Rachel and I spent a quick couple of hours at the last day of Macworld Expo to see all the new goodies and do a little research. MWSF (Macworld San Francisco) is a tradition for me for over a decade, starting when Ben and I drove up from Los Angeles when I was in 11th grade, when nobody had CD-ROM drives and a color scanner cost $5,000. Boy have times changed. With the uprising of the Internet, the tone of expos has gradually changed until there are pretty much two kinds of vendors: the huge corporations with exhibition palaces and small quirky companies with science-fair booths. Rachel and I both brought our cameras to the show, and I'm happy to link you to our second joint album.

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Want to go to the expo, but you're not in the Bay Area or cant get off work? As is so often the case nowadays, Flickr members offer the next best thing.

Check out the Flickr slideshow of all images tagged 'macworld'. I'm going on Friday and will be sure to contribute a few pics of my own.

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An MSNBC story today gives the author's thoughts on how Episode III should bridge the gap between I and II and the original trilogy. At the end of the article, the reporter asks how you would write the story, and save the series.

Here's my take:

Padme, realizing that the legislative battle against the Imperial senate is futile, turns toward more desperate measures to save her planet. Working with Darth Maul to position her world as a founding member of the new Empire, she turns Anakin toward his more powerful dark side, showing him that his true nature lies in fury, evidenced by the retributitive bloodbath he enacted after the killing of his mother.

Secretly gathering influences of her own throughout the Imperium, she masterminds the overthrow of the Imperial order.

Halfway through the movie it comes out that she has an extremely high, though inactive, latent midichlorean count herself, and deliberately sought out Annie more than a decade ago, in order to produce a child more powerful in the Force than any ever seen before him.

Kenobi, who discovers this duplicity as Amadala is birthing the twins are born, kills Amadala (in self defense, of course) and steals away the twins.

Anakin never knew Amadala was carrying twins, and so attempts to hunt down Kenobi on Corusant. To hide Leia's existence, Kenobi looks up his friends, the royal family of Alderaan, who are on the capitol planet for a State function, and convinces them to hide Leia and raise her as their own child.

Kenobi then flees and takes Luke with him to Tattoine, where he knows Vader's deep-rooted turmoil around the death of his mother will prevent him from sensing Luke's presence across the light years.

Despite the best efforts of the Jedi council, including a space battle where the Jedi Masters attempt to defeat a swarm of Clone-piloted Tie Fighters from their own hand-crafted ships (each reflecting that Master's character and physiology) they are eventually forced to sacrifice themselves to destroy a Jedi superweapon weilded by Duku, Vader, and Sidious. The resulting devastation leaves all dead except for Vader, Yoda, and Sidious.

Vader is so seriously wounded that Sidious has Vader's suit and helmet crafted to sustain him.

As Vader and Sidious continue their takeover of the Empire, Yoda retreats to Degobah, awaiting the eventual weakening of the new Empire, or the emergence of a new Jedi force.

Montage: Anakin/Vader at Padme/Amadala's grave, where he loses the last vestage of his humanity and his tears turn to a stone demeanor we are all familiar with.

Yoda, cleaning his old home and peering in (with Jedi sight) on Leia, now on her new home of Alderaan, presented to her people as an adoptive princess, and then on a newborn Luke, cared for by his aunt and uncle, who were presented with Luke by an intermediary, as Obi Wan looks on from afar.

R2 tweets at Obi Wan, who gazes into the Tatooine sunset and says "No, my little friend. It is just the beginning..."

Roll credits.

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BargainPDA reports on a forthcoming Bluetooth Stowaway keyboard in the works from Think Outside.

While I think that's very cool, and I love the idea of not only typing wirelessly to my PDA, but even typing to my PDA while the PDA is secured away in my bag or pocket, I'm keen to know if the're using standard Bluetooth peripheral protocols. Specifically, I'm hooking up my old Lombard Powerbook to my TV as a sort of dedicated music/web/??? terminal, with the laptop tucked away with the other components. I'd been thinking about getting an Apple bluetooth keyboard and mouse to control it, but it would be so much nicer to have this convenient folding keyboard that would be even less obtrusive when not in use.

Just thinking about being anywhere within 30 feet of the computer, opening the keyboard, typing a song name and hearing it over the stereo. Also thinking about how it could be a nice peripheral for ambient computing (as oposed to just ambient displays).

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So as I wrote and was wondering about where my car was in the space-time continuum (or rather, the part of the ST continuum that's closest to me in time), it was indeed chugging across the Atlantic ocean. It's built. Complete. It's coming to America.

December 8th (+- a few days) is the day! It'll be so hard getting it on a Monday when I'll have to wait all week to just drive and drive. But then maybe I can take it to Plough.

Which brings me to Mutant, my beloved Honda Civic. I've got to sell her, much as I love her. Bobbi the dashboard hula dancer is optional, but I hope they both find a good home.

And the license plate. I still need to replace the front plate but then I need to decide whether to keep the plate with Mutant (because what's a mutant without a "GRR ARG"?) and get a new personalized plate for the Prius, because my Prius is red, and not as mutant-like or enemy-ish.

