Mile Zero
No matter where you go, there you are
Mile Zero is the personal website of Thomas Wilburn. All statements and
opinions here are my own, and do not represent the views or policies of
my employers at Congressional Quarterly, Ars Technica, or other
publications.
March 5, 2010
He is a dreamer; let us leave him.
- I actually don't like programming--I like solving problems. It just happens that every good application usually has at least one brain-teasing problem inside. Here's a cool one: BK trees are a method for organizing words to find close dictionary matches, as in a spellcheck or a keyboard auto-correct. I was wondering the other day how to do this, and now I know.
- Flotilla is my latest indie game acquisition, and it fits in well with the release of Sins of a Solar Empire: Diplomacy. While fleet combat in Sins relies on upgrade trees and swarm composition, Flotilla actually models small-scale, 3D space tactics--it's all about positioning, orientation, and group coordination. It gives me flashbacks to the great Kirk vs. Khan space battle in Star Trek II. Also includes a surreal, darkly-funny campaign mode played out around a randomly-generated galaxy.
- Humanitarian.info tears into Ashraf Ghani's fetish for technocratic governance in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, over at Afromusing, Juliana Rotich tosses out five ideas on futurity in Africa, and asks: where are the African futurists?
- Strife.tv put up footage of the battles at Unbreakable 3 a couple
of weeks ago. It took place at my old alma mater, George Mason
University, and I had a great time there. I especially love the exhibition
between Iron Man and Meen187, who are both really musical dancers:
When the camera dips down behind someone's head and you can't see anything for a moment, that's basically what it was like to actually be there. As I told someone later, I'm glad I went, but I'm also glad we have YouTube.
- Blog plugin to-do: Reader Achievements.
February 2, 2010
Oh, man. Budget season. What a drag.
- I committed a new version of Underground to its Google Code repository the other day, adding support for Home app replacements like OpenHome, as well as Android 2.1 devices with new launchers like the Nexus One. I'll push a new version out to market as soon as I've tested it a bit. This is long overdue--hardcoding the launcher Intent was always a hack, but it was relatively low-priority until the Nexus broke it.
- Speaking of Android, remember how it's supposed to be fragmenting all over the place? Turns out that even for game developers, who are relatively "down to the metal," that's not true at all. I look forward to retractions.
- Jo Walton discusses reading science fiction as a skillset. Interesting meta-commentary, which should ring bells for anyone who's tried to get a friend or relative into the genre.
- It turns out that GPS proves the Theory of Relativity in interesting ways. Take that, Newton!
- As a tinkerer, I found Mark Pilgrim's post on the 'Tinkerer's Sunset' to be really interesting, moving stuff.
- Some Foursquare badges I'd like to see. Personally, instead of joining Foursquare, I'm just going to constantly post snarky commentary about my location on Twitter. Pretty much the same thing I do now, in other words.
- The Berkman Center hosted a lunch to discuss piracy research from the perspective of developing nations. They'll probably have a video and audio soon, but David Weinberger has a good liveblog summary. The most interesting note was that piracy is bad for open software advocates: it lets closed, for-pay software propagate as long as the software developers turn a blind eye. To what degree are grey markets (here and elsewhere) becoming a legitimate business strategy?
- Microsoft is making their own 2D data tag, in competition with QR codes and datagrid codes. You may have seen these already without knowing it: they use these on some XBox games, largely for cross-promotional and inventory purposes. I believe them when they say that these are better than QR codes, but they'll never take off for the same reason that Ogg Vorbis hasn't beat out MP3: a good-enough de-facto standard can practically live forever, and the other 2D barcode formats have all the momentum.
A little story to go with that last item: last time I ordered business cards for myself, a couple of years ago, I integrated a QR code into the graphic design of the front, and stuck one containing my v-card on the back. I thought of it as a demonstration for potential employers: who's got two thumbs (the card symbolically asks) and can navigate between the world of print and online journalism in innovative ways? This guy. But I never really thought that it'd be usable, since this was before I had a smartphone, much less anyone else I knew. I made it with a chunk of badly-translated Taiwanese freeware, and tested it with a webcam at work.
