Month: April 2005

where are you from?

Linked from everywhere today, Your Genetic Journey – The Genographic Project (1):

Did you ever wonder about your most ancient ancestors? The Genographic Project will introduce you to them, and explain the genetic journeys that bond your personal lineage over tens of thousands of years.

US$$99.95 plus US$7.55 shipping and handling, a cheek swab, and a few weeks is all it takes: you can understand with certainty how you got here, wherever your personal here is.

I’ll do it when I can afford it, for sure.

a flying Segway?

Took a family outing to the Museum of Flight (106) yesterday and was pleasantly surprised by the new exhibits as well as some others I hadn’t looked at very closely. Case in point:

Williams X-Jet – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (1):
Images-1-1

The Williams X-Jet, created by Williams International, was a small, light-weight Vertical Take Off and Landing (VTOL) system powered by a modified Williams F107 turbofan aircraft engine. It was designed to be operated by and carry one person and controlled by leaning in the direction of desired travel and adjusting the power. It could move in any direction, accelerate rapidly, hover, and rotate on its axis, staying aloft for up to 45 minutes and traveling at speeds up to 60 miles per hour (100 km/h). It was evaluated by the U.S. Army in the 1980s, and was deemed inferior to the capabilities of helicopters and small unmanned aircraft.

450Px-Williams X-Jet

I wish I could locate the video they showed: a promo piece to be sure, but the similarities to the Segway — the pilot controls direction by shifting his body weight — were striking. Power and lift were controlled with a couple of simple twistgrips and that was it. A 30 minute flight duration would be fine for commuting, especially at 60 mph. Imagine the license and regulation nightmare: as bad as people share terrestrial space with just two dimensions, what would three be like?

Now playing: Shadow by Brian Eno (13) from the album “On Land” | Get it

after action report

so the morning after the flood of visitors and it’s time to look over the stats.

14,000 page views yesterday, a new high (no idea how many hits for images or css files: I don’t log ’em).

Unsurprisingly, BoingBoing was the top external referer and /wordpress/index.php/archives/2005/04/11/your-wish-is-my-command/ was the most requested page (5400 requests out of 1800 pages).

What did surprise me was the breakdown of browsers: Firefox is crushing the others like bugs. 3200+ requests from FireFox 1.0.2/Windows . . . lots of IE variants, but those FireFox users are Windows users who’ve switched. (Granted, BoingBoing readers are more likely to be able to think for themselves, so there is some skew.) By major browser type, Netscape/Mozilla takes 49.1%, with IE at 24.8%.

The OS breakdown is no great surprise: Windows in the majority at 61%, Mac at 18%.

And the CafePress swag continues to move . . . . 16 happy people have ordered 30 items.

the meaning of art

Banksy (23):

The time of getting fame for your name on its own is over. Artwork that is only about wanting to be famous will never make you famous. Any fame is a by-product of making something that means something. You don’t go to a restaurant and order a meal because you want to have a shit.

Trouble is, there are still quite a few (millions of) people who will reward someone for doing something devoid of meaning other than notoriety/fame.

Now playing: Do The Strand by Bryan Ferry & Roxy Music from the album “Street Life – Greatest Hits” | Get it

memory and music

A meditation on exploring a once-familiar soundtrack from one’s earlier life:

Rogue Semiotics » Old songs:

I think there’s a pretty simple explanation. Much of musicality is prediction; like comedy, music satisfies by fulfilling expectations in often unexpected ways. The perfection of Bach is best appreciated when the listener is teetering on the edge of fully understanding the pattern. Things are clear without being obvious.

Old songs are obvious without being clear. You know moments perfectly, but can’t recall how the patterns go together. The moment one song finishes I know the opening of the next, but I don’t recognise the song itself for a while after. Everything is backwards. Songs are shorter than I recall, but the album longer. Worse. The songs are the same in their finest detail, but utterly different to their memory. It’s like waking up having fallen asleep on your arm. There is something there completely of you, but totally alien.

There’s something strange going on tonight. But I feel fine.

I was surprised at the Olde Diske used in this experiment (I feel a little older as a result). I have most of the band’s oeuvre in my iPod, so it’s not quite the same experience for me when I hear those familiar strains. I think early 70’s Yes would do it for me.

how much bandwidth equals a slashdotting?

The other week, the folks at Boing Boing linked to this guy’s website and in no time, he had to take the site down and put up a placeholder like the one below:

Glenn Feron – The Art of Retouching:

Welcome to GlennFeron.com. Due to overwhelming traffic to this site, I’m
rethinking how to best show my work without going over my host’s traffic limits.

Given the draw was the images he had online as opposed to a more text-y site like this one, how much traffic does it take to capsize a site? I’m sure it varies by provider as well (how well-connected they are to peering points and larger pipes, how responsive they are to spikes vs real increases, and generally how agreeable they are).

I wonder if Akamai is missing an opportunity here . . .

something horrible (but recoverable) happened

Nothing personal or life-changing but my iBook was doing all kinds of weird stuff today. Otherwise solid apps wouldn’t run (I kept getting crash reports on EXEC BREAK, whatever that means) and the messages were all about the core libraries being flaky. Eeep!

I had resigned myself to a format and reinstall at worst, but I noticed that logging in as root didn’t manifest the same problems. If I switched to my account, the Finder wouldn’t even load: just up and down, over and over again.

So I ended up taking a backup (16 Gb worth) of my home, then moving the ~/Library/Preferences directory aside and rebuilding it.

Simply logging in starts the process. I ended up with

  • ~/Library/Preferences
  • ~/Library/Preferences.old
  • ~/Library/Preferences.good

The first and last were identical, once I set a few simple preferences that I felt wouldn’t break anything. I copied a few trustworthy items from .old to ~/Library/Preferences, then I simply copied .good once I had things reasonably solid.

Then I copied the contents of ~/Library/Preferences over the contents of .old, then copied it all back, so I could both overwrites bad files with good ones and then repopulate my prefs for apps I didn’t want to do one at a time.

So far (knock, knock) so good.

your wish is my command

Welcome, visitors from SlashDot! The shirts from Giant Robot Printing are really nice, if you want to take the message to the streets.

Lessig and Tweedy on Downloading:

I’m with Meg: “What about a bumper sticker that says, ‘Your failed business model is not my problem’?

Businessmodel-Sticker

I have some T-Shirt art as well.

<update> I am putting swag up here [http://www.cafepress.com/crankyproducts] @ no markup, since the remixing is not really mine.
<further update @ 4:30 pm> 9 subscribers to the Creative Commonist way of thinking have scored 17 items. This is fun.

If you want a red or yellow shirt (and I know you do), I have sent the artwork to the nice people at Giant Robot Printing: so head over there and order away.

<update 4/16> And here’s the artwork as a PNG file if you want it: let me know where it turns up. Businessmodel-Art