Fragments weblog > Monthly Archive

Sterling's Open Source speech

I really think you should read Bruce Sterling's Open Source speech.

Sep 1, 2002 @ 11:41 » no comments » General

Nine, not ten

Yes, this has bugged me too. Why does the snooze button of your alarm clock give you a 9 minute reprieve from the dangers of the waking world? Why not 10? Or even better, 5 minutes. I used to have a travel alarm clock that had a 5 minute snooze function and that was just perfect for my wacky waking pattern. Luckily Cecil Adams has the Straight Dope on this important issue.

Sep 2, 2002 @ 09:21 » 1 comment » General

Irony

This is pretty ironic, don't you think? You ask Sygate to do a scan for open ports on your system and it can't do it for you because they have closed the necessary ports on their webserver "for security reasons".

Still, you can check the security on your system with ShieldsUp! at GRC.com or the DSLReports Portscan.

Sep 2, 2002 @ 14:04 » no comments » General

Zuuuul

Maybe you don't have this problem where you live, but here in the Netherlands we also get the German shampoo brand Guhl. Whenever I see that bottle in the shower, my brain goes Zuuuuul, complete with a nice hall-effect. Guess I've seen Ghostbusters at an impressionable age.

And the only effect that sorts, is that I have to think about the next to unplayable Activision Ghostbusters game that I had for my MSX homecomputer (review!). The game mostly involved driving around the city, getting to ghost infected areas in time, setting up a trap, positioning your ghostbusters so that their beams wouldn't cross, but would still be close enough to trap the ghost that moved about the screen, and then hitting the fire-button of the joystick just in time to vaporize and catch the ghost. This all accompanied by that wonderful Ghostbusters themesong mangled by a good old synthesizer chip, click here if you dare for a midi file. Ick ;-)

Sep 3, 2002 @ 00:25 » no comments » General

Blog-o-sphere

For future reference: Living in the Blog-o-sphere by Steven Levy.

Sep 3, 2002 @ 10:25 » no comments » Blogosphere

Dot com is US property

Yuck! The Register writes that two recent court decisions in combination with the 1999 Anti-Cybersquatting legislation mean that .com domainnames are now considered "property" you own and because the .com domain name registry sits in Virginia, Virginia (and US) law apply. Basically, if you're not a Virginia inhabitant, you're the "absentee" owner of some property in Virginia.

If you injure someone by virtue of that property (we're talking trademark disputes here) then Virginia's courts will take the case. This may sound surprising, but it has worked for both Porsche and Harrods, each of whom sued some sixty or so domains in a single action.

What's even worse than the fact that you'll have to hire horrendously expensive American lawyers, there's a clause in one of the rulings that states that:

"Virginia's interest in not permitting foreign companies to use rights emanating from, and facilities located in, its territory to infringe U.S. trademarks also supports [this] exercise...." In other words, if your .com domain name (however inadvertently) infringes a US trademark, the Commonwealth of Virginia has an interest in not permitting you, as a foreigner or otherwise, to use the facilities of the domain name registry database.

These sort of US centric land grabs make me feel sick. I mean, every other country uses their country top level domain and sticks second level .edu.au, .com.tw domains under it. Aren't the top level .edu, .org, .net and .com domains supposed to be global domains? And how is it that one country not only implicitly lays claim to these domains (how many .edu.us, .com.us domains do you know?! or conversely, how many non-American educational institutions have a .edu domain name?) but also claims ultimate legal power over these domains?

Sep 4, 2002 @ 15:50 » no comments » General

Done

In the meanwhile I've finished Jon Courtenay Grimwood's Pashazade: The First Arabesque and Cory Doctorow's short story 0wnz0red.

I'm rather impressed by Pashazade and I don't know if I can wait for the Second Arabesk to be published in paperback... It's a strong story with some hard-boiled detective elements, set in a novel locale, and the main characters are developed sensibly. What more do you want? If you like cyberpunk novels, or even if you don't because there's too much tech-talk in there, this is a novel for you. There is novel technology around, but it plays a secondary role to the main story that is set in El Iskandryia, a Northern African metropole, which provides a welcome break from the almost ubiquitous Japanese/MegaTokyo backdrop of many cyberpunk novels.