What plate might I get instead? Well, 'GRR ARG' was pretty obscure for the uninitiated, but it was at least parsable as a phrase. My leading frontrunner for personalized Prius plates is '10E100'.

Too geeky? Is too geeky better in this case?

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Total (approximate) number of visits to the front page since October, 1999: 424,443

Total number of words written in Fury posts since October, 1999 (excluding comments (and this post)): 350,828

Visits per word written on Fury: 1.21

I don't know if I wish this number were higher or lower.

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Probably my hottest passion in HCI is the concept of ambient displays. Ambient displays abound in nature. The way the spectrum of light changes a few minutes before rain starts falling, the way birds waking up at 4am let you know you've been studying too late again, your sense of balance. These are all examples of ambient displays.

In the HCI realm, the hot geek project de l'annee has been to create novel man-made ambient displays. Classic examples are the network activity dangling string and a thicket of waterfall and windchime-oriented projects. In the past few years most of these projects have been filed under the concept of 'ubiquitous computing' though I think this is a bit of a misnomer, since if an ambient display is truly ubiquitou, the 'computing' portion of it should be invisible to the user and therefore should no more have the label 'computing' than a car or DVD player should. The advancement of the field comes in the expression, not the computing.

At any rate, I've been wanting to create ambient displays at home for quite a while, but time, money, or other factors always got in the way. Now that I'm settling in to a new home, the desire to create an ambient informatic environment has risen anew, and I've spent the last several days thinking about two things: What form could these displays take, and what information do I want to display?

Though I don't have a shortage of answers for either of these two questions, I often find a disconnect between the two lists. Without any 'in the world' relationship between, say, traffic to fury.com and the sound of flowing water, that relationship has to exist in my head. Therein lies the problem, because there is a deliberate cognitive step that has to happen in my head when I hear the water surge briefly to understand what that display maps to in the real world. Further, someone who hasn't explicitly been told about the relationship between flowing water and my web site traffic (or in the linked example, the dangling string and the office's overall network activity), would never make that connection. This brought me to my first realization:

All ambient displays are learned.

Whether it's the flat sunlight before an imminent downpour, or the birds chirping at 4am, these displays only become effective as the user makes the connection (causal or otherwise) between the two phenomena. In the most effective ambient displays, this connection happens unconsciously, so that not only does the subject not know how they know it's about to rain, but they don't even notice that the light outside has changed.

In the network-string example, it's likely that the information needed to correlate the string to network traffic isn't available to the user, unless they start to realize that their web-browsing gets slower at the same time as the string gets more energetic. In the website traffic and water example, there is even less data to correlate because my website traffic is a metric completely hidden from someone sitting in my living room. The data that the subconscious brain needs to create this binding simply isn't available, and so explicit knowledge is required, negating the very nature of ubiquity.

To take it a step further, I believe that the linkage between the display and the underlying data should not only be available to the subject, but it must be available in a way where it is internalized inexplicitly. In other words, just having a sign saying "this string's activity indicates network traffic" won't do, because the knowledge of the linkage, while in the world, still has to be internalized consciously, and after the first handful of interactions with the display, the user will carry the knowledge in their head, but in their conscious attention.

This creates a direct obstacle to ubiquitous assimilation of the display's information, because a short-circuit to the conscious level has been created. When the subject encounters the ambient display, they think about the display and their explicit learned linkage, eliminating the opportunity for the display to affect them of its own accord.

It's like stopping hiccups: The most successful and difficult method to succeed is to think about something else entirely, only you can't, because you keep polling yourself to see if it worked, at which point you hiccup. By trying to use an ambient display ambiently, people will often try to see 'if it's working' which means it can't. When a linkage between display and data happens in the subconscious, there isn't that conscious recurrent check to see if it's working, because the conscious mind was never given a role in the experience.

So what makes an effective ambient display? What is effectiveness? Is ambience and/or ubiquity the most important facet? Or is it the fidelity to which the changing data is realized in the subject? It must be a middle ground, where explicit data is sacrificed for the sake of 'calm'. A cellphone ring is not an ambient display, while a static painting falls on the 'overly calm' side of the spectrum: a display that might have a deep meaning, but no change over time.

I'm still doing a lot of thinking on the subject, but rather than running headstrong into waterfalls and colored balls, I'm taking a step back and approaching from a research perspective. I'm going to start keeping a log of the ambient displays I sense every day, how I interact with them, and how I learned the relationship between the display and the information behind it.

My next step will be stretching a few of these displays a bit farther from their data, and see if they still work. For example, right now it's very quiet in my apartment because it's 1am. The ambient noise level is a display telling me very roughly what time it is. If I tied this kind of relationship to my radio, so that it grew softer as the evening wore on, and grew louder in the morning, mirroring the average change in ambient background noise, it might give me a better indication of the time of day, both when I'm staying up too late blogging, and when I should be getting up to start the day. In this respect it might serve as both an ambient alarm clock and 'time to sleep' notification, without any of the abruptness of a clock-radio. The most important difference here is that this radio doesn't attempt to tell you what to do or when, it simply gives you a better sense of the world around you.

