...more recent posts
I walked into the coffee shop today and Tim was sitting at the counter. "Jim" he said, grinning, "I've come over to your side." At first I couldn't figure out what he was talking about. Had he slept with a girl? No, he bought a Mac.
Short interview with the wife and two children of Philip K. Dick.
(OK, yeah, it's not that interesting, but c'mon, we're talking PKD. Any explanations are helpful.)
Outside of my coerced adventure into the land of javascript drop down menus, most of what I've been doing lately involves stripping unnecessary features out of my CMS (I never know what to call it, but it's vaguely a Content Management System.) This is for a specific implementation (the basic business site implementation) where a lot of the built in features aren't needed. And even though I was aware of this general idea, I'm still shocked to find the whole package improving the more I trim it down.
Maybe someday I'll get all the way back to zero. The most elegant solution: look for yourself and remember.
I couldn't bring myself to watch. If someone could provide very brief scoring of the speach I'd be grateful. (I mean, you watched it, right?)
Wow that's cool (requires Flash - give it a second to load.)
I've been really enjoying listening to Lemon Jelly. The first two tracks off of Lost Horizons are especially cool (Elements and Space Walk.)
I wonder if people who are really into electronic music think of this as the bubble gum pop of their world.
Tough night for the internet. A massive worm exploiting a known (and patched) hole in Microsoft SQL Server (that's a database) is doing a pretty good job of grinding the net to a halt. Here's a disassembly of the 400 or so bytes being sent by infected systems. (No, I can't make anything out of that either, but it's kind of cool to look at.)
The worm isn't doing anything (it's not trying to destroy the infected databases,) it's just broadcasting information as it spreads creating a massive denial of service type situation. Basically a giant traffic jam. Theoretically this should be pretty easy to get under control, because all outbound traffic from infected machines is directed at the same port which can just be closed.
But I still can't get to my colo'd mail server with any regularity.
I've been hiding out. Making good progress on my project, but I haven't been able to deal with anything else. Sorry if I've been ignoring you.
I'm wrestling with something. I'd say more, but that's about all I know.
The next couple posts are some of the stuff I would have been blogging if I'd been writing more recently.
Wes Felter said this a few days ago:
I have to admit that I'm skeptical of the whole Open Spectrum thing. Is there no limit to wireless capacity or is there a really large limit? If I pile up a thousand radio-of-the-future gizmos all trying to talk to each other, what actually happens? And how much do these whiz-bang smart radios of the future cost, anyway?Damn these sensible questions. I wish someone would answer him in a way that would reassure me. Is this going to turn out to be just the latest in a series of utopian visions that always seem "right around the corner" but never quite get here? Maybe there's some purpose in that.
Still, I believe this story for the minute. Once we start building radios out of software, our radio devices (cellphones, wireless computers...) will be able to reconfigure themselves on the fly, not just maximizing potential network capacity over a given area, but actually increasing it as the number of devices on the network increases. How does it do this? Unlike now, where your radio is sending and receiving signals with special devices that form the network (cellphone towers, wireless base stations...,) the new whiz-bang network will be made up of the devices themselves, which are now so smart that nearby devices can automatically configure themselves into networks without the help of centralized infrastructure (cell phone towers and telco computers,) and then route traffic for the network in the background, while still serving their original function as clients on the network.
But yeah, you have to wonder, will that really work? I just mean technically, to start. After that there's the little issue about nobody making any money from such a network. And don't forget the billions of dollars invested in present day non whiz-bang networks.