Never been one to let the carrier drop

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day and he mentioned that Web 2.0 doesn’t really exactly exist.

I mean, yes, we can point to applications on the web and say these are clearly web 2.0 applications, but no one has (that I know of) laid down a concrete standard for what the dividing line between 2.0 and 1.0 is.

For that matter, web 1.0 didn’t exist either. We had several diverging standards of how http was to be rendered – to the point that in some cases web developers were forced to write seperate versions of HTML for seperate browsers. Web 1.0 exists only in retrospect.

What I’m sort of wondering, at this point, is where web 3.0 is going to be taking us. I would share what’s in my crystal ball, but I’d probably be (very) wrong. One of the interesting trends is the perpetual game of pushing CPU load off to the client – or the server. It seems possible that Google will release a desktop OS that turns all the computers in the world into one massively parallel computer, and you’ll never know if your spreadsheet is stored on your local hard drive or somewhere in another country. People who use skype already accept that they’re going to be relaying off their neighbors, and vice versa. It may be that web 3.0 will be the end of the server-client mentality and we’ll all be using one monster peer-to-peer system.

Or it might not. I can’t imagine which direction web 3.0 will go in, because I don’t know what radically new developments are just over the horizen. Most of the technology we’ve seen in the last ten years have been logical extensions of Moore’s law – but it seems like there are a lot of concepts that are completely unexplored, and there are a lot more people out there to explore them.

On a unrelated note, I still wonder when and if we will see hybrid analog-digital computers. I thought this would start with each computer having several registers of random noise, generated using some sort of very high quality white noise generator. I also keep thinking certain functions that are very expensive in CPU cycles are very easy with op-amps. Of course, it’s possible this is already being done inside GPUs – anyone know if GPUs have analog computers as part of them?

I also wonder if the science of analog pattern recognition or analog recognition assistance shouldn’t be bumped up a notch or three. We’ve gotten a little too obsessed with digital of late – not saying digital isn’t great, wonderful, the dog’s bark and the cat’s meow, but a hybrid digital/analog computer might be able to achieve things that neither a analog or a digital system could do alone.

I’ve been very strongly resisting buying a intel mac for a whole host of reasons – the biggest one being that almost everything I do with my mac is music-related and I have literally thousands of dollars of software that I’ve purchased that will all have to be upgraded. However, one of my clients has loaned me a MacBook Pro, and I think probably I will indeed want to buy one of these, and upgrade all said software. OSX 10.5 is just sooo much better than 10.2 – and a Core 2 Duo does rather beat the pants off a G4.

I will, of course, have to make sure there are drivers available for all the obscure music hardware that I cable up to the thing. Since all of it is 4+ years old, the odds don’t look too great.. on the other hand, MOTU still sells the MTP AV, so at least that probably will be good to go. I don’t know about the 896es…

The biggest difference I see is actually thermal – where my G4 gets rather toasty, this machine stays cool as a cucumber most of the time. Of course, part of that might be that the things I’m doing with this machine aren’t CPU-intensive, where applying realtime EQ to 12 channels of audio at once probably is. 😉

Other things that I really like about it include the integrated 802.11n, the gigabit ethernet port (which my PC laptop doesn’t have – I keep meaning to pick up a gigabit card for it but it’s that new weird standard instead of PCMCIA)

Speaking of that new weird standard, does anyone know of ANY expresscard bluetooth adapter? My PC laptop doesn’t have integrated bluetooth, and I hate dongles sticking out of the side because you can’t throw the machine in the laptop bag with them still attached 😉

I also get to try to figure out how to load up my laptop bag with *two* 17″ laptops. Or perhaps I’ll just get another, identical bag.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand – OSX seems to be turning into a mature operating system. I’ve been learning about Xcode and objectiveC – and I’m starting to wonder several things:

1) Is every language migrating towards being event-driven and data aware? 😉

2) Is there a objective-C compiler for windows?

3) How long will it take me to master this language, and will I be given that time?

I’ve written things on my mac, but they’ve always either been console or tk. The idea of actually writing mac gui apps scared me – I’m resistant to change – but apparently it shouldn’t have. The mac gui framework seems to be *extremely* well documented. And while ObjectiveC clearly isn’t C, it also clearly is understandable – though I need to find a really good document on delegation on objectiveC because it’s clear that it’s going to be important, but for some reason the first docs I read on it failed to make it completely clear to me

I had a interesting idea while I was driving the other day that I thought I’d post for y’all’s amusement:  Computer aided sex.

