I am not a lemming!

And chipper noted that Neal Stephenson is running a wiki, and also wrote:

I bought "Contact" out of the toss-away bin at Wall-Mart, watched it for the first time since seeing it in the threatre, and picked up on this for the first time:
"An alien intelligence is going to be more advanced. That means efficiency functioning on multiple levels and in multiple dimensions."--Dr. Hadden
More advanced eh? So what do we call more advanced?

Fucking Microsoft Word document formats and proprietary pdfs.

Fuck us, we deserve it.

I had a dream this morning. I dreamt I said I'm tired of playing by the rules. I just want to create, I just want to live my life free from hassles, I want to just write in html and .sxw formats, record in flac and I cried out as I woke - I AM NOT A LEMMING!

An intelligent man makes and lives by his own rules.

You ain't that negative "us", chipper, unless you choose to be. Why use the human race as a role model?

repeat after me:

I am not a lemming... I am an alien intelligence.

---

I had written part of a long rant last night too - about all the christmas stuff that drives me bats - but I've got to run some fish tape down a wall to get to an errant usb/midi cable.



  ¶ 10:52 AM 0 comments

  The ethernet-wired electric guitar - at 100Mbits! The Electric Studio - at 6ft 1inches up!

Brian Clapper sent in this link:

The mercurial CEO of Gibson Guitar Corporation wants to shove Ethernet up your ax and rock the music world. By Greg Milner from Wired magazine.

I got excited about this technology about a year ago. The guitarists I talked to about it met the idea with fear and distain - "Waaa? Can I still do feedback?" - me , I want this sort of feature on my audio gear, desperately. I have noise problems - I want perfect sound from my keyboard, a bed of silence so deep you can smell the snow - and I can't get it. Guitarists, now... they want to be noisy....

Brian plays trombone - and his .sig on this message cracked me up -
I came home the other night and tried to open the door with my car keys...and the building started up. So I took it out for a drive. A cop pulled me over for speeding. He asked me where I live. I said, "Here."-- Steven Wright

And I live... here. I spent until the wee hours of the morning in a massive multi-tasking mode - burning cds, building software on three different machines on two different architectures, dictating into my ipaq, fixing various things wrong with my network, hacking on secure sendmail - and best of all I got a toolbox, found all my tools, put it in it...
Then hauled the toolbox into the laundry and finally put my multi-media box - the one I continually try to work on my songs on -- in the laundry room. It was just too noisy where it was. Better yet, I had an innovative idea:
The real innovation was that I put it on the shelf, just before you exit the house (see aformentioned steven wright tale), and I put the shelf just above the door, and the computer upside down so that an ejected DVD or CD is within easy reach on the way in or out.
I sawed. I hammered. I drilled holes to pass the firewire and vga cables through the wall. All while blasting .flac files at maximum volume.
Amazing what you can do at 2AM when you live alone.

I gotta take a picture of this. It seemed so wrong - yet so right - to mount the dvd upside down in the case. But it is so simple... and just perfect up high, out of the way....

I flashed on Tom Wolfe's "The right stuff" when I did it - one of the astronaut candidates had had it with all the tests and started playing games with the deadly serious shrinks he was dealing with.... handed a blank piece of paper, and asked:

"What do you see?"

he looked at the tester deadpan and said

"But it's upside down."

...I guess I should rip apart the power supply and flip the fan to blow rather than suck - wind sucks rather than blows, according to Bucky Fuller....

---

Brian wrote later about his 15ms of fame:

Years ago (probably 16 or 17 years ago at this point), I saw Steven Wright doing his comedy stand-up routine at a comedy club in Philly. I forget the name of the club; it's the one that had a Middle Eastern restaurant over top of it. Anyway, we had seats right up toward the stage; there were four or five of us at this round table. At one point during his act, I was laughing so hard he actually stopped and looked at me.

I had a similar experience last year when maotig took me to see Henry Rollins. We had center seats and at times he seemed to be talking right to me. It was really reassuring at the time to see a guy on stage, that talked and thought so much like I do - only funnier - For months I wanted to write him, saying - hey, remember me, I was the guy in the red sweater??

My 15ms of fame.


  ¶ 10:37 AM 0 comments

  an X10 christmas

After all this time hacking on X11, I took a step back this holiday and installed an X10 house automation system. I had held off for years - primarily due to the overwelming invasivenes and html abuse of the the x10 web site - and my inherent hatred of an unreliable protocol (you can't tell if a module is on or off) - but the call of house automation could not be ignored.

I can finally make my mark on my house - as I have decided to stay - and making the house as easy to manage as I thought it would be (my god, managing the place is a hassle).

I shorted out the house twice along the way (* note 1 - no matter your faith in your own invulnerability, cut the circuit breaker before connecting the internal wall switch. * note 2 - is it the black wire that connects to the blue wire or the black wire that connects to the black wire? I can't remember - and remember to not do this stuff after 7PM - see note 1 - it's impossible to tell the difference between these two colors in the dark.)

The motion sensors are the best. It really is great to step outside, or pull up in the driveway, and have the outside lights switch on. The house says: "Welcome home!" Ahh... Two minutes later, the lights switch off - the electric company says: "waaaa.... "

I can now reach across my desk and turn on the stereo, the christmas tree, the lava lamp... there is a Linux interface to it so I can control it all via the kerbango memorial radio and my wireless ipaq... if I get around to patching my kernel. I can see how metcalf's law applies - after doing half the house I NEED MORE MODULES to control the heater, the camera, the cat toy....

Heinlein once wrote about the lazy man - a guy that spent a lot of effort so completely automating his life that he could ultimately lounge in a hammock and take it easy - I want to be that guy - but I'd probably be bored. (song of the year - Stress - by Jim's Big Ego. The song describes my 2002)

Now if only I could push a button on my remote control and get the property taxes paid and the sagging floor fixed!

In other news, Where's Cherie made yahoo's Picks of the day. Woohoo - Go Cherie! I have followed her adventures from the comfort of my deskchair for a over a year now!

Lets see - what else?

I have a bunch of longer blogs stacked up - one that I may take the time to finish today.

In trying to get to 1/100th of Doc's unbelievable productivity, I decided what I really needed was an outliner. I've been kvetching about that for a long time - it has really stopped me from writing larger pieces.

There are a bunch of good ones on DOS and Windows, but Linux lacks... about the best one I had found was called Buzz -

For a while I used a DOS one, then that machine died. I couldn't read the format with another tool...

Buzz did't quite do what I wanted to do... it was written in python, which I don't grok...

Then a couple months back I discovered Mathew Allum's figment. Aha! it worked on my ipaq, and on my desktop. It used a simple xml based format, based on radio userland's OPML standard. Best of all, the code was simple, and easy for me to understand... before I knew it I'd made the thing closer to Gnome HID compliant, and started work on getting the important features I needed going.

What I really need to be doing is writing - not writing an outliner - ah well - it was fun to spend a couple nights working out the concepts...

Here's source to a pre-pre-pre release figment... more after I get cvs access.

You have to take time, every so often, to scratch your own itches. I have been very frustrated at work...

My vacuum cleaner is broke. I just have to order a roomba. Just have to...  ¶ 10:53 AM 0 comments

  roomba vacuum cleaner

I have wanted an robotic vacuumer ever since I first started living away from home...

The Roomba looks way cool.

Of course... me being me... What I would like to do is:

attach a cat toy to it!

  ¶ 11:53 AM 0 comments

  ZKmem

I hate script kiddies.

I hate script kiddies.

I hate script kiddies.

I just spent most of a week puzzling over some odd behavior on a Linux server and finally figuring out today that the simplest possible explanation was an exploit... it was an exploit. It was one heck of a good one, too, replicating itself three different ways, hiding under different uids and names, overwiting init....

Advice to redhat users - install the latest kernel updates and the latest ssh - there's a malignant virus out there called "zkmem"... more after I get some sleep and an email off to CERT.

I hate script kiddies.

I hate script kiddies.

I hate script kiddies.

Despite appearences my job here is NOT to do network security. This stuff gives me nightmares.  ¶ 3:02 AM 0 comments

  Scheduling meetings....

Since I can't talk about Molino Network's product today, as cool as it is, darn it...

I'll rant about another cool product instead - the wizard web sign for room scheduling. Instantly see what a room is scheduled for! Schedule it on via the touchscreen. Transfer the schedule to your pda. Transfer your pda's schedule to the touchscreen...

This is an awesome set of ideas. Room scheduling and associated conflicts eat so much of our time in the corporate world it's a wonder nobody's come to market with a solution before now. Now someone has. Check it out!

I thought we'd be embedding LCD panels in doors long before now...

(btw, It runs linux... and Xwindows. Thanks to chipper at AV Washington for pointing it out)

  ¶ 3:43 PM 0 comments

  Introducing... Molino Networks

OK, we now have the front page to our website up. Introducing:



I still can't talk about what we're doing. But it's cool. We're building a piece of gear that a lot of people are going to want. We think. So...

Stay tuned. More news after we hit Demo 2004 in mid feburary.

  ¶ 11:10 AM 0 comments

  How to Saturate a gigE network

0) Assume your class 10/8 network is happy .
1) Have a single host infected with a windows worm, spewing out 32 million packets at a time across the wire, infecting everything it finds.
2) Install windows XP on a new vmware virtual machine, and start downloading the security updates from Microsoft. Before you finish downloading the new machine is already infected, and also spewing out 32 million packets at a time.
3) Repeat step 2 as required until you notice that
  A) Your switch is lit up solid red
  B) There's smoke coming from the wall jack
  C) Your security updates take utterly forever to install.

