Rhonabwy

very nice wine. Not nathan quality wine - it’s only like $11 a bottle or something. In fact, it might even qualify as high grade swill to a serious connesuir, but i’m enjoying the heck of out it. (get it - heck out of it).

yeah, and I’m posting too.

Fine idea - posting while drinking wine. Fine idea.

Did you see wil shipley’s photo in that WWDC ad? Come on - advertise to someone else, will ya? I hear enough about you already.

Hey, check it out. Just after Andrew posts his XCode project for SQLite, Apple goes and releases a big ole hoodoo about making open source projects into universal binaries using XCode

Microsoft promises bright, complex virtualization future - at the Register. Server R2 is a decent product, actually. Although I’m annoyed at it’s complete dependence on installing IIS and making assumptions about my ability to be a domain administrator to get the basic package working. Fortunatley, I’ve become reasonably competant at figuring out microsoft freaky IIS code and permissions.

I’m also using VMWare’s product. Frankly, they’re both pretty darn nice. I like VMWare a little better, but only because it’s cross OS.

I’m reminded of a quote today that seems to be particularly appropriate:

Bring me A bowl of coffee before I turn into a goat

This very quote is painted on the upstairs wall of El Diablo too.

Okay - back to work.

Hey, hey it’s your birthday! You know it’s my birthday too.

I don’t remember the lyrics beyond that. Not too bad sharing a birthday with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

And Apollo 10 gets a view of earthrise while it’s on a dry run for the upcoming July moon landing

I’m sort of feeling like that Carl Sagan quote - the universe is really, really big. In this case, it’s applying to Morrowind Oblivion - a game so huge in scope and playing area that I never really thought to see it. This game is just monstrously huge.

I’ve always rather enjoyed the freeform RPG games that don’t force you down a path. This is right in that vein. The graphics, as you might imagine, are stunning as well. The rendered plants are just incredible - and I’ve had Karen peering over to the TV occasionally saying “Hey, go over there - what’s that plant?”.

Okay - gotta get SOME sleep tonight…

Karen conspired to get me a birthday present tonight - presented it to me at dinner. I just got a copy of Morrowind Oblivion. I’m going to have a hard time keeping away from this… especially since it’s got all sorts of new toy syndrome to go along with it. You see, it takes an XBox 360 to play this game… so I got that too!

And it’s not even my birthday yet! But karen said it would be mean to wait until monday to give me this particular present, and I’m not complaining!

Woohoo - forget the blog. I’m going to hook up my new toy!

I was listening to a podcast this morning - a short talk by Nathan Eagle
on his Reality Mining project. There is also a series of slides associated with the talk.

The implications of the talk were really pretty astounding, especially given the prevelance of cell phones today. Location is known - even if it’s bured in some provider’s database and inaccessible to you. It’s not inaccessible to the government.

Right now, Nathan’s research seemed to be primarily focused on folks who added a little bit of something to their phone to send back information and details about location (Something symbian series 60 phones enable) - because he couldn’t retreive that data from the providers. But he’s also added a data capture mechanism that he’s called “BlueDar” - which scans the nearby and available bluetooth devices. You don’t even need them correlated with specific people to be able to provide some really interesting data in the aggregate. And the interesting thing here is - pretty much most laptops could function as one of those devices (albeit more expensive than his D-link wireless router and custom fab stuff). Interestingly, continuous scanning with the bluedar also drained out the cell phone’s battery pretty quickly.

I’m not sure wether to be astounded and excited, or completely terrified by this whole thing. Yesterday, I was all “Wow, awesome, cool!”, and last night I was “What do you mean they’re watching my every (physical) move and potentially applying statistical analysis to determine my relative worth to the community!?” It’s enough to make you want to be a luddite.

The more I think about it, the more I’m reminded of some of David Brin’s essays about transparency as the only real means of security when it comes to information. It is letting only a few people have the information that is so darn scarey. When everyone has it - you’re just as accountable, its just that everyone knows it. And I rather suspect that his conclusion about privacy is correct: we’re going to loose many senses of it, it’s just a matter of how it happens.

Very cool…. I just pulled down a copy of MySQL Administrator from VersionTracker (it showed up in the feed, and I clicked it out on a whim). And what does your standard Mac geek do upon downloading the freeware, but start poking into the application package.

Turns out the guys include a framework - MySQLToolsCommon.framework - with a bunch of included headers! How cool is that?! I wonder (I haven’t looked) if they make something like this available in source form…

Some of the more interesting header names: MSQLSyntaxColoring.h (Created by Alfredo Kojima on 5/20/05), MMySQLDispatcher.h (same dude, july 2004), and MTreeDataSource.h (also july 2004). There’s also some GPL’d unix headers in there on which other parts are based.

I don’t know that they’ve done any other nifty wrappers - but I thought that was kinda neat.

Adrian (one of the Django dudes) has an article on XML.com entitled ‘Dynamic News Stories’. It’s a neat concept idea of slapping a little additional light XML into a stream of data to hopefully mark up freetext with something a little more contextual. Actually - right in line with the original concept of hypertext.

And I would have posted this there - if their system didn’t send me into an infinite redirect loop when I clicked on “Comment on this Article” on page 2.

The problem isn’t with the scheme to store metadata - or even making systems that read that data. There’s lots of those, and while it’s not “trivial” - I wouldn’t call it hard. What is hard, and will remain hard, is getting us monkeys to add the metadata. When we get value out of it, we’ll do it. If we don’t get some value immediately… forget it. After working with several companies who live by metadata, I’m convinced - it’s just human nature. And I find myself arguing this point with lots of people who say things like “If they’d just enter the meta data…”

Forget it - they won’t. That’s why we need digital cameras to embed the long/lat data INTO the jpeg to make location information a useful part of the that whole “where picture” data concept. Cell phone, ironically, have about the best chance of making this happen quickly - with thier shitty little pictures. But a shitty little picture with location data - that’s worth something a bit more.

So why would someone, unless they were paid or forced at gunpoint, put a profanity XML markup around that previous sentence? I didn’t - it would even have been pretty easy. And it’s why probabilistic systems that derive metadata automagically from free-text are so very, very powerful. Because they make up for our laziness. I bet there’s a good bayesian filter someone, all trained up, that will recognize profanity and be able to make it with all the neat levels that Adrian would like to see. And I think that’s about the only way we’re going to see it.

And by the way - I don’t think Adrian is stupid or anything… in fact, I think he rocks. At least due to Django and because he’s from my Alma Mater. Gus even spoke highly of him - but Django does all the talkin’ he needs to do.