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I've put up a page detailing some of my thoughts on the new system to which we are about to migrate. Rather long, and definitely a first draft, but might be good for you people here to check out. Sorry for the lack of editing. All comments and feedback welcome.
- jim 4-29-2001 7:57 pm [link] [add a comment]

Now that's strange. I guess we're not the only ones planning a major site overhaul. I don't think we'll quite be ready on the 1st, but I guess there must be something in the air.
- jim 4-27-2001 3:27 pm [link] [add a comment]

Here's a good, fairly academic look at the history of "Virtual Reality".
- jim 4-26-2001 9:20 pm [link] [add a comment]

Jorn Barger is thinking about XML encoded historical timelines. The more formal page is here. To me this screams for some interaction with the McKenna Time Wave thing. Will that ever be seen as important?
- jim 4-26-2001 4:18 pm [link] [add a comment]

Right now you are part of the internet. Your computer is connected to my computer, and by extension to every other computer on the internet. But aside from the ability to click buttons and fill in various HTML form elements, your browser software basically only receives information. This is the web as we know it. But soon, or so they keep saying, we will move to the next phase of the internet. On this new frontier your computer will be both a receiver and a broadcaster (a client and a server.) This movement is already pressaged by the likes of napster, gnutella, SETI@home, and mojonation, etc... These are very different services, operating in different manners, and employing different protocols. But all have been lumped together (sometimes without too much sense) under the title P2P. That means Peer to Peer, and it stands in contrast to the more traditional server to client model. Or more generally P2P means a flat hierarchy with content information flowing bi-directionally (communication), as opposed to a hierarchy, with most content information flowing in one direction (consumption). A telephone call is like a P2P application; watching a television program is like a traditional client-server model. You can talk back to your T.V., but it's not listening. Guess which model Big Business wants?

Anyway, the web is seriously abuzz about Sun's new framework for designing P2P applications, JXTA. Wes Felter has the quick first look technical overview: So what is JXTA? Dave Winer has a bunch of links including a package of O'Reilly pages (this one being the overview,) the register's rather negative take, and Sun's own press release.

JXTA is at least one whole level more fundamental than anything I ever deal with, but I understand what it is trying to provide. I'll be very happy to employ some of the things that others might be able to make with JXTA. Or with some other set of P2P building tools. A lot of people are in sync on this issue, now it's just a matter of getting on with the slightly more political fight, as the big gorillas (Microsoft, Sun, etc.) fight it out with each other (.net vs. JXTA) and with those weirdo (;-) independent developers who by providing fun applications play a crucial role in a particular framework's acceptance, but who keep insisting that these fundamental layers of the web should be developed with open standards. The jury will be out for awhile on JXTA (it's just a framework for building things, it isn't really anything itself) but at this point the more efforts the better. I guess this means there's one more thing to keep an eye on.
- jim 4-26-2001 4:07 pm [link] [add a comment]

Salon premium.
- jim 4-25-2001 3:29 pm [link] [add a comment]

Right on. Douglas Rushkoff just solved (at least temporarily) one of the things that bugs me most about the web: The New York Times. I don't necessarily trust them, but I do like this paper. Most days I read the front section and the business section at my coffee shop. But they make it difficult for others to link to them, thus circumventing all the best results of putting their articles on the web in the first place. Anyway, Rushkoff points out in this article that the WAP version of the New York Times (that's Wireless Access Protocol, the standard devised for fitting the web onto the small display screens of cell phones and wireless PDAs) can be accessed by any browser at avantgo. You can get the Times here, and unlike some other back doors around the Times mandatory sign in, I'm not sure they'll be able to close this one. Or, at least, here's hoping.
- jim 4-24-2001 11:07 pm [link] [4 comments]

15,000 scientists can't be wrong. Is there a scientific journal boycott brewing? (/. story)
- jim 4-24-2001 4:20 pm [link] [3 comments]

Apple acquires Focal Point Systems, creators of Film Logic. Finally. Final Cut Pro can now seriously compete with high end video editing solutions.

