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Monday, 24 June 2002 |
Addiction. Today Dave reveals that he faces serious health risks unless he quits smoking. It is often said that nicotine is more addictive than heroin. In the strictest sense, of physical dependence, this is an exaggeration. But the psychological dependencies make the difference. Any addict who does any drug repeatedly will learn to crave when presented with the paraphenalia unique to that drug, in the same way that Pavlov's dogs learned to salivate when they heard the sound of a bell. The triggers that have been conditioned into the average recovering heroin addicts brain can be very unpredictable. The style of door on the flop house he used to inhabit, the smell of oxidizing iron mixed with oil after a rain, and so on. Heroin produces such a powerful high that Pavlov doesn't need to ring his bell too many times to condition the response. [Better Living Through Software]
A brilliant peice on the economics and psychology surrounding smoking addiction. I honestly think the current "war on drugs" is quite possibly being lost on purpose because it is worth the money to various elites for the war to be lost.
For example, the outlawing on hemp growth made the way for the plastic materials revolution. If hemp had continued its existence as the basic cash crop, I suspect our current world would be very different.
5:41:30 PM 
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Floodbots. I was talking to an old friend today. She spends a lot of her time helping run the Undernet IRC network, and is really worried about how many trojanned clients are hanging around.
[The Desktop Fishbowl]
This is only going to get worse as we get more desktop applications like Radio. OTOH, as more services migrate from centralised server to distributed p2p architecture the ability of floodbots to take out individual hosts becomes irrelevent.
So, in some ways, this threat is not a whole lot different to other threats to the network infrastucture. The network needs to evolve to the point where the failure of individual nodes can be delt with.
1:38:23 PM
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Photosensitive bacteria art. 
Denise sez: "This artist/scientist? (I don't know, it's in German) took
a petri dish of photosensitive bacteria and projected a
negative image of a partially submerged submarine on it.
The bacteria moved to the light areas of the image forming
this."
Link
(Thanks, Denise!)
[Boing Boing Blog]
HellaCute. So I am drawn to pretty things. Bite me. ;)
1:34:29 PM
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I wonder why kerneltrap's rss feed is not remembering it's "delete"d state in radio?
I get the major problem for writing a News Aggregator is dealing with broken rss feeds. So, it's just like the problem with dealing with broken html, except worse. Cool! :)
[Later...] I have had to unsubscribe from KernelTrap because of this issue. Unfortunate, cuz kerneltrap has some good stuff. I am subscribed to other Drupal sites, and they aren't being problematic. I shall see if I can get some help from the kerneltrap guys on this issue...
12:36:10 PM
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Gigantic airships aim to damp forest fires: "Water will rain down continuously from gigantic airships, which will be kept topped up by passing drop-planes or helicopters. 'It'll be like having a non-stop artificial rainstorm,' says Pope. They suggest using 300-metre-long propeller-powered airships carrying just under one million litres of water and flying high above the flames. From there, adjustable valves on the underside of the balloon--much like large shower heads--will pump out a staggering 200,000 litres an hour over a large area of the fire. They could also have a few water cannon that can be directed over particularly persistent hot spots." [From the Desktop of Dane Carlson]
This looks do-able - all bar the refilling via chopper. The amount of water this thing will dump is probably not airliftable economically. Easier just to have a rotating fleet of blimps.
Could even be used to water crops if really needed. :)
12:32:57 PM
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Morons in the News: Panty Peeker Punishment Paltry. I live for alliterative headlines like this.... [Morons Dot Org]
For some reason the above link is core dumping Moz1.1a. Rolling up to the latest win32 nightly, and hopefully we can get usable bug reportage material.
[Later ...] The latest win32 nightly doesn't crash. But the googlebar didn't come up on loading of mozilla. Hmmm. Time to start a bug report with the GoogleSearchBar ppl. :/
11:56:42 AM
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Roller art. In case you are wondering, the artwork on this page comes from a bookcase that I painted for my 5 year old son Alex. I also painted an armoire for my mom using the same theme - the $1.69, doll-house variety armoire, that is. [Blogging Roller]
It's pretty cute. Reminds me of a more innocent time. Nostalgia is a cool thing. Honestly.
11:45:13 AM
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A Battle PC Giants Should Lose. When research company IDC announced last week that major PC makers Hewlett-Packard, IBM,
Dell and Compaq were being shouldered aside by the no-name, white-box PC industry in terms
of worldwide sales, I rejoiced. [osOpinion]
PC creation just got commodified. Now if only the white-box makes can figure out we'd like a greater range of colours, i'd be happy. :)
11:31:31 AM
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... Via BeBlogging via Rebelutionary via rc3.org. [Blogging Roller]
And to think that just 30 days ago I couldn't find a single good Java/J2EE blog - now stories are bouncing around like hot potatoes. I guess this is how community forms - a little like the build up of static electricity. So who gets zapped?  [rebelutionary]
Its called the Tipping Point. Non-linearity is cool like that.
11:30:12 AM
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Wondering what Sydney looks like in mid-winter? Here's a picture of the sunset I took on the way home from a late, boozy Sunday lunch. Enjoy. [rebelutionary]
Any chance of getting that desktop background sized? :)
11:19:35 AM
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Chameleon.
