Posts for March 2007

KAZ: Episode 17

Here is the blip.tv page, and direct MP3 download link for the March 24th episode.

I share info on appliance replacements, my Nokia 770, ubiquitous Net access, some thoughts on my site organization, how I read RSS feeds, and p2p reputation. It's a mess, like the inside of my head often is!

(sorry for traffic noise)

March 30, 2007 permalink | Comments (0)

KAZ: Episode 16

Here is the blip.tv page, and direct MP3 download link for the March 23rd episode.

I worship at the altar of Bruce Sterling today, with a bit of a rant on his SXSW closing speech. Awesome stuff. Broadband eats everything, baby!

March 30, 2007 permalink | Comments (0)

Identity madness

Kim Cameron (identity guru working at Microsoft) recently began gathering links on a disturbing trend: mandatory (ie, no parental opt-opt) fingerprinting of children, for reasons as trivial as school lunch program identification. Kim is /far/ more eloquent than I in parsing the issues, including a bizarre assertion that consent by the child is sufficient to override parental objection!

For those who need more background, Kim Cameron, Bruce Schneier, and David Brin are all great. For example...part of the issue with biometrics is that they are non-revocable and eternal...I can't change my fingerprints! That makes them (and SSNs, for that matter) useful identification tokens, but problematic authentification credentials. We do way too much mixing up of the two. This will get worse before it gets better...but there is hope!

March 30, 2007 permalink | Comments (0)

Sterling at SXSW 07: Broadband eats everything

Wow...I'm just over 4 minutes into Bruce Sterling's annual SXSW closing rant, and he's already dropped a supremely memorable meme:They [the Internet and Movies/TV] don't converge. Broadband eats everything. It just eats the living daylights out of it. And the old line guys are trying to live on artificial scarcity, and they're really trying to just guard the pipes, and just pile up the DRM, and it's just...it's a terrible business.

Any question as to whether or not Bruce gets it? Get this from the SXSW podcasts page, or direct url here.

March 23, 2007 permalink | Comments (0)

Neokast looks interesting

Cringely just dropped a few more details on the Neokast teaser that he started last week. Looks /really/ interesting; a new spin on multicast, with what appears to be a p2p, Bittorrent-like chaser. I fondly remember playing with MBone a couple of times back in the late 90s (IIRC)...*sigh*. Geek memories.

So I scooted over to the Neokast site and signed up for the beta test...go check it out!

March 23, 2007 permalink | Comments (0)

KAZ: Episode 15

Here is the blip.tv page, and direct MP3 download link for the March 22nd episode.

Chat about recent gaming, geekfests, sousveillance, and MoMoCon! And I even got it uploaded same day...w00t!

March 22, 2007 permalink | Comments (0)

Like geek podcasts? Listen to Technometria

I have been adding Phil Windley's Technometria podcast to my ITConversations podcast queue as one-offs for too long now...this thing is too damn good to risk missing! I just found and added the podcast feed directly. His recent conversation with Doc Searls was simply outstanding. Phil has joined Jon Udell in my podcast list of Class-A technical stuff to think about bloggers/podcasters. Thanks for everything, Phil! (PS: his blog's good too!)

March 21, 2007 permalink | Comments (0)

Great blog: Overcoming Bias

I have been starring (in Google Reader) the crap out of posting on Overcoming Bias recently. The blog kicks ass.

March 21, 2007 permalink | Comments (0)

Geekin': ...uh, geek movie. Good!

I had missed it a couple of times previously at other venues, but this past weekend at MoMoCon, I finally managed to watch a screening of Geekin': Love, Jealousy and Twenty-Sided Dice. If you're a pen-and-paper roleplaying geek, you will dig this movie. I laughed out loud multiple times, and was able to empathize all too well with most of the principals. Definitely going on my wishlist for birthday or Christmas! Recommended to all you geeks out there; catch a screening if you can!

March 20, 2007 permalink | Comments (0)

Mesh networking in the wild

Damn...this is COOL. NetEquality is a reseller of Meraki mesh networking gear, and also an experienced installer. Their site includes a projects page that shows mesh networking apartment complex installations of between 6 and 150 units. Mesh networking systems allow wifi-enabled devices to seamlessly share one or more high-bandwidth net connections (usually DSL or cable) across a large area; the Meraki units simply mesh automatically into a large net of wifi goodness. As long as any wifi device can see any Meraki unit, it can access the internet! Good stuff. Next-gen. Where we need to be. I knew Meraki was cooking, but I had no idea they were already cooking this hard!