Approaching the problem from the other end, I should take a look at the pieces of data I want that aren't adequately addressed by ambient displays. Then I need to find the right way to extend that data into the real world, as opposed to creating a display and an arbitrary linkage.

These are slow steps, but hopefully the results will have a greater utility to wow-factor ratio than most of the ambient work I've done so far.

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Along with the idea of a Radio TiVo, I'm also looking at outfitting my new home with custom ambient displays. I'm planting a few auxiliary speakers around the place, to be driven by my Lombard G3 laptop, and I'm looking at easily modifiable picture displays.

Though they' won't be on the market for another quarter at least, I'll be keen to take a look at Nokia's new photo pendants.

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I ought to spend more time at ThinkGeek. I went there today to buy a C.H.I.M.P. for my cube, but got floored by seeing that they sell a watch based on the same idea as a clock I designed for a ubiquitous interface project three years ago at Cal.

At $450 it's more than I want to spend on something that bangs around on my wrist, but I'm satisfying my geek urges by buying this nifty Pocket WiFi Finder. Now if it could only tell the difference between closed and open networks...

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How to set up a VT-100 terminal with OS X. At first glance, I thought 'doesn't the Terminal app emulate VT-100?' Well, yes, it does, but this link tells you how to take that old physical terminal, you know, the one with the green or amber screen, 80 cols and 24 rows of text display, and hook it to your OS X mac, where it acts as a command-line console, for whatever you want to use a CLI for (Pine, grep queries, running display of search referrers, whatever your fancy).

Since it uses a null modem and regular serial cables, it's easy to put it in another room, so it could also be a text-based email station in the kitchen, an iTunes remote, or what have you. So geeky. I want to see pics of this in action.

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'Nuff said.

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If the real-life me were a character in dungeons and Dragons, I would be:

Str: 9
Int: 12
Wis: 13
Dex: 17
Con: 10
Chr: 15

I don't know what it takes to have an 18 intelligence, but I know they're not using the Stanford-Binet test as their scale. In D&D land, IQs go up to 250+...

Numeralize yourself

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Who has the biggest starship? Now you can compare!

The work that went in to this is truly impressive, as are the ships themselves. The only craft I looked for but wasn't there was the RingWorld. That would be a very cool addition, and a 'space craft' in the truest sense...

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Just for fun (okay, and procrastination): Choose your own font for Fury.

If you choose a custom font, make sure you spell it right, or it won't work!

(how obvious is it that I'm just pimping myself for the best programmed website bloggie?)

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Today's moment of zen, 2 minutes old, was watching a businessman playing with one of the new 12" titanium powerbooks, as he checked his stocks, made a trade, and confided to me that he made enough in the market today to pay for the powerbook he was clearly lusting after.

Yes, I'm at Macworld Expo this afternoon. Very, very cool toys, and I'm glad to say that if I had to decide today, I'd still get the giga15tibook.

Okay, enough sitting on the floor of the Apple booth. Back to the jungle I go! Today's quest: great sound editing software. Reason and ProTools are high on my list.

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I was making myself some ramen the other day, and I needed two cups of water, but my measuring cup was dirty. I thought to myself that there had to be a way for me to measure two cups of water into the pot without having to clean a dish. After a few seconds thinking...

1. Turn on the faucet midway
2. Put the measuring cup under the faucet
3. Start counting
4. When it hits two cups, stop counting
5. Put the pot under the faucet
6. Start counting
7. When you hit your original count, take the pot away and turn off the water

And, to the inevitable clever reader who says that I'm wasting water doing that, remember that washing a cup takes three times the water of filling a cup, so I saved there, too.

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Hey y'all! Continuing in the three-year-old thread of writing bots for AOL Instant Messenger, I've written an applescript interface between AIM and iTunes.

While offices can use it to let anyone at any desk control the office iTunes jukebox, and stores can use it to control their music from computers in the front of the store, I wrote it so I could control my stereo from my couch, using my hiptop's AIM client.

Anyhow, it's getting pretty polished and I'd like to know if any folks out there use AIM and use iTunes, and would be interested in doing a little usability testing and QA on it before I release the first full version next week.

Interested, or know someone who is? Drop me a line!

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Well, maybe not. But I could.

Combine a close lightning strike every few seconds with an apartment with ungrounded outlets (despite being 3-pronged), and the reasonable thing to do is turn off and unplug the computer, and so I have.

Let me just mention how cool my hiptop (err, 'sidekick') is, that I can, with no modification, browse to my weblog's composition page, and hammer (well, thumb) out a blog post, despite not having a computer turned on anywhere around.

There will be a hiptop review and, after spending a week or two with it, I'll be able to go into so much greater detail than I could have with 15 minutes in a conference room.

I love it, and there are a lot of areas that need improvement, almost all software, thankfully. The biggest testament for the hiptop interface may merely be that it isn't a pain to use it to compose a post of this length!

