Technology Category Archive
Rogers, iPhone, Canada. Lame.
Rogers is continuing it's strategy of gouging Canadian customers and making us the laughing stock of the wireless world. Today, Rogers announced their price plans for the iPhone, which they and their wholly-ownded subsidiary (once upon a time their only...
Claire de lune
Clair de lune from musanim on Vimeo Gorgeous. More pieces here. From the Music Animation Machine, which isn't a machine at all. ;) This fits perfectly with a thought I had last week about time: how the past is...
Chessbot
IBM's Deep Blue beat Kasparov 10 years ago. I remember it clearly. Apparently, today the average PC has more processing power than DB had, which is simultaneously surprising and not. I mean, we're used to hearing stuff like "the Americans...
Télépatexto
I just sent an empty text message ("SMS") to someone. It happened because I was thinking the message as I went though the process of creating new message, adding contact... and send. woops. désolé Izo....
Crippled
Sometime while I was away this winter, IleSansFil, the Montreal free community wifi service, crippled all their hotspots, by disallowing any and all traffic without login. (Or so it seems, I've only tried at 4 or 5) The ISF service...
A place or a feeling?
Bruno throwing snowballs at me and TyOriginally uploaded by Shawna Nelles. Last night at Laïka, I had a brief conversation with Michael, founder of Ile Sans Fil and good friend, about various things, including how places are not just geographic...
What is code?
A picture is worth a thousand words... The premise of the linked article is to show how one can create a web browser in "one line of code" using a bunch of stuff that more or less comes with Mac...
So out of shape
(sorry about posting these... having fun ;) And the course I ran, mapped on GMap Pedometer. (Funny how mapping a jog like that brings the enormity of Tokyo down to a personal, human scale. If my lungs held out,...
Brainloop
Brainloop is an interactive performance platform that utilizes a Brain Computer Interface (BCI) system which allows a subject to operate devices merely by imagining specific motor commands. These mentally visualized commands may be seen as the rehearsal of a motor...
Running man?
Part of the premise of the movie "Running Man" is how the main character gets framed as a murdering police officer by manipulating video evidence. Now, Photoshopping images and AfterEffects-ing video is already possible but it's still a huge pain...
EcoBlack
How the colour of your website costs the earth Changing the background colour of Google from white (ffffff) to black (000000) would save an estimated 750 Megawatt hours a year globally, thats about half the full output of a dual-nuclear...
oh while we're on about mobile
Funambol Open Source mobile application platform. Funambol is open source mobile application server software that provides push email, address book and calendar (PIM) data synchronization, application provisioning, and device management for wireless devices and PCs, leveraging standard protocols. For users,...
"push" email, my Nokia N80 and a japanese SIM chip
It just works. Un.Believe.Able. Joi went out of his way on a busy day and got me keitai on his carrier's "friends and family" plan. Domo domo domo arrigato gozaimasta, Joi-sama! ;) It's a nice piece to be sure; sort...
disconnect
Every time I come to Japan, the biggest frustration is getting a mobile phone. This time it's not a phone I need (I have two I could use) as much as just a connection. It seems that will be just...
Cheaper behavior
Calling my mobile carrier just now to modify my services brought to the forefront some interesting considerations. My main purpose was to disable call messaging (voice mail): I haven't checked my voice mailbox, I am not exaggerating, in a year....
A consciousness
(get past the melodrama and the fact that it's an anime / "oh it's cheesy scifi" ;) Just as there are many parts needed to make a human a human there's a remarkable number of things needed to make an...
Vicious Interface
the above is a cheat sheet for the vi terminal-based text editor. it is evil in it's powerful complexity. amongst geek ideology wars, vi is often pitted again emacs. the emacs camp backronyms vi to mean "vicious interface" my...
Find teh kittens!
From a list of undergraduate projects available at the Center for Intelligent machines at McGill, "Content-Based Image Retrieval": 2. Finding Animals in Internet Imagery Using Learning Methods This project, based on a recently published paper, involves finding images on the...
facl
setfacl gets soooo much more useful after you realise you can also getfacl. facl. getfacl --access --tabular -R -P ... ah that's why you can't do anything on that server, Jer......
