lanka. Noting that it’s important to work with a mobile vendor, the document avers that to “conduct an effective large-scale mobile advocacy campaign, you’ll need to work with a mobile vendor who can help you with setup, implementation, list management, and understanding metrics”.

Juxtapose this to this cryptic email answer I got from the CSR division of the mobile telecoms provider I approached with an idea for the use of mobiles to support the peace process:

I;m not sure if we’ll be keen to get into the peace line, since we operate in the north and east.

So much for CSR and peacebuilding…

In fact, the document only mentions a single human rights campaign that used SMS in collecting petition signatures. This is both interesting and regrettable – interesting because it clearly demonstrates the potential to scale up such approaches and strategies for the use of mobiles, and regrettable because there aren’t more examples, in the document, of similar experiences from other conflict & post-conflict zones. As I’ve noted earlier on this blog, even organisations such as Amnesty International have much to learn in online petitions – and the advent of mobile based petitions may clear the path for even small CBOs to ratchet up campaigns in support of human rights & democracy.

I would personally love to see the use of mobiles for peacebuilding and online dispute resolution (ODR).

Katrin Verclas, who edited this short publication, and I had a lengthy Skype conversation in early January this year where we explored some conceptual and practical uses of mobiles in social activism and transformation. I’m looking forward to reading more from MobileActive.org in the future.

More reading:
Mobile phones, laptops and ODR
News and information through SMS: A Second Look at Jasminenews
Building peace through ICT: Ideas for practical projects
The future of protesting
Mobiles and peacebuilding
Mobiles phones: Access and content development

Defeating Repressive Regimes
Mobile Phone Futures

Community based, community driven disaster and humanitarian response

During incidents like Hurricane Katrina, the Kobe earthquake, the British foot-and-mouth disease outbreak, and the Indonesian tsunami, communities collaborated via the Internet to provide supplies and assistance to those in need of help, which is what Shneiderman and Preece are looking to create. Under the proposed project, the web sites will be run by “trained volunteers with a few professionals, much as volunteer fire departments now operate,” according to the proposition in Science magazine. The sites would accept text, video, and photos from the community to help emergency crews react more quickly to disasters as well as inform others of the status of the situation via the web. “Citizen reporters would report to a centralized authority who will take care of emergency response coordination and allocate scarce resources of police fire and medical services,” Professor Shneiderman told BBC News.

A story on ArsTechnica and BBC alerts us to the possibilities of mobiles, new media and citizen journalism in support of humanitarian operations and disaster relief.

Also see:
How much information should we share in peacebuilding and humanitarian operations?
Wikis, Webs and Networks: Creating Connections for Conflict-Prone Settings
Is Technology Neutral?

A conversation with Indi Samarajiva

Indi Samarajiva was raised in Columbus, Ohio, studied at McGill University in Montreal and now lives in Colombo. His blog serves up some of the most interesting posts and subsequent discussions in the Sri Lankan blogosphere. Kottu, an blog aggregation website he was instrumental in creating, now collects over 100 blogs on Sri Lanka. His writing, ideas and innovation is pioneering, and has inspired many of us, including myself, to take up and treat blogging as a serious activity.

Now working for a large mobile telecoms company, I caught up with Indi after a long time and over email fired a couple of questions.

When and why did you start blogging?
I was in Montreal, studying at McGill. I was taking this open-ended Technology and Education with Andre Renaud. He got us using FTP and starting websites and had us do a journal, in HTML. I loved FTP cause it was the first time I’d really uploaded stuff to the web, where I’d been downloading for years. That’s when I started messing with websites.

I started blogging cause it was easier than writing and uploading my own clumsy HTML. FTP is fun but it’s literally moving files around and that gets old. I started on Xanga, then 20six. I got the first generation smartphone, a Sony Ericsson P800 and I was really into moblogging. Montreal is a beautiful city and I just walked around photographing stuff and writing about it. My phone bills were like $100 a month with data, but I learned a lot. I used Phlog for photos too, Flickr wasn’t around then. Also I had a Typepad account for a while. I used a lot of free servers before I got frustrated with the lack of control.

