State of the Backups
May 26, 2009 | Technology
In the past few weeks a couple of folks have asked what I'm doing for data backups. Here's the story.
First, I bought a ReadyNAS NVX with RAID, so I could stop worrying about a single hard drive crash ($1,400). This was more money than I wanted to spend right now, but it forms the hub of everything data-related going forward.
[A brief digression rationalizing the expensive NAS purchase. The ReadyNAS is also an iTunes server, so I can pipe music upstairs to the big-rig stereo once I buy another gadget to connect the wifi to the stereo preamp. I like the Squeezebox Duet, but it's a little long in the tooth and I'm hoping to hold out long enough for an 802.11n version, which I have to assume they're developing and will deliver at some point. There's nothing wrong with the current version, but the rest of my network is 802.11n instead of b/g, so I'd rather wait. Someday I hope Apple builds a home media server, but the AppleTV ain't it for me, especially since even they claim it's only a hobby.]
For off-site backups I bought a NewerTech Voyager Q bare hard drive backup unit ($99), based on Dan Benjamin's review. His followup review is also useful.
I bought two WD Caviar Green 1 TB drives, and will probably buy more for rotation. Amazon has them for $109.
Then I got some WiebieTech anti-static cases to carry them around, $7 each.
I use SuperDuper! to do the actual work of copying stuff to the bare drives. I will also – soon! – make a SuperDuper! schedule to back up the laptop to the NAS. Right now I do it manually to an external hard drive and also to the off-site bare drives.
Essentially, K carries the bare drives in their anti-static cases to her office, and I ask her to bring them home when I want to do another off-site rotation. A bank safe deposit box may also be in my future to make this easier. Note that these bare drives are unencrypted, so if she or I lose a drive data is exposed. We treat them like a pile of $10,000 bills. I.e., don't leave them in the car while going to the gym.
The NAS is currently a 1TB setup (two 1TB drives in a mirrored RAID config) with two empty drive bays. So right now I can back that up to an external 1TB drive. But when I add another 1TB drive to the NAS it will be a 2TB setup (with one empty drive bay). Then I'll need a $300 2TB drive for off-site backup. If I get to a 4TB NAS setup I'm hoping they have 4TB drives, or that I can easily split the data and backup to two 2TB external drives.
My brother, crazier than I am but also with more reason to go the extra mile, actually bought a second NAS and a foam-padded hard case to hold it, and backs up his primary NAS to the secondary one, taking the second one to and from the office. That's certainly the most robust method, and if one goes down, there's no restore - just plug it in and give it the same IP address. But that's an expensive solution.
The online backup stuff I looked at, including the ReadyNAS Vault service, ended up pretty expensive, around $125/month for 250GB. If you don't have all that much data check out JungleDisk which is an interface to Amazon's cloud storage. It's $0.15/GB/month, and gets good reviews. It takes a long time for initial upload but it's probably fast enough on the nightly deltas.
The biggest thing I'm worried about right now is a fire or theft of the NAS. I've probably got a decent weekly schedule going for off-sites, so the impact would vary depending on exactly when disaster struck. I've thought about moving the NAS out of the office, maybe hidden in the basement ceiling far away from the furnace, possibly near a basement window. Then your typical pawn-shop house thieves (or maybe former investment bankers) would be less likely to rip it just because it's there, since it wouldn't be visible and blinking its lights at them, looking all valuable and come-hither. And if the house were burning down I could potentially break the window, root around and yank the thing out of the ceiling. I suppose if the house were going to be empty for more than a weekend I'd do a round of off-site backups and move the disconnected NAS and hide it somewhere. But not in a dresser or a closet, since that's the first place to look for valuables.
If I ever build a house or an office outbuilding, I'm definitely making a secret room, or at least a secret storage stash for stuff like this.
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Apple WWDC 2009
April 7, 2009 | People & Society | Software | Technology
If you read my post last year and want to make plans, here's the link.
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Mostly Twittering
October 14, 2008 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Technology
Thoughts are shorter-form these days. Twitter is a good place to follow me. Example:
New Macbook video: http://bit.ly/1xNvDH Awesome emo marketing, utter techporn, richly deserves to be parodied.
So there's that....
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Up and Out (1:40)
June 10, 2008 | Life | Technology
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Hot Dating Tip [SF, CA, USA]
June 9, 2008 | People & Society | Software | Technology
It's sweeping generalizations day at Notio!
I guess it's kind of a semi-secret, but once you crack the code, dating geeks is a really good move. Granted, the male/female ratio is unbalanced – but generally, if you're a woman and you're looking for a guy, you could do a heck of a lot worse than finding a cool geek to hang out with. The girl geeks tend to be really cool too, there are just fewer of them.
Here's a post that gives you the downlow howto. The comments there flesh it out. Here's another one a little more cliched. But their summary is good:
Why Geek Dudes Rule
- They are generally available.
- Other women will tend not to steal them.
- They can fix things.
- Your parents will love them.
- They're smart.
This post is decent too. The classic essay on dating geeks is called Dating an Apple Developer by Emily Hambidge, but the link is currently broken; maybe it will come back.
The reason I bring it all up is, this week in San Francisco CA, there are 5,200 Macintosh and iPhone developers – programmers, engineers, ubergeeks – mostly age ~16 to ~50, congregating downtown at The Moscone Center for Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC). These are the people who designed and built things like the iMac and the iPod and the iPhone. There are over 1,000 Apple engineers (SF local) on-site. As Kathryn said this weekend, "Hot dating pool."
Even better, Apple has provided a two-hour keynote stream live on the Internet. Why would you want to spend two hours watching Steve Jobs and Scott Forstall and Phil Schiller (and a dozen other geeky guys) do technology demos? Well, when you go crawling the hotels and pubs around Moscone, this is what everyone will be talking about. It's rocking their world. They're hanging with their peeps, and life is good. The video is two hours of ultimate inside conversation starters, background info, and geek dude archetypes. It's like a briefing book for engaging with the hot geeks this week.
If you're single in SF, go down to the Moscone at the end of the day and follow the packs of geeks to the pizza and beer joints, and ask them what's cool at the conference, or what cool iPhone apps they've seen.
And if you miss this year, it's an annual event, usually in June, so just come another time.
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Pioneers vs Feudalists
May 2, 2008 | People & Society | Technology
Fascinating 1982 essay by Jim Bowery.
Pioneers want to be left alone to do their work and enjoy its fruits. Feudalists say "no man is an island" and feel the pioneer is a "hick" or worse, an escapist. Feudalists view themselves as lords and pioneers as serfs. Pioneers view feudalists as either irrelevant or as some sort of inevitable creeping crud devouring everything in its path. At their best, feudalists represent the stable balance and harmony exhibited by Eastern philosophy. At their worst, feudalists represent the tyrannical predation of pioneers unable to escape domination. At their best, pioneers represent the freedom, diversity and respect for the individual represented by Western philosophy. At their worst, pioneers represent the inefficient, destructive exploitation of virgin environs. [...]
In addition to the normal modes of organizational management, new modes will spring up that are impractical outside of an information utility. Perhaps the most important example involves the way individuals are given authority within organizations. Traditional organizations select authority via a top-down, authoritarian system or via a bottom-up democratic system. The authoritarian system is more efficient than the democratic system, but it is also more vulnerable to mistakes and corruption. The democratic system gets harder to maintain the larger it gets. People have a natural limit to the number of people they can effectively associate with. In large representative democracies, such as our government, a national union, etc. virtually no one voting for a candidate knows the candidate personally. This, combined with the event called "election" creates the "campaign" where the virtues of democracy are almost entirely subverted by its vices.
Bowery authored one of the first electronic mail systems (PLATO, 1974), and the basis for Postscript (and thus laser printing), among other things. Found via .
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FYI
March 28, 2008 | Life | Software | Technology
WinXP (hello, ActiveX) & IE7 (welcome, Acrobat Reader 8.1.2) running Online Quickbooks, via Parallels and Mac OS X running on a MacBook Pro, prints checks no problem on the HP color laser connected via JetDirect and Ethernet. Astounding.
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Power of the Internet, Part MMMXXCLLVI
March 24, 2008 | Technology
Question at photo.net:
Has any one else expeienced the following and if so, how did you correct? I was shooting martial arts yesterday inside against a back drop. Camera was set at ISO of 1250, aperture priority at F2.8 1/640 in Raw, no flash, used continuous lighting. I was shooting high speed (CH - 6FPS). Problem was different frames in the sequence had different white balance. One or two would be dead on and several would be much yellower. I tried both auto WB and preset. I know I can fix in Photoshop, but would like to get right in camera.
Answer, 2 hours later:
You are most likely experiencing fluctuations in the electrical cycle of the lighting. To get it right in camera you will have to set your exposures based on the 60 hertz cycle (50 hertz cycle in Europe); so you have to select Manual Exposure mode and choose 1/15, 1/30, 1/60, 1/125, 1/250, 1/500, 1/1000, etc. Most people don't realize that when using Aperture priority you get slight variations in shutter speeds; so this this should avoided when getting exact shutter speeds is critical.
Then follow the example shots and comparison histograms. Amazing.
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U23D at IMAX
March 13, 2008 | Arts & Culture | People & Society | Technology
One good thing about living in the society of the spectacle is that every once in a while it produces something truly mind-blowing. In this case, a U2 concert movie filmed in a new 3D technology, playing on the huge IMAX screens. Unbelievably good.
The experience is nothing like previous 3D movies. This is absolutely convincing, beautiful and glorious, with presence and immediacy. Band members exist in 3-space, walking around, moving toward and away from you. The drum kit looked especially impressive, with a depth and lighting that you just have never seen on screen before.
The technology is produced by 3ality Digital. Here's a semi-technical article on the production from Film & Video magazine's January issue. Even better, this companion article on software post-production has a lot of interesting details:
The toolset also allows for multiple convergence points. “This is something that doesn’t make sense at all in 2D,” says Postley. “You can have not only multiple 3D layers, but each one of the layers has a different focal plane or convergence point. If I took a shot of Bono, a shot of Edge and so on into editing, I can cut up the images and layer them to make them look like they’re standing in the same depth in the screen. It’s a 3D effect for which there is no 2D corollary.”
