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a man slumped on his desk, from 'The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters'

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2002-05-31

rss in the house, 802.11b gargoyles

Locust Technologies are a UK group working on WiFi gargoyle tech – webcam, audio and more in luggable backpacks that can communicate with other nodes to form a portable mesh network. Great for armies of independent reporters. Or just armies, if you want to look at it like that.

This stuff has been long awaited; from NTK, 1999-01-15:

2.5Ghz? So close…

Phil Wolff asked if I had an RSS feed for Oblomovka. Well, I guess I have now. I tried to work out what current practice was, and it seems to be “stuff the entire entry into the <description> tag, so that’s what I’m doing for now. 48K of RDF, though: I have a bad feeling about this.

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2002-05-30

mozillablogs

For scrappy, trying-to-improve-matters-from-within, no holds barred, troll your workmates, shout-your-rage corporate blogs, I don’t think you need to look further than the excellent Mozilla blogs – especially the ongoing (productive) spats between the Chimera developers and their colleagues. Compare that to all the nicey-nicey community stuff from those Macromedia guys. Once seems to be just a question of keeping the consumers happy. The other serves the function of keeping them informed with what’s really going on. Plus the Mozilla guys’ blogs seems to be spilling off into blog-friendly Mozilla adaptions, like in-browser RSS viewing and HTML editing.

Hope they don’t get sacked.

Aiieee. Dave linked here, even though this is essentially my “pfft-pfft. Is this thing on?” test site.

What’s particularly frustrating is that last night, I dreamt this spectacular four thousand word piece that would explain once and for all the relation of blogs to journalists, the nature of flash crowds, and what lessons Corrupt Bloggers can learn from Corrupt Journalism before it’s too late.

But unlike you, I’m only a theoretical blogger, and while Eric S. Raymond will write a megabyte of distilled opinion before he gets up and shoots his breakfast, it still takes me a week to think enough thoughts to spit out even a hundred words.

I’ll save it all for that guest DaveNet I drunkenly promised Dave. Yes, yes, that is what I will do. Straight after panicking about next week’s Extreme Computing Conference in London . And doing whatever it is I get paid for.

In the mean time, here is who I currently read when I’m avoiding writing: Seth from the EFF, and Leonard from robotfindskitten, and Quinn from my life, and Lee from NTK, and everybody from Advogato. Smarter than you and I, thank God.

If I were a package in Debian GNU/Linux, my package name would be:

libqtdanny8g

What’s yours?

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2002-05-28

Tue May 28 13:15:00 2002

We come in peace. Hell, we come in packets.

You can now pre-order Zone 1 DVD’s of Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi! Only $22.49. If you haven’t seen Koyaanisqatsi, it’s about as marvellous and moving as an 87 minute Philip Glass minimalist soundtrack set to beautiful time-lapse photography of the natural world can be. Previously you could only get hold of DVDs by paying a >$100 donation to the film’s non-profit owners, the Institute for Regional Education. On the other hand, I’d like to see their planned sequel, Naqoyqatsi (‘War Time’) – so maybe I should donate, at that.

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2002-05-25

Sun May 26 04:11:00 2002

So, after months of faffing around peering at different Wiki implementations, I’ve finally made my Big Decision. I’m moving all of commonhouse‘s wikis over to MoinMoin. It looks like the Wiki for me: extensible, a nice bunch of prepared macros, vibrant developer community, written in Python – plus it just hit 1.0.

My big questions, though, couldn’t be answered by staring at READMEs. I needed to know where I could hack MoinMoin to run many instances of different wikis off the one copy; whether I could keep all the data in the slightly weird places commonhouse likes to keep data. And could I easily copy the existing wikis over from the existing wikis we already run? To answer those, I had to install the little fella.

I did all but the porting of old wikidom tonight, in about an hour. The most idiosyncratic stuff I did by changing about four lines of code in moins_config.py, and some slight mod_rewrite fu. The rest was a breeze. Fun even.

Moinmoin has an XML-RPC interface, and I’m going to try to use that to port the old C2.com style wikis over tomorrow night. Then I’m going to play around with its calendar and blogging macros. Oh yes.

Comments Off on Sun May 26 04:11:00 2002

evenly matched, this battle is.

So we all went to Baycon SF convention as part of my early conditioning prior to visiting WorldCon in September. I suffered only minor culture shock (primarily over the Sailor Moon ladies and a women dressed in slightly less than a sheet).

