When it comes to international development, the road to IT hell is paved with good intentions. Steve Howard of AMD mentioned a village he visited in Uganda that had been given an uplink dish for an internet connection: the kind donors had never told the locals they had to reposition it if it ever got knocked out of alignment. So when he visited, it was pointing uselessly at the ground.

He thinks the problem is that developers don't think about everything that surrounds their machine in the field. He calls this the ecosystem approach. This means ensuring energy reliability, proper finance, and proper support and training. He noted the One Laptop Per Child project, where it's not just a machine, but an integrated project: and, he added, it cannot and should not be the sole solution to getting helpful tech into developing nations.

And don't forget means what limited equipment is in the field when you start writing code. "We're talking about Web2.0 " he said. "Emphasis needs to be put on Web.02."

Series creator of The Wire, Homicide, and The Corner will be in Austin March 18, speaking at the College of Communication March 18 at 6pm at the Austin City Limits Studio at the University of Texas at Austin campus. [See map at www.utexas.edu/maps/main.]

The event is free and open to the public but rsvps are requested: Wade Lee at (512) 232-5466 or [email protected].

No website administrator wants the police (or FBI, or Homeland Security) to come tapping on their door because of what someone has said on their site.

Panelist Mohammed Suleiman Khan of blog aggregator Hadithuna.com had some pretty sensible advice to when to say 'enough is enough' without compromising free speech. He had some pretty simple advice: keep clear until it's really a problem. When does it become a problem? He uses that great jargon term that has become a fave amongst campaign managers and marketing people: the tipping point, which he says he can gauge against four easy criteria:

Is it unprotected speech?
Is it a non-constructive opinion?
Do they run contrary to the point of the website?
Are they driving users away?

Look for Tim McCanlies to shoot his long-awaited low-budget film The Two Bobs, in Austin next month, thanks in large part to the Writers Guild strike. The strike gave him time to concentrate on the long-gestating film, which he described as in the tone of The Big Lebowski and Trainspotting. It follows two guys who are in legends in the gaming business whose new, much-anticipated game is stolen right as they finish it.

It seems like anytime someone talks about Muslims on the Web, everyone is bundled together as one radical mass. According to the panelists this afternoon at Online Extremism – and the Muslims Who Fight It, people need to get smarter not just about who is radical and not, but what kind of radical.

So what should people really look for? "Violent radicalization, and that violent part is important," said Shaarik Zafar, senior policy adviser with the Department of Homeland Security Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. Since so many people (including policy makers) have so little grasp of Islamic scholarship and its myriad, complicated theological strands, they miss the big difference between the ascetics of Sufism and a bomb-building terrorist, like there is between a Quaker and a white supremacist.

"You can't kill and capture a website," said Frank Cilluffo, director of Homeland Security Policy Institute. He called Al-Qaeda a brand more than an organization, and a brand name can be damaged like any other brand, by tackling and discrediting them. That meant not attacking Muslim religiosity on the web, but encouraging (without co-opting) Islamic scholars to highlight the intellectual bankruptcy and un-Islamic nature of some radicals: to find "a Tookie Williams of terrorism." They exist, he said: several former spiritual advisers to Osama bin-Laden have now renounced him.

Here's an easy prediction: The showing of Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay tonight at the Paramount Theatre will turn people away. A full house counting in the hundreds listened this afternoon as stars John Cho, Kal Penn and Neil Patrick Harris and writer/directing tag team Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg discussed the political ramifications of the sequel.

"I felt like it was a device to amp up the stakes," Cho said of any fun the film will have with the Bush administration's treatment of foreign prisoners. "I don't think the movie has anything to say politically. It just uses the current political climate to make vagina jokes.'

(Part one of this interview is now online)

Something is making gaming innovator and SXSW:IA panelist Tim Langdell scratch his head. "The biggest selling-game ever was The Sims 1. The biggest selling game for women was The Sims 1. Why is that the games industry didn't pick up on this?"

Big as it is, Langdell (appearing today at 3.30pm in room 6 at the Austin Convention Center at Redrum in the Rue Morgue': Collaboration in International Communities) thinks gaming as a business is missing out. "It's a $100 billion industry that's underperforming," he said. The trick is guessing what will work, and the problem has been that the industry has as bad a track record of spotting the next big thing as any other industry.

Take MMOs. "if you'd have asked people in the mainstream game industry five years ago, they would have said that if you got 100,000 on Everquest, that's good going." That meant that investors were wary of sinking cash into them. When it came to Blizzard and the monster that is World of Warcraft, according to Langdell. they struck a deal to basically operate under the radar, and "were able to develop it as a really-high-end independent developer."

Endless lines of people that wrap around the building, cyber geeks of every shape and form, and 30-pound bags full of marketing trash – the madness has begun.

I jump-started this year but hitting events back to back, wasting no time waiting in the halls, verbalizing my résumé to strangers or punching random buttons on my cell phone like I have someone important to call. The first event I attended was at 3pm, Book Reading: The Principles of Beautiful Web Design with Jason Beaird. I expected to pick up some new-age technology tips of designing our online commercialism, but it was nothing of the sort.

The strangest revelation at the Texas Film Hall of Fame was Morgan Fairchild at age 15 dated a drummer who ended up in a band called ZZ Top. Frank Beard offered a lame denial, but, hey, every girl's crazy about a sharp dressed drummer.