Wednesday, October 9, 2002

Now I'm paranoid about publishing my Radio weblog over my GPRS phone, with good reason. Since I'm running Mac OS X, I have a great web server right on my box. What if I upstreamed Radio to my locally installed web server, tested pages there, and then deployed it to Jepstone using rsync? That way, I can shut down Radio before I connect to my GPRS account, and if rsync is as good as everyone says it is, it will upstream to Jepstone using as few bytes as possible. 7:01:06 PM

So that's where everyone is tonight, and me without a car. Somehow I missed the original announcement or (more likely) filed it under "oh, but it's so far", not realizing it was the eve of the DevCon. If I'd had my act together, I would have gone directly to Sam's talk from South Station, and bummed a ride back to the hotel from someone. Even if it wasn't the eve of the DevCon, how hard would it be to get a bunch of .NET geeks from Rhode Island into a car and barrel up to Waltham? I really need to get over this "oh, but it's so far" hangup. 6:37:02 PM

My trip went as planned; when I arrived at the Burlington Mall, I gave the hotel a call, and they dispatched their courtesy van to fetch me. It took me about four hours to get from my house to the hotel, which is not too bad considering the intermodal nature of my trip. If I had driven, it would have been about two hours, but my nerves would have been shot. (By the way, I griped about the quality of the voice calls in an earlier entry. At the mall, I got crystal-clear reception, so it seems like this is going to be one of those hit and miss things.) 5:32:12 PM

I'm at the DevCon, and it sure is quiet here. I was expecting to see at least a few shirtless web service hackers running up and down the hallways. Maybe I'm on the wrong floor for that. 5:27:00 PM

Time to tally up: launching Radio, letting the aggregator run, and submitting a post took 601,555 bytes worth of data upstream and 401610 downstream. I spent 21 minutes, 20 seconds on line all told, but some of that was dawdling and typing (and I was on a moving vehicle). The "2002/10/09.html" document took a long time; perhaps it was all those tunnels we went through. All told, I used almost one megabyte of data, which isn't cheap (I have 8 megabytes a month, and it's about $6 a megabyte over that). 2:54:02 PM

Trainblogging. I'm hurtling up the northeast corridor with my iBook and T68i spread out on the table in front of me. So far, I've used the GPRS connection for ssh, and I'm pretty happy with the performance (definitely an improvement over my old CDPD modem). I'm not too happy with the voice thing, though, since I've had a lot of dropped calls. The data service seems to survive going through areas with no or low signal better than my CDPD modem did, though. 2:35:58 PM

Dori just got her T68i, and is accumulating a bunch of helpful links. The Mac themes she points to are hard to resist. 11:21:49 AM

Forwarding Address: OS X: "I wasn't able to find out how to enable this in order to get colorized emacs on the console until Scot Ballard, an Apple System Engineer, was nice enough to show me the trick..." 11:17:20 AM

Sam points to an article on .NET's No-Touch Deployment. 11:16:19 AM

Sam points to a basic tutorial on creating Visual Studio .NET Add-Ins. 11:14:49 AM

ActiveWin: How to Optimise Windows XP Home and Pro There are some interesting tips in here; perhaps they will help the performance of Virtual PC. Just when I'd gotten tired of banging my head against that particular wall. 11:05:40 AM

Jeremy Zawodny: "Oh, you might be asking yourself why I work for a big media company if I'm a culture jamming fan." Two of my favorite culture jammers are Abbie Hoffman and Philip K. Dick. Abbie Hoffman and his Yippie buddies jammed post-war complacency, and lived in a time when hearing the word "fuck" could cause you to re-evaluate your place in the universe. Sometimes, the Yippies used fearful memes, such as when they threatened to put LSD in the water supply. In Pranks, Abbie says: ...we're negotiating with the Deputy Mayor behind the scenes and I said, "Why can't we work this out? To show my good faith, I'll tell you that you can take all your soldiers away, because it's chemically impossible to put LSD in the water supply—LSD simply doesn't dissolve that readily." He said, "I know it can't happen, but we can't take any chances anyway." The myth had gone beyond reality. Philip K. Dick was fucking with your minds (and his) on a totally different level. He wanted you to doubt the very nature of reality itself. In Dick's speech How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, he says "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." But anyone who's read Philip K. Dick's books knows that this is not easy (spurious realities often have the strength to reassert themselves long after the main character stops believing them). Dick goes on to say: But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudoworlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. I don't see too much of a disconnect in Jeremy's case. Big media companies and culture jammers are both trying to introduce memes into the consciousness stream, usually for different reasons. I think that culture jamming can be a grassroots form of social engineering. Pranks and science fiction stories are tools we can use to reshape reality. 9:45:01 AM