"The carrier wave has been tuned at huge cost to deliver a single message: you are not free, you desire nothing but the products we produce, you have no world but the world we give you."

via matt jones i discovered that scott andrew has started a "Google It!" feature that initiates a google search on the topic of that particular post.

it's funny that for over a year-and-a-half, i've had a similar "find related" function on the other sections of my site, which is "powered" by google and it never once occured to me to use the title of the article on a general search, instead of trying to find related things by url. i've tried it with a couple of articles and it's immediately far more fun and useful.

speaking of google - who knew that they've been working on a distributed computing toolbar client? certainly not me. [ via webvoice ]

i've been making a conscious effort to not add my two cents to the growing mountain of blog commentary on blog commentary on blog journalism on blog commentary. this is partly because i really am not going to add anything more or less insightful than chris locke or meg or jason , but it's also because the whole thing feels like it portends a change that's not healthy.

i like visiting sites that feel personal after days and weeks of reading. i don't enjoy reading post after post after post of navel-gazing that seem like herculean attempts to obfuscate dvorak's "you just don't understand" straw man argument.

so having said that i was trying to stay out of the fray, why did i decide to jump in? because of a coincidence.

just by chance, i had to explain to somebody today what exactly this whole weblog thing was. a co-worker had visited my site and had seen, via my outbound links, that there are a "whole bunch of people doing something similar", which struck him as odd.

"no, actually that's the point," i said in a failed attempt at clarification. "i mean, they aren't exactly the same."

"you know - it's like knowledge sharing and group forming networks and personal branding all rolled into one tidy package." this was getting me nowhere.

so i decided to go with a specific example. "there's this librarian named jenny and she kicks ass. even more than the "rewind librarian" , which is wierd because they are both from chicago. anyway, jenny has a quality weblog and that's what makes it worthwhile. people sharing. with a tool like radio she goes from zero to a worldwide audience in no time flat. it's like this one guy said, strangers and their utterances are the stuff of the web ." as you might guess, i'm only digging the hole of incomprehension deeper and deeper. and that's when i heard the little voice in my head.

"you just don't understand."

"crap." i thought, "i've become blogger moonie."

chagrined , i went back and decided to find a little solice from uncle dave and found two impossibly perfect links. first, i guess i can find some comfort in the fact that no less a luminary than dan bricklin also has attempted to do some explaining of the whole weblog thing to the uninitiated and, not surprisingly, does a much better job than myself. but far, far more perfectly - dave exemplifies the spirit of blogging:

"I gotta say this. Having a librarian in our midst is fantastic. I worshipped librarians as a kid. They are so happy to help, and so damned smart!"

eppure si muove

blogzilla and forwarding address: osx are two new and interesting blogs. one is about something that occupies a fair amount of my time and another thing that looks like it will likely take up more of my time in the future.

just in case you're not the observant type, with a bunch of help from matt i've got some snazzy new font action happening on the site. how about that house gothic 23? smooth.

brent ashley's blogchat is pretty interesting and a great example of the type of stuff that can be done with remote scripting. i've thrown up a quick beta blogchat [doesn't work with netscape 4.x], so you might be able to catch me there. i've got a few ideas for some interesting blogchat twists, and if they work out, i may deploy blogchat more widely on the site.

in case you haven't heard - rob flickenger of nocat and "building communiy wireless networks" fame was recently hospitalized for serious injuries inflicted from a fall from a roof while installing an antenna. i really, truly wish rob a speedy recovery.

speaking of rob, i ran across sputnik recently and wondered if they were using nocat as a foundation. well, it turns out - they are and it sounds like they've made some nice enhancements:

"Yep, our new company, Sputnik, has created an all-in-one Smart AP (uses the HostAP drivers for Linux), router, dynamic firewall (iptables-based) with bandwidth shaping, and a modified NoCatAuth captive portal that authenticates with our backend authentication, settlement and billing systems. It doesn't currently authenticate against RADIUS, Active Directory, or NDS just yet, these are some additional features that we're building into the backend as we speak."

