January 31 2001

By the gods, its the end of January! And its above 0 degrees! Somewhat ironic that we get all this info about the dangers of Global Warming, and we are having unseasonably warm weather.

Working on a little project involving Flash 5 and the XMLSocket Object. More info as it becomes available. (tho i have to admit that the Habbo Hotel kicks such serious ass that i'm now feeling a bit... bummed about any project i try)

Funny weblinks, weblog, thingie - MonkeyFarts.org. Its where i found the link to the below article. (link - Mark Q.)

Holy shit - if you liked Mobilesdisco, you have to check this out - Habbo Hotel. Unreal.

January 30 2001

Hey ya'll. Well, i don't even know where to start. Was away in New York over the weekend. It was, well, quite amazing. We drove to Buffalo on Thursday (and had to deal with the rudest boarder guard i've ever met). After a fab night at Motel 6, we went to the airport and jumped into our fancy JetBlue plane. I've got to say, JetBlue Rocked. I'd fly them again anytime. We arrived at JFK airport and took a cab into Manhattan. Driving through Queens, and having the first site of the skyline. Just actually seeing something that until now was only in film or on tv, was great. We got to our hotel (at 34th and 7th, right across from Madison Square), dropped our stuff off and started walking toward Central Park, up 7th. I was pretty awed. Tonnes of pedestrians, huge buildings, narrow side streets. We ended up at MoMA. Again, wonderful to see some 'classic' art in person. The huge ball (like, 5 meters across, suspend by a huge chain) with the train tracks all over, built out of concrete, bricks and junk, was great. Well, really, too much to write about, but it was all good. We got back to the hotel and rested for a bit, our feet and legs were killing us! Then we went to the east village for dinner, at Il Baggetos. Saturday, we had breakfast at the 9th Street Market, which i recommend if you get the chance. We walked down to the Tenement Museum, which is another must. Some subwaying got us back downtown for some shopping. Dinner at a Sushi place, then a movie at the AMC. Sunday, before we left, we took in Grand Central Station. Then back to the airport and buffalo and the drive back to Toronto! Whew, i left lots out, but it was a really excellent trip! I'm looking forward to my next visit there!

January 24 2001

From my Aunt Norah:

Plump up your bagpipes, dust off your tartan shirts, stir your porridge oats and hoist a wee dram to the Scots Baird "Robbie Burns" tomorrow!
Happy Robbie Burns Day!

January 22 2001

Ah yes, look at this and this example of why we are going to die as a species. I used to worry about economic issues being the downfall of humanity, but its going to be environmental (which, i admit, were driven by economic issues). There was a book i read about this, well half read, called "The Next 100 Years", and it talked about how we are only now feeling and seeing the effects of what we did 100 years ago. It was pretty depressing, even for me, and i could only get through about half of it. This is just more proof, to me, that its forecasts are coming true.

Ok, i know this was on Slashdot today, but its too much up my alley to pass by - "What's Wrong With Content Protection" by John Gilmore of the EFF. A really good read, i highly recommend it. Here are some more reference links - Copyright and Fair Use and Timeline: A History of Copyright in the U.S.

January 19 2001

Shamelessly ripped from Tony's site, an interview with the NeverWinterNights folks.

January 18 2001

I keep holding out for some kind of 'standard' micropayment/online payment tool. I thought that PayPal might be it, especially with its Pilot app for beaming money from one Pilot to another, but now i'm not so sure. They have started to institute service fee's on each transfer, limiting its usefulness for small transfers. There is another online currency company, e-gold, which sounds kind of interesting. I guess we will just have to wait and see how it all falls out.

Oh my god - lego moviemaker set. Really. With a camera. Wow. Created with Steven Spielberg (i'm sure its just a licensing deal, but still).

Tony has a good ramble about our government in today's bites.

Another article, this time by Michael Abrash, called "It's Great to be Back! Fast Code, Game Programming, and Other Thoughts from 20 (Minus 2) Years in the Trenches" is up at gamasutra.com. I leaned my first graphics and 3d coding (all done on a 286 with a math coprocessor, in assembly! I was like 14 or something) from his articles in dr.dobbs and his book "Zen of graphics programming". Ah, the things i could do then, that i cant do now!

More reading online! The text to the book "Underground - tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier" by Suelette Dreyfus is now available free. Mummm, online/pilot reading!

