Tuesday, November 30, 2004

Rivers Deserts Mountains The structure of landscape is infinitesimal / Like the structure of music. Here is the story of Hsuan Tsang / A Buddhist monk, he went from Xian to southern India / And back--on horseback, on camel-back, on elephant-back, and on foot. / Ten thousand miles... / Mountains and deserts, / In search of the Truth... Traversing rivers and deserts, scaling mountains and passing through desolate lands with no traces of human habitation, 7th century Chinese monk Hsuan Tsang made his journey in 627 AD from Changan to India for religious purposes. His detailed travel journal is believed to be among the earliest reliable sources of information about distant countries whose terrain and customs had been known, at that time, in only the sketchiest way. He travelled over land mostly on foot and horseback along the Silk Road, west towards India. The Buddhist scholar's pilgrimage (627-645 AD) contributed enormously to the cultural flow between East and West Asia. His "Hsi Yu Ki" or "Records of the Western World" is considered the most valuable book source for the study of ancient Indian history and culture. Italian explorer Marco Polo, whose travel writings fired the imagination of Europeans for centuries, was believed to have used Hsuan Tsang's travelogue as a guide during his travels in the 13th century. More than 1,300 years after Hsuan Tsang's historical journey, Taiwanese magazine Rhythms Monthly embarked on a project to retrace Hsuan Tsang's 19-year pilgrimage through a road that, today, belongs to 11 different countries. more inside [MetaFilter] 8:20:04 PM

Coral: The NYU Distribution Network Recommended for Podcasters and online auteurs. - Editor Coral is peer-to-peer content distribution network. It allows a user to run a web site that offers high performance and meets huge demand, all for the price of a $50/month cable modem. Sites that volunteer to run Coral automatically replicate content as a side effect of users accessing it. Publishing through Coral is as simple as appending a short string to the hostname of objects' URLs; a peer-to-peer DNS layer transparently redirects browsers to participating cache nodes, which in turn cooperate to minimize load on the source web server. Using modern peer-to-peer indexing techniques, Coral will efficiently find a cached object if it exists anywhere in the network, requiring that it use the origin server only to initially fetch the object once. http://www.scs.cs.nyu.edu/coral/ 7:29:32 PM

Re: Music Subscriptions - MP3, AAC, Apple Lossless Podcasting : Subscription Service. Music: Blue Camel - Rabih Abou-Khalil I love the idea of "subscribing" to musicians, so that whenever they have new material, it just appears in your iPod. *that*'s the way I want to get my music... - canton Yes, I agree with you. That is the way to get music. And it may be a solution for our subscription service. I see two choices: Find a way to password-protect podcasts and podcast AAC/mp4 files at 192 or 224kbps, which will sound very nice. Only subscribers would be able to use this service. OR - and I am liking this option more and more, because it has the potential to be more viral as it can be shared: Podcast low grade mp3s (at 128kbps or lower) for free and then let subscribers download high-grade AAC files at 192 or 224 or Apple Lossless, or even AIFF at their convenience from a password protected data base. Apple has an obvious lead in this area and the iPod has the largest marketshare. Software for iTunes as well as for Podcasting are available for both Mac and Windows. [Ottmar Liebert] 7:06:22 PM

CyLab - Seurat Seurat: A Pointillist Approach to Network Security. In this article, Computerworld describes several of the projects currently under way at Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab. For instance, CyLab just received "a $6.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation for an initiative called Security Through Interaction Modeling (STIM), which studies complex interactions between people, the computers they use and attacks from the outside." CyLab is also looking at self-healing or autonomic computer systems. And in its Coral project, CyLab is developing network defense mechanisms for virus and worm attacks. But here I just want to focus on the Seurat project, named after the French impressionist painter Georges Seurat who invented the technique of pointillism. The goal of this project is to monitor network anomalies caused by buffer overloads or corrupted systems. The project was called Seurat because like his paintings, the Web has so many layers or points where a possible attack might occur. This overview contains more details and references from CyLab about Seurat. [Daily Relay] 6:34:09 PM

Rankled Neighbor Foreign policy has rankled Canadians, Bush admits [The Globe And Mail: National] 6:30:03 PM

Browser Prototype New Netscape embraces Firefox, IE. AOL releases Netscape browser prototype bristling with RSS feeds, tabs, plenty of Netscape branding--and the option to surf in IE. Image: Netscape's new browser [CNET News.com] 6:23:30 PM

Zines The Golden Age of Zines. Beer Frame and Dishwasher and Murder Can Be Fun. My top 3 Zines of all time (here's a list of more). There was a used record/comics store near where I worked. They had lots of Zines and I would frequent them just to see if new issues were in. Weeks of waiting were sometimes rewarded with a new issue. Almost always worth the wait. Anyone have a favorite? Any good Zines around anymore? [more inside] [MetaFilter] 6:16:56 PM

Re: Bit Torrent Bit Torrent Comment: Engadget, NPR, and CBC. Three examples of informative listening about Bit Torrent: Engadget’s Podcast number 17 NPR’s Joel Rose comments on the future of Bit Torrent CBC on why Bit Torrent makes Bid Media sad (this link is the MP3 file) [unmediated] 6:03:13 PM

Hoefnagel & Hoefnagel Hoefnagel & Hoefnagel's Archetypa. In Frankfurt in 1592, one Jacob Hoefnagel, then still just nineteen years old, produced a book of fifty-two engravings based... [Giornale Nuovo] 5:58:33 PM

Grandfather Kimono Grandfather Kimono. o2ma posted a photo: By (o2ma). [o2ma's Photos] 7:31:47 AM

Borboletta Borboletta. o2ma posted a photo: By (o2ma). [o2ma's Photos] 7:28:16 AM

Solar Cell Battery Solar Cell Doubles as Battery. Technology Review reports that scientists from Toin University of Yokohama have designed a single device that can both convert solar energy to electricity and store the electricity. The photocapacitor can also capture energy from weak light sources like sunlight on cloudy or rainy days and indoor lighting. The light-driven, self-charging capacitor could eventually be used to power phones, cameras, and PDAs. "Users can just bring the device anywhere and expose it to indoor and outdoor ambient light whether they need power or not [then] release the stored electricity anytime they want," explains Tsutomu Miyasaka, a researcher at the University. [unmediated] 7:21:07 AM

Carribean Xmas 1995-2 Carribean Xmas 1995-2. o2ma posted a photo: By (o2ma). [o2ma's Photos] 7:15:34 AM