1. 07 May 2008

    Little Brother

    153 days ago

    New novel from Cory Doctorow (link). Definitely enjoyable, but there’s something about his novels that seems funny: it’s like reading blogs except it’s a long, coherent text. I do like this book, don’t get me wrong, but it bothers me how campy it is, sort of like a maelstrom of all the big ideas to have passed through the collective attention of blog-land. It’s just weird, makes me roll my eyes a lot. Might also have to do that this book is classed as young adult, but I don’t think so: put a 23 year old in place of a 17 year old as the main character and I don’t think that would change the book that much.

    I read it all through my web browser. I’ve taken to reading books on the laptop lately. It’s awkward to hold, and can be less comfortable than curling up with a book, but the sheer availability of books off the internet is very nice. You can crank up the text size (when reading lots I like the text at 20pts or so, which I hope doesn’t mean I’m going blind) and scroll through.

    You just leave the browser window open when not reading, at the proper spot. cmd-tab works great for finding where you just were if you lose your place, just pull two or three words out of your short term memory and in all likelihood they’ll take you back to the exact spot. Compare that with your page slipping away and having to slowly go through and try to find where your thumb ought to go.

    I’ve always felt I read slowly, but trying to read faster has never worked for me. I like to take my time really. I’ve had Rescue Time running for about a week now (more on the disturbing amount of time I spend on my computer if I ever get the guts to confront that topic), and it says I’ve spent 6 hours on craphound.com. My calculations are that the book (excluding pre– and post–ambles) is 110,062 words, so that by 6 by 60 (hours and minute) is 305 wpm.

    Wikipedia says this is on the high side of average, so I can’t be that slow, but also that people who train their speed–reading technique can get up to 800. But training my reading ability for speed seems questionable—reading is for fun, why mess with it and turn it into some kind of optimized algorithm? I wouldn’t want to turn it into something not fun for the ability to do lots more of it.

    I actually read all but the first few chapters of the book yesterday in a conscious effort at productive procrastination (I need to be doing schoolwork, semester ends next week and I’m not ahead by any means). But here I am writing this silly post and still not doing my stuff. Ouch.

  2. 01 March 2007

    586 days ago

    Wired 15.03

    Wired spammed me into a $10 subscription. I figured that with people like Neal Stephenson and Kevin Kelley writing on occasion for the magazine it would be worth the hamilton. Not a bad read.

    I particularly liked the short spot on Thomas Heatherwick, a guy to keep an eye out for. (coolest bridge ever?)

    Kjell Olsen586 days ago

  3. 04 April 2006

    917 days ago

    Mother Earth Mother Board

    Delightful Neal Stephenson article on the laying of undersea cable, written about 10 years ago.

    In 1870, a new cable was laid between England and France, and Napoleon III used it to send a congratulatory message to Queen Victoria. Hours later, a French fisherman hauled the cable up into his boat, identified it as either the tail of a sea monster or a new species of gold-bearing seaweed, and cut off a chunk to take home.

    The rule of thumb for calculating revenue loss works like this: for every penny per minute that the long distance market will bear on a particular route, the loss of revenue, should FLAG be severed on that route, is about $3,000 a minute. So if calls on that route are a dime a minute, the damage is $30,000 a minute, and if calls are a dollar a minute, the damage is almost a third of a million dollars for every minute the cable is down. Upcoming advances in fiber bandwidth may push this figure, for some cables, past the million-dollar-a-minute mark.

    It’s when a society plunders its ability to look over the horizon and into the future in order to get short-term gain – sometimes illusory gain – that it begins a long slide nearly impossible to reverse.
    The collapse of the lighthouse must have been astonishing, like watching the World Trade Center fall over. But it took only a few seconds, and if you were looking the other way when it happened, you might have missed it entirely – you’d see nothing but blue breakers rolling in from the Mediterranean, hiding a field of ruins, quickly forgotten.

