why yes virginia, i did run my very first 10k today.

while browsing the nascent business plan archive , think smug thoughts about how you won't be that poor sap condemned to repeat history. don't miss the Statistical Summary of the Dot Com Shakeout - complete with lively metaphors, sure to work wonders at your next cocktail party:

"It may appear on the surface that the decline in dot com shutdowns is simply a result of the fact that are no dot coms left to shut down. That is not the case, however. We conservatively estimate, based on several data sources, that between 7,000 and 10,000 Internet companies have received some sort of "formal" funding, which suggests that at most, ten percent of significant Internet companies have shut down or declared bankruptcy. It may be safer to say that the Darwinian process has left many fewer WEAK Internet companies. But to say that the decline in shutdowns is because there are no dot coms left is a bit like saying a decline in rabies rates is due to the fact that all the dogs are dead."

[via webvoice ]

not that i'm trying to encourage script kiddies, but i found this plea regarding the "Fucking savages in this town" mildly amusing and yet sadly indicative of the kind of mayhem that can be produced with the growing popularity of wifi:

"At the 2002 Ottawa Linux Symposium, it seems that there's some script kiddie exploiting a bug in the wvlan_cs and orinoco drivers to cause bunches of laptops to freeze. If you find this person, please kick them in the junk."

amidst all the other fun stuff happening in our lovely legal system recently, i almost missed yesterday's ruling which will have soccer mom's sons and daughters peeing in cups across the nation:

"The Supreme Court approved random drug tests for many public high school students Thursday, ruling that schools' interest in ridding their campuses of drugs outweighs an individual's right to privacy.

The 5-4 decision would allow the broadest drug testing the court has yet permitted for young people whom authorities have no particular reason to suspect of wrongdoing. It applies to students who join competitive after-school activities or teams, a category that includes many if not most middle-school and high-school students."

if you figure out where today went, please let me know. i'm not sure, but i think i might have left it somewhere in chicago-style traffic brouhaha around o'hare airport.

i just got around to trying l.m. orchard's amphetadesk amphy-outline-skin and it's just chock full of niceties:

• "All channels, items of channels, and descriptions of items are arranged in a tree of expandable/collapsible branches.
• Links are provided to expand/collapse all channels, and all items in a given channel.
• If more than 10 items appear in a channel, the rest are hidden below a collapsed branch, but still available.
• From newest item to oldest, the font changes from large and bold to small and normal."

well, sweet jesus - warchalking has blasted up the daypop top 40 with a bullet. it's a great idea that will hopefully take off. at the very least it beats the product development costs for an 802.11 detector keychain .

i think i just might do my part by grabbing some fat chalk, firing up macstumbler and doing some warchalkin', baby!

""What is all this about? Well - it was born out of a good lunch, like lots of ideas; where we hit upon the idea of creating a hobo language for wireless access points.

Find a node, and leave a chalk symbol for others to find the node with a minimum of all that tiresome netstumbler business.

for whatever reason, i've been getting into time management theory lately. who knew it was possible to collapse the entire field into into one, easily digestable theory. enter the pickle jar theory :

"We also have things which we enjoy doing, such as the pebbles. We have other things we have to do, like the sand. And finally, we have things that simply clutter up our lives and get in everywhere: water.

None of these are bad things. After all, we need the gamut of these objects--from large priorities to times of rest--in order to feel truly fulfilled. No Time Management theory should be without balance, and the Pickle Jar theory is all about balance. You make time for everything, and everything simply fits well where it is supposed to fit."

i think i'm going to start a consulting career founded upon the 7 habits of highly effective pickle jar practitioners.

eXchangable Faceted Metadata Language :

"XFML allows for easy creation of advanced, automatically generated navigation for your website. You can even automatically generate links to related topics on other websites. It also allows for merging of metadata between different websites."

