What's That Noise?! [Ian Kallen's Weblog]

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20060802 Wednesday August 02, 2006

I would pay Muni 10x the fare if...

...just once when a passenger wearing too much perfume or cologne boards the metro, it would prompt the driver (who would be Samuel L. Jackson) to stand up, turn to the passengers and demand, "Get those mother effin' stinks off this mother effin' train!"

Perhaps for once I'd get my money's worth from Muni.

       

( Aug 02 2006, 09:46:20 AM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


The 5-year forecast

Sam Ruby's Teenagers on the go slide deck is an interesting prognosis on the future impact of the protocols, formats and form factors in our midst on publishing, sharing and participating on the web.

( Aug 02 2006, 07:13:37 AM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060730 Sunday July 30, 2006

Participant Created Artifacts

Since the universally understood (at least among the intelligentsia) descriptor user generated content continues to nag at people (Tim raised it again during his OSCON session) and the alternatives have been difficult to pin down (was Tim suggesting people contributed experiences?), it's my caffeinated Sunday morning aspiration to consider the alternatives.

Having a label is important, we're making a distinction between published artifacts that are developed by editors and/or paid staff and the stuff created by Normals who are contributing the artifacts of their creative process to the web. Yes, the term user is definitely sterile, generated too mechanical and content seems so... vacuous. Does participant created artifacts work as a descriptor for all of the photos we're uploading, blog posts we're posting and so forth?

           

( Jul 30 2006, 08:44:40 AM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060729 Saturday July 29, 2006

OSCON Rocked

Had a great time at OSCON! Besides the previously noted keynotes and sessions, my faves were Perrin Harkins' Low-Maintenance Perl (a good discussion of best practices in Perl as the simple practices, Perl as the sole domain of wizards is so old school), Moazam Raja's Troubleshooting the JVM and the Applications That Run Within It (a good survey of the built in runtime diagnostics available for java), Tim Bray's The Atom Publishing Protocol as Universal Web Glue (a good example of using vi and curl for bare metal wire protocol demos as well as how slow JRuby's start-up time is!) and Damian Conway's Friday keynote was suitably humorous! If there was anything that I wish I coulda rearranged it was the time slots when there were more than one session I wanted to be in. But the timeslots with nothing interesting going on were good opportunities for hallway conversations; which are often the most important activities at these events, so I won't complain vigorously.

Enjoyed hanging out Friday afternoon for "OSCON decompression" at Urban Grind ("Coffee should be black as night, hot as hell, and strong as love.") with James, David, Josh, David and Scott. Heh, I got PostGIS running on my powerbook, which gave me something to play with on the flight home!

Portland is a really nice town, the Disneyland-like lightrail system (complete with automaton announcements in english and espanol), the neighborhood ambiance, the surrounding greenery... I dig it. For next year's OSCON trip, I'll be bringing the family along!

( Jul 29 2006, 11:20:55 AM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060727 Thursday July 27, 2006

Google Code Project Hosting

At Greg Stein's talk, A Google Service for the Open Source Community, he outlined how Google's following up on it's Summer of Code project with a new contribution to open source. No, it's not a dating service or personal trainer service for geeks (that'll be Google's 2007 contribution). And no, it's not source code search (does Krugle have that covered?). This is project hosting on Google Code Project Hosting.

Yes, there is nothing new about project hosting; there's long been things like Source Forge, Tigris, java.net and so forth. Things like Sourceforge are doing a great job, but there are strengthes that Google has that could be brought to bear on the project hosting space. Some of the unique features of Google's project hosting that Greg cited are

simplicity, scalability, reliability
The system is built with Google's trademark minimalist approach to user interfaces as well as leveraging Google's horizontal scaling and robust the data center sauce.
Subversion on Bigtable
They've built a new backend for Subversion that, instead of using flat files or BerkeleyDB, uses Bigtable. Bigtable data is fast, highly available and replicated across data centers so that all Subversion stored resources will benefit from the Bigtable backend.
Complete re-think of issue tracking
Bugzilla, Trac, Jira and most other issue tracking systems are workflow heavy and laden with permissions and security provisions. The heavy stuff is often unnecessary, it just gets in the way of issue tracking for open source projects instead of facilitating the core use cases that people need. They've replaced all of the highly structured data model and query environment with labels (tags). Labels get attached to projects and issues to tags and provide a minimalist structure to query by using full text queries.
Next came the demo.

