Dead blog in the middle of the road

Hi. I quit this blog. I'm tired of Moveabletype. So very very tired. I'm playing with wordpress.org's new tool. And loving it. Check it out

Further Achievements...

It seems as if the once dead http://achieve.utoronto.ca is on its way for a comeback, revenantly speaking as my niece is wont to say. Replaced the powersupply ($45). And then realized the the Fedora Linux can be installed over RH7.2 with not much problem. That's going on now. I think I'm going to move the moos (and projectachive.net) back over to it. Just have to work out a backup schedule without a DDS3 drive... fun... wow!

Oh, and the URL of the day is http://www.lares.dti.ne.jp/%7Eyugo/storage/monocrafts_ver3/03/index.html thanks to ken

THe Mann Proof

Here's some pictures of Ken and I and others over at Steve Mann's Studio playing with a strange projector.

Papers updated...

I've put up a PDF of the following paper, in my paper's section. Nothing new, but it might be of interest.

Nolan, J. (In Press) ìThe Influence of ASCII on the Construction of Internet-based Knowledgeî OISE-UT Papers in Technology Education. Jim Hewitt ed. Toronto: Imperial Oil Centre for Science, Mathematics and Technology Education.
http://jasonnolan.net/papers/InfluenceofASCII.pdf

MP3 Request...

Anyone got an MP3 for "Gimme that O'l Time Religion" by perhaps Phil Harris. I need a copy for a special reason.

Sympatico Speed Bump

According to this article: Bell to double download speed for High-Speed Internet - Improve upload performance by five times, we're getting a speed bump in January or so.

Holiday Edition of the Ugly Building Cam

steve's on his way over to scope out the view from my building... and he asked if the cam was running, so I thought I'd bring you... the return of the OCAD Ugly Building Cam:

Hit refresh to see if the images changes (it probably won't) or go to the cam page.

Thanks Fabio!

Just went down to the UofT computer shop and Fab swapped out my old broken keyboard from my laptop and popped in another one... turn around time for repair? 30seconds. Now that's service.

I love my new keyboard... it is so clean.

Powerpoint Makes You Dumb

Both Ken and Alan sent me this New York Times article: Powerpoint Makes You Dumb yesterday. And no, this is not a joke. I hate PPT. The worst paper I saw from students this fall was the only one done in powerpoint. And yes, I'm going to get the Edward Tufte pamphlet.

"In August, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board at NASA released Volume 1 of its report on why the space shuttle crashed. As expected, the ship's foam insulation was the main cause of the disaster. But the board also fingered another unusual culprit: PowerPoint, Microsoft's well-known ''slideware'' program."

Cyborg Barbies

That's Megan with Barbie... Her student Pia had everyone cyborgizing barbie as part of their response to Donna Haraway. Check out the photoshow

iPod

My iPod is working! Got the part mailed from Michigan. Put it in, put the pod back together, and voila! Don't let anyone tell you you can't get your iPod apart and back together. Just don't do it with sharp toys.

Access Grid

Many Ayromlou let me use his Access Grid set up at Ryerson to talk with Ken at the NRC this afternoon. Actually, it was largely Ken and Many getting to know each other, and what their respective locations are doing with the AG. Now we're hoping we can pull together an interesting project using AG. More later.

Server outages today...

I'm upgrading my server today, so access to the following domains will be hit and miss:

jasonnolan.net
edublog.com
yukazine.com
roomofbensown.net

News Update
Server update is successful. Let me know if you notice any problems.

Email issues at UofT

Just so you know, certain parts of the UofT email network is down. I don't know why, cause I didn't bother to read the email sent out to all system admins about it. But I can't send or receive email at the moment. Sweet.

Off to RCAT to speak on blogs and scholarly communities

I'm giving my talk on Blogging and the The Significance of 'Communities of Scholars' in the Academic Environment at RCAT in 30 minutes. Hope some of you can come by. Here are my notes: Community of Scholars if you can't.

Computer viruses now 20 years old

From BBC News: This week computer viruses celebrate 20 years of causing trouble and strife to all types of computer users. More...

Though I'd like to note that according to Zakon's Internet timeline, the first virus to shut down the internet happened in 1980... which is what I remember reading.

No User Serviceable Parts

Just One Dead iPod...

Well, Mr Fiddler broke his iPod. Broke it real good. My audio jack was busted, it is a well known problem, and I was going to open it up to fix it. Did some searching about and found some instructions. And things went pretty well, until I had the cover all off. Great. Pulled it apart gently and noticed that I had poked a hole in the ribbon cable that goes from the harddrive to the circuitboard. There you go. A useless and dead 20 gig iPod. Moan.

I did some searching, and have found some damaged iPods for sale... shouldn't be a problem. And then I found a reference to someone in Michigan who says that he'll repair iPods cheap. Have emailed him to see if he'll sell me a cable. He's checking. And I'm holding my breath.

And yes, I checked with Apple. Repairing the plug would have cost more than a new iPod.

The Ugly Building Cam... Hijacked!!!

If you go to Artsnetwork.tv and click about, you'll find my OCAD ugly building Cam. No one told me, and I've been using the feed for other things... like pictures of the inside of my apartment.

