Staticfree Blog

New photos in structure/:

See more ...

New photos in silly/:

Some of your friends are already this fucked. An interesting look on the music industry from a financial point of view. How much money does an average band make? I don't quite know the accuracy of the numbers, but looking them over they seem to make sense.

In the shower, I was pondering relationships. As happens too frequently, I started pondering them in terms of other things, and this case - in terms of internet protocols. Yeah, I swear I'm not addicted to computers.

One night stands

This one's simple: UDP. It's an unreliable protocol where no permanent connection is established. You aren't even guaranteed a reply at all.

Relationship (significant other)

TCP/IP. You go through a bit of a dance to establish a connection (lots of hand shaking) and once you do, you've got a reliable connection. Even over long distances and through harsh networks you can have a reliable connection, although they're more apt to disconnect that way. When you're done with the connection, you say a few magic words and it's over; the port you reserved for it is then freed.

Polyamory

Multicasting. It's not widely supported, but some use it on a daily basis. Some think it's the future, while others think it has too much overhead. Some will try it out and realize that it's not for them, while others get very into it and often get swept away by it.

Flirting

nmap ;-)

New photos in Xmas2003/:

See more ...

PuTTY for SymbianOS (the operating system of my cellphone). PuTTY is my favorite SSH client when I can't get the real thing. Having it live on my cellphone means that I can have an ssh client...in my pants. (Arguably, I've had such for awhile, but the program is for my Palm and is remarkably slow). I recall drooling about the idea a few years back and hearing various people saying, "bah. what's the point?" The point? Does there need to be a point? It's SSH in my pants! [From MobileWhack]

This was accidentally posted before I finished it. Apologies to those who were horribly confused.

foreach my  ( @lives ){
    live( \@lives,  );
}
live();

I don't really like this very much - it seems so vain - but some people keep asking for gift lists. It's a bit late, I suppose, but here's a list of stuff that I like. Part of it is automagically updated from my Palm's list of media that I need to research, so it's still rather current.

Gifts are so hard, I just don't generally desire many things that aren't very expensive. I spend most my money on computer equipment and eating at fancy restaurants; both things that are hard to give as gifts. I suppose recently, media is the best bet for little things that I like, but that's such an impersonal sort of thing. Everyone should just give me a day of hanging out with them for the holidays - I think I'd like that a lot.

It's about time. I finally made it to one of Dave Weiner's Berkman Thursday weblog meetings. I ended up showing up a bit late, as I couldn't get a fix on exactly how to get to where I wanted to on Mass. ave. (don't pretend to be in a car, walk on the other side of the street).

Before I went, I listened to one of the recordings to get a feel of what was going on. I anticipated a meeting overrun by a large collection of pale, scrawny geek guys, but it turned out to be a refreshingly eclectic group. I arrived, hovered a bit, and eventually landed at the table, fitting in by pulling out my laptop.

I find that an increasingly popular phenomenon: a group of people existing in meatspace proximity, yet simultaneously conversing and residing in a virtual space as well. In this case, everyone was chatting in IRC while Dave talked about how keen public aggregators of common content are (and how easy it is to find this common content if people continuously send you links to it). It allowed silly conversation to go on, while also having a more serious discussion. Both would feed on each other: the IRC channel providing links and flames based on the conversation IRL. All we need to do now is remove the keyboard, screen and shove as much of the tech into an implant. Let this sort of discussion/metadiscussion happen every day.

All in all, I met a bunch of interesting people who don't mind chatting about the social problems of crpytography over a very tasty indian dinner. I'll be going back if I can manage to plan it into my week (things always come up on thursdays) and see if I can drag a friend or two along with me.

I really must stop this habit of posting blog entries before I go off to work: my computer keeps yelling at me to get going. "Yeah yeah, µ, I'm on my way."

New photos in LOTR/:

See more ...

In reading the Creative Commons RSS feed, I came across another feed for archive.org, which is very keen. There's a ton of free (free as in beer, free as in legal, free as in speech) music there and some of it's even good.

A particularly nifty compilation there called One Minute Massacre Volume 1 was put together by a bunch of electronic music artists, each contributing a 1-2 minute segment that is supposed to blend with the previous segment. Some of the artists succeed remarkably well. Check it out, the only cost is a 141MB download.

New photos in Boston/:

See more ...

In thinking of how news propagates through an information network, Dyfrgi and I came up with the (perhaps not original, but new to us) idea of distributed, pluggable RSS filter modules. Somewhat like what Localfeeds is, except with optional control lines. I like to think of them in the way that Galan thinks of LADSPA plugins: a network of connected modules with separate control lines.

See more ...

Hello dear readers. I've recently set up my cellcam such that it'll upload straight to my photo gallery and post an entry to my blog. I've so far heard one negative comment on this and one neutral one. What do you think?

The options I've considered are:

1. Leave it as-is, posting a set of 320x240 occasionally.
2. Smaller thumbnails, leave as-is.
3. Post one image from a set as a "teaser" and put all inline in the comments page.
4. Post a link to the comments page (and/or the images) in the "summary".
5. ...

Please leave me your compliments, suggestions, flames, etc. I want to be able to share these things with people, but I don't want to annoy my audience in such a way that they get up and leave. Tell me, dear readers, what you want to see.

New photos in structure/:

See more ...

A flash-based web meme, the snowman creator! I'm mainly noting this here as their gallery seems to have died and I was quite proud of my fractal snowman. I was going to iterate it a bit further, but then I realized that I'm drawing a bloody snowman fractal. And life goes on.

New photos in people/:

New photos in people/:

See more ...