Here's a page written by a guy hired to do the Stereoscopic Depth Balancing:
Because so much of the project was edited in fast paced, "MTV" type cuts, and almost every scene involved multiple layers and special effect composites, we were faced with continuous alignment and dynamic artistic placement issues. This gave us opportunities to experiment with and learn from freely floating objects, people and backgrounds in a "dream-like" visual montage. We learned to "hand off" changes of depth from near to far and back again, smoothly guiding the eyes from scene to scene. The result is comfortable viewing through disolves and quick cuts, and an 84 minute movie that doesn't strain the eyes or induce headaches.
The sound also rocks hard. The clarity and auditory spatial focus seem to follow the visual focus. And the lighting is very dramatic. Crisp everywhere, with lots of variation and shading, as well as the usual knockout punches that concert light can deliver.
It's simply a tour de force of concert movie immersion. I certainly want to see it again and get the perfect seat, half-way up in the center. Kathryn and I saw this in Baltimore and sat low, in the 3rd or 4th row, far off to the side – pretty bad seats, and it was still impressive.
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Fully Immersed in Something
February 1, 2008 | Arts & Culture | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Technology
For when you truly have money to burn, Ultra Geeky Home Cinemas.
Instead, perhaps consider this? (All 4:21 are worth it, lyrics and images.)
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iPhone Guitar
January 25, 2008 | Technology
More hacking from today's youth: Hacking the iPhone to make it into a guitar. Amazing.
Feeling very middle-aged this morning.
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Head-Tracking VR with Wii Remote
January 25, 2008 | Technology
Super-duper video (5:00) of Carnegie-Mellon student Johnny Lee demonstrating how to hack the Wii remote and sensor bar to demonstrate 3D images from a television screen. Very clear presentation, with several opportunities to say, "Wow!" Really geeky cool. Good job, Johnny Lee.
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On Twitter
January 23, 2008 | Arts & Culture | People & Society | Software | Technology
rentzsch: yay morphed a client meeting into client work-time. "Nothing new to talk about, how about I just keep working?" "Sure." I love sane clients
I never understood Twitter. I checked it out way back when, probably around when it first started, readin' the blogs and all, and I just didn't get it. "Okay, you're supposed to answer the question, 'What are you doing?' – I guess you post from mobile phones or something – SMS, I think that's a phone thing – because posts are limited to 140 characters! What can be said in 140 chars? Well, maybe someone will probably use it."
I signed up for an account though, mostly to landgrab the esteemed and coveted notio member name. I'm not sure I ever went back, even after I read about Twitter taking off and getting popular. I just figured, "I don't really have a modern phone, pretty sure it doesn't do SMS, and gosh ain't the kids just crazy these days with their Internets??"
Then in early January a friend was flying out to Iowa, and he said, "I'm on Twitter BTW. I usually post when I travel." And I said, "What is the deal with Twitter? I just don't get it." He said, "You have to get a desktop client, like Twitterific. Then subscribe to a few people, look at my friends and then look at their friends and subscribe to the interesting ones. You can't use the website this way, you need the integrated view. They're calling my flight, gotta go."
So I downloaded Twitterific, and did what he said, and it only took about half a day, before, suddenly – bing! – the bell rang inside my head. It turns out that keeping Twitterific on the the background is like sitting in a cafe where everyone there is a friend. The 140 char "restriction" drove behavior toward a new style of online banter, sort of a synthetic conversation made up of everyone announcing presence to each other. It's not really better or worse, it's just really different.
I "followed" my friend over two days, as he made his way through his business trip. Here are some examples to give you a sense of the flow:
It's Jan 2nd, can we stop the Christmas music playing at the airport yet?Delayed twice already. Looks like I'm missing my connection.
Can someone at Gate 36 in Cincinatti please tell the woman cutting her nails in public that it is disgusting.
Next to Mike Wallace while checking in at the Marriott.
Shorter than I expected.
DSL line just went down... to the backup we go.
Up and running on the backup DSL. That was a little stressful... but better now than 8:00
Romney has conceded Iowa
They are calling it for Obama here.
Adam Nagourney is an intense typist.
The live band at the Ron Paul party next door is playing "When will I be loved"
Teardown time.
Done. I'm outta here.
Happy to see and hard to beleive but the airport is totally mellow.
It's got its own vibe, doesn't it? Poetic, in a way. I had a real sense of what was going on in his life. A tight connection, over two days. And each of those "tweets" was read in-line with several other folks on-going comments and announcements. When people subscribe to each other's tweets you often see people reply to each other, in public, using the "@" to cue the recipient, as in, "@notio are you making a point?"
All this just goes to say that Twitter is an interesting place to play, and I missed it the first time because I tried to box it into existing mental models. On its own terms it's radical and super-interesting. For instance, back to that quote from the beginning:
rentzsch: yay morphed a client meeting into client work-time. "Nothing new to talk about, how about I just keep working?" "Sure." I love sane clients
Anyone who has ever worked in a professional services capacity will recognize several nuggets of humorized truth in rentzsch's tweet. It conveyed to me a complete emotional state. I laughed out loud, smiled, and when I happened to see Twitterific ask, "What are you doing?" I wrote, "Writing about twitterific"
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Technolust, defined
January 15, 2008 | Products & Opportunites | Technology
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MBA in Guesswork
January 1, 2008 | Business & Commerce | Technology
Good quote from a commencement speech by Bruce Eckel:
Management is much harder than technology because it involves virtually no deterministic factors. It's all guesswork, so if you don't have good intuition you'll probably make stupid decisions.
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See Change, Part 1
December 11, 2007 | Life | Technology
I remember when I started wearing glasses, in third grade (1970). These days I think they test kids a lot younger, but back in the day that was the first test I took and I needed glasses pretty badly. I used to always sit in the last row of class, and on that first day with glasses I went to my normal seat and was amazed when the teacher started on her material.
I couldn't believe it – she was writing stuff on the wall up there!! All this time I thought she was just telling us stuff, I had no idea she was writing things on a "blackboard" and pulling maps down from rollers. Wow.
I told her this at morning break, and she looked at me funny, in a way I ow recognize as disbelief, and moved my seat to the second row, permanently. I forget if it was her or my Dad who said, "No wonder your handwriting is so bad." [And people ask, "How did you decide to study psychoacoustics in college?"]
Today, 37 years later, my prescription was nearly -10 in the right eye and nearly-11 in the left, including some astigmatism in the left eye. If 20/20 is normal" vision, this corresponds to approximately 20/2,000. What other people could see at 2,000 feet, I could only see at 20 feet. The problem with lenses this strong is that the light is distorted by the lens except at the very center. With a strong lens, that center area is very small. So as my eyes scanned across a page of text, the eye would see distorted, then focused, then distorted text. The brain can process it, but it takes more cycles, and it's fatiguing. I used to be the fastest reader I know, these days, not so much.
Of course, there's all the usual reasons why wearing glasses sucks: Raindrops in the rain, fogging up when you walk inside during the winter (six months, here in New Hampshire), and getting smudged with every kiss, etcetera.
So, after five years of occasional research and consideration, last Thursday I had Lasik surgery at Laservue in Montreal. Technically, in their marketing-speak, thin-flap, high-definition, custom-wavefront Lasik. Here's the story.
It's a very modern clinic, on the second floor of a medical office building. The area I saw was about half the floor. It appears they have most of the whole floor, but we weren't in the other half.
I checked in at 1 PM. I gave them the patient consent form, checked my basic information, and gave them my hotel information. After a short wait, a technician took me to what would be the first of six testing and treatment rooms. She started with the CRS-Master wavefront measurement and a standard refractive test. This created a computer map of the topology of each eye, and programs the laser how to do its work. We moved to a second room and she measured the thickness of my cornea (and the curvature too, I think). Then we went to a third room, much like a standard optometrist office, where, in fact, an optometrist conducted the standard subjective eye exam.
After confirming that indeed I was a candidate for surgery (verifying the pre-testing dne by my local eye doctor), and confirming that indeed I would like to have the surgery done, they sent me to billing where I signed the billing release and ran the Visa card. $2,400 Canadian, currently with a ~10% discount rate to the US dollar.
She directed me to a second waiting room, and soon the two doctors came out to have a discussion about my supposed allergy to Proparicaine HCL, a common eye numbing solution. Long story short, they were pretty darn sure I wasn't allergic, but had a vasovagal syncope, common among young men, which is when I was originally diagnosed. They asked a few other questions, nodding and looking at each other knowingly, until one finally said, "Classic." They would put a single drop into each eye and look for a reaction, but didn't expect one.
They took me to another room where a paramedic asked me to lay on the table. I said, "This is it, right? This is probably the last chance to use the bathroom before surgery?" It was happening kind of fast at this point, and it suddenly occurred to me that, you know, there was a certain amount of fear, and, well, peeing my pants would be unfortunate. So I ran off to the restroom, whilst Kathryn, the nurse, and the doctors had a brief laugh. "That's certainly a nervous pee," he said. As it turned out, I'm glad I went.
So then I'm back in pre-op, laying on the table, being told, "Okay, look straight up (drop into each eye), look up toward me [she was standing behind me, at the head of the table] (another drop), look down at your shoes (drop, drop)." This went on for several rounds, and if you go read anything about the Lasik surgery procedure, you will know why they want the eyes good and numb. At one point I was unable to look down at my shoes. I tried, but couldn't seem to do it, and I think at that point they know they've got enough in there.
Next, stand up, a little weirded out by the heavy eye numbing, and the next thing you know I'm laying on the table of the Zeiss MEL-80, an excimer laser.
At this point you can see my sleeve rolled up – they had given me a shot of Atropine, to control that vasovagal syncope, and on the television screen you can just barely make out a close up of one of my eyes under the laser. And how does the laser work, exactly?
Rather than burning or cutting material, the excimer laser adds enough energy to disrupt the molecular bonds of the surface tissue, which effectively disintegrates into the air in a tightly controlled manner through ablation rather than burning. Thus excimer lasers have the useful property that they can remove exceptionally fine layers of surface material with almost no heating or change to the remainder of the material which is left intact.