The other day after a breaking class, someone asked for my contact information, and I noticed that they had an Android phone. So I showed them how it worked, told them to grab Barcode Scanner from the market ("But I've got a different phone." "Doesn't matter, it's all Android."), and passed them a spare card. Pretty much instantly, they were able to import my card to their contact list. It was pretty cool for me, but it was even better to see the enormous grin on their face when my friend realized they had basically just pulled information out of thin air, like magic. Sometimes, technology's okay.
January 4, 2010
- Celebrated five years together with Belle, an achievement for which few words would be sufficient. Thanks, babe!
- Mostly followed my gaming resolutions from last year. Definitely played more indie titles, skipped tedious grinding, and avoided console shooters when possible. Did not get around to trying an MMO, which was probably for the best.
- Bought a Kindle 2 and an Android Dev Phone. Became a developer for the latter, much to my dismay.
- Wrote about a quarter of a game engine, then quit when I got to the parts that aren't instantly gratifying (preloading, faux-threading, AI). Still managed to learn way more than anyone should know about high-performance Actionscript optimization.
- Survived a congressional session, a corporate purchase, and a promotion.
- Survived a mild case of extensor tendonitis, and resolved to take better care of my hands.
- Rewrote my personal subset of Blosxom in PHP, increasing the speed of this blog by an order of magnitude. Resisted the urge to convert to a real publishing platform like Wordpress. Purged a number of old entries, while I was at it.
- Read a fair number of books, including a long, miserable slog through Chris Anderson's Free.
- Began taking breakdancing classes, which (after six months) qualifies me as something of a b-boy-in-training, I guess. Lost about 20 pounds in the process, but failed (so far) to conquer a general deficiency of flavor.
Reviewer's notes: The special effects may be showing their age, and portions seemed rushed or in need of additional polish. But overall, 2009 delivered a solid annual experience, not to mention a definite improvement over previous franchise installments. Possible candidate for Year of the Year. Score: 9/10
October 15, 2009
In anticipation of future FCC policies, I'd like to state up front that I was not paid or bribed in any way for these links, which seems like an awful shame, as well as a real opportunity for anyone with some extra bribe money lying around.
- There's video from local b-boy battle-slash-arts-fair Crafty Bastards here (check the related section for more). I caught the first round of this last week, and if I can find a partner, I'm entering next year.
- MobileActive has an overview of different setups for SMS activism. Lots of good links there, including an SMS server/analysis tool that runs on Android.
- John Robb theorizes that protest is being militarized by governments that treat it as a national security threat. This is not a good thing.
- This is your planet on climate change: Theatre of Inconveniences presents Kenya's drought in photos as part of a series on the impact of global warming on wildlife.
- Ethan Zuckerman got eye surgery and somehow still managed to blog a ton of incredibly insightful stuff. One of my favorite entries is The Cloud and Useful Illusions, which discusses the ways that the "cloud" metaphor invites us to ignore the underlying infrastructure and politics, in both good ways and bad.
- YES IT IS A CAT VIDEO.
- Happy Internet Human Rights day, China! Let us know how that's working out for you, if you can get past the firewall now that they're blocking TOR.
August 27, 2009
It's like a linkup, but more pessimistic.
- RECAP is a Firefox extension that sends public documents behind a for-pay firewall to the Internet Archive as users browse the original site. Evgeny Morozov has more. Effectively, they're crowdsourcing the process of creating a site mirror. It may have implications for getting around censorship, but it's more interesting to me in the way that it creates something valuable by piggybacking on the user's actions, much the same way that ReCAPTCHA leverages site verification to improve OCR for scanned documents.
- At Arthur Magazine, Douglas Rushkoff argues that "movements" are dead, because they now play a role that's more social than actively political. I disagree, personally: I would say that he's picked some stunningly poor movements, then. The goal of the New Dissent, just as with traditional social and protest movements, is to put feet on the ground, albeit in a new way. A movement that doesn't put feet on the ground is a failure, no matter whether it's Rushkoff's strawman of "a top-down, passionately executed, and highly branded movement" or a decentralized, flash mob of demonstrators. Ironically, the very health protest astroturf that's made Rushkoff so dejected is a prime example of this kind of action. It's not necessarily seeing results--but that's because it's badly run. People show up, and then act like either loons or idiots, which convinces no-one. But that doesn't mean the organizing principles are unsound.
