...more recent posts
Very tired at this point, even though I had a long night of sleep. I guess these things are always a bit of an ordeal. I don't think I could handle a real wine trip. But of course that's not my business. I can see that Mike is good at it.
It's late morning now and we're getting ready to leave the Steigenberger Avance Hotel in Krems. Long drive (3 plus hours) to the final wine maker today. They have kidnapped us for the afternoon, evening, and night. Nobody is sure what to expect from this one. I'm not familiar with their wines at all.
It has been very foggy every day, so it's hard to get too much sense of the country side. Rudi Pichler took us up into the steeply terraced gruner veltliner vinyards. The stone work of the terraces is very impressive. Quite ancient stuff. We would have had some great views of the Wachau valley, but it was left mostly to our imagination. Looks like more of the same today.
Everyone is getting along well. It's nice to have the laptop, and all my music, in the car. Now if only there was wi-fi data connections everywhere.
Tomorrow we're headed back into Vienna.
It's not the morning yet, but I think I made it. Amazing. Nice to have an internet terminal in the lobby.
I've still been dreaming a lot every night, but not so dramtically. In between each dream I wake up and think about the picture upload system which is really bugging me. I know I don't have it thought out correctly. But I have some new ideas I'll run by Tom when I get home. I think I might be close to the solution. It's comforting to have a problem in any case.
And, oh yeah, the wine is out of control.
Well, of course I had the schedule a little wrong. Tuesday we were still in Vienna. Had a massive lunch where I ate some pork and duck (ok, just a bite or two.) We took it easy last night, and then this morning we were up early to get the car.
Morning appointment at my favorite wine maker, Knoll. Maybe Frank remembers from GSI. We got the tour and then tasted 4 2002 from the barell and then a bunch of 2001's in the celler with Emerich Jr. After that we got a quick lunch and then another tasting with Rudi Pichler.
After that I was basically out of gas, but the Wheel keeps turning, and all that, so now after checking into the hotel we're headed back to Knoll for dinner. More in the morning if I make it.
Long flight. Thank god it was direct. That really makes all the difference. We left JFK at 6:50 and arrived 8:00 hours later which was 9:00 am in Austria. Took a cab to the hotel and went right to breakfast. Wasn't feeling so hot at that point.
But we forced ourselves to stay up. MB and I took a walk around the neighborhood waiting for Mike and Linda and Alex to arrive. A few hours later we ran into them in the street and we all did some more looking around. The architecture is amazing.
Vienna is beautiful. We're staying right in the heart of the city near St. Stephen's church. I have lots of pictures, but it doesn't seem like I will be able to get my machine on line (I'm at a cafe right now.)
Around 2:00 we went back to the hotel and I slept until 4:00. Surprisingly, having not slept at all the night before, this was enough to feel pretty good. At 6:00 we took a cab a half hour out of town to a winery where we took a short tour and then had dinner with the owner. Great guy. Great meal. Great wine. More details on all that should be coming from Mike.
Today was more touring around the city. Tonight is a bigger meal in Vienna, and then tomorrow we head out for the country and more wineries. Very fun so far.
Last night I had the strongest, clearest, and most numerous dreams of my life. Quite strange toward morning. Luckily I can report that the plot to take over the world using ingestible tablet microcomputers was foiled when the giant Amanita mushroom spaceship broke free and escaped.
Two days until Knoll, the expected highlight of the trip. More reports to follow.
Yes, I'm in my usual pre travel panic state. This is a low grade panic - you might even mistake it for indifference - but it's panic nonetheless. 28 hours until take off.
The Brown Daily Herald has the first interview with geek babe Ellen Feiss. Unsurprisingly the site is completely slashdotted.
Our friend Alex Hay is in town for a show of his work from the 1960's at the Peter Freeman gallery (B'way and Prince.) Alex is the best guy ever. You should really go check it out. The giant brown paper bag is amazing.
How do I get internet access for one week in Austria?
Dean Kamen introduces a (not completely done) Stirling engine.
T-Mobile has introduced a much more reasonable rate plan for the sidekick:
$59.99/MonthStill not enough voice minutes for the super user, but plenty for me. I'll have to watch my bills, but I think I'm already over enough that this would save me money. I'll look into it when I get back from vacation.
