New things

So, because I'm thinking mostly about secret things this week, I'll just mention that in my bedside bookstack are Rudy Rucker's Spaceland, the New Media Reader, Quantum Theory, A Very Short Introduction (it is apparently about 1/2 as short as my attention span, as I'm stuck halfway through), Bowling Alone, A New Kind of Science (which would be more fun if Wolfram didn't repeat the title at every opportunity and didn't claim to have invented dirt), and Hokusia and Hiroshige for when I fail words. I'm usually done quickly with fiction (e.g. Spaceland is a two "hour-before-bed" book) so the others fill in when I'm between fictions.

Tonight, I'd like to dream that I am Edwin A. Abbott's child and he is pressing me like a wildflower into a bible. I need some four dimensional sleep, where the 4th dimension is made entirely of layer upon layer of fine momen futon. Why (indeed, or why) weren't Lawrence Lessig and S. Wolfram guests with the White Stripes on Late Night with Conan O'Brien? Mark my word O'Brien, you missed out on the greatest quartet in history.

A format, an article

This post on Pseudorandom is an example of Frank Boosman's style of taking rather large texts and quoting from them with commentary. At first I wasn't enjoying the length of the posts, as I think that there are shorter ways to make the points he's trying to make, but then a few weeks ago something clicked and now I'm reading every word. I think I switched from thinking of Pseudorandom as a personal blog to more of a one man online magazine.

Oh, and he picks apart the transcript of Senator Rick Santorum's latest proof of his inability to be kind.

The clumps are coming

Tim, of Linkmonger, claims to be working on some deep mojo in the form of member created themed lists of links, a la Amazon list-mania lists but for information instead of atomic goods. He's calling them clumps and I'm chomping at the bit. Though I do like Safari's bookmark system, I've come to the realization that I need my bookmarks to live online for reachability from one of the seven (7!) machines I use on a daily basis (home: laptop, desktop, partner's laptop... work: desktop, dev machine 1, dev machine 2) and for sharing. I have wicked funny bookmark groups that memepool would die for, if only they weren't already too powerful for me to support. Instead, I'll clump them. Let's here it for Tim's one man show!

So proud

I cannot express the pride I feel because I am the same species as the creator of this moment in flickerbox history. Not only is it certain to incense those pictured, but to entertain millions. For good or for bad, welcome to time based art.

ETCon Notes

During each session of ETCon, several of us have been using Hydra to take notes. Note that I didn't take most of these notes; they were the efforts of many people over the course of the conference.

Peer-to-Peer Semantic Search Engines: Building a Memex: Notes, Speaker Notes
A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy: Social Structure in Social Software: Notes
"Daddy, Are We There Yet?" The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet: Notes
Gonzo Collaborative Mapping on the Semantic Web: Notes
Under the Hood of the Internet Archive's Digital Bookmobile: Notes
Journalism 3.1b2: Notes
Personal Interfaces: Notes
From the Margins of the Writable Web: Notes
SSA BoF: Notes
Biological Computing : Notes, More Notes
There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom - ICT Innovation for the Other 90%: Notes
University, Library, and Museum Content Meets XML, Web Services, and P2P: Notes
If You Meet Alan Turing on the Road, Kill Him!: Notes
The Future of Web Services: Notes
Mapping the Wireless Revolution: Notes
Business (Operating?) Models for Stupid Networks: Notes
Technology Innovation and Collective Action: Notes
Roboflies, Flexonics, and the Social Life of Smart Dust: Notes
What Groups Will Be: Notes
Data Mining Social Cyberspaces: Notes
GNU Radio: Hacking the RF Spectrum with Free Software and Hardware: Notes
LazyWeb BoF: Notes
Google, Innovation, and the Web: Notes
Identity, Security, and XML Web Services: Notes
Mailing List Bots: Phil-Notes

All the notes: ETCNotes.tgz

The template we used for later sessions: Template

Update: O'Reilly is posting the presentation slides as they come in.

