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2004-02-12

apres etech

Two weeks ago I mentioned – in passing – that it’d be a great idea to have an informal evening affair in San Francisco where people could braindump what they’d learnt at Emerging Technology and preview the sort of stuff that they’d see at CodeCon . There’s more people who should see this stuff than just people who can scrape up the fare and ticket to go to San Diego.

Well, it’s done. Rachel “Moonbase University’ Chalmers , Marc “rotten.com ” Powell and Karen “dorkbot sf ” Marcelo magicked it through a flurry of emails. It’s happening this Monday the 16th:

The best bit of this ConCon may well mirror Etech: meeting new smart people between the official talks. Then again, the five minute lightning talks look to be great too. Here’s who is set up to speak so far:

I’m not sure we’ll have time for many more speakers, but if you’d like to talk about either Etech or CodeCon and you’re near San Francisco, stick your name down on the Wiki. I’ll try and get to you. I’m compering. I’m easily bribed.

When this started actually happening, I got a little bit guilty, as this is exactly the sort of spontaneous Bay Area event that I used to look very bitterly at when I lived in London. It was a mixture of irritation that San Francisco thought the whole world revolved around San Francisco, and envy that we couldn’t do something like that in London.

Amusingly, when I got to SF, lots of people told me about how much more vibrant they thought the geek community was in Britain, and how they wished they could do the same kind of events as they’d seen talked about in the UK and Europe.

So, anyway, there were enough Brits at Etech to pull off another spin-off braindump, so now I’m pushing my luck and hand-waving them do the same thing in the UK for next Monday (the 23rd).

Here’s the Wiki page where people are sorting out a venue. Go to it, my helpless puppets!

(No, I don’t know why I’m calling it Etech and not Etcon now either.)

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2004-02-07

we’re at the san diego l0ft

It’s a great place, and our dachb0den hosts are being fantastic. I just ate the best steak I’ve had in years fresh off their barbeque, and I’m leaching off one of the faster connection. It’s also about 4 minutes walk from the Emerging Tech hotel in a straight line West down E Ave. Looking after the now toddling Ada in a paradise of switches, hubs and MP3s is taking … some improvisational skills, but it should be okay.

Ye Olde Traditional Emerging Man Party is set for Wednesday, which should be after most of the talkers have given their talks, but before we all begin to fade.

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2004-02-01

em3rg1ng l0ft

We all really enjoyed Emerging Man last year. It was a makeshift campsite in our back garden that we used to house some of the geeks who were having trouble finding affordable accomodation for Emerging Tech in Silicon Valley. This year, the cost of finding a hotel room in San Diego looks to be even worse. Even worse to that “even worse” I don’t live in San Diego. Damn me!

This wasn’t a problem of pure altruism. I’m speaking this year, so I don’t have to pay for a ticket, but even so we were having real problems working out how to afford the trip.

I think we’ve pulled something together. Dachb0den run a hacker l0ft near where the conference is being held, and they’ve really kindly let me and whatever squatters I could assemble sleep on their floor.

When this was tentative, I put out feelers with UK people to see if anyone needed a bed, and the spaces filled up before I really had a chance to make it public. There may be more room as time goes on though (people came and went at Emerging Man, and you know, there’ll probably be some in-conference bartering of nice accommodation for Orkut testimonials or something).

And, anyway, we’ll have a party on … Wednesday? To which you are invited, of course. And, just to play to all the stereotypes a little bit more, here’s the Em3rg1ng L0ft W1k1.

The other idea I was hatching but never really got together there was to have an Emerging Tech/CodeCon crossover session in San Francisco. There’s a lot of people who traditionally go to both conferences, but haven’t been able to afford to go to both this year. Also, as ever, a bunch of people applied with really good papers to either one and didn’t get accepted.

It occurred to me and a few others that would could hire somewhere in SF during the intervening week, and manage both a decompression from ETech and ramp people up for CodeCon. And you could easily fill a schedule with people who didn’t fit at either. I’d love people who managed to make it to ETech to recount the good bits in lightning talks to people who didn’t, and you could use the same format to plug interesting upcoming ideas for Codecon, or stuff that got missed by both. It’d make for a fun evening. Well, I think it would.

Doing this rather fell off my radar, but there’s still time. If anyone knows anywhere has Secret Knowledge (Moonbase University? Dorkbot SF?) on hosting such a ConCon in SF during the intervening week (February 14th-20th), go for it. I’m going to be monster busy when I get back from Etech but I hereby foolishly volunteer to do an impressionistic rendition of my Etech talk and anyone elses I see. If you’re on for the hassle, mail me, and I’ll put you all in touch with each other, and then I shall stand well back and try and publicise it in San Diego and elsewhere.

