...more recent posts
Great time last night at the first intra-site get together (minus one member.) Getting the last few things together here before the late summer double Mom fest begins. Then it's back to school... oh, no wait, that was a long time ago.
I'm all for technology, but I have noticed this never works out well for humans in sci-fi stories.
"Hod Lipson, a mechanical engineer who worked with Pollack on the project, described it as 'nearly a self-replicating artificial life system.'"
Well, no Powerbooks, which is probably a good thing, but only 2 more weeks until OS X. I will be getting and installing as soon as it is out. That should provide update fodder for a few days/weeks/months. I'm actually pretty excited, which is most likely not a good thing to be over a piece of software. But that's how it is.
As much as I don't believe it, I will admit to keeping one eye on Seybold for the possible introduction of the G4 powerbook. Mmmmm. I'm pretty sure they need to wait for the G4e before they can stuff it into that little form factor (although they did it with the cube, so who knows) but like I said, I'm sort of watching. I know of one person who's out there. Any updates from the trenches?
Busy week. Trying to get away for the weekend. Of course this means that a million little things are popping up which have to get done first. I guess that's almost the point of going away. Not just to rest, but to get everything from your real life in order. It's like having to cross a checkpoint. If I never went away, I could just keep letting things slide until tomorrow. Letting things slide until I get back from vacation doesn't seem like as much of an option. We'll see if I'm still feeling like that on Thursday morning. Big night tonight. Bigger night tomorrow. Must work now.
I saw Craig Venter (president of Celera Genomics) on Charlie Rose last night. Seemed like a decent incredibly smart guy. Still, he made me feel very uncomfortable by not answering the questions about why they are filing so many patents.
Did you hear the Verizon strike conspiracy theory? Supposedly their research showed that the new name was not catching on with the public. So they "manufactured" the strike, forcing the name to be repeated over and over for a few weeks in the media. Now everyone knows Verizon. :-p
If you use the internet, you probably already know all about trolls. I keep meaning to write something a bit longer about them, becasue it is a pretty interesting phenomenon. You can see some (arguably very bad) trolls talking amongst themselves here (warning: lots of stupid, juvenille, possibly offensive stuff mixed in with a couple of interesting bits.) Anyway, the longer discourse will have to wait, but I'm bringing this up because I'm wondering if a whole web site can be a troll? I'm thinking of this one in particular. It's perfect troll material (at least for slashdot.) Here are a few of my favorite quotes.
"The settlement in the Cyber Patrol case reported yesterday is in danger since it was learned that the hackers who created the 'cphack' virus are part of a neo-Socialistic cult that renounces individual ownership of software.Neo-Socialistic cult, eh? Well, how about this one:
"This new medium of the Information Superhighway--created by brave Cold Warriors in the struggle against Communist aggression..."Yeah, I know about DARPA, but saying it was...oh nevermind (IHBT)...The insanity continues:
"According to the Rutherford Institute, the number of sites with anti-Christian content has risen by over 350 percent during the period from 1997 to 1999. Most of these sites are created by self-styled Satanists or 'free thinkers'."Isn't there a law against that free thinking stuff? Anyway, my point is (you knew I had a point, right?) if you can't tell the difference between a seriously raving lunatic, and a troll, isn't it better just to consider it a troll? All those politicians aren't really serious (come on, how could they be,) they're just trolling. Once you see things this way, the solution is easy: don't feed the trolls. Don't pay any attention. They are trying to get that predictable rise out of you. I think I like this outlook. Now I can just forget about politics and get back to mastering regular expressions.
I'm guessing this might be enough to make some politician step in and knock a little wind out of these overly litigious corporations. (If you don't know: a judge recently ruled for the MPAA against the "hacker" magazine/website 2600 for linking to the DeCSS software code which makes it possible for people running linux to watch DVD's. Now it turns out that CNN (which is owned by Time Warner which is a part of the MPAA) has links to the same software.)
Another cool thing about google I never knew: if you enter
links: http://www.somesite.org into the search field you get a listing of all the pages that google knows of pointing to somesite.org.
New books:
Permutation City by Greg Egan
Mastering Regular Expressions (O'Reilly - owl) J.E.F. Friedl
I know you are probably all wondering "Hey, I wonder how the work on the new office in Jim's building is going?" Well, it's funny you should ask, because I've got a few pictures. You see, I woke up the other morning with a terrible pounding in my head. I groaned, not sure why I should have such a splitting hangover. Then I realized I didn't. There really was a pounding in my head, and it was Louis driving a sledgehammer into the side of the building over and over again. Those things really echo in a tiny brick airshaft. Anyway, I quickly realized that the work on converting the basement was about to accelerate and I better get some shots while it still looks like a basement. So here you go. I guess these are the "before" shots. Check back in a month or so for the results.
