David Douglas: Notebook

Voluntary Filtering Works for Us (and Us Too)

Tue, 21 Sep 2004 22:05:27 GMT

Ed Felten's suggestions for monitoring and filtering what your kids watch totally resonated with me. It's not a hard-core architecture enforced approach, but instead an architecture enabled approach which balances practicality and other lessons you'd like to teach your kids.

We already have our kids PC in the family room for the same general reason (but also have the same issue early in the morning!).

Kerry and the IP extremists

Sat, 18 Sep 2004 02:40:58 GMT

Lawrence Lessig says that Kerry has selected an "IP Czar" that is not (if Kerry is elected) make the our current IP environment get any better.

Good summary of Grokster finding

Tue, 07 Sep 2004 01:50:40 GMT

Belated link to a good summary of the key points of the MGM v. Grokster ruling.

Cuban on Dream Teams

Tue, 07 Sep 2004 01:50:20 GMT

Good study of Canadian hockey and how they got to the top on international competitions again. After the weak effort by our Olympic basketball program (yes, it was weak), these are good lessons.

Jonathan on competing with Linux

Tue, 07 Sep 2004 01:50:13 GMT

Good post by Jonathan Schwartz on competing against Linux. I agree that Sun is a lot stronger when it can focus on another company. I don't necessarily agree that Linux has been the primary source of the company's problems over the last few years. On the other hand it is a big piece of causing the giant business model change that's underway at Sun...

Jim Moore on the state of the Dems

Tue, 07 Sep 2004 01:50:04 GMT

Interesting post by Jim Moore on the state of the Democratic Party. It matches my impression that the specific Dems we have in front of us right now are consistently running against things or people, not for anything.

XM PCR discussion and pointers

Tue, 07 Sep 2004 01:49:55 GMT

Good discussion by Jim Moore of XM Radio's short-lived PCR capability, and a number of other implementations you can go get.

Gallery of fake trees that disguise cellphone towers

Tue, 07 Sep 2004 01:49:47 GMT

Xeni Jardin:

Website that collects photos of fake trees that serve to disguise mobile phone signal towers. Some disguises are more convincing than others. Link (Thanks, Alex) [from Boing Boing Blog]

del.icio.us

Tue, 07 Sep 2004 01:49:23 GMT

Jon Udell on adding metadata tags to posts. Use of both XHTML and del.icio.us. Here's an interesting follow-up. Finally, he builds on this to consider multi-user information routing.

Triangulation

Thu, 19 Aug 2004 03:16:41 GMT

Simon Phipps summarizes why the increase in data collection is bigger than it looks. I'm not sure I agree with his paradoxical answer, but I'm also hopeful.

Report from Crypto 2004

Thu, 19 Aug 2004 03:11:57 GMT

Ed Felten gives good summary of the excitement at Crypto 2004. Some important algorithms have been shown to have some weaknesses, and it seems like it's a bit a surprise to people. This post tells why the seemingly small breaches are significant.

Microsoft, Dividends and Stock Buybacks

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 03:22:02 GMT

Mark Cuban on corporate stock buybacks. One of those things most people never really think through, but should.

Competition in the Software Industry

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 03:19:20 GMT

Good post by Jonathan Schwartz on the dynamics of the software industry, and users ability to switch among vendors.

I'm sure he takes heat from the Linux community on his comments, but the emergence of Red Hat as a company charging high prices for server software are an important indicator that the utopian vision isn't yet a reality...

Some NBA Rules

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 03:13:27 GMT

This is a truly amazing post by Mark Cuban, rich man and owner of the Dallas Mavericks. Ever been confused by a trade (or non-trade) in the NBA? This will make you at least step back and say "Well, maybe I have no clue how this all works".

A "NearWalden" experience for the Internet BookMobile

Sun, 11 Jul 2004 01:19:44 GMT

The Internet Bookmobile came to Walden Pond and learned first hand about the conflicting goals for that property. What would Thoreau think?

Yesterday (July 8, 2004) I took the Internet Bookmobile to Walden Pond in Concord, Mass. It was the 150th anniversary of H. D. Thoreau's boo k "Walden." The Thoreau Society had a dawn to dusk reading.

After an hour of having readers print and take away free copies of "Walden,"
I was asked by the Walden Pond Reservation police to pack up and leave
and threatened with arrest. I left.

The park supervisor (Denise Morrissey, 978-369-3254) told me I could
not pass out free literature without a permit. And she would not give me
a permit because, as she explained, the state park gets money from a
concession by the Thoreau Society, which operates a store that sells
"Walden"--and I was competing with them by giving away free copies.

