Hurricane Katrina

[Updates at the end of this post.]

As I write this at about 1:30 AM eastern time, the outer edges of Hurricane Katrina have just started to touch Louisiana and New Orleans. Nobody yet knows how it will turn out.

Katrina is a full-fledged Category Five hurricane with constant winds of 150-175 miles per hour, and gusting up to 200 mph. If that isn't bad enough, 20 to 25 feet of flooding is expected. That much water will basically destroy all buildings up to the third floor. The NOAA had an extremely sobering description of the anticipated damage up for a while (original seems to be gone, this via Atrios):

MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS...PERHAPS LONGER. AT LEAST ONE HALF OF WELL CONSTRUCTED HOMES WILL HAVE ROOF AND WALL FAILURE. ALL GABLED ROOFS WILL FAIL...LEAVING THOSE HOMES SEVERELY DAMAGED OR DESTROYED.

THE MAJORITY OF INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS WILL BECOME NON FUNCTIONAL. PARTIAL TO COMPLETE WALL AND ROOF FAILURE IS EXPECTED. ALL WOOD FRAMED LOW RISING APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL BE DESTROYED. CONCRETE BLOCK LOW RISE APARTMENTS WILL SUSTAIN MAJOR DAMAGE...INCLUDING SOME WALL AND ROOF FAILURE.

HIGH RISE OFFICE AND APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL SWAY DANGEROUSLY...A FEW TO THE POINT OF TOTAL COLLAPSE. ALL WINDOWS WILL BLOW OUT.

AIRBORNE DEBRIS WILL BE WIDESPREAD...AND MAY INCLUDE HEAVY ITEMS SUCH AS HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES AND EVEN LIGHT VEHICLES. SPORT UTILITY VEHICLES AND LIGHT TRUCKS WILL BE MOVED. THE BLOWN DEBRIS WILL CREATE ADDITIONAL DESTRUCTION. PERSONS...PETS...AND LIVESTOCK EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL FACE CERTAIN DEATH IF STRUCK.

POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS...AS MOST POWER POLES WILL BE DOWN AND TRANSFORMERS DESTROYED. WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS.

THE VAST MAJORITY OF NATIVE TREES WILL BE SNAPPED OR UPROOTED. ONLY THE HEARTIEST WILL REMAIN STANDING...BUT BE TOTALLY DEFOLIATED. FEW CROPS WILL REMAIN. LIVESTOCK LEFT EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL BE KILLED.

Most of the area has been evacuated, but about a hundred thousand people who don't own a car have been relocated to the Superdome and other shelters. It's unknown whether the Superdome can withstand that kind of wind and flooding if it gets hit full on -- there's a very frightening possibility that it might become a death trap.

The brand-new (literally, it's nine days old) the Weather Channel blog has some excellent commentary from the meteorologists themselves, and so far at least I find it a lot more informal and interesting than watching TV. This personal note from Lucas about his father and grandmother reminds us how many, many people are affected by this storm across the country. If they can keep the blog updated through the day tomorrow then it should be a very good source of information. Highly recommended. (Update: Not much going on there now that Katrina has made landfall -- probably too busy today. Weather Underground has some slightly better info at the link below.)

Please, pray for everyone in the area. If you want to take action, please, give money to the Red Cross. A cash donation is infinitely better than a donation of goods -- especially for an emergency like this. They buy in bulk direct from the appropriate distributor (often at cost) and deliver it right where it's needed.

Update: More blogging sources: Mark Kraft is collecting eyewitness reports of people who didn't evacuate. Sounds like some people are going to be blogging til the power goes out. Teece has more, and ends on the disturbing comment "I would have liked to have seen New Orleans." The eye is now visible on long-range radar, at least until the radar is destroyed by the storm. The Weather Underground blogs are also good sources.

Here's that Red Cross link again: Please donate.

Update (11am ET): More blogs describing it as it happens:

• Times-Picayune reporters sheltering inside the TP building. Some of the reports are chilling.
• Sun Herald reporters.
• Metroblogging New Orleans
• The Irish Trojan
• And there's even a Flickr group with pictures.