"Oh, and by the way, all of the gateway code is open source, including the changes and improvements we made to NoCatAuth (well _duh_, it's GPL'd code)."

nice sounding stuff. dave sifry and other linuxcare co-founders are behind the recently launched company.

i haven't made up my mind about the proposed fees for webcasts. while it's certainly not good news for businesses like live365, it's not completely devastating for "microbroadcasters". if i pull out my trusty calculator, i can see that if you're a "pop" microbroadcaster you'll play around 14 songs an hour. according to the "per use" fee structure for commercial webcasters, this translates to around 2 cents per hour per listener and for a non-commercial webcaster you'll have to anty up 7 tenths of a cent per hour per listener. even if you assume that most microbroadcasters are somehow deemed to fit into the "commercial" category and can somehow muster a thousand listeners per broadcast, then you're talking $20 per hour, which is not nothing, but isn't a deal killer either - if you're running a weekly show. then again, if you get more than a thousand listeners and you want to run a nightly show then the costs begin to skyrocket. hmmm. i guess i'll have to let the dust settle a bit before i commence with a nightly webcast.

after 3 years of adequate performace, i think it's time to heed this sage advice:

"First, just come to terms with the fact that Windows 95 and 98 will, in normal use, slowly pollute themselves into broken-ness."

i'm going with john robb's assessment of the affordable os-less walmart pc. i think the analysts are missing the boat. i'm in the market for a throw-away home lan server and i'd probably buy one if i had more information on the parts and pieces to ensure compatability with linux.

watch as is goes from bad to worse for paypal . i know that people have been predicting the death of paypal for awhile, but this is like watching a slow-motion train wreck.

o.k. i take it back. the message i got yesterday about evergreen wasn't odd at all. not compared to the email that i got today:

"Did you see Betty Cutter on 48 hours the other night? Wasn't she your professor at Evergreen. I know Shoshanah worked with her too. They had some story about the guy that they called the Hollywood Bank Robber. Do you remember him. It turns out that he was a Greener many years ago. He used to make crystal meth in the chemistry labs at Evergreen before he turned to bank robbery. He was living in a tree house in Olympia the whole time we were there. It's nice to see Greeners making the news. He's dead by the way. I think the cops shot him. Anyway, I just thought you should know."

wow. high wierdness. i knew a guy who lived in a teepee, but i don't recall meeting "hollywood" who apparently lived in a tree house.

i guess maybe you have to be an alumni of that bastion of educational liberalism known as the evergreen state college to understand just how odd it is to receive an e.mail with the following pronouncement:

"Log on to alumni-owned radio station MIXX 96 to hear the Evergreen men's basketball conference championship games."

when i was there we didn't have no damn sports. well, i guess there was a really informal rugby team. i mean, this is an institution whose mascot is a giant mollusc and whose motto is omni extaris, Latin for "Let it all hang out." sports? feh!

over at the most striking thing about matt's observation about mp3s and the recording industry is that it even needs to be said at all:

"Everyone with a computer I know uses them, rips them from their CDs, and shares them with others. Napster (and later on, Kazaa) built massive worldwide networks based on the sharing of these files, spreading terabytes of files to millions of users. And yet, you can't walk into a store anywhere in America and buy a physical form of media embedded with mp3s."

"Given the ubiquity of mp3s among consumers, the continued rise in popularity of the format despite anything that's been put in place to stop them, and the millions of dollars being spent on mp3 encoding/decoding software and hardware, I no longer think the RIAA operates solely on fear. At this point, they're simply running on stupidity."

and yet it does need to be said.

it's hard to believe that it has been nearly two years since infoworld ran with the wonderfully straightforwardly-titled Napster sends a message to music industry: 'Your customers aren't happy' and the recording industry still can't seem to get a clue. just look at the facts, ma'am - you're spending alot of money attempting to kill a messenger which is only getting stronger.

over at skippingdotnet there's a nice little story about actually realizing the primary benefit of open source software:

"Where I am headed, what I wanted to share with you today, is an example of people working with Open Source software and seeing benefits from the actual Open Source-osity of the software. Not just benefits from the fact that the software is free, nor just benefits from the fact that the software works extremely well, but benefits from the fact that the source code is available for people to do with as they please."

not that i'm trying to stop you from going out and purchasing programming jabber, but a reviewer's copy on the manuscript is online. i was procrastinating on purchasing the book, but based on the usefulness of the chapter on the jabber.xml file, i'm picking-up a copy quick-like.