And canon announces a 3d lens for the XL1 (although the Canon site says this is a proof of concept and no price or ship dates have been set, macnn says it will go on sale in October for $8500.)
- jim 4-23-2001 8:55 pm [link] [add a comment]


- jim 4-23-2001 8:40 pm [link] [5 comments]

David McCusker takes a break from talking about stuff I can't understand, and introduces us to his mysticism.
- jim 4-23-2001 3:47 pm [link] [1 comment]

Dan Gillmor writes some more about weblogs (second item.)
- jim 4-23-2001 3:02 pm [link] [add a comment]

Astronomy picture of the day. Beautiful shot of the Jovian moon IO against a background of Jupiter itself.
- jim 4-22-2001 6:23 pm [link] [add a comment]

Peep. Ping. Coming up for air. I think I've got the translation script working. This script walks the tree, starting at a given page of the old system, and translates all the posts into the new system. The hard part is that each post is itself the top node of a smaller tree which represents the downward cascading comments which may or may not be under each post. And these comments cascade down to an arbitrary and theoretically infinite depth. So that means lots of recursive functions (a loop of code that invokes another iteration of itself from inside the execution of that same loop.) This sort of thing is hard for me to grasp. And it can get out of control. (Remember way back in the day when I basically crashed that csoft server with some faulty perl code? That was a recursive function that never came out of its infundibular self invoking spiral.) There still might be some subtle bug in it, but I can't find one. This is the hardest thing I've ever written. Very interesting process. I wonder if people who are really trained work this same way. For me it's like having a conversation with the computer. Eventually I'm going to write something longer about this interesting phenomenon. I guess it's a dialectic. In any case, it lets me make things beyond myself. I don't know exactly how this script works, but I'm pretty sure it does. I figured it out, like I said, by having a conversation with the machine. Both of us (the machine and I, as it were) understand the script, but neither of us alone can understand the whole thing. Or something like that. Cool stuff.

So if I'm right, and it is working, it won't be too long now. First of May seems possible. Or, hey, the third is a Thrusday. That's a nice date.
- jim 4-21-2001 4:06 pm [link] [4 comments]

To settle the wager from last night. Does 23% constitute ownership? In this case I'd say yes. 50 cents to Mr. Fink.
- jim 4-20-2001 3:25 pm [link] [4 comments]






almost there...
- jim 4-19-2001 10:11 pm [link] [add a comment]

The new Wired (May 2001, yes I still read it sometimes) has an interview with Larry Roberts, one of the creators of the internet, about his company Caspian Networks who are supposedly making a next generation router that will "kick Cisco's ass". Anyway, in the article he says the following:

"They're [cisco, juniper, avici] using hypercube or hypertoroid topology, so they're limited to six dimensions.... I've been able to take more steps, to go into n-dimensional space..."
If anyone could explain to me how present network topology is in any way related to a hypertoroid (and you'll really have to explain because I'm a little rusty on my higher dimensional topology mathematics) it would be greatly appreciated. I know I know some people who could, but I don't think they're reading. Anyway, I love that shape and have always had the intuition (intuvision?) that it is important, but I don't know enough about these things. BUt that's the first time I've heard it mentioned.

Mmmm... higher dimensional doughnuts.
- jim 4-19-2001 9:06 pm [link] [1 ref] [2 comments]

Rohit Khare (of knownow and foRK fame) on namespaces and the future of "postmodernist networking". Fairly technical.
- jim 4-19-2001 8:56 pm [link] [add a comment]

O.K., I think the 'new post' feature is working again on my page. Let me know if it's not. Thanks.
- jim 4-19-2001 6:49 pm [link] [add a comment]

