Lost to Funky Bunch ~10-3. Al and Lisa are now playing for the team.

This is a test of the time travelling mechanism. If you start seeing posts appear before the "First Post" it is because I am now trying to post older entries that were never blogged.

Finally got Movable Type up and running on kwc.org. I need to get ImageMagick installed, but otherwise all is well. I'll have to figure out what I want to do with this site. More importantly, I have a bunch of content that I would like to import, but I have to figure out how to blog retroactively, i.e. I would have one of the few blogs on the Web that would be running backwards in time. Anyways, it's late, and this is enough for now.

For those of you interested in this setup, here's what it is:
- Apache 2.x
- Movable Type 2.62 (had to modify all of the .cgi scripts to not point at /usr/bin/perl)
- ActiveState Perl
- DB File module for Berkeley DB

Movable Type doesn't have the simplest installer, but its not too hard to fix everything up.

(this was meant to be a test of the trackback system, but I think wu-tang's blogger site is busted)

Wu-tang is building a Web site for a Zen monk. I find this slightly odd, unless the Internet is sufficiently ethereral to not be considered an earthly binding. However, in my experience, any tie to the Internet only increases one's suffering.

My favorite is:

"and so wu-shu made the tag blink, and the students saw, and then did not see, and then they saw again..." (ad infinutum)

The other was:

"and so wu-shu said, 'What is the sound of TCP/IP over fiber?'"

That one seems a little too dorky to be funny just yet. Perhaps with some refinement.

You can find the rest of the conversation here.

Ubicomp Reading: Charting Past, Present, and Future Research in Ubiquitous Computing
Gregory Abowd and Elizabeth Mynatt
Georgia Institute of Technology

Amusing link from the betas list:
- How to get your car in the 14s

A quote from ar: "Getting with girls is like Voltron: the more you hook up the more powerful you become"

Secret-Ballot Receipts & Transparent Integrity
David Chaum
- inventor of digital cash
- vreceipt.com

PARC Forum
Silicon Valley Regional Computer Forensic Laboratory (RCFL)
Special Agent Chris Beeson
FBI San Francisco
Computer Analysis Response Team

Lost to Hitfolk 16-11, or thereabouts. Most of our runs came from the 1 run/inning penalty for the Hitfolk not having two women, but we still had fun. Seni is playing with us now, but we were missing Steve, Al, Ray, and Christiaan to name a few. Ming's was yummy.

This is an interesting Wired article on why my favorite electronics company is forced to make terrible mp3 players: full text.

It's slightly dated, but especially relevant given Apple's new music store and Sony's failures with Pressplay. Apple has it a lot easier, though, because nearly everyone who buys an Apple:
- uses iTunes
- if given the choice of mp3 player would buy an iPod
- is used to Apple controlling their entire digital life

Sony, on the other hand, makes PCs, and OpenMG is a terrible music player when compared to the best-of-breed PC applications. Thus, being forced to switch over to OpenMG or RealOne just so I can buy music online and transfer tunes to my Network Walkman isn't a great user experience for me (as I own a Sony mp3 player, I speak from experience: it's sloooow to transfer songs with the unnecessary mp3->ATRAC re-encoding).

It's beautiful outside. The weather's starting to get good again. Take a look (click on "continue")

At Home with Ubiquitous Computing: Seven Challenges
W. Keith Edwards and Rebecca E. Grinter
pdf

Got a lot of culture over the weekend down in Los Angeles with my Aunt and Uncle. I went to the Getty, saw Gehry's new Disney Center, saw Esa-Peka Salonen conduct Mahler's 3rd, went to the Huntington Library/Gardens, and went to the Norton Simon. I took lots of pictures, but the early reports on my DSL are that it really won't work for photos. I'll have to find a better way of posting my photos, as the architecture was really cool (Getty and Gehry), and I got to see a lot of good paintings, including a lot of great Impressionist works.

The following post was made with regard to Microsoft's new Longhorn OS plus HP's prototype PC being imitation of Apple's OS X and Cube. I thought it was funny, but, then again, my office uses thirty-six reams of Xerox paper to prop up my monitors and table.

Re:Flattery and Imitation (Score:5, Funny) by B3ryllium (571199) on Monday May 12, @03:45PM (#5938675)

Xerox. In fact, it's rather ironic that everyone copies Xerox.

original post

To give proper credit to my employer, however, it's, "Xerox (PARC). In fact, it's rather ironic that everyone copies Xerox (PARC)."

