this year
2006
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2001
Diggory, Andrew, and Matt R.
why I like 802.11
senate committee letter
oscon2003
ms and free software
ubiquity
webolodeon
wat
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haiku
November 2002
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<<Oct Dec>> SpinSanity is exactly the sort of site that I don't visit as
much as I'd like, but would read every day in a RSS reader like
Except I'm not using OS X much these days, so I don't have an RSS reader. Time to play around with Straw.
Over seven hundred slides from Peter Gutman's Godzilla Crypto Tutorial. I imagine aliens flipping through this in about thirty seconds to absorb all current knowledge regarding the uses and abuses of crypto. Not particularly mathematically heavy-weight, but pretty techie in parts. The seventy-one slide guide to crypto politics is pretty comprehensive (not entirely up to date though). I got this from the enhyper financial crypto digital library mailing list, which occasionally turns up some great resources.
And I thought burning a video of the ultrasound onto CD-ROM was high-tech. This New Mexico firm is doing 3D ultrasound images, with a haptic interface so you can reach out (in?) and touch your unborn child. I admit to being mildly freaked.
One of the first cross-cultural fidgets I learnt in America: the English use "please" on more occasions than Americans do; OTOH Americans expect "thank-you" when English people wouldn't miss it at all (or would be deploying it sarcastically). So this is one way we manage to sound rude and overpolite to each other at the same time. So, thanks. Thanks!
Anyway: New get your war on. New reverse-link engine to see who is linking to your blog.
Rupert Goodwins did the BBC interview on Palladium I mentioned. He says that the Microsoft rep, Stuart Okin said that Pd was being pushed by Microsoft to become TCPA 1.2. That's to say, not complement or extend, but actively replace the old standard. Anyone heard this said in public before?
I'm still recovering from flu, which I caught in San Jose, just before flying to New York. I still have it now, here in Portland, and apparently I'm still contagious (I had to abandon going over to a nursing home to help Quinn's grandfather today for fear of spreading it). I got it from Gilbert, and I do wonder if he picked it up from the Boston LISA conference. My hosts in New York caught it while I was there, and I'm sure I must have handed it to at least a couple of the people at the Social Software summit, who will be displacing it all over the world.
I wonder what strain it was? It was the worse flu I've had for years, and snagged everybody in our house by the time it had finished. But the CDC report for this week (permanent link for November 16th flu report here) says that there's been no noticeable flu activity in California.
I wonder if that will change in the next few weeks. I wonder if the strain will spread in other areas, and I wonder that if it does whether I might have something to do with that. I feel like Typhoid Mary.
Less egotistically, Quinn asks how anarcho-capitalist systems without centralised disease control would deal with epidemiology: how do you introduce standards to monitor, control and eliminate, say, smallpox without a central organising force? I wonder if our amazement at vanquishing smallpox and TB by centrally setting standards isn't partly fuelled by a sense that epidemics are rarely controllable centrally at all: that these are the exceptions rather than the rules, and require massive acts of co-operation to work. Disease control is the act of a mature and very sophisticated centralised system: is it fair to compare it with simple models of decentralisation?
Doesn't answer the question, though: Q thinks that this is up there with National Defence as a life-without-the-state showstopper. It's one of those warning flags that makes most of us feel that radical decentralisation might tumble into something rather more horrid than the bright lights of Libertaria.
When you meet Charlie Stross, he gives you a business card CD-ROM. Being a SF author, not only does it contain all his published work to date, it's also got a large chunk of his future output on it too. I'm about two-thirds through his almost-imminent space opera, Festival of Fools (It'll be called Singularity Sky in the US). It's great fun, especially if you like singularities, time-travelling godlike posthumans, sassy future UN weapons inspectors, and superintelligent space-faring viral hive minds that appear to be based on the cultural flotsam of the Edinburgh Festival. Or, indeed, if you've ever wondered what would happen if Imperial Russian Navy tried to take on a post-scarcity nanotech orbital flotilla.
All of those descriptions apply in bucketloads to me. Maybe Stross just has a script that burns a personalised novel onto each CD-ROM just before he hands it over. That would be slightly less impressive, I think.
Plotsk was barely recognizable today. Whole districts were burned-out scars on the ground, while a clump of slim white towers soared halfway to the stratosphere from the site of the former cathedral. Burya gaped as something emerald green spat from a window halfway up a tower, a glaring light that hurtled across the sky and passed overhead with a strange double boom. The smell, half-gunpowder and half-orchids, was back again. Sister Seventh sat up and inhaled deepy. "One loves the smell of wild assemblers in the morning. Bushbot baby uploads and cyborg militia. Spires of bone and ivory. Craving for apocalypse."