Here is what I remember of the surgery itself. All of this happened in less than ten minutes, maybe five or six. I lay on the table, and they put the bolster under my knees. The table is motorized and it rotates me under the laser. I get the shot. I am positioned to work on the right eye first. They put a clamp on my eyelid to hold it open. They tell me to look at the green spot – which is actually a wide green pattern, kind of like a snowy TV screen, or a 2D barcode. The nurse says, "Now we will let you hear the sounds of the surgery, so they will be familiar. First, the [name I forgot] will position your eye, then the microkeratome will make a sound [buzzing sound], then, finally, the laser will make a high-pitched sound." The doctor held my head. The second doctor took my pulse. The microkeratome was lowered toward my eye. The nurse called out two numbers, something like, "436, 528." The doctor said, "Lower," which I took to be a confirmation, or a "Go" statement, rather than a directive.The buzzing started. My sight went very blurry. "Keep staring at the center of the green dot." I thought, "No turning back now." Funny time to think that, but whatever. The buzzing stopped. Through blurry vision I saw a clear sheet with a hole in it placed over my eye, probably a sort of bib to protect the eye from debris. The high-pitched sound began.
I did a lot of reading about all this, over five years, but no one, nowhere, told me there would be a smell, like burning hair. So I stopped breathing through my nose.
A few seconds later, at most a minute or two of ablation, the doctor said, "Perfect." The laser stopped, he removed the protective sheet, the flap went back onto my cornea, and he started putting drops in my eye while it sealed in place, which took maybe 10 - 30 seconds. The table repositioned me for left eye treatment, and we began again. The left eye took a bit longer because it was a stronger correction. I was twitchier, and tried to focus on my breathing.
And then, the table moved me out from under the laser, and the doctor said, "Aren't you glad you don't have four eyes?" which is a very funny double entendre, if you think about it. Even at this moment, through blurry, wet eyes, I could tell the light was entering my eyes totally differently.
They walked me across the hall to a typical optometrist setup, and did a close inspection of each eye. My left eye had a 'piece of mucus' he carefully brushed away – this could have been a euphemism for making sure the edge of the flap was not curling up. In any case, he did that, said, "Perfect," and they taped plastic shields over my eyes, which I wore until the next morning. I got some basic instructions, and we walked down the hall, got our coats, and some water, and drove out of the parking lot at about 2 PM, one hour after checking in.
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Not Yet Within Range
February 28, 2007 | Arts & Culture | Life | Technology
For some reason, I am now craving a Leica M8 digital rangefinder camera, with the 16-18-21mm, the 28-35-50mm, and the 90mm lenses.
This is absurd, since that would be about $15,000 in camera equipment, well outside not only my budget, but also my socio-economic caste.
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Stop Buying This Crap
February 15, 2007 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Technology
Rant, defined.
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Rapid Serial Visual Presentation
February 11, 2007 | Arts & Culture | Software | Technology
Reading this interview with Cory Doctorow (by RU Sirius, nonetheless), I discovered Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (of text).
The speed-read shows you one word at a time, and it shows them at a speed that’s determined by a little slider. And it pauses a little after a comma, and longer after a period, and longer after a paragraph break. And you can crank it way up and it just rockets past. And you’re getting every word. It’s kind of meant for very small screens, and it really feels like you’re doing something weird to your brain. It really feels like you’re tweaking your cognition in ways that it was not intended to be tweaked. It’s very transhuman.
Worth researching, methought. If you want to see a simple example without loading your own text, here is Cory's book Eastern Standard Tribe pre-loaded into SpeedReader online. Just go to that link and move the slider to the right and set the speed you want. Following are brief instructions to experience RSVP with any text you want.
Download this simple Java-based app that runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux. Then grab some text. I used the text file of Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks, but you can use any plain text file you want. Dump the text into the "speederText.txt" file, add "START_SPEEDER" at the top of the file, save it, and open "textExample.html" in your web browser.
The first thing I notice, reading the Acknowledgments, is that, hehehe, the word "I" is all but invisible. I imagine people hear that invisibility too, when you write with a lot of "I's" in your sentences. So I think I should probably stop using "I" when I express myself.
After ten minutes of play, is there is a difference in perception between fiction and non-fiction? Cory's book seems easier to "read" than Yochai's, but the in addition to being non-fiction, Wealth is written from a legal perspective. It could simply be more dense, no matter slow or fast.
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Web 2.0 In Just Under 5 Minutes
February 7, 2007 | Arts & Culture | People & Society | Technology
Tour de force video explaining how Web 2.0 is changing the nature of online interaction.
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Know Your Cell Phone
December 3, 2006 | People & Society | Technology
Did you know that when you turn your cell phone "off" it is not actually off?
Well, I had previously heard a rumor that the GPS (global positioning system) stuff was still available when a cell phone was "off," enabling it to be used as a tracking device. But that was a rumor, and I hadn't taken the time to research it.
Today comes news, from reliable sources like court documents, that in fact the microphone can be used when the phone is "off."
The U.S. Commerce Department's security office warns that "a cellular telephone can be turned into a microphone and transmitter for the purpose of listening to conversations in the vicinity of the phone." An article in the Financial Times last year said mobile providers can "remotely install a piece of software on to any handset, without the owner's knowledge, which will activate the microphone even when its owner is not making a call."
Pretty amazing, huh? Lest you think this is all science fiction, note that the court opinion regarded the admissibility of said evidence against a mafia crime family. So it's been done, is being done, and is being admitted in court.
Of course, if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to worry about, right?
A BBC article from 2004 reported that intelligence agencies routinely employ the remote-activiation method. "A mobile sitting on the desk of a politician or businessman can act as a powerful, undetectable bug," the article said, "enabling them to be activated at a later date to pick up sounds even when the receiver is down."
Other mobile providers were reluctant to talk about this kind of surveillance. Verizon Wireless said only that it "works closely with law enforcement and public safety officials. When presented with legally authorized orders, we assist law enforcement in every way possible."
Oh, and that really neat OnStar "safety net" in your car?
Surreptitious activation of built-in microphones by the FBI has been done before. A 2003 lawsuit revealed that the FBI was able to surreptitiously turn on the built-in microphones in automotive systems like General Motors' OnStar to snoop on passengers' conversations. When FBI agents remotely activated the system and were listening in, passengers in the vehicle could not tell that their conversations were being monitored
I feel so safe I can hardly stand it.
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Connect the Dots
October 16, 2006 | Governance | People & Society | Technology
The US election is November 7th. Three weeks away. Read this, then read this. Then, spend 12 minutes and watch this testimony under oath from a computer programmer who was hired to write software to flip the vote in electronic voting machines. Scary? Well, even worse is that he was hired by Tom Feeney, the Speaker of the House of Florida at the time, currently a US Representative.
Update: via TPM: Department of amazing coincidences: Saddam verdict to be read out on November 5th.
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Getting Connected
October 16, 2006 | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Technology
Classic Steve Jobs quote:
Microsoft has announced its new iPod competitor, Zune. It says that this device is all about building communities. Are you worried?
In a word, no. I've seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you've gone through all that, the girl's got up and left! You're much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you're connected with about two feet of headphone cable.
The guy sure knows how to give good media.
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Gadgetoff
October 11, 2006 | Arts & Culture | People & Society | Technology
The New Yorker reports on this year's Gadgetoff event:
When asked what he planned to do with his three and a half minutes, he said, “I’m going to demonstrate how you can transfer data faster with snails than with broadband.”
Then he showed a slide of a snail hitched to a tiny chariot with DVDs for wheels. If each disk contains 4.7 gigabytes of data, and if the snail (chasing a scrap of lettuce) travels at 0.000023 metres per second, the snail-system performance rate is over thirty-seven megabits per second. That blows ADSL out of the water.
Also: robot soccer, magic lock-picking keys, and an "enormous vibrating-balls organ."
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The iPod Suit
September 14, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Products & Opportunites | Technology
From Eleksen, the iPod suit:
The Bagir suit jacket integrates Eleksen’s ElekTex® smart fabric touchpad technology, which transforms a lapel into a five-button electronic control panel. The ElekTex-enabled iPod Suit is both fashionable and functional. The suit is machine-washable and wrinkle-resistant, making it the ideal choice for today’s music-savvy and style conscious business professionals.
My life is now complete.
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Quote of the Day
September 14, 2006 | Products & Opportunites | Technology
John Gruber, on Steve Jobs:
Remember his on-stage demo last year [of the Motorola Rokr] iTunes-compatible phone? His contempt for the device was palpable; when he failed to successfully switch from song playback to accept a call, he seemed poised to just toss the thing off-stage and cry out that it was a piece of garbage.
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The Difference a ".." Makes
August 1, 2006 | Life | Software | Technology
Unbelievably crazy-busy day. At one point in the morning, Adrian was working on a website redesign, Marty was starting the v4.1 SFTP programming, Anne was catching me up on her sales work and the plan for August, and I'm thinking, "It used to be that I came to this office and it was mine alone and it was quiet and I could work for hours without interruption." Then Chris walked in to pick up his CDs and we talked about Radial for a few minutes. I looked around and there were five of us, three working on my projects and me wanting to escape and go talk music for a few hours. Insane.
So let's skip over the middle of the day, including the improvisational client meeting, the friendly walk back afterwards, the guilty pleasure of a massage mid-day, the haircut, and the work-dodging visit to Strings. I went to the post office and back to work. Oh, wow, now it's 5:30—is that still "mid-day??"
So I walk in and Marty is coding Perl, Adrian is coding CSS, and Anne is rearranging the office, having taken all the boxes to the basement, set up another desk in the corner, swapped locations of the round table and the printer, consolidated the office supplies, reset my filing space, measured for window shades, and generally cleaned up virtually everything. She's a little aggressive that way—I mean, I had done a thorough cleaning when I moved into the place in 1999, does it really need it again already?? Anyway, now four people can work there, maybe five, and while it might not be exactly private or spacious it certainly looks like a startup scene.