[ via morelikethis ]

stretching is a good thing.

maybe one or two of you will be happy to know that i've fixed the photograph archive .

reason #867 for loving your ipod . rediscovering funkadelic's maggot brain while digging through your cd collection:

"I'll just say it up front: the title song of this album contains the best guitar solo in the history of rock music. You won't believe me, probably, because you have your own favorite solos clutched tightly to your chest, and anyway, isn't Funkadelic, well, y'know, a funk band? I salute your right to worship your own guitar gods; that's why we listen to loud music. But don't let the name of the band, or their color, or the age of this album fool you: Eddie Hazel recorded - in one take - the solo against which all other solos would be measured if he hadn't been African American."

no, really. i think it might be difficult for you to imagine just how bad i am at golf.

i've caught a few of the apple "switch" commercials and found them mildly interesting, since i've recently purchased an ibook after years of tolerating having a wintel box as my primary computer.

i probably wouldn't have thought twice about the ads until i noticed aaron adams' website [ which looks like it's down as i type this post ] and damon wright's weblog . perhaps i'm showing the true depths of my superdorkness, but i was thoroughly fascinated to read about these guys' real life experiences and how freakishly similar some of the parallels were to my own life.

"hey!" i thought. "these guys really are just like me."

well. unfortunately, i didn't realize just how true that thought could be :

"The bad news is that Apple couldn't have picked a starker collection of life's losers with which to promote the Macintosh.

Here in unforgiving relief are a collection of scarred, terrified refugees from life - for whom the computer is alternately a punishment surrogate, a child substitute or a masturbation object. "

"These people are so freaky that if one sat next to you on the bus, you'd suddenly find yourself wondering if walking home might be an altogether less traumatic option."

great. and yes, my wife does find this all very, very amusing.

me scratches chin. Graphical Interface For Very Large-Scale Conversations:

"In principle the Conversation Map system can be used just like a usual electronic news or mail program (e.g., Eudora, RN, or Netscape Messenger). The main difference is that the Conversation Map system analyzes the content and the relationships between messages and then uses the results of the analysis to create a graphical interface. With the graphical interface, a participant can see the social and semantic relationships that have emerged over the course of the discussion. The Conversation Map system computes and then graphs out who is "talking" to whom, what they are "talking" about, and the central terms and possible metaphors of the conversation."

[ via nooface ]

hmm. i was getting ready to follow ben trott's advice on installing spamassasin for os x and along comes cloudmark which sounds intriguing:

"The company's flagship product called SpamNet is the first collaborative spam reporting network capturing nearly every spam attack around the world in real-time to automatically keep 75 percent of spam out of peoples' inboxes - a percentage that will improve overtime as the network grows."

on further reading, unless i missed something completely obvious, it doesn't look like there's a os x client support yet and if it does appear soon, it'll probably be for outlook which i don't use. hi. ho.

Desktop Pattern Organization In Mac OS X:

"In Mac OS X desktop pattern and picture organization seems a lot more confusing and inaccessible then it did in OS 9. In the Desktop System Preference Pane there is a pull down menu of the few collections that Apple has pre-installed on your computer. What about your own collections? There is a very simple way to add your own collections to this menu so accessing your own pictures can become a breeze."

[ via splorp ]

with strategy letter v, joel once again displays his adeptness at making complicated things simple:

"Once again: demand for a product increases when the price of its complements decreases. In general, a company's strategic interest is going to be to get the price of their complements as low as possible. The lowest theoretically sustainable price would be the "commodity price" -- the price that arises when you have a bunch of competitors offering indistinguishable goods. So: Smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements."

wow. the k5 community comes up big for rusty's plea for help:

" It's almost a cliche at this point that whenever K5 faces adversity, whenever times look darkest, you pull out all the stops and restore my faith in humanity with a force that makes my head spin. And folks, you have done it again. In one day, you all managed to raise ten thousand dollars. I Am Not Making This Up."

best of luck to dave on a speedy recovery.

bummer. i guess rusty's headline says it all.

We're Broke: The Economics of a Web Community:

"I come to you, Kuro5hin community, in an hour of need.

Great googly-moogly, could that be any more pompous? Nevertheless, it's true. You see, I found out last week that K5 is out of money. Our last remaining funds just went off to the gub'mint for quarterly taxes. I won't get a paycheck this month. Subscription income will help a little, but in the longer term, the prognosis is bleak. Frankly, I don't know what to do.

