Tag: events

You are invited

Heya,
Susan Kaup and I are hosting a dinner party on the evening of Thursday, December 9, 2004 at Casablanca, a mediterranean restaurant in Harvard Square located at 40 Brattle Street under the Brattle Theater and Cafe Algiers. The gathering is being held after the Berkman Center for Internet & Society’s kick-off event for their “Votes, Bits & Bytes” conference and the first meeting of the Boston Cocoon & Lenya User Group. Dinner starts at 20:30 and is dutch treat. You can expect to pay $25-$40 (meal, drinks gratuity). For directions and more information about the restaurant, visit Casablanca’s website or the local-i page of reviews and related tidbits. Please RSVP in the comments of Sooz’ entry or email her at susankaup@gmail.com.
UPDATE pictures of the event.

Sushi dinner 2004

Gregor and I are conspiring to host my 7th annual sushi fest. This year it will be held at 21:00 on Thursday, December 9th. The dinner coincides with the first night of “Votes, Bits and Bytes“, The Berkman Center for Internet & Society’s conference about the impact of technology on politics. The location will be near Harvard Square with more specific details on the way.

mark your calendar! i’ll send out an invite shortly, if you want to be on the list and i don’t know you, leave a comment below.

State of X Windows

Jim Gettys, one of the main developers of X Windows, gave a talk about the future of X11 at MIT. The present had some nasty surprises in store, when it took Jim a considerable while to make X11 talk to the projector 😉 It is gratifying to know that even the gurus sometimes fail with the “simplest” tasks.
Rough notes from his talk:
X’s flaws
X’s font architecture fundamentally flawed
Inadequate 2D graphics
Accessibility difficult to implement
No Eye candy
Full integration into 3D environment
Collaborative shared use of X
Cairo brings extremely high quality graphics to free software. Client side fonts are the biggest change in X since 1988.
Try turning on hinting in Freetype (patent problem prevent it from being on by default.)
Lessons learned:
X is but one component of a complete desktop environment
no more flashing: double buffering everywhere
To preserve traditional X flexibility, new Compositioning Manager is introduced. Solved via indirection, copied to visible frame buffer by compositing manager. Apps never draw the screen, compositioning manager applies whatever effects are appropriate and does the screen drawing.
Mouse input needs to be captured and transformed for accessibility. XEvie by Sun does this.
4 new extensions: XFixes, Damage, Composite, XEvie
Eye candy is designed in a way that institutes an upper bound for computation cost. This is a very nice design. (Bound is human perception)
Demo with drop shadows, fade in / out. “A 1000 eye candy flowers will bloom, most will stink, but some will smell nice. Expect a cambrian explosion of eye candy.”
X becomes just another GL application. Croquet project highly recommended.
Jim evoked visions of millions of people sharing 3D spaces with it.
Efforts underway to make X build more easy. Switch to autotools underway. 90% of server round trips can be eliminated. Network compression for synthetic images can do 300x (needed for competition with RDP, Citrix) Session migration needs Xlib support for connection loss. There is a migration prototype done in GTK+ 2.2 One goal is to make input devices network transparent (on the way to X11 entertainment center 🙂
“Network audio solutions are all very lame”
“XFree86 is dead”, most developers moved to X.org. It moved from industry consortium to open membership. X11R6.8 includes X fixes, Evie, Damage, Composite, shipping now. New releases happening much more frequently now.

Zurich cityecho

the initial issue of zurich cityecho is now available. billed as a monthly event magazine, it offers better service than existing event rags, to wit:

  • More location details
  • More non-mainstream events
  • less advertising

while some of the details of this new magazine are still in flux, there is hope that it can offer options beyond the house / R&B wasteland that is the conventional wisdom. i wish these guys luck. disclaimer: my sister christine is one of the founders of cityecho.

XML summer school

I will be speaking at XML summer school (wadham college, oxford, 30th july 2004) about the state of xml for end users. i will look at XML authoring and blogging as 2 areas where end users get in contact with XML. the talk will be followed by a panel discussion with andrew orlowski (the register), peter rodgers (1060.com) and steve pepper (ontopia.net), chaired by lauren wood (textuality). it’s bound to be interesting with panelists like these 🙂
2004-09-02:

I pulled together and chaired a day on “What’s Hot and What’s Not? which was extremely thought-provoking. I certainly came back with lots of ideas from it, and others who attended said the same.

Tutankhamun


what they don’t say in the amazing exhibit about old boy tut and his gold treasure: how he may have looked like.
2015-08-16:

this is Nefertiti’s tomb. Tutankhamun has been sleeping on the couch in his mother-in-law’s living room.

2022-02-14:

More than 170 pharaohs ruled across 30 dynasties for more than 3 ka; Tutankhamun ruled for only 10 years, starting at age 8. The King’s accomplishments, many of them undertaken by one of his advisers, who succeeded Tutankhamun as pharaoh, amounted to reversing his father’s cultural reforms: he restored Thebes (now Luxor) as the capital of the New Kingdom and returned to polytheism after Akhenaten had promoted the worship of Aten above all other gods. (Born Tutankhaten, he changed his name to reflect his renewed worship of Amun-Ra.) Before the discovery of his tomb, he was rarely mentioned in histories of Egypt. Today, many more people can recount his biography than that of Neferkare, thought to have reigned the longest of any pharaoh, for between 64 and 94 years, starting when he was 6; or that of Khufu, who was buried in the Great Pyramid of Giza; or even that of Ramses II, who is regarded as the most powerful of all the ancient rulers of Egypt. More children have worshipped Tutankhamun during the past 100 years than ever did in his lifetime; whatever his authority in the ancient world, he now rules over the kingdom populated by dinosaurs and pirates, horses and astronauts.

Boston future salon?

john robb:

Mark Finnern (a great guy by the way) has some amazing speakers at his SF future salon. Worth looking into if you are a) have a curious intelligence and b) in the area. BTW: We need someone in Boston to put something like this together (I would love to, but I have way too many irons in the fire).

after accelerating 2003, i wholeheartedly agree. looks like i’ll be in boston for the summer, so maybe i can help. but now, i need to fly back to zurich first. back in 2 weeks.

networking a sustainable future

Planetwork Interactive, San Francisco, June 5 – 6, 2004

Join innovators from the world of information technology, peace and social justice activists, environmental visionaries, independent media pioneers and many others to explore how social networks, information technologies and the Internet can play a key role in the 2004 election and beyond, to support emerging global democracy everywhere, including Florida.

sounds very interesting. topics:

  • Environmental: Proactive Responses to Global Warming & Mass Extinction
  • Digital Democracy: Civil Rights & Civil Liberties from the DMCA to Touch Screen Voting
  • Social Networks and Civil Society Emerging Technical and Social Issues & Implications
  • Alternative Economics: Online & Offline Strategies Complementary Currencies, Electronic barter & beyond
  • The Real-World Game: Bucky’s Spaceship Earth meets Sim Earth using real data to model Future Scenarios
  • Independent Media from Blogs and RSS to DV and TiVo, new technologies for independent networked news