Oblomovka

2002-12-19»

As you may have spotted, I'm college-educated, and English-speaking. I'm also currently in the midst of converting my position here in the US to the status of permanent resident. There's no real hurry - I'm on a journalist visa at the moment which is valid for five years and is renewable; it's just that now I'm having my child in this country, I'd like to make my stay here as secure as possible.

When I say, "in the midst of", let me tell you what that involves. I'm on my third attempt to have the documentation even processed. Twice it's been sent back because of a filing error on my part. This is not surprising: the documentation needed to even apply for permanent residency is so vast, and so often changed, that even with the best explanations in the world, there are dozens of ambiguities. And the explanations are not the best in the world. INS requirements differ from office to office: official Website explanations contradict one another. This is hard. Here's the first step in my application process:

Included in that wodge are a couple of detailed notarised documents from friends, tax returns, about eight photographs (in several differing but precise sizes, not shown), and a partridge in a pear tree. And remember, there are interviews and cross-checks with the CIA, FBI and the American consulate before this finally gets through to the point where I can have an interview. And after the interview, I will have to notify the government every time I move house - or any time my friends move house, or I'm in violation.

I can honestly say it's been the most inpenetrably complex bureacratic procedure I have been involved with in my life. If my livelihood and my residency in this country depended on it, I'd be terrified.

As I say, I'm lucky. For me, it's just a way of securing my status. My immigration attorney says my case is "relatively straightforward". I'm on a long-term visa here already. I can speak English. They've recently changed the rules in San Jose to allow me to file by post, so I no longer have to pitch a tent outside the INS offices here and wait in a queue from 1 in the morning until they open at 8.00 (think I'm joking? Go check the temporary encampment that emerges every night. There's a video clip of it here.

But most of all, right now, I'm lucky because I'm not from an Arab country. Because the simple form-filling errors that I've made in the past - me, English-speaking, college-educated, was-studying-to-be-a-lawyer-at-school - would have got me handcuffed, arrested and thrown in jail this week.

Estimates by immigration lawyers suggest that a quarter of the people in LA who traipsed off to the INS to take part in yet another bureacratic hoop-jump were taken away to prison Tuesday. I wonder what the other three-quarters think? If you come from Iran, or you come from Syria, Iraq or the Sudan you know what to do in this situation. Don't ever come forward when the government calls your name again. Hide. Because in those countries, such sudden, unexpected, disproportionate and ethnic-group specific roundups (of just the men, by the way, not the women) by government are usually a prelude to something very nasty. Of course, as they say, that couldn't possibly happen here. But they don't know that, do they? They're not English-speaking, college-educated, white, and safe in their homes like me, are they?

Anyway, I'm buying myself a Christmas present. I'm joining the ACLU. It only costs $20, which is certainly less than the $600 or so my immigration application costs. There's only one form to fill in - and I can do it online. And nobody is going to round me up and throw me in jail because I decided to come forward and hand in this paperwork. Or at least, that's the general idea.

2002-12-17»

Here, I think, is the key quote, from the jury foreman, Dennis Strader:

The defense argued that the program merely enabled owners of Adobe eBook Reader software to make copies of e-books for personal use. If an owner makes a backup copy of an e-book or transfers it to another device he owns, they argued, that is permitted under the "fair use" concept of copyright law.

Jury foreman Dennis Strader said the argument made a big impact on the jurors, who asked U.S. District Judge Ronald M. Whyte to clarify the "fair use" definition shortly after deliberations began.

"Under the eBook formats, you have no rights at all, and the jury had trouble with that concept," said Strader.

(From the Associated Press story)

The excellent Creative Commons animation I mentioned is right here. It's brilliant. But what license is it? I'm worried that Junell's Web server will get killed by too many people linking to it, and I'd like to co-host it here. Hmmm...

Okay, I've watched it right through to the end, and it looks like it's under an attribution, sharealike, non-commercial license. So I can mirror the movie with a clear conscience! Excellent. This really works!

