There have been countless Steve Jobs eulogies in the past week. Jobs is a complicated figure for me. He joins other historic American innovators such as Bell, Edison and Ford, who’s biographies celebrate the “land of opportunity” mythology, where anyone motivated could get ahead. On one hand they bettered society with affordable mass-produced technology, and on the other hand they employed aggressive business strategies, introduced bad labor practices, and ruthlessly quashed competition.

Dennis Ritchie passed away this Saturday. Eulogies are not competitions, obviously. But the contrasts between Jobs’s and Ritchie’s legacies are hard to ignore. Jobs introduced to the world iconic form factors, gadgets you could hold. But Ritchie and his co-inventors laid the foundation for modern software. That svelte iPad? Its operating system is 40 years old, Ritchie’s brainchild.

But along with the software, Ritchie and his friends introduced an entire philosophy. A philosophy that is just as seductive to an engineer as the latest Apple aluminium unibody product.

I grew up on UNIX. We had a machine at home with the hostname saris, Hebrew for eunuch. My dad taught me The Cool. Specifically the UNIX Cool of keeping it simple, less is more, and silence is success. It is this Cool that made me want to program, and it will outlast every fancy gadget.

I’ll be talking about inclusive design.

Collabora

I have been drafting Telepathy specs, improving Gabble, drafting more specs, and generally learning a lot. Some (potential) user-visible features include bomb-proof XMPP invisibility, interactive authentication, power saving, communication policy (contact blocking), improved codec-conflict user messages in VoIP and video sessions. And more that I can’t remember right now. Of course this is on top of the client work that is not public yet. It’s been a great experience, working with energized smart people like Simon, Will and Sjoerd is fantastic. I would love to head to FOSDEM this year and see everyone, but I will be turning 30, so probably not.

GNOME Accessibility Team

Early last year Willie Walker’s Orca team in Oracle was finally liquidated and we were not sure where things were headed. I was working on putting a hackfest together, giving a talk, organizing a booth, and generally having a presence in CSUN. This was the first a11y meetup, and I spent time preparing a presentation, dealing with sponsorship and travel, getting resources for the hackfest and booth. Besides saying goodbye to Will at CSUN, it was also a disengagement for me, as my job and other projects were keeping me elsewhere.

Since that hackfest there has been another one in Seville, Alejandro and Joanie have been leading the GNOME a11y team like nobody’s business. There is even a weekly meeting that I never attend on a regular basis. Things are looking good, it is really humbling. Joanie started doing this work pretty much at the same time I got involved in a11y, and she is still plugging away. Somebody please hire her so she could do this full time.

I also gave a talk at GUADEC about Universal Design. I learned a lot preparing it, and I hope to continue polishing it.

Getting Closer

At some point this year, I found the time to develop an iPhone application, a GIS Django backend and a web-based map authoring tool! The idea of the app is basically aural augmented reality. For example you could walk around in a city neighborhood and listen to past events and stories of different places. The main difference from an audio tour is that you are being led by sound as it gets louder when you approach as opposed to visible landmarks. Of course the technology is the trivial part, the real magic is in the well-produced audio. Jenny Asarnow has been doing that, and created fantastic soundscapes with stories and music. Full discloser, she is also my sweetheart. Getting Closer was showcased in two events: Megapolis in Baltimore and Third Coast in Chicago. We hope to collaborate with more audio producers and find new and exciting uses for this. As for my end, it was fun to step out of my niche Desktop programming and do some mainstream stuff, like iOS, Django and HTML/JS, just to know I could.

Causing A Nuisance

I joined other young Jewish activists in New Orleans this fall where we successfully agitated the Jewish American community into conversation by interrupting the Jewish General Assembly, the largest annual event surrounding Jewish philanthropy. Disrupting the Israeli prime minister’s keynote was really just an added bonus. This is one of the most important things I have been part of this year, and I am completely flattened by the amount of positive responses we have gotten for this. I wrote an essay about the experience that I hope it will be published soon. I am looking forward to continuing to be part of this conversation.

Caribou

After things settled down, and I caught back up on work, I started giving Caribou some desperately needed attention. I asked that it be pulled from the GNOME 2.32 module set in the last cycle because I just never had time to really get it ready for release. No excuses! I spent the holiday slowness porting Caribou to GTK3 and GObject introspection. Let me tell you, it was not trivial! I ended up rewriting whole chunks of Caribou, which was not all that bad. Since taking over maintainership I have done little in doing major changes, and accepted some large patches that I never should have, so it was cleanup time. This whole ordeal did not introduce any user-visible changes besides a new prefs window and stability. Um, I guess that is something. Anyway, I will be merging it to master today. That bad news (and this is what sucks about GNOME 3.0), is that other contributors and testers will need to do a jhbuild dance before being able to run any of this. I have a moduleset I will share with the world that does the minimum required stuff for a development a11y stack, with the new AT-SPI2, Orca, Accerciser and Caribou. There are some amazing artists in the GNOME community, anyone fancy on designing an icon for Caribou?