I didn’t get my own server and upload WordPress till my first summer in Sri Lanka.

For a medium that’s still dominated by English in Sri Lanka, what do you think it’s potential is to reach the vernacular speaking people?
Most of the blogs in the world are in Chinese or Japanese, so I don’t think it’s a language thing. Right now you can’t type or read Sinhala reliably, though the Unicode finally exists. That’s the biggest hurdle, I think you’ll see growth after that.

The curve is going in a lot of different ways, so I actually dunno where SL will come in. I suspect that people will get online through mobiles more than computers, but dunno. Video may even outgallop text by then. I think people will always need content.

You are the creator of Kottu. What prompted you to create a blog aggregator for Sri Lanka?
It was Mahangu’s idea. He wanted to do something like a group blog, for fun. I was just coming off tsunami work. During the tsunami government was AWOL and NGO communications were fucked. I knew people were non-technical, and I though if they set up blogs it would be easy. I wanted to make a blog aggregator (called a Planet) to pull them all together, to enable some communication. I think I pitched it at a CPA meeting but they brushed me off. Some computer industry guys said ‘don’t worry about it’ and wrote Sahana, which I thought was technical and useless. I mean, nobody I knew used it. Anyways, I had that data structure and just implemented it for Kottu. I was honestly more interested in the data structure than the content at first.

What are your future plans for Kottu, if any?
Dunno. I’d like to develop some ties with the main stream media. Am developing ties. I suspect that the MSM may be beyond repair, however, so I’m looking into mobile stuff as well.

Your own blog brings up many interesting issues on economics, media, politics, society and life in general – who is your primary audience?
I think it’s people with nothing to do at work. Mostly Sri Lankans, though I’m actually not that interested in SL politics. I read Andrew Sullivan and the New York Times everyday, so I can say more about the Libby trial than the UNP/SLFP drama. I honestly only write about SL politics because it intrudes on my life, usually in a bad way.

The audience that I care about is fellow bloggers, and a few friends who read. When I write I write mainly for my own taste. I try to research cause my parents and school have drilled that into me, that ideas need to be solid and defensible.

Have you done any demographic study / survey of those who visit Kottu? If not, what is your sense of the age, sex, location of those who visit?
No. The stats are public, but not demographic per se. Most are Sri Lankan, and young. Many are younger than me (24). Mostly male, but women seem to do very well.

Can blogging fulfill any larger social purpose other than writing for oneself? If so, can you give any examples, say from Sri Lanka?
It’s just words, so of course. Laws and Constitutions are just words and the American Revolution was spurred by pamphleteers. One example is one of the Rotary Clubs. I gave them a presentation on Blogger through my friend Harsha. I didn’t think it’d go anywhere, but then the tsunami hit and they setup a blog. They posted photos, got tons of email and raised enough money to buy lots of food and build some houses. On a larger scale, I setup and wrote a blog for Sarvodaya during that time and we raised over $800,000 dollars. I remember the first night we setup the payment gateway like $25,000 came in. And the comments were very supportive, and Sarvodaya used the blog to post detailed financial reports, and give people some feedback for their money.

Blogging, to me, is inextricably tied to the tsunami. That’s what Kottu was borne of and it was at that time I realized how vital international communication is. Blogging also helped me meet girls.

What really is the potential for media such as blogs to foster reconciliation and support democracy where there is a deficit of both?
I think blogs and politics are actually very connected. In the US every major politician has a blog and many announce their campaigns there. Stuff like YouTube also has the potential to keep people honest. They’re into it cause they can raise a lot of money, but I think the end result is more democracy.

But do I think blogs can foster democracy and reconciliation in SL, not really. Not yet I guess. This is still a print/TV culture and some bridge needs to be built.