Denim is a really cool sketch-based UI prototyping tool

Xpdf and Selling Open Source Software
Derek Noonberg

ABSTRACT:

I've been working on Xpdf since 1995. I'll start with an overview of
Xpdf's architecture and a brief history of the project. The PDF format
has some interesting characteristics, and working with it has raised
some interesting issues. Finally, I'll talk about open source business
models in general, and Glyph & Cog's model more specifically.

COMMANDER NOTES:

Derek is the author of xpdf and runs a company that sells GPL license
exceptions to that software. Xpdf is a PDF1.4 compliant viewer/decoder
and is therefore JBIG2 capable. Derek's homepage is http://ww.foolabs.com/derekn

At Home with the Technology: An Ethnographic Study of a Set-Top-Box Trial
Jon O'Brien, XRCE
and
Tom Rodden, Mark Roucefield, and John Hughes, Lancaster University
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, Sept 1999

I was googling today to find friend's web sites. I didn't find any, but that doesn't mean that Google didn't give me some good stuff.

First off, here's an article that I found that mentions a contest I was in with Russ and Hogue my freshman year: tech article. I ended up paying an extra hundred bucks so I could fly back from my vacation to compete in the follow-up contest, but I was so tired that I overslept and everyone left without me.

Speaking of Hogue, type in "Andrew Hogue" into Google's address bar or your Pheonix address bar. Here's the link in case it ever gets lost: http://orgs.unt.edu/fmla/articles/hogue.html

Finally, google pulled this up for me: south boston online article. The article itself isn't the most funny of the related material, but it's the only I can find online. Some other great (related) things I've seen around Boston:
- "The Beating up of Conley" (editorial piece in the Globe about Officer Kenneth Conley)
- "Free Ken Conley" (bumper stickers witnessed in Boston)

I don't like cats, and they don't like me. But I could start liking them if they were all as evil as this one:

Britney, the patron saint of my cat hates you

Source: my cat hates you (� 2002-2003 Seamus McAnus Productions)

News notes:
- Bombing in Riyadh kills 29+, declared by Powell to be Al Qaeda
- New $20 bills with colored background
- Johannson officially leaving Caps, feels slighted at short ice time in final game
- Beijing declares SARS under control as number of cases in China eclipses 5100

The Aware Home: A Living Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing Research [pdf]
Cory D. Kidd, Robert Orr, Gregory D. Abowd, et al
Georgia Institute of Technology

As we may live - Real-world implications of ubiquitous computing [pdf]
Marc Langheinrich, Vlad Coroama, Jurgen Bohn, and Michael Rohs
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology

Good summary of privacy and ubicomp, including definitions of privacy, privacy motivations, privacy borders, ubicomp economic implications, etc...

The Active Badge Location System
Roy Want, Andy Hopper, Veronica Falcao, and Jonathan Gibbons
Olivetti Research Ltd.

This graph has at least four things wrong with it, can you spot them all? (note: I previously said three, but I was lumping two together)

this entry contains an image, click to view

Additional info: The graph is based on DC-NY-Boston routes by the respective companies. The ** next to the Delta Shuttle refers to the fact that they're only counting DC-NY routes for the Delta Shuttle "statistics."

This is copied from an e-mail I sent this morning. It's in response to a dad describing how his 5 year-old who couldn't grok the fact that his grandma's house didn't have TiVo. I agree with the kid - watching TV without TiVo is like living among Troglodytes. Am I the only one that finds himself subconsciously trying to hit an instant replay movie when I see a cool scene in the movies? (only to be disappointed that movie theaters don't have TiVo)

Other things that need TiVo-like functionality:
- radios
- people (what was that again?)
- snowboards

Follow-up: others have since suggested cars, guns, and sex.

Casablanca: Designing Social Communication Devices for the Home
Debby Hindus, Scott Mainwaring, Nicole Leduc, Anna Elizabeth Hagstrom and Oliver Bayley
Interval Research Corporation
CHI 2001

InfoStick: an interaction device for Inter-Appliance Computing
Naohiko Kohtake, Jun Rekimoto, and Yuichiro Anzai
Keio University
Sony CSL Interaction Labs

Finally won one - and under a lunar eclipse to boot. Beat the Ducks 20-5.

Bye-bye Lakers - Duncan's 37 pts and 16 boards lead Spurs over the Lakers 110-82 to win the series in 6. Ends LA's bid to win 4 in a row.