When this sort of thing happens it reminds me why living in a monoculture can wipe out a species.

I know a guy that once took a baseball bat into the server rooms of a Microsoft colocation facility.

Last night, at 3AM, I know just how he felt.   ¶ 3:12 PM 0 comments

  Happy post thanksgiving!

Ohhh, the bloated feeling.... Must be them thanksgiving blues.

I've been too busy to post, or write - which is a good thing. I started a new gig last week - first real work in a long time - I'm employee number 7 at a startup.

Naturally, I can't talk about it much just yet - but over time I will - (after Dec 15th, anyway) and in the interim I have a ton of work to do.

Saturday was the first day I've had a chance to "stop" in a while. Everybody else went golfing, or shopping. Me, I was left to guard the rabbit from the dog, and install bluetooth and redhat 9 everywhere. Bluetooth seems "ready" but it requires too much configuration for my taste. I sure hope it eats less power than 802.11b does on my ipaq... I'm pleased with rh9, not so pleased at the fedora thing going on....
So, this morning, here I sit at lunch, with a ton of half-finished blog entries, a ton of hardware, and a ton of todos...

Ahh... paradise.

PS I finally figured out how to get my last name showing up right in html, if not in copy and paste. The ASCII character set has been the bane of my ancestors, and spell correctors the bane of my current existence.

Spell me,

Mike Täht

  ¶ 12:30 PM 0 comments

  A short text to speech surf report

I woke up to the output of this script (scheduled via cron on my main server) coming out of my gpe based ipaq.

#!/bin/sh

links --source http://www.surfline.com/surfline/livecams/getsurfmapsurfbreakreport.cfm?alias=pleasurecam | grep -A 100 "PLEASURE POINT" > surfraw.html
links --dump ./surfraw.html > textoutput.txt
flite textoutput.txt surf_report.wav
sox surf_report.wav -r 32000 -c 1 surf_report2.wav
esdplay --server ipaq surf_report.wav
bladeenc -32 surf_report2.wav

todays' output of the script is here. Have a listen.

I have errands to run but nothing's open yet. Hmm... a little diversion this morning for this linux dude is in order. Outta here!  ¶ 7:37 AM 0 comments

  Rediscovering internet radio

I spent six hours dictating yesterday, flat on my back, talking to my Ipaq...

In recent weeks I've rediscovered Internet radio -- in particular: Radio Paradise.

It's wonderful to have a variety high quality music in my home again. My FM reception is very poor, the only signal here without static is a spanish station. So I finally tuned into shoutcast (also: Icecast) and whammo! Radio! Lots of NetRadio! Radio anywhere in my house. Goood radio.

Like most things, my joy was dampened almost immediately. I can only receive a 64 K feed of any given station using my dual ISDN line - and that bugs me. I would like to get higher quality audio over the internet - 128K stereo, mininum, but that's just a little bit more than my internet connection can do. I'm envious of you T1 and DSL users out there.

Using up my bandwidth while I'm trying to work during the day irks me too. I see no reason why I need to listen to radio as it happens, I should be able to time shift net radio just like a VCR recording. Not only that, but I should be able to song-shift, too, when the current song irks me.

I could download 10 hours of audio at night or when I'm away from home, and then play it back - I could skip a song I don't like or just continue to listen to the random stream - and have all the benefits of radio with all the benefits of mp3 - all day - without impacting my network or my ears.

This hybrid of Internet radio would be ideal, especially in the wake of the post Naspter world. I've been living in a world of pure pull, where I have to choose all the music I listen to. The effort of choosing is too much. I don't always want to choose my song stack.

It's like the problem with google: you always get what you want. You can't just get what you want, how do you know what you want? Certainly you can learn from friends, or remember hits from your past - but having the directed randomness of an expert DJ spewing tunes at you is a delight, especially without commercials!

I don't always want what I get, but our world so filled with music that you can never hear everything you might like. You might never even know what you dislike.

I know one thing - I slept like a rock while listening to some ambient chillout 96kbps stuff - and
I guess my squid web proxy cached a whole lot of it overnight because I'm having no trouble surfing the web this morning. No dropouts, nothing... ahhh.... another day on paradise.


  ¶ 6:51 AM 0 comments

  Going hands-free for dictation and phone calls

This is what I want:

A stereo bluetooth wireless headset, with dictation capabilities. Basically it would operate like a quality headset (like the plantronics DSP-300), but it would also emulate a keyboard with about 5 keys:

COMMAND
MUTE
STOP/START
2 USER DEFINED

You'd be able to listen to music, do dictation, and make phone calls to a normal phone line, cell, and VOIP, all at the same time.

Anybody building one?   ¶ 11:28 AM 1 comments

  Garage Gold

Rope lights on the deck - installed, need four more and a motion sensor to stop stumbling up the stairs at night. Somewhere there's a motion sensor and a box full of X10 gear...
Mirror clips
Shelving for speakers, audio cable extension, discovered that 12 foot optical toslink cables exist so I can move the reciever someplace more logical...
192 MB 2 1/2 inch ATA flash drive and mounting bracket - that firewall/web server looks more feasible solid state - discoverd that 1GB flash drives cost 278 dollars nowadays. I wonder what the cost curve looks like - when will a gig of flash cost 50 bucks? I opened it up - 6 flash chips. Hmm.

Found a 1GB hard disk, looks like it eats 7 watts. Don't know how many watts the flash drive eats... in standby mode it uses 500uA... wow... I'm going to plug it into something and see if it even gets warm.... What can I do with 192MB? I mean, I used to fit an entire firewall into a 1.4MB floppy....

Realizing how lame my 18 month old ipaq demo was, I took a deep breath, wiped out my code, and installed gpe2. Wow - my pda was useful as a pda again, running X, and the fonts look GREAT. Love the teleport feature - two clicks, and the apps that support it appear on your main display, so you can type directly into it. Hmm... installed cygwin, got X working on XP, I wonder if matchbox was ported to it? X everywhere at 0 cost. Or maybe I can get the xdm display manager to run off the ipaq and get cygwin Xfree to run in 320x240 mode on a window... yep. Neato: -multiwin mode or -rootless. Neat - SQLite is a nice mini-implementation of SQL.... I am actually intrigued enough to want to get a development environment going for this thing again.... no, you have other priorities get it working as a PDA - got all my contacts transfered... Oh, yes... I'm living in the 00s now. Battery life is good.... Fiddle with ipkg....

And... wow, mallum strikes again - a nice, basic outliner for gpe. Oh, yes. I've been fiddling with a couple outliners for windows - I have some really big things to organize - and both have features and flaws - but both are much nicer than the outliners built into word and open office. Mallum's outliner is in the right place though....

Backups are getting more important every day. 200GB+, 5 working computers, 2 to go.... how to back all this stuff up?

Got a wireless usb adapter to work on the music workstation - at least temporarily

Found a 1watt amp for the wireless antenna. Maybe I can get rid of the directional hanging from the tree now. Maybe with the flash drive and the internal wireless card the former kerbango memorial radio will run cool enough for 24x7 operation....

Gosh, what else got found this weekend? - all this was on my quest for the !@#!@ power supply for my scanner - found 5 more power supplies - What? like socks do they mate in the darkness, exchange genes, and grow mutations? But found a power supply for my old voice processor, and a couple more devices that should fit one of these stinking extra powersupplies. Every room has more wall warts than normal 120v power - I sure wish edison had lost to westinghouse and my house ran on DC....

looked into getting a usb mic for Dragon Dictate. Audio quality is very bad on my existing mic, maybe better quality will get recognition up to perfection...(and best of all, usb mics are portable from machine to machine without retraining....)

Got a monster todo list, a couple appointments, and I gotta run.

Hmm... email2speech... flite with a good voice is 140MB - yuck - maybe do the conversion to mp3 on the server, transfer over the net to the ipaq?

  ¶ 9:00 AM 0 comments

  A credit card ad for the 00s:

"Theater tickets for two - 104 dollars
Dinner - 50 dollars
Viagra... priceless"  ¶ 8:25 AM 0 comments

  An electric addict contemplates Warbiking

I'm hopelessly dependent on electricity.

Here I sit, on a beautiful day, with a todo list stored on a battery dead ipaq. I'm waiting for it to charge up.

I have an ebike with a big, fat 12 v battery fully charged, but the night-light on it is dead and also charging as I write.

Hmm... a little hacking on the power connector and a 12v to 5v regulator and I could run either the ipaq or the driving light off the main battery... I could go warbiking and surf the net via my neighbors wireless connection!

...and I could get out of here. Sure I can plug these two devices into the inverter on my car and take off, but getting exercise is more important than getting out of here... if I can just get everything I'm co-dependent on ready to go with me! Electricity - it's a worse addiction than cigarettes.

Ahh... the geek life - dragging this endless tail of chargers and electronic devices around is much like carrying around the supply chain required to keep a baby fed, warm, and occupied. Except: that a baby ultimately grows up and takes care of you in your old age.

In my case I just seem to be getting more incompatible chargers - I have 3 devices left to hook up in my house, and 18 AC adaptors that aren't the right ones. Somewhere in my garage is a box with the right three !@#! wall-warts. Somewhere... and what the heck are these other 18 wall-warts for? Where did the devices they used to plug in go to?