Moving to Megabit

KAT! reminded me and BERNiE that we should reconsider using Megabit for our internet service. I'd used it in the past and had had to stop. Megabit is a service by which your Sympatico ADSL connection is routed directly to the university of Toronto. Many and sundry advantages: better and faster service, not having mail bounce because Sympatico is a spamhaven, access to UofT licensed online services such as the OED and silverplatter search functions... the list goes on and on. I can, by virtue of my facultiness, get a static IP address which will allow me to sync up computers at home and at work.

Sometimes tech works.

Minor Disruptions...

T'was a long day. One that I shall describe in brief. Went to my KMDI office to install the 60gig HD that Larry (Diving Dazes on the right menu) had FedExed to me from the US into Edublog. I have to pay GST on the value of the harddrive, even though it is Larry's and we're just putting it in my computer for a while. Took the puter apart and installed it. Nothing new there. But I couldn't boot off my backup drive or my CDrom for some reason. GAK. Actually, I knew I couldn't boot off my backup drive, that's one of the reasons I wanted Larry's 60gig.

I was about to walk home to get my other 60gig backup drive, cause I know you can boot from that, when I had a brainstorm... hey, I can boot from my iPod!!! Dragged my iPod out, plugged it into my laptop, and installed an OS on it. Took iPod and backup drive to Edublog, plugged it in, booted from the iPod, and initialized the 60gig, and transfirred all the stuff over to it... and turned on Edublog again. It *seems* to be OK.

Since the day was disrupted, I decided to clean my office. Our room has work stations for 5 people. I had two of them, and peter had 3. As he has 10+ computers to my 3-4. Now he has 2 assistants, and so I'm losing half my office space, and have to cram 100% of my stuff into 50% of the space... like 3m x 3m. Ack. So much for moving up in the world. I guess I'll move more over to my Ryerson office, or home, or throw it out.

Actually, I have two broken 17" monitors for the Achieve server, which I'm finally dumping. And this is good, because there's no room on my smaller desk for it.

Anyone want to buy me a 15" LCD monitor? I'll have to get something, as I need to be able to log into the GUI to install security updates for Project Achieve.

Today is more quiet... looking for jobs for next year, I think.

Customer service...

I got a strange bill from Sympatico, with lots of extra charges on my credit card statement. And I thought that perhaps my home network had been hacked and someone was doing something nefarious. It happened in the past, when I mistakenly left Yuka's firewall turned off. Someone uploaded 800megs of videos. Luckily it was not pr0n, but rather simpson's and bugs bunny videos. Then I remembered that sympatico's bandwith usage charges had been dropped. Purplexed I tried to find out my usage and whatnot online. Of course I could not get onto the secure site. The page after login would just hang. So, I called up the Bell Sympatico Customer Service d00ds. I hoped I'd Brin working at the call centre, but no luck.

1) Found out that the charge was from my dad's internet usage. I must have left my login/password set for his computer up north when I set up his computer last month. No problem there.

2) The Sympatico d00ds told me that since they could get to customer care page, it must be my fault; with various and sundry mutterings about firewalls and the like. (I'd already turned off my firewall, and blocking of pop-up adds while troubleshooting things before I called them.). While I was talking, I remembered how ProMac Sympatio !is. So I turned off Safari, and sparked up Internet Explorer. Voila. Sympatico's web site doesn't work with macs.

Their reason? They haven't bought a licence for Safari. So, I asked them if they were compatible with Mozilla, being all open source and all. Nope. Didn't buy a licence for that either, I was told. It is with answers like this that I back off slowly.

Customer service... isn't it great that we're a service culture now?

Even Stephenson's figured it out...

I thought I was one of the only ones into pre-digital technology. I'm using that book New Media: 1740-1910 in one of my upcoming courses... and here's Neal Stephenson (author of snowcrash, diamond age and cryptonomicon) who's already looking down that path in the popular realm. Good for him.

Wired 11.09: Neal Stephenson Rewrites History

Neal Stephenson Rewrites HistoryFor the dark prince of hacker fiction, looking backward is another way of seeing the future.

Deconism in the Dark Picts

Here are the pictures of Derek, Steve, Maurice and Pierre that I took at the event I mentioned last week.

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, July 14, 2003:PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption

PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption (Alertbox)
If you don't know who Jakob is, you should take the time to find out. Even if you don't like him, he shouldn't be ignored.

iChat AV

rochelle, Ben, Larry and I have been playing with the new iChat AV beta from Apple. Aside from the normal text message, it allows for voice over internet to whomever you're chatting with. The quality is amazing. No special microphones. Just talk to your computer. Much better than anything I've ever tried aside from the $16k polycom unit at KMDI that I use sometimes.

I don't have the video camera to go with it, but perhaps I will get one as soon as I have the funds.

Snap'n Drag

I just downloaded Snap'n Drag: Snap'nDrag for MacOS X - Screen Capture Made Easy. Screen capture is when you take a picture of your screen. It is very necessary when showing web designers what their content looks like on your computer. Or for anyone for that matter who says, "Well, it looks ok on MY screen." But Apple's OS X does not do as good a job of screen capture than older versions did, because it saves the captures as PDF files, not gifs of JPGs. This tool should help.

From Explorer to Safari...

jimmygrewal.com tells us that Jimmy is leaving his work at Microsoft, and that MS will no longer be developing Internet Explorer for Apple. We will all be expected to use Safari now. That's a goood thing for me, because I like Safari. But who is Jimmy? Things I need to know.

