One life in recursive eval of transubstantiation_by_successive_approximation(self),
observations and commentary, at work, at home, and everywhere else.
"Building Commercial Scale ISP/ASP Infrastructure for Dummies"
meets "Tales of the City". Whatever. 
Strata Rose Chalup
strata_@_virtual_._net
formen.ign.com: GearHeadsUp: MODO
"So what does it do? Well, the beeper sized MODO receives - and only receives - information from Scout Electromedia about local entertainment. Scout will create and supply the content that will automatically be beamed to MODO units all over the city. I guess they have a squad of in the know city folk who just feed their favorite places into the MODO system. You could find out about nightclubs, shows, restaurants, etc. while on the go." Finally, *somebody* doing something useful with PointCast. OK, not PointCast the company, but the concept is great. My husband and I are both ham radio opertors (WA2FHF and KF6NBZ), and wonder why no one has done this with ham radio. Just recrystal a bunch of boring old pagers and run a packet service.
For that matter, when the PalmVII was starting up, I suggested that folks just use packet technology and set up a gateway for packet radio based PQAs. Like most good ideas, if you don't have time to do it yourself, it's hard to get other folks interested (though I really didn't try widely).
Kenwood sells a nice little handheld that integrates a slow-scan TV broadcaster and video camera with the unit (via a cable, the video unit is an addon). They could have a WAP/CDML/HDML device that uses packet gateways to surf for non-business legal non-FCC-violating type uses.
All those quasi-broken old 8086 handheld PDAs out there that can talk serial talk to an RS-232 interface and have a working BASIC or other language could become packet gateways with one of the Tigertronic teeny-tiny TNCs. Heck, you could implement a really simple APRS and just stick the thing on your dashboard, only use it when you have your rig and your GPS in the car. Why oh why don't I have time to tinker?
Actually, I know the answer to that one-- when I "tinker", I do it with things I actually give a damn about. The resulting single-mindedness is not healthy for staying employed. Though now that I'm married and could arrange a temporary external conscience, I should think again about how much that is a limitation. In any case, working for a startup is not a good time to start off-hours projects, since there are so few of them. The off-hours, not the projects, which stack to fill time exponentially.
_SRC
posted by Strata Chalup 8/11/2000 7:57:06 PM
Old US spy cocks a snook from HavanaThis is more of a test of NewsBlogger than anything else, but I found it amusing. After fruitlessly searching for a few unusual things I'm interested in (my cat's names, annual gatherings like AMW or BaitCon, the name of our obscure startup, etc) I settled on "scuba diver, scuba diving" and this was one of the items I got.
Apparently being an international spy also can qualify one to become an international travel agent. Very amusing. I don't have an official position on the whole Cuba/Miami Cubanos/Elian thing except to say that almost everyone involved except the actual child acted with a shocking degree of immaturity.
O tempora, O mores , as always. Or as Cicero once said, "Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book."_SRC
posted by Strata Chalup 8/11/2000 5:26:42 PM
Million Monkey Software-- Our code sucks, but you should see this thing we wrote called Hamlet.
(unknown, from a random friend's .sig)A million monkeys on the net,
and I ain't seen no Shakespeare yet.
(unknown, ditto)Sisyphean MicroRant of the Day:
Most people blindly interpret the "million monkey" argument as something akin to the ever-growing project team in Brooks' classic _The Mythical Man-Month_. "Of course you won't get Hamlet from a million monkeys", (or AOL users, or whomever the speaker wants to pick on) they say.
That's not the point at all-- the point is that the Internet makes it more likely that you will find the good stuff among the junk. How many Shakespeares have kept their stories in their heads, not written them down, written them but never performed them, etc? We will still miss those, and the ones that never post or publish anything to the net, but at least we now have a chance to discover some of them.
Statistically, it is much more likely that there will be a few interesting monkeys among the million than among a few thousand. They may even collaborate. It's not a given. It's not a dependency. It's just that they're out there, and we can find them better with a net than without them.
