] It's not that I'm bitter. Oh alright then, I am. When I
] was doing a weekly round-up of interesting web links in
] 1996 (still the top search result for the phrase "GLR
] jokes", if you'd like to check), I found myself using
] something very similar to what experts now call the
] weblog format. And was I hailed as the pioneer of a brave
] new form of distributed grassroots journalism? No, I was
] not.
]
] I was regarded - quite rightly, as it turned out - as
] some sort of nut who re-used the same HTML to update his
] home page every now and again. Don't get me wrong: I'm a
] huge fan of fanzines, home pages, and the whole
] do-it-yourself attitude. But because publishing one of
] these usually requires some element of effort, sometimes
] that's reflected in their contents.
]
] On the other hand, it's getting so easy to update a
] weblog that some users seem to type in their thoughts
] willy-nilly, posting unimaginable banalities, like a
] nation of Alan Partridges trying to fill an internet's
] worth of dead air: CDs they're listening to,
] scintillating accounts of their day at work, URLs of
] sites they feel they should acknowledge, despite having
] nothing new to say about them. It is like one of those
] terrible Christmas family newsletters for every single
] day of the year.

I love the conclusion of this article. It's so true:
"People used to worry about the government compiling a database of everything they knew about you and everything you did. But who'd have thought we'd be so keen to keep updating our own entries?"

Guardian Unlimited | Online | A blogger is a stalker's dream

quoted:
===

I am the coolest stud at MIT. I hacked an old-school telephone handset on my cell phone. Now I walk around Cambridge MA, looking like a phat pimp!

===

Why I'm the Coolest Stud at MIT

By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, July 4, 2001; Page A01

TEHRAN -- Arash Fahimi is a teenager in a nation that frowns on dating, outlaws rock music and offers a 17-year-old almost no chance for travel beyond its borders.

But Fahimi, like hundreds of thousands of young Iranians, has discovered an escape from his cultural cocoon. Sitting at a computer terminal in an Internet cafe, he downloads the latest Western pop music hits and chats daily with cyber-acquaintances around the globe. He even found a girlfriend on the Internet.

"I want to have a better idea of what the world is like," said Fahimi, earphones clamped under a Nike baseball cap and fingers tapping out a chat room response on his screen. "If I can't make a trip abroad, the Internet is the best way."

washingtonpost.com: Cybermania Takes Iran by Surprise

] In the photo above is the webACE: a Fairchild ACE1101MT8
] microcontroller programmed as a Web server and containing
] two tiny web pages in its on-chip memory. Since the
] ACE1101MT8 is the smallest available microcontroller, I
] believe that this really is the World's Smallest Web
] Server.

This is the platform used in that fly article. This article is a little more informative. I don't really care about the fly. I care about the server. Links to a number of other more practical platforms such as PIC based servers (they are technically larger, but basically the idea is the same). A little digging and you'll find a number of open source TCP/IP stacks for microcontrollers.

This is of use if you want to embed internet connectivity into extremely small devices. The next question is how small can you make your bluetooth transmitter.

Tiny webserver, without the fly

] The music industry has been spoiled. They have controlled
] the distribution of music by producing CDs, and thereby
] have also protected their profits. So they have resisted
] Internet distribution. Six years ago I asked Sony Music
] to start working with IBM to figure out how to offer
] secured distribution of their content over the Net. But
] nobody in Sony Music would listen. Then about six months
] ago, they started to panic.

A very candid conversation with the CEO of Sony.

Sony's CEO Unplugged :: AO

Welcome to the exhibition of rediscovered works by the mid 20th century illustrator A.C. Radebaugh.

A very cool exhibit, soon to open in Philadelphia, displaying lots of futuristic graphic artwork from the 1950s. Flying cars, urban airships docked at skyscrapers, and more. This stuff is almost propagandist in its technological optimism.

