Anyone wanna form a pool on when stuff like [SMS flirting services](http://web.archive.org/web/20210614020153/http://web.archive.org/web/20210614020153/http://www.smartmobs.com/archives/000244.html (original) “Smart Mobs -”) (original) is gonna appear in a major Hollywood movie? I’m thinking summer 2005. Won’t happen this year, and 2004 is just a little too early. Hollywood’s conservative about youth culture.
CNN is showing photos that a viewer emailed in. Real time citizen reporting is here. Why did it have to be about this? The picture appears to be the moment of actual explosion; you can see chunks of debris centered on the shuttle. There’s a shot of Mission Control, which is utterly quiet. My god. Addenda: now they’re asking a caller to hold her phone up to her radio scanner. No good news, although she hasn’t heard anything about injuries on the ground. She has heard that a lot of debris has been found. She’s been deputized to relay from the scanners to CNN.
Sure; when there are easy ways to send text messages around on little tiny devices, students will cheat (original). I wonder how you keep that from happening in the Steve Mann vision of always-on cyborgs? You’d have to actively jam the devices, since communication inside the classroom is as much a problem as access to the Internet. Or just retool to an open book system, which might be much better.
The Internet was hit by this attack last night. Parties unknown exploited the MS SQL vulnerability to launch a distributed denial of service attack which took down much of the Internet, as per this post. Meanwhile, I’d been mulling over a recent security alert (original) that discusses a vulnerability close to the heart of the HTTP protocol. Once again, Vernor Vinge got it pretty much right. His future computer nets weren’t something you jacked into, they were a vast network full of legacy code and unexpected consequences. Sounds about right.
I’m at the Apple Store watching the Macworld Expo keynote broadcast. Lots of audience shots onscreen right now, so I got into the spirit of the thing and snapped two pics, visible at Hiptop Nation. I’ll update this if Jobs says anything interesting. My, this is an excited crowd locally. Steve can’t hear you clapping, you know. OK, an iPod jacket with controls on the sleeve is cool. More integration between the iApps is pretty cool. Updates for all of ‘em, it sounds like… ah, except iTunes, which had hiden features in 3.0. iPhoto 2, with integration plus really slick retouch. Wow, very solid integration. ...
Caf
The blogosphere is all excited about moblogging, which I guess is the neologism for mobile blogging. I am too, actually. Mobile blogging is cool. But I had another thought, which I think was triggered while I was driving around with my brother looking at all the pretty 802.11b networks the other day. What about a non-mobile collaborative blog? What if I stuck a wireless access point somewhere in Harvard Square, and set up a weblog for people using the access point, and only let people post to it if they were coming from the access point’s IP? ...
Since I’ve been boosting the Sidekick excitedly for the last few days, I ought to let people know about a caveat. If you use Keyguard mode, sometimes incoming calls won’t ring, which means you’ll miss the call unless you happen to be looking at the screen when the call comes in. (Keyguard mode automatically locks the screen after a given period of inactivity, to prevent accidental calls.) If you turn Keyguard mode off, no problems. ...
I’m sort of fooling around with a side project, with the intent of using Movable Type as a general content management system, and I came up with something that I thought was kind of clever. I wanted a list of offsite links on the front page, and I thought it might be nice to allow other blog authors to add links, but I didn’t want to give full template modification access. Thought about it a while; came up with a solution. ...
So: why doesn’t my web browser detect unlinked URLs in a page and turn them into links for me? Sure, sure, it should be an option I can turn off. However, I want to stop cutting and pasting stuff like http://www.meyerweb.com. For that matter, I wouldn’t mind if it picked up any hostname beginning with www — let it catch www.meyerweb.com too. Catching anything that registers as a domain name might be a bit much. On the other hand, perhaps it might be worth doing a DNS lookup and converting anything that returns. In a very optimistic world with sufficient computing power, you could do the DNS lookup, check port 80, and if there’s something responding then do the conversion. ...