And I have things to hammer, tasks to complete, surf to contemplate, a couple blog entries to write, an ad to place - and I'd really like to make an appointment for an interview at a cool local company but I misplaced my cellphone (maybe it's in the same box as the three missing wall-warts) and canceled cell service long ago!! Aggh - just to leave the house I have to feed 4 electronic devices??

OK, OK, maybe I'll drive today, just to get all these things fed...  ¶ 11:22 AM 0 comments

  Bloggers for State office - Emergent democracy from the bottom up

All politics is local - Tip O'Neil

All the furor and chatter about various presidential campaigns - and California's new animatronic governor - bugs me. The bevy of reporters, the news coverage, etc - are merely weapons of mass distraction. Sure, talk all you want about the main offices of the nation, but remember that your vote on that scale is statistically the least likely to make a difference.

Attention Bloggers: Voting is not enough. If you really want to make a difference... run for a smaller office in the primaries. Candidate registration in California starts Monday (oct 27th) and runs through november 5th. This should be front page news, but it isn't. Hey, Press? Mind covering where the real process of democracy starts? For a change?

Here's How to run for California State Assembly or Senate. It's easy:

For a mere 990 dollars - or 1500 signatures - anyone can run in the primaries for assembly under the flag of any party. For 3000 signatures you can run for state senate. Both are fairly high paying jobs, if you care about that part, and the money you donate to your own campaign is tax deductable (I think) - so why not run for one of these positions? Make a difference!

Want to fix your state government? Run for state office! Want to change the democratic party? Run from within! Same for the Republicans? Run from within! Can't stand those parties? Run as an independent!

Getting past the filing fee via those signatures - should be easy in any district of the nation given the size of the blogging network. Post your intent - ask for signatures - get on the candidate rolls - and after that, it's all up to you and the rest of us.

In my district the state senator seat is open, and the assembly seat is held by a first term incumbent. How about yours? Tired of taxation without representation? Come on, bloggers & technocrats - run for office.... any office. Take responsibility. Flex your political muscles. Run. Run for change.

Run in the primary.

Democracy is the theory that the people know what they want - and deserve to get it, good and hard - H.L. Mencken
  ¶ 9:21 AM 0 comments

  Surf conditions on October 19th, 2003

This pic is from sunday at Mavericks, which is about 30 miles up the coast from the beach I surf at (4 Mile). Mavericks has the biggest waves on this coast that I know of. 4 Mile was about half this size, but for a guy raised on close-out beach breaks in NJ, it was plenty big enough on this day. No wonder my arms still hurt! (admittedly I went out 5 days running - tuesday was perfect, no wind, 3ft overhead conditions, perfect sets - I had a blast - and conquered a lot of fear - and forgot most of my troubles)

I had a bunch of chores planned for this week, but the waves wait for no man, especially one that had missed every swell between 1980 and 2002 because he was working too hard.

I'd spent the last three weeks moving back into my house and prepping my spare room for a potential renter, so I wasn't too bothered that Neptune swept across my mundane tasks with such a glorious swell... until yesterday. I had planned out yesterday carefully (A-K was plenty surprised!) but I got two callbacks in a row about jobs that ate into my errand running schedule, so I piled them into today. Today I got hit by so many unplanned things at once I'm surprised I managed to accomplish anything at all. I got the errands run that I'd planned to run yesterday done, but little else, and now I have to pile into tomorrow what I'd planned to pile into today, and I already had tomorrow packed.

I worked out what I was going to do on the way home from SJ at 9PM - still hoping to surf mavericks (for the first time) on the way up to SF for dinner with "She who will not be blogged" but when I got home I'd got an email with an interview schedule from 2-5 in SF which makes a 6PM dinner unlikely - ok, move to 7..... While it would great fun to show up for an interview still crusted over with salt and smelling of wetsuit rubber, heck, maybe still in the wetsuit, dripping- I think I'll pass.

I have to remember that there will be another swell. And another. And another. Fall is my favorite time of year. If you go out at dawn there's plenmty of time to make it to work by 10

Notes to self: pack 5gallons of water, scrape surf wax away from business suit - vacuum up sand - maybe sit near a beach with some reference materials in hand for a while. Put roof racks back on car. Feed cat. place ad in craigslist. find door that fits or some soundproofing that works on it, write down ccosts of door coversion, place ad the local paper = network. Charge up Ipaq. find business suit. Set timer for 6:4- AM. Gas in car. Locks. Finish rental ad... sure wish there was an efficent bussing to train system. I am sore tempted to take a laptop with me to kind of catch up with the pluggin issues I'm sure to get a call on, sleep with book....


  ¶ 11:04 PM 0 comments

  Energy source found in tap water... but it's all a matter of scale

Life is like a sewer - you get out of it what you put into it - Tom Lehrer

Are the column inches devoted to headlines in conventional publications always so misleading?

Scientists find new way to make electricity, Cdn researchers find new source of electricity, Electricity Discovery Pumps Up The Power, Energy source found in tap water, Response gives profs a charge, Lightbulb moment leads to clean energy source Can water run your mobile?... etc.

I'm not going to list all the publications involved (if you want, you can hit this google link for more headlines on this topic), but the reprints all stem from an original article in the Journal of Micromechanics and Engineering about generating electricity "electrokinetically" from pushing water through microtubes.

Most of the glassy eye'd, enthusiastic transcriptions of what must have been a carefully worded press release by a PR agency manage to miss what Nature magazine nailed - that a conventional water driven turbine was far more efficient than the current electrokinetic process.... The new process is currently less than 1% efficient where a hydroelectric turbine can be 80-95% efficient - so we aren't going to see any change in how dams are built any time soon. (more about that in a minute, after I get done ranting)

No... instead almost universally, the articles mention that in the experiment, water was Squeezed through a syringe and powered a lightbulb...

a VERY SMALL light bulb. A very, very, very, very small lightbulb.

The howler headline?

Energy source found in tap water - Rediff

In a world where tap water is subsidized heavily (as in supplied free), sure. But it would be much more efficient to power your house with small turbines under each tap and garden hose!

The second howler in this headline? Electrokinetics is not an "energy source", OK? At best, it's an "Energy storage mechanism". A battery. You can quibble about where energy actually comes from but in the case of this experiment, it came from a syringe. (Again... nature mag got it right.)

The three laws of thermodynamics (paraphrased)

You can't win
You can't break even
You can't even get out of the game

Water that gets pumped uphill to your tap can't possibly generate more energy on the way down than on the way up.

Another howler headline: "Can water run your mobile?"

Fuel cells may be appearing in consumer devices in the next couple years. A fuel cell generates water as a byproduct of the energy retrieval process (it's still a battery, you have to pump energy in to get energy out). It's highly unlikely that highly pressurized water will be used to power your mobile - but highly pressurized hydrogen gas is a distinct possibility.

So, anyway, in short, electrokinetic electricity generation is a new idea, but it is, at best, a far more inefficient means of storing and retrieving electricity, especially in bulk, than most other known means. Sensationalism over science does everyone a disservice. Years from now 1000s of people will think that electricity from water is a suppressed technology, just like cold fusion....

---

Now... having roundly debunked some of the more absurd statements made about this discovery, I'd like to place emphasis on the original context by which the scientists announced it. I was going to talk about really tiny machines - and about teflon, and a few other things - but I'm runninglate, and I'd rather you just read Dr. Richard Feynman's 1959 speech on There's plenty of Room at the bottom....

The world functions differently at the cellular or molecular scale. Electrokinetic energy might actually make sense as a means to power devices much smaller than your mobile. How small? Chips the size of what Dust, Inc. is working on. Or smaller.

More later. Maybe.  ¶ 8:24 AM 0 comments

  Happy Birthday, Anna-Kim!

I met Anna-Kim 5 months and two days ago. She opened the singer/songwriter night in Rio Del Mar - it was my first time out in a very long time. Rebecca and Gary Parks (whose set followed Anna-Kim's) had stayed overnight at my house and convinced me to listen in at their gig the next day. I got a good seat near the stage but couldn't get a waitress to serve me, so I hung my jacket on the back of the seat and went to the bar.

Scribbling down a poem on my Ipaq while trying to find a way to extricate myself from a drunk's animated enthusiasm about PocketPC, I had my back to Anna-Kim for most of her set. A couple of her songs did catch my ear, but nothing really stuck with me. As Rebecca and Gary were setting up, I wandered back to my seat, but it had been taken. Every seat had been taken.

Anna-Kim was sitting alone on the couch, with a glass of wine in her hand. I swallowed, put on my best "blogger as music journalist" facade, grabbed my jacket, and sat down next to her.

We started talking. We talked all through the Park's set, actually, pausing only for a couple of Rebecca's strongest songs ("Fade to Black", "When working isn't working", "Sexy in Socks"). I liked that Anna-Kim didn't feel compelled to talk over the music... the conversation had a natural ebb and flow to it... we talked through the next set... and the next.

So I bought a copy of DreamWorld, and invited her to join us at the one place still open for food at 1AM in Santa Cruz - The Saturn Cafe. I listened to her CD in the car as I drove over ("Untameable", "cruising the milky way", and "I miss myself" stuck with me), and I figured that was as close to her as I was ever going to get.

I really didn't expect her to make it to the saturn cafe. But she did...

And we've been dating ever since. We've had good times and bad times together - most recently far more good than bad as we've learned more of each other's ways. I remember back when I was writing Beating the Brand, and all the brand names in my kitchen were still covered with post-it notes, I woke up to find she'd written a little note on each one of them, things like:

"I like your eyes", and "You're cute", and "You are a bright star in my starry night", and "I love being kissed by a surfer dude".

