...more recent posts
Today is the first day I feel sort of normal since I drank way too much with S. on her last night in town. Still haven't really gotten anything done since then, but it's been a good week in other ways. Lots of interior changes. Sort of like I redecorated my mind. Not exactly sure how that night ended. Hope S. is still talking to me when she gets back.
(My dillema of late: If you know what this means, then you probably heard the news already; if you don't know what I'm talking about then you definitely wouldn't care. Oh well. I'm so pleased about this I'm going to blog it anyway.) MySQL has been GPL'd
Sounds good Alex. 5:30. (I'll get our private page up again soon. Promise:)
A lot of these posts are done so that I can find these links again by searching my own site when I need them. Sort of a bookmark list, but with more meta data. Here's the PHP front end for Java XML stuff. (Yes, that means Cocoon too.) It will definitely make my life easier if I can access these things through PHP. (See? Now I can search for PHP, Java, XML, or Cocoon, and find the link each way.)
Here's a compelling history of copyright law. I should have known the Irish were behind this. Probably there is an opposing viewpoint (as this one seems pretty slanted toward my views.) Any pointers?
It's getting pretty exciting on the software front. Microsoft's new .NET strategy has really stoked the fires. Perhaps because it sounds just like what everybody except Microsoft has been saying for the past couple of years. Now that Microsoft has bought in, things are going to evolve fast. Tune in to scripting news for near constant reports from the trenches. Here's a typically insightful link. Lots of buzzwords, sure, but that may be the best explanation of what's happening I've heard lately. The key point, I think, is that we are trying to enable our data (content, documents, ect...) to be understood (read, processed) by software. Until now we've only been concerned with our data being accessible to people. Making the jump from human readable to machine readable is a big jump. It is like we are turning our minds inside out. The process of externalizing our minds is the process of completely specifiying how it is that we process information in our minds. Producing this complete specification is the same as producing software that can do the job. XML is not any sort of answer. It's the starting point. It's a specification for how we are going to describe this externalization of our thought. It's not the externalization itself. That will be something implemented using XML (not XML itself.) I think the real fun part is about to begin.
The BBC has a funny article on Russian crop circles. I like how the Russian government just talks matter of factly about the existence of UFO's. Vasily Belchenko, security council deputy secretary, said "An unknown object definitely landed there. It obviously used an unknown landing principle."
Had a great dinner with MB, Mike, and Linda last night at Blue Hill (75 Washington Place.) Get in before the word gets out. Trust me.
Lots of quick links today. First up, genehack refreshes our memory with a link to As we may think, the 1945 essay by Vannevar Bush. Amazing. Is it that he saw the future, or that people built the future he saw? I can't think of a better starting place for the historian of computers. A modern example of the knowledge sharing made possible by the information devices Mr. Bush predicted is nanodot.org, yet another slashdot style site, this one run by the foresight institute and of course covering the world of nanotech research. Looks good. Tord Jansson gives us his first draft of Why software shouldn't be covered by patents (from advogato) while the Free Protocols Foundation explains why we should just say no to WAP. Will Sanchez (lead Darwin developer from Apple) outlines, interestingly, some of the problems integrating the MacOS and UNIX (if you're into that sort of thing.) And finally, Simon St.Laurant tries to poke a little hole in the hype, as he explores some of the problems generated by the transition to XML.
shouldexist.org is a promising slashdot style site where users contribute "stories" that are ideas for products/services they think should exist. Then other users chime in either furthering the idea or ripping it apart. Nice interaction. Thumbs up.
Here's a collection of links about the possible water on Mars story. (Links aren't underlined on Kuro5hin, so run your cursor around.) This looks promising, but until they find something I'm going to stay on the first-contact-on-Europa bandwagon.
Just in case you were curious, here's a shot of the server room at Napster (you mean that's it?) P.S., I love Scripting News.
Woke up at 5:45 yesterday to get an early start on the summer. Drove up to Bear Mt. with Alex and friend Matty (sp?) for a little hiking and introduction to bird watching from the man himself. Like most other pursuits these days, the technology really makes a difference. Good binoculars are a must for enjoying this very peaceful and meditative endeavor. And looking through them all day is not unlike staring at a screen (although a very high resolution one.) Thought a lot (again) about using natural landscapes to model data. Also I realized (although this may not be true) that xml has some serious problems. It might be the case that the data (the content) is itself the most consise (meta-data) description of itself. Or, in other words, it might be that we will not be able to decide on any but the most trivial schemas to share in common. Oh well. Still more thinking to be done.
