The PDP-10 is to a MacBook Air as a nematode is to a cruise missile. It’s a bad boy from back in the days when a single CPU cost as much as a small plane and was almost as large. In my CFT* I’m hacking at a PDP-10 emulator in an attempt to run some very, very old software, all as part of a pointless prank that no one would understand in the unlikely event that they noticed I’d done it.
Geek
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Two already doing it; three more by the end of the month. They identify location to within a few meters; smoothing algorithms can turn this into a path through the venue.
The technology can tell when people enter a shopping centre, what stores they visit, how long they remain there, and what route they take as they walked around.
They indicate but do not identify; that is, a signal is unique but not (yet) connected to identifying personal data, they claim. However, they use the IMEI of the handset to index users, and that provides a pivot into unique identification, which the reporter failed to be horrified at:
In the case of Gunwharf Quays, managers were surprised to discover that an unusually high percentage of visitors were German - the receivers can tell in which country each phone is registered - which led to the management translating the instructions in the car park.
How fortunate for those German tourists, who now have parking instructions in their native language. Technology is great!
Via Times Online.
I just used the word ‘grok’ in a sentence to a German colleague. Realising my mistake and preempting the question, I said, “Sorry, ‘grok’ is a word meaning ‘to understand deeply’. It’s not in the dictionary, it was coined by an American science fiction writer in the seventies.”
Then I idly hit apple-space and typed ‘grok’, and
grok |grɑk|
verb ( grokked, grokking)[ trans. ] informal - understand (something) intuitively or by empathy.
[ intrans. ] empathize or communicate sympathetically; establish a rapport.
ORIGIN mid 20th cent.: a word coined by Robert Heinlein (1907–88), American science fiction writer, in Stranger in a Strange Land.
Neologism in action!
On a whim, I took a look at the functions available in Google’s spreadsheet application. I found “GoogleLookup”:
Here are a couple examples using the formula:
To insert the number of Internet users in Paraguay:
=GoogleLookup(”Paraguay”; “internet users”)
To insert the Earned Run Average of Roger Clemens:
=GoogleLookup(”Roger Clemens”;”earned run average”)
At the bottom, they have the standard documentation question: “was this information helpful?”. But they only have ‘yes’ or ‘no’, not ‘terrifyingly so’.
Perhaps this is of as much use to you at your workplace as it is to me at mine.
WebCollageX for MacOS X released
I don’t get to code very often, but the other day I saw Jamie Zawinski had updated his brilliant webcollage screen saver.
webcollage is a screen saver that uses randomly chosen words to prime search engines. It composites the images it finds into a ‘non-stop pop-culture brainbath’ — a cross-section of the entire web. In test runs I’ve seen doctored billboard ads, Marilyn Monroe, flooded midwestern towns, smiling and floodflash-lit second-place swim teams, people’s diapered kids on tricycles, on and on.
So I hacked together a version wrapped around the webcollage engine. The result is available for download: WebCollage X v0.9.
It’s been tested a fair amount but I am on a dialup line so I’m not sure of real-world performance. Enjoy, and let me know if you run into any problems. To be clear: this is beta code, and could set your cat on fire, etc etc.
To use it, download and open the .dmg file. Drag the WebCollageX.saver into the Screen Savers folder in the Library folder of your home directory.
Heaps of credit for the original idea and the operating-room clean implementation to jwz; all mistakes are added by my code.
Geek:
What’s better is that this version has (thanks to the cleanest perl code I’ve ever seen) built-in support for driftnet (think dolphins), which listens in monitor mode to your local network segment and captures any images it detects. This means your screensaver can be composed of a collage of all the porn your coworkers are surfing! I hear opendarwin has a darwin port of this. Send me a working executable or instructions for compilation (that don’t include ‘install X Windows’), and I’ll make sure WebCollageX works with it.
Future plans include use of your mail file instead of the default dictionary, so it searches the web with random words culled from your own email, caching fetched lists of found but unused URLs so it starts up faster, and switching to a bell curve distribution so images pile up closer to center. Maybe writing out an HTML list with index thumbnails linked to the original page so you can find out where an image came from.
I *am* a geek, you know. Two things:
First, HubZilla is a 4-port FireWire hub with “menacingly fast 400 Mbps data transfers” and posable arms, legs and tail, as well as eyes that glow red when your FireWire bus powers up.
Second, rumor sayeth there is a (new) Volkswagen Beetle in the area with a custom license plate that reads, “FEATURE”. If you don’t get this, you’re not a geek.