Booknotes is talking about an idea to enable "block blogging" of important topics (where many people link to the same story from many individual personal sites.) I don't quite get it. I understand what people are after is some idea that certain news topics deserve to be widely covered (maybe things that specifically don't get covered in the mainstream) and that all these personal sites can help out by jumping on the bandwagon and all linking to the same stories. But isn't that exactly what happens already? Without any news feed apparatus? I remember when people used to think all the link overlap was a bad thing.
- jim 4-19-2001 4:00 pm [link] [2 comments]

Paul Ford has been traveling in Israel and thinking about the Holocaust.
- jim 4-19-2001 3:17 pm [link] [add a comment]

My friend J. wrote yesterday about us getting together, and I mailed him back saying I was around Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. The fact that it was already 6:00 pm on Wednesday probably made that email a little confusing. When we finally talked I could tell he had that "are you sure you're ok?" sound in his voice. Yes, I'm ok. Just been concentrating a little too much maybe. So what if I thought it was Monday yesterday.
- jim 4-19-2001 3:03 pm [link] [4 comments]

ComicsML:

"What we need now, McCloud argues, is new ideas for presenting comics digitally, which will inevitably emerge from many directions; but we'll also need new technologies to make digital delivery easier."

- jim 4-19-2001 2:44 pm [link] [add a comment]

I've been looking more closely at XML-RPC. This is a protocol for communicating with "web services" which themselves don't really exist yet, but soon. Real soon. This is the sort of thing that microsoft's .net is all about. The idea is that computer programs, things like word processors, or spreadsheets, or even computer games can all be thought of as providing "services" to the client (that's you.) Up until now, software programs usually ran on your computer. In the future (or so the story goes) software will more and more run on large servers located "out there" on the web. Your computer will run the software by sending requests to these different servers and listening for the response. This back and forth with remote servers running applications could be done in countless ways, but XML-RPC seems to be making some headway. As is SOAP, but that's a different story. Anyway, the RPC part stands for Remote Procedure Call, and the XML part just means that these calls to remotely running procedures (or programs) are encoded in XML (instead of HTML or ubbi dubbi or whatever other standard you could think of.)

Anyway, like I said, I was digging through the docs on XML-RPC and I came across that little list of services, none of which seem very useful outside of the userland community, except this one: Speller. This is a great example of an XML-RPC service. You send Speller a text string, and it sends you back a list of words it thinks are misspelled (and some guesses at correct spellings if it's able.) Nice. And it won't really be you doing this communicating, it will be some little program on your computer. You won't even notice it. If that doesn't get you excited rest assured that people who write software are very excited. In this new world I'll be able, for example, to add spell checking to any application I write just by making a simple XML-RPC call to the speller server. Once enough of these base services are deployed, we'll be able to build new web apps just by stringing together these basic blocks. This will be tremendously easy. (Of course there's a complicated cost structure issue here, but I'll leave that for another day.)

Would it be better to have these service available locally on your own machine? Well, yes and no. It would be faster to run them locally, but then - in the case of Speller, say - you'd have to install a dictionary program, and worse, you'd have to update it when updates came out, and patch it when security holes are found. The beauty of these distributed services (be they XML-RPC based or not) is that somebody else (the service host) deals with all that stuff. You sacrifice a little control, but you gain a great deal of ease of use. If you have a lot of bandwidth, this is probably a good trade off.

After looking over Speller, I finally realized where I knew the author's (host's?) name - Lance Arthur. He's glassdog, a weblog I used to read, but for some reason haven't been lately. Nice to tune back in. He's written a rather nice piece exhorting us all to be great.

"Good God, don't you realize what you have? Can't you see it sitting right there in front of you? It's everything! It's amazing and colossal and yours for the taking! There are no rules. There are no laws. There's no one here you have to listen to or answer to or pay attention to. This is the time you've been waiting for. Now. It's here."
Speller is certainly a great gift to the community, so he's already doing his part. Now if everybody else would just make something cool and give it away...
- jim 4-17-2001 6:10 pm [link] [add a comment]

The Deep Web.