Creating a new hosted project is simple enough, you fill out a form with the project name, a summary description, a full description, select a license (Apache, Artistic + GPL, GPL v2, LGPL, BSD, MIT and Mozilla are choices ... dual licensing is not permitted) and apply some labels (tags). If you don't have one yet, a subversion password is created for you (it's *not* your gmail password). Your project will have a tabbed interface for the main page, issues, browsing the soruce and an administrative page. Project creators and administrators must use a GMail account. If not using GMail, bug reporters must have some Google account (Picasa, Groups, etc). The "Issues" screen provides a tabular view of bugs, the columns are ajax enabled for parameterization. The neat thing is that instead of using a big form with tons of check boxes and selectors, the issue tracking uses query expressions to refine issue search results. Status field for a bug can be free text; while a static vocabulary is defined and selectable in an ajax drop down the vocabulary is unconstrained. Status isn't the only metadata that's open-ended, instead of having "release version", "milestone", "component", etc the system uses labels. The issue list column repertoire is adaptable so that you can select labels you've defined as listing criteria. All of the open endedness may be an invitation to pandemoneum but the focus is on having the user interface make it easy for the user to do the right thing.

Some of the administratively defined aspects of a project include the issue creation template (defines the prompts that issue creators will see), project links, project discussion groups (using Google Groups), project blogs and activity notification email addresses. The system will support issue tracking feeds. Most of the metadata that will be visible on the project summary page that newcomers to the project will see.

There's currently no "tarball download" service and integration with other Google services is in the works. For the time being, any downloads made available must be done within the limit of the quotas on your subversion repository (100 MB). Plans for importing and exporting, creating APIs and so forth are underway (the issue tracking seems like a natural fit for Atom and Atom Publishing Protocol).

Congrats to Greg and the Google Code team on a great launch!

( Jul 27 2006, 03:46:06 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060726 Wednesday July 26, 2006

OSCON Keynotes (July 26, 2006)

I missed the first keynotes (I just arrived in time for Tim O'Reilly's "what technologies are hot according to these slices on the data" bit that he does) but enjoyed Greenplum's Scott Yara talk, School of Rock. He highlighted the parallels of open source development and rock and roll. I'll paraphrase his points.

Open source, like rock and roll, has flourished simply because people enjoyed it. Like rock and roll, money has jumped into open source and an industry has swelled around it. Like rock and roll, open source threatens the establishment but also mutually coopts and becomes the establishment. Yara showed a funny "twins separated at birth?" photo pairing of Rick Rubin and Richard Stallman! What will sustain open source's integrity (like rock and roll's) are the intangibles, the real emotions and inspirations the drive innovation. The popularity game isn't a measure of quality... just because it's widely downloaded doesn't mean it's good just as Britney Spears' and N'Sync's sales success aren't validations of "good" music. So, beware of the vogue of open source, people are starting to believe that open source is better but don't let that undermine what's important. For those who are building their business on open source, go for the $$$ but keep your integrity. At that point Yara ran a little excert of Metallica goofing on a radio promo production (from Some Kind of Monster?), the ironies of choosing them as illustrations of how money changes everything, given how they coopted and have become the music establishment, were high humor for me. Nonetheless, Metallica like a lot of successful open source software projects have succeeded by being a little dangerous, by being genuine and not bothering with the constraints of the legacy establishment.

Anil Dash gave a talk about Trying to Suck Less: Making Web 2.0 Mean Something basically outlining that beyond the technology stack (i.e. LAMP), there are higher level tools that developers can employ to suck less (yep, I confess, at Technorati when we can't quite kick the butt that we aspire to, we focus on sucking less). Citing the technologies that have grown out of SixApart's software plumbing, he highlighted that all successful Web 2.0 compnaies are using load balancing, messaging, caching, filesystems and other scalability and performance platform components. In SixApart's case, perlbal, memcached, mogilefs and djabberd are the core technologies that they build on ... and, so the pitch goes, should you if you want to suck less.