    They [Alexander Graham Bell, et al] electrified the reeds in such a way that they generated not only acoustical vibrations but corresponding electrical ones. They sought to combine the electrical vibrations of all these reeds into one complicated waveform and feed it into one end of a cable. At the far end of the cable, they would feed the signal into an identical set of reeds. Each reed would vibrate in sympathy only with its counterpart on the other end of the wire, and by recording the pattern of vibrations exhibited by that reed, one could extract a Morse code message independent of the other messages being transmitted on the other reeds. For the price of one wire, you could send many simultaneous coded messages and have them all sort themselves out on the other end.

    The world has actually been wired together by digital communications systems for a century and a half. Nothing that has happened during that time compares in its impact to the first exchange of messages between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan in 1858. That was so impressive that a mob of celebrants poured into the streets of New York and set fire to City Hall.

    Kjell Olsen917 days ago

  4. 02 April 2006

    919 days ago

    Prisoner of Redmond

    During one of those last long nights working to deliver DOS 2.0 in early 1983, I am told that Paul Allen heard Gates and Ballmer discussing his health and talking about how to get his Microsoft shares back if Allen were to die.

    I’d sure feel good about buying my computer software from those guys. The combination of Allen having distanced his financial well being from his MS stock and an Iowa anti trust suit being heard this year lead Cringely to believe:

    Based purely on character (or lack of it), I confidently predict that Microsoft is going down. It should be interesting.

    via Kjell Olsen919 days ago

  5. 24 March 2006

    The Last Whole Earth Catalog

    Steward Brand

    929 days ago

    The Whole Earth Catalog is a phenomenon way before my time, but it’s been referenced in all the interesting stuff I’ve read for awhile, and I looked it up in the school library.

    It’s a collection of recommendations, stories and articles assembled by hippies in the late sixties, it’s tagline Access to tools. The guy behind it is Stewart Brand, quite the impressive early technologist.

    There’s lots of stuff in there, I only flipped through the pages. Skimming and taking note of anything that looked particularly interesting.

    I was hoping that I’d get the version ended “stay hungry, stay foolish,” and I thought this would be it. But I read through both the beginning and the end, and didn’t find it. The back page is a picture of the earth from space under the words “We can’t put it together. It is together.” A great thing to say. Too bad it’s quickly coming apart.

    This was apparently to be the ‘last’ edition, but it looks like later editions were printed. Brand mentions near the end in a section on the organization’s history that one day he was driving to work and realized he’d stopped having fun; so he decided to stop the thing right where it was. Coincidentally, he stopped feeling it right about when the catalog went from cult to mainstream status.

    There was some good talk on the Whole Earth Catalog and the whole hippie scene in sixties california within What the Doormouse Said, which probably convinced me to write TWEC down on my booklist and eventually read it. I think the whole techno-hippie scene depicted in the book completely fascinating, wouldn’t mind finding it’s progeny in my age.

    Here are the notes I made throughout reading the book, I mostly just took down book titles and authors that looked interesting.

    • The Pentagon of Power, Lewis Mumford. 29
    • A book on Sumeria, Dr. F. Wong Agolt. 73
    • The Sketchbooks of Paolo Soleri. 83
    • Dune, Frank Herbert. 180
    • The Israel Army Fitness book. 212
    • The Elements of Style, William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. 310
    • postmonetary economy. 339
    • The Open Classroom, Herbert R. Kohl. 403
    • The Five Ages of Man, Gerard Heard. 410
    • Education Automation, Buckminster Fuller. 411
    • Self Hypnosis, Lawrence Sparks (and the books on meditation, same page). 422

    This is really a much better coffee table book then read it once through book, if it weren’t for my disdain of spending money and dislike of physical things I’d pick one up off ebay right away. I’ll be tempted in any case.

