Oblomovka

2002-06-04»

The NSA is running "loose lips" ads in military magazines and as posters in military facilities. More pictures #1, #2, and #3 (shown), and #4.

This is the first time the NSA has ever commissioned an outside ad campaign, said NSA spokeswomen Marti Mercer. Like all aspects of budget for the ultra-secret NSA, the advertising campaign's cost is classified.

Very early attempts to analyse the structure of Simmish, the language of the Sims. Not very detailed, but I appreciate learning the canonical spelling of "Dis graw is fredeshay".

A lot of birthdays coming up: Ditherati, NTK, and Netscape 4.0 are all five, osil8 is six, Zeldman was seven. And Mozilla, hopefully, will be either zero, or too many years old, depending on how you look at it.

Things that should have an RDF feed, number one.

2002-06-03»

Dorodango! The shiny ball of mud that kids (and cheating adults with electron microscopes) go crazy for!

Onion prefigures future: Meg's fall from vegetarian grace leads ineluctably to I Desperately Need Bone Marrow.

BrainHeart is the strangest magazine I read these days. It's a glossy Swedish magazine funded by one of the big Euro wireless venture capital firms. It has this crazy aspiration to be a muddy mix of Wallpaper*, Red Herring, Fast Company, Wired, and What Mobile?. All the articles are written in a eurojetsetting Scandlish intonation: perfectly grammatical with a plodding sing-song quality. "Let's assume that we would like to take a wireless tourist tour through Stockholm's 750-year-old Old Town, Gamla Stan. What would the tour look like?", begins one rip-roaring read. Every cover has a man and a women from the endlessly dull business world of Swedish telecoms, wearing these perfect clothes, perfectly photographed in perfect settings. The articles are all about building telcos "with brain and heart", but it's mostly just "wouldn't it be great if we could all be nice to one another, and guess how many Kronor I just spent on my new headset?". I can't put it down. I haven't been as simultaneously revolted and fascinated by a publication since the rise of the Mexican Death zine. Get a BrainHeart subscription for free, and share my confusion.

I've rather foolishly hacked DeadHorse (this site's PHP blogging system) to cope with multiple entries in one day. It was a bit of a struggle, frankly, but it works - although the entries within a day are no longer in reverse chronological order, which ain't the blog way. DeadHorse's design is collapsing under the strain. I'll have to refactor it, which if previous experience is to go by, means migrating it from PHP to something a bit less clunky.

update: Oh, it does work. I was just writing backwards. Excellent.

2002-06-02»

Quinn says it's funny that Metafilter should run

"since", she says, "Metafilter is the ultimate BBS tribute site".

Just a datapoint: with rebates, WiFi cards are now down to $35 in the US.

Nick Szabo, one of the more precise extropian thinkers, has sketched out a formal language for defining contracts. I'd love to hear what a lawyer (preferably a lawyer with some knowledge of computer language theory) thought of this. He also has a lighter piece on Medieval clocks and economics. - from Seth

Shades of Henry Ford: one of those "bad UI" moments.

2002-06-01»

Brewster "Internet Archive" Kahle is God; and a hardworking God at that. Latest project: digitising and distributing the receding edge - that's to say, all the public domain stuff that existed prior to the Web.

"Public Access to the Public Domain" is a step towards Raj's "Universal Access to Human Knowledge". How hard can it be?

We have to use the
next value from each node to
get to the next node.

I've added that <LINK> thing. What mime type should RDF be anyway? I have it down at application/xml. Is that right?

Movements in the politech world. Stanton 'mech' McCandlish is leaving the EFF. Like old movie stars who you can only imagine in black and white, I can only see Stanton's name in non-proportional Courier font, sitting on top of e-mails from the Blue Ribbon era EFF. Declan McCullagh is moving from Wired News, too.

There are big changes occurring in the UK cyberrights scene this week, but can't talk about those quite yet.