Those the high points of the morning (so far).

( Jul 26 2006, 10:00:31 AM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060725 Tuesday July 25, 2006

Technorati's Extreme Makeover

In case you hadn't heard, we've had a lot of things cooking at Technorati. Besides the engaging new look, the new features and the complete overhaul of URL search and link counts, we've been making great strides in our blog spam mitigation (you wouldn't believe the stuff we catch ... and the shear quantity of it!), our internal caching and messaging infrastructure and our data center network. Of course, there's still much to do but we've been heads down on it; if you haven't checked us out lately I think you'll find that our efforts to improve the front end, the back end and all of the cogs and pullies in between have been moving forward.

I'm really proud of the team I work with at Technorati! If you'd like to join the team, we have a lot of innovation ahead. Grab me this week at OSCON and tell me about how you'd like to materialize the real time web! I'll also be moderating a Microformats BOF, this will be a good opportunity to talk about the implementations for producing and consuming microformats. See ya in Portland!

         

( Jul 25 2006, 10:37:36 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060506 Saturday May 06, 2006

The Evils of Blogger's URL Recycling

Blog publishing services typically propagate updates about new posts from blogs (ergo, new blogs too) by pinging or publishing a changes.xml file. But what none of the services provide is an "un-ping" -- blog indexing services such as Technorati don't know when a blog has been deleted from a service. I noticed this today when I found http://blogtrarian.blogspot.com/ participating in a link farm infesting Blogger's service. This can happen because Google's Blogger recycles URLs; when a blog is removed from the system, the URL is freed for reuse.

That particular URL is one that dates back to 2004, it was dormant for several months but just came to life recently with spam. The historic posts (until August 2005) look like normal blogging fare but the recent posts are clearly just splog content. We'll have to work on "un-pinging" so it's easier to distinguish dormant blogs and dead ones.

           

( May 06 2006, 03:13:14 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060505 Friday May 05, 2006

Google Is Full?

So Google's CEO Eric Schmidt says his servers are full, hmm. Tying that to SEO'ers griping about their indexing, Andrew Orlowski speculates that it's web spam besetting big daddy. Could be but the hard data isn't out in the wild. The numbers that we can see are that Google is spending several banana republics worth of GDP on capital expenses:

Google continued to make substantial capital investments, mainly in computer servers, networking equipment and its data centers. It spent $345 million on such items in the first quarter, more than double the level of last year. Yahoo, its closest rival, spent $142 million on capital expenses in the first quarter.
Referring to the sheer volume of Web site information, video and e-mail that Google's servers hold, Schmidt said: "Those machines are full. We have a huge machine crisis." (read more)

If the problem is spam, then certainly it's Google's own doing. The elephant in the room is that the acceleration of web spam everyone's talking about is fueled by AdSense, often aided and abetted by Blogger splogs, Google Pages, Google Base, etc. The spam ecosystem is within Google's capacity to reign in but the don't-be-evil company is making too much money on click fraud with plausible deniability to do anything about it. Is Google having problems handling web spam and "filling up" their machines? Cry me a river, all the way to the bank.

         

( May 05 2006, 02:09:19 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060504 Thursday May 04, 2006

Thwarting Kleptotorial

When I read the words on

Microsoft yesterday reached a tentative $70 million deal to settle a California class-action antitrust lawsuit, according to a statement by the law firm representing the plaintiffs in the suit.
at http://www.satishlive.info/?p=27 I had the distinct sense of deja-vu. So I ran some queries against Technorati's index and sho-nuf, I found the exact same content had already been published by InfoWorld. Ah, there was an attribution at the bottom... but InfoWorld didn't publish under a creative commons license. Looks like blatant theft.

Then I checked the next post (http://www.satishlive.info/?p=28) on that blog and read:

I took a new blog search tool called Sphere for a little spin this morning and found it useful.
... hey, didn't I just see that somewhere else? Yep, this time it was PC World and no attribution.