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Thanks Benjy for writing the article I wish I wrote.

I had exactly the same experience, except the object of my affection will be out of state for another 3-4 weeks, not 5-7 days.

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Well, first off, RSS is (as of October 13th, 2002) the most recent feature addition to Fury.com. More importantly, RSS is probably the optimal way to track all the sites you read (that have RSS feeds), seeing what new items have been posted since your last visit, and getting a quick look at the headlines and excerpts before jumping over to the site.

Don't get me wrong, I like people hitting the main page as often as possible. In fact, I regularly check my stats page to see just how many front page views there are on any given day. Keeping that number up is one of my motivations for making sure I don't go more than a day or two without posting.

Nevertheless, there are better ways to surf the web than jumping back to the same sites a couple (or couple dozen) times a day, just to see if anything new has been posted. This is where RSS comes in.

It doesn't have a catchy name. In fact, there's not even agreement on what 'RSS' stands for (but the same argument rages about 'PHP', not that it's hindered PHP's popularity. Most of the descriptions you'll find if you search for 'What is RSS' are at least two years old. Worse, they're written for people who might want to create an RSS feed, instead of those who might want to read one. Even worse, it talks about RSS in terms of XML, and I know there's no faster way to make a non-geek's (or even a lot of geeks') eyes glaze over than to even mention XML.

RSS is just a protocol, a format. Several really good programs have come out recently that will take the RSS pages for the sites you regularly visit and check them once every hour (or 30 minutes, or 4 hours, or whenever you say) and it'll tell you how many new articles have been posted. Even better, it'll give you a list of those articles' titles, and even give you a description of the article. This description is usually the first paragraph or so of the article. sometime's it's a bona-fide synopsis, and sometimes it doesn't exist at all. It all depends on how the site's creator set up the RSS feed.

But a picture's worth a thousand words, and my thousand's almost up. This is a screen shot form NetNewsWire Lite, easily the best RSS viewer currently out for OS X:

NetNewsWire Lite in action...

For the PC, there are a few good RSS readers, and some not so good ones. The most recent, and the one that seems to lead the bunch in terms of looks and functionality is NewzCrawler. Trillian, the AIM/Y!M/MSN/ICQ überclient, also supports RSS feeds, and I'm sure some people using RSS feeds now probably have some good insights into good Windows clients, so you might want to check the comments.

I hope this explains a bit about what RSS feeds are, but I understand if it doesn't. I expect that this page will probably make it to the first page of hits for the google search linked above, and if that happens, I'll feel obligatged to make it a little more holisitic, so please let me know if, after reading this post you 'get it' or are still backing away slowly...

Now, if you're sold on RSS, have downloaded a reader, and are good to go, then the icon links to the RSS feed, so you can right-click (option click for macfolk) to copy the url to the clipboard, and then paste it into the appropriate spot on your RSS reader program.

Give it a go... RSS has been around for over 3 years, but only in the last three or four months has it really been starting to pick up steam. Most of the news and community sites you might read (news.com, bbc, msnbc, slashdot, metafilter, kuro5hin, wired, plastic, etc.) already have RSS feeds, as do a lot of the blogs out there, since both Blogger 2.0 and Moveable Type 2.5 offer RSS feeds with the check of a checkbox, alongside a regular blog. If your favorite site doesn't have the XML button, ask them if they have an RSS feed. You might get a pleasant surprise. If not, they might decide to check that box (or write that code, for us loners who write our own blogging software), and join the coming wave of RSS-savvy folk.

Incidentally, this also spells the official end of Metacookie because, while it was a great idea, RSS feeds have already reached the tipping point, and actually provide a better solution to the problem of keeping current with a site. That admission alone should tell you just how viable I think it is.

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The macs in the clusters at CMU have an option to change the key layout to Dvorak. Heh.

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A lot of people call weblogging software "Content Management Systems." I think this fits only in the loosest sense, as most weblogging packages are really 'Content Delivery Systems' with a little CMS thrown in.

Real content management is the domain of tools which, contrary to their mandate, are so difficult to insert into the regular process flow of data creation, modification, and deployment, that it's not used anywhere near as often as it should be, and is usually used only where it has to be, say where programmers are all working concurrently on a codebase. That's where concurrent versioning comes in.

To handle simultaneous access, file locking, merging, source branching, and all that, your options are few. You can buy, deploy, learn and mandate the use of an expensive package like Interwoven or Perforce, use something slightly less expensive but with a host of other workflow problems like Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, or you can do what millions of geeks do and learn to use CVS, or Concurrent Versioning system, an open-source implementation atop RCS, another open-source tool.

The beauty of personal content management is really seen when you use it for more than just code. It will save every version of a file, so when you want to go back and get that paragraph you edited out of your great american novel five weeks ago, it's there for you. If you think your site redesign was a mistake, a year after you launched it, you can rol back the templates to the way they all were at any specific date.

CVS isn't trivial to learn, especially if you're setting up and running your own CVS server, but kudos to Apple for publishing a how-to article Mac OS X: Version Control with CVS.