In all the time we've been together, I've never told her I loved her. When we met, my heart was stone cold, filled with bitterness, and gradually she has healed me, enough to say today:

I love you! You fill my garden with music, and my heart lifts.

The happiest of birthdays Anna-Kim!

Love,

mike


"Something seeks you out - in the dark
Something that from your own heart sparks
When you find it, then you must be a part
of the answers in the end

There is no use to run and you can't hide
Though you're tempted and you've already tried
to go flying high, far and fast
only to find that I'll always outlast... you

(Chorus)
So hold me, hold me, hold me, hold me tight
Keep your focus, keep me in your sight
Hold my heart up just like a light
In the middle of your night
In the middle of your night

(Verse)

I can help you, that's why I was sent
I signed up and I won't relent
It's been a lifetime of training, of tears spent
to show up here, and be your friend

(Chorus)

You must find your way through
There are people waiting for you
Places are calling, and you can't keep stalling
The other side of the dark
(Chorus)

I will guide you, through these woods we go
Don't be frightened, the way you already know
You just lost sight of the path so long ago
Lost your vision, lost your soul

(Chorus)

(Coda)

In the middle of your night
In the middle of your night
In the middle of your night"
Copyright 2003 Anna-Kim Aleris  ¶ 8:06 AM 0 comments

  Chance favors a prepared mind... and body

Waves are pushing 10ft. All the piddly 3 ft surf of summer was no preparation for this. I look wistfully at the broken weight machine - the parts that build up your arms have been broken all year and... oh... my arms hurt this morning. Note to self - fix the weight machine....

Going out again. I've got all the must-have-done before winter problems under control - and surfing really clears the mind...

I was talking about a google inferiority complex the other day, it rang true with a bunch of people. Have an idea? Any idea? Treasure it... think it through... do a cost model... lie awake at night thinking about how to do it.... then google for it, and 10 times out of 10, somebody else has already had it...

Thus died the cat door with voice recognition.

Note to self - remember to get some tomatoes and some 2x4s on the way back. Yes you can work and surf on the same day. Remember that...  ¶ 11:54 AM 0 comments

  And the surf is up... again

I was gonna work on the deck... but I'm outta here.  ¶ 11:02 AM 0 comments

  An old graphic

Heh. Archive.org preserved this for me. I thought I'd misplaced it on some old hard drive somewhere...



I discovered I can do most of my errands via bike. It's a beautiful day. Outta here....  ¶ 2:54 PM 0 comments

  A different vision

I had a very different vision of what the internet in the home would look like 14 years ago.

I thought:

Everyone would have a dedicated IP address, and electronic mail would be delivered right to your server in the wall. (Email would then have the same privacy rights as private mail). Your internal network would be firewalled off from the outside, but you could let advanced services, like telephony and video conferencing in. You'd be able to access your home network from anywhere using a secure, encrypted connection.

Phone lines would go away to be replaced by ethernet jacks. New home and development builders would embed ethernet cable and fiber optic cable in the walls with jacks near nearly every electrical outlet. Where there wasn't cabling there'd be wireless - enough to cover the property and connect to 4 of your physical neighbors in a mesh network. Power through the home would be DC where appropriate, and served up via a central UPS that got power during the night from the electric company (when rates were low - during the week the nightly rates are 1/3 that as day), and powered through the day via solar.

Hard disks would be replaced by solid state memory. Doors would have LCD panels embedded in them with calendars, todo lists, graphic art, etc.

Computers - those square boxy things - would become stylish, incorporated into furniture, directly into monitors, into bookcases, and into lamps.

I thought we'd solve the speech recognition from anywhere in a room problem by now. When will DSP processing catch up to star trek?

Now I'm faced with the reality of an IP shortage, and a 70 year old house.

alright... now I'm really off to run some errands.

My electric is currently running at 80 dollars a month. In the winter it spikes to about 120-130 due to using an electric heater a little too often.

Aha, I remember what really bugs me. Nobody makes a timer that survives power failures. Either you use battery'd clocks or you run around fixing all the clocks in the house every time the power goes out - and there's clocks on the range, the coffee maker, the microwave, timers on the stereo.

Hmm. 802.11 wireless chips are getting cheaper, and so is bluetooth. Why not embed bluetooth into an electrical wall socket to control the power?
I've done this with X10 (got most of the parts around for the old system somewhere - we used to have the lava lamp flash when email arrived! But hooking it to the coffee maker didn't work - it used too much power for the appliance module to take) - doing it with wireless would let you control it from anywhere...

Hmmm.... another solution is to just have reliable power. Once I got a steal on gel batteries that could power a whole building of 60 people for a couple hours, cost about 7k. Another partial solution is to figure out exactly what uses power... hmm... maybe some more blankets on the bed this year - I got the woodstove to where I could run it for 12 hours at a time for about a week last winter - but it barely kept up with feburary...

Note to self - call electric company about variable meter. Also maybe about installing two meters.

Now... I'm really, really, really off to run some errands. with a tape deck in hand.  ¶ 2:21 PM 0 comments

  The camels of the dark side...

The morals of the next to last blog entry are manyfold. The first thing I realized after writing it - was that I was talking about letting camels in your tent. Once I knuckled under and said, OK, I'll use XP again, the applications for it started to multiply. I had to beat them back and remember the purposes I use Linux for - and then start coming up with a more reasonable network and system design that incorporated the best of both worlds, and solved existing problems.

The second point I was making to myself (again, not realizing it until after I wrote it down) was that the knock of the Jehova's witnesses was much like my own attempts at convincing others to run Linux on the desktop. It's religion. It's hard to convince skeptics....

1) That "finish 5 jobs, 400% of the effort" thing is really true. You have to buckle down to finish them to have room in your brain for more stuff. I've been buckling down using newton's law "An object in motion tends to stay in motion". OK, I have a hard time sitting still for a long time or focusing on one task. For the past year I've been working on the sensory deprivation model - getting my life and house so quiet I could hear myself again. I think I'm doing that...

But historically that's not been how I function best. I used to tell time via music - I'd pile up a whole bunch of records and tapes back to back at the beginning of the day, and play them. The passage of each song or record would keep my calm and clued as to the passage of time. Simultaniously the TV would be on - just imagery on repeat - like Philip Glass's film that I can't spell the name of right now. I'd have something like sidekick going for the random thoughts. I used to have a dual monitor system, with 4 virtual desktops, which gave me a place for web/email/work and misc. There'd be a virtual desktop running windows for the windows things....

Now I've got things organised closer to that. There's a workstation for writing, surrounded by writing books (dictionaries/strunk and white/etc). There's a space for programming and diagramming with all my programming books. And there's a machine for fun, not even connected to the net - but connected to the stereo so I can play back music I was working on while I'm working.

The cacaphony of all this stuff going at once gives me an outlet for actually focusing on the things I need to finish - it's getting it all going at once that takes too much time now....

Anyway, I had 5 tough jobs in front of me earlier in the week, and facing any one of them was putting me off. I got 2 of them done yesterday, and hopefully a third today

2) I'm not going to convert my main box to XP. Yet. I may decide to try Win4Lin or vmware again, but for now, the machine is rock stable, and does most of what I need. Better to focus on getting a firewall and web server up (actually, to decide whether or not I want to run web and email services at home first) - and even then, these are indoor activities that I can do best at night. Gotta focus on what I can do via business hours. I do need a working scanner, bad - have to convert all kinds of documentation, and I still can't find the power supply. I found 15 other power supplies.... anyway... off to run some errands.
  ¶ 1:48 PM 0 comments

  Google - stranger than Lovecraft?

Sometimes I think google is stranger than Lovecraft. I misspelt Cuthulu as Cthulhu. But how I got that spelt right is a mystery, I wasn't conciously looking for it, I was looking up "Postieror sensory appendages such as the anal cirri of annelid words and the cerci of insects".

Today: I blogged, I worked on cabling for a while, finished a first cut sequence of a song that at least looked good on paper, scratched my head about the boards, emptied the shelves of all the irrelevant books, filled up my todo box by the door, wrote tons of notes on my white board, and scratched my head about moving the washer and dryer.

That shelf needs to come down. Or the weight machine needs to go in the garage.

Nooooo. weight machine must stay. Garage can have w/d, maybe there's room under the old kitchen to put a hole in the floor and run a ladder down. A circus pole. A door that seals after the cat eats. Heh. I need a testbed. I'll turn the doghouse into a cathouse!

I keep thinking about mems. really, really small single chip circuits.

A cat transporter. With voice recognition. Can a cat be trained to emit a certain meow to enter a house? Given the frequency range of a cat's meow, what is the likelyhood of another animal duplicating it?

Dear Cindi Clawford:

Pay no attention to your master bearing the microphone around. Just act natural. Talk to me. You have a questioning meow, an open the damn door please now meow, an "I'm hungry meow", a hello meow, - don't you? Come on now, talk to me, just don't stare at the !@#! frigging microphone or brush against it... just you... wait, just come back here and emit a single dang sound just so I can think about training a single stupid but cheap chip with the sound and hitching that to the door opener or lift.

Got a lot to do tomorrow. "She who will not be blogged" is coming down for the weekend. I gotta order some firewood, get the chimney cleaned, um... what else had I put off? Oh yea... I...

I found that Lovecraft book... wedged between a pair of 1970s galaxy paperbacks. ha... the story I'd been reminded of was "The shunned house". Damn, only a few days left to Halloween.

