Random Archive - September

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Seem to be getting a little more consistent.

September 3rd, 2002 Long weekend. My father-in-law flew out to help us move and ended up doing much of the work. Thanks to him we got the living room, shower, and front door togther. Not to mention that it was great to hang out with a first generation computer geek.

If you're looking for interesting food products you could try, Tienda.com. (from The New York Times Magazine)

I'm very disapointed to see Support For 1st Amendment Slipping. Although I'm never sure who they are polling when they do these things, I get worried because I know that politicans and the media pay attention to these things. To see the errosion of the spirit that inspired the quote, "I will defend to the death your right to say it.", which as it turns out may be wrongly attributed to Voltaire, is a sad thing.

The dex, had an intersting link to incredible brain facts, which I have had no time to research. If you find any collaborating evidence, please let me know.

September 4th, 2002 I heard the new Tom Petty, The Last DJ this morning. The DJ on Arrow 93.1 asked the listeners to "listen" to what Tom was saying. I had to wonder if he would have his job tommorow. For those of you who think that Napster hosed the artists, just listen to the track.

New PCs restrict copying, and there you have it. For those who believe that it cannot happen here, because the government, or the courts would never allow it, you were wrong. Not because the government is evil (although it is ocasionaly tweaked), not because the congress is owned by the Entertainment Industry (although Senator from Disney is catchy!), but because the tech industry (read MICROSOFT, yes, they were CONVICTED of being a MONOPOLY) wants to be in bed with the Entertainment Industry. Now the reasons for that run from the obvious, money and content provision, to the wildest of conspiracy theories. Sometimes, like when reading Noam Chomsky, you start to say, "Hey, maybe he's right, maybe it really did happen that way.".

So the conspiracy theorists might just be right, maybe Microsoft jumping into bed with the Entertainment industry is just about Microsoft owning your computer. Is it possible that Palladium is a Trojan Horse? That maybe, just maybe Microsoft wants to insure that nothing not ordained by Redmond runs on your box? Could it be that Entertainment Industry will find itself locked out if it refuses to play by Microsoft's rules? But, that's just another crazy conspiracy theory.
It'll never happen here.

You have to wonder what the point of playing a video game is when the game can take over and play for them. And I personally do not want to play Halflife on my cell. I have a hard enough time limiting myself to the keyboard.

From the dex:

September 5th, 2002 Another big morning. Mostly from the dex:
9/11 Lesson Plan, so that I'm clear on this, I don't agree with everything in this piece, but since I'm supporting free speech I'm putting up stuff that pushes my edges a bit. In Heading for Trouble the author challanges my support for kicking the snot out of Iraq with some of the best arguments I've heard yet.

Of course I like to cover my own interests too. Environmentalist Wacko Quotes, shows how messed up some of these people are, but not all the quotes are so far fetched. And then we have humor about how silly Eruopeans are, I suggest reading the posts above it as well.

I'll probably not open a feed on this site anytime soon, my 'nix skills are rusty, but RSS looks like an especially cool idea, although I think that most things webservicy are more hype than substance. Finaly, a link related to a lunch discussion yeterday. The Patent Office sucks (from Jim), but you probably knew that already.

September 6th, 2002 I know that we all have the right to think whatever we want, and express it, and pursue it, etc. I support those rights for others, even those views that I dislike. However, I have to ask what the point is of taking part in a Patriot Day ceromony while cutting out Patriotism. I must hang my head in shame, for my State, for my fellow citizens, for my Collegiate system. I have one question for Jessica Quindel.

Why don't you care about "exclud[ing] and offend[ing]" me?
But, for every bunch of whacked out people, there sometimes appear a group who gets it. Let's hear it for Duke's challange of copyright law. I almost didn't post this, but, I have to say to the donor, and to the school officals who took up the task; thank you from the bottom of my heart. You are worth of the term citizen.

I'm also happy about the first commercial moon mission.

ArchNewsNow and the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture & Urbanism look like good Architecture resources.

September 9th, 2002 Thank you MSN... the Work You Were Born to Do, which can be summererized thus:

"If the right career choice is not obvious from the information you have gathered about yourself, then try reading What Color Is Your Parachute?"
Thanks, I couldn't have figured that out. So insightful, but then I didn't expect much from Microsoft.

For all your Perl application need, although unsued by the author his company has put it to work.

Another UserFriendly captures the sad state of the world.

Fith Taste Identified (from Girl Hacker)

September 10th, 2002 First: Go read Jim, he has some great links about the recording industry.

He left me the link to all the money your representitives made from the entertainment industry.

And the dex, had a real-time test of censorship in China. We'll see if my site shows up now.

September 11th, 2002 I thought about doing something special today, after a coworker asked if was going to. The truth is that many others have spoken. Many others have said things more succinctly, more eloquently, and more poignantly. Many others have paid tribute, and called attention, and remembered. So all I'm going to do today is remember.

