Entries from January 2003
Random computing thoughts
There’s been a lot of excitement lately about different ways to get one web page to talk to another. To the uninitiated, this probably sounds incredibly weird, but it’s also a very powerful concept. This is accomplished using techniques with mysterious names like xmlrpc and REST. Unless you are an über-geek, the difference between the [...]
Coffeeshops
Ruta Maya’s new location: good. Flight Path: done in by its own popularity?
Tinfoil hats, part 2
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.
Yet another browser
Some mad scientist has ported Phoenix to OS X. It’s still somewhat primitive, but it’s interesting to see. Funny that I ran across this news on the same day I read that Opera may be withdrawing from the Mac. No great loss there. At any rate, that leaves us with, what, four Mozilla-based browsers for [...]
Tinfoil hats
Patrick Nielsen Hayden tells us it’s time to put on the tinfoil hat, connecting the dots between the new chairmain of the committee investigating 9/11 to Osama bin Laden.
In the wake of 9/11, The Onion observed that American life had turned into a bad Jerry Bruckheimer movie. It might actually be a bad Richard [...]
Aren’t they visiting Japan or something?
MT 2.6 in 2.5 weeks.
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
Saw Confessions of a Dangerous Mind the other day. Movies based on the lives of obscure celebrities may be turning into a trend: first Auto-focus, now this. (Next up: The Nipsey Russel Saga, Scott Baio — Behind the Scenes, and Tragic Mediocity: the Unravelling of Dana Plato.) I jest, but it was actually quite an [...]
Baraka
Saw Baraka at the Paramount recently. Amazing movie. Very much in the same vein as Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi, that is, no plot, dialog, or story: simply a succession of loosely linked images of nature and human activity, with a very good score running throughout. Some amazing locations, including Angkor Wat, the Highway of Death, Everest, [...]
Mail down
Due to a configuration problem, any mail sent to me between roughly noon Sunday (Jan 26) and 9:00 AM Monday (Jan 27) would have bounced. It should be working now.
Mesh networks
Locust World has developed the software and hardware to create mesh networks on the cheap (about $400 per box). This is potentially big. A mesh network allows one to extend a wireless network indefinitely — a signal will hop from one box to the next, until eventually finding one that’s got a landline connection. Obviously [...]
