Category: General

The International Children’s Digital Library is a pretty cheering concept. I bet it gets more traffic from adults than children, though. Um, by which I mean adults who want to read the books themselves. Current computer screens are not the best technology for reading books to kids.

This is much closer to what I want than Microsoft’s Tablet PC. Not quite there, cause I still want the keyboard, but pretty close. There’s nothing really aweinspiring about the technology; it’s just X Windows for Microsoft. Still pretty sexy.

There’s actually no reason Apple couldn’t do something like this for the Mac, although they’d need to provide remote display capabilities in Aqua. Still, why not? PDF might be a little heavyweight for transmission over WiFi, I suppose.

The real “digital hub” revolution comes when WiFi gets built into the television, DVD player, and so on. However, free-roaming lightweight devices that leave the computing power in various hubs are an important part of that. The DVR talks to the central processor, which runs the portable display, and so on. Gotta be small, gotta be light.

Thinking more on roaming devices, what might be useful is some sort of standard database discovery protocol. You want to be able to tell roaming devices in your vicinity what sort of information you’ve got, and allow them to do queries based on that. Perhaps you do need some intelligence in the device after all.

Would that intelligence be appropriate for home use? Sure; a lot of what you want to do/know with the DVD and the DVR and so on are lookups anyhow. You probably need a discovery process for procedures you can run, as well. The real trick is the higher level UI stuff, that knits it all together into a coherent whole.

“Borders Hub is offering the database Books in Store with the description ‘Books available in the store.’ Subscribe?” Tabs, maybe, to flip between databases. Some standard query interface stuff.

Saturday was busy; Sunday was pleasantly quiet. Either way it wasn’t a talkative web weekend for me. I woke up at 4:45 AM on Saturday for some network maintenance at work, which went very well indeed; I went to bed around midnight, after the Ring of Honor show. Lotta video games in between. Sunday I just slept and caught up on movies and watched wrestling. You know how it is. (I feel a little like I should belch around here.)

Raiders beat the Patriots last night. The Pats managed to score 20 points with no offensive touchdowns. Tom Brady had best be using this year as a learning experience; he gets a free pass for a year for winning a Super Bowl but god help him if he doesn’t improve next year. The Bledsoe trade may wind up driving Belichick out of New England yet.

Greg Beato takes the time to analyze Glenn Reynolds’ readership claims. My. I’m going to have to visit his weblog more often; he does a better job of skewering Professor Reynolds than I do.

Speaking of which, a friend on LJ asked me why I read this stuff, referring to the rants of Mischa and others. My answer may be found there, but boils down to “I think it’s important that someone goes out and points out the inconsistencies, the hatred, and the poor logic. Criticisms must exist, and they must be discoverable.”

The subway gas scare in London may have been unjustified. London police are saying that there’s no evidence the three men arrested were planning on gassing the Tube, and they did not actually possess any gas. The terrorist materials for which they were arrested were false ID papers.

Winter has come to Boston. I am glad of the winter jacket I bought last week.

I got a cute spam this morning:

From: service@paypal-ebay.com
To: Durrell <durrell@innocence.com>
Subject: Notification of PayPal Limited Account Access

PayPal is constantly working to ensure security by regularly screening the accounts in our system. We recently reviewed your account, and we need more information to help us provide you with secure service. Until we can collect this information, your access to sensitive account features will be limited. We apologize for the inconvenience, and we would like to restore your access as soon as possible.

For more information about the status of your account and for instructions on how to restore full use of your account, please log in using the link below:

http://www.paypal-ebay.com

And so on. Good grammar, smartly constructed. The domain paypal-ebay.com is owned by Justin Young, at 2780 Fairlane Avenue, Columbus OH, 68601. This is in no way similar to either Paypal or Ebay. Naughty little scammer.

There’s also a phone number. So I called it. I got Justin Young’s wife, who either doesn’t know what her husband did or who is a good liar. But she gave me his work number, so I’ll be calling over there later.

How stupid do you have to be to run a Paypal scam and leave your real contact info attached?

As an English major, I’ve heard the story about Alan Sokal, physics professor, who got a paper published in a postmodern literature journal. In fact, I’ve heard it one too many times. Consequently, this report fills me with utter glee.

It might be worth rereading some of Mr. Sokal’s discussions about his hoax, by the by. He never meant it to demonstrate that the study of English literature is inherently flawed; rather, he was making some fairly interesting points as a leftist regarding the dangers of whole-scale adoption of structuralist dogma by the American radical left wing. This is a point too often missed when discussing his hoax. I hope he has something to say about this one — I think it’d be an interesting read.

In sharp contrast to the previous: I also like apes. Thanks, Max!