I got to the Creative Commons launch late (Q and I had to apply CPR to a dead server in Portland), and had to stand near the back, near the avocado dip. My summary of the speeches, therefore, has to be "Mumble mumble mumble (LOUD CRUNCHING NOISES OF MY OWN MOUTH) (APPLAUSE)". Some elements I gathered through the static: Lessig, to follow up on his triumph of getting Milton Friedman and Ursula Le Guin to join forces in Eldred, got video pledges of support from John Perry "Intellectual Property is an Oxymoron" Barlow and Jack "I 0wnz0r Y0ur C0mm0nw3al" Valenti. Together - AT LAST. DJ Spooky spoke, then played something Quinn described as "19th Century Koyaanisqatsi" and therefore I liked. It is under the MUMBLE MUMBLE CRUNCH license. Aaron Swartz managed to explain RDF well, even as his presentation AV morphed behind him into /dev/random piping into video memory. The Creative Commons team also showed a fantastic Flash movie that explains the whole concept far better than any echo-mumbling I could muster. I can't find it on the site, but oooohhh when I do, it is so getting redistributed. The brie was nice.

Our replacement Roomba (the previous one died in protest of our lifestyle) arrived. We're looking for someone else in the area to play Two Robot Vacuum Cleaners Enter, One Robot Vacuum Cleaner Leaves. This is where two Roombas are placed back-to-back in the middle of a room, and set running. First to escape through the one open door wins. Also, when we're drunker, we're tying pens to them and making automatic art on the kitchen floor.

2002-12-16»

Matt's amazing warchalking meme makes it into New York Times Idea of the Year list (I am so proud I got to be the first to rub my hands in glee). It's a great list, incidentally - as it would have to be, with "Pokemon Hegemon" as one of the headings.

2002-12-14»

One more thing I'm going to have problems explaining to my daughter: what "cc:" stands for.

Hmmm. Some buzz going about Ronald Rivest's new startup, a cryptographically secure micropayment protcol. My spider-sense is tingling about online payment systems in 2003. Oh, boy, another opportunity to look stupid in twelve month's time. Scott Loftesness is a good news-aggregating blogger on this topic and quite a few others.

2002-12-12»

So, last week's ST column was about RSI (I'm slowly crippling myself with mouse shoulder, so I'm trying to stop doing Bad Things). Gary Marshall wrote a very kind mail listing all the trick he's been doing to fend it off. I said that it'd be great if he through it up on the Web, and he did, so I'm linking to it: Gary Marshall's Guide to RSI.

Great short piece from the New Yorker wondering what Philip K. Dick would make of the Total Awareness Office. I came because the title of the piece - Too Much Information - which is fun. I blogged because of the fantastic payoff in the last paragraph. Sometimes you suspect people write whole columns just to be able to finish them on flourishes like that. Or, as in this case, you just know they did.

Small tweak to the bookmarklet below - I've stuck in an escape function call to cope with news URLs with GET parameters. The bookmarklet will still have problems with URLs that willfully stick in user information into the URL (like MSNBC), but it'll do much better with quite a few others.

Here's your Google News bookmarklet, courtesy of the amazing (and currently not quite as lazy) Rod Begbie.

2002-12-11»

Another (slightly trickier) URL hack. Bookmark this google news bookmark in Moz, and give it a shortcut (as in the last entry) - say "gn". Now, if you're at a news article, and you want to see what other news sources have to say about it, just replace the "http://" bit of the URL with "gn ", hit return, and Google News will spew out the cluster of news stories that are similiar to your news article. So, if you were at "http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2568223.stm", a news story about Yemen, change the URL to "gn news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2568223.stm" would take you to http://news.google.com/news?num=30&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=cluster:news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2568223.stm which is the index page for all the news stories Google knows about this topic.

This could probably do with turning into a platform-independent bookmarklet. Any volunteers?

Bookmark this link in Mozilla or Phoenix, and then go to "Bookmarks/ Manage Bookmarks", select the new bookmark, choose "Edit/Properties..." then give the damn thing the keyword "ntk". Then, whenever you type in "ntk foobar" into the location bar, you'll search NTK for foobar. Here's another one for Oblomovka.

NTK plugged a Brussels European Parliament meeting on the EU's moves to adopt software patents last month. Here's a summary of what happened there. For those who want the juicy bit (any juicy bit), here's EuroLinux's list of cases where software patents are currently blocking development and availability of free software.

