...more recent posts
This weather is too good. I love the fall. Perfect. Now if we could just hold it right here until about April...
Two days ago I woke up in the morning and the first thing I thought about (or was it the last thing I was dreaming about?) was the phrase "quantum entanglement." Now this was strange because although I have heard this phrase before, I really have no idea what quantum entanglement is. Apparently it might be important.
It shipped!
Damn you Brig Eaton for turning me on to nyc and me, the blog Drat Fink said reminds him of "felicity meets coyote ugly." Who could resist? Now if only she'd get her own computer so we could read about her life more often. (I think this one tops even *riothero for voyeristic fun. Sort of makes me cringe, but I keep going back for more.)
I think this site gets hit by more robots than humans. The indexing going on is insane. Does the googlebot ever sleep? Or play with its friends? My god that thing needs a day off.
One half a manifesto, by Jaron Lanier. It's always interesting what he has to say, but this one is especially good. I guess I'm guilty of much he is charging, but his ideas seem to strengthen my mind rather than attempting to disrupt, or change it. He's really picked up the ball here in the ongoing techno-cultural dialogue that has perhaps been too skewed lately by Bill Joy, Ray Kurtzweil, et al. Find the time for this one. (from /.)
"An interesting development for you freaks that follow the Roswell story..."
And as if that link weren't enough, 7CR also has this one, to a great page called "weird but true."
Lots of preparations for the big Thanksgiving trip. Things are getting pretty exciting. There's nothing quite like traveling with the Wheel.
Still no plumber, so the office construction is still stalled. Definitely won't be done before the vacation. Hopefully it won't be too long after we are back. I have to order the sdsl before the 30th to get in on a special rebate offer, so I'll actually be in the strange position of hoping they don't install it too fast. Now there's a dsl wish that might come true.
Here are 10 one meter resolution satellite images taken from the commercial satellite Ikonos (the first one meter resolution capable commercial satellite.) Perhaps as impressive as the pictures is the fact that their servers seem unfazed by the front page link on Slashdot (although I did catch the story very soon after it was posted.) Looks like they are running Apache on FreeBSD. Nice site.
New design at eatonweb. Looks great I think. Is it just my imagination, or are a lot of people starting to make really clean, really simple page designs? Thank god. [update: Oh, I was looking at it with javascript off (in Nav 4.75 Mac) and of course that kills style sheets, so I guess she didn't mean for it to look like I saw it. Still nice though. Without style sheets the page is just a small box of white surrounding the eatonweb gif floating on an otherwise grey background. No vertical lines or anything. Looks good both ways.]
I think I've decided to go the SDSL route so that I can play around with the Apache server in OS X. I'll let MB and Hannah order the really fast ADSL, and I'll just get the slowest SDSL to run my server. Then I can speed bump it as needed. I cannot wait to get MB's new machine set up so I can get my B&W back and start playing with Apache.
Here's a new mailing list for working with the holy trinity: Apache, MySql, and PHP. Looks like the place for figuring out how to get these running on OSX (well, Apache is already running, I mean the other two.)
Dave and I once had an idea for a bar that would have lots of T.V.'s connected to vintage home video game consoles. Pong, Atari 2600, intellivision, colecovision. We had Pong when I was in second or third grade, but that was the last machine I had. I remember going to my friend Chris' house down the street and playing missle command on his 2600. That machine was sweet. The joysticks looked like something Apple would make today. Anyway, here's a page by some guy who is way more nostaligic about the 2600 than me. He built his own portable unit. The original cartridges plug right in. He even imitated that great 70's styling. Of course the site could be a fake, which would raise the interesting question of which activity is more disturbingly geeky: faking all the pictures in photoshop, or actually building the thing IRL. Sure, I was wrong on the potato powered web server (fake,) but this one seems legit. Apparently he's going to build another one, and at that point put the first one up for auction on e-bay. Some newly rich thirty year old is going to pay a lot of money to be able to carry around all those childhood memories. You didn't throw out all your cartridges did you?
"To Our Valued Apple Customer:
Thank you for your recent Power Mac G4 order.
We have experienced an unanticipated supply delay and we are unable to ship your order in the time frame originally communicated. We expect to resume shipping late next week or early the following week.