So by 6 PM all the slackers cleared out of there and we could get some work done. After just barely finishing the brain-meltingly complicated testing for version 4.0 (and, truth be told, it's not quite exactly totally done until I finish some UI changes and write the release notes and perform one last round of basic testing on the staging site) we launched into version 4.1, which has the SFTP support.
SFTP stands for secure FTP, and basically it tunnels insecure FTP over a secure encrypted SSH connection. Crypto is like the hardest thing in computing, and luckily Scott could get all the special pre-built binaries installed on Sunday so we could get right at it this week.
The first thing we needed was a server account where we could publish files via SFTP. We got that going, but it stopped working. We tried from another machine but couldn't get connected to the net. I wondered about the firewall, and messed around with some settings there. Didn't help. (Red herring: if it worked once, it wasn't the firewall.) Marty took the laptop outdoors to get some free Ivy League wi-fi, and it worked out on the porch even at 100 degrees and high humidity. So we messed around with the Ethernet routing and got the laptop connected and verified that it could SFTP in, but our development box couldn't. I had a flash that they were filtering our IP address because of our bad login attempts, and convinced Marty that it was worth emailing them to check. Ten minutes later, yes indeed. Notio shoots; scores. Okay, so now we can log in from both machines.
You probably can't believe you're still reading this.
So then I configured our software to publish to this now-working server. The target working directory path was "../www/workspace/pivot" We verified that when we logged in manually this path worked. We tested a publish run, and it failed. Well, off to look at logs, etc. Iterate on verifying where the code is failing. Etc.
Long story short, after, who knows? an hour? half an hour? we realized that logging in via SFTP put you in a different location than logging in via FTP. Really? Test. Yes, it's true. Logging in via SFTP you need to use "../www/workspace/pivot" but logging in via FTP you need "www/workspace/pivot" And that's the difference a ".." makes. It's sensible, one you realize that FTP typically sandboxes you into a location amenable to a webserver, whereas SFTP is actually using SSH, which is typically dropping you into your home directory, only a subdirectory of which is wired to the webserver. Oy vey.
So we need to have two config variables, one for FTP and one for SFTP. Now we know. Then we spent half an hour talking local search dev models, engineering talent availability, funding options, various complications, etc.
At 8 PM I went to the Coop to get dinner, technically supper, and came home to have a beer and eat and write this and try to chill enough to go to sleep. So much got done today, but exactly zero on my list. The next two days have to be super-productive, or the clients will have my head. Wish me luck.
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IPtables is Fun!
July 29, 2006 | Technology
Highly technical Internet practical joke. If you don't get the tech stuff at the top, scroll down to the resulting images. Very amusing.
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Tesla Roadster
July 26, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Technology
Now here's an electric car worth waiting for. Lots of new here. It will be sold over the web starting next summer. According to their blog they have engaged Lotus for key contract engineering skills.
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AI@50
July 13, 2006 | Arts & Culture | People & Society | Software | Technology
Meg Houston Maker is doing some fantastic live blogging of the Dartmouth AI@50 conference.
This gathering celebrates, explores, and, to an extent, reprises the original Dartmouth Summer Research Project in artificial intelligence of 1956, which proceeded "on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it." John McCarthy, then a Dartmouth mathematics professor, and his colleagues Marvin Minsky (Harvard), Nathaniel Rochester (IBM), and Claude Shannon (Bell Labs) coined the term "artificial intelligence" in their funding proposal to highlight the role computers may play in simulating (or bettering) human intelligence.
It's some of the best live blogging I've ever seen — she could do this for a living.
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Nine Lives Is Nine Too Many
July 13, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Technology
If the Internet turns into this, then I'm switching it off. Please, god, no.
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Examples of Categories
July 11, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Life | Nature & Environment | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Science | Software | Technology
Art: Leonard Cohen and Sonny Rollins on live TV. (Thanks Jon.)
Commerce: Do Patents Encourage or Stifle Innovation?
Culture: On media elitism and the "derivative" myth
Technology: On playing with my Holux GPS unit...
Cool: Velcro Being Pulled Apart
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Make Something People Want
July 9, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Software | Technology
I hesitate to point to every Paul Graham essay that comes along, but these links are useful for future research. Excerpts:
The idea of building something popular then figuring out how to make money from it was born in the Bubble. It sounds irresponsible, but it works. Requiring founders to have a carefully worked out plan for making money is not hard-headed business sense. It's what hackers call "premature optimization." The really important thing is to make something people want.
Startups will be ever more common because they're now so cheap to start. In most of the startups we fund, the biggest expense in the first year is simply food and rent. It costs little more to start a startup than to hang around doing nothing. And instead of having to go work in a cubicle in some office park, you get to work with your friends on your own project. If you succeed, you get rich.
We look for two things in startup founders: brains and commitment. One thing we've learned in this past year is that commitment matters more than we thought, and brains less. The founders can't be stupid, but as long as they're over a certain threshold, the most important thing is commitment.
A sense of design is also a big advantage. Big companies treat design almost as if you could paint it on after the fact. A hacker with design sense is really dangerous, especially as a startup founder. We don't care too much about the initial idea, except as evidence of brains and commitment. The idea will change. What matters most is that the founders really want to do a startup.
A lot of the most characteristically lame startups of the Bubble were that way because they were started by business guys, who then went looking for hackers to implement their ideas. That model may have worked in 1960, but it didn't work so well in 1998, and it gets more obsolete every year. I think the future belongs to the hackers. Technology is an ever larger component of business, so of course power is shifting to the people who are experts in that, rather than management or finance.
As always, there's more via the link.
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Backup Brain
July 6, 2006 | Software | Technology
So I don't have to spend twenty minutes with Google-fu the next time I'm looking for this, here are two in-depth articles on Mac OSX backup.
1) The State of Backup and Cloning Tools under Mac OS X
2) Mac Backup Software Harmful
Summary: 1) It's a complicated problem. 2) Use SuperDuper.
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Great Bass, Lesh Philling
July 4, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | Technology
Right up until Sunday, the day of the show, I wasn't sure if I'd go to see Phil Lesh & Friends at SPAC. I'd been sick for two weeks, the first week full-blown, with all symptoms known to (wo)man, and a second full week with the phlegmish hacking cough. Symptoms had died down by Saturday, but I didn't want to travel unless I was going to have a great time – I could have a good time at home.
When I woke up I felt good, and balancing continued R&R vs. dancing until midnight, I decided to let the hotel decide. If I could easily get a reasonable room the morning of the show, I was good to go. Let's have fun. First call, at the Super-8 over by the big Wal-Mart – across from the Home Depot and Target, right off the exit, before you get to the Best Buy, Bed Bath & Beyond, and EMS – the Super-8 had a room for the in-season typical $125. Therefore, it's a deal, we're on the road, pack it up. Figured on a 3-hour drive in holiday weekend mid-day traffic. It was 11 AM, and the show started at 5.
I arrived at about 4:15, after stopping at the hotel to change. Surprisingly, I got a great parking spot in the VIP area just off the back entrance by the reflecting pool. One reason might be that as I drove down Avenue of the Pines and hit the traffic directors, there was a sign that said, "Main parking lot [arrow right]; VIP parking [arrow left]." Everyone was going to the main lot, but I just turned left, no one seemed to care, and drove into a shaded parking spot. Got out of the car, stretched, looked around. No one was walking after me or hollering, and people of the tribe were grilling and chilling so I decided: Parked.
The reason to see concerts at SPAC is that if you get there early you have a very nice State Park scene for hanging out.
I've been coming to concerts here since 1983, when those trees were a lot shorter. There's a lot more crowd control now. Back in the day they'd put 34,000 people here, with multiple delay towers for sound, and it was crazy spinning sweating hippies even at the way-back of the lawn. Now they top out more like 25,000, and there's never any delay towers beyond the house system hung on the back of the balcony. And instead of a couple dozen ushers and a virtual autonomous zone, there are hundreds of ushers and you can hardly go visit a friend across the aisle without answering for it. But it's still SPAC, a New York State Park, manicured for our dionysian pleasure, with its marble stall dividers, lush green lawn, old pine trees, brick outbuildings, waterfall, bridge, and ravine. It just doesn't get much better than this for rock 'n roll, so stop complaining already. We're lucky they let fools like us in the place with the terror alert at Code Yellow (soon rising again as we approach November).
June 30, 2006 – The United States remains at an elevated risk, Code Yellow, for terrorist attack. The Department of Homeland Security continues to analyze intelligence and closely monitor events as they unfold overseas. At this time, there is no credible intelligence to suggest a specific or imminent threat to the homeland.
Back in the real world, sans propaganda, people were enjoying themselves at a cultural event. First up was the Benevento-Russo Duo, who I'd never heard, or heard of. They seem pretty young, so I think this is a big gig for them:
Keyboard player and drummer. I would call the music I heard intense, pattern-oriented electronica. Driving, tight, cranked. Very well-played. Enjoyable, and a pretty danceable 45 minute set. Worth exploring.
Next up were Trey Anastasio and Mike Gordon, former Phishmates. What I didn't realize is that they're playing with the Duo. They set up as a foursome and played a little over an hour:
Those guys totally rocked out. After the second tune, which contained more than one killer jam and a spectacular close, the guy next to me (who I didn't know) looked over and said, "Dude! That was totally like the old days!!" Indeed it was. When those guys hit the groove they nearly got the gold ring. Surprisingly good, and not just a nostalgia act. The Duo adds a modern element that takes Trey and Mike into the 21st century. Recommended.
Here's a wider shot to get a sense of the indoor scene:
Toward the middle of the set a guy named Blake showed up in the aisle in front of me. A little while later he turned and asked, "Did Mike play the acoustic [guitar] yet?" No, not that I remember. A few minutes later they jumped into "Who Are You?" by The Who, a classic-rock surprise prize, and along the way Mike did then pick up the acoustic for that little ditty in the middle of the song and the guy Blake turned around and high-fived me. "Psychic!," he said. Of course, he had been on the road and this was his third of four shows, so he might have had some sub-conscious low-frequency pattern-recognition going on there.