That’s Not It!

I am sure I forgot stuff.

“I still don’t understand what I did wrong. Seriously, I don’t understand!” Eden said during a morning radio interview after pictures of her posing next to blindfolded Palestinian detainees were found on her Facebook page.

Of course she doesn’t understand, she spent “the best years” of her life serving in an army of occupation, immersed in a culture that is blind to the humanity of it’s subject population. It’s not a sentiment reserved for the lower ranks, or the middle ranks, it goes all the way up. It’s a mentality where the only people with mothers are people who speak Hebrew. The Israeli army is where youthful experimentation occurs, you get to humiliate, you get to intimidate, and if you are lucky: you get to kill.

“I’ll rephrase my question, Eden, so that perhaps we can learn together how it was wrong…”, the radio host will walk her through it, slowly.

She crossed an invisible line, specifically she embarrassed the IDF, “I hoped there wouldn’t be any media interest” an IDF spokesperson said. But the media showed interest, and that is what turned Eden’s souvenir into “shameful behavior”.

And now Israel’s military, media and political elite must fulfill their solemn role: behave like disappointed adults, and wrinkle their noses in distaste. Another delinquent youth has infiltrated “the most moral army in the world”.

This isn’t of course the first morally corrupt soldier that the IDF has disowned. There are many more, and they have done worse deeds. Mostly these individuals don’t exceed the rank of second lieutenant.

And this is how the IDF keeps it’s legitimacy in it’s own eyes. While the Israeli government and it’s army are accused repeatedly of war crimes and violating human rights, the IDF, through internal inquiry, discovers that all of those heinous acts were committed by the rank and file alone. Where were the brigade and battalion commanders? Where was the regional command? The general staff? They were giving compassionate orders of the utmost morality, but a few teenagers spoiled it for everyone.

“We are a nation surrounded by enemies” Eden tells the the radio host. She doesn’t understand she is outside the fold, she is now a joke. She will repeat all the mantras and clichés she was told that enabled her to see Arabs as less than human. That allowed her to enjoy those army years so much without a hint of remorse or regret. Everyone else will shake their heads: “she doesn’t “get it”, she doesn’t understand how bad this makes us look.

Daniel Gordis wrote this, and I couldn’t help but reply. Since I spent time writing it, maybe it’s worth a post of my own? You’re welcome.

You may not like it, but I am extremely encouraged by where young people, in particular young American Jews are taking us. A new generation is taking a fresh look at Israel today, and it doesn’t like what it sees.

On one hand we learn about the American civil rights movement, about separation of church and state, about a progressive immigration policy, about multi-cultural multi-ethnic society, and about the rule of law. We learn to cherish and defend these principles especially as Jewish minority, especially after our experience in the Old World. And then we go to Hebrew school, where first we are lied to (“a people without a land, for a land without a people”), and later we are told to love Israel, an ethnocentric state where one set of laws does not apply to half of it’s population, where a secret police reigns supreme, where it views 1/5 of it’s population at best as a blight in the landscape and at worst as a fifth column or a “demographic time-bomb”.

We are lucky that this new Jewish generation is not outright schizophrenic, but overall has understood these contradictions in its education.

“Pro-Israel” advocates will try to re-brand and encourage the narrative of a pluralistic, secular, gay-friendly and technologically advanced Israel that is contrasted with its dark, backwards, violent, and poor neighbors. This is meant to appeal to democratic and progressive ears, but it is nothing more than veiled racism that simply rekindles our fear of the unfamiliar, of the brown, and of smelly poor people.

You say “the only association they have with Israel is the conflict with the Palestinians”. A good observation. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict rightly eclipses every other aspect of Israel’s image. It cannot be overstated, any attempt to trivialize it is simply dishonest. Even the word “conflict” deceives, as it implies the clash of two equal parties, where the reality is of an occupying power and a (increasingly) dispossessed and disenfranchised population.

Judging by the comments on this post, it seems like your readership is mostly middle-aged and concerned about their children’s attitude towards Israel. I just hope your kids manage to remind you what it’s all about and help you snap out of the euphoria and delusion you have been in since ‘67. Your children’s expensive education does not teach them to agree with you, even though you are footing the bill.

I was reminded of my moderated comment when I saw this essay by Peter Beinart that was just posted on The New York Review of Books.

GUADEC 2010

I am going! And more importantly I am presenting. The title is Accessible by Universal Design: Why I love The iPhone. Did I provoke you yet? Hope so. In this talk I will show how smug designers with their high sense of aesthetic could be even better (and smugger). I am not racist, some of my best friends are designers.

