Author: gulley

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog, but soon they’ll know exactly where your doghouse is. Despite the mysterious whereless possibilities of cyberspace, it turns out that not only do websites want to know where you are, you want to tell other people where you are too. This New York Times article on Online Locator Software talks about how commercial content providers want to know your surfing address for the same reason TV broadcasters do: markets behave geographically. That’s not so surprising, but wouldn’t you expect people to want to hide behind the location-free anonymity of the web? Not so. The GeoURL server allows websites to attach themselves to physical locations on the globe, and it’s quite popular. Only today, fifty people added themselves to the list, and there are more than 12,000 sites catalogued so far. Cyberspace permits rootlessness, but the humans that inhabit cyberspace crave roots. When I look at the logs for my site, I want to know the same thing: where are you? Australia? Germany? Canada? Next door? Does it matter? Yes it does. I have spent a long time, for example, reading through kuro5hin’s Roll Call posting. kuro5hin is a popular site, and the roll call post just asks people to say who they are. The results are fascinating.

So who are you? And where are you? For the record, this blog comes to you from Watertown, Massachusetts, USA, just outside of Boston. Anyway, remember, you leave a lot more footprints than you think wherever you go, and they all lead straight back to your door. Hope that’s okay with you, $BLOG_VISITOR_NAME.

Here’s another nifty ambient data display, though not commercial yet. Take an illustration, say a calming tropical beach scene, and then tie elements of the picture to incoming data streams. As we read on the Technology Research News website:

The dedicated information screen in Stasko’s office displays a beach theme. A sailboat moves from left to right between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. to keep time. The type of clouds in the sky reflect the weather in Pennsylvania where his parents live. A large seagull shows the Dow Jones performance: minus 200 points is the left edge of the screen and plus 200 is the right. Mousing over elements in the image makes small text balloons pop up to display, for instance, “42 degrees.” When Stasko gets email from his wife, a towel appears on the beach chair.

It may sound a little silly now, but I’m certain there will be lots of this kind of thing in the near future. Then again, just imagine how puzzled your co-workers would be if you jumped up and yelled “Oh my God! Look where that sea gull is!” and ran out of the office.

This new baby gig is making it hard to stay up late and blog, but I finally got around to trying out some RSS syndication software, and I can now safely say that I get it. I knew it was useful… it made sense, but I hadn’t really experienced how valuable it was until I tried it myself.

If you’ve never heard of RSS before, it’s really simple. I mean, it’s REALLY really simple, because RSS stands for Really Simply Syndication. That is, it’s a way for a site, any site, to provide a freeze-dried condensed version of what’s happened recently. I have one here at http://www.starchamber.com/index.rdf. Take a look at it to see what it looks like. It’s just an abbreviated XML version of my latest posts. But if you subscribe to the RSS feeds for a lot of interesting sites, it changes how you look at the web.

A few eons ago, during the Great Dot-Com Era, there were a number of companies trying to create “MyPage” personal newspaper sites (octopus.com is the only I can recall right now). They all failed. But the idea wasn’t fundamentally flawed. Something was off about the timing and the approach. RSS might change that. I use an RSS aggregator called Aggie (there are lots of others; see the bottom of this page). It works very well, and it lets me scan in one document the (new) daily content from a number of blogs, newspapers, and magazine sites. It’s a faster way to sift through lots of information, and it finally starts to deliver on the promise of the personalized newspaper.

Moore’s Law has exerted a strange pull on the modern psyche for the past dozen years or so. What was once simply a statistical prediction has become a mythological imperative with the apparent force of physical law. For years it was an exciting harbinger of progress, but recently it has taken on a darker tone, as all gods eventually do. Exuberance has become fretfulness: we must keep up with it (it is a law, after all) and yet how, and to what end? It becomes a burden… what must we sacrifice to appease this pitiless law? And if we fail, how will we be punished?

And now even Moore’s Meta-Law is in danger of becoming obsolete. Moore’s Law, as you cannot fail to know, says that the computing power of a single chip will double every 18 months. Moore’s Meta-Law states that usage of the phrase “Moore’s Law” in the world press will double every 12 months. After years of solid predictability, there now appear to be both long term and short term limitations to Moore’s Meta-Law. A Google search this evening reveals a surprisingly feeble 143,000 documents that refer to the fabled law.

In the immediate future, we can expect to see continuing heavy impact from events in the Middle East as they drain the available reservoir of journalistic ink: more politics means less Moore. Is this the future you deserve? Don’t you deserve Moore? Working on exactly this principle, several House Democrats eager to revitalize the tech sector have proposed a “More Moore’s Law Law” that would legally coerce journalists to include more mentions of Moore’s Law in their articles in order to bring us in line with the prescribed trend, perhaps thereby vaulting the economy out of recession.