IRC logging, revisited
This afternoon I set up a "logger bot" which monitors and logs the GlobalVoices IRC channel. About an hour ago, Karl showed me the log he tweaked for the Semantic Web Interest Group IRC channel and mentioned how he structured...
Everything part II
continuation of previous post They say there is opportunity in chaos. The chaos they speak of exists generally outside, and on the fringes of, "The System". Humanity, for better or worse, seeks always to order, structure, the chaos and...
Well stated
Lucas Gonze puts into words what most iPod/iTunes users haven't quite become aware of yet: why you need more music from Wired -- The Day the Music Died: I thought at first I had misheard him. "... library of 90,000...
MIT Center for Collective Intelligence
Our basic research question is: How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before? Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated....
Use Case Scenarios
It is SO hard for me to write these scenarios without diving into "how I would build this." I keep going over and back over and having to edit out whispered pre-suppositions of "how." This is where "technological determinism" is...
"UK and US companies sold mobile phone tapping equipment to Vietnam"
Reporters sans frontières - Vietnam: Reporters Without Borders has learned that a British company, Silver Bullet, and a US company, Verint Systems (a subsidiary of Comverse Technology), sold equipment for intercepting mobile phone calls to the Vietnamese intelligence services. The...
Mobile Media Conference 2007 call for papers
My mobile, wireless, nomadic, policy, geo wonk friends... check it out. Various forms of mobile media have been imagined for sometime, and are now a reality: mobile Internet, new forms of mobile text, mobile music, mobile film and video, mobile...
Open Data Movement talk in Helsinki
For the last two weeks I have been dying for an excuse, any excuse, to be in Helsinki right now. The announcement of Matt Biddulph's Aula talk today comes a full 48 hours too late for me to do up...
I spot WiFi from the corner of my eye
I've toted around for years various WiFi detectors and sniffers, to find Wireless Internet access as I roam around. They ugly, clunky, totally utilitarian dedicated devices that resulted in my actually getting a connection only a small percentage of the...
Location Portals
Michael finally went and got himself a "this is not personal!" weblog where he will talk about something that is central to everything he hopes and dreams about (in a non personal way! hehe). If you're interested in location based,...
I have no mouth and I must scream.
The irony. I have not been able, yet, to "moblog" from my new Nokia N80. I am able to browse websites and use a chat program, via both my mobile provider's GPRS and my WiFi networks at home and at...
Rewiring
I've long been telling stories about how I seem to be quite aware of many of my thought processes, and often these stories take on computer jargon analogies. Stuff like "the scripts I have running in the background" to make...
I'll consider it when...
Foreword: I am a long time Apple user BUT ALSO have ALWAYS considered Apple to be far far more evil than Microsoft, and more recently Google combined. Apple's fascist streak has been showing ever stronger since the victorious return of...
Scenario of a Blogject
Poking around I came across a very nice scenario by Jan Chipchase, which sounded downright Blogject-y to me: With vehicle mounted (weather) sensors and positioning tools its possible to collect highly localised weather information - trucks, cars, motorbikes and bicyles...
Certifiable
Quick! Someone make a t-shirt for these people. It should say: "Non-conformity is the new conformity" or "zealotry is sexy again!" ("I'm with stupid"'s already been done.) Pride is such a terribly dangerous thing. And too often people confuse pride...
Musical Nokia
I'm poking around Nokia trying to decide between an N70 or N80, but that's not the point. I called up the Nokia main portal page, then moved my attention over to something else for a moment, and in so doing...
10 years on
I just came across this interview with Joi done in 1995. Reading it I am struck by a few things: - 10 years ago Joi was roughly my age. - He saw very very clearly what was going on, on...
Cellular automata talk
Should be interesting....
No phone
For anyone trying to call me: no phone. I left my charger in San Francisco (!) and Aaron's apparently been busy. Perhaps now's a good time to get a new one... Update: Still no phone, and to make matters worse,...
Marvin! Robots!
My friend Marvin, whom I met at the Global Voices conference in London last december, sent me an email the other day. Amongst other things he shared this: I wanted to tell you of my success in being accepted...