What happened to Cam's CMS mailing list? I almost got crushed by the volume at first, and now not a single post for days. What gives? Maybe I was unsubscribed. Or maybe everyone decided it really wasn't so great after all? I was starting to think so. I had hoped it would be about people designing their own CMS's; but it turned out to be more about people debating the relative merits of different commercial packages. I can already read Dave Winer talk about frontier on his site. Did he kill the discussion by participating too much? Was the topic just too broad? Or is everyone just really busy right now, and I should calm down and wait for things to pick up again? You know, I was starting to expect those mails...
Double dose of sci-fi fact on /. today. First up, evidence for the existence of a salt water ocean under the surface of Europa. Not a very good discussion, so maybe click right to this UKTimes piece that was the original source of the story. Contact creeps closer. And secondly, a team of Australian biologists is preparing to clone the Tasmanian tiger. It's been extinct for 70 years. Probably best to skip the troll/slashbot wars on that one too, and jump right to the MSNBC story. And if you like these sorts of cloning, space exploration, search for extraterestrial life stories, let me once again plug the incredible sci-fi book Diaspora, by Greg Egan.
I think this is the shortest, most clear summary of the hole found in PGP. (A little on the technical side, but if you're clicking through on a story about security holes in PGP, that's probably what you're looking for.) Probably no reason to panic, but if you are using this sort of encryption, you better read up.
Unlike yesterday, today is going pretty well.
And I thought rock stars were the only ones with ridiculous work space demands (insert some joke about little sandwiches and unstuffed olives here.) I guess computer programmers can get in on the action now too. But a lego desk? And check out the fully functional lego grandfather clock the creator previously made. Ummmm... lego's.
Sevencrabrangoon has got to be the deadpan funniest, solo geek personal site in the world. Check this one out. LOL, or whatever it is they say.
Random web quote of the day: "If we can make something decentralised, out of control, and of great simplicity, we must be prepared to be
astonished at whatever might grow out of that new medium." --Tim Berners-Lee
Neil Stephenson in negotiations to do consulting work on the live action movie version of the Batman Beyond cartoon?
Here's some information from nasa about when the new International Space Station is viewable with the naked eye. "As ISS assembly continues over the next four-five years,
the light dot will grow to a brilliant star in the morning or evening
skies, second only in brightness to the planet Venus, the brightest object
(besides the moon) in the morning or evening." For NYC, for the near future, we're talking:
| New York, NY |
22-Aug-2000 23-Aug-2000 24-Aug-2000 24-Aug-2000 25-Aug-2000 26-Aug-2000 27-Aug-2000 |
8:49 PM 9:19 PM 8:13 PM 9:49 PM 8:43 PM 9:13 PM 8:07 PM |
NW/ENE NW/NNE NW/ENE WNW/W NW/ENE WNW/SW NW/ESE |
Now that's some bird watching.
Here's an interesting discussion, between some interesting people, about (you guessed it) Napster, file sharing, and intellecutal property rights. David Gans, Scott Rosen, among others. Some musicians in the mix. Not all ranting; some actual conversation..
And I sort of liked Sony. Oh well. Where do they find these guys for all their middle management positions? Does he know what a computer is? How the internet works? One thing he obviously knows is how to piss people off. Here's the report on a speech given by Steve Heckler, senior vice president of Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc.. And here is a little taste of the good part:
"Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop [Napster]," Heckler told the Summer Forty-Niner. "We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source -- we will block it at your cable company, we will block it at your phone company, we will block it at your [Internet-service provider]. We will firewall it at your PC..."Huh? Sony is going to firewall my PC? Ummm, I don't think so. Somebody at Sony should get a clue and smack this guy down before he does them any more damage. Or maybe he's a double agent, and secretly working to rally the Gnutella forces?
(from here, picked up here, mentioned here, soon to be everywhere.)
Downloaded Netscape 4.75 today. It took me way too many steps to get AOL instant messenger off my system after I did a custom install without it, followed by checking no in a dialogue box when it seemed like it was going to install it anyway. I don't like when installers put things I don't want in my system folder (in 3 different places.) That's just not very polite. Anyway, this fixes the horrible Netscape Java security bug, although I still keep Java off all the time unless I really need it (and I never really need it.) Some people have been reporting more stable performance out of 4.75 (even one "much more stable" by someone probably too hopeful) so I'm going forward. I wish Mozilla would get better. I want to feel good about my browser.
David McCusker lays down the game rules for middlemen. I wish he was in charge of the game.
