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2001-12-08»
Clambering over the heavy folds of morning to bring you:
iv class="urlsummary">
Boo-ya! At last, a
critique of Web design I can get my teeth into. Also, a new determinating
term: stylist. - A List
Apart
Call me cranky, but contrast Nigo's t-shirts and posters to the
painstakingly worked-out, user-need-driven work of one of the creators
featured in British Rail Design , say Jock Kinneir himself. Is this an
unfair comparison, a sterling example of apples v. oranges?
Absolutely. Because only one of the two works in the field of
design.
The other is best described as a stylist.
Read the copyright fine print; win
a car. - Boing
Boing
Flash stylists for civil
liberties! - Tom
Paine
How to win at Rock,
Stone, Scissors and therefore have cheaper sex in a Japanese
whorehouse. - AccordionGuy
Two things about this
XBox modders' story (via Slashdot). First, that Microsoft
asked him to take down the BIOS image *twelve hours* after it went up
(that'll be Google-as-limit-on-free-speech). Second: he's got an MP3 up of
the phone request.
Ever since I worked at the Guardian and we uploaded the Aitken/Ritz
faxes, I've always wanted articles to include as footnotes the
supporting evidence: MP3s of phone calls, the notes, the e-mails, the
books read, the employees interviewed.
Journalists say it's hard to do because of legal implications and the
difficulty
of preserving anonymity. That's
often true, but not always. What is always true is that this
paraphernalia is often halting, confused, and a bit amateurish. Few
journalists can bare to listen to their interview tapes themselves, let
alone hand them over to the public. One part of a journalists' job is to
polish and re-edit this mess until you have a coherent, lively, readable
tale.
But the truth isn't lively, readable or professional. And it's coherent
in a way that we can't anticipate. I think the faster we learn to
discriminate between storytelling and the universe, the better.
On which note, Seth has a piece on the stories we tell
ourselves of crypto and usability.
2001-12-07»
Post NTK reshuffle:
Welp, so much for the EC taking care of human rights: Europe
succumbs to UK pressure on data retention - ZDNet
The editorials in the Hamas Weekly are fantastically lurid. The Daily Mail
has nothing on this Ode To
Anthrax, as translated by the pro-Israeli MEMRI:
"I swear
that your story is peculiar. The Americans see you as an imminent attack
that is about to shake the lady with the proboscises that suck the blood
of the peoples? All [the rulers of Arab and Islamic countries] tell [the
U.S.] ? every time she farts, ? "Allah bless you" ? Nevertheless, you have
found your way to only eight American breasts so far?"
Alexander Rose of the Long Now
Foundation spoke at Xerox Parc last night.
Rose is quietly-spoken and seemed a little shy in front of the curmudgeonly,
Waldorf-and-Statler crowd at Xerox. He won them over, of course. He ran
through some of the features of the 10,000 year clock, but concentrated on the
Rosetta Disk project.
The disks contain examples of a 1000 languages, micro-encoded onto nickel
plate and embedded into a sphere, one half tungsten, the other a domed
magnifying glass.
A selection of the most popular languages are arranged in a spiral lines
around the edge. Each spiral contains the first words of Genesis (the only
text the Long Now could find which is translated into enough languages). Each
letter grows smaller as the text spirals into the center. The last letter of
the spiral is the same size as the rest of the thousand language texts encoded
in the center of the disk.
We've reached the point of civilisation where we're creating Mysterious Alien Artifacts™.
2001-12-06»
Good Morning, East Ham:
When doing scientific research into the onset of seasons, don't
forget leap years. Science Daily
Writing a
braille driver for Linux: Linux
Weekly News
We were lucky - Dave Mielke wrote a new driver within only two days
and it was working right out of the box.
It might have been easier for Dave Mielke, if he actually had the
hardware in front of him. But as Dave Mielke lives in Canada and we in
Denmark (Europe) and he had no device, he had to do it in blind - so to
speak. Well, Dave Mielke is actually 100% blind, so the C program
really was written in the blind.
2001-12-05»
Morning rounds:
Audiences fascinate me. I went to see Robert Anton Wilson speak last night,
and the mix - while pretty heavily tilted towards the LSD end of the culture
pool
- was fascinating. A smattering of sweet, awe-struck teenagers ("H-h-how did
you even begin to th-th-think of Schrodinger's Cat?"), a fistful of
RAW contemporaries raucous at the back, serious
twenty-somethings querying well-worn conspiracy trivia, a man who
repeatedly asks in gentle voice about the nature of hyperspace,
and a surprising number of couples, including us. Wilson himself spoke for
three hours. He rarely flagged, never held back with the
zinging Swiftian end-jokes, even as he relished retelling
anecdotes for no doubt the billionth time. He made us all Discordian
Popes,
except Quinn, who has always refused the title, no matter how many times
she's been elected to it. He recommended Terry Southern. He told me whether
Father Christmas exists or not.