According to the article linked to from Jimmy's page, Microsoft will not be making any new standalone versions of IE for Windows computers either. It will be integrated with the operating system. Isn't that what they got sued for a long time ago?

Changes to Edublog's Blogs

Hey hey... if you have a blog on the edublog.com or jasonnolan.net servers, there are changes afoot.

First, I successfully repartitioned the hard drives and reinstalled the contents from backup. This has been a problem for a year, as the server only has a 6 gig drive, which came to me partitioned, and I had no time to fix it back then. That caused lots of problems for updating the OS and keeping it working smoothly. But I waited until the end of the year, so that if things went wrong, not too many students would be discomfited.

Next I am going to update MoveableType to the current version, which I know Roger's been waiting for, and I'll attach it to a MySQL database, which will make managing it that much easier. I hope.

Finally I'm going to try and move Project Achieve and all the stuff on the achieve sevrver over to Edublog, so I have everything on one easy to maintain computer. The old edublog hardware is a bit hard to update and maintain, versus Edublog, which is an old iMac.

If that works, I have no idea what to do with the Achieve server. It is only an old Pentium II/350, but it has 512 megs of ram and 36gigs of SCSI drives. Great for highspeed internet storage.

Anyone want a scanner? Trade for Beer

I just noticed that I have a scanner in the closet. It is a Microtek Slimscan C3. USB scanner. Not often used. Will trade for beer. It does NOT work with OSX, but works with many/most other operating systems. Check out their web site for a list of compatabilties. And I won't ship it. So, if you're not local, or wanting to pay shipping, no go. It is in original packaging.

I'm just busy ripping my apartment apart looking for stuff. And finding more than I knew was there, but not what I'm looking for.

It is unAmerican to provide web services to nonAmerican media sources. Oh, and technology is apolitical... right :)

Julia D sent this to me a couple of days ago. Akamai Cancels a Contract for Arabic Network's Site (registration required). I rant on enough about the cultural hegemony inherent in the actual structure, utilities, encoding and code of the internet. I sometimes forget to look at what's going on on the surface. In this case, it is unAmerican to provide web services to nonAmerican media sources.

[Full text of the article is below, in case you're worried about the registration fro NYT getting you dumped on an unAmerican government list]

Akamai Cancels a Contract for Arabic Network's Site

April 4, 2003
By WARREN ST. JOHN

In a move sure to complicate the efforts of Al Jazeera, the
Arabic news network, to get its English-language Web site
running, Akamai Technologies abruptly canceled a contract
on Wednesday to provide Web services for the site.

Employees at Al Jazeera headquarters in Doha, Qatar, said
they were frustrated by the decision, though not entirely
surprised. "It has nothing to do with technical issues,"
said Joanne Tucker, the managing editor of the
English-language site. "It's nonstop political pressure on
these companies not to deal with us."

Akamai, based in Cambridge, Mass., would not comment on the
reason for the cancellation. But Jeff Young, a company
spokesman, issued a statement confirming that Akamai would
no longer do business with Al Jazeera.

"Akamai worked briefly this week with Al Jazeera to
understand the issues they are having distributing their
Web sites," he said. "We ultimately decided not to continue
a customer relationship with Al Jazeera, and we are not
going to be providing them our services."

The English version of Al Jazeera's Web site was shut by
hackers roughly 12 hours after it went online on March 25.
For a time, Web users trying to gain access were directed
to a Web page bearing an American flag. Akamai, whose
clients include MSNBC and CNN, maintains a broad network of
servers that provide protection from hacking attempts. It
was for that reason, Ms. Tucker said, that Al Jazeera hired
the company.

"Basically this was our answer to the hacking that has been
nonstop and pretty aggressive," she said. "We had a
done-and-dusted deal on March 28. Then yesterday, we get a
letter from them terminating the contract."

Akamai's decision is one in a series of headaches for Al
Jazeera since the start of the war. Defense Department
officials criticized the network for showing images of dead
and captured American soldiers. After that episode, the
network's American financial correspondents were banned
from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and the
Nasdaq. On Wednesday, Iraqi officials expelled one Jazeera
correspondent from Baghdad and barred another from
reporting there. American officials have also accused the
network of unduly emphasizing civilian casualties in Iraq.

Al Jazeera contends that much of the traffic that shut
down its site was from Web users simply curious about its
coverage. The search engine Lycos reported yesterday that
"Al Jazeera" was its most-searched-for term last week.

Ms. Tucker said that Al Jazeera hoped to have its English
site up within 24 hours, but that without Akamai's many
servers, the site would be more vulnerable to hacking
attempts.

The site went live just after 7 p.m. last night.

"It
doesn't derail us," she said. "We can withstand the hacking
up to a point, but if they focus it all on one server it
would put a lot of pressure on that server.

"We hope that won't be the case," she added. "We're working
on it all the time."

Ms. Tucker called the hacking attempts "pathetic." "It's a
narrow, pro-censorship attempt to silence a news site," she
said.

This is not the first time that Akamai has had to deal
first-hand with tensions between the Arab world and the
United States. The company's co-founder and chief
technology officer, Daniel Lewin, 31, was on American
Airlines Flight 11 on Sept. 11, 2001, when the plane
crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/04/technology/04WEB.html?ex=1050593603&ei=1&en=9e9846594854ea35

HOW TO ADVERTISE

BlogRollMe

Blogroll Me! is a nice widget that I'll add on the right so that people with blogrolling (like I have) can blogroll me with ease.