It's safe to surmise that this is kleptotorial laden with AdSense and stuffed into the update stream. I've seen screenscrapes and feedscrapes on splogs before but they're usually easier to identify visually, I had to look more carefully at this to note its spamminess. Is there a market in alerting publishers to copyright infringement? Obviously this stuff should be removed from Technorati's index but is there a more valuable service to publishers that should be provided here? How much would you pay to find out about misappropriations of your content? Is there a market for Technorati to do something like Plagiarism.org to fingerprint blog content?

             

( May 04 2006, 09:34:17 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060502 Tuesday May 02, 2006

The Colbert Smackdown


In case you've been hiding under a rock, the blogosphere is abuzz about Stephen Colbert's weekend dressing down of George Bush and just about everything else inside the beltway. If you haven't, see the c-span vids: or read the transcript

The chatter (even art work on flickr) about it is frantic. Thank You Stephen Colbert has 700 links right now (this is a blog that came into being less than 72 hours ago), it's getting about five or ten links per hour at the moment. The videos are the most linked-to youtube reels on Technorati. How wonderful it is to have an administration that is so bad, the opportunities for high humor are so many. Why did we invade Iraq?

                           

( May 02 2006, 09:27:30 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060430 Sunday April 30, 2006

Link Raising Won't Pay The Bills

I have developed a great deal of respect for those who do fund raising full time as a profession, it's a tough business. The Happy Valley Odyssey of the Mind teams are trying to raise money to send themselves (the kids) and their coaches to the World Finals and, so far, it's been tough moving that along. With basically three weeks left before the big trip to Ames, Iowa, the thermometer still has quite a ways to go. If you can't donate today, how about linking to their site? Sure links won't pay the bills directly but if getting the word out means that someone who can help with the bills will find out about it, maybe it can help indirectly.

Put a badge on your site with this code :

A study cited by the pros found that donors say they have more money than time. In this case, the teams are putting in all of the time (that's the point of Odyssey of the Mind, it's all of the kids' creativity and intellect applied to problem solving); now they just need to pay some bills. If you can't donate cash and donating your time won't impact their endeavor, what can you do? Donate attention! OK, admittedly badges aren't the most attractive things, but you can take this one down after the World competition. So for the month of May, if you can't send money, send 'em some links!

         

( Apr 30 2006, 09:42:34 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060428 Friday April 28, 2006

Search Crib Notes

There are so many weird and wonderful things on the big search services, you need cheat sheets to keep track of the specialized types of search that they provide. The Yahoo! Shortcuts page has a bunch o' tricks for searching Yahoo! The Google Cheat Sheet has coverage on the search operators and parameters that can be fed to their query systems. Well, we don't have crib notes or hacks books about us (yet) at Technorati, but we're working on being that cool, too <g>

       

( Apr 28 2006, 10:51:05 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060427 Thursday April 27, 2006

Pinging Technorati

There are lots of ways to ping Technorati. Your blogging platform may do it already. You could use a slick editing tool like ecto that will do it for you. You can even roll it yourself in c-sharp. But however you do it, it's important that you let Technorati include you in the distributed conversation by notifying that you've posted.

Recently, there have been some problems with Ping-o-Matic that I worked with Matt to unravel. If you use a ping relaying service and are having difficulty getting indexed by Technorati, please ping directly! Of course Technorati will continue working with ping relayers such as Ping-o-Matic, Pingoat and so forth; they're providing a valuable service to the blogging communities that we are grateful for. However, when in doubt take the direct route!

More soon to come on the Technorati Weblog!

           

( Apr 27 2006, 11:27:31 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060425 Tuesday April 25, 2006

GData and Goofles

Since Niall mentioned GData, I've been meaning to look into it further. Today Otis mentioned that one of the Apache/Summer of Code projects proposed is a lucene-based GData server implementation.

I took a look at the docs and realized that this is actually a really old spec, as old as the epoch as a matter of fact. Check it out:

But seriously folks, the G-man and his crue have done a fine job providing client implementations (as long as your not waiting on Ruby or one of the P-languages, no perl, python or php yet). Even a nice set of examples for the Java implementation. Thanks, G!

