...more recent posts
From metafilter comes my (probably) last post of the year.
Imagine that the history of the universe is compressed into one year—with the big bang occurring in the first seconds of New Year’s Day, and all our known history occurring in the final seconds before midnight on December 31. Using this scale of time, each month would equal a little over a billion years. Here’s a closer look at when important events would occur when we imagine the universe in one year.The rest of the months are condensed on the linked page, but here's the expanded December calendar for our thought experiment year:
I love that the final 10 second New Year's countdown brings us from the building of the pyramids all the way to the present. At this pace we should have the galaxy populated by the end of New Year's Day. Let's get to work.
Apparently I'm the only person in the world who likes this holiday. Fine. So be it. I know you'll be celebrating anyway, so aren't your protestations a bit hollow? "I just hate staying up late into the night with friends drinking champagne." Huh?
My friends this is it. This is the great major holiday. Unencumbered by religious significance or family duty. The one where alcohol, rightly, takes precedent over the large dead animal featured on the lesser holiday tables, over trinkets of commerce exchanged to and fro. For truely, who needs such foodstuff? Who needs material gifts? I tell you, good friends and fine bubbles are all that are required for life. For the good life. Drink deep. Kiss long. Float up into the heavens. This is what ever happens, yet our earthly bodies do not always get to partake. Don't scorn your chance. That decision might speak of regret.
But what do I know? As Frank says, I'm just a high class wino, and of course the first part is debatable. Or just wrong. Still, we'll be drinking the good stuff. The new restaurant isn't quite ready yet, so we'll be at AKA from 8:30 on. Stop by if you're on the gLower East Side. Everybody is welcome. Leave the scowl at home.
The Guardian is running an article on the seven wonders of the web. They are, according to the article: Google, Yahoo, Project Gutenburg, Multimap, Ebay, Amazon, and Blogger. The only one I hadn't heard of is Multimap. At first glance it looks pretty useful. My own list would probably tend more towards: Google, Google Images, Google Groups, and uh.... Google, Google, Google, and Google. God I hope they are profitable. I think I'd even send them money if they asked. As Jason Kottke famously opined: "Google is the default command-line interface to the Web."
Put my mother on the train back to Boston this morning. We had a full couple of days. Alex took us on a walk through Central Park one day. We ended up at the MET which is very enjoyable with a knowledgable guide. Yesterday we walked down to the site. Absolutely crammed with people at Broadway and Fulton. The debris removal is far enough along now that you really can't see anything. If you're not familiar enough with the area to detect the presence of a giant absence then the view is not too powerful. Looked like they are constructing a wooden ramp to a viewing platform at that location. When completed (next few days is my guess) it will provide a good look at the remaining destruction. Not sure if this is helpful or not, but clearly people want to see. I think it's a bit more than gawking, but surely there is some of that.
We stopped in to see the lobby of my favorite NYC building, the Woolworth building, but were unceremoniously turned away. "It's a federal building now, you'll have to leave immediately." What! When did this happen? The lobby is one of the great architectural gems of the city. Built by Cass Gilbert in 1913, this 792 foot tall building was the tallest in the world from it's completion until 1930 when the Chrysler building went to 1046 feet, followed one year later by the Empire State which held the record all the way until the WTC passed it in 1972. The Empire State is 1250 feet tall and the World Trade had stood at a mighty 1368. That's on the way to being twice as tall as the Woolworth which is now, again, one of the tallest structures in lower Manhattan. In other words, those things were frickin' huge. Out of scale huge. Massive.
Many New Yorkers (and others) never liked the WTC. From an architectural standpoint they were decried as horribly ugly boxes blighting the Manhattan skyline. I always liked them, but maybe because I don't remember a time without them. I mean not counting the past few months of course. I think I've mentioned before that from my desk I have a great view of lower Manhattan. It's certainly less impressive now, but some of the smaller giant buildings - most notably the Woolworth - are now returned to their place at center stage. Hopefully the closing is some sort of over reaction and the Woolworth will be reopened to visitors. At least the lobby. I'll have to look into this claim that it is a federal building. I can't believe that. Perhaps it has been designated as some sort of landmark, and thus under federal protection in this time of crisis, but I don't think the feds bought it. I'll report back if I find out more.
Here's an interesting aerial shot of the top of the Woolworth poking through some low lying clouds.
O.K., I didn't say I wasn't going to post at all. Here's a great Robert Cringely on building his own supercomputer for $6000.
Wrapped up in the end of the year. My mother is visiting for a few days. Making the restaurant rounds. I'm trying to keep up the flow, but the pickings will be slim here until after the first. Hoping to return with strength in 2002.
I took the advice of Craig at booknotes and picked up a copy of the Rhino Records Christmas compilation Blue Yule. Great solution if you have to play some holiday music but can't stand the usual fare.