Seth has linked to a Google search for "Moen's Law of Bicycles", in order to explain what "Moen's Law Of Bicycles" is. Unfortunately, the blogosphere being what it is, Seth's own diary entry is now the number one hit on his own Google search. The second entry is currently another blog entry from someone else, noting that Seth is now the number one hit on his own search. In an attempt to prevent the link spiralling into meta-uselessness, I'll now invoke fair use to quote Moen's Law of Bicycles in its entirety, and hope my overuse of the phrease "Moen's Law of Bicycles" will throw this somewhere near the top:
MOEN'S LAW OF BICYCLESIn the mid-1970s, bicycles suddenly became very popular in the USA. Massive numbers of people were suddenly in the market, few of them knowing anything about bicycles, and many could distinguish poorly if at all between good equipment and bad; good customer service and bad. Consequently, poorly made bicycles (which cost less to make) undercut well made ones (and poor customer service out-earned the good variety), because their superior value ceased to be perceived. Over time, the overall quality of available bicycles declined considerably, almost entirely because of this dynamic with customers, recovering only after the fad ended, years later.
Moen's Law holds that "Good customers make for good products." Quality thrives only when people can tell the difference. When they haven't a clue about the products and how they work, schlock merchandise prevails.
(From A First Look At You-Know-What, Blue Notes, Sept/October 1995 Issue)
- nobody seems to know about oral rehydration therapy.
Stuck in the Basque country in the eighties with not much of the language and a lot of food poisoning, ORT kept me off an intravenous drip and nursed me back to life in a couple of days. Since then, whenever I've had really bad diarrhea, oral rehydration salts been the first thing I've bought or mixed up to get me back on my feet.
ORT is was described by the Lancet as "the most important medical advance this century. It was discovered by US researchers in 1968, and is now used by 38% of all diarrhea cases in the world, saving millions of lives. It's also fantastically cheap - it's just a magic ratio of sodium and glucose and water.
Unfortunately, I have a really bad memory, so I can never remember what the magic ratio is. So, for the record, it's:
Mix it up well, and drink in small sips. It's as easy as that.
I was stumbling around New York, very ill, this week, and asked in a pharmacy about ORT. They said they'd never heard of it, and to buy some Gatorade. Apart from the fact that Gatorade is more expensive, it just isn't the same thing. Gatorade has too much sugar and not enough salt for the magic to work.
In cases of diarrhea, it's really difficult to get water into the human body, because the usual method - absorption through the intestinal wall - is broken. ORT works because the glucose provides an alternative transport across the intestinal wall for the sodium, which increases the concentrate of the salts behind the wall, which means the water moves across far more easily.
But you need to get the ratios right. Gatorade doesn't have it. Apparently the kid's electrolyte fluids (like Pedialyte and Kaolectrolyte) are better, but even they seem to be full of weirdness (like Pedialyte 'goes bad' very quickly). And why just for children? I don't get it.
DELTASS looks like a real life Thunderbird 5. I hope John Tracy is okay up there.
I've let this lie fallow for far too long, but perhaps RSS feeds mean that not watering a blog doesn't mean that it dies beyond recovery.
Aaanyway, the BBC is looking for someone to stand up against the boys from Microsoft and Intel when they explain how great Palladium and LaGrande will be for consumers, producers, and - oh, but who else could there be? It's for a TV interview in the UK next week, and they've already asked Alan Cox and Ross Anderson. I can't think of anyone off the top of my head, which is generally an indication that I'm being dense. Do you know someone? Are you that someone? Let me know, and I'll mail the BBC.
Hooray for the Lazyweb!
I knew PK of PKZIP died in nasty circumstances. But was it all just payback for ZIP's own dodgy past?
RTE says that Trinity College are considering suing Lucas for nicking the likeness of the Long Room Library in Trinity for re-use as the Jedi Archive in Attack of The Clones. (Thanks, Karlin!)
I had no idea National Airlines went bust yesterday. Which is a bit of a pain as it strands Gilbert on the other side of the continent. I pity Dulles staff today - dealing with a squadron of stranded Bay Area sysadmins home from LISA is not going to be fun. Those people do not appreciate having their tickets marked INVALID.
This falls into the blog as spare brain category. Michigan University has a great and impartial Iraq War resources page, if you're interested in that kind of thing. Which, I guess, we have no choice but to be these days. (From the Left-Right anti-war blog Stand Down, a useful resource in itself.)
This story - about a seemingly fake set of scientific papers that managed to get published in reputable scientific journals - just gets more and more weird. Apparently the twins appear quite sincere in their belief that their paper has legitimate merit (rather than just being the Anti-Sokals that I thought they were initially). And they even have bodacious fans!
The sociological milieu of the affair is rich in color and personalities. The Bogdanovs have been described as "charismatic" and and "persuasive." One of the juicier details is that the Bogdanov twins actually have FANS - scores of beautiful, nubile young women - who attend their seminars thereby delighting the other physicists - distracting them from theoretical to applied pysics. The Bogdanovs have political cachet - even the support of the French Minister of education. In addition to this, because of their prominence, the Bogdanov brothers have brought various publishing houses into the fray, making for a general circus-like atmosphere in the normally subdued and monkly Ivory towers of science.
Mind you, the site that's from also talks about a COINTELPRO conspiracy to hold back science. We appear to be entering the really dark, conspiracy-laden corners of sci.physics here. Or at least slightly more French than I'm accustomed to.
Josh's friend Chris got hold of his marketing data under the Data Protection Act. Now he's selling it to the highest bidder on e-bay.