Really interesting story on the BBC Sci/Tech page today. Apparently some Canadian scientists have genetically modified a goat so that it will produce spider silk in its milk. Huh? In case you didn't know, spider silk is "[s]tronger and more flexible than steel... [it] offers a lightweight alternative to carbon fibre." Because Spiders are anti-social they could never be farmed, and hence this material could never be massed produced. Until now. I wonder if you could make one of those Clarke Space Elevators with this stuff? (a tether connecting the ground and a geostationary - Clarke orbit - sattelite.)
Well, that wasn't so hard after all. I guess it wasn't just a waste of space to actually repeat the database entry when building the comment pages. I wouldn't be surprised if this came in useful sometime in the future. Relational databases (we use MySQL) are incredibly cool. I'm totally blown away that something this powerful is available for free. If you are signed in, let me know if there is anything screwy with the new post/comment counts. I had to go directly into the database to fix this (which is what got me into trouble in the first place) so possibly there are some orphaned posts which might interfere with the counters. I can fix it if I know its happening. Thanks.
MB is away for the weekend, so I've had lots of time to work. Almost cleared my plate, so I can start thinking about this page again. I'm going to give one shot at restoring the lost posts (there is some redundancy in the system which might be a feature or a bug depending on how you look at such things, but it might allow me to extract a copy of everything from the database - the harder part will be putting it back on the page where it belongs.) On the other hand, maybe I'll use this event as an excuse to change the focus of my page. I wish the new office was done (and that I would pull the trigger on making the new machine purchase for MB) so that I could go back to Final Cut/Flash experiments. But now with the (rather unbelievable) rumors about G4 powerbooks at Seybold in September (I was thinking February,) I may have to wait some more before deciding. Blah, blah, blah. Beautiful Sunday anyway. Enjoy.
MB is away for the weekend, so I've had lots of time to work. Almost cleared my plate, so I can start thinking about this page again. I'm going to give one shot at restoring the lost posts (there is some redundancy in the system which might be a feature or a bug depending on how you look at such things, but it might allow me to extract a copy of everything from the database - the harder part will be putting it back on the page where it belongs.) On the other hand, maybe I'll use this event as an excuse to change the focus of my page. I wish the new office was done (and that I would pull the trigger on making the new machine purchase for MB) so that I could go back to Final Cut/Flash experiments. But now with the (rather unbelievable) rumors about G4 powerbooks at Seybold in September (I was thinking February,) I may have to wait some more before deciding. Blah, blah, blah. Beautiful Sunday anyway. Enjoy.
I just erased my whole page. No I didn't mean to. Yes I'm pissed. Yes I'm stupid. AAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH.
I just erased my whole page. No I didn't mean to. Yes I'm pissed. Yes I'm stupid. AAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH.
testing...
Between email and all the posting activity here, it's almost like Mike isn't half way around the world on vacation. This global information network is really starting to work out ;-)
Saw the Apple Cube yesterday. It is really cool looking. They had it hooked up to a 15 inch Apple flat panel. I had no idea they changed the 15 inch; now it is exactly like the 22 inch Cinema display (only smaller.) Beautiful. And frankly, it seemed much bigger than 15 inches (much bigger than the imac screen which was right next to it.) The Cube with that display makes a very slick package (although $3000 - ouch.) It's definitely my recommendation for rich people who really don't need a computer, but want an incredibly fast one just on the principal of buying kick ass equipment (that's some niche Apple has, huh?)
Looks like Intel is backing away from Rambus. This is a very good thing for your future RAM purchasing.
MacOS Rumors is reporting (as a rumor) that MacOS X is building on the Alpha processor. Supposedly the Mac and Compaq engineers have a very close working relationship. That's news to me, but what do I know? Well, for one, I do know that Motorolla is really screwing things up with their inability to get the G4 passed 500 Mhz. I guess Apple is just keeping their options open (like with the even more outlandish IBM Power4 rumors.) Maybe this is more to scare Motorolla than anything else. But I can still dream. (Reality check: OS X is building, but without Carbon and the Classic environment.)
The indentity-sure tipping system (now called the tipster protocol) Jeff Kandt hatched on Wes Felter's Hack the Planet has now moved to a web site of its own. This is the one to watch if you are interested in viable payment methods for the future of digital content. Of course its much too reasonable to ever work in the marketplace (big money will squash it,) but it's fun to watch smart people in action. I wish I could tip them.
I will be off line for the next day and a half (gasp.) Please don't mess up the place while I'm gone. Bye.
