I don't have nearly enough time to look at all of these *really* old tech reports, but just scanning the author names reveals once again Xerox PARC's amazing impact on computing. Gifford, Guttag, Zellweger, Geschke, Card, Norman, Boyer & Moore's string matching paper, Bobrow, Warnock, Kay, Demers, etc. etc.
Need I say more.
Memo to self: don't know how long this archive will stick around, but it might be worth a crawl
Apropos of nothing, other than really good writing, Karlan Lillington blogs of her encounter with William Gibson.
Memo to audience: Pattern Recognition is pretty good.
Not all that exciting, but Microsoft is cooking up a plug-in for Windows Media Player to grab info about the currently playing track and deliver it elsewhere.
When this stuff first surfaced, I thought MS was putting a blog writing tool in WMP. Now that would have been cool.
Way out of left field is an RSS aggregator implemented completely in Mozilla's XUL interface language. Not sure whether to be amazed or repulsed.
Doesn't seem to support navigation very well in my opinion.
Continuing in our Python mode, Divmod has brought us Lupy and Pyndex, two systems for text indexing with the popular scripting language that starts with a P and names a snake. Might be useful in the NusRoom.
Phillipe Biondi has put together Scapy, a serious network hacking tool tightly integrated with Python. Think tcpdump, netcat, et. al. nicely embedded, with persistence, in Python.
Of course the payback for all of this philandering is that I missed some major events, like the Columbia School of Journalism naming a new dean. While I was keeping up my blog reading, apparently this wasn't a big enough happening for bloggers (at least until today).
Thankfully, Seth Mnookin of MSNBC snagged an interview with the incoming head honcho.
I'm back after a trip to the University of Colorado, Computer Science Department, hosted by the amazingly gracious Skip Ellis. Between giving a talk, meeting with various faculty, and carousing in exciting Boulder (Dushanbe Tea House, very nice) I decided not to make any time for weblogging whatsoever.
That being said, I managed to read most of Duncan Watt's "Small Worlds". I'm now more convinced than ever that weblog power laws (see Shirky and Kottke) really don't mean squat, and that the underlying network structure is the big deal.
Curiously, I haven't run into anybody mentioning Ron Burt, of the University of Chicago. He'd surely tell you that the power isn't in the center, it's in the holes.
Besides, if you take a look at the data that originated this meme, there's a lot to be desired.
As an inveterate Lisper, Paul Prescod's claim rings heretical. However, I must admit I find his argument somewhat convincing.
John Seeley Brown gave the keynote speech at the USC-Berkeley New Media Conference about 3 weeks ago. Upon request, he graciously sent me a copy of the slides he prepared. I say prepared because he didn't get to present them all.
During the talk I took some haphazard notes. I'm posting them here mostly for myself, but on the off chance that someone else might find a use for them. I may also revise them at some point.
At Sitepoint, Daniel Kerton demonstrates how to make spiffy image collages using Macromedia Fireworks.
Tipped off by Simon Willison.
According to Computerworld, there's only been 3 years of Wi-Fi, so look out for growing pains ahead. Key issues: standardization of higher speed protocols, coordination on backend services, and deployment of hotspots.
Screw that though, what the heck were those Lucent Orinoco cards I was using then?
Kimberly Patch, of Technology Research News, reports on a breakthrough in manufacturing organic LEDs by Klaus Meerholz of Munich University. Bottom line, better, cheaper, higher resolution, lower power displays within 2 years.
Some enterprising folks with the Elvin project, a wide area publish/subscribe toolkit, have created a Macromedia Xtra to interface with Elvin. Wonder how portable it might be to Flash?
I've seen artima.com before, but William Grosso highlighted the fact that the site is providing a lot more value. They even have some pretty serious webloggers.
Funneled through CNet, McKinsey reports that the much maligned broadband, may actually have delivered on its promise and may be reaching maturity. Only one problem with the report.
What's their definition of broadband? And yes it does matter.
Speaking of TiVo's Home Media Option, apparently there's an SDK, and well, some folks have already started hacking away.
The street finds its own uses.
Frankly, I feel Robert X. Cringely is worthy of a post every week, but that would get redundant. However, this week's piece from The Pulpit, covers new tech, media, and hacking. How could I not point to it?
Cringley burns off a few words on some lame dog hallucination, but then launches into how to hack fiber optic cables, Microsoft's plans for the Windows Media format, and what the TiVo Home Media Option really means. Good stuff all the way around.
Before the Berkeley Weblogs Panel, described below, Ross Mayfield will be speaking. He strikes me as having interesting takes on so-called "social software" among other things.
Continuing in a series of interesting public events, the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism is running a panel on Weblogs, Information, & Society. The panel features topnotch folks such as Dan Gillmor, Scott Rosenberg, and Ed Felten.
Why isn't stuff like this happening at Northwestern University?
Memo to self: get off your ass and jam
Paul Graham is arguably our most eloquent statesmen regarding populist thinking about programming language design and implementation. In his essay on "The Hundred-Year Language", he ranges on a number of topics on the trail of thinking about a programming language from 100 years in the future. Java is an evolutionary dead in. Parallel programming won't really matter (but parallelism will). Perl actually has some good ideas.
There are two really great features of this essay. First, despite being a top notch Common Lisp hacker, he never comes across as a bitter Lisp burnout. Second, the discussion inspires thinking about a language 100 years in the future because it might actually be useful today. This essay should be required reading for any aspiring programming language designer.