Radebaugh: The Future We Were Promised

] Three weeks ago, in a stunning raid, Russian hackers
] seized control of the servers that support one of the
] Internet's largest online gaming operations, demanding a
] ransom. It was a real-life, high-tech version of the
] movie Ocean's Eleven. By the time the ransom was paid,
] one key server -- the one containing all operational data
] for 120 Internet gaming sites and a long list of
] consulting clients -- seemed to be stripped of its data.
]
]
]
] At stake were all the operational records of a gambling
] empire. "We didn't even have the names of customers,"
] says Juan Bonilla, executive vice-president of Grafix
] Softech F.A. of San Juan, Costa Rica. "We lost
] everything." To make matters worse, little, if any, of
] the data had been backed up off-site. Grafix Softech was
] losing an estimated US$75,000 a day in profits, and the
] incident left it open to lawsuits from customers whose
] businesses relied on Grafix Softech's services. What
] could have been a major disaster became a bump in the
] corporate road. In an amazing feat of ingenuity, CBL Data
] Recovery Technologies Inc. of Markham, Ont., managed to
] recover all the lost data. It was a close call, admits
] Bill Margeson, president of CBL

Russian hackers raid largest online gaming operation

]A harsh scolding from U.S. Ambassador Alexander Vershbow has
]prompted a crackdown at the Gorbushka market, Moscow's mecca of
]pirated films and music, and city authorities on Tuesday promised
]that this was only the start.

]Gone from the second floor are the row upon row of cheap pirated
]videos, DVDs, music discs and computer games, which just a month
]ago made up an estimated 75 percent to 95 percent of all goods
]sold there.

Every day my dollars buy less rubles, and now they've taken my beloved Garbushka... its like the current administration is out to ruin every expat in Moscow :(

Some background: The Gorbushka started out as an open air weekend market, selling (usually very nice) reproductions of tapes and CDs and movies. It became quite large, and a couple years ago it moved into several large buildings. Along with the software/music/movies, now came appliances, computers, and anything and everything electronic. All crammed in tiny stalls lining narrow hallways. Its like those shots you see of Hong Kong, where the small businesses are so dense, and the hustle and bustle so intense (I made a rhyme!). This place is great. Now they've ruined it.

This action was just a token effort to make Russia look good for getting into the WTO. It is not possible to stop rampant pirating in Russia, or even in Moscow (where people have much more money than outside Moscow), because people simply do not have enough money to buy the real deal. Even with the reduced prices they mention. For the foreseeable future, this is just an inconvenience. You can still find any software and popular movie you want around one of Moscow's large bookstores, or on its mainstreets. The real reason this sucks is that there were ALL KINDS of wierd electronic, and international music at the Gorbushka... and now its going to be very hard to find that stuff legitimately, or pirated for $3 a pop.

Poo

Gorbushka Tossing Out the Pirates

] The resurrection of a bankrupt wireless Internet company
] isn't just a boon for editors dying to write "Ricochet
] bounces back" in a headline. It's also a nod to the
] vulnerability of Wi-Fi, which doesn't offer continuous
] coverage between so-called hot spots.

Wired News: Ricochet Wireless Rides Again

You've probably noticed that the look of the site is dramatically different. My goal with this is to make the site a little easier on the eyes.

The biggest change in this release is the Social Network Maping. If you click on the Social Network links around the site you'll be able to see who is linking who. The maps are interactive; you can move through the network from link to link by clicking on people's names.

This data is all based on Recommendations (not clickthroughs). It provides an excellent way to get feedback about the links you are providing. As the community is small, most people are connected to a small group of frequent posters. However, as the site grows, this feature should provide an interesting way to surf through the social network on the site in search of interesting people. Rattle deserves all of the credit for this feature.

The MemeBox has been updated. The frames version was a little cramped. This should be more comfortable to use.

New users will not show up in the recent posters list until they've recommend an article. I also fixed a bug with selecting multiple paragraphs of text with the bookmarklet.

02/16/03: UI Changes/Social Network Mapping