    Stewart Brand on starting a business:

    What you’re trying to do is nourish and design an organism which can learn and stay alive while it’s learning. Once that process has its stride, don’t tinker with it; work for it, let it work for you. Make interesting demands on each other. 438

  6. 07 March 2006

    945 days ago

    Spore

    Completely mind blowing. Imagine the sum of all games you’ve ever played – and here you go. There are some videos around, here’s one, demonstrating gameplay. I haven’t played videogames in any capacity since the Sim City 2000, Marathon, Madden ‘00 days, but all I can say is holy shit.

    via Kjell Olsen945 days ago

  7. 27 December 2005

    Don't Make Me Think!

    Steve Krug

    1015 days ago

    A good look at usability in web design. Quick read with nice illustration. I got the second edition, all nice and glossy, and had I been going anywhere on an airplane, likely could have finished reading it while up in the air.

    Not too much to say about it, but that it will be a nice one to have on the shelf to peek at.

    The overall idea is that of common sense – make things easy for the people using your website. Test the site against actual people to see what needs improvement. Test early in the development cycle, so that feedback can quickly be integrated into the site.

    Applies more to static web sites. There isn’t lots directly applying to web apps, which is more what I’m interested in, but most of it rubs off in some applicable fashion.

  8. 23 December 2005

    Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

    Cory Doctorow

    1020 days ago

    Great novel. The first I’ve ever read from Cory Doctorow, although everyone reads boingboing and I’ve been following his Themepunks as it gets syndicated at salon.com

    I read the book through rss, and I’m not entirely sure I liked it. I’m a sit down and tear through books kind of guy, and having one or two chapters coming down the wire every day made the novel rub off on me a bit disconnected. Trying to remember what happened last time is a pain, and it’s hard to really get into the book when your daily allowance is up before you can really get into the reading groove.

    But I’d recommend the book, which you can download and read off your computer. I don’t really know how to categorize it, fantasy probably. So check it out.

  9. 21 December 2005

    1021 days ago

    A photo tour of the Transparent Factory in Dresden

    Incredible.

    Kjell Olsen1021 days ago

  10. 02 December 2005

    1040 days ago

    The MySpace Generation

    Please, dear god, don’t let my generation be dubbed thusly.

    But real interesting article about how the internet works socially for kids these days.

    Kjell Olsen1040 days ago

  11. 15 November 2005

    Massively Multiplayer Online Soccer: The Ultimate User Generated Content?

    1057 days ago

    I really wish I could get into video games – they can be really fun.

    But games today suck. My roomate and a friend are here playing midnight racer all the time, and I can’t believe they’re still at it. It’s the same goddamn thing over and over, the same five songs repeating, just you racing around cities at night.

    I think Beattie is on to something here. I played a mud pretty obsessively for a year or two, and got really into it before I just quit one day and never went back. Around the same time I’d mastered Madden 2000 and could beat anyone I played. Now I can hardly play a game without getting bored.

    Computer games of today are the same as they were five years ago. Better graphics, but the graphics still aren’t that good. In fact, the closer virtual humans come to real humans, the worse they get.

    There needs to be something more compelling to gaming. A kid on my floor plays WoW all the time, and apart from me being all RPG’d out, I’d give it a try.

    I think that the same thing that happened with social software, the enabling of user participation, is that usable content balloons so significantly when users are enabled to participate at the highest level. Skinnable computer games enable way more creativity then static console games. So they enjoy a greater popularity for a longer time. How many of you really kept playing Tony Hawk after beating it?

    The thing I loved about that mud was that not only is it open ended, but because it’s text based you can write scripts to capture the environment of the game and do whatever you want with it.

    Games today are at the communication level of phone calls – bi (maybe tri) directional. As games begin to approach the level the internet has reached, as they begin to take on multiple nodes of simultaneous communication, I think they’ll really start to kick.

  12. 10 November 2005

    1062 days ago

    Wired News: Eat, Sleep, Work, Consume, Die

    Just because technology makes it possible for us to work 10 times faster than we used to doesn’t mean we should do it. The body may be able to withstand the strain—for a while—but the spirit isn’t meant to flail away uselessly on the commercial gerbil wheel.

    via Kjell Olsen1062 days ago

  13. 03 November 2005

    1069 days ago

    Class 4 Burning, Cutting Lasers

    Laser Guns finally get REAL.

    via Kjell Olsen1069 days ago

  14. 02 November 2005

    Exponential Growth

    1070 days ago

    Earlier today I was explaining blogs and aggregation to a friend as casting a net out that will bring you back the stuff you want. Blogs filter out all the stuff I don’t care about, and in addition to providing me with interesting content, they provide me with other sources of more similar and interesting content.