So I thought I'd take a little time and lay out the structure and workings of the media business in general, and K5 in particular, and ask what you think I should do."

matt jones and victor lombardi make me think about why i haven't been visiting ia blogs so much lately:

"The current social networks thinking is fascinating, and will only get better once more people dig into web services, and then the semantic web. It's a little disconcerting, embarrasing even, that no IAs are at the forefront of these discussions. Isn't that what we do, find interesting patterns in information and present them to people? It's high time we start balancing our focus on library science with some attention to computer science."

Working for Wankers Makes You Wordless:

"The dissociators work for wankers; it really is that simple. Wanker management believes that the company has One Voice; that voice comes down from On High and must neither be contradicted nor amplified nor qualified - and it must particularly never admit a mistake. Wanker management believes that smart workers exist basically to feed knowledge upward so that it can be properly incorporated into the One Voice - at which point, of course, any trace of the worker originating the knowledge is extinguished."

and with a beautiful sense of timing, morbus has released amphetadesk v0.93, so that i could have enjoy a easy to use aggregator on my shiny new ibook [ thanks to the os x faceplate work from l.m. orchard ].

i experienced some initial hiccups installing it on the laptop, but a fix was available quickly and now things are running smooth. nice work.

how much fun can you have with a new ibook and macstumbler in chicago's ukrainian village and wicker park neighborhoods? alot. i'm truly flabbergasted at the number of open access points in otherwise nondescript looking streets.

Language Use, Personality and True Conversational Interfaces:

"Demand for conversational interfaces is great and growing, especially for online commercial applications. Various studies into how users react socially to an interface have shown that it is possible to improve the usability and general attraction of an interface by carefully implementing an appropriate personality. These findings are taken and applied to a true, reactive, real world, conversational interface. The personality of the interface was manipulated by altering the linguistic style of the systems dialogue. It was found that personality effects, in such an interface, are more complex and subtle than previous research has suggested and that to produce ?real? synthetic personalities the interaction style as a whole must be considered. The linguistic style of different user personality groups was also found to be somewhat inconsistent with findings from written and spoken language. "

yeah, baby! guess who got a brand new ibook and 10 gig ipod. i knew i was going to the store to snag an ibook, but the ipod was a total and compete bit of hedonistic abandon that i'll probably regret in the morning, but it's sounding pretty good right now.

sometimes, linux can be maddening. like when you want to get a shiny, new pcmcia/pc-card drive for pci bus working. quickly. sigh.

wow. ever wonder what a really comprehensive blog tool feature comparison table would look like?

[ via webvoice ]

Comparative Jabber book review:

"Jabber is an open, XML-based protocol you can use to add instant messaging to your applications. If you're interested in learning about Jabber but aren't quite sure where to begin, here's a review of three books on the subject to help you get off to the right start."

so, i ran my very first 5k today and even though i ran, finished without walking and set a personal best time - i'm not sure what to think of the fact that i was beaten by a woman pushing a baby in a stroller.

Krispy Kreme: New World Order:

"After a visit to the local Krispy Kreme, it's clear that every single ecommerce company shouldn't have even fucking tried. It's not a question of what an earnest young Vice President can learn from Krispy Kreme's operation and apply to their own version of online asshole-punchery; if said VP actually paid attention, he'd realize that he should pack his bags and head back to the planet that the rest of us live on where we don't give a shit about an 'online retail experience'."

[ via premium blend ]

well, things were going south fairly quickly at cedant and it looks like i'm not alone, since people are trying to start a class action lawsuit :

"As many of your know, Cedant has recently started moving domains from Alabanza servers to their own new servers which have many problems.

They are refusing to answer customer service emails and even refusing to cancel accounts as they are moved to other hosting companies.

I would be interested in hearing from any other affected parties wishing to join in a class action suit. I am local to them and am willing to coordinate an action against them."

what a shame. i've had great service for several years, but now it's time to move on.

after doing some checking around, i decided to go with cornerhost, primarily on the strength of mark pilgrim's testimonial . i haven't been using the sevice for long enough to make any worthwhile comments about reliability, but i can say that withing 24 hours of my request for an account, michal had everything set up and ready to go, without taking a dime from me. nice work.

on the upside, i'm going to see a rare dj shadow show tonight at park west in chicago which should be a good time.

i don't know what's up with cedant, but they are being very unresponsive in their support emails, which isn't like them. i'll give them the benefit of the doubt for another day, but otherwise i may have to start looking for a new hosting provider.

