Month: October 2004

Jesse goes to hawaii…

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…and forgets to take a real camera 😉

I keep forgetting to blog this. My brother had a chance to go to Hawaii and he took his new camera phone with him, then filled his weblog with action shots of his adventures in Hawaii. You’ll probably need to scroll through his archives a bit to get to the photos since he’s posted quite a few since then.

It’s interesting the tradeoffs between spontaneity and image fidelity – most of the pics he posted shade way too far into the purple/blue end of the spectrum, leaving me wishing he had brought a real camera, but on the other hand if he had, he wouldn’t have been able to post them as they happened.

Anyway, worth a gander, especially if, like me, you’ve never been to Hawaii.

Enter yourself in the global human registry

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Here’s a clever idea – establish a wiki as the authoritative source of information about people, and allow the people themselves to self edit the content. Check it out over at Biojack.com. I’m not in there yet, nor is the famous photographer who shares my name. What amuses me is imagining the battles that will spring up around famous folks who are controversial, like, say, George Bush. Get bickering folks! Or at least, get yourself in there.

Fiber for all of us

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I’ve mentioned this before – Verizon is aggressively rolling out Fiber To The Premises (fttp) – this is true asynchronous broadband to our homes folks, imagine connectivity several orders of magnitude faster than that so-called ‘speedy’ cable modem on your desk now, but for the same price. Anyway I’m mentioning it today because verizon has announced that they’re expanding their rollout to six more states, including mine (NY). My bet is I am still at least a couple of years away from seeing this available to me, but it’s progress. I’m excited about this in the same way I anxiously anticipated cable modems 8-10 years ago- it’s going to enable another round of innovation just as the cable modems did.

(and it has the fringe benefit of kicking time warner in the ass – longtime readers know how angry I’ve been about the limited upstream capacity of their network. If the cable company can’t figure out this isn’t a broadcast medium, fine. We’ll let the telcos make the point. It can’t happen soon enough for me).

The core of the network

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I’ve talked about and linked to folks talking about how to route around the existing tv networks. It’s already happening right now of course, just take a look at suprnova.org a few hours after your favorite tv show has aired and you’ll find it there for the downloading, usually edited such that the commercials and filler material are gone. The problem is it needs to be automatic – this needs to happen as seamlessly as your existing tivo setup works for this to really take off. I love peering into the crannies of the software development community to see what kinds of things the developers are cooking up. Here’s today’s excellent example – Buttress. There are a number of apps attempting to do the relatively simple thing buttress is doing – subscribe to an RSS feed, whenever that feed links to a torrent file, Buttress grabs it and ques it up in your Bit torrent client. You come home and find your favorite content ready and waiting for you.

Cool, cool stuff. A little rough around the edges, but some digging on your part and you’ve got yourself the perfect personalized tv network. Give these concepts another 6 months to a year to evolve and we will start to hear the networks squealing and the congress legislating to stop this.

This is Java-based so it should run on any platform with the appropriate JVM installed. I leave it to you all to find the appropriate RSS feeds 😉

Insight into how you read

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Check out the following paragraph:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey

Neat huh? Assuming it worked for you the same way it worked for me, ie I was able to read that paragraph about as quickly as I could have normally. Bad spellers untie, it’s apparantly irrelevant 😉

Shop for xmas early, save $$$

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A little known fact to most of the folks who wander by here – for the past several years Toys R Us has run a ‘buy 2, get 1 free’ special on console videogames during the holiday season. This year it begins this Sunday, the 24th. If you’re looking to buy a few games as gifts, you can save yourself $50 by doing your shopping early and getting them at Toys R Us sometime during the next week.

Siblings considering this deal should be aware that the new Grand Theft Auto game or Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne for the PS2 are both excellent choices for me, or Paper Mario for the Gamecube.

Clever web app

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Think of a discussion board, then cross it with that corkboard in the hall outside the administrative offices in your high school, and imagine what a programmer might do with it. Then check out webnote. Does it look anything like what you were imagining? Be sure to try the filtering feature. This is cool cool stuff. I’m going to try and get this up and running on my server once the code has evolved a bit, it’s still under very active development. Note that you can jump to the root address (www.aypwip.org/webnote) to make your own ‘corkboard’ and read about the codebase and the developer’s plans for it.

This requires a modern browser, Firefox, IE 6 or Safari, just fyi.

Amazing free 3d earth browser

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Nasa has released an amazing 3d terrain browser for windows. If you’re on a windows box with a reasonably capable 3d card, you simply must check this out. They use sattelite imagery to give you a photorealistic environment to navigate around in. Ever wondered what the volcanoes of Hawaii look like up close? Go check it out. Bottom of the grand canyon? It’s yours to fly through. This is amazingly cool technology. I immediately recalled twistory and tried to imagine what it would look like if it used an interface like this. When I run across headlines about the use of GIS data in education this is the kind of stuff I imagine, not the rather more dry (I know, I know, equally valuable….it’s still dry) kinds of uses it’s being put to today.

The sum of all human knowledge…

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I’ve touched on this subject before, but I want to bring it up again today – google has just stealth launched their new Google Print service. No doubt you’ve been to amazon.com and noticed how they publish exerpts of many books on the book’s product page. This is an extension of that notion – Google’s intent is to make the full text of books searchable. I know this is going to sound like hyperbole, but if Google manages to succeed in convincing publishers that this is a good thing, it’s medium term effect on our civilization will be as profound as Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. It’s all about the knowledge transmission folks, doing it in the most expeditious way possible, and this is a major step in the right direction.

Once again, my plea – make your government representatives aware that these kinds of advances are good things, that locking away content behind copyright is a bad thing – it’s impeding progress in the evolution of the information age.

Meanwhile, go read the text of the talk Brewster Kahle gave at the recent Web 2.0 conference and if that doesn’t convince you…..I give up 😉