Posted by matijs
30/09/2004 at 21h19
Speaking from a pathetically low sample size, I can conclude that all
ASNs go through a comatose period, where the number of users is clearly
larger than the system's implementation can handle. Friendster had it, but
is now fast again, and Orkut, which was fast, now has it.
The thing is, I'm not really that interested in ASNs, because after logging
on, I'm not sure what I should do there, and talking to complete strangers
seems just as awkward as in real life. Given that, I still would like them
to be fast, for when I do get into the spirit of artificially networking
on-line.
At this point, I wrote the following:
The trouble is of course the fact that all these ASNs are server-based,
which makes them vulnerable to comatosity. What we need is a peer-to-peer
ASN. A kind of FOAF on steroids. With a client that spiders your friends'
friend lists (down to a certain level), and constructs your network on your
machine. Your profile is your web page of course. Maybe some new home-page
providers would spring up to provide the home-page-less with their much
needed profile space.
There should be a way to send messages to other people in your network.
Perhaps each member could publish a public key, and you would encrypt your
message with all the public keys along the route to the person you're
trying to contact, and then send it on its way. Each link in your route
would only accept e-mail for this purpose from their direct friends, so a
real chain linking the sender and the receiver would have to exist.
A similar public key system could help with the accessing of profiles
(yes this contradicts the web page idea). Possibly at most friends of
friends would get to see something not completely public.
I think this sounds great. With some more thinking, it should be
possible to create something that actually works, has al the features of
current ASNs that are actually nice, and avoids all
current annoyances.
So, what's wrong with this idea? How can it be abused?
And then, of course, I started looking around on the FOAF site, and
found out that this is, in fact, not a new idea (except
maybe for the public key bits).
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Posted by matijs
20/09/2004 at 20h37
I have just spent most of this day trying to get nice scans of some of my
photographs. And I'm annoyed.
My father found me a working scanner in the trash. Yes, people throw away
perfectly good scanners. And monitors too. I even threw away a perfectly
good computer once. It was hideously old, and someone else found it in the
trash. I know, because it was gone before the garbage truck came. Anyway,
after a while we managed to arrange for the scanner to actually come to my
house, and after fixing an endianness-problem it actually worked. Note that
I consider fixing endianness-problems fun.
So, what is the problem? The scans are overlayed with a wave
pattern of blue and red. It's a pattern that repeats every 16 rows, and
it's perfectly predictable. It's also very hard to filter out using
standard image tools.
I know almost nothing about image filtering, and I know nothing of
scripting either the Gimp, or ImageMagick. So, while trying to
figure out what I had to do to the image to get it right, I was also trying
to figure out how to do whatever I had to do using the underdocumented
scripting features of these fine programs. Let me qualify that: Gimp's
Script-Fu may be well-documented, but I didn't want to combine the two
things I already didn't know with a programming language I didn't know
(i.e., scheme), so I stayed with the Perl version.
So, I spent a day without much progress (well, the colors look better),
and I'm so annoyed, that while writing this, I smeared garlic on my
keyboard.
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Posted by matijs
15/09/2004 at 22h52
I sometimes think of fun things that should be researched. These are typically topics for things like term papers. At least, I think they are.
Usually I forget about them after half a day or so, and then I'm annoyed
that I didn't write this wonderful idea down. These days, I'm trying to
remember to write things down before I forget them.
The first item on my list of things that should be researched that I have
actually remembered long enough to write down is: The history of french fries
and their sauces.
Some background information on this subject: I was having dinner with
some people from different western cultures recently (Dutch, German,
American), and one of the Americans (my stepfather, in fact) wanted ketchup
with his fries. A friendly discussion ensued, as it had previously, where
we Europeans condemned the tendency of these Americans (and, by gross
generalization, all Americans) to put ketchup on everything. It then turned
to the subject of french fries, and who had first thought of — as
the Americans put it — putting mayonnaise instead of ketchup on
their fries. Hence the present research subject.
Of course, you can just google for it, and find this: The Secret
History of French Fries. It still leaves the sauces, though.
On a related note, in discussions there will often be a point where
someone says: We'll look it up, and somehow, the looking-up never
happens, and we forget about the whole discussion. This is of course one
way to end discussions.
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Posted by matijs
18/08/2004 at 22h50
Simon Cozens, author of the very software this blog runs on, mentions finishing projects
in passing:
Maybe I need to stop coming up with interesting new project ideas, and
finish some of the ones I've started.
Nah. Where's the fun in that?
How true. And how annoying that old projects stop being fun before they
are truly finished. Somehow, they either linger in a mildly usable state
(usable enough for me to use them, not for others), or in a half-finished
and unused state, bit-rotting away. This is why I consider so few of my
projects fit for publication on my website.
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Posted by matijs
16/08/2004 at 23h06
Last month, I decided August would be the month of finishing projects.
After August, I would get back to worrying about the future, but until
then, I would be tying up the loose ends of the past. This is working, in a
way, as I'm actually finishing a big part of my blog-project. On the other
hand, lots of my old, rusting, projects won't get finished, and the blog
seems entirely too recent to be spending most of my time on.
Luckily, it seems the blog software is now finally working
completely.
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Posted by matijs
31/07/2004 at 15h12
After trying out Straw, I am now quite satisfied with Liferea. It does what it needs to do in a
straightforward manner. However, I think there is still room for some
revolutionary thought on feed reader interfaces. What I'm looking for here
are new ways of managing the quickly expanding number of posts that have to
be dealt with on a daily basis.
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Posted by matijs
24/07/2004 at 22h01
Although I've been posting some thoughts on my home page already, it was
not yet what anyone would call a blog. Mostly, I was annoyed that I had to
hand-edit the HTML. Of course, there was also no possibility to post
comments, there were no permalinks, etc. This had to change.
I took a look at blosxom, but quickly
decided that it wouldn't satisfy my needs. In particular, it used the
modification date of its input files as the date of the blog entries. This
is a nice idea in itself, but I want to be able to edit — update
— my posts without worrying that they'll change dates.
Luckily, I found Simon Cozen's article on
Bryar, and today I finally got it working. This is not to say it was
that hard, just that I have been procrastinating. Of course, not everything
went swimmingly, but that's for another day.
So here it is, my very own blog.
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Posted by matijs
31/05/2004 at 18h00
I fixed up MSGConvert some
more. All outstanding bug reports were taken care of.
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Posted by matijs
28/05/2004 at 18h00
After reading about RSS
and Atom (mostly on dive into
mark), I decided to try out Straw, a news aggregator
for GNOME. It works, but keeps
spinning up my disk. Thus, it is unusable on a laptop.
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Posted by matijs
20/05/2004 at 18h00
I spent last week in Switzerland, where my mother lives, and this gave
me time in between enjoying the beautiful outdoors to fix
two bugs in MSGConvert. My earlier rewrite already paid off in making
the less trivial one much easier to fix.
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