Damnable

At every conference I've been to for the past few years, some bozo creates a computer2computer WiFi network with the same name as the access point created network, thereby boning everyone else. I hereby declare that all OS'es that ship new versions without fixing this problem will be on my "enemies list", along with SUV drivers.

the world as a blog

map of the world + rolling list of blog updates == fun! [thanks Jersey]

The world is divided into two types of people: People who use '=' and people who use "=="

The world is also divided into two other types of people: People who use single quotes around characters and double quotes around string, and people who don't know when to quit and go get some coffee already.

As when I dream, I am all of these people.

I should be asleep

I'm beginning to think that commuting from San Francisco to the Santa Clara Westin for three days of this conference wasn't such a great idea, but then I haven't had my coffee yet.

I'm too sleepy to post a full review of the sessions, but I will say that when I first heard of Hydra I thought that it wasn't all that handy. But that was before I used it in a small conference setting. In every session someone starts a shared document and then everyone collaborates on a set of notes. Hydra lets you see people's keystrokes as they type, so at one point there were eight people note taking on a single document, filling in references and expanding where other people missed. It was this weird combination of chat, email, and pair programming. I've been taking screenshots to capture the highlighted annotation, which I'll post later. I hope that the creators of Hydra create a file format that saved that metadata.

Must. Get. Going.

Hydra

At ETCon people are using Hydra to take collective session notes. Neat!

Wired wired wired.

The ETCon, which started tutorials today, is so damn digitally interconnected. There are two (yes, two) completely separate online "break the ice" systems and innumerable blogs, wikis, IRC channels, and Rendezvous chats. This is one big Happening.

People always said that most of what happens at a conference isn't on the slides, and now that's true digitally as well as in face space.

Two questions for E.D.

Is a representative democracy with agile voting methods and small granularities of jurisdiction an emergent democracy?

Is voting in an emergent democracy a binary system?

Blogs as serotonin

"the process that governs the way our brains think, described by William Calvin as the "emergent properties of recurrent excitatory networks in the superficial layers of cerebral cortex," scales up in self-similar fashion to the way people work together in groups, and groups of groups -- an ultimately, up to direct democracy.
-- Peter Kaminski

Kehoe Beach

Yesterday my partner and I decided to head out of San Francisco with the dog, so we jumped in the truck and drove to Kehoe beach on Point Reyes. Kehoe beach is your basic spare beauty of a beach (gratuitous QT VR), but when we walked to the North end we found this hut made of drifted things with this message on the outside. Inside there were paintings and poems, drawings and symbolic arrangements. Someone had put a lot of time into injecting spirit into a small corner of Kehoe beach.

A redistributed search

Yesterday I received a paper letter from a stranger, Bev Uding. It looks like Bev printed out the following message repeatedly, cut the paper into individual messages, and then mailed them to a lot of people named Trevor. The note reads as follows:

"hiya.... if this isn't the trevor i'm looking for i'm sorry.. but if this is my brother trevor please write back to let me know i have the right address since none of your family here has a current address or phone number for you...and we would like to get in touch with you.. thanks.. bev"

If you know a Trevor (maybe even a Trevor Smith) who might be Bev's brother, please let him know that Bev from Wilkes Barre, PA is looking for him.

Emerging picture of E.T.C.

As the Emerging Technology Conference approaches, the folks at O'Reilly are arranging several channels for pre-conference attendee communication. These include several emails, but also a repurposed TED tool, Intro.

The Intro UI arranges conference attendees around you (the center of the universe, of course) by how closely their profile matches your own. Apparently, my profile matches my coworker Mark and Doc Searls, so I'm sure that before the week is out Doc'll be calling me "The F'er" and I'll be ribbing him for his accordian fetish while Mark moblogs the whole thing.

So, maybe not.

Anyway, I'm still looking forward to the conference.

Pressure from the Spanish press

This post, if true, is an impressive display of self control by the Spanish press corp. I had heard that more journalists are ENFP than in the general public. Reading this, I believe it.

Dive into this

Welcome to all of you here through Mark Pilgrim's advertising link. In addition to browsing this site, check out my online comic, George and Abe, and the unabashedly nerdy in the crowd might enjoy my Memex Simulator project.

Touch the icon, smell the love.

3 years!

