...more recent posts
Jenna Bush is hereby invited to all future social gatherings associated with this site. (And if she wants a table at Fresh Foods, I'll see what I can do.)
Space Hotel coming soon:
"A Las Vegas hotel tycoon is seeking permission from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to build a private space station, something he contends can be done in the next three years. Robert Bigelow, who made his fortune as owner of Budget Suites of America, said he anticipates that his Bigelow Aerospace division will be able to launch a full-size space station module into orbit within 30 months."Yeah, O.K., I know this isn't going to happen in the next 30 months if the feds have anything to say about it, but I can dream. Wonder what it would cost? (here's the predictable /. thread)
An incomplete annotated history of weblogs.
An interview with the jodi.org masterminds.
John Udell on weblogs.
A large scale example of how the weblog model can be used in business settings.
Yesterday we received an upgrade to our stereo system at Rivington. Apparently the mysterious Mr. X, who is occasionally among the guests at various social functions here, could not stand the $35 boom box we had been using for the past several months. And when he sets out to fix a problem, you can be pretty sure the situation will be fixed. He called it a "community upgrade" explaining that no self respecting party host can be without a good sound system - and if the host is too lazy to fix the situation, then the community has to step in. So we opened a few bottles and spent the afternoon testing the limits of our old JBL bookshelf speakers which actually sound amazing when you drive them with a Classe Audio Seventy amp and Audio Thirty preamp. It's like getting a whole new music collection. High fidelity. I hope the neighbors are as enthusiastic.
Then we took a short cruise around the city. Great day for a drive. Up the FDR and over the 59th street bridge. Then down to the waterfront in Queens where there is a nice new park looking back towards Manhattan. Spectacular at sunset. Mr. X seemed to be conducting some sort of business deal on my cell phone as MB and I looked on in awe at the huge stripped bass someone had just pulled from the east river. "Can you eat that?" I asked, and MB just shrugged her shoulders like "Well, I guess you can..."
Then we blasted back into the city for a meal at GSI, where thanks to the Wheel they seem to think I am some kind of wine importer. I don't straighten them out. Perhaps when they notice that we drink all our wine and forgo the spit bucket they helpfully provide they will figure it out. We met Sarah and her parents who are in town from Montana. Always nice to see them. The spicy squid with celery almost blew my head off. A fine day all around.
Hmmm. I lost a post towards the bottom of the page. Well, I didn't lose it, but it was retired into the archive prematurely. It's back now. That sort of weirdness is very depressing, because it can be quite time consuming to track it down.
If you've ever wondered exactly how the bad guys go about breaking into computers, here's an interesting overview of methodologies.
fascinating New Yorker article on Ultima Online, a massively multi-player online role-playing game.
"Finally, last year, U.O. gave up on the notion of self-policing. Britannia these days exists in two parallel versions, or 'facets'—Felucca, where killing other players is O.K., and Trammel, where, except under very limited circumstances, it is not. Four-fifths of all players choose Trammel."And I'd still like some confirmation of these numbres, but apparently the video game industry is worth more than hollywood. (via robotwisdom)
Who says engineers can't write? This is from the official IETF Internet-Draft entitled Interplanetary Internet (IPN): Architectural Definition
(via /.)Desiderata of Interplanetary Internetworking
Go thoughtfully in the knowledge that all interplanetary communication derives from the modulation of radiated energy, and sometimes a planet will be between the source and the destination. Therefore rely not on end-to-end connectivity at any time, for the universe does not work that way.
Neither rely on ample bandwidth, for power is scarce out there and the bit error rates are high. Know too that signal strength drops off by the square of the distance, and there is a lot of distance.
Consider the preciousness of interplanetary communication links, and restrict access to them with all your heart. Protect also the confidentiality of application data or risk losing your customers.
Remember always that launch mass costs money. Think not, then, that you may require all the universe to adopt at once the newest technologies. Be backward compatible.
Never confuse patience with inaction. By waiting for acknowledgement to one message before sending the next, you squander tracking pass time that will never come to you again in this life. Send as much as you can, as early as you can, and meanwhile confidently await responses for as long as they may take to find their way to you.
Therefore be at peace with physics, and expect not to manage the network in closed control loops -- neither in the limiting of congestion nor in the negotiation of connection parameters nor even in on-demand access to transmission bands. Each node must make its own operating choices in its own understanding, for all the others are too far away to ask. Truly the solar system is a large place and each one of us is on his or her own. Deal with it.
S. Burleigh
Stating the Obvious gets an interesting new re-architecting. There's a really nice idea in there.
Hyperspace structures. Small (< 500K) mpeg's of a rotating hypercube and hypertorus.