Above, in the left of the frame, you see Leigha, who's currently working as a bartender in New Paltz, NY. She was with a couple who drove up for the day. We had talked a bit during the set, I don't remember how it started, I think maybe I asked her something, since one of the things I'm doing these days is learning how to talk to random people. I'm more of a closer, not much of an opener, so I'm practicing. At the break her friends went to get water, so she and Blake and I talked for a while.
Blake was having a good time, as they say, and Leigha and I were pretty much drinking water and hanging out. We talked some facts like wherefrom, schools, tour plans. Blake had been to Bonnaroo last month, and Leigha had been for the past three years but not this year. I asked them what they liked about it. He said, "Good bands." Leigha? "I think the community, the feeling you get when you're there." Like how? "Well, like when you're walking by a campground and some people are cooking eggs and you say, 'Oh, that smells good!' and they say, 'We have extra, do you want some?' Stuff like that happened all the time." [Well, this is a lot better than talking about college.]
So I asked, "What do you think creates that sense of community? The world needs more of that, what can we do to create that, to bring that out in people?" She thought for a minute and said, "I think it has to do with being open, and being nice to people, and helping people along the way." I said, "So, if we can be open and vulnerable in more situations, just engage without preconceptions, then maybe it rubs off on other people or something?" She replied, "Well, at the least it's a couple more open and engaged people in the world, and that can't be all bad." At this point Blake suddenly blurted, "Man, you guys are deep! I am in no shape to talk about stuff like this." [No wonder guys get a bad rep.]
Leigha smiled. I winked at her, and thought, "Is this the state of competition for dates these days? Blake, dude, have something to talk about!" We chit-chatted to include him. Turns out Leigha has a master's in literature and the environment, a program she heard about when she was teaching English in China. I asked her if I could take her picture. She wasn't comfortable with that. She asked me where I lived, and why I liked it there. She asked Blake what he did for work. Turns out he's a mortgage broker in the sub-prime sector – "We help people save their homes, even if they have bad credit; We loan them the money ourselves for 7% a year for two years, then it converts into a regular loan; I mean, yeah, at that point it's 13%, so I guess that's why they call us the predatory mortgage market, but I can sleep at night, at least these people have their houses, they wouldn't otherwise."
Okay. Time to go get some water. Handshakes all around. Good eye contact.
Placed a bet with myself: When I return either Leigha is with her friends and Blake is gone, or Blake is there and she's gone. Zero probability of anything else happening. I walked up through the lawn, and it had filled in quite a bit:
Bought four waters, two liters to drink and two 16 oz to give away. Went to the men's room. Wandered around the vending and food options. Considered the beer tent and skipped it. Took some crowd pictures, but that seemed to generate slightly bad vibes. Makes sense. Headed back inside. Blake was there alone, natch. I won the bet. Gave him a water. "Wow, thanks!" "Just building community. Leigha split?" "She said she'll be back."
When Phil came out, I was surprised to see Joan Osbourne with them. She had played with The Dead, but never with Phil & Friends. I didn't know she was on the tour. When Chris and I saw this band in December, I remember thinking it was early in the tour, and they would get a lot better. Now it's three tours later, and it's the lineup we saw in Boston, plus Joan on vocals, and Greg Osby on sax. They were a lot more together, and Joan adds an important vocal component for this band.
The show had something of a slow entrainment for me. Good Times, okay soundcheck opener. Sittin' on Top of the World did get a nice groove going with some jazzy fiddle and horn jams. I usually dig Direwolf, but this was kind of poppy. It didn't have any kind of deep or thick or fur-lined groove happening. Then Joan sang Peaceful Valley, a Ryan Adams tune. Slow and sweet, southern bluegrass country. Maybe too slow that early in the set.
Then I'm not sure what happened, maybe a bus came by and I got on, that's when it all began. Suddenly we were in Fennario, and everyone—band, audients, Audience—was locked in. Bang, in a heartbeat. Best Peggy-O ever, no doubt about it. So beautiful. Then a slow solid stomping Althea. Can't talk to you without talking to me, We're guilty of the same old thing. Thinking a lot about less and less, And forgetting the love we bring.Very deliberate and smokey. Magic is possible when you take the time to rehearse. Some of the sax solos and improvisation sounded more like a baroque ensemble than a rock band.
I heard a lot of interesting tempo changes, perhaps micro-tempo changes, in Peggy-O and Althea. Subtle shifts in the pacing, slight changes in the exact placement of the one, stretching and compressing the elasticity of time. Very skilled and polished, I thought. But there's a guy on the Internet who seems to think they didn't have it together:
Everything was well performed, but the band had a tough time getting on the same page during Peggy-O, which was to bad condisering how well I heard them play it in February. Althea was pretty smoking to close the set and featured some great playing from all, even Osby. This was my first time seeing and hearing this band with Osby and I really have to say that he did not add to much. He sounded like he was struggling at times and like he is trying to figured what key the songs are in for the entire performance of the tune. I really wasn't impressed with him at all. But in his defense he is still getting to know the material and he hasn't spent much time with the band, and I'm sure it will get better as it goes along.
Huh? Greg Osby is a master player. What he was playing during those two songs probably went over the heads of most of the audience. It's more likely our critic was listening to his expectations and not open to the brand-new, fresh, never-before-heard music in the room. Greg Osby trying to figure out the key? Get a grip.
Thus ended the hour-long first set. Seemed super-short, since I only connected deeply with the last two songs. I stayed in place for the break. I wore my new favorite t-shirt and stood up and showed it off whenever I could.
When I first saw someone wearing this shirt at Dairy Day I laughed out loud. The day before I'd seen a "got democracy?" t-shirt on a friend and this was even better. More direct. Cutting. But then I realized the back of the shirt shows the seven cooperative principles and it's a co-op movement t-shirt! Happy happy joy joy!
A 60-something usher glanced at the shirt and as he checked my ticket said quietly, to himself, "Ok, got principles, that's a good one." Smiled and pointed down the aisle and handed me my ticket. Mostly the hippies laugh and the crew-cuts look away. Meme injection project continues apace.
One thing I don't like about the new and improved well-managed SPAC are video ads played during intermission. Granted, they're silent, so it's not too intrusive, but you can't really escape the video screens. The variety was amazing. Here's a sampling, so you can avoid these merchants that leech off the good vibes of counter-culture rock 'n roll: Jeep, Hinekin, GE, State Farm, Marriott ("be treated like a star"), fye, Fetzer wine, Appleby's, Verizon, livenation.com, Rockstar Energy Drink, Best Buy, Dunkin' Doughnuts ("iced coffee in nine flavors"). Etc. You'll notice they get no link love from Notio.
Okay, second set opened with New Speedway Boogie. It's unlikely I will ever forget Joan's inflection delivering One step done and another begun, in I wonder how many miles? Spent a little time on the mountain, Spent a little time on the hill, Things went down we don't understand, but I think in time we will.
Three rows in front of me there's a woman in her late-20s or early-30s. She's wearing an erotic asian art t-shirt. Not exactly like the art linked (I didn't yet find a copy online) but similar. A guy could never wear this shirt. And, doesn't she get hit on constantly wearing that? Maybe it's a way to separate the men from the boys, so to speak. It's certainly a conversation starter, and possibly an immediate ender too, all rolled into one. Maybe it intimidates people so they don't approach her?
Nice lengthy and considered jam going into He's Gone. Nothing left to do but smile, smile, smile.
Into Uncle John's Band. It's a Buck Dancer's Choice, my friend, better take my advice. You know all the rules by now, and the fire from the ice.
They're teasing Truckin' during every jam between songs, so I wonder if it will be the set-closer payoff. The show is error-free at the level of the song. They're remembering the lyrics or using the monitors—and not a decade too soon. There may be a musical faux pax here and there, but I don't hear anything obvious and it's probably at a level that most won't notice. I don't think anyone missed a lyric all night, nearly unheard-of in the land of the Dead.
Joan leaves the stage, and Phil and Greg lead a free jam which issues a transfer to Unbroken Chain. I love this song, and they seem to play it a lot when I'm in attendance, and I like that. November and more as I wait for the score, They're telling me forgiveness is the key to every door. A slow winter day, a night like forever, Sink like a stone, float like a feather.
We forgive Phil for singing because he wrote the song and it's so good. His voice has been shot for years, and he's kind enough to hire other singers for most of the tours, but there are a few songs he still sings. Tonight was very strong, with some sort of Eleven-ish jam in the middle. Totally sick, as my college buddy Bug would say. Then back into Chain. Amazing.
Long pause. Band resets. Joan returns. We wait quietly. Count off, click click click pause. Morning Dew. Please god let Joan sing it. Yes. Thank you. Beautiful. Calm. Strong. Respect.
Short pause. Trey walks out and plugs in. Quiet free jam to start. Trey in the lead. The band is trancing, hypnotic, looking nowhere, listening everywhere. Trey might already be drooling. Thought it was going to be Tomorrow Never Knows because of Joan's throaty vocalizations during the intro. She sounded like a sax, then Greg came in to carry it on. Suddenly:
Into The Wheel. You can't go back, and you can't stand still. If the thunder don't get you, then the lightning will. Unlike any previous Wheel ever. Trey and Phil are in the lead; the band is supporting Trey. Harmonic, soaring, waves crashing, round and round, then back to the song. Exit jam sounds like TNK again. Smokin'.
Into Not Fade Away. Rock out closer. During the jams Trey is playing hard and Joan is standing in front of him dancing with him, smiling. I'm laughing; they're having a great time. She's got her back to most of the audience, he's an audience of one. She spins around to sing her verse and then turns back to him. Joan and Trey trade places, Joan dances with Greg while Trey jams across Phil with Larry. Rock 'n roll, baby. At the peak Joan is vocalizing at the top of her game, totally putting out for that song. While the band brings it home to land she steps back and looks left, looks right, and smiles with satisfaction. Her boys done good.
Rap for organ donors, then Casey Jones. House lights. I sit for a while and listen to the crowd. Happiness. I stand near the aisle for a while and show off the t-shirt. One nice thing about staying inside for a bit is the interior view glowing gently like a spaceship.