"...These persons will not cut off suddenly by any one cause' rather did it seem that their vitality was insidiously sapped, so that each one died the sooner from what tendency to weakness he may have naturally had. And those that didn't die displayed in varying degree a type of anaemia or consumption, or a decline of the mental faculties, which spoke ill for the salubriousness of the building. Neighboring houses, it must be added, seemed entirely free from the noxious quality. "

The book is in a collection of stories copyright 1939 and 1943 by August Derleth and Donald Wandrie. And re-copyrighted 1964 by August Derleth. Cthula! I sneeze!

What were the rules again?  ¶ 10:37 PM 0 comments

  The slow seduction of the camels of the Dark Side

Now I'm considering installing Windows XP on my fastest machine. Why?

It all started when a pair of Jehovah's Witnesses stopped by my door to introduce themselves as my neighbors. I had been writing since 3AM – the words flowing out of me like teardrops – and I welcomed the knock on my door as I had missed breakfast and lunch, and the fire in my woodstove had gone out.

I generally fry solicitors for lunch.

One young lady wore braces and spoke not at all, but the one talking was pretty, and articulate. She asked me a couple leading questions, and then read from the Bible about heaven on earth. 'Did I agree?', she said. “Oh, yes” I said, thinking in more graphic detail about heaven on earth – via the Kama Sutra - with someone else.

She read a little more, and kept asking me if I agreed with each statement... and at every point I agreed - (There's plenty as agreeable in the Bible if you look in the right places, like in the eyes of a pretty woman that's at your door). I started planning my next move... what was it going to be?

Invite them in and whip out my copies of the Torah, Koran, and try to engage in a serious discussion of religion in general?
Offer them a glass of water, smile, and tell them that the Church of All Worlds welcomed members of all religions?
Ask her for her phone number and then sign her up (as my own act of charity) for the donotcall phone list?

A million plans like that ran through my head; I must have become a little glassy eyed. Just as I was going to invite them both to the Cthultu virgin sacrifice next week as “my special guests”, she ran out of steam, handed me a copy of the Watchtower, and fled up the street.

You know, ever since I started using the net, I've lacked burnable paper. The 4th class mail I get usually has little plastic windows on it and smells bad when burned... two pages of their pamphlet restarted my woodstove nicely, and I went back to writing.

---

What the heck does this have to do with a Linux geek installing windows? Well...

Maybe it started with a phone call I got last week from the very first person I ever worked for in the computer industry... Don Fox. He was in Florida, and thought I still lived in Fort Lauderdale. He googled for me, then rang me up. We talked for hours.

Back in the late 70s Don owned the Computer and Software Store in Ocean City, NJ, and I was in high school. I'd come by and play with the VIC-20 (a more powerful machine than the CBM Pet and IBM mini I had access to), writing dinky little programs in basic, and playing games on it, and we got to talking. I was a pretty good customer for a while, and when the Commodore 64 came out (1982?), I got one. I learned everything there was to know about it. Don offered me a job fixing the stream of broken 64s that came into his place (it was a great machine but quality control sucked), and I worked for Don, on and off, for a couple years.

My computer clique grew rapidly as Electronic Arts had a policy then of shipping two free copies of every new computer game to every retailer every month. I remember losing most of a summer to Zork, dreaming about it, scheming with friends to try and find solutions, late night phone calls like “why don't you try... and maybe if you...” Don was just as addicted to computer games as I was and we'd spend hours playing them when we should have been drumming up business. We also hacked a lot - back then it seemed possible to really know everything there was to know about a computer – “burn a new BIOS? No problem” - Don also did Dbase programming on the side, which was more lucrative than retail, and I got sucked into it. First we both got into Dbase III, then he moved to Clipper and I to Foxpro and SQL, and gradually our paths diverged over the mid-80s. I've seen him, oh, maybe five times since the 90s.

So anyway, Don and I talked for hours, reminiscing about the Good Old Days... He told me he'd been programming Access and Visual BASIC for the last 3 years, saying that Access 98 had sucked but Access 2000 was good enough to write real applications in, once you spent time learning the language. I asked him about Clipper - "Dead as a doornail, no demand for it"...

I told him about my Linux work of the last few years, and about some of the products that I've had a hand in... and I also told him I was a mite depressed at not finding work that fit my X11/gtk/embedded background - he interrupted - "GEK, what's that?". "Yea", I said. "Exactly."

He upped my spirits: "Remember when you first showed me the internet, back in 1987? I thought it would never fly. I thought you were nuts to be wasting time with it and that Unix thing. Even in 94 when you were starting that ISP, I didn't get it - what did you get from the Net that you couldn't from a BBS? You may have been wrong about a lot of things, but the Internet? I use it for everything now. I bought my last two cars online. I bank online. I'm online from the time I get up to the time I get to bed. It's changed my life. You showed me all that - you realized the potential early on - and few understood until much later. Your biggest problem is that you've always been way ahead of the curve."

Here I am trying to cure myself of Internet addiction... and all the way across the country I'm thanked for the Net by an old friend. The irony. "OK", I thought - "Maybe there will be a market in 10 years for google rehabiliation centers, that the web will be regulated like ritalin for causing ADD, that there will be a back to pen and paper movement, that digital recording will fade away to tape...."

"Maybe you should ressurect an old skill or two." Don said. "You've done a ton of database work. DBAs are making a pretty penny all over the country, there's a real shortage. You should also maybe give XP a try, most of the reasons why you switched to Unix are addressed by XP...."

After he hung up, I sat and stewed. I've spent a lot of time re-evaluating why I do just about everything I do in life this year, why not think about Linux, XP, and Mac again?

I became convinced of the quality of free software (in terms of the gcc compiler) in 1991-92, and started using it in everyday work. I switched to Linux in 93, but I ran NT on my desk with an Xwindow emulator from 94-96. Why did I do that? For programming, and file/web serving Linux was better - but for project management and document interchange, NT was the way to go. I managed with the best of both worlds for a long time. Then Windows 98 came out, and oh, was it buggy. NT 4.0 had such reliability issues that I made a living for a while swapping out NT servers for samba servers - seeing uptimes go from 3 days to 6 months, typically. Mac? Don't make me laugh.

And here was the little penguin that could. I got convinced that Linux and Open Source would sweep over the world. That was my state of mind from 97-02. I look now at how far the Linux desktop has come since then, and I'm amazed - yet it still isn't far enough.

In 02 I started having doubts. Linux companies were dropping like flies. Netscape lost the browser war, arguably much earlier, but I thought mozilla really would take back market share. PocketPC invaded the niche that PalmOS had been in, and Linux didn't. I kept working harder and harder at my job but it seemed like I was treading water at best. Although I'd been active in open source prior to actually doing it for a living full-time, I'd gradually dropped out of the things that most interested me. I would turn bricks into something that booted and then move on, never actually using a computer for anything useful, just solving other peoples problems with them. I kept thinking of how Mark Twain had dreamed of being a river pilot for years, and when he'd actually become one, all the romance dropped out of it.

Living in a gift culture is draining. I have name recognition now, sure, and food on the table, but that's about it. My interests have changed. I'm mostly interested in things like voice recognition, and sound production, things that Linux doesn't do well (yet!), and I want to be doing these things now, not years from now. That 24 track recorder I just put online has sat idle for a couple years now because I was unwilling to deal with another operating system in the house... and so, I didn't record or play, or even practice much all this time. Dumb. "What's the harm of running one little XP box for that?" - I thought.

I have got this far in my life by over rigorously applying the 80/20 rule. I thought that if I did 5 jobs - 5*(20% effort for 80% of the work) I was accomplishing 400 percent of the work of normal human being - which often was the case. But that last 20% of the work piles up, especially if you are doing 5 jobs at once... and, well, do the math - expending 400% more effort to finish those 5 jobs is quite overwhelming.

At that point, you really have to sit down and think about what jobs are worth doing.

"For each machine, a purpose..." - I thought. I sat down with a fresh piece of paper, and diagrammed out what I wanted my house network to look like. Something was wrong from the start - why was having a house network important in the first place? I spent years with my mission in life being to hook computers up to the internet - it was even my handle for a time, "Johnny Net" - Johnny Appleseed... but wasn't using at least one computer for something other than the Internet more productive? Haven't I been saying that for months? Hmmm....

OK, that simplified cabling for the synthesiser - in fact, I could put the computer and synth somewhere I couldn't run ethernet... wham - boom - it fit perfectly. And, Joy of Joys, after I installed XP, and a little sneaker-net, I could record 4 tracks and midi in sync, spdif just worked. Worse... I had a ball playing with it... still worse... the interfaces to cakewalk and windows itself came right back to me - I even spent a few days without a mouse forcing myself to relearn the keyboard commands....

I went back to that piece of paper. what else bothered me about my existing computers and network? The pile of tapes, of interviews, ideas, todos and god knows what els in the corner drew my eye. I've been meaning to type them up, but the pile keeps getting bigger and bigger. Right next to the tape, a store-bought copy of dragon-dictate 6... I always dictate first drafts, I used to hire college students to take care of typing in the important ones, but now I can't do that... and so the tapes pile up.

"What do I use computers at home for? I need to be able to write, to outline, to share documents, to publish on the Web, to create e-mail, to create music, and preferably do as much of this stuff flat on my back with my eyes closed because that's how I think best. I don't know what I'm going to use a computer at home for work, for, why worry about it overmuch now? Make your home as productive as possible"

So I made my mini-itx box dual boot, and put dragon dictate on it. A 533 Mhz C3 processor fine for word processing and the web but it is about 5x too slow to do useful dictation to... but almost this entire blog was dictated last night before I went to sleep. I lay in bed this morning wishing the microphone cable would reach. With a really big font in open office I can see what I writing from a prone position.

