...more recent posts
Worst spring ever.
Transcript of William Gibson's speech to the Director's Guild to America.
Emergent technology is, by its very nature, out of control, and leads to unpredictable outcomes.... As indeed does the emergent realm of the digital. I prefer to view this not as the advent of some new and extraordinary weirdness, but as part of the ongoing manifestation of some very ancient and extraordinary weirdness: our gradual spinning of a sort of extended prosthetic mass nervous-system, out of some urge that was present around the cooking-fires of our earliest human ancestors.
Blogumentary trailer. (16megs via fimoculous)
Call me crazy, but it seems like having to reboot your phone is a step in the wrong direction.
I guess it's better than having to reboot your car though.
A professional photographer gets hooked on the idea of cellphone cameras: "Why will wireless camera phones revolutionize the photography industry?"
We're dogsitting a little black pug. You know, the ones with the bulging eyes and the smooshed in face. Of Men in Black fame? Anyway, her name is supposedly Fury. But that's just not right so we have taken to calling her Snorty. She's definitely a Snorty. So far no one has seen her and not been reduced to blubbering baby talking "oh you're so cute - yes you are" hysterics. It's amazing. People absolutely love her. Snort. Drool. It's like a law of physics or something.
Single guys should get this dog. I mean if you don't want to be single anymore. Who knew?
Maybe they haven't heard of blogs?
The Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is soliciting proposals to develop an ontology-based (sub)system that captures, stores, and makes accessible the flow of one person's experience in and interactions with the world in order to support a broad spectrum of associates/assistants and other system capabilities. The objective of this "LifeLog" concept is to be able to trace the "threads" of an individual's life in terms of events, states, and relationships.(via MeFi)
J. just got us tickets to the Matrix for Friday at 5:00 at 2nd ave and 12th street. Call now and get one if you want to join us.
WFMU broadcasts to the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area and beyond over 91.1 and WXHD 90.1 FM and Internet streaming. Their studio signal reaches their 90.1 transmitter in New York's lower Hudson Valley via satellite feed.
Station manager Ken Freedman installed a 5GB iPod at the transmitter in Mount Hope to cope with the inevitable loss of the satellite feed during the thunderstorm season. By using a phone to dial in to a remote control unit at the transmitter site, station staff can switch to the iPod instead of satellite audio. The Apple device is set on continuous random play from a playlist containing the extensive collection of "Live at WFMU" CDs (live music recorded at the radio station's studios).
David Weinberger takes an impassioned look at the digital rights management (DRM) mess we are getting ourselves into.
We're screwed. Not because we MP3 cowboys and cowgirls will not have to pay for content we've been "stealing." No, we're screwed because we're undercutting the basis of our shared intellectual and creative lives. For us to talk, argue, try out ideas, tear down and build up thoughts, assimilate and appropriate concepts - heck, just to be together in public - we have to grant all sorts of leeway. That's how ideas breed, how cultures get built. If any public space needs plenty of light, air, and room to play, it's the marketplace of ideas.As usual, extremely well written.
There are times when rules need to be imposed within that marketplace, whether they're international laws against bootleg CDs or the right of someone to sue for libel. But the fact that sometimes we resort to rules shouldn't lead us to think that they are the norm. In fact, leeway is the default and rules are the exception.
Fairness means knowing when to make exceptions. After all, applying rules equally is easy. Any bureaucrat can do it. It's far harder to know when to bend or even ignore the rules. That requires being sensitive to individual needs, understanding the larger context, balancing competing values, and forgiving transgressions when appropriate.
And on my favorite topic, which with great effort I don't mention every day, Ars Technica's Hannibal has posted the second part (the good part) of his IBM PowerPC 970 article. This is going to be the new brain in high end Apple machines. Should show up sometime between late June and September. Needs to be a home run, and it looks like it might be.
Finally, turning once again to Apple's use of the 970, I believe that Apple is poised for a huge overhaul of its hardware line based on this processor and a renewed relationship with IBM. I'm finally convinced that Apple's days of wandering in the wilderness with Motorola are over, and that personal computer users will be able to see the Mac as a real option again in terms of desktop, and not just portable, performance.
Bunch of interesting stuff today.
LanLink is an all volunteer project to create a coast to coast (U.S.) wireless network.
A project of this magnitude will undoubtedly take on new meanings and visions as hurdles are passed and obstacles are overcome, but today, the purpose of LL is to setup a wireless lan infrastructure in the homes of average people that spiderwebs and interconnects coast to coast using store bought wifi equipment and not at any point connect to the real Internet. A successful test of this experiment will be to ping remote hosts the farthest that is possible.5 out of 4 stars cool.
Unimportant statistic of the day: the last post I made was the 22,222 post on this site (not just my page, the whole site.) That's not counting comments.
Trepia has a new Wi-Fi instant messanger program for windows that works like Apple's rendezvous enabled iChat instant messanger in that it will allow you to connect to other Wi-Fi users in your immediate vicinity.
While programs like ICQ and AIM will show you a static list of friends, Trepia shows you a list of people who are currently in your area -- people who you most likely didn't know before! You can check out their profile and picture and strike up a conversation, knowing that if you actually want to meet them, they are never more than a few minutes away.As public Wi-Fi nodes proliferate this sort of thing is going to become very cool.
I also like Trepia's copy under the download button: "Trepia is free to use and contains no spyware or ads." Amen.