This is not a real product. There is a strange tradition in the Mac watching world where external (non-Apple) third parties produce concept designs of rumored products. The apple pda/cellphone is one of the more widely speculated on new products (apple never says anything about stuff in development, but sometimes those engineers have a hard time not talking about what they are doing...) In any case, this concept design is looking pretty good. And it's from the same people who previewed a clamshell notebook enclosure well before the ibooks hit the market, so this might not be a total guess. I'm ready for this phone. (Although I'm guessing 2003 before good net access.)
Here's a very interesting piece on the future of computers and information space. Non technical, but obviously written by someone who knows what they are talking about. It's called a manifesto, but I always use the ridiculous phrase 'intuition pump' to describe writing like this. It doesn't go into detail, it just gives enough shape to get you thinking. I agree with almost everything, especially number 20. (from eatonweb)
Apparently, British Telecom (BT) is thinking about suing all ISP's for infringing on one of their patents. What's the patent you ask? Oh nothing really, just a little something about hyperlinks. As in: BT thinks they invented (and patented) the idea of hyperlinks. You can read the patent yourself here. I'd like to see what Al Gore has to say about this one. Who really did invent the internet? Whatever your answer, BT probably isn't it. This suit (if they really do bring it) will definitely go nowhere (prior art? How about Ted Nelson's Xanadu from 20 years earlier?) Still, it's annoying to see companies try to cash in like this. Maybe this one is so outrageous that it will spark some much needed patent law reform. We can only hope.
Making banner ads is probably not a very fun job. But Barbelith has a link to a cool site which features some creative work in that usually dead boring category. (Flash required, I believe, although I have no idea why they built it that way.)
Making the web a two way information space is the primary goal. The Magi Project is on the right track. Every device needs to be boty a client and a server in a giant peer to peer network. There is a lot of activity starting to build toward this end. Check out Ed Dumbill's excellent the state of XML keynote speech for an overview of the XML underpinnings of this near future collaborative web environment.
David Boies is going to be representing Napster in the case brought against them by the RIAA. In case you don't know, he's the guy that destroyed every Microsoft witness for the DOJ. Interesting. Maybe they do have a chance.
Mozilla M16 (milestone 16) is up. I'm downloading now and will report back.
Today (among other things) I've been checking out the icab web browser. It is Macintosh only (how often does that happen?) and very good. Quick download (1.1 mb) here. No installation, no hassles, very well behaved program (this is too rare these days.) Just download and double click and you're off to the races. This is a pre-release version, but so far it appears rock solid (unlike that other preview release browser we won't mention.) The only draw back is that javascript support is lacking at this point, so for some sites it will not work. But for this site (and most others) it functions very well. It's fast. And it doesn't need a lot of memory. I definitely recommend you check it out. The final release promises javascript and CSS level II (!) support. Possibly I'm not thinking clearly, but if feels like they (gasp) tried to make a good product rather than corner the rights to a mountain of money. Go icab.
Oh my god. Courtney Love is my new hero. Here's a transcript of a speech she gave to the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference. Long, but very worth it. Here's the quick (very) paraphrased version: "Take my Prada pants - fuck it. All I need is a good back end coder."
Looks like the RIAA is seriously going after Napster now. They are going to try to force Napster to remove all major label content from their servers. And they are trying to get an injunction to force Napster to comply while the legal battle is being fought. The obvious pro-Napster argument is "O.K., sure, done!" because the content isn't on their servers (only pointers to where the content is,) but my guess is that the RIAA might win this one regardless of such technical details. The funny thing is, defeating Napster will be the worse thing for the music industry. I'm not saying they shouldn't try. It might be that they have to pursue this or be seen as weak and ineffectual, but seriously, this will spell the end for them. As long as Napster is around I doubt that freenet or gnutella could break out to mass acceptance. They are simply not as easy to use. But if all the content comes down off Napster, people will switch. And at least with Napster the RIAA has someone to strike a comprise deal with. Stopping Gnutella would involve something like shutting down the internet - probably not going to happen. So while all this pirating may well be wrong, ethically speaking, I'm not sure that arguing ethical philosophy is really what the RIAA should be doing. To me it seems like they cut a deal with MP3.com, but are drawing the line with Napster. But what they should do is cut a deal with Napster and draw the line with Freenet and Gnutella.
Here's some speculation about the future of information architecture. 100% new buzzword compliant. Yet more proof that everyone is thinking the same thing these days. (I know this is just an illusion of (my) perspective, but that doesn't make watching this convergence any less interesting.)
I lived in Montana briefly many years ago. Although I wasn't there long, it made a big impression on me. Now if I'm missing it I can get a little taste of the big sky country here. (I've seen this site before, but now with the new redesign it's really looking good.) Weblogs really are everywhere.
