...more recent posts
I've been letting a lot of stuff slide. Partly it's the heat. But also it's a cycle. I'm trying to think of the next thing. Either that or I'm just making excuses.
I'm trying to move into the fall with enough to keep me at my machine coding through the winter. I've been sucessful the past two years. The trick is, it has to be a good idea. It can't be just what I've done before. That's why I need this time of letting go and forgetting and wandering. But it also can't be too different or there won't be enough focus, enough momentum, to drive the heads down repetition required to actually do it. Delicate situation. Stray, but not too far.
Talking about it here is one trick to make myself come through. It's easy to decide a secret isn't worth the effort when you get to the hard part. Much harder to abandon even semi public plans.
So I'll try to say something. Part of what has been taking shape is a game. Or, some aspects of it are game like. I don't have much experience in this area. I never played computer games. I never played D & D either. Or magic. But I think I understand something.
Everquest has been in the news a lot lately, and although it has little to do with what I am vaguely starting to imagine, the articles have been really resonating for me. Hard to say more than that. I'll keep trying though. For my own sake at least.
Amazing 8 megabyte flash (mostly audio) presentation of Lawrence Lessig's speech at OS Con. He's the man. It takes about 30 minutes to listen to, but you learn everything about what's important at the intersection of law and technology. Make the time. Can we run him for president?
New Powermacs from Apple. Incremental imporvement. All dual processors. Finally two internal optical drive bays. The low end is most noteworthy: $1699 (no monitor) gets you a pretty smoking machine. Have to wait and see how much of a difference 166 mhz system bus makes. I can't imagine the IBM chip will surface (if at all) until next summer.
Just renewed this domain. It will be three years old on Wednesday. Thanks to everyone who has taken part.
I'm really getting mad at all the "terrorist profiling" stories in the news. It's like no one can think clearly any more. Not only does profiling not work, it actually opens up a huge security hole. The only arguments I hear in the news media against profiling are all based on some lame political correctness angle. That's not the point! The fact is profiling is worse than completely random searches at catching the bad guy. Why can't the media grasp this?
Here's an MIT student paper explaining why this is so. The paper is padded quite a bit (reminded me of some things I wrote back in school) with a lot of unnecessary math to make it seem more complex than it is. But the main idea is right on. If you use a profiling algorithm (like: stop all arab men) then it is trivial for your enemy to defeat this (don't send arab looking men.) D'uh.
Is blogs.salon.com making any impact? Anybody read any of them?
In related news, it looks like blogger is going to do something that may be like that as well (userland powers the salon blogs.)
Sometime later this month, the first public, large-scale, non-Pyra-run installation of Blogger will go live.
Linux Journal has the complete coverage of the RealNetworks goes open source story from the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. Well, community source, at least. All these different licenses are tricky.
I'm still not sure what to think of this. I'm used to not trusting Real. (I will say that the OS X RealPlayer beta has been solid so far in limited use. Not sure if that's a testament to Real or OS X though.) You'd better get a handle on this story if you're interested in digital streaming media.
Here's the project sound from a distance inside someone's head invention in case you missed it. Still not sure there are any positive uses for such technology.
An unverifiable bit from Debkafile:
Tuesday August 6, at 0800 hours Middle East time, US and British air bombers went into action and destroyed the Iraqi air command and control center at al-Nukhaib in the desert between Iraq and Saudi Arabia.... For the first time, the US air force used new precision-guided bombs capable of locating and destroying fiber optic systems. The existence of such weaponry was hitherto unknown.Interesting weapon. Quite useful no doubt, if it exists.
The memory hole. Full text of news stories that are pulled from circulation. Are these guys credible? Looks good to me, but I'll believe almost anything. Interesting in any case.