Vanu shows off software defined radio prototype running on the iPaq. Here's all the +3 slashdot comments, including this representative overview:
...What this means (in the future, with 2.4GHz+ capable devices) is that one device (be it your PDA, mobile phone, PCMCIA card) can be a GSM phone, can be a CDMA phone, can be a 3G phone, can be a CB/commercial/police radio receiver, it could even be used for 802.11b or Bluetooth. The possibilities for software radio are mind boggling. Linux is really irrelevant in the scheme of things, it's essentially just used to bolt the stuff together - it's the underlying technology that is impressive.Bring on the uber communicator. Converge damn it.
T-shirt. (via fimoculous)
Geek alert: the technorati API has been released. This will let people with too much time on their hands write scripts to mine data from the vast technorati database. In other words, this will help automate the weaving together of the weblog world.
Over the past few months, I've gotten a lot of requests from people who wanted to be able to use the Technorati database for a variety of purposes - everything from social network research to mini-applications that would send them a page or an IM whenever someone posted a link to their website. I created the Technorati API order to help foster these creative ideas and developers.
Verizon to add wi-fi to phone booths?
Crossing fingers...
Ftrain is always worth the ride:
An editor, could I persuade one to read this far, would correctly say, "where is the story?"
My weak reply: this is not a story but a marker. People will find it in the future, as they come across these pages, and they will see that after the water boiled and I drank my tea, I kept writing. 2004, 2005, 2006, 2020.
Christopher Locke is back on a roll. He puts the 'is' in disorder. Or possibly the 'or'...
New Neal Stephenson novel, Quicksilver, due out in September.
In this wonderfully inventive follow-up to his bestseller Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson brings to life a cast of unforgettable characters in a time of breathtaking genius and discovery, men and women whose exploits defined an age known as the Baroque.Preview chapter on line now.
Computer programs can be very good at textual pattern matching, but they are very bad at semantic matching. Finding every occurrence of 'rose' is no problem; finding every expression of love is impossible.
Given this, might it be the case that since information on the web is largely found by computer programs (like google,) will the web exert pressure (realized or not) on writers to standardize (fossilize?) their use of language?
In other words, will our dependence on google as a means of having our writing discovered by people who are looking for just such things, exert a pressure on us as authors to use language more uniformly? Or, again, will something like the semantic web emerge, not through marking up our writings with XML tags which specify what we "really mean", but through a general shift towards always using the same word or phrase for a single idea?
You might think of this as the emergent semantic web. Or the bottom up semantic web. But - and this is the point - you'll have trouble finding all documents on this or any other subject unless we stick to one name or the other.
Will this be good or bad for language? And for humans?
If you're experimenting with iTunes rendezvous sharing you probably want to grab this http://www.etek.chalmers.se/~lernvall/itdlgui2.tgz.
[update: just to be clear, since at least one person was confused, I didn't write this program. And I have no idea who did. Just passing along something I found useful.]
From the prurient link department: James Joyce's (really quite) dirty letters. Possibly not safe for work if your surfing is being monitored.
My friend T. bought the new 30 gig iPod. I haven't seen this reported elsewhere, but in playing with it for a few minutes I noted some severe sluggishness in the interface. Sometimes it wouldn't respond at all to the "wheel" for many seconds. This is troublesome. I wonder if he might have gotten a bad unit? Or is the 30 gig drive just too big? (He did have it full.) I'd be curious if anyone else can report on this.
The new Nokia 6800 is finally out in Europe. Soon in the States. Very interesting flip open keyboard for text entry. (Yeah, I linked to this one a long time ago.)
And the Danger HIptop (my mobile) is now out in color. Apparently, even with the color screen, battery life has slightly improved. And the seriously underpowered camera has also been slightly bumped, from 120x90 pixels to 320x240. I want more, but that's better than nothing.
But no word yet from T-Mobile on terms. Remember, they only promised flat rate data for the first year. What's going to happen? It's the flat rate pricing that makes this the current best device for me.
Here's a little something new for authors here. You can now break apart a long post, having only the first part show on your page, but the entire post show on the comment page, by inserting <more> inside your post. This will be replaced with a link to 'Read the rest of this post...' as in the post below this one.
This will only work if comments are enabled on your page.
Here's the convergence I'm watching: wireless networking, mobile computing devices, and digital identity.
I haven't said anything about digital identity, despite the numerous conversations on this topic in other blogs. (Here for instance.) The basic idea is that internet commerce is being held back because we lack strong digital identities on the web. In other words, there is no way for people on one side of a transaction to be sure who is on the other side.
I've been uninterested in this discussion mainly because I don't care that much about internet commerce. But with the rise of wireless networks I'm starting to see how important this issue will be. And not just for commerce.
"An experiment is under way in Paris that aims to turn the city into one huge Wi-Fi hot spot, making it what could be the first large wireless city in the world."
Hi Carol. Thanks for lunch.
An edited extracted from Thomas Pynchon's introduction to the new Plume (Penguin US) edition of George Orwell's 1984.
Apparently (here and here) the new iPods have an undocumented recording mode. But why is it hidden?
Hot off the press (thanks Chris!): ServerStore, an iTunes 4 internet playlist sharing database.
I also spotted this one recently: iPod tracks -> desktop. I haven't had a chance to test this yet, but apparently it lets you copy tracks from a connected iPod (right from the iPod playlist in iTunes) to your desktop. This would be a big improvement over something like Podmaster which does the same, but has to be run as a cumbersome and slow seperate application.
"Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged, people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled."