2002-06-03»
dem tater tot bones»Onion prefigures future: Meg’s fall from vegetarian grace leads ineluctably to I Desperately Need Bone Marrow.
Currently:
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
brain, heart, and a five figure photography budget»
BrainHeart is the strangest magazine I read these days. It’s a glossy Swedish magazine funded by one of the big Euro wireless venture capital firms. It has this crazy aspiration to be a muddy mix of Wallpaper*, Red Herring, Fast Company, Wired, and What Mobile?. All the articles are written in a eurojetsetting Scandlish intonation: perfectly grammatical with a plodding sing-song quality. “Let’s assume that we would like to take a wireless tourist tour through Stockholm’s 750-year-old Old Town, Gamla Stan. What would the tour look like?”, begins one rip-roaring read. Every cover has a man and a women from the endlessly dull business world of Swedish telecoms, wearing these perfect clothes, perfectly photographed in perfect settings. The articles are all about building telcos “with brain and heart”, but it’s mostly just “wouldn’t it be great if we could all be nice to one another, and guess how many Kronor I just spent on my new headset?”. I can’t put it down. I haven’t been as simultaneously revolted and fascinated by a publication since the rise of the Mexican Death zine. Get a BrainHeart subscription for free, and share my confusion.
2002-06-02»
ideas have term limits»I’ve rather foolishly hacked DeadHorse (this site’s PHP blogging system) to cope with multiple entries in one day. It was a bit of a struggle, frankly, but it works – although the entries within a day are no longer in reverse chronological order, which ain’t the blog way. DeadHorse’s design is collapsing under the strain. I’ll have to refactor it, which if previous experience is to go by, means migrating it from PHP to something a bit less clunky.
update: Oh, it does work. I was just writing backwards. Excellent.
creepy obsession or pale imitation?»
Quinn says it’s funny that Metafilter should run
Back in the day . . . Remembering a time when the BBS was king.
posted by dogmatic at 9:58 PM PST – 13 comments
posted by dogmatic at 9:58 PM PST – 13 comments
on the same day as
The odd phenomenon of tribute bands. Heartfelt homage and harmless fun? Creepy obsession and pale imitation? Whatever you see it as, their numbers are swelling. Some that you’d expect, a few that’ll surprise you, at least one that vaguely frightens me and one to which I say ‘it’s about time!’. Sincerest form of flattery or mild insanity? Your call.
posted by jonmc at 7:53 PM PST – 13 comments
posted by jonmc at 7:53 PM PST – 13 comments
“since”, she says, “Metafilter is the ultimate BBS tribute site”.
smart contracts»
Nick Szabo, one of the more precise extropian thinkers, has sketched out a formal language for defining contracts. I’d love to hear what a lawyer (preferably a lawyer with some knowledge of computer language theory) thought of this. He also has a lighter piece on Medieval clocks and economics. – from Seth
all change: stanton and declan moving on; rss >link< added; java haiku!; brewster is god»
Brewster “Internet Archive” Kahle is God; and a hardworking God at that. Latest project: digitising and distributing the receding edge – that’s to say, all the public domain stuff that existed prior to the Web.
“Public Access to the Public Domain” is a step towards Raj’s “Universal Access to Human Knowledge”. How hard can it be?
– from Aaron
We have to use the
next value from each node to
get to the next node.
Allen B. Downey, co-author of the How To Think Like A Computer Scientist (libre edition here): has written a Java version of haiku, and ran his book through it.
I’ve added that <LINK> thing. What mime type should RDF be anyway? I have it down at application/xml. Is that right?
Movements in the politech world. Stanton ‘mech’ McCandlish is leaving the EFF. Like old movie stars who you can only imagine in black and white, I can only see Stanton’s name in non-proportional Courier font, sitting on top of e-mails from the Blue Ribbon era EFF. Declan McCullagh is moving from Wired News, too.
There are big changes occurring in the UK cyberrights scene this week, but can’t talk about those quite yet.
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.
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.