TalkAbout
The outback of the mind

http://kevan.org/extispicious.cgi?name=mshook";>extispicious?name=mshook">

Another editthispage.com backup option

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Download Radio Userland and use it to backup your site to XML.

Instructions for doing this are here.

Radio Userland is a free download and can be used for 30 days for free.

You get a bunch of directories of XML, but at least they're somewhat human readable.

Thursday, November 10, 2005
Usersland charging at least $99/year for formerly free editthispage.com hosting as of 12/1/05

When I'm logged into Talkabout is see this:

(if you're not logged in, you don't see it)

Isn't this sort of big news? How many user do they have?

I don't dispute that it is their right to do this, but it is certainly annoying.

userland editthispage change fee free annoying

Thursday, November 3, 2005
Turing Sphere

A Turing Sphere is like a Dyson Sphere except it isn't based on maximal use of a star's energy, but rather on maximally high information density. It's based on the notion that the more nodes you have closer together the higher the information density you can support.

With the Turing Sphere what we observe is the information that seeps out. Compression and encryption makes what we see highly random.

I'm guessing that it is indistinguishable from a Dyson Sphere, that is, it emits low grade infrared radiation.

turing dyson sphere dysonsphere turingsphere speculation physics information density energy

Wednesday, November 2, 2005
Sony Employee Goes to Jail?

Sony Ships Sneaky DRM Software

Wait a minute! Shouldn't somebody at Sony be going to jail? What do those anti-virus laws actually say?

sony jail law virus rootkit drm

Saturday, October 1, 2005
The 'Bary

I'm mostly blogging at the 'Bary these days...

Sunday, July 17, 2005
GREs and Podcasts

I took the GREs yesterday and was pretty pleased with how it went. I'm afraid to say that I actually found some of the bits of academic writing they had that they then asked questions about were well written and mostly interesting. One was about water on Mars, another about Emerson's place in the American canon and anothe about women in the workplace. I might have posted some of them to del.icio.us if I'd come across them on the web.

On the drive down and the drive back I listened to quite a few podcasts and overall quite enjoyed it. I listed to four or five of Jon Udell's podcasts and they just increased my respect for him. I like his quiet, matter of fact and very non-radio voice. In several interviews he maintained a healthy skeptiscism about the technologies he was finding out about. He's does better than anyone else I can think of of bridging technical issues down to the bare metal with larger social issues. Especially recommended: Open source audio.

I also enjoyed some of the Berkeley Groks science show - geeky, amateurish and entertaining.

Tags: gre judell eclectic audio podcast

Tuesday, July 5, 2005
The Interface Culture by Neal Stephenson [Annotated]

The Interface Culture by Neal Stephenson [Annotated]

I’ve long appreciated Neal Stephenson’s brilliant essay on culture. It is part of a longer essay entitled In The Beginning Was The Command Line. That essay is aimed principally at computerists whereas I believe The Interface Culture section should have a much wider audience. But pointing people to the larger essay and then telling them to do a text search for a particular section is tedious. Some years ago for my own edification I outlined it.

Tags: neal essay culture

Monday, June 27, 2005
AKMA states his case....

Not subject to easy summarization, but worth reading. It's titled "Why I Am Not A Liberal" but it is much more than that.

Tags: akma theology religion politics episcopal liberal good

Saturday, June 18, 2005
Homepage at WikiWiki

I've just added a homepage for myself at Ward Cunningham's WikiWiki. This is the original wiki.

I added it because I think I have something to contribute to that community or at least to the body of knowledge that aggregates there. Given the focus of the community on patterns and web development, I'm surprised that there isn't more stuff there about tagging. So I've put in a little. To get them started? Who knows....

I spent a couple of hours exploring to see what relation the CategoryCategory mechanism that it uses may have to tagging. It put my head in a spin. A couple of quick observations. Tagging has to be really easy for it to work for me. Any any time you get a significant number of tags, you really need faceted navigation to make full use of them.

Tags: wiki tags facet navigation

Tuesday, June 7, 2005
The Maine Lighthouse Corporation

Maine Lighthouse is working to establish a long-term residential treatment program, called a Therapeutic Community (TC), to treat addiction and provide ongoing support towards productive, law-abiding, drug and alcohol free lives.

