random($foo)

5/31

Via JesseR: Bill Nye the Science Guy will be at UCLA tomorrow! 3-6PM, free and open to the public, and free food.

Picked up a 35mm f/2.0 and 50mm f/1.8 prime this morning. Hooray, handheld shooting in streetlight has just become that much easier.

5/30

Ian sums up the AOL/Microsoft deal (see Mozillazine for more coverage).

"The FBI has been reading my diary" - A student is mistakenly targeted as an investigation blurs the line between local and federal law enforcement.

What's particularly ridiculous is the gestapo tactics used (surprise, surprise - I mean, sig heil!), and well, the sheer incompetence of it all. They brought in the student because of a blog entry entitled "Somebody Hacked the Gibson." No wonder cybercrime is such a huge problem; 90% of the brownshirts are morons who know more about bullying than technology.

Oh, and these "FBI" officers? Actually Chapel Hill Police officers. Where are the laws to protect us from them?

Pastry - A scalable, decentralized, self-organizing and fault-tolerant substrate for peer-to-peer applications. Project of Antony Rowstron @ Microsoft Research. See also: FreePastry, an OSS implementation (Java, BSD-like license).

Twist is in:

Ahh, deriving a certain satisfaction about this whole SCO mess. (Cringely summarizes - better than a soap opera!)

The Harvard of Interactive - a glowing writeup of NYU's ITP. I'll have to admit, the classes sound like fun: "The Future of the Infrastructure," "Creative Microcomputing," "Information Architecture," "The Poetics of Virtual Space," "Contagious Media."

Holy crap this is awesome.

Starting to EAC some CD's again. See sidebar for latest additions.

Brad with a post on scaling LJ. I spoke w/ Brad one night about some of this stuff at this past SXSW (he has a sweet deal w/ F5), but it's good to see where they're going (see memcache info from lj_dev).

A few intersting notes. Brad mentions the uselessness of pconnects for MySQL, (yes) but goes on to blast InnoDB. From my experience, InnoDB is not only technically superior, but faster speedwise as well (some InnoDB vs MyISAM benchmarks). Also, although improvements have been made, MyISAM still has fugly row-level locking. The main real caveat is that there's no full text search support current in InnoDB (others: slow counts due to multiversioning, auto-incrementing and table status are funky and other misc 'stuff').

Peterme wrote an interesting bit on paths at Berkeley. I can think of at least two examples of this same problem at USC. Chained fences were put up in one location, and the other simply gets re-turfed at regular intervals (when the parents are in town).

Ever get that feeling when you stand up real quick and it seems like all your blood isn't quite making it to your head and you get sorta dizzy?

Anyway, when you're feeling like that just in general, it's a good idea to try to go to sleep early. At least you'll be up bright and early, so you can enjoy the nice 'pit in your stomach' feeling.

Last bit of autobiographica: I swung by McDonald's last night for the first time in months. I ate a quarter-pounder combo while reading Fast Food Nation. I think this counts as my first literal cheese sandwich post.

5/29

Nullsoft has just released WASTE (mirror). See /. discussion. Still processing, but it seems like the Nullsoft guys have very much been thinking in a similar direction as I have been, although basically going for a OSS Groove thing - unfortunately, it looks like the protocol isn't built for scaling (they mention 10-50 nodes).

5/28

5/27

I may not be blogging for a while, certainly not until I get my home connection back up (and hopefully getting something setup on the ol' server)

In the meantime, if you like this blog, you might like some of these:

5/26

For some reason my cable at home has been on the fritz, so for the first time in recent memory, I've been without Internet access (been taking advantage of the hiptop, am currently on-campus enjoying a very nice day - in the shade of course, so I can see the screen).

5/23

Gabe posted pics of his nyc apt. It looks cozy, but at the same time, crazy small. Basically, three 10' x 10' rooms lined up. That's about the same square footage as the main room of my studio.

Chris Hedges, author of War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning gave a commencement speech at Rockford College (in Rockford, IL) that was booed and interrupted multiple times. Reading the speech, I found it both interesting and insightful The predictable response was both sad, but also (more?) sadly not unexpected.

We will pay for this, but what saddens me most is that those who will by and large pay the highest price are poor kids from Mississippi or Alabama or Texas who could not get a decent job or health insurance and joined the army because it was all we offered them. For war in the end is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of soldiers by politicians, and of idealists by cynics. Read Antigone, when the king imposes his will without listening to those he rules or Thucydides' history. Read how Athens' expanding empire saw it become a tyrant abroad and then a tyrant at home. How the tyranny the Athenian leadership imposed on others it finally imposed on itself.