And so, I started thinking about making my pride, my joy, my 200GB, 1GB RAM, 1.4 Ghz athlon computer dual boot. I've come a heck of a long way since last year. all I have to do is move DNS/DHCP and web service off of it to something else - Maybe an ipaq, maybe that dual ppro - and I can convert the big box... hey, I can upgrade to redhat 9 on one box... and use this other box as a firewall...

I don't know if this is a tactical retreat (I still have 3 dedicated Linux boxen and a Cisco in the house), but it sure is a change.

And so this oddessy back into the M$ world continues. I've lost that old-time religion. Certainly being more OS agnostic will help me find work close by....

Yesterday (remember that I was down about being an X11/Gtk programmer earlier in this blog?) I got a call out of the blue for an X11/gtk job in SF. Sounded like it had a lot of potential.

I still haven't diagrammed out the house net. Or told my realtor in writing to pull the house off the market. Or converted my main box to dual boot. Or finished pulling up the boards to my deck, or ordering firewood, or so many other things - so I'm going to log off now, and stay logged off for a while.


  ¶ 10:32 AM 0 comments

  Almost a normal morning

Yes, after several years of running a Windows-Free (tm) household, I've bitten the bullet and installed XP on two systems. On one system I didn't have a choice - boogieman has a 24 track audio card from MOTU that is only supported under Windows, and runs cakewalk and reason, which only work under windows... so, dang it, I'm not going to use one of the new Linux sequencers until I can afford to get at least 8 track capability on a Linux box, which is an investment in hardware I'm not prepared to make for a while.

I've got that machine running quite reliably - I've got cakewalk tracking audio and midi down to 1.5 ms, which is quite nice - the audio playback and the midi playback seem indistinguishable. Reason has trouble keeping up with me playing piano, but I haven't tried the ASIO drivers yet. I really don't want to throw a faster box at this application, as cool as it is... there's an upgrade available too... more things to download... but this is the first machine I've put together in years that I don't want to connect to the net - no distractions - so I'm going to keep sneaker netting it until I get frustrated enough to drill a hole in the floor....

On to machine #2.

Squeezebox is one of my nearly silent mini-itx based PCs. The FPU runs at half the clockspeed of 533 Mhz - Aside from audio processing it's fast enough for browsing, tax prep, and word processing - as well as basic software development. I installed both Redhat 8 and XP on it.

Right away, I was annoyed by IE, so I started trying to make my XP environment as much like my Linux environment as possible. (I know that this is backward from how most reviewers do it!) I installed Mozilla and Openoffice on Squeezebox. I've been able to crash mozilla 1.4 and 1.5 easily with the Cowell's Beach cam. Aggh, I might have to use IE! OpenOffice so far seems OK. I've still got 2 critical updates to XP to install.

Ahh, the care and feeding of PCs... got a cat on my lap, a cup of decaf, and a few phone calls to make. Almost like a normal day, except that I can go to the beach any time I want. Too bad there's no waves. I guess I'll keep building up my home office to usability. Where's the dang power supply to the scanner?
  ¶ 8:46 AM 0 comments

  The winter of my disconnect

I managed nearly a week offline, working at my house, fixing the roof, various other issues... the surf was really rocking, too, I got some more surfing in....

I've been reconnecting everything that I had packed up in the garage. I finally have three reliable machines doing exactly what I want them to do:

Boogieman - 24 tracks of audio, dvd burner, 800 mhz Athlon
Squeezebox - A 533 Mhz via epia motherboard in a nearly silent case - to become my main workstation
Lompico - currently my main workstation and houshold server, with a 1.4 ghz athlon - to be retired temporarily and upgraded into an oracle/mysql server...

Next to ressurect: Lugosi - An ancient (10 year old) dual pentium pro - to run experiments on user mode linux and gentoo and vmware... I have had a long-standing need to install multiple versions of Linux (Suse/Mandrake/Redhat 7.3, 8, 9, AS) for compatability testing, this is probably my best shot at trying to find a stable way to run about 12 OSes at the same time on the same box.

I'm seriously considering using my linux based ipaq as my home dns/web server. It has a lot of features that would be useful in this role - including inherent battery backup, 16MB of spare flash - and totally silent operation. I never use it as a PDA anymore (I've reverted to paper!).

  ¶ 3:47 AM 0 comments

  Now is the time for all good men...

to go surfing!

Today's waves were at 7+ feet. Facing my first one I got the longest, most elegant ride I'd had ever since I got the shorter stick. I moaned all summer about it being too long - 7'4" is too big to rip around 2-3 foot swells... but 7 foot tall perfect sets rolling in the board came alive underneath me. There was a magnificent sunset on the one side of Le Secre't surfing hole, and a perfect moon rising out of the reflected sunset on the other side... wonderful. I'm so tired I can hardly lift my arms.



  ¶ 10:02 PM 0 comments

  A primal feeling

OK, now we have a new governor. The next year or two of California politics ought to be much more interesting.

I liked the recall. Why? It was more entertaining than Survivor - and it was a clear case of democracy - as weird and as plutocratic as it gets, but democracy... What I liked best was how simple it is to force an election: All it takes is a single disgruntled millionaire and a ton of signatures to force an election which is thrown open to all. In this last case, 135 people ran - and people turned out in record numbers to vote. Maybe... just maybe... some will bother voting in the primaries, where the real electoral process takes place.

Will multiple disgruntled millionaires mudwrestle in the primary elections? Stay tuned....

I just want to lock them in a room with each other until millionth monkey syndrome is cured.

Anybody out there know how the state primary process works?. I spent a frustrated weekend trying to figure out how to become a republican party or democratic party candidate for the primaries... as a theoretical exercise... and I got bogged down with things like central comittees and a whole bunch of forms. As best as I can tell, to get into the primary, you have to file between October and November 10th - with a filing fee is 2% of the first year's salary of whatever political office you seek. The rules on signatures are unclear to me at the moment - Somebody out there help me out? If you want to avoid the filing fee how many signatures do you need to run for either the Democratic or Republican Party for something like state assembly?

So all you people out there that so happily just threw out Davis - Just voting isn't enough. Running in the primaries sounds more fun. Everybody should do it.

"We have an insurmountable problem, said the general to Curtis LeMay. "We don't have problems here", groweled LeMay, "only opportunities!" After careful consideration the general said: "We have an insurmountable opportunity!"

I can't wait to read what the scriptwriters have in store for the next segment of this virtual reality show. It's just too surreal not to participate in it. It's an insurmountable opportunity... to sell tax deductable thongs! Have porn stars make appearances on your behalf! You can stand up to the little guy as symbolized by gary coleman! Now we get a governor that would look just fine poised with a machine gun on the capitol gates! What next?

Has anyone ever run eliza for an elective office?

It's just too funny - artifical intelligences are prohibited from running for elective... wait... do we know if Arnie... actually represents artificial intelligence? We've come a long way since Eliza and basic animatronics. I guess we're going to find out now, huh! In Terminator 4... do the machines win?

Anyway, after being one of the few to vote for Georgy... I asked myself:

"Self, you know anything about John Laird?" I googled. He seems very environmental, not much else, though - first 2 year term... with an 80s style webpage design.

Then I wondered: I who's running in the primaries as a replacement for the existing state senator....

Hmm....

I wondered who else was wondering about the next - hey, everybody - just pick a primary, and run in it! Let's see some emergent democracy in action!

---

I've spent the last week moving back into my house. I had packed up my stuff in preparation to move, but there's no way I can leave California without seeing what happens next.   ¶ 8:57 AM 0 comments

  The Rolling Blackout Blues

It's too bad that songs like this don't get played on the radio anymore. It's kind of an ironic reminder of how critically dependent we are on technology and on government that works.

The Rolling Blackout Blues

Copyright 2000-2001 Rick Ednie with a Realaudio clip here and cd available from Rick Ednie Records at: http://www.rickednie.com

This mornin' when I arose, no smell of coffee came to my nose
Stumbled to the kitchen to see the coffee machine was blinkin' at me
As my groggy head started thinkin', I seen my alarm clock wasn’t tickin'
Seems my clock had lost its power and I’d slept in for over two hours
Water's cold, we got no heat too, even my dog’s tongue looks blue
'Cause last night I didn’t see the news, now I’ve got those rollin' blackout blues

I made it to work just after eleven, computers were down, oh thank heaven
No cool air was found to be blowin', beads of sweat started showin'
All around lovely Lucy’s face, she had her makeup runnin' all over the place

She’s got those rollin' blackout blues, maybe you’ve even had ’em too
They say bad things come in threes, what could be next, maybe the killer bees?
Tell me please what’s next for us all? Maybe it’s gonna be the Big One by next fall

Now my baby's all alone, she can’t even use her new cell phone
They say we’ve lost power 'till three, oh my God we got no TV
The free and only solution to me is if California falls in the sea

Now my six pack of beer's no longer cold
And the cheese is stale, gone green with mold
Who out there will stand up and save us?
Superman, hell no, Gray Davis???

We’ve got those rollin' blackout blues, hey, hey, have ya heard the news?
Politicians’ lack of vision has left us in our current condition
Now who’s gonna pay when the bill comes due
Now we’ve all got those rollin' blackout blues

---

Most days I avoid thinking about the California recall. Some days I think programmers and sysadmins should vote as a block for Georgy Russell (left) - as the only candidate that can possibly understand the problems engineers face in keeping the lights on and the computers humming. She, at least, has a little idealism left, and a clear political agenda. She gives a good speech, too.

