Oblomovka

2002-08-05»

The unstoppable Lloyd Wood sent me this PDF presentation, The First 31 Years of the Internet — An Insider’s View, for NTK. I’m going to stick it here first otherwise I’ll forget about it. It’s just the slides for a talk, but it stands alone as a great thumbnail explanation of a lot of the historical and future issues with the Net – including the Rise of the Stupid Network and the less-than-smooth political machinations behind the Net’s organising powers. It’s written by Bob Braden, who took over from Jon Postel as keeper of the RFCs.

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A wireless RS232 cable, courtesy of 802.11b. I really badly needed one of these about two years ago. I wonder if they’ll be able to do the same with USB?

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2002-08-04»

I spent a good hour ploughing through SuperSnail’s images of OSCON last year. And now he’s done the same for the people of OSCON 2002, and they’re just as funny and revealing.

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Dave Green angrily suggested I get a fucking search feature working on this site, so I’ve done so. It’s to the left. It doesn’t work very well if you search for URLs. It tries to “highlight” the search term, and so mangles any thing inside a tag, but I can’t work out a way of fixing that without parsing HTML.

One nice spin off, though, is that now my RSS feed does searches too. So if you want to keep an updated list of all entries where I mention the word “BBC”, say, you can subscribe to http://www.oblomovka.com/rss.php3?q=BBC and you’ll get just that.

I have a feeling that sooner or later, I’ll wish I optimised that code.

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I have made an unsolicited promise to my editor that I will never ever mention the looming arrival of my kid in the column. It’s a rule I’ll break eventually, but, well, you’ve got to exercise some discipline. (Except here, of course, where I can bang on about the topic all the time. Ha!)

I’m not sure why I made this commitment. I think it’s because I know at some deep level that my family is not as Universally Fascinating as I am currently being rewired by my own endochrinology to believe. Of course, computers aren’t either – but that’s okay, because those of us who are deluded into loving them are in a minority. So I still feel I’m catering to an underappreciated taste, which is the next best thing to being tasteful.

The other reason is because no matter how much I write, I’ll never be as good at discussing parenthood as my friend Juliet Jones, whose chaotic, mournful, celebratory and hilarious cries for help live on an obscure site in the middle of the Web, instead of the front page of the Women’s bit of the Guardian, or wrapped up in a best-selling book, or plastered in mile-high letters at the North Pole, or something.

One of the reasons why I hate columns about parenthood is you just know that the writers are mincing everything to make a good story – convey that they’re a good parent. Even the “my life is chaos!” pieces you get in the funny papers are junking the truth for a joke. Juliet’s pieces are bone-jarring honest.

Billie is a “lie in bed and yell till someone comes merchant”. Olly on the other hand, arrives like some dishevelled traveller carrying his most important possessions (pillow, toy, book) and sobs by the side of the bed. The Zombies to his Witchdoctor influence we rise, make room for him and one or other of us wanders off to find a new place of rest. One of the most bizarre and Kafkaesque stories I heard of nighttime waking was from a guy who did some plumbing work here. He said that every night his child comes into their bedroom, wakes them up and asks them to take him back to bed. Talk about playing with your mind.

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The consume.net mailing list folk have spotted a bargain: British branches of PC World are selling the SMC 2632 PCI WiFi Card for £49.95, which is about half the standard price. And, coincidentally, just two-thirds of the monthly subscription for BT’s new WiFi hotspot service. BT either have no idea about competitive pricing, or no idea about how to roll out a cheap network. Maybe both.

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2002-08-03»

A random mail from a random someone asking for advice.

Dear Sir, Imlooking for advice, & i went onto the net to seek it, please can you help me? my son had an accident, & i was put in touch with a solicitor…

… and it looks like the solicitor might have taken more than their fair share (or at least not explained the process well enough for their client to understand).

I don’t know jack about what to do about this, so I told this man what I would do. I’d find the local Citizens Advice Bureau, and ask them. I googled for a bureau near him, and sent him the URL and phone number.

Mail like this arrives about once every six months. Last time it was a woman in a Pakistani cybercafe asking about her brother. He’d run away to Britain and she hadn’t heard from him since. We tracked him down to a prison in the north of England. I found out the address and phone number for her – again not much, but something.

Cory talks about using spare brain-cycles across the planet to solve problems. I think this is the closest I get. Not that my brain-cycles are that precious anyway. I’m wasting them right now, thinking too much about the strangeness of one word: bureau. We don’t start bureaux enough these days. We need to start the Distributed Bureau of Investigation.

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2002-07-31»

The best trick in blogging: wait a while, and someone else will write your entry for you. Dave Winer said yesterday:

Very little really usable software has come from people who are willing to work for $0. (I chose my words carefully, infrastructure is another matter entirely.) Further, it’s weird to say, as Richard Stallman does, that by coercing programmers to work for $0 that that’s freedom. To me it seems obvious that that’s slavery.

… which seemed to me so wrong, on so many levels. But it took a better man than me to write the gentlemanly reply (and from more experience than I can provide too):

I’m surprised by each of these sentiments: that we’re not writing usable software, that we’re not making money, and that it’s coercion (and thus slavery).

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2002-07-30»

Jorn‘s just linked to the very funny Verity Stob journals, so I guess I can now. Verity was my first boss, actually – we both worked on or near a magazine called .EXE in the early Nineties. One of my proudest claims is that I’m the annoying new office boy who sets fire to a UNIX box in one of the earlier columns. The girl Adrian Mole should have married, if life were kinder to him, and even crueller to Verity.

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2002-07-25»

Bram Cohen , the man behind CodeCon and other fine goods and services, has a problem. He’s been working on an excellent P2P utility for the last six months or so, called BitTorrent. The idea behind BT is brilliant – it’s a helper application for browsers that lets you download large files (like movies) from multiple locations at the same time. One site is the original location – the others are all the other BitTorrent users who are downloading the file at the same time. In return, you share the bits of the file you’ve already grabbed to other downloaders. It’s like instant, distributed mirroring. It takes the load off the original server and increases the speed of everyone’s file grab . The throttled bandwidth taken by others uploading is not noticeable (after all, you’re already filling much of your pipe with your download anyway), and unlike most P2P apps, it all goes away as soon as you’ve finished downloading anyway.

Anyway, Bram’s in the final stages of stress testing his code – but he’s got a problem. BitTorrent currently shrugs off every load test he’s thrown at it, but even in the middle of a slashdotting, he’s only ever seen twenty or so people doing a simultaneous download of his test files. In the words of Bram:

I’m now in the very bizarre position of having to beg for people to download porn. The page of the current load test (a 700+ meg file) is http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/porn.html.

Windows, Unix tars and a Debian package of BitTorrent are available from Bram’s site.I’ve suggested that he get hold of the ISOs to the full Debian 3.0 install CDs – the equivalent of pr0n among the Free Software sexless beings of pure energy.

Debian users who have not yet sublimated can get their kicks with
wget http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/bittorrent_2.9.8-0_all.deb
dpkg -i bittorrent_2.9.8-0_all.deb
/usr/bin/btdownloadheadless.py --url \
   http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/Blonds_On_Fire_avi.torrent --saveas porn.avi


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