Basically, the concept I was playing with is that sex is, among other things, the art of matching two dissimilar clocks. I’m thinking you could train a computer by having it look at a series of EEG, pulse, etc outputs during orgasm to recognize what EEG output looks like as humans approach orgasm. Then, by equipping said computer with biometric outputs from both participants, it could gauge where they are relative to each other. Then, by having the computer control the BPM of music and lighting and whatnot, it could suggest tempos that would be harmonics of both of the participant’s clocks, and try to nudge them to orgasming at the same time.

Recently I started working for a new client – no names – who needed me on a emergancy basis. After the emergancy was mostly over, they indicated a interest in continuing to employ me and presented me with their contractor service agreement.

I can’t remember exactly how it was worded, but the clause that got me angry was basically that anything I invent or create while I’m working for them – and the way it was worded it read to me as if it was in the time duration that I was working for them – was their property. Now, I’m fine with cedeing everything I create while I’m ‘on the clock’ to my employer – after all, that’s part of what they buy when they rent time on the supercomputer array named Sheer. But the idea that anyone would try to slip over that they should own everything I create when I’m *off the clock*..

I’m angry about it. Fortunately, I don’t actually need the job – it would be fun, and there’s lots of smart people there, but I do have more than enough work. So I sent back the contract with the bits that I couldn’t deal with highlighted in yellow and a note explaining why I couldn’t sign it. I don’t know what they’ll do about it..

.. but I’m still upset.

Now, sometime around OnAir I started reading everything that got put in front of me to sign. Prior to that I signed without reading, just assuming the organizations were trustworthy. This is only the second time that someone has tried to put something in a contract that I was supposed to sign that’s made me actively angry.

Once I was angry, there were a couple of other clauses they wanted me to agree with that I didn’t – one was that in the event of any legal activity, the loser would be responsable for all court costs. I’m sure they could get that written into the lawsuit, but I’m not about to help them by agreeing to it up front – especially since I already have had my trust in the organization seriously damaged by the attempt to weasel-word in that they own all my ideas.

The other one that annoyed me was that they wanted me to have certain amounts of insurance coverage. Maybe if I charged a bit more – but at my rates, if you want insurance for me, you buy it yourself.

I think that the document they tried to get me to sign illustrates what’s wrong with

a) Money – essentually, this contract was written to protect the bottom line of company A, at noticable cost to humanity as a whole. How much time would I have to spend emailing them every significant idea I have? I don’t know about you guys, but I have at least one neat idea a day (see my next post for my neat idea from yesterday). Most of them just get tossed, some of them get mentally bookmarked for further study, and a few of them actually get acted upon.  Company A was concerned that I might have a neat idea worth signfiicant numbers of dollars, and was willing to waste my time – and theirs – to make sure that those dollars if they actually happened went into their pockets
b) Corperations – in essence, company A did something dumb. They probably see it the other way around – they are the center of the universe and I should be salivating all over myself wanting to work for them because of their deep pockets and fast equipment and whatnot. However, from my viewpoint, they’ve damaged their credibility and if they can’t come to terms with my rejection of their contract, they will lose my services. Perhaps it’s egotistical of me, but I’m coming to think that my services are in fact rather useful and valuable and that there are not a inifinate number of Sheers running around.

Essentually, the problem I see is that companies forget that they exist for the convenience of their employees and customers, NOT the other way around. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – the proper order of operations, in terms of who you make happy in a company, is 1) Customers 2) Employees – starting at the bottom and working up 3) Stockholders. In my opinion, in a properly run company even the janitors think “This is MY company. I’m proud to work here, I’m happy with what we do, and I trust us to treat the customers and ourselves right.”

I know that I’m full of what some have referred to as ‘pointless idealism’. I think I prefer it that way.

Does anyone out there know of any backup client for windows that will pause the backup whenever the workstation is in use and resume it when the workstation goes idle again?

It works much better if you edit ‘compile’ to read:

#!/bin/sh

# WARNING: This file was auto-generated. Do not edit!

exec gcc -include /usr/include/errno.h -O2 -c ${1+”$@”}

the -include /usr/include/errno.h part is the part that makes it work. 😉

As part of a discussion with my friend deadman the other night, the subject of how much batteries suck came up.

Now, as many of you know, I’m a strong proponent of plug-in EVs, rechargables instead of primary cells, and in general a battery kind of guy. However, I will be the first to admit that batteries suck. What’s astonishing is how *much* they suck.

I got into this line of thinking because I was musing about how much energy (tens of kilowatt-hours) each  of us keeps stored. 1 kg of fat = approximately 10 kwh,which means 2 kg of fat – 4.4 pounds for you non-metric types – contains as much power as the traction pack of my car. Which weighs, let’s see, approximately 700 lbs.  Hm. 4.4 lbs != 700 lbs.

It’s easy to see why people are pushing for fuel cells, but really hard to see why they’re pushing for platinum based ones. As deadman pointed out, perhaps what we need – and I’m sure there are thousands of people working on this, and also that by the time I could learn enough about it to contribute anything useful it would be solved – is a enzyme-catalized room-temp fuel cell.

