...more recent posts
Sorry, no time for updates today. Dividing my time between the kitchen and the computer. One of the fabled sites I keep saying I am working on is actually about to go live. Plus the guests from Tucson are on the way.
Note to appleinsider: You use this word 'soon' but I do not think it means what you think it means.
Sunny afternoon on Long Island. MB's famous fried fish sandwiches.
David Weinberger has posted some pieces of a new book (which he is writing on line, so these are just early public drafts.) Interesting reading about the web. But does he really need to go to the formality of actually writing the book now?
Now playing - Aretha Franklin: Soul '69
Good stuff.
Nobody asked, but here's the personal update from yesterday. Nothing too interesting here. You've been warned:
Long day yesterday. My legs are killing me. Left here in the morning with no particular direction. Ended up on lower fifth avenue where I was reminded that it was Gay Pride day. Walked up the length of 5th (to the park) as all the floats were coming down past me. Very colorful. Of course I didn't have my camera.
The sidewalks were packed with people watching. Well, more than watching really. Dancing. Prancing. Shouting. Yelling. Everybody had some sort of camera. Lots of pictures. Lots of posing. And I kept hearing the same exchange: "...have a good parade!" This sounded just like what I remember from outside of grateful dead shows where people always parted with "...have a good show!" You have to say it as if you're not expecting the person to just watch. The spectators are the show. Everybody is performing. Everybody is on. Very nice. And seeing 280 pound bald headed men with moustaches twirling down fifth avenue in blue tutus is something probably everybody should see at some point.
[Update 6/26: rion.nu didn't forget her camera]
Eventually I cleared the crowd and made my way into the park. I had my eye open for Mr. Wilson, it being a nice day, and a weekend. But I wasn't really scouting for him as I have done a few times before. That's a different sort of walking. Faster. Head up and constantly scanning the horizon. You have to cover a lot of ground if you hope to find someone randomly. But yesterday I was just walking around. Real slow. Up and around the reservoir. I found a nice bench up on the east side and just sat for half an hour. Not even really thinking. My brain needed a rest.
Then off again back down fifth. Over two hundred blocks. As I said, my legs are hurting. Made it home in time for a quick shower and then off to the opening game of the Staten Island Yankees. They have a beautiful new ballpark at St. George, which is right where the Staten Island Ferry lands. And although I find it hard to believe myself, this was my first trip on the ferry. Amazing views of NYC. Again, I didn't bring my camera. I sat the whole way thinking how stupid I was as the great pre dusk light lit the clouds over my favorite view of the city. Really spectacular.
The park is nice. MB and H. did some graphics work for them, so I finally saw these big banners they made in their full glory. Must be nice to see your work so large. And so visible. They really did a good job. I have to think this is one of the nicest minor league parks. You sit in the stands looking out over the field, and then the water beyond, and then Wall Street rising in the distance. Very nice. This is single A ball, but the play was better than I had imagined. And it's actually sort of nice to see something short of major league quality. You get a much better sense of just how hard the game is. They missed turning some double plays that any big league team would have made look easy. But they weren't sloppy, it's just hard to turn it at second unless everything works out perfect. And it only rarely works out perfect for these guys. Much more fun than I thought.
After the game (which the Yanks won, by the way, 2-1) there were some fireworks from two barges just over the outfield fence in the harbor. Then we were back on the ferry (literally right there) and home again. We could see other larger fire works from the Gay Pride Day finale as we were crossing back to Manhattan. Everything seemed pretty festive.
Quick bite at Paladar, and home to bed. Must remember to do some stretching before any future adventures. And I guess remembering the camera would be nice too. If only I could grab stills from my optic nerve...
I can't wait to hear the story. Slashdot has been down for a couple of days. Unbelievable. My traceroutes get into exodus (where the servers are colocated) but then time out. I wonder if it's hard to bring a box back up when tons of people are pinging your site every second to see if you've managed to bring the box back up?
On the verge of AI? Cyc "is powered by an immense multi-contextual knowledge base and an efficient inference engine. The knowledge base is built upon a core of over 1,000,000 hand-entered assertions (or "rules") designed to capture a large portion of what we normally consider consensus knowledge about the world."
"HAL killed the ['2001'] crew because it had been told not to lie to them, but also to lie to them about the mission," [Douglas B. Lenat] observes. "No one ever told HAL that killing is worse than lying. But we've told Cyc."I hope they mentioned the thing about opening the pod bay doors too. (Amazingly, the LA Times doesn't even link to the Cycorp site.)
Douglas Hofstadter (of Godel Escher Bach fame) takes the other side of the debate: "I don't believe in the idea that intelligence is founded upon having vast amounts of facts about the world." I can see both sides. I don't really have a strong intuition about who's right, but this is clearly cool stuff.
Someday I'm going to collect all the links to articles of the "what's a weblog?" variety in one place. Someday. Real soon now. Anyway, here's another.
If you're interested in music on the internet you should know about Ogg Vorbis. Here's the faq.