You’ve been attacked personally, your current partner has been attacked viciously, and with every post, you seem to rake up progressive discussions as well as hate speech in what appears to be equal measure. Is there any way in which the balance can be tipped in favour of civil conversations and progressive debate?
I think part of the problem is anonymity. I don’t tell people to fuck off in real life cause my identity and my place in this culture means something to me. A lot of perfectly sane people are complete sociopaths on the road, when they’re hidden behind a windshield. No one walks like that. I think what we call civility is heavily dependent on facial and non-verbal communications, which simply doesn’t exist on the Internet. The diplomatic civility of letters and print is again dependent on a concrete identity at the end of the chain, and there’s a legal framework against libel and obscenity.

As for a way out, I think there are ways to give more identity to commenters. I’ve been experimenting with these WordPress plugins that detect IP and show their national flag, and another one that generates these cool icons from their IP address. I’m inclined towards those cause they’re automatic, I don’t think enough people will sign up for gravatars or whatever. If people have identity maybe they’d behave more like people.

Also, comment moderation works, and I use it. In the blogosphere a person’s right to moderate comments is a non-issue, but it still generates debate here. If someone is simply spewing hate and diverting the thread I’ll moderate them, and I have some semi-functional filters on the backend to do that.

With all the online attacks, what keeps you going?
The first ones hurt, but I’ve been getting it for years, so it just registers like email spam. A harsh comment doesn’t make me anymore nervous than an email about V1agra. I read them all in my email anyways. I honestly don’t read most comments, especially long ones. If someone is being especially toxic I’ll moderate them.

I also never wrote for comments. For about 2 years I had like 30 readers a day, mostly random. For the first year I think it was just my mom reading cause I never called home. It’s nice getting comments, but it honestly has nothing to do with why I write. I don’t really participate in the threads and they’re mostly there for the people that do. If it wasn’t a blog I’d be writing in a notebook, or on walls.

Is the essential anonymity of new media a boon or bane for conversations that engage with contentious issues such as peacebuilding?
I dunno. The net is anonymous. I think it’s overall good cause nobody gets killed for what they say.

What was the fate of iTimes? Is old media dead?
I left. I dunno what they’re doing with it. I wasn’t a good fit for the job, and there’s a lot of admin stuff that I just sucked at.

Old media thinks it’s dying, but it’s not. Especially in Sri Lanka. Old media hasn’t even really begun here. People really love print here, I think there’s a huge market. What I would love to see is for someone to neutralize the state media. If one can find an alternate classifieds system then that kills their revenue. The Sunday Observer sucks. People just read it for the jobs and matrimonials.

How do you see the evolution of new media in general, and blogs in particular, in Sri Lanka?
Mobile is the best vector to reach people, but the user experience sucks. I think that’s just one pipe. New media is, to me, separating form from content. You have a database of content (some user generated) which is then distributed via print/TV/mobile/whatever. I think blogs are a part of that. However, social networking sites like Hi5 and Facebook are more popular here than blogging, so I think that’s more important.

Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t really think of stuff in a Sri Lankan context. Blogs and new media are by essence global. I think Sri Lanka is a good place to test and dev stuff, but it’s not a significant market. Eventually we have to start talking to the world.

Who do you think are key allies to foster and strengthen if blogging is to be developed (especially in the vernacular) in Sri Lanka? Does an institution like ICTA have any role to play in such a process?
I’m more interest in the mobile companies and stuff. The MSM I guess, but they’re actually very small and inefficient. I don’t know much about the ICTA. Nothing they’ve done has made any ripples in the online world I know. I honestly don’t care. I’m just writing cause I like it, there’s no national plan in mind.

I don’t think it’s an organizational thing. I think you just need more people doing whatever they love. Blogging and Net is just infrastructure to enable them. Whatever good comes will come from them, and I think it’ll be surprising. I wish I could do more writing and less infrastructure, but that’s just how it is right now.

How not to go about an online petition – Amnesty USA’s online petition on Sri Lanka

International rights group Amnesty International has called for an end to the impunity on the spate of disappearances and has setup an online petition addressed to Prime Minister Ratnasiri Wickramanayake calling on the government to take urgent steps to curb the trend.

