...more recent posts
I lived in Montana briefly many years ago. Although I wasn't there long, it made a big impression on me. Now if I'm missing it I can get a little taste of the big sky country here. (I've seen this site before, but now with the new redesign it's really looking good.) Weblogs really are everywhere.
Right now I have the feeling that a lot of people are thinking about the same problem. It might be called de-centralized network architecture. I guess Gnutella and Freenet brought these ideas to a wide audience, and now you can hear the gears churning and the light bulbs going on all over the net. Aha! Put the client and the server together, at every node, and really banish the center. WorldOS is trying to define a framework for doing just that. This page has some details about routing messages in a network without any central nodes. God, I am so excited about this stuff. It's part web architecture problem, and part deconstructive philosophy experiment. Today the web is more like several interconnected hubs (with the huge portal/search engines at the centers.) Tomorrow's web might really be a web, with messaging propagating peer to peer (to peer to peer...) and not "up" to some authority and then back "down" to a destination.
I'm really enjoying this new site. It's a news hub (with the very well designed look of xmlhack) for the enabling web authors technology field. The two-way web is where it's at, and this site hits it square on. (If you're a little foggy on the 'two-way web' idea, you can get up to speed here, but the idea is simply about enabling everyone to be a content producer.)
Adobe has released their SVG viewer plug-in for web browsers. You can download it here. I haven't installed it yet, but I played around with the beta a few months ago, and even that seemed pretty solid, so this should be ready to go. SVG stands for scalable vector graphics. Unlike bitmap graphics (which is everything on the web except for some flash stuff,) vector graphics allow for zooming with no pixelation of the image. Once SVG content is deployed, this will really mean a step up in visual quality of the web. Also, some really cool things are going to be possible with java script. It will be a little while before this really starts to happen, but it's great that Abode is pushing this forward. (Illustrator 9.0 will export SVG.)
Lots of coverage of the data haven being set up on the strange "country" of Sealand. Time must be speeding up because last year this was part of the science fiction plot of Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. And actually, the history of Sealand reads like an alternate version of parts of that story.
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Real life thriller-ish geek stories today. First up is part 4 of Cracked! (Start here for Part 1, then Part 2, then Part 3.) It's been fun following this. An interesting inside look at a giant community site system administrator trying to combat a very sophisticated cracker. A little technical, but the story flows like a suspense novel, and how else are you going to learn? Then, as if that wasn't enough of the cloak and dagger cyber stuff, Cam had this link to the story of a spammer who forged the wrong domain name. I've always wondered who these people were. Now I know way too much about them. You can too. Oh yeah, and remember, your data is not safe.
Today I spent a lot of time wandering through David McCusker's site tree dragon. He is writing a new high level scripting language. I can't understand most of what he is talking about, but I want to learn more. (This is a classic example of a personal log posting that probably nobody else would find interesting. Sort of self centered I guess, except I'm not really forcing this on anyone. I'm just documenting what is important to me as I go - and not really for anyone else (although I like the idea that people might care to read all this) but just for the discipline of formalizing some things, of choosing which bits out of my day need to be written out in a way that someone else could understand.)
Something is coming into focus for me. For a while I had my head down and was really caught up in building something. Then, although it isn't, and probably won't ever be, finished, I felt like I crossed the threshold. I took things about as far as possible given my not too incredible starting assumptions. So I started to pick my head up and sniff the air for the next thing. I'm ready to start in again (on another learning curve) but I'm a little wiser now about the necessity of picking really good problems. A good problem will take you a long way in the process of working through it. I think I'm starting to get hold of one. At least I have some sort of central nugget in hand. It feels good to turn it over in my mind, to have something to work on.
Here's John Perry Barlow on Napster. I keep going through cycles of being fed up with this whole story, and then rediscovering it again from a different angle. Add in gnutella and freenet, and the conversation can start to swerve into some interesting areas. The Barlow piece is good background.