They're giving the EFF ten dollars for every copy sold until the end of December. (From Doc's weblog).

2002-12-10»

The always excellent c't magazine analyses the hypotheticals of the Dutch IP-surveillance scandal:

According to anonymous sources within the Dutch intelligence community, all tapping equipment of the Dutch intelligence services and half the tapping equipment of the national police force, is insecure and is leaking information to Israel. How difficult is it to make a back-door in the Dutch Transport of Intercepted IP Traffic system?

Lloyd keeps sending me advance notice of West Coast missile launches from Vandenberg and I keep forgetting to blog them. Heads up, as it were:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 04:22:20 -0800
From: Brian Webb 
To: SeeSat-L@satobs.org
Subject: Vandenberg AFB Missile Launch
Resent-Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 07:19:42 -0500
Resent-From: SeeSat-L@satobs.org

Hi All:

Be advised that a modified Minuteman II missile will be launched from Vandenberg AFB on California's central coast several hours from now.

The vehicle is scheduled to leave northwest Vandenberg on Wednesday morning, December 11 at 00:01 PST (right after midnight), the start of a four-hour launch window. This translates to DEC 11 08:01 to 12:01 UTC.

Following launch, the vehicle will fly a ballistic trajectory and send an unarmed warhead and decoys to the central Pacific as part of a missile defense test. Several minutes later, an interceptor launched from the Marshall Islands will attempt to kill the warhead.

The Minuteman launch should be visible at least as far away as Phoenix, Arizona; Saint George, Utah; and Reno, Nevada. Look for a bright orange "star" in the direction of Vandenberg. If you have binoculars or an astronomical telescope, you might want to use it to view the launch (the view could be impressive).

If you see anything tonight, let me know.

Regards,

Brian Webb

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Viva Memory Hole

2002-12-09»

I went down to the San Jose federal courthouse today with Lisa and watched Dmitry Sklyarov give evidence in the Elcomsoft trial. I've been there before, when Dmitry was in handcuffs and a bright orange prisoner garb. Now he wears a suit, like every non-gangster Russian I've seen wear a suit, like I wear a suit: scruffily.

American courts are, naturally, straight from TV land. This separates them from British courts, which are from period drama TV land. Counsel approaches the bench. Objections are sustained. Truths are pledged. I idly noted that this Federal court has a gold-fringed American flag, which must drive nutty tax protestors even more crazy.

I'm not sure how much I can talk about the case. I suppose a great deal, but my old sub judice instincts kick in, so I'll try not to draw too many conclusions. Here's how the arguments appear to be going.

The Defence

• ... claimed Elcomsoft produced the software to expose weaknesses in e-book products. They introduced Dmitry's Defcon speech as evidence for this. Dmitry's speech is rather dry (apart from a hilarious moment at the beginning where another Defcon attendee forces him to say "Where are the nuclear vessels in Alameda?". I laughed a bit too loudly in court here.)
• ... asserted Elcomsoft deliberately kept the price of software high to reduce the damage to ebook publishers. The claim here is that $100 was enough to dissuade casual copiers of books, but allowed them to release the software into general use.
• ... said that the software in the case - the Advanced Ebook Processor, is essentially the same as the Advanced PDF password recovery program, which Adobe appears to have no complaint with.
• ... and that Elcomsoft (and Sklyarov) intended the software to be used for non-infringing uses: backup copies, blind users, fair use, etc. The backup provision is the most important here. Under Russian law, any computer user can make one backup copy - something they claim would not be possible with a standard Adobe ebook.

