i was going to write an eloquent, witty and moving essay about the past and upcoming year, but after some thought i decided instead to get a headstart on one of my resolutions for next year by spending some time with my wife and dogs with a bottle of wine and a few movies.

<raises glass>here's to keeping the simple things simple. have a happy and safe new year's eve and a wonderful new year.</raises glass>

wow. Life begins at 100 Mbps! is an amazing bit of analysis which demonstrates that the former cto of british telecom is a smarty. if you'd like an inside peak into how the broadband situation got to such a sorry state then read the whole thing. twice. it also points towards a vision of a future that should sound familiar:

"So how are we going to advance? I think we have been here before. Back in the 1940s USA TV companies couldn't find an economic means of providing signals to outlying communities. So people clubbed together to build towers and antenna systems, and wired their houses to realize Community Antenna TV. This was so successful that the expanded systems became the Cable systems of today.

In a similar manner, youngsters now frustrated by the lack of bandwidth are linking homes with CAT5 LAN wiring strewn across gardens. Schools are buying 802.11 wireless-LAN cards to create their own networks at a much lower cost than building wiring schemes. There is a message here for the network companies, and a huge opportunity. If they don't provide the bandwidth demanded by rapidly advancing terminal technologies, people will just set to and provide their own. Hotels, schools, coffee shops and places of work are starting to look like the phone boxes of the 21st Century. People are gathering there to satisfy their craving for wide-bandwidth, which isn't a 56Kbit/s or 2Mbit/s dribble, but orders of magnitude more."

i'm not sure exactly what it means, but it sounds like as good a resolution as any. maybe it'd be easier than quitting all those other bad habits that i've accumulated over the years.

while a few of of the photos are taken by people who went to the steven spielberg school of emotional manipulation, many of the shots from msnbc year in pictures are extraordinary.

it might just be me but it seems that the holidays put a much bigger damper on the blogging activity this year. i guess everyone's out enjoying friends and family. bah! well, at least glenn fleishman has a few interesting things to say about how networks mature:

"I believe my reports have been mistaken for extolling Boingo qua Boingo: rather, I am excited about the message that Boingo sends. Wi-Fi is open for business. Wireless ISPs are willing to cut the kinds of deals necessary to create more traffic on their networks to reach, ultimately, a repayment of their investment and actual profit."

while we haven't seen nearly as much snow as buffalo , western michigan is still getting a good amount of accumulation thanks to the lake effect - over thirty inches have fallen since sunday with more expected through new years' day.

whoa. time is flying by. i hope everyone had a happy x.mas, if you're into that type of thing. you can all rest assured that the universe is continuing to engage in shenanigans at my expense. on christmas day, while happily enjoying a fine ritz cracker, i cracked a filling in a molar and lost about 70 percent of my tooth (i have one and only one really, really deep cavity).

thanks to modern dental technology, i got a quick repair job this morning for a whole 36 dollars. it involved injecting some gel on my tooth which polymerized in the presence of UV light, so no exposed nerve endings for me. whoohoo.

i usually downplay the fact that the literal translation in inuit of my last name, snowdeal, is "one who deals or makes snow". simply put, this means i can control the moisture content in the air. of course, in the winter this translates into the ability to "call forth" snow.

i don't talk about it much because it seems like one of those things that doesn't seem so special. just look at who my role models were growing up. sure, iceman was o.k., but aquaman pretty much ruined any chance that water-based superpowers would gain widespread acceptance. granted, aquaman, just talked with the fish and didn't really have anything to do with altering moisture content, but that's the power of guilt-by-association.

besides the lack of any strong role model, there was also the big blizzard of '78 in downeast maine. i was 8 and catholic and the nuns had plenty to say about fire and brimstone and remembering what happened to the women in salem. so, since having the fear of being turned into a pillar of salt, i haven't been motivated to put my powers to use, save for the occasional mild humid day here or a flurry there.

if you live in the midwest, then i don't have to tell you how pathetic an excuse for winter we've been experiencing and last night i decided that enough was enough and that i'd probably escape divine retribution with an inch or two of white stuff - nothing fancy-schmancy, just enough to give a capra-esque flavor to christmas eve.