Saw Moulin Rouge last night on DVD. About a third of the way through I was thinking it was the best movie I had ever seen. Of course I'm prone to hyperbolic thinking in the moment. By two thirds through I thought it was running a little long. By the end I was completely bored. Visually stunning. Very clever use of songs. I just wish there had been a little more to the plot.
OK, now I'm even more happy. My least favorite thing about the OSX desktop is the look of finder (file system) windows. Each one has a toolbar across the top with helpful one click navigational icons that point to often used system resources. That's nice. But the icons are ugly. Or worse. That heart for favorites? Come on. And the faux 'A' with the paintbrush and pencil and ruler for 'Applications' is not much better. These images alone would have kept my graphic design friends from switching. Here's a detail from a screenshot.
But of course it's all customizable. I knew it would be, but I wasn't looking in the right place. And not only is it customizable, but you can get rid of the icons all together in favor of just text. Right on. As they say: a picture is worth a thousand words, unless it's a picture of a word. I almost always find this true. 'Home' is plenty descriptive enough (it will take me to my home directory.) I don't need a little cartoon rendering of a house. Thanks.
Anyway, you can change it all to text through 'Customize toolbar...' in the view menu (while in the finder with a finder window open.) Plus you can select what links you want in the toolbar. Here's the same detail of the toolbar after customization. And here's a blurry shot of the whole desktop. I keep the dock on the right, set to not hide, with no magnification, and no genie effect. I might put it at the bottom if I had a bigger monitor. Magnification looks sort of cool (the icons magnify as you mouse over them) but it makes the trash a moving target. Similarly, the genie effect looks cool, but that wears off pretty quick. It still takes some getting used to if you are an old hand at classic Mac OS, but I think you can change it enough to satisfy almost anyone. The biggest thing missing if you're coming from an older Mac OS is springloaded folders, and they are set to return in 10.2.
An amazing security hole found in Windows XP. Arguably the largest security hole in an OS ever. Merely connecting to the internet puts your entire computer and all its contents at risk. But I no longer see the point in mentioning these stories. It really isn't news. Now if Microsoft ever made a secure product - that might be news. But until that happens I'm not going to mention these reports any more.
OSX 10.1.2 is out. Mozilla 0.9.7 is out.
I've noticed (at least in 10.1.1, we'll see if .2 fixes it) that when I try to connect to other machines on the appletalk LAN in the office, 10.1.1 won't see any machines that are asleep! That's not very convenient. In 9.x (and 8.x) you could hear all the machines wake up automatically when you look for available machines in the chooser. This isn't so bad for me since all the machines are physically close. I can just walk over and wake up the desired machine from its keyboard, but still...
The second part to Lawrence Lessig's slashdot interview has been posted (the first part was the questions, these are Lessig's answers.) If you don't know Lawrence Lessig is a Stanford University law professor much embroiled in the great copyright debates. Influential - albeit on the losing side - in the Napster case, the DeCSS DVD decoding case, and the anti-trust case against Microsoft. Probably the foremost legal thinker on the diverse matters of law being turned inside out by the digital age.
Bill posts the scoop on the fabled Christmas tree deep inside the PATH train tunnel under the hudson river between NYC and NJ.
My plan was to toil in relative obscurity here, and for the most part that has really worked out for me. I know some of my friends here read this page. And I think maybe my Mom and Sister do sometimes too. Otherwise things are pretty quiet around here visitor wise.
But then a few weeks ago someone linked to me from their page. It didn't produce a tidal wave of hits, but I have a feeling the steady trickle coming my way is of the highest quality. Too high most likely. And there's the problem. While I couldn't be more pleased with the link, I can't help wondering what caught his attention. He sure isn't picking up any programming tips. I keep reminding myself that his sidebar links aren't really an endorsement, but just a list of recently visited sites. I figured I'd be rotated out of the lineup in a hurry. But every day when I click over to read his previous nights entry I see my link is still there. This makes me feel very good, but also adds a little pressure. "You mean people I don't know are reading this?" I think it's one of the more interesting things about the whole weblog world that I actually care about this. It's somehow more important because I don't know him. Too bad he's not in NYC or I'd offer to get him a table at the restaurant.
I wasn't even going to mention this at all. But then today I noticed another person I've come to respect through reading his page has also added my link. Seriously? Wow. I'll have to start dropping some Shulgin references or something. Again, not a deluge of traffic, but I don't care about that. It's the quality I'm after. So if you're coming here through either of those fine pages, welcome, have a look around, but don't hold it against them.
How long does 15 minutes last on a 400 mhz G3?