Looks like booknotes is back from (short) hiatus. I found this link to punk rock and the two-way web. Nothing earth shattering, but interesting since I always think about the web in terms of deadheads.
Introduction to the Kaycee hoax. The metafilter thread where the debunking took place. Strange stuff. Metafilter itself was taken down yesterday (although maybe before, I hadn't looked in a few days) with a note that included references to this whole thing. Now it is back up. Not sure what any of this means, but it is the blog topic du jour.
Months ahead of schedule (well, ahead of the pushed back schedule) Apple begins shipping OSX preinstalled on all computers as of today.
Lots of good stuff here, like this explanation of why Godel's Theorem doesn't "prove" that AI is impossible.
Singularity links.
I'm developing a Sunday night dinner and Soprano's routine. I saw the first six episodes of this show on video, and starting last week I am now watching the show weekly. The violence can be a little shocking (to me at least) but apart from those scattered scenes the characters are very likable. This feels almost manipulative, but I think they (writers? actors?) pull it off.
Anyway, for me, the routine is the really great part. Maybe it's some phase I'm going through, but it seems like the weeks (months, years) can really slip by quickly. I feel a certain amount of pressure towards scheduling lest I get so busy that I forget to do anything (cue Pink Floyd DSotM...) I guess these routines are like self perpetuating schedules: once you set them up they just sort of run, filling in the time.
In a dream last night the Wheel and I were staying in some big house (with a big group of people and a powerful matriarch) in Amsterdam and I knew I had to get back to the States, but MB wasn't there, and the Wheel was staying on, and I just couldn't deal with getting the tickets and making my way to the airport by myself. The whole process of making the arrangements was just too complex. Everything was strange and foreign. Do you ever get that feeling in dreams where you are trying to move, but it's like somebody cranked up the gravity, or the air has been changed into a thick viscous goo? You try, but nothing gets done. You can't make any headway. Luckily, in the end, I just had to wake up in order to be home.
I guess it's pretty much the best thing in the world to wake up next to someone you love. That's the best routine in my life. The loop that drives everything else. The constancy. Like a heartbeat. On a slightly different level, my regular thursday night outings have become very important for me as well. Marking the weeks, since the weekdays and weekends all blend together. And now Sundays (at least two in a row, we'll see how that develops) are added in. Another beat driving the score. I know over the long term these arrangements come and go, or at least re-arrange, but right now everything has drifted into a nice tight formation. Lots of repetition, but with the beats falling on the things I like the most. That's some kind of blessing.
You're not waiting for a point, are you? I don't have one. Except tonight I'm going to a friends house for dinner and the Soprano's, I'm not stuck in Amsterdam somewhere on the way to the airport, and even though my life is busy these days, I guess it's the absolute best kind of busy. The kind that keeps bringing you and your friends back together.
Time for some work now. Putting a new machine on the network in the office and starting in on the DSL. This kind of stuff is the other routine, and really it's not too bad either. Until something goes wrong and there's a driver conflict, or the network goes haywire, or the dog gods of Sirius decide that packets are going to mysteriously disappear at the firewall today. And even then it's not so bad. Only a few more hours until the Soprano's.
Ended up in Brooklyn last night at Pete's Candy Store, a nice little bar with a beautiful performance space in the back. Saw a one act play, and a reading of another longer play - both by Nora Breen. Great stuff. Ignoring the potential dangers of classing up the place too much, Tom and I are on the mission of bringing her to the site.
Lots of familiar faces in the crowd. Practically a class reunion from the old Nation coffee shop on avenue A. If it wasn't for that damn monkey man I'd probably venture across the river more often.
Stand together - the free software answer to the Mundie (microsoft) attack. Just looking at the list of signers I have to wonder if the victory isn't already clear. The obviously Stallman-esque wording of the document ("GNU/linux system", plus the repeated use of "free software" instead of the watered down - although not necessarily worse - "open source") represents an amazing case of what the title suggests - standing together. Stallman's ideas really do represent a huge shift in thinking, and under anything but the most extreme conditions I think cooler, more consession oriented voices would win out. But if microsoft continues to polarize the atmosphere I wonder if something a little more radical might be able to get up some steam. I think the GPL is pretty radical. It's the monkey wrench.
News from the left: liberal arts mafia.
Supposedly, DSL will be turned on in the office tomorrow. We'll see about that.
Telco: Vegas is hack proof
Hacker: "Vegas was easy"
And so IT goes. (via /.)
What are talkers?
Lots of interesting thoughts on, well, the future of the book.
Can you eat too many macadamia nuts? Where's the line?
