...more recent posts
Wow. This protest thing is really taking off. Another long meeting tonight. It's amazing to watch these people go. They really know what they are doing. It's like a crash course in how to have a meeting.
Assuming the GPRS network is working, I'm planning some serious live coverage of this event. Might be kind of fun.
One more long day tomorrow, and then we're off at 7:00 am Saturday. I'll start broadcasting right away. (Or is that narrowcasting?) In any case, stay tuned.
So you mean if I just update to the most recent (december 2001) iMac firmware version (2.4f), my dead monitor will come back to life? Yup. It's true.
Not sure how I missed this crucial bit of information, but I'm sure glad to have found it.
Behold! A fully operational deathst... er, iMac.
Peter Rojas breaks the open spectrum party line to the masses in today' new york times (page g7, "what's next") This is the easy to understand version of the stuff David Reed (extensively quoted in the article) has been preaching for some time. Short summary: wireless radio spectrum is not limited. In fact, with the right hardware in place, data carrying capacity increases as the number of wireless devices in a given area increases. This is promised land type stuff.
I'm writing this from my mobile (and I'd sure like some more bandwidth) so I won't include links right now, but you could search my page for 'reed' or 'mesh' or 'ad-hoc' and find lots of stuff if you are curious.
Had a nice dinner with my step sister last night. She turned me on to this information packed site on downtown NYC her company helped build. Lots of information in there (click on downtown guide from the front page.)
Wow. On Monday there was a huge Denial of Service attack against the 13 root name servers that form the core of the internet.
Vixie said only four or five of the 13 servers were able to withstand the attack and remain available to legitimate Internet traffic throughout the strike. "It was an attack against all 13 servers, which is a little more rare than an attack against any one of us," he said.Here's the slashdot thread.
Is Mitch Kapor going to save us all? You'd think so by the response to his latest project announcement: an open source personal information manager.
Our product (code-named "Chandler" after the great detective novelist Raymond Chandler), is a Personal Information Manager (PIM) intended for use in everyday information and communication tasks, such as composing and reading email, managing an appointment calendar and keeping a contact list. Because of the ease with which Chandler users can share information with others, we might call Chandler the first Interpersonal Information Manager. (The term PIM was first used in conjunction with the product Lotus Agenda in the 1980's. Chandler is the spiritual descendant of Agenda (and has a common designer in Mitch Kapor.)Mitch has a blog where he talks about what they are doing.
We are trying to make a PIM which is substantive enough and enticing enough to make people want to move to it from whatever they are currently using, which statistically is probably Microsoft Outlook.If you've ever talked to a business person about switching to unix from microsoft you already know that Outlook is what maintains the monopoly. (Well, OK, Excel and Powerpoint too, but those are easier to deal with.)
Dan Gilmore has a good non technical article that ends with this bit of profound understatement: "This is potentially a big deal."
I think people are going to cast this as the big showdown. Can open source really slay goliath? Or at least give him a bad case of heartburn? The geeks are tripping over themselves to get on board ("Oy am I drooling over the ProductManagement job enough to almost wish I lived out West...." Bill Seitz; "Just look at the architecture and feature list. I must be dreaming! This is way too good to be true!" Aaron Swartz.)
Not only will the entire code base be open source, but it's going to be built with just about every ultra hip open source technology, including python, ZODB, Jabber, RDF, and parts of the mozilla project.
This looks like a really important showdown in the final struggle. Will you control the details of your digital life, or will your digital future be locked into someone else's plan for world domination? Go Mitch!
Lots of people linking to todays Doonesbury. But this isn't the first mention of blogs, I remember blogging this one almost two months ago. Still, this one is more subject matter than mention.
Crap. I just erased about 80 pictures from the server. That was a really stupid mistake. I always read about people screwing up with rm -f but I never really though it would happen to me. I was actually 2 characters away from erasing all the pictures, so it might have been even worse.
Update: turns out this wasn't as bad as I thought. Still some loss though. I'll email people.
David Weinberger is blogging the PopTech conference. Sounds like great stuff. Right now you can tune in here. If you're in the future you can find it around here (plus maybe a little forward or back, depending on how long it goes on.)
Long John Perry Barlow on where we're at: THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC IS DEAD. HAIL THE AMERICAN EMPIRE. OR ELSE.
He makes some important points at the end (yes we were already aware) about the organizers behind the Oct. 26th marches in DC and San Francisco. We all feel like he does. We don't want to support them, but we're going anyway with the hopes of drowning those voices out.