On another note. iBlog's programmers and I have been chatting, and sharing bugs. They fast and efficient d00ds. And they're from India. It is nice to see original software from India out in the online worldspace. Coolness comes from many diverse places.

Bernie's Wired

Or just strange. This is bernie (one of my students), in the lower left, as pictured on Wired.com's article: Wired News: Brain Music: Not Much to Dance To

He was at one of Steve Mann's Decon events. Luckily he didn't have to get naked. From what I heard, no postmodernism was used in the conceptualization or execution of this event.

Manning the Deconism - Cyborg Echoes: Collective Consciousness beyond the Post-Cyborg Era

[Steve asked me to blog this event, but I'll be in Florida at the IAFA presenting on medieval vampires. So he asked me to spread the word instead. If you want to participate, come on down! If you don't want to participate, come on down and picket! Or get ejected. Or whatever. I just hope someone videotapes it.]

Be part of cyborg history as the Deconism Gallery hosts the world's first collective brainwave musical concert.
http://wearcam.org/deconism/cyborg_echoes.htm

The Deconism and Interaccess galleries, are to host three events and ongoing exhibitions that explore the relationship between cyborg art, science, technology, architecture, design, philosophy, and law. Each of these works explores the premise that we've already (and in some cases unwittingly) become cyborgs, but that this transformation has occurred without an understanding of the implicit opportunities and threats to our collective minds and bodies.

Following a noon speaker series, March 21 12:00pm-1:50pm, Prof. Ian Kerr, University of Ottawa, R. Owens, and Prof. Steve Mann for Speaker Series, in Flavelle Dining Room, University of Toronto, Speaking on Cyborg Law. Open to the public.

DECONversation at Deconism Gallery

ÝFriday March 21st, 7pm

330 Dundas Street West, located directly across the street from the main entrance to the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO).

Robotic Body vs Cyborg Mind: A Live Probe Into the Continuum of Existentiality with Steve Mann and Stelarc

The McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto presents an evening's dialogue between Stelarc, an internationally recognized Australian performance artist and public intellectual in the area of new media and technology, and Steve Mann, the acclaimed inventor of the wearable computer and the world's first photographic cyborg. Stelarc and Mann have both probed the nature and workings of the body and mind through technological mediation. The dialogue will be a probe into a future of awareness, the nature of consciousness reacting to technological extensions, and the ensuing effects upon individuals, culture, and society. Audience questions and participation are encouraged, and a glogged transmission of the evening's event as seen through Steve Mann's wearable EyeTap system will be broadcast to the AD ASTRA 2003 science fiction & fantasy convention. This event follows the opening of Stelarc's "The Prosthetic Head" at Interaccess Gallery.

For more information: http://eyetap.org/deconism.htm and http://wearcam.org/deconism.htm

DECONcert at Deconism
Saturday March 22nd, 7pm

330 Dundas Street West, located directly across the street from the main entrance to the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO).

DECONcert in the Key of EEG: Regenerative Music

An outgrowth of Toronto cyborg and PhD candidate James Fung's research into biofeedback, DECONcert presents the world's first regenerative soundscapes in which audience members actively (and unconsciously) choreograph a collective cyborg consciousness by contributing their own brainwave patterns. The resulting atmosphere is an open-ended and participatory experience incorporating leading-edge EEG (brainwave) technology. Regenerative Music places the human being into the feedback loop of a computational artistic process.

DECONcert Hertz: Wearable Brain Waves

The conception of neuroscience researcher-cum-fashion designer Ariel Garten, "DECONcert Hertz" is a play on the popular music concert phenomenon, wherein one walks away from the performance with a t-shirt of the band. However, in DECONcert, the audience is the band so the concertgoer walks away with a print of his or her own band width, in Hertz, on an EEG shirt. As our recorded brain waves are continually emitted unbeknownst to us, they may constitute yet another form of communication or surveillance.

For more information: http://eyetap.org/deconism.htm and http://wearcam.org/deconism.htm

Tickets for each of Friday and Saturday evenings are $10, and are available at Flavour Hall (500 College St. Toronto 416-839-9943) or at the door, first come first served. Space is limited.

Ongoing Exhibitions at Deconism Gallery
March 22nd - 31st

DECONsciousness: Building as Blog

Ever had cause to wonder what a house or building is thinking? In an age of networked consciousness, that thought is an echo that slips frictionlessly past the soapy surface of time's constraints. Agile, flexible, and invasively curious, the spaces of this exhibition are collaboratively curated and designed by Steve Mann and architectural designer Stewart Morgan.

The History and Future of Wearable Computing

This exhibit features selected highlights from the invention, research, design, and development of the wearable computer. The continuum between seminal art installations and Steve Mann's next-generation wearable computing prototypes will be presented in a rare public display. The exhibit condenses thirty years of design into an "executive summary" interval of time and space by using high-thought width demonstration media.

Deconism events are presented in association with the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, University of Toronto. Funding for this event is provided by Thought Technology Ltd. Ongoing work is funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council.

Press contacts:
* Mark Federman - McLuhan Program - 416-978-7026
* Ariel Garten - Flavour Hall - 416-839-9943
* Steve Mann - Deconism Gallery - 416-946-3387

OpenOSX runs Wintel software on your Mac...