500 Anytime Minutes*
Unlimited Night & Weekend Minutes*
Unlimited Data
1000 T-Mobile 2-Way Text Messages
Included features: voicemail, paging, caller ID, call waiting, call forwarding, conference calling, and Instant Messaging.
*Updated Feature. All else is same as original plan.
On the geo-political scene I'm getting very strong here we go vibes. Like the rollercoaster just got to the top of the first hill. (The first hill?!?!)
I'm watching Israel. Things could go quick from here. Or hopefully I'm wrong.
If you have an apple laptop running OS X check out uControl. This will install a new pane in your system preference window (apple menu -> system preferences...) In that pane click on 'scrolling' and then check 'scroll wheel emulation'. Now when you hold down the function key you can use the trackpad like a scroll wheel.
No obvious problems in a few minutes of use. Excellent. This was bugging me. Surfing on the laptop will be much better now.
I haven't experimented, but this will also let you remap lots of different keys. Could be useful for desktop users as well.
I'll be saying more about [upload] over the next few days, but for now you might want to know there is a new verb, "getthumb" that operates exactly like "getpic" but displays a tumbnail instead of the picture itself. Picture x (/getpic/x) now automatically has a thumbnail with the same id (/getthumb/x).
For people with pages here (or on any of the other sites) you can now make any page display as a bulletin board. You'll see this new option on [editpage]. You can switch back and forth between the weblog view and the bbs view with no loss of data. Also, in [settings], you can make your account default so that you always see pages as either weblogs, or bulletin boards, no matter how each individual page is set by its' owner.
Again, like the advanced search, formatting hasn't really had any attention paid to it. That will come. Suggestions appreciated.
If you're not familiar, the thing that might be cool about bulletin boards is that it's easy for readers who don't have accounts to keep up with new comments. The bulletin board lists the subject of the the post (you have to click through to actually read the post and comments,) plus the name of the author, and the date of the most recent post or comment in that thread. But the important thing is that the posts are ordered by most recent activity. So if a very old post receives a new comment, that post summary is returned at the top of your page in bulletin board view.
Probably not so helpful for the people on this site, but some of the other sites can use this sort of thing. Nice for organizational stuff when you can't convice people to sign in and use the [new post] [new comment] links from the front page.
I'm still unclear on the terminology, but you can now get RSS feeds (in RDF form if I'm understanding all the acronyms correctly) for any page here by adding /xml to the end of the URL. So my feed is here. Works in NetNewsWire Lite. I'd be interested if anyone could tell me if it worked in Radio. And of course I'd be grateful if anyone could correct my form. Thanks.
Steven Johnson (of feed, suck, and NYU's ITP program) has a blog.
Here's the site for that weird futuristic boutique on Ave. B we've been wondering about.
We're back up on the new server. I made lots of behind the scenes changes so there will no doubt be some problems. Let me know if you experience anything weird (I mean in reference to this page...)
OK. Looks like tomorrow (Friday) at 5:30 am the site will disappear for anyone coming from an ISP where any customer has connected to the site in the last week or so (so all of you for sure.) Should be back by 5:30 am on Saturday.
Sorry for all the confusion. Probably there will be a few glitches when it comes back up, but I'll be on the job. Thanks!
Well, this site has been transfered to the new server. But right now we are still seeing the old site. I don't know enough about the strange magic that is the DNS system, so I can't say exactly when the switch will take place (or, I mean, it's already taken place, but I can't say when it will go into effect.) Weird.
Anything posted from a few hours ago forward (until the switch takes effect) will have to be moved later by hand. So you should be skeptical of that. In other words, if you're about to post your masterpiece, maybe hold off until tomorrow.
Hmmm. We might be getting an addition to the family today.
Excellent! David McCusker is going to work for Mitch Kapor's Open Source Application Foundation. This makes me happy in numerous ways. I can't wait to see what they build.
Today is my first day as an OSAF engineer, and my mission is to write world class software that revolutionizes the way data is stored and accessed by computer programs. So I'll be doing a lot of work on the Chandler storage system and future OSAF apps in pursuit of this goal. I'm quite excited by this new position and happy to join the project.
Congratulations David! Good luck.
My mobile data is back on. Going through the back log now. Sorry if I missed anyone yesterday.
This site should be going off the air temporarily today. We'll see you all tomorrow from our new location.
