Mokurai

Epictetus - "Only the educated are free."

Founder, Earth Treasury, an NGO to link schools around the world for education and business. Mokurai volunteers at OLPC as a volunteer coordinator, localization administrator (Khmer and Kreyòl), and general knoker (an especially Yiddish know-all, the kind who did math homework in pen), based on his training as a mathematician, classroom teacher, amateur musician and linguist, philosopher, and Buddhist priest plus his lifetime of encyclopedic reading, many years in high-tech market research and technical writing, and work in Unicode and Free Software.

AKA

• Edward Mokurai Cherlin/Czerwin
• גרשון בן יסעף
• Эдуард Георгеевич Черлын
• 장영구/張永久
• 法雲默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज

Contact

• My e-mail
• My public key
• At SCALE x6 Sixth SoCal Linux Expo

AIM chat: mokurai

408 219 4178

• My LinkedIn profile
• Friendly Favors I'm FF10136 - Edward Cherlin
• My Digital Earth wiki page

Background

When I wrote a guide for new Internet users at Newbie.Net, there were three questions I couldn't answer:

• How to stop spam. So I founded the Coalition Against UCE (Unsolicited Commercial E-mail)
• How to view all languages correctly in browsers and other software. So I joined Unicode.org and a number of Free Software projects dealing with browsers, fonts, keyboard layouts, locales, and rendering software for screen display and printing, and the IETF standards process for multilingual URLs and URIs.
• How to get everybody on the Net. So here I am. I have previously worked on wireless networking, satellite internet, and the Simputer.

I'm contributing information on countries and languages on the OLPC Wiki, including writing systems, fonts, keyboard layouts, sources of literature, and other items of interest, and administering Localization localization projects. I will be adding material on education and on the other impacts of the Laptop. It will have major effects in social development, health, economic opportunity, politics, and other important areas.

Contributions

I started to work on OLPC documentation, but then I discovered that even more pressing needs were being ignored. So now I have appointed myself Shadow Chairman & CEO, and taken on the additional responsibilities described at Earth Treasury, on problems that OLPC considers out of its scope. I'm also helping at Sugar Labs to create a research consortium to address some of these issues.

Generalist

Buddhist priest, software developer, market researcher, technical writer, Peace Corps volunteer, cook, goatherd, music teacher...

I edited the Geode processor manuals for National Semiconductor, before they sold the product line to AMD. (The Laptop contains an AMD Geode processor.)

Languages: Hebrew, German, Latin, Russian, French, Swahili, Korean, Japanese Chinese, Sanskrit, Pali, Classical Greek, Lojban, Klingon

Programming languages: APL, LISP/Scheme, FORTH, SNOBOL, FORTRAN, COBOL, Algol, Java, C, C++, Pascal, Smalltalk, Python, scripting languages. And I'm learning Squeak.

Unicode

Free/Open Source Software: I-APL, Open Voting Consortium, others

Math

Science Check out Astronomy Picture of the Day and the world's biggest telescopes, for neutrinos and gravity waves.

Co-founder of global anti-spam organization, The Coalition Against UCE (Unsolicited Commercial E-mail)

Music: Yale Concert Band and Marching Band, clarinet; First Prize, Classical, in first-ever Foreigner's Korean Music contest of the Korea Herald on gayageum; Slavyanka Russian Chorus; Music Around the World pre-school multilingual music program; banjo, recorders, spoons, piano, harpsichord, dumbek

Simputer: Simple, inexpensive, multilingual computer for poor people

Village telemedicine over wireless

Science Fiction: John Brunner would have loved the OLPC project if he had lived to see it. Check out Stand on Zanzibar (includes national development projects in fictional countries), The Shockwave Rider (integrated disaster recovery and sustainable communities), The Sheep Look Up (environmental catastrophe), and The Stone that Never Come Down (What if people couldn't ignore information they have?).

Geek code GAT d-- s+:+ a+++ C++ UL++ P+ L+++ E- W++ N+++@ o+ K++ M+ b+++ e+++ h---- r+++ w--- APL++++ House, MD+++

Basic level in Korean, Chinese, Swahili, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, German
Intermediate level in Russian, French