"Table 2 indicates that the 60 known, largest deep Web sites contain data of about 750 terabytes (HTML included basis), or roughly 40 times the size of the known surface Web. These sites appear in a broad array of domains from science to law to images and commerce. We estimate the total number of records or documents within this group to be about 85 billion."

(via my new fav - thanks dave - wood s lot)
- jim 4-17-2001 3:56 pm [link] [add a comment]

apache == mp3 streaming server

Cool.
- jim 4-17-2001 3:21 pm [link] [add a comment]

Astronomy picture of the day: M51: The Whirlpool Galaxy.
- jim 4-17-2001 3:19 pm [link] [add a comment]

Arstechnica has a nice look at the current state of digital photography.
- jim 4-17-2001 3:05 pm [link] [add a comment]

I think (or is that hope?) we'll be seeing more articles like this:

"The folks responsible for corporate strategy should get their heads into the Web log phenomenon and take some time to think about how it might help them achieve various corporate objectives."
Probably nothing new to anyone here, but it's interesting to see how it creeps toward the mainstream. (via scripting news)
- jim 4-17-2001 3:01 pm [link] [add a comment]

Stopped in a cab at a light on King street yesterday evening. A man hobbles up to the drivers window and with outstretched palm mumbles something neither I nor the driver could understand. The driver, from under his elaborate turban, asks for clarification, although we both know in general what he was asking. "Ten cents'n 'll bring you good luck" the man repeats, not very convincingly. Somewhere between weariness and exasperation the driver leans over and fishes a coin out of his ashtray, and without missing a beat says "Why don't you bring your own self luck? Here's a quarter." To which the man admits "I don't believe in luck."
- jim 4-16-2001 2:43 pm [link] [add a comment]

Trellix licenses Blogger. Dan Bricklin, who wrote the seminal software program Visicalc (which really started the whole personal computer thing,) and who now works for Trellix developing some sort of on line bloggish thing, explains the deal.
- jim 4-16-2001 2:19 pm [link] [1 comment]

I think today might be a good time to try another round of meta bird watching. I've heard the rare Wilson Watcher might be in Central Park today. Maybe I'll head up and try to spot one.
- jim 4-14-2001 5:10 pm [link] [2 comments]

Nothing like a good post-dot-com-bubble hyperlinked epic poem to put it all in perspective.
- jim 4-14-2001 4:23 pm [link] [add a comment]

Here's a good resource for information on Claude Shannon, information theory, and entropy.

And I can never mention entropy without remembering the line Kesey has the young girl say in Demon Box: "Entropy? That's only a problem in a closed system."
- jim 4-14-2001 4:15 pm [link] [add a comment]

Here are a few photos from the Laffoley exhibit we went to last night. I had no idea the painting were this large. Incredible. Great time. Happy birthday Bill! (Warning: the first page is sort of large. Approximately 400k.)
- jim 4-13-2001 4:31 pm [link] [add a comment]

Well, despite the fact that I thought it was Tuesday today, things are going pretty well. I still have work to do on the site I'm getting up now for unmentioned "real people" (I like to keep that dirty business stuff off this page) but it has clearly passed out of my stewardship as of today. Still a lot of work bringing others up to speed, but that mostly involves writing documentation. Boring, sure, but not the sort of work where suddenly everything can unravel and leave you back at the beginning. Hopefully with a strong showing this weekend I can have all the decks cleared for a Monday morning start in on getting this site transfered to the new software. I don't really know how long that will take, but I guess I'm hoping for May day at this point. Wasn't that some sort of deadline last year? Anyway, I still have to get the archives working, and the new comment pages are only threaded at this point, and of course they need to be nested. Those shouldn't take too long, but both issues can be sort of tricky. Still, May 1 seems like a good bet. After that we should be able to grow a little more quickly, although, as I like to remind people, growing just for the sake of growing isn't really the point. Still, I hope it becomes more fun for people as we go. You'll all have a little more power in the new universe, and who can disagree with that?
- jim 4-11-2001 9:53 pm [link] [2 comments]