               

( Apr 25 2006, 08:17:45 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


The Google Web Spam Ecosystem

Over the last year and a half, I've spoken extensively to friends, colleagues and audiences about web spam. At eTech I showed how spam blogs behave statistically atypical, as soon as you start looking at the publishing characteristics (such as linking and posting rates), the spam comes percolating up to the top. For instance, this chart is a sample of linked-to domains from blogs hosted by Google's blogspot service (the y-axis is in thousands of links per day):

The highlighted domains are sites that the spammers are trying to put in front of mouse cursors by making them look important. Besides being a nuisance, this is part of a larger hazard to the whole web advertising market.

While Technology Evangelist pointed out Google News' role in the spam ecosystem, Niall has previously noted that Google provides lots of tools for perpetrators of web spam to employ. AdSense is the prime object and subject of spam. A video posted yesterday on YouTube details the anatomy of some typical AdSense abuse:

There has been a recent explosion in abuse of AdWords, Google's PPC (pay per click) advertising platform. It is apparent that the techniques do not follow Google's own clear guidelines. Unfortunately, users and legitimate advertisers pay the price, while Google and the unscrupulous advertisers profit.
Google has always put its users first and one would hope that they will continue to abide by their charter. My aim with this video is to urge them to do something about these issues sooner rather than later.
Web spam isn't new, this has been going on for years and at this point, one must conclude that Google's not serious about doing anything about their spam problems. There used to be a qualification step for AdSense and they'd reject sites that didn't meet some basic criteria as legitimate sources of content. But that stopped about a year and a half ago and the spam has been pouring on ever since. The video is a call to action to complain to Google; they have a fidicuary responsibility to move against the abuse. The video shows a search for forklifts to illustrate rampant ad policy violations. The video narration asks, "Why is google allowing this to happen?" and answers
This is the dirty little secret about these tactics: Google profits from every click on it's network. Be it on ads that are clicked on google.com or ads that are clicked on websites that are running google ads throuth the adsense program. This is a very difficult thing for them to self police because doing something about it will effect their short term profits.
I'm not condemning AdSense per se, it's a great service and revitalized web advertising after the flame-out a few years ago. But black-hat SEO's have definitely cranked up the game over the last year or so and are putting the whole market at risk again. Google may not be particularly motivated to go out and find the abuse but they have to act against it when you bring it to their attention. Watch this video:

             

( Apr 25 2006, 12:28:25 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060424 Monday April 24, 2006

AJP13 for Ruby on Rails!

A few months ago, I mused that we should be able to abandon FastCGI (with extreme prejudice) and use AJP13 with Ruby on Rails instead. Well, unbeknownst to me at the time, someone was hatching just such a plot, the Ruby/AJP Project! I'd heard last month that David Andersen was tinkering on installing it... well, he not only got it online but he blogged how he did it. Take a look at his compile time and run time configuration details using Apache 2.2's native AJP13 protocol plugin for mod_proxy (i.e. no mod_jk, good riddance), it's really cool! Way to go, David!

           

( Apr 24 2006, 08:48:30 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060423 Sunday April 23, 2006

Using the Google Maps API

Just for giggles, I fiddled around with the Google Maps API on the Happy Valley Odyssey of the Mind blog by putting up a map of Ames, Iowa, where the Odyssey of the Mind World Finals take place.

I tried setting polylines to outline the perimeter of the Iowa State University campus but it seems like the Google Maps API is pretty brittle; if you get it wrong, there's no debugging apparent (I checked the Javascript console), you just get a blank map. I'll have to poke at it a bit more some other day. Doing the basic stuff is easy though, check out How to add a Google Map to any web page.

Be sure to stop by the Happy Valley Odyssey of the Mind blog and make a donation, it's a great cause!

       

( Apr 23 2006, 07:36:08 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060422 Saturday April 22, 2006

I'm The Decider

If there's anything to be said for the innovations in the tools of creation and distribution of our present day, it's that contemporary political humor has gotten so much funnier!