You may not care, but I always think emulators are interesting, especially if they support diversity in computing. OpenOSX.com's WinTel CD allows you to run a multplicity of OSes on your G4 Mac. It seems to be an alternative to VirtualPC at 1/10th the cost.

Steve is da Mann

Steve's got a new article ou in First Monday about Cyborg logs which he is conceptualizing as predating blogs. I feel responsible for telling him about blogs, but really it is not my fault. He'd have found them anyway sooner or later. Thanks to JuliaD for pointing me to the link.

Camping with Kenny.

I've been going camping with Kenny for almost 20 years. Most always to Algonquin Park, sometimes to my mom and larz' place at Eagle Lakes. Sometimes even with our partners, though Yuka and Angela have supreme good taste and usually prefer that we go off on our own.

Well, it has gone too far. We're sitting in my apartment in Hokkaido, Japan. And we realized it was back to our old camping lifestyle. Which means sitting around, making coffee by the fire. Hanging the bear bags. Foraging for firewood. Making stupid comments to one another from our sleeping bags in the dark. This morning, we're drinking 'Blendy Coffee' from bowls, eating Hokkaido camembert with baguette, and oranges. Ken looks supremely relaxed. Or asleep.

Last night we went out to an isakaya (Japanese pub/eating place) and had this strange stuff in a pot. I forget what it was called. But chicken, leeks, fish, shellfish, cabbage, mushrooms. Plus a big plate of yakitori and other yakiStuff (yaki == BBQ). (see previous entry for picture.)

Yesterday we went up to the university, and Larry gave Ken the tour while I played (skip to next paragraph if you don't want compspeak) with the bits of Redhat/Linux 8.0 that are totally wacked. It has changed a lot since system 7.2, and some of the tools I'm used to using aren't there, like linuxconf. And some don't work, like the firewall setting tools!!! So, the frigging firewall's up, and I can't use the tools I'm used to to reset it. Can't even find tripwire!!!!

Luckily, Hillel brought professor Nakauye to visit. He's from Mukogawa Women's University's Department of English. And we talked about MOOs, Blogs, and Slashdotty things. It turns out that he's teaching unix tools to students as tools of learning and reflection. Teaching text editors (not word processors), grep functions and FTP. To English majors. So very cool. Anyway, he wants to get involved with some of our projects, and was helpful when Hillel went off to a meeting with the system admins about getting them to support some of our projects.

Kenny had brought some of his strange distractors. Like his "Listen to the Paper" activity. You'd know about it if the doof would get a web site up. That an some of his other acoustic ecology projects. Larry and Hillel are interested in adopting the ideas for some of their projects. I was expecting them to find kenny's stuff interesting.

Today's a national holiday... though about what, I don't know. It's 9:45am, and kenny and I will soon head downtown, probably walking the 6k, if bus service is too slow. Not wanting to pay 2000 yen for a cab. I am so cheap. Then we'll hook up with larry this afternoon, and perhaps go out for a bite.

Who knows. I may even find an internationally able phone, and give yuka a call!!! If it wasn't for instant messaging on the computer, I'd have had no contact with her at all. Sad. But the trip's 40% over, and a lot has been accomplished. Enough to consider the trip both a success and worthwhile.

Hakodate apartment at 6am

I've been up for about four hours. Nothing new for me in Japan. The jetlag frog has me in its clutches. When I've been over in the past, I've always woken up early for the first couple of days. But usually I'm staying at my sister-in-law Yoshie's house. There I can creep out of the house, and grab a hot canned coffee or two from a 24 hour vending machine at the side of the road, and go for a walk. Usually, I'd go out among the rice fields, and stop at a shrine or temple, or just polk about the town. Once, I remember calling Yuka after I'd been out for 2.5 hours. I'd walked through town and up into the mountains, and I needed instructions regarding which bus to take to get home.

Apartment pictures: hallway, bedroom 1, bedroom 2

Not this time. There's work to be done. I finished transcribing a couple of chapters of William of Newburgh's Historia Rerum Anglicarum that Ben needs to have so he can translate it for our vampire conference. UNFORTUNATELY, I didn't photocopy all the pages I needed. So I wrote an email to the always lovely and ever talented Mudsey to grab the book out of my office and to photocopy, and hopefully fax, the missing pages to Larry's office.

Of course, I was watching TV, and saw the pictures of something streaming across the sky, accompanied by the words NASA and Texas, and bits and pieces of the Japanese from the announcers I could figure out. Strange feeling, as I was sitting alone in a bachelor apartment typing back in 1986, just before I moved to Japan for a year, with the radio on behind me, when I heard about the challenger disaster. My uncle was a senior engineer on the space shuttle program, responsible for the heat shield team, and he'd passed away the previous summer. So I've always had a special interest in the space shuttles, even though I find the whole space exploration thing a real problem.

You probably don't care about my reminiscing about this. What about the cool apartment Larry and Atsuko (larry's partner) arranged for me. I've got a tiny apartment about 15 minutes on foot from Larry's house, and 25 minutes on foot from the university. Views one and two show the inside of the main room, and view three shows the entrance way. It is about three times larger than the one I had when I lived in Japan in the mid 80s. So it is luxury plus. TV. Washing machine. Japanese style bath. Everything looks brand new, and the heater keeps everything toasty. Only the main room is heated. The kitchette, bathroom and toilet are unheated... wise. Of course the toilet seat is heated.