Gentle brush past my shoulder
This is so close to me it's not even funny. Nokia and Yahoo! add Flickr support in Nokia Nseries Multimedia Computers You can upload your full size photos to Flickr directly from the camera or image Gallery application on your...
Dumb.
Some days, I tell ya. Here's an example of how sometimes, try as I might to do something smartly, I end up in a stupid situation. On my way back to the lab early this morning, I decide to turn...
David Suzuki
I've been meaning to write about David Suzuki for a long time, and haven't yet mainly because I have not done what I told myself I'd do first: actually get acquainted with "his stuff", knowing it would affect my life...
"America's Online Censors"
Rebecca does an absolutely great job of summing up many of the issues and thoughts and results of the U.S. Congressional hearings held last week concerning U.S. technology companies and their roles in Internet censorship regimes around the world. We...
Best IM status message ever.
Awesome. Merci Francis. ;)...
On the success of weblogs et al
The success of all these things such as weblogs, websyndication, etc, is directly attributable, I think, to one basic fact: weblogs are basic, rudimentary Content Management Systems. At risk of over-simplifying, I say that human intellect, human intelligence itself, in...
Upon reading the back cover of "Diamond Age"
"The Diamond Age : Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" (Neal Stephenson) I thought: Nanotech will bridge cyberspace and "realspace". Why? Because if indeed in cyberspace anything is possible, it is so because anything can be created from scratch and...
The Mac OS Binder
Not Finder, Binder. Simple app, basic UI on top of a database and a few APIs. Allow me to manage all my tags, local and remote. Remote tags could be stored locally for apps like ecto, 1001, Cocoalicious; local tags...
Backchannel
Justin's made his backchannel experiments an official project at the USC IMD, where he is studying. Having experienced several types of backchannel setups myself, though never of the intensely focused and tweaked 14 screens of the ZML, I can say...
Tim Berners-Lee's weblog
TBL created the web. Now Tim Berners-Lee has a weblog. Good first post too! (I'd quote here but you really need to read the whole thing... to give you a little history lesson. ;)...
Expression Under Repression
Rebecca and Ethan and a few other of the Global Voices Online team were WSIS in Tunisia this week and today gave a workshop presentation on "Expression Under Repression", despite technically having been canceled "by the authorities". Very exciting, awesome...
Look! Up in the sky!
FlightAware. Wow. (ugly but ... hell there's alot of data, and it is blazing fast.) How live is FlightAware's tracking and status data? The data displayed on FlightAware is typically six minutes delayed from real time. How often does the...
Human hands
In the process of clearing up a misunderstanding, Ethan points to a great article by one Justin Mason about cellphone repair stalls in the streets of India. Amongst other things, it speaks to how most people in a consumerist culture...
Aperture
(This screen cap is from a demonstration of Keyword Hierarchies - a.k.a Tag Bundles, label pools, etc - and how you can apply selected keywords to multiple images at once. It also shows a surfer in a meta-hoola-skirt, surfing...
You say hello, I say goodbye...
Well, it's happened.The American-based internet giant, AOL, wholly-owned by Time-Warner, has formed a working partnership with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to permit unlimited surveillance of the millions of AOL online members, according to a report from the U.S....
Cross-platform collaborative text editor
Just found this which will make a few people very happy: Gobby is a free collaborative editor based on libobby, a library which provides synced document buffers. It supports multiple documents in one session and a multi-user chat. It runs...
I was worried but now I am relieved
This will sound like ass-kissing but I assure you it's not. Joi finally posted a really great entry after a long quiet period. (I know I know, research. Daijobu.) More than that, it runs parallel to my suspicions regarding "what's...
nano cry babies
What a bunch of total hyper-obsessive morons. 1- Cotton does not scratch hard polycarbonate. Besides which do you really think for one second after 3+ years experience producing iPods, Apple would suddenly use "softer" plastic? Which, contrary to reports from...
What we need is more McLuhan
I've been meaning to send some link love (daaah, cannot believe I used that phrase) to Mark Federman's new weblog. Mark's the Chief Strategist at the McLuhan Center at the University of Toronto. He used to write at their official...
