Staticfree Blog

I keep on drawing myself back into the internet, into its warm folds and snuggles of people caring and exchanging energy and voices and laughter. I wish to be a part of this flowing mass all the time because I feel such a lack of real connection in those near me. I more than anything wish for someone nearby to connect into on a daily level...

*smiles and gets back to coding reality-augmenting technology*

A new [borrowed] toy

We just got a few Socket Bluetooth GPS adapters in at the office the other day. This device meets my approval with its minimalist interface, while still remaining hackable enough to not suck. It has a place to feed it, a place to make it stronger (antenna), a switch to make it go, and three blinky lights to let you know what's going on inside its little black case. This is good. Except for the ability to replace the battery or perhaps change the Bluetooth pairing key, I can't think of anything else it'd need to meet my approval. I like this trend of devices: where they function on a basic level, do it well, and are flexible enough to meet a geek's approval.

I managed to make it go with both my Palm and my Linux-running laptop - a true trial of a device's compatibility. They both work Really Well with it, so much that they make me want to go get one right away.

In more technical terms, it's simple as well: you pair it with a device, establish a serial connection and it starts spitting out GPS coords in the standard NMEA format. I was able to successfully get it going in Linux with GPSDrive (and gpsd) and on my Palm with Mapopolis. I've been pondering a cheaper USB one for µ, but the novelty (and potential benefit) of being able to use it without a full-fledged computer is starting to win out cost. Walking down the street on my Palm, GPS in backpack, listening to OGGs playing off it is just too wonderful a thing.

Bluetooth doesn't suck!

Despite initial skepticism, I'm starting to like Bluetooth. Devices today seem to mostly play nice: I can go online using either my laptop or cellphone as PPP proxies from either my laptop or Palm without any trouble. (Well, not quite, but that's a known firmware bug on the cellphone.) I can send vCards and other contact information the like between any of the devices, I can place calls on the phone from the Palm - all in all, it actually works.

In my extensive playing around with the technology, I've come across a few usability bugs.

1. Pairing - an obvious problem for devices, like the GPS, with no user input. The device really should have a user-configurable "pairing password", but most just have some arbitrary hard-coded value. Otherwise, anyone who's near you can pair with the device without your knowledge and potentially get at sensitive information. (Although GPS data is arguably not "sensitive" data)
2. Detection - Bluetooth device detection seems to be flaky. Frequently, when I scan for nearby Bluetooth devices, one or more that should be shown are not. A second scan tends to correct that problem, but you shouldn't have to do that. Once device detection occurs, a way of seeing what the device can do (can it connect to the 'net and act as a modem? can it accept contacts? can it act as a fax sender?) called service discovery takes place. That frequently fails to give useful information (at least in Linux with Bluez).
3. Too slow - I've already hit the limit of Bluetooth, hard. I've tried to go online with my cellphone, connect the phone to my laptop so the laptop can be online, then connect my palm to my laptop so I can use that connection. That totally hosed the Bluetooth. I'm not quite sure entirely what went wrong, but I have a feeling it has to do with sending/receiving so much data at once. I ended up getting less than 1KB/s on the Palm which is simply unacceptable.

Besides these complaints, I'm fond of the technology. I still can't get over how keen it is to have a bunch of boxes in various locations on my person (cell in cargo pants, GPS in backpack) and have them all work successfully. This is the wave of the future.

I just pre-registered for Penguicon 2004, a geek convention up in Michigan this April. Penguicon = StarTrek + Linux + Anime. From their description:

What is Penguicon?

To those of you familiar with the Linux and Open Source community, think of a weekend long Linux Users Group meeting with hundreds of other geeks which also just happens to have nationally acclaimed guests, its own wireless network, free caffeine and snacks always available, lots of folks talking about Science Fiction and Fantasy, situated next to a place to buy really cool t-shirts and buttons and such, and with some extra events like amateur singing, anime, a costume contest, and a fantasy art show.

To those of you familiar with Science Fiction conventions, imagine all the convention features you know and love, with the addition of wireless Internet access, computer gaming (including the fabulous Celebrity Frag Fest), non-stop Internet access, people who know about online publishing / books on demand / digital art, a programming track involving computing topics and another one focusing on the crossover between Science Fiction and computing.

I'll be going with Rym and Scott of the RIT Anime Club fame. Yes, it will be perhaps the single geekiest event I've ever been to, but that's part of the point, isn't it?

