...more recent posts
Wardriving is the strange (and somewhat unfortunate) name for driving around with an 802.11x wi-fi equipped notebook computer looking for open access points. In a place like Manhattan they are everywhere. If you find one, you might want to engage in a little on the spot documentation with a graffiti language created to tip off fellow searchers: warchalking.
But why limit yourself to just wi-fi? The air is full of all kinds of signals. Check out these do it yourself plans for remotely monitoring wireless video cameras: warspying.
I'm working on a full report of the new apple music service, as well as iTunes 4.
This afternoon I've been trying to get iTunes to share music over the net. This is the cool new ability in iTunes 4. Apple calls it rendezvous, but that is just the apple branding of the open source project zero conf. This aims at establishing networks of computers with zero configuration. In other words, if networks are possible (over ethernet or over wi-fi or whatever) they will just be established automagically. No fussing with IP addresses or any other networking arcana.
And it actually works. Or pretty much. Machines running iTunes 4 on our office ethernet indeed connect to each other, and music on any one computer shows up as a seperate play list in the iTunes jukebox on every other computer. So I can play music off any other machine in the office, and anyone can play music off my machine. Very slick.
But I should also be able to do this over the internet! That is the real amazing thing. But I could only sort of get that to work. iTunes can see my dial up machine from the office over the internet, but I can't see the office from my dial up machine. No doubt this has to do with the router and switch my office machine is sitting behind. So the afternoon was filled with lots of reading about router configuration and port forwarding. But so far to no avail. I'll try some more tomorrow.
Rough transcript of the Chandler presentation at ETCon. This is the most information I've seen yet on Chandler.
There is a satellite broadcast of today's Apple event (1pm eastern time) but no webcast. Or at least none was announced. But someone said this might be it. It loads for me, but there is no content there at the moment. Maybe at 1:00.
Went to Barramundi for R.'s birthday yesterday which doubled as their annual garden opening event. Now it really feels like summer. Also, from the additional confirmation department, this morning I bought a mango. Life is sweet.
My t-mobile sidekick (danger hiptop) email service has gotten much worse lately. I used to get emails immediately. Like within a few seconds of their being sent. Now it sometimes takes an hour!
An hour!
This will not do.
So we're thinking about putting free Wi-Fi at the cafe. Anybody have any experiences to share? I'm under the impression that it is against the terms of service to share a Verizon DSL line (not sure how they'd ever know though.) Unfortunately it is impossible to find the real fine print on their site (well, OK, maybe it's not impossible, but I couldn't do it.)
I've looked at bway.net a bit, as I've always heard good things about them. They seem to be of the "it's your bandwidth, do what you want with it" school of thinking which is obviously what I'm looking for. Any experiences with them? How about speakeasy?
And finally, does it even make sense to sign a one year contract with a little guy like bway? (or speakeasy?) I mean taking into account possible legislation which would remove the onus presently on the big Telco's to share their lines with these guys. I've fallen a bit out of touch and no longer know where that legal stuff stands.
Help appreciated. If not, I'll update below as I find answers myself. Pretty fun project.
Big Apple announcement on Monday (well, maybe it won't be big.) Probably new iPods, and most likely the introduction of an Apple music download service. Those rumors about Apple buying Universal Music Group seem to have died down.
I'm worried about this download service. I'm scared they will price it too high (and put in too much DRM) for it to work. Apple can't take too big a failure at the point in time.
What would you people pay to download music? I mean legally. How much per song? How much per album?
Good legal news for file sharing networks:
In an almost complete reversal of previous victories for the record labels and movie studios, federal court Judge Stephen Wilson ruled that Streamcast--parent of the Morpheus software--and Grokster were not liable for copyright infringements that took place using their software. The ruling does not directly affect Kazaa, software distributed by Sharman Networks, which has also been targeted by the entertainment industry.
"Defendants distribute and support software, the users of which can and do choose to employ it for both lawful and unlawful ends," Wilson wrote in his opinion, released Friday. "Grokster and StreamCast are not significantly different from companies that sell home video recorders or copy machines, both of which can be and are used to infringe copyrights."
This will only be interesting to people posting here (unless someone wants to tell me how other blogging software deals with this issue.)