Two ex Microsoft gazillionaires (Paul Allen and Nathan Myhrvold) have given 12.5 million dollars "to a group of
astronomers in the San Francisco region, for the construction
of the largest-ever radiotelescope to be used in the search for
alien life." (According to this ZDnet story.) What was that Terence quote? "To search expectantly for a radio signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture-bound a presumption as to search the galaxy for a good Italian restaurant." Still, this might be interesting. At the very least it will give us enough data so that everyone in the world can run SETI at home and we still won't be able to crunch through all the information. But while we're busy doing that, the question remains: aren't they already here?
It said: "Your face is like an imperfectly shaven tennis ball." I thought: "How true." And it was a computer that served me up this forehand volley of wisdom. The Surrealist Compliment Generator to be precise. Go there now and generate your own compliment, because "You cannot compare with the apex of a ferris wheel, nor the nadir of a ditch filled with a coelocanth's droppings." And you know it's true.
In a follow up to the previous CDR camera post, ArsTechnica again points the way, this time to the Hitachi DZ-MV100 DVD-RAM camcorder. That's right. This thing records video in MPEG-2 directly to DVD-RAM. Wow. Frankly, I don't mind recording to DV tape because I always figure I need to do lots of cutting before anything would be worth watching, but recording directly to disc is pretty freakin' cool. I'm amazed they can stabilize these drives enough. Awesome.
By my own judging, I'm doing pretty well in avoiding the more contentious political battles. A few months ago I was so angry at the state of affairs here in the U.S. that I was only able to generate some rather negative vibrations when discoursing on the subject. And except for a little slip up last week at a drunken dinner, I've been doing O.K. There is some reason in trying your best just to be happy. Still, I miss the occasional good rant. Thank god Ethel the Blog has been holding up his end. And much better than I ever could. Go read his last week of entries. Way to go Steve. And I can really relate to the prize he is offering to anyone who can guess the author of a quote he printed:
"If anyone guesses correctly... they win a 'get out of hearing me rant about politics in a bar after 10 P.M. free' card, a prize for which many would trade their left eyeball."
Geek bumperstickers on the information highway I always laugh when I see this guys .sig on /.
"My other car is a cdr"
I really should get out more.
No frills tech news aggregator.
Mourning Sir Alec Guinness the Rasterweb way:
"The day was marred only by the loss of Obi-wan... sigh... Obi-wan said it best when he told Han: 'Let's just say we'd like to avoid any Imperial entanglements.' How true! A good Jedi, a good friend. The report says 'The spokesman could not confirm the cause of death.' Um, gee, I'm pretty sure Darth Vader killed him, hello???"
If consumers are getting their music for free now, I guess the government decided they can get something out of the record industry too. The BBC reports:
"State attorneys from 28 US states have filed a law suit against the world's five largest record companies, accusing them of fixing compact disc prices.... The attorneys have filed suit against Time Warner's Warner Brothers music group, Sony Music, Universal Music Group, Bertelsmann's BMG Entertainment, and EMI.... The states are demanding damages running into 'hundreds of millions of dollars', or 'several dollars' per CD sold."I can't wait to hear what they will propose to do with the money. Programs to keep kids off gangsta rap? Free Britney Spears CDs for low income families? Isn't the market speaking loudly enough on this one?
The latest Mozilla (M17) is available for download. I'm grabing it now, but my net connection has been so slow and unreliable the past few days I'm not sure I'll get it. Netscape has also released M17, under the name Netscape Communciator 6.0 PR2 (Preview Release 2.) I'm just going to report back on Mozilla though. I'm still very behind this project (I mean spiritually or something, I'm not actually helping in any way.) But I don't have very high expectations. Lots of fighting lately, especially since the WSP published that scathing aritcle blasting Netscape for the slow progress of Mozilla (and demanding they take Netscape 4.x off the market.) Suck got into the action with their own brand of software review (i.e., lots of quips, not many facts.) Then Monty Manley wrote What went wrong with Mozilla, to which everybody and their brother on the Moz side replied (see Mike Cornall's There is nothing wrong with Mozilla in Linux Today as well.) Back and forth. The bickering is getting worse. If only the product were getting better. We'll see. At least you can play Pac-Man on it - take that IE. And surprisingly, my connection to ftp.mozilla.org is rocking. It's almost half down since I started this little blurb. Check back for the results.
Amazing satelite image of the lights of Europe. 300K and well worth the trip. For some reason that picture gets me all choked up. Our technological ambitions are breathtaking. Oh no wait, I just had my collar too tight.
Great dinner at Lupa last night (Thompson, north of Houston.) They can cook pasta. Not sure what got into me (barbara d'alba -> rofosco, maybe,) but I started arguing, a bit too loudly, my not too well reasoned "political decentralization as a prelude to space colonization" rant. Anyway, apologies to my friends who have probably heard this too many times. I'll try to take it down a notch.