This, Thucydides wrote, is what doomed Athenian democracy; Athens destroyed itself. For the instrument of empire is war and war is a poison, a poison which at times we must ingest just as a cancer patient must ingest a poison to survive. But if we do not understand the poison of war -- if we do not understand how deadly that poison is -- it can kill us just as surely as the disease.

5/22

The Nokia 6800 (phonescoop) looks like a neat device, but it doesn't seem to have any Bluetooth? I just can't understand how that thought process works. Also, seem to only to be available from Cingular presently.

Hmm... UPS vs. Sapient

If you're reinstalling Mozilla (or possibly Mozilla Firebird), here's a list of add-ons/tweaks that I use to get me back into a working state:

Had my first day of class today. I'm taking CTCS 505 (Survey of Interactive Media) this summer. It's a 2 unit class, but is from 9-3PM TTh. Yeah, seems weird to me too. It's being taught by Dan Harries, who seems like a nice enough guy. Also, introduced myself and had lunch with a few of my fellow grad students, all of whom seem like neat people. The reader is The New Media Book, which, well, despite the title might not be all bad. I'll probably set up a blog for my class notes. Maybe get around to installing SnipSnap or TikiWiki.

Sometime last week I decided I was going to actually enroll in the Interactive Media grad program. Some thoughts on my upcoming schedule:

0.75x Work
0.75x Grad school
  My girl
  Personal projects
  Freelance
  Misc social commitments

Note, that sleep is not accounted for in this schedule.

Wow, this had me laughing pretty hard. Looks like Kevin was able to fix that.

(My name isn't as googlejuiced as others, but hey, I have the top few spots (and no, I'm not the teen bodybuilder). Also, you can read various old posts/mailing list stuff and have a giggle)

5/21

I haven't written much about Matrix Reloaded. Perhaps a rather funny thing considering I dedicated a skin to it. But, w/ everyone having their own reviews, here's mine: I had fun watching it, and I can't wait for the ending this fall, but there was a slight tinge of disappointment at missed opportunities. Unfortunately on the road to sequeldom, Reloaded ends up losing so many of the elements that made the original so refreshing; the sense of style and deftness, darkness, and danger instead gets replaced by sprawl, hamminess, and pure spectacle (and a beyond cheezy Zion). Probably most objectionable for me, however, was the disjointed nature of the film on almost every level. What was so amazing about the original film was how organic and unified it was. The visual and thematic elements blended perfectly and the plot twists and philosophy didn't come in globby exposition but unfolded fluidly, expressed and supported by the action.

I have no idea if this is properly expressing what I'm thinking. Part of me wants to write paragraphs about how great the dojo scene or the original Smith showdowns were at viscerally expressing and tying together the story's themes. Having given some thought to it, that in fact seems to be perhaps a more revolutionary and the true triumphant achievement of the movie.

Anyway, at the very least, the philosophy bits in the second was interesting. (see: some thoughts on the original movie)

Hmm, so, basically Simon proves jwz right; CSS is too fuckin' hard.

5/20

Wow, now this put a smile on my face. Some friends are doing a art/music/poetry thing in town this weekend. Well, reading through the bios, turns out one of my old classmates, Corey Jackson, is actually now Art Lead @ Ludicorp. What a small frickin' world.

(Be sure to check out Corey's MFA statement of purpose and his sketchbooks [check out how he's progressed over the years]).

5/19

Boo-urns. Feeling slightly under the weather (ok, feels like a frog in my throat, but it could be worse).

Gave a friend the P2P social software spiel, he brought up a good point about data scraping, lack of double blind transactions—which is true, that's a whole different issue...

Also, been looking into mobile devices after learning that when using GPRS (more info), voice calls are shunted directly to Voice Mail if data is being sent or received. It looks like right now, using Sprint's 1xRTT is a pretty much the same, allowing incoming data while dormant. Sometime this year Sprint may be aiming for the ability to suspend active data to receive incoming voice.

Frankly, I'm rather surprised by this VM behavior, and I think that 90% of people aren't aware that by transferring data they have a good chance of missing calls. What's the point of having data services if it means that people can't reach you when they need to?

5/18

Random thought: when are the PowerBooks with transflective screens coming? Ironicaly, it seems the latest generations of PDAs are more usable than laptops now because you can actually see them in the sun. The Panasonic ToughBooks are the only consumer laptops I know of right now that have transflective screens...