2001-12-04»
Morning genetically-modified roundup:
A look at Naked
News Obscure
Store - they want to introduce naked foreign
correspondents.
"The tone was always to be news naked," Pinckert says. "The nudity was a metaphor for getting down to the bare facts, the naked truth, if you will." In other words, the nudity doesn't undermine their credibility, it enhances it.
Fat
has a taste. Science
Daily - making it the sixth sense (after sweet, salty,
sour, bitter and umami.)
Just got the official announcement from AT&T that my Net connection is
back up (it's been up since yesterday lunchtime, but you can understand them
waiting until everything cleared). I've been quite impressed by the
switch-over. If the DHCP reconfig didn't work, the AT&T engineers set up
fake @home DNS and News servers that tell you to manually change your
settings. The DNS hack is clever and the newsserver is a sign they were really
paying attention. ISP's never remember the newserver.
2001-12-03»
Feh. Just when I promised myself to be a bit assiduous on the blogging,
AT&T
ceases to be @home. Back up now, thanks to some stealthy listening
for ARP calls on the cable circuit.
Evening scan:
Blah, blah, blah, Ginger, blah, blah.
Journalist
Thrown Off Flight for Taking Photos wartimeliberty.com
Appears to be more extenuated than first meets the eye (the
paranoid Guard, it's implied, is a undercover drugs officer).
Worrying though - and I know someone is going to say "Well,
serves the journalist right. He shouldn't have been practicing Yoga".
Al Qaeda Spokesman Abu Ghaith Seriously Wounded al
jazeera
The
laptops for schools pilot project mefi that lead to a general rollout of
PCs to Maine's
kids says wireless networks made it a success:
"If they had to plug the laptops into a wall someplace to get Internet access I don't think we would be seeing the impact we have," said Priest. "Untethering the technology has been key, so that it is as easy as using a pencil and piece a paper."
On the other hand, judging from another pilot project in VA, it's not all beer
and skittles
In the past four weeks, we have discovered that some students have been using the Internet excessively for personal use during school time. This has put a tremendous strain on the network, creating network traffic which is preventing the effective usage of iBooks for their intended educational purposes.
\.
discussion on Cingular's 2.5G mobile rollout. I was at the same 802.11
conference that GlennF blogged so
finely, and I agree with him: it was eye-opening how the
US mobile telcos are coming to the unlicensed side of the
Force.
One speaker mentioned that telcos planning 2.5G/3G networks really didn't
want wandering desktop apps on laptops consuming large amounts of
bandwidth over the cellular net. They want to charge by the packet on 3G, and
applications that would require hours of data transfer would make those rates
look ridiculous. Customers, the thinking goes, will be happy at paying a $1
for a minute long video clip, but would seriously balk at $60 an hour for
file-sharing.
Somebody else I spoke to - again from a big mobile telco - mentioned that
the cost-effectiveness of the 802.11 base stations compared to 3G. Even though
the range is so crummy, 3G basestations currently cost >$100,000. "I'd
much prefer to rollout an 802.11 based network.", he said, unprompted.
This fits in with a comment by Monica
Paolini that real estate owners are the people who will determine the
nature and cost of large scale 802.11 rollouts - with such short range,
there's a lot more negotiating and partnerships with the people living under
your basestation to be done.
2001-11-29»
The morning rounds:
Fancy schmancy Scandi wireless
mag, with great wireless
poster.
Despite being Mr Privacy Man a lot of the time, I've often wondered exactly
how the "creeping loss of rights" game plays out. Do soft concessions like
widespread CCTVs really lead to more pernicious abuses? I'd say this
case might be a good litmus test of public reaction:
Litter
louts to be filmed, have their pictures published.
London's growing army of litter louts are to be named and shamed in a special
"rogues gallery" as part of a groundbreaking new clean-up campaign.
Merton Council, in south London, plans to use its 60 CCTV surveillance
cameras to zoom in on anybody dropping litter.
2001-11-19»
I'm sure it'll zoom up the
charts
but I do like
Secret Santa