Sitting on my own brain, waiting for the end of days
Corporation profits, Bloody oil money
I'm above the law and I'll decide what's right or wrong

I am the egg head, I'm the Commander, I'm the Decider
Koo-Koo-Kachoo

(check it out)
Thanks, Adam!

           

( Apr 22 2006, 05:26:39 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060421 Friday April 21, 2006

The Hard Work of Making Java Easy

The Java backlash that began a few years ago was mostly a J2EE backlash, not against the Java language per se. Too many people took the blueprints too seriously, too literally or just too damned religiously. Too many applications that didn't need EJBs were using them, letting the container manage low level application plumbing invited slow and buggy behaviors that were painful to debug. The backlash has made a lot Perl/Python/PHP enthusiasts express self-righteous vindication and have helped morph the J2EE backlash into a broader Java backlash. Geez, even IBM is getting all spun up on PHP, whodathunk? But I think the dismissal of Java is premature. None of the P languages or Java are without hazards. These days a lot of developers are over the blueprint kool-aid and are standardizing on a simplified and productive stack:

However, there is still a rapid development gap. I've heard Java called a "high ceremony" language. Where you can often prototype a lot of functionality in a modest amount of code with the P languages, you end up writing a lot more code to do the same things in Java. On the other hand, the run time errors, sorcerers and hackers adherent to the P languages are at least as guilty of the same brand of excessive zealotry as the blueprint adherents. The practical heresy demands recognizing that you can get it really wrong in just about any programming language. As far as the high ceremony, Java and J2EE are guilty as charged. As if to punish Sun, the developer community has innovated just fine without advance posturing within Sun's prescribed processes (the good news there: many within Sun seem to realize that they can't carry on as a cathedral and, in fact, are embracing the bazaar, bravo!). Spring and Hibernate each offer a degree of code simplification but require a bit of XML-hell. Even though the XML is way simpler to maintain than say, struts-config.xml and EJB deployment descriptors, you've reduced your compile-time safety code maintenance but increased your runtime hazards with more XML. Xdoclet or JSR-175 annotations can simplify a lot of the XML configulation required for Struts and Hibernate but then you might end up in another kind of hell: annotation hell. Choose your hell well!

To really bring rapid development and prototyping to a Java environment, there a lot options to look at such as dynamic JVM languages:

Jython
By most accounts, a mature but quirky Python for the JVM
JRuby
An immature but progressing Ruby for the JVM
Groovy
A failed experiment or work in progress, depending on who you talk to
Ruby on Rails doesn't run on JRuby (supposedly, it's coming). Grails (the artist formerly known as Groovy on Rails) is on v0.1, I'm not holding my breath. What about getting the simple life "convention-over-configuration" in Java? You get some of it simply by using Maven; organize your code to the Maven convention and compiling, testing and packaging your application just works. Eclipse provides so much developer support for Java already, using Maven and Eclipse together is great way to keep a lot of the high ceremony out of your way. But for application development, there are a few rails-alike frameworks for Java that I'm still interested in trying: rife and trails.

I expect in the months ahead to be writing applications with plugin support and that the big win for the dynamic JVM languages for me will be in easing the rapid development of plugins. In other words, I probably wouldn't write an end to end application with them but given a set of interfaces for extension points that can be automatically tested, writing the extensions in JRuby or Groovy sounds compelling.

I actually haven't had time and opportunity to substantially try half the things I've mentioned thus far. Surveying the number of tools, languages and frameworks it's clear that there are a lot of things to consider and that a lot people are concerned with (and working hard on) bringing the down the high ceremony of Java. I'll still be using P languages in the future, too. Down the road, I suspect virtual machines (JVM? parrot? mono/CLR?) will make a lot of these issues fade away and the questions at hand will be around when to use closures and when to use objects, when to annotate and when to externally declare, when to explicitly type or auto-type and so forth. The languages will be incidental as they support shared constructs and virtual machines.