My mobile has had a voice connection all day (at least I think so, I haven't talked to anyone,) but no data. Bummer. So if you're sending to that address I'm not ignoring you. I'll get anything sent when the network comes back up, or resend to a different address.
What the heck is going on lately? I've been seriously productive. Lots of new features coming on line. Sure, most are small, but I've added them all in the past few weeks and they've been on the to do list for years. I guess it's something like momentum. Once you start knocking stuff off the list you see that it's really not so hard. And it feels good. So you just keep rolling. And since I'm not hitting any major hurdles I seem to be building speed.
Nice while it lasts. Ten days to vacation.
Looks like Thursday will be the down day due to the server migration.
I have the bulletin board view working now, as well as the xml feed. The later is a crazy maze of political infighting. I'm just a novice, so I can't even say what type of xml it actually is that I am employing. What I can say is that it works when you look at it in NetNewsWire lite. Still, there is so much bickering about how this type of thing should be formatted, that it may well be the case that someone could claim my implementation is broken. Whatever. I'm happy to learn as I go.
My format comes from copying the structure of Aaron Swartz's feed. But is this RSS? RDF? WTF? I guess people are still working these things out. I'm just happy it's at least basically functioning.
I'll point to it after the server switch.
[update: OK, I guess it's RDF, although it may be RSS also (that is, RDF is one way to encode RSS.) Is that right?]
Of course now that I've commited to the server move, this one has been amazingly fast (from my perspective at least.) This is in comparison to the very slow speeds I had been seeing for the last few weeks. Oh well. I'll be curious to see how the new server does. It's actually a less powerful machine, but under orders of magnitude less load. I'm figuring it will be an improvement, but if it's only as fast as this one is right now I'll be happy.
The new server is up. If everything goes correctly this domain will be transfered tomorrow. This might mean (well, ok, probably mean) the site will be unreachable for up to 24 hours. I'll post again when I'm more sure, but it looks like tomorrow will be the day.
Great Alex Wilson piece on Veteran's Day.
Art Medlar wrote to David Weinberger pointing out that if you search for 'http' in google you get the raw ordering of pages by rank. Wow. No big surprises, but very cool.
Alex is going to have a heart attack or something: I'm finally rebuilding the advanced search. This will debut next week after we change servers.
Macromedia starts to get what blog tool makers have been saying for years.
Christopher Locke makes me laugh out loud. And that's pretty good seeing as his topic is a business meeting.
The chimera web browser is a simplified version of mozilla for OS X (with a native cocoa user interface.) Still in beta, the new 0.6 release is quite good. I'm using it as my main browser now. Much faster at rendering pages than Mozilla. Worth a look despite it's pre 1.0 status.
We will be moving to a new server next week. More details to follow...
Apple released kick ass new portables. Same form factors. The iBook is now $999 - $1850 (my pick: $1500 = 800mhz g3, 640 megs ram, 30 gig hard drive, DVD/CDrw, Radeon 7500 w/ 32 megs) and the Powerbook is now $2300 - $3000 (my pick: $3000 = 1ghz g4, 512 megs ram, 60 gig hard drive DVDrw/CDrw, Radeon 9000 w/ 64 megs !!!)
These are very competitive machines. You can find something cheaper on the Windows side, but it won't be as good. And it won't be that much cheaper. I don't even think you can get a recordable DVD at all (or did Sony just announce one too?)
Nice boost to Apple's struggling line up.
Happy Birthday MB!
Yuck.
If you abandon a moral position because that position puts you at risk, then the position was never moral, but merely one of convenience. Bravery is sticking to your beliefs, even when those beliefs open you to danger. No matter what our military strength, we are cowards if we do not fight in a manner consistent with our beliefs. And this is more true the graver the danger, not the other way around as some would have it. There is no way to temporarily lay aside justice. Once it's gone you cannot have it back.
I ran out of disk space on my iMac and my mail program crashes pretty hard. I'm trying to recover right now, but I might have lost email sent to me after 6:00 pm last night.
Check out this new Nokia 6800 phone with regular numeric keypad, and - with a flip - full qwerty keyboard. Genius.
Ogg Vorbis plugin for iTunes 3!
