I’ve just spent about two weeks researching various Wi-Fi contention and multi-hop routing issues for an article. And within minutes of finishing it, Slashdot runs two stories that would have saved me most of that time. And which, anyway, now transform my ingenious point into common knowledge for most /. readers.
I hate the Net. Hates it, hates it.
Flew up to Portland and back down, which involved getting up at 5AM and stumbling home for 5PM. Was absolutely worth it though, as I slid into being a guest at my grandparents-in-law’s wedding. Annie and Russell are a fine couple and were dressed to the nines. They’re both over eighty, and have been living together for thirty years. It was beautiful, so beautiful in fact that every picture Quinn and I took ended up looking like the arresting front-cover image from a major corporate rebranding exercise.
(from Quinn’s moblog)
Can’t you see that on a double-page spread, with “For All The Colours Of Your Life: Reckitt Industrial ” underneath?
I have an even better one of Annie talking on a mobile phone while Rusell looks on, from behind a big wedding cake. I await the call from Verizon’s marketing team.
Spent the day not-writing in the brand spanking new MLK Public Library in San Jose. It’s a co-operative venture between San Jose University and the city itself. Puzzling over how to get to the uni and the town’s residents to integrate better, they decided to smersh their two (slightly poor) library collections together into one $178 million co-venture.
It’s worked amazingly well. Everything was running smoothly on the first day. They’ve combined the two catalogues (even though one used Dewey and the other the Library of Congress cataloguing system), and moved both groups of readers into a brand new building.
There are 150 data-ports in the building for laptops, about three hundred PCs for general use, and hundred laptops that can be loaned. See how long they last. (No wifi yet, though.) Looks like they’ve negotiated deals with all the SJSU academic database providers – so I can get LexisNexis ,the O’Reilly Safari. book collection, the OED and a stack of other for-money subscriptions if I access them from within the building.
The printed book collection really benefits from the merge. The usual popular introductions to non-fiction fields are all there, courtesy of the public library, and backed up with several large research collections if you’re tempted to pursue any in more detail. I love deep, wide archives like this.
The selection gets more and more ethereal as you clamber up the seven floors. There’s a browsing section on the ground floor, laid out like a bookstore, and at the very top, there are piles of SJSU theses, empty group study rooms and that hay-and-dust smell of old, hardbound stacks.
But my favourite moment was when Quinn and I were snooping around the pop fiction section. Someone leant on the “Mystery” bookshelf. It swung around, to show a false shelf of books behind with a fake secret passage.
A library with easter eggs!
It’s been ten years since CD-ROM drives became affordable (prices dropped from $700 to $200 in 1993), and I’ve been asked to write a piece about the rise (and fall) (and rise) of the CD-ROM as a medium. As part of this, I’m doing a little retrospective of the best CD-ROMs of the decade.
It feels a bit odd to hive-off CD-ROM as a category. There’s something very 1996 about doing that. It does mean something, though: a package that depends on permanent storage rather than pulling data off the Net; whose form is melded around slow-access times, and perhaps nodding to that “digital book” ideal.
I’m guess I’m looking for apps that exploited the CD-ROM form well, and perhaps lived up to that all-to-brief moment of being the forefront of “interactive multimedia”, but have still managed to survive the test of time.
Me, I have a soft-spot for Voyager’s Spinal Tap, which not only set the standard for video CD-ROM, but I think defined how DVD bonus material would be executed. And I think I’ll include the original Myst (even though I’m a bit loathe to include every game too big to fit on floppies), because its rendered gameplay was such a ingenious exploitation of the large size of CD-ROMs, rather than clever programming. And then there’s the You Don’t Know Jack, spin-offs of which I still see for sale.
What are your favourites? All suggestions ungratefully purloined.
Nigel Rantor is collecting datapoints to build an open 3D map of the London Underground, and is looking for suggestions as to what to do with it. Geowankers, assemble!
Oh, shut up, yes, it’s another blog entry about blogs. I’m interested, all right?
Maciej’s team have done the first number-crunching I could think of with his Blog Census stats. How many blogs are actively updated? Roughly two-thirds, it seems -65%. The rest are either abandoned (where the blogger says he’s quitting – 4%), no longer updated (no posts in two months – 16%), sites that just contain test posts (8%), 404ing, or otherwise inaccessible.
RIAA-style revealing of subscriber identities without even sub poenas? And worse? What fresh hell is this?
I’m spending the day listening to my own cackling voice asking dumb questions of smart people. They’re all very quiet people, too, and I foolishly left the laptop recording with the noisy mains plugged-in, so all I can hear is my booming idiocy and then them speaking as though through a lawnmower, darkly.
That said, this piece is going better than most. My expectations of what my interviewees would say have not been so undermined that I’ll have to rejig the entire skeleton structure I originally had in mind. But I’ve still been sufficiently surprised by what they have to say that I know I’m not just imposing my naive pre-story belief onto the facts.
Plus, I’m getting to write about new RFCs in a mainstream publication, which is always to the good.
DJ Adams has written up how to get dashboard up and running. This is, bar endless fooling around, how I did it. I’m using Debian – currently the development Debian packages for mono and gtk-sharp aren’t recent enough to compile or run dashboard.
Spent the evening recreationally pulling mono , gtk-sharp and dashboard out of cvs and manhandling them into compiling. Everything works, except for one goddamn line in dashboard, where it calls GTK.Html.BeginContent() – which the compiler confident tells me doesn’t exist. But I can see it, Computer! I can see it in the API XML spec!
time passes…
Well. I felt so defeated by writing that last blog entry, that I went off and had another go. My general approach in these situations is to randomly futz with the source until I can’t remember what it looked like pre-futz, then flamboyantly delete it all in frustration and despair. I got as far as futzing – I replaced BeginContent() with Begin(), which was the function above it in the API list – and it all magically worked.
There’s not much to see yet, unfortunately, because I don’t use any programs that have a dashboard frontend (that’s to say, that passively spit dashboard clues about what I’m currently looking at/typing). But it managed my blog entry about itself when I asked it outright. And that makes me strangely happy.