so how did it turn out? well, i should have taken refresher course on the best laid plans and good intentions, since i awoke this morning to about 4 inches of snow and we might just end up with 8-12 inches by the end of christmas day.

yup, the dang lake-effect moisture has turned a little into a lot.

cory doctorow makes some optimistic predictions in 2002: The Carpetbaggers Go Home :

" The next generation of Internet entrepreneurs will be people who understand this. They'll be working to provide unreliable services that work in concert with other unreliable services to provide a service that works on average, but not predictably at any given moment. They'll challenge the received wisdom that customers are hothouse flowers, expensive to acquire and prone to wilting at the first sign of trouble. These entrepreneurs will build services that are so compelling that they'll be indispensable, worth using even if the service flakes out when you want it the most."

Working Without Copyleft:

"It's possible to be an ardent supporter of open source development and not be a fan of copyleft and the General Public License. In this article the authors -- software developers -- relate how they came to embrace copyleft, became disillusioned with its limitations, and consequently turned away from it."

as if any of my family needed further proof that i'm a superdork.

i'm in grand rapids, michigan visiting relatives for the holidays and this year i thought i'd do something special for myself. yes, that's right - i brought along my 802.11 access point, so that this year i can enjoy the in-laws' big screen tv, eat all their junk food >and< surf the internet, untethered.

just add eggnog and you've got all the ingredients for the perfect holiday season.

i agree with nearly all the predictions made in Carriers moving to 3G alternative in 2002 :

"THE WIRELESS STRATEGIES to stimulate the adoption of mobile data among enterprises that were hatched in the boardrooms of major telecommunications carriers in 2001 are likely to take hold in 2002.

Chief among those strategies will be a move by carriers like Sprint and VoiceStream -- and possibly AT&T Wireless -- to offer an alternative to their current 3G (third-generation) plans via low-cost, high-performance access to data over Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11b/a) solutions."

no, no. nothing going on here. and i'm not lobbing the open source research community into the annotated bookmark bin :

"In the spirit of open source, we are attempting to establish a community in which information will be freely exchanged, so that we may further the understanding of open source and its implications outside the realm of software development. We invite researchers to post their papers on open source and free software here, and to add themselves to the research directory, so that our community can become steadily larger and more comprehensive."

whoohoo! the rss feeds are now available on syndic8 and i updated pixie, who now, when asked politely, parses the rss feeds and relays the latest snowdeal posts.

so, if you have a jabber client handy, then put pixie@snowdeal.org on your roster and say "hello" to find out what she knows about.

oh yeah, i tried to get her to relay the latest metafilter posts, but she's a bit finicky and didn't like the mefi rss file.

i guess i'll have to work on making her a bit more forgiving.

the latest SMART Letter contains some absolutely right-on quotes from roxane googin who is an iconoclast and a smarty:

""The goodness of the new network on one hand is a nightmare economically on the other. It is a paradox. And just like oil, society is going to benefit the most if bandwidth is the cheapest. But if bandwidth is so cheap, no one is going to be there to build the bandwidth. So what I saw happening is that the cat had been let out of the bag, the genie was out of the bottle, and people were building these networks and we were headed for this huge train wreck whereby capital would start pulling away from this industry once they realized that this was going to happen."

so, just in case there was any confusion as to how you can buy chicken for 89 cents per pound, i present exhibit a :

"Tyson Foods Inc., the world's largest poultry processor, two of the firm's executives and four former managers have been indicted on charges of conspiracy to smuggle illegal immigrants to work at its U.S. plants as a way to boost profits, the Justice Department said Wednesday."

for that one other person out there that might care, the groove mindmap tool has been updated for v1.3:

"This is a flexible brainstorming outline tool, which you can share with your friends. It's easy to add new items and edit them; then you can drag items around the screen to arrange your thoughts and connect them in different ways."

speaking of unfinished projects [ see previous post. ]. there's not one, but two, jabber books in the works.

Programming Jabber: Extending XML Messaging:

"Programming Jabber offers developers a chance to learn and understand the Jabber technology and protocol from an implementer's point of view. Detailed information of each part of the Jabber protocol is introduced, explained, and discussed in the form of mini-projects, or simple and extended examples in Perl, Python, and Java. This book provides the foundation and framework for developers to hit the ground running, and is the essential book on Jabber."