From Harold Cohen's website:
"Harold Cohen, former director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), was anWired has a story on Aaron which has recently got the attention of Ray Kurzweil who has backed a free downloadable Aaron screen saver. It only runs on Windows. I'd be curious if anyone checks it out. (via /. and in an unrelated story the screensaver site is completely unreachable at the moment.)
English painter with an established international reputation when he came to UCSD in 1968 for a
one-year Visiting Professorship. His first experience with computing followed almost immediately, and he
never returned to London. Cohen is the author of the celebrated AARON program, an ongoing research
effort in autonomous machine (art making) intelligence which began when he was a visiting scholar at
Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1973."
I'll start with the punch line: becasue he can.
A minute-by-minute account of a glamorous day in the life of The Wine Importer!
I don't think it's clear to many business people yet, but this is the future of business websites. We're already seeing the beginning of this trend in the fact that Madison Ave. is waking up to the new "sophisticated consumer." This new consumer is hip to the idea that businesses generally don't care about you, and everyone is just out to make money. Pitching someone who holds these jaded beliefs if very difficult. The advertisers are trying to fight this (the Sprite campaigns spring to mind) by being up front about the greed, and thereby making it less of a big deal (and also forging a little bond between the hip jaded consumer who knows it's all crap, and the hip company who will admit that yes, it's all crap.)
Anyway, this advertising ploy isn't going to work for too long. It just breeds even more jaded consumers in a sort of meta-jaded escalating spiral. The real answer is for businesses to actually start giving a crap about something other than money. You can care about that too, of course, but my point is that we (jaded consumers) just want to know that there is a real human being in there, and not just some roboticized money making buerocracy. We don't necessarily want to know that you are nice, or trying to save the world, or anything like that which we probably won't believe anyway. We just want to know that you are human. We want to know that you eat oatmeal in the morning, and that you get bugged by telemarketers, and that you too are perplexed by a law mandating the percentage of floor area that must be covered by carpets in your apartment. This makes us feel very comfortable. "Hey, there's really someone in there!"
Anyway, that's what I think. I don't know how much he would agree with that, or whether he just does it because he's one of those people who needs to talk a lot, but that's sort of my point. Either way is O.K. Just let it all out.
You all called your mothers, right?
The links to some old stuff that used to be on secondary pages (mostly various pictures) are now broken. I'll be fixing them over the next few days. I doubt this is going to put anyone out, but sorry if you were looking for something. 99% of the links are fine (all the links to external sites.)
Well, without any warning I've started to switch over the system. Probably you've noticed some weirdness if you've been on in the last hour. Should start stabilizing in another hour or so. Email me with problems as you see them. Thanks.
Frontier on MacOS X. Cool.
Welcome to the new page. Sure it basically looks the same as the old page, but it's new underneath. I was looking back over the archives and I noticed that it was exactly one year ago today that I started in with the old system. There was stuff going all the way back to the summer of '99 that was done through blogger, but thankfully those posts are no longer on line. I'm so close to putting this new system into place that I figured I might as well redirect to my page on the new system today. The /new will be dropped from the URL when I do the official switch over. Possibly as early as tomorrow.
The new post counters will be messed up until then for my page.
Welcome to the third planet Mason Phillip Polaner.
The entire text of Buckminster Fuller's synergetics is online.
testing
123
It's my sisters birthday today. Happy birthday Elisabeth!
Here's a very interesting collection of flying saucer images found in various historical artworks.
I recently loaned a Paul Laffoley book to a friend, and this has apparently turned out to be quite a big deal. Her enthusiasm has caused me to take another look, and while this probably comes as no surprise, I am way into this guy. Anyway, I dug back through my amazingly unlabeled video tape archive, and eventually found the tape I shot of his speech at the disnifo.con conference (last fall?) He is completely over the top, and it's funny to hear myself laughing nervously at some of his more unbelievable claims, but I'm very impressed that he appears to actually be trying to say something. As soon as I get my video set up back on line I'll make a little mpeg of this talk (or at least an mp3, it's pretty long.)
Parlez-vous jabber? This sounds like a very good thing for a protocol I am really routing for. Tres bien.
One of my favorite sci-fi devices that might actually be realized in my life is the space elevator. I've talked about this before, but now apparently we're a step closer. Cool.
Well, I have the new system up and running at datamantic.com. Plans are fairly fluid at the moment but I guess the idea is that datamantic is where I can quickly make people pages so they can try out the system while I try to convince them that they need their own dedicated server running this software. I'm trying to make sure there is a clear split between any potential business side of things, and the rigorously uncommercial site we have here. One page is already up and he seems pleased so far. More to come. And of course, we will get this site switched over very soon, as there are more people to add here as well, plus I know some of you (steve,frank) are waiting on me. Soon.