I had a little idealism when I was younger, too. Still do, actually, once I cut through my grimy layers of cynicism.

I have hope for Georgy's generation - the people under thirty - because they were raised on the internet. It may take 30 years or more for them to get into power - but they have one advantage over the generations suckled on television: They can read - and write - and think - better than any generation of humanity raised - ever.

The one thing I really like about the recall is that people are registering to vote in droves. This is the first election in which "the people" actually have real choices for a major political office in years. 130+ choices! That makes voting a worthwhile exercise!


Not that you can tell that by reading the papers. The press, out of lazyness and the lack of column inches, has boiled the race down to two people. Thanks a lot, press. If you think you are doing your job right in this election - you are being led by the nose by both political machines - and if you had done your job right every single candidate got an equal amount of coverage. Period. You would have pre-picked no "front-runners". The plutocratic playing field in politics pisses me off just as much as set-piece television debates, and just because you only have so many column inches to devote to the topic doesn't mean you have to simplify the electoral process down to a choice between Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Most of you, and the big political machines, treat voters like children.


  ¶ 5:14 AM 0 comments

  Tired of being a victim

I am not a victim. I control my own destiny.

I need to eliminate "I can't" - and "I'm afraid" from my vocabulary.

I need to face the world, every day, and stare it down.

I need to work, every time I am able, to make my home my castle.

I will laugh at the wolves howling at my door. Let them howl!  ¶ 7:41 PM 0 comments

  Portrait of the artist as a (very) young man

The early art of Benjamin Hunt is on web display from now through December.

This mixed-media show, Hunt's first since the confrontational Crayons of Rage installation in the Linoleum Space, offers a fresh new direction for the ever-evolving young artist, combining brooding social commentary with frequent references to the haute-kitsch imagery in his later food works.

  ¶ 12:38 PM 0 comments

  Paul Vixie vs Verisign

Once upon a time, the internet was run by responsible engineers. People like Jon Postel made decisions for purely technical reasons, by consensus with the users, as part of the internet social contract. The contract started to tear when he died, and while ICANN squabbled, control of the Net shifted from recognisable people to faceless corporations. Mostly.

Verisign, the company that controls the .com and .net domains, and has a stranglehold on the cryptography that ensures 'safe' commerce, introduced a new "service" yesterday that redirects mis-spelt domains to an ad for Verisign's domain sales service. On the face of it, it's a a brilliant marketing idea, but the reality is that this 'feature' breaks the Net in a fundamental way - spam filters, among other things, don't work anymore. No engineer would have approved this change to the basic structure of the Net.

Thankfully, as Lessig wrote, "Code is law" - and coders can still make a difference. People like Paul Vixie, that still believe in the internet's social contract, continue to fight for the original dream. His non-profit company, the internet software consortium, still controls the software that runs domain service, and in one day, ISC is releasing a patch to bind that blocks this insane change to how the Net works. It's not a political decision, but an engineering one - Verisign broke the internet, Vixie's fixing it.

I don't know how quickly this patch will propigate, but I'm willing to bet it will cover the globe in a matter of weeks for a large percentage of sites - but many users, for years, will have to put up with an ad every single time they mistype a domain name. It's one hell of a penalty for typos.

My thanks to Paul Vixie, a recognisable, responsible face on the internet. The guy still answers his postmaster email!

---

Confessions of someone that wasn't always as responsible

I remember exactly when I got burned out on banner ads. I was sitting in a meeting with a bunch of high muckety mucks and advertising people, all talking about new places to force their messages down people's throats. Finally I lost it, and started babbling about the new IPv13 protocol:

"The new IPv13 protocol replaces IPv4 at layers two and three. After 14-256 ACK packets is a required ADV (advertising) packet, which can be up to 32k bytes in length. Once enabled, it permits advertising over telnet, irc, gopher, and database links. Best of all, it works transparently to the underlying application, and there's talk of an extension for streaming media and flash!"

Now: There is no IPv13 protocol. I had just lost it, completely. I was making it up, riffing on this single, preposterous idea. I'd cracked. I was the technical expert in the room and I couldn't stand what these people wanted to do to the internet. I shudder to think of what would have happened if the same people had been present at the early stages of the internet design - because... because... of the 10 in the room that day, every last one thought IPv13 was a great idea and started incorporating it in their plans. Even the few that should have known better bought the story hook, line, and sinker.

I knew then, that I had to get out of that biz. I went and worked on banner ad blocking software for a while, and then I found something even more wholesome and positive to do. Someday, I thought, I'd write up an april fools day rfc for IPv13, but I'm afraid too many would take it seriously.

---

I know, that somewhere, in Verisign, there's an engineer that helped, unwittingly, break the Net, yesterday. Maybe he or she didn't realize what they were doing. Maybe they didn't care. Maybe the money was good. I just hope that maybe - he or she - realizes their error, and finds a way to sleep at night.

---

You see, it took me ages to figure out what was really bothering me. After I implemented junkbuster on my personal server, I figured, cynically, that banner ads did really serve a purpose - they funded some really great services, and who was I to care if nobody else was as tired of looking at them as I was - if they were, they'd install junkbuster, too.

As the numbers piled up, I stayed on at that job, working towards that day where all the perl code I'd worked on would be replaced by java code I'd never touched. Every day I'd get these glowing reports of: "3 million hits at 10AM - 27 million for the day - Atta Boy - we're doing great - we're gonna go public with a bang!" and it bothered me. I knew that code I'd worked on was annoying some percentage of those internet users - a college student, perhaps, hanging off the edge of the network in Belize, spending their last dime in an internet coffee shop waiting for the ads to finish downloading at 9600 baud, or a doctor trying to do a quick search on yahoo.

The sheer waste of bandwidth that banner ads represented - sometimes 95% of the page download time - there had to be a better way! By the time that code was retired, it had served up over 6 billion banner ads, either I'd bothered everyone on the planet once, or everyone on the internet 60 times!

I carried angst around until I met a guy named "elf" - who'd been at the first meeting at hotwired where they created the darn things, set the format size, and turned them loose. There's guilt for ya. Oddly enough, I felt better after we talked. I realized that the core of dissonance was not just the waste of bandwidth, and of time - but that banner ads marked the decline of Truth found on the internet. Truth is hard to find, as it is... it's why I blog. Anybody but me noticed that Micro$oft has an ad campaign running on every story that mentions Linux these days?

I do understand that banner ads funded the internet expansion, and keep some great services alive. I find that Google's text ads are vastly superior to banner ads, and yet so many services don't use them (cost model? Inertia?). I have hope for micro-transactions, too.

Anyway, as whatever engineers modified DNS for Verisign looks back on their handywork, at the hit counts for mis-typed url after mis-typed url, perhaps they too will come to the same realizations as I did. It takes time to understand an error of this magnitude.

In the meantime, if seeing the ad for mistyped urls bothers you - or your spam load has gone up since monday, like mine has - send an email to verisign with your concerns. Or call them up. Maybe they'll pull the service. Who knows?

Thanks, Paul, for reminding me that there are good men doing something so that Truth, Justice, and the Internet Way may prevail!  ¶ 8:25 AM 0 comments

  Get a grip on traffic conditions with Know Traffic

Greg Retkowski of Raging Network Services, friend, co-author, former roomate, sailing buddy, has just started Know Traffic, a new service that sends you traffic conditions (speed/accident reports) on your route to work to your SMS-enabled cellphone. He's looking for testers... and wrote me

Good Afternoon Mike!

I was thinking to myself, 'self, where could I find a group of vocal, opinionated, technically savvy folks to use my service and give me feedback?. Of course, the blog community! So if you could put a blurb on yer blog, let fellow bloggers with cellphones and commutes know that I'd love to give them free accounts on KnowTraffic.com in exchange for some good feedback on the service. Just have them email greg.

More blurbage:

KnowTraffic is a real-time traffic alerting and reporting system tailored for each subscriber's traffic routes and schedules. It uses SMS text messaging on the existing cellular infrastructure - available anywhere at any time and with no additional special equipment.

Automatically receive accurate and timely traffic information!

Sitting in traffic for hours because of an accident is now completely avoidable. This system takes the pain out of commuting.

Greg took turns kicking my ass in starcraft and finishing the code for it last week - and I beat Know Traffic around a little - I like it. It seems like a great idea that could use a few people banging on it. I remember when we used to have police radio scanners - are they still legal? Anyway - this service is legal, so far as I can tell, so try it out before the guy in the car next over does.

This is ordinarily a commercial-free blog but I owe greg. Dang those pesky little humans, they outproduce us Protoss every time...  ¶ 5:46 PM 0 comments

  The Ball and Chain

Remind me not to buy a house in the middle of a downturn next time, ok? Given how much money I was making last year I figured that my house near Santa Cruz was a safe investment. It took me 4 offers on 4 places - on most of which I was outbid by 10% or more - before I got this one. So... I figured I could always sell the place quickly at a nice little profit if I changed jobs.

Ha. The place has been on the market for what I bought it for for 60 days, as of today. No takers.

I've been out of work for 90 days. Geez, I remember when my phone rang off the hook, all through 97-99, just because recruiters could find my resume via a search engine. I turned down job after job at dumbideas.com before I settled in for Mediaplex's run at going public. They made it in late 99 but the stock went bust in march, leaving a lot of employees in the dust.