In the long run though, even if we pull out of the current downturn, we can expect to hit the true physical limitations of Moore’s Meta-Law before the close of this decade. According to some projections, by late 2008, every word appearing in print will be “Moore”, “Law”, or words that sound like them. Beyond this horizon predictions are sketchy, but we should remember that in the past researchers have always managed to overcome obstacles that seemed all but insurmountable. Dr. Leonard Chen of Lucent’s Bell Labs observes that “we may yet work out a satisfactory semaphore system, not unlike Morse Code, in which the dashes and dots are replaced by the words Moore and Law.” Armed with this “Moore’s Code” we could, in theory, stay on track for another three years or so merely by increasing the total output of published matter in the world’s press. Beyond this it’s anybody’s guess. But ingenuity has always kept us on track in the past, and if sacrificing meaningful communication is the cost of progress, then Moore’s Law Law Moore’s Law Moore’s Moore’s Law!

As part of my cleanup work over the weekend, I was trying to untangle some Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) problems I was having with my blog. The problem goes like this: any element on your page, like a block of text, can inherit a property, like its color or its font size, from any of several style definitions that surround it. For simple style sheets, this is straightforward. But as the style sheets you use (particularly those you didn’t write) get more complicated it can be hard to deduce why the page doesn’t look right. Was the problem due to the <p> paragraph style or the <div> style or the <span> style or what? I figured there must be some diagnostic tools out there, and with the aid of Google I quickly found just the thing: bookmarklets.

Bookmarklets use CSS and JavaScript magic to instantly change your web page in useful ways. Jesse Ruderman’s amazing ancestor bookmarklet does exactly what I was looking for. Hovering over any element on your page will reveal the inheritance structure. For instance, the text below has the

HTML > BODY > DIV#content > DIV.blog > DIV.blogbody > BLOCKQUOTE

Try it! Click on this link, and then hover over this page somewhere. Believe me, this is marvelous information. Now go back to Jesse’s Bookmarklet page and check out some of the other cool loot, like the one that zaps cheap effects on cheesy web pages. There’s a lot of good stuff here.

Happy Memorial Day!

I’ve spent a some time in the last few days remembering and cleaning up a lot of old stuff around the site. Now all the styles should be pointing at the same style sheet for a least a modicum of consistency. Also, I have dusted off the page where I list all the writing I did before (and some after) I started the blog: Paracelsus Writes.

I started the Star Chamber website with three other guys in April of 1996, and between the four of us, we had something new up on the site once every week, more or less. This was, of course, before blogs were invented, so we were kind of making it up as we went. We wrote longer pieces and we posted them less often than your typical blog. If we were starting the same thing today, it would probably be a group blog. But hey! We kept it up for four years before we lost steam as a group. Now I’m the last one standing on the site, and it has largely been co-opted by my blog. But all the old files are still there. If you want to know more about the other members of the Star Chamber and what they wrote, look at the About the Star Chamber page. And if you’re really interested in getting a taste of the old site, a collection of Star Chamber writing is available via Peanut Press for convenient reading on your PDA or handheld computer. Check it out:
The Star Chamber: Writings from the Web

The two most valuable new developments in internet software in the last five years are blogging and wiki. They are both fundamentally new forms that arise because publishing is now extremely cheap. Blogging gives a voice to one person, whereas wiki gives a voice to a community. Blogging is certainly the better known of the two, which isn’t surprising given that it is easier to coordinate the efforts of one person than those of a crowd. Even so, I have been surprised that wiki, which is so useful and widespread where I work, has not made more of a splash. The short course on wiki goes like this: anyone can add, edit, or remove pages from a wiki site. What sounds like a recipe for chaos is surprisingly stable. The New York Times put together a good article about it:
Business Is Toying With a Web Tool. As I mentioned, though, we have been using it with great success at my company for over a year. The grandfather of all wikis is the PortlandPatternRepository. If you’re curious about how a wiki really works, read this OneMinuteWiki page from that site.

Finally, shifting to blogs for a second, here’s another New York Times article about the quasi-public lifestyle that goes along with dating a blogger: Dating a Blogger, Reading All About It. It’s nice to see a blogging article that isn’t about Blogging and Its Impact on Modern Journalism. This is the more human, and decidedly more common, side of blogging.

After I read JMike’s gambit comment here, I started poking around some more about the etymology of the word gambero. Gambero is the Italian word for prawn or shrimp, and gamba is the word for leg. I was convinced that it must derive from “that little feller with all them wiggly legs.” My web research turned up an Italian dictionary with an etymological entry that seemed to confirm my guess (my Italian, she is a no so good), but along the way I also found this dandy site on the etymology of anatomical words that mixes in famous paintings for good measure: Medical Etymology. It seems to be maintained by the clever and obsessive W. Wertelecki, M.D. His pages are long entertaining riffs on related words and how they fit together. On the subject of thighs, he points out the connection between gamba (Italian), jambon (French), jamon (Spanish), and ham (you know). Mmm, ham.

No.

But as I learned from Mad Scientist Mike Onken, some Sulawesi Macaques at the Paignton Zoo Environmental Park have been employed to see if the reverse was true, putting to the test the old adage “Give a million monkeys enough time and they will write the complete works blah blah blah adf;j;as hbanana banaba.” They’ve even got a (publicity stunt) book you can buy: Notes Towards the Complete Works of Shakespeare by Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan (monkeys all).

Not to gloat, of course, but we have previously dealt with this very topic at length at the Star Chamber. Read this informative interview with Miles the Talking Monkey.