There is no place to park at Walden Pond except in the state parking
lot, for which I paid $5.

[via Boing Boing Blog]

The Future of Weblogs

Thu, 08 Jul 2004 02:45:55 GMT

Ben Hammersley outlines how to get your Fedex package status as an RSS feed.

As I've written before, I believe that automatically generated blogs are as much of the future of blogging as human-generated ones.

Weblog Growth

Thu, 08 Jul 2004 02:38:36 GMT

David Sifry tracks the growth of weblogs. Amazing growth curves...

MP3's from the Bands

Thu, 08 Jul 2004 02:26:31 GMT

Pitchfork Media - with lots of downloads and reviews

Bray on writing Python

Wed, 07 Jul 2004 00:50:07 GMT

I just wrote my first Python program. It occurs to me, given the generally grey colour of my beard, that this may be the last time I learn a new programming language. Which, frankly, would be OK, it’s real work. This thing scans all the feeds coming out of Planet Sun using Mark Pilgrim’s Universal Feed Parser, detects any that have changed in the last day, and pings weblogs.com, technorati.com, and blo.gs to let them know. (Question: who else should be pinged?) It’s only 57 lines of code, but I had to learn a modest amount of Web wrangling, string munging, time arithmetic, and data structure walking to get it going. I suspect it’s not a very good Python program, but I can live with that. If you’re going to scale the Pythonic slopes, you’ll need one browser tab open to Dive Into Python, another to the Python Tutorial, a shell window handy where you can type things like pydoc time, and a nontrivial chunk of Python code in a nearby editor buffer (I used the Feed Parser) so you can look up idioms. At the end of the day, the code looks distinctly weird to my eye, kind of ragged without a supporting visual lattice of {’s }’s, and ;’s. But I’m sure you get used to it quickly. [ongoing]

Telcordia Study: ILEC FTTP feasible, driven by opex savings

Tue, 06 Jul 2004 01:21:17 GMT

David Isenberg cites another interesting FTTH feasibility study. From everything I've seen in what various towns have done this idea continues to gain strength.

Mobile phone antenna disguised as a churchtop crucifix

Wed, 23 Jun 2004 03:27:35 GMT

Yowsa. Scary stuff from BoingBoing.

There are Euro companies that specialise in camouflaged cellular masts and antennae, as a sop to people who worry that these eyesores irradiate their children's gonads. One such firm is now manufacturing an antenna disguised as a crucifix, intended to go on the steeples of churches where they need really good mobile reception.

Link

(via Engadget)
and Boing Boing Blog)

John Battelle visits Danny

Sun, 20 Jun 2004 02:16:29 GMT

Nice teaser for Applied Minds. I wish there was a way that their wonderful world could be more in the open, but I suppose that the business model naturally leads to the current mode of operation.

Remembering Reagan

Sun, 06 Jun 2004 13:25:04 GMT

It was awhile ago, but I hope that everyone who remembers it can take a moment and recall the psychological change that Ronald Reagan brought to this country as President. At the end of the Carter "era" it seemed like everything was going wrong - high interest rates, oil shortages, Americans were under attack in the Middle East, and the USSR still looked like a daunting foe. Reagan believed we could be better and created an environment where it could happen. Was he perfect? Of course not. But we are still benefitting from the positive momentum created by Ronald Reagan. Today's problems are different than when Reagan took office, but we've got some of the same psychological malaise. While I generally support what Bush has done, I have serious issues which how he did it. We're losing allies around the world and dividing the country. Reagan didn't have universal support, but the style of leadership he exhibited didn't divide people the way Bush does. On the other hand, even a few months into the serious campaign it's clear that John Kerry doesn't have it either. If half (or more) of our country wasn't so mad at Bush, Kerry would never be a serious candidate for president in this country.

Offshoring Is Bad For America

Sun, 09 May 2004 23:41:14 GMT

Think about the offshoring issue for too long, with too open a mind, and I promise you’ll go nuts.

David Coursey takes an interesting pass through the outsourcing conundrum. It's not a simple issue, and there's plenty of quality positions to go around. While I don't think some of his ideas are tenable, some of the basic conclusions are on the money and I'm glad someone is taking a creative look at this, since the two extreme positions are not viable in my mind. I also think there's something in what he says about taxing the incoming code as an import. Of course it doesn't work in real life, but there the germ of an idea there.

Bubblets

Wed, 28 Apr 2004 02:33:19 GMT

Latest Udell hack, and Simon Phipps critiques.