The Prosecution

• ...pointed out that Dmitry didn't write a program that exclusively produce copies in accordance with fair use (ie allow you to cut and paste just a few pages, output only in braille, etc.) Dmitry answered this by pointing out that there'd be no point - after a few uses, you could essentially decrypt everything.
• ...asked why, if they wanted to draw attention to the flaws in Adobe's ebook, why Dmitry hadn't released his exploit on Bugtraq. This is a fascinating attack, given that it seems to imply that it would be *better* for Elcomsoft to release flaws on Bugtraq. Given that many people believe that releasing such circumvention code on Bugtraq is a breach of the DMCA itself, this seems kind of a weird condemnation. The point wasn't examined in detail by either prosecution or defence. Dmitry said that Elcomsoft didn't want to damage ebook publishers by publically releasing the exploit.
• ...said that by reverse-engineering Adobe's ebook reader, Sklyarov had breached Adobe's download license. Dmitry pointed out that reverse-engeering for compatibility reasons was legal in Russia, so that part of the license didn't apply.

This last point lead to the biggest soundbite of Sklyarov's evidence, where the prosecution asked him "Did you care whether you broke US law when you wrote this program?". Dmitry said no, he didn't care. Prosecution, in a real TV Land moment, seized the opportunity to say "no further questions, your honour", dramatically shuffled their papers and sat down. Defence leapt up and attempted to clarify what Dmitry had said. Dmitry rather stubbornly insisted that he didn't care, and said that he was rather more concerned about whether he was legal under Russian law, which he was convinced it was.

Speaking personally, and given the "Alameda" yukfest at the beginning of the evidence, I would have taken this opportunity to cry out "In Soviet Russia, broken US laws do not care about you!". I guess this is why I'm never asked to be an expert witness.

I missed the second witness, the MD of Elcomsoft. By all accounts, he played one of the better cards of the defence, by revealing that the vast majority of Elcomsoft customers were law enforcement and in the security field.

I'll try and pop along tomorrow, although I'm now a bit late filing for my real work this week.

Quinn wanted a distributed project to synthesise all possible music, and hand out the copyrights to whoever has the screensaver running at the time. This man clearly needs a distributed project to synthesis all human thought, and good luck to him.

At Biella's house last night, somebody was looking for 37,000 signatures to get a proposition onto San Francisco's ballot. Cory wisely suggested that this was too humble: why not seek out 37,000 propositions, and then get each of the proposers to sign each others' propositions? Everyone wins! San Francisco's a creative place, after all, and everyone loves a denial-of-service attack on democracy. My suggestion at this point was to construct a distributed project to generate all possible signatures (therefore guaranteeing all future propositions would be automatically included), then, once that was achieved, a distributed project to generate all possible propositions. Perhaps we could even copyright them all, and win some cash whatever the political outcome.

After that, I fear, the suggestions became quite impracticable.

2002-12-07»

Nick Szabo has written a layman(ish) guide to smart contracts on First Monday. Which I will read, oh yes. Just after I've ploughed through Design Patterns, a cheapo copy of which turned up yesterday. It was getting too embarassing to admit I've never read it. It's a great book for explaining to you what you already knew at some level - and I mean that as a compliment. There's stuff that these patterns solve that I consistently get wrong, fix, and relearn, only to forget again the next time. Hopefully having a vocabulary will staple this into my head.

2002-12-05»

David Docherty, a man who, when he wasn't bemoaning the immoral anarchy of the Net , was hiring "viral marketeers" to spam newsgroups with fake environmental groups to plug his new novel, finally departed his job at Telewest. His title was "Head of Broadband Content", which is like being "Man In Charge Of What People Should Say On The Telephone".

In his parting shot in the Guardian, he says that we're a "cookie monster" generation, who want everything to be free. He says that the programmers behind P2P are "like Fagin in Oliver Twist - they just want to pick a pocket or two". And that's why broadband has failed, apparently.

I can't think of a single word to say, except: how did he last so long? See ya, Chicken Dance Elmo. Hope you do better in a market intended to promote fictions.

Summary: we don't know, even if some people claim to. Energy-industry sponsored researcher Mark Mills told everyone it was around 13% of the total U.S. electricity output, in stories like the famous Forbes cry "Dig more coal -- the PCs are coming". The figure was bandied around as a reason for the California blackouts - even as it become obvious that the crazy power prices were down to a faulty deregulatory market and outright manipulation by Enron. Now WSJ columnist David Wessel points to a competing Berkeley report that says its closer to 3%. And admits that the chances are we don't know. But what's important is to admit we don't know.