Jersey at parasitic mentioned that today is the 97th anniversary of the great San Francisco earthquake. My first thought was "Holy Crap, we only have three years to get ready for the 100th anniversary!"

Everybody start getting ready!

XonXinX

Despite thinking that X11 should be considered a third class citizen on OS X, I'm surprised that Apple hasn't defined an application bundle format for X Windows applications which is comprised of a small X server that runs just the one application. The user wouldn't necessarily know that X11 was the underlying windowing system (assuming that they didn't notice the 80s look of most X11 widget sets), much as they don't know whether other applications are Carbon, Cocoa, or Java.

What they would give up in inefficient use of disk space, would be more than made up for in ease of use among most OS X users.

For example, the OpenOffice for OS X distribution could have been one application bundle which, when run from Finder, started an X server for the sole purpose of supporting OpenOffice. Instead, people have to download and install one of the X11 distributions, download and install OpenOffice, reboot, run X11, and only then can OpenOffice launch.

Housing

Not all houses movable houses are on wheels. MMW's Fhiltex house is beautiful, off grid, and completely prefab:

I wonder how R. Buckminster Fuller would react:

Stuck on 1

I was going to publish a bit about Bruce Sterling's excellent piece in the February 2001 Dwell, "The Sensitive House", (complete with a silly joke about computation structures made from openbricks) but Dwell doesn't put back issues online, so the context would be lost. Ah, well.

What I will comment on is the problem that I have with lists that start with huge ideas, as I'll read the first item and then never make it to numbers 2 through N. Instead, I'll have too many free associations with # 1, requiring many web and bookshelf searches, during which I usually come across another list that starts with a huge idea.

For example, I started on Viridian Priciples 1.0 and I got to the first item in Section A, "Eat what you kill" when suddenly I'm thinking about kids in my hometown who shot dinner before eating breakfast, and about how Plan9 ate UNIX, and about how my current projects could eat similar projects, and how Linux installers don't eat network, mail, and browser preferences out of the MS Windows partitions that they overwrite, and then I'm digging through the New Oxford Annotated Bible to find out how Ashurah was portraited in the apocrypha when Mr. Monotheism ate Madam Polytheism, when the I wondered how the ten commandments would line up with the Viridian Principles 1.0 and then I'm at #1, (known as "I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.", "I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt not have strange gods before me.", and "Thou shalt have no other gods before me.") and off I go again.

A GAA example

George And Abe are too funny, if I do say so myself.

Other projects

I have several side projects (outside of work at PARC) that I'll be ramping up as the year progresses:

I have almost 100 more strips for George and Abe and in the shower the other day I had an inspiration for the community story for the Memex Simulator.

I probably won't get around to reworking the San Francisco Bike Map (kind of like Yahoo Maps driving directions, except for bikes) but it is pretty handy so I'll leave it up with the source for any coders who want to have at it.

Sad if true...

I had heard rumours about automobile companies making deals to destroy public transit, but I had no idea that it went this far. I'm used to our terrible transit system, but how must people have felt as their transit systems crumbled out from under them?

Demo hell was extended until yesterday.

(posts.today().count() == C / commitments.today().count()) is so true.

Tomorrow is today

The author of the NewsFighter (home of the Orwell Compliance action committee) sent a link to this article detailing the recent 70th anniversary of the firebombing of the Reichstag.

It takes my breath away to think of how precarious our situation is, given this lesson about undefended freedoms.

Exciterging

I really shouldn't be as excited as I am about the upcoming Emerging Technology Conference, but so many of the speakers have been core to the social web. It is certainly a refreshing change to have people like Howard Rheingold, Wendy Seltzer, and Meg Hourihan at the podium for a few days instead of Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs.

As with the masked organizers of cival unrest at peace marches, there's something about people who keep more money than most third world gross national products which leads me to distrust anything that they say about being social.

Everyday use

The recent looting of the National Museum of Iraq, in addition to being a tragedy of the scale of the burning of the libraries of Alexandria, makes me think of the Alice Walker short story, "Everyday Use".