any suggestions? i lean towards flexible shell accounts with perl, python, java, php etc. ability to run a jabber server a plus. anyway, email is still down, which is unacceptable, jabber is still down, syndication is still down. sigh. blogger works :-)

aaaaarrrggggghhhh! cedant didn't just give me a new ip address, they switched operating systems. from linux to sunos? perl modules disappeared. jabber server won't run. i guess you could say that the transition was a little less than seemless. i guess the syndication feeds won't be updated until tommorrow when i can update the perl modules.

that's right, kids! it's time for the ip address switchover. again. if all goes well, i'll see you on the flipside. if not, then i lose a bunch of e.mail and aggregators everywhere will start wondering just where the hell my feed disappeared to.

in the mean time, you can try to decide if i should be arrested for ending a sentence with a preposition.

thanks to a pointer from nick denton , i now feel compelled to bid on some vintage antique tools.

hey, it looks like zoe is going open sourceish:

"Our plan is to choose a handful of experienced developers to form the core development team for Zoe. Anyone is free to contribute code which members of the development team will review add back into the codebase. Over time we will invite developers who have demonstrated their interest and abilities to join our core team. We'll keep the mailing lists public and encourage everyone to sign up and throw in any comments they may have."

ugh. i just discovered that the IP switchover didn't happen, even though i updated the dns record. please fasten your seatbelt. site bumpiness expected as an incorrect setting propagates through the system, thanks to the fact that cedant decided to delay the switch by a day and not tell me. normally they are pretty good about these sorts of things.

Jabber: Instant messaging for e-business :

"By using the example in this article, you can now send one-way messages instantly to users on any device. To give recipients a more personal experience, you might also want to make it possible for them to talk back. For instance, enhance your relay to also be a full-featured Jabber bot. You might want to give customers the option to ask questions about orders, get contacts from within the company, reach support, or anything else that might be valuable."

so, i just updated my dns record thanks to a shiny, new, unplanned ip address from cedant. i wonder how many things will break while i'm going sleepy, sleepy, nite, nite.

<scratches chin mode="mischievous ">not that i'd ever try to swipe free cable just because i'm already paying for broadband.</scratches chin>

"Drawing on old-school methods to splice cable TV lines for unauthorized use, hackers say they can buy a splitter at the local electronics store and easily run an additional line from the cable modem line for the computer into the television. Without a set-top box, the result is free, basic, analog cable; with an illegal converter or set-top, hackers say they have access to premium channels such as HBO and Showtime."

i've been so busy that i forgot to mention that somehow the folks at 37 signals [ home of the venerable signals vs noise ] made some kind of ghastly mistake and actually let me into the party celebrating the chicago stop of the adaptive path world tour. the folks from 37 signals were gracious hosts and i had a great time drinking a few beers and chatting with luminaries such as peter merholtz and jeffrey veen.

it's fun to watch mark pilgrim take the new rss discovery formalism via the link tag and run with it at the service of social networks.

i picked-up the new 802.11 Wireless Networks: The Definitive Guide the other day, and if you're into that wifi thing, you might like it. but don't just take my word for it, since it seems to be getting good reviews:

"Gast nimbly leads the reader through the 802.11 minefield, making the complicated concepts understandable; no easy task in a world where time units of kilo-micro seconds reign. (Only 802.11 could mangle the metric system so mercilessly.) Gast often provides key links to software and other references on the Net where appropriate. His examples are useful and numerous, with the text targeted at those with some network administration experience (particularly in an Ethernet setting). Definitely worth the read if you are doing any wireless Ethernet work, this is the best 802.11 reference I've seen."

Integrating communication and information through ContactMap :

"Which organizing principle might be adapted for designing and developing advanced user interfaces affording information and communication services in a single integrated system? Our research on communication patterns in the workplace points to models of personal social networks. We have found that people invest considerable effort in maintaining links with networks of colleagues, acquaintances, and friends, and that these networks are a significant organizing principle for work and information. Here, we outline and analyze a study of workplace communication that informs our development efforts, describing our evolving software prototype, ContactMap, as well as recent user experiments with the system."

[ via nooface ]