I've been trying to put together a longer piece to say something about all these "free" and "open" software and file formats I like to push. It's come to my attention that maybe I've never explained it too well. This is turning out to be a difficult thing to write, but maybe just the small version will be enough to get started:
The internet might seem like a "place" (albeit virtual) right now, but I think that soon, as things progress, this idea will disappear. We're going to all live on the internet, except by then it won't seem like some other place. It will just seem like the world. It will be the world. What had previously been this new thing the internet will be micro miniaturized, wireless, and completely built in. It will be so pervasive and constant that it won't even seem like anything. So the fights over "free software" and "open source" aren't about making a "new economy" or somehow challenging capitalism. It's way beyond that. It's about securing fundamental rights for human beings in the new world. We're talking, in the end, over who is going to control the wiring of your brain.
What if a for profit corporation owned oxygen? Or multiplication? Or the color blue? This wouldn't make any sense.
Exactly. To return to Ogg, if I can't stream MP3s from my website without paying someone (Fraunhofer in this case) then unless I have enough money I won't be able to have a voice in the world (audio streams aren't only for songs remember, that's just an early popular application.) So fine, we won't use MP3. We'll use Ogg. It's important for there to be free audio codecs, and not just so that we can get all our music for free, thumb our noses at the RIAA, etc.... It's to protect the notion that all people, regardless of economic position, should be able to have a voice that can be heard. In today's world this is protected in some limited way by the inability of a company to patent the biological system that humans use to produce sound. But in the new world we won't always be using biological systems. We'll be using technological systems that companies are having great success in patenting and keeping secret and charging for and locking you into....
But as I think ogg demonstrates, you can't keep this sort of cat inside the bag. Someone will just design around you.
Don't miss: Sarah Macfadden one of a kind jewelry show.
Paul Ford writes some good stuff. From the heart. I don't know him, but I feel like I do. I wish him well. (Make sure you click through to Bridge and River Consecration too.)
I haven't done a long drive in quite some time. Probably yesterday was not the best day to have broken my streak.
I'm off to Boston for the night. Back tomorrow. My phone should work if you need me.
It's the 15th of the month, so that means a new crypto-gram from computer security big boss man Bruce Schneier. The first item is about honeypots, which are network connected computers set up to monitor crackers "in the wild." One such installation is called Honeynet, and is described this way:
The Honeynet Project was initiated to shine a light into this darkness. This team of researchers has built an entire computerWhat did they find out? Well...
network and completely wired it with sensors. Then it put the network up on the Internet, giving it a suitably enticing name and content, and recorded what happened.
A random computer on the Internet is scanned dozens of times a day. The life expectancy of a default installation of Red Hat 6.2 server, or the time before someone successfully hacks it, is less than 72 hours. A common home user setup, with Windows 98 and file sharing enabled, was hacked five times in four days. Systems are subjected to NetBIOS scans an average of 17 times a day. And the fastest time for a server being hacked: 15 minutes after plugging it into the network.
Morning meditation: Fibonacci grid.
I usually don't link to java applets, but this one's pretty cool: visual thesaurus. Pretty slow on my machine, but Mac java support is poor, so you may have better results.
Datasynapse just got $15 million in new financing. Nice going guys.
photo series of the basement office construction.
Photos are back.
Wow. This seems reasonable given the current economic situation, but I hadn't seen it in writing (although this is just a note, not an official message.) Anyway, looks like Userland isn't going to be offering free Manilla sites forever. Apparently they've alread turned off the ability to create any new free sites.
I've been trying to think of a way to organize photos on the site. This started in an effort to support Alex's work, but as always I want to generalize anything I build so that it will work for a variety of people in a variety of situations. This is efficient, in one way, but also difficult. As the scope of a tool increases, it's utility often decreases. Anyway, I had been trying to think this problem out (walking the line between a general enough solution so I can reuse it, and a specific, and simple, enough one so that it is really useful) and hadn't been having much luck. Then the other day I started putting up some photos, and as usual, once I started to get some real experience with the problem (instead of just thinking about it) the answer was clear immediately. What I want is a way to make closely linked series of pictures. Something like a slide show, where each frame is a new page. Traditionally the pages would have forward and back buttons to either advance or retreat through the series. (This is what Alex does a lot for the picture pages accompanying Arboretum.) I was going to build a whole new system to deal with this, but of course now I see that the archive system for these pages is exactly what I want. If the window for display on the page is set to 1 post (instead of several,) and the '...more recent posts' and 'older posts...' links have their wording changed (to '...previous' and 'next...', say) then that is exactly what I want. To make a slide show like series, just post all the pictures to one page, and then crank the window down to 1. Easy. I'll get this finished up right away.
Anyway, I'm mentioning this mostly to help me remember the lesson. I try to do this anyway, but often I forget. You can't just think about a problem. You have to really get involved with it. And luckily this is often easier than just trying to think about it. Jump in and swim around - even if you don't know how to swim - and the answers will come fast.
So I'm taking down the awkwardly architected photo pages here, and they'll reappear in the new style soon. I think this will be a good solution.