Hey F. are you out there? I need your email for the electronic part of our correspondence. I think it's on my unbootable computer. (jimb at digitalmediatree.com) Thanks.
- jim 4-11-2001 7:31 pm [link] [11 comments]

YAWVP (yet another web visualization project.) What does the web look like? A jellyfish perhaps?
- jim 4-11-2001 2:48 pm [link] [1 comment]

Tim Berners-Lee has published an aritcle in the Scientific American explaning the "semantic web". Rather mundane examples, but I guess that's the cost of writing something technical that could be widely understood. I'm sure you can think of something more interesting than scheduling car pools. Still, all the background is in there. Very clear.
- jim 4-11-2001 2:46 pm [link] [add a comment]

Like things could get any better. I think we're sprouting again. I've been hoping for this one since the beginning. Details to follow...
- jim 4-09-2001 6:46 pm [link] [3 comments]

Hack the Planet has been getting more and more popular. The discussion board there has crossed some sort of threshold, and now seems like a very important public place. Is that what slashdot used to be like? I came too late to the party to be sure. Anyway, I guess it's the case that very smart computer programmers like to communicate with other very smart computer programmers. The technical stuff is largely over my head, but lately there hasn't been much technical stuff.

I can see now that this post is going to be a little long, but there is a payoff.

Anyway, Wes posted this picture on March 28, and 8 minutes later Aaron Swartz posted this reply. What happened next was probably the most interesting discussion thread I've ever watched unfold (and watching is all I do on that board.) Aaron, evidently, is a very bright 14 year old computer geek. He is very articulate. Maybe you remember him as the author of this great article (explaning the "semantic web") that I linked to a week and a half ago. And that's just one of his interests. Another is a more quixotic quest to change the american educational system which he sees as basically bankrupt, full of busy work, and signifying nothing. (Of course this is all to put words in his mouth which is a dangerous thing, but I have to summarize somehow.) Anyway, the discussion thread on Hack the Planet turned into a beautiful/frightning back and forth between the very outspoken and unfearful Swartz, and a variety of much older, more jaded, but also highly intelligent and outspoken programmer types. It was clearly evident that many saw Aaron as youger versions of themselves: overly smart in a specifically technical sense that makes it difficult to fit inside a strict bureaucracy (be it a corporate job, or american high school.) Many had very kind encouraging things to say to him. Many had what I thought very wise advice for growing up feeling you are a little different. A few thought he should quit complaining and just swallow his medicine. That's the way it is with internet conversations. They can get a little heated. They can get a little nasty. This is part of what makes them so interesting. Some of the social regulations which govern face to face communications are stripped away, and you can really get at what people think. Sometimes it's not so nice. O.K., here's the payoff. My favorite person to read on the site is David McCusker. His personal site is here. What he does is so far beyond me that I couldn't begin to judge his competence, but I can tell how the other people treat him, and let's just say he carries some weight. When the thread began to get a little personal I started wondering if someone would step in, and David McCusker did. Here's his reply (hint: that's the payoff, go read that entire post.) I say we put this guy in charge. If only every person new to the internet, and this particular way of communicating, could be persuaded to read his post. I think he makes the world a better place.
- jim 4-09-2001 5:32 pm [link] [8 comments]

I now have two different, longer, and much harder to write posts that I want to make. I can't seem to crack either one though, so in the meantime I'll point out that google is starting to do language translation (from scripting news.)
- jim 4-08-2001 3:43 pm [link] [add a comment]

I now have two different, longer, and much harder to write posts that I want to make. I can't seem to crack either one though, so in the meantime I'll point out that google is starting to do language translation (from scripting news.)
- jim 4-08-2001 3:43 pm [link] [add a comment]