We apologize for any inconvenience this delay may have caused.
Thank you for your patience."
Basic, but very informative pages on scanning and printing. Good primer if you are working with digital pictures (either scanning, or downloading from a digital camera and printing.) Covers scaling images and resampling. (this link is from this excellent thread addressing same issues.)
Threatening skies, but I'm going to try to make it up to the park to meet Alex. Then a sort of anniversary dinner at chez Wheel. Another year passes. I have been blessed.
"I know how to spell `banana', but I don't know when to stop." Ever had one of those projects?
Thinking of buying a laptop from Dell? You might want to read one person's experience. Thinking of installing linux on any sort of laptop? You definitely want to check out this page.
I'm not quite getting it. Handspring, maker of the popular Visor PDA (a Palm compatible with the proprietary Springboard expansion slot) has announced a cellphone springboard plug in module. This will turn your Visor PDA into a cell phone. (Other modules give you more memory, turn your Visor into an MP3 player, and I think there is a camera module.) The cellphone module costs $300. Already that's more than almost any cellphone, and that's not even counting the original cost of the Visor. Plus, if your phone is your PDA, you can't really look up a number, or open your calendar, while you're talking to someone on the phone. I guess you could say it saves space, but the module is only marginally smaller than today's smallest cellphones (like the startac or the new flip open samsung/sprint/qualcomm phone.) I can't think of one reason why you would want this over a regular cell phone; worse, I can think of several why you wouldn't. Who's going to buy this thing? And as long as I'm complaining, I'll throw in a little dig at the proprietary expansion slots that Handspring and Sony (memorystick) keep trying to peddle. Don't trust them. Don't buy it. Why don't they just use compact flash, or PCMCIA? (Answer: because they want you to be locked into their products instead of trying to provide the best product to their consumers.)
Genetic art project creates green glow in the dark bunny.
What an amazing day. I wish I could put this weather on hold for Saturday.
The NYTimes has put together a panel discussion (no sign-in BS) on file sharing technologies and their impact on more traditional media business. Hilary Rosen (RIAA), David Boies (Napster lawer), Gene Kan (Gnutella programmer), Kevin Smith (film director), Esther Dyson (cyber bigwig), Senator Orin Hatch, and some 17 year old average internet consumer kid. Surprisingly, to me at least, is how much Sen. Orin Hatch seems to understand. He's talking the correct talk (Is that PCPC talk?):
"The Internet generally (and peer-to-peer file sharing technology in particular) is dramatically shaking up the traditional relationships between artist and audience, as well as the entities that mediate between them. It makes possible direct dissemination of creative works with essentially no reproduction or distribution costs. That is very exciting, but frightening to the mediators who have added value by helping with the previously costly processes of copying and distributing. Artists can still benefit from many promotional, business and financing services in the wired world, so we are not necessarily facing the extinction of record companies and movie studios, obviously. But I hope that we are moving toward a system where artists and the audience drive the process more, have more choice. That is the hope. If the business mediators can find supportive, value-adding roles (as they should be able to), and if the artists and the audience can have a more direct relationship through this media, we need not have an adversarial relationship. Quite the contrary. I believe this technology can foster a closer relationship between performing artist and audience than we have ever had since Edison separated artistic performance from live performers. I hope to help that happen."I hope he can help it happen too. But really, politicians mostly need to not stop it from happening. Seems like the technology will take care of the rest.
Here's the archives to a good mailing list for would-be Mac OS X system administrators.
Just purchased tickets for the big Thanksgiving adventure. More exciting details to follow...
Progress has stalled slightly on the new office. Hopefully tomorrow it will be back on track. Supposedly the plumber is coming to move all the pipes (running along the ceiling) into one group to be boxed in next to the one large support beam. This will give us another few inches of headspace which seems like a very good thing seeing as it is a basement space. I'm thinking everything will progress a little quicker once this unforseen step is taken care of.
being assembled
The John Perry Barlow article in the new Wired is worth the read.
Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds, and Steve Jobs have joined channel #Newbie Bloggers. I'm sure it reflects poorly on my mindset, but this is the funniest thing I've read in weeks. LOL.