"Enables developers to build their own Jabber-based messaging systems quickly and easily. Examples are in Visual Basic and make use of JabberCOM. Readers will be able to create their own instant messaging clients for use with AOL, MSN, ICQ and other popular chat clients. Includes coverage of installing and running your own Jabber Server."

back in september when i was playing around with the topic mapping software touchgraph , i had plans. big plans.

i was going to try to begin storing metadata about posts indexed by the blogger post ID [ made easier by the emergence of the blogger api ], so i could do all kinds of fancy, schmancy visualization of the relationships between posts. well, like a lot of my big ideas, it never made it past the lame prototype that i threw together.

well, chris langreiter mocks my procrastination with his excellent vanilla-vista :

" vanilla-vista is the umbrella term for quite a few ideas regarding visualizing the space and its (link) structure. In its first incarnation, it's basically TouchGraph plus a few extensions."

the mozilla 0.97 branch is available for your browsing pleasure.

i'm playing with it now and despite some recent instability issues in the nighly builds, things seem quite nice. apparently the 0.97 branch is slated for "official" release on friday.

things keep getting better and better.

Information Interaction Design: A Unified Field Theory of Design :

"An interface to any experience, whether technological, physical, or conceptual, must have a message and a reason for communicating it and begin with the creation of meaning and the development of appropriate types of interactivity. These decisions drive the use of sensorial media to present the experience to the audience in an appropriate and supportive way. Addressing one factor without the others can contribute to an experience that is incomplete or unbalanced."

dang. now, i know that we aren't fighting with .38 specials and i'm not normally awestruck by weaponry, but the ac-130 aircraft is devastatingly impressive.

"The Vietnam era had the "Puff the Magic Dragon" Gun ships. The latest version of the weapon is the AC-130 with its 105 mm cannons and Gattling guns. Computer controls allow for concentrated targeting while the aircraft lumbers in circles. This time lapse photo shows the accuracy, as every fifth round is a tracer! Guaranteed to scare the shit out of anyone within 10 miles."

XML and Modern CGI Applications :

"Borrowing heavily from the Model-View-Controller pattern, CGI::XMLApplication provides a modular, XML-based alternative to traditional CGI scripting. The typical CGI::XMLApplication project consists of three parts: a small executable script that provides access to the application, a logic module that implements various handler methods that are called in response to the current state of the application, and one or more XSLT stylesheets that are used, based on application-state, to transform the data returned by the module into something a browser can display to its user."

perception and self perception. yesterday i went to the eye doctor and found out that, while i'm not going blind, my eyesite has taken a turn for the worse. and not just a little turn for the worse. the optometrist was kind enough to point out that, in the year-and-a-half since my last eye examine, my eyesite has degraded to the point that i would no longer be able to pass the illinois driver's exam. with my contacts in place. and if that weren't enough positive news, he also pointed out, in an oddly cheerful tone that my right eye, "...seems to have a little trouble focusing." jeez louis.

in not-so-related new - via nick denton i discovered the online polical test political compass and discovered that, while i might perceive myself to be a centrist with mild liberal leanings, that i'm actually a rather strong liberal-libertarian [ -5.63 liberal/ -6.26 libertarian]. and that's after self-moderating a few of my answers. i'm honestly surprised by the results. i guess it might go a long ways towards explaining why i'm the odd man out during family holiday dinner discussions.

so, everybody knows that knowledge management is over used and under understood, but that doesn't stop the latest ibm systems journal from having a worthwhile mix of articles. they lose points for the vacuous intro blurb:

"The business environment is rapidly changing, and intellectual capital is a key asset of the enterprise. By managing its knowledge assets, an enterprise can improve its adaptability and increase its chances for survival. The papers in this issue of the IBM Systems Journal deal with various aspects of knowledge management: supporting technologies, products, and social aspects."

despite the goofy title, the xml revolution is a pretty beefy tutorial:

"This slide collection provides an introduction and overview of XML, Namespaces, XInclude, XML Base, XLink, XPointer, XPath, DTD, XML Schema, DSD, XSLT, XQuery, DOM, SAX, and JDOM including selected links to more information about each topic."