[update: sorry had an error in the block quote. Fixed now.]
HTML entites:
Character entity references, or entities for short, provide a method of entering characters that cannot be expressed in the document's character encoding or that cannot easily be entered on a keyboard. Entities are case-sensitive and take the form &name;. Examples of entities include © for the copyright symbol and Α for the Greek capital letter alpha.These are useful. Here's a list of Latin-1 entites. Here's a list for symbols and greek characters. Here's a list for special entites. In those lists you should be looking at the two 'entity' columns (the first is what you put in your post, the second is the character that will result when viewed in a web browser.)
Great. The problem is if you use HTML entites in a post, and then go back to edit the post, when the system puts the entity into the editing text box in your browser, it displays the entity, not the code for the entity. In other words if you make a post with > your post will display the greater than symbol: >. But when you go back to edit, instead of seeing > in the editing box, you'll just see > which isn't what you want (because you'd have to change it by hand back to >)
I wonder if that's clear? Anyway, the work around for this is non standard, but will work on all pages here: insert an underscore after the ampersand. So instead of © to make a copyright symbol, you should use &_copy;
Thanks to Bruno for finding some problems in my first implementation of this.
Esther mentioned Google's purchase of Applied Semantics on her new blog.
From Google's side, interesting too! Last month at PC Forum I was pestering Sergey Brin about whether Google would move beyond mostly abstract algorithms to more explicitly semantic analysis... watch that space!
And today there is a tiny mention in Cory's notes from the "Google, Innovation, and the Web" talk at ETCon by Craig Silverstein, director of technology for Google:
We just acquired Applied Semantics. They do targetted advertising. I can't say more. Semantic tech could be applied somewhere other than ads. If I said more, I'd have to kill you.I'm skeptical about the semantic web, but if anyone can make progress it's probably google...
Aka was slamming. Nice downtown crowd.
Now we're at arlene's grocery for the 3rd annual picture show. It turns out this means quirky indepenent videos shown on a 15 inch low quality TV hanging on the wall.
Ok, correction, now I see. There's another room with a bigger screen. That room is completely packed. It's not that big but still, nice turn out. Seems like a cool thing. Might want to get here a bit earlier.
April 25 - April 28. Arlene's Grocery. Stanton btw ludlow and orchard. Starts at noon tomorrow (saturday.) Goes all day.
This looks pretty cool: martian netdrive. A tiny, completely silent, wireless 120 gb hard drive. Just plug it in, and you have an 802.11b file and print server. Stick it in the closet, under the bed, whatever. Runs a custom version of linux. $479.
Esther Dyson started blogging. Interesting post about google.
Who is she? ICANN bio, edge.org page.
I know just little enough to still hope for a really cool big breakthrough: unlimited decentralized wireless bandwidth everywhere. Or at least everywhere there are other people.
Ad-hoc mesh networking, in other words. Taking the telecom infrastructure that currently underlies the internet and distributing it out into end user devices. In this new model you don't just connect to the internet, you are the internet. Instead of your modem connecting to a router (say, at your ISP) your modem will also be a router. And so will everyone else's.
O.K., that's probably a bit too simple, but something like this is happening. And the key will be software, not hardware. Specifically, software defined radio, like gnu radio. This type of software allows your general purpose computer to reconfigure itself on the fly to work with any known radio format.
Here are Cory Doctorow's short notes from a talk by the gnu radio guys at ETcon.
GNU Radio is a free software toolkit for realtime signal processing things -- radio included. Works for sonar, medical imaging, etc.This flexibility will unleash a tidal wave of experimentation. Think how hard, and expensive, it is to introduce a new wireless technology. The telcoms have to roll out all new equipment (like build towers everywhere!) while the public has to buy all new wireless cards. This sort of outlay cannot happen very often, which is why we still have very poor wireless technology deployed.
Get as much stuff as we can into software, out of hardware.
Turn all the hardware problems into software problems -- all wave forms are encoded, decoded, modulated and demodded in software.