I encourage the mac and the (far more common) PC user to check out the article. You can get CVS for virtually any platform, and its benefits aren't tied to the OS.

It's early, I'm running a bit late, and I just woke up 20 minutes ago, so I'm not running at full-proselytizing speed, but CVS is really cool, is something that by all rights should be built-in to the fabric of any modern OS (especially when hard drives cost $250 for 120 gigs), and can totally save your ass. Now that I've turned aside from proprietary data formats like Microsoft Word (my last year in college I wrote everything in HTML with a simple stylesheet. It's really nice to be able to read, edit, and publish anywhere, especially when you don't need Word's featurebloat for a simple paper), CVS becomes even more useful, as the diff and merge functionality is easily comprehended, and only actual changes are saved, instead of resaving a whole file because you changed 'teh' to 'the.'

Okay, shower time, then takin' the train to work. Happy Friday!

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So my camcorder came today, and the building manager signed for it, but he wasn't in when I got home, so I dropped by his office on my way to the Starry Plough at 9, and he was there.

Tromping back up to the top floor with my new tech, I wondered if Sony was cool enough to charge the battery for me. they were, but about half of it had bled off since it left Sony's hands, probably over a month ago.

Still, half a charge was better than none, and I wasted no time (well, maybe a little) getting the beastie to the Plough where I was a wallflower, but a wallflower with a third eye.

Coming home at about 11:30, what else was there to do but fire up iMovie and make my first quicktime? Okay, it's a little rough. I did something wrong when I tried to up the brightness and contrast that resulted in some funky color shifts, but all in all I'm pretty impressed considering the low ambient light and fast action.

I even made you a copy (3 minutes, 4.9 megs). W'hoo!

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I'm starting a new wish-post-list I call 'synergy', or what would happen if two nifty technologies joined forces.

Today's synergy is the combination of UPS Shipment Tracking and FlightTracker.

The idea is simple: Enter your tracking numbers from any of the major carriers (UPS, FedEx, Airborne, TNT, USPS) or have them automatically entered by giving your shippers a 'receiver number' instead of name/address/phone/shoe-size, and they would all appear in realtime on a map of the US (or your country, or relevant space to accomodate both from and to locations). The map would continually update and you could click on any individual blip to learn more about that package, or submit special instructions to the company (leave in the bushes, hold for pickup, etc.).

The information is there. The carrier already knows what truck has your package, and the trucks (and planes) have GPS transceivers on them. I don't know if the delivery trucks do, but the cross-country haulers and planes are a go.

Like my Garmin GPS, I want to see a heading, distance traveled, distance to go, time estimate, the whole works on there. I want to be able to zoom in ala Maps and see the truck make the left onto the turnpike. I want to see how long he rests at the rest stop. I want to watch him change lanes.

I want to be able to know how many blocks away the package is from my door so I'm not downstairs putting the laundry in the drier when he buzzes my door.

I want to understand how I can order something from MacConnection at 11pm and still have it show up at eight the next morning.

We have the technology, now only if we still lived in the tech-happy world where every idea gets funding. Heck, it could still happen. All it takes are the two magic words 'premium service'.

If they will pay for it, it will come.

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I'm all for ubiquitous computeing, but some web innovations should never make the transition into the 'real world.'

Topping that list is Am I Hot Or Not: Palm Pilot Party Edition, where you and your palm-packing party-pals can rate each other anonymously and you can find out if you're hotter than the party average.

I have to think that the fatal flaw here is that the hottest person at the party is likely the one not frantically beaming their rating of every other person at the party in n*n-n many combinations.

I want the lite version: Am I a geek or not?

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Briefly, I point you to a great saga of one guy's tech adventure to reclaim his sister's stolen iMac, using the power of Timbuktu and AppleScript.

Deep down I think a lot of people wish this happened to them, so they could really try out their hacking skills without fear of criminal persecution, because they're hacking into their own machine, stolen and placed somewhere else on the net.

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Okay, so I did it! The logic took a looot of thinking through, but I've implemented 'new to you' color coding!

Here's how it works:

• The first time you come to the home page since I installed new to you, you get issued a static cookie. Initially, you're fully up to date, and nothing is 'new to you'.
• When new things get posted, they'll show up in the red color on your next visit. Things that are color-coded this way are the message title bars, the 'timeline' bar at the top of the page, and the little 'comment' circles associated with message blocks in the timeline.
• When you visit, look at the 'timeline' to see which messages have new comments since your last visit, and which messages are new since your last visit. you can click on either the message block or the comment circle to have the associated content spring forth.