Home Network Security [html]
Carl M. Ellison Corporate Technology Group, Intel Corporation

This is the worst paper I've read on home networking. It is so far removed from any proper understanding of the home user that it saddens me that this is the basis of Universal Plug-n-Play Security. This is clearly people who design solutions for the corporate space trying to design for a space they've never worked in before.

Using Memory Errors to Attack a Virtual Machine [pdf]
A. Appel and Sudhakar Govindavajhala

This hack is way cool, mainly because it's not just theoretical. Some people at work saw this demonstrated at a recent security conference (see page 9 for the setup). The attack goes as follows: get JVM (or .Net) to load your applet, shine lamp onto the system's memory chips to induce a random bit flip, bit flip modifies pointer in object, object can now write to abitrary portions of memory.

In the practical world, this attack isn't very realistic (you need to have physical access and be able to get the JVM to allocate a huge amount of memory for your objects), but it's still very cool.

...to a new Pro TI Specialized BG Saddle. I got one today and my butt already appreciates it. It's got a much better surface than the lower-end models, so I highly suggest shelling out the $80 to get a seat that can hold you on the bike, rather than make you feel like you're always sliding off.

Dr. Minkow who invented the BG line spoke at PARC several months back. His anecdotes were rather interesting. When he first got Specialized to manufacture the seat, they were fairly worried. Biking is very steeped in Italian tradition, so many racers who looked at the seat dismissed it immediately (and also were adamant in denying any problems).

Minkow credits good science with helping overcome early dismissal. With the help of a well-publicized Stanford study and promotional stunts (including having cigrette smoking, booze drinking, tow truck drivers compete in a famous grueling bike race), the seat began to get some favorable press. Now that all is said and done, Specialized BG seats with the Minkow wedge are now Specialized's most successful product ever, and now nearly every seat manufacturer has tried to copy the design.

Minkow is now working on an ergonomic handlebar. Not that interesting to me, but more power to him.

Ever wonder how bike cops lockup their bike? No? Neither did I, but look in the complete entry for the answer.

I found this great parody of the drain of powerpoint: Gettysburg Address in Powerpoint. There's also Tufte's analysis of Boeing's report on Columbia Tile Damage. Powerpoint really takes the crown for robbing the corporate coffers of brain cells. I never thought I would say this, but I miss good ole's overhead transparencies that cost $2/piece to make. At least once they were made no one would even dare suggest using a synonym for the second word in bullet four on slide three.

Credit: IDblog (entry) for the link to Dan Brown's Understanding Powerpoint: Special Deliverables #5, which provided the GA link.

BTW: Tufte uses ArsDigita Community System. Good stuff, even if you don't like Greenspun.

Just took the political compass test. If I read their graphs right, then I'm most like the Dalai Lama.

The results aren't too accurate, as I felt the questionaire used too much connotation rather than denotation. It also referred to specific programs rather than the abstract ideas of the programs (thus making it difficult to agree with a statement about a program that I believe is poorly implemented).

Where do you lie?

Now that I've searched the web and seen all the cool things that Movable Type can do, here are some extensions I'm considering to this site:

- upgrading the layout templates
- category-based listing
- MTAmazon plugin
- TikiText
- rss feed plugin to import content from sites i like
- weather plugin

For the last two I'll have to figure out how to do periodic rebuilds of the main index.

According to CNN, it's time to buy duct tape again.

Bye bye:

Hello:

Found this classic on the Daily Show site. Man, the democrats didn't make it past the first round.

From the front page of Google News. The only freaky part is the last three words.

Financial Times
Nation Returns to Orange Alert
FOX News - 55 minutes ago
WASHINGTON The United States went back on orange alert (search) Tuesday afternoon, indicating a high risk of a terror attack within the country, Fox News has learned. Warning prompts US to raise terror alert Financial Times Official confirms al-Qaeda arrests
NEWS.com.au - Forbes - United Press International - CNN - Ananova - and 911 related »

Iterative Design of Seamless Collaboration Media
Hiroshi Ishii, Minoru Kobayashi, Kazuho Arita

This paper presented several interesting prototypes of computers that you can look "through" to see the person you are collaborating with (imagine standing on opposite sides of a glass wall with markers).

mediaBLOCKs: Physical Containers, Transports, and Controls for Online Media [pdf]
Brygg Ullmer, Hiroshi Ishii, and Dylas Glas
Tangible Media Group
MIT Media Lab
SIGGRAPH 98

This is an interesting complement/predecessor of DataTiles.