Having read the news-story in today’s Daily Mirror on Amnesty’s online petition against dissapearances, I was surprised that Amnesty’s main website had no record of this petition. A Google search alerted me to its existence on the Amnesty International USA.

This is more than a bit daft – an organisation such as Amnesty must surely realise the value of having all its output available from a central location, or at the very least, indexed in one catalogue that’s accessible through all the websites that each of its country / region offices set up. Clearly this is not the case at present, and leads to a situation where one has to visit at least two websites in order to ascertain whether Amnesty’s put out anything on Sri Lanka’s erosion of human rights.

Secondly, the online petition itself is complicated to send. You need to register first, and I never got past it to actually send the petition, managing only to repeatedly encounter this cryptic message:

Your country does not match the restrictions for this action item.

Registering also requires one to enter a US State even if resident outside the US. Given that online petitions need to be as accessible as possible, from all countries, especially from Sri Lanka, this is quite bizarre and most unfortunate.

While the petition itself can be printed out as a letter, Amnesty International USA’s approach to online petitions leaves much to be desired and is frankly tantamount to a grossly callous approach to online human rights awareness raising and (online) activism.

PetitionOnline, Petition Spot and Petition Them are just three websites on the web that allow for the creation, free of charge, of online petitions.

More interesting, and certainly very progressive, is the e-petition (to date beta) website set up by the British Prime Minister’s office. As noted on this website,

Petitioners may freely disagree with the Government or call for changes of policy. There will be no attempt to exclude critical views and decisions to accept or reject will not be made on a party political basis.

Amnesty International USA’s flawed approach to e-petitions could be inspired by what’s already out there on the web, since I don’t believe that for all their hype and hoopla of e-government in Sri Lanka, ICTA is going to follow the Downing Street model anytime soon.

War and free software

But while FOSS’s role in the waging of war is surely rising, it doesn’t mean that war will/should become more inevitable. In fact, the principles behind the development of FOSS can be the biggest deterrent to war—people from all walks of life, all over the world, working together, to produce tools that can be used to benefit everyone. It is up to us to work, and if necessary fight, to ensure that our creations are used to make us free, and not to destroy us.

Read the full article here.

From a PC to a Mac: Life after switching to OS X

This post technically speaking has nothing to do with ICT4Peace per se, in that as a theory and practice, ICT4Peace aims to be platform, operating system agnostic. That said, I thought I’d share my experience of using a Mac for my work in Sri Lanka on a number of ICT4Peace initiatives.

Why I switched
One reason – VOR Radio. The tools I needed to edit audio, create jingles and manage podcasts are on a single package on the Mac – Garageband. As I’ve discovered with all Mac software, it’s rock solid, blindingly fast and works seamlessly with other applications I use in the iLife suite that comes with all Macs. In short, it just works – no blue screens, no hard drive thrashing, no memory leaks, no frozen screens, no crashes.

In fact, that really captures by overall experience on my Mac, a Core Duo 2.16Ghz with 1Gb RAM and a 100Gb hard drive. Mac OS X 10.4.8 is fluid, simple and intuitive. That hardest part, after using Windows almost daily since 1996 (and MS-DOS since the early 90’s), was the learning curve associated with what is really a remarkable operating system. In a sense, you have to unlearn everything you learnt with Windows (until XP SP2, I’ve not tried Vista yet) and get used to an UI that is as aesthetically pleasing as it is functional.

The basic Mac comes with iLife, multimedia tools and creativity tools including a programme that allows you to make cartoon strips, for those so inclined, that are definitely years ahead of those offered in Windows XP. This is a phrase I’ll use a lot in this post: everything just works. There’s no need to remember complex key sequences, there’s a uniform UI to each app, one is not bombarded with dialog boxes and questions in order to complete tasks, and the OS X, strange to understand at first, only actually alerts you when there is something wrong (as opposed to the Windows XP behaviour of heralding everything it detects or does with a dialog box you have to click to get rid of, such as plugging in a USB drive)

The worst applications on the Mac
I thought I would get the worst out of the way – and not surprisingly, it’s Microsoft Office for the Mac. I don’t know what the performance of Office applications on the older PowerPC based Macs are, but on my machine, they are, by far, the slowest, ugliest and most unstable applications I use.