Larry took me out to a 100 yen store, and we picked up some necessities. Bowls, cups, glasses, chopsticks, cutlery, and the sort of foods you can get for 100 yen. Dried seaweed soups and stuff. I have some rice in the microwave as I type, and I'll probably sprinkle some soup mix over it, and that's breakfast! Nummy.

It is friggen cold outside. Not like it has been in Toronto, but I want to go out and explore here, and just walk about. I know it will be a challenge today, but as soon as the sun's up, I'll head out, probably in the direction of the university, to see what I can see. Larry's going to call me this afternoon, and I'll probably go out with he and Atsuko for dinner.

And tomorrow, I'll start in at his office, to see if I have some workspace. He told me that they've approved my internet access, so I'll be able to post these blogs in rapid succession, and get email sent out. What fun!

Just got back from that "little walk when the sun's up" but it took about 5 hours. Didn't get lost. That would be too easy. Walked the 2.5 km up to the university. More on that when I recover. Then walked back. Then continued on downtown for another 3km. Looking for something to eat, on a Sunday at 10:30am besides eating from a 7-11. Ended up with KFC, which is better here than in Canada. Did some real shopping: carrots, peppers, satsuma (oranges), bokchoy, fresh noodles, bottle of wine. I can start eating civilized.

Larry called me on his cell that he's loaned me to say we're going out for sushi tonight! And asked if I wanted to go to a snow festival. I need some sleep though. Got 3.5 hours to do it.

This is the TV for me!

I want a Predicta! By telstar!

No Joking. Look for it on my tabletop soon.

Typing in the past...

On Jason O'Grady's PowerPage I found a link to The ElectriClerk. Go. Look at it. It is great. It is wonderful. It is a William S. Burroughesque/Brazilesque mechanical/digital monstrosity of beauty.

Steve Mann announces Glogs

Cyborglogs ("glogs") is what Steve's using to describe what he and Joi Ito, and others, are doing in the blogging world... He's always got something new up his sleeve... collecting intel.

And he'll be doing, I think, his first public lecture on Glogging in my KMD1000 class this week. Don't miss it...

As Steve puts it: Cyborg Logs (also known as cyborglogs, or "glogs" for short) are timestamped stream-of-deconsciousness personal diaries often made public in realtime on the World Wide Web. Unlike Web Logs (weblogs, blogs) that are done from a desktop, glogs invite the public inside the life of the glogger, and allow others to communicate with the cyborg by modifying his or her visual perception of reality in realtime.

Something overdue

The Politics of Code: Shaping the Future of the Next Internet is a conference next month hosted by the Oxford Internet Institute.

People seem to think that code is culturally neutral... scary that people can think that value neutral technologies and text can exist.

Guess What Apple Lost Tonight?

Their Homepage...

Surfing Safari!

Just downloaded Safari, the new Apple web browser. Somewhat similar to the Mozilla Navigator browser, but closer to the MacOS. Much nicer than IE, which I'm using at the moment. Why? Because all the other browsers act funny. Sigh.

How did this happen?

I have too many domains under my control. Luckily two of them are going to expire at the end of the month. Torontodarkwriters.com is going, as is another one that you don't know about, and will probably never know. That leaves jasonnolan.net, poetrix.net (for the fish), projectachieve.net, roomofbenzone.net (for the zone), edublog.com. Plus achieve.utoronto.ca and edublog.kmdi.utoronto.ca. There should be a limit. Course the only one that is mine to do with what I want is jasonnolan.net, as it should be. Actually, I just noticed that I don't have control over edublog.com. I wonder who does. I will have to look into this.

ProjectAchieve.net

I've registered the domain name http://ProjectAchieve.net. This mirrors http://achieve.utoronto.ca and will take over as the main URL for that server. Both will work for the next six months, but as I assume that I'll be working somewhere after the end of the school year, I figured that I'd like to get things percolating through the Internet in advance.

Roger Day

Now it is Roger Kuin's turn. I need to update movabletype to the new version, then add some libraries that I've not had in for a bit. Then fix up his student's blogs.

NOTE: if you can't find some blogs that you previously could find on edublog.com check the address. edublog.com/docs/kuin/journal is now edublog.com/kuin/journal. And same for anything else previously found with a /docs/. I'll try to imagine a symbolic link solution as soon as i get some yoga and some coffee into me.

done!

Thanks to ben, I got things straightened out.
http://jasonnolan.net http://lmmontgomery.net http://edublog.com and http://edublog.kmdi.utoronto.ca are all now in their particular zoos. I've been putting it off for six months, because OS X is just that much more strange than RH Linux that I couldn't figure out how to configure httpd.conf on OS X. But knowing that Ben needed http://lmmontgomery.net running, and I'd promised to get it up, AND I did need to get jasonnolan.net running properly, I finally got to it.

And it was fun.

Attention OS X users

I just downloaded and installed uControl. Check it out. It allows you to remap keys on your keyboard. For people with laptops, it means that you can remap useless keys like 'enter' to make it a command or control key or something. My TiBook has only one command key on the left of the spacebar. Some keyboards have them on both sides, but not mine. But now, with the cleaning and disinfecting power of uControl, ugly and unsightly stains are a thing of the past!