    I’ve read blogs in some capacity for two years now, and never come close to my threshold. But lately I’ve been a little trigger happy with

  15. 22 October 2005

    1081 days ago

    The Railroad, Then and Now

    Excellent look at how rails and rapid development will change the software world. Homesteaders vs. Gold Diggers is a nice allusion, I don’t know which I’d rather be.

    Kjell Olsen1081 days ago

  16. 1081 days ago

    Accidental invention could light up the future - LiveScience - MSNBC.com

    Graduate student fucks around with nanoparticles, comes up with sweet LED bulb…

    The new device gives off a warm, yellowish-white light that shines twice as bright and lasts 50 times longer than the standard 60 watt light bulb.

    Cost?

    via Kjell Olsen1081 days ago

  17. 21 October 2005

    1082 days ago

    collision detection: The snobbery of iPods

    iPod users: mostly snobs. I bought a 2nd gen iPod three years ago, and am proud to say I was one of the first. But I’m almost embarrassed to pull it out today – and I hate when kids walk around with the buds in. I replaced my headphones awhile back, but my sony’s broke, so I’m back to the earbuds.

    Indeed, so devoted are iPod owners to this cultivation of appearance that they’ve refused to replace the white earbuds with anonymous black ones, even when police recently began warning people that muggers were explicitly targetting the white ones. They’d rather risk having their iPod stolen than miss a chance to impress the proles.

    And as for songs on my iPod? 3846 (It’s just a 20gig, 500MB left).

    via Kjell Olsen1082 days ago

  18. 20 October 2005

    1083 days ago

    Missed class? Try a podcast

    This is getting absurd – why even pay for college? I bet there are a bunch of cool podcasts to listen to and learn from. In the days of the internet and free information, a college degree is really starting to feel like a $60,000 piece of paper.

    And at the University of Hawaii, hundreds of students in a computer science class are required to show up at a lecture hall only twice a semester—for the midterm and final. Instead of a textbook, they buy a small iPod at the bookstore, though most students already have one, the course professor said.

    via Kjell Olsen1083 days ago

  19. 18 October 2005

    1085 days ago

    How Apple Does It

    Go apple go. I’ve pledged allegiance to you ever since I’ve had an allegiance to pledge. You could rule the world way better then google.

    via Kjell Olsen1085 days ago

  20. 05 October 2005

    1098 days ago

    BBC accidentally reveals video iPod? - Engadget - www.engadget.com

    Video iPod a week from today?

    via Kjell Olsen1098 days ago

  21. 04 October 2005

    1099 days ago

    Rocket Racing League

    !!!!!!

    via Kjell Olsen1099 days ago

  22. 03 October 2005

    1100 days ago

    Google Star Search

    I’ve wanted something like this for awhile now – tracking of every page you visit. Hopefully on top of using it to improve searching we can have some cool representation of where we’ve been on the web.

    Google Star Search solves that problem: when you visit Google you can now choose between a full-Web search and a search limited to the pages in your history; a full-content, ranked query of everything you

    via Kjell Olsen1100 days ago

  23. 17 September 2005

    1116 days ago

    Double Plus Darwin

    I’ve got a killer startup idea up my sleeve, and maybe twenty percent developed. I want to launch it – I think it could really have a market – but have the slightest idea how.

    I will use this blog to document on a weekly basis the startup process from beginning to end. I think it will be very interesting to all to compare theory to practice.

    via Kjell Olsen1116 days ago

  24. 27 August 2005

    Cryptonomicon

    Neal Stephenson

    1137 days ago

    I’m really starting to love Neal Stephenson. Cryptonomicon is definitely as good as Snow Crash, which I loved also. It’s the longest book I’ve read in awhile, at 900 some pages, but I also read it faster then anything else – I started it monday night and was done by thursday morning.