Leigha never came back. Next time I'll invite her to come with for water, not leave her with the sub-prime mortgage broker.
Rather than sit in traffic I walk around the park for a while. Men's room. Wash up in the cold water. Some trash pickup. Drink some more water. Take in the post-show view. Walk on the grass under the tress to the car. Drive to the hotel. Eat some peanuts. Look at the photos. Twelve hours earlier I was packing, now it's over.
Thanks to Rob Clarke, who recorded, mastered, and uploaded the show before I even got home to download it. You can also buy an official soundboard recording.
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Nano-Enabled Advances
July 1, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Technology
Email from Amazon alerted me to this new book: Nanotechnology Applications And Markets, by Lawrence Gasman, $79.
Discover nanotech opportunities the smart way with the first "down to business" market analysis that separates commercial reality from hype and gives you the tools you need to forecast nanotech’s impact on any company. This professional-level book spotlights the most viable R&D now taking root, what nano-enabled products will likely emerge in what industries first, and what timeframes you can expect before market rollout. You get a rich understanding of technical, business and legal essentials, and a solid framework for assessing commercial potential without either overheated expectations or overcautious pessimism. This indispensable resource focuses on the best nanotech-driven opportunities arising in the computer/electronics, medical/biotech, and energy industries — from nano-engineered microchips and fuel cells to nano-enabled drug discovery and delivery. You see where the "low hanging fruit" will be and won’t be in each field, and how nanotech will change each industry. The book also highlights nano-enabled advances taking place in such diverse industries as textiles, specialty chemicals, automotive, aerospace, agriculture, and building materials. What’s more, a unique and well-detailed "impact assessment audit" helps you identify how nanotech may soon change your company’s products, R&D, and production processes, and what new opportunities or threats to your business may emerge as the result of nanotech. Rounding out the coverage are extensive resource lists for further research in this up-and-coming sector.
This is going to have a major impact on society over the next 10 to 30 years—in other words, in our lifetimes. Bigger than personal computers.
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Will Desktop Affordances be Useful?
June 24, 2006 | Products & Opportunites | Technology
Computer technology demos are always interesting, but sometimes you wonder if it would actually be useful in real life. And the opposite is true: Blogging doesn't demo well, people have a hard time understanding why, but it turns out to be valuable. This week's impressive demo is BumpTop, showing "physically-based casual interfaces and pen-centric interactions."
Well, it's totally cool. The seven-minute movie is worth your attention. It makes your computer desktop look archaic. But I tend to agree with Merlin that I'm not sure I'd use it for that purpose.
See, here’s the thing: once your computer (and your related world, writ large) has excellent indexing, search, and access via something like Quicksilver, this kind of “physical” interface metaphor starts seeming quaint, if not downright exhausting. I guess I just never find myself shuffling and re-organizing large numbers of files in a way that isn’t more than satisfactorily addressed with sorting, Smart Folders, icon views, and searching. I throw stuff into the most general piles I can stand, then let Quicksilver and Spotlight do all the heavy lifting. Maybe that’s me, but this seems like a recipe for non-stop fiddling.
Reminds me of David Gelernter's project called Lifestreams, which looked cool but ultimately hasn't taken hold. It was core research, however, so maybe something will come of it someday.
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The Most Thankless Job in Tech Support
June 5, 2006 | Life | Technology | Travel
Tried to use the web without paying the $10 extortion tonight. No go; way slow. So I went to the upgrade screen and authorized the billing. But nothing changed—still super-super-slow, as billg would say.
So I called the tech support line, cringing all the way. Can you imagine a worse job in tech support than fielding calls from semi- to fully-clueless people paying $250+ per night at random hotels, trying to get their hopeless Windows laptops onto the web? People in airports and hotel lobbies regularly ask me, "Can you help me get the wireless working?" And I say, "Windows? Sorry, I use Mac, no idea. Would help if I could." The support guy was not totally clueless, but he was basically working from screenshots, and I'm running down ping speeds (1,500 ms!) and packet loss (35%) and MAC addresses, and sub-netted IP addresses, and he's not sure what to do with it all. The symptom presented as if the hotel network had cached my MAC address and was routing it through the old connection and slow equipment. The ideal "hit it with a hammer" fix would be to clear the router cache located somewhere in the bowels of the hotel. Good luck with that, Notio!
What worked was to plug in an ethernet cable, fooling the laptop into thinking the network port had changed, then switching back to wireless, which for whatever reason got things working again. At least it's not as bad as Minneapolis in 2004, when Internet service was provided by housekeeping. OMFG, that was scary, but worked out okay in the end.
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Nike+iPod
May 23, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Science | Technology
Amazing advance in product sophistication. Apple partners with Nike on a blockbuster idea. Buy special (Nike) running shoes with a sensor in the footbed. The wireless sensor talks with a small receiver pluged into the dock connector of the (Apple) iPod. A special version of software takes over the display, and adds voice feedback cues over your music. When you get home, the iPod syncs your stats into iTunes and nikeplus.com, where you can get all kinda bling charts and razzle-dazzle trending of your sweat sessions. Of course, coming soon are Nike Sport Mixes, Workout Mixes, and informative podcasts from the iTunes online store. Rocka Rocka or what?
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Pragmatic Technology Strategy
May 23, 2006 | Cooperatives | Life | Software | Technology
Yesterday Mark and I drove down to Andover MA to meet with Walden. We three are running a (pro-bono) session for a Coop consulting group next month on technology strategy. Because Kate wasn't feeling well, we went to Panera for three hours. The place was hoppin' with businesspeople!
Above you see Walden coaching Mark on the use of an important strategic technology tool – the pen and paper. They're really amazing! You can write in any light, without any battery power, on both sides of the device. You're not restricted to "documents" or linear formatting. You can create an unlimited number of pages no matter how little memory you have. There are a whole raft of accessories to collect, sort, organize, and store your notes – and they're all cheap! File folders cost a nickel or something, nothing like the cost of a hard drive upgrade. And you can use pen and paper on any surface, even including a computer tablet!
If you look closely, you can see that Walden is carrying this toolset in his front pocket! Just try doing that with your fancy new MacBook.
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Gratuitous Name-Dropping
May 16, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | Software | Technology
[Attention conservation notice: This post contains little of actual value.]
I spoke with Jeffrey Zeldman today. (I just have to say it again—I spoke with Jeffrey Zeldman today!)
A client is evaluating technical vendors. One of the prospects wrote a strong proposal, really kind of in-your-face for this small northern New England college, but she was from New York New York so I just took it as par for the course. I got to the last page and her first reference was Zeldman.
Well, that got my attention. Zeldman is One Of The Most Famous Web Designers In The World. He wrote a great book that introduced a lot of us to the very real possibility of standards-based web design. He operates Happy Cog Studios, a web design consultancy, and also runs a well-trafficed weekly newsletter for web developers called A List Apart.
Long story short, we're calling references. I emailed Zeldman and asked for ten minutes on the phone Tuesday morning or anytime Thursday. He wrote back and said sure. I called at the appointed time, and we chatted for about 15 minutes. He worked with The Potential Vendor (The Subject Under Discussion) on a project for the New York Public Library. He likes her. Thinks she's a good designer. Delivered the goods on the project. All that stuff she said was probably genuine, not bull.
So that was pretty much that. I thanked him and we hung up. I sent a thank you email and promised not to blog his phone number. Then I went to a six-hour project meeting and came home exhausted.
Mañana. Namaste, y'all.
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An Anti-Traction, Mobility Denial Material
May 2, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Technology
New Scientist describes a patent for a "riot slimer."
Riot police or troops would wear a back pack with three cylinders – one containing compressed air, another filled with plain water and a third containing a supply of very dry, finely ground, polyacrylamide powder. A nozzle, resembling a shower head, would blasts two separate jets, containing the water and the polymer powder, in the general direction of an ugly crowd.
As the two jets mix in the air, after clearing the nozzle, they create a slimy mixture that covers the ground and causes everyone in the area to fall down. Even vehicles should be unable to get a grip on the goo, the patent says. And because the gel is non-toxic, it should cause no permanent harm, besides a few bruised bottoms, that is.
Oh, hehehe, that's such a clever ending!! Okay, now then, very well; let me ask: How exactly do the riot slime backpacker police themselves stay standing, or control the crowd, or move laterally once the slime goes down? Wasn't there a scene in Ghost Busters just like this? ("I've been slimed!!") How can you get a patent on something that was in a movie 22 years ago?? Has that patent clerk not seen Ghost Busters?!?!
Just one more example of the Bush administration's incompetence.
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.NET on OS X?
May 1, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Software | Technology
Can someone confirm this rumor I heard last night: Microsoft is porting the .NET runtime framework to Mac OS X. [Note: Currently just a rumor!]
If this is true it's a pretty big deal. With Apple currently offering dual-boot software to run Windows XP on Mac hardware, and the likelihood that they will offer virtualization software to run Windows side-by-side with the Mac OS next year, we are apparently headed for a cross-platform world where the OS actually acts more like an application.
At least on the Mac, that is. In this scenario Macs will run the cool, well-designed, elegant, and stable Mac apps, on the best-designed hardware available today as well as whatever Windows apps you want to throw at it. And if you buy a Dell? Well, you'll get the same hacker-target OS on the same flakey hardware with the same lame customer service you've come to expect – you won't notice any difference and you can continue feeling superior that you're running with the big dogs on the best-selling platform and you won't have to spend an hour or two learning how to do things in an easier and more obvious way on OS X. Windowz Rulz!
Why would Microsoft support this? Well, because they are so large and mature they are really just a cash-machine, and all the Mac users would have to buy a copy of XP or Vista (cha-ching!), and their developers will be happy to have a larger base of users buying their apps.
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Disintermediation Denial
April 30, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Software | Technology
Dumbest move this week™.
Microsoft and The New York Times unveiled software on Friday that would allow readers to download an electronic version of the newspaper and view it on a portable device.
With Microsoft's new Windows Vista software, to be available in January, virtually any newspaper, magazine or book can be formatted into an electronic version and read online or off. The software would allow The Times to replicate its look — fonts, typeface and layout — more closely than its Web site now does.