The Maine Lighthouse Corporation
Google "Maine Lighthouse Corporation"

Thursday, June 2, 2005
Casting SPELs in Lisp: Table of Contents

Casting SPELs in Lisp is a great introduction to Lisp. Unfortunately, it doesn't have a table of contents - you can only go through it sequentially. So here is a TOC.

• Introduction
• Syntax and Semantics
• Defining the Data for our Game World
• Looking Around in our Game World
• Walking Around In Our World
• Casting SPELs
• Creating Special Actions in Our Game
• Addendum

Tags: lisp game introduction

Friday, May 27, 2005
ISBNs as del.icio.us tags?

When I want post a book to http://del.icio.us/mshook I usually do it by posting the Amazon page with the cruft removed. I don't think I've every run into someone else posting the same book the same way. (I just found one: http://del.icio.us/url/1aa545df2716ffb6b4d6f498e00dcc09)

My local public library has just switch to Innovative Systems Millenium software as part of Maine's Minerva system. This put ISBN into play locally. So all of a sudden I realize, why not use ISBNs as del.icio.us tags? Looking around, I can't see that any one is doing it, but that's actually hard to determine.

I'm going to start for myself. I'm going to use the following: isbn, the raw isbn (1573223077) plus isbn1573223077. Eventually I may see if anyone else is doing the same thing.

Tags: isbn del.icio.us tags library books book

Saturday, May 14, 2005
Tag chords

When I first saw this post on tag clouds I thought it said tag chords.

I knew exactly what it meant: groups of tags that I tend to use together that form a language for which I haven't fully worked out the syntax.

Tags: tags music harmony chords language

Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Library talk

I've created a new blog for stuff surrounding the the talk I'm doing at the Southwest Harbor Public Library Tuesday 31 May.

Tags: library swhpl presentation asc

Sunday, May 8, 2005
Esther Dyson on Time and Attention

today’s children are living in an information-rich, time-compressed environment that often stifles a child’s imagination rather than stimulates it. Being fed so much processed information—video, audio, images, flashing screens, pop-up ads, talking toys, simulated action games—is akin to being fed too much processed, sugar-rich food. It may seriously mess up children’s informational metabolism—their ability to process information for themselves. Will they be able to discern cause and effect, put together a coherent story line, think scientifically, understand the meaning of what’s happening around them, read a book with a single argument rather than a stream of blog postings?

bad fr yr health?
Esther Dyson

Tags: esther time attention future

Saturday, April 30, 2005
Daniel Dennett lecture in Westbrook: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Richard, Eben and I drove down to hear Daniel Dennett's lecture at the Westbrook campus of the University of New England. It was quite the enjoyable outing.

Notes:

Dennett began with some slides of the goings on in Rome and took the stance of the of the Martian biologist noting that this was very expensive behavior that must be justified by differential reproduction. Then he went into a tutorial on Darwinian thought:

• replication
• variation
• differential reproduction

To "Darwin's trio" of

• "methodical" selection,
• "unconscious" selection and
• natural selection

Bon mots:

• Virus: a string of nucleaic acid with attitude
• Genes are the information, not the chemicals - getting rid of all the smallpox virus is no good since we can recreate the sequence.
• Words are memes that can be pronounced.
• A non-word meme: wearing a baseball cap backwords.
• Paul MacCready quote:

  Over billions of years, on a unique sphere, chance has painted a thin covering of life --complex, improbable, wonderful, and fragile. Suddenly we humans, (a recently arrived species no longer subject to the checks and balances inherent in nature), have grown in population, technology, and intelligence to a position of terrible power: we now wield the paintbrush.

He's got a book coming out in January '05 - Breaking the Spell aimed at non-academic religious people (the audience seemed to be mostly non-religious academic people). The purpose of the book is to convince us of the importance of scientific study of religion.

Some points

• analogy to the evolutionary sweet tooth
• "hyperactive agent detection device"
• approach avoidance conflict over dead bodies
• indecision
• mild hypnotizability
• Group recitation and incomprehesability as two mechanisms which foster the accurate reproduction of memes.

He notes that Richard Dawkins emphatically believes that the world would be a better place without religion. Dennett is "genuinely agnostic" on that question.