Randal Schwartz is a software programmer best known for his wildley popular O'Reilly books on the Perl programming language. Quite a few people, myself included, started their computer lives with a copy of Randal's classic, Learning Perl. He's also a friend of Steve's so I hope to be able to meet him some day. In any case, he was also involved in some serious legal problems with Intel in 1995. He didn't do very well. But the court of appeals has finally ruled on his appeal, and although the three convictions against him were basically upheld, he's not going to have to pay Intel the $70,000 restitution award. Slashdot has the story and a bunch of links. Pretty interesting case.
- jim 4-08-2001 1:17 am [link] [add a comment]

Randal Schwartz is a software programmer best known for his wildley popular O'Reilly books on the Perl programming language. Quite a few people, myself included, started their computer lives with a copy of Randal's classic, Learning Perl. He's also a friend of Steve's so I hope to be able to meet him some day. In any case, he was also involved in some serious legal problems with Intel in 1995. He didn't do very well. But the court of appeals has finally ruled on his appeal, and although the three convictions against him were basically upheld, he's not going to have to pay Intel the $70,000 restitution award. Slashdot has the story and a bunch of links. Pretty interesting case.
- jim 4-08-2001 1:17 am [link] [add a comment]

RMS in the UK.

"This provoked Stallman into an extended rant against the whole idea of patenting software, and ended in him leaving the room to shout in the corridor while Professor Bill Cornish, who was chairing, tried to resume the discussion."
Here is Stallman's homepage, and here is his must read distopian vision of the future that everyone used to laugh at, and that now, with the advent of the DMCA and things like CPRM, no one is laughing at anymore (disclaimer: he's no William Gibson or anything, but the writing style is not the point.) Dave's been doing some good digging into this area as well.
- jim 4-07-2001 4:56 pm [link] [1 comment]

RMS in the UK.

"This provoked Stallman into an extended rant against the whole idea of patenting software, and ended in him leaving the room to shout in the corridor while Professor Bill Cornish, who was chairing, tried to resume the discussion."
Here is Stallman's homepage, and here is his must read distopian vision of the future that everyone used to laugh at, and that now, with the advent of the DMCA and things like CPRM, no one is laughing at anymore (disclaimer: he's no William Gibson or anything, but the writing style is not the point.) Dave's been doing some good digging into this area as well.
- jim 4-07-2001 4:56 pm [link] [1 comment]

megnut @ knownow. That's some high profile geek team they've got over there.
- jim 4-07-2001 4:12 pm [link] [add a comment]

megnut @ knownow. That's some high profile geek team they've got over there.
- jim 4-07-2001 4:12 pm [link] [add a comment]

O'Reilly, maker of fine computer books with funny drawings of animals on the covers, is starting a weblog service.
- jim 4-07-2001 4:11 pm [link] [add a comment]

O'Reilly, maker of fine computer books with funny drawings of animals on the covers, is starting a weblog service.
- jim 4-07-2001 4:11 pm [link] [add a comment]

"Color geek extraordinaire Bruce Fraser gets to the bottom of rendering intents, and when to use each to get the best results." Some day I will learn about this stuff. Not today, though. Maybe one of you graphic designer types can tackle this.
- jim 4-07-2001 4:00 pm [link] [add a comment]

"Color geek extraordinaire Bruce Fraser gets to the bottom of rendering intents, and when to use each to get the best results." Some day I will learn about this stuff. Not today, though. Maybe one of you graphic designer types can tackle this.
- jim 4-07-2001 4:00 pm [link] [add a comment]

I've been listening a lot to a Lucinda Williams bootleg a friend sent me. It is so good. After a certain number of plays a CD will burn itself into my head. This one is way in there.

The sun came up it was another day,
The sun went down we were blown away.
- jim 4-06-2001 2:27 pm [link] [1 comment]

I've been listening a lot to a Lucinda Williams bootleg a friend sent me. It is so good. After a certain number of plays a CD will burn itself into my head. This one is way in there.

