Author Archives: admin

Comment spam

2005/11/16 – 10:59

I’ve been getting an annoying level of comment spam. I’ve installed Bad Behavior, which will be wicked-awesome if it works. If you get blocked when trying to submit a comment, please tell me through some other channel…

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A brief catalog of things I learned for fun that later made me money

2005/11/12 – 22:31

I’m thankful for… things that I learned ‘just cuz’, which later netted me some profit in my work life.

  • what drivers are and how they interact
  • how to build a PC from parts
  • how to install, administer, and run Linux
  • typing
  • 3D graphics/modelling/simulation
  • what’s underneath the covers of the Internet and Web
  • calculus
  • how to build an Ethernet network
  • x86 assembly language
  • Python
  • a number of other programming languages
  • computer audio
  • …

The list goes on… Most of my career has been a series of happy accidents combined with a general wish to align my interests and my work. That’s nice.

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Oh, patents

2005/11/08 – 19:34

You could claim that it’s a result of having lived in the world in which this had already been invented, or something like that, but the first time I ever thought about hot-swapping software modules, this is the basic scheme I came up with in about 10 minutes of contemplation. To think that I might be legally unable to use such a method because someone else wrote a massively oververbose document about it just seems wrong…
Real time control system and method for replacing software in a controlled system – US Patent 5421017

Patentstorm looks like it might be a useful resource.

(I happened upon this while doing the search for ‘entitization’ mentioned in the last post.)

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Entitization

2005/11/08 – 19:19

(fun word. Do a web search on it to see all the different ways it’s used…)

I wonder how many of the ills of the world (ya know, the things that I declare to be ills) are a result of entitization, of the human tendency to spontaneously create entities. Entities want to survive, to grow, to reproduce, whether they are biological entities or the sort of virtual entities that people create, like companies, governments, jobs, committees, subdivisions, etc. We create a company to do a this or a that, but then it grows, morphs, spawns, and we find we are no longer happy with what it has become… but now we can’t easily stop it.

Whence virtual entities get their power to do these things is not completely clear, but that they do, and that it can go astray, is clear. I suspect that the power comes simply from the human act of naming the entity as such, i.e. it’s really a quirk of psychology and/or language. If that’s the case, then we can mitigate the ills by simply taking care to not create entities needlessly.

So, ya know, go do that.

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Egos, search engines

2005/11/06 – 11:53

Hmmm, since I posted this, I tried the ‘lurgid’ search again. My blog is ‘no longer’ ‘number 1’ for that search. That, of course, is not a big deal. However, I wonder why it was the first time I tried it.

I have a feeling that the concept of ‘number 1 for that search’ is no longer always a meaningful one. At least Google (and probably other engines) has talked about using inferred (or directly known) data about the searcher to augment the search terms themselves to make for better searches. Given my gmail account, they know my name. So they could very well rerank my blog posts in my searches, which of course wouldn’t affect other people’s searches. Unless, of course, they were inferred to be my friends, or people who read my blog, or something.

So, I suppose the shocking number of number 1’s I mentioned may well be a simple artifact of the fact that I’m me, and that search engines know ‘too much’ about me. Hmmm.

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“Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far”

2005/11/02 – 09:05

Urgggh, is all I can say:
Mark’s Sysinternals Blog: Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far

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Scrapbook

2005/10/29 – 00:06

Speaking of learning, why wouldn’t you have already installed Scrapbook, if you indeed haven’t already? Excellent tool for browsing, which in turn makes it an excellent tool for learning.

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Learning

2005/10/29 – 00:03

I’m thankful for… learning. I mean, I don’t know about you, but the thing that gets me going more than practically anything else is acquiring new knowledge, skills, insights… And this world is just freakin’ full of opportunities. Significant forces in the world are aligned to not only allow me to learn, but to encourage, beg, force, and reward me to learn. That’s a nice thing, that I practically can’t escape doing what I like to do most :-). I better keep this a secret, though…

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Is that Big Brother in your pocket…?

2005/10/27 – 15:49

I’ve started a new ‘Paranoia’ category. Don’t take any of this _too_ seriously.

I had just been thinking about the potential to turn our love of cell phones into a nice vector for the infiltration of monitoring technology into our homes when this story showed up:
Cell phone signals may track traffic.

There’s lots more data to be collected than geographic location, too. How do you know your cell phone isn’t streaming audio somewhere as it sits there ‘idle’ in your pocket right now?

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It’s not quite fair

2005/10/25 – 23:20

Of all the things my blog is number 1 for in search engines (and there’s a shocking number of such things), I suppose I’m most proud of “lurgid”. However, that’s not really fair, so I’m going to redirect all you future lurgid searchers to something more appropriate: Douglas Adams’ official site. Go buy all the stuff, even if Douglas isn’t with us any more…

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