Oblomovka

2004-07-12»

Aha. So, I’ve been writing a column for Linux User and Developer, the UK Linux magazine (which also did a fairly well-regarded expo). It’s a fun gig. I haven’t received payment for the last three months, which sadly doesn’t appear to be that unusual in the publishing industry. But you know, why should that stop me having fun?

Some time last week, LinuxUser’s pages on the Live Publishing site disappeared. Uh-oh.

I’ve just called Live Publishing, and their receptionist has instructed any queries to be redirected to Alan Coleman at Unity. Unity “provides constructive advice and effective solutions to all insolvency-related problems”.

Uh-oh.

Can’t get through to speak to Alan yet. I see the expo wing of the company has merged with LinuxWorld. I suspect that was a bit of a one-sided merge.

The odd thing is that, rather naively, I thought that LinuxUser was a magazine being published by Live Publishing rather than a separate company that could hit the skids all on its own. The LinuxUser pages in the Google cache all say “copyright Live Publishing”. I wonder how long it has been this separate, glorious, but sadly a bit cash-strapped institution?

Discuss

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2004-07-11»

In December of 2002, I uploaded a screen-captured table showing IBM’s estimates for the cost of a terabyte over the next eight years. I couldn’t be bothered to convert it into HTML. Eighteen months on, Adrian Furby did just that. This shows there’s some “can I have some more”‘s law of the lazyweb or something, and that you should optimise for laziness and early public whining instead of planning ahead. I’ve added it to the page.

I just checked with NewEgg for prices, and with a $61 80GB harddrive, we’re four bucks short of right on target. We should be down to a sub-$500 terabyte some time next year.

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2004-07-01»

I’m downloading the demo version of a repartitioning application. I can’t help thinking this is a bad idea. “You’re 30 days are up! Now re-repartioning your drive.”

You have to admire their business savvy though, releasing a MacOS partition resizer the day that Tiger hits the file-sharing networks.

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2004-06-30»

… with a motherboard and processor that’s almost exactly the same as the 1999 model that I was using before (except of course now it only costs $100 or so). About the only thing that tempted me to upgrade a bit was how much CPU power my desktop machine spends analysing spam. It’s like some devil mirror image of those worthy distributed processing projects: all those cycles being turned into nothing better than contributory global warming. There has to be some spin-off calculation that could be folded into this. Maybe we could track changes in people’s sexual proclivities through keyword analysis of pr0n spam? Maybe there’s some powerful thesis about word-recognition waiting to be deduced in all those viagra variants?

?

I went to the Jobs keynote, and didn’t tell you about it. I’m sorry. I started to write a blog entry, but it turned into a column. I’m writing too many columns; all my prose is puddling into the generic Flann O’Brien/ Beachcomber/ Richard Geefe knock-off is the end of all columnist’s minds.

I think the only bit that won’t go into the column is that I spent too much time at the keynote trying to work out whether Jobs was wearing the same jeans as last year. I don’t think he was. I think he has a million identical jeans, on a huge Matrix-style clothesrack in his flying Pixar palace.

My notes are full of this crap. Everyone else in the journalist’s compound was clattering into outliners about the H.264 and personal iChat servers and how it all interrelates with current market conditions. My notes say “iChat AV, 3 other people. OMG they ARE trapped like General Zod! Is woman he talking to wife? Wrong kind of flirty. Forced bonhomie. Are you killed if you fuckup Jobs demos? Maybe they have gunmen off unseen, off webcam. “But, darling, it was my net connection it was bursty I couldn’t hear what BLAM BLAM BLAMBLAM”.

I need to let this stuff out here more, before I go mad.

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2004-06-23»

My desktop machine’s motherboard is finally giving up the ghost (in a staccato, clattering, stutters to halt every half-hour death rattle kind of way). Its chief function is mail-wrangling. Without it I’m left to stare rather bemusedly at 2000 and counting mail messages a day.

The upshot of this is, I’m not going to be very good at answering mail for the next few days. Stick “OBHURRY!” in the subject line and I’ll spot you, though.

(Or you could IM me, which is what all the hip kids who have abandoned mail are doing. Rats! Rats leaving the ship!)

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2004-06-15»

LayerOne was great: in the same way as NotCon was intended to be a scaled down, more social version of commercial technical conferences like Emerging Tech, LayerOne was a scaled-down, more talky version of hacker cons lke DefCon.

As I said in the intro to NotCon, the real secret intent behind a lot of what we’ve done with NTK live events is to “cross the streams” – introduce disparate geek groups who are doing eminently combinable things, but who don’t usually meet. LayerOne was a fantastic example of that kind of crossover. (Justin Mason has already picked up a few potential anti-spam approaches from chatting to white hat computer underground types).