My mother (who believes we were created by a perfect creator)  is probably gloating about how our bodies beat our best rechargable energy systems by a factor of 100 right now, and I can’t really blame her. Our RNA and DNA data storage also beats our best hard drives by several orders of magnitude, so it’s not like this is exactly suprising. We’re not really inventing new technology so much as trying to find ways to duplicate what’s already in our bodies in ways that we can control and debug.

(although, in all fairness, the signalling rate of our nervious systems is way, way slower than the internet. Probably. )

My back hurts again. I’ve been trying to do the exercises that the physical therapist suggested for me, and *they* hurt. So I guess I will call him and go back in and have him work on me some more.

I still blame the car accident that I was in a few years ago – I never had any problems with my back before that, and it seems like it’s been intermittently broken in more and more irritating ways ever since. Since I can’t think of any amount of money that would be worth ongoing pain, I think that what we need to do is redesign cars so that these things can’t happen.

I was musing last night as I was driving to get fast food about how many different ways computer-assisted driving could work. Obvious ways are things like putting a bracket around anything radiating at 37 degrees so that you’d be aware of children, dogs, etc as you drove past them – and, of course, a system that tracked what speed you were closing on potential obsticles and displayed warnings, sounded alarms, and ultimately engaged the car’s braking system.

I keep hoping that DARPA’s various autonomous vehicle challenges will lead to more autonomous safety systems being built into vehicles. Humans really shouldn’t drive cars – we’re too easily distracted, we can only see in two directions at once and those directions have to be on approximately the same plane, and we’re too fragile and we don’t handle high G loads well. When humans fly planes or drive trains, they often use computer systems to assist them in all sorts of ways – and, yes, I know taht cars have traction control computers and antilock computers, but that’s really just a small segment of what should be onboard.

Among other things, why don’t cars have black box style recorders? It seems to me that this would remove a lot of sources of arguments during car accident discussions – how fast was driver A going? How hard did he brake? What was he seeing?

I also suspect that a somewhat centrally-dispatched traffic management system – soemthing more sophisticated than a guy on the radio telling me I should avoid the 405 – would save everybody a lot of time.

Someone should also figure out a very sort set of strategies  that if done by every driver in a traffic jam, will tend to unjam the traffic. I noticed when me and Nicka drive down 123 at rush hour on our mopeds that by slowing the road from 45 to 35, it changed from gridlock to flowing smoothly. I suspect that there’s a whole set of these – like, for example, leaving more space in front of you during a traffic jam so you can drive at a constant speed, using the space in front of you as a buffer, rather than constantly speeding up and slowing down (and losing time to human reaction time for every single driver behind you as they do the same)

I noticed one of my friends talked about a book, something like you can’t afford a negative thought. I definately think I suffer from some negative thinking.. part of it is engineer’s disease – you have to be able to see all the flaws before you can improve the system.. but part of it is just plain excessive.

Anyway, my back hurts, whine whine whine whine

Hi! Where would YOU rather be?
Four places where I’ve held jobs in my life:
– Epoch Internet
– Hacker Shack computers
– Radio shack
– OnAir.com/www.com

Four movies I could watch over and over:
– Pump Up The Volume

– Dead poets society
– Hackers
– Sneakers

Four cities in which I have lived:
– Fayetteville, AR
– Woodbridge, VA

– Irvine, CA
– Seattle, WA

Four TV shows that I watch:
– House

– MASH

– Ally McBeal

– The Muppets

Four places I have been to:
– Bangkok, Thailand

– New York, NY
– Swindon

– Sydney, Australia

Four people who email, IM or call me regularly:
– Kayti
– Dan S.

– My boss
– My coworkers

Four of my favorite foods:
– Portabello burgers
– Sushi

– Chicken fajitas
– Pho

Four places I would rather be right now:
– in another universe with file permissions, multithreaded time, and not based on the model that all life lives at the expense of other life

– in tropical paradise
– at a rave

– at a jam session

Four stupidest things I’ve ever done:
– cheated on people
– been born in America
– worked for free for someone who could afford to pay me

– not done things

Four things I am grateful for:
– Kayti

– my cat

– the knowledge that this, too, will pass

– steady employment

Four things I am looking forward to this year:
–  I’m drawing a blank here
– perhaps the insurance company of the guy who hit me will finally cough up the money I lost because of lost work time (and, today, my back hurts. Grr. Humans shouldn’t drive cars)

– possibly releasing the software I’ve been working on for almost a year
– maybe having somewhat more financial security

Arther C Clarke has logged out. Godspeed, wherever you’re headed…

(and don’t forget to write)