One does note that Office runs in emulation mode (Rosetta) on the new Intel based Macs, which really does show when you are editing a large document with nested tables, or running a complex accounting formula in Excel, or editing a complex PowerPoint. Also, there’s supposed to be a new release later this year that’s going to run natively on the Intel Macs. But for now, I’m just going to have to deal with Word for Mac crashing ever so often, forcing me to more paranoid that I ever was on Windows and Office 2003 when editing a document.

Transferring emails. Lots of them.

The biggest fear of switching for me was the migration of around 1.5Gb of emails, from around 2000 (totally over 60,000) that I had on Outlook 2003 on my previous laptop, a Dell X1 (which at the time, was only the 3rd to be sold in Sri Lanka). The folks at BT Options, who helped me out with this, installed LittleMachine’s O2M, which I honestly didn’t expect to work as well as it did. It took a while to convert the emails into a Mac friendly format, but once it did, I was able to import all my emails to Entourage on the Mac (the rough equivalent of Outlook for Windows) without losing a single email or attachment.

Entourage vs. Mac.app
The reason I chose Entourage as my email client over the Mac’s built in email app was because I was more comfortable with using a Microsoft programme for tasks that I simply did not have the time to learn anew the Mac email app (I usually have to meet at least one deadline a day via email).

This was, however, before I discovered just how slow Entourage was when sifting through the 60,000+ emails I had, even through Spotlight.

I switched to the Mac’s built-in email app around 4 months after I bought the machine, and have not regretted it for a second. Though less capable than Entourage, the Mail app runs natively, is bloody fast when displaying emails received 2 – 3 years ago, and works, as one would expect, very well with Spotlight.

Apps I use daily. Well, almost daily.
After sifting through the web’s 10 best mac apps / 10 best free mac apps / 10 mac apps you can’t live without and related blog posts, I’ve found a few apps that have become increasingly indispensable for the work that I do. And that’s really the point – this is not a list that going to be as useful for other Mac users, and perhaps I’m missing out on apps that are better, but the fact is that these work for me, and they work well.

So in no particular order:

Adium

Can’t imagine going back to multiple instant messaging clients. Adium for the Mac is not just eye-candy, its rock solid and connects to more services that I have accounts for. Good shit.

Toast Titanium 8
Mac’s, like Windows XP, comes with CD / DVD burning capabilities built into the OS, but in both operating systems, I’ve found them to be less useful (and reliable) than a dedicated CD / DVD burning app. Toast Titanium 8 is as close to perfection as it gets – slick, fast and with the latest version, even giving me the option of burning Blu-ray discs, this is the best optical media copying and burning app I’ve used.

Aperture

I’m increasingly into amateur photography (saving up to buy a decent digital SLR) and quickly outgrew the (amazing) iPhoto application, that comes bundled with the Mac. Switched to Aperture and though I’m still getting to grips with the application, the joy of working at native speeds on the Intel chip (Adobe Photoshop CS3, still in beta at the time of writing, will be the first Photoshop to support the Intel based Macs without Rosetta) and the power to manipulate RAW images and tweak photos, in real time, made this a natural choice for me. I still use Photoshop CS for image manipulation, especially filters, but the more I use Aperture, the more I grow to love, as with all Apple products, the sheer genius in design and functionality.

RSSOwl

I used this on Windows, and wasn’t about to ditch it when I switched to a Mac. Same functionality, same reliability as the Windows version.