I'm not going to say much about the story, you'll have to read that for yourself (recommended!), but there was this one line about the book, that isn't on the back cover where I thought it was, that said something like El Iskandryia taking on the role of a character in the book as much as the the other characters. Very true... and resonates nicely with something that is on the back cover: "If Ashraf Bey is to survive in Iskandryia he must turn detective to uncover answers to questions about himself and the city that holds him in its embrace. Answers that may be factually accurate but are not necessarily true." And that in turn resonates nicely with a remark Reiser made in a totally different context: "A system may still be effective when its assumptions are known to be false."

Doctorow's story is an imaginative short story set in Silicon Valley and it's laced with tech-talk and Valley-speak. The story is aimed at a tech savvy audience, but if you fit in that category (as I'm afraid I do ;-) I think you'll like the ironic commentary on the high-tech lifestyle. (There are links to explanatory websites for the more obscure terms.) Besides that, Doctorow comments intelligently on developments like the "Honorable Computing Initiative", about which one of the characters muses:

"Yeah." Murray said. Ring Zero, the first registers in the processor, was where your computer checked to figure out how to start itself up. Compromise Ring Zero and you can make the computer do anything -- load an alternate operating system, turn the whole box into a brain-in-a-jar, executing in an unknown environment. Ring Minus One, well, that was like God-code, space on another, virtual processor that was unalterable, owned by some remote party, by LoCal and its entertainment giants. Software was released without any copy-prevention tech because everyone knew that copy-prevention tech didn't work. Nevertheless, Hollywood was always chewing the scenery and hollering, they just didn't believe that the hairfaces and ponytails didn't have some seekrit tech that would keep their movies safe from copying until the heat death of the universe or the expiry of copyright, whichever came last.

In short, I liked it, I recommend it, it's free, go read it :-)

Sep 5, 2002 @ 11:27 » 1 comment » Reading

Wishing you google luck

I just fired off a mail to someone about finding something on the net and I wished him "google luck". I thought that was a pretty neat expression...

I wasn't the first to come up with this though (in chronological order: 1, 2 and 3), but I can honestly say that I haven't seen or heard the expression before. Indeed, Google itself lists only nine occurences of the terms "google luck", of which only the above three use the expression of wishing someone google luck.

So, whatever you search for today... google luck!

Sep 6, 2002 @ 09:48 » no comments » General

Photologs

It's a link day: photologs.

quarlo.com
alifeuncommon.org
madorangefools.com (love the polaroids!)
photogeek.org
lomogeek.org
milov.nl
lightningfield.com
phonezilla.net/phlog
mood-indigo.net
lay-c.com
ellessu.net
nycasd.com

Feel free to drop some suggestions in a comment, I feel like browsing :-)

Sep 9, 2002 @ 11:30 » 3 comments » Blogosphere

So...

A lot has happened in the past year and a lot didn't happen after all. A year ago I was in a conference that was held here in Amsterdam. After the last afternoon session one of the organisers came to the podium and announced that planes had hit the WTC. I guess that was about an hour after it had actually happened. A couple of people freaked, because they had partners flying into NY that day or because they lived there themselves. Apparently there was only one place in the whole building where we could watch tv, so we all huddled up in a really small storage room next to the conference room. We stood amidst folding chairs, spare furniture, boxes with cables and mikes, remote controls and videos stacked up on shelves and we watched the crashes unfold on tv, many times over, from many angles, in many different slow motion replays. The tv only had Dutch channels, so the four or five Dutch people started to translate for the four or five people nearest to them. It quickly got hot in that small room. It seemed all so surreal.

Sep 11, 2002 @ 09:45 » no comments » General

Cat and Girl

On a lighter note: Cat and Girl.

