...more recent posts
13 hours till blast off. I made a page here where I will attempt to photo blog (phlog?) the event. Theoretically I should have wireless data service the whole way. But who knows? This is my first experience with the sidekick outside of NYC.
Busy night tonight making final preparations. This has turned into a really big production. Complete with media on one of the buses. But you can get the scoop (almost) live if you check in here tomorrow.
I have to give this a much closer read, but Curious Yellow: The First Coordinated Worm Design is quite intriguing. And scary. Could someone hijack the global mind? (via aaron swartz)
Google news changed their layout a few weeks ago. I cursed the new style, without ever looking for a link to a less graphically intense version. Of course such a link is right there on the front page. Excellent. Now I have my news back the way I like it.
The bad news is that rumors predict google is going to charge for this at some point in the future.
Canon's new professional 11 megapixel camera compared with the "old" (heh!) 6 megapixel monster. How high will it go?
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!