Pages

More powerful than Word, and what one can say is the equivalent of Microsoft Publisher for the Mac, Pages makes DTP enjoyable. Less capable than InDesign CS (which I’m learning) and QuarkXPress (which I have no desire to learn) but far more powerful than Word for the Mac, iPages delivers incredibly professional even in the hands of those who only know a smattering of DTP. Emphasis on professional – the templates included in Pages can transform even the most boring and ill-formatted Word document into something that looks as if it’s come out of a professional DTP house with a minimum of fuss. And once to get to grip with the underlying power of Pages, its a real disincentive to go for something like InDesign unless you really want to enter into high-end, high volume DTP.

Ecto

While I used Bloggar under Windows, I was disappointed to learn that there wasn’t a Mac version available. This disappointment was short lived – Ecto’s now my single point of entry to around 10 blogs to which I contribute to on a range of platforms – from Blogger to WordPress. Everything just works.

AntiRSI

Recently diagnosed with RSI, I was told that I needed to change my posture and my work patterns or else face surgery or worse. Taking the hint, I installed AntiRSI, which helpfully reminds me that no deadline is more important than my health. Not that I always listen…

Paparazzi!

Some of my work involves taking screenshots of websites for promotional purposes, writing manuals, creating help screens, or to include in reports. Paparazzi! makes all this a cinch – and I really haven’t come across an equivalent for Windows.

MaxBulk Mailer Professional

While I never used the Windows equivalent, the need to send out email updates to over 2,500 recipients required that I do something a bit more sophisticated than sending the same email many times over using the BCC field. Enter MaxBulk Mailer, which for around $60 gives me the control I need to send out emails in a structured manner, allows me to keep organised lists, group emails etc. Best of all, on my Mac, it uses Postfix, which is blindingly fast and very reliable.

WriteRoom

Simply the best tool for a writer on the Mac. Period. And, in what I think is absolutely unique on for a programme on the web, the authors even tell you how to bypass the licensing scheme, allowing to effectively get the paid version, for free!

Mindjet MindManager 6 for Mac
I used MindManager a lot on my Dell, and was a bit lost when I switched to find something as easy to use on the Mac, even though there are quite a few open source mind-mapping tools around. Happily, MindJet released MindManager for the Mac, which, dare I say, is even easier to use than the Windows version.

Skype + Call Recorder
Ah – Skype. Honestly, what would an information worker today do without it? Problem is, Skype features on / for the Mac trail behind the Windows counterpart. None of the new features in Skype 3 for Windows are featured in the current release for the Mac, but the VoIP and video features work just fine, thank you.

And with Call Recorder, I can very easily create podcasts from Skype calls.

Flip4Mac
Now how could I watch all my WMV movies without Flip4Mac?

Growl
Hard to describe this one – except that Growl is a programme that once installed, provides status notifications from a wide range of programmes installed on my Mac unobstrusively in the upper right hand corner of my screen. Very smooth.

Google Earth
Honestly haven’t used this for any serious purpose. Yet. But whizzing through the global with accelerated OpenGL goodness powered by a Radeon graphics card that kicks ass can be a such an enjoyable waste of time.

Parallels
Here’s the irony. I actually got Jack Ozzie, Ray Ozzie’s brother, to buy me what was my first legit copy of Windows XP SP2 direct from Microsoft (employees get a massive discount) and the bloody CD doesn’t work! There has to be some karma involved here for all the years of bootlegging Windows. Anyway, as a result, I’ve not been able to play around much with Parallels which everyone is oohing and aahhing about, save to install Ubuntu Edgy Eft – which works like a charm.

Transmission
The only BitTorrent client I’ve used on my Mac. The only BitTorrent client I’ll ever use on my Mac.

Apart from these programmes – some of which I use many times daily, all of which I use at least once a week – I also love & use Uno, ccPublisher, CoconutBattery, HandBrake, OnyX, The Unarchiver, iStat Pro and Zinio.

And finally, there’s Dashboard. I’ve downloaded quite a few widgets to try them out, but iStat Pro is the only one I’ve found truly useful, aside from the built in widgets. The (currency) unit converter widget is one I find tremendously useful when writing a proposal & budget – it connects to the web to get the latest forex rates and what used to be a rather laborious task of going to the web to find the latest rates is now a cinch.