Sep 11, 2002 @ 13:09 » no comments » General

Diffuseness

Meanwhile the light's gone back to diffuse. Overcast sky. It's muggy because summer's not gone completely. People back from holiday. They appear to have left any sense of humor and ability to relativize at home. I look at the beautiful light and wonder if that really is the Netherlands. Why can't we have more direct sunlight here? People seem to need it. I need it.

Sep 11, 2002 @ 15:41 » no comments » General

Sun

Maybe I should have complained earlier. There's a nice sun out today, but it somehow feels like the light here is always filtered through a thin layer of smog, real high up in the sky. Not the kind of thoroughly blue and clear skies we saw in Australia's red center earlier this year. But that might also have to do with the fact that Australia misses part of its ozone layer.

Anyway, next week it's going to be rather quiet around here, because I'll be in Nijmegen for a week's worth of courses. The picture is of the place where we'll be staying. Not too shabby, ey?

Sep 12, 2002 @ 13:37 » no comments » General

Spooky

Hover over the icons in the top right corner of this page. Turn up the volume of your speakers a bit if you're not yet spooked. The future of navigation?

Sep 12, 2002 @ 16:30 » no comments » Webdesign

First :-)

Slashdot refers us to the results of a hunt for the first ever use of a smiley.

The Register helpfully provides us with a link to Scott Fahlman's homepage, where the inventor of the smiley gives some more background information. And the whole conversation where the first mention of the smiley came from is here.

As Slashdot remarks: a nice piece of online archaeology.

Sep 13, 2002 @ 12:40 » no comments » General

Back

I'm back from my weeklong summerschool. We spend the preceding weekend visiting some friends and enjoying a walk in beautiful Twente and I figured I'd post a quick update here when I'd get to the conference center/retreat/old monastry, but as it turned out, they had no internet access there whatsoever. No public computers, no easily accessible phone jacks, and that is a good thing I think...

We spend a week with little distraction and our common goal to make as much of that time as possible: the pressure cooker effect. Most presentations were really good and Steve Woolgar managed to keep us on our toes and remained provocative throughout the week. I think I haven't slept more than 4 hours per day that week, because instead of dying down, discussions flared up and raged on during breakfast, lunch, dinner and deep into the night. It's been a long while (if ever) that I spend so much of my day amongst a bunch of such smart people, my brain pushed to its hundred percent limit almost all the time. I have a lot of good ideas and gained some practical insights that will last me for quite a while.

Back on the job though and loads of e-mail to wade through, a bunch of meetings and guest lectures lined up. Browsed the web a bit yesterday, still a bit too groggy to post here. Good to notice nothing much has changed. I thought this was pretty cool though: Poke the Penguin

Sep 23, 2002 @ 09:51 » no comments » Research

Matrix

I watched the Matrix last night, for the first time since I saw it in the cinema. For quite a few people the Matrix is their only experience with, broadly phrased, cyberpunk, or indeed cyberspace. They don't know Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson or even Blade Runner. It's interesting then to see how the Matrix constructs the virtual, the real and technology.

Although on the face of it the virtual and the real seem dichotomous in the Matrix, the matter is somewhat more complex, starting with the fact that dying in the Matrix also means dying in Reality (we'll return to dying and not really dying in a moment). The movie starts in what we later learn to be the Matrix, a 'false world' controlled, let's say, by an artificially intelligent entity (plural?) that has enslaved humankind. Neo is coaxed to leave the Matrix behind and ends up in Reality: a vessel traversing the bowels of enormous ruined cities.

