...more recent posts
"I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone"
--Bjarne Stronstrup (originator of C++ programming language)
We went to see De la guarda last night. This is an Argentinian show put on in a beautiful old bank building right off Union Square. To start, everyone is herded into a dark room. A low fabric ceiling hangs above. The walls are dark fabric. The crowd is just standing around in the low light, not quite sure what is going to happen. It's not clear if there is a stage, or a direction to face, or an optimal place to stand in the shoulder to shoulder crowd.
And then you notice some rising ambient music. Like sounds of the jungle. And then you notice lights flickering up above the fabric of the ceiling. And other strange sounds. Is that water falling on the other side of the ceiling?
And then more lights flickering above. And then the shadows of people. Swooping. Flying up above your head, their shadows racing across the fabric roof above you. The music gets louder. The flying becomes more frantic. And then eventually the people above start to tear through the fabric of the ceiling. The music explodes. People are yelling. The whole ceiling comes down and the night of acrobatic bungie jumping Argentinian dancers running and flying and looping and spinning overhead begins. They literally dance up and around the walls. They pick a few people up from the crowd and swoop around with them overhead. Neat.
Lots of drumming. Lots of water (you get a little wet.) Lots of crowd participation. Pretty cool gimmick.
Went to a party in Booklyn last night (the 7th Ave stop on the F.) Absolutely amazing views from the Verrazano all the way around to Queens (which includes the entire New York harbor, Statue of Liberty, Red Hook in the foreground, Manhattan in the background, etc...) We were treated to a great sunset as well.
Of course I didn't have a camera. That G1 is great, but it's too big to just throw into your bag. And since I wasn't even carrying a bag last night it was definitely out of the question. Clearly I need one of those casio wrist watch cameras to fill in the gaps.
David Reed breaks it down for the FCC.
My argument is based on a simple but crucially important technical fact: the useful economic value in a communications system architecture does not inhere in some abstract “ether” that can be allocated by dividing it into disjoint frequency bands and coverage areas. Instead it is created largely by the system design choices – the choice of data switching architecture, information coding scheme, modulation scheme, antenna placement, etc.(emphasis mine.)
The most important observation about the impact of systems architecture on economic value is this: there exist networked architectures whose utility increases with the density of independent terminals (terminals are end-points, such as cellular telephones, TV sets, wireless mobile PDAs, consumer electronic devices in the home, etc.) Network architectures provide tremendous gain in communications efficiency on a systems basis – I call this cooperation gain, because it arises out of cooperative strategies among the various terminals and other elements in a networked system.
This is of little consequence (unlike the rest of the oh so important posts on this page) but I can't be the only one to have noticed that the New York Times has a reporter on the high tech beat whose byline is Jennifer 8. Lee. She's written lots of columns over the past 6 months or so. Check the front page of today's Circuits section. My question, of course, is what's with the middle initial?
First of all, I didn't think your could have a number for a name (I remember reading about somebody unsucessfully trying to change their name to a number, but maybe that was an urban myth.) But beyond that, why the period? Is her middle name really 8675309 or something? Because if it's just 8 then there shouldn't be a period. And if it's a longer number that starts with 8 - well, I don't know - shouldn't it be Jennifer 8... Lee? Or is that only if it repeats?
Or maybe it's a pseudnym for an otherwise last named Jennifer who had to perform some oval office type acts on...
Oh forget it.
Now don't get me started about the umlauts in The New Yorker.
We can always argue about motives, but the campaign against the general purpose computer is alive and well and going forward. Several major announcements occured while I was away including some insights into the grand plans of Microsoft in this area - now called Palladium (see Bob Cringely's I Told You So critique.)
(Etymological side note: Palladium - "From the Middle English Palladion, a statue of Pallas Athena believed to protect Troy..."
Well, if it was good enough to protect Troy then it - oh, no wait....)
Kuro5hin has a great overview of TCPA and Palladium. Cryptome has the full text of Microsoft's Digital rights management operating system patent. (They mean the digital rights of IP owners, not customers, although they do their best to conflate these two groups.) This is a shocking, but not surprising, end game gambit being played by the forces of control and dominance.
But my own personal view point on all this has gone from outraged to apathetic. Who cares what happens with this stuff? What's the worse case scenario? I can't watch a hollywood movie, or listen to Britney Spears unless I buy one of their "trusted" computers? Actually, I was looking for a way to ensure I didn't digest any more of their worthless crap. Or maybe it will be illegal for me to own a computer running linux? That will just give me the thrill of being a freedom fighter bravely putting myself in danger for my beliefs (things were getting a little dull around here anyway, plus, chicks dig an ethical outlaw.) Maybe they'll shut down the internet? That would probably be the only event that can get the ad hoc mesh WLAN alternative I'd like to see off the ground.
The forces for creativity and sharing have always already won. Sometimes there's just a little more to do than other times. But the busy times are often more fun. So bring it on mega-corp. Take your best shot. The force of your strike will just be redirected against you (because there is no us to strike - aren't you reading up on all this assymetrical warfare stuff?) Hopefully you'll knock yourself clean out.
Interesting analog dj turntable gone solid state digital hackery. (via /.)
I'm having the most frustrating problem on one of my client sites. None of the images are viewable in IE 5 on Mac OS X.
If I type the image URL into the address field in the browser I can view the image. But the same URL inside an img tag results in no image. How could that be?
Curiously, if the image is in the browsers cache it will display it. Clearing the cache again results in no image.
Anyone...anyone...Bueller?
Photos from Butte Montana are up. Butte is my favorite city in Montana. At the end of the 19th century it was the richest city in the West thanks to the huge copper mine it was built on top of. Lots of wealth was generated, lots of different people moved there (over 100,000 at it's peak,) and lots of big ostentatious (for the non-coastal west at least) building went on. It feels urban. Even to someone from NYC.
Today it is incredibly toxic (double superfund site.) The copper mine became a huge open pit mine, and is now completely filled up with water containing all sorts of nasty heavy metals. This one mine single handedly endangers the drinking water of the entire pacific northwest. Trees wouldn't even grow in the valley until very recently. The people are strange, even to other Montanans. MB called it a "ghost city." We all loved it.
If you're running Mozilla, you should install Mouse Gestures. They are awkward at first, but I can already tell I won't be able to surf without them once it becomes automatic. Here's a guide to what gestures control what actions in the browser. For instance, instead of clicking on the back button in your browser, just click and hold the mouse (no matter where you are on the page) and drag it to the left. Click and drag to the right to go forward. Mozilla is cool.