But move all the custom hardware into software, and now we can reconfigure as easily as we download patches for our software, or firmware updates for our machines. This is made possible, generally, by the incredible computational power of ordinary general purpose computing. Or, in other words, the need for building custom (expensive!) hardware to solve technical problems decreases as general purpose hardware increases in power.
What can you do with it?And this is all in software, on the computer you are using right now. Go gnu radio!
* Conventional radio
* Spectrum monitoring
* Multichannel -- one app sucks down the whole RF spectrum; AT&T could support all its legacy phones (GSM, CDMA, Analog) on one tower, without any forklift upgrade.
* Morph mode
* Morph on the fly -- a device that reconfigures itself for what you need, sat phone, cell phone, pager, etc, your 802.11b could talk 802.11g once it's invented
* Better spectrum utilization -- listen-before-talk, then choose an unused band. Accommodates legacy users and lets you move forward.
* Cognitive radio -- minimal power, shaped xmission, etc
Little network problem for the last few minutes. Anybody else notice that?
I can't get Safari to accept cookies from localhost. I dimly recall having this problem before, but I can't find any reference to it here, so maybe I'm dreaming.
Anyone?
More on my latest lust: +1 megapixel digital camera phones. Of course in Japan first. Nothing new in that article, really, but the last two paragraphs are interesting.
Some camera makers are nevertheless concerned that cell phone cameras with 3 megapixel quality would affect the markets of low-quality digital cameras of the 1 megapixel class and disposable cameras."[M]ore formal photo sessions...," huh? Yeah right. The digital camera will be completely subsumed into the phone very quickly for all but the most professional applications. Those companies better move into the +10 megapixel pro range, or strike some deals with cell makers. Who's going to want to carry two devices? Especially when the added bulk gets you less functionality (can't send your picture to someone while in the field with your regular digital camera.)
However, many of them expect that camera-equipped cell phones and regular digital cameras can coexist in the market. "Camera-equipped cell phones can be used for casual snapshots, while regular digital cameras are suitable for more formal photo sessions," an employee of a camera maker said.
Converge damn it, converge!
Dave has been loaning us DVDs from his rather extensive collection. Last night we watched The Day The Earth Stood Still. I was not expecting too much from this 1951 sci-fi picture, but I remember Paul Laffoley mentioning that this movie had a huge influence on him as a kid. Especially the spaceship whose shape holds some sort of golden mean beauty to those with mathematical eyes. So I figured what the heck. And it turned out to be a great film. It's dated, sure, except not so much as you'd think. Very interesting.
Also we've seen a lot of crap. Not from Dave of course, but from the little video store across the street. One exception to those misfires was Secretary. Fun movie.
Not sure why I'm not putting this on the movie page.
Chadler 0.1 is now available. Here's the release info. You can download it here (windows, linux, os x).
I'm excited about this, but don't have the time right now to play with it. I'll report back as soon as I do.
Here's Cory Doctorow's blurb which captures exactly why I have so much hope for this project.
Mitch Kapor and the Open Source Applications Foundation have released the first public alpha of Chandler, the serverless, P2P mailer/calendar/PIM that looks more and more like an application framework for displacing the OS as the primary tool of info-management -- I *already* use my mailer as a database layered on top of my OS, since I email almost everything I do to someone, somewhere. I've stopped sweating careful file-heirarchies for my archived docs on my HDD and started just using my mailer's search functions to find the documents I need to retreive. Looks to me like Chandler is being *designed* for that kind of use.File system hierarchies are not something the average user should have to concern themselves with. This complexity is holding back adoption.
On March 2, 2003 at 4:12 pm, I disappeared. My name is isabella v., but it's not. I'm twentysomething and I am an international fugitive.
Easter Sunday sermon.
I slept through the egg hunt on the first floor, although we did write a few of the traditional (around here anyway) rhyming clues last night over sushi. Hopefully it went well.
And hopefully this really is the start of spring because people are in some need. Ran into L last night in the bodega and he was typical of most people I know in the city. Smiling and trying to be happy, but admitting that this has been the worst winter ever. And I'm not talking about the weather. We can take it, sure, and even worse, it's just that we would rather not. Strong only goes so far.
Early Sunday dinner tonight with the extended NYC family plus some parts of my family who have never interacted. Should be interesting.
Both my old friend Diana and my father wrote to inform me of the closing of the M&M bar in Butte Montana. I wrote about the M&M here, along with a couple of pictures. The passing of an era. Very sad news.
Supposedly there is a story in the Montana Standard, but I can't find it...
How do I not notice these things? Nested comments were not ordering correctly in the comment threads. Should be fixed now.
I dislike this nested style more and more. I'm not going to remove the option, but I'm thinking of switching my page to flat comments (one sequence of comments, ordered by time posted - no indenting.) I really think that is the better way. If you need to reply to a comment some way up the page, just quote part of that comment in your reply.
Any feelings on this?
aktiom.net is offering linux server colocation, with 40 GB of traffic, for $75 a month. How do they do it?
A common question concerns how we're able to provide such a high-quality service for $75/month. By using powerful hardware combined with a specialized Linux kernel, we can put multiple client servers on one physical machine. This is unlike virtual webhosting in a few ways:I wonder how this works out? Price is right.This is also different from a FreeBSD
- • you have full root access to your Linux system
- • other Aktiom Networks clients are completely partitioned from your data and network traffic
- • you have full access to available hardware resources (i.e. RAM/CPU limits aren't placed on you)
jail()configuration. Users inside a FreeBSD jail are unable to use tools such as ping, traceroute, and tcpdump (they require access to raw sockets), and are limited to one IP address. None of these limitations appear in our solution. Security-conscious people might be wary of allowing tcpdump, but please remember that other server instances are completely partitioned away from your data and network traffic.
The U.S. government has appointed the former head of privacy at Doubleclick - the dot com company with the most sinister privacy track record - as the Department of Homeland Security's first privacy czar.
Don't they even try to convince anyone they are not evil anymore? This would be like hiring the former head of the KGB to advise the department on monitoring U.S. citizens. Oh wait, they already did that.
The second public beta of Apple's new browser Safari is now available. This is v.73 if you're keeping track. I'm not sure why they are still calling it a beta, but whatever. I'm very happy with it as my main browser (but I was happy with v.67, so this is to be expected.)
My very small gripes are as follows: spell checking (finally, yay!) has to be enabled in every new textarea (why not gloabally on? Boo!) and, of even less concern, but still, there is no way to force links from external programs to open in a new tab (rather than a new window.) Camino could do this.
Otherwise, perfect.
Looks like Rys McCusker will be leaving the Chandler project. Sounds like everyone is on good terms. Unclear what this will mean for the project. Hopefully, for Rys, it will mean more time to blog.
Mark's new page of news clips pertaining to the U.S. / Syria situation is really well done. If you have an account you can add it to your front page here.
I hope this style becomes a trend. It seems important that we try to remember what these people actually say leading up to an event, because afterwards there is so much spin it is very easy to become confused. WMD? Regime change? Liberation? Why did we start this war again?
This same style would be great for the coming election season. I wish I had one with all the juicy GWB quotes made during the last campaign. The distance his policies (especially foreign) have come since then is amazing. Or disturbing. Maybe this type of exhaustive record keeping could help hold people to account.
And I also have to mention Bruno's weblog ruminatrix. This is my new first stop on the daily round of global political analysis pages. It's really great to have him writing.
Of course Dave and Tom (despite sporadic attempts to actually run an art page ;-) are still going strong, but you already knew that...
David Reed is worried about the Total Information Awarness program. And he has some advice for building arguments against it.
In fact, the privacy and liberty folks, by expressing concern in the form of risks to "privacy" tend to reinforce the belief that there is any real investigatory information that can be extracted by inference from a very noisy and randomly selected pile of information.This is interesting, and strikes me as being true. Probably it is better to argue that there is no useful information to be had from Poindexter's method, rather than arguing that the cost to privacy of extracting the information is too high. I believe the math is on Reed's side, but he has to unpack his thoughts a bit more if he wants someone like me to really get what he's saying.
Waxy.org says that loading this page will cause your CD drive to eject if you are using IE on Windows. Is it true?
Really interesting Paul Graham article on designing a programming language of the future. I love stuff like this. (via HTP)
Apple in talks to buy Universal Music Group. Wow.
Unconfirmed report:
Up to now, all PowerPC 970 processors manufactured have been prototypes, made for testing purposes. The 970 is now considered completely bug-free and ready for production. Yesterday, Peter Sandon - father of the 970 - gave the green light.This will be Apple's new high end chip. You don't know how much effort I've had to expend to restrain myself from posting any 970 related info before this bit. It's almost a year now that I've been watching this story. Now it finally seems like it is near. And not a moment too soon. It's do or die time at 1 Infinite Loop (that's Apple headquarters street address. I swear.)
As of April 15, the 970 will be manufactured in quantity in IBM factories. Starting the end of June, the chips will be integrated in IBM Blade servers and in Apple systems.
More 1 megapixel + digital camera phones coming (in Japan.) This is my latest fetish. I cannot wait for these to hit here in the U.S.
Here's what I'd do about the bandwidth problem. First, the phone has to have a lot of memory. At least a gigabyte. And no SD or memorystick please. Either give us a real hard drive (a la the iPod) or a CF type II slot (for a microdrive, or a just a big CF card.)
Store the pictures locally at highest resolution. At the same time, scale down a copy to a user preset pixel size / resolution (I'd set my camera to scale pictures down to 500 pixels wide at around 70% jpeg quality) and send the reduced photo wireless to either a user specified server, or to a teleco server. Use open standards for these transactions (FTP I guess. Or Webdav?) Possibly have a second size/resolution preset at an even greater reduction for use when sending to someone else's phone.
The phone should also have bluetooth so that the full resolution pictures will be synced with your main computer whenever you are within range (which could be almost all the time if you have a laptop.)
With your help, Dan Gilmore is writing a book.
Dear Readers:This is one of those ideas that sounds cool, but in the wrong hands could turn into something more like a marketing gimmick than a valid strategy for book writing. But I think Dan is the man for this job, and I'm very curious to see what comes of this close to my heart topic.
I'm working on a book, and invite you to be part of it.
The book will explore the intersection of technology and journalism. The working title is "Making the News" -- reflecting a central point of this project, namely that today's (and tomorrow's) communications tools are turning traditional notions of news and journalism in new directions. These tools give us the ability to take advantage, in the best sense of the word, of the fact that our collective knowledge and wisdom greatly exceeds any one person's grasp of almost any subject. We can, and must, use that reality to our mutual advantage.
I'm doing the typical research: reading, interviewing, thinking, organizing, etc. I think I know a lot already about this subject. Naturally, I also am aware that I could know a lot more. So let's practice what I preach.
To that end, I hope you will become a part of this book, too. You can start by reading the outline below. My publisher, O'Reilly & Associates, agreed that this was a good idea.
The Phaistos Disk. "It's beautiful, it's a mystery, and it's very old; what's not to like?"
Long super geeky backgrounder on implementing VisiCalc, the program that fueled the personal computer revolution.
The strange story of a guy, an accordian, a weblog, and a girl who wasn't who she said she was. Not sure what the moral of this story is. Sort of unsettling on many fronts. And he doesn't even consider the weirdest possibility: maybe she really did prove P = NP, and now the world will never know.
This came up in his blog, but it seemed to me at the time like things had been worked out, and it wasn't that big of a deal. Now wired has an article about the agonist plagiarizing many of his battle updates from a pay newsletter put out by Stratfor. Wired says:
Some of the information was attributed to news outlets and other sources, but much of it was unsourced, particularly the almost real-time combat information presumably gleaned from a string of high-level sources worldwide....I never had the sense that he had a "string of high-level sources worldwide" but I guess that doesn't absolve him. Still, I think he provided a valuable (if slightly illegal) service. He distilled the news at a time when this was very difficult to do. Obviously he couldn't source the Stratfor stuff, because it was a paid service.
The only problem: Much of his material was plagiarized -- lifted word-for-word from a paid news service put out by Austin, Texas, commercial intelligence company Stratfor.
I guess you could object that he shouldn't have used the Stratfor stuff at all. Fair enough. I'm just saying that a lot of people wanted to know what was going on, and he provided that information. I put his wrong doing in the same camp as running a gnutella client. In other words: wrong, but it's not going to stop me from using such a fine service.
I'm going to attempt to transition away from my 100% depressing all war coverage. Not sure how it will go.
In any case, here's the April 3rd status report from the Chandler team. Because you know, what a war mongering empire really needs is a good open source PIM.
OK, it's not going so well yet. Give me some time.
Environy is making buttons. I like this one especially:
N.Y. Times article (super annoying registration required - you can use fmhreader / fmhreader for name / password) on military training using computer simulation.
One notion involves a scenario quite literally torn from the pages of a science fiction novel, in which a virtual training system becomes the actual means of waging war. "Ender's Game," a cult classic by Orson Scott Card, tells the story of a group of young soldiers battling aliens in a video game. In the end, they emerge to find that their victory has saved humankind, and that it was not a game.
" 'Ender's Game' has had a lot of influence on our thinking," said Michael Macedonia, director of the Army's simulation technology center in Orlando, Fla., which plans to build a virtual Afghanistan that could host hundreds of thousands of networked computers. "The intent is to build a simulation that allows people to play in that world for months or years, participate in different types of roles and see consequences of their decisions."
Bruce Sterling on Poindexter, the Contras, and al Qaeda.
A useful bit of USENET jargon for these times of intense on line debate (invoked by the agonist): Godwin's Law:
"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin's Law thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread length in those groups. However there is also a widely- recognized codicil that any intentional triggering of Godwin's Law in order to invoke its thread-ending effects will be unsuccessful.
Debka (salt to taste) says:
Exclusive Middle East sources have tracked down the top Iraqi leadership's bolt-hole. It is a large 1,600-room luxury resort with 600 meters of private sandy beach in the Mediterranean coastal town of Latakiya called Cote d'Azur De Cham Resort, prepaid and chartered in toto by Baghdad.That would sure fit the rest of the puzzle pretty well (I mean the part where the U.S. invades Syria next.) What could possibly be in it for Syria?
The group may include Saddam Hussein or his sons, but this is not confirmed.
The hotel is located close to the Assad family villa.
Top Iraqi officials are reported hiding there since March 23, four days after the US-led coalition invaded Iraq. They are guarded by a Syrian commando unit armed with anti-air missiles while Syrian naval missile boats secure the port.
Keep your eye on the ball.
Echoing a wider move away from the US dollar, the Indonesian government and the central bank, Bank Indonesia, may begin to use the euro in export-import transactions and foreign-exchange reserves.Who's next? Iran?
The statement was made by Finance Minister Boediono, Bank Indonesia governor Syahril Sabirin and senior deputy governor Anwar Nasution here on the weekend in connection with state oil company Pertamina's plan to use the euro in its trade transactions.
I think the conventional wisdom is that Iraq has learned at least something from Kosovo. Here's an interesting story of how they defeated U.S. radar seeking missles with microwave ovens. Could this be true?
If it's true that we don't seem to be able to knock out Iraqi communications infrastructure, I wonder if they might be using UWB wireless. Could the U.S. even do anything about that?
Here's an old Cringley piece on ultra wide band, if you want to know what it is.
Andrew Tyndall tirelessly tracks network news broadcasts, publishing a weekly newsletter, The Tyndall Report, with an exhaustive breakdown of minutes of coverage given to all major stories. Plus some quick analysis. Especially interesting now, I think.
Last one for now. Just something to remember:
"I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk."
Dick Cheney, "Meet the Press", March 16, 2003
Can anyone find a definitive link establishing the validity of this quote? (I'm sure it's accurate, I just want a link.) I'm looking too. I'll report back any findings.
[update: I believe this quote is not accurate. Discussion inside.]
I have no time for this today. Lots of work to do. But I hope to say something soon about the phrase "weapons of mass destruction" and, to a lesser extent, the term "terrorism." These two terms are very dangerous because they are much in use right now, and yet they both appear to have no meaning.
If I was editor of this website I'd assign Bruno with the linguistic backgrounder on these terms - both their use and misuse - and Frank with the (L.R.J influenced) piece on the danger of words with no meanings. Of course I wield no such power, so you'll have to suffer through my no doubt inferior take on these matters.
As soon as I get a few moments.