Next Morpheus takes Neo into a Construct to prepare him for future travels into the Matrix. This Construct, just like the Matrix, is a cyberspace, a virtual reality. The main difference between the two is that the Construct is under human control, whereas the Matrix is under the control of the evil entity/program. One of the first things Morpheus does in the Construct, is to show Neo how the world really looks like after a (nuclear?) war between the humans and the artificial intelligence(s) they created. Inside the Construct Neo and Morpheus find themselves in a postapocalyptic setting and Morpheus calls it "the desert of the real", referring to Baudrillard's use (coining?) of that phrase. So interestingly enough, the presentation of the most real reality takes place inside the Construct. Neo doesn't appear to doubt Morpheus' use of the Construct to present this reality and the claim that this is what is beyond the Reality of the vessel called Nebuchadnezzar. What follows is a series of 'jumps' between Reality and the Matrix, whereby Neo progressively learns to 'decode' the system that animates the Matrix.

The status of the Matrix and the Construct are at times compromised though. Other characters in the Matrix, such as the Oracle and the Potentials in the waiting room, seem to have some sort of knowledge of a reality or even Reality beyond the Matrix. This knowledge however is framed as mystical or religious inside the Matrix, rendering it powerless in the rationalist Western late 20th century. This framing of the knowledge however gains credibility in the frame of Reality, where allusions are made to the last stronghold of humankind, deep in the Earth's crust, called Zion. Again, interestingly, the Matrix's artificial intelligence(s) mainly in the form of Agent Smith are after the computer access codes that will give them access to this Zion. This seems to imply that they/it know where Zion is, but that begs the question why they cannot destroy it, or alternatively, they/it don't know where it is, but supposedly there is some sort of guarded online connection between Zion and the Matrix, which begs the question if Zion resides in Reality or in the Matrix.

Further compromise of Reality and the Matrix lies in their interconnection. Neo bleeds in Reality when hurt both in the Construct and in the Matrix. Neo asks at some point, "If you're killed in the Matrix, you die here?" and Morpheus replies, "The body cannot live without the mind." No mention is made of the (im)possibility of dying in Reality and living on in the Matrix. This seems precluded by the same logic that governs the inverse relation and Cypher kills several of the crew members by unplugging them while they're in the Matrix. The separation of mind and body means death, but at the same time it is the very separation of the body that stays behind in Reality and the mind that wanders the Matrix in the guise of a body that remarkably resembles the Real body that makes the whole notion of the Matrix, of virtual reality possible. The separation of body and mind is rather paradoxical, at once possible and impossible.

Or maybe that's my own simplified notion creeping in here: it could be argued that even when the mind wanders the Matrix, the center of experience is still firmly lodged in the actual body, in that body's brain. Morpheus seems to imply as much when Neo asks, "Right now we're inside a computer program?"

Morpheus: Is it really so hard to believe? Your clothes are different. The plugs in your arms and head are gone. Your hair has changed. Your appearance now is what we call residual self image. It is the mental projection of your digital self. Neo: This...this isn't real? Morpheus: What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain. This is the world that you know. The world as it was at the end of the twentieth century. It exists now only as part of a neural-interactive simulation that we call the Matrix. You've been living in a dream world, Neo. This is the world as it exists today... Welcome.. to the desert.. of the real.

The situation remains sketchy at best. A connection between mind and body is posited and the death of one leads to the death of the other, but it remains unclear if this happens exactly because body and mind are one and the same or because severing the tether of technology that makes it possibly for the mind to stray far from the physical body actually prevents the mind from returning to its body.

Another aspect of the movie (which personally troubles me most) that complicates all this, is the fact that Technology in the form of the Matrix/Artificial Intelligence/Agent Smith is portrayed as having robbed humankind of its humanity. Mere humans are, once again, in the hands of a saviour who possesses superhuman powers, but who appears to remain even more human than other humans. It might be said that Neo's neural reflexes are not so much superhuman, as that they are the magnified essence of what it means to be human. Neo's special ability is not so much that he possesses these powers, in theory it seems everybody could have them, but that he is the one who can unlock them by performing the essence of being human. This is underscored when Agent Jones, whose bullets manage to graze Neo, remarks: "Only human."

