...more recent posts
Yesterday we received an upgrade to our stereo system at Rivington. Apparently the mysterious Mr. X, who is occasionally among the guests at various social functions here, could not stand the $35 boom box we had been using for the past several months. And when he sets out to fix a problem, you can be pretty sure the situation will be fixed. He called it a "community upgrade" explaining that no self respecting party host can be without a good sound system - and if the host is too lazy to fix the situation, then the community has to step in. So we opened a few bottles and spent the afternoon testing the limits of our old JBL bookshelf speakers which actually sound amazing when you drive them with a Classe Audio Seventy amp and Audio Thirty preamp. It's like getting a whole new music collection. High fidelity. I hope the neighbors are as enthusiastic.
Then we took a short cruise around the city. Great day for a drive. Up the FDR and over the 59th street bridge. Then down to the waterfront in Queens where there is a nice new park looking back towards Manhattan. Spectacular at sunset. Mr. X seemed to be conducting some sort of business deal on my cell phone as MB and I looked on in awe at the huge stripped bass someone had just pulled from the east river. "Can you eat that?" I asked, and MB just shrugged her shoulders like "Well, I guess you can..."
Then we blasted back into the city for a meal at GSI, where thanks to the Wheel they seem to think I am some kind of wine importer. I don't straighten them out. Perhaps when they notice that we drink all our wine and forgo the spit bucket they helpfully provide they will figure it out. We met Sarah and her parents who are in town from Montana. Always nice to see them. The spicy squid with celery almost blew my head off. A fine day all around.
Hmmm. I lost a post towards the bottom of the page. Well, I didn't lose it, but it was retired into the archive prematurely. It's back now. That sort of weirdness is very depressing, because it can be quite time consuming to track it down.
If you've ever wondered exactly how the bad guys go about breaking into computers, here's an interesting overview of methodologies.
fascinating New Yorker article on Ultima Online, a massively multi-player online role-playing game.
"Finally, last year, U.O. gave up on the notion of self-policing. Britannia these days exists in two parallel versions, or 'facets'—Felucca, where killing other players is O.K., and Trammel, where, except under very limited circumstances, it is not. Four-fifths of all players choose Trammel."And I'd still like some confirmation of these numbres, but apparently the video game industry is worth more than hollywood. (via robotwisdom)
Who says engineers can't write? This is from the official IETF Internet-Draft entitled Interplanetary Internet (IPN): Architectural Definition
(via /.)Desiderata of Interplanetary Internetworking
Go thoughtfully in the knowledge that all interplanetary communication derives from the modulation of radiated energy, and sometimes a planet will be between the source and the destination. Therefore rely not on end-to-end connectivity at any time, for the universe does not work that way.
Neither rely on ample bandwidth, for power is scarce out there and the bit error rates are high. Know too that signal strength drops off by the square of the distance, and there is a lot of distance.
Consider the preciousness of interplanetary communication links, and restrict access to them with all your heart. Protect also the confidentiality of application data or risk losing your customers.
Remember always that launch mass costs money. Think not, then, that you may require all the universe to adopt at once the newest technologies. Be backward compatible.
Never confuse patience with inaction. By waiting for acknowledgement to one message before sending the next, you squander tracking pass time that will never come to you again in this life. Send as much as you can, as early as you can, and meanwhile confidently await responses for as long as they may take to find their way to you.
Therefore be at peace with physics, and expect not to manage the network in closed control loops -- neither in the limiting of congestion nor in the negotiation of connection parameters nor even in on-demand access to transmission bands. Each node must make its own operating choices in its own understanding, for all the others are too far away to ask. Truly the solar system is a large place and each one of us is on his or her own. Deal with it.
S. Burleigh
Stating the Obvious gets an interesting new re-architecting. There's a really nice idea in there.
Hyperspace structures. Small (< 500K) mpeg's of a rotating hypercube and hypertorus.
Looks like booknotes is back from (short) hiatus. I found this link to punk rock and the two-way web. Nothing earth shattering, but interesting since I always think about the web in terms of deadheads.
Introduction to the Kaycee hoax. The metafilter thread where the debunking took place. Strange stuff. Metafilter itself was taken down yesterday (although maybe before, I hadn't looked in a few days) with a note that included references to this whole thing. Now it is back up. Not sure what any of this means, but it is the blog topic du jour.
Months ahead of schedule (well, ahead of the pushed back schedule) Apple begins shipping OSX preinstalled on all computers as of today.