Here's the slightly tricky part:

• If you visit the site and there's say, 4 new posts, and you follow a link and come back to the site, it would be a bad thing if the system decided that this was another visit, and thus all these things should be marked as read.
• With this in mind, I coded a system where a 'new visit' is made only if the home page view happens more than X minutes after your last home page view. Basically, if you look at the home page every minute, things that were new will keep showing up as new, but when you leave for X minutes and come back, the system will say everything that was posted since the last page view (not counting the current one) are new to you.
• This all sounds horribly complicated, but the point is that you-the-reader shouldn't have to think about it at all, and it should just work like you'd expect.
• 'X' is currently set to be 10 minutes, so as long as you look at the home page once every 10 minutes, Fury will think it's part of the same 'visit'.
• If you want to reset your 'last visit' timer by hand, click on the "New To You" link in the Legend navbar, top right. that will force everything to be marked as read, and will reload the home page.

Make sense? Yes? No? Don't worry about it. If I'm any good as an interaction designer, it should all make sense without my explaining it (except for the 'mark all' easter egg), but I like to keep you posted, and I'd like to hear what you think.

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Okay, so I may have taken it down from the front page by the time you read this, so if so, check out my take on Apple's '3 days till' message.

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Ever wonder what water would look like if it was boiling in zero-gravity (well, microgravity, anyhow)? No? Okay, you're normal.

But just in case you're a geek, here's a story all about Shuttle experiments of microgravity boiling, with some cool MPEGs.

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There are some items that are simply geek chic. The stock geeks have the same items in their utility-belt. A year ago it was a Nokia 51x0 or 62x0 cellphone, a Canon Digital Elph S100, A Palm V, and some sort of music accessory. For me it was a Archos MP3 Jukebox.

Now things are getting smaller. The Nokia 82x0 and the Samsung (argh, what's it called, anyone?) have taken the place of the older Nokias, iPods are sure to reign even amongst those without macs of their own, and the PDA trunk has bifurcated into m500/505s, Visors, and (for the supercool) color Cliae (I declare the plural of Clie to be Cliae). The S110 and S300 are cooler (fractionally) than the S100, but this new mini-digi-cam camera would take the cake, if only it had a resolution better than 640.480. That time will come.

(btw, I'd like up all those product refs to description pages, but I'm just too busy today, but not too busy yo write to you. Never too busy for that. :-)

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Time-lapse driving movies is a project I've wanted to do for a while. It's nice to see I'm not the only one. I actually tried it once, seven years ago, with an original QuickCam and a Powerbook Duo, but the duo fell off the dash and froze, and that ended that project.

Now if I could tie that into data recorded by my new GPS receiver, I could get a nice little data-montage of location, speed, and video. Oh for that land of days without end...

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Talk about time-sensitive: This post is really only interesting for the next hour or two. At 10am Apple's announcing a new 'breakthrough product' that's not a Mac. There's been tons of speculation on what it will be, but I think this MacSlash article sums it up best.

Of course, by the time most of you read this, it'll all be old news.

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Okay, okay. I was about to go to sleep and I see that I haven't posted anything since yesterday afternoon, so I feel compelled to churn up some nugget of insight right now, on command.

I really am going to sleep now though, so this is a quickie.

The Blogger Purity Survey is moving along. I sent out the list of 500+ questions to eight fellow bloggers, and six have already gone through the list, rating each one on its merits for inclusion in the final survey. Now I'm feeding those numbers back into an excel spreadsheet, removing duplicates, fixing grammar, and sorting into 5 or so categories.

The net result is that the BPS will go live for the masses within 7 days.

The other big news is that Mac OS X 10.1 was finally released today (well, 'announced' today, (well, it was 'announced' back in July) for Saturday release) and I can't wait to get it on my powerbook. The big upside for me is that, after installing PHP and mySQL, I'll once again have a development machine without having to mess with stuff via FTP and SSH to Dreamhost when I want to tinker with code and databases. I lost that when I tore down Linux in favor (and I use the term lightly) of Win2K.

And best of all, it'll be portable, so I can actually develop web apps on the train, instead of write untested code that I'll have to debug later. I'm also taking the train tomorrow, which means I'll be able to start catching up on the ever-growing scraps of blogthoughts that is threatening to burst my meager wallet.

Okay, now to sleep.

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Now that Cingular has 'info alert' functionality, they've been trying like mad to make it useful. The problem is that it's not on-demand. You have to go to the web site and preprogram what you want. "I want Giants scores at 5pm (regardless of when the day's game ends), weather at 6am and my horoscope at 8 sharp."

Aside from the difficulty in even finding the page where you customize your info alerts, the alerts themselves are tiny to fit on a regular non-WAP Nokia 5190, 6190, or 8290 screen.

The net result is 'news alerts' that consist of obscure headlines only, no stories. You have to go to the web site to read the full story.

Undoubtedly the worst part is the horoscopes. Call me spoiled from having read some truly great astrologers, but Cingular's daily cellphone horoscopes plainly suck. Yesterday's was: "Plug the leaks. Take a mental health day. Yoga practitioners are ahead of the game." Sunday: "Talk with authority. Color code your moods. Don't argue about small differences." Huh?

After reading these for months I'm convinced they're not written by an astrologer, or even a fortune cookie copywriter. It seems more likely that someone just wrote a few hundred sentences on pieces of paper and grabs them out of a paper bag randomly, arranging them into barely cogent pebbles of 'wisdom.'