I agreed with Dave Winer's comment, ("Bill Gates helps the NY Times turn the clock back.") but then I thought about it some more and went further.
This is so lame.
First, there's this thing called the "Web" – maybe you've heard of it? It has a structural markup language called HTML, and a styling layout language called CSS. If you use this, your stuff can work nearly anywhere, Mac, PC, Linux, mobile phone, TV display, etc. The Microsoft/Times approach is so 1996, and probably has more to do with DRM than anything else. This announcement is very disappointing, and indicative that the Times is not thinking clearly about digital disintermediation.
Second, there's this other thing called PDF. It's been around for years, and it's pretty well debugged (unlike the yet-to-ship Vista, nee Longhorn, with it's constantly slipping schedule and on-going feature-kill). Even better, PDF currently allows "virtually any newspaper, magazine or book [to] be formatted into an electronic version and read online or off." [Is there an echo in here?] Only one problem, it's from Adobe, and Microsoft would never think of using that!
Instead, what they should be doing is figuring out how to engage the army of bloggers to use Times stories as a focal point for their efforts. Who freaking cares if the formatting looks good offline? I'm reading most of my news in generic text via NetNewsWire anyway. It's very train-friendly already.
Hint: The advertisers care. Therefore realize that the "customers" of the Times are advertisers, not readers. What the readers are is not clear, though "consumers" might fit. I'm surprised Umair hasn't written about this yet, perhaps because it's such a dumb move that it's not worth commenting.
Face it. The Times is going to be very distracted for the next year. They've moving into a new building late this year or early next (I forget) - the whole staff, moving a new place for the first time since the 1800's or somesuch crazy-long time. They're building the building, so you can imagine the impact on your "core competencies" if you've ever built or renovated a house. The Bush administration is going to sue their ass off for the NSA spy leak; you can see pretty clearly that it's going to get ugly. And they're still hamstrung by the myth of objectivity. They (along with everyone else) still print whatever the Administration says, even when it's a blatant outright lie (c.f. anything Cheney has said for the past several years).
Imagine instead if the Times had a Blogger Research Program. It would work like this: Bloggers would sign up, and there would be a nominal annual fee to separate out the serious from the hasslers. Say, $20 a month. For that you get access to a password-protected RSS feed of story drafts in development. (You might also include a subscription to Times Select.) You submit your thoughts, corrections, research notes, and op-ed comments to a private forum or blog, where there is one topic/post per story. Every time the Times uses one of your quotes or research in a published story you get paid a nominal amount. Say, $5. The goal for bloggers would be to earn some income (eBay style). Maybe some people are occasionally invited to write an op-ed piece for full publication. Maybe some longer pieces are commissioned based on the blog posts. Maybe the super-pros rise to a full-time gig at the Times. The goal for the Times is to get hundreds of people competing for pixels and ink in a national pub. Their quality would go sky-high. The online dynamic would change too – bloggers would write for broad appeal and re-use, not just for venting. The Times would be hungry for their blogger army contributions because they could never pay for such a large and well-distributed research staff.
The details need more thought than the 15 minutes I've put in. But this is what comes off the top of my head, and IMHO it's a hell of a lot more pragmatic and clear-thinking than what Sulzberger and Gates came up with. [How's that for ego inflation?]
To my loyal Times employee reader: I would love to help implement something like this, and guess what? I'm already an experienced consultant working in the field! How convenient is that?
Have your people call my people and we'll do lunch.
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More Hell for Web Developers
April 22, 2006 | Software | Technology
Dave Hyatt, chief architect of Safari and WebKit, outlines a proposal to solve the "high-DPI" problem:
Consider a Web page that is designed for an 800×600 resolution. Let’s say we render this Web page such that the pixels specified in CSS (and in img tags and such on the page) map to one pixel on your screen.
On a screen with 1920×1200 resolution the Web site is going to be tiny, taking up < 50% of the screen's width and half the screen's height. In terms of absolute size, the text will be much smaller and harder to read.
Now this may not be a huge problem yet, but as displays cram more and more pixels into the same amount of space, if a Web browser (or any other application for that matter) naively continues to say that one pixel according to the app’s concept of pixels is the same as one pixel on the screen, then eventually you have text and images so small that they’re impossible to view easily.
How do you solve this problem? The natural way to solve this “high DPI” problem is to automatically magnify content so that it remains readable and easily viewable by the user. It’s not enough of course to simply pick a pleasing default, since the preferences of individuals may vary widely. An eagle-eyed developer may enjoy being able to have many open windows crammed into the same amount of space, but many of us would like our apps to remain more or less the same size and don’t want to have to squint to read text.
The full solution to this problem therefore is to allow your user interface to scale, with the scale factor being configurable by the user. This means that Web content has to be zoomable, with the entire page properly scaling based off the magnification chosen by the user.
Much more detail in the post, including elaborations on questions such as, "What the heck is a CSS px anyway? Most Web site authors have traditionally thought of a CSS pixel as a device pixel." Yup, I sure have.
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N-Dimensional Web 2.0
April 5, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Life | Nature & Environment | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Science | Site Maintenance | Software | Technology | Travel
Many people are trying to define "Web 2.0" – what it is, what it means, how to build Web 2.0 apps, what makes a company a Web 2.0 company, etc. All of those efforts fall short, because Web 2.0 is n-dimensional. Web 2.0 is "reflecting more complex multivariable situations.1"
Today I learned of a new dimension to Web 2.0. Chris2 invited me to join a beta of CollectiveX, a new Web 2.0-ish social widget. To invite someone you have to set a temporary password, and when they log in they change it to whatever they want. Chris set my password to "ratdoggy." Ha! Now that's a good one. This made me laugh out loud, and when I told Meg3 she lost it too. What's so funny?
Well, it creates a strong but secret connection between the title of a recent post I wrote – wherein "maybe too much information" was offered4 – and an unrelated client task. Chris' password was an acknowledgment that he read the post. Maybe even he liked it. And he certainly knew it would make me think of that post in the middle of the workday. But in any case "ratdoggy" is not in frequent usage (Google: "Did you mean: ratdog?") and his reference expanded its sphere of influence.
Which is like a link, just not a web hyperlink. It was a link from one mind to another, from one blog post to a work moment, from a concert review to a social software login, from my original post written on a couch in the lobby of a cinderblock hotel in Charlestown to my colleague's laughter at the password in an office building in Hanover, from all that to this post which you are reading now. Links, links, links, everywhere you look. Which makes me smile.
And that seems to be the common element of a Web 2.0 app – that it makes you smile, somehow, in some way that maybe you never have before.
1) An Introduction to Chemometrics. A report given as Session F of Educational Symposium No. 17, The Use of Statistical Methods in Formulating and Testing of Rubber at the 130th Meeting of the ACS Rubber Division by Brian A. Rock, Ph.D. in October, 1985.
2) Blog updated according to a complex precision timing schedule involving the highway, the moon, the clouds, and the stars.
3) I did not invoice for this minute of laughter, nor did the client utilize any official company time or resources in reaction to the laughter event.
4) Plausible Story, personal communication.
Now, how many new links can you find in the above footnotes?
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In Case You Were Wondering
March 21, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life | Technology
Do you happen to know if there's wifi available in the Lebanon Coop?
There is not. I have asked for it a few times over the years. Being board president doesn't pull any weight on this, believe it or not (due to a personality-minimizing governance structure which is long-term good and specific-issue annoying).
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Official Phone of 37signals & Ruby On Rails
March 19, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Technology
The next Internet trend: Ruby and Rails geeks buy the Motorola PEBL phone because David and Jason both raved about it. Less Phone, that sort of thing.
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Server Down?
March 13, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Technology
That's the sort of email subject line people like me dislike seeing first thing in the morning. After verifying that, in fact, the servers are unreachable, suddenly you have a fire drill. Whatever morning plans you had are shot. Yoga? I don't think so. Finish that systems diagram from last night? Maybe later today.
Instead, shower, fast breakfast, drive to work behind every slowest car in the region. Have plenty of time to consider that I have been threatening for two years to move these servers out of my office and into a secure managed hosting environment. Decide that this is the year it happens. Traffic slows as I pull into town. I could scream. Navigate the construction scene around my parking lot. Walk down Main Street, turn the corner to my building - still standing, that's good. Walk a little further - neighbors have lights on, so there's electricity, that's good. Approach the outside door, which is locked - good. Get to my interior door, also locked and not broken into, good. Servers on? Yes. Verify server problem - still can't get to them. Okay, reboot router and firewall, wait for reset. Check again. All set. Send out email notices.
Now, on with the day. What was my day plan again? Whatever it was, it's probably a good time to verify the data backups.
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Mail Bombed
March 12, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Site Maintenance | Technology
Notio is getting emailed bombed, or something. In the last couple of hours I've received over a thousand emails like this:
From: Philomena Astle
(Every return address is different.)
Subject: Re: POtharamacy news
(Lots of variations on this.)
Hi,
Do you want to j O l V f E d R r P k A c Y for your u M k e j d o i e a r c x t b i b o j n n s?
Nothing like you need it, l S f a r v v e over g 5 d 0 r % with http://wiqo31.selterrote.com
They come in batches of 200 or 300. WTF? They pass through the server spam filter and get pulled down via POP3, where they pass the local spam filters and I have to wade through them trying not to miss a real email.
Thanks guys. And the point is?? Do you think you're going to get rich or something? Sheesh.
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Three Things About Pivot
February 21, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Software | Technology
Very exciting. Chris Boone wrote a brief review of my website management system, PivotCMS. [Man, do I need to do some marketing work – the product far outshines the marketing, especially the currently-lame website.] He calls out three important design decisions we made early on, and learns how they impact his day-to-day work with clients. Thanks Chris!
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What Google Knows
January 31, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Governance | People & Society | Technology
John Battelle, author of Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, asked Google:
1) "Given a list of search terms, can Google produce a list of people who searched for that term, identified by IP address and/or Google cookie value?"
2) "Given an IP address or Google cookie value, can Google produce a list of the terms searched by the user of that IP address or cookie value?"