"When people hear a statistic that matches their assumptions about how the world is going, they tend not to question it," Mr. Koomey says. That was especially so during the euphoria-induced gullibility of the late 1990s, when WorldCom Inc.'s UUNet subsidiary started an avalanche with the catchy, but false, claim that Internet traffic was doubling every 100 days.

Old assumptions demand re-examination. Are forecasts for electricity demand proving wrong? Some issues demand debate. How much potential does conservation really have? What's the wisest way to be sure we have enough energy for the future? What should government do or not do to ensure that our children and grandchildren live better? What is best left to the market?

But no good comes from pretending we know more than we do or from treating suppositions as truths.

So Quinn and I went over to the Internet Archive and interviewed Brewster Kahle about - well, whatever he wanted to talk about. I started with a list of the current Brewster projects I knew about - the Internet Archive, his donation of a copy of the Internet Archive to the Library of Alexandria, the Internet Bookmobile, his plan to light up most of San Francisco with free WiFi, his amicus curiae in the Eldred case, the September 11th archive, the Wayback Machine... he picked the bookmobile, and we talked binding technology, how books on demand now means its a buck-a-book at quantities of one or more, the future role of librarians, the collateral damage of the 1976 copyright law, how to get kids printing Dickens instead of selling drugs, and what happens if he got run over by a bus.

I'll try and put up my notes after the Irish Times piece is finished, but if I don't, here are the key blogworthy bits:

Firstly, the Internet Archive is in San Francisco's Presidio which is a historic ex-military post that magically turned into a park in 1994. I don't yet have an easy way of describing the feel of the place, but my notes say "Like a colonial version of 'The Prisoner'" and "Americana-ville, Federalsburg". It has its own law enforcement, fire and medical services. It's very hard to estimate who lives there: my guess was all the ex-presidents, from Washington onwards. I expected to see Thomas Jefferson pass me on a golf cart.

The Internet Archive office looks like the village schoolhouse. I meant to ask Kahle how they snagged an office there, but we forgot. I forgot a lot of things; he's somewhat of a firehose. Usually it's pretty hard for an interviewee get a word in edgeways with me, but Brewster managed it.

Remember Rafe's blog entry about how 93% of pre-1946 copyrighted films are unavailable? I told Brewster and he said, well, they're doing better than the world of books. 98% of currently copyrighted books are out of print and effectively unobtainable.

Of course, there's not much he can do about the stuff imprisoned in copyright. But there's still the public domain. The Archive has plans to scan 1,000,000 public domain books by 2005. If you'd like to contribute your own, pre-Disney works, just scan 'em in page by page as TIFFs and send them to the Archive. They'll keep them for you, and for the whole of posterity.

He also wants to help libraries to start scanning in their PD collections too; make librarys' access to their works a two-way street. He quotes Michael "Project Gutenberg" Hart:

We have the technology to take the history of the world to your town, and the history of your town to the world.

It's a tragedy that children don't have access to the whole of the public domain. This is what the Bookmobile jaunt was for - to show people the value of the public domain. (The Bookmobile would drive up to schools, set up their satellite dish, let a kid pick a book, and print and bind it for them, then and there. Cost a buck a book. They paid a dollar, and got to keep a book for the rest of their life.)

He talked about his grandfather's book collection, how so many of those books are unavailable now. He wants to give the collection to his children. But he has two children. Where is he going to get another copy of these out-of-print books? His grandfathers been dead forty years: his library should have passed onto everyone.

"The history of libraries is this: they get burnt down. By governments. I'm not anti-government: I'm a librarian, not a libertarian. But that's the truth."

And lots, lots more. I keep hearing him say "we can make a different world, by building it", which sounds clumsy copied from my notes, but in context, spoken by Brewster Kahle in an old wooden house with a bunch of commodity web servers in one corner, a whiteboard with plans to scan a million books on the wall to the left, and shelf with a freshly minted Alice in Wonderland and his federally-printed submission to the Supreme Court behind me, it made me think of Patrick and Theresa Nielsen Hayden's motto:

Work like you were living in the early days of a better nation

I need to record these things on tape and upload them, don't I?

