Category: Geek

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Eno, Wright, Generative Systems

Posted back in 2002 about the Long Now Foundation – created by Stewart Brand to think about the very distant future of humanity. Their flagship project is the construction of a clock to last 10,000 years, which will chime once per century.

The foundation recently hosted a conversation between musician Brian Eno and game designer Will Wright (The Sims, Spore). Haven’t heard the whole thing yet, but the first half hour was fascinating — Eno and Wright mostly discussing generative systems — complexity arising from simple rules. Eno reminisces about the first time he heard Steve Reich perform a pair of tape loops — an inflection point in Eno’s career.

Reich took two identical 1.8-second audio segments and created identical loops out of them, strung them through two decks, and played one slightly slower than the other. Gradually the two segments went out of phase with one another, giving rise to complex and beautiful relationships. The pieces come back into sync 30 minutes later, and the piece ends. Objective correlative: Near the end of the work day, I watched sadly as the J-School hauled its last remaining reel-to-reel tape decks out to the electronic recycling bin, their usefulness behind them.

Wright talks about the Game of Life as a generative system giving rise to complex relationships from a base of a few simple rules, correlates to the Chinese game of Go, which also has very few rules but tremendous complexity. Eno demonstrates a version of “Life” that generates music from the ongoing relationships in the same game.

The conversation is downloadable as MP3 or Ogg/Vorbis, and is accesible through the SALT podcast.

Surfing around the longnow site this morning, arrived back at the homepage to find the face of my boss (Orville Schell) gazing back at me – no escape!

Eno has released a CD, Bell Studies for the Clock of the Long Now, which I haven’t yet heard. Still listening to Eno almost nightly, putting Miles to bed. It’s almost impossible to burn out on them.

Music: Gilgamesh :: Extract
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Leopard Preview

At the risk of participating in the echo chamber, Apple unveiled a preview of OS X Leopard at WWDC today. Not attending this year, but looks like a fairly substantial release. Following on BeOS / X-Windows heels, Spaces finally gives the Mac a version of Workspaces. No mention yet on how many you can have, and little info on how they’re navigated, but it’s certainly an improvement over nothing at all (though I confess I stopped missing them sooner than I thought I would when switching from BeOS to OS X).

Very cool stuff on extending iChat for collaboration with desktop applications (though I can imagine some scary security issues here when a remote user convinces you that they’re your sysadmin “just need access for a few minutes” — wondering what the security model for this will be.

Time Machine uses built-in version control to let you rewind to previous versions of the file system, undelete long-gone images, etc. Nifty but not earth shaking. A feature probably growing out of awareness that most users are utilizing maybe 10 or 20% of today’s gi-normous hard drives. [Addendum: Turns out you need to have a 2nd hard drive installed to use Time Machine, a fact which will relegate the feature to use only by the hard-core, and perhaps some institutional implementations. Would like to see Apple offer a non-destructive partitioning scheme, so users could not only take advantage of Time Machine but also do all kinds of other things, like set up Boot Camp or other VM without starting from scratch.]

Since I like to imagine that someone is actually listening on the other end of the OS X Feedback form, I’m stoked to see the addition of a stationery feature to Mail.app — I wrote Apple about a year ago saying that stationery was the one killer feature in Eudora that no other mail client had seemed to grok (though I don’t care about fancy mail formatting, I always found the ability to craft boilerplate responses I could call up instantly an invaluable feature in Eudora). The macslash.org take on stationery is that they’re going to make it even easier to send “craptastic HTML email.” Which is probably true, as unfortunate side effects go.

Music: Tom Verlaine :: Wheel Broke
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WP-Digest

Tired of banging my head against a wall trying to figure out why WPBlogMail (which sends weekly Birdhouse email updates to subscribers) would choke on 3rd-party WP plugins (but only when run via cron). Plus I wanted to pull digests via lynx, rather than handling everything manually in PHP (lynx –dump has some great formatting options). And I hated the name. Finally decided it was time for an entirely new architecture for the system, so started work on WP-Digest.

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Photosynth

Some very cool stuff going on in Microsoft labs. Photosynth is an image browser from another dimension. Give it a giant pile of photos shot from anywhere within a single location (a beach, a museum…) and it will intelligently find edges, determine positions, and stitch together images into a massive 3-D soup of relationships through which users can surf, zoom, spin, dig and dive. No human intervention or tagging needed to build the relationships. Watching the demo, I’m wondering how much CPU it takes to burrow through an environment like this at reasonable speed, or how long it took to calculate the stitching (even creating high-quality QuickTime VR movies can take all night, and this is way beyond anything QTVR is capable of).

Demo is in WMV format (of course). I’ve been appreciating the Flip4Mac module that allows QuickTime to play WMV content.

Music: Marais & Miranda :: What Is A Mammal?

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RAIDiator: Infrant Home NAS / RAID

When I lost a secondary MP3 drive to disk failure a while back, it was like being hit upside the head with a blunt object – a reminder that I had no good way to back up my main MP3 collection, and I could easily lose all my music at any moment (and not just the music, but five years worth of collection tweaking work). This month, finally filled the 160GB main music drive to capacity. Meanwhile, the drive that hosts backups for Birdhouse, plus Amy’s and my home backups, had been flirting with capacity for a while. Decided I couldn’t put it off any longer – time for a fully redundant, high capacity network-attached RAID.

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Spam Plants

Spamplants Romanian-born computer artist Alex Dragulescu turns crap into gold — he’s developed a computational analysis system to transform ordinary spam into renderings of organic-looking plants (though some look more like sea anemones to me). via c|net:


For the Spam Plants, he parsed the data within junk e-mail–including subject lines, headers and footers–to detect relationships between that data. For example, the program draws on the numeric address of an e-mail sender and matches those numbers to a color chart, from 0 to 225. It needs three numbers to define a color, such as teal, so the program breaks down the IP address to three numbers so it can determine the color of the plant. The time a message is sent also plays a role. If it’s sent in the early morning, the plant is smaller, or the time might stunt the plant’s ability to grow.

Dragulescu has also done similar projects with architecture, weblog text, transit, etc.

Music: Lou Reed and John Cale :: Nobody But You
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TCP/IP Over FireWire

A few years ago I noticed that OS X started offering “FireWire” as one of the tcp/ip connection types, alongside ethernet and modem. Sounded intriguing, but couldn’t imagine a situation where it would be useful.

The brilliance of this arrangement dawned on me over the past couple of weeks, as I found myself in a house with a DSL connection but no router — DSL modem feeding their eMac directly. To get my laptop online without taking their machine off the network, just enabled connection sharing on their Mac, connected a FireWire cable from it to me, and I was online, slickr-n-snot. All of my posts here over the past two weeks were made over FireWire.

Heck, you could even plug a laptop into the back of an external FireWire drive. Effortless.

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Why I Don’t Do Link Exchange

For years, I’ve received email requests to engage in link exchanges with other sites. Because Google and other search engines base a site’s PageRank in large part on the number of incoming links to that site, many webmasters and SEO types see pre-meditated link exchange as an easy way to build rank.

I refuse nearly all link exchange requests, to this or any other site I manage. On occasion, webmasters have taken umbrage at my refusal. Because I’m tired of explaining why I don’t do link exchange, this page exists to explain why I think the practice is wrong.
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