Lloyds TSB: Approximately 500 pages of personal data including an analysis of banking products they believe I might be interested in. Also includes overdraft limit maintenance history (hand written), risk management history data (93 pages) and a full list of letters sent over the previous 5 years (completed by hand). All data and codes come with explanatory notes provided by Lloyds TSB. Original cost £ 10.
Sainsbury's: Dated 12 July 2001, this data is split into five separate reports. Report 1. Operational report (name and address etc.) Report 2. Operational report again, with summarised details and the last 31 transactions on the card. Report 3. Drawn from the main data repository and includes the 'Acorn' standard marketing categorisation. Includes the assumption that we are 'better-off inner-city executives living in a partially gentrified multi-ethnic area'. Report 4. Shows the transactions made using our reward card. Report 5. This is a list of EVERYTHING we bought from Sainsbury's over a 3 year period - where we bought it and how much we paid. This data has been co-produced with my partner whose individual data has been removed.
It's the little differences that make a marriage. When I get pestered by someone phoning up all hours of the day, I try to ignore it. When it happens to Quinn, she starts up a blog about it.
Great slashdot comment by Dan "ssh ninja" Kaminsky, matching the decentralised theories of maverick economist David Friedman with the grim realities of how reputation management works. I really enjoy reading Friedman's work, because he seems to be the only laissez-faire economist who truly believes what they all appear to be saying. Friedman genuinely does think the market is the best solution to anything - including legal systems, national defence, and the environment. I don't agree with him, but I think his models give strong clues on how a completely decentralised, emergent infrastructure might work. He's also much more readable than most economists ("The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations." is one of his). If you've read any Ken Macleod, the economy of The Stone Canal is based on Friedman's Machinery of Freedom: the weird bit where you can kill someone legally if you get a witness is lifted from his analysis of the private law world of medieval Iceland.
1988 Economist editorial by Nico Colchester, on the advantages of crunchy over soggy.(From Tomski).
Crunchy systems are those in which small changes have big effects leaving those affected by them in no doubt whether they are up or down, rich or broke, winning or losing, dead or alive. The going was crunchy for Captain Scott as he plodded southwards across the sastrugi. He was either on top of the snow-crust and smiling, or floundering thigh-deep. The farther south he marched the crunchier his predicament became.
Sogginess is comfortable uncertainty. The modern Scott is unsure how deeply he is in it. He can radio for an airlift, or drop in on an American early-warning station for a hot toddy. The richer a society becomes, the soggier its systems get. Light-switches no longer turn on or off: they dim.
So back in the new home (which is an older house than the previous home). Still living out of cardboard food and cardboard boxes, and a fantastic backload of mail, and trying to pick up the rubbery tatters of busted deadlines I dived through to go up to Portland.
But I'm getting there with my desktop PC. It's now got a Soundblaster Live!, SCSI card and tape backup, CD-RW, video capture, webcam, and PCMCIA card stuffed into it, and is still coming up for air. Everything's supported under Linux; I haven't had to recompile the kernel once, although some dancing was required for the CD-RW.
And my desktop is looking a lot better. Here's what it looks like now (as opposed to a few days ago). I'm running Gnome 2, which has just turned up in Debian unstable. I just typed:
apt-get install -t unstable gnometo get it all set up. It'd have been a bit tricker if I was upgrading from an old Gnome installation, but as it is, I timed this pretty well.
Session management still sucks under X-Windows. That's a bit unfair, as session management doesn't really exist anywhere else. It's the feature that's supposed to let your apps pop up and reinstate themselves in all the right places when you login. In theory, all the windows you see on my desktop should appear without prompting or dragging or clicking or manhandling of any kind. Well, that's the theory. For some reason, Mozilla is one of the few X-Windows apps that pays no attention to session management, which is a pain. X-Chat seems to obey it, but gets very confused as to where it should be. And multi-gnome-terminal - the cool tabbed term you can see in the top left of the desktop plot - just crashes. Yay.
Better news: windows managers are finally getting off the crack pipe in Linux and doing what they're supposed to. Metacity, Havoc's cut-down window-manager for Gnome2, does just what I need: including allowing arbitrary commands to be run from key presses anywhere on the screen. That, and a decent Alt-Tab logic means I'm pretty close to having an almost mouse-free existence.
I'm pretty excited about this. I can now get to almost anywhere I want on the net with just a few keystrokes. I have ALT-G set to go to Google, and I have ALT-ENTER set to go to my bookmarks page. Mozilla's new typeahead feature means I can zoom through my bookmarks by just typing what I think the URL is called. This works fantastically well - I can get to boing boing by just typing ALT-ENTER,b,o,i,ENTER. I can get to Tom Coates' site by just typing ALT-G,Tom Coates,TAB,TAB,ENTER (that's enough to do "I feel lucky" on Tom's name).
It's funny looking at all of this and observing what habits I've picked up from my time with an iBook. I'm not using multiple workspaces on my new desktop, a combination of learning to live without them on the iBook, and suddenly having more screen resolution than I've ever had in my life. And the whole ALT-ENTER thing smacks a great deal of LaunchBar, a great Macintosh intuitive keyboard shortcut utility that really needs to be ported to Linux.