                   

( Apr 21 2006, 09:03:42 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060420 Thursday April 20, 2006

Mindstorms Open Source

I've been wondering how Lego will maintain a business around Mindstorms and at last, I think we have an answer: they'll hop on ye olde cluetrain. By enabling the community of Mindstorms enthusiasts to drive innovation openly, I finally feel confident that the Mindstorms technology will enjoy long term viability. From the Gizmodo post:

Jon Lund took some time out from liveblogging the CustomerMade conference in Copenhagen to email in and tell us that according to Soren Lund of Lego, the software behind the upcoming highly anticipated Mindstorms NXT will be published as open source; Lego is currently in the last stage, figuring out which public domain license to use before releasing it. Power to the people! (read on)
The dreaded EOL'ing scenario, such as that suffered by the Sony Aibo, would have been a really crappy outcome for Mindstorms. Instead, they're innovating and opening up. Thanks, Lego! Oh, and one hting: BSD/Apache style licenses, please!

         

( Apr 20 2006, 03:25:53 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


Commuter Blues

I suspect I'll be opting to casual carpool more often with BART eliminating free parking at the Contra Costa county stations I frequent. That could raise my already-not-inconsequential commute costs 15%. And how timely. Gas is already exceeding $3/gallon and the chatter on the radio is to expect $4/gallon! In that scenario, I wouldn't be surprised to see carpool drivers putting a cup out for the riders as their fuel prices put them in the squeeze. Meanwhile, the Big Oil Companies are ringing in record profits...

One possible ray of light for the BART ride option is the report of WiMax service coming:

WiMAX is similar to WiFi but can carry signals across greater distances. WiMax is also being considered by Silicon Valley public transportation officials (free registration) who want to let passengers browse the Internet on local train systems like BART. They want to run a test from July to December. WiMAX, they believe, might be a better technology to do hand-offs as the train rushes through various wireless coverage zones. read on
(via burtonator)

Maybe the price hikes will help them pay for a software test harness; BART's bugs have rendered the system unusable in the past.

     

( Apr 20 2006, 07:19:57 AM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060419 Wednesday April 19, 2006

Air Force One Tagged

This is totally amazing! With all of the gazillions of dollars and BTU's of hot air poured out over "homeland security," here comes Marc Ecko laughing in the face of the beast by tagging (as in, the spray paint kind, not folksonomy) Air Force One!

Coming next: "Mark Ecko In Gitmo"

         

( Apr 19 2006, 09:29:21 AM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


Buh Bye Scott McClellan

Here comes a changing of the guard at the War House: McClellan Out as White House Press Secretary. Now I just wonder what the final parting words from Dubya to exiting Press Secretary Scott McClellan will be, let's see:

  1. You're dead to me.
  2. Will ya still be joining us in Kennebunkport?
  3. Recall the first rule of the war club: nobody talks about the war club.
  4. Keep what you've seen to yourself 'cause I have some stories of my own. Remember that cutie in Helsinki?
  5. Don't go writing any books now, you know I don't read!
  6. Ya know what they say, Scotty: What happens at the white house, stays at the white house.
  7. Publish memoirs and I'll make sure you're joining Dick Cheney's next hunting party...
  8. Ya know the "forget everything you've just seen" light flash in Men In Black? Was that real? Ya think we can do that? It'd be for the good of us all.
  9. You're not going to one of those quote think tanks, are ya?
  10. If things don't go well in Donnie's corner, would ya like to come back as Secretary of Defense?
Follow along.

       

( Apr 19 2006, 06:43:50 AM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060418 Tuesday April 18, 2006

Taking on the World

I posted last month about how winning feels good. With the thrill of victory comes a new challenge: what's next? Well, my daughter's team's second place showing in the Odyssey of the Mind regionals was followed up by first place in the State competition, so next up: the World!

The World competition is in Ames, Iowa. I've never been there. I've flown over Iowa plenty of times, traveling to and from Chicago. But the corn fields, cattle corrals and pig pokes of Iowa ... will be a new to me. All told, we're running up thousands of dollars to pull this off but I'm sure for the kids this will be one of life's great experiences, so it's all worth it. I have an alter-ego running a separate blog to track that endeavor and our challenges. We've got paypal links to accept donations (tax deductible, even) but simply talking about and linking to that blog will help, so please shine a little light on us.

     

( Apr 18 2006, 05:20:20 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


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