  25. 31 July 2005

    The Pragmatic Programmer

    Andrew Hunt, David Thomas

    1164 days ago

    A great look at how to program well.

  26. 14 April 2005

    Technology Nightmare

    1272 days ago

    I had a nightmare last night that I deleted everything in my Documents folder. But happily, I didn’t – and I even managed to convince myself that it was just a dream before running downstairs out of fear at 3am.

  27. 30 March 2005

    1287 days ago

    Wired 13.04: La Vida Robot

    Undocumented immigrant teenagers kick ass in a NASA sponsored robotics competition.

    The teachers had entered the club in the expert-level Explorer class instead of the beginner Ranger class. They figured their students would lose anyway, and there was more honor in losing to the college kids in the Explorer division than to the high schoolers in Ranger. Their real goal was to show the students that there were opportunities outside West Phoenix. The teachers wanted to give their kids hope. ??1??

    [Installing their battery on board, instead of tethering it from above] was a bold idea. If they didn’t have to run a power line down to the bot, their tether could be much thinner, making the bot more mobile. Since the competition required that their bot run through a series of seven exploration tasks – from taking depth measurements to locating and retrieving acoustic pingers – mobility was key. Most of the other teams wouldn’t even consider putting their power supplies in the water. A leak could take the whole system down. But if they couldn’t figure out how to waterproof their case, Cristian argued, then they shouldn’t be in an underwater contest. ??2??

    Cristian had hacked together off-the-shelf joysticks, a motherboard, motors, and an array of onboard finger-sized video cameras, which now sent flickering images to black-and-white monitors on a folding picnic table. Using five small electric trolling motors, the robot could spin and tilt in any direction. To move smoothly, two drivers had to coordinate their commands. The first thing they did was smash the robot into a wall. ??2??

    The Carl Hayden teammates tried to hide their nervousness, but they were intimidated. Lorenzo had never seen so many white people in one place. ??3??

    Now that they were focused on the mission, both pilots relaxed and made almost imperceptibly small movements with their joysticks. Oscar tapped the control forward while Cristian gave a short backward blast on the vertical propellers. As Stinky floated forward a half inch, its rear raised up and the sampling pipe sank perfectly into the drum.
    “Díos mío,” Oscar whispered, not fully believing what he saw. ??4??

    “Why don’t you have a PowerPoint display?” he asked.
    “PowerPoint is a distraction,” Cristian replied. “People use it when they don’t know what to say.”
    “And you know what to say?”
    “Yes, sir.” ??4??

    Still, both teachers were in a good mood. They had learned that the team placed third out of 11 in the seven underwater exercises. Only MIT and Cape Fear Community College from North Carolina had done better. The overall winner would be determined by combining those results with the engineering interview and a review of each group’s technical manual. Even if they did poorly on the interview, they were now positive that they hadn’t placed last. ??4??

    “And the overall winner for the Marine Technology ROV championship,” Merrill continued, looking up at the crowd, “goes to Carl Hayden High School of Phoenix, Arizona!”
    [...]
    They hope to see all four kids go to college before they quit teaching, which means they’re likely to keep working for a long time. Since the teenagers are undocumented, they don’t qualify for federal loans. And though they’ve lived in Arizona for an average of 11 years, they would still have to pay out-of-state tuition, which can be as much as three times the in-state cost. They can’t afford it. ??5??

    You can send your donations to a fund set up by the phoenix school system, if ya like.

    via Kjell Olsen1287 days ago

  28. 27 October 2004

    1441 days ago

    Laszlo Interactive Language Overview

    Really simplifies making flash for someone without Flash.app… or any knowledge of actionscript. But would it be better to just learn how to make flash?

    via Kjell Olsen1441 days ago

  29. Also somewhat recently

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