March 20, 2007 permalink | Comments (0)

Let's pile on 300, shall we?

Short version:

So...there's this movie, called the 300, and it's about Thermopylae, and I should be happy because people are learning about history, and instead I'm cranky because there are war elephants 150 years too early, and other discrepancies, and important history SHOULD BE ACCURATE. Then people slapped me, and I felt better. OK, there was no slapping, and I'm still a little cranky...but that's the gist.

Longer version:

I'll be honest here...I don't watch a lot of movies anymore first run; we Netflix almost everything we see, unless we're making an event of going out with friends. Plus, I watch very little network/cable televsion, so I don't even see trailers. I'm usually not in the loop on what's coming up. So I actually didn't even hear about 300 until about 2 months ago. And I only realized it was based on Frank Miller's graphic novel about 3 WEEKS ago...when I saw and flipped through the novel at a local bookstore. It was at this point that my hackles started to rise a bit, as Miller has taken some...liberties, shall we say, with the histories here. All in the quest of a good story, I'm sure...but as far as I am aware (feel free to comment if you know otherwise, please!) there's no indication or suggestion in the historical record that the Leonidas's consultation with the Delphic Oracle was rigged by Persian spies, or that the Gorgo in Sparta subplot (from the movie) existed in any way. As I heard more about the movie I began to become irritated: weapon, armor, and tactics inaccuracies, a mistatement (for dramatic license) of Sparta's belief system, and finally, the straw that broke my back...war elephants and rhinos. There were no war rhinos, and it's generally thought that the first Europeans to see war elephants were Alexander the Great's men once they reached India...150 years after Thermopylae. With that much chronological slippage, the next American Revolutionary War movie could include biplanes and machine guns...for the drama!

Now, I realize many of you fans of the movie couldn't care less about these inaccuracies. And believe it or not, I often try to forgive them, because otherwise, historical fiction is difficult (if not impossible) to write. But a) some of these are pretty bad, and b) this is Thermopylae. And the course of Western civilization turned during this campaign, via Thermopylae and (more directly) Salamis. After his loss against the Athenian navy at Salamis, Xerxes left the Greek peninsula, and history continued on the course we know. The Greek victory allowed the city-states to continue the evolution of the democratic ideas that influenced (for a while) Rome, the Enlightenment, and the founders of the United States (among others). Note: counterfactual history is a tricky thing, and I'm not trying to say that Persians are bad, or that there was some great good vs. evil battle going on here. I'm simply stating that history, world history, would have been very different had Xerxes conquered Greece at this point.

WRT historical fiction blockbusters, I always end up of two minds. I'm glad that people who don't read Herodotus' Histories are learning something about the historical underpinnings of our civilization...but when they're learning half-truths, half-dramatization for the sake of the plot, it can lead their education astray. (off-topic case in point...I'm sick and tired about hearing about the hero in 24 torturing people into giving him the info that he needs, RIGHT NOW, to solve a problem. People who study the use of torture historically know that people LIE when tortured. People say anything to get it to stop. Innocent people confess to crimes they know little or nothing about...*sigh* I'll get off that soapbox. Rant off.) Point being, fake history isn't REAL history, so you can't learn fake history in an attempt to apply it's lessons to the future. Our understanding of history isn't perfect, of course, but the goal is to head closer to the TRUTH, not closer to what sells.

But after some discussions this weekend, I've adjusted my stance a bit. I'm not going to stop pointing out the inaccuracies (thus this post), because it's important. But several friends have pointed out that problems with the history are being brought up and discussed in blogs, in reviews, and in specials on the History Channel. Which people apparently DO watch; sweet. So that's good. And the movie's look is supposedly very comic-book like...that sounds trivial, but I really do think it's important. People use these sorts of unconscious cues to tweak the level of truth they impart to a movie or book; a documentary-style show gets evaluated differently than a over-the-top saga-style movie, regardless of the actual level of accuracy. The comic-book style actually helps here, IMO.

So go have fun (heck, it's already in my Netflix queue), but there were no war elephants. Seriously. Oh, yeah...and Spartans fought with chest armor. Always a good idea. And go watch a History Channel documentary on this, please!