Here's an article on filtering adds out of your web surfing experience (on linux, windows, BEos, and Mac.) I've downloaded their files, but am not terribly impressed yet. Perhaps I'm still doing something wrong. Wired is the only site I can find that it seems to work on. I'll report back if I get it working well. Would be great to have this ability. If anyone tries it on Windows, let me know.
Here's the camera for Alex if anybody feels like funding the Arboretum to the tune of $1300. Check out the zoom.
This could be the worst hole yet. Java security hole makes Netscape into a web server. This is not good. If you run Netscape (on any platform) your entire filesystem (that's every file on your computer) may be viewable/downloadable to others on the net. Seems like a problem with java (not javascript, but java,) as well as a problem with Netscape's (poorly written) code. TURN JAVA OFF. (I always keep it off, but that was just paranoid; now it's mandatory.) Turn javascript off too, although nothing this big has ever been found in javascript (plus lots of sites use it so it's more of a pain - although I have it off.) You can do this in the preferences in Netscape (under 'advanced'.) Perhaps this will turn out to be a hoax and/or not so bad as it seems, but I seriously doubt it. I think this is real, and it pretty much spells the end for Netscape. I'm switching to icab.
Wow. I just found out that you can create and control Flash movies from inside PHP. It's cool not to like Flash, and indeed I don't like the proprietary nature of the technology, but for some things there is just no other tool. Sure Flash is abused, but also there is cool stuff done with it. Like any tool, much rests on the good judgement of the operator. But dynamic flash? Web front ends for flash creation? Almost anything would be possible. Interesting. Too bad you need PHP 4 installed. Eventually I'll upgrade, and then we'll see what we can do. Maybe there will be more than text and the occasional picture on the site.
Is it just me, or is there something unsettling about this BBC headline: Bush meat destroying African species?
You guys know when you see this at the bottom of spam email that you should not (under any circumstances) believe them?
To be removed from any future mailings, send email to "anything@percode.com" and type "Remove" in the subject line. We appologize for any inconvenience.If you reply they will not remove you. In fact they will put your email address in another pile marked "confirmed address" (i.e., confirmed that the address does exist and is read by a human.) Now it is worth even more money and will be sold to more and more spammers. Nice, huh?
And since I can't go one day without talking about Napster (which I really don't care that much about - really - it just leads to an interesting discussion) here is todays piece: a Salon interview with Talal Shamoon, described as a "key technologist" behind (at?) the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI.) I read this closely, but couldn't really find anything being said. At least he's not claiming they can really protect the music. He keeps falling back to the rather nebulous position that the music industry will make the secure music experience so pleasant that everyone will adopt it. Sounds good, but then when he describes the value-added part that the industry hopes will lure consumers from the already available free product, it starts to sound not so good.
"You can do things like super-distribution, for example, where you can e-mail the song and say, 'If you get 10 of your best friends to buy it, I'll give you free tickets to the Britney Spears concert next month.' So you get on AOL and you e-mail the thing to 50 of your best friends and so on."How is that good for consumers? Sounds more like his line to sell this to the industry. Anyway, the real meat of the interview comes in the final reply, where he is talking about how the industry is working with the media-player software companies (real, winamp, ect...) and the consumer electronics industry (who build portable mp3 players, ect...) This is key because for any protection scheme to work, it has to be built into the data that is the music, as well as the player that is playing the music (in other words, the data is marked to say 'hey, I'm protected' but it is the player (either software on your computer, or stand alone devices like home stereos) that have to read and respect that message.) The reason why everyone keeps maintaining that you can't protect digital information (including music) is that the industry no longer controls the creation of the playback devices. As much as the music industry would like to get us all to listen to their secure music only on their sanctioned secure music players, the fact is that most people will be listening to this music on their general purpose computing devices. And that means they can choose what ever play back software they want. Some will pay attention to the security protocols, others will not. The ones that don't will probably be free (made by people who just want to play the music) while the ones that do will probably cost money (made by companies in agreement with the recording industry in the hopes of making big profits.) Shamoon as much as admits this after laying out the secure player pipe dream by saying "...[n]ow, there's a lot of twiddles there because computers allow you to do a lot more stuff than consumer electronics devices, but that's basically where we'll stand." Where is that again?
Here's an article detailing the results of last weeks experiment which sent some bacteria from extreme earth environments into space. The bacteria survived.
"The experiment lends credence to the theory that primitive life might hitchhike between Earth and other worlds aboard debris from meteorite impacts."