Easy 802.11b Wireless for Small Businesses highlights the conundrum facing anyone attempting to make money from 802.11 connectivity - it's so darn cheap and easy that it's hard to justify not offering it for free:

"One of the first questions a business owner needs to answer is “Why am I providing wireless access for my customers?” If the answer is to find a way to make a bit of money, then obviously, a charge is in order. However, given that it costs so little to provide wireless access, most businesses should probably look at providing this as an amenity for the customers, just as the furniture and the pictures on the wall are meant to be. It should be a perk that encourages customers to come back. Often these are referred to as "value-added" services."

and relatedly, "tapping in freely" gives nocat some good press - complete with surprisingly agnostic comments from ISPs:

""The intended use is for the single home or business," said Fletcher Cook, a spokesman for Pacific Bell. "While our policy does not prohibit this, it is not the intended use. It increases vulnerability and security, but we don't see this as widespread problem."

Dane Jasper, president of Sonic.net, a Santa Rosa Internet service provider, even applauds the network organizers' ingenuity."

TextAds:

"TextAds are a simple, polite, and inexpensive alternative to banners and other online advertising. TextAds provide all of the benefits of other forms of online advertising without the annoying downsides."

"TextAds can be run on any Linux based server running PHP, Apache, and MySQL."

[ via jy ]

simson garfinkel's latest column for mit tech review has lots of sage advice for anyone attempting to start a wireless service:

"One of the most surprising things we learned from launching our Internet startup was that providing wireless Internet service is really cheap. What ended up bankrupting the company were all the ancillary services we had to develop—credit card billing, technical support, the corporate Web site and the various security measures we had to put in place to prevent unauthorized use of the network by nonsubscribers. Organizations that aren’t trying to make money providing wireless Internet service can do away with all of these measures and offer the service for free.

This isn’t just some techno-utopian notion—it’s today’s reality."

so, if your site is the sole site preventing a search term for qualifying for a googlewhack - as is the case with "WLAN Aspen Boingo Benchmark" - what is that?

802.11b Homebrew Antenna Shootout:

"My plan was to get relative performance measurements for various designs (including mine) of homebrew antennas for 802.11b wireless networks. To do this, I setup a wireless link and changed only the antenna- recording each antennas' performance under identical conditions."

The results surprised me! In our test, the Flickenger Pringles can did a little better than my modified Pringles design. Both did no better than the Lucent omnidirectional. Now this is just on raw signal strength, noise rejection due to directivity still makes a directional antenna a better choice for some uses even if there is no gain benefit. The waveguides all soundly trounced the Pringles can designs. I mean they stomped them into the ground on signal strength - as much as 9 dBm better."

from the for-better-or-worse-you-can't-escape-the-google-cache department, secretary of the army, thomas e. white's resume before and after deemphasis of his tenure as an enron executive.