New photos in CelesteBday/:

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This is perhaps the funniest video I've seen in a long time. Disco never dies. The best part is that the song at the end is something that Geekwad showed me way back in high school. [from BoingBoing link-fu]

I just dug up an old piece of code and cleaned it up some. It reads a DTD and spits out a pretty-printed (and hyperlinked!) HTML document for easy navigating the file. It uses CSS and spits out HTML 4.01 so it should be decently friendly. It's called dtd2html and is free to use/hack under the GPL. Post any comments here regarding bugs or feature requests (or you can email them to me if you want).

New photos in Arisia/:

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The cult classic that spawned the wall coverings of many-a-college dorms is now available, legitimately, from Archive.org. Download Reefer Madness and enjoy the wonderful 1930's propaganda against "the other tobacco".

Check out more media pertaining to this meeting at the official blog.

New photos in Berkman/:

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edge.org has a good article on life laws and what famous minds' laws are. One of the ones that directly applies to me (at least recently):

Sterling's Law of Ubiquitous Computation

First, your home is a constant, while the Net is a place you go; then the Net becomes a constant while your home is a place you go.

Or, perhaps, the 'net is the home, while the place-of-residence is just a place to sleep? "Oh how times are a-changin'".

New photos in hangingout/:

Some people came over to my house and baked cookies in our kitchen. They were quite good, though.

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I put together a quick hack for the upcoming geek holiday: a binary countdown clock. It requires Perl, Time::ParseDate, and a VT100-compliant terminal. Run it with no arguments for this holiday.

The holiday is another high-order bit being flipped in the Unix time. Unix time, for those not in-the-know, is the number of seconds since midnight of Jan. 1, 1970. You might think, "wow, that must be a lot of seconds". It is. At precisely 08:37:04 tomorrow (January 10^th), it will reach 2³⁰ (or 1,073,741,824) seconds - hence the holiday.

So, happy almost-2³⁰-seconds-since-the-Unix-epoch!

Update: I put together a Javascript version of the countdown clock. Enjoy :-)

New photos in Berkman/:

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In playing around with presence and broadcasting presence information, I've created an RSS feed for my physical status system, PhysStat. Now you can subscribe to my status to find out exactly when I go to sleep, or run off into the world. The usefulness of this is questionable, but it's certainly an interesting idea.

PhysStat is a simple set of tools that I use to provide a form of presence and status information to various parts of my computer systems. Think of it as a global "away message" for your life.

I wrote some utilities to set and query the status from both web pages as well as programs. Perl scripts can query the status in order to act on them. For example, I have an "alert Steve" command that will attempt to get a message to me depending on my status. If I'm "away", it emails me the message, if I'm "online" it will display it on my On-Screen display or speak it out loud (depending on another flag), and if I'm "asleep" it will wake me up and speak the message to me. I've written a Jabber bot that will set the status based on my Jabber status and keyword matching (an away message with the words "sleep" or "dream" in it sets the status to "asleep"). As soon as I redo the main storage mechanism, I'll put up a page and publish it for anyone who's interested.

I just recently discovered a language blog that seems to have some rather wonderful content on it. Mark Liberman wrote a wonderful piece, Divine Ambiguity, that pokes fun at Pat Robertson's recent [mis]use of the word, "like". Mark does well: it is a piece of absolutely hilarious and subtle wit.

Paul Graham wrote an intriguing article on what you can't say. He shares some good thoughts on heresy and how cultures always seem to have heretical thoughts, even modern ones who often think they're beyond such things.[from Slashdot]

Low. I wake on a bed of cushions in a foreign room, but this is not abnormal. My body still feels last night's dancing. All sounds seem like my blurry vision, just awakening; still deafened from the thrashing guitars and wailing vocals of the 6 hour show. It was the type of music that's so loud you have to plug your ears to hear anything other than static and I enjoyed exactly half of it. If only I could regain half-again as much hearing to make up for my sacrifice.

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Matthew Haughey wrote up some interesting ideas for social software that doesn't seem to exist yet. A few ideas are based on social networks - one of which my coworker and I were actually playing with ourselves ("Geographical opinion systems" and potentially "Collaborative consumed media"). My co-worker's idea was based on using FOAF as the publishing format. We also pondered arbitrary ratings of entities, like restaurants or public restrooms (which could be tied to geographic locations).

New photos in NewYears2004/:

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