I haven't had as much time lately for posting here. Things are very busy on the home front plus my recent venture into OS X fanaticism is taking a lot of my time. I think I will be swallowed by the project builder monster if I'm not careful. It's much to Apple's credit that I would find myself with the courage to even open up such a program. But this introduction to Applescript on OSX was just too tempting. "You mean I can make cocoa programs with Applescript?" That's something even a not so sophisticated PHP scripting philosophy major can probably deal with.
Doc Searls: "Hotel California Lists, or HCLs, are my new label for email lists you can check out of, but never leave."
Wow, this is going well. OSX has restored some of the excitement I remember from my beginning days on the web. Two thumbs up. Proselytizing will now begin in earnest, so watch out if you have to spend any time with me in the near future.
It turns out I didn't have the latest (10.1.1) version of X. I grabbed that this morning after Chris, from the on hiatus mors.ante.servitium, reminded me.
I'm running this on a 400 mhz G3 iMac and speed is not too bad. But it is slow at times, especially when resizing windows. I only have 128 megs of RAM in this machine, so perhaps bumping that will help. I'm sure a G4 would do better, but this is what I have for the moment. In any case, I use Mozilla as my main browser, so I must not care too much about blindingly fast user interfaces. It's funny how if I like a technology on a theoretical (philosophical? ethical?) level I am willing to cut it a lot of slack. Probably there is some loose thinking in there, but that's how it is. On the other hand, the first time I was annoyed by Microsoft or Real I banished them from my world forever.
Back upstairs on the dialup now. Seems to work fine. This is what I had problems with in the public beta. I could never get PPP to stay connected. Needless to say, they've come a long way from the pb to 10.1. Nice work. Cheapest new computer I've ever gotten.
Long day of downloading. For no good reason I'll say what I did.
Backed up a couple of gigs off my home machine (graphite iMac) onto one of the Mac towers in the office. Did some actual math and discovered we only get about 5.5 Mb/sec over the LAN. I'll have to look into that.
Wiped the single partition on the iMac. Made two new partitions.
Installed 9.0.4 (off CD) onto the smaller partition.
Downloaded 9.1 updater from Apple. Installed over 9.0.4.
Downloaded 9.2 updater from Apple. Tried to install - corrupt. Couldn't go back.
Installed 9.0.4 again off CD. Updated again to 9.1.
Downloaded 9.2 updater from Apple again. Installed sucessfully.
Downloaded 9.2.2 updater from Apple. Installed.
Installed 10.1 (off CD) onto the larger partition.
Downloaded developer tools (200+ Megs!) and installed.
Writing this from mozilla 0.9.6 running on OS 10.1. Feels good so far. I got a consistent 60 K/sec from Apple on the DSL. Still, that's not so fast for over half a gig of downloads. Started around noon and am just finishing up now.
I've meant to make this upgrade for some time, but I suspected it would turn into an all day adventure and so I had been putting it off. Glad I finally got it done. I traded emails a few weeks ago with mors.ante.servitium and his OS X enthusiasm sort of shamed me into finally doing it. Thanks. Everything is working well so far. I'll keep you informed on how it goes.
My guilty conscience will not let me rest until I expose the extremely unamerican way I behaved today: I failed to conduct all my affairs under the highest level of security. Also, I made no efforts to observe, not to mention report, any evil doings. And as for smoking people out of their holes, I'm sad to say I'm not even sure what that means. Sorry. I'll try harder tomorrow.
Rageboy on fire.
Mac in red plastic jug conversion photos. No, I don't know why.
Google groups now has a full 20 years of usenet history on line. That's over 700 million messages. Aaron Swartz pointed to some fun old ones, like Tim Berners-Lee's first post and this first "executive summary" of the world wide web project. More links on Aaron's page.
update: Here's a timeline from google with many of these early interesting threads. Wow.
MB has been working on a project lately that involves a childrens television personality I grew up watching on the magic screen. I met her last week here at the apartment. We were introduced, and shook hands, and I pretended there was nothing strange with meeting someone in real life who comes from my TV fueled childhood imagination. "Oh hi, nice to meet you." Last night we all ate at the bar at Fresh Foods and I was trying to see if Dennis, the bartender, recognized her. I mean, she looks exactly the same. But he didn't know what I was talking about. I guess you have to be of a certain age.
007
At ocean eleven
an' now rudeboys 'ave a wail...
Saw Ocean's 11 last night. The Desmond Dekker song is not in it, but I ended up with it stuck in my head anyway. It was my first time at the Zigfeld which is a really old and very large theatre on 54th street just off 6th avenue. The biggest in NYC. It's interesting to watch a movie with so many other people. I grew up on those tiny 20 little narrow cinemas in one strip mall places out in the suburbs. A really big screen does make a difference.
I enjoyed the movie while I was watching, but then afterwards we went to dinner and by the end of the meal I already wasn't too sure. Today it's on the way to having been bad. Strange how that works.