2002-05-31»

Locust Technologies are a UK group working on WiFi gargoyle tech - webcam, audio and more in luggable backpacks that can communicate with other nodes to form a portable mesh network. Great for armies of independent reporters. Or just armies, if you want to look at it like that.

This stuff has been long awaited; from NTK, 1999-01-15:

Nice to see Librettos being put to better use than as
portable Quake-stations: last Monday, RODDY MANSFIELD and
his associates from the video newszine UNDERCURRENTS
barricaded themselves into Shell's London offices to protest
the company's mistreatment of the citizens of the Niger
Delta. Hours later they were forcibly expelled by police,
who smashed through partition walls to arrest them. Despite
Shell cutting off light and electricity, the team managed to
issue press releases and photos via the 133Mhz Tosh, a
cellular modem and digital camera. It's a hack that could
have wider applications. As previous Undercurrents docs have
shown, Police officers at protests have taken to arresting
legitimate videojournalists. After being released without
charge, their tapes are returned too late for mainstream
news programmes to use. In some cases, the police actively
erase footage. Now, hardware hacker that you are, you'll
realise that a handheld videocam feeding into a digitiser,
broadcasting via a line o' sight link (2500MHz? 1900MHz?) to
a mobile archive centre would provide these impromptu
censors - and us eager Max Headroom fans - with... well,
must-see TV. Think you'd like to help develop such a
monster? Give our operators a bleep. 
mailto:stef@spesh.com
       - unconnected with undercurrents, we hasten to add
http://www.kemptown.org/shell/pictures.html
      - but, you know, if we do come up with anything 
         

2.5Ghz? So close...

Phil Wolff asked if I had an RSS feed for Oblomovka. Well, I guess I have now. I tried to work out what current practice was, and it seems to be "stuff the entire entry into the <description> tag, so that's what I'm doing for now. 48K of RDF, though: I have a bad feeling about this.

2002-05-30»

For scrappy, trying-to-improve-matters-from-within, no holds barred, troll your workmates, shout-your-rage corporate blogs, I don't think you need to look further than the excellent Mozilla blogs - especially the ongoing (productive) spats between the Chimera developers and their colleagues. Compare that to all the nicey-nicey community stuff from those Macromedia guys. Once seems to be just a question of keeping the consumers happy. The other serves the function of keeping them informed with what's really going on. Plus the Mozilla guys' blogs seems to be spilling off into blog-friendly Mozilla adaptions, like in-browser RSS viewing and HTML editing.

Hope they don't get sacked.

Aiieee. Dave linked here, even though this is essentially my "pfft-pfft. Is this thing on?" test site.

What's particularly frustrating is that last night, I dreamt this spectacular four thousand word piece that would explain once and for all the relation of blogs to journalists, the nature of flash crowds, and what lessons Corrupt Bloggers can learn from Corrupt Journalism before it's too late.

But unlike you, I'm only a theoretical blogger, and while Eric S. Raymond will write a megabyte of distilled opinion before he gets up and shoots his breakfast, it still takes me a week to think enough thoughts to spit out even a hundred words.

I'll save it all for that guest DaveNet I drunkenly promised Dave. Yes, yes, that is what I will do. Straight after panicking about next week's Extreme Computing Conference in London . And doing whatever it is I get paid for.

In the mean time, here is who I currently read when I'm avoiding writing: Seth from the EFF, and Leonard from robotfindskitten, and Quinn from my life, and Lee from NTK, and everybody from Advogato. Smarter than you and I, thank God.

2002-05-28»

We come in peace. Hell, we come in packets.

You can now pre-order Zone 1 DVD's of Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi! Only $22.49. If you haven't seen Koyaanisqatsi, it's about as marvellous and moving as an 87 minute Philip Glass minimalist soundtrack set to beautiful time-lapse photography of the natural world can be. Previously you could only get hold of DVDs by paying a >$100 donation to the film's non-profit owners, the Institute for Regional Education. On the other hand, I'd like to see their planned sequel, Naqoyqatsi ('War Time') - so maybe I should donate, at that.