...more recent posts
Trepia has a new Wi-Fi instant messanger program for windows that works like Apple's rendezvous enabled iChat instant messanger in that it will allow you to connect to other Wi-Fi users in your immediate vicinity.
While programs like ICQ and AIM will show you a static list of friends, Trepia shows you a list of people who are currently in your area -- people who you most likely didn't know before! You can check out their profile and picture and strike up a conversation, knowing that if you actually want to meet them, they are never more than a few minutes away.As public Wi-Fi nodes proliferate this sort of thing is going to become very cool.
I also like Trepia's copy under the download button: "Trepia is free to use and contains no spyware or ads." Amen.
Vanu shows off software defined radio prototype running on the iPaq. Here's all the +3 slashdot comments, including this representative overview:
...What this means (in the future, with 2.4GHz+ capable devices) is that one device (be it your PDA, mobile phone, PCMCIA card) can be a GSM phone, can be a CDMA phone, can be a 3G phone, can be a CB/commercial/police radio receiver, it could even be used for 802.11b or Bluetooth. The possibilities for software radio are mind boggling. Linux is really irrelevant in the scheme of things, it's essentially just used to bolt the stuff together - it's the underlying technology that is impressive.Bring on the uber communicator. Converge damn it.
T-shirt. (via fimoculous)
Geek alert: the technorati API has been released. This will let people with too much time on their hands write scripts to mine data from the vast technorati database. In other words, this will help automate the weaving together of the weblog world.
Over the past few months, I've gotten a lot of requests from people who wanted to be able to use the Technorati database for a variety of purposes - everything from social network research to mini-applications that would send them a page or an IM whenever someone posted a link to their website. I created the Technorati API order to help foster these creative ideas and developers.
Verizon to add wi-fi to phone booths?
Crossing fingers...
Ftrain is always worth the ride:
An editor, could I persuade one to read this far, would correctly say, "where is the story?"
My weak reply: this is not a story but a marker. People will find it in the future, as they come across these pages, and they will see that after the water boiled and I drank my tea, I kept writing. 2004, 2005, 2006, 2020.
Christopher Locke is back on a roll. He puts the 'is' in disorder. Or possibly the 'or'...
New Neal Stephenson novel, Quicksilver, due out in September.
In this wonderfully inventive follow-up to his bestseller Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson brings to life a cast of unforgettable characters in a time of breathtaking genius and discovery, men and women whose exploits defined an age known as the Baroque.Preview chapter on line now.
Computer programs can be very good at textual pattern matching, but they are very bad at semantic matching. Finding every occurrence of 'rose' is no problem; finding every expression of love is impossible.
Given this, might it be the case that since information on the web is largely found by computer programs (like google,) will the web exert pressure (realized or not) on writers to standardize (fossilize?) their use of language?
In other words, will our dependence on google as a means of having our writing discovered by people who are looking for just such things, exert a pressure on us as authors to use language more uniformly? Or, again, will something like the semantic web emerge, not through marking up our writings with XML tags which specify what we "really mean", but through a general shift towards always using the same word or phrase for a single idea?
You might think of this as the emergent semantic web. Or the bottom up semantic web. But - and this is the point - you'll have trouble finding all documents on this or any other subject unless we stick to one name or the other.
Will this be good or bad for language? And for humans?
If you're experimenting with iTunes rendezvous sharing you probably want to grab this http://www.etek.chalmers.se/~lernvall/itdlgui2.tgz.
[update: just to be clear, since at least one person was confused, I didn't write this program. And I have no idea who did. Just passing along something I found useful.]