[ via rc3]

it's always a joy to see more words of wisdom from joel:

"If there's one thing every junior consultant needs to have injected into their head with a heavy duty 2500 RPM DeWalt Drill, it's this: Customers Don't Know What They Want. Stop Expecting Customers to Know What They Want. It's just never going to happen. Get over it."

i'm not too proud to confess that when i was a young chap i wanted to be waylon jennings . at the time, i couldn't think of a better gig than singing the intro to dukes of hazzard because surely that meant he was in like flynn with daisy duke. rip waylon.

from the one-can-always-hope department, the wireless village spec was released today. maybe now that the spec is here we can all live in the interoperability promised land. ahem.

speaking of IM interoperability, dj has a new article up from programming jabber detailing how to build a currency conversion bot, which i may have to build into my personal rosterbot, pixie [ nevermind that i can't actually remember the last time i needed to do a currency conversion - but maybe i just don't get out enough and i don't really think pixie cares anyway]:

"Through the power of Perl, we've now given ChatBot the facility to perform currency conversions for us. Wonderful. And what's more, we've not at all been slack in our pursuit of the three key values: we were impatient enough to want a currency-conversion function without having to write one from scratch, we were lazy enough to do as little as possible with the exchange.pl script once we found it, as well as being lazy enough to want a bot to perform the conversions for us in the first place, and we had enough hubris to combine code from infobot and ChatBot (after all, "hubris" has the same etymological root as "hybrid," and implies an "insult" to both parties being combined) to get the job done."

i wonder if the newly resurrected jabber sms transport will support 2-way messaging. it doesn't look like simplewire supports supports it either, which is a drag because combine things like the currency exchange bot and 2-way sms and instant messaging integration and you're getting into killer app land:

"Myriad challenges face developers who want to undertake wireless projects today. While the rosy glow of a wireless future beckons, working with widespread technologies like the Short Messaging System (SMS) requires a different mindset. In this article, Wes Biggs outlines the difficulties facing developers tackling wireless today, and explains how SMS-based solutions could have greater killer app potential than many realize."

well, o.k. maybe not killer app land land, but maybe compelling app territory. FWIW, i think 2-way sms support is important, because i just don't think that many people are going to want to close the loop by using the phone like the ibm folks suggest.

sadly there's no permalinks, because certain "olympic" posts from bryan really are begging to be shared and cherished:

"At the end of the pre-show, I thought nothing would top the three, steam-heated, metal tubes that run above the urinals so that one may warm one's hands before one grabs one's Johnson. This is Utahian ingenuity at its best."

[ via ev ]

whoohoo, i've got a superfine logo! hopefully you'll enjoy it.

it took quit a bit of css and div finangling, but i managed to get everything positioned sans tables or spacer gifs. it has been tested on ie5.5, nn4.7x and mz0.98+ on windows and ie5 and mz0.98 on mac. everything looked satisfactory, except for some minor overlap in the title and the navigation bar on ie5 for mac. it should still be useable.

if you have any troubles or just want to tell me how much the logo sucks, then ping me.

over on the ptp list, there's a suggestion to put a wiki clone on the nocat box which manages the "captive" portal:

"One of my plans for a long time has been to deploy a wiki/weblog/forum (something along those lines) on each nocat box to act as a neighborhood forum. Given the geographic boundries of wireless I think that this could be a pretty powerful tool. In the Lucky Lab it could be used for customers to chat, for the Lab to post specials. In a neighborhood it could be used for neighboorhod events (block parties, news letters etc). What would it be used for in pioneer square?"

the suggestion of a wiki is timely, since the jspwiki is now sporting an xmlrpc interface. and it's fun to contemplate what other things you could throw in the box - perhaps caching and a jabber server? hmmm.

don't mind me - just giving a few links the ol' heave ho into the annotated bookmark bin.

Links & JavaScript Living Together in Harmony :

"It seems there's not a week that goes by that someone isn't asking about how to properly execute some JavaScript from a link."

"I haven't covered all the possibilities or reasons for calling JavaScript within links. However, I hope you've seen that there are ways to do so and have the page degrade as gracefully as possible."

safemail :

"SafeMail lets you put your address on the page using javascript's document.write method. With this, your user's browser displays your email link exactly as if you had coded it with HTML, except you can achieve this effect without at any point putting the string of your email address in the code. This means spambots find nothing, and you stay clear of spam."

a search engine in perl :

"“Slow down, coach,” some of you may be grumbling. “I’m a web designer, not a programmer. It took me some work just to get a handle on the DOM. I thought this was supposed to be a introduction!” Well, calm down, even a little programming experience is enough for what we are about to attempt.