Finis.
_SRC
PS- Picorant of the day: I wish that I felt confident enough of the rendering of <STRONG> and <EMP> to use them instead of <B> and <I>. I guess I'll have to put philosophy ahead of usability in my next blogging and just go ahead and use 'em. I'm tired of misapplied tagging. It's not even clear if the markup of the delimiter tags themselves will display properly. Sigh.
posted by Strata Chalup 8/11/2000 3:37:06 PM
Rohit got with Peyman,
Adam, Hao and FoRK,
They were sharing Rohit's outlook
On making routing work.Mikey loved Hawaiian shirts
And JT had his doggies.
They were all in love with routing
They hacked it in XML.Kragen coded Perl5
like a savant on caffeine.
Ben developed HyperChat,
JScripting like a fiend.They were all in love with routing,
Packet-streaming from the fountain
that was RSSing like an avalanche
SOAPing down NET mountain.Some will burn out in startup mode
In daylong design meetings
Some will burnout in startup mode
While reading flamewar greetings.Some will fall in love with code
and packet-stream a fountain
That is RSSing like an avalanche
SOAPing down NET mountain.There's an intensity here that is something I've missed for a long time. I am here at work anywhere from 10 - 14+ hours a day and am reluctant to leave. It's rather appalling how much of my difficulty with motivation over the last several years seems to be psychological, related to work environment.
It's very different to feel that whatever I'm doing matters. When you have less than 10 people onboard, each person has a large contribution to make, whether to tangible intangibles like functionality & morale or intangible tangibles like making sure there's always milk in the fridge and being the token CostCo card-bearer.
I don't mind the stress sometimes,
The abilities it brings.
I can wear an evil grin
And think of other things.Cinnamon and sugar
And boldly taken hacks,
You never know what you can do
Until you just relax.[With a tip of the hat to the BHSurfers, song "Pepper"]
posted by Strata Chalup 8/10/2000 10:23:29 PM
I am an old SunOS fossil who still puts /usr/ucb in my $PATH before /bin and /usr/bin. I am in the process of learning linux. It is just enough like what I know to lull me into a false sense of security, until I run into various interesting brick walls.For instance, under SunOS or Solaris you could pick up /usr/local/src, move it to /opt/src (or /home/src, if you prefer), and then
ln -s /opt/src /usr/local/src, and be happy. Do that under linux and everything will look happy until you try to compile something, upon which zillions of../../../blah.hincludes will scurry out of the underbrush and reduce an entire tucows.c to a skeleton-make error faster than you can say "TECO".I used to think that "deep hardware spookery" was changing driver.c parameters before a kernel compile, or judicious use of
clrion a truly recalcitrant filesystem. Never would I have guessed that commands likesetpci,isapnp, and their ilk would come to be.In my glory days, it was only necessary to pull a gleaming bullet from
man -k inodeto shoot yourself in the foot. Linux provides an entire armory, stocked like a Niven/Pournelle wetdream with everything from casing molds and reloaders (/etc/conf.modules) to ravening molecular depolymerizer beams (isapnp.conf). Many, if not most, come thoughtfully pre-aimed somewhere above the knee.How marvelous, to live in such interesting times!
posted by Strata Chalup 8/9/2000 2:39:44 PM
"Changing with change"
"Movable in a movable element"
"Restless iconoclast with humanitarian streak. Or vice versa."
"Boy, howdy, I would *love* to have my own submarine, as long as it had Victorian decor and a huge pipe organ."
"OK, I'd settle for pseudo-IKEA decor and a Korg M-5."
Right.Now that's out of the way, and we don't need to ask what "mobilis in mobili" means anymore.
Actual content? Here? Perish the thought. The attempt will be made, but scrupulously without promises.
_SRC
posted by Strata Chalup 8/9/2000 1:54:43 PM
