this year
2006
2006
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2002
2001
Diggory, Andrew, and Matt R.
why I like 802.11
senate committee letter
oscon2003
ms and free software
ubiquity
webolodeon
wat
tagling
haiku
August 2002
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<<Jul Sep>> 
AOL subscribers using AOL's new MacOS X client will see the Web through Mozilla's rendering engine. I'm guessing that's a tiny subset of the online population right now, but it's a sign that we're moving towards slightly more diversity - both in operating systems and browsers.
A bad brew. Stayed up all last night trying to crank the UK Patent Office's draft EUCD legislation into my brain, then relaxed today by learning Squeak the small mammal language left over after the Xerox dinosaur swallowed the meteor. Now my brain's all broken.
Squeak's a mess, which surprised me. Its developers are on an ongoing voyage between two paradigms - from the old Model-View-Controller idea that SmallTalk pioneered, and this new Morphic ideal, which seems to be visual programming on steroids (lots of dragging of boxes which represent methods next to boxes that represent numbers, then throwing them into buckets that represent data, etc). This trip has been going on since around 1998 as far as I can work out, and, in true SmallTalk fashion, they've been rewriting their whole environment as they went. Squeak now looks like this bastard hybrid of a Disney Children's Constructor Kit and an explosion in an object factory.
I understand now that Extreme Programming is a response to the awful temptations of power that come with a SmallTalkish environment. Fiddle with code forever! Redefine everything, every day! SmallTalk (and Squeak) is a bit like having a development environment based on the same instincts that make you fiddle with your screensaver settings all afternoon. It's the sort of environment Jack from "Heat Vision and Jack" would code in. Viewed like that, XP is an Zen Monklike act of profound discipline, rather than the anarchic disruptor that everyone seems to think it is.
Anyway, after traipsing a bit depressingly through haphazard Swikis and online Squeak Foundation manifestos from 1999, I finally found out where all the Squeakers hide out. As always during major upheavals, the true believers hunker down on the the mailing lists. So if you're interested in playing around with Squeak yourself (and it is fun), I think that's the first stop after the obligatory Squeak FAQs
Dave Eggers talks about his latest book. I'm glad he's living in San Francisco. Seth took me to the Pirate Supply Store a while back. There were these extremely McSweeneyesque-style signs all over the place - on lard, and scurvy, and the use of eyeglasses. I'd be a bit afraid if anyone else was aping Eggers quite that precisely. Turns out it's Eggers and the McSweeney's Permanent Staff all along, and just a the flimsy front for his children's writing lab out the back. Apparently it's all funded from the pirate lard sales.
According to this Slashdot post (and who could possibly doubt those), in Kansas you can check your home's power consumption online on an hour by hour basis. I'd love to have those data points to snick into my evil number-crunching bots. Sadly, I live in California, where such eldritch magic is viewed as the work of Satan by our beneficent energy companies.
The unstoppable Lloyd Wood sent me this PDF presentation, The First 31 Years of the Internet -- An Insider's View, for NTK. I'm going to stick it here first otherwise I'll forget about it. It's just the slides for a talk, but it stands alone as a great thumbnail explanation of a lot of the historical and future issues with the Net - including the Rise of the Stupid Network and the less-than-smooth political machinations behind the Net's organising powers. It's written by Bob Braden, who took over from Jon Postel as keeper of the RFCs.
A wireless RS232 cable, courtesy of 802.11b. I really badly needed one of these about two years ago. I wonder if they'll be able to do the same with USB?