I'm going to take this to mean 26 more hours until Kuro5hin is back on the web. In hopefully unrelated news, (dig the msnbc headline copy:) hackers amass new zombie army, making ready the forces of evil for another round of DDOS attacks. CERT has the advisory, noting holes in rcp.statd (whatever that is) and wu-ftpd. I knew we shouldn't have let a bunch of rappers from Staten Island write the FTP code. D'oh. Slashdot debates the issue.
A University of Michigan professor, Philip Bucksbaum, is saying that a single electron can store an infinite amount of data. Maybe the whole really is contained in each of its parts.
Making sure the recording industry remembers Love's a bitch.
Robert Cringely supplies the responses, completing his slashdot interview. He's smart.
Today's picture (archived here) is my niece Mary. Despite the fact that I am related to her, she is very cute. We had a great dinner with her in Providence.
Well, this is turning out to be a little frustrating (I thought it might.) Almost 2 hours spent trying to give Apple a lot of money. Too bad their servers can't handle the load. How many people could really be hitting the Apple store right now? A million? I doubt it. They should be able to handle the load. Maybe they should look into Solaris. Anyway, I keep trying to place the order and I keep getting server errors (too much load, I'm pretty sure) and then after 5 or 6 times my session will time out and I have to start all over. Of course the whole time I'm on hold (voice) with them as well, just in case someone picks up. Anyway, the last time I had to go back to the beginning and start over it is showing that I have an order being processed (even though I never got any message over the web telling me that they acknowledged the order.) Unfortunately when I check the order status it just says my account is being revised. Grrrr. It might be possible that I ordered the same machine like 80 times. I wonder what the limit on that card is?
And you thought blogs were only full of crappy, uninteresting, self-centered ramblings... oh, wait....
[update: Well, something got ordered. Unfortunately, I've already received 6 email confirmations, and there seems to be another one in my mailbox every time I check. I sure hope they realize I don't want 80 versions of the exact same order.]
Finally it's here. Mac OSX public beta has been released. MacNN has good coverage of the whole Paris expo. New ibooks (w/firewire) were also released. No new Powerbooks (although I want one, I'm glad they didn't rush something out; I'd rather wait for bigger screen, and higher mhz G4e.) I'm ordering X today for my machine, but we're not planning on changing over the whole office until we're sure it's ready (fonts and printer drivers are making me especially worried.) Maybe by February or March. Long way to go, but I feel like it's the start of a new era (for me at least.)
Too bizarre. Here's some info if you're curious about the picture. I wonder if they'll make the smart(y) pants?
On the web design front: I've never seen this before. Check out the little animation that plays (once) when you load the page. It reminds you to make sure you are seeing all of the horizontal information in the graph. It's a little thing, but it's nice. If I was still on the chi-web (Computer Human Interface) mailing list, I would point that one out. (The chart is a list of costs for credit card transactions. Suddenly I'm hearing a lot about micropayments again.)
Just in case you're looking for yet another summary of the current intellectual property rights in the networked computer age debate, here is an unusually good one. Heavily biased toward the information sharing side of the argument, but well argued, and reasonably presented. And for the rest of your cyber-freedom legal shopping, take a look around the whole Berkman Openlaw site while you're at it.
If I were a different person, it might be soap operas. Or that Blind Date show (O.K., that is me sometimes.) But I'm me, and so the guilty pleasure is riothero. But today I am absolved. He actually had a useful link. Noesis: Philosophical Research On-line.
I love finding stories that remind me I live in the future. Here's one about how the Sydney Olympics are trying to beat conterfeit Olympic products. They have formulated a special ink which contains the DNA of one particular unnamed Australian athlete.
"The DNA-laced ink is being applied to most of the 3,500 official souvenirs -- some 50 million individual items. It's the largest deployment ever of DNA as a security device. McGill oversees a team of 60 'logocops' equipped with special scanners that can detect the DNA ink. The logocops will roam Sydney and other Australian cities, pouncing on street vendors and retail outlets to determine whether their merchandise is authentic."I love the fact that they are keeping secret the identity of the human from whom the DNA was taken. Like maybe some counterfeiting mastermind could kidnap him, take some DNA, and whip up their own version of the ink? Muwahahahahahah. (link from /.)