Time-Machine Computing: A Time-centric Approach for the Information Environment
Jun Rekimoto
Sony CSL

This paper is motivated by observations that many users prefer to use the desktop as a spatial organizational area (Malone), instead of using folders and the like. This leads to the inevitable problem of limited desktop space, which in Malone's research was partially solved with the idea of "piles." Freeman et. al have argued that time-oriented approaches (e.g. e-mail) are superior to pure spatial approaches and proposed a one-dimensional timeline system. Rekimoto expands upon both of these observations by trying to create a two-dimensional timeline system that allows for time-based and spatial cues.

Tomorrow is Ethernet's 30th birthday! Celebrations will be held at PARC, with both Boggs and Metcalfe attending. I'm tempted to bring some wirecutters and cut myself a piece of original ether. CNET already has an
interview.

As Gibson is one of my favorite authors (I just finished Pattern Recognition - good book), I feel compelled to link to his latest blog entry, which is a metaphorical and imaginative look at media past, present, and future (google link weight +1).

Bob Metcalfe gave a short talk as part of the Ethernet celebration. It was a hurried, spirited talk off of notecards. My chaotic notes (along with some statements by Liddle) are below.

Kick some entitled male butt (shot by shot).

Update: Annika finished round one at 1 over par. Good job!

Update 2: Annika's second round didn't go as well, but I'm still rooting for her.

They're celebrating Ethernet's 30th birthday here at PARC. Celebrations begin in 10 minutes but I thought I'd post some photos of some original ether.

Results of the alignment test:

me: neutral
amanda: neutral good
will: chaotic evil (i should be frightened of this one)

Bryan and Amanda are now playing with Movable Type also. I've found Bryan's Weblog on his site, but I haven't found Amanda's yet (tricksy hobbit).

Update: the tricksy hobbit has posted her marathon blog and her general blog.

We lost by a bunch to the lodge. I don't even remember the score, but it was fun.

The European Central Bank is thinking of adding RFID tags to banknotes to protect against forgery (story).

In addition to anti-forgery benefits, think of all the efficiencies the tags will introduce: ATMs won't give out the wrong amount, banks can count stacks of bills faster, thieves can choose their victims more carefully. With RFID crime does pay... efficiently.

Now that Bryan and Amanda both have Movable Type weblogs, I feel compelled to redesign this site to look different. If you notice any display problems in your browser, please send me a comment. Thanks!

BTW: this is the "template" for the current redesign:

It's a photoshopped image of a photo I took at the Bellagio in Vegas.

BTW2: the calendar bar is partly inspired by Tufte's Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Although you lose information such as day-of-week from the redesign, I like the fact that it gives you a good idea of frequency.

I found this comic while blog-surfing. It describes my life so well [except the part about receiving a gamecube as a gift :( ]

Original link: thegeekout : comics : the little things : video addict

Mr. Au posed this question today at brunch: is there any cooked food that doesn't have its flavor enhanced by adding butter?

This question is harder than it seems. The only thing I've been able to come up with is dry ribs.

Lisa Rein Rocks! She's been posting clips of the Daily Show. She doesn't have all of my favorite spots, but she's got most of them, and unlike the Comedy Central site, you can actually save the downloads locally.

I found this link to a 1989 panorama of Mt. Everest. Someone converted it to Quicktime so you can manuever the full 360.

Some interesting links, mostly having to do with the growth of bloggin:

- Graph of Weblogs reported on Weblogs.com vs. time

- Wired article on search results being overrun by blogs

- Another (slightly less interesting) analysis of blog growth numbers

- For Amanda: An analysis of Pollock + chaos + fractals. The fractal bit I find less interesting because anything approaching true randomness is going to be inherently fractal.

Went to Monterey - saw some seals, sea otters, sea gulls, sea urchins, sea anenome's, humans, etc... I've posted some of my photos (the otters were too far away to get a good photograph).

More photos in the extended entry...

At long last, photos of some early ether (2.94Mbit).

The way the story was retold, the researchers at PARC couldn't figure out how to tap the coax cable with the right impedences (they didn't want to have to cut the cable). One of the researchers suggested looking at a cable parts catalog and they came up with using the vampire taps you can see in the photo.