Since getting a Mac, I’ve been challenged to find an excuse that isn’t a lie to explain a delay in keeping to a deadline – this laptop simply does not crash, I haven’t re-started the system for over a week and it’s still working fine, all the software just works and the OS (OS X 10.4.8) so rock solid that you sometimes almost will it to crash just to see what it must be like.

Couple of minor annoyances. I think I mentioned the instability of Word in particular, but MS Office in general on the Intel based Macbook Pro. Given that I use this suite the most in a given day, I can’t wait to upgrade to the new version for Macs due sometime later this year, that should bring the feature set and functionality more in line with the new Office for Windows. And, more importantly, native Intel performance.

I wish, somewhere, there was a hard drive light. Though it doesn’t crash, the Mac does thrash the hard drive sometimes, and since it’s so bloody silent, the whirling beach-ball animation is all that gives an indication of hard drive activity.

This laptop runs hot – and I find it impossible to work with it on my lap. There are a few utilities out there that allows for the control of fan speeds, but I’ve shied away from tweaking such settings.

Windows vs. Mac
I don’t think I’m going to go back to Windows soon. For ICT4Peace and the work that I do, I can unequivocally say that a Mac is better than any Windows XP based laptop / desktop I’ve used – I now concentrate more on my work, than on maintaining my laptop with regular anti-virus upgrades, defragmenting, anti-spyware updates, Internet Explorer exploit updates and all manner of other annoying tasks that really does take up a whole lot of time if you add up the minutes.

I say Windows XP because aside from an early beta, I’ve not really used Vista. Having seen videos of it in action, I’d love to try it out to see how it compares with what I’m now used to on the Mac. But again, having experienced what is really a higher level of computing, unless there is a definitive and overwhelmingly compelling reason to go back to Windows, I don’t think I will.

Liberation or coercion?

It has become vital to examine new technology from a moral standpoint and understand the secondary effects. If firms and democratic countries continue to duck the issue and pass off ethical responsibility on others, we shall soon be in a world where all our communications are spied on.

Read this excellent article by Julien Pain, head of the Internet freedom desk for Reporters Without Borders.

Also see:
HRW 2007 Report’s essay on Internet & Web Censorship – Lessons for Lanka?
The New Arab Conversation: Blogging in the Middle East

ChaCha: Human assisted search

If you have the time, check out ChaCha, a web search engine I came across through an article on Technology Review.

As this picture shows, the human assisted search function for ICT for Peacebuilding brought up three entries from my blog, but none that linked to the ICT4Peace Foundation, which ranks No. 1 on Google.

ChaCha’s potential lies in bringing in human comprehension to web searches. Provided the person searching for the information communicates it well, and provided the human agent comprehends the search, and provided ChaCha’s software gives useful results, which are then judged by the human agent as best he / she can to be relevant to the query, there’s the possibility to get far more useful information from ChaCha’s human assisted search than through, say, Google or Yahoo.

But that’s a shed-load of “ifs” and as the article points out, they are still in the very early stages of human assisted searching.

It’s interesting whether the same model can be used for a smaller range of issues – say, to train a few people who then increasingly become experts in searching for information in specific areas, like human rights. A search operation thus built could be useful for niche audiences, and can, amongst other ways, be accessed via email, SMS or fax. Useful, I would imagine, for a raft of people including students who want a framework of references for background reading in a related topic.

Wonder if ChaCha will follow the specialisation route, or will attempt to be a Google run by humans. Either way, as the article ends:

The seeming strength of ChaCha’s operation is that its guides earn real money, and therefore–unlike contributors to Digg or Wikipedia or Yahoo Answers–have a vested interest in finding the best results. Its weakness may be that in an era of divided attention and instantaneous electronic self-service–when teenagers prefer three-minute YouTube videos to network TV and drivers pay hundreds of dollars for automated GPS devices rather than pull over to ask for directions–ChaCha’s guided searches move at an excruciatingly human pace.