Five big e-government hacks in the pipeline for 2011:

2011 Code for America Projects

They look pretty damn spiffy.

So, I’m asking around the office today, where Mandarin is the first language of several people, and opinion seems to be that Google China’s license renewal (described here and discussed here) was a win for both sides.

To break it down a little further and provide some context: Google decided at the beginning of this year that it was no longer willing to run a Chinese language search that complied with Beijing censorship rules. It had been doing so since 2006. The change came after Chinese agents reportedly hacked into Google, stealing information on Chinese dissidents as well as technical information on Google’s login system. Google’s response seemed clear enough to me. If you won’t play nicely, we’re taking back our toys.

But what’s actually been going on since March was a little unclear to me. The Google announcement spells it out fairly clearly, though. They’ve been working to relocate the Web search portion of their business from google.cn (Google China) to google.com.hk (Google Hong Kong), splitting it off from other applications like music search and text translation that could be provided locally. For several months they automatically redirected requests for Google China over to Google Hong Kong.

What made this a significant and ballsy move is that Hong Kong is a separate legal jurisdiction. The territory was restored to China by the UK in 1997, but it remains largely autonomous and has different political and economic systems. By renewing Google’s Web license, China effectively endorses their right to do search according to Hong Kong’s rules and suggests it will not prevent users from accessing the Hong Kong site. Google says this means their China search is no longer censored–I am told “less censored” may be more accurate–and so they will be pleased to continue to do business there.

There are caveats, of course. China’s Internet has some built-in filtering, but it can be overcome with a little technical saaviness. Much as GMail can be accessed over HTTPS to prevent snooping, Google search can be done over HTTPS to prevent network filters from seeing and blocking keywords. I understand China permits the former, so they would presumably permit the latter.

What does China get for allowing this? Well, the technicalities of the compromise may be important. As of now, visitors to google.cn are not automatically sent to the Hong Kong site; they have to click a link to google.com.hk when they want to do search. Other services are provided directly by google.cn. Wired and Reuters both suggested that this was a concession to allow Chinese authorities to save face. Mel once explained to me the concept of “face” and its importance in China. If it was a matter of face, then face was probably more important than any handicap that extra click imposes on google.cn as a Web portal.

That said, Google still arguably gets a lot more out of the deal than Beijing does. China doesn’t want to lose Google. Some industry figures there have stressed its importance, and the importance of a more open network, as both a source of innovation and a bridge to the West. What they worry about, I think, is a force for change that they can’t control. That could lead to turmoil, rather than growth and improved foreign relations. The fact that they’ve taken this first step is encouraging to me.

I keep feel like I’ve been doing something (okay, several things) wrong and something helped crystallize that today. I arrived at the office, pulled my bag out of the car and found my boss parked next to me, seeming to have an animated conversation with his car.

Oh, I knew Dan hadn’t lost his marbles. Dan’s a gadget freak; he buys cars that support his iPhone addiction. The Apple hardware sets him notably apart from most of my geek friends, who tend to carry G1s, but in spirit it’s all the same. He’d phoned in to a morning teleconference with the aid of some Bluetooth middleware and was hesitating to disconnect from its superior audio system to walk inside.

The connection didn’t come to me until the afternoon. I was driving home, and doing something I find myself doing a lot lately: I was having an internal monologue I really did not want wasted. Deep thoughts tend to come to me then, when I’m slowly unraveling—my day at the office concluded and my meds wearing off—and making the difficult switch between contexts. That cool and potentially useful Java or JS component I was trying to think out, when it came time to leave, refuses to quietly yield to the Robert Jordan book I’m reading at home, its startlingly sympathetic portrait of the outlaw Logain, and the general awesomeness of a fantasy author who can pull off successive allusions to such diverse material as Lord of the Rings and chaos theory. Not to mention any number of other topical concerns, the inevitable forking off of other lines of technical brainstorming, etc.

It’s a wonder I get anything out onto paper or into the blog like this. I used to come home and do more web programming as a hobby; now, with a working VPN and the ability to carry on from home, I’m doing less work of either sort. I was thinking that, to rally myself to do more with the extra energy I keep claiming to have from my workouts, I might need to institute a once-monthly work weekend, with some kind of reward system to goad myself into some useful bursts of productivity. Gah. Too much to say.

So the thing is, I normally end up losing all the random abstract thoughts, and the fewer good concrete ones, that should be forming the basis for more posts and more freelance technical work. This doesn’t have to happen.

We live in the age of magical pocket-sized wonderment. I’ve been fretting over the fact that I can only post to Twitter, or update my IM status, upon reaching a destination with Wi-Fi, always long after the thought to do so has come; but I’ve been thinking too small.

I do need to get me a magic phone. But not for Twitter, much as it amuses me. Not even for the out-of-sight-out-of-mind benefit of intelligent feed-generating apps that let your friends know when you’re staying in their city on a trip. No, I need it so I can stop this confounded inner-blogging that ends up draining off into /dev/null.

I haven’t investigated for app availability and the quality of hardware support, but I’m pretty sure this is a model use case for either the iPhone or the T-Mobile G1. In fact I spent part of the trip home thinking about ways you could use speech processing in concert with mobile apps to make the whole process more straightforward. Straightforward isn’t really the right word, but it would definitely make it more effective. I could easily find myself geeking out over a custom hardware / software setup if I’m not careful–consensus seems to be that even the best smart phones are stingy with processing power, and liable to drain their batteries if pushed too hard. Audio processing would be a task more suited to a stationary machine or dedicated DSP… okay, so uploading to the laptop at home is a more appropriate solution, but it isn’t half as sexy

Yak yak yak.

More Slashdot pickins’:

OLPCnews has an analysis of the Windows XO hype and recent demo. I’m a bit disappointed actually, in that smug and condescending sort of way. Do these engineers understand what it is they’re up against? Have they looked at the Sugar interface? Because my SCOPE team took the same naive approach to running Windows on bare-bones hardware, and our requirements were a lot less stringent than theirs.

With what amounts to a glorified copy-paste of Windows XP Home Edition, they’re hedging their bets on riding the coattails of XO’s hard-won popularity with educators and administrators and politicos. Those people may not understand or value the Open Source difference, but they understand cheap, and they value child-friendly. You want to really impress them? Kill the clutter. I know you hold the patent on folder trees, and you’re proud of it, but that design metaphor has no place in the start menu of a learning machine, and it enables your featureaholism. Tsk.

Also, in IT news, a possible ID on the DNS flaw, and San Fran PD really needs to get its shit together.