For $450 (MSR), you can soon get 250 GB worth of storage to hang off of your TiBook with a FireWire attachment.
Yowsa!!
Mark Pilgrim collects links to Dorothea Salo's explanation of how templates work in Movable Type. I've pretty much figured the dang things out myself, but there are still nooks and crannies that befuddle me. Besides taking care of my intro text needs for future students hacking with me, I'm hoping there's enough depth to clear up some of my own confusion.
Memo to audience: stuff like this is why MT is the tool of thought leaders in weblog tech
Now that I have a couple of whizzy new iPaqs with Bluetooth baked in, I thought I'd learn how to program them. The state of documentation available for developers is, shall we say, less than desirable.
Net searching with Google, I managed to find one article by Qusay Mahmoud that at least gives a nice overview of Bluetooth and how you might program for it. This is in marked contrast to the horror show in the bowels of the Microsoft's MSDN documentation on Bluetooth, shudder...
Martin Walker's article on how media in Iraq are becoming buddy, buddy with the military supports an analogy that's been growing on me. Embedding reporters into military operations bears a striking similarity to Microsoft's philosophy of "embrace and extend".
Memo to audience: sprinkle with chilling theme music as you see fit
The livehttpheaders project is an addon for Mozilla to see all the meta-stuff that gets shipped between your browser and a Web server. Very useful for debugging Web apps.
I can't quite figure out who wrote this review of Extending and Embedding Perl, by Jenness and Cozens, to give proper attribution. However, the review is mostly positive for a book I sorely needed for my scripting languages course this past fall.
Memo to self: time for a review copy
The latest version of TiVo plays really with others, but especially Macs. Thank you Rendezvous!
Petri Possi, of the Mobitopia crew, notes the arrival of gear that makes 3G a viable alternative to WiFi. Since 3G in the US is an oxymoron, this probably only has practical import in Europe. However, that's nothing to sneeze at. The beautiful thing is that apparently both cellular carriers and unlicensed folks can play in this arena. Seems like fertile competitive ground.
SharpReader is one of those new RSS aggregators. It's written by Luke Hutteman. SharpReader's wizzy new feature is that it shows outbound links in a threaded view. You've gotta see the screenshots for this to make sense.
Memo to audience: USENET will be completely reinvented eventually
There's been a mild explosion of RSS aggregators in recent days, many of them running on the .Net platform. Brad Wilson has kicked the tires on most of them and has a few suggestions for this new breed of RSS readers.
Not that I'm using a Win32 OS on a daily basis, but if I did, I bet a number of apps pointed to by TinyApps.Org would wind up on my desktop.
Six Apart only seems to have this stale, tiny bit on using text formatting in MovableType 2.6x. I know I've blogged it before, but Timothy Appnel's treatise on writing Movable Type plug-ins has the goods on the innards of text formatting plug-ins. I finally put two and two together and realized that MT entries in XML can now be processed with XML tools, through text formatting plug-ins. Now Movable Type is even more attractive as RSS aggregation infrastructure.
Apropos of nothing, according to Google, I'm the top New Media Hack at the current moment. No blogroll, no self promotion, no commentary elsewhere. Power laws ain't manifest destiny.
Sony's working on a plasma screen with Internet connectivity baked in. The net connection is intended to be used for streaming digital video to the device. All sorts of remote hosting and proxy based hacks come to mind.
A colleague of mine directed me to Marc Canter's discussion of open standards to put more smarts on the Web, especially in the arena of collaborative content generation. Mainly I'm getting the link out of my inbox and into this blog before I accidentally delete it.
Memo to self: read, review, followup
CanWest Global Communications is going to start delivering multimedia e-newspapers according to Canada's National Post. The article is short on technical details, but the e-newspapers look like they'll be in a closed format (I'm guessing Flash or PDF) and contain embedded video. These new newspapers will also be tied to regular hard-copy subscription.
Memo to self: more investigation required
I started March with a goal to post once every day, come hell or high water. Mission accomplished. It wasn't amazingly difficult, but there were some sketchy moments. March entails the end of Winter quarter at Northwestern, so schedules get pretty tight. Plus, like a lot of other CS departments, we're in the middle of recruiting season, so there's an added burden. And I took two trips at the end of the month.
At this stage, I'm starting to look beyond the link/commentary style to something different. However, I don't really want to go infrequent essay style like many of the high profile bloggers. I've got a few ideas in the hopper, so expect some subtle, but interesting, changes ahead.
Memo to self: time for some analysis and reflection
In conjunction with its 80th anniversary, Time has put up a database of digitized covers going back to 1923. What a fabulous historical trove. This is a great example of content that can't really be done through any other medium. Tip of the hat to Steve Outing over at E-Media Tidbits.
Now of course the collaborative software hacker in me says, "wouldn't it be great if folks could build their own annotated scrapbooks and make them visible to others?" This can probably be easily done without AOL/TimeWarner's permission, but it would have been really forward looking if they had incorporated some ideas from Phil G. Why I bet they even could have gotten people to pay for access. Allow folks to build their own "80 Covers of History" and enter them into a contest. Charge $10 a pop. Laugh all the way to the bank.
Memo to self: new content based business model, authoring contests with Disney style peekaboo archives
Apropos of nothing, this is the first day in which I found not much of real interest in the news flow.