Mozilla 0.9 has been released. I'll let you know later if I get it working. The roadmap now has May 23 as a freeze for 0.91, and then any release after that has at least a chance of being crowned 1.0 (the real thing.) Anyway, sometime this summer. No sense rushing now that so many have given up hope. Better to get it right.
For no apparent reason (or maybe because I've told a few people about this site and there's nothing too interesting on this page,) here are some of my favorite posts elsewhere on the site: here, here, here, here (700K,) and here. Of course there are lots more, but that's a little taste of what's going on.
Blast from the past. My first ever excursion into the online world happened from my basement while in junior high school. I would dial into the Top Cat BBS with my 300 baud modem equiped IBM PCjr. Those were the days! Anyway, some nut has compiled an abolutely huge list (that's a /. induced mirror, the permanent site is here) of all these old (pre-internet) bulletin board systems. Over 77,000 listings. Western Massachusetts, where I lived, has over 200 entries. And low and behold, the tiny little Top Cat BBS is listed about half way down the page. Apparently it ran until 1991. When I was on I think there were only 4 or 5 members. Maybe it got larger later. Not very interesting to anyone else, but this sure took me back to how it all began. Thanks to my Mom for originally hooking me up.
Here's a nice quick overview of some different google search features.
We took the weekend off and spent some great time out on Long Island. Our friends in Sayville have a very nice house on a well tended little patch of paradise. I got to work for a few hours (well, 20 minutes at least) in the garden. This sort of work is so foreign to me that it is really fun. Probably the level of fun is tied somehow to the 20 minute part. Anyway, a little break away from the computer was good for the head. The air is so different out there. Very clean. I'd probably go into shock if I got to some place where the air really is clean.
Still a few little problems brewing in the new system, but I think all the big stuff is hammered out. Not sure how to go about making the change over. I guess I'm not in a real big hury. Bought a new domain and I think maybe I'll put that up first. My other project (the one for someone else) is about to go live as well. Should be a busy week as usual. Hope I can stay on top of the wave.
Well, this stuff is almost boring at this point; if only it weren't so important. Last week Microsoft sent another shot the open source way through a speech given by VP Craig Mundie, claiming once again that Microsoft owning everything is somehow better for everyone than having lots of competition. Huh? Anyway, I don't recommend the Mundie speech unless you're looking for examples of very poor reasoning. It's the same kind of logic that the RIAA, and the MPAA, and every other group that profits from selling the creative works of others tries to make: strong intellectual property rights are fundamental to creative output. It's the old, "nobody would make any music if they weren't going to get paid" argument, which is so patently false I wonder how some of these people can actually make it with a straight face. Ever heard of history? How about 10,000+ years of cultural development that had nothing to do with strong intellectual property rights. How about the very foundation of western science with its reliance on sharing of information? (peer review anyone?) We're all richer by sharing, and anyone arguing anything else is trying to...
Oh forget it. Read the response to Mundie from Linus "benedict" Torvalds himself:
"I'd rather listen to Newton than to Mundie. He may have been dead for almost three hundred years, but despite that he stinks up the room less."
Just got back in touch with an old friend from out west. She's just like I remember her. So sweet. It's nice when the past comes around again.
Potlatch - the gift economy.
"Right now we're just trying to describe an economic system in which creators don't have to sell their chldren to survive. Because of the nature and the popularity of P2P 'viral distribution' networks, we don't think that payment for cultural products can be enforced - hence the emphasis on gifts and voluntary payments. We do think that payment, or reciprocity, can be facillitated and encouraged in various ways. To this end we hope to introduce an intuitive, reliable, and reasonably secure peer-to-peer payment system. Design goals: easy to set up; easy to use; impossible to control."
Today I am 2 to the 5th years old.
Another good "What's a blog?" type story. There's been a couple good ones lately.
It's an Apple event day, which as hard as I try not to care, still gets me a little curious. I never thought much of the iBook, but the rumors about the new one which might be announced later today have got me very interested. Just how small can you make a laptop and still have it be usable? Apple had an old machine (years ago) called the 2400 which for many long time fans is the dream machine (although I had a Duo 210 that I thought had an even better form factor.) Anyway, this new iBook might finally fill the "small is better" longing. Super slim VAIO competitor, with powerbook-like titanium enclosure, 1024 x 768 12 inch screen, AND built in CD/DVD - starting at $999? Now, if they can just get those OS X updates out that would be a serious portable development tool. We'll see.
Well, I have a lot of work to do on the piece I posted yesterday. Now I'm disagreeing with - if not everything I said - at least the way I said it. I don't think I put the emphasis in the right place. I hope to have some major revisions to that document up by late today.
Happy May Day.