Somewhere in Iraq, there are people who have known poverty for many years using some treasure of their land's past as a table, wondering what they could get for it at market. These treasures will make their way up through the heirarchy of collectors' homes, on display as a trophy of this war. Or maybe they will be rendered into their elements and sold as currency, all craft destroyed and all records erased.

Iraq has a new regime and a new history.

Computechtural

Thinking about the social effects of architectural changes on the scale of the Internet (as Lessig does) makes my head hurt, and I reject plans that revolve around prediction and comprehension of such systems. However, I am hopeful that we're slowly understanding more agile techniques for responding to the evolving needs of the net and its people.

On a smaller scale, my personal network (which supports just two people and a dog) has an evolving set of computational devices including laptops, desktops, digital video recorders, digital answering/caller ID machines, webcams, camcorders, cell phones, and PDAs. The network includes ethernet, WiFi, ADSL, GPRS, infrared bridges, and a network of sensors for the security system. And that's just the hardware. The software includes several versions of several operating systems, many applications, several remote servers, and two simultaneous virtual private networks. And that's just on my network, which is connected to several larger networks, including the internet.

Because there are no patterns for interoperability among devices and services that haven't been designed for one another (no shared data type, protocol, interface, cabling...), each new device is an island of information and coders must create an exponentially increasing number of bridges between them. The information technology industry has made a lot of money by charging for piecemeal integration, and still interconnection of the simplest form is often available only to the technically elite. P2P discovery and service description languages (e.g. Rendezvous, UPnP, and Jini) are a step in the right direction, but once you've found two services to connect what are the chances that you already have the code to connect them?

My phone doesn't connect to my laptop which doesn't connect to my PVR which doesn't connect to my DV camera which doesn't connect to my blog. Look at the hoops that Matt Haughey jumped through just to get pictures from his phone onto his web site. The term "not scalable" doesn't even begin to cover our solutions to these problems.

So, what now? I'm obviously biased, but I suggest reading "The Case for Recombinant Computing" and "Designing for Serendipity", two papers from my lab. They are short and they explore one approach to recombinant networking.

I've created a recombinant network topic page for trackbacks at the excellent Internet Topic Exchange, or you can email me directly at trevor at georgeandabe dot com.

a Happening

This intersection of four+ media into one event that is more than a conversation, unless you include asynchronous and synchronous, persisting and temporary, multichannel and multistage communication in the meaning of conversation.

I might have created a new name for this, instead of overloading "happening", but I can't complain about the technique and the topics.

Pick something, anything.

Despite frequent thoughts of "how useless" or "there are people starving", I respect a person executing a grand plan.

Haskell

I reached the meme awareness tipping point^* on the programming language haskell about six months ago, and ever since then it has popped up in quite a few papers and web sites. Just today I was reading a note from the excellent sweetcode mailing list about darcs, a neat idea in source revision control using an slick patch system. It's coded in haskell.

I suppose that at some point I'll break down and code something in haskell, as I enjoy functional languages for the same reasons that I enjoyed Kiswahili in college. Without diversity of thought, the normal is invisible. Here are an intoduction to functional languages and a description of haskell, if you're interested.

* It's like when you first notice Tom Waits, and then over the course of the next year realize that he's in articles that you've already read, albums that you already own, and in movies that you've already seen. He's been there all along, but his meme hadn't penetrated your media field.

Source in executable

As bandwidth widens, disks space expands, and CPU cycles compress, I wonder what assumptions about the relationship between OSes and executables should be questioned.

For example, should an OS include as part of its executable file a protocol for fetching the source code to the executable? Perhaps the source code is in the executable file, or perhaps the file has an URN to the source tree.

How can we reduce the time between deciding to tweak something about a running application and tweaking it? In Darwin, it is seriously easy to run a variety of executable formats within application bundles with no difference in the UI, especially if you use the cocoa UI abstraction layer. There is an abstraction between starting an application and jumping to main(..) that allows the OS to choose the right executable for the environment. Maybe one of the executable formats could be buildable source, built the first time and whenever you've made changes. Another tactic would be to include a standard source directory or a reference to the source and a description language for how to build.