Walking out after the show Tom was asking me about the digital projection. I hadn't even noticed it was digital. So I guess the technology is good enough for my eyes. The only thing weird I saw was some kind of upper lip distortion on Julia Roberts, but maybe that wasn't a projection issue.
Google zeitgeist. If I wasn't already used to the feeling I'd be surprised I hadn't seen that page before. Probably as close to a snapshot of the world computer using group mind as you can get. Dig the top 5 historical personalities:
1. picasso
2. van gogh
3. marilyn monroe
4. bruce lee
5. einstein
I'm pretty sure that says something about us. Not sure what though.
Bruce Sterling. Long. Very worth it.
"Hi" - Nasty Outlook virus going around. I'm getting hammered with this thing. Here's what to do if you are infected. Well, that plus stop using Outlook Express unless you really know that program well (I mean unless you know how to change all the massively insecure defaults - not showing file extensions of downloaded files!!! Automatically executing them!!! - that Microsoft ships this thing with.)
The stars must be lined up or something. I really got a lot done today. I was fortunate enough to have eight straight hours to spend in the code, and I now have the complete system in my head just like back when I wrote it. Except this time I'm rested enough to actually do battle with all the little inconsistencies I just let go the first time around following the "good enough" engineering principle (or is that the "can't see it from my house" building principle?) Anyway, there were some serious inconsistencies which I believe are now worked out. Phew. I love working on this thing.
I'll explain the changes tomorrow over here.
We've been talking about Segway over here if you're wondering why I haven't mentioned it.
A couple more photos from 76 Clinton.
Random time waster graphic novel type thing: shapeshifter. Starts out kind of slow and awkward but stick with it. That's a really really really really good cup of coffee.....
Nice time last night at J.'s party. Saw some old friends from school which is always interesting. I guess J is a friend from school too, but I don't think of her that way any more now that we've been hanging out for so long in NYC. Those Providence college days seem long ago, which I guess is a complete cliche, but not surprisingly it is also true. I had a great time back then, but I don't miss those years. Things are happening now. I was always young before. Now, suddenly, I'm not. And that doesn't have anything to do with chronological age. I think it has to do with engaging the task that will be the work of your life.
I talked to J.B. for a little bit amid all the wine. He always seems genuinely interested in what I am doing, and I really appreciate that. He's smart. I tried to argue something about cool software being produced (or at least completely thought out) by one person. That it has to bear the stamp of an individual if it is really going to catch the fancy of people. But I wasn't able to argue (explain) my point well. Of course most software will be produced by teams of people. Most of it is too complex to do any other way. This will be especially true of large projects. But I think that the really revolutionary software (where revolutionary doesn't necessarily mean 'world changing' but just something like 'suddenly popular out of left field') will be the result of one person thinking through a problem. Individuals have a better chance than teams at making breakthroughs (although probably highly isolated individuals are at a disadvantage - so the whole issue is sort of muddy.)
I hope I get the chance to continue that conversation with him.
Now playing: two Gram Parsons CDs in one (mostly with Emmylou Harris) -> GP and Grievous Angel. How could it be I had never heard of these albums? Nice weekend listening. "Love Hurts" is beautiful. I know the Kim Deal (and Bob Mould?) version from, I think, the Love and a .45 soundtrack, but I never knew where the original was from. Incredible. Not very often I feel too young these days, but not knowing about this stuff before almost does it.
[update: O.K., I guess the Gram Parsons / Emmylou isn't the original Love Hurts. A lot of people recored it, but it was written by Boudleaux Bryant.]
I'm making good progress on the new [editpage].
This is going to solve some long standing and subtle (but still annoying) problems. I really feel like it's coming together.
I do almost all my scripting in BBEdit on the Mac (although everything runs on Linux.) David McCusker just greatly improved my life by pointing out the MPW font. If you code on the Mac, do yourself a big favor and download this font right now:
ftp://ftp.apple.com/developer/Tool_Chest/Core_Mac_OS_Tools/
MPW_etc./Miscellaneous/MPW_Font.sit.hqx
Thanks!
Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal has a review of the handspring Treo, a combo cell phone, PDA, email/SMS/webrowser due out early 2002. Sweet. Here's The Treo page at handspring.com, and here's the /. thread this all came from.
I want one. The one with the blackberry style keyboard, that is, not the graffiti (PalmOS) pen input one.
Couldn't sleep last night. Layed in bed thinking about different page caching schemes. That may not sound like fun, but it actually wasn't too bad. I think I came up with a solution. Hopefully this weekend I can make good progress on the new preference setting interface. This is going to be my first attempt to make everything usable by someone who hasn't been using the system all along. Traditionally I'm not very good at that sort of thing, but I have some hope for this attempt. I'm trying to get something ready for the first of the year, but that's just a loose date. We'll see how much free time December allows.