The sun came up it was another day,
The sun went down we were blown away.
- jim 4-06-2001 2:27 pm [link] [1 ref] [1 comment]

I used to post some semi interesting stuff. You know, links and whatnot. At least that's how I remember it. Now it's just this same boring crap all the time. "Couldn't sleep last night..." or "Hit a snag in the project..." or "Made a little progress in the project..." Yawn. I remember this stage from the last time around. The initial excitement is subsiding because I've already made all the big decisions. As I actually execute the idea the open space of possibilities is reduced. This is a good thing in the sense that a specific thing is being formed, but from a purely intellectual point of view the whole project looses some of its lustre. At first it's all about thinking with just a little bit of doing. Then it's more and more doing and less thinking. Finally it's very little thinking at all, and lots of cleaning up around the edges. I'm not very good at that. I'm better than I was last time, but still not very good. The final 5% of this project is taking around 75% of the total time. Yuck. Yawn. Did I mention I got my automatic lists to sort on multiple fields? Not on the indeterminite n number of fields that I had wanted when I was just thinking about how it should work, but at least on up to 12 different fields. That should be enough, sure, but it's the kind of disappointing trade off that has to be made as something crosses the line from idea to reality. You can't have everything, or it wouldn't be anything (in particular.) The contingencies of the real world work to squash a lot of pretty ideas. Oh well. Such is life. Keep your head down and for gods sake keep moving. Once you stop it is very hard to get going again. Lots of cleaning up around the edges to do today. Looking forward to tonight.
- jim 4-05-2001 3:52 pm [link] [add a comment]

I used to post some semi interesting stuff. You know, links and whatnot. At least that's how I remember it. Now it's just this same boring crap all the time. "Couldn't sleep last night..." or "Hit a snag in the project..." or "Made a little progress in the project..." Yawn. I remember this stage from the last time around. The initial excitement is subsiding because I've already made all the big decisions. As I actually execute the idea the open space of possibilities is reduced. This is a good thing in the sense that a specific thing is being formed, but from a purely intellectual point of view the whole project looses some of its lustre. At first it's all about thinking with just a little bit of doing. Then it's more and more doing and less thinking. Finally it's very little thinking at all, and lots of cleaning up around the edges. I'm not very good at that. I'm better than I was last time, but still not very good. The final 5% of this project is taking around 75% of the total time. Yuck. Yawn. Did I mention I got my automatic lists to sort on multiple fields? Not on the indeterminite n number of fields that I had wanted when I was just thinking about how it should work, but at least on up to 12 different fields. That should be enough, sure, but it's the kind of disappointing trade off that has to be made as something crosses the line from idea to reality. You can't have everything, or it wouldn't be anything (in particular.) The contingencies of the real world work to squash a lot of pretty ideas. Oh well. Such is life. Keep your head down and for gods sake keep moving. Once you stop it is very hard to get going again. Lots of cleaning up around the edges to do today. Looking forward to tonight.
- jim 4-05-2001 3:52 pm [link] [add a comment]

Couldn't sleep again last night. What a curious experience. I remember when I was much younger, in my seriously dreading school days, when this would occasionally happen. Usually the night before a big test. The longer you lie awake the more desperate you become to fall asleep, and of course this makes it even harder to do so. "O.K., if I fall asleep right now I can still get three hours..." Anyway, it's not so bad now that I am older and don't have to suffer through big tests anymore. Sure I'm tired now, but maybe I can sleep for a few hours this afternoon. As I always suspected way back then, it IS better to be a grown up (or should I say it's better to be an almost grown up with a nice place to live and no kids and not too many worries except how am I going to get the database to handle sorting on multiple fields...?) Getting to it. Big day. The giant ball of mud continues to grow.
- jim 4-04-2001 3:31 pm [link] [add a comment]