Scenario: I'm using Safari to edit this blog, and I realize that I'd really like to use Shift-Control-Command-Fn-F1 to capture a webpage as a PDF and FTP it and a thumbnail to this blog. What if I could load Project Builder, point it at the Safari bundle and it could read how to set up a buildable source tree? And what if it could also figure out how I could submit patches of my changes back to the Safari team? I'm certain that they would love my Shift-Control-Command-Fn-F1 idea!

Well, maybe not "love".

My point is that with a minor step we've bridged from a world in which coders are separated from hacking an app by at least a couple of hours of finding and installing a new tree to a world in which coders are minutes away from hacking the source.

I won't even go into what sort of changes could be made at runtime (hint, hint, hint).

What are other assumptions about our OS that we need to question? More script bridges, additional languages, source only distributions ... Mail trevor at georgeandabe.com if you have good ideas. We'll chat.

What the hell?

Planting a University flag in a presidential palace is an insult to the people of Iraq. It isn't enough that their country has been under a dictator and they've been shelled for weeks. No, now we're planting flags to whatever fanatical football team we please on the equivalent of their white house lawn. That was disgraceful to our nation and to theirs.

Ease of use.

If you would like a bookmarklet that allows you to quickly look up words at M-W, then look no further: This link can be dragged into your bookmarks bar and when clicked should pop open a JavaScript window into which you should write the word that you want defined.

I've only tested it in Safari, in which I've added it as the third bookmark on my bookmark bar. This allows me to hit Command-3 from any Safari window to get the popup. It's quick! It's easy! It's better than a stick in the eye!

Thanks to Tim of linkmonger for the original JavaScript.

Dr. Anita Borg died today

The Institute for Women and Technology is a wonderful organization with the important goal to "increase the impact of women on all aspects of technology and to increase the positive impact of technology on the lives of the world's women". Its founder, Anita Borg, was a member of the research community of PARC until last year, and I'm sad that she's no longer around, making the world a better place.

At long last

Our ex-landlord, Mark Distler, finally returned the deposit that he failed to cough up when we moved out. Basically, he claimed that we shouldn't have painted. When we moved in, the apartment was painted depressing gray and we asked him if we could paint. He OK'ed the color, but I guess that we should have had on paper, because when we moved out he tried to short us for $1150, claiming that he would have to pay extra to get the place repainted.

What Mark didn't know is that we had taken pictures before and after the painting, so we had proof that the color was such that it would in fact be cheaper to put on a new coat, since the new cream color would be much easier to paint over than the original dark gray. We mentioned the pictures to him, but he maintained that because we didn't have it in writing that he was keeping the money.

Keep in mind that we had paid him San Francisco rent for four years (more than $75,000!) without so much as a late payment, so it was a bit much for him to also keep the deposit.

So, my wife filed in small claims court, found his home address through the tax records, and paid a private investigator to serve him. I guess that some landlords use P.O. boxes for their business addresses in order to make it hard to track them down at their place of business, but the SF Tenants Union suggested that we use the tax records or one of the online services that will find people's addresses.

I'm not sure what finally made him take notice that my wife wasn't going to let him just keep our money, but today his girlfriend dropped off a check. Maybe it was the fear of having a public record that he tried to keep our deposit. Maybe he just didn't want the hassle of going to court. Either way, I'm glad that we had pictures and that my wife is the kind of person to go the extra mile to ensure that he couldn't keep what wasn't his.

The Remembrance Agent

I read about the remembrance agent a while ago (I think it was in WiReD, back when it was way too intercapped [probably the love affair article about Pattie Maes]) and I've often looked for similar features in bloated projects like Office or one of the open source window managers.

Basically, the network watches your information stream and displays related material. Different systems use varying types of contextual information and vary in their ability to bridge several applications. One simple example is Mozilla's "What's Related" sidebar, which uses one piece of information, your current page, to show you related documents on the web. The agent linked above sits in emacs and shows you documents on your local machine that are similar to the focus buffer.

So, one big problem of any remembrance agent is to determine where you have spent your attention. A few years ago I ran a simple experiement in which I built a very web proxy that cached every document I viewed. I wanted to get a scale of how much raw data was flowing before me. In addition to realizing that my browser touches many more sites than the ones in my location bar, I found that on some days I would easily break a gigabyte of data.