Heck, that's what computers are for! So, to share my wry amusement with these horoscopes, I've taken several dozen of these cellphone horoscopes and broken them apart and last week on the train (where, incidentally, I'm writing this post, while slogging through the south bay salt beds (yeah, really funky timeshifting in the editing process here... Deal with it. :-) ) ) I wrote the Cellphone Horoscope Generator.

I wrote it in perl since I don't have a PHP interpreter on my mac (yet), but I translated it to PHP tonight so it will work within the existing system without a problem. If you haven't noticed it yet, it's be there in the navbar on the left, under 'Cell-o-scope.' Every reload will give you a new cellphone horoscope!

Yes, I was a little bored on the train...

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Watching ST: Voyager I was thinking about 'Voyager's database' and the sci-fi assumption that everything in a computer system is in a 'database.' I suppose that broadening the term to simply refer to a repository of information would mean that any hard drive, isolinear chip, or filing cabinet is a 'database of information' but then I starting wondering what it would look like if all data really were in a database.

On one level, that would be easy to do: Simply take each file and put its ascii or binary data in a database field, and put its name, modification date, file type, and other metadata in other fields in the same entry and voila, it's in a database, albeit a shallow, general purpose one.

But what about the files themselves? What if, in an XML-like fashion, every file's data were in turn kept in a database? What if individual file contents consisted entirely of its own database, with its own schema, stored procedures, and all the rest? For example, one of the nifty things about mySQL is that each table is kept as a file on the hard drive, and you could back up by exporting a dump of SQL calls needed to reconstruct the database, or you could just copy the table file and put it in a safe place. What if these files were in turn kept in binary format in the fields of another, encompassing database? So that regardless of differences in schema from file to file, data would still be kept in databases within databases, or hierarchical databases?

To take it a step further, what if the SQL language (I hate saying that like I hate saying 'ATM machine' 'RAID array' 'PIN number' or any other redundant acronym) were extended to allow for 'deep queries' that would be able to isolate records and then further qualify and manipulate contents of the databases stored within the data of those records themselves? Excel spreadsheets could be stored in a database format, alongside powerpoint presentations, word files, email repositories (with records being individual email messages, which in turn could have attachments with embedded databases), and so on.

On some level what I'm talking about boils down to hierarchical XML, but with the power of SQL built into it. XML is an ideal format for transmitting information, as databases are for storing it. XML has the added features of DTDs to specify the format particular datatypes should follow, while SQL has unique schemas. Perhaps they both could learn a bit from each other.

Anyhow, no rousing conclusion here, other than to say I've got to get to bed. Stayed home sick from work today, went to the doctor, and the fun goes on and on. I just wanted to type this one into the ether before going to sleep and having it replaced by random dreams...

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My Gameboy Advance is coming...

...pation

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After 134 days without a restart, my Linux box locked up today and I had to toe the reset switch. Now that the box no longer serves the fury.com domain, I've been meaning to install Windows on it, as there's some software I need to run and the Vaio is just too damn small (1024x768 on a 10" display (122 ppi) is hard on the eyes). I've been holding off, stupidly, because I didn't want to shut the machine down. Well, now that the uptime is kicked back down to.. checking... 5 minutes, the nostalgia's gone and I can play with the box again.

It was a good run.

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I figured out why I don't get enough sleep. I get caught up writing posts like this one.

(Note: Slashdot has archived the story, so you'll have to follow the link and search for 'check this shit out' in the resulting page.)

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Wow. Okay, I'll admit that two entries in tonight's Tuesday TV Trinity I'm only interested in because they're brand new 'car-accident-esque' shows.

At 8pm tonight we have: Chains of Love on UPN, Weakest Link on NBC, and Buffy: TVS on the WB.

Luckily, I'm catsitting Kisa for Emily tonight, so I can record Chains of Love on my TiVo, leave her TiVo as it is to record Buffy, and watch Weakest Link live. Then of course there's Angel and Dark Angel, which the twin tivos can handle as usual...

I don't even have to touch a VCR. I'm riding a techno-high.

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Berkeley's MRI scanner got upgraded yesterday from a 1.5 Tesla to a 4 Tesla coil, which will result much higher resolution images.

They're looking for students to assist in the calibration of the new coil by volunteering to have their brains scanned. Unlike PET scans, it's completely non-invasive (no radioactive goo to be ingested, inhaled, or injected into your bloodstream) and they'll give you images of the scans when it's done. I'm so looking forward to it. Don't worry, I'll post the images here, of course!

I wonder how booked time on the machine is, and if this will open the door to truly vital imaging research.

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Last night I started rebuilding my powerbook from scratch (wiping the drive with 1s and 0s and repartitioning) just because there was so much bloat.

So, reinstalling all the important bits of software (BBEdit 6.0, Transmit, IE 5, Photoshop 5.5) I ran into a problem trying to register PS 5.5. It wanted a serial number, of course, so I opened up my old copy and copied it out of the About box, only it didn't work. After 5 tries I sought help online and found that it's only a partial number. The 'full' serial number has three additional digits after the number.