Couldn't sleep again last night. What a curious experience. I remember when I was much younger, in my seriously dreading school days, when this would occasionally happen. Usually the night before a big test. The longer you lie awake the more desperate you become to fall asleep, and of course this makes it even harder to do so. "O.K., if I fall asleep right now I can still get three hours..." Anyway, it's not so bad now that I am older and don't have to suffer through big tests anymore. Sure I'm tired now, but maybe I can sleep for a few hours this afternoon. As I always suspected way back then, it IS better to be a grown up (or should I say it's better to be an almost grown up with a nice place to live and no kids and not too many worries except how am I going to get the database to handle sorting on multiple fields...?) Getting to it. Big day. The giant ball of mud continues to grow.
- jim 4-04-2001 3:31 pm [link] [add a comment]

Oh my god. MB is a genius. I'm not allowed to say more yet, so I'll just say that again: Oh my god MB is a genius.
- jim 4-02-2001 7:38 pm [link] [3 comments]

Oh my god. MB is a genius. I'm not allowed to say more yet, so I'll just say that again: Oh my god MB is a genius.
- jim 4-02-2001 7:38 pm [link] [3 comments]

Glennf has written yet another introduction to blogging for the Seattle Times. Nothing new here, but a pretty good job for the uninitiated.
- jim 4-02-2001 7:16 pm [link] [add a comment]

Glennf has written yet another introduction to blogging for the Seattle Times. Nothing new here, but a pretty good job for the uninitiated.
- jim 4-02-2001 7:16 pm [link] [add a comment]

For future reference: XML-RPC from PHP.
- jim 3-31-2001 3:31 pm [link] [add a comment]

For future reference: XML-RPC from PHP.
- jim 3-31-2001 3:31 pm [link] [add a comment]

Dry wall is going up in the new office. Bright blue Cat5 has been strung to every work station. Finally some movement.
- jim 3-31-2001 3:25 pm [link] [add a comment]

Dry wall is going up in the new office. Bright blue Cat5 has been strung to every work station. Finally some movement.
- jim 3-31-2001 3:25 pm [link] [add a comment]

Danny Hillis red herring interview. He's leaving Disney, where he held one of the incredibly super-cool "disney fellow" positions. That's one of those ever dwindling "pure research" jobs where you get a big budget, and no requirements to make anything particularly marketable. Hillis made a giant mechanical clock out of nothing but stone age tools that should run for 10,000 years (it gets wound by the stream of tourists who visit the site and take the tour which climbs up through the inner workings - I said it was giant.) Cool. Anyway, he's also responsible for more traditional high tech, like the idea of massively parallel computers. He's got the goods, and I think he knows where we're going.

"...[t]hat's why Bill Joy's article struck such a chord. People are uneasy because they literally cannot imagine the world their children will live in. But I don't think intelligent machines will happen suddenly. They'll happen gradually. For example, people believed a machine couldn't beat a human at chess, or thought it'd be the end of the world. Then Deep Blue happened, and it didn't matter -- people still play chess, though machines are better at it. We'll see lots of steps like that...."

- jim 3-31-2001 3:10 pm [link] [add a comment]

Danny Hillis red herring interview. He's leaving Disney, where he held one of the incredibly super-cool "disney fellow" positions. That's one of those ever dwindling "pure research" jobs where you get a big budget, and no requirements to make anything particularly marketable. Hillis made a giant mechanical clock out of nothing but stone age tools that should run for 10,000 years (it gets wound by the stream of tourists who visit the site and take the tour which climbs up through the inner workings - I said it was giant.) Cool. Anyway, he's also responsible for more traditional high tech, like the idea of massively parallel computers. He's got the goods, and I think he knows where we're going.

"...[t]hat's why Bill Joy's article struck such a chord. People are uneasy because they literally cannot imagine the world their children will live in. But I don't think intelligent machines will happen suddenly. They'll happen gradually. For example, people believed a machine couldn't beat a human at chess, or thought it'd be the end of the world. Then Deep Blue happened, and it didn't matter -- people still play chess, though machines are better at it. We'll see lots of steps like that...."

- jim 3-31-2001 3:10 pm [link] [add a comment]

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