BTW - Metcalfe prefers calling it 2.94Mbit Ether rather than 3Mbit ether because the rounding error is greater than the speed of ARPANet at the time (if I got my facts right).

Techno\culture blogger Karlin Lillington
interviewed William Gibson and posted her summary. Unfortunately there's very little of Gibson's own words, but a nice homage nevertheless.

Now all he needs is a earthquake machine and locust breeder: Thai king to receive rain-making patent. 27/05/2003. ABC News Online

(posted for Amanda's benefit)

24 ended last week with a semi-cliffhanger. Amanda sent me this Boondocks farewell to Jack:

I'd be much happier with the series (which started off great) if they just killed the daughter - her story arcs are so excruciating, like listening to the answering machine in Swingers.

The Boondocks Official Site

Co-worker/pyro Jeff Breidenbach made it to the front page of Slashdot courtesy of Leigh Klotz with his GlyphChess program. I'm so honored to be in the presence of geek celebrity. * PARC GlyphChess page * Slashdot Article

Yahoo! News - 'Reading Rainbow' Fighting for Survival

It will be a sad statement on PBS if they keep showing Barney and Teletubbies but let Reading Rainbow be cancelled.

I: This bug cost me half an entire afternoon: 318003 - BUG: Visual Studio .NET Setup Fails on AddShareAndPermissions Custom Action. Apparently, you have to setup a fake wwwroot in order to install Visual Studio, a programming environment. Whaaa? I'm sure in 2004 it will complain that my Windows Media Player isn't up-to-date when I try to install C#.

II: The other half of my afternoon was wasted by bad dependency verification in the Visual Studio .NET installer. After I did a Windows Update on the .NET framework (which came with the installer), it finally started working (5 reboots and 2 hours later). I'm not even sure the two were related.

(I) update: My problems with (I) are not over. Among the suggestions I now have to try: (i) copy the entire DVD to my hard drive and try the installation, (ii) create yet another folder on my computer with appropriate permissions and (iii) update my DVD-ROM firmware and disable DMA.

(I) update 2: Finally, I have it installed. Apparently you need to copy all of the files off the DVD into a directory named "mssucks."

...just like the Microsoft software that's stamped on it

Update: Bryan points out that this is a DVD, not a CD.

You don't need me to tell you that Edward Tufte's Visual Display of Quantitative Information (amazon) is a good book. I've posted my outline notes below (mostly for my own benefit, as this is useless without Tufte's pretty [and ugly] examples).

Aw yeah, I'm Neo.

You are Neo, from "The Matrix." You
display a perfect fusion of heroism and
compassion.


What Matrix Persona Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

I'm slowly updating my blog with past journal entries that I have lying around on 4 separate computers. It's a slow process. I'll first be posting a lot of "Etc..." news entries, as those are the quickest to transcribe. The Etc... entries are important to me as I like to have the juxtaposition of world events against other entries.

Hopefully, as I get further along I'll be posting more interesting links/entries. One thing that is slowing me down is copyright issues - i.e. I have cached copies of some interesting articles, but I have to track down a current valid link if I'm going to post it. Some of them (i.e. comics) are not likely to make an appearance unfortunately, as most comics don't maintain long archives. The hardest entries to post will be ones that only exist on paper, and those will most likely be last.

Yeah Spurs - way to not blow it this time. Now onto the finals.
- SI.com - 2003 NBA Playoffs - Kerr the surprise hero as Spurs advance to NBA Finals - Friday May 30, 2003 01:08 AM

We just had a forum on beer-making with a beer tasting afterwards, now how cool is that?

Beer: From Grain Brain To Glass
Presented by: Peter Bouckaert
New Belgium Brewing, Co.

Marketing types in the world of brewing like to say their beers are "steeped in tradition," but does this not ignore hundreds of years of experience and innovation?

In an entertainment industry where 10 minutes of pleasure is our product, working artfully towards a new creation is key. Starting from the glass and going over everything from grain to brain, some challenges of the new ingredients (i.e., experience, knowledge and creativity) will be fermented. A beer seminar addressing E = mc2, child development and Jackson Pollock awaits you!

More below...

ButtonMaker and Steal These Buttons are awesome. I think I'm about to go badge-crazy with my site. Beware the badges.

Here's my first badge (needs a little tweaking):

Update:
Here are some alternates:

Lost to the Hitfolk by a bunch, but they're undefeated anyway and a nice team to play.