Performing the essence of being human centers around belief and much of the story revolves around Neo accepting the state of the world, the fact that he is a human in that world and finally believing in himself. This very secular belief in oneself and in being human is contrasted by the much discussed religious imagery of the movie. Near the end of the movie Neo actually dies in the Matrix and consequently in Reality when Agent Smith shoots him, but he is resurrected by Trinity professing her love for him in Reality and telling him that he can't be dead because the profecy of the Oracle said that she would fall in love with the One.

Trinity: So you see, you can't be dead. You can't be, because I love you. You hear me? I love you... Now get up.

It seems that there is one thing even stronger than the belief in oneself and in being human and that appears to be love. Neo gets up in the Matrix, having attained a form of enlightenment and now is able to see the "code", the construction of the Matrix for what it is, which grants him (almost?) total control over the construct that is the Matrix, defeats Agent Smith and then returns to Reality to find himself in Trinity's embrace and they kiss.

Sep 24, 2002 @ 08:08 » 1 comment » Research

Shoot!

PictureYourself.org

I'm going to sell all my 35mm gear, body, lenses, filters... even my beloved 85mm/F2.0 lens, the darkroom equipment and buy a good digital camera. What's the use of having it around and not using it because you don't have the time to develop and print yourself?

Sep 24, 2002 @ 21:15 » no comments » General

Tips and tricks

Yesterday our research group discussed a paper about a research on how people look for health information. Internet is now one of the venues where people look for that kind of information, but we all were shocked by how little practical understanding these people had of the internet, how to find stuff and how to navigate. That the respondents found anything appears to be sheer luck, considering the way they approached (or rather didn't) search engines, commercial interests and brand names. Some literally understood 'the internet' as one huge publication, comparing it with a book, and deemed 'the internet' as whole as a trustworthy source of information, apparently totally oblivious to the fact that 'the net' is rather fragmented and contested 'medium' instead of a 'publication'.

Savvy users may giggle and dismiss these users, but if you find yourself giggling, consider this article on usability research at IBM. It's called 'Seven tricks web users don't know' and I think it's a rather interesting wake-up call. Consider the fact that even tech-savvy users simply don't know that a company logo usually is a link back to the home page or that the use of the stop and refresh buttons of the browser is completely unclear to many users. The author remarks that these users are not dumb or wouldn't like to use the cursor keys to navigate drop-down fields... they simply don't know it's possible. Rather than trying to change all those people's behaviour she argues, it might be wiser to change your website.

Sep 25, 2002 @ 11:09 » no comments » General

Free University not so freely accessible

Ouch... the Free University (that is the other Amsterdam university and not the one where I work) has redesigned their website. Taste is debatable, but accessibility is not. You either can access it, or you can't. In this case, the Free University doesn't let me access their site... kind of reminds me of the silly Canadian KPMG website thingy.

Using Opera 6.05 there is no way to access their site. You are advised to either use Netscape 4.7, IE4 (or IE5 on Mac), or to click to enter the site regardless... but clicking that link only takes you back to the same page in Opera. Telling Opera to identify itself as Netscape, Mozilla or IE doesn't make a difference.

The situation is slightly better with Mozilla 1.1, because the site lets you actually continue by clicking the "show me the site anyway" link. However, as this image shows, it will only block your access at a later point in the site. If you click the 'show me the friggen site already' link at that point, you're taken back to the home page instead of proceeding to the particular page you were trying to access.

You get invited to do a guestlecture, but they don't want you to know how to get there. Bit silly innit?

Sep 25, 2002 @ 15:52 » 2 comments » Webdesign

OS X to go

Everybody seems to love OS X and Apple TiBooks. I certainly wouldn't mind having one, but they're kind of expensive. You can get a top of the range 700MHz G3 iBook for about the same price (~2650 euro) you can get a more or less top of the range 1.8 GHz mobile P4 Dell Inspiron 8200 with a much nicer 15" screen. But what you really want of course is a 800 MHz G4 TiBook and that will set you back more than 4500 euro. That's about 1800 euro more than we paid for our very nice second hand Citroen ZX with only 80.000 kms on the clock last year. See what I mean with "kind of expensive"?