Smarter Stuff

Maps Are Cool

Particularly maps which use publicly available information to show you which of your neighbors contributed to whom: FundRace 2004 Block Party.

Some people will undoubtedly be a little unnerved by what can be visualized using disparate sources of data. Particularly since you can retrieve all contributors in a given ZIP Code, e.g. 95403.

What FundRace *ought* to do is provide an API interface to the data (which evidently they've spent more than a little effort to clean up enough to put into a database), allowing others to write applications which build on their efforts.

There's value in data sets.

Let Your Fingers Do The Walking

What are people { trying to buy, interested in buying }?

One approximation: Yellow Pages Top 300.

More free Yellow Pages research.

All this courtesy of John Batelle.

A Sea of Bits

A good article on the problems/opportunities we'll face when terabyte storage becomes commonplace:

A Sea of Bits at ZDNet.

You are seriously geeky when you have multi-terabyte storage at home.

Of course, he doesn't really answer the question (how do you find anything in a sea of bits?), but the trend towards more and more stored data is real.

I was thinking "personal telemetry" as I read this article - an aircraft-style "black box" recorder for your body, allowing you to track the state of your health over time.

Of course, once we figure out how to record consciousness (can you say Brainstorm? I knew you could.), we'll just record your entire (literal) stream of consciousness.

(As an aside, I'm playing with my blog as a place to record stuff I want to remember. This is in contrast to a very subject-focused blog [like WiFiPDX ought to be - hi, Adam].)

Feld's Precepts

Better than a mission statement.

Feld Technologies Precepts, circa 1992.

I really like this a lot more than a mission statement. Looking up precept, we see that it's "a rule of personal conduct," which is a good thing to have rules for.

Part of the problem with mission statements is that they are so compressed as to be useless. I don't remember the mission statement of a single company I've worked for. The SCDS mission statement is pretty unwieldy, although "Integrity, Respect, Contribution, Excitement in Learning" is something I've managed to memorize, along with some short explications of each point (mostly about integrity and respect). We're presenting working on "Principles and Practices", which is very much like the "precepts" above.

(Aside: I chair the Board of Trustees of Sonoma Country Day School [SCDS].)

George Saunders

Two good links from Willa's blog:

• The PRKA Manifesto at Slate
• Amazon.com interview

Check out CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. I'd write more, but my copy seems to have evaporated from my bookshelf.

What Technorati Thinks About Smarter Stuff

See the Cosmos for this URL

From Ian Kallen's weblog.

(later: the URL above can be inserted into any blog and it will work for that blog, i.e. it uses the referrer as the search parameter at Technorati.)

Google Desktop Search: destablizer?

John Battelle posts the news about Google's new desktop search, noting that it doesn't work except with Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

It seems to me that Google would be well served to make sure it works with Firefox (comments on the above post indicate that it does). Perhaps Google is treading lightly, but clearly Microsoft would have no qualms about eating Google's lunch. Google can aid the destabilization of IE's dominant position.

[later: it really is tied to IE, as it has knowledge of where the browser cache resides - this should get fixed in pretty short order. Jon Udell already hacked together a proxy solution.]

This is also indicative of the benefit of getting a credible product to market quickly, and then iterating quickly. It would be nice if it supported Eudora mailbox files, and not just Outlook. I imagine a lot will be happening here.

Underneath, it's a local Web server which presents the files it has indexed on your hard drive. Pretty cool.

It looks like Web- and mobile-based innovations are cranking up.

Black Beauty in 18 Gauge Steel

Certainly a conversation piece for the parlor. About the same price as a new G5 iMac. Both make a statement when placed prominently in your home. And they named it after me...

Cryptic, eh?

(from Tiny Pineapple)

Please Reboot Now

Although it didn't make a huge splash, the Air Traffic Control system in Southern California was out of commission for several hours at the end of last month (September, 2004).

According to this post (http://garage.docsearls.com/node/view/459), it appears related to the fact that the 32-bit millisecond tick counter in the Windows OS rolls over every 49.7 days.

The designers of the system failed to account for the possibility of rollover. That was their first mistake.

For some reason, rather than correct the basic programming problem, the system designers established a manual procedure (reboot the system every 30 days) to work around it, compounding their mistake.

Per Finagle's Law, human error led to a failure to reboot the system before 49.7 days elapsed. There was no second check (manual or [preferably] automated) to verify the procedure was being followed, introducing a single point of failure to the system.

The goal is a system which just runs. In this case, the system designers failed to achieve that goal, even though there was the typical "Microsoft Windows is crap" commentary which obscures the fact that it was poor design at the heart of the matter:

• Failure to account for rollover
• Failure to double-check manual procedure was being carried out (preferably automatically)
• Failure to recognized manual check as single point of failure

I would have really loved to have seen the console warning message, though:

Warning: this Windows system has been running for more than 30 days. Please reboot now.

Of course, the right answer would be to correctly account for rollover. The exercise is left for the reader.

In the overall context of systems that just run, this is an interesting question:

How would you build a clock that ran for 10,000 years?

Note the consideration (and abandonment) of "human ritual" as one way of keeping the clock wound for 100 centuries.

Pod People

At some level, I'm willing to agree that podcasting (aka RSS for audio) is The New Cool Thing. Subscribe to a feed of audio content, automagically downloaded to your iPod (or similar device), and listen at your leisure.

What I don't understand is how people have the *time* to listen to all of this stuff.

Maybe I need an iPod to understand it properly (hard to be cool these days without an iPod). So far, the only iPod I've purchased has been for my daughter, since she has a much higher need for cool than her old man.

(note again, the time shifting theme, a la Tivo.)