That's not quite right... but still.

Big scary meetings

I had a big scary meeting in my office yesterday with Katherine and Catspaw. It was long. We discussed many things. There is a new thing being developed. It will be the next big thing. And I was there, at the big scary meeting.

Internet Destroyer

My first new years revolution. I will stop using InternetDestroyer as my main web browser. Still some testing to do, but I think I can use Navigator. I don't like Mozilla, because it is too slow, but Nav is good. Just need to see if it can 'do' everything I need.

Internet Destroyer, just loves to crash/hang/freakout at the wrong times, and alternative browsers are *just* about up to snuff.

Who knows what the Net knows.

Hung out with Catspaw this afters. Her job, and she accepted it without drug induced coersion, was to install Willinsky's Open Journal Systems on Edublog. Five (5) hours later, it was all down to a configuration setting in php.ini, a file that we could not find anywhere on the server. All things being equal, I think coming down from the trees was a highly over-rated development in the human species.

It's free for staff and students.

I just found out that UofT has free NAV. But you have to use your utorid login and password to get it: Norton Anti-Virus Software at U of T

For only $7500 CDN

Segway Human Transporter -- First come, first served for delivery starting March 2003. Buy it now at Amazon.com

Free Journal Software

John Willinsky is talking at RCAT on Monday about his Open Journal Systems Journal environment software. It is a total online refereed journal tool, including editorial and review components and the works. I wanna try it with a journal soon. Any takers?

Proper Backups!

I finally have proper backups running for the edublog server. I've been doing them by hand since forever. And that always leaves one in a panic. Thanks to Peter Wolf, I've not got Retrospect for Mac running, backing up all data nightly.

One less thing to bring nightmares in my sleep.

Oh, was it bad? Yes. It was.

Danger. Danger. Gasthaus Switzerland Inn has fallen so far off my recommended list that I think a long descriptive letter to the Ottawa Tourist Board is in order. And yes, I had two (2) major blowups with the owner. Needless to say, it put a bit of a slant on the trip. And needless to say as well, I'll give a full report.

Puter Fixed!

Walked into the puter shop repair room. No one there. Out doing a delivery I'm told. So I snoop. My puter's there. Almost. paper work says it is mine. I can't recognize it. So I put it back and go looking at books until they return.

Yep it is mine. But not what I sent in. Only the motherboard, ram, HD, battery and DVD player are mine. They replaced everything else. EVERYTHING. New keyboard, back case, main case, track pad, wireless network card and screen assembly. That means that every part you'd ever touch is new.

Wow. I knew I didn't abuse the puter, but didn't know if they'd believe me. It was cracked, and bent, and broken. Ridden hard and put away wet just one time too many.

Thanks apple.

Still no computer

It is now 11 days without a computer. And I can't believe that. I'm enjoying not really being connected, and only getting online in spurts and moments. At least my data's in tact. And thanks to yuka for letting me on momentarily. Like when she's asleep or in the shower.

Boom

My poor TiBook finally exploded after 18 months of over use, on my part. The litany of problems.
corruped b-tree that couldn't be repaired
- CD stuck in side
- battery stuck
- airport wireless card not working
- latch broken
- rubber feet that keep screen from touching the keyboard disappeared
- some plastic widget on one side is pushed in

Groan

The DoS Rears Its Head.

The Globe and Mail: Powerful Internet attack thwarted
An unusually powerful electronic attack briefly crippled nine of the 13 computer servers that manage global Internet traffic this week, officials disclosed Tuesday.

But they never say where the attack came from.

Disconnected Technologies

I just had a thought. First one of the day... and resulting from the recent intersection of coffee and cookie. That and proofreading something. And chatting on AIM with someone about the fact that my spellchecker is suggesting that the correct spelling, of every mispelled word, is "Street Kids." Ask me why and I'll scream.

At that point, I realized something. I have many friends online. Some I email. Some I MOO with. Some AIM. Or ICQ. Or Blog. Though many of them are on multiple technologies, I only communicate with them on one. Someone with MOO/ICQ/AIM, I may only know his MOO point of acces. Someone else, her AIM account, even though I know she MOOs.

And in a way, this is good. I don't talk to everyone with every technology. If someone doesn't want to talk with me, they know that they can ignore me, by sticking to technologies that I don't know them on. And if they do want to talk to me, they know where to find me.

This selective dexterity points to the maturing of online communication where the goal is not to always be in touch, but to be selectively in touch. And often not in touch at all. In the end, that's what friendship is all about.

BUL c00l

We had our BUL (Bell University Labs) demo of Project Achieve last night. Kat and Muddy helped out, probably thought they were just sitting there doing nothing, but *looking* involved and engaged is what it is about, and we very appreciated. Various Bell and higher UofT admin d00ds came by to see what we're doing, and were suitably impressed.

Then we found the food. Shucked oysters, shrimp and salmon on sticks. Varous things on various breads and pasteries. Wine and such. It just didn't feel like I was in the humanities any more.

And the night ended when I found Kat and Mud playing with the 60" digital whiteboard... playing solitaire and watching quicktime trailers for various movies. Finally, people who understand how to make technology meaningful.