- In this Google video, Nils Gilman of the Global Business Network discusses "the global illicit economy"--basically the globalized black market in guns, drugs, sex, and malware. Some interesting observations inside: for example, says Gilman, attempting to control drug trade via border control is counterproductive because it raises the profit margins for successful traffickers.
- It turns out that people will pay for explainers, but won't pay for your vague trend piece. Surprise! It's almost like good journalism could be profitable in this country, if it weren't being killed by all those pesky blogs and Internets. Nieman Journalism Lab has a lot of great interviews like this, by the way, including Bill Wasik on the Politico and David Simon on charging for web content.
- Shepherd Fairey interviews Banksy. In other news from the four elements of hip-hop, More Than A Stance has a neat "breakumentary" on b-boy history shot at Street Science in Rotterdam.
- As someone who's done his share of public speaking and video editing, even to a teetotaler this Johnnie Walker ad is unbelievable. It's a single, six-minute steadicam shot of Robert Carlyle walking through Scotland, telling the brand's history as he walks by carefully-placed props or visual aids. Apparently it took 40 takes. I find it fascinating for two reasons: first, because the craftsmanship of it is striking. But second, because it breaks the commonly-accepted rule of thumb for video journalism--"keep it short," because people won't watch long-form web video. As I've said before, I think that's a fallacy. People will certainly watch long-form productions, if it's interesting. What they won't watch is a lengthy imitation of "local news"-style coverage.
- Hall and Oates, Carlos Santana, U2: what do these artists have in common, besides a soporific effect rivalling prescription drugs? Satan.
July 31, 2009
Money for Nothin', Links for Free
After a week of Free, this round's on the house.
- In Praise of [Some] DDoSs? asks whether a denial-of-service attack is morally equivalent to blackmail--or to a sit-in. It's a fascinating question: do lawmakers write anti-cybercrime laws with mythical uberhackers in mind, without recognizing that they may fall under the same range of intent as meatspace offenses? And what does that mean for digital activism?
- While cruising through Saurik's Android Market webclient the other day, I found CRIME MAP, a mobile mashup between Google Maps and live crime data (sadly, only for Osaka, Japan at this time). So it's like EveryBlock, but map-oriented. And I started to think about the potential for this kind of thing--match it up with a Locale plugin, for example, to warn you if you're about to walk into a high-crime area. Or if it were adapted to non-crime tasks, and people were allowed to submit activities/tagging to it (instant flash protest?). A big deal has been made out of the camera-aware augmented reality applications beginning to trickle out, but I wonder if this limited-but-ubiquitous form would be more effective--a sixth sense, instead of a direct visual overlay.
- Appfrica has details on Mozilla's Week of Service, which matches IT volunteers with needy nonprofits. If you need the help, there's a link to the Idealist page for registration. I was disappointed that the volunteers are not necessarily just Mozilla staff, because I thought it would be hilarious if JQuery creator John Resig showed up to rebuild Belle's nonprofit web page. But it's still a good idea.
- Adam West is a strange, strange man.
- A Gabonese presidential candidate is attempting to use social media to mobilize his followers, although it's unclear how many people he's going to reach, given that only 10% of the country has access.
- I've had no time, at all, for playing games this week. When I have, it's been adventure-centric: Monkey Island 2 on the smartphone, and Zombie Cow's smart indie comedies, Ben There, Dan That! and Time, Gentlemen, Please! I highly recommend both of the latter, especially if you love the old Lucasarts titles. The first is free, but there's an option to donate extra when buying the second one. Go ahead, push the total up to $10. You won't regret it.
- Tonight is my first breakdancing class. No, you can't see video.
- Josh finds the common thread between America, Apocalypse, and Anime.
July 14, 2009
It was hungry.
- Two interesting commentaries from danah boyd: in the first, she presented a paper at the Personal Democracy Forum on the politics of class online, specifically across MySpace and Facebook. Her fellow Berkman Center scholar Eszter Hargittai has also done a lot of research on this, if you're interested.