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2004-01-30

bbc censorship

It’s always a joy to watch prissy corporate mail filters twitch their lace curtains and bounce back NTK when they spot a phrase they don’t like. This week they refused to deliver NTK because we used the word “dyke”. As in Greg Dyke. (Admittedly, the completely justified use of “butt” and “wanker” elsewhere might not have helped our case.)

Not as bad as one UK firm’s IT department, which is currently binning any incoming email with “hello” or “Hi” in the subject line. “These are common header descriptions of the e-mails containing the [MyDoom] virus”, they say. I’ll go out on a limb here and suggest they’re also common header descriptions of the e-mails not containing it, too.

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2004-01-29

mydoom vs procmail – battle of the cpu cycles

A bit too late for most, I guess, here’s the procmail recipe I’ve been using to fend off the majority of MyDoom

It’s nabbed about 900 of them so far. There’s a variant that uses random ascii for the document name which that it doesn’t catch, but I haven’t seen many of those.

Now, to devise some way of coping with the million anti-virus checkers that bounce the mail with a “Virus Refused” message – even though their designers know that the return address is fake, and they are bouncing to innocent parties. Sigh.

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2004-01-15

valley o’ books

Continuing my love affair with Silicon Valley libraries: a bookmarklet for local library fans.

Drag the following to your toolbar, or right click and choose “add to Bookmarks”: SearchLib

Click on it when you’re on an Amazon book page (like this one), and it will automatically search for all copies of that book in the local interlibrary loan network (like this result). If it’s not at your local branch, it can be delivered – generally within the week, in my experience.

It’s a blatant copy of Jon Udell’s great big pile of bookmarklets that do the same thing for other library catalog systems.

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2004-01-06

cute babies, morphic resonance, applications of, among

During the long drawn-out negotiations over Ada’s name, all of us noted that whatever we chose, we’d undoubtedly prove to be part of some wider trend in names. For instance, my parents chose “Daniel” because they thought it sounded “international” – not really tied to a place, but still quite Irish. I’m not sure everyone would agree on the thought, but many agreed with a decision. Within a couple of years of me, everybody was called Daniel. Or so it seemed. My parents were fractionally ahead of the curve, at least in my town. I was often the only Dan* in my class, but the year below was clogged with us. Poor boys barely out of nursery had to fight among themselves over who got Dan, Danny, Danno, Danzy and (once Daniel-overload had hit), Spider, Spud and Bazz.

It’s not like anyone was out to rip off their friends or be part of some big “Parents of Danny” mob. Everyone aspires to uniqueness with their kid’s name. You are choosing a unique identifier, after all – you’re actively dedicated to establishing a stand-out naming scheme.

But like people choosing a random vegetables, there are always patterns to even the most determinedly individual act (Carrots! They always pick carrots!). We think we’re original – and we are being original. It’s just that a bit too many people, all somewhat similar to us, all under the same influences, are being original too. People read the latest baby lists and titter at the people calling their kids Chardonnay and Marlis, but the chances are they’re caught up in some other herd of the like-minded, making some other mooing choice. We’re all stuck in some corner of a giant state-machine.

Resigned to our fate, we made our choice, then tried to play a meta game of guessing what trend we belonged to. We had a fairly specific reason for choosing Ada (yes, it’s that Ada). But obviously other pressures came to bear. We like our justification – but we liked our justification for other names too. Ada, though, sounded right. Ohhhhh, those subconscious betrayers of our collective minds.

Knowing we were just herd animals, our guess was that Ada would probably be part of some meta-trend of victorian sounding names – lots of grannies being commemorated, desperate attempts to avoid the hippy Moonunit errors of the recent past, and, perhaps as this article Fiona found supposes, a determination to protect our babies from modern-day woes like (apparently) carjackers. Judging from this year’s stats, it looks like we were right. It’s all strait-faced 19th century monickers these days.

What we didn’t spot was the other trend we clustered with.

Ada’s middle name, much to the horror of our more Moonunit-anoic friends, is “Trouble”.

Since you ask, it’s a family name. Ada’s maternal line has a vibrant genetic heritage of handsome rogues, muscular horsefolk, Western explorers, independent ladies and the odd native american mass-murderer. Trouble was the middle name of one of her finest forebears, and the outer bracketing for many more. I love my in-laws and their stories, and Trouble was a very early suggestion for Ada, and one that kicked around as the placeholder when she was kicking around inside Quinn. It turned into “T.” around the cautiousness of the birth, and popped back into “Trouble” around the time she got a social security number. Trouble she is.

