Category: observations

how we know a thing to be true

Ben Hammersley.com: Metadata and truth

Indeed, it is the presence of metadata in the first place that allows us to make probablistic guesses towards what data is to be trusted, and what isn’t. A document marked up with dates and topics and creators’ details has this many more points of fact through which to detect falsity. A document with nothing but a name, a date and some content has very little through which we can measure trust programatically.

This is another way to looking at how we manage relationships: the more we know about a person and their habits, quirks, and tendencies allows us to to know when they are acting out of character. So with a document or artifact attributed to them.

This brings to mind the section of “The Tipping Point (see link on main page) where we learn that primate brains are as big as they are for social purposes, to manage the relationships of society, remember faces and other identifiers.

brand awareness

As I was on my oh-so-brief vacation, I decided to update the name of this weblog. Since the name isn’t in the URL, my audience, both of you, should have no trouble finding me.

rip, AlanE

KDE on FreeBSD – Alan Eldridge 1961 – 2003

Alan Eldridge (AlanE) passed away on 6 June 2003 in Denver, Colorado, USA, apparently the result of a self-induced overdose.

Born on 15 December 1961, Alan moved from Iowa to New York City some 15 years ago to make a life for himself as a first rate Unix programmer. Recently, however, his professional and personal life was severely disrupted, and as a result, Alan moved to Denver to start anew.

A member of the KDE on FreeBSD Core Team, both a FreeBSD and KDE committer and maintainer of numerous FreeBSD ports, Alan will be sorely missed by all those of us who knew him personally, by those who knew him only through his work and, indeed, by the entire FreeBSD and KDE communities at large.

And individual members of those communities, like me. He was an energetic, acerbic, but whip-smart contributor, helpful and dedicated.

building the wrong thing

The Man Pushing Faster Internet Access in U.S.

For telecommunications companies, making the investment in broadband access is not without risk. The costs for building high-speed networks are enormous, whether through wires on the ground or through wireless networks. Moreover, the companies must market the concept to consumers who are already paying monthly fees for home telephone, cellphone and cable television service and may not want to pay yet more for high-speed access.

The gripe in this article is ostensibly about the high cost of building broadband networks, but a careful reading — heck, even a cursory one — shows that the industry’s problem is in building a business model, not a network. They’ve got dark fiber (unused fiber-optic capacity) under the streets of most cities. Cable TV passes 95% of the homes in the US. The network is there, but they haven’t figured out how to make people pay what they want to charge for it.

There’s no mention of the costs associated with these technologies from the consumer end. An additional $50 a month for faster email and stock quote access is a hard sell: make it $9.99 and see what happens.

learning the iPod

This is one of those devices that borders on the magical. I like the design of the intelligence behind the interface: while the the thumbwheel is simple and elegant, the details like it keeping track of what you listen to and allowing the user to rate tracks and preset the EQ for each track is very nice. The custom playlists are nice, allowing you to build a playlist by genre, time period or artist, as quickly as you can ask for it.

Maybe all this has been covered in reviews or I’m the last person to discover these cool things . . . I think it’s very interesting.

I have 204 tracks, 15.8 hours and 1.09 Gb used so far. I’m finding my biggest problem to be finding disk space for the music: I’m going to be limited by that until I can get some space freed up or buy some additional storage (80 Gb FireWire drives are available on eBay as well).