Matrix Reloaded, the first major motion picture to accurately portray a hack. See pics at Insecure.org. Trinity uses an SSHv1 exploit to get #. Cool! Timeline discussion:

Not only is it important for
the coolness factor, but we can learn how Nmap
looks in the future by studying that output!

Maybe not.

In the first movie, the Matrix world is in 1999.

Morpheus mentions how since Neo became the One, they
have "freed more minds in the past six months than the
past six years".

So Trinity is actually using an exploit discovered in
2001, in a simulated world that can be no later than
June 2000.

So how can she do this? Possibilities.

* Trinity is one of the best hackers on the planet.
She could have discovered the flaw herself, or perhaps
some other Zion-based hacker did.

* In the real world, they do have some technology from
earlier eras. Perhaps Trinity came across some old
mailing lists on a CDROM. Say hi to her next time you
post.

5/17

Ashley faring much better in the wide-angle than I:

ashley and me

Definitely need to take some better photos.

5/16

Passed the 1000 mark this morning on the EOS. Still not bored. Wait until I get some more lenses. More pics up soon. :)

5/15

Put up some of the E3 pictures I took yesterday. A few keepers. Most were shot w/ the EOS-10D at 1600+ ISO.

5/14

OMFG, Half-Life 2 is amazing. Brilliant character animation, character AI, and stupendous physical modelling. Definitely best in show, and blows away everything else I saw (yes, this includes Doom 3). If you're there, don't stand in line for 3 hours. Go directly to the Standard (6th/Flower) where their showing demo screenings of the current build every half-hour on the half-hour.

Shot: 501 images (14 rolls), only 1.3GB as I switched to shooting JPEG -- RAW was just way too massive.

Random fun story: Gabe and I were so engrossed in GTA3: Vice City, yelling and just in a state of pure joy taking out virtual cops with an assault rifle that we didn't even notice that there was a filming crew moving around (with lights event!) capturing our excited squeals at how the heads popped right off the police officers.

I will be at E3 today with my EOS-10D and my F402. I'll be taking pictures. I may even post some online later. ;)

Hyatt has been discussing XBL on his blog. I haven't done much playing around with XBL (it's on my list), but it seems to make a lot more sense for client-side presentation than XSLT.

brainfart: [js fragment processing / bookmarklet for creating aribrary DOM node searching/linking...]

alt: Mozilla, SashXB, XWT

5/13

Raises some interesting questions: Putting The Brain On Trial

He was a schoolteacher, a husband, a father. Then he became a pedophile preoccupied with sex.

Doctors who treated him at the University of Virginia hospital in 2000 believe that the man's powerful sex addiction was caused by an egg-sized tumor in his brain.

"It turned out he was a guy who had made it into his 40s without having any problem with this," said Dr. Russell Swerdlow, a UVa associate professor of neurology. "He had a brain tumor that was damaging the part of the brain that controls impulse."

Once the tumor was removed, the man's sexual obsession disappeared. Swerdlow believes this is the first known case to link damage of the frontal lobe with pedophilia.

Only in LA: Oh, what a tangled web he wove, an article detailing some of the whole Tobey Maguire/Spiderman 2 thing.

Moving Outlook messages from one computer to another to another computer to import into Outlook Express is weirdly convoluted. Because of the way that the import works (it looks for Outlook profiles for importing PST's), you have to go through shenanigans to move the files into the right place. I ended up just getting annoyed the crap out, converting the .DBX files on the source computing and moving it into the proper ID in the target computer.

(This requires another 10 more steps because by default, XP's search not only won't search for hidden/system files, but won't even let you get to them until you drill down through annoying dog avatar menus to select the 'advanced' mode. Also, using real command lines all day, you forget how absolutely gimpy CMD.EXE is)

Anyway, one of the many reasons that personally, I use IMAP and not have to worry about any of this mail transfer business. Also, illustrative of why I hate XP. I'd reinstall W2K, but my hardware requires the 'upgrade'.

5/12

I had long suspected it, but straight from the horse's mouth: Johny Memnonic shouldn't have sucked (well, as much, at least, if not for Sony's meddling).

Public Service Announcement: if you're looking forward to the Matrix Reloaded (and if not, you should be!) and want to stay unspoiled, you might want to avoid /. this week, as trolls are not only posting a monster spoiler in posts but also embedding them in otherwise normal looking stuff (very evil).

5/11

This weekend, I actually got around to finally cleaning my apartment. Amazing what you can get accomplished when properly motivated.

more or less clean apartment

There's still some clutter still, and it's not spotless, but it definitely is showing potential that I previously hadn't thought possible.