To its credit, it rapidly replied that the answer in both cases is "yes." Just FYI.
Good to know. The answer is likely the same for Yahoo, MSN, and AOL. Of course, if you are innocent in the eyes of the Administration, you have nothing to hide. If, like Martin Luther King, you have any issues with the strategy or tactics of the Administration, then you might want to turn off browser cookies, as a minimum measure.
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Microsoft ftpd Madness
January 30, 2006 | Software | Technology
So, to transfer files between computers there's this protocol called FTP - File Transfer Protocol. It's been around forever, and on dozens of different Unix operating systems when you do a directory listing it looks something like this:
-rw-r--r-- 1 187 6358 Jul 18 2005 index.html
Then along comes Microsoft. For some reason, this return string format is not good enough for them, so they decide to do it like this, instead:
01-30-06 10:15AM 7064 index.html
Well, great if you use Internet Explorer as your FTP client! But if you're running automated publishing systems that rely on interoperability, this is broken. Granted, because the specification does not elaborate the directory listing return format, the Microsoft software is not officially out of line. But why the heck couldn't they do it like everyone else? Is this a good place to express your unique vision of how an ftp daemon should describe a directory listing? (With, BTW, far less information presented.) Couldn't they just try to fit in a bit, and go with the existing flow? Accept that perhaps the old way, utilized by hundreds of thousands if not millions of other servers, might just be good enough?
This is why people hate Microsoft. There was an existing de facto standard, and they made gratuitous changes that reduce interoperability with non-Microsoft systems. This is why Microsoft holds a 20% share of the web server market, while the open-source Apache has 67%. People who have to make technology systems work together are tired of this crap.
So here's the solution to several problems of this variety: Go visit the Apple Store, and pick yourself out a nice, new, powerful, Unix-based, easy-to-use Mac – laptop or desktop. When the transaction is complete, stand up, and open your office window. Unplug your existing Microsoft-OS computer, and disconnect it from the network. Pick it up, and carry it to the window. Say a short ritual prayer to the deities with which you resonate, and throw that piece of junk computer out the window. Hopefully it will fall several floors and smash to bits upon landing, or land in a snowbank or pond, so it will be unusable by anyone who finds it. Then take a few days vacation until your new Mac arrives. If everyone did this together many future wasted hours would be recovered and we could all ftp together again with joy, love, and happiness.
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Path Finder and Web Inspector
January 17, 2006 | Software | Technology
We interrupt this stream of musical sub-texts to recommend some Mac power-user software.
Path Finder 4 is a fantastic Finder replacement, providing a more intuitive and powerful file management and navigation application. For starters, tabs in the Finder window – how cool is that? If you want the gory details on what's wrong with the present OS X Finder, you can read John Siracusa's series of articles. Most people wish Apple would buy Path Finder and make it the "advanced Finder" mode, if not just ditch the Finder altogether.
If you're a web developer, this post by the Safari team has exciting news about their new "Web Inspector," an advanced DOM inspector. You can use WebKit just like Safari; download the latest build, an application called WebKit, and when launched it shows up as Safari, and acts just like Safari, but with the latest new features. The Web Inspector is pretty cool, and beats the heck out of anything else I've seen, though to be fair I only do this stuff occasionally.
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Steve Jobs Movie Posters
December 30, 2005 | Arts & Culture | Technology
The magic of Photoshop.
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Ruby on Rails Bootcamp at Big Nerd Ranch
December 23, 2005 | Life | Software | Technology
During the first week of December I traveled to rural Atlanta to attend the Ruby on Rails Bootcamp at the Big Nerd Ranch.
The Ranch isn't a place, exactly – more like a concept. In the US, they rent an executive retreat lodge 1-2 weeks per month, where 18 students take single rooms in a relaxed natural setting with full-service meals. They hire top-notch instructors on chunky technical topics, and they geek out in a major way.
The day schedule was thus:
- Breakfast at 8:30 AM
- Class from 9:00 to 12:30 PM
- Lunch from 12:30 to 1:00
- Class from 1:00 to 2:30
- Execise/nature/photography walk outside from 2:30 to 3:00
- Class from 3:00 to 6:30
- Dinner from 6:30 to 7:00
- Hacking sessions in the lab from 7:00 PM to midnight or 1:00 AM. The lab is open 24 hours a day, and some people took good advantage of it. Here's the lab/classroom:
The attendees were diverse, except that we were all white males. Here's a photo:
One person from Germany, and one from the UK. Three US government/military employees – one who couldn't discuss what department he worked for (probably the NSA. At one point he asked, "Is there a way to open a socket to a specific IP and capture the stream to a database?"). Ages ranged from early '20s to early '60s. One person had extensive Lotus Notes programming experience, several had worked on large complex software for industry. Two people worked on Windows machines, the rest on Mac OSX. Several were Linux refugees. We had one O'Reilly author in the room. One person had been to the Ranch once before, another had been twice before. Keith Bingman and I brought up the rear on programming experience, but we didn't drown, and we both got a lot out of the full-immersion approach.
Cost: $3,500 plus a $400 plane ticket and $70 in airport parking. A significant investment, but worth it. I left my house on Sunday at 8:00 AM and returned home the following Friday at midnight.
Our instructor – Marcel Molina, Jr., one of the Rails core developers and a 37 Signals employee – deserves kudos and gratitude for organizing a course with no prerequisites that satisfied such a wide range of experience and understanding. Marcel knew the material completely, and had in-depth knowledge of the Unix shell, databases, Martin Fowler's computer science writings, typical practices and idioms, popular culture, and literary theory. We had a lot of fun banter ("Who is the best Rails programmer ever?"), witty techie asides ("TextMate has preferences?!?"), and deep recursive pedagogy (grokking the functional and unit testing framework while getting sidetracked by a bug in Rails that existed only for 18 hours – during which time we had grabbed our code snapshot – while learning the theory of testing in general).
I had the rare experience of focusing on a single topic for five days, virtually all day every day. A couple of students had solid Ruby or Rails knowledge and came to work on their applications outside of the interrupt-driven work environment. For them, the class segments were less important than the focus time and access to an expert for design and code assistance along the way.
I've written about Rails before, about a year ago ("Avoiding Software Fear"). In that post I wrote, "'New' technology becomes 'mainstream' technology through the momentum of use." Rails today has momentum of use, far more than when I first wrote about it last January. In the next six months I think people in the technical community will be saturated with Rails developments, from whizzy applications, to regular code updates, to new books.
In about six or eight hours of programming, I wrote a simple blog-style application. It has user login, posts, comments, human-readable URLs, time-stamping, and AJAX-based deleting. Remember, the last time I did any programming was in 1976. If you want to build web apps in the next few years, you could do a lot worse than pick a framework that assists programmer productivity. I have a lot to learn, but this was a great way to jump up the learning curve.
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Chaotic Growth
December 23, 2005 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Technology
Michael Arrington tackles the Web 2.0 definition:
Web 2.0 is not a marketing slogan. It is the slogan of a people’s army. Our army. They are words that help us explain the explosion of conversations on the web, and justify our enthusiasm for innovation. Web 2.0 is why I came back from my exodus at the fringes of technology, to explore the frontier of the new consumer web.
Look at Flickr. Look at Delicious. Look at Riya. And 1,000 more. My God, how dare you tell me that something amazing and new, completely new, hasn’t happened on the web. Web 2.0 isn’t about wikipedia definitions and neatly wrapped bundles of functionality that non-innovators can use to understand what’s going on. It’s about the web coming out of a nuclear winter and bursting forth in a fit of chaotic growth. It’s about hope and love and getting ridiculously wealthy by ignoring the wisdom of those around you who say “your idea, it sucks”.
Dave Winer contrasts this with The Tim O'Reilly and John Batalle school of Web 2.0.
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404 Page as Micro-Narrative
November 25, 2005 | Technology
I wish all "page not found" (error 404) pages were as good as this one:
http://kinkless.com/articles/category/kgtd/
Especially on the web sites I maintain!
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(Almost) Music to My Ears
October 24, 2005 | Life | Technology
8:18 AM: On FedEx vehicle for delivery.
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The Lumix Has Landed
September 2, 2005 | Life | Technology
The new camera has arrived. All other work has stopped.
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Evolution of an idea
August 22, 2005 | Business & Commerce | Life | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Software | Technology
Back in the day, memepool was one of my very favorite websites. It was more or less anonymous, had a biting wit, posted very unusual links, and updated frequently so it made for a good daily browse. It was just a guy or two, sharing their cool links with whoever found them. The design remains unchanged to this day.
In 2001 I clicked the "comments" link at the bottom of the page and emailed:
I'm wondering what you use to maintain the site. It has a very nice combination of chronological order on the home page and subject categorization. When I look at 'weblog' tools they seem very overblown if all one wants to do is keep track of 'net flotsam and jetsam.
The entirety of the response was:
I wrote it myself. Memepool predates all those tools and even the notion of "blogs"
I remembered memepool today, for the first time in years, and took a visit. At the bottom of the page now there are two names listed. One of them, Joshua Schachter, has a home page here. As it turns out, Joshua wrote del.icio.us, the social bookmark manager, otherwise known as a way to keep track of your 'net flotsam and jetsam, and share it with the world.
Now does that complete the circle or what?
Here's what Paul Graham had to say about Delicious recently:
The New York Times front page is a list of articles written by people who work for the New York Times. Delicious is a list of articles that are interesting. And it's only now that you can see the two side by side that you notice how little overlap there is.
If you follow the timeline, Joshua graduated from Carnegie Mellon in 1996. Memepool has been running since 1998. It's likely that Joshua started memepool around the time he started high-school. Then at college he studied electrical and computer engineering. Then, either over time or in a fit of creative output, Delicious was born. Perhaps it wasn't "based on" memepool, or perhaps it was designed to address a different set of goals, but it's interesting that at its core there is still a good idea: That people find and collect interesting things (in this case, links) and want to share them with others.
What's most personal is most general. That's the collective unconscious in a nutshell. Observing that Memepool morphed into Delicious is a great example of how an idea evolves.
