...more recent posts
Interesting technical analysis of word frequencies in spam (linked everywhere.)
We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs is a book, available next week, written by veteran bloggers Meg(nut) Hourihan, Matt Haughey, and Paul Bausch. Blogroots.com is the web site companion to the book. A couple of chapters are on line, including Chapter 8, Using Blogs in Business.
It makes me very happy to see people making this argument (or is just an explanation?) about using blogs in the business world. That this is a good idea for businesses is obvious to me, yet I've had almost no luck in convincing anyone. I just want to build the software, I don't want to convince people they should use it. Hopefully this will help. Of course, the seminal Cluetrain Manifesto would be another book I'd recommend to help make the case for business blogs. I hope more follow.
September Wired magazine has an article about Alexander Shulgin (pg. 114.) Interesting guy. Not on line (yet.)
First Danger Hiptop review I've seen - from ZDNet:
I've been playing with the Sidekick, the first Danger-powered hiptop device (yes, that's a play on laptop), which will be available from T-Mobile Wireless (formerly VoiceStream) in late September. Believe it or not, it's actually going to cost $199 with new activation. Monthly service will run $39.95 for unlimited data--yes, you read that right, unlimited data--plus 200 minutes of peak and 1,000 minutes of night and weekend nationwide talk time.That pricing seems very good to me. MB's been asking me to get a new cell phone so she can have mine (she already used to how it works, which is a big plus for her.) I can't wait to get this thing. More from the review:
As a former BlackBerry user, there's simply no way I would choose a BlackBerry over a Sidekick...
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.