Category: technology
a very nice map of the entire internet
The implementation is maybe soso, but the actual idea to put all 4,294,967,296 IP addresses into a grid is really nice.
A couple of week ago a high res map of internet connections was widely linked to.
Which does remind me of Aaron Koblin and his“Flight Patterns”.
Reading this it sounds like “middleware” is this big deal. I wonder, if it’s not just something that a mediocre perl script could do??? It probably could.
Call me crazy, but I think that the story of JH Schön could make a great movie. In the right hands. But I am so much out of touch that it might have come out last spring and friends of mine have worked on it.
I am sitting here and code. Since hours. It’s what I do, and I like it. But sometimes I wonder how weird I really am. Since I am alone I had no reason to speak. The phone didn’t rang either. It might sound grim, but I really get allot done, and I like it quiet like this.
Then I read:
my $min = ($x, $y)[$x > $y];
somewhere, and I said “ha!”. I think it’s a bit weird if the first visible emotion in a couple of hours comes from reading ($x, $y)[$x > $y]. Geek!
It is a neat hack though.
The perfect gift for those two.
Sorry. This is the probably the most superflous (sp?) post I ever made. I just couldn’t resist.
Recently Flash for video delivery might look less appauling, since Adobe overhauled the codec. But it still pretty much sucks ass if it comes to playing while there is less than the required bandwidth is available. Quicktime on the other side just goes ahead and downloads the movie, until enough of is on the local computer so that it can play smoothly. From start to finish. With flash you are often just out of luck and have to sit through some ridicolous stuttering. Which is basically unbearable. Of course you can still fuck up in Quicktime by not enabling progressive download when you encode it. Why the default is not to have progressive download is always on is beyond me. There is no downside. It does work since years. Real well. Not like that Flash crapp. Maybe one day people will test their sites and movies on actual internet connections, not while they practically sit on the server that they develop it on.
Kyle Wilson wrote an interesting essay about finishing software back in August.
I am wondering why so much great software does not even get started: Since a long time I am using an EVDO modem to connect to the internet. The upside is, that I have Internet wherever I go. If there is the slightest hint of civilisation I can connect to the internet. Which is great. The hardware is smart enough not only to move bits around it also knows where it is. GPS is a rather elaborate system with satelites floating around the planet and all. It is a big commotion, and it works. Just, that the software to connect to that part of the device does not exist on a Mac. With the right amount of documentation a programmer that has done something similar before would only need a few days to program this. And they sold thousands and thousands of these the device. The benefit for my computer to know where exactly I am would be huge. Since I am also connected to the internet a website could replace a 300 US$ GPS device. Still nobody has done it.
The other day I learned that Los Angeles is not storing the traffic data it automatically collects. It is allot of work, and certainly was not cheap, to put all those sensors in place. The data flows to the right places. And then gets simply not archived.
In both cases the effort to add the extra functionality would be ridicolously small compared to the potential gain. In both cases it might never happen: There is no driving force behind it. Nobody is making a living from something similar enough to jump on these opportunities. Even though ideas might be clear and simple, they might never happen, no matter how good they are, as long there is not a similar enterprise already happening. This theory has a sad other side as well: If there is already some kind of business going in certain way, then all sorts of similar activities will be spawned. No matter if they make any sense (Sony’s Mp3 players) or if they are valid for society ( Arms dealer, Mafia, Spam).
That whole ‘think different’ campaign:
had to come out and haunt them. Once they stopped doing so, and sold their image to peddle some ringtones. Apple is just like AT&T or Exxon Mobile for that matter. They all are just trying to make as much money as they can.