February 2008
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Some views on the blogosystem
JP Rangaswami points me to The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, by Frank Rose, in Wired. It features a large interactive (I guess flash) graphic that places even the icky stuff (such as spam blogs, or splogs) inside the ‘system. I haven’t looked too much at it because I get annoyed by its interactivity.… Continue reading
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Frames that prevent a neutral Net
We’d hardly yearn for Net Neutrality laws if Comcast and other carriers truly understood that the Net is more than an interactive TV channel with troublesome users. Unfortunately there are technical as well as busines and political reasons why they fail to grok the Net. A big one is DOCSIS, which is the standard framework… Continue reading
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Google Earth & Sky
I just discovered that Google Earth is also useful for astronomy. You go under View and click on Switch to Sky. Suddenly your screen is a planetarium. It’s not quite the equal yet of KStars, Starry Night or Carinasoft’s Voyager (the three programs I know best), but it’s not bad for a start, and with… Continue reading
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Lie like an astrorug
From Portfolio.com: Comcast spokeswoman Jennifer Khoury said that the company paid some people to arrive early and hold places in the queue for local Comcast employees who wanted to attend the hearing. Some of those placeholders, however, did more than wait in line: They filled many of the seats at the meeting, according… Continue reading
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Honk
People have been asking if my voice is back. Thanks, it is, mostly. But sleeping is hard for some reason. Too much good stuff going on, and to think about. And some of me is still on Pacific Time, while here it’s GMT. Trying once more… Continue reading
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Buzz on buzz
Buzz Bruggeman, to Kevin O’Keefe: It’s very difficult for me to imagine today that a successful lawyer would not have an active blog. It’s sort of like imagining that they wouldn’t have business cards, or imagining that they wouldn’t have their number in a phone book — it’s a way to discover them, a… Continue reading
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Looking grand
That’s a shot of the Lava Falls section of the Grand Canyon. It’s one of my favorite scenes: of lava from the Uinkaret Lava Field slopping down into the canyon over the north rim. Atop Lava Falls itself is Vulcan’s Throne, a volcanic vent about 73,000 years old. This may seem old, but the lava… Continue reading
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Oh well
Larry Lessig: After lots of thinking and advice, I have decided it does not make sense for the Change Congress movement for me to a run for Congress in CA12. He is still out, of course, to Change Congress. Continue reading
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The FCC and the Giant Zero
So here’s the concept: the end-to-end nature of the Internet is not about “access for consumers”. It’s about creating a World of Ends in which all of us are at zero functional distance from each other — or close enough. That’s why I can listen in on the hearing right now from London, and IM… Continue reading
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Fighting deafness at the FCC hearing
I really really really wish I was back in Cambridge right now, where for sure I’d be in the Ames Courtroom, taking part in the hearing where all five FCC commisioners are participating. I could do the same, to some degree, from here in my stuffy London hotel room, if the FCC’s #@$%& Real audio… Continue reading
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Shootings
Getting this one up quickly from my seat in a London-bound 777 before taking off. It’s a set of shots heading westbound from Comb Ridge to Monument Valley in southern Utah during the trip west I’m ending now. The shot above is of Red Lake, a dry lake in the midst of an only slightly… Continue reading
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Free speechlessness
I’ve never had laryngitis before, but I do now. I can hardly say a thing. I wanted to make some calls while driving from Santa Barbara to LAX, but ended up giving my voice a rest, which so far hasn’t worked. It was almost impossible to make myself undersood to the United and TSA personnel… Continue reading
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The lying of politics, and vice versa
Heard a piece on NPR this morning in which Brooks Jackson, director of FactCheck.org, said Hillary Clinton was correct when she said (in much stronger language) that an Obama flyer was misleading. FactCheck goes on to say, We’ve also previously criticized Clinton for sending a mailer that twisted Obama’s words and gave a false… Continue reading
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Scattering words
People ask why I don’t blog as much as I used to. One answer is that I write as much, but I just don’t do as much of it here. I’ve been blogging more at Linux Journal, in addition to writing for the magazine. (The March issue just arrived. In it are eight pieces of… Continue reading
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Is there a WordPress for video?
That’s the question Tim Olson of KQED just asked me here at Public Media 2008. Given that there are countless open code bases laying around in the world, I’d say the answer is yes. But I don’t know, and the Net connection here is so slow that finding out is too big a chore. So… Continue reading
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What will be U.S. 2.0?
I saw the end of the Debate last night on CNN, and fell asleep on the hotel room bed while Anderson Cooper and his coterie of opinionators blabbed about how both contestants performed. When I woke up a few minutes ago, seven hours later, it was still going on. I switched over to ESPN and… Continue reading
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Quote du jour
Amazingly, Adobe seems to have entirely missed the fact that the reason that the Flash video format has taken off is that it’s so fluid, versatile and remixable — not because they sucked up to some Hollysaurs and crippled their technology. – Cory Doctorow I love “Hollysaurs”. Continue reading
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Uncoverage
Not sure whether or not it’s a local thing, but Verizon’s cell service seems to be especially lame lately — at least for me. Riding home to Santa Barbara yesterday on the Pacific Coast Highway, there seemed to be more than the usual dropouts. Here in the Omni Hotel in downtown Los Angeles (on Olive),… Continue reading
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Quote du jour
The best blogs are easily the equal of the best opinion columnists at the New York Times. – Jimmy Wales, a few minutes ago at Public Media 2008. Later: Software patents are a really bad idea. Continue reading
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The future, from 1 to 10
I’ll be on a panel later today at Public Media 2008 in Los Angeles. The subject is Technology and Trends: What’s Around the Bend? I got started answering that question with this list at Linux Journal. Continue reading