I didn’t get to see as much of the talks as I wanted, but what I did see was very, very good: Dan Kaminsky did his usual “pile one crazy but conceivable idea on top of another until you end up with something that’s impossible yet implemented” magic. You really don’t want to know what he’s been doing with DNS (especially if you’re a sysadmin) – but if you do, here’s the PowerPoint. David Hulton and Lance James showed just how professional ad hoc security audits are getting these days: David reverse-engineered a smartcard parking meter to show the potential exploits, and Lance did some serious cryptoanalysis on Trillian’s secure IM features, including a fascinating digression on how man-in-the-middle-attacks are eminently possible on cable-modem networks.

I’m looking forward to next year!

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2004-06-11»

If you’re in Los Angeles, come along to the Westin LAX LayerOne this weekend for a fantastic-looking conference. It should be fun. It will be for me, for I get to go to someone else’s con and imbibe like an overclocked imbibamatic-o-mat. As the invite says: free beer!

This will also (barring being boo-ed off stage) be the canonical version of the Life Hacks talk. I will try very hard to not handwave arbitrary statistics when in full flow. Nor will I guilelessly slander/fawn over prominent Net celebrities in the search of a good joke. Consecutive Life Hack talks have featured me describing one correspondent as a “genius” and inventing a fictional mano e mano fist-fight between us in the next. Neither are strictly true, as this canonical version will make clear.

It also means that I’ll finally slap up the MP3 and PowerPoint of the complete presentation, ending the mystery of the eight or so words that Cory has failed to meticulously transcribe in his notes.

Not that I’m unhappy he’s so detailed. Lacking any memory of what I say on stage, I reconstructed my original talk for NotCon from Cory’s Etech notes. I’m now adding bits from his NotCon coverage for the LayerOne talk. He’s the Boswell to my Mr Pooter!

Doctorow isn’t here for this rendition, which should hopefully stop us getting into a screeching feedback loop. But that’s all irrelevant anyway. Come tomorrow, there will only be one Life Hacks talk. All the rest were imaginary stories taking place on alternate worlds – which never happened. Excelsior!

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2004-06-10»

Andover Consulting in San Francisco is liquidating its operations and auctioning off all its stuff.

Before it shut down, its core business was liquidating dotcom companies and auctioning off all their stuff.

Is this a good or bad economic sign? I can’t tell. Will it become clearer if the company running this auction goes bust too?

So, somebody from Andover has mailed to say that they’re not going out of business. They do appear to be selling off a lot of their San Francisco offices, though. And you’d think they’d use their own liquidation company to do the liquidating, in a sort of anti-bootstrapping move, wouldn’t you? I’ll look into it some more when I’m not travelling.

Update: Mike from Andover writes: “We are moving to more of a broker model as selling individual computers, etc. is just not profitable when new P4s are selling for $300.” Basically, I think they’re closing their warehouse.

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2004-06-06»

It is the special privilege of con organisers (which I barely am) to not have any idea how the damn thing went. I really only saw Yoz and Sean’s report from the set of the Hitchhiker’s movie, and the launch, finally, of TheyWorkForYou. Everyone I spoke to seem to enjoy themselves, despite the trademark chaos.

Now. Need. Sleep.

P.S. We launched TheyWorkForYou, a *huge* effort by all the usual suspects to revamp Hansard, the official record of the UK parliament, in a more Web-a-like form. Help us beta test it! Subscribe to the RSS feeds of your local MP! Subscribe to our infrequent site updates! Play around with search! Still. Need. Sleep!

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2004-05-19»

Lee, NTK’s chief moral compass, wonders about mail he sends that ends up with a third-party *cough Gmail cough*. He suggests that if Google was trying to be truly not evil, it should perhaps work on a “Disposition-Notification” header that would optionally the original sender know what’s happening to their mail.

This reminds me of mails from Boogah, who is organising Layer One, and whose .sig reads, in part.

this email is: [x] bloggable [ ] ask first [ ] private

My second thought, which is playing on me a lot these days, is how openness is viral. When one lives or works with someone who is more open or free with their own personal information, you find yourself become less able to maintain your own privacy. Your information is part of their information.

How can we maintain high levels of privacy – or indeed, maintain high levels of honesty – when our associates disagree on those levels?

This isn’t a new problem, of course. But something is changing. I have friends who dive out of the way of cameras to protect their privacy when they are with me. The time when there is somewhere to dive might end someday.

(In the meanwhile, if you send me something with X-No-Archive: in the headers, it won’t get forwarded to my Gmail account).

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