I don't have a DVD player, and even if I did I'm not sure I would buy this, but I'm glad to see someone is putting the technology to use. And I'm not too surprised it's the Beastie Boys who are doing it. "...This 2-DVD piece will lend sound credence to the rumors that Adam Yauch is a certifiable home theatre geek...."
It's even worse than I thought. Wired's WebMonkey has done some in depth testing to see if web designers really need to stick with the cannonical 216 "web safe colors" palette. Turns out that 216 is a little too many if you really want to ensure that the colors will display properly (especially important if you are trying to hide an image by making it - or it's background - the same color as the page background.) Here's the very sad "really safe colors" palette. As they said in the article, "hope you like green." For more info, here's the conclusions, and here's the start of the article.
If your the sort of person who remembers ruefully the period when Wired eclipsed Mondo 2000 as the technocultures magazine of choice, R.U. Sirius has a little look back. I guess this is what internet time is all about: the web is still in its infancy, and already there is nostalgia for the good old days.
They are crunching numbers over in the FoRK archives. If you're trying to figure where we'll be (bandwidth,storage,cpu cycle cost/byte) in a few years this thread is a pretty good read. Also, if you're thinking about distributed apps (and I know some of you are) this is a mailing list to keep up with.
I've mentioned the Arthur C. Clarke inspired space elevator a number of times. Here's a very informative one page summary of where we stand. And how cool is that first picture? (Nasa's conclusion: "In 50 years or so, we'll be there. Then, if the need is there, we'll be able to do this. That's the gist of the report.")
IP address index. Network numbers, network names, and identitites. (via cam) [as of 02/15/01 this page seems to have been taken down. :-( I'd appreciate it if anybody could point me toward a similar resource. Just post below.]
Rebeccablood has posted a history of weblogging. (via genehack)
Very intriguing report on MacOSRumors today about a possible Apple hand-held device. Airport equiped, palm V sized, color hand-held unit reportedly net booting OS X in a master/slave configuration? This is in rumor stage for sure, but: WOW. That would be the coolest thing ever. Of course, you'd have to be pretty close to an airport equipped computer that could function as a master, but since I plan on always having my powerbook with me (as soon as they make the powerbook I'm waiting for) this would be perfect. Keep your notebook in your backpack, and access your minute to minute data through the hand-held. Maybe even stream MP3's out of your laptop to this unit? Too cool.
Here's the archives to a new mailing list offering daily tips concerning the transition from html to xhtml. I haven't been working too hard on our compliance, but we'll get around to it eventually. If any of the widely used browsers supported the standards I'd be more likely to care. Still, we don't want to fall too far behind.
Is this going too far? Frankly, I'd rather have an 802.11 wireless laptop, but I'll give credit for the recycling of old machine angle. (from genehack)
I've been getting my courage up for the next round of computer learning. With the added space I'll be getting with the new office I'm going to finally add that windows machine. And unless I chicken out, I'm going to try to assemble it myself. I'll be following the sage advice of the Ars Technica staff who put together near monthly updates to the latest and greatest PC components. I'll be following their budget box recommendations, but for the more flush they also offer the midpriced hotrod box, and the no explanation necessary god box. Buy the parts, snap it together, how hard could it be? (Cut to picture of Jim gnashing teeth amid motherboards and hard disc controller ribbons.) And then for my next trick, I'm going to try to get it to dual boot linux. The ever inspiring Rasterweb has been documenting his attempts at Linux DIY in The Road to Linux, and not really having any good ideas myself, I'll try to do the same thing here. But I've got to get the machine first.
Since my other links to hack the planet (not to mention the links to just about every other site in the world) already put me in violation of the DeCSS injunction, I might as well make it official. Pfewfffft. Baaaaa. Gaccck.
The BBC has this story about a Canadian researcher turning to the internet for help in creating a huge database of basic human knowledge to be used in creating artificial intelligences that share basic assumptions about the world with humans. Anyone can contribute to the store of simple assumptions (water is wet, 1+1=2, a dog is not a cat, ect...,) and people who contribute a lot are to be rewarded with shares of any company that emerges from the project. The goal is 1 billion discreet bits of information, which the project is calling "mind pixels." The database will be made available to other AI researchers. It's called GAC ("Jack".) Cool.
Great weekend. Thanks to everyone. I'll post a picture or two later today. Nice to be back in NYC.
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.