Friends of Jezebel's Mirror has been much imporved on the server side and relaunched as the mirror project. Very nice. If I were smarter I'd try to say something about why this is so cool. Just hit random for a while and you'll see.
Started to add some of my links. Now that I'm often working on different machines I need to have these on line.
This whole microsoft smart tags thing is a little overblown. It might be another reason not to use Internet Explorer (not that you have much option at this point) but it's clearly within Microsoft's rights to do this. Once you put something on the web you aren't really in control of it any more. Anybody should be free to write any sort of software to "browse" web pages in any manner the software author sees fit. This would include adding, subtracting, or just plain rearranging content. If you're against smart tags are you also against something like netomat (or junkbuster for that matter?) I don't see how to support one without supporting the other.
[Just to be clear: I think this is an incredibly stupid, almost offensive feature, and I would never use it. Plus I'll encourage others - probably through a childish sort of mocking - not to use Microsofts products as well. Still, they should be able to do it if they want.]
Looks like automatic media is gone due to "an inability to secure additional financing." Rest in peace: plastic, suck, feed (and salon?) Too bad. I'll miss them. But I'm not really surprised.
John Robb has started a weblog on the singularity. It starts with the Kurzweil link I had a week or so ago (which didn't get the best reviews) but goes on from there in at least a more personal way (whereas the Kurzweil site does seem a bit self promoting in an obviously money-making way.) In any case today he is discussing A.I. vs. I.A. ("Individual Augmentation"). Not really enough stuff yet to judge, but looks promising. (via Hack the Planet)
Yes, this project is taking forever. If you look closely at the top picture you can see that the framework for the facade is in, and I think the facade itself will be up in the next few days. Then the plywood can come down and it will look relatively spiffy from the outside. As is obvious from the shot below that, the inside still needs a lot of work. But the ethernet is all strung (pic 3) so everything I care about is ready to go. I keep trying to get them to just move in, but they want it to look good, or something. Graphic designers; what can you do?
DSL is awesome. Downloaded limewire which is a great front end for the gnutella network (a decentralized file sharing network - like Napster, but without the central entity for the RIAA to sue,) and am presently listening to some tracks off the new Lucinda Williams album. We're going to see her tonight at Roseland. Good stuff.
Pictures of the doomed NASA X-43A experimental aircraft.
Random message board quote of the day:
"Now what? How do I install libmd? The directions at GNU-DarwinAin't that the way?
seem to be for people who know what they're doing."
Somebody should make a t-shirt that says: gnurd.
Must get away from computer. Goodnight.
John Udell, who had a nice column I pointed to last week about storytelling and weblogs, has another nice one (more technical) about the future of the file system. Plus, elsewhere, David McCusker replies to a request for his thoughts on the subject.
Linus Torvalds is going to be on NPR's Fresh Air tonight at 7:00 pm EDT (although Fresh Air airs at different times in different cities.) Or you can listen to the interview on line if you are part of the dark side, err, I mean if you have RealPlayer installed. (via /.)
Well, we finally got the DSL in the office. Posting this over a (supposedly) 1.5 Mb/sec. connection. Seems pretty snappy. I just have it etherneted into one machine right now. Still have to get it connected up to the network so we can all share it. I've got a bad feeling that the way Verizon has set this up is going to make things a little difficult.
Clear background piece (that link will expire) on the free software / open source vs. Microsoft squirmishes that have been going on lately. I love this Eban Moglen quote:
"Microsoft, which used to say all theYeah, O.K., that's maybe a little overblown. But how much? Think globally. Think about developing nations. Think about China. Think about Africa. In ten years which operating system is going to be globally dominant? Let's see: one that costs more than people in many countries make in a month, or a free one? Actually, Moglen's comment may not be overblown at all.
time that the software business was ruthlessly competitive, is now matched against a competitor whose model of production and distribution is so much better that Microsoft stands no chance of
prevailing in the long run. They're simply trying to scare people out of dealing with a competitor they can't buy, can't intimidate and can't stop."
Tom pointed out that people without accounts here have been unable to post comments. This was a bug. It is now fixed. Sorry about that if it seemed unhospitable.
Frank introduces Wood S. Lot to Laura Riding Jackson.
Ah, mother American night,
here comes the light...
Frighteningly detailed account of a denial of service attack. Great techno cyber detective sort of thing.
Special extra thanks to Mike who is working almost all day today, but still managing to cook us a meal tonight as his contribution to the big party. Probably this is so far beyond the call of duty as to be unfair. Still I've done nothing to stop it, and probably a little to encourage things along. Make sure you lay the thanks on heavy tonight if you're here for dinner.
Early crew in the 3:00 - 4:00 range. Mid crew in the 6:00 - 7:00 range (some food here.) Official party is 8:30 (more food here - around 9:00.) Feel free to decide to which crew you belong.
Tomorrow night is the big party and I haven't done one thing yet. I don't even have a sense of who is coming. Seems like I didn't invite very many people. Maybe it will just be a modest affair. Hopefully it will all come together at the last minute.
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.