Pieces of the Superdome's roof are peeling away, but so far it appears to be just the foamy membrane and not the structural steel. (Update 11:40am ET: AP is reporting that a few chunks of metal have come off leaving the interior exposed to the sky, but they are relatively small. (20' x 5', which is small compared to the size of the dome.) [12:30pm ET: NOLA now has pictures of the roof]. Originally I heard 100,000 souls there, but now the numbers being reported are more like 9,000 or 10,000 (or 26,000, or ... you name it). Why? Part of that may be because they were running security and bag checks at the door (oh my God, have we progressed to this?) and there was still a huge line outside as the winds started to get really, really bad.

Here's that Red Cross link again: Please donate.

United Federation of Chat

Google has just come out with Google Talk, their new IM service.

The application part of it is very pretty; looking at the screenshots, it's essentially iChat for Windows. Simple, clean, and easy to use.

In fact, it looks so much like iChat that it probably borders on copyright-infringing, but hey -- that's for Google and Apple to work out between themselves. It's Jabber-based, supports SSL, and seems very nice overall.

But an IM service is an IM service, and we've got too many of them. The real news is buried in the middle of a page called "Additional Resources". That's where Google quietly announces that they are starting an initiative to merge all the separate IM networks into one. Emphasis mine:

What is "service choice" and how does Google Talk enable it?

Service choice is something you have with email and, for the most part, with your regular phone service today. This means that regardless of whom you choose as your email service provider (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, your school or ISP, etc), you can email anyone who is using another service provider. The same applies to phone service. You can call someone even if they do not use the same phone company as you do. This allows you to choose your service provider based on other more important factors, such as features, quality of service, and price, while still being able to talk to anyone you want.

Unfortunately, the same is not true with most popular IM and VOIP networks today. If the people you want to talk to are all on different IM/VOIP services, you need to sign up for an account on each service and connect to each service to talk to them.

We plan to partner with other willing service providers to enable federation of our services. This means that a user on one service can communicate with users on another service without needing to sign up for, or sign in with, each service.

What the... federation? Whoa, you mean I won't need to have a separate ICQ number and AIM account and Yahoo Messenger account and MSN Chat account to keep in touch with all of my friends and family and work contacts? Why, that ... that would actually be good for the end user. Unpossible!

Crazy as it seems, it looks like Google has a shot at doing it. Rather than standardizing on one network, their description makes me think they are taking a network-to-network bridge approach. So you'd still use your existing account and chat application, and you'd still have all the network-specific features you were used to, but you'd be able to talk to more people. Perfect. I would also expect, given Google's track record, that it would be done 'right': ie, it would be decentralized and all the networks would be peers. Networks that join up would not be beholden to Google in any way.

If that's so, then it seems likely that we'll see consolidation in reverse order of marketshare: all the small players will join up with Google immediately because it's good business sense for them: Their networks suddenly become huge and they are free to differentiate themselves on software alone. Mid-size networks like ICQ will probably follow soon thereafter. Yahoo and MSN might hold out for longer because they would hate to give in to Google, but popular demand from their users will make it necessary.

And then there was one.

The big one, AOL, will probably be harder to win over. I don't have a solid source for current IM marketshare numbers, which is partly because it's a confusing mess since so many people are forced to use multiple IM services. But the data I've been able to find suggest that AOL and AIM have a massive dominance in the IM field, perhaps covering about 50-70% of all IM users. The problem, of course, is that AIM is proprietary and AOL has refused to open it up for a long time now.

I don't know what will happen there. Clearly Google thinks it's worth a shot. And AOL has opened up the AIM network before, for iChat, so it's possible they'll do it again in the name of an open standard. But the company's sluggish history with moving onto the Internet and supporting email and web standards suggests that they will only be dragged into compliance kicking and screaming; as long as there's a buck to be made by being incompatible they would rather be incompatible. It's possible that for quite a while we'll probably be faced with AIM on one side and everyone else on the other. While not perfect, that would at least be better than what we have now.

So what do you think? Are you concerned that Google has got its sticky fingers into too much stuff? Got any links to actual IM marketshare numbers? Let me know.