(Ironically, I'm happily watching the Order right now on my 770, which is a schlocky conspiracy in the Catholic Church, angels and demons B-film, with made up religious orders, secret rituals, and forbidden magicks. In other words, not exactly historically accurate. Hm...so call it cognitive dissonance, eh? *sigh* Maybe I should have a little more faith. (faith...LOL. Good one, Ken.)

Of course, I don't let the fact that a movie has demons in it cause me to believe in demons. I'd say that I'll give folks the benefit of the doubt on that one...but Da Vinci Code grossed $200+ million, and The Passion of the Christ $300+ million. On the gripping hand, though, there's also a thriving industry of the truth about the Da Vinci Code types who keep the conversation going, tossing facts and assertions and hearsay and accusations back and forth like a live hand grenade. And as long as people are willing to have the discussion, I guess that's all I can ask for, you know?)

March 19, 2007 permalink | Comments (0)

If you're an author, read this now

Cory Doctorow knocks another one out of the friggin' park with this essay in Locus: You Do Like Reading Off a Computer Screen. He's nailed a point that's been floating around in my head half-formed for awhile now. Literature still exists in this era...but the novel as a primary text-based unit of sale may be as antiquated as 60-minute albums and 15-hour operas are today. Just go read it; the man's a genius of this era. He groks the spew.

March 18, 2007 permalink | Comments (0)

I see you, Google Reader fans...

Cool. Google now puts info on your Google Feed subscriber total into the crawler's GET request. Interesting! Hello, you two (yeah, 2. Whatever! *grin*) Google Reader subcribers; I think it's pretty cool, actually, because neither of those is ME.

March 16, 2007 permalink | Comments (1)

Secular samplings

Got some good stuff out of my podcasts recently:

Freethought Radio had an excerpt from Sam Harris' knockout speech at the 2006 FFRF convention: How Not to Believe in God.

Found a new podcast recently, from the Institute for Humanist Studies. Great stuff! (worth a link all by itself). I've just listened to my first episode, and it had some must-click links:

Enjoy.

March 14, 2007 permalink | Comments (0)

Some recent good stuff...

I'm finishing up some fairly big changes to the way I manage my media consumption, which should greatly improve my ability to flick quick little recommendations into the blog queue. In the meantime, some media I've enjoyed:

All of those were simply outstanding.

March 13, 2007 permalink | Comments (0)

KAZ: Episode 14

Here is the blip.tv page, and direct MP3 download link for the March 6th episode.

More than you EVER wanted to know about my quest to avoid iPods by buying the weirdest media players known to man. And other such geekiness. It was a slow news week, folks...

March 12, 2007 permalink | Comments (0)

RIAA killed the webcasting star

(OK, bad, I know. I couldn't resist).

RAIN (Radio and Internet Newsletter) has a great overview of the Copyright Royalty Board's decision on Internet royalty rates from Friday. Short of it: everyone dies. Big ones (Pandora) crushed. Middle-size (Radio Paradise) double-crushed (why crush someone when you can double crush them, I guess.). Small fry (Live365 streams, etc.): at $500/year minimum, they'll probably just go away. Crazy.

Mad? Write your Congress-critter. OTOH...this could be a classic RIAA-shoots-self-in-foot-AGAIN, and another boost for Creative Commons-licensed music. (I personally really dig Magnatune, but find what you love!). It's sad, but maybe it's time.

Feh...go write that Congressperson. This is crazy!

March 7, 2007 permalink | Comments (0)

Not too shabby

Sometimes you have to hit 'em with a mackerel to get people to notice: Dispatch from Germany, Summer of 1939 (III): Building an Effective Resistance. He's nothing if not subtle. I like that! And yes, I agree...attacking Iran would be criminal insanity.

March 7, 2007 permalink | Comments (0)

Behind the RSS 8-ball

Sheesh! I haven't seen the right side of Google Reader's (100+ Items New) in several weeks now! It only takes a week or so of not keeping up to put you WAY in the hole. Admittedly, BoingBoing, Crunchgear, and Truthdig make up a disproporionate share of the backlog...but the rest are interesting feeds from all over. I love this stuff...I can't bear to mark as read anything but the big aggregate feeds.

March 7, 2007 permalink | Comments (0)

Jacking in

Oh hell yes: Project Epoc

March 5, 2007 permalink | Comments (0)

Earlier posts -- Later posts