Recently, I got an interesting idea in my head with regards to social software. I haven't entirely been keeping up with the latest developments, so have been starting to bone up and go through archives for stuff I may have missed, basically using the following as starting points:

Oh, coincidentally, there's a recent /. post on The Debate about Social Software (watch out reading the comments, there are major Matrix Reloaded spoilers hidden there. In fact, it might be a good idea to stay away from /. this week if you don't want to be spoiled).

Doing this sort of semi-directed research has highlighted how inadequate my tools and process for online research are (bookmarking, relating, annotating, etc).

Semi-related: Justin's getting a lot of crap for his donation request. I look at it with some bemusement, quite a few people getting riled up about it. I mean, personally, the asking for donations thing isn't for me (and also, if you're getting charged $75/mo for 30GB/mo transfer, Justin, you're getting ripped the fuck off), but I mean come on, I'm not going to rip into him about it or anything. Have these people even ever met Justin, or do they just think they can say whatever because it's online, or they've been reading his writing for a few years? Anyway, interesting questions raised all around about the nature of digital identity and social relationships, self-publishing (and attendent reader-writer responsibilities), and the like - exactly what makes this so fun, right?

Andre is right, this the True Crime site is really well done, and the first video completely rocks. Definitely looking forward to see if this thing plays as good as it looks at E3.

More stolen links: Phil has a Compilation of the Indie Rock 1000 list from the CMJ Bulletin Board thread.

Also, yet another reason to NEVER EVER get a cat.

5/10

I've been looking for good OS X CD tools for a while, but hadn't had much luck on my last search. However, I was just looking around and finding some new stuff:

The rsync algorithm rocks so hard. Here are some stats for syncing changed ID3 tags. Yay rolling checksums! :)

rsync[1869] (sender) heap statistics:
  arena:         758264   (bytes from sbrk)
  ordblks:           11   (chunks not in use)
  smblks:             2
  hblks:              1   (chunks from mmap)
  hblkhd:        266240   (bytes from mmap)
  usmblks:            0
  fsmblks:           80
  uordblks:      690592   (bytes used)
  fordblks:       67672   (bytes free)
  keepcost:         840   (bytes in releasable chunk)

Number of files: 3007
Number of files transferred: 10
Total file size: 14747774318 bytes
Total transferred file size: 49373563 bytes
Literal data: 52963 bytes
Matched data: 49320600 bytes
File list size: 143445
Total bytes written: 150027
Total bytes read: 423414

wrote 150027 bytes  read 423414 bytes  39547.66 bytes/sec
total size is 14747774318  speedup is 25718.03

5/9

Interview with Brian Walski on PDN

Maybe I'll be happy where I end up in a couple of years, but I'll never look back on it and say it was a good thing. I hurt my reputation and the LA Times' reputation, and that's something I feel really bad about. And the Internet thing, that's hard to deal with. I did a Google search on my name, and it comes up in about 25 languages. Every photographer wants to be known for a picture he's taken. I'll be known for this. It's not something I'm proud of. The photographers who are covering Iraq—I've hurt them in a way. If I could apologize...People should be proud of the work they've done over there. I take responsibility for what I did.

I really feel bad for Walski. While what he did was wrong, he really got crucified, especially consider how much of the war coverage was made up anyway. Did anyone get fired for all the stuff invented in the press (try the Memory Hole for some examples)? Did anyone get fired for the completely staged statue toppling?

Whoever said money can't buy happiness should pick up a digital EOS.

The Lemon: History Of The Internet (for a more serious take, check out ISOC's Internet Histories or the various timelines and historical resources).

For those interested, I've decided to go w/ a Powerbook 12" (I've been lugging around a 1st gen 15" TiBook for the past year and a half) for my new laptop. I have a PB12" vs X31 excel spreadsheet outlining listing some of the why-fors. Basically, it comes down to the fact that though the PB12" gets blown away in the hardware department (it is fast enough to be useful, but barely), OS X's laptop handling and native *NIX environment makes up for it. The biggest things I miss when I'm on a Mac: TopStyle, Neat Image, WINAMP 2, ACDSee, and Trillian. (dealing w/ CRW files is much more limited on the Mac as well, but the next version of Photoshop will come bundled with Thomas Knoll's kick ass Adobe RAW plug-in, so I'm not super worried about that)

On the flip-side, useful apps that are Mac only: iLife, AppleScript, Konfabulator, OmniGraffle, Final Cut Pro.

Most of the apps I use all the time: Mozilla, vim, and Photoshop, are on both platforms.