Now, I've reorganized my apartment entirely in the last few months, and I don't remember seeing a manual or registration card for Photoshop 3.01 (the version from whence the serial number originally came, several upgrades ago), and Adobe support was closed, even if they would help me so, being in a bored, brute-force state of mind, I sat down to try all 1000 combinations.

Luckily I hit it after only 200 or so... In the words of Nicci and Jonni, BLAR.

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My copy of Mac OS X shipped this morning, and is on its way to my powerbook! Now all they need to do is release the gcc compiler for the platform (coming next month, they say).

In other news, in a patent cross-licensing deal, Apple now has rights to use Amazon's one-click shopping patent. I guess nobody told Jobs that just because people can order with one click, doesn't mean their orders won't still take 4 weeks to ship. Still, it's just the thing when you want to impulse-buy that Cube G4 off the home page.

Actually, I wonder what Apple patents Amazon wants to use...

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Today's chuckle comes from gaijin. This is the handbook for the wannabe geek: How to be l33t.

The only addition I would make to this list (read the list first) is "If you already have your MCSE you're studying to upgrade it because goddamn Microsoft is retiring the NT 3.5, SQLServer 6.5 and IIS 3 exams you worked so hard to pass. Damn Microsoft. (See? Two birds with one stone!)

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For those intent on keeping Star Wars in your personal memepool until Episode II comes out in '02, there's Star Wars Telent, a Win95/98/NT/2K telnet client that displays output in 'star wars opening credits' format.

Almost makes me want to set up that Win98 box just to play with it... Just the thing for watching those scrolling web logfiles in realtime.

Also, be sure to check out NetPong on the same site. As an owner of an actual functioning Magnavox Odyssey 300 (circa 1977) I can absolutely respect the necessity of this project.

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Wow, seek and ye shall find. I went hinting tonight for a command-line AOL client, or ideally an AOL module for Perl, and here it is.

This will let me enhance AOLiza in a bunch of ways, most notably that it won't require a semi-dedicated mac running Applescript.

It'll also be more robust, let me have several screen names running simultaneously (different personas), be a heck of a lot faster (though I'll still keep delays in to make it feel real), and will let me open the project up to everyone. I should be able to handle dozens, if not hundreds, of simultaneous conversations.

Anyhow, it's back to real work for me now, so other than putting up a few gems that came in this weekend, AOLiza enhancements will have to wait 'till next weekend.

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Ever wonder what would happen if an AI program got loose on America Online? Welcome to fury.com's latest project: AOLiza is absolutely, positively, a must see. Check it out before you hear about it from a co-worker!

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Blatantly tangenting off of a thread from peterme I wanted to share an article that theorizes nerdism may be a mild form of autism.

It seems that M.I.T. has a course to help nerds get along in a social world, but for those of you interested in pushing the other way, I'm working on two microsites to help bring forth your inner savant. Each microsite is devoted to teaching mere mild geeks two of the tricks often demonstrated by the true autistic savants.

First is the "human calendar" exercise. This site will teach you how to convert any date in the past two-thousand years or the next two thousand (or however far you want) into a day of the week (what's more, you'll get the right day of the week).

Second is the 'one-function calculator' exercise where somebody gives you a 9 digit number and you tell them its cube root instantly.

Both of these tricks are often performed by autistic savants as demonstrations of their remarkable gifts, but remarkable as they may be, they can both be mastered within an afternoon by anyone with a reasonable memory and the ability to do two-digit math in their head.

So the microsites aren't done yet, but if you'd like an email reminder when they're available, enter your email address below and I'll drop you an email when it's done. I promise not to use it for anything else.

Enter email:

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Just a quickie for the 10% who're interested. I read an interesting article comparing the various MP3 encoders by encoding speed and quality, and the question came up as to why they should have different quality at all, considering MPEG 2 Audio Layer 3 (MP3) is a standard.

The answer lies in the difference between a verb and a noun. MPEG2 is an 'encoding standard' where encoding is a noun. If it were a verb, it would mean that the process of encoding is standardized, but what it actually specifies is only the nature of the final result (the 'encoding'). the idea is that you can use whatever technique or algorithm you like to encode audio or video into an MPEG encoding, but that encoding must be decodable by a specified, standardized process, so it's 'encode once, decode anywhere.'

It's a nitpick to most, but for the MP3 and MPEG afficionados out there, it might make a little more sense of the variety of encoders out there.

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If you're interested in cryptography, especially steganography, you might want to read a post I put up on Slashdot this afternoon.

It details how a hypothetical data haven could work for secure transmission of information between you and someone else, where not only the data is secure, but also the information about who you're sending it to, where you're getting it from, and whether you're getting it at all.

Best of all, it's all out in the open.

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I spent far too long this evening working on Sendmail, BIND, and weblog analysis.

I intended to go to the Starry Plough, but it wasn't destined to happen I suppose. Now I'm off to sleep. I'll have some breakfast questions for you in the morning, so be ready with your spoon!

G'night.

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