I'd been smart, I thought, I stayed on as a contractor and never took any stock - but the hype around the embedded linux market and all the successful offerings (redhat, VA Linux, slashdot) whetted my taste for stock options - so I joined a likely candidate for that pie in the sky.

I stayed on for three years. In the early days it was the classic startup, I got to keep on doing the open source things I had been doing prior, and work on everything - cross-development, it, research, hacking in general - a lot of fun. Later on I headed up the Graphics (& sound) project, hacking on mozilla, dillo, gtk, x11 on all kinds of neat hardware. By the time the 20th board rolled around, though, it was getting old, and I was getting sick and tired, and it was obvious that we wasn't going public any time soon.

When I left I figured, oh, by august something would turn up, and I'd spend the time on the beach working on problems that I had put off working on for 6 hectic years of the boom and bust... and maybe have a little fun, too. I had forgotten why I lived in california and I needed to remember.

I hadn't realized one thing - that I'd become a little overspecialized. There's not a big market for a Linux X11/gtk guy with tons of cross development expertise. As a matter of fact, as best I can tell, there's no market - nationwide I've only seen 8 job postings that use the best of that skill set, and half were in San Diego. 3 years of work, useless. I'd always managed to dodge the personal obsolescence bullet before (although I was a mite worried about NT before Linux took off)

Ah, no problem, I thought. I really like San Diego and San Francisco, I figure when my house sells... I'll... wait... house?

This is one of those "Oh, shiza" moments. The Ball and Chain around my ankle has slipped up to my throat. I could rent the house out, but then where would I live? Jefe's RV is dead, as much as I'd like to pack it up and go south, it isn't going to happen.

Nothing left to do but ride it out, and refresh older parts of my skill set. It hurts to code in C these days anyway - too tedious, I can't sit still for it. SQL seems to work, DHTML (thanks to the blog) makes sense to me now, lessee, what else is marketable? Plenty. Perl, php, sysadm... There's lots more to catch up on - it's going to be a long fall.

Some rules for taht-watchers though...

0) When I contract for a pre-ipo firm, take the job and the options.
1) When I get in the stock market, get out.
2) When I get into a house, sell yours.

When I get out of this hole I'm going to start using the I Ching to make decisions.  ¶ 5:04 PM 0 comments

  On the invention of the Form

In the End, there was BUREAUCRACY.

In the Beginning, there was DARKNESS - but that's besides the point.

They say that God created the universe, fire, sex, fishing and a lot of other neat things but still the poor fool won't admit that paperwork was His fault. He gave Man papyrus, and quill, and said: "Go out unto the world and prosper and create unto it!".

Man, quivering, with inkpot in hand, walked out into the cold new world. Soon afterwards, two men stepped back into back into God's chambers...

"Oh, our Lord?" they cried in unison.
"Speak Unto me, what have you created?" - thundered God.

The first man, a little short, a little bald, a little fat, timidly cleared his throat. "I, uh... O' Great, uh, Sir," said he, gathering strength enough to draw something out importantly from his stained robe, allowing a note of pride to creep into his voice, "Have Invented.... THE FORM!". The other man stepped forward now and spoke unto the echoes - "And I, Lord, have invented TRIPLICATE!" They each then threw handfuls of papryus into the air, clasped hands and danced in a circle (a rite continued to this day, behind closed doors, of course).

God spoke presently, "That's nice. But what do they do?"

"Well you see, " said the first man, "you spend several hours with quill and ink making these little marks on the paper, you know, and then you throw it on the fire to keep warm."

"Ah," the Lord said, "But what do you do for heat in the meantime?"

"That, O most heavenly sir, is where my triplicate comes in, " man Two grinned.... "Now we can have thrice as much heat from one form!" Then the two proto-bureaucrats glanced at each other in pure joy and went into their merry dance again.

Faced with the impeccable logic, God pronouced the thing Good, and sent it out into the earth to prosper, and multiply.

---

Well, Man took 'forms" to heart, quite unlike his usual reaction to God's bounty. Man soon was scribbling and burning, scribbling and burning. It was great fun - and what else can one do to while away the cold hours between dusk and dawn? Sex before the invention of condoms had consequences that scribbling on forms did not. Forms became gifts in the cold season, you'd hand your host a card at a party, it would be ceremoniously lit and everyone present would dive towards the fire to keep warm.

Suddenly, different people in all corners of the world discovered that the 'form' could be a means of communication!! The concept of 'writing' developed. Letters and words, appeared! We wrote left to right, while peoples on the other sides of the globe wrote right to left or up and down. People would read a letter, and THEN ceremoniously dump it in the fire. Now everyone was gleefully passing letters back and forth. It so happened however that some people kept (and burned) more letters than they sent out. They were therefore warmer than those who sent out more letters than they received - who often died of cold. This division of survival rates between 'reader' and 'writer' persists to this day.

Then someone invented green forms and the public went wild! They thought that these forms were so valuable that they could trade them for other things like food, water, or women. This 'green stuff' was so valuable in fact, that it couldn't be burned, and quite a few people froze to death before the advent of Technology. God is thought to have died during this period as more people worshipped 'money' than Him; money was so much more fun than He had ever been, and His hopes that money was only a fad were demolished.

His last words: "Brother, can you spare a dime?"

Poof!

Soon afterwards Bureaucracy covered the earth, and like the darkness that preceded it, it was boundless, but it was not - without form.

---

I wrote this story Dec 20th, 1982... the commentary on it was "Very interesting! But it really wasn't what I wanted. What are the chances of getting that essay, too?" Very cold of the teacher, that was. She did give me an A-, but I would have prefered a little criticism on the writing itself, but that's the story of my childhood - I never could deliver quite what the teacher wanted.

The plight of the writer vs the reader remains - except: in the electronic age, both parties keep warmer by running faster computers, and use gas or electric heat in addition. Light is provided not by God, but by a carbon filament.

The original purpose of the form is retained in some parts of our language. Arguments held via email are called flame wars...

I think I've proven that: writing sheds more heat than light.
And that: I should really go back to writing code for a living.   ¶ 4:34 PM 0 comments

  Planetary sciences, Science Fiction, Star Trek and Instant Gratification (lack thereof)

Interest in space exploration has, for many, died the death of a thousand episodes of "Star Trek". The motto: to explore strange new worlds... to seek out other civilizations... to boldly go where no man has gone before has soured science for those suckled up to television's tit or wacking off on the web.

The real world - real science - hasn't the instant gratification that we expect no matter how fascinating the universe remains. Exploring the real world takes patience, dedication, and thought - all things in short supply in our ADD'd world.

I spent two days at last week's planetary sciences conference in Monterey. Fascinating paper after fascinating paper was presented on every topic of the universe. Everyone I met was enthusiastic, interested, brilliant, with a name number one on google. Steven Ostro was awarded the Kuiper Prize. Ostro did amazing things with radar on imaging the solar system. He gave a great speech summarizing all that - talking about about everything from early radar to the space probe Muses-C.

I came home early friday night, outlined a half dozen talks I wanted to write about, and checked the news sources to see if anyone else had scooped me. The outlines grew longer, and longer. I kept checking the news sources. Nothing... Nothing... no coverage at all. Cool, I thought, maybe I will get something into somewhere....

Passive voice attacked my writing ("was presented","was enthusiastic","had done") - and I'm still shaking off the assault.

I reached a stumbling block on my first piece - my notes were unreadable - and I went back to the website to see if that talk was available so I could make sure I wouldn't make a mistake. No luck. Only the abstracts are available. An abstract is a real tease, I want the conclusions right here in front of me so I can think and write about them coherently and... no way...

I realized that of the twenty-something talks I'd seen, only 3 were on the web. Fine, fine, I remembered one talk's title off the top of my head - so I searched altavista for: Dynamics of the Kuiper Belt and the origin of the Planets. Altavista - literally - told me to go fish.

I found it on google, but I have to say that the real strength of this presentation was Hal Levison himself. I would have liked to have had an mp3...

I kept checking the news outlets... No coverage. No coverage. Hmmm. I kept writing, but my pace slowed to a crawl, and I got discouraged. Most meetings I've attended recently A) - I could look up things up on the internet in real time - and B) I have a copy of the presentation right in front of me.

There were few laptops in the audience. There wasn't working wireless except within a few feet of the computer cafe'. I didn't see any recording devices in use except at the plenary sessions. The sound-guy said they hadn't asked for a tape recording off the board, either. I guess that electronic distribution of anything in planetary science but the abstract remains the province of for pay services, and the researcher.

The value of making recordings is outweighed by... what?

Three days later - 13 stories on google. Maybe there's a link?

So, anyway, today Spider Robinson posted an editorial on the decline of science fiction, and doc talked about a link to a study that unsurprisingly found that (three otherwise random events in the web/blogosphere)... and I figured I might as well get the above, and this, off my chest, before I struggle to turn another abstract into english.

Spider wrote:

SF's central metaphor and brightest vision, lovingly polished and presented as entertainingly as we knew how to make it, has been largely rejected by the world we meant to save. Because I was born in 1948, the phrase I'll probably always use to indicate something is futuristic is "space age."

About the only part of our shared vision of the future that actually came to pass was the part where America just naturally took over the world. But while it's prepared to police (parts of) a planet, the new Terran Federation is so far not interested enough to even glance at another one.

Inconceivable wealth and limitless energy lie right over our heads, within easy reach, and we're too dumb to go get them[..]

  ¶ 1:52 PM 0 comments