- Second, boyd wrote a post on generational use of "backchannel"--how younger people use Twitter/blogging/IRC/Wikipedia/etc. during public presentations and lectures to augment the experience. I do wonder, though, if surprise at this is strictly limited to academic settings. After all, every meeting I've been in for the last five years has often been populated by Blackberry users acting in the same fashion. One could, in fact, argue that this is the real curse of the Blackberry: by giving managers and knowledge workers the ability to work during otherwise unproductive meetings via the backchannel, it eliminates part of the valid case against those meetings in the first place.
- Patrick Meier continues a fine series of posts on digital activism by noting the primacy of content over channel. A great series of resources, especially centered on the many studies of nonviolence available online.
- These ten guidelines for building low bandwidth pages are meant to benefit audiences in developing countries, and that's a great thing to keep in mind. But it's also important for mobile development: 2G networks suffer from exactly the same problems. And even fancy new smartphones can find themselves operating on 2G networks once you leave the major metro areas of the US (or worse, as I was reminded while driving through West Virginia last month). All of this is a major reason why, despite the temptation, I've never added Javascript or multiple CSS files to Mile Zero. Also, because I am lazy.
- Cultivating a decent network on Delicious has been yielding all kinds of great stuff lately: Justin Pickard found Venkatesh Rao's "The Rhetoric of the Hyperlink", looking at how the link has changed writing and voice. The examples are fantastic.
- Odd Delicious coincidence: I find new link feeds by looking at the people who bookmark the same kinds of things I do, but unless you use something personal (like your name) there's nothing to really identify who a given user is in real life. Today I realized that one of the people in my network is Aleks Krotoski of The Guardian's gaming blog. Weird. So now I've got that going for me.
- If you read enough futurists for long enough, you start to notice something: at the extremes of the political left and right, they start to blend together. I had always assumed that was one of those political aphorisms used by moderates to denigrate activists, but in this case it seems to be true--when it comes to discussion of "resilient" communities and local production, you may start to see a lot of similarity between (on the Left) Rob Hopkins' Transition Towns and (on the Right, I think) John Robb's new world order of global guerrillas. Case in point: this Make post on Backwoods Home magazine, a rural libertarian journal for DIY types that's nonetheless reviewed as "useful, regardless of your political persuasion, [due to] the wealth of information written by practitioners in the arts of self-reliance"--and compared directly to the granola-crunching Mother Earth News.
- Me, I'm more with Bruce Sterling from the talk posted below: I'm a city kid, and I believe there's a lot of good to be derived from urban humanity. But its savings are going to come more from addressing the systemic and cultural wastefulness of global capitalism than learning how to grow my own radishes. In this, I'm encouraged by this speech by the WWF's Jason Clay (transcribed loosely by Ethan Zuckerman) on approaching sustainability from the perspective of massive, multinational corporations and their supply chains. It's full of fascinating facts on where the real costs of production occur (Mars buys more fish than Wal-mart each year, just to make cat food).
June 19, 2009
I feel like all links are symbolic of something, personally.
- The executive producer for Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles wrote up a blog entry on cancelation, office spaces, and the trunk check. Coming from someone who liked the show: if it had been consistently as well-written as that post, it might still be on the air.
- Hackaday has some notes on Slow Loris, a denial-of-service attack that only requires one computer and doesn't use a flood. Seems like you could fix it on the server side, though. It's not a new kind of attack--I'm surprised it still works.
- On the topic of security, Patrick Meier has been writing some really good stuff lately. Check out his guide to communicating securely in repressive environments and his review of How to Lie with Maps.
- Laptops and Appropriate Technology is a post about XO laptops by a teacher in Malawi. An interesting read, even for a cranky skeptic like myself.
- Libertarians on Boats: The Saga Continues. You know, I mock these guys a lot, but there's something impressive about the amount of coverage they get. For all the articles that are written, you'd think it was some kind of vast movement across the entire libertarian party--but then you actually read further, and it's really just the same small group every time, somehow always just thiiiiis close to their seasteading paradise. Until next time, guys.
- So we are holding a Rock Band party this weekend, which is cause for much excitement. But it's also cause for consternation: where do you get the second guitar, so people can play bass and mock my real-life instrumentation? I'm sure they're very nice, but spare instruments for the game are $80, which (plus the cost of boarding an over-excitable dog) is really more than I wanted to spend. But once you start looking into borrowing, the market segmentation really becomes a hassle: not only do music games fail to play nicely with each other, but you can't use controllers from the same game on different consoles. My friends with the PS2 version wouldn't have any place to plug in. Apparently even the USB microphone isn't cross-platform. Finally, we found someone who knew someone else with an XBox 360 guitar. The heavens opened, and the faint sounds of Iron Maiden could once again be heard.
- One of the amazing things about Stephen Colbert's act is that he almost never breaks character. Talking Points Memo has a clip of him backstage with John Kerry a couple of years ago. It's bizarre just to see him talking softly.
- 15 Travel Tips for Africa, or anywhere really.
June 3, 2009
Yoshimi Battles the Link Robots
At my funeral, I want them to play "Do You Realize?"
- Is your pen a deadly weapon? What happened to being mightier than the sword?
- Newsweek comments on Ray Kurzweil's mid-life crisis. Not much new there, but it is kind of funny to hear that even fellow Singularity U professors think he may be a little crazy.
- Last week, Wikipedia banned Scientology--or, to be more accurate, they put a blanket ban on IP addresses known to originate with the Church of Scientology. As satisfying as that might seem, Evgeny Morozov has a few good reasons why Wikipedia was wrong to do it.
- A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages: "1972 - Dennis Ritchie invents a powerful gun that shoots both forward and backward simultaneously. Not satisfied with the number of deaths and permanent maimings from that invention he invents C and Unix."
- Jim Rossignol provides impressions of the "Thrilling Wonder Stories" panel, discussing architecture, fiction, and futurism. Guests included Warren Ellis and the designer of Half-Life 2's cityscapes, Viktor Antonov. There are elements of a post about gaming's relationship to both science fiction and futurism gestating as a result of this.
- I think it's really, really important that Harmonix--and not the Neversoft Guitar Hero team--ended up doing Beatles Rock Band. Technical issues aside, there was always a feeling that Harmonix understood the musical side of what they were doing in a way that their successors didn't, and it shows through in the product. I'm not even a huge Beatles fan, and I still think this is phenomenal. The trailer with actual game footage is also looking really sharp. Belle is very excited.
- Along those lines, Anil Dash comments on the New Yorker and supporting artists.
- As for the rest of E3: Eh. Microsoft's motion-tracking looks very cool (and apparently actually works), which would be great if I had a living room with actual space in it. Likewise, if I wanted to annoy people I guess hooking my XBox up to my Facebook status would be one way to do it. Nintendo's being Nintendo with a million franchise sequels and Wii attachments. Sony continues to find ways to milk fans for money: more virtual objects for Home! A download-only portable console that's still way too expensive! And as usual, practically nothing for PC.
- I once argued, to a room of conservative think-tank contributors, that hip-hop (and jazz) were distinctly American forms of music--genres that prize reinvention, improvisation, and a unique tension between individual and collective action. Perhaps I should have specified that it's not right for everyone.
May 13, 2009
Sometimes the puns don't come easy, you know.
- The interesting implication of captcha on routers isn't that most people's security habits are poor. It's that, as everything in the home gets smarter, vulnerabilities multiply in odd places. I had no idea that some malware was using a browser exploit to inject bad DNS entries into home routers, but I'm really kind of impressed by it.
- Matt Taibbi meditates on aging and Friedman.
- Is new media an elite forum? And is it best used simply to bootstrap narratives into the traditional media?
- The Griefer Future, continued: Russian hackers have pioneered ransomware, which holds your computer hostange until you pay a ransom via SMS message.
- The Gecko netbook runs on 8 rechargeable AA batteries. Is this the solution to my laptop battery complaints? Surely there are hidden pitfalls to something like this--it seems too good to be true.
- I'm two years late on Ikea Hacker. Which is too bad, since its advice applies to pretty much all our furniture.
- The Center for Global Development has a post about using mobile phones to monitor pandemic flu.