(04:42:34) Brigitte: internet needs a peaceful quiet...

The Internet has become a sort of home for me. It's the one place (if you could even call it such) where I find my self returning to each day and falling asleep in. Like a good home, it's comforting to me in many regards - being able to communicate in various ways with my friends and lovers as though they were there. It's missing many things, but one particular one I've been wanting recently - quiet.

The real world is a subtractive environment: you have to actively do less in order to communicate less. You have to make the conscious decision to lay still to not communicate body language. Even then, the pattern and rate of your breathing, the state of your eyes, your facial expression, all say great deals about yourself.

Online, communication is additive. If you want to express yourself, there's a wall up that you squeeze your expression through. You must actively place words, actively create a web page, actively interact with your computer in order to communicate information. The only passive information in the electronic world is your chat status, your avatar. That, though, is ultimately controlled by you, so it is effectively additive.

Why note this distinction between additive and subtractive communication?

Silence.

In an additive world, silence is the norm. If there's nothing happening, then simply nothing is being directly communicated. There's no passive facial expression to show how someone is inside. You can't tell if someone is there and sharing the silence with you, or off playing a video game at top volume. In all the silence, there is no guaranteed lack of activity. You cannot share a silent moment with someone online for there is no silence.

Why is this important? Why does one need to have pure, unadulterated silence? It's a remarkably personal thing. We, as humans, pride ourselves on our accomplishments, on our creations, on our successes. But silence is the opposite of that. There is no activity there. A silence is a moment of reflection: a 4am lay-on-the-couch-and-ponder-the-universe silence. It's a time people can share together, intimate and isolated.

There is no easy way to give the Internet this capability. As noted, it's additive. You would have to literally see all that was happening and hear all that way playing on someone's computer to truly share such an intimate moment like this. Perhaps some things should simply be left to the reality and not recreated in an abstraction.

Grouphug.us came across my radar recently. It's a site where people can post anonymous confessions. As a minister, I feel it my duty to hear some confessions every once in awhile. It's more than that, though: it's intriguing. You get to hear what people feel is bad in their life, what they deem to be wrong. Things vary from having wild, drunken sex with relatives behind their SO's back to confessing that they aren't honest and true to their friends.

I don't know how much is truthful, but it doesn't really matter. Like The Dead Letter Office, it's a small, penetrating look at a portion of a random someone's life that is often hidden. Or what they want people to think about it anyhow.

I have a morbid fascination with these sites which I'm sure many people would deem unhealthy. I think quite the opposite: I can reflect on them and see how I stand against a random set of individuals. I can look at their seemingly unsolvable problems and I can ask myself how I'd handle it. I can look at myself and say, "I'd never do that; I'm better than that" and ask myself if that's really true. It's a strange sort of thing that I like to call "my daily hate", for without the bad, the good loses all its contrast and definition.

MozCC is a nifty plugin for Mozilla-based browsers that lets you view, at a glance, the Creative Commons copyright information embedded in the page. It puts little icons in the lower-right corner of the status bar that show what you're required to do if sharing the work. See this post which has a bunch of other nifty CC toys, including a CC validator.

This robotic vehicle is totally awesome. It has 4 carefully-controlled wheels per side which can rotate more than 90° as well as move forward and backward, raise and lower. It can drive normally, sideways, spin in place, walk(!), and other keen things. If only there was enough monetary interest to build a full-scale model of it. Now that I'd pay to see.

I just received my first Christmas gift in the mail the other day, straight from CD Baby. In the package came a keen sampler of other CD Baby artists (an mp3 CD with a good 90-something songs). One of the songs caught my ear so far, Come to Me by Bethany Yarrow.

Good female vocalists always catch my fancy, especially when accompanied by intriguing backup instruments. There were some particularly amazing samples of a live set where Ari did accompaniment vocals to some ambient electronica by Antarktika; I wish I had been there. On that note, Ari will be performing around Boston. She's having a regular show every Monday of December, so I think I'm going to try and make those. See her site for more details.

I just put together a Nokia image upload server so that I can upload photos straight to my server from my cell. You can see the photos I've uploaded so far in my gallery. I'm pondering a good way to make an RSS feed out of uploads, while consolidating common events into single posts. I'll see what I can find/write tomorrow, when I'm not in dire need of sleep.

Every time I hear someone mentioning "balancing a checkbook" I realize that it's one of the many tedium tasks that I've managed to escape ever having to do. Technology has revolutionized my life in ways I don't even realize at times. Here are a few things which I've never had to do that my parents did, due to technology or modernization.

I have never:

Balanced a checkbook

Online banking and electronic bill payments pretty much got rid of this. I've written perhaps 10-15 checks in my life and they were mostly for rent and payment to friends. I'm still not entirely sure what it means, though I've got some notions and am glad I won't need to do it any time soon.

Gotten cut while shaving

The ads have some merit: never get cut again. Well, I haven't yet. Electric razors don't really cut, nor do the three-bladed ones; that's all I've ever used.

Sent taxes via postal mail

I've filed all my taxes electronically. This is definitely a good thing as it reduces the amount of people in the system considerably.

Used a typewriter for work

They're still used for filling out forms on occasion, which I've only ever done electronically (most of my College applications had magical type-in PDFs).

Sent a fax

OK, this is just a silly thing that I'm glad I never had to do. I've only heard bad things about fax machines, yet somehow a faxed signature is legally-binding. I don't get it.

Used a print encyclopedia

This is a bit of a lie, way back in my childhood, I would occasionally look through the one we had for fun. But I've never used a print encyclopedia for any real work.

What have your parents (or that generation) had to do that technology has saved you from?