September 16th, 2002 Didn't realize I had been gone so long. From September 11th:

More from the "it'll never happen here" front. With Intel building an antipiracy chip, I see more and more reason to buy AMD, and soon. This is more than the unique id that Intel tried to foist on us a few years back, this is serious stuff.

A lunar landing skeptic says 'Buzz' Aldrin attacked him. Go Buzz! I'm now using Mozilla for my browsing. And with another case where Science meets Fiction: Star Trek Communicator comes one step closer to reality. (Not really, but...)

September 17th, 2002 When will companies realize that knowledge workers work better when not constrained to set hours? In Managin for Results states:

"When you measure office time as a surrogate for productivity, your staff will spend plenty of time at work—but may not accomplish anything productive."
Here, here! At least the Law in my state provides some remedies. So maybe employers in this state will start to realize that they do not OWN their people.

September 19th, 2002 I have found a new source:

Moore's Lore
Dude is getting a nav link as soon as I can edit the file!

Not surprisingly Wired agrees with me about the fate of technology if we don't do something.

99.9% of Proper Grammar Is Obsolete points out some interesting oversights in the original article.
The messages work because over four or five years of widespread online use users did not merely tolerate non-standard writing; they actually encouraged sloppy authoring and proprietary scripting in an ill-conceived battle to send messages as fast as they received them.
Which is actually why the sites work. We were coding them, and are still maintaing them, as fast as we can put them up. The web would not be the second biggest part of the Internet without all those piecemeal pages. How many blogs take into account user factors? How many news sites? E-Commerce? How many sites do you use? I can still buy stuff from bobs-bug-o-rama.com as long as the site actually submits the order. If we didn't have this great body of sites, how would we be able to find out what works and what doesn't? I want to know, without all the "Obsolete" sites would the guy who wrote the original article even be employed?

In the spirit of my Tuesday's post, Helpdesk had an appropriate comic.

September 23rd, 2002 (Based on discovery date, not posting date.) Another in a line of products designed to keep power in the hands of the Entertainment Industry.

A cool hardrive selector.

Although I find History too open to interpretation, and a very inexact science, I find ancient technology fascinating.
Modern micro fuel cell technology is pretty cool too.

September 24th, 2002 How many different ways can you open a text file? I'm serious, sure we come out with new languages, and that's interesting for a little while. But as someone said it's all "syntactic sugar". So what captures my interest? Well first off I really like Hive Mind a chapter from the book Out of Control by Kevin Kelly. The question becomes how do we replicate this in Information Retrival? How do we store book information so that a computer program can grab all the introductory books on Mathematics without storing all the information about each book and linking it to a codex? Can we use Sparse Distributed Memory? These questions we could probably spend a lifetime exploring. (found via typophile)

I'm still on the warpath about the DMCA and all the restrictions on digital technology croping up due to the entertainment industry. This little bit of foolishness showed up and I had to scratch my head.

September 25th, 2002 Another standard in bloging: ping back which could fill some of the promises of the web. In that we could now have a quick trace to where our data is used, and link to those comments we found most lucid. In fact this idea is covered by Ray in "Architecture Matters:The Rebirth of Public Discussion"

"If someone on a blog "posts a topic", others can respond, but generally do so in their own blogs, hyperlinked back to the topic's permalink. This goes on and on, back and forth. In essence, it's the same hyperlinking mechanism as the traditional discussion design pattern, except that the topics and responses are spread out all over the Web."
Which I find interesting since he prefers to preform this linking himself, but what a great improvement when the linking of the distributed content is automatic.

On that note some intelligent insights from an allegedly long time industry insider, can be found at Ray Ozzie.net and I say allegdly, just now realizing that he is probably a big wig at Groove.

Starbucks expands the market for coffeehouses, which reminds of an article I read on about market expansion somewhere else... I'll post it when I find it.

For those who think that dictionaries are authoratative, here is a glimpse into how they are made. I guess this means that I'll have to allow my wife her creativity with the English codex.

Build your own matchbox webserver, the home of which can be found at Stanford Wearables.

And for a bit of nostalgia I found a web link to Fidonet.

September 30th, 2002 I am concerned about several things going on in congress including proposal for a "brodcast" flag. [pdf] (pg 3.) Before you tune out, thinking what's the big deal, let me ask you what this does to an open source software project. If the source code is available then anyone could modify it to ignore the required flag. So in effect this law would make open source projects illegal for certian types of software. This law would completely eradicate consumer choice.

Speaking of governmental regulation choice, I was sent the following article on the California energy crisis. Ignoring the other bias in the article, I must address the underlying suggestion that something must be done to regulate the markets.

"Maybe our national faith in free markets is so strong that people just don’t want to talk about a case in which markets went spectacularly bad."
The subtle flaw in this statement is that California was a "free market", California is in fact a very regulated market. One of the requirements for free market capitalism to work is that new players can enter the market whenever encumbant companies begin charging too much. This is nearly impossible in California due to a variety of reasons, mainly environmental regulations. So I must go back to what the papers were claiming and that is that "meddlesome bureaucrats" were the cause of the crisis.

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