Chameleon is a Haskell-style language which provides a flexible
overloading mechanism based on Constraint Handling Rules (CHRs).
The user can impose conditions on overloaded identifiers via CHRs.
For example, consider the functional dependency
class Collects ce e | ce -> e where ...
In Chameleon, we would provide instead the following CHR:
rule Collects ce e, Collects ce e' ==> e=e'
[...]
Also available are three papers
- "Beyond Type Classes", describing the connection and
differences compared to Haskell-style type classes.
- "A Theory of Overloading", describing the theoretical machinery
behind the Chameleon language.
- "A Theory of Overloading Part II: Semantics and Coherence", describing
an implementation scheme which we yet have to implement.
[Lambda the Ultimate]
Nothing like learning a new language to spice up a cold monday morning.
11:17:04 AM
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Devising a plot, evil-overlord style. Brilliant author/editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden has posted her "Evil Overlord" formula for devising a plot for your flagging science fiction story. It's terrific.
* A plot doesn't have to be new. It just has to be new to the reader.
* In fact, it doesn't even have to be new to the reader. It just has to get past him. (It helps if the story's moving fast and there's lots of other interesting stuff going on.)
* A plot device that's been used a thousand times may be a cliche, but it's also a trick that works. That's why it keeps getting used.
* Several half-baked ideas can often be combined into one fully-cooked one.
* If you have one plot presented three ways, you have three plots. If you have three plots presented one way, you have one plot. (I stole this principle from Jim Macdonald's lecture on how to really generate plots, which is much better than my lecture on stupid plot tricks.)
* Steal from the best.
Link
Discuss
(via Making Light) [Boing Boing Blog]
I much prefer a story that consists of a conflagration of almost independant sub plots. The confusion that comes from rapid cutting between stories leads to a sense of tension. It also lets me think a little. Straight as a die single plots stories are boooooring.
11:11:38 AM
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XML Schema. Once complex object schemas are introduced and the massively complex XML Schema specification along with WSDL, I can't help feeling like all we've really done is just reimplement CORBA and DCOM all over again, with all the same problems. [james strachan's musings]
May it possibly be that we have quite a difficult problem that we are attempting to solve here? Cross platform object oriented remote calling with asynchronous capabilities with late binding of calling procedures, along with automated service discover is a pigdog.
Xml-Rpc just works. Sometimes simplistic solutions are better because we do not attempt to automate the hard to automate sections of the problem domain...
11:05:37 AM
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The US is changing the color of its money: "The new design, referred to as NexGen, affects the $100, $50, and $20 notes. Circulation of the NexGen series could begin as early as fall 2003 with the introduction of the redesigned $20 note. The $100 and $50 notes will follow in twelve to eighteen months. Consistent with past design changes, the NexGen notes will remain the same size and use similar portraits and historical images to maintain an American appearance. The NexGen designs will include the introduction of subtle background colors. While color is not in itself a security feature, the use of color provides the opportunity to add additional features that could assist in deterring counterfeiting. The introduction of additional colors will also help consumers to identify the different denominations." [From the Desktop of Dane Carlson]
I am not going to think about how many times I have fought with americans over the "stupidity" of Oz money's many coloured design. All I can say is, the number of times I mistook an american 10 for an american 1 made me quite poor on my last trip to the states.
11:02:56 AM
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Semant-O-Matic may be just the thing. Its author, Maciej Ceglowski, calls it a Blog semantic search engine. [Scripting News]
Wonder what it is going to take for google to hoover this idea?
10:55:58 AM
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BeOS: Cosmoe 0.5.2. Three months ago, in March of 2002, Bill Hayden announced that he was forking AtheOS [earlier story], porting it to run on top of the Linux kernel and providing wrappers for the BeOS API and Carbon API. The project is now officially named Cosmoe, the Compatible Open-Source Multi Operating-system.
Bill recently released version 0.5.2 of Cosmoe, saying: "Cosmoe 0.5.2, the 'if only this had been the first release' release, is now available for download on www.cosmoe.com. If you've had trouble compiling Cosmoe in the past, check this release out." This release solves numerous earlier compilation problems. Find a screenshot of Cosmoe running on a Linux 2.4.18 kernel here. Also of interest is this earlier OSNews interview with Bill. For the full release announcement, read on. [KernelTrap - Your Source For Current Kernel News]
Its wrong to judge an operating system by the cool-ness of screenshots. All the same, Cosmoe looks sexy. Heh.
10:49:36 AM
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Google bar for Mozilla. Cool!. This rocks! I found the link while peeking in my referer log and saw that Brett Morgan is reading now.
http://googlebar.mozdev.org/ [pberry: Radio Edition]
Heh. Cool. Glad to be of service to the community. :)
Btw, to make the disappearing google bar re-appear just select View -> Show/Hide -> Google Toolbar. Yes it says that it is visible (even tho it aint), but selecting it makes it re-appear. Dunno if this is a Moz1.1a bug or a Googlebar bug. Hmmm.
10:20:21 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Brett Morgan.
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