2002-11-04»
full disclosure»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.
Currently:
Author Archive
kaminsky on friedman»
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.
soggy versus crunchy»
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.
2002-11-01»
out of chaos, better chaos»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 gnome
to 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.
2002-10-28»
portland, or»Grandfather doing much better. Talking to neurologist tomorrow.
Rejected names for kid: Medusa, Yoko.
2002-10-26»
time is one sequential event after another»Quinn’s grandfather just had a stroke. We’re not sure of the seriousness of it yet (mainly because for cost reasons, he’s been moved to a hospital that doesn’t have anyone to do any tests until Monday. God, I could wave my little NHS card in the air and have it work its kindly magic here.). Anyway, we’re about to fly up and might be a bit incommunicado for the next few days.
Donations of spare luck gratefully received.
2002-10-25»
and we’re back…»“We”, in this case, meaning both Blogger and me. I’m sitting in the new home – because home is where the homepage is – using the Net for the first time, thanks to Gilbert‘s late-night net-fu. I ended up doing NTK in a local cafe at six this morning, stopping occasionally to filter the latest blogger news. The nomadic net life is giving me flashbacks of being hunched over underpowered Macs in cold Edinburgh flats, handcoding bits of the Guardian’s first Website. Weird, and ancient.
With the new house, we’ve had a PC cabinet reshuffle. Gilbert’s got a brand new thang, so I got his old 1Ghz machine, which I’ve been regutting to form my new Debian desktop. Rather than just copy over my old machine’s hard drive, I started with a fresh install, and have been adding the useful bits of code from old backups as I go. Like anyone else, I’ve collected a lot of cruft over the years, and this seems to be a good way of paring it down to the essentials.
One can go a bit too far.This is my desktop right now, as set up by default on a minimal Debian install. A bit too barebones. It’d be interesting (well, interesting for me anyway) to compare what it looks like in say a months’ time, when the cruft is drifting back.
blogger haxx0red»
okay, I’ve set up a QuickTopic for this. Remember you can subscribe for email updates on the discussion.
One of those stories that is, by it’s nature, a bit hard to get out (especially as Metafilter is down right now too). Mr Tom Plasticbag Coates reports:
A good proportion (over half of the people I’ve asked) passwords has changed, and everyone who has been part of the attack has now had their e-mail address, site URL and password changed. No one can publish. We can’t add new users either because the database is full and has crashed. All the content appears to be intact at the moment, but we won’t know for sure for a while yet. No one can get in touch with Ev…
I’ll post a link as soon I find out (or someone tells me) where the refugees are gathering to pool news.
2002-10-22»
in witch space»I’m really sorry if you’ve been trying to get hold of me for the last few days. We’re in the middle of moving house, and while it’s going pretty well, it does involve me doing most of my Net work within a two hour window in our old but still-wired house. Our old house is empty of anything but a Web server, a wireless AP, and house-moving sheddings, so I feel like I’m hacking from a squat. Again.
Still, relocating is one of those perfect excuses to do a mass re-re-re-re-organisation of one’s life. And thus I imagine that I will have much more free time, just as soon as I have scanned in all my books’ barcodes, re-installed Debian from scratch, and bought a bunch of useless boxes from Organised Living.
Yeah, right. Still, we did our final moving cash splurge today, and bought a Roomba. And, what do you know, it’s actually pretty good: both at cleaning and removing the bejesus out of nearby cats. It backed Dyson into the corner of our living room within minutes – she kept tottering backwards for about ten yards, like she was facing the Feline Terminator.
I feel somehow safer knowing that as I sit here, surrounded by crap, writing crap, somewhere else in town my new home is being cleaned by a small beeping robot.
2002-10-07»
at last, i have an excuse»… for not updating: I’m doing the guestblog at Boing Boing. Now to find an excuse for missing last week.