Google swallows the internet whole, and you with it
First, it was about "indexing" all of the web. Then, it bought a small chunk of that web (Blogger). Then Google said "hey, there's more than the web out there!" and Google Mail was pushed out. Quickly followed by Google...
That was quick!
"Apple supports video podcasting" Seems they "turned it on" without telling anyone. Told. you. so. :D...
Relate
Slowly, they are learning. See, look! TagHop: Taghop allows you to relate categories on the web. If your "Technology" category is related to someone elses "Software" category, then link the two. Someone else may relate their category to the same...
Modernity | Hold -> Musak -> Static
As mentioned, I spent a "good" amount of time on the phone with various customer support lines over the last 2-3 weeks. This means alot of time on hold. In the evolution of phone-based services, "hold" was of course an...
Doing right
Well, Dell, I must say: wow. Wow. So I ordered this 2005FPW 20" TFT monitor from you over three weeks ago. I complained a bit about the fact that the website was essentially useless for tracking the status of my...
Safe travels gaucho
So, Steven's probably sitting on the tarmac at Pierre Elliott Trudeau Airport right now, beginning a 2 month trip to Cuba and, I suspect, to the core of himself. No, he's not going to go sit on the beach. He's...
Dude, yer waiting on a Dell!
Monitor update. So, they are out of stock and estimating another 5 days before they get them in. Then, if they do, it's a few more days to get it shipped to me. To make matters worse, this info is...
Break it down, build it up
(just a quick note.) Existant data-object storage and retrieval systems: - Hard hierarchialization ("taxonomies", "categories with parent/child relationships") - Analytico-synthetic ("Faceted categorization", "Semantic Web") - Unstructured labelization ("Tags", "Labels") - Statistical extrapolation ("Keywords") - Unstructured data ("Full text search") [Disclaimer:...
some pig
OMG... well.. videocasting is here and the predictable severely rapid decline of "culture" * may begin. ----------------------------------------------------- You should check out the Internet TV channel "some pig". If you don't have DTV, you can get it here: http://www.participatoryculture.org/download.php And then subscribe...
KhmerOS
Awesome We envision a country where Cambodians can learn and use computers in their own language, a country that does not have to change to a new language in order to use computers! Bravo. They're translating and localizing stuff like...
Judge a book by it's thumbprint
A few months ago I enabled a feature on Joi Ito's weblog which I called his "blog thumbprint". What it is, is a weighted list of the most frequently used words in the entirety of Joi's blog, with the text...
Tags in MT admin interface
It took a few hours but I've gone and done it. I hacked out the "suggested tags" UI goodies from del.icio.us and grafted it into the Movable Type admin's "Edit Entry" template. Now for my purposes, the "suggested tags"...
Getting the job done
CTIN511 - Larry Gertz, originally uploaded by JulianBleeckr. Super impressive backchannel setup at the USC IMD. While a visiting lecturer speaks, the class takes notes and group-edits a single document (using SubEthaEdit), one person acts as "Google jockey", searching...
Free Montreal WiFi Google mapped
Michael barked at me that "it's in WifiDOG CVS now!" the other night and I guess it's cause I haven't sparked my aggregator in a week that I missed it but... Here's a standalone GoogleMap of all Ile Sans Fil...
Bit Torrent Opera
Yahoo/AP reports: The upcoming Opera 8.0.2, now available in a test version, will try to make BitTorrent downloads seamless, just like any other download using HTTP or FTP for transfers. The exception is the appearance of a warning that users...
Remote backup script...
I've got an idea for a shell script/program that would be very useful to me, and probably countless others. In fact I bet countless others have already coded something like it up... Requirements: I don't care what programming language it's...
Can hate be good?
"Hate something, change something." That's what was on the mind of Honda engineers when they supposedly made a better diesel engine. Interesting. I think it is an all-out race to not only find any and all alternatives for fossil fuels,...
Holy map!
Mobile GMaps is a free piece of software that displays Google Maps and Keyhole satellite imagery on Java J2ME-enabled mobile phones or other devices. Apparently it is super slow, and I imagine it sucks up alot of limited expensive bandwidth......