2002-12-04»

Much more detailed info than the keynote is Trevor Marshall's talk on security and antenna design and how not to leak signals in directions you don't want. Or, alternately, given that Marshall designed a parabolic feed that secured a 125Km WiFi link using standard Cisco cards, how to leak in exactly the directions you do want.) I suspect the talk is similiar to the one he gave to the SoCal Wireless Users group, which is streamed on the Linux Public Broadcasting Network if you want to learn more.

He also has some ugly-ass plots of PCMCIA antenna signal strengths (below - the two colours are different polarisations). WiFi card signals are all over the place, which I found out to my cost when I was trying to write a triangulating utility a while back.

I'm blogging Sky Dayton's keynote at 802.11 planet. There's not been much that's new, but it's a nice overview of Sky's take on the market.

Sky's "ah-ha" moment was when he was in Aspen, and he saw three APs in his hotel room. Two turned out to be wireless ISPs - both of whom starting scrapping between each other to talk to him. Reminded him of early days of Earthlink.

Survey says: 97% of travelling businessmen would alter their plans to gravitate to high-speed access (high-speed access is more important to them than wireless access)

Ubiquity in laptops - Dell will be putting WiFi in their laptops by default, new iPaq will have WiFi built in.

He sees WiFi in cellphones, cars, gameboys. How low can the power go on these things, I wonder? There must be some physical limit. Maybe we just need more sensitive APs? Sorry, mind wandering - back to Sky.

Only 3,000 commercial hotspots in the US - about a million potential locations (212 conference centers, 3032 train stations, 5352 airports, 72,720 business centers, 202,600 gas stations, 480,298 restaurants and cafes, 1,111,300 retail stores. Wow. There are more airports than train stations in the US.)

But how do you get to ubiquity?

Dayton compares it to early days of ISPs ("Nobody knew who was their customer and who was their competition"). Back then, everybody tried to do everything - owning the wires, the network, and the brands. Eventually each company concentrated in one area - end users are AOL, MSN, networks are UUNET etc, wires are the telcos. (Hmmm. Has this happened in broadband yet?)

Dayton's division in the WiFi market is: Venues (Mariot, Hilton, Borders, etc). Hot Spot Operators: "(Wayport, T-Mobile, Surf and Sip, etc). Aggregators, who take the fragmented networks and provide cohesion: Boingo, GRIC, iPass. And brands: Boingo, T-Mobile, Earthlink, Sprint, Cingular, AT&T.

Big potential, says Sky, is in Hot Spot Operators. Two aggregators max. But he would say that...

He believes that no one HSO (Hot Spot Operator) will be able to deploy more than 10% of the total footprint - because WiFi's short range, low barrier to entry, and venue fragmentation. If your brother runs a chain of coffee shops, you could set up a HSO and roll it out, and steal past any bigger HSO. That's why aggregators are necessary.

Mac version of Boingo sniffer in Q1 2003. Not much talk about *how* it aggregates with HSO.

Some nattering about Hot Spot in a Box - allows any access point becomes a commercial hot spot. Costs $500 includes hardware, will drop to $300 as they talk to major manufacturers -- any broadband end point could become a hotspot. There must be a way of turning that into a software app. What kind of cut do these Boingo resellers get?

Hardware with Boingo built-in: Nomadix, Colubris, and Vernier. Fairly minor players. Client software carried with Orinoco, D-Link, SMC, Netgear, HP laptops, Earthlink (doh), Fiberlink. Yeah, but who pays attention to the CDs in the box?

Audience seem a bit underwhelmed. You can see that WiFi is taking off: lots of low-attention-span wide-eyed MBA wolverines sniffing and snarling their business plans on the floor. They already know Sky's overview - they want to know what everyone is going to do for them, or what they can do to everyone else.

The conference is much much bigger than last year, but I think the smarts has got a bit more dilute. Ah, well - once more into the J-curve...

Now, should find Glen and feed him some Theraflu?

A friend wrote asking me if a petabyte would be an affordable amount of disk storage in five years time. Blowed if I know, but in scrabbling to answer, I did find this great projection of the next twenty years of magnetic storage. It contains this graph which is based on IBM estimates of future storage capacity and price. (which I couldn't be bothered to convert into HTML - hey, but maybe you will and sent the text to me. Updated 2004-07-11: For my birthday, Adrian Furby sent me this HTMLised. Thanks, Adrian!)

