Oblomovka

2004-10-06»

The Wired News piece on Marshall Beddoe's work with bioinformatic algorithms to crack protocol reverse-engineering has had some good results, in the sense that it's shedding a bit more light on possible crossovers between bioinf and Net applications. (I've written about this sort of genetic cyborg weird-ass mutie crossrbreeding before, for New Scientist).

In the discussion I had with Marshall about his next steps, he commented that a lot of his future work had less to do with number-crunching, and more to do with visualisation. One bioinfodesign innovation that got pointed out to him as a result of the article was sequence logos.

Sequence logos are graphics used in bioinformatics to visually highlight commonalities between multiple sequences. The rows shows how often letters in a gene sequence occur at each position (the GATCs - the taller the letter, the more often the nucleotide appears) together with a measure of how much commonality is preserved over all the sequences (the curve).

If you're trying to spot patterns in long data sequences, some adaptation of this might be useful to you too. I'm really interested in seeing what Marshall comes up with next.

2004-10-04»

So what am I doing at the moment? you ask, gripping the edge of your seat.

Well, for those of you who remember as far back as my first application for permanent residence, I'm now at the point where I can write for U.S. companies, which I'm doing with my closest personal approximation to abandon. I'm writing a little bit of stuff for the O'Reilly people, and I've just filed a story for Wired News. I'm feeling my way a little here, working out what stories work best for each publication, trying to not mix up everybody's house styles. Or fuck up. Very important not to fuck up.

What I'm trying for is a bit more of a spectrum between my usual Proper Media work (where I carefully and as non-scarily as possible explain the edge of technological culture to new audiences. Or at least, that's the idea.) and the free-wheeling, private-jokey, LOOK AT ME I'M SLAMMING MY FACE AGAINST THE WALL OF IGNORANCE. LOOK! I DID IT AGAIN! words that we make NTK out of.

Weirdly, the best medium for that middle-ground so far has been Linux User and Developer, the magazine that went bust, and now lives again. I continue to write their back page. The deceased previous company owes me money, but the new lot seem to be paying up okay. It's one of my favourite jobs right now.

In other anti-news, no, I still haven't updated the Life Hacks site. Maybe the next deadline will jerk me into activity - Merlin "43 Folders" Mann and I will be speaking at the MacOS X conference on Thursday October 28th, 2004. This session will primarily consist of Merlin leaping around high-kicking Macs on stage and typing in QuickSilver command sequences with his knees, while I stand behind him describing the geeky sociological and API basis of these tricks in a steady reassuring monotone. It'll be like the KLF meets Anthony Robbins.

I quit a bunch of UK net.politics. I was thinking about doing this last year when partner-in-crime Stef Magdalinski took nine months off from the same projects. He came back looking so refreshed that instantly I regretted not taking the time myself. Apart from anything else, it had got to the point where I'd say yes to anything, whether I had the time or ability to do it or not. And standing around saying "ooh I'd love to help but..." doesn't help anyone. So I helped myself to the unsubscribe notice.

TheyWorkForYou seems to have survived perfectly well without someone to write overly jocular body text for them. If you want to see the internal workings of how something like this gets done, they've just opened up their original dev wiki. (login: theyworkforyou, password: novemb3r ).

If I was still involved, my job would have have been to make impassioned speeches about why we didn't really need to password-protect the wiki to fight off spammers, thus winning a decision which would bite us all on the arse six months down the line.

Oh, and if you want to have a go at a project like this, but worry that you're not glitteringly professional enough, check out Stef and Tom's first sketches.

The fame piece got a big reaction, and has been looking increasingly fascinating topic for me. Like Life Hacks, I've got this strong sense that this is rich new topic that may be too big for me to explore on my own. I'm doing my best.

At the moment I'm just trying to listen to people as much as I can. There was all kinds of layers of irony when I tried to do this at Foo Camp this year. The year before, having a slot there to talk about life hacks (which was then called "Secret Software") worked very well, as nobody knew what the hell it was about. So only a handful of people turned up, and we quickly brainstormed a lot of ideas. This year, the fame talk gathered a big crowd, which meant I had to quickly scale up the presentation. That worked well in some respects, not in others.

One of the problems was that I really want to talk to people about their experiences being micro-famous. But it's a bit like talking about your salary - one-on-one it's fine, but in a big audience, you risk sounding like you're boasting or archly disingenuous.

What I really need is something concrete to hook the whole question on. With Life Hacks, that was sending a questionnaire about, but I suspect the Fame question needs something a little harder. I've thought about doing some stat analysis of how many names appear in, say, the New York Times over time. That doesn't seem quite right yet, but may point in some good directions.