...more recent posts
Lots of coverage of the data haven being set up on the strange "country" of Sealand. Time must be speeding up because last year this was part of the science fiction plot of Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. And actually, the history of Sealand reads like an alternate version of parts of that story.
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Real life thriller-ish geek stories today. First up is part 4 of Cracked! (Start here for Part 1, then Part 2, then Part 3.) It's been fun following this. An interesting inside look at a giant community site system administrator trying to combat a very sophisticated cracker. A little technical, but the story flows like a suspense novel, and how else are you going to learn? Then, as if that wasn't enough of the cloak and dagger cyber stuff, Cam had this link to the story of a spammer who forged the wrong domain name. I've always wondered who these people were. Now I know way too much about them. You can too. Oh yeah, and remember, your data is not safe.
Today I spent a lot of time wandering through David McCusker's site tree dragon. He is writing a new high level scripting language. I can't understand most of what he is talking about, but I want to learn more. (This is a classic example of a personal log posting that probably nobody else would find interesting. Sort of self centered I guess, except I'm not really forcing this on anyone. I'm just documenting what is important to me as I go - and not really for anyone else (although I like the idea that people might care to read all this) but just for the discipline of formalizing some things, of choosing which bits out of my day need to be written out in a way that someone else could understand.)
Something is coming into focus for me. For a while I had my head down and was really caught up in building something. Then, although it isn't, and probably won't ever be, finished, I felt like I crossed the threshold. I took things about as far as possible given my not too incredible starting assumptions. So I started to pick my head up and sniff the air for the next thing. I'm ready to start in again (on another learning curve) but I'm a little wiser now about the necessity of picking really good problems. A good problem will take you a long way in the process of working through it. I think I'm starting to get hold of one. At least I have some sort of central nugget in hand. It feels good to turn it over in my mind, to have something to work on.
Here's John Perry Barlow on Napster. I keep going through cycles of being fed up with this whole story, and then rediscovering it again from a different angle. Add in gnutella and freenet, and the conversation can start to swerve into some interesting areas. The Barlow piece is good background.