
my roommate andreas sent me a picture via flickr to let me know that everything is a-ok in zurich 😉
Tag: me
Cog in the crawler
Now that Google is helping me to surf faster (works as advertised, by the way), I have effectively become a cog in a huge distributed crawling machine. Obviously, this is only the first step (alexa-style traffic analysis is naturally already happening). If you control the proxy that people use, annotation and tagging at internet scale are suddenly becoming feasible. ‘tag this’ button in the google toolbar anyone? This will lead to a repeat of the third voice lawsuits, but these features are too useful to be derailed by these problems for long. Years ago at KPMG, I experimented with the office server extensions annotation system, and I am eager to see it return in a cross platform way. People have been pointing out the possibilities for adsense (targeted ads based on your surfing history), personalized search and cobrowsing
improv
today, we went to the improv in cambridge, and sure enough, i ran into jason pratchett from somethingpositive. it’s eerie to run into a cast member of a comic strip you follow.
Am i an alien?
sarah just sent me this, with a stern face:
YOUR FRIEND OR CO-WORKER COULD BE A SPACE ALIEN … here’s how you can tell (by Michael Cassels of the “National Inquirer”)
Many Americans live and work side by side with space aliens who look human -but you can spot these visitors by looking for certain tip-offs.
They listed 10 signs to watch for:
1. Odd or mismatched clothes. “Often space aliens don’t fully understand the different styles, so they wear combinations that are in bad taste, such as checked pants with a striped shirt or a tuxedo jacket with blue jeans or sneakers,” noted Brad Steiger, a renowned UFO investigator and author.
OR, SAY, CLOTHES THAT DO NOT FIT PROPERLY AND ARE NOT MATCHED BY COLOR AND MAYBE THE PANTS ARE TOO SHORT OR DO NOT BUTTON
2. Strange diet or unusual eating habits. Space aliens might eat French fries with a spoon or gobble down large amounts of pills, the experts say.
YEAST. ALL OATMEAL ALL THE TIME.
3. Bizarre sense of humor. Space aliens who don’t understand earthly humor may laugh during a serious company training film or tell jokes that no one understands.
YOU MAKE MANY JOKES I DO NOT UNDERSTAND.
4. Takes frequent sick days. A space alien might need extra time off to “rejuvenate its energy”.
OR PERHAPS CANNOT WAKE UP EARLY AND MUST LIE ABOUT IN BED FOR HOURS BEFORE GETTING UP FOR WORK
5. Keeps a written or tape recorded diary. “Aliens are constantly gathering information.”.
ONE WORD: BLOG
6. Misuses everyday items. “A space alien may use correction fluid to paint its nails”.
GREGOR + HARDWARE = BAD SCENE
7. Constant questioning about customs of co-workers. Space aliens who are trying to learn about earth culture might ask questions that seem stupid.
“For example, a co-worker may ask why so many Americans picnic on the Fourth of July,” noted Steiger.
WHY ARE AMERICANS SO FAT? WHY IS THE US GOVERNMENT SO STUPID? WHY DOES EVERYTHING CLOSE SO EARLY?
8. Secretive about personal life-style and home. “An alien won’t discuss domestic details or talk about what it does at night or on weekends”.
ONE WORD REVISITED: BLOG
9. Frequently talks to himself. “An alien may not be used to speaking as we do,so an alien may practice speaking,” Steiger noted.
PRETENDS TO BE SPEAKING A “SECOND LANGUAGE” SO SLIP UPS CAN BE EASILY EXPLAINED AWAY
10. Displays a change of mood or physical reaction when near certain high-tech hardware. “An alien may experience a mood change when a microwave oven is turned on”. The experts pointed out that a co-worker would have to display most if not all of these traits before you can positively identify him as a space alien.
EXPOSURE TO SHINY SOFTWARE INCREASES YOUR PULSE QUITE DRAMATICALLY
I am going to sell my story to the newspaper and then harvest your organs for our scientists to study.
Pencilneck
“I’ll tell you what, I did not wanna put that thing on after I heard what happened to that poor pencilneck, Gunter or…uh…Gregor, yeah, Gregor Rothfuss. But you know, the guys, uh… they were kinda hasslin’ me and jokin’, you know, givin’ me crap, so I sucked it up and put it on. Hehe…hasn’t eaten me yet. I swear I’m gonna pound those little grey smurfs for making me put that thing on. It’s weird stuff, man, we shouldn’t even be touching it. Pop the bugs
and leave their toys for the scientists, that’s what I say. You don’t put it on.”
it seems that i have become a character in a remake of Atari’s (formerly Microprose) turn-based strategy classic: X-COM: UFO Defense in a new game entitled Xenocide.
Open source miscellanea
Matthias Stuermer of lots fame recently interviewed me on various open source topics. The transcript is now available.
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.
Google vs MSN, round 2
google (newly updated) now has over 60k entries on my name (results may differ depending on your location). the new msn search limps along with ~14k. please tell me there is more to MSN search than meets the eye, i’d like some competition 🙂 not because i would necessarily switch engines, but because it would kick google into high gear.
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.