I can’t ever resist a good discussion of online identity. This one seems to me to assume that pseudonyms must by nature be fragmentary. I think that this is true if you assume that our online identities are discrete units, without overlap, but I also think that such an assumption would be false.

I can’t speak for the law bloggers whom TPH discusses, but for me, a pseudonym shares many aspects of the “real” me. Alice, at least, seems to agree with that. I speak English; so do my theoretical pseudonyms. I’m sarcastic; so, generally, are they. On the occasions when I’ve had reason to construct a shield around my identity, it’s been a matter of thinking about what I want to change rather than building a persona from scratch.

(Once I went so far as to deliberately change my punctuation habits, since my semi-colons are fairly distinctive to those who know me. I suspect most law bloggers don’t go as far. Should they? Would your professor recognize your writing style? Ah well; I digress.)

So, in any case, I have to disagree. Pseudonyms don’t diminish, because they aren’t necessarily limited.

TPH also says that he wants the “psychological benefit that comes from identifying myself with the things that I say…” which is an understandable desire. I don’t write for publication under a pseudonym because I want people to know that’s me. However, I’d suggest that you can also gain psychological benefits from constructing a well-known persona. Specifically, it can be proof that your ideas stand up even when separated from any biases people may have regarding you specifically.

Also, in time, your pseudonym may well gain the same sort of respect that you have — and then it’s just a matter of whether or not you identify with that pseudonym. My online chat nickname is Garrett, and it’s not a separate personality, but I do have somewhat different habits when I’m speaking under that name. This is no different than the salaryman who behaves one way at the office and another at home. Does he find his workplace achievements less meaningful because they’re attached to a somewhat different persona? No, and I don’t find praise directed to Garrett to be much different than praise directed to Bryant. It’s all me at the core.

I think, finally, that the concept of writing anonymously as opposed to pseudonomously is a bit of a straw man. At the very worst, in the blog world, you’re identified by your URL. On Usenet, your email address is an identifier. I don’t know many (if any) who have chosen to write each individual packet of words with absolutely no identifying information whatsoever.

This meandering brought to you courtesy of the aforementioned Alice, whose links are of superior quality.

I’ve thought to myself, from time to time, that J. K. Rowling’s world is just a little bit on the bigoted side. The Washington Post has an nice editorial on the subject. Mind you, the tendency isn’t reserved for fantasy — it might have been interesting to cross reference Slan for an example of the same thing with a scientific spin. (Hey, that review was written by Tasha Robinson. She used to be a housemate.) When it gets right down to it, the distaste of technology we find in the Harry Potter books is just another avenue through which we express our desire to be different.

Link ripped from the pages of Tapped, which is worth reading.

By way of the distinguished Charlie Stross, I present you with the best Nigerian counterscam ever. It’s easy to respond to Nigerian 419 scams, but it’s hard to do so in a manner which will entertain anyone but yourself. This guy figured out the trick. Like all good tricks, it involves Cthulhu.

(You might say he leveraged his secret knowledge to produce humor. Bwah hah ha.)

Worth reading: Salon’s interview with Michael Chabon, on the subject of his new novel Summerland. I haven’t read the book yet, because I was far too broke to buy hardcovers over the summer, but I rather expect to remember to pick it up soon. I think that Chabon’s sense of wonder makes him one of the best authors out there right now. Summerland sounds like a glorious expression of that sense of wonder.

It’s so clear that Chabon is a fan, by which I mean he covertly dwells in the weird little meshwork of interlocking subcultures defined by comic books, roleplaying games, science fiction, and other such traditionally geeky pursuits. I say covertly because he’s never really said as much, and on occasion he’s avoided answering questions regarding the depths of his comic book fandom. I can’t blame him: it’s a tarpit of a ghetto for someone who’s made it in the literary world. I would say that Chabon is no better a writer than Sean Stewart, but Stewart will never break out into the New York Times Book Review, because he comes nicely prelabelled.

As Chabon says, “When people heard that [Kavalier and Clay] was about comic books, I got a lot of ‘Oh, really? ‘Cause I thought I might be interested until I heard that.’ I was aware there was going to be some initial resistance from some people.” I think it’s reasonable to be wary. This way he gets good publicity, and he still gets to write the screenplay for the next Spider-Man movie. Lucky bastard.

Anyhow, in this interview, he mentions that he’s always wanted to write something like Susan Cooper’s “The Dark Is Rising” sequence. The signs are pretty clear. He’s one of us.

I thought it was a little sad that the interviewer failed to comment on the relationship between Summerland and the aforementioned Sean Stewart, who also dives deep into the rich world of American mythology, or even the rather obvious American Gods. Still, it’s nice hearing what Chabon had to say about the process and the choices and laziness in writing.