Then we went to watch Brad Templeton, chair of the EFF, get called a “motherfucker” by Harlon Ellison in a debate about copyright issues. Admittedly, Harlon’s primary critique of Brad at that point was that he was “looking at [Harlon] funny”. But he didn’t have much good to say about the Net either.

I channelled the whole thing to the scofflaws on “an Internet” (as Harlon called it in passing) via the #infoanarchy IRC channel. For those who like garbled transliterations, here’s the log.

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2002-05-22

Thu May 23 05:43:00 2002

So I’ve been tinkering and thinking about what to do with Oblomovka. My main problem with blogging, as I’ve mentioned before, is that I don’t particularly enjoy writing. My whole modus operandi is to spend hours boiling down what I think into as few a words as I think it deserves, then spitting them out as far away from me as I can. This can be a very painful process. Trust me – you’d be shocked by how long it takes me to write the 1,000 or so words that make up my weekly living. Me and the written language have a very co-dependent relationship, as they say out here.

Anyway, the idea of spooling out even more verbage here isn’t exactly the crazy temptation and fun hobby that it needs to be. Also, with regards to “by writing every day, you’ll become a better writer” saw; ptchui. Even if it’s true, I want to be a better person, not a better writer.

So my current task is to work out how to make this site do that: make me better.

When I started writing this entry, I thought it would be by giving me an outlet for code, not words. Now, I’m not so sure. Damn you, words!

Comments Off on Thu May 23 05:43:00 2002

2002-04-25

natural death, natural lives

I believe in writing about technology as natural history; to observe and document changes in the world we live in, to better describe the forces that shape those changes. I suppose I see technology as inhuman – just as the natural world is inhuman, and oblivious to us all. But I also see technology as definitively human: a reflection of our emotions and our needs, and our attempts to be more humane than the chaotic world we have been dropped into.

I don’t understand why, as writers, we are so often forced to describe technology in the language of the market, as consumers, as cataloguers of a pile of unconnected, unemotional things. It’s as though the only descriptions we can read of the countryside were written by estate agents, eager to sell us a farm.

I haven’t always liked what Robert X. Cringely has written, but in his craziness, he’s often attempted to escape from those restrictions. His column this week does so, but at a terrible terrible cost.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that perhaps some people will view a tech column about his son’s death as a trivialisation of life, whereas I see life and death is what this <waves hands> is all about.

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2002-04-23

Tue Apr 23 22:53:00 2002

A traditional list of the seventy-two sects of Islam. I love lists like this; especially ones that fracture ideas presented so monolithically.

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2002-04-22

Mon Apr 22 14:32:00 2002

It’s been a good week. I had a blast at Computers, Freedom and Privacy. I attended last year, when it was held in the middle of a snowdrift in Boston, and I was a little too isolated, a little too awestruck to enjoy it.

This year I bumped into plenty of interesting folk for the second time, when they were happy to sit a while and talk instead of politely deferring until they knew who the hell I was.

There was also a greater sense of the game being afoot. In private e-mails from CFP ‘2001 I wrote that there was

a lot of talking-from-the-platform about various nasty supra-national organisations, without much grassroots input.
This year, with all the very fresh copyright law wrangling and the higher public profile of individuals like Patrick Ball and Jon Johansen, it felt like more practical, personal, public work was going on.

The EFF in particular, seems to be transforming into more of grassroots advocacy organisation. I’m not sure whether it’s a deliberate policy move, a shift of emphasis due to an influx of new blood or just the outside world waking up to what they’ve been doing all along, but it’s highly welcome. They have some real corkers lined up.

Comments Off on Mon Apr 22 14:32:00 2002

2002-04-14

Sun Apr 14 19:55:00 2002

Ah, patents:

Lastly, it should be noted that because pulling alternately on one chain and then the other resembles in some measure the movements one would use to swing from vines in a dense jungle forest, the swinging method of the present invention may be referred to by the present inventor and his sister as “Tarzan” swinging. The user may even choose to produce a Tarzan-type yell while swinging in the manner described, which more accurately replicates swinging on vines in a dense jungle forest. Actual jungle forestry is not required.

I’m tempting to patent my dish-washing algorithm.

(via yusufg)

Comments Off on Sun Apr 14 19:55:00 2002

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