We are going to build a quick ’n easy search engine for your site; we won’t be going anywhere near the complexity of a major search engine like Google or Yahoo. In fact, we won’t need to do anything more complex than write a few calls to functions already provided for us by modules."

jason has spurred an interesting conversation on personal taxonomies:

"I need some advice. I've been trying to develop a personal schema/taxonomy** and I don't really know where to start. I'm not looking for tools or anything like that, just some general advice. I guess another way to put the question is: if you had to organize all the stuff that a person comes into contact with, how would you do it? Do you have any experience in doing this, say, within the context of The Brain, a Wiki, or categories for a personal weblog? How did you go about doing it? Got any advice?"

i've never really found anything that is flexible enough to justify the extra work; however, something like chris langreiter's vanilla vista comes oh-so-close.

i'm getting old. i'm not grumpy-old-man old - yet. but i'm getting old and i now have incontrovertible proof.

first, there's the 20th anniversary of ET. in my mind, ET was released awhile ago. maybe i'll even grant that it was released a long time ago, but not twenty years ago. there is only one conclusion that can be drawn from this fact. sooner, rather than later, things that seemed like they happened only yesterday will, in fact, have occurred 22, or 25 years ago. and in what will seem like a few days from now, ET will be celebrating its 30th anniversay and i'll be surprised, since it was only yesterday that it was 20 years old.

second. i swear it was the day before yesterday that i was listening to husker du and maybe it was yesterday afternoon that i bought new sugar albums [sic], but apparently it couldn't have been yesterday. indeed, i must not have followed anything bob mould has done lately. you know how i know that bob has completely dropped off my radar? because i was shocked - shocked - to find out that he has been working behind the scenes in the wrestling industry. for quiet a while.

and the third bit of evidence that i'm getting older? i found no zero humor in gene simmons' obnoxious banter with terri gross on fresh air.

sure, newsblaster is cool for summarizing newsfeeds, but where's the blogblaster that everyone's waiting for. i smell a ph.d proposal waiting to happen.

i think doc's quote from farallon founder reese jones on "social software" is spot on:

"All human communication, he said, is one-to-one. It's personal. Even in groups, we're only paying close attention to what one person says at a time. Reese was working towards a Ph.D. in some brain research specialty when he paused to found Farallon (inventing those nifty PhoneNet connectors that ran AppleTalk over phone wiring), and added a bunch of brainy facts I don't remember to this obvious but overlooked fact: our brains are purposefully restricted in their ability to listen. We may think we can hear two conversations at once, but we can't. Our brains only hear one conversation clearly. And to some degree they suck at that, because they're also built to forget most specifics after a few seconds and retain only meaning . When we compare what we remember verbatim to what we forget, the former rounds out to zero. What make quotes compelling is that they stand as exceptions to the forget-everything rule."

Reese so believed in the foundational importance of conversation that he made it Farallon's calling to produce "software for telephones." To him telephony's century-wide seniority over computing made it the more fundamental technology. "

if i may be so bold, this is what i'm dancing around when i quote the conversational technologies from peer-to-peer:

"Conversations provide a comfortable medium in which knowledge flows in both directions, and where contributors share an inherent context through their subjects and relationships. In addition to old forms of conversations--direct interaction and communication over the phone and in person--conversations are becoming an increasingly important part of the networked world. Witness the popularity of email, chat, and instant messaging, which enable users to increase the range and scope of their conversations to reach those that they may not have before.

"Still, little attention has been paid in recent years to the popular Internet channels that most naturally support conversations."