Caribou

It will be in GNOME 3.0. I recently took over maintainership, which basically means cutting releases, making sure it’s translatable, accessible, packageable, and generally keeping up with the GNOME schedule. There seems to be a good amount of people interested in it, and there is even official funding for it in Spain, so we will be getting some good contributions in the near future.

iPhone Application

I have one in the app store. Before you accuse me of being a sellout and an Apple fanboy, let me just say that it was an interesting experience, and my motivation was mostly writing for something that everybody has (and it’s a real thrill). Took the better part of two weekends, Jenny and I are unveiling it in Megapolis in Baltimore this weekend, if you are in the area you should download it and give it a try. Future versions should have a lot more user-submitted content and work in other areas around the world. Maybe a Maemo and Android version too…

Work

It’s fun and interesting, hope to give an update on that once I actually have something to show.

After what feels like an eternity of anticipation, the first GNOME Accessibility Hackfest begins next week. To put this into perspective, this won’t be a casual event. It’s a large conference riddled with many sessions of interest, a huge showroom packed with a milling crowd, 14 GNOME a11y contributors trying to get the most done together in the space of a few days,  and countless hordes of cute (yet unpettable) guide dogs.

If you plan to attend, make sure to visit the ever-changing wiki page.

I would like to thank sponsors such as the Mozilla Foundation, for being a steadfast supporter of FOSS a11y in all it’s forms, the Mike and the Paciello Group for help with the venue, and of course the GNOME Foundation. The CSUN organizers have also cut us some slack in a largely expensive event, so thank you organizers.

And thank you Hylke for the awesome logo.

More soon.

The Israeli ministry of Hasbara (propaganda), recently started a campaign to reach out to Israeli travelers abroad and expatriates, and provide them with resources for “explaining Israel”. They are recruiting citizen ambassadors, if you will. Supposedly, if you are a Hebrew speaker boarding an El Al plane in Israel, they will actually hand you a resource pamphlet that will help you make friends abroad and somehow justify Israel’s abominable behavior.

I finally bit the bullet, and visited the ministry’s resource site.

The first section I perused was titled “Israel Abroad: Myth vs. Reality”.  The first 4 myths were benign, things like “Israel is a large country” or “People only eat falafel and hummus in Israel”. It’s these amusements that get you sucked in, it is also the myths that they highlight in the televised campaign. I scrolled quickly down to find something a bit more controversial than hummus and camel riding.

One supposed myth is that “Israelis don’t really want peace”. First off, by saying Israelis and not Israel, they are off the hook from explaining government policies, and could get away with a vague (and arguable) public sentiment. By following links under that “myth” I got to a page dedicated to the green line. The initial facts were mostly accurate, but then later in the page it digressed into legalistic interpretations of resolution 242 and cherry-picked quotes of Lyndon Johnson.

Did you guys ever wonder what Israel’s official perspective is regarding Palestinian refugees? I know I did. So I was delighted to find a page dedicated to the refugee topic on the site. The refugee issue is seen as a topic with the potential of undermining Israel’s legitimacy, so it is often not touched with a ten foot pole.

Anyway, on the top of the page, they offered the following itemized list:

Arab Refugees: Facts and Figures

1. 800,000 Arabs lived in pre-state Israel before the war of ’48-’49.
2. 170,000 Arabs remained after the war.
3. 100,000 were permitted to return to Israel for family reunification.
4. 100,000 middle and upper class people were absorbed in their host Arab countries.
5. 50,000 foreign workers returned to their countries.
6. 50,000 Bedouins were absorbed by tribes in Jordan and Sinai.
7. 10,000 – 15,000 were killed in the war of ’48 – ’49.
8. Total refugees: 320,000.

Wait, what?? If you were reading that like I was and got to item number 8, you probably didn’t understand this as a subtraction exercise either. Did they just take some 8th grader’s homework and post it on the site? UNRWA alone reported aiding 711,000 Palestinian refugees back in 1950, and today has over 4 million beneficiaries – descendants of refugees from 1948.

Also, what is with the 50,000 foreign workers? Who are they talking about?

Before we explain the issue of the refugees of ’48, it’s important you understand this basic fact: Israel’s Arabs from before the war settled in the country as refugees from other Arab countries.

They go on and talk about Egyptian draft dodgers who came in 1831 to Acre, and cite British geographers from the 19th century. I don’t really feel like translating all of this disinformation, sorry.

To the point, I’ll paraphrase Israel’s excuse in a nutshell: We only displaced 340,000 Palestinians. It’s not us who told them to leave, their leaders did. They weren’t really Palestinian anyway.

Good luck with that message, citizen ambassador! I hope you find out sooner rather than later that students on foriegn campuses know full well that you don’t ride camels at home. Growing up in Israel does not provide you with innate historical knowledge, you are confusing that with the indoctrination you received your entire life.