As you can see, a petabyte will still cost about $70,000 in 2008. Consolation prize: a terabyte will sell for $70. Better start saving those files now!

According to a cursory IMDB search, Jason Schultz has discovered that 93% of the movies released from 1927-1946 are unavailable (it'd be interesting to include current TV showings in this - what was that site that let you grep through US TV listings for keywords?). As an interesting aside, the IMDB has 36,386 titles for that period. The copyright office says there are 37,144 - which means that the IMDB, a largely amateur effort, has snagged 98% of the titles. All goes to show that Kevin Kelly's assertion that enthusiasts might be better at preserving film history than paid copyright holders might turn out to be true. (Off of the rc3.org)

2002-12-03»

A new and better patch for the old linux-wlan on the 2.4 kernel; an addition to How To Wash Dishes that was meant to be added in March (sorry Dave.)

A lesson in game design, hosted on IRC.

How many inhabitants does Sunnydale need to support its apparently limitless supply of vampires? Brian Thomas, PhD candidate in ecology at Stanford, investigates. (From More Like This)

It's December, so it must be time for the Perl Advent Calendar: one CPAN module explained (with brief tutorial) every day. Day one taught me about finding URLs in text, day two explained how to write to files in place with automatic data recovery if it all goes wrong, and day three showed me a all-Perl Perl-and-C mini-SQL database in less than 300KB.

2002-12-02»

I use public transport a lot - even in Silicon Valley, where it sucketh like the Black Hole of Calcutta. To do so in such bus and train deadzone requires exactly the kind of juggling of schedules and careful dead-reckoning navigation that I am utterly lame at.

This is why I depend on online journey planners (like these versions for San Francisco and London). I also walk around quite a bit, trying hard not to get lost. A little pocket GPS and an online street address to latitude/longitude converter have revolutionised my wanderings, around and apart from public transport trips. I hardly ever get lost anymore, and I rarely underestimate how long it will take to get somewhere.

There's just a whole stack of destinations that this tech has let me see are perfectly reachable without a car, even in California.

Now add into the mix services like NextBus, which monitors and shares info on the realtime position of all the buses in San Francisco. Wrap it all into some portable device (or wireless service), that lets me provide an street address, and plots a route and ETA on the fly.

I feel confident with more realtime info, and realtime positioning, a lot more folk would be tempted by public transport, or indeed walking, than now.

That it takes slightly longer to get places doesn't bother me - I get a lot more done on a bus or train than I do even as a passenger in a car. The cost is a pain in the Valley ($4.00 for a day pass), but in most decently-run trans areas that burden is less acute.

No, the largest hurdle public transport has to overcome, I think, is the feeling of powerlessness and unpredictability it induces in most people. I think you can go a long way to reducing that - without requiring any heavy initial investments in public transport itself, by harnassing this new tech. It'll never be for anyone - but it's certainly increased my usage, and appreciation of, even one of the flimsiest public trans system in the world.

2002-12-01»

So I googled for a biography of Winston Churchill, and this was the second hit. It's a fine potted history, but ends on an odd note:

...During all of his life he had served no less than six British monarchs: Queen Victoria, Edward VII, George IV, Edward VIII, George VI and Elisabeth II.

He also possessed a large collection of toy soldiers. However in his book 'My Early Life' he does not mention which make of soldiers he collected. They were probably all made between 1880 and 1900 and therefore some time before Lineol and Hausser figures became available. As a collector he might be the only one of whom also a personality figure was produced.

... and then I realise. This is the biography of Winston Churchill, as it affects the world of toy soldiers. Did that make it any less useful, though?

2002-11-30»

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 NetNewsWire. And now they've added a RSS feed, I can. Hooray!

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.

2002-11-28»

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?

2002-11-27»

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.

2002-11-26»

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."

2002-11-25»

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 BICYCLES

In 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:

• 1 Liter of Clean Water
• One level teaspoon of salt
• Eight level teaspoons of sugar

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!