regular visitors will now notice that i started an ex machina rss feed [ it's also available for all the "sections" ]. undoubtably, there will be some goofyness that will occur, so any feedback is appreciated. because of my general disregard for any rules of punctuation and grammar, i had to go with the somewhat-unelegant approach of just chomping the descriptions at a defined number of characters. and i'm none-too-pleased with the current placement of the xml icon, but i spent far too long debating about it. hi. ho.

so, if you're aggregation then start aggregatin'.

thanks brig's linking to the social security administration's name distribution data, i now have an answer to one of the questions that tends to keep me awake at night - just exactly how popular is my first name?

i mean, i've known an "eric" or two over my life and many people i know claim that they've also happened upon other "eric's", but how close has the name come to capturing the most popular name award? inquiring minds now know.

i messaged the ranking data to output a "popularity index" which shows how close the name has come to capturing the top spot over the past century. sadly, the name appears to have reached it's popularity zenith in the 70's and has been steadily losing ground over the decades.

it may be a statistical fluke, but the data appear to show a decrease in popularity from the 1900's to the 1910's - perhaps the the name was actually coming off a huge wave of popularity in the late 1800's? yeah, i'll bet that's it.

but alas, it looks like there's no hope from recovering anytime soom from the hegemony of jacob, michael, josua and matthew. and who says we're a nation of infidels - by the looks of the popular names, we're a nice lot of old-school, god-fearin' folks.

perhaps not surprisingly the economist has one of the most cogent analysis of the enron fiasco :

"That points to the most ironic twist of all in this morality tale. Mr Lay had always described himself as “passionate about markets”. That fervent belief in the invisible hand led him to spot one of the most powerful trends of the past decade: the deregulation of commodity markets. He would often forge ahead fearlessly into newly deregulating markets, bully recalcitrant regulators into speeding reforms and develop clever financial vehicles that pressed to the very edge of the law. In the end, though, Enron appears to have overstepped the mark. The resultant backlash comes as a bitter reminder that the market forces that Mr Lay once worshipped can prove a double-edged sword."

from the "because-you-can" department: Running Linux on the Apple Airport Base Station :

"This page gives information about how to run the LINUX operating system on the Apple Airport or Lucent RG-1000 base station. LINUX (or any other OS or standalone program) is booted over a network using the public (GPL) etherboot software."

finally! proof of something that parents everywhere have intuited since, well, the beginning of modern times - that adolescents haven't quite figured out how to use their whole brain:

"It appears that early human ancestors grew up very much like today's great apes - taking about 12 years to reach adulthood.

Modern humans on the other hand take much longer - up to 20 years.

The difference seems to allow us to learn how to use our bigger brains."

it seems particularly appropriate that my brand spanking new copy of building wireless community networks came in the mail today, since everyone seems to be talking about the open spectrum.

so, i didn't get a chance to post anything for link and think . and not because, as you might suspect i was busy drinking cheap beer while watching wrestling.

no, as a matter of fact, my wife and i travelled to grand rapids, michigan to attend a party thrown by my sister-in-law who happens to be a lesbian and who also happens to be happily antipicating the birth of a child being carried by her partner.

this all says something. i'm just not sure what.

today, it's a two-fer pilfered from jy .

from brent simmons' weblog come words of wisdom which are simple, true and should form the basis of daily meditation:

" It’s been said by other people, but it’s worth repeating: the best programmers these days know how to use the Web to solve problems."

"XMLmind XML Editor (XXE for short) is a full-fledged XML 1.0 editor featuring a word processor-like view (CSS2 styled). It has been created to make technical persons comfortable and productive at editing XML documents and XML data."

how could i have known that while innocently enjoying evan's latest ramblings i would stumble on a technology so important that it could change millions and millions of lives?

ladies and gentleman. behold the telezapper :

"The TeleZapper takes advantage of the telemarketers' automatic dialing equipment and uses it against them. The TeleZapper sends out a signal that your phone is disconnected. By "fooling" the auto dialer into recording your number as disconnected, it removes your name from telemarketers' calling lists. Sales calls are virtually stopped altogether, but all other calls get through trouble-free. Telemarketers are trapped by their own technology!"

my mozilla sidebar has vanished. i wonder why it left in such an abrupt manner. was it something i said?