How very original. Except…

Having a strange middle name is getting nigh ubiquitous among our friends newborns. Quinn’s on a baby mailing list where almost all the kids have the template [Normal] [Weird] [FamilyName]. And I see more and more of these idiosyncratic middle names every day. Among the sprog-popping pals of my generation, the determination not to saddle the next generation with flip inventions mixed with the naughty wish to sneak them some little token of our quiet ironic rebelliousness, the often-repeated rationalisation of “Well she/he can always ignore it if it’s a middle name” – it’s all there, on auto-repeat. I’d even go far to say that it’s the shadow-side of this first name victoriana. Very safe name/very crazy name. It’s your choice, little one. You get your taste of free will, just as we realise how much we are just boids in the wind.

(Now where did that come from? I was intending to write about Steve Jobs keynote. Oh, well. Maybe Steve tomorrow.)

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2003-11-24

squiggle

Here’s the piece on public, private, and secret, translated into Hebrew by a Israeli net magazine. I gave it to them under the Creative Commons attribution-sharealike license. They had the good sense to lop off the foo-orlowski bit at the beginning. If you too want to reproduce it in a more sensible form, you should merely re-translate it into your language of choice, stick the by-sa license on it, and away you go.

Actually if any Hebrew speakers can check that I haven’t been made to say “Oh, and while we’re talking of private, check out this semi-naked chick’s picture, fwoaaar” or other such translator’s liberties, that’d be great.

In other news, Ada’s lead test came back as 3.25µg/dL. Which is okay. Not the lowest, but lower than the average for Ontario and Massachusetts, so she’ll be smarter than those idiots for sure. Of course, she’s only begun to start licking the walls, guzzling the bathwater and eating the garden, so we’ll be keeping an eye on it.

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2003-10-24

oblomov on weblogs

An Oblink, I suppose, but it deserves a place in full view. Oblomov anticipates Weblogs.

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2003-10-22

life hacks

Everyone who knows me – and many of their therapists – knows that I am the most disorganised, undisciplined wretch on God’s green earth. I have a 159 things to do in my todo list; he oldest (“learn to drive”) is 15 years in the todoing. Earlier today I managed to slam the “snooze” button on my alarm clock twelve times. I don’t know where my mobile phone is. The last I saw of it was in a cafe in San Francisco – maybe two weeks ago? I should cancel it. Hold on, let me add that to the todo list. There. It is as good as done.

This is by way of conveying quite how much horror should be expressed at the subject of my talk at next year’s Emerging Technology conference. I will speak, it says here, on the Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks.

As a colonel in the underprolific geek army, I am the worst-prepared person to talk on this topic. Which is why I’m doing it, of course. Instead of coming up with my own fruit-loop theories, I’m going to spend the next few months asking other far more efficient geeks what they do to get through the day.

This has a number of advantages. First: hopefully, by retaining my aloof incompetence, I can safely research “the top ten habits of effective infovores” without becoming yet some muscly overachieving Tony Robbins coach. (and if I do, please kill me, preferably while I am pointing enthusiastically into a camera.)

Second: I’ve no preconceptions. Well, I’d be surprised if people said “Oh, we just do what you do, only slower”, but apart from that, I’m clueless.

It might be that there are no patterns, no learnable behaviour. It may be that some people are just better at coping with information overload than others. This will make for a depressingly darwinist ETCON report, but hey, the nazis were all over genetic determination, and Nuremberg was still a blast, right? Okay, bad example.

Finally, I’m curious. There are hundreds of little tricks, habits, desktop arrangements, and hacks being invented (and I suspect, reinvented) by people to organise their life using today’s technology. We very rarely get to see any of it, because we all assume no-one else would be interested in the dull rigmarole of our lives.

Because of my flawed nature, I’m really interested in these secrets. I find well-organised people fascinating, like aliens. I think everyone is curious about one another’s desktop. If there was a soap opera for geeks, it would be all about people juggling sixteen projects while filtering sixteen thousand emails on twenty monitors. It would be called “Shoulder Surf” and would be on at five in the morning and to save time it would be broadcast in fast-forward.

Anyway, I digress. I’m going to grit my teeth and do some real work on this. The first step is to find people to interview. I’m building up a little list, but I would love to know who you would suggest. My list has big blindspots – not enough Windows people, not enough non-Webby folk, too many of the usual suspects – and I don’t want to shut out any corner. My only, very rough rules, at this stage are:

Stick your suggestions down in this here discussion pit. I’ve suggested a few at the beginning, but really only to give an idea of how broad a spectrum I’m looking at here.

Good, done that. Tick!

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