A few weeks ago someone called me from a rock concert in Texas, held the phone up, and told me to listen to one of the songs. The person in this email claimed they were busted by security at a rolling stones concert for doing the same thing. Ubiquitous cell phones means ubiquitous audio recording (and surveillance), ubiquitous cameras, and soon video. What are the implications of this? For privacy? IP? Media?

Cellphones and copyright

Kinda scary that Norway hasn't fixed "Y2K" problems yet: "A 105 year old woman was offered a place in a Norwegian kindergarten after a millennium bug knocked a century off her age. "When our list showed she was born in '94' we just assumed it was 1994 rather than 1894," Olga Moerk, in charge of a project offering free day-care to five-year-olds in central Oslo, said on Friday." A social worker visited the old people's home where the woman lives after getting no reply to the free playschool offer.

Y2K Bug Bites 105 Year Old

A case of the law of large numbers coming into play? Hardly. In a neighborhood of 200 homes, only one on average has a TiVo. More U.S. homes have outhouses, 671,000, than TiVos, 514,000." Microsoft seems to think TiVo's business model is broken, after it tried to adopt the same model for itself. But oddly they continue with their Xbox.

Shit More Popular Than Technology

Simply put, it's time to quit Slashdot, once and for all."

Woo Hoo! Use Memestreams!

Quit Slashdot.org Today!

Since v2.04, bash has allowed you to intelligently program and extend its standard completion behavior to achieve complex command lines with just a few keystrokes. Imagine typing ssh [Tab] and being able to complete on hosts from your ~/.ssh/known_hosts files. Or typing man 3 str [Tab] and getting a list of all string handling functions in the UNIX manual. mount system: [Tab] would complete on all exported file-systems from the host called system, while make [Tab] would complete on all targets in Makefile. This project was conceived to produce programmable completion routines for the most common Linux/UNIX commands, reducing the amount of typing sysadmins and programmers need to do on a daily basis.

If you are not using this yet, its time to be bourne again with super powers.

Bash Programmable Completion

Rocky Mountain Radar introduces a device designed to make your car electronically unreadable - if you get a ticket while using the product, the manufacturer will pay your fine!

Phazer II Radar Jammer

No Wires, absolutely nothing to solder
Flash Upgradeable (programmer included)
Installs in under 5 min
Works with ALL Xbox's

XBox Chip - The Matrix

The major advance of the ER1 over previous consumer robot products is that it can do sophisticated analysis of visual information, said Jennifer McNally, senior director of marketing for Pasadena, Calif.-based Evolution. Show a CD cover to the ER1's camera, and it can recognize the disc and cue it up from a networked music appliance. Wave a beer bottle in front of it, and it knows what to look for on its trip to the kitchen.

Every day more consumer products become available that will make it easier for me to build my army of killer robots.

Kit morphs laptops into robots

NetMon, the "sister" of NetReg, collects and processes information from the network. It captures CAM table and ARP table information from network devices, as well as store DHCP lease information (updated every minute by the DHCP servers). The goal of NetMon is to provide a real-time as well as historical view of the network. Using NetMon we are able to detect misregistered and unregistered machines.

No need for Lucent QIP or Nortel NetID anymore.

NetReg/NetMon

In Spring 2001, Virginia Tech professor Naren Ramakrishnan taught an entire course on the topic of recommender systems. Here you can browse the syllabus, review slides from the lectures, and review the reading list.

Course overview: CS 6604 concentrates on algorithms, methodologies, systems, and larger-scope issues (economic, commercial etc.) pertaining to reducing information overload. The unique aspect of this course will be how it integrates ideas from diverse areas: numerical analysis (strange but true), information systems, human-computer interaction, and algorithmics. Over the past three years, a large body of literature on recommender systems, filtering, and personalization technologies has been developed. Even though the field is driven by commercial trends and industrial developments, many of the ideas are nearing a stage of stabilization when their use is becoming common place (textbook material). CS 6604 will help illustrate the interplay between these different areas and demonstrate how ideas from diverse backgrounds can be combined in novel and sophisticated ways.

CS 6604: Recommender Systems (Spring 2001)