Books:

• Guns, Germs and Steel - good
• The God Gene - lots of unsupported stuff but on the right track relative to hypnotizability
• Religion Explained - good - he likes the title
• In Gods We Trust - good
• Darwin's Cathedral - good

I asked him about

• parallels to music and he said there's lots of stuff on music in the book.
• Andrew Brown's characterization of him with regard to his attitude towards mystery. He said it was good.

I'll probably buy the book, or ask the library to buy it.

Tags: dennett evolution darwin st1722 religion quote philosophy notes

Tuesday, April 26, 2005
How to run DocBook on a Windows PC

I've been trying to figure how to convert DocBook XML documents to useful output on a Windows PC. There seems to be lots available for Linux, but not much for Windows. I've finally made some progress.

Cygwin seems to be the key. Cygwin is a Windows .dll that emulates the Linux API. It makes it relatively easy to port Linux software to Windows. The important thing is though, that a vast amount of Linux software has been ported to Cygwin, including it appears, lots of the Linux DocBook tool chain.

Cygwin is also an internet-based installation system. It's not very well documented, but a good start is here.

One thing I never found in Cygwin documentation but I finally guessed and just tried it and it worked: how to add additional software to your Cygwin installation once you've already installed it. The answer is, just run the Cygwin setup.exe again.

Once I figured that out I installed the DocBook 4.3 package and the toxml script that I'd discovered in the Linux documentation for DocBook. It worked like a charm for converting a DocBook xml file to html.

I'm still working on conversion to PDF and customizing the conversion.

Another recent find is css which will allow a DocBook XML file to be viewed with a contemporary browser.

Tags: docbook windows howto xml cygwin

Monday, February 21, 2005
Andrew Zolli on the G7 & the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China)

All of this raises the question: what is the long-term geopolitical impact of the inevitable chaffing between the G7 and the BRICs? In our current period of significant global instability, several scenarios seem plausible, ranging from a new cold-war with a bloc of nations focused on U.S. containment (including the BRICs, Venezuela, and some particularly anti-US governments in Europe) to the emergence of a new set of relationships, dominated, say, by the U.S. and China, where the two nations' interests are so closely linked that they could effectively split the BRIC bloc. Who knows? Perhaps the prospect of a massively destabilizing and massively expensive competition for oil with the BRICs will be the tipping point the finally pushes the U.S. toward a true green energy revolution.

The G7 and the BRICs: Long Term Collision, Cooperation or Both?
Andrew Zolli

Tags: bric global politics future brazil russia china india

Saturday, February 19, 2005
A new (for me) del.icio.us/AvantGo application

The problem: I'm in the video store and can't think of what to rent. Even though I know there are lots of movies I'd like to rent.

The use case: When I'm at the video store I check my Palm for videos that I've heard about and bookmarked.

The solution: A new (to me) del.icio.us tag torent (not to be confussed with torrent) and adding http://del.icio.us/html/mshook/torent?extended=body&tags=no&rssbutton=no to my AvantGo synch list so that the list automatically gets downloaded whenever I synch my Palm.

Total time investment: 30 minutes, including writing this. There was a time that you'd create a whole startup, get VC funding, etc. to build and market that application.

It does beg the question, how does one make money in this business any more?

Tags: del.icio.us movies application

Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Computer Lib/Dream Machines

• It makes sense to own your own [computer].
• Rigid and inhuman computer systems are the creation of rigid and inhuman people.
• Beware of "cybercrud" (computer-related terminology and practices used to fool, manipulate, and control people).
• Remember [Herb] Grosch's Law: No matter how clever the hardware boys are, the software boys "p-s" it away!
• IBM is run by and for people who really believe in authority.
• A computer center has a Director and assistants, with jobs and an empire to defend. It has a bureaucracy with vested interests and rules.
• Using a computer should always be easier than not using a computer.
• Any system which cannot be well taught to a layman in ten minutes, by a tutor in the presence of a responding setup, is too complicated.
• Whatever chance remains for the survival of anything good may be in the preservation and availability of information, the only commodity that will be cheaper and more convenient.
• Knowledge, understanding and freedom can all be advanced by the promotion and deployment of computer display consoles.
• Not the nature of machines, but the nature of ideas, is what matters.
• Everything is deeply "intertwingled."

from a review
(written by
Vince Juliano) of
Computer Lib/Dream Machines

Print/PDA
(Simplified format)