Ok, to start off with, i'm sorry. These are some kind of disturbing pictures of... well... a snake. And something it ate. Pic 1, pic 2 and pic 3.

January 17 2001

From the US. Census Bureau - Statistical Abstract of the United States. Just the bit that i read from section 5 - Law Enforcement, Courts and Prison was interesting.

From a story at Kuro5hin.org about the anniversary of the gulf war, i got a link to a long article on the iran-iraq war (started in 1980 - lordy, i was only 10!).

From yet another company suing over patent infringement story at slashdot, i got this great link to a history of search engines!

Wow, you should all check out 20q.net. Its 20 questions, with some kind of computer AI backend which asks the questions. Pretty damn good, i had Role Playing Game, and it got it. Which i thought was pretty good.

January 16 2001

Macromedia and Allaire Merging!

Happy Gulf War anniversary!

Got the PPPoE interface working in Be. So nothing remains between me and many many hours of futzing!

Tony was saying yesterday how dark it was in the morning, and i'd just like to add that i thought today was even darker... we must be in hell. Or the sun is going out. At any rate, its not good.

This will probably be on everyone's page, but there is a great article on Salon about folks that explore subways, sewer systems and basically go places people usually dont. Infiltration is a great 'zine by a guy in Toronto that does this kind of stuff, and the Salon article has lots of great links too. I used to do this stuff, when i was younger and didn't fear for my life like i do now.

January 15 2001

Arg, no no no, not another OS! Be is pulling me into its grasp again. ah well, its not like i'm busy or anything. And, there is now a PPPoE driver for their Network Stack, which was the major thing holding me back from doing anything with it.

January 12 2001

BurningMan update. Still not sure if i want to go again... anybody else out there thinking of going this year? Email me.

Kung-Fu Friday's continue! Check out Colin's kung-fu page for listings of upcoming films at the Royal! Tonight - "Enter the Fat Dragon!"

January 11 2001

Hah! Ever wonder how 'big' a byte is? A megabyte? This page has some great examples.

Just a quick note - if you have been trying to get a hold of me via my work email (jos@trapeze.com), its been down since yesterday, so i'm not ignoring you, i just havent seen your messages! Sorry! You can always just send them to jos@theorganization.net, which should get to me for sure. Hopefully, stinkin UUnet will get their act together soon, and i will have several day's worth of reading, once all the backlogged email is delivered.
UPDATE UUnet is now reporting that they are under some kind of attack, probably DoS, by some vandals. bummer.

January 10 2001

The on-going back and forth of online privacy. A nice quick article with some good references about what has described as "...[a] perfect privacy storm" is brewing..."

Have been reading a bunch of stuff over at gamasutra.com. Especially Crosbie Fitch's articles on 'Cyberspace in the 21st Century'. They offer an interesting take on how to implement a massively multiplayer online consensual cyberspace (just seeing how many buzz words i could get in there!). Its really quite interesting. The description he is giving involved releasing some of the control we typically associate with having an avatar in cyberspace - its not as much like a FPS as it is more of a sim, kind of. Its also a distributed app, rather then your typical client/server model, and Fitch suggests that his model would allow for truly massive amounts of users to interact at once, like, the population of the planet. If you are into multiplayer games, like the idea of cyberspace or are a bit of a geek, you should read these articles.

January 9 2001

Thanks to Tony for the prop's yesterday.

some pretty interesting stuff from Apple today at MacWorld. New Laptop, with a shell of Titanium. Huh, titanium eh? Pretty expensive and difficult material to use. But undeniable cool. DVD authoring tool, iDVD (of course), also sounds good, especially with the release of cheap media from apple - $10 per DVD-R, which is 1/5th the cost of current DVD-R's. Nice.

Was looking at the Aztek last night. Pretty cool lookin' but expensive! Something like $29k Canadian! Not that i'd be buying a car anytime soon, but it is neat.

Am also looking to replace my stolen bicycle (ages ago but i'm still bitter). The Trek 7300 sounds nice, but again $700 for a bike... i don't know... The 'reviews' at epinions.com are positive about it tho.

January 8 2001

Just listening to some KMFDM - Anarchy. Man, this song rocks. Its by Tim Skold, who, apparently had a band named "Shotgun Messiah" before he worked/toured with KMFDM. Anyway, i don't know about his other shit, but Anarchy is really good.

For those of you who still care, some dirt on the new president of the united states of america.

