Geeking

Take a look at this article from Bunnie Hwang, reporting on the copycat industries in China. Bunnie’s nailed it, there is something interesting and important going on. Writing these guys off as copycats is exactly the wrong read on the situation. These guys are going to be a cornerstone of the foundation that science fiction writers are going to launch themselves from in order to help the rest of us understand what things are going to look like in 30 years. ...

A long time ago I thought it would be fun to open two windows and see two things on Google Maps next to each other. That way, I could compare the sizes of them. But getting the scale set the same on both maps was not easy. Wouldn’t it be neat if the scale of the maps was set to the same? I finally got around to implementing this with Google Maps API: ...

Is way too hard. But results in interesting t9 errors, like clogging instead of blogging.

I don’t really like Facebook, but I have to use it because that’s where my friends are. (Well, my fiancée is there, and she makes my friends for me. So I use it. Begrudgingly.) At first what I didn’t like about Facebook was that it is a thinly veilled CIA front, and even if that weren’t true, they are grossly negligent about privacy, meaning that the CIA could get all my data even if Facebook wasn’t using Langely for offsite backups. (And they are.) ...

This is insane. At the time the web came into being, AOL was already offering a content-driven text and graphics medium. And Microsoft was hard at work making “Blackbird”, which was a content authoring technology for MSN that never saw the light of day because of HTML. Microsoft ditched it and launched MSN over PPP and HTTP, and embarrassed AOL by showing them the future. Also, network administrators are not technophobic reactionaries. They are professionals with conflicting responsibilities. Like all professionals, they do what they have to do to get the job done. Sometimes it is appropriate to filter something in order to maintain the breathing room for the network to do the job. In the early 90’s, filtering technologies certainly existed that could have killed off the web, but there was a critical mass of academic networks, and under-critical-mass of commercial ISPs. The academics were interested in seeing what new things were coming. The commercial ISPs were split between common carriers like UUnet, and walled gardens. As I already mentioned, the walled gardens had their own content technologies and wanted to move past the limitations of Gopher. The common carriers didn’t care what went over the network, as long as it drove demand for the network itself. ...

Carl Malamud + the Government Printing Office is a match made in heaven. Please, President Obama, make it happen. This guy is one of us, one of the good guys who cares about transparency, about good government, about the freedom to know, to learn, to discuss and to criticize. He’s a person who speaks not with words, but with actions. I’ve followed his career and his dreams for years, always being pleasantly surprised when something I wanted to know or find had become available to me because of his tireless work. ...

Microsoft, what’s your problem? Why are you so stupid? My current irritation is with Silverlight. First, it’s a redundant technology. Bringing .Net into browsers is not a compelling argument for redoing everything that Adobe Flash already does better than Silverlight. But fine, I’m not a shareholder anymore, you can waste their money all you want. I wanted to see how well Moonlight (the Linux version of Silverlight) works. It’s partly because I’m compelled to poke my nose into the train crash that is Linux + Firefox + plugins + video + audio. It’s one of those things… so horrific, you can’t stop watching. ...

Tonight I am giving a talk the Old Broadcasting House at O’Reilly Ignite, UK North. Here are my slides. Update: There’s a video here.

I was sick last week, and in my drug- and virus-induced haze of incoherence, the idea that I should write a Scheme interpreter in assembly language came to mind. I cannot explain from where, but there it was. So I started looking into it, wondering if I still had it in me to dig into a computer problem and get it done. I’ve been feeling a bit burned out on different aspects of the IT world, and I was thinking maybe that getting back to the basics of computer science might help. The course that I remember mostly vividly (not fondly: vividly, like in nightmares) was my Programming Languages class, where I wrote a Scheme interpreter in (wait for it, wait for it…) Scheme. It was hard, really hard. But I was also young and stupid. I don’t think it would be so hard now. ...

I was reading a bit about Grub 2’s modules, including this page for gfxterm, a reimplementation of VGA console mode for Grub 2 – VGA console mode isn’t good enough because it cannot display Arabic, simplified Chineese, nor Inuit glyphs. And, let’s face it, the kinds of Inuits frobbing their boot loaders can’t possibly be expected to only get along with Latin-1 characters, right? This reminded me of Zawinkski’s Law of Software Envelopment: ...