One interesting observation was that I didn't actually see most of the data because it was off the bottom of a page and I didn't scroll, because I mentally filtered out the ads or the usual navigation graphics, and because I often moved on to another page before the render was completed. If a remembrance agent simply took the entire contents of every web page that I viewed and showed me relevant documents based on all of that content, then I'm going to see a lot of remembrance notes which are relevant to the parts of the pages which I didn't see, those being the majority.

So, a good agent needs more than just a timeline of documents. A good agent needs a stream of what was actually seen by me. I wonder if anyone has run some experiments with eye tracking hardware to see how specific the remembrance search terms could be.

Blam!

The net noted that the world was filled with half-assed book reviews with no metadata, and then created Blam!. Fill out a form with your review, and then Blam! will suck out amazonian metadata and give you the HTML to earn associate points such that you might read more books and write more reviews.

You can browse the reviews at Blaxm!.

Spacewar

Ever wanted to play the legendary Spacewar? Well, here is your chance.

A hell of a lot of excitement

I have to include this quote from a letter from Dee Hock to Joi Ito about Visa:
"At the heart of it is a communication network linked in an unimaginable number of ways. Consider that a resident of a small town in Japan can appear at random anywhere on the globe, say a resort hotel in Venice. He presents his card to the cashier who swipes it through a terminal providing information which excites a neuron of code in the terminal to recognizes this information will be exciting to a neuron of code in the computer of the hotel and passes it along. The neuron of code in the hotel computer recognizes the message will be exciting to a neuron of code in the computer of Bank America d Italia in Rome, which enrolled the merchant and holds its bank account, and passes it along. There, another neuron of code is excited to realize the message will excite a neuron of code in the central computer of the Visa European center in Blasingame England. That computer recognizes the message will excite code in the central computer of Visa in San Mateo California which realizes the message will excite a neuron of code in the computer of the Asia Pacific Region in Japan, which recognizes it will excite a neuron of code in the central computer of Sumitomo Bank where another neuron of code recognizes that it will excite code in the Branch of the Bank with issued the card to its customer and holds his bank account. That neuron recognizes that its response will be exciting to the chain in reverse order and instantly provides information of acceptance or rejection. Along the path, other neurons of code are excited to provide language translation, currency conversion and net settlement between the parties at a system wide agreed rate, protection from fraud and counterfeiting and a host of other activities. Every neuron trusts the other neurons to perform in an acceptable manner which results in the trust between cardholder and merchant that is essential to the functioning of the system. Multiply this single transaction by twenty thousand banks, 220 countries, millions of merchant locations and more than a billion card holders and you have a whole hell of a lot of excitement. Imagine what such a system would look like if its currency were ideas and concepts rather than money. Is this what you mean by blogging?"

Wingnut

Steve Mann is just my kind of fanatic wingnut. In addition to offering up his body to wearable science, he coined a term for reciprocal surveillance, "sousveillance", and went on to write a legible position paper about it.

Work, work, work

My posting has died down a bit because I've been entangled in a recurring demo hell that involves (heaven help me) win32 DirectX coding. I've been snubbing that OS (and that language, frankly) for a while because I usually have the luxury of defining my platform, but now I'm back in the land of the brain dead. I should return to sanity on Tuesday.

In the mean time, here is a related quote from Douglas Adams (as seen here):
The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong, it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.

Maybe not right...

I'm not saying that this conversation is some sort of grand truth, but I am saying that it sounds like many conversations I've heard (or been part of) recently.

Low down

I've always been ashamed of disliking museums of art, despite having a high regard for their contents and goals. Perhaps "dislike" isn't the proper word, as my reaction is somewhere between a panic attack and the urge to break out in childrens' songs while running for the door.

This morning's email included a wordspy note about Stendhals' Syndrome, which is defined as: "Dizziness, panic, paranoia, or madness caused by viewing certain artistic or historical artifacts or by trying to see too many such artifacts in too short a time."

Once again, I am not alone.