Right now I have the feeling that a lot of people are thinking about the same problem. It might be called de-centralized network architecture. I guess Gnutella and Freenet brought these ideas to a wide audience, and now you can hear the gears churning and the light bulbs going on all over the net. Aha! Put the client and the server together, at every node, and really banish the center. WorldOS is trying to define a framework for doing just that. This page has some details about routing messages in a network without any central nodes. God, I am so excited about this stuff. It's part web architecture problem, and part deconstructive philosophy experiment. Today the web is more like several interconnected hubs (with the huge portal/search engines at the centers.) Tomorrow's web might really be a web, with messaging propagating peer to peer (to peer to peer...) and not "up" to some authority and then back "down" to a destination.
I'm really enjoying this new site. It's a news hub (with the very well designed look of xmlhack) for the enabling web authors technology field. The two-way web is where it's at, and this site hits it square on. (If you're a little foggy on the 'two-way web' idea, you can get up to speed here, but the idea is simply about enabling everyone to be a content producer.)
Adobe has released their SVG viewer plug-in for web browsers. You can download it here. I haven't installed it yet, but I played around with the beta a few months ago, and even that seemed pretty solid, so this should be ready to go. SVG stands for scalable vector graphics. Unlike bitmap graphics (which is everything on the web except for some flash stuff,) vector graphics allow for zooming with no pixelation of the image. Once SVG content is deployed, this will really mean a step up in visual quality of the web. Also, some really cool things are going to be possible with java script. It will be a little while before this really starts to happen, but it's great that Abode is pushing this forward. (Illustrator 9.0 will export SVG.)
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.
The New York Press has this interesting piece on the future of digital projection movie theatres. Some interesting ideas about how digital content (and wireless delivery of that content) will change the whole business model.
[T]he advantage... is that it will allow theaters to program much besides canned entertainment like movies: every sort of live event from basketball playoffs to rock concerts to telethons. I argued in my "Death of Film" article last year that this will be the real revolution, since it’s destined to produce a new form of entertainment palace that will owe as much to the programming paradigms of television as it does to traditional movies. In fact, this revolution is already under way: in January, Canada’s Famous Players chain started beaming live professional wrestling matches into its theaters. The shows have been selling out at $15 a seat.Entertainment palace... ummmm....
Dave linked to an article yesterday at edge.org, and while I was there I spied this other gem: Is the Market on Prozac? I hadn't thought this before, but it really could be the case. Here's a little from the piece by Randolph M. Nesse, M.D.:
The press has been preoccupied with possible explanations for the current extraordinary boom. Many articles say, as they always do while a bubble grows, that this market is "different." Some attribute the difference to new information technology. Others credit changes in foreign trade, or the baby boomer's lack of experience with a real economic depression. But you never see a serious story about the possibility that this market is different because investor's brains are different. There is good reason to suspect that they are.
Prescriptions for psychoactive drugs have increased from 131 million in 1988 to 233 million in 1998, with nearly 10 million prescriptions filled last year for Prozac alone. The market for antidepressants in the USA is now $6.3 billion per year. Additional huge numbers of people use herbs to influence their moods. I cannot find solid data on how many people in the USA take antidepressants, but a calculation based on sales suggests a rough estimate of 20 million.
What percent of brokers, dealers, and investors are taking antidepressant drugs? Wealthy, stressed urbanites are especially likely to use them. I would not be surprised to learn that one in four large investors has used some kind of mood-altering drug....
Kuro5hin has a write-up of an interesting proposal to fix the current DNS system. I think either it will be reformed (not likely) or a radically more distributed system will arise. Freenet and gnutella are both interesting steps in this direction (and, consequently, both are much more interesting than just the latest way to trade MP3's.)
This is incredibly cool. The BBC is reporting on a project to construct (by 2010) a virtual plant. Modeled after Arabidopsis thaliana, a relative of cabbage, this computer simulation would contain a complete description of all genes, as well as the proteins involved, and their expression at any point in time. A sort of "wiring diagram" of a living plant. Dr. Chory of the Salk Institute said
"We'd love, for instance, to see a four-dimensional view of a plant that covers all the details from when the seed germinates to when the next generation seeds fall off the mother plant. And we'd like to be able to stop the process at any phase in the plant's life-cycle and see which proteins are expressed and how they interact."If a simulation of a plant behaves exactly like a plant, is it one? In any case, cyberspace definitely needs a little greening.
Barbelith reprinted this funny open letter to Dr. Laura.
Brig (no, I don't really know her, but I'll call her Brig as if I did...) has a poll on her page today about webloggers and gender. Pretty even score so far (boys just slightly in the lead.)
Rasterweb has a funny page of insults for computer geeks. A little repetitive, but some gems. I liked: "He's not the fastest router on the network." His call for other quips is my big chance to interact: must...think...of something...funny...