Poetry != spamm

Bev, in my KMD1000 class pointed me to this one in light of Salmon's lecture for us last week: Haiku'da Been a Spam Filter

Redesigning the Zoo

Had a neat meeting with someone from the Toronto Zoo today. Topic: redesigning the Toronto Zoo web site. Don't panic. I'm not going to do it. Just a preliminary discussion with one of the main dudes on what needs to be considered. We discussed Jakob Nielsen, community based designs, blogs, phpWhatevers and slashdottiness, and of course the webcamification of the Zoo. All in the context of building community of course. It was loads of fun, but after 2+ hours of rambling, I'm happy to not have to speak for a bit.

The key thing is that I got the important ideas in before anyone starts talking about design, backends and shite like that.

Jhai Foundation

Welcome to the Jhai Foundation is a group doing some great things with ultralowcost computing. I envy it. THey have a remote IT project which gives cheap and robust computers to villages that have no electricity or phone, and they're hooked up to wireless (like airport) networking to all the villiages. Then the farmers can find out, by email, if the price of grain is high enough to warrant the 30km walk into town to sell it. WOW!

Gotta love technology

Some of you, up early and regularly reading this blog, may have noticed, along with a bunch of Roger Kuin's English 3150 students, and perhaps some KMDIers, that Edublog suddenly became unavailable last night. I quietly panicked and made my way in this morning to see what had blown or crashed. Luckily I have years of experience with things going wrong. So I wasn't shocked to find that the server was running, and started poking about. First I found out that though the server was running, it couldn't find the internet either. The ethernet connection to the hub was flashing properly, but just for the hell of it, I unplugged the ethernet cable and plugged it back in. Nothing looked strange, but of course that fixed it. Loose cable. Not even a broken one. Just a slight jiggly connection. Almost wrecked my morning, but it didn't. Gotta get better backups though. I'm doing them manually, as OSX doesn't have a good backup system that I can use yet, but I'm testing backing up the machine to an old iMac I've called Pollen. Happiness.

Too cool OSX software

Bombich Software has virtual desktop, harddrive cloning and delocalizing. Just what you need for OSX. And it is free.

Gee... networks as easy as computers.

ÝÝ ÝÝ
San Francisco ó Computer maker Sun Microsystems Inc. said it would create in a few years a network environment that will be as straightforward to handle as a single machine, a strategy it calls N1.

You notice that they didn't say as easy as a mac, or as easy as WinXP, or even as easy as dos. No, just as easy as a single machine. Personally, I think the single machine IS the problem. And I know the solution. When a computer breaks because of stupidly designed software, somewhere a computer programmer has his big toe bashed with a hammer. Software crashes because of interoperability problems? A manager gets it. And so on.

The problem is that the system is, of course in its infancy but also, irresponsible. Write code, sell it, doesn't work, ooops! Upgrade OS, don't test it properly, sell it, Ooops!

Would that the tech industry be at LEAST as responsible as teachers are. Teachers at least have to look you in the eye year after year when they goof. Would that everyone had to look you in the eye when their 'solutions' aren't.

Wanna see what I'm doing?

I've been playing with iCal from apple. And no, it is not a diet drink. It is a calendar program. It's way better than what I was using before. Strange thing is that you can see my calendar online, just by clicking on me: jason. It is a little scary, but I've doubled the locks on my door at hom, and there's no indication where I am for these meetings, home/online/office, so it may not be a total privacy invasion. We'll see.

Digital Frame

I found this James Roos article on via Powerpage via SlashDot called "Building a digital picture frame from a PowerBook Duo 270c/280c". And I was wondering what ever became of that Powerbook 180c that I'd lent to someone. Lo! And did I not get an email from Ben "puckish lad" Lefebvre asking me if I wanted my 180c back? I'll explain why he might feel over teched after brekkie. So, no I can turn my 180c into a picture frame, which was the reason I got it in the first place a couple of years ago.

Wheeeeeee.

I'm back.

Ok. I've finally fixed MT, after I destroyed my OS X folder on edublog.com recently. I'll explain later. I'm off to salmooooon's to return some stuff.

My AIM is true.

Ok. I got an AIM account. And I'm using it. The name is ComplicityTheory. There you go.

the Web's Real Money Is in the Gutter

From Unseemly to Lowbrow, the Web's Real Money Is in the Gutter [NY Times, login required.]

I do want to rant long and deep on this issue. I got online in November 1987. I cried when the net opened to biz. I cried, though later cheered, when the WWW came along.

Now people (like bruce sterling) are complaining that the net is dying because of the dotBomb, and the post-apocalyptical porn and fraud biz, along with the snakeoil salespeople.

I didn't want biz, but they came, they failed, they complained. And they think that their revenant afterglow is some nasty plague.

The net will get back to people talking to people, and looking for the information that they want from public and personal caches of information.

The sooner that people give up on the net as a get rich quick scheme and go somewhere else, the more quickly we can go on living our lives. Hopefully some of us will make a living online, but I don't want to see anyone making a killing online.

Building Virtual Communities is out!

Building Virtual Communities - Cambridge University Press is out!

FUGU me

Fugu! The Research Systems Unix Group at Umich has made a GUI front end for SFTP!!! That's secureFTP. And that's a Good Thing^tm

And it is free. And it means I can FTP to Achieve (which has no FTP for security reasons I'm not presently willing to devulge).

The start of a good day.

Happy Birthday Hildegarde!!!