Month: January 2004

people of the book? Not the Koran, though . . .

Making Light: Consider the source

If the almanac is the only documentation that comes to the FBI’s collective mind when they visualize potential terrorists engaged in “target selection and pre-operational planning,”? what that suggests is that almanacs are pretty much what they’re working from when they’re doing their own target selection and pre-operational planning.

That’s unsettling. Almanacs are a great resource, a good place to start your research, but they’re the very definition of “general information.”? Somehow, I feel as though I’d just found out that FBI agents were all recruited from the kids who did their class reports by copying stuff out of the encyclopedia.

A great summary of how silly this is, and the followup posts are worth reading.

why I find Go hard to learn

I have been playing this for a few days now with no discernable improvement: I found a really informative tutorial and felt like I had learned a little about the dynamics of the game. But trying my hand at the game here (admittedly, I am playing against a computer, so perhaps my expectations need to be tempered), I’m still able to lose by the number of points on the board. It’s as if I never placed a single stone.

I realize where my main problem is: I have not yet figured out how to see at a glance (or even a prolonged stare) how the territory breaks out. So I have no idea how badly I’m doing until the game is over and scored. I’m getting a little better at it, but I think that’s the hardest part: if there was some way to have the breakdown of territorial control highlighted for beginners (this client software doesn’t support, nor does any other I’ve seen: probably not anything any moderately intelligent person needs), I would find it immensely useful.

Ah, well, I’ll persevere and see if I learn any more.

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patronizing the arts

Christmas gift today: my first trip to Benaroya Hall to see one of the true masterworks . . .

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony
Gerard Schwarz, conductor
Alexandra Deshorties, soprano
Robynne Redmon, mezzo-soprano
Clifton Forbis, tenor
Clayton Brainerd, baritone
Seattle Symphony Chorale
Seattle Symphony

Wagner: Siegfried Idyll

Beethoven: Symphony No. 9, Choral

This should be interesting to follow

Introducing the TPSM

Methodology Here’s how it works: I’ll present a list of major marquee technologies dating back over the past couple of decades, divided into two groups of a half dozen or so each. One group is technology winners (examples: Java and the Personal Computer), the other is the losers (examples: Ada and Interactive TV). Then, I’ll present a list of ten or so factors which might plausibly be useful in predicting the success of new technologies (examples: Investor Support and Technical Elegance).

From there on it’s obvious: you build a matrix of the technology winners and losers and what each potential predictor would have said about them. From this, with any luck, patterns emerge and it becomes obvious which of the predictors are the ones that work.

It will be instructive to see which predictors work in the real world (ie, why was interactive TV considered a clear winner?).

are social networks a viable business proposition?

Om Malik on Social Nets

The point is this whole trend of social networking. Whether it is Tribe.net, Friendster, or LinkedIn, they are banking on one little aspect – we would share our rolodex, and build up a network of our own, and of course somehow more links would be formed.

[ . . . ]

The question I have is: why the F**K should I share my network of contacts with these commercial entities. They are like BlogSpot that does nothing for my brand equity and in many ways chews me out after making the network connections. Thus what I want is a “MoveableType” of social networking. Blogs took off because it was about one person – me. My social networks should be of my making for me. Lets figure out a way to cut out the middlemen.

The deal killer for me is the requirement that we all give away our hard-won networks of colleagues and friends to a system that doesn’t preserve the nuances of how we manage those relationships. Some people you can call to shoot the breeze with and maybe spark off an idea, others you only call when you have the whole thing hashed out. Others you don’t call: they call you. I haven’t seen a social network website that allows you to sort your contacts this way.

And the other aspect of this is that the people worth networking with are not in these networks: the website services are optimistically hoping that they’ll build sufficient critical mass that Steve Jobs or John Doerr signs up as a member. As if either of them needs an introduction . . . . .

an overview of going from vinyl to bits

The NYT has published a detailed how-to for converting vinyl LPs to MP3s or CDs. When Napster started, it solved two distinct problems. The obvious one was that you might not have the CD handy that you wanted to listen to (either because you hadn’t bought it or because you’d left it somewhere else, i.e., at your parents’ place while you went to college), but the more subtle one was that ripping CDs used to be really hard. You needed specialied software, tons of hard-drive space, and you had to title all those tracks by hand.

Eh, I don’t remember this part of it: I just dropped CDs into any cddb-aware (now gracenote) ripper and it was all done, unless I was the first person ever to rip that particular disc.

But the part that tied my tail in a knot was this:

(80% of the music ever recorded isn’t available for sale — if you want to hear the song on that groovy LP through your iPod’s headphones, you’re gonna have to get ripping).

Have I mentioned the idea of the RIAA could make a ton of money by re-releasing all the stuff in their vaults in mp3 or some other digital format?

Go? I’m a goner . . .

Play Go on Mac OS X

I decided to learn more about this game, having only heard of it so far. Chess and checkers have become very popular at home, but the rules and strategic implications of chess can be overwhelming for a 6 year old. Checkers is less of a struggle, but lacks variety. Hence, Go . . . .

There is a lot of information about the game, why it’s good, what it purports to reveal, etc. and the OS X implementation is very nice, as far as I can tell. But it’s hard to get a handle on how to play it. The strategy seems, well, vague. Even playing on the 9 x 9 beginners board, I get beaten like a drum everytime . . . . They say that, unlike chess, no computer program can reliably beat a master player. Well, I suppose if the Go equivalent of Deep Blue wants to win badly enough, I can expect knock at my door.

They say practice is how you learn so I can hope for some improvement.

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Let the bidding commence

Who Should Hire Me, and Why

It seems unambitious just to shout “Will do technology for food” at the world; so I thought I’d pick a few candidate employers and explain why they should hire me. There are lots of other interesting organizations that I’d love to work for; the idea here is to provide some examples.

My guess would be MSFT has already called . . . . though they didn’t make the short list of prospects.

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