Proving that comic hilarity can continue even after you're no longer 'embittered', or 'hapless', Ernie's back online. the 10-sided die of 'i don't think so' - now that's classic.

Turn-about, fair play, etc.

In severe need of a 50mm prime.

Gaaah. This weekend must be dedicated to getting blogging system up and running. This is interminable.

5/8

Borrowing a couple of lenses from Jaime right now. Here's a shot from Day 1 shooting. 1600 looks really good scaled down. I love RAW.

My process needs some work, but the IQ is spectacular: 12-bit linear -> 16-bit sRGB TIFF -> Crop -> White/Blackpoint General Curves -> 8-bit -> Color adjustment with image mask -> scale -> USM

Occurred to me I should be using the real Matrix screen font, since it's installed on most systems.

I've already taken over two hundred photos (maybe 1 or 2 good ones, mind you) in the past day, about 1GB of files. Maybe I should buy another HD?

It's been raining toys recently. Finally got my EOS-10D yesterday. After going to a friends house and borrowing some lenses, I filled up the half-gig CF card I had with me in a matter of minutes. I can see that that new HD I ordered should come in handy.

5/6

Oh, got my NEX ia today. Has some pretty neat features, seems to work well. Will write up sometime after I get a chance to play with it.

MPlayerOSX - Mac binary distribution of "Movie Player for Linux" - flossy. Plays DIVX (and kin), Real, etc.

Just got around to installing the new version of TopStyle. It has an interface to access the TopStyle Blog straight from the program. Cool! (Recently I've been doing most of my design/editing in vim, but TopStyle really is great - everything that used to be good about HomeSite (not surprising seeing as it's by the guy who originally wrote HomeSite).

5/5

Yeah, it's pretty uninspired... but come on, you knew it was coming.

Musssst.... resist... remember, they betrayed us...

Ahh, there we go, sanity returning... It's useless to me if I can't read through my blogroll, and no SSH. That solves it. Oh, and there's an SDK but no way to load my own apps. (and no expansion, and no BT) Next!

5/4

The blog might be sitting fallow until I get off my lazy butt and fix things. Been futzing with my Gateway Touchpad and USB Audio Device in my nonexistant spare time. Oh and the work, freelance work, stack of bills and cleaning and all that jazz.

In other news, the Star Wars clips I've been mirroring for Andy hit a max of 10.5Mbps Friday (my connection is a fully burstable 100Mbps - theoretical 12.5MB/s). Since then, a few more mirrors have been added, so, I'm not too worried about bandwidth usage, but will have to look at it in a few days.

What is disappointing is that Andy had to turn off commenting [and delete about 50 posts] because of the increasingly spiteful, petty, malicious, and distasteful nature of the comments. In any case, it was a little reminder that things are much different now that the rest of the world is online. It's filled with the same sort of stupidity, careless cruelty, and downright mean-spiritedness as the real world (hoo-ray for humanity!).

Andy notes the irony that the people ripping into this kid most viciously are primarily coming from Game, Hardware and Tech, and Star Wars fanboy sites. Talk about pots and kettles. Maybe we need a different kind of mirror for these guys.

5/3

I was looking for this a few months ago. It looks like I just wasn't looking hard enough (well, searching for the right keywords, at least). LUFS is a "hybrid userspace file system framework" which allows you to mount FTP, SSH, and even Gnutella files (it's expandable) as local folders.

It involves a kernel mod and a user daemon that handles most of the VFS calls... Too bad there's no way to handle the stuff purely as a loopback device, that would make it easier to port to OS X, I'd imagine. Obviously it doesn't work on Windows, though. The only solution I've found over the past few months that'll mount SSH/SSL drives is KnoWare's Internet Neighborhood Pro.

(Look into KDE Fish - might work xplatform - can it work outside of KIOSlave - ie, at system level, or does it require Konqueror [and a GUI]?)

See also:

5/2

Worth noting: U.S. says Canada cares too much about liberties.

The comments in an annual report on international terrorism were the latest critical remarks from the U.S. apparently aimed at prodding Canada to bring its security measures in line.

The State Department report on global terrorism for 2002 suggests that while Canada has been helpful in the fight against terrorism, it doesn't spend enough on policing and places too much emphasis on civil liberties.

Hoo-ray for the Land of the Free™.

5/1

No updates for a while until I figure out to do with publishing. Also, lots of work / freelance work / projects I've been working on, going to try to get some productivity going.

Just about everything on the new system is up and running... vhosts are working again.