October 29, 2003
Ten years ago, one Nigerian fax offering me 15 percent of five million dollars seemed almost worth a moment's curiosity. Now they arrive three a day, signed by dead dictators and confused warlords — I once got mail from Charles Taylor and his lawyer in the same week. The mechanics of the 419 scam I've since figured out. What I still can't work out is the business plan.
October 27, 2003
Bush's case for invading Iraq as part of the War on Terror never quite added up — Saddam and Al Qaeda were barely on speaking terms. And yet, post-invasion, Iraq has somehow become the world's busiest terrorist hangout, with jihadis flying in from everywhere to take a shot at the Great Satan. Maybe that's the accident. Or maybe it's the plan: a country-sized mousetrap, baited and set.
October 26, 2003
Two projects out of the drawer and onto the web. ZAmazon is a Zope product that lets you run Amazon searches from inside Zope. SixMovies is a Six-Degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon game played on actors and films — except Amazon's database turns out to be a bit too shallow to make it really sing. It works well enough to show you what it wants to be.
October 25, 2003
The actor playing Jesus in a certain controversial film got struck by lightning on set. Statistically unlikely, sure, but explainable. Less explainable: it was the second time it happened during the same shoot. If he gets a third, even an atheist might concede that Someone is trying to send a memo.
October 24, 2003
A printer that doesn't print but cuts through wood and plastic with a laser. Amazon quietly scanning 120,000 books so you can full-text search 33 million pages. And, because we live in the future, a USB-powered air purifier. The USB port, it turns out, has become the cigarette lighter of the computer.
October 23, 2003
A modern Pentium is roughly ten thousand times faster than the 6502 in my old BBC Micro. That's the difference between a snail and a highway. So why does Word still take forever to start? The initial state is the same every time, after all. There has to be a trick the OS is missing.
October 21, 2003
Software gets refactored when it accumulates too much legacy cruft. Step back, redesign, rewrite the awkward bits. The result: a system new people can actually understand. Most Western law was written in the 19th century, talks about phenomena from 80 years ago, and is incomprehensible to anyone without a billable hour. So why don't we apply the same trick?
October 21, 2003
A reader points out that the Mind World Map seems to have stalled — a decent map appears quickly, and then just noise piles on top. There's a reason, and it has to do with what happens when 95% of people click the right pixel. Sounds great, until you do the math on what the other 5% are quietly doing to your map.
October 17, 2003
I went back to the failed best-time-to-visit project and tortured the code until it gave reasonable answers. It now scans Google snippets for month names and picks the top two. There's still one nagging problem: it knows April and October are the right months for Amsterdam, but it doesn't know which one comes first. February in Amsterdam is, shall we say, suboptimal.
October 15, 2003
Can Google be used as a common sense engine? My early attempts to extract trivia by parsing snippets worked surprisingly well, until they didn't — June, apparently, is also the best time to visit Australia. Maybe scanning the top 100 would help. Maybe Google itself, with three billion documents and a clever algorithm, is the one that should be doing this. Skynet, but for trivia.
October 14, 2003
The CDDB started as a volunteer project — strangers typing in song titles for the love of it. Then the Internet boom hit, the founders realized there was money on the table, and the volunteers got nothing. IMDB went the same way. TravLang too. And, I'm sorry to say, world66.com — a project I helped set up. Which is why we're opening it back up.
October 14, 2003
Usenet doesn't really forget. Dig around and you can find the unassuming first posts — a guy named Stallman with a bright idea about free Unix, a Finnish student tinkering with an OS for some old hardware, a fellow at CERN announcing a thing he optimistically called the WorldWideWeb. Plus one Larry Page asking a basic Java question for an app he was building.
October 13, 2003
A glance at the referer logs shows people keep arriving here looking for Google hacks. Fair enough — there's now a category for them, six projects deep, all doing something slightly unreasonable with the worlds favourite search engine.
October 13, 2003
Steven Berlin Johnson writes about salvaging email through better organization. I'd settle for two simpler things: search in Outlook that doesn't take minutes to grind through a 500MB mail file, and rules that file mail away a day after it arrives — so my inbox shows only the recent stuff I actually have to deal with. Weren't computers supposed to be fast?
October 10, 2003
Germany pushed for the European Stability Pact because they feared their fiscally lax neighbours would weaken the Euro. Years later, Germany is the one busting the rules, France is daring anyone to stop them, and the Euro is somehow strong anyway. There's a deeper irony lurking — and it's about to be carved into the constitution.
October 10, 2003
On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog — but for how much longer? Powerful parties want mandatory Digital IDs, and they'll wrap the pitch in spam, piracy and terrorism. You need a license to drive the highway, so why not the Information Super Highway? The answer matters more than it sounds.
October 09, 2003
If removing a head of state by force is ever justified, surely the bar is the threat they pose to human welfare. By that measure the greatest danger on the planet right now isn't sitting in Baghdad — and one daisy cutter would handle it in minutes. A provocation, with a serious question buried inside.
October 08, 2003
Feed Google three or four words and let it predict the next one. Then the next. Then the next. The result is dada poetry by way of the search index — a language model built out of the web before anyone called it that.
October 07, 2003
Everyone moaning about programming jobs moving to India seems to have skipped the day they covered Ricardo. If productivity destroyed jobs, the industrial revolution would have left 90% of us idle by now. A walk through comparative advantage, the lump of labour fallacy, and why the real problem with outsourcing isn't what people think.
October 06, 2003
My Archean project got picked up by a software art site, which raises an awkward question: can code be art? Socrates was a sculptor before he was a philosopher, and Fred Brooks claimed programmers build castles in the air from pure thought-stuff. Where Rembrandt and a quick hack might actually have something in common.
He who hesitates is sometimes saved.