Wired has an article about a company, Vivato, set to introduce a new type of antenna for wifi (802.11) access points that will greatly increase the range of these devices. If we are to believe them their new antenna will provide for 2000 foot radius coverage indoors, and up to 4 miles outside! Holy wow. That would pretty much solve almost everything.
Dan Gillmore on telecoms, the FCC, and the promotion of open spectrum.
Cory Doctorow reviews Harold Rheingold's new book Smartmobs. Worth a look.
Wow. Long elaborate dream last night. We were on some kind of plush party train Big Jimmy had hooked up rolling across Montana. The countryside was filled with weird space ship launching pads. And I kept trying to blog everything on my mobile. I think that helped me remember so much of the dream.
In one of the cars I met a woman who had a much cooler mobile device. It was called a Bueno Avalanche. I remember trying to write the name into a blog, and it was taking me forever because the letters kept changing around. Anyway, the device folded up in the most improbably manner, so that when closed it was about the size of a book of matches, but then it would expand transformer-style into a much bigger device. I was showing her mine, but she wasn't very impressed. "That's last generation technology."
Don't miss blogs of the day: one, two.
The image upload function is about to get a nice upgrade. I've always wanted these features but didn't think I could do it before. Very satisfying to see it finally working. (Note: it's not working at this site yet.)
Here's another open spectrum overview, this time with more focus on the technology side of things, which right now means software defined radio. This is what will change everything (yeah, I know, it usually doesn't work out like that, but I enjoy believing such things...)
DailyWireless has links to some of the players in the industry.
People in Bayport (you know who you are!) should not read the rest of this post. Believe me, it's for your own good.
42" Wide Screen Flat Plasma Monitor for under $3000 (although, yeah, the resolution doesn't seem that outstanding.)
Doc Searls on the bottom-up nature of protocols that form the infrastructure of the internet: "They need to be born of universal intentions that support commercial activity, but are not reducible to it." I love that sentence.
Great short Jorn Barger (Mr. Robotwisdom) essay on an Internet way of self-knowledge.
Science News Online wonders if we have it all wrong:
Nearly all political elections in the United States are plurality votes, in which each voter selects a single candidate, and the candidate with the most votes wins. Yet voting theorists argue that plurality voting is one of the worst of all possible choices.
Another mainstream overview of the arguments for open spectrum. My long distance and not terribly informed view is that Michael Powell (head of the FCC) might actually support such thinking. Can he actually do this, and keep his job? Seems doubtful with the present administration.
Was using the thumb-board on my mobile in my dream last night. I guess I'm assimilated.
Check out how much of Manhattan is covered by wi-fi (wireless internet access.)
Chandler is the code name for the Open Software Application Foundation's networkable PIM I mentioned a few days ago. (That's Personal Information Manager: mail, calendar, contacts, to-do, etc.) The buzz around this project is huge. Vista is a prototype for what Chandler might be like. It's not a product that will be released, but it's described in detail, with screenshots, in the hopes of focusing discussion. This looks very very cool. The idea that we could have networkable PIMs without a centralized server is very promising.
One of the coolest features of Vista is the ability to browse remote repositories using Jabber to convey the necessary data and meta-data. It uses Jabber extension messages to determine what views are accessible to the requestor, and to request and receive the relevant data items, via a simple UI described in the next section. More sophisticated users can address remote views and data items directly, by typing a URL that has a Jabber ID at the beginning, as described above.
Making good progress today, although there is a lot to do in very little time.
Here's my latest working theory. Probably this is obvious, but I don't think it's ever been implemented exactly the way I am doing it. The idea is that since all posts (and comments) are stored in a database, there is remarkable freedom in how I can serve them back up. And recently it occured to me just how similar weblogs, bulletin boards, email lists, and RSS feeds are. They're just different views of the same atomic data.
So I'm extending the system so that any page can be viewed in any of these styles. Making what are now weblog pages into mailing lists is my first task, because a mailing list is what we need. In this scenario the weblog becomes the mailinglist archive. Anything posted to the page gets sent as email to everyone on the list. Same with comments. This is working now, although you have to open a web page to reply (you can't just hit reply in your mail client, you have to click the reply link in the message which will open the proper page in your browser.) So that's a drawback, but I'll have this fixed up fairly soon.
I'll probably make the bulletin board view next, and then the RSS feeds. But I need the mailing list wow. I mean now. Almost there.