A link (found in the notes section of the below article) to some online text by Richard Mitchell, who is described by the poster of the link suchly "If you aren't a reader of Richard Mitchell, "circulation manager" of 'The Underground Grammarian,' you should be. He is the most lucid essayist living today. His book are out of print these days but they are available on the web, with his blessings. And funny! viciously funny." Lots of text there (a complete book and many articles), ah more reading!

Great article (long) by David Weinberger (the guy that writes JOHO) - "he Hyperlinked Metaphysics of the Web". Here is what the arthor has to say about its theme:

The article says the Web is altering the building-block concepts of our culture — things like space, time, self, and morality. Then it tries to draw the whole thing together in some namby-pamby, idealistic codswallop about the Web being architected on hope.

I really like his writing, he is also one of the authors of "the cluetrain manifesto". He is pretty irreverent, and makes an easy, fun read. Check it out.

Ok, so there is a bill up for vote in Vermont which is the opposite of what we here in canada do, with regard to gun ownership. If you are over 18 and do not own a gun, you have to register! And pay $500! Read a bit about it here at Kuro5hin.org, and see the proposal here.

Went and saw a couple of really good movies over the weekend. The first was "Oh Brother, were art thou?", which was based (lightly) on the Oddessy! Very good, great acting by all involved, and good music too. The second was "traffic". I don't really know where to start about this film. Well, it was also excellent, and you should all hustle out and see it. It also really affected me - it was very powerful. Here are some articles and stories about the effect that the USA's 'war on drugs' is having.

• Discussion at Slashdot
• Review by Jon Katz at Slashdot
• Alarming Facts In The War On Drugs
• Walter Cronkite on the War on Drugs
• War on Drugs Costs American Lives and Liberties

January 5 2001

Well, i just made my final payment to OSAP! Ya, its all done, no more monthly payments, i'm debt free baby! Ahhhh, and it feels good. Thank you, thank you very much.

January 4 2001

Just in case you missed it, i've removed the link to the radio station. It was just too much of a pain to keep going, and i was not really updateing, as i've not bought new music in quite some time. If i get better 'net access, and have a dedicated 'puter for it, i might start it up again. Or if hord's of my listeners (ya, i think i was the only one!) ask for it back, i might put it back up...

Just read that there is a multiplayer patch for Deus Ex. And a level editor. Oh ya.

2001? Remember the monolith? Its inOOdysseye.

Ok, i know i've probably talked about these folks before, but if you like Kung-fu films, you should check out TheKwoon.com. They make their own short kung-fu movies! The download's are pretty big (the 3rd episode is 230megs!), but if you've got the time, get it and watch it. There is also this good interview with the creator/script writer.

More about the mid-east craziness, via indymedia.org.

Sadly, Technocrat.net is shutting down. Bruce Perens cites lack of activity and traffic as reasons for its demise. Too bad really as the conversations there were actually pretty good, unlike most at Slashdot and its ilk.

Good article about the status of 'Hacktivism' and the over-reaction to online 'cyber-war' and 'cyber-terrorism'. Make some pretty good points, and this one really good quote -

"I think we have really twisted values," says Dr Taylor. "In the Kosovan war the Pentagon was scared of using cyber warfare in case it was a war crime - but they bombed civilians. It seems to me that it's quite skewed values by which 1,500 lives are less relevant than the legal elements of cyber war. People talk about the Tamils sending email bombs to the Sri Lankan government, but surely that's better than real ones."

January 3 2001

Just watched a video by the band "brassy". Heard about them via Tony via Russ. Check out their label's site - www.wiiija.com.

By the gods, we made it to 2001. Who'd a thought. I've been very sick over the holiday's, so that's my excuse for not having any updates since the 25th. Hope everyone else had a nice time off work (if you were off work) and managed to not get sick!

Interview with the two owners of Bioware about the state of the gaming industry at the end of 2000 and going into 2001. Sounds like this fall will see the release of NeverWinter Nights. Very excited about that.

The folks over at k23 Productions have released a new Beta of Cloud:9ine, a windows replacement shell. I've used it before and its quite nice - the stuff they have in the pipe also is very cool

Have started to get interested in modifiying Unreal, and to further that quest have begun to play around with UnrealEd. Ah, nothing good can come of this, i'm sure!

Just bought "Culture Jam : How to reverse america's suicidal consumer binge - and why we must" by Kalle Lasn, the founder of Adbusters. Pretty good so far, i'll have more on this later i'm sure.

December is archived!