Many years ago I read about a dude who’d converted Unix server logs into a real-time auditory environment — specifically, a rain forest. Server load controlled the level of the rain, CGI calls were bird chirps, potential malicious attacks were the cough of a jaguar, etc. Sadly, I can’t find any info on this anymore. […]
Tag Archives: Technology
Augmented (non-visual) reality
Been thinking a lot about augmented reality recently, for fairly obvious reasons. The other night I was talking to Yiying Lu at the first LaunchUp Las Vegas about AR and the possibilities inherent in it, and it got me thinking. I’ve always had a big interest in ambient information interfaces and what is apparently called […]
How can we go from 419 to Web 3.0?
Here’s a quote from an amazing TechCrunch article about former and current Nigerian 419 scammers by Sarah Lacy: Boakye’s sheer hacker genius was the most astounding. It’s not just technical ability– he tries to figure out how the person who set up the security system he’s trying to break thinks, and outsmart him at his […]
An Immodest Proposal: iqCAPTCHA
One of my friend Alex’s hard and fast rules is: never talk to the Internet people. Don’t read blog comments, don’t reply to blog comments, don’t get in flamewars. It’s a rule I follow myself, by and large; I almost never read blog comments (Update: except here, of course) and never, ever, ever engage in […]
Rhapsody Blind
Just a shout-out here on something my friend John has created: Rhapsody Blind, a set of scripts that allow visually-impaired Windows users to navigate Rhapsody, the streaming music service. From what I can tell, there aren’t really a whole lot of good tools for blind computer users; we rarely think about how the traditional GUI […]
More Wikileaks thinking
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the whole Wikileaks thing these past few weeks, like a lot of people who belong to my particular sub-set of the human population. (First World, technology-oriented, somewhat politically minded. White as a goddamn ghost.) I’m massively ambiguous about the whole affair, which has earned me my fair […]
Twitter vs. RSS vs. Web
I don’t post here much very often these days, mainly thanks to Twitter. (I also haven’t really felt like I had much to say, this past year or so.) Twitter is quick and simple, and unlike a blog post, I don’t really have to think about what I’m trying to express. (Not that I have […]
At A Crossroads
So I’d like your advice, my dear Internet. I have a software project called dbasr that I’ve been working on for a while — several years, on and off, in fact. Weirdly enough, it’s actually probably more relevant and useful now than when I started it. I’ve rewritten the code base several times, but I […]
VGrid for CSS nerds
Here’s a little something I just whipped up for my own uses, but you might find it useful as well: vgrid.css, a CSS style sheet for handling vertical height of objects by em, as a sort of companion to the 960 grid. It’s got vgrid_x classes from 1 to 100; if you’re assigning onscreen elements […]
The value of music
So apparently a group of musicians in England called the Featured Artists Coalition have voted to support a “three strikes” law against illegal file downloaders: get caught three times and have your bandwidth reduced to a point where you can no longer download big files. It has not met with enthusiasm from the British blogosphere. […]