Quick and Dirty Topic Mapping looks like it might solve eighty percent of something i've been thinking about for awhile - lighweight, bottom-up, ad-hoc "clumping" of my posts:

"The essence of this strategy is to work bottom-up, rather than top-down. I don't start with a predefined set of topics. Rather, I allow them to emerge from the material as I work my way through it. I don't try to create a topic hierarchy. Having wrestled with questions such as whether XML should be a subcategory of Web Development , or vice versa, I've concluded that this way lies madness. My goal now is simply to assign resources to a flat list of topics--from 15 to, at most, 40 of them, depending on the data set. The resulting topic map isn't fancy, but it chunks the data set usefully, it's easy to create, and it's easy to maintain."

throw in the fact that there's a new release of the touchgraph topic mapping software and it would appear that all my procrastination has paid off.

activebuddy's release of a developer's kit is "neat", but i'm not really sure that using roster bots to "enhance the customer experience" is really that compelling of an application. and let's not ignore the fact that conversational command line interfaces aren't exactly the easiest things to construct. just how many people want to fill out surveys or check the weather and stock quotes?

don't get me wrong, i've certainly done my share of rosterbot fiddling - it's just that i'm hearing a bunch of technology-driven babble, which isn't going to lead anywhere. then again, what do i know, maybe jenny's onto something

"Still, I can foresee possible uses for this. Library hours, answers to questions in your local ready reference file, registration for programs, maybe even integration with the OPAC to let you know when your ILL request is in. What if one way to search the OPAC would be via IM on your cell phone? Maybe this could be the automated "Wal-Mart greeter" and the second-level of questions goes to a human being. Just thinking out loud here...."

sure, the google programming contest is everywhere, but i'm going to post it anyway, because it's just that kind of day. smart move on their part, but it's not like anyone expects anything less from them. considering they get to pick from the cream of the crop, i'm sure they'll find someway to scale whatever wacky ideas come their way.

from the "no-surprises-here" department - it looks like the msn messenger has loose handle on privacy:

"If you are running MSN messenger (and have JavaScript enabled) you should see your name displayed below, along with a list of all your contacts.

If this page was hosted on microsoft.com, hotmail.com or hotmail.msn.com you would also see your email address and your contacts email addresses ."

"However third parties could get access to the email addresses, by simply adding a single entry to your registry. That would require a little more effort, but is easily done. e.g. Installing software which contains "spyware" or "adware" ."

it only works if you're using the dynamic duo of messanger and ie. fun stuff.

i did it. i put my money where my mouth is and upgraded to blogger pro, even despite the fact that it doesn't work with mozilla [although there are rumors that it's being worked on] and it look like i may have to pay and extra 3 bucks a month for extra posting "capacity". according to the nifty posting history meter that ev has provided, it appears that i regularly exceed the 100K posting limit. hi. ho. hopefully my hard earned cash will be put to good use.

despite being a little late the mozilla 0.98 milestone was released with minimal feature creep and maximal stability.

Superbowl PDFA Ads:

"From running shoes to agribusiness, from automobiles to energy, one way or another, some of our money will eventually support bad people and bad policies . Significant amounts of money contributed by every law-abiding, tax-paying citizen of the U.S. go to support all manner of questionable regimes. We insulate ourselves from some of these bitter notions with convenient justifications. "If we don't defoliate their country and destroy their crops, I won't be able to prevent my kid from using drugs." "Yes, this company abuses their seed and water monopolies in regions of famine and scarce resources, but golly wouldja look at the size of this tomato?" "Yes, the money for my gasoline goes to fund monarchies with dismal human rights records, who in turn foment just the sort of anti-American fervor that leads to flight school -- but hey, it's cheap and my Esplanade is thirsty." The drug user is merely one among many uninformed contributors."

[ via dave ]

don't mind me, just making a few cosmetic changes. the one you will notice the most, is the "outbound" list of links on the right hand side of the screen. i'm not 100 percent happy with how things look, but at the very least it's a little cleaner than before.

i realized that ex machina is hosed in navigator 4.x and i can't figure out why, since it uses the same template as the other parts of the site, which are fine.

denim 1.0:

"DENIM is a system that helps web site designers in the early